Comments for Engineering Reality

Comment on Equip your server with cheap 128+GB RAM that preserves application state upon restart by Nikola Toshev

Thu, 03 May 2007 05:26:42 +0000

If you write back from DRAM to Flash once a minute on average (update all memory once a minute, if you use memory evenly), you have at least two years life before you need to replace the flash.

Comment on Equip your server with cheap 128+GB RAM that preserves application state upon restart by Bill W. Davis

Thu, 03 May 2007 01:19:58 +0000

Doesn’t flash ram wear out after so many writes? If you use a higher end RAID, you could mitigate that, but how often would you have to replace your memory?

Comment on Equip your server with cheap 128+GB RAM that preserves application state upon restart by Ryan

Wed, 02 May 2007 20:14:13 +0000

You can already buy solid state drives from companies like sandisk, samsung, and trancend up to about 32GB online but the cost is around $16.50+/GB

Comment on The Microsoft Religion by Nikola Toshev

Fri, 09 Mar 2007 03:34:12 +0000

I totally understand Microsoft is expected to maximize profits, and I don’t think it is a bad thing. I am just saying it is not the type of thing that would create a cult following, if the audience are not all Microsoft shareholders.

Comment on The Microsoft Religion by Derek

Thu, 08 Mar 2007 19:02:08 +0000

I really like this article, save for the typos. It presents a good balance. However, I never have understood people that make this statement:
…they act out of selfish commercial interest…

Microsoft is a corporation, owned by shareholders. Their existance is defined as that towards increasing shareholder profits - a truly American thing, similar to freedom. Is it not a bit over the top to indicate that acting according to one’s corporate model is a ’selfish’ act?

MS is not an open source project nor an open source community. Comparing it to such and calling that selfish is not a fair assessment. Comparing the quality and consistency of MS and open source products is something you have done well in this article.

Comment on Language errors by Митко

Mon, 31 Jul 2006 15:00:00 +0000

ъъ таковата.. оправи “затепайките”

Comment on Why programmers write things like “if (myBoolVar==true) {…” by Nikola Toshev

Tue, 11 Jul 2006 19:31:20 +0000

I also agree with you only partially

E=m.c^2 has straightforward interpretation, for example it is used to calculate the energy released in the process of nuclear fission - you substract the sum of the produced nuclei from the mass of the initial U235 nucleus, and convert the difference in energy. Actually, see the wikipeia article if you want:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E%3Dmc2

I am not a matematician myself, but I believe mathematicians who really contribute to the science have very good intuition about their domains. They gain intuitition about how things would be first, verify it with examples, then try to proove it.

I agree some steps or even results can be mechanical. But I am not sure how this translates in programming.

Comment on Summer School in Cognitive science by Nikola Toshev

Tue, 11 Jul 2006 19:09:35 +0000

No, unfortunately they are not that flexible. But slides will be posted online at the address I linked to.

Comment on Summer School in Cognitive science by Developing Intelligence

Mon, 10 Jul 2006 22:23:11 +0000

This looks like a great summer program.

Be sure to post about any papers/talks that were particularly good.

Also, do you think your department would allow you to videotape the lectures? It would be great to post them on google video.

Comment on Why programmers write things like “if (myBoolVar==true) {…” by Peter

Sun, 09 Jul 2006 13:39:32 +0000

I don’t completely agree.
Let’s take Mathematics for example. There was a highly respected professor in Sofia University and you probably know him, who used to say that Maths is a very simple thing - a matter of simple text processing. You take a formula or two, you make several modifications, combining the formulas in the process and you reach a new formula.
Most times the semantics of the starting points and the final result are clear. Still, it is hard or even impossible to define the semantics of some of the intermediate results and it is rarely necessary to do so - you use these intermediate results in a purely syntactical manner. Precisely “text processing”.
Moreover, often even the starting points and the final result cannot be interpreted well in a semantical way. For example, how do you interpret E=m.c^2? For whose sake would the speed of light be related to the enegry? Or what is the meaning behind the fact that a^n = b^n + c^n has no solution in whole numbers, except when n=2?
So, sometimes, to reach a strong result, you actually have to stop thinking in a purely semantical way and just let syntax manipulations flow in.
And the same goes for programming - if you do try to perceive semantically every single operation you put in your code, you would hardly be able to reach strong results, as in Mathematics. Sometimes you just have to rely on syntactical equivalence.
I would say that the better programmer is not the one who operates in semantic mode all the time, but the one who understands the difference bethween semantics and syntax, who undersands whether in a situation he must operate in semantic mode or he may rely on syntactical thinking, and who dribbles with both of them correctly.