Asterisk is a mess. Weird, idiosyncratic syntax that changes from version to version, poor documentation, and a lack of capability. You can program in the stuff, but it's not easy. It's a good cure for people who hate Perl and shell scripting. After struggling with crap like Asterisk, if you don't long for something better like Perl, you aren't a programmer.
One legacy of the past our businesses still suffer from is feudalism. We elect national leaders, but we still use the old systems of inheritance and absolute rule to select corporate leaders. Then, it was a near universally accepted fact that a domain's first obligation was to the ruler. The idea that a leader is a public servant, and that the interests of the people counted for anything, was unthinkable. To bolster this, domains had propaganda machines that constantly reminded everyone that the ruler was the smartest, wisest, and holiest person in the domain. "King by the grace of God" and "Long live the King". To suggest otherwise was treason. Sounds awful like modern corporations, doesn't it? Stockholders are supposed to elect leaders and vote on other matters, but they've been effectively sidelined thanks to the power to set the agenda being in the hands of a privileged few, the board members, and they are all too sympathetic to the problems and burdens suffered by the poor CEOs. The result is that we sometimes get lucky, but many times our corporations end up very badly run. Look at Hostess for a recent example. There, the "royalty" decided their serfs weren't oppressed enough and pillaged their kingdom. They grabbed the treasury and ran, leaving the kingdom to its fate. Which, without money and leadership, was a swift collapse.
I think patents should be abolished. Maybe they made sense more than 100 years ago, but to me the 1930s finding of universal computing calls into doubt the entire basis for patents. They ended up serving as another weapon in the arsenal of the rich to help perpetuate their wealth and power. To be sure, patent litigation doesn't always work out that way, and it was not meant to, rather the opposite. But now patents certainly favor the powerful.
It's a real slog reading the Silmarillion, thanks in part to the remote style Tolkien used. I didn't find it boring exactly. I found it stupidly tragic.
Behind half the plot elements is this notion of unrepeatability and decline. Yavanna can't grow another Two Trees to replace the ones the Dark Lord destroyed. Apparently, she also can't grow something else to light up the world, like a glowing tumbleweed, or mistletoe on the Trees, or a sunflower, or I dunno, a fly trap plant that eats spiders. We aren't given much of a reason why that's so, just a begging-the-question assertion that great works can only be done once. But, Feanor has captured the light of the Trees in his Silmarils, and they can be used to bring the Trees back to life. Except that somehow, this process would destroy the Silmarils, and that would so distress Feanor that he'd die. Naturally, Feanor can't make more Silmarils. Guess he didn't keep any notes! Then, Feanor is put on the spot, asked if he would give his Silmarils to Yavanna before they find out the question is moot, as the Dark Lord has also stolen the Silmarils. So Feanor gets to deny Yavanna, and she and her peers in their turn refuse to help Feanor get the Silmarils back. Another minor detail is that there are 3 Silmarils and only 2 Trees. Seems like Yavanna shouldn't need to destroy all 3 Silmarils to save the Trees.
Tolkien's universe is all about loss, regret, and decline. Sure broadens the scope for tragedy, but I find the whole idea grating.
The T-shirt company actually tried to rip her off and keep the money without making the shirts
More details, please. What is the name of this t-shirt company? And why did they try to rip off a customer? Was it because they're prejudiced scum who figured a customer who is a minor and a female would just roll over dead rather than fight? Or did Scientology somehow hear about it and pressure them? But in the latter case, why not simply return the money? Of course the cult could have been encouraging the t-shirt maker to keep the money, to deal a crippling blow to the plans to make those t-shirts. Classic Scientology tactic, attacking the means.
When considering a new project, I look first for libraries I want to use. CPAN has the most commonly used ones, but get a little obscure, and you're out of luck. For instance, CPAN has OpenGL, but not OpenSceneGraph. Then I find out what languages interface with them. It quickly narrows down until maybe one language is left, and most often that language is C/C++. Sometimes no languages are left, and then I have to decide if I want to go through the pain of linking multiple languages, or search for more libraries. I like Perl's data types and regular expressions, but the pain of interfacing with a C library is greater than the convenience of not having to hack up custom hash functions and not bother with dynamic memory management. At least there's PCRE.
Perl 6 is supposed to address this issue. Seamless interfacing with any C/C++ libraries. If it works, would make a lot of CPAN redundant. Been waiting for Perl 6 for years now.
I visited London in 1985. After just one day, my snot was black from all the soot. Was disconcerting to blow my nose and see a white tissue turn black. I hear that today, London is much cleaner.
Intelligence doesn't help if you don't use it. It still only takes one mistake to turn anyone into a Darwin Award nominee. Even geniuses can screw up fatally. Then there's bad luck.
I have a relative who is comfortably above average intelligence, judging from her ability to write good English, organize and plan, manage money, not be suckered by con artists, and in general navigate the complexities of modern life. But she believes in cultish branches of Christianity and associated nonsense such as Creationism, faith healing, prophecy, and that D&D is evil. When confronted, she simply turns her brain off. In 1991, during the fall of the Soviet Union, she predicted that Gorby, whose birth mark was the mark of evil, would take over as absolute dictator of Russia, and then would invade Israel, thus kicking off the End of the World. When events didn't unfold as she prophesied, she conveniently dropped the whole thing. Some years later, her pet conspiracy theory was this notion that there was a mysterious 6 story building in Belgium in which vital data about every person in the world was being stored, and once it was all collected then bad stuff would happen. I quickly shredded that one by pointing out that no 6 story building was needed, a stack of CDs one person could carry around could hold enough data to do that. She was in shock while the implications of that revelation sank in. Recently, she nearly died from a ruptured appendix. Wouldn't go to a real doctor until it was nearly too late.
Part of the problem is that she stays away from other smart people. There's no one in her circle who can reason better than she can. She spews out nonsense, and no one around her can argue about it.
Some would say no one who believes nonsense like that can be intelligent. She is an exhibit to the contrary. One should remember that education and accumulated knowledge counts for much. Archimedes was one of the greatest scientists of antiquity, but there is much we know today that he never figured out, never had a chance to figure out, hobbled as he was by the knowledge of his time and the lack of tools for exploring the world. A crucial tool lacking in antiquity was a decent numbering system. Doing math with Roman numbers is painful.
Yes, you're right. They mentioned CMPXCHG and XADD on LKML. I thought that those were not important, because you don't need SMP on a machine that doesn't have multiple CPUs. Machines with multiple CPUs were pretty rare before 64bit PCs. Didn't know about the limitation on the WP bit.
Last time I ran a benchmark, FAT was by far the slowest file system. Ext2, 3 and 4, Reiser 3 and 4, btrfs, xfs, jfs, and even ntfs were all much faster. Each varied on different kinds of loads, but the differences between them was insignificant next to the difference in speed between all of them and FAT. Simplicity often doesn't translate to speed. FAT does many things in brain dead ways. Let's rewrite the entire file for every tiny change, and do it right away, no caching! Insert a little something in the middle? Rewrite all the data that comes after it! And don't even try to at least defragment a little bit while doing so.
That's why you don't use heat pumps much in colder climates. They're good down to about freezing or a little below, which is about as cold as it gets in winter in the southern US. For colder climates, it's better to use gas or oil. Best of all is solar. A large, southward facing set of windows can heat a house in the northern US almost by itself, needing only a little boost.
Electric heat is effective in cold climates, but expensive. It should be your last choice.
Aaaggh! This is what I hate so about interviewing. All my education, training, and experience means less than a highly subjective and unreliable measure such as body language. In those kinds of interviews, it's annoying to discover you've been wasting your time talking with someone who doesn't care what you're talking about because they don't know jack about technology. All they've been doing is judging your mannerisms, seeing how old you look, and listening for any hints about your family situation that they're not supposed to consider when making a hiring decision.
You rely on body language, and you will get stuck with the bullshit artists. There are more bullshit artists than there are competent engineers. Think you can tell the different between these two kinds of people? If you don't know the field, you haven't got a chance. Take people who are weak on math and hazy about the odds and rules of poker but who think they're great at reading body language, and see how far they get.
Last time I took a quick look at the Computer Science section of ArXiv, I only looked over a dozen titles, and saw one paper which claimed to prove that P=NP. I skimmed that paper, and found it full of plain wrong assertions, that is, where they simply hadn't glossed over things entirely. In short, that paper was garbage. If ArXiv filters obvious crackpots, they sure missed that one.
ought to change the kernel version number to 4
on
Linux Nukes 386 Support
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· Score: 3, Insightful
This is a big enough change to warrant version 4.0. Otherwise, we might reach kernel version 3.8.6 which won't work on a 386.
What I don't understand is what change between the 386 and 486 makes dropping the 386 a good idea. What functionality has the 486 got that the 386 doesn't have?
The powers that be are clinging hard to their ownership "paradise", demonstrating yet again that they are willing to simply trample upon the law when they can't change it enough to suit themselves. Decency and the good of society be damned, when they aren't clothing themselves in fake morality.
History is full of reactionary, entrenched interests struggling mightily to hold back change for the better, and failing every time but not before causing a great deal of damage and misery. A few people were burnt at the stake for using the Gutenberg press to print unsanctioned Bibles. Monarchists executed many democrats. The US Civil War was one of the most extreme cases. Today we have Big Oil fighting to deny that there is a global warming problem, to the point it seems they really would rather see hundreds of coastal metropolises drown or go to the prohibitive expense of building dikes along the entire coast, if that meant they could keep selling oil. Otherwise they would have to develop and tap new sources of energy. They might have to hire more engineers and scientists, and even train more, heaven forbid!
Big Media's hypocrisy is exposed again. What next? Would be nice if humanity advanced to the point that reactionary moves were immediately discerned and those trying any dirty pool were swiftly censured. Then these kinds of differences would be resolved before the mud or bullets flew.
Don't forget screwing employees out of even base pay by refusing to employ them on a wage or salary basis, but instead calling them "contractors" and paying through a 1099 form which lets them skip social security contributions, health insurance, and various labor laws. Under that arrangement, contractors have to pay social security taxes out of their own pockets. If the employer is late (as in never) with the pay, the contractor cannot go to the labor board. The only recourse is a lawsuit. That's why people ought not to accept a 1099 arrangement unless the pay is considerably higher than a salaried rate. $30/hour on a 1099 is NOT equivalent to $60k/year annual salary. I've heard that 1099 pay ought to be as much as 50% higher to compensate.
10 years ago I was making $80k/year in the Monterey area. You certainly can live on that, if you stay the hell out of a house. I rented an apartment for $900 per month. Cheapest house I saw was half a million for a tiny, run down 1950s house with 2 bed, 1 bath. I could have had something for "only" $300k in Salinas, about 20 miles away. But something else to think about is the lack of job security. And sure enough, that job ended in a total train wreck. I could have entered into a brutal mortgage, only to have to sell a year later. Sales commission of something like 5%, plus property taxes (I never did find out how bad that was), and most of all the fact that in the first years of a mortgage one does not make much headway on the principal, means I could have easily forked over $50k or more for the privilege of living in a house in California for 1 year. The only thing that would have saved the situation was that houses were still bubbling up at that time. But suppose I had bought a house, and the bubble had burst during the year I was there, and I go underwater on the mortgage? Despite making $80k, I would have lost money on the deal, and would have been better off if I'd been unemployed rather than take that job in California.
If you're thinking only a dummy would have bought a house, remember at that time it was inconceivable that a house could turn into a bad investment like that. Many people advised me in all seriousness to buy a house. A few of these were my bosses, who leaned on me to commit to a major buy so that in their eyes I would be a more "reliable" employee. That's all part of the management theory of "hold gun to employee's head". I would work harder, because if things blew up I would lose my home. Well, to use a car analogy, pulling off a miracle by making the car able to go 300 mph does not help if the management can't figure out which road to take. And if I also had car payments, a student loan, and a family to support, what would have happened? I can imagine the student loan administrator hammering on me to make payments since I was employed, ratcheting up the rate perhaps even as the house was drowning me.
So, yeah, $80k per year is not enough to bail you out if you in all innocence pursue the American Dream and it turns into a nightmare. The American Dream wasn't supposed to be a trap.
Mars could be a hedge against disaster. But maybe not a very good one. There's really no reason why a nuclear war on Earth couldn't reach Mars as well. And humanity on Mars would no doubt be far more fragile. The harder problem is not moving ourselves there, it's establishing our environment. Likely there would be millions of species we could never establish on Mars in any kind of "natural" self sustaining fashion. If we brought them to Mars at all, they'd have to stay in greenhouses and zoos. Not that we'd be much better off ourselves on that point.
What would it take to get Mars to the point where we could reestablish life on Earth should it be wiped out by some terrible accident such as a massive meteor strike? We don't yet know our own world or ourselves well enough. Biosphere 2 showed that among other things. Or, suppose Earth was not just killed but also rendered uninhabitable for millennia, as could happen if lots of radioactive material were dumped on it? Could a Martian colony survive without Earth?
We really cannot count on Mars to save us in case we recklessly spoil the Earth.
Conditional instructions are cool. The x86 instruction set isn't.
Are there any x86 instructions that are slow to emulate
Yes. Lots of them. Not only are these instructions slow, they're useless. No one needs the ASCII or decimal adjust instructions AAA, AAD, AAS, AAM, DAA, or DAS anymore, and they were never much use to start with. There have been a few cases in which these instructions were cleverly used for other than their intended purpose, but those are rare. Then there's the REP with CMPSB, CMPSW, SCASB, and SCASW instructions. They're useless for string searches-- we have much better string search algorithms than that. SCAS in particular is a legacy of C strings. Its main use is to search for the terminating null. Nice, except that the terminating null never was a good idea to start with, and we've been pulling away from it. They're useful for string comparison, except that we have lots of ways to avoid having to do a nasty old string comparison. LOOP could have been more useful, except they tied it to a single register-- the same register that REP needs. Besides, it doesn't save much-- a DEC plus JNE does the same thing. There is also CALL and RET, and PUSH, POP, PUSHF, and POPF. The idea of subroutines and stacks is fine, but this implementation pigs out on valuable registers (a longstanding criticism of x86 is that they didn't put in enough general purpose registers), and stacks can be implemented just fine with more general purpose instructions. CALL can be done with a store and jump, and RET can be done with a indirect jump that fetches the address stored earlier. Stacks are so 1970s in thinking. The x87 stuff is even more fixated on organizing around a stack. We have gobs of memory now, but this PUSH and POP work on one register at a time. Why? So a subroutine can save only the registers it uses? In the 1970s, every byte was precious. Now, have a LOADALL and STOREALL instruction with a more general pointer increment not one that must use only one register pair, SP:SI, don't worry if a few registers that didn't need saving got saved anyway, and let the CPU get on with the real code instead of forcing it to pipeline 8 or more PUSH instructions. Instructions like XLAT and LODS are more of those overspecific, too limited to be much use instructions. The function they perform is very useful, but it's better done more generally with an indirect MOV. The instructions for manipulating flags, LAHF and SAHF, and CLC, CLI, CLD, CMC, STC, STD, and STI are rather silly. Have a register devoted to the flags, and manipulate them with all the general purpose instructions that work on any register, rather than waste opcode space on them. Another dumb instruction is TEST, which is an AND that doesn't keep the result, it only sets flags. Totally unnecessary if there are plenty of registers.
The x86 is absolutely chock full of 1970s cruft that isn't much used anymore, but which must be dragged around for the odd compatibility need. Worse, it wasn't even all that good a design for its time!
Copyright is a bigger problem than most appreciate. This isn't about free entertainment, this is about legal restrictions on our opportunities to share knowledge. "Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it." I don't want to repeat mistakes because knowledge of them are locked away by copyright.
The only theft going on here is the theft of our natural rights to share, and our right to speech. Speech might cause unauthorized sharing to occur.
Sharing of knowledge is a huge social good. We got to the top of the animal kingdom not only through sheer intelligence, but also by harnessing our great intelligence through cooperation. Sharing of knowledge is a vital part of the cooperation that has enabled us to work together. Over the past few decades, these greedy fools have tried to make themselves the gatekeepers through which all sharing passes. They can't see or don't care that if they somehow succeeded, they would slow progress to nothing, and hurt themselves as well as the rest of us. All they see is money. They would deny us the methods we used to reach the top, and which we still very badly need to solve the problems we still face. All the money in the world does you no good if you need something that doesn't exist. Things like cures for AIDS and cancer, knowledge of an approaching meteor of a size that killed the dinosaurs and the means to avert it, tools to deal with climate change and ocean acidification, advances enabling us to colonize Mars, flying cars, and who knows what else. And most of all, establishing and maintaining a tradition of openness and honesty so that real crimes can't be hidden.
Fortunately for us all, they can't stop the sharing of knowledge. They can outlaw it, demonize it, viciously victimize a few unfortunates to try to terrorize us all, but not stop it. Sharing should be seen as an act of good and kindness like charitable donations, but even better, and far more common. Instead, these squatters on intellectual "properties" have suckered a lot of people into thinking of knowledge as deserving of the same ownership and handling as real, physical property. Getting people to use the very term, "property", and to make the association with "theft", was huge. It's sad how many people are thoroughly indoctrinated with the holiness of ownership, and get extremely moralistic over piracy, defending these villains and their propaganda. But the edifice is cracking. I find the successes of the Pirate Party most encouraging. No matter how this latest issue plays out, it will be good publicity. Keep it up, PP!
Sometimes lights malfunction. Sometimes the sensors fail to detect a vehicle. I've had that happen to me a few times. Late at night once I spent over five minutes waiting for a light to change. In all that time, I saw just one other car on the crossing road. Finally another car came up beside me and the light still did not change. The other fellow finally ran the light.
Are you going to wait at a red light at an empty intersection for 10 minutes? 15 minutes? At what point do you decide it's not working correctly? Blind obedience means you wait there until it turns green, even if it takes all night.
Revenue cynicism and whiners is it? You are trolling. There is such a thing as objectivity, which can be applied to determine whether a complaint is fair or not. In this case, we have documented evidence of yellow lights being shortened below what little we do have in the way of standards. This cheating is quite common. We also have many cases of cities abandoning their red light camera programs when they prove unprofitable.
Enforcement should always be the last resort for dealing with a problem. If a problem can be fixed without resorting to heavy penalties, we should do so. Moralizing about it is especially touchy. And there is a simple fix-- come up with a fair standard for the length of the yellow, and stick to it. While we do have some minimums that aren't good enough, you'll notice we have no maximum. We could make the yellow light last 10 seconds or longer if we wanted. As far as I know, no light has ever been set so, why is that?
That we don't have a fair standard is all the evidence a reasonable person needs to know what this is really all about.
Slashdot Mirror
Asterisk is a mess. Weird, idiosyncratic syntax that changes from version to version, poor documentation, and a lack of capability. You can program in the stuff, but it's not easy. It's a good cure for people who hate Perl and shell scripting. After struggling with crap like Asterisk, if you don't long for something better like Perl, you aren't a programmer.
One legacy of the past our businesses still suffer from is feudalism. We elect national leaders, but we still use the old systems of inheritance and absolute rule to select corporate leaders. Then, it was a near universally accepted fact that a domain's first obligation was to the ruler. The idea that a leader is a public servant, and that the interests of the people counted for anything, was unthinkable. To bolster this, domains had propaganda machines that constantly reminded everyone that the ruler was the smartest, wisest, and holiest person in the domain. "King by the grace of God" and "Long live the King". To suggest otherwise was treason. Sounds awful like modern corporations, doesn't it? Stockholders are supposed to elect leaders and vote on other matters, but they've been effectively sidelined thanks to the power to set the agenda being in the hands of a privileged few, the board members, and they are all too sympathetic to the problems and burdens suffered by the poor CEOs. The result is that we sometimes get lucky, but many times our corporations end up very badly run. Look at Hostess for a recent example. There, the "royalty" decided their serfs weren't oppressed enough and pillaged their kingdom. They grabbed the treasury and ran, leaving the kingdom to its fate. Which, without money and leadership, was a swift collapse.
I think patents should be abolished. Maybe they made sense more than 100 years ago, but to me the 1930s finding of universal computing calls into doubt the entire basis for patents. They ended up serving as another weapon in the arsenal of the rich to help perpetuate their wealth and power. To be sure, patent litigation doesn't always work out that way, and it was not meant to, rather the opposite. But now patents certainly favor the powerful.
It's a real slog reading the Silmarillion, thanks in part to the remote style Tolkien used. I didn't find it boring exactly. I found it stupidly tragic.
Behind half the plot elements is this notion of unrepeatability and decline. Yavanna can't grow another Two Trees to replace the ones the Dark Lord destroyed. Apparently, she also can't grow something else to light up the world, like a glowing tumbleweed, or mistletoe on the Trees, or a sunflower, or I dunno, a fly trap plant that eats spiders. We aren't given much of a reason why that's so, just a begging-the-question assertion that great works can only be done once. But, Feanor has captured the light of the Trees in his Silmarils, and they can be used to bring the Trees back to life. Except that somehow, this process would destroy the Silmarils, and that would so distress Feanor that he'd die. Naturally, Feanor can't make more Silmarils. Guess he didn't keep any notes! Then, Feanor is put on the spot, asked if he would give his Silmarils to Yavanna before they find out the question is moot, as the Dark Lord has also stolen the Silmarils. So Feanor gets to deny Yavanna, and she and her peers in their turn refuse to help Feanor get the Silmarils back. Another minor detail is that there are 3 Silmarils and only 2 Trees. Seems like Yavanna shouldn't need to destroy all 3 Silmarils to save the Trees.
Tolkien's universe is all about loss, regret, and decline. Sure broadens the scope for tragedy, but I find the whole idea grating.
The T-shirt company actually tried to rip her off and keep the money without making the shirts
More details, please. What is the name of this t-shirt company? And why did they try to rip off a customer? Was it because they're prejudiced scum who figured a customer who is a minor and a female would just roll over dead rather than fight? Or did Scientology somehow hear about it and pressure them? But in the latter case, why not simply return the money? Of course the cult could have been encouraging the t-shirt maker to keep the money, to deal a crippling blow to the plans to make those t-shirts. Classic Scientology tactic, attacking the means.
When considering a new project, I look first for libraries I want to use. CPAN has the most commonly used ones, but get a little obscure, and you're out of luck. For instance, CPAN has OpenGL, but not OpenSceneGraph. Then I find out what languages interface with them. It quickly narrows down until maybe one language is left, and most often that language is C/C++. Sometimes no languages are left, and then I have to decide if I want to go through the pain of linking multiple languages, or search for more libraries. I like Perl's data types and regular expressions, but the pain of interfacing with a C library is greater than the convenience of not having to hack up custom hash functions and not bother with dynamic memory management. At least there's PCRE.
Perl 6 is supposed to address this issue. Seamless interfacing with any C/C++ libraries. If it works, would make a lot of CPAN redundant. Been waiting for Perl 6 for years now.
I visited London in 1985. After just one day, my snot was black from all the soot. Was disconcerting to blow my nose and see a white tissue turn black. I hear that today, London is much cleaner.
Intelligence doesn't help if you don't use it. It still only takes one mistake to turn anyone into a Darwin Award nominee. Even geniuses can screw up fatally. Then there's bad luck.
I have a relative who is comfortably above average intelligence, judging from her ability to write good English, organize and plan, manage money, not be suckered by con artists, and in general navigate the complexities of modern life. But she believes in cultish branches of Christianity and associated nonsense such as Creationism, faith healing, prophecy, and that D&D is evil. When confronted, she simply turns her brain off. In 1991, during the fall of the Soviet Union, she predicted that Gorby, whose birth mark was the mark of evil, would take over as absolute dictator of Russia, and then would invade Israel, thus kicking off the End of the World. When events didn't unfold as she prophesied, she conveniently dropped the whole thing. Some years later, her pet conspiracy theory was this notion that there was a mysterious 6 story building in Belgium in which vital data about every person in the world was being stored, and once it was all collected then bad stuff would happen. I quickly shredded that one by pointing out that no 6 story building was needed, a stack of CDs one person could carry around could hold enough data to do that. She was in shock while the implications of that revelation sank in. Recently, she nearly died from a ruptured appendix. Wouldn't go to a real doctor until it was nearly too late.
Part of the problem is that she stays away from other smart people. There's no one in her circle who can reason better than she can. She spews out nonsense, and no one around her can argue about it.
Some would say no one who believes nonsense like that can be intelligent. She is an exhibit to the contrary. One should remember that education and accumulated knowledge counts for much. Archimedes was one of the greatest scientists of antiquity, but there is much we know today that he never figured out, never had a chance to figure out, hobbled as he was by the knowledge of his time and the lack of tools for exploring the world. A crucial tool lacking in antiquity was a decent numbering system. Doing math with Roman numbers is painful.
Yes, you're right. They mentioned CMPXCHG and XADD on LKML. I thought that those were not important, because you don't need SMP on a machine that doesn't have multiple CPUs. Machines with multiple CPUs were pretty rare before 64bit PCs. Didn't know about the limitation on the WP bit.
Last time I ran a benchmark, FAT was by far the slowest file system. Ext2, 3 and 4, Reiser 3 and 4, btrfs, xfs, jfs, and even ntfs were all much faster. Each varied on different kinds of loads, but the differences between them was insignificant next to the difference in speed between all of them and FAT. Simplicity often doesn't translate to speed. FAT does many things in brain dead ways. Let's rewrite the entire file for every tiny change, and do it right away, no caching! Insert a little something in the middle? Rewrite all the data that comes after it! And don't even try to at least defragment a little bit while doing so.
That's why you don't use heat pumps much in colder climates. They're good down to about freezing or a little below, which is about as cold as it gets in winter in the southern US. For colder climates, it's better to use gas or oil. Best of all is solar. A large, southward facing set of windows can heat a house in the northern US almost by itself, needing only a little boost.
Electric heat is effective in cold climates, but expensive. It should be your last choice.
Body language is very important.
Aaaggh! This is what I hate so about interviewing. All my education, training, and experience means less than a highly subjective and unreliable measure such as body language. In those kinds of interviews, it's annoying to discover you've been wasting your time talking with someone who doesn't care what you're talking about because they don't know jack about technology. All they've been doing is judging your mannerisms, seeing how old you look, and listening for any hints about your family situation that they're not supposed to consider when making a hiring decision.
You rely on body language, and you will get stuck with the bullshit artists. There are more bullshit artists than there are competent engineers. Think you can tell the different between these two kinds of people? If you don't know the field, you haven't got a chance. Take people who are weak on math and hazy about the odds and rules of poker but who think they're great at reading body language, and see how far they get.
Last time I took a quick look at the Computer Science section of ArXiv, I only looked over a dozen titles, and saw one paper which claimed to prove that P=NP. I skimmed that paper, and found it full of plain wrong assertions, that is, where they simply hadn't glossed over things entirely. In short, that paper was garbage. If ArXiv filters obvious crackpots, they sure missed that one.
This is a big enough change to warrant version 4.0. Otherwise, we might reach kernel version 3.8.6 which won't work on a 386.
What I don't understand is what change between the 386 and 486 makes dropping the 386 a good idea. What functionality has the 486 got that the 386 doesn't have?
The powers that be are clinging hard to their ownership "paradise", demonstrating yet again that they are willing to simply trample upon the law when they can't change it enough to suit themselves. Decency and the good of society be damned, when they aren't clothing themselves in fake morality.
History is full of reactionary, entrenched interests struggling mightily to hold back change for the better, and failing every time but not before causing a great deal of damage and misery. A few people were burnt at the stake for using the Gutenberg press to print unsanctioned Bibles. Monarchists executed many democrats. The US Civil War was one of the most extreme cases. Today we have Big Oil fighting to deny that there is a global warming problem, to the point it seems they really would rather see hundreds of coastal metropolises drown or go to the prohibitive expense of building dikes along the entire coast, if that meant they could keep selling oil. Otherwise they would have to develop and tap new sources of energy. They might have to hire more engineers and scientists, and even train more, heaven forbid!
Big Media's hypocrisy is exposed again. What next? Would be nice if humanity advanced to the point that reactionary moves were immediately discerned and those trying any dirty pool were swiftly censured. Then these kinds of differences would be resolved before the mud or bullets flew.
Don't forget screwing employees out of even base pay by refusing to employ them on a wage or salary basis, but instead calling them "contractors" and paying through a 1099 form which lets them skip social security contributions, health insurance, and various labor laws. Under that arrangement, contractors have to pay social security taxes out of their own pockets. If the employer is late (as in never) with the pay, the contractor cannot go to the labor board. The only recourse is a lawsuit. That's why people ought not to accept a 1099 arrangement unless the pay is considerably higher than a salaried rate. $30/hour on a 1099 is NOT equivalent to $60k/year annual salary. I've heard that 1099 pay ought to be as much as 50% higher to compensate.
10 years ago I was making $80k/year in the Monterey area. You certainly can live on that, if you stay the hell out of a house. I rented an apartment for $900 per month. Cheapest house I saw was half a million for a tiny, run down 1950s house with 2 bed, 1 bath. I could have had something for "only" $300k in Salinas, about 20 miles away. But something else to think about is the lack of job security. And sure enough, that job ended in a total train wreck. I could have entered into a brutal mortgage, only to have to sell a year later. Sales commission of something like 5%, plus property taxes (I never did find out how bad that was), and most of all the fact that in the first years of a mortgage one does not make much headway on the principal, means I could have easily forked over $50k or more for the privilege of living in a house in California for 1 year. The only thing that would have saved the situation was that houses were still bubbling up at that time. But suppose I had bought a house, and the bubble had burst during the year I was there, and I go underwater on the mortgage? Despite making $80k, I would have lost money on the deal, and would have been better off if I'd been unemployed rather than take that job in California.
If you're thinking only a dummy would have bought a house, remember at that time it was inconceivable that a house could turn into a bad investment like that. Many people advised me in all seriousness to buy a house. A few of these were my bosses, who leaned on me to commit to a major buy so that in their eyes I would be a more "reliable" employee. That's all part of the management theory of "hold gun to employee's head". I would work harder, because if things blew up I would lose my home. Well, to use a car analogy, pulling off a miracle by making the car able to go 300 mph does not help if the management can't figure out which road to take. And if I also had car payments, a student loan, and a family to support, what would have happened? I can imagine the student loan administrator hammering on me to make payments since I was employed, ratcheting up the rate perhaps even as the house was drowning me.
So, yeah, $80k per year is not enough to bail you out if you in all innocence pursue the American Dream and it turns into a nightmare. The American Dream wasn't supposed to be a trap.
Mars could be a hedge against disaster. But maybe not a very good one. There's really no reason why a nuclear war on Earth couldn't reach Mars as well. And humanity on Mars would no doubt be far more fragile. The harder problem is not moving ourselves there, it's establishing our environment. Likely there would be millions of species we could never establish on Mars in any kind of "natural" self sustaining fashion. If we brought them to Mars at all, they'd have to stay in greenhouses and zoos. Not that we'd be much better off ourselves on that point.
What would it take to get Mars to the point where we could reestablish life on Earth should it be wiped out by some terrible accident such as a massive meteor strike? We don't yet know our own world or ourselves well enough. Biosphere 2 showed that among other things. Or, suppose Earth was not just killed but also rendered uninhabitable for millennia, as could happen if lots of radioactive material were dumped on it? Could a Martian colony survive without Earth?
We really cannot count on Mars to save us in case we recklessly spoil the Earth.
insanely complex for no apparent reason ... like trying to use libpng
What's so hard about using libpng? I've used it before and don't recall it being difficult. It's easier than OpenGL, and that's not hard either.
Conditional instructions are cool. The x86 instruction set isn't.
Are there any x86 instructions that are slow to emulate
Yes. Lots of them. Not only are these instructions slow, they're useless. No one needs the ASCII or decimal adjust instructions AAA, AAD, AAS, AAM, DAA, or DAS anymore, and they were never much use to start with. There have been a few cases in which these instructions were cleverly used for other than their intended purpose, but those are rare. Then there's the REP with CMPSB, CMPSW, SCASB, and SCASW instructions. They're useless for string searches-- we have much better string search algorithms than that. SCAS in particular is a legacy of C strings. Its main use is to search for the terminating null. Nice, except that the terminating null never was a good idea to start with, and we've been pulling away from it. They're useful for string comparison, except that we have lots of ways to avoid having to do a nasty old string comparison. LOOP could have been more useful, except they tied it to a single register-- the same register that REP needs. Besides, it doesn't save much-- a DEC plus JNE does the same thing. There is also CALL and RET, and PUSH, POP, PUSHF, and POPF. The idea of subroutines and stacks is fine, but this implementation pigs out on valuable registers (a longstanding criticism of x86 is that they didn't put in enough general purpose registers), and stacks can be implemented just fine with more general purpose instructions. CALL can be done with a store and jump, and RET can be done with a indirect jump that fetches the address stored earlier. Stacks are so 1970s in thinking. The x87 stuff is even more fixated on organizing around a stack. We have gobs of memory now, but this PUSH and POP work on one register at a time. Why? So a subroutine can save only the registers it uses? In the 1970s, every byte was precious. Now, have a LOADALL and STOREALL instruction with a more general pointer increment not one that must use only one register pair, SP:SI, don't worry if a few registers that didn't need saving got saved anyway, and let the CPU get on with the real code instead of forcing it to pipeline 8 or more PUSH instructions. Instructions like XLAT and LODS are more of those overspecific, too limited to be much use instructions. The function they perform is very useful, but it's better done more generally with an indirect MOV. The instructions for manipulating flags, LAHF and SAHF, and CLC, CLI, CLD, CMC, STC, STD, and STI are rather silly. Have a register devoted to the flags, and manipulate them with all the general purpose instructions that work on any register, rather than waste opcode space on them. Another dumb instruction is TEST, which is an AND that doesn't keep the result, it only sets flags. Totally unnecessary if there are plenty of registers.
The x86 is absolutely chock full of 1970s cruft that isn't much used anymore, but which must be dragged around for the odd compatibility need. Worse, it wasn't even all that good a design for its time!
Copyright is a bigger problem than most appreciate. This isn't about free entertainment, this is about legal restrictions on our opportunities to share knowledge. "Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it." I don't want to repeat mistakes because knowledge of them are locked away by copyright.
The only theft going on here is the theft of our natural rights to share, and our right to speech. Speech might cause unauthorized sharing to occur.
Sharing of knowledge is a huge social good. We got to the top of the animal kingdom not only through sheer intelligence, but also by harnessing our great intelligence through cooperation. Sharing of knowledge is a vital part of the cooperation that has enabled us to work together. Over the past few decades, these greedy fools have tried to make themselves the gatekeepers through which all sharing passes. They can't see or don't care that if they somehow succeeded, they would slow progress to nothing, and hurt themselves as well as the rest of us. All they see is money. They would deny us the methods we used to reach the top, and which we still very badly need to solve the problems we still face. All the money in the world does you no good if you need something that doesn't exist. Things like cures for AIDS and cancer, knowledge of an approaching meteor of a size that killed the dinosaurs and the means to avert it, tools to deal with climate change and ocean acidification, advances enabling us to colonize Mars, flying cars, and who knows what else. And most of all, establishing and maintaining a tradition of openness and honesty so that real crimes can't be hidden.
Fortunately for us all, they can't stop the sharing of knowledge. They can outlaw it, demonize it, viciously victimize a few unfortunates to try to terrorize us all, but not stop it. Sharing should be seen as an act of good and kindness like charitable donations, but even better, and far more common. Instead, these squatters on intellectual "properties" have suckered a lot of people into thinking of knowledge as deserving of the same ownership and handling as real, physical property. Getting people to use the very term, "property", and to make the association with "theft", was huge. It's sad how many people are thoroughly indoctrinated with the holiness of ownership, and get extremely moralistic over piracy, defending these villains and their propaganda. But the edifice is cracking. I find the successes of the Pirate Party most encouraging. No matter how this latest issue plays out, it will be good publicity. Keep it up, PP!
If the company is not profitable at that later stage, the company keeps the bonus and uses it in whatever way it needs, to become profitable again
The unspoken and sadly true assumption here is that the bonus is big enough to do that.
Sometimes lights malfunction. Sometimes the sensors fail to detect a vehicle. I've had that happen to me a few times. Late at night once I spent over five minutes waiting for a light to change. In all that time, I saw just one other car on the crossing road. Finally another car came up beside me and the light still did not change. The other fellow finally ran the light.
Are you going to wait at a red light at an empty intersection for 10 minutes? 15 minutes? At what point do you decide it's not working correctly? Blind obedience means you wait there until it turns green, even if it takes all night.
Revenue cynicism and whiners is it? You are trolling. There is such a thing as objectivity, which can be applied to determine whether a complaint is fair or not. In this case, we have documented evidence of yellow lights being shortened below what little we do have in the way of standards. This cheating is quite common. We also have many cases of cities abandoning their red light camera programs when they prove unprofitable.
Enforcement should always be the last resort for dealing with a problem. If a problem can be fixed without resorting to heavy penalties, we should do so. Moralizing about it is especially touchy. And there is a simple fix-- come up with a fair standard for the length of the yellow, and stick to it. While we do have some minimums that aren't good enough, you'll notice we have no maximum. We could make the yellow light last 10 seconds or longer if we wanted. As far as I know, no light has ever been set so, why is that?
That we don't have a fair standard is all the evidence a reasonable person needs to know what this is really all about.
Should copyright be abolished?
Some have argued that the GPL needs copyright. They claim that getting rid of copyright would ruin copyleft.