Microsoft always aimed to be the middle man between the hardware and the user, through the windows system, widgets and API specifications. For business users, that was all they needed, they didn't really want to mess about with DMA interrupt channels, extended memory, device driver memory allocations every time someone needed a new PC.
Usually, the company will have two teams - the first writes all the applications code. The other team writes automated tests which try to break the application code.
One of the most interesting things in doing things in a hurry is that you write the absolute minimum of code necessary to solve a problem, but will need to continuously add new features in the future . In the past, design by committee with sub-committees, technical reports, and you will get an PI with more layered architecture, but lots of extra functions and a smorgasbord of data structures, will last longer, but take years to be considered to be reliable and trusted by customers. In the past, such systems would have to wait for the advance of CPU's before they became usable.
Used to be called "macho-management" - managers would decide to take the change of a short-cut or cut corners to save time. Maybe skip the design or layout stage, and just get everyone to start hacking away. Then as new features get added, more and more special-cases are added until the complexity becomes unpredictable and unmaintainable. What could have been a simple filter/matching system implemented from the first day, has become a tangled heap of if-else cases in multiple functions. The situation isn't helped by manuals written in poor translations or API's having undocumented features. The stress becomes so high, that the only way to keep everyone sane is to have hard-drinking sessions.
There were several short sci-fi story on this topics. The first story had two advanced technology countries at war with each other. Gone were the days when orders or messages or even mathematics were written down on pen and pencil. Layer and layer of defence and and attack technology was developed. Long range radar, missile shields, interceptor drones, attack satellites, jammer satellites, space mines, all networked and controlled by defence computer systems. At the same time, an archeologists rediscovered hand-written mathematical notes. After deciphering them, he figured out a way that a human could navigate and pilot a high-altitude aircraft without the danger of being jammed. Then the military became interested.
Another story had two space battalions engaged in a permanent game of three-dimensional chess in deep space. For every move recommended by one strategic computer system, the enemy's strategic computer system would formulate a counter move. For generations this extra-solar game of chess had been played with people graduating from space warfare academy, assigned a position, climbing up the ranks and retiring on a pension. Then one person figured out a way of winning this game - sending the order to attack at random.
Because they are jealous - that the Chinese could afford to remission a probe to do something "trivial" as photograph an asteroid. Of course when NASA decides to remission probes to deliberately crash into the Moon then that is "discovery". To me, deliberately crashing anything man-made into an extra-terrestrial object runs the risk of contaminating samples for future experiments.
That's like the early home computers and the era of DOS programming. You just needed some RS-232 ports or analog-to-digital ports and you could plug anything into your computer - light sensors, pressure pads, thermistors. With DOS programming you set up a couple of interrupt handlers for the mouse and keyboard, one more for the video screen and the rest was up to your imagination.
BBC did a documentary too back in the 1970's - "When the Chips are down". They had a panel of three people (Corporate CEO, union leader and academic researcher). The worry was "if the chip replaces all these jobs, what is the rest of the population going to do?" They knew something was on the horizon, but didn't know what to do. They looked at how in Silicon Valley companies had spun-off start-up, while in Japan, they concentrated on memory chips, quality and high yields.
I liked the stories of the early housing development - they'd name a street Cherry Street because every home would have a different type of cherry tree in their front gardens so that they could share with their neighbors.
Silicon Valley (or the computing industry is like that). Back in the 1980's, the hot jobs were X-windows/Motif and X.25 communications (early 1990's). Then Windows 95/NT (late 1990's). Then HTML, ActiveX, Java and the dot com boom (late 1990's). Windows XP with MFC (early 2000's). Now Android systems like smartphones, tablet and netbooks are current value.
It means they have to match the speed at which calculations are performed on chunks of data against the speed that these chunks can be propagated to and from neighbors. Then every now and again they need to save checkpoints or saves of the entire simulation, so they don't lose months of calculations.
It's the same topology as the state space of a Rubik's cube.
a 1D torus is simply a ring. Imagine a simple ring made from eight points. Translate that ring to the side a bit, and spin 360 degrees in steps of 45 degrees. That gives you a 2D torus. Now once again move that torus off to one side, and spin it again with the same number of iterations. That's a 3D torus. Another tasty way of visualisation would be a ring of donuts sitting on the sides stacked top to bottom in a closed circle. Every node then has six neighbors. Every additional dimension adds two neighbors, until you have 10 connections for each node. Obviously, you need some means of getting data in and out, so that gives you the data connections.
My first tower desktop left dark dust-marks against the wall where the fans were. Told my parents that I forgot to turn the after-burners off after take-off.
One of my relatives are teachers. First thing is, she is absolutely petrified of computers, scared if she presses the wrong key, something will break especially if it is school property and affect her promotion prospects. Can use email but detests using spreadsheets to manage the prescribed teaching objectives of her classes. If she is expected to use or teach any technology related equipment, she expects to be put on the training course, have course and teaching materials provided for her to make sure there isn't anything she has forgotten about during her lessons.
Perhaps that is the attitude of most people in the government sector. There was always the joke about becoming an "inventory control officer" if you seriously messed things up - they wouldn't fire you, they'd just have you driving round the country, checking serial numbers of staplers, filing cabinets and office chairs, every day of every week until you retired.
In the 1990's, most departments had inhouse staff training with "trainers" - semi-retired people who were earning $300/hour with the patience to teach applications like E-mail, spreadsheets, SQL databases, and other corporate applications.
Not a clinical trial, but my experience from living in different apartments and staying in hotel rooms, as well as hearing comments from other guests. Good things that reduce the numbers of hours required to sleep:
1. Blackout curtains - make the room completely dark - not a single photon from a single street lamp, emergency light, security light, car headlight at night. 2. Soundproofing / quiet area - you don't have other residents walking past drunk or with suitcases past your apartment or room, or other street noise like taxis, police cars or fire engines. 3. Fresh purified air by air conditioner / ionizer. Hotel guests who stayed in this kind of room stated that they only needed six hours of sleep instead of eight. This also helps get to a deeper sleep quicker. This was the biggest one I heard about. 4. Avoid stimulants like caffeine before going to bed. These prevent you getting into deep sleep. 5. Eat lots of fruit and vegetables to help get rid of toxin buildup - carrots, cucumber, lettuce, broccoli.
Solar panels and batteries to store electricity. An industrial crushed to pulverize the rock into powder (since the asteroid is already close to absolute zero). Then use the stored electricity to melt the outer layers of the rock into an aerodynamic shape, maybe even coat it with aerogel or something heat resistant, then glide it back to Earth.
That happened to the recycled paper market in many cities. When the recycling of paper first started, their was a market of something like $250/tonne of scrap paper. It was certainly attractive to city councils. Just get the residents to bundle their newspapers into little blue boxes, and the recycling van comes around every two weeks. A nice simple earner. There were problems with "crime" where third parties would skiff all the paper before the council workers got to it, and they would sell the bundles directly to the paper mill. But those were sorted out. Then the problem was that the paper mill no longer needed fresh clean paper from saw mills and tree farms, so the latter two actually went out of business. Then the price of recycled paper went down simply because so much of it was being recycled at the same time that the population was switching over to digital communications. It was effectively becoming a closed loop system where less input was needed each time.
We can already make synthetic diamonds here on Earth. DeBeers developed some tests to distinguish between "genuine" carbon based diamonds and "fake" synthetic diamonds through the use of analysis of impurities. Then their diamonds get a certificate of authenticity.
Gold and silver could be analyzed through their isotope ratios in the same way.
Domes, arches and columns in cathedrals have to withstand the gravitational force of 1G combined with hundreds of tonnes of stone. That is why they are the shape that they are. The dome and arch transfer force from the top down to the bottom.
It's just the way these systems are developed. Same with Digital cameras and all consumer electronics. When these systems are designed, everything is usually on a breadboard the size of a dinner tray. Then the engineers have the task of squeezing the components into a particular shape. Circuit boards get cut in half, merged into single chips until the weight, volume and power constraints are reached.
Trying to reposition a power button that popped out of place (basically a rubber mat with two cylindrical buttons held in place by four little tabs) required disassemblying one clam shell for the outer case, disassembling the inner clam shell, unpeeling the adhesive copper foil insulation, moving circuit boards and ribbon cable out of the way, finding the lost button, and redoing everything that had just been undone.
I can't see the justification for having a dozen different types of screw. Though it happens with laptops and desktops as well.
Because once we forget how this software worked, someone else comes along and does a research project, thinks that they have invented something new, patents it and/or names it after themselves. Then they'll start sending lawyers after other people. I've seen this happening with something as simple as 3x3 convolution matrices and widget libraries. What was common knowledge in personal computer magazines back in the 1980's now seems to be stuff that leads to patent battles now.
That would be the most reasonable explanation. I was job hunting in the UK some time ago. The cost of living had risen so much that 20K was the minimum salary that would allow anyone to just exist (pay rent, energy bills and council tax and buy food). Many employers were offering considerably less than that for employment as a software engineer (15K or less). In many cases, graduates were expected to pay for intern experience.
In other countries, there are vocational training program where you have to attend a polytechnic course, then do an apprenticeship before being considered qualified.
In the past in the USA, american corporations had career paths where someone could start as a mail-room worker and move all the way up to CEO (working in the mail-room would have given someone insider knowledge of all the important departments, who spent the most time talking to who).
In the UK, manufacturing companies had or have inhouse training programs to allow employees to migrate up from junior positions to R&D and/or management positions.
It's like having a wi-fi router with a built-in firewall that is enabled by default. Except they also have VPN services enabled by default too with easy to guess hardcoded administrator passwords as well.
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Microsoft always aimed to be the middle man between the hardware and the user, through the windows system, widgets and API specifications. For business users, that was all they needed, they didn't really want to mess about with DMA interrupt channels, extended memory, device driver memory allocations every time someone needed a new PC.
Usually, the company will have two teams - the first writes all the applications code. The other team writes automated tests which try to break the application code.
One of the most interesting things in doing things in a hurry is that you write the absolute minimum of code necessary to solve a problem, but will need to continuously add new features in the future . In the past, design by committee with sub-committees, technical reports, and you will get an PI with more layered architecture, but lots of extra functions and a smorgasbord of data structures, will last longer, but take years to be considered to be reliable and trusted by customers. In the past, such systems would have to wait for the advance of CPU's before they became usable.
Used to be called "macho-management" - managers would decide to take the change of a short-cut or cut corners to save time. Maybe skip the design or layout stage, and just get everyone to start hacking away. Then as new features get added, more and more special-cases are added until the complexity becomes unpredictable and unmaintainable. What could have been a simple filter/matching system implemented from the first day, has become a tangled heap of if-else cases in multiple functions. The situation isn't helped by manuals written in poor translations or API's having undocumented features. The stress becomes so high, that the only way to keep everyone sane is to have hard-drinking sessions.
There were several short sci-fi story on this topics. The first story had two advanced technology countries at war with each other. Gone were the days when orders or messages or even mathematics were written down on pen and pencil. Layer and layer of defence and and attack technology was developed. Long range radar, missile shields, interceptor drones, attack satellites, jammer satellites, space mines, all networked and controlled by defence computer systems. At the same time, an archeologists rediscovered hand-written mathematical notes. After deciphering them, he figured out a way that a human could navigate and pilot a high-altitude aircraft without the danger of being jammed. Then the military became interested.
Another story had two space battalions engaged in a permanent game of three-dimensional chess in deep space. For every move recommended by one strategic computer system, the enemy's strategic computer system would formulate a counter move. For generations this extra-solar game of chess had been played with people graduating from space warfare academy, assigned a position, climbing up the ranks and retiring on a pension. Then one person figured out a way of winning this game - sending the order to attack at random.
Because they are jealous - that the Chinese could afford to remission a probe to do something "trivial" as photograph an asteroid. Of course when NASA decides to remission probes to deliberately crash into the Moon then that is "discovery". To me, deliberately crashing anything man-made into an extra-terrestrial object runs the risk of contaminating samples for future experiments.
That's like the early home computers and the era of DOS programming. You just needed some RS-232 ports or analog-to-digital ports and you could plug anything into your computer - light sensors, pressure pads, thermistors. With DOS programming you set up a couple of interrupt handlers for the mouse and keyboard, one more for the video screen and the rest was up to your imagination.
BBC did a documentary too back in the 1970's - "When the Chips are down". They had a panel of three people (Corporate CEO, union leader and academic researcher). The worry was "if the chip replaces all these jobs, what is the rest of the population going to do?" They knew something was on the horizon, but didn't know what to do. They looked at how in Silicon Valley companies had spun-off start-up, while in Japan, they concentrated on memory chips, quality and high yields.
I liked the stories of the early housing development - they'd name a street Cherry Street because every home would have a different type of cherry tree in their front gardens so that they could share with their neighbors.
Silicon Valley (or the computing industry is like that). Back in the 1980's, the hot jobs were X-windows/Motif and X.25 communications (early 1990's). Then Windows 95/NT (late 1990's). Then HTML, ActiveX, Java and the dot com boom (late 1990's). Windows XP with MFC (early 2000's). Now Android systems like smartphones, tablet and netbooks are current value.
It means they have to match the speed at which calculations are performed on chunks of data against the speed that these chunks can be propagated to and from neighbors. Then every now and again they need to save checkpoints or saves of the entire simulation, so they don't lose months of calculations.
It's the same topology as the state space of a Rubik's cube.
a 1D torus is simply a ring. Imagine a simple ring made from eight points. Translate that ring to the side a bit, and spin 360 degrees in steps of 45 degrees. That gives you a 2D torus. Now once again move that torus off to one side, and spin it again with the same number of iterations. That's a 3D torus. Another tasty way of visualisation would be a ring of donuts sitting on the sides stacked top to bottom in a closed circle. Every node then has six neighbors. Every additional dimension adds two neighbors, until you have 10 connections for each node. Obviously, you need some means of getting data in and out, so that gives you the data connections.
My first tower desktop left dark dust-marks against the wall where the fans were. Told my parents that I forgot to turn the after-burners off after take-off.
One of my relatives are teachers. First thing is, she is absolutely petrified of computers, scared if she presses the wrong key, something will break especially if it is school property and affect her promotion prospects. Can use email but detests using spreadsheets to manage the prescribed teaching objectives of her classes. If she is expected to use or teach any technology related equipment, she expects to be put on the training course, have course and teaching materials provided for her to make sure there isn't anything she has forgotten about during her lessons.
Perhaps that is the attitude of most people in the government sector. There was always the joke about becoming an "inventory control officer" if you seriously messed things up - they wouldn't fire you, they'd just have you driving round the country, checking serial numbers of staplers, filing cabinets and office chairs, every day of every week until you retired.
In the 1990's, most departments had inhouse staff training with "trainers" - semi-retired people who were earning $300/hour with the patience to teach applications like E-mail, spreadsheets, SQL databases, and other corporate applications.
Rockheim in Trondheim does that - they play random patterns as well as what looks like cellular automata.
Not a clinical trial, but my experience from living in different apartments and staying in hotel rooms, as well as hearing comments from other guests. Good things that reduce the numbers of hours required to sleep:
1. Blackout curtains - make the room completely dark - not a single photon from a single street lamp, emergency light, security light, car headlight at night.
2. Soundproofing / quiet area - you don't have other residents walking past drunk or with suitcases past your apartment or room, or other street noise like taxis, police cars or fire engines.
3. Fresh purified air by air conditioner / ionizer. Hotel guests who stayed in this kind of room stated that they only needed six hours of sleep instead of eight. This also helps get to a deeper sleep quicker. This was the biggest one I heard about.
4. Avoid stimulants like caffeine before going to bed. These prevent you getting into deep sleep.
5. Eat lots of fruit and vegetables to help get rid of toxin buildup - carrots, cucumber, lettuce, broccoli.
Solar panels and batteries to store electricity. An industrial crushed to pulverize the rock into powder (since the asteroid is already close to absolute zero). Then use the stored electricity to melt the outer layers of the rock into an aerodynamic shape, maybe even coat it with aerogel or something heat resistant, then glide it back to Earth.
That happened to the recycled paper market in many cities. When the recycling of paper first started, their was a market of something like $250/tonne of scrap paper. It was certainly attractive to city councils. Just get the residents to bundle their newspapers into little blue boxes, and the recycling van comes around every two weeks. A nice simple earner. There were problems with "crime" where third parties would skiff all the paper before the council workers got to it, and they would sell the bundles directly to the paper mill. But those were sorted out. Then the problem was that the paper mill no longer needed fresh clean paper from saw mills and tree farms, so the latter two actually went out of business. Then the price of recycled paper went down simply because so much of it was being recycled at the same time that the population was switching over to digital communications. It was effectively becoming a closed loop system where less input was needed each time.
We can already make synthetic diamonds here on Earth. DeBeers developed some tests to distinguish between "genuine" carbon based diamonds and "fake" synthetic diamonds through the use of analysis of impurities. Then their diamonds get a certificate of authenticity.
Gold and silver could be analyzed through their isotope ratios in the same way.
Domes, arches and columns in cathedrals have to withstand the gravitational force of 1G combined with hundreds of tonnes of stone. That is why they are the shape that they are. The dome and arch transfer force from the top down to the bottom.
It's just the way these systems are developed. Same with Digital cameras and all consumer electronics. When these systems are designed, everything is usually on a breadboard the size of a dinner tray. Then the engineers have the task of squeezing the components into a particular shape. Circuit boards get cut in half, merged into single chips until the weight, volume and power constraints are reached.
Trying to reposition a power button that popped out of place (basically a rubber mat with two cylindrical buttons held in place by four little tabs) required disassemblying one clam shell for the outer case, disassembling the inner clam shell, unpeeling the adhesive copper foil insulation, moving circuit boards and ribbon cable out of the way, finding the lost button, and redoing everything that had just been undone.
I can't see the justification for having a dozen different types of screw. Though it happens with laptops and desktops as well.
Crosstalk (the pricy RS-232 comms package)
Kermit (the open-source RS-232 and later network comms package)
Fastback (PC backup utility)
Norton disk explorer (disk drive maintainance)
Brief (another PC editor)
GED (another PC editor)
Fract386 (fractal explorer)
PHIGS (early 3D CAD library)
SRGP (Simple Raster Graphics Package)
Because once we forget how this software worked, someone else comes along and does a research project, thinks that they have invented something new, patents it and/or names it after themselves. Then they'll start sending lawyers after other people. I've seen this happening with something as simple as 3x3 convolution matrices and widget libraries. What was common knowledge in personal computer magazines back in the 1980's now seems to be stuff that leads
to patent battles now.
That would be the most reasonable explanation. I was job hunting in the UK some time ago. The cost of living had risen so much that 20K was the minimum salary that would allow anyone to just exist (pay rent, energy bills and council tax and buy food). Many employers were offering considerably less than that for employment as a software engineer (15K or less). In many cases, graduates were expected to pay for intern experience.
In other countries, there are vocational training program where you have to attend a polytechnic course, then do an apprenticeship before being considered qualified.
In the past in the USA, american corporations had career paths where someone could start as a mail-room worker and move all the way up to CEO (working in the mail-room would have given someone insider knowledge of all the important departments, who spent the most time talking to who).
In the UK, manufacturing companies had or have inhouse training programs to allow employees to migrate up from junior positions to R&D and/or management positions.
It's like having a wi-fi router with a built-in firewall that is enabled by default. Except they also have VPN services enabled by default too with easy to guess hardcoded administrator passwords as well.