The Cambrian explosion is more likely explained in terms of genetic software. At some point, a collection of genes evolved that could reliably control and pass on complex growth patterns. Before those existed, multi-cell organisms had very simple forms and limited functionality. Once that morphological operating system was in place, a vast variety of organisms could evolve.
From the IBM History FAQ, page 26:
"Q. Did Thomas Watson say in the 1950s that he foresaw a market potential for only five electronic computers?
A. We believe the statement that you attribute to Thomas Watson is a misunderstanding of remarks made at IBM’s annual stockholders meeting on April 28, 1953. In referring specifically and only to the IBM 701 Electronic Data Processing Machine -- which had been introduced the year before as the company’s first production computer designed for scientific calculations -- Thomas Watson, Jr., told stockholders that “IBM had developed a paper plan for such a machine and took this paper plan across the country to some 20 concerns that we thought could use such a machine. I would like to tell you that the machine rents for between $12,000 and $18,000 a month, so it was not the type of thing that could be sold from place to place. But, as a result of our trip, on which we expected to get orders for five machines, we came home with orders for 18.”
Maybe you are thinking of the earlier IBM 1620? The 1130 had a "pizza platter" disk drive and the Fortran compiler was stored on disk, as was your object program.
The punched card era ended for me in 1975, when I started working on Data General Nova minicomputers at Computervision. But I spend more than a decade before that with cards and keypunch machines. I never let anyone else punch in my programs, as I usually found some errors when I typed them in myself. Card decks weren't dropped often and it wasn't that big a deal. Dropping a deck is not an effective way to shuffle it. I'm more nervous about my online source files being munged by accident. The overnight or 24 hour turnaround was common, but possible to work around. I spend many nights after mid-night at the MIT computer center in the late 1960s, when hour or even half hour turnarounds were possible. One spent the time waiting socializing or helping others find their bugs. During summer jobs at NASA MSC, I found a Honeywell 316 that wasn't being used much and could get time on it all to myself when needed. In the early 1970s my employer had an IBM 1130 and we took turns using it, so turnaround was not an issue there, though it could be when software was to be installed at a client. Finding ways to get around obstacles in your path was a valuable skill then as now.
One could also interpret the data as saying that since 2011, 8% of data center operators have looked into improving their energy efficiency and have done as much as they think feasible. That 50% consider energy efficiency very important in the latest survey suggests that it is still is. Data centers use about 2% of the electricity consumed in the United States.
The longer you keep you kid off computers the better. Computers are highly addictive and you won't have the will power to limit it's use in any effective way. You've got important stuff to do, kid is being a pest, it's just too easy to bring up a game and put him in front of it. Let the kid learn about the real world, enjoy physical activity and interact with people fact to face.
It seems to me Apple has a strategic choice: it can license its patents on basic technology, like pinch zoom and edge bounce, to Samsung and others, or keep suing. Licensing keeps Google Android as its main rival, while Apple gets a tidy tax on every smartphone sold. Not licensing puts Microsoft and Nokia, two hungry giants, back in the game and brings Apple nothing. Sometimes it's best to quit while you're ahead.
Accident statistics in the U.S. do not seem to support the supposed danger of driving while talking on cell phones. During the period when cell phones became wildly popular here, the automobile accident rate has dropped sharply. According to the Centers for Disease Control http://www.cdc.gov/Motorvehiclesafety/mmwr_achievements.html/ "From 2000 to 2009, while the number of vehicle miles traveled on the nation's roads increased by 8.5%, the death rate related to that travel declined from 14.9 per 100,000 population to 11.0 and the injury rate declined from 1,130 to 722." Yes, there were other factors, like seat belt laws, but if cell phones were such a major danger, it's hard to believe deaths could have fallen that much at the exact same time they became ubiquitous.
I attended the World Wide Developers' conference when the Mac II was introduced. Rumors insisted it was to be the first color Macintosh. When the exhibit hall doors opened, there was a Mac II with its big (for the time) monitor, but the image was the original Mac's crisp black and white. It was only when I got closer that I noticed the Apple logo in the upper left corner of the screen--it alone displayed in bright rainbow color. That was Job's showmanship.
Right, but the South switched to 4 foot 9 inches in 1886 to match the gauge used by the Pennsylvania RR. The last 1/2 inch came later. But that was good enough.
everyone seems to see it as a fail on behalf of Sony .
Isn't this IBM's Cell at fault ?
The Epic Fail, exposing Sony's private key, had nothing to do with the IBM Cell processor. In fact the flaw was not in any of the PS3 software. It was a mistake in the program used to sign software approved to run on the PS3. That program presumably runs only on some highly guarded server in the bowels of Sony. It could have been fixed by adding one line of code, a call to random number generator to generate a new random value for each signature. Even a crappy random number generator would probably have resisted attack. All that was needed was keeping attackers from finding two different signatures that used the same "random" number. You have to go back to the Venona NSA exploit in the Cold War to find an example of a large organization screwing up what should have been an unbreakable cipher system.
One thing in the NYT article that did not make sense was the claim the large amounts of capital are needed to make this happen. If local people can afford the solar units and they pay for themselves in a few months, what's holding the wide scale deployment up?
By law, the US government publishes a report each year on all lawful wiretaps, Federal and state. Here is an excerpt from the latest report: "Public Law 106-197 amended 18 U.S.C. 2519(2)(b) to require that reporting should refect the number of wiretap applications granted for which encryption was encountered and whether such encryption prevented law enforcement officials from obtaining the plain text of communications intercepted pursuant to the court orders. In 2009, one instance was reported of encryption encountered during a state wiretap; however, this did not prevent officials from obtaining the plain text of the communications."
In other words, there was just one lawful wiretap last year where communications were encrypted and even that did not stymie law enforcement. The proposed law is not about aiding law enforcement, it's about perfecting the surveillance society, where all communications are filtered for suspicious content.
64-megajoules is 17.8 kilowatt-hours. Even assuming the gun is only 10% efficient, that isn't so much power. To put it another way, to fire the gun every 64 seconds at 10% efficiency takes 10 megawatts, or 13000 horsepower. Destroyer turbine engines put out considerably more power than that. What am I missing?
Hundreds of edits don't make you an admin. I'm not saying that the Wikipedia deleition process is without flaws. There is some cliquishness. My point is that a publication in the main stream media that loves to write about inaccuracies in Wikipedia can't be bothered to do some basic fact checking. All the information on the deletion and admin selection processes are available on the Wikipedia web site and reasonably easy to find. And I suspect the reason it wasn't checked is shrinking staffs due to economic pressure on the newspaper industry. Wikipedia may have more fact checkers than the Washington Post has readers. Reader beware everywhere.
The Post article quotes Jimmy Wales as saying that the decision to exclude an article is based on "a discussion among known editors." The article goes on to ask who those editors are and answers its own question "these editors are called 'administrators' and they get their jobs after being nominated and voted in by the great mass of Wikipedia contributors." Well, that is wrong on two counts. The discussions on deleting articles are in no way restricted to admins. Admins do determine what the consensus of the discussion is after a fixed time period and have access to the tools to actually delete the article, but they have no special role in the discussion. The second error concerns how admins are selected. There is no vote by "by the great mass of Wikipedia contributors." There is a nomination and review process and the final decision is made by an even smaller group known as "bureaucrats." See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_fo r_adminship . That's two errors in a single paragraph, but I suppose with tight budgets in the newspaper business these days, they can't afford the kind of scrutiny for accuracy that Wikipedia articles get.
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The Cambrian explosion is more likely explained in terms of genetic software. At some point, a collection of genes evolved that could reliably control and pass on complex growth patterns. Before those existed, multi-cell organisms had very simple forms and limited functionality. Once that morphological operating system was in place, a vast variety of organisms could evolve.
From the IBM History FAQ, page 26: "Q. Did Thomas Watson say in the 1950s that he foresaw a market potential for only five electronic computers? A. We believe the statement that you attribute to Thomas Watson is a misunderstanding of remarks made at IBM’s annual stockholders meeting on April 28, 1953. In referring specifically and only to the IBM 701 Electronic Data Processing Machine -- which had been introduced the year before as the company’s first production computer designed for scientific calculations -- Thomas Watson, Jr., told stockholders that “IBM had developed a paper plan for such a machine and took this paper plan across the country to some 20 concerns that we thought could use such a machine. I would like to tell you that the machine rents for between $12,000 and $18,000 a month, so it was not the type of thing that could be sold from place to place. But, as a result of our trip, on which we expected to get orders for five machines, we came home with orders for 18.”
Maybe you are thinking of the earlier IBM 1620? The 1130 had a "pizza platter" disk drive and the Fortran compiler was stored on disk, as was your object program.
The punched card era ended for me in 1975, when I started working on Data General Nova minicomputers at Computervision. But I spend more than a decade before that with cards and keypunch machines. I never let anyone else punch in my programs, as I usually found some errors when I typed them in myself. Card decks weren't dropped often and it wasn't that big a deal. Dropping a deck is not an effective way to shuffle it. I'm more nervous about my online source files being munged by accident. The overnight or 24 hour turnaround was common, but possible to work around. I spend many nights after mid-night at the MIT computer center in the late 1960s, when hour or even half hour turnarounds were possible. One spent the time waiting socializing or helping others find their bugs. During summer jobs at NASA MSC, I found a Honeywell 316 that wasn't being used much and could get time on it all to myself when needed. In the early 1970s my employer had an IBM 1130 and we took turns using it, so turnaround was not an issue there, though it could be when software was to be installed at a client. Finding ways to get around obstacles in your path was a valuable skill then as now.
One could also interpret the data as saying that since 2011, 8% of data center operators have looked into improving their energy efficiency and have done as much as they think feasible. That 50% consider energy efficiency very important in the latest survey suggests that it is still is. Data centers use about 2% of the electricity consumed in the United States.
The longer you keep you kid off computers the better. Computers are highly addictive and you won't have the will power to limit it's use in any effective way. You've got important stuff to do, kid is being a pest, it's just too easy to bring up a game and put him in front of it. Let the kid learn about the real world, enjoy physical activity and interact with people fact to face.
It seems to me Apple has a strategic choice: it can license its patents on basic technology, like pinch zoom and edge bounce, to Samsung and others, or keep suing. Licensing keeps Google Android as its main rival, while Apple gets a tidy tax on every smartphone sold. Not licensing puts Microsoft and Nokia, two hungry giants, back in the game and brings Apple nothing. Sometimes it's best to quit while you're ahead.
Accident statistics in the U.S. do not seem to support the supposed danger of driving while talking on cell phones. During the period when cell phones became wildly popular here, the automobile accident rate has dropped sharply. According to the Centers for Disease Control http://www.cdc.gov/Motorvehiclesafety/mmwr_achievements.html/ "From 2000 to 2009, while the number of vehicle miles traveled on the nation's roads increased by 8.5%, the death rate related to that travel declined from 14.9 per 100,000 population to 11.0 and the injury rate declined from 1,130 to 722." Yes, there were other factors, like seat belt laws, but if cell phones were such a major danger, it's hard to believe deaths could have fallen that much at the exact same time they became ubiquitous.
I attended the World Wide Developers' conference when the Mac II was introduced. Rumors insisted it was to be the first color Macintosh. When the exhibit hall doors opened, there was a Mac II with its big (for the time) monitor, but the image was the original Mac's crisp black and white. It was only when I got closer that I noticed the Apple logo in the upper left corner of the screen--it alone displayed in bright rainbow color. That was Job's showmanship.
Right, but the South switched to 4 foot 9 inches in 1886 to match the gauge used by the Pennsylvania RR. The last 1/2 inch came later. But that was good enough.
...
everyone seems to see it as a fail on behalf of Sony . Isn't this IBM's Cell at fault ?
The Epic Fail, exposing Sony's private key, had nothing to do with the IBM Cell processor. In fact the flaw was not in any of the PS3 software. It was a mistake in the program used to sign software approved to run on the PS3. That program presumably runs only on some highly guarded server in the bowels of Sony. It could have been fixed by adding one line of code, a call to random number generator to generate a new random value for each signature. Even a crappy random number generator would probably have resisted attack. All that was needed was keeping attackers from finding two different signatures that used the same "random" number. You have to go back to the Venona NSA exploit in the Cold War to find an example of a large organization screwing up what should have been an unbreakable cipher system.
Uhh no. We have some trade issues with China, but they hardly rise to the level of Cold War.
One thing in the NYT article that did not make sense was the claim the large amounts of capital are needed to make this happen. If local people can afford the solar units and they pay for themselves in a few months, what's holding the wide scale deployment up?
By law, the US government publishes a report each year on all lawful wiretaps, Federal and state. Here is an excerpt from the latest report: "Public Law 106-197 amended 18 U.S.C. 2519(2)(b) to require that reporting should refect the number of wiretap applications granted for which encryption was encountered and whether such encryption prevented law enforcement officials from obtaining the plain text of communications intercepted pursuant to the court orders. In 2009, one instance was reported of encryption encountered during a state wiretap; however, this did not prevent officials from obtaining the plain text of the communications." In other words, there was just one lawful wiretap last year where communications were encrypted and even that did not stymie law enforcement. The proposed law is not about aiding law enforcement, it's about perfecting the surveillance society, where all communications are filtered for suspicious content.
Very informative, but for the record, cars and trucks don't use GPS in a safety-critical role and railroads don't use it at all.
64-megajoules is 17.8 kilowatt-hours. Even assuming the gun is only 10% efficient, that isn't so much power. To put it another way, to fire the gun every 64 seconds at 10% efficiency takes 10 megawatts, or 13000 horsepower. Destroyer turbine engines put out considerably more power than that. What am I missing?
Why deal with all the Vista craziness when there is another vendor that already has its DRM act together?
the fair comparison would be magic hydrogen generation, transportation and consumption technologies vs magic batteries
Hundreds of edits don't make you an admin. I'm not saying that the Wikipedia deleition process is without flaws. There is some cliquishness. My point is that a publication in the main stream media that loves to write about inaccuracies in Wikipedia can't be bothered to do some basic fact checking. All the information on the deletion and admin selection processes are available on the Wikipedia web site and reasonably easy to find. And I suspect the reason it wasn't checked is shrinking staffs due to economic pressure on the newspaper industry. Wikipedia may have more fact checkers than the Washington Post has readers. Reader beware everywhere.
The Post article quotes Jimmy Wales as saying that the decision to exclude an article is based on "a discussion among known editors." The article goes on to ask who those editors are and answers its own question "these editors are called 'administrators' and they get their jobs after being nominated and voted in by the great mass of Wikipedia contributors." Well, that is wrong on two counts. The discussions on deleting articles are in no way restricted to admins. Admins do determine what the consensus of the discussion is after a fixed time period and have access to the tools to actually delete the article, but they have no special role in the discussion. The second error concerns how admins are selected. There is no vote by "by the great mass of Wikipedia contributors." There is a nomination and review process and the final decision is made by an even smaller group known as "bureaucrats." See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_fo r_adminship . That's two errors in a single paragraph, but I suppose with tight budgets in the newspaper business these days, they can't afford the kind of scrutiny for accuracy that Wikipedia articles get.