How are we/ever/ going to get it into a package that is small enough it fit in your ear and watertight enough to let swim around in a bowl of water when you're not using it?
I admit, I think destroying your own agricultural capacity is a pretty dumb way to keep people fed, but I can understand the reasoning for not allowing GM corn into the country. There/have/ been problems with GM crops that are engineered to be unable to reproduce cross-pollinating with normal crops, producing a second generation of said crop with the gene that keeps them from reproducing properly. Should corn that has been modified to carry genes like this make it into Zimbabwe and be used as seed corn, Zimbabwe could go from little food to no food in a few growing seasons. Since biotech firms aren't always very forthcoming about the products they make, I think I'm going to have to say that Zimbabwe's fear/paranoia is not unfounded in this case.
They're still blathering idiots for destroying most of their agricultural infrastructure, though.
1) You have to dive through the code to insert them and then recompile on every iteration of the debugging process.
2) You have to dive through the code to remove them and then recompile on every iteration of the debugging process if you don't want to keep getting info for finding bugs you've already fixed every time you run the program.
3) They clutter up your code and make it much less readable and maintainable.
and as a super extra bonus for everyone
4) The only workaround for problems (1) and (2) is fancy use of the preprocessor, which has the unwanted side effect of making (3) even worse!
And I quote (from the article), "I'd love to hear answers more substantive than 'use printf()' and/or 'just use ____, my favorite gdb frontend'".
As we all know, DDD is just a frontend for GDB, and does/not/ fix any of the abovementioned problems with GDB. All it does is make the interface more manageable.
Here's what I was able to find on Google - freshmeat proved entirely useless (does anyone else think its search capabilities are somewhat, well, crappo? I'd like to see some better indexing on it.)
I'd love to know, too, since gdb falls short on this.
The best I can offer is that the debugger that comes with Intel's free (for non-commerical use) compiler for linux probably works well, but I haven't installed it on my computer since I'm too lazy to install rpm on my machine and get it set up so that it won't scream when the installer runs rpm.
To that end, I was able to find a debugger called <A HREF=http://www.concerto.demon.co.uk/UPS/>UPS</a&g t; that looks semi-mature, although the information on the webpage is sketchy at best.
More useful may be <A HREF=http://hegel.ittc.ukans.edu/projects/smartgdb/>SmartGDB</a>, which is described as a "scriptable, thread-aware" debugger.
The donuts on a rope phenomenon has, to the best of my knowledge, not been fully explainet yet (i.e., nobody is fessing up as to what plane is making those contrails).
The most plausible explanations I can see for it require some sort of pulsejet engine. I'd expect scramjet engines to generate contrails similar to ramjet engines, since the shift to supersonic speeds doesn't turn any other supersonic engine's contrails into donuts on a rope.
At least it didn't make the stupid suggestion that CD-ROM drives don't seem to be getting faster because they're nearing the speed at which CD's might explode from G-forces.
The real reason for the limited speeds that can be reached with CD-ROM drives is the vibrations in the CD resulting from motion in that speeds. If the CD moves too much, the laster can't read it properly. Hence, the reason why caddy drives used to be popular - the caddy helped keep the CD still, thus allowing the drive to spin it faster.
If you want a faster CD-ROM drive, you'll have to do what they did in this experiment - tighten the CD down so that it is always perfectly coplanar with the plane of rotation.
I seem to remember hearing somewhere that the avionics system on the F-22 uses a neural net of some sort. In my experience, some kinds of neural networks can develop this creeping flakiness as a result of a sort of entropy in the weightings on each neuron. Since neural nets are subtle enough that it would be nigh-impossible to get rid of this cruft on the fly, the best way I can think of to fix problems is to simply reset all of the weights to a default value.
The best analogy of this that I can think of is to say that it's similar to a reboot, even though it doesn't necessarily require shutting the entire system down for a period of time.
Of course, like all hearsay, this doesn't make a whole lot of sense when you think of it. . . I'm not aware of any reason why they would put a neural net that continues to learn while it is being used in control of the avionics system, but then again a lot of technologies I see make no sense to me. . .
When a company tells me they aren't going to use the information I give them for anything but demographics research, then asks me for my phone number and address and makes both fields required, I consider it safe to assume that company is lying, and don't feel think it's at all naughty to fib.
On the other hand, if the company really only requires me to answer questions of demographic importance, such as what country and state/province I am from and my age, I am likely to respond truthfully.
The UI stinks not because the Open Source community's programming talens are balkanized, but because that's not where Linux's goals were until very recently.
When I got into Linux five years ago, everyone was using FVWM because that's what they <i>liked</i> to use. A bit later, Gnome and KDE become well-known, and most the Linux users I know, including myself, said, "What the hell am I going to use <i>that</i> for?" Don't forget, we're largely a culture of console jockeys.
Think about time, too. MacOS 1.0 came out 21 years ago. Windows 1.0 came out 18 years ago.
What about Gnome and KDE? 3 years and 4 years, respectively. (Granted, I realize that 1.0 versions of many open source products seem to be more mature than the 1.0 versions of many commercial products.)
Looking at that timeline, and considering that a desktop GUI didn't even become a popular idea in the GNU/Linux community until recently, I'd say that regardless of how many programmer man-hours are involved in either product, both have come along much faster than Windows. (I'll keep my mouth shut about OS X)
Forcing everyone run OfficialLinux v1.0 is no better then forcing everyone to run windows.
Not entirely, but it does take away one of the biggest things that attracts me and many other users to Linux - choice. I/like/ that I can use one Windowmanager/Desktop pair on my desktop computer, and just a lightweight windowmanager on my laptop for performance and memory usage reasons. I/like/ that if I don't like the way one distro is set up, or don't like where they seem to be going, I can switch to another one without a problem.
I think this diversity is a Good Thing, too. It means that the GNU/Linux (heck, the Unix community in general) hacker community can create several different offerings for itself, and all of the users can decide what they like best. As time goes on, the crappier products die off (go dormant, really) as developers and users move to the products they like.
Comare that with Microsoft and Apple, where a user can find it damn hard to figure out how to replace your mp3 player with the one Apple or Microsoft shoved down your throat. Windows users are now stuck with a media player that has the crappiest interface I have ever seen and sends mysterious messages to some server in Redmond every time you play a file. It's the one they're stuck with, because they have some verison of OfficialWindows98-XP.
Long story short, I agree with isorox. What the Linux community needs to do to take over the world is not to beat everyone at their own game, but to not even bother playing their game.
Why not take the ludicrous level of choice offered by Linux, and streamline the mechanisms for that choice until GNU/Linux becomes a modular operating system? It wouldn't be an easy game to play - one advantage Microsoft and Apple get to cramming everything down their users' throats is brand recognition. Oh well - we don't need brand recognition. Red Hat may want brand recognition (I'm assuming thats why they put a "powered by Red Hat" sticker in the box along with their distro.), but the Linux Community in general ain't doing this for any reason but because we like it. Don't nobody forget that.
Not the best site to find a lot of information, but the FAQ on Bjarne Stroustrup's homepage has a lot of good answers to some more arcane C++ questions.
For a more comprehensive resource, also in FAQ format, check out the C++ FAQ-lite by Marshall Cline.
So... I fail to see how air conditioning caused these problems. Especially "cutting down all the trees around a lot to ease construction". Seems more like the rush to build cheaper and cheaper houses and not a big A/C conspiracy.
Once A/C become common, the need to build houses so that they stay cool naturally went away - and it's much cheaper to just use AC, too.
Hence, ceilings didn't need to be as high, and one didn't need to put as much thought into the placement of windows, because with A/C there was no need for a good breeze to keep the houe cool.
It's cheaper to cut down the trees when building the building, yes. With A/C, those trees (and the shade they provide) lost much of their importance for keeping the house cool.
It's not that I think that there's an A/C conspiracy, it's just that A/C made it more feasible to cut a few corners when building a house. Personally, I'd like to have a house that has all of the stuff I'm lamenting the loss of/and/ A/C.
8' (as opposed to 10') ceilings, poor placement of windows leading to no cross-ventilation, cutting down all the trees around a lot to ease construction but destroying the shade, the death of the porch.
I love air conditioning, but I want to hate it. . .
I think game developers would only love it if the performance could be increased by quite a bit. The clock rate on the fastest Crusoe processor is 800mhz, and although I don't know the architecture of anything past a 586 very well, I seriously doubt anything Transmeta makes could do as much in a single clock cycle as a G4 or a Pentium 4.
A look at the system requirements for most of the games I see my little brother playing suggests that there's quite a ways to go before the technology would be popular with the game industry.
I know nothing about the feasibility issues involved, but it seems like that kind of idea could be extremely useful. I'm thinking a machine with a CPU capable of running multiple instruction sets simultaneously coupled with a VM-type operating system that allows you to bootstrap virtual machines of various architectures.
Unfortunately, their push was toward the mobile market, so they appear to have put more effort into power consumption than they did performance, and I dont think they even tried to get a Crusoe processor running multiple instruction sets simultaneously yet, so anything along those lines that we would see anytime soon would probably not be better than just buying two different machines of different architectures, and I doubt many companies percieve much of a need to have a machine capable of handling 3, 4, or 5 instruction sets, which is probably where the cost of purchasing such a machine would start to be justified. ..
There's also the possibility of using it as testing machines for software being developed for CPU architectures that haven't had fully functional prototypes come off the line yet, but that's wouldn't provide nearly enough business to keep a company going. . .
It's too bad there are no laws saying patents have to be protected from the beginning for the patent owner to retain the right to enforce ownership of the patent in the same way a trademark owner has to protect it to maintain legal control of the trademark.
With how many frivolous patents are out there, it's downright ludicrous to expect everyone to make sure that there aren't any patents covering a new product, so the only group that it would make sense to expect to enforce patent rights is the holder of the patent.
But there needs to be something to make sure all the Rambuses and Unisyses out there don't just sit for a few years or decades watching a technology they have patented slowly become an industry standard before flexing their muscles. That kind of dirty business is a threat to the existence of open industry standards in general, and when those are gone the tech industry's shift from competetive capitalism to monopolistic capitalism will be complete and we'll all be stuck sitting at our keyboards slowly starting to realize that forcing our customers to pay hundreds of dollars for what amounts to little more than a bugfix or driver update and requiring other companies to shell out licensing fees to be compatible with your product really/are/ the kind of innovation the world of computing needs!
Slashdot Mirror
How are we /ever/ going to get it into a package that is small enough it fit in your ear and watertight enough to let swim around in a bowl of water when you're not using it?
I admit, I think destroying your own agricultural capacity is a pretty dumb way to keep people fed, but I can understand the reasoning for not allowing GM corn into the country. There /have/ been problems with GM crops that are engineered to be unable to reproduce cross-pollinating with normal crops, producing a second generation of said crop with the gene that keeps them from reproducing properly. Should corn that has been modified to carry genes like this make it into Zimbabwe and be used as seed corn, Zimbabwe could go from little food to no food in a few growing seasons.
Since biotech firms aren't always very forthcoming about the products they make, I think I'm going to have to say that Zimbabwe's fear/paranoia is not unfounded in this case.
They're still blathering idiots for destroying most of their agricultural infrastructure, though.
1) You have to dive through the code to insert them and then recompile on every iteration of the debugging process.
2) You have to dive through the code to remove them and then recompile on every iteration of the debugging process if you don't want to keep getting info for finding bugs you've already fixed every time you run the program.
3) They clutter up your code and make it much less readable and maintainable.
and as a super extra bonus for everyone
4) The only workaround for problems (1) and (2) is fancy use of the preprocessor, which has the unwanted side effect of making (3) even worse!
And I quote (from the article), "I'd love to hear answers more substantive than 'use printf()' and/or 'just use ____, my favorite gdb frontend'".
/not/ fix any of the abovementioned problems with GDB. All it does is make the interface more manageable.
As we all know, DDD is just a frontend for GDB, and does
Here's what I was able to find on Google - freshmeat proved entirely useless (does anyone else think its search capabilities are somewhat, well, crappo? I'd like to see some better indexing on it.)
g t; that looks semi-mature, although the information on the webpage is sketchy at best.
b />SmartGDB</a>, which is described as a "scriptable, thread-aware" debugger.
I'd love to know, too, since gdb falls short on this.
The best I can offer is that the debugger that comes with Intel's free (for non-commerical use) compiler for linux probably works well, but I haven't installed it on my computer since I'm too lazy to install rpm on my machine and get it set up so that it won't scream when the installer runs rpm.
To that end, I was able to find a debugger called <A HREF=http://www.concerto.demon.co.uk/UPS/>UPS</a&
More useful may be <A HREF=http://hegel.ittc.ukans.edu/projects/smartgd
Hope that helps. . .
A bit offtopic, but I thought I'd share the error message popup Mozilla gave me when I tried to follow this link:
This page contains information of a type
(text/plain) that can only be viewed with
the appropriate Plug-in.
Of course, there is no appropriate plugin =)
I doubt it.
The donuts on a rope phenomenon has, to the best of my knowledge, not been fully explainet yet (i.e., nobody is fessing up as to what plane is making those contrails).
The most plausible explanations I can see for it require some sort of pulsejet engine. I'd expect scramjet engines to generate contrails similar to ramjet engines, since the shift to supersonic speeds doesn't turn any other supersonic engine's contrails into donuts on a rope.
A diagram of the difference in design between a ramjet and a scramjet engine can be found here.
For more information, check out the HyShot homepage.
Just have a co-ed circle jerk.
Since with two condoms on the likelihood of both breaking is pretty high.
So if ^ is XOR, what is AND?
At least it didn't make the stupid suggestion that CD-ROM drives don't seem to be getting faster because they're nearing the speed at which CD's might explode from G-forces.
The real reason for the limited speeds that can be reached with CD-ROM drives is the vibrations in the CD resulting from motion in that speeds. If the CD moves too much, the laster can't read it properly. Hence, the reason why caddy drives used to be popular - the caddy helped keep the CD still, thus allowing the drive to spin it faster.
If you want a faster CD-ROM drive, you'll have to do what they did in this experiment - tighten the CD down so that it is always perfectly coplanar with the plane of rotation.
I seem to remember hearing somewhere that the avionics system on the F-22 uses a neural net of some sort. In my experience, some kinds of neural networks can develop this creeping flakiness as a result of a sort of entropy in the weightings on each neuron. Since neural nets are subtle enough that it would be nigh-impossible to get rid of this cruft on the fly, the best way I can think of to fix problems is to simply reset all of the weights to a default value.
The best analogy of this that I can think of is to say that it's similar to a reboot, even though it doesn't necessarily require shutting the entire system down for a period of time.
Of course, like all hearsay, this doesn't make a whole lot of sense when you think of it. . . I'm not aware of any reason why they would put a neural net that continues to learn while it is being used in control of the avionics system, but then again a lot of technologies I see make no sense to me. . .
When a company tells me they aren't going to use the information I give them for anything but demographics research, then asks me for my phone number and address and makes both fields required, I consider it safe to assume that company is lying, and don't feel think it's at all naughty to fib.
On the other hand, if the company really only requires me to answer questions of demographic importance, such as what country and state/province I am from and my age, I am likely to respond truthfully.
The UI stinks not because the Open Source community's programming talens are balkanized, but because that's not where Linux's goals were until very recently.
When I got into Linux five years ago, everyone was using FVWM because that's what they <i>liked</i> to use. A bit later, Gnome and KDE become well-known, and most the Linux users I know, including myself, said, "What the hell am I going to use <i>that</i> for?" Don't forget, we're largely a culture of console jockeys.
Think about time, too. MacOS 1.0 came out 21 years ago. Windows 1.0 came out 18 years ago.
What about Gnome and KDE? 3 years and 4 years, respectively. (Granted, I realize that 1.0 versions of many open source products seem to be more mature than the 1.0 versions of many commercial products.)
Looking at that timeline, and considering that a desktop GUI didn't even become a popular idea in the GNU/Linux community until recently, I'd say that regardless of how many programmer man-hours are involved in either product, both have come along much faster than Windows. (I'll keep my mouth shut about OS X)
Forcing everyone run OfficialLinux v1.0 is no better then forcing everyone to run windows.
/like/ that I can use one Windowmanager/Desktop pair on my desktop computer, and just a lightweight windowmanager on my laptop for performance and memory usage reasons. I /like/ that if I don't like the way one distro is set up, or don't like where they seem to be going, I can switch to another one without a problem.
Not entirely, but it does take away one of the biggest things that attracts me and many other users to Linux - choice. I
I think this diversity is a Good Thing, too. It means that the GNU/Linux (heck, the Unix community in general) hacker community can create several different offerings for itself, and all of the users can decide what they like best. As time goes on, the crappier products die off (go dormant, really) as developers and users move to the products they like.
Comare that with Microsoft and Apple, where a user can find it damn hard to figure out how to replace your mp3 player with the one Apple or Microsoft shoved down your throat. Windows users are now stuck with a media player that has the crappiest interface I have ever seen and sends mysterious messages to some server in Redmond every time you play a file. It's the one they're stuck with, because they have some verison of OfficialWindows98-XP.
Long story short, I agree with isorox. What the Linux community needs to do to take over the world is not to beat everyone at their own game, but to not even bother playing their game.
Why not take the ludicrous level of choice offered by Linux, and streamline the mechanisms for that choice until GNU/Linux becomes a modular operating system? It wouldn't be an easy game to play - one advantage Microsoft and Apple get to cramming everything down their users' throats is brand recognition. Oh well - we don't need brand recognition. Red Hat may want brand recognition (I'm assuming thats why they put a "powered by Red Hat" sticker in the box along with their distro.), but the Linux Community in general ain't doing this for any reason but because we like it. Don't nobody forget that.
You can't beat the perl manpages. They are organized like a book, and are easily the best introduction to programming in perl I have seen anywhere.
They may also be in perldoc format, but I haven't bothered checking. . .
Not the best site to find a lot of information, but the FAQ on Bjarne Stroustrup's homepage has a lot of good answers to some more arcane C++ questions.
For a more comprehensive resource, also in FAQ format, check out the C++ FAQ-lite by Marshall Cline.
8' (as opposed to 10') ceilings, poor placement of windows leading to no cross-ventilation, cutting down all the trees around a lot to ease construction but destroying the shade, the death of the porch.
I love air conditioning, but I want to hate it. . .
The user chooses the software =)
Viva Unix! =)
Try putting these handy tags around the deadline, and all will be revealed.
<sarcasm> </sarcasm>
Does that help?
I think game developers would only love it if the performance could be increased by quite a bit. The clock rate on the fastest Crusoe processor is 800mhz, and although I don't know the architecture of anything past a 586 very well, I seriously doubt anything Transmeta makes could do as much in a single clock cycle as a G4 or a Pentium 4.
A look at the system requirements for most of the games I see my little brother playing suggests that there's quite a ways to go before the technology would be popular with the game industry.
I know nothing about the feasibility issues involved, but it seems like that kind of idea could be extremely useful. I'm thinking a machine with a CPU capable of running multiple instruction sets simultaneously coupled with a VM-type operating system that allows you to bootstrap virtual machines of various architectures.
.
Unfortunately, their push was toward the mobile market, so they appear to have put more effort into power consumption than they did performance, and I dont think they even tried to get a Crusoe processor running multiple instruction sets simultaneously yet, so anything along those lines that we would see anytime soon would probably not be better than just buying two different machines of different architectures, and I doubt many companies percieve much of a need to have a machine capable of handling 3, 4, or 5 instruction sets, which is probably where the cost of purchasing such a machine would start to be justified. .
There's also the possibility of using it as testing machines for software being developed for CPU architectures that haven't had fully functional prototypes come off the line yet, but that's wouldn't provide nearly enough business to keep a company going. . .
It's too bad there are no laws saying patents have to be protected from the beginning for the patent owner to retain the right to enforce ownership of the patent in the same way a trademark owner has to protect it to maintain legal control of the trademark.
/are/ the kind of innovation the world of computing needs!
With how many frivolous patents are out there, it's downright ludicrous to expect everyone to make sure that there aren't any patents covering a new product, so the only group that it would make sense to expect to enforce patent rights is the holder of the patent.
But there needs to be something to make sure all the Rambuses and Unisyses out there don't just sit for a few years or decades watching a technology they have patented slowly become an industry standard before flexing their muscles. That kind of dirty business is a threat to the existence of open industry standards in general, and when those are gone the tech industry's shift from competetive capitalism to monopolistic capitalism will be complete and we'll all be stuck sitting at our keyboards slowly starting to realize that forcing our customers to pay hundreds of dollars for what amounts to little more than a bugfix or driver update and requiring other companies to shell out licensing fees to be compatible with your product really