Last time I paid attention (5 years ago), the #5ESS and the DMS-100 both had about 20-30 million lines of code - since development has slowed down on both core switches, it could well be that Vista is larger. Note that it is hard to figure out how many "lines of code" you have in a telephone switch, because it is really a network of many types of device each with its own code base (and each customer will use a subset of the device types).
Nortel tried a total re-write of the DMS-100 software, sort of like Microsoft is doing now, about 10 years ago - it looked good on paper, but eventually it was thrown away (and several hundred million was flushed down the toilet).
I worked on the DMS-100, and I think that 1000 lines of code per year is probably about what was produced in that project as well. Once you get to a large enough size, you spend more time being careful not to break anything, and it really slows you down. The space shuttle programmers produced 80 lines of code per year.
The larger the project that you are adding code to, the more you have to think before acting. 1000 lines of code added to a 50 million line code base can be much harder and more time consuming than writing a 10,000 line application.
Since both species hunt humans, and are grumpy vicious, and well nigh indestructible anyway,
I don't see how a hybrid would be worse. Polar bears and brown bears both kill people all the time.
A Kodiak bear crossed with a Poodle, that would be a vicious mofo.
It sounds from the article that polar bears and brown bears always have fertile offspring though. Of course, I doubt that we have enough examples to know for sure.
If the two types of bear can mate and produce fertile offspring, then they are really the same species. Too bad they shot the bear instead of getting it to hump another bear...
If the polar bear population folds into the brown bear gene pool during periods of warming, that would explain how the polar bears survived the previous warm periods (like the 8000 BC to 4000 BC "climate optimum").
Other news sites are saying 300% growth by 2015. Toshiba is paying 34 times earnings, for a business that they expect to grow by 12% per year - unless they think that they will get significant synergy with their existing nuclear businesses, then I think that they are significantly overpaying for the business.
Saddam Hussein killed 17,000 people per year for 25 years. Sanctions against Iraq killed 50,000 people per year for 10 years.
We have killed 70,000 people per year since we got there, roughly equal to the number that would have been killed if we had not gone to war. It is reasonable to assume that fewer and fewer people will be killed there as time goes on from now, so the end result is that more people would have died had we not gone to war.
They would have been different people dying, though, a lot more Kurds and Shia, and a lot less Sunnis than are dying now.
Snowblind bought the rights when Black Isle went out of Business -
in two months they are supposed to announce their new title, and
many hope that it is Baldur's Gate III.
Make it a live action RPG like Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance - the story is already great - pretty much the best story of any game, but turn-based games are old and sucky. For that matter, make Dark Alliance III! With combat combos like Soul Calibur!
"Apple has also recently made market share inroads in the United States, according to IDC. After years of hovering between a 2.5
and 3.7 percent share of the U.S. PC market, the company finally cracked 4 percent in the first half of 2005, Daoud said.
Apple's market share of PC shipments was 4.4 percent in the third quarter, an increase of 43 percent from the year ago period,
while the overall PC market expanded by only 2 percent, he said."
Microsoft lost $4 billion on sales of 20 million units. That means that
they lost $200 per unit - just as if they gave a console + game away for
free to each user of the Xbox.
Get them to upgrade the coax from the street to your house to
the biggest available (bigger than RG-11, but I forget what it
is called). I live 500 feet from the pole, with a cable as big
around as a large thumb, and I get great service.
Good point, but there will be a delay. High oil prices -> loads of alternative energy research -> several year delay -> alternative energy hits the market -> lower oil prices
The most important thing is that we develop alternative while oil is plentiful. Global warming can kill a billion people, but it won't knock us permainantly back to the stone age like we could potentially do if we run out of oil with no alternatives.
And by the way, wind power is very bad for the environment - by slowing the wind down, it causes all kinds of environmental havoc (local heating, heating at poles, etc) accoring to recent computer models. Solar towers, Nuclear, Geothermal (unless it causes problems by cooling the earth), and hydro electric are the ways to go.
Saudi arabia is tapped out, see my other posts in this sub-thread. Also, you need some evidence on your side, and a course in logical argument - there was absolutely no substance in your post. But it didn't upset me...
I agree, except that I have great hope for solar towers and pebble bed nuclear reactors in the short term.
Note that biodiesel could provide for the needs of the western world if we convert 3rd world food production into fuel production. My view is that significant biodiesel production will occur, since we can afford to pay more for fuel than they can pay for food (and massive famine will result).
Europe is already starting the plan for buring Africans as fuel:
You are looking at things as if a single person held all the strings, which is not the case. A group of people (or a group of countries) acts a whole lot different than a single person.
Alternative energy research jumped significantly during the 70s because of high oil prices. It will do the same again, and any effort at conservation fights that trend by lowering prices.
google "peak oil" - we can't get much more oil that we already do out of the earth. Adding new wells will not help us, oil production is going to start declining by 3% each year soon.
So - we have a fixed supply of oil each year, and the price of oil adjusts until the demand matches the supply. We only get to decide who burns the oil, not how much is burned. It is like an eBay auction, and if you have too few bidders the price will be low (and we want to stop global warming, we need the price to be high enough to encourage alternative fuel research).
Slashdot Mirror
Last time I paid attention (5 years ago), the #5ESS and the DMS-100
both had about 20-30 million lines of code - since development has slowed
down on both core switches, it could well be that Vista is larger. Note
that it is hard to figure out how many "lines of code" you have in a
telephone switch, because it is really a network of many types of device
each with its own code base (and each customer will use a subset of the
device types).
Nortel tried a total re-write of the DMS-100 software, sort of like
Microsoft is doing now, about 10 years ago - it looked good on paper, but
eventually it was thrown away (and several hundred million was flushed
down the toilet).
I worked on the DMS-100, and I think that 1000 lines of code per year
is probably about what was produced in that project as well. Once you get
to a large enough size, you spend more time being careful not to break
anything, and it really slows you down. The space shuttle programmers
produced 80 lines of code per year.
The larger the project that you are adding code to, the more you have to think before acting. 1000 lines of code added to a 50 million line code base can be much harder and more time consuming than writing a 10,000 line application.
Here is one you will like:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungeon_Keeper
I played the demo years ago - you play the guy who owns
a dungeon, and heros try to come in and take your gold.
Since both species hunt humans, and are grumpy vicious, and well nigh indestructible anyway, I don't see how a hybrid would be worse. Polar bears and brown bears both kill people all the time. A Kodiak bear crossed with a Poodle, that would be a vicious mofo.
It sounds from the article that polar bears and brown bears
always have fertile offspring though. Of course, I doubt that
we have enough examples to know for sure.
But the two groups could *become* a single species, as the
earth warms the brown bears will migrate into polar bear
territory and start mating away.
Likewise, if things got cold again, the two groups could
re-differentiate.
If the two types of bear can mate and produce fertile offspring, then
they are really the same species. Too bad they shot the bear instead
of getting it to hump another bear...
If the polar bear population folds into the brown bear gene pool during
periods of warming, that would explain how the polar bears survived the
previous warm periods (like the 8000 BC to 4000 BC "climate optimum").
Other news sites are saying 300% growth by 2015. Toshiba is paying
34 times earnings, for a business that they expect to grow by 12% per
year - unless they think that they will get significant synergy with
their existing nuclear businesses, then I think that they are significantly
overpaying for the business.
Saddam Hussein killed 17,000 people per year for 25 years.
Sanctions against Iraq killed 50,000 people per year for 10 years.
We have killed 70,000 people per year since we got there, roughly
equal to the number that would have been killed if we had not gone
to war. It is reasonable to assume that fewer and fewer people will
be killed there as time goes on from now, so the end result is that
more people would have died had we not gone to war.
They would have been different people dying, though, a lot more Kurds
and Shia, and a lot less Sunnis than are dying now.
I was replying to somebody who said the computers would sell poorly, you just didn't notice because my parent went to -1.
do a search for "core duo" on the page, they are still there.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/new-for-you/t op-sellers/-/pc/all/pc/0/1/1/1/104-6461076-7991161
The Intel roadmap has the new server and desktop processors coming out in the 3rd quarter. http://common.ziffdavisinternet.com/util_get_image /10/0,1425,sz=1&i=105032,00.jpg
Probably one of those code-names will be our powermacs ("Conroe"?)
Snowblind bought the rights when Black Isle went out of Business - in two months they are supposed to announce their new title, and many hope that it is Baldur's Gate III.
Make it a live action RPG like Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance - the story is already great - pretty much the best story of any game, but turn-based games are old and sucky. For that matter, make Dark Alliance III! With combat combos like Soul Calibur!
http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/b
"Apple has also recently made market share inroads in the United States, according to IDC. After years of hovering between a 2.5
and 3.7 percent share of the U.S. PC market, the company finally cracked 4 percent in the first half of 2005, Daoud said.
Apple's market share of PC shipments was 4.4 percent in the third quarter, an increase of 43 percent from the year ago period,
while the overall PC market expanded by only 2 percent, he said."
I think that you are taking things too literally 8)
Microsoft lost $4 billion on sales of 20 million units. That means that they lost $200 per unit - just as if they gave a console + game away for free to each user of the Xbox.
Get them to upgrade the coax from the street to your house to the biggest available (bigger than RG-11, but I forget what it is called). I live 500 feet from the pole, with a cable as big around as a large thumb, and I get great service.
Good point, but there will be a delay. High oil prices -> loads of alternative energy research -> several year delay -> alternative energy hits the market -> lower oil prices The most important thing is that we develop alternative while oil is plentiful. Global warming can kill a billion people, but it won't knock us permainantly back to the stone age like we could potentially do if we run out of oil with no alternatives. And by the way, wind power is very bad for the environment - by slowing the wind down, it causes all kinds of environmental havoc (local heating, heating at poles, etc) accoring to recent computer models. Solar towers, Nuclear, Geothermal (unless it causes problems by cooling the earth), and hydro electric are the ways to go.
Saudi arabia is tapped out, see my other posts in this sub-thread. Also, you need some evidence on your side, and a course in logical argument - there was absolutely no substance in your post. But it didn't upset me...
I agree, except that I have great hope for solar towers and pebble bed nuclear reactors in the short term.
Note that biodiesel could provide for the needs of the western world if we convert 3rd world food production into fuel production. My view is that significant biodiesel production will occur, since we can afford to pay more for fuel than they can pay for food (and massive famine will result).
Europe is already starting the plan for buring Africans as fuel:
http://www.energybulletin.net/3288.html
"The European Union wants 2% of the oil we use to be biodiesel by the end of next year, rising to 6% by 2010 and 20% by 2020."
"The IEA figures put the total spare capacity of all 11 countries in OPEC at just 330,000 bpd (down from 6 million bpd in 2002). Conventional Saudi spare capacity is zero." http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/0234CBB3-16 9D-42DF-8B33-6BEFF80FA478.htm
Saudi Arabian fields probably past peak production:
http://www.thestreet.com/_tsccom/funds/supermodels /10174679.html
You are looking at things as if a single person held all the strings, which is not the case. A group of people (or a group of countries) acts a whole lot different than a single person. Alternative energy research jumped significantly during the 70s because of high oil prices. It will do the same again, and any effort at conservation fights that trend by lowering prices.
google "peak oil" - we can't get much more oil that we already do out of the earth. Adding new wells will not help us, oil production is going to start declining by 3% each year soon.
So - we have a fixed supply of oil each year, and the price of oil adjusts until the demand matches the supply. We only get to decide who burns the oil, not how much is burned. It is like an eBay auction, and if you have too few bidders the price will be low (and we want to stop global warming, we need the price to be high enough to encourage alternative fuel research).