commercial suicide

From the results paper: "Part of Ardilla's implementation depends on modifications to the open-source Zend interpreter...made (for a different purpose) by a student while he was an intern at IBM. We have since made many more modifications, but since the original small diffs are owned by IBM, we cannot release either those original modifications or our later work that builds on them...It would be valuable for someone to re-implement the original changes, so that we could release our entire system as we would prefer. "

How would these changes be "re-implemented" - would the code have to be re-engineered, or would a trawl through the original code (patching in changes verbatim) be acceptable? Otherwise, would somebody have to find alternative syntax for implementing the same functionality? Barrel of worms methinks.

China has saved ~50% GDP for many years, USA has saved very little. This space race is unlikely to swing America's way; don't look over your shoulder, it's the sky that's watching...

Can't say it better than Key Trends in Globalisation does http://tinyurl.com/dkmdht

Therefore adding domestic and international savings together gives a lower bound for the real value of China's savings, using official exchange rates, of $1,110 billion and a probable upper bound, using PPP figures, equivalent to $1,938 billion. This equates to savings rates for China of 56 per cent, if official exchange rates are used, and 50 per cent if a PPP exchange rate is used.

If even the lower figure is taken, that is 50 per cent of GDP, a necessary corollary is that China's total savings in absolute terms will be as large as those of the US when its economy is only half the size of that of the US. If the higher percentage is used then China's total savings will exceed those of the US before it is half the size of the US economy.

It may, therefore, already be the case that China's total savings have reached in absolute terms those of the US. More probably its savings are still somewhat lower than those of the US in absolute terms but they are already approaching it.

While China's GDP will not overtake that of the US in absolute terms for some time, China has therefore either already overtaken the US as the world's greatest source of finance for investment or will do so in a relatively short time frame.

Superpowers, ready? On your marks, get set...

I am far more keen on the traditional digital examination thanks.

During those couple of hours the site is running from a degraded RAID array and the only backup is on the way to a remote storage area. Table locking may be an issue with very large data sets, but there are still solutions: using a redundant server with block level replication (DRBD) the replication can be paused and a backup taken while there is no disk or database I/O. A "re-sync" of even very large disks is much faster to restore than a RAID rebuild due to block level meta data stored on the disks by DRBD.