The posts so far seemed to have missed the funniest line of the skit... Candygram!
For those who don't know, the skit was Landshark from the 1970's Saturday Night Live program. At the time 'Jaws' was new at the movies. Chevy Chase played the shark, and in one episode was Larraine Newman sitting at home in her apartment when the doorbell rings...
Rumors have it that in the 1st episode of Stargate next season, MacGyver builds a new stargate out of three tablets of XTC and a paper clip, and Kurt Russel (from the original StarGate movie) comes back as Tango and gives MacGyver some Cash.
For those of you wondering where the 'box girder bridge' reference originates...
"How To Do It"
The cast:
ALAN
John Cleese
NOEL
Graham Chapman
JACKIE
Eric Idle
The sketch:
(Cut to a sign saying 'How to do it'. Music. Pull out to reveal a 'Blue Peter' type set. Sitting casually on the edge of a dais an three presenters in sweaters - Noel, Jackie and Alan - plus a large bloodhound.)
Alan: Hello.
Noel: Hello.
Alan: Well, last week we showed you how to become a gynaecologist. And this week on 'How to do it' we're going to show you how to play the flute, how to split an atom, how to construct a box girder bridge, how to irrigate the Sahara Desert and make vast new areas of land cultivatable, but first, here's Jackie to tell you all how to rid the world of all known diseases.
Jackie: Hello, Alan.
Alan: Hello, Jackie.
Jackie: Well, first of all become a doctor and discover a marvellous cure for something, and then, when the medical profession really starts to take notice of you, you can jolly well tell them what to do and make sure they get everything right so there'll never be any diseases ever again.
Alan: Thanks, Jackie. Great idea. How to play the flute. (picking up a flute) Well here we are. You blow there and you move your fingers up and down here.
Noel: Great, great, Alan. Well, next week we'Ll be showing you how black and white people can live together in peace and harmony, and Alan will be over in Moscow showing us how to reconcile the Russians and the Chinese. So, until next week, cheerio.
Alan: Bye.
Jackie: Bye.
(Children's music.)
One thing that always bugged me was how the Time Domain Multiplex (TDM) formats naming doesn't make a lot of sense. A DS-3 carries 28 T-1's. A DS-3 is sometimes known as a T-3, and maps closely onto an OC-1. The OC naming makes a bit more sense, in that OC-3 is three times the capacity of an OC-1, OC-12 is twelve times, etc.
If the ISP has more than 28 T-1 customers and a single DS-3 (or OC-1) to its provider, then you are all sharing that bandwidth. But if you think about it, at some point you are going to have to share comm. links somewhere upstream, so the fact that an ISP has only a DS-3 is not in itself a concern.
About the only thing you can do is keep an eye on the performance that you get, and ensure that you (1) can achieve peak bandwidth of 1.544 Mbps sometimes, and (2) that your average bandwidth isn't too low. Ask your ISP what average bandwidth you can expect to its provider, and use that as a benchmark. If your average gets too low, then you can complain.
Check out Point Roberts, WA to see an example of an outcome of treaty-making without good surveying. The outcome of the war of 1812 caused the Americans and British to firm up borders. Finally, in 1846 the border between the US and what is now British Columbia was established at 49 degrees North. Apparently they didn't realize Point Roberts would be an isolated outpost of the US!
Apparently the border markers along this part of the world were done with 1800's technology, and the generally accepted border in the area is about 300m too far north. So there is some strip of "Canadian" territory being "occupied" by Americans just south of Vancouver. This is an academic joke because both countries have since agreed that the border stands where the markers are. However, the State of Washington, until fairly recently, had officially defined the border as 49 degrees North, and a number of court cases for crimes committed in this 300m strip, notably illegal fishing just off-shore, were thrown out due to lack of jurisdiction!
The irony, IMHO, comes from the notion that the U.S. was one of the first nations to enact export restrictions, much to the impedement of worldwide adoption of privacy. It is ironic that a nation that fancies itself as a bastion of freedom restricts access of other nations to privacy tools.
And it is doubly ironic that that these European countries seem to move toward regulating encryption where the US had formerly taken criticism from these folks for its restrictions.
Of course, the guitarist of the title track was not the fictional Ziggy, nor Bowie himself, but Mick Ronson, one of the greats of the era who sadly died in 1993.
I know, nobody actually grounds themselves with a static strap when putting together a PC. But in this movie they handle the CPU with about as much care as your car keys. Either they are lucky or did the video with a dead CPU. I try to use a little more care to prevent frying a new CPU and losing a few hundred bucks.
Highly concetrated hydrogen peroxide as used in this rocket are a hazard, especially to aquatic life (see here). It is also a personal hazard to the pilot and ground crew as it may cause tissue damage, like blindness.
So, do you have any concerns about the pollution your rocket may produce? Where in the priority of design parameters does concern for leaks, minor spills, and spills due to catastrophic failure fall?
Somebody, please mod this up because jeff is right damn it!!!
I've worked with both the SA-11x0 (StrongARM) and the PXA250 "Cotulla" (Xscale) CPUs and everything jeff says is pretty much on the money (except the CLZ instruction is far from useless, it's *awesome* for fixed-point logarithms, dude).
Also, the DSP coprocessor in the X-scale is about as useful as tits on a bull for codecs with 16-bit data streams. You spend so many clocks marshalling data around to get it in and out of the thing that it's *much* more efficient to use the MAC instructions native to ARM v4 on normal registers! Even the Intel engineers who put together their IPP's have avoided the DSP coprocessor since it provides no real advantage.
It's pretty clear to me the v4/v5 thing is a red herring. Let's face it DEC was much better at putting out a general purspose ARM-based CPU than Intel.
Software's so bad because it's still handcrafted, and the interchangable parts don't. Cars sucked too when when they were done the same way. OSS isn't the solution. The solution is for Computer Engineering to someday become as rigorous as other areas of Engineering.
Your analogy is intriguing but has some obvious flaws. Software development is fundamentally different than mass-production of cars, or any other hardware, because software has near-zero cost to copy and distribute. Building thousands of cars with the same tightly-controlled parts is economical because the production costs per unit are huge. Henry Ford's success at mass production was due mostly to the fact that he made good cars that were cheaper than the competition, especially in volume.
While I agree that better methodologies and more rigorous development practices can result in better software, the market is working against this. With cars, a cheaper product means mass production, assembly lines and as such quality control and tight tolerances of the parts. Since a CD of software is not "assembled" separately for each customer shipped, the unit costs are very low, and there is simply not the market incentive to move to the model you mention.
The major stumbing block, and why this idea cannot immediately go to cell phones, is the notion of band-split and the fact that the cell-phone network is fundamentally circuit-switched (as alluded in the article).
Mobile devices are licenced to transmit on certain frequencies and receive on another set. The base station (at the tower) has the opposite band-split. That's how a full-duplex connection is made. One can listen and talk without having to push a button like a walkie-talkie since there are two separate radio connections used together simultaneously. Mobiles typically transmit on the low side of the band and base stations on the high side.
In order for a mobile to act as a base station (for the purposes of repeating or P2P), it would have to implement the radio hardware to do listen to other phones, like a base station does. Besides the licensing issues, cell phones do not offer this extra-cost (and potentially bulky) RF hardware.
The P2P cellphone idea demonstrated on 802.11 has a fundamentally different RF architecture, where one band is shared in a multiple-access fashion. It's also inherently a packet-switched technology. In 802.11 band-split is not an issue for P2P.
I am reminded of a Saturday Night Live sketch starring William Shatner, in which he is pelted with inane questions from feverish trekkies about "What was the combination to the lock in Episode 17?"...You are those fuckwits now...
...a wonderful source of Star Trek history, but provide a unique, behind-the-scenes glimpse into the production details of each episode, and are absolutely fascinating reading!
All those memos, like this one, start at $150US a pop. Given these are originals, can the purchaser not publish their contents electronically? I for one would find it interesting, but certainly don't have the budget.
Any geeks out there with dot-com-bubble cash (Mark Cuban?) wanna snap these up an publish for the rest of us?
But BREW is just on the Qualcomm (ARM CPU) chips. To port BREW to any other chip/architecture means (1) the B(inary) in BREW isn't the same without ARM, and (2) it is *MORE* work to do the JVM since it must run on another CPU. The BREW APIs are just sugar on top of a native API for the phone. The JVM is *MORE* efficient running on the native API than through the BREW layer. It's just not that compelling to use BREW.
Essentially, BREW does much of the heavy lifting that wireless carriers prefer not to tackle. It is also an open standard that supports multiple languages including the Java platform -- which means game developers don't have to worry about writing multiple versions for different devices.
This statement is misleading. BREW is a "Binary Runtime Environment for Wireless" by Qualcomm. It is just a friggin' API for phones with an ARM CPU! The only reason they claim Java - which does not ship by the way - is that is is conceivable to port and run Java under any environment. Putting a JVM on top of BREW is totally useless since the JVM does not need BREW whatsoever to run on an ARM - it's all marketing hype promoting the false associating with Write-Once Run-Anywhere. BREW competes with Java and locks you into the Qualcomm licensing machine. BREW is not open (or maybe it is, check for yourself here), not cross-platform (ARM only), and does about as much for reducing the need for different software versions as Win32 - or any other proprietary "environment" - does for the desktop.
Slashdot Mirror
is that Bart does all his own stunts.
The posts so far seemed to have missed the funniest line of the skit... Candygram!
For those who don't know, the skit was Landshark from the 1970's Saturday Night Live program. At the time 'Jaws' was new at the movies. Chevy Chase played the shark, and in one episode was Larraine Newman sitting at home in her apartment when the doorbell rings...
Rumors have it that in the 1st episode of Stargate next season, MacGyver builds a new stargate out of three tablets of XTC and a paper clip, and Kurt Russel (from the original StarGate movie) comes back as Tango and gives MacGyver some Cash.
While this is obviously a joke, it *would* make some sense for Kurt Russell to do a cameo spot on SG-1, since the show is shot here in Vancouver, and Kurt and Goldie are living here so their son can go to hockey school.
For those of you wondering where the 'box girder bridge' reference originates...
"How To Do It"The cast:
ALAN
John Cleese
NOEL
Graham Chapman
JACKIE
Eric Idle
The sketch:
(Cut to a sign saying 'How to do it'. Music. Pull out to reveal a 'Blue Peter' type set. Sitting casually on the edge of a dais an three presenters in sweaters - Noel, Jackie and Alan - plus a large bloodhound.)
Alan: Hello.
Noel: Hello.
Alan: Well, last week we showed you how to become a gynaecologist. And this week on 'How to do it' we're going to show you how to play the flute, how to split an atom, how to construct a box girder bridge, how to irrigate the Sahara Desert and make vast new areas of land cultivatable, but first, here's Jackie to tell you all how to rid the world of all known diseases.
Jackie: Hello, Alan.
Alan: Hello, Jackie.
Jackie: Well, first of all become a doctor and discover a marvellous cure for something, and then, when the medical profession really starts to take notice of you, you can jolly well tell them what to do and make sure they get everything right so there'll never be any diseases ever again.
Alan: Thanks, Jackie. Great idea. How to play the flute. (picking up a flute) Well here we are. You blow there and you move your fingers up and down here.
Noel: Great, great, Alan. Well, next week we'Ll be showing you how black and white people can live together in peace and harmony, and Alan will be over in Moscow showing us how to reconcile the Russians and the Chinese. So, until next week, cheerio.
Alan: Bye.
Jackie: Bye.
(Children's music.)
It's Commander Taco. He didn't spend 6 years in Taco military school to be called Mista, ok?
I suppose on graduation day they rang the Taco Bell?
Somebody, quick, register all domains [a-z]{1,3}gug.[org|com|net] and cash in on the wave of GUGs that will now start popping up everywhere!
Is Britney coming? Hmmm... floating in zero-G... must grab something for stability...
One thing that always bugged me was how the Time Domain Multiplex (TDM) formats naming doesn't make a lot of sense. A DS-3 carries 28 T-1's. A DS-3 is sometimes known as a T-3, and maps closely onto an OC-1. The OC naming makes a bit more sense, in that OC-3 is three times the capacity of an OC-1, OC-12 is twelve times, etc.
If the ISP has more than 28 T-1 customers and a single DS-3 (or OC-1) to its provider, then you are all sharing that bandwidth. But if you think about it, at some point you are going to have to share comm. links somewhere upstream, so the fact that an ISP has only a DS-3 is not in itself a concern.
About the only thing you can do is keep an eye on the performance that you get, and ensure that you (1) can achieve peak bandwidth of 1.544 Mbps sometimes, and (2) that your average bandwidth isn't too low. Ask your ISP what average bandwidth you can expect to its provider, and use that as a benchmark. If your average gets too low, then you can complain.
... is like putting an Archer 8-track stereophonic in your new Lexus. Sound comes out, but it's just plain wrong.
Check out Point Roberts, WA to see an example of an outcome of treaty-making without good surveying. The outcome of the war of 1812 caused the Americans and British to firm up borders. Finally, in 1846 the border between the US and what is now British Columbia was established at 49 degrees North. Apparently they didn't realize Point Roberts would be an isolated outpost of the US!
Apparently the border markers along this part of the world were done with 1800's technology, and the generally accepted border in the area is about 300m too far north. So there is some strip of "Canadian" territory being "occupied" by Americans just south of Vancouver. This is an academic joke because both countries have since agreed that the border stands where the markers are. However, the State of Washington, until fairly recently, had officially defined the border as 49 degrees North, and a number of court cases for crimes committed in this 300m strip, notably illegal fishing just off-shore, were thrown out due to lack of jurisdiction!
The irony, IMHO, comes from the notion that the U.S. was one of the first nations to enact export restrictions, much to the impedement of worldwide adoption of privacy. It is ironic that a nation that fancies itself as a bastion of freedom restricts access of other nations to privacy tools.
And it is doubly ironic that that these European countries seem to move toward regulating encryption where the US had formerly taken criticism from these folks for its restrictions.
Of course, the guitarist of the title track was not the fictional Ziggy, nor Bowie himself, but Mick Ronson, one of the greats of the era who sadly died in 1993.
I know, nobody actually grounds themselves with a static strap when putting together a PC. But in this movie they handle the CPU with about as much care as your car keys. Either they are lucky or did the video with a dead CPU. I try to use a little more care to prevent frying a new CPU and losing a few hundred bucks.
Highly concetrated hydrogen peroxide as used in this rocket are a hazard, especially to aquatic life (see here). It is also a personal hazard to the pilot and ground crew as it may cause tissue damage, like blindness.
So, do you have any concerns about the pollution your rocket may produce? Where in the priority of design parameters does concern for leaks, minor spills, and spills due to catastrophic failure fall?
Maybe instead of Windows, it should be Winston, © 1984 Microsoft.
Somebody, please mod this up because jeff is right damn it!!!
I've worked with both the SA-11x0 (StrongARM) and the PXA250 "Cotulla" (Xscale) CPUs and everything jeff says is pretty much on the money (except the CLZ instruction is far from useless, it's *awesome* for fixed-point logarithms, dude).
Also, the DSP coprocessor in the X-scale is about as useful as tits on a bull for codecs with 16-bit data streams. You spend so many clocks marshalling data around to get it in and out of the thing that it's *much* more efficient to use the MAC instructions native to ARM v4 on normal registers! Even the Intel engineers who put together their IPP's have avoided the DSP coprocessor since it provides no real advantage.
It's pretty clear to me the v4/v5 thing is a red herring. Let's face it DEC was much better at putting out a general purspose ARM-based CPU than Intel.
Software's so bad because it's still handcrafted, and the interchangable parts don't. Cars sucked too when when they were done the same way. OSS isn't the solution. The solution is for Computer Engineering to someday become as rigorous as other areas of Engineering.
Your analogy is intriguing but has some obvious flaws. Software development is fundamentally different than mass-production of cars, or any other hardware, because software has near-zero cost to copy and distribute. Building thousands of cars with the same tightly-controlled parts is economical because the production costs per unit are huge. Henry Ford's success at mass production was due mostly to the fact that he made good cars that were cheaper than the competition, especially in volume.
While I agree that better methodologies and more rigorous development practices can result in better software, the market is working against this. With cars, a cheaper product means mass production, assembly lines and as such quality control and tight tolerances of the parts. Since a CD of software is not "assembled" separately for each customer shipped, the unit costs are very low, and there is simply not the market incentive to move to the model you mention.
So this paper makes it easier to bring down a P2P network, then, after your efforts, you settle down and have a nice piece of pie for dessert.
The major stumbing block, and why this idea cannot immediately go to cell phones, is the notion of band-split and the fact that the cell-phone network is fundamentally circuit-switched (as alluded in the article).
Mobile devices are licenced to transmit on certain frequencies and receive on another set. The base station (at the tower) has the opposite band-split. That's how a full-duplex connection is made. One can listen and talk without having to push a button like a walkie-talkie since there are two separate radio connections used together simultaneously. Mobiles typically transmit on the low side of the band and base stations on the high side.
In order for a mobile to act as a base station (for the purposes of repeating or P2P), it would have to implement the radio hardware to do listen to other phones, like a base station does. Besides the licensing issues, cell phones do not offer this extra-cost (and potentially bulky) RF hardware.
The P2P cellphone idea demonstrated on 802.11 has a fundamentally different RF architecture, where one band is shared in a multiple-access fashion. It's also inherently a packet-switched technology. In 802.11 band-split is not an issue for P2P.
I am reminded of a Saturday Night Live sketch starring William Shatner, in which he is pelted with inane questions from feverish trekkies about "What was the combination to the lock in Episode 17?" ...You are those fuckwits now...
It was episode 38. Now who's the fuckwit?
C'mon, laugh.
All those memos, like this one, start at $150US a pop. Given these are originals, can the purchaser not publish their contents electronically? I for one would find it interesting, but certainly don't have the budget.
Any geeks out there with dot-com-bubble cash (Mark Cuban?) wanna snap these up an publish for the rest of us?
I guess they won't be calling it Unbreakable GNU/Linux (UGLi) for obvious reasons.
But BREW is just on the Qualcomm (ARM CPU) chips. To port BREW to any other chip/architecture means (1) the B(inary) in BREW isn't the same without ARM, and (2) it is *MORE* work to do the JVM since it must run on another CPU. The BREW APIs are just sugar on top of a native API for the phone. The JVM is *MORE* efficient running on the native API than through the BREW layer. It's just not that compelling to use BREW.
Essentially, BREW does much of the heavy lifting that wireless carriers prefer not to tackle. It is also an open standard that supports multiple languages including the Java platform -- which means game developers don't have to worry about writing multiple versions for different devices.
This statement is misleading. BREW is a "Binary Runtime Environment for Wireless" by Qualcomm. It is just a friggin' API for phones with an ARM CPU! The only reason they claim Java - which does not ship by the way - is that is is conceivable to port and run Java under any environment. Putting a JVM on top of BREW is totally useless since the JVM does not need BREW whatsoever to run on an ARM - it's all marketing hype promoting the false associating with Write-Once Run-Anywhere. BREW competes with Java and locks you into the Qualcomm licensing machine. BREW is not open (or maybe it is, check for yourself here), not cross-platform (ARM only), and does about as much for reducing the need for different software versions as Win32 - or any other proprietary "environment" - does for the desktop.