This was my first microprocessor of any kind. It came with a COSMAC-1802 chip. I forget the clock speed, but I seem to recall the effective MIPS as about 0.3. Yeah 300khz or in that vicinity. I got it for $100, and it came with 1kb RAM. I bought another 1kb for $50. It used the good old cassette tape interface for storing/loading programs. It had a 1kb rom chip with a monitor program, and also had a tiny interpreter (about.5kb) on tape.
I had a lot of fun programming this thing in machine code, writing the codes in pencil & paper before hex-keying them in. Wrote several actually useful programs. One was a Morse code sender and receiver for amateur radio. Another analyzed signals I had coming from a $5 ADC chip I got at the local store. This is straight machine code, not assembly.
I really liked playing with this chip, and it started an interest in hardware and down-to-the-metal coding that I still enjoy sometimes.
The 1802 chip was never big in the home computing world, but was very successful in embedded designs. Space hardware used them often. Whenever I see something in the news about computer makers worrying about ever-increasing power consumption, I suspect that maybe we have forgotton something that was known long ago with the old power-stingy CMOS designs.
I think that's the point of the design. The ions can be accelerated without the need for being attracted by cathode plates or wire mesh at the back, as is done now.
Java badly needs a JDK 2.0 (not meaning J2SE)
on
Java Is So 90s
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· Score: 2, Informative
I agree that Java needs a basic overhaul. Not so much because of its age, but because it was not developed in an organized manner, but evolved.
Over the years, as new technologies were added, the interpreter and the API were constantly augmented. Basically the new features were slapped on like coats of paint, but it was never reengineered nor refactored. Look how little of the old cruft of 'deprecated' stuff from JDK 1.0 or 1.1 has ever been removed. For example, why does Java still need 3 types of remote invocation, all flavors of the same thing: RMI, CORBA, and RMI-IIOP? Can't one be selected for the core API, and others be add-ons? Why are AWT and Swing still separate, and why do Swing classes still not implement Containers, as was the plan long ago?
I know that this is for backward compatibly, which is why I think it is time for JDK 2.0. The current J2SE/Java5 is really JDK 1.5. Let the old 1.x series be grandfathered out, but always be available for whoever needs it. Refactor, clean up, fix the things that have always needed to be fixed. Organize the API in a clean, logical and intuitive hierarchy. Make a JDK 2.x series with that new car smell. Market it as Java6 or whatever.
As an aside, I do not think that I will ever understand these "X is cool. Y sucks" arguments. A good developer selects the proper tool for the job, whatever it is. I haven't tried Ruby yet, but I have used all of the others. All have their qualities and drawbacks. For example, I really like PHP, but I don't think that MySQL- or Postgres-specific calls should be in the core; rather, the ODBC-like abstraction like can be found in PEAR.
Following the narrow path of a single language only limits a person's skills. Consider the different options not as opposing each other, but orthogonal to each other, adding new dimensions or degrees of freedom.
I can't stress enough how valuable one of these, or some other good LiveCD, can be. If the box is Windows, Linux, whatever, keep one handy. One of these things can be priceless if the thing refuses to boot properly, someone deleted NTLDR, X locks up on runlevel 5, your driver interrupts conflict, a recursive script uses all of the PIDs, or any number of problems. Keep a printout of the boot options for the disk, too, to boot the unbootable.
Military and/or aerospace organizations have an inherent distrust and dislike of any software that cannot be traced line by line in its decision making. Trusting software to make life-or-death decisions, without designers knowing exactly how those decisions are made, will not happen in the short term.
What does work, however, is to make a human/computer partnership, with the proportion of who makes the decisions adjustable between the two. One starts with the human making 100% of the choices, and gradually using the software more and more as trust develops. Initially the human will use the software in a consultative role, the way we normally use computers. But as experience develops, the human will move the needle toward letting the software play a larger role. The "Watershed" moment comes when the the human tells the computer "you do this" for a given task. This would grow more and more, but would probably never reach the asymptotic point where the computer does everything.
This is like the difference between a fire-detection computer telling a security guard that there is a fire and the guard turning on the sprinkler system, and the computer turning on the sprinkler itself.
I'm not really espousing this as a way to start integrating AI into military or aerospace. I'm just saying that this is how it is currently done.
JPEG 2000 is a perfect example of why such patents need to be fought. Nobody will ever adopt it, or formats like it, while there are such legal swords of Damocles threatening them. Look here, where apparently the JPEG group seems to have given up on the idea of certifying that JPEG is patent-safe.
But non-decipherable stuff is archived
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RSA-640 Factored
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· Score: 1
Code-breaking agencies all over the world have a practice of archiving everything of pertinent value, for possible decryption in the future. So even if it is not breakable today, it could be in the near future.
So, do feel safe about having your personal secrets made public eventually, no matter how careful you are at encryption?
I noticed that the program listed after War of the Worlds is the Brothers Karamazov. The 1958 movie version of this story co-starred none other than William Shatner as the brother who became a priest.
I found
this news item while searching for articles about the LBT telescope in Arizona. Italians helped with the mirror technology of the LBT and are working on newer lightweight designs.
Why must Slashdot comments always degenerate to "We are cool. You suck!" ? There should be less NAND and NOR, more AND and OR when considering the many varieties of software available in Open Source. Windows vs BSD vs Linux vs Whatever, Gnome vs KDE, mice versus trackballs... these arguments are getting old and tired. People should learn and embrace the spectrum of technologies, and select the best ones for the given task at hand.
Minix's abilities are neither worse nor better, just different. That is the charm.
And technologies can benefit from the others' ideas. For example, many Linux distros have PnP and WLAN-NG, which have architectures in common with microkernels: a pluggable API with dynamically loaded modules.
Considering that this is to benefit poor children in developing countries, twice the price seems fair to me. That way, each of us fat and lazy westerners could provide at least one free laptop to someone who could really use it.
Also, keep in mind that open source software developers would need some of these to test their apps running on these boxes.
In my opinion, here is the benchmark as to what is resistant to scratching in normal everyday use. They -never- scratch. I like their advertisement where they expand on Timex... after a truck drives over the watch, not only does it "keep on ticking," but it shows no scratching or damage.
I have several very important things: 1) My Doom3 disk 2) Several printouts of the London Times daily Su Doku puzzles 3) A jar of Kalamata olives 4) 2 Wifi cards. The Dlink G card I use myself, and the $10 B card that I loan to others at the pub in exchange for a beer.
Sending signals over unshielded cables is always a bad idea. But sending them over something as unsuitable as power lines, with their horrendous impedance mismatches, is a crime against nature. The level of man-made radio noise on this planet will rise to unprecedented levels.
Who the hell said that? People are hired according to their merits, just like anywhere else. This sounds like an urban legend: "I know a guy who knows a guy who has a relative that said....[your myth here]...."
That's what I did. The local pub had business Internet access, but was totally neutral whether or not he provided wireless access to his customers. He just didn't want the headache of setting it up or running it. So I purchased a nice cheap 802.11g access point for about $45 from the web about 15 months ago. I just gave it to the pub owner. I set it up, gave it an easy-to-remember WEP code, and that was that. He has never needed to worry about it at all since then. I have had free access there for 15 months now, so that comes out to $3/month for me, and $0 for everyone else. With the occasional beer someone buys me in thanks, I have come out way ahead.
One of the ideas, and possibly the one that will be used, will be to wait a bit for the changeover of the vector renderer from Inkscape's own (libnr), to using the Cairo vector graphics library. It is developing its own PS and PDF backend. If we use that one, the synchronicity will eliminate duplication of effort and produce a more robust output.
The Inkscape people are not ignoring this. They just need someone to do the work. Any volunteers?
I know it sounds like a crappy workaround, but it is quite easy to get a sharp bitmap: use the Gimp to get a screen capture. Then you get a WYSIWYG bitmap rendition of the vector drawing.
The goal is, and has always been, to control content, stifle dissident voices, and provide a business-friendly, user-harsh Internet for their downtrodden masses.
Another common method is to blow superheated steam over red-hot iron shavings or wool. In this situation, rust is more stable than water, so the atoms change partners, freeing gaseous hydrogen. But yes, reducing hydrocarbons is the most common method. Electrolysis is just too slow and inefficient. On the other hand, if electricity were relatively free, it would be a good way to store energy. Hydroelectric energy or off-peak production of a nuclear plant could become very profitable this way.
Maybe SciFi will concentrate on scifi now
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Sci-Fi on the Cheap
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· Score: 1
If we are lucky, maybe this will lessen to a degree the SciFi Channel's total disdain for their own genre. The endless diet of reality shows, critter/bug flicks, and psychic trailer trash shows that they either do not understand science fiction, or hate it. If the network bosses love that kind of lowbrow/trash/schlock fare, let them take it somewhere else. Showing them on the SciFi channel seems a bit like bait-and-switch.
Slashdot Mirror
I had a lot of fun programming this thing in machine code, writing the codes in pencil & paper before hex-keying them in. Wrote several actually useful programs. One was a Morse code sender and receiver for amateur radio. Another analyzed signals I had coming from a $5 ADC chip I got at the local store. This is straight machine code, not assembly.
I really liked playing with this chip, and it started an interest in hardware and down-to-the-metal coding that I still enjoy sometimes.
The 1802 chip was never big in the home computing world, but was very successful in embedded designs. Space hardware used them often. Whenever I see something in the news about computer makers worrying about ever-increasing power consumption, I suspect that maybe we have forgotton something that was known long ago with the old power-stingy CMOS designs.
I found a pic of it on the web here.
I think that's the point of the design. The ions can be accelerated without the need for being attracted by cathode plates or wire mesh at the back, as is done now.
Over the years, as new technologies were added, the interpreter and the API were constantly augmented. Basically the new features were slapped on like coats of paint, but it was never reengineered nor refactored. Look how little of the old cruft of 'deprecated' stuff from JDK 1.0 or 1.1 has ever been removed. For example, why does Java still need 3 types of remote invocation, all flavors of the same thing: RMI, CORBA, and RMI-IIOP? Can't one be selected for the core API, and others be add-ons? Why are AWT and Swing still separate, and why do Swing classes still not implement Containers, as was the plan long ago?
I know that this is for backward compatibly, which is why I think it is time for JDK 2.0. The current J2SE/Java5 is really JDK 1.5. Let the old 1.x series be grandfathered out, but always be available for whoever needs it. Refactor, clean up, fix the things that have always needed to be fixed. Organize the API in a clean, logical and intuitive hierarchy. Make a JDK 2.x series with that new car smell. Market it as Java6 or whatever.
As an aside, I do not think that I will ever understand these "X is cool. Y sucks" arguments. A good developer selects the proper tool for the job, whatever it is. I haven't tried Ruby yet, but I have used all of the others. All have their qualities and drawbacks. For example, I really like PHP, but I don't think that MySQL- or Postgres-specific calls should be in the core; rather, the ODBC-like abstraction like can be found in PEAR.
Following the narrow path of a single language only limits a person's skills. Consider the different options not as opposing each other, but orthogonal to each other, adding new dimensions or degrees of freedom.
I can't stress enough how valuable one of these, or some other good LiveCD, can be. If the box is Windows, Linux, whatever, keep one handy. One of these things can be priceless if the thing refuses to boot properly, someone deleted NTLDR, X locks up on runlevel 5, your driver interrupts conflict, a recursive script uses all of the PIDs, or any number of problems. Keep a printout of the boot options for the disk, too, to boot the unbootable.
What does work, however, is to make a human/computer partnership, with the proportion of who makes the decisions adjustable between the two. One starts with the human making 100% of the choices, and gradually using the software more and more as trust develops. Initially the human will use the software in a consultative role, the way we normally use computers. But as experience develops, the human will move the needle toward letting the software play a larger role. The "Watershed" moment comes when the the human tells the computer "you do this" for a given task. This would grow more and more, but would probably never reach the asymptotic point where the computer does everything.
This is like the difference between a fire-detection computer telling a security guard that there is a fire and the guard turning on the sprinkler system, and the computer turning on the sprinkler itself.
I'm not really espousing this as a way to start integrating AI into military or aerospace. I'm just saying that this is how it is currently done.
That would inspire the typical "Who the hell IS this guy?" response.
JPEG 2000 is a perfect example of why such patents need to be fought. Nobody will ever adopt it, or formats like it, while there are such legal swords of Damocles threatening them. Look here, where apparently the JPEG group seems to have given up on the idea of certifying that JPEG is patent-safe.
So, do feel safe about having your personal secrets made public eventually, no matter how careful you are at encryption?
I noticed that the program listed after War of the Worlds is the Brothers Karamazov. The 1958 movie version of this story co-starred none other than William Shatner as the brother who became a priest.
I found this news item while searching for articles about the LBT telescope in Arizona. Italians helped with the mirror technology of the LBT and are working on newer lightweight designs.
Minix's abilities are neither worse nor better, just different. That is the charm.
And technologies can benefit from the others' ideas. For example, many Linux distros have PnP and WLAN-NG, which have architectures in common with microkernels: a pluggable API with dynamically loaded modules.
Also, keep in mind that open source software developers would need some of these to test their apps running on these boxes.
In my opinion, here is the benchmark as to what is resistant to scratching in normal everyday use. They -never- scratch. I like their advertisement where they expand on Timex... after a truck drives over the watch, not only does it "keep on ticking," but it shows no scratching or damage.
However, there is at least one Mozilla extension that allows switching between plugins and the internal implementation, for usability's sake.
Maybe some polite emails to these SVG sites (GIS, mapping, etc) could convince them to use an alternate set of tags for their SVG.
I have several very important things:
1) My Doom3 disk
2) Several printouts of the London Times daily Su Doku puzzles
3) A jar of Kalamata olives
4) 2 Wifi cards. The Dlink G card I use myself, and the $10 B card that I loan to others at the pub in exchange for a beer.
Sending signals over unshielded cables is always a bad idea. But sending them over something as unsuitable as power lines, with their horrendous impedance mismatches, is a crime against nature. The level of man-made radio noise on this planet will rise to unprecedented levels.
Who the hell said that ? People are hired according to their merits, just like anywhere else. This sounds like an urban legend: "I know a guy who knows a guy who has a relative that said....[your myth here]...."
That's what I did. The local pub had business Internet access, but was totally neutral whether or not he provided wireless access to his customers. He just didn't want the headache of setting it up or running it. So I purchased a nice cheap 802.11g access point for about $45 from the web about 15 months ago. I just gave it to the pub owner. I set it up, gave it an easy-to-remember WEP code, and that was that. He has never needed to worry about it at all since then. I have had free access there for 15 months now, so that comes out to $3/month for me, and $0 for everyone else. With the occasional beer someone buys me in thanks, I have come out way ahead.
The Inkscape people are not ignoring this. They just need someone to do the work. Any volunteers?
I know it sounds like a crappy workaround, but it is quite easy to get a sharp bitmap: use the Gimp to get a screen capture. Then you get a WYSIWYG bitmap rendition of the vector drawing.
Well, of course! Click on the Front Page link, and Voila! You are on the Atom development wiki. This is hardly an unbiased discussion.
The goal is, and has always been, to control content , stifle dissident voices, and provide a business-friendly, user-harsh Internet for their downtrodden masses.
Another common method is to blow superheated steam over red-hot iron shavings or wool. In this situation, rust is more stable than water, so the atoms change partners, freeing gaseous hydrogen. But yes, reducing hydrocarbons is the most common method. Electrolysis is just too slow and inefficient. On the other hand, if electricity were relatively free, it would be a good way to store energy. Hydroelectric energy or off-peak production of a nuclear plant could become very profitable this way.
If we are lucky, maybe this will lessen to a degree the SciFi Channel's total disdain for their own genre. The endless diet of reality shows, critter/bug flicks, and psychic trailer trash shows that they either do not understand science fiction, or hate it. If the network bosses love that kind of lowbrow/trash/schlock fare, let them take it somewhere else. Showing them on the SciFi channel seems a bit like bait-and-switch.
Over at news.com there is a video of the guy describing the implementation. And yes, it is J2ME.