Well, you can change to see if there is processor time being stolen from the OS by toggling a pin on a fast cycle and watching it with an oscilloscope, or perhaps polling the internal pentium timer. Someone before me had checked with our specific setup to see if this was happening (specifically we were concerned if USB hookups caused the BIOS to inject work) but nothing was detected. We use custom PC boards that could have had it disabled at the BIOS level, but I'm just not sure,
Off-the-shelf is where BSP's and drivers come in. The BSP (board support package) needs to be configured for the specific board. WindRiver provides a kajillion default packages, and if you use a off-the-shelf-board, the BSP and driver set should require little or no modification at all so you can just go straight to customizing your OS. The more customized your board is, the more you might have to do, such as writing VME, clock, PCI, or Ethernet drivers, do custom memory management, etc. I guess it's not fair to peg this complication on WindRiver. I haven't tried a Linux kernel on a custom board, but just as much configuring must go on at some point.
I haven't had any experience with other systems yet really. VxWorks did add an abstraction layer for hardware drivers called "VxBus". So far the only advantage I've found is that.. Okay well I haven't found one but I did eventually get it to work. The advantage is they didn't break everything when they introduced it.
I don't understand why WindRiver hates documentation to much. They actually have a policy of not sending hard copies of their manuals anymore. Their man pages are kind of half-assed. I usually have to go straight to the kernel source tree to figure out what a function really does. I really must still state, it's a real pain to use, but their stuff DOES work. Once you get it set up right, I've found 99.99% of what goes wrong is application code's fault.
I've learned that if it takes more than a day to figure out how a specific something works, I pass it along as a service request to them. It's not my fault if the didn't document well enough!
Oh yes I've coded for it. I'm on my second BSP and my third kernel. It's not as bad as it used to be in some respects. The Eclipse is the IDE now. The documentation is still horrendous though. WindRiver is working hard on their own RTOS Linux solution. I don't know if they are planning on eventually digging a hole and throwing VxWorks in it, or just trying to combat the free RTOS Linux market with something they can sell to managers.
The benchmarks that are really expected by real time in my area are things like consistency. For example if we set a task/thread to execute every 125 milliseconds, the closer it hits the mark the better. Time lag in either direction puts that OS in the "No" category. Another important asset of an RTOS is well defined task preemption: No task gets preempted by one with worse priority. Time slicing might be enabled so that a task gets preempted by one of the same priority, and better priority tasks always preempt if they are ready to go. Also if a high priority task is waiting on a resource owned by a low priority task, that low priority task gets an elevated priority equal to the high priority task. As a last ditch effort to provide mutual exclusion / data protection, threads/tasks need to be able to disable system interrupts. Remember kids, in the RTOS world one task can take down the whole system.
VxWorks is the only OS I've played with so far that allows this, but I'm VERY curious to see what people can inject into the Linux kernel. VxWorks is.. shall we say... NOT CHEAP. And inter-version migration is a pain... and god help you if you aren't using off the shelf hardware...
The parent is correct. We aren't close to having boxes with more memory than we actively use. As soon as we add more memory, we actively use it. See Vista. See games. See Eclipse. I'm glad at work that I have 2 GB of ram on my workstation because just opening the bare applications I use minus a webbrowser puts me at about 1.2G used. (My bootup before launching any app is around 150 megs)
Right. Of course you're forgetting the most important part...
If I install Windows XP, it prompts me to create a user. That user becomes an administrator. I'm never told another thing about users and permissions ever again.
If I install Ubuntu, it prompts me to create a user. That user is given significant privilege, although it does not have root access. I'm never told another thing about permissions. I have to make technical changes by my own volition to allow myself to log in as root.
I think Vista does a better job now, sorta. My parents have a Vista machine and they have to enter a password (which they know) to do administrator things. Unlike their XP system, which got horribly infected every month, they've been running clean for six months now. Sure sure, you CAN configure XP like that, but it won't be that way unless you know to do it.
So the question isn't "Can the machine be configured to be safe". That's irrelevant to the masses. The question is, IS the machine configured to be safe. That shouldn't require user intervention to accomplish.
/me doesn't like want to remember to turn on his own airbags, though I am willing to buckle my seatbelt.
... what is the evolutionary benefit that mammals get from not regenerating?
Well, if the typical regeneration benefit would come to someone who is too old or otherwise too hurt to possibly be a parent, there's no way for a genetic advantage to pass along. I don't know if that's what's going on here.
Or conversely, perhaps the regeneration scheme has a better chance of screwing things up than that of a freak accident occurring. The opposite might be true for a zebra fish, thus it could develop.
I'm talking ottah my butt here, but it sounds good to me at the moment.
or.. why not set your working / waking hours accordingly? Do you require a nation to fib about the time of day for a large period of the year to be able to enjoy sunlight? May your deity(s) help you if we ever abolish the time zone bizcrap.
(In response to this comment and the sibling comment...)
My main supermarket is Wegman's. Officially, they don't have sales (unofficially they do). Example flyer. They look like sales, but trust me, they aren't. It's just the concoction of some advertising guru. Notice there's no normal price, or savings listed.
Now I disagree about chasing sales being how to save money. For me, that'd be a ridiculous thing to do. My shopping bill is low, and it's not from chasing sales. Its from buying what I know I can use, not having to throw away anything rotting in my fridge, etc. (Throw away half a can of beans, you just doubled the price). Costco helps too.
I guess this is just different takes on shopping. All I know is that food would cost less if they didn't spend money circulating those ads.
How are supermarket ads useful to anyone except someone who doesn't know the supermarket exists? At least around here, there's no coupons anymore. Actually it's pretty silly--everyone offers to double or triple their competitors' coupons, but none of them offer any so it's useless. As for the content of the ads.. well gee there's a special on turkey in mid-November? Thanks advertisement.
At any rate, supermarket ads are as useful as the tracking scheme most chains use now where you have to use a card just to pay the normal price. Might be useful to them, sure isn't useful to me.
/me hates ads in general /me doesn't want to be your product, wants to be your customer /me wants to introduce a model where if you advertise (turn me into a product without my permission), I should get a piece of the action since this unauthorized BS just increased the cost of whatever is being sold.
Exactly. Technology can be invaluable, but it will eventually be leaked on one way or another. The best thing to do is trade it while it's at its highest value. If we give them enough technologies, they might even give us a city. A quick culture bomb might be on the horizon and that great wall would do wonders for our southern border.
That's a rather uneducated response. We have very short term patents for that case. I can't remember what they are called, but I was in a group given a presentation about it. Essentially, you file for this patent that lasts one to two years or something in that neighborhood. It's there to protect your invention while you figure out how to patent it.. I think. That's ample time to get an investor to build a prototype--WHILE it is protected.
Either I am wrong about this or.. what were you saying?
Slashdot Mirror
Well, you can change to see if there is processor time being stolen from the OS by toggling a pin on a fast cycle and watching it with an oscilloscope, or perhaps polling the internal pentium timer. Someone before me had checked with our specific setup to see if this was happening (specifically we were concerned if USB hookups caused the BIOS to inject work) but nothing was detected. We use custom PC boards that could have had it disabled at the BIOS level, but I'm just not sure,
Off-the-shelf is where BSP's and drivers come in. The BSP (board support package) needs to be configured for the specific board. WindRiver provides a kajillion default packages, and if you use a off-the-shelf-board, the BSP and driver set should require little or no modification at all so you can just go straight to customizing your OS. The more customized your board is, the more you might have to do, such as writing VME, clock, PCI, or Ethernet drivers, do custom memory management, etc. I guess it's not fair to peg this complication on WindRiver. I haven't tried a Linux kernel on a custom board, but just as much configuring must go on at some point.
I haven't had any experience with other systems yet really. VxWorks did add an abstraction layer for hardware drivers called "VxBus". So far the only advantage I've found is that.. Okay well I haven't found one but I did eventually get it to work. The advantage is they didn't break everything when they introduced it.
I don't understand why WindRiver hates documentation to much. They actually have a policy of not sending hard copies of their manuals anymore. Their man pages are kind of half-assed. I usually have to go straight to the kernel source tree to figure out what a function really does. I really must still state, it's a real pain to use, but their stuff DOES work. Once you get it set up right, I've found 99.99% of what goes wrong is application code's fault.
I've learned that if it takes more than a day to figure out how a specific something works, I pass it along as a service request to them. It's not my fault if the didn't document well enough!
Oh yes I've coded for it. I'm on my second BSP and my third kernel. It's not as bad as it used to be in some respects. The Eclipse is the IDE now. The documentation is still horrendous though. WindRiver is working hard on their own RTOS Linux solution. I don't know if they are planning on eventually digging a hole and throwing VxWorks in it, or just trying to combat the free RTOS Linux market with something they can sell to managers.
The benchmarks that are really expected by real time in my area are things like consistency. For example if we set a task/thread to execute every 125 milliseconds, the closer it hits the mark the better. Time lag in either direction puts that OS in the "No" category. Another important asset of an RTOS is well defined task preemption: No task gets preempted by one with worse priority. Time slicing might be enabled so that a task gets preempted by one of the same priority, and better priority tasks always preempt if they are ready to go. Also if a high priority task is waiting on a resource owned by a low priority task, that low priority task gets an elevated priority equal to the high priority task. As a last ditch effort to provide mutual exclusion / data protection, threads/tasks need to be able to disable system interrupts. Remember kids, in the RTOS world one task can take down the whole system.
VxWorks is the only OS I've played with so far that allows this, but I'm VERY curious to see what people can inject into the Linux kernel. VxWorks is.. shall we say... NOT CHEAP. And inter-version migration is a pain... and god help you if you aren't using off the shelf hardware...
I had mouthwash in my mouth! You owe me a wall you insensitive clod!
The parent is correct. We aren't close to having boxes with more memory than we actively use. As soon as we add more memory, we actively use it. See Vista. See games. See Eclipse. I'm glad at work that I have 2 GB of ram on my workstation because just opening the bare applications I use minus a webbrowser puts me at about 1.2G used. (My bootup before launching any app is around 150 megs)
Only old Korean scientists covered in grits drink beer.
Right. Of course you're forgetting the most important part...
/me doesn't like want to remember to turn on his own airbags, though I am willing to buckle my seatbelt.
If I install Windows XP, it prompts me to create a user. That user becomes an administrator. I'm never told another thing about users and permissions ever again.
If I install Ubuntu, it prompts me to create a user. That user is given significant privilege, although it does not have root access. I'm never told another thing about permissions. I have to make technical changes by my own volition to allow myself to log in as root.
I think Vista does a better job now, sorta. My parents have a Vista machine and they have to enter a password (which they know) to do administrator things. Unlike their XP system, which got horribly infected every month, they've been running clean for six months now. Sure sure, you CAN configure XP like that, but it won't be that way unless you know to do it.
So the question isn't "Can the machine be configured to be safe". That's irrelevant to the masses. The question is, IS the machine configured to be safe. That shouldn't require user intervention to accomplish.
... what is the evolutionary benefit that mammals get from not regenerating?
Well, if the typical regeneration benefit would come to someone who is too old or otherwise too hurt to possibly be a parent, there's no way for a genetic advantage to pass along. I don't know if that's what's going on here.
Or conversely, perhaps the regeneration scheme has a better chance of screwing things up than that of a freak accident occurring. The opposite might be true for a zebra fish, thus it could develop.
I'm talking ottah my butt here, but it sounds good to me at the moment.
Wow. You pwned him.
I tip my hat to you.
Here it is in all it's glory:
THIS.True. Now can we get rid of timezones anytime soon? Or at least make them much bigger? (US, Eastern Europe, Western Europe, etc.)
or.. why not set your working / waking hours accordingly? Do you require a nation to fib about the time of day for a large period of the year to be able to enjoy sunlight? May your deity(s) help you if we ever abolish the time zone bizcrap.
(In response to this comment and the sibling comment...)
My main supermarket is Wegman's. Officially, they don't have sales (unofficially they do). Example flyer. They look like sales, but trust me, they aren't. It's just the concoction of some advertising guru. Notice there's no normal price, or savings listed.
Now I disagree about chasing sales being how to save money. For me, that'd be a ridiculous thing to do. My shopping bill is low, and it's not from chasing sales. Its from buying what I know I can use, not having to throw away anything rotting in my fridge, etc. (Throw away half a can of beans, you just doubled the price). Costco helps too.
I guess this is just different takes on shopping. All I know is that food would cost less if they didn't spend money circulating those ads.
How are supermarket ads useful to anyone except someone who doesn't know the supermarket exists? At least around here, there's no coupons anymore. Actually it's pretty silly--everyone offers to double or triple their competitors' coupons, but none of them offer any so it's useless. As for the content of the ads.. well gee there's a special on turkey in mid-November? Thanks advertisement.
/me hates ads in general
/me doesn't want to be your product, wants to be your customer
/me wants to introduce a model where if you advertise (turn me into a product without my permission), I should get a piece of the action since this unauthorized BS just increased the cost of whatever is being sold.
At any rate, supermarket ads are as useful as the tracking scheme most chains use now where you have to use a card just to pay the normal price. Might be useful to them, sure isn't useful to me.
Quakertown or Bust: Unelectric Boogaloo
$9 000 of fuel per second * 60 seconds per minute * 1440 minutes per day = $777 600 000 of fuel per day. Per plane.
One of these numbers has to be wrong.
Must be the number of minutes per day.Let me repeat what this guy said, because either you didn't read it or didn't care.
Personal accountability requires information. What's being discussed here is not outlawing things, but providing information.
You can reply to me with or without reading that, it doesn't seem to matter to you.
Exactly. Technology can be invaluable, but it will eventually be leaked on one way or another. The best thing to do is trade it while it's at its highest value. If we give them enough technologies, they might even give us a city. A quick culture bomb might be on the horizon and that great wall would do wonders for our southern border.
Puce. Obviously.
I thought everyone knew this. Cryophiles taste awesome.
That's a rather uneducated response. We have very short term patents for that case. I can't remember what they are called, but I was in a group given a presentation about it. Essentially, you file for this patent that lasts one to two years or something in that neighborhood. It's there to protect your invention while you figure out how to patent it.. I think. That's ample time to get an investor to build a prototype--WHILE it is protected.
Either I am wrong about this or.. what were you saying?
Since when were the rich people rich due to a payroll? You think they work for it?
Typically, someone making $1M a year is not making it through a salary. The exceptions are athletes and movie stars.
120,000 may or may not even be upper class. For a family of four in a urban area, I think not.
Because the French have no word in their language for entrepreneur, they are not capable of understanding the American concept of laissez-faire.
This is the funniest thing I have ever seen on Slashdot. I'd +1 but you're already 5.
11 holidays a year
:P
Let's see. 2 for Christmas, 2 for Thanksgiving, 1 for New Years, 1 for Memorial Day, 1 for July 4th, 1 for Labor Day.
That's 8. Plus two "personal days" and 10 days vacation a year.... yay..
I'm entry so I'm not too concerned about so few vacation days yet.