although storing an ASCII file in 60 bit words would be clumsy as hell
No kidding. In fact mostly they didn't. Even into the early 1980s, CDC Cyber machines stored (and maniuplated) text in one of two formats: 6-bit character, or 6/12-bit character, the latter being 6-bit plus an escape character for lower case. When they brought out the next series of machines the hardware could run in either 60-bit or 64-bit mode, and they introduced an 8-in-12 character set which was essentially 8-bit ASCII stored in 12 bits, wasting 4, until the OS was converted to 64-bit.
Doing text processing/formatting was a royal pain on that system, so I ended up writing a clone of Waterloo Script (vaguely like 'roff) in Pascal (named "Formal") that internally treated everything as 7-bit ASCII and translated on input and output. Proved pretty popular, a number of other CDC sites bought it.
(Side note -- the I/O on those 60-bit CDC machines was handled by 12-bit "PPU"s (peripheral processor units) to offload the CPU.)
why we currently use 8/16/32/64, instead of 12/24/48/96
Because we currently use 8/16-bit character sets. Blame it on ASCII and EBCDIC (and UNICODE). (Okay, plain ASCII is 7-bit, but in communications there was a parity bit too.)
A lot of older machines use 6-bit character sets, that's all you need if you ignore case. There's the 12-bit PDP-8, the 36-bit DEC-10 and -20, the 48-bit Burroughs machines (which could handle both 6-bit and 8-bit characters), and the 60-bit Control Data machines. The PDP-8 was superceded by the 16-bit PDP-11, the DEC-10s were dropped (superceded by 32-bit VAX), the 48-bit Burroughs machines may well still be 48-bit (Unisys) for all I know, and the 60-bit Cyber series evolved to 64-bits sometime in the 1980s.
Tweaking the generated assembler and doing my own _start and -nostartfiles gets it down to about 1700 (yay!) except that I can't get it to exit cleanly, it segfaults after printing the string, even with a call to _exit (boo!).
A computer screen will be like a piece of paper. Elements will be drawn by real-world measurements (x centimeters versus x pixels) such that the number of "dots" will become arbitrary.
Ohh...
You mean like Display PostScript - circa late 1980s, or NeWS, which predates even that.
Guelph (about 20 miles down the road from Kitchener-Waterloo, for those not familiar with the geography of southern Ontario) was named Guelph when it was founded in 1827 by John Galt. (No, not that John Galt.) Guelph was one of the family names of the British royal family.
(I used to live in Waterloo and work at U of Guelph. My commute took me past Waterloo-Wellington Airport, so on nice days I'd sometimes stop and get in some flying practise.)
True, Kitchener, Ontario (twin city to Waterloo, which folks on this site are more likely to have heard of) was named Berlin. It was renamed (after Lord Kitchener) during WW I for obvious political reasons.
And if you'd read the linked article, you'd know why the project was renamed Fresco, although the display server implementation retains the name Berlin.
Not necessarily. We used to visit my (first) wife's in-laws a lot. I suppose technically they'd be her former in-laws, the parents and sibling of her late first husband. (He died in a car crash a couple years before I met her.)
Firewire is a peer-to-peer network technology: everything on the firewire bus is a node and can talk with any other node. Thus you can have two computers and a disk drive all connected, either computer can talk to the drive (or the other computer, for that matter).
Of course, you probably don't want to have both computers mounting it as writeable simultaneously (kiss your filesystem goodbye), but that's a resolved issue.
Andyway, a suddenly-dead computer would appear to have just dropped off the bus (hotplug is part of the spec), so the the other could take over, just as with shared-SCSI.
Funny, I haven't seen any USB 2.0 digital video cameras lately. Plenty of FireWire ones, though. Nice being able to do a digital dub from one camcorder to another with just a cable, no computer.
Haven't seen any USB 2.0 ports on high end A/V equipment, either (eg DVRs). Seen FireWire ports, though.
Never seen anyone run IP-over-USB, but I have seen IP-over-FireWire. Kinda tricky connecting two computers with USB anyway, one end of the cable always seems to be wrong.
I'm not sure why anyone would want to run a keyboard/mouse bus at 480 Mbps, anyway.;-)
(More seriously, I think there's just a general slowdown in introduction of new products because of the economy. I haven't noticed a particular difference in the number of firewire vs USB devices introduced.)
Shrug, firewire cards are cheap if you look around. (A lot of the stuff in stores tends to be packaged with "free" DV editing software and the card price is inflated.) They'll support 50 megabytes per second, a bit faster than Ultra Wide or Ultra2 SCSI (40 MB/s).
Assuming FireWire2 is IEEE-1394b, then try 400 MB/s (3.2 Gbps). Quoting from here:
IEEE 1394b allows extensions to 800Mbit/sec., 1.6Gbit/sec. and 3.2Gbit/sec., all over copper wire. It supports long-distance transfers to 100 meters over a variety of media: CAT-5 unshielded cable at 100Mbit/sec., existing plastic optical fiber at 200Mbits/sec., next-generation plastic optical fiber at 400Mbit/sec. and 50-micron mulitmode glass optical fiber at up to 3.2Gbit/sec.
(Note, it supports all speeds over copper for normal cable lengths, the optical for higher speeds is only needed for runs up to 100 meters.)
Firewire (1392a) is 400Mbps now, but 1392b goes to 3200 Mbps, 50% faster than Fibre Channel. 1392b hardware (when it becomes widely available) might cost a bit more than 1392a, but imagine it will still be cheaper than Fibre Channel due to higher production volumes (bigger more diverse market).
It's been a while, but I vaguely remember some terms covering the MSDN documentation of the Word.doc format (such as it is) included verbage to the effect that you had to agree not to use the info in writing a competing word processing application.
Basically the MSDN info is for people who want to augment Microsoft's wares, not compete with them. (Although they may well find themselves in competition if they come up with something popular.)
The problem with these sorts of lawsuits is that writers, artists, etc are exposed to the same sorts of ideas (memes, if you like) and so similar stuff tends to pop up at the same time. (Like two simultaneous major movies about asteroids hitting earth a couple of years ago, etc.) Sure, sometimes it's a ripoff, sometimes it's coincidence.
The "Toy Story 2" DVD had a "sneak preview" of "Monsters, Inc" featuring Mike and Sully. The file date on the disc is Sept. 14, 2000. That clip was likely in production and preproduction for a long time before that. In time for an artist visiting Mouse to be heavily influenced by what he saw there? Maybe, but I'm doubtful.
And regarding "[t]he lawsuit claims that Disney and Pixar also appropriated the "buddy" relationship theme from Mouse's work" -- oh, please, like there's never been a prior "buddy" movie? Abbott and Costello? Hope and Crosby? Laurel and Hardy? Hello? You want to see a rip off of that (in particular, Hope and Crosby), see Dreamworks' "The Road To El Dorado". (Actually I'd call that more a tribute to, what with the "Road To..." title and all.)
Not that I'm sorry to see Disney get a taste of their own medicine, but really...
Well, unless the theory is entirely within the domain of mathematics, it isn't mathematically "provable" in some absolute sense because first you'd have to prove that the mathematics correlates with reality.
Good luck;-)
More practically, though, we agree that certain theories and mathematics correlate with reality within certain bounds and domains. Euclidian geometry and Newtonian physics holds as a reasonable approximation of the macroscopic world we routinely experience, but both break down at the relativistic and quantum levels.
Things get interesting when we find a theory doesn't work in a domain that we previously thought it would. That's an area where our mathematical models don't correlate with reality.
It's not begging the question, it's defining the term.
You seem to be confusing the difference between a theory being false (ie, incorrect) and falsifiable (ie, an experiment could be devised which, given a certain result, would show the theory to be incorrect). A theory can be either, both, or neither.
Falsifiable means that it is possible to prove it wrong (if it is wrong); that for a given test, there will be some result which, if it occurs, proves the hypothesis wrong. Sure, it's hard to imagine that happening in any test of action/reaction, simply because of the amount of collective experience we've had with it working. If the billiard balls don't ricochet the way we expect, we're inclined to suspect a problem with the balls or the table, not with Newton's Third Law.
But that's a psychological barrier to falsifiability, not a logical one.
True enough, but it does narrow the domain of things to test. If the assumptions have proved themselves in other experiments, it's a good bet the problem is with the theory. Conversely, coming up with a different method for testing either the theory or the assumptions could show where the problem is.
Either way you learn something about how things really work.
Suppose you find an action with a very visible opposite reaction, but one that is far from equal -- i.e. of much greater magnitude.
Now of course, since this defies scientific observation up until this time, the onus is going to be on you to show that you didn't have some hidden extra action 'a' that accounts for the extra magnitude 'b'. That and to make sure your particular experiment can be replicated so others can satisfy themselves that there's no extra inputs.
Logically your case and this are equivalent: on the one hand you're asking to "prove the absence of an output", on the other you're asking to "prove the absence of an extra input".
But of course, you can't prove a negative.
In the case of an experiment demonstrating an action with no reaction, it isn't up to the experimenter to go to absurd lengths to prove it (but at least reasonable lengths). Rather the onus is on those wishing to maintain that "for every action there's an equal and opposite reaction" to duplicate the experiment and point out just where that reaction is happening; either that or restate the theory ("the reaction occurs as a burst of magic momentum particles which are almost impossible to detect but account for the missing momentum" -- substitute "neutrinos" for "magic momentum particles" and you've pretty much got an example from real physics).
'Every action has an equal and opposite reaction' is logically flawed as a scientific theory since it cannot be disproved.
Um, no, you're confused. If the theory were false, then I could disprove it by performing an experiment where an action does not have an equal and opposite reaction. Thus, the theory is hypothetically falsifiable and therefore valid as a theory (it may be incorrect, but at least it is phrased as a valid theory).
If numerous experiments demonstrating action and reaction do not disprove it, then odds are that it is also correct.
But proof of correctness is never absolute (maybe we haven't found the circumstances under which it doesn't hold, yet), while proof of incorrectness is.
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although storing an ASCII file in 60 bit words would be clumsy as hell
No kidding. In fact mostly they didn't. Even into the early 1980s, CDC Cyber machines stored (and maniuplated) text in one of two formats: 6-bit character, or 6/12-bit character, the latter being 6-bit plus an escape character for lower case. When they brought out the next series of machines the hardware could run in either 60-bit or 64-bit mode, and they introduced an 8-in-12 character set which was essentially 8-bit ASCII stored in 12 bits, wasting 4, until the OS was converted to 64-bit.
Doing text processing/formatting was a royal pain on that system, so I ended up writing a clone of Waterloo Script (vaguely like 'roff) in Pascal (named "Formal") that internally treated everything as 7-bit ASCII and translated on input and output. Proved pretty popular, a number of other CDC sites bought it.
(Side note -- the I/O on those 60-bit CDC machines was handled by 12-bit "PPU"s (peripheral processor units) to offload the CPU.)
why we currently use 8/16/32/64, instead of 12/24/48/96
Because we currently use 8/16-bit character sets. Blame it on ASCII and EBCDIC (and UNICODE). (Okay, plain ASCII is 7-bit, but in communications there was a parity bit too.)
A lot of older machines use 6-bit character sets, that's all you need if you ignore case. There's the 12-bit PDP-8, the 36-bit DEC-10 and -20, the 48-bit Burroughs machines (which could handle both 6-bit and 8-bit characters), and the 60-bit Control Data machines. The PDP-8 was superceded by the 16-bit PDP-11, the DEC-10s were dropped (superceded by 32-bit VAX), the 48-bit Burroughs machines may well still be 48-bit (Unisys) for all I know, and the 60-bit Cyber series evolved to 64-bits sometime in the 1980s.
Okay. That 3200 number was with GCC 2.95.
Tweaking the generated assembler and doing my own _start and -nostartfiles gets it down to about 1700 (yay!) except that I can't get it to exit cleanly, it segfaults after printing the string, even with a call to _exit (boo!).
Ah well, enough playing for one evening.
Just for comparison's sake, the quick'n'dirty approach:
main()
{
char *msg = "The deep gray mouse runs after the holy yellow cheese.\n";
write(1, msg, 56);
}
produces, stripped, a 3200 byte binary -- too big to qualify by 700 bytes.
A computer screen will be like a piece of paper. Elements will be drawn by real-world measurements (x centimeters versus x pixels) such that the number of "dots" will become arbitrary.
Ohh...
You mean like Display PostScript - circa late 1980s, or NeWS, which predates even that.
Can Canadian towns or cities in different provinces have the same name?
I'm not aware of anything that forbids it, but I'm having a hard time coming up with an example, either.
I'm not aware of a Moose Jaw, Ont, but there is a Moose Factory, also a Moosonee, both near the mouth of the Moose River on James Bay.
(googles around a bit...)
Hah! Found one: there's a Trenton, Nova Scotia and a Trenton, Ontario.
Nope. It was Kitchener.
Guelph (about 20 miles down the road from Kitchener-Waterloo, for those not familiar with the geography of southern Ontario) was named Guelph when it was founded in 1827 by John Galt. (No, not that John Galt.) Guelph was one of the family names of the British royal family.
(I used to live in Waterloo and work at U of Guelph. My commute took me past Waterloo-Wellington Airport, so on nice days I'd sometimes stop and get in some flying practise.)
True, Kitchener, Ontario (twin city to Waterloo, which folks on this site are more likely to have heard of) was named Berlin. It was renamed (after Lord Kitchener) during WW I for obvious political reasons.
And if you'd read the linked article, you'd know why the project was renamed Fresco, although the display server implementation retains the name Berlin.
Not necessarily. We used to visit my (first) wife's in-laws a lot. I suppose technically they'd be her former in-laws, the parents and sibling of her late first husband. (He died in a car crash a couple years before I met her.)
SCSI over IP sounds real good
... well, you get the idea.
Heh, there's also IP over SCSI (see RFC-2143).
I guess if you're really perverse you could run SCSI over IP over SCSI over IP over
Cheer up. Firewire2 (well, 1394b) will do 400 MBps (3.2 Gbps).
Firewire is a peer-to-peer network technology: everything on the firewire bus is a node and can talk with any other node. Thus you can have two computers and a disk drive all connected, either computer can talk to the drive (or the other computer, for that matter).
Of course, you probably don't want to have both computers mounting it as writeable simultaneously (kiss your filesystem goodbye), but that's a resolved issue.
Andyway, a suddenly-dead computer would appear to have just dropped off the bus (hotplug is part of the spec), so the the other could take over, just as with shared-SCSI.
Funny, I haven't seen any USB 2.0 digital video cameras lately. Plenty of FireWire ones, though. Nice being able to do a digital dub from one camcorder to another with just a cable, no computer.
;-)
Haven't seen any USB 2.0 ports on high end A/V equipment, either (eg DVRs). Seen FireWire ports, though.
Never seen anyone run IP-over-USB, but I have seen IP-over-FireWire. Kinda tricky connecting two computers with USB anyway, one end of the cable always seems to be wrong.
I'm not sure why anyone would want to run a keyboard/mouse bus at 480 Mbps, anyway.
(More seriously, I think there's just a general slowdown in introduction of new products because of the economy. I haven't noticed a particular difference in the number of firewire vs USB devices introduced.)
Shrug, firewire cards are cheap if you look around. (A lot of the stuff in stores tends to be packaged with "free" DV editing software and the card price is inflated.) They'll support 50 megabytes per second, a bit faster than Ultra Wide or Ultra2 SCSI (40 MB/s).
So I'd say so, yes.
Assuming FireWire2 is IEEE-1394b, then try 400 MB/s (3.2 Gbps). Quoting from here:
IEEE 1394b allows extensions to 800Mbit/sec., 1.6Gbit/sec. and 3.2Gbit/sec., all over copper wire. It supports long-distance transfers to 100 meters over a variety of media: CAT-5 unshielded cable at 100Mbit/sec., existing plastic optical fiber at 200Mbits/sec., next-generation plastic optical fiber at 400Mbit/sec. and 50-micron mulitmode glass optical fiber at up to 3.2Gbit/sec.
(Note, it supports all speeds over copper for normal cable lengths, the optical for higher speeds is only needed for runs up to 100 meters.)
Aargh!
s/1392/1394/g
Sorry about the brain fart.
Firewire (1392a) is 400Mbps now, but 1392b goes to 3200 Mbps, 50% faster than Fibre Channel. 1392b hardware (when it becomes widely available) might cost a bit more than 1392a, but imagine it will still be cheaper than Fibre Channel due to higher production volumes (bigger more diverse market).
Any tasty nuggets in MSDN's license agreement?
.doc format (such as it is) included verbage to the effect that you had to agree not to use the info in writing a competing word processing application.
It's been a while, but I vaguely remember some terms covering the MSDN documentation of the Word
Basically the MSDN info is for people who want to augment Microsoft's wares, not compete with them. (Although they may well find themselves in competition if they come up with something popular.)
You're still confusing the terms.
Perhaps deliberately.
Have a nice day.
The problem with these sorts of lawsuits is that writers, artists, etc are exposed to the same sorts of ideas (memes, if you like) and so similar stuff tends to pop up at the same time. (Like two simultaneous major movies about asteroids hitting earth a couple of years ago, etc.) Sure, sometimes it's a ripoff, sometimes it's coincidence.
..." title and all.)
The "Toy Story 2" DVD had a "sneak preview" of "Monsters, Inc" featuring Mike and Sully. The file date on the disc is Sept. 14, 2000. That clip was likely in production and preproduction for a long time before that. In time for an artist visiting Mouse to be heavily influenced by what he saw there? Maybe, but I'm doubtful.
And regarding "[t]he lawsuit claims that Disney and Pixar also appropriated the "buddy" relationship theme from Mouse's work" -- oh, please, like there's never been a prior "buddy" movie? Abbott and Costello? Hope and Crosby? Laurel and Hardy? Hello? You want to see a rip off of that (in particular, Hope and Crosby), see Dreamworks' "The Road To El Dorado". (Actually I'd call that more a tribute to, what with the "Road To
Not that I'm sorry to see Disney get a taste of their own medicine, but really...
Well, unless the theory is entirely within the domain of mathematics, it isn't mathematically "provable" in some absolute sense because first you'd have to prove that the mathematics correlates with reality.
;-)
Good luck
More practically, though, we agree that certain theories and mathematics correlate with reality within certain bounds and domains. Euclidian geometry and Newtonian physics holds as a reasonable approximation of the macroscopic world we routinely experience, but both break down at the relativistic and quantum levels.
Things get interesting when we find a theory doesn't work in a domain that we previously thought it would. That's an area where our mathematical models don't correlate with reality.
It's not begging the question, it's defining the term.
You seem to be confusing the difference between a theory being false (ie, incorrect) and falsifiable (ie, an experiment could be devised which, given a certain result, would show the theory to be incorrect). A theory can be either, both, or neither.
Falsifiable means that it is possible to prove it wrong (if it is wrong); that for a given test, there will be some result which, if it occurs, proves the hypothesis wrong. Sure, it's hard to imagine that happening in any test of action/reaction, simply because of the amount of collective experience we've had with it working. If the billiard balls don't ricochet the way we expect, we're inclined to suspect a problem with the balls or the table, not with Newton's Third Law.
But that's a psychological barrier to falsifiability, not a logical one.
True enough, but it does narrow the domain of things to test. If the assumptions have proved themselves in other experiments, it's a good bet the problem is with the theory. Conversely, coming up with a different method for testing either the theory or the assumptions could show where the problem is.
Either way you learn something about how things really work.
Well, invert that.
Suppose you find an action with a very visible opposite reaction, but one that is far from equal -- i.e. of much greater magnitude.
Now of course, since this defies scientific observation up until this time, the onus is going to be on you to show that you didn't have some hidden extra action 'a' that accounts for the extra magnitude 'b'. That and to make sure your particular experiment can be replicated so others can satisfy themselves that there's no extra inputs.
Logically your case and this are equivalent: on the one hand you're asking to "prove the absence of an output", on the other you're asking to "prove the absence of an extra input".
But of course, you can't prove a negative.
In the case of an experiment demonstrating an action with no reaction, it isn't up to the experimenter to go to absurd lengths to prove it (but at least reasonable lengths). Rather the onus is on those wishing to maintain that "for every action there's an equal and opposite reaction" to duplicate the experiment and point out just where that reaction is happening; either that or restate the theory ("the reaction occurs as a burst of magic momentum particles which are almost impossible to detect but account for the missing momentum" -- substitute "neutrinos" for "magic momentum particles" and you've pretty much got an example from real physics).
'Every action has an equal and opposite reaction' is logically flawed as a scientific theory since it cannot be disproved.
Um, no, you're confused. If the theory were false, then I could disprove it by performing an experiment where an action does not have an equal and opposite reaction. Thus, the theory is hypothetically falsifiable and therefore valid as a theory (it may be incorrect, but at least it is phrased as a valid theory).
If numerous experiments demonstrating action and reaction do not disprove it, then odds are that it is also correct.
But proof of correctness is never absolute (maybe we haven't found the circumstances under which it doesn't hold, yet), while proof of incorrectness is.