First off, as somebody mentioned earlier: This is a press release, not a released product. Thus, it's still vaporware.
So that's it. They're pre-announcing it so they can get response to it from Slashdotters, and add in all the stuff they forgot, such as one thing mentioned several times in these comments:
"OMF'inG!!! We forgot Gravity!"
And while they're putting physics ona chip, perhaps they could take a hint from my tagline...
I'm sure this kind of commentary cannot help Wikipedia's credibility. Wikipedia needs a huge content enema.
I was recently reading this particular article (sorry, there are no explicit pics on this page [yet]): [a Wiki page entry] and read an extreme lack of commentary. The article is nothing but a blow-by-blow description of the web phenomenon in question, and descriptions of parodies of said web phebomenon. This page could use one line of commentary, or perhaps it's just an observation:
This photograph is commonly regarded as the most obscene picture on the internet.
Perhaps Wiki could give its authors/editors need more direction about how much commentary and conjecture (properly attributed as such, of course) should be in articles.
Take the drive and remove the cover screws using the T-7 Torx key
This is improper use of a Torx, especially if you don't have one and feel you have to go out and buy one to open a disk drive you're not going to put back together as if it were never opened.
Using a Dremel moto-tool and a cutoff wheel to cut a regular slot takes only a few seconds per screw, and is much more in the spirit of destructive disassembly. Then you can use a regular flatblade screwdriver for slotted screws to remove the newly modified "security" (cough, hack) screws.
I was HOPING to save it to HD so I can view it later at full speed/resolution, so I can view it offline at any time and without any possibility of Net hiccups. But this brought up Real[I'm-Real-ashamed-I-have-it-installed]Player in Firefox on Windows, I looked at the first minute or so, the audio was there, but the video was mostly a still picture every second or two, and when I did see motion it was fairly 'pixelly.' I want to see real video, not RealStreamingCrap.
I saw a recent episode of PBS's NOVA online (streaming), and was very impressed with the video quality, especially on this aging PIII-450. Nova has alwsys had good standards. But I still wanted to save it. Disk space is SO cheap...
Since, in C, a false value is a value that is non-zero, comparing to some constant "true" wouldn't work pefectly all the time.
No, you (obviously) meant to say "a true value is a value that is non-zero..."
At least it's in English and a well-understood mistake, rather than being actual code that would compile and then fail at some later, inappropriate time...
What you're saying is (since C iplays loose and fast with integer and boolean values - IIRC, in the original K&R they're the same type, perhaps they still are in ANSI) there can be more than one value of 'true', and so the comparison of value==true can be dangerous: it will fail when they are both non-zero and not equal to each other.
This is one of several 'gotchas' that new C programmers (eventually) learn to avoid, often the hard way. At first it looks so neat to be able to #define FALSE and TRUE and this and that, then play fast and loose with boolean expressions that "ought to work" because they read just like English sentences...
Strong typechecking (as in Pascal) fixes the problem, but makes older C code not work. The real problem this generates is that C programmers will tell you "We LIKE mixing integers with booleans in this way, it makes our code more terse and easier to read." And in a real sense that's correct. How do you argue with tradition...
(I'm tempted to make some racist crack about the submitter, but I've met lots of programmers, from every corner of the planet, with similarly dimwitted notions about what happens to their source code when it is submitted to the compiler. Obviously, the general quality of computer science education (or computer science students) is depressingly low the world over.)
I don't recall a compiler that didn't have assembly-language output file generation as an option, but if there were, one could always disassemble the binary object code. So, it's easy enough to do this Computer Science experiment:
Hypothessis: This piece of code when compiled will execute faster and/or be smaller than that equivalent piece of code.
Test: Compile both pieces of code, measure code size and execution time.
Conclusion: Differences were found to be nil or inconsequential.
From there it's a small step to this, which can result in a giant leap in realization (while you're at it, mod me redundant):
Hypothesis: Using the most appropriate algorithm makes a larger difference than doing micro-optimizations.
Test: Do a few projects with well-thought-out algorithms and don't try to micro-optimize.
That said, I've tried to use a compiler on an 8051 as well, and it just isn't worth the trouble. Assembly can be your friend.
I tried a C compiler (IIRC, by Programming Languages Corportation, the only compiler available for it at the time) for a Zilog DSP, and it generated some strange stuff for subroutine calls that included disabling interrupts. I went ahead and did the whole thing in assembly, though for some of it I wrote pseudocode in C and 'hand-compiled' it.
That was eight years ago, and even the 'small chip' embedded compilers I've seen since (such as for the 6805 (!) ) do pretty well at optimization. Thesedays, if by some chance the C compiler for your controller isn't good enough, it may be worth it to move to another chip that DOES have a good C compiler. That wasn't possible in my case above, as this was the only chip that fit the requirements.
There are a LOT of companies that make versions/variants of the 8051, and there are many compilers for it. I would think some of them would be 'good enough.'
But you're right about newer architectures, many are so assembly-unfriendly (TI's '5402 has a half dozen different 'load' mnemonics) that C is the only practical language for them. Fortunately the optimizations are a lot better then before.
Compilers for embedded systems seem to be about a decade behind those for mainstream OS's, so it's good that Microsoft and Borland had good optimizing compilers well over ten years ago.
The recommended way for (x == y) is if ( log(x) == log(y)) All the real good programmers that read magazine articles are doing this.
If either x or y is negative, this gets evaluated as a complex number and slows down execution. And of course in ths case it's the programmer, not the progam, that should be executed.
In fact never program. Because one day you'll enter a typo, and you might have a bug, and so you should never program.
Executing the programmer would insure that the programmer never makes a typo or bug.
And btw, to answer your question - yes, I've read the GPL several times now and still don't get it completely. Whenever I notice a license like that (that I don't know fully) I try to search if anyone has written a short "what you can", "what you can't" article.
That's a great idea for a website that has "plain language" translations of EULA's. Hmm, it appears eula.org is owned by a URL-squatter, but plainlanguageeula.org (and.com and everything else) is available...
"The goal of this was to prove that one should read all EULAs, so that one can see if an app is spyware if it is buried in the EULA."
This is even assuming the 'this product includes spyware' statement is even there, encoded in a bunch of legalese. Companies that have spyware in their products are going to hide it as much as is legally possible, and even moreso if they think they can get away with it. This story indicates that they probably CAN get away with it.
Let's all generate Geocities pages saying "iDownload is Spyware." I wonder how much their lawyers charge them to send each C&D letter??? What clowns...
Just for the record:
iDownload is Spyware.
Signed, Antispam_Ben. Come and get me. Yes, I'm also anti-spyware, and anti-malware, and anti-crap in general.
There are a *lot* of people crunching work for SETI@Home...
Gimps (http://www.mersenne.org/prime.htm, large prime number search) is also a popular distributed computing task, and I think there are a few other 'minor players' in the game of soliciting free CPU cycles from the public. Does anyone know offhand how many computers are running each task?
This is cool and all, but I think Folding@home is more relevant and important. It's an amazing perversity that we know less about how the components of our bodies work than about how stars and black holes work.
There are probably some simple reasons for that. Stars and black holes are simpler and easier to learn about than protiens.
I do agree that biological research is important, OTOH I don't feel badly that more people don't choose to donate their extra CPU cycles to such research. I paid for my computers, and I get to choose how they are used, and I likewise respect others' choices.
There's some online info somewhere on the LIGO project about the things they're looking for. One hoped-for event is two black holes in close orbit (generating a gravitational wave with frequency determined by their orbital times) which get closer and fall into each other, generating a higher and higher frequency as they close in on each other.
Nasa has gone Safety bananas. Theres a limit to how safe something can be, and space is inherently very dangerous. The more safe you want it to be (with a clunky, ultra-complicated flawed vehicle) the more money and time you will spend. You will spend money and time exponentially approaching an asymtopte. Funny thing about asymptoptes- you can never really reach them by spending the money.
You would think Nasa would realize that.
I see it as a cost-benefit thing. Of course it's dangerous, there are unknowns, it's a complicated thing and there are a lot of things that can go wrong. But losing a spacecraft has so many huge costs, not even counting human loss, that it's a very good idea to spend lots of money on safety, and spend it as appropriately and as efficiently as one reasonably can. It's not like "Aww, shit, we lost one, well let's keep on the schedule for tne next one next month." The retutn-to-space time after the Challenger exploded was "only" 18 months, and it's been two years since we lost Columbia (we don't have Feynman around to help this time). That's three and a half years sitting on the ground instead of doing experiments, getting the money to launch big sattelites, adding on parts to the ISS, and generally doing the business of manned space exploration. Furthermore (and since it affects NASA's pursestrings, this may be the biggest cost), it's just not politically expedient to lose a spacecraft.
It's certainly bad that so many eggs are in one basket, but since that's the case, we should have the best basket we can afford.
The article says that Atlantis is being prepped simultaneously for a possible rescue mission. I doubt it actually be on the other pad when Discovery launches, but how realistic is it for NASA to set up another launch on two weeks' notice?
One of the original goals with having four shuttles was to do a new mission every two weeks, and so turn around time of each shuttle was supposed to be every eight weeks. They never approached that rate of launches long-term, but they came close a few times. The ill-fated the 1986 Challenger launch was just 16 days after the launch of the previous mission:
That's still an average of less than one a month, and after having lost not one but two shuttles, they're sure to 'try harder' to put safety above turnaround time. Now that may mean not launching one until the next one can reasonably be launched within two weeks.
It's amazing that we were affected 50,000 light years away. I wonder how much damage could have occured to humans on the moon; i.e. radiation exposure, physical damage to structures.
Aren't there still a couple of people on the International Space Station? I imaging it's protected from most such radiation by the Van Allen belt, but I'd still worry.
Wouldn't you love to be flying around in a spaceship and have that Magnatar blast a couple of trillion, trillion, trillion watts of energy at you? This would certainly eliminate most life in the area, as someone mentioned earlier, no worries about aliens from that section of the Galaxy!
Robert. L. Forward's stories Dragon's Egg and Starquake discuss life evolvong on a neutron star (okay, it's not hydrocarbon based), as well as [relative to this] very 'minor' quake. I found them a really fun read.
It consumes the same as older processors like the Z80 (while smoking it in processing power)!
I'm glad I'm not the only one who remembers when processors didn't need heat sinks. My specialty was the 6502.
If AMD markets this thing right and performs as promised, they will make a killing out of it. There's a lot of money in the embeeded systems market.
Maybe. One big question in the embedded market is how long a part is expected to be available. A couple of years is plenty of time in the PC market where a product lifetime is short, and no one would think of selling a product based on two-year-old technology. Embedded manufacturers like their products to have a longer lifetime, and likewise for the components, so that a year or two down the road production doesn't get stopped for silly things like new PC board layout for the "new, improved" replacement chip.
Slashdot Mirror
First off, as somebody mentioned earlier: This is a press release, not a released product. Thus, it's still vaporware.
So that's it. They're pre-announcing it so they can get response to it from Slashdotters, and add in all the stuff they forgot, such as one thing mentioned several times in these comments:
"OMF'inG!!! We forgot Gravity!"
And while they're putting physics ona chip, perhaps they could take a hint from my tagline...
Macintosh? At 9.8 meters/second squared?
This will surely improve the realism of boobie bounce. :)
So THAT's what this song is about - I've wondered all these years:
http://mp3.juno.co.uk/MP3/SF153578-01-01-01.mp3
The LP: Like a big CD, and BOTH sides play music!
http://www.juno.co.uk/products/153578-01.htm
Aren't these influential men also deserving of Knighthood?
I'm sure this kind of commentary cannot help Wikipedia's credibility. Wikipedia needs a huge content enema.
I was recently reading this particular article (sorry, there are no explicit pics on this page [yet]):
[a Wiki page entry]
and read an extreme lack of commentary. The article is nothing but a blow-by-blow description of the web phenomenon in question, and descriptions of parodies of said web phebomenon. This page could use one line of commentary, or perhaps it's just an observation:
This photograph is commonly regarded as the most obscene picture on the internet.
Perhaps Wiki could give its authors/editors need more direction about how much commentary and conjecture (properly attributed as such, of course) should be in articles.
From TFA:
Take the drive and remove the cover screws using the T-7 Torx key
This is improper use of a Torx, especially if you don't have one and feel you have to go out and buy one to open a disk drive you're not going to put back together as if it were never opened.
Using a Dremel moto-tool and a cutoff wheel to cut a regular slot takes only a few seconds per screw, and is much more in the spirit of destructive disassembly. Then you can use a regular flatblade screwdriver for slotted screws to remove the newly modified "security" (cough, hack) screws.
For some strange reason, this has been a recurring topic on sci.electronics.design.
Go to http://groups.google.com/ and look for threads with these subject lines:
Hard Drive Zapping
Destroying a hard drive ?
A possible cure for FCC bandwidth woes.
I was HOPING to save it to HD so I can view it later at full speed/resolution, so I can view it offline at any time and without any possibility of Net hiccups. But this brought up Real[I'm-Real-ashamed-I-have-it-installed]Player in Firefox on Windows, I looked at the first minute or so, the audio was there, but the video was mostly a still picture every second or two, and when I did see motion it was fairly 'pixelly.' I want to see real video, not RealStreamingCrap.
I saw a recent episode of PBS's NOVA online (streaming), and was very impressed with the video quality, especially on this aging PIII-450. Nova has alwsys had good standards. But I still wanted to save it. Disk space is SO cheap...
Just wondering, but as The True Origin of The WWW, I suspect they have enough bandwidrh to handle being the subject of a Slashdot article.
Since, in C, a false value is a value that is non-zero, comparing to some constant "true" wouldn't work pefectly all the time.
No, you (obviously) meant to say "a true value is a value that is non-zero..."
At least it's in English and a well-understood mistake, rather than being actual code that would compile and then fail at some later, inappropriate time...
What you're saying is (since C iplays loose and fast with integer and boolean values - IIRC, in the original K&R they're the same type, perhaps they still are in ANSI) there can be more than one value of 'true', and so the comparison of value==true can be dangerous: it will fail when they are both non-zero and not equal to each other.
This is one of several 'gotchas' that new C programmers (eventually) learn to avoid, often the hard way. At first it looks so neat to be able to #define FALSE and TRUE and this and that, then play fast and loose with boolean expressions that "ought to work" because they read just like English sentences...
Strong typechecking (as in Pascal) fixes the problem, but makes older C code not work. The real problem this generates is that C programmers will tell you "We LIKE mixing integers with booleans in this way, it makes our code more terse and easier to read." And in a real sense that's correct. How do you argue with tradition...
(I'm tempted to make some racist crack about the submitter, but I've met lots of programmers, from every corner of the planet, with similarly dimwitted notions about what happens to their source code when it is submitted to the compiler. Obviously, the general quality of computer science education (or computer science students) is depressingly low the world over.)
I don't recall a compiler that didn't have assembly-language output file generation as an option, but if there were, one could always disassemble the binary object code. So, it's easy enough to do this Computer Science experiment:
Hypothessis:
This piece of code when compiled will execute faster and/or be smaller than that equivalent piece of code.
Test:
Compile both pieces of code, measure code size and execution time.
Conclusion:
Differences were found to be nil or inconsequential.
From there it's a small step to this, which can result in a giant leap in realization (while you're at it, mod me redundant):
Hypothesis:
Using the most appropriate algorithm makes a larger difference than doing micro-optimizations.
Test:
Do a few projects with well-thought-out algorithms and don't try to micro-optimize.
Conclusion:
Wow, what a difference!
That said, I've tried to use a compiler on an 8051 as well, and it just isn't worth the trouble. Assembly can be your friend.
I tried a C compiler (IIRC, by Programming Languages Corportation, the only compiler available for it at the time) for a Zilog DSP, and it generated some strange stuff for subroutine calls that included disabling interrupts. I went ahead and did the whole thing in assembly, though for some of it I wrote pseudocode in C and 'hand-compiled' it.
That was eight years ago, and even the 'small chip' embedded compilers I've seen since (such as for the 6805 (!) ) do pretty well at optimization. Thesedays, if by some chance the C compiler for your controller isn't good enough, it may be worth it to move to another chip that DOES have a good C compiler. That wasn't possible in my case above, as this was the only chip that fit the requirements.
There are a LOT of companies that make versions/variants of the 8051, and there are many compilers for it. I would think some of them would be 'good enough.'
But you're right about newer architectures, many are so assembly-unfriendly (TI's '5402 has a half dozen different 'load' mnemonics) that C is the only practical language for them. Fortunately the optimizations are a lot better then before.
Compilers for embedded systems seem to be about a decade behind those for mainstream OS's, so it's good that Microsoft and Borland had good optimizing compilers well over ten years ago.
The recommended way for (x == y) is
if ( log(x) == log(y)) All the real good programmers that read magazine articles are doing this.
If either x or y is negative, this gets evaluated as a complex number and slows down execution. And of course in ths case it's the programmer, not the progam, that should be executed.
In fact never program. Because one day you'll enter a typo, and you might have a bug, and so you should never program.
Executing the programmer would insure that the programmer never makes a typo or bug.
And btw, to answer your question - yes, I've read the GPL several times now and still don't get it completely. Whenever I notice a license like that (that I don't know fully) I try to search if anyone has written a short "what you can", "what you can't" article.
.com and everything else) is available...
That's a great idea for a website that has "plain language" translations of EULA's. Hmm, it appears eula.org is owned by a URL-squatter, but plainlanguageeula.org (and
From TFA:
"The goal of this was to prove that one should read all EULAs, so that one can see if an app is spyware if it is buried in the EULA."
This is even assuming the 'this product includes spyware' statement is even there, encoded in a bunch of legalese. Companies that have spyware in their products are going to hide it as much as is legally possible, and even moreso if they think they can get away with it. This story indicates that they probably CAN get away with it.
Let's all generate Geocities pages saying "iDownload is Spyware." I wonder how much their lawyers charge them to send each C&D letter??? What clowns...
Just for the record:
iDownload is Spyware.
Signed, Antispam_Ben. Come and get me. Yes, I'm also anti-spyware, and anti-malware, and anti-crap in general.
Read the ad right here from Datamation Magazine:
http://www.panix.com/~kludge/egg-1970.jpeg
There are a *lot* of people crunching work for SETI@Home...
Gimps (http://www.mersenne.org/prime.htm, large prime number search) is also a popular distributed computing task, and I think there are a few other 'minor players' in the game of soliciting free CPU cycles from the public. Does anyone know offhand how many computers are running each task?
This is cool and all, but I think Folding@home is more relevant and important. It's an amazing perversity that we know less about how the components of our bodies work than about how stars and black holes work.
There are probably some simple reasons for that. Stars and black holes are simpler and easier to learn about than protiens.
I do agree that biological research is important, OTOH I don't feel badly that more people don't choose to donate their extra CPU cycles to such research. I paid for my computers, and I get to choose how they are used, and I likewise respect others' choices.
There's some online info somewhere on the LIGO project about the things they're looking for. One hoped-for event is two black holes in close orbit (generating a gravitational wave with frequency determined by their orbital times) which get closer and fall into each other, generating a higher and higher frequency as they close in on each other.
1 9/013255&tid=160 - I imagine that event generated a detectable gravity-wave pulse.
Also, read yesterday's story "Science: Huge Star Quake Rocks Milky Way" http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/02/
Nasa has gone Safety bananas. Theres a limit to how safe something can be, and space is inherently very dangerous. The more safe you want it to be (with a clunky, ultra-complicated flawed vehicle) the more money and time you will spend. You will spend money and time exponentially approaching an asymtopte. Funny thing about asymptoptes- you can never really reach them by spending the money.
You would think Nasa would realize that.
I see it as a cost-benefit thing. Of course it's dangerous, there are unknowns, it's a complicated thing and there are a lot of things that can go wrong.
But losing a spacecraft has so many huge costs, not even counting human loss, that it's a very good idea to spend lots of money on safety, and spend it as appropriately and as efficiently as one reasonably can. It's not like "Aww, shit, we lost one, well let's keep on the schedule for tne next one next month." The retutn-to-space time after the Challenger exploded was "only" 18 months, and it's been two years since we lost Columbia (we don't have Feynman around to help this time). That's three and a half years sitting on the ground instead of doing experiments, getting the money to launch big sattelites, adding on parts to the ISS, and generally doing the business of manned space exploration. Furthermore (and since it affects NASA's pursestrings, this may be the biggest cost), it's just not politically expedient to lose a spacecraft.
It's certainly bad that so many eggs are in one basket, but since that's the case, we should have the best basket we can afford.
The article says that Atlantis is being prepped simultaneously for a possible rescue mission. I doubt it actually be on the other pad when Discovery launches, but how realistic is it for NASA to set up another launch on two weeks' notice?
y ear1986.html
y ear1985.html
One of the original goals with having four shuttles was to do a new mission every two weeks, and so turn around time of each shuttle was supposed to be every eight weeks. They never approached that rate of launches long-term, but they came close a few times. The ill-fated the 1986 Challenger launch was just 16 days after the launch of the previous mission:
http://www.spaceflight.nasa.gov/shuttle/archives/
In the year before, 1985, there were nine Shuttle missions, more than in any other year:
http://www.spaceflight.nasa.gov/shuttle/archives/
That's still an average of less than one a month, and after having lost not one but two shuttles, they're sure to 'try harder' to put safety above turnaround time. Now that may mean not launching one until the next one can reasonably be launched within two weeks.
By my count there are only eleven stars within ten light years of the sun...
Do we know where the nearest 20-km-diameter (or any other size) neutron stars are? How far away would such a star be detectable (BEFORE it explodes)?
It's amazing that we were affected 50,000 light years away. I wonder how much damage could have occured to humans on the moon; i.e. radiation exposure, physical damage to structures.
Aren't there still a couple of people on the International Space Station? I imaging it's protected from most such radiation by the Van Allen belt, but I'd still worry.
Wouldn't you love to be flying around in a spaceship and have that Magnatar blast a couple of trillion, trillion, trillion watts of energy at you? This would certainly eliminate most life in the area, as someone mentioned earlier, no worries about aliens from that section of the Galaxy!
Robert. L. Forward's stories Dragon's Egg and Starquake discuss life evolvong on a neutron star (okay, it's not hydrocarbon based), as well as [relative to this] very 'minor' quake. I found them a really fun read.
It consumes the same as older processors like the Z80 (while smoking it in processing power)!
I'm glad I'm not the only one who remembers when processors didn't need heat sinks. My specialty was the 6502.
If AMD markets this thing right and performs as promised, they will make a killing out of it. There's a lot of money in the embeeded systems market.
Maybe. One big question in the embedded market is how long a part is expected to be available. A couple of years is plenty of time in the PC market where a product lifetime is short, and no one would think of selling a product based on two-year-old technology. Embedded manufacturers like their products to have a longer lifetime, and likewise for the components, so that a year or two down the road production doesn't get stopped for silly things like new PC board layout for the "new, improved" replacement chip.