Re: filling in missing dates in a time series
From: paul c <toledobythesea_at_oohay.ac>
Date: Thu, 16 Feb 2006 02:03:28 GMT
Message-ID: <Q3RIf.14924$B94.12111_at_pd7tw3no>
>> Bob Badour wrote:
>>
>>> paul c wrote:
>>>
>>>> carol_marra_at_msn.com wrote:
>> Yes, have been doing some timing tests lately and wish I had been born
>> thirty years later. Saw the interview with Eckart on computerworld
>> today and he quoted a speed for some arithmetic operation of .00002
>> seconds on the 1946 Eniac, which in rough terms was about the speed of
>> the S360/30, twenty years after the Eniac. Now, on this little
>> Pentium Mobile I have here, which the hardware people consider medium
>> speed on the desktop I am getting results that are roughly hundreds of
>> times faster, sometimes thousands. Doesn't take very long now to
>> something a billion times - I have to run my tests for many many
>> seconds because there aren't enough timer pops to get accurate
>> measurements on the speed of this thing. Plus, I could fit many of
>> the multi-user apps I used to work on in memory. I believe this
>> undercuts the traditional starting point for much of the concurrency
>> theory of the last thirty years, not to mention many of the physical
>> comprises that today surround Codd's basic relational operators.
>>
>> I guess my point in this reply is that the practical limits have
>> changed dramatically since Codd's first papers - the practical
>> ceilings are much higher now.
Date: Thu, 16 Feb 2006 02:03:28 GMT
Message-ID: <Q3RIf.14924$B94.12111_at_pd7tw3no>
Frank Hamersley wrote:
> 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. > ...
They say as one gets older that the distant past becomes more familiar than yesterday. Showing my age I guess. Seems dramatic to me since thirty years ago now seems like yesterday!
> 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. > ...
No argument about the quantities involved, just the quality. Much of today's demands seem either frivolous or spurious to me. After all, we're just talking about simple computers, not television sets!
pc Received on Thu Feb 16 2006 - 03:03:28 CET