I'm not going to swear that it was the ROM (obviously it was a while back). But I distinctly remember something that took up a goodish chunck of what was nominally RAM. The memory map was pretty darned fragmented IIRC.
At some point, I'll have to dig through my closet and see if I still have my C64 Programmer's Guide.
Sorry, but the VIC-20 only had 3.5 K available for the user at a MSRP of $299 when it was released. The Commodore 64 was the one that had 64K (however, of that 64K, only about 40K or so was available: IIRC the remainder was taken up by the Basic interpreter which was loaded from ROM on boot). It had a $595 MSRP.
The first program I ever wrote was on a VIC-20. That just brings back memories.
I work in a decent OOP language, and I need code that is (to an extent) non self-explanatory on an ongoing basis. Code can be completely consistent internally, legible, correctly indented, with correct variable names, etc., ad nauseum, and still be difficult for another programmer to understand, because code isn't written in a vacuum. It does the maintenance programmer that will support my code absolutely no good to see my great code if he has no idea why it was written that way.
For instance, a good chunk of the code I'm responsible for involves bi-directional serial communication with hardware from other vendors. Vendors being definately plural. And every vendor has their own set of specifications and their own set of gotchas that you have to deal with.
So, the effects of the code are (painfully) obvious on their face, but there seems to be no obvious reason for the way some of the code is written. I make sure I add a comment (in regular, plain, well-constructed English) as to why I wrote a section the way I did, and what the maintenance programmer will break if he removes the seemingly nonsensical line of code below the comment.
...But this judge is making the same mistake that Jackson did in the Microsoft trial.
Do not blast the litigants until the trial is over.
This isn't quite the same thing. The thing that Judge Jackson got in trouble for was "blasting" Microsoft in an interview outside the courtroom. He was provoked, but the things he said in that interview crossed the line. Judge Kimball is simply doing his job at this point: he's ruling on motions and actually doing SCO a favor by saying that, if they don't produce more evidence, they'll soon be finished. While this was a "blasting" of SCO, the blasting was done where it should be done: not behind the litigant's back where they couldn't reply. It was done in a ruling based on the evidence presented.
I suppose you could say that it is showing bias, but it's bias towards the truth.
I think the point the grandparent was trying to make was that there are those who believe that it takes more energy to create a gallon of ethanol than the ethanol itself contains. According to
several
references, this supposition is incorrect.
I'd have no such expectation. Companies typically try to get by with as few employees and consultants as possible. To them, having "people at the ready" for problems like this seems more like having "people with nothing to do" most of the time.
Then I'd expect you to be right in particular, but wrong in the general case: most major corporations do not have hordes of Linux kernel developers sitting around drinking coffee in a "Kernel Bug Ready Room" waiting for Linus to declare DefCon 2.
They do, however, have other programming assets that are performing other functions related to keeping the business moving forward. These assets can (and frequently are), reassigned at a moment's notice to evaluate problems or security holes as they arise.
Linus isn't the only one that can change any part of the kernel. You may be correct by saying that an enterprise level operation isn't going to accept a patch from you or me.
I'd expect that most enterprise level IT operations have developers on staff (or available through some sort of outsourcing or support contract) that may add a temporary fix until an official patch is available.
At the bare minimum, even if they don't want to craft a patch themselves, they can evaluate for themselves the security ramifications of the hole and possibly take other protective measures, up to and including disabling a part of the system temporarily until a fix is made.
As a rough example, there's a difference in Microsoft saying, "There's a security problem in the Windows GDI that won't affect you unless you're running a specific video card.", and you being able to look at the source for the GDI and affirming it for yourself.
First, I'm going to assume that you got the USB 2 upgrade when D.I. made it available (I've got one of the USB 2.0 Gamma units).
Assuming you do, as a test, you may want to just copy over a couple of gig of files to your Neuros to see how long it takes. I was originally a little peeved when I got my Neuros back from the upgrade and it didn't seem that much faster. After some experimentation, it appeared to me that the bottleneck was in the sync software adding files to the database.
If you just copy files by themselves, you'll (most likely) find that it is quite a bit faster (I think it took me something like 20 minutes to copy ~9 gb of music over). Then I just did an orphan search to add everything to the database, which took an additional 3 minutes or so.
Moral of the story, don't do a straight synchronization when copying a lot of music to the Neuros. Both NDBM and NSM are very slow adding to the database.
I don't know about you, but I haven't had to worry about thunking since all of the operating systems for which I code went to a flat 32 bit memory model.
Please do a quick Google for antibiotic families and modes of action. You will find pages like this
and this.
Penicillin and derivitaves are still prescribed, but virtually every bug in the world (+ dog) is resistent to them.
One evening of watching the Discovery channel does not a B.S. in Microbiology confer.
The "natural" antibiotics to which you refer are still being found by the dozens. The problems are not (primarily) with patents. You have to:
You have to find an organism that has some antibiotic activity. Not as easy as you might thing. Searches go on CONSTANTLY, and the major drug companies grab soil samples from everywhere they can to test for organisms in the soil that exhibit unknown antibiotic properties.
You've spent several years and have found a likely candidate. Now you have to test the snot out of it. How does it do what it does? Is it a cell wall synthesis inhibitor? Does it go after 23S ribosomes? How about side effects? After all, bleach is one of the best antibiotics in the world. It's used for disinfection in BSL3 and BSL 4 microbiology labs. However, it wouldn't do you much good if you were to drink it, either. Drug interactions? If it kills someone that is taking a common drug (or worse, an uncommon drug), you're still in trouble.
Now, you have to start the FDA certification process. Do you think the FDA reimburses you for the millions you've spent to this point if things go bad? Nope. Do you think they're even going to reimburse you for the millions you're going to spend in clinical trials? Not likely. Remember Martha Stewart and IMClone? The bottom fell out of ImClone because they'd sunk a good chunk of their cash into a drug that was not going to be approved (granted, IIRC it was a cancer drug and not an antibiotic, but the principle applies).
Yes, pharmaceutical companies are businesses. They are for-profit. But it is not so much corporate greed that causes some of the outrageous drug prices as it is them having to pay for the research costs involved with the 99 drugs that didn't make it to market with the money made from the one drug that did.
Please do some research before making statements like the ones you've made.
If I remember correctly, when a DMA write is done, the OS hands a memory block pointer and block size to the device. The device then sends information back to the DMA controller which writes the info to memory and triggers an interrupt when done. I don't believe that it was physically possible for a DMA controller to write outside the block allocated by the OS. So, this can't happen. Or, at the worst, the driver (not the OS) would access violate if it tried.
No, he couldn't. The problem with folks like his boss is that, if you remove one time waster, they'll always find something with which to replace it.
Game playing (at work) is a symptom, not a disease. The only cure is to counsel the individual involved, and terminate them if the counseling is ineffective.
I'm sorry, but that is incorrect. Unless they've changed the way the targeting devices work for the AH-64D. The AH-64A uses a small HUD that is clipped to the right side of the pilot's helmet. The image is projected on a piece of semi-transparent, angled glass, just like a regular HUD in any other military aircraft.
The innovative thing about the Apache was not the monocle. It was the way the monocle was boresighted and the way the helmet was tracked in 3D space inside the cockpit. The net effect was that, when the copilot/gunner looks at something, the aircraft can tell where he's looking. The TADS (or Target Acquisition and Designation System) follows his head motion. And, if the 30mm chain gun is the active weapon, it follows his head motion as well. All the CPG has to do is either lase to get a range or lase to designate the target and pull the trigger.
For the pilot, the helmet was boresighted so that the PNVS (or Pilot's Night Vision System) would automatically follow his head motions. The PNVS is an infrared system (not light multiplying) based in a small turret at the front of the aircraft. The pilots said that the perspective change took a bit of getting used to, but it worked very effectively.
As a point in fact, look at the current fracas going on in the X world with XFree86 and X org. Granted, the code itself didn't fork, but an implementation of an open standard appeared which serves the users better.
Guess where all the talent went?
And guess which X subsystem is being used in virtually all of the newer versions of the more popular distros?
Open Source software development is a particularly Darwinian environment. Which, in my opinion, is a good thing.
Nope. Girlfriend. Wives cost a A LOT more than $50 per month. Trust me on this one.
Re:Don't worry...as usual, Slashdot misinforms
on
Microsoft Clips Longhorn
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
From my perspective (and from the actual grandparent post), the vitriol has not been directed at the fact that Longhorn is going to be later than originally planned.
The vitriol is due to the fact that Microsoft did their level best to bend every customer they could find over a barrel to sign them up for a maintenance plan that was going to cost said customers more money than buying Windows and Office over the counter if the upgrade cycle lasts more than 3 years. And, when this was pointed out to Microsoft, they promised (hand on heart!) that there'd be some sort of ROI for this maintenance plan.
The technology may be amazing. It may be able to make demons fly out of my nose. But they conned a LOT of CIO/CTO folks into paying them for delivering nothing while they spent 5 years building the thing.
How they did this without keeping a straight face is beyond me.
You considerably understate the danger posed by this chemical.
I didn't say that it would be fun stuff to go rolling around in. If you smelt an acrid smell and your eyes started tearing up, wouldn't you want to go to a different location?
Yes, if you cut osmium tetroxide into lines like coke and do a couple of them, you're going to have big problems. But under the exposures to which a person would be generally exposed during a chemical attack, the most dangerous thing would be people panicking and hurting each other, not the chemical itself.
This is why I used the word generally in my original post.
...You may recall a quote from Justice Goldberg that the Constitution "is not a suicide pact."
It's amusing, though, isn't it to note that, in
Kennedy vs. Mendoza-Martinez Justice Goldberg held that the act of depriving an American citizen of their citizenship because of draft dodging was a violation of "...the procedural safeguards guaranteed by the Fifth and Sixth Amendments". Just like I feel that the e-mail monitoring to which the original poster was willing to submit was a violation of my due process rights.
As a matter of fact, in the full context of the quote, all Justice Goldberg was saying was that Congress has the authority to compel an individual to live up to the civic duties laid upon them by the constitution.
I'd suggest reading the case and the opinion. It's very interesting.
Yes, Mr. (or Ms.) A.C. Google can be your friend. However, you should be more careful to take your quotes in context.
That a goodly percentage of the people responding to this story are in favor of this device. At one point, I would have thought that people smart enough to find/. would have been smart enough to know better.
I'd like to think I'm a responsibile cell phone user. In theatres, the first thing I do is either switch it off, or to vibrate only. If a call comes in for me in a public place, I step outside into an uncrowded area, or I let voice mail catch the call.
Unfortunately, in the U.S. today, the concept of personal responsibility has been killed. It's gone. It's pushing up posies. This is the same argument used by the gun control fanatic types: "An average person isn't smart enough to own a gun. So, instead of making them take responsibility for their actions, we'll just make it illegal to own guns."
So, here, instead of politely tasing (using a Taser) on rude individuals who insist on using cell phones rudely, we have people that want to make cell phone use impossible, thus taking away the ability of people who truly do need them from being able to be in those areas.
You don't need to have a cell phone to be rude and insensitive: Miss Manners existed well before the cell phone was invented.
Ahhhh... I love the smell of my karma burning in the afternoon.. It's the smell of victory.
First off, osmium tetroxide is an irritant. Exposure is generally not permanently harmful. But, even assuming the case that this was some form of fatal weapon of mass destruction, I'd like to quote Benjamin Franklin:
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
Give up your own rights if you wish to do so (am assuming you're in the UK from the URL in your/. user id). I'll keep my rights right where they are, thank you.
Slashdot Mirror
At some point, I'll have to dig through my closet and see if I still have my C64 Programmer's Guide.
The first program I ever wrote was on a VIC-20. That just brings back memories.
Obviously one of the mods today has a double recessive in his/her sarcasm gene.
Let's look at Microsoft's history with Win2K and WinXP and then re-ask that question, shall we?
Sorry, but the day that RMS shows up naked is the day I switch to MacOS.
Malarky.
I work in a decent OOP language, and I need code that is (to an extent) non self-explanatory on an ongoing basis. Code can be completely consistent internally, legible, correctly indented, with correct variable names, etc., ad nauseum, and still be difficult for another programmer to understand, because code isn't written in a vacuum. It does the maintenance programmer that will support my code absolutely no good to see my great code if he has no idea why it was written that way.
For instance, a good chunk of the code I'm responsible for involves bi-directional serial communication with hardware from other vendors. Vendors being definately plural. And every vendor has their own set of specifications and their own set of gotchas that you have to deal with.
So, the effects of the code are (painfully) obvious on their face, but there seems to be no obvious reason for the way some of the code is written. I make sure I add a comment (in regular, plain, well-constructed English) as to why I wrote a section the way I did, and what the maintenance programmer will break if he removes the seemingly nonsensical line of code below the comment.
Do not blast the litigants until the trial is over.
This isn't quite the same thing. The thing that Judge Jackson got in trouble for was "blasting" Microsoft in an interview outside the courtroom. He was provoked, but the things he said in that interview crossed the line. Judge Kimball is simply doing his job at this point: he's ruling on motions and actually doing SCO a favor by saying that, if they don't produce more evidence, they'll soon be finished. While this was a "blasting" of SCO, the blasting was done where it should be done: not behind the litigant's back where they couldn't reply. It was done in a ruling based on the evidence presented.
I suppose you could say that it is showing bias, but it's bias towards the truth.
It makes for good press, though.
Or like Gentoo 2004.3 on my laptop.
Then I'd expect you to be right in particular, but wrong in the general case: most major corporations do not have hordes of Linux kernel developers sitting around drinking coffee in a "Kernel Bug Ready Room" waiting for Linus to declare DefCon 2.
They do, however, have other programming assets that are performing other functions related to keeping the business moving forward. These assets can (and frequently are), reassigned at a moment's notice to evaluate problems or security holes as they arise.
Linus isn't the only one that can change any part of the kernel. You may be correct by saying that an enterprise level operation isn't going to accept a patch from you or me.
I'd expect that most enterprise level IT operations have developers on staff (or available through some sort of outsourcing or support contract) that may add a temporary fix until an official patch is available.
At the bare minimum, even if they don't want to craft a patch themselves, they can evaluate for themselves the security ramifications of the hole and possibly take other protective measures, up to and including disabling a part of the system temporarily until a fix is made.
As a rough example, there's a difference in Microsoft saying, "There's a security problem in the Windows GDI that won't affect you unless you're running a specific video card.", and you being able to look at the source for the GDI and affirming it for yourself.
Assuming you do, as a test, you may want to just copy over a couple of gig of files to your Neuros to see how long it takes. I was originally a little peeved when I got my Neuros back from the upgrade and it didn't seem that much faster. After some experimentation, it appeared to me that the bottleneck was in the sync software adding files to the database.
If you just copy files by themselves, you'll (most likely) find that it is quite a bit faster (I think it took me something like 20 minutes to copy ~9 gb of music over). Then I just did an orphan search to add everything to the database, which took an additional 3 minutes or so.
Moral of the story, don't do a straight synchronization when copying a lot of music to the Neuros. Both NDBM and NSM are very slow adding to the database.
Oh..... You mean....
Never mind.
Please do a quick Google for antibiotic families and modes of action. You will find pages like this and this.
Penicillin and derivitaves are still prescribed, but virtually every bug in the world (+ dog) is resistent to them.
One evening of watching the Discovery channel does not a B.S. in Microbiology confer.
The "natural" antibiotics to which you refer are still being found by the dozens. The problems are not (primarily) with patents. You have to:
You have to find an organism that has some antibiotic activity. Not as easy as you might thing. Searches go on CONSTANTLY, and the major drug companies grab soil samples from everywhere they can to test for organisms in the soil that exhibit unknown antibiotic properties.
You've spent several years and have found a likely candidate. Now you have to test the snot out of it. How does it do what it does? Is it a cell wall synthesis inhibitor? Does it go after 23S ribosomes? How about side effects? After all, bleach is one of the best antibiotics in the world. It's used for disinfection in BSL3 and BSL 4 microbiology labs. However, it wouldn't do you much good if you were to drink it, either. Drug interactions? If it kills someone that is taking a common drug (or worse, an uncommon drug), you're still in trouble.
Now, you have to start the FDA certification process. Do you think the FDA reimburses you for the millions you've spent to this point if things go bad? Nope. Do you think they're even going to reimburse you for the millions you're going to spend in clinical trials? Not likely. Remember Martha Stewart and IMClone? The bottom fell out of ImClone because they'd sunk a good chunk of their cash into a drug that was not going to be approved (granted, IIRC it was a cancer drug and not an antibiotic, but the principle applies).
Yes, pharmaceutical companies are businesses. They are for-profit. But it is not so much corporate greed that causes some of the outrageous drug prices as it is them having to pay for the research costs involved with the 99 drugs that didn't make it to market with the money made from the one drug that did.
Please do some research before making statements like the ones you've made.
{dusting off my OS textbook}
If I remember correctly, when a DMA write is done, the OS hands a memory block pointer and block size to the device. The device then sends information back to the DMA controller which writes the info to memory and triggers an interrupt when done. I don't believe that it was physically possible for a DMA controller to write outside the block allocated by the OS. So, this can't happen. Or, at the worst, the driver (not the OS) would access violate if it tried.
Game playing (at work) is a symptom, not a disease. The only cure is to counsel the individual involved, and terminate them if the counseling is ineffective.
Well, I don't disagree that the United States is the home of the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
I'm a little iffy on the "...internationally respected agency..." part, though
The innovative thing about the Apache was not the monocle. It was the way the monocle was boresighted and the way the helmet was tracked in 3D space inside the cockpit. The net effect was that, when the copilot/gunner looks at something, the aircraft can tell where he's looking. The TADS (or Target Acquisition and Designation System) follows his head motion. And, if the 30mm chain gun is the active weapon, it follows his head motion as well. All the CPG has to do is either lase to get a range or lase to designate the target and pull the trigger.
For the pilot, the helmet was boresighted so that the PNVS (or Pilot's Night Vision System) would automatically follow his head motions. The PNVS is an infrared system (not light multiplying) based in a small turret at the front of the aircraft. The pilots said that the perspective change took a bit of getting used to, but it worked very effectively.
I was an Apache crewchief for four years.
Thanks for the correction.
Guess where all the talent went?
And guess which X subsystem is being used in virtually all of the newer versions of the more popular distros?
Open Source software development is a particularly Darwinian environment. Which, in my opinion, is a good thing.
Nope. Girlfriend. Wives cost a A LOT more than $50 per month. Trust me on this one.
The vitriol is due to the fact that Microsoft did their level best to bend every customer they could find over a barrel to sign them up for a maintenance plan that was going to cost said customers more money than buying Windows and Office over the counter if the upgrade cycle lasts more than 3 years. And, when this was pointed out to Microsoft, they promised (hand on heart!) that there'd be some sort of ROI for this maintenance plan.
The technology may be amazing. It may be able to make demons fly out of my nose. But they conned a LOT of CIO/CTO folks into paying them for delivering nothing while they spent 5 years building the thing.
How they did this without keeping a straight face is beyond me.
I didn't say that it would be fun stuff to go rolling around in. If you smelt an acrid smell and your eyes started tearing up, wouldn't you want to go to a different location?
Yes, if you cut osmium tetroxide into lines like coke and do a couple of them, you're going to have big problems. But under the exposures to which a person would be generally exposed during a chemical attack, the most dangerous thing would be people panicking and hurting each other, not the chemical itself.
This is why I used the word generally in my original post.
It's amusing, though, isn't it to note that, in Kennedy vs. Mendoza-Martinez Justice Goldberg held that the act of depriving an American citizen of their citizenship because of draft dodging was a violation of "...the procedural safeguards guaranteed by the Fifth and Sixth Amendments". Just like I feel that the e-mail monitoring to which the original poster was willing to submit was a violation of my due process rights.As a matter of fact, in the full context of the quote, all Justice Goldberg was saying was that Congress has the authority to compel an individual to live up to the civic duties laid upon them by the constitution.
I'd suggest reading the case and the opinion. It's very interesting.
Yes, Mr. (or Ms.) A.C. Google can be your friend. However, you should be more careful to take your quotes in context.
I'd like to think I'm a responsibile cell phone user. In theatres, the first thing I do is either switch it off, or to vibrate only. If a call comes in for me in a public place, I step outside into an uncrowded area, or I let voice mail catch the call.
Unfortunately, in the U.S. today, the concept of personal responsibility has been killed. It's gone. It's pushing up posies. This is the same argument used by the gun control fanatic types: "An average person isn't smart enough to own a gun. So, instead of making them take responsibility for their actions, we'll just make it illegal to own guns."
So, here, instead of politely tasing (using a Taser) on rude individuals who insist on using cell phones rudely, we have people that want to make cell phone use impossible, thus taking away the ability of people who truly do need them from being able to be in those areas.
You don't need to have a cell phone to be rude and insensitive: Miss Manners existed well before the cell phone was invented.
Ahhhh... I love the smell of my karma burning in the afternoon.. It's the smell of victory.
Give up your own rights if you wish to do so (am assuming you're in the UK from the URL in your /. user id). I'll keep my rights right where they are, thank you.