The PATH evironment variable is used by NT to locate libraries when they are needed. This value can be changed for any process, allowing for multiple versions of libraries to be loaded. Of course, setting this up for system level DLLs, like ODBC, can be tricky at best. But, for things like the equivalent to libc, it's really easy. Just put "." as the first entry in the PATH.
No need for that "." in the path, as the DLL loader automatically does this anyway.
From the MSDN Docs on LoadLibrary (and LoadLibraryEx):
If no path is specified in the lpLibFileName parameter, and the base file name does not match the base file name of a loaded module, the LoadLibraryEx function uses the same standard file search strategy that LoadLibrary, SearchPath, and OpenFile use to find the executable module and any associated executable modules that it causes to be loaded. This standard strategy searches for a file in the following sequence:
1. The directory from which the application loaded. 1. The current directory. [snip]
This is my favorite one of the entire bunch. Basically Windows DLL management is basically broken by design and should be tought as a prime example of how not to build a stable system. Consider the facts:
1) Every little (or bit) P.O.S. application can (and often will) overwrite system DLLs. I would not dare to overwrite libc.so on my system every time I install a new app.
This is a problem with the app author, not with NT. If you don't like it, lock down your System directory so that it can't be modified. Also, Windows 2000 fixes this so that only service packs can change system components.
2) You have very little control over where you go to find your libraries. Compare this to LD_LIBRARY_PATH where you can set exactly where you look for your libraries (thus giving you the ability to use different versions without harming each other).
Er... that's complete rubbish.
Check out the documentation for the LoadLibraryEx function (http://msdn.microsoft.com/isapi/msdnlib2.idc?theU RL=/library/psdk/winbase/dll_4abc.htm)
Basically, it's quite easy to specify how DLLs are searched for and loaded.
Parameters lpLibFileName [in] Pointer to a null-terminated string that names the executable module (either a.dll or an.exe file). The name specified is the file name of the executable module. This name is not related to the name stored in a library module itself, as specified by the LIBRARY keyword in the module-definition (.DEF) file. If the string specifies a path, but the file does not exist in the specified directory, the function fails. When specifying a path, be sure to use backslashes (\), not forward slashes (/).
If the string does not specify a path, and the file name extension is omitted, the function appends the default library extension.dll to the file name. However, the file name string can include a trailing point character (.) to indicate that the module name has no extension.
If the string does not specify a path, the function uses a standard search strategy to find the file. See the Remarks for more information.
If mapping the specified module into the address space causes the system to map in other, associated executable modules, the function can use either the standard search strategy or an alternate search strategy to find those modules. See the Remarks for more information.
If no path is specified in the lpLibFileName parameter, and the base file name does not match the base file name of a loaded module, the LoadLibraryEx function uses the same standard file search strategy that LoadLibrary, SearchPath, and OpenFile use to find the executable module and any associated executable modules that it causes to be loaded. This standard strategy searches for a file in the following sequence:
The directory from which the application loaded. The current directory. Windows 95/98: The Windows system directory. Use the GetSystemDirectory function to get the path of this directory. Windows NT/ 2000: The 32-bit Windows system directory. Use the GetSystemDirectory function to get the path of this directory. The name of this directory is SYSTEM32.
Windows NT/ 2000: The 16-bit Windows system directory. There is no function that obtains the path of this directory, but it is searched. The name of this directory is SYSTEM. The Windows directory. Use the GetWindowsDirectory function to get the path of this directory. The directories that are listed in the PATH environment variable. If a path is specified, and the dwFlags parameter is set to LOAD_WITH_ALTERED_SEARCH_PATH, the LoadLibraryEx function uses an alternate file search strategy to find any executable modules that the specified module causes to be loaded. This alternate strategy searches for a file in the following sequence:
The directory specified by the lpLibFileName path. In other words, the directory that the specified executable module is in. The current directory. Windows 95/98: The Windows system directory. Use the GetSystemDirectory function to get the path of this directory. Windows NT/ 2000: The 32-bit Windows system directory. Use the GetSystemDirectory function to get the path of this directory. The name of this directory is SYSTEM32.
Windows NT/ 2000: The 16-bit Windows system directory. There is no function that obtains the path of this directory, but it is searched. The name of this directory is SYSTEM. The Windows directory. Use the GetWindowsDirectory function to get the path of this directory. The directories that are listed in the PATH environment variable. Note that the standard file search strategy and the alternate search strategy differ in just one way: the standard strategy starts its search in the calling application's directory, and the alternate strategy starts its search in the directory of the executable module that LoadLibraryEx is loading.
If you specify the alternate search strategy, its behavior continues until all associated executable modules have been located. After the system starts processing DLL initialization routines, the system reverts to the standard search strategy.
Windows 2000: If a path is specified and there is a redirection file associated with the application, the LoadLibraryEx function searches for the module in the application directory. If the module exists in the application directory, LoadLibraryEx ignores the path specification and loads the module from the application directory. If the module does not exist in the application directory, the function loads the module from the specified directory.
This is because if God had said 'America will be rulled by a 7 man council who, using the Internet and Television will have all of the christians persecuted to death' it wouldn't have made any sense to John.
Yay! So the rest of the world is safe!!!:)
Contraversially (or not, on Slashdot), Microsoft's Executive Committe is 7 strong... hmmm...
Another comment on this, I read through the 'Life in Our Anti-Chiristian America' compilation and it struck me that atheists apparently don't understand why christians try to convert them. Christians believe that when someone dies unsaved they go to hell and burn in pain for eternity. We don't like the idea that others might be subjected to this, so we are trying to help as many people as we can.
The thing is, the central tenet of every religion on the planet (apart from some of the more... esoteric ones) is to do no harm, and to help your fellow human. In other words, lead a good life. Ever single religion, whether it be muslim, Christianity, what-have-you, has the same deal. Everything else is religious dogma, which personally I see as being completely unnecessary.
I don't subscribe to any official, organized religion - I have my beliefs, and I try to live by them. They're decidedly similar to beliefs that people the world over have. Yet, by deliberately spending my time following those beliefs (and being a good person - which, remember, is the central idea behind Christianity) I will supposedly end up in some lake of fire somewhere or other for the rest of eternity.
Personally, I'd prefer to spend my time doing good now, rather than waste it in a church giving "praise" to a God that I reckon would prefer it if I got the hell out of there and did something worthwhile for other people instead. I'll worry about the lake of fire later; no doubt if you're right, I'll have a long time to think about it.
But when it comes down to it, no-one has any definitive answer about all this - it's all up in the air. You have to believe whatever makes the most sense to you, and whatever makes you more complete as a human. That is, whatever makes you happy and whole.
Would you be this offended if I were trying to stop you from running full speed off of a cliff, just because you didn't know it was there?
Not at all. But that cliff is signposted. While I'll give anyone the time of day, there are limits to that time. I wouldn't mind if it was just a case of "Hey... there's this really cool Christ guy who gave his life so that you wouldn't have to be Satan's Own Charcoal-Broiled Snack"; it's when people start trying to convince me that I've got it all wrong, and that their idea of what the world is about is the only one that counts, that I have a problem with it.
The trick is this: Live and Let Live. Sure, tell people about it. But don't try to convert them if they don't want to be converted -- it's their choice what to believe in, not yours.
Simon
ps. Just wanted to point out that I'm not criticizing you personally; just the general modus operandi of most people who try to sell others on their brand of salvation, in the belief that they Know the One True Way.
pps. Interesting that the Gefilte fish (very important symbol from Judaeism) is currently the most popular car-bumper item displayed by Christians. Did anyone bother to check?:)
Deciphering vision is but the first step in making borg. It would be wonderful to make Geordi's eyes for blind people, and some new inner ears for deaf people. Borg don't have to be bad at all. I think borg-like devices will help a lot of people.
Microsoft have succeeded in making Borg for years:)
And I can tell you from experience that the implants are a bugger to get out... I had to use a 1/4" mortar drill bit, and some conc. sulfuric acid...
even anti-matter is gravitationally attractive; an anti-particle has positive energy.
This Anti-materia you speak of would need to have negative energy (which you can just about create using the Casimir effect). But it's definitely not every day stuff -- and my other argument still holds...
Was that last bit serious? (I'm not a physics student if you couldn't tell) Sounds like something I read in NS some time ago about a guy who had resolved the universe down to information theory and reakoned that everything was to do with wormholes (explained entanglement and quantum randomness and everything else to boot).
That last bit was serious as far as I'm concerned, but other than a few discussions with a friend of mine who was at CERN (who said that I'm correct in principle... but that some of it was out of his field), I've never had the guts to formally write it down. Not to mention that it'd take me a few years to relearn everything I needed to know, and learn enough about quantum mechanics and space-time theory to be able to determine the wormhole structure:)
Funnily enough, Kip Thorne never replied to my email... not surprised... I probably sounded like a complete kook:)
Mind you, a number of professors at my uni (way back when) did buy off on the "gravity as knotted spacetime" part of my theory... and on the whole "time as nonlinear for particles" part of it too...
Maybe at some point I'll join the legions of kooks across the world and put something up on my website. It'll all be geometrical arguments though:)
Mind you, the theory, as it stands, is in pretty good shape. It has the potential to give another explanation as to why there's more matter than antimatter in the universe (without symmetry breaking, which I've always had a slight dislike for), and also gives a possible method of "faster than light" communication (though that's actually a misnomer). However, that depends on whether or not the half-twist in the wormhole between an electron/positron pair has an impedance high enough that it acts as a reflective barrier to signals squirted into it. The good thing though is that it should be reasonable easily testable, now that molecular cages have been created. Just create one hydrogen molecule, one anti-hydrogen molecule, trap them both in cages, and make sure that the electron around the hydrogen and the positron around the anti-hydrogen were both created in the same particle-pair creation event. Then squirt light into one of them; if the theory holds and there is no reflection at the twist, then the other will "ring" in sympathy, no matter how far away it is physically. Think of the applications;) (time I got down to the patent office).
This also explains radiation resistance;)
[Mind you, if the theory was correct it'd explain why the SETI project hasn't picked up anything]
Errrr, hate to break it to you, but their does exist a force that repels matter. It is called E&M. You know, same potential as gravity, but it can repel as well as attract. Last I checked it isn't playing hell with our concepts of energy conservation. By the way, it does take an infinite amount of energy to create a point charge (classically speaking). Just make it a footnote and forget about it since ervery thing else works.
Er, yes... but the thing is, with EM, both particles repulse one another (with the strength of repulsion diminishing by the inverse square law). However, with gravity, because of the nature of the force involved, the "normal" particle would still be attracted to the "anti" particle (even though the "anti" particle would be repelling it), and as such, they'd chase each other across the universe with a constant force (ie. constant acceleration, which gives infinite energy). Which is a no-go.
Damn. Wish I hadn't jettisoned most of this stuff from my brain.
I'll work on a full treatment of the problem if you like:)
Yep, it's a memory hog. As is Exchange. However, you can fix that - all it takes is modifying a couple of registry keys to change their memory footprint and memory usage behavior.
They're designed to initally be run on a dedicated machine... but you can throttle them down.
Problem: Anti-Matter doesn't repulse matter. In fact, there's a very good reason for this (namely being that by Feynman and Wheeler, you can look at anti-matter as just being matter going backwards through time; so it's the same stuff, just going in a different direction). Also, imagine if something that had a repulsive effect on matter actually existed? I can't remember the exact details of the argument, but me and my physics tutor worked out that if such a substance were to exist, you'd end up with it chasing across the universe, eventually gaining near-infinite energy. FROM NOWHERE. Which violates the principle of conservation of energy (and equally, by reversing the argument, would require infinite energy to create such a particle in the first place). [this is much worse than quantum physics, which violates the conservation of energy law and allows particles to "borrow" energy, as long as they give it back before anyone looks hard enough and notices that its gone...]
Besides, gravity is caused by knots in spacetime anyway (or to be precise, it's caused by tension between two ends of a wormhole connecting a particle and an anti-particle; whereas the charge is caused by the relative angle of twist of the mouth of the wormhole with respect to the surrounding spacetime... and the reason it's twisted is because that's the minimum stable configuration for a two-mouthed wormhole to exist without collapsing in on itself).
public class Class1 { public static void main (String[] args) { String s="";// put binary string here int c=0; for (int i=0;is.length();i++) { if (s.charAt(i)!=' ') { c *= 2; c+=(s.charAt(i) == '0') ? 0 : 1; } else { System.out.print((char)c); c = 0; } } System.out.println(""); } }
And here's a Z80 one just for the hell of it... RST 0x10 prints to the console;)
start: LD HL,msg LD C,0 loop: LD A,(HL) ; null terminated OR A RET Z
RLC C
LD A,(HL) INC HL CP ' ' JR Z,print CP '0' JR NZ,loop INC C JR loop print: RST 0x10 LD C,0 JR loop
Mmmmm..... yeah... well, try going to http://www.crp.org and checking out who Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers donates money to (if you don't know who they are, check out http://www.kpcb.org -- they're the venture capital firm with all the money behind Sun, AOL, etc etc), who Microsoft donates money to, and comparing and contrasting the two.
*laughs* Well... I'm glad you felt disgust at Norton / Symantec being "ripped off" in DOS 6.0 by the inclusion of "Speeddisk" AND a "DiskDoctor" clone... because those tools were actually Norton/Symantec's SpeedDisk AND DiskDoctor. They were licensed by Microsoft for inclusion in DOS 6.0 (which you can tell if you look at the COPYRIGHT on the bottom of the apps).
Deary deary me... why not try observing instead of just looking some time?
.. then how come I'm 99% sure that I can read words instantaneously? That doesn't include understanding them; you seem to have to pump them through some kind of auditory circuit first and internally vocalize them, but I'm pretty damn sure that I read the words themselves nigh-on immediately.
Now if only I could get around that road-block in the middle, but I guess the brain still has to break it up, digest it, and commit it to memory - which takes time.
As ever (and as with even the best computer architectures today), the problem appears to be the pipe between the processor and memory:)
Recognition and processing is parallel. Understanding is serial.
Yikes! I wouldn't trust my life to Linux; never mind Windows NT -- give me a custom written realtime OS for anything like that (or just straight assembler) thankyouverymuch.
Hmm.. Sounds cool 65000 colors Resolution: 240 x 160 pixels Maximum colors to be displayed simultaneously: 65,000 240 times 160 is 38400. Why can't marketing guys do math?
Awww.. give 'em a break... and mentally replace "to be" with "capable of being".
I wish I had the link handy but I remember reading in ZDNET (of all places) that a memo was leaked out outlining this exact strategy by MS. MS wanted to create the "appearance of grass roots support" by paying people to post pro MS posts on BBS systems. I think the term they used was "astroturf". Look into it.
Already have... that memo was an Edelman PR company document, suggesting a plan that was never put into place... Not only that, but it followed "traditional" astroturf methods; that is, organizing grassroots support -- and if you ask someone who's a supporter to write something for you, then you have to pay them. If you read up on the actual memo itself, it clearly states that they wouldn't be getting people to fake support -- they'd just be asking them to stand up and be counted. And this was in magazines and newspapers - not on BBSes.
As for the paying people to post pro MS posts on BBS systems... it never happened. The only person who even comes close to doing so was that guy on Compuserve a while back (his name escapes me right now), who was fired after the MS management came out. There's a strict policy at MS of how the Internet should be used which may have been put in place after this happened.
It's probably using the ARM 710 CPU Macrocell, which can be embedded in any ASIC... so it'll be on the same cell as the memory it needs... saves chip space (especially as it'll be cartridge based), but possibly will stop people from adding more memory to it.
C'est la guerre.
(Btw: it could also be using the 7TDMI, or the 7100)
The gameboy, game gear, coleco vision, sega master and many clasic arcades all used the z80. Sega even used the z80 as the graphics cpu in the genesis/mega drive/nomad. The nes used the 6502. This chip was almost identical to the chip in the atari 2600 btw. And the SNES used a 16 bit version of the same chip. If there are any more consoles that people know of that used a z80, please post them here:)
Actually... here's some corrections...
The gameboy didn't actually use a Z80; it used a modified Z80 die which was missing the IX, IY, and alternate register sets... it also had some new instructions added to talk to the hardware, and a weird zero-page addition to it.
The Game Gear was a Sega Master System with a slightly different sound chip, all of the TV display stuff ripped out, and more glue to get it to work with an LCD.
Sega didn't use the Z80 as a graphics cpu in the genesis/mega drive/nomad -- the Z80 was a secondary processor (main one being a 68000) used for initial systems booting and handling the controller interfaces -- with its main purpose being handling sound for the console; you'd pipe a music/sound effect player routine into the Z80, and set it going on its own in the background.
As for other things that use the Z80... look at:
The ZX80, ZX81, Sinclair Spectrum, SAM Coupe, MSX... and a variety of washing machines, process controllers and other bits and pieces around the globe.
Personally, I'm more interested in the Z380 these days... it's a wonderful chip - 32bit address bus, but can be switched into a pin-compatible "Z80" mode. (It can even be turned into a pipelined, cache aware, Z80 which is completely instruction compatible with the original if you flick a software switch). It's missing the R register (memory refreshes are handled dynamically using CAS before RAS SIMMs line trickery-pokery), which means that some games which rely on this for random number generation would have problems using it, but who cares:)
It's a neat little chip... if someone made a console around it, I'd be programming games in assembler again in a heart beat:)
My own guess is that they have at least two and probably around five people in their anti-Linux squad (which had around 30 people in it the last time a Microsoft insider posted the number here) whose sole job is to make the rounds of the pro-Linux sites trying to disrupt them. This would put their anti-Linux efforts onto a similar scale to their past anti-OS/2 efforts along those lines. These jobs are in the marketing department, by the way -- do you seriously doubt that MS has plenty of money to hire marketroids?
Eric... the thing is... why would MS bother with a BBS? Why not newspapers, magazines, trade journals, etc etc? After all, they'd target business managers who they'd sell on using the technology, rather than techies.
I don't work there any more, but please at the very least consider the possibility that a lot of this is FUD dredged up by people who hate Microsoft. Also, MS is pretty lax on letting people post to the net; and with 30,000 people working there (though from what I've heard, there's a quite a lot less now), you're going to get a few rabid zealots who want to come online and defend their company.
Slashdot Mirror
The PATH evironment variable is used by NT to locate libraries when they are needed. This value can be changed for any process, allowing for multiple versions of libraries to be loaded. Of course, setting this up for system level DLLs, like ODBC, can be tricky at best. But, for things like the equivalent to libc, it's really easy. Just put "." as the first entry in the PATH.
No need for that "." in the path, as the DLL loader automatically does this anyway.
From the MSDN Docs on LoadLibrary (and LoadLibraryEx):
If no path is specified in the lpLibFileName parameter, and the base file name does not match the base file name of a loaded module, the LoadLibraryEx function uses the same standard file search strategy that LoadLibrary, SearchPath, and OpenFile use to find the executable module and any associated executable modules that it causes to be loaded. This standard strategy searches for a file in the following sequence:
1. The directory from which the application loaded.
1. The current directory.
[snip]
Simon
This is my favorite one of the entire bunch. Basically Windows DLL management is basically broken by design and should be tought as a prime example of how not to build a stable system. Consider the facts:
U RL=/library/psdk/winbase/dll_4abc.htm)
.dll or an .exe file). The name specified is the file name of the executable module. This name is not related to the name stored in a library module itself, as specified by the LIBRARY keyword in the module-definition (.DEF) file.
.dll to the file name. However, the file name string can include a trailing point character (.) to indicate that the module name has no extension.
1) Every little (or bit) P.O.S. application can (and often will) overwrite system DLLs. I would not dare to overwrite libc.so on my system every time I install a new app.
This is a problem with the app author, not with NT. If you don't like it, lock down your System directory so that it can't be modified. Also, Windows 2000 fixes this so that only service packs can change system components.
2) You have very little control over where you go to find your libraries. Compare this to LD_LIBRARY_PATH where you can set exactly where you look for your libraries (thus giving you the ability to use different versions without harming each other).
Er... that's complete rubbish.
Check out the documentation for the LoadLibraryEx function (http://msdn.microsoft.com/isapi/msdnlib2.idc?the
Basically, it's quite easy to specify how DLLs are searched for and loaded.
Parameters
lpLibFileName
[in] Pointer to a null-terminated string that names the executable module (either a
If the string specifies a path, but the file does not exist in the specified directory, the function fails. When specifying a path, be sure to use backslashes (\), not forward slashes (/).
If the string does not specify a path, and the file name extension is omitted, the function appends the default library extension
If the string does not specify a path, the function uses a standard search strategy to find the file. See the Remarks for more information.
If mapping the specified module into the address space causes the system to map in other, associated executable modules, the function can use either the standard search strategy or an alternate search strategy to find those modules. See the Remarks for more information.
If no path is specified in the lpLibFileName parameter, and the base file name does not match the base file name of a loaded module, the LoadLibraryEx function uses the same standard file search strategy that LoadLibrary, SearchPath, and OpenFile use to find the executable module and any associated executable modules that it causes to be loaded. This standard strategy searches for a file in the following sequence:
The directory from which the application loaded.
The current directory.
Windows 95/98: The Windows system directory. Use the GetSystemDirectory function to get the path of this directory.
Windows NT/ 2000: The 32-bit Windows system directory. Use the GetSystemDirectory function to get the path of this directory. The name of this directory is SYSTEM32.
Windows NT/ 2000: The 16-bit Windows system directory. There is no function that obtains the path of this directory, but it is searched. The name of this directory is SYSTEM.
The Windows directory. Use the GetWindowsDirectory function to get the path of this directory.
The directories that are listed in the PATH environment variable.
If a path is specified, and the dwFlags parameter is set to LOAD_WITH_ALTERED_SEARCH_PATH, the LoadLibraryEx function uses an alternate file search strategy to find any executable modules that the specified module causes to be loaded. This alternate strategy searches for a file in the following sequence:
The directory specified by the lpLibFileName path. In other words, the directory that the specified executable module is in.
The current directory.
Windows 95/98: The Windows system directory. Use the GetSystemDirectory function to get the path of this directory.
Windows NT/ 2000: The 32-bit Windows system directory. Use the GetSystemDirectory function to get the path of this directory. The name of this directory is SYSTEM32.
Windows NT/ 2000: The 16-bit Windows system directory. There is no function that obtains the path of this directory, but it is searched. The name of this directory is SYSTEM.
The Windows directory. Use the GetWindowsDirectory function to get the path of this directory.
The directories that are listed in the PATH environment variable.
Note that the standard file search strategy and the alternate search strategy differ in just one way: the standard strategy starts its search in the calling application's directory, and the alternate strategy starts its search in the directory of the executable module that LoadLibraryEx is loading.
If you specify the alternate search strategy, its behavior continues until all associated executable modules have been located. After the system starts processing DLL initialization routines, the system reverts to the standard search strategy.
Windows 2000: If a path is specified and there is a redirection file associated with the application, the LoadLibraryEx function searches for the module in the application directory. If the module exists in the application directory, LoadLibraryEx ignores the path specification and loads the module from the application directory. If the module does not exist in the application directory, the function loads the module from the specified directory.
This is because if God had said 'America will be rulled by a 7 man council who, using the Internet and Television will have all of the christians persecuted to death' it wouldn't have made any sense to John.
:)
:)
Yay! So the rest of the world is safe!!!
Contraversially (or not, on Slashdot), Microsoft's Executive Committe is 7 strong... hmmm...
Simon
ps. Yes, I am joking
Another comment on this, I read through the 'Life in Our Anti-Chiristian America' compilation and it struck me that atheists apparently don't understand why christians try to convert them. Christians believe that when someone dies unsaved they go to hell and burn in pain for eternity. We don't like the idea that others might be subjected to this, so we are trying to help as many people as we can.
... esoteric ones) is to do no harm, and to help your fellow human. In other words, lead a good life. Ever single religion, whether it be muslim, Christianity, what-have-you, has the same deal. Everything else is religious dogma, which personally I see as being completely unnecessary.
:)
The thing is, the central tenet of every religion on the planet (apart from some of the more
I don't subscribe to any official, organized religion - I have my beliefs, and I try to live by them. They're decidedly similar to beliefs that people the world over have. Yet, by deliberately spending my time following those beliefs (and being a good person - which, remember, is the central idea behind Christianity) I will supposedly end up in some lake of fire somewhere or other for the rest of eternity.
Personally, I'd prefer to spend my time doing good now, rather than waste it in a church giving "praise" to a God that I reckon would prefer it if I got the hell out of there and did something worthwhile for other people instead. I'll worry about the lake of fire later; no doubt if you're right, I'll have a long time to think about it.
But when it comes down to it, no-one has any definitive answer about all this - it's all up in the air. You have to believe whatever makes the most sense to you, and whatever makes you more complete as a human. That is, whatever makes you happy and whole.
Would you be this offended if I were trying to stop you from running full speed off of a cliff, just because you didn't know it was there?
Not at all. But that cliff is signposted. While I'll give anyone the time of day, there are limits to that time. I wouldn't mind if it was just a case of "Hey... there's this really cool Christ guy who gave his life so that you wouldn't have to be Satan's Own Charcoal-Broiled Snack"; it's when people start trying to convince me that I've got it all wrong, and that their idea of what the world is about is the only one that counts, that I have a problem with it.
The trick is this: Live and Let Live. Sure, tell people about it. But don't try to convert them if they don't want to be converted -- it's their choice what to believe in, not yours.
Simon
ps. Just wanted to point out that I'm not criticizing you personally; just the general modus operandi of most people who try to sell others on their brand of salvation, in the belief that they Know the One True Way.
pps. Interesting that the Gefilte fish (very important symbol from Judaeism) is currently the most popular car-bumper item displayed by Christians. Did anyone bother to check?
Deciphering vision is but the first step in making borg. It would be wonderful to make Geordi's eyes for blind people, and some new inner ears for deaf people. Borg don't have to be bad at all. I think borg-like devices will help a lot of people.
:)
;)
Microsoft have succeeded in making Borg for years
And I can tell you from experience that the implants are a bugger to get out... I had to use a 1/4" mortar drill bit, and some conc. sulfuric acid...
I still have the scars today
simon
Oh yes... quick note:
even anti-matter is gravitationally attractive; an anti-particle has positive energy.
This Anti-materia you speak of would need to have negative energy (which you can just about create using the Casimir effect). But it's definitely not every day stuff -- and my other argument still holds...
Simon
Was that last bit serious? (I'm not a physics student if you couldn't tell) Sounds like something I read in NS some time ago about a guy who had resolved the universe down to information theory and reakoned that everything was to do with wormholes (explained entanglement and quantum randomness and everything else to boot).
:)
:)
:)
;) (time I got down to the patent office).
;)
That last bit was serious as far as I'm concerned, but other than a few discussions with a friend of mine who was at CERN (who said that I'm correct in principle... but that some of it was out of his field), I've never had the guts to formally write it down. Not to mention that it'd take me a few years to relearn everything I needed to know, and learn enough about quantum mechanics and space-time theory to be able to determine the wormhole structure
Funnily enough, Kip Thorne never replied to my email... not surprised... I probably sounded like a complete kook
Mind you, a number of professors at my uni (way back when) did buy off on the "gravity as knotted spacetime" part of my theory... and on the whole "time as nonlinear for particles" part of it too...
Maybe at some point I'll join the legions of kooks across the world and put something up on my website. It'll all be geometrical arguments though
Mind you, the theory, as it stands, is in pretty good shape. It has the potential to give another explanation as to why there's more matter than antimatter in the universe (without symmetry breaking, which I've always had a slight dislike for), and also gives a possible method of "faster than light" communication (though that's actually a misnomer). However, that depends on whether or not the half-twist in the wormhole between an electron/positron pair has an impedance high enough that it acts as a reflective barrier to signals squirted into it. The good thing though is that it should be reasonable easily testable, now that molecular cages have been created. Just create one hydrogen molecule, one anti-hydrogen molecule, trap them both in cages, and make sure that the electron around the hydrogen and the positron around the anti-hydrogen were both created in the same particle-pair creation event. Then squirt light into one of them; if the theory holds and there is no reflection at the twist, then the other will "ring" in sympathy, no matter how far away it is physically. Think of the applications
This also explains radiation resistance
[Mind you, if the theory was correct it'd explain why the SETI project hasn't picked up anything]
Si
(Joining a legion of kooks...)
Errrr, hate to break it to you, but their does exist a force that repels matter. It is called E&M. You know, same potential as gravity, but it can repel as well as attract. Last I checked it isn't playing hell with our concepts of energy conservation. By the way, it does take an infinite amount of energy to create a point charge (classically speaking). Just make it a footnote and forget about it since ervery thing else works.
:)
Er, yes... but the thing is, with EM, both particles repulse one another (with the strength of repulsion diminishing by the inverse square law). However, with gravity, because of the nature of the force involved, the "normal" particle would still be attracted to the "anti" particle (even though the "anti" particle would be repelling it), and as such, they'd chase each other across the universe with a constant force (ie. constant acceleration, which gives infinite energy). Which is a no-go.
Damn. Wish I hadn't jettisoned most of this stuff from my brain.
I'll work on a full treatment of the problem if you like
Simon
Yep, it's a memory hog. As is Exchange. However, you can fix that - all it takes is modifying a couple of registry keys to change their memory footprint and memory usage behavior.
They're designed to initally be run on a dedicated machine... but you can throttle them down.
Simon
Problem: Anti-Matter doesn't repulse matter. In fact, there's a very good reason for this (namely being that by Feynman and Wheeler, you can look at anti-matter as just being matter going backwards through time; so it's the same stuff, just going in a different direction). Also, imagine if something that had a repulsive effect on matter actually existed? I can't remember the exact details of the argument, but me and my physics tutor worked out that if such a substance were to exist, you'd end up with it chasing across the universe, eventually gaining near-infinite energy. FROM NOWHERE. Which violates the principle of conservation of energy (and equally, by reversing the argument, would require infinite energy to create such a particle in the first place). [this is much worse than quantum physics, which violates the conservation of energy law and allows particles to "borrow" energy, as long as they give it back before anyone looks hard enough and notices that its gone...]
;)
Besides, gravity is caused by knots in spacetime anyway (or to be precise, it's caused by tension between two ends of a wormhole connecting a particle and an anti-particle; whereas the charge is caused by the relative angle of twist of the mouth of the wormhole with respect to the surrounding spacetime... and the reason it's twisted is because that's the minimum stable configuration for a two-mouthed wormhole to exist without collapsing in on itself).
*ahem* sorry.. I was rambling
Simon
I worked as a dev on Visual Studio...
Same here... drop me a line!
Si
Was:
print: RST 0x10
LD C,0
JR loop
Should have been:
print: LD A,C
RST 0x10
LD C,0
JR loop
:)
(not that anybody cares...)
Si
Ugh! Scanf! Yuk!
;)
Nearly as bad as strtok
Simon
Here's a Java one :)
;)
:)
public class Class1 {
public static void main (String[] args) {
String s="";// put binary string here
int c=0;
for (int i=0;is.length();i++) {
if (s.charAt(i)!=' ') {
c *= 2;
c+=(s.charAt(i) == '0') ? 0 : 1;
} else {
System.out.print((char)c);
c = 0;
}
}
System.out.println("");
}
}
And here's a Z80 one just for the hell of it... RST 0x10 prints to the console
start:
LD HL,msg
LD C,0
loop:
LD A,(HL) ; null terminated
OR A
RET Z
RLC C
LD A,(HL)
INC HL
CP ' '
JR Z,print
CP '0'
JR NZ,loop
INC C
JR loop
print: RST 0x10
LD C,0
JR loop
msg: DM "10101010 10101010 010101010"
DB 0
Heheh
Si
Mmmmm..... yeah... well, try going to http://www.crp.org and checking out who Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers donates money to (if you don't know who they are, check out http://www.kpcb.org -- they're the venture capital firm with all the money behind Sun, AOL, etc etc), who Microsoft donates money to, and comparing and contrasting the two.
Ignore the keiretsu behind the curtain.
Simon
*laughs* Well... I'm glad you felt disgust at Norton / Symantec being "ripped off" in DOS 6.0 by the inclusion of "Speeddisk" AND a "DiskDoctor" clone... because those tools were actually Norton/Symantec's SpeedDisk AND DiskDoctor. They were licensed by Microsoft for inclusion in DOS 6.0 (which you can tell if you look at the COPYRIGHT on the bottom of the apps).
Deary deary me... why not try observing instead of just looking some time?
Simon
.. then how come I'm 99% sure that I can read words instantaneously? That doesn't include understanding them; you seem to have to pump them through some kind of auditory circuit first and internally vocalize them, but I'm pretty damn sure that I read the words themselves nigh-on immediately.
:)
Now if only I could get around that road-block in the middle, but I guess the brain still has to break it up, digest it, and commit it to memory - which takes time.
As ever (and as with even the best computer architectures today), the problem appears to be the pipe between the processor and memory
Recognition and processing is parallel.
Understanding is serial.
Simon
Yikes! I wouldn't trust my life to Linux; never mind Windows NT -- give me a custom written realtime OS for anything like that (or just straight assembler) thankyouverymuch.
Simon
Hmm.. Sounds cool 65000 colors
Resolution: 240 x 160 pixels
Maximum colors to be displayed simultaneously: 65,000
240 times 160 is 38400. Why can't marketing guys do math?
Awww.. give 'em a break... and mentally replace "to be" with "capable of being".
Si
I wish I had the link handy but I remember reading in ZDNET (of all places) that a memo was leaked out outlining this exact strategy by MS. MS wanted to create the "appearance of grass roots support" by paying people to post pro MS posts on BBS systems. I think the term they used was "astroturf". Look into it.
Already have... that memo was an Edelman PR company document, suggesting a plan that was never put into place... Not only that, but it followed "traditional" astroturf methods; that is, organizing grassroots support -- and if you ask someone who's a supporter to write something for you, then you have to pay them. If you read up on the actual memo itself, it clearly states that they wouldn't be getting people to fake support -- they'd just be asking them to stand up and be counted. And this was in magazines and newspapers - not on BBSes.
As for the paying people to post pro MS posts on BBS systems... it never happened. The only person who even comes close to doing so was that guy on Compuserve a while back (his name escapes me right now), who was fired after the MS management came out. There's a strict policy at MS of how the Internet should be used which may have been put in place after this happened.
Simon
It's probably using the ARM 710 CPU Macrocell, which can be embedded in any ASIC... so it'll be on the same cell as the memory it needs... saves chip space (especially as it'll be cartridge based), but possibly will stop people from adding more memory to it.
C'est la guerre.
(Btw: it could also be using the 7TDMI, or the 7100)
Simon
The gameboy, game gear, coleco vision, sega master and many clasic arcades all used the z80. Sega even used the z80 as the graphics cpu in the genesis/mega drive/nomad. The nes used the 6502. This chip was almost identical to the chip in the atari 2600 btw. And the SNES used a 16 bit version of the same chip. If there are any more consoles that people know of that used a z80, please post them here :)
:)
:)
Actually... here's some corrections...
The gameboy didn't actually use a Z80; it used a modified Z80 die which was missing the IX, IY, and alternate register sets... it also had some new instructions added to talk to the hardware, and a weird zero-page addition to it.
The Game Gear was a Sega Master System with a slightly different sound chip, all of the TV display stuff ripped out, and more glue to get it to work with an LCD.
Sega didn't use the Z80 as a graphics cpu in the genesis/mega drive/nomad -- the Z80 was a secondary processor (main one being a 68000) used for initial systems booting and handling the controller interfaces -- with its main purpose being handling sound for the console; you'd pipe a music/sound effect player routine into the Z80, and set it going on its own in the background.
As for other things that use the Z80... look at:
The ZX80, ZX81, Sinclair Spectrum, SAM Coupe, MSX... and a variety of washing machines, process controllers and other bits and pieces around the globe.
Personally, I'm more interested in the Z380 these days... it's a wonderful chip - 32bit address bus, but can be switched into a pin-compatible "Z80" mode. (It can even be turned into a pipelined, cache aware, Z80 which is completely instruction compatible with the original if you flick a software switch). It's missing the R register (memory refreshes are handled dynamically using CAS before RAS SIMMs line trickery-pokery), which means that some games which rely on this for random number generation would have problems using it, but who cares
It's a neat little chip... if someone made a console around it, I'd be programming games in assembler again in a heart beat
Simon
Ooops... make that "The rest of europe and the US" :)
Si
Is this a bit of a first ? I've never had the privalidge of seeing a major new product being launched first in the United Kingdom before.
... so now you know :)
Brilliant, and about time too !
Funnily enough, the UK is often used for test-marketing purposes for the rest of Europe and the UK
Simon
My own guess is that they have at least two and probably around five people in their anti-Linux squad (which had around 30 people in it the last time a Microsoft insider posted the number here) whose sole job is to make the rounds of the pro-Linux sites trying to disrupt them. This would put their anti-Linux efforts onto a similar scale to their past anti-OS/2 efforts along those lines. These jobs are in the marketing department, by the way -- do you seriously doubt that MS has plenty of money to hire marketroids?
Eric... the thing is... why would MS bother with a BBS? Why not newspapers, magazines, trade journals, etc etc? After all, they'd target business managers who they'd sell on using the technology, rather than techies.
I don't work there any more, but please at the very least consider the possibility that a lot of this is FUD dredged up by people who hate Microsoft. Also, MS is pretty lax on letting people post to the net; and with 30,000 people working there (though from what I've heard, there's a quite a lot less now), you're going to get a few rabid zealots who want to come online and defend their company.
Simon