Intense cold can't be good for them Intense vacuum should just about completely desiccate them. Intense radiation should destroy any genetic material in the bacteria
Actually, no. "In this example, instead of placing a special instruction in the place of interest in the source code, a software call to a specially named function is issued. There is no other function of the same name in the code and the debugger always sets a breakpoint at the function of that name. Using an exemplary specially named function, _DebugBreak, what would happen would be the program would execute until it reaches the place where _DebugBreak would be called. The debugger would detect this. The name of the function, _DebugBreak, would be recognized. Then, the exemplary desired action would be to break the execution at the place where _DebugBreak returns. The net result would be that the programs breaks the execution and allows single stepping at exactly the place the programmer intended. "
This example from the patent is simply a debugger macro run on every invocation that sets a breakpoint on return from "_DebugBreak". Or, an IDE that remembers where your breakpoints are located for every invocation of the debugger, or reload of the program. Run the debugger on a different processor? No problem, GDB would be more than happy to run the macro and set the breakpoint on "_DebugBreak". Use a different programming language? No problem, GDB would be more than happy to run the macro and set the breakpoint on "_DebugBreak".
It may say something about me, but the first thing I can think of off the top of my head is encrypted traffic. All hosts and all clients are expected to both support and use secure sessions. Sure, there might be a fallback for those underpowered devices that can't support RSA2048, and that's OK, but it should certainly be the exception rather than the rule.
Next?
Well, a little understanding of how the cell phone networks work would help here...
The number of channels (frequencies, if you will) available to a single cell site is limited. Let's say that Verizon is assigned (by the FCC) sufficient bandwidth to have 100 simultaneous calls in the city of Phoenix. Now, they could (like the Television stations) place a gigantic antenna on the top of the biggest mountain in the city, thus covering an area of, say, 100 miles radius. They would only be able to have 100 customers talking at a time; not a very good situation.
So, Verizon gets smart. They put 1000 antennas around the city, on very short towers so each one covers, say, 1 mile. Now each of these antennnas can support 100 customers talking at a time, and Verizon can now have 100,000 customers talking simultaneously. With some overlap on the towers, Verizon can tell that you're driving towards the edge of the coverage of one tower, and seamlessly tell your phone to change channels and start talking to a new tower. Ever had your call dropped while driving along? Probably because the tower you were coming into range of was full, or there was a software glitch in the handoff to the new tower.
Now, let's assume you are flying over Phoenix, talking to the wifey about what the rugrats did today. The channel that you're using cannot be reused by any of the 1000 cell towers in the city, because all of the cell towers have a clear line-of-sight to your airplane. You have just taken up cell phone bandwidth equivalent to 1000 customers.
That's why the FCC is concerned./frank
Is there anyone other than me who wants my browser to just be a browser?
Why do I have to browse the web on something that wants to be an applications platform, an office suite, a local filesystem browser, and a dessert topping? Don't you remember that the original advantage of the Firefox browser was that it was smaller, faster, and more secure than IE (because it didn't include things like ActiveX)?
We're in the process of doing a SOC ASIC, with a 32 bit CPU, analog sensing hardware, USB and other communications ports, sophisticated low power wakeup mechanisms, and RSA/AES/SHA-256 hardware. It only contains 32KB of ROM and 12KB of RAM. We expect the part to require less than 10ma of current in full-scale operation (generating 1 MB/sec of encrypted sensor data). We expect the parts to sell for less than $3, including several bits of external hardware, into a highly competitive marketplace. If our parts cost $0.10 more than our competitors or take 10 ma more current, we're out of business. We expect to sell millions of parts per month.
ROM and RAM comprise the largest space on the die. Die cost is about linearly proportional to area - doubling the size of the die doubles the cost. As a result, we don't have the luxury of embedding Linux, throwing a couple more MB of RAM at the problem, or increasing the clock speed. We certainly don't have the luxury of throwing this weeks latest, greatest academic language at the problem. 'C' and Assembly is the only way this product is going to survive.
I think you can be a fine Web programmer without knowing assembly or 'C'; I think you'd be a better one after one assignment to a project like mine, where every design decision is made and every line of code is written with a thought to "how fast is this going to run, how much code does this generate?", rather than "how do I get this done fastest and easiest?". There are many situations where the "throw more hardware at it" approach is valid; there are also many situations where it isn't.
First off, I'd dump any mention of 68hc08, 68hc11, 8051, z80, etc. There are more of those doing more than you would ever believe out there in the world, but it's like suggesting that someone learn GUI programming by giving them an 8086 with dual floppy drives and 256K of memory, and a copy of Windows 1.0. Time has passed them by; learning the quirks and tricks necessary to get them running happily is more an exercise in dedication in the modern world than any way to learn modern processing.
As a professional embedded programmer, I'm quite surprised by the number of recommendations for the AVR in this thread. I've never used it, but I may have to look into it. Quite a rabid following there.
I would recommend getting into ARM. In the professional world, they have pretty much taken over the middle ground of 30-200 MHz 32-bit processors, especially in the custom-chip arena.
With the NXP (nee Philips) LPC versions, you can have a 256KB FLASH/32KB RAM device with a USB port and a million on-board peripherals for the cost of a $10 chip (Digi-key quantity 1), a PCB, and a crystal. Pre-built development boards are a dime a dozen; I'm partial to the http://www.embeddedartists.com/ boards, and happen to have their http://www.embeddedartists.com/products/education/ edu_base.php LPC2148 Education board on my desk at the moment. It's a bit pricey at 99 EU, but without all the motors, LCD and LED displays you can get the basic board http://www.embeddedartists.com/products/boards/lpc 2148.php a bit cheaper.
ARMS are extremely well supported by the excellent GNUARM toolset (http://www.gnuarm.com/), giving you a completely free C/C++/Assembly toolset, and there are a huge number of sample programs available from Embedded Artists, Keil, Olimex, etc., for doing almost anything you might want.
Why teach them about code pages, completely screwey function call mechanics, 256 byte jumps, limited capability C libraries, etc., when they could be learning about putting their name on the display, spinning a motor, playing a tune, and shipping data up to a PC over USB?
/frank
Records had one big disadvantage over tapedecks: Click, pop, and record warp. Played loud, a pop on the record could be deadly. Played loud, a warped record (and they were all warped), could cause major woofer excursions at a very nice 2 Hz.
A little hiss in the background was far less of a problem, at least in my college days.
Assignment: Pick up the undocumented, buggy, unfinished, unspec-ed project from the previous years senior class (i.e., none of the original developers are still around to ask questions), and add a difficult, meaningless feature that has to be done by the end of the quarter.
55,000 bridges on 46,000 miles of highway? More than 1 bridge per mile? Sounds like we should've done a better job of surveying the route before starting to build freeways.
Actually, the column limit in Excel is an unsigned BYTE. That's right, 256 columns wide.
I've run into that multiple times, misusing Excel as a means for distributing a structured view of experimental measurements.
specious argument.
You are assuming, of course, that worms in the IPV6 world will crawl the way they do now, by generating a random IP address and trying to attack it.
Suppose they listen for broadcasts, and attack addresses they hear from?
Suppose they assume that a PC which has an Intel NIC in it, is in an organization that likely has more Intel NICs in it, and concentrates it's energies searching for other PC's in that 40 bit space?
Suppose the worm simply accepts the slow build-up of hosts; rather than having a Slammer-type worm that infects the vulnerable population in 10 minutes (http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~nweaver/sapphire/), perhaps you end up with worms that take days to build up rather than minutes; the low rate of scanning would probably keep them below the radar of the network monitors until their exponential growth started creating a blip.
Perhaps the worms would start linking together to divvy up the address space to search. If you have two copies of the worm inside an organization, there's no reason at all that they should be attacking the same addresses. Imagine a giant P2P worm network that served to coordinate the attack.
Perhaps you have a worm that gets launched from 10,000 hosts simultaneously; we know that zombie networks can be this large. Perhaps the zombie PCs that launch the attack spend a week or two simply collecting IP addresses - off broadcasts, off the local DNS, off low-level PING requests. Each one could have hundreds or thousands of initial, valid, local targets to pinpoint before D-Day.
Perhaps you have a breakthrough worm that does all of these things.
Yeah, it does a great job of breaking all those incoming connections from, say, the 1000 worms traversing the internet as well.
I'll stick with having to configure my router to forward a port, thank you.
I'm not.
Yahoo! music won't play (as far as I can tell) on my Archos Jukebox. It won't play in any of three existing Flash-based MP3 players. So, there's several hundred dollars worth of electronics I'd need to replace to use Yahoo! music.
And, I have no guarantees whatsoever that I'll be able to play the music I purchase 5 years from now. Technological obsolescence happens; I've seen it too many times.
It's in a proprietary, poorly-supported format. If the market decides to switch to a new format, this one will be left in the dust./frank
A PC emits heat at roughly the same rate as a resistive heater (think Lightbulb or electric baseboard heating). A heat pump emits significantly more heat than that (two to three times more), by extracting heat from the outdoors and moving it inside.
No laws of thermodynamics are broken in the process.
You want to work with the Open Source community?
Fine. Show us your openness. Tell us about your relationship with SCO.
That'll be one big test of their willingness.
No need for winds to start up a dust devil; they'll kick off on a perfectly calm day.
What happens is that the sun heats the ground. The ground heats the air just above it. The Hot air is less dense than cold air above it, and so it tries to rise through the cold air. Some pushing and shoving goes on, because the cold air doesn't really want to move out of the way, meanwhile more air is getting heated by the ground. Eventually, the hot air finds a weak spot in the obstinate cold air and coalesces into a coherent stream which rushes upward. It sucks in hot air from the ground all around the stream; most times, due to terrain effects or random noise, the incoming air will start a rotation of the column of rising air, and Bingo! you've got a dust devil./frank
1. All your students can be provided free copies of exactly the same software they're using at school for their home machines.
2. No audits from the BSA.
3. No worries about whether every single machine in the school has valid licenses for every single piece of software on them (see item #2).
4. It works good enough.
Gotta agree. More TLDs just mean more domain names that Microsoft, Walmart, Sears, etc., have to buy up, and don't really expand the number of names available.
Do you really expect Walmart to be happy with Walmart.com, and not also snap up Walmart.biz, Walmart.org, Walmart.biz, Walmart.us, and anything else that comes up?
Junk the TLDs. They were a good idea that has fatally flopped in the real world.
Isolate as much as possible - cheap UPS's won't do that for you.
Here's a thought. For each computer (or, possibly, group of two or three computers), run 120/240V power into an RV or Marine battery charger (something like http://cgi.ebay.com/ebaymotors/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?Vi ewItem&rd=1&item=4538880150&category=50073
or
http://cgi.ebay.com/ebaymotors/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?Vi ewItem&rd=1&item=4538380600&category=26444
) connected to one or more car batteries. Coming off the car batteries, you hang a cheap inverter - 400 watt 12V->120V inverters (enough for a computer and monitor) are in the $30 range. Hang a voltmeter across the batteries, draw a red line at 12V or so, and teach the kids that when the needle is below the liine, you can't run the computers (deals with most issues associated with deep cycling the batteries).
This gives you an inexpensive, reasonably isolated, double-conversion system. It might even work!
OK, I'll tell you what. I'll pull my 98 Explorer with 90,000 miles on it up to the nearest emissions testing station, in any condition you choose (hot, cold, whatever). You pull up in your non-catalytic equipped, reasonably similarly engined vehicle. We'll put $500 apiece down, least emissions takes all.
Are you willing to take that bet? 'Cause I'm willing to take your money.
If 49% had tried to make a difference, who did they vote for?
As has been pointed out multiple times, in the grand scheme of things the difference between R's and D's is miniscule in this country. BOTH parties believe in bigger government, BOTH parties believe in more control over the lives of citizens, BOTH parties are willing to sell you down the river in a heartbeat.
If 49% had tried to make a difference, they would have brought in new voices to the political scene./frank
Slashdot Mirror
Intense cold can't be good for them
/frank
Intense vacuum should just about completely desiccate them.
Intense radiation should destroy any genetic material in the bacteria
Exposure to all of these for how many years?
pfft.
Actually, no.
/frank
"In this example, instead of placing a special instruction in the place of interest in the source code, a software call to a specially named function is issued. There is no other function of the same name in the code and the debugger always sets a breakpoint at the function of that name. Using an exemplary specially named function, _DebugBreak, what would happen would be the program would execute until it reaches the place where _DebugBreak would be called. The debugger would detect this. The name of the function, _DebugBreak, would be recognized. Then, the exemplary desired action would be to break the execution at the place where _DebugBreak returns. The net result would be that the programs breaks the execution and allows single stepping at exactly the place the programmer intended. "
This example from the patent is simply a debugger macro run on every invocation that sets a breakpoint on return from "_DebugBreak". Or, an IDE that remembers where your breakpoints are located for every invocation of the debugger, or reload of the program. Run the debugger on a different processor? No problem, GDB would be more than happy to run the macro and set the breakpoint on "_DebugBreak". Use a different programming language? No problem, GDB would be more than happy to run the macro and set the breakpoint on "_DebugBreak".
I gotta start writing patents.
It may say something about me, but the first thing I can think of off the top of my head is encrypted traffic. All hosts and all clients are expected to both support and use secure sessions. Sure, there might be a fallback for those underpowered devices that can't support RSA2048, and that's OK, but it should certainly be the exception rather than the rule. Next?
Well, a little understanding of how the cell phone networks work would help here... The number of channels (frequencies, if you will) available to a single cell site is limited. Let's say that Verizon is assigned (by the FCC) sufficient bandwidth to have 100 simultaneous calls in the city of Phoenix. Now, they could (like the Television stations) place a gigantic antenna on the top of the biggest mountain in the city, thus covering an area of, say, 100 miles radius. They would only be able to have 100 customers talking at a time; not a very good situation. So, Verizon gets smart. They put 1000 antennas around the city, on very short towers so each one covers, say, 1 mile. Now each of these antennnas can support 100 customers talking at a time, and Verizon can now have 100,000 customers talking simultaneously. With some overlap on the towers, Verizon can tell that you're driving towards the edge of the coverage of one tower, and seamlessly tell your phone to change channels and start talking to a new tower. Ever had your call dropped while driving along? Probably because the tower you were coming into range of was full, or there was a software glitch in the handoff to the new tower. Now, let's assume you are flying over Phoenix, talking to the wifey about what the rugrats did today. The channel that you're using cannot be reused by any of the 1000 cell towers in the city, because all of the cell towers have a clear line-of-sight to your airplane. You have just taken up cell phone bandwidth equivalent to 1000 customers. That's why the FCC is concerned. /frank
Is there anyone other than me who wants my browser to just be a browser?
/frank
Why do I have to browse the web on something that wants to be an applications platform, an office suite, a local filesystem browser, and a dessert topping? Don't you remember that the original advantage of the Firefox browser was that it was smaller, faster, and more secure than IE (because it didn't include things like ActiveX)?
What happened?
We're in the process of doing a SOC ASIC, with a 32 bit CPU, analog sensing hardware, USB and other communications ports, sophisticated low power wakeup mechanisms, and RSA/AES/SHA-256 hardware. It only contains 32KB of ROM and 12KB of RAM. We expect the part to require less than 10ma of current in full-scale operation (generating 1 MB/sec of encrypted sensor data). We expect the parts to sell for less than $3, including several bits of external hardware, into a highly competitive marketplace. If our parts cost $0.10 more than our competitors or take 10 ma more current, we're out of business. We expect to sell millions of parts per month.
ROM and RAM comprise the largest space on the die. Die cost is about linearly proportional to area - doubling the size of the die doubles the cost. As a result, we don't have the luxury of embedding Linux, throwing a couple more MB of RAM at the problem, or increasing the clock speed. We certainly don't have the luxury of throwing this weeks latest, greatest academic language at the problem. 'C' and Assembly is the only way this product is going to survive.
I think you can be a fine Web programmer without knowing assembly or 'C'; I think you'd be a better one after one assignment to a project like mine, where every design decision is made and every line of code is written with a thought to "how fast is this going to run, how much code does this generate?", rather than "how do I get this done fastest and easiest?". There are many situations where the "throw more hardware at it" approach is valid; there are also many situations where it isn't.
First off, I'd dump any mention of 68hc08, 68hc11, 8051, z80, etc. There are more of those doing more than you would ever believe out there in the world, but it's like suggesting that someone learn GUI programming by giving them an 8086 with dual floppy drives and 256K of memory, and a copy of Windows 1.0. Time has passed them by; learning the quirks and tricks necessary to get them running happily is more an exercise in dedication in the modern world than any way to learn modern processing./ edu_base.php LPC2148 Education board on my desk at the moment. It's a bit pricey at 99 EU, but without all the motors, LCD and LED displays you can get the basic board http://www.embeddedartists.com/products/boards/lpc 2148.php a bit cheaper.
/frank
As a professional embedded programmer, I'm quite surprised by the number of recommendations for the AVR in this thread. I've never used it, but I may have to look into it. Quite a rabid following there.
I would recommend getting into ARM. In the professional world, they have pretty much taken over the middle ground of 30-200 MHz 32-bit processors, especially in the custom-chip arena.
With the NXP (nee Philips) LPC versions, you can have a 256KB FLASH/32KB RAM device with a USB port and a million on-board peripherals for the cost of a $10 chip (Digi-key quantity 1), a PCB, and a crystal. Pre-built development boards are a dime a dozen; I'm partial to the http://www.embeddedartists.com/ boards, and happen to have their http://www.embeddedartists.com/products/education
ARMS are extremely well supported by the excellent GNUARM toolset (http://www.gnuarm.com/), giving you a completely free C/C++/Assembly toolset, and there are a huge number of sample programs available from Embedded Artists, Keil, Olimex, etc., for doing almost anything you might want.
Why teach them about code pages, completely screwey function call mechanics, 256 byte jumps, limited capability C libraries, etc., when they could be learning about putting their name on the display, spinning a motor, playing a tune, and shipping data up to a PC over USB?
Records had one big disadvantage over tapedecks: Click, pop, and record warp. Played loud, a pop on the record could be deadly. Played loud, a warped record (and they were all warped), could cause major woofer excursions at a very nice 2 Hz. A little hiss in the background was far less of a problem, at least in my college days.
Assignment: Pick up the undocumented, buggy, unfinished, unspec-ed project from the previous years senior class (i.e., none of the original developers are still around to ask questions), and add a difficult, meaningless feature that has to be done by the end of the quarter.
Sigh. I guess I've been doing this too long.
So, I should be allowed to fire a gun randomly in a shopping mall, as long as I don't hit anyone? Explain why the situation is different.
55,000 bridges on 46,000 miles of highway? More than 1 bridge per mile? Sounds like we should've done a better job of surveying the route before starting to build freeways.
Actually, the column limit in Excel is an unsigned BYTE. That's right, 256 columns wide. I've run into that multiple times, misusing Excel as a means for distributing a structured view of experimental measurements.
> let go the parts that don't
So, did they let go the Linux parts, or did they kill, dismember, burn, and disperse them?
specious argument. You are assuming, of course, that worms in the IPV6 world will crawl the way they do now, by generating a random IP address and trying to attack it.
Suppose they listen for broadcasts, and attack addresses they hear from?
Suppose they assume that a PC which has an Intel NIC in it, is in an organization that likely has more Intel NICs in it, and concentrates it's energies searching for other PC's in that 40 bit space?
Suppose the worm simply accepts the slow build-up of hosts; rather than having a Slammer-type worm that infects the vulnerable population in 10 minutes (http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~nweaver/sapphire/), perhaps you end up with worms that take days to build up rather than minutes; the low rate of scanning would probably keep them below the radar of the network monitors until their exponential growth started creating a blip.
Perhaps the worms would start linking together to divvy up the address space to search. If you have two copies of the worm inside an organization, there's no reason at all that they should be attacking the same addresses. Imagine a giant P2P worm network that served to coordinate the attack.
Perhaps you have a worm that gets launched from 10,000 hosts simultaneously; we know that zombie networks can be this large. Perhaps the zombie PCs that launch the attack spend a week or two simply collecting IP addresses - off broadcasts, off the local DNS, off low-level PING requests. Each one could have hundreds or thousands of initial, valid, local targets to pinpoint before D-Day.
Perhaps you have a breakthrough worm that does all of these things.
Thanks, but I'll keep my NAT box.
Yeah, it does a great job of breaking all those incoming connections from, say, the 1000 worms traversing the internet as well. I'll stick with having to configure my router to forward a port, thank you.
I'm not. Yahoo! music won't play (as far as I can tell) on my Archos Jukebox. It won't play in any of three existing Flash-based MP3 players. So, there's several hundred dollars worth of electronics I'd need to replace to use Yahoo! music. And, I have no guarantees whatsoever that I'll be able to play the music I purchase 5 years from now. Technological obsolescence happens; I've seen it too many times. It's in a proprietary, poorly-supported format. If the market decides to switch to a new format, this one will be left in the dust. /frank
Please read up http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_pump on how a heat pump works, because you are apparently ignorant of their operation.
A PC emits heat at roughly the same rate as a resistive heater (think Lightbulb or electric baseboard heating). A heat pump emits significantly more heat than that (two to three times more), by extracting heat from the outdoors and moving it inside.
No laws of thermodynamics are broken in the process.
You want to work with the Open Source community? Fine. Show us your openness. Tell us about your relationship with SCO. That'll be one big test of their willingness.
No need for winds to start up a dust devil; they'll kick off on a perfectly calm day. What happens is that the sun heats the ground. The ground heats the air just above it. The Hot air is less dense than cold air above it, and so it tries to rise through the cold air. Some pushing and shoving goes on, because the cold air doesn't really want to move out of the way, meanwhile more air is getting heated by the ground. Eventually, the hot air finds a weak spot in the obstinate cold air and coalesces into a coherent stream which rushes upward. It sucks in hot air from the ground all around the stream; most times, due to terrain effects or random noise, the incoming air will start a rotation of the column of rising air, and Bingo! you've got a dust devil. /frank
1. All your students can be provided free copies of exactly the same software they're using at school for their home machines. 2. No audits from the BSA. 3. No worries about whether every single machine in the school has valid licenses for every single piece of software on them (see item #2). 4. It works good enough.
Gotta agree. More TLDs just mean more domain names that Microsoft, Walmart, Sears, etc., have to buy up, and don't really expand the number of names available.
/frank
Do you really expect Walmart to be happy with Walmart.com, and not also snap up Walmart.biz, Walmart.org, Walmart.biz, Walmart.us, and anything else that comes up?
Junk the TLDs. They were a good idea that has fatally flopped in the real world.
Isolate as much as possible - cheap UPS's won't do that for you.
i ewItem&rd=1&item=4538880150&category=50073
or
http://cgi.ebay.com/ebaymotors/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?Vi ewItem&rd=1&item=4538380600&category=26444
) connected to one or more car batteries. Coming off the car batteries, you hang a cheap inverter - 400 watt 12V->120V inverters (enough for a computer and monitor) are in the $30 range. Hang a voltmeter across the batteries, draw a red line at 12V or so, and teach the kids that when the needle is below the liine, you can't run the computers (deals with most issues associated with deep cycling the batteries).
/frank
Here's a thought. For each computer (or, possibly, group of two or three computers), run 120/240V power into an RV or Marine battery charger (something like http://cgi.ebay.com/ebaymotors/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?V
This gives you an inexpensive, reasonably isolated, double-conversion system. It might even work!
Actually, neither of the parents points are particularly true. http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.aspx?catid =50&threadid=1531887&enterthread=y
is a discussion on another board with some good info from PowerEngineer.
OK, I'll tell you what. I'll pull my 98 Explorer with 90,000 miles on it up to the nearest emissions testing station, in any condition you choose (hot, cold, whatever). You pull up in your non-catalytic equipped, reasonably similarly engined vehicle. We'll put $500 apiece down, least emissions takes all. Are you willing to take that bet? 'Cause I'm willing to take your money.
If 49% had tried to make a difference, who did they vote for?
/frank
As has been pointed out multiple times, in the grand scheme of things the difference between R's and D's is miniscule in this country. BOTH parties believe in bigger government, BOTH parties believe in more control over the lives of citizens, BOTH parties are willing to sell you down the river in a heartbeat.
If 49% had tried to make a difference, they would have brought in new voices to the political scene.