I run in 1152x864 on my aging 17". I'd use a higher resolution but my monitor has limited bandwidth. However, you can't go wrong with CAN$200 (US$125) for it.
Because I increased my Netscape fonts, I overlap 2 or three browsers and a couple of xterms (don't go anywhere without one...). I also always leave a bit of room on the right side of the screen for download windows, music players, knotes, etc.
Now, on the average 17" monitor, try reading one thing, and referencing another. The programs don't tile/cascade well while retaining their GUI (meaning the workspace-to-toolbar ratio changes).
That depends. In Windows, it seems that most of the applications are optimized for full screen. They just don't look very good in a non-maximised state.
I prefer the various X apps. They appear to be designed to share space with other apps. Netscape is an example. I have to maximise it in windows, but in X, maximising it makes it look odd, and a waste of space. I rarely use a second workspace, even though I run *a lot* of stuff at one time (people look at my desktop in wide-eyed amazement). Default font sizes are one reason for this, even though I increase my font in Netscape. the other thing is the multi-window apps, like the GIMP. Use a graphic app in windows, and you have to full screen it to be able to use it, then you have to deal with that MDI garbage. I prefer being able to switch between windows of the same app in the same manner as switching between apps.
It's especially useful for programming, I can have docs, my code, a debugger, as well as other things on the screen at one time. That's a hell of a lot quicker than any reference manual.
It seems that it's the older people that tend to print more things off.
Your example, well, makes me sick. Trees are not nearly as renewable as I wish. Hemp is a damn near perfect solution to this but many governments are horribly misinformed/fearful. It's a good thing they're growing it in Ontario. I hope the practice gets more popular. I've seen the effects of clear-cutting and it disturbs me.
Older people tend to be set in their ways. They resist change.
I started working at a place in January and I did a fair bit of research. I would grab items from various sites, generate plots of data I collected (They let me use GNUPlot and Cygwin, yay), etc. When I would tell someone that I had an item or a piece of data, I would tell them what directory to find it in. Invariably, they would say, "print it off."
I have a Satellite Pro 400 CDT which is almost exactly the same as yours, with a TFT screen.
I haven't opened it. I haven't been able to find any service manual and my attempt to open the damn thing failed (If anybody knows how, please contact me). Removing screws, pulling at the cover gingerly and not forcing anything because I'm scared to break it.
Generally, on laptops, most of the components are directly soldered in to save space. That was the case on my old Thinkpad (which IBM has a pdf service manual for...) with bad RAM. The RAM and processor were directly soldered in.
Then again, with the proper tools and *a lot* of SMT experience, you might be able to replace the processor.
Until we can open up our computers, we really can't tell. If it's socketed, well, that would be neat. I'd be getting mine upgraded, too.
I think we will soon see the point where digital modeling amplifiers will be able to simulate tubes very closely. The efforts to this point haven't been great, but they've come leaps and bounds from where they were.
Actually, I read somewhere that Bob Carver did it. He claimed to be able to match the sound of any tube amp on the planet for much cheaper. Those elitest advertising-driven guys at Audiophile took him up on it and speced an amp (a very expensive one). They sat in double-blind tests and couldn't actually tell the difference.
Why Carver hasn't been really promoting it is a mystery to me, though. It seems he could be making a killing.
Then again, I'm quite happy with my '60s era Ampeg B-15N, and my brother's happy with his '70s era Twin and Vibrolux.
Please join me in boycotting Loki. I'm not about to trust these clowns with a tech support call, much less my credit card number.
Um, this wasn't exactly a Loki press release. This was an individual employee, not speaking for the company, who I doubt even asked his supervisor if he could spread the story.
A few people here scream "boycott!" at the drop of a hat (which is often red, incidentally).
It doesn't solve anything.
You boycott a company that hires child/slave labour in foreign countries. You boycott companies that destroy the environment or personal freedoms. You don't boycott trivial stuff like this. Few people will listen to you.
Instead, a linux company does the same thing and suddenly it's "Microsoft is hiring idiots and trying to spread FUD, blah blah blah".
Actually, most of the talk on this story is about useability issues with Linux. To top it all off, I see lots of agreement that Linux does lack useability in many areas.
Yeah, Debian installs quite nicely when you have a FAT partition. If you want to do an FTP install on a clear box you gotta have those seven disks (or a CD, but then you wouldn't really care about FTP installing).
Nothing beats NFS installs though. At my last school we had a 100MBit network. I stuck Slack on a box and everybody installed from that. The teacher's jaw dropped, being used to the 10 MBit network at the university.
Yes, everybody in the class were Slackers (the teacher, too). I had a SuSE system for myself, though. I installed PHP and Apache on a Slackware box before, and it just took up a lot of time. SuSE can just make it work at installation.
Don't get me started on Win installs. I buy all "name-brand" components and still it crashes over and over on install. I think it averages about 5 during the install alone, in my experience.
Then, I have to, ugh, install all of those damn drivers and then apps. It takes about a week (a conservative estimate) to get to where a big distrib like SuSE or Debian gets in a day (including apps).
Anybody who thinks Linux is hard to install is living in a dream world. It's after the install where everybody should be working on useability now.
See, it even makes your jaw drop. 5.5GB is about the size of a SuSE install if you install absolutely everything. I suspect Debian would be just as big or bigger, but you need 7 disks to do an FTP install. SuSE will install from an FTP server with a single floppy disk (or 2 if you use a NIC that doesn't have a driver on the first disk).
I seriously doubt this was posted to bash anybody.
It seems to me (any many others) that this is a wakeup call regarding how easy Linux (or any UNIX, for that matter) really is to a new user.
I want to see Linux flourish as a desktop environment. In many ways it has surpassed Windows. However, the battle isn't over yet. There are many issues that still have to be solved. The problem is that us "advanced users" don't think about them enough.
I don't care what you say, even with all the dicking around it does not take that long to install any other OS, Linux included.
Well, it can take longer if you do an FTP install. However, it blows people away when you tell them that you can install 5.5GB of software from a single floppy disk.
I have Civ:CTP. I like it, I liked it's install. However, it wasn't perfect (from my ever-ongoing useablility test mindset:-)* ).
The newbie doesn't understand mounting. That's step one. You can't even *read* the README on the CD until you do that. When you explain mounting, they usually say something like, "that's pretty stupid."
But that's not so much of a problem. The biggest problem, as I see it is the variable filesystem structure among distributions. There's tons of work being done on useability, etc, but it is pretty much in the context of one distribution at a time (SuSE installs KDE in/opt, Mandrake installs it in, well, everywhere, etc).
What is needed is an agreement on a filesystem structure, first and foremost. There was work being done on that, but where is it now??
How come I haven't heard a thing about it in *months*? I've heard so much news about new releases of XX distrib, XX desktop, etc. LSB? nothing.
I think that the importance of GUI install work should be downgraded to make room for this. When a developer can release a package and not have to supply different binaries for different distributions, we'll all be happier.
Ok, for small packages,./configure && make && make install is nice and quick, and works quite well on different distribs, but get a new user to install GNOME or KDE from sources and watch them cry.
The worst thing is that this is an aspect of open-source that "low-ranking" people like me and many others cannot really make an impact in. This has to be done by Red Hat, Caldera, SuSE, Debian, Corel, among others.
The char[]=HAL;while(char x != '\0'){ printf("%c", x+1); } thing was widely speculated upon.
Another interesting coincidence though, is with the "Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite" sequence and the Pink Floyd song "Echoes" from the Meddle album.
Start the song just as the title comes up, and the changes in the song coincide with the changes in the movie. Then the song and movie ends at exactly the same time.
When there are flyovers of alien terrain there are wind and squealing sounds that seem incredibly appropriate.
Interesting lyric: "I am you and you are me." Later on Dave Bowman looks at himself.
It was a lot of fun to watch 5 times over. It'd be interesting to have a DVD with that as an alternate soundtrack.
However, you did leave an error for me to correct:
"1 + 1 it could manage (2) and 1 + 2 (3) and 2 + 2 (4) or tan 74 (3.4874145), but anything above 4 it represented merely as `A Suffusion of Yellow.'"
Other recommended features:
- The playing of MP3s by the band "Pugilism and t he Third Autistic Cuckoo."
- Some method of determining which car knew where it was going. Screw GPS, let's go with Zen navigation!
Ah, to be Dirk Gently...
Interestingly enough, I found my copy of "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency" in a local mysticism shop. How appropriate...
Re:This is amusing --MIRROR
on
WinLinux 2000
·
· Score: 2
Hey, I was a Slackware guy! I still run it on my notebook.
You're trashing everybody who ran Slack because they didn't know Linux could be installed on FAT?
That was always a selling point of Slack. Anybody who installed Slack by reading the installation instructions (ie. nobody standing there saying "press enter here") knows that Slack has installed via UMSDOS for a looooooong time. Now there's ZipSlack, which is specifically designed to install on UMSDOS. Check it out here.
So be assured that all of the *real* Slackers know all about it. Any Slacker who says what you say they do is, well, a liar.
My bank (Toronto Dominion) has a net banking solution.
It grew from a touch-tone system (which I avoid using) to a proprietary client to a browser based app. They recently phased out the propietary client.
However, I would not be able to legally access my info outside of North America. Yep, it only allows 128-bit crypto. It'll reject anything else.
Between that and the phone, I trust the browser more. It is really easy to just record a phone session and get the touch-tone password and card number.
So banks outside North America are getting the shaft due to dumb US export restrictions.
Quite frankly, I'm surprised they're "letting" us use it. But then again, is that IP owned by the US government? What right do they have to impede international business?
What pisses me off the most is that I can't really do anything about it. They're not going to listen to me, as I'm not a US citizen.
All of you US people should each write a monthly letter to their politicians, or a monthly fax. Let them know how strongly you feel.
Re:Velocity x Mass / Stupidity = Bear Suit
on
Project Grizzly
·
· Score: 1
Hmmm, Velocity * Mass / Stupidity = Bear Suit...
In your subject line you show an inversely proportional relationship between Stupidity and Bear Suit.
Meaning that more Bear Suits will decrease stupidity. Makes sense to me, it'd be pretty stupid to roam bear country without any protection.
I assume you have no bear suits soooooo you have infinite stupidity.:-)*
I never dealt with 232/485 on them so I can't comment on it.
I liked having the included source code, I changed a few things in there quite easily. Their tech support did things like email me code snippets.
The Dynamic C environment was really neat too. Costatements were pretty cool.
Of course, I used them strictly for process automation so I guess it's a "right tool for the job" kind of thing. I wouldn't exactly use them for vision systems or anything:-)*
Once you've seen ONE assembly, they are all the same, but you need to start humble, and the Z80 was just a great start for me.
Ever seen PIC assembly? Some things are the same, but some of it is way off the beaten track.
There's an unconditional jump called GOTO.
There's no real conditional jump...
BTFSC/BTFSS - Bit Test F, Skip if Clear/Skip if Set. It basically skips the next line if a specific bit is clear or set. Make the next line a GOTO and you essentially have a conditional jump.
SWAPF - Swap nybbles in F. Interesting.... especially for a RISC chip...
If you're used to other architectures, the PIC looks, well, wierd. The first thing most people notice is the lack of instructions that begin with 'J':-)* However, it is really easy to program and I've seen absolute beginners to any type of programming eat into it *really* quickly.
Of course, the Z80 is great for getting into more "traditional" architechtures. Now with TI explicitly enabling asm programming on their calculators (without having to use memory dumps) a lot of young ones are delving right into it.
Those things are great. I have both a TI-85 and a TI-86. I was really happy to be able to recommend those great ZWorld contollers at a job a while back. An absolute dream to work with. I recommend them all over the place now.
Man, they were pretty successful in milking them. I have their 1997 Master Selection Guide here and it's full of really neat app-specific chips for PDA's, set-top boxes, data communications, DSP (including voice), and so on.
Zilog were really smart with the Z80. Good for them. And they did it without all that shameless marketing certain-other-processor-companies are known for.
I have that driver as well. I bought the Montego thinking, "Oh, don't worry, there'll be a Linux driver real soon." When I found out about the Vortex NDA crap, I was crushed. So I bought the 4front driver. It installs *really* nicely.
I'm kind of glad I payed for it because when I got it, some stuff was playing too fast (MP3s). I went to the support form on their page and got a human reply within 15 minutes. The whole thing was explained without any dumbing down (I write support queries in such a way that it's clear that they don't have to dumb it down). For support like that, US$30 is dirt cheap.
I just linked/dev/audio to/dev/audio1 and/dev/dsp to/dev/dsp1 and it plays through the soft mixer, eliminating the speed problems. However, the sound quality leaves a little to be desired in the soft mixer. I just hope that it's fixed soon (It might be fixed now, I haven't checked in a while).
I remember when some jerk (read: lawyer) started posting messages to the Linux newsgroups a long time ago saying that everybody running Linux had to send him money because he "patented" it or something.
If a court ever sides with these types of scum, I'll have to make a mental note to never live in that country. It would be fairly obvious that their courts are more concerned with the game of law than actually protecting honest people's rights.
Why are lawyers the only people who ever try this stuff?
I prefer incandescent, of course. I make sure that the shade performs its function well (doesn't shine direct light into your eyes). I place it somewhere behind the front of the monitor (right now, to the left, on top of my subwoofer).
In an office environment, you may have trouble getting this unless a doctor recommends it.
Ideally, you have your own office (I hate cubicles, but that's a given) that you can simply turn off the flourescent light in.
Oh yeah, flourescents give off *lots* of noise. You can demonstrate that with a microphone. That may be another "playing card" you can use with your employer.
Slashdot Mirror
Ottawa appears to be a computer industry hotbed (eg. Ottawa Linux Symposium). A lot of tech companies are there, including IBM.
Here's a good site (remember that US$1 = CAN$1.50):
http://www.canadasearch.com/jobsearch/emp loy.htm
Personally, I like the Halifax area. They have a great music scene and people are actually nice. It's not too expensive to live there, either.
I run in 1152x864 on my aging 17". I'd use a higher resolution but my monitor has limited bandwidth. However, you can't go wrong with CAN$200 (US$125) for it.
Because I increased my Netscape fonts, I overlap 2 or three browsers and a couple of xterms (don't go anywhere without one...). I also always leave a bit of room on the right side of the screen for download windows, music players, knotes, etc.
Now, on the average 17" monitor, try reading one thing, and referencing another. The programs don't tile/cascade well while retaining their GUI (meaning the workspace-to-toolbar ratio changes).
That depends. In Windows, it seems that most of the applications are optimized for full screen. They just don't look very good in a non-maximised state.
I prefer the various X apps. They appear to be designed to share space with other apps. Netscape is an example. I have to maximise it in windows, but in X, maximising it makes it look odd, and a waste of space. I rarely use a second workspace, even though I run *a lot* of stuff at one time (people look at my desktop in wide-eyed amazement). Default font sizes are one reason for this, even though I increase my font in Netscape. the other thing is the multi-window apps, like the GIMP. Use a graphic app in windows, and you have to full screen it to be able to use it, then you have to deal with that MDI garbage. I prefer being able to switch between windows of the same app in the same manner as switching between apps.
It's especially useful for programming, I can have docs, my code, a debugger, as well as other things on the screen at one time. That's a hell of a lot quicker than any reference manual.
It seems that it's the older people that tend to print more things off.
Your example, well, makes me sick. Trees are not nearly as renewable as I wish. Hemp is a damn near perfect solution to this but many governments are horribly misinformed/fearful. It's a good thing they're growing it in Ontario. I hope the practice gets more popular. I've seen the effects of clear-cutting and it disturbs me.
Older people tend to be set in their ways. They resist change.
I started working at a place in January and I did a fair bit of research. I would grab items from various sites, generate plots of data I collected (They let me use GNUPlot and Cygwin, yay), etc. When I would tell someone that I had an item or a piece of data, I would tell them what directory to find it in. Invariably, they would say, "print it off."
I didn't like doing it, but, well, I had to.
I have a Satellite Pro 400 CDT which is almost exactly the same as yours, with a TFT screen.
I haven't opened it. I haven't been able to find any service manual and my attempt to open the damn thing failed (If anybody knows how, please contact me). Removing screws, pulling at the cover gingerly and not forcing anything because I'm scared to break it.
Generally, on laptops, most of the components are directly soldered in to save space. That was the case on my old Thinkpad (which IBM has a pdf service manual for...) with bad RAM. The RAM and processor were directly soldered in.
Then again, with the proper tools and *a lot* of SMT experience, you might be able to replace the processor.
Until we can open up our computers, we really can't tell. If it's socketed, well, that would be neat. I'd be getting mine upgraded, too.
Arrgh, I hate Cakewalk, too. I've never heard of anyone actually using it professionally, just hobbyist stuff.
Here's a nice list of sound apps for Linux:
http://www.4front-tech.com/ossapps.html.
There's some really nice stuff there.
I think we will soon see the point where digital modeling amplifiers will be able to simulate tubes very closely. The efforts to this point haven't been great, but they've come leaps and bounds from where they were.
Actually, I read somewhere that Bob Carver did it. He claimed to be able to match the sound of any tube amp on the planet for much cheaper. Those elitest advertising-driven guys at Audiophile took him up on it and speced an amp (a very expensive one). They sat in double-blind tests and couldn't actually tell the difference.
Why Carver hasn't been really promoting it is a mystery to me, though. It seems he could be making a killing.
Then again, I'm quite happy with my '60s era Ampeg B-15N, and my brother's happy with his '70s era Twin and Vibrolux.
Please join me in boycotting Loki. I'm not about to trust these clowns with a tech support call, much less my credit card number.
Um, this wasn't exactly a Loki press release. This was an individual employee, not speaking for the company, who I doubt even asked his supervisor if he could spread the story.
A few people here scream "boycott!" at the drop of a hat (which is often red, incidentally).
It doesn't solve anything.
You boycott a company that hires child/slave labour in foreign countries. You boycott companies that destroy the environment or personal freedoms. You don't boycott trivial stuff like this. Few people will listen to you.
Instead, a linux company does the same thing and suddenly it's "Microsoft is hiring idiots and trying to spread FUD, blah blah blah".
Actually, most of the talk on this story is about useability issues with Linux. To top it all off, I see lots of agreement that Linux does lack useability in many areas.
Yeah, Debian installs quite nicely when you have a FAT partition. If you want to do an FTP install on a clear box you gotta have those seven disks (or a CD, but then you wouldn't really care about FTP installing).
Nothing beats NFS installs though. At my last school we had a 100MBit network. I stuck Slack on a box and everybody installed from that. The teacher's jaw dropped, being used to the 10 MBit network at the university.
Yes, everybody in the class were Slackers (the teacher, too). I had a SuSE system for myself, though. I installed PHP and Apache on a Slackware box before, and it just took up a lot of time. SuSE can just make it work at installation.
Don't get me started on Win installs. I buy all "name-brand" components and still it crashes over and over on install. I think it averages about 5 during the install alone, in my experience.
Then, I have to, ugh, install all of those damn drivers and then apps. It takes about a week (a conservative estimate) to get to where a big distrib like SuSE or Debian gets in a day (including apps).
Anybody who thinks Linux is hard to install is living in a dream world. It's after the install where everybody should be working on useability now.
See, it even makes your jaw drop. 5.5GB is about the size of a SuSE install if you install absolutely everything. I suspect Debian would be just as big or bigger, but you need 7 disks to do an FTP install. SuSE will install from an FTP server with a single floppy disk (or 2 if you use a NIC that doesn't have a driver on the first disk).
I seriously doubt this was posted to bash anybody.
It seems to me (any many others) that this is a wakeup call regarding how easy Linux (or any UNIX, for that matter) really is to a new user.
I want to see Linux flourish as a desktop environment. In many ways it has surpassed Windows. However, the battle isn't over yet. There are many issues that still have to be solved. The problem is that us "advanced users" don't think about them enough.
I don't care what you say, even with all the dicking around it does not take that long to install any other OS, Linux included.
Well, it can take longer if you do an FTP install. However, it blows people away when you tell them that you can install 5.5GB of software from a single floppy disk.
I have Civ:CTP. I like it, I liked it's install. However, it wasn't perfect (from my ever-ongoing useablility test mindset :-)* ).
/opt, Mandrake installs it in, well, everywhere, etc).
./configure && make && make install is nice and quick, and works quite well on different distribs, but get a new user to install GNOME or KDE from sources and watch them cry.
The newbie doesn't understand mounting. That's step one. You can't even *read* the README on the CD until you do that. When you explain mounting, they usually say something like, "that's pretty stupid."
But that's not so much of a problem. The biggest problem, as I see it is the variable filesystem structure among distributions. There's tons of work being done on useability, etc, but it is pretty much in the context of one distribution at a time (SuSE installs KDE in
What is needed is an agreement on a filesystem structure, first and foremost. There was work being done on that, but where is it now??
How come I haven't heard a thing about it in *months*? I've heard so much news about new releases of XX distrib, XX desktop, etc. LSB? nothing.
I think that the importance of GUI install work should be downgraded to make room for this. When a developer can release a package and not have to supply different binaries for different distributions, we'll all be happier.
Ok, for small packages,
The worst thing is that this is an aspect of open-source that "low-ranking" people like me and many others cannot really make an impact in. This has to be done by Red Hat, Caldera, SuSE, Debian, Corel, among others.
The char[]=HAL;while(char x != '\0'){ printf("%c", x+1); } thing was widely speculated upon.
Another interesting coincidence though, is with the "Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite" sequence and the Pink Floyd song "Echoes" from the Meddle album.
Start the song just as the title comes up, and the changes in the song coincide with the changes in the movie. Then the song and movie ends at exactly the same time.
When there are flyovers of alien terrain there are wind and squealing sounds that seem incredibly appropriate.
Interesting lyric: "I am you and you are me." Later on Dave Bowman looks at himself.
It was a lot of fun to watch 5 times over. It'd be interesting to have a DVD with that as an alternate soundtrack.
Maybe I should get a DVD-RAM drive
There were IBM logos in the movie as well. Some of the computers shown on the moon were IBM.
Ah, you beat me to it! :-)*
However, you did leave an error for me to correct:
"1 + 1 it could manage (2) and 1 + 2 (3) and 2 + 2 (4) or tan 74 (3.4874145), but anything above 4 it represented merely as `A Suffusion of Yellow.'"
Other recommended features:
- The playing of MP3s by the band "Pugilism and t he Third Autistic Cuckoo."
- Some method of determining which car knew where it was going. Screw GPS, let's go with Zen navigation!
Ah, to be Dirk Gently...
Interestingly enough, I found my copy of "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency" in a local mysticism shop. How appropriate...
Hey, I was a Slackware guy! I still run it on my notebook.
You're trashing everybody who ran Slack because they didn't know Linux could be installed on FAT?
That was always a selling point of Slack. Anybody who installed Slack by reading the installation instructions (ie. nobody standing there saying "press enter here") knows that Slack has installed via UMSDOS for a looooooong time. Now there's ZipSlack, which is specifically designed to install on UMSDOS. Check it out here.
So be assured that all of the *real* Slackers know all about it. Any Slacker who says what you say they do is, well, a liar.
My bank (Toronto Dominion) has a net banking solution.
It grew from a touch-tone system (which I avoid using) to a proprietary client to a browser based app. They recently phased out the propietary client.
However, I would not be able to legally access my info outside of North America. Yep, it only allows 128-bit crypto. It'll reject anything else.
Between that and the phone, I trust the browser more. It is really easy to just record a phone session and get the touch-tone password and card number.
So banks outside North America are getting the shaft due to dumb US export restrictions.
Quite frankly, I'm surprised they're "letting" us use it. But then again, is that IP owned by the US government? What right do they have to impede international business?
What pisses me off the most is that I can't really do anything about it. They're not going to listen to me, as I'm not a US citizen.
All of you US people should each write a monthly letter to their politicians, or a monthly fax. Let them know how strongly you feel.
Hmmm, Velocity * Mass / Stupidity = Bear Suit...
:-)*
In your subject line you show an inversely proportional relationship between Stupidity and Bear Suit.
Meaning that more Bear Suits will decrease stupidity. Makes sense to me, it'd be pretty stupid to roam bear country without any protection.
I assume you have no bear suits soooooo you have infinite stupidity.
Really?
:-)*
I never dealt with 232/485 on them so I can't comment on it.
I liked having the included source code, I changed a few things in there quite easily. Their tech support did things like email me code snippets.
The Dynamic C environment was really neat too. Costatements were pretty cool.
Of course, I used them strictly for process automation so I guess it's a "right tool for the job" kind of thing. I wouldn't exactly use them for vision systems or anything
Once you've seen ONE assembly, they are all the same, but you need to start humble, and the Z80 was just a great start for me.
:-)* However, it is really easy to program and I've seen absolute beginners to any type of programming eat into it *really* quickly.
Ever seen PIC assembly? Some things are the same, but some of it is way off the beaten track.
There's an unconditional jump called GOTO.
There's no real conditional jump...
BTFSC/BTFSS - Bit Test F, Skip if Clear/Skip if Set. It basically skips the next line if a specific bit is clear or set. Make the next line a GOTO and you essentially have a conditional jump.
SWAPF - Swap nybbles in F. Interesting.... especially for a RISC chip...
If you're used to other architectures, the PIC looks, well, wierd. The first thing most people notice is the lack of instructions that begin with 'J'
Of course, the Z80 is great for getting into more "traditional" architechtures. Now with TI explicitly enabling asm programming on their calculators (without having to use memory dumps) a lot of young ones are delving right into it.
Zilog's greatest product line.
From the little Z8's to the z180's, et. al.
Those things are great. I have both a TI-85 and a TI-86. I was really happy to be able to recommend those great ZWorld contollers at a job a while back. An absolute dream to work with. I recommend them all over the place now.
Man, they were pretty successful in milking them. I have their 1997 Master Selection Guide here and it's full of really neat app-specific chips for PDA's, set-top boxes, data communications, DSP (including voice), and so on.
Zilog were really smart with the Z80. Good for them. And they did it without all that shameless marketing certain-other-processor-companies are known for.
I have that driver as well. I bought the Montego thinking, "Oh, don't worry, there'll be a Linux driver real soon." When I found out about the Vortex NDA crap, I was crushed. So I bought the 4front driver. It installs *really* nicely.
/dev/audio to /dev/audio1 and /dev/dsp to /dev/dsp1 and it plays through the soft mixer, eliminating the speed problems. However, the sound quality leaves a little to be desired in the soft mixer. I just hope that it's fixed soon (It might be fixed now, I haven't checked in a while).
I'm kind of glad I payed for it because when I got it, some stuff was playing too fast (MP3s). I went to the support form on their page and got a human reply within 15 minutes. The whole thing was explained without any dumbing down (I write support queries in such a way that it's clear that they don't have to dumb it down). For support like that, US$30 is dirt cheap.
I just linked
Civ:CTP sounds fine though..
How many times has this happened now?
I remember when some jerk (read: lawyer) started posting messages to the Linux newsgroups a long time ago saying that everybody running Linux had to send him money because he "patented" it or something.
If a court ever sides with these types of scum, I'll have to make a mental note to never live in that country. It would be fairly obvious that their courts are more concerned with the game of law than actually protecting honest people's rights.
Why are lawyers the only people who ever try this stuff?
I prefer incandescent, of course. I make sure that the shade performs its function well (doesn't shine direct light into your eyes). I place it somewhere behind the front of the monitor (right now, to the left, on top of my subwoofer).
In an office environment, you may have trouble getting this unless a doctor recommends it.
Ideally, you have your own office (I hate cubicles, but that's a given) that you can simply turn off the flourescent light in.
Oh yeah, flourescents give off *lots* of noise. You can demonstrate that with a microphone. That may be another "playing card" you can use with your employer.