This sounds like fun. I saw an article about something similar in Scientific American a few years ago, but this is the first time I've heard of flight code being changed so close to the wire.
The code they had was not really "flight" code - the code did not control flight in any way - it was just a sealed baloon that went up and popped. The code was just controlling when to turn GPS / radio and camera on and off. In the end they wrote code to run it for 2 hours, then turn it off. Not exactly the most complicated code on the planet.
First of all, make sure optimization is turned on. Otherwise, every variable goes on the stack, and you incur a stack load for every one.
Secondly, code size is almost irrelevant. The CPU spends a lot of time waiting for things to filter through the pipeline, especially if you're trying to use the results of an instruction right on the next instruction. So doing some more unrelated instructions in the middle does not affect performance at all.
What you should really do, as someone suggested, is benchmark Microsoft's code against yours and see which one is _really_ faster, and by how much.
The slashdot blurb is quite misleading. If you RTFA, you notice that not only did he "claim to kill a cop", but made a specific reference to a specific murder of a specific cop. (Who actually was killed).
Now, whoever posts info in internet forums admitting he committed a specific murder, with details, is so stupid that he probably deserves what he'll get.
The stats you link to show that 23 million crimes were commited, not that 23 million people were involved! Ever think about the fact that criminals tend to do a _few_ crimes before getting caught? It's only for "large" crimes (murder, rape, etc.) is it likely that the crime was commited only once. If a guy is caught stealing cars, he probably has done it quite a few times. Finally, criminals tend to get out of jail, and go back to doing more crime. Again, more than 1 per person.
So, if each criminal does on average, lets suppose, 10 crimes, that's only 1% of the population!
I wish the states would run grocery stores and perhaps clothing stores. Would be much nicer to have a lower bill at the end of each week.
What makes you think you will have lower bills?
State ventures are usually much less efficient than private ones, so if anything, you would see either higher bills, or higher taxes. Either way, you'd end up paying more.
If you want state-run stores and industry, try moving to the last surviving communist countries - North Korea or Cuba for example. Good luck.
Go to eBay, look for an "e-vectra" or "e-pc" from HP. These are small form-factor machines, and have a laptop-like DC power input - you can use a cheap laptop car power adaptor to power them. Makes a great PC for a car.
Another possibility is a laptop with a broken screen (also cheap on eBay). The laptop has the added advantage of having a battery - it can, for example, shutdown automatically on sensing power loss (== ignition off).
About the Patriot act: you have a good point of course. But noone should vote for something sight-unseen. And "everyone else is doing it" is hardly an excuse. There is, of course, politics to consider, but still, the action was wrong.
As far as flip-flopping from "good" to "bad" versions of bills, just implies that he doesn't have a strong enough view on _any_ of those topics to be swayed by changes in details. If he really cared about the issues, he would have tried to take out the changes he didn't like.
But of course, all that can be debated to no end. What I take issue with is you assertion that becauase Kerry's grandfather is Jewish, he somehow will automatically have an unfavorable outlook on Arafat and friends. In fact, his 1/4-jewishness non-withstanding, Kerry has proposed sending Clinton back to the middle east, then backtracked and said he'll send some other Clinton-era officials, etc. It was Clinton's politics that enabled and encouraged Arafat to start this current intifada in Israel, and led to Sep. 11th here. Kerry wants to go back to that, which is just what Arafat wants.
Well, if everyone takes the alternate route, collectively suggested by their same-model NAV systems, wouldn't the guy _without_ the NAV system be left better off;)
Fahrenheit 9/11 had a whole section on the USAP at Riot Act. The gist: The actual final text was not made available to Congress before it was voted on! It was a huge document, written (probably well before 9/11) by Ashcroft and company, and submitted under the heat of the moment to Congress, with a strong push to DO SOMETHING FAST. Stuff got stuck in at the last minute.
Oh, thats fine then? He voted for something he hasn't even looked at?
Aren't there a little too many of Kerry's votes which he is trying to wiggle out of? Do you want a president who reverses his own decisions every few months?
Was it also NPR that ran a story that most some SETI scientist are starting to think that radio waves is the wrong place to look. Some now believe that lasers would be used by more advanced civilizations as radio waves would be used but a brief history of the civilization.
Other scientist are suggesting that actually sending something physical over (i.e. a disk:) ) is much more efficient than beaming radio waves. Its the old FedEx comp-sci problem - an overnight FedEx with a large DAT tape has more bandwidth than a T3.
I remember 5 or 6 years ago the new 64-bit chips from Intel were "hot" with everyone talking about them
They definately were. The front of the Itanium-1 4-CPU systems was composed almost entirely of fans to blow air with a ridiculous force through the box to cool those suckers:)
We've already seen game companies transitioning more and more to consoles (and the games suffering as a result). They're doing this because of the extra protection from piracy. As more and more people pirate the fuck out of everything, the system will eventually completely crumble, and nobody will be able to make a living off of any software.
Do you realize that piracy is not a new problem? In fact, nowdays a much bigger percentage of computer users are not computer-savy, and don't know how or where to find pirated software, keygens, serials, etc. The highschool and college kids who pirate software would not buy it anyway, so the piracy figures are always greatly exaggerated (i.e. if all those pirates were to buy it... but they would never buy it!) Finally, notice what has happened: With greater and greater proliferation of computers and useful software for such, the market has grown considerably. Computer games are a huge business now (vs. 15 years ago), every musician nowdays has to have some sort of computer setup for effects, processing, and whatnot, every home business is managed using computers, etc. Its the widespread use of computers (that does owe something to the ability of said highschool kids to get a.. ahem.. free version of Windows and some games, so they're used to using computers for everything) that has expanded the software market. These days a lot more people are making money on software than ever before.
According to his resume, he supposedly published an english-language weekly newsletter. He should know a bit about the language. The gross misuse of words like that just shows what the readers of said newletter had to suffer through.
The CVS does not include some parts.
Most notably, things which make games with copy protection run correctly (since the code is licensed from Macrovision, or something).
There are also other missing pieces such as "Point2Play" (sp?) which lets you keep different wine settings for different games, and I believe comes with presets for many games to run properly.
Thats exactly why TransGaming is a subscription based service. You pay $5/month, and get access to any new versions that come out, support, and a vote in the games TG works on next.
Look, it very much sucks that he died. However, the goal that he was working for -- solar powered automobiles -- probably has more potential impact on humanity than his direct living.
So slashdot is now turning into an advertising medium for the software equivalent of snake oil? I can't believe the editors let this sort of crap through. The seeming "question", and then the amazing success story of using the wonderful Hare program. Ugh. Even if this "advert" wasn't intentional by the submitter (which I have a hard time believing), it is giving this shady Hare program way more free publicity than it deserves.
so buy the replacement now and stick it in the glovebox
That's actually a smart thing to do!
The problem is after you get into the car using a regular key, you need to disable the alarm. Putting a replacement battery in the glove box will help you in exactly that situation!
However, at least with my remote, I noticed that it starts giving signs of going a long time before it dies - the range starts decreasing, and you have to press the button repeatedly for it to respond. Thats a sign you need a new battery.
You should come to NJ - the home of jughandles. Half of the roads require you to turn right to turn left. You get used to it after a while, but its confusing for people who are not used to the idea.
Well, even if you don't have stdin supported by the player, you can easily add playlist functionality to an mp3 playing program like mpg123 (which just plays a given file) with a simple shell script:
while read FILE; do mpg123 $FILE done
Thats why console apps are great - its extremely simple to add any functionality you want.
Slashdot Mirror
The code they had was not really "flight" code - the code did not control flight in any way - it was just a sealed baloon that went up and popped. The code was just controlling when to turn GPS / radio and camera on and off. In the end they wrote code to run it for 2 hours, then turn it off. Not exactly the most complicated code on the planet.
Secondly, code size is almost irrelevant. The CPU spends a lot of time waiting for things to filter through the pipeline, especially if you're trying to use the results of an instruction right on the next instruction. So doing some more unrelated instructions in the middle does not affect performance at all.
What you should really do, as someone suggested, is benchmark Microsoft's code against yours and see which one is _really_ faster, and by how much.
The slashdot blurb is quite misleading. If you RTFA, you notice that not only did he "claim to kill a cop", but made a specific reference to a specific murder of a specific cop. (Who actually was killed).
Now, whoever posts info in internet forums admitting he committed a specific murder, with details, is so stupid that he probably deserves what he'll get.
The stats you link to show that 23 million crimes were commited, not that 23 million people were involved! Ever think about the fact that criminals tend to do a _few_ crimes before getting caught? It's only for "large" crimes (murder, rape, etc.) is it likely that the crime was commited only once. If a guy is caught stealing cars, he probably has done it quite a few times. Finally, criminals tend to get out of jail, and go back to doing more crime. Again, more than 1 per person.
So, if each criminal does on average, lets suppose, 10 crimes, that's only 1% of the population!
Man, they definitely don't suck. Black holes rule!
What makes you think you will have lower bills?
State ventures are usually much less efficient than private ones, so if anything, you would see either higher bills, or higher taxes. Either way, you'd end up paying more.
If you want state-run stores and industry, try moving to the last surviving communist countries - North Korea or Cuba for example. Good luck.
Go to eBay, look for an "e-vectra" or "e-pc" from HP. These are small form-factor machines, and have a laptop-like DC power input - you can use a cheap laptop car power adaptor to power them. Makes a great PC for a car.
Another possibility is a laptop with a broken screen (also cheap on eBay). The laptop has the added advantage of having a battery - it can, for example, shutdown automatically on sensing power loss (== ignition off).
Seems not to work well in Konqueror - the images get cached, and the whole point is lost.
Mozilla seems to work just fine though.
As far as flip-flopping from "good" to "bad" versions of bills, just implies that he doesn't have a strong enough view on _any_ of those topics to be swayed by changes in details. If he really cared about the issues, he would have tried to take out the changes he didn't like.
But of course, all that can be debated to no end. What I take issue with is you assertion that becauase Kerry's grandfather is Jewish, he somehow will automatically have an unfavorable outlook on Arafat and friends. In fact, his 1/4-jewishness non-withstanding, Kerry has proposed sending Clinton back to the middle east, then backtracked and said he'll send some other Clinton-era officials, etc. It was Clinton's politics that enabled and encouraged Arafat to start this current intifada in Israel, and led to Sep. 11th here. Kerry wants to go back to that, which is just what Arafat wants.
No, not tomorrow. Gotta give windows a couple of months to boot on that..
Oh, thats fine then? He voted for something he hasn't even looked at?
Aren't there a little too many of Kerry's votes which he is trying to wiggle out of? Do you want a president who reverses his own decisions every few months?
That's because we know that the 2-legged things the DNA produces are usually not that intelligent.
Was it also NPR that ran a story that most some SETI scientist are starting to think that radio waves is the wrong place to look. Some now believe that lasers would be used by more advanced civilizations as radio waves would be used but a brief history of the civilization.
Other scientist are suggesting that actually sending something physical over (i.e. a disk :) ) is much more efficient than beaming radio waves. Its the old FedEx comp-sci problem - an overnight FedEx with a large DAT tape has more bandwidth than a T3.
It was a DeLorean coupe - it only had 2 doors. /. would get this wrong! :)
Can't believe someone on
They definately were. The front of the Itanium-1 4-CPU systems was composed almost entirely of fans to blow air with a ridiculous force through the box to cool those suckers
Do you realize that piracy is not a new problem? In fact, nowdays a much bigger percentage of computer users are not computer-savy, and don't know how or where to find pirated software, keygens, serials, etc.
The highschool and college kids who pirate software would not buy it anyway, so the piracy figures are always greatly exaggerated (i.e. if all those pirates were to buy it
Finally, notice what has happened: With greater and greater proliferation of computers and useful software for such, the market has grown considerably. Computer games are a huge business now (vs. 15 years ago), every musician nowdays has to have some sort of computer setup for effects, processing, and whatnot, every home business is managed using computers, etc. Its the widespread use of computers (that does owe something to the ability of said highschool kids to get a
According to his resume, he supposedly published an english-language weekly newsletter. He should know a bit about the language. The gross misuse of words like that just shows what the readers of said newletter had to suffer through.
The CVS does not include some parts. Most notably, things which make games with copy protection run correctly (since the code is licensed from Macrovision, or something). There are also other missing pieces such as "Point2Play" (sp?) which lets you keep different wine settings for different games, and I believe comes with presets for many games to run properly.
Thats exactly why TransGaming is a subscription based service. You pay $5/month, and get access to any new versions that come out, support, and a vote in the games TG works on next.
That's nice. You go tell that to his family.
So slashdot is now turning into an advertising medium for the software equivalent of snake oil?
I can't believe the editors let this sort of crap through. The seeming "question", and then the amazing success story of using the wonderful Hare program. Ugh.
Even if this "advert" wasn't intentional by the submitter (which I have a hard time believing), it is giving this shady Hare program way more free publicity than it deserves.
That's actually a smart thing to do!
The problem is after you get into the car using a regular key, you need to disable the alarm. Putting a replacement battery in the glove box will help you in exactly that situation!
However, at least with my remote, I noticed that it starts giving signs of going a long time before it dies - the range starts decreasing, and you have to press the button repeatedly for it to respond. Thats a sign you need a new battery.
You should come to NJ - the home of jughandles. Half of the roads require you to turn right to turn left. You get used to it after a while, but its confusing for people who are not used to the idea.