"I've seen a self-checkout cash register system boot up: Java on top of Windows"
Back in the early 90s I used to work for a firm that did checkout software. When I arrived it was written in C with a large amount of assembler on top of DOS and ran at a blistering pace even on a 286. Then some gimp of a manager got taken to lunch by some greasy haired sales rep and next thing we knew it was being re-written in VB & Powerbuilder (yeah , I know, laugh now but people used to think it was cool) on top of Win 3.1.
Upshot? It ran at about 1/4 the speed and crashed far more often plus the PCs needed to be 386 minimum - cue lots of upgrading by customers.
... (along with most other computer/OS manufacturers) that the OS is *NOT* to be used in situations where failure of the system may lead to injuries or loss of life. The fact that a consumer OS is being used at all, never mind one so suscpetable to malware, in a scenario wheres peoples lives may hang in the balance is frankly staggering.
Why should I do the googling for you you lazy cnut? Your the one who claimed JBoss had been around "a long time". Well newsflash buddy - 7 years isn't a long time in the message passing world.
Go look up JORAM, MSMQ, Active MQ , RabbitMQ , OAQ, Solace systems content routers as well as the 2 I already mentioned.
If you've found your code has a last minute bug or god forbid a design flaw then all those nice class/flow/structure diagrams go out the window and its quick and dirty hack time. Unfortunately this happens far to often meaning even the most well controlled projects eventually end up with some hairball code that some poor maintenance coder gets to wrestle with 2 years down the line. After all - if the hack works who's going to bother to tidy it up and rewrite it especially if everyone haa another dozen tasks on their todo list.
"Firstly, TTL consumes a great deal of power, which isn't optimal for a watch. "
CPU cores in those days weren't exactly known for their frugality. And most ran on 5V , not the 1V available from a watch battery.
What you describe I'm sure was possible but the watch I had was one of the very first that followed the LED generation of watches. I very much doubt it had anything approaching a 4004 in it - why embed 10K transistors to create a CPU core when you can get away with a tenth of that using hard wired logic? To use my other example - compare the number of transitors required to make pong , then compare that with the number that pong would have required if it had been built around a CPU. Of course the law of diminishing returns applies and at some level of functionality hard wiring would require more components but a watch isn't that level.
"My impression is that build quality on 1987 386s was better than on current equipment."
Indeed they were. Back in those days a PC was an expensive business item as was built accordingly. These days they're just disposable commodity items built to a price. Expecting them to function perfectly in 16 years time is IMO a touch optimistic.
... I wouldn't want to lay money on the electronics still working in 16 years time (gone off electrolytic capacitors being the most likely) and thats before you have to worry about the mechanical components of the hard drive seizing up through lack of use not to mention the data becoming corrupted as the magnetism on the disk slowly changes. And similarly even if you use a netbook with an SSD theres a good chance it would have lost or corrupted enough data by then to make it crash prone or even unbootable.
Back in the 80s you could walk into a Tandys (Radioshack in the states) and just buy components. Now all the Tandys are gone and Maplins has hardly any components in store - you need to mail order everything which is a bit off putting for people who just want to dabble. Well, IMO anyway.
at this moment in time , and goes down well with the we-hate-MS-stallman/linus/raymond[delete as applicable]-is-god fanboys which is what you need to get a story posted on slashdot.
I had a digital watch in 1979 that could do a stopwatch and day of the week. Do you honestly think it had a programmed CPU in it? It was all hardwired TTL logic on a single chip. You can do quite a lot with hardware alone - ask the creators of Pong.
Then you have to spend a day cleaning melted plastic off the sides of your oven and fumigating it. Hmm , I think I might be seeing a flaw in your friends plan...
Unfortunately Sci fi is a genre that doesn't age well unless its done *really* well. Cheap sets, tacky costumes, poor technology (sorry , a wardrobe with flashing lights and some tapes spinning doesn't cut it in 2009) and bad acting end up making something made in the 70s or 80s almost comical now. One of the few exceptions I can think of is Space 1999 (not sure if the yanks ever got that) which I watched last year and though it looked a bit dated the effects somehow still worked and Martin Landau was/is a fscking good actor.
And I don't see why a sci fi series dealing with adult themes should be made child friendly. Kids have enough TV of their own. Its bad enough with most films being downgraded to 12 certificates without infliciting the same on TV shows. Clearly you think the original series is rubbish or you would have shown your kids that instead.
Slashdot Mirror
Fair point.
"I've seen a self-checkout cash register system boot up: Java on top of Windows"
Back in the early 90s I used to work for a firm that did checkout software. When I arrived it was written in C with a large amount of assembler on top of DOS and ran at a blistering pace even on a 286. Then some gimp of a manager got taken to lunch by some greasy haired sales rep and next thing we knew it was being re-written in VB & Powerbuilder (yeah , I know, laugh now but people used to think it was cool) on top of Win 3.1.
Upshot? It ran at about 1/4 the speed and crashed far more often plus the PCs needed to be 386 minimum - cue lots of upgrading by customers.
Apparently they call it "progress".
We're talking about something a bit more critical than online text messaging for the facebook generation.
... (along with most other computer/OS manufacturers) that the OS is *NOT* to be used in situations where failure of the system may lead to injuries or loss of life. The fact that a consumer OS is being used at all, never mind one so suscpetable to malware, in a scenario wheres peoples lives may hang in the balance is frankly staggering.
Why should I do the googling for you you lazy cnut? Your the one who claimed JBoss had been around "a long time". Well newsflash buddy - 7 years isn't a long time in the message passing world.
Go look up JORAM, MSMQ, Active MQ , RabbitMQ , OAQ, Solace systems content routers as well as the 2 I already mentioned.
"Given that it's been around for so long"
Yeah, right. Go look up the 2 main ones used in the Fortune 100s - Websphere (formally) MQ Series and Tibco EMS and see how long they've been around.
Just what the world needed.
Is there something special about this that the 101 others around can't do or is it just a Me-Too product for Redhat?
If you've found your code has a last minute bug or god forbid a design flaw then all those nice class/flow/structure diagrams go out the window and its quick and dirty hack time. Unfortunately this happens far to often meaning even the most well controlled projects eventually end up with some hairball code that some poor maintenance coder gets to wrestle with 2 years down the line. After all - if the hack works who's going to bother to tidy it up and rewrite it especially if everyone haa another dozen tasks on their todo list.
"They must search for the label to find out where control is going to"
And how hard is that exactly?
/ in vi. BFD.
"Return, break and continue do not have this effect."
With a return you have no idea where its going to return to just by looking at a specific function. How is that clearer?
Taking the address of a label is a gnu extension to C. Its not part of the standard language.
"Firstly, TTL consumes a great deal of power, which isn't optimal for a watch. "
CPU cores in those days weren't exactly known for their frugality. And most ran on 5V , not the 1V available from a watch battery.
What you describe I'm sure was possible but the watch I had was one of the very first that followed the LED generation of watches. I very much doubt it had anything approaching a 4004 in it - why embed 10K transistors to create a CPU core when you can get away with a tenth of that using hard wired logic? To use my other example - compare the number of transitors required to make pong , then compare that with the number that pong would have required if it had been built around a CPU. Of course the law of diminishing returns applies and at some level of functionality hard wiring would require more components but a watch isn't that level.
"My impression is that build quality on 1987 386s was better than on current equipment."
Indeed they were. Back in those days a PC was an expensive business item as was built accordingly. These days they're just disposable commodity items built to a price. Expecting them to function perfectly in 16 years time is IMO a touch optimistic.
How can you accidentaly lick a live spark plug FFS???
... I wouldn't want to lay money on the electronics still working in 16 years time (gone off electrolytic capacitors being the most likely) and thats before you have to worry about the mechanical components of the hard drive seizing up through lack of use not to mention the data becoming corrupted as the magnetism on the disk slowly changes. And similarly even if you use a netbook with an SSD theres a good chance it would have lost or corrupted enough data by then to make it crash prone or even unbootable.
Back in the 80s you could walk into a Tandys (Radioshack in the states) and just buy components. Now all the Tandys are gone and Maplins has hardly any components in store - you need to mail order everything which is a bit off putting for people who just want to dabble. Well, IMO anyway.
at this moment in time , and goes down well with the we-hate-MS-stallman/linus/raymond[delete as applicable]-is-god fanboys which is what you need to get a story posted on slashdot.
I had a digital watch in 1979 that could do a stopwatch and day of the week. Do you honestly think it had a programmed CPU in it? It was all hardwired TTL logic on a single chip. You can do quite a lot with hardware alone - ask the creators of Pong.
You can't have an irrational base, its meaningless as calculations would be impossible other than as relative values of the base value itself.
It can't be accurately defined no matter what number base you use either as an interger + mantissa or as a fractional value.
... they have only needed 1 port! :)
Then you have to spend a day cleaning melted plastic off the sides of your oven and fumigating it. Hmm , I think I might be seeing a flaw in your friends plan...
"I'm not sure how respectable their space program actually was, and neither are a lot of people."
They put a couple of landers on venus and took pictures. Don't remember the yanks having managed that yet.
"we really have no idea how many cosmonauts died during the Soviet program."
Probably somewhat less than have died in the space shuttle.
"Thunderbirds has barely aged at all."
Agreed. I guess its because its puppets which makes it almost cartoon like and cartoons generally age much more slowly than live action.
Unfortunately Sci fi is a genre that doesn't age well unless its done *really* well. Cheap sets, tacky costumes, poor technology (sorry , a wardrobe with flashing lights and some tapes spinning doesn't cut it in 2009) and bad acting end up making something made in the 70s or 80s almost comical now. One of the few exceptions I can think of is Space 1999 (not sure if the yanks ever got that) which I watched last year and though it looked a bit dated the effects somehow still worked and Martin Landau was/is a fscking good actor.
And I don't see why a sci fi series dealing with adult themes should be made child friendly. Kids have enough TV of their own. Its bad enough with most films being downgraded to 12 certificates without infliciting the same on TV shows. Clearly you think the original series is rubbish or you would have shown your kids that instead.