The UK - "on the social", "getting the social" etc. The real term for the free cash is "social security" money. The contraction is pretty obvious. I think they've changed the name of the dept. now (it used to be the DSS - Department of Social Security - now I think it's the dept. of Work and Pensions). The slang term is less easily changed, though.
Simon.
Microsostrich
on
ZOMG New Zunes
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· Score: 5, Insightful
It seems Microsoft's answer to the ipod Touch and the iphone interface id to ignore it completely. And whereas the improvements to the Zune (V1, I suppose) are welcome and useful, I don't really see how it is supposed to beat out an ipod any time soon. What people will do is compare the Touch to the Zune (no matter how unfair that comparison is), conclude that the touch is better, and then buy an ipod if they can't afford the Touch. Yes, people are weird that way - having the market-leader, even if it's not generally affordable, is a big push for sales across the board.
Also, it's not the player - I still can't believe people are missing this. It's the synergy of the player, the music, the store, the industrial design, the marketing and the ubiquity. MS have just changed maybe 2 of these (the design looks to be better). That's not sufficient.
If you saw any of the zune V1 adverts, I think you'll agree they were just plain weird - Apple's promotion of (ahem) a *music* player was to show people enjoying their music. Microsoft's approach should be a case-study in how not to market stuff -
"the social" is a term of derision for unemployment benefit,
"squirting" music. Really ? That was really what you came up with ?
brown. Enough said. (although some will like it, it's not the #1 choice of everyone, is it?)
Complete disconnect from the product when marketing it. What ???
I could go on... the problems were legion
Let's see if they do better this time around. I think they will, marginally. I still don't think they have a world-changer on their hands, and that's what they need - in the same way as Apple need a world-changer to upset the MS hegemony in the PC sphere; even with steadily increasing monthly saled percentages (far better than the zune is doing), a Mac is still very much a second-tier choice.
As the owner of a modded iphone (3rd-party apps only, I'm fine with AT&T), I didn't install the update. That's because I have more than one brain cell.
If I took you to the top of the Empire State building, and told you not to jump off, would you jump ?
- If you would, great. One less moron in the world.
- If you wouldn't, fine. You understand the concept "actions have consequences".
Would it be my problem if you jumped and killed yourself - hell no. I told you not to jump in the first place. If the culpability is yours in the case of a human death, why the hell should (ab)using a cellphone get preferential treatment ?
If you can't see the analogy, I guess you're another of those all-too-common people who lack any sense of personal responsibility. You were warned not to update the phone if you'd hacked it because it would break. You updated it. It broke. Your fault and yours alone. Deal.
The main reason for the subtlety inherent in English is the last time we lost a war on home soil - almost a thousand years ago, the French successfully invaded and started to change the language. English was almost destroyed while royalty had more ties to France than England; with the removal of the english-speaking aristocracy, French became commonplace amongst the powerful families governing the land, and inevitably trickled down to the populace.
A few hundred years later, English rebounded with the establishment of powerful nobles and royalty that considered themselves English, not French. I think it was circa 1300-1400 that the language was codified and standardised. We ended up with two (or more, when you consider that the church were pushing Latin) words for pretty much everything, so subtleties crept into the language.
That acceptance of words from other cultures became the hallmark of English - in the colonial era "the sun never set on the British empire", leading to a massive influx of new ideas, culture and (of course) words. The language is a dynamic living thing - depending on your disposition, it could be called a hybrid of opportunity, or a mongrel language.
From the British perspective, we're taught that Americans decided the (rather acrimonious, after all:) break from the motherland was a good time to clear up some of the oddities that had crept into the evolving language, so Z replaced S in several places, a few U letters were sent packing, and a couple of tenses were changed. What astounds me is that they didn't take the opportunity to clear up the ough problem - consider the pronunciation of through, though, thought, thorough, bough, and cough - and that's just off-the-cuff. I'm sure there are more...
So, at the end of all this, I suppose my point is that the language is dynamic, has been both stable and evolving for almost a thousand years, and will undoubtedly continue to do so. Worrying about it, or becoming too focussed on the minutiae is counter-productive. If my American cousins spell colour without the U, so what ? - I can understand them perfectly well, and the purpose of language is to communicate. To be honest, I have far more problems with tomAYto - whenever I ask for tomAHto on a sandwich, I get blank looks... Oh well, when in Rome (or CA, for that matter:)
The warning was public. The update is manual. Any bad result is entirely the user's fault. This is speaking as someone who's written and installed his own apps - I obviously didn't install the update, because I have more than one brain cell. There's far too many people with a lack of personal responsibility - actions have consequences, and if you can't cope with the consequences, don't do the action.
Right, because complete 64-bit support, a *useable* *automatic* backup utility, the new developer tools, Objective-C 2.0, core-animation, a complete new interface & Finder, things like Xray (useable DTrace) mean nothing - and that's just off the top of my head!
You can't please all the people all the time, but to pretend it's "Apple's Vista" when it's not even out yet is the biggest load of tripe I've ever heard.
Whatever. At least we still have Habeas Corpus, huh ?
FWIW, having lived in both the US and the UK, I don't see much difference. In both countries, there are cameras at airports, in shops, in gambling halls, on street-corners (looking at traffic), in banks etc. For all the rap the UK gets about this "network of cameras", 99% of them are exactly the same cameras as the US (anf many other countries) have.
Well, usually that's true. However, in the case of ObjC and Foundation/Cocoa (the frameworks), it's very difficult to tell where ObjC stops and Foundation starts... There's not a lot "Obj" about ObjC, if you don't have the whole NSObject (or some other as-yet-non-existent root-object framework).
It is your "not wanting to comply with the GPL" which requires you to re-implement...
It probably stems from your assertion that the GPL somehow forces restrictions on developers when in reality the restrictions are forced by their own decisions. Virtually all licenses aside from public domain are the same, including BSD. If you refuse to adhere to the license then you cannot legally use the code
Semantics.
The GPL lays down certain restrictions on what I can do with anything GPL-licenced. Sure, I can make the decision to use or not to use the GPL code/data, but I'm still deciding to use it based on the restrictions it imposes.
I'm not sure how you got that I don't understand the GPL and its implications. I think it's quite clear from my posts that I do - and there are times when I want to licence my stuff under GPL (and have done), and times when I want to licence under a less-restrictive licence (and I've done that too).
In the initial post I was expressing regret/frustration that the original author for those tiles put his work under the GPL - and therefore I couldn't just use them in a non-GPL application. I fully understand why the author chose to do that, and I don't have a problem with it. However, if they'd been licenced under a (less-restrictive) BSD-style licence, I could have just used the tiles - that's why the GPL is more restrictive, it's stopping me from just using the tiles.
Now you can say "good - you shouldn't be profiting from someone else's work for free", and I would say "if that other person didn't mind, then where's the harm". Now quite clearly, that other person *does* mind (hence the GPL), and I'm fine with that too. To try and characterise it as a non-GPL issue seems bizzare though, given that a change in licence from GPL to BSD would abrogate the issue completely.
In case it's not abundantly clear, I'm GPL-neutral. I don't buy into any of the politics, I just see it as a tool I can use under some circumstances - as I see the BSD licence as a tool I can use under different circumstances.
"I thought it would be obvious that if you don't agree to the conditions of the license that the code was released under, you can't use it... "
Agreed - my point exactly, which is why I'm amazed someone picked this part of the post to argue against!
"But don't be a prick about it and threaten the people trying to help you"
Sorry, I don't much give a damn about any individual case (unless it's my code, of course)., it's the principle I was defending. It doesn't matter (to me) how much of (to use your phrase) "a prick" someone is when *they're* the wronged party. It may lower my opinion of them as individuals, but the fact remains that they have been wronged. End of story - at least until that wrong is put right.
I guess we're reading things differently in this case anyway - from my perspective, I have yet to see a clear attribution of the BSD work along with an apology for the previous mischaracterisation, in as public a manner as the GPL attribution. Once that has happened (and it may - I'm not pre-judging Eben/FSF's actions), it's time for the "well, they could have helped themselves by being less aggressive" complaints.
I'm not sure what your problem with MS is - they used BSD code in a closed-source project (so you'll never see the code), and they do have a clear attribution. That's all that's necessary. FWIW, they apparently claim it's been re-written 3 times, and hasn't contained BSD code since 1984 - from a quick google.
I mentioned in my original post that I've released lots of GPL software. I don't have a problem with the GPL. This could (there's a tiny possibility) be a commercial game, so I don't want to use GPL stuff, where you got that I wanted to use the BSD license for that is beyond me.
As for why BSD, that's surely obvious:
1) Use BSD when you want to release something and you don't care who uses it, or for what. You may even want to encourage commercial use. 2) Use GPL when you don't want the above - when you only want other GPL applications to make use of your code.
Can you read ? Or perhaps English is not your first language ? I ask that in all seriousness, because I fail to see how you could garner that impression from what I wrote.
"At the moment, I'm drawing over 1000 tiles for a CIV-2 type game, because the 'freeland' tiles are GPL, and having to put the amount of work in to duplicate it that I am doing, I completely understand why."
So, for your elucidation:
1) I obviously *have* the tiles, and yet I'm re-implementing them. The implication here is that I understand I can't just take them
2) I'm expressing understanding as to why (whoever) placed them under the GPL, because a lot of work is involved. The implication here is that I am in agreement with the original author that this is a lot of work, and I understand why (s)he might not want that work ripped off.
Sheesh. God help the country when the kids grow up...
Yes it does, under the circumstances of not wanting to comply with the GPL. Perhaps that wasn't clear to you in my original prose. I thought the context was obvious, but (obviously) not.
"This makes absolutely no sense what so ever"
What I object to, is the relicensing of my code, under a more-restrictive license, without the original attribution back to my license. If you want to relicense under GPL, fine. But if you don't also keep the BSD license that *I* licensed it under originally, that's not fine. If, for example, your big-money GPL program (which uses my BSD subsystem at the core) is the star of some show, someone who wanted to use my code may not realize that they can do so without the GPL restrictions. *I* don't see why *you* have the right to deprive that person of the right *I* granted him/her, by changing the license from BSD to GPL. It may be that my codebase remains relatively unknown, after all.
I think the problem here is that what I describe is in fact happening. The Atheros HAL project did not originally credit the BSD people, and they got annoyed. I would, too.
As for your mischaracterisation of me as "disliking the GPL", I don't know where that came from. as I mentioned in the original post, I've released lots of stuff under the GPL, but I don't have any political reasons for it. I *always* want attribution, and some stuff I want to forbid closed-access to, some stuff I want to grant closed-access to. That's *my* call, not someone else who repackages it.
I dunno, from the thread that's on the "lashed back" page, linked-to in the summary, it seems to me the SFLC does have some explaining to do...
On 16/09/2007, Marc Espie wrote: > On Sun, Sep 16, 2007 at 09:17:41AM -0400, Eben Moglen wrote: > > We will make no more public statements until the work is complete, and > > we will be neither hurried nor intimidated by people who shout at us > > instead of helping. > > http://www.softwarefreedom.org/news/2007/jul/31/openhal/ > > As I said in a former email, this has several glaring problems. > > As far as I understand, this is a public statement, even if it predates > the issue at hand. > > Please fix it in a timely manner, or take it down for now.
Most noticeably, I fail to see any credits to Reyk Floeter in the above press release.
Moreover, back when the release was first posted at the above address, there was no credit even to the OpenBSD project, which I found simply outrageous! Only after I (and possibly others) have complained to SFLC did they append the release to give some really vague mention that OpenHAL is based on OpenBSD's ath(4) HAL.
Eben, is this the work that you are doing in bringing the communities together, by omitting such vital information as giving credit to the people and projects who performed most of the work? After all of these mistakes, after ignoring the ethical side of the relicensing, after failing to inform when relicensing is even legally an option, are you seriously even surprised about the negative attention that SFLC is getting now? Taking a step aside, don't you agree it is well-deserved?
I'm a software developer, and I don't always write open-source code. I've written plenty of OS code, contributing to PHP, GCJ, SDL etc. and I GPL'd my geolocation website, but I also write commercial code.
It can be hard to see a perfectly good piece of code, that does exactly what you want, and then have to go and re-implement it yourself, but that's what the GPL requires, and that's what I do. At the moment, I'm drawing over 1000 tiles for a CIV-2 type game, because the 'freeland' tiles are GPL, and having to put the amount of work in to duplicate it that I am doing, I completely understand why.
I think that if anyone relicenced any of my OS code under their own, more restrictive (to pluck an example out of the air: GPL rather than BSD) licence, I would be incensed. It remains to be seen if this has happened within Linux, and if it has, hard questions are going to require very good answers..
I've written about this before, but I think the best argument I can make is to point to the dot-net addict site, and point out that wherever he compares.NET to ObjC, it's almost a guarantee he'll prefer ObjC. He's authored several (a dozen ?) books on.NET, and is a self-confessed addict, I'm guessing he's a better advocate than I.
Most people come late to Objective C, it's only really used on the Mac, and the [method syntax] throws people off (though I don't think it's any worse than a C programmer seeing all those:: signs everywhere when he sees a C++ program). It's far simpler than C++ (and provides a full object-orientated system), it's much better designed than.Net, it's faster than Java for most things (those byte-code compilers win over everything sometimes:).
The only real drawback in modern times was the [retain]/[release] memory management, and even that is pretty simple - it even works with the built-in distributed objects across applications. With Leopard, we get managed memory, while still keeping the ability to link with any C library - did I mention it's a formal superset of C ? So *any* C program will compile under ObjC. And then you get to the real crux of it's strength - the dynamic nature of the language. Messaging an object ([myObject doSomething]) is not the same as calling a method (myObject->doSomething()), and you get a lot of power from that.
And, of course, it comes with a very powerful, elegant class-library. It's *hard* to write a non-MVC application in Cocoa - you have to really try. I think you only start to appreciate the subtlety of the class-library design after you've used it for a while. Easy things are easy. A lot of hard things are easy, and pretty much anything is possible. I've had a few "so that's why" moments over the past few years, and another cog slots into place.
Short version: Genuine Vista crapped out on me, screwed up a huge download (twice!) and initially refused to realise it was genuine. Only after installing an Active-X control (God, I hate those) did I manage to get it working (and it only offered that solution the second-time-around).
A sufficiently bad experience that I just deleted the windows VM and installed Ubuntu on a VM instead. So, yes, MS screwed me out of the $300 or so for the 'Windows Vista that is licensed for VMs", but it's the last thing I'll ever buy from them. Anyone want to buy a (used once) GENUINE copy of Vista ?
I don't pirate software. I don't see why I should be inconvenienced (at full price) because MS can't find their backside with either hand - if you're going to deny fake vista installations, then MAKE SURE THE DAMN SOFTWARE WORKS. PERIOD. NO IFs BUTs OR OTHER EXCUSES. [rant over].
I Disagree. Compassion is not inevitable. You're working from your own tenets and philosophies, a machine need not have those same ideals. Compassion is at least partially born of self-interest. The cynical (or non-empathic, if you prefer) view is that compassionate societies aid those who need it, because later the person previously aided may be able to render aid... "There, but for the grace of God, go I", "Do unto others as you would be done unto", etc., etc.
Are we suggesting that these hyper-intelligent machines would have any self-interest in keeping around the competition for resources that humanity represents ? I'm not trying to be trollish, here - I'm asking a genuine question. Humanity is ruthless in exterminating competing lower lifeforms. Why would we expect superior machines to be any different ?
And even should there be some self-interest in the first generations of such machines, what about the 5th generation, the 10th, the 1000th ? All I'm suggesting is that some thought be put into providing good answers for questions like this *before* we create competition. I'm as much of a technophile as the rest of you, but the phrase goes "look *before* you leap". Later may be, well, too late.
Well, I have circuit diagrams for old projects, (I think - only because I don't tend to 'trash' stuff), and I tend to comment my source-code a lot.... That's about as far as it goes... Perhaps I'll try and put some stuff on my blog in future...
I don't think there's any *need* for a formal education (I'm a physicist by degrees, but have spent my whole career as a coder). If you were planning on making a career in this area though, then just like any other area, having a provable education would help a lot, otherwise you show experience (I've done this, and this, and this, and...). You should probably ask real hardware engineers for their opinion too - I'm just an amateur. Personally, it's just a hobby - I'm not planning to change my career any time soon:-)
As for the term 'hardware engineer', all I meant was to distinguish the creation of software from that of hardware - you still need programming skills, the end result is different though.
Just to pick this up - coming back to it later - Apple said NBC want to "more than double", not "double".
I very much doubt Apple is lying, since lying in public is a massively bad PR move. Apple don't really do "massively bad PR moves", they let NBC do things like that...
As I mentioned above to a different poster, I think we're playing in different ballparks. The cheapest (and pretty-much useless for anything other than playing around on) V5 dev-kit I know of is ~$1000. That's an order of magnitude more than the cheapest S3A or S3E kits. 4-luts may be on their way out at the very high end, but they're definitely still around in the sort of things us mere mortals can buy/use.
No, I'm aware of what you say, I just can't afford *any* of the commercial IP cores. I enquired about the cost of a JPEG core once, and was basically laughed at.
I'm coming from a different perspective, that's all. FPGA's are a hobby for me, nothing more. I can afford to spend a few hundred dollars on a kit board, but I'd never drop a few grand on a core... I'd either do it myself or make do without. I'll use webpack exclusively for development (since they dropped the in-between option, Foundation is far too expensive). I think the most I ever spent was $400 on an FX12 board, which I linked up to an HD video source.
As for the hard cores, I'm aware that pretty much all the modern FPGAs come with multipliers, but for hobbyists like me, a spartan-2 can be just as useful because it has 5v-tolerant i/o. You don't need to insert quickswitch chips, though I've just found out about SN74LVCC4245ADW chips, which may make life easier:)
I've just ordered a 3A kit from Xilinx, it's going to form the basis of my EDK-based VME/VGA/Ethernet board for my just-purchased TT. I was going to mention the DSP blocks (though some of that is marketing, IMHO... and I know what the EDK is for [grin]. There's just only so much I'm prepared to type on a/. post, so perhaps I wasn't clear...
Well, common FPGA's are basically look-up tables surrounded by a sea of interconnect logic. The designer specifies the function of each LUT, and the connections between them using a language such as Verilog or VHDL. They're not "generic logic", they're defineable logic. Example: On a CPU, you have the 'add x,y' instruction - that's a chunk of logic on-chip. On an FPGA, that chunk of logic doesn't exist until you write a design that needs it.
You can buy (though I think they're very expensive) "IP cores", which are pre-packaged modules ready to plug-in-and-go. There are some free ones available as well. You may have to do more work to get the free ones to work [grin].
There are also built-in hard cores on modern FPGA's. You never used to be able to synthesize the statement "a = b * c;" in a verilog design, for example. Now that FPGA's have hardware multiplier blocks in them, it synthesises to a bunch of wires connecting up the LUTs to the built-in hardware. For the more-complex examples you suggest, it's best to implement them in logic, because an FFT (of a particular radix, input format (complex or real), and output requirements) is a very specific piece of hardware, and not generally useful to most customers.
You get multipliers, blocks of fast dual-port RAM, even entire processors (PPC) embedded into the FPGA fabric these days. Of course, you pay more for things like embedded CPUs... Funnily enough, a CPU is one of the easier things to write for an FPGA IMHO. You'll never get the speed of the FPGA fabric to match the hard-CPU core though...
To do what you're talking about though, you'd need a way to interface the FPGA to the PC - there's a freely available PCI core, so you'd then just need a card which had a PCI interface (there's one from Enterpoint for ~$150... Then you just need to link the PCI core to your own cores (FFT, whatever) and write software to offload any FFT's to your co-processor. Xilinx offer the "Embedded Development Kit" to make this easier (you have to pay for this, the other tools are free to download). I don't know if anyone has made the freely-available PCI core into an EDK module though...
There are some FPGA's that can control their output impedance on pins, but an FPGA is really for digital electronics - you're using 4-way look-up tables to emulate arbitrary 4-input logic-gates for the most (99.99%) part. I've seen genetic-algorithms produce capacitance-based designs where unconnected circuits affect each other due to analogue effects, but not humans. We tend to stick to the straight and narrow...
An FPGA really is conceptually very simple, and they're not hard to "program" either... Contrived example:
Verilog design to add/subtract 2 numbers (you'd never do this, but...)
always @(a or b or addnsub)
begin
if (addnsub)
result = a + b;
else
result = a - b;
end
endmodule
Compare that to a K&R "C" routine to do the same thing...
void addsub(a, b, addnsub, result) short a; short b; unsigned char addnsub; short *result;
{
if (addnsub)
*result = a + b;
else
*result = a - b; }
In both cases, of course, you'd just use the 'if...else...' part, but I wanted to show more language structure...
The key thing to remember is that in C, all things happen serially, unless you arrange otherwise with threading libraries. In Verilog, any block beginning with 'always @' happens in parallel with every other 'always @' block. Once you've mentally-mapped the concept of vast numbers of threads to the way hardware works, any competent multi-threaded programmer can become a competent hardware engineer.
Of course, there's "guru stuff" in there as well (as much as you want, trust me:-), you don't get world-beating overnight, but it's relatively easy to get the 80% solution, and that might be just fine. Eking out the last 20% is where it gets hard, as you have to understand the internal structure of the LUTs, and how they interact with the carry-chain, what the LUT->LUT delay can be useful for etc. None of this is at all relevant unless you're missing your timing on a critical circuit (eg: you need 133MHz so your DDR2 SDRAM can work, but the synthesis tools (equivalent to a compiler) only deliver 125 MHz for your design).
The 'always@' part is the hint of just where the power lies. *Everything* can happen in parallel, so you can build pipelines (like CPU's are pipelined today) into your logic, thus reducing the time taken per step (while taking multiple steps), thus increasing your clock rate. The benefit of course is that although the *first* result comes out in the same time, every clock thereafter, you'll also get a result.
I wrote a JPEG decoder a couple of years or so ago, running at ~130MHz. That doesn't sound much, but that comes to ~65 MPixels/second because of the pipelining. Looking at the SSE-optimised intel libraries, a CMYK422->CMYK baseline decode (which is what the FPGA was doing) takes 371 clocks/pixel. The intel chip I was comparing to was a 3.6GHz P4, meaning it could do ~9.7 Mpixels/second. For motion-jpeg that's the difference between decoding SD frames (for the P4) and decoding HD frames (for the FPGA)...
So, FPGAs tend to run slowly (relative to today's CPUs) but can exploit parallelism in ways CPUs just can't, but of course for serial processing, you can't beat a tradition
Slashdot Mirror
The UK - "on the social", "getting the social" etc. The real term for the free cash is "social security" money. The contraction is pretty obvious. I think they've changed the name of the dept. now (it used to be the DSS - Department of Social Security - now I think it's the dept. of Work and Pensions). The slang term is less easily changed, though.
Simon.
Also, it's not the player - I still can't believe people are missing this. It's the synergy of the player, the music, the store, the industrial design, the marketing and the ubiquity. MS have just changed maybe 2 of these (the design looks to be better). That's not sufficient.
If you saw any of the zune V1 adverts, I think you'll agree they were just plain weird - Apple's promotion of (ahem) a *music* player was to show people enjoying their music. Microsoft's approach should be a case-study in how not to market stuff -
Let's see if they do better this time around. I think they will, marginally. I still don't think they have a world-changer on their hands, and that's what they need - in the same way as Apple need a world-changer to upset the MS hegemony in the PC sphere; even with steadily increasing monthly saled percentages (far better than the zune is doing), a Mac is still very much a second-tier choice.
So - nice try MS. Must do better.
Simon
As the owner of a modded iphone (3rd-party apps only, I'm fine with AT&T), I didn't install the update. That's because I have more than one brain cell.
If I took you to the top of the Empire State building, and told you not to jump off, would you jump ?
- If you would, great. One less moron in the world.
- If you wouldn't, fine. You understand the concept "actions have consequences".
Would it be my problem if you jumped and killed yourself - hell no. I told you not to jump in the first place. If the culpability is yours in the case of a human death, why the hell should (ab)using a cellphone get preferential treatment ?
If you can't see the analogy, I guess you're another of those all-too-common people who lack any sense of personal responsibility. You were warned not to update the phone if you'd hacked it because it would break. You updated it. It broke. Your fault and yours alone. Deal.
Simon.
The main reason for the subtlety inherent in English is the last time we lost a war on home soil - almost a thousand years ago, the French successfully invaded and started to change the language. English was almost destroyed while royalty had more ties to France than England; with the removal of the english-speaking aristocracy, French became commonplace amongst the powerful families governing the land, and inevitably trickled down to the populace.
:) break from the motherland was a good time to clear up some of the oddities that had crept into the evolving language, so Z replaced S in several places, a few U letters were sent packing, and a couple of tenses were changed. What astounds me is that they didn't take the opportunity to clear up the ough problem - consider the pronunciation of through, though, thought, thorough, bough, and cough - and that's just off-the-cuff. I'm sure there are more...
:)
A few hundred years later, English rebounded with the establishment of powerful nobles and royalty that considered themselves English, not French. I think it was circa 1300-1400 that the language was codified and standardised. We ended up with two (or more, when you consider that the church were pushing Latin) words for pretty much everything, so subtleties crept into the language.
That acceptance of words from other cultures became the hallmark of English - in the colonial era "the sun never set on the British empire", leading to a massive influx of new ideas, culture and (of course) words. The language is a dynamic living thing - depending on your disposition, it could be called a hybrid of opportunity, or a mongrel language.
From the British perspective, we're taught that Americans decided the (rather acrimonious, after all
So, at the end of all this, I suppose my point is that the language is dynamic, has been both stable and evolving for almost a thousand years, and will undoubtedly continue to do so. Worrying about it, or becoming too focussed on the minutiae is counter-productive. If my American cousins spell colour without the U, so what ? - I can understand them perfectly well, and the purpose of language is to communicate. To be honest, I have far more problems with tomAYto - whenever I ask for tomAHto on a sandwich, I get blank looks... Oh well, when in Rome (or CA, for that matter
Simon.
It always asks.
The warning was public. The update is manual. Any bad result is entirely the user's fault. This is speaking as someone who's written and installed his own apps - I obviously didn't install the update, because I have more than one brain cell. There's far too many people with a lack of personal responsibility - actions have consequences, and if you can't cope with the consequences, don't do the action.
Simon.
Right, because complete 64-bit support, a *useable* *automatic* backup utility, the new developer tools, Objective-C 2.0, core-animation, a complete new interface & Finder, things like Xray (useable DTrace) mean nothing - and that's just off the top of my head!
You can't please all the people all the time, but to pretend it's "Apple's Vista" when it's not even out yet is the biggest load of tripe I've ever heard.
Simon.
Whatever. At least we still have Habeas Corpus, huh ?
FWIW, having lived in both the US and the UK, I don't see much difference. In both countries, there are cameras at airports, in shops, in gambling halls, on street-corners (looking at traffic), in banks etc. For all the rap the UK gets about this "network of cameras", 99% of them are exactly the same cameras as the US (anf many other countries) have.
Simon.
Well, usually that's true. However, in the case of ObjC and Foundation/Cocoa (the frameworks), it's very difficult to tell where ObjC stops and Foundation starts ... There's not a lot "Obj" about ObjC, if you don't have the whole NSObject (or some other as-yet-non-existent root-object framework).
Simon.
Semantics.
The GPL lays down certain restrictions on what I can do with anything GPL-licenced. Sure, I can make the decision to use or not to use the GPL code/data, but I'm still deciding to use it based on the restrictions it imposes.
I'm not sure how you got that I don't understand the GPL and its implications. I think it's quite clear from my posts that I do - and there are times when I want to licence my stuff under GPL (and have done), and times when I want to licence under a less-restrictive licence (and I've done that too).
In the initial post I was expressing regret/frustration that the original author for those tiles put his work under the GPL - and therefore I couldn't just use them in a non-GPL application. I fully understand why the author chose to do that, and I don't have a problem with it. However, if they'd been licenced under a (less-restrictive) BSD-style licence, I could have just used the tiles - that's why the GPL is more restrictive, it's stopping me from just using the tiles.
Now you can say "good - you shouldn't be profiting from someone else's work for free", and I would say "if that other person didn't mind, then where's the harm". Now quite clearly, that other person *does* mind (hence the GPL), and I'm fine with that too. To try and characterise it as a non-GPL issue seems bizzare though, given that a change in licence from GPL to BSD would abrogate the issue completely.
In case it's not abundantly clear, I'm GPL-neutral. I don't buy into any of the politics, I just see it as a tool I can use under some circumstances - as I see the BSD licence as a tool I can use under different circumstances.
Simon.
"I thought it would be obvious that if you don't agree to the conditions of the license that the code was released under, you can't use it... "
Agreed - my point exactly, which is why I'm amazed someone picked this part of the post to argue against!
"But don't be a prick about it and threaten the people trying to help you"
Sorry, I don't much give a damn about any individual case (unless it's my code, of course)., it's the principle I was defending. It doesn't matter (to me) how much of (to use your phrase) "a prick" someone is when *they're* the wronged party. It may lower my opinion of them as individuals, but the fact remains that they have been wronged. End of story - at least until that wrong is put right.
I guess we're reading things differently in this case anyway - from my perspective, I have yet to see a clear attribution of the BSD work along with an apology for the previous mischaracterisation, in as public a manner as the GPL attribution. Once that has happened (and it may - I'm not pre-judging Eben/FSF's actions), it's time for the "well, they could have helped themselves by being less aggressive" complaints.
I'm not sure what your problem with MS is - they used BSD code in a closed-source project (so you'll never see the code), and they do have a clear attribution. That's all that's necessary. FWIW, they apparently claim it's been re-written 3 times, and hasn't contained BSD code since 1984 - from a quick google.
Simon
Someone else who can't read.
I mentioned in my original post that I've released lots of GPL software. I don't have a problem with the GPL. This could (there's a tiny possibility) be a commercial game, so I don't want to use GPL stuff, where you got that I wanted to use the BSD license for that is beyond me.
As for why BSD, that's surely obvious:
1) Use BSD when you want to release something and you don't care who uses it, or for what. You may even want to encourage commercial use.
2) Use GPL when you don't want the above - when you only want other GPL applications to make use of your code.
Seems pretty straightforward to me.
Simon.
Can you read ? Or perhaps English is not your first language ? I ask that in all seriousness, because I fail to see how you could garner that impression from what I wrote.
"At the moment, I'm drawing over 1000 tiles for a CIV-2 type game, because the 'freeland' tiles are GPL, and having to put the amount of work in to duplicate it that I am doing, I completely understand why."
So, for your elucidation:
1) I obviously *have* the tiles, and yet I'm re-implementing them. The implication here is that I understand I can't just take them
2) I'm expressing understanding as to why (whoever) placed them under the GPL, because a lot of work is involved. The implication here is that I am in agreement with the original author that this is a lot of work, and I understand why (s)he might not want that work ripped off.
Sheesh. God help the country when the kids grow up...
Simon.
"The GPL does not require you to re-implement"
Yes it does, under the circumstances of not wanting to comply with the GPL. Perhaps that wasn't clear to you in my original prose. I thought the context was obvious, but (obviously) not.
"This makes absolutely no sense what so ever"
What I object to, is the relicensing of my code, under a more-restrictive license, without the original attribution back to my license. If you want to relicense under GPL, fine. But if you don't also keep the BSD license that *I* licensed it under originally, that's not fine. If, for example, your big-money GPL program (which uses my BSD subsystem at the core) is the star of some show, someone who wanted to use my code may not realize that they can do so without the GPL restrictions. *I* don't see why *you* have the right to deprive that person of the right *I* granted him/her, by changing the license from BSD to GPL. It may be that my codebase remains relatively unknown, after all.
I think the problem here is that what I describe is in fact happening. The Atheros HAL project did not originally credit the BSD people, and they got annoyed. I would, too.
As for your mischaracterisation of me as "disliking the GPL", I don't know where that came from. as I mentioned in the original post, I've released lots of stuff under the GPL, but I don't have any political reasons for it. I *always* want attribution, and some stuff I want to forbid closed-access to, some stuff I want to grant closed-access to. That's *my* call, not someone else who repackages it.
Making sense, now ?
Simon.
I'm a software developer, and I don't always write open-source code. I've written plenty of OS code, contributing to PHP, GCJ, SDL etc. and I GPL'd my geolocation website, but I also write commercial code.
It can be hard to see a perfectly good piece of code, that does exactly what you want, and then have to go and re-implement it yourself, but that's what the GPL requires, and that's what I do. At the moment, I'm drawing over 1000 tiles for a CIV-2 type game, because the 'freeland' tiles are GPL, and having to put the amount of work in to duplicate it that I am doing, I completely understand why.
I think that if anyone relicenced any of my OS code under their own, more restrictive (to pluck an example out of the air: GPL rather than BSD) licence, I would be incensed. It remains to be seen if this has happened within Linux, and if it has, hard questions are going to require very good answers..
Simon
I've written about this before, but I think the best argument I can make is to point to the dot-net addict site, and point out that wherever he compares .NET to ObjC, it's almost a guarantee he'll prefer ObjC. He's authored several (a dozen ?) books on .NET, and is a self-confessed addict, I'm guessing he's a better advocate than I.
:: signs everywhere when he sees a C++ program). It's far simpler than C++ (and provides a full object-orientated system), it's much better designed than .Net, it's faster than Java for most things (those byte-code compilers win over everything sometimes :).
Most people come late to Objective C, it's only really used on the Mac, and the [method syntax] throws people off (though I don't think it's any worse than a C programmer seeing all those
The only real drawback in modern times was the [retain]/[release] memory management, and even that is pretty simple - it even works with the built-in distributed objects across applications. With Leopard, we get managed memory, while still keeping the ability to link with any C library - did I mention it's a formal superset of C ? So *any* C program will compile under ObjC. And then you get to the real crux of it's strength - the dynamic nature of the language. Messaging an object ([myObject doSomething]) is not the same as calling a method (myObject->doSomething()), and you get a lot of power from that.
And, of course, it comes with a very powerful, elegant class-library. It's *hard* to write a non-MVC application in Cocoa - you have to really try. I think you only start to appreciate the subtlety of the class-library design after you've used it for a while. Easy things are easy. A lot of hard things are easy, and pretty much anything is possible. I've had a few "so that's why" moments over the past few years, and another cog slots into place.
Simon.
If I thought I'd get a refund from Frys, I would...
Simon.
I recently wrote about this ...
Short version: Genuine Vista crapped out on me, screwed up a huge download (twice!) and initially refused to realise it was genuine. Only after installing an Active-X control (God, I hate those) did I manage to get it working (and it only offered that solution the second-time-around).
A sufficiently bad experience that I just deleted the windows VM and installed Ubuntu on a VM instead. So, yes, MS screwed me out of the $300 or so for the 'Windows Vista that is licensed for VMs", but it's the last thing I'll ever buy from them. Anyone want to buy a (used once) GENUINE copy of Vista ?
I don't pirate software. I don't see why I should be inconvenienced (at full price) because MS can't find their backside with either hand - if you're going to deny fake vista installations, then MAKE SURE THE DAMN SOFTWARE WORKS. PERIOD. NO IFs BUTs OR OTHER EXCUSES. [rant over].
Simon, disgusted with MS's attitude.
"Compassion is the inevitable result of empathy "
I Disagree. Compassion is not inevitable. You're working from your own tenets and philosophies, a machine need not have those same ideals. Compassion is at least partially born of self-interest. The cynical (or non-empathic, if you prefer) view is that compassionate societies aid those who need it, because later the person previously aided may be able to render aid... "There, but for the grace of God, go I", "Do unto others as you would be done unto", etc., etc.
Are we suggesting that these hyper-intelligent machines would have any self-interest in keeping around the competition for resources that humanity represents ? I'm not trying to be trollish, here - I'm asking a genuine question. Humanity is ruthless in exterminating competing lower lifeforms. Why would we expect superior machines to be any different ?
And even should there be some self-interest in the first generations of such machines, what about the 5th generation, the 10th, the 1000th ? All I'm suggesting is that some thought be put into providing good answers for questions like this *before* we create competition. I'm as much of a technophile as the rest of you, but the phrase goes "look *before* you leap". Later may be, well, too late.
Simon
Documentation ? You want documentation ? ? ?
Well, I have circuit diagrams for old projects, (I think - only because I don't tend to 'trash' stuff), and I tend to comment my source-code a lot.... That's about as far as it goes... Perhaps I'll try and put some stuff on my blog in future...
Cheers,
Simon
I don't think there's any *need* for a formal education (I'm a physicist by degrees, but have spent my whole career as a coder). If you were planning on making a career in this area though, then just like any other area, having a provable education would help a lot, otherwise you show experience (I've done this, and this, and this, and...). You should probably ask real hardware engineers for their opinion too - I'm just an amateur. Personally, it's just a hobby - I'm not planning to change my career any time soon :-)
As for the term 'hardware engineer', all I meant was to distinguish the creation of software from that of hardware - you still need programming skills, the end result is different though.
Cheers,
Simon
Just to pick this up - coming back to it later - Apple said NBC want to "more than double", not "double".
I very much doubt Apple is lying, since lying in public is a massively bad PR move. Apple don't really do "massively bad PR moves", they let NBC do things like that...
Simon
As I mentioned above to a different poster, I think we're playing in different ballparks. The cheapest (and pretty-much useless for anything other than playing around on) V5 dev-kit I know of is ~$1000. That's an order of magnitude more than the cheapest S3A or S3E kits. 4-luts may be on their way out at the very high end, but they're definitely still around in the sort of things us mere mortals can buy/use.
Simon.
No, I'm aware of what you say, I just can't afford *any* of the commercial IP cores. I enquired about the cost of a JPEG core once, and was basically laughed at.
:)
/. post, so perhaps I wasn't clear...
I'm coming from a different perspective, that's all. FPGA's are a hobby for me, nothing more. I can afford to spend a few hundred dollars on a kit board, but I'd never drop a few grand on a core... I'd either do it myself or make do without. I'll use webpack exclusively for development (since they dropped the in-between option, Foundation is far too expensive). I think the most I ever spent was $400 on an FX12 board, which I linked up to an HD video source.
As for the hard cores, I'm aware that pretty much all the modern FPGAs come with multipliers, but for hobbyists like me, a spartan-2 can be just as useful because it has 5v-tolerant i/o. You don't need to insert quickswitch chips, though I've just found out about SN74LVCC4245ADW chips, which may make life easier
I've just ordered a 3A kit from Xilinx, it's going to form the basis of my EDK-based VME/VGA/Ethernet board for my just-purchased TT. I was going to mention the DSP blocks (though some of that is marketing, IMHO... and I know what the EDK is for [grin]. There's just only so much I'm prepared to type on a
Simon.
Well, common FPGA's are basically look-up tables surrounded by a sea of interconnect logic. The designer specifies the function of each LUT, and the connections between them using a language such as Verilog or VHDL. They're not "generic logic", they're defineable logic. Example: On a CPU, you have the 'add x,y' instruction - that's a chunk of logic on-chip. On an FPGA, that chunk of logic doesn't exist until you write a design that needs it.
You can buy (though I think they're very expensive) "IP cores", which are pre-packaged modules ready to plug-in-and-go. There are some free ones available as well. You may have to do more work to get the free ones to work [grin].
There are also built-in hard cores on modern FPGA's. You never used to be able to synthesize the statement "a = b * c;" in a verilog design, for example. Now that FPGA's have hardware multiplier blocks in them, it synthesises to a bunch of wires connecting up the LUTs to the built-in hardware. For the more-complex examples you suggest, it's best to implement them in logic, because an FFT (of a particular radix, input format (complex or real), and output requirements) is a very specific piece of hardware, and not generally useful to most customers.
You get multipliers, blocks of fast dual-port RAM, even entire processors (PPC) embedded into the FPGA fabric these days. Of course, you pay more for things like embedded CPUs... Funnily enough, a CPU is one of the easier things to write for an FPGA IMHO. You'll never get the speed of the FPGA fabric to match the hard-CPU core though...
To do what you're talking about though, you'd need a way to interface the FPGA to the PC - there's a freely available PCI core, so you'd then just need a card which had a PCI interface (there's one from Enterpoint for ~$150... Then you just need to link the PCI core to your own cores (FFT, whatever) and write software to offload any FFT's to your co-processor. Xilinx offer the "Embedded Development Kit" to make this easier (you have to pay for this, the other tools are free to download). I don't know if anyone has made the freely-available PCI core into an EDK module though...
Simon.
Simon
An FPGA really is conceptually very simple, and they're not hard to "program" either... Contrived example:
Verilog design to add/subtract 2 numbers (you'd never do this, but...)
Compare that to a K&R "C" routine to do the same thing...
In both cases, of course, you'd just use the 'if...else...' part, but I wanted to show more language structure...
:-), you don't get world-beating overnight, but it's relatively easy to get the 80% solution, and that might be just fine. Eking out the last 20% is where it gets hard, as you have to understand the internal structure of the LUTs, and how they interact with the carry-chain, what the LUT->LUT delay can be useful for etc. None of this is at all relevant unless you're missing your timing on a critical circuit (eg: you need 133MHz so your DDR2 SDRAM can work, but the synthesis tools (equivalent to a compiler) only deliver 125 MHz for your design).
The key thing to remember is that in C, all things happen serially, unless you arrange otherwise with threading libraries. In Verilog, any block beginning with 'always @' happens in parallel with every other 'always @' block. Once you've mentally-mapped the concept of vast numbers of threads to the way hardware works, any competent multi-threaded programmer can become a competent hardware engineer.
Of course, there's "guru stuff" in there as well (as much as you want, trust me
The 'always@' part is the hint of just where the power lies. *Everything* can happen in parallel, so you can build pipelines (like CPU's are pipelined today) into your logic, thus reducing the time taken per step (while taking multiple steps), thus increasing your clock rate. The benefit of course is that although the *first* result comes out in the same time, every clock thereafter, you'll also get a result.
I wrote a JPEG decoder a couple of years or so ago, running at ~130MHz. That doesn't sound much, but that comes to ~65 MPixels/second because of the pipelining. Looking at the SSE-optimised intel libraries, a CMYK422->CMYK baseline decode (which is what the FPGA was doing) takes 371 clocks/pixel. The intel chip I was comparing to was a 3.6GHz P4, meaning it could do ~9.7 Mpixels/second. For motion-jpeg that's the difference between decoding SD frames (for the P4) and decoding HD frames (for the FPGA)...
So, FPGAs tend to run slowly (relative to today's CPUs) but can exploit parallelism in ways CPUs just can't, but of course for serial processing, you can't beat a tradition