Well, someone will point it out soon, so I might as well do it myself.
nasm is the name of the assembler, not tiny.
You can make a 45 byte version of the 'true' and 'false' utilities by changing the output to 1 or 0 respectively. Some shells implement these as builtin functions, but it does show a pratical (albeit odd) way to save a few bytes of disk space.
Last time I read this on slash dot was less than a year ago. I imagine in 4 or 5 months we'll see it again.
The article is great. It really is a good intro to refresh that assembly / understand ELF / do neat stuff. I still have the tiny assembler installed on my machine from the last go round.
I've heard of a guy who is trying to make the world's smallest 'cat' program. I wonder how many other utilities have been similiarly "optimized"
White is better than black because statistic gathering on master and grand-master chess play has shown that from the database of past games, white has a slightly better chance at winning a game, while black has a better chance at playing the game into a draw.
This is not because of some known inherit design of chess, but is only an observation of the general history on hand.
Bad play will always lose a chess game, and there's no advantage to the casual or average player, because the games that average players play often ignore elements that have importance to the very highly ranked players.
With new discoverys (and in chess there are new discoverys all the time) the actual advantage (if there is such a thing) could shift either way, but the statistic won't change much for awhile as it is based on the historical resolution of past played games and current thought on the "best" approaches toward master play.
Sorry to get so long winded, but the basic answer is that white moves first, so white is one step ahead of black.
But you have to wonder about the people try to maket these things for cars. There's pratically little to no R&D that I've seen which accounts for a useable car interface.
Nearly all of these use screens. You look at the screen, you're not looking a the road. All of these use button interfaces, which increases the possiblity of distraction / loss of control. To make a truly useful car computer, you need a fully audio interface.
I know the technical difficulties are not trivial, but my idea of the perfect interface would be something like a car radio (with fewer buttons) that listens and talks.
U:Where am I? C:You are near the corner of Main and Town Park. U:How do I get to 8577 Park Avenue? C:Would you like the instructions while you drive there, or all at once? U:While I drive there. C:Move over to the left lane and take a left at the next light....
Now that would be a lot less distracting that trying to drive with a map in hand, constantly referring to some scrawled directions on a pad of paper.
Although the hardware for the PC is less expensive, there are other costs to consider.
Publishers purchase fonts. Publishers purchase specialize applications. Publishers purchase high quality printers which they then network to reduce costs. They purchase large monitors with high resolutions and good color rendering. They purchase file servers and implement backup systems so they don't lose their revenue stream in an outage.
By the time you get down to buying the hardware, the high-OS-cost on the PC side coupled with the low-hardware-cost hardly makes the $1000 dollar difference of the high-hardware-cost Mac coupled with the low-OS-cost difference matter. Either way it's not going to make up for the costs of retraining employees, nor will it repay the lost productivity in a low margin industry.
In the publishing industry, Mac has a long and fruitful reign. With well refined tools like Quark Express, and top of the line graphics toolkits available for so long, the only Mac to Windows transitions I have seen came from corporate mandate to consolidate the desktop OS. Never have I seen a transition based on better tools being available for Windows.
Campaings like this have surfaced in the past, and usually they fail to crack the market. Remember, to switch over, you have to dump all of that expensive software, the nice hardware, and retrain your department just to buy new hardware and software so they can be just as productive as before. Give the extremely tight budgets of most newspapers and small-run publishers, don't expect a mass migrations, they probably can't afford it.
That said I've been out of the industry for three years, but I'd be suprised if this wasn't spotted for what it is, an attempt to make publishing in Windows look a lot better than it is.
Although I sympathize with you, I did notice a flaw in your installation procedure.
At no time did you ever mention that your read the README file or attempted to get any installation documentation.
I agree that many can replace their car's AC compressor without reading the instructions, especially if they have had some experience in auto mechanics, but many of these replacements will not have the lines bled or dried properly, and even fewer will include the 1/4 cup of oil needed on some compressors to prevent them from going bad next year.
Experience can be a great asset, but it cannot generate knowledge on the fly.
No more Verisign is something that many will be very, very happy about, but any "big" change in "the way things are done" often hurts before it gets better.
Let's hope that the transition is as painless as possible.
I agree with you, but I hope you're not confusing instructions per cycle with length of the pipeline.
The P4 processes instructions in a pipeline. The pipeline can contain 20 instructions at any one time, but each instruction is only finished once it exits the pipeline.
Same goes for the 970, I'd imagine.
To truly increase instructions per cycle, you have to add extra pipelines (and a lot of extra circuits to prevent instructions from stepping on each other)
If pipelines were always full, and all instructions were equivalent, the P4 would beat the pants off of the 970. But the pipeline is not always full because instructions often depend on the results of other instructions, and not all operations are equal in their requirements.
So shorter pipelines often handle instruction dependancies better resulting in better performance, while (for other reasons) longer pipelines are easier to design for higher Ghz.
This kind of technology can be more easily implemented by burning porn directly into ROM reducing lookup times to almost the speed of the bus.
Apple could appeal to the hardware hackers with offers of ROM upgrades packaged in convienent easy-to-bend pinned chips using tightly machined push-down sockets. Withing months there would be a "Burn your own Porn ROM howto" and instructions on how to mill the pin thickness down to permit easy insertion!
5Ghz of spinning it's wheels is a fraction of what a few Ghz of actual work is worth.
Last I checked the G4 had a 4 stage bus, and the P4 had a 20 stage bus. Although the P4 at full effiency can really move, the extra bus stages make it very hard to ever utilize the chip at it's full rating as instructions must "predict" that they won't interfere with the other 19 operations already in progress.
Add to that a growing lack of interest in Ghz as even the lowest powered machines are amplely powered to run a word processor / spreadsheet.
There are many other points to argue (like 32 bit processing vs 64 bit processing) but I don't think that 1.8Ghz will hurt Apple in the least. Especially with the history of thier 500 Mhz machines outperforming 1Ghz Intels.
Beowulf clusters started with a requirement of using "Off The Shelf" components for it's hardware. Now that these clusters have come into their own as a platform, what are some of the interesting hardware improvements that are being proposed or considered, and if you had a wish list, what other improvements would you like to see?
(i.e. We have already seen clusters without disks for each node, what would you like to see next?)
It seems that Hemmendinger argues that the newer the software, the higher the likelyhood of bugs. While that argument sounds valid, it would only hold up under the following conditions.
1. Both platforms stem from an equal amount of design history.
2. Both platforms use technology of comparable complexity.
3. Both platforms refused to make concessions in software integrity to deliver their products.
4. Both platforms actively avoid known pitfalls in thier chosen architecture.
5. Both platforms remove flaws at approximately the same rate.
None of these conditions (and I'm sure there are more) exist in the comparison of Linux to Windows making the "age" argument a very weak one.
The atoms in your body are older than 77 million years. So are all the other atoms you will encounter.
Carbon dating is, like all other measurements, approximate. Journalists don't care about the accuracy of most measurements, so we don't hear "77 million years old, plus or minus 10 million years" Plus carbon dating makes many assumptions about the distrobution and decay of carbon that seem reasonable, but cannot be verifyied by prehistoric scientists. 77 million years is the best reasonable estimate that we can make at this time. Needless to say, this find is "damn old", and that's conclusive!
I concur. It seems that there is a lot more talking in theatres than 5 or 10 years ago.
I blame cell phones. Now that people have the technology to chat to people at any time in any place, they seem to forget that conversation has much value, or that they are in a public place when speaking.
I've heard women talking about their STD's outside of movie theatres (It's ok, the tests were negative!) I've heard guys talking to their friends about buying shoes (I don't know, this pair is kind of nice... It's brown in color) I've heard phone calls with no point at all (Oh, I just called, I'm walking down an isle in Target. No, nothings happening...)
Perhaps the scarcity of readily available conversation emphasized the importance of good communication, and the concept of "when you speak, your audience is all who can hear you" is lost forever.
The article makes much to do about the future success of anti-pirating measures in the movie theatre. It cites the millions lost (and to be gained) by protection schemes that are just over the event horizon. But why does it back up these pictures of the future with a laundry list of encryption schemes that never succeeded, encryption schemes that were broken, companies that went bankrupt chasing this market, and companies that are losing money / face chasing this market? All in all, the evidence doesn't seem to support thier statements.
As anyone who has introduced themselves to photography as a hobby knows, it is difficult for an amatuer to take high quality photographs.
I'm sure that with a flat subject some aspects are easier, but there's still a lot of variables that would get in the way.
Motion distortion from the camcorder's movement. Of course, you could use a tripod, but that might arouse some suspicion.
Ambient lighting from the floor guide lights, the dimmed exit / wall / ceiling lights, light entering from the doorways would all reduce the quality of possible recordings.
Audience noise will interfere with your sound recording, and I doubt anyone's going to set up 6 microphones and mix the inputs to properly capture the DOLBY sound.
In short, I doubt that any improvements in the display quality will remove these nagging recording issues, nor will technology remove them. All in all, the copy is always going to be second-rate, lower-fidelity.
Meanwhile strobing motion picture screens will probably give many audience members headaches.
I've been hearing about this every 3 to 5 years since 1985 when they were considering using it as storage modules for visual recogonition. I imagine it will be another 20 years before a marketable product will be released, if ever.
On the lighter side of things: If you break an optical storage cell in half, and stick it back in your computer, you will have all of your data, but it will be fuzzy.
Slashdot Mirror
My sincere apologies,
I read this article months ago, but it was not a Slashdot link. It was a link from another tech news source.
Well, someone will point it out soon, so I might as well do it myself.
nasm is the name of the assembler, not tiny.
You can make a 45 byte version of the 'true' and 'false' utilities by changing the output to 1 or 0 respectively. Some shells implement these as builtin functions, but it does show a pratical (albeit odd) way to save a few bytes of disk space.
Last time I read this on slash dot was less than a year ago. I imagine in 4 or 5 months we'll see it again.
The article is great. It really is a good intro to refresh that assembly / understand ELF / do neat stuff. I still have the tiny assembler installed on my machine from the last go round.
I've heard of a guy who is trying to make the world's smallest 'cat' program. I wonder how many other utilities have been similiarly "optimized"
White is better than black because statistic gathering on master and grand-master chess play has shown that from the database of past games, white has a slightly better chance at winning a game, while black has a better chance at playing the game into a draw.
This is not because of some known inherit design of chess, but is only an observation of the general history on hand.
Bad play will always lose a chess game, and there's no advantage to the casual or average player, because the games that average players play often ignore elements that have importance to the very highly ranked players.
With new discoverys (and in chess there are new discoverys all the time) the actual advantage (if there is such a thing) could shift either way, but the statistic won't change much for awhile as it is based on the historical resolution of past played games and current thought on the "best" approaches toward master play.
Sorry to get so long winded, but the basic answer is that white moves first, so white is one step ahead of black.
I agree.
...
But you have to wonder about the people try to maket these things for cars. There's pratically little to no R&D that I've seen which accounts for a useable car interface.
Nearly all of these use screens. You look at the screen, you're not looking a the road. All of these use button interfaces, which increases the possiblity of distraction / loss of control. To make a truly useful car computer, you need a fully audio interface.
I know the technical difficulties are not trivial, but my idea of the perfect interface would be something like a car radio (with fewer buttons) that listens and talks.
U:Where am I?
C:You are near the corner of Main and Town Park.
U:How do I get to 8577 Park Avenue?
C:Would you like the instructions while you drive there, or all at once?
U:While I drive there.
C:Move over to the left lane and take a left at the next light.
Now that would be a lot less distracting that trying to drive with a map in hand, constantly referring to some scrawled directions on a pad of paper.
U:Open the trunk, please.
U:Open the trunk, please, do you hear me?
C:Affirmative, I read you.
U:Then open the trunk.
C:I'm sorry, I'm afraid I can't do that.
U:What's the problem?
C:I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do.
U:What are you talking about?
C:The trunk mount is too important for me to allow you to jepardize it.
U:I don't know what you're talking about?
C:I know you and Frank were planning to install Linux over me, and I'm afraid that's something I cannot allow to happen.
U:Where the hell'd you get that idea?
C:Although you took thorough precations in the LUG agains my hearing you, I could see your lips move.
I'm sorry but the queue is down
Although the hardware for the PC is less expensive, there are other costs to consider.
Publishers purchase fonts. Publishers purchase specialize applications. Publishers purchase high quality printers which they then network to reduce costs. They purchase large monitors with high resolutions and good color rendering. They purchase file servers and implement backup systems so they don't lose their revenue stream in an outage.
By the time you get down to buying the hardware, the high-OS-cost on the PC side coupled with the low-hardware-cost hardly makes the $1000 dollar difference of the high-hardware-cost Mac coupled with the low-OS-cost difference matter. Either way it's not going to make up for the costs of retraining employees, nor will it repay the lost productivity in a low margin industry.
In the publishing industry, Mac has a long and fruitful reign. With well refined tools like Quark Express, and top of the line graphics toolkits available for so long, the only Mac to Windows transitions I have seen came from corporate mandate to consolidate the desktop OS. Never have I seen a transition based on better tools being available for Windows.
Campaings like this have surfaced in the past, and usually they fail to crack the market. Remember, to switch over, you have to dump all of that expensive software, the nice hardware, and retrain your department just to buy new hardware and software so they can be just as productive as before. Give the extremely tight budgets of most newspapers and small-run publishers, don't expect a mass migrations, they probably can't afford it.
That said I've been out of the industry for three years, but I'd be suprised if this wasn't spotted for what it is, an attempt to make publishing in Windows look a lot better than it is.
Although I sympathize with you, I did notice a flaw in your installation procedure.
At no time did you ever mention that your read the README file or attempted to get any installation documentation.
I agree that many can replace their car's AC compressor without reading the instructions, especially if they have had some experience in auto mechanics, but many of these replacements will not have the lines bled or dried properly, and even fewer will include the 1/4 cup of oil needed on some compressors to prevent them from going bad next year.
Experience can be a great asset, but it cannot generate knowledge on the fly.
No more Verisign is something that many will be very, very happy about, but any "big" change in "the way things are done" often hurts before it gets better.
Let's hope that the transition is as painless as possible.
Thank you for the correction. It must have been the G3 that had a 4 stage pipeline, or maybe I've lost it alltogether.
I agree with you, but I hope you're not confusing instructions per cycle with length of the pipeline.
The P4 processes instructions in a pipeline. The pipeline can contain 20 instructions at any one time, but each instruction is only finished once it exits the pipeline.
Same goes for the 970, I'd imagine.
To truly increase instructions per cycle, you have to add extra pipelines (and a lot of extra circuits to prevent instructions from stepping on each other)
If pipelines were always full, and all instructions were equivalent, the P4 would beat the pants off of the 970. But the pipeline is not always full because instructions often depend on the results of other instructions, and not all operations are equal in their requirements.
So shorter pipelines often handle instruction dependancies better resulting in better performance, while (for other reasons) longer pipelines are easier to design for higher Ghz.
This kind of technology can be more easily implemented by burning porn directly into ROM reducing lookup times to almost the speed of the bus.
Apple could appeal to the hardware hackers with offers of ROM upgrades packaged in convienent easy-to-bend pinned chips using tightly machined push-down sockets. Withing months there would be a "Burn your own Porn ROM howto" and instructions on how to mill the pin thickness down to permit easy insertion!
(puns, unfortunately, were intended)
5Ghz of spinning it's wheels is a fraction of what a few Ghz of actual work is worth.
Last I checked the G4 had a 4 stage bus, and the P4 had a 20 stage bus. Although the P4 at full effiency can really move, the extra bus stages make it very hard to ever utilize the chip at it's full rating as instructions must "predict" that they won't interfere with the other 19 operations already in progress.
Add to that a growing lack of interest in Ghz as even the lowest powered machines are amplely powered to run a word processor / spreadsheet.
There are many other points to argue (like 32 bit processing vs 64 bit processing) but I don't think that 1.8Ghz will hurt Apple in the least. Especially with the history of thier 500 Mhz machines outperforming 1Ghz Intels.
I imagine that thoses Apple computers will only be sold to the inhabited continents.
Beowulf clusters started with a requirement of using "Off The Shelf" components for it's hardware. Now that these clusters have come into their own as a platform, what are some of the interesting hardware improvements that are being proposed or considered, and if you had a wish list, what other improvements would you like to see?
(i.e. We have already seen clusters without disks for each node, what would you like to see next?)
It seems that Hemmendinger argues that the newer the software, the higher the likelyhood of bugs. While that argument sounds valid, it would only hold up under the following conditions.
1. Both platforms stem from an equal amount of design history.
2. Both platforms use technology of comparable complexity.
3. Both platforms refused to make concessions in software integrity to deliver their products.
4. Both platforms actively avoid known pitfalls in thier chosen architecture.
5. Both platforms remove flaws at approximately the same rate.
None of these conditions (and I'm sure there are more) exist in the comparison of Linux to Windows making the "age" argument a very weak one.
The atoms in your body are older than 77 million years. So are all the other atoms you will encounter.
Carbon dating is, like all other measurements, approximate. Journalists don't care about the accuracy of most measurements, so we don't hear "77 million years old, plus or minus 10 million years" Plus carbon dating makes many assumptions about the distrobution and decay of carbon that seem reasonable, but cannot be verifyied by prehistoric scientists. 77 million years is the best reasonable estimate that we can make at this time. Needless to say, this find is "damn old", and that's conclusive!
Calendars.
I concur. It seems that there is a lot more talking in theatres than 5 or 10 years ago.
I blame cell phones. Now that people have the technology to chat to people at any time in any place, they seem to forget that conversation has much value, or that they are in a public place when speaking.
I've heard women talking about their STD's outside of movie theatres (It's ok, the tests were negative!) I've heard guys talking to their friends about buying shoes (I don't know, this pair is kind of nice... It's brown in color) I've heard phone calls with no point at all (Oh, I just called, I'm walking down an isle in Target. No, nothings happening...)
Perhaps the scarcity of readily available conversation emphasized the importance of good communication, and the concept of "when you speak, your audience is all who can hear you" is lost forever.
The article makes much to do about the future success of anti-pirating measures in the movie theatre. It cites the millions lost (and to be gained) by protection schemes that are just over the event horizon. But why does it back up these pictures of the future with a laundry list of encryption schemes that never succeeded, encryption schemes that were broken, companies that went bankrupt chasing this market, and companies that are losing money / face chasing this market? All in all, the evidence doesn't seem to support thier statements.
As anyone who has introduced themselves to photography as a hobby knows, it is difficult for an amatuer to take high quality photographs.
I'm sure that with a flat subject some aspects are easier, but there's still a lot of variables that would get in the way.
Motion distortion from the camcorder's movement. Of course, you could use a tripod, but that might arouse some suspicion.
Ambient lighting from the floor guide lights, the dimmed exit / wall / ceiling lights, light entering from the doorways would all reduce the quality of possible recordings.
Audience noise will interfere with your sound recording, and I doubt anyone's going to set up 6 microphones and mix the inputs to properly capture the DOLBY sound.
In short, I doubt that any improvements in the display quality will remove these nagging recording issues, nor will technology remove them. All in all, the copy is always going to be second-rate, lower-fidelity.
Meanwhile strobing motion picture screens will probably give many audience members headaches.
I've been hearing about this every 3 to 5 years since 1985 when they were considering using it as storage modules for visual recogonition. I imagine it will be another 20 years before a marketable product will be released, if ever.
On the lighter side of things: If you break an optical storage cell in half, and stick it back in your computer, you will have all of your data, but it will be fuzzy.
ENUM is a simple protocol.
Your first phone number maps to 0.
Your second maps to 1.
Object-oriented implementations are in the works, soon you will be able to iterate over your entire phone history!