Historical approach
One solution might be for Japan to re-occupy Taiwan. That could then be extended to the mainland in the name of One China. A Co-Prosperity Sphere, they used to call it.
1534 publicly visible posts • joined 31 Oct 2010
In London for a US company, I once had to maintain some software originally outsourced to India. As I found one problem after another, I felt the coders in India had never talked it over with the designers in the US. It always used to be expensive to make phone calls in or out of India; but I suspect also that management in India was reluctant to admit that there really were problems and queries.
I saw somewhere that the age of that galactic cluster is 4.6 billion years. About the age of the solar system, give or take a hundred million or two.
So there may easily be life there now. As for the epoch when that light began its journey to us there is still plenty of time from the big bang some 13 billion years back.
No, I was not thinking of VAX Fortran, though I am interested in your point.
The library I am thinking of was first developed by SUN. Its intention was to take data from VAX machines and make it run on the SUN. When it was ported to other systems, it could export data on magnetic tape or through those new-fangled internet sockets in a common format, which was essentially SUN format. I had programs running on PC/Linux systems, old SUN workstations, and a MIPS machine.
Intel use IEEE formats for floating point and double precision arithmetic. DEC had developed their own formats before those standards emerged.
There was a library, but I forget its name, for converting data between SUN, VAX, and intel formats. It handled byte ordering for integers and floats, as well as converting floating bit patterns. Text data, one byte at a time, needed no special treatment.
The UK "copyright libraries" are: the British Library, the Bodleian (Oxford Uni), Cambridge University, Trinity College Dublin, University of Wales, and the University of Scotland. The British Library insists on receiving a copy of all published books etc. The other libraries have the option of insisting on a copy.
With modern printing facilities, it is easy to order a few extra copies at a sensible price: there is no need to carry a huge stock or to have a huge initial print run.
I have recently been running the new FreeDos release, 1.3, on live hardware: a Lenovo T60 laptop, vintage 2006. Under that FreeDos I have run Wordstar 3.3, MS Word 5.5, and WordPerfect 5.1. MS Word could run in a Windows emulation mode which made it much easier to use than Wordperfect. The menu system in Wordstar reminded me of the Locoscript software I used in the 1980s; it seems to me that Locoscript 'borrowed' the user interface from Wordstar.
But I still prefer modern versions of Word: yes, with the ribbon.
Yes, humans can use intelligence without using words. For example, when playing ball games or riding a bicycle. Cats and dogs can play ball games, and some dogs have been seen to ride bicycles. I have seen dogs with traffic sense: running between cars without getting run over and thereby causing chaos.
"Calculators often lie..."
I have a test for calculators, spreadsheets, etc.
x = 355/113 - PI() = 2.667E-07 on my calculator. So the six most significant digits have been lost.
Then 1/x = 3749531.309, which is seriously wrong.
Excel yields 3748629.088.
An old Quattro Pro also yields 3748629.088
Windows 7 calculator: 3748629.093
An online 30-digit calculator yields 3748629.093
The 20 or so amino acids used by life on Earth are just a fraction of the possible amino acids, most of which are not used. E.g. we use only alpha-amino acids, with the amino (NH2) group attached to the same carbon atom as the carboxyl (COOH) group. Then there is the question, are the ones found 'left-handed' or 'right-handed' stereoisomers?
What choked off a VAX I worked on was the Common Data Dictionary, that somehow got larger every time we did something I have now forgotten involving Datatrieve, DEC's query language for various types of files and for their relational database.
Various types of files: serial, sequential, indexed sequential. And various types of text: implicit CRLF, explicit CRLF, and indexed text accessible by a line number part of each record.
But at least it was all ASCII, this was before the days of UTF-8, UTF-7, UTF-16LE, UTF-16BE.
I don't use Windows to do my work, I use apps. Principally MS Office, including Word, Excel, and OneNote. But not PowerPoint, an utter waste of space. On my "other computers" I use Libre Office, but LO does not have anything comparable to OneNote. I occasionally use Access, much better than the database software in LO.
OneNote is superb for the first version of new documents, for which I am not always certain at the beginning how they will work out.
I once constructed a list of the words I use, to support a spellcheck program. I was using about 5,000 root words; with plurals, verb forms,etc, that became about 20,000 words.
Select 5 from 20,000 and that is a lot of short sentences, most of which are impossible. The fun starts if you want to guess what the possible ones might mean, for purposes such as translation, indexing and filing, and customer service.
I suspect the current brute force approach is running out of steam. For example, machine translations are less worse than they were, but still not up to a standard anyone would pay for.
I always thought the VW scandal began in a genuine way. Code was put there for debugging purposes and was never intended to run in a milestone test or final delivery.
But mistakes happen, and so a milestone test passed brilliantly, to the astonishment and delight of VW management. When the techies said, "Er, there's a problem here", the management answer was, "You are not going to be difficult about this, are you?".
For six months the website of The Spectator has refused to speak to me. Their help department is utterly useless. Their latest gem: "Please login with a new account and new email address". I have been telling them for six months that I cannot get their front page or login screen.