If you look at a typical web page, you have a load of images, a few iframes with ads, scripts (possibly with with multiple web workers). Each one of those really wants to be a separate security domain. You don't want a vulnerability in libpng (something that has happened many times before) to be able to do anything other than break the single image that it's decoding. This kind of fine-grained security is a lot easier if you have the ability to have a load of cheap threads.
I bought a Dell 1355 a few years ago. It has a network port and USB and can print PDFs from FTP and SMB network shares and from FAT-formatted USB drives.
Bridge isn't a cooperative game, it's a team-based game. You're still playing against other humans. In Pandemic, you play against the game. And normally lose, but it's still fun. The nice thing about a game like this is that you can easily mix experienced and inexperienced players: there's no penalty for helping the inexperienced players (they're on your side!) and it's common for everyone to discuss what a person is going to do before they actually do it.
Von Neumann architecture? Nope, Princeton, after WWII.
Microprocessor? Nope, Intel with the 4004 aimed at commercial calculators (or possibly TI with a similar story, depending on which history you read).
Multitasking operating systems? Nope, started with the LEO III, aimed at payroll-style commercial endeavours. Pushed by IBM in the '70s as a way of consolidating minicomputers.
Ethernet? Nope, Xerox PARC blue-sky R&D funded by copier sales.
GUIs? Nope, Xerox PARC again.
TCP/IP? You can have this one, as it was funded as part of a DARPA project, but it was based on the OSI work that was purely academic research, although most of the protocol suite as used today was developed independently of DARPA funding.
HTTP, HTML? Nope, CERN.
C, UNIX? Nope, Bell Labs again. Most of the development was funded with the goal of producing a commercial typesetting system.
What are the things that you were thinking of? No popular modern ISA, OS, or programming language that I can think of originates with defence R&D.
Easy to say when you are, if the alternatives are starving on the street or working similar hours in a field for lower wages. Just because the jobs suck doesn't mean that they're not better than the available alternatives. The problem is that this used to be a stepping stone to a modern economy and is now just a stage when a country is exploited by companies that can easily move to the next target.
The US and Russia could already initiate a reasonably effective first strike. The problem is not first strike, it's making sure that the first strike knocks out the enemy's second strike capability, which includes nuclear submarines, missiles on allies' soil and so on. Or being able to knock out the second strike missiles in flight (before they get near enough to you that the fallout from scattering the fissile material will be a problem).
It's not just about saying that you're powerful, it's about being part of the club that all of the changes in your first paragraph talked about. No one wants to put a country with nuclear weapons in a position where they have nothing to lose.
If you're a submarine, then telling everyone where you are is a problem. If you're an aircraft carrier with escort fleet, there's a good bet everyone knows where you are already. Those things aren't exactly silent. Or invisible to satellite.
In some ways he was better. There was a lot more social mobility in Napoleon's empire than in much of the rest of Europe at the time. The main problem was that he was a great general but a terrible politician. He had no idea how to run a country without a war and he didn't have an economy that could sustain perpetual war. On the other hand, he did abolish the metric time system that the French Revolution introduced...
Hmm, if that's a good justification, can we have the reset of the British Empire back please? Although I guess we'll have to give most of the UK back to Italy eventually, as it was part of the Roman Empire.
That's why Soviet and NATO nuclear submarine fleets had orders to launch if they didn't receive their regular don't-attack message. If the command and control infrastructure is damaged then the submarines would launch, so all this conventional attack would do is guarantee a nuclear response.
That's a good argument for R&D investment, not for war. Defence spending happens to be a traditionally easy way to get lots of R&D money, but it isn't the only way. It was WWII defence money that built the first computers, but it was almost all civilian commercial R&D that took us from there to pocket computers that are orders of magnitude more powerful.
Nuclear weapons are not as anonymous as you might think. Isotope ratios in the fallout make it possible to identify the design of bomb and where the fissile materials came from. If a North Korean bomb went off, they'd better have told the allies of the target in advance that it had been stolen and cooperated with international efforts to recover it if they want to be able to deny responsibility.
The game changer for nuclear weapons is not a faster delivery system, it's an effective shield. That was why the Soviet Union was so worried about Star Wars. If it had worked, then it would have meant that the USA could have launched a first strike without worrying about the USSR's second strike capability. Hypersonics just make it harder to develop any kind of active shield (it's hard for an interceptor to hit something travelling at Mach 5-25).
Of course, the real game changer for nuclear weapons would be someone who doesn't care about second strike. The easy and cheap way of building something that has the same military impact as a fully functional shield is to simply not care about your civilian population. This is why everyone is nervous about North Korea: if they wanted to fire a nuke at South Korea or Japan, the threat of nuclear annihilation of their cities in response wouldn't be very likely to dissuade them.
When I was at school, we had an assembly by the chaplain who insisted that life on Earth was evidence of God, because the amino acids had to react in exactly the right order to produce DNA and that couldn't possibly have happened without divine intervention. It struck me then that his faith was based on a complete lack of understanding of scale. The number of amino acids in the sea when life arose was huge. The sea itself is enormous and yet the process still took a billion years or so. And the sample size that we have is precisely one planet where this happened. It looks like the conditions that will lead to seas containing amino acids are not that uncommon, so expecting DNA to exist in at least one place in the universe seems like a reasonable bet. Add to that the survivor bias: if the universe had managed to exist without life, no one would have remarked on it.
The universe is really, really big. Big enough that any plausible chemical reaction is likely to have happened somewhere at least once. Expecting something with the complex properties that we call life not to exist somewhere would be a miracle.
The iMac owed a lot of its success to the fact that USB took off though. Previously, people making keyboards or mice made a PS/2 version (sometimes also a 5-pin DIN and RS-232 version, but often just an adaptor for these) and an ADB version. Because the ADB version sold a lot fewer, they charged a lot more for them. With USB, people were making one peripheral that worked with Windows and Mac. That made the cost of owning a Mac a lot lower (and redirected the profit back to Apple). Without the success of USB independent of the Mac, the iMac would not have been nearly as successful.
Even that is coming to an end, with the end of Denard scaling. You can still double the number of transistors on a chip for a fixed investment, but you can't double the number that you can have powered at any given time. That's why accelerator cores and things like dedicated AES instructions have become common: its worth spending some transistors on things that speed up a single algorithm or class of algorithms.
I went to school with someone who was UK national chess champion for his age bracket for most of the time until about age 14. He never demonstrated any exceptional ability in anything else (not top in his class in maths at any age, for example) and didn't get exceptionally good results in his later exams. I realise that this is a single anecdote, but it left me quite sceptical about the ability of chess to train the mind. I was on my school chess team for a bit, but eventually I found purely deterministic games to be as tedious as purely nondeterministic ones.
Everyone started building them, but it would have been a short-lived fad if Intel hadn't put the USB controller in their southbridge chips and if Microsoft hadn't fixed their USB driver issues. The iMac wasn't a big enough market to sustain USB by itself, and it could have ended up as the new ADB (expensive and Apple-only) if the rest of the industry didn't jump on board. Remember the iMac also shipped with FireWire, which sadly didn't take off and is now gone from new Macs. Most PCs didn't come with FireWire and most that did used the 4-pin ports, which didn't have power and so were much less useful, but meant that devices ended up not drawing power from FireWire either, adding another reason for FireWire to be more expensive than USB.
It takes a long time for a big company to die and many can reinvent themselves. Look at the origins of Nokia and Nintendo - neither was exactly a tech company when they started. Companies like Microsoft, Apple, and Google are big enough to survive ten year of terrible decisions by management (Microsoft already has!) without much pain. The companies that tend to die are ones where some disruptive technology changes their market completely and they don't adapt. SGI was a good example: some of their engineers proposed building a cheaper graphics accelerator for the mass market and they decided not to build them because they'd cannibalise the graphics workstation market. Those engineers left and formed nVidia, and now a graphics workstation is just a commodity PC with a high-end nVidia card in it. SGI had the opportunity to lead a shift in the market and decided not to take it. Those are hard to predict, because they typically rely on advances in manufacturing that suddenly make something economically viable that wasn't previously. Often these things are gradual (in the nVidia/SGI case, the reduction in fabrication costs until it became feasible to make a mass-market GPU) and aren't obvious until a watershed has passed.
I have a 40MB Seagate drive that was still working happily 12 years after it was bought (no idea if it still works - I haven't tried to use it for ages). Like your anecdote, mine tells you nothing at all about modern Seagate drives.
They're approaching it, but they're still failing. Electrical failures can damage the entire array, as can OS bugs, and they definitely won't protect you against a compromised machine. ZFS is quite nice in that you can combine the snapshots with zfs send / zfs receive to do incremental backups, but you want to make sure that at least one of the drives that you're doing this to is offline at all times.
The underlying flash won't fail as described. Data stored on flash degrades over time. It's an analogue medium (just like a disk and anything else in reality above quantum levels) that is then quantised. When a cell is brand new, the difference between a 1 and a 0 is big and easy to detect. Over time, without rewrites, the difference lowers. When you rewrite a cell, you get a big difference again, but usually a slightly smaller difference than the previous time that it was rewritten. The controller knows roughly how the data degrades over time and will avoid using cells that don't look as if they can hold their content for a year (don't store SSDs on the shelf unpowered for a few years and expect to be able to read anything back!) and will refresh cells periodically. Once a cell fails to meet that requirement immediately after a write, it will be discarded and reused for something else (there was a nice paper at EuroSys this year about using the less-reliable cells for things).
If a given cell won't hold its value in a readable way after an erase, there's a good chance that it won't before the erase either (and the erase may have been triggered by a refresh because it's getting close to the borderline). If a single cell that is visible to the user is starting to exhibit these properties, it means that the wear levelling has run out of reliable cells to use and the device is basically dead.
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If you look at a typical web page, you have a load of images, a few iframes with ads, scripts (possibly with with multiple web workers). Each one of those really wants to be a separate security domain. You don't want a vulnerability in libpng (something that has happened many times before) to be able to do anything other than break the single image that it's decoding. This kind of fine-grained security is a lot easier if you have the ability to have a load of cheap threads.
That's what happens when you try to write without a lock.
I bought a Dell 1355 a few years ago. It has a network port and USB and can print PDFs from FTP and SMB network shares and from FAT-formatted USB drives.
How on earth would you Godwin this? Comparing the Nazis to the Nazis is a bit redundant.
Bridge isn't a cooperative game, it's a team-based game. You're still playing against other humans. In Pandemic, you play against the game. And normally lose, but it's still fun. The nice thing about a game like this is that you can easily mix experienced and inexperienced players: there's no penalty for helping the inexperienced players (they're on your side!) and it's common for everyone to discuss what a person is going to do before they actually do it.
What are the things that you were thinking of? No popular modern ISA, OS, or programming language that I can think of originates with defence R&D.
Easy to say when you are, if the alternatives are starving on the street or working similar hours in a field for lower wages. Just because the jobs suck doesn't mean that they're not better than the available alternatives. The problem is that this used to be a stepping stone to a modern economy and is now just a stage when a country is exploited by companies that can easily move to the next target.
The US and Russia could already initiate a reasonably effective first strike. The problem is not first strike, it's making sure that the first strike knocks out the enemy's second strike capability, which includes nuclear submarines, missiles on allies' soil and so on. Or being able to knock out the second strike missiles in flight (before they get near enough to you that the fallout from scattering the fissile material will be a problem).
It's not just about saying that you're powerful, it's about being part of the club that all of the changes in your first paragraph talked about. No one wants to put a country with nuclear weapons in a position where they have nothing to lose.
If you're a submarine, then telling everyone where you are is a problem. If you're an aircraft carrier with escort fleet, there's a good bet everyone knows where you are already. Those things aren't exactly silent. Or invisible to satellite.
In some ways he was better. There was a lot more social mobility in Napoleon's empire than in much of the rest of Europe at the time. The main problem was that he was a great general but a terrible politician. He had no idea how to run a country without a war and he didn't have an economy that could sustain perpetual war. On the other hand, he did abolish the metric time system that the French Revolution introduced...
Hmm, if that's a good justification, can we have the reset of the British Empire back please? Although I guess we'll have to give most of the UK back to Italy eventually, as it was part of the Roman Empire.
That's why Soviet and NATO nuclear submarine fleets had orders to launch if they didn't receive their regular don't-attack message. If the command and control infrastructure is damaged then the submarines would launch, so all this conventional attack would do is guarantee a nuclear response.
That's a good argument for R&D investment, not for war. Defence spending happens to be a traditionally easy way to get lots of R&D money, but it isn't the only way. It was WWII defence money that built the first computers, but it was almost all civilian commercial R&D that took us from there to pocket computers that are orders of magnitude more powerful.
Nuclear weapons are not as anonymous as you might think. Isotope ratios in the fallout make it possible to identify the design of bomb and where the fissile materials came from. If a North Korean bomb went off, they'd better have told the allies of the target in advance that it had been stolen and cooperated with international efforts to recover it if they want to be able to deny responsibility.
The game changer for nuclear weapons is not a faster delivery system, it's an effective shield. That was why the Soviet Union was so worried about Star Wars. If it had worked, then it would have meant that the USA could have launched a first strike without worrying about the USSR's second strike capability. Hypersonics just make it harder to develop any kind of active shield (it's hard for an interceptor to hit something travelling at Mach 5-25).
Of course, the real game changer for nuclear weapons would be someone who doesn't care about second strike. The easy and cheap way of building something that has the same military impact as a fully functional shield is to simply not care about your civilian population. This is why everyone is nervous about North Korea: if they wanted to fire a nuke at South Korea or Japan, the threat of nuclear annihilation of their cities in response wouldn't be very likely to dissuade them.
When I was at school, we had an assembly by the chaplain who insisted that life on Earth was evidence of God, because the amino acids had to react in exactly the right order to produce DNA and that couldn't possibly have happened without divine intervention. It struck me then that his faith was based on a complete lack of understanding of scale. The number of amino acids in the sea when life arose was huge. The sea itself is enormous and yet the process still took a billion years or so. And the sample size that we have is precisely one planet where this happened. It looks like the conditions that will lead to seas containing amino acids are not that uncommon, so expecting DNA to exist in at least one place in the universe seems like a reasonable bet. Add to that the survivor bias: if the universe had managed to exist without life, no one would have remarked on it.
The universe is really, really big. Big enough that any plausible chemical reaction is likely to have happened somewhere at least once. Expecting something with the complex properties that we call life not to exist somewhere would be a miracle.
The iMac owed a lot of its success to the fact that USB took off though. Previously, people making keyboards or mice made a PS/2 version (sometimes also a 5-pin DIN and RS-232 version, but often just an adaptor for these) and an ADB version. Because the ADB version sold a lot fewer, they charged a lot more for them. With USB, people were making one peripheral that worked with Windows and Mac. That made the cost of owning a Mac a lot lower (and redirected the profit back to Apple). Without the success of USB independent of the Mac, the iMac would not have been nearly as successful.
Even that is coming to an end, with the end of Denard scaling. You can still double the number of transistors on a chip for a fixed investment, but you can't double the number that you can have powered at any given time. That's why accelerator cores and things like dedicated AES instructions have become common: its worth spending some transistors on things that speed up a single algorithm or class of algorithms.
I went to school with someone who was UK national chess champion for his age bracket for most of the time until about age 14. He never demonstrated any exceptional ability in anything else (not top in his class in maths at any age, for example) and didn't get exceptionally good results in his later exams. I realise that this is a single anecdote, but it left me quite sceptical about the ability of chess to train the mind. I was on my school chess team for a bit, but eventually I found purely deterministic games to be as tedious as purely nondeterministic ones.
Everyone started building them, but it would have been a short-lived fad if Intel hadn't put the USB controller in their southbridge chips and if Microsoft hadn't fixed their USB driver issues. The iMac wasn't a big enough market to sustain USB by itself, and it could have ended up as the new ADB (expensive and Apple-only) if the rest of the industry didn't jump on board. Remember the iMac also shipped with FireWire, which sadly didn't take off and is now gone from new Macs. Most PCs didn't come with FireWire and most that did used the 4-pin ports, which didn't have power and so were much less useful, but meant that devices ended up not drawing power from FireWire either, adding another reason for FireWire to be more expensive than USB.
It takes a long time for a big company to die and many can reinvent themselves. Look at the origins of Nokia and Nintendo - neither was exactly a tech company when they started. Companies like Microsoft, Apple, and Google are big enough to survive ten year of terrible decisions by management (Microsoft already has!) without much pain. The companies that tend to die are ones where some disruptive technology changes their market completely and they don't adapt. SGI was a good example: some of their engineers proposed building a cheaper graphics accelerator for the mass market and they decided not to build them because they'd cannibalise the graphics workstation market. Those engineers left and formed nVidia, and now a graphics workstation is just a commodity PC with a high-end nVidia card in it. SGI had the opportunity to lead a shift in the market and decided not to take it. Those are hard to predict, because they typically rely on advances in manufacturing that suddenly make something economically viable that wasn't previously. Often these things are gradual (in the nVidia/SGI case, the reduction in fabrication costs until it became feasible to make a mass-market GPU) and aren't obvious until a watershed has passed.
I have a 40MB Seagate drive that was still working happily 12 years after it was bought (no idea if it still works - I haven't tried to use it for ages). Like your anecdote, mine tells you nothing at all about modern Seagate drives.
They're approaching it, but they're still failing. Electrical failures can damage the entire array, as can OS bugs, and they definitely won't protect you against a compromised machine. ZFS is quite nice in that you can combine the snapshots with zfs send / zfs receive to do incremental backups, but you want to make sure that at least one of the drives that you're doing this to is offline at all times.
The underlying flash won't fail as described. Data stored on flash degrades over time. It's an analogue medium (just like a disk and anything else in reality above quantum levels) that is then quantised. When a cell is brand new, the difference between a 1 and a 0 is big and easy to detect. Over time, without rewrites, the difference lowers. When you rewrite a cell, you get a big difference again, but usually a slightly smaller difference than the previous time that it was rewritten. The controller knows roughly how the data degrades over time and will avoid using cells that don't look as if they can hold their content for a year (don't store SSDs on the shelf unpowered for a few years and expect to be able to read anything back!) and will refresh cells periodically. Once a cell fails to meet that requirement immediately after a write, it will be discarded and reused for something else (there was a nice paper at EuroSys this year about using the less-reliable cells for things).
If a given cell won't hold its value in a readable way after an erase, there's a good chance that it won't before the erase either (and the erase may have been triggered by a refresh because it's getting close to the borderline). If a single cell that is visible to the user is starting to exhibit these properties, it means that the wear levelling has run out of reliable cells to use and the device is basically dead.