When it is stated that the guy "put eighteen years of his life into the project", does that really mean that, for 18 years, he spent all his workdays (or at least all his research time, considering he is a University professor) doing nothing else but designing and building the hardware for this experiment?
I want to see what advances we make. I want to see the unfolding of the human story.
The "human story" only unfolds, and we only make advances, when there is a healthy mix of young and old. In a society whose members are mostly hundreds or thousands of years old, there wouldn't be any advances, and no unfolding of anything. Everything would be stagnant.
Even if we manage to eliminate all brain diseases like dementia, Alzheimer's disease etc., the human brain changes with age, simply because we learn more and more things and gain more and more experiences. Older people are more conservative and less ready to invent new things or to think in fundamentally new or different ways. When the average age of a society is hundreds of years, this trend dominates everything.
Beagle was an unpowered landing capsule; it costed a fraction of what NASA's mars rovers cost. It was, to a large part, an experiment to see whether such a low-cost approach could work. The high failure probability was anticipated. The main fraction (75% ?) of the money went into the orbiter (Mars Express), which works flawlessly to this day (as do the NASA rovers, yes).
And I agree that the Italian contractor fucked it up badly.
So you can install MS Office, MSSQL, or Visual Studio as a normal user? Several versions of those in parallel? Several instances of the same version, each with a seperate configuration? Last time I checked, that didn't seem to be possible.
the not-so-obvious ('Our users are the admins of their machines. They can load whatever software they want on their machines
Note the subtle line of reasoning there -- what he implied to say is "Our users are the admins of their machines *so* they can load whatever software they want on their machines". Which is perfectly obvious, because it appears that on Windows, to do anything even slightly more advanced (like, say, installing new non-trivial software), you have to be an admin. Personally, I don't know of any Windows development shop where the programmers aren't admins and don't each have their own personal single-user PC...
Typically, I have a lot of respect for my fellow geeks (but maybe you are not geeks, merely nerds). The problem I have is that so many people that I consider relatively intelligence are making weakly backed observations and are making uninformed comments.
Weakly backed observations and uninformed comments? You mean like these:
[Kerry]He simply makes bold faced lies to the jury, and even though they are objected... the jury still has to hear it.
He has turned the economy around, and that is irrefutible. If you argue with that you are a fool.
[Healthcare, Kerry's plan] It is too outlandish, and I really hope it never is passed. President Bush's plan is more realistic and addresses the root cause of the issue
President Bush is certainly not a perfect man
(Oh. You should tell him that sometime. He himself still thinks he's directly implementing God's will on earth.)
but he has held his position with integrity.
(so has Pol Pot. But I digress...)
Regardless of what Kerry says, I can tell you with the utmost confidence that John Kerry would have invaded Iraq if he were president during this past term, even without 9/11.
What? What twisted planet are you from?
In regards to terrorism, Bush did what was necessary, the public demanded it, as well as his moral conviction demanded it.
Why is it that the Americans must destroy the only secular regime in the Middle East, besides Syria? If Saddam Hussein falls, there will be chaos here, and these crazy Islamists and terrorist will triumph in the end.
Sounds prophetic, doesn't it? Bush is the best thing that has happened to islamic terrorism in a long time. His crusades are probably doing a better job a recruiting junior terrorists than Al-Quaida alone ever could. I'm sure Bin Laden is endorsing Bush's re-election all he can...
(more "observations")
This is just all ridiculous. The Democrats are total liars, and anyone who follows them is a complete fool.
Democrats tend to be selfish, or lazy, or have no one who relies on them.
The Democrats support every single issue that is questionable. They support gay/lesbain marriage (only positive for gay/lesbian community), they support stem cell research from embryos and abortion(only positive for feminists, and do not get me started on that).
On a certain meta-level I tend to agree with the person who modded you "Interesting". It is "interesting" indeed to watch one of those gung-ho Bush believers dismantle himself.
In effect, the [Doppler] shift would push the signal out of synch with the timing scheme used to recover data from the phase-modulated carrier.
My understanding of this sentence was that the phase detection/demodulation works correctly, and "timing scheme" refers to whatever they do to clock the 8192bits/s bitstream into Cassini's onboard computer (the paragraph immediately following the text you quoted also seems to suggest that).
Also, the article states that "the timing scheme was implemented by firmware loaded in Cassini's receiver". There is probably no way one could detect phase changes in a 2060 MHz carrier signal in realtime purely in software.
It's probable not about the symbol rate, but the carrier frequency, which is often crystal-generated, hence must be specifically designed tunable in some fashion, otherwise is very, very stable.
To quote from the article:
The board discovered that Alenia Spazio SpA, the Rome-based company that built the radio link, had properly anticipated the need to make the receiver sensitive over a wide enough range of frequencies to detect Huygens's carrier signal even when Doppler shifted. But it had overlooked another subtle consequence: Doppler shift would affect not just the frequency of the carrier wave that the probe's vital observations would be transmitted on but also the digitally encoded signal itself. In effect, the shift would push the signal out of synch with the timing scheme used to recover data from the phase-modulated carrier.
So, it appears that the HF receiver and demodulator work correctly even in the presence of Doppler shifting, but the "bit extractor" (which, unless I misunderstood something, must operate at only ~ 8kHz) doesn't.
According to the article, the bitstream coming out of the receiver/demodular component has a bitrate of 8192 bit/s. At a relative speed of a couple of km/s, the relative Doppler shift is roughly v/c=1/100000. So, the bitrate increases to something like 8192.08 bit/s. And that's all that's needed to make the subsequent circuit choke and lose half the data? I would say, no wonder they didn't want to reveal their design to anybody...
That's the whole point of using the same runtime for all three [languages]
The point of that is also that you have only one debugged runtime and don't have to write your own for each language.
A very important fact hasn't been mentioned here: When you compile multiple languages to the same VM, you don't automatically get interoperatibility between those languages. Interoperatibility is a different concept that must be separately achieved, mostly by defining additional rules and standards on-top-of the VM specification.
For example, look at different C or C++ compilers on Linux/x86. They all compile to the same machine code, but Intel machine code has no concept of "symbol names", "class names", "type names" etc., so, for the compiled codes to be interoperable, they must comply to additional specifications like ELF or some C++ ABI ("name mangling").
Parrot bytecode may define some or all of those concepts, but some scripting languages will probably define additional features (macros, MI, continuations etc.) that have no "native" representation in Parrot, so additional conventions to represent those things in Parrot must be agreed upon. The.NET CLS ("common language specification") is another example of such a set of addional rules to provide for language interoperatibility.
Yeah, just use CVS/svn or rsync and store your home directory at one place (e.g. your account at your university) and checkout/synchronize it everywhere. You appear to be using Windoze, which is bad luck (messy filesystem layout, registry hell), but in principle it should be possible to do this there as well.
Sorry, but a secure runtime can never trust that the intermediate bytecode is correct.
I didn't claim otherwise. It can't trust that intermediate bytecode is correct, it can prove it (for certain definitions of "correct"). That is, it can prove that the code complies to certain rules (no stack overflows/underflows, compliance to statically declared type information etc.), or that the code does not call specific (potentially insecure) low-level APIs (Perl's or Ruby's "tainted modes" also do this to a point, as well as Java's security architecture).
My point was that it would be unwise to provide the CLR/.NET framework as the only interface to the operating system, because there are cases where you use languages like Perl or Ruby that come with their own runtimes, including sandboxing features. As far as I know, you could download and execute untrusted Ruby scripts from the web and run them in an interpreter on your local machine, as long as you make sure Ruby's "taint mode" was activated before (Perl's taint mode is insufficient for running untrusted code).
Please refer to Jasmin (a "Java assembler") for my proof-by-example.
Oh, you're the Jasmin developer?
If a Java VM implementation ignores the security rules
Yeah well, there are always some things you have to depend on, and most of the time, a non-faulty JVM is one of them:-)
It makes no sense to completely ditch any C-based API layer in favor of.NET, when you can as well implement the.NET CLR on top of a (still available and documented) C-based API (as is the case in the current implementation). There are languages that come with their own, specialised runtime with distinct advantages. Highly dynamic languages like Smalltalk or Ruby come to mind, as well as languages like Ada or SPARK, where the compiler does all the checks and correctness proofs, so it's perfectly valid to compile everything down to low-level, unchecked machine code in the end. Using the CLR as the common base for everything would cost an order of magnitude of performance and would question the status of Windows as an all-purpose operating system.
Leaving the.NET framework as the only documented interface to the operating system has no benefits except lower maintenance costs for Microsoft -- but the have enough money, haven't they?
Microsoft has realised what a turd the software patent system is , and is trying to shield itself from companies that try to make a buck by doing nothing else then suing left and right.
If that were true, they wouldn't lobby for the introduction of SW patents all over the world. After all, the best way to "shield oneself from companies that try to make a buck by doing nothing else then suing left and right" would be a legislation that does not allow software patents.
M$, like most big software companies, intends to use SW patents as a means of keeping newcomers (who don't own a "competitive" amount of patents) off the market.
When it comes to Perl 6, I'll be glad to see the alleged OOP support in Perl 5 torn out and thrown away. That way, if I ever have to venture back into Perl I won't find it/quite/ such a painful experience. Still, as a recovering Perl user currently revelling in the "oh, it all makes sense!" experience of Python, I hope never to have to do that at all.
Perl5's OO architecture is basically built on modules, bless and @ISA and can be explained exhaustively in about 5 sentences. Yet it is still quite useful.
I beg to differ. Who cares whether they are "proper" doubles (whatever that means).
It means that the aspect ratio (W/H) does not change when folding or doubling sheets, which is the prerequisite for not having to re-layout anything and at the same time not wasting any space on the paper. This only works if H/W==sqrt(2).
Unfortunately, Mr. Kuhn, the US does not have the insight gained from the Third Reich to meet global expectations. Maybe after reading Mein Kampf and throwing all the minorities in gas chambers we'll be able to understand your point of view!
Godwin's Law.
As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one. Once this occurs, that thread is over, and whoever mentioned the Nazis has automatically lost whatever argument was in progress.
There's a lot of people who prefer SAMBA over NFS or AFS.
In 100% Unix sites? I don't know of any. Most pure-Unix networks I know use NFS, and several large sites use AFS (OpenAFS mostly), so those are far from dead. Just look at the *ix-based campus network at some random university. SMB exports a Windows-like filesystem which isn't really well suited for Unix filesharing (no symlinks, no real *ix permissions etc.).
Just because a SAMBA developer doesn't think SMB is the most pleasant network FS to deal with, architecturally speaking,
I don't know of any member of the Samba team who wouldn't agree with that view. Read some random interview with Andrew Tridgell.
Anyway, my point was that Samba was not invented to copy Windows, it was invented to inter-operate with Windows. It aims at supporting NTFS file semantics to the utmost -- something you don't need in pure *ix environments.
NFS and AFS are dead to everyone except those obsessed with avoiding anything related to Microsoft or obsessed with architectural cleanliness.
Slashdot Mirror
When it is stated that the guy "put eighteen years of his life into the project", does that really mean that, for 18 years, he spent all his workdays (or at least all his research time, considering he is a University professor) doing nothing else but designing and building the hardware for this experiment?
The "human story" only unfolds, and we only make advances, when there is a healthy mix of young and old. In a society whose members are mostly hundreds or thousands of years old, there wouldn't be any advances, and no unfolding of anything. Everything would be stagnant.
Even if we manage to eliminate all brain diseases like dementia, Alzheimer's disease etc., the human brain changes with age, simply because we learn more and more things and gain more and more experiences. Older people are more conservative and less ready to invent new things or to think in fundamentally new or different ways. When the average age of a society is hundreds of years, this trend dominates everything.
And I agree that the Italian contractor fucked it up badly.
Which has next to nothing to do with grid computing.
So you can install MS Office, MSSQL, or Visual Studio as a normal user? Several versions of those in parallel? Several instances of the same version, each with a seperate configuration? Last time I checked, that didn't seem to be possible.
Note the subtle line of reasoning there -- what he implied to say is "Our users are the admins of their machines *so* they can load whatever software they want on their machines". Which is perfectly obvious, because it appears that on Windows, to do anything even slightly more advanced (like, say, installing new non-trivial software), you have to be an admin. Personally, I don't know of any Windows development shop where the programmers aren't admins and don't each have their own personal single-user PC...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross_product
Example?
not half as consistent as Smalltalk
(so you agree that Ruby is more consistent than Python?)
Smalltalk has no form of MI, has it? At least not in the original version. That may be consistent, but it's not practical at times...
Weakly backed observations and uninformed comments? You mean like these:
[Kerry]He simply makes bold faced lies to the jury, and even though they are objected... the jury still has to hear it.
He has turned the economy around, and that is irrefutible. If you argue with that you are a fool.
[Healthcare, Kerry's plan] It is too outlandish, and I really hope it never is passed. President Bush's plan is more realistic and addresses the root cause of the issue
President Bush is certainly not a perfect man
(Oh. You should tell him that sometime. He himself still thinks he's directly implementing God's will on earth.)
but he has held his position with integrity.
(so has Pol Pot. But I digress...)
Regardless of what Kerry says, I can tell you with the utmost confidence that John Kerry would have invaded Iraq if he were president during this past term, even without 9/11.
What? What twisted planet are you from?
In regards to terrorism, Bush did what was necessary, the public demanded it, as well as his moral conviction demanded it.
Taha Yassin Ramadan, then-vice president of Iraq, shortly before the invasion:
Sounds prophetic, doesn't it? Bush is the best thing that has happened to islamic terrorism in a long time. His crusades are probably doing a better job a recruiting junior terrorists than Al-Quaida alone ever could. I'm sure Bin Laden is endorsing Bush's re-election all he can...
(more "observations")
This is just all ridiculous. The Democrats are total liars, and anyone who follows them is a complete fool.
Democrats tend to be selfish, or lazy, or have no one who relies on them.
The Democrats support every single issue that is questionable. They support gay/lesbain marriage (only positive for gay/lesbian community), they support stem cell research from embryos and abortion(only positive for feminists, and do not get me started on that).
On a certain meta-level I tend to agree with the person who modded you "Interesting". It is "interesting" indeed to watch one of those gung-ho Bush believers dismantle himself.
My understanding of this sentence was that the phase detection/demodulation works correctly, and "timing scheme" refers to whatever they do to clock the 8192bits/s bitstream into Cassini's onboard computer (the paragraph immediately following the text you quoted also seems to suggest that).
Also, the article states that "the timing scheme was implemented by firmware loaded in Cassini's receiver". There is probably no way one could detect phase changes in a 2060 MHz carrier signal in realtime purely in software.
To quote from the article:
So, it appears that the HF receiver and demodulator work correctly even in the presence of Doppler shifting, but the "bit extractor" (which, unless I misunderstood something, must operate at only ~ 8kHz) doesn't.
According to the article, the bitstream coming out of the receiver/demodular component has a bitrate of 8192 bit/s. At a relative speed of a couple of km/s, the relative Doppler shift is roughly v/c=1/100000. So, the bitrate increases to something like 8192.08 bit/s. And that's all that's needed to make the subsequent circuit choke and lose half the data? I would say, no wonder they didn't want to reveal their design to anybody...
The point of that is also that you have only one debugged runtime and don't have to write your own for each language.
A very important fact hasn't been mentioned here: When you compile multiple languages to the same VM, you don't automatically get interoperatibility between those languages. Interoperatibility is a different concept that must be separately achieved, mostly by defining additional rules and standards on-top-of the VM specification.
For example, look at different C or C++ compilers on Linux/x86. They all compile to the same machine code, but Intel machine code has no concept of "symbol names", "class names", "type names" etc., so, for the compiled codes to be interoperable, they must comply to additional specifications like ELF or some C++ ABI ("name mangling").
Parrot bytecode may define some or all of those concepts, but some scripting languages will probably define additional features (macros, MI, continuations etc.) that have no "native" representation in Parrot, so additional conventions to represent those things in Parrot must be agreed upon. The .NET CLS ("common language specification") is another example of such a set of addional rules to provide for language interoperatibility.
Running a "licensing shop" without threatening to sue people who use "licensed" technologies but refuse to acquire a license makes no sense.
Less storage capacity.
Exactly.
Yeah, just use CVS/svn or rsync and store your home directory at one place (e.g. your account at your university) and checkout/synchronize it everywhere. You appear to be using Windoze, which is bad luck (messy filesystem layout, registry hell), but in principle it should be possible to do this there as well.
I didn't claim otherwise. It can't trust that intermediate bytecode is correct, it can prove it (for certain definitions of "correct"). That is, it can prove that the code complies to certain rules (no stack overflows/underflows, compliance to statically declared type information etc.), or that the code does not call specific (potentially insecure) low-level APIs (Perl's or Ruby's "tainted modes" also do this to a point, as well as Java's security architecture).
My point was that it would be unwise to provide the CLR/.NET framework as the only interface to the operating system, because there are cases where you use languages like Perl or Ruby that come with their own runtimes, including sandboxing features. As far as I know, you could download and execute untrusted Ruby scripts from the web and run them in an interpreter on your local machine, as long as you make sure Ruby's "taint mode" was activated before (Perl's taint mode is insufficient for running untrusted code).
Please refer to Jasmin (a "Java assembler") for my proof-by-example.
Oh, you're the Jasmin developer?
If a Java VM implementation ignores the security rules
Yeah well, there are always some things you have to depend on, and most of the time, a non-faulty JVM is one of them :-)
Leaving the .NET framework as the only documented interface to the operating system has no benefits except lower maintenance costs for Microsoft -- but the have enough money, haven't they?
help ulimit
If that were true, they wouldn't lobby for the introduction of SW patents all over the world. After all, the best way to "shield oneself from companies that try to make a buck by doing nothing else then suing left and right" would be a legislation that does not allow software patents.
M$, like most big software companies, intends to use SW patents as a means of keeping newcomers (who don't own a "competitive" amount of patents) off the market.
Perl5's OO architecture is basically built on modules, bless and @ISA and can be explained exhaustively in about 5 sentences. Yet it is still quite useful.
It means that the aspect ratio (W/H) does not change when folding or doubling sheets, which is the prerequisite for not having to re-layout anything and at the same time not wasting any space on the paper. This only works if H/W==sqrt(2).
Godwin's Law.
In 100% Unix sites? I don't know of any. Most pure-Unix networks I know use NFS, and several large sites use AFS (OpenAFS mostly), so those are far from dead. Just look at the *ix-based campus network at some random university. SMB exports a Windows-like filesystem which isn't really well suited for Unix filesharing (no symlinks, no real *ix permissions etc.).
Just because a SAMBA developer doesn't think SMB is the most pleasant network FS to deal with, architecturally speaking,
I don't know of any member of the Samba team who wouldn't agree with that view. Read some random interview with Andrew Tridgell.
Anyway, my point was that Samba was not invented to copy Windows, it was invented to inter-operate with Windows. It aims at supporting NTFS file semantics to the utmost -- something you don't need in pure *ix environments.
NFS and AFS are dead to everyone except those obsessed with avoiding anything related to Microsoft or obsessed with architectural cleanliness.
FUD...