Although it's strongly expected that antimatter will respond to and generate gravity in the same way as normal matter, it's never been experimentally verified because no one's ever had enough antimatter, moving slowly enough, to measure the force of gravity on it. This sounds like it might be a big step towards performing this
experiment.
If it did have negative gravitic mass, that would have all kinds of funky consequences. Maybe we could stabilize wormholes, and get faster-than-light travel and time travel. Fun to think about, anyway.
So a Multia would make a very good Quake or QII
server. The server doesn't need to do 3D graphics, it just needs to track the positions of all the players, rockets, etc. This is FPU-heavy, but the Alpha's FPU was always better than the Pentiums of the time. Although the integer processing wasn't much faster, an Alpha could smoke any Pentium at, e.g., rendering.
I think they were just comment on the people/land ratio.
In a completely misleading fashion. Talking about how much space that people physically stand on is utterly unrelated to how much land a given population needs to support itself.
Imagine you were designing a space station, and specified an adequate air supply for ten people. Then some PHB comes along and says, "I just read that human lungs only hold about three liters of air. You've got thousands of liters there. So we can squeeze a few hundred people on the station, right?"
The upshot is that even with optimistic assumptions, the amount of space people need in support vastly outstrips the mere "living space" (housing) they need. The proportion is sobering.
...opt-out offers are usually ignored; only 2% to 3% of consumers opted out in response to the privacy notices mailed out this past summer, according to federal and industry sources.
I can understand that to an extent. I almost threw out some of those "privacy notices" and I was looking for them! The companies sure didn't want to draw any attention to the possibility of opting out. I had to do phone calls, and postal mail, and sometimes I had to do it once for each account with the same company, and all in all it was a major hassle.
But still, I would have thought that more like 10% would have opted out. Maybe they were too busy sorting through junk mail and spam...
The biggest problem with marketing Linux-based PDAs is the miniscule software catalogue.
Some people have looked into porting POSE (the Palm OS Emulator) to the Zaurus and other Linux handhelds, so that it could run Palm apps. Unfortunately, POSE needs a Palm ROM image, and those are not freely redistributable. You'd need to have a Palm anyway to get it to work. And the speed would likely be atrocious on a 200MHz ARM chip. It's not full speed even on my K6-II 500MHz.
I had a different idea. The Palm SDK's are available, and there's prc-tools and such for Linux. Why not create an emulation layer for the Palm API, like Wine emulates the Windows API on Linux?
The Palm API is better-documented, and much simpler. It'd probably be fairly easy to get to at least Palm OS 2.0 or so. Then you could recompile Palm apps for a Linux PDA. There would be a speed hit due to redirection, but the underlying processor is much faster; overall I'd think there would be a speed boost.
You'd still need to recompile, but there are lots of open-source Palm apps, and lots more developed with Linux; the developers might have good motivation to quickly port their app to a new platform.
I think the endianess is the same, so that's not a problem. To be legally safe there might need to be a clean-room effort, I'm not sure yet, but this'd be a way to get a lot of apps for, e.g., the Zaurus, and quickly.
no. Weird al gets premission first. When he wrote amish paradice, he almost got sued because he forgot to ask.
Coolio's record company said it was all right without asking Coolio. At least, that's Coolio's story. See here, page down to The Coolio Fiasco.
parodies are NOT protected.
Weird Al asks out of politeness, not necessity. Parodies are protected, but as with everything else in the world, enough money can buy a measure of injustice. Buy enough lawyers and you drown the other side in legal proceedings.
PalmOS programs are significantly smaller than WinCE/PPC programs, thus requiring less RAM to begin with.
Yup, CISC vs. RISC. The RISC opcodes do less, so a given program needs more of 'em to get the job done. The biggest program on my Palm is LispME; a full Scheme environment in 137K.
You also missed another benefit of the Palms; sure, you can't play Quake on a 16-33MHz CPU, but the batteries last for at least weeks instead of the hours you get with a 206MHZ CPU...
Re:Your own reference seems to contradict you
on
Black Holes Disputed
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Also, think for a moment that you (YANAAE) are disputing the word of an aerodynamics engineer...
Of course, if the traditional explanation for how a wing works were correct, planes would not be able to fly upside down.
Sure, no one will ever run Quake on any existing Palm, but the Dragonball ain't so bad. For one thing, binaries for CISC processors tend to be smaller than those for RISC processors, which stretches that 8 or 16MB quite a bit. I've barely filled half of my 8MB, and I've got a bunch of street maps loaded up. I think the largest actual code is LispMe, a Scheme environment, and it's ~175K.
Heck, the Mac SE came out in 1987 with an 8MHz 68000 (the Dragonball's model) and 2MB of RAM. It cost almost $3K and sure didn't run for months on two AAA batteries. After I upgraded it to 4MB, I did development on that puppy. (Okay, it had a whopping 40MB hard drive, fine.)
I admit that a high-res screen would be nice. The problem is that small, flat, high-res screens are expensive, and eat power, and probably will stay that way for a while. The ARM processor doesn't eat as much power as others, but 206MHz doesn't come free. I can get 20 hours of continuous operation on my Palm IIIxe; from what I've heard, 4 hours is great for a WinCE device.
Maybe you just need to wait a couple more generations. The first Palms came out in, what, 1997 or so, and were about equivalent to a mid-to-late-80's PC. The WinCE devices of 2001 are about equivalent to an early-to-mid-90's PC. At that rate by 2005 or so you should be able to hold in your hand something roughly equivalent to an average PC of today.
Re:And this is what's wrong with NASA
on
802.11b Space Suits
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Back in 1969, I watched with amazement as we first landed on the moon, and I wondered what would come next. Space colonies? Lunar waste disposal? The discovery of intelligent extraterrestrial life?...if they can't produce useful results, innovations, and profit within a few years, we need to start cutting projects and staff.
But even aside from that, NASA isn't a corporation and not everything should be run as one. You need some "blue-sky" research that isn't focused on a specific goal. You don't know what you'll find, but you'll find something.
Now, incompetence and dumb mistakes (why didn't they use a second intererometer to check?) need to be dealt with, but overall I'd keep NASA. What we really need is some revisions in space law so that private companies can do more space research and run their own launches. Then we get the best of both worlds (no pun intended).
In all likelyhood, they're the equivalent of the underwater soap-carving courses that engineering students take to "satisfy" the arts requirement component of their curriculum.
Oh, come on. I don't know about what it is/was like at your school, but I barely had time for any electives while pursuing my EE Bachelor's. My parents gave me the best possible graduation gift - I didn't have to graduate. I got to take an extra term of whatever I wanted.
I took things that were mostly as far as possible from Engineering. Oh, sure, I took the 1/2 credit Holograms class, and I took the Fantasy as Literature class 'cause the Science Fiction one wasn't offered that term. But I also took Intro to Anthropology, Intro to Women's Studies (boy, that was fun, me being a white male middle-class heterosexual engineer), and Intro to Modern Dance (where I proved that I am an educatable dyslexic in the language of dance, but I showed up every day which was more than some dance enthusiasts did).
Perhaps these were fluff courses. Women's Studies was certainly low on intellectual rigor. But even if that were true (a) they certainly weren't required for an Engineering degree, and (b) they were no more fluff than the joke math and science courses the jocks and humanities types could get away with.
Assuming that history can be changed, yes, someone had to design them. And they did, just in an alternate universe that we didn't get to see.
On the other hand, it is consistent, if you assume that the past cannot be changed, for the technology to have no inventors. Information need not be conserved in time-travel interactions.
This isn't a paradox. A paradox is self-inconsistent. But you can also have consistent loops where effects are their own causes. This is an orthogonal concept, so they have been called "perpendoxes".
Anyway, if you care about this sort of thing, check out my time travel page.
...the T800 lowered itself into the molten steel at the end of T2... How are they gonna explain that one away?
Cyberdyne's offsite backups! Any remotely competent admin will make sure that there are some backups kept somewhere else, in case there's a fire or a rampaging cyborg.
I made the mistake of making my app too portable. It already runs on Linux, Solaris, HP-UX, Tru64, AIX (yuck), and even VMS. Now management wants SGI (easy enough), AS/400 (EBCDIC?!?!?), and OS/2 (should be simple...).
I have a boxed set of OS/2 Warp Connect, and VA C++ Pro 4.0, but boy is documentation of the OS/2 API hard to come by. Not much on the web, either. If I wanted to write an app for OS/2, where the heck would I find any documentation, hints, FAQs, etc.?
So please tell me how a chemical reaction can make statements of truth or falsehood.
Aw, heck, this takes me back to the old days on alt.atheism. For nostalgia's sake...
We don't know precisely how thought and intent arise from chemical processes. But we have ample evidence that they do; just tackle it from the opposite direction. When you take away those chemical reactions, what's left?
When you damage the brain, you damage the capacity for thought. Read "The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat", by Oliver Sachs, a neurologist who writes like he swallowed a poet. It's a collection of case histories that illustrates my point quite well. Some strokes remove the ability of a person to, for example, consider the idea of "left". They only eat the food on the right side of their plates. When asked to imagine walking down a familiar street, they only describe the objects on their right. Ask them to imagine turning around and walking the other way, they forget the buildings they just described and describe the ones they forgot.
Severe enough damage to the visual cortex not only renders a person blind, they lose the entire concept of vision. Words like color, light, etc. don't make sense; they've forgotten not only that they could see but that sight itself exists.
Damage to Broca's and Wernicke's areas of the brain results in different types of aphasia. People with Broca's aphasia have extreme difficulty speaking, but can often understand speech well. People with Wernicke's aphasia can talk, but they don't understand what's said to them and speak in what's called "word salad"; a stream of nonsense. Put two patients with Wernicke's aphasia together and they'll have a complete gibberish conversation, without even apparently realizing that they aren't saying anything.
I could go on and on. The point is, damage the brain and you damage the ability to think, to emote, to be a conscious individual. I don't know of a capacity for thought that can't be destroyed by damaging some area of the brain or another.
To put it bluntly, I don't see what's left for a soul to do. If I have a soul, I can't see why I should care what happens to it after I die; what's left after my brain is destroyed can't be said to be "me" in any reasonable sense.
Now, as I said, we don't know exactly how these chemical processes give rise to consciousness. But even if you didn't know how a car worked, you'd notice that if the engine is removed it won't work anymore.
Because there is no "you" available: there's just a bag of chemical reactions.
Straw man. Obviously there's a "me"; here I am, cogito ergo sum. But I object to your use of the word "just" above.
In one sense, there's no such thing as a "rainbow"; just billions of tiny water droplets of the right size, positioned such that they reflect and refract light in just the right way to separate out the hidden colors in white light. But in another sense, there is such a thing as rainbow; it's just on a different level.
Like a rainbow is something water droplets do, so the mind is what the brain does. The mind is a process. A rainbow is not 'degraded' by having arisen from 'mere' physical processes. Physical processes are ennobled by giving rise to such beauty.
I find people just as valuable as you do (perhaps more; I think we're lucky to be here and that we don't have a cosmic protector so we should be a little more careful and considerate with each other). But I think I've got a clearer conception of what they actually are, and why.
SuperOlympics
Take all the drugs you want, upgrade your genes...
Been done. The Saturday Night Live sketch, "The All-Drug Olympics".
Dennis, getting ready to lift now is Sergei Akmudov of the Soviet Union. His trainer has told me that he's taken antibolic steroids, Novacaine, Nyquil, Darvon, and some sort of fish paralyzer. Also, I believe he's had a few cocktails within the last hour or so. All of this is, of course, perfectly legal at the All-Drug Olympics, in fact it's encouraged. Akmudov is getting set now, he's going for a clean and jerk of over 1500 pounds, which would triple the existing world record.
The September 2000 issue has an article (sadly not in the archives yet) that talked about genetically increasing muscle strength and speed. Humans have two types of muscle, "fast-twitch" (strong and fast, but low-endurance) and "slow-twitch" (slower and weaker, but high-endurance). Some mammals (e.g. rabbits, which have to run fast to escape predators) have an "ultra-fast-twitch" muscle type. Humans have the genes to make it but don't have the gene to make the signal protien that causes it to be produced.
Injecting muscle with genes to produce the activator might lead to super-fast sprinters and amazing power-lifters. Or, people who can tear their tendons out of their bones...
I think it's idiotic that someone can come up with a song or book or program and profit off it for the rest of their lives, and for the lives of their great grandchildren, as seemingly happens with the copyright system today.
Oh, no. That's not how it works. The great-grandchildren of the author don't make any money. The great-grandchildren of the executives of the publishing company who extorted the rights from the author make the money.
Our group inherited some code that used the STL throughout. The authors thought they were doing things portably, but they just wrote a Solaris version and never tried any other platforms.
Porting it to HP-UX was a headache; the STL's on the platforms differed in a multitude of subtle ways. AIX has been even harder (there may be something good about AIX, but I haven't run into it yet).
The STL seems to be about where C was when the ANSI spec first came out. It took several years before code was really portable...
I wrote a non-GUI background app for my company that runs on about six flavors of Unix and VMS as well. I ported about 60% of it to Windows as a knock-off project to help solve a customer problem. Writing portable code is possible, but difficult.
The key thing is that you must develop for at least three platforms from the start. My initial work was on Solaris, Linux, and VMS. This allows you to find (most of) the inconsistencies early and design around them before they get too embedded in the project to ever change.
You also need to identify what things are very likely to change across platforms (in my case it was threads, networking, and file I/O) and abstract those out from the start. Write wrapper functions and use them. Actually, I wish I had wrappered more of the output functions; as it is, the app's a little too dependent on ASCII. Given a few wrapper functions I could easily have supported EBCDIC and Unicode; now it'd be a bear to add that.
Stick with anything ANSI, and POSIX is good. C++ still hasn't finalized everywhere, not like ANSI C. If you write in ANSI C it works darn near everywhere. Windows doesn't do POSIX threads natively, but if you aren't doing anything really weird, wrapper functions can handle that. (All I needed was threads with default stack sizes, and mutexes.)
Not that all the Unixes are the same. AIX in particular has some non-standard silliness in its implementation of pthreads. A comment from my code:
/* AIX documentation is incorrect and its threads don't follow the standard, we have to explicitly declare that the threads aren't detached and can be joined. Worse, they use the nonstandard "PTHREAD_CREATE_UNDETACHED" constant instead of the standard "PTHREAD_CREATE_JOINABLE". */
A few #ifdefs can take care of things like that.
But really, really, really: Port from the start!
For the GUI part of it, make a separate front-end app. Use something portable for that; a library or Java or whatever. Speed is hardly ever a problem for GUI front-ends. Just make it simple and reuse as much code as you can between platforms.
Best Practices says that if your password or keys are compromised, you need to change them as soon as possible.
Of course, the authorities may have already backed up your data. And the new password can be compelled out of you by various means. (So-called "rubber hose cryptography", as in, "We beat the password out of him with a rubber hose.")
So you use a cryptographic filesystem that has several passwords. One retrieves mildly incriminating data, and another one gets the real data. So you can look like you complied but it doesn't do them any good.
Shen reportedly had planned to improve the core and implement it in an FPGA.
It wouldn't run as fast as dedicated silicon, but it'd run pretty well. For a commercial product, I dunno if it'd be cheaper to roll-your-own with FPGA's or license ARM's stuff and hire a fab plant to make them. For smaller runs and less demanding applications it might make sense. Sounds like ARM is trying to keep a monopoly so that they can keep prices up.
I don't think the ARM instructions have been patented (and if they have, they shouldn't be). In any case, I can see patenting a clever implementation of those instructions, but the instructions themselves (i.e. this binary pattern corresponds to this operation) shouldn't be.
Slashdot Mirror
If it did have negative gravitic mass, that would have all kinds of funky consequences. Maybe we could stabilize wormholes, and get faster-than-light travel and time travel. Fun to think about, anyway.
So a Multia would make a very good Quake or QII server. The server doesn't need to do 3D graphics, it just needs to track the positions of all the players, rockets, etc. This is FPU-heavy, but the Alpha's FPU was always better than the Pentiums of the time. Although the integer processing wasn't much faster, an Alpha could smoke any Pentium at, e.g., rendering.
In a completely misleading fashion. Talking about how much space that people physically stand on is utterly unrelated to how much land a given population needs to support itself.
Imagine you were designing a space station, and specified an adequate air supply for ten people. Then some PHB comes along and says, "I just read that human lungs only hold about three liters of air. You've got thousands of liters there. So we can squeeze a few hundred people on the station, right?"
The Texas Myth.
The upshot is that even with optimistic assumptions, the amount of space people need in support vastly outstrips the mere "living space" (housing) they need. The proportion is sobering.
I can understand that to an extent. I almost threw out some of those "privacy notices" and I was looking for them! The companies sure didn't want to draw any attention to the possibility of opting out. I had to do phone calls, and postal mail, and sometimes I had to do it once for each account with the same company, and all in all it was a major hassle.
But still, I would have thought that more like 10% would have opted out. Maybe they were too busy sorting through junk mail and spam...
Some people have looked into porting POSE (the Palm OS Emulator) to the Zaurus and other Linux handhelds, so that it could run Palm apps. Unfortunately, POSE needs a Palm ROM image, and those are not freely redistributable. You'd need to have a Palm anyway to get it to work. And the speed would likely be atrocious on a 200MHz ARM chip. It's not full speed even on my K6-II 500MHz.
I had a different idea. The Palm SDK's are available, and there's prc-tools and such for Linux. Why not create an emulation layer for the Palm API, like Wine emulates the Windows API on Linux?
The Palm API is better-documented, and much simpler. It'd probably be fairly easy to get to at least Palm OS 2.0 or so. Then you could recompile Palm apps for a Linux PDA. There would be a speed hit due to redirection, but the underlying processor is much faster; overall I'd think there would be a speed boost.
You'd still need to recompile, but there are lots of open-source Palm apps, and lots more developed with Linux; the developers might have good motivation to quickly port their app to a new platform.
I think the endianess is the same, so that's not a problem. To be legally safe there might need to be a clean-room effort, I'm not sure yet, but this'd be a way to get a lot of apps for, e.g., the Zaurus, and quickly.
Coolio's record company said it was all right without asking Coolio. At least, that's Coolio's story. See here, page down to The Coolio Fiasco.
parodies are NOT protected.
Weird Al asks out of politeness, not necessity. Parodies are protected, but as with everything else in the world, enough money can buy a measure of injustice. Buy enough lawyers and you drown the other side in legal proceedings.
Yup, CISC vs. RISC. The RISC opcodes do less, so a given program needs more of 'em to get the job done. The biggest program on my Palm is LispME; a full Scheme environment in 137K.
You also missed another benefit of the Palms; sure, you can't play Quake on a 16-33MHz CPU, but the batteries last for at least weeks instead of the hours you get with a 206MHZ CPU...
Of course, if the traditional explanation for how a wing works were correct, planes would not be able to fly upside down.
But they can...
Heck, the Mac SE came out in 1987 with an 8MHz 68000 (the Dragonball's model) and 2MB of RAM. It cost almost $3K and sure didn't run for months on two AAA batteries. After I upgraded it to 4MB, I did development on that puppy. (Okay, it had a whopping 40MB hard drive, fine.)
I admit that a high-res screen would be nice. The problem is that small, flat, high-res screens are expensive, and eat power, and probably will stay that way for a while. The ARM processor doesn't eat as much power as others, but 206MHz doesn't come free. I can get 20 hours of continuous operation on my Palm IIIxe; from what I've heard, 4 hours is great for a WinCE device.
Maybe you just need to wait a couple more generations. The first Palms came out in, what, 1997 or so, and were about equivalent to a mid-to-late-80's PC. The WinCE devices of 2001 are about equivalent to an early-to-mid-90's PC. At that rate by 2005 or so you should be able to hold in your hand something roughly equivalent to an average PC of today.
First off, NASA has produced thousands of spinoffs, and I guarantee you use several of them every day.
But even aside from that, NASA isn't a corporation and not everything should be run as one. You need some "blue-sky" research that isn't focused on a specific goal. You don't know what you'll find, but you'll find something.
Now, incompetence and dumb mistakes (why didn't they use a second intererometer to check?) need to be dealt with, but overall I'd keep NASA. What we really need is some revisions in space law so that private companies can do more space research and run their own launches. Then we get the best of both worlds (no pun intended).
Oh, come on. I don't know about what it is/was like at your school, but I barely had time for any electives while pursuing my EE Bachelor's. My parents gave me the best possible graduation gift - I didn't have to graduate. I got to take an extra term of whatever I wanted.
I took things that were mostly as far as possible from Engineering. Oh, sure, I took the 1/2 credit Holograms class, and I took the Fantasy as Literature class 'cause the Science Fiction one wasn't offered that term. But I also took Intro to Anthropology, Intro to Women's Studies (boy, that was fun, me being a white male middle-class heterosexual engineer), and Intro to Modern Dance (where I proved that I am an educatable dyslexic in the language of dance, but I showed up every day which was more than some dance enthusiasts did).
Perhaps these were fluff courses. Women's Studies was certainly low on intellectual rigor. But even if that were true (a) they certainly weren't required for an Engineering degree, and (b) they were no more fluff than the joke math and science courses the jocks and humanities types could get away with.
Assuming that history can be changed, yes, someone had to design them. And they did, just in an alternate universe that we didn't get to see.
On the other hand, it is consistent, if you assume that the past cannot be changed, for the technology to have no inventors. Information need not be conserved in time-travel interactions.
This isn't a paradox. A paradox is self-inconsistent. But you can also have consistent loops where effects are their own causes. This is an orthogonal concept, so they have been called "perpendoxes".
Anyway, if you care about this sort of thing, check out my time travel page.
Cyberdyne's offsite backups! Any remotely competent admin will make sure that there are some backups kept somewhere else, in case there's a fire or a rampaging cyborg.
I have a boxed set of OS/2 Warp Connect, and VA C++ Pro 4.0, but boy is documentation of the OS/2 API hard to come by. Not much on the web, either. If I wanted to write an app for OS/2, where the heck would I find any documentation, hints, FAQs, etc.?
And it doesn't require a supercomputer to play. My K6-II/500 and TNT 1 play it rock solid and pretty.
Aw, heck, this takes me back to the old days on alt.atheism. For nostalgia's sake...
We don't know precisely how thought and intent arise from chemical processes. But we have ample evidence that they do; just tackle it from the opposite direction. When you take away those chemical reactions, what's left?
When you damage the brain, you damage the capacity for thought. Read "The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat", by Oliver Sachs, a neurologist who writes like he swallowed a poet. It's a collection of case histories that illustrates my point quite well. Some strokes remove the ability of a person to, for example, consider the idea of "left". They only eat the food on the right side of their plates. When asked to imagine walking down a familiar street, they only describe the objects on their right. Ask them to imagine turning around and walking the other way, they forget the buildings they just described and describe the ones they forgot.
Severe enough damage to the visual cortex not only renders a person blind, they lose the entire concept of vision. Words like color, light, etc. don't make sense; they've forgotten not only that they could see but that sight itself exists.
Damage to Broca's and Wernicke's areas of the brain results in different types of aphasia. People with Broca's aphasia have extreme difficulty speaking, but can often understand speech well. People with Wernicke's aphasia can talk, but they don't understand what's said to them and speak in what's called "word salad"; a stream of nonsense. Put two patients with Wernicke's aphasia together and they'll have a complete gibberish conversation, without even apparently realizing that they aren't saying anything.
I could go on and on. The point is, damage the brain and you damage the ability to think, to emote, to be a conscious individual. I don't know of a capacity for thought that can't be destroyed by damaging some area of the brain or another.
To put it bluntly, I don't see what's left for a soul to do. If I have a soul, I can't see why I should care what happens to it after I die; what's left after my brain is destroyed can't be said to be "me" in any reasonable sense.
Now, as I said, we don't know exactly how these chemical processes give rise to consciousness. But even if you didn't know how a car worked, you'd notice that if the engine is removed it won't work anymore.
Because there is no "you" available: there's just a bag of chemical reactions.
Straw man. Obviously there's a "me"; here I am, cogito ergo sum. But I object to your use of the word "just" above.
In one sense, there's no such thing as a "rainbow"; just billions of tiny water droplets of the right size, positioned such that they reflect and refract light in just the right way to separate out the hidden colors in white light. But in another sense, there is such a thing as rainbow; it's just on a different level.
Like a rainbow is something water droplets do, so the mind is what the brain does. The mind is a process. A rainbow is not 'degraded' by having arisen from 'mere' physical processes. Physical processes are ennobled by giving rise to such beauty.
I find people just as valuable as you do (perhaps more; I think we're lucky to be here and that we don't have a cosmic protector so we should be a little more careful and considerate with each other). But I think I've got a clearer conception of what they actually are, and why.
Take all the drugs you want, upgrade your genes...
Been done. The Saturday Night Live sketch, "The All-Drug Olympics".
A muscle-building vaccine.
The September 2000 issue has an article (sadly not in the archives yet) that talked about genetically increasing muscle strength and speed. Humans have two types of muscle, "fast-twitch" (strong and fast, but low-endurance) and "slow-twitch" (slower and weaker, but high-endurance). Some mammals (e.g. rabbits, which have to run fast to escape predators) have an "ultra-fast-twitch" muscle type. Humans have the genes to make it but don't have the gene to make the signal protien that causes it to be produced.
Injecting muscle with genes to produce the activator might lead to super-fast sprinters and amazing power-lifters. Or, people who can tear their tendons out of their bones...
Oh, no. That's not how it works. The great-grandchildren of the author don't make any money. The great-grandchildren of the executives of the publishing company who extorted the rights from the author make the money.
Porting it to HP-UX was a headache; the STL's on the platforms differed in a multitude of subtle ways. AIX has been even harder (there may be something good about AIX, but I haven't run into it yet).
The STL seems to be about where C was when the ANSI spec first came out. It took several years before code was really portable...
The key thing is that you must develop for at least three platforms from the start. My initial work was on Solaris, Linux, and VMS. This allows you to find (most of) the inconsistencies early and design around them before they get too embedded in the project to ever change.
You also need to identify what things are very likely to change across platforms (in my case it was threads, networking, and file I/O) and abstract those out from the start. Write wrapper functions and use them. Actually, I wish I had wrappered more of the output functions; as it is, the app's a little too dependent on ASCII. Given a few wrapper functions I could easily have supported EBCDIC and Unicode; now it'd be a bear to add that.
Stick with anything ANSI, and POSIX is good. C++ still hasn't finalized everywhere, not like ANSI C. If you write in ANSI C it works darn near everywhere. Windows doesn't do POSIX threads natively, but if you aren't doing anything really weird, wrapper functions can handle that. (All I needed was threads with default stack sizes, and mutexes.)
Not that all the Unixes are the same. AIX in particular has some non-standard silliness in its implementation of pthreads. A comment from my code:
A few #ifdefs can take care of things like that. But really, really, really: Port from the start!
For the GUI part of it, make a separate front-end app. Use something portable for that; a library or Java or whatever. Speed is hardly ever a problem for GUI front-ends. Just make it simple and reuse as much code as you can between platforms.
The US Constitution, Article 2, Section 2, detailing the Presidency:
He shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur...
So Bush and 2/3 of the Senate have to agree. Just so you know who to lobby.
Of course, the authorities may have already backed up your data. And the new password can be compelled out of you by various means. (So-called "rubber hose cryptography", as in, "We beat the password out of him with a rubber hose.")
So you use a cryptographic filesystem that has several passwords. One retrieves mildly incriminating data, and another one gets the real data. So you can look like you complied but it doesn't do them any good.
Available for Linux 2.2, *BSD ports coming along.
Shen reportedly had planned to improve the core and implement it in an FPGA.
It wouldn't run as fast as dedicated silicon, but it'd run pretty well. For a commercial product, I dunno if it'd be cheaper to roll-your-own with FPGA's or license ARM's stuff and hire a fab plant to make them. For smaller runs and less demanding applications it might make sense. Sounds like ARM is trying to keep a monopoly so that they can keep prices up.
I don't think the ARM instructions have been patented (and if they have, they shouldn't be). In any case, I can see patenting a clever implementation of those instructions, but the instructions themselves (i.e. this binary pattern corresponds to this operation) shouldn't be.