Comment Re:Tannenbaum's predictions... (Score 1) 136
X86 went away fifteen years ago. Every "x86" COU built since the last 1990s runs an x86 layer, but underneath is a very different bear.
X86 went away fifteen years ago. Every "x86" COU built since the last 1990s runs an x86 layer, but underneath is a very different bear.
At the time, the closest the DOS world had to multitasking was TSRs. Beside my first PC was my CoCo 3 with OS/9 level 2 with 512k of RAM with a true preemptive multitasking kernel running on an 8 but 6809 CPU. Microsoft's dominance at the time meant in many ways the most common 16 bit opposing system in the world was only marginally better than a CPM machine from 1980.
Retaliation for Spying: Germany Asks CIA Official to Leave Country
Initially, there had been talk of a formal expulsion of the CIA employee, who is officially accredited as the so-called chief of station and is responsible for the US intelligence service's activities in Germany. A short time later, the government backpedalled and said it had only recommended that he leave. Although it cannot be compared with a formal explusion, it remains an unfriendly gesture.
On a diplomatic level, it is no less than an earthquake and represents a measure that until Thursday would have only been implemented against pariah states like North Korea or Iran. It also underscores just how deep tensions have grown between Berlin and Washington over the spying affair.
The USA's response has been something along the lines of "you expected us not to conducting traditional spying activities?"
This is nonsense. Computers generate programs they weren't designed to produce all the time.
There's a very beginner-approachable book on the topic called "Blondie24: Playing at the Edge of AI."
This "challenge" was passed by Claude Shannon in the 60s.
The F18 is 30 years old, which is like 120 in fighter aircraft years. We flew the F-86 Saber only 20 years, the F-4 phantom flew 20 (as a fighter), and these are the grey beards of the fighter world from the past. The F-18 is a fine platform, to be sure, but like it or not, it's getting really old for what it does.
Is your claim that the airframes are reaching their service life and need to be replaced by new builds, or are you claiming that an aircraft design undergoes some sort of senility independent of remaning service life?
Please explain why, for example, a new build F-15 or F-18, with 21st century enhancements, would be in adequate to do its job today if that is your argument.
I see your point, but I don't think we have time to develop anything else.
OK - I'll bite. Why not?
Is there a major war scheduled we don't want to be late for?
Is there an enemy superpower that will outstrip us militarily in a meaningful way if we don't get this plane fielded ASAP?
We really have no viable choice but to fly the F-35 for now so we need these planes in production.
It was already argued that we could buy other NATO aircraft that are in production. This option is "viable" even if the U.S. Senators prefer to keep the pork at home.
Minix was really the first of its kind; a Unix-like OS that you could run on cheap (relatively speaking at the time) commodity hardware and that you could get the source code for. A lot of the computing we take for granted now comes from Tanenbaum's work.
My first Minix install was on a 386-SX with a whopping 4mb of RAM I borrowed from work back in the early 1990s. I quickly abandoned Minix for Linux once it came out, but for several years I had Minix running on an old 386 laptop just for fun.
I really miss the good old days when technical debates were over the merits and faults of such simple things as different kinds of kernels, and not about whether or not every single thing you do online is being stacked into half a dozen nation's permanent data storage facilities.
The Linus vs. Tanenbaum dustup is from a simpler, more positive age.
Nobody builds Chernobyl-type reactors any more. That simply can't happen with most reactors.
And you don't think they said that older reactors 'simply cant fail' when they built them?
(b) there was this tsunami that killed twenty-five thousand people going on, disrupting a whole lot of things.
Wait, if the reactor can't fail, why are you bringing up environmental/situational issues? It shouldn't matter...
My point is you can't tell me the issues that will be faced in the future and therefore can't claim a nuclear reactor is 'safe'.
The 'potential' liability of nuclear is far far far greater than anything else. Operational issues are relevant and coal has many bad things about it...but it simply can't fail catastrophically. A plant can blow up, a waste lake can collapse and flood a single valley. Both sites you can safely walk on the very next day. Nuclear can't do that....and won't every be able to do that.
And as I've said in other posts, nuclear is going to be absolutely required for the next century or so...simply because the scale of climate change damage dwarfs even nuclear's problems. Being the lesser of two evils doesn't make it less 'evil'.
He said ice sheet. So we're supposed to ignore what he actually said and assume he meant something completely different? Um, no.
"I am not well read in this department" - wait a minute, you can give exact cites for research papers on sea ice, but don't even have a *general* conception of what percentage of the Antarctic ice sheet is gaining versus what is losing? Something tells me you're just grabbing cites you've never even read from denier websites.
Let me help you out with ice sheet. Pretty much all of the East Antarctic ice sheet is gaining, while pretty much the only area losing is the Antarctic peninsula and surrounding areas in West Antarctica. Now, they're losing *mass* a lot faster per unit area than the east is gaining mass, but in terms of area, the overwhelming majority of Antarctica is gaining ice. Because it almost never gets above freezing there, even in a warming world.
The 2010 paper was evaluating the failed CMIP5 predictions
If you'd actually read the paper, which you clearly haven't, you'd know that they themselves did the CMIP5 runs, it's not CMIP5 runs that had been done earlier. Do you even have a clue what CMIP5 stands for? Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5. As in, "there were four freaking phases that came before this one". CMIP5 is comprised of all of the latest models from all over the world. They didn't even start planning CMIP5 unitl September 2008. Your notion that this is some sort of review of old climate predictions just shows how terrible your understanding is of what you're talking about and how you don't actually read the papers that you cite, that you're just simply grabbing them from whatever denialist trash websites you read.
First, that's a paper from 2010. How was a paper from 2010 supposed to be "predicting" anything about what scientists in the past thought?
Secondly, and more importantly, I had been responding to Archangel Michael, who was talking about the thickness of the Antarctic ice sheet, not Antarctic sea ice. So your link about pack ice is totally irrelevant.
But hey, let's switch topics totally and talk about sea ice, since you seem to want to. Here's how the IPCC sums up all papers on the modelling of antarctic sea ice, including this one:
Whereas sea ice extent in the Arctic has decreased, sea ice extent in the Antarctic has very likely increased. Sea ice extent across the Southern Hemisphere over the year as a whole increased by 1.3– 1.67% per decade from 1979–2012 with the largest increase in the Ross Sea during the autumn, while sea ice extent decreased in the Amundsen-Bellingshausen Sea. The observed upward trend in Antarctic sea ice extent is found to be inconsistent with internal variability based on the residuals from a linear trend fitted to the observations, though this approach could underestimate multi-decadal variability. The CMIP5 simulations on average simulate a decrease in Antarctic sea ice extent , though Turner et al. (2013) find that approximately 10% of CMIP5 simulations exhibit an increasing trend in Antarctic sea ice extent larger than observed over the 1979-2005 period. However, Antarctic sea ice extent variability appears on average to be too large in the CMIP5 models . Overall, the shortness of the observed record and differences in simulated and observed variability preclude an assessment of whether or not the observed increase in Antarctic sea ice extent is inconsistent with internal variability. Based on Figure 10.16b and (Meehl et al., 2007b), the trend of Antarctic sea ice loss in simulations due to changes in forcing is weak (relative to the Arctic) and the internal variability is high, and thus the time necessary for detection is longer than in the Arctic.
Weak trend, short observed record, and high internal variability in the simulations. Which shouldn't be surprising, sea ice is a lot harder to model than ice sheet thickness, which really only has three main parameters - snowfall, melt/sublimation, and outflow, and the short observed record is due to how few people historically have navigated antarctic waters vs. arctic.
But again, to reiterate the primary point: the conversation you jumped into was about ice sheet thickness, not sea ice.
It is actually the intrusiveness that bothers people. Most people don't really care if they are recorded, as long as it isn't obvious and in their face. Not many people are bothered by store security cameras, etc.
The difference is that we know what a store security camera is going to do with the recording: record over it in XY days.
We don't know what [random glasshole] is going to do with the recording they make of us.
So it really doesn't matter what the recorder's unspoken intent is, what causes discomfort is the recordee's uncertainty.
Forget the fact that once the oil's gone the wealth remaining in the region will leach away as there's so few people (though it'll take a very long time).
Dubai and the other Emirates are acutely aware of the limits to their oil reserves.
They've been very busy turning their States into financial and trade hubs for the Arabian Peninsula,
with plenty of free trade zones (no taxes on corporate income) in order to draw in international corporations.
My advice: Bilk Dubai for all its worth now, because in 50 years it'll be a distant memory of largesse gone awry by modern standards.
Your advice is wrong.
Abu Dhabi is the 800 lb gorilla in the UAE and has the 2nd largest sovereign wealth fund in the world.
As long as Dubai's royal family goes along with Abu Dhabi's Sheikh, Dubai can keep borrowing money until the end of time.
/The last time Dubai needed cash, they had to reform some laws as a condition set by Abu Dhabi.
I'm sorry, I just read through that paper, and nowhere in it does it say that a decline in Antarctic ice is a forecast of AGW. That's one of the worst examples of "proof by ghost reference" I've ever seen. Not to mention that the paper is mainly focused on the Antarctic Peninsula, the one place that actually gets melt on more than super-rare occasions and juts into a different climate zone.
One possible reason that things aren't going according to plan is that there never was a plan in the first place.
