The MIPS architecture is a popular one with people who implement their own cores. In fact, it is rather common for computer science/engineering students to implement their own using FPGAs, based on the commonly used Computer Architecture by Hennessy and Patterson. The architecture is extremely simple, straightforward, and easy to implement.
I believe you can implemented a near complete MIPS R3000 core with only minor differences and avoid any patent issues (as long as you don't call it a MIPS). Some of the ops on the newer cores are still encumbered and cannot be implemented without paying money to MIPS Technologies. I've worked with a couple of MIPS clones, some by American companies, and there is nothing illegal about them. In fact, it would be far more surprising if the Chinese companies wasted the time creating their own architecture instead of basing it on a proven one.
Now perhaps you're referring to scheduling problems in the kernel.. I'm sure that AMD would be generous enough to provide kernel patches as are necessary.
I find that the two processors in my dual-core Athlon X2 run at slightly different speeds (according to AMD, this is expected). That in fact did cause the Linux kernel some problems, since it was trying to balance handling the interrupts between the two. The problem happened when the timer interrupt bounced between the two, as within an hour or two of startup their tick counts became significantly separated. This made the system clock start running forward at a rapid rate. A Linux patch fixed this issue. So I can definitively say that Linux does run on SMP cores at different speeds.
I'm not sure how Windows will do it, but they'll probably figure it out if they haven't yet. The real challenge is a new scheduling algorithm for variable CPU capabilities (although we do have that to some extent with frequency scaling on single CPUs).
I hope there are minigames like Alien vs. Child Predator or that you get to play Mayor Haggar on a mission from the devil.
I can see it now: "Oh, a sewer level. I guess this is the point where the developers said 'fuck it, I'm out of ideas. Let's just have you go through a sewer.'"
Any business with a competent IT staff is already putting all its documents in the hands of another corporation on a regular basis in the form of off-site backups.
Your off-site backups are not encrypted? Why not? You may want to rethink the comment about competent IT.
In fact, halting is decidable for all deterministic machines with finite memory. Either you repeat a previous state, or halt within a finite number of cycles. The decision process may be made arbitrarily hard, but that's not undecidability.
Yes, but no. While a computer as we know it is a finite-state machine, the number of possible states exceeds the number of atoms in the universe. In reality, your assertion that it is decideable is worthless except for contrived examples and does not solve the problem in the general case.
The halting problem is, in theory if not in practice, decidable for deterministic machines with finite memory. A machine with finite memory has a finite number of states, and thus any deterministic program on it must eventually either halt or repeat a previous state:
"...any finite-state machine, if left completely to itself, will fall eventually into a perfectly periodic repetitive pattern. The duration of this repeating pattern cannot exceed the number of internal states of the machine..."(Minsky 1967, p. 24)
Minsky warns us, however, that for machines such as computers with e.g. a million small parts, each with two states, will have on the order of 2^1,000,000 possible states:
"This is a 1 followed by about three hundred thousand zeroes... Even if such a machine were to operate at the frequencies of cosmic rays, the aeons of galactic evolution would be as nothing compared to the time of a journey through such a cycle" (Minsky p. 25)
OpenDarwin is dying. Another crippling bombshell hit the beleaguered OpenDarwin community, dot dot dot
Listen, it's been over twenty minutes since this story was posted, and I haven't seen a Netcraft confirmation post yet. How do I know it's really dying? C'mon, people, get on the ball.
Brothers, our time has come. This is the secret weapon that will allow our final victory over The Old People! With this technology in our hands, they will be our slaves. They will mine our ore and harvest our lumber to have access to our precious Alzheimers medicine. The Groundor has become the Groundee. He who controls the spice, er, meds, controls the universe!
1) I don't hate Microsoft. Okay, maybe a little. 2) The chips you point to are 400+MHz ARM9s, the Xscale being a superscalar processor. I was thinking more along the lines of a sub 100MHz part (like your run-of-the-mill ARM7 or MIPS R3000).
But I'll concede that it's a fine (and arbitrary) line.
Though I consider an embedded OS more along something you could run on an ARM7, whereas Microsoft considers it something you could run on a Pentium 3 with a full chipset in box that doesn't look like a standard PC. By my definition, the latter two don't qualify, and WinCE only barely.
I doubt you've ever even used WinCE (called Windows Mobile now btw). Seems like your comment is just MS-bashing FUD.
Windows Mobile is a "platform" based on WinCE. It's what they used to call Pocket PC. Basically it's a CE core, Windows Media Player, Internet Explorer, and the Pocket PC UI and control panel (there's a few more things that I forget). People who aren't doing PDAs (like, oh, those doing engine control systems), use WinCE.
Now, what do you suppose the difference is between running CE in a cash register (which, in my opinion, is a good idea), versus running it in an automobile (not such a good idea, again, in my opinion)? I know, for example (being a WinCE user), that WinCE 5.x uses a shared single virtual memory space, divided into slots for the application. And that the code segment is mostly unprotected from write access (in a supposedly modern OS, can you believe it?), and that it has no security model whatsoever, and that all apps run in kernel mode and can, if they feel like it, capture the processor and stop all preemption and interrupts. Because of this, I'm not worried running WinCE on a cash register, but I am a bit more fearful in the case where lives are involved.
This is a good chance for Microsoft to show off their embedded systems (Maybe WinCE? The article doesn't say.)
Of course WinCE (it's their only embedded OS, not counting the XBOX OS and WinXP embedded). The real point of this exercise is to get Microsoft software in *production* automobiles. Technology developed or refined in F1 and other racing leagues often makes its way down to consumer vehicles (antilock brakes, stability control systems, variable valve timing, hydraulic clutch,...). Microsoft wants new engine control technology developed on and tied into WinCE. When the time comes to transfer that to the production world, WinCE will come along with it.
Having worked with WinCE, this is a very scary proposition. I'd be terrified of putting it on any device that doesn't have a RESET button (hmm, why do all WinCE phones have reset buttons but Symbian ones don't?). One can only imagine how much they paid the F1 people to "standardize" on a software platform that is individually and independently developed by each team/manufacturer.
In my exception handling code, if I find that the crash is unrecoverable and due to fubar code by myself, I'm always sure to create an additional segment violation. This way, the "Report error to Microsoft" dialog comes up and the user thinks the bug is Windows' fault.
void pass_the_buck(void) { unsigned int *a;
// blame microsoft (the loop is just for dramatic effect) for(a = NULL; *a = 0xdeadbeef; a++); }
After using the "P" languages over the years (Perl, Python, PHP), I still find c to be my favourite (probably because I really like the preprocessor).
You do know that you can use the C preprocessor on any text file, right? It's a standalone program on systems using GCC. You will have to avoid shell-style comments (#), but otherwise it works well. It is a bit weird running Make on your PHP files, though.
You seem to be confused about the intent. This has nothing to do with the market, it has nothing to do with consumers, it has nothing to do with products. The GPL is about software. The intent of the GPL is to keep all GPL'd software available to anyone. The point of the license changes is to insure that the redistribution clause of the GPL is not rendered useless by DRM systems. You can't use the changes I've made to GPL software, even though you have the hardware for it, because I've created DRM software that prevents you from doing so. I've managed to close some GPL code, I've defeated the intent. The v3 license attempts to fix this.
The informed consumers (or lack thereof) is another problem, but not one the GPL can address.
As an embedded systems engineer, I've created systems using open source software, GPL and others. You could go to our company's website and download the source to all those that we are required to distribute. But these won't do you any good. The system cryptographically authenticates all binaries from the bootloader on. Even if you changed our kernel, improved our software, you'll never be able to use them on the hardware you bought from us*. This "security" is to secure the content from you, the person who paid for it. In the process, we have subverted the intent of the GPL (without violating any of its rules). The point is to let you modify the software and *be able to use it*, not just stare at the authentication error message when you'll try to run the software you've built yourself.
RMS is trying to stop this, stop the erosion of software freedom. In ten years, what I'm doing today will be a standard feature of your motherboard. Your authenticated OS will not run your unsigned code. Your free OS will not have access to the encrypted drive partition where your content is stored. Your hardware will conspire against you. Stallman is trying to extricate GPL software from the world where some are able to put restrictions on its free nature by means of DRM systems.
* Well, you could if you're really smart, but in the U.S. this is prohibited by law.
Re:Looks interesting, but does it fold?
on
Acme for Windows
·
· Score: 1
Well, Visual Studio 2005 does it, but somehow I get the feeling that's not what you were looking for. I believe one of the KDE editors does it (Kate?), KDevelop certainly does (see screenshot).
I managed to add a man page reader (ex: http;//kiwi/wiki/Man:fopen) into my company's wiki fairly easily. It was actually a bigger pain figuring out how to preserve the man page format than it was how to patch into MediaWiki and add an extension. However, you're correct. If you plan to change the look or behaviour of it, you are truly out of luck due to the MediaWiki codebase mess.
Are you sure you don't want the students building their own transistors and generating their own electricity? How will they learn? Welcome to reductio ad absurdum.
javac, javadoc, and jar are fundamental tools of java programming. Understanding execve() and assembly programming are not. Using javac is the minimum you need to program java in any environment. It is in fact all you need, unless you want additional tools. An IDE is nice to have, if you're into that kind of thing, but it is far from a requirement for java development. A student who has learned the IDE and not the fundamental tools has been done a disservice by a poor teacher.
I'm saying there is no time to lose. Newton is gone, Palm has hit the wall....NET mobile will be the only binary compatible handheld platform unless Sun act now.
As an embedded systems developer who has recently been dealing with Windows CE, let me tell you that Microsoft is pushing.NET for embedded devices, and they're pushing it *hard*. The first words out of the mouth of every new MS guy I meet are "are you using managed code?". Every single presentation I've seen, block diagrams, feature lists, tools descriptions, every one has a block dedicated to managed code, c-sharp, and the portable dotnet framework right next to native code. It's pretty obvious that there was a directive from high on up of what to do and how to do it (I've never seen Microsoft so organized about something before). On the desktop side, they expect to kill Java by pushing out the dotnet framework with the next version of Windows, so things are currently pretty relaxed. On the server side, they are working on strong integration into all of their server products and all of their development tools (vb and asp replaced by dotnet versions). On the embedded side, they are pushing dotnet like it's the cure for every development issue ever.
The Java market is fragmenting. All these groups are taking it in different directions. The Apache people are re-implementing it, the GNU people won't deal with Sun Java, distribution is a mess. Microsoft offers a consistant product, a consistant platform, and a hard sell. Java is losing ground on the server side. On the embedded side, Microsoft is determined to "fucking kill [java]", and they're not resting. It's not all doom and gloom, Java will be around for a while. But it wouldn't hurt if Sun got off their asses and removed the obstacles in the way of their allies in the war against dotnet.
Thanks. However, I was looking for something that Noscript doesn't have (to my knowledge). That is, a default deny policy for 3rd party javascript, with a default allow for the current site. I generally don't visit sites that I don't want running javascript in my browser. With this policy I will (in the general case) have to do nothing special except set a checkbox in the preferences one time, and my policy will be in place. with Noscript, I will have to enable it on every site I on which I would like to use javascript.
As it is, I've got Adblock to filter out all of these ad/tracking servers. I just thought it would be a good privacy feature.
Does anyone know if FF2 will have the ability to block 3rd party javascript includes? Right now I have to adblock them manually, but it seems like a handy feature. For example, the Slashdot page I'm currently viewing is serving me:
Actually, the real reason that drives are increasing cache size is that production of low-sized memory modules is becoming scarce, and the price of smaller memory chips is actually going up. As DRAM manufacturers ramp up on the highest density currently out, they take their oldest fabs off line and start to retool them for the next big thing. I had worked on a system where we bumped the RAM from 8MB to 16MB because the availability of the eights was becoming an issue and there was no price difference. Given the quantities they buy, I have no doubt Seagate is getting 64 megabit parts at at least the same price as 32-megabit parts. You may even find that some drives with 8MB of cache actually have 16MB, half of which may be unused.
We're leaving together But still it's farewell And maybe we'll come back To Earth, who can tell I guess there is no one to blame We're leaving ground (leaving ground) Will things ever be the same again It's the final countdown... The final countdown Ooh oh
We're heading for Venus (Venus) And still we stand tall Cause maybe they've seen us And welcome us all (yeah) With so many light years to go And things to be found (to be found) I'm sure that we'll all miss her so It's the final countdown... The final countdown The final countdown (the final countdown) Ooh ooh oh
(interlude)
The final countdown Ooh oh I'ts the final countdown The final countdown The final countdown (the final countdown) Ooh It's the final countdown We are leaving together The final countdown
Slashdot Mirror
The MIPS architecture is a popular one with people who implement their own cores. In fact, it is rather common for computer science/engineering students to implement their own using FPGAs, based on the commonly used Computer Architecture by Hennessy and Patterson. The architecture is extremely simple, straightforward, and easy to implement.
I believe you can implemented a near complete MIPS R3000 core with only minor differences and avoid any patent issues (as long as you don't call it a MIPS). Some of the ops on the newer cores are still encumbered and cannot be implemented without paying money to MIPS Technologies. I've worked with a couple of MIPS clones, some by American companies, and there is nothing illegal about them. In fact, it would be far more surprising if the Chinese companies wasted the time creating their own architecture instead of basing it on a proven one.
Now perhaps you're referring to scheduling problems in the kernel.. I'm sure that AMD would be generous enough to provide kernel patches as are necessary.
I find that the two processors in my dual-core Athlon X2 run at slightly different speeds (according to AMD, this is expected). That in fact did cause the Linux kernel some problems, since it was trying to balance handling the interrupts between the two. The problem happened when the timer interrupt bounced between the two, as within an hour or two of startup their tick counts became significantly separated. This made the system clock start running forward at a rapid rate. A Linux patch fixed this issue. So I can definitively say that Linux does run on SMP cores at different speeds.
I'm not sure how Windows will do it, but they'll probably figure it out if they haven't yet. The real challenge is a new scheduling algorithm for variable CPU capabilities (although we do have that to some extent with frequency scaling on single CPUs).
All I can say is SWEET.
I hope there are minigames like Alien vs. Child Predator or that you get to play Mayor Haggar on a mission from the devil.
I can see it now:
"Oh, a sewer level. I guess this is the point where the developers said 'fuck it, I'm out of ideas. Let's just have you go through a sewer.'"
Any business with a competent IT staff is already putting all its documents in the hands of another corporation on a regular basis in the form of off-site backups.
Your off-site backups are not encrypted? Why not? You may want to rethink the comment about competent IT.
Yes, but no. While a computer as we know it is a finite-state machine, the number of possible states exceeds the number of atoms in the universe. In reality, your assertion that it is decideable is worthless except for contrived examples and does not solve the problem in the general case.
Here's the relevant quote from the Halting problem article
Intel PRO/Wireless Network Connection Drivers Remote Code Execution Vulnerabilities . Look at that, a remotely exploitable security hole in the Wifi driver. Anyone using one of these things is vulnerable if they have not upgraded their Wifi drivers, regardless of OS. This was disclosed by the vendor (Intel).
I guess you were right. No facts, just theories.
OpenDarwin is dying. Another crippling bombshell hit the beleaguered OpenDarwin community, dot dot dot
Listen, it's been over twenty minutes since this story was posted, and I haven't seen a Netcraft confirmation post yet. How do I know it's really dying? C'mon, people, get on the ball.
Brothers, our time has come. This is the secret weapon that will allow our final victory over The Old People! With this technology in our hands, they will be our slaves. They will mine our ore and harvest our lumber to have access to our precious Alzheimers medicine. The Groundor has become the Groundee. He who controls the spice, er, meds, controls the universe!
I hate MSFT too, but must look at reality.
1) I don't hate Microsoft. Okay, maybe a little.
2) The chips you point to are 400+MHz ARM9s, the Xscale being a superscalar processor. I was thinking more along the lines of a sub 100MHz part (like your run-of-the-mill ARM7 or MIPS R3000).
But I'll concede that it's a fine (and arbitrary) line.
Mod the man Funny.
Though I consider an embedded OS more along something you could run on an ARM7, whereas Microsoft considers it something you could run on a Pentium 3 with a full chipset in box that doesn't look like a standard PC. By my definition, the latter two don't qualify, and WinCE only barely.
I doubt you've ever even used WinCE (called Windows Mobile now btw). Seems like your comment is just MS-bashing FUD.
Windows Mobile is a "platform" based on WinCE. It's what they used to call Pocket PC. Basically it's a CE core, Windows Media Player, Internet Explorer, and the Pocket PC UI and control panel (there's a few more things that I forget). People who aren't doing PDAs (like, oh, those doing engine control systems), use WinCE.
Now, what do you suppose the difference is between running CE in a cash register (which, in my opinion, is a good idea), versus running it in an automobile (not such a good idea, again, in my opinion)? I know, for example (being a WinCE user), that WinCE 5.x uses a shared single virtual memory space, divided into slots for the application. And that the code segment is mostly unprotected from write access (in a supposedly modern OS, can you believe it?), and that it has no security model whatsoever, and that all apps run in kernel mode and can, if they feel like it, capture the processor and stop all preemption and interrupts. Because of this, I'm not worried running WinCE on a cash register, but I am a bit more fearful in the case where lives are involved.
This is a good chance for Microsoft to show off their embedded systems (Maybe WinCE? The article doesn't say.)
...). Microsoft wants new engine control technology developed on and tied into WinCE. When the time comes to transfer that to the production world, WinCE will come along with it.
Of course WinCE (it's their only embedded OS, not counting the XBOX OS and WinXP embedded). The real point of this exercise is to get Microsoft software in *production* automobiles. Technology developed or refined in F1 and other racing leagues often makes its way down to consumer vehicles (antilock brakes, stability control systems, variable valve timing, hydraulic clutch,
Having worked with WinCE, this is a very scary proposition. I'd be terrified of putting it on any device that doesn't have a RESET button (hmm, why do all WinCE phones have reset buttons but Symbian ones don't?). One can only imagine how much they paid the F1 people to "standardize" on a software platform that is individually and independently developed by each team/manufacturer.
In my exception handling code, if I find that the crash is unrecoverable and due to fubar code by myself, I'm always sure to create an additional segment violation. This way, the "Report error to Microsoft" dialog comes up and the user thinks the bug is Windows' fault.
// blame microsoft (the loop is just for dramatic effect) ;
void pass_the_buck(void)
{
unsigned int *a;
for(a = NULL; *a = 0xdeadbeef; a++)
}
After using the "P" languages over the years (Perl, Python, PHP), I still find c to be my favourite (probably because I really like the preprocessor).
You do know that you can use the C preprocessor on any text file, right? It's a standalone program on systems using GCC. You will have to avoid shell-style comments (#), but otherwise it works well. It is a bit weird running Make on your PHP files, though.
echo -e '#define MSG "hello"\necho MSG;\n' | cpp > processed.php
You seem to be confused about the intent. This has nothing to do with the market, it has nothing to do with consumers, it has nothing to do with products. The GPL is about software. The intent of the GPL is to keep all GPL'd software available to anyone. The point of the license changes is to insure that the redistribution clause of the GPL is not rendered useless by DRM systems. You can't use the changes I've made to GPL software, even though you have the hardware for it, because I've created DRM software that prevents you from doing so. I've managed to close some GPL code, I've defeated the intent. The v3 license attempts to fix this.
The informed consumers (or lack thereof) is another problem, but not one the GPL can address.
As an embedded systems engineer, I've created systems using open source software, GPL and others. You could go to our company's website and download the source to all those that we are required to distribute. But these won't do you any good. The system cryptographically authenticates all binaries from the bootloader on. Even if you changed our kernel, improved our software, you'll never be able to use them on the hardware you bought from us*. This "security" is to secure the content from you, the person who paid for it. In the process, we have subverted the intent of the GPL (without violating any of its rules). The point is to let you modify the software and *be able to use it*, not just stare at the authentication error message when you'll try to run the software you've built yourself.
RMS is trying to stop this, stop the erosion of software freedom. In ten years, what I'm doing today will be a standard feature of your motherboard. Your authenticated OS will not run your unsigned code. Your free OS will not have access to the encrypted drive partition where your content is stored. Your hardware will conspire against you. Stallman is trying to extricate GPL software from the world where some are able to put restrictions on its free nature by means of DRM systems.
* Well, you could if you're really smart, but in the U.S. this is prohibited by law.
Well, Visual Studio 2005 does it, but somehow I get the feeling that's not what you were looking for. I believe one of the KDE editors does it (Kate?), KDevelop certainly does (see screenshot).
I managed to add a man page reader (ex: http;//kiwi/wiki/Man:fopen) into my company's wiki fairly easily. It was actually a bigger pain figuring out how to preserve the man page format than it was how to patch into MediaWiki and add an extension.
However, you're correct. If you plan to change the look or behaviour of it, you are truly out of luck due to the MediaWiki codebase mess.
Are you sure you don't want the students building their own transistors and generating their own electricity? How will they learn? Welcome to reductio ad absurdum.
javac, javadoc, and jar are fundamental tools of java programming. Understanding execve() and assembly programming are not. Using javac is the minimum you need to program java in any environment. It is in fact all you need, unless you want additional tools. An IDE is nice to have, if you're into that kind of thing, but it is far from a requirement for java development. A student who has learned the IDE and not the fundamental tools has been done a disservice by a poor teacher.
You seem to be under the impression that the number 1000 has some special meaning. Let's try your comment again, in octal:
pi * 1750 genes. Got to love those fun coincidences
Not so exciting now, is it? Nature is not decimal-based. The only reason we tend to be is because of the number of fingers we have.
I'm saying there is no time to lose. Newton is gone, Palm has hit the wall ... .NET mobile will be the only binary compatible handheld platform unless Sun act now.
.NET for embedded devices, and they're pushing it *hard*. The first words out of the mouth of every new MS guy I meet are "are you using managed code?". Every single presentation I've seen, block diagrams, feature lists, tools descriptions, every one has a block dedicated to managed code, c-sharp, and the portable dotnet framework right next to native code. It's pretty obvious that there was a directive from high on up of what to do and how to do it (I've never seen Microsoft so organized about something before). On the desktop side, they expect to kill Java by pushing out the dotnet framework with the next version of Windows, so things are currently pretty relaxed. On the server side, they are working on strong integration into all of their server products and all of their development tools (vb and asp replaced by dotnet versions). On the embedded side, they are pushing dotnet like it's the cure for every development issue ever.
As an embedded systems developer who has recently been dealing with Windows CE, let me tell you that Microsoft is pushing
The Java market is fragmenting. All these groups are taking it in different directions. The Apache people are re-implementing it, the GNU people won't deal with Sun Java, distribution is a mess. Microsoft offers a consistant product, a consistant platform, and a hard sell. Java is losing ground on the server side. On the embedded side, Microsoft is determined to "fucking kill [java]", and they're not resting. It's not all doom and gloom, Java will be around for a while. But it wouldn't hurt if Sun got off their asses and removed the obstacles in the way of their allies in the war against dotnet.
Thanks. However, I was looking for something that Noscript doesn't have (to my knowledge). That is, a default deny policy for 3rd party javascript, with a default allow for the current site. I generally don't visit sites that I don't want running javascript in my browser. With this policy I will (in the general case) have to do nothing special except set a checkbox in the preferences one time, and my policy will be in place. with Noscript, I will have to enable it on every site I on which I would like to use javascript.
As it is, I've got Adblock to filter out all of these ad/tracking servers. I just thought it would be a good privacy feature.
And that's slashdot, a relatively well-behaved site (I had to put the extra space in there to stop the stupid comment filter from auto-linking those).
Actually, the real reason that drives are increasing cache size is that production of low-sized memory modules is becoming scarce, and the price of smaller memory chips is actually going up. As DRAM manufacturers ramp up on the highest density currently out, they take their oldest fabs off line and start to retool them for the next big thing. I had worked on a system where we bumped the RAM from 8MB to 16MB because the availability of the eights was becoming an issue and there was no price difference. Given the quantities they buy, I have no doubt Seagate is getting 64 megabit parts at at least the same price as 32-megabit parts. You may even find that some drives with 8MB of cache actually have 16MB, half of which may be unused.
The Final Countdown by Europe (1990)
We're leaving together
But still it's farewell
And maybe we'll come back
To Earth, who can tell
I guess there is no one to blame
We're leaving ground (leaving ground)
Will things ever be the same again
It's the final countdown...
The final countdown
Ooh oh
We're heading for Venus (Venus)
And still we stand tall
Cause maybe they've seen us
And welcome us all (yeah)
With so many light years to go
And things to be found (to be found)
I'm sure that we'll all miss her so
It's the final countdown...
The final countdown
The final countdown (the final countdown)
Ooh ooh oh
(interlude)
The final countdown
Ooh oh
I'ts the final countdown
The final countdown
The final countdown (the final countdown)
Ooh
It's the final countdown
We are leaving together
The final countdown