I've been watching their weekly update for a while and one of the most fascinating thing was
when they decided to do powered landing instead
of parachute:
The reason being that parachute has failure mode (premature deployment) which may possibley cause damanage on the ground in much wider area. But comparing to landing parachute, it is such a dynamic control that it MUST be landed by computer. How many of you trust your programming enough to
put your life solely depending on it?
Me? Hell no.
Apple computers do not hibernate. Rather, when they "sleep", enough devices (in particular, the dynamic RAM) are kept alive (at the cost of some battery life, if the computer is running on battery power). Consequently, upon wakeup, the user perceives instant-on behavior: a very desirable effect.
I don't know how they can be proud of not
hibernating. Windows can sleep OR hibernate. Although being a Mac household, hibernation is one reason I MIGHT consider
windows for my next laptop. The ability to get back to all you have left around with your laptop hibernating for a few days unplugged and still have full battery power when you open it up is VERY nice.
Somebody finally asked about the current water and answer was that it is possible 100s of meters below the surface. Still no specific mention of the mud.
Why they are all talking about the water of the past and not about the "mud" which is more exciting news about the "current" water. Also why nobody asking the question regarding this?
No, that's certified MAIL and not certified EMAIL as mentioned in my link. Yes, you can track certified physical mail electronically now, but the service I mentioned was totally digital. They were providing digital certificate service.
I think it was back in 1992, I was working for a company called
Applicon (or Schlumberger CAD/CAM division) and we were major reseller
of Digital hardware with our CAD/CAM software. Due to that
relashonship, we had early access to Alpha platform and I did trial
porting of our 3D graphics library to the platform.
I mean it was really early. The environment was that we cross
compiled/linked the image on a VAX, copy the image to dual mounted
disk, dismount the disk, boot Alpha and mount the disk and run the
image. No debugger. When the image crashed, I got register dump. Not even
stack trace. Network to the box was Digital's LAT (Local Area
Transport), so I used Xlib over that transport.
I think I spend a couple weeks there. In 2nd week, we got debugger,
version X.0001 or something. When I finally got our library to start
running some simple rendering test, the picture didn't look right. A
squre cube looked very distorted. Run a quick test of trigonometry
functions. Hmmm, sin() returning value bigger than 1.0 didn't look
right. Was told that I was a first one to excersize floating point on
their chip. It was fixed shortly and we got nice pictures drawn.
I was told that we were the first external customer to run code on
Alpha. And of course, we were doing all that work on the only ture
operating systerm on Alpha: VMS:-)
Another interesting but far less practical project I got involved
later was to try out Digital's binary translator which translated
DECstation (MIPS) Ultrix's binary image into Digital Unix (or was it
still OSF/1) Alpha binary image. It was pretty impressive. It took
our image, which was more than 40M on Ultrix (about 6million lines of
PL/I, C and Fortran), and created image more than 80M of size. It was
still maintaining whole MIPS image inside it because it has to
interpret the MIPS binary in some complicated situation. I think it
was for something like exception handling which our PL/I code heavily
used. After they fixed the last problem regarding this exception
handling, the translated image actually passed through our basic
regression test suite. I was not involved but there was also VAX/VMS
to Alpha/VMS binary translator, which we played with too. If I
remember correctly, some VMS softwares on early Alpha/VMS were
actually binary translated images. We never shipped anything using
those translators (it is pretty much impossible to debug the
translated image), but it was a interesting excersize.
Slashdot Mirror
December 20, 2003 notes
The reason being that parachute has failure mode (premature deployment) which may possibley cause damanage on the ground in much wider area. But comparing to landing parachute, it is such a dynamic control that it MUST be landed by computer. How many of you trust your programming enough to put your life solely depending on it? Me? Hell no.
Apple computers do not hibernate. Rather, when they "sleep", enough devices (in particular, the dynamic RAM) are kept alive (at the cost of some battery life, if the computer is running on battery power). Consequently, upon wakeup, the user perceives instant-on behavior: a very desirable effect.
I don't know how they can be proud of not hibernating. Windows can sleep OR hibernate. Although being a Mac household, hibernation is one reason I MIGHT consider windows for my next laptop. The ability to get back to all you have left around with your laptop hibernating for a few days unplugged and still have full battery power when you open it up is VERY nice.
This one has arms.
Somebody finally asked about the current water and answer was that it is possible 100s of meters below the surface. Still no specific mention of the mud.
Other images show the rover tracks clearly are being made in "mud", with water being pressed out of that material, Levin said. "That water promptly freezes and you can see reflecting ice. That's clearly ice. It could be nothing else," he said, "and the source is the water that came out of the mud."
Why they are all talking about the water of the past and not about the "mud" which is more exciting news about the "current" water. Also why nobody asking the question regarding this?
Flying VxWorks to Mars
No, that's certified MAIL and not certified EMAIL as mentioned in my link. Yes, you can track certified physical mail electronically now, but the service I mentioned was totally digital. They were providing digital certificate service.
USPS delivers a digital, signature-certified mail system
It is no where to be found in usps.gov anymore.
eCos has ITRON API implemented as a compatibility subsystem.
I mean it was really early. The environment was that we cross compiled/linked the image on a VAX, copy the image to dual mounted disk, dismount the disk, boot Alpha and mount the disk and run the image. No debugger. When the image crashed, I got register dump. Not even stack trace. Network to the box was Digital's LAT (Local Area Transport), so I used Xlib over that transport.
I think I spend a couple weeks there. In 2nd week, we got debugger, version X.0001 or something. When I finally got our library to start running some simple rendering test, the picture didn't look right. A squre cube looked very distorted. Run a quick test of trigonometry functions. Hmmm, sin() returning value bigger than 1.0 didn't look right. Was told that I was a first one to excersize floating point on their chip. It was fixed shortly and we got nice pictures drawn.
I was told that we were the first external customer to run code on Alpha. And of course, we were doing all that work on the only ture operating systerm on Alpha: VMS :-)
Another interesting but far less practical project I got involved later was to try out Digital's binary translator which translated DECstation (MIPS) Ultrix's binary image into Digital Unix (or was it still OSF/1) Alpha binary image. It was pretty impressive. It took our image, which was more than 40M on Ultrix (about 6million lines of PL/I, C and Fortran), and created image more than 80M of size. It was still maintaining whole MIPS image inside it because it has to interpret the MIPS binary in some complicated situation. I think it was for something like exception handling which our PL/I code heavily used. After they fixed the last problem regarding this exception handling, the translated image actually passed through our basic regression test suite. I was not involved but there was also VAX/VMS to Alpha/VMS binary translator, which we played with too. If I remember correctly, some VMS softwares on early Alpha/VMS were actually binary translated images. We never shipped anything using those translators (it is pretty much impossible to debug the translated image), but it was a interesting excersize.
Hiroto