Dr. Dobbs Journal of Computer Calisthenics and Orthodontia
"Running Light without OverByte"
"Dobbs" was a synthetic name, not a single individual. They got rid of the "Orthodontia" part because they claimed too many Dentists were inquiring, thinking it was of professional interest to them.
Yeah these programmers today are spoiled little brats! Multicores, thousands of MB of memory? trying having to PEEK and POKE because every single fricking BYTE costs! Looking at the specs of my first PC and you could a couple hundred emulated versions of it on your average dumpster dived PC.
The "old media format" that killed it for me was loss of the Dead Tree option, although in DDJ's case, much of the charm went out when they stopped "Running light without overbyte".
I have the first several years of DDJ as collected volumes and a few more as loose issues. From back in the day when bare-metal programming was still common and we didn't have a vast universe of ready-made software solutions at hand. There's some interesting stuff in there.
Once it shifted to other topics, I dropped my subscription and only rarely glanced at DDJ.
I read fiction and a few reference manuals on my tablet. I don't like to read magazines there, since part of the charm of a dead-tree magazine is just flipping it open and seeing what's on random pages, piquing my interest in things that (at the moment) have no immediate practical application for me. The closest I can come to that sort of thing outside a magazine is a Wikipedia article, but I don't surf Wikipedia with that sort of spontanaity.
It takes time to prepare, edit and produce a magazine article and to fit it into the publishing schedule. If I have a specific need to read on a given topic, I just go to the sources themselves or find a good blog. They're going to be more up-to-date.
LibreOffice isn't intended to be simply a slavish function-by-function replacement for MS Office. Not everything MS Office does is done well.
Actually, MS Office has some real warts inside. Look at a table in its RTF form and you can see one of the most blatant, as the "table" isn't really a table.
If you're used to doing things one way, even a superior replacement is likely to offend. Sometimes, eventually, you may come to prefer the new way, though.
Working with framed objects in LibreOffice is not intuitive. It has more precision of placement and more options (for example, text wrapping/overlay) than a simple "slam-image-here" sort of paste.
I too, find it irritating when all I want is a brain-dead way of inserting images. But I eventually, I supposed I'll break down and RTFM.
About 30 years back, the US border with Canada was more or less a line drawn with chalk and the Mexican border was not much less porous itself. Most of the Carribean was easy-entry as well, excepting, of course Cuba.
Then after 9/11, the US began to build its version of the Berlin wall.
It's hard to remember that the original reason for beefing up the fences and guarding them with deadly force was fear that brown-skinned terrorists should slip over it. We got all caught up in the illegal-immigrants-taking-our-jobs meme, instead.
It is not strictly true that language controls thought, as George Orwell posited and untold proponents of Politically Correct speech believe. You can ask no better example of that, than all the permutations of meaning that the word "nice" has had over time - some of them flattering, some insulting.
However, language does provide viewpoints. English and Spanish are quite different in many ways, but an astounding number of Spanish and English idioms translate back and forth almost word for word.
German, on the other hand. despite its closer kinship, has some real conceptual differences. Which is why even English speakers use terms like Schadenfreude or Weltschmerz. Similarly with French and so forth.
To eliminate these alternative cultures - or mindsets or whatever - is much the same thing as eliminating colors on an artist's palette. You can still paint, but the results will be more constrained.
I have an accounting system. Doesn't mean I like my online account reports to be out of sync with them.
Nor does it mean that when I want to transfer money from one account to another that that money is effectively useless until the float period has passed.
The banks love float. That's why they had to be bludgeoned into shorter float times.
Personal users, not so much. When I transfer money, I'm usually counting on the money to go where it needs to be ASAP rather than gumming up my accounts. If I wanted "float", I'd simply delay when I did the transfer.
The Cronulla race riot station? I suggest trying the ABC, channel 7, channel 9, channel 10, sky, any newspaper website, any other radio station etc etc first. It may be less entertaining from another source but you'll get more accuracy.
Ah yes. The old "I know what part of the store the TVs are in without looking". I don't miss it. Although I always figured that the ringing was resonance from the picture tube, not the actual transformer.
I'll confess to listening to MP3s on a regular basis. FM radio's cutoff is about 15 KHz, in part because the pilot signal used for stereo demodulation is 18KHz. Or was it 22? Long time since I needed to know.
I guess the real reason why I prefer CD to vinyl is that most pops and clicks on scratched vinyl are heavily laden with high frequencies. And, being sensitive to higher frequences, that makes them more annoying to me.
Technically correct, but my hearing exceeds 15KHz - unusally good for humans - whereas the step period for digital CD is 40KHz, IIRC. And, as others have mentioned, even if all other things remained equal, the various inductive and capactive elements in the system - including the inertia of the speaker coil and membranes themselves - are likely to render the difference moot.
The true test isn't in displaying what comes off the CD, it's displaying what's actually arrriving at people's ears. Of course, to graph that properly, I'd want a microphone that could linearly transcribe input over the full dynamic range at frequencies at at least 100 KHz.
When vinyl was the rage, a good Hi-Fi system was rated from 20Hz to 20KHz. Anything outside of that wasn't guaranteed.
The software I use most often actually works best on a system thats 1600x1200 or some similar aspect. The prevalence of 1080p has been a real pain. But rotating to portrait mode would be worse.
That particular product, incidentally, already allows putting controls in any of the 4 borders and I do have some of them running down the side.
Websites often are either slideshows, in which case orientation isn't really an issue or they are long, narrow things that run down like a papyrus scroll. For that sort of thing, portrait is not a bad idea. I read most websites on my tablet in portrait.
Unfortunately, I prefer the handly 7-inch one-hand tablet and not all "mobile" websites are really "mobile" enough for that screen size.
SystemD was cool and innovative back then. It is now cool to hate and bash it 3 months ago from an article posted here.
Now you're a troll if you talk about benefits and insightful for stiring misgivings. It is political as no one gave a crap until recently
Well, I never gave a crap until it started biting me on the ass.
What inflamed me was people trying to convince me that I was an ungratefui idiot because I like my logfiles out in the open where they can be read without intermediate agencies. Having already endured their approach on other systems.
I'm afraid you vastly underestimate the amount of inconvenience most people will endure when dealing with a big company. They'll complain a little bit, then drag out their wallets, just like they do with overpriced cable services.
Because it will be too inconvenient for them to install Linux when Windows is already on the box.
I'm sorry, I don't rent my operating systems. Or my applications for that matter.
I wonder how this could possibly work in the retail channel. Do you buy a PC with a free 1 year subscription to Windows 10 and Office? And then after that year it runs in safe mode 640x480 until you pony up?
Every version of Windows since Windows 2000 has been chatty with Daddy Bill via the Internet. A small adjustment: stay paid up or Windows stops working. Or. if you want to work off-grid, they could offer a long-term lease for a higher fee where once a year you'd either dial in or receive a new activation key to type in.
Red Hat's model is different, I believe. You don't have to activate RHEL, because the fees are for support. The average Windows home user gets local support and only updates come from Microsoft, however, so I doubt that Microsoft could leverage that model for the mass market.
The thing is, if you use structures with bit fields, C will not optimize the manipulations with them correctly. So you end up doing a lot of hand-holding in driver development in C. You have to be very much aware of the code being produced. It is not uncommon that you check specific inner loop sections to see exactly how they are being compiled and then based on the result and number of instructions might need to rewrite the C part or even just insert the assembly code directly.
Depends on the compiler and the compile options/pragmas selected.
If you need EXACTLY the certain machine instructions in EXACTLY a specific order, I don't recommend embedded ("inserted") assembler. The overhead of calling out to a separate assembler module isn't that high and you don't muddle the (allegedly) platform-independent C code with non-C code.
If you want to set/check bitfields with attention to concurrency, that support has been in there for a long time. Even back in the 1980s C compilers were incorporating the "volatile" keyword for things like memory-mapped I/O devices and spin locks, optimising bit-set/reset/test operations and the like.
What, "Japanese, Chinese" isn't a single language? Next you'll be telling me "Overseas" isn't a single country!
Sure it is. It's right next to Terrorstan. Which, if we didn't have such weak-kneed Liberal sissies in Congress, we're go in and nuke and end the Terrorist Threat forever!
And why would you make it a tax? If you can identify the rate that other, similarly qualified people are making, then you can just require that H1Bs get paid 10% more than that.
Because IT jobs aren't apples, or apples and oranges, they're an entire mixed fruit basket. As you already noted. We're already supposed to be requiring that H1-Bs be paid according to prevailing wages, but they fudge the "prevailing wages" so that the actual H1-B wage is much less.
If you jack up the tax enough, then you can make the H1-B incentive much less attractive without having to argue case-by-case with the number fudgers.
What's the point? Yes, LED First-World light bulbs are a thing. They can be big and bright and consume significant amounts of power, albeit less than older lamps do.
But I make coffee in the morning using a 3-diode LED reading lamp that's had the same 2 AA batteries powering it for about 18 months now. It's still bright enough to find my way around the kitchen. And, for that matter, to read by.
We're not necessarily talking about turning slum shacks into the Metropolitan Opera house, just adding enough light to be able to do things after the sun sets without either illegally (and unsafely) stealing power from the mains or burning some sort of (probably expensive) oil. As a bonus, the heat output is minimal and the last thing you want in the tropics is usually more heat in the house.
And, charging cellphones from these batteries is a secondary feature. In India, cellphones are literally the poor person's computer.
Slashdot Mirror
More properly:
Dr. Dobbs Journal of Computer Calisthenics and Orthodontia
"Running Light without OverByte"
"Dobbs" was a synthetic name, not a single individual. They got rid of the "Orthodontia" part because they claimed too many Dentists were inquiring, thinking it was of professional interest to them.
Yeah these programmers today are spoiled little brats! Multicores, thousands of MB of memory? trying having to PEEK and POKE because every single fricking BYTE costs! Looking at the specs of my first PC and you could a couple hundred emulated versions of it on your average dumpster dived PC.
I could say the same about my first mainframe.
The "old media format" that killed it for me was loss of the Dead Tree option, although in DDJ's case, much of the charm went out when they stopped "Running light without overbyte".
I have the first several years of DDJ as collected volumes and a few more as loose issues. From back in the day when bare-metal programming was still common and we didn't have a vast universe of ready-made software solutions at hand. There's some interesting stuff in there.
Once it shifted to other topics, I dropped my subscription and only rarely glanced at DDJ.
I read fiction and a few reference manuals on my tablet. I don't like to read magazines there, since part of the charm of a dead-tree magazine is just flipping it open and seeing what's on random pages, piquing my interest in things that (at the moment) have no immediate practical application for me. The closest I can come to that sort of thing outside a magazine is a Wikipedia article, but I don't surf Wikipedia with that sort of spontanaity.
It takes time to prepare, edit and produce a magazine article and to fit it into the publishing schedule. If I have a specific need to read on a given topic, I just go to the sources themselves or find a good blog. They're going to be more up-to-date.
LibreOffice isn't intended to be simply a slavish function-by-function replacement for MS Office. Not everything MS Office does is done well.
Actually, MS Office has some real warts inside. Look at a table in its RTF form and you can see one of the most blatant, as the "table" isn't really a table.
If you're used to doing things one way, even a superior replacement is likely to offend. Sometimes, eventually, you may come to prefer the new way, though.
Working with framed objects in LibreOffice is not intuitive. It has more precision of placement and more options (for example, text wrapping/overlay) than a simple "slam-image-here" sort of paste.
I too, find it irritating when all I want is a brain-dead way of inserting images. But I eventually, I supposed I'll break down and RTFM.
About 30 years back, the US border with Canada was more or less a line drawn with chalk and the Mexican border was not much less porous itself. Most of the Carribean was easy-entry as well, excepting, of course Cuba.
Then after 9/11, the US began to build its version of the Berlin wall.
It's hard to remember that the original reason for beefing up the fences and guarding them with deadly force was fear that brown-skinned terrorists should slip over it. We got all caught up in the illegal-immigrants-taking-our-jobs meme, instead.
It is not strictly true that language controls thought, as George Orwell posited and untold proponents of Politically Correct speech believe. You can ask no better example of that, than all the permutations of meaning that the word "nice" has had over time - some of them flattering, some insulting.
However, language does provide viewpoints. English and Spanish are quite different in many ways, but an astounding number of Spanish and English idioms translate back and forth almost word for word.
German, on the other hand. despite its closer kinship, has some real conceptual differences. Which is why even English speakers use terms like Schadenfreude or Weltschmerz. Similarly with French and so forth.
To eliminate these alternative cultures - or mindsets or whatever - is much the same thing as eliminating colors on an artist's palette. You can still paint, but the results will be more constrained.
We're going to spend more effort on security now.
The new password: S-o-n-y
So you advocate Monoculture?
Let's go one step further. 'Murican! Don't need nothin' else!
I have an accounting system. Doesn't mean I like my online account reports to be out of sync with them.
Nor does it mean that when I want to transfer money from one account to another that that money is effectively useless until the float period has passed.
Sometimes I'm in a hurry.
The banks love float. That's why they had to be bludgeoned into shorter float times.
Personal users, not so much. When I transfer money, I'm usually counting on the money to go where it needs to be ASAP rather than gumming up my accounts. If I wanted "float", I'd simply delay when I did the transfer.
The Cronulla race riot station? I suggest trying the ABC, channel 7, channel 9, channel 10, sky, any newspaper website, any other radio station etc etc first. It may be less entertaining from another source but you'll get more accuracy.
Fox News?
Ah yes. The old "I know what part of the store the TVs are in without looking". I don't miss it. Although I always figured that the ringing was resonance from the picture tube, not the actual transformer.
I'll confess to listening to MP3s on a regular basis. FM radio's cutoff is about 15 KHz, in part because the pilot signal used for stereo demodulation is 18KHz. Or was it 22? Long time since I needed to know.
I guess the real reason why I prefer CD to vinyl is that most pops and clicks on scratched vinyl are heavily laden with high frequencies. And, being sensitive to higher frequences, that makes them more annoying to me.
Technically correct, but my hearing exceeds 15KHz - unusally good for humans - whereas the step period for digital CD is 40KHz, IIRC. And, as others have mentioned, even if all other things remained equal, the various inductive and capactive elements in the system - including the inertia of the speaker coil and membranes themselves - are likely to render the difference moot.
The true test isn't in displaying what comes off the CD, it's displaying what's actually arrriving at people's ears. Of course, to graph that properly, I'd want a microphone that could linearly transcribe input over the full dynamic range at frequencies at at least 100 KHz.
When vinyl was the rage, a good Hi-Fi system was rated from 20Hz to 20KHz. Anything outside of that wasn't guaranteed.
The software I use most often actually works best on a system thats 1600x1200 or some similar aspect. The prevalence of 1080p has been a real pain. But rotating to portrait mode would be worse.
That particular product, incidentally, already allows putting controls in any of the 4 borders and I do have some of them running down the side.
Websites often are either slideshows, in which case orientation isn't really an issue or they are long, narrow things that run down like a papyrus scroll. For that sort of thing, portrait is not a bad idea. I read most websites on my tablet in portrait.
Unfortunately, I prefer the handly 7-inch one-hand tablet and not all "mobile" websites are really "mobile" enough for that screen size.
SystemD was cool and innovative back then. It is now cool to hate and bash it 3 months ago from an article posted here.
Now you're a troll if you talk about benefits and insightful for stiring misgivings. It is political as no one gave a crap until recently
Well, I never gave a crap until it started biting me on the ass.
What inflamed me was people trying to convince me that I was an ungratefui idiot because I like my logfiles out in the open where they can be read without intermediate agencies. Having already endured their approach on other systems.
The parts of the world where an Eye for an Eye is the accepted method are the same parts of the world known for perpetual violent hostility.
Northern Ireland finally wised up.
They didn't have fun, to be sure, but brutal it wasn't.
Lots of things don't leave a mark on you but still result in PTSD. When you deliberately stress a person to that level, it's brutal.
No, the universe extracts the ultimate tax: entropy.
And... We have a winner!
I'm afraid you vastly underestimate the amount of inconvenience most people will endure when dealing with a big company. They'll complain a little bit, then drag out their wallets, just like they do with overpriced cable services.
Because it will be too inconvenient for them to install Linux when Windows is already on the box.
I'm sorry, I don't rent my operating systems. Or my applications for that matter.
I wonder how this could possibly work in the retail channel.
Do you buy a PC with a free 1 year subscription to Windows 10 and Office?
And then after that year it runs in safe mode 640x480 until you pony up?
Every version of Windows since Windows 2000 has been chatty with Daddy Bill via the Internet. A small adjustment: stay paid up or Windows stops working. Or. if you want to work off-grid, they could offer a long-term lease for a higher fee where once a year you'd either dial in or receive a new activation key to type in.
Red Hat's model is different, I believe. You don't have to activate RHEL, because the fees are for support. The average Windows home user gets local support and only updates come from Microsoft, however, so I doubt that Microsoft could leverage that model for the mass market.
The thing is, if you use structures with bit fields, C will not optimize the manipulations with them correctly. So you end up doing a lot of hand-holding in driver development in C. You have to be very much aware of the code being produced. It is not uncommon that you check specific inner loop sections to see exactly how they are being compiled and then based on the result and number of instructions might need to rewrite the C part or even just insert the assembly code directly.
Depends on the compiler and the compile options/pragmas selected.
If you need EXACTLY the certain machine instructions in EXACTLY a specific order, I don't recommend embedded ("inserted") assembler. The overhead of calling out to a separate assembler module isn't that high and you don't muddle the (allegedly) platform-independent C code with non-C code.
If you want to set/check bitfields with attention to concurrency, that support has been in there for a long time. Even back in the 1980s C compilers were incorporating the "volatile" keyword for things like memory-mapped I/O devices and spin locks, optimising bit-set/reset/test operations and the like.
Maybe - just maybe - the economy of free software is based on a different type of currency than what the Fed prints.
Not everything in this Universe is based on Dollars, Pounds, and Euros.
Heck, the Universe itself is a non-profit organization.
What, "Japanese, Chinese" isn't a single language? Next you'll be telling me "Overseas" isn't a single country!
Sure it is. It's right next to Terrorstan. Which, if we didn't have such weak-kneed Liberal sissies in Congress, we're go in and nuke and end the Terrorist Threat forever!
And why would you make it a tax? If you can identify the rate that other, similarly qualified people are making, then you can just require that H1Bs get paid 10% more than that.
Because IT jobs aren't apples, or apples and oranges, they're an entire mixed fruit basket. As you already noted. We're already supposed to be requiring that H1-Bs be paid according to prevailing wages, but they fudge the "prevailing wages" so that the actual H1-B wage is much less.
If you jack up the tax enough, then you can make the H1-B incentive much less attractive without having to argue case-by-case with the number fudgers.
What's the point? Yes, LED First-World light bulbs are a thing. They can be big and bright and consume significant amounts of power, albeit less than older lamps do.
But I make coffee in the morning using a 3-diode LED reading lamp that's had the same 2 AA batteries powering it for about 18 months now. It's still bright enough to find my way around the kitchen. And, for that matter, to read by.
We're not necessarily talking about turning slum shacks into the Metropolitan Opera house, just adding enough light to be able to do things after the sun sets without either illegally (and unsafely) stealing power from the mains or burning some sort of (probably expensive) oil. As a bonus, the heat output is minimal and the last thing you want in the tropics is usually more heat in the house.
And, charging cellphones from these batteries is a secondary feature. In India, cellphones are literally the poor person's computer.