Back in the day I remember testing DJGPP and Watcom against eachother (and against Microsoft's DOS compiler) and being pretty impressed with Watcom's optimization and general cleverness. It was a very good compiler for the x86 architecture of the time, and may still be. My general impression of GCC's optimization features on x86 was not too good. GCC, however, is a fabulous compiler for PPC, MIPS, and ARM architectures.
Does anybody know the current state of the two compilers in terms of optimization on x86?
A) Isn't the "gain market share and then change the rules" approach one of the main complaints that leads people to go to Open Source over commercial solutions?
B) If say, for instance, Linux were to adopt this new version of the GPL (assuming this clause ever manages to get it's way in there) it would not be a hard migration path for everybody to switch to BSD.
C) Even if changing the rules mid-flight wasn't sort of a microsoft-ish thing to do, does GNU/Linux and all of the conglomerated applications surrounding it (and making up the core of Free Software that is used on a daily basis) hold enough market share that the GPL drafters could make the case in the marketplace that it's worth ditching a proven profitable business model in exchange for continued use of a somewhat replacable product (see point B).
In either case, it looks (to me) like this is just chest-pounding. Even if it goes through, the beautiful thing about the whole free software concept is that a fork from current-version GPL'd software could be maintained under a sane (no heavy political clauses) version of the license and we'll see which one the marketplace and usership embraces.
An example of this (although it's more geek Funk than geek Rap) is Dr. Theopolis, from Portland. I was exposed to these crazy geeks on a recent trip out west, and will never be the same again. http://www.drtheopolis.com/
Very true. I have a handful of film cameras, and the one I use most (an old Kiev 6C, no bells or whistles, but a real workhorse) has no battery at all, everything is manual, and it does exactly what you tell it to: Take pictures.
I have a Canon Digital Rebel, their consumer-range digital SLR. They make a next model up which features heftier physical construction, more end-user control over light metering, and a couple other small but useful features. It turns out that other than the case, the electronic guts are the same, and if the firmware were to be open then end users could patch it to have all the extra features without shoveling out the extra bux.
While I love that camera, I despise crippleware when you have a hardware product that is capable of more, but you have to buy a more expensive version of the same device just to flip a handful of bits in a flash-rom somewhere to give you access.
She is gorgeous (Where's "Grits Boy" when you need him), but I think the fact that she hacks around with hardware and brings video games to kids makes her extra-attractive. *sigh*
What if Ford, Honda, and GM decided that they'd let their big customers (companies with fleets of cars) in on safety recalls before joe schmoe who has just _one_ car that he drives his kids around in. Would that be a big deal?
It's not that they're giving new and exciting features to preferred customers, it's that their product is defective and they couldn't be bothered to give a sh*t about the little guy.
Idunno about you guys, but I have definitely skimped on the food budget from time to time in my younger days in favor of upgrades to the computer. A week of rice'n'beans instead of real food => one more bank of ram.
From what I understand, this has become one of those annoying things like buying a video card or what-not, where the manufacturers have optimized the design to preform well on benchmarks. The benchmarks were designed to simulate real-world conditions, but the simulation is only so good, so there is a descrepancy.
That being said, I ride a motorcycle and get about 50 mpg in town and 60 on the highway. It's a 1983 Honda Nighthawk 650. On a lot of newer bikes of comparable size that I've read specs for the fuel economy is not so good. It seems that lately motorcycles have been optimized for performance over gas milage.
Man, this just doesn't sound good. I mean, this is going to lead to a new arms race, etc... Lots of paranoia, military spending, national debt, etc... Oh, joy.
My other question is how well shielded are these things? What does it do to the gunners to be near one of these things when it discharges? How strong is that magnetic field? I know for instance that machinists can't get MRI scans of their head because the magnets will pull little metal fragments out of their faces in a painful / vision endangering manner.
The military doesn't have a stellar record when it comes to safety/health in deploying new weapons. Look at Agent Orange, Depleted Uranium, and the atomic bomb.
I can tell you what it's for: Mindspace tracking. A large number of people read the news every day. Each one of them gathers these little bits of information in some rough proportion to how often they're mentioned, filtered through their level of interest in any given subject.
Say you want to place ads, or make a strategy for getting your message out, or watch a news story explode and see which things get increasing print space over time proportional to how important they are. There you go.
For instance, if this has been the week after Howard Dean's "scream", we would have seen the coverage of that ramp up until it displaced a bunch of issues of much higher world importance.
It's something to think about. This tool seems sort of crude, but it's open source so it could be expanded.
Ten years ago I ran a BBS with a friend, and it was fairly successful. A lot of it had to do with the fact that we had a lot of content that wasn't around elsewhere. One problem I forsee is soembody mirroring in real time to the web, then you won't have that unique content anymore. I mean you'll still have it, but it won't be unique.
So first off, you have to assume that anything you have will leak off to the larger network. That doesn't mean that all is lost, you just have to make sure that your content is compelling enough to grab people and make them connect up, post, and participate.
I would suggest a MUD as a possible hook to grab people. They're fun, they're community based by nature, and they're addictive. Or something like TradeWars 2002, etc... Back in the BBS days people would log in all the time to play the games, and then once they were on they'd also post messages, exchange files, and communicate.
I would also suggest having informal get-togethers every once in a while. In Ithaca, NY we used to have "geekfests" every month where you could meet and greet people from the BBS community, people would bring their computers and game or show off their latest programming projects, etc... That really anchored the community aspect. Lately Fark has been doing something similar, having parties for FARK users in various cities, and then the photos and some highlights get posted back to the main site. While I don't participate extensively in FARK, it seems like that is building some sense of real community there.
In essence, if you have enough content to hook people, and you facilitate the initial socialization period, you can build a community that will endure.
Dead pixels are a concern, but you know what? TFT LCD panels suffer from dead pixels too. As do most digital cameras, even nice ones. When it's an input device like a camera the DSP can detect that there is a dead pixel and interpolate but on an output device you're stuck with it (but I find my eyes eventually learn to ignore the dead pixel). That being said, I'm really looking forward to this technology being commonplace. Wearable computing could benefit, because right now the only low-power high-contrast (daylight readable) off-the-shelf display I've seen is a klunky monochrome AMEL (active matrix electroluminescent) solution, and from the data sheets it doesn't look worth its price. Of course there are the perpetually one-year-from-market laser retinal displays, but untill I can buy one retail, with a credit card (no NDA's, no qualified beta tester screening, no OEM only crap) it might as well not exist in terms of the computer-geek-in-the-basement market.
Once I was on a greyhound bus and I talked to a blind guy who was allergic to dogs, so he didn't have a guide dog, and that was making his trip more difficult than it needed to be just because the layout of the buildings and the terrain surrounding each bus station was unfamiliar and had lots of more-or-less random noise going on.
Right now I'm sitting in an office populated by three people, and a number of active black mold spores approaching infinity. The building we rent space in is owned by an allergist. He hasn't had a filter or humidifier on the furnace for as long as we've been here, and according to our neighbors, considerably longer than that. Everybody is constantly allergic to the building. There are no firewalls between offices as required by code, and the electric circuits are not seperated out by office, so our neighbors running their microwave kills the breaker we're on (which is burried in the supply closet of yet another neighboring office). Our UPSs get a workout.
To top it all off, the building is right next to a goddamn swamp, and _stink bugs_ come in through the cracks in the building and wander around the office blending in with the brindle ugly 70's carpeting such that you can't always see them, and at least once a week somebody rolls over one with a rollie chair and the whole place becomes uninhabitable for about 15 minutes while the pathetic ventilation system slowly wheezes along. It's also drafty, and anytime before noon there is terrible monitor glare. They also use fiberglass drop ceilings which drop little itchy bits on you, and the ligts are all the ancient high-flicker flourescents. Bleah!
Boy, did I ever need to get that out of my system.
This is an updated verson of a very old (middle ages) tradition of monastaries doing some specialized task (and doing it well) and using thier product to sell or barter for needed supplies, food, etc...
This practice kept a lot of trades and information alive that might have otherwise died out. It would take a reel jerk to sue them for DMCA violations too =:-)
The question is how does this effect the privacy of the horses? I mean, sometimes after a long race, a horse needs some privacy to... well.. we all know where this is going =:-)
Wow, I'd always meant to google around for the robotic duck... That particular robotic duck plays an interresting character in the novel "Maxon & Dixon". Cool =:-)
GPS independance is good...
on
A.I. Helicopter?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
It's really cool to see somebody useing a non-GPS navigation system, because once you get into cities, GPS becomes pretty flakey, not to mention that the US military can shut it down at their convenience (and the inconvenience of the rest of the world).
My hat's off to their programmers =:-)
The problem with consumer testing requirements is that often that raises the cost of entry for the small guy. On several occasions I have talked to small inventors who found FCC and UL certification of electronic things (even things that are really unlikely to possible cause fire, shock, or interference) to be an incredibly high cost barrier. We're talking about a several thousand dollar certification process per model or revision. Unless you are pretty sure you're going to sell at least several thousand units, you really have no other choice but to license your design to some larger outfit.
I have the feeling that large commercial software vendors would with great glee lobby to have the price of the certification process raised as high as would be needed to shut out open source as well as small mom and pop commercial operations.
This can also lead to plenty of protection-racket like problems. You can still go out and by a non UL approved floor lamp, but if you read the fine print on your fire insurance, you'll see your coverage is void if you operate such a thing inside your house.
Slashdot Mirror
Back in the day I remember testing DJGPP and Watcom against eachother (and against Microsoft's DOS compiler) and being pretty impressed with Watcom's optimization and general cleverness. It was a very good compiler for the x86 architecture of the time, and may still be. My general impression of GCC's optimization features on x86 was not too good. GCC, however, is a fabulous compiler for PPC, MIPS, and ARM architectures.
Does anybody know the current state of the two compilers in terms of optimization on x86?
A) Isn't the "gain market share and then change the rules" approach one of the main complaints that leads people to go to Open Source over commercial solutions?
B) If say, for instance, Linux were to adopt this new version of the GPL (assuming this clause ever manages to get it's way in there) it would not be a hard migration path for everybody to switch to BSD.
C) Even if changing the rules mid-flight wasn't sort of a microsoft-ish thing to do, does GNU/Linux and all of the conglomerated applications surrounding it (and making up the core of Free Software that is used on a daily basis) hold enough market share that the GPL drafters could make the case in the marketplace that it's worth ditching a proven profitable business model in exchange for continued use of a somewhat replacable product (see point B).
In either case, it looks (to me) like this is just chest-pounding. Even if it goes through, the beautiful thing about the whole free software concept is that a fork from current-version GPL'd software could be maintained under a sane (no heavy political clauses) version of the license and we'll see which one the marketplace and usership embraces.
An example of this (although it's more geek Funk than geek Rap) is Dr. Theopolis, from Portland. I was exposed to these crazy geeks on a recent trip out west, and will never be the same again.
http://www.drtheopolis.com/
Very true. I have a handful of film cameras, and the one I use most (an old Kiev 6C, no bells or whistles, but a real workhorse) has no battery at all, everything is manual, and it does exactly what you tell it to: Take pictures.
Too bad they're so expensive, I was really hoping to print out a copy of the Necronomicon, the e-book is just not the same =:-)
I have a Canon Digital Rebel, their consumer-range digital SLR. They make a next model up which features heftier physical construction, more end-user control over light metering, and a couple other small but useful features. It turns out that other than the case, the electronic guts are the same, and if the firmware were to be open then end users could patch it to have all the extra features without shoveling out the extra bux.
While I love that camera, I despise crippleware when you have a hardware product that is capable of more, but you have to buy a more expensive version of the same device just to flip a handful of bits in a flash-rom somewhere to give you access.
She is gorgeous (Where's "Grits Boy" when you need him), but I think the fact that she hacks around with hardware and brings video games to kids makes her extra-attractive. *sigh*
What if Ford, Honda, and GM decided that they'd let their big customers (companies with fleets of cars) in on safety recalls before joe schmoe who has just _one_ car that he drives his kids around in. Would that be a big deal?
It's not that they're giving new and exciting features to preferred customers, it's that their product is defective and they couldn't be bothered to give a sh*t about the little guy.
Idunno about you guys, but I have definitely skimped on the food budget from time to time in my younger days in favor of upgrades to the computer. A week of rice'n'beans instead of real food => one more bank of ram.
From what I understand, this has become one of those annoying things like buying a video card or what-not, where the manufacturers have optimized the design to preform well on benchmarks. The benchmarks were designed to simulate real-world conditions, but the simulation is only so good, so there is a descrepancy.
That being said, I ride a motorcycle and get about 50 mpg in town and 60 on the highway. It's a 1983 Honda Nighthawk 650. On a lot of newer bikes of comparable size that I've read specs for the fuel economy is not so good. It seems that lately motorcycles have been optimized for performance over gas milage.
Man, this just doesn't sound good. I mean, this is going to lead to a new arms race, etc... Lots of paranoia, military spending, national debt, etc... Oh, joy.
My other question is how well shielded are these things? What does it do to the gunners to be near one of these things when it discharges? How strong is that magnetic field? I know for instance that machinists can't get MRI scans of their head because the magnets will pull little metal fragments out of their faces in a painful / vision endangering manner.
The military doesn't have a stellar record when it comes to safety/health in deploying new weapons. Look at Agent Orange, Depleted Uranium, and the atomic bomb.
I wonder if he's got the weight allowance to bring a towel, just in case...
I can tell you what it's for: Mindspace tracking. A large number of people read the news every day. Each one of them gathers these little bits of information in some rough proportion to how often they're mentioned, filtered through their level of interest in any given subject.
Say you want to place ads, or make a strategy for getting your message out, or watch a news story explode and see which things get increasing print space over time proportional to how important they are. There you go.
For instance, if this has been the week after Howard Dean's "scream", we would have seen the coverage of that ramp up until it displaced a bunch of issues of much higher world importance.
It's something to think about. This tool seems sort of crude, but it's open source so it could be expanded.
Ten years ago I ran a BBS with a friend, and it was fairly successful. A lot of it had to do with the fact that we had a lot of content that wasn't around elsewhere. One problem I forsee is soembody mirroring in real time to the web, then you won't have that unique content anymore. I mean you'll still have it, but it won't be unique.
So first off, you have to assume that anything you have will leak off to the larger network. That doesn't mean that all is lost, you just have to make sure that your content is compelling enough to grab people and make them connect up, post, and participate.
I would suggest a MUD as a possible hook to grab people. They're fun, they're community based by nature, and they're addictive. Or something like TradeWars 2002, etc... Back in the BBS days people would log in all the time to play the games, and then once they were on they'd also post messages, exchange files, and communicate.
I would also suggest having informal get-togethers every once in a while. In Ithaca, NY we used to have "geekfests" every month where you could meet and greet people from the BBS community, people would bring their computers and game or show off their latest programming projects, etc... That really anchored the community aspect. Lately Fark has been doing something similar, having parties for FARK users in various cities, and then the photos and some highlights get posted back to the main site. While I don't participate extensively in FARK, it seems like that is building some sense of real community there.
In essence, if you have enough content to hook people, and you facilitate the initial socialization period, you can build a community that will endure.
It sounds to me like the Bit from tron =:-) *YES* *NO*
Dead pixels are a concern, but you know what? TFT LCD panels suffer from dead pixels too. As do most digital cameras, even nice ones. When it's an input device like a camera the DSP can detect that there is a dead pixel and interpolate but on an output device you're stuck with it (but I find my eyes eventually learn to ignore the dead pixel). That being said, I'm really looking forward to this technology being commonplace. Wearable computing could benefit, because right now the only low-power high-contrast (daylight readable) off-the-shelf display I've seen is a klunky monochrome AMEL (active matrix electroluminescent) solution, and from the data sheets it doesn't look worth its price. Of course there are the perpetually one-year-from-market laser retinal displays, but untill I can buy one retail, with a credit card (no NDA's, no qualified beta tester screening, no OEM only crap) it might as well not exist in terms of the computer-geek-in-the-basement market.
Once I was on a greyhound bus and I talked to a blind guy who was allergic to dogs, so he didn't have a guide dog, and that was making his trip more difficult than it needed to be just because the layout of the buildings and the terrain surrounding each bus station was unfamiliar and had lots of more-or-less random noise going on.
and include a Quasar Cannon! Yeah, that's it =:-)
Right now I'm sitting in an office populated by three people, and a number of active black mold spores approaching infinity. The building we rent space in is owned by an allergist. He hasn't had a filter or humidifier on the furnace for as long as we've been here, and according to our neighbors, considerably longer than that. Everybody is constantly allergic to the building. There are no firewalls between offices as required by code, and the electric circuits are not seperated out by office, so our neighbors running their microwave kills the breaker we're on (which is burried in the supply closet of yet another neighboring office). Our UPSs get a workout.
To top it all off, the building is right next to a goddamn swamp, and _stink bugs_ come in through the cracks in the building and wander around the office blending in with the brindle ugly 70's carpeting such that you can't always see them, and at least once a week somebody rolls over one with a rollie chair and the whole place becomes uninhabitable for about 15 minutes while the pathetic ventilation system slowly wheezes along. It's also drafty, and anytime before noon there is terrible monitor glare. They also use fiberglass drop ceilings which drop little itchy bits on you, and the ligts are all the ancient high-flicker flourescents. Bleah!
Boy, did I ever need to get that out of my system.
Christ on a pogo stick! Get over it already. I'm personaly an atheist, but I still think it's sort of a neat idea. Spit your venom elsewhere, please.
This is an updated verson of a very old (middle ages) tradition of monastaries doing some specialized task (and doing it well) and using thier product to sell or barter for needed supplies, food, etc...
This practice kept a lot of trades and information alive that might have otherwise died out. It would take a reel jerk to sue them for DMCA violations too =:-)
The question is how does this effect the privacy of the horses? I mean, sometimes after a long race, a horse needs some privacy to... well.. we all know where this is going =:-)
Wow, I'd always meant to google around for the robotic duck... That particular robotic duck plays an interresting character in the novel "Maxon & Dixon". Cool =:-)
It's really cool to see somebody useing a non-GPS navigation system, because once you get into cities, GPS becomes pretty flakey, not to mention that the US military can shut it down at their convenience (and the inconvenience of the rest of the world).
My hat's off to their programmers =:-)
The problem with consumer testing requirements is that often that raises the cost of entry for the small guy. On several occasions I have talked to small inventors who found FCC and UL certification of electronic things (even things that are really unlikely to possible cause fire, shock, or interference) to be an incredibly high cost barrier. We're talking about a several thousand dollar certification process per model or revision. Unless you are pretty sure you're going to sell at least several thousand units, you really have no other choice but to license your design to some larger outfit.
I have the feeling that large commercial software vendors would with great glee lobby to have the price of the certification process raised as high as would be needed to shut out open source as well as small mom and pop commercial operations.
This can also lead to plenty of protection-racket like problems. You can still go out and by a non UL approved floor lamp, but if you read the fine print on your fire insurance, you'll see your coverage is void if you operate such a thing inside your house.