Re:You mean there isn't a "Microsoft PC"?
on
The Cult of Mac
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· Score: 1
And every keyboard I've purchased at Best Buy in the last 6 or 7 years has that Windows key on it.
So pull off the Windblows key and use ctrl-esc.
I only use PS/2 keyboards when I can, because I like the feel - somewhat like the AT keyboard, but not quite as loud a click. I miss that big, Selectric-sized return key, though.
You forgot the One Big Amiga Feature:
on
The Cult of Mac
·
· Score: 1
The reasons Amigas are still worshipped these days are because back in the days they were wonderful little machines; 10% of the price of a Mac, pretty good specifications AND it was easier to modify an Amiga one way or another then it is to pick your nose. Anyone with some spare time and soldering skills could start building expansions for his Amiga. In the end, there were CD-players, IDE controllers, SCSI controllers, USB controllers, NICs, "flicker-fixer"s (larger resolutions causes scanline glitches which appeared to cause the screen to flicker) and what have ye not.
You wrote all that and didn't mention that the Amiga had (okay, has) a PRE-EMPTIVE multitasking operating system at a time when others were struggling with the Mac System 6.0 and/or Windows 3.1?
I had a Mac II (16.7MHz 68020) at the time, I considered it pretty nice and fast and such, but doing "event loop" programming and remembering to add a system call in the middle of long loops was a pain, and I knew it was stupid, a "co-operative" OS, a kludge on top of the original single-application-at-a-time Mac OS, and Win 3.1 was the same only worse, because it was basically a graphical shell on top of MS-DOS, and horribly unreliable.
But the Amiga people had it all, technically. Unfortunately, "pre-emptive multitasking OS" wasn't exactly something a marketing person could do something with, other than sell to nerds.
Oh come on! I can think of a few that are worse than Ed Wood
I haven't heard of the others (OTOH I'm not a movie buff), but Ed Wood's fame is for "having the title of" the World's Worst Film Maker.
Actually, there's someone else who's quite infamous for his movies and othe works. Look him up in that movie database thing. He's even in the author field of the HTML code here: http://www.musicalgearbox.com/.
And don't worry, we're all ready to paste in the news link and hit preview/submit story with subject "NEC ships World's Fastest Supercomputer running at 65 teraflops" just as soon as NEC announces they're shipping.
you can always get 2thousand latest CPUs, stick them in a cluster and have a super computer... but unless we move forward towards faster individual CPU, nothing is awe inspiring...
True, but there ARE some Very Important Things that speed up in proportion to the number of parallel processors you have going, such as real-time high-resolution Mandelbrot Set movies.
One more comment for anyone still reading the comments to this article, this book by A. K. Dewdney (one of several who wrote the recreational column that replaced Martin Gardner's "Mathematical Games" in Scientific American, ISTR it was "Computer Recreations" when Dewdney wrote it) may be of interest, the full title of the book is "The Tinkertoy Computer and Other Machinations." This book appears to be out of print, but many used copies are available from used/out-of-print sellers on http://amazon.com/ and through the book metasearch engine http://www.bookfinder.com/.
Also, I'm endeavoring to write shorter sentences than the first on in this comment.
In short, even if you still have some form of organisation operating the cameras, you're in for a FAR heavier invasion of privacy burden: compare a written note saying "14:55 - Nothing happening" to 10 seconds of footage showing people, their faces, their placards, their expressions... and nothing happening.
I see the point, but this is clearly a UK concern, where I understand that privacy is taken much more seriously than in the USA where the streets are apparently "public domain" and anyone, including the Government, can take pictures anytime. Cameras to photograph the tags of those running traffic lights are becoming more common here.
But even in the UK, aren't TV news crews allowed to record video of such events as much as they want? Maybe I don't see the point after all...
I'm sure someone will call me a dumbass though. Hopefully.
Okay, you're a... no, I won't say it, sorry I'm such a tease.
But for me, I'm well aware that "overseas" (from the USA) they use periods instead of commas to separate 3-digit sequences in large numbers, and the comma instead of the period for decimal point. I perhaps first came across this over 20 years ago when HP calculators of the time had a feature to swap the function of commas and periods. And the spelling of programme set me up to expect the "alternate" non-USA ways of doing things such as the period instead of the comma.
One never-seen-in-the-USA convention that I first saw a British person use on a mailing list is the abbreviation of -ve and +ve for negative and positive. I found it annoying and thought it was his own personal abbreviation until I saw someone else using these on Usenet.
It's interesting to observe that this is done to the left of the decimal point to more easily indicate the magnitude of large nummbers (presumably so Government Representatives can more easily distinguish between, say, 10^9 and 10^12 monetary units), but now I wonder why this isn't done with long decimal expansions to the right of the decimal (presumably mathematicians can count digits better than Representatives can). I do recall some books such as the CRC Math Tables that have a space after every third or fourth digit (it may not even be consistent, I know I've seen four-digit groups, and there may also be three-digit groups in the same book), but for the most part decimals are a solid string of numbers. Such a convention would be an improvement. Instead of: (USA conventions, sorry to yall across the Pond): 3.141592653589793238462643383... one would have: 3.141,592,653,589,793,238,462,643,383,... And yes, this is "tech-topic drift" but so far in human history it's "Orders of Magitude" more productive than looking for extraterrestrials.
... that would cause a big "404 error" or similar on the Internet. One can only wonder if defense agencies and the President have such capability to turn off major Net backbones, and if doing so would be (in this example of a live-streamed riot) used for political purposes.
But physically small disk drives (and loop-tape DAT or similar recorders as someone else mentioned) small enough to go in handheld devices and store good quaility compressed video are available, and only one or a few people who record an event need to "get out alive" (or the person recording it really dies or is otherwise disabled, someone else grabs it and goes) with it for it to get out to the public.
For the Government Officials reading this and wanting a solution to this "problem," I'll save you some time: EMP*. You're welcome.
* And here's what to say to the companies in nearby buildings who "lost everything" as far as business data: "You shudda had offsite backups. What, the net went down in the middle of your backup? Aww, gee, sorry about that..."
The theory goes, if they cover or turn off the camera and someone makes an allegation, the cops look guilty already and the accusation gets heard, instead of the coppers all giving the same story.
Good idea and it's sure to happen with continued advances in available/affordable technology. but I suspect those things would need to be made very rugged, else they would "fail to work" and "have technical problems" quite often. Not that I would ever accuse one of Our Finest of anything...
Actually, similar things have already happened with the video cameras used in many police cars. And of course the footage does double duty for TV shows such as "Worlds Worst Polica Chase Videos" or whatever they're called.
http://www.henrylim.org/Harpsichord.html Yes, it's what the html filename says it is. Some of the pics appear to have jaggies from aliasing, but a closer look shows they are actual Lego blocks.
You can program a serial EEPROM with all the codes, clock it with an oscillator, with the output driving an infrared LED (maybe through a transistor to give enough drive current). Have it power up once every few minutes, with cmos 555 timer and long r/c time constant. This thing could be squeezed onto probably a 1cm square PCB, and powered for hours or days by a couple of button cells. In quantity you can make each one cheap enough to leave in an innocuous place in your otherwise-favorite-restaurant-except-for-the-TV. It may take them hours or days to figure out they can put tape on the TV remote receiver sensor, and then hours more to find it on the front panel. Eventually, every restaurant will have masking or electrical tape over the remote sensor.
The above text is for Entertainment Purposes Only, does not promote the making or use of any device, bla bla bla, etc. This text is not here just to cover my ass, please take it seriously. Your battery life may vary.
It determines the number of votes a program can count:
int candidate_1_count; if (vote==candidate_1)
candidate_1_count++;
On an 32-bit machine, this will count up to 2 billion votes before the counter rolls over and goes negative. On a 16-bit machine, 32,000 votes. On an 8-bit machine, 127 votes.
Of course, by the time the UN becomes the Defacto World Government, all processors will be 64 bit, so we won't have to worry about a register rolling over in Global Voting.
If I read TFA correctly, this is a version of the ARM processor, which is RISC, and though I'm not familiar with it, it should have fast, fixed interrupt response times. Predictable and low interrupt latency is absolutely the thing that small microcontrollers and DSP's have over the large, general-purpose CISC processors that take variable numbers of clock cycles for executing each of the different instructions in their pipelines, making interrupt response time a lottery.
2) Goodbye 8bit There will always be a place for the smaller parts. Rice Cookers for example are manufacutered in *huge* quantities; Do you think they will spend 10 cent more on a CPU because it is 'easier to code on'? No.
I haven't taken a long, hard shopping trip to Wallmart or Target in a while, but the rice cookers I've seen don't have microcontrollers. Microwave ovens don't use 8-bit controllers, they use FOUR bit controllers(!) which are even cheaper in quantity, and are among the highest quantity processors in production.
Presuming microwave ovens become "smart" and on a network, they'll evolve to using 8-bit or 16-bit (such as MSP430) controllers with TCP/IP stack code. Then you can control the microwave through a webpage on the refrigerator's touchscreen.
But you're right, overall, rarely does any new introduction completely remove older technologies from the market, the older ones just get cheaper and find new niches to fill.
No, they do it because they believe it works. If you end up going to enough meetings, you may end up believing it works too. That's what happened to me in AA.
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And every keyboard I've purchased at Best Buy in the last 6 or 7 years has that Windows key on it.
So pull off the Windblows key and use ctrl-esc.
I only use PS/2 keyboards when I can, because I like the feel - somewhat like the AT keyboard, but not quite as loud a click. I miss that big, Selectric-sized return key, though.
The reasons Amigas are still worshipped these days are because back in the days they were wonderful little machines; 10% of the price of a Mac, pretty good specifications AND it was easier to modify an Amiga one way or another then it is to pick your nose. Anyone with some spare time and soldering skills could start building expansions for his Amiga. In the end, there were CD-players, IDE controllers, SCSI controllers, USB controllers, NICs, "flicker-fixer"s (larger resolutions causes scanline glitches which appeared to cause the screen to flicker) and what have ye not.
You wrote all that and didn't mention that the Amiga had (okay, has) a PRE-EMPTIVE multitasking operating system at a time when others were struggling with the Mac System 6.0 and/or Windows 3.1?
I had a Mac II (16.7MHz 68020) at the time, I considered it pretty nice and fast and such, but doing "event loop" programming and remembering to add a system call in the middle of long loops was a pain, and I knew it was stupid, a "co-operative" OS, a kludge on top of the original single-application-at-a-time Mac OS, and Win 3.1 was the same only worse, because it was basically a graphical shell on top of MS-DOS, and horribly unreliable.
But the Amiga people had it all, technically. Unfortunately, "pre-emptive multitasking OS" wasn't exactly something a marketing person could do something with, other than sell to nerds.
In 1986, one shuttle at a time.
No, they actually made a replacement for the Challenger. There hasn't been the first peep about a replacement for the Columbia.
Oh come on! I can think of a few that are worse than Ed Wood
I haven't heard of the others (OTOH I'm not a movie buff), but Ed Wood's fame is for "having the title of" the World's Worst Film Maker.
Actually, there's someone else who's quite infamous for his movies and othe works. Look him up in that movie database thing. He's even in the author field of the HTML code here: http://www.musicalgearbox.com/.
And don't worry, we're all ready to paste in the news link and hit preview/submit story with subject "NEC ships World's Fastest Supercomputer running at 65 teraflops" just as soon as NEC announces they're shipping.
you can always get 2thousand latest CPUs, stick them in a cluster and have a super computer ... but unless we move forward towards faster individual CPU, nothing is awe inspiring ...
True, but there ARE some Very Important Things that speed up in proportion to the number of parallel processors you have going, such as real-time high-resolution Mandelbrot Set movies.
One more comment for anyone still reading the comments to this article, this book by A. K. Dewdney (one of several who wrote the recreational column that replaced Martin Gardner's "Mathematical Games" in Scientific American, ISTR it was "Computer Recreations" when Dewdney wrote it) may be of interest, the full title of the book is "The Tinkertoy Computer and Other Machinations." This book appears to be out of print, but many used copies are available from used/out-of-print sellers on http://amazon.com/ and through the book metasearch engine http://www.bookfinder.com/.
Also, I'm endeavoring to write shorter sentences than the first on in this comment.
(lots of Score:4, Interesting stuff snipped)
In short, even if you still have some form of organisation operating the cameras, you're in for a FAR heavier invasion of privacy burden: compare a written note saying "14:55 - Nothing happening" to 10 seconds of footage showing people, their faces, their placards, their expressions... and nothing happening.
I see the point, but this is clearly a UK concern, where I understand that privacy is taken much more seriously than in the USA where the streets are apparently "public domain" and anyone, including the Government, can take pictures anytime. Cameras to photograph the tags of those running traffic lights are becoming more common here.
But even in the UK, aren't TV news crews allowed to record video of such events as much as they want? Maybe I don't see the point after all...
I'm sure someone will call me a dumbass though. Hopefully.
... no, I won't say it, sorry I'm such a tease.
Okay, you're a
But for me, I'm well aware that "overseas" (from the USA) they use periods instead of commas to separate 3-digit sequences in large numbers, and the comma instead of the period for decimal point. I perhaps first came across this over 20 years ago when HP calculators of the time had a feature to swap the function of commas and periods. And the spelling of programme set me up to expect the "alternate" non-USA ways of doing things such as the period instead of the comma.
One never-seen-in-the-USA convention that I first saw a British person use on a mailing list is the abbreviation of -ve and +ve for negative and positive. I found it annoying and thought it was his own personal abbreviation until I saw someone else using these on Usenet.
It's interesting to observe that this is done to the left of the decimal point to more easily indicate the magnitude of large nummbers (presumably so Government Representatives can more easily distinguish between, say, 10^9 and 10^12 monetary units), but now I wonder why this isn't done with long decimal expansions to the right of the decimal (presumably mathematicians can count digits better than Representatives can). I do recall some books such as the CRC Math Tables that have a space after every third or fourth digit (it may not even be consistent, I know I've seen four-digit groups, and there may also be three-digit groups in the same book), but for the most part decimals are a solid string of numbers. Such a convention would be an improvement. Instead of:
(USA conventions, sorry to yall across the Pond):
3.141592653589793238462643383...
one would have:
3.141,592,653,589,793,238,462,643,383,...
And yes, this is "tech-topic drift" but so far in human history it's "Orders of Magitude" more productive than looking for extraterrestrials.
... that would cause a big "404 error" or similar on the Internet. One can only wonder if defense agencies and the President have such capability to turn off major Net backbones, and if doing so would be (in this example of a live-streamed riot) used for political purposes.
But physically small disk drives (and loop-tape DAT or similar recorders as someone else mentioned) small enough to go in handheld devices and store good quaility compressed video are available, and only one or a few people who record an event need to "get out alive" (or the person recording it really dies or is otherwise disabled, someone else grabs it and goes) with it for it to get out to the public.
For the Government Officials reading this and wanting a solution to this "problem," I'll save you some time: EMP*. You're welcome.
* And here's what to say to the companies in nearby buildings who "lost everything" as far as business data: "You shudda had offsite backups. What, the net went down in the middle of your backup? Aww, gee, sorry about that..."
The theory goes, if they cover or turn off the camera and someone makes an allegation, the cops look guilty already and the accusation gets heard, instead of the coppers all giving the same story.
Good idea and it's sure to happen with continued advances in available/affordable technology. but I suspect those things would need to be made very rugged, else they would "fail to work" and "have technical problems" quite often. Not that I would ever accuse one of Our Finest of anything...
Actually, similar things have already happened with the video cameras used in many police cars. And of course the footage does double duty for TV shows such as "Worlds Worst Polica Chase Videos" or whatever they're called.
It is rather crude looking but we have video to prove it works.
From the comment "Slightly less enormous lego cube":
His page includes a short video showing the cube in operation.
I have little doubt these videos are real, but statements such as "have a video of it" remind me of those videos from that alleged robot allegedly made from a Cooper Mini automobile.
http://www.henrylim.org/Harpsichord.html
Yes, it's what the html filename says it is. Some of the pics appear to have jaggies from aliasing, but a closer look shows they are actual Lego blocks.
You can program a serial EEPROM with all the codes, clock it with an oscillator, with the output driving an infrared LED (maybe through a transistor to give enough drive current). Have it power up once every few minutes, with cmos 555 timer and long r/c time constant. This thing could be squeezed onto probably a 1cm square PCB, and powered for hours or days by a couple of button cells. In quantity you can make each one cheap enough to leave in an innocuous place in your otherwise-favorite-restaurant-except-for-the-TV. It may take them hours or days to figure out they can put tape on the TV remote receiver sensor, and then hours more to find it on the front panel. Eventually, every restaurant will have masking or electrical tape over the remote sensor.
The above text is for Entertainment Purposes Only, does not promote the making or use of any device, bla bla bla, etc. This text is not here just to cover my ass, please take it seriously. Your battery life may vary.
This brings back memories of when someone, as a joke, subscribed two mailing lists (one of which I was on) to each other.
...all loops (for, while, do) can all be handled by a simple if and goto statement.
I've always done that when coding in assembly language.
Geez, shouldn't they be using X11 by now? I mean, how long has it been out?
It's your typical low-speed protocol, and has been out long enough that the "1" in the string "X10" is now being transmitted.
(Joking)
Not me...
... go to the next exciting /. article, "27 Year Anniversary of the Mattel Electronics Football Game"
The author's name is Piers Anthony.
He does NOT just throw a bunch of words together to make up novels, he also throws in PUNS!
Of course, by the time the UN becomes the Defacto World Government, all processors will be 64 bit, so we won't have to worry about a register rolling over in Global Voting.
If I read TFA correctly, this is a version of the ARM processor, which is RISC, and though I'm not familiar with it, it should have fast, fixed interrupt response times. Predictable and low interrupt latency is absolutely the thing that small microcontrollers and DSP's have over the large, general-purpose CISC processors that take variable numbers of clock cycles for executing each of the different instructions in their pipelines, making interrupt response time a lottery.
2) Goodbye 8bit
There will always be a place for the smaller parts. Rice Cookers for example are manufacutered in *huge* quantities; Do you think they will spend 10 cent more on a CPU because it is 'easier to code on'? No.
I haven't taken a long, hard shopping trip to Wallmart or Target in a while, but the rice cookers I've seen don't have microcontrollers. Microwave ovens don't use 8-bit controllers, they use FOUR bit controllers(!) which are even cheaper in quantity, and are among the highest quantity processors in production.
Presuming microwave ovens become "smart" and on a network, they'll evolve to using 8-bit or 16-bit (such as MSP430) controllers with TCP/IP stack code. Then you can control the microwave through a webpage on the refrigerator's touchscreen.
But you're right, overall, rarely does any new introduction completely remove older technologies from the market, the older ones just get cheaper and find new niches to fill.
I dunno about the rest of you, but to me this line sounds suspiciously like, "If you don't anger it, maybe it will leave us alone and not hurt us."
g
This seems like appeasement, like saying "A vote for John Kerry ls a vote for the terrorists."
http://boortz.com/images/funny/global_test_kit.jp
Maybe they do it just because it works?
4 46041
No, they do it because they believe it works. If you end up going to enough meetings, you may end up believing it works too. That's what happened to me in AA.
See my other post in this thread:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=124489&cid=10