I don't know why you guys are going on about BCD as if it is a godsend or something -- it's horrible. Not only is it wasteful of space (instead of 256 possible values per byte, you can only have 100), but when converting [ascii|int] [to|from] bcd, you have all sorts of possible flags:
- what to do if it's an odd number of nibbles (left 0 ? left F ? right 0 ? right F ?)
- what to do if it's too small or too big for the buffer you're writing into (error ? 0 ? 0-fill ? F-fill ? )
- when reading an odd number of nibbles, do you want to start from the second nibble? or is the last nibble invalid? how do you even know in advance if it's an odd number of nibbles or an even?
Of course you can define a set of conventions to avoid these problems, but it all makes for quite voluminous code, and then if you need to go against convention sometime then your library won't support it.
Here's a better solution: use (*gasp*) integers. And if your language's integer size isn't big enough for what you want, then use some library that allows for arbitrarily-sized integers, such as GNUmp. Heck, if you only need 64-bit and you have a 32-bit machine, just define your own library! (stick 2 ints together). It'd take all of ten minutes of coding..
PS. Why does the GNU 'search' page never return any results? Searching for 'mp' didn't find that; I had to look it up in the directory of all packages.
Is it also the largest tag in Europe? I enjoyed ball tag in school, at the time, but now I shudder at the thought of having my freedoms infringed by playing "proprietary" tags.
There are phones like that. However, at a cost of about $1000 a pop, people prefer to use the phone book (and perhaps buy a PC with a web browser and have money left over).
yeah. I've found that djb's dnscache will stop responding to queries after a while (few days or so), and I have to HUP it. I dont like my chances of discovering a fix for the problem though. Having said that, it's still preferable to the Bloated IND.
Reminds me of those cartoons (and even a few non-cartoons) where a tree or something is falling, and the character runs away by running in the line that it's falling, and gets hit by the treetop, instead of just stepping to the side.
Maybe because it was hard to program for those black and white Macs with tiny screens that came about 15 years ago. They didn't even have a command window, let alone builtin Basic. I often wondered how any applications came about for them at all.
Programmers absolutely have to know how to work with memory.
Well, many people who call themself C/C++ programmers don't. Ask them what the stack is and they go 'Huh?'. If you try and learn C/C++ yourself, or from a crap book, you will become one of these people, churning out buffer overflows and memory leaks and thinking they are writing good code.
Qbasic doesn't teach bad concepts really. This isn't the old days of 10 GOTO 100 etc. Automatic memory management is fine while you are learning how to program in general. Once you grok programming then you can start taking finer control. Agreed, there are some people for whom C is a great language to start. But not everyone is as gifted as you or I might feel we are:)
BTW, 'new' and 'delete' are more powerful than malloc and free, because they also call constructors and destructors, while there is nothing you can do with malloc that you can't do with new.
There are only two construable reasons one would learn QBasic. You've correctly stated one: very shallow learning curve. All the old micros came with Basic because even the dumbest people would be able to do a little bit of coding, and not feel bamboozled. This is how I got started too (on my Speccy when I was 4 years old, AAMOF, Win 3.1 was still 7 years away).
The distinction has nothing to do with the Venera pictures. However you were attempting to apply a false principle to the pictures; and the principle is one that should be debated without any concrete example in mind.
Anyway, if there is a continuous change in refractive index then there is no boundary. The index at any point (x) may be different to at point (x + delta) . If you're going to say that there's a boundary between (x) and (x + delta) for arbitrary small delta, then you're saying that the entire atmosphere is a boundary (which seems a silly application of the word 'boundary').
On the other issue: we don't know from the pictures or the article whether the atmosphere is of uniform density or not (with refractive index varying with density of course). Intuitively it would seem that it would get less dense as you go upwards. Also, in such a volatile environment there may be steep gradients everywhere (like how there are winds and storms and crap everywhere here, but on a much larger scale)
From http://www.googlism.com/index.htm?ism=beowulf+clus ter&type=2:
beowulf cluster is offline beowulf cluster is such a high performance computing environment beowulf cluster is the only machine in the cluster that you can login to beowulf cluster is extremely powerful beowulf cluster is a bit extreme beowulf cluster is an investment beowulf cluster is available for $1195 per person beowulf cluster is a computer system conforming to the beowulf architecture beowulf cluster is to first connect to the university unix service via the common desktop environment beowulf cluster is now operational beowulf cluster is shown below beowulf cluster is via httpd running on your server node beowulf cluster is a little off the beaten path beowulf cluster is linux beowulf cluster is connected with 100 beowulf cluster is reported beowulf cluster is the number of people waiting in line to run their code on the system beowulf cluster is 42nd on the list beowulf cluster is small
You can tell an American thought of this page, can't you;)
The screwup I remember the most was one probe that was supposed to take a soil sample and return it to Earth, but the digger tool came down exactly on top of the camera lens cap, which the camera had popped off upon landing.
Of course, this could have been solved by a piece of string.
Me too. Unfortunately, the words 'Portman' or 'grits' seems to be an instant trigger for "Offtopic" or "Troll" moderation. I guess everyone with a sense of humour has left Slashdot
The worst effect might be that Becker's email address will change AGAIN.
In fact this gets me thinking: thousands of people (or more?) have registered domains for personal use (joe-bloggs.net etc.), to post info about themself and to provide an email address that will never change. Why not have a TLD for this purpose? (eg.per (for Person(al)))
Argh. I said "A", and you said "Yes that's right, B". You know you are wrong and are just trying to confuse the issue.
To elaborate, you are introducing the premise that the medium is constant. This was not a part of your original claim. If you wish to retract that claim, and assert that "refraction only occurs at a boundary, given that there are no boundaries", then say so.
You seemed to be arguing that refraction could only occur if there were a boundary between 2 regions with different refractive indices. (And therefore, since this didn't occur in the Venusian atmosphere, the atmosphere can't cause the lensing effect). OK so far?
Thanks, will get onto it:) I had heard from somewhere that you had to pay for the 'good version' of Zend, but perhaps it was confusion that begain with merely 'non-GPL'
Slashdot Mirror
That's what Viagra is for
I don't know why you guys are going on about BCD as if it is a godsend or something -- it's horrible. Not only is it wasteful of space (instead of 256 possible values per byte, you can only have 100), but when converting [ascii|int] [to|from] bcd, you have all sorts of possible flags:
- what to do if it's an odd number of nibbles (left 0 ? left F ? right 0 ? right F ?)
- what to do if it's too small or too big for the buffer you're writing into (error ? 0 ? 0-fill ? F-fill ? )
- when reading an odd number of nibbles, do you want to start from the second nibble? or is the last nibble invalid? how do you even know in advance if it's an odd number of nibbles or an even?
Of course you can define a set of conventions to avoid these problems, but it all makes for quite voluminous code, and then if you need to go against convention sometime then your library won't support it.
Here's a better solution: use (*gasp*) integers. And if your language's integer size isn't big enough for what you want, then use some library that allows for arbitrarily-sized integers, such as GNUmp. Heck, if you only need 64-bit and you have a 32-bit machine, just define your own library! (stick 2 ints together). It'd take all of ten minutes of coding..
PS. Why does the GNU 'search' page never return any results? Searching for 'mp' didn't find that; I had to look it up in the directory of all packages.
Is it also the largest tag in Europe? I enjoyed ball tag in school, at the time, but now I shudder at the thought of having my freedoms infringed by playing "proprietary" tags.
Because somebody proved it (the two guys whose name goes with it).
There are phones like that. However, at a cost of about $1000 a pop, people prefer to use the phone book (and perhaps buy a PC with a web browser and have money left over).
yeah. I've found that djb's dnscache will stop responding to queries after a while (few days or so), and I have to HUP it. I dont like my chances of discovering a fix for the problem though.
Having said that, it's still preferable to the Bloated IND.
Were you trying "Right Brain URL Typing" when you came up with that one? ;)
Reminds me of those cartoons (and even a few non-cartoons) where a tree or something is falling, and the character runs away by running in the line that it's falling, and gets hit by the treetop, instead of just stepping to the side.
Maybe because it was hard to program for those black and white Macs with tiny screens that came about 15 years ago. They didn't even have a command window, let alone builtin Basic. I often wondered how any applications came about for them at all.
So the conclusion is, we're both pedants who have nothing better to do than argue in old slashdot threads. :)
The earlier MS OS's had things like BASICA, BASICJA, and then a bit later, GWBASIC.
QBASIC came with the later range of pre-Win95 DOS releases.
Well, many people who call themself C/C++ programmers don't. Ask them what the stack is and they go 'Huh?'. If you try and learn C/C++ yourself, or from a crap book, you will become one of these people, churning out buffer overflows and memory leaks and thinking they are writing good code.
Qbasic doesn't teach bad concepts really. This isn't the old days of 10 GOTO 100 etc. Automatic memory management is fine while you are learning how to program in general. Once you grok programming then you can start taking finer control. Agreed, there are some people for whom C is a great language to start. But not everyone is as gifted as you or I might feel we are
BTW, 'new' and 'delete' are more powerful than malloc and free, because they also call constructors and destructors, while there is nothing you can do with malloc that you can't do with new.
There are only two construable reasons one would learn QBasic. You've correctly stated one: very shallow learning curve. All the old micros came with Basic because even the dumbest people would be able to do a little bit of coding, and not feel bamboozled. This is how I got started too (on my Speccy when I was 4 years old, AAMOF, Win 3.1 was still 7 years away).
The second reason: if you know Qbasic then you may be able to maintain VB programs with little or no further training -- a good skill to have on your resumé, and if (god forbid) you want to learn VB properly, you will already be half way there.
You aren't alone. I've heard of companies that charge $50k or more for programs written in Visual Basic (ie. Qbasic with objects).
The distinction has nothing to do with the Venera pictures. However you were attempting to apply a false principle to the pictures; and the principle is one that should be debated without any concrete example in mind.
Anyway, if there is a continuous change in refractive index then there is no boundary. The index at any point (x) may be different to at point (x + delta) . If you're going to say that there's a boundary between (x) and (x + delta) for arbitrary small delta, then you're saying that the entire atmosphere is a boundary (which seems a silly application of the word 'boundary').
On the other issue: we don't know from the pictures or the article whether the atmosphere is of uniform density or not (with refractive index varying with density of course). Intuitively it would seem that it would get less dense as you go upwards. Also, in such a volatile environment there may be steep gradients everywhere (like how there are winds and storms and crap everywhere here, but on a much larger scale)
From http://www.googlism.com/index.htm?ism=beowulf+clus ter&type=2 :
;)
beowulf cluster is offline
beowulf cluster is such a high performance computing environment
beowulf cluster is the only machine in the cluster that you can login to
beowulf cluster is extremely powerful
beowulf cluster is a bit extreme
beowulf cluster is an investment
beowulf cluster is available for $1195 per person
beowulf cluster is a computer system conforming to the beowulf architecture
beowulf cluster is to first connect to the university unix service via the common desktop environment
beowulf cluster is now operational
beowulf cluster is shown below
beowulf cluster is via httpd running on your server node
beowulf cluster is a little off the beaten path
beowulf cluster is linux
beowulf cluster is connected with 100
beowulf cluster is reported
beowulf cluster is the number of people waiting in line to run their code on the system
beowulf cluster is 42nd on the list
beowulf cluster is small
You can tell an American thought of this page, can't you
The screwup I remember the most was one probe that was supposed to take a soil sample and return it to Earth, but the digger tool came down exactly on top of the camera lens cap, which the camera had popped off upon landing.
Of course, this could have been solved by a piece of string.
Amen to that. We wouldn't want Martians mounting a return trip to Earth and announcing "Take me to Slim Shady"..
Me too. Unfortunately, the words 'Portman' or 'grits' seems to be an instant trigger for "Offtopic" or "Troll" moderation. I guess everyone with a sense of humour has left Slashdot
What speed improvement would you get from , say, 12 250MHz machines vs. 1. 3GHz P4 (with hyperthreading etc.)
Isn't solaris free? You just have to pay if you want Sun hardware?
The worst effect might be that Becker's email address will change AGAIN.
.per (for Person(al)))
In fact this gets me thinking: thousands of people (or more?) have registered domains for personal use (joe-bloggs.net etc.), to post info about themself and to provide an email address that will never change. Why not have a TLD for this purpose? (eg
Argh. I said "A", and you said "Yes that's right, B". You know you are wrong and are just trying to confuse the issue.
To elaborate, you are introducing the premise that the medium is constant. This was not a part of your original claim. If you wish to retract that claim, and assert that "refraction only occurs at a boundary, given that there are no boundaries", then say so.
You seemed to be arguing that refraction could only occur if there were a boundary between 2 regions with different refractive indices. (And therefore, since this didn't occur in the Venusian atmosphere, the atmosphere can't cause the lensing effect). OK so far?
Thanks, will get onto it :) I had heard from somewhere that you had to pay for the 'good version' of Zend, but perhaps it was confusion that begain with merely 'non-GPL'