Even the pay-for versions didn't do too bad. I paid for an Emusic account for a couple of months, and had they had shit worth downloading on there (the range available just _sucked_) then I would still have it.
Trouble is, all the producers need hitting with the fabled clue-by-four - until they actually sell their stuff online, they're screwed. Even today, no-one has any choice except to (a) buy monstrously-expensive CDs (and in the UK the standard price is £14 which is about $20), or (b) rip them off Morpheus. Shit, there's a market out there, they've demonstrated that they've got money simply by owning $500 of PC, they've demonstrated they want music to download, and they've demonstrated that the technology exists. Ho hum - I think your "first class idiot" hypothesis is getting closer to being a theorem...
As well, Turing never originally envisaged hardware as being part of it. At the time, "computers" were people who sat in a room doing sums all day. Stuff like lookup tables for missile targetting systems and planetary movements were calculated by _people_ back then. Turing's gift was to reduce the operations possible to the bare minimum and still have full functionality.
Our PCs today do not behave in the same way as a Turing machine, however it can be proven that they can be emulated by a Turing machine with a sufficiently large tape and a sufficiently long time to execute the instruction sequence. Since that's the case, it means that what can be done with a computer is limited to what can be done with a Turing machine, for which there is much mathematical work. In spite of the apparent flexibility of PCs, there are some things which are not possible with a computer; also, there are further things which may or may not be possible on a computer such as encryption-cracking methods which improve on the "brute-force" hack, so until anyone can prove that they are not possible, the encryption guys have to assume that it _is_ possible and design accordingly.
Choose from: police, fire service, healthcare, unemployment/childcare benefits, road repairs, education, space program... That's just the ones I can think of in 30 seconds. All have suffered axing by governments to meet their spending requirements. And please note the first item on the list is cuts in police spending.
Did I miss something, or do they not now have a copy of your thumbprint? Stick your thumb in a scanner and send the results in - instant proof of ID. They will keep hold of this information, in the same way that the information on your driver's license or passport is stored for the duration of you having a license/passport.
Read the notes. There is NO central database distributing fingerprint info to the readers. Your fingerprint info is only contained on your card - all the reader does is compare your actual fingerprint against the fingerprint your card says you have. Job done. If the government wants to create a central database for distribution to gov agencies using that information, it needs a new law. In China human rights are not a big deal, but you'd never get it into law in any civilised country (and yes, I do mean by that that China is an uncivilised country which still hasn't left the Dark Ages).
This assumes that the police force stays the same size when crimes become easier to solve. This will not be the case - all police forces have very real budget constraints, and if it becomes simple to solve a crime then the budget _will_ be cut.
The more interesting question is this - when all crimes can be solved, what do we do with criminals, given that jails are already overcrowded? Now _that_ is the question for the next century...
You ever got a passport? To get a passport, you must send two photo-booth pictures of yourself to the passport office. It used to be that one went on the passport and the other went into the files, but these days both stay on file and the passport picture is done by a printer from a scan of the photo. So the government has already got your picture on file, unless you never go outside your country of origin (a rare situation in every country except the US and possibly Russia).
Fingerprints - well hey, I committed a crime and they can find me! Damn that's hard! Should be illegal for the cops to find me!;-) Ditto genetic fingerprints. And that's assuming that the police get access to the database for searches on crime scene data, which is not the case here.
As for genetic information being used by other parties, that information is a part of your medical records. In order for companies to use it, it'll take a change in the law in every Western country to allow anyone else to have access to your private medical records. In addition, most countries (including the US) already have bans on using genetic profiling for health insurance and similar stuff - the lawmakers and civil liberties groups saw this coming as soon as genetic research started.
And please note that this card does NOT contain any information on your genetic sequence, or details of your health record (for which there are damn good reasons for having the info immediately available, such as health workers taking special precautions if someone has AIDS).
Lastly, identity theft. Read the article. The card contains a scan of your thumbprint - to prove that you are the genuine owner of the card, you have to put your thumb on a sensor, and the reader checks your thumbprint against the one stored on the card. You are only recognised as the legitimate owner of the card if the two match. Note that AT NO TIME is there a central database of thumbprints being distributed to the readers! So this is a much better system than PIN numbers - a card and a thumb-print sensor, and it's literally impossible to fake identity. No-one can now rip off your card without having cut your hand off first!:-) So in one move, it would put an end to credit card theft.
Is there anything I've missed? Or do you not now have a leg to stand on...?
Good point. But I was trying to think of a film which sucked, not a decent film.;-) Having said that, "Ben Hur" didn't occur to me, simply bcos it's not my generation - I can remember crap films from 1985 through today as much as you want, but I have a poor memory for the good films from earlier which I've seen on TV. Ho hum.
Yeah, it'll have some nice pictures. But that doesn't make it a good film. There's a quote from a guy who worked on Shrek along the lines of "People think that the holy grail of animation is to be able to animate a human. In fact, it's to tell a story." TPM didn't tell a story, it just filled in some lame links between CGI sequences, and the content of those CGI scenes was usually trite and uninteresting.
The pod race that you all drool over is nothing more than "Days of Thunder" with different pictures (and hey, did that film ever suck!) - nice speed effects, but nothing interesting happening to make you worry about the character. The ground battle scene sucked by taking place on a manicured lawn and the simple question "if they have bombs, why don't they get other better weapons?". The storming-the-palace scenes sucked by the "oh hey, they all suddenly get guns with ropes on, yeah right" bit. And the space bit was just "Home Alone" - kid lucks out with slapstick to save the day. Never mind the totally irrelevant fish-chasing-the-submarine sequence.
The only new and interesting thing in the whole film was the Jedi fight scenes - they finally worked out how a Jedi (who can use the Force to jump and stuff) would be able to fight.
Check out the books. "20k leagues" and "Voyage to the Moon" ("voyage"/"journey"?) both use English characters.
Basically, remember when JV was writing. Britain was _the_ superpower then - like America today but many, many times more so. (Flame away, Britain lost the War of Independence in America, but the Empire stayed intact for another 150 years.) Every writer, regardless of nationality, would be affected by Britain, and to claim otherwise would be similar to saying that a modern film-maker wasn't influenced by America and American films. This goes double for anyone writing books with British characters.
Not that I think the British social class system was a good thing - a caste system is never good. It's worrying that the US seems to be reinventing it with the quantity of top jobs going to the same families (ie. the families with money), and the election-by-money-not-policy system. You're effectively getting a class of aristocrats only without the responsibilities of the old-fashioned aristocracy.
Trouble is that 3G isn't showing any signs of coming around soon. It's required a massive investment to get the infrastructure for current phones rolled out, and there simply isn't anyone left with the money to do another rollout of 3G so soon. Plus in many countries (particularly Europe) the phone networks have bid so much for the rights to install 3G that they've got no money left to build the damn things! If I were you, I'd not expect to see 3G networks for at least 2-3 years (from talking to friends who work with mobile phones).
The thing is though, the more bandwidth the phones need, the more it's going to cost the phone companies - phone base stations are limited (a) by range and (b) by the number of simultaneous transmissions they can handle, and (b) is dependent on the bandwidth required per phone. If you're putting base stations around a major city such as downtown London or Manhattan, where (b) is the limiting factor, then increasing the number of simultaneous transmissions will reduce the number of base stations required, and so reduce your costs.
Yeah, I remember seeing TW cover it. "News" eh?:-)
The TW demonstration was pretty cool - a couple dancing in a silent ballroom and the presenter doing her bit nearby. Then she walks towards them with the mike, and a yard or two away the music appears. A pretty neat demo. (Of course, the cynics would say that you can fake it all in post-production just by adding the music to the mix, but that's unlikely given that this was the BBC's tech-news programme).
Two ppl colliding can easily break a leg. As for keeping the old off it, there's plenty of keen older skiers, and if they face-plant then they're more likely to bust something. And a rule saying "no-one over 50 may ride this" ain't gonna get past the lawyers...
Sure, that I sort of understand. There's actually some "royalties" paid back from the police to the manufacturer on the fines from those stop-light cameras, and that's just plain wrong.
But really there's not a problem. Even as far as the stop-light thing goes, the only issue is for the city/police to define exactly what tolerance is permitted (to allow for dodgy speedometers), and then frankly no-one has a leg to stand on. Ppl jumping red lights are more of a danger than a speeder. Some ppl complain that they only put them on busy junctions - well DOH! where else would you use them, except in areas where there's lots of cars and the odd asshole jumping the lights is likely to cause a more serious accident and traffic problems?
On bad stretches of road, there's a definite correlation between speed and accidents. In the UK, speed cameras tend to appear on those bad stretches of the road. Ppl slow down to avoid getting a ticket, and accident rates go right down.
Unfortunately in the US, cretinous tinfoil-hat-wearers have decided that a speed camera infringes their privacy by taking a photo of them speeding, so the police can only use handheld cameras to catch speeders. Which means that speed traps are limited to places where you can park a police car, effectively limiting it to freeways and larger roads, which aren't as risky. Ho hum.
You want your autopilot to never have a task scheduler? Obviously you have no experience in embedded systems design at all, or you wouldn't say something so blatantly stupid. I'm sorry, but that's just rubbish.
In EVERY embedded application, there's multiple layers of stuff happening, ranging from ultra-high priority interrupts that need micro-second accuracy scheduling, down to background loop stuff that doesn't need to be done more often than every few seconds. Every embedded system uses this approach.
A single loop running round is fine if your code needs to do nothing more complex than a Windows program, which any 16-year-old kiddie can write. The moment it breaks this complexity, you're screwed. For example, consider a car engine controller (which I design software for, BTW). Scheduling the start and stop times for injector and ignition pulses requires the processor to recalculate the times a fraction of a second before the pulse, to make sure the fuel and ignition pulses are accurate for the current conditions. And importantly, the number of times you need to do this changes with engine speed, since you need to update every engine rev. It is unacceptable to burden this ultra-fast processing with stuff which doesn't need to be run 7000 times a second, eg. toggling the indicators.
So the solution is to go to a multi-rate system. Stuff which needs to run fast, runs fast; stuff which can run slow, runs slow. This frees up processing time for the fast stuff which can then handle more iterations per second. And in order to work this, you need something to tell all your functions when to run. Sometimes it's designed as part of your main application, sometimes it's a separate bit of object code bought-in, but it's always required. Even your autopilot will be doing this - as a minimum there'll be a fast loop controlling the aircraft, and a slow loop sending info back to the pilots.
So there's many different task rates, all running at their own time frame. For example, in the Ford project I'm working on currently, there's a task happens twice per rev to schedule fuel and spark, there's another task happens once per cam, and there's time-based tasks at 10ms, 16ms, 32ms, 50ms and 100ms rates. And this allows us to allocate resources to the processing that needs it, such as critical tasks like keeping ppl alive.
Well, except that someone as part of the app will have written a task scheduler and some input and output processing functions. Which means that there _is_ an OS in there effectively, it's just that it doesn't come in separately-installed parts but instead is all compiled together.
Realtime stuff is starting to go more for using OSes though. There's a great resources hit in everyone developing a new task scheduler for each new platform they work on, so it makes more sense for an OS producer (eg. WindRiver) to produce an OS once and everyone else to license it. This is becoming more the case as processors get more complex and time-to-market gets smaller - it's cheaper to license an OS and only use a small fraction of it than it is to get some of your guys to write a new one from scratch.
Warp drive is _not_ just around the corner. Minute actions amongst atomic particles have been investigated - it's a pretty damn huge step from there to building the Starship Enterprise! Sure there's theory, but no-one's yet come up with how to do it for real! When it becomes just an engineering problem then great, but so far they really _don't_ know whether it's possible or not on any scale beyond atomic.
The quantum entanglement has only just happened, and no-one's yet sure what the rules are about how it works yet (theories abound, but bleeding-edge physics has theories all over, and most of them get modified on a regular basis from the results of the latest batch of experiments).
Yes, fusion has been done, but no-one yet has managed to make it give out more heat than you put into it. So far, the experiments have been like using a blowtorch to light a twig. When they can use that blowtorch to light a bonfire and get a return on the energy investment in starting the process, then it'll be ready for mainline use, but we've been promised that for the last 10 years and they're still not there yet.
Fusion requires a large volume of plasma to get more energy out than you put in, which is why the JET project was canned to make way for a bigger torus. With the size required for this, you ain't likely to see it in the tiny little Space Shuttle, nor even in a C-130!
And as far as the next shuttle goes, NASA is _not_ using fusion. The next-gen shuttle is just using hydrogen and oxygen as before, but with a more advanced engine for burning it. The plan for the generation after that is to use air-breathing engines which can use air instead of pure oxygen for the atmospheric phase of the flight, to cut down on the amount of oxygen needed and therefore allow more payload to be carried - but again it's just going to be hydrogen and oxygen burning. Post a link to your fusion press release if you know different.
Doh! If there's multiple companies, it's not a monopoly. Look it up in a dictionary.
You're contradicting yourself. Either it's good for one company (or a group of companies) to come up with a standard, or it's good for everyone to have competing formats and wait for consumers to decide on one. After VHS/Betamax, customers simply will _not_ buy anything where the industry's relying on the second option; think of all the next-gen floppy disks which came and went before the CD-ROM (with a fixed standard) became the norm.
If one company/group does it, they'll be putting in significant amounts of money and time for research, so other companies save themselves an R&D budget by licensing that research.
As far as getting fees back goes, work it out. Philips and co spend years working on the successor to CDs, investing millions in R&D. If they can't get a return on that investment, that money is just gone, man. And if they can't get a return on investing in new products, they won't - they'll just steal off someone else who's come up with a new idea. Eventually no-one produces anything new, bcos it's not in anyone's interest to do so. Great idea, dude.
Maybe so, but if it plays DVDs then they're violating Philips' patents. Just bcos it doesn't blatantly say on the box "this is a DVD player which uses Philips' patents" doesn't mean that it doesn't!
Nope. Colouring _inside_ the lines teaches hand-eye coordination and an appreciation of visual shapes. Until you can colour inside the lines, you're not ready to express yourself by colouring outside the lines.
It's the difference between someone who drives 100mph bcos they know the road perfectly and are a good driver, and someone who's only had a half-dozen lessons driving 100mph bcos they don't know to look at the speedometer. Or the difference between a kid hitting random notes on a piano, and a great jazz musician hitting apparently-random notes on a piano.
Until you've got an appreciation of what the conventions are and why they're there, breaking them is NOT good. Conventions like "don't drink the results of a chemistry experiment" for instance have a very good basis - it isn't until you have enough knowledge of chemistry to know that the substance you're producing is harmless (or a recreational substance;-) that you should break it! That's where adults have to provide some control over kids - children are born literally unable to associate cause and effect, so they cannot associate shooting their little brother with their little brother dying, it's just not in their range of experience.
So not exactly _news_ for nerds then? Ah well, I guess a couple hundred/.ers posted it when it came round and all the bosses rejected it, then a year later J Random Coward stumbles over it and gets it posted. Not that I'm bitter or anything....;-)
Grab.
Re:NATO Commander was one of the early ones.
on
HIstory of RTS Games
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· Score: 2
That makes Doom and Quake the world's greatest strategy games, right?
The correct word for this level of planning (eg. "you two go up there while we sneak up behind") is "tactics", which involves fighting a small corner of a conflict (eg. taking a bridge). "Strategy" is planning the entire conflict (eg. taking a city or a country).
Slashdot Mirror
Even the pay-for versions didn't do too bad. I paid for an Emusic account for a couple of months, and had they had shit worth downloading on there (the range available just _sucked_) then I would still have it.
Trouble is, all the producers need hitting with the fabled clue-by-four - until they actually sell their stuff online, they're screwed. Even today, no-one has any choice except to (a) buy monstrously-expensive CDs (and in the UK the standard price is £14 which is about $20), or (b) rip them off Morpheus. Shit, there's a market out there, they've demonstrated that they've got money simply by owning $500 of PC, they've demonstrated they want music to download, and they've demonstrated that the technology exists. Ho hum - I think your "first class idiot" hypothesis is getting closer to being a theorem...
Grab.
As well, Turing never originally envisaged hardware as being part of it. At the time, "computers" were people who sat in a room doing sums all day. Stuff like lookup tables for missile targetting systems and planetary movements were calculated by _people_ back then. Turing's gift was to reduce the operations possible to the bare minimum and still have full functionality.
Our PCs today do not behave in the same way as a Turing machine, however it can be proven that they can be emulated by a Turing machine with a sufficiently large tape and a sufficiently long time to execute the instruction sequence. Since that's the case, it means that what can be done with a computer is limited to what can be done with a Turing machine, for which there is much mathematical work. In spite of the apparent flexibility of PCs, there are some things which are not possible with a computer; also, there are further things which may or may not be possible on a computer such as encryption-cracking methods which improve on the "brute-force" hack, so until anyone can prove that they are not possible, the encryption guys have to assume that it _is_ possible and design accordingly.
Grab.
Quite possible he did, but if they wanted to remove everything metal off him, then that means every sensor and every bit of wire.
Grab.
Choose from: police, fire service, healthcare, unemployment/childcare benefits, road repairs, education, space program... That's just the ones I can think of in 30 seconds. All have suffered axing by governments to meet their spending requirements. And please note the first item on the list is cuts in police spending.
Grab.
Did I miss something, or do they not now have a copy of your thumbprint? Stick your thumb in a scanner and send the results in - instant proof of ID. They will keep hold of this information, in the same way that the information on your driver's license or passport is stored for the duration of you having a license/passport.
Grab.
Read the notes. There is NO central database distributing fingerprint info to the readers. Your fingerprint info is only contained on your card - all the reader does is compare your actual fingerprint against the fingerprint your card says you have. Job done. If the government wants to create a central database for distribution to gov agencies using that information, it needs a new law. In China human rights are not a big deal, but you'd never get it into law in any civilised country (and yes, I do mean by that that China is an uncivilised country which still hasn't left the Dark Ages).
Grab.
This assumes that the police force stays the same size when crimes become easier to solve. This will not be the case - all police forces have very real budget constraints, and if it becomes simple to solve a crime then the budget _will_ be cut.
The more interesting question is this - when all crimes can be solved, what do we do with criminals, given that jails are already overcrowded? Now _that_ is the question for the next century...
Grab.
Anything you've missed?! In a word, plenty!
;-) Ditto genetic fingerprints. And that's assuming that the police get access to the database for searches on crime scene data, which is not the case here.
:-) So in one move, it would put an end to credit card theft.
You ever got a passport? To get a passport, you must send two photo-booth pictures of yourself to the passport office. It used to be that one went on the passport and the other went into the files, but these days both stay on file and the passport picture is done by a printer from a scan of the photo. So the government has already got your picture on file, unless you never go outside your country of origin (a rare situation in every country except the US and possibly Russia).
Fingerprints - well hey, I committed a crime and they can find me! Damn that's hard! Should be illegal for the cops to find me!
As for genetic information being used by other parties, that information is a part of your medical records. In order for companies to use it, it'll take a change in the law in every Western country to allow anyone else to have access to your private medical records. In addition, most countries (including the US) already have bans on using genetic profiling for health insurance and similar stuff - the lawmakers and civil liberties groups saw this coming as soon as genetic research started.
And please note that this card does NOT contain any information on your genetic sequence, or details of your health record (for which there are damn good reasons for having the info immediately available, such as health workers taking special precautions if someone has AIDS).
Lastly, identity theft. Read the article. The card contains a scan of your thumbprint - to prove that you are the genuine owner of the card, you have to put your thumb on a sensor, and the reader checks your thumbprint against the one stored on the card. You are only recognised as the legitimate owner of the card if the two match. Note that AT NO TIME is there a central database of thumbprints being distributed to the readers! So this is a much better system than PIN numbers - a card and a thumb-print sensor, and it's literally impossible to fake identity. No-one can now rip off your card without having cut your hand off first!
Is there anything I've missed? Or do you not now have a leg to stand on...?
Grab.
Good point. But I was trying to think of a film which sucked, not a decent film. ;-) Having said that, "Ben Hur" didn't occur to me, simply bcos it's not my generation - I can remember crap films from 1985 through today as much as you want, but I have a poor memory for the good films from earlier which I've seen on TV. Ho hum.
Grab.
Yeah, it'll have some nice pictures. But that doesn't make it a good film. There's a quote from a guy who worked on Shrek along the lines of "People think that the holy grail of animation is to be able to animate a human. In fact, it's to tell a story." TPM didn't tell a story, it just filled in some lame links between CGI sequences, and the content of those CGI scenes was usually trite and uninteresting.
The pod race that you all drool over is nothing more than "Days of Thunder" with different pictures (and hey, did that film ever suck!) - nice speed effects, but nothing interesting happening to make you worry about the character. The ground battle scene sucked by taking place on a manicured lawn and the simple question "if they have bombs, why don't they get other better weapons?". The storming-the-palace scenes sucked by the "oh hey, they all suddenly get guns with ropes on, yeah right" bit. And the space bit was just "Home Alone" - kid lucks out with slapstick to save the day. Never mind the totally irrelevant fish-chasing-the-submarine sequence.
The only new and interesting thing in the whole film was the Jedi fight scenes - they finally worked out how a Jedi (who can use the Force to jump and stuff) would be able to fight.
Grab.
Check out the books. "20k leagues" and "Voyage to the Moon" ("voyage"/"journey"?) both use English characters.
Basically, remember when JV was writing. Britain was _the_ superpower then - like America today but many, many times more so. (Flame away, Britain lost the War of Independence in America, but the Empire stayed intact for another 150 years.) Every writer, regardless of nationality, would be affected by Britain, and to claim otherwise would be similar to saying that a modern film-maker wasn't influenced by America and American films. This goes double for anyone writing books with British characters.
Not that I think the British social class system was a good thing - a caste system is never good. It's worrying that the US seems to be reinventing it with the quantity of top jobs going to the same families (ie. the families with money), and the election-by-money-not-policy system. You're effectively getting a class of aristocrats only without the responsibilities of the old-fashioned aristocracy.
Grab.
SlashDot Pedants' Dictionary: "postamster" not recognised. Suggested replacement: "post hamster".
Grab.
Trouble is that 3G isn't showing any signs of coming around soon. It's required a massive investment to get the infrastructure for current phones rolled out, and there simply isn't anyone left with the money to do another rollout of 3G so soon. Plus in many countries (particularly Europe) the phone networks have bid so much for the rights to install 3G that they've got no money left to build the damn things! If I were you, I'd not expect to see 3G networks for at least 2-3 years (from talking to friends who work with mobile phones).
The thing is though, the more bandwidth the phones need, the more it's going to cost the phone companies - phone base stations are limited (a) by range and (b) by the number of simultaneous transmissions they can handle, and (b) is dependent on the bandwidth required per phone. If you're putting base stations around a major city such as downtown London or Manhattan, where (b) is the limiting factor, then increasing the number of simultaneous transmissions will reduce the number of base stations required, and so reduce your costs.
Grab.
Yeah, I remember seeing TW cover it. "News" eh? :-)
The TW demonstration was pretty cool - a couple dancing in a silent ballroom and the presenter doing her bit nearby. Then she walks towards them with the mike, and a yard or two away the music appears. A pretty neat demo. (Of course, the cynics would say that you can fake it all in post-production just by adding the music to the mix, but that's unlikely given that this was the BBC's tech-news programme).
Grab.
Two ppl colliding can easily break a leg. As for keeping the old off it, there's plenty of keen older skiers, and if they face-plant then they're more likely to bust something. And a rule saying "no-one over 50 may ride this" ain't gonna get past the lawyers...
Grab.
Sure, that I sort of understand. There's actually some "royalties" paid back from the police to the manufacturer on the fines from those stop-light cameras, and that's just plain wrong.
But really there's not a problem. Even as far as the stop-light thing goes, the only issue is for the city/police to define exactly what tolerance is permitted (to allow for dodgy speedometers), and then frankly no-one has a leg to stand on. Ppl jumping red lights are more of a danger than a speeder. Some ppl complain that they only put them on busy junctions - well DOH! where else would you use them, except in areas where there's lots of cars and the odd asshole jumping the lights is likely to cause a more serious accident and traffic problems?
Grab.
On bad stretches of road, there's a definite correlation between speed and accidents. In the UK, speed cameras tend to appear on those bad stretches of the road. Ppl slow down to avoid getting a ticket, and accident rates go right down.
Unfortunately in the US, cretinous tinfoil-hat-wearers have decided that a speed camera infringes their privacy by taking a photo of them speeding, so the police can only use handheld cameras to catch speeders. Which means that speed traps are limited to places where you can park a police car, effectively limiting it to freeways and larger roads, which aren't as risky. Ho hum.
Grab.
You want your autopilot to never have a task scheduler? Obviously you have no experience in embedded systems design at all, or you wouldn't say something so blatantly stupid. I'm sorry, but that's just rubbish.
In EVERY embedded application, there's multiple layers of stuff happening, ranging from ultra-high priority interrupts that need micro-second accuracy scheduling, down to background loop stuff that doesn't need to be done more often than every few seconds. Every embedded system uses this approach.
A single loop running round is fine if your code needs to do nothing more complex than a Windows program, which any 16-year-old kiddie can write. The moment it breaks this complexity, you're screwed. For example, consider a car engine controller (which I design software for, BTW). Scheduling the start and stop times for injector and ignition pulses requires the processor to recalculate the times a fraction of a second before the pulse, to make sure the fuel and ignition pulses are accurate for the current conditions. And importantly, the number of times you need to do this changes with engine speed, since you need to update every engine rev. It is unacceptable to burden this ultra-fast processing with stuff which doesn't need to be run 7000 times a second, eg. toggling the indicators.
So the solution is to go to a multi-rate system. Stuff which needs to run fast, runs fast; stuff which can run slow, runs slow. This frees up processing time for the fast stuff which can then handle more iterations per second. And in order to work this, you need something to tell all your functions when to run. Sometimes it's designed as part of your main application, sometimes it's a separate bit of object code bought-in, but it's always required. Even your autopilot will be doing this - as a minimum there'll be a fast loop controlling the aircraft, and a slow loop sending info back to the pilots.
So there's many different task rates, all running at their own time frame. For example, in the Ford project I'm working on currently, there's a task happens twice per rev to schedule fuel and spark, there's another task happens once per cam, and there's time-based tasks at 10ms, 16ms, 32ms, 50ms and 100ms rates. And this allows us to allocate resources to the processing that needs it, such as critical tasks like keeping ppl alive.
Grab.
Well, except that someone as part of the app will have written a task scheduler and some input and output processing functions. Which means that there _is_ an OS in there effectively, it's just that it doesn't come in separately-installed parts but instead is all compiled together.
Realtime stuff is starting to go more for using OSes though. There's a great resources hit in everyone developing a new task scheduler for each new platform they work on, so it makes more sense for an OS producer (eg. WindRiver) to produce an OS once and everyone else to license it. This is becoming more the case as processors get more complex and time-to-market gets smaller - it's cheaper to license an OS and only use a small fraction of it than it is to get some of your guys to write a new one from scratch.
Grab.
We have all this technology now, right?
Warp drive is _not_ just around the corner. Minute actions amongst atomic particles have been investigated - it's a pretty damn huge step from there to building the Starship Enterprise! Sure there's theory, but no-one's yet come up with how to do it for real! When it becomes just an engineering problem then great, but so far they really _don't_ know whether it's possible or not on any scale beyond atomic.
The quantum entanglement has only just happened, and no-one's yet sure what the rules are about how it works yet (theories abound, but bleeding-edge physics has theories all over, and most of them get modified on a regular basis from the results of the latest batch of experiments).
Yes, fusion has been done, but no-one yet has managed to make it give out more heat than you put into it. So far, the experiments have been like using a blowtorch to light a twig. When they can use that blowtorch to light a bonfire and get a return on the energy investment in starting the process, then it'll be ready for mainline use, but we've been promised that for the last 10 years and they're still not there yet.
Fusion requires a large volume of plasma to get more energy out than you put in, which is why the JET project was canned to make way for a bigger torus. With the size required for this, you ain't likely to see it in the tiny little Space Shuttle, nor even in a C-130!
And as far as the next shuttle goes, NASA is _not_ using fusion. The next-gen shuttle is just using hydrogen and oxygen as before, but with a more advanced engine for burning it. The plan for the generation after that is to use air-breathing engines which can use air instead of pure oxygen for the atmospheric phase of the flight, to cut down on the amount of oxygen needed and therefore allow more payload to be carried - but again it's just going to be hydrogen and oxygen burning. Post a link to your fusion press release if you know different.
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Doh! If there's multiple companies, it's not a monopoly. Look it up in a dictionary.
You're contradicting yourself. Either it's good for one company (or a group of companies) to come up with a standard, or it's good for everyone to have competing formats and wait for consumers to decide on one. After VHS/Betamax, customers simply will _not_ buy anything where the industry's relying on the second option; think of all the next-gen floppy disks which came and went before the CD-ROM (with a fixed standard) became the norm.
If one company/group does it, they'll be putting in significant amounts of money and time for research, so other companies save themselves an R&D budget by licensing that research.
As far as getting fees back goes, work it out. Philips and co spend years working on the successor to CDs, investing millions in R&D. If they can't get a return on that investment, that money is just gone, man. And if they can't get a return on investing in new products, they won't - they'll just steal off someone else who's come up with a new idea. Eventually no-one produces anything new, bcos it's not in anyone's interest to do so. Great idea, dude.
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Maybe so, but if it plays DVDs then they're violating Philips' patents. Just bcos it doesn't blatantly say on the box "this is a DVD player which uses Philips' patents" doesn't mean that it doesn't!
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Nope. Colouring _inside_ the lines teaches hand-eye coordination and an appreciation of visual shapes. Until you can colour inside the lines, you're not ready to express yourself by colouring outside the lines.
;-) that you should break it! That's where adults have to provide some control over kids - children are born literally unable to associate cause and effect, so they cannot associate shooting their little brother with their little brother dying, it's just not in their range of experience.
It's the difference between someone who drives 100mph bcos they know the road perfectly and are a good driver, and someone who's only had a half-dozen lessons driving 100mph bcos they don't know to look at the speedometer. Or the difference between a kid hitting random notes on a piano, and a great jazz musician hitting apparently-random notes on a piano.
Until you've got an appreciation of what the conventions are and why they're there, breaking them is NOT good. Conventions like "don't drink the results of a chemistry experiment" for instance have a very good basis - it isn't until you have enough knowledge of chemistry to know that the substance you're producing is harmless (or a recreational substance
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So not exactly _news_ for nerds then? Ah well, I guess a couple hundred /.ers posted it when it came round and all the bosses rejected it, then a year later J Random Coward stumbles over it and gets it posted. Not that I'm bitter or anything.... ;-)
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That makes Doom and Quake the world's greatest strategy games, right?
The correct word for this level of planning (eg. "you two go up there while we sneak up behind") is "tactics", which involves fighting a small corner of a conflict (eg. taking a bridge). "Strategy" is planning the entire conflict (eg. taking a city or a country).
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