Honestly? If you are spending 20 hours rewriting that report, going through every sentence with a fine-tooth comb, and are able to construct a logically equivalent but actually distinct report... then you HAVE learned the material, probably better than most of the people who wrote the same report. (There might be a slight quibble with you not knowing your way around a lab, but you know that too!)
I'm not a teacher myself, but if I were I would be happy to give you A's for what you did.
Ironic, but you managed to follow the spirit of doing the work, while technically violate the letter of the law. Your grade should reflect what you LEARNED - and in this case, you did learn what the class was teaching.
(Side note: I can't think of the last time I used data that was completely my own for a lab report. Everyone fudges a number here or repeats an experiment there when the numbers don't line up, and I've even had profs hand out entire data sets because no one could produce correct numbers in the lab.)
I think a lot of our difference of opinion could be marketing: most of the things you mention are commercial or committee-based development efforts, that focus on major releases and simply don't introduce incremental improvements at the rate Linux does. The philosophy is, "we need to sell XXX units two years from now, let's write some extra stuff so our customers can justify spending the money". (Yes, this is even the open-source examples - where the user's time is the currency involved, the time to upgrade a perl distro is non-trivial unless you are a serious perl developer!).
Linux is completely different - releases come out as soon as they are ready, and the big Linux vendors are not shy about pushing kernel updates out. My personal opinion is that this generates more enthusiasm, and is a good thing overall, though I am even more impressed that Linux has not had any major forks. Too many other projects (*cough* BSD *cough*) split into several competing camps - but Linux still has the one mainline, stock kernel - and every major fork of that kernel more or less tracks the mainline!
Other software that follows this Linux model? Mozilla seems to, but my opinion is that it's too young still. I said before I think Apache does. Maybe Java, with significant functionality (that is immediately used IN PLACE of old functionality) in each new release.
Too many of the examples you cited seemed to burn really fast, coming out with a fancy version of the project... then everything's done, the developer support goes home to work on something else, and the project enters maintenence mode (or, equivalently, release-every-two-years-with-small-improvements as -a-revenue-model mode). Yes the software moves forward, but - to me at least - it feels like more of an evolutionary sequence than the revolutionary sequence the Linux kernel has been. Linux has probably evolved through 30 years of OS evolution in only ten, and while there may be only another 10 years of OS evolution left for it to catch up on, Linux doesn't seem to be slowing down at all. I fully expect it to push onward into experimental OS design still running full speed - which is something no other OS can claim.
Being a serious hiker, I'd love a system like this. If I turn up missing, putting this in would up my survival chances enormously. I'd plan to pass through a few points like this, should I know about them, just to add that safe feeling.
But... the risk is someone else getting ahold of that data. "Oh, Bob called in sick today... and was out hiking that mountain? Why wasn't he in the office!?!?". THAT'S the privacy concern.
There's one other concern - the park ranger asking, "did this hiker actually follow his/her itenerary, and not enter any restricted areas"? But that's largely irrelevant - you want the added safety of letting the ranger find you if you become lost, you surrender the privacy to violate some rules. I consider this tradeoff more than fair.
My honest suggestion? I'm assuming a hiker would sign in for some sort of tracking device that would follow where he/she actually went - when the hiker returns the device back to headquarters after getting out safely, DELETE THE RECORDS. You want the information exclusively for S&R, then use it exclusively for S&R... once I'm out of the woods, I don't need S&R anymore so you don't need the data anymore. Once I declare I'm out, you need to destroy any connection between the data you collected and me as a person - and the only safe way to do that is to actually destroy the data.
Let me add one thing to Linus' list of accomplishments that the Excel team hasn't matched: he has successfully guided the continuing evolution and improvement of a software project for over ten years. I honestly can't think of a single (modern) piece of software that hasn't been stagnant, at least in terms of core features, for a good chunk of that time (well, maybe apache?), nor any project that has evolved so fast without major forking issues.
Really, Linux is the poster child for a successful open source project, and Linus runs the personality cult behind it. I don't think Linus' programming and architecting exploits are enough for this sort of recognition, but his overall vision should be more than enough.
Someone else might point out RMS or ESR as visionaries... but here's the difference: Linus has an extremely successful, widely adopted, and still evolving project to back up his vision. The others... well, what was the last non-cosmetic change to Emacs, or fetchmail? Those projects are done, dead, and in maintainence. Sorry guys, but while you are talking the talk and reminiscing about the glory days, Linus is busy walking the walk - and for that, he deserves credit.
The major benefit of dual-core (or multi-core - there are quad-core processors being implemented as research tools) is that the actual processor core can be MUCH simpler. Instead of these 4-way issue, 20-30 stage pipeline, super-branch-predicting monstrosities of now (all that logic eats die space and power), a multi-core CPU is more likely to be a simple pipelined design - something that's small and fast. Any one CPU can execute 1/2 the instructions of a single-core processor... but there are two CPUs, or four, or eight. And simple cores scale much better to high clock rates!
That case has all sorts of interesting snippits... from that ruling:
We further note that we are free to consider the public benefit resulting from a particular use... In the case before us, Accolade's identification of the functional requirements for Genesis compatibility has led to an increase in the number of independently designed video game programs offered for use with the Genesis console. It is precisely this growth in creative expression, based on the dissemination of other creative works and the unprotected ideas contained in those works, that the Copyright Act was intended to promote.
I've lost count of how many times I've read this exact argument here on/.!
Accolade did not seek to avoid paying a customarily charged fee for use of those procedures, nor did it simply copy Sega's code; rather, it wrote its own procedures based on what it had learned through disassembly.
Wow... DeCSS anyone?
But anyway... looks like Sega v Accolade was settled out of court. The court was leaning towards an illegal use of copyright to prevent interop - I agree there - but I would quibble on "protocol-compatible" versus "network-compatible". Anyway, a less interesting discussion than reading that case!
Just because something is not illegal doesn't make it a right.
US Constitution, Amendment X: The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.
(Yes, I understand if you are not in the US - but since so much of these rights issues crop up in the US, I think it applies).
But, that's beside the point. Really, I can't see how reverse-engineering could be forbidden by copyright AT ALL. I can see patents forbidding reverse engineering (which is another issue), but copyright / DMCA doesn't even apply.
To anyone designing networks:
If you want to forbid access to your network, toss some sort of copyrighted part into the protocol. Example: all packets must carry the string "Foobar network, copyright Evil Corp" in a header somewhere, any packet w/o that information must be dropped. THEN, you can restrict access to your network based on copyright (copying that string into the packet is a blindingly obvious violation of copyright!). Yes it wastes a few bytes, but you wanted an exclusive network, right? Exclusivity ain't free!
Or, patent the implementation of the network. But, as the parent is noting, that may or may not hold up legally - whereas a copyrighted string certainly should. (Yeah, IANAL)
My opinion: if a company wants to retain control of their network, it needs to be through copyright. A trivial protocol change! But then the rest of us (e.g. slashdot crowd) can reverse-engineer the protocol, CHANGE THAT STRING, and have an entirely separate network! Then, reverse-engineering = legal, sharing that network = illegal. It's not that difficult! And it's one hell of a lot cheaper than lawsuits...
The reason no company offers that OS geared for virtualization is hardware support. Any host OS has to support all the hardware that it runs on, and who has the largest support base? Windows, then Linux. No one else is in the ballpark (except maybe Apple, but that's for Apple hardware only...).
For comparison, the VMware server offerings DO have their own mini-OS to serve as host. It's a heavily-modified RedHat Linux, which provides a console and basic OS services (like hard disks and network routing), and not much else. Though from what I hear, even that kernel is very specialized and has limited hardware support - you have to run a fairly standard server to get VMware on it.
Huge cache, high memory bandwidth... PLUS an operating system comfortable running 32 distinct processors. Solaris, anyone?
Sounds to me like this chip is the _perfect_ chip for Sun. It plays exactly to their hardware strengths (throughput over raw speed) and their software strengths (scalability). Linux and x86 may be matching Solaris on the low-end (with a handful of concurrent threads), but a chip like this gives the advantage squarely back to Sun.
Pretty much, I agree that American engineers tend to be "higher quality" (as you put it, more creative) than foreign counterparts. I've been in too many CS classes where the foreign students simply cannot apply an idea that the average native student follows immediately - as soon as the professor tosses in an idea that's slighly off what the textbook has taught, their hands fly up.
As far as ability to do the basic number crunching and grunt work of being an engineer, I freely admit that foreign engineers (usually, grad students) are faster and, in general, more accurate; as soon as a question asks for the application of knowledge to a problem outside of the textbook (the kind of problem that shows understanding instead of rote memorization) - well, the rest of us enjoy a nice, fat curve while they struggle horribly. This isn't a rule, but it's the consistent trend I've observed in my CS classes.
I don't see the whole outsourcing issue as a problem right now. I see a lot of "grunt work" engineering - stuff that requires maybe a few years of vocational training, not a full CS degree - being sent oversees. My opinion is that too many CS graduates are overqualified for the work they are doing (a one-shot gunky script that converts data from one format to another does NOT require a CS degree; designing that other format to scale well to millions of users does). Throwing together a web page does not require a CS degree; the kid next door who actually read the book can do that. Design an application like Paint Shop Pro or Oracle, and you'd better have some advanced studies that this kid next door doesn't. But I don't see this distinction within today's job market.
My take on the industry right now is that it is a lemon market. There are too many wannabe hotshot programmers expecting to make as much as the real hotshot programmers - even though they lack the real programmer's talent. (A wannabe hotshot programmer = java programmer who has no idea what a pointer is, etc. - see other threads in this discussion for examples abound!). There ought to be two markets - one for good programmers, creative engineers as you put it, who really are qualified to be paid the six-figure salaries of the dot-com boom (or at least the salaries of today's good programmers). And another market for programming jobs that do not require skill, but rather just filling in code; a job like that should not pay as much as a full, trained, computer scientist!
This outsourcing seems to be a reaction to this market. Management wants task X done as cheaply as possible; it can be done internally with 10 highly paid US engineers, or overseas by 10 less highly paid foreign engineers. The RIGHT (and cheapest) thing to do is to use 2-3 highly paid engineers and 7-8 "code monkeys" - but no, US engineers are arrogant and stupid and can't work for less than their coworkers, so in terms of cost it ends up being 6 highly-paid engineers (of which maybe 2 or 3 are really hot) versus 10 foreign engineers - of course the foreign engineers are going to get more work done! Boom, job moves overseas. I'm not at all surprised.
IIRC, UNIX inherently uses this sort of scheme - except x86 doesn't have hardware support for it, so the x86 implementations (e.g. Linux) just ignore the "execute" bit manipulations that other processors have.
What I gather from the article and the comments here is that AMD is releasing a chip that supports the execute bit in hardware. Something other architectures (e.g. Sparc and others) have been doing for a longer time, but until now wasn't necessary in anything except a server-class machine.
More important than just x86, it's going to come out on x86-64 (AMD). Anyone remember the two or three DUPED stories a month ago on the topic? *cough cough*.
It means rock-solid 64-bit UNIX on commodity x86 hardware. Very cool...
Christmas is about the guy who died for our sins. We exchange gifts because of a Roman holiday called the Saturnalia, which involved exhanging gifts, that ran Dec 17 through the end of the year. Apparently the concept was so popular early Christian leaders adopted it...
I'm using Objective-C right now. Yes it's a true object-oriented language... but it throws out the most useful feature of C/C++: type safety! It's like C, except with LISP for function calls.
I can see the utility of an OO language for GUIs. Really. But Objective-C still has C's memory-management ugliness (made worse, I feel, by reference counting), lacks C++'s type safety, and breaks countless conventions of other OO languages (the dot operator? C++ and Java at least?). I will admit the API is a lot cleaner, especially in comparison to either Win32 or MFC.
I think I will have to go get this Qt book, since it's probably the cleanest way to get a GUI up on the screen. My bookshelf slowly expands...
The distinction is between "head of state" and "head of government". Both a monarchy and a constitutional monarchy have the King/Queen as head of state (figurehead powers). Actual powers reside in the head of government, which in a monarchy is the King/Queen but in a constitutional monarchy is the Prime Minister or some such politico (depending on which particular flavor of monarchy).
Political theory has a BIG distinction between these two. Being royalty doesn't amount for much if you still have to answer to the Prime Minister!
Ah, nuts, yeah. Substitute "low bandwidth" for "moderate latency" because of stupidity.:-) (Okay, so I was too busy drooling over processor-to-processor bandwidths to remember the main memory interface...)
In other news, the Playstation 2 also has a "mere" 32MB of RAM running at low bandwidth, so any pointer larger than 32 bits is completely and utterly useless. (It doesn't do virtual memory either - no swap device).
That being said, yes, the PS2 has an absolutely beautiful processor setup. Inter-processor bandwidth galore and extremely custom caches (think DMA on steroids). The overhead of doing extra-bit calculations (e.g. SIMD instructions) disappears entirely behind the more optimized architecture.
It is irony, in that they are attempting to provide information that portrays the Secret Service in a positive light - they "investigate crimes" (ooh how exciting!) to protect the public. 1984 contradicts that positive light.
As a bit of trivia, the country in 1984 - "Oceania" - was the North America plus the UK. The story was set in Britain, but it implied the US was equally draconian.
Two-army dilemma is the basic illustration for synchronization problems.
An army is in two parts, A and B. If both parts attack together in a coordinated assault, they will win; if either part attacks alone, it will be defeated by the enemy army.
So, the commander of army A sends a note to army B saying "attack at noon tomorrow". But he wants to make sure that army B actually gets the message (i.e. the messenger wasn't captured), so he requests a reply. Say he doesn't get a response - did army B not get his message? Or did the reply get lost? Maybe army B's commander is smart and wants a confirmation that A knows B is going to attack... when can B be sure that A is going to attack? Actually, there is NO POSSIBLE WAY to make sure both armies agree - thus, the dilemma.
The lesson you are supposed to learn is that it is impossible for two entities to simultaneously be sure of the same thing (e.g. the attack time) AND sure that the other entity knows it. Or, you have to allow for some communication problems whenever you have to communicate with someone else.:-)
Nobody is sitting outside the Whitehouse with a wireless laptop, downloading music, and getting arrested in front of the press.
Well, maybe someone should:-) (perhaps a mass of a thousand college students? I'm sure that would at least make a splash in the press...).
But I'd be quite happy to get slapped with a tort for violating copyright. I would go to court to fight it, probably lose, then happily pay the fine. Can I look "sympathetic"? Maybe, maybe not: I'm just a college student downloading the music he can't hear over the radio, because I don't have a radio and I can't find a good webcasting radio station I like; downloading to the tune of maybe twenty songs. The way I figure, if I lose I'm out a whole $20 (if that's the cost of downloading those 20 songs off iTunes legitimately) - I believe I could argue (in a civil court) that that's the value of the songs. And it would make for a rather entertaining story: "student sued for listening to music you're listening to on the radio right now". I feel that the potential punishment to me (getting hit with that tort) is worth the statement I'd be making - even if only to a small-time local newspaper.
I'm not saying copyrights are completely wrong, and I won't advocate ignoring them without cause. But I will break the parts of the law I feel are wrong, and I am prepared for the costs of that belief. I ain't Gandhi and I ain't trying to go to jail, but I am not going to roll over and let a monopoly dictate how much I have to pay for music I can hear over the radio for free. That price is for market forces (e.g. iTunes) to determine.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not a teacher myself, but if I were I would be happy to give you A's for what you did.
Ironic, but you managed to follow the spirit of doing the work, while technically violate the letter of the law. Your grade should reflect what you LEARNED - and in this case, you did learn what the class was teaching.
(Side note: I can't think of the last time I used data that was completely my own for a lab report. Everyone fudges a number here or repeats an experiment there when the numbers don't line up, and I've even had profs hand out entire data sets because no one could produce correct numbers in the lab.)
Linux is completely different - releases come out as soon as they are ready, and the big Linux vendors are not shy about pushing kernel updates out. My personal opinion is that this generates more enthusiasm, and is a good thing overall, though I am even more impressed that Linux has not had any major forks. Too many other projects (*cough* BSD *cough*) split into several competing camps - but Linux still has the one mainline, stock kernel - and every major fork of that kernel more or less tracks the mainline!
Other software that follows this Linux model? Mozilla seems to, but my opinion is that it's too young still. I said before I think Apache does. Maybe Java, with significant functionality (that is immediately used IN PLACE of old functionality) in each new release.
Too many of the examples you cited seemed to burn really fast, coming out with a fancy version of the project... then everything's done, the developer support goes home to work on something else, and the project enters maintenence mode (or, equivalently, release-every-two-years-with-small-improvements as -a-revenue-model mode). Yes the software moves forward, but - to me at least - it feels like more of an evolutionary sequence than the revolutionary sequence the Linux kernel has been. Linux has probably evolved through 30 years of OS evolution in only ten, and while there may be only another 10 years of OS evolution left for it to catch up on, Linux doesn't seem to be slowing down at all. I fully expect it to push onward into experimental OS design still running full speed - which is something no other OS can claim.
Being a serious hiker, I'd love a system like this. If I turn up missing, putting this in would up my survival chances enormously. I'd plan to pass through a few points like this, should I know about them, just to add that safe feeling.
But... the risk is someone else getting ahold of that data. "Oh, Bob called in sick today... and was out hiking that mountain? Why wasn't he in the office!?!?". THAT'S the privacy concern.
There's one other concern - the park ranger asking, "did this hiker actually follow his/her itenerary, and not enter any restricted areas"? But that's largely irrelevant - you want the added safety of letting the ranger find you if you become lost, you surrender the privacy to violate some rules. I consider this tradeoff more than fair.
My honest suggestion? I'm assuming a hiker would sign in for some sort of tracking device that would follow where he/she actually went - when the hiker returns the device back to headquarters after getting out safely, DELETE THE RECORDS. You want the information exclusively for S&R, then use it exclusively for S&R... once I'm out of the woods, I don't need S&R anymore so you don't need the data anymore. Once I declare I'm out, you need to destroy any connection between the data you collected and me as a person - and the only safe way to do that is to actually destroy the data.
Really, Linux is the poster child for a successful open source project, and Linus runs the personality cult behind it. I don't think Linus' programming and architecting exploits are enough for this sort of recognition, but his overall vision should be more than enough.
Someone else might point out RMS or ESR as visionaries... but here's the difference: Linus has an extremely successful, widely adopted, and still evolving project to back up his vision. The others... well, what was the last non-cosmetic change to Emacs, or fetchmail? Those projects are done, dead, and in maintainence. Sorry guys, but while you are talking the talk and reminiscing about the glory days, Linus is busy walking the walk - and for that, he deserves credit.
The major benefit of dual-core (or multi-core - there are quad-core processors being implemented as research tools) is that the actual processor core can be MUCH simpler. Instead of these 4-way issue, 20-30 stage pipeline, super-branch-predicting monstrosities of now (all that logic eats die space and power), a multi-core CPU is more likely to be a simple pipelined design - something that's small and fast. Any one CPU can execute 1/2 the instructions of a single-core processor... but there are two CPUs, or four, or eight. And simple cores scale much better to high clock rates!
We further note that we are free to consider the public benefit resulting from a particular use ... In the case before us, Accolade's identification of the functional requirements for Genesis compatibility has led to an increase in the number of independently designed video game programs offered for use with the Genesis console. It is precisely this growth in creative expression, based on the dissemination of other creative works and the unprotected ideas contained in those works, that the Copyright Act was intended to promote.
I've lost count of how many times I've read this exact argument here on /.!
Accolade did not seek to avoid paying a customarily charged fee for use of those procedures, nor did it simply copy Sega's code; rather, it wrote its own procedures based on what it had learned through disassembly.
Wow... DeCSS anyone?
But anyway... looks like Sega v Accolade was settled out of court. The court was leaning towards an illegal use of copyright to prevent interop - I agree there - but I would quibble on "protocol-compatible" versus "network-compatible". Anyway, a less interesting discussion than reading that case!
US Constitution, Amendment X: The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.
(Yes, I understand if you are not in the US - but since so much of these rights issues crop up in the US, I think it applies).
But, that's beside the point. Really, I can't see how reverse-engineering could be forbidden by copyright AT ALL. I can see patents forbidding reverse engineering (which is another issue), but copyright / DMCA doesn't even apply.
To anyone designing networks:
- If you want to forbid access to your network, toss some sort of copyrighted part into the protocol. Example: all packets must carry the string "Foobar network, copyright Evil Corp" in a header somewhere, any packet w/o that information must be dropped. THEN, you can restrict access to your network based on copyright (copying that string into the packet is a blindingly obvious violation of copyright!). Yes it wastes a few bytes, but you wanted an exclusive network, right? Exclusivity ain't free!
- Or, patent the implementation of the network. But, as the parent is noting, that may or may not hold up legally - whereas a copyrighted string certainly should. (Yeah, IANAL)
My opinion: if a company wants to retain control of their network, it needs to be through copyright. A trivial protocol change! But then the rest of us (e.g. slashdot crowd) can reverse-engineer the protocol, CHANGE THAT STRING, and have an entirely separate network! Then, reverse-engineering = legal, sharing that network = illegal. It's not that difficult! And it's one hell of a lot cheaper than lawsuits...For comparison, the VMware server offerings DO have their own mini-OS to serve as host. It's a heavily-modified RedHat Linux, which provides a console and basic OS services (like hard disks and network routing), and not much else. Though from what I hear, even that kernel is very specialized and has limited hardware support - you have to run a fairly standard server to get VMware on it.
Sounds to me like this chip is the _perfect_ chip for Sun. It plays exactly to their hardware strengths (throughput over raw speed) and their software strengths (scalability). Linux and x86 may be matching Solaris on the low-end (with a handful of concurrent threads), but a chip like this gives the advantage squarely back to Sun.
Pretty much, I agree that American engineers tend to be "higher quality" (as you put it, more creative) than foreign counterparts. I've been in too many CS classes where the foreign students simply cannot apply an idea that the average native student follows immediately - as soon as the professor tosses in an idea that's slighly off what the textbook has taught, their hands fly up.
As far as ability to do the basic number crunching and grunt work of being an engineer, I freely admit that foreign engineers (usually, grad students) are faster and, in general, more accurate; as soon as a question asks for the application of knowledge to a problem outside of the textbook (the kind of problem that shows understanding instead of rote memorization) - well, the rest of us enjoy a nice, fat curve while they struggle horribly. This isn't a rule, but it's the consistent trend I've observed in my CS classes.
I don't see the whole outsourcing issue as a problem right now. I see a lot of "grunt work" engineering - stuff that requires maybe a few years of vocational training, not a full CS degree - being sent oversees. My opinion is that too many CS graduates are overqualified for the work they are doing (a one-shot gunky script that converts data from one format to another does NOT require a CS degree; designing that other format to scale well to millions of users does). Throwing together a web page does not require a CS degree; the kid next door who actually read the book can do that. Design an application like Paint Shop Pro or Oracle, and you'd better have some advanced studies that this kid next door doesn't. But I don't see this distinction within today's job market.
My take on the industry right now is that it is a lemon market. There are too many wannabe hotshot programmers expecting to make as much as the real hotshot programmers - even though they lack the real programmer's talent. (A wannabe hotshot programmer = java programmer who has no idea what a pointer is, etc. - see other threads in this discussion for examples abound!). There ought to be two markets - one for good programmers, creative engineers as you put it, who really are qualified to be paid the six-figure salaries of the dot-com boom (or at least the salaries of today's good programmers). And another market for programming jobs that do not require skill, but rather just filling in code; a job like that should not pay as much as a full, trained, computer scientist!
This outsourcing seems to be a reaction to this market. Management wants task X done as cheaply as possible; it can be done internally with 10 highly paid US engineers, or overseas by 10 less highly paid foreign engineers. The RIGHT (and cheapest) thing to do is to use 2-3 highly paid engineers and 7-8 "code monkeys" - but no, US engineers are arrogant and stupid and can't work for less than their coworkers, so in terms of cost it ends up being 6 highly-paid engineers (of which maybe 2 or 3 are really hot) versus 10 foreign engineers - of course the foreign engineers are going to get more work done! Boom, job moves overseas. I'm not at all surprised.
"Only Ctrl-S Saves"
on a bumper sticker. The sad part was that I immediately thought, "shouldn't that be :wq ?" D'oh!
[ptr theFuncThatUsesA:aPtr andAlsoUsesB:bPtr andTakesAFlag:flag andMaybeAStringForGoodMeasure:str];
What I gather from the article and the comments here is that AMD is releasing a chip that supports the execute bit in hardware. Something other architectures (e.g. Sparc and others) have been doing for a longer time, but until now wasn't necessary in anything except a server-class machine.
It means rock-solid 64-bit UNIX on commodity x86 hardware. Very cool...
Christmas is about the guy who died for our sins. We exchange gifts because of a Roman holiday called the Saturnalia, which involved exhanging gifts, that ran Dec 17 through the end of the year. Apparently the concept was so popular early Christian leaders adopted it...
To wives and mistresses,
May they never meet!
Old British navy toast - the Sunday toast, I believe. [End being age-of-sail buff]
I can see the utility of an OO language for GUIs. Really. But Objective-C still has C's memory-management ugliness (made worse, I feel, by reference counting), lacks C++'s type safety, and breaks countless conventions of other OO languages (the dot operator? C++ and Java at least?). I will admit the API is a lot cleaner, especially in comparison to either Win32 or MFC.
I think I will have to go get this Qt book, since it's probably the cleanest way to get a GUI up on the screen. My bookshelf slowly expands...
(with a deliberate mispronouciation)
Political theory has a BIG distinction between these two. Being royalty doesn't amount for much if you still have to answer to the Prime Minister!
Ah, nuts, yeah. Substitute "low bandwidth" for "moderate latency" because of stupidity. :-) (Okay, so I was too busy drooling over processor-to-processor bandwidths to remember the main memory interface...)
That being said, yes, the PS2 has an absolutely beautiful processor setup. Inter-processor bandwidth galore and extremely custom caches (think DMA on steroids). The overhead of doing extra-bit calculations (e.g. SIMD instructions) disappears entirely behind the more optimized architecture.
As a bit of trivia, the country in 1984 - "Oceania" - was the North America plus the UK. The story was set in Britain, but it implied the US was equally draconian.
An army is in two parts, A and B. If both parts attack together in a coordinated assault, they will win; if either part attacks alone, it will be defeated by the enemy army.
So, the commander of army A sends a note to army B saying "attack at noon tomorrow". But he wants to make sure that army B actually gets the message (i.e. the messenger wasn't captured), so he requests a reply. Say he doesn't get a response - did army B not get his message? Or did the reply get lost? Maybe army B's commander is smart and wants a confirmation that A knows B is going to attack... when can B be sure that A is going to attack? Actually, there is NO POSSIBLE WAY to make sure both armies agree - thus, the dilemma.
The lesson you are supposed to learn is that it is impossible for two entities to simultaneously be sure of the same thing (e.g. the attack time) AND sure that the other entity knows it. Or, you have to allow for some communication problems whenever you have to communicate with someone else. :-)
Guesstimating from some info here, Denver, CO is ~12 PSI. A tall mountain in the US is ~10 PSI at the top.
Lousy, cheap NASA equipment! It wouldn't work down here on Earth anyways.
Well, maybe someone should :-) (perhaps a mass of a thousand college students? I'm sure that would at least make a splash in the press...).
But I'd be quite happy to get slapped with a tort for violating copyright. I would go to court to fight it, probably lose, then happily pay the fine. Can I look "sympathetic"? Maybe, maybe not: I'm just a college student downloading the music he can't hear over the radio, because I don't have a radio and I can't find a good webcasting radio station I like; downloading to the tune of maybe twenty songs. The way I figure, if I lose I'm out a whole $20 (if that's the cost of downloading those 20 songs off iTunes legitimately) - I believe I could argue (in a civil court) that that's the value of the songs. And it would make for a rather entertaining story: "student sued for listening to music you're listening to on the radio right now". I feel that the potential punishment to me (getting hit with that tort) is worth the statement I'd be making - even if only to a small-time local newspaper.
I'm not saying copyrights are completely wrong, and I won't advocate ignoring them without cause. But I will break the parts of the law I feel are wrong, and I am prepared for the costs of that belief. I ain't Gandhi and I ain't trying to go to jail, but I am not going to roll over and let a monopoly dictate how much I have to pay for music I can hear over the radio for free. That price is for market forces (e.g. iTunes) to determine.