It my position that machine languages really should not be on such a language philosophy list at all. Machine operation codes do not express program logic in any meaningful abstraction. They represent the actual stream of operations to be performed in a way that is unflinchingly explicit.
It is the case that, in the process of writing machine code, the developer is likely to create a number of abstractions expressed in machine language by way of implication. Such abstractions exist exclusively in the domain of the developer's mind and engineering notes, and have no direct representation in machine code.
My take on this assumes that we strip away the artifice of Assembly Language as being a slightly more human-centric way of expressing executable codes. As such, if there is any philosophy to be expressed in a machine language, it is most likely to appear in the syntax and form the assembler directives take than in the operational details of the machine instruction codes that are eventually expressed in the the binary executable.
The more appropriate place to look for philosophy with regard to machine languages is the machine itself. It is the processor architecture, and it's implied programming model, that express philosophy, if any is to be found.
Beyond a utiliarian understanding of what problem solving domain(s) the processor was designed to address, any discussion of philosophy with regard to a machine language seems pointless.
The most straightforward is to be better than everybody else at one or more things. If your competitors run at 3-4mph and you can run at 5mph then you're going to be the one that catches the gazalle and has dinner.
Or... put another way: I don't have to out run the lion. I just have to out run YOU!
Instead the extra 7% sales tax will be charged to the customer. They will pay the cost, not me.
That being the case your business will quickly lose sales since the bigger fish can split the difference and lower their prices by 3.5% thus cutting you out of the market, since your margin cannot absorb even a 3.5% additional cost at sale.
The big retailers can afford to take a small hit in profits for the near term to wait out all of the smaller retailers with thin margins to fold or to move into markets that are less competitive. These larger retailers can gradually raise the price back up to cover the tax, and then some, and the consumer market wont even blink...
Why do you persist? Does it pay your bar tab or something?
I had a business partner that tried to game 5% margins and I fired her.... why? Because the risk she was exposing me to was too high!
She didn't understand... 5% WAS profit.... problem is that she didn't account for MY TIME PREPPING THE SALE, buying used, required my time to configure and test.... etc...
I was getting ripped off and working insane hours to make a 5% profit work.... fux that.... GF or no she was GONE! SEE YA Buhbye....
Margins that small are begging for someone to cut you off at the knees.
Very interesting.... I worked for a freight company that specialized in realtime freight tracking in CA. during the early 90's that looked somewhat like site depicted in TFA.... the CEO was a retired submarine commander.... many of the execs were ex-submariners.
The master DB and networking hub there ran on three large Amdahl systems and was floating on a massive array of.... ex-navy submarine batteries fed by a stunning array of AC->DC - AC converters... out back in the parking lot were three 250KW generators set to autostart on PF...
The NOC was impressive.... Massive wall of projected video depicting the USA with a highway map overlay, showing travel vectors for every active tuck in the fleet, along with it's ID, fuel status, engine RPMs etc....
Their tracking was so complete you could pull up a detail layout of a rig and get a detailed report of every package in the trailer and where it was physically located....
My mission was to health check the 3x2-way redundant Amdahl systems keeping all this info on tap, and kicking 15 high-speed line-printers, and about 50 slower high-speed DM Printers and their dedicated print spoolers when they would jam.... a full time job in itself, from 4am until 1pm, 6 days a week....
The Dir.Op. was also ex-Navy.... he was a SEAL..... That man scared the shit out of me.... just on general principles....
He had a habit of sneaking into the building during the early part of my shift and creating failures for me to deal with....
Thats the only time, ever, in my carrier that I REALLY wanted to frag my boss....
Yes they do. People HAVE died from taking sports to extremes. Long distance runners who die from exhaustion or getting lost. Weight lifters who are crushed under weights. What about racers who go just a bit to fast? Taking the sport to extremes, same as gaming for 18 hours is extreem.
I can still remember the opening to 'The Wide World of Sports' and watching the 'Agony of Defeat' sequence.... Even visualizing it now to write this it chills me to the bone....
When I see sports taken to the point where people die, or are maimed for life... I have to ask was this person taking things a little too far?
This to me is the real mark of addiction.... when lives are destroyed and Howard Cosell has to move on to the next play after a dramatic pause....
When I get my first toon to lvl 80 I'll take it easy....
How is that any different than worrying about the wasted life and family of a giant slalom racer who bit off more than he could chew in the third turn and damn near got killed on national television, every week,..... for 20 fuxing years?
My point is this addiction thing has nothing to do with the mode of commitment it has to do with the level of commitment. I think there are many people at all levels in the this society that need to take a big freaking step back, and stop....
Stop. Take a sabbatical. Back the heck off. Go spend more time with your girl, guy, kids, your wife, your mum & dad, or grandparents...
yes it does and this winter I proved it. Not once did I turn on the electric baseboard heater in my hovel. I used the waste heat from 2 iMacs, a dual core 1U server and an custom build, water-cooled 2U quad-core server to heat said hovel. My energy bill for the winter was 25% less than the previous winter.
IANAL: However: I think this guy is fuxed if they find ANYTHING significant on the sezied media that confirms the witness statements, re his involvement in unauthorized access.
The only hope the EFF has is somehow showing that all of the witnesses have it out for this guy because of some social tiff and getting the warrant tossed due to conspiracy to defame.... then again that DHCP record is pretty damning assuming he has a bootable system on his equipment with that specific host-name....
If he gets off of this hook.... he's either gonna be one of those scared straight dudes, or he's gonna get much worse...
But when I mentally set the stage for this commercial, I imagine a little dwarf coming out and saying, "I'm Linux, do you guys know how to get my wireless card working? I'm having trouble printing. Why can't I play this damn DVD?"
So sorry... Dwarves don't get a +15 on engineering... So it would be a little Gnome Mage with a big silver fro...
The Dwarf would be the kind to 'reprogram' the central database of the cluster with an oversized double-bladed axe.... and would totally pull a Scotty on it.
Night Elves... "Apple Rules the Night!"
Humans: "You have a... Computer?! 0.o What ever for?"
Draenai.... "*Shrug* We used Windows because that was what was preinstalled..... look where it got us....:( We presently doing a postmortem and reassessing our options for a new OS.... while we pick up the pieces. "
The Horde Races?..... Stubborn-ass Windows shop through and through....
This a serious issue for a game like WoW since many sources of 'value' in the game come from random events.... if the gold points become fungible then Blizzard would be liable for gambling.
SL had to ban all forms of gambling from their world to avoid this problem....
it used to be as common or more common than virtual escort services.
I could use alternate ways to make money, but I don't find playing the auction house fun. In fact, I find it highly unethical. You're taking advantage of people who don't know what things really should cost. That's flat out wrong. And anti-gold farmers complain about my ethics?
Oh so if I do the research and determine what fair market for an item is, I am being unethical? And I make plenty of gold to keep my 29lvl twink and other toons well equipped and buffed.
But violating TOS and subverting the game balance is fine for you?
I hope you get smacked with the ban hammer good and hard.
The utility of an OS is based on what you, the developer, can do with it, while expending the least amount of development/research effort possible. By that standard Windows is a WIN, and all *nix variants including MacOS are FAIL.
With a little clever engineering you could build a bias circuit that monitored the output of the Zener such that the average output voltage was very close to 50% of the reverse conduction voltage, thus keeping the Zener in it's 'noisy' output mode.... even with component drift. However, most implementations I have seen just use a voltage divider(two resistors) and a trim-pot to tune the bias... *shrug*
If you carefully reverse bias a zener diode such that it is right on the verge of reverse breakdown conduction, you will see a series of random pulses at the reverse bias voltage voltage...
So if you use a zener diode that has about 5.1V reverse breakdown and feed the output of that into a chain of... say, TTL shift registers that are being clocked at a usefully high rate you will get a nice truly random number every time you read the register set.
Drawbacks:
Resistors used to bias the diode drift with temperature and age.
Voltage fluctuations from the power supply will cause diode bias network to fall out of conduction periodically, thus making the output sequence semi-predictable.
Zener Diodes age and this causes their breakdown voltage to drift over time...
Working with truly random numbers in software is a pain in the ass from an SQA perspective. How do you reliably reproduce failure conditions in software that relies on random input?
Anyway.... over the years I have seen various implementations of the zener noise source.... It's easy to implement but hard to make it safe for production.
I believe a number of early computers used this method for generating random number, but I do not know if the Manchester used this method.
lol: my 2000 Powerbook Titanium is on it's fourth drive; so what?!
It's been kicked around for years in a bookbag and on international flights.... it's a miracle the thing still runs at all... but it does... go figure. It's been through two earthquakes... one of which the drive was spun-up... not as bad as getting banged around in Russia on countless busses and trains, I am sure.
Skumanick... (unfortunate name) fuxed up by not filing charges when the evidence was provided to.... ummmm him....
IMO: he played a sick(?) game with the families involved and got caught out. By not filing charges out of the gate... the federal court could not overlook the issue, according to tradition.
My concern is that in the future, a prosecutor grokking this massive fail on Mr. Skumanick's part, will simply file charges and then open it to pleading after the fact... thus keeping the feds out of the state's business.
So why is this clown failing to prosecute the individuals in possession of said photos, and the alleged person(s) responsible for taking them with the girls' cell phones? It seems that from the descriptions of the picture's content it is unlikely to have been taken by the girls themselves.... Am I missing something here?
That Peter North discussion a good example and a good reason why no college level instructor will accept citations from Wikipedia....
If I want to get a plan-view of a subject or a quick answer I might hold my nose and look something up, but for the most part.... the quality is shite....
Too bad too.... it could have been great.... but now it's just drivel.
Slashdot Mirror
It my position that machine languages really should not be on such a language philosophy list at all. Machine operation codes do not express program logic in any meaningful abstraction. They represent the actual stream of operations to be performed in a way that is unflinchingly explicit.
It is the case that, in the process of writing machine code, the developer is likely to create a number of abstractions expressed in machine language by way of implication. Such abstractions exist exclusively in the domain of the developer's mind and engineering notes, and have no direct representation in machine code.
My take on this assumes that we strip away the artifice of Assembly Language as being a slightly more human-centric way of expressing executable codes. As such, if there is any philosophy to be expressed in a machine language, it is most likely to appear in the syntax and form the assembler directives take than in the operational details of the machine instruction codes that are eventually expressed in the the binary executable.
The more appropriate place to look for philosophy with regard to machine languages is the machine itself. It is the processor architecture, and it's implied programming model, that express philosophy, if any is to be found.
Beyond a utiliarian understanding of what problem solving domain(s) the processor was designed to address, any discussion of philosophy with regard to a machine language seems pointless.
The most straightforward is to be better than everybody else at one or more things. If your competitors run at 3-4mph and you can run at 5mph then you're going to be the one that catches the gazalle and has dinner.
Or... put another way: I don't have to out run the lion. I just have to out run YOU!
Instead the extra 7% sales tax will be charged to the customer. They will pay the cost, not me.
That being the case your business will quickly lose sales since the bigger fish can split the difference and lower their prices by 3.5% thus cutting you out of the market, since your margin cannot absorb even a 3.5% additional cost at sale.
The big retailers can afford to take a small hit in profits for the near term to wait out all of the smaller retailers with thin margins to fold or to move into markets that are less competitive. These larger retailers can gradually raise the price back up to cover the tax, and then some, and the consumer market wont even blink...
Your in the WRONG business dude....
With no room to breath....
Why do you persist? Does it pay your bar tab or something?
I had a business partner that tried to game 5% margins and I fired her.... why? Because the risk she was exposing me to was too high!
She didn't understand... 5% WAS profit.... problem is that she didn't account for MY TIME PREPPING THE SALE, buying used, required my time to configure and test.... etc...
I was getting ripped off and working insane hours to make a 5% profit work.... fux that.... GF or no she was GONE! SEE YA Buhbye....
Margins that small are begging for someone to cut you off at the knees.
Extreme locations.....
Very interesting.... I worked for a freight company that specialized in realtime freight tracking in CA. during the early 90's that looked somewhat like site depicted in TFA.... the CEO was a retired submarine commander.... many of the execs were ex-submariners.
The master DB and networking hub there ran on three large Amdahl systems and was floating on a massive array of .... ex-navy submarine batteries fed by a stunning array of AC->DC - AC converters... out back in the parking lot were three 250KW generators set to autostart on PF...
The NOC was impressive.... Massive wall of projected video depicting the USA with a highway map overlay, showing travel vectors for every active tuck in the fleet, along with it's ID, fuel status, engine RPMs etc....
Their tracking was so complete you could pull up a detail layout of a rig and get a detailed report of every package in the trailer and where it was physically located....
My mission was to health check the 3x2-way redundant Amdahl systems keeping all this info on tap, and kicking 15 high-speed line-printers, and about 50 slower high-speed DM Printers and their dedicated print spoolers when they would jam.... a full time job in itself, from 4am until 1pm, 6 days a week....
The Dir.Op. was also ex-Navy.... he was a SEAL..... That man scared the shit out of me.... just on general principles....
He had a habit of sneaking into the building during the early part of my shift and creating failures for me to deal with....
Thats the only time, ever, in my carrier that I REALLY wanted to frag my boss....
Yes they do. People HAVE died from taking sports to extremes. Long distance runners who die from exhaustion or getting lost. Weight lifters who are crushed under weights. What about racers who go just a bit to fast? Taking the sport to extremes, same as gaming for 18 hours is extreem.
I can still remember the opening to 'The Wide World of Sports'
and watching the 'Agony of Defeat' sequence.... Even visualizing it now to write this it chills me to the bone....
When I see sports taken to the point where people die, or are maimed for life... I have to ask was this person taking things a little too far?
This to me is the real mark of addiction.... when lives are destroyed and Howard Cosell has to move on to the next play after a dramatic pause....
When I get my first toon to lvl 80 I'll take it easy....
How is that any different than worrying about the wasted life and family of a giant slalom racer who bit off more than he could chew in the third turn and damn near got killed on national television, every week,..... for 20 fuxing years?
My point is this addiction thing has nothing to do with the mode of commitment it has to do with the level of commitment. I think there are many people at all levels in the this society that need to take a big freaking step back, and stop....
Stop. Take a sabbatical. Back the heck off. Go spend more time with your girl, guy, kids, your wife, your mum & dad, or grandparents...
yes it does and this winter I proved it. Not once did I turn on the electric baseboard heater in my hovel. I used the waste heat from 2 iMacs, a dual core 1U server and an custom build, water-cooled 2U quad-core server to heat said hovel. My energy bill for the winter was 25% less than the previous winter.
Not exactly scientific.... but it worked for me.
IANAL:
However:
I think this guy is fuxed if they find ANYTHING significant on the sezied media that confirms the witness statements, re his involvement in unauthorized access.
The only hope the EFF has is somehow showing that all of the witnesses have it out for this guy because of some social tiff and getting the warrant tossed due to conspiracy to defame.... then again that DHCP record is pretty damning assuming he has a bootable system on his equipment with that specific host-name....
If he gets off of this hook.... he's either gonna be one of those scared straight dudes, or he's gonna get much worse...
HMMV
I was thinking....
SPAAAAaaaaaaaccceeee GHOoooooossst!!!!!!
YMMV
If you take down the Sun, the entire network would fall apart in 8 minutes flat.
There fixed that for you :P
yeah and now.... YOU... yes you KILLED THEM.... oh well. I guess I'll save the link until the /dotting effect dies off.
Type setters.
Hmmm Gollum......? Maybe more like Yoda....
But when I mentally set the stage for this commercial, I imagine a little dwarf coming out and saying, "I'm Linux, do you guys know how to get my wireless card working? I'm having trouble printing. Why can't I play this damn DVD?"
So sorry... Dwarves don't get a +15 on engineering... So it would be a little Gnome Mage with a big silver fro...
The Dwarf would be the kind to 'reprogram' the central database of the cluster with an oversized double-bladed axe.... and would totally pull a Scotty on it.
Night Elves... "Apple Rules the Night!"
Humans: "You have a... Computer?! 0.o What ever for?"
Draenai.... "*Shrug* We used Windows because that was what was preinstalled..... look where it got us.... :( We presently doing a postmortem and reassessing our options for a new OS.... while we pick up the pieces. "
The Horde Races?..... Stubborn-ass Windows shop through and through....
This a serious issue for a game like WoW since many sources of 'value' in the game come from random events.... if the gold points become fungible then Blizzard would be liable for gambling.
SL had to ban all forms of gambling from their world to avoid this problem....
it used to be as common or more common than virtual escort services.
I could use alternate ways to make money, but I don't find playing the auction house fun. In fact, I find it highly unethical. You're taking advantage of people who don't know what things really should cost. That's flat out wrong. And anti-gold farmers complain about my ethics?
Oh so if I do the research and determine what fair market for an item is, I am being unethical? And I make plenty of gold to keep my 29lvl twink and other toons well equipped and buffed.
But violating TOS and subverting the game balance is fine for you?
I hope you get smacked with the ban hammer good and hard.
dumbed down?
That is total bullshit...
The utility of an OS is based on what you, the developer, can do with it, while expending the least amount of development/research effort possible. By that standard Windows is a WIN, and all *nix variants including MacOS are FAIL.
Now, YOU GET OFF MY LAWN!
With a little clever engineering you could build a bias circuit that monitored the output of the Zener such that the average output voltage was very close to 50% of the reverse conduction voltage, thus keeping the Zener in it's 'noisy' output mode.... even with component drift. However, most implementations I have seen just use a voltage divider(two resistors) and a trim-pot to tune the bias... *shrug*
If you carefully reverse bias a zener diode such that it is right on the verge of reverse breakdown conduction, you will see a series of random pulses at the reverse bias voltage voltage...
So if you use a zener diode that has about 5.1V reverse breakdown and feed the output of that into a chain of... say, TTL shift registers that are being clocked at a usefully high rate you will get a nice truly random number every time you read the register set.
Drawbacks:
Resistors used to bias the diode drift with temperature and age.
Voltage fluctuations from the power supply will cause diode bias network to fall out of conduction periodically, thus making the output sequence semi-predictable.
Zener Diodes age and this causes their breakdown voltage to drift over time...
Working with truly random numbers in software is a pain in the ass from an SQA perspective. How do you reliably reproduce failure conditions in software that relies on random input?
Anyway.... over the years I have seen various implementations of the zener noise source.... It's easy to implement but hard to make it safe for production.
I believe a number of early computers used this method for generating random number, but I do not know if the Manchester used this method.
lol: my 2000 Powerbook Titanium is on it's fourth drive; so what?!
It's been kicked around for years in a bookbag and on international flights.... it's a miracle the thing still runs at all... but it does... go figure. It's been through two earthquakes... one of which the drive was spun-up... not as bad as getting banged around in Russia on countless busses and trains, I am sure.
that sounds like a high energy half-sine impulse to me....
Were the racks bolted to the concrete floor? That might be a problem.... earthquakes don't do half-sine shocks...
Skumanick gets his convictions to further his career..... and three girls get fuxed. Small price to pay for a great prosecutor, right?
IANAL:
Skumanick... (unfortunate name) fuxed up by not filing charges when the evidence was provided to.... ummmm him....
IMO: he played a sick(?) game with the families involved and got caught out. By not filing charges out of the gate... the federal court could not overlook the issue, according to tradition.
My concern is that in the future, a prosecutor grokking this massive fail on Mr. Skumanick's part, will simply file charges and then open it to pleading after the fact... thus keeping the feds out of the state's business.
So why is this clown failing to prosecute the individuals in possession of said photos, and the alleged person(s) responsible for taking them with the girls' cell phones? It seems that from the descriptions of the picture's content it is unlikely to have been taken by the girls themselves.... Am I missing something here?
Umm... I seem to recall an unmanned mission that couldn't decide where Mars began and where space ended....
All because two measurement systems can't get along...
For fux sake.... can't we all just get along?!?!
That Peter North discussion a good example and a good reason why no college level instructor will accept citations from Wikipedia....
If I want to get a plan-view of a subject or a quick answer I might hold my nose and look something up, but for the most part.... the quality is shite....
Too bad too.... it could have been great.... but now it's just drivel.