I'm not certain, but I think the D programming language (like C but better) does structs much better (no 'holes' in the struct memory etc.)
Which part of "Choosing a better compiler for this project is not an option... that call was made at a higher pay grade." didn't you understand?
Additionally I doubt D would help here since the Linker is calling the shots about where the struct elements get stored. The linker is doing the right thing, in this case, in that it packs the fields of a globally declared struct with other declared globals in a way that leaves the fewest holes possible, considering the MCU I am dealing with has segmented working memory, this is a good trade off. The sacrifice is that you cannot count on a global or static complex array to have all of it's fields lined up head-to-tail the way you can in GCC, and most large platform compilers.
While structs certainly help with readability and managing linked objects, they can also cause problems...
I recently ran into a problem like this. I was implementing a user preference object, since my compiler is C99 based I figured no biggie I'll implement a few nested typedef structs, and then instance the sucker with a C99 initializer...
Ok first problem for my compiler the C99 instancing is not robust, and initializing nestes arrays of structured arrays was simply FAIL. Choosing a better compiler for this project is not an option... that call was made at a higher pay grade.
Second problem... The linker will not promise that all of my fields will be contiguous for this struct, so I don't get the luxury of running a void* over it to serialize it. For portability reasons I don't get to force the linker to behave.
Third problem.... even if the linker did promise it would keep the struct contiguous, another of the constraints would put me in fail territory. Part of my memory budget was given to a new feature... this meant that I no longer had enough memory to copy the EEPROM version of the preference struct into the working memory. I have to access it in-place from the EEPROM, thus I don't get random access to it from my code.
With all this FAIL, I re-implemented the feature using a couple of arrays. I found I could meet all of my design goals. I reduced my memory footprint, and my code footprint, as well.
The only thing I sacrificed was readability.
By attempting to use good structure oriented C, C++ practices I came painfully close to shooting my toes off.
Thanks for pointing that out. The Senior Programmer mentioned above sounds like he spent a lot of years doing embedded design.
The GP sounds like a modern OOP Skript Kiddie.
Younger SEs cut their teeth on machines where understanding the underlying machine is not all that useful. If you are programming in Java or C#, Pearl, Python, PHP, Ruby... HLL de jure, it is generally not worthwhile to even consider the underlying metal because your code is never even going to see a significant portion of that metal's full potential. In some cases any attempt at understanding the underlying metal is going to hurt your project's portability, when someone in the team gets cocky and implements a platform dependent optimization.
Embeded firmware developers have the opposite experience. They always have to understand the underlying metal intimately.
idn't MDY lose on a decision recently regarding this? They were found to be infringing copyright because the game was loaded into RAM, which was considered a "copy" of the game, and MDY's wowglider program was modifying it (or something like that). So isn't this this opposite?
IANAL As I understood the ruling: The issue revolved around MDY acting in contravention of Blizzard's TOS for the way the Application is loaded into memory.
Blizzards sanctioned mechanism for launching the WoW main executable is via a 'bootloader' that performs monitoring of the user's computer. This bootloader launches as a 'faceless application,' and then examines the execution environment of the user's operating system for signs of other running tasks known by Blizzard to provide services that violate TOS. If no such applications were found to be running, then the bootloader launches the WoW client application, and remains resident. The bootloader continues to monitor the WoW client and the user's computer for activity in violation of TOS and to provide error reporting services should the client executable fail.
MDY sought to bypass this bootloader, by supplanting it with their own work-alike. This work alike would copy the WoW client software into random access memory, thus creating a copy in memory, using a method not authorized by TOS.
MDY's software was indeed fixing a copy of the WoW client into memory in contravention of Blizzard's licensing terms with the end user, which expressly forbid the use of unauthorized methods to load the client's binary image into the computer's random access memory.
MDY it was argued, created a situation where the end-user was unknowingly induced into violating Copyright by fixing a copy of the WoW software into the computer memory in a manner that was inconsistent with the terms of the Copyright License.
MDY was not accused of violating copyright. MDY was accused of Tortuous Interference on two different counts in providing their customers with the software that they sold.
It is said that within a democracy, a people get the leader they deserve. I'm not entirely sure what Americans have done recently to deserve a leader with Obama's comparitive level of decency, especially given that Bush was so far to the opposite, but even for us outside America, Obama's integrity is certainly very welcome.
I think the one thing that worries me most.... this that if he continues to exhibit these positive attributes and is able to act effectively he may get rewarded the way JFK did.:(
I am slightly too young to have witnessed the events of 11/22/63, and the immediate aftermath. Yet, I have been profoundly aware and influenced by the reverberations it has caused in our nation. More recently I have seen disturbing parallels following the events of 9/11....
Maybe this feeling comes from subtle inherited guilt that somehow, we as a people and a nation were not deserving of Kennedy, now that you mention it.... Obama seems to have a similar quality about him.... God, preserve him.
Yeah you are working a pretty tough audience here, Ray. We don't tend to click on ads for obvious security reasons.
This is true even for sites like yours that I do trust, since I often don't feel I can trust the advertiser(s) to properly keep their sites free of drive-by infestations.
I just noticed a child posting that suggests a PayPal.... I second the argument that this might be a more acceptable way to get a little revenue to support your web service...
Like regulation prevented the GFC from becoming a major issue in Australia? Banks being forced by the government to maintain a certain percentage of liquidity to prevent them running entirely on credit, or interest rates that reflected the true growth of the market?
One commentator I read suggested that the reason that Spain has been working to buy UK banks is because they had laws in place that effectively prohibited their banks from buying CDOs and similar instruments. This seems to have had the effect of making their banking system relatively immune to the contagion at the root of the global meltdown.
Go back a little further and CDs were pretty expensive in the early days. My first CD player was a 16x over sampling player with lousy ECC, but it was the best I could afford at $350. The better units were all in the $500 - $700 range in 1985.
I don't often chime in on these issues as I find it much more educational to lurk, and learn.
In this case I would like to suggest that the first two RIAA vs End User briefs you reference might have been penned so early in Obama's term that the President didn't have an opportunity to assert policy direction on them, or that they were already in the pipeline before internal executive policy directives on the DOJ's new Copyright policy was officially established.
While I can't say for certain I believe I have already hints of similar about-faces in other departments under the Executive Branches' authority.... so far this Amicus Brief is the most blatant about-face I have seen yet, and I hope (as most of us seem to) that it represents a genuine shift in policy, for the better.
If you cite the wiki expect to get bounced by your instructor..... The Wiki is NOT peer reviewed by any credible authority and is regularly gamed by charlatans with an agenda.... at best it can give you a few sources to look up that do have merit, and at worst it's totally bogus....
I like this particular thread..... I hear the sounds erasers bouncing off snoozing skulls.... and the sharp report of rulers smacking the glass-smooth surface of desk enamel...
Hypothetical: So.... someone... big... in the PeeCee hardware market wants to sell hardware that will run MacOS.... and wants to force Apple to sell them license. So they start small.... fund the whack-nuts that can build the hackintosh and think they can make a go on some legal theory.... ok big name PC company and lawyers fund and advise.... SILENTLY..... and carefully watch the inevitable backscatter for useful info....
Psystar folds before Apple can determine who funded them....
Wanna bet that Quo folds before Apple gets a good bite?
Wanna bet that some other knuckle-head pops up about 6 months later with yet another out-of-the-blue business making clones with a similar M.O.?
Something fishy is going on in this and I am very interested to see who is baiting the hooks.
If you had read the parent carefully you'd realize that Dell couldn't make a go of it. They discontinued the product. I guess they couldn't prop that low-ball price up....
If I had to guess it was that the margin was too small....
They could probably kill windows overnight if they invested in mainstream hardware drivers
Let's go over this one more time.
1. Apple makes OS run on any PC. 2. People buy PCs instead of Macs. 3. Apple profit tanks. 3a. Apple raises price of MacOS License to compensate... 3b. Microsoft undercuts with Win7 and bleeds MacOS marketshare back to 1% market share in 2 years. 3c. Apple focuses on iPhone, iPod, and iTunes... 3d. iPhone, iPod and iTunes gradually die off due to lack of Media Hub features that were a corner stone of MacOS. 4. Apple stock tanks. 4a. Apple sells MacOS to Microsoft. 5. Apple tanks. 5a. Microsoft buys Apple.
Apple already went down this road in the mid 90's and it damn near cost them the whole shooting match.
The clone makers kissed Apple's ass up front and swore on their mamma's ever-lovin' grave they wouldn't step on Apple's toes, and would innovate and differentiate and go for the high end.... blah... blah.... bullshit....
The clones went for the bottom end of the market and never looked back... Apple went from having from 10 Billion in sales to a minority player in their own market in 5 years.
By the time Apple begged Jobs to save them they were on the verge of bankruptcy.
With that horrible gut check and the reminder of a long since dead-and-buried ghost of IBM's Personal Computer..... utterly gutted by clone makers....
Is it any wonder that Apple will brutally slay anyone that tries to cannibalize their hardware market?
MacOS supports Apple's hardware business model.... not the other way around.
I watched the quote in context from the interview.... it's clear from his backpedaling when confronted with that quote, that Ted was kinda railroaded into supporting the merger. He hints that he didn't think it was a good idea, but if he had not been on board they would have left him on the side lines.... and Ted is not the kind of guy who would want to be seen as being side-lined.
So it cost him an arm and a leg.... he saved face. In his realm saving face is far more important than earnings....
the 68000 was the last CPU that Motorola laid out by hand. They had a 'print-check' room that was the size of a high school gymnasium that's sole purpose was to allow the engineering team to walk around on massive photo-plots of the schematic and later the process layers. Shoes were removed. Engineers padded around on the plots in their socks.
Later processors were compiled from RTL and pre-verliog HDL descriptions.
I myself ran early Apple//e code compatibility tests on pre-silicon prototypes of the Apple//gs. The pre-VLSI prototypes were the size of a medium sized conference room table and there were only three of them made. at any given time only 1 was operational. The final post-VLSI//gs mobo was about the same area as a modern ATX mobo.
When I was 16 or 17 my father gave me a "green-wire" board that had been tossed. This was a 68000L8 'GMAP' processor board designed by Granger & Assoc. back in the early 80's this particular prototype board never ran and the engineering staff couldn't figure out why. I ended up with the board, a set of schematics and the PCB wiring plots. When I got a little more hardware savvy I was able to figure out why it didn't run.... and why this particular spin of the board design had FAIL written all over it.
One of their 'green-wire' fixes had left a TTL inverter faced backwards near the bottom of the system clock chain, thus feeding the CPU an effective clock of about 50 MHz... This had a strange effect on the poor 68000L8.... This extreme over-clocking caused the 68000 to sequence the address pins sequentially counting up from 0x000000 to 0xFFFFFF... I wonder if that was a test mode for the processor?
In the end I was able to get it to run code. I removed the errant gate from the clock chain and the 68K sprung to life and began executing code.
Before I stopped messing with it I was able to adapt a 68030 and 68882 FPU daughter card to the board and get it to run at about 30Mhz reliably.
Most of the I/O sections were horribly mangled by a truly disastrous interaction between the schematic layout artist and the PCB layout artist. Which lead to none of the I/O actually being serviceable. In the end, I chucked the board in around 1995 after having learned all I could learn from it.
The most valuable lessons being: This is how to design a large format embedded controller... NOT!
All code written for the system was developed and debugged on a Mac SE30 via Apple's MPW IDE and the 68K assembler. The resulting binary image was then sneaker-netted to an Apple//gs that had an EPROM burner plugged into one of it's card-slots. The binary image was then split into The high and low EPROM images using a custom AppleSoft BASIC program, and loaded into the hires video memory of the Apple//. The EPROM burner could only be accessed via the monitor ROM (CALL -151) The resulting EPROMS were then socketed into the GMAP and power applied.... 5 LEDs on the board supplied debugging and status/ code progress info....
The real question is would it happen in the wild.... Let's say all humans vanished over night.
Dogs get to fend for themselves again.... and really dogs and cats have the best chance to make that transition as most other domestic animals are so hopelessly dependent on humans for basic survival that they would become extinct very quickly for a myriad of reasons.
Mastiff would not interbreed with Chihuahua in any rational interpretation of a natural setting... They wouldn't even have the same natural geographic range. First winter after the "The Day After," breeds with no winter coats, or other hedges against cold (loose rolls of leather-skin in the Mastiff's case) would likely be functionally extinct in areas more than 34 degrees from the equator.
Breeds with thick fur would quickly migrate to areas where their attributes would do them the most good. Simply put dogs with more fur are going to get choices.
At this point there are plenty of breeds in the ring possible.... there would be a large amount of remixing in the first 50 or so generations, but large size differences and body plans are going to limit interbreeding very quickly. There won't be many opportunities for a sheltie to breed or be bred with say german sheperds... because the Sheltie not realistically going to win the dominance role in a pack of larger dogs. A sheltie would make a nice meal for a pack of larger dogs.
All of these different breeds would be separated by geography size, and disposition, in a biologically insignificant span of time...
On the geological scale.... well nothing much would happen, and there would likely be no speciation, but there would be a lot of new breeds created... likely many that would be little more than mutts. This changes when one or more environmental, long term stress events forced these separate populations to diverge or go extinct.... once they adapt, and their biology shifts to the new environment the odds of them being separate species -- in the classical meaning of the term... No interbreeding biologically speaking even with alien animal husbandry (remember humans left the scene for Heaven or Hell) . -- becomes more likely.
TFA points out that our definition of a species MIGHT be lacking in nuance and the author makes, IMO, a weak argument to support it, but TFA does have a point... and current Dogma doesn't appear to refute it very well.
If the central point of the TFA is extrapolated over a much longer time base than humans have been breeding dogs, I think TFA argument has merit.
I recall shortly after I moved to WA (from California) there was a news report of a homeowner who shot a perp that was breaking in. The perp then ran way. Police found him bleeding in an ally a short time later. The suspect claimed he was the victim of a drive-by shooting.
The Public Relations Officer was quoted as saying: "We have taken the suspect to the hospital and are having the bullet removed. If the bullet matches the homeowner's gun we will file charges on the suspect for attempted burglary."
End of story.... No one even raised the possibility that the homeowner had over stepped their rights to use deadly force.
The only time in Seattle I heard of anything of a legal nature happening to a person defending themselves with deadly force was when a victim of a strong arm robbery shot the perp, and was later cited for discharging a firearm with in the city limits.
In California, for comparison, they typically charge the homeowner in a similar situation with assault with a deadly weapon, if the crook lives; and manslaughter if he doesn't. Further if the crook lives or dies the homeowner is at risk of civil a suit for damages.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not certain, but I think the D programming language (like C but better) does structs much better (no 'holes' in the struct memory etc.)
Which part of "Choosing a better compiler for this project is not an option... that call was made at a higher pay grade." didn't you understand?
Additionally I doubt D would help here since the Linker is calling the shots about where the struct elements get stored. The linker is doing the right thing, in this case, in that it packs the fields of a globally declared struct with other declared globals in a way that leaves the fewest holes possible, considering the MCU I am dealing with has segmented working memory, this is a good trade off. The sacrifice is that you cannot count on a global or static complex array to have all of it's fields lined up head-to-tail the way you can in GCC, and most large platform compilers.
While structs certainly help with readability and managing linked objects, they can also cause problems...
I recently ran into a problem like this. I was implementing a user preference object, since my compiler is C99 based I figured no biggie I'll implement a few nested typedef structs, and then instance the sucker with a C99 initializer...
Ok first problem for my compiler the C99 instancing is not robust, and initializing nestes arrays of structured arrays was simply FAIL. Choosing a better compiler for this project is not an option... that call was made at a higher pay grade.
Second problem... The linker will not promise that all of my fields will be contiguous for this struct, so I don't get the luxury of running a void* over it to serialize it. For portability reasons I don't get to force the linker to behave.
Third problem.... even if the linker did promise it would keep the struct contiguous, another of the constraints would put me in fail territory. Part of my memory budget was given to a new feature... this meant that I no longer had enough memory to copy the EEPROM version of the preference struct into the working memory. I have to access it in-place from the EEPROM, thus I don't get random access to it from my code.
With all this FAIL, I re-implemented the feature using a couple of arrays. I found I could meet all of my design goals. I reduced my memory footprint, and my code footprint, as well.
The only thing I sacrificed was readability.
By attempting to use good structure oriented C, C++ practices I came painfully close to shooting my toes off.
Thanks for pointing that out. The Senior Programmer mentioned above sounds like he spent a lot of years doing embedded design.
The GP sounds like a modern OOP Skript Kiddie.
Younger SEs cut their teeth on machines where understanding the underlying machine is not all that useful. If you are programming in Java or C#, Pearl, Python, PHP, Ruby... HLL de jure, it is generally not worthwhile to even consider the underlying metal because your code is never even going to see a significant portion of that metal's full potential. In some cases any attempt at understanding the underlying metal is going to hurt your project's portability, when someone in the team gets cocky and implements a platform dependent optimization.
Embeded firmware developers have the opposite experience. They always have to understand the underlying metal intimately.
I'd go for a simple backwards 'L' so they can read it in the mirror...
idn't MDY lose on a decision recently regarding this? They were found to be infringing copyright because the game was loaded into RAM, which was considered a "copy" of the game, and MDY's wowglider program was modifying it (or something like that). So isn't this this opposite?
IANAL
As I understood the ruling: The issue revolved around MDY acting in contravention of Blizzard's TOS for the way the Application is loaded into memory.
Blizzards sanctioned mechanism for launching the WoW main executable is via a 'bootloader' that performs monitoring of the user's computer. This bootloader launches as a 'faceless application,' and then examines the execution environment of the user's operating system for signs of other running tasks known by Blizzard to provide services that violate TOS.
If no such applications were found to be running, then the bootloader launches the WoW client application, and remains resident. The bootloader continues to monitor the WoW client and the user's computer for activity in violation of TOS and to provide error reporting services should the client executable fail.
MDY sought to bypass this bootloader, by supplanting it with their own work-alike. This work alike would copy the WoW client software into random access memory, thus creating a copy in memory, using a method not authorized by TOS.
MDY's software was indeed fixing a copy of the WoW client into memory in contravention of Blizzard's licensing terms with the end user, which expressly forbid the use of unauthorized methods to load the client's binary image into the computer's random access memory.
MDY it was argued, created a situation where the end-user was unknowingly induced into violating Copyright by fixing a copy of the WoW software into the computer memory in a manner that was inconsistent with the terms of the Copyright License.
MDY was not accused of violating copyright. MDY was accused of Tortuous Interference on two different counts in providing their customers with the software that they sold.
It is said that within a democracy, a people get the leader they deserve. I'm not entirely sure what Americans have done recently to deserve a leader with Obama's comparitive level of decency, especially given that Bush was so far to the opposite, but even for us outside America, Obama's integrity is certainly very welcome.
I think the one thing that worries me most.... this that if he continues to exhibit these positive attributes and is able to act effectively he may get rewarded the way JFK did. :(
I am slightly too young to have witnessed the events of 11/22/63, and the immediate aftermath. Yet, I have been profoundly aware and influenced by the reverberations it has caused in our nation. More recently I have seen disturbing parallels following the events of 9/11....
Maybe this feeling comes from subtle inherited guilt that somehow, we as a people and a nation were not deserving of Kennedy, now that you mention it.... Obama seems to have a similar quality about him.... God, preserve him.
Yeah you are working a pretty tough audience here, Ray. We don't tend to click on ads for obvious security reasons.
This is true even for sites like yours that I do trust, since I often don't feel I can trust the advertiser(s) to properly keep their sites free of drive-by infestations.
I just noticed a child posting that suggests a PayPal.... I second the argument that this might be a more acceptable way to get a little revenue to support your web service...
Cheers,
Metaforest.
Like regulation prevented the GFC from becoming a major issue in Australia? Banks being forced by the government to maintain a certain percentage of liquidity to prevent them running entirely on credit, or interest rates that reflected the true growth of the market?
One commentator I read suggested that the reason that Spain has been working to buy UK banks is because they had laws in place that effectively prohibited their banks from buying CDOs and similar instruments. This seems to have had the effect of making their banking system relatively immune to the contagion at the root of the global meltdown.
Go back a little further and CDs were pretty expensive in the early days. My first CD player was a 16x over sampling player with lousy ECC, but it was the best I could afford at $350. The better units were all in the $500 - $700 range in 1985.
Pigs don't fly. They glide.
It's just that their glide ratio is closer to a rock than a feather.
\Pedantic
Hi Ray,
I don't often chime in on these issues as I find it much more educational to lurk, and learn.
In this case I would like to suggest that the first two RIAA vs End User briefs you reference might have been penned so early in Obama's term that the President didn't have an opportunity to assert policy direction on them, or that they were already in the pipeline before internal executive policy directives on the DOJ's new Copyright policy was officially established.
While I can't say for certain I believe I have already hints of similar about-faces in other departments under the Executive Branches' authority.... so far this Amicus Brief is the most blatant about-face I have seen yet, and I hope (as most of us seem to) that it represents a genuine shift in policy, for the better.
If you cite the wiki expect to get bounced by your instructor..... The Wiki is NOT peer reviewed by any credible authority and is regularly gamed by charlatans with an agenda.... at best it can give you a few sources to look up that do have merit, and at worst it's totally bogus....
90%?
Did you pull that figure out of your ass?
I like this particular thread..... I hear the sounds erasers bouncing off snoozing skulls.... and the sharp report of rulers smacking the glass-smooth surface of desk enamel...
Here there be educators :D
Hypothetical:
So.... someone... big... in the PeeCee hardware market wants to sell hardware that will run MacOS.... and wants to force Apple to sell them license. So they start small.... fund the whack-nuts that can build the hackintosh and think they can make a go on some legal theory.... ok big name PC company and lawyers fund and advise.... SILENTLY..... and carefully watch the inevitable backscatter for useful info....
Psystar folds before Apple can determine who funded them....
Wanna bet that Quo folds before Apple gets a good bite?
Wanna bet that some other knuckle-head pops up about 6 months later with yet another out-of-the-blue business making clones with a similar M.O.?
Something fishy is going on in this and I am very interested to see who is baiting the hooks.
$0.02
If you had read the parent carefully you'd realize that Dell couldn't make a go of it. They discontinued the product. I guess they couldn't prop that low-ball price up....
If I had to guess it was that the margin was too small....
They could probably kill windows overnight if they invested in mainstream hardware drivers
Let's go over this one more time.
1. Apple makes OS run on any PC.
2. People buy PCs instead of Macs.
3. Apple profit tanks.
3a. Apple raises price of MacOS License to compensate...
3b. Microsoft undercuts with Win7 and bleeds MacOS marketshare back to 1% market share in 2 years.
3c. Apple focuses on iPhone, iPod, and iTunes...
3d. iPhone, iPod and iTunes gradually die off due to lack of Media Hub features that were a corner stone of MacOS.
4. Apple stock tanks.
4a. Apple sells MacOS to Microsoft.
5. Apple tanks.
5a. Microsoft buys Apple.
There fixed that for you :P
Apple already went down this road in the mid 90's and it damn near cost them the whole shooting match.
The clone makers kissed Apple's ass up front and swore on their mamma's ever-lovin' grave they wouldn't step on Apple's toes, and would innovate and differentiate and go for the high end.... blah... blah .... bullshit....
The clones went for the bottom end of the market and never looked back... Apple went from having from 10 Billion in sales to a minority player in their own market in 5 years.
By the time Apple begged Jobs to save them they were on the verge of bankruptcy.
With that horrible gut check and the reminder of a long since dead-and-buried ghost of IBM's Personal Computer..... utterly gutted by clone makers....
Is it any wonder that Apple will brutally slay anyone that tries to cannibalize their hardware market?
MacOS supports Apple's hardware business model.... not the other way around.
I watched the quote in context from the interview.... it's clear from his backpedaling when confronted with that quote, that Ted was kinda railroaded into supporting the merger. He hints that he didn't think it was a good idea, but if he had not been on board they would have left him on the side lines.... and Ted is not the kind of guy who would want to be seen as being side-lined.
So it cost him an arm and a leg.... he saved face. In his realm saving face is far more important than earnings....
$0.02
the 68000 was the last CPU that Motorola laid out by hand. They had a 'print-check' room that was the size of a high school gymnasium that's sole purpose was to allow the engineering team to walk around on massive photo-plots of the schematic and later the process layers. Shoes were removed. Engineers padded around on the plots in their socks.
Later processors were compiled from RTL and pre-verliog HDL descriptions.
I myself ran early Apple //e code compatibility tests on pre-silicon prototypes of the Apple //gs. The pre-VLSI prototypes were the size of a medium sized conference room table and there were only three of them made. at any given time only 1 was operational. The final post-VLSI //gs mobo was about the same area as a modern ATX mobo.
I still have a MC6809 in my part stash.... Nifty little CPU...
When I was 16 or 17 my father gave me a "green-wire" board that had been tossed. This was a 68000L8 'GMAP' processor board designed by Granger & Assoc. back in the early 80's this particular prototype board never ran and the engineering staff couldn't figure out why. I ended up with the board, a set of schematics and the PCB wiring plots. When I got a little more hardware savvy I was able to figure out why it didn't run.... and why this particular spin of the board design had FAIL written all over it.
One of their 'green-wire' fixes had left a TTL inverter faced backwards near the bottom of the system clock chain, thus feeding the CPU an effective clock of about 50 MHz... This had a strange effect on the poor 68000L8.... This extreme over-clocking caused the 68000 to sequence the address pins sequentially counting up from 0x000000 to 0xFFFFFF... I wonder if that was a test mode for the processor?
In the end I was able to get it to run code. I removed the errant gate from the clock chain and the 68K sprung to life and began executing code.
Before I stopped messing with it I was able to adapt a 68030 and 68882 FPU daughter card to the board and get it to run at about 30Mhz reliably.
Most of the I/O sections were horribly mangled by a truly disastrous interaction between the schematic layout artist and the PCB layout artist. Which lead to none of the I/O actually being serviceable. In the end, I chucked the board in around 1995 after having learned all I could learn from it.
The most valuable lessons being: This is how to design a large format embedded controller... NOT!
All code written for the system was developed and debugged on a Mac SE30 via Apple's MPW IDE and the 68K assembler. The resulting binary image was then sneaker-netted to an Apple //gs that had an EPROM burner plugged into one of it's card-slots. The binary image was then split into The high and low EPROM images using a custom AppleSoft BASIC program, and loaded into the hires video memory of the Apple //. The EPROM burner could only be accessed via the monitor ROM (CALL -151) The resulting EPROMS were then socketed into the GMAP and power applied.... 5 LEDs on the board supplied debugging and status/ code progress info....
Ok you need to get out of your mother's basement for a few days.... maybe a trip to Bellevue Mental Hospital?
Some nice young men in nice white coats?
could be good to talk to a therapist.
Awww come on.... YOU know YOU want to :D :D :) :D
The real question is would it happen in the wild.... Let's say all humans vanished over night.
Dogs get to fend for themselves again.... and really dogs and cats have the best chance to make that transition as most other domestic animals are so hopelessly dependent on humans for basic survival that they would become extinct very quickly for a myriad of reasons.
Mastiff would not interbreed with Chihuahua in any rational interpretation of a natural setting... They wouldn't even have the same natural geographic range. First winter after the "The Day After," breeds with no winter coats, or other hedges against cold (loose rolls of leather-skin in the Mastiff's case) would likely be functionally extinct in areas more than 34 degrees from the equator.
Breeds with thick fur would quickly migrate to areas where their attributes would do them the most good. Simply put dogs with more fur are going to get choices.
At this point there are plenty of breeds in the ring possible.... there would be a large amount of remixing in the first 50 or so generations, but large size differences and body plans are going to limit interbreeding very quickly. There won't be many opportunities for a sheltie to breed or be bred with say german sheperds... because the Sheltie not realistically going to win the dominance role in a pack of larger dogs. A sheltie would make a nice meal for a pack of larger dogs.
All of these different breeds would be separated by geography size, and disposition, in a biologically insignificant span of time...
On the geological scale.... well nothing much would happen, and there would likely be no speciation, but there would be a lot of new breeds created... likely many that would be little more than mutts. This changes when one or more environmental, long term stress events forced these separate populations to diverge or go extinct.... once they adapt, and their biology shifts to the new environment the odds of them being separate species -- in the classical meaning of the term... No interbreeding biologically speaking even with alien animal husbandry (remember humans left the scene for Heaven or Hell) . -- becomes more likely.
TFA points out that our definition of a species MIGHT be lacking in nuance and the author makes, IMO, a weak argument to support it, but TFA does have a point... and current Dogma doesn't appear to refute it very well.
If the central point of the TFA is extrapolated over a much longer time base than humans have been breeding dogs, I think TFA argument has merit.
I recall shortly after I moved to WA (from California) there was a news report of a homeowner who shot a perp that was breaking in. The perp then ran way. Police found him bleeding in an ally a short time later. The suspect claimed he was the victim of a drive-by shooting.
The Public Relations Officer was quoted as saying: "We have taken the suspect to the hospital and are having the bullet removed. If the bullet matches the homeowner's gun we will file charges on the suspect for attempted burglary."
End of story.... No one even raised the possibility that the homeowner had over stepped their rights to use deadly force.
The only time in Seattle I heard of anything of a legal nature happening to a person defending themselves with deadly force was when a victim of a strong arm robbery shot the perp, and was later cited for discharging a firearm with in the city limits.
In California, for comparison, they typically charge the homeowner in a similar situation with assault with a deadly weapon, if the crook lives; and manslaughter if he doesn't. Further if the crook lives or dies the homeowner is at risk of civil a suit for damages.
I wouldn't count #$^@#^@#^#