And the more important question, would the RIAA/MPAA ever let it happen? Imagine people selling discs of thousands of hours of music, or a whole year's popular films for $5 on the street.
With the latest legislative trends, the world
will soon be safe for this kind of media.
Maybe something like: make an illicit disk containing 20 movies, receive 20
consecutive life sentences. That should keep
everyone on the straight and narrow path.
news flash - the coders didn't recieve all that money.
That's part of the problem. More of the money
should have been spent on engineering, and
less should have ended up in Microsoft's
multibillion dollar hoard of cash.
Interoperatability bugs happen, there are plenty of coders working together. They're always crushing bugs and developing, but they're only human.
Instead of just crushing bugs and developing,
they should have invested in
a little bit of design work. That way,
they wouldn't need to be superhuman.
Yeah, your right. Microsoft should have written every line perfectly like every line of code you ever have written.
In exchange for the countless billions of dollars
that Microsoft has collected from the world's
computer users, I would expect them to adhere
to the highest possible quality standards when
writing their code. In
real time, not after the fact.
Nothing is perfect, but much of their past
software has been obviously and deeply flawed.
People have been pointing this out for many
years, and only now do they deign to address
the issue. This is why they deserve most of
the harsh criticism they receive.
But don't the video stores have to buy
most movies shortly after they are released?
I thought that the studios price the movies
much higher than $35 for a short while after
release so that they pull in maximum
revenue from video stores.
It doesn't help that you constantly use
the derogatory term "goblin" to refer to
your coworker. It would be more acceptable
to use "Folklorian-American" or just
"Elfish Figure".
The fault here really lies with your boss,
who should have known that most mythological
creatures don't have the educational
background for modern software development.
Your coworker should have been placed in a
position that could more directly benefit
from the strengh areas of his background,
like mischief and evil deeds.
Re:$5 to anyone who proves this statement wrong-
on
The Economics of Spam
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
They're probably learning the basics of business.
If every business earned each dollar by leeching $100
of time and resources out of everybody else,
this economy would grind to a halt in a week.
This morning, after a set of tennis,
I set out to find the set of
TV sets that are small enough to set on
my new cement porch.
I brought the TV home and set it up,
but now there are
dimples permanently set in my porch because the cement hadn't fully set. I was all set to
watch a show, but when I tried to set the channels, my circuit breaker reset.
Without TV to watch, all I could do was
sit there and ponder why human language
has so many overloaded words. I decided
I was happy that people *usually* don't have problems understanding overloaded terms,
and I was happy that they *usually* don't complain about their usage, because that
would sure make it hard to tell a simple story.
The machines are on 24x7 anyway; the business has alreay accepted that cost of doing business.
I've hooked an ammeter to the AC power cord
on my Athlon system. It sucks down about 20
more watts when the CPU is under load than when
it is idle. It makes sense that you would
use more power when the logic units, memory
cells and bus signals are doing more work.
OTOH, nobody ever seems to care when most of
the employees leave their big hot CRTs turned
24x7. Each of these is wasting 50 to 100W of power. Look at most any office building at
night; you can see all of the monitors that
people are too lazy to flip off.
The Earth's axis of rotation, on the other hand, is about as fixed as anything can be.
According to a somewhat cheesy TV documentary
that I recently saw, we can thank our
large moon the stability of our rotational axis.
Currently, the axis wobbles by at most 1 degree.
They claimed that without the moon to stabilize
things, over time it would
wobble up to almost 90 degrees. Such an
extreme angle and the associated
seasonal changes would probably eliminate
the possibility
that advanced life would evolve on this planet.
. How come y'all are switching to a thread-based model now? Was the other way running out of steam?
Correctly programming threads is hard, so
they should only be used when necessary.
Many of the things that can be done with
threads can be done more safely with
fork() and/or select(). Since Windows lacks
the former and has a broken version of the
latter, Windows programmers tend to use
threads when Unix programmers would use
an alternative.
IIRC, a while back Consumer Reports
(who tend to be "environmentally
conscious") said it was a Good Thing to
grind up food scraps in the garbage disposal.
This way, it ends up back in the biosphere
instead of entombed in a hermetically
sealed landfill taking up space that would
be better be used by junked computers. Since
the garbage disposal is easy and fun, I'm
signed up for that.
As for composting, that leaves us with leaves.
My municipal government's website suggests:
"Try running them over with a mulching mower".
Since I got a shiny new mulching mower this
year, I tried it. My verdict: kick ass. Easy and fun;
and no more raking. Leaves are shredded to tiny
confetti that sinks into the grass. (As long
as you don't let them build up too much
between mowings.)
So now, I don't throw out any biomass, and
I don't have to break my back tending to
piles of dirt.
IIRC the partition size limit is due to the fact that the filesystem server mmaps the partition; on 32-bit systems there isn't enough address space for large partitions.
Hmmm. That is a very elegant way to handle
disk partitions. Maybe they shouldn't rush into
a quick fix for this that loses the benefits of mmaping
the whole partition. In a few short years,
AMD, Intel and IBM will all be offering mainstream
64-bit CPUs, and they'll be able to mmap
exabyte sized partitions without throwing out
the current codebase.
I think that they should just hold
tight until then. No need for reckless haste.
By implementing his ideas on top of an OS,
he's cheating. If he's going to be credible, he
needs to go back and
get his stuff running right on bare metal without
the OS training wheels. Since it needs to
run everywhere, he needs to include
direct support for a few hundred system
architectures and thousands of hardware
peripherals.
That should keep him quiet for a few decades...
Real World Design Patterns
on
Design Patterns
·
· Score: 5, Funny
Book learnin' is fine and all, but here are some design patterns
from the real world:
The Demo design pattern: Boss: We need to have a working demo by the trade show next month.
Developer: OK, but it's just going to be a barely working hack.
There's no time to do any proper design by the show.
It's going to push back the ship date because we're going to have
to rip out the kludges and redo them properly.
Boss: Fine. Just get me that demo.
The Ship date design pattern: Boss: We need to ship the product by the middle of next quarter.
Developer: We don't have time to fix the demo hacks by then.
We need more time to do a proper design. I told you that the
ship date would be pushed back by the demo.
Boss: Everybody saw it working at the show, and they wonder
why they can't have it now. We have to go with whatever you've got.
The Beeper Design pattern: Boss: Support has been getting a lot of calls from customers
in the field. A lot of random crashes. We need to have a developer
available 24x7 to help debug these problems. Here, take this beeper.
Developer: I told you so.
Boss: We need to get a demo of version 2.0 by the field sales
seminar next month.
Developer: Aaarrghhh!
People in Montana shouldn't be dicked out of representation, just because they're not living in a major metropolis. They're citizens of this country, why should their needs be prioritized below the needs of high population states? Maybe it's just because they don't vote the same way you do.
You're the one who doesn't understand the issue.
They wouldn't be "dicked out of representation".
They would get their fair share of representation.
With their high priority voting weight, their needs are currently prioritized above
the needs of high population states.
If we had direct popular election of the Presidency, do you think the President would ever care about what concerns citizens in Montana had?
Instead, we have a system in which the concerns
of a few people in Montana have excessive
influence over the whole country. If more people
live in the cities, why shouldn't their concerns
get proportional weight? What gives a person who is
surrounded by big fields more importance
than anyone else?
We don't go around quoting: "We hold
these truths to be self evident, that all
men are created equal, and all acres are
created equal, and a man equals 1000 acres."
We shouldn't run the country that way, either.
Note that for local transportation, the problem isn't speed but coverage. I can't realistically take public transportation to work because it would take me far too long to get to the nearest station and because trains take far too long to get to the destination (because of a lot of stops).
That's exactly why mass transit in its current form
will never be popular in the USA. My personal
pet idea (probably already invented somewhere
else) would be a standardized mini car that
could be instantly loaded in and out of one of
these tube transports. You would have three
modes: free range electric mini car (manually
driven) for getting
to/from the end destination, mini-car loaded on
transporter in normal
tubes (automatically driven) for urban commuting,
and mini-car in vacuum tube for 300MPH interstate trips.
(Note that without having to deal with scheduled
flight times, airplane taxiing and cow herding delays, you'd get
to your destination much quicker in a 300MPH
self-scheduled tube than all but the very longest
scheduled 500MPH flights.)
The mini car could be electric and would
recharge whenever it's in the system. When
you request your destination, a central
computer instantly allocates the tube transports and
adjusts all tube traffic to give you a clear
shot to where you're going.
With this kind of system, you'd get the best
of both worlds: The freedom to get within
a few feet of anywhere you want on your own
schedule, and the ability to sit back and read
during the bulk of your commute time. As a bonus,
the 300MPH evacuated tubes eliminate the
hassles of airports and rental cars. You just
stay in your own personal germ-free
car in all of these cases.
So you're saying we should go back to old cheap Vietnam-era technology like Napalm? That way you can have tens of thousands of dead civilians in each little war instead of a few hundred dead.
But at least you wouldn't be spending too much money on weapons.
By copying someone's work without his permission, you are infringing on his property rights, and turning him into your slave, to work for your benefit, rather than his own benefit.
Nobody's holding a gun to their head and making
them author shiny plastic disks. Therefore, they
cannot be slaves.
The static actually means "not dynamic", as in
not using a leaky capacitor to hold the state
they way DRAMs do. Way back when I was
an intern, I actually helped work on a static
ram for mainframe caches implemented in
ECL.
ECL was fast, but it was just about as opposite
of CMOS as you can get. It works using
bipolar transistors to continually shunt
large currents through resistors even
when the gate is idle. That single
1K chip I worked on probably drew several
of watts of power. Nevertheless, it was considered
to be a SRAM.
(The mainframe CPUs put a hundred or
more ECL chips on a ceramic substrate, then
used the mother of all water cooled heatsinks
to pull out the massive heat that was generated.)
Both SRAM and DRAM require constant power to reliably store data.
SRAMs can be designed for raw speed
(CPU caches) or low power (CMOS memory
in old PCs before flash). High speed SRAMs
can suck down a lot of power due to all of the
gates and frequent logic transitions.
OTOH, The low power SRAMs intended for
nonvolatile storage use all CMOS FET transistors
in their logic gates.
These gates draw essentially zero current
unless they are actually switching.
Thus, while low power SRAMs require a voltage
(typically supplied by a battery)
to retain their state, they draw no current when idle.
Therefore, in a technical sense,
they don't actually require "power"
(voltage*current) to keep their state, just
a static potential.
A hydraulic analogy would be rigging two
toilet flush flap valves in series, then ensuring
that they never open simultaneously. This
setup could store one bit (1 - open/closed,
0 - closed/open) with just static
water pressure and zero flow. (A little water
would flow when the valves are actually flipped.)
Slashdot Mirror
That scheme would be fine with me. I only use the food I eat for a day or two. After that, they're welcome to have it back if they really want it.
With the latest legislative trends, the world will soon be safe for this kind of media. Maybe something like: make an illicit disk containing 20 movies, receive 20 consecutive life sentences. That should keep everyone on the straight and narrow path.
That's part of the problem. More of the money should have been spent on engineering, and less should have ended up in Microsoft's multibillion dollar hoard of cash.
Interoperatability bugs happen, there are plenty of coders working together. They're always crushing bugs and developing, but they're only human.
Instead of just crushing bugs and developing, they should have invested in a little bit of design work. That way, they wouldn't need to be superhuman.
In exchange for the countless billions of dollars that Microsoft has collected from the world's computer users, I would expect them to adhere to the highest possible quality standards when writing their code. In real time, not after the fact.
Nothing is perfect, but much of their past software has been obviously and deeply flawed. People have been pointing this out for many years, and only now do they deign to address the issue. This is why they deserve most of the harsh criticism they receive.
But don't the video stores have to buy most movies shortly after they are released? I thought that the studios price the movies much higher than $35 for a short while after release so that they pull in maximum revenue from video stores.
The fault here really lies with your boss, who should have known that most mythological creatures don't have the educational background for modern software development. Your coworker should have been placed in a position that could more directly benefit from the strengh areas of his background, like mischief and evil deeds.
If every business earned each dollar by leeching $100 of time and resources out of everybody else, this economy would grind to a halt in a week.
They have had a way to tax that for centuries. It's called a tariff.
This morning, after a set of tennis, I set out to find the set of TV sets that are small enough to set on my new cement porch. I brought the TV home and set it up, but now there are dimples permanently set in my porch because the cement hadn't fully set. I was all set to watch a show, but when I tried to set the channels, my circuit breaker reset.
Without TV to watch, all I could do was sit there and ponder why human language has so many overloaded words. I decided I was happy that people *usually* don't have problems understanding overloaded terms, and I was happy that they *usually* don't complain about their usage, because that would sure make it hard to tell a simple story.
I've hooked an ammeter to the AC power cord on my Athlon system. It sucks down about 20 more watts when the CPU is under load than when it is idle. It makes sense that you would use more power when the logic units, memory cells and bus signals are doing more work.
OTOH, nobody ever seems to care when most of the employees leave their big hot CRTs turned 24x7. Each of these is wasting 50 to 100W of power. Look at most any office building at night; you can see all of the monitors that people are too lazy to flip off.
According to a somewhat cheesy TV documentary that I recently saw, we can thank our large moon the stability of our rotational axis.
Currently, the axis wobbles by at most 1 degree. They claimed that without the moon to stabilize things, over time it would wobble up to almost 90 degrees. Such an extreme angle and the associated seasonal changes would probably eliminate the possibility that advanced life would evolve on this planet.
Correctly programming threads is hard, so they should only be used when necessary. Many of the things that can be done with threads can be done more safely with fork() and/or select(). Since Windows lacks the former and has a broken version of the latter, Windows programmers tend to use threads when Unix programmers would use an alternative.
As for composting, that leaves us with leaves. My municipal government's website suggests: "Try running them over with a mulching mower". Since I got a shiny new mulching mower this year, I tried it. My verdict: kick ass. Easy and fun; and no more raking. Leaves are shredded to tiny confetti that sinks into the grass. (As long as you don't let them build up too much between mowings.)
So now, I don't throw out any biomass, and I don't have to break my back tending to piles of dirt.
Hmmm. That is a very elegant way to handle disk partitions. Maybe they shouldn't rush into a quick fix for this that loses the benefits of mmaping the whole partition. In a few short years, AMD, Intel and IBM will all be offering mainstream 64-bit CPUs, and they'll be able to mmap exabyte sized partitions without throwing out the current codebase.
I think that they should just hold tight until then. No need for reckless haste.
That should keep him quiet for a few decades...
The Demo design pattern:
Boss: We need to have a working demo by the trade show next month.
Developer: OK, but it's just going to be a barely working hack. There's no time to do any proper design by the show. It's going to push back the ship date because we're going to have to rip out the kludges and redo them properly.
Boss: Fine. Just get me that demo.
The Ship date design pattern:
Boss: We need to ship the product by the middle of next quarter.
Developer: We don't have time to fix the demo hacks by then. We need more time to do a proper design. I told you that the ship date would be pushed back by the demo.
Boss: Everybody saw it working at the show, and they wonder why they can't have it now. We have to go with whatever you've got.
The Beeper Design pattern:
Boss: Support has been getting a lot of calls from customers in the field. A lot of random crashes. We need to have a developer available 24x7 to help debug these problems. Here, take this beeper.
Developer: I told you so.
Boss: We need to get a demo of version 2.0 by the field sales seminar next month.
Developer: Aaarrghhh!
I got Capholio'd. Now my PC has a bunghole.
Heheh yah heheh.
Are you thrrreatening me?
Count the electoral college votes in Montana compared with Florida, NY, Texas, California... places with much higher populations.
Then tell me how Montana gets a bigger share, somehow.
Montana population: 904,000; electors: 3; Voters per elector: 300,000
California population: 34,000,000; electors: 54; Voters per elector: 629000
Montana: one man, two votes. And Montana is not the only state with excessive representation per voter. It adds up.
You're the one who doesn't understand the issue. They wouldn't be "dicked out of representation". They would get their fair share of representation. With their high priority voting weight, their needs are currently prioritized above the needs of high population states.
Instead, we have a system in which the concerns of a few people in Montana have excessive influence over the whole country. If more people live in the cities, why shouldn't their concerns get proportional weight? What gives a person who is surrounded by big fields more importance than anyone else?
We don't go around quoting: "We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, and all acres are created equal, and a man equals 1000 acres." We shouldn't run the country that way, either.
That's exactly why mass transit in its current form will never be popular in the USA. My personal pet idea (probably already invented somewhere else) would be a standardized mini car that could be instantly loaded in and out of one of these tube transports. You would have three modes: free range electric mini car (manually driven) for getting to/from the end destination, mini-car loaded on transporter in normal tubes (automatically driven) for urban commuting, and mini-car in vacuum tube for 300MPH interstate trips. (Note that without having to deal with scheduled flight times, airplane taxiing and cow herding delays, you'd get to your destination much quicker in a 300MPH self-scheduled tube than all but the very longest scheduled 500MPH flights.)
The mini car could be electric and would recharge whenever it's in the system. When you request your destination, a central computer instantly allocates the tube transports and adjusts all tube traffic to give you a clear shot to where you're going.
With this kind of system, you'd get the best of both worlds: The freedom to get within a few feet of anywhere you want on your own schedule, and the ability to sit back and read during the bulk of your commute time. As a bonus, the 300MPH evacuated tubes eliminate the hassles of airports and rental cars. You just stay in your own personal germ-free car in all of these cases.
But at least you wouldn't be spending too much money on weapons.
Nobody's holding a gun to their head and making them author shiny plastic disks. Therefore, they cannot be slaves.
ECL was fast, but it was just about as opposite of CMOS as you can get. It works using bipolar transistors to continually shunt large currents through resistors even when the gate is idle. That single 1K chip I worked on probably drew several of watts of power. Nevertheless, it was considered to be a SRAM.
(The mainframe CPUs put a hundred or more ECL chips on a ceramic substrate, then used the mother of all water cooled heatsinks to pull out the massive heat that was generated.)
SRAMs can be designed for raw speed (CPU caches) or low power (CMOS memory in old PCs before flash). High speed SRAMs can suck down a lot of power due to all of the gates and frequent logic transitions.
OTOH, The low power SRAMs intended for nonvolatile storage use all CMOS FET transistors in their logic gates. These gates draw essentially zero current unless they are actually switching.
Thus, while low power SRAMs require a voltage (typically supplied by a battery) to retain their state, they draw no current when idle. Therefore, in a technical sense, they don't actually require "power" (voltage*current) to keep their state, just a static potential.
A hydraulic analogy would be rigging two toilet flush flap valves in series, then ensuring that they never open simultaneously. This setup could store one bit (1 - open/closed, 0 - closed/open) with just static water pressure and zero flow. (A little water would flow when the valves are actually flipped.)
(btw, IAAEE)