Thanks, interesting document, found here. The audio is really bad at the beginning and fluctuates throughout the talk. The interesting bit that you refer to is at 21 minutes from the start.
I'm trying to type in what he said directly from the audio:
The 16-bit design gave us a megabyte of memory. The 8086 has a 20-bit address. It is really a segmented 16-bit data path with segment registers that are really indexes. It is a 1-MB address space. And in this original design I took the upper 384K and tied it to a certain amount to provide for memory video, the ROM and I/O. And that left 640K for general purpose memory. And that leads to today's situation where people talk about the 640K barrier. The limit to how much memory you can put to these machines. I have to say that in 1981 while making those decisions I felt like I was providing enough freedom for 10 years. That is, a move from 64K to 640K felt like something that would last a great deal of time. Well, it didn't. It took only 6 years before people started to see that as a real problem.
Fortunately, there is a reasonable solution. Intel has moved forward with its chips families, the 286 chip introduced in 1984 moves us to a 24-bit address space (mumbles about segmented indirection, being not that good). That is sort of an intermediate milestone. in 1986 we moved up to the 386 where we get a full 32-bit offset to these segments that have been designed in this architecture. So what we have is a machine that can address 4GB of RAM. And I have to say with all honesty, I believe that it will take us more than 10 years to use up that address space.
So he never makes that exact quote, however one can understand why people picked it up. Essentially, BG thought in 1981 640K would be enough for everybody for a long while. Note that he was reasonably prudent regarding using up the 32-bit address space (that ship has sailed now).
Later, regarding memory, he says that computers should have about 1MB of RAM per MIPS. Specifically, he goes on to saying machines with 30-60MB of RAM should be desirable soon (in 1989).
In this talk he talks about many things, most are pretty insightful in fact: OS design, multitasking, parallelization, multi-processor designs, dynamic linking, object-oriented design. Funnily he talks at length about OS2 in a very positive way. This was before Windows 3 of course. He compares OS2 and Unix, saying that OS2 will take over the desktop and Unix the servers, and all other OSes will die out. He talks about the FSF, saying its task of creating a free Unix-like OS is doomed.
Sorry hit send too soon, replying to myself, bad form.
In my case when I had long commute times, I sometimes solved bug in my head that had eluded me all day pounding on the keyboard trying to find out what was happening. When you are forced away from the screen/keyboard and you must think for yourself without any help from documentation or debugger or anything else, your may realise that your assumptions had been wrong from the start and your design was not optimal, for instance.
Now I have a more academic job where sometimes I have to come up with mathematical proofs, or at least things like novel algorithms that are not linked to producing lots of code in an editor. More often than not, they form up by themselves in my head when I'm doing something mindless and apparently unproductive: taking a shower, driving, grocery shopping, etc. Mind you this only happens after a lot of work (on paper or computer or just thinking), but the final step often somehow clicks when not thinking about it.
So unstructured, *boring* time is essential for many tasks. Also having fun. Many people like driving.
Lots of ifs in your post, also assumptions. While I'm not disputing that driving is largely non-productive, setting aside some non-productive time in your schedule is also good. Be it driving (if you enjoy it) or staring at clouds, or walking, basically empty your mind in some way. Humans are not machine whose productivity is linear as a function of the time they can work during the day. It is likely that when your were driving to/from work you had some random thoughts that turned out to be good ideas, be they for work or for home/family. So it is not *entirely* wasted.
You are perhaps thinking of London, Singapore, Hong-kong, Beijing, Tokyo, Sydney or Paris. These cities are criss-crossed with an effective public transport system (including taxis). However this mostly works for the downtown area. A bit further afield and you'll find that there are busses and trains but they don't run very often, and taxis become expensive and don't want to go there. So it is possible to get around without owning or renting a car, but not always easy or convenient. My experience is similar to that in the Bay Area, Los Angeles, New-York, Boston, Chicago, and other North American cities with a non-ridiculous public transport system.
However it is mindset. My European friends tend to think of using the public transport first when they come for a visit wherever I've been. And most of the time it is there and it works (mostly). I many Asian cities it would be a very bad idea indeed to think of driving a car yourself. In North America, visitors tend to rent a car when they arrive and drive themselves around when they can.
Public transport develops as demand increases. European and Asian cities are by and large not well designed for car trafic, so developing a public transport system was a natural solution to the increase in population. It requires a lot of coordination between local governments, and a lot of investment over the years. In America cities are relatively easy to navigate and widespread so self-transport is a natural solution not requiring as much investing and coordination from local authorities.
Really ? if I had enough money (say 10 millions) to live on without requiring a salary, I would set up myself as an associate researcher in some famous university like Stanford or MIT, or probably a much smaller one, perhaps not in the US but still good with less turf war and less admin, propose a research prize in CS/Applied mathematics and fund a few bright kids' PhD every year. One a year every year works out to about 200k$ per year. Pretty cheap. No outcome pressure, no need for expensive equipment (a small number of fast computers, some offices). Bright and fun colleagues would be a plus. I could do that forever. The kids would have their own agenda and limited time, so research outcomes would probably just flow, in the right environment.
In research it is possible to get funding up to a few millions but you can't invest it, you can only spend it, and you have a limited time to do so. This is too bad.
Exactly. Thoroughly agree with you. Also to the list add failure to pay taxes (aka tax havens), hugely costly mistakes without repercussion (think subprimes).
Except there is no real reason why it should continue that way. If you look around you, there are lots of anti-science movements, less interest in academia, less investment in long-term ventures. The "easy" problems are solved, and the hard ones are still there. Sure we should continue to make progress, but also we could face disasters like never before (cue global warming, energy crisis, new cold or hot wars, etc). Personally I work harder than ever before I and I see lots of unemployed people around me. Not a good combination.
So let's summarize this. Some rich person think they are smarter than everyone else and that they have the ills of the world figured out. Namely: a cure for cancer is just around the corner (based on what evidence?), so they choose a diet that is totally unproven to do anything good or bad, they plan to live forever and they will retreat to some mystical artificial island where they can do what they want and not be bothered by anyone not of their own kind. So far so good.
What I don't get is why they think welfare is bad. Obviously they don't need it, they're rich. But not everyone can be rich, this would be the same as everyone being poor. So given that in any society there will be richer and poorer people, welfare simply ensures that even the poorest get some minimum access to services, typically health care. This does not prevent richer people to get better services. Explain to me why this is bad? Given that rich/poor status is mostly a question of luck, being anti-welfare has always struck me as being selfish.
What is important in wikipedia? Obviously the content. The content is essentially provided by volunteers. The pages design is nothing special. Google provides the search. What does the WMF do? They host the content, and they are making millions while essentially doing nothing productive. Sure they must pay for bandwidth and hosting the data, but this is really very little compared with the money they spend on other things. The pages are each very lightweight. The full content of Wikipedia probably does not exceed a few TB. In today's age, any large company would be happy to host WP for nearly free in return for the goodwill it would generate.
I admit I feel cheated by the WMF intrusive, blatant and disrespectful grab for donations.
Thanks, I've read the book. The first part is a introduction to Mach effects. The second part reads like a lab book to a great extent (description of experiments, matching of theory to seen results, etc), leading to experimental descriptions to demonstrate the existence of these effects. The authors makes some interesting benchtop experiments. He sees some new physics happening, including very small reactionless thrust effect, in the order of a few microNewtons, that he cannot explain away with obvious side effects, like heating, varying electromagnetic fields, and so on. He has the theory for it, but not fully developed. It seems a little ad-hoc. This is still great, but this is not yet new real physics, and this is not yet useful. Someone else needs to redo the experiments and confirm them. We need to see if the effects can scale to something not so tiny.
The last part of the book is speculative with wormholes and so on. The authors is careful to draw attention to the work of others, well-respected physicists like K. Thorne. It is fun to read.
In summary, with the author's theory, if it were correct, and if it scaled, it *would* be possible to build Startrek-style engines. We are not *quite* there yet.
Most *people* do that. If only it were limited to academics, life would be easy. But no. Taxi drivers, assistants, hairdressers, dentists, you name it.
We have built machinery that can be used to replicate the same machinery (e.g. 3D printers), but not by themselves. This is hugely difficult: even making simple plastics is hard work and requires lots of resources.
Slashdot Mirror
At the time it was innovative in many ways.
It already does unless you've forcibly removed OSX.
Indeed a great upgrade at less than $100 these days.
Thanks, interesting document, found here. The audio is really bad at the beginning and fluctuates throughout the talk. The interesting bit that you refer to is at 21 minutes from the start.
I'm trying to type in what he said directly from the audio:
The 16-bit design gave us a megabyte of memory. The 8086 has a 20-bit address. It is really a segmented 16-bit data path with segment registers that are really indexes. It is a 1-MB address space. And in this original design I took the upper 384K and tied it to a certain amount to provide for memory video, the ROM and I/O. And that left 640K for general purpose memory. And that leads to today's situation where people talk about the 640K barrier. The limit to how much memory you can put to these machines. I have to say that in 1981 while making those decisions I felt like I was providing enough freedom for 10 years. That is, a move from 64K to 640K felt like something that would last a great deal of time. Well, it didn't. It took only 6 years before people started to see that as a real problem.
Fortunately, there is a reasonable solution. Intel has moved forward with its chips families, the 286 chip introduced in 1984 moves us to a 24-bit address space (mumbles about segmented indirection, being not that good). That is sort of an intermediate milestone. in 1986 we moved up to the 386 where we get a full 32-bit offset to these segments that have been designed in this architecture. So what we have is a machine that can address 4GB of RAM. And I have to say with all honesty, I believe that it will take us more than 10 years to use up that address space.
So he never makes that exact quote, however one can understand why people picked it up. Essentially, BG thought in 1981 640K would be enough for everybody for a long while. Note that he was reasonably prudent regarding using up the 32-bit address space (that ship has sailed now).
Later, regarding memory, he says that computers should have about 1MB of RAM per MIPS. Specifically, he goes on to saying machines with 30-60MB of RAM should be desirable soon (in 1989).
In this talk he talks about many things, most are pretty insightful in fact: OS design, multitasking, parallelization, multi-processor designs, dynamic linking, object-oriented design. Funnily he talks at length about OS2 in a very positive way. This was before Windows 3 of course. He compares OS2 and Unix, saying that OS2 will take over the desktop and Unix the servers, and all other OSes will die out. He talks about the FSF, saying its task of creating a free Unix-like OS is doomed.
Some interesting comments on that talk here.
Sorry hit send too soon, replying to myself, bad form.
In my case when I had long commute times, I sometimes solved bug in my head that had eluded me all day pounding on the keyboard trying to find out what was happening. When you are forced away from the screen/keyboard and you must think for yourself without any help from documentation or debugger or anything else, your may realise that your assumptions had been wrong from the start and your design was not optimal, for instance.
Now I have a more academic job where sometimes I have to come up with mathematical proofs, or at least things like novel algorithms that are not linked to producing lots of code in an editor. More often than not, they form up by themselves in my head when I'm doing something mindless and apparently unproductive: taking a shower, driving, grocery shopping, etc. Mind you this only happens after a lot of work (on paper or computer or just thinking), but the final step often somehow clicks when not thinking about it.
So unstructured, *boring* time is essential for many tasks. Also having fun. Many people like driving.
Lots of ifs in your post, also assumptions. While I'm not disputing that driving is largely non-productive, setting aside some non-productive time in your schedule is also good. Be it driving (if you enjoy it) or staring at clouds, or walking, basically empty your mind in some way. Humans are not machine whose productivity is linear as a function of the time they can work during the day. It is likely that when your were driving to /from work you had some random thoughts that turned out to be good ideas, be they for work or for home/family. So it is not *entirely* wasted.
You are perhaps thinking of London, Singapore, Hong-kong, Beijing, Tokyo, Sydney or Paris. These cities are criss-crossed with an effective public transport system (including taxis). However this mostly works for the downtown area. A bit further afield and you'll find that there are busses and trains but they don't run very often, and taxis become expensive and don't want to go there. So it is possible to get around without owning or renting a car, but not always easy or convenient. My experience is similar to that in the Bay Area, Los Angeles, New-York, Boston, Chicago, and other North American cities with a non-ridiculous public transport system.
However it is mindset. My European friends tend to think of using the public transport first when they come for a visit wherever I've been. And most of the time it is there and it works (mostly). I many Asian cities it would be a very bad idea indeed to think of driving a car yourself. In North America, visitors tend to rent a car when they arrive and drive themselves around when they can.
Public transport develops as demand increases. European and Asian cities are by and large not well designed for car trafic, so developing a public transport system was a natural solution to the increase in population. It requires a lot of coordination between local governments, and a lot of investment over the years. In America cities are relatively easy to navigate and widespread so self-transport is a natural solution not requiring as much investing and coordination from local authorities.
If you read the Forbes article the parent linked to, you will see that in this case IBM behaved exactly like a patent troll.
Really ? if I had enough money (say 10 millions) to live on without requiring a salary, I would set up myself as an associate researcher in some famous university like Stanford or MIT, or probably a much smaller one, perhaps not in the US but still good with less turf war and less admin, propose a research prize in CS/Applied mathematics and fund a few bright kids' PhD every year. One a year every year works out to about 200k$ per year. Pretty cheap. No outcome pressure, no need for expensive equipment (a small number of fast computers, some offices). Bright and fun colleagues would be a plus. I could do that forever. The kids would have their own agenda and limited time, so research outcomes would probably just flow, in the right environment.
In research it is possible to get funding up to a few millions but you can't invest it, you can only spend it, and you have a limited time to do so. This is too bad.
Exactly. Thoroughly agree with you. Also to the list add failure to pay taxes (aka tax havens), hugely costly mistakes without repercussion (think subprimes).
Don't post anon, this is great ! Thanks.
I'm with you, I'll go with lucky.
I wasn't aware cancer was cured for the rich.
Except there is no real reason why it should continue that way. If you look around you, there are lots of anti-science movements, less interest in academia, less investment in long-term ventures. The "easy" problems are solved, and the hard ones are still there. Sure we should continue to make progress, but also we could face disasters like never before (cue global warming, energy crisis, new cold or hot wars, etc). Personally I work harder than ever before I and I see lots of unemployed people around me. Not a good combination.
That is certainly what it sounds like from TFA.
So let's summarize this. Some rich person think they are smarter than everyone else and that they have the ills of the world figured out. Namely: a cure for cancer is just around the corner (based on what evidence?), so they choose a diet that is totally unproven to do anything good or bad, they plan to live forever and they will retreat to some mystical artificial island where they can do what they want and not be bothered by anyone not of their own kind. So far so good.
What I don't get is why they think welfare is bad. Obviously they don't need it, they're rich. But not everyone can be rich, this would be the same as everyone being poor. So given that in any society there will be richer and poorer people, welfare simply ensures that even the poorest get some minimum access to services, typically health care. This does not prevent richer people to get better services. Explain to me why this is bad? Given that rich/poor status is mostly a question of luck, being anti-welfare has always struck me as being selfish.
It is already illegal to work more than 35 hours a week in France, but it hasn't worked out so well.
Verrrryyyyy slow for a perfect system.
What is important in wikipedia? Obviously the content. The content is essentially provided by volunteers. The pages design is nothing special. Google provides the search. What does the WMF do? They host the content, and they are making millions while essentially doing nothing productive. Sure they must pay for bandwidth and hosting the data, but this is really very little compared with the money they spend on other things. The pages are each very lightweight. The full content of Wikipedia probably does not exceed a few TB. In today's age, any large company would be happy to host WP for nearly free in return for the goodwill it would generate.
I admit I feel cheated by the WMF intrusive, blatant and disrespectful grab for donations.
Thanks, I've read the book. The first part is a introduction to Mach effects. The second part reads like a lab book to a great extent (description of experiments, matching of theory to seen results, etc), leading to experimental descriptions to demonstrate the existence of these effects. The authors makes some interesting benchtop experiments. He sees some new physics happening, including very small reactionless thrust effect, in the order of a few microNewtons, that he cannot explain away with obvious side effects, like heating, varying electromagnetic fields, and so on. He has the theory for it, but not fully developed. It seems a little ad-hoc. This is still great, but this is not yet new real physics, and this is not yet useful. Someone else needs to redo the experiments and confirm them. We need to see if the effects can scale to something not so tiny.
The last part of the book is speculative with wormholes and so on. The authors is careful to draw attention to the work of others, well-respected physicists like K. Thorne. It is fun to read.
In summary, with the author's theory, if it were correct, and if it scaled, it *would* be possible to build Startrek-style engines. We are not *quite* there yet.
don't want to nitpick but the propagation delay is a bit more than 1 ns per foot. Light travels at 11.8 inch per nanosecond, i.e. 1.017 ns per foot.
Or, to paraphrase dear old Stalin, quantity is a quality all of its own.
Most *people* do that. If only it were limited to academics, life would be easy. But no. Taxi drivers, assistants, hairdressers, dentists, you name it.
The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind.
We have built machinery that can be used to replicate the same machinery (e.g. 3D printers), but not by themselves. This is hugely difficult: even making simple plastics is hard work and requires lots of resources.