The match going out comment in more usually attributed to Diesel fuels, Kerosene and paraffin, which have a much higher flash point, and a higher boiling point. This means there is little vapor above the liquid and they are not likely to be ignited by a lighted match.
My father has a small yacht. There's an outboard motor, powered off the usual marine petrol/oil mixture, but the cabin cooker and lighting run off paraffin.
Petrol is never allowed in the cabin. It gets stored in the engine well, which was floor-level vents so that any petrol fumes will go overboard. If petrol got taken into the cabin, then the fumes would go down into the bilge, where they'd build up --- having your boat explode while out at sea is generally considered a bad thing.
(Paraffin's a great fuel. Cheap, easy to use, very safe; it's more or less liquid wax. We generally use primuses, where the fuel gets preheated by the flame to vaporise it before it reaches the burner; you have to bootstrap them with methylated spirits to get them hot enough to run. Modern primuses, though, have atomiser jets good enough that you can light the fuel spray directly without needing the bootstrap stage. I'm surprised paraffin's not used more often.)
That code looks like it's going out of its way to deal with endian issues to me.
Hardly --- you have four bytes on disk, you want to put them together to form an integer, how else are you going to do it? { int i; fread(&i, 1, 4, fd); } ? I'm sorry, but that's grotesque hackery; it's making all kinds of assumptions as to the size of int and the encoding used, and while people did do that kind of foulness in times past, these days we know better. I stand by my earlier statement; if you do that sort of thing, then you've been either badly taught, or do not care about writing good code, and either way, it's deeply unprofessional.
{ uint32_t value = read32bit(offset) & 0x1FFFFFFF; }
Totally portable, totally trivial, and efficient --- any reasonable compiler will optimise out the 'return' line if it can.. (I'm assuming little-endian. May contain typos.)
This is basic programming skills. There is nothing the least bit hard here, and these days, people should be doing this kind of thing as a matter of course.
You have to go out of your way to make sure it doesn't work, unless you're dealing with binary files on a disk that you didn't write, you have no guarantee that they are of the same endianness as the CPU you are running on at the moment.
Only if you were reading those binary data structures in an incredibly stupid way --- i.e., by fread()ing them into a structure. And frankly, if you do that, you're incompetent. These days, the way data's encoded on disk is completely irrelevant to the way it's stored in memory. This sort of thing has been known about for years.
Problem: Why doesn't the driver work on 64-bit and bigendian systems?
Yeah, but... surely any well-written code for a portable operating system, such as Linux, should be written in such a way that endianness and word size is irrelevant? In fact, these days you'd pretty much have to go out of your way to ensure that it didn't work. Particularly for user-space code.
This was the set-up for David Brin's novel Glory Season: The vast majority of the population of an isolated colony world were female, and most of those were clones of various ancestral mothers.
A good book (although the Conway's Game of Life obsession did strike me as rather odd).
Another good book is Lois McMaster Bujold's Ethan of Athos, which turns the scenario on its head: her colony world is inhabited solely by men. They use technological alternatives ('uterine replicators') to in utero gestation. They used cloned female ovarine tissue to produce eggs, which then got fertilised in the normal way; the plot focuses around the fact that they're basically running out, and the lead character needs to head out into the galaxy to try and find more. He's really not looking forward to meeting women.
Here in the real world, research is ongoing towards stimulating stem cells into producing eggs; so it ought to be, quite soon, entirely possible for a child to be born with two fathers and no mother. (Although I do find myself wondering about what the absence of sex-linked genes would do.)
Mime-types fail due to not being actually encoded on-filesystem, and magic strings require users to use a hex editor to try and identify an alien file type.
Acorn's RiscOS had a modular VFS supporting case-preserving filenames with a seperate 24-bit file type field; the default filesystem, ADFS, supported 10-char filenames but there were others that supported longer ones. It worked, really, really well, but was radically different from anything in the DOS or Unix world --- you couldn't have two files with the same name but different types, for example.
Even more unfortunately, they picked . as the directory specifier. A full path would look like:
adfs::DiskName.$.Foo.Bar.Baz.Thingy
...where 'adfs:' was the filesystem, ':DiskName' was the name of the disk on that filesystem, and '$' was the root directory. This made programming in C a nightmare; most people ended up with directories called 'c' and 'h' containing a bag of files, so that instead of referring to 'foo.c' and 'foo.h' you'd use 'c.foo' and 'h.foo' instead. Ugh.
Even worse, trying to transfer files off DOS floppies was a pain --- the 8.3 DOS filenames were mapped to 8/3 RiscOS filenames. So 'wibble.bas' became 'wibble/bas'. Yup, that means that the maximum size was 12 characters, which wouldn't fit on a default ADFS volume.
RiscOS was a deeply beautiful system, and was a pleasure to use, but it really didn't play nice with the rest of the world. Fair enough, really, since it pretty much predated Windows...
There is a law that you must allow roll back room for the car in front of you, too bad most people are too stupid to understand those laws or learn to stay away from the truck in front of them after the first few times they get hit. (we rolled back 6 -12 inches.)
Uh... roll back room? I'm a bit confused; here in the UK, one of the standard driving test procedures is the hill start; if you roll back at all, you fail. (At least when I took it. They might have changed things.)
Unless this is something to do with automatics, but you said you drive a truck, and they tend to use manual gearboxes...
Not to mention modern day classics like "Spider and Web" (best "Aha!" puzzle I've ever encountered)...
Spider and Web (which you can play online!) is, indeed superb --- and I know the moment you mean; I remember sitting there in amazement that he'd managed to pull off something so perfect and so unexpected.
It's not perfect --- the 'that's not important right now' bits really annoyed me for reasons that would be a spoiler to go into. But it's a great game. It's also very hard.
(Background: Spider and Web is a modern adventure game written to run on Infocom's Z-machine. There's a large and vibrant community based around writing and playing adventure games --- the genre's never been healthier. You can find more information than you ever believed possible off the link above.)
It's not a better-than or worse-than comparison, I'm simply stating the facts. You have to have a certain critical mass of density to make rail networks worth your while. An analogy that works well with Europeans I've met: Imagine France. Now imagine there is nothing in the country but Paris, Lyon, and Marseille. None of the little villages, towns, and cities. Nothing but desert. Now consider the practicality of a rail network in the country. This is Texas.
The thing is, though, I'm not talking about building a high-density rail network across the entire country. That's obviously not going to work. What I am talking about is building a high-density rail network in specific areas. My experiences were of travelling from one place in North Carolina to another place in North Carolina --- not a particularly large distance, and it's got a high enough population density to make a local network worthwhile.
Plus, your argument is flawed: the problems with building local networks do not scale linearly with area, because you build everywhere at once. That is, each area that needs a rail network has its own workforce with which to build it. In your depopulated Europe example, Paris, Lyon and Marseille would each build their own Metro at the same time (as I believe they have). It would take the same amount of time regardless of how many cities there are.
Not only that, but the fact that there are large distances between these cities merely reinforces the need for high-speed rail links between them. One thing that people in countries like the US often fail to realise is that modern trains are really fast; the TGV cruises at 200mph. Way faster than driving, and while it's slower than flying, it's only about a third of the speed of a 747. When you factor in the times taken for checkin, security, take-off, getting up to cruising altitude, etc, then you begin to realise that for medium distances, high-speed rail can be faster (as well as cheaper) than flying. As well as a hell of a lot less stressful --- bigger seats and you can get up and walk around. TGVs don't stop between major population centres, so the fact that in the US there's nothing in between them is completely irrelevant.
Take a look at Australia sometime. It's of comparable size to the US, with even worse population density problems, and is investing large amounts of money in its rail network.
In Europe, they've got it all. Their intercity highways are better than ours. And for commuting, they have train networks that actually work and are pleasant enough that people want to use them. Saves gas, saves time (the high-speed trains are faster and you don't have to park them), and you can still drive your car just fine when you are going somewhere the trains don't go or don't reach effectively.
I live in the UK. We used to have the best railway network in the world. Hell, we invented them. Then we had Margaret Thatcher, who loved cars, and we had decades of apathetic state-funded railway management, and then we sold the whole lot off to Railtrack, who didn't maintain the network for ten years and caused several huge railway crashes, and as a result the rail network these days is expensive, unreliable, and slow.
And it's still orders of magnitude better than the US system. The last time I went there --- it was to North Carolina, and I'm quite aware that North Carolina is not the US's best point --- it was like visiting a third world country. Where any European airport is smoothly integrated into a quiet, cleanly running mass transit hub, we got out at Raleigh into a dirty, smelly car park full of honking horns. We had to hire a car to get to the fairly large town where we were going simply because we couldn't find out any other way to get there. (There may have been buses, but we were all completely unable to find any kind of centralised bus timetable system.) It was a hell of a culture shock.
This April I went skiing in Austria. I got the bus from my house to Reading railway station; got the bus there to Heathrow; flew to Munich; got on the mass transit from the airport to central Munich; got a long-distance train to Jenbach; got on the Zillertalbahn mountain railway to Mayrhofen; and then got on the Postbus from Mayrhofen to the guest house where I was staying; I got dropped off at the door. Sounds complicated? I went to the Deutschbahn website, told it I wanted to go from Reading, UK to Juns, Austria and it routed the whole lot for me. Through three countries. Everything was on time, too.
What's this obsession with using screwdrivers to bang nails in?
Your example of a camping trip is possibly the absolute worst thing that a mass-transit system would be good for. Nobody in their right mind would suggest building a railway simply to take three people out into the wilderness. That's the kind of thing that cars are ideally suited for.
Conversely, commuter traffic, or bulk transport, are the absolute worst thing that personal transport systems are good for. You're using a separate vehicle, each with its own engine, for each person? When most of them are travelling the same route at the same time? That's just silly.
What's appropriate is to use a rail system for commuting from suburbia to the city centre twice daily, or to carry a million tonnes of coal from Texas to New York City (or whereever). And you use the car when you want to go camping.
The first step when decided what the right tool is for a particular job is to be aware that more than one tool exists!
There should be some badge or other distinction you get from the Mile High Club for broadcasting the various positions you tried out with your girlfriend.
Oh.
My.
God.
Mile High Club live webcam shows. Call it plane porn. You could make an absolute mint...
What? What about when you are on the ground and happen to be standing in between 3 different towers, an equal distance from each? Wouldn't that be the same kind of situation you are talking about in an air plane?
Because all the cells need to negotiate with each other to ensure that your phone is only logged in to one cell at a time? And if you're on a plane, not only can your mobile see a lot of cells (meaning that negotiation is expensive), but because you're moving fast, the system has to renegotiate very frequently as you move from cell to cell?
The average person who knows what he's doing, sure. If that gets in the official mag, I bet there'll be at least a few "I want to try that too" types who completely screw up.
So they'll screw it up, ask Microsoft to fix it, get laughed at, and have to buy a new XBox. How does Microsoft lose by this? Remember, this is the official magazine...
I get a spam IM about once every few months, if not rarer, and all it contains is an obfuscated link to some camgirl website or something (I haven't clicked, I'm just guessing).
I'll agree that I very rarely get IM spam --- and I subscribe to five different accounts, including ICQ --- but have you visited a Yahoo chat room recently? It's... unfortunate. Rooms will contain 30 bots (usually spamming in 48pt blink red) and, if you're lucky, maybe three actual people. They're practically unusable.
And I remember Sony going on to win that war, and PlayStation becoming the de facto shorthand for 'video games'.
Well, that's odd, because I don't. Here in the UK, my experience is that the N64 and the Playstation were about equally ubiquitous. 'Playing Nintendo' was synonymous for playing a console game. N64s were pretty much everywhere.
And certainly, from what I've seen, the N64 was far more desirable --- no moving parts! Silent! Solid! No delicate, easily-scratchable disks! No load times! No fiddly save-game cards! Analogue sticks! Rumble packs! One of the best controllers ever made! Playstations always seemed cheap and plasticy by comparison.
Slashdot Mirror
The match going out comment in more usually attributed to Diesel fuels, Kerosene and paraffin, which have a much higher flash point, and a higher boiling point. This means there is little vapor above the liquid and they are not likely to be ignited by a lighted match.
My father has a small yacht. There's an outboard motor, powered off the usual marine petrol/oil mixture, but the cabin cooker and lighting run off paraffin.
Petrol is never allowed in the cabin. It gets stored in the engine well, which was floor-level vents so that any petrol fumes will go overboard. If petrol got taken into the cabin, then the fumes would go down into the bilge, where they'd build up --- having your boat explode while out at sea is generally considered a bad thing.
(Paraffin's a great fuel. Cheap, easy to use, very safe; it's more or less liquid wax. We generally use primuses, where the fuel gets preheated by the flame to vaporise it before it reaches the burner; you have to bootstrap them with methylated spirits to get them hot enough to run. Modern primuses, though, have atomiser jets good enough that you can light the fuel spray directly without needing the bootstrap stage. I'm surprised paraffin's not used more often.)
"Interportlet"?
That code looks like it's going out of its way to deal with endian issues to me.
Hardly --- you have four bytes on disk, you want to put them together to form an integer, how else are you going to do it? { int i; fread(&i, 1, 4, fd); } ? I'm sorry, but that's grotesque hackery; it's making all kinds of assumptions as to the size of int and the encoding used, and while people did do that kind of foulness in times past, these days we know better. I stand by my earlier statement; if you do that sort of thing, then you've been either badly taught, or do not care about writing good code, and either way, it's deeply unprofessional.
So you're saying reading four bytes from a file into a uint32_t will magically take care of any endianness for you?
Well --- given that you get to specify what order you put those bytes together to make the uint32_t, then yes, it does.
Let's try reading a 32-bit value from the disk surface and masking out the top 3 bits (random file-systemesque example chosen off the top of my head).
Totally portable, totally trivial, and efficient --- any reasonable compiler will optimise out the 'return' line if it can.. (I'm assuming little-endian. May contain typos.)
This is basic programming skills. There is nothing the least bit hard here, and these days, people should be doing this kind of thing as a matter of course.
You have to go out of your way to make sure it doesn't work, unless you're dealing with binary files on a disk that you didn't write, you have no guarantee that they are of the same endianness as the CPU you are running on at the moment.
Only if you were reading those binary data structures in an incredibly stupid way --- i.e., by fread()ing them into a structure. And frankly, if you do that, you're incompetent. These days, the way data's encoded on disk is completely irrelevant to the way it's stored in memory. This sort of thing has been known about for years.
Problem: Why doesn't the driver work on 64-bit and bigendian systems?
Yeah, but... surely any well-written code for a portable operating system, such as Linux, should be written in such a way that endianness and word size is irrelevant? In fact, these days you'd pretty much have to go out of your way to ensure that it didn't work. Particularly for user-space code.
Has anyone actually tried this yet?
U.S. Dept. Of Retro Warns: 'We May Be Running Out Of Past'
That was nine years ago.
This was the set-up for David Brin's novel Glory Season: The vast majority of the population of an isolated colony world were female, and most of those were clones of various ancestral mothers.
A good book (although the Conway's Game of Life obsession did strike me as rather odd).
Another good book is Lois McMaster Bujold's Ethan of Athos, which turns the scenario on its head: her colony world is inhabited solely by men. They use technological alternatives ('uterine replicators') to in utero gestation. They used cloned female ovarine tissue to produce eggs, which then got fertilised in the normal way; the plot focuses around the fact that they're basically running out, and the lead character needs to head out into the galaxy to try and find more. He's really not looking forward to meeting women.
Here in the real world, research is ongoing towards stimulating stem cells into producing eggs; so it ought to be, quite soon, entirely possible for a child to be born with two fathers and no mother. (Although I do find myself wondering about what the absence of sex-linked genes would do.)
You cannot use random character string for file names.
<pedant>
You cannot use a random byte string. You can use a random character string, provided the string is a valid UTF-8 sequence, of course.
(This is a good thing.)
</pedant>
Mime-types fail due to not being actually encoded on-filesystem, and magic strings require users to use a hex editor to try and identify an alien file type.
Acorn's RiscOS had a modular VFS supporting case-preserving filenames with a seperate 24-bit file type field; the default filesystem, ADFS, supported 10-char filenames but there were others that supported longer ones. It worked, really, really well, but was radically different from anything in the DOS or Unix world --- you couldn't have two files with the same name but different types, for example.
Even more unfortunately, they picked . as the directory specifier. A full path would look like:
adfs::DiskName.$.Foo.Bar.Baz.Thingy
...where 'adfs:' was the filesystem, ':DiskName' was the name of the disk on that filesystem, and '$' was the root directory. This made programming in C a nightmare; most people ended up with directories called 'c' and 'h' containing a bag of files, so that instead of referring to 'foo.c' and 'foo.h' you'd use 'c.foo' and 'h.foo' instead. Ugh.
Even worse, trying to transfer files off DOS floppies was a pain --- the 8.3 DOS filenames were mapped to 8/3 RiscOS filenames. So 'wibble.bas' became 'wibble/bas'. Yup, that means that the maximum size was 12 characters, which wouldn't fit on a default ADFS volume.
RiscOS was a deeply beautiful system, and was a pleasure to use, but it really didn't play nice with the rest of the world. Fair enough, really, since it pretty much predated Windows...
There is a law that you must allow roll back room for the car in front of you, too bad most people are too stupid to understand those laws or learn to stay away from the truck in front of them after the first few times they get hit. (we rolled back 6 -12 inches.)
Uh... roll back room? I'm a bit confused; here in the UK, one of the standard driving test procedures is the hill start; if you roll back at all, you fail. (At least when I took it. They might have changed things.)
Unless this is something to do with automatics, but you said you drive a truck, and they tend to use manual gearboxes...
Not to mention modern day classics like "Spider and Web" (best "Aha!" puzzle I've ever encountered)...
Spider and Web (which you can play online!) is, indeed superb --- and I know the moment you mean; I remember sitting there in amazement that he'd managed to pull off something so perfect and so unexpected.
It's not perfect --- the 'that's not important right now' bits really annoyed me for reasons that would be a spoiler to go into. But it's a great game. It's also very hard.
(Background: Spider and Web is a modern adventure game written to run on Infocom's Z-machine. There's a large and vibrant community based around writing and playing adventure games --- the genre's never been healthier. You can find more information than you ever believed possible off the link above.)
It's not a better-than or worse-than comparison, I'm simply stating the facts. You have to have a certain critical mass of density to make rail networks worth your while. An analogy that works well with Europeans I've met: Imagine France. Now imagine there is nothing in the country but Paris, Lyon, and Marseille. None of the little villages, towns, and cities. Nothing but desert. Now consider the practicality of a rail network in the country. This is Texas.
The thing is, though, I'm not talking about building a high-density rail network across the entire country. That's obviously not going to work. What I am talking about is building a high-density rail network in specific areas. My experiences were of travelling from one place in North Carolina to another place in North Carolina --- not a particularly large distance, and it's got a high enough population density to make a local network worthwhile.
Plus, your argument is flawed: the problems with building local networks do not scale linearly with area, because you build everywhere at once. That is, each area that needs a rail network has its own workforce with which to build it. In your depopulated Europe example, Paris, Lyon and Marseille would each build their own Metro at the same time (as I believe they have). It would take the same amount of time regardless of how many cities there are.
Not only that, but the fact that there are large distances between these cities merely reinforces the need for high-speed rail links between them. One thing that people in countries like the US often fail to realise is that modern trains are really fast; the TGV cruises at 200mph. Way faster than driving, and while it's slower than flying, it's only about a third of the speed of a 747. When you factor in the times taken for checkin, security, take-off, getting up to cruising altitude, etc, then you begin to realise that for medium distances, high-speed rail can be faster (as well as cheaper) than flying. As well as a hell of a lot less stressful --- bigger seats and you can get up and walk around. TGVs don't stop between major population centres, so the fact that in the US there's nothing in between them is completely irrelevant.
Take a look at Australia sometime. It's of comparable size to the US, with even worse population density problems, and is investing large amounts of money in its rail network.
In Europe, they've got it all. Their intercity highways are better than ours. And for commuting, they have train networks that actually work and are pleasant enough that people want to use them. Saves gas, saves time (the high-speed trains are faster and you don't have to park them), and you can still drive your car just fine when you are going somewhere the trains don't go or don't reach effectively.
I live in the UK. We used to have the best railway network in the world. Hell, we invented them. Then we had Margaret Thatcher, who loved cars, and we had decades of apathetic state-funded railway management, and then we sold the whole lot off to Railtrack, who didn't maintain the network for ten years and caused several huge railway crashes, and as a result the rail network these days is expensive, unreliable, and slow.
And it's still orders of magnitude better than the US system. The last time I went there --- it was to North Carolina, and I'm quite aware that North Carolina is not the US's best point --- it was like visiting a third world country. Where any European airport is smoothly integrated into a quiet, cleanly running mass transit hub, we got out at Raleigh into a dirty, smelly car park full of honking horns. We had to hire a car to get to the fairly large town where we were going simply because we couldn't find out any other way to get there. (There may have been buses, but we were all completely unable to find any kind of centralised bus timetable system.) It was a hell of a culture shock.
This April I went skiing in Austria. I got the bus from my house to Reading railway station; got the bus there to Heathrow; flew to Munich; got on the mass transit from the airport to central Munich; got a long-distance train to Jenbach; got on the Zillertalbahn mountain railway to Mayrhofen; and then got on the Postbus from Mayrhofen to the guest house where I was staying; I got dropped off at the door. Sounds complicated? I went to the Deutschbahn website, told it I wanted to go from Reading, UK to Juns, Austria and it routed the whole lot for me. Through three countries. Everything was on time, too.
What's this obsession with using screwdrivers to bang nails in?
Your example of a camping trip is possibly the absolute worst thing that a mass-transit system would be good for. Nobody in their right mind would suggest building a railway simply to take three people out into the wilderness. That's the kind of thing that cars are ideally suited for.
Conversely, commuter traffic, or bulk transport, are the absolute worst thing that personal transport systems are good for. You're using a separate vehicle, each with its own engine, for each person? When most of them are travelling the same route at the same time? That's just silly.
What's appropriate is to use a rail system for commuting from suburbia to the city centre twice daily, or to carry a million tonnes of coal from Texas to New York City (or whereever). And you use the car when you want to go camping.
The first step when decided what the right tool is for a particular job is to be aware that more than one tool exists!
There should be some badge or other distinction you get from the Mile High Club for broadcasting the various positions you tried out with your girlfriend.
Oh.
My.
God.
Mile High Club live webcam shows. Call it plane porn. You could make an absolute mint...
What? What about when you are on the ground and happen to be standing in between 3 different towers, an equal distance from each? Wouldn't that be the same kind of situation you are talking about in an air plane?
Because all the cells need to negotiate with each other to ensure that your phone is only logged in to one cell at a time? And if you're on a plane, not only can your mobile see a lot of cells (meaning that negotiation is expensive), but because you're moving fast, the system has to renegotiate very frequently as you move from cell to cell?
The average person who knows what he's doing, sure. If that gets in the official mag, I bet there'll be at least a few "I want to try that too" types who completely screw up.
So they'll screw it up, ask Microsoft to fix it, get laughed at, and have to buy a new XBox. How does Microsoft lose by this? Remember, this is the official magazine...
Mr. Rogers.
Accordion Hero: Mad Polka Beats
You think you're joking, don't you?
Schadenfreude Interactive's Accordion Hero --- Gamasutra's post-mortem report on the development process
Grand Theft Auto: Animal Crossing
*vroom* *squick*
...surely that means it's optimised for playing Elite?
I get a spam IM about once every few months, if not rarer, and all it contains is an obfuscated link to some camgirl website or something (I haven't clicked, I'm just guessing).
I'll agree that I very rarely get IM spam --- and I subscribe to five different accounts, including ICQ --- but have you visited a Yahoo chat room recently? It's... unfortunate. Rooms will contain 30 bots (usually spamming in 48pt blink red) and, if you're lucky, maybe three actual people. They're practically unusable.
And I remember Sony going on to win that war, and PlayStation becoming the de facto shorthand for 'video games'.
Well, that's odd, because I don't. Here in the UK, my experience is that the N64 and the Playstation were about equally ubiquitous. 'Playing Nintendo' was synonymous for playing a console game. N64s were pretty much everywhere.
And certainly, from what I've seen, the N64 was far more desirable --- no moving parts! Silent! Solid! No delicate, easily-scratchable disks! No load times! No fiddly save-game cards! Analogue sticks! Rumble packs! One of the best controllers ever made! Playstations always seemed cheap and plasticy by comparison.
Are things really so different in the US?