Except that there will always be some coder who needs to put food on the table, and the only paying company is DRM'R'US software. It only takes a few rogue programmers to impliment this system, and by then it'll be too late.
not necessarily whining about progressing technology, but crappy software. it gets tiring seeing so much crap software out there that requires the latest and greatest hardware just to run because the developers were too lazy to not use bubble sorts and what not.
it's like doing a for i in *;do rm -f $i;done instead of just a rm -f *. net result is the same, but the execution times are probably a bit different (depending on the number of files etc).
Yes! interactive is a must. learning is not a passive process by any means.
I'm not sure if i like the unlock system, simply because i, personally, bounce all over subjects, wether i know previous material or not. there are always people who jump to the middle or end of books to learn a particular piece of information quickly, without wanting to know the whole of the information before it. so maybe an 'unlocked' edition as well, for those kinds of people?
and maybe a largly indexed edition (like a textbook), as a reference type material (for people who learn almost entirely by topic or something).
now that i think about it, there'd have to be all kinds of versions just so all the different learning types could have easy access to information:)
Not to answer for the poster here, but here's my insight (for what it's worth).
How many people have you met that said they screwed around in school, and now they regret it? not many, but hopefully more than none. those people were probably labled 'the dumb kids' the first time around, simply because they saw no point in what they were doing. later, they saw a purpose to learning, but by then, by our system, it was too late to really fix things. it's never too late really, but personal circumstances (job, kids, etc) do pin people into their current situation.
what about those people who get out in the world, and find they dont need school? let them stay there! as long as they aren't leeching from others due to their poverty levels, who cares if they're a double Ph.D or not even past 5th grade. if at some point they decide 'oops, this was bad', let them start somewhere reasonable, and go farther. there's a whole lot more to life than school.
I'm not blaming students, I'm stating how generally apathetic they are _towards what's taught in school_. I bet most dont care about what i find interesting, and i have no desire to make them interested in what i like. if they're curious enough to ask, i'll tell them all about it.
nor is all educational innovation futile. without it, it would stay where it is now, which is definatly not optimal or anywhere close. what i was saying is that this, as a technology, is not as 'innovative' as it appears. through application, VHS, laser disk, cassette tape, CD, and computers have all been used, and I (and others that i have talked with) find these tools to not really benefit their educational experience.
as for testing student ambition, rather than test for it, why not let them take whatever they want. if im interested in math, let me take math. if i hate english, dont force me to take it. schools have these regulations set to _require_ a student to take X hours of Blah classes. very quickly, the student becomees bored, and then things go down hill from there. playing movies from a CD may not impact this cycle as much as we all would hope.
The education deficit in this country and others occurs because the quantity of student learning needs boosting. Students need access to more learning opportunities.
More access to learning opprotunities? What they need is more of a will to use the opprotunities they have. The unfortunate truth that I have at least witnessed is that most students don't care to learn. those that actualyl do want to learn often find their own means when their opprotunities aren't enough. agreed, some do not, but i believe a far greater number simply do not care.
They go on to say how video is the best way to learn? haha, i don't think so. interaction is needed for real learning. and then, the cd's only hold 70 minutes. what can one really learn in 70 minutes? a lot for some things, but almost nothing for others. a lot of subjects are either a lot of practice (calculus, for example), or just a lot of material (french language). because this offers no interaction (practice/ Q&A sessions), the only application would really be subjects that are volumnous, and those may not fit all in 70 minutes...lots of cd changing is in your future =)
i dunno, it just seems like a waste to me. not that the current education system is anywhere near perfect (indeed, i feel it is far from it), this doesn't seem to me like it would enhance it much. anyone get to watch those science laser disks in science class? interesting pictures and demonstrations, but most of the actual content of the class was drawn on the chalkboard.
i'm concerned about another maxis product called "the sims" which relies heavily on having the CD in the drive at all times, reading from it constantly, absolutely *killing* my drive. can't they just put the whole thing on my gigantic HD?
haven't you looked? each install takes up ~700MB. it _does_ copy the whole cd to the freaking harddrive. it's annoying to those of us without gigantic harddrives, having to free up 1.5GB so the children can play EA's bloated cash cow. (each expansion adds considerably more. ) additionally, each neighborhood, empty, takes up nearly 12MB(not too evil, but still obscene for what it contains (nothing)). and the web templates garbage was another 30 or so. it's really pathetic, when you look at it. maxis has lost my interest with these pieces of crap lately =(
"Part of being a good programmer is using the right tools to maximize your effectiveness. The compiler is a great syntactic and semantic validator. Let it do that for you. The manual is much better at retaining information about specifics. Let it do that for you. As long as you can use these tools to craft quality code, then you are being effective. "
Exactly =) Programming, as a career, is _not_ memorizing all the man pages, but knowing how to use them quickly, and learn on the fly. Every task you do is likly to be different, so why bother memorizing everything? i, for one, use them for function argument order, which i never remember because all the libraries i use have slightly different orders.
I suppose it'd be better to think you get it right, only to find a logical error somewhere down the line when you provide the source and dest structs in the wrong order..? right;)
as other have said, no, you can't catch a kill -9. your process simply gets killed.
however, you can catch a -15 (sigterm i believe). so, a kill -15 `pidof X` might have it terminate gracefully (the signal can be caught). i have no idea on how X handles signals and such though. it may already do stuff with it (when shutting down, for example, it gets sigterm from init, then 3-5 seconds later it gets sigkill). so it may already be in there.
Does this really have less moving parts though? as far i know, harddrives have maybe 3: the spindle, the voice coil, and maybe a solenoid for something. the article claimed it had thousands of arms, all moving by way of high temperatures (seems possibly high stress?).
in any event, it is a really cool development. perhaps the density could be further increased by varying the depth of the holes in the plastic (making it slower still, but maybe doubling the density). even with this, 90 days of audio seems insane =)
everyone knows how pentiums etc are RISC at the core level. However, anyone who knows ans x86 asm will know that the interface to it was and still is CISC. the decoding/translation stages all you CISC->RISC people get all worked up about is rather amusing, as it means completely jack to anyone developing for the cpu (unless they tell you how to manipulate the translator with undocumented instructions or something).
Again, no matter how intelligent and efficnet the CISC->RISC decoder is, i doubt it's anything close to just using RISC. fewer transistors for decode/translate logic saves more power/space for actual computations or cache.
unless RISC cpu's really translate RISC opcodes into some other sub-risc instruction set. that might be implimented, i wouldn't know off hand.
however, these cards plug into a pci slot, not a memory slot. pci is still 66mhz max (unless you oc it). so even if your memory could dump over a gigabyte per second (which it most likly can, by a factor or two or more these days), you can't sent out all that directly to the nic.
Now, if they were to make nics that plugged into agp slots, it might be a little different (they are clocked higher and transmit more data per clock), but iirc it's still slower than the memory bus.
so we clearly need a nic that plugs into a dimm slot to utilize all this bandwidth =)
Imagine, for instance, that you are an expert engineer who was magically transported to a pre-civilized era. Would the vast body of knowledge that you posessed help you, in that era, take actions that effect any significant amount of change? Would you, in fact, be able to do anything with the advanced information that you posess in such a situation?
i know the basics behind internal combusion engines. developing those hunderds (thousands even) of years in advance would be helpful.
many mathematical theorems can be expressed earlier, allowing the advancement of science and technology.
knowledge of genetics can improve farming earlier, revolutionizing the food sources for early civilizations. it's not too far off, and while yes, knowing something like x86 assembly or windows dx api's wouldn't help any, it could at least allow you to instill design ideas that favor doing the Right Thing over the Easy Thing.
In earlier times, it was entirely ok to spread any and all information, because the worst that the information could do would be to change somebody's opinion on a political matter or teach somebody how to make a shoddy weapon (read: a stick) of minor consequence. In the near future, one will be able to transmit a digital specification for a weapon to be fabricated on one's personal fab-lab.
and obtaining some form of protection will be impossible? haha. yes, there is little protection against a nuke, but i imagine it would be equally difficult to magically obtain enough uranium/plutonium to make one successfully. while the threat arises, you fail to consider how society will change when such things are possible.
it never ceases to amaze me how people fear knowledge. ahh, get it away, it has the potential to hurt me! better take that cpu fan off, the blades might cut your fingers.
i don't enjoy viruses at all, but i've had the great fortune of never having any on my personal systems. a simple reminder to the family not to do dumb things is 90% of the challenge. keeping code up to date is another part. in a couple cases, i've found virus proof-of-concept code helpful in self-patching code until a more formal patch is ready, which isn't too long normally anyways. the only people proof-of-concept viruses are those who are unable to defend themselves (they _lack_ knowledge) and those who want the blanket of false security (i know no one knows how to break my breakable software, so somehow i must be safe).
there is a huge difference between clearing a harddrive and spraying brains all over the place, and the time it'll take to bridge that gap will no doubt provide other developments to protect people.
This is NOT what millions of people in our history died for in defending our country!!!!
Exactly! People wonder why i'm not patriotic. they wonder why im not all pro-america all the time. This is exactly why i am not. Thank you for putting my thoughts into usable words.
only 2000 times better? i think it's way more than that.
your 2x1Ghz thing is right (new cpu's do 2 ops per cycle normally). however, old cpu's often took many cycles to do just one. iirc, 8088's too 12 cycles to execute 1 instruction, making a 12Mhz 8088 the same as a 6Mhz new cpu (athlon, p4, whatever).
depending on operations per clock, your new machine is probably 4000 times more powerful or more.
"If i was a video card driver writer, I'd be concentrating on making the existing one more stable instead of contemplating why we even bother producing it."
I've been under the impression that video cards come out so frequently now that almost no time is put into the drivers. after the driver is released, some minor bug fixes may happen, but thats all. the majority of the work now begins on the new card that will be just around the corner...
160 in 1 and model rockets! sounds like my not-so-distant childhood =). though i had a few of those electrical kits.. one from way back when transistors came in cans.
it's too bad creative play is looked down upon, or at least not encouraged any more. on the other hand, non-creative play leads to fewer dmca violations...
until you run some self-modifying code. gonna recompile the whole thing everytime some memory is written that _might_ be executable? afaik, this hasnt been solved cleanly, but it has some possibilities that are less expensive than the above. (recompile the local memory area, insert nop's if the result is smaller on the local machine. but what if it's bigger? scoot the end farther, and realign all the pointers? what about modified pointers that are now somewhere+1, and you cant find with a simple scan?).
it'd be quite hard, i imagine (on the other hand, self-modifying code is probably rare these days)
iirc, the eye notices more in green, then blue, and then red. thats why 16bpp color mode is almost always rrrrrggggggbbbbb (565). more information in green, because we notice it more.
the reason we see more green is *i think* because it is in the middle of the spectrum. blue is near the uv end, but farther from the end than red is from infrared. similar to how our ears hear things with higher definition in 1-2khz fairly well, but less at =20khz. or something like that. im not a doctor though.
no kidding. what i though would be even nicer would be a way to dynamically udate hz.. during idle hours, or when one big process is running, hz low would slightly (negligibly probably) increase thru-put, while in busy times, hz==1024 would help responsiveness/reduce latency.
implimenting this is difficult though (in the middle of it, little to show for it). everything has the right to change the pit (x86, maybe mips) and there seems to be no way to read what was written. pit shold have been made a device from the start.
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Except that there will always be some coder who needs to put food on the table, and the only paying company is DRM'R'US software. It only takes a few rogue programmers to impliment this system, and by then it'll be too late.
not necessarily whining about progressing technology, but crappy software. it gets tiring seeing so much crap software out there that requires the latest and greatest hardware just to run because the developers were too lazy to not use bubble sorts and what not.
it's like doing a for i in *;do rm -f $i;done instead of just a rm -f *. net result is the same, but the execution times are probably a bit different (depending on the number of files etc).
yep! try 'nul' sometime too, same thing. i think there's one for the printer as well (LPTx ?), but i havnt done dos in years. fun stuff =)
Yes! interactive is a must. learning is not a passive process by any means.
:)
I'm not sure if i like the unlock system, simply because i, personally, bounce all over subjects, wether i know previous material or not. there are always people who jump to the middle or end of books to learn a particular piece of information quickly, without wanting to know the whole of the information before it. so maybe an 'unlocked' edition as well, for those kinds of people? and maybe a largly indexed edition (like a textbook), as a reference type material (for people who learn almost entirely by topic or something).
now that i think about it, there'd have to be all kinds of versions just so all the different learning types could have easy access to information
Not to answer for the poster here, but here's my insight (for what it's worth).
How many people have you met that said they screwed around in school, and now they regret it? not many, but hopefully more than none. those people were probably labled 'the dumb kids' the first time around, simply because they saw no point in what they were doing. later, they saw a purpose to learning, but by then, by our system, it was too late to really fix things. it's never too late really, but personal circumstances (job, kids, etc) do pin people into their current situation.
what about those people who get out in the world, and find they dont need school? let them stay there! as long as they aren't leeching from others due to their poverty levels, who cares if they're a double Ph.D or not even past 5th grade. if at some point they decide 'oops, this was bad', let them start somewhere reasonable, and go farther. there's a whole lot more to life than school.
I'm not blaming students, I'm stating how generally apathetic they are _towards what's taught in school_. I bet most dont care about what i find interesting, and i have no desire to make them interested in what i like. if they're curious enough to ask, i'll tell them all about it.
nor is all educational innovation futile. without it, it would stay where it is now, which is definatly not optimal or anywhere close. what i was saying is that this, as a technology, is not as 'innovative' as it appears. through application, VHS, laser disk, cassette tape, CD, and computers have all been used, and I (and others that i have talked with) find these tools to not really benefit their educational experience.
as for testing student ambition, rather than test for it, why not let them take whatever they want. if im interested in math, let me take math. if i hate english, dont force me to take it. schools have these regulations set to _require_ a student to take X hours of Blah classes. very quickly, the student becomees bored, and then things go down hill from there. playing movies from a CD may not impact this cycle as much as we all would hope.
More access to learning opprotunities? What they need is more of a will to use the opprotunities they have. The unfortunate truth that I have at least witnessed is that most students don't care to learn. those that actualyl do want to learn often find their own means when their opprotunities aren't enough. agreed, some do not, but i believe a far greater number simply do not care.
They go on to say how video is the best way to learn? haha, i don't think so. interaction is needed for real learning. and then, the cd's only hold 70 minutes. what can one really learn in 70 minutes? a lot for some things, but almost nothing for others. a lot of subjects are either a lot of practice (calculus, for example), or just a lot of material (french language). because this offers no interaction (practice/ Q&A sessions), the only application would really be subjects that are volumnous, and those may not fit all in 70 minutes...lots of cd changing is in your future =)
i dunno, it just seems like a waste to me. not that the current education system is anywhere near perfect (indeed, i feel it is far from it), this doesn't seem to me like it would enhance it much. anyone get to watch those science laser disks in science class? interesting pictures and demonstrations, but most of the actual content of the class was drawn on the chalkboard.
i'm concerned about another maxis product called "the sims" which relies heavily on having the CD in the drive at all times, reading from it constantly, absolutely *killing* my drive. can't they just put the whole thing on my gigantic HD?
haven't you looked? each install takes up ~700MB. it _does_ copy the whole cd to the freaking harddrive. it's annoying to those of us without gigantic harddrives, having to free up 1.5GB so the children can play EA's bloated cash cow. (each expansion adds considerably more. ) additionally, each neighborhood, empty, takes up nearly 12MB(not too evil, but still obscene for what it contains (nothing)). and the web templates garbage was another 30 or so. it's really pathetic, when you look at it. maxis has lost my interest with these pieces of crap lately =(
"Part of being a good programmer is using the right tools to maximize your effectiveness. The compiler is a great syntactic and semantic validator. Let it do that for you. The manual is much better at retaining information about specifics. Let it do that for you. As long as you can use these tools to craft quality code, then you are being effective. "
;)
Exactly =) Programming, as a career, is _not_ memorizing all the man pages, but knowing how to use them quickly, and learn on the fly. Every task you do is likly to be different, so why bother memorizing everything? i, for one, use them for function argument order, which i never remember because all the libraries i use have slightly different orders.
I suppose it'd be better to think you get it right, only to find a logical error somewhere down the line when you provide the source and dest structs in the wrong order..? right
as other have said, no, you can't catch a kill -9. your process simply gets killed.
however, you can catch a -15 (sigterm i believe). so, a kill -15 `pidof X` might have it terminate gracefully (the signal can be caught). i have no idea on how X handles signals and such though. it may already do stuff with it (when shutting down, for example, it gets sigterm from init, then 3-5 seconds later it gets sigkill). so it may already be in there.
Does this really have less moving parts though? as far i know, harddrives have maybe 3: the spindle, the voice coil, and maybe a solenoid for something. the article claimed it had thousands of arms, all moving by way of high temperatures (seems possibly high stress?).
in any event, it is a really cool development. perhaps the density could be further increased by varying the depth of the holes in the plastic (making it slower still, but maybe doubling the density). even with this, 90 days of audio seems insane =)
everyone knows how pentiums etc are RISC at the core level. However, anyone who knows ans x86 asm will know that the interface to it was and still is CISC. the decoding/translation stages all you CISC->RISC people get all worked up about is rather amusing, as it means completely jack to anyone developing for the cpu (unless they tell you how to manipulate the translator with undocumented instructions or something).
Again, no matter how intelligent and efficnet the CISC->RISC decoder is, i doubt it's anything close to just using RISC. fewer transistors for decode/translate logic saves more power/space for actual computations or cache.
unless RISC cpu's really translate RISC opcodes into some other sub-risc instruction set. that might be implimented, i wouldn't know off hand.
Way to go! it's nice to see someone who agrees with me when i say c++ is slower than c =) c++ is for lazy programmers (or coders with a deadline ;^)
i don't know, was q3 and friends written with assembly (i know q1 was, and im fairly sure q2 was as well)? i haven't really kept up.
very tru. i gotta stop posting when half asleep. my math is so bad =(
however, these cards plug into a pci slot, not a memory slot. pci is still 66mhz max (unless you oc it). so even if your memory could dump over a gigabyte per second (which it most likly can, by a factor or two or more these days), you can't sent out all that directly to the nic.
Now, if they were to make nics that plugged into agp slots, it might be a little different (they are clocked higher and transmit more data per clock), but iirc it's still slower than the memory bus.
so we clearly need a nic that plugs into a dimm slot to utilize all this bandwidth =)
Imagine, for instance, that you are an expert engineer who was magically transported to a pre-civilized era. Would the vast body of knowledge that you posessed help you, in that era, take actions that effect any significant amount of change? Would you, in fact, be able to do anything with the advanced information that you posess in such a situation?
i know the basics behind internal combusion engines. developing those hunderds (thousands even) of years in advance would be helpful.
many mathematical theorems can be expressed earlier, allowing the advancement of science and technology.
knowledge of genetics can improve farming earlier, revolutionizing the food sources for early civilizations. it's not too far off, and while yes, knowing something like x86 assembly or windows dx api's wouldn't help any, it could at least allow you to instill design ideas that favor doing the Right Thing over the Easy Thing.
In earlier times, it was entirely ok to spread any and all information, because the worst that the information could do would be to change somebody's opinion on a political matter or teach somebody how to make a shoddy weapon (read: a stick) of minor consequence. In the near future, one will be able to transmit a digital specification for a weapon to be fabricated on one's personal fab-lab.
and obtaining some form of protection will be impossible? haha. yes, there is little protection against a nuke, but i imagine it would be equally difficult to magically obtain enough uranium/plutonium to make one successfully. while the threat arises, you fail to consider how society will change when such things are possible.
it never ceases to amaze me how people fear knowledge. ahh, get it away, it has the potential to hurt me! better take that cpu fan off, the blades might cut your fingers. i don't enjoy viruses at all, but i've had the great fortune of never having any on my personal systems. a simple reminder to the family not to do dumb things is 90% of the challenge. keeping code up to date is another part. in a couple cases, i've found virus proof-of-concept code helpful in self-patching code until a more formal patch is ready, which isn't too long normally anyways. the only people proof-of-concept viruses are those who are unable to defend themselves (they _lack_ knowledge) and those who want the blanket of false security (i know no one knows how to break my breakable software, so somehow i must be safe).
there is a huge difference between clearing a harddrive and spraying brains all over the place, and the time it'll take to bridge that gap will no doubt provide other developments to protect people.
I wouldn't say that's helpful at all.
if there was to be a large fight, having thousands of extra people just walking around doing nothing would benefit neither side.
by the time they realize what it means, it'll probably be too late.
No kidding, i remember an article about this exact same thing years ago (when i was a wee lad, at the dentists office iirc).
Windtraps would be sweet though
only 2000 times better? i think it's way more than that.
:^)
your 2x1Ghz thing is right (new cpu's do 2 ops per cycle normally).
however, old cpu's often took many cycles to do just one. iirc, 8088's too 12 cycles to execute 1 instruction, making a 12Mhz 8088 the same as a 6Mhz new cpu (athlon, p4, whatever).
depending on operations per clock, your new machine is probably 4000 times more powerful or more.
sorry to be geeky about the technicality
"If i was a video card driver writer, I'd be concentrating on making the existing one more stable instead of contemplating why we even bother producing it."
I've been under the impression that video cards come out so frequently now that almost no time is put into the drivers. after the driver is released, some minor bug fixes may happen, but thats all. the majority of the work now begins on the new card that will be just around the corner...
160 in 1 and model rockets! sounds like my not-so-distant childhood =). though i had a few of those electrical kits.. one from way back when transistors came in cans.
it's too bad creative play is looked down upon, or at least not encouraged any more. on the other hand, non-creative play leads to fewer dmca violations...
have fun with the rockets =)
until you run some self-modifying code. gonna recompile the whole thing everytime some memory is written that _might_ be executable? afaik, this hasnt been solved cleanly, but it has some possibilities that are less expensive than the above. (recompile the local memory area, insert nop's if the result is smaller on the local machine. but what if it's bigger? scoot the end farther, and realign all the pointers? what about modified pointers that are now somewhere+1, and you cant find with a simple scan?).
it'd be quite hard, i imagine (on the other hand, self-modifying code is probably rare these days)
iirc, the eye notices more in green, then blue, and then red. thats why 16bpp color mode is almost always rrrrrggggggbbbbb (565). more information in green, because we notice it more.
the reason we see more green is *i think* because it is in the middle of the spectrum. blue is near the uv end, but farther from the end than red is from infrared. similar to how our ears hear things with higher definition in 1-2khz fairly well, but less at =20khz. or something like that. im not a doctor though.
no kidding. what i though would be even nicer would be a way to dynamically udate hz.. during idle hours, or when one big process is running, hz low would slightly (negligibly probably) increase thru-put, while in busy times, hz==1024 would help responsiveness/reduce latency.
implimenting this is difficult though (in the middle of it, little to show for it). everything has the right to change the pit (x86, maybe mips) and there seems to be no way to read what was written. pit shold have been made a device from the start.