He had strong religous beliefs which were a big factor in his message.
But the parts of the message that were worth having were independent of the particular belief system he subscribed to. Basically, it boils down to "treat people how you would like to be treated", which is a maxim that has been around considerably before modern Christianity sprung up in the 5th or 6th Century CE.
This is a positive message, but using religion as the vector of transmission is, IMHO, a bad move. It's like splicing genes for cough medicine* into the ebola virus. Cough medicine is positively good for you, but you don't want to catch ebola to get the benefit.
* - Yes, I know there aren't actually genes for cough medicine, but you get the idea
The new facility, Diamond, will be housed at Rutherford Appleton Laboratories near Oxford. There was a concerted effort to get the project sited at the existing synchrotron facility at Daresbury.
The reasons for siting at Daresbury seemed to be well thought out and sensible - see the campaign website for more information.
The government has decided to site it in the expensive South of England, putting the existing synchroton research team at Daresbury in jeopardy and virtually guaranteeing a dispersal of talent.
For an order-of-magnitude decrease in launch costs, reusables are the way to go. They do cost more to develop, though. There's a wonderful sequence in one of Terry Pratchett's books that I hope is appropriate here:
The reason the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.
Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in the city on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time
and would still have wet feet.
Development should be "build a little, fly a little". I'm a big fan of the way Rotary Rocket approached things. If they had managed to get the cash equivalent of one shuttle launch, they would most likely be on orbit by now. But their business plan wasn't convincing enough, apparently. Sigh.
Of course you really want a 3-orders-of-magnitude decrease in launch costs, but for that you need a space elevator. And these cost *much* more to develop.:-)
Most of the delta-V on re-entry is achieved using aerodynamics rather than fuel. A craft made of composite materials which does not have a full load of fuel on board will have a very slow terminal velocity. You just need enough fuel on re-entry for maneuvering and the final approach and landing. This is likely to be considerably less weighty than wings.
It's not just software that has problems in this regard.
One place where innovation is obvious is in car radio features over the last 10 years. In the old days, you had a manual tuner and a volume knob. You had some push-buttons for half-a-dozen stations. And that was about it.
A positive innovation was RDS - now I can select a station and keep tracking it even if I move out of range of one transmitter and into another on a different frequency. This is appropriate technology - find a problem and solve it as unobtrusively as possible.
A negative innovation (on my model at least) is the lack of a volume knob. Instead, there's a multi-function control button marked +/-. Normally, that's not too bad, but the mode buttons are immediately above it. If I hit a bump while trying to change the volume, I suddenly get stuck in a mode where I'm changing the balance, fade, or something else. More functionality, sure, but badly implemented. Setting up tone, fade, etc. is something you do once. Why not have a single, recessed, "setup" button and keep it out of harm's way?
My mother has had such a bad experience with the radio in my step-father's car that she will not even turn it on. "It never does what I want" she complains. That strikes her as very annoying. After all, she has been working radios quite satisfactorily for several decades.
All of these problems are UI design problems, not problems with innovation per se.
Another non-UI negative innovation in the car is the introduction of proprietary protocols for in-car audio. My radio is also a head unit for a CD changer, but my efforts to build or source a MP3 jukebox that interfaces to it have been scuppered because Ford do not publish the protocols (or pinouts) for the interface.
Shuttle supremely failed to meet its design goals due to political interference. Here's what I think NASA should do next.
1. Scrap STS (shuttle), and other "spaceplane" designs. 2. Funnel these funds into rapid development of a small, VTVL reusable manned launcher (like Roton, DC-Y, ISAS RVT). 3. Fund this program up front, not with stop-start funding rounds.
"I do not have free will" - non sequitur. Actions are defined by the past, yes, but there are several problems with trying to predict the state of the brain from its past history. It is a complex, nonlinear system, which means that classical chaos causes us problems. Add quantum uncertainty to that and you have enough noise in the system to make prediction of its future state impossible. This is probably where "free will" comes from.
Oh, and I'm guessing that they might have been able to spell "chance", too.
Re:The *real* source of the problem
on
Potato Bazookas
·
· Score: 4, Funny
I guess it's different over in the US.
Don't you guys over there in the States have a constitutional right to keep and bear potatoes?
And I seem to recall Charlton Heston saying that "Potatoes don't kill people, people kill people" (only sometimes with potatoes). And "A society with potatoes is a polite society. Pass the fries, please."
Here is the text of the e-mail I sent to museumtour.com after uncovering what I think may be prior art, in only a few minutes poking around on the web:
Sir,
I have been appalled by the acceptance of over-broad patents by the USPTO for some time, and was similarly appalled to see the abuse of a patent on Frames-based browsing used to threaten legal action against your site. Although I am not a lawyer, I believe that I may have found some invalidating prior art. [Please insert standard not-a-lawyer disclaimers here.]
As far as I can tell, the patent covers the existence of links in one frame that affect the display of information in another. This technique was described and published in the original documentation on frames, which you can see on the Netscape website here:
1. Elements that the user should always see, such as control bars, copyright notices, and title graphics can be placed in a static, individual frame. As the user navigates the site in "live" frames, the static frame's contents remain fixed, even though adjoining frames redraw.
2. Table of contents are more functional. One frame can contain TOC links that, when clicked, display results in an adjoining frame.
3. Frames side-by-side design allows queries to be posed and answered on the same page, with one frame holding the query form, and the other presenting the results.
Point 2 appears to describe the technique patented, and therefore constitutes prior art if published before 17 May 1996.
This documentation does not itself have a date, and has not been archived by the Wayback Machine (http://www.archive.org), but appears to have been in existence for some time prior to the patent application date. The evidence for this comes in a reference from a post to the HTML mailing list in January 1996:
The nice GUI buttons and controls are there for a reason. I have no problem learning an interface to a product - I do have a problem learning how to use and identify user interface *elements*.
That's what skinning buys you - a half-hour hunt for the "open file" widget. Skinning adds no functionality, and obscures what functionality is already present.
Sorry to disagree, but the original author is right, and you even point it out yourself:
Interaction is a bit different than usual, i'll admit, but it's intuitive and easy once you get used to it.
There's the problem right there, staring you in the face.
Why should I have to "get used to it"? I have already spent time and effort gaining knowledge about how to deal with scroll bars, file selectors, bringing windows to the top, minimizing windows, etc. If I can't apply that to this app, and have to learn all those things all over again just for this app then I lose.
I haven't got the time to "get used to" every app's idea of a pretty UI. I want something that works the way everything else works, thanks.
For some reason, it's media stuff that tends to sport these kinds of interfaces. Non-standard windows. Controls I can't see, or that don't work the way I expect, or that don't do anything because they are cruft that just looks like a control. More pixels dedicated to the skin than to the movie. Favorites bars. Channel bars. Media bars. Quicklaunch bars. For all I know or care, topless bars.
WHO ON EARTH THOUGHT I WANTED ANY OF THIS CRAP?
What I want from a media player is simple: a rectangular window with a standard title and menu bar. Controls: play, stop, and a horizontal scroll bar for fast forward/rewind - and it had better be a proper UI standard scrollbar too. Maximise widget for full screen video. Standard menus for everything else.
Of course, Linux isn't the only OS that has this problem. Windows Media Player is another execrable pile of "cool" skins and stuff. I selected the "classic" skin as soon as the thing installed, and turned every UI option off. And Quicktime player's UI rightly has its own page in the UI hall of shame. You don't even get a choice with this one.
No wonder users these days get confused. And when users get confused, they leave.
I don't understand why the telemarketing lobby is against the do-not-call list. Surely, it is an effective way of identifying the least receptive segment of the population and eliminating them from their advertising budget.
Won't this result in more hits for less effort, or am I missing something blindingly obvious?
BTW, here in the UK we have national do-not-call, do-not-mail and do-not-fax opt-out lists, and I'm on all three. So far, the DNC list seems to be working, but I still seem to get lots of junk mail for some reason. Oh, and I don't actually have a fax, but those telemarketers are so terribly cunning I though it best to cover all the bases...
So here's my personal best possible outcome of this:
$$$ saved:
1. ISS scrapped or mothballed long term.
2. Shuttle upgrade program scrapped - expires at end of current lifetime.
$$$ spent:
1. Money allocated up-front to be spent on fast-track development of low cost, manned, VTVL reusable launcher (a la Roton, DC-Y, ISAS RVT, PHOENIX, etc.) with incremental build-and-fly development. Orbital 2-man demonstration vehicle to be flight ready by end of 2006.
2. VTVL design licensed to multiple commercial implementers (Boeing, MD, ArianeSpace, ISAS, etc.) Commitment to buy cargo space from cheapest bidder, starting 2008.
3. Award commercial, fixed price contracts for operating local spaceports (Mojave, Utah, etc.) If your state has a pro-space senator, then they can set up local jobs in space!
This paper in particular caught my eye. A generic technique for removing any watermarking scheme?
Surely if they locked up Dmitri Sklyarov for talking about Adobe's abysmal protection mechanisms, how long can it be before we see the same for Darko Kirovski? (Gee, he sounds kinda russian too, guys - let's get him!)
Luckily Fabien Petitcolas, his co-author, lives in England and therefore is out of reach of the RIAA, unless of course he is called over to Redmond on business some day...
Re:This is Dilution of Distributed Compute Power!
on
ECCp-109 Solved
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Having all these different crypto challenges, protien folding challenges, SETI searches etc, just dilutes the pool of available computers for each task
Not necessarily. Each potential user is likely to be interested in only a few of these projects. I an runnning SETI, and if (when) that ends, I will probably go over to protein folding or the cancer drug search instead, as long as they have command-line clients. I'm not interested in crypto busting; it doesn't actually discover anything!
The number of projects is optimal where the average number of projects of interest to each user is a bit above 1. That probably means one crypto, one SETI, one biology, etc.
Looks like we can get ahead of the game here, by ensuring that we have our "Free Alex" flyers and placards printed out in advance.
Seriously, the amount of information in this paper is similar to that which got Dmitry Sklyarov detained under the Downloaded Music Criminalization Act (DMCA). It even gives information as to which programs and hardware are most effective at bypassing these copy-restriction technologies.
It's well worth a read to see how these technolgies only work due to buggy or fragile implementations of the standard.
But if CO levels are low, and COS (carbonyl sulphide) levels are elevated and out of equilibrium, then I would place my bets on an ultraviolet driven reaction involving sulphuric acid and carbon monoxide rather than on life.
(4CO + H2SO4 --(catalyst+uv)--> 3CO2 + H2O + COS balances, but is probably not exactly what's going on.)
After all, on Earth, ozone is decidedly not something you would get in an equilibrium condition, but it is still produced inorganically.
Orthogonality in this case means that the registers are not distinguished from each other - any register can be used for any purpose. So, for a binary operation, if you know that
ADD rA, rB
adds rB to rA and stores the result in rA again, you would expect the multiply instruction to be something like this:
MUL rA, rB
If instead, it's something like this
MUL rB...where one operand and the destination is hard coded, then you have to relearn the syntax for this new instruction. Alternatively, the syntax may be the same, but there may be new restrictions such as rB must not be the same as rA, or it can't be ESP, or some such.
It gets worse with things like
MOVSB
where *all* of the operands are implicit and you have to remember that DS goes with ESI and ES with EDI. (I hope I got that right - I would have to look it up, which is the point I'm trying to make.)
An orthogonal instruction set means that MOV instructions are comparatively rare - you don't have to ensure that certain operands are in the special purpose registers, you just use them wherever you are.
(To the other poster on this thread - sorry about the link. Just in a hurry this morning, I guess.)
The scheme as proposed would work, but nothing will change the fact that it's another hideous hack to get around the non-orthogonal addressing modes in the original Intel 80x86 architecture.
Even the little microcontroller chips that I can buy for $2 have 32 general purpose registers (Atmel AVRs, for anyone who cares).
Worse, this scheme would not benefit existing code - it still requires code changes to work.
Finally, on the gripping hand, the Pentium III and 4 have a very similar register renaming scheme going on automatically in the hardware. The 8 "logical" registers are already mapped dynamically into a much larger physical register file. (From ExtremeTech: http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,3973,471327, 00.asp.)
You know what's most depressing about this? If you Google for Varuna and Ixion, the top link is this one:
http://astrologershq.com/asteroids.html
The top link on the world's best web search engine is to a bunch of retarded charlatans who think that this is another piece of bait to separate the gullible from their cash.
Here's a sample of the tripe from this site:
'Enter the new theory of Hyperdimensional Space, or Hyperspace. In this theory, "attraction" replaces "gravity". In the Hyperspace theory, velocity is a very important factor. So, the high speed which the outer bodies of our Solar System are traveling become very significant even - influencing the placement of the "Barycenter."'
These things don't travel at high speed. They travel at low speed. If they have a profound effect, why was it professional astronomers who discovered them, and not astrologers?
Not always. Company loyalty has to be earned, just as individual trust has to be earned. The company I work for has consistently treated me well, and has earned my loyalty.
Also, the net usage policy treats people like adults, and as a result people tend to work like adults. Where people have to spend a little time doing personal stuff, they make up the time voluntarily by staying a little later or taking a shorter lunch break.
It's a balance. Think of it like the freedom to decorate your own cube. Of course, nude calendars won't be tolerated, but there's no need to go for a draconian clear desk policy either. And 99% of people are quite sensible about it anyway, so you just have to deal with the 1% who aren't rather than fending off the 95% of people who would be pissed off otherwise.
You will have noticed that, during the big press conference when the winning design for the X-33 was announced, that the audience was basically silent except for a collective intake of breath.
There was then much muttering about political pressure, pork barrels, etc. and the chosen X-33 design was finally dumped.
The X-33 concept that was apparently the favorite amongst the engineering community was the vertical take-off, vertical landing "DC-Y" concept. This was a evolution of the DC-X prototype which had already been demonstrated. (see http://gargravarr.cc.utexas.edu/ssrt/images/ and http://members.aol.com/Nathan2go/X33.htm)
VTVL has a big advantage over HTHL designs - all the stresses are in virtuall the same direction all the time. You can therefore make a much lighter design - especially true in a single stage to orbit design.
Slashdot Mirror
But the parts of the message that were worth having were independent of the particular belief system he subscribed to. Basically, it boils down to "treat people how you would like to be treated", which is a maxim that has been around considerably before modern Christianity sprung up in the 5th or 6th Century CE.
This is a positive message, but using religion as the vector of transmission is, IMHO, a bad move. It's like splicing genes for cough medicine* into the ebola virus. Cough medicine is positively good for you, but you don't want to catch ebola to get the benefit.
* - Yes, I know there aren't actually genes for cough medicine, but you get the idea
The reasons for siting at Daresbury seemed to be well thought out and sensible - see the campaign website for more information.
The government has decided to site it in the expensive South of England, putting the existing synchroton research team at Daresbury in jeopardy and virtually guaranteeing a dispersal of talent.
For an order-of-magnitude decrease in launch costs, reusables are the way to go. They do cost more to develop, though. There's a wonderful sequence in one of Terry Pratchett's books that I hope is appropriate here:
Development should be "build a little, fly a little". I'm a big fan of the way Rotary Rocket approached things. If they had managed to get the cash equivalent of one shuttle launch, they would most likely be on orbit by now. But their business plan wasn't convincing enough, apparently. Sigh.
Of course you really want a 3-orders-of-magnitude decrease in launch costs, but for that you need a space elevator. And these cost *much* more to develop. :-)
Most of the delta-V on re-entry is achieved using aerodynamics rather than fuel. A craft made of composite materials which does not have a full load of fuel on board will have a very slow terminal velocity. You just need enough fuel on re-entry for maneuvering and the final approach and landing. This is likely to be considerably less weighty than wings.
It's not just software that has problems in this regard.
One place where innovation is obvious is in car radio features over the last 10 years. In the old days, you had a manual tuner and a volume knob. You had some push-buttons for half-a-dozen stations. And that was about it.
A positive innovation was RDS - now I can select a station and keep tracking it even if I move out of range of one transmitter and into another on a different frequency. This is appropriate technology - find a problem and solve it as unobtrusively as possible.
A negative innovation (on my model at least) is the lack of a volume knob. Instead, there's a multi-function control button marked +/-. Normally, that's not too bad, but the mode buttons are immediately above it. If I hit a bump while trying to change the volume, I suddenly get stuck in a mode where I'm changing the balance, fade, or something else. More functionality, sure, but badly implemented. Setting up tone, fade, etc. is something you do once. Why not have a single, recessed, "setup" button and keep it out of harm's way?
My mother has had such a bad experience with the radio in my step-father's car that she will not even turn it on. "It never does what I want" she complains. That strikes her as very annoying. After all, she has been working radios quite satisfactorily for several decades.
All of these problems are UI design problems, not problems with innovation per se.
Another non-UI negative innovation in the car is the introduction of proprietary protocols for in-car audio. My radio is also a head unit for a CD changer, but my efforts to build or source a MP3 jukebox that interfaces to it have been scuppered because Ford do not publish the protocols (or pinouts) for the interface.
Shuttle supremely failed to meet its design goals due to political interference. Here's what I think NASA should do next.
1. Scrap STS (shuttle), and other "spaceplane" designs.
2. Funnel these funds into rapid development of a small, VTVL reusable manned launcher (like Roton, DC-Y, ISAS RVT).
3. Fund this program up front, not with stop-start funding rounds.
I wonder if all these scientist would also have signed a statement like: [snip]
"Random process" - change is random, the selection of fit individuals is not random.
"Mere illusion" - illusion, maybe. "Mere" certainly not. Consciousness is extremely useful.
"I do not have free will" - non sequitur. Actions are defined by the past, yes, but there are several problems with trying to predict the state of the brain from its past history. It is a complex, nonlinear system, which means that classical chaos causes us problems. Add quantum uncertainty to that and you have enough noise in the system to make prediction of its future state impossible. This is probably where "free will" comes from.
Oh, and I'm guessing that they might have been able to spell "chance", too.
I guess it's different over in the US.
Don't you guys over there in the States have a constitutional right to keep and bear potatoes?
And I seem to recall Charlton Heston saying that "Potatoes don't kill people, people kill people" (only sometimes with potatoes). And "A society with potatoes is a polite society. Pass the fries, please."
Or something like that, anyway.
Here is the text of the e-mail I sent to museumtour.com after uncovering what I think may be prior art, in only a few minutes poking around on the web:
Sir,
I have been appalled by the acceptance of over-broad patents by the USPTO for some time, and was similarly appalled to see the abuse of a patent on Frames-based browsing used to threaten legal action against your site. Although I am not a lawyer, I believe that I may have found some invalidating prior art. [Please insert standard not-a-lawyer disclaimers here.]
As far as I can tell, the patent covers the existence of links in one frame that affect the display of information in another. This technique was described and published in the original documentation on frames, which you can see on the Netscape website here:
http://home.netscape.com/assist/net_sites/frames.h tml
This includes the text:
Point 2 appears to describe the technique patented, and therefore constitutes prior art if published before 17 May 1996.
This documentation does not itself have a date, and has not been archived by the Wayback Machine (http://www.archive.org), but appears to have been in existence for some time prior to the patent application date. The evidence for this comes in a reference from a post to the HTML mailing list in January 1996:
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-html/1996J an/0110.html
It should be possible to check with Netscape to determine the date of publication of this web page.
I hope that this is of some use.
The nice GUI buttons and controls are there for a reason. I have no problem learning an interface to a product - I do have a problem learning how to use and identify user interface *elements*.
That's what skinning buys you - a half-hour hunt for the "open file" widget. Skinning adds no functionality, and obscures what functionality is already present.
Ahh, marketing. Welcome to the Dilbert zone...
maybe you should be suggesting to them how it should be rather than insulting them.
My point is that I shouldn't have to do this. There are UI design guides out there for any OS you care to mention: Linux, OSX, Windows.
I don't mind learning how to use the software. I do object when I have to learn how to use a scroll bar all over again just to use the software.
Sorry to disagree, but the original author is right, and you even point it out yourself:
Interaction is a bit different than usual, i'll admit, but it's intuitive and easy once you get used to it.
There's the problem right there, staring you in the face.
Why should I have to "get used to it"? I have already spent time and effort gaining knowledge about how to deal with scroll bars, file selectors, bringing windows to the top, minimizing windows, etc. If I can't apply that to this app, and have to learn all those things all over again just for this app then I lose.
I haven't got the time to "get used to" every app's idea of a pretty UI. I want something that works the way everything else works, thanks.
For some reason, it's media stuff that tends to sport these kinds of interfaces. Non-standard windows. Controls I can't see, or that don't work the way I expect, or that don't do anything because they are cruft that just looks like a control. More pixels dedicated to the skin than to the movie. Favorites bars. Channel bars. Media bars. Quicklaunch bars. For all I know or care, topless bars.
WHO ON EARTH THOUGHT I WANTED ANY OF THIS CRAP?
What I want from a media player is simple: a rectangular window with a standard title and menu bar. Controls: play, stop, and a horizontal scroll bar for fast forward/rewind - and it had better be a proper UI standard scrollbar too. Maximise widget for full screen video. Standard menus for everything else.
Of course, Linux isn't the only OS that has this problem. Windows Media Player is another execrable pile of "cool" skins and stuff. I selected the "classic" skin as soon as the thing installed, and turned every UI option off. And Quicktime player's UI rightly has its own page in the UI hall of shame. You don't even get a choice with this one.
No wonder users these days get confused. And when users get confused, they leave.
I don't understand why the telemarketing lobby is against the do-not-call list. Surely, it is an effective way of identifying the least receptive segment of the population and eliminating them from their advertising budget.
Won't this result in more hits for less effort, or am I missing something blindingly obvious?
BTW, here in the UK we have national do-not-call, do-not-mail and do-not-fax opt-out lists, and I'm on all three. So far, the DNC list seems to be working, but I still seem to get lots of junk mail for some reason. Oh, and I don't actually have a fax, but those telemarketers are so terribly cunning I though it best to cover all the bases...
So here's my personal best possible outcome of this:
$$$ saved:
1. ISS scrapped or mothballed long term.
2. Shuttle upgrade program scrapped - expires at end of current lifetime.
$$$ spent:
1. Money allocated up-front to be spent on fast-track development of low cost, manned, VTVL reusable launcher (a la Roton, DC-Y, ISAS RVT, PHOENIX, etc.) with incremental build-and-fly development. Orbital 2-man demonstration vehicle to be flight ready by end of 2006.
2. VTVL design licensed to multiple commercial implementers (Boeing, MD, ArianeSpace, ISAS, etc.) Commitment to buy cargo space from cheapest bidder, starting 2008.
3. Award commercial, fixed price contracts for operating local spaceports (Mojave, Utah, etc.) If your state has a pro-space senator, then they can set up local jobs in space!
This paper in particular caught my eye. A generic technique for removing any watermarking scheme?
Surely if they locked up Dmitri Sklyarov for talking about Adobe's abysmal protection mechanisms, how long can it be before we see the same for Darko Kirovski? (Gee, he sounds kinda russian too, guys - let's get him!)
Luckily Fabien Petitcolas, his co-author, lives in England and therefore is out of reach of the RIAA, unless of course he is called over to Redmond on business some day...
Having all these different crypto challenges, protien folding challenges, SETI searches etc, just dilutes the pool of available computers for each task
Not necessarily. Each potential user is likely to be interested in only a few of these projects. I an runnning SETI, and if (when) that ends, I will probably go over to protein folding or the cancer drug search instead, as long as they have command-line clients. I'm not interested in crypto busting; it doesn't actually discover anything!
The number of projects is optimal where the average number of projects of interest to each user is a bit above 1. That probably means one crypto, one SETI, one biology, etc.
Looks like we can get ahead of the game here, by ensuring that we have our "Free Alex" flyers and placards printed out in advance.
Seriously, the amount of information in this paper is similar to that which got Dmitry Sklyarov detained under the Downloaded Music Criminalization Act (DMCA). It even gives information as to which programs and hardware are most effective at bypassing these copy-restriction technologies.
It's well worth a read to see how these technolgies only work due to buggy or fragile implementations of the standard.
Of course, life would be great.
But if CO levels are low, and COS (carbonyl sulphide) levels are elevated and out of equilibrium, then I would place my bets on an ultraviolet driven reaction involving sulphuric acid and carbon monoxide rather than on life.
(4CO + H2SO4 --(catalyst+uv)--> 3CO2 + H2O + COS balances, but is probably not exactly what's going on.)
After all, on Earth, ozone is decidedly not something you would get in an equilibrium condition, but it is still produced inorganically.
Orthogonality in this case means that the registers are not distinguished from each other - any register can be used for any purpose. So, for a binary operation, if you know that
...where one operand and the destination is hard coded, then you have to relearn the syntax for this new instruction. Alternatively, the syntax may be the same, but there may be new restrictions such as rB must not be the same as rA, or it can't be ESP, or some such.
ADD rA, rB
adds rB to rA and stores the result in rA again, you would expect the multiply instruction to be something like this:
MUL rA, rB
If instead, it's something like this
MUL rB
It gets worse with things like
MOVSB
where *all* of the operands are implicit and you have to remember that DS goes with ESI and ES with EDI. (I hope I got that right - I would have to look it up, which is the point I'm trying to make.)
An orthogonal instruction set means that MOV instructions are comparatively rare - you don't have to ensure that certain operands are in the special purpose registers, you just use them wherever you are.
(To the other poster on this thread - sorry about the link. Just in a hurry this morning, I guess.)
The scheme as proposed would work, but nothing will change the fact that it's another hideous hack to get around the non-orthogonal addressing modes in the original Intel 80x86 architecture.
, 00.asp .)
Even the little microcontroller chips that I can buy for $2 have 32 general purpose registers (Atmel AVRs, for anyone who cares).
Worse, this scheme would not benefit existing code - it still requires code changes to work.
Finally, on the gripping hand, the Pentium III and 4 have a very similar register renaming scheme going on automatically in the hardware. The 8 "logical" registers are already mapped dynamically into a much larger physical register file. (From ExtremeTech: http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,3973,471327
You know what's most depressing about this? If you Google for Varuna and Ixion, the top link is this one:
http://astrologershq.com/asteroids.html
The top link on the world's best web search engine is to a bunch of retarded charlatans who think that this is another piece of bait to separate the gullible from their cash.
Here's a sample of the tripe from this site:
'Enter the new theory of Hyperdimensional Space, or Hyperspace. In this theory, "attraction" replaces "gravity". In the Hyperspace theory, velocity is a very important factor. So, the high speed which the outer bodies of our Solar System are traveling become very significant even - influencing the placement of the "Barycenter."'
These things don't travel at high speed. They travel at low speed. If they have a profound effect, why was it professional astronomers who discovered them, and not astrologers?
It makes me so angry.
He won't move it - he'll collapse it into an 8 foot neutronium sphere and use it to power his gravity generators with.
Company loyalty is a complete farce.
Not always. Company loyalty has to be earned, just as individual trust has to be earned. The company I work for has consistently treated me well, and has earned my loyalty.
Also, the net usage policy treats people like adults, and as a result people tend to work like adults. Where people have to spend a little time doing personal stuff, they make up the time voluntarily by staying a little later or taking a shorter lunch break.
It's a balance. Think of it like the freedom to decorate your own cube. Of course, nude calendars won't be tolerated, but there's no need to go for a draconian clear desk policy either. And 99% of people are quite sensible about it anyway, so you just have to deal with the 1% who aren't rather than fending off the 95% of people who would be pissed off otherwise.
You will have noticed that, during the big press conference when the winning design for the X-33 was announced, that the audience was basically silent except for a collective intake of breath.
There was then much muttering about political pressure, pork barrels, etc. and the chosen X-33 design was finally dumped.
The X-33 concept that was apparently the favorite amongst the engineering community was the vertical take-off, vertical landing "DC-Y" concept. This was a evolution of the DC-X prototype which had already been demonstrated.
(see http://gargravarr.cc.utexas.edu/ssrt/images/ and http://members.aol.com/Nathan2go/X33.htm)
VTVL has a big advantage over HTHL designs - all the stresses are in virtuall the same direction all the time. You can therefore make a much lighter design - especially true in a single stage to orbit design.