I bet you didnt know that

Bandana boy

Mandarins are a class of Orange that includes Tangerines , Clementines and Satsuma's

So all Satsumas are Mandarins but not all Mandarins are Satsuma's

jimgoose

Persephone kindness wrote: »

Your computer can commit suicide if you give it one simple command.

Any computer going back decades will drop dead given a suitable Touch of Death. For example, a Sinclair ZX Spectrum from 1982:

POKE 23659,0

Any machine running Solaris:

echo "rootdir/W 0" | adb -k

...and so on. Most old-ish IBM mainframes can be made to shit themselves using evil FORTRAN negative array indices to write a negative number to the Program Counter CPU register.

Persephone kindness

jimgoose wrote: »

Any computer going back decades will drop dead given a suitable Touch of Death. For example, a Sinclair ZX Spectrum from 1982:

POKE 23659,0

Any machine running Solaris:

echo "rootdir/W 0" | adb -k

...and so on. Most old-ish IBM mainframes can be made to shit themselves using evil FORTRAN negative array indices to write a negative number to the Program Counter CPU register.

I feel powerful.

jimgoose

Persephone kindness wrote: »

I feel powerful.

Yes, that's it - use your hate!

Tell me how

jimgoose wrote:

This gentleman is Seymour Roger Cray:

Now that's a post worth reading.

jimgoose

Tell me how wrote: »

Now that's a post worth reading.

I'm glad you thought so. You might also enjoy the free-verse ballad of Mel Kaye, Real Programmer(TM) and a contemporary of Cray's:

http://catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html

Lilmiss82

Dolphins can commit suicide

Capt'n Midnight

To get a Vax to keel over you get a batch file to keep submitting itself as a batch job. some thing like submit /NOLOG_FILE s.bat

other than that Vaxen can easily have stupid uptimes
http://comp.os.vms.narkive.com/vX4kcOkk/the-uptimes-project-vms-does-very-well

The Irish National Railway story is not a legend. It was a Customer
who's OpenVMS application (controlling railway switching as I recall)
was continuously available for 17 years. One of the Customer reps from
this site talked about it during one of the OpenVMS events.

As I recall, (and memory may be fading), they ran a dual VAX 750 with
shared IO peripherals.

Capt'n Midnight

jimgoose wrote: »

As some Unknown Soldier once said,

Dead Men Do Tell Tales: The Strange and Fascinating Cases of a Forensic Anthropologist is a book worth reading sometime.

Anyway it's got a bit about where they were trying to identify the corpses from the Vietnam War. One was chosen by the powers that be to be the "Unknown Soldier" against the wishes of the forensic guy who reckoned that given more time he'd be able to identify him.

jimgoose

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

To get a Vax to keel over you get a batch file to keep submitting itself as a batch job. some thing like submit /NOLOG_FILE s.bat

other than that Vaxen can easily have stupid uptimes
http://comp.os.vms.narkive.com/vX4kcOkk/the-uptimes-project-vms-does-very-well

That's the VMS equivalent of a forkbomb.

Thargor

jimgoose wrote: »

This gentleman is Seymour Roger Cray:

[IMG]This is the man largely responsible for the multi-core, multi-threaded supercomputer in your pocket, and indeed the whole mainframe/supercomputer scene as we know it today. He was an electrical engineer by trade, born in the sleepy town of Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin in 1925. After cutting his teeth at Engineering Research Associates of Minnesota and aspects of the design of various UNIVAC models, Cray eventually designed and built the Control Data Corporation (CDC) model 6600 in 1963, recognised as the first true "supercomputer" device. He followed this up not too long after with the CDC 7600, which was five times faster again. Cray's genius in both digital and analog electrical design and engineering enabled him to consider all manner of aspects to computer design, primarily focused on keeping the processors "fed" with data. This included such strokes as ensuring that every electrical signal path on his machines' circuit boards was exactly the same length, thus eliminating such timing problems as clock-skew. As he said himself, "Anyone can build a fast CPU. The trick is to build a fast system.". This machine caused some consternation at IBM, who despite their massive resources weren't able to get within an ass's roar of it in speed terms. As Thomas J. Watson Jr. put it, "I understand that in the laboratory developing the system there are only 34 people including the janitor." In 1972 Cray left Control Data to found Cray Research. In 1976, he came up with this:[/img][IMG]That is a Cray-1 supercomputer, a vector-processing machine that absolutely trounced everything else in the Universe, sold to the NCAR for €8.8m and launched the superstar-status of Cray machines insofar as countries started falling over themselves to get into the "Cray Club", i.e. to host a Cray supercomputer installation somewhere in their territories. He followed this up with the Cray-2 (which used artificial blood in it's cooling system, which you could see via transparent channels in the machine's outer "skin", prompting some to wonder if the thing was alive in some way!) and the commercial failure Cray-3, although the latter being an engineering marvel in itself. Here's a Cray-2:[/img][IMG]By the 1990s a number of massively-parallel machines had been commissioned, which offered a price/performance ratio that even the mighty Cray could not touch. Recognising this Seymour, who had hitherto resisted massively-parallel designs ("If you were plowing a field, which would you rather use: Two strong oxen or 1024 chickens?") set up SRC Computers to concentrate on a new generation of designs. He intended to bring his legendary know-how to the sticky-wicket of effective communication between multiple parallel CPUs and memory/IO subsystems, but unfortunately was killed in a road accident in 1996, aged 71. Cray Research Inc. lives on, and four of the top ten supercomputer installations in the World bear the name of the great man. He had a tunnel in progress under his house, and when struck by the engineer's equivalent of Writer's Block, he would retreat under the house and dig. He said elves would appear in due course and offer solutions to whatever intractable problem had been eluding him. Seymour hadn't much time for either operating systems or programmers. Once more, as he said himself: "The trouble with programmers is that you can never tell what a programmer is doing until it's too late!" "Memory is like an orgasm - it's much better if you don't have to fake it." Farewell Seymour - I presume wherever you are now, things are running a whole[/img]fuckton faster. :cool:

Mad that the Cray-1 was as powerful as an Ipad 2 according to Wiki, it must have seemed God-like to any researcher that needed it back then.

valoren

The earth is 4.6 billion years old. Scaling to 46 years, 'we' have been here 4 hours, the industrial revolution began 1 minute ago, and in that time, we’ve destroyed more than half of the world’s forests.

StupidLikeAFox

Lilmiss82 wrote: »

Dolphins can commit suicide

Please elaborate!

Capt'n Midnight

For most of earth's history the oceans were a dirty brown colour.

steddyeddy

N2

---

> 2NH3 or the conversion of nitrogen gas to the solid form ammonia is essential to all life. We need nitrogen to make amino acids which are the building blocks of proteins.

We can't do this and rely on micro organisms to do it for us. Like all biological reactions they use enzymes (biological catalysts) which catalyse the reaction. The enzyme involved is called nitrogenase. One of the most important molecules on the planet.

Enzymes can perform chemistry far far in advance of some of the chemistry we can manage in industrial settings. For example the Harber process is used to convert nitrogen gas to solid ammonia in industry. The bond between two nitrogens is one of the strongest in nature and requires the reaction to be performed at several hundred atmospheres and hundreds of degrees. The enzyme nitrogenase catalyses the same reaction at one atmosphere and ambient temperatures.

Enzymes fascinate me. They use a combination of quantum mechanics, simple chemistry and enzyme dynamics to sustain life. They replicate DNA, they break down glucose, they can reform glucose, break down fats or synthesis complex molecules. Another enzyme called carbonic anhydrase converts CO2 in the blood (co2 in the blood isn't good it can become carbonic acid and lower the PH) into bicarbonate. It does this at a rate of one million molecules per second.

steddyeddy

The honey bee, apis mellifera is one of the most interesting animals. A colony of honey bees can contain tens of thousands of bees. Amongst the bees are workers (females), a few males and a queen. The queen can live up to twenty times longer than the workers, she has no sting, no wax gland or no pollen baskets. She is near to double the size of a worker bee. Worker bees live for weeks yet the queen lives fo years. The interesting thing is she is genetically identical to thousands of her sisters since birth yet develops completely differently to them.

The queen might mate with several males and as a result not all bees will be genetically identical to each other but the hive will contain tens of thousands of genetical identical bees. All of these genetically identical larvae will be fed royal jelly from the nurse bees up to their third day of life. Then something mysterious happens, for some reason as of yet unknown to scientists, the nurse bees select some of the larvae (for reasons as yet unknown) which are indentical to their sisters and continue to feed them royal jelly after the third day. The rest of the larvae are fed pollen and nectar and develop into worker bees. The larvae fed on royal jelly develop into queen bees.

Only recently has the mechanisim behind this been elucidated. Royal jelly is a strange highly nutritious substance containing amino acids, strange fats and some as of yet uknown substances. This substance causes methylation of the bee's DNA (the addition of a carbon and three hydrogens to one of the DNA bases) this causes some of the genes to shut off and other genes to turn off. Hence one substance causes a complete change in the phenotype (the genotype is the actual list genes contained in the organism but the phenotype is the expression of those genes) of that animal.

Kat1170

steddyeddy wrote: »

The queen might mate with several males and as a result not all bees will be genetically identical to each other but the hive will contain tens of thousands of genetical identical bees. All of these genetically identical larvae will be fed royal jelly from the nurse bees up to their third day of life. Then something mysterious happens, for some reason as of yet unknown to scientists, the nurse bees select some of the larvae (for reasons as yet unknown) which are indentical to their sisters and continue to feed them royal jelly after the third day. The rest of the larvae are fed pollen and nectar and develop into worker bees. The larvae fed on royal jelly develop into queen bees.

Well obviously being an advanced form of life, like ourselves (sic), they use the scientifically proven Sting Theory formula,

"Eeny, meeny, miny, moe"? :pac:

Capt'n Midnight

steddyeddy wrote: »

N2

---

> 2NH3 or the conversion of nitrogen gas to the solid form ammonia is essential to all life.

Ammonia is a gas that's very soluble in water.

They used to make it down in Arklow and send it by train to the Asahi factory in Mayo. It's quite toxic. Worst case scenario for a train crash would be to kill everything within a quarter mile. People, animals, grass. So needless to say they used to ship it through Dublin at night.


More nitrogen is fixed by Humans using the Harber process than by plants.

And one of the best ways to block nitrogen run off from excess fertilizer use for going downstream is to get some beavers on the job.

Chancer3001

StupidLikeAFox wrote: »

Please elaborate!

Well all animals can commit suicide I guess


But with dolphins they have to come to the surface to breath. And if they live in captivity and are suffering, sometimes they just "don't bother" and suffocate to death/drown instead

It was in that documentary The Cove

Senna

Chancer3001 wrote: »

Well all animals can commit suicide I guess


But with dolphins they have to come to the surface to breath. And if they live in captivity and are suffering, sometimes they just "don't bother" and suffocate to death/drown instead

It was in that documentary The Cove

One of the main dolphins used for the tv series Flipper committed suicide "on set" as it couldn't take the performing and captivity.

Chancer3001

Yeah that's the narrative given by the trainer...

But ya know...

The dolphin might have just died. All animals die

cdeb

Maybe it just fled the planet.

Anyone found a crystal bowl yet?

New Home

cdeb wrote: »

Maybe it just fled the planet.

Anyone found a crystal bowl yet?

Or a note that said "So long and thanks for all the fish"?

(Sorry, I couldn't resist)

cdeb

Zat's the joke...

stimpson

If identical twin brothers marry identical twin sisters then the offspring of both couples are genetically siblings, although legally they are first cousins.

Persephone kindness

stimpson wrote: »

If identical twin brothers marry identical twin sisters then the offspring of both couples are genetically siblings, although legally they are first cousins.

Is that real? THAT IS INTERESTING!

IvyTheTerrible

stimpson wrote: »

If identical twin brothers marry identical twin sisters then the offspring of both couples are genetically siblings, although legally they are first cousins.

My great-grandmother and her identical twin sister married identical twins...

RiderOnTheStorm

To go back to the computer AI subject (just for a min, as I am only catching up now), I heard that a test used for determining intelligence, is for a computer to be able to differentiate a cat from a dog.
A 2nd test is to be able to tell the true subject in the sentence "I saw a nice bike in the shop window, and I am going to buy it". The "it" here is the bike.... But a computer will identify "it" as the window.

Lastly, a joke....
A programmers wife asked him to go to the shops and get a litre of milk, and if they have fresh eggs, get 6. The programmer did as he was asked and returned with six litres of milk. The wife asked why he got 6 litres of milk, he replied "because the eggs were fresh".

Using a diet mixer with your drink gets you 27% drunker than if you use a non diet mixer. Reason being that the diet mixer passes through the stomach much faster due to the lack of calories and brings the alcohol with it.

alchemist33

The UK government's COBRA commitee (called after terrorist incidents etc) might sound like an agency from a Bond movie but it's actually called after where the meetings happen: Cabinet Office, BoardRoom A