Re: Expensive part
What this world needs is a really solid $1 supercomputer.
185 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Nov 2014
It seems enormously unlikely that something like this exists in isolation, if only because the skills and techniques had to be developed through simpler predecessors. Even Babbage's Difference Engine, huge advance that it was, did not appear out of thin air, and it had a number of successors.
Were they just very few of these? Were they not preserved well?
Or are there other examples that have just been missed, mistaken for lumps of mud and rock?
"Are you the International Alliance of Atheists?"
"F*ck off! We're the Atheist International Alliance!"
"Wait, I thought we were the International Atheism Alliance?"
"No, they split years ago. By the way, whatever happened to the International Atheism Alliance?"
"He's over there."
(All) "Splitter!"
"Random internet person thinks he understands financial law better than highly experienced judge who write 100-page opinion citiing authorities, statute, and precedent".
What is with some people that they think they can just wake up, fall out of bed, and pronounce on complex matters of law?
The combination of the large size of the error *and* the fact that it was the exact amount due is critical here. Neither part *by itself* sets a precedent, dangerous or otherwise. Indeed, the judge relied strongly on *existing* precedent.
The relevant New York law says that a transaction made in error is not reversible iff
(a) It is (or appears to be) payment in full for a debt that is owed
and
(b) The receiving bank has done "due diligence" to verify that the payment was correctly made
So the size of the loan is not the important thing by itself, but rather its supports the receiving banks' belief that it couldn't possibly be a mistake, i.e. it is one part of satisfying (b). Several of the banks also checked with each other to see if they had also been paid and when the answer came back yes, said to each other "Welp, I guess Revlon refinanced with somebody else". And the judge said that was a reasonable inference under *all* the circumstances, size included.
Not that complicated. A big chunk of the revenue in the Systems business is driven by z (mainframe) sales. Whenever a new z machine is released there is a massive spike in revenue as buyers rush to the new machine. The following quarter there is typically a smaller but still significant spike in mainframe-attached storage. And as that machine generation ages, demand declines... until the next release and the next spike.
So if you want to understand what is happening in the rest of the Systems business - primarily Storage and Power - you need to factor out the extremely cyclical z impact.
If the author is American, "could care less" is exactly what they meant. The phrase has a universally understood meaning in American English that decades ago diverged from the literal meaning of the words taken out of this context. "Understanding what the phrase should really mean".
Fun fact: I have a list of things called "More Wrong", where the people correcting others are actually incorrect. This is on the list
Um, actually... "the hoi polloi" is correct English.
Yes, "hoi polloi" means "the people" in Greek. However, we are not speaking Greek, and the phrase "hoi polloi" has been thoroughly assimilated into English entirely independently of the grammar of its Greek source. And "hoi" does not mean "the" in English. Hence, "the hoi polloi". That's how languages work.
For the same reason, the plural of "octopus" is "octopuses" and not "octopodes".
Fun fact: it's a common misconception that "prove" in "the exception proves the rule" really means test.
The original, original meaning comes from lawyers, in particular the Latin phrase "exceptio probat regulam in casibus non exceptis" - the last part meaning "in cases not excepted". When a sign says something like "Parking is allowed between midnight and 5am", this exception "proves" that there is a general rule against parking there; otherwise, why would there be a need to state the exception?
There, isn't that fun?
Is anybody genuinely surprised that the big are getting bigger? The cloud business is ideally suited to favor economies of scale. And like enterprise software business in the days of on-prem software, it's almost inevitable that you'll get 3 (in this case 4 because of geography and geopolitics) big winners and a host of distantly-trailing niche vendors. Look at the evolution of the markets for relational databases, Linux distros, application servers, ERP/CRM suites, and any number of other software markets...
:=
)
That's assuming they are using the formal definition of EB as decimal quantities. If they are using the technically incorrect but widely adopted practice of using EB, PB and TB as binary quantities then 1 EB = 1024 PB etc. Once you get up to PBs and EBs it starts to make a material difference...
There was a court case in the US some years ago regarding consumer storage that established that when the packaging said "MB", buyers had a reasonable expectation that this meant 1024 GBs (and so on down).
...or they might be wanting this data so that they can comply with Federal law that requires them to collect it, and so that they can verify they aren't discriminating *against* anybody.
No brownie points or imaginary preferential hiring required to explain it.
But it's fascinating how easily trigged the "anti-PC" crowd are by anything that challenges their privilege.
That was the first system I worked on professionally, close to 40 years ago. I was an apprentice programmer at Satchwell Control Systems writing very bad code for a building management system. We developed under ISIS and cross-compiled to RMX, if memory serves.
The offices were in Slough, just on the fringe of the famous Slough Trading Estate, and at the time we were a subsidiary of GEC.
I remember a lot of excitement about the potential for MAID about three years ago, but then everything seemed to go quiet. As I recall, one of the concerns was that repeatedly powering drives up and down would shorten their lives significantly.
Since Microsoft is talking about this publicly again, I assume something significant has changed. Perhaps what they asked of the drive manufacturers was disks that can sustain the power cycling better?
The EAC is a pretty fascinating example. Although it started out as a trading company, and was certainly a very large corporation in every formal sense, before long it was hard to tell the difference between it and a country in its own right. It controlled a huge amount of trade, established rule in India (laying the foundation for the British Raj), and even fought wars with its French counterpart. Real wars, I mean, not just trade wars.
From Wiki: "By 1803, at the height of its rule in India, the British East India company had a private army of about 260,000—twice the size of the British Army. The company eventually came to rule large areas of India with its private armies, exercising military power and assuming administrative functions."
There are probably fascinating parallels to be drawn between the EAC and companies such as Facebook or Google, but I leave that as an exercise for people smarter than I.