OK. It was a poor example. The x86 is a horrible, terrible, poorly tought-out, really lousy, crufty architecture. It's crazy to imagine someone would subject him/herself to do hand-assembly for it.
I used to do hand-assembly on the 6502 and could look at hex dumps and disassemble a lot of them in my head, but the 6502 was a small, simple and elegant design. IIRC, the 16016 and 32032 were even easier, but I never tried that for real.
The fact is that you _can_ write useful x86 code with nothing more than an assembler. You can write C code with a text editor. You don't need an IDE to do it. It's not even that much painful to do so.
But most of the stuff SOAP is made of would require you to edit and keep coherent a set of XML files that are remarkably human-hostile. That's why it requires a fairly sophisticated and complex tool.
I like Perl's "do or die" construct, but that's about it. I used to love the language support for rich data types and the "magic" operator, but since that time, Python conquered my heart with much of the same expressive power with a much more readable syntax. Perl programs can easily become write-only programs.
I never used Ruby much, but I intend to learn more about it. The syntax is still a little confusing for me, but maybe I can get used to it and love it. I like the Lisp-ish way it treats closures.
One must not confuse dynamic/static-typing with strong/weak-typing. While both Python, Java and C are strongly typed, Java and C are static-typed (all types are resolved on compile-time) while Python is dynamically-typed and solves type issues during runtime, but does not go out of its way to convert incompatible types. JavaScript converts incompatible types (you can add null with a string) and this tends to harbor some remarkably elusive bugs.
JavaScript prototype-based OOP is interesting, but it does not outweight its other shortcomings.
Your LCD uses more or less the same technology your 5 year-old LCD uses. The OLPC display has a LED backlight, higher energy and light efficiency due to an innovative non-absorbing color splitting layer and has a 200dpi reflective mode (transmissive mode is also somewhere around 200dpi, but it's a little more complicated than that).
They are not really the same, so it's very hard to compare them.
BTW, in Brazil you can walk into just about any car dealership and buy a car that runs on both gasoline and ethanol. Several models can also run on natural gas and come this way out of the factory. Pretty much every gas station sells ethanol while about 10% of the also stock natural gas.
It is a perfectly viable alternative and it is so economically viable it is in widespread use (my car runs exclusively on ethanol).
As for making ethanol, not all carbon has to be released back to the atmosphere - the residues of the extraction process are carbon-rich and are burned to run the ethanol factories. If we can run the factories on clean energy, that carbon will stay out of the atmosphere for the time being.
According to your reasoning, the British military have as much reason not to leak that information as the US military so not to neutralize those hidden features' advantage. The software plays a huge role in any modern weapon. If you don't have full access to the software, you can't use the weapon to its full potential.
If the US does trust the British, they should give them the full specs, trusting their allies would not reveal those abilities unless there is a real need.
I wouldn't buy such a complex system from someone who doesn't trust me. I would not trust someone who doesn't trust me, BTW.
And while we are at it, there is no guarantee that the same software is installed in both US and British units. The British could receive a different version and never know what the American F-22 can really do. It's not like the plane has a main computer with a single hard disk and it's easy to run "./configure", "make" and "make install" - the software is scattered all around the plane in some components smaller than a cigarette pack, with different architectures.
In recent TV, that's one thing I like on BSG. When two spaceships engage in combat, they have no deflectors, no ray-guns and have to do with canons and missiles with explosive payloads. And even nukes are not very devastating in space - it's just a couple kilograms of material being ejected in all directions with very high energy.
And well... You know... sci-fi is not about being realistic, but exploring extreme possibilities from extreme angles.
Just to remind you Microsoft has the power to install just about any software in your computer with the automatic Windows Update method. To give a different set of "updates" to a given IP address would be trivial.
If we are talking Windows Genuine, then, delivering something to a specific Windows registration code should be trivial.
They must have known they would have no evidence and no case. If what they wanted was money, they should have gone with someone who would be unable to fight a long war and would entered an agreement before the lack of evidence became evident.
In their place I would have picked SGI, who contributed a lot to the Linux kernel.
All they had to do was to find in the Linux kernel source-tree fragments of code that were equal or very similar to the ones present in Unix. Just in case, try to find them in the GNU tools.
IIRC they could also have requested the Dynix and AIX sources and source history.
If you have the suspicion someone wronged you, you can usually point to what they did, how and when.
The fact that they couldn't do it in a couple years is proof enough they have no case at all. The fact that they repeatedly stated they had such evidence while they knew they had nothing is libel. Since it is reasonable to assume they did it with the purpose of manipulating the market is far worse.
On one side there is the special interests of the citizens of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts who would rather not have to purchase a specific brand of computer program in order to interact with the local government.
On other side are the special interests of a convicted monopoly abuser, who is willing to spend a huge amount of money for not allowing really open formats being mandated as it would undermine the very monopoly it loves to abuse.
In those days, programming seemed really more fun.
I remember a program I wrote for the II that, when running, left 35 and half bytes free in memory. I was using only the lower 4 bits of the last one.:-)
I collect old and interesting computers. This morning I was holding a DDS2 tape in my hands that couldn't store this computer's RAM.
The machines we use today are way beyond the sci-fi I had when I was a kid.
I started my digital life (at least the disk-based one) on an Apple II. I have never experienced 8.3 until I started playing with CP/M and MS-DOS many years later.
I can't imagine what was 6.3. I remember FORTH was named like that because an IBM OS had a 5 letter limitation on names, but 6.3 beats me.
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OK. It was a poor example. The x86 is a horrible, terrible, poorly tought-out, really lousy, crufty architecture. It's crazy to imagine someone would subject him/herself to do hand-assembly for it.
I used to do hand-assembly on the 6502 and could look at hex dumps and disassemble a lot of them in my head, but the 6502 was a small, simple and elegant design. IIRC, the 16016 and 32032 were even easier, but I never tried that for real.
It's really sad we live in the Age of the x86...
Now I know a little bit more than I did this morning. Thank you both.
The fact is that you _can_ write useful x86 code with nothing more than an assembler. You can write C code with a text editor. You don't need an IDE to do it. It's not even that much painful to do so.
But most of the stuff SOAP is made of would require you to edit and keep coherent a set of XML files that are remarkably human-hostile. That's why it requires a fairly sophisticated and complex tool.
I like Perl's "do or die" construct, but that's about it. I used to love the language support for rich data types and the "magic" operator, but since that time, Python conquered my heart with much of the same expressive power with a much more readable syntax. Perl programs can easily become write-only programs.
I never used Ruby much, but I intend to learn more about it. The syntax is still a little confusing for me, but maybe I can get used to it and love it. I like the Lisp-ish way it treats closures.
One must not confuse dynamic/static-typing with strong/weak-typing. While both Python, Java and C are strongly typed, Java and C are static-typed (all types are resolved on compile-time) while Python is dynamically-typed and solves type issues during runtime, but does not go out of its way to convert incompatible types. JavaScript converts incompatible types (you can add null with a string) and this tends to harbor some remarkably elusive bugs.
JavaScript prototype-based OOP is interesting, but it does not outweight its other shortcomings.
Just out of curiosity, what are CATIA's main competitors and how do they handle data transfer from one program to the other?
C-like ugly syntax...
weak typing...
No. No respect.
I may use it, but respect it? Nah...
Any technology that requires a specific tool to write code for it is way too complex.
Without a Next-Next-Finish wizard, SOAP is a pain. With the tool it's mildly uncomfortable.
Because technology moves forward.
Your LCD uses more or less the same technology your 5 year-old LCD uses. The OLPC display has a LED backlight, higher energy and light efficiency due to an innovative non-absorbing color splitting layer and has a 200dpi reflective mode (transmissive mode is also somewhere around 200dpi, but it's a little more complicated than that).
They are not really the same, so it's very hard to compare them.
Well... If you have a couple servers that idle most of the time, I suggest that, instead of AMD, you buy VMWare.
Or go Xen, OpenVz or whatever does the trick.
But, most important, get rid of the idling boxes.
It serves to remind us that being around for a couple dozen million years is no guarantee for the next couple million years.
There are far more species that disappeared than species living today.
I only hope _we_ stay around longer than 20 million years.
Unless they push this "improvements" down the Windows Update pipe.
BTW, in Brazil you can walk into just about any car dealership and buy a car that runs on both gasoline and ethanol. Several models can also run on natural gas and come this way out of the factory. Pretty much every gas station sells ethanol while about 10% of the also stock natural gas.
It is a perfectly viable alternative and it is so economically viable it is in widespread use (my car runs exclusively on ethanol).
As for making ethanol, not all carbon has to be released back to the atmosphere - the residues of the extraction process are carbon-rich and are burned to run the ethanol factories. If we can run the factories on clean energy, that carbon will stay out of the atmosphere for the time being.
Is there a way to forbid Microsoft from calling this TCP/IP?
There must be some exploitable part that can be used to gain access to the hypervisor... It is Microsoft we are talking about.
Lets not call it "religion-bashing". If we call it "fanatism-bashing" we can all be happy.
According to your reasoning, the British military have as much reason not to leak that information as the US military so not to neutralize those hidden features' advantage. The software plays a huge role in any modern weapon. If you don't have full access to the software, you can't use the weapon to its full potential.
If the US does trust the British, they should give them the full specs, trusting their allies would not reveal those abilities unless there is a real need.
I wouldn't buy such a complex system from someone who doesn't trust me. I would not trust someone who doesn't trust me, BTW.
And while we are at it, there is no guarantee that the same software is installed in both US and British units. The British could receive a different version and never know what the American F-22 can really do. It's not like the plane has a main computer with a single hard disk and it's easy to run "./configure", "make" and "make install" - the software is scattered all around the plane in some components smaller than a cigarette pack, with different architectures.
In recent TV, that's one thing I like on BSG. When two spaceships engage in combat, they have no deflectors, no ray-guns and have to do with canons and missiles with explosive payloads. And even nukes are not very devastating in space - it's just a couple kilograms of material being ejected in all directions with very high energy.
And well... You know... sci-fi is not about being realistic, but exploring extreme possibilities from extreme angles.
Just to remind you Microsoft has the power to install just about any software in your computer with the automatic Windows Update method. To give a different set of "updates" to a given IP address would be trivial.
If we are talking Windows Genuine, then, delivering something to a specific Windows registration code should be trivial.
I must wonder why they picked IBM.
They must have known they would have no evidence and no case. If what they wanted was money, they should have gone with someone who would be unable to fight a long war and would entered an agreement before the lack of evidence became evident.
In their place I would have picked SGI, who contributed a lot to the Linux kernel.
All they had to do was to find in the Linux kernel source-tree fragments of code that were equal or very similar to the ones present in Unix. Just in case, try to find them in the GNU tools.
IIRC they could also have requested the Dynix and AIX sources and source history.
If you have the suspicion someone wronged you, you can usually point to what they did, how and when.
The fact that they couldn't do it in a couple years is proof enough they have no case at all. The fact that they repeatedly stated they had such evidence while they knew they had nothing is libel. Since it is reasonable to assume they did it with the purpose of manipulating the market is far worse.
Sure.
On one side there is the special interests of the citizens of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts who would rather not have to purchase a specific brand of computer program in order to interact with the local government.
On other side are the special interests of a convicted monopoly abuser, who is willing to spend a huge amount of money for not allowing really open formats being mandated as it would undermine the very monopoly it loves to abuse.
In those days, programming seemed really more fun.
:-)
I remember a program I wrote for the II that, when running, left 35 and half bytes free in memory. I was using only the lower 4 bits of the last one.
I collect old and interesting computers. This morning I was holding a DDS2 tape in my hands that couldn't store this computer's RAM.
The machines we use today are way beyond the sci-fi I had when I was a kid.
Maybe it's time to suggest (again) we start collecting money to pay for the prosecution of Darl McBride.
www.darlbehindbars.org, anyone?
Just out of curiosity, what was the 6.3 jail?
I started my digital life (at least the disk-based one) on an Apple II. I have never experienced 8.3 until I started playing with CP/M and MS-DOS many years later.
I can't imagine what was 6.3. I remember FORTH was named like that because an IBM OS had a 5 letter limitation on names, but 6.3 beats me.
6.3?! I could bet CP/M was 8.3...
By that time, I was using an Apple II, so I had long file name suppport. 8.3 is so 70's...