You're right that analysis of motive by itself is insufficient to judge the truth of what someone is saying. However, there is (sad to say) usually a high degree of correlation between the motive of a person or group, and the truthfullness (or lack thereof) of what they say. The former is a valid first approximation for the latter.
That doesn't mean that one should forgo careful analysis of the actual data and arguments, but as a quick rule-of-thumb, it is fairly reliable.
but I'm disappointed CEBus never really got its act together. Good protocol, good language; it was obvious the people who designed it had put a lot of thought into it. I was kinda jazzed about it, looking forward to automating my house with it, and then... pfttt! A whole lotta nothin! It seems to have made it's way into high-end home-theater type things, but not the everyday, actually useful stuff you could use to control your lights, hvac, ordinary television, etc. Bummer.
In brief, the Nonstop Kernel is none of the above. It's a proprietary OS, originally written from the ground up by Jimmy Treybig and two other ex-HP engineers. It has a loosly-coupled, message-based architecture, designed with reliability as its primary focus. It runs on proprietary hardware, also designed with reliability as its goal.
When HP expressed no interest in this new high-reliabilty, high-availability computer that three of their engineers had designed, those engineers quit HP and founded their own company, Tandem Computers, around 1974. The name came from the design of the platform; the minimum system you can buy has two processors and two (mirrored) disc drives (the maximum has 4000+ processors); processes run in pairs, with data checkpointed from the primary to the backup, so that if a process or cpu fails, the backup can takeover immediately and continue processing. Failover time is typically less than 15 milliseconds.
True story: a data center where I worked had half Tandems and half Amdahls. The building got hit by lightning. The Amdahls all went down, and took three days to get back up. The Tandems lost half their processors and a third of their disc drives, and kept right on going. Processing continued with nary a pause, and no data was lost. It was amazing to watch.
Tandem had revenue of $1.9 billion; the reason you never heard of them is that their target market was never consumers. The cheapest machine was in the $millions circa 1980, and about $250k circa mid-nineties. They built enterprise-level machines for transaction processing that would almost never go down (some units have run in the field 24/7/365 for 5+ years with zero downtime), and they sold to banks and stock-exchanges and telephone companies. Most of the world's financial processing infrastructure runs on Tandems; almost any financial transaction you make, anywhere in the world, e.g. withdraw money from an ATM, buy gas using your debit card, buy or sell stock, etc., is processed on the backend by a Tandem computer.
In 1997, Compaq bought Tandem. In 2001, HP bought Compaq, and with it, the Tandem division. Tandem computers are now called HP Nonstop computers. Full circle.
You want extreme reliability? Put the app on an HP Nonstop, use some system calls to checkpoint the data to the app's backup process at key points in the processing, and voila! If the app crashes or the processor goes down, the backup process will takeover in less than 15 milliseconds, and continue processing. And yes, you can do it in C++.
A potential drawback: last time I knew, the cheapest two-processor Nonstop you could buy would set you back $250k.
The Nonstop is designed from the ground up to be extremely robust and reliable. That's why 80+ percent of all the ATM transactions in the world are handled by a Nonstop computer back at the bank's data center. 90+ percent of all the world's stock exchanges run on Nonstop machines.
(Full disclosure: I have never worked for HP. I spent 12 years working on Tandem computers, 6 at Tandem HQ. Compaq bought Tandem, then (as we all know) HP bought Compaq, and so through them acquiring a company founded in 1978 by 3 ex-HP engineers. The formerly Tandem platform is now called the HP Nonstop.)
I was speaking in regard to the truth about incidents of "sloppy science, misconduct, plagiarism, manipulation or faking of data", not some grand scientific 'truth', which as you pointed out, doesn't exist.
You're not thinking long-enough term. In the short term, science proceeds in fits and starts, complete with old-boy networks and the occasional prejudice, greed, self-promotion, in-fighting, blind alleys, etc., and even falsified data and experiments.
BUT, over the *long-term* (decades, perhaps longer) science IS self-correcting. The very article you cite is proof; the truth came out. The scientific method guarantees that, given enough time, the truth *will* become known. You just have to think longer-term.
You are conflating two separate issues. It's not the wiretapping to which most object, it's the bypassing of the FISA court. Those are two separate things.
Look, it's really simple: the national security people have the authority, under law, to intiate an international wiretap whenver they think it necessary; they just have to inform the FISA court within 72 hours, and then get permission to continue the tap. What's so hard about that?
The problem here is not that Bush wishes to protect the country (which I believe he sincerely does), but that he thinks he doesn't have to obey the law. The FISA law was particularly crafted to allow him a great deal of latitude in protecting the country, but Mr. Bush doesn't want *anyone* looking over his shoulder; unfortunately for him, 'looking over his shoulder' is *exactly* the purpose of the courts, and the reason the Founders split our government into three parts. But since Bush doesn't like them, he simply ignores them. That's against the law, and against the constitutional separation of powers. In trying to protect our Constitution, Bush is weakening it.
He could have his wiretaps and still obey the law, but he chooses not to. *That* is the problem.
Isolators cost about nothing [snip] Why didn't you use them?
If by 'you', you mean me, personally, it's because I was just a lowly operator at the time; I assumed they had 'em, and even if I'd known they didn't, my influence was, of course, zero.
If by 'you', you mean the brokerage firm, it's because they were cheap! Duh. Well, cheap where it wouldn't show. They spent millions covering the huge lobby with italian marble, and putting in a double row of palm trees, leading to the two-story glass atrium window overlooking the Hudson. They spent probably a million more hosting a political fund-raiser in the new lobby for the (then) President. They spent hundreds of thousands paneling their offices with walnut and putting in extra-thick, luxurious carpets. But, they obviously wouldn't open up the purse for some lightning protection, which they'd never get to show off (or so they thought). After this little incident, they heard from their investors, big time. They opened two redundant data centers, one in Brooklyn, and the other in New Jersey.
But you're right about no protection from errant airplanes in the hands of crazies. When the World Trade Center went down, their building was heavily damaged, including both the data center, and the obscenely extravagent lobby. I shed many a tear for those who died, especially the poor souls forced to jump. I shed none for all that wrecked italian marble.
The first fault-tolerant computers (circa 1978) were made by Tandem Computers, which is now the NonStop Division (or something like that) of HP. They're still the best: no single point of failure, backups take over in 15 microseconds.
Full disclosure: I worked for Tandem for 6 years. Prior to that, I worked for a Manhatten brokerage firm; the building got hit by lightning one evening; all the Amdall and IBM mainframes went down, and it took three days to get them back up. The Tandem system's lost half their processors and a third of their disc drives, and kept right on processing. No down time, no lost data.
The only drawback is price; these are Enterprise class servers; the cheapest one is $250k. I guess you get what you pay for.
I've been programming for 18 years, and I'd never seen this one before (of course, I don't hang out on IRC either - got better things to do with my time - like code).
I f*cking laughed my ass off! ROTFL!
This story *should* be re-run every once in a while, so other "poor shmuck"s like myself can get a good laugh.
At one of my former employers, our programming group insisted that every requirement in the Requirements doc have an identifier. Every element of the subsequent Design had to refer, by id, to which requirement it fulfilled, and have its own identifier in turn. Everything specified in the Internal and External Specs had to refer, by id, to which part of the Design it implemented. The QA Designs and Specs for each test had to refer to these ids for each test.
This forced us, while designing, to that ensure that every design feature actually fulfilled a specific requirement or requirements. While coding, it forced us to ensure that every implementation detail arose from a specific element of the design. And in QA, it allowed us to directly correlate specific tests with specific requirements - any requirement that wasn't covered by a test was glaringly apparent. In short, it made the documents and code both directly testable long before the formal QA stage, and made the applicability of each QA test itself testable.
As it also forced us to audit our design and code during development, it made superfluous features or implementations obvious as they arose. In some cases, that meant simply losing the superfluous bit, but in most cases, it exposed places where the requirements, or design, were vague, and forced us to clear them up before proceeding further (usually, if an element of the design was vague, it's because the requirement it purported to fulfill was vague). As a result, the requirements tended rather quickly toward the unambiguous and testable, and our ultimate design and implementation was cleaner. Our bug-count went down noticeably just because of this one practice.
WTF?? Did you really not have Prosser lie down in the mud in Arthur's place? If you did eliminate it, for God's sake, why man???
Besides simply being a scream, that one bit, right at the beginning, tells you everything you need to know about what to expect from the rest of the story. It sets up the proper attitude for what is to come. It's a *legendary* bit. HHGTG without Prosser in the mud is like Bugs Bunny without carrots or Porky Pig without his stutter.
So, you must have had your reasons. Please enlighten us.
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You're right that analysis of motive by itself is insufficient to judge the truth of what someone is saying. However, there is (sad to say) usually a high degree of correlation between the motive of a person or group, and the truthfullness (or lack thereof) of what they say. The former is a valid first approximation for the latter.
That doesn't mean that one should forgo careful analysis of the actual data and arguments, but as a quick rule-of-thumb, it is fairly reliable.
I use Bigfoot.com to forward my email - a week ago, Comcast blocked them without warning. The embargo was finally lifted this morning.
but I'm disappointed CEBus never really got its act together. Good protocol, good language; it was obvious the people who designed it had put a lot of thought into it. I was kinda jazzed about it, looking forward to automating my house with it, and then... pfttt! A whole lotta nothin! It seems to have made it's way into high-end home-theater type things, but not the everyday, actually useful stuff you could use to control your lights, hvac, ordinary television, etc. Bummer.
It's only a Robot if it's autonomous. Otherwise, it's a Remote Device. Asimov's laws remain unbroken. For now.
And I'll bet none of those 'top' restaurants serve *British* food. They all serve originially foreign cuisines. Am I right?
For a really good look at the history and early design of Tandem computers, see this wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tandem_Computers.
In brief, the Nonstop Kernel is none of the above. It's a proprietary OS, originally written from the ground up by Jimmy Treybig and two other ex-HP engineers. It has a loosly-coupled, message-based architecture, designed with reliability as its primary focus. It runs on proprietary hardware, also designed with reliability as its goal.
When HP expressed no interest in this new high-reliabilty, high-availability computer that three of their engineers had designed, those engineers quit HP and founded their own company, Tandem Computers, around 1974. The name came from the design of the platform; the minimum system you can buy has two processors and two (mirrored) disc drives (the maximum has 4000+ processors); processes run in pairs, with data checkpointed from the primary to the backup, so that if a process or cpu fails, the backup can takeover immediately and continue processing. Failover time is typically less than 15 milliseconds.
True story: a data center where I worked had half Tandems and half Amdahls. The building got hit by lightning. The Amdahls all went down, and took three days to get back up. The Tandems lost half their processors and a third of their disc drives, and kept right on going. Processing continued with nary a pause, and no data was lost. It was amazing to watch.
Tandem had revenue of $1.9 billion; the reason you never heard of them is that their target market was never consumers. The cheapest machine was in the $millions circa 1980, and about $250k circa mid-nineties. They built enterprise-level machines for transaction processing that would almost never go down (some units have run in the field 24/7/365 for 5+ years with zero downtime), and they sold to banks and stock-exchanges and telephone companies. Most of the world's financial processing infrastructure runs on Tandems; almost any financial transaction you make, anywhere in the world, e.g. withdraw money from an ATM, buy gas using your debit card, buy or sell stock, etc., is processed on the backend by a Tandem computer.
In 1997, Compaq bought Tandem. In 2001, HP bought Compaq, and with it, the Tandem division. Tandem computers are now called HP Nonstop computers. Full circle.
You want extreme reliability? Put the app on an HP Nonstop, use some system calls to checkpoint the data to the app's backup process at key points in the processing, and voila! If the app crashes or the processor goes down, the backup process will takeover in less than 15 milliseconds, and continue processing. And yes, you can do it in C++.
A potential drawback: last time I knew, the cheapest two-processor Nonstop you could buy would set you back $250k.
The Nonstop is designed from the ground up to be extremely robust and reliable. That's why 80+ percent of all the ATM transactions in the world are handled by a Nonstop computer back at the bank's data center. 90+ percent of all the world's stock exchanges run on Nonstop machines.
(Full disclosure: I have never worked for HP. I spent 12 years working on Tandem computers, 6 at Tandem HQ. Compaq bought Tandem, then (as we all know) HP bought Compaq, and so through them acquiring a company founded in 1978 by 3 ex-HP engineers. The formerly Tandem platform is now called the HP Nonstop.)
I was speaking in regard to the truth about incidents of "sloppy science, misconduct, plagiarism, manipulation or faking of data", not some grand scientific 'truth', which as you pointed out, doesn't exist.
Duh.
You're not thinking long-enough term. In the short term, science proceeds in fits and starts, complete with old-boy networks and the occasional prejudice, greed, self-promotion, in-fighting, blind alleys, etc., and even falsified data and experiments.
BUT, over the *long-term* (decades, perhaps longer) science IS self-correcting. The very article you cite is proof; the truth came out. The scientific method guarantees that, given enough time, the truth *will* become known. You just have to think longer-term.
You are conflating two separate issues. It's not the wiretapping to which most object, it's the bypassing of the FISA court. Those are two separate things. Look, it's really simple: the national security people have the authority, under law, to intiate an international wiretap whenver they think it necessary; they just have to inform the FISA court within 72 hours, and then get permission to continue the tap. What's so hard about that? The problem here is not that Bush wishes to protect the country (which I believe he sincerely does), but that he thinks he doesn't have to obey the law. The FISA law was particularly crafted to allow him a great deal of latitude in protecting the country, but Mr. Bush doesn't want *anyone* looking over his shoulder; unfortunately for him, 'looking over his shoulder' is *exactly* the purpose of the courts, and the reason the Founders split our government into three parts. But since Bush doesn't like them, he simply ignores them. That's against the law, and against the constitutional separation of powers. In trying to protect our Constitution, Bush is weakening it. He could have his wiretaps and still obey the law, but he chooses not to. *That* is the problem.
Isolators cost about nothing [snip] Why didn't you use them?
If by 'you', you mean me, personally, it's because I was just a lowly operator at the time; I assumed they had 'em, and even if I'd known they didn't, my influence was, of course, zero.
If by 'you', you mean the brokerage firm, it's because they were cheap! Duh. Well, cheap where it wouldn't show. They spent millions covering the huge lobby with italian marble, and putting in a double row of palm trees, leading to the two-story glass atrium window overlooking the Hudson. They spent probably a million more hosting a political fund-raiser in the new lobby for the (then) President. They spent hundreds of thousands paneling their offices with walnut and putting in extra-thick, luxurious carpets. But, they obviously wouldn't open up the purse for some lightning protection, which they'd never get to show off (or so they thought). After this little incident, they heard from their investors, big time. They opened two redundant data centers, one in Brooklyn, and the other in New Jersey.
But you're right about no protection from errant airplanes in the hands of crazies. When the World Trade Center went down, their building was heavily damaged, including both the data center, and the obscenely extravagent lobby. I shed many a tear for those who died, especially the poor souls forced to jump. I shed none for all that wrecked italian marble.
The first fault-tolerant computers (circa 1978) were made by Tandem Computers, which is now the NonStop Division (or something like that) of HP. They're still the best: no single point of failure, backups take over in 15 microseconds. Full disclosure: I worked for Tandem for 6 years. Prior to that, I worked for a Manhatten brokerage firm; the building got hit by lightning one evening; all the Amdall and IBM mainframes went down, and it took three days to get them back up. The Tandem system's lost half their processors and a third of their disc drives, and kept right on processing. No down time, no lost data. The only drawback is price; these are Enterprise class servers; the cheapest one is $250k. I guess you get what you pay for.
I've been programming for 18 years, and I'd never seen this one before (of course, I don't hang out on IRC either - got better things to do with my time - like code).
I f*cking laughed my ass off! ROTFL!
This story *should* be re-run every once in a while, so other "poor shmuck"s like myself can get a good laugh.
He's right - traceability is *very* helpful.
At one of my former employers, our programming group insisted that every requirement in the Requirements doc have an identifier. Every element of the subsequent Design had to refer, by id, to which requirement it fulfilled, and have its own identifier in turn. Everything specified in the Internal and External Specs had to refer, by id, to which part of the Design it implemented. The QA Designs and Specs for each test had to refer to these ids for each test.
This forced us, while designing, to that ensure that every design feature actually fulfilled a specific requirement or requirements. While coding, it forced us to ensure that every implementation detail arose from a specific element of the design. And in QA, it allowed us to directly correlate specific tests with specific requirements - any requirement that wasn't covered by a test was glaringly apparent. In short, it made the documents and code both directly testable long before the formal QA stage, and made the applicability of each QA test itself testable.
As it also forced us to audit our design and code during development, it made superfluous features or implementations obvious as they arose. In some cases, that meant simply losing the superfluous bit, but in most cases, it exposed places where the requirements, or design, were vague, and forced us to clear them up before proceeding further (usually, if an element of the design was vague, it's because the requirement it purported to fulfill was vague). As a result, the requirements tended rather quickly toward the unambiguous and testable, and our ultimate design and implementation was cleaner. Our bug-count went down noticeably just because of this one practice.
WTF?? Did you really not have Prosser lie down in the mud in Arthur's place? If you did eliminate it, for God's sake, why man???
Besides simply being a scream, that one bit, right at the beginning, tells you everything you need to know about what to expect from the rest of the story. It sets up the proper attitude for what is to come. It's a *legendary* bit. HHGTG without Prosser in the mud is like Bugs Bunny without carrots or Porky Pig without his stutter.
So, you must have had your reasons. Please enlighten us.