Tom wrote:
On Fri, Dec 05, 2003 at 11:43:23PM -0500, Joey Hess wrote: [great stuff which is absolutely correct] However, I "Tom Ballard" have figured it all out.The problem with all of computer science is the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing. All of these problems are finite and can be handled in an "a priori" way. The problem is computer science grew up not knowing that so we pretend we don't immediately know everything and compute in an "a posteori way".
epistemology. The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition. 2001...together with an acceptance of the values of data and ideas derived from experience (a posteriori).
The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition. 2001...and those known deductively or theoretically, from a priori principles. ;-)
Hugo.
What I'm talking about is tearing down the concept of a general purpose computer. The only reason I can't run all my programs in a single memory space and know just exactly what the heck is going to happen is it makes poor economic sense to work that way.Consider a SQL Server for example. For any given schema which will a maximum of contain {N1...Nm} records, I can compute "a priori" the exact disk location of any record. If memory wasn't so fucking slow and there were plenty of it, we could assemble any image of this very quickly. All I need is a simple "I/O monster" that does this one fixed task in an "a priori way".So the problem is general purpose computers. We need to be able to produce fixed-function devices in a one-off fashion.[This rant is probably full of shit] :-)