They've probably done a refresh on SRT, but the system I installed had 8kb of RAM each on several 24 sq-in boards.
I looked at this with the Astronautics tech, and said "My Apple ][ that I had in high school 4 years ago had 6 times the memory in a quarter of the space". He didn't have a good response.:-)
Don't get me started on the Mannesmann-Tally "dot matrix" printers. Total junk.
And it was built in the early 1980's. You would think that in a plane whose computers limit turns to 9g's -- not because of the airframe, but because of the stresses on the pilot -- they would have concerns over strength. But that is not so.
One concern the USAF had with the F-16 was that in the event of a crash, a cloud of electrically conductive carbon fibers would settle over the base, shorting out anything electrical. Judging by the F-16 we had burn on the taxiway at Hahn AB in 1985, that wasn't the case.
Given that pretty much all our military's high-accuracy munitions depend on GPS for their "smartness", there is almost certainly a redundant control system elsewhere. Possibly with the 1st Mob or the 3rd Herd, which are expeditionary forces so they aren't sitting ducks like an Air Base is.
Congrats to Ameritrade on owning up to the problem and closing the hole caused by the rogue code.
However, the programmer (or hacker) who added this code probably didn't do it just once -- there are likely other backdoors that they put in. So, Ameritrade needs to perform a top-to-bottom code audit in order to ensure that all their code is what it is supposed to be. This should be done by two unrelated teams of skilled developers who are familiar with financial systems, and who have never been on their payroll, or the payroll of any of their vendors they have used in the past.
Only then can the management at Ameritrade have any assurance at any level, that their systems are now uncompromised.
The author here highlights one of the language features, the Erlang light weight process. These are true processes (not threads) but take up very little in the way of resources. Indeed it is not unusual to have 1000's of such processes running in an application.
Would a good analogy be that an Erlang process is comparable to an object instance, in that both are loosely coupled (ideally), focused on one task (ideally), but in Erlang they're all running asynchronously and the OS/runtime automatically handles the communications for you?
Chip H.
Re:how many of them work after that time
on
The CD Turns 25 Today
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I bought a Sony CDP-101 (first commercial CD player) in 1983 for $650 (a lot of money back then.) Still have it in a closet somewhere (sounds horrible compared to modern gear, but it's built like a rock!)
All the discs I bought back then still play -- Eurythmics, Deutsche Grammophon von Karajan, The Kinks, Star Wars soundtrack.
The ones that have problems are the mass-market CDs of recent vintage -- the pressing company seems to have let their quality standards slip in favor of shipping more product. What looks to have happened is the lacquer protectant had pinholes & gaps that allow the aluminum to oxidize.
A good take-away from this would be: "People who file dumb lawsuits aren't that popular with the general public, and give the profession a bad reputation."
Forgive me, but STM is a crutch. Yes, it will help the programmer masses not shoot themselves in the foot, but the overhead in STM is phenomenal, and you're relying on Moore's Law to save you.
If you want a responsive system (running on thread-unfriendly OSs like Windows) there's no substitute for knowing what you're doing.
We currently have some offshore developers who are peppering their code with Thread.Sleep() statements, with sleep values selected so that the code kinda-sorta works on their machines. They might as well as be doing Thread.Sleep(Rnd()) for all the good it's doing them.
What's needed is some education in how to write multithreaded programs -- and most universities are not able to provide that education or experience in the time available for a bachelor's degree.
I wish that Palm had open-sourced the BeOs source when they acquired the company. Or at least the parts that weren't encumbered by other people's IP. If it had been placed on Sourceforge, it would have been a good starting point for people to learn how to do it correctly, and gotten some eyeballs on it to fix some it's warts.
McDonalds and Burger King buns as well as Pizza Hut pizza sauce taste repulsively sweet once you're no longer used to a certain minimum amount of sugar in each meal.
Take a look at the ingredient list of hotdog/hamburger buns the next time you're at the supermarket.
Why does a simple bun need high fructose corn syrup added as a sweetener? It should be flour, yeast, water, and not much else.
If I were a mid-sized business that needed an accounting system or other line-of-business app, I'd be looking at AS/400 based products.
You buy an AS/400, plug it in, and ignore it. It just works for years and years.
Sure, it's not sexy-GUI, but who cares -- you're tracking profit-loss numbers, not pictures of your classmates.
For techno-lust: they're 64-bit with single-level storage. Which means that all attached storage is mapped into a single address space. Add a new RAID array? To the OS, it just means that there's now an additional block of addressable memory. None of this kinda-sorta 64-bit support like on the x86 platform -- it's FULLY 64 bit.
Security is enforced in hardware, too. No TCM chip needed -- there's an extra bit that's used to separate user and system code. The only way a user program can elevate it's priviledges is by way of a soldering iron.
I was hot stuff in high school because our family had two Disk ][ drives. Which worked out really well for doing Pascal (once we upgraded to 64k and an 80-column card) because the compiler would be in the 1st drive and your source would be on the second.
Also - remember disk notchers? That would cut an extra notch on the floppy so you could use the other side? (Disk ][ drives were single-sided)
A broken strand is going to wrap around the planet to some extent. Most likely it would land on top of an orphanage for cute puppies run by disabled nuns.
While at first glance that doesn't sound so bad (hey, it just lands, right?), you're forgetting the whipcord effect, where the trailing end of the cable would be travelling at some multiple of the earth's rotational velocity when it hits. Think Krakatoa. Only with bigger Tsunamis.
Redundant strands don't help you with this. If even one of them fails, the damage it'd cause around the globe would be immense.
So yes, you need a material approximately 3 times the strength of a (perfect) carbon nanotube in order to be a relatively safe civil/space engineering construction.
I agree. With wireless networking so cheap, the most ethernet wire I'd string would be a couple of lines to an out-of-the-way closet on each floor (don't forget to run power to the closets!) for wireless hubs.
I'd put my money into things which will save you money, such as geothermal heatpumps, thermally-controlled attic fans, and high-end windows [PDF] and doors.
Additional benefits can be had from hiring your own construction supervisor. My experience has been that builders will use cheap unskilled labor to do the initial work, and only if you complain loudly will they bring in the high-priced high-talent crews to correct the mistakes made by the first group of tradesmen. Having your own person looking over the construction each day will save you a lot of heartache and get you a better-build home. After hurricanes, you'll see hordes of fly-by-nighters arrive in town, hoping to make a quick buck. In New Orleans, this might be especially true with all the rebuilding going on.
HDMI connectors are friction-fit. So if you have a heavy gauge HDMI cable running up the wall to your expensive plasma display, there's a good chance that the weight of the cable will exceed the strength of the connection, causing the cable to fall off.
A friend does high-end installations, and he's taken to super-gluing (with customer approval) the cable to the TV to prevent this. Otherwise you've got a pissed off customer who can't move their 75+ lb television by themselves & get it reconnected (if they do somehow manage to get it plugged back in, it'll just fall off again shortly afterwards).
If the HDMI people had put some latches on the connector, this wouldn't be necessary.
Chip H.
The best part about this protein....
on
The Human Mutation
·
· Score: 5, Funny
...is that your pets have been already eating it for two months!
A friend was a programmer for one of the nation's largest banks, and was chit-chatting in a conference room prior to the meeting starting. Someone asked him what his hobbies were, and he mentioned that he restored old cars, and shot pistols competitively (bowling pin matches, IIRC).
One of the people in the meeting later called corporate security, saying they felt threatened by him. Security immediately escorted him out of the building (he was a full-time employee in an at-will state, so this was within their rights).
It later came out that the person who called security was bucking for a promotion, and wanted his job. Got it, too. Isn't corporate politics fun?
Slashdot Mirror
And if they won't leave you alone?
Remember, they have free will too.
Chip H.
So, do nano-scale carbon tubes sound better than transistors?
Or, only if you use oxygen-free silver interconnects the size of a garden hose?
Chip H.
Society prepares the crime. The criminal commits it.
Chip H.
Or 12" LaserDisc.
Until DVD, it was the highest-quality video you could have in the home.
Chip H.
They've probably done a refresh on SRT, but the system I installed had 8kb of RAM each on several 24 sq-in boards.
:-)
I looked at this with the Astronautics tech, and said "My Apple ][ that I had in high school 4 years ago had 6 times the memory in a quarter of the space". He didn't have a good response.
Don't get me started on the Mannesmann-Tally "dot matrix" printers. Total junk.
Chip H.
You were still using DSTE in 1986?
I helped remove what I think was the last installation in USAFE in 1984, and replace it with SRT.
Mmmmm. 512 bits of core memory!
Chip H.
NNNN
If this is true, Leopard is probably the last OS upgrade that will be available for the 1.2-1.5gHz PPC Mac Mini family.
Prepare to buy an Intel CPU Mac for your next major OS upgrade after Leopard.
Chip H.
And it was built in the early 1980's. You would think that in a plane whose computers limit turns to 9g's -- not because of the airframe, but because of the stresses on the pilot -- they would have concerns over strength. But that is not so.
One concern the USAF had with the F-16 was that in the event of a crash, a cloud of electrically conductive carbon fibers would settle over the base, shorting out anything electrical. Judging by the F-16 we had burn on the taxiway at Hahn AB in 1985, that wasn't the case.
Chip H.
Given that pretty much all our military's high-accuracy munitions depend on GPS for their "smartness", there is almost certainly a redundant control system elsewhere. Possibly with the 1st Mob or the 3rd Herd, which are expeditionary forces so they aren't sitting ducks like an Air Base is.
Chip H.
Congrats to Ameritrade on owning up to the problem and closing the hole caused by the rogue code.
However, the programmer (or hacker) who added this code probably didn't do it just once -- there are likely other backdoors that they put in. So, Ameritrade needs to perform a top-to-bottom code audit in order to ensure that all their code is what it is supposed to be. This should be done by two unrelated teams of skilled developers who are familiar with financial systems, and who have never been on their payroll, or the payroll of any of their vendors they have used in the past.
Only then can the management at Ameritrade have any assurance at any level, that their systems are now uncompromised.
Chip H.
Would a good analogy be that an Erlang process is comparable to an object instance, in that both are loosely coupled (ideally), focused on one task (ideally), but in Erlang they're all running asynchronously and the OS/runtime automatically handles the communications for you?
Chip H.
I bought a Sony CDP-101 (first commercial CD player) in 1983 for $650 (a lot of money back then.) Still have it in a closet somewhere (sounds horrible compared to modern gear, but it's built like a rock!)
All the discs I bought back then still play -- Eurythmics, Deutsche Grammophon von Karajan, The Kinks, Star Wars soundtrack.
The ones that have problems are the mass-market CDs of recent vintage -- the pressing company seems to have let their quality standards slip in favor of shipping more product. What looks to have happened is the lacquer protectant had pinholes & gaps that allow the aluminum to oxidize.
Chip H.
The city that won the business intelligence award for data mining is Richmond VA, not 'Redmond'.
Chip H.
Don't get any ideas.
A good take-away from this would be: "People who file dumb lawsuits aren't that popular with the general public, and give the profession a bad reputation."
Chip H.
Forgive me, but STM is a crutch.
Yes, it will help the programmer masses not shoot themselves in the foot, but the overhead in STM is phenomenal, and you're relying on Moore's Law to save you.
If you want a responsive system (running on thread-unfriendly OSs like Windows) there's no substitute for knowing what you're doing.
We currently have some offshore developers who are peppering their code with Thread.Sleep() statements, with sleep values selected so that the code kinda-sorta works on their machines. They might as well as be doing Thread.Sleep(Rnd()) for all the good it's doing them.
What's needed is some education in how to write multithreaded programs -- and most universities are not able to provide that education or experience in the time available for a bachelor's degree.
I wish that Palm had open-sourced the BeOs source when they acquired the company. Or at least the parts that weren't encumbered by other people's IP. If it had been placed on Sourceforge, it would have been a good starting point for people to learn how to do it correctly, and gotten some eyeballs on it to fix some it's warts.
Chip H.
McDonalds and Burger King buns as well as Pizza Hut pizza sauce taste repulsively sweet once you're no longer used to a certain minimum amount of sugar in each meal.
Take a look at the ingredient list of hotdog/hamburger buns the next time you're at the supermarket.
Why does a simple bun need high fructose corn syrup added as a sweetener? It should be flour, yeast, water, and not much else.
Chip H.
If I were a mid-sized business that needed an accounting system or other line-of-business app, I'd be looking at AS/400 based products.
You buy an AS/400, plug it in, and ignore it. It just works for years and years.
Sure, it's not sexy-GUI, but who cares -- you're tracking profit-loss numbers, not pictures of your classmates.
For techno-lust: they're 64-bit with single-level storage. Which means that all attached storage is mapped into a single address space. Add a new RAID array? To the OS, it just means that there's now an additional block of addressable memory. None of this kinda-sorta 64-bit support like on the x86 platform -- it's FULLY 64 bit.
Security is enforced in hardware, too. No TCM chip needed -- there's an extra bit that's used to separate user and system code. The only way a user program can elevate it's priviledges is by way of a soldering iron.
Chip H.
Imagine if you could create Asbestos Ducks that you'd drop into a subduction zone to trace the earth's magma currents.
Of course, you'd have to wait a bit longer than 4 years for them to pop up at their destination...
Chip H.
I was hot stuff in high school because our family had two Disk ][ drives. Which worked out really well for doing Pascal (once we upgraded to 64k and an 80-column card) because the compiler would be in the 1st drive and your source would be on the second.
Also - remember disk notchers? That would cut an extra notch on the floppy so you could use the other side? (Disk ][ drives were single-sided)
Chip H.
A broken strand is going to wrap around the planet to some extent. Most likely it would land on top of an orphanage for cute puppies run by disabled nuns.
While at first glance that doesn't sound so bad (hey, it just lands, right?), you're forgetting the whipcord effect, where the trailing end of the cable would be travelling at some multiple of the earth's rotational velocity when it hits. Think Krakatoa. Only with bigger Tsunamis.
Chip H.
Redundant strands don't help you with this. If even one of them fails, the damage it'd cause around the globe would be immense.
So yes, you need a material approximately 3 times the strength of a (perfect) carbon nanotube in order to be a relatively safe civil/space engineering construction.
Chip H.
I agree. With wireless networking so cheap, the most ethernet wire I'd string would be a couple of lines to an out-of-the-way closet on each floor (don't forget to run power to the closets!) for wireless hubs.
I'd put my money into things which will save you money, such as geothermal heatpumps, thermally-controlled attic fans, and high-end windows [PDF] and doors.
Additional benefits can be had from hiring your own construction supervisor. My experience has been that builders will use cheap unskilled labor to do the initial work, and only if you complain loudly will they bring in the high-priced high-talent crews to correct the mistakes made by the first group of tradesmen. Having your own person looking over the construction each day will save you a lot of heartache and get you a better-build home. After hurricanes, you'll see hordes of fly-by-nighters arrive in town, hoping to make a quick buck. In New Orleans, this might be especially true with all the rebuilding going on.
Chip H.
HDMI connectors are friction-fit. So if you have a heavy gauge HDMI cable running up the wall to your expensive plasma display, there's a good chance that the weight of the cable will exceed the strength of the connection, causing the cable to fall off.
A friend does high-end installations, and he's taken to super-gluing (with customer approval) the cable to the TV to prevent this. Otherwise you've got a pissed off customer who can't move their 75+ lb television by themselves & get it reconnected (if they do somehow manage to get it plugged back in, it'll just fall off again shortly afterwards).
If the HDMI people had put some latches on the connector, this wouldn't be necessary.
Chip H.
...is that your pets have been already eating it for two months!
Chip H.
A friend was a programmer for one of the nation's largest banks, and was chit-chatting in a conference room prior to the meeting starting. Someone asked him what his hobbies were, and he mentioned that he restored old cars, and shot pistols competitively (bowling pin matches, IIRC).
One of the people in the meeting later called corporate security, saying they felt threatened by him. Security immediately escorted him out of the building (he was a full-time employee in an at-will state, so this was within their rights).
It later came out that the person who called security was bucking for a promotion, and wanted his job. Got it, too.
Isn't corporate politics fun?
Chip H.