I think he refers to the structure described there:
The structure seen above was placed to test the ability of the sandy Berlin soil to support the weight of the triumphal arch. It was a large concrete mass with apparatus to test and measure its movement relative to the ground level
I wasn't aware that destroying it was that out of reach.
Just to get in the mood for it, first you have to read that lengthy introduction to git-svn for Subversion/SVK users and deserters. You're so not expected to read that page through to its end at the first attempt, so instead you're expected to refer to it again sometimes after your first hand-on experience. Here goes:
git add modified_file_1 modified_file_2 added_file # (at this stage, be sure to know what the "index" is) git commit
and work that way locally for a while, venturing into branching (remember: git is about having plenty of small, not so short-lived, feature branches) and then merging until all that you see in the gitk --all and git ui GUIs make sense to you. Or, why not, cloning your repo/directory, and pushing from the clone to its "master".
Overall at this stage, the github usage docs and getting started are your friend. After this learning phase, stackoverflow will come in handy:)
Last, don't be too afraid to try things on working copy with clean status, since git commands only affects the.git repository in an append-only fashion, you'll be able to revert on every command that turned awful:
git reset --hard HEAD@{1}
will take you to the previously recorded state of your repository. Just look into git reflog for past things not necessarily in "gitk --all".
I don't know about pre-grub time, but SGA Bios is a damn cool looking bit of x86 asm from Google themselves, meant to be cast in one of your BIOS option ROMs (wtf ? does it hurt ?? maybe some answers, as usual, on Wikipedia) that enhances your VGA console output with serial port IOs. Used by Google (themselves) for their servers farms, or so they say.
Ok, there may be discussion, and I'll even agree this raise a thousand objections and obstacles to be overcome. Still, I'll keep in mind that the idea of having a LED display under your car wheels sounds damn cool, and that forking a tenth of million dollars on that possibility might more rational use of taxpayer money compared to... well you know what I mean: hey,/. people! quit whining when (even though) a (very tiny by recent times standard) bit of money flows towards genuine engineering experiments, rather than f***ing massive scale financial experiments. Both have the potential of burning money, only bankers have grown outrageously good at it.
Please be bothered instead that this is, after all, not so much money, or, if you really need to stick to your whining mood, blame the funds granters and their nonsensical criterias
Aside from the obvious wear and tear, what about the fact that cars are covering up the panels?
That very point is addressed in their FAQ section on their website. In short: cars never packs up and cover more than a small fraction of the asphalt surface. Other common objections are, if not addressed, at least discussed, on that same page which, all in all, makes for a nice engidreaming read.
I'll try to elaborate on this, from my selfish little point of view. I had to marvel some times ago at Les Paul wikipedia photograph, where he can be seen playing guitar on stage. He was born 1915, which made him 2 years younger than my (late) grandfather, and the wp photograph is from 2004: abstracting the fact that mine was not exactly the artist kind of person, boy-would-it-feel-strange seeing daddy rocking the stage with his guitar !
I quite like the way this blog by an old time Atari employee recalls the when and how of Atari developement. Something (Donkey Kong port on Atari consoles) that read
I should explain how Atari's Arcade conversions group worked. Basically, Atari's marketing folks would negotiate a license to ship GameCorp's "Foobar Blaster" on a cartridge for the Atari Home Computer System. That was it. That was the entirety of the deal.
made it clearer with:
We got ZERO help from the original developers of the games. No listings, no talking to the engineers, no design documents, nothing.
but, wait... there was even less:
In fact, we had to buy our own copy of the arcade machine and simply get good at the game (which was why I was playing it at the hotel our copy of the game hadn't even been delivered yet).
was for me a sure way to a plentiful of nostalgiaholic reading.
Yeah, and I don't know to which extent the mathematician programmer (namely Don Knuth) rejoins the Sudoku one (ultra optimisd bit squeezing), but I somehow felt a shock when I had the TexBook rendered by olden TeX as a 500 page DVI file, in a few seconds. You may object that.dvi are not that useful files, so... well (I had to perform some timing measurements for the sake of factual commenting) and PDF-TeX does the thing in 12 seconds (compared to 7 seconds for DVI TeXing, all on my rusty 1.4G centrino).
The point is: ask Indesign to do the same, and tell me which one is the true demo. Then ask indesign to do the same, on the machines TeX would originally render the TeXbook. PDP-what ?
What ? Are you advertising here some evil-closed-source software ?
Unless you'll argue that back in the days, well, HEX was considered the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it:)
Just kidding, of course, thanks for sharing this bit of history with us !
Al.
If you were to look for text-in-nodes with attributes, I'd suggest you should go for XPath (quick, even for large document, at least in MSXML).
The SkXML link above lets you do just that, but can take text flexions into account, and on large XML document collections. Well, it requires batched indexing, though:(
Lately I've bought an Alphasmart Dana, which looks like the Tandy you describe, and is a Palm system with a battery, changeable for 3 AA batteries, leaving you with a 25 hour autonomy. If that is not enough, you may still get; from the same manufacturer, the simpler "Neo" offers a whopping 700 hours autonomy, and 8 text buffers (no PalmOS this time), and some basic connectivity to a PC.
Not exactly "feel the power" kind of stuff but imho, these do nicely match the portability, general resilience and autonomy requirements. They're rather expansive, too.
Another interesting way is to adjoin a Bluetooth keyboard to a PDA.
Elaborating on this, it seems to me that this "hardware stack" is really an implementation detail: there's a stack anyway, and since its top is really often accessed, I suspect it gets easily loaded in the innermost, fastest, cache of a processor. Don't forget that knowledgeable people here keep saying that "even assembly is now far from the metal".
What people do say about this "fine grained paralellism" is only currently doable because some C compiler had the guts to allocate register for some of variables that would have otherwise (say, gcc -O0) been put on the stack: there may be some information a stack based processor would miss in order to achieve the same optimisation, but, well, I'm just talking out of the blue.
Would there be something to do with the "function boudaries" that C language imposes on the register usage schema ? But then, that would only be a problem wrt C based language. And a stack based language may rely on an efficient implementation of pure stack manipulations by an x86 clone.
Slashdot Mirror
The structure seen above was placed to test the ability of the sandy Berlin soil to support the weight of the triumphal arch. It was a large concrete mass with apparatus to test and measure its movement relative to the ground level
I wasn't aware that destroying it was that out of reach.
Al.
and work that way locally for a while, venturing into branching (remember: git is about having plenty of small, not so short-lived, feature branches) and then merging until all that you see in the gitk --all and git ui GUIs make sense to you. Or, why not, cloning your repo/directory, and pushing from the clone to its "master".
Overall at this stage, the github usage docs and getting started are your friend. After this learning phase, stackoverflow will come in handy :)
Last, don't be too afraid to try things on working copy with clean status, since git commands only affects the .git repository in an append-only fashion, you'll be able to revert on every command that turned awful:
will take you to the previously recorded state of your repository. Just look into git reflog for past things not necessarily in "gitk --all".
Short, only one links, but hope this will help.
Hal.
Emacs is at 23, with 24 in beta... and comes bundled with a text editor and an operating system. Still some way to go, Google !
The only "intuitive" interface is the nipple. All the rest is education.
Al.
I don't know about pre-grub time, but SGA Bios is a damn cool looking bit of x86 asm from Google themselves, meant to be cast in one of your BIOS option ROMs (wtf ? does it hurt ?? maybe some answers, as usual, on Wikipedia) that enhances your VGA console output with serial port IOs. Used by Google (themselves) for their servers farms, or so they say.
Al.
Ok, there may be discussion, and I'll even agree this raise a thousand objections and obstacles to be overcome. Still, I'll keep in mind that the idea of having a LED display under your car wheels sounds damn cool, and that forking a tenth of million dollars on that possibility might more rational use of taxpayer money compared to... well you know what I mean: hey, /. people! quit whining when (even though) a (very tiny by recent times standard) bit of money flows towards genuine engineering experiments, rather than f***ing massive scale financial experiments. Both have the potential of burning money, only bankers have grown outrageously good at it.
Please be bothered instead that this is, after all, not so much money, or, if you really need to stick to your whining mood, blame the funds granters and their nonsensical criterias
Al.
Aside from the obvious wear and tear, what about the fact that cars are covering up the panels?
That very point is addressed in their FAQ section on their website. In short: cars never packs up and cover more than a small fraction of the asphalt surface. Other common objections are, if not addressed, at least discussed, on that same page which, all in all, makes for a nice engidreaming read.
Al.
... Amazing how long he kept playing ...
I'll try to elaborate on this, from my selfish little point of view. I had to marvel some times ago at Les Paul wikipedia photograph, where he can be seen playing guitar on stage. He was born 1915, which made him 2 years younger than my (late) grandfather, and the wp photograph is from 2004: abstracting the fact that mine was not exactly the artist kind of person, boy-would-it-feel-strange seeing daddy rocking the stage with his guitar !
Too bad he used to be for some time head of the Stairway to Heaven — The 100 oldest rockstars still living list.
Wishes to the family,
Al
I quite like the way this blog by an old time Atari employee recalls the when and how of Atari developement. Something (Donkey Kong port on Atari consoles) that read
I should explain how Atari's Arcade conversions group worked. Basically, Atari's marketing folks would negotiate a license to ship GameCorp's "Foobar Blaster" on a cartridge for the Atari Home Computer System. That was it. That was the entirety of the deal.
made it clearer with :
We got ZERO help from the original developers of the games. No listings, no talking to the engineers, no design documents, nothing.
but, wait... there was even less:
In fact, we had to buy our own copy of the arcade machine and simply get good at the game (which was why I was playing it at the hotel our copy of the game hadn't even been delivered yet).
was for me a sure way to a plentiful of nostalgiaholic reading.
Al.
Many thanks for making this clear : this is also what I had fathomed from the very clear summary, but wasn't too sure.
Well.. we might actually be the two wrong ones :)
Al.
Yeah, and I don't know to which extent the mathematician programmer (namely Don Knuth) rejoins the Sudoku one (ultra optimisd bit squeezing), but I somehow felt a shock when I had the TexBook rendered by olden TeX as a 500 page DVI file, in a few seconds. You may object that .dvi are not that useful files, so... well (I had to perform some timing measurements for the sake of factual commenting) and PDF-TeX does the thing in 12 seconds (compared to 7 seconds for DVI TeXing, all on my rusty 1.4G centrino).
The point is: ask Indesign to do the same, and tell me which one is the true demo. Then ask indesign to do the same, on the machines TeX would originally render the TeXbook. PDP-what ?
My 0.002 kilo-cents.
What ? Are you advertising here some evil-closed-source software ? Unless you'll argue that back in the days, well, HEX was considered the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it :)
Just kidding, of course, thanks for sharing this bit of history with us !
Al.
Out of curiosity, does this help:
:(
http://sk.idm.fr/skxml/
If you were to look for text-in-nodes with attributes, I'd suggest you should go for XPath (quick, even for large document, at least in MSXML).
The SkXML link above lets you do just that, but can take text flexions into account, and on large XML document collections. Well, it requires batched indexing, though
Al.
Lately I've bought an Alphasmart Dana, which looks like the Tandy you describe, and is a Palm system with a battery, changeable for 3 AA batteries, leaving you with a 25 hour autonomy. If that is not enough, you may still get; from the same manufacturer, the simpler "Neo" offers a whopping 700 hours autonomy, and 8 text buffers (no PalmOS this time), and some basic connectivity to a PC.
http://www.alphasmart.com/products/
Not exactly "feel the power" kind of stuff but imho, these do nicely match the portability, general resilience and autonomy requirements. They're rather expansive, too.
Another interesting way is to adjoin a Bluetooth keyboard to a PDA.
Just my 2 eurocents.
Elaborating on this, it seems to me that this "hardware stack" is really an implementation detail: there's a stack anyway, and since its top is really often accessed, I suspect it gets easily loaded in the innermost, fastest, cache of a processor. Don't forget that knowledgeable people here keep saying that "even assembly is now far from the metal".
What people do say about this "fine grained paralellism" is only currently doable because some C compiler had the guts to allocate register for some of variables that would have otherwise (say, gcc -O0) been put on the stack: there may be some information a stack based processor would miss in order to achieve the same optimisation, but, well, I'm just talking out of the blue.
Would there be something to do with the "function boudaries" that C language imposes on the register usage schema ? But then, that would only be a problem wrt C based language. And a stack based language may rely on an efficient implementation of pure stack manipulations by an x86 clone.
Any comments appreciated
Don't get me wrong: it's a very nice and cool pill, only that sometimes it may kill you.