even normal text and C++ programs may bear conflicts
Actually, this is something I've been considering for quite a while. I keep meaning to switch to Dvorak, having discovered it about 15 years ago [Under DOS, keybdk was a sure way of pissing people off using shared computers!]
But given that the majority of the work I do is coding, I'm not too sure that it would be optimised for this. I suppose it helps that common english words are used for variable names, although excluding 'the' most likely, and the fact that some languages such as Java tend to promote using shift a lot, and I'm very biased towards my left hand for shift, with my right hand drifting over one or two keys to compensate.
I might have a go at running his code my collection of source code to see what it produces, although this may be unfair. E.g. / and * will score highly because of comments, although I tend to make long lines of * for comment blocks by cut and pasting.
I only use 4 buttons of around 30 on my DVD remote.
Yeah. If the common controls were arranged sensibly on the remote in a cursor arrangement, you could have something like: up=play, left=rewind, right=forward[*], center=select, down=pause, menu. Then any "extra" functionality could be provided through on-screen menus.
Of course, there are always going to be people who want extra features, like a shuttle control, but there aren't many controls that need instant access rather than a menu. There's always the option of providing a choice of controllers on purchase.
[*] Out of interest: notice how right=forward, left=rewind shows the L-R reading bias we have... Is this accepted in UIs worldwide, or are these swapped for R-L locales?
I think you're confused as to what deep linking is
Doh! I think I'm a dumbass! I was still thinking about the Deutsche Bahn case... I'll excuse my self for not reading the article though:-)
If that's really what the deal is, then frankly they shouldn't be so stupid. There are easy technical solutions to stop people deep-linking in the way you suggest, such as checking the "Referrer" header and redirecting to an index page or some other page that encloses the page in a frame, etc, if you've come from outside the site.
I don't see the need for courts to be involved, when there's a perfectly good technical solution.
This is all starting to become a dangerous precedent... I hope deep-linking is only considered illegal if you explain how to find something by following the links.
Does that mean that if I link to slashdot which has an article that links to 2600 which links to DeCSS source (or something that is illegal in whatever country), or even any other convulted route that I am breaking the law? Surely not. Or is it only if I say, "click here, follow link x, follow link y and then link z".
users demanding features in software that the developer isn't being paid for
And that is exactly the point.
When I develop software off my own back, I do what I want to do. If I need a feature, I add it. If I see that someone wants a featue and it'll make it better and it's not too much trouble, then I'll do it. But if it is a lot of work, and it's for a feature I can't really get excited about, then it's simply not going to happen, because I'll get bored halfway or instead do something else that I want to do. If someone else really wants a feature, they can add it themselves or pay someone else to add it. Of course, most people are unhappy to pay for development work knowing that it must then be put back into the public domain.
This is probably a reason why more commercial software suceeds than open source. People working in commercial jobs don't want to loose their jobs, so they add the features their boss wants them to add. Sure, they may re-prioritise fun stuff above boring stuff, but at the end of the day if the manager is any good, they'll make sure it all gets done.
People just don't do stuff they don't enjoy unless there's no option.
Globalwin 802...The moral is - if you use filters, make sure you clean them!
I have to clean the filter in my 802 and generally remove dust everywhere every couple of months. It always amazes me how much dust I get, although I suppose the carpet lining I put inside the case to reduce noise might have something to do with it!
There isn't really all that much to burn in there either, so the unlikely fire won't last long anyways.
Hmmm. I have carpet in mine, lining all edges of the case to reduce vibrations and consequently noise. But then most of that noise is due to the 6 fans I have inside my case... I think I will investigate water cooling when I have more money.
Last week, my power supply went, taking with it all hardware attached to the board(video,audio,ide,eth,etc).
That's not too surprising really, considering that pretty much all power-supplies these days are switched-mode instead of the old transformer type.
Transformers use coils where current from one induces a current in the other. Although these fail sometimes, when coils short together, generally this will just cause a lower induced current in the output coil, and a lower resistance on the input coil which will hopefully causing the fuse to the PSU to blow.
Switched-mode power supplies instead chop up the input AC signal, rectify it and smooth it. However, this also means that if a component in the PSU fails, your component is effectively directly connected to the mains and it's quite likely that your devices willget the full 110V / 220V put across them. This is generally a bad thing.
Ever wondered why power-supplies from the last 10 years or so are so much lighter than older ones?
Indeed. But last time I touched my Amiga was sometime back in 1994 (just after I discovered UNIX:-) when I wrote this.
At some point I really do need to go through my old floppy collection and transfer all my old source code to a UAE-able form before it gets irretrievably lost.
Back on topic: Somewhere, I started on a Spectrum emulator that managed to emulate the weird Speccy screen layout by using the copper - the alternative at the time had to re-draw the screen every few frames, which really killed emulation speed.
But I guess that illustrates the point nicely between an emulator and a VM. The side effect of changing a single byte could means lots of work for the emulator, whereas changing another byte at some other address with the same instruction could just be as simple as storing the data.
This seems like an excellent strategy on Microsoft's part. And your comment helps explain why:
Microsoft loses money on every XBox they sell!
Really? I heard they were losing around $100 on every X-box when the retail price was around $300.
Solution: re-assign a bunch of programmers for a few months to develop some extra software at fixed cost, and now charge $500 per unit. So, even if you never buy any games, they're still making a profit on the initial sale. Smart move -- they can now market the combined product cheaper than another console + Tivo.
Yeah, they're basically the same, but the distinction is fundamentally on the original intention.
A virtual machine is designed specifically to be general and run in different environments, whereas an emulator is designed to emulate the environment of some existing hardware or software to trick software into beleiving that it genuinely is running on the original device.
So, whereas a virtual machine will have a fairly abstract policy towards doing things (compare Java's AWT - I'd like to open a window, I'd like a button here, I'd like a menu there) and an emulator will get really bogged down emualting details, e.g. memory address $DFF180 changes the background colour.
Both can be easily emulated by a state machine (hence why they come up in this book), however virtual machines can be made more efficient as they are intentionally abstract. e.g. in the JVM, you know what is code and what isn't, so you can translate blocks of code into native machine code and run that directly instead of interpreting every instruction. If you try that with an emulator, you'll come unstuck when you come across self-modifying code, or things that access memory mapped registers (e.g. on a 68000 the instruction mov d0,4(a0) offers no clue as to whether the write is to hardware or memory.
Generally, you'll find that most virtual machine designs aim to reduce the instruction set down to a bare minimum. This allows a virtual machine (if it chooses) to effectively re-build the original parse tree and generate native code. However, emulators are generally trying to emulate CISC processors where as much is squashed into an instruction set as possible. Similarly, most virtual machines are heavily stack based, so as not to make any assumptions about register availability.
Given that there are accurate minutes taken of everything that is said in court, I think they'd be able to keep pretty close tabs on what he testifies in court, don't you?
And besides, the judge knows the system. He wouldn't even be allowed to testify in court if it broke his parole.
Anyone who's in the UK should probably look at dabs.com. Everything is very slick, most stuff will be delivered next day even if you order at 6pm, and prices are almost as low as you get. They even do free delivery if the order's over £75 (though it used to be £40:-( )
I reckon that between my own orders and those from companies I've worked and ordered for, I've placed about £13,000 of orders, of various sizes. Out of all that, everything has been perfect apart from one dead power supply which was replaced next day without returning the defective one, and they've even been happy to take back stuff that we ordered and then didn't want.
I can really recommend them.
Another good place that's worth a look is overclockers.co.uk, though the bias is very much on what's en vogue in the gaming market. But they often have good prices on things, although you need quite a large order to offset post and packaging.
But often, I think you'll find that you'll end up spending more in the long run building a PC yourself, as you won't get a cheap OEM deal on Windows (assuming you don't want Linux), and when you realise how crap most of the components are in a pre-build "cheap" box, you'll want to buy higher quality bits for your own box.
To get the bugs put in one hour of programming while half asleep, you need ten hours of debugging while wide awake.
Kind of, but not always. I remember before I went to Uni, I used to write Amiga stuff in assembler. It was truly amazing looking at some of the stuff I'd written whilst drunk that worked perfectly, and yet when sober I sure as hell couldn't figure out what it was doing. Equally, there was code that skirted around the obvious immplementation so much that it had me laughing at myself for days.
It is a ploy designed to confuse the user, break as many existing java apps as possible
Microsoft could _only_ distribute an old version according to their contractual/legal obligations
Yeah, and it doesn't really matter all that much that it is an old version, as it's the same old version that everyone else uses. Anyone who's done any applet development knows what a PITA it is targetting JDK 1.1, but you just have to deal with it.
What labels should do is let users download music for a small fee.
Good point. I actually very much approve of these tactics being used to hinder people freeloading, despite being shocked how expensive music and films are too buy.
However, I am very much for record compaies distributing music via the internet. By cutting out the end retailer, who typically take 50% of the final price of the CD, and removing the cost of media manufacture, there is no reason why these goods shouldn't be available for those that want to download them. There'll always be the hardcore fans who want the boxed editions (check out special edition box sets, etc..) but a lot of people also are only concerned about the actual music. In fact, it could probably even be argued that if music companies sold the music in MP3 formats, the die-hard music afficionardos would still buy the real CDs just for the quality difference.
But back to the P2P issue. You get what you pay for. If you expect to download things for free, you can hardly complain when those things aren't what you expected. If you use a warez search engine, chances are you'll spend the next 10 minutes closing all the popup windows, even if you never actually downloaded anything! You don't see many people up in arms about that.
And if you think the record companies don't deserve their profits, think again... Why do you think there are always scores of new bands signing up to these labels? Because the record companies invest heavily in lots of bands, many of whom will flop dismally. They invest in advertising, gigs, promotional CDs, PR parties, you name it. If they end up making 10 times the profit you think is far on a particular band, bear in mind that there were probalby four other bands that they promoted that didn't make it that got the chance.
The current government seem to be a bunch of control freaks. Gatsos, cameras everywhere, monitoring email, RIP etc.
Agreed. I really can't see why they thought this bill would help. If they just wanted mail headers, they truly wouldn't learn much of any great benefit anyway.
This power will be abused, it's just a matter of time, and if commercial spying by select companies becomes legal, it's obvious that people within these companies will be tempted to engage in industrial espionage.
-- Naq V org guvf jbhyq cvff gur tbireazrag bss gbb...
The Canon's are really small, and let's face it - nobody really wants 640x480 pictures any more, as they look terrible when printed and nowhere near fill a monitor nowadays.
If you really want just a barebones installation, RH7.0 will install with just disk 1. And that gives you far more than Windows does - a web server, database, etc...
And were you to install office, IIS and Visual Studio on Windows, you'll already have gone through 6 CDs.
I struggle to see how their aims are any different from W3C, as there seems to be little on their page that says what their goal is apart from "The Web Standards Project (WaSP) fights for standards that reduce the cost and complexity of development while increasing the accessibility and long-term viability of any site published on the Web". Later, they cite as a list of standards those created by W3C. All I can figure is that maybe they oppose the RAND proposals, etc... but this doesn't seem to be stated.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, this is something I've been considering for quite a while. I keep meaning to switch to Dvorak, having discovered it about 15 years ago [Under DOS, keybdk was a sure way of pissing people off using shared computers!]
But given that the majority of the work I do is coding, I'm not too sure that it would be optimised for this. I suppose it helps that common english words are used for variable names, although excluding 'the' most likely, and the fact that some languages such as Java tend to promote using shift a lot, and I'm very biased towards my left hand for shift, with my right hand drifting over one or two keys to compensate.
I might have a go at running his code my collection of source code to see what it produces, although this may be unfair. E.g. / and * will score highly because of comments, although I tend to make long lines of * for comment blocks by cut and pasting.
Is this the first from-the-grave posting on Slashdot?
Yeah. If the common controls were arranged sensibly on the remote in a cursor arrangement, you could have something like: up=play, left=rewind, right=forward[*], center=select, down=pause, menu. Then any "extra" functionality could be provided through on-screen menus.
Of course, there are always going to be people who want extra features, like a shuttle control, but there aren't many controls that need instant access rather than a menu. There's always the option of providing a choice of controllers on purchase.
[*] Out of interest: notice how right=forward, left=rewind shows the L-R reading bias we have... Is this accepted in UIs worldwide, or are these swapped for R-L locales?
Doh! I think I'm a dumbass! I was still thinking about the Deutsche Bahn case... I'll excuse my self for not reading the article though :-)
If that's really what the deal is, then frankly they shouldn't be so stupid. There are easy technical solutions to stop people deep-linking in the way you suggest, such as checking the "Referrer" header and redirecting to an index page or some other page that encloses the page in a frame, etc, if you've come from outside the site. I don't see the need for courts to be involved, when there's a perfectly good technical solution.
It does work to a degree, but it's still nowhere near silent. I'd say it cuts out maybe 20% of the noise.
Does that mean that if I link to slashdot which has an article that links to 2600 which links to DeCSS source (or something that is illegal in whatever country), or even any other convulted route that I am breaking the law? Surely not. Or is it only if I say, "click here, follow link x, follow link y and then link z".
Sigh.
And that is exactly the point.
When I develop software off my own back, I do what I want to do. If I need a feature, I add it. If I see that someone wants a featue and it'll make it better and it's not too much trouble, then I'll do it. But if it is a lot of work, and it's for a feature I can't really get excited about, then it's simply not going to happen, because I'll get bored halfway or instead do something else that I want to do. If someone else really wants a feature, they can add it themselves or pay someone else to add it. Of course, most people are unhappy to pay for development work knowing that it must then be put back into the public domain.
This is probably a reason why more commercial software suceeds than open source. People working in commercial jobs don't want to loose their jobs, so they add the features their boss wants them to add. Sure, they may re-prioritise fun stuff above boring stuff, but at the end of the day if the manager is any good, they'll make sure it all gets done.
People just don't do stuff they don't enjoy unless there's no option.
I have to clean the filter in my 802 and generally remove dust everywhere every couple of months. It always amazes me how much dust I get, although I suppose the carpet lining I put inside the case to reduce noise might have something to do with it!
Hmmm. I have carpet in mine, lining all edges of the case to reduce vibrations and consequently noise. But then most of that noise is due to the 6 fans I have inside my case... I think I will investigate water cooling when I have more money.
That's not too surprising really, considering that pretty much all power-supplies these days are switched-mode instead of the old transformer type.
Transformers use coils where current from one induces a current in the other. Although these fail sometimes, when coils short together, generally this will just cause a lower induced current in the output coil, and a lower resistance on the input coil which will hopefully causing the fuse to the PSU to blow.
Switched-mode power supplies instead chop up the input AC signal, rectify it and smooth it. However, this also means that if a component in the PSU fails, your component is effectively directly connected to the mains and it's quite likely that your devices willget the full 110V / 220V put across them. This is generally a bad thing.
Ever wondered why power-supplies from the last 10 years or so are so much lighter than older ones?
Indeed. But last time I touched my Amiga was sometime back in 1994 (just after I discovered UNIX :-) when I wrote this.
At some point I really do need to go through my old floppy collection and transfer all my old source code to a UAE-able form before it gets irretrievably lost.
Back on topic: Somewhere, I started on a Spectrum emulator that managed to emulate the weird Speccy screen layout by using the copper - the alternative at the time had to re-draw the screen every few frames, which really killed emulation speed.
But I guess that illustrates the point nicely between an emulator and a VM. The side effect of changing a single byte could means lots of work for the emulator, whereas changing another byte at some other address with the same instruction could just be as simple as storing the data.
Microsoft loses money on every XBox they sell!
Really? I heard they were losing around $100 on every X-box when the retail price was around $300.
Solution: re-assign a bunch of programmers for a few months to develop some extra software at fixed cost, and now charge $500 per unit. So, even if you never buy any games, they're still making a profit on the initial sale. Smart move -- they can now market the combined product cheaper than another console + Tivo.
A virtual machine is designed specifically to be general and run in different environments, whereas an emulator is designed to emulate the environment of some existing hardware or software to trick software into beleiving that it genuinely is running on the original device.
So, whereas a virtual machine will have a fairly abstract policy towards doing things (compare Java's AWT - I'd like to open a window, I'd like a button here, I'd like a menu there) and an emulator will get really bogged down emualting details, e.g. memory address $DFF180 changes the background colour.
Both can be easily emulated by a state machine (hence why they come up in this book), however virtual machines can be made more efficient as they are intentionally abstract. e.g. in the JVM, you know what is code and what isn't, so you can translate blocks of code into native machine code and run that directly instead of interpreting every instruction. If you try that with an emulator, you'll come unstuck when you come across self-modifying code, or things that access memory mapped registers (e.g. on a 68000 the instruction mov d0,4(a0) offers no clue as to whether the write is to hardware or memory.
Generally, you'll find that most virtual machine designs aim to reduce the instruction set down to a bare minimum. This allows a virtual machine (if it chooses) to effectively re-build the original parse tree and generate native code. However, emulators are generally trying to emulate CISC processors where as much is squashed into an instruction set as possible. Similarly, most virtual machines are heavily stack based, so as not to make any assumptions about register availability.
And besides, the judge knows the system. He wouldn't even be allowed to testify in court if it broke his parole.
I reckon that between my own orders and those from companies I've worked and ordered for, I've placed about £13,000 of orders, of various sizes. Out of all that, everything has been perfect apart from one dead power supply which was replaced next day without returning the defective one, and they've even been happy to take back stuff that we ordered and then didn't want. I can really recommend them.
Another good place that's worth a look is overclockers.co.uk, though the bias is very much on what's en vogue in the gaming market. But they often have good prices on things, although you need quite a large order to offset post and packaging.
But often, I think you'll find that you'll end up spending more in the long run building a PC yourself, as you won't get a cheap OEM deal on Windows (assuming you don't want Linux), and when you realise how crap most of the components are in a pre-build "cheap" box, you'll want to buy higher quality bits for your own box.
Good luck!
Ralf
Kind of, but not always. I remember before I went to Uni, I used to write Amiga stuff in assembler. It was truly amazing looking at some of the stuff I'd written whilst drunk that worked perfectly, and yet when sober I sure as hell couldn't figure out what it was doing. Equally, there was code that skirted around the obvious immplementation so much that it had me laughing at myself for days.
I kind of miss those care-free days...
Microsoft could _only_ distribute an old version according to their contractual/legal obligations
Yeah, and it doesn't really matter all that much that it is an old version, as it's the same old version that everyone else uses. Anyone who's done any applet development knows what a PITA it is targetting JDK 1.1, but you just have to deal with it.
Hmmm.. Ain't MSNBC owned by Microsoft? Talk about the left hand not knowing what the right is doing...
(Anyhow, I'm sure Windows has cost consumers a lot more than $8.75 million...)
Good point. I actually very much approve of these tactics being used to hinder people freeloading, despite being shocked how expensive music and films are too buy.
However, I am very much for record compaies distributing music via the internet. By cutting out the end retailer, who typically take 50% of the final price of the CD, and removing the cost of media manufacture, there is no reason why these goods shouldn't be available for those that want to download them. There'll always be the hardcore fans who want the boxed editions (check out special edition box sets, etc..) but a lot of people also are only concerned about the actual music. In fact, it could probably even be argued that if music companies sold the music in MP3 formats, the die-hard music afficionardos would still buy the real CDs just for the quality difference.
But back to the P2P issue. You get what you pay for. If you expect to download things for free, you can hardly complain when those things aren't what you expected. If you use a warez search engine, chances are you'll spend the next 10 minutes closing all the popup windows, even if you never actually downloaded anything! You don't see many people up in arms about that.
And if you think the record companies don't deserve their profits, think again... Why do you think there are always scores of new bands signing up to these labels? Because the record companies invest heavily in lots of bands, many of whom will flop dismally. They invest in advertising, gigs, promotional CDs, PR parties, you name it. If they end up making 10 times the profit you think is far on a particular band, bear in mind that there were probalby four other bands that they promoted that didn't make it that got the chance.
Agreed. I really can't see why they thought this bill would help. If they just wanted mail headers, they truly wouldn't learn much of any great benefit anyway.
Of course, I doubt this is their plan. Given their stated aims of wanting to be able to read every e-mail that goes through the UK: We needed to take powers so that we could decrypt commercial encrypted emails and other communications. Why? Because we knew that terrorists were going to use this," said Straw, it's clear that the government really do want to turn us into a big brother state.
This power will be abused, it's just a matter of time, and if commercial spying by select companies becomes legal, it's obvious that people within these companies will be tempted to engage in industrial espionage.
--
Naq V org guvf jbhyq cvff gur tbireazrag bss gbb...
The Canon's are really small, and let's face it - nobody really wants 640x480 pictures any more, as they look terrible when printed and nowhere near fill a monitor nowadays.
And were you to install office, IIS and Visual Studio on Windows, you'll already have gone through 6 CDs.
Still, you could always package it in a big box.
Anyone with any ideas?
What he's actually done is connected a slightly bigger and brighter screen to the original LCD connector. Doesn't seem all that wonderful really.