I'd rather my compiler wasn't pay per use, especially if I needed to compile to debug.
But I saw one tool where they wanted $150,000 per development seat. It was a tool I could see myself using 3-4 times / year. Each time it would save me hundreds of hours of development, but I couldn't justify buying it, nor the $40,000 in annual maintenance.
I don't know about ArgoML or the latest version of Rational specifically.
The last time I looked at UML it had 2 drawbacks compared with Stateflow:
At that time it organized your code, but you still had to write all the C code by hand. It might make some wrappers for you though.
You couldn't debug in the graphical environment. You had to understand how it put the code together, and then keep the flowchart on your lap as you debugged in your normal debugger.
Stateflow makes code that can pretty hard to follow, but hopefully you've debugged before generating code and hopefully it generated C code faithful to your design.
Because I've occasionally seen things about Executable UML, I've always assumed there was some core deficiency to UML that prevented it from being directly compiled.
Looking over the Rational Rose Technical Developer product, they include the blurb Runtime model execution, fully executable code generation and visual debugging. so this product may now do what I ask of it.
I didn't find the paragraph at Argo about code generation.
The website for the book Executable UML has exercises based on BridgePoint by Project Technology. Just to throw another option out there.
The one think I always liked about The Mathworks suite was the ability to build dynamic models of the environment the code is meant to operate in. This is so much richer and easier than building test scripts and simple test benches. They have good tools for modelling the domain I work in, but I wouldn't find them useful if I were building a web app. But if I were building a web app, I'd look for a tool that lets me simulate a dynamic environment there as well.
Yes, it is going to be pricey. Somewhere on the order of $20k for a development seat.
The learning curve is going to depend on what you want to do with it. Building charts in Stateflow is probably like Go, an afternoon to learn but a lifetime to master. There are only about 4 or 5 graphical elements to understand, and the syntax for actions & conditions is very C like. Learning to make good charts can be difficult, but I'd assumed you were already looking for that challenge if you were asking for a flowcharting language.
The learning curve is really going to kick in when you want to integrate the C code from your chart with the rest of your project.
As to users, I know there are some. The academic users (the pricing is much different for a university) seem to post to comp.soft-sys.matlab,
while the commercial users complain directly to The Mathworks.
If you're looking for something a little cheaper, you might want to check into Ptolemy from Berkeley. The earlier version could do code generation from flow charts, but that hasn't quite made its way into the rewrite Ptolemy II.
The only quote mentioning tax breaks appears to come from Ari Emanuel, Michael Moore's agent. Everything else on the 'net appears to eventually point back to this article.
Mr. Moore's agent, Ari Emanuel, said Michael D. Eisner, Disney's chief executive, asked him last spring to pull out of the deal with Miramax. Mr. Emanuel said Mr. Eisner expressed particular concern that it would endanger tax breaks Disney receives for its theme park, hotels and other ventures in Florida, where Mr. Bush's brother, Jeb, is governor.
So did Mr. Emanuel manufacture this controversy, or did Disney change their story? This is so twisted, I can't say. But I agree no reporter has ever gotten a quote from a Disney executive saying tax breaks were the reason.
I'm not sure why Disney cares, as every conservative should already be boycotting them for offering domestic partner benefits.
From what I've heard, MySQL is pretty strict about people trying to distribute software not under the GPL without a paying for a commercial license.
I think this sentance says it best: (We also believe that if you have strong reasons not to go GPL, you also have the monetary means to purchase commercial licences.)
You may be right about being able to write a GPL driver and leave the rest of the application non-GPL, but while the MySQL page never states that this is unacceptable, they do say: If you use MySQL Software within your organisation and you don't want to risk it falling under the GPL license, you are welcome to purchase a commercial license.
That is NOT how someone gets comfortable with a system. They get comfortable by trying out a number of different tasks that come up from day to day. At least that's how I got comfortable with Linux. I downloaded it one day, and played with it. I tried to surf the web. I tried to set up X. I didn't understand it right away, and so I booted into Windows and did what needed to be done. Eventually I learned more and my computer spent most of its time booted there.
Compare that to the Mac. I have spend $2-$3k just to get my foot in the door. If I don't do that, all I know is its supposed to be great, but when my boss asks, "Well Bob, in your experience is the Mac the best choice?" I can't say yes because I've don't have any experience with it.
Everything else has either been cheap enough to play with, or sold as "Just like" something cheap enough to play with.
I've been happy with McLeodUSA for the past year after I switched because SBC couldn't figure out how to charge a credit card and MCI hit me with hidden charges. Not sure what will happen soon, as Illinois just passed a law to allow SBC to charge another $10/month per subscriber so they don't lose so many customers.
This is 3,650,000 barrels per year. Or 0.002% of the theoretical maximum energy production of North America.
Of course, this doesn't allow any room for food, factories, homes, or people. Or account for mountains, lakes, and poor soil. But it is reassuring. Because if we were using more energy than we could ever produce in our wildest dreams, we would hit that wall extremely hard when the oil runs out.
This is exactly what's needed. Ideally I could download a small utility off the web that quickly checks what libraries I have installed, tells me where to get the ones that are missing, and can even grab the tar/rpm/deb and install it for me if I have the root password. All that could be done in stages if it gets accepted.
Does anybody remember when PCs were extrememly non-standard, and the game market was going nowhere fast? CGA/EGA/VGA, Adlib/SB/Offbrand, DOS/DRDOS/Win3.1, everything from only 360k floppies to 40M hard drives, CPUs from 8088s to 386DXs. I had a PCjr, and had the fun of trying to find games that knew how to address its oddly placed video memory. Then Microsoft and Intel sat down and defined the Multimedia PC standard. I think all version 1 mandated was an Adlib or SB soundcard. But every year or two they released a new one, not forward looking so much as raising minimum standards. And that seemed to provide a nice solid base.
Of course MS replaced this process with ready to run on Windows and increasing levels of DirectX when 3D began to splinter. Hmm, maybe the people saying "Screw the games, go buy a Dreamcast!" have the right idea.
Re:Why not create something like the DNS system?
on
The Gnutella Paradox
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· Score: 1
As mentioned, anything with manual centralization can be attacked legally. The people running the root servers could be forced to take them down.
What if the system was self organizing. Nobody would decide to become root servers, it would just happen if they had the resources. Depending on the bandwidth and computer, the computer would be placed somewhere in the heirarchy, which could reorganize itself as needed. Possibly this could extend to caching, preventing the problem of not enough people sharing.
I just wonder if there are enough people with good connections for this to work. If there are only 20 people with the necessary connections willing to do this, the RIAA can still easily cripple the network.
Capital is also all other property owned by the company which can be used for production. Thus factories, lab equipment, and other items not consumed in production are capital. Slightly farther afield, other intangibles may also be considered capital. If a trademark is well regarded, the control of that trademark is capital. Some companies now consider the knowledge and abilities of their workers as capital, and are trying to create human resource policies capabale of conserving it.
From the review, it appears the book is trying to say natural resources should be considered capital, and efforts should be made to increase it.
This makes sense because capital is used to produce other things. Each year x% of all capital produces consumables and (100-x)% generates more capital. The next year you have more capital and so more is produced. If you can find some way to include the value of natural capital, users would have to pay the owner for its use.
How those payments start to flow about is rather difficult, and would probably involve many lawsuits as ownership is distributed. For example, does the owner of a chunk of land (who may or may not own mineral rights, and certainly doesn't own the rights to the airspace above) also own the oxygen productivity of the land? If he doesn't, he'd have to pay the owner (most likely the government) to pave over the field. If he does, the oxygen users (most likely everyone as represented by the government) would have to pay him a yearly allowance.
Re:Stupid questions: Gravity?
on
Orbitsville
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· Score: 1
Thickness won't help because you're on the inside. The thickness below you pulls you down, but the thickness (and the star) above you pull you up.
If it spins at a faster than orbiting rate, you will spin at a faster than orbiting rate, some force other than gravity will need to push against your feet. In the equitorial regions, this could probably nicely replace gravity. Then you'd have a "planet" of constantly varying gravity. You could dispose of trash by pushing it towards the poles until it falls into the sun. If you didn't need to conserve the material.
At my university, they provide a large software library on the local net for student use. But they needed some way to ensure it just couldn't be copied to whomever, including former students taking their computer & unlicensed software with them when they leave.
In order to run any of this software, you have to run a key-client concurrently. As the software runs, it checks for a valid license through the key-client. If you shut the key-client down or lose your connection to the server, the software shuts down as well.
Yes, you can filter out the key packets, but that just disables your software. You can crack the software and avoid the key, but that's violating the license, and you should have just pirated it in the first place, because you're still getting fined/going to jail.
I've seen a number of good comments on how to talk to your local legistlator, but how much good will this actually do? You're one in 10,000, and may not have even voted in the last election. (Around here they don't track who you voted for, but do track if you voted. And if you didn't...oh well.)
Write a letter to the editor of your local paper, and remember that Joe Smith will be reading it, so sensationalism sells. Even better, this is sweeps month. All the local news organisations are looking for stories to get people's attention. What better than a law that gives corporations rights to our first-borns?
The arguements against blocking software are highly technical, while the arguements for it are emotional. The essay seemed to lament the majority being swayed by emotional issues, and this post seemed to point out this isn't going to change. An equally emotional counter-arguement is necessary, not more facts and figures.
I use two search engines. Google and the text-only Altavista boolean search. As long as I can link directly to these two pages, I don't care what happens to the front end.
Assuming that there is no soul granting God, it should be possible to create a computer that mimics the mind. (Boiled down it can't be anything more than algorithms. The difficulty will be in providing a similar input environment.)
The dull question is whether this silicon brain will be better able to interface with the dumb super calculator than our own. The physical connections will be easier, but the information connections may still be impossible. If it is, it will be better at physics and calculus and computer programming. So what.
It seems that if silicon life will ever rival the complexity of carbon life, we will have to create environments that allow natural selection to do most of the work for us. These environments are the key, because the environment determines the characteristics of the resulting organism.
The basic pressure driving organic evolution is the ability of an attribute to allow its underlying gene to reach the next generation. Because of this the gene needs to create an organism that sucessfully eats and breeds, living long enough to maximize successful children.
This same survival selector may be used in some silicon experiments, but in others survival depends on the organisms ability to solve a problem. Right now we are able to shape A-life because we create the means of reproduction.
At the moment we are selecting for the ability to recognize a signal, and other basic tasks. What if we are able to keep control of the process long enough to control selection of primitive social organizations? We could become the all-knowing judgemental god, stamping out evil whereever it occurs. And in the end we may have created heirs.
Yes, there are lots of reasons why we will have to lose control long before A-life reaches the social stage. And as soon as we lose control of reproduction, we lose fine grained control. Though we may still be able to send computer virii through environments we feel are supporting the wrong type of development.
Think in a thousand years silicon men will sit around their dorm room, and wonder how life started. Two people sitting across the table discussing if the weather conditions had ever been right to allow primitive nanites to develop, or if some god had to be involved.
Slashdot Mirror
Having worked some with code generation, it does seem to take a different tack.
Where I've used it we've tried to ensure the interface was clear & well documented, but ignored the obscure code within. So far its worked out well.
I think it depends on the tool.
I'd hate to think my text editor was pay per use.
I'd rather my compiler wasn't pay per use, especially if I needed to compile to debug.
But I saw one tool where they wanted $150,000 per development seat. It was a tool I could see myself using 3-4 times / year. Each time it would save me hundreds of hours of development, but I couldn't justify buying it, nor the $40,000 in annual maintenance.
Now that's something I could see paying per use.
I don't know about ArgoML or the latest version of Rational specifically.
The last time I looked at UML it had 2 drawbacks compared with Stateflow:
Stateflow makes code that can pretty hard to follow, but hopefully you've debugged before generating code and hopefully it generated C code faithful to your design.
Because I've occasionally seen things about Executable UML, I've always assumed there was some core deficiency to UML that prevented it from being directly compiled.
Looking over the Rational Rose Technical Developer product, they include the blurb Runtime model execution, fully executable code generation and visual debugging. so this product may now do what I ask of it.
I didn't find the paragraph at Argo about code generation.
The website for the book Executable UML has exercises based on BridgePoint by Project Technology. Just to throw another option out there.
The one think I always liked about The Mathworks suite was the ability to build dynamic models of the environment the code is meant to operate in. This is so much richer and easier than building test scripts and simple test benches. They have good tools for modelling the domain I work in, but I wouldn't find them useful if I were building a web app. But if I were building a web app, I'd look for a tool that lets me simulate a dynamic environment there as well.
Yes, it is going to be pricey. Somewhere on the order of $20k for a development seat.
The learning curve is going to depend on what you want to do with it. Building charts in Stateflow is probably like Go, an afternoon to learn but a lifetime to master. There are only about 4 or 5 graphical elements to understand, and the syntax for actions & conditions is very C like. Learning to make good charts can be difficult, but I'd assumed you were already looking for that challenge if you were asking for a flowcharting language.
The learning curve is really going to kick in when you want to integrate the C code from your chart with the rest of your project.
As to users, I know there are some. The academic users (the pricing is much different for a university) seem to post to comp.soft-sys.matlab, while the commercial users complain directly to The Mathworks.
If you're looking for something a little cheaper, you might want to check into Ptolemy from Berkeley. The earlier version could do code generation from flow charts, but that hasn't quite made its way into the rewrite Ptolemy II.
Where's my compilable flowchart?
I believe this is what you're looking for:
Stateflow Coder
Everything I've seen appears to be quoting a May 5, 2004 story that appeared in the New York Times.
A search of the archives turned up:
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F40 B13FA35590C768CDDAC0894DC404482
Unfortunately, articles more than 5 days old are not available to free subscribers.
Searching Google, there appears to be a copy of the article available at:
http://www.rawfoodinfo.com/articles/art_Disneyforb ids.html
The only quote mentioning tax breaks appears to come from Ari Emanuel, Michael Moore's agent. Everything else on the 'net appears to eventually point back to this article.
Mr. Moore's agent, Ari Emanuel, said Michael D. Eisner, Disney's chief executive, asked him last spring to pull out of the deal with Miramax. Mr. Emanuel said Mr. Eisner expressed particular concern that it would endanger tax breaks Disney receives for its theme park, hotels and other ventures in Florida, where Mr. Bush's brother, Jeb, is governor.
So did Mr. Emanuel manufacture this controversy, or did Disney change their story? This is so twisted, I can't say. But I agree no reporter has ever gotten a quote from a Disney executive saying tax breaks were the reason.
I'm not sure why Disney cares, as every conservative should already be boycotting them for offering domestic partner benefits.
http://www.mysql.com/products/licensing.html
From what I've heard, MySQL is pretty strict about people trying to distribute software not under the GPL without a paying for a commercial license.
I think this sentance says it best:
(We also believe that if you have strong reasons not to go GPL, you also have the monetary means to purchase commercial licences.)
You may be right about being able to write a GPL driver and leave the rest of the application non-GPL, but while the MySQL page never states that this is unacceptable, they do say:
If you use MySQL Software within your organisation and you don't want to risk it falling under the GPL license, you are welcome to purchase a commercial license.
That is NOT how someone gets comfortable with a system. They get comfortable by trying out a number of different tasks that come up from day to day. At least that's how I got comfortable with Linux. I downloaded it one day, and played with it. I tried to surf the web. I tried to set up X. I didn't understand it right away, and so I booted into Windows and did what needed to be done. Eventually I learned more and my computer spent most of its time booted there.
Compare that to the Mac. I have spend $2-$3k just to get my foot in the door. If I don't do that, all I know is its supposed to be great, but when my boss asks, "Well Bob, in your experience is the Mac the best choice?" I can't say yes because I've don't have any experience with it.
Everything else has either been cheap enough to play with, or sold as "Just like" something cheap enough to play with.
I've been happy with McLeodUSA for the past year after I switched because SBC couldn't figure out how to charge a credit card and MCI hit me with hidden charges. Not sure what will happen soon, as Illinois just passed a law to allow SBC to charge another $10/month per subscriber so they don't lose so many customers.
800 Gallons of Ethanol/acre
US & Canada = 18.8 million square miles
1 acre = 0.0015625 square mile
800 * 18,800,000 / 0.0015625 = 9,625,600,000,000 gallons
Now of course, ethanol isn't as dense as crude oil.
Crude Oil has 6 million BTUs/barrel, ethanol has 3.7 (From the same source, the US uses 1 million BTU every 1.1 days per capita.)
1 barrel = 42 gallons
So converting from gallons of ethanol to the equivalent barrels of oil:
9,625,600,000,000 * 3.7 / 6 / 42 = 141,328,253,968.254
the maximum average oil imports from February 1999 to February 2001 was 10,000 barrels / day.
This is 3,650,000 barrels per year. Or 0.002% of the theoretical maximum energy production of North America.
Of course, this doesn't allow any room for food, factories, homes, or people. Or account for mountains, lakes, and poor soil. But it is reassuring. Because if we were using more energy than we could ever produce in our wildest dreams, we would hit that wall extremely hard when the oil runs out.
So my preferred scheme for this is...
Satelite 1: Orbiting the Sun Mercury distance and focusing sunlight on...
Satelite 2: Orbiting the Sun Earth distance and transmitting the energy to...
Satelite 3: Orbiting the Earth and beaming the power to the ground station.
Figure this way you could collect large amounts of energy in a small space, while limiting the ability to boil away the oceans.
This is exactly what's needed. Ideally I could download a small utility off the web that quickly checks what libraries I have installed, tells me where to get the ones that are missing, and can even grab the tar/rpm/deb and install it for me if I have the root password. All that could be done in stages if it gets accepted.
Does anybody remember when PCs were extrememly non-standard, and the game market was going nowhere fast? CGA/EGA/VGA, Adlib/SB/Offbrand, DOS/DRDOS/Win3.1, everything from only 360k floppies to 40M hard drives, CPUs from 8088s to 386DXs. I had a PCjr, and had the fun of trying to find games that knew how to address its oddly placed video memory. Then Microsoft and Intel sat down and defined the Multimedia PC standard. I think all version 1 mandated was an Adlib or SB soundcard. But every year or two they released a new one, not forward looking so much as raising minimum standards. And that seemed to provide a nice solid base.
Of course MS replaced this process with ready to run on Windows and increasing levels of DirectX when 3D began to splinter. Hmm, maybe the people saying "Screw the games, go buy a Dreamcast!" have the right idea.
As mentioned, anything with manual centralization can be attacked legally. The people running the root servers could be forced to take them down. What if the system was self organizing. Nobody would decide to become root servers, it would just happen if they had the resources. Depending on the bandwidth and computer, the computer would be placed somewhere in the heirarchy, which could reorganize itself as needed. Possibly this could extend to caching, preventing the problem of not enough people sharing. I just wonder if there are enough people with good connections for this to work. If there are only 20 people with the necessary connections willing to do this, the RIAA can still easily cripple the network.
> Capital, as used in economics, is money...
Capital is also all other property owned by the company which can be used for production. Thus factories, lab equipment, and other items not consumed in production are capital. Slightly farther afield, other intangibles may also be considered capital. If a trademark is well regarded, the control of that trademark is capital. Some companies now consider the knowledge and abilities of their workers as capital, and are trying to create human resource policies capabale of conserving it.
From the review, it appears the book is trying to say natural resources should be considered capital, and efforts should be made to increase it.
This makes sense because capital is used to produce other things. Each year x% of all capital produces consumables and (100-x)% generates more capital. The next year you have more capital and so more is produced. If you can find some way to include the value of natural capital, users would have to pay the owner for its use.
How those payments start to flow about is rather difficult, and would probably involve many lawsuits as ownership is distributed. For example, does the owner of a chunk of land (who may or may not own mineral rights, and certainly doesn't own the rights to the airspace above) also own the oxygen productivity of the land? If he doesn't, he'd have to pay the owner (most likely the government) to pave over the field. If he does, the oxygen users (most likely everyone as represented by the government) would have to pay him a yearly allowance.
Thickness won't help because you're on the inside. The thickness below you pulls you down, but the thickness (and the star) above you pull you up.
If it spins at a faster than orbiting rate, you will spin at a faster than orbiting rate, some force other than gravity will need to push against your feet. In the equitorial regions, this could probably nicely replace gravity. Then you'd have a "planet" of constantly varying gravity. You could dispose of trash by pushing it towards the poles until it falls into the sun. If you didn't need to conserve the material.
I've seen the dash mounted DVD player for sale in the U.S., at a high end A/V store over 6 months ago.
At my university, they provide a large software library on the local net for student use. But they needed some way to ensure it just couldn't be copied to whomever, including former students taking their computer & unlicensed software with them when they leave.
In order to run any of this software, you have to run a key-client concurrently. As the software runs, it checks for a valid license through the key-client. If you shut the key-client down or lose your connection to the server, the software shuts down as well.
Yes, you can filter out the key packets, but that just disables your software. You can crack the software and avoid the key, but that's violating the license, and you should have just pirated it in the first place, because you're still getting fined/going to jail.
I've seen a number of good comments on how to talk to your local legistlator, but how much good will this actually do? You're one in 10,000, and may not have even voted in the last election. (Around here they don't track who you voted for, but do track if you voted. And if you didn't...oh well.)
Write a letter to the editor of your local paper, and remember that Joe Smith will be reading it, so sensationalism sells. Even better, this is sweeps month. All the local news organisations are looking for stories to get people's attention. What better than a law that gives corporations rights to our first-borns?
The arguements against blocking software are highly technical, while the arguements for it are emotional. The essay seemed to lament the majority being swayed by emotional issues, and this post seemed to point out this isn't going to change. An equally emotional counter-arguement is necessary, not more facts and figures.
I didn't know people were allowed to do that anymore. I've always tried to stay very far away at work.
I use two search engines. Google and the text-only Altavista boolean search. As long as I can link directly to these two pages, I don't care what happens to the front end.
The average monitor is 75DPI. The average ink-jet is 300DPI, the average laser 600DPI. It is easier to read a piece of paper than a screen.
Also, personally I tend to use my finger to mark where I am, something nearly impossible to do on a screen.
Assuming that there is no soul granting God, it should be possible to create a computer that mimics the mind. (Boiled down it can't be anything more than algorithms. The difficulty will be in providing a similar input environment.)
The dull question is whether this silicon brain will be better able to interface with the dumb super calculator than our own. The physical connections will be easier, but the information connections may still be impossible. If it is, it will be better at physics and calculus and computer programming. So what.
It seems that if silicon life will ever rival the complexity of carbon life, we will have to create environments that allow natural selection to do most of the work for us. These environments are the key, because the environment determines the characteristics of the resulting organism.
The basic pressure driving organic evolution is the ability of an attribute to allow its underlying gene to reach the next generation. Because of this the gene needs to create an organism that sucessfully eats and breeds, living long enough to maximize successful children.
This same survival selector may be used in some silicon experiments, but in others survival depends on the organisms ability to solve a problem. Right now we are able to shape A-life because we create the means of reproduction.
At the moment we are selecting for the ability to recognize a signal, and other basic tasks. What if we are able to keep control of the process long enough to control selection of primitive social organizations? We could become the all-knowing judgemental god, stamping out evil whereever it occurs. And in the end we may have created heirs.
Yes, there are lots of reasons why we will have to lose control long before A-life reaches the social stage. And as soon as we lose control of reproduction, we lose fine grained control. Though we may still be able to send computer virii through environments we feel are supporting the wrong type of development.
Think in a thousand years silicon men will sit around their dorm room, and wonder how life started. Two people sitting across the table discussing if the weather conditions had ever been right to allow primitive nanites to develop, or if some god had to be involved.