That's more to do with population demographics, home size and available spending.
Even in the 1980's and in the present, families living in council estates and working class terraced streets have less money to spend on science or computer magazines like New Scientist, BYTE or in the 1980's, World of Knowledge, Insight, the dozens of home computer magazines, let alone home computers. In all probability the local newsagents and supermarkets wouldn't see a need to stock these items. In the home, there wouldn't be the space for a home computer (requiring desk, chair, TV, shelves, desk lamp) as bedrooms would be shared. Even if there was space, there are so many other kids playing out on the street that they wouldn't have the incentive to be alone. They might even be harassed for wanting to learn.
The middle classes lived in semi-detached homes, have a bedroom for each kid, or at least a large Victorian bedroom, where there is plenty of space. They'd also have the money to buy a computer, home exercise system, and all the other things like skateboards, BMX bikes, game rigs, university text books. Those wealthy parents (and those who sacrificed their own treats) could afford home tutors and textbooks that filled in the gaps that the school textbooks didn't.
That's Britains biggest problem - the wide variation in housing designs. And it's been deliberately created due to attempts to "solve the housing crisis" by have smaller homes.
In the UK civil service, if you really ****'ed up, they wouldn't fire you, but simply redeploy you to something like "inventory control officer". You would spend the rest of your career travelling to and walking through every facility under your watch and scanning barcodes until the day you retired. Though, some people actually enjoyed that work, meeting new people and getting to travel for free.
I do wonder how disorganized they could be. What happens after the alarm sounds? Did they go running for the metal box containing the authentication codes, only to find that they had also used it to store the team scores for the local Poker team tournaments, as well as the football pools and their lucky Powerball Jackpot numbers? Took them 10 minutes to find the right brown envelope.
Did somebody try and use the authentication codes for the Powerball to see if they would get a high prize? Then they made copies of all the console keys and handed them out, so as to save time looking for them when a random drill practice was scheduled? Then they replaced the standard MIL-STD keyboards with backlit keyboards because they look cooler in the dark? And they redirected the satellite dishes to the DirectTV network, so they could watch soap operas from neighboring countries (that actually happened to a water supply project in a developing world country).
Looks like the kind of ice and snow that remains on the shadow side of a mountain or ridge. The ice slowly melts, so the water gradually creates a depression on one side and deposits mud at the bottom.
The early Asimov story "It's such a beautiful day" is a good example. The one physics violation is the use of teleporters, which have become as commonplace as household cookers. They've replaced school buses, driving down to the supermarket and commuting to work. Homes still have frontyards and backyards, but these are maintained by automatic machines. Then they have one kid who decides he prefers to go outdoors and walk to and from school rather than use the school teleporter. This causes chaos because his elementary school has the teleporter send everyone home in alphabetical order based on the school attendance for that day. Principal is furious, so she recommends that he gets sent to a psychiatrist. The doctor interviews the parents, the child and concludes that there isn't anything wrong. Just let him have a healthy balance between going outside and teleporting. In the end the doctor decides it's such a beautiful day, he will walk home too.
But humans make useful servants. What other species on the planet has managed to get another species a hundred times larger than themselves to bring them food, water and clean their homes for them?
A lot of tissue growth and development is controlled by reaction-diffusion equations. In two dimensions you get patterns like infinite growing spots, spots, stripes, labyrinths, branching and spirals. In three dimensions you get infinite growing spheres, spots, spot-splitting, sheets, 3D tube labyrinths and scroll waves. In between infinite growing spheres and labyrinths you get wrinkled brains. You can model this using the Gray-Scott reaction diffusion system. Just a single change in ratios of a single chemical gives you a totally different shape.
The ways brains are organized, is that you have the actual processing (gray matter) on the outer 2.5 millimeters of the brain , while all the interconnections (white matter) are in the center of the brain. The wrinkling helps to boost short-distance connections. Look for pictures on "diffusion tensor imaging" to get pictures of these connections. There was some research carried out that indicated that indicated that the length of the connections and thickness of the gray matter influenced a persons abilities in whatever part of the brain that region was responsible for.
But you do get self-organisation in nature: reaction-diffusion equations can create spots, stripes, tip-splitting and scroll waves patterns from initial random conditions.
There is some physical basis for the paper - one of the great mysteries early on in the 1600's, was why two clocks would either synchronise in phase or out of phase (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odd_sympathy). This was investigated by Christiaan Huygen. Turns out each clock would exert a tiny force on its surrounds. That was enough to create a coupled driver oscillator.
Re:Ending maintenance also ends control
on
The Eternal Mainframe
·
· Score: 3, Informative
And if you know where to look, you can find the whole collection of magazines scanned and available online (http://atariage.com/forums/topic/167235-byte-magazine/) The best issues where when they had geek cartoons or photographs of real hardware on the front cover. The real change was when everything went all pastel shaded with the little bod characters in suits. I guess that coincided with the shift from hardware projects to software API programming on personal computers.
That's the difference - the traditional mainframe was a one vendor product - racks, disk drives, CPU's, network boards, cables, terminals, everything available from the one supplier at "special" corporate rates, providing that you gave them the exclusive maintenance contract. Want printed system manuals? We'll charge you for that. Want more than eight user accounts? That cost extra too. Need a compiler for OS development work? That'll cost extra. Want the pre-compiled development API's to write applications? That'll cost more too. Want an optimizing compiler for high performance applications? That's cost some more too. Need a cable for your laser printer? We''ll supply that for a fee.
Compare that to the current server room where everything has generic components from the racks, cabinets to the fans, memory, network boards, cabling. If you consider that you can buy CPU's from any number of suppliers even if they are AMD/Intel, then they too are generic components. Everything removable and replaceable whenever technology advances.
Must have been 6-7 years ago, but when I was at college, every room had a locked cabinet with three or four router/terminal servers like boxes interwired together. Three years later, the network had been updated, and those boxes had been made redundant as the processing had gone back to the server room.
When home built gaming rig range from $600 systems to $4000 6-core Intel i7 with up to three GPU boards in SLI/Crossfire configurations, corporate customers are looking at cloud computing services to centralize heavy computing power and protect proprietary algorithms, is there any future for low-end corporate PC's?
I agree, the probability of getting all those base pairs just in the right order is going to be something like 24^159662, though that might be reduced slightly if those 182 genes can be reorder randomly, and even more if the number of "don't care" base pairs could be calculated. Human mitochondria consists of 16,569 base pairs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_mitochondrial_genetics)
However, when you look at the number of viruses and bacteriophages per square meter (5 x 10^7 per square millilitre or 4 x 10^30 bacteriophages in the oceans), it would seem quite possible (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_bacteriophage)
I have read about the history of compilers and the "chicken and egg" situation between which came first. The first C compilers were hand written in assembler, and could be used to compile C code which could then be used to write the next generation of compilers with new feature like macros. The code evolution goes on to C++ and scripting languages like Python, and Python based code generators.
I agree, there is still the fundamental problem of moving from self-replicating groups of atoms to something that has its own interpreted instruction set. From Computer Theory class, that goes all the way back to Turing machines and infinite tapes with a small set of symbols.
However, when you look at the number of atoms in the oceans and the total number of combinations, it could be possible Number of atoms of water in one square meter (Avogadro's constant) = 6.022169 x 10^23 (http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/mole-per-meter-cubed-Avogadro-constant) Volume of Earth's oceans = 1.5 billion km^3 = 1.5 x 10^9 km^3 = 1.5 x 10^18 m^3 (http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2001/SyedQadri.shtml)
Combine those two together and you get 6.022169 x 10^18 m^3 x 1.5x10^18 = 9 x 10^23 = = 9 x 10^41 atoms in the oceans.
Assuming the availability of all the elements then each atom space could be one of 120 atoms. That would raise the total to something like 120 ^ (9 x 10^41). Look at the number of viruses and bacteriophages in the oceans.
I remember those days - getting that intro DVD with a Dell PC, the one with segments of chronos and Minds Eye. Those are still awesome, especially on a wide screen. I look forward to the day I can turn my living room entertainment system into a VR cave and see those videos in true 360 degree views.
Q1 Key Financial Information and Business Unit Trends PC Client Group revenue of $8.0 billion, down 6.6 percent sequentially and down 6.0 percent year-over-year. Data Center Group revenue of $2.6 billion, down 6.9 percent sequentially and up 7.5 percent year-over-year. Other Intel® Architecture Group revenue of $1.0 billion, down 3.9 percent sequentially and down 9.0 percent year-over-year. Gross margin of 56 percent, down 2 percentage points sequentially and down 8 percentage points year-over-year.
I know a good number of examples - many of our friends bought PC's solely for the purpose of surfing the web (mainly to print out Ryanair checkin tickets) and to receive/send email. The PC wasn't used that often and so was kept in an alcove under the staircase. Now they have a smartphone, they can do all that surfing and just connect the phone to the printer. They also have the advantage of being able to book rooms with hotels in an emergency. No more dashing over to an airport internet cafe or desperately calling relatives back home for help. Other families had the problem of their children coming over to visit for the holidays and downloading crudware onto the computer. It was seen as a "family resource". Having a smartphone becomes a "personal resource".
PC's also killed themselves when they switched the graphics board connector from AGP to PCIE It was easy to upgrade a PC with graphics card up to 2004/2005, but as soon as they switched connectors to PCI/E, that was a whole generation of PC's which couldn't be cheaply upgraded. You had to buy an entire new system from the motherboard upwards.
That's the problem - terrorists might use a windowed system to design weapons of mass destruction - there's actually a click to install on every Linux distribution agaisnt this. There are export limitations on such technology to certain countries. Then you would have to control exports of smartphones and tablets.
The concepts of click, double-click, drag-and-drop, pin-and-rotate or stretch/pinch to zoom in/out are fairly standard.
The problem is all the different symbols that are now being used to something simple like cut and paste - cut used to be a box with dashed lines, paste used to be a glue-paint brush. Now it can be scissors, little points connected by lines, But specifying those shouldn't be any more difficult than selecting an icon sheet stored in a pixelmap. You can find dozens just by searching for that term; everything from galaxies to high-resolution shaded images.
Just about every user interface has some kind of texturing or subtle shadowing (even 1980's DOS games has some kind of texture like marble for their score panels). If Microsoft had done some themes like industrial/technical (rotating lights, yellow/black lines), urban (grafitti/sidewalk/neon lights style), cyberpunk (varnished wood/copper), they would have made the user interface much more interesting with minimum effort. Or at least allowed people to customize the theme.
They both unify with the first organisms at the start of time. Somewhere along the way, they switched from just being blocks of amino acids floating around and self-assembling into membranes and geodesic shapes being a self-reproducing bacteria with cell membranes, DNA, RNA, receptors, enzymes and proteins.
I could imagine that once the first complex molecules could self-assemble into sheets and spheres, it wouldn't be too long for some other molecule to figure out how to take those apart and incorporate those into its own form. Eventually, you'd have a molecule that could sense what type of "food source" it was next to, and determine the optimum way of taking it apart and reproducing itself. Eventually the decision making logic would move to the centre of the molecule, become DNA while the outer layers would become receptors and the middle layers RNA.
Slashdot Mirror
That's more to do with population demographics, home size and available spending.
Even in the 1980's and in the present, families living in council estates and working class terraced streets have less money to spend on science or computer magazines like New Scientist, BYTE or in the 1980's, World of Knowledge, Insight, the dozens of home computer magazines, let alone home computers. In all probability the local newsagents and supermarkets wouldn't see a need to stock these items. In the home, there wouldn't be the space for a home computer (requiring desk, chair, TV, shelves, desk lamp) as bedrooms would be shared. Even if there was space, there are so many other kids playing out on the street that they wouldn't have the incentive to be alone. They might even be harassed for wanting to learn.
The middle classes lived in semi-detached homes, have a bedroom for each kid, or at least a large Victorian bedroom, where there is plenty of space. They'd also have the money to buy a computer, home exercise system, and all the other things like skateboards, BMX bikes, game rigs, university text books.
Those wealthy parents (and those who sacrificed their own treats) could afford home tutors and textbooks that filled in the gaps that the school textbooks didn't.
That's Britains biggest problem - the wide variation in housing designs. And it's been deliberately created due to attempts to "solve the housing crisis" by have smaller homes.
In the UK civil service, if you really ****'ed up, they wouldn't fire you, but simply redeploy you to something like "inventory control officer". You would spend the rest of your career travelling to and walking through every facility under your watch and scanning barcodes until the day you retired. Though, some people actually enjoyed that work, meeting new people and getting to travel for free.
I do wonder how disorganized they could be. What happens after the alarm sounds? Did they go running for the metal box containing the authentication codes, only to find that they had also used it to store the team scores for the local Poker team tournaments, as well as the football pools and their lucky Powerball Jackpot numbers? Took them 10 minutes to find the right brown envelope.
Did somebody try and use the authentication codes for the Powerball to see if they would get a high prize? Then they made copies of all the console keys and handed them out, so as to save time looking for them when a random drill practice was scheduled? Then they replaced the standard MIL-STD keyboards with backlit keyboards because they look cooler in the dark? And they redirected the satellite dishes to the DirectTV network, so they could watch soap operas from neighboring countries (that actually happened to a water supply project in a developing world country).
That looks like some kind of cellular automata spiral algorithm with maybe three or four different cell types.
The world's longest abstract art painting.
Looks like the kind of ice and snow that remains on the shadow side of a mountain or ridge. The ice slowly melts, so the water gradually creates a depression on one side and deposits mud at the bottom.
The early Asimov story "It's such a beautiful day" is a good example. The one physics violation is the use of teleporters, which have become as commonplace as household cookers. They've replaced school buses, driving down to the supermarket and commuting to work. Homes still have frontyards and backyards, but these are maintained by automatic machines. Then they have one kid who decides he prefers to go outdoors and walk to and from school rather than use the school teleporter. This causes chaos because his elementary school has the teleporter send everyone home in alphabetical order based on the school attendance for that day. Principal is furious, so she recommends that he gets sent to a psychiatrist. The doctor interviews the parents, the child and concludes that there isn't anything wrong. Just let him have a healthy balance between going outside and teleporting. In the end the doctor decides it's such a beautiful day, he will walk home too.
But humans make useful servants. What other species on the planet has managed to get another species a hundred times larger than themselves to bring them food, water and clean their homes for them?
A lot of tissue growth and development is controlled by reaction-diffusion equations. In two dimensions you get patterns like infinite growing spots, spots, stripes, labyrinths, branching and spirals. In three dimensions you get infinite growing spheres, spots, spot-splitting, sheets, 3D tube labyrinths and scroll waves. In between infinite growing spheres and labyrinths you get wrinkled brains. You can model this using the Gray-Scott reaction diffusion system. Just a single change in ratios of a single chemical gives you a totally different shape.
The ways brains are organized, is that you have the actual processing (gray matter) on the outer 2.5 millimeters of the brain , while all the interconnections (white matter) are in the center of the brain. The wrinkling helps to boost short-distance connections. Look for pictures on "diffusion tensor imaging" to get pictures of these connections. There was some research carried out that indicated that indicated that the length of the connections and thickness of the gray matter influenced a persons abilities in whatever part of the brain that region was responsible for.
But you do get self-organisation in nature: reaction-diffusion equations can create spots, stripes, tip-splitting and scroll waves patterns from initial random conditions.
There is some physical basis for the paper - one of the great mysteries early on in the 1600's, was why two clocks would either synchronise in phase or out of phase (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odd_sympathy). This was investigated by Christiaan Huygen. Turns out each clock would exert a tiny force on its surrounds. That was enough to create a coupled driver oscillator.
And if you know where to look, you can find the whole collection of magazines scanned and available online (http://atariage.com/forums/topic/167235-byte-magazine/)
The best issues where when they had geek cartoons or photographs of real hardware on the front cover. The real change was when everything went all pastel shaded with the little bod characters in suits. I guess that coincided with the shift from hardware projects to software API programming on personal computers.
That's the difference - the traditional mainframe was a one vendor product - racks, disk drives, CPU's, network boards, cables, terminals, everything available from the one supplier at "special" corporate rates, providing that you gave them the exclusive maintenance contract. Want printed system manuals? We'll charge you for that. Want more than eight user accounts? That cost extra too. Need a compiler for OS development work? That'll cost extra. Want the pre-compiled development API's to write applications? That'll cost more too. Want an optimizing compiler for high performance applications? That's cost some more too. Need a cable for your laser printer? We''ll supply that for a fee.
Compare that to the current server room where everything has generic components from the racks, cabinets to the fans, memory, network boards, cabling. If you consider that you can buy CPU's from any number of suppliers even if they are AMD/Intel, then they too are generic components. Everything removable and replaceable whenever technology advances.
Must have been 6-7 years ago, but when I was at college, every room had a locked cabinet with three or four router/terminal servers like boxes interwired together. Three years later, the network had been updated, and those boxes had been made redundant as the processing had gone back to the server room.
When home built gaming rig range from $600 systems to $4000 6-core Intel i7 with up to three GPU boards in SLI/Crossfire configurations, corporate customers are looking at cloud computing services to centralize heavy computing power and protect proprietary algorithms, is there any future for low-end corporate PC's?
Scientists have been able to reduce the smallest cell down to around 182 genes (159,662 base pairs).
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/10/061012184647.htm
I agree, the probability of getting all those base pairs just in the right order is going to be something like 24^159662, though that might be reduced slightly if those 182 genes can be reorder randomly, and even more if the number of "don't care" base pairs could be calculated. Human mitochondria consists of 16,569 base pairs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_mitochondrial_genetics)
However, when you look at the number of viruses and bacteriophages per square meter (5 x 10^7 per square millilitre or 4 x 10^30 bacteriophages in the oceans), it would seem quite possible (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_bacteriophage)
I have read about the history of compilers and the "chicken and egg" situation between which came first. The first C compilers were hand written in assembler, and could be used to compile C code which could then be used to write the next generation of compilers with new feature like macros. The code evolution goes on to C++ and scripting languages like Python, and Python based code generators.
I agree, there is still the fundamental problem of moving from self-replicating groups of atoms to something that has its own interpreted instruction set. From Computer Theory class, that goes all the way back to Turing machines and infinite tapes with a small set of symbols.
However, when you look at the number of atoms in the oceans and the total number of combinations, it could be possible
Number of atoms of water in one square meter (Avogadro's constant) = 6.022169 x 10^23 (http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/mole-per-meter-cubed-Avogadro-constant)
Volume of Earth's oceans = 1.5 billion km^3 = 1.5 x 10^9 km^3 = 1.5 x 10^18 m^3 (http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2001/SyedQadri.shtml)
Combine those two together and you get 6.022169 x 10^18 m^3 x 1.5x10^18 = 9 x 10^23 = = 9 x 10^41 atoms in the oceans.
Assuming the availability of all the elements then each atom space could be one of 120 atoms. That would raise the total to something like 120 ^ (9 x 10^41).
Look at the number of viruses and bacteriophages in the oceans.
Wow! Did he win the slashdot awards for the longest article, and the longest article that was totally impossible to understand?
I remember those days - getting that intro DVD with a Dell PC, the one with segments of chronos and Minds Eye. Those are still awesome, especially on a wide screen. I look forward to the day I can turn my living room entertainment system into a VR cave and see those videos in true 360 degree views.
http://newsroom.intel.com/community/intel_newsroom/blog/2013/04/16/intel-reports-first-quarter-revenue-of-126-billion
Q1 Key Financial Information and Business Unit Trends
PC Client Group revenue of $8.0 billion, down 6.6 percent sequentially and down 6.0 percent year-over-year.
Data Center Group revenue of $2.6 billion, down 6.9 percent sequentially and up 7.5 percent year-over-year.
Other Intel® Architecture Group revenue of $1.0 billion, down 3.9 percent sequentially and down 9.0 percent year-over-year.
Gross margin of 56 percent, down 2 percentage points sequentially and down 8 percentage points year-over-year.
I know a good number of examples - many of our friends bought PC's solely for the purpose of surfing the web (mainly to print out Ryanair checkin tickets) and to receive/send email. The PC wasn't used that often and so was kept in an alcove under the staircase. Now they have a smartphone, they can do all that surfing and just connect the phone to the printer. They also have the advantage of being able to book rooms with hotels in an emergency. No more dashing over to an airport internet cafe or desperately calling relatives back home for help. Other families had the problem of their children coming over to visit for the holidays and downloading crudware onto the computer. It was seen as a "family resource". Having a smartphone becomes a "personal resource".
PC's also killed themselves when they switched the graphics board connector from AGP to PCIE It was easy to upgrade a PC with graphics card up to 2004/2005, but as soon as they switched connectors to PCI/E, that was a whole generation of PC's which couldn't be cheaply upgraded. You had to buy an entire new system from the motherboard upwards.
That's the problem - terrorists might use a windowed system to design weapons of mass destruction - there's actually a click to install on every Linux distribution agaisnt this. There are export limitations on such technology to certain countries. Then you would have to control exports of smartphones and tablets.
The concepts of click, double-click, drag-and-drop, pin-and-rotate or stretch/pinch to zoom in/out are fairly standard.
The problem is all the different symbols that are now being used to something simple like cut and paste - cut used to be a box with dashed lines, paste used to be a glue-paint brush. Now it can be scissors, little points connected by lines, But specifying those shouldn't be any more difficult than selecting an icon sheet stored in a pixelmap. You can find dozens just by searching for that term; everything from galaxies to high-resolution shaded images.
You missed out Windows CE, Windows ME, Windows NT, known as Windows CE/ME/NT
Just about every user interface has some kind of texturing or subtle shadowing (even 1980's DOS games has some kind of texture like marble for their score panels). If Microsoft had done some themes like industrial/technical (rotating lights, yellow/black lines), urban (grafitti/sidewalk/neon lights style), cyberpunk (varnished wood/copper), they would have made the user interface much more interesting with minimum effort. Or at least allowed people to customize the theme.
They both unify with the first organisms at the start of time. Somewhere along the way, they switched from just being blocks of amino acids floating around and self-assembling into membranes and geodesic shapes being a self-reproducing bacteria with cell membranes, DNA, RNA, receptors, enzymes and proteins.
I could imagine that once the first complex molecules could self-assemble into sheets and spheres, it wouldn't be too long for some other molecule to figure out how to take those apart and incorporate those into its own form. Eventually, you'd have a molecule that could sense what type of "food source" it was next to, and determine the optimum way of taking it apart and reproducing itself. Eventually the decision making logic would move to the centre of the molecule, become DNA while the outer layers would become receptors and the middle layers RNA.