Because Linux is more effective than Windows, China will be more effective at oppressing and controlling the population? Hm.. perhaps China will buy Volvos instead of Volkswagens because you can fit more arrested students in them!
People often 'reinvent' things. British scientist Michael Faraday liquefied ammonia to cause cooling in the 18th century, yet some people think General Electric invented the fridge! The British also claim the phone and the TV as their own inventions.
Putting it to use is more important, and this bloke's work is changing lives. Of course, you could take the view that, by making fruit keep longer, the price will go up, so it has negative as well as positive effects.
> do you REALLY think that windmills and
> solar panels can provide all the energy
> we'll need for the 21st century?
Mind your language. It's either quit emissions or die out. Easy choice?
You have missed one group. They are a bit like the first group, but they are concerned with us (not just our descendants) having a place (any place) to live in 15 or 20 years, not hundreds of years.
The way things are running, it is likely that working people today will end up in a totally broken planet, with no services and global economies unable to cope with effects such as global drought, and Atlantic Conveyor Shutdown. This may all happen in 15 to 20 years, i.e. while my kids are still at school.
With a name like Hew Raymond Griffiths, this bloke is welsh, so he can also hunker down in a remote village out on the Lleyn until all this blows over.
The locals would never reveal him to the Saesneg (saxons) whatever the law says.
> The shuttle is as close to a fail-safe
> system as our species is capable of.
There are far safer ways of getting around the planet than catching the space shuttle.
The reaction ran away, the steam built up and blew the top off the reactor, a huge fire broke out and an explosion scattered large amounts of radio active material around the world! I'd say the worst did happen.
There is a condition called "not invented here syndrome". Sufferers imagine that only thier own culture is any good. It it closely related to "isolationism" and "jingoism". Ex-colonies of Britain seem particularly prone to it.
I suspect that this whole story is an urban myth that may have a grain of truth. I worked through the mid 70's and 80's on Process Control and Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems that are used to control nuclear, chemical, space and pipeline systems. This was the period when systems moved from largely pneumatic telemetered systems to electronic and computerised control. The old technology had run large industrial systems since the war, and was by and large highly reliable. The new technology was considered cheap and inferior and was not (and is still not) trusted. Such systems were created fail safe, such that computer crashes caused shut downs, not explosions. This was very ingrained into the designers of such systems. Failures such as Chernobyl and Flixborough added to the designers' caution, even though control was sometimes not a contributory factor.
Most software systems in this category required very significant source code modifications to make them fit for purpose. It was rare to ship a system without giving the purchaser inspection access to the code so that they could assess the quality for themselves.
The designers of this soviet pipeline would have had double cause for concern, and would most certainly have been suspicious of the provenance of the system. In such a case, it is highly likely that they would have built in extra hardware constraints into the system to prevent failure due to malicious software, especially if they could not read and validate the source.
Ha... Britain is lazy, eh. At least we got round to inventing the English language, which you you have (lasily) adopted for yourself to express your own (heavy?) legal machinery.
That's right. The SPAM act may not be illegal, but the payload might be.
The right solution is to require a digital stamp on mail, which may be refunded if the receiver likes the mail!
I meant that floats have too much precision, not too little. Accounting programs only need 2 places (for pennies), but floats have much more. It is better in an accountancy program to keep the data to 2 places with absolute accuracy (zero error) than to keep the data in floats, which introduce slight inaccuracies when converting between base two values and base 10 values. Unless you program carefully, these slight inaccuracies are cumulative, and eventually can result in rounding errors in the penny range, which can make it hard to reconcile accounts with absolute accuracy.
COBOL and ORACLE are advanced in this respect, and have special number ranges that can hold cash amounts with absolute accuracy. The IBM 370 mainframes even had built a native data type (packed decimal) that did not round data off to the nearest binary equivalent.
I assume that the trouble with using floats for a financial application is that, in arithmetic, non-exact rounding can occur that might make exact totalling up more difficult, or something like that.
Years ago, I imposed the use of courier fixed font on official flight procedures for a satellite mission, to make it easy to line things up in the days before word processors had table features. This made it quicker for the SATCONs to find the right action when anomalies happened, so I don't necessarily agree that Times is more readable.
My decision stood for some years until a new clerk 'translated' the procedures into a proportional font and formatted the tables 'properly'. I suspect this was a make-work activity, for which the government is famous. By then, I couldn't care less, although I would be most peeved if someone translated my FORTRAN source code into Times!
This shows that to be normal, people must conform to the 'thumb in bum, mind in neutral' culture of modern consumerism, while those who stand outside (mostly private, thoughtful people of good intentions) are assessed as strange loners for not dumbing down with the masses. When will people wake up to the fact that step 1 is realising that we are not on the same staircase?
I used to live in Montreal but I moved back to England in '98. I was shocked at how much money British people waste on high priced stuff. The British attitude is easy come, easy go, perhaps because when all the money's gone, they have the welfare state to bail them out (dole, NHS, national pension plan, income supplements etc.) So they don't have any incentive not to spend it all whatever the cost. What goes around comes around though. They don't organise their businesses particularly effectively and they don't work hard, so margins are less despite higher prices. Disorganisation is a British trait, and they are very proud of it. Also, although they don't work hard or effectively, they do put in a lot of hours, so they don't have a lot of time to quibble about a few quid when they go shopping.
That's my guess, anyway. Good luck to them, though - it's a lot of fun to live here.
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Because Linux is more effective than Windows, China will be more effective at oppressing and controlling the population? Hm.. perhaps China will buy Volvos instead of Volkswagens because you can fit more arrested students in them!
Putting it to use is more important, and this bloke's work is changing lives. Of course, you could take the view that, by making fruit keep longer, the price will go up, so it has negative as well as positive effects.
> do you REALLY think that windmills and > solar panels can provide all the energy > we'll need for the 21st century? Mind your language. It's either quit emissions or die out. Easy choice?
You have missed one group. They are a bit like the first group, but they are concerned with us (not just our descendants) having a place (any place) to live in 15 or 20 years, not hundreds of years. The way things are running, it is likely that working people today will end up in a totally broken planet, with no services and global economies unable to cope with effects such as global drought, and Atlantic Conveyor Shutdown. This may all happen in 15 to 20 years, i.e. while my kids are still at school.
You must have meant to say -
The environmentalist groups do everything in their power to see that we don't die out.
Havn't you heard? We are not progressing in our knowledge and abilities! We are dying out according to Conveyor Shut Down.
> It's a pretty freaking big planet.
It's so huge that it takes a satellite over an hour to orbit it. You could have breakfast in that time.
Yes, it is. Maybe he's slowing turning Australian, and in twenty years he'll be called Hew Crocodile Dundee.
With a name like Hew Raymond Griffiths, this bloke is welsh, so he can also hunker down in a remote village out on the Lleyn until all this blows over. The locals would never reveal him to the Saesneg (saxons) whatever the law says.
Laws are standards, so who would make them if the government doesn't?
> The shuttle is as close to a fail-safe > system as our species is capable of. There are far safer ways of getting around the planet than catching the space shuttle.
Judging by your post, there isn't.
Yes, it's amazing what you can do in India. Image trying to live like that in Canada or the US!
The reaction ran away, the steam built up and blew the top off the reactor, a huge fire broke out and an explosion scattered large amounts of radio active material around the world! I'd say the worst did happen.
There is a condition called "not invented here syndrome". Sufferers imagine that only thier own culture is any good. It it closely related to "isolationism" and "jingoism". Ex-colonies of Britain seem particularly prone to it.
I suspect that this whole story is an urban myth that may have a grain of truth. I worked through the mid 70's and 80's on Process Control and Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems that are used to control nuclear, chemical, space and pipeline systems. This was the period when systems moved from largely pneumatic telemetered systems to electronic and computerised control. The old technology had run large industrial systems since the war, and was by and large highly reliable. The new technology was considered cheap and inferior and was not (and is still not) trusted. Such systems were created fail safe, such that computer crashes caused shut downs, not explosions. This was very ingrained into the designers of such systems. Failures such as Chernobyl and Flixborough added to the designers' caution, even though control was sometimes not a contributory factor. Most software systems in this category required very significant source code modifications to make them fit for purpose. It was rare to ship a system without giving the purchaser inspection access to the code so that they could assess the quality for themselves. The designers of this soviet pipeline would have had double cause for concern, and would most certainly have been suspicious of the provenance of the system. In such a case, it is highly likely that they would have built in extra hardware constraints into the system to prevent failure due to malicious software, especially if they could not read and validate the source.
Ha... Britain is lazy, eh. At least we got round to inventing the English language, which you you have (lasily) adopted for yourself to express your own (heavy?) legal machinery.
That's right. The SPAM act may not be illegal, but the payload might be. The right solution is to require a digital stamp on mail, which may be refunded if the receiver likes the mail!
I meant that floats have too much precision, not too little. Accounting programs only need 2 places (for pennies), but floats have much more. It is better in an accountancy program to keep the data to 2 places with absolute accuracy (zero error) than to keep the data in floats, which introduce slight inaccuracies when converting between base two values and base 10 values. Unless you program carefully, these slight inaccuracies are cumulative, and eventually can result in rounding errors in the penny range, which can make it hard to reconcile accounts with absolute accuracy. COBOL and ORACLE are advanced in this respect, and have special number ranges that can hold cash amounts with absolute accuracy. The IBM 370 mainframes even had built a native data type (packed decimal) that did not round data off to the nearest binary equivalent.
I assume that the trouble with using floats for a financial application is that, in arithmetic, non-exact rounding can occur that might make exact totalling up more difficult, or something like that.
Years ago, I imposed the use of courier fixed font on official flight procedures for a satellite mission, to make it easy to line things up in the days before word processors had table features. This made it quicker for the SATCONs to find the right action when anomalies happened, so I don't necessarily agree that Times is more readable. My decision stood for some years until a new clerk 'translated' the procedures into a proportional font and formatted the tables 'properly'. I suspect this was a make-work activity, for which the government is famous. By then, I couldn't care less, although I would be most peeved if someone translated my FORTRAN source code into Times!
Can you copy it to tape or disk as well for two days?
This shows that to be normal, people must conform to the 'thumb in bum, mind in neutral' culture of modern consumerism, while those who stand outside (mostly private, thoughtful people of good intentions) are assessed as strange loners for not dumbing down with the masses. When will people wake up to the fact that step 1 is realising that we are not on the same staircase?
I used to live in Montreal but I moved back to England in '98. I was shocked at how much money British people waste on high priced stuff. The British attitude is easy come, easy go, perhaps because when all the money's gone, they have the welfare state to bail them out (dole, NHS, national pension plan, income supplements etc.) So they don't have any incentive not to spend it all whatever the cost. What goes around comes around though. They don't organise their businesses particularly effectively and they don't work hard, so margins are less despite higher prices. Disorganisation is a British trait, and they are very proud of it. Also, although they don't work hard or effectively, they do put in a lot of hours, so they don't have a lot of time to quibble about a few quid when they go shopping. That's my guess, anyway. Good luck to them, though - it's a lot of fun to live here.
I'm in the UK. You are a foreigner.