My take on this is that it depends how you pronounce it. I do sometimes say EEe-sir, so Esa would be correct. I never say Yoo-sir, so it is USA. If you want to enforce Ee-Ess-Eh, it should be ESA.
After all, the original purpose of script was to represent speech. So it makes sense to use the extra flexibility of capitalisation to convey information about speech.
Stretching the timescale was simply not an option. It was a passenger on Mars Ezpress, which was going to launch in a particular narrow window because of the relative positions of Mars and Earth. The options were 1: fit it into the time available, 2: cancel.
Or rather, in aerospace, safety critical system have been limited to the kind of problem that can be solved without dynamic memory management.
I could imagine plenty of problems which are open-ended, safety critical, which you might want to build a computer system to solve, but dare not. Free routing, for example. Every plane has a GPS and tells every other plane where it is and where it is goint, and all the planes agree to adjusrt their speeds to avoid each other. Unlimited number of other planes transmitting routes of arbitrary complexity - and if you get it wrong, doom. On the other hand, in crowded airspace, fuel savings of up to 25% - big bucks. But too dangerous for today's software technologies. The hardware is up to it, but we cannot write the software.
I agree that this is actually the problem. As I understand it, the high-reliability people have more-or-less solved the problem of enduring the code follows the specification (though at a cost that woul deter for less critical applications). But all this does is push the problem one level higher.
In the early days of compilers, one of the claims for compilers was that they would make mistakes impossible. Of course, all they did was make one class of stupid assembler mistakes impossible.
The reason for the verbosity of COBOL is the idea that it would be so like business English that management could read it, if not write it.
Eash time we get a tool that removes one class of mistakes, all we do is increase the systen m complexity until the level of mistakes returns to the previous level of near-unacceptability. "Snafu" is the normal state of the programmers universe - it is only a case of how large a system you build before it all fouls up.
Having said that, Design By Contract is a good idea. While accepting that it is always going to turn to ratshit, you might as well do so at a higher level as a lower one. However, it isn't new: look at Eiffel and Aspect Java for instance.
The key is to not stay at a job more than 2 years (average), because you will not learn anything new after that, chances are, and you cannot expect to get a 20% raise at the same company.
Not actually inevitably true. I have been at the same company for 25 years, and my salary is now approx 16 times my entry salary. OK, we've had a fair bit of inflation in the mean time, but in real terms I am probably getting four times my initial salary. And I am still, basically, a geek. I design system architectures and program the critical bits; nobody reports to me.
No. There is an SEC regulation that requires them to file a whole raft of info if they have more than a certain number of shareholders - which, with all the options they have handed out, they now have. This information is nearly as much as the information they need to file as a publci company, so the extra cost of going public is not that great.
The reason that they are doing the IPO is that the Venture Capitaliasts who put in the original money now want to cash in their investment.
This is the right way to respond to the foaming-mouthed radicals of the right.
There is no point in trying to point out their idiocies. Anyone with enough braincells to count in binary can see that they are spouting irrational codswallop. But there is no point in losing your temper and trying to point out the idiocy of their ways - these guys are beyond redemption. Laughter is the safest refuge - laugh lest ye cry. Well done (again), Linus.
Did black America suddenly turn around and get its shit together while I wasn't looking?
Yes. A lot, but not all, did. Social background and education are much more informative than skin colour. If you factor these two terms in, you have already used all the information given by skin colour; if you add skin colour in, you are effectively double counting. And these other measures are more efficient: they allow you to drop white dropouts and bring in brilliant blacks.
It is true that if you had no other information at all, skin colour would have some predictive value. But if you have the information available on any normal resume, skin colour tells you nothing more than you know already.
Statistics for black people only tell you an average for about 20 million people, exactly one of whome you are interviewing at this moment. They are about as useful as statistics for the 20 million people in the same height band.
No. A search and failure to find is a positive datum, not a neutral one. If I had not considered the religious options, I would agree with you. Having considered the various religions offered to me, I have come to the conclusion that they are all essentially human constructs. I therefore have the working hypothesis, eminently falsifiable, that all religions are human constructs.
This is no more arbitrary than the Second Law of Thermodynamics. No system has ever been found in which, when carefully observed, this law was broken. Since the number of tests of that law is large, we use it as a working hypothesis, and design our machines accordingly. In principle, some new physics could falsify it (though I am not holding my breath). In practice, we regard it as fact and regard any machine which appears to break it as suspect.
As to whether it matters, remember Pascal's Wager. If God does exist, and you suffer eternal pain if you break his rules, you should change your life to match. If God does not exist, than any effort spend obeying "God's rules" is wasted. If you are not changing your life to obey "God's rules" (as opposed to your own internal morality), or spending some effort to find out what "God's rules" might be, you are implicitly saying that there is no God.
I disagree. I say that I am using "God does not exist" as my working hypothisis. I spent thiry years as an agnostic - not knowing at all. Now I have adopted the view that, having looked for a reasonable amount of time, I must consider the failure to find to be a positive, not a neutral, datum. I believe that the facts as I see them show that there is not God - a stronger opin ion that that they do not show that there is a God. However, that is not an absolute - it is a conclusion that could be changed by fresh evidence.
My view is the positive "God does not exist", not the neutral "I don't know if God exists" nor the anti-theist "God cannot exist" (with the subtext that you are stupid to believe in the concept).
it's nothing but a bunch of speculation about how to convert aliens to christianity.
Did you RTFA? It is certainly not "nothing but" such speculation. Certainly, it contains that speculation - but it cointains quite a lot more, like the inteviewees current research on metorites (which I am almost certain can not be converted to Christianity).
As an atheist, I dislike the implication that atheists inevitably mock religion, or take the view that God necessarily does not exist. I take the view that, having failed to find any convincing evidence for the existence of God, I must accept the null hypothesis - that God does not exist. You cannot prove a negative: it is certainly possible that God exists but, for inscrutable reasons, has not revealed himself to me but has to others. It is possible that one day in the future such evidence will be revealed to me, and I will cease to be an atheist. But until I have positive evidence, I will not believe just on somebody eles's day so.
But please stop tarring me with the sins of atheist bigots, just as I do not tar all Christians with the sins of Christian bigots.
I would prefer to call atheist bigots "anti-theists" not "a-theists".
They need to develop a controller that can directly handle, say, 64 hard drives, analogous to a big network switch.
It's called a Fibre Channel controller. Fibre Channel loop (which disks use) offers a total of 255 addresses - which has to include the controller. Disks now available in the 300Gbyte region, so 80 Tbyte/loop seems reasonable (and, according to the article, they seem only to have 100Tbyte up so far). 12 of these loops will give you your petabyte. Mind you, you will waste the disk bandwidth; this will gicve you capacity but not throughput.
Turnpike is a mail and news client which provides the functionality you are looking for. I think it was originally designed with small office in mind rather than home user, but had migrated to home user. Nonetheless, the mail files are encrypted separately for each user, who has their own password.
I use it personally and find it quite a good system for a windows environment. Spell checking, threaded emails, a "Windows-like" interface. Not free, except for users of Demon Internet, who won it, but I think has a 30-day trial. I like it
It's certainly not 1 drive - the disk manufacturers are only about the 300Gbyte mark, so it has got to be at least 3. And 3 would probably have the bandwidth needed, including compression. Maybe 4.
If the drive "only" contains the last weeks TV, you're not likely to be that pissed; anything you *really* wanted to see will soon come round again. You probably have no more critical data than any other PC. No point in Raid-ing a DVR. Don't use it as your "real" PC; use it for home entertainment.
Because his sexual orientation led directly to his suicide. It stopped him doing proper work after the war, and killed him when, apparently, he still had a lot more to give to computer research.
If his sexuality had been, as it should have been, part of his prite life, then it would of course be unimportant and not worth mentioning. For most people nowadays that would be the case. Unfortunately, for Turing that was not the case. Any bio that ignored it would be to leave out vital facts about his laife and death.
He was the best example I know of how anti-gay prejudice had deprived the world of talent. How many other talented gays (and women, and coloured people... ) have we lost through bigoted ignorance.
There is a fundamental thing stopping the governments from snooping right now: practicality.
Part of Google's income comes from providing search functionality for other companies. There is no obvious reason why the Federal government could not buy Google's search expertise and use it on a database populated by their Echelon monitoring system. While expensive, it would not be ridiculous compared with other federal spending on security. (Actually, I think it would be a lot better value for money than the ham-fisted repeated searches of the same baggage and repeated checks of the same documents currently going on in airports).
Now, I know that Google says "Do no evil", and some people will immediately call this evil. But I am not so sure you can make such a black-and-white judgement about it. It certainly would be a powerful tool in the hands of an oppressive government. But that is because it is a powerful tool - it is also a powerful tool for detecting terrorists. We know that terrorists are using ad-hoc email to co-ordinate their activities. It is the same power that helps me sort through the dross on the net for the gold I want. It is a dilemma facing anybody who manufactures dual-use technology. Should you stop manufacturing boots because they can be used to kick prisoners to death?
I don't think it is really going to be such a giant blow, because it really is only for large scale corporate users running Websphere. I don't see the smaller company, the self-employed, or the home user switching to this. Which means that it cannot become a de-facto standard, as Word and Excel have. Which in turn means that the corporations will not be that enthusiastic, because they also deal with these other people. If you want som ething that is really quite compatible with the de-facto standard, but not quite, Open Office is available for $0.00 per month.
It will appeal to pointy haired power freaks who dislike the idea of employees having letters and/or spreadsheets on their C: drive. This way, everything is on the company managed central server. Mwahahahaha! Of course, there are cood reasons for that as well - backuip, legal liability, central administration. But they are, broadly speaking, considerations for megacorps not the small user. And it is the magacorps who are IBM's favourite customers.
Fractionally worse than dual proc, but not much. Only a single cache, so two processors will do better at different jobs. On occasions the two dual CPU may go faster by sharing cache but this will be rare, unless you are heavily into simulation or. similar.
Dual CPU chips is better - but much more expensive. Like anything else in this business, if you have got it out of the packaging, it is obsolete. When this chip comes to market, everybody will have what you paid good money for at $200 less.
As I understand it, the cpu core is quite a small part of the silicon area of a modern processor chip. Which is, of course, the logic behind this development. But then, why stop at two? Well, maybe Intel have simulated and found that, in the current state of the art, two is optimal. But if cache gets larger and busses get faster, two may cease to be optimal. Which will lead to competition by number of cpus, not GHz.
For the processor, you are right. But I think that the bulk of the die area is cache and bus logic, not cpu. So doubling the cpu area to get more mileage out of the cache and bus makes sense.
The trouble with dedicated processors (to the OS or amything else) is that their spare MIPS go to waste. And two separate CPUS have more problems communicating than one. If the other processor is different (e.g. the processor on a graphics board), then it may be worthwhile. But if the processor is just another of the same, better to share tasks between all the available processors.
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My take on this is that it depends how you pronounce it. I do sometimes say EEe-sir, so Esa would be correct. I never say Yoo-sir, so it is USA. If you want to enforce Ee-Ess-Eh, it should be ESA.
After all, the original purpose of script was to represent speech. So it makes sense to use the extra flexibility of capitalisation to convey information about speech.
Stretching the timescale was simply not an option. It was a passenger on Mars Ezpress, which was going to launch in a particular narrow window because of the relative positions of Mars and Earth. The options were 1: fit it into the time available, 2: cancel.
Or rather, in aerospace, safety critical system have been limited to the kind of problem that can be solved without dynamic memory management.
I could imagine plenty of problems which are open-ended, safety critical, which you might want to build a computer system to solve, but dare not. Free routing, for example. Every plane has a GPS and tells every other plane where it is and where it is goint, and all the planes agree to adjusrt their speeds to avoid each other. Unlimited number of other planes transmitting routes of arbitrary complexity - and if you get it wrong, doom. On the other hand, in crowded airspace, fuel savings of up to 25% - big bucks. But too dangerous for today's software technologies. The hardware is up to it, but we cannot write the software.
I agree that this is actually the problem. As I understand it, the high-reliability people have more-or-less solved the problem of enduring the code follows the specification (though at a cost that woul deter for less critical applications). But all this does is push the problem one level higher.
In the early days of compilers, one of the claims for compilers was that they would make mistakes impossible. Of course, all they did was make one class of stupid assembler mistakes impossible.
The reason for the verbosity of COBOL is the idea that it would be so like business English that management could read it, if not write it.
Eash time we get a tool that removes one class of mistakes, all we do is increase the systen m complexity until the level of mistakes returns to the previous level of near-unacceptability. "Snafu" is the normal state of the programmers universe - it is only a case of how large a system you build before it all fouls up.
Having said that, Design By Contract is a good idea. While accepting that it is always going to turn to ratshit, you might as well do so at a higher level as a lower one. However, it isn't new: look at Eiffel and Aspect Java for instance.
The key is to not stay at a job more than 2 years (average), because you will not learn anything new after that, chances are, and you cannot expect to get a 20% raise at the same company.
Not actually inevitably true. I have been at the same company for 25 years, and my salary is now approx 16 times my entry salary. OK, we've had a fair bit of inflation in the mean time, but in real terms I am probably getting four times my initial salary. And I am still, basically, a geek. I design system architectures and program the critical bits; nobody reports to me.
No. There is an SEC regulation that requires them to file a whole raft of info if they have more than a certain number of shareholders - which, with all the options they have handed out, they now have. This information is nearly as much as the information they need to file as a publci company, so the extra cost of going public is not that great.
The reason that they are doing the IPO is that the Venture Capitaliasts who put in the original money now want to cash in their investment.
This is the right way to respond to the foaming-mouthed radicals of the right.
There is no point in trying to point out their idiocies. Anyone with enough braincells to count in binary can see that they are spouting irrational codswallop. But there is no point in losing your temper and trying to point out the idiocy of their ways - these guys are beyond redemption. Laughter is the safest refuge - laugh lest ye cry. Well done (again), Linus.
If someone can't be arsed to walk 100 yards to vote
OK for townies. In the country people have to travel further.
Did black America suddenly turn around and get its shit together while I wasn't looking?
Yes. A lot, but not all, did. Social background and education are much more informative than skin colour. If you factor these two terms in, you have already used all the information given by skin colour; if you add skin colour in, you are effectively double counting. And these other measures are more efficient: they allow you to drop white dropouts and bring in brilliant blacks.
It is true that if you had no other information at all, skin colour would have some predictive value. But if you have the information available on any normal resume, skin colour tells you nothing more than you know already.
Statistics for black people only tell you an average for about 20 million people, exactly one of whome you are interviewing at this moment. They are about as useful as statistics for the 20 million people in the same height band.
No. A search and failure to find is a positive datum, not a neutral one. If I had not considered the religious options, I would agree with you. Having considered the various religions offered to me, I have come to the conclusion that they are all essentially human constructs. I therefore have the working hypothesis, eminently falsifiable, that all religions are human constructs.
This is no more arbitrary than the Second Law of Thermodynamics. No system has ever been found in which, when carefully observed, this law was broken. Since the number of tests of that law is large, we use it as a working hypothesis, and design our machines accordingly. In principle, some new physics could falsify it (though I am not holding my breath). In practice, we regard it as fact and regard any machine which appears to break it as suspect.
As to whether it matters, remember Pascal's Wager. If God does exist, and you suffer eternal pain if you break his rules, you should change your life to match. If God does not exist, than any effort spend obeying "God's rules" is wasted. If you are not changing your life to obey "God's rules" (as opposed to your own internal morality), or spending some effort to find out what "God's rules" might be, you are implicitly saying that there is no God.
I disagree. I say that I am using "God does not exist" as my working hypothisis. I spent thiry years as an agnostic - not knowing at all. Now I have adopted the view that, having looked for a reasonable amount of time, I must consider the failure to find to be a positive, not a neutral, datum. I believe that the facts as I see them show that there is not God - a stronger opin ion that that they do not show that there is a God. However, that is not an absolute - it is a conclusion that could be changed by fresh evidence.
My view is the positive "God does not exist", not the neutral "I don't know if God exists" nor the anti-theist "God cannot exist" (with the subtext that you are stupid to believe in the concept).
He says there are "about a dozen of us".
it's nothing but a bunch of speculation about how to convert aliens to christianity.
Did you RTFA? It is certainly not "nothing but" such speculation. Certainly, it contains that speculation - but it cointains quite a lot more, like the inteviewees current research on metorites (which I am almost certain can not be converted to Christianity).
As an atheist, I dislike the implication that atheists inevitably mock religion, or take the view that God necessarily does not exist. I take the view that, having failed to find any convincing evidence for the existence of God, I must accept the null hypothesis - that God does not exist. You cannot prove a negative: it is certainly possible that God exists but, for inscrutable reasons, has not revealed himself to me but has to others. It is possible that one day in the future such evidence will be revealed to me, and I will cease to be an atheist. But until I have positive evidence, I will not believe just on somebody eles's day so.
But please stop tarring me with the sins of atheist bigots, just as I do not tar all Christians with the sins of Christian bigots.
I would prefer to call atheist bigots "anti-theists" not "a-theists".
No, DEC's supremo Ken Olsen said that he could see no need for a computer in the home. The IBM quote is correct.
They need to develop a controller that can directly handle, say, 64 hard drives, analogous to a big network switch.
It's called a Fibre Channel controller. Fibre Channel loop (which disks use) offers a total of 255 addresses - which has to include the controller. Disks now available in the 300Gbyte region, so 80 Tbyte/loop seems reasonable (and, according to the article, they seem only to have 100Tbyte up so far). 12 of these loops will give you your petabyte. Mind you, you will waste the disk bandwidth; this will gicve you capacity but not throughput.
Turnpike is a mail and news client which provides the functionality you are looking for. I think it was originally designed with small office in mind rather than home user, but had migrated to home user. Nonetheless, the mail files are encrypted separately for each user, who has their own password.
I use it personally and find it quite a good system for a windows environment. Spell checking, threaded emails, a "Windows-like" interface. Not free, except for users of Demon Internet, who won it, but I think has a 30-day trial. I like it
It's certainly not 1 drive - the disk manufacturers are only about the 300Gbyte mark, so it has got to be at least 3. And 3 would probably have the bandwidth needed, including compression. Maybe 4.
If the drive "only" contains the last weeks TV, you're not likely to be that pissed; anything you *really* wanted to see will soon come round again. You probably have no more critical data than any other PC. No point in Raid-ing a DVR. Don't use it as your "real" PC; use it for home entertainment.
Because his sexual orientation led directly to his suicide. It stopped him doing proper work after the war, and killed him when, apparently, he still had a lot more to give to computer research.
If his sexuality had been, as it should have been, part of his prite life, then it would of course be unimportant and not worth mentioning. For most people nowadays that would be the case. Unfortunately, for Turing that was not the case. Any bio that ignored it would be to leave out vital facts about his laife and death.
He was the best example I know of how anti-gay prejudice had deprived the world of talent. How many other talented gays (and women, and coloured people... ) have we lost through bigoted ignorance.
There is a fundamental thing stopping the governments from snooping right now: practicality.
Part of Google's income comes from providing search functionality for other companies. There is no obvious reason why the Federal government could not buy Google's search expertise and use it on a database populated by their Echelon monitoring system. While expensive, it would not be ridiculous compared with other federal spending on security. (Actually, I think it would be a lot better value for money than the ham-fisted repeated searches of the same baggage and repeated checks of the same documents currently going on in airports).
Now, I know that Google says "Do no evil", and some people will immediately call this evil. But I am not so sure you can make such a black-and-white judgement about it. It certainly would be a powerful tool in the hands of an oppressive government. But that is because it is a powerful tool - it is also a powerful tool for detecting terrorists. We know that terrorists are using ad-hoc email to co-ordinate their activities. It is the same power that helps me sort through the dross on the net for the gold I want. It is a dilemma facing anybody who manufactures dual-use technology. Should you stop manufacturing boots because they can be used to kick prisoners to death?
I don't think it is really going to be such a giant blow, because it really is only for large scale corporate users running Websphere. I don't see the smaller company, the self-employed, or the home user switching to this. Which means that it cannot become a de-facto standard, as Word and Excel have. Which in turn means that the corporations will not be that enthusiastic, because they also deal with these other people. If you want som ething that is really quite compatible with the de-facto standard, but not quite, Open Office is available for $0.00 per month.
It will appeal to pointy haired power freaks who dislike the idea of employees having letters and/or spreadsheets on their C: drive. This way, everything is on the company managed central server. Mwahahahaha! Of course, there are cood reasons for that as well - backuip, legal liability, central administration. But they are, broadly speaking, considerations for megacorps not the small user. And it is the magacorps who are IBM's favourite customers.
Fractionally worse than dual proc, but not much. Only a single cache, so two processors will do better at different jobs. On occasions the two dual CPU may go faster by sharing cache but this will be rare, unless you are heavily into simulation or. similar.
Dual CPU chips is better - but much more expensive. Like anything else in this business, if you have got it out of the packaging, it is obsolete. When this chip comes to market, everybody will have what you paid good money for at $200 less.
As I understand it, the cpu core is quite a small part of the silicon area of a modern processor chip. Which is, of course, the logic behind this development. But then, why stop at two? Well, maybe Intel have simulated and found that, in the current state of the art, two is optimal. But if cache gets larger and busses get faster, two may cease to be optimal. Which will lead to competition by number of cpus, not GHz.
For the processor, you are right. But I think that the bulk of the die area is cache and bus logic, not cpu. So doubling the cpu area to get more mileage out of the cache and bus makes sense.
The trouble with dedicated processors (to the OS or amything else) is that their spare MIPS go to waste. And two separate CPUS have more problems communicating than one. If the other processor is different (e.g. the processor on a graphics board), then it may be worthwhile. But if the processor is just another of the same, better to share tasks between all the available processors.