Comment Re:Always be wary of extrapolating (Score 1) 397
The right story to cite is Robert Heinlein's "The year of the jackpot". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Year_of_the_Jackpot
Comment Re:Why? (Score 1) 50
Note from the history at http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/rational/library/04/r-3190/the_role_of_enterprise_generation_language.pdf, the origin of EGL (once called 4GL) goes back to the 1980s.
Comment RIP (Score 1) 1613
He truly made the world a better place.
Comment Re:I really really hope this is appealed (Score 1) 473
You really don't want that....SCOTUS will likely rule that only corporations can legally record public officials.
Comment Re:Easy reason (Score 1) 533
Good summary - the admins come off as the worst kind of detail-oriented bureaucrats.
Comment Re:But has it increased by 25%? (Score 1) 317
If 50% of the accidents are caused by men, does that mean men shouldn't be allowed to drive? There are standards in the scientific community for how to do valid prospective and retrospective studies. You can then measure whether using or not using something actually increases (or not) your probability of experiencing the undesirable event.
Submission + - DHS Admits Knowledge Of Infected Technology (fastcompany.com)
smitty777 writes: Deputy Undersecretary Schaffer of the DHS National Protection and Programs Directorate confessed to being aware of foreign technology that had been imported with spyware, malware, and other security risks. According to the article, "More worryingly, the hearing specifically mentioned hardware components as possibly being compromised--which raises the questions of whether, perhaps, something as innocuous as Flash memory or embedded RFID chips could be used by interested foreign parties."
These hearings were held on July 7th to "examine the nature and extent of the current threat to America's infrastructure.
These hearings were held on July 7th to "examine the nature and extent of the current threat to America's infrastructure.
Submission + - Facebook trapped in MySQL 'fate worse than death' (gigaom.com) 1
wasimkadak writes: According to database pioneer Michael Stonebraker, Facebook is operating a huge, complex MySQL implementation equivalent to “a fate worse than death,” and the only way out is “bite the bullet and rewrite everything.”
Not that it’s necessarily Facebook’s fault, though. Stonebraker says the social network’s predicament is all too common among web startups that start small and grow to epic proportions.
Not that it’s necessarily Facebook’s fault, though. Stonebraker says the social network’s predicament is all too common among web startups that start small and grow to epic proportions.
Comment Re:No subsidies! (Score 1) 94
Leave it to the private sector.
Comment No subsidies! (Score 1) 94
Congress will immediately begin cutting the budget for all intra-stellar mass transit.
Comment What is included? (Score 3, Funny) 52
Is there a $25 baggage check fee?
Comment absolute value? (Score 3, Insightful) 168
Perhaps some of the knowledge broadcast has a negative value, so the absolute value of the knowledge broadcast is high, but the net information distributed is much smaller?
Comment Re:This is research? (Score 1) 81
Very few studies of software as it is and as it runs.
Try http://www.research.ibm.com/people/n/nickmitchell/publications/lcsd2005.pdf to a paper called "Diary of a Datum" and http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1297046 to another paper called "The causes of bloat, the limits of health". Both describe studies of large running applications in situ.
Full disclosure - I work for IBM Research and these papers were by folks in my department.
Comment Please reply to this /. post by... (Score 1) 252
owl
Comment Babbage Difference Engine at the CHM (Score 1) 127
It isn't the analytical engine, but it works ... today ... and can be seen at the Computer History Museum in the SF Bay Area. http://www.computerhistory.org/babbage/
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They are called computers simply because computation is the only significant job that has so far been given to them.
