To store critical (or any data of some value ie: not junk) data on technology that is so vunurable to external forces if the technology is so small/fragile ?
There was a brief time a few decades ago when the essence of my entire being was contained in a single molecule, with no backups! Luckily, I made it through that episode relatively unscathed.
Ever since then, I've been making backups like crazy.
This is useful because it is an effort to commoditize another little piece of the foundations of the Windows/Office monopoly. As an industry matures, more of its parts get commoditized, and costs drop towards the marginal cost of production (which in the case of software is near zero).
Microsoft has been able to buck this trend for over a decade with their unique mix of copyrights, trade secrets and customers locked into large investments of Win32/Office data and code. Microsoft competes on cost, but not against other companies. It competes against its customers' barriers to exiting the Windows corral. Each project that can create a new crack in those barriers reduces the cost Microsoft can charge for their software, thus saving money for the public at large.
And if he was speaking about 15 years ago, 2 MB might have been a very generous disk quota. I know of UNIX shops where you feel lucky to get 100MB even today.
Which just reinforces the parent rant. On a PC, that 100MB would cost ten cents. Maybe instead of rationing disk space, the sysadmins could save more money for the company by scavenging abandoned half-full cups of coffee in the break room and pouring them back into the coffee pots.
My contrarian father bought this system for our family in the late 70s rather than the slightly more popular Atari. IIRC, it did have somewhat better technical specs, but none of my friends knew how to play any of the games. The Galaxians clone was far superior to the Atari version, however.
They turned out to be very sensitive to being fried by ESD (static electricity). He went on to buy several more units at surplus sales over the years to protect our investment in game cartridges.
One cool thing you could get for it was a BASIC cartridge. You used the cheap bouncy 15-button calculator keypad on the base unit to peck out programs for the 1K or so RAM. The cartridge itself had a 1/8-inch phono jack embedded in it so you could save programs on casette. It was a heavy cartridge; I'm guessing it had more logic in it than the base unit. I wrote my first lines of code on that thing.
If someone took a freely available program and modified it and sold it, clearly they are selling the value of the delta/changes, NOT the value of the program which is no less freely avaiable to any and all.
That's what I tried to tell the federal agents when they came to confiscate the whole production run of my new video, "Mickey Mouse plays Twelve Favorite Metallica Hits", which I had produced and offered for sale on E-Bay.
ther German should immediately pass a homeland security act to combat these behaviour of terrorism.
Since potatoes are a munition, all potato sales must be strictly regulated. Henceforth, no potato shall be sold to the public unless it has been chipped, julienned or mashed at an approved and licensed facility so as to render it harmless.
Just like a good movie on a VCR tape, this story worth rewinding and playing again and again.
I never get tired of VHS vs. Betamax flamewars. Nothing could be more compelling, relevant or engaging than debating the relative merits of these 20-year old tape formats a few more times.
XP testing techniques are great in theory, but there is still a gaping hole: if your tests aren't correct, your program could still end up flawed.
That's why I've moved on to XXP, which focuses first on correctness of tests. First, I write a test that tests a test. Then I write the test. I test the test until the test tests ok. Then I write a test for another test, and so on.
My pair programming partner is currently working on an idea he calls "XXXP". I'll post our results if we ever finish a project without getting lost in infinite recursion.
Ahh, no. Like any other library, they can buy their own copy of anything they want.
Bzzzt. As the guy one thread above pointed out, copyright law chapter 7 section 704 says:
(a) Upon their deposit in the Copyright Office under sections 407 and 408, all copies, phonorecords, and identifying material, including those deposited in connection with claims that have been refused registration, are the property of the United States Government.
(b) In the case of published works, all copies, phonorecords, and identifying material deposited are available to the Library of Congress for its collections, or for exchange or transfer to any other library. In the case of unpublished works, the Library is entitled, under regulations that the Register of Copyrights shall prescribe, to select any deposits for its collections or for transfer to the National Archives of the United States or to a Federal records center, as defined in section 2901 of title 44.
If you were congress and invented IP, you'd be a fool to saddle yourself with the restricions you're imposing on everyone else.
If the goal is protecting the integrity of processes, wasn't this what we were supposed to expect from any halfway-decent hardware and OS combination?
Indeed, the vast majority of exploits don't break the existing hardware or kernel security directly. They take over some other application via a hole in its internal logic, and then use its (possibly very high) privileges. This does not require breaking even the existing OS/CPU security model, much less some new layer.
Granted, TCPA and/or Palladium will support some kind of "tripwire on steroids" feature to scan all of your critical system files. I would imagine, however, that the bad guys would just shift strategy. Rather than overwriting the system files, they could stick to memory resident things. To cover reboots, they could just embed a macro somewhere in the user files that re-hacks the system the same way they got in the first time.
Can't we just give them segways with snow wheels instead?
I'm imagining a scaled up segway for this application. A 1000 ton, 200 foot tall gas turbine powered segway that could cruise at 150mph over the ice highway would rock. The view from the bridge perched on top of the vehicle would be awesome.
Contrast yes, brightness, maybe, but I generally think LCDs are much sharper than CRTs.
They are sharper, assuming that the LCD's pixel clock is properly locked. If you have a VGA connection, some tweaking might be needed. First, of course, you have to be running the LCD's native resolution. Even then, I was having problems with the clock fine tuning on my monitor.
The "auto calibrate" button just wasn't doing the job and there would be about a 1-pixel drift between the VGA clock and the LCD across the display. This makes for fuzzy areas on the screen where the monitor interpolates adjacent pixels. Hand fiddling with the settings made it mostly better, but I use a KVM box to switch systems frequently and that's too time consuming.
I figured out that I could fix this by displaying a large bitmap of alternating black and white pixels (similar to an X-Windows startup screen) during the auto calibration. The monitor can lock onto this perfectly and the display looks 100% better. (In fact, far better than any CRT I have ever used.)
In other news, each beer sold generates on average one toilet flush. In areas with a lot of old large-sized toilets, that can be almost 32kg of water per beer.
I feel bad, because I've consumed many more beers than memory chips in my life.
So where are the processors that Sun promissed that would run Java bytecode natively?
Not necessary. These days, there are already layers of abstraction between the object code and the CPU's internal core. Most modern processors don't even run their own assembly code natively. An Athlon or Pentium translates the x86 code stream into native RISC operations.
Why invest hardware design effort into translating Java bytecodes directly when the CPU can translate a pre-existing standard code stream like x86 opcodes. That way, you don't have to write a new xxx to Java bytecode compiler for each of the hundreds of languages out there; instead you write a Java bytecode to yyy compiler for each of the handful of existing CPU architectures. Moreover, your CPU can run much more existing software.
They now will only support releases for one year with errata.
If you find yourself in this situation, just download a free copy of the latest and greatest version of Red Hat from their website and tell yourself it's a patch.
correct me if im wrong, but xm isnt radio waves, its a digital signal. radio is analog, is it not? and free?
To be precise, XM is a system comprised of a digital signal modulated onto analog radio waves.
FM is a system where an analog signal is modulated onto analog radio waves. And it's only free you can withstand the withering barrage of idiot DJs, screaming car salesmen and suffocatingly repetitive playlists.
We got a man on the moon in 9 years using a computer with less power then my wrist watch. I think we can get to mars in 7 years if we wanted to.
One of the main things that enabled them to achieve the goal in 9 years is that they only had a computer with less power than your wrist watch. With the bloat capacity of today's computers, the delays caused by software development and testing scheduling slips would push back the completion date by another decade.
Another cool thing you can do with wxWindows is hack your project out in a couple of days with wxPython. Then you can easily mess around with it in this RAD-like environment until you get the UI finalized.
If it has satisfactory performance at this point, ship it. Otherwise, port it over to straight C++ wxWindows.
Slashdot Mirror
There was a brief time a few decades ago when the essence of my entire being was contained in a single molecule, with no backups! Luckily, I made it through that episode relatively unscathed.
Ever since then, I've been making backups like crazy.
Microsoft has been able to buck this trend for over a decade with their unique mix of copyrights, trade secrets and customers locked into large investments of Win32/Office data and code. Microsoft competes on cost, but not against other companies. It competes against its customers' barriers to exiting the Windows corral. Each project that can create a new crack in those barriers reduces the cost Microsoft can charge for their software, thus saving money for the public at large.
Which just reinforces the parent rant. On a PC, that 100MB would cost ten cents. Maybe instead of rationing disk space, the sysadmins could save more money for the company by scavenging abandoned half-full cups of coffee in the break room and pouring them back into the coffee pots.
They turned out to be very sensitive to being fried by ESD (static electricity). He went on to buy several more units at surplus sales over the years to protect our investment in game cartridges.
One cool thing you could get for it was a BASIC cartridge. You used the cheap bouncy 15-button calculator keypad on the base unit to peck out programs for the 1K or so RAM. The cartridge itself had a 1/8-inch phono jack embedded in it so you could save programs on casette. It was a heavy cartridge; I'm guessing it had more logic in it than the base unit. I wrote my first lines of code on that thing.
That's what I tried to tell the federal agents when they came to confiscate the whole production run of my new video, "Mickey Mouse plays Twelve Favorite Metallica Hits", which I had produced and offered for sale on E-Bay.
Since potatoes are a munition, all potato sales must be strictly regulated. Henceforth, no potato shall be sold to the public unless it has been chipped, julienned or mashed at an approved and licensed facility so as to render it harmless.
Just like a good movie on a VCR tape, this story worth rewinding and playing again and again.
I never get tired of VHS vs. Betamax flamewars. Nothing could be more compelling, relevant or engaging than debating the relative merits of these 20-year old tape formats a few more times.
That's why I've moved on to XXP, which focuses first on correctness of tests. First, I write a test that tests a test. Then I write the test. I test the test until the test tests ok. Then I write a test for another test, and so on.
My pair programming partner is currently working on an idea he calls "XXXP". I'll post our results if we ever finish a project without getting lost in infinite recursion.
Bzzzt. As the guy one thread above pointed out, copyright law chapter 7 section 704 says:
If you were congress and invented IP, you'd be a fool to saddle yourself with the restricions you're imposing on everyone else.
All your next-generation secure computing base are belong to key signer.
Indeed, the vast majority of exploits don't break the existing hardware or kernel security directly. They take over some other application via a hole in its internal logic, and then use its (possibly very high) privileges. This does not require breaking even the existing OS/CPU security model, much less some new layer.
Granted, TCPA and/or Palladium will support some kind of "tripwire on steroids" feature to scan all of your critical system files. I would imagine, however, that the bad guys would just shift strategy. Rather than overwriting the system files, they could stick to memory resident things. To cover reboots, they could just embed a macro somewhere in the user files that re-hacks the system the same way they got in the first time.
>>> they want a clean and clear interface that affords usage in obvious ways
>>> (for a media player that of course is for VCR like functionality).
Here's your VCR functionality user interface:
#!/usr/bin/python
import curses, curses.wrapper
def vcr(scr):
scr.addstr('12:00', curses.A_BLINK)
scr.refresh()
raw_input('')
curses.wrapper(vcr)
:)
I'm imagining a scaled up segway for this application. A 1000 ton, 200 foot tall gas turbine powered segway that could cruise at 150mph over the ice highway would rock. The view from the bridge perched on top of the vehicle would be awesome.
Probably because if there's one thing more tempting than money, it's fame.
They are sharper, assuming that the LCD's pixel clock is properly locked. If you have a VGA connection, some tweaking might be needed. First, of course, you have to be running the LCD's native resolution. Even then, I was having problems with the clock fine tuning on my monitor.
The "auto calibrate" button just wasn't doing the job and there would be about a 1-pixel drift between the VGA clock and the LCD across the display. This makes for fuzzy areas on the screen where the monitor interpolates adjacent pixels. Hand fiddling with the settings made it mostly better, but I use a KVM box to switch systems frequently and that's too time consuming.
I figured out that I could fix this by displaying a large bitmap of alternating black and white pixels (similar to an X-Windows startup screen) during the auto calibration. The monitor can lock onto this perfectly and the display looks 100% better. (In fact, far better than any CRT I have ever used.)
In other news, each beer sold generates on average one toilet flush. In areas with a lot of old large-sized toilets, that can be almost 32kg of water per beer.
I feel bad, because I've consumed many more beers than memory chips in my life.
Not necessary. These days, there are already layers of abstraction between the object code and the CPU's internal core. Most modern processors don't even run their own assembly code natively. An Athlon or Pentium translates the x86 code stream into native RISC operations.
Why invest hardware design effort into translating Java bytecodes directly when the CPU can translate a pre-existing standard code stream like x86 opcodes. That way, you don't have to write a new xxx to Java bytecode compiler for each of the hundreds of languages out there; instead you write a Java bytecode to yyy compiler for each of the handful of existing CPU architectures. Moreover, your CPU can run much more existing software.
There is no correctly spelled English word that contains the asterisk character.
It's funny that we're able to discuss this point on a site that is essentially comprised of a couple of people and a script.
If you find yourself in this situation, just download a free copy of the latest and greatest version of Red Hat from their website and tell yourself it's a patch.
To be precise, XM is a system comprised of a digital signal modulated onto analog radio waves.
FM is a system where an analog signal is modulated onto analog radio waves. And it's only free you can withstand the withering barrage of idiot DJs, screaming car salesmen and suffocatingly repetitive playlists.
One of the main things that enabled them to achieve the goal in 9 years is that they only had a computer with less power than your wrist watch. With the bloat capacity of today's computers, the delays caused by software development and testing scheduling slips would push back the completion date by another decade.
If it has satisfactory performance at this point, ship it. Otherwise, port it over to straight C++ wxWindows.
<darth_vader_voice>
</darth_vader_voice>Looks like it didn't work.