I think you're confused. That is not specific to OSX; every suspend, MUST save every application down to the instruction running. If it did not, it would be highly likely that everything you were running would crash. Programs don't cope very well if you don't execute bits of it at random.
I would say that if it is even feasible that every check in could include a unit test then you are checking in far too infrequently.
Move to a decent version control system - git is my favourite, but I'm sure mercurial, darcs or bzr-ng would be fine too.
I used to use version control only to check in large relatively complete changes. I now realise that that was completely missing the point. I now constantly check in, every patch is small and easily read. The description that goes with it is easy to write because the patch is small; best of all though is that merging and cherry picking are suddenly hugely powerful because you can be very precise with which patches you use.
Oh - and if management ever says "and what do you do exactly"; it's lots of fun to supply a log dump that tells them.:-)
Depends how close you are to it. Your eye would have no trouble seeing a feature that is 0.1mm. A typical technical pen set would have the following nib sizes: 0.13, 0.18, 0.25, 0.35, 0.5, 0.7, 1.0, 1.5, and 2.0.
I think you misunderstand me: I wasn't talking about "the web" the technology, I was talking about "the web" the information.
This is nothing like making your desktop go 3D - which is one program, deployed many times. This is like rewriting every document you and everyone else has ever written using your "desktop".
My contention is that there will be no sudden leap to this new 3D web, because every website out there is already implemented. You've got to persuade an awful lot of people to remake their website.
Have a look at how fast the IPv4 to IPv6 switchover is going - and that is a small change relative to changing all the content on the Internet.
Will people stop confusing the word "quantum" with "small"?
A quantum leap does not mean "the smallest possible leap"; it just so happens it is the smallest possible leap. However, it means a jump from one discrete energy level to another, without passing through anything in between.
To me, that makes "a quantum leap in technology" a perfectly resonable metaphor. Albeit completely overused by marketing droids.
You're correct I forgot rolling resistance (however, it was only a back-of-the-envelope calculation to see if the numbers where absolutely crazy).
However, the energy losses I imagined would be taken care of by regenerative breaking. The energy required to get up to 55mph would be gained back when you drop back to zero (excepting the losses of course). I'm not really sure why a bump in the road would lose you energy - if you used magnetic suspension, you could probably gain some energy from the bump.
Please bear in mind, given that most of my figures are guessed, it seemed a little bit pedantic for me to go into too much detail.
I meant to write this the first time the article appeared:-) I had originally thought that it wasn't going to work out; but getting to the end, it turned out they did. Oh well - now I've done it, you might be interested... for your viewing pleasure...
Supposition: 500 miles on a 5 minute charge, with $9 worth of electricity.
$9 worth of electricity = 100kWh 100kWh = 360 megajoules 500 miles = 804 kilometres
Force = Energy / distance
= 360e6 / 804e3
= 447 Newtons
(of course the above is only the average force available for that journey)
Which is well within the average 447 available; and gives scope for losses. So; it turns out it's not crazy to suggest you can get 500 miles on $9 worth of electricity.
Sure, you can do with Python or Perl the same you could do with BASIC twenty years ago
Which is exactly my point. The article was blaming lack of access in modern times, for the reason that children don't code. That assertion is blatently untrue.
The problem is (and has always been) one of motivation. Sufficiently interested children will not be stopped. Making interested children is what the article should have been about.
What a load of rubbish. apt-get install \
bash \
python \
gambas2 \
kturtle \
fp-compiler fp-units-base \
php5-cli
The reason children don't code (if that is even true, as it's a completely unsubstantiated assertion) is because they don't want to.
I started programming when I was ten, and I did it by hand-converting Z80 assembly language to machine code and then used BASIC poke commands to write them into memory. I had to work hard to scrape a C compiler from somewhere and that was heaven.
Today it is a million times easier to write a program if you wanted to. Blame ease-of-use culture; blame video games; blame stupid parents; but blaming the lack of access to programming languages is ridiculous to say the least.
I don't dedicate huge quantities of my time to gaming, so when I do I want it to be fun. After playing Burnout: Revenge for half an hour, I realised that I was going to have to go through the whole gradual-collection-of-cool-cars thing just like with Burnout 3; and that it wasn't going to be any fun doing so. So I stopped after half an hour and haven't played it since.
Knights of the old Republic on the other hand is rewarding every time. I'm not putting huge effort in, but there is something to do every time I switch it on. It doesn't require that I have spent X hours in order that this time it's fun.
It's obviously a difficult balance to achieve, but I don't believe that a game should be "hard" in order that it's fun.
A game which had huge potential - "Destroy All Humans" - and I was loving, got bogged down in impossibly difficult levels that I was playing over and over. All I wanted to do was toss tanks around and blow stuff up; the constantly regenerating bad (good) guys made it all feel a bit pointless - there was effectively no way to win. I wanted to obliterate everyone on a level and survey my handywork with a happy grin.
Thinking about it, I think the games I enjoy most are those that have a progression, but are fairly easy. If I have to play a section more than once, then I'm working, not playing.
Multiplayer is a different thing completely of course. There, the goal is to laugh while destroying friends. A friend and I still get original Worms out on the playstation regularly. (Why has no one made classic worms for a modern console - 3D worms is not welcome)
In that case, why is the first security measure the airports in the UK introduced to ban hand luggage? If we're worried about bombs, why does it matter whether the bomb is hand luggage or cargo?
At the time, Borland (or maybe Watcom) had the best C++ compilers. They also had a wonderfully designed library in the form of TurboVision for doing console applications with menus and windows. However, time has passed, GCC is a damned fine compiler and Qt is a superb UI framework (et al). If Borland wanted to join in this game they should have open sourced their compiler a long time ago. Too little, too late I'm afraid.
It's a shame really, Borland were my favourite company, then Philip Kahn left, they changed their name to Inprise and all their top developers went to Microsoft.
I agree with you in principle: these girls are not the innocents they are made out to be (in fact, children in general are a lot less innocent than the media would have us believe - try shifting some tresspassing nine year olds and they will all shout "you can't do anything to me, I'll say you hit me"). However, I think that the punishment of death for being petty and vindictive is a little extreme. She should have known better, yes, but that doesn't mean she deserves death.
I don't think the ISPs have figured it out yet - they do not represent the value of the Internet, they are not the ones with the power.
If I were a content provider, say Google, and verizon said "give us money all we'll lower the speed of your connections" I'd say "get bent". Then I would walk to my firewall and block Verizon's subnet from accessing my lovely Google search engine. Then wait a week, and see if Verizon would like to talk about selective traffic control.
My advice to content providers: respond in kind - they are your servers and you can do what you like with them. The ISPs have nothing to sell without you, and they've forgotten that.
No it's not. Every PCI device has a unique number assigned to it, made up of a vendor code and a product number. The pciids project maintains a useful list of these IDs.
In addition, each device plugged in to your system gets a PCI address, but that is entirely dependent on your particular system.
Run "lspci -vv" one day and you can have a look at the information supplied.
I've recently bought a Belkin card which is based on a RaLink chip. Debian doesn't have binaries, but that's because they would need a binary package for each driver for each kernel in the archive - completely pointless considering that it's a snap to make your own binary with instructions from the driver homepage.
Which gets the correct kernel headers for you, builds the driver, and installs it.
The Debian guys do a very good job of this sort of thing, the problem I've found is that no one actually knows how easy they've made it. If you don't know about module-assistant you can be tempted to download source, and kernels and do all your own compilation.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you're confused. That is not specific to OSX; every suspend, MUST save every application down to the instruction running. If it did not, it would be highly likely that everything you were running would crash. Programs don't cope very well if you don't execute bits of it at random.
Excellent post. Just wanted to correct a little fault in your English, the phrase is "for all intents and purposes", not "for all intensive purposes".
I would say that if it is even feasible that every check in could include a unit test then you are checking in far too infrequently.
:-)
Move to a decent version control system - git is my favourite, but I'm sure mercurial, darcs or bzr-ng would be fine too.
I used to use version control only to check in large relatively complete changes. I now realise that that was completely missing the point. I now constantly check in, every patch is small and easily read. The description that goes with it is easy to write because the patch is small; best of all though is that merging and cherry picking are suddenly hugely powerful because you can be very precise with which patches you use.
Oh - and if management ever says "and what do you do exactly"; it's lots of fun to supply a log dump that tells them.
Depends how close you are to it. Your eye would have no trouble seeing a feature that is 0.1mm. A typical technical pen set would have the following nib sizes: 0.13, 0.18, 0.25, 0.35, 0.5, 0.7, 1.0, 1.5, and 2.0.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_pen
I think you misunderstand me: I wasn't talking about "the web" the technology, I was talking about "the web" the information.
This is nothing like making your desktop go 3D - which is one program, deployed many times. This is like rewriting every document you and everyone else has ever written using your "desktop".
My contention is that there will be no sudden leap to this new 3D web, because every website out there is already implemented. You've got to persuade an awful lot of people to remake their website.
Have a look at how fast the IPv4 to IPv6 switchover is going - and that is a small change relative to changing all the content on the Internet.
The current web represents a huge investment in time, effort and money. It's not going anywhere for a long time.
Will people stop confusing the word "quantum" with "small"?
A quantum leap does not mean "the smallest possible leap"; it just so happens it is the smallest possible leap. However, it means a jump from one discrete energy level to another, without passing through anything in between.
To me, that makes "a quantum leap in technology" a perfectly resonable metaphor. Albeit completely overused by marketing droids.
You're correct I forgot rolling resistance (however, it was only a back-of-the-envelope calculation to see if the numbers where absolutely crazy).
However, the energy losses I imagined would be taken care of by regenerative breaking. The energy required to get up to 55mph would be gained back when you drop back to zero (excepting the losses of course). I'm not really sure why a bump in the road would lose you energy - if you used magnetic suspension, you could probably gain some energy from the bump.
Please bear in mind, given that most of my figures are guessed, it seemed a little bit pedantic for me to go into too much detail.
I meant to write this the first time the article appeared :-) I had originally thought that it wasn't going to work out; but getting to the end, it turned out they did. Oh well - now I've done it, you might be interested... for your viewing pleasure...
Supposition: 500 miles on a 5 minute charge, with $9 worth of electricity.
$9 worth of electricity = 100kWh
100kWh = 360 megajoules
500 miles = 804 kilometres
Force = Energy / distance
= 360e6 / 804e3
= 447 Newtons
(of course the above is only the average force available for that journey)
F_drag = 1/2 * Drag_Coefficient * Cross_Section * AirDensity * Velocity^2
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drag_coefficient gives Drag as around 0.3 for an average car. Cross-section is probably about 3 square metres.
F_drag = 0.5 * 0.3 * 3 * 1.29 * v^2
= 0.581 v^2
55 mph = 24 m/s
F_drag_55 = 334 Newtons
Which is well within the average 447 available; and gives scope for losses. So; it turns out it's not crazy to suggest you can get 500 miles on $9 worth of electricity.
I wonder how far my house would travel a month...
The huge startup cost of the PS3 means that you have to spend an enormous amount to really reduce the effect of that first purchase.
The phrase is "I'd just as soon not".
Which is exactly my point. The article was blaming lack of access in modern times, for the reason that children don't code. That assertion is blatently untrue.
The problem is (and has always been) one of motivation. Sufficiently interested children will not be stopped. Making interested children is what the article should have been about.
What a load of rubbish.
apt-get install \
bash \
python \
gambas2 \
kturtle \
fp-compiler fp-units-base \
php5-cli
The reason children don't code (if that is even true, as it's a completely unsubstantiated assertion) is because they don't want to.
I started programming when I was ten, and I did it by hand-converting Z80 assembly language to machine code and then used BASIC poke commands to write them into memory. I had to work hard to scrape a C compiler from somewhere and that was heaven.
Today it is a million times easier to write a program if you wanted to. Blame ease-of-use culture; blame video games; blame stupid parents; but blaming the lack of access to programming languages is ridiculous to say the least.
I don't dedicate huge quantities of my time to gaming, so when I do I want it to be fun. After playing Burnout: Revenge for half an hour, I realised that I was going to have to go through the whole gradual-collection-of-cool-cars thing just like with Burnout 3; and that it wasn't going to be any fun doing so. So I stopped after half an hour and haven't played it since.
Knights of the old Republic on the other hand is rewarding every time. I'm not putting huge effort in, but there is something to do every time I switch it on. It doesn't require that I have spent X hours in order that this time it's fun.
It's obviously a difficult balance to achieve, but I don't believe that a game should be "hard" in order that it's fun.
A game which had huge potential - "Destroy All Humans" - and I was loving, got bogged down in impossibly difficult levels that I was playing over and over. All I wanted to do was toss tanks around and blow stuff up; the constantly regenerating bad (good) guys made it all feel a bit pointless - there was effectively no way to win. I wanted to obliterate everyone on a level and survey my handywork with a happy grin.
Thinking about it, I think the games I enjoy most are those that have a progression, but are fairly easy. If I have to play a section more than once, then I'm working, not playing.
Multiplayer is a different thing completely of course. There, the goal is to laugh while destroying friends. A friend and I still get original Worms out on the playstation regularly. (Why has no one made classic worms for a modern console - 3D worms is not welcome)
It's been a while since chemistry class but: isn't an explosion by definition an exothermic reaction :-)
In that case, why is the first security measure the airports in the UK introduced to ban hand luggage? If we're worried about bombs, why does it matter whether the bomb is hand luggage or cargo?
I know! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_theatre
Me too - in case anyone is interested, there is a Borland colour scheme for vim available from http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=92 . I can't live without it.
At the time, Borland (or maybe Watcom) had the best C++ compilers. They also had a wonderfully designed library in the form of TurboVision for doing console applications with menus and windows. However, time has passed, GCC is a damned fine compiler and Qt is a superb UI framework (et al). If Borland wanted to join in this game they should have open sourced their compiler a long time ago. Too little, too late I'm afraid.
It's a shame really, Borland were my favourite company, then Philip Kahn left, they changed their name to Inprise and all their top developers went to Microsoft.
I agree with you in principle: these girls are not the innocents they are made out to be (in fact, children in general are a lot less innocent than the media would have us believe - try shifting some tresspassing nine year olds and they will all shout "you can't do anything to me, I'll say you hit me"). However, I think that the punishment of death for being petty and vindictive is a little extreme. She should have known better, yes, but that doesn't mean she deserves death.
I don't think the ISPs have figured it out yet - they do not represent the value of the Internet, they are not the ones with the power.
If I were a content provider, say Google, and verizon said "give us money all we'll lower the speed of your connections" I'd say "get bent". Then I would walk to my firewall and block Verizon's subnet from accessing my lovely Google search engine. Then wait a week, and see if Verizon would like to talk about selective traffic control.
My advice to content providers: respond in kind - they are your servers and you can do what you like with them. The ISPs have nothing to sell without you, and they've forgotten that.
80-90MB? Not if you use a decent distribution that has modularised the binaries:
$ apt-cache show openoffice.org-writer
Package: openoffice.org-writer
Installed-Size: 10944
Version: 2.0.2-3
Size: 4945590
5 MB download, 10 MB install. Not that painful really.
No it's not. Every PCI device has a unique number assigned to it, made up of a vendor code and a product number. The pciids project maintains a useful list of these IDs.
In addition, each device plugged in to your system gets a PCI address, but that is entirely dependent on your particular system.
Run "lspci -vv" one day and you can have a look at the information supplied.
It boils down toWhich gets the correct kernel headers for you, builds the driver, and installs it.
The Debian guys do a very good job of this sort of thing, the problem I've found is that no one actually knows how easy they've made it. If you don't know about module-assistant you can be tempted to download source, and kernels and do all your own compilation.
It sounds like you aren't aware that time on mainframes was often leased in the past? Making the comparison reasonably valid.
No they don't.