The original hack required someone to fabricate a hard-drive bracket and cable, plus solder a 40-pin IDE header to the board. Then they tried to stop it and the real fun began.
Netpliance locked out the BIOS. So people started sharing old BIOS images, then somebody had to open up their unit, pull the flash, reflash it in a programmer, then reassemble.
Netpliance then started epoxying the BIOS into the socket. So then people wrote a QNX flash program.
Netpliance then started sending the Cease and Desist letters. Somebody wrote a webpage with an embedded QNX flash applet. No screwdriver required... just point it's built in web-browser at a URL.
Just duplicate the PC boards in the XMPCR and sell them complete without the XM Module. Once all the cars with built-in XM radios start hitting the junkyards, you'll see the price of used car radios (with their XM module inside) plummet.
And there's only 12 or so big fat easy-to-solder pins on the module.
You've passed over many good people then...
on
IOCCC Winners Announced
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Those suckers never even got their foot in the door. I don't care how smart they think they are, we have to get products out fast, and realistically be able to maintain/upgrade them 10+ years or so.
At a couple of the companies I've been with we'd have after-hours informal little "Who can optimize this code the most" contests and they were amazingly instructive. They force you to think about solutions in new and creative ways, and to really understand an algorithm or CPU at a far deeper level than a simple straightforward implementation.
And while those obscenely optimized implementations may never get near the shipping product, you always walk away with a far far better grasp of how the shipping code really does work. (And yes, we've discovered bugs by inspection... because the little optimization contest had us questioning assumptions that the shipping code relied upon)
If you add an extra execution unit to a CPU, you have to add all sorts of logic to decide what is pairable with what else (i.e. allocation of execution units such that they don't collide in terms of input or output registers).
At somepoint you reach a limit where you can't use extra execution units because you don't know the input values to an instruction because the previous instructions upon which it depends are still in the pipline of other execution units.
Dual core avoids that... plus if you validate one core, you can cookie-cutter another one in and have minimal new validation. Especially if the communication between cores is a HT link just like what you're using in a single core design to talk to the outside world already.
I thought India's policy to Pakistan was the old US-Soviet Mutually Assured Destruction writ small. So their official government position *requires* that they have:
1) Nukes
2) The willingness to use them
Geesh... Next thing you know referring to body temperature as 98.6 degrees will be flamebait because of those delicate European sensibilities that will be offended.
between flashy products and grim utalitarian products.
OS/2 2.0 caught a lot of crap from people because the icons and graphics were basic, simple with muted colors. What people didn't know was that those icons had been vetted through legal review, special-needs review (i.e. all the various forms of color blindness), internationalization (like pointing with the index finger is OK here, but bad in europe, etc).
By the time you get through all those reviews, most of "chimp attract" is gone.... so where along the continuium do you want your product to be?
But don't worry, there'll be more news related postings...
"Steven King Dead At xx" and there'll be insightfull political analysis...
"IN SOVIET RUSSIA" Later in the hour we'll cover entertainment news...
"Natalie Portman marries Hot Grits"
For agreeing with my post... as I said I've had first line managers direct me to do such stuff knowing that higher level management wouldn't go for it.
They *can* hack in an easter egg while *USING SOURCE CODE CONTROL*. And in the management reports it will show up as "fixed a misspelling".
I've done it, I know bunches of other people that have done it, and I've been directed by my manager at one company to do it.
The cutoff date for features is *way* earlier than the cutoff date for defect fixes, and on occasion we'd (i.e. my first level department) discover a feature that we needed to have in the product, but which higher level management would never agree to due to the schedule. Our first line boss would give us the OK to slime it in. It's the old "It's easier to beg forgiveness than to ask permission".
Would somebody lose their job? I guess it all depends on whether your first line manager goes to bat for you or not... but that being said I've *never* heard of a programmer losing their job due to slime.
Have you heard of the term "slime"? Slime in the parlance is a "feature" introduced under the version control cover of a "defect".
Let's say I need to fix a simple little bug, a misspelling in a message, which happens to be in source code file "abcd.c". I've got sitting on my hard drive this awesome new feature (at least *I* as the developer think it's cool), but nobody wants to accept it into the product. Hey! It's in file "abcd.c" too! I check in the misspelling fix, along with 2000 lines of new code for my new feature. In version control though it shows up as nothing but "fix a misspelling". That's slime.
With open source you can't do slime... well you could try but it'd never stay undercover. Thus I'd argue this *is* an insightful comment for a non-open source release, but possibly Flamebait for a Linux release.
What if the gravity is strong enough for a suicidally depressed person to walk on, but weak enough that a happy person with a little "bounce" in their walk goes flying off into orbit?
Of course the thought of that would be enough to make any astronaut upset.... so... wait... I guess that won't be a problem.
due to living in the path of a radio tower. Whether you liked his work or not, we can all appreciate that inhaling huge quantities of blow had nothing to do with it as this latest research indicates.
Oh yeah... and Elvis is dead too. Had nothing to do with peanut butter & bananna sandwiches or drugs... nope... Graceland was just down the hill from a big 'ol King sized radio tower.
Did I mention "King sized"? Since his name came up, Stephen King is still very much alive. But Catherine Zeta Jones and that "Can you hear me now?" guy are looking pretty mortal at this point.
It ate my post! That'll teach me to preview.
Aeronautical: greater than 6%
Chemical: greater than 6%
Civil: much less than 6%
Electrical: much greater than 6%
Mechanical: greater than 6%
Industrial: greater than 6%
We may produce 6% of the world's engineers total, but I bet you the breakdown would be something like:
Aeronautical: > 6%
Chemical: > 6%
Civil: 6%
Mechanical: > 6%
Industrial: > 6%
The demand for Civil engineers I imagine is far less here in the states than it is in developing nations that are still building out their basic infrastructure.
I'm sure like many busy professionals, I don't have time to sort the wheat from the chaff on all the different computer news and magazines sites. I've come to rely on a couple of specialist/niche weblogs to point me to the stories that I need.
ZD's actions are going to result in nobody linking to their material, and thus ZD will effectively disappear from the eyeballs of people like me.
The real question, the business question, is how long it'll take them (or their advertisers) to figure that out.
Slashdot Mirror
Mr. Sinus is done at 9pm to midnight on Friday and Satuday nights... in the Club district... in a drafthouse.
Ain't nobody taking their kids there by accident.
Netpliance and the iOpener
The original hack required someone to fabricate a hard-drive bracket and cable, plus solder a 40-pin IDE header to the board. Then they tried to stop it and the real fun began.
Netpliance locked out the BIOS. So people started sharing old BIOS images, then somebody had to open up their unit, pull the flash, reflash it in a programmer, then reassemble.
Netpliance then started epoxying the BIOS into the socket. So then people wrote a QNX flash program.
Netpliance then started sending the Cease and Desist letters. Somebody wrote a webpage with an embedded QNX flash applet. No screwdriver required... just point it's built in web-browser at a URL.
Just duplicate the PC boards in the XMPCR and sell them complete without the XM Module. Once all the cars with built-in XM radios start hitting the junkyards, you'll see the price of used car radios (with their XM module inside) plummet.
And there's only 12 or so big fat easy-to-solder pins on the module.
Those suckers never even got their foot in the door. I don't care how smart they think they are, we have to get products out fast, and realistically be able to maintain/upgrade them 10+ years or so.
At a couple of the companies I've been with we'd have after-hours informal little "Who can optimize this code the most" contests and they were amazingly instructive. They force you to think about solutions in new and creative ways, and to really understand an algorithm or CPU at a far deeper level than a simple straightforward implementation.
And while those obscenely optimized implementations may never get near the shipping product, you always walk away with a far far better grasp of how the shipping code really does work. (And yes, we've discovered bugs by inspection... because the little optimization contest had us questioning assumptions that the shipping code relied upon)
Can we get a courtesy (cache) flush?
It's "RISC CPI for the CISC guy"
I can't wait to see what they do to his nonorthogonal register file.
If you add an extra execution unit to a CPU, you have to add all sorts of logic to decide what is pairable with what else (i.e. allocation of execution units such that they don't collide in terms of input or output registers).
At somepoint you reach a limit where you can't use extra execution units because you don't know the input values to an instruction because the previous instructions upon which it depends are still in the pipline of other execution units.
Dual core avoids that... plus if you validate one core, you can cookie-cutter another one in and have minimal new validation. Especially if the communication between cores is a HT link just like what you're using in a single core design to talk to the outside world already.
I wish I had mod points for you... thanks! That looks like exactly what I was wishing for!
Those USB connected XM Radios are dirt cheap (~$39 if I remember right)... somebody needs to make a TiVo like recording engine for it.
Just let it record and catalog in the background 24/7.
Well, it might be worth subscribing if we didn't have to replay the same level^H^H^H^H^Hstory every couple of days.
Flamebait? Flamebaiting who exactly?
I thought India's policy to Pakistan was the old US-Soviet Mutually Assured Destruction writ small. So their official government position *requires* that they have:
1) Nukes
2) The willingness to use them
Geesh... Next thing you know referring to body temperature as 98.6 degrees will be flamebait because of those delicate European sensibilities that will be offended.
Do you have nukes and an itchy trigger finger?
between flashy products and grim utalitarian products.
OS/2 2.0 caught a lot of crap from people because the icons and graphics were basic, simple with muted colors. What people didn't know was that those icons had been vetted through legal review, special-needs review (i.e. all the various forms of color blindness), internationalization (like pointing with the index finger is OK here, but bad in europe, etc).
By the time you get through all those reviews, most of "chimp attract" is gone.... so where along the continuium do you want your product to be?
But don't worry, there'll be more news related postings...
"Steven King Dead At xx"
and there'll be insightfull political analysis...
"IN SOVIET RUSSIA"
Later in the hour we'll cover entertainment news...
"Natalie Portman marries Hot Grits"
Relax and enjoy yourself.
What are you trying to say? "disinfranchised"? Did you mean disenfranchised?
Could you vote for Google management before the IPO? No? Then what the hell did you lose?
For agreeing with my post... as I said I've had first line managers direct me to do such stuff knowing that higher level management wouldn't go for it.
They *can* hack in an easter egg while *USING SOURCE CODE CONTROL*. And in the management reports it will show up as "fixed a misspelling".
I've done it, I know bunches of other people that have done it, and I've been directed by my manager at one company to do it.
The cutoff date for features is *way* earlier than the cutoff date for defect fixes, and on occasion we'd (i.e. my first level department) discover a feature that we needed to have in the product, but which higher level management would never agree to due to the schedule. Our first line boss would give us the OK to slime it in. It's the old "It's easier to beg forgiveness than to ask permission".
Would somebody lose their job? I guess it all depends on whether your first line manager goes to bat for you or not... but that being said I've *never* heard of a programmer losing their job due to slime.
Score 4, Insightful? If you were commenting on a Troll, this would maybe be Off-Topic. At the very least, Overrated would be more appropriate. :-p
Have you heard of the term "slime"? Slime in the parlance is a "feature" introduced under the version control cover of a "defect".
Let's say I need to fix a simple little bug, a misspelling in a message, which happens to be in source code file "abcd.c". I've got sitting on my hard drive this awesome new feature (at least *I* as the developer think it's cool), but nobody wants to accept it into the product. Hey! It's in file "abcd.c" too! I check in the misspelling fix, along with 2000 lines of new code for my new feature. In version control though it shows up as nothing but "fix a misspelling". That's slime.
With open source you can't do slime... well you could try but it'd never stay undercover. Thus I'd argue this *is* an insightful comment for a non-open source release, but possibly Flamebait for a Linux release.
is the list of bugs they've *introduced*.
What if the gravity is strong enough for a suicidally depressed person to walk on, but weak enough that a happy person with a little "bounce" in their walk goes flying off into orbit?
Of course the thought of that would be enough to make any astronaut upset.... so... wait... I guess that won't be a problem.
due to living in the path of a radio tower. Whether you liked his work or not, we can all appreciate that inhaling huge quantities of blow had nothing to do with it as this latest research indicates.
Oh yeah... and Elvis is dead too. Had nothing to do with peanut butter & bananna sandwiches or drugs... nope... Graceland was just down the hill from a big 'ol King sized radio tower.
Did I mention "King sized"? Since his name came up, Stephen King is still very much alive. But Catherine Zeta Jones and that "Can you hear me now?" guy are looking pretty mortal at this point.
It ate my post! That'll teach me to preview.
Aeronautical: greater than 6%
Chemical: greater than 6%
Civil: much less than 6%
Electrical: much greater than 6%
Mechanical: greater than 6%
Industrial: greater than 6%
We may produce 6% of the world's engineers total, but I bet you the breakdown would be something like:
Aeronautical: > 6%
Chemical: > 6%
Civil: 6%
Mechanical: > 6%
Industrial: > 6%
The demand for Civil engineers I imagine is far less here in the states than it is in developing nations that are still building out their basic infrastructure.
I'm sure like many busy professionals, I don't have time to sort the wheat from the chaff on all the different computer news and magazines sites. I've come to rely on a couple of specialist/niche weblogs to point me to the stories that I need.
ZD's actions are going to result in nobody linking to their material, and thus ZD will effectively disappear from the eyeballs of people like me.
The real question, the business question, is how long it'll take them (or their advertisers) to figure that out.