Would it possible to build something like this held up by the buoyancy of hot air rather than helium?
With the right kind of insulating materials in the envelope, heat loss could be controlled. There might also be a way of using solar power to heat the air.
Last month Channel 4 News did a story about the "hidden internet" (i.e. illegal drugs trading, arms, slavery, child sexual abuse etc.) and "its currency: Bitcoin."
Unusually for Channel 4 News, the direct link was made between Bitcoin and illegal activity i.e. the false premise that Bitcoin was designed specifically to facilitate crime on the Internet.
Maybe I'm naive and still believe that the Internet is for the common good and that Bitcoin was a legitimate tool, but maybe it was just designed for crooks all along, just like TOR, which they also talk about.
Obama for doing nothing gets a Nobel prize, Bush gets an arrest warrant.
This was a message from the rest of the world to the USA: thank you at last for electing a leader with a shred of humanity who isn't hell-bent on destroying the rest of world for America's short term gain and who isn't interested in making enemies of foreigners simply for being foreign.
C is an absolutely incredible language. It is very simple, but not too simple. It's is very powerful and can be used to create some very high-level abstractions yet still gives absolute control over the machine. A simple C compiler can be implemented relatively (for a compiler!) easily (so they say) and for most architectures. C code can be very portable and the machine code produced even by the simpler compilers is quite efficient. This was very important 30+ years ago when hitherto the only way to get decent performance was to write in tedious and un-portable assembly language.
To give you an idea of how simple and efficient C can be, the first C compiler I used was HiSoft C for the ZX Spectrum. This ran on a machine with about 40k usable RAM and a 3.5MHz Z80 (8-bit). The compiler (integer-only, though) and editor were RAM-resident and could compile and execute programs of many hundreds of lines.
Taking the positive, pro-active "professional" approach always sounds great, but very often it can go nowhere, especially if you're young. Established "professionals" tend not to listen to enthusiastic newbies, not matter how reasoned an argument they put forward.
One thing I've learned with experience is to know when to stop and to move on to the next opportunity. You can lead a horse to water and all that.
This company is a bunch of clowns. They can not possibly hope to deliver working software reliably and on time (or at all).
What happens is that everyone develops "their" code in isolation. Near the deadline for the project everyone tried to deliver their code all at once. Not only do they find that it doesn't "fit together" (it doesn't compile), but after a few weeks of late-nighters and all-weekenders trying to fix it, when it does compile, it doesn't run and certainly doesn't do what it was intended to.
This sort of disaster scenario has been documented and understood - in books you can buy from Amazon - (heck, even by Microsoft of all organisations) since the 1980s. This isn't just old, it's antediluvian. It doesn't work!
I worked at a place like that before. Not only was the product flaky and always late, but it was a very stressful place to work with the developers "given responsibility" whenever something went wrong. They went bust 18 months after I escaped.
The reasons things went wrong were that there wasn't a team: individual developers silo'd and working on different things, forbidden from communicating in case they were "wasting time." And there were a bunch of enthusiastic but inexperienced junior coders in China churning out lines of code (Perl-written-in-C) by the thousand that did nothing but crash.
There were no peer reviews (i.e. code reviews), there was a coding standard that was ignored, infrequent status meetings, plans (MS Project) that were pure fantasy.
The Director of Software Development and his sidekick sought to ensure quality and timeliness by taking the developers individually into their offices and shouting at them for 30-45 minutes.
Appraisals involved the aforementioned dynamic duo. You would be invited in, smiled at unconvincingly and then asked how you thought you did in the previous year. Then you would be told how you did and what pay rise you were (or weren't) getting.
I was there for 2 years and 2 months and the Software office had between 22 and 25 people at any one time during that period. 19 of us left (including 2 who resigned when I was working out my 1 month notice period).
They were dinosaurs and their bones lie under the Cambridgeshire countryside.
I believe that Solaris x86 on x86-64 scales better on large systems than Linux. Large x86 CPU manufacturers like Solaris x86 because it shows off their hardware better than Linux.
Yesterday (October 4, 2011) Oracle made the surprising announcement that they would be porting some key Solaris features, DTrace and Zones, to Oracle Enterprise Linux. As one of the original authors, the news about DTrace was particularly interesting to me, so I started digging. Even among Oracle employees, there's uncertainty about what was announced.
This sounds like a typical PHB decision: make a crazy choice without consulting the engineers as to whether it's a good idea, possible or even wanted, and could potentially threaten the existence of their existing products that have had blood sweated over them for 20 years, makes their continuing relevance to the company (and therefore employment prospects) seem very uncertain and replaces a technically-superior product with a less-able competitor.
Disclaimer: I don't work for Oracle. I know some Solaris people, and although Linux is great (it's what I do), Solaris still beats it in terms of things like high-end scalability. As we move to a massively multi-core, multi-cpu world, the Solaris kernel has a lot of advantages.
Maybe the PHBs don't care any more. Maybe they'd rather spend the effort on Linux. Who knows. It sounds like a bad time to work in the Solaris group at Oracle.
So, again, "good" is being replaced by "good enough." That's the commoditisation of technology. The invisible hand has spoken. That's life.
I've been working for a large (>100k people now) company for 4 years. The first year we got small pay rises. Then for the next three years there was a RIF every year and no pay rises. This year we got 2.7% and sold to an Indian outsourcing company. Peoples' pensions got hammered. Our jobs are going to India and many of us are training our replacement with vague promises of new work for other customers at the end of it. My project is going, lock, stock and barrel, to India. There is no new work yet: the excuse is they can't get us new work while we're still committed to the old work. Ho hum.
Meanwhile, people across the pond, still working for the old employer are being asked to take substantial pay cuts (up to 50% for the lowest paid!).
I've worked for smaller companies too. The only difference was the Dickensian attitude to staff motivation. The pay rises were non-existent or very poor, but in addition, they thought that intimidating and threatening the staff would improve output and quality. It just made turnover astronomical. I was there for 2 years and 2 months. The software office had 22-25 people employed over that period. 19 of us left (2 in the month I worked my notice).
It's all about managers' bonuses and shareholder value.
On the bright side, pretty soon, most of these companies will be dead (the last one already is). Maybe we will enter a new era where staff are valued?
If the UltraSPARC is running a multi-user operating system with a multi-threaded kernel, sophisticated networking stack, an over-the-network graphics system and the other is running a 1970s-vintage CP/M rip-off (which is basically doing no work while anything else is running) and a 16-bit GUI or a Frankenstein 16/32-bit cesspool of DOS and goodness knows what else, then the comparison is hardly fair.
I saw a 40MHz computer in 1990 and was in awe. I think it was a Mac IIfx. It had 640x480 graphics with 16.7 million colours, a 68040 processor and I think it might have had a DSP that could do CD-quality sound.
In those days anything above 33MHz was very special indeed, and I think we were just about getting to 1 million transistors on a chip.
My dad used to have a 286-12 laptop (Compaq SLT). I learned MS-DOS on that and a bit of C coding with Lattice C.
Sun's first out-of-order execution CPU was code named Millennium and was due out in y2k but it was late. They canceled the project in 2005. It was going to be called UltraSPARC V. Rumour has it that it was going to have a mode without register windows as well to further increase performance.
None of the Sun UltraSPARC CPUs (I, II, IIi, III, IIIi, IV, IV+) had ooo.
Sun just couldn't get ooo to work. Fujitsu had no problem, on the other hand. Their SPARC64 CPUs were miles better at the same clock frequency and went to higher frequencies too. Sun always made sure that you always got the last generation version of Solaris when you bought a Fujitsu box to make the Sun boxes more compelling.
Sun then gave up on "conventional" CPU design and went for the highly multi-threaded designs that they bought in from Afara (formed by ex-Sun staffers) and the Rock which turned out to be a dud. There was a good article about that after Oracle bought out Sun explaining why it wasn't a good design but I can't find the link.
So Sun did a deal with Fujitsu to re-badge their SPARC64 boxes with the latest Solaris on them...
I've no doubt that the T4 will be very good for certain loads. I know that my current employer bought a couple of T2 boxes as ClearCase view servers a few years back and the performance was abysmal since ClearCase doesn't scale well on multi-threaded systems. They had to be reassigned and replaced by M-series boxes with the (more conventional) Fujitsu SPARC64 CPUs.
And I'm very angry with what Oracle has done with Solaris 11 licensing. I've got a pile of old Sun workstations for playing with that have now become landfill. Oh well, my Solais skills can rot. It's Linux all the way now.
Yes, I can read. But are they likely to make a decent go of it? Often when these big companies buy another, the products and staff wither on the vine, usually because of management incompetence trying to impose their failing culture on the acquisition.
Slashdot Mirror
So sending manned missions to celestial objects would be much easier, less risky than Columbus' voyage?
Sounds great. Let's get cracking!
Would it possible to build something like this held up by the buoyancy of hot air rather than helium?
With the right kind of insulating materials in the envelope, heat loss could be controlled. There might also be a way of using solar power to heat the air.
Just for anyone who may not know: Channel 4 is the closest thing the UK has to Fox News.
Not on my planet.
Last month Channel 4 News did a story about the "hidden internet" (i.e. illegal drugs trading, arms, slavery, child sexual abuse etc.) and "its currency: Bitcoin."
Unusually for Channel 4 News, the direct link was made between Bitcoin and illegal activity i.e. the false premise that Bitcoin was designed specifically to facilitate crime on the Internet.
Maybe I'm naive and still believe that the Internet is for the common good and that Bitcoin was a legitimate tool, but maybe it was just designed for crooks all along, just like TOR, which they also talk about.
A prisoner has lost their rights.
Wrong answer, A prisoner has lost their liberty.
Obama for doing nothing gets a Nobel prize, Bush gets an arrest warrant.
This was a message from the rest of the world to the USA: thank you at last for electing a leader with a shred of humanity who isn't hell-bent on destroying the rest of world for America's short term gain and who isn't interested in making enemies of foreigners simply for being foreign.
What's so hard to understand about that?
C is an absolutely incredible language. It is very simple, but not too simple. It's is very powerful and can be used to create some very high-level abstractions yet still gives absolute control over the machine. A simple C compiler can be implemented relatively (for a compiler!) easily (so they say) and for most architectures. C code can be very portable and the machine code produced even by the simpler compilers is quite efficient. This was very important 30+ years ago when hitherto the only way to get decent performance was to write in tedious and un-portable assembly language.
To give you an idea of how simple and efficient C can be, the first C compiler I used was HiSoft C for the ZX Spectrum. This ran on a machine with about 40k usable RAM and a 3.5MHz Z80 (8-bit). The compiler (integer-only, though) and editor were RAM-resident and could compile and execute programs of many hundreds of lines.
Good. Now Roto will be able to find his lobster pots again on his way out of Cove harbour and the sheep will not get lost on their way to loch Draing.
That's an overly cynical point of view :-)
Thank you.
Taking the positive, pro-active "professional" approach always sounds great, but very often it can go nowhere, especially if you're young. Established "professionals" tend not to listen to enthusiastic newbies, not matter how reasoned an argument they put forward.
One thing I've learned with experience is to know when to stop and to move on to the next opportunity. You can lead a horse to water and all that.
This company is a bunch of clowns. They can not possibly hope to deliver working software reliably and on time (or at all).
What happens is that everyone develops "their" code in isolation. Near the deadline for the project everyone tried to deliver their code all at once. Not only do they find that it doesn't "fit together" (it doesn't compile), but after a few weeks of late-nighters and all-weekenders trying to fix it, when it does compile, it doesn't run and certainly doesn't do what it was intended to.
This sort of disaster scenario has been documented and understood - in books you can buy from Amazon - (heck, even by Microsoft of all organisations) since the 1980s. This isn't just old, it's antediluvian. It doesn't work!
I worked at a place like that before. Not only was the product flaky and always late, but it was a very stressful place to work with the developers "given responsibility" whenever something went wrong. They went bust 18 months after I escaped.
The reasons things went wrong were that there wasn't a team: individual developers silo'd and working on different things, forbidden from communicating in case they were "wasting time." And there were a bunch of enthusiastic but inexperienced junior coders in China churning out lines of code (Perl-written-in-C) by the thousand that did nothing but crash.
There were no peer reviews (i.e. code reviews), there was a coding standard that was ignored, infrequent status meetings, plans (MS Project) that were pure fantasy.
The Director of Software Development and his sidekick sought to ensure quality and timeliness by taking the developers individually into their offices and shouting at them for 30-45 minutes.
Appraisals involved the aforementioned dynamic duo. You would be invited in, smiled at unconvincingly and then asked how you thought you did in the previous year. Then you would be told how you did and what pay rise you were (or weren't) getting.
I was there for 2 years and 2 months and the Software office had between 22 and 25 people at any one time during that period. 19 of us left (including 2 who resigned when I was working out my 1 month notice period).
They were dinosaurs and their bones lie under the Cambridgeshire countryside.
BTW, it was my second job in the industry, too.
I believe that Solaris x86 on x86-64 scales better on large systems than Linux. Large x86 CPU manufacturers like Solaris x86 because it shows off their hardware better than Linux.
Fantastic!!! If they port all the major features of Solaris to OEL, then they can have the same unix for both Sparcservers as well as Opterons/Xeons.
Sorry, I'm having a sense-of-humour failure at the moment so I can't tell whether you're being sarcastic... but what about Solaris x86?
Yesterday (October 4, 2011) Oracle made the surprising announcement that they would be porting some key Solaris features, DTrace and Zones, to Oracle Enterprise Linux. As one of the original authors, the news about DTrace was particularly interesting to me, so I started digging. Even among Oracle employees, there's uncertainty about what was announced.
This sounds like a typical PHB decision: make a crazy choice without consulting the engineers as to whether it's a good idea, possible or even wanted, and could potentially threaten the existence of their existing products that have had blood sweated over them for 20 years, makes their continuing relevance to the company (and therefore employment prospects) seem very uncertain and replaces a technically-superior product with a less-able competitor.
Disclaimer: I don't work for Oracle. I know some Solaris people, and although Linux is great (it's what I do), Solaris still beats it in terms of things like high-end scalability. As we move to a massively multi-core, multi-cpu world, the Solaris kernel has a lot of advantages.
Maybe the PHBs don't care any more. Maybe they'd rather spend the effort on Linux. Who knows. It sounds like a bad time to work in the Solaris group at Oracle.
So, again, "good" is being replaced by "good enough." That's the commoditisation of technology. The invisible hand has spoken. That's life.
That's a happy ending.
I've been working for a large (>100k people now) company for 4 years. The first year we got small pay rises. Then for the next three years there was a RIF every year and no pay rises. This year we got 2.7% and sold to an Indian outsourcing company. Peoples' pensions got hammered. Our jobs are going to India and many of us are training our replacement with vague promises of new work for other customers at the end of it. My project is going, lock, stock and barrel, to India. There is no new work yet: the excuse is they can't get us new work while we're still committed to the old work. Ho hum.
Meanwhile, people across the pond, still working for the old employer are being asked to take substantial pay cuts (up to 50% for the lowest paid!).
I've worked for smaller companies too. The only difference was the Dickensian attitude to staff motivation. The pay rises were non-existent or very poor, but in addition, they thought that intimidating and threatening the staff would improve output and quality. It just made turnover astronomical. I was there for 2 years and 2 months. The software office had 22-25 people employed over that period. 19 of us left (2 in the month I worked my notice).
It's all about managers' bonuses and shareholder value.
On the bright side, pretty soon, most of these companies will be dead (the last one already is). Maybe we will enter a new era where staff are valued?
If the UltraSPARC is running a multi-user operating system with a multi-threaded kernel, sophisticated networking stack, an over-the-network graphics system and the other is running a 1970s-vintage CP/M rip-off (which is basically doing no work while anything else is running) and a 16-bit GUI or a Frankenstein 16/32-bit cesspool of DOS and goodness knows what else, then the comparison is hardly fair.
I saw a 40MHz computer in 1990 and was in awe. I think it was a Mac IIfx. It had 640x480 graphics with 16.7 million colours, a 68040 processor and I think it might have had a DSP that could do CD-quality sound.
In those days anything above 33MHz was very special indeed, and I think we were just about getting to 1 million transistors on a chip.
My dad used to have a 286-12 laptop (Compaq SLT). I learned MS-DOS on that and a bit of C coding with Lattice C.
Was that Pentium 133 running a proper operating system or a glorified program-loader with lipstick on (e.g. DOS/Win 3.11 or Win95)?
That UltraSPARC I could whip the 133MHz Pentium at integer and floating point. Solaris was doing far more than DOS or Windows were at the time.
Now the DEC Alpha and MIPS processors of that time could make the UltraSPARC look slow.
Hmm.. OpenBSD. Sounds dangerous! Good idea, though. I want to keep some heterogeneity about for the purposes of writing good code.
Sun's first out-of-order execution CPU was code named Millennium and was due out in y2k but it was late. They canceled the project in 2005. It was going to be called UltraSPARC V. Rumour has it that it was going to have a mode without register windows as well to further increase performance.
None of the Sun UltraSPARC CPUs (I, II, IIi, III, IIIi, IV, IV+) had ooo.
Sun just couldn't get ooo to work. Fujitsu had no problem, on the other hand. Their SPARC64 CPUs were miles better at the same clock frequency and went to higher frequencies too. Sun always made sure that you always got the last generation version of Solaris when you bought a Fujitsu box to make the Sun boxes more compelling.
Sun then gave up on "conventional" CPU design and went for the highly multi-threaded designs that they bought in from Afara (formed by ex-Sun staffers) and the Rock which turned out to be a dud. There was a good article about that after Oracle bought out Sun explaining why it wasn't a good design but I can't find the link.
So Sun did a deal with Fujitsu to re-badge their SPARC64 boxes with the latest Solaris on them...
I've no doubt that the T4 will be very good for certain loads. I know that my current employer bought a couple of T2 boxes as ClearCase view servers a few years back and the performance was abysmal since ClearCase doesn't scale well on multi-threaded systems. They had to be reassigned and replaced by M-series boxes with the (more conventional) Fujitsu SPARC64 CPUs.
And I'm very angry with what Oracle has done with Solaris 11 licensing. I've got a pile of old Sun workstations for playing with that have now become landfill. Oh well, my Solais skills can rot. It's Linux all the way now.
Put it in a barn.
Interesting. What does sulphur hexafluoride do?
Crushed to death.
I'd rather take the barbiturates, thanks.
Yes, I can read. But are they likely to make a decent go of it? Often when these big companies buy another, the products and staff wither on the vine, usually because of management incompetence trying to impose their failing culture on the acquisition.
Can that glue convert 16-bit integers to 32-bit floating-point?