Things are indeed "weird". I think we went just a smidgen too far with the "corporations as people" metaphor. We have to take a step back and realize that corporations only exist because of a government charter... they are really an extension of government and we can do anything we want with them.
There is no "natural" state of the corporation, and there is no libertarian argument for freeing them from regulation. In fact quite the opposite - the invention of "limited liability" completely throws off libertarian free market theory and represents perhaps the largest intervention in the free market that the US has ever wielded.
The other side of the same coin are unions. They need to exist in some form, simply because there is no economic counter to the corporation that would represent the worker bees. But then we let them also represent government workers - which doesn't make sense since the government is already a democracy. We let unions move out of the economic sphere and into the political one.
And then we gave both the ability to directly lobby government. We took these purely economic concepts and granted the resulting beasts political powers. It's all indeed very "weird" and I wish we could talk about it without fleeing to our respective political comfort corners.
Well, there was a battle going on over there. It's not entirely ridiculous to assume that a camera was trained that direction - especially if there were jets swooping around.
That's not really true. There are multiple, competing models and they use multiple data sets to determine historical conditions. While it is true that climate science can never be as rigorously instrumented as theoretical physics, it does not mean that they cannot follow the scientific method.
The worst science I've seen in the climate area have been people throwing out simple correlations. Everyone who bothers to build a more complicated model seems to trend toward consensus.
Apple couldn't crush Samsung if they sunk their last dime into it. The smartphone ecosystem is one of the most exciting, dynamic, and competitive there has been in technology in my lifetime. Well, there was the early PC and video game market, but I was a little young to appreciate those.
Apple has nothing even approaching a monopoly in any of their markets. Perhaps in dedicated MP3 players, if anyone still cares about that market... I think they had something like 70% of that at one time.
Comcast is a terrible company, and I wish them luck trying to sell pieces of their Comcrapstic pipe. So long as it doesn't affect my internet service, I don't really care what they fill it with. Right now it is filled with useless (to me) channels.
but how will the Turks feel in a few years when they realized they got off the democracy bus along with Erdogan.
Sadly, they will elect him as the one who most represents their view of the world. It just shows how poorly democracy works when you have widespread ignorance. The same thing happens in the US, though we fell into a two-party system that forces people to get under the same tent.
RICH PEOPLE: Free, compulsory, quality education for the masses is for YOU, not them. Please stop fighting it. Thank you.
Often you get 20 year parts availability, and even longer for compatible interfaces. For example, you can still get embedded PC boards with ISA slots. These have vanished in consumer PCs some 10 years ago. They will still be available in the industrial sphere in 10 or 20 years.
Yes, well, there is "availability" and then there is "cost effectiveness". We still use a VME bus, for instance. Problem is that the chips, simple as they are, are getting mighty expensive. So we are transitioning away. Fact is, the bus is so slow that we were finding ourselves bypassing it anyway.
I have to confess total ignorance of the ATM industry other than what I've read. IIRC, they had to move from OS/2 for something really stupid like audio drivers. It wouldn't surprise me if some critical component spurs a similar move to abandon XP. You have to remember that saving a couple of bucks per machine by buying off-the-shelf hardware is a big motivator. I don't know what the volume is for a typical ATM machine, but if they ship 10,000 units, 100 bucks per unit adds up fast!
The power industry is critical infrastructure. Our equipment is only used in assembly lines and the resulting product is subject to QA. Even a single badly-behaving machine would be detected in a short time. There are safety issues to the operator, but most safety systems are never installed by the Chinese (and other Asian) customers - and in any case they are usually either hardware lockouts or controlled by the real time OS, not Windows.
We have had virus outbreaks - specifically due to infected USB sticks. There is little we can do about this, since the customer is very hesitant to touch the software in machines that are in active production. They seem to prefer simply forbidding outside memory sticks.
It depends if the application needs security fixes or not. If it does, you need someone to backport fixes into the old kernel / application stack you are using. You probably will need to support new hardware at some point, since even "long term support" hardware can only realistically be expected to be produced for about 5 years. Often you get lucky and the next version is backwards compatible, but still...
You might very well end up implementing your routine with simpler math, but I'd bet a dollar that you'd first design the system in something like MATLAB before simplifying. And depending on the application, you might stop there because controller chips are so cheap now. PID with feedforward is possible on almost anything.
We would love to make things more secure, but there are some practical constraints. We have no physical access to the equipment once it is installed, and the customer is loath to touch software on machines in production. We have several CPUs with several different OSes which serve different purposes. Windows is "good enough" for one small part of the machine. A major vendor sort of requires it for a certain library, and it makes supporting USB devices easy. If it gets infected, it probably won't impact production but worst case you can just swap out the box with Windows on it for a fresh box. They typically have hundreds or thousands of these machines in production, so spares aren't usually an issue. The Windows box can't be put directly on the network in any case - that connection is handled by vxworks, and typically the machines are on a separate network that only manages the production line.
I think we will consider Linux when XP is no longer licensed, but I can't rule out some kind of Windows Embedded system since that is the path of least resistance and the vendor clearly prefers sending us Windows libraries. We are just now starting to ramp up the newer box that would support a newer version of Windows. Ideally this new box could swap in with the old one so that we don't need to maintain two sets. We're not a small company, but there is a very small crew maintaining this particular part of the machine.
Well, you'll go out of your mind when I tell you that it runs as admin then.
Our company is not incompetent. Like any business, we manage limited resources. If our customers start demanding security, then we will be happy to oblige. As it is, they just don't let in outside USB sticks... they learn this the first time the entire factory gets infected by the flavor of the day virus. They understand that the alternative is frequent updates to hundreds of machines, and they want no part of that. A determined adversary would indeed find our machines trivial to sabotage. If you have enemies like the United States, I suggest finding another manufacturer or keeping spies away from your equipment.
A tuned feed-forward loop is pretty interesting, and it will be very enlightening to see how it is done by a natural neural network. If you did this with a man-built system, you would definitely use calculus to tune the system.
magnetosphere to falter, disappear, and be rebuilt in the opposing polarity
It will not disappear - it will become more complex and less effective at blocking solar radiation. But that shouldn't matter to those of us on the ground, since we have the atmosphere to protect us. The folks in the space station might have a problem, however.
Yes, this is true. We will have a painful transition, though, since even our new equipment still goes out with XP Embedded. At some point we will have to sell our customers an upgrade kit if they want to stay current. The newest hardware will support a newer Windows Embedded version, but there is nothing to be done for the older boxes. Fortunately, our equipment is not internet-connected (though it is networked), so security isn't really a principle concern.
I completely agree. I was just omitting them from my argument because they were not necessary to make my point.
The economics are simple: the old machines are worth supporting until the costs of increased maintenance (including software maintenance fees) exceed the costs of financing new equipment. You would obviously have to pay someone to maintain the old versions of Linux - a cost that will go up as fewer people use it.
Although they should have used a more industrial product to begin with.
This can be hard in practice. Vendors of niche products often only support Windows. Even if they support other OSes, you end up being the beta tester since the code is not as widely used. We ended up using XP embedded years ago because, of all things, USB memory stick compatibility. We tried to use Wind River's drivers, Linux drivers (years ago), and even Windows CE - but XP was the only solution that worked with almost every stick out there. When we used Wind River's solution, we had to maintain a compatibility list. But this effort was impossible once they started to explode in popularity. We of course sold compatible sticks to use with our equipment, but this was not popular with our customers and our competitors used Windows, so we were at a disadvantage.
You aren't thinking like a hardware manufacturer. Using XP on all of their hardware - new and old - enabled them to support all hardware with one code base. Switching to the newest version of Windows at any stage makes support more complicated. Maybe it wouldn't matter for some embedded devices, but you need to keep ATMs up to date for security reasons. So sure, the 10-year-old ATMs you can just write off and call obsolete. But what about those sold 5 years ago? Last year? Your choices are to sell your customers a new "upgrade kit", which will piss them off, or swallow the costs. Once you swallow the costs, you start to wonder whether it would be better to simply use a stable OS in the first place. There are vendors who will support a certain version of Linux more or less forever.
Incidentally, XP Embedded is supported through 2016, so this is not as pressing a matter as it would seem.
Yes, No. We are arguing semantics and semantics are language features and math is a language so we are talking about what's happening in actual fact.
Math is a language of precision. English is, for the most part, not. When we need precision, we have to use some subset like "legalese". Complaining about imprecise language in a scientific journal is one thing - complaining about the precision of a NY Times headline is quite another. Expecting the NY Times to write headlines that sound like scientific paper titles is not realistic IMHO.
FWIW, in the article they clarify with: "Humans use calculus to solve these kinds of problem involving multiple changes in angular momentum, said Dr. Cohen. Exactly what math the neurons in the haltere system use is something for neuroscientists to investigate further."
Slashdot Mirror
Things are indeed "weird". I think we went just a smidgen too far with the "corporations as people" metaphor. We have to take a step back and realize that corporations only exist because of a government charter... they are really an extension of government and we can do anything we want with them.
There is no "natural" state of the corporation, and there is no libertarian argument for freeing them from regulation. In fact quite the opposite - the invention of "limited liability" completely throws off libertarian free market theory and represents perhaps the largest intervention in the free market that the US has ever wielded.
The other side of the same coin are unions. They need to exist in some form, simply because there is no economic counter to the corporation that would represent the worker bees. But then we let them also represent government workers - which doesn't make sense since the government is already a democracy. We let unions move out of the economic sphere and into the political one.
And then we gave both the ability to directly lobby government. We took these purely economic concepts and granted the resulting beasts political powers. It's all indeed very "weird" and I wish we could talk about it without fleeing to our respective political comfort corners.
Well, there was a battle going on over there. It's not entirely ridiculous to assume that a camera was trained that direction - especially if there were jets swooping around.
That's not really true. There are multiple, competing models and they use multiple data sets to determine historical conditions. While it is true that climate science can never be as rigorously instrumented as theoretical physics, it does not mean that they cannot follow the scientific method.
The worst science I've seen in the climate area have been people throwing out simple correlations. Everyone who bothers to build a more complicated model seems to trend toward consensus.
Apple couldn't crush Samsung if they sunk their last dime into it. The smartphone ecosystem is one of the most exciting, dynamic, and competitive there has been in technology in my lifetime. Well, there was the early PC and video game market, but I was a little young to appreciate those.
Apple has nothing even approaching a monopoly in any of their markets. Perhaps in dedicated MP3 players, if anyone still cares about that market... I think they had something like 70% of that at one time.
Comcast is a terrible company, and I wish them luck trying to sell pieces of their Comcrapstic pipe. So long as it doesn't affect my internet service, I don't really care what they fill it with. Right now it is filled with useless (to me) channels.
LOL!
I'm suggesting that the elite are short-term thinkers and perhaps poor students of history. Thus my all-caps plea to rich people.
but how will the Turks feel in a few years when they realized they got off the democracy bus along with Erdogan.
Sadly, they will elect him as the one who most represents their view of the world. It just shows how poorly democracy works when you have widespread ignorance. The same thing happens in the US, though we fell into a two-party system that forces people to get under the same tent.
RICH PEOPLE: Free, compulsory, quality education for the masses is for YOU, not them. Please stop fighting it. Thank you.
If that's the case, they should let it run against Shatner in TOS.
That's kind of hilarious.
Here ya go.
Often you get 20 year parts availability, and even longer for compatible interfaces. For example, you can still get embedded PC boards with ISA slots. These have vanished in consumer PCs some 10 years ago. They will still be available in the industrial sphere in 10 or 20 years.
Yes, well, there is "availability" and then there is "cost effectiveness". We still use a VME bus, for instance. Problem is that the chips, simple as they are, are getting mighty expensive. So we are transitioning away. Fact is, the bus is so slow that we were finding ourselves bypassing it anyway.
I have to confess total ignorance of the ATM industry other than what I've read. IIRC, they had to move from OS/2 for something really stupid like audio drivers. It wouldn't surprise me if some critical component spurs a similar move to abandon XP. You have to remember that saving a couple of bucks per machine by buying off-the-shelf hardware is a big motivator. I don't know what the volume is for a typical ATM machine, but if they ship 10,000 units, 100 bucks per unit adds up fast!
The power industry is critical infrastructure. Our equipment is only used in assembly lines and the resulting product is subject to QA. Even a single badly-behaving machine would be detected in a short time. There are safety issues to the operator, but most safety systems are never installed by the Chinese (and other Asian) customers - and in any case they are usually either hardware lockouts or controlled by the real time OS, not Windows.
We have had virus outbreaks - specifically due to infected USB sticks. There is little we can do about this, since the customer is very hesitant to touch the software in machines that are in active production. They seem to prefer simply forbidding outside memory sticks.
It depends if the application needs security fixes or not. If it does, you need someone to backport fixes into the old kernel / application stack you are using. You probably will need to support new hardware at some point, since even "long term support" hardware can only realistically be expected to be produced for about 5 years. Often you get lucky and the next version is backwards compatible, but still...
You might very well end up implementing your routine with simpler math, but I'd bet a dollar that you'd first design the system in something like MATLAB before simplifying. And depending on the application, you might stop there because controller chips are so cheap now. PID with feedforward is possible on almost anything.
We would love to make things more secure, but there are some practical constraints. We have no physical access to the equipment once it is installed, and the customer is loath to touch software on machines in production. We have several CPUs with several different OSes which serve different purposes. Windows is "good enough" for one small part of the machine. A major vendor sort of requires it for a certain library, and it makes supporting USB devices easy. If it gets infected, it probably won't impact production but worst case you can just swap out the box with Windows on it for a fresh box. They typically have hundreds or thousands of these machines in production, so spares aren't usually an issue. The Windows box can't be put directly on the network in any case - that connection is handled by vxworks, and typically the machines are on a separate network that only manages the production line.
I think we will consider Linux when XP is no longer licensed, but I can't rule out some kind of Windows Embedded system since that is the path of least resistance and the vendor clearly prefers sending us Windows libraries. We are just now starting to ramp up the newer box that would support a newer version of Windows. Ideally this new box could swap in with the old one so that we don't need to maintain two sets. We're not a small company, but there is a very small crew maintaining this particular part of the machine.
Well, you'll go out of your mind when I tell you that it runs as admin then.
Our company is not incompetent. Like any business, we manage limited resources. If our customers start demanding security, then we will be happy to oblige. As it is, they just don't let in outside USB sticks... they learn this the first time the entire factory gets infected by the flavor of the day virus. They understand that the alternative is frequent updates to hundreds of machines, and they want no part of that. A determined adversary would indeed find our machines trivial to sabotage. If you have enemies like the United States, I suggest finding another manufacturer or keeping spies away from your equipment.
A tuned feed-forward loop is pretty interesting, and it will be very enlightening to see how it is done by a natural neural network. If you did this with a man-built system, you would definitely use calculus to tune the system.
magnetosphere to falter, disappear, and be rebuilt in the opposing polarity
It will not disappear - it will become more complex and less effective at blocking solar radiation. But that shouldn't matter to those of us on the ground, since we have the atmosphere to protect us. The folks in the space station might have a problem, however.
I know you meant 2016 :)
Yes, this is true. We will have a painful transition, though, since even our new equipment still goes out with XP Embedded. At some point we will have to sell our customers an upgrade kit if they want to stay current. The newest hardware will support a newer Windows Embedded version, but there is nothing to be done for the older boxes. Fortunately, our equipment is not internet-connected (though it is networked), so security isn't really a principle concern.
There is no reason to write-off 10 year old ATMs.
I completely agree. I was just omitting them from my argument because they were not necessary to make my point.
The economics are simple: the old machines are worth supporting until the costs of increased maintenance (including software maintenance fees) exceed the costs of financing new equipment. You would obviously have to pay someone to maintain the old versions of Linux - a cost that will go up as fewer people use it.
Most tradesmen appreciate cash.
Although they should have used a more industrial product to begin with.
This can be hard in practice. Vendors of niche products often only support Windows. Even if they support other OSes, you end up being the beta tester since the code is not as widely used. We ended up using XP embedded years ago because, of all things, USB memory stick compatibility. We tried to use Wind River's drivers, Linux drivers (years ago), and even Windows CE - but XP was the only solution that worked with almost every stick out there. When we used Wind River's solution, we had to maintain a compatibility list. But this effort was impossible once they started to explode in popularity. We of course sold compatible sticks to use with our equipment, but this was not popular with our customers and our competitors used Windows, so we were at a disadvantage.
You aren't thinking like a hardware manufacturer. Using XP on all of their hardware - new and old - enabled them to support all hardware with one code base. Switching to the newest version of Windows at any stage makes support more complicated. Maybe it wouldn't matter for some embedded devices, but you need to keep ATMs up to date for security reasons. So sure, the 10-year-old ATMs you can just write off and call obsolete. But what about those sold 5 years ago? Last year? Your choices are to sell your customers a new "upgrade kit", which will piss them off, or swallow the costs. Once you swallow the costs, you start to wonder whether it would be better to simply use a stable OS in the first place. There are vendors who will support a certain version of Linux more or less forever.
Incidentally, XP Embedded is supported through 2016, so this is not as pressing a matter as it would seem.
Yes, No. We are arguing semantics and semantics are language features and math is a language so we are talking about what's happening in actual fact.
Math is a language of precision. English is, for the most part, not. When we need precision, we have to use some subset like "legalese". Complaining about imprecise language in a scientific journal is one thing - complaining about the precision of a NY Times headline is quite another. Expecting the NY Times to write headlines that sound like scientific paper titles is not realistic IMHO.
FWIW, in the article they clarify with:
"Humans use calculus to solve these kinds of problem involving multiple changes in angular momentum, said Dr. Cohen. Exactly what math the neurons in the haltere system use is something for neuroscientists to investigate further."