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Pastimes : Dream Machine ( Build your own PC ) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Clarence Dodge who wrote (7119)	4/17/1999 9:54:00 PM
From: Spots	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 14778

>> I have many blank pages in my knowledge base. I always assume something is going on that I don't know about which make any conclusions I may come to very suspect. Nope. Wrong. You can conclude NEGATIVES from the things you know that may make xxx assumption impossible. This is an important point. You cannot conclude something is possible with holes in your knowledge. Most of the time, there are SOME holes in your knowledge. BUT you can perfectly well conclude something is impossible if you have imperfect knowledge and you are willing to face the implications of your reasoning. By the last, I mean you have understand that the conclusion of impossibility is predicated on the actual truth of what you "know". So you must be aware that if what you "know" is later proved false, you have to abandon the conclusion of impossibility. As an example, if I were to discover that the OS ALWAYS keeps the disk contents synched up, no matter what, then I would have to realize that my conclusion that the hot-swapping you described was possibly safe. I couldn't CONCLUDE it was safe, but I couldn't reject it either. I'll let you know when I'm ready to believe that. (BTW, there are fault-tolerant systems that can do exactly that by implementing audits of changes which are safe-stored to one disk before a change is commited to the original disk. On THOSE systems, I couldn't conclude what I said. Though I might reinstate it if I found out the auditing process was flawed. This goes on ...). Within these limits, though, this is a very powerful tool for drawing valid conclusions with imperfect knowledge. It's all the more valuable because it fits so many real-world situations. You're always drawing valid negative conclusions! I've always maintained that we pessimists are the happiest people around. We get nothing but pleasant surprises, having always anticipated worse! Besides, we're right most of the time. Spots