A little gag? I don't think so. The "2CV" originally did mean "2 Horsepower". Also keep in mind it's tax horsepower and doesn't "really" reflect the power of the machine. Nobody calls in Deux-Cé-Vé.
I've done it manually for over a year. It doesn't take as long as you think and an automatic system will certainly beat me doing it in speed. When doing it manually, you're not looking around and picking your nose. You have your hand ready on the key for when the light turns green or when the cars brake lights in front of your go out.
Also, a warm engine turns on pretty much instantly.
Yes, me and the other guy understand that: timeless design. Thing is "timeless" design is exactly that. Not much design at all. Once it's set, you can't change much. This means there isn't much "work" for a designer. For a designer it's a very frustrating (but challenging) position to work for these manufacturer.
Car brands with designs that suck don't gain much by hiring the designers responsible for "timeless design". They first need the designers that find that timeless design (which does mean radical change from the existing brand) and then, just then, revert to the design philosophy that the Big Three Germans employ.
I live in Luxembourg. I've had two of co-workers drive 150 to work and another 150km from work every day. (One was from Namur, the other from Sarguemines) While those are exceptions, 100km/each way is very common. The reason? Luxembourg has high wages, but even higher real estate prices. So they work here and live where it's cheaper. Commutes in Europe can be quite long too....
It's a very weird phenomenon. Mercedes ranks very high in US perception. Over here in Europe, a Mercedes is for old people... For me it's a farmers car. If a farmer is a bit well off; he'll buy a Mercedes. You could bet your first born on that. (Small company owners also invariably own Mercedes.... Hello father in law!)
BMW is for posers (sorry) and Audi is for those who can't afford either (Disclaimer: I'm an Audi owner). None of these brands actually do much design (Audi most, but that's because they stay in the third place of the luxury car segment meaning they have more headroom for failure). That segment comes with a price: design is very costly, in the sense that the buyers of these cars won't buy a car they don't visually like. Hence the very small design changes. This is not true in the nomal/budget brands: People need a car; the price is right, well it's not that pretty but it's reliable and it will get you from A to B. I once saw an interview with one of the Mercedes design team leader who explained this problem and he did of course a much better job that I do right now.
Mercedes/BMW/Audi DO change design, but they do it first in the cheaper models and see how the reaction is. Easy to see: the Audi A3 got the "new front" first, all the other models later. Much later. Consider also the Mercedes A-Class, which radically departs from the Mercedes standard design. They can do it there, because if it doesn't sell well it is written off as "No Mercedes demand in that price-class". The US market never see those cars, by the way.
They do? SCSI cards cost what now? 50$ Which is nothing compared what they used to cost. I've got a truckload of PCI SCSI cards out of dumpsters. SCSI is wonderfully versatile. Attach the disk, the scanner, the optical drive or the tape drive and chances it will just work. Your chances are better with Linux than with Windows these days, but often it's just complaining from Windows. We have a SCSI Dia Scanner device, which used to turn up with a yellow triangle in the device manager on XP. Worked fine with the enclosed software, though. With Linux it works, but not with XSane... I have VueScan license (actually two, I have one, my dad has one). Works perfectly fine. Good software also for those unsupported scanners: Canon LiDE 20. No support on Mac OS X, but with VueScan... No problem. I'm getting offtopic though.
My experience is that SCSI disks will do just fine attached to a modern SCSI card and I still have my Iomega Jaz 1GB which works just fine.
The two PCMCIA SCSI cards I have though don't work well: not at all under Windows IIRC, and very badly under Linux.
Anyway: best I probably can do for "esoteric" is some Computer Architecture Projects I did back at the Uni on OS/2 Warp. Made on some IBM Office software that came with it. Those files are stored on one of the Jaz disks (Yes, the disks are still functional, I tested them a few months ago for kick 'n giggles when I found them back). Getting them from there is not hard (It's FAT32 after all), but reading the files might turn out problematic.
Second "hardest" is probably Wordperfect 5.1 files from even longer ago. I still have some letters I wrote with my teenage romance. Ah, memories... Those simply stayed in an archive folder that moved with me from computer to computer. They're zipped and I expect OpenOffice to open them just fine (or at least "readable").
Can't compete with those on esoteric material with weird filesystems on audio tapes and the like. I'm too young for that, even though I'm 34.
Interesting.... Is it still one? Don't forget that Microsoft has the nasty habit of buying companies and gutting them in such a way that they only serve Microsoft. In this case, the gutting may have occurred prematurely.
Hmm, if only Microsoft had bought a company that made an x86 emulator. Oh, wait, they did.
Are you referring to Virtual PC? You might need to read up on what an emulator is and what virtualization software is. Bochs is an emulator, Virtual PC is virtualization software. You can't use Virtual PC on, let's say a SPARC, software to run Windows on that machine. You can, however, run Bochs on a SPARC machine to run Windows... I wouldn't suggest you try, because it's going to be slow.
Virtualization software only supports the architectures that the underlying architecture supports.
In a Von Neumann Architecture, Data and Programs are the same. In the strict sense of the word, even compiled code is data. So just differentiating Java Apps or Perl scripts from compiled code makes no sense.
It's not impossible to do this translation (thinking of Rosetta here), but is it the task of the operating system? That's pretty much what commodore64_love was insinuating.
As for drivers... How can you even mention so casually "apart from timing loop issues"? The reason they're drivers is because they have these issues, otherwise it could simply be implemented in user space.
Basically, if you want this, you need an operating system that provides only a managed Virtual Machine (in the Java sense) and you can only implement on that. To gain backward compatibility (which this ARM/x86 thread is about), you'd need a VM that does x86 on any architecture. That is called emulation and is slow. Try Bochs someday.
I thought modern OSes blocked the software from running directly on the hardware
In the end.... everything that runs on your machine, runs directly on the hardware. Even Java Applications, even Perl scripts... They just are passed through layers and layers and layers of checks and sandboxes, but in the end, what has to be done is done on the hardware. Directly. There is no magical layer which does the work without the CPU, you know.
Every CPU architecture has its instruction set and to run the code it needs to be in that instruction set. Imagine that the code 01 means ADD 1 to the Accumulator on architecture 1, but 01 means apply NOT on the Accumulator. So, the "same" instruction means something completely different on the two architectures.
The task of the operating system is not to abstract the hardware from the software in that sense, because the software that runs is still in pure machine instructions (It's the only thing your machine actually understands). The task of an operating system (as we know them today) is to provide a way for the machine to use the resources in a (relatively, for coders) easy way. Programs running on the operating system still need to be compiled, which results in the binary which are nothing more or less than numbers having meaning to the CPU. You change the CPU, you must change those numbers.
If you think of libraries... Yes, they make it easier for applications to be more portable, but still in the end the binary must match the binary of the library. There is no way around it
What you want would be a kind of on the fly compiler or interpreter, which was the original goal of Java. Java Chips would be there "any day now". Not many around, eh?
Your vision on what an operating system is, seems a bit off.
Re:That's one heck of a "long goodbye"
on
Goodbye, VGA
·
· Score: 1
It might make a difference when your computer is under heavy load and you try to kill the runaway process.
Re:That's one heck of a "long goodbye"
on
Goodbye, VGA
·
· Score: 2
Oddly enough I have one of those at work... I never think of using them... I always connect stuff directly to the laptop or the docking station. In my mind a keyboard is still something standalone... Heck, even my external monitor has USB connectors. I never use those either. I simply don't think of them as USB hubs.
Re:That's one heck of a "long goodbye"
on
Goodbye, VGA
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
What's wrong with PS/2 connectors? I prefer them, unlike USB they don't require polling as they are interrupt driven. When I can choose, I take PS/2 over USB for keyboards and mice. Saves USB ports too for other duties.
Probably would work... Well, I'd simply do "rm ~/.adobe/*; chmod 500 ~/.adobe/*", which would be shorter and keep read/access rights to said directory.
That said, if Flash expects to be able to write to that directory, it might crash when it tries to utilize it. So it really isn't a foolproof method.
As per this moment, under.adobe in my home directory exists the following structure: "~/.adobe/Flash_Player/AssetCache/VSUUJTSX/". The directory is probably randomly generated just like profile directories in Mozilla (harder to predict in case of a flaw in the plugin/browser). In there are just files with the extensions.swz and.heu and one file called "cacheSize.txt". None of these files seems to be human readable (well, okay cacheSize.txt makes somehow sense). Oddly enough, the oldest file is from 25th September 2010. As I use my browser daily and don't mind youtube or the odd flash game, this is strange indeed. I would nearly say that they stopped using it.
Luxembourg? Where all these companies got, in best case, a manager and a secretary... A mailbox at best. Neither of those companies is big at all in my home country. I'm pretty sure I'd know some people working there as the IT world isn't exactly big in a small country, but I don't.
It also doesn't help residents at all... For Amazon and eBay, we have to deal with Germany (Try ordering anything but books or CDs at Amazon from Luxembourg... won't happen...). PayPal is officially a bank, but that's really about it. As a matter of fact, I just checked, they are in the same building as the company I work for, which is filled to the brim with small tax-evading companies.... Doesn't inspire much confidence to me. (Yes, I do realize what it says about my job... No need to tell me.)
iTunes? Luxembourg was one of the LAST countries that got access to iTunes from the end-user point of view. I highly doubt they have a single server here.
Also, while Luxembourg is pretty good for corporate taxes (will change, we are impacted by the crisis too...), employees are expensive because the average wages are very high. Foreign companies have a hard time understanding that, especially if they come from countries with lower average wages like Ireland. The local average salaries are understandable, because the country is small and real-estate prices are insane. I have a pretty ok salary, but I don't dream of ever owning any real-estate. Unless I quit the country (which has other downsides), it simply is unaffordable.
At home, I simply am my own CA, which really isn't all that hard. You just need to deploy the CA public certificate to the clients and you'll never get the warning. Now, depending on the "applicances" you might be able to replace the certificate with one you signed with your own CA, but I've never tried it.
Adobe Reader is already a performance slouch. This probably won't help a bit. Too bad my tax declaration only works with their version. Well, as far as I could see at least.
When was this? If you started doing this in the seventies and eighties, I can easily see that happening. Nineties, perhaps... mainly because of the dot-com bubble. Now? Much less probable. Not saying you can't these days. Having a healthy interest in technology does help, and can get you a long way in the IT sector. Now, people look at your experience and that's why you (still) get hired.
Slashdot Mirror
Can you read? I said 2 tax horsepower. Look it up!
A little gag? I don't think so. The "2CV" originally did mean "2 Horsepower". Also keep in mind it's tax horsepower and doesn't "really" reflect the power of the machine. Nobody calls in Deux-Cé-Vé.
I've done it manually for over a year. It doesn't take as long as you think and an automatic system will certainly beat me doing it in speed. When doing it manually, you're not looking around and picking your nose. You have your hand ready on the key for when the light turns green or when the cars brake lights in front of your go out.
Also, a warm engine turns on pretty much instantly.
Yes, me and the other guy understand that: timeless design. Thing is "timeless" design is exactly that. Not much design at all. Once it's set, you can't change much. This means there isn't much "work" for a designer. For a designer it's a very frustrating (but challenging) position to work for these manufacturer.
Car brands with designs that suck don't gain much by hiring the designers responsible for "timeless design". They first need the designers that find that timeless design (which does mean radical change from the existing brand) and then, just then, revert to the design philosophy that the Big Three Germans employ.
I live in Luxembourg. I've had two of co-workers drive 150 to work and another 150km from work every day. (One was from Namur, the other from Sarguemines) While those are exceptions, 100km/each way is very common. The reason? Luxembourg has high wages, but even higher real estate prices. So they work here and live where it's cheaper. Commutes in Europe can be quite long too....
It's also illegal in many places. Here it will cost you 45€ fine if they catch you doing it.
It's a very weird phenomenon. Mercedes ranks very high in US perception. Over here in Europe, a Mercedes is for old people... For me it's a farmers car. If a farmer is a bit well off; he'll buy a Mercedes. You could bet your first born on that. (Small company owners also invariably own Mercedes.... Hello father in law!)
BMW is for posers (sorry) and Audi is for those who can't afford either (Disclaimer: I'm an Audi owner). None of these brands actually do much design (Audi most, but that's because they stay in the third place of the luxury car segment meaning they have more headroom for failure). That segment comes with a price: design is very costly, in the sense that the buyers of these cars won't buy a car they don't visually like. Hence the very small design changes. This is not true in the nomal/budget brands: People need a car; the price is right, well it's not that pretty but it's reliable and it will get you from A to B. I once saw an interview with one of the Mercedes design team leader who explained this problem and he did of course a much better job that I do right now.
Mercedes/BMW/Audi DO change design, but they do it first in the cheaper models and see how the reaction is. Easy to see: the Audi A3 got the "new front" first, all the other models later. Much later. Consider also the Mercedes A-Class, which radically departs from the Mercedes standard design. They can do it there, because if it doesn't sell well it is written off as "No Mercedes demand in that price-class". The US market never see those cars, by the way.
I still keep a few 5.25" drives handy... Just in case. They should still work on modern computers.
They do? SCSI cards cost what now? 50$ Which is nothing compared what they used to cost. I've got a truckload of PCI SCSI cards out of dumpsters. SCSI is wonderfully versatile. Attach the disk, the scanner, the optical drive or the tape drive and chances it will just work. Your chances are better with Linux than with Windows these days, but often it's just complaining from Windows. We have a SCSI Dia Scanner device, which used to turn up with a yellow triangle in the device manager on XP. Worked fine with the enclosed software, though. With Linux it works, but not with XSane... I have VueScan license (actually two, I have one, my dad has one). Works perfectly fine. Good software also for those unsupported scanners: Canon LiDE 20. No support on Mac OS X, but with VueScan... No problem. I'm getting offtopic though.
My experience is that SCSI disks will do just fine attached to a modern SCSI card and I still have my Iomega Jaz 1GB which works just fine.
The two PCMCIA SCSI cards I have though don't work well: not at all under Windows IIRC, and very badly under Linux.
Anyway: best I probably can do for "esoteric" is some Computer Architecture Projects I did back at the Uni on OS/2 Warp. Made on some IBM Office software that came with it. Those files are stored on one of the Jaz disks (Yes, the disks are still functional, I tested them a few months ago for kick 'n giggles when I found them back). Getting them from there is not hard (It's FAT32 after all), but reading the files might turn out problematic.
Second "hardest" is probably Wordperfect 5.1 files from even longer ago. I still have some letters I wrote with my teenage romance. Ah, memories... Those simply stayed in an archive folder that moved with me from computer to computer. They're zipped and I expect OpenOffice to open them just fine (or at least "readable").
Can't compete with those on esoteric material with weird filesystems on audio tapes and the like. I'm too young for that, even though I'm 34.
Interesting.... Is it still one? Don't forget that Microsoft has the nasty habit of buying companies and gutting them in such a way that they only serve Microsoft. In this case, the gutting may have occurred prematurely.
Are you referring to Virtual PC? You might need to read up on what an emulator is and what virtualization software is. Bochs is an emulator, Virtual PC is virtualization software. You can't use Virtual PC on, let's say a SPARC, software to run Windows on that machine. You can, however, run Bochs on a SPARC machine to run Windows... I wouldn't suggest you try, because it's going to be slow.
Virtualization software only supports the architectures that the underlying architecture supports.
In a Von Neumann Architecture, Data and Programs are the same. In the strict sense of the word, even compiled code is data. So just differentiating Java Apps or Perl scripts from compiled code makes no sense.
It's not impossible to do this translation (thinking of Rosetta here), but is it the task of the operating system? That's pretty much what commodore64_love was insinuating.
As for drivers... How can you even mention so casually "apart from timing loop issues"? The reason they're drivers is because they have these issues, otherwise it could simply be implemented in user space.
Basically, if you want this, you need an operating system that provides only a managed Virtual Machine (in the Java sense) and you can only implement on that. To gain backward compatibility (which this ARM/x86 thread is about), you'd need a VM that does x86 on any architecture. That is called emulation and is slow. Try Bochs someday.
My point exactly. That you even installed it is amazing.
Do you know anyone who uses Works?!? For real?
Besides, Works is anything except lightweight. For starters, it comes with a full blown Microsoft Word.
In the end.... everything that runs on your machine, runs directly on the hardware. Even Java Applications, even Perl scripts... They just are passed through layers and layers and layers of checks and sandboxes, but in the end, what has to be done is done on the hardware. Directly. There is no magical layer which does the work without the CPU, you know.
Troll or serious question?
Every CPU architecture has its instruction set and to run the code it needs to be in that instruction set. Imagine that the code 01 means ADD 1 to the Accumulator on architecture 1, but 01 means apply NOT on the Accumulator. So, the "same" instruction means something completely different on the two architectures.
The task of the operating system is not to abstract the hardware from the software in that sense, because the software that runs is still in pure machine instructions (It's the only thing your machine actually understands). The task of an operating system (as we know them today) is to provide a way for the machine to use the resources in a (relatively, for coders) easy way. Programs running on the operating system still need to be compiled, which results in the binary which are nothing more or less than numbers having meaning to the CPU. You change the CPU, you must change those numbers.
If you think of libraries... Yes, they make it easier for applications to be more portable, but still in the end the binary must match the binary of the library. There is no way around it
What you want would be a kind of on the fly compiler or interpreter, which was the original goal of Java. Java Chips would be there "any day now". Not many around, eh?
Your vision on what an operating system is, seems a bit off.
It might make a difference when your computer is under heavy load and you try to kill the runaway process.
Oddly enough I have one of those at work... I never think of using them... I always connect stuff directly to the laptop or the docking station. In my mind a keyboard is still something standalone... Heck, even my external monitor has USB connectors. I never use those either. I simply don't think of them as USB hubs.
What's wrong with PS/2 connectors? I prefer them, unlike USB they don't require polling as they are interrupt driven. When I can choose, I take PS/2 over USB for keyboards and mice. Saves USB ports too for other duties.
Probably would work... Well, I'd simply do "rm ~/.adobe/*; chmod 500 ~/.adobe/*", which would be shorter and keep read/access rights to said directory.
That said, if Flash expects to be able to write to that directory, it might crash when it tries to utilize it. So it really isn't a foolproof method.
As per this moment, under .adobe in my home directory exists the following structure: "~/.adobe/Flash_Player/AssetCache/VSUUJTSX/". The directory is probably randomly generated just like profile directories in Mozilla (harder to predict in case of a flaw in the plugin/browser). In there are just files with the extensions .swz and .heu and one file called "cacheSize.txt". None of these files seems to be human readable (well, okay cacheSize.txt makes somehow sense). Oddly enough, the oldest file is from 25th September 2010. As I use my browser daily and don't mind youtube or the odd flash game, this is strange indeed. I would nearly say that they stopped using it.
Luxembourg? Where all these companies got, in best case, a manager and a secretary... A mailbox at best. Neither of those companies is big at all in my home country. I'm pretty sure I'd know some people working there as the IT world isn't exactly big in a small country, but I don't.
It also doesn't help residents at all... For Amazon and eBay, we have to deal with Germany (Try ordering anything but books or CDs at Amazon from Luxembourg... won't happen...). PayPal is officially a bank, but that's really about it. As a matter of fact, I just checked, they are in the same building as the company I work for, which is filled to the brim with small tax-evading companies.... Doesn't inspire much confidence to me. (Yes, I do realize what it says about my job... No need to tell me.)
iTunes? Luxembourg was one of the LAST countries that got access to iTunes from the end-user point of view. I highly doubt they have a single server here.
Also, while Luxembourg is pretty good for corporate taxes (will change, we are impacted by the crisis too...), employees are expensive because the average wages are very high. Foreign companies have a hard time understanding that, especially if they come from countries with lower average wages like Ireland. The local average salaries are understandable, because the country is small and real-estate prices are insane. I have a pretty ok salary, but I don't dream of ever owning any real-estate. Unless I quit the country (which has other downsides), it simply is unaffordable.
At home, I simply am my own CA, which really isn't all that hard. You just need to deploy the CA public certificate to the clients and you'll never get the warning. Now, depending on the "applicances" you might be able to replace the certificate with one you signed with your own CA, but I've never tried it.
Adobe Reader is already a performance slouch. This probably won't help a bit. Too bad my tax declaration only works with their version. Well, as far as I could see at least.
In French it's called Menuisier-ébéniste. I'd be glad to learn the English term.
When was this? If you started doing this in the seventies and eighties, I can easily see that happening. Nineties, perhaps... mainly because of the dot-com bubble. Now? Much less probable. Not saying you can't these days. Having a healthy interest in technology does help, and can get you a long way in the IT sector. Now, people look at your experience and that's why you (still) get hired.