byte_bach · HackerTrans

13 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

Worth noting that the assumption that the Collatz function terminates ('while n != 1') is actually an open mathematical question. It's been checked for initial values up to the godzillions, but there is no proof yet that this function will always terminate for all inputs. Paul Erdos was reported to have said "Mathematics is not yet ready for such problems".

byte_bach

13 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

Well,

   sorry to say I don't buy the "Unix was designed as a phone switch control plane" nonsense at all. Here is Dennis Ritchie:

"From the point of view of the group that was to be most involved in the beginnings of Unix (K. Thompson, Ritchie, M. D. McIlroy, J. F. Ossanna), the decline and fall of Multics had a directly felt effect. We were among the last Bell Laboratories holdouts actually working on Multics, so we still felt some sort of stake in its success. More important, the convenient interactive computing service that Multics had promised to the entire community was in fact available to our limited group, at first under the CTSS system used to develop Multics, and later under Multics itself. Even though Multics could not then support many users, it could support us, albeit at exorbitant cost. We didn't want to lose the pleasant niche we occupied, because no similar ones were available; even the time-sharing service that would later be offered under GE's operating system did not exist. What we wanted to preserve was not just a good environment in which to do programming, but a system around which a fellowship could form. We knew from experience that the essence of communal computing, as supplied by remote-access, time-shared machines, is not just to type programs into a terminal instead of a keypunch, but to encourage close communication. "

Unix was designed for people, not for Bell System Switches: http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/hist.html

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