In the US, cops can only carry a taser after they've been tased themselves. I've been tased as part of a demo, I have trouble imagining a relatively healthy person suffering any long-term effects, but since I've read it on the web it must be true.
>jcr wrote: >Thank goodness that legislation takes more than one pig-ignorant prat's decree.
I assume you live on the moon or some equally remote location, if you look around here in the US or anyplace else I can think of there is NO evidence at all to support your assertion.
Don't deal with financial professionals, if they were any good they'd be rich and thus unavailable to the likes of you and me.
Think about peace of mind, money in the bank does nobody any real good. Get rid of debt, *I* *BELIEVE* that in the long run you'll be happiest if you owe nobody anything. Three and a half years later I still wake up every few nights in a cold sweat with the thought that I owe money on my house. It is bad enough that I've considered selling out part of my 401(k) and paying my land off. 10% to the feds might be a small price to pay for the peace of mind.
Above all, ignore my advice and that of others, you and only you know what will keep you wide awake at night and what will have you sleeping like a baby.
Why would I switch away form Apple? The answer lies in why I switched to Macs in the first place. Terrific integration between well designed hardware and an OS which is robust, performant, familiar (I'm a BSD user since BSD 2.8), available (mostly) in source, pretty, and most importantly, just works.
Is a substantial amount of this going to change when the CPU changes? Not likely. I've been running Darwin on a PC for some time now, just to get a feel for it and all seems well in all regards (OK, it's not yet pretty).
Will I switch? Only if Apple messes up big time. All indications are that I'll be replacing whatever hardware will need replacing with whatever Apple happens to be offering at the time I decide I need to replace.
I've found spotlight to be of little use to me at home where I have all Macs as I tend to keep all my material pretty well organized. I am however thinking of writing an importer for my weather station app's data files and seeing if spotlight then starts to make sense.
Unfortunately I don't work in a Mac workplace so here where it would do wonders on all the PDF docs that go around (even schematics) I'm stuck with nothing. Hmm, a FreeBSD version of spotlight anyone? I actually like spotlight so much that I've considered buying a Mini on my own buck to keep at the office. Sigh, it's just money.
None of my code uses the AltiVec stuff so I can't say, but the Mini runs just fine with Tiger. I assume this comes as no surprise to anyone. I do like the new compiler.
First off *any* compiler will make that particular optimization.
You should only think of instruction level optimization when you know with certainty that it will pay off, for example because you've run your code under a profiler and found the areas where it will actually make a difference. Once you've found the (probably tiny) areas where optimizing actually helps, do whatever it takes, and document your reasons as well as your methods.
You can always ask your compiler to output assembly and look it over, if you aren't fluent in your proc's assembly you probably shouldn't be trying to out-optimize the compiler anyhow.
That being said, "if (!ptr)" is legitimate and bears a different connotation from "if (ptr == NULL)", at least in my mind. One is truth, the other is zeroness. In some cases the former is actually the more obvious test. There are also cases where compactness yields more readable code because the whole idea fits in a space easily acquired at a glance, for example, "if (structp && structp->member == VAL)" is natural and obvious to anyone who's been at this for any amount of time.
Some of use went off and bought BSDI's 386bsd (or was it bsd386?) to support their efforts in the law-suit. In return we got a very well supported, highly performant, well tested, and well supported OS with which we could do everything that previously required an account at one of the more technically aware universities, from home. In the process we got hooked on the BSD way. I now run FreeBSD on every machine other than my PowerBook and TiVo and don't envision changing any time soon. Not that there aren't better alternatives, just that I've got many years of habits which just don't want to break.
-michael
What's the purpose of the article?
on
Where's Alviso?
·
· Score: 1
Another technology making its appearance in Alviso is PCI Express (PCIe). I'm not quite sure where the benefit is for this currently
This guy doesn't get it. PCI express means fewer runs on your board, thus easier routing. Why is it hard to figure out how that would help in a cramped design such as Alviso is targeted at? Even if the end devices don't end up being PCIe, the PXH PCIe to PCIx bridge will add flexibility in component placement.
Beyond that, the article was a waste of time, vague conjecture, a mild rant on DDR2 memory pricing, and no answers. Sigh.
Seems to me that all current broadcasters I know of that are listed in the suit fail to meet this criteria of sending the signal in a fraction of real time
Other than the companies that do digital encoding directly onto the server (does anyone?), it is safe to assume that content loading is done at greater than real-time. Regardless, we don't want anyone to weasel their way through loopholes, we want the damn patent thrown out with enough fanfare that the process gets re-examined by someone more influential than a bunch of us/. fanatics.
I've worked at companies with private offices, I've worked at companies with sheets of plywood used to separate the work areas. In my mind there were a few things that made working a living hell (Veritas) or a trully fantastic place.
1) Give me interesting projects, challenging but not to the point of frustrating me. 2) Surround me with people who constantly keep me on my toes. 3) Don't micro-manage me, but don't let me feel forgotten. 4) Allow plants, aquariums, and other forms of life that are non-invasive to co-workers. 4) Give me my choice of monitor, keyboard, and mouse. 6) Let me set the lighting levels I'm comfortable with.
In these regards, nCube (my current employer) is absolute tops. Sequent was VERY good until IBM bought us and destroyed us. Veritas did buy me a nice keyboard, mouse, and monitor.
Some people might not have even known that owning the cards were legal
Do you purchase something thinking there's a good chance that it is illegal? If so, perhaps you deserve whatever you get, legal threats and all. Note that I'm not supporting DirecTV's position, far from it, but it seems like there might be a Darwinian aspect to this.
Don't bother, my a**. This is the idiotic notion that has yielded Windows and all it's associated bloatware. If you don't understand your machine, will you think to pad structures to cache line boundaries? Will you know to declare variables with stricter alignment restrictions before those with more relaxed restrictions? True, this may not always be portable from one architecture to the next, but the reality is that you'll at least know enough to locate the macros that yield the cache-line size and use them for structures that are likely to end up in arrays. Code written by someone with a strong assembly language background is less likely to fragment the heap since they'll likely combine small allocations or endeavor to allocate equal size data items. I could go on, and on, and on, but those who believe already do, those who don't are plain lazy. IMO, of course.
This image may be of interest to those who've followed the topic as it has drifted. It is a scan from a picture of Woody's original manuscript for This Land is Your Land (formerly God Blessed America), complete with his corrections. Unfortunately I don't know who took the picture and digitized it so I can't give credit.
IBM may be a good company to work for, just don't ever stop working for them. After the bought and destroyed Sequent I stayed on for a while. Out of boredom I finally left. Here's part of how handled my departure.
The best you can do is to put in place a new board of directors. Even doing this you would not achieve anything, a corporation is NOT beholden to it's board.
As I mentioned in reply on a previous thread, some years back (mid 90s, prior to Monterey) Sequent contributed a significant amount of SMP work to the UnixWare code base. I do not know if RCU was part of that contribution or not. I'm not a lawyer (and proud of it) but I would imagine that if we (Sequent) gave this work to SCO for inclusion in their licensed product they would have full rights to it. Who knows.
On a related note, can you imagine the poor engineers who work at SCO these days? Walking in public must be incredibly humiliating.
If I recall correctly Sequent contributed significant amounts of MP code to SCO in one of its floundering attempts to partner up with an outside OS vendor so they could get rid of the base OS engineering group (this was before I worked for Sequent). Some years later IBM bought Sequent (this was while I worked in the base OS group there) and pushed many of the engineers off the Dynix/PTX boat onto the Linux boat with the stated goal of helping Linux scale to larger MP systems. I can't help but wonder if in this effort some Sequent code which had already been shared with SCO might not have made it into Linux.
I never did work for the Sequent/IBM group that was doing this work so I have no concrete basis for this speculation.
Slashdot Mirror
The cops get the full 5 second hit. You are however correct about spotters.
In the US, cops can only carry a taser after they've been tased themselves. I've been tased as part of a demo, I have trouble imagining a relatively healthy person suffering any long-term effects, but since I've read it on the web it must be true.
>jcr wrote:
>Thank goodness that legislation takes more than one pig-ignorant prat's decree.
I assume you live on the moon or some equally remote location, if you look around here in the US or anyplace else I can think of there is NO evidence at all to support your assertion.
-michael
Don't deal with financial professionals, if they were any good they'd be rich and thus unavailable to the likes of you and me.
Think about peace of mind, money in the bank does nobody any real good. Get rid of debt, *I* *BELIEVE* that in the long run you'll be happiest if you owe nobody anything. Three and a half years later I still wake up every few nights in a cold sweat with the thought that I owe money on my house. It is bad enough that I've considered selling out part of my 401(k) and paying my land off. 10% to the feds might be a small price to pay for the peace of mind.
Above all, ignore my advice and that of others, you and only you know what will keep you wide awake at night and what will have you sleeping like a baby.
-michael
> It's coming, Bouman says. Yes, just like $5/gal gas..."
Anyone want to bet that California will see $5/gal gas within 12 months?
I'll see your hummer and raise you my Corola...
-michael
Yes, unless you are smart enough to live in an area with no coverage, like me, for example :-).
-michael
Why would I switch away form Apple? The answer lies in why I switched to Macs in the first place. Terrific integration between well designed hardware and an OS which is robust, performant, familiar (I'm a BSD user since BSD 2.8), available (mostly) in source, pretty, and most importantly, just works.
Is a substantial amount of this going to change when the CPU changes? Not likely. I've been running Darwin on a PC for some time now, just to get a feel for it and all seems well in all regards (OK, it's not yet pretty).
Will I switch? Only if Apple messes up big time. All indications are that I'll be replacing whatever hardware will need replacing with whatever Apple happens to be offering at the time I decide I need to replace.
-michael
There is no spelling error in the headline, what you see is a glaring punctuation issue.
-michael
I've found spotlight to be of little use to me at home where I have all Macs as I tend to keep all my material pretty well organized. I am however thinking of writing an importer for my weather station app's data files and seeing if spotlight then starts to make sense.
Unfortunately I don't work in a Mac workplace so here where it would do wonders on all the PDF docs that go around (even schematics) I'm stuck with nothing. Hmm, a FreeBSD version of spotlight anyone? I actually like spotlight so much that I've considered buying a Mini on my own buck to keep at the office. Sigh, it's just money.
-michael
None of my code uses the AltiVec stuff so I can't say, but the Mini runs just fine with Tiger. I assume this comes as no surprise to anyone. I do like the new compiler .
-michael
A couple of points.
First off *any* compiler will make that particular optimization.
You should only think of instruction level optimization when you know with certainty that it will pay off, for example because you've run your code under a profiler and found the areas where it will actually make a difference. Once you've found the (probably tiny) areas where optimizing actually helps, do whatever it takes, and document your reasons as well as your methods.
You can always ask your compiler to output assembly and look it over, if you aren't fluent in your proc's assembly you probably shouldn't be trying to out-optimize the compiler anyhow.
That being said, "if (!ptr)" is legitimate and bears a different connotation from "if (ptr == NULL)", at least in my mind. One is truth, the other is zeroness. In some cases the former is actually the more obvious test. There are also cases where compactness yields more readable code because the whole idea fits in a space easily acquired at a glance, for example, "if (structp && structp->member == VAL)" is natural and obvious to anyone who's been at this for any amount of time.
All of this, of course, IMO.
-michael
Some of use went off and bought BSDI's 386bsd (or was it bsd386?) to support their efforts in the law-suit. In return we got a very well supported, highly performant, well tested, and well supported OS with which we could do everything that previously required an account at one of the more technically aware universities, from home. In the process we got hooked on the BSD way. I now run FreeBSD on every machine other than my PowerBook and TiVo and don't envision changing any time soon. Not that there aren't better alternatives, just that I've got many years of habits which just don't want to break.
-michael
Another technology making its appearance in Alviso is PCI Express (PCIe). I'm not quite sure where the benefit is for this currently
This guy doesn't get it. PCI express means fewer runs on your board, thus easier routing. Why is it hard to figure out how that would help in a cramped design such as Alviso is targeted at? Even if the end devices don't end up being PCIe, the PXH PCIe to PCIx bridge will add flexibility in component placement.
Beyond that, the article was a waste of time, vague conjecture, a mild rant on DDR2 memory pricing, and no answers. Sigh.
-michael
Seems to me that all current broadcasters I know of that are listed in the suit fail to meet this criteria of sending the signal in a fraction of real time
/. fanatics.
Other than the companies that do digital encoding directly onto the server (does anyone?), it is safe to assume that content loading is done at greater than real-time. Regardless, we don't want anyone to weasel their way through loopholes, we want the damn patent thrown out with enough fanfare that the process gets re-examined by someone more influential than a bunch of us
IMO of course.
-michael
I've worked at companies with private offices, I've worked at companies with sheets of plywood used to separate the work areas. In my mind there were a few things that made working a living hell (Veritas) or a trully fantastic place.
1) Give me interesting projects, challenging but not to the point of frustrating me.
2) Surround me with people who constantly keep me on my toes.
3) Don't micro-manage me, but don't let me feel forgotten.
4) Allow plants, aquariums, and other forms of life that are non-invasive to co-workers.
4) Give me my choice of monitor, keyboard, and mouse.
6) Let me set the lighting levels I'm comfortable with.
In these regards, nCube (my current employer) is absolute tops. Sequent was VERY good until IBM bought us and destroyed us. Veritas did buy me a nice keyboard, mouse, and monitor.
-michael
Some people might not have even known that owning the cards were legal
Do you purchase something thinking there's a good chance that it is illegal? If so, perhaps you deserve whatever you get, legal threats and all. Note that I'm not supporting DirecTV's position, far from it, but it seems like there might be a Darwinian aspect to this.
-michael
I'll put my crudely coded Javascript quicksort algorithm against your finely honed 100% assembly bubblesort algorithm any day.
Only if Java's sort routine was written by someone intimately familiar with the target environment's assembly language.
-michael
Don't bother, my a**. This is the idiotic notion that has yielded Windows and all it's associated bloatware. If you don't understand your machine, will you think to pad structures to cache line boundaries? Will you know to declare variables with stricter alignment restrictions before those with more relaxed restrictions? True, this may not always be portable from one architecture to the next, but the reality is that you'll at least know enough to locate the macros that yield the cache-line size and use them for structures that are likely to end up in arrays. Code written by someone with a strong assembly language background is less likely to fragment the heap since they'll likely combine small allocations or endeavor to allocate equal size data items. I could go on, and on, and on, but those who believe already do, those who don't are plain lazy. IMO, of course.
-michael
This image may be of interest to those who've followed the topic as it has drifted. It is a scan from a picture of Woody's original manuscript for This Land is Your Land (formerly God Blessed America), complete with his corrections. Unfortunately I don't know who took the picture and digitized it so I can't give credit.
-michael
IBM may be a good company to work for, just don't ever stop working for them. After the bought and destroyed Sequent I stayed on for a while. Out of boredom I finally left. Here's part of how handled my departure.
http://michael.galassi.org/ibm.shtml
-michael
Nice intro. I've been running jails on FreeBSD for some time now, here are some additional notes I put together some time back.
http://www.xyz.com/notes/jailnotes.html
Hope this helps someone.
-michael
-michael
On a related note, can you imagine the poor engineers who work at SCO these days? Walking in public must be incredibly humiliating.
-michael
How is that? Oh, the Microsoft logo at the top, gotcha...
-michael
I never did work for the Sequent/IBM group that was doing this work so I have no concrete basis for this speculation.
-michael