> The IEEE spec has expired This seems to be true. When I tried to run my Scheme interpreter today, this is what it output: (but (are (sorry we)) (has (expired (IEEE-specification Scheme)))) (for (interest your (in Scheme)) thankyou) (provide (to you) (are (hard (working we))) (replacement (a technology))) (may (meantime (the in)) (suggest we (try you (other (fine languages))) (such-as (Python Ruby Haskell C# Java Forth)))) (for (are (sorry we)) (caused (any (inconvenience you))))
We have pocket Crays already, in a manner of speaking.
This is true. The original Crays were roughly
cylindrical with a bigger portion at the base.
About half of the people out there are already
sporting pocket-sized hardware of a similar nature.
In a landmark licensing deal, Pepsico Inc (PEP) and NASA announced today that Pepsi has purchased the naming rights to the historic Apollo lunar missions. This agreement is valued at over $4 Billion and gives Pepsi exlusive naming rights to all events relating to the former Apollo program for the next 30 years. Pepsi's restaraunt partners are also participating in this deal.
As part of this deal, "Tranquility Base" will be redubbed "Pepsi Tranquility Base (tm)". The Apollo 11 mission itself will know be known as "Taco Bell Run Beyond the Border 11 (tm)". Neil Armstrong's name will be officially changed to "Commander KFC".
Further announcements will be made concerning the new official nomenclature for all of the other Pepsico/Apollo missions, as well as the plans for a new theme park in Cape Mountain Dew.
I loaded Linux on my 200MHz iPaq, and it ran vastly slower than a 200MHz Pentium Pro machine that I have. I didn't do any official benchmarks, but it felt like it ran on par with a 66MHz 486.
I would guess that the performance difference has to do with issues such as tiny cache, lack of parallelism and pipelining in the CPU, slow narrow memory, software framebuffer, etc.
In my day, every teacher was proficient in cranking out mimeographs with purple ink. They used a big heavy machine with a crank on the side, and wasted no time doing it. Typing mistakes were corrected with hand scribbles.
We didn't need no friggin PowerPoint presentations. I wouldn't want to view a presentation that doesn't have that distinctive purple ink smell.
Am I the only one who finds Gravitational Lenses
to be kind of creepy? Photons leave a star on
different paths, eventually become separated by
many thousands of light years so that entire galaxies separate them, then get
deflected so that they eventually
converge to within inches of each other just as
they hit the surface of planet earth. Those are
are some tall odds.
The strong cryptography genie is out of the bottle. No law passed here will prevent usage of currently available products or future production of crypto by other countries.
However, it is well known that security is like a chain. A single broken link exposes the secrets, and cryptography is just one (very strong) link. There are many other weak links available to the government when they need to snoop. Just ask that mafia guy who recently got a free FBI keyboard sniffer.
I foresee the TLAs (three letter agencies) getting heavily into activities that circumvent the crypto measures that criminals and non-criminals attempt to use. They'll employ tiny electronic bugs, chemical tracers, Tempest snooping (eventually packed into portable devices instead of vans), computer trojans and worms, real-time monitoring of all global financial transactions, traffic analysis of the entire Internet, cell phone GPS data, face recognition, DNA sampling, etc. But most effectively, they'll hire a lot more spies who use social engineering techniques to just trick people into telling them what they want to know, or who infiltrate the bad guys' organizations.
I'm sure the spooks already know this reality, and they know that no criminal would ever use new broken crypto when old or foreign working crypto is available. Crypto backdoors are just the reaction of some clueless politicians. Likewise, too many people believe that if they have strong crypto then they have privacy.
Licenses are getting too confusing.
on
Mozilla Relicensing
·
· Score: 2, Funny
To solve the licensing issues once and for all,
I propose the following Inconsistent Public License: (IPL)
You may only distribute this work under the following terms:
If you distribute this work, it must not be distributed in a manner that satisfies these terms.
Don't worry, I was employing irony.. (noun: the use of words to express something other than and especially the opposite of the literal meaning)
Except about the word "great"... Microsoft's overuse of the word has almost ruined its meaning for me. I can't read it without seeing an image of Bill Gates.
(Actually, I haven't used C#, but it looks reasonable enough. The main problem I see with it from looking at MS example snippets is that this "attribute" stuff tacked into the syntax to do COM stuff seems to be out of control. A couple of examples I saw had more of that in it than real code.)
Could someone _please_ explain to me how this got modded as a Troll???
Probably because they said "C# is a great language". The adjective "great" is so overused in MS literature that the original poster is obviously a paid MS shill. A genuine/. complement would have said something more like "I ported all of emacs to C# in 3 days and it's rock solid running on my Amiga and BeOS boxen".
Well, the actual situation depends very much on the abstraction level of the program being implemented.
JIT compiled Java is kind of strange because it is competeitive with C++ at both low-level (bit banging primitives) and high-level (dynamically allocated objects). However, in middle ground (nontrivial objects that can be allocated solely on the stack), C++ blows Java away. This is mainly because all Java data that is not a local primitive variable must be dynamically allocated.
As an example, one concept that is on the border between mid-level and high-level abstraction is strings:
If you use C++ at a nice comfortably high level of abstraction (i.e., with some implementations of STL's std::string), it can be significantly slower than Java because of construction and destruction of every function parameter. OTOH, if you write your C++ program in a painstaking and dangerous C-like fashion (using one stack-based buffer for a string across many levels of function call), it can be an 1 or 2 orders of magnitude faster. If you bang on strings alot, a language like Perl can be a good choice because its mutable strings are more efficient than Java and safer or easier than C/C++.
(Aside: In my experience, a rule-of-thumb is that most dynamic memory allocations in any language seem to take on the order of 1000 CPU clocks, and most dynamic "objects" end up consuming about 1000 bytes.)
Of course, at the end of the day, all the issues that I just raised pale in comparison to the importance of the basic structure of your algorithms. If you feed in 50X times your expected load into your application, it will often slow down and/or eat memory in a spectacular fashion. By recoding to eliminating that problem, you can often make a "slow" language outperform "fast" one. This is often done by identifying the portions of your algorithm that depend on input size and perform worse than N*log(N) in space or time, then recoding them so they don't.
I recently downloaded GNU Forth out of curiosity.
I hadn't played around with it in over a decade, but I always thought it was a lot of fun to program in Forth.
I soon noticed what looked like a cool new feature: named function parameters.
You can now access stack slots by name instead of always juggling the parameters
with operations like DUP, ROT, SWAP, etc.
After using this new capability, though, I realized that much of the fun of writing Forth code is figuring out clever ways to juggle the stack.
Using named parameters makes the language kind of boring, combining C's explicit
memory management headaches with the performance questions of an interpreted language.
I guess I just never got deep enough into the Forth ways to take much advantage of the magical
"extend the language with itself" capabilities. OTOH, Lisp can do some of these tricks
and provides automatic memory management.
Oh well, my favorite language this year is Ruby, anyway. It brings together a lot of good concepts from
other languages in a nice way that's easy to understand; it even has a little bit of the extensibility that Forth exhibits.
Why does someone always come out with the inappropriate car analogies?
Cars are obviously different from software. Why, if Ford were to make a vehicle that was as prone to crashing as Windows, then people would be lining up in droves to sue their asses and their executives would be hauled before congressional committ...
I began to get upset that all these "dot.com" people came to to bay area, jacked up the median rental and home prices, then bailed after things started going bad. Although rentals and home prices have started to level off they have, for the most part, not gone down.
Don't worry, one day "the big one" is going to hit and reduce the whole area to rubble and ashes. After that, your real estate prices will be nice and cheap.:-)
Why is this modded as funny?! I know I'm being a jerk, but those binary strings don't translate to anything in ascii.
Of course it doesn't translate to ASCII. Alan Turing died in 1954 and ASCII was created in 1963.
The joke is probably a Turing machine tape anyway. We don't know how to interpret the symbols without the state machine specification to give it context. Many jokes are not funny out of context.
and let passers-by use your 'net connection. Where's the harm in that?
Your proposal is a great public service. Many crackers out there are in dire need of a totally untraceable way to launch the next innovations in Outlook and IIS worms. Without wide open wireless access points, advances in malware state-of-the-art would be needlessly hindered.
Re:"Nobel laureates and the like.."?
on
Microsoft vs. Ximian
·
· Score: 3, Funny
Say what?!? Anyone have a more detailed explanation of this status and who the "geniuses" are who get it?
I'm a genius, but I'm also a U.S. citizen, so the visa won't do me much good. I'd be interested if anyone has information about any other government perks available to a genius. Thanks in advance.
Back when I was a hardware guy, GaAs was a last resort. A GaAs PAL device was 30% faster than anything else, but it was also expensive, flakey, hot, only available from one manufacturer, and suffered chronic yield problems. I saw more than one product suffer in the market because of problems acquiring the single GaAs device that it used.
It looks like they're going to fix the expensive issue; I hope that the other problems are addressed as well.
Slashdot Mirror
Ummm, Macintosh?
With the operation translation tables, it looks like trying to write a program in it is similar to brute-force encryption cracking.
It is impressive that the one guy managed to write a "hello world" implementation.
> The IEEE spec has expired
This seems to be true. When I tried to run my Scheme interpreter today,
this is what it output:
(but (are (sorry we))
(has (expired (IEEE-specification Scheme))))
(for (interest your (in Scheme)) thankyou)
(provide (to you) (are (hard (working we)))
(replacement (a technology)))
(may (meantime (the in))
(suggest we (try you (other (fine languages)))
(such-as (Python Ruby Haskell C# Java Forth))))
(for (are (sorry we))
(caused (any (inconvenience you))))
This is true. The original Crays were roughly cylindrical with a bigger portion at the base. About half of the people out there are already sporting pocket-sized hardware of a similar nature.
As part of this deal, "Tranquility Base" will be redubbed "Pepsi Tranquility Base (tm)". The Apollo 11 mission itself will know be known as "Taco Bell Run Beyond the Border 11 (tm)". Neil Armstrong's name will be officially changed to "Commander KFC".
Further announcements will be made concerning the new official nomenclature for all of the other Pepsico/Apollo missions, as well as the plans for a new theme park in Cape Mountain Dew.
I would guess that the performance difference has to do with issues such as tiny cache, lack of parallelism and pipelining in the CPU, slow narrow memory, software framebuffer, etc.
We didn't need no friggin PowerPoint presentations. I wouldn't want to view a presentation that doesn't have that distinctive purple ink smell.
Am I the only one who finds Gravitational Lenses to be kind of creepy? Photons leave a star on different paths, eventually become separated by many thousands of light years so that entire galaxies separate them, then get deflected so that they eventually converge to within inches of each other just as they hit the surface of planet earth. Those are are some tall odds.
All I know is, if you're in the Air Force, and they issue a uniform to you that includes a red shirt, then it's time to go AWOL.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
True enough. I can't argue logic with someone who has a sig like yours.
However, it is well known that security is like a chain. A single broken link exposes the secrets, and cryptography is just one (very strong) link. There are many other weak links available to the government when they need to snoop. Just ask that mafia guy who recently got a free FBI keyboard sniffer.
I foresee the TLAs (three letter agencies) getting heavily into activities that circumvent the crypto measures that criminals and non-criminals attempt to use. They'll employ tiny electronic bugs, chemical tracers, Tempest snooping (eventually packed into portable devices instead of vans), computer trojans and worms, real-time monitoring of all global financial transactions, traffic analysis of the entire Internet, cell phone GPS data, face recognition, DNA sampling, etc. But most effectively, they'll hire a lot more spies who use social engineering techniques to just trick people into telling them what they want to know, or who infiltrate the bad guys' organizations.
I'm sure the spooks already know this reality, and they know that no criminal would ever use new broken crypto when old or foreign working crypto is available. Crypto backdoors are just the reaction of some clueless politicians. Likewise, too many people believe that if they have strong crypto then they have privacy.
You may only distribute this work under the following terms:
- If you distribute this work, it must not be distributed in a manner that satisfies these terms.
End of license.Except about the word "great"... Microsoft's overuse of the word has almost ruined its meaning for me. I can't read it without seeing an image of Bill Gates.
(Actually, I haven't used C#, but it looks reasonable enough. The main problem I see with it from looking at MS example snippets is that this "attribute" stuff tacked into the syntax to do COM stuff seems to be out of control. A couple of examples I saw had more of that in it than real code.)
Could someone _please_ explain to me how this got modded as a Troll???
/. complement would have said something more like "I ported all of emacs to C# in 3 days and it's rock solid running on my Amiga and BeOS boxen".
Probably because they said "C# is a great language". The adjective "great" is so overused in MS literature that the original poster is obviously a paid MS shill. A genuine
Well, the actual situation depends very much on the abstraction level of the program being implemented.
JIT compiled Java is kind of strange because it is competeitive with C++ at both low-level (bit banging primitives) and high-level (dynamically allocated objects). However, in middle ground (nontrivial objects that can be allocated solely on the stack), C++ blows Java away. This is mainly because all Java data that is not a local primitive variable must be dynamically allocated.
As an example, one concept that is on the border between mid-level and high-level abstraction is strings:
If you use C++ at a nice comfortably high level of abstraction (i.e., with some implementations of STL's std::string), it can be significantly slower than Java because of construction and destruction of every function parameter. OTOH, if you write your C++ program in a painstaking and dangerous C-like fashion (using one stack-based buffer for a string across many levels of function call), it can be an 1 or 2 orders of magnitude faster. If you bang on strings alot, a language like Perl can be a good choice because its mutable strings are more efficient than Java and safer or easier than C/C++.
(Aside: In my experience, a rule-of-thumb is that most dynamic memory allocations in any language seem to take on the order of 1000 CPU clocks, and most dynamic "objects" end up consuming about 1000 bytes.)
Of course, at the end of the day, all the issues that I just raised pale in comparison to the importance of the basic structure of your algorithms. If you feed in 50X times your expected load into your application, it will often slow down and/or eat memory in a spectacular fashion. By recoding to eliminating that problem, you can often make a "slow" language outperform "fast" one. This is often done by identifying the portions of your algorithm that depend on input size and perform worse than N*log(N) in space or time, then recoding them so they don't.
The upshot: it all depends.
I soon noticed what looked like a cool new feature: named function parameters. You can now access stack slots by name instead of always juggling the parameters with operations like DUP, ROT, SWAP, etc.
After using this new capability, though, I realized that much of the fun of writing Forth code is figuring out clever ways to juggle the stack. Using named parameters makes the language kind of boring, combining C's explicit memory management headaches with the performance questions of an interpreted language.
I guess I just never got deep enough into the Forth ways to take much advantage of the magical "extend the language with itself" capabilities. OTOH, Lisp can do some of these tricks and provides automatic memory management.
Oh well, my favorite language this year is Ruby, anyway. It brings together a lot of good concepts from other languages in a nice way that's easy to understand; it even has a little bit of the extensibility that Forth exhibits.
The cat is already out of the bag
The genie is out of the bottle
Humpty Dumpty is already broken
Etc.
What would this accomplish?
Cars are obviously different from software. Why, if Ford were to make a vehicle that was as prone to crashing as Windows, then people would be lining up in droves to sue their asses and their executives would be hauled before congressional committ...
umm, wait a minute...
Don't worry, one day "the big one" is going to hit and reduce the whole area to rubble and ashes. After that, your real estate prices will be nice and cheap.
Write it in VBScript. You can create the first OS that can be installed and redistributed by clicking an e-mail attachment.
Of course it doesn't translate to ASCII. Alan Turing died in 1954 and ASCII was created in 1963.
The joke is probably a Turing machine tape anyway. We don't know how to interpret the symbols without the state machine specification to give it context. Many jokes are not funny out of context.
Your proposal is a great public service. Many crackers out there are in dire need of a totally untraceable way to launch the next innovations in Outlook and IIS worms. Without wide open wireless access points, advances in malware state-of-the-art would be needlessly hindered.
I'm a genius, but I'm also a U.S. citizen, so the visa won't do me much good. I'd be interested if anyone has information about any other government perks available to a genius. Thanks in advance.
A dedicated 100-Mb fiber link should be sufficient. Imagine hardball business negotiations in 9-channel Dolby surround sound.
Back when I was a hardware guy, GaAs was a last
resort. A GaAs PAL device was 30% faster than
anything else, but it was also expensive, flakey,
hot, only available from one manufacturer, and
suffered chronic yield problems. I saw more than one product suffer in the market because of problems acquiring the single GaAs device that it used.
It looks like they're going to fix the expensive
issue; I hope that the other problems are addressed
as well.