What about smart chips? I believe those are a pretty good, too. (Data is stored in static RAM)
I've put one through the wash and run it over a magnet. No effect. Plus, they can store a little more than any of the other things you've mentioned (and they are cheap, too).
Analog phone data takes very little bandwidth. Plus, people don't want to use it continuously. It a resource that doesn't have an unlimited demand. Therefore, time-based multiplexing is easily possible.
By comparison, the internet is an unlimited demand resource - there will always be people who will use most (all) of their bandwidth part of the time. If it gets faster, they can store less on their computers.
But I still think that its caused by price-leading in the oglopoly who control internet access for most users.
First of all, I'm not following the "longer lifespan" logic. You've labeled a group who favors physical health more to die first? I don't really think that the age of puberty really determines the age of death.
Also you're saying all the cheerleaders and jocks are stupid, or all of the geeks aren't horny, and none of them are stupid, and that none of them are going to act upon their desires to mate? Its a difficult conclusion to draw.
I've personally seen it go all ways. There was a girl in all of my gifted classes in high school who was quite a knock-out, and a cheerleader to boot. Another similarly beutiful, intelligent girl was on the track team. She became saludictorian. Knowing both of their personalities from having been in most of their classes for four years, I know they place more importance on brains than braun.
There where a few guys who fell into the third category, but not as many. What happened more often was a dichotomy in a single family. I have a friend who is going into computer engineering right now, and is quite a scholar, while his brother is a weight lifter, it seems, first and foremost. My family is another perfect example of this - one of my siblings has great physical skill, but not as much mental, I'm the true geek, and a third sibling is sort of in between.
Many people favor a balance of intelligence and physical skill. Perhaps there are other things that are genetically dichotomized, but I don't really think this is one of them. For myself, I don't see marrying (mating) with someone who can't sing, but otherwise, I wouldn't really mind marrying an idiot.
Musical intelligence is what I value in others, though I have other intelligences myself.
Ada was developed for military use as a coding standard. Its syntax is so strict that the code works often. But...uh...it doesn't matter. You can still screw up.
Smaller parts mean smaller battery, for the most part - except when you have to moving parts like MEMS does.
I doubt that a slower, more expensive and more highly breakable technology is going to be replacing the current one. A general rule of thumb is that no moving parts can be faster/safer/lower power/smaller than moving parts. MEMS has previously been used to replace larger mechanical systems. Its especially good for increasing the resolution of mechanical scans. There was a presentation at my school on the subject - a guy came in with a credit card sized thing and showed that all you do is connect it to a solution and siphon the solution through the card. A MEMS system could then recognize certain chemical agents in the solution (something that is only possible by having a higher resolution scan of the materials).
But for wireless? At least, it becomes extremely difficult to transmit a signal without a large antennae, and I think mems would require more power than passive systems.
This is all the truth of the technology as I have read about it in the past. Has anyone seen anything that contradicts my assertions?
That's right! Its theorized that the key to cold Fusion is in wavelets!
In addition, the government has proved that wavelets, when properly applied, are responsible for keeping George Washington alive all these years in a secret location.
Since your a wireless engineer, I take it you know how the Fourier series and transform works - the ultimate idea is that a series of circular functions of various frequency, amplitude, and phase (sines or cosine functions).
Wavelets work similarly, except that instead of sines or cosines as the basis, a bandwidth limited function, such as rect (not used that often) is used as the basis for the series. There are a few obvious advantages to this (there are some other not quite so obvious ones that I won't get into).
1) Different basis functions can be chosen for different domains based upon which function most compactly represents the desired signal. (For example, it is impossible to perfectly represent a triangular wave by Fourier transform, but quite possible with some wavelets).
2) More data can be fit into a single stream since all the waves are localized (unlike sine and cosine, which are infinite).
The long and short of it is that it is a very good frequency transform.
People have always been pushing some agenda - trying to sell something. It was the greek philosophers who first observed that the truth of the issue is not what matters in showing a point, so much as the persuasiveness of the speaker through logos, ethos, and pathos. Its an art that has been studied for thousands of years, and a good persuasion is something to be admired, no matter what the outcome - at least it can be for those of us who have to communicate with other humans (I think that covers pretty much everybody).
At the very least, we can laugh at how bad their persuasion is. I used to love watching the old "Shake 'N Bake" commercial where a child said, "My mom's making me Shake 'N Bake because she loves me." I could just imagine her finishing her thought, "and your mom doesn't because she doesn't make chicken with that." Or the "Mentos" commercials, where somebody does something sneaky, underhanded, or slightly illegal to someone else, who is understandably irritated, until they see the Mentos pop into the criminal's mouth. I keep waiting for them to push the envelope and show that anything's okay with Mentos by having someone stab someone else to death in front of a cop, and then pop a Mentos in their mouth to get the cop to let them off.
But I digress. Commercials are an art, worth of appreciation or ridicule, despite their purpose. They are, to some degree, a form of literature, meant to do all of the same things as other media.
Does this mean, as the author of the previous post suggests, that we have no appreciation for other forms of art?
Umm...they do provide all the hardware except the TV or monitor.
It comes with a 40 GB hard drive, network card, 2 Linux DVDs, a VGA interface adapter, a mouse, and a keyboard. This is a competitive rate for all of this stuff. Plus, you have the guarantee of compatibility.
What else were you planning on putting into your playstation? A floppy drive?
This is a competitive product; most applications don't need a powerful processor, and it really is a full fledged computer which even has an edge for gaming with the built-in hardware. Is $300 too much to pay for a fully loaded computer?
I gotta tell you, I'd never buy a playstation for just the games. But I'd buy one that I could use to run games AND a mature operating system.
I stand corrected. It seems Intel is charging for their compiler now. Plus, it works similarly on Athlons. Strange company practice, shooting themselves in the foot like that.
...at a conference I went to on computer vision. You see, intel also has an optimized computer vision library. They began their talk for the day with the statement "Intel is in the business of selling chips. However, everyone already has enough processor power to do word processing and that sort of thing. We need people to make more complicated applications so that it make these faster chis we come out with worthwhile."
I imagine that similar logic applies to their compiler: they give it away for free (binary version, so they can control it), but build in the hooks that make it work faster with their newer chips than with the competitions' while at the same time encouraging people to write more CPU intensive programs because they have the power to do so.
Ultimately, they succeed at their real goal: to sell more chips. By the way, AFAIK, Intel still gives away its compiler in binary form, though only for Windows. Of course, the last time I checked was a year and a half ago...
I suppose that might be true. In my experience the most often occuring reason a battery has a higher voltage is that the battery has more ions in it - more energy.
I can't really think of those "lots" of ways that wouldn't be obvious to Reuters. The only trick I can think of would be to heat up the battery using the wires as heat conductors, and even that's kind of shaky. They'd probably have noticed that.
Here are the other ways I can think of:
alter the chemical makeup of the battery - wouldn't work because Reuters would notice while it happened
decrease the pressure on the battery - once again, Reuters would notice
What Reuters observed and concluded, and wrote, would be the most likely conclusions.
1) The black box, when connected to batteries, can increase the voltage by a significant amount - which probably means that more energy was in the batteries at the end of the trial.
2) Despite "creating" energy, it is may not be inherently a perpetual motion device. Perhaps it is only capable of a certain quantity of power, no matter the input power, which is not enough for it to sustain itself without an external power source. With a perfect battery, that would be perpetual, but we know there isn't such a thing. Also the device could be drawing any amount of current to operate, not just the power for the lights.
IMHO, Slashdot's conclusion that "Reuter's report is flawed" is flawed. However, there is something to be said for obeying the current laws of physics. I'm with the parent of this post. I think they used a system which already had a significant amount of energy in some form.
Did I say that people can't believe what they want? I would assume that your saying that I wouldn't tolerate people with beliefs other than mine. That's not true, and not what I wrote. Is it possible to tolerate others whose beliefs you think are totally wrong? Absolutely. Thats the foundation of this country.
So of course they are wrong and should be fired.
You're inferring quite a lot. I was actually talking about the fact that you can be fired or not hired for believing that someone else's beliefs are wrong.
A belief in a single religious belief, such as fundamentalism as you have suggested, would be such an example of an anti-pluralism. So would atheism, though that one doesn't seem to take as much heat. [I wouldn't really call myself right winged, or fundamentalist, since you're into labeling, by the way.]
If you really want to be hired, its best to not know what to believe. That way you won't hit extreme prejudices, that at the very least could cause people to shout at you and accuse you of unscrupulous hiring practices.
I think you've been slightly misinformed.
The average salary for a woman is overall lower.
While that's true, the salary for women given the same skill set as men is higher.
The only reason they make less in general is because, in general, most jobs held by women are not in demand as much.
Also, women are, statistically about twice as likely to succeed in business.
Sad, isn't it, that there are still those who think that the old prejudices govern the workplace?
No, there are all new prejudices now - more sinister. We can accept anyone. We can accept any behavior. The only thing that is intolerable is not accepting pluralism - that is, not believing that all beliefs are equally correct.
I can believe anything I want, except that you're wrong. How can we move forward this way?
At the top of the change log
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Xfree86 4.2.0 Out
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· Score: 3, Informative
I think its pretty significant that they've finally made the system work with the old Rage cards. They still sell those (for about $12), and they have a strong hold on the non-gamer market. Heck, I have one on the workstation I'm working on now (don't worry, I've got a game station too). It could help convince businessmen with old Pentiums that they should use Linux if they can get it to work with their typical hardware on the first try.
Why should we compare FPGAs to ASICs? That's not what Java (which has been adapted to a HDL) has been used for. I know they're "large" compared to ASICs. But ASICs are, by definition, small compared to conventional desktop systems. They're custom made to be that way.
Synplify is made by Synopsis, dude. Synopsis is a company, not a tool.
And for this argument, it doesn't matter how VHDL compares to Verilog. I was comparing both of them to JHDL, and basically stating that the only real choices for HDLs are Verilog and VHDL.
Also, I tend to believe you're wrong about the "verilog is more popular" argument. I use VHDL because more companies have VHDL packages than Verilog packages for the work that I've done, so that I can test my designs in VHDL before synthesis. Also, I've been able to find a lot more information about VHDL. Perhaps Verilog is more popular with the people you've worked with.
(On a side note, I think Verilog is way too simple - it makes you work at the lowest levels when you don't have to do so. You don't have to because components are already available that can do a very good job).
For very large designs, it is incredibly important to have a very good synthesizer, because FPGAs just aren't that big, and because hardware bugs are harder to catch (not only are there software bugs in hardware, but you can have bugs based upon physical problems) and more catastrophic.
However, there are really only two companies that make very high quality synthesizers: Cadence and Synopsis. Having used both of their products, I have to say that they only design for two languages: VHDL and Verilog.
And I must say, I don't blame them. Trying to extend Java to create hardware is crazy; they have to do a workaround in order to create multiple inheritance, as well as justifying the use of functions to specify IO properties of certian wires.
Syntax is sort of irrelevant, both VHDL and Verilog don't make this blunder. A function should not determine the properties of a signal - it makes a lot more sense that the only thing that functions can do is change the value of said signal.
Also, someone might try to use Java primitives that simply confuse the issue. VHDL has very basic support for primitives, which is very tied to bit manipulation (as well it should be, since each bit represents a single wire). Java isn't nearly as good without adding some non-inuitive (in Java) functions to the mix.
VHDL is not very close to ADA, despite a few slight syntactic elements. Verilog is not C, despite the same. They are HDLs, well suited to their tasks.
One final point: those languages (Ada and C) make good starting points for other languages. ADA provides the necessary strictness to ensure hardware design is not sloppy - a necessity since sloppiness results in errors and most hardware errors are impossible to detect during runtime. C was designed to be a low-level language, and to interface well with low-level operations, making it particularly well suited to the design of low-level systems. What other language makes a better starting place for a new languages design than these two based upon these lingual goals?
When UML came out, I thought it was a good idea. After applying it for a while it struck me that I already had a design overview that was showing me the relationships between classes and the like (I started in C++ on OOP): the class definitions!
Pretty much all object oriented programming languages have these, and I have noted that they make the code a lot easier to follow, especially if you produce automatic documentation from them - they're about as good as UML.
In addition, you HAVE to do them anyway for your projects to get off the ground, so you don't even risk wasting time creating notes that won't really help you.
Since I realized that, I started creating every class definition I'm going to use in my code before I wrote out any of the methods, so that I could be sure of all the relationships, just as you are with UML.
That's 24 hour 1 hour periods (a solid 24 hour block), not a day.
Besides, I've never read a SAMs book that really contained lots of info. I think I read the C book, and the HTML book and absorbed all the knowledge in those books in about a day. Then I moved on to the more complicated stuff, and I had to get another book.
In addition, UML is for MODELING a system design. Kind of like how flowcharts are for modeling a system design. I just bring this up because I feel that most people are probably familiar with those to some degree. In fact, I'd say that UML is sort of the object-oriented equivalent to flowcharts.
If you've already worked with imperative programming languages, understanding and writing flowcharts is simple. The same is true here: if you've already implemented all of the OOP concepts, then writing UML is fairly simple. If it wasn't, then we'd need a new modeling language, because the purpose of a modeling language is to be simple to write and read so that the structure of a program is easy to follow.
Of course, this is my opinion based upon my experience, but at least I can say that there's a lot less to UML than there is to Java, C, C++, perl, Javascript, HTML, Lisp, or VHDL (I suppose LISP is argueable since its got a small orthogonal basis set).
That thing about the "crystalline structures" thing is how I would say dilithium crystals work (from Star Trek), if they actually did work. Totally my theory.
As far as the warp theory idea, its a natural (and probable) consequence of the theory of curved space. Its all dependant upon the what-if: "What if I could spontaneously create and destroy massive amounts of matter at will?"
And the last bit was from the movie "First Contact."
The ultimate goal is to send an automated craft to the sun and convert heat energy into order, stored as crystalline structure. The crystals can then be broken down to generate massive amounts of energy, stored in a magnetically based containment system as heat and light. This reaction can be used to initiate a form of hyper-fusion reaction with electrodes to separate matter from antimatter within the byproduct.
This will spontaneously generate tons of matter in a very small space. Some of this matter and antimatter will be expelled in order to produce locomotion, while the rest is simply to compress the space surrounding the vehicle. After this, the matter-antimatter will be recombined, to once again, expand space. The operation of expanding/shrinking space will be repeated continuously in order to allow faster than light travel without breaking the laws of relativity. NASA has deemed this mode of transport "Warp travel," since space is warped in the locomotion process. Since this is the major breakthrough that allows for extra-solar exploration, it is theorized that it may attract the attention and diplomatic relations of any nearby space-traveling civilizations.
Well...maybe its just to have a source of energy that is extremely easy to use and very portable.
LaTeX can output RTF (and by that token also MAN), HTML, DVI, PS, and PDF. As far as quality to effort, many organizations have already created formatting classes to produce the desired document format used by many groups of people (for instance, you can get IEEE format easily). BibTeX, which is used extremely frequently with LaTeX, also makes it easy to manage huge bibliography databases. Also, the Math formatting is absolutely spectacular, and I doubt it could get simpler without losing functionality (I don't know that this is true - tell me if you've found the opposite to be true).
What other formats are you looking for? And what do you mean, it has a higher output quality, and lower quality to effort ratio? You need to qualify that.
I think that perhaps you're talking about writing a man or info page. Perhaps an application specifically designed for that purpose is better at it than a general purpose application, but overall, I think that the reason so many more people are using LaTeX for documentation than texinfo is because of its usefulness.
I await the day television executives aren't 40, and aren't appealing to 40 year olds.
The day that business executives are mostly slashdot readers, and the "working man" watches cartoons. The day is coming, my friends. Cartoon network has "adult swim" now - with comics specifically for adults.
It is only a matter of time. Quantum computing may or may not be a reality, but the Tick will rise again. And so will Shaft.
Slashdot Mirror
What about smart chips? I believe those are a pretty good, too. (Data is stored in static RAM)
I've put one through the wash and run it over a magnet. No effect. Plus, they can store a little more than any of the other things you've mentioned (and they are cheap, too).
Analog phone data takes very little bandwidth. Plus, people don't want to use it continuously. It a resource that doesn't have an unlimited demand. Therefore, time-based multiplexing is easily possible.
By comparison, the internet is an unlimited demand resource - there will always be people who will use most (all) of their bandwidth part of the time. If it gets faster, they can store less on their computers.
But I still think that its caused by price-leading in the oglopoly who control internet access for most users.
First of all, I'm not following the "longer lifespan" logic. You've labeled a group who favors physical health more to die first? I don't really think that the age of puberty really determines the age of death.
Also you're saying all the cheerleaders and jocks are stupid, or all of the geeks aren't horny, and none of them are stupid, and that none of them are going to act upon their desires to mate? Its a difficult conclusion to draw.
I've personally seen it go all ways. There was a girl in all of my gifted classes in high school who was quite a knock-out, and a cheerleader to boot. Another similarly beutiful, intelligent girl was on the track team. She became saludictorian. Knowing both of their personalities from having been in most of their classes for four years, I know they place more importance on brains than braun.
There where a few guys who fell into the third category, but not as many. What happened more often was a dichotomy in a single family. I have a friend who is going into computer engineering right now, and is quite a scholar, while his brother is a weight lifter, it seems, first and foremost. My family is another perfect example of this - one of my siblings has great physical skill, but not as much mental, I'm the true geek, and a third sibling is sort of in between.
Many people favor a balance of intelligence and physical skill. Perhaps there are other things that are genetically dichotomized, but I don't really think this is one of them. For myself, I don't see marrying (mating) with someone who can't sing, but otherwise, I wouldn't really mind marrying an idiot.
Musical intelligence is what I value in others, though I have other intelligences myself.
Ada was developed for military use as a coding standard. Its syntax is so strict that the code works often. But...uh...it doesn't matter. You can still screw up.
Similarly, people speak English badly every day.
I was under the impression that Apache without Cygwin was faster, better, and more secure.
Why would you want to use the cygwin version?
Smaller parts mean smaller battery, for the most part - except when you have to moving parts like MEMS does.
I doubt that a slower, more expensive and more highly breakable technology is going to be replacing the current one. A general rule of thumb is that no moving parts can be faster/safer/lower power/smaller than moving parts. MEMS has previously been used to replace larger mechanical systems. Its especially good for increasing the resolution of mechanical scans. There was a presentation at my school on the subject - a guy came in with a credit card sized thing and showed that all you do is connect it to a solution and siphon the solution through the card. A MEMS system could then recognize certain chemical agents in the solution (something that is only possible by having a higher resolution scan of the materials).
But for wireless? At least, it becomes extremely difficult to transmit a signal without a large antennae, and I think mems would require more power than passive systems.
This is all the truth of the technology as I have read about it in the past. Has anyone seen anything that contradicts my assertions?
That's right! Its theorized that the key to cold Fusion is in wavelets!
In addition, the government has proved that wavelets, when properly applied, are responsible for keeping George Washington alive all these years in a secret location.
Since your a wireless engineer, I take it you know how the Fourier series and transform works - the ultimate idea is that a series of circular functions of various frequency, amplitude, and phase (sines or cosine functions).
Wavelets work similarly, except that instead of sines or cosines as the basis, a bandwidth limited function, such as rect (not used that often) is used as the basis for the series. There are a few obvious advantages to this (there are some other not quite so obvious ones that I won't get into).
1) Different basis functions can be chosen for different domains based upon which function most compactly represents the desired signal. (For example, it is impossible to perfectly represent a triangular wave by Fourier transform, but quite possible with some wavelets).
2) More data can be fit into a single stream since all the waves are localized (unlike sine and cosine, which are infinite).
The long and short of it is that it is a very good frequency transform.
Not New Scientist!
Does that mean the GPL is impossible, too?
People have always been pushing some agenda - trying to sell something. It was the greek philosophers who first observed that the truth of the issue is not what matters in showing a point, so much as the persuasiveness of the speaker through logos, ethos, and pathos. Its an art that has been studied for thousands of years, and a good persuasion is something to be admired, no matter what the outcome - at least it can be for those of us who have to communicate with other humans (I think that covers pretty much everybody).
At the very least, we can laugh at how bad their persuasion is. I used to love watching the old "Shake 'N Bake" commercial where a child said, "My mom's making me Shake 'N Bake because she loves me." I could just imagine her finishing her thought, "and your mom doesn't because she doesn't make chicken with that." Or the "Mentos" commercials, where somebody does something sneaky, underhanded, or slightly illegal to someone else, who is understandably irritated, until they see the Mentos pop into the criminal's mouth. I keep waiting for them to push the envelope and show that anything's okay with Mentos by having someone stab someone else to death in front of a cop, and then pop a Mentos in their mouth to get the cop to let them off.
But I digress. Commercials are an art, worth of appreciation or ridicule, despite their purpose. They are, to some degree, a form of literature, meant to do all of the same things as other media.
Does this mean, as the author of the previous post suggests, that we have no appreciation for other forms of art?
Umm...they do provide all the hardware except the TV or monitor.
It comes with a 40 GB hard drive, network card, 2 Linux DVDs, a VGA interface adapter, a mouse, and a keyboard. This is a competitive rate for all of this stuff. Plus, you have the guarantee of compatibility.
What else were you planning on putting into your playstation? A floppy drive?
This is a competitive product; most applications don't need a powerful processor, and it really is a full fledged computer which even has an edge for gaming with the built-in hardware. Is $300 too much to pay for a fully loaded computer?
I gotta tell you, I'd never buy a playstation for just the games. But I'd buy one that I could use to run games AND a mature operating system.
I stand corrected. It seems Intel is charging for their compiler now. Plus, it works similarly on Athlons. Strange company practice, shooting themselves in the foot like that.
...at a conference I went to on computer vision. You see, intel also has an optimized computer vision library. They began their talk for the day with the statement "Intel is in the business of selling chips. However, everyone already has enough processor power to do word processing and that sort of thing. We need people to make more complicated applications so that it make these faster chis we come out with worthwhile."
I imagine that similar logic applies to their compiler: they give it away for free (binary version, so they can control it), but build in the hooks that make it work faster with their newer chips than with the competitions' while at the same time encouraging people to write more CPU intensive programs because they have the power to do so.
Ultimately, they succeed at their real goal: to sell more chips. By the way, AFAIK, Intel still gives away its compiler in binary form, though only for Windows. Of course, the last time I checked was a year and a half ago...
I suppose that might be true. In my experience the most often occuring reason a battery has a higher voltage is that the battery has more ions in it - more energy.
I can't really think of those "lots" of ways that wouldn't be obvious to Reuters. The only trick I can think of would be to heat up the battery using the wires as heat conductors, and even that's kind of shaky. They'd probably have noticed that.
Here are the other ways I can think of:
alter the chemical makeup of the battery - wouldn't work because Reuters would notice while it happened
decrease the pressure on the battery - once again, Reuters would notice
shake the battery - they'd notice
That's a grand total of four ways.
What Reuters observed and concluded, and wrote, would be the most likely conclusions.
1) The black box, when connected to batteries, can increase the voltage by a significant amount - which probably means that more energy was in the batteries at the end of the trial.
2) Despite "creating" energy, it is may not be inherently a perpetual motion device. Perhaps it is only capable of a certain quantity of power, no matter the input power, which is not enough for it to sustain itself without an external power source. With a perfect battery, that would be perpetual, but we know there isn't such a thing. Also the device could be drawing any amount of current to operate, not just the power for the lights.
IMHO, Slashdot's conclusion that "Reuter's report is flawed" is flawed. However, there is something to be said for obeying the current laws of physics. I'm with the parent of this post. I think they used a system which already had a significant amount of energy in some form.
Hostile, aren't we?
Did I say that people can't believe what they want? I would assume that your saying that I wouldn't tolerate people with beliefs other than mine. That's not true, and not what I wrote. Is it possible to tolerate others whose beliefs you think are totally wrong? Absolutely. Thats the foundation of this country.
So of course they are wrong and should be fired.
You're inferring quite a lot. I was actually talking about the fact that you can be fired or not hired for believing that someone else's beliefs are wrong.
A belief in a single religious belief, such as fundamentalism as you have suggested, would be such an example of an anti-pluralism. So would atheism, though that one doesn't seem to take as much heat. [I wouldn't really call myself right winged, or fundamentalist, since you're into labeling, by the way.]
If you really want to be hired, its best to not know what to believe. That way you won't hit extreme prejudices, that at the very least could cause people to shout at you and accuse you of unscrupulous hiring practices.
I think you've been slightly misinformed.
The average salary for a woman is overall lower.
While that's true, the salary for women given the same skill set as men is higher.
The only reason they make less in general is because, in general, most jobs held by women are not in demand as much.
Also, women are, statistically about twice as likely to succeed in business.
Sad, isn't it, that there are still those who think that the old prejudices govern the workplace?
No, there are all new prejudices now - more sinister. We can accept anyone. We can accept any behavior. The only thing that is intolerable is not accepting pluralism - that is, not believing that all beliefs are equally correct.
I can believe anything I want, except that you're wrong. How can we move forward this way?
I think its pretty significant that they've finally made the system work with the old Rage cards. They still sell those (for about $12), and they have a strong hold on the non-gamer market. Heck, I have one on the workstation I'm working on now (don't worry, I've got a game station too). It could help convince businessmen with old Pentiums that they should use Linux if they can get it to work with their typical hardware on the first try.
Why should we compare FPGAs to ASICs? That's not what Java (which has been adapted to a HDL) has been used for. I know they're "large" compared to ASICs. But ASICs are, by definition, small compared to conventional desktop systems. They're custom made to be that way.
Synplify is made by Synopsis, dude. Synopsis is a company, not a tool.
And for this argument, it doesn't matter how VHDL compares to Verilog. I was comparing both of them to JHDL, and basically stating that the only real choices for HDLs are Verilog and VHDL.
Also, I tend to believe you're wrong about the "verilog is more popular" argument. I use VHDL because more companies have VHDL packages than Verilog packages for the work that I've done, so that I can test my designs in VHDL before synthesis. Also, I've been able to find a lot more information about VHDL. Perhaps Verilog is more popular with the people you've worked with.
(On a side note, I think Verilog is way too simple - it makes you work at the lowest levels when you don't have to do so. You don't have to because components are already available that can do a very good job).
For very large designs, it is incredibly important to have a very good synthesizer, because FPGAs just aren't that big, and because hardware bugs are harder to catch (not only are there software bugs in hardware, but you can have bugs based upon physical problems) and more catastrophic.
However, there are really only two companies that make very high quality synthesizers: Cadence and Synopsis. Having used both of their products, I have to say that they only design for two languages: VHDL and Verilog.
And I must say, I don't blame them. Trying to extend Java to create hardware is crazy; they have to do a workaround in order to create multiple inheritance, as well as justifying the use of functions to specify IO properties of certian wires.
Syntax is sort of irrelevant, both VHDL and Verilog don't make this blunder. A function should not determine the properties of a signal - it makes a lot more sense that the only thing that functions can do is change the value of said signal.
Also, someone might try to use Java primitives that simply confuse the issue. VHDL has very basic support for primitives, which is very tied to bit manipulation (as well it should be, since each bit represents a single wire). Java isn't nearly as good without adding some non-inuitive (in Java) functions to the mix.
VHDL is not very close to ADA, despite a few slight syntactic elements. Verilog is not C, despite the same. They are HDLs, well suited to their tasks.
One final point: those languages (Ada and C) make good starting points for other languages. ADA provides the necessary strictness to ensure hardware design is not sloppy - a necessity since sloppiness results in errors and most hardware errors are impossible to detect during runtime. C was designed to be a low-level language, and to interface well with low-level operations, making it particularly well suited to the design of low-level systems. What other language makes a better starting place for a new languages design than these two based upon these lingual goals?
When UML came out, I thought it was a good idea. After applying it for a while it struck me that I already had a design overview that was showing me the relationships between classes and the like (I started in C++ on OOP): the class definitions!
Pretty much all object oriented programming languages have these, and I have noted that they make the code a lot easier to follow, especially if you produce automatic documentation from them - they're about as good as UML.
In addition, you HAVE to do them anyway for your projects to get off the ground, so you don't even risk wasting time creating notes that won't really help you.
Since I realized that, I started creating every class definition I'm going to use in my code before I wrote out any of the methods, so that I could be sure of all the relationships, just as you are with UML.
That's 24 hour 1 hour periods (a solid 24 hour block), not a day.
Besides, I've never read a SAMs book that really contained lots of info. I think I read the C book, and the HTML book and absorbed all the knowledge in those books in about a day. Then I moved on to the more complicated stuff, and I had to get another book.
In addition, UML is for MODELING a system design. Kind of like how flowcharts are for modeling a system design. I just bring this up because I feel that most people are probably familiar with those to some degree. In fact, I'd say that UML is sort of the object-oriented equivalent to flowcharts.
If you've already worked with imperative programming languages, understanding and writing flowcharts is simple. The same is true here: if you've already implemented all of the OOP concepts, then writing UML is fairly simple. If it wasn't, then we'd need a new modeling language, because the purpose of a modeling language is to be simple to write and read so that the structure of a program is easy to follow.
Of course, this is my opinion based upon my experience, but at least I can say that there's a lot less to UML than there is to Java, C, C++, perl, Javascript, HTML, Lisp, or VHDL (I suppose LISP is argueable since its got a small orthogonal basis set).
Actually, only some of it is crap.
That thing about the "crystalline structures" thing is how I would say dilithium crystals work (from Star Trek), if they actually did work. Totally my theory.
As far as the warp theory idea, its a natural (and probable) consequence of the theory of curved space. Its all dependant upon the what-if: "What if I could spontaneously create and destroy massive amounts of matter at will?"
And the last bit was from the movie "First Contact."
The ultimate goal is to send an automated craft to the sun and convert heat energy into order, stored as crystalline structure. The crystals can then be broken down to generate massive amounts of energy, stored in a magnetically based containment system as heat and light. This reaction can be used to initiate a form of hyper-fusion reaction with electrodes to separate matter from antimatter within the byproduct.
This will spontaneously generate tons of matter in a very small space. Some of this matter and antimatter will be expelled in order to produce locomotion, while the rest is simply to compress the space surrounding the vehicle. After this, the matter-antimatter will be recombined, to once again, expand space. The operation of expanding/shrinking space will be repeated continuously in order to allow faster than light travel without breaking the laws of relativity. NASA has deemed this mode of transport "Warp travel," since space is warped in the locomotion process. Since this is the major breakthrough that allows for extra-solar exploration, it is theorized that it may attract the attention and diplomatic relations of any nearby space-traveling civilizations.
Well...maybe its just to have a source of energy that is extremely easy to use and very portable.
But we can always dream, can't we?
LaTeX can output RTF (and by that token also MAN), HTML, DVI, PS, and PDF. As far as quality to effort, many organizations have already created formatting classes to produce the desired document format used by many groups of people (for instance, you can get IEEE format easily). BibTeX, which is used extremely frequently with LaTeX, also makes it easy to manage huge bibliography databases. Also, the Math formatting is absolutely spectacular, and I doubt it could get simpler without losing functionality (I don't know that this is true - tell me if you've found the opposite to be true).
What other formats are you looking for? And what do you mean, it has a higher output quality, and lower quality to effort ratio? You need to qualify that.
I think that perhaps you're talking about writing a man or info page. Perhaps an application specifically designed for that purpose is better at it than a general purpose application, but overall, I think that the reason so many more people are using LaTeX for documentation than texinfo is because of its usefulness.
I await the day television executives aren't 40, and aren't appealing to 40 year olds.
The day that business executives are mostly slashdot readers, and the "working man" watches cartoons. The day is coming, my friends. Cartoon network has "adult swim" now - with comics specifically for adults.
It is only a matter of time. Quantum computing may or may not be a reality, but the Tick will rise again. And so will Shaft.