You forgot all the hardware engineering... PC's wouldn't exist if people didn't understand D.E.s (which you mentioned) for analyzing circuits, nevermind analysis of semiconductor device behaviour, which is analyzed using D.E.s, Bose-Einstein statistics, Fermi-Dirac statistics and probably a load of other stuff that I'm unaware of...
Of course, you're right about the computer people not getting into the really hard math. A buddy of mine is in pure math, and anytime i see his work i either shudder in horror or stare dumbly at it because i don't know what the hell it is.
you're absolutely right about how atoms are in fact perpetual motion "machines". the whole idea of a "PMM" is a misnomer, because the idea behind it is not one of perpetual motion, but of perpetual work/energy. that's the part that isn't kosher, because it violates the first law of thermodynamics "energy cannot be created or destroyed".
there's alot of things going on here. by "main store do you mean main memory? if so, forget about it. DRAM is never going to be as fast as the SRAM in your cache. IMHO, capacitors just can't do it. writing to cache is a different story, but now you're talking about cache control issues by having two devices dirtying up the cache. maybe this wouldn't be such a problem becuase the processor is going to know when it tells the "bit manipulator" to do its work.
I have no idea what kind of clock speed you can get out of different FPGA's. I could look it up, but I won't. ASIC would probably be better for this. it's fast. the operation you're talking about is something like this (i think):
Given an arbitrary 8 bit word:
8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
x x x x x x x x
We want to modify bits 4, 3, 2, so we go:
x x x x x x x x
AND 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 1
to get
x x x x 0 0 0 x
OR 0 0 0 0 y y y 0
to end up with
x x x x y y y x
So you need something that can do a word-length AND + OR in one clock cycle... Can you do it at 2GHz+? I have no idea...
"First, I don't know where you've been buying your CD-Rs, but you are getting ripped off. It's been years since I've paid more than $.30 each."
sigh... sorry, don't mean to be a dick... but...there are other countries besides the U.S. that use the dollar as the unit of currency.
in fairness, the poster you're replying to should have specified US$, CAN$, NZ$, etc... but i digress.
secondly, was the poster you responded to referring to playing CDs burned in a CDR on a PC, or was he referring to the fact that stereo component recorders like the Sony RCD-W1 require the special "Audio CD-R"s. Yes, I know, the market penetration of these things relative to PC burners is miniscule, but still, you've gotta ask yourself, "Why do these stereo component burners require special discs, when I know that plain old Data CD-Rs will do the job?" Secondly, ask yourself, "Why do these special discs that get used in these idiot-proof player/burners cost so much more? Is the company trying to take advantage of ignorant consumers that don't know any better, or are technophobic?"
Ah, the sweet sweet machinations of modern corporations.:)
In related news, thousands of help desk workers were seen screaming, crying and worse in reaction to the announcement.
Sniffed one worker,"Oh God!!! Why!? How the hell am I supposed to fix anything now? Corrupted registries can't be fixed with ren user.da0 user.dat. I can't del or deltree. And with Microsoft's registration bullshit, the hundreds of Windows reinstalls I'll be doing are going to take even longer! Damn you, Gates! DAMN YOU!!!"
She then proceeded to wrap her arms around her knees, and rock back and forth, muttering "Where are my bookmarks? It won't print! I don't remember where I saved it! I opened this attachment called iloveyou.vbs, is that ok?" over and over again.
Yeah, that's right. When Luke meets Obi Wan for the first time on Tatooine, and they go back to Obi Wans' house. Obi Wan tells Luke that he fought with Lukes' father in the clone wars.
IMHO, the clone wars were probably the event that brought about the collapse of the republic and the installation of Palpatine as emperor. I believe in Ep. 4 the Emperor says something like "I've dissolved the senate. The last remnants of the old republic have been swept away."
hype yo. any university soft.eng. prof. will tell you that maintenance is by far the largest part of the software life cycle, in terms of both time and $$$. readability and maintainability (which in some ways are pretty much the same thing).
however, I would personally choose a language based on the problem at hand before I chose it based on syntax.
Sorry, couldn't help myself. Standard Operating Environment. We've got one here at work, like many others, I'm sure, but it's not rigidly enforced. The IT people can tell when you've got non-standard software installed, but there's no installation lockout. Win2k migration is coming soon, though, so that could change...:(
This might be offtopic, and I apologize, but the parent comment contains a very important statement.
"There's no such thing as data that can't be manipulated"
Would somebody please tell this to all the equipment manufacturers, all the software developers, the RIAA, the MPAA, and most importantly, the lawyers and lawmakers? Please!?
This statement should be considered a defining law of the "digital age". If everybody understood this incontrovertible fact, maybe the world wouldn't be so stupid sometimes.
I have to disagree with your disagreement. Granted, anybody can start sticking in pieces of wire or certain devices into an analog circuit, and see what kind of cool noises or smoke they can make, but to actually understand why the circuit does what it does usually requires a bit more skill.
Do some reading on deriving Bode plots, complex analysis, sinusoidal steady-state analysis, transfer functions, op amps etc. etc. etc. and then tell me that analog circuit analysis is easy.
It doesn't "take real skill and understanding to do anything analog", but those things are generally required if you're not doing amateurish hacking.
you forgot about making sure the isolinear chips are interfaced to the plasma conduit through the positronic warp field controller.
on that note, (get ready to mod -1, offtopic) where did the people on star trek poop? i figure they must have used the transporters to extract waste directly from the crews' bowels/bladders. I never saw any toilets on the enterprise, did you?
dude, I totally agree with your last point, and there's nothing paranoid about it. look at the media industry in Canada; BCE, Rogers, CanWest, Chum, Shaw, Alliance Atlantis and Quebecor own practically everything.
Go have a look at the CRTC website under "Industry Ownership Profiles". Media Convergence is very real. Witnesseth AOL Time Warner, the conglomeration of conglomerates of conglomerates.
if someone is an assembly line worker, the most contact they will have with computers would be on the line
no offense, but wtf are you talking about? 80%+ of the jobs on an automotive assembly line involve using air tools to screw/bolt pieces together. yes, there are lots of computers involved in the factory automation processes, but these generally require no operator intervention. they don't put computers on the factory floor so people can use them. they put them there to eliminate positions.
if they were using new stuff, their cases would catch on fire.
"Wow, those P-IV's are really smokin!"
Re:Don't forget (yuck) process and (yes) giveback
on
Coder or Architect?
·
· Score: 1
I liked your points about civil engineering. Software is (finally) starting to move in that direction, albeit slowly. I don't know about elsewhere in the world, but here in Canada, we're starting to see full university software engineering programs, where the people graduate and can become licensed, professional software engineers. Note: As in many countries, engineering is a regulated profession in Canada, somewhat similar to medicine. It is illegal to call yourself an engineer if you're not licensed to practice by your provincial regulatory association.
Right now, EE's with software concentrations, and CE's are doing this kind of work, although not necessarily in the IT industry. They're the people who write the control software for nuclear power plants, or airplane autopilots; in general, critical systems involving the preservation of property or life. They're licensed, and if their software fscks up, they have professional (mal)practice insurance for covering their legal liability.
My point is, as the world starts to get more real EE's, CE's and SE's, I hope we'll start to see a more regulated, standardized software industry.
if XP is the same as all the other post-3.11 software, backup user.dat and then regedit. ain't nothin like hackin off whole branches of your registry tree. it's theraputic.:)
IIRC, R ~ sqrt(f) for high frequencies
maybe we're not thinking of the same thing, but i thought Z = jwL or Z = 1/(jwC) where Z is impedance, j = sqrt(-1), w is angular freq., and L and C are inductance and capacitance, respectively.
true. i just finished doing a bunch of these last week at work. what a pain in the ass, holy crap.
however, as other repliers to this post pointed out, that's only when you're splicing together two pieces of raw fiber. there are lots of standard male/female plugs for fiber now, which are used in patch panels and when terminating a run at a device. keeping these clean is definitely important, as the signal strength gets attenuated when you're fusing glass to glass, never mind when you're hooking up via connectors.
Nonetheless, optical plugs are quite common, and I can't see it being much of a problem to create a standard optical expansion slot on an optical motherboard. One thing that could be tricky is routing light pipes on the board, when you have to maintain a minimum radius of curvature on your corners. Remember, no sharp angles allowed, only smooth curves. Unless they figure out how to make tiny little mirrors with minimal signal disappation.
These guys pretty much run the show when it comes to this kind of stuff.
i was gonna say almost the exact same damn thing. please please please mod parent up.
it's pretty disgusting, when you think about it. a bill written in response to a tragic incident where thousands of innocent civilians lost their lives, and the RIAA figures it's a good time to make sure their own fscking greedy interests are well-protected.
as far as i'm concerned, nobody can search my house unless they're the police and have a warrant, and that includes my computer and what's on it. morally/ethically, if not legally, the RIAA has absolutely no right to r/w/x anything on my system, under any circumstances.
a chapter on buzzwords? trying to use language that sounds "hip" or "cool" or "cutting edge" to entice people? like "gonzo marketing"?
marketer: "gonzo marketing"? what the hell is that? wow, this guy must be some kind of "guru" on the "bleeding edge". i want to be sure i'm up to speed on the latest techniques in this "new economy" world. gosh, maybe us marketing guys will finally have an impressive array of lingo and abbreviations like the programmers do. woo hoo!
i beleive (correct me if i'm wrong) that the article points out that the heating effects which induced the dust storms in the first place also caused the atmosphere of the planet to increase in volume. although there would of course be a corresponding decrease in atmospheric density, the calculations used to determine the flight characteristics of the aerobraking maneuver would be affected, i'm 99% sure.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, you're right about the computer people not getting into the really hard math. A buddy of mine is in pure math, and anytime i see his work i either shudder in horror or stare dumbly at it because i don't know what the hell it is.
you're absolutely right about how atoms are in fact perpetual motion "machines". the whole idea of a "PMM" is a misnomer, because the idea behind it is not one of perpetual motion, but of perpetual work/energy. that's the part that isn't kosher, because it violates the first law of thermodynamics "energy cannot be created or destroyed".
there's alot of things going on here. by "main store do you mean main memory? if so, forget about it. DRAM is never going to be as fast as the SRAM in your cache. IMHO, capacitors just can't do it. writing to cache is a different story, but now you're talking about cache control issues by having two devices dirtying up the cache. maybe this wouldn't be such a problem becuase the processor is going to know when it tells the "bit manipulator" to do its work.
I have no idea what kind of clock speed you can get out of different FPGA's. I could look it up, but I won't. ASIC would probably be better for this. it's fast. the operation you're talking about is something like this (i think):
So you need something that can do a word-length AND + OR in one clock cycle... Can you do it at 2GHz+? I have no idea...
sigh... sorry, don't mean to be a dick... but...there are other countries besides the U.S. that use the dollar as the unit of currency.
in fairness, the poster you're replying to should have specified US$, CAN$, NZ$, etc... but i digress.
secondly, was the poster you responded to referring to playing CDs burned in a CDR on a PC, or was he referring to the fact that stereo component recorders like the Sony RCD-W1 require the special "Audio CD-R"s. Yes, I know, the market penetration of these things relative to PC burners is miniscule, but still, you've gotta ask yourself, "Why do these stereo component burners require special discs, when I know that plain old Data CD-Rs will do the job?" Secondly, ask yourself, "Why do these special discs that get used in these idiot-proof player/burners cost so much more? Is the company trying to take advantage of ignorant consumers that don't know any better, or are technophobic?"
Ah, the sweet sweet machinations of modern corporations. :)
Sniffed one worker,"Oh God!!! Why!? How the hell am I supposed to fix anything now? Corrupted registries can't be fixed with ren user.da0 user.dat. I can't del or deltree. And with Microsoft's registration bullshit, the hundreds of Windows reinstalls I'll be doing are going to take even longer! Damn you, Gates! DAMN YOU!!!"
She then proceeded to wrap her arms around her knees, and rock back and forth, muttering "Where are my bookmarks? It won't print! I don't remember where I saved it! I opened this attachment called iloveyou.vbs, is that ok?" over and over again.
IMHO, the clone wars were probably the event that brought about the collapse of the republic and the installation of Palpatine as emperor. I believe in Ep. 4 the Emperor says something like "I've dissolved the senate. The last remnants of the old republic have been swept away."
however, I would personally choose a language based on the problem at hand before I chose it based on syntax.
Oh good... because we all enjoy maintaining COBOL code so much, they thought we needed to try THAT again. Sigh...
Shithole of Evil. :)
Sorry, couldn't help myself. Standard Operating Environment. We've got one here at work, like many others, I'm sure, but it's not rigidly enforced. The IT people can tell when you've got non-standard software installed, but there's no installation lockout. Win2k migration is coming soon, though, so that could change... :(
"There's no such thing as data that can't be manipulated"
Would somebody please tell this to all the equipment manufacturers, all the software developers, the RIAA, the MPAA, and most importantly, the lawyers and lawmakers? Please!?
This statement should be considered a defining law of the "digital age". If everybody understood this incontrovertible fact, maybe the world wouldn't be so stupid sometimes.
Do some reading on deriving Bode plots, complex analysis, sinusoidal steady-state analysis, transfer functions, op amps etc. etc. etc. and then tell me that analog circuit analysis is easy.
It doesn't "take real skill and understanding to do anything analog", but those things are generally required if you're not doing amateurish hacking.
Oh, thank you for that... I think we could all use a little more Hubbard-bashing in our lives... :)
Q: What's the difference between an auditor and a thetan?
A: Who cares? Only nutjobs believe in that shit anyways!!! :)
on that note, (get ready to mod -1, offtopic) where did the people on star trek poop? i figure they must have used the transporters to extract waste directly from the crews' bowels/bladders. I never saw any toilets on the enterprise, did you?
Go have a look at the CRTC website under "Industry Ownership Profiles". Media Convergence is very real. Witnesseth AOL Time Warner, the conglomeration of conglomerates of conglomerates.
no offense, but wtf are you talking about? 80%+ of the jobs on an automotive assembly line involve using air tools to screw/bolt pieces together. yes, there are lots of computers involved in the factory automation processes, but these generally require no operator intervention. they don't put computers on the factory floor so people can use them. they put them there to eliminate positions.
"Wow, those P-IV's are really smokin!"
Right now, EE's with software concentrations, and CE's are doing this kind of work, although not necessarily in the IT industry. They're the people who write the control software for nuclear power plants, or airplane autopilots; in general, critical systems involving the preservation of property or life. They're licensed, and if their software fscks up, they have professional (mal)practice insurance for covering their legal liability.
My point is, as the world starts to get more real EE's, CE's and SE's, I hope we'll start to see a more regulated, standardized software industry.
More info on SoftEng profession in Canada. Apparently, there's been some legal wrangling of late.
legacy code can lick my cajones, that piece of garbage should have been dropped a long time ago.
if XP is the same as all the other post-3.11 software, backup user.dat and then regedit. ain't nothin like hackin off whole branches of your registry tree. it's theraputic. :)
IIRC, R ~ sqrt(f) for high frequencies maybe we're not thinking of the same thing, but i thought Z = jwL or Z = 1/(jwC) where Z is impedance, j = sqrt(-1), w is angular freq., and L and C are inductance and capacitance, respectively.
however, as other repliers to this post pointed out, that's only when you're splicing together two pieces of raw fiber. there are lots of standard male/female plugs for fiber now, which are used in patch panels and when terminating a run at a device. keeping these clean is definitely important, as the signal strength gets attenuated when you're fusing glass to glass, never mind when you're hooking up via connectors.
Nonetheless, optical plugs are quite common, and I can't see it being much of a problem to create a standard optical expansion slot on an optical motherboard. One thing that could be tricky is routing light pipes on the board, when you have to maintain a minimum radius of curvature on your corners. Remember, no sharp angles allowed, only smooth curves. Unless they figure out how to make tiny little mirrors with minimal signal disappation.
These guys pretty much run the show when it comes to this kind of stuff.
it's pretty disgusting, when you think about it. a bill written in response to a tragic incident where thousands of innocent civilians lost their lives, and the RIAA figures it's a good time to make sure their own fscking greedy interests are well-protected.
as far as i'm concerned, nobody can search my house unless they're the police and have a warrant, and that includes my computer and what's on it. morally/ethically, if not legally, the RIAA has absolutely no right to r/w/x anything on my system, under any circumstances.
marketer: "gonzo marketing"? what the hell is that? wow, this guy must be some kind of "guru" on the "bleeding edge". i want to be sure i'm up to speed on the latest techniques in this "new economy" world. gosh, maybe us marketing guys will finally have an impressive array of lingo and abbreviations like the programmers do. woo hoo!
But aesthetically, it's a piece of crap.
i beleive (correct me if i'm wrong) that the article points out that the heating effects which induced the dust storms in the first place also caused the atmosphere of the planet to increase in volume. although there would of course be a corresponding decrease in atmospheric density, the calculations used to determine the flight characteristics of the aerobraking maneuver would be affected, i'm 99% sure.