If the name is a problem why would you keep suggesting ubuntu? For a server it hardly matters which distribution you use. If they like "Big Names" why not suggest Solaris. Doesn't Oracle have a linux distribution now? Or Red Hat Enterprise Server?
Once they agree to Linux/UNIX then you can do thetrad studies and see which is best.
You are talking about two things: reliability and performance. And there are two ways to measure performance: Latency (what one end user sees) and through put (number of transactions per unit time). You have to decide what to address.
You can address reliability and through put by invest a LOT of money in hardware and using things like round robin load balancing, clusters and mirrored DBMSes, RAID 5 and so on. Then losing a power supply or a disk drive means only degraded performance.
Latency is hard to address. You have to profile and collect good data. You may have to write test tools to measure parts of the system in isolation. You need to account for every millisecond before you can start shaving them off
Of course you could take a quick look for obvious stuff like poorly designed SQL data bases, lack of indexes on joined tables and cgi-bin scripts that require a process to be strarted each time they are called.
"John and his team have taken this challenge in directions that the "big guys" have never tried"
The "big guys" landed on the moon in the late 1960's.
Landing on the moon is MUCH harder because you are coming in at something like 22,000 miles per hours and need to slow to a soft landing. The take off hover then land senario means there is never much relative velocity between the ground the the vehicle. John and his team are only simulating the last few meters of a lunar landing.
"...Satellite radio has about 50Mhz of the S band for 150 channels of content. FM radio has about a 5th of the channels in about 5 times the spectrum...Massively inefficient..."
The math don't work. Check you figures. If satellite has 50Mhz and 150 channels and FM radio has "about 5 times the spectrum" then, FM must have 250Mhz of spectrum. I think not. My dial goes from about 86Mhz to about 107Mhz or roughly about 20Mhz But you are right the channels are wider. The reason is because FM uses many independent transmitters and they need separation while satellite radio uses just one transmitter. So you are off by two orders of magnitude. The right answer is closer to 0.5 not 50.
"So in the United States, labor unions can exist only if the employer accepts them?"
No, employees can form a union whenever they like. The employer does not need to accept and in fact their are laws requiring the employer to accept the union.
What Walmart did was after the meant packers unionized, Walmart simply closed the entire meat department and layed off everyone. There are laws saying you can't fire people because they joined a union but no laws requiring you to stay in business forever either.
H.264 was added at Apple's request. they are currently streaming h264 to iPhone ad Apple TV users, Both of these devices use H264. I don't know the agreement between Apple and utube but I'd bet Apple is helping to pay for the re-encoding of content to h264. Now it looks like they decided to take advantage of the re-encoding of their library and add h264 to Flash. It's good to move to an open standard like H264
Here's my plan. I'll make a web site then I'll block _everyone_ except AOL users. There has to be a way to make money off people dumb enough to stick with AOL.
Here is what I did: Set up a proxy server that checks a list of URLs and sends a one bit transparent GIF image in place of a listed URL. Other URLs get proxied. Now I point my browser, be it IE, Safari or Firefox at the proxy and no more ads. but beter then that no more waiting for ads. The trick of sending the one bit gif works well and lets the pages render in the browser normally. There are any number of ad blockers that work like this most of them run under squid.
When I turn theis feature on and off I notice a lage difference in appearent speed and also I'n no longer bothered by these stupid Flashbased ads.
Solaris is Open Source. That means anyone can use Solaris on their servers, desktops or whatever. Our Suns "sales guy" explained that it to me. They say "if they grow the pie, everyone's slice gets bigger" Sun is in the same possition as Apple. Either one can if they play it right double their sales by only gaining a few percent more market share. This is a very good place to be. Do you think Microsoft could double their sales? No they are "flat" now and have only one way left to go if they move off "flat". For Sun the "grow the pie" sceme is their best option. They have a gear product with Solaris and people with the right technical background can see this sothey need to sell to those people. IBM can help them do that.
IBM needs something other ten Linux. Solaris is much more robust then Linux and ikley an easier sell to many customers. SO IBM gains so customers that would have resisted Linux and Sun gets to grow the Solaris pie.
Again Solaris is Open Source. A lot like (but not same lic. as) Linux or BSD
"How about working on making the free PDF writer stable enough for daily browser use first?"
I'll bet all the people who gripe about this are running MS Windows versions. I never have such problems but then, I'm using Safari on Mac OS X and Firefox on Linux.
You are absolutely correct. Every Math, engineering and science major needs to take some classes in the education department just to see the difference. It's just as you say. Like being in the 9th grade all over again. But on the other hand if your job is going to be teaching colors and shapes and the alphabet to 5 year old children you do need some experience with blunt end scissors and contraction paper.
Several of the teachers at my Son's high school got into teaching basically because it was clear they they needed to change majors in collage. If you are not getting A and B grades in your major subjects maybe it's time to think about going for a business or education major.
A buss and a baseball "fly" about the same. The way to figure it out is to first figure out how long at 70MPH the buss would take to travle the length of the gap. Say it takes one second. Now how far do objects on earth fall in one second?
You don't need a degree in physics for this. This is covered in High School Physics classes
Now back to why you need to know the mass of the buss. The typical high school physic exercise always says "neglecting air resistance" but that's not realistic. If you want to compute the deceleration of the buss as if flys through the air you need to know the force of the drag due to air resistance and the mas of the buss. But for a short one second flight I think you could neglect this effect.
Didn't this happen once? BSD is so close to "no restrictions at all" that it may as well be. Of course after that release AT&T continued development that led to System V. The stuff that is not already available is not s useful a what is already open sourced.
"I heard that NASA was actually debating whether or not to even address this,"
There is some small risk if it is left un-repaired but. But a reapair carries considerable risk (1) Simply going outside puts the astronaut at risk of all kinds possible accidents. (2) The repair attempt could go wrong and cause more damage (3) the repair method is untested and may not even work
Way risk the above if they know that many shuttles have landed with this type of damage and not had problems.
That said one reason to try it is to test the repair technique.
I was carful when I wrote "flight control software" and not just "flight software". Seems they are going with Ada for the approx 4% of the code that really matters. The JSF will have about 15 million lines of code aboard. So only 150,000 lines is considered "safely critical" I guess. That's good because I doubt anyone could write 15M bug free lines of code. 150K will still be "way hard" but do-able.
I read Lockeed's presentation where they jutified C++. Their reasoning was simple: They would not hire enough Ada programmers. They said they could not train them either because people don't see a career in Ada anymore so they leave. The bulk of the pages was numbers to support the claim that there are not enough people to write 15M lLOC in Ada and worse, in futrue years there will be no one to maintain it.
Notice that they are not really writing in C++. They are writing in a very restricted sub-set of C++ and the subset is defined in a way to facilitate testing and inspection.
The only reason to steal this would be that there was a buyer for it. No one would just take it so they could have a big rock. So the real question is who in the world would buy this and what would they do with it. You can't show it to anyone. It would be as dumb as stealing a famous painting. You could only sell it to some nut case who wants to hide it in a closet.
How is the law written. In many places they define "burgler tools" as things like a screw driver or pry bar. But clearly it is legal to own these. It depends on how and where these are used. A screw driver in a workshop or a job site is one thing but at night near someone I don'tknow's house it another. Perhaps some of these software tools are treated the same way.
Typically laws are written in very technical terms using works with meaning that have been defined in court cases. So without knowlage of these cases you can't know the details, even if you could read German
"Computers have been slowly turing... into overly-equipped money sinks ever since.."
You mean the price has gone up? Do you have any idea what computers used to cost in the 60's, 70's or 80's? or even in the 90's compared to today? The price trend is downwards. If you have been spending more it is because you can afford to spend more and simply want a more powerful machine.
If you want to really be impressed you should see what this little computer can do for less then $2. http://www.atmel.com/products/AVR/ It can't run Linux but it can be programmed with gcc and the GNU tool chain. The little chip is almost as powerfull as the VAX750 I used in the early 80's
"Simply put, we deserve something better than C++ and it isn't going to be enough to enhance C++ because a full redesign is needed in order to address the issues noted above. We need and deserve a language that takes what we've learned from C++ and is designed from the ground up to address those issues."
Yes, I agree. It's odd that Ada did not see wide usage outside of it's specialty. It is used today mostly only for applications that a "life critical" meaning that people could die if the code breaks. Things like the flight controls on airplains, controls on nuclear reactors and guidance systems on cruise missiles.
If you were going to be the test pilot AND the programmer for a new fly-by-wire flight control system. What language would you pick? There is a good change a software bug would be fatal (literally) so choose the language well. Very few would pick C++.
Ada was designed from the ground up to cover all the Issues. It does it well. The problem was with programers and their managment who looked at it said "I don't want to have to learn something new". The other big proble was that it was some years later thatthere iwas a good, free compiler. I think the not-free compiler is what did it in. But now days gcc does Ada and the generated code is as good as you get from C++
This is not the worst thing J&J ever did, for example I notice in the store they sell "Baby Oil". Pressing babies for oil has to be one of the most cruel is disgusting practices I've ever seen. How can this even be allowed? And then there is this "Baby Powder" they also sell which I assume must be a by-product of the oil making process.
Have you ever watched a shuttle lunch? All that smoke and fire and exhaust plume you see is NOT coming out of the Shuttle Main Engine. The bulk of the power is coming from the solid boosters. Those boosters burn solid fuel which is basically rubber and aluminum powder. The shuttle does burn a lot of H2 but the main propellant is solid.
Remember the Hindenburg disaster? It was a hydrogen filled envelope that caught fire but the envelope was covered with guess what? Rubber and aluminum powder or "rocket fuel". All those flames and smoke you saw where the solid rocket fuel burning.
In the case of both the shuttle and the Hindenburg the hydrogen combustion was a minority of what was going on and in both cases mostly invisible o2/h2 combustion leaves no big visible fire ball and no smoke.
"How is adding more layers going to make anything faster?"
"Faster" is not the goal. Better machine utilization is. In the Windows PC world sysadmins know that loading multiple functions all running on the same machine is inviting trouble and can crash Windows so they spread their servers out. This allows the admin to consolidate the servers back into one machine by running multiple copies of the Windows OS on one server. He gets the stability gain of running one task on a box biox he stops wasting so many boxes.
The other use for VMs is so you can run multiple OSes at the same time on the same machine. But this is something developers, testers and suport people like to do and may as well be done using VMWare on a host OS.
My statement the you can not disprove my claim to have created the universe myself was actually in SUPPORT of Creationism. Logically if you could disprove my claim you also disprove all Creationist claims. You can't disprove my claim.
I don't argue against Creationism. I argue against those who do not differentiate between faith and science. The big difference of course is that science makes FALSIFIABLE claims while faith is a believe in some claim even in the face of good reasons not to. The mainstream view is that they address different non overlapping areas of concern
Back on topic. I think the correct answer is that the the linage of hominids branched many times and all branches but us died out. Scientest can sort out the shape of the tree and will get it closer and closer to being correct as more data are collected but they will never know exactly because some data are missing
Did you know that if you break of the head of a gizillion wooden matches and stuff them into a glass bottle you cam make a rocket? Well maybe. But on the other hand you will likely loose both eyes and both hands trying to get this to work.
What other great advice can we post... Here's one. Remember you mother telling you not to cross the street if you see a car coming? Here a loop hole. Close your eyes. If you cover your eyes you will never see a car coming so it will be OK to cross the street.
I've heard you can put a cigarette out by dunking it in a cup on gasoline. If you do it fast enough the gas will suck the heat out of the flame before the cigarette has time to vaporize and ignite the gas. It's all about timing and being quick.
Five out of six Russian Roulette players "win". Your changes are pretty good.
Compared to the above the laser trick sounds safe. Blind in one eye is not nearly so bad as being covered with burning gasoline or a bullet through the head,
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If the name is a problem why would you keep suggesting ubuntu? For a server it hardly matters which distribution you use. If they like "Big Names" why not suggest Solaris. Doesn't Oracle have a linux distribution now? Or Red Hat Enterprise Server?
Once they agree to Linux/UNIX then you can do thetrad studies and see which is best.
You are talking about two things: reliability and performance. And there are two ways to measure performance: Latency (what one end user sees) and through put (number of transactions per unit time). You have to decide what to address.
You can address reliability and through put by invest a LOT of money in hardware and using things like round robin load balancing, clusters and mirrored DBMSes, RAID 5 and so on. Then losing a power supply or a disk drive means only degraded performance.
Latency is hard to address. You have to profile and collect good data. You may have to write test tools to measure parts of the system in isolation. You need to account for every millisecond before you can start shaving them off
Of course you could take a quick look for obvious stuff like poorly designed SQL data bases, lack of indexes on joined tables and cgi-bin scripts that require a process to be strarted each time they are called.
"John and his team have taken this challenge in directions that the "big guys" have never tried"
The "big guys" landed on the moon in the late 1960's.
Landing on the moon is MUCH harder because you are coming in at something like 22,000 miles per hours and need to slow to a soft landing. The take off hover then land senario means there is never much relative velocity between the ground the the vehicle. John and his team are only simulating the last few meters of a lunar landing.
"...Satellite radio has about 50Mhz of the S band for 150 channels of content. FM radio has about a 5th of the channels in about 5 times the spectrum...Massively inefficient..."
The math don't work. Check you figures. If satellite has 50Mhz and 150 channels and FM radio has "about 5 times the spectrum" then, FM must have 250Mhz of spectrum. I think not. My dial goes from about 86Mhz to about 107Mhz or roughly about 20Mhz But you are right the channels are wider. The reason is because FM uses many independent transmitters and they need separation while satellite radio uses just one transmitter. So you are off by two orders of magnitude. The right answer is closer to 0.5 not 50.
"So in the United States, labor unions can exist only if the employer accepts them?"
No, employees can form a union whenever they like. The employer does not need to accept and in fact their are laws requiring the employer to accept the union.
What Walmart did was after the meant packers unionized, Walmart simply closed the entire meat department and layed off everyone. There are laws saying you can't fire people because they joined a union but no laws requiring you to stay in business forever either.
H.264 was added at Apple's request. they are currently streaming h264 to iPhone ad Apple TV users, Both of these devices use H264. I don't know the agreement between Apple and utube but I'd bet Apple is helping to pay for the re-encoding of content to h264. Now it looks like they decided to take advantage of the re-encoding of their library and add h264 to Flash. It's good to move to an open standard like H264
Here's my plan. I'll make a web site then I'll block _everyone_ except AOL users. There has to be a way to make money off people dumb enough to stick with AOL.
Here is what I did: Set up a proxy server that checks a list of URLs and sends a one bit transparent GIF image in place of a listed URL. Other URLs get proxied. Now I point my browser, be it IE, Safari or Firefox at the proxy and no more ads. but beter then that no more waiting for ads. The trick of sending the one bit gif works well and lets the pages render in the browser normally. There are any number of ad blockers that work like this most of them run under squid.
When I turn theis feature on and off I notice a lage difference in appearent speed and also I'n no longer bothered by these stupid Flashbased ads.
Solaris is Open Source. That means anyone can use Solaris on their servers, desktops or whatever. Our Suns "sales guy" explained that it to me. They say "if they grow the pie, everyone's slice gets bigger" Sun is in the same possition as Apple. Either one can if they play it right double their sales by only gaining a few percent more market share. This is a very good place to be. Do you think Microsoft could double their sales? No they are "flat" now and have only one way left to go if they move off "flat". For Sun the "grow the pie" sceme is their best option. They have a gear product with Solaris and people with the right technical background can see this sothey need to sell to those people. IBM can help them do that. IBM needs something other ten Linux. Solaris is much more robust then Linux and ikley an easier sell to many customers. SO IBM gains so customers that would have resisted Linux and Sun gets to grow the Solaris pie. Again Solaris is Open Source. A lot like (but not same lic. as) Linux or BSD
"I daresay that these companies can hire better employees".
Why are you not working for them? Whatever answer you give explains why these companies can NOT hire better employees.
The bottom line is that if you are really good at handling customer service calls you can likely find a better job.
"How about working on making the free PDF writer stable enough for daily browser use first?"
I'll bet all the people who gripe about this are running MS Windows versions. I never have such problems but then, I'm using Safari on Mac OS X and Firefox on Linux.
You are absolutely correct. Every Math, engineering and science major needs to take some classes in the education department just to see the difference. It's just as you say. Like being in the 9th grade all over again. But on the other hand if your job is going to be teaching colors and shapes and the alphabet to 5 year old children you do need some experience with blunt end scissors and contraction paper.
Several of the teachers at my Son's high school got into teaching basically because it was clear they they needed to change majors in collage. If you are not getting A and B grades in your major subjects maybe it's time to think about going for a business or education major.
"What's the average mass of a bus anyways?"
Why would you need to know this?
A buss and a baseball "fly" about the same. The way to figure it out is to first figure out how long at 70MPH the buss would take to travle the length of the gap. Say it takes one second.
Now how far do objects on earth fall in one second?
You don't need a degree in physics for this. This is covered in High School Physics classes
Now back to why you need to know the mass of the buss. The typical high school physic exercise always says "neglecting air resistance" but that's not realistic. If you want to compute the deceleration of the buss as if flys through the air you need to know the force of the drag due to air resistance and the mas of the buss. But for a short one second flight I think you could neglect this effect.
Didn't this happen once? BSD is so close to "no restrictions at all" that it may as well be. Of course after that release AT&T continued development that led to System V. The stuff that is not already available is not s useful a what is already open sourced.
"I heard that NASA was actually debating whether or not to even address this,"
There is some small risk if it is left un-repaired but. But a reapair carries considerable risk (1) Simply going outside puts the astronaut at risk of all kinds possible accidents. (2) The repair attempt could go wrong and cause more damage (3) the repair method is untested and may not even work
Way risk the above if they know that many shuttles have landed with this type of damage and not had problems.
That said one reason to try it is to test the repair technique.
I was carful when I wrote "flight control software" and not just "flight software". Seems they are going with Ada for the approx 4% of the code that really matters. The JSF will have about 15 million lines of code aboard. So only 150,000 lines is considered "safely critical" I guess. That's good because I doubt anyone could write 15M bug free lines of code. 150K will still be "way hard" but do-able. I read Lockeed's presentation where they jutified C++. Their reasoning was simple: They would not hire enough Ada programmers. They said they could not train them either because people don't see a career in Ada anymore so they leave. The bulk of the pages was numbers to support the claim that there are not enough people to write 15M lLOC in Ada and worse, in futrue years there will be no one to maintain it. Notice that they are not really writing in C++. They are writing in a very restricted sub-set of C++ and the subset is defined in a way to facilitate testing and inspection.
The only reason to steal this would be that there was a buyer for it. No one would just take it so they could have a big rock. So the real question is who in the world would buy this and what would they do with it. You can't show it to anyone. It would be as dumb as stealing a famous painting. You could only sell it to some nut case who wants to hide it in a closet.
How is the law written. In many places they define "burgler tools" as things like a screw driver or pry bar. But clearly it is legal to own these. It depends on how and where these are used. A screw driver in a workshop or a job site is one thing but at night near someone I don'tknow's house it another. Perhaps some of these software tools are treated the same way.
Typically laws are written in very technical terms using works with meaning that have been defined in court cases. So without knowlage of these cases you can't know the details, even if you could read German
"Computers have been slowly turing ... into overly-equipped money sinks ever since.."
You mean the price has gone up? Do you have any idea what computers used to cost in the 60's, 70's or 80's? or even in the 90's compared to today? The price trend is downwards. If you have been spending more it is because you can afford to spend more and simply want a more powerful machine.
If you want to really be impressed you should see what this little computer can do for less then $2. http://www.atmel.com/products/AVR/ It can't run Linux but it can be programmed with gcc and the GNU tool chain. The little chip is almost as powerfull as the VAX750 I used in the early 80's
"Simply put, we deserve something better than C++ and it isn't going to be enough to enhance C++ because a full redesign is needed in order to address the issues noted above. We need and deserve a language that takes what we've learned from C++ and is designed from the ground up to address those issues."
Yes, I agree. It's odd that Ada did not see wide usage outside of it's specialty. It is used today mostly only for applications that a "life critical" meaning that people could die if the code breaks. Things like the flight controls on airplains, controls on nuclear reactors and guidance systems on cruise missiles.
If you were going to be the test pilot AND the programmer for a new fly-by-wire flight control system. What language would you pick? There is a good change a software bug would be fatal (literally) so choose the language well. Very few would pick C++.
Ada was designed from the ground up to cover all the Issues. It does it well. The problem was with programers and their managment who looked at it said "I don't want to have to learn something new". The other big proble was that it was some years later thatthere iwas a good, free compiler. I think the not-free compiler is what did it in. But now days gcc does Ada and the generated code is as good as you get from C++
This is not the worst thing J&J ever did, for example I notice in the store they sell "Baby Oil". Pressing babies for oil has to be one of the most cruel is disgusting practices I've ever seen. How can this even be allowed? And then there is this "Baby Powder" they also sell which I assume must be a by-product of the oil making process.
Have you ever watched a shuttle lunch? All that smoke and fire and exhaust plume you see is NOT coming out of the Shuttle Main Engine. The bulk of the power is coming from the solid boosters. Those boosters burn solid fuel which is basically rubber and aluminum powder. The shuttle does burn a lot of H2 but the main propellant is solid.
Remember the Hindenburg disaster? It was a hydrogen filled envelope that caught fire but the envelope was covered with guess what? Rubber and aluminum powder or "rocket fuel". All those flames and smoke you saw where the solid rocket fuel burning.
In the case of both the shuttle and the Hindenburg the hydrogen combustion was a minority of what was going on and in both cases mostly invisible o2/h2 combustion leaves no big visible fire ball and no smoke.
"How is adding more layers going to make anything faster?"
"Faster" is not the goal. Better machine utilization is. In the Windows PC world sysadmins know that loading multiple functions all running on the same machine is inviting trouble and can crash Windows so they spread their servers out. This allows the admin to consolidate the servers back into one machine by running multiple copies of the Windows OS on one server. He gets the stability gain of running one task on a box biox he stops wasting so many boxes.
The other use for VMs is so you can run multiple OSes at the same time on the same machine. But this is something developers, testers and suport people like to do and may as well be done using VMWare on a host OS.
My statement the you can not disprove my claim to have created the universe myself was actually in SUPPORT of Creationism. Logically if you could disprove my claim you also disprove all Creationist claims. You can't disprove my claim.
I don't argue against Creationism. I argue against those who do not differentiate between faith and science. The big difference of course is that science makes FALSIFIABLE claims while faith is a believe in some claim even in the face of good reasons not to. The mainstream view is that they address different non overlapping areas of concern
Back on topic. I think the correct answer is that the the linage of hominids branched many times and all branches but us died out. Scientest can sort out the shape of the tree and will get it closer and closer to being correct as more data are collected but they will never know exactly because some data are missing
Did you know that if you break of the head of a gizillion wooden matches and stuff them into a glass bottle you cam make a rocket? Well maybe. But on the other hand you will likely loose both eyes and both hands trying to get this to work.
What other great advice can we post... Here's one. Remember you mother telling you not to cross the street if you see a car coming? Here a loop hole. Close your eyes. If you cover your eyes you will never see a car coming so it will be OK to cross the street.
I've heard you can put a cigarette out by dunking it in a cup on gasoline. If you do it fast enough the gas will suck the heat out of the flame before the cigarette has time to vaporize and ignite the gas. It's all about timing and being quick.
Five out of six Russian Roulette players "win". Your changes are pretty good.
Compared to the above the laser trick sounds safe. Blind in one eye is not nearly so bad as being covered with burning gasoline or a bullet through the head,