As long as we're talking about the 6809 and stack architectures, particularly Forth, in the same thread...
Did you ever do Forth on the 6809? Did you ever see the source? The main "execute loop" was 2 instructions long. I figured it out once, that had they had another address mode (I forget what it was now, but it did exist on other architectures at the time, PDP-11 and/or Series/1.) it would have been a single instruction.
I tweaked up a Sieve myself on a 1MHz 6809 that beat the published values for a 4.77MHz 8088.
Perhaps an appropriate point, but I still think there's something different between microcode and the micro-ops of modern architectures.
By the way, I *have* done microcode. In a way, it's maybe the most enlightening programming ever, because with microcode you know (and have to know) exactly on a cycle-by-cycle basis what's going on. For that matter, even the cycle is too coarse a measure, you have to know what's going on inside the cycle.
As an extra qualifier, I know there's horizontal and vertical microcode, and I did fairly narrow horizontal. But I guess I think that the difference is that microcode, at least the stuff I did, didn't really dispatch instructions, but rather the bits in the microcode corresponded, after a little simple decode, to actual wires that did things like select registers, pick a leg of a mux, or gate read/write operations. The correspondence was stunningly one-to-one, so that a hardware type with a few software courses could pick it up pretty readily.
By contrast, I think of the dispatches of the Pentium II - come to think of it, really the Pentium Pro and later were higher-level constructs, not simple decoded wires. As I said, maybe the distinction between this and vertical microcode is blurrier than it is with horizontal.
Even in assembler, the mainstream hasn't been programming to the metal since Pentium I.
Beginning with Pentium II, and propagating to pretty much all of the other archictures in a short time, non of the mainstream CPUs have exposed their metal. We have an instruction set, but it's torn into primitives and scheduled for execution. We don't see the primitives, not even in assembler. AFAIK, there isn't even a way to use the true primitives, except perhaps on the Transmeta, where it was undocumented.
So in this light, since we're already fairly far from the true metal, it seems to me that it makes a lot of sense to re-evaluate the instruction set itself. Of course one could raise the Itanium argument, but I would also argue that politics were too big a part, there. Then again, one could also argue that x86 and amd64 are just so entrenched that it doesn't matter, and they do run well on today's hardware.
Then again I could cite my old favorite, the 6809. It started from the same origins and precepts as RISC, but a different attitude. RISC simply tried to optimize the most common operations, at the expense of less common ones. With the 6809, they tried to understand WHY certain things were happening, and how those things could be done better and faster. They ended up with a few more transistors, the same speed, and something approaching 3X the throughput, as compared to the 6800. More similar to the current topic, there was a paper on 'contour mapping', mapping blocks of cache into stacks and data structures. The 6809 was too old for a cache, but it seems to me that combining it's concepts with the contour mapping would be interesting indeed.
But like stack engines, it's not x86/amd64 compatible.
But the other point that I heard about the whole thing was that treatment worked, and crime dropped. That was the whole point, interdiction and enforcement are politically correct by today's standards, and make politicians sound tough and dynamic - but are ineffective.
I guess it's kind of like abstinance education as the only means of controlling teenage pregnancy. I recently found that someone I knew - born in the 1920's - was a 'miracle baby', the kind born less than 9 months after the wedding. Hormonal control has been a problem as long as there have been hormones.
You say legalize drugs for taxation, a pragmatic reason. Someone else said legalize drugs because, "It's my body!" a principled reason.
I have another pragmatic reason:
Legalize drugs because the collateral damage of "crimes of financing" and the "War on Drugs" itself are worse than the drugs themselves. Beyond that it has polarized and destabilized source nations like Columbia, and I have no doubt that we're breeding more US resentment there, so we won't feel lonely if we were to somehow work through our Islamist extremist problems.
Obviously legalization would have problems, and would need to be treated similarly to alcohol. Clearly users while under the influence need to be kept out from behind the wheel.
Which brings us to Richard Nixon, or at least an urban legend about Richard Nixon.
During his campaign for the 1968 election, Nixon part of his platform was good old Law'n'Order. Once elected, he felt he needed to deliver. One of his key advisors told him that more/stronger attempts at interdiction and enforcement have never worked, and never would. According to this advisor the ONLY way to solve the problem was through drug treatment - essentially working the demand side of the problem instead of the supply side. The way I heard the story, this was done, and it worked - crime dropped during Nixon's first term.
Then during the second term, Law'n'Order was no longer an issue and the Vietnam war was all-consuming. Since it was no longer needed, politically speaking, the drug treatment program was dismantled, never to be seen again. Since then it's been more of the same ineffective, counter-productive interdiction and enforcement.
I didn't know that, though perhaps I might have guessed it. I presume it's the cold, reduced (Is cargo space pressurized?) pressure, or temperature cycling. Can you supply a link?
Just because Einstein turned Newtonian physics on its ear doesn't make Newton any less of a genius. Whenever Einstein is superceded, it won't make him less of a genious, either. It just means that someone else has stood on his shoulders, like he stood on Newton's, and has seen even further.
Newton and Einstein both "changed the Universe" because they changed how we view it and how we relate to it. Or the example Burke uses is Galileo, and how he shifted the center of the Universe from the Earth to the Sun. (I know you could argue that it was really Copernicus, and that neither was really correct.)
No, I would be unhappy to find out that God is as limited as the Bible-thumpers would have him be. That we were created with brains and minds to think and comprehend the Universe, and then that Universe was created 6,000 years ago, but with an apparent age of billions of years, simply to fool the sharpest of those minds. That 'extreme intervention' over '6 days' was needed to create the Universe, as opposed to a starting moment some 15.8 billion years ago, that God isn't the quintessential physicist. That God is as limited and small as the writers of the Bible depict. (and being men themselves, were.)
"From the article: '...researchers found, for instance, that "judicial nominations" have consumed steadily more Congressional attention between 1997 and 2004. "
I wouldn't bet against you, either. Just because they pulled if off then doesn't mean they will now. Vista has a lot more baggage than Win2k, and a lot less focus. (Win2k was focused on business, not on everything)
Actually AOL does serve a function, and quite a useful one - security.
For one aspect, as someone mentions in another thread, AOL has been aggressive about keeping spam under control.
For another side, a co-worker uses AOL simply as a more secure through-point for his family. They offer the multiple accounts with 'parent' and 'child' privileges, and allow the parents to set the criteria and for the children. I'm under the impression that there is also some other security filtering going on for mail and browsing, as well.
One more learned may scoff at the idea of AOL as a security provider, but for Joe 6pak it's a heck of a lot better than going out on the net naked, security-wise.
On a related topic, I'm also happy with my (non-networked) 1320. It's plugged in with a USB cable, the second I've used. The first cable developed problems, or maybe never fully worked in the first place. The second cable clearly worked well at first, but has developed problems. (Don't ask me how a wire goes bad!) I get communications errors in the logs, but am still able to print. The problems seem to be related to getting information back from the printer.
So I'd happily go out and spend $20 for a new cable, but I have no guarantees that it would be any better than the 2 flea-market special's that I've been runnin. How can I know that I'm getting a good USB cable.
Alternatively, has anyone added JetDirect to the 1320, and can comment on experiences, suppliers, and pricing?
You don't strictly *need* kids in order to play with stuff like this. It just makes it easier to justify the time, vs doing more mundane, but 'necessary' stuff. (like mowing the lawn or washing the dishes)
I suspect Peggy Lee would be the poster child for this.
She essentially signed away all rights for a bit in the Disney cartoon, "Lady and the Tramp," thinking that meant film rights. Then videotape came along... She sued, but I don't remember the outcome.
I rebadge that, "The New York State Throughway Principle." Nobody does the speed limit on the NYST, in fact you'd be a hazard on the road, going that slowly and congesting traffic. So just about everyone on the road is in violation of the law, and just about anyone on the road can be stopped and charged with at least speeding.
In the old days, before the 55 limit was move to 65 on the NYST, the traffic still used to vary from 55 to 80. Back then, it was a JOY to cross through Pa and into Ohio. There, the speedlimit was 65, they enforced at 65, and the traffic all went 65. The "temperature" (random relative motion) of the traffic was much lower, and the road felt safer.
This is what bothers me about the, "If you're not breaking the law, you have nothing to fear," argument. It's easy to set up situations where practically everyone breaks the law. Then for instance, if you speed, they can add things like 'physical control' and 'reckless endangerment' to the charges.
There was a Rand Fan a few doors down in college. I read "The Fountainhead" and it was ok, a bit preachy. Then I started to read "Atlas Shrugged" and within the first few pages, it seemed like it was walking closely over the same territory, so I returned it. "Let's all be individualists, just like Ayn Rand!"
You're getting the current stuff. I got the new stuff from Canadian TV last year, and this year I'm getting it from SciFi, but it's just last year's again, so I haven't seen any post-Eccelson. (I'm sure the spelling on that is wrong.)
(I hope they manage to bring back Gallifrey. They brought back the Daleks, after all. It was fun to visit Gallifrey every now and then.)
I fear checking out that link, at least until I get home.
But I always thought MECO was Main Engine Cut Off.
As for your.sig, what do conservatives conserve, there ain't no root derivation from 'conservation', either. IMHO, today's 'conservatives' are conserving their power and wealth, and thump the Bible so they can feel good while they're busy accumulating insane fortunes.
None of the ISPs I've ever dealt with permit you to resell services. Maybe you and your neighbor are "going halves" on the network service, but from their point of view, one party is getting that connection at full price, and reselling it to the other at half price.
Leaving an open connection is a more interesting problem, because you're giving away bandwidth, not reselling it.
But as others have pointed out, as the officially contracted party for the network connection, you're responsible for all communications over it. By leaving a connection open, you're inviting the ??AA, DHS, and all of their friends to come knocking at your door. The government might buy an innocent-faced, "Oops, I didn't know my connection was open to others' sharing," excuse, but I'm sure the ??AA wouldn't.
According to our PVR statistics, this month you skipped 4.6 hours of televised advertising. This falls well above the nuisance threshold of 0.5 hours, and deprives our advertising customers of significant value. Accordingly, we feel compelled to refund $14.53 to them for your share of unviewed advertising. We are passing this cost along to you, along with handling, billing, and maintenance fees for a total of $17.00, which will be included in your next cable/satellite bill.
Thank you very much, Your TV distribution executive
The won/failed are flip-sides of the same coin. Microsoft perceived Netscape as a threat, and they responded to the threat. Once Netscape was asphyxiated, (Remember that the phrase was, "Cut off their air supply.") the threat was gone. They had been expending substantial resources on IE, responding to the Netscape Threat. Once the threat was gone, it was only logical to divert those resources to other more active issues.
This is the very real threat of a monopoly. There is no incentive to improve a monopoly product as a competitive response. Think IE, think of how DOS stagnated before DRDOS came out. On the other hand, it isn't completely this way, because as a monopoly Microsoft has to compete with its installed base. The revenue driver becomes upgrades rather than conversions from a competitor, and they have to give people some sort of reason to upgrade.
Slashdot Mirror
As long as we're talking about the 6809 and stack architectures, particularly Forth, in the same thread...
Did you ever do Forth on the 6809?
Did you ever see the source?
The main "execute loop" was 2 instructions long. I figured it out once, that had they had another address mode (I forget what it was now, but it did exist on other architectures at the time, PDP-11 and/or Series/1.) it would have been a single instruction.
I tweaked up a Sieve myself on a 1MHz 6809 that beat the published values for a 4.77MHz 8088.
Perhaps an appropriate point, but I still think there's something different between microcode and the micro-ops of modern architectures.
By the way, I *have* done microcode. In a way, it's maybe the most enlightening programming ever, because with microcode you know (and have to know) exactly on a cycle-by-cycle basis what's going on. For that matter, even the cycle is too coarse a measure, you have to know what's going on inside the cycle.
As an extra qualifier, I know there's horizontal and vertical microcode, and I did fairly narrow horizontal. But I guess I think that the difference is that microcode, at least the stuff I did, didn't really dispatch instructions, but rather the bits in the microcode corresponded, after a little simple decode, to actual wires that did things like select registers, pick a leg of a mux, or gate read/write operations. The correspondence was stunningly one-to-one, so that a hardware type with a few software courses could pick it up pretty readily.
By contrast, I think of the dispatches of the Pentium II - come to think of it, really the Pentium Pro and later were higher-level constructs, not simple decoded wires. As I said, maybe the distinction between this and vertical microcode is blurrier than it is with horizontal.
Even in assembler, the mainstream hasn't been programming to the metal since Pentium I.
Beginning with Pentium II, and propagating to pretty much all of the other archictures in a short time, non of the mainstream CPUs have exposed their metal. We have an instruction set, but it's torn into primitives and scheduled for execution. We don't see the primitives, not even in assembler. AFAIK, there isn't even a way to use the true primitives, except perhaps on the Transmeta, where it was undocumented.
So in this light, since we're already fairly far from the true metal, it seems to me that it makes a lot of sense to re-evaluate the instruction set itself. Of course one could raise the Itanium argument, but I would also argue that politics were too big a part, there. Then again, one could also argue that x86 and amd64 are just so entrenched that it doesn't matter, and they do run well on today's hardware.
Then again I could cite my old favorite, the 6809. It started from the same origins and precepts as RISC, but a different attitude. RISC simply tried to optimize the most common operations, at the expense of less common ones. With the 6809, they tried to understand WHY certain things were happening, and how those things could be done better and faster. They ended up with a few more transistors, the same speed, and something approaching 3X the throughput, as compared to the 6800. More similar to the current topic, there was a paper on 'contour mapping', mapping blocks of cache into stacks and data structures. The 6809 was too old for a cache, but it seems to me that combining it's concepts with the contour mapping would be interesting indeed.
But like stack engines, it's not x86/amd64 compatible.
But the other point that I heard about the whole thing was that treatment worked, and crime dropped. That was the whole point, interdiction and enforcement are politically correct by today's standards, and make politicians sound tough and dynamic - but are ineffective.
I guess it's kind of like abstinance education as the only means of controlling teenage pregnancy. I recently found that someone I knew - born in the 1920's - was a 'miracle baby', the kind born less than 9 months after the wedding. Hormonal control has been a problem as long as there have been hormones.
I guess it's the whole facts vs truthiness thing.
A first!
I've never heard use 'Chuck Norris' and 'ecelectic' in the same sentence, before.
You say legalize drugs for taxation, a pragmatic reason.
Someone else said legalize drugs because, "It's my body!" a principled reason.
I have another pragmatic reason:
Legalize drugs because the collateral damage of "crimes of financing" and the "War on Drugs" itself are worse than the drugs themselves. Beyond that it has polarized and destabilized source nations like Columbia, and I have no doubt that we're breeding more US resentment there, so we won't feel lonely if we were to somehow work through our Islamist extremist problems.
Obviously legalization would have problems, and would need to be treated similarly to alcohol. Clearly users while under the influence need to be kept out from behind the wheel.
Which brings us to Richard Nixon, or at least an urban legend about Richard Nixon.
During his campaign for the 1968 election, Nixon part of his platform was good old Law'n'Order. Once elected, he felt he needed to deliver. One of his key advisors told him that more/stronger attempts at interdiction and enforcement have never worked, and never would. According to this advisor the ONLY way to solve the problem was through drug treatment - essentially working the demand side of the problem instead of the supply side. The way I heard the story, this was done, and it worked - crime dropped during Nixon's first term.
Then during the second term, Law'n'Order was no longer an issue and the Vietnam war was all-consuming. Since it was no longer needed, politically speaking, the drug treatment program was dismantled, never to be seen again. Since then it's been more of the same ineffective, counter-productive interdiction and enforcement.
I didn't know that, though perhaps I might have guessed it. I presume it's the cold, reduced (Is cargo space pressurized?) pressure, or temperature cycling. Can you supply a link?
But when I see the "Long Tail" in print, if I read it too fast I misread, "Long Trail Ale" and wonder where the "Ale" went.
Some time read, "The Day The Universe Changed," by James Burke. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0316117048/002-07 01003-8544823?v=glance&n=283155 or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_the_Universe_ Changed
Just because Einstein turned Newtonian physics on its ear doesn't make Newton any less of a genius. Whenever Einstein is superceded, it won't make him less of a genious, either. It just means that someone else has stood on his shoulders, like he stood on Newton's, and has seen even further.
Newton and Einstein both "changed the Universe" because they changed how we view it and how we relate to it. Or the example Burke uses is Galileo, and how he shifted the center of the Universe from the Earth to the Sun. (I know you could argue that it was really Copernicus, and that neither was really correct.)
No, I would be unhappy to find out that God is as limited as the Bible-thumpers would have him be.
That we were created with brains and minds to think and comprehend the Universe, and then that Universe was created 6,000 years ago, but with an apparent age of billions of years, simply to fool the sharpest of those minds.
That 'extreme intervention' over '6 days' was needed to create the Universe, as opposed to a starting moment some 15.8 billion years ago, that God isn't the quintessential physicist.
That God is as limited and small as the writers of the Bible depict. (and being men themselves, were.)
Lookie here: http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/0 8/04/055227
"From the article: '...researchers found, for instance, that "judicial nominations" have consumed steadily more Congressional attention between 1997 and 2004. "
As they say, this too, shall pass.
I wouldn't bet against you, either. Just because they pulled if off then doesn't mean they will now. Vista has a lot more baggage than Win2k, and a lot less focus. (Win2k was focused on business, not on everything)
But there are some parallels.
I seem to remember almost those same words... years ago, before the release of Win2k.
Not that I don't grant your point, but these days Win2k seems to get accolades as "the Best Windows ever!"
Actually AOL does serve a function, and quite a useful one - security.
For one aspect, as someone mentions in another thread, AOL has been aggressive about keeping spam under control.
For another side, a co-worker uses AOL simply as a more secure through-point for his family. They offer the multiple accounts with 'parent' and 'child' privileges, and allow the parents to set the criteria and for the children. I'm under the impression that there is also some other security filtering going on for mail and browsing, as well.
One more learned may scoff at the idea of AOL as a security provider, but for Joe 6pak it's a heck of a lot better than going out on the net naked, security-wise.
On a related topic, I'm also happy with my (non-networked) 1320. It's plugged in with a USB cable, the second I've used. The first cable developed problems, or maybe never fully worked in the first place. The second cable clearly worked well at first, but has developed problems. (Don't ask me how a wire goes bad!) I get communications errors in the logs, but am still able to print. The problems seem to be related to getting information back from the printer.
So I'd happily go out and spend $20 for a new cable, but I have no guarantees that it would be any better than the 2 flea-market special's that I've been runnin. How can I know that I'm getting a good USB cable.
Alternatively, has anyone added JetDirect to the 1320, and can comment on experiences, suppliers, and pricing?
I didn't say that I don't play, even without kids. It's just that kids make it easier. They also give good refresher lessons at it.
You don't strictly *need* kids in order to play with stuff like this. It just makes it easier to justify the time, vs doing more mundane, but 'necessary' stuff. (like mowing the lawn or washing the dishes)
One of the positive side-effects of having kids - getting to play with stuff like this with mine. (as well as Legos, etc.)
I was going to post about Oobleck, but first did a quick scan to see if anyone else had. We called it corn starch instead of cornflour.
I presume the name comes from "Bartholomew and the Oobleck" by Dr. Suess.
I suspect Peggy Lee would be the poster child for this.
She essentially signed away all rights for a bit in the Disney cartoon, "Lady and the Tramp," thinking that meant film rights. Then videotape came along... She sued, but I don't remember the outcome.
I rebadge that, "The New York State Throughway Principle." Nobody does the speed limit on the NYST, in fact you'd be a hazard on the road, going that slowly and congesting traffic. So just about everyone on the road is in violation of the law, and just about anyone on the road can be stopped and charged with at least speeding.
In the old days, before the 55 limit was move to 65 on the NYST, the traffic still used to vary from 55 to 80. Back then, it was a JOY to cross through Pa and into Ohio. There, the speedlimit was 65, they enforced at 65, and the traffic all went 65. The "temperature" (random relative motion) of the traffic was much lower, and the road felt safer.
This is what bothers me about the, "If you're not breaking the law, you have nothing to fear," argument. It's easy to set up situations where practically everyone breaks the law. Then for instance, if you speed, they can add things like 'physical control' and 'reckless endangerment' to the charges.
There was a Rand Fan a few doors down in college. I read "The Fountainhead" and it was ok, a bit preachy. Then I started to read "Atlas Shrugged" and within the first few pages, it seemed like it was walking closely over the same territory, so I returned it. "Let's all be individualists, just like Ayn Rand!"
Lucky!
You're getting the current stuff. I got the new stuff from Canadian TV last year, and this year I'm getting it from SciFi, but it's just last year's again, so I haven't seen any post-Eccelson. (I'm sure the spelling on that is wrong.)
(I hope they manage to bring back Gallifrey. They brought back the Daleks, after all. It was fun to visit Gallifrey every now and then.)
I fear checking out that link, at least until I get home.
.sig, what do conservatives conserve, there ain't no root derivation from 'conservation', either. IMHO, today's 'conservatives' are conserving their power and wealth, and thump the Bible so they can feel good while they're busy accumulating insane fortunes.
But I always thought MECO was Main Engine Cut Off.
As for your
None of the ISPs I've ever dealt with permit you to resell services. Maybe you and your neighbor are "going halves" on the network service, but from their point of view, one party is getting that connection at full price, and reselling it to the other at half price.
Leaving an open connection is a more interesting problem, because you're giving away bandwidth, not reselling it.
But as others have pointed out, as the officially contracted party for the network connection, you're responsible for all communications over it. By leaving a connection open, you're inviting the ??AA, DHS, and all of their friends to come knocking at your door. The government might buy an innocent-faced, "Oops, I didn't know my connection was open to others' sharing," excuse, but I'm sure the ??AA wouldn't.
Dear Sir/Maam:
According to our PVR statistics, this month you skipped 4.6 hours of televised advertising. This falls well above the nuisance threshold of 0.5 hours, and deprives our advertising customers of significant value. Accordingly, we feel compelled to refund $14.53 to them for your share of unviewed advertising. We are passing this cost along to you, along with handling, billing, and maintenance fees for a total of $17.00, which will be included in your next cable/satellite bill.
Thank you very much,
Your TV distribution executive
The won/failed are flip-sides of the same coin. Microsoft perceived Netscape as a threat, and they responded to the threat. Once Netscape was asphyxiated, (Remember that the phrase was, "Cut off their air supply.") the threat was gone. They had been expending substantial resources on IE, responding to the Netscape Threat. Once the threat was gone, it was only logical to divert those resources to other more active issues.
This is the very real threat of a monopoly. There is no incentive to improve a monopoly product as a competitive response. Think IE, think of how DOS stagnated before DRDOS came out. On the other hand, it isn't completely this way, because as a monopoly Microsoft has to compete with its installed base. The revenue driver becomes upgrades rather than conversions from a competitor, and they have to give people some sort of reason to upgrade.