[FRIAM] naive question

Fri Oct 21 19:02:37 EDT 2022

As for "NeXT machine's software RIP", Rick Rashid, who was central in the
development of that software, was my office neighbor.  He left to take a
position at Microsoft as VP of Research.  I wonder if the software is
RIPing.

---
Frank C. Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
Santa Fe, NM 87505

505 670-9918
Santa Fe, NM

On Fri, Oct 21, 2022, 3:08 PM Steve Smith <sasmyth at swcp.com> wrote:

> FWIW,  I dipped into the higher levels of real-time-systems development
> several times in my career.  The earliest being a control system (circa
> 1981) for the LANL Proton Storage Ring where one naturally can't afford
> anything *but* failsafe implementations, etc. The stakes are just too
> 'ffing high and the coupling to electrooptomechanical systems quite
> intimate.
>
> The "digital" components of such systems might have had the opportunity
> to ignore timing issues and simply "execute the same steps" regardless
> of timing.  But in fact many software-driven (sub)systems represented
> time-critical processes and sometimes were up agains the timing limits
> of the analog components which had no leeway in their "execution".
>
> There are all kinds of analogies in federated (distributed) simulation
> environments which Glen (and others here) probably know much better than
> I, where different "clocks" matter, and different levels of
> synchronization and reproducibility are in play.   The Postscript
> interpreters, printers, and film recorders were also pseudo real-time
> systems since some of the timing components were in fact software
> controlled (for example, the film recorders were "stroke" devices with
> software driving D-A converters to "sweep" out vectors and "clip" the
> on/off of the beam with appropriate analog component delays/biases/gains
> needing to be calibrated for.   Fortunately failures in this step did
> not (usually) damage anyone or risk anyone's health and safety (like the
> beam in the PSR did).
>
> Regarding identity and equivalence, I prefer the phrase: "close enough
> for who it's for"...
>
>
> On 10/21/22 11:18 AM, glen wrote:
> > Ha! If we're going to argue about words, then let's stick with the
> > word "identity" and skip the "metaphor" nonsense. You and Frank seem
> > to be using the word in a weird way. Identity means "the exact same
> > particular thing over any differencing available" or somesuch. I mean,
> > it's used that way in phrases like "identity theft" as well as
> > mathematical identity. It's equivalence sets all the way down. I just
> > can't imagine any working computationalist would ever say anything
> > like "executed identically" unless ... well ... the exact same
> > process, with the exact same steps, happened.
> >
> > I suppose there are deep philosophical intuitions pried at by the
> > words "emulation" versus "simulation". And one can argue (again with
> > help from Christian List) about whether there exist fully closed
> > ontological walls like we try to create with things like Jails,
> > HyperV, Docker, VM's like Java's, etc. But "execute identically" is a
> > phrase that would only be used by someone who worked *way* above such
> > levels (assuming levels even exist at all). It's a bit like talking to
> > the kids programming websites these days, with access to infinite disk
> > space, infinite memory, steeped in continuous delivery, etc. [⛧]
> >
> > Layers of abstraction are fine. Use 'em when you need 'em. But we
> > shouldn't posture by invoking things like "instruction sets" and
> > "execute identically" in the same breath. (Not that you did that ...
> > just sayin'.)
> >
> >
> > [⛧] Rant: This is a good talk
> > <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Ab3ArE8W3s>. But I get super
> > irritated when people use *toy* code in their rhetoric and leave large
> > scale deployment as an exercise for the reader. Yeah, fine. The REPL
> > is cool and all. But when my simulation takes a fvcking WEEK to
> > execute, it's difficult to sympathize. I've recently been playing
> > around with VSCodium, which is pretty cool. But whatever, man. I still
> > have to upload the code somewhere and execute it. Get off my lawn!
> >
> > On 10/21/22 09:24, Steve Smith wrote:
> >>
> >> As a counter-example,  we ran film recorders whose "guts" were built
> >> by Ed Fredkin's Information International company and were built to
> >> the spec of Dec PDP-11 (I think 11?) and it was anecdotally agreed
> >> among the user community (of a few thousand delivered units in the
> >> world?) that these PDP-clones *never* failed to execute the code
> >> identically to the machines they were patterned after.   I don't
> >> remember the details of implementation of these 70's era hardware
> >> designs, but I understood that they III designed their own PCBs but
> >> (obviously?) used the same CPU chips... I don't know about all the
> >> other support components... A likely answer to this pondering is that
> >> these machines did not run a general purpose OS and the III
> >> software/system people probably made up for any differences in
> >> Software/Timing/Error Handling?
> >>
> >> If Owen is listening in here, I think he was there for more than a
> >> little of this from inside Apple/Sun?
> >>
> >> - Steve
> >>
> >> PS.   To concede/confront glen's sentiment that: " 'Metaphor' is an
> >> evil word, used only by manipulators and gaslighters",   I would
> >> offer that the use of *conceptual metaphor*  is to thinking as noise
> >> is to simulated annealing, and his point about "tighter or looser
> >> equivalence" might well be the best argument *for* the use of
> >> metaphorical thinking?  I can't believe I'm stirring/kicking this can
> >> of worm-hornets down the street again...
> >>
> >
>
> -. --- - / ...- .- .-.. .. -.. / -- --- .-. ... . / -.-. --- -.. .
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Fridays 9a-12p Friday St. Johns Cafe   /   Thursdays 9a-12p Zoom
> https://bit.ly/virtualfriam
> to (un)subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
> archives:  5/2017 thru present
> https://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/
>   1/2003 thru 6/2021  http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/attachments/20221021/3b1a2797/attachment.html>