You can auto-generate your own steps using Dancing Monkeys and mp3s of your own songs, if you're willing to spend a little time messing about (and a fair amount of cpu time). They work with Stepmania (is what I use).
It only works well on songs with a regular beat (about one in three songs I run it on provides a decent set of steps), but it at leasts lets you dance to something other than pop/trance and anime theme songs (not that I particularly dislike those genres, but they can get rather monotonous). For example, I've got fairly decent auto-generated steps for a bunch of Ministry, KMFDM and Gravity Kills songs. I also use it to generate very long songs (3-4 minutes) for exercise (I had to tweak the source code for that though).
Only downside is that the steps tend to be rather simplistic, but that means they are great for dancing at 2x speed for better exercise.
I use stepmania with a pc and a solid dance mat, mainly for exercise rather than enjoyment. I try to do 40-50 minutes of pretty fast dancing a day, which used to be enough to knacker me out, but these days I have to hold
5kg weights while dancing to get a decent workout.
I wasn't fat to start with, just unfit, but it is most definitely good exercise if you can get fast enough and do lots of songs one after another. Most of the stories on the internet about people losing weight with DDR seems to be from obese people getting down to normal weight, which I guess doesn't require one to get so good at DDR, nor spend much money on arcades/mats.
Whether it is any better than just going out running is debatable; I guess it depends on your personality whether you will find an hours DDR more boring than 40 minutes running, and whether you have enough money to get a decent mat. I've
moved on to alternating between DDR and running; running for endurance training, DDR for quick intense sprint type bursts and a better upper body workout (with the weights).
For Windows 2003 Server (what used to be.NET Server IIRC), they've recompiled everything with the/GS compiler switch, which hopefully will mean that at worst servers crash, rather than allowing overflows. The system talked about in the article sounds very similar, but I was a little unclear on whether this was in gcc, or whether they had explicitly instrumented all the kernel calls in some way.
For the 64 bit versions all pages have proper rwx permissions applied as specified in VirtualAlloc etc., but I'm not sure if the stack is no-exec by default.
Still, there are bound to be tons of protocol implementation errors that have nothing to do with fixed length buffers:P
It's a CPLD rather than an FPGA (bit of a vague distinction, CPLDs are generally much smaller and have fewer pins). It's probably not even big enough to do a single DES round. Most likely to be routing clocks and data buses around internally.
The 3000 gate figure is just the nand gate equivalent count, in reality it only has 128 moderately configurable cells. By comparison the FPGAs that people use for anything slightly serious start at about 600 cells (~40k gates, the cells in FPGAs are more complex). In the stuff I do (image processing mostly) the smallest FPGA I use is a xcv1000e with 27,648 cells (~1.5M gates), and this is fairly out of date.
OTOH you really don't want an FPGA in a handheld, as they are very inefficient in terms of power/heat. They get way too hot to touch running in my computer (admittedly without active cooling, but that would be difficult to achieve in a handheld anyway), and suck a huge amount of power (some of our machines with weaker 300W PSUs can't provide enough current to boot with an FPGA card in). Admittedly the parts I use are more heavyweight than you'd think of putting in a mobile device, but even the smaller ones need alot of power.
Annapolis (a slightly odd FPGA platform vendor) do a PCMCIA card called the Wildcard which apparently works in an iPaq (plus adaptor), for example used in this project for wireless encryption project. But they cost $999:)
There is a COM implementation for linux from softwareag. Admittedly it's geared towards transparent DCOM interop with windows machines rather than ActiveX style scripting, but pretty much all of the base COM stuff is there. Can be a bitch to get things working on it sometimes though.
More interestingly, Mozilla is largely hooked up using COM (well, they call it XPCOM, but it's extremely similar in the fundamentals), and there are mappings to JavaScript and Python. Maybe more people will expose applications/components using XPCOM in the future; isn't the web browser supposed to be the operating system anyway?... or maybe I'm out of date:)
Anyway, I agree, OLE/ActiveX/COM are great, and hopefully linux (or I guess more probably KDE/Gnome) will eventually incorporate some or all of the functionality they provide. But better, with less stupid gotchas, and less bloat (as a user I love OLE, as a developer I loath it:)
Whilst that's true to a certain extent, pre-compiled headers still definitely have their use just for cutting down the time taken for the compiler to find, load and parse all the system headers, crt headers, stl headers, boost headers etc.
You could argue that including only the very specific headers you need for each source file is the best way to go, but I think it is a reasonable trade-off to include all these static system/library headers in a precompiled header, then to re-reference the specific headers in the user source code to indicate the dependency explicitly. I totally agree with the stuff in the book about people binding modules together too tightly through inter-dependencies in user headers though (although I'm not convinced by everything he talks about:)
I usually chuck almost all the stl and alot of boost into my pre-compiled headers when setting up a build, which cuts the full rebuild time at least in half, usually more. I'm always reluctant to do a full rebuild of the same module under g++ as I know it'll take a long time (comparatively). Admittedly the larger each source file is, the less the benefit, but I tend towards lots of small to medium sized source files anyway.
I'm not sure how the gcc version will do it, but the msvc (boo, hiss etc.) version actually takes a memory dump of the parsed code tree when pre-compiling, then just copies this back into memory for successive compilations, so the speed increase is dramatic. Hopefully the gcc version does something similar (or better). Be nice if it had something similar to ccache built in as well.
Yeah, I though about mentioning it, but it seems like he's tied to NT. I'm using them for the same thing that I used to use the manual throttling for, and they are great, particularly when spawning lots of third party tools like compilers.
AFAIK they work on any W2k or higher machine, but I could be wrong; I don't think I use any machines that aren't server (rather than pro) for my stuff.
If you have a bit of C knowledge then you could write something to throttle the processes back via API calls. Simplest would be to find all the access processes (via toolhelp), then every once in a while enumerate all the threads in each process and suspend them for a fraction of a second (SuspendThread/ResumeThread).
As long as the suspensions are done quick and often there is usually no visible difference, except that the process takes a lower percentage of cpu time. Admittedly I've only used this sytem before to make processes self throttling, but there is no reason why it shouldn't work for third party processes.
Obviously it would take a bit of tuning to get right, particularly if the access processes aren't competing with anything else most of the time, but it shouldn't take more than a hundred lines of code.
Erm, yeah, or you could just run them at a lower priority.
There is some work towards improving the C++ standard library via boost, which is the semi-official testing ground for candidates. Most of the libraries are simply utilities for exploiting the language efficiently and safely, but there are also some more systems orientated libraries such as a cross platform threading library, filesytem support, type safe printf etc.
There has been talk of doing some higher level things such as networking, graphics and user interfaces, but nobody can come up with specifications that are simple enough, or that are easily ported between platforms.
Coolest new bit is the Spirit parser generator. Who needs seperate lex+yacc files, embed that BNF in the C++:)
Rabbit was an early mobile phone network in the UK (possibly elsewhere too) which only allowed you to make outgoing calls (to landlines), and only if you were within range of one of the access points. I think it's been mentioned on slashdot threads obliquely before. Mobile phone access in tube stations was supposedly one of its big advantages.
Anyway, when the scheme inevitably collapsed most of the Rabbit access point signs disappeared, but a noble few were left behind, either as largish stickers high on the wall, or as sticking out signs next to boxes on the ceiling/wall. I guess it was too much trouble to take them down, or they were just overlooked as they were covered in tube grime.
IIRC there was one in Tottenham Court Road, and another in Westminster, but I haven't noticed them in a year or so. I used to catch sight of them every once in a while and they always amused me.
try looking for the few Rabbit mobile phone access points that are still visible in some of the tube stations.
The few remaining relics of a once great mobile comms network (heh), slowly being obscured by grime.
Slashdot Mirror
You can auto-generate your own steps using Dancing Monkeys and mp3s of your own songs, if you're willing to spend a little time messing about (and a fair amount of cpu time). They work with Stepmania (is what I use).
It only works well on songs with a regular beat (about one in three songs I run it on provides a decent set of steps), but it at leasts lets you dance to something other than pop/trance and anime theme songs (not that I particularly dislike those genres, but they can get rather monotonous). For example, I've got fairly decent auto-generated steps for a bunch of Ministry, KMFDM and Gravity Kills songs. I also use it to generate very long songs (3-4 minutes) for exercise (I had to tweak the source code for that though).
Only downside is that the steps tend to be rather simplistic, but that means they are great for dancing at 2x speed for better exercise.
I use stepmania with a pc and a solid dance mat, mainly for exercise rather than enjoyment. I try to do 40-50 minutes of pretty fast dancing a day, which used to be enough to knacker me out, but these days I have to hold 5kg weights while dancing to get a decent workout.
I wasn't fat to start with, just unfit, but it is most definitely good exercise if you can get fast enough and do lots of songs one after another. Most of the stories on the internet about people losing weight with DDR seems to be from obese people getting down to normal weight, which I guess doesn't require one to get so good at DDR, nor spend much money on arcades/mats.
Whether it is any better than just going out running is debatable; I guess it depends on your personality whether you will find an hours DDR more boring than 40 minutes running, and whether you have enough money to get a decent mat. I've moved on to alternating between DDR and running; running for endurance training, DDR for quick intense sprint type bursts and a better upper body workout (with the weights).
For the 64 bit versions all pages have proper rwx permissions applied as specified in VirtualAlloc etc., but I'm not sure if the stack is no-exec by default.
Still, there are bound to be tons of protocol implementation errors that have nothing to do with fixed length buffers :P
The 3000 gate figure is just the nand gate equivalent count, in reality it only has 128 moderately configurable cells. By comparison the FPGAs that people use for anything slightly serious start at about 600 cells (~40k gates, the cells in FPGAs are more complex). In the stuff I do (image processing mostly) the smallest FPGA I use is a xcv1000e with 27,648 cells (~1.5M gates), and this is fairly out of date.
OTOH you really don't want an FPGA in a handheld, as they are very inefficient in terms of power/heat. They get way too hot to touch running in my computer (admittedly without active cooling, but that would be difficult to achieve in a handheld anyway), and suck a huge amount of power (some of our machines with weaker 300W PSUs can't provide enough current to boot with an FPGA card in). Admittedly the parts I use are more heavyweight than you'd think of putting in a mobile device, but even the smaller ones need alot of power.
Annapolis (a slightly odd FPGA platform vendor) do a PCMCIA card called the Wildcard which apparently works in an iPaq (plus adaptor), for example used in this project for wireless encryption project. But they cost $999 :)
More interestingly, Mozilla is largely hooked up using COM (well, they call it XPCOM, but it's extremely similar in the fundamentals), and there are mappings to JavaScript and Python. Maybe more people will expose applications/components using XPCOM in the future; isn't the web browser supposed to be the operating system anyway?... or maybe I'm out of date :)
Anyway, I agree, OLE/ActiveX/COM are great, and hopefully linux (or I guess more probably KDE/Gnome) will eventually incorporate some or all of the functionality they provide. But better, with less stupid gotchas, and less bloat (as a user I love OLE, as a developer I loath it:)
I seem to remember a similar discussion when the link was last posted :)
You could argue that including only the very specific headers you need for each source file is the best way to go, but I think it is a reasonable trade-off to include all these static system/library headers in a precompiled header, then to re-reference the specific headers in the user source code to indicate the dependency explicitly. I totally agree with the stuff in the book about people binding modules together too tightly through inter-dependencies in user headers though (although I'm not convinced by everything he talks about :)
I usually chuck almost all the stl and alot of boost into my pre-compiled headers when setting up a build, which cuts the full rebuild time at least in half, usually more. I'm always reluctant to do a full rebuild of the same module under g++ as I know it'll take a long time (comparatively). Admittedly the larger each source file is, the less the benefit, but I tend towards lots of small to medium sized source files anyway.
I'm not sure how the gcc version will do it, but the msvc (boo, hiss etc.) version actually takes a memory dump of the parsed code tree when pre-compiling, then just copies this back into memory for successive compilations, so the speed increase is dramatic. Hopefully the gcc version does something similar (or better). Be nice if it had something similar to ccache built in as well.
AFAIK they work on any W2k or higher machine, but I could be wrong; I don't think I use any machines that aren't server (rather than pro) for my stuff.
As long as the suspensions are done quick and often there is usually no visible difference, except that the process takes a lower percentage of cpu time. Admittedly I've only used this sytem before to make processes self throttling, but there is no reason why it shouldn't work for third party processes.
Obviously it would take a bit of tuning to get right, particularly if the access processes aren't competing with anything else most of the time, but it shouldn't take more than a hundred lines of code.
Erm, yeah, or you could just run them at a lower priority.
There has been talk of doing some higher level things such as networking, graphics and user interfaces, but nobody can come up with specifications that are simple enough, or that are easily ported between platforms.
Coolest new bit is the Spirit parser generator. Who needs seperate lex+yacc files, embed that BNF in the C++ :)
Anyway, when the scheme inevitably collapsed most of the Rabbit access point signs disappeared, but a noble few were left behind, either as largish stickers high on the wall, or as sticking out signs next to boxes on the ceiling/wall. I guess it was too much trouble to take them down, or they were just overlooked as they were covered in tube grime.
IIRC there was one in Tottenham Court Road, and another in Westminster, but I haven't noticed them in a year or so. I used to catch sight of them every once in a while and they always amused me.
try looking for the few Rabbit mobile phone access points that are still visible in some of the tube stations. The few remaining relics of a once great mobile comms network (heh), slowly being obscured by grime.