There have been steps in the right direction, though I'm not sure it's fully open yet. You can certainly get xine to play mpeg2's, but you may have to use the via-binary version.
There has been a reverse-engineering of the binary-only module though, which I think is waiting to be integrated into the main applications.
Via's Nehemiah core (what a name!) is not as efficient as the modern x86 cores, so running an Eden at 1GHz is approximately the same as a P3 at 6-800 MHz, if you could buy such a thing.
There are reviews (envynews for example, against an Athlon 1900) which show the cpus at 1104:4696 for example, makeing the Nehemiah roughly the equivalent of an Athlon 450 (!)
Now, the CPU has other things which make up for it, hardware-assisted mpeg-2 playback etc, so it can playback your VOB's and DiVX's even with its weedy cpu, but don't expect this one to be too powerful, it's normally rated from 'ok' to 'disappointing' in the business benchmarks.
I'm getting one anyway - I intend to make a *quiet* PVR (Myth-TV) with network streaming (ffserver) mpegs and write-DVD (cdrecord) functionality that I can sit in the living-room, but know your machine before you get too impressed with the 7watt/1GHz hype...
Pedantic doesn't even begin to describe it. You're correcting me saying "two jabs", after I linked (*in* my post) explaining why I said "two jabs" and not "two jags". You presumably somehow think that "two jabs" is less correct than "two jags" ??
The guy's name is John. Not 'two (anything)'. I think 'two jabs' is far funnier than 'two jags', because of what he did to get the nickname - I can understand a liking for gorgeous cars...
If you're seriously suggesting that anyone in the UK wouldn't know who I mean when I say "two jabs" Prescott, I think you're out to lunch, or you've found someone who doesn't interact much with society...
I'm not sure how 'lasting image' can really integrate with 'briefly' within the same sentence anyway, but as for nicknames, 'ole John has many, ranging from 'that thick fat bastard' through various colourful phrases, up to the more politically correct 'two ja{bg}s'
Enough. Respond if you will, but we're going to have to agree to differ on this one, I think.
[grin] I just can't see ole "two jabs" using Linux. I can't see him using anything more complicated than a notebook and pencil, to be honest... Concepts like 'desktop metaphor' were not meant for the JP's of the world (pun intended:-)
You're aware that the BBC has no adverts or pay-per-view yes ? Which media conglomerates are you talking about ?
The Beeb is supported by basically the entire country (everyone with a TV) paying for a TV licence. You can't watch TV without one - saying "I don't watch BBC" is not a defence:-) They also sell their programs abroad.
In general the quality is a damn sight better than all the advert-or-ppv-funded channels. You can argue whether the "tax" imposed on TV viewers is fair, but since it costs me less per year for the Beeb than it does for 2 months of Sky, I don't think it's a strong argument, given that the programs can be much better. Yeah, they have crap too. Show me a channel that doesn't...
There hasn't been any terrorist activity in the UK (let alone London) for years - at least 3 or 4, maybe more, it's too long ago to remember! It stopped more or less when the US stopped funding the IRA via 'Noraid'... Ok, I guess the peace process had something to do with it as well...
The stabbing rate is currently higher tthan the US average, but to single out stabbing is somewhat unfair anyway. In overall murders, Washington DC has a rate of 69 murders per 100k citizens, whereas London has 2.1 per 100k. See http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/153988.stm. There are US govt docs that confirm this, if you think the BBC would make it up...
London is a *far* safer place than Washington (and a lot of other US cities), and England is a *far* safer place than London. The two are sufficiently different as to be separate "countries".
I've lived in both SF and NY, and I'm not claiming London is the promised land, but it feels a damn sight safer than NY!
Not so as you'd notice. The fixed speed limit on a motorway is 70mph. The variable ones only reduce from that:-(
Of course, the average speed (apart from the M25, which has speed cameras behind all those speed-limit signs) is approx. 90, at least when the roads are clear...
Can't see any Foundation for the work myself. I'd say (with it being a tiny piece of research way out on fringe of science) it'd have *no* chance of making it big, unless of course there's some secret society within the scientific community willing to help it along, guide it through it's trials and tribulations etc.
That's the reason for the variable speed limits around the M25 (London UK Orbital motorway). Every 500m or so, there are a new set of overhead speed limits. The idea is to dampen the phononically-modelled wave into a more laminar flow for the lanes. In theory the individual lanes can be controlled, but I've never seen it.
It is reportedly working better than the previous (fixed speed) system though, with friends of mine who have to drive a car around the M25 claiming their journey time is shorter. Personally I've got a 'bike:-))
As part of my work, I have a rack at a co-lo. There are no services other than bandwidth provided by the co-lo (Level 3). I run DNS, mail, web, ftp, etc. etc. on machines at the co-lo for all the domains I use.
How likely is it that Level-3 are actually storing anything - they'd have to put a transparent proxy in front of my systems, and it would have to be fast enough and good enough to handle the 500 or so racks in the room the my rack is in. Each rack is served with 100mbit (which I use) and 1Gbit endpoints...The potential bandwidth this room can saturate is pretty F'ing big -/. effect, eat your heart out! My personal best peak so far has been 76 mbit/second throughput...
They could always have one proxy per customer, I suppose, but that's a lot of rack space going to "waste". I suppose if you use blade servers, you could fit ~120 or so in a rack, otherwise at 1U proxy-machine per customer, you're looking at 13 racks for my room. Did I mention there are several other rooms just as large or larger ?
Mmm. The study looks somewhat skewed to me. It's in the interests of the US dept. Justice to present the figures in the best possible light after all...
Given the much more concentrated nature of British society, I would expect (all other things being equal) Britain to have a far higher crime rate in all categories than the US. Humans, like most primates, are territorial and crowding has a negative effect.The USA has some 280(ish) million people in it. The UK has some 60(ish) million people (a ratio of 1/4.5), in an area approximately 1/40th the size. The UK has similar population concentration issues as well - 14% of the country population live in London. Millions more commute into it to work every day.
According to safestreets washington dc had 262 murders with a population of 600,000. That means (I can barely believe this!) 0.04% of the population were murdered in DC last year! London had 190 with 8 million inhabitants... New York, under Giuliani, has recorded a murder-rate fall from 1,927 in 1993 to 643 in 2001 (Livingstone's London), in a similar city-size. He made it 10% in the last year... I hope you keep it up.
London is by far the worst place to live in the UK for any crime. It's a melting pot of rich and poor, officially the world's most multi-cultural society, an immigration target as the stepping-stone to the rest of the UK, and has lots of social issues. I still feel a *lot* safer in the UK than the US, and I've lived in both. I've never had any problems in either, OTOH, I did have a doctor refuse to come out on a night call in LA until morning, she said it was too dangerous. I've never had that in the UK, or anything remotely like it.
There's no need to cower or fear, the truth is stark and simple. You are more likely to be assaulted or burgled in the UK than the US. You are more likely to be killed in the US than the UK. Your call.
[grin] I'd be willing to bet that the number of sword-deaths are reasonably low per 100,000 citizens as well.
Just to make things easier on you Yanks, howsabout we add up the number of gun-deaths and sword-deaths together per 100k citizens. Hmm... I doubt there's much difference in the figures...
"Home Office figures showed the murder rate in the US in 1998 was 6.3 per 100,000 people compared with 1.4 per 100,000 in England and Wales.
The murder rate in London is 2.9 per 100,000 compared with 8.6 per 100,000 in New York and 49.15 per 100,000 in Washington DC.
A report produced by the US Department of Justice in 1998 would appear to support the Home Office's claims.
It shows the murder rate was 5.7 times higher in the US than England and Wales and the rape rate was about three times higher.
The report also showed firearms were used in 68% of murders in the US compared with 7% in England and Wales, and in 41% of robberies in America against 5% in England and Wales.
But the rates for assault, burglary and motor vehicle theft were all lower in America than in England and Wales.
... from a bbc report on other crime being worse in the uk...
Wow! 0.05% of Washington DC's population is murdered every year! Those are bad odds...
Err, no. There is a lot of nitrogen, but there's a lot more oxygen. The 78% figure for nitrogen is in the gaseous atmospheric form of N2 (whereas oxygen (O2) has 21%).
On the other hand, apart from the masses and masses of oxides present in the earth's makeup, there's a fair amount of water (H20) around on the planet, which is far denser than the atmosphere... There's a fair amount of nitrogen around too, lots of organic compounds have N in them, but lots also have O in them, so that probably roughly balances...
I'd say there was probably more iron than oxygen though - AFAIR(emember), most of the Earth's core is iron, hence the magnetic field...
Who cares about the risk to human life ? Seriously, Who ? Presumably the only people who *should* have a say in it (the astronauts) are happy about it, or they wouldn't have spent many years of their lives striving towards that goal!
Anyone else worrying about it is just a busybody, stirring things up for their own agenda, in my not-so-humble opinion.
For any great venture, there is normally great risk. The first people to do anything monumental (like, say, fly an aeroplane, break the sound barrier, climb the tallest mountain, dive to the deepest ocean depths, go to the moon, land on mars) almost always take their lives into their own hands. It's a risk/reward tradeoff.
You have to respect that decision. You've certainly got no right to gainsay it solely on those terms. Now, if you'd said "it's too expensive", "what's the point ?", or "I don't think we should venture off our planet", you would have had an argument - a bad one (again, imnsho), but an argument nonetheless.
Personally, I think you're just using the human-life thing as an emotional prop to argue against space exploration for other reasons. Hey, maybe I'm wrong...
By the same argument, I'm sure you'd welcome the government tracking you, in case you had an accident crossing the road and lost your memory. They could then take you home so your loving family could take care of you, arrange the various medical benefits (because they already know what you're entitled to), notify your employer of your changed employment status, cancel any appointments with your friends (because they know your typical schedule... no golf today!), and notify your insurance company of your changed medical condition. All wonderful things, I'm sure you'll agree.
It's easy to say "sure I can see the benefits for X", when X is someone else. If you don't like the idea of it happening to you, why would X like it happening to them ? Not owning a home, being poor, and not being 100% compus mentus do not (in any civilised society) deprive you of the basic freedoms.
Depends who your research is funded by. Mine was by the Ministry of Defence in the UK. Quarterly meetings with the paymasters, progress had to be made or a good reason why no progress was made had to be given.
The group I was in was small but exceptional. Two of them now work for Eidos (one's the TD). One of them is at Nasa, One's a TD at CNN Money, and the remaining two of us own our own companies. Getting a PhD certainly didn't hold any of us back.
We were (mainly) investigating neural networks for pattern identification. My contribution was the introduction of context in a meaningful way. A fair few of our ideas were fast-tracked to the product stage within the MOD, not all worked in the field, but some did.
[I wish I'd seen this on Slashdot earlier, it probably won't get read now:-(]
Some history:
Waaay back in the mists of time (1988) I was a 1st-year undergrad in Physics. Together with a couple of friends, I wrote a virus, just to see if we could, and let it loose on just one of the networked machines in the year-1 lab.
I guess I should say that the virus was completely harmless, it just prepended 'Copyright (c) 1988 The Virus' to the start of directory listings. It was written for Acorn Archimedes/BBC micro's (the lab hadn't got onto PC's by this time, and the Acorn range had loads of ports, which physics labs like:-)
It spread like wildfire. People would come in, log into the network, and become infected because the last person to use their current computer was infected. It would then infect their account, so wherever they logged on in future would also infect the computer they were using then. A couple of hours later, and most of the lab was infected.
You have to remember that virii in those days weren't really networked. They came on floppy disks for Atari ST's and Amiga's. I witnessed people logging onto the same computer "to see if they were infected too". Of course, the act of logging in would infect them...
Of course "authority" was not amused. Actually they were seriously unamused, not that they caught us. They shut down the year-1,2,3 network and disinfected all the accounts on the network server by hand. Ouch.
There were basically 3 ways the virus could be activated:
typing any '*' command (eg: "*.", which gave you a directory listing. Sneaky, I thought, since the virus announced itself when you did a '*.' When you thought you'd beaten it, you'd do a '*.' to see if it was still there:-)
The events (keypress, network, disk etc.) all activated the virus, and also re-enabled the interrupts, if they had been disabled
The interrupts (NMI,VBI,..) all activated the virus, and also re-enabled the events, if they had been deactivated.
We hadn't really counted on just how effective this was. Within a few days of the virus being cleansed (and everyone settling back to normal), it suddenly made a re-appearance again, racing through the network once more within an hour or two. Someone had put the virus onto their floppy disk (by typing *. on the floppy rather than the network) and had then brought the disk back into college and re-infected the network.
If we thought authority was unamused last time, this time they held a meeting for the entire department, and calmly said the culprit when found would be expelled. Excrement and fans came to mind. Of course, they thought we'd just re-released it, but in fact it was just too successful for comfort...
Since we had "shot our bolt", owning up didn't seem like a good idea. The only solution we came up with was to write another (silent, this time:-) virus which would disable any copy of the old one, whilst hiding itself from the users. We built in a time-to-die of a couple of months, let it go, and prayed...
We had actually built in a kill-switch to the original virus, which would disable and remove it - we didn't want to be infected ourselves (at the start). Of course, it became a matter of self-preservation to be infected later on in the saga - 3 accounts unaccountably (pun intended:-) uninfected... It wasn't too hard to destroy the original by having the new virus "press" the key combination that deleted the old one.
So, everyone was happy. Infected with the counter-virus, but happy. "Authority" thought they'd laid down the law, and been taken seriously (oh if they knew...) and we'd not been expelled. Everyone else lost their infections within a few months...
Anyway. I've never written anything remotely like a virus since [grin]
It's not crippled as regards linux. It's crippled as regards the PS2.
The PS2 is a dataflow architecture, which relies heavily on programmed DMA between chips. The DMA controller is more powerful than most, allowing chained DMA commands to be set up. You can "program" it on the fly.
The linux kit emulates the DMA controller, providing little of the flexibility of the real PS2, and hence a lower standard of operation.
[grin] The 3500-file project *is* a sub-project... It's an enterprise asset-management system, based around collaborative nodes rather than a central machine with the application running on it. The 3500-file project is the parallellising (sp?) scripting engine built into each node. It's a reasonably complex script environment, because the idea is to distribute sections of script jobs over the available nodes (using a firing-condition model), taking into account the current environment.
I've tried it before with larger vm memory params, and it does help a bit, but not as much as I had expected. We do a *lot* of object instantiation, so I guess we're probably a corner-case for the VM (when running in the debugger, for example).
Strategic System.gc() calls (just before instantiating another Scripting engine, for example) have turned out to be useful during deployment, if not so much during development...
Hmm. JBuilder isn't that good with medium-sized projects. We have 3 developers (all enterprise) working with a 3500-ish java-files project. Each machine has 1.5Gb ram, and a 2Ghz processor. The JVM in jbuilder just gets tied up in knots sometimes - you move the mouse, it lags behind; hit the 'close-window' and it can take literally minutes for the VM to catch up; etc.
Sometimes it's great. Certainly going to the 'about' tab and forcing a garbage collection helps, but Jbuilder could certainly improve....
Whether that's JBuilder's problem, or Swing's problem, is of course hard to determine:-)
If they attempt to make the link, they should be impeached. Has anyone else ever noticed how hard it is to get rid of X once they're in power. Maybe that's the fundamental flaw in our "democracies", wherever they may be in the world.
I'm all for oratory and impassioned argument to make a case - I draw the line some way before we get to FUD though.
Slashdot Mirror
There have been steps in the right direction, though I'm not sure it's fully open yet. You can certainly get xine to play mpeg2's, but you may have to use the via-binary version.
There has been a reverse-engineering of the binary-only module though, which I think is waiting to be integrated into the main applications.
Simon
Via's Nehemiah core (what a name!) is not as efficient as the modern x86 cores, so running an Eden at 1GHz is approximately the same as a P3 at 6-800 MHz, if you could buy such a thing.
...
There are reviews (envynews for example, against an Athlon 1900) which show the cpus at 1104:4696 for example, makeing the Nehemiah roughly the equivalent of an Athlon 450 (!)
Now, the CPU has other things which make up for it, hardware-assisted mpeg-2 playback etc, so it can playback your VOB's and DiVX's even with its weedy cpu, but don't expect this one to be too powerful, it's normally rated from 'ok' to 'disappointing' in the business benchmarks.
I'm getting one anyway - I intend to make a *quiet* PVR (Myth-TV) with network streaming (ffserver) mpegs and write-DVD (cdrecord) functionality that I can sit in the living-room, but know your machine before you get too impressed with the 7watt/1GHz hype
Simon
Pedantic doesn't even begin to describe it. You're correcting me saying "two jabs", after I linked (*in* my post) explaining why I said "two jabs" and not "two jags". You presumably somehow think that "two jabs" is less correct than "two jags" ??
The guy's name is John. Not 'two (anything)'. I think 'two jabs' is far funnier than 'two jags', because of what he did to get the nickname - I can understand a liking for gorgeous cars...
If you're seriously suggesting that anyone in the UK wouldn't know who I mean when I say "two jabs" Prescott, I think you're out to lunch, or you've found someone who doesn't interact much with society...
I'm not sure how 'lasting image' can really integrate with 'briefly' within the same sentence anyway, but as for nicknames, 'ole John has many, ranging from 'that thick fat bastard' through various colourful phrases, up to the more politically correct 'two ja{bg}s'
Enough. Respond if you will, but we're going to have to agree to differ on this one, I think.
Simon.
Oh dear. I suggest you click on the link and read it ....
Simon.
[grin] I just can't see ole "two jabs" using Linux. I can't see him using anything more complicated than a notebook and pencil, to be honest ... Concepts like 'desktop metaphor' were not meant for the JP's of the world (pun intended :-)
Simon.
There is a difference between an engine, and fuel. Good (insert random deity) man!
...
Whether it's a waste is a different matter, mind
Simon
You're aware that the BBC has no adverts or pay-per-view yes ? Which media conglomerates are you talking about ?
:-) They also sell their programs abroad.
The Beeb is supported by basically the entire country (everyone with a TV) paying for a TV licence. You can't watch TV without one - saying "I don't watch BBC" is not a defence
In general the quality is a damn sight better than all the advert-or-ppv-funded channels. You can argue whether the "tax" imposed on TV viewers is fair, but since it costs me less per year for the Beeb than it does for 2 months of Sky, I don't think it's a strong argument, given that the programs can be much better. Yeah, they have crap too. Show me a channel that doesn't...
Simon.
Er, this is very misleading.
...
There hasn't been any terrorist activity in the UK (let alone London) for years - at least 3 or 4, maybe more, it's too long ago to remember! It stopped more or less when the US stopped funding the IRA via 'Noraid'... Ok, I guess the peace process had something to do with it as well
The stabbing rate is currently higher tthan the US average, but to single out stabbing is somewhat unfair anyway. In overall murders, Washington DC has a rate of 69 murders per 100k citizens, whereas London has 2.1 per 100k. See http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/153988.stm. There are US govt docs that confirm this, if you think the BBC would make it up...
London is a *far* safer place than Washington (and a lot of other US cities), and England is a *far* safer place than London. The two are sufficiently different as to be separate "countries".
I've lived in both SF and NY, and I'm not claiming London is the promised land, but it feels a damn sight safer than NY!
Simon.
Not so as you'd notice. The fixed speed limit on a motorway is 70mph. The variable ones only reduce from that :-(
Of course, the average speed (apart from the M25, which has speed cameras behind all those speed-limit signs) is approx. 90, at least when the roads are clear...
Simon.
Sorry to reply to my own post, guys, but this has to be a record for me :-) post to +5 in about 5 minutes!
...
[grin] Now off to watch the football, probably find it's at -1 when I get back
Simon.
Can't see any Foundation for the work myself. I'd say (with it being a tiny piece of research way out on fringe of science) it'd have *no* chance of making it big, unless of course there's some secret society within the scientific community willing to help it along, guide it through it's trials and tribulations etc.
[grin, for the humour-impaired]
Simon.
That's the reason for the variable speed limits around the M25 (London UK Orbital motorway). Every 500m or so, there are a new set of overhead speed limits. The idea is to dampen the phononically-modelled wave into a more laminar flow for the lanes. In theory the individual lanes can be controlled, but I've never seen it.
:-))
It is reportedly working better than the previous (fixed speed) system though, with friends of mine who have to drive a car around the M25 claiming their journey time is shorter. Personally I've got a 'bike
Simon
As part of my work, I have a rack at a co-lo. There are no services other than bandwidth provided by the co-lo (Level 3). I run DNS, mail, web, ftp, etc. etc. on machines at the co-lo for all the domains I use.
.The potential bandwidth this room can saturate is pretty F'ing big - /. effect, eat your heart out! My personal best peak so far has been 76 mbit/second throughput ...
How likely is it that Level-3 are actually storing anything - they'd have to put a transparent proxy in front of my systems, and it would have to be fast enough and good enough to handle the 500 or so racks in the room the my rack is in. Each rack is served with 100mbit (which I use) and 1Gbit endpoints..
They could always have one proxy per customer, I suppose, but that's a lot of rack space going to "waste". I suppose if you use blade servers, you could fit ~120 or so in a rack, otherwise at 1U proxy-machine per customer, you're looking at 13 racks for my room. Did I mention there are several other rooms just as large or larger ?
So, how's it going to work for businesses ?
Simon.
Mmm. The study looks somewhat skewed to me. It's in the interests of the US dept. Justice to present the figures in the best possible light after all...
Given the much more concentrated nature of British society, I would expect (all other things being equal) Britain to have a far higher crime rate in all categories than the US. Humans, like most primates, are territorial and crowding has a negative effect.The USA has some 280(ish) million people in it. The UK has some 60(ish) million people (a ratio of 1/4.5), in an area approximately 1/40th the size. The UK has similar population concentration issues as well - 14% of the country population live in London. Millions more commute into it to work every day.
According to safestreets washington dc had 262 murders with a population of 600,000. That means (I can barely believe this!) 0.04% of the population were murdered in DC last year! London had 190 with 8 million inhabitants... New York, under Giuliani, has recorded a murder-rate fall from 1,927 in 1993 to 643 in 2001 (Livingstone's London), in a similar city-size. He made it 10% in the last year... I hope you keep it up.
London is by far the worst place to live in the UK for any crime. It's a melting pot of rich and poor, officially the world's most multi-cultural society, an immigration target as the stepping-stone to the rest of the UK, and has lots of social issues. I still feel a *lot* safer in the UK than the US, and I've lived in both. I've never had any problems in either, OTOH, I did have a doctor refuse to come out on a night call in LA until morning, she said it was too dangerous. I've never had that in the UK, or anything remotely like it.
There's no need to cower or fear, the truth is stark and simple. You are more likely to be assaulted or burgled in the UK than the US. You are more likely to be killed in the US than the UK. Your call.
Simon.
Just to make things easier on you Yanks, howsabout we add up the number of gun-deaths and sword-deaths together per 100k citizens. Hmm... I doubt there's much difference in the figures...
Wow! 0.05% of Washington DC's population is murdered every year! Those are bad odds...
Simon
Err, no. There is a lot of nitrogen, but there's a lot more oxygen. The 78% figure for nitrogen is in the gaseous atmospheric form of N2 (whereas oxygen (O2) has 21%).
On the other hand, apart from the masses and masses of oxides present in the earth's makeup, there's a fair amount of water (H20) around on the planet, which is far denser than the atmosphere... There's a fair amount of nitrogen around too, lots of organic compounds have N in them, but lots also have O in them, so that probably roughly balances...
I'd say there was probably more iron than oxygen though - AFAIR(emember), most of the Earth's core is iron, hence the magnetic field...
Simon
Who cares about the risk to human life ? Seriously, Who ? Presumably the only people who *should* have a say in it (the astronauts) are happy about it, or they wouldn't have spent many years of their lives striving towards that goal!
Anyone else worrying about it is just a busybody, stirring things up for their own agenda, in my not-so-humble opinion.
For any great venture, there is normally great risk. The first people to do anything monumental (like, say, fly an aeroplane, break the sound barrier, climb the tallest mountain, dive to the deepest ocean depths, go to the moon, land on mars) almost always take their lives into their own hands. It's a risk/reward tradeoff.
You have to respect that decision. You've certainly got no right to gainsay it solely on those terms. Now, if you'd said "it's too expensive", "what's the point ?", or "I don't think we should venture off our planet", you would have had an argument - a bad one (again, imnsho), but an argument nonetheless.
Personally, I think you're just using the human-life thing as an emotional prop to argue against space exploration for other reasons. Hey, maybe I'm wrong...
Simon.
By the same argument, I'm sure you'd welcome the government tracking you, in case you had an accident crossing the road and lost your memory. They could then take you home so your loving family could take care of you, arrange the various medical benefits (because they already know what you're entitled to), notify your employer of your changed employment status, cancel any appointments with your friends (because they know your typical schedule... no golf today!), and notify your insurance company of your changed medical condition. All wonderful things, I'm sure you'll agree.
It's easy to say "sure I can see the benefits for X", when X is someone else. If you don't like the idea of it happening to you, why would X like it happening to them ? Not owning a home, being poor, and not being 100% compus mentus do not (in any civilised society) deprive you of the basic freedoms.
Simon.
Depends who your research is funded by. Mine was by the Ministry of Defence in the UK. Quarterly meetings with the paymasters, progress had to be made or a good reason why no progress was made had to be given.
The group I was in was small but exceptional. Two of them now work for Eidos (one's the TD). One of them is at Nasa, One's a TD at CNN Money, and the remaining two of us own our own companies. Getting a PhD certainly didn't hold any of us back.
We were (mainly) investigating neural networks for pattern identification. My contribution was the introduction of context in a meaningful way. A fair few of our ideas were fast-tracked to the product stage within the MOD, not all worked in the field, but some did.
Simon.
Some history:
Waaay back in the mists of time (1988) I was a 1st-year undergrad in Physics. Together with a couple of friends, I wrote a virus, just to see if we could, and let it loose on just one of the networked machines in the year-1 lab.
I guess I should say that the virus was completely harmless, it just prepended 'Copyright (c) 1988 The Virus' to the start of directory listings. It was written for Acorn Archimedes/BBC micro's (the lab hadn't got onto PC's by this time, and the Acorn range had loads of ports, which physics labs like
It spread like wildfire. People would come in, log into the network, and become infected because the last person to use their current computer was infected. It would then infect their account, so wherever they logged on in future would also infect the computer they were using then. A couple of hours later, and most of the lab was infected.
You have to remember that virii in those days weren't really networked. They came on floppy disks for Atari ST's and Amiga's. I witnessed people logging onto the same computer "to see if they were infected too". Of course, the act of logging in would infect them...
Of course "authority" was not amused. Actually they were seriously unamused, not that they caught us. They shut down the year-1,2,3 network and disinfected all the accounts on the network server by hand. Ouch.
There were basically 3 ways the virus could be activated:
We hadn't really counted on just how effective this was. Within a few days of the virus being cleansed (and everyone settling back to normal), it suddenly made a re-appearance again, racing through the network once more within an hour or two. Someone had put the virus onto their floppy disk (by typing *. on the floppy rather than the network) and had then brought the disk back into college and re-infected the network.
If we thought authority was unamused last time, this time they held a meeting for the entire department, and calmly said the culprit when found would be expelled. Excrement and fans came to mind. Of course, they thought we'd just re-released it, but in fact it was just too successful for comfort...
Since we had "shot our bolt", owning up didn't seem like a good idea. The only solution we came up with was to write another (silent, this time
We had actually built in a kill-switch to the original virus, which would disable and remove it - we didn't want to be infected ourselves (at the start). Of course, it became a matter of self-preservation to be infected later on in the saga - 3 accounts unaccountably (pun intended
So, everyone was happy. Infected with the counter-virus, but happy. "Authority" thought they'd laid down the law, and been taken seriously (oh if they knew...) and we'd not been expelled. Everyone else lost their infections within a few months
Anyway. I've never written anything remotely like a virus since [grin]
Simon.
It's not crippled as regards linux. It's crippled as regards the PS2.
The PS2 is a dataflow architecture, which relies heavily on programmed DMA between chips. The DMA controller is more powerful than most, allowing chained DMA commands to be set up. You can "program" it on the fly.
The linux kit emulates the DMA controller, providing little of the flexibility of the real PS2, and hence a lower standard of operation.
Simon.
[grin] The 3500-file project *is* a sub-project ... It's an enterprise asset-management system, based around collaborative nodes rather than a central machine with the application running on it. The 3500-file project is the parallellising (sp?) scripting engine built into each node. It's a reasonably complex script environment, because the idea is to distribute sections of script jobs over the available nodes (using a firing-condition model), taking into account the current environment.
I've tried it before with larger vm memory params, and it does help a bit, but not as much as I had expected. We do a *lot* of object instantiation, so I guess we're probably a corner-case for the VM (when running in the debugger, for example).
Strategic System.gc() calls (just before instantiating another Scripting engine, for example) have turned out to be useful during deployment, if not so much during development...
Simon.
Hmm. JBuilder isn't that good with medium-sized projects. We have 3 developers (all enterprise) working with a 3500-ish java-files project. Each machine has 1.5Gb ram, and a 2Ghz processor. The JVM in jbuilder just gets tied up in knots sometimes - you move the mouse, it lags behind; hit the 'close-window' and it can take literally minutes for the VM to catch up; etc.
:-)
Sometimes it's great. Certainly going to the 'about' tab and forcing a garbage collection helps, but Jbuilder could certainly improve....
Whether that's JBuilder's problem, or Swing's problem, is of course hard to determine
Simon
Corporate stupidity does not veracity make. Mendacity, now, ...
Simon.
Fair enough :-)
If they attempt to make the link, they should be impeached. Has anyone else ever noticed how hard it is to get rid of X once they're in power. Maybe that's the fundamental flaw in our "democracies", wherever they may be in the world.
I'm all for oratory and impassioned argument to make a case - I draw the line some way before we get to FUD though.
Simon.