What the Vax $Fortran/nodebug function did was to compile the code excluding any source code lines that had a "D" in the first column (or was it the 6th? I wrote about a half-million lines of the stuff long, long ago, and I claim Eld as a defense). The code line was a special procedural noop (a line of normal Fortran code) that became active upon compilation with the $Fortran/debug option. The code -- a breakpoint or print statement, generally -- was embedded in the code thus compiled. This was different from $run/nodebug, which meant to run without the debugger present at execution time.
This fits a pattern of "special nop function, programmer-defined and linked into the executable image and which must be mapped to various actions to be performed". As a literal construal of prior art it works, although I will admit Fortran IV is seldom used in embedded systems any more.
YMMV, please turn off radio before entering carwash as we are not liable for broken antennae.
If you're in an office with a Microsoft sales rep and you have a magazine featuring MySQL on the cover on your desk with a few Post-It flags inserted at random pages, printed magazines can potentially save you $millions. Of course, a competitor's branded coffee cup can sometimes have the same effect.
Maybe we shouldn't use solder any more? Micro sized wires were routinely welded on older model (VERY older model) IC's internally. Micro-miniature spring clips into copper plated holes? It could be made to work. Mind you, using present knowledge (or to be honest, my present lack of knowledge) any prototype laptop I built this way would cost as much as your car and would probably also need wheels, but hey -- this is theory, right?
Getting only a little more serious -- is there any alternative to the old fashioned wave soldering manufacturing process? Is there some combination of materials that could be laser or maser welded rather than soldered? What if we went copper-to-copper instead of aluminium-to-copper-via-solder? A micro-mechanical solution (spring clips) would have appeal if the right alloys -- conductive, non-corrosive, springy -- could be adapted. I doubt that anything we can lay our hands on today could do it, would take a lot of research, but then a newer, greener world would by definition be different, and we'll have to come up with some new thoughts. Maybe Wm & Melinda Gates could fund a few grants, pay some of that fortune back into the industry at the bedrock.
Sometimes one of those massive great electrolytics on the old Vax HSC controllers would go *PAF* and go up in a small, greasy mushroom cloud. Made fault tracking really easy.
DEC Engineer: "Where's the fault"? -- Me: "It's that HSC over there with the smoke stains on the back".
Any good blues chord progression should do it, repeat to fit in 12 bars. Prounounce the acronym as a word. Play it until you run out of alcohol or your brains fall out your ears, or both.
Apparently the developer litters the source code with SOFTWARE_BREAKPOINT; calls which turn into do-nothing statements if there is no debugger running the code
VMS Fortran IV: $ Fortran/nodebug
I hereby copyright the meme ROFL (Rolling On Floor Laughing) and it's derivitave ROFLBTCAFTC (Rolling On Floor Laughing, Biting The Carpet And Frightening The Cat. Oh, and unclosed parenthetical groups.
Phil Farmer wrote a book called Venus on the Half-Shell (oddly enough by pseudonym Kilgore Trout, a Vonnegut character's name). In it he described a place called "The Prison Planet". Laws were strictly enforced, and there were many of them. As the prison population grew, the prison walls expanded further and further until they crossed the equator, then kept on increasing the surface area of the prison. Eventually only a small circular wall remained with one guard in it, the only person living outside the prison.
Or another way to put it might be -- the more you tighten your grasp, Highness, the more planet will slip through your fingers.
The djinni is out of the bottle folks. The djinni is well and truly out of the bottle. If people try to firewall the Internet, you'll have to round up and imprison all your radio amateurs too. Got a copy of an old ARRL handbook out there? You can make a radio with one and enough copper wire & a few fairly easy to make bits. One good ham engineer on either side of the pond to boost a cheap wifi router and you've got Internet again. It wouldn't be a dump truck, or even much of a tube at the start, but you'd have at least as good a connection as the Samizdat network that pulled down another historical wall.
Dang. Sentimental tears. Where's my Pink Floyd collection? I want to hear my -- uh, off-site backup copy of The Wall again...
All governments tend toward feudalism. The component names change, and on the whole there's a lot more wealth to concentrate in the few, but call them bureaus, baronetcies, kingdoms, corporations, power and wealth will concentrate in fewer and fewer people until the disconnect between the emperors (The Gates' and Buffet's) the Kings (the C-level execs) and the people becomes so large it is refactored into a different society. Then the new groups tend toward feudalism over time again. Long live the technology underground. Until it wins, grows, and becomes a bureau itself...Perhaps I am a cynic.
I bow to your superior terminology, and would be happy to amend to use "wake" =).
Although, truth be told, I was wondering when someone would mentally map my illustration to the last ss windtunnel illustration they've seen.
Wind tunnels are fun. I remember watching the YF-18 model in one of the old Northrop wind tunnels when I was just starting out as a programmer (Honeywell DDP-15 anyone? Ooohh... a Graph Plotter!). I wanted that little toy sooo bad...
Move out. Homeowner's Associations are evil -- far, far worse than a school board for IQ(Mob)=least(IQ(Mob))/cardinality(Mob). Best of modern economics coupled with the worst of small-town power-mad parochialism. Yes, I have examples, no I won't bore you with them. But you'd better fit in, sunshine!
The point is, the cars are going to be generating that wind whether it's used or not. Inside a plenum, you will get a lateral compression shock wave from pushing the car through that air. That compression results in drag. Where that compressive effect is diminished (by say, venting it through holes in the plenum walls --- oh, yes, let's stick some turbines there while we're at it --- you will get a net reduction in the amount of drag on the cars. They're still pushing air and making the shock waves, but the compressive resistance is less than it would normally be, no? Ergo, no measurable penalty.
I imagine if they slso harvested all that exhaust heat from passing cars and friction dumped into the road from the rotating tyres, you could tap that heat differential with a closed gas heat exchanger perhaps running a Stirling engine.
The energy is being dumped anyway, might as well recover what we can. Reduce, re-use, regenerate...
So, do you hide the technology from people when they do ask about it? There's a difference between needing to know and wanting to know.
Unlike the other professions where people have very little visibility of the technology, the Internet (and the PC in general) is relatively new, pervasive and important, and people are going to ask about their environment until they're bludgeoned into not asking about it any more (and I do hope that point doesn't arrive any time soon).
If someone were to ask you what a BIOS did would you say "It's kind of how your desktop software knows about the hardware inside your PC" or would you assume they want more detail than that immediately, and say "I'm sorry, it's technical, and you don't have the background to understand it"?
The latter would elicit any of a number of negative responses, including "oh, so you don't know either...". And people do ask about such things, because some technical terms are close to the surface. If they want more, point them to the Wiki.
But a courteous question always deserves a courteous answer, if you have one to offer. If we try to cloister even basic concepts away then we're by default leaving it in the hands of people like Senator Ted to answer it for us.
I disagree, it isn't irrelevant to all, just those with a technology clue. I think we're developing an example of what C.P. Snow wrote about so long ago -- the huge gap developing between the intellectual "haves" and "have-nots". It's rapidly becoming an insurmountable gulf.
For people immersed in an IT culture, what the Internet "is" and "how it works" are no-brainers. But there's a trap of expertise in that it does not cross cultural boundaries, as communications between the technology "haves" and "have-nots" tends to atrophy and eventually the "other group" isn't recognised at all. Here's a sample meme:
"If all you have is a hammer, then it's generally a bad idea to adjust your BIOS settings".
I can understand that meme, you can understand that meme -- here's a test, can you imagine anyone who wouldn't get that meme? Yet the first part is local to an engineering aphorism and the second is pure desktop technology. Yet the meaning is immediately familiar to us. So familiar, in fact, that one cannot possibly imagine how anybody today could not "get" it. Yet how many people from, say, the class of people with only a small grocery store background, or a background in politics or fashion management or timber industry would know what a BIOS was if it bit them in the clock?
Those in the know are often unaware just how eye-glazing our conversation can be to those who don't. And trust me, there are a lot in the latter camp. A lot in the latter camp.
Um yes, I get asked specifically how it works. By people missing technical clue #1, who both want and need to know. So it's good to have a stock "elevator explanation" in hand. Sometimes I get asked by people who believe that someone who can explain something simply is likely someone who knows what it's all about, who are dismissive of people who can't "rise above the detail", and from whom the butter for my bread cometh, i.e. boss-level. People who spear you with 10 seconds of intense interest and adjust your career based on what you say in the first 9 seconds of that.
And everybody doesn't know. Honest. Senior execs, cab drivers, and nuns have asked me that question. They're not people I particularly want to offend, on general principles. Besides, I like people and appreciate their genuine interest.
Yes, most people have an idea of what the Internet does for them, but a number of laymen want to know what makes it go without being shown what a routing table is or what an MX record is for.
For these people I say:
"It's computers talking to other computers over cables. The cables are connected via a sort of automatic phone dialer called a "Router" using a sort of electronic phone directory called "DNS" where the name of the site you click on to is translated into the that site's phone number. That's simplistic, and there's a lot more to it than that of course, but that's basically it -- cables, routers and electronic directories".
Disclaimer -- I'm a senior architect for a major telco's VoIP transformation, so nothing I'm likely to say is authoritative. But I do have to say these words to people...
Funny thing is, you probably need math more working in a small shop than you would in the IT industry. Except for Boolean algebra, and set theory, and perhaps a bit of calculus, regular expressions... oh never mind, I'm wrong.
Dont't forget that you're dealing with a big phone company, so your everyday normal cartesian logic will not take hold there.
True! BistroMath has nothing on TelcoMath. Some days I think my job is so complex it would take a camel (preferably YouBastard himself) to understand it.
Slashdot Mirror
"Listen, am I the only one getting splinters from the keyboard here?"
"It can't be that cheap"
"Damn, they took my kidney!!"
Maybe. Mercury's mantle maximises magnitism at the Mohovoric median, meaning magma must melt marginally at most.
Yep. Popular metaphor. Good use of irony, Wall0159. Not slagging you, but people are not eggs.
This fits a pattern of "special nop function, programmer-defined and linked into the executable image and which must be mapped to various actions to be performed". As a literal construal of prior art it works, although I will admit Fortran IV is seldom used in embedded systems any more.
YMMV, please turn off radio before entering carwash as we are not liable for broken antennae.
If you're in an office with a Microsoft sales rep and you have a magazine featuring MySQL on the cover on your desk with a few Post-It flags inserted at random pages, printed magazines can potentially save you $millions. Of course, a competitor's branded coffee cup can sometimes have the same effect.
Getting only a little more serious -- is there any alternative to the old fashioned wave soldering manufacturing process? Is there some combination of materials that could be laser or maser welded rather than soldered? What if we went copper-to-copper instead of aluminium-to-copper-via-solder? A micro-mechanical solution (spring clips) would have appeal if the right alloys -- conductive, non-corrosive, springy -- could be adapted. I doubt that anything we can lay our hands on today could do it, would take a lot of research, but then a newer, greener world would by definition be different, and we'll have to come up with some new thoughts. Maybe Wm & Melinda Gates could fund a few grants, pay some of that fortune back into the industry at the bedrock.
DEC Engineer: "Where's the fault"? -- Me: "It's that HSC over there with the smoke stains on the back".
They don't got it in their pocket or their shoes
Chicago you know has Always had The Blues.
I guess this time was RIAA's turn to lose.
--
Any good blues chord progression should do it, repeat to fit in 12 bars. Prounounce the acronym as a word. Play it until you run out of alcohol or your brains fall out your ears, or both.
VMS Fortran IV: $ Fortran/nodebug
I hereby copyright the meme ROFL (Rolling On Floor Laughing) and it's derivitave ROFLBTCAFTC (Rolling On Floor Laughing, Biting The Carpet And Frightening The Cat. Oh, and unclosed parenthetical groups.
Or another way to put it might be -- the more you tighten your grasp, Highness, the more planet will slip through your fingers.
The djinni is out of the bottle folks. The djinni is well and truly out of the bottle. If people try to firewall the Internet, you'll have to round up and imprison all your radio amateurs too. Got a copy of an old ARRL handbook out there? You can make a radio with one and enough copper wire & a few fairly easy to make bits. One good ham engineer on either side of the pond to boost a cheap wifi router and you've got Internet again. It wouldn't be a dump truck, or even much of a tube at the start, but you'd have at least as good a connection as the Samizdat network that pulled down another historical wall.
Dang. Sentimental tears. Where's my Pink Floyd collection? I want to hear my -- uh, off-site backup copy of The Wall again...
All governments tend toward feudalism. The component names change, and on the whole there's a lot more wealth to concentrate in the few, but call them bureaus, baronetcies, kingdoms, corporations, power and wealth will concentrate in fewer and fewer people until the disconnect between the emperors (The Gates' and Buffet's) the Kings (the C-level execs) and the people becomes so large it is refactored into a different society. Then the new groups tend toward feudalism over time again. Long live the technology underground. Until it wins, grows, and becomes a bureau itself...Perhaps I am a cynic.
Although, truth be told, I was wondering when someone would mentally map my illustration to the last ss windtunnel illustration they've seen.
Wind tunnels are fun. I remember watching the YF-18 model in one of the old Northrop wind tunnels when I was just starting out as a programmer (Honeywell DDP-15 anyone? Ooohh... a Graph Plotter!). I wanted that little toy sooo bad...
Move out. Homeowner's Associations are evil -- far, far worse than a school board for IQ(Mob)=least(IQ(Mob)) /cardinality(Mob). Best of modern economics coupled with the worst of small-town power-mad parochialism. Yes, I have examples, no I won't bore you with them. But you'd better fit in, sunshine!
I imagine if they slso harvested all that exhaust heat from passing cars and friction dumped into the road from the rotating tyres, you could tap that heat differential with a closed gas heat exchanger perhaps running a Stirling engine.
The energy is being dumped anyway, might as well recover what we can. Reduce, re-use, regenerate...
Disclaimer: snow is sort of an abstract concept to me, and I don't really understand it.
Unlike the other professions where people have very little visibility of the technology, the Internet (and the PC in general) is relatively new, pervasive and important, and people are going to ask about their environment until they're bludgeoned into not asking about it any more (and I do hope that point doesn't arrive any time soon).
If someone were to ask you what a BIOS did would you say "It's kind of how your desktop software knows about the hardware inside your PC" or would you assume they want more detail than that immediately, and say "I'm sorry, it's technical, and you don't have the background to understand it"?
The latter would elicit any of a number of negative responses, including "oh, so you don't know either...". And people do ask about such things, because some technical terms are close to the surface. If they want more, point them to the Wiki.
But a courteous question always deserves a courteous answer, if you have one to offer. If we try to cloister even basic concepts away then we're by default leaving it in the hands of people like Senator Ted to answer it for us.
For people immersed in an IT culture, what the Internet "is" and "how it works" are no-brainers. But there's a trap of expertise in that it does not cross cultural boundaries, as communications between the technology "haves" and "have-nots" tends to atrophy and eventually the "other group" isn't recognised at all. Here's a sample meme:
"If all you have is a hammer, then it's generally a bad idea to adjust your BIOS settings".
I can understand that meme, you can understand that meme -- here's a test, can you imagine anyone who wouldn't get that meme? Yet the first part is local to an engineering aphorism and the second is pure desktop technology. Yet the meaning is immediately familiar to us. So familiar, in fact, that one cannot possibly imagine how anybody today could not "get" it. Yet how many people from, say, the class of people with only a small grocery store background, or a background in politics or fashion management or timber industry would know what a BIOS was if it bit them in the clock?
Those in the know are often unaware just how eye-glazing our conversation can be to those who don't. And trust me, there are a lot in the latter camp. A lot in the latter camp.
No, not what it is, everyone knows that --- they asked how it all worked. Different question.
And everybody doesn't know. Honest. Senior execs, cab drivers, and nuns have asked me that question. They're not people I particularly want to offend, on general principles. Besides, I like people and appreciate their genuine interest.
For these people I say:
"It's computers talking to other computers over cables. The cables are connected via a sort of automatic phone dialer called a "Router" using a sort of electronic phone directory called "DNS" where the name of the site you click on to is translated into the that site's phone number. That's simplistic, and there's a lot more to it than that of course, but that's basically it -- cables, routers and electronic directories".
Disclaimer -- I'm a senior architect for a major telco's VoIP transformation, so nothing I'm likely to say is authoritative. But I do have to say these words to people...
Fun treatment on this in an old SF novel "The Complete Venus Equilateral" by George O. Smith. Be careful with the air plant!
Doesn't that class as prior art?
Isn't this just a re-application of technique known since at least WWII?
Funny thing is, you probably need math more working in a small shop than you would in the IT industry. Except for Boolean algebra, and set theory, and perhaps a bit of calculus, regular expressions... oh never mind, I'm wrong.
True! BistroMath has nothing on TelcoMath. Some days I think my job is so complex it would take a camel (preferably YouBastard himself) to understand it.
Dunno... maybe medieval palentology was more advanced than we thought ;-P