The "brainstorm session" files on the website has some ideas for games that Atari had that I WANT TO PLAY!
"Mr. Bill" - Utilize a selection of weapons to destroy "Mr. Bill" character in the least amount of time. (sounds like fun, Mr Bill!)
But I'm not yet sure about "1st Person Mole - Find your way out of 1st person maze. Screen is black except when you hit a wall" - sounds like you don't need a 3d card for that one!
I just wish that companies would put at least as much effort into their new movies as they put into their failed copy protection/digital limitations systems. I mean, what is the percentage of worthwhile movies that came out in the last two years? 10% ?
You would be surprised. At gigabit ethernet speeds, protocol and memory management and packet size suddenly become very very important. Imagine all your bandwidth being taken up by 1Kbyte packets. That means 100,000 packets per second! So that means you have only 10 microseconds processing time per packet before they start piling up and eventually get tossed.
Special consideration must be taken in order to be efficient.
Take a look at uvm-zero-copy.ps as an example of the kernel changes made to *bsd in order to get high throughput in gigabit ethernet.
Also, most of those cheapie gig-e adaptors in the mac and for pc's usually won't cut it for real high bandwidth.
But in which way is shredding documents different from a 'document retention policy' that effectively shreds the same documents except before the lawsuit?
If you have a 90 day document retention policy, that means every day you are deleting the documents that are 91 days old. If you get a an order from the court, does that mean you have to stop your document retention policy?
That is a very good point. I just used TinkerTool to shut off the font anti-aliasing on my mac osx box, and was very surprised about how bad the standard fonts looked!
One thing though that Mac OSX does very nicely is the multi-level ligatures. I haven't yet seen an app on linux that even has the concept. is there one?
Another point I figured out regarding cathedrals. You see all these really old cathedrals and they are still standing! First thought is that they had great building design capabilities.
But in reality many buildings fell down, and they tried again. We don't see the ones that fell down.
And mistakes happen even now with building design. Big example is the 'Save-on-foods' collapse in Burnaby B.C. Canada. Plus there are tons of little ones - like the new office building in Vancouver which had to be renovated a few months ago because the washrooms had no drainage holes in the floor. One overflowing toilet caused major havoc and power failures.
Makes me think of the possibility of a new product! anti-cheatfinder!
Parse the original code and then re-organize the parse tree to be different yet functionally equivalent. Output the new code based on the modified parse tree. No need to change the variable names since cheatfinder ignores them anyways.
Then, sell the product to cheaters around the world! Hopefully they will go get jobs at microsoft!
As computers get faster and faster, the overhead generated by a virtual machine becomes less and less.
At first that sentence makes sense, but it is not necessarily true. It depends on how much work can be done in one opcode in your virtual machine.
The problem comes when the VM decides to decode an opcode and dispatch it to the routine which implements it.
As computers get faster and faster, typically their pipelines get longer. At the dispatch point for the opcode, the pipeline gets flushed. Wham, you got a 19 cycle hit.
Also, when code does simple arithmetic, almost always the VM's are designed to do them in a serial fashion which will effectively kill any possible optimizations with multiple parallel ALU's or other execution units.
So, I expect that the speed difference between optimized compiled C/C++ code and any Virtual Machine will typically INCREASE as processors get 'faster'.
The speedups in the newer, faster processors is not just clock speed - they require the code to take advantage of the pipelining, fine grained parallelism, instruction scheduling, vector operations and intelligent cache control. And if your VM doesn't take advantage of these features then it won't see the speedup without using native calls.
Windows 2000 on my old (now dead) laptop. Before SP1. Worked great! Faster than Win98 on the same laptop!
I had 2 blue screens of death. First was when I set WinAMP to go full screen via DirectX.
Second was when I used the 'suspend to disk' option of Windows 2000. The power was off. Forgot that I was 'suspended to disk'.
I removed the pcmcia ethernet card, stuck in my modem card. Power up, and it instantly complains about different hardware so it can not restore the state from disk. reboots and was never stable again. After that point it would always blue screen crash within the first 5 minutes of a fresh reboot.
The only fix was to re-install everything from scratch!
I don't know if this problem was fixed in a service pack, but it wasn't very nice.
It isn't confusing the issue. If you can't dial 911 then people can die. Overload of phone calls, overload of www.cnn.com, overload of a buffer, what is the difference? In a non-critical system no one cares. In a critical system they are all problems.
Criminals could synchronize their attacks near ticket masters with the timing of spice girls ticket sales. Guaranteed 30 extra minutes!
Yes, somebody screwed up big time. The problem though is that I am in the same exchange as Ticket Master. Everyone in this exchange could not call ANYONE or even 911 because there was no dial tone.
Thats more the equivelent of a Denial of Service attack NOT a system malfunction.
Tell that to anyone who needed to call 911 during that time!
In my opinion a Denial of Service of 911 emergency services IS a system malfunction. The 911 system has fault tolerance everwhere. But if the phone company cannot provide a dial tone, you're out of luck.
2 years ago I picked up my phone. No dial tone. Huh. Did I forget to pay my bill? No. Checked the wiring and the phone. 15 minutes later still no dial tone. My cell phone worked though, so I called the operator and asked her about my phone.
The problem was that Spice Girls tickets just went on sale. The phone call load to the nearby Ticket Master outlet flooded the system. No one in my area had a dial tone for half an hour. No one could call 911 on a land line!
Problems happen even with properly engineered systems. When an improperly designed system is put into place, all hell will break loose.
I'm not just talking Microsoft here, there is a real problem with companies/programmers seeing their system work once, and then assuming it is good enough to ship.
Microsoft (and friends) have taken a long time but they have basically trained the average computer user to expect and accept computer crashes - instead of going back to the store and demanding a refund for a defective product!
This can be both good and bad. Maybe less people will rely on non-fault-tolerant systems for ultra-important issues like emergency/military/banking?
Or maybe people will get desensitized to the crashing. Programmer's don't need to fully test their products anymore since people accept the crashes. People just go along thinking that it is the normal way, wreaking havoc in the world with a simple blue screen on a computer that had no business being in a critical system.
Slashdot Mirror
The "brainstorm session" files on the website has some ideas for games that Atari had that I WANT TO PLAY!
"Mr. Bill" - Utilize a selection of weapons to destroy "Mr. Bill" character in the least amount of time. (sounds like fun, Mr Bill!)
But I'm not yet sure about "1st Person Mole - Find your way out of 1st person maze. Screen is black except when you hit a wall" - sounds like you don't need a 3d card for that one!
--jeff
and T.V. shows dedicated to advertisements.
Every once in a while I am happily reminded again of the reasons that I do not have a television set and why I do not watch any T.V.
--Jeff
I just wish that companies would put at least as much effort into their new movies as they put into their failed copy protection/digital limitations systems. I mean, what is the percentage of worthwhile movies that came out in the last two years? 10% ?
--Jeff
You would be surprised. At gigabit ethernet speeds, protocol and memory management and packet size suddenly become very very important. Imagine all your bandwidth being taken up by 1Kbyte packets. That means 100,000 packets per second! So that means you have only 10 microseconds processing time per packet before they start piling up and eventually get tossed.
Special consideration must be taken in order to be efficient.
Take a look at uvm-zero-copy.ps as an example of the kernel changes made to *bsd in order to get high throughput in gigabit ethernet.
Also, most of those cheapie gig-e adaptors in the mac and for pc's usually won't cut it for real high bandwidth.
--jeff
But in which way is shredding documents different from a 'document retention policy' that effectively shreds the same documents except before the lawsuit?
If you have a 90 day document retention policy, that means every day you are deleting the documents that are 91 days old. If you get a an order from the court, does that mean you have to stop your document retention policy?
It seems the line is very fine....
--jeff
take it a bit further.
"Every sperm is sacred
Every sperm is great
If any sperm gets wasted
god gets quite irate"
(what show did that come from?)
--jeff
Was she cute? Did she have a boyfriend there at the bar?
Which means that the top GCC/G++ compiler gurus would be AOL employees. You never know, this could be a good thing...
--jeff
For communicating a method to circumvent copy protection.
--jeff
I believe that under the DMCA you could be prosecuted for that statemennt.
--jeff
That is a very good point. I just used TinkerTool to shut off the font anti-aliasing on my mac osx box, and was very surprised about how bad the standard fonts looked!
One thing though that Mac OSX does very nicely is the multi-level ligatures. I haven't yet seen an app on linux that even has the concept. is there one?
jeffk
Right.
Another point I figured out regarding cathedrals. You see all these really old cathedrals and they are still standing! First thought is that they had great building design capabilities.
But in reality many buildings fell down, and they tried again. We don't see the ones that fell down.
And mistakes happen even now with building design. Big example is the 'Save-on-foods' collapse in Burnaby B.C. Canada. Plus there are tons of little ones - like the new office building in Vancouver which had to be renovated a few months ago because the washrooms had no drainage holes in the floor. One overflowing toilet caused major havoc and power failures.
--jeff
Hmmm...
Makes me think of the possibility of a new product! anti-cheatfinder!
Parse the original code and then re-organize the parse tree to be different yet functionally equivalent. Output the new code based on the modified parse tree. No need to change the variable names since cheatfinder ignores them anyways.
Then, sell the product to cheaters around the world! Hopefully they will go get jobs at microsoft!
Jeff
At first that sentence makes sense, but it is not necessarily true. It depends on how much work can be done in one opcode in your virtual machine.
The problem comes when the VM decides to decode an opcode and dispatch it to the routine which implements it.
As computers get faster and faster, typically their pipelines get longer. At the dispatch point for the opcode, the pipeline gets flushed. Wham, you got a 19 cycle hit.
Also, when code does simple arithmetic, almost always the VM's are designed to do them in a serial fashion which will effectively kill any possible optimizations with multiple parallel ALU's or other execution units.
So, I expect that the speed difference between optimized compiled C/C++ code and any Virtual Machine will typically INCREASE as processors get 'faster'.
The speedups in the newer, faster processors is not just clock speed - they require the code to take advantage of the pipelining, fine grained parallelism, instruction scheduling, vector operations and intelligent cache control. And if your VM doesn't take advantage of these features then it won't see the speedup without using native calls.
--jeff
I didn't say that it made sense... it is just typical.
--jeff
Now that god has apparently failed him he is probably off learning how to be a satanist. (typical extremist behaviour)
--jeff
Huh. Those work fine for me too. Well there is something weird going on.
Check this out:s e.png
http://people.redhat.com/jrb/files/Screenshot-Mou
That does not work for me under IE 5.1
However it does work under mozilla build 2001122106 for max osx. Perhaps a mimetype problem?
--jeff
Microsoft IE v5.1 on Mac-OSX does NOT support viewing .png files.
Jeff
Windows 2000 on my old (now dead) laptop. Before SP1. Worked great! Faster than Win98 on the same laptop!
I had 2 blue screens of death. First was when I set WinAMP to go full screen via DirectX.
Second was when I used the 'suspend to disk' option of Windows 2000. The power was off. Forgot that I was 'suspended to disk'.
I removed the pcmcia ethernet card, stuck in my modem card. Power up, and it instantly complains about different hardware so it can not restore the state from disk. reboots and was never stable again. After that point it would always blue screen crash within the first 5 minutes of a fresh reboot.
The only fix was to re-install everything from scratch!
I don't know if this problem was fixed in a service pack, but it wasn't very nice.
--jeff
Lol!
I didn't even know they went on sale before it was too late! Darn!
--jeff
It isn't confusing the issue. If you can't dial 911 then people can die. Overload of phone calls, overload of www.cnn.com, overload of a buffer, what is the difference? In a non-critical system no one cares. In a critical system they are all problems.
Criminals could synchronize their attacks near ticket masters with the timing of spice girls ticket sales. Guaranteed 30 extra minutes!
--jeff
Yes, somebody screwed up big time. The problem though is that I am in the same exchange as Ticket Master. Everyone in this exchange could not call ANYONE or even 911 because there was no dial tone.
--jeff
Tell that to anyone who needed to call 911 during that time!
In my opinion a Denial of Service of 911 emergency services IS a system malfunction. The 911 system has fault tolerance everwhere. But if the phone company cannot provide a dial tone, you're out of luck.
--jeff
2 years ago I picked up my phone. No dial tone. Huh. Did I forget to pay my bill? No. Checked the wiring and the phone. 15 minutes later still no dial tone. My cell phone worked though, so I called the operator and asked her about my phone.
The problem was that Spice Girls tickets just went on sale. The phone call load to the nearby Ticket Master outlet flooded the system. No one in my area had a dial tone for half an hour. No one could call 911 on a land line!
Problems happen even with properly engineered systems. When an improperly designed system is put into place, all hell will break loose.
I'm not just talking Microsoft here, there is a real problem with companies/programmers seeing their system work once, and then assuming it is good enough to ship.
--jeff
Microsoft (and friends) have taken a long time but they have basically trained the average computer user to expect and accept computer crashes - instead of going back to the store and demanding a refund for a defective product!
This can be both good and bad. Maybe less people will rely on non-fault-tolerant systems for ultra-important issues like emergency/military/banking?
Or maybe people will get desensitized to the crashing. Programmer's don't need to fully test their products anymore since people accept the crashes. People just go along thinking that it is the normal way, wreaking havoc in the world with a simple blue screen on a computer that had no business being in a critical system.
read The Risks Digest for scary stories.
--jeff