The surprise isn't that the effect exists (well, we haven't yet figured out how to control universal constants) but that we now have an understanding of 'how'. This generally leads into an understanding of 'why' and, when we understand that, exposure to 'what other nifty stuff can we do with it.'
So no; the effect may not be new - but our understanding of it is.
Did you code for said website? Probably not, or you wouldn't be AC.
PHP is a fine language if you're a strict programmer. People, by and large, aren't strict programmers: And thus you get things like older versions of Mysource Classic. Even completing second year computer science should expose you to enough good practices to identify badly-written, poorly-scaling code with poor abstraction.
Unfortunately there's not a lot of good programmers out there and they're working on rather large PHP projects - which leaves us unfortunate sods having to maintain their stuff when it doesn't quite scale the way it was intended.
I think he's referring to the idea of 'microcode'. If you look at older 8 bit CPUs (eg z80, 6809, 6510, etc) - there's a decent link between the bits in the instruction and what the instructions do. Microcode based CPUs, even the 8086/8088, are a little different: each instruction triggers a series of instructions which in turn make the CPU logic do something (latch register X onto databus, add to accumulator, etc..). So, when you execute an instruction on a microcode CPU you're triggering off a series of actions for the CPU to perform. You could replace the instruction set the CPU runs by changing the microcode.
I don't believe they were aiming for a well designed chip. The 8086/8088 form a very simple(!) upgrade path from 8080/8085/Z80 based architectures. Indeed, the 8088 bus design in minimum mode is so damned similar you could make it work with whatever crazy S100 peripherals existed at the time.
The register set looks remarkably similar to the 8080 instruction set. Indeed, there were utilities available to translate 8 bit CPM programs to run under CPM/86 because the 8080 instruction set was mirrored (albiet with different opcodes) in the 8086/8088.
So, yes, the architecture was crippled but it did seem to provide a migration path for hardware and software.
much like why I've written a mass spammer on my local network.
To (a) see if it can be done, and (b) use it to demonstrate that there really is a problem.
I mean, popups _are_ a problem. Some of the browsers would not have had anti-popup magic added to them if it wasn't the case. You can thank the abusers of the system for the (partial) solution to the problem.
And, for the spam mailer - it really is a tricky problem. Its easy to write a multiplexed mailer which takes a list of email addresses, a list of pre-resolved MX IPs for each domain and send a piece of mail to each. The trick is doing it in such a way as to not kill the remote host(s). I learnt a _lot_ about how very very large SMTP mailers work and I have a lot of respect for hotmail/aol/yahoo/google from it.
Actually, as far as I can tell its not Diku-based.
http://www.ironrealms.com has the actual language programming guide, and its not like any MUD engine I've seen. Please feel free to correct me on this.
Its $10k because (a) it works, (b) it works well, and (c) it works well in a commercial environment. (d), funnily enough, it doesn't have any "you can't use this for commercial gain" in its licence, quite obvious if you've bought it. Thats not the whole licence as I'm not really going to repeat everything that I know here but suffice to say its proven itself in the real world.
Now, before you go "I can do it with 10K!" - how about you go and write something similar to Rapture, run a commercial MUD which actually makes money, and then sell it for 10k. Sure, _I_ could write a mud engine for 10k too but I think its completely unfair to actually ask for it before having some working, demonstratable code.:)
Finally, The "credits" system in Achaea is quite far from how it began. If you read the Announce posts you'll find that it initially was going to be a pay-to-play MUD (like EverCrack). After a while, and I guess a few credit purchases, the credit system turned into a method of getting more lessons and buying artifacts. Artifacts were actually auctioned off initially. There wasn't even an in-game credit market.
I play Achaea because I'm addicted to the multitude of ways you can achieve things. Sure, I actually enjoy the indepth PK system (which is completely another story) but the diplomacy, economics, stock market-like credit market are just three of the reasons _I_ am still around. That kind of stuff isn't easy to write or balance.
Achaea may not be a pioneer in a lot of the things they've tried, but so what.
(Note: I do know that Achaea has a lot of downsides. Heck, I've bitched about them myself. But, *shrug*, everything has its downside.)
Actually, you can burn the tracks to CD as audio. Then you can do what you want.
The 3 different PC restriction is actually for sharing via iTunes sharing.
This offers more than your CD store. It means that I'm finally able to download the 12 tracks I want to put on _my_ CD compilation without having to buy 5 CDs worth of music.
Note "life" doesn't just mean "thinking, feeling humans". If you take "life" all the way down to single-celled organisms:
* their concept of communication could be, quite simply, some basic chemical exchanges
* their concept of reproduction is, simply, splitting and retaining/replicating information, which the article noted isn't happening
Your post seems to mix both sentient life and cellular life. I do, however, agree with your general gist of things. Remember, though, that multi-cellular life (plants, animals) looks much different when viewed as single-celled organisms in isolation.
Actually, take Australia as a counter-example here. One of the requirements the US has set down in the updated Free Trade Agreement proposals is that Australia lifts its "stringent requirements" on media which actually requires Australian film/radio to show a certain percentage of "local" content.
You'll find that >8gigabyte RAM space isn't fully addressable. Go do some research on PAE (which, to me, is EMS for the 21st century.)
Then, go do some research on VM space. That 8 gigabytes, if you really wanted to, could be mapped into a _single process_. Try doing that on a 32 bit platform.
Actually, TCP doesn't expect 0% packet loss at all. It expects an unreliable data path.
The problem here, as you subsequently covered, is that ethernet backs off and handles its own retransmission. This screws with the TCP timers.
If you could turn off the ethernet retransmission then TCP would still work just fine.
But yes, unswitched ethernet sucked when you had many stations trying to move large amounts of data. Token ring (and ATM!) _did_ handle load better but was much more costly.
(My DEC friends commonly refer to Ethernet as "cheapernet" with a little curled tongue action.. eww.)
But, this is the internet. Its not meant to be done right. If you'd like a laugh try and find out some information about people building IP "rings" in the late 90s and what BGP did.:-)
Agreed, but if you can hold up a document, point to it and say "this is now an internet standard, its implemented by these vendors who advertise they run most of the internet" people may notice.
Slashdot Mirror
The surprise isn't that the effect exists (well, we haven't yet figured out how to control universal constants) but that we now have an understanding of 'how'. This generally leads into an understanding of 'why' and, when we understand that, exposure to 'what other nifty stuff can we do with it.'
So no; the effect may not be new - but our understanding of it is.
Did you code for said website? Probably not, or you wouldn't be AC.
PHP is a fine language if you're a strict programmer. People, by and large, aren't strict programmers: And thus you get things like older versions of Mysource Classic. Even completing second year computer science should expose you to enough good practices to identify badly-written, poorly-scaling code with poor abstraction.
Unfortunately there's not a lot of good programmers out there and they're working on rather large PHP projects - which leaves us unfortunate sods having to maintain their stuff when it doesn't quite scale the way it was intended.
I think he's referring to the idea of 'microcode'. If you look at older 8 bit CPUs (eg z80, 6809, 6510, etc) - there's a decent link between the bits in the instruction and what the instructions do. Microcode based CPUs, even the 8086/8088, are a little different: each instruction triggers a series of instructions which in turn make the CPU logic do something (latch register X onto databus, add to accumulator, etc..). So, when you execute an instruction on a microcode CPU you're triggering off a series of actions for the CPU to perform. You could replace the instruction set the CPU runs by changing the microcode.
I don't believe they were aiming for a well designed chip. The 8086/8088 form a very simple(!) upgrade path from 8080/8085/Z80 based architectures. Indeed, the 8088 bus design in minimum mode is so damned similar you could make it work with whatever crazy S100 peripherals existed at the time.
The register set looks remarkably similar to the 8080 instruction set. Indeed, there were utilities available to translate 8 bit CPM programs to run under CPM/86 because the 8080 instruction set was mirrored (albiet with different opcodes) in the 8086/8088.
So, yes, the architecture was crippled but it did seem to provide a migration path for hardware and software.
much like why I've written a mass spammer on my local network.
To (a) see if it can be done, and (b) use it to demonstrate that there really is a problem.
I mean, popups _are_ a problem. Some of the browsers would not have had anti-popup magic added to them if it wasn't the case. You can thank the abusers of the system for the (partial) solution to the problem.
And, for the spam mailer - it really is a tricky problem. Its easy to write a multiplexed mailer which takes a list of email addresses, a list of pre-resolved MX IPs for each domain and send a piece of mail to each. The trick is doing it in such a way as to not kill the remote host(s). I learnt a _lot_ about how very very large SMTP mailers work and I have a lot of respect for hotmail/aol/yahoo/google from it.
Actually, as far as I can tell its not Diku-based.
:)
http://www.ironrealms.com has the actual language programming guide, and its not like any MUD engine I've seen.
Please feel free to correct me on this.
Its $10k because (a) it works, (b) it works well, and (c) it works well in a commercial environment. (d), funnily enough, it doesn't have any "you can't use this for commercial gain" in its licence, quite obvious if you've bought it. Thats not the whole licence as I'm not really going to repeat everything that I know here but suffice to say its proven itself in the real world.
Now, before you go "I can do it with 10K!" - how about you go and write something similar to Rapture, run a commercial MUD which actually makes money, and then sell it for 10k. Sure, _I_ could write a mud engine for 10k too but I think its completely unfair to actually ask for it before having some working, demonstratable code.
Finally, The "credits" system in Achaea is quite far from how it began. If you read the Announce posts you'll find that it initially was going to be a pay-to-play MUD (like EverCrack). After a while, and I guess a few credit purchases, the credit system turned into a method of getting more lessons and buying artifacts. Artifacts were actually auctioned off initially. There wasn't even an in-game credit market.
I play Achaea because I'm addicted to the multitude of ways you can achieve things. Sure, I actually enjoy the indepth PK system (which is completely another story) but the diplomacy, economics, stock market-like credit market are just three of the reasons _I_ am still around. That kind of stuff isn't easy to write or balance.
Achaea may not be a pioneer in a lot of the things they've tried, but so what.
(Note: I do know that Achaea has a lot of downsides. Heck, I've bitched about them myself. But, *shrug*, everything has its downside.)
There's at least one Y! employee working pretty much on FreeBSD and making it happy on fast, modern hardware.
There were more than one in the past but its been a while since I've spoken to them all.
I believe Y! also provide some resources to the FreeBSD developers.
Basically, Y! have put in their 2c.
Actually, you can burn the tracks to CD as audio.
Then you can do what you want.
The 3 different PC restriction is actually for sharing via iTunes sharing.
This offers more than your CD store. It means that I'm finally able to download the 12 tracks I want to put on _my_ CD compilation without having to buy 5 CDs worth of music.
You can't easily use more than 4gig in a _single_ application on a PC without .. well, many many hacks.
On a 64 bit OS, I can just go "OS, give me 5 gig of RAM" and it'll quite happily do so. In a single chunk.
So, yes, its a bit misleading, but the only real misleading thing I have a problem with is the "first 64-bit desktop machine". *cough* Alpha.
Could you or someone else please post a mirror to this?
Note "life" doesn't just mean "thinking, feeling humans". If you take "life" all the way down to single-celled organisms:
* their concept of communication could be, quite simply, some basic chemical exchanges
* their concept of reproduction is, simply, splitting and retaining/replicating information, which the article noted isn't happening
Your post seems to mix both sentient life and cellular life. I do, however, agree with your general gist of things. Remember, though, that multi-cellular life (plants, animals) looks much different when viewed as single-celled organisms in isolation.
Actually, there's overhead in the loader - resolving symbols and checking libraries takes a while.
Actually, take Australia as a counter-example here. One of the requirements the US has set down in the updated Free Trade Agreement proposals is that Australia lifts its "stringent requirements" on media which actually requires Australian film/radio to show a certain percentage of "local" content.
Yay, you've been owned by a troll!
because the glass won't be refilling itself.
Doomsday 1 - text and possibly sketches.
Doomsday 2 - text, sound, moving pictures, photographs, cross-linked statistics and from how its been described a very intense lookup system.
Yup. Progress. Things have changed significantly in 17 years. I just hope people learn from these kinds of media mistakes.
Err, there's a difference.
Its 8gigabytes of _addressable RAM_.
You'll find that >8gigabyte RAM space isn't fully addressable. Go do some research on PAE (which, to me, is EMS for the 21st century.)
Then, go do some research on VM space. That 8 gigabytes, if you really wanted to, could be mapped into a _single process_. Try doing that on a 32 bit platform.
Its a nice statement. Care to provide some background?
If you can prove the above I know a few scientists that would love to meet you.
One nice side-effect of different sized notes - blind people can read them unassisted.
Eep!
TCP doesn't care about alternate data paths. Thats an IP routing issue.
You could, in theory, implement TCP directly on top of some other protocol quite happily.. including directly on top of ethernet.
Its all in the timers..
Actually, TCP doesn't expect 0% packet loss at all. It expects an unreliable data path.
The problem here, as you subsequently covered, is that ethernet backs off and handles its own retransmission. This screws with the TCP timers.
If you could turn off the ethernet retransmission then TCP would still work just fine.
But yes, unswitched ethernet sucked when you had many stations trying to move large amounts of data. Token ring (and ATM!) _did_ handle load better but was much more costly.
(My DEC friends commonly refer to Ethernet as "cheapernet" with a little curled tongue action.. eww.)
Or, to be portable AND clear:
#define BUFSIZE 1024
main()
{
char buf[BUFSIZE];
snprintf(buf, BUFSIZE-1, "foo");
}
The one thing that really does define us as humans is our ability to train ourselves not to act on our instincts.
(Let the flood of counter-examples speweth forward.)
Hey, I agree with you!
:-)
But, this is the internet. Its not meant to be done right. If you'd like a laugh try and find out some information about people building IP "rings" in the late 90s and what BGP did.
Agreed, but if you can hold up a document, point to it and say "this is now an internet standard, its implemented by these vendors who advertise they run most of the internet" people may notice.