See here for a concise biography of Gates, in particular the history of the wealth of the Gates family of Washington State. Summarizing he's always been upper class, he was already from one of the wealthiest families in Washington State at birth. As an aside many "entrepreneurs" came from upper class backgrounds: the Walton family (yeah Sam started off running a mom and pop grocery but it's been growing exponentially since the early 70's, by the time Wal-Marts started popping up like dandelions Walton was already among the wealthiest people in Arkansas) and Donald Trump (second generation scion of a New York real estate millionaire) and Ted Turner (he bet the already considerable family fortune on cable television in the early 70's).
Really there are two kinds of "entrepreneur" those who entered the world without access to significant capital (Larry Ellison, don't know about Jobs, Mark Cuban) and those who risked significant personal wealth (Turner, Gates et al.) to move from being merely very wealthy (as in top1 or 2% of the population) to extremely wealthy (as in the number of individuals with similar wealth on the entire planet numbers less than 1000). Given that the very wealthy can afford to make great sacrifices (gamble) because often they will still be very wealthy even if they fail it's really not that remarkable that sometimes they succeed. For example Gates sacrificed a Harvard degree (and the concommitant access it provides) to move to New Mexico where all he had to fall back on was a $1 million trust fund ($1 million in 1979 remember, invested conservatively at 6% that's $3.8 million today a far cry from $1 billion but I'm sure Bill would find a way to survive on it).
Apparently you don't look very hard. There are significant differences even in the examples you have presented. First of all the LISP/Scheme code support introspection (you can determine the contents of my_function with other LISP/Scheme code) which is impossible in the C (and that won't work in C anyway) or assembler model. Secondly the issue of type safety is unaddressed especially in the assembly and C code (what are you adding integers? Reals? Complex values? Inquiring compilers want to know). Finally to paraphrase Larry Wall states a language should make the easy things easy without making the hard things impossible which is the driving impetus behind programming language creation. There are real and fundamental disagreements over what is/should be easy and what's impossible.
Too bad there does not exist a universal computer language compiler system whereby one could code in the computer language they prefer and check the code in and the next guy could check out the code in the language they prefer.
That desire seems to express much of the design behind the.NET CLR. In principle it should be possible to disassemble CLR code into a language other than its original implementation, however the disconnect in features (just how would you disassemble a LISP closure into C code? Or worse yet the entire Smalltalk environment?) makes this less feasible than your simplistic assumptions would indicate.
I think a more accurate statement is the probability density of the location of the proton has an ovoid appearance. Just as only the s orbitals of electrons have a spherical distribution and the others take on some rather remarkable shapes.
An additional caveat is the electrons scattering was used to probe the proton. So the primary interaction was electromagnetic with a very small weak component. Protons may have a different "shape" when viewed by a neutrino since neutrinos do not couple with the electromagnetic field. This is a guess though and I am not qualified to make that statement more precise.
Finally, the obvious question is how do we define a "top" for a proton, ie, how do we know which direction the ovoid is oriented in? The answer is since a proton has a nonzero spin it assumes one of two diametrically opposed orientations in a magnetic field and we can use the axis formed by those directions to define "up". Finally, thinking about it that way, since quarks also couple to the electromagnetic field as well as interacting with each other through the strong force, it's not that surprising that a proton has a shape, it may be a result of the complicated interactions between the quarks. Then again, no one has done the calculation (which is fiendishly difficult and impossible to do analytically since it's a pretty general 3 body problem) so maybe it's a little unjust to call the result unsurprising.
Since when did I suggest the use of blocking I/O? Any single-threaded application of this sort needs to use non-blocking I/O as a matter of course. See POSIX AIO for one non-blocking I/O API.
Use of nonblocking I/O is in general almost as difficult as writing good multithreaded code. In effect the developer has to reimplement the logic of a multithreaded application in user space and wrap it around the nonblocking I/O calls. For applications such as a log file writer of course using nonblocking I/O without extra logic to check the results is fine though. Consider the case of a plant controller though, where multiple sensors could be triggering events for multiple controlers asynchronously. In that case a multithreaded design may make for simpler code than writing (and optimizing) what is in effect a thread scheduler for a single threaded application. In short, unless one does not read the results of a previous write, there is no such thing as truly nonblocking, I/O. You will always have to check a semaphore to determine whether it is safe to read (or have some subsytem below implement the logic).
Finally... you mention that error states are possible in threaded applications, and can be exercised by appropriately written code ("tests" which cripple a multithreaded application). Personally, having a number of almost impossible to find deadlocks hidden away in my system until some end-user chances upon one makes me very, very nervous.
Now you are taking liberties with my statements. I did not say multithreaded code necessarily contains an error state. I was thinking of the case of a TPC like test. One common architecture for a multithreaded application is to have a pool of threads available which can perform all tasks available to the system. If the "benchmark" causes all the available threads to be contending for a single resource (like a write to the same record) then the application may be unavailable for future requests thus reducing throughput. A single threaded application will generally batch requests, so the multiple writes will be condensed to a single write request and the throughput will be higher. Nothing prevents a multithreaded application from doing the same thing, but you are correct the overhead in communication required in a multithreaded application would probably prevent it from equalling a single threaded app's performance on such a test. Deadlocks are a challenge because the most popular current languages have poor support for writing multithreaded applications (compare the relatively unpopular Ada95 to C/C++ for example). Deadlocks are not a necessity anymore than unstructured assembly code, but just as higher level languages encourage better structured code, newer languages encourage writing of reentrant, nonlocking code (Java for example strikes a reasonable middle ground between Ada and C as far as multiple threads go).
There is one sigificant caveat to your assertion that a single threaded application will always outperform a multithreaded version. "a well-written single-threaded application that never makes a blocking system call (such as I/O) while there is useful worrk to be done will always be faster than an equivalent multithreaded application", emphasis mine. Since a large number of useful applications: DB's, mail clients, browsers, processor simulators, web servers etc. have exactly this kind of behaviour it is very desirable.
To cover my own ass, I will add one more caveat. This perfomance advantage only shows up in thoughput on a balanced workload. It is trivial to create "tests" which cripple a multithreaded application by finding a code path which causes all threads to block on a shared resource (ie force a DB to write to tables that have little disk/memory locality simultaneously) which a single threaded app composed to deal with that situation will show higher performance in. Single threaded apps using that architecture generally fail in more balanced (you can argue whether that's real world or not) situations.
I'm not an Ellison fan by any means but I doubt he'd have to pull those stunts to raise the funds for his effort. Last year alone he made $700 million in cash exercising his options. In case you though he blew it all on a sail boat he still has $400 million worth of options that are in the money, even at the deflated stock price. Oh yeah, and that $700 million only represented about 2% of his Oracle holdings at the time.
If Oracle corporation is financially involved in this boat at all it's probably by buying sponsorship like any other corporation. Of course that eases the burden on Larry's pocketbook a bit, but in accouting terms since sponsorship is advertising and advertising is supposed to result in increased revenue in the future. So at least in that sense you can argue that he isn't pulling money out of his employee's paychecks to fund this effort.
No Formula 1 is extremely boring. The problem with the tech is that it really doesn't not bring any benefit anymore.
OK there's a double negative that's a little tricky to parse, but I'll assume you meant "it doesn't really bring any benefit anymore", you're wrong.
Previously it made engines faster, stronger and influenced cars. But now we have 500 HP monsters on the road. So I ask you what are you going to do with a 500 HP monster? Only in Germany can you semi use that speed, but even then it is dangerous. My car is limited to 250 KPH (cheaper insurance) and 250 KPH is damm fast. My average speed is probably about 160 KPH (traffic, other people, etc).
There is more to improving an automobile's performance than increasing horsepower. For example as far as engines are concerned: driveability in the form of a flat torque curve over a wide range of rpm is useful in racing especially in F1 where circuits typically have tight corners connected by straight sections so being able to accelerate out of a corner is key to victory. In a road going car this helps in giving you the ability to accelerate when merging onto a highway without requiring you to floor it and potentially fishtail. Mercedes Benz engines of the last 10 years are noted for particularly flat torque curves, is it any surprise that Mercedes powered McLarens dominated F1 in the latter half of the 90's. Fuel efficiency is still a concern since in racing it opens up your options for pit strategy. Since most forms of racing have displacement limits volumetric efficiency is still a concern which has led to the highly efficient yet powerful 100HP/liter engines from Honda, BMW, and Ferrari available in their road cars. However engine technology is not the primary focus in Grand Prix and other high end racing anymore, the two key technologies to victory are aerodynamics and tires. With the F360 and 550 Maranello Ferrari has started to apply racing aerodynamic technology to increase high speed stability of normal road cars. Porsche has also paid a lot of attention to the high speed stability of their road going cars. Regardless of national speed limits, the real factor limiting driver speeds is comfort with the car's handling at speed (I have a link for this but can't find it right now). Admitedly this technology is only available on high cost automobiles but like nearly every other automotive technology of the last 30 years: ABS, traction control, airbags, in car navigation systems, active suspension etc. it will trickle down to cars available to the general public over time. Perhaps the biggest change in automotive technology over the last decade is not from the major manufacteres but the tire companies. Off the shelf I can buy Pirelli POne and PZero or Michelin Pilot tires which can improve the handling capabilities of my car by nearly 10% over typical (cheap) OEM tires. Winter and rain tire technology has improved even further. In fact, modern supercars like the Ferrari 360 and Dodge Viper can nearly match pure race built GT cars (I'm talking about nonstreet legal versions of cars like the 911, RX7, Mustang etc. that you see bringing up the back of the pack in the ALMS series or in the Speedvision GT series not GT prototypes) of 10 to 15 years ago off the showroom floor without having significantly more horsepower or lighter structures. This performance advantage is not as apparent in more mass market cars like the Accord or Camry because chassis engineers have used the extra traction to provide softer damping rates for a smoother ride. Using aftermarket shock and spring packages on these cars quickly demonstrate how much more capable they are than their previous generation models.
The fuel limit was dropped so fuel efficiency is not important. The body of the car is made with kevlar, carbon fibre, which has about a snow's ball's chance in hell in making it to regular cars.
Again, untrue. Audi is already building lightweight aluminum unibodies for the A8 and will probably move the technology down their product line over time. Lotus (which has close ties to GM) also is doing pioneering work in lightweight chassis and bodies with the Elise. The Opel Speedster that GM may bring to the US uses the same technology. You can get road going cars with Carbon Fiber bodies from Lamborghini (although their space frame construction makes it unlikely that anyone else will adopt their approach) or BMW (in the M3 CSL although only some portions of the car are Carbon Fiber). For those of us with incomes closer to the median, there are plenty of aftermarket suppliers for carbon fiber body panels for production automobiles like the Ford Focus, Honda Civic, Honda Accord etc.
Also there is a de facto fuel efficiency limit in Formula 1 since you are required to make at least one pit stop. Given the sensitivity of a modern Formula 1 car to fuel weight, in some circumstances it pays to run a lighter fuel load and make more pit stops. If you are not fuel efficient then you'll have to carry more fuel on the multistop strategies slowing you down. CART has a de facto fuel efficiency limit too since there is a minimum number of laps one is allowed to run between stops and a maximum tank size in the rules.
As for boring or elitist entertainment. That's almost entirely a matter of taste. The wealthy tend to prefer to be with people in their own income group and one method of excluding the nonwealthy is to choose pursuits in which they cannot participate. They can then use their wealth to further exclude participation by increasing equipment costs. Golf and Tennis are two examples of sports which should be relatively cheap (if Golf equipment was cheap stainless steel instead of hard to forge titanium heads on highly engineered carbon fiber shafts, and likewise for tennis racket materials) but aren't. On the other hand, I can play chess but have little interest in devoting a lot of time to watching it, but I can imagine how a more devoted fan would find a well played game very interesting to observe.
I hope this was in jest since a simple look up returns chapter and verse Ecc 3:8.
If so sorry for no being earnest, but given many peoples inability to identify what is and isn't actually said in the Bible (see the section What American's Believe") I think I'd like to clear things up for accuracy's sake.
For the link weary (wary?), electrokinetic drives are a crude form of ion propulsion where instead of using some form of ion source, the ions naturally present in the atmosphere are accelerated by a large electric field. The first link in the list seems to be the most reputable and reports NO acceleration produced. A few of the later links talsk about elctrokinetic migration of ions in soil due to chemically generated electric fields. Electrokinetic propulsion of airborne vehicles seems to be impossible.
That's not a question in general relativity. The curvature of a spacetime can be measured without considering it as being embedded in manifold of higher dimension. How? Here is the common demonstration of the idea without using the language of math which makes the idea harder to convey. If you want a more rigourous explanation see here. Note that the curvature we are concerned with here is the Gaussian curvature which is intrinsic, ie it can be measured without considering directions outside of the dimension of interest.
Consider the surface of sphere, any ball is a reasonable approximation. Now consider the following path. Starting at the equator while facing west (these are all well defined directions if you use the right hand rule and call north the direction of your thumb then east follows the curvature of your fingers and west is opposite east). Now go 1/4 of the circumference of the circle west, turn to face north. This is a 90 degree turn. Go to the north pole. Now turn 90 degrees again (again this is a well defined operation, when facing any direction a 90 degree turn is accomplished by orienting yourself such that the direction previously over your right shoulder is now the direction you are facing). Now continue to the equator. You should be at the original starting point, and another 90 degree turn will leave you facing west, your original direction of departure.
So you've traced out a triangle: a closed path with three vertices, but you've made 3 90 degree turns so the sum of the interior angles is greater than 180 degrees in violation of euclidean geometry. Therefore you know your 2 dimensional world: which is the surface of the sphere, is curved. Note that is is not necessary for this surface to actually be curved "into" anything. If the sphere is the spacetime of a universe then there is by definition nothing outside of the surface of the sphere to consider, all of space and all of time are contained on the surface. The surface is still curved, but it doesn't "curve" into anything, that's just a property of the spacetime.
I'm not sure I can make it any clearer, but if you consider Occam's razor you'll see that it doesn't make sense to thing about curved spacetimes as being embedded in some higher dimension. Since it is possible to measure curvature without appealing to a higher dimension (remember we never left the surface of the sphere in the above example) then you don't need the higher dimension, all the information required is contained in your local spacetime.
I believe I ran the spec95 benchmarks. The difference between a uniprocessor and a dual processor were only about 1-2% if I recall, so the overhead is small, but it exists. If you are really interested send me a note (mukasa@jeol.com) and I will run it again and send you the results.
I wouldn't call myself a mathematician, I just use Mathematica a lot. As I said I am running Mathematica on a dual G4 box and as far as I know none of the standard distribution is SMP aware. I suppose this is due to the difficulty of parallelizing the language since most machine specific behaviour is abstracted away. Otherwise it runs very well on the Mac. I mostly use it for symbolic calculations and numerical algorithm development so I don't make a lot of plots, but from the Mathematic on OS X presentation from Wolfram it seems there are some advantages to using Quartz for graphics.
Then again, I do believe there was a version of Mathematica for the Connection Machine that was SMP aware. Maybe they can dust it off and reincorporate it into the standard version.
No, what I'm saying is that extrapolating from the performance of the small and exceptional population of world class athletes to determine attributes of the population as a whole is fallacious. Otherwise one arrives at the paradoxical situation of African Americans being both the best and worst sprinters in the American population as a whole. How is that? Because being disproportionately poor, African Americans share disproportionately in the afflictions associated with poverty in America, one of which is a predilection for diabetes and obesity. So African Americans are simultaneously among the most obese, least athletic and also produce the most world class sprinters among American people groups. Given that a genetic propensity for heart disease and other ailments also seems to be part of the legacy of genes from West Africa one must decide what the situation is, are African Americans predisposed to sprinting glory or couch potato ignominy?
I submit that the reason people of African descent are dominant at athletics at this moment is simply because they participate more and are willing to commit to a higher level of training than relatively wealthier people who tend to make other life choices. This is a periodic phenomenon and as the Chinese sports machine cranks up to Soviet style levels we are going to see world class competitors from China in all sports. This is not because the Chinese do or do not have a special genetic inheritance, merely that they are willing to exploit their inheritance. Given that most regional groupings of humanity of size greater than 1000 share 88% of the total genetic variation of all humanity discounting for the founder effect in groups like the Mormons the Chinese have access to plenty of world class athletes in nearly any sport, it's merely a task of identification and support of these athletes. Of course that explanation is too obvious, subtle and undramatic so when the great red sports machine gets cranking your moronic ABC commentator will of course pick up on the assinine racial difference and attempt to "explain" Chinese competitors based on some loosely grounded theory of genetics, or blame drugs.
Another example of commitment is the German bobsledding program. Christoph Langen may be one of the best athletes the world has ever seen with a 350+ pound bench press and a 40" vertical leap he could have been one of the greatest running backs the NFL had ever seen if he didn't drive bobsleds. Naive American coaches subconciously believing in racial theories of perfomance attempted to improve the US bobsled team by recruiting African American sprinters and running backs to no avail. Amazingly all the drivers remain white, kind of like the white quarterback syndrome the NFL is only starting to recover from. The point here is simply that all world class bobsledders, German or not are great athletes and your chances of finding one in any region of the world are roughly equal. Of course, you'll respond with your anecdote about Vonetta Flowers. But that's my point, Langen, Flowers, Bonaly et. al. are all just anecdotes. They are the 6 sigma deviants in humanity and are not representative of anything but ultimate physical human potential.
As for Bonaly, athletic as she is, the only women's skater to attempt a quad in competition is the white, Jewish Sasha Cohen. Had Mary Lou Retton put on skates I'm pretty sure she could match Bonaly flip for flip and jump for jump.
Without that ability to control for economics and perform a proper experiment one can of course only do statistical analyses. I submit that there is simply a minimal level of investment required to be competitive at the world level in any sport. As the wealthiest country the US can meet this level in many sports. Were the playing field economically level then the result would probably be that medal counts would reflect relative population sizes.
Are you a track and field athlete or have you ever competed as one? I have, I know that from an early age in the US, coaches play favourites with athletes based on personal prejudices that may or may not have a basis in fact. If one is encouraged from an early age to pursue the dream of being a track star, as Jackie Joyner-Kersee and Gail Devers were, while others are told to concentrate on other activities like many of the excellent athletes who decided to concentrate on academics and end up at Ivy League institutions, like Bill Bradley, then of course it will look like African Americans are better athletes. I am not a world class athlete but I was reasonably fast enough (10.7 100m) to be a competitive high school athlete and I know how the sports machine works at the lowest levels. If you have a racial theory of athletic performance then I suggest you test it against the performance of junior high school aged children, before most external forces have changed the playing field. I think that you will find the best performances are proportionately divided among the races.
Finally, note that most of the Kenyan long distance runners come from a relatively small tribe in an isolated part of the country. In fact many of them are cousins. If there is any genetic effect, it's the founder effect: they share the genes of one particular individual which have propogated through the population because of relative isolation. Mormons, Jews and Icelandics show the same traits, having genetic trees that very quickly trace back to a very small set of common ancestors. There probably is a similar population somewhere in the 350 million residents of the US. The Mexicans attempted to exploit the habits of one of their indigenous tribes who put high value on long distance running ability, and the Mexican and Morroccan programs are probably the best challengers to the Kenyans. But for the rest of us, who share bloodlines drawn essentially from the entirety of the globe, we cannot benefit from a founder effect. I myself have ancestors only three generations back who come from, Europe, Africa and the Native Americans of the Caribbean basin. Although to the ignorant I'm sure you can guess what my appearance is. So yes, genetics play a component, but in general, especially now that so many previously isolated populations have mixed there is too much variation between individuals within a population group no matter how you divide the group to account for large performance differences. Furthermore genetic studies indicate that even isolated groups retain a large amount of genetic variation as long as they were separated from a larger group rather than founded by a very small population.
I don't know what your workload is, I do a lot of Mathematica on a dual 1GHz PowerMac. On the positive side I never get noticeable lag in GUI operations or other activities while running a long calculation in the background, even when both columns on the CPU meter are totally green (usually for about a second or so). On the other hand, Mathematica itself is not SMP aware and when other system activity is low I still see the load switching between CPUs on the CPU meter. Benchmark tests confirm that my box is actually slower than a single processor due to overhead as processing switches between CPUs.
So, if you are not running SMP aware apps, but do regularly run processor intensive apps in the background then the dual processors are worth it if only because of lost productivity due to a nonresponsive GUI otherwise. On the other hand, if you only run processor intensive task while away from the machine then save yourself the money and wait (and pray) for a faster CPU.
First of all genetic variations between people groups across the various regions of the 2nd largest continent in the world are nearly as large as that of humanity across the entire globe. So your second sentence is a meaningless gross generalization.
Secondly, athletic prowess is also poorly defined. This article is about one particular event: long distance running. No one seems to comment on the dominance of Slavs in power lifting or Slavs and East Asians in gymnastics and diving. These are also basic sports in that they emphasize excellence in one particular area: power or flexibility, while not requiring the level of training in technique of sporst such as golf or baseball where good hand eye coordination can compensate for a difference in power. At this point I will make the obligatory mention of the lack of success of Kenyans at events shorter than 800m.
Third of all, anyone paying attention to the standings at world class competitions will note the rise of competitiveness of South Koreans and Mexicans at 10000m and longer events, Morroccans at events from 1500m to 10000m, Eastern Europeans in the Decathlon and so on.
Which brings me to my next point, we are discussing world class performances here. By definition this requires a level of training and commitment that most people are not willing to achieve. Excellence at the world class level depends on many factors: equipment, training and and taking advantage of whatever genetic advantages one has. Since Bikila's breakthrough at the Rome Olympics, there has been a concerted effort among East African nations to provide top athletes for the long distance events. This has led to national programs that identify, support and promote the best available talent on a scale that the US Olympic effort has only recently begun to match. Note that the original "African" long distance champions were Ethiopians who are as distinct from the current crop of Kenyans as a Swede is from an Italian when compared visually. No one was complaining when the US had a running obsession in the 70's and regularly produced long distance champions. There is no reason to suspect Kenya's current dominance, which I predict will fall to Mexico within a decade, is any different.
As for taking advantage of genetic heritage; any American whose family has been here for more than 3 generations can likely trace portions of their genetic heritage to ancestors from virtually any part of the globe. This is especially true of "African" Americans as they usually have ancestors originally from Europe at some point in their bloodline. The primary example is Tiger Woods who's ancestry is almost equally divided among Asian, European, African and Native Americans. As it becomes easier for population groups to intermingle Woods is going to be the rule rather than the exception.
Finally, anyone who has actually been to Japan as opposed to recieved "wisdom" from the popular culture will note that Japanese adolescents are on average much closer in height to other people groups than Japanese adults. Naoko Takashi, the Nagano Olympic Marathon Champion, is 1.62m or 5' 3" tall, this is 1" below the average height for a woman. Not exceptionally short or tall. Furthermore, elite long distance runners tend to be shorter than average so this is not an interesting case at all. From pictures her legs don't appear to be disproportionately short, in fact they seem long but she's pretty skinny so it's hard to tell.
In some circles it has become fashionable to blame genetics for one's circumstances. Also there is usually an unspoken corollary to the athletes of African descent have a genetic advantage argument. That of course is that African's are genetically predisposed to having a lesser IQ, or other quantifier linked to intelligence. The truth is the situation is far more complex that simply asking where one was born in an attempt to identify their capability at any particular endeavour. In nearly any meaningful test, the variation in performance of any group of humans is so large as to render the ability to predict the performance of an individual impossible.
And yes, there are of course some obvious physiological caveats; stride length, ratio of upper body mass to lower body mass, hemocrit etc. as to whether one is capable of a world class performance in long distance or not. But again, there are individuals from every region of the globe who meet the necessary criteria.
Gates' scenarios usually take the form of surprisingly simple questions that customers might have. Here's a sampling from our interviews:
Why are my document files stored one way, my contacts another way, and my e-mail and instant-messaging buddy list still another, and why aren't they related to my calendar or to one another and easy to search en masse?
Because email was developed under Unix systems and ported over to Windows by one group, then because Instant Messaging was developed in Isreal and the US (Carnegie Mellon) as an open protocol, and ported over to Windows by another group, and Windows' groupware was a response to Lotus Notes developed by yet another group of "Bill's Geeks".
So all of a sudden, Microsoft got the religion that there aren't any more third party apps to ape/buy and maybe it's time to put their own house in order. Unfortunately it seems they are doing so in exactly the wrong manner, by having independent groups funneled through one "architect" rather than having a single (or a few) developers writing a core foundation for all this stuff and then porting the next generation of Outlook, MSN and Exchange over. Forget the mythical man-month, this is going to set records for waisted man-years of developer time.
Why can't my computer protect me from distractions by screening phone calls and e-mails, and why can't it track me down when I'm out of the office or forward things to me automatically?
Because us poor nonbillionaire working stiffs can't afford administrative assistants and aren't as hyperorganized as the chief drone of Microsoft. I for one am not looking forward to the day my work schedule is planned according to guidance from Redmond as implemented in LongshotBKSPBKSPBKSPBKSPhorn
Why can't our computers arrange conference calls and online meetings for us?
Because PBX's work well enough.
Why is it so hard for a soccer mom to set up a simple Website and e-mail group to keep people informed about who's driving and who's bringing treats?
Define "hard". Most people have a good idea of risk/reward and the time to put up a yahoo/msn/aol user group get everyone to check it and reschedule whenever plans change (little Jimmy is almost bound to get flu/chicken pox/strep etc. on the day you were responsible for treats) for a soccer season that lasts eight weeks and then do it again for baseball then again for swimming then again... It's not worth it, and it would be a pretty miraculous piece of software that was so easy to use it would replace phone chains for organizing short term ad hoc organizations.
Why can't I tap into all my stuff at home or at work from any device that's mine, and have it just be available because it knows I'm me?
Because Bill the Great never understood that the personal in a personal computer meant you could store data without bugging the IT department, not that you wished to lock all your data in a box you were replacing in 18 months anyway. That coupled with the marketing realities of replicating multiuser technology as implemented in MULTICS, Unix, MVS etc. 30 years ago without letting those OSes use that technology to replace Windows in workgroups (cough)SAMBA(cough) is why Windows has a problem with multiple users. Breaking Kerberos didn't help either. Since Apple went to OS X this is really only a problem for Windows (and Palm).
Why can't I read digital versions of magazines on my portable computer that look the way they're supposed to look?
Mac's work just fine. Maybe it's because except for gaming technology Windows' imaging solutions have been subpar. Although I will admit hardware variations in the Wintel world also cause imaging problems. Again, the Microsoft uber alles attitude at Redmond that prevents open standards like OpenGL or PDF or Postscript from working as first class citizens in the Windows world because someone else may get $0.10 of the $1.00 flowing to Microsoft is to blame also. Again, on most Unix systems (and Be) the was never a problem.
No, the reason Faraday cages work against EM is that they form an equal and opposite field to the field you are trying to stop on the interior of the cage. There is no (known) negative mass so there is no such thing as a gravitic Faraday cage.
A simple thought experiment shows that this should be the case. If you placed one mass inside of a hollow spherical mass; for example a marble inside a beachball the interior mass doesn't float. However in most elementary physics courses you learn that there is no gravitational attraction inside sphere. On the other hand, a charged metal sphere inside another metal sphere is not affected by charges outside of the sphere.
If the probability of you getting home were small, you'd be dead. Even at a 51% chance of failure, the probability of you surviving a month's worth of trips home is 1 in 6 billion, essentially enough to consider you already dead.
Not really. You are confusing the fringes of a subject with its core. Economists, at least respectable ones, do not get paid for determining if the economy is currently receding or increasing, at least not on the CNBC, FN timescale of a day to a month. Current economic practice accepts that an economy moves in cycles with a general upward trend and economic theory is mostly focused on mitigating the negative aspects of the cycles ie, inflation, unemployment etc. The predictions of recessions etc. are about as valuable as a Super Bowl prediction made in July, there are just too many unknowns to lend any credence to it. But it's fun to do and brings in the ratings for CNBC.
As for dieticians; modernity has brought on a unique set of circumstances in human hisotry. In the US, Europe and Japan food is so cheaply available that calories are essentially free to the entire populace. That has never happened before in history where with the exception of the very wealthy the scope of nutrition sources, cultural traditions and limited population movement meant that nutrition sources were of limited scope and populations learned to adapt to thier food pretty quickly (ie high fat inuit diets, low fat tropical diets etc.). The current diet craze is simply a result of the change in conditions.
Exobiology is about as specious a "science" as possible because the ability to perform the fundamental act of science: experiment, is negligible. This article is actually more of a statement about the large scale conditions in other galactic regions: much higher radiation levels, lower likelihood of long term orbits (although the prevalence of binary pairs in clusters makes me think this idea is overrated) and different nucleosynthesis rates mean that the regions of the galaxy that are like our neighborhood may be smaller than a less sophisticated analysis would lead one to believe. If you insist on looking for life among the stars (and given the condition of much life here on Earth maybe we should be more concerned about local conditions) this article gives useful suggestions on places you shouldn't bother looking. Of course, that also reduces the likelihood of finding nearby life. That's all.
As a layman then the idea is to understand the big picture: we are learning a lot about; complex dynamical systems (economics), human physiology and social responses (nutrition), and galaxy scale structure (astronomy). But we don't have enough information yet to accurately predict a lot of things (and given nonlinear dynamics the number of things we will learn to predict may turn out to be depressingly small). So statements about recession, Aiken diets and extraterrestial life are amusing cocktail conversation but they are not what the experts in these fields are getting paid for, nor should they be.
I'm glad you have a job, I have one too. I am a programmer (job title: senior software engineer) but my company's core business is not software but chemistry equipment. It is a medium sized (>1000 employees on 5 continents, $100 million+ revenue) global firm. We too pay out the nose for support on mission critical systems over which we have little control with varying amounts of success.
As far as I can tell, for those bugs in Microsoft or Apple software (to choose a few examples) that are not immediate show stoppers like Outlook exploits, you have the "option" of waiting for Microsoft or Apple to get around to addressing the issue in 6-12 months, perhaps. That is the life of the average end user of which there are far more than banks, and whose software experience is just as legitimate as yours.
I'm not sure if Red Hat's corporate support service is still running, but I am sure there are plenty of consultants at KPMG, Oracle, IBM et al. who are willing to take large sums of cash from you to comse sit at your site and solve your Linux/Windows 2000/Oracle 9/SAP etc. problems. Which they could have stayed home and solved on the message boards, albeit for far less renumeration.
The point is not whether if you have enough money you can find someone to handhold your software. If you were lucky enough to own a Ferrari F50 you were also privileged enough to have your own personal mechanic fly over from Maranello to keep things in working order too. But that doesn't mean Joe Hyundai driver doesn't want support for his automobile as well. There is nothing to be gained from comparing the Ferrari F50 experience to Jiffy Lube however.
Software is different in that it is far easier to distribute a patch, especially a patch to source, than to issue an automobile recall. By closing source though the software industry is artificially creating an automobile recall model of service without having the courage to issue a warranty. Furthermore, to elaborate on the idea of software as an unfinished good. The usual clause in the EULA of most software indemnifying the writer from any damage caused by the failure of the software is enough to indicate they don't have as much faith in the software as say a cabinet maker does in remodelling a kitchen.
Finally, although I am not a SysAdmin (although I do have to maintain some of the odder pieces of hardware and software I use for my job). I know enough about the job to know I don't want to be one.
The chair analogy is facetious. There is nothing that prevents you from selling GPL'd software. Stallman's basic argument for free software boils down to this: software has bugs, some of which may be repairable by the user of said software if the source code is available. Unless you are shipping bug free software you should ship the code as well or you are doing a disservice to the end user.
To make the chair analogy more apropos, imagine getting on of those wonderful particle boards in a box assemblies from IKEA without any instructions for assembly. IKEA can claim to have sent you the requested piece of furniture but without a guide for assembly it is useless to the user. Granted for simpler pieces a sufficiently motivated person may be able to assemble it anyway, but for any furniture with a significant number of hidden supports that is not the case. As with all analogies this breaks down upon close examination, but then again, that was my original point: software is not equivalent to a finished manufactured good
Incidentally, a better analogy may be other complex systems delivered to an end user such as a nuclear power plant. The handholding and training that the manufacterer (usually Westinghouse or Siemens) has to give to the user (your local utility) is roughly equivalent to providing the source code.
Finally, the "grab a tie" argument has little legitimacy either. If I have a problem with my Linux Kernel, I can hop on the boards (and admitedly absorb some abuse from a few socially underdeveloped board lurkers) and get an answer from the actual software developer themself. Compare this to my officemate who is navigating the "customer support" network of his network card driver manufacterer in an attempt to find the linux drivers the manufacterer claims exist (on thier webpage) but do not provide in any obvious form. He is grabbing lots of ties, but so far the only result is an intense desire to turn them into hangman's nooses.
I don't understand what you're trying to say. Although marathoners are fast: being able to string together a series of miles at near world class pace, over the traditional sprinting distances of 400m or less they are not competitive. Athletes who are better at the sprints tend to be of the mesomorphic body type like Maurice Green, Carl Lewis, Ato Boldon, Michael Johnson. Ectomorphic types like Bikila tend to excel at the distance events where a high rate of speed is maintained for a long period, like a deer, not at maximum speed dashes like a cheetah.
Furthermore, attempting to extrapolate between such radically different body plans as a human; who in the larger scheme of things is a poor runner in all regimes, an ostrich, whose body is essentially all leg and neck and a T-Rex, with a much different torso to leg length ratio from both ostriches and humans is an exercise fraught with difficulty.
It seems the current problem is to attempt to determine the maximum speeds of which T-Rexes and their prey are capable. That could give one a clue as to the T-Rex's hunting style: if a T-Rex is much faster than its prey it may hunt like a cheetah, if its about the same speed it may hunt like a tiger; cornering its prey then making a very short rush, or if it has good endurance it may hunt like a wolf by running its prey to exhaustion.
Whatever the final probable outcome, attempting to intuit the result from the performance of human athletes is probably not going to give any useful information. I am not an expert but I believe that if anything at this point paleontology is only beginning to realize how little information we have about the living habits of dinosaurs. All we really have is a decent idea about the variety of body plans of dinosaurs, and as far as I know even the warm blooded versus cold blooded debate is not completely settled yet either. Similarly biomechanics is still an infant science, we have only recently come to understand the aerodynamic principles that allow a bumblebee to fly and still don't have a very good idea about the possible range of movement of the giant saurapods.
Today I need to know why I need to learn how to think with the functional paradigm. It's a serious problem, which stops many
people before they learn functional languages.
Many years ago I was writing C programs to process text, and I could do everything that way, I just didn't realize, that there were
better ways to do the same. That was before I knew Regular Expressions [oreilly.com], egrep [gnu.org], sed [gnu.org] or Perl
[oreilly.com]. Now I write Perl one-liners for tasks, which used to take me days of writing C code, but I didn't know that before,
because "If the only tool you have in the toolbox is a hammer - every problem looks like a nail."
As one idea to consider, lets take your text programming exercise. Imagine you have a block of text that is actually represents a program. Assume you need to transform that program using a regular expression, simple enough in Perl/C/choose your own poison. OK, now exectue that program. In Perl, which has borrowed some ideas from the functional paradigm it's possible, in C it's a nightmare. You have 3 choices: develop an interpreter for that language in C and pass the code to it. Spawn off a process that calls a shell script that executes the program, but if you need to communicate with the program as it is running you're going to have to jump through some extremely tight hoops. Dump the code to a text file, terminate your program, fire up the appropriate compiler/interpreter and again any interprocess communication requires significant programmer effort.
Granted this is not a problem everyone has, executing random code has caused enough problems for Microsoft Outlook already. However, for applications which support a domain specific language, usually for scripting purposes, this problem is common. So aside from the readability and maintainability advantages that functional programming advocates tout there's a problem that functional programming style supports that's difficult in a nonfunctional language. For an example of this idea writ large look at Mathematica.
Also don't confuse functional programming style with a functional programming language. Just as you can do OOP in pure C without the ++ you can do functional programming in C or more easily in Perl but most easily in Haskell, ML or LISP.
So essentially the CLR and the.NET framework on top of it must necessarily be the most productive way of producing code?
Given the horror that is Win32, with which I have first hand experience and the wounds to prove it, I seriously doubt Microsoft's ability to develop the uber-productive framework while simultaneously meeting the demands of maintaining share price with regular updates of the API and eliminating threatening programs by swallowing whole applications as portions of the next version of the API.
In their domain the so called "exotic" features are very natural. For example, symbolic processing in an imperative language almost always necessitates writing of a parser (or using one from the framework). However because imperative languages lack a read-eval loop, it is a nontrivial exercise to turn parsed code into a callable function, a trivial exercise in LISP. When writing a computational algebra application therefore it is far more difficult to turn expressions into evaluable functions and then evaluate them in an imperative style than a functional.
Granted not everyone needs a computer algebra system, but you'd be surprised at the number of people who use one and.NET has nothing to offer them. There are many other processing domains beyond the timely provision of paychecks based on information stored in an Oracle database for which languages with "exotic" features result in far more programmer productivity than most people are willing to give credit for. This whole discussion actually is an opportunity for open-source to address a problem: appropriate tools for domain specific tasks (of which producing the GNOME GUI is one) rather than adopting the solution of a proprietary code vendor. Most of all, the CLR address a specific business problem Microsoft has: that too many serverside applications are being written in Java because a lot of developers prefer the Java framework to BackOffice. All other hype aside that's the fundamental reason for the existence of C# and the CLR. The other portions of.NET from Passport to Hailstorm similarly are responses to the problem of maintaining Bill Gates' personal wealth as opposed to Larry Ellison's, Steve Case's and Scott McNealy's. The technical problems of programmer's in the pits are only an aside in this much larger overall picture.
Miguel made a point, there is a technical need in GNOME for language interoperability. His answer however was to accept a solution that has too much baggage tied to it. I think Alan Cox's responses were an attempt to make Miguel see the light. Are there pieces of the CLR that are valuable? Probably, but not many. The free and open software movements (I've wandered a bit too far off topic here so I'll stop soon) should be aware of what proprietary software vendors are doing. But when a deficiency is apparent (such as the lack of a cheap, robust Unix-like kernel for x86 hardware in the early 90's) free and or open software developers should develop solutions that solve thier own problems, not Microsoft's.
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See here for a concise biography of Gates, in particular the history of the wealth of the Gates family of Washington State. Summarizing he's always been upper class, he was already from one of the wealthiest families in Washington State at birth. As an aside many "entrepreneurs" came from upper class backgrounds: the Walton family (yeah Sam started off running a mom and pop grocery but it's been growing exponentially since the early 70's, by the time Wal-Marts started popping up like dandelions Walton was already among the wealthiest people in Arkansas) and Donald Trump (second generation scion of a New York real estate millionaire) and Ted Turner (he bet the already considerable family fortune on cable television in the early 70's).
Really there are two kinds of "entrepreneur" those who entered the world without access to significant capital (Larry Ellison, don't know about Jobs, Mark Cuban) and those who risked significant personal wealth (Turner, Gates et al.) to move from being merely very wealthy (as in top1 or 2% of the population) to extremely wealthy (as in the number of individuals with similar wealth on the entire planet numbers less than 1000). Given that the very wealthy can afford to make great sacrifices (gamble) because often they will still be very wealthy even if they fail it's really not that remarkable that sometimes they succeed. For example Gates sacrificed a Harvard degree (and the concommitant access it provides) to move to New Mexico where all he had to fall back on was a $1 million trust fund ($1 million in 1979 remember, invested conservatively at 6% that's $3.8 million today a far cry from $1 billion but I'm sure Bill would find a way to survive on it).
I see very little difference between:
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Apparently you don't look very hard. There are significant differences even in the examples you have presented. First of all the LISP/Scheme code support introspection (you can determine the contents of my_function with other LISP/Scheme code) which is impossible in the C (and that won't work in C anyway) or assembler model. Secondly the issue of type safety is unaddressed especially in the assembly and C code (what are you adding integers? Reals? Complex values? Inquiring compilers want to know). Finally to paraphrase Larry Wall states a language should make the easy things easy without making the hard things impossible which is the driving impetus behind programming language creation. There are real and fundamental disagreements over what is/should be easy and what's impossible.
Too bad there does not exist a universal computer language compiler system whereby one could code in the computer language they prefer and check the code in and the next guy could check out the code in the language they prefer.
That desire seems to express much of the design behind the .NET CLR. In principle it should be possible to disassemble CLR code into a language other than its original implementation, however the disconnect in features (just how would you disassemble a LISP closure into C code? Or worse yet the entire Smalltalk environment?) makes this less feasible than your simplistic assumptions would indicate.
I think a more accurate statement is the probability density of the location of the proton has an ovoid appearance. Just as only the s orbitals of electrons have a spherical distribution and the others take on some rather remarkable shapes.
An additional caveat is the electrons scattering was used to probe the proton. So the primary interaction was electromagnetic with a very small weak component. Protons may have a different "shape" when viewed by a neutrino since neutrinos do not couple with the electromagnetic field. This is a guess though and I am not qualified to make that statement more precise.
Finally, the obvious question is how do we define a "top" for a proton, ie, how do we know which direction the ovoid is oriented in? The answer is since a proton has a nonzero spin it assumes one of two diametrically opposed orientations in a magnetic field and we can use the axis formed by those directions to define "up". Finally, thinking about it that way, since quarks also couple to the electromagnetic field as well as interacting with each other through the strong force, it's not that surprising that a proton has a shape, it may be a result of the complicated interactions between the quarks. Then again, no one has done the calculation (which is fiendishly difficult and impossible to do analytically since it's a pretty general 3 body problem) so maybe it's a little unjust to call the result unsurprising.
Since when did I suggest the use of blocking I/O? Any single-threaded application of this sort needs to use non-blocking I/O as a matter of course. See POSIX AIO for one non-blocking I/O API.
Use of nonblocking I/O is in general almost as difficult as writing good multithreaded code. In effect the developer has to reimplement the logic of a multithreaded application in user space and wrap it around the nonblocking I/O calls. For applications such as a log file writer of course using nonblocking I/O without extra logic to check the results is fine though. Consider the case of a plant controller though, where multiple sensors could be triggering events for multiple controlers asynchronously. In that case a multithreaded design may make for simpler code than writing (and optimizing) what is in effect a thread scheduler for a single threaded application. In short, unless one does not read the results of a previous write, there is no such thing as truly nonblocking, I/O. You will always have to check a semaphore to determine whether it is safe to read (or have some subsytem below implement the logic).
Finally... you mention that error states are possible in threaded applications, and can be exercised by appropriately written code ("tests" which cripple a multithreaded application). Personally, having a number of almost impossible to find deadlocks hidden away in my system until some end-user chances upon one makes me very, very nervous.
Now you are taking liberties with my statements. I did not say multithreaded code necessarily contains an error state. I was thinking of the case of a TPC like test. One common architecture for a multithreaded application is to have a pool of threads available which can perform all tasks available to the system. If the "benchmark" causes all the available threads to be contending for a single resource (like a write to the same record) then the application may be unavailable for future requests thus reducing throughput. A single threaded application will generally batch requests, so the multiple writes will be condensed to a single write request and the throughput will be higher. Nothing prevents a multithreaded application from doing the same thing, but you are correct the overhead in communication required in a multithreaded application would probably prevent it from equalling a single threaded app's performance on such a test. Deadlocks are a challenge because the most popular current languages have poor support for writing multithreaded applications (compare the relatively unpopular Ada95 to C/C++ for example). Deadlocks are not a necessity anymore than unstructured assembly code, but just as higher level languages encourage better structured code, newer languages encourage writing of reentrant, nonlocking code (Java for example strikes a reasonable middle ground between Ada and C as far as multiple threads go).
There is one sigificant caveat to your assertion that a single threaded application will always outperform a multithreaded version. "a well-written single-threaded application that never makes a blocking system call (such as I/O) while there is useful worrk to be done will always be faster than an equivalent multithreaded application", emphasis mine. Since a large number of useful applications: DB's, mail clients, browsers, processor simulators, web servers etc. have exactly this kind of behaviour it is very desirable.
To cover my own ass, I will add one more caveat. This perfomance advantage only shows up in thoughput on a balanced workload. It is trivial to create "tests" which cripple a multithreaded application by finding a code path which causes all threads to block on a shared resource (ie force a DB to write to tables that have little disk/memory locality simultaneously) which a single threaded app composed to deal with that situation will show higher performance in. Single threaded apps using that architecture generally fail in more balanced (you can argue whether that's real world or not) situations.
I'm not an Ellison fan by any means but I doubt he'd have to pull those stunts to raise the funds for his effort. Last year alone he made $700 million in cash exercising his options. In case you though he blew it all on a sail boat he still has $400 million worth of options that are in the money, even at the deflated stock price. Oh yeah, and that $700 million only represented about 2% of his Oracle holdings at the time.
If Oracle corporation is financially involved in this boat at all it's probably by buying sponsorship like any other corporation. Of course that eases the burden on Larry's pocketbook a bit, but in accouting terms since sponsorship is advertising and advertising is supposed to result in increased revenue in the future. So at least in that sense you can argue that he isn't pulling money out of his employee's paychecks to fund this effort.
No Formula 1 is extremely boring. The problem with the tech is that it really doesn't not bring any benefit anymore.
OK there's a double negative that's a little tricky to parse, but I'll assume you meant "it doesn't really bring any benefit anymore", you're wrong.
Previously it made engines faster, stronger and influenced cars. But now we have 500 HP monsters on the road. So I ask you what are you going to do with a 500 HP monster? Only in Germany can you semi use that speed, but even then it is dangerous. My car is limited to 250 KPH (cheaper insurance) and 250 KPH is damm fast. My average speed is probably about 160 KPH (traffic, other people, etc).
There is more to improving an automobile's performance than increasing horsepower. For example as far as engines are concerned: driveability in the form of a flat torque curve over a wide range of rpm is useful in racing especially in F1 where circuits typically have tight corners connected by straight sections so being able to accelerate out of a corner is key to victory. In a road going car this helps in giving you the ability to accelerate when merging onto a highway without requiring you to floor it and potentially fishtail. Mercedes Benz engines of the last 10 years are noted for particularly flat torque curves, is it any surprise that Mercedes powered McLarens dominated F1 in the latter half of the 90's. Fuel efficiency is still a concern since in racing it opens up your options for pit strategy. Since most forms of racing have displacement limits volumetric efficiency is still a concern which has led to the highly efficient yet powerful 100HP/liter engines from Honda, BMW, and Ferrari available in their road cars. However engine technology is not the primary focus in Grand Prix and other high end racing anymore, the two key technologies to victory are aerodynamics and tires. With the F360 and 550 Maranello Ferrari has started to apply racing aerodynamic technology to increase high speed stability of normal road cars. Porsche has also paid a lot of attention to the high speed stability of their road going cars. Regardless of national speed limits, the real factor limiting driver speeds is comfort with the car's handling at speed (I have a link for this but can't find it right now). Admitedly this technology is only available on high cost automobiles but like nearly every other automotive technology of the last 30 years: ABS, traction control, airbags, in car navigation systems, active suspension etc. it will trickle down to cars available to the general public over time. Perhaps the biggest change in automotive technology over the last decade is not from the major manufacteres but the tire companies. Off the shelf I can buy Pirelli POne and PZero or Michelin Pilot tires which can improve the handling capabilities of my car by nearly 10% over typical (cheap) OEM tires. Winter and rain tire technology has improved even further. In fact, modern supercars like the Ferrari 360 and Dodge Viper can nearly match pure race built GT cars (I'm talking about nonstreet legal versions of cars like the 911, RX7, Mustang etc. that you see bringing up the back of the pack in the ALMS series or in the Speedvision GT series not GT prototypes) of 10 to 15 years ago off the showroom floor without having significantly more horsepower or lighter structures. This performance advantage is not as apparent in more mass market cars like the Accord or Camry because chassis engineers have used the extra traction to provide softer damping rates for a smoother ride. Using aftermarket shock and spring packages on these cars quickly demonstrate how much more capable they are than their previous generation models.
The fuel limit was dropped so fuel efficiency is not important. The body of the car is made with kevlar, carbon fibre, which has about a snow's ball's chance in hell in making it to regular cars.
Again, untrue. Audi is already building lightweight aluminum unibodies for the A8 and will probably move the technology down their product line over time. Lotus (which has close ties to GM) also is doing pioneering work in lightweight chassis and bodies with the Elise. The Opel Speedster that GM may bring to the US uses the same technology. You can get road going cars with Carbon Fiber bodies from Lamborghini (although their space frame construction makes it unlikely that anyone else will adopt their approach) or BMW (in the M3 CSL although only some portions of the car are Carbon Fiber). For those of us with incomes closer to the median, there are plenty of aftermarket suppliers for carbon fiber body panels for production automobiles like the Ford Focus, Honda Civic, Honda Accord etc.
Also there is a de facto fuel efficiency limit in Formula 1 since you are required to make at least one pit stop. Given the sensitivity of a modern Formula 1 car to fuel weight, in some circumstances it pays to run a lighter fuel load and make more pit stops. If you are not fuel efficient then you'll have to carry more fuel on the multistop strategies slowing you down. CART has a de facto fuel efficiency limit too since there is a minimum number of laps one is allowed to run between stops and a maximum tank size in the rules.
As for boring or elitist entertainment. That's almost entirely a matter of taste. The wealthy tend to prefer to be with people in their own income group and one method of excluding the nonwealthy is to choose pursuits in which they cannot participate. They can then use their wealth to further exclude participation by increasing equipment costs. Golf and Tennis are two examples of sports which should be relatively cheap (if Golf equipment was cheap stainless steel instead of hard to forge titanium heads on highly engineered carbon fiber shafts, and likewise for tennis racket materials) but aren't. On the other hand, I can play chess but have little interest in devoting a lot of time to watching it, but I can imagine how a more devoted fan would find a well played game very interesting to observe.
I hope this was in jest since a simple look up returns chapter and verse Ecc 3:8.
If so sorry for no being earnest, but given many peoples inability to identify what is and isn't actually said in the Bible (see the section What American's Believe") I think I'd like to clear things up for accuracy's sake.
Big airships? OK
Stealth? OK
Electrokinetic drives? Uh Uh (Google).
For the link weary (wary?), electrokinetic drives are a crude form of ion propulsion where instead of using some form of ion source, the ions naturally present in the atmosphere are accelerated by a large electric field. The first link in the list seems to be the most reputable and reports NO acceleration produced. A few of the later links talsk about elctrokinetic migration of ions in soil due to chemically generated electric fields. Electrokinetic propulsion of airborne vehicles seems to be impossible.
No.
That's not a question in general relativity. The curvature of a spacetime can be measured without considering it as being embedded in manifold of higher dimension. How? Here is the common demonstration of the idea without using the language of math which makes the idea harder to convey. If you want a more rigourous explanation see here. Note that the curvature we are concerned with here is the Gaussian curvature which is intrinsic, ie it can be measured without considering directions outside of the dimension of interest.
Consider the surface of sphere, any ball is a reasonable approximation. Now consider the following path. Starting at the equator while facing west (these are all well defined directions if you use the right hand rule and call north the direction of your thumb then east follows the curvature of your fingers and west is opposite east). Now go 1/4 of the circumference of the circle west, turn to face north. This is a 90 degree turn. Go to the north pole. Now turn 90 degrees again (again this is a well defined operation, when facing any direction a 90 degree turn is accomplished by orienting yourself such that the direction previously over your right shoulder is now the direction you are facing). Now continue to the equator. You should be at the original starting point, and another 90 degree turn will leave you facing west, your original direction of departure.
So you've traced out a triangle: a closed path with three vertices, but you've made 3 90 degree turns so the sum of the interior angles is greater than 180 degrees in violation of euclidean geometry. Therefore you know your 2 dimensional world: which is the surface of the sphere, is curved. Note that is is not necessary for this surface to actually be curved "into" anything. If the sphere is the spacetime of a universe then there is by definition nothing outside of the surface of the sphere to consider, all of space and all of time are contained on the surface. The surface is still curved, but it doesn't "curve" into anything, that's just a property of the spacetime.
I'm not sure I can make it any clearer, but if you consider Occam's razor you'll see that it doesn't make sense to thing about curved spacetimes as being embedded in some higher dimension. Since it is possible to measure curvature without appealing to a higher dimension (remember we never left the surface of the sphere in the above example) then you don't need the higher dimension, all the information required is contained in your local spacetime.
I believe I ran the spec95 benchmarks. The difference between a uniprocessor and a dual processor were only about 1-2% if I recall, so the overhead is small, but it exists. If you are really interested send me a note (mukasa@jeol.com) and I will run it again and send you the results.
I wouldn't call myself a mathematician, I just use Mathematica a lot. As I said I am running Mathematica on a dual G4 box and as far as I know none of the standard distribution is SMP aware. I suppose this is due to the difficulty of parallelizing the language since most machine specific behaviour is abstracted away. Otherwise it runs very well on the Mac. I mostly use it for symbolic calculations and numerical algorithm development so I don't make a lot of plots, but from the Mathematic on OS X presentation from Wolfram it seems there are some advantages to using Quartz for graphics.
Then again, I do believe there was a version of Mathematica for the Connection Machine that was SMP aware. Maybe they can dust it off and reincorporate it into the standard version.
No, what I'm saying is that extrapolating from the performance of the small and exceptional population of world class athletes to determine attributes of the population as a whole is fallacious. Otherwise one arrives at the paradoxical situation of African Americans being both the best and worst sprinters in the American population as a whole. How is that? Because being disproportionately poor, African Americans share disproportionately in the afflictions associated with poverty in America, one of which is a predilection for diabetes and obesity. So African Americans are simultaneously among the most obese, least athletic and also produce the most world class sprinters among American people groups. Given that a genetic propensity for heart disease and other ailments also seems to be part of the legacy of genes from West Africa one must decide what the situation is, are African Americans predisposed to sprinting glory or couch potato ignominy?
I submit that the reason people of African descent are dominant at athletics at this moment is simply because they participate more and are willing to commit to a higher level of training than relatively wealthier people who tend to make other life choices. This is a periodic phenomenon and as the Chinese sports machine cranks up to Soviet style levels we are going to see world class competitors from China in all sports. This is not because the Chinese do or do not have a special genetic inheritance, merely that they are willing to exploit their inheritance. Given that most regional groupings of humanity of size greater than 1000 share 88% of the total genetic variation of all humanity discounting for the founder effect in groups like the Mormons the Chinese have access to plenty of world class athletes in nearly any sport, it's merely a task of identification and support of these athletes. Of course that explanation is too obvious, subtle and undramatic so when the great red sports machine gets cranking your moronic ABC commentator will of course pick up on the assinine racial difference and attempt to "explain" Chinese competitors based on some loosely grounded theory of genetics, or blame drugs.
Another example of commitment is the German bobsledding program. Christoph Langen may be one of the best athletes the world has ever seen with a 350+ pound bench press and a 40" vertical leap he could have been one of the greatest running backs the NFL had ever seen if he didn't drive bobsleds. Naive American coaches subconciously believing in racial theories of perfomance attempted to improve the US bobsled team by recruiting African American sprinters and running backs to no avail. Amazingly all the drivers remain white, kind of like the white quarterback syndrome the NFL is only starting to recover from. The point here is simply that all world class bobsledders, German or not are great athletes and your chances of finding one in any region of the world are roughly equal. Of course, you'll respond with your anecdote about Vonetta Flowers. But that's my point, Langen, Flowers, Bonaly et. al. are all just anecdotes. They are the 6 sigma deviants in humanity and are not representative of anything but ultimate physical human potential.
As for Bonaly, athletic as she is, the only women's skater to attempt a quad in competition is the white, Jewish Sasha Cohen. Had Mary Lou Retton put on skates I'm pretty sure she could match Bonaly flip for flip and jump for jump.
Without that ability to control for economics and perform a proper experiment one can of course only do statistical analyses. I submit that there is simply a minimal level of investment required to be competitive at the world level in any sport. As the wealthiest country the US can meet this level in many sports. Were the playing field economically level then the result would probably be that medal counts would reflect relative population sizes.
Are you a track and field athlete or have you ever competed as one? I have, I know that from an early age in the US, coaches play favourites with athletes based on personal prejudices that may or may not have a basis in fact. If one is encouraged from an early age to pursue the dream of being a track star, as Jackie Joyner-Kersee and Gail Devers were, while others are told to concentrate on other activities like many of the excellent athletes who decided to concentrate on academics and end up at Ivy League institutions, like Bill Bradley, then of course it will look like African Americans are better athletes. I am not a world class athlete but I was reasonably fast enough (10.7 100m) to be a competitive high school athlete and I know how the sports machine works at the lowest levels. If you have a racial theory of athletic performance then I suggest you test it against the performance of junior high school aged children, before most external forces have changed the playing field. I think that you will find the best performances are proportionately divided among the races.
Finally, note that most of the Kenyan long distance runners come from a relatively small tribe in an isolated part of the country. In fact many of them are cousins. If there is any genetic effect, it's the founder effect: they share the genes of one particular individual which have propogated through the population because of relative isolation. Mormons, Jews and Icelandics show the same traits, having genetic trees that very quickly trace back to a very small set of common ancestors. There probably is a similar population somewhere in the 350 million residents of the US. The Mexicans attempted to exploit the habits of one of their indigenous tribes who put high value on long distance running ability, and the Mexican and Morroccan programs are probably the best challengers to the Kenyans. But for the rest of us, who share bloodlines drawn essentially from the entirety of the globe, we cannot benefit from a founder effect. I myself have ancestors only three generations back who come from, Europe, Africa and the Native Americans of the Caribbean basin. Although to the ignorant I'm sure you can guess what my appearance is. So yes, genetics play a component, but in general, especially now that so many previously isolated populations have mixed there is too much variation between individuals within a population group no matter how you divide the group to account for large performance differences. Furthermore genetic studies indicate that even isolated groups retain a large amount of genetic variation as long as they were separated from a larger group rather than founded by a very small population.
I don't know what your workload is, I do a lot of Mathematica on a dual 1GHz PowerMac. On the positive side I never get noticeable lag in GUI operations or other activities while running a long calculation in the background, even when both columns on the CPU meter are totally green (usually for about a second or so). On the other hand, Mathematica itself is not SMP aware and when other system activity is low I still see the load switching between CPUs on the CPU meter. Benchmark tests confirm that my box is actually slower than a single processor due to overhead as processing switches between CPUs.
So, if you are not running SMP aware apps, but do regularly run processor intensive apps in the background then the dual processors are worth it if only because of lost productivity due to a nonresponsive GUI otherwise. On the other hand, if you only run processor intensive task while away from the machine then save yourself the money and wait (and pray) for a faster CPU.
First of all genetic variations between people groups across the various regions of the 2nd largest continent in the world are nearly as large as that of humanity across the entire globe. So your second sentence is a meaningless gross generalization.
Secondly, athletic prowess is also poorly defined. This article is about one particular event: long distance running. No one seems to comment on the dominance of Slavs in power lifting or Slavs and East Asians in gymnastics and diving. These are also basic sports in that they emphasize excellence in one particular area: power or flexibility, while not requiring the level of training in technique of sporst such as golf or baseball where good hand eye coordination can compensate for a difference in power. At this point I will make the obligatory mention of the lack of success of Kenyans at events shorter than 800m.
Third of all, anyone paying attention to the standings at world class competitions will note the rise of competitiveness of South Koreans and Mexicans at 10000m and longer events, Morroccans at events from 1500m to 10000m, Eastern Europeans in the Decathlon and so on.
Which brings me to my next point, we are discussing world class performances here. By definition this requires a level of training and commitment that most people are not willing to achieve. Excellence at the world class level depends on many factors: equipment, training and and taking advantage of whatever genetic advantages one has. Since Bikila's breakthrough at the Rome Olympics, there has been a concerted effort among East African nations to provide top athletes for the long distance events. This has led to national programs that identify, support and promote the best available talent on a scale that the US Olympic effort has only recently begun to match. Note that the original "African" long distance champions were Ethiopians who are as distinct from the current crop of Kenyans as a Swede is from an Italian when compared visually. No one was complaining when the US had a running obsession in the 70's and regularly produced long distance champions. There is no reason to suspect Kenya's current dominance, which I predict will fall to Mexico within a decade, is any different.
As for taking advantage of genetic heritage; any American whose family has been here for more than 3 generations can likely trace portions of their genetic heritage to ancestors from virtually any part of the globe. This is especially true of "African" Americans as they usually have ancestors originally from Europe at some point in their bloodline. The primary example is Tiger Woods who's ancestry is almost equally divided among Asian, European, African and Native Americans. As it becomes easier for population groups to intermingle Woods is going to be the rule rather than the exception.
Finally, anyone who has actually been to Japan as opposed to recieved "wisdom" from the popular culture will note that Japanese adolescents are on average much closer in height to other people groups than Japanese adults. Naoko Takashi, the Nagano Olympic Marathon Champion, is 1.62m or 5' 3" tall, this is 1" below the average height for a woman. Not exceptionally short or tall. Furthermore, elite long distance runners tend to be shorter than average so this is not an interesting case at all. From pictures her legs don't appear to be disproportionately short, in fact they seem long but she's pretty skinny so it's hard to tell.
In some circles it has become fashionable to blame genetics for one's circumstances. Also there is usually an unspoken corollary to the athletes of African descent have a genetic advantage argument. That of course is that African's are genetically predisposed to having a lesser IQ, or other quantifier linked to intelligence. The truth is the situation is far more complex that simply asking where one was born in an attempt to identify their capability at any particular endeavour. In nearly any meaningful test, the variation in performance of any group of humans is so large as to render the ability to predict the performance of an individual impossible.
And yes, there are of course some obvious physiological caveats; stride length, ratio of upper body mass to lower body mass, hemocrit etc. as to whether one is capable of a world class performance in long distance or not. But again, there are individuals from every region of the globe who meet the necessary criteria.
Gates' scenarios usually take the form of surprisingly simple questions that customers might have. Here's a sampling from our interviews:
Why are my document files stored one way, my contacts another way, and my e-mail and instant-messaging buddy list still another, and why aren't they related to my calendar or to one another and easy to search en masse?
Because email was developed under Unix systems and ported over to Windows by one group, then because Instant Messaging was developed in Isreal and the US (Carnegie Mellon) as an open protocol, and ported over to Windows by another group, and Windows' groupware was a response to Lotus Notes developed by yet another group of "Bill's Geeks".
So all of a sudden, Microsoft got the religion that there aren't any more third party apps to ape/buy and maybe it's time to put their own house in order. Unfortunately it seems they are doing so in exactly the wrong manner, by having independent groups funneled through one "architect" rather than having a single (or a few) developers writing a core foundation for all this stuff and then porting the next generation of Outlook, MSN and Exchange over. Forget the mythical man-month, this is going to set records for waisted man-years of developer time.
Why can't my computer protect me from distractions by screening phone calls and e-mails, and why can't it track me down when I'm out of the office or forward things to me automatically?
Because us poor nonbillionaire working stiffs can't afford administrative assistants and aren't as hyperorganized as the chief drone of Microsoft. I for one am not looking forward to the day my work schedule is planned according to guidance from Redmond as implemented in LongshotBKSPBKSPBKSPBKSPhorn
Why can't our computers arrange conference calls and online meetings for us?
Because PBX's work well enough.
Why is it so hard for a soccer mom to set up a simple Website and e-mail group to keep people informed about who's driving and who's bringing treats?
Define "hard". Most people have a good idea of risk/reward and the time to put up a yahoo/msn/aol user group get everyone to check it and reschedule whenever plans change (little Jimmy is almost bound to get flu/chicken pox/strep etc. on the day you were responsible for treats) for a soccer season that lasts eight weeks and then do it again for baseball then again for swimming then again... It's not worth it, and it would be a pretty miraculous piece of software that was so easy to use it would replace phone chains for organizing short term ad hoc organizations.
Why can't I tap into all my stuff at home or at work from any device that's mine, and have it just be available because it knows I'm me?
Because Bill the Great never understood that the personal in a personal computer meant you could store data without bugging the IT department, not that you wished to lock all your data in a box you were replacing in 18 months anyway. That coupled with the marketing realities of replicating multiuser technology as implemented in MULTICS, Unix, MVS etc. 30 years ago without letting those OSes use that technology to replace Windows in workgroups (cough)SAMBA(cough) is why Windows has a problem with multiple users. Breaking Kerberos didn't help either. Since Apple went to OS X this is really only a problem for Windows (and Palm).
Why can't I read digital versions of magazines on my portable computer that look the way they're supposed to look?
Mac's work just fine. Maybe it's because except for gaming technology Windows' imaging solutions have been subpar. Although I will admit hardware variations in the Wintel world also cause imaging problems. Again, the Microsoft uber alles attitude at Redmond that prevents open standards like OpenGL or PDF or Postscript from working as first class citizens in the Windows world because someone else may get $0.10 of the $1.00 flowing to Microsoft is to blame also. Again, on most Unix systems (and Be) the was never a problem.
No, the reason Faraday cages work against EM is that they form an equal and opposite field to the field you are trying to stop on the interior of the cage. There is no (known) negative mass so there is no such thing as a gravitic Faraday cage.
A simple thought experiment shows that this should be the case. If you placed one mass inside of a hollow spherical mass; for example a marble inside a beachball the interior mass doesn't float. However in most elementary physics courses you learn that there is no gravitational attraction inside sphere. On the other hand, a charged metal sphere inside another metal sphere is not affected by charges outside of the sphere.
If the probability of you getting home were small, you'd be dead. Even at a 51% chance of failure, the probability of you surviving a month's worth of trips home is 1 in 6 billion, essentially enough to consider you already dead.
Probability is funny like that.
Not really. You are confusing the fringes of a subject with its core. Economists, at least respectable ones, do not get paid for determining if the economy is currently receding or increasing, at least not on the CNBC, FN timescale of a day to a month. Current economic practice accepts that an economy moves in cycles with a general upward trend and economic theory is mostly focused on mitigating the negative aspects of the cycles ie, inflation, unemployment etc. The predictions of recessions etc. are about as valuable as a Super Bowl prediction made in July, there are just too many unknowns to lend any credence to it. But it's fun to do and brings in the ratings for CNBC.
As for dieticians; modernity has brought on a unique set of circumstances in human hisotry. In the US, Europe and Japan food is so cheaply available that calories are essentially free to the entire populace. That has never happened before in history where with the exception of the very wealthy the scope of nutrition sources, cultural traditions and limited population movement meant that nutrition sources were of limited scope and populations learned to adapt to thier food pretty quickly (ie high fat inuit diets, low fat tropical diets etc.). The current diet craze is simply a result of the change in conditions.
Exobiology is about as specious a "science" as possible because the ability to perform the fundamental act of science: experiment, is negligible. This article is actually more of a statement about the large scale conditions in other galactic regions: much higher radiation levels, lower likelihood of long term orbits (although the prevalence of binary pairs in clusters makes me think this idea is overrated) and different nucleosynthesis rates mean that the regions of the galaxy that are like our neighborhood may be smaller than a less sophisticated analysis would lead one to believe. If you insist on looking for life among the stars (and given the condition of much life here on Earth maybe we should be more concerned about local conditions) this article gives useful suggestions on places you shouldn't bother looking. Of course, that also reduces the likelihood of finding nearby life. That's all.
As a layman then the idea is to understand the big picture: we are learning a lot about; complex dynamical systems (economics), human physiology and social responses (nutrition), and galaxy scale structure (astronomy). But we don't have enough information yet to accurately predict a lot of things (and given nonlinear dynamics the number of things we will learn to predict may turn out to be depressingly small). So statements about recession, Aiken diets and extraterrestial life are amusing cocktail conversation but they are not what the experts in these fields are getting paid for, nor should they be.
google is your friend.
I'm glad you have a job, I have one too. I am a programmer (job title: senior software engineer) but my company's core business is not software but chemistry equipment. It is a medium sized (>1000 employees on 5 continents, $100 million+ revenue) global firm. We too pay out the nose for support on mission critical systems over which we have little control with varying amounts of success.
As far as I can tell, for those bugs in Microsoft or Apple software (to choose a few examples) that are not immediate show stoppers like Outlook exploits, you have the "option" of waiting for Microsoft or Apple to get around to addressing the issue in 6-12 months, perhaps. That is the life of the average end user of which there are far more than banks, and whose software experience is just as legitimate as yours.
I'm not sure if Red Hat's corporate support service is still running, but I am sure there are plenty of consultants at KPMG, Oracle, IBM et al. who are willing to take large sums of cash from you to comse sit at your site and solve your Linux/Windows 2000/Oracle 9/SAP etc. problems. Which they could have stayed home and solved on the message boards, albeit for far less renumeration.
The point is not whether if you have enough money you can find someone to handhold your software. If you were lucky enough to own a Ferrari F50 you were also privileged enough to have your own personal mechanic fly over from Maranello to keep things in working order too. But that doesn't mean Joe Hyundai driver doesn't want support for his automobile as well. There is nothing to be gained from comparing the Ferrari F50 experience to Jiffy Lube however.
Software is different in that it is far easier to distribute a patch, especially a patch to source, than to issue an automobile recall. By closing source though the software industry is artificially creating an automobile recall model of service without having the courage to issue a warranty. Furthermore, to elaborate on the idea of software as an unfinished good. The usual clause in the EULA of most software indemnifying the writer from any damage caused by the failure of the software is enough to indicate they don't have as much faith in the software as say a cabinet maker does in remodelling a kitchen.
Finally, although I am not a SysAdmin (although I do have to maintain some of the odder pieces of hardware and software I use for my job). I know enough about the job to know I don't want to be one.
The chair analogy is facetious. There is nothing that prevents you from selling GPL'd software. Stallman's basic argument for free software boils down to this: software has bugs, some of which may be repairable by the user of said software if the source code is available. Unless you are shipping bug free software you should ship the code as well or you are doing a disservice to the end user.
To make the chair analogy more apropos, imagine getting on of those wonderful particle boards in a box assemblies from IKEA without any instructions for assembly. IKEA can claim to have sent you the requested piece of furniture but without a guide for assembly it is useless to the user. Granted for simpler pieces a sufficiently motivated person may be able to assemble it anyway, but for any furniture with a significant number of hidden supports that is not the case. As with all analogies this breaks down upon close examination, but then again, that was my original point: software is not equivalent to a finished manufactured good
Incidentally, a better analogy may be other complex systems delivered to an end user such as a nuclear power plant. The handholding and training that the manufacterer (usually Westinghouse or Siemens) has to give to the user (your local utility) is roughly equivalent to providing the source code.
Finally, the "grab a tie" argument has little legitimacy either. If I have a problem with my Linux Kernel, I can hop on the boards (and admitedly absorb some abuse from a few socially underdeveloped board lurkers) and get an answer from the actual software developer themself. Compare this to my officemate who is navigating the "customer support" network of his network card driver manufacterer in an attempt to find the linux drivers the manufacterer claims exist (on thier webpage) but do not provide in any obvious form. He is grabbing lots of ties, but so far the only result is an intense desire to turn them into hangman's nooses.
Although trained as an engineer, Iacocca was primarily a salesman.
I don't understand what you're trying to say. Although marathoners are fast: being able to string together a series of miles at near world class pace, over the traditional sprinting distances of 400m or less they are not competitive. Athletes who are better at the sprints tend to be of the mesomorphic body type like Maurice Green, Carl Lewis, Ato Boldon, Michael Johnson. Ectomorphic types like Bikila tend to excel at the distance events where a high rate of speed is maintained for a long period, like a deer, not at maximum speed dashes like a cheetah.
Furthermore, attempting to extrapolate between such radically different body plans as a human; who in the larger scheme of things is a poor runner in all regimes, an ostrich, whose body is essentially all leg and neck and a T-Rex, with a much different torso to leg length ratio from both ostriches and humans is an exercise fraught with difficulty.
It seems the current problem is to attempt to determine the maximum speeds of which T-Rexes and their prey are capable. That could give one a clue as to the T-Rex's hunting style: if a T-Rex is much faster than its prey it may hunt like a cheetah, if its about the same speed it may hunt like a tiger; cornering its prey then making a very short rush, or if it has good endurance it may hunt like a wolf by running its prey to exhaustion.
Whatever the final probable outcome, attempting to intuit the result from the performance of human athletes is probably not going to give any useful information. I am not an expert but I believe that if anything at this point paleontology is only beginning to realize how little information we have about the living habits of dinosaurs. All we really have is a decent idea about the variety of body plans of dinosaurs, and as far as I know even the warm blooded versus cold blooded debate is not completely settled yet either. Similarly biomechanics is still an infant science, we have only recently come to understand the aerodynamic principles that allow a bumblebee to fly and still don't have a very good idea about the possible range of movement of the giant saurapods.
Today I need to know why I need to learn how to think with the functional paradigm. It's a serious problem, which stops many people before they learn functional languages.
Many years ago I was writing C programs to process text, and I could do everything that way, I just didn't realize, that there were better ways to do the same. That was before I knew Regular Expressions [oreilly.com], egrep [gnu.org], sed [gnu.org] or Perl [oreilly.com]. Now I write Perl one-liners for tasks, which used to take me days of writing C code, but I didn't know that before, because "If the only tool you have in the toolbox is a hammer - every problem looks like a nail."
As one idea to consider, lets take your text programming exercise. Imagine you have a block of text that is actually represents a program. Assume you need to transform that program using a regular expression, simple enough in Perl/C/choose your own poison. OK, now exectue that program. In Perl, which has borrowed some ideas from the functional paradigm it's possible, in C it's a nightmare. You have 3 choices: develop an interpreter for that language in C and pass the code to it. Spawn off a process that calls a shell script that executes the program, but if you need to communicate with the program as it is running you're going to have to jump through some extremely tight hoops. Dump the code to a text file, terminate your program, fire up the appropriate compiler/interpreter and again any interprocess communication requires significant programmer effort.
Granted this is not a problem everyone has, executing random code has caused enough problems for Microsoft Outlook already. However, for applications which support a domain specific language, usually for scripting purposes, this problem is common. So aside from the readability and maintainability advantages that functional programming advocates tout there's a problem that functional programming style supports that's difficult in a nonfunctional language. For an example of this idea writ large look at Mathematica.
Also don't confuse functional programming style with a functional programming language. Just as you can do OOP in pure C without the ++ you can do functional programming in C or more easily in Perl but most easily in Haskell, ML or LISP.
So essentially the CLR and the .NET framework on top of it must necessarily be the most productive way of producing code?
Given the horror that is Win32, with which I have first hand experience and the wounds to prove it, I seriously doubt Microsoft's ability to develop the uber-productive framework while simultaneously meeting the demands of maintaining share price with regular updates of the API and eliminating threatening programs by swallowing whole applications as portions of the next version of the API.
In their domain the so called "exotic" features are very natural. For example, symbolic processing in an imperative language almost always necessitates writing of a parser (or using one from the framework). However because imperative languages lack a read-eval loop, it is a nontrivial exercise to turn parsed code into a callable function, a trivial exercise in LISP. When writing a computational algebra application therefore it is far more difficult to turn expressions into evaluable functions and then evaluate them in an imperative style than a functional.
Granted not everyone needs a computer algebra system, but you'd be surprised at the number of people who use one and .NET has nothing to offer them. There are many other processing domains beyond the timely provision of paychecks based on information stored in an Oracle database for which languages with "exotic" features result in far more programmer productivity than most people are willing to give credit for. This whole discussion actually is an opportunity for open-source to address a problem: appropriate tools for domain specific tasks (of which producing the GNOME GUI is one) rather than adopting the solution of a proprietary code vendor. Most of all, the CLR address a specific business problem Microsoft has: that too many serverside applications are being written in Java because a lot of developers prefer the Java framework to BackOffice. All other hype aside that's the fundamental reason for the existence of C# and the CLR. The other portions of .NET from Passport to Hailstorm similarly are responses to the problem of maintaining Bill Gates' personal wealth as opposed to Larry Ellison's, Steve Case's and Scott McNealy's. The technical problems of programmer's in the pits are only an aside in this much larger overall picture.
Miguel made a point, there is a technical need in GNOME for language interoperability. His answer however was to accept a solution that has too much baggage tied to it. I think Alan Cox's responses were an attempt to make Miguel see the light. Are there pieces of the CLR that are valuable? Probably, but not many. The free and open software movements (I've wandered a bit too far off topic here so I'll stop soon) should be aware of what proprietary software vendors are doing. But when a deficiency is apparent (such as the lack of a cheap, robust Unix-like kernel for x86 hardware in the early 90's) free and or open software developers should develop solutions that solve thier own problems, not Microsoft's.