He wasn't being elitist or condemning "rich people" or whatever. He was pointing out that if the wealthy and powerful had to stand in the same lines as the proles, they'd use their influence to change things.
Personally I doubt that -- Ted Kennedy didn't launch an investigation into the abuses of the no-fly list after he was caught up in it -- but his point wasn't what you thought it was.
Religion isn't bad. Extremists are bad. Zealots are bad. Idiots are bad. Religion may bring about these things, or those with these may be attracted to religion, however that isn't the fault of the religion itself. If a country began to kill and oppress in the name of democracy would you say democracy was bad? If a man began to kidnap and rape people in the name of love would love be bad?
Two points:
1) Zealots have little power in the absence of a moderate base. The difference in influence between a Pat Robertson and a Jim Jones is quantitative, not qualitative.
2) Democracy and love are rather abstract concepts compared to the notion of a specific God who wants me to hate and persecute specific classes of people. That's the problem with the faith of someone like Francis Collins... his apologetics are all hand-wavy and woo-woo-driven, but the actual God he's evangelizing for has specific traits, specific likes and dislikes... and specific plans for humanity that simply are not compatible with the rational worldview we (should) demand of our scientists.
It made sense to pre-announce ZFS to head off the competition, but now that the cards are all face-up on the table, Apple doesn't want to be seen as overpromising and underdelivering. Once iFPGA in particular is out the door, nobody will remember this delay, or any of the other political snafus.
I would strongly recommend "HDL Chip Design" by Douglas Smith. It's out of print, still sells for $200+ and is about the best book on chip design you'll ever have.
Thanks; I'll have a look for that one. That's the same Douglas Smith that wrote the popular DSP book, right?
So what you are saying is that you have no idea what you are talking about, and have never tried to program in C. Trust me. It is very common for programmers - especially n00bs - to write a C program where no error or warning is emitted at compile/link time, the logic looks fine to many programmer's eyes, yet the "code" does random crap or nothing at all.
Heh, I only wish I could be considered a n00b at C/C++. Remember, on Slashdot, everybody worked for Dennis Ritchie.
Personally I think the other fellow's point was a good one, and illustrative of my own: Because the programming parts of it don't work when the synthesis tool tries to map it to gates.
When I write a C program, one of three things will happen: 1) The program will do what I told it to do, and work; 2) The program will do what I told it to do, and fail; or 3) The compiler will issue an error or warning message that calls attention to my mistake.
I've never had to work on ASIC designs that take hours or days to synthesize, so I was no more interested in HDL simulation than I would be in running a board full of TTL chips through SPICE. I approached the Verilog learning process the way you and I both learned C -- write a program, run it on the target hardware, and fix any bugs.
But at least when using XST with Verilog, I encountered cases where no error or warning is emitted, the logic looks fine to this "programmer"'s eye, yet the "code" does random crap or nothing at all.
That's not a programming language in my book... or if it is, it's a really shitty one. Yes, you can draw comparisons to multithreaded programming and the need to manage your locks and/or transactions carefully to keep an otherwise-correct program from failing, but the nature of the failure is still quite different. The design I was trying to synthesize had nothing wrong with it, except that XST didn't like the way I was expressing it. A more experienced Verilog user would no doubt be able to tell me what I did wrong, but trust me... no C programmer would tolerate tools this crappy, or language features that could be misapplied in ways that are both syntactically and semantically correct. Perhaps other synthesis tools are vastly better in that respect, but that's not the impression I get from reading similar complaints about the rest of them.
As far as the rest of the flamage is concerned, yeah, fine, good luck with that. Writing synthesizable Verilog is nothing like writing C. That's all I'm saying, and anyone who says differently is full of bull, regardless of how many PC-104 boards they prototyped with duct tape and a distributor cap or whatever.
As someone who has spent A LOT of time using both in university, I would say Verilog is the easiest to learn because its syntax is very closely related to C.
Doing FPGA or ASIC designs?
1) The syntax is incredibly similar to C. Which is why it is always described as "C like" to people who have very little experience in HDL.
Speaking as someone who just got his first Verilog-based design working on a Nexys2 board, I can confidently say that there are two serious mistakes a n00b can make:
1) Thinking of Verilog (or any HDL) as anything like C. Yes, there are semicolons. Yes, you can write a "for" loop, if you want to synthesize a huge mess. That's about it.
2) Thinking of Verilog as a programming language at all. HDL stands for "Hardware description language," and that's what they are.
Verilog is fun stuff, but it's the hardest thing I've ever taught myself. For those who are trying, I've found the Bhasker books on synthesis to be quite useful, Pong Chu's FPGA Prototyping with Verilog Examples to be reasonably useful, and most of the others to be fairly worthless. Too many books focus on simulation at the expense of synthesis practices, IMO.
Also have just received Richard Haskell's new books on basic and advanced Verilog using the Basys and Nexys2 platforms. They look very good at first glance but I haven't yet had a lot of time to spend with either of them.
True, a few hookers posting cryptic, discreet ads is inevitable. But Craigslist had an entire section devoted to it and allowed it.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
September 30, 1980-- The Public Board of Inquiry concludes NutraSweet should not be approved pending further investigations of brain tumors in animals. The board states it "has not been presented with proof of reasonable certainty that aspartame is safe for use as a food additive."
Do you have any idea how much aspartame they force-fed those animals to provoke a (possible) carcinogenic response?
<shrug> If you design your user interface to mimic a traditional search engine, don't act all butthurt when users anticipate traditional search functionality.
Oh, I know what it means, all right -- it means that whether or not Alpha addresses my problem domain is a matter of opinion. That's a real drawback, because my opinion is not always going to dovetail with Wolfram's.
I spent a couple of hours playing with it on launch night. It's nifty, but the parser is rather Infocom-esque. If you don't happen to stumble over just the right phrasing, you get no love. It's optimized for their example queries but you can't go too far off those specific paths. Traditional search engines seem much better at inferring the user's intent.
"The design of the system is that it intelligently scrapes quantifiable information that can be put into a defined knowledge base structure and inter-related."
As a potential user, I have no clue what that means. Ergo, they fail.
... when they refused to grow a pair and claim First Amendment protection, not to mention the safe-harbor provision of the CDA. Paternalistic, moralizing governors and DAs have no Constitutional basis to object to anything Craigslist was doing, and the company should have told them to STFU and GBTW.
But instead they tried to "negotiate," "compromise," and otherwise find a middle ground with religiously-motivated censors and nanny-statists.
Yeah. That always works. Because those sorts of people always go away and leave you in peace once you give in to their demands. <rolleyes>
That we don't know what those boundaries are should terrify you.... I see the disbelief climate-change deniers as being similar to 19th century disbelief that it was impossible for species to go extinct.
What terrifies me is the idea of rewiring entire economic systems based on science that's this shaky.
I wouldn't get on an airplane, or even drive over a bridge, if it had been designed with nothing but pie-in-the-sky mathematical models and a few conflicting indirect observations. What if those models aren't as realistic as you thought?
Economic interference, on the other hand, will cause suffering and death without question. We don't have to look 100,000 years into the past to see that.
Get the math right, then get the models right, then get the laws right. We're nowhere near done with step 2 yet.
Please show me one quote from the previous President telling anyone who they can sleep with. Why is this moderated "Insightful"? I am no fan of overreaching government (yeah, I am one of those libertarian whackos), but shouldn't/. mods maintain a modicum of neutrality and ability to think critically about what they moderate?
I went looking for an amicus brief or other statement of support from the Bush DoJ for the State of Texas's position in Lawrence v. Texas, but couldn't find one on short notice. However, since I was able to find citations for such briefs from other state governments and NGOs dominated by Republicans, I don't think it's a violation of "neutrality" or "critical thinking" to assume that the GOP and its leadership approved of Texas's attempt to enforce their state sodomy law.
So, yes, technically, I failed to meet your challenge, in that I can't find anything with Gonzalez's or Ashcroft's name on it "telling us who we can sleep with." But I think a lot of people would agree that the Lawrence briefs show a pattern of aggressive governmental and partisan interest in the question.
Slashdot Mirror
He wasn't being elitist or condemning "rich people" or whatever. He was pointing out that if the wealthy and powerful had to stand in the same lines as the proles, they'd use their influence to change things.
Personally I doubt that -- Ted Kennedy didn't launch an investigation into the abuses of the no-fly list after he was caught up in it -- but his point wasn't what you thought it was.
You can get a vasectomy reversed.
Yes, that's a big deal, and it's risky.
Guess what? So's having children.
Well, maybe they should have called it the "Museum of Congress," then. Whatever. Content is still, and has always been, king.
Perhaps AT&T should use as their new slogan, "War is Peace; Freedom is Slavery; Ignorance is Strength."
True, that sounds even better than their current slogan ("Your world. Delivered. To the NSA.")
Religion isn't bad. Extremists are bad. Zealots are bad. Idiots are bad. Religion may bring about these things, or those with these may be attracted to religion, however that isn't the fault of the religion itself. If a country began to kill and oppress in the name of democracy would you say democracy was bad? If a man began to kidnap and rape people in the name of love would love be bad?
Two points:
1) Zealots have little power in the absence of a moderate base. The difference in influence between a Pat Robertson and a Jim Jones is quantitative, not qualitative.
2) Democracy and love are rather abstract concepts compared to the notion of a specific God who wants me to hate and persecute specific classes of people. That's the problem with the faith of someone like Francis Collins... his apologetics are all hand-wavy and woo-woo-driven, but the actual God he's evangelizing for has specific traits, specific likes and dislikes... and specific plans for humanity that simply are not compatible with the rational worldview we (should) demand of our scientists.
It made sense to pre-announce ZFS to head off the competition, but now that the cards are all face-up on the table, Apple doesn't want to be seen as overpromising and underdelivering. Once iFPGA in particular is out the door, nobody will remember this delay, or any of the other political snafus.
... poorly compressed, and gratuitously spread out across 10 pages for no reason other than ad revenue.
Attention Wired: Look at how boston.com does it. They're doing it right. You're doing it wrong.
I would strongly recommend "HDL Chip Design" by Douglas Smith. It's out of print, still sells for $200+ and is about the best book on chip design you'll ever have.
Thanks; I'll have a look for that one. That's the same Douglas Smith that wrote the popular DSP book, right?
I'd pony up the extra few bucks for the Nexys2 instead of the Basys. The USB implementation is better documented, and there's a nice Hirose connector.
So what you are saying is that you have no idea what you are talking about, and have never tried to program in C. Trust me. It is very common for programmers - especially n00bs - to write a C program where no error or warning is emitted at compile/link time, the logic looks fine to many programmer's eyes, yet the "code" does random crap or nothing at all.
Heh, I only wish I could be considered a n00b at C/C++. Remember, on Slashdot, everybody worked for Dennis Ritchie.
Personally I think the other fellow's point was a good one, and illustrative of my own: Because the programming parts of it don't work when the synthesis tool tries to map it to gates.
When I write a C program, one of three things will happen: 1) The program will do what I told it to do, and work; 2) The program will do what I told it to do, and fail; or 3) The compiler will issue an error or warning message that calls attention to my mistake.
I've never had to work on ASIC designs that take hours or days to synthesize, so I was no more interested in HDL simulation than I would be in running a board full of TTL chips through SPICE. I approached the Verilog learning process the way you and I both learned C -- write a program, run it on the target hardware, and fix any bugs.
But at least when using XST with Verilog, I encountered cases where no error or warning is emitted, the logic looks fine to this "programmer"'s eye, yet the "code" does random crap or nothing at all.
That's not a programming language in my book... or if it is, it's a really shitty one. Yes, you can draw comparisons to multithreaded programming and the need to manage your locks and/or transactions carefully to keep an otherwise-correct program from failing, but the nature of the failure is still quite different. The design I was trying to synthesize had nothing wrong with it, except that XST didn't like the way I was expressing it. A more experienced Verilog user would no doubt be able to tell me what I did wrong, but trust me... no C programmer would tolerate tools this crappy, or language features that could be misapplied in ways that are both syntactically and semantically correct. Perhaps other synthesis tools are vastly better in that respect, but that's not the impression I get from reading similar complaints about the rest of them.
As far as the rest of the flamage is concerned, yeah, fine, good luck with that. Writing synthesizable Verilog is nothing like writing C. That's all I'm saying, and anyone who says differently is full of bull, regardless of how many PC-104 boards they prototyped with duct tape and a distributor cap or whatever.
As someone who has spent A LOT of time using both in university, I would say Verilog is the easiest to learn because its syntax is very closely related to C.
Doing FPGA or ASIC designs?
1) The syntax is incredibly similar to C. Which is why it is always described as "C like" to people who have very little experience in HDL.
Syntax doth not a language make.
Speaking as someone who just got his first Verilog-based design working on a Nexys2 board, I can confidently say that there are two serious mistakes a n00b can make:
1) Thinking of Verilog (or any HDL) as anything like C. Yes, there are semicolons. Yes, you can write a "for" loop, if you want to synthesize a huge mess. That's about it.
2) Thinking of Verilog as a programming language at all. HDL stands for "Hardware description language," and that's what they are.
Verilog is fun stuff, but it's the hardest thing I've ever taught myself. For those who are trying, I've found the Bhasker books on synthesis to be quite useful, Pong Chu's FPGA Prototyping with Verilog Examples to be reasonably useful, and most of the others to be fairly worthless. Too many books focus on simulation at the expense of synthesis practices, IMO.
Also have just received Richard Haskell's new books on basic and advanced Verilog using the Basys and Nexys2 platforms. They look very good at first glance but I haven't yet had a lot of time to spend with either of them.
"Guess what, I'm not."
Guess what, you were wrong when you said that digital photography could never replace film in the professional world, and you're wrong this time, too.
(Well, maybe you didn't say that, but a lot of people who sounded a lot like you did.)
Yes, because it has relativistic mass according to E=mc^2.
True, a few hookers posting cryptic, discreet ads is inevitable. But Craigslist had an entire section devoted to it and allowed it.
September 30, 1980-- The Public Board of Inquiry concludes NutraSweet should not be approved pending further investigations of brain tumors in animals. The board states it "has not been presented with proof of reasonable certainty that aspartame is safe for use as a food additive."
Do you have any idea how much aspartame they force-fed those animals to provoke a (possible) carcinogenic response?
Do you care?
<shrug> If you design your user interface to mimic a traditional search engine, don't act all butthurt when users anticipate traditional search functionality.
Oh, I know what it means, all right -- it means that whether or not Alpha addresses my problem domain is a matter of opinion. That's a real drawback, because my opinion is not always going to dovetail with Wolfram's.
I spent a couple of hours playing with it on launch night. It's nifty, but the parser is rather Infocom-esque. If you don't happen to stumble over just the right phrasing, you get no love. It's optimized for their example queries but you can't go too far off those specific paths. Traditional search engines seem much better at inferring the user's intent.
"The design of the system is that it intelligently scrapes quantifiable information that can be put into a defined knowledge base structure and inter-related."
As a potential user, I have no clue what that means. Ergo, they fail.
... when they refused to grow a pair and claim First Amendment protection, not to mention the safe-harbor provision of the CDA. Paternalistic, moralizing governors and DAs have no Constitutional basis to object to anything Craigslist was doing, and the company should have told them to STFU and GBTW.
But instead they tried to "negotiate," "compromise," and otherwise find a middle ground with religiously-motivated censors and nanny-statists.
Yeah. That always works. Because those sorts of people always go away and leave you in peace once you give in to their demands. <rolleyes>
I asked it "what is the 999999999999999999th root of 12?" and now it no longer responds to queries at all.
That'd be "Ms Fnd in a Lbry", but you'd do better to go back to the original source material, which would have been JL Borges's The Library of Babel.
That we don't know what those boundaries are should terrify you. ... I see the disbelief climate-change deniers as being similar to 19th century disbelief that it was impossible for species to go extinct.
What terrifies me is the idea of rewiring entire economic systems based on science that's this shaky.
I wouldn't get on an airplane, or even drive over a bridge, if it had been designed with nothing but pie-in-the-sky mathematical models and a few conflicting indirect observations. What if those models aren't as realistic as you thought?
Economic interference, on the other hand, will cause suffering and death without question. We don't have to look 100,000 years into the past to see that.
Get the math right, then get the models right, then get the laws right. We're nowhere near done with step 2 yet.
Please show me one quote from the previous President telling anyone who they can sleep with. Why is this moderated "Insightful"? I am no fan of overreaching government (yeah, I am one of those libertarian whackos), but shouldn't /. mods maintain a modicum of neutrality and ability to think critically about what they moderate?
I went looking for an amicus brief or other statement of support from the Bush DoJ for the State of Texas's position in Lawrence v. Texas, but couldn't find one on short notice. However, since I was able to find citations for such briefs from other state governments and NGOs dominated by Republicans, I don't think it's a violation of "neutrality" or "critical thinking" to assume that the GOP and its leadership approved of Texas's attempt to enforce their state sodomy law.
So, yes, technically, I failed to meet your challenge, in that I can't find anything with Gonzalez's or Ashcroft's name on it "telling us who we can sleep with." But I think a lot of people would agree that the Lawrence briefs show a pattern of aggressive governmental and partisan interest in the question.