Not surprising. If I ran an insurance agency I wouldn't want to give life insurance to someone who's just going to strap a bomb to his chest.
Yeah? Well be a gent and send all those people my way, would you? Because at my insurance agency, I love to take insurance premiums from people who I know I will never have to pay benefits for because like basically every life insurance plan in existence mine don't cover suicides.
They were extrapolating from the OP's statement that Tolkein is "second rate" fantasy, that the OP believed there was "actual literature" in the fantasy genre that would be better chosen. They were obviously not saying that Tolkein was the progenitor of all "literature" in a general sense; that would be unbelievably stupid.
Sometimes it's hard to tell the innocent pedantry from the deliberate failures to understand.
But if there's a toxic gas in the mine, would you save ten of your fellow miners or one canary? Not to say that one shouldn't be concerned for the canary, but one must remember there was exactly one reason to bring canaries down the mine: to save *miners*. Yes, exactly, now continue thinking. So the canary is in the mine for only one reason, to save the miners. How does the canary save the miners? By being more vulnerable to toxic gas, and thus being the first thing to die, indicating that the gas is present, so the miners know to bug the hell out of there. Or, in the case of birds of prey, when DDT becomes concentrated enough in their bodies that it kills their young, that's the sign to the rest of us that we need to stop spraying the poison before it accumulates enough to harm us.
Geddit? The eagle was a warning sign like the canary?
Judicious use of DDT can help prevent malaria outbreaks. "Judicious" does not in any way describe how it was being used, and in many places where malaria is a serious problem, they did continue to use it judiciously. What politics were involved where they could have used it judiciously and didn't, I don't know. What I do know is that the reasons for banning DDT in the states were sound, and if the science behind global warming turns out to be equally accurate, then in that case we will be saving billions of human lives.
If you understood why the miner cares for the life of the canary, maybe you'd appreciate why I'm concerned about the life of the bald eagle with regard to a poison that accumulates up the food chain.
Did we really have a concept of the nation-state back in the time of the Neanderthals? That example is probably more applicable to the various conflicts between sects of homo sapiens -- i.e: the conquest of the New World, Roman conquests, etc, etc.
No, I seriously doubt it. I just meant that there being a bigger total Neanderthal population didn't matter on any particular meeting between the two species, since it was probably small band vs band or tribe or what have you.
The DDT ban was one of the most successful examples of environmental policy in our history.
I presume that you love America? And perhaps by extension that you love our national symbol, the bald eagle? Well the only reason you can see them in the wild today is because of the DDT ban. They are one of the few species to ever come back after being placed on the endangered species list, and it's directly due to environmental action. So I'd hope you'd show a little gratitude.
I've heard convincing arguments that an outright ban on DDT went too far, and allowing small-scale controlled usage would have been beneficial. However the large scale cause-and-effect of spewing tremendous amounts of DDT everywhere -> bald eagle populations dropping, and banning DDT -> bald eagle populations recovering is indisputable. We know it was the DDT; we could measure it in the corpses of their prematurely dead young.
Other than that... Global Cooling was not actually a mainstream theory. Pollution/Smog was a serious problem, ask anyone who lived in L.A. in the 80s and now compared to now thanks to their emissions regulations. The ban of CFCs has had a demonstrably positive effect on the condition of the ozone layer.
So you're basing your decision to not believe in Global Warming based on a series of things which mostly turned out to be completely true?
I've never yet been accused of claiming that we've succeeded in that goal, or that other countries might have done better.
Nor are you being now. You're being accused of dismissing our failure to reach that goal by saying that life has been worse somewhere and somewhen else, akin to responding to a failing in our respect for human rights by claiming that at least we're better than China. Having to use such a comparison is in reality an admission of failure.
And surely those to whom we should actually be comparing ourselves, other modern democracies, are anything but perfect. Yet at the same time, I haven't heard any horror story of the Canadian or British that I could attribute to it being public, rather than them spending vastly less per capita on health care than we do. Considering just how much of our health care dollars are wasted paying the for-profit middlemen, I think a public American health care system that didn't reduce overall spending could be truly impressive and give us bragging rights over basically everyone.
Maybe. Don't sell your species short. We're a clever, sneaky, and potentially quite vicious bunch of apes. These few remaining humans, even if they got lucky (as they almost certainly did), demonstrated that they could survive when nearly all others of their species died. Whatever their physical fitness level, they probably had what it took upstairs.
Of course what I'm really saying is that in all probability we would have struck first, catching the Neanderthals by surprise. And without any concept of a nation-state to organize them, their overall superior numbers would have mattered little.
If I was a Neanderthal, and I knew what Humans were capable of, I probably would have been pretty worried over 2,000 of em running around.
Oh, you literally meant only explicit calls to operator new() in non-constructor code. Okay.
I view having to call erase() to free up the memory consumed by an object in an stl structure that is no longer needed to be a form of manual memory management. If you never have to do that, and only ever deallocate stl objects by letting them go out of scope, then that does to me constitute a trivial example, at least from a memory management point of view.
Here in America, that's what the goal is supposed to be. Over most of the world, during most of history, the goal has been to improve the lives of the leaders at the expense of the rest of the people.
Yeah, and let's just ignore the part of the world that also has the same goal as America, but is doing a better job of it by providing health care for all of its people.
Yes, most of the world for most of history has been a terrible place for the commoners. That is not and should not in any way be our goalpost.
That makes C++ a lot better for application writing, but not necessarily for OS writing. The kinds of resources being managed in a kernel usually aren't the kind that are easily managed through "scope".
One criticism of C++ is that by automatically handling the destruction of objects when they go out of scope, it can lead to a feeling of false security to programmers who assume that because their objects are destroyed, that all resources are properly freed. The possibility for leaks is quite significantly there, in the design of constructors and destructors and anything that uses a pointer. Though while not always easy, having to make no mistakes in any of your destructors for any class is a heck of a lot easier than never making a mistake on any individual object's deallocation as in C.
By the same token, it's quite possible to have "leaks" in Java or C#, simply by having extraneous references to no-longer needed objects laying around in objects that are themselves still referenced.
I'd still take C++ any day over C for a big application.
Well, Assembly isn't so much a "language" as a human-readable representation of the bits that will be read by the computer, i.e. the computer's interface, and thus it changes depending on what processor you are using. I guess you could call it a class or family of languages. Regardless of what you call it, assembly can't go away until the processor interface changes to something completely different and we no longer have ISAs... Yeah I don't even know what that would possibly look like. So it's definitely sticking around for a while.
Really, with C especially, just about every advantage it has over more modern languages are advantages that C itself has over assembly. Assembly is still needed, but no one in their right mind would, say, write an entire OS in assembly.
C's big advantage and strength is that it's essentially a thin wrapper over assembly to 1) make porting it to different processors easy and 2) make the programmers life easier by not having to do manual register management. It gives you nearly all the power and control over the hardware that assembly does, but at a higher-level.
C++ just adds syntactic sugar on top of that to make OOP easier, but it's still essentially the same bare-to-them-metal kind of wrapper over assembly.
The day is coming when no one in their right mind will write an entire OS in C or C++, or even an entire OS kernel -- depending on your definition of "kernel".
No, I think it's pretty safe to say that people will still write OS kernels in C, and I think the definition of "kernel" will track very nicely with those parts that nobody in their right mind would code with anything but C. You can't use Java or C# to write a memory manager; they already assume you have one as part of the runtime. If once you've written the MMU and the couple other parts that absolutely need bare-metal access you want to write the rest of the OS in Java or C#, you can, but they will be separate from the parts written in C, and you'll have a "microkernel" OS. And if we're assuming that we can afford the overhead of Java in basic OS services, then I think it's safe to assume we can afford the overhead of a microkernel too and so going that route makes a lot of sense.
Could someone reassure me that's a mistake before I go home to sit down with a bottle of Jack Daniels and a revolver with a single bullet in it?
That depends... are you using a silver bullet only for the sake of poetry, or because you a werewolf or other creature vulnerable only to silver?
Because, being a Hunter like I am, if you are a werewolf or such I'd have to say that Visual Basic is in fact on a steady course to overtaking all other languages, and in fact will likely supplant all other languages in the next few years. There's no hope, end it now.
I read that statement as saying "with finite states and infinite trials, it is guaranteed that you will have some repetition in the sequence"... basically akin to saying that if you roll a 6-sided die, many times, you won't necessarily roll each number, but you are guaranteed to roll some duplicates. Ah, right, I was thinking about it wrong.
I think of it this way: if I flip a coin N times, there are 2^N different possibilities. Only one of those completely excludes "tails". So the probability, after N flips, of never seeing a "tails" is 1/(2^N). For large N, the probability becomes very small. If you take the limit as N->infinity, then you end up with the probability of not seeing "tails" as zero. That is, you will get "tails" eventually. Sure, but now think about the opposite situation: You have a finite number of trials, but an infinite number of possible outcomes. With a uniform distribution, the probability of a trial resulting in any given outcome is 1/N. As N -> infinity, the probability of getting a certain outcome goes to zero. Yet the probability of those outcomes actually happening is not literally zero, or no outcome would be possible at all.
Now, whether there is a difference between "guaranteed to happen" and "probability of not happening is zero in limit of infinity" is perhaps the remaining question. Let me know if you know the answer! (For instance, the argument I used above about coin flips does bother me a bit: I can easily imagine an infinite sequence of heads, with not a single "tails" anywhere in it. But the math suggests that obtaining such an infinite sequence from a probabilistic process is not possible??)
I think it would be possible, since coin tosses (and presumably but not obviously Hubble Volumes) are independent events. No matter how unlikely the preceding string of "heads" flips, the odds of the next one being heads again is still 50%. Though an infinite string of heads would be extremely (vanishly would be accurate) unlikely. Mathematically guaranteed not to happen? I don't think so.
I guess that's part of the problem, we're dealing with limits. The whole point of a limit is that you cannot actually ever reach it, which makes reasoning about what would happen at the limit rather difficult.
So lets forget the limit where P(no duplicate for our universe) = 0. If we rephrase the statement as "The probability of our universe not having at least one duplicate is vanishingly small" then it doesn't bother me at a mathematical level, and the argument as to why this would be the case actually makes a lot of sense.
On the other hand, that's taking the basic premise that there are an infinite number of Hubble Volumes out there... I didn't read the whole paper, so how we're supposed to be able to find evidence for the existence of things which by definition we can never interact with nor vice versa, I don't know. Also the thinking that these are necessarily discreet and independent seems odd, I mean the Hubble Volume centered on Earth overlaps with the Hubble Volume centered on Andromeda, so something could be within the Hubble Length of Andromeda, but not Earth.
Anyway, fascinating stuff. Some day, maybe when I retire, I'll go back to school and study physics.:)
If you are a carrier in telephony, you should have many load-balanced servers that can be taken offline one at a time and restored after patching.
Two things:
The very fact that there is load balancing means that every server is likely to have active connections going through it. If you currently have connections going through a specific server, you don't want to drop those connections in order to reboot that particular machine. This allows updates to a live machine.
Second, this is telephony, meaning it is the infrastructure on which the internet is based. There's no dns tricks or tcp/ip you can use to send people to a different "server" if that server is the switch connected to your fiber backbone. Basically, there are points in the infrastructure where there are by necessity a single chokepoint.
As to how often these things collide, and how much of a pain it is to actually stop a server for some amount of time, I can't say. But I can see situations where being able to hot-swap a kernel would be useful.
In case you (or anyone else) is still interested in this question, here are some things I came across. Actually, I am still interested, so thanks.
A: That's correct: infinite space alone guarantees only that SOME Hubble volume will have a duplicate, not that our own will. However, if (as in the current cosmological standard model) the cosmic density fluctuations originate from quantum fluctuations during inflation, their statistical properties DO guarantee that our (and indeed every) Hubble volume has a duplicate. So, unless I'm misunderstanding this, a crucial point is that the number of arrangements inside a Hubble volume are finite (assuming quantum mechanics isn't wrong). If there are an infinite number of Hubble volumes (which appears to be the case, based on cosmological measurements), and if the initial process of selecting states is totally random (as predicted by inflation), then each state is guaranteed to show up. Hrm, well I sure don't know anything about the statistical properties of quantum fluctuations during inflation. The fact that a quantized universe means that within a finite volume of space there is a finite number of possible states has many interesting implications, that's for sure. However as they keep referring to probability distributions, and I do know something about that, I can't help but still feel off. For example, the statement "infinite space alone guarantees only that SOME Hubble volume will have a duplicate" displeases me because in a traditional probabilistic sense, that isn't true. Even with an infinite number of trials, with a finite number of possible outcomes, it is not guaranteed that every outcome will occur. Probability is never about guarantees. If there's some special quantum-joo-joo that alters that I can't say.
Slashdot Mirror
Same way you'd define a Private Transaction.
Or a Sergent Transaction, or Lance Corporal Transaction.
Not surprising. If I ran an insurance agency I wouldn't want to give life insurance to someone who's just going to strap a bomb to his chest.
Yeah? Well be a gent and send all those people my way, would you? Because at my insurance agency, I love to take insurance premiums from people who I know I will never have to pay benefits for because like basically every life insurance plan in existence mine don't cover suicides.
They were extrapolating from the OP's statement that Tolkein is "second rate" fantasy, that the OP believed there was "actual literature" in the fantasy genre that would be better chosen. They were obviously not saying that Tolkein was the progenitor of all "literature" in a general sense; that would be unbelievably stupid.
Sometimes it's hard to tell the innocent pedantry from the deliberate failures to understand.
Bald eagles have no natural predators.
Neither do we.
We're both top of the food chain.
You'll have to figure the rest out on your own.
Geddit? The eagle was a warning sign like the canary?
Judicious use of DDT can help prevent malaria outbreaks. "Judicious" does not in any way describe how it was being used, and in many places where malaria is a serious problem, they did continue to use it judiciously. What politics were involved where they could have used it judiciously and didn't, I don't know. What I do know is that the reasons for banning DDT in the states were sound, and if the science behind global warming turns out to be equally accurate, then in that case we will be saving billions of human lives.
If you understood why the miner cares for the life of the canary, maybe you'd appreciate why I'm concerned about the life of the bald eagle with regard to a poison that accumulates up the food chain.
Did we really have a concept of the nation-state back in the time of the Neanderthals? That example is probably more applicable to the various conflicts between sects of homo sapiens -- i.e: the conquest of the New World, Roman conquests, etc, etc.
No, I seriously doubt it. I just meant that there being a bigger total Neanderthal population didn't matter on any particular meeting between the two species, since it was probably small band vs band or tribe or what have you.
The DDT ban was one of the most successful examples of environmental policy in our history.
I presume that you love America? And perhaps by extension that you love our national symbol, the bald eagle? Well the only reason you can see them in the wild today is because of the DDT ban. They are one of the few species to ever come back after being placed on the endangered species list, and it's directly due to environmental action. So I'd hope you'd show a little gratitude.
I've heard convincing arguments that an outright ban on DDT went too far, and allowing small-scale controlled usage would have been beneficial. However the large scale cause-and-effect of spewing tremendous amounts of DDT everywhere -> bald eagle populations dropping, and banning DDT -> bald eagle populations recovering is indisputable. We know it was the DDT; we could measure it in the corpses of their prematurely dead young.
Other than that... Global Cooling was not actually a mainstream theory. Pollution/Smog was a serious problem, ask anyone who lived in L.A. in the 80s and now compared to now thanks to their emissions regulations. The ban of CFCs has had a demonstrably positive effect on the condition of the ozone layer.
So you're basing your decision to not believe in Global Warming based on a series of things which mostly turned out to be completely true?
Good job!
I've never yet been accused of claiming that we've succeeded in that goal, or that other countries might have done better.
Nor are you being now. You're being accused of dismissing our failure to reach that goal by saying that life has been worse somewhere and somewhen else, akin to responding to a failing in our respect for human rights by claiming that at least we're better than China. Having to use such a comparison is in reality an admission of failure.
And surely those to whom we should actually be comparing ourselves, other modern democracies, are anything but perfect. Yet at the same time, I haven't heard any horror story of the Canadian or British that I could attribute to it being public, rather than them spending vastly less per capita on health care than we do. Considering just how much of our health care dollars are wasted paying the for-profit middlemen, I think a public American health care system that didn't reduce overall spending could be truly impressive and give us bragging rights over basically everyone.
Maybe. Don't sell your species short. We're a clever, sneaky, and potentially quite vicious bunch of apes. These few remaining humans, even if they got lucky (as they almost certainly did), demonstrated that they could survive when nearly all others of their species died. Whatever their physical fitness level, they probably had what it took upstairs.
Of course what I'm really saying is that in all probability we would have struck first, catching the Neanderthals by surprise. And without any concept of a nation-state to organize them, their overall superior numbers would have mattered little.
If I was a Neanderthal, and I knew what Humans were capable of, I probably would have been pretty worried over 2,000 of em running around.
Just sayin'.
Oh, you literally meant only explicit calls to operator new() in non-constructor code. Okay.
I view having to call erase() to free up the memory consumed by an object in an stl structure that is no longer needed to be a form of manual memory management. If you never have to do that, and only ever deallocate stl objects by letting them go out of scope, then that does to me constitute a trivial example, at least from a memory management point of view.
Here in America, that's what the goal is supposed to be. Over most of the world, during most of history, the goal has been to improve the lives of the leaders at the expense of the rest of the people.
Yeah, and let's just ignore the part of the world that also has the same goal as America, but is doing a better job of it by providing health care for all of its people.
Yes, most of the world for most of history has been a terrible place for the commoners. That is not and should not in any way be our goalpost.
And anyway, garbage collection is irrelevant if you never "new" anything in the first place.
True, but your program is pretty trivial if it never needs to dynamically allocate a memory resource.
Werewolf? There wolf.
In summary: A hammer is best when your problem is a nail, and a screwdriver is best when your problem is a screw.
I also find screwdrivers to be a very good solution when my problem is sobriety, and maybe Vitamin C deficiency.
That makes C++ a lot better for application writing, but not necessarily for OS writing. The kinds of resources being managed in a kernel usually aren't the kind that are easily managed through "scope".
One criticism of C++ is that by automatically handling the destruction of objects when they go out of scope, it can lead to a feeling of false security to programmers who assume that because their objects are destroyed, that all resources are properly freed. The possibility for leaks is quite significantly there, in the design of constructors and destructors and anything that uses a pointer. Though while not always easy, having to make no mistakes in any of your destructors for any class is a heck of a lot easier than never making a mistake on any individual object's deallocation as in C.
By the same token, it's quite possible to have "leaks" in Java or C#, simply by having extraneous references to no-longer needed objects laying around in objects that are themselves still referenced.
I'd still take C++ any day over C for a big application.
Assembly will always be there. Period.
Well, Assembly isn't so much a "language" as a human-readable representation of the bits that will be read by the computer, i.e. the computer's interface, and thus it changes depending on what processor you are using. I guess you could call it a class or family of languages. Regardless of what you call it, assembly can't go away until the processor interface changes to something completely different and we no longer have ISAs... Yeah I don't even know what that would possibly look like. So it's definitely sticking around for a while.
Really, with C especially, just about every advantage it has over more modern languages are advantages that C itself has over assembly. Assembly is still needed, but no one in their right mind would, say, write an entire OS in assembly.
C's big advantage and strength is that it's essentially a thin wrapper over assembly to 1) make porting it to different processors easy and 2) make the programmers life easier by not having to do manual register management. It gives you nearly all the power and control over the hardware that assembly does, but at a higher-level.
C++ just adds syntactic sugar on top of that to make OOP easier, but it's still essentially the same bare-to-them-metal kind of wrapper over assembly.
The day is coming when no one in their right mind will write an entire OS in C or C++, or even an entire OS kernel -- depending on your definition of "kernel".
No, I think it's pretty safe to say that people will still write OS kernels in C, and I think the definition of "kernel" will track very nicely with those parts that nobody in their right mind would code with anything but C. You can't use Java or C# to write a memory manager; they already assume you have one as part of the runtime. If once you've written the MMU and the couple other parts that absolutely need bare-metal access you want to write the rest of the OS in Java or C#, you can, but they will be separate from the parts written in C, and you'll have a "microkernel" OS. And if we're assuming that we can afford the overhead of Java in basic OS services, then I think it's safe to assume we can afford the overhead of a microkernel too and so going that route makes a lot of sense.
I don't have to take that from a vampire!
Hey Mr. Werewolf Eldavojohn, this vampire says your mom codes in VB!
Single, not silver.
Gah, damnit!
I guess now you know why I'm such a terrible werewolf hunter that I have to try to do it by tricking them into committing suicide over the internet.
Now if only the native code generation for C# wasn't so pitiful and unsupported. ...
Yeah, my Python compiles are pretty damn fast too. All I need to do is hit Save in my editor, and my program is ready to run!
I see what you're saying, but yeah, if you aren't getting native code out of the deal then compile time shouldn't be an issue in any case.
Could someone reassure me that's a mistake before I go home to sit down with a bottle of Jack Daniels and a revolver with a single bullet in it?
That depends... are you using a silver bullet only for the sake of poetry, or because you a werewolf or other creature vulnerable only to silver?
Because, being a Hunter like I am, if you are a werewolf or such I'd have to say that Visual Basic is in fact on a steady course to overtaking all other languages, and in fact will likely supplant all other languages in the next few years. There's no hope, end it now.
Now, whether there is a difference between "guaranteed to happen" and "probability of not happening is zero in limit of infinity" is perhaps the remaining question. Let me know if you know the answer! (For instance, the argument I used above about coin flips does bother me a bit: I can easily imagine an infinite sequence of heads, with not a single "tails" anywhere in it. But the math suggests that obtaining such an infinite sequence from a probabilistic process is not possible??)
I think it would be possible, since coin tosses (and presumably but not obviously Hubble Volumes) are independent events. No matter how unlikely the preceding string of "heads" flips, the odds of the next one being heads again is still 50%. Though an infinite string of heads would be extremely (vanishly would be accurate) unlikely. Mathematically guaranteed not to happen? I don't think so.
I guess that's part of the problem, we're dealing with limits. The whole point of a limit is that you cannot actually ever reach it, which makes reasoning about what would happen at the limit rather difficult.
So lets forget the limit where P(no duplicate for our universe) = 0. If we rephrase the statement as "The probability of our universe not having at least one duplicate is vanishingly small" then it doesn't bother me at a mathematical level, and the argument as to why this would be the case actually makes a lot of sense.
On the other hand, that's taking the basic premise that there are an infinite number of Hubble Volumes out there... I didn't read the whole paper, so how we're supposed to be able to find evidence for the existence of things which by definition we can never interact with nor vice versa, I don't know. Also the thinking that these are necessarily discreet and independent seems odd, I mean the Hubble Volume centered on Earth overlaps with the Hubble Volume centered on Andromeda, so something could be within the Hubble Length of Andromeda, but not Earth.
Anyway, fascinating stuff. Some day, maybe when I retire, I'll go back to school and study physics.
If you are a carrier in telephony, you should have many load-balanced servers that can be taken offline one at a time and restored after patching.
Two things:
The very fact that there is load balancing means that every server is likely to have active connections going through it. If you currently have connections going through a specific server, you don't want to drop those connections in order to reboot that particular machine. This allows updates to a live machine.
Second, this is telephony, meaning it is the infrastructure on which the internet is based. There's no dns tricks or tcp/ip you can use to send people to a different "server" if that server is the switch connected to your fiber backbone. Basically, there are points in the infrastructure where there are by necessity a single chokepoint.
As to how often these things collide, and how much of a pain it is to actually stop a server for some amount of time, I can't say. But I can see situations where being able to hot-swap a kernel would be useful.