Excel has had subroutines that try to use the FPU if there is one since at least 1989. The way I know that is because in the 80s, frequently there were two versions of every chip: integer-only and with-FPU, which cost more. Every compiler which wanted to claim numerics could either emit calls to the FPU emulation subroutine library (what was libm for integer machines), or the actual FPU calls (just an API.) It used to be that people would test the two to make sure they agreed, and it was a big deal, which is what IEEE 754 was all about.
Actually some guy in Virginia, or Maryland, IIRC, got an inconsistent result and traced it to his chip. I do not know whether he was testing the FPU at the time or just stumbled on it. Was that 10 years ago yet?
The problem is that there is essentially no way to write a regression test that checks the operation for any permutation of states. Electrical problems with chip lithography, when they arise, are often dependent on a particular problem of indeterminate rarity.
If a CPU producer passed a general purpose chip, and it ended up that the defect was responsible for a tort, then they might be liable.
Their ought to be three bins: MIL-SPEC, No Defects, and Defect Detected But Passed Regression Suite. Anyone purchasing from the third bin has to accept liability for unforseen malfunctions.
MR. RUSSERT: But, Senator Roberts, December of 2002 the president expressing doubts about the intelligence on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and yet three months later we were at war. How do you explain that?
SEN. ROBERTS: Well, we have a situation where the DCI, George Tenet--and it's very easy to go back and pick out a certain statement. Of course, his most famous one is "slam dunk." There isn't any slam dunk in intelligence. You don't bat, you know, 1,000 percent. I mean, you're lucky if you bat, you know, 500 percent.
The information that was provided to the president and to the Congress that led to the same kind of assertive comments that the same critics are now blaming the president for was flawed. What he said is what he got, and what he got was wrong, and I think he was right to challenge it at the time. George Tenet stood up and said, "It's a slam dunk case." It was not a slam dunk case.
This thing started clear back in 1991, as I've indicated, with the discovery that he was farther ahead with his nuclear weaponry than we thought before. He was involved in a war with Iran. He was involved, obviously, in the invasion in Kuwait. And then, as I said, every global intelligence agency figured out, "Well, it's an assumption train." They thought he would reconstitute the weapons and he didn't.
MR. RUSSERT: Senator Rockefeller, there is a couple sentences in the report that I want to share with you because this was voted on unanimously by nine Republicans, eight Democrats. Political pressure--"The Committee was not presented with any evidence that intelligence analysts changed their judgments as a result of political pressure, altered or produced intelligence products to conform with Administration policy, or that anyone even attempted to coerce, influence or pressure analysts to do so."
Does that put to rest at whole discussion of whether or not the administration had a predisposition or pressured analysts?
SEN. ROCKEFELLER: In no way does it put that to rest. Pat Roberts and I both understand that this was the great fight in our committee about the report. And I voted for the report in spite of that with which I did not agree, that is the subject of pressure. I think there was a lot of pressure.
There are various ways of doing pressure. What we focused on in the report was, you know, if we interviewed an analyst and we're putting pressure on that analyst, did any of them complain that our staff was putting pressure on them. The answer is, "No, they didn't." But there are all kinds of other pressures. Mr. Kerr, who is deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency, did a study on this and came out with the view that there was a lot of pressure. George Tenet himself was visited by analysts who complained of being pressured, and he used the phrase, "if you want to relieve the pressure," thus
justifying the fact that there was pressure on these folks, "then don't tell them anything if there isn't new information." But most importantly, the ombudsman of the CIA, whose job it is to listen to people's complaints said that in his 32 years of work in the CIA, he had never seen so much hammering, i.e. pressure, on the intelligence community.
Plus the fact that all during this time in advance of the intelligence that he was getting, the president and his top administrators--the top folks--you know, Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, etc.--they were putting out these hair-raising, paralyzing, horrifying statements about what was going to happen, was about to come back to the homeland, the mushroom cloud. This is pressure, folks. This is pressure.
The amount of advertising that groups.yahoo.com users must endure is absurd.
The original egroups customers, and customers who find their time valuable enough not to sit through interstitial ads to get to list archives detest yahoo, and I think I speak for many of them when I say that we avoid Yahoo when possible because of such obtrusiveness.
You would think that someone in Yahoo would have the basic common sense to know that mailing lists are exactly the worst place to put the most obtrusive ads. No wonder their capitalization ratio relative to Google is totally out of proportion with their sales. That's the canary in the mineshaft, guys: Wall Street thinks you're weaker than Google because Google has found a sweeter spot on the ads-vs.-content scale. Learn the obvious lesson or fade away, it's up to Yahoo.
I'm not going to go so far as to imply a conflict of interest
Eisenhower states his opinions on collusion between military (incldes NASA more than ever with this appointment) and industry in his farewell address.
We apologize for the deleterious effects of the military-industrial complex at our peril.
Each shuttle launch puts as much carbon dioxide into the air as driving 50 million SUVs 10 miles each. Are we getting that kind of value from space launches? The captains of industry get it through their revlving door of corruption.
I see now that they point mainly to their claim 21, which does make a lot more sense, but is also so broad to be absurd. How can they pretend that this was novel in 1998?
1. A method for protecting publicly distributed software from unauthorised use, comprising the steps of:
determining if identity information, is existing in a processing apparatus;
using a positive result of said determination as a pre-condition for causing said processing apparatus to provide user access to said software desired to be protected;
wherein:
said identity information, if so existing, being capable of being used in enabling electronic commerce operation(s) for which rightful user(s) of said software desired to be protected has to be responsible;
access to said software desired to be protected is being provided without causing a said operation being performed and said identity information being specific to said rightful user(s).
There are at least five ambigious anticedents that I don't understand there.
The further-out geostatonary belt is called crowded, but only by people who have to point antennas. It is less cluttered with junk and the near-zero relative speeds of everything in it makes what little there is fairly safe.
The closer you get to the planet, the more crap there is. Some of it is really interesting crap, but it's still deadly crap.
I think the main problem people had with the essay (other than the inflammitory title) were these two sentences:
Actually, come to think about it, we had about 150 years of black slavery, and it hasn't even been 150 years since the Civil War. It wouldn't surprise me to find that blacks are still taught to value their leisure time more highly than whites.
Not only does this show a lack of understanding of history (slave ships had begun British colony trade at Jamestown by 1620, and were involved with Spanish colonies in North America at least 50 years before that), but the idea that one's value of leisure time is handed down from generation to generation is profoundly anti-individualist and deepl racist on its face.
I've never met Russ, but after reading his blog I get the impression that he is someone I might like to know (and convince to think about what he writes a little while longer before he writes it), but he is far too outspoken to serve as a figurehead for an organization frequently targeted by professional PR flacks (e.g. Microsoft's.) I don't wish him any ill will, but I think he made the right choice here.
The market gives a larger capitalization to Google, 51 to 44 billion (on 3.2 and 3.6 billion in revenue respectively), because Google's margins are much larger, even if they reach half as many daily users. Most of Yahoo's pageviews come from their news, finance, and mail sections, with their directory and search engine much less popular. Google redirects stock quotes to finance.yahoo.com right now, and their default "top stories" news interface is the same as it was a couple years ago. Gmail is still invitation-only.
My guess is that as soon as Google moves in those three areas, they'll eat Yahoo's lunch. We'll see.
I actually liked the first third better than the rest. The beat really falls apart. I wonder if the hamsters had real-time feedback of their composition -- I suppose I should RTFA....
Slashdot Mirror
Why are they spending time arguing about whether the 90s were the hottest or not? The data are clear.
Excel has had subroutines that try to use the FPU if there is one since at least 1989. The way I know that is because in the 80s, frequently there were two versions of every chip: integer-only and with-FPU, which cost more. Every compiler which wanted to claim numerics could either emit calls to the FPU emulation subroutine library (what was libm for integer machines), or the actual FPU calls (just an API.) It used to be that people would test the two to make sure they agreed, and it was a big deal, which is what IEEE 754 was all about.
Actually some guy in Virginia, or Maryland, IIRC, got an inconsistent result and traced it to his chip. I do not know whether he was testing the FPU at the time or just stumbled on it. Was that 10 years ago yet?
If a CPU producer passed a general purpose chip, and it ended up that the defect was responsible for a tort, then they might be liable.
Their ought to be three bins: MIL-SPEC, No Defects, and Defect Detected But Passed Regression Suite. Anyone purchasing from the third bin has to accept liability for unforseen malfunctions.
Send me email if you want to make an offer for the software only, with the disclaimer that there's no support of the Axim yet.
Any President who must shape the intelligence to match his whims is not acting in defense of U.S. security interests.
I'm sure there is no offence taken, but I recommend ordering some clothes to be on the safe side.
A stand-alone PDA, e.g., Palm or Pocket PC, is not considered an embedded system, is it?
The original egroups customers, and customers who find their time valuable enough not to sit through interstitial ads to get to list archives detest yahoo, and I think I speak for many of them when I say that we avoid Yahoo when possible because of such obtrusiveness.
You would think that someone in Yahoo would have the basic common sense to know that mailing lists are exactly the worst place to put the most obtrusive ads. No wonder their capitalization ratio relative to Google is totally out of proportion with their sales. That's the canary in the mineshaft, guys: Wall Street thinks you're weaker than Google because Google has found a sweeter spot on the ads-vs.-content scale. Learn the obvious lesson or fade away, it's up to Yahoo.
A few months ago someone on efnet #math asked me about poker.... I wonder if it's the same guy.
I'm glad there are still people who enjoy civil engineering.
Does this matter to anyone outside of Boston, at all?
We apologize for the deleterious effects of the military-industrial complex at our peril.
Each shuttle launch puts as much carbon dioxide into the air as driving 50 million SUVs 10 miles each. Are we getting that kind of value from space launches? The captains of industry get it through their revlving door of corruption.
I see now that they point mainly to their claim 21, which does make a lot more sense, but is also so broad to be absurd. How can they pretend that this was novel in 1998?
Can anyone parse it?
The closer you get to the planet, the more crap there is. Some of it is really interesting crap, but it's still deadly crap.
I've never met Russ, but after reading his blog I get the impression that he is someone I might like to know (and convince to think about what he writes a little while longer before he writes it), but he is far too outspoken to serve as a figurehead for an organization frequently targeted by professional PR flacks (e.g. Microsoft's.) I don't wish him any ill will, but I think he made the right choice here.
Russ himself signed the petition; acording to the petition's author, tomhudson, he emailed to confirm his signature.
Using a virtual keyboard is also a work around productivity.
However, it's plenty easy to install a hardware keylogger undetectably inside a chassis.
There are easier, safer ways for public terminal security.
My guess is that as soon as Google moves in those three areas, they'll eat Yahoo's lunch. We'll see.
Yeah, the top hamster seems to have more control over both the beat and the tonality than all the others put together.
I actually liked the first third better than the rest. The beat really falls apart. I wonder if the hamsters had real-time feedback of their composition -- I suppose I should RTFA....
groan!
I hear Rush Limbaugh will be broadcasting from there for a while.