Re: filling in missing dates in a time series

From: Frank Hamersley <terabitemightbe_at_bigpond.com>
Date: Thu, 16 Feb 2006 00:08:15 GMT
Message-ID: <PnPIf.9056$yK1.8938_at_news-server.bigpond.net.au>


paul c wrote:
> Bob Badour wrote:
>> paul c wrote:
>>> carol_marra_at_msn.com wrote:
[..]
> Yes, have been doing some timing tests lately and wish I had been born
> thirty years later. Saw the interview with Eckart on computerworld
> today and he quoted a speed for some arithmetic operation of .00002
> seconds on the 1946 Eniac, which in rough terms was about the speed of
> the S360/30, twenty years after the Eniac. Now, on this little Pentium
> Mobile I have here, which the hardware people consider medium speed on
> the desktop I am getting results that are roughly hundreds of times
> faster, sometimes thousands. Doesn't take very long now to something a
> billion times - I have to run my tests for many many seconds because
> there aren't enough timer pops to get accurate measurements on the speed
> of this thing. Plus, I could fit many of the multi-user apps I used to
> work on in memory. I believe this undercuts the traditional starting
> point for much of the concurrency theory of the last thirty years, not
> to mention many of the physical comprises that today surround Codd's
> basic relational operators.
>
> I guess my point in this reply is that the practical limits have changed
> dramatically since Codd's first papers - the practical ceilings are much
> higher now.

I disagree in particular with the term "dramatically". It only seems dramatic when you draw upon a long time frame for a base point of reference.

In fact the progress, which as you said yourself is only 2 or 3 orders of magnitude, I hold is actually insignificant relative to the increased demands (the amount of data stored and the computational interest) extant today.

As it happens I was reviewing the architecture of the IBM Cell chip the other day and was quite struck with its similarity to the system I spent my first years with as a Systems Programmer - the CDC Cyber 73.

Then I got to thinking how much "work" that system produced back then and speculating what is a par score these days. Having done that I remain impressed as to how good that system was and would be even in todays terms.

Possibly nostalgia, probably not.

Cheers, Frank. Received on Thu Feb 16 2006 - 01:08:15 CET

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