"if (!ptr)" translates perfectly clear into english as "if no (valid) pointer" while "if (ptr==NULL)" involves some spurious special case value that I need to spend extra tinkering with.
A null pointer doth not point to a 0 of any type, despite some blasphemous old code which impiously assumes this.
A hundred thousand ignorant bloggers screaming at the top of their lungs won't stop you from reading whoever you want to read, exactly as if everyone else wasn't there.
On the contray, those bloggers pollute the indexes of search engines, making it that much harder to find information that is relevant to your search. The vast knowledge resources of the Internet are useful only so long as you can find what you're looking for after all.
Um, dude, a rootkit for *any* OS that hides itself by intercepting kernel calls is effectively uneradicable except by total reinstall. How the hell would a Mac save you from that?
>...ARM-like procs at 400MHz each with something like 400MBs or more available memory bandwidth per proc.
This could have been done already with ordinary procs; it hasn't because once you hit an area that's serialized, your app winds up effectively running at 400MHz on a single proc. (More of a problem for desktop applications rather than server applications.)
>Of course the extreme limit would be to have millions of 1 bit processors, but I don't think that anyone is proposing that just yet.
>If we had the adequate resources, wouldn't we choose NOT to work at all, or just work a little bit?
Yeah, just look at that chump Linus Torvalds having fun at his job working on the Linux kernel. Obviously brainwashed by his corporate masters. What a tool. </SARCASM>
This really isn't a troll, it's an honest statement when I sat that it was the "Monkey Boy" video that really put me off Microsoft. I remember thinking "this idiot is in charge of what happens to our Windows PC's?".
Q: What are Linus Torvalds, Miguel de Icaza, Larry Wall, and Brian Behlendorf
Stupid as the video is, if it isn't obvious as a kick in the crotch that a platform lives or dies by the developers it attracts, both for the platform itself and the applications that run on it, perhaps it isn't Ballmer that is the idiot... (I refer not specifically to you, but slashdot in general.)
Obviously I still have a PC but I only use that for games now.
Gee, I wonder why you don't just play games on your Mac? (Hint, the answer starts with a "D".)
>If this device was connected to his car then he would have been using his gasoline to transport it. If this was done without permission, the police have stolen (even if only a miniscule amount of) gasoline from him.
Hey, how many times do I have to say it? It's not theft, it's gasoline infringement...uh,...
I've also heard stories of credits expiring after ten years, but I think that may be an urban legend.
No, it's definitely not an urban legend; where I went, the academic policy handbook at the time said that credits do expire after ten years. I'm not sure if they still have that policy though.
Plot driven games, like movies, are something the player tends to go through once and then shelve. That doesn't seem likely to be compatible with the OSS model of incremental releases by which a package gets polished into an acceptable state. Non-plot driven games (e.g. the multiplayer modes of FPSes and other games) have better longevity but still tend to be relatively short lived.
It seems more likely that OSS devlopment model would succeed with game development libraries and engines.
Server? You mean, like the tens of thousands of machines Google runs? The tens of thousands of commodity-PC-based machines? That they don't even bother swapping out when they fail, until the next regular maintenance cycle?
Poor counterexample. It's rather rare at the enterprise IT level to have 10k boxes running exactly the same application with a ridiculously easy fail-over scenario. Moreover, I seriously doubt that Google runs their transaction based stuff (e.g. ad signup/payment and DBs) on commodity PCs.
Parts such that, given a list of them, you could build it yourself off-the-shelf from Pricewatch for $5k vs $20k+.
The machines are the same only if you think high-availabilty features, engineering quality, and extensive compatibilty testing are worth nothing. (Dell excluded; they probably do use commodity motherboards.) As you rightfully point out, for non-enterprise applications, mostly they do happen to be worth nothing. But that in no way makes the two machines equivalent.
>...so the word is Direct3D is getting ported to a non-intel architecture for the first time - so they'll able to call it bi-platform, if not truly multiplatform like OpenGL.
Not true. An implementation of DirectX existed for Sega's Dreamcast, which used a Hitachi SH4 processor, but was used by very few games.
>...it'll be interesting to see how they'll compare with FPGAs in the upcoming years since both offer what the other is looking for.
How so? FPGAs operate at the digital logic level and CPUs operate at the machine language level. Either you have an FPGA emulating a CPU, in which case the basic inefficiency of a FPGA kills you, or you recompile every bit of software into its digital logic description to be used on some sort of uber-FPGA, in which case architectural and compiler problems kill you. The cases where FPGAs perform computations faster than CPUs are where the problem maps better to the digital logic level than the machine language level.
It's also telling to note that Xilinx integrated a hard-CPU into its Virtex II Pro and its new Virtex 4 FPGAs, even though they have soft-CPU designs available.
>If i remember correctly, multi-tasking is used incorrectly even in the computer field. The processor "seems" to multi-task only because it's very rapidly switching between the tasks.
>Firstly, multi-tasking is the wrong word to use as we're not simultaneously doing two or more activities, but are doing it in a round-robin, pre-emptive, or time-sharing kind of way.
Um, dude, that's the very definition of multi-tasking on a single processor system. Look it up in an OS or comp. arch. textbook.
Unless you've got more than one brain, multi-tasking is definitely the right word.
Unfortunately the single biggest problem for westerners has to be the Japanese addressing system.
If you're travelling to Tokyo, I recommend "Tokyo City Atlas: A Bilingual Guide" published by Kodansha, ISBN 4-7700-2809-1. I got mine through the Japanese Amazon.co.jp site (they have an English ordering option for the Japanese impaired); it does not show up on any of the US book sites, IIRC. It's accurate down street-level detail and has a bilingual index to allow you to translate addresses to map locations.
Re:Sign Me Up.... I Want My Charlie Back!
on
Re-Pet a Reality
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· Score: 1
>I also hope you find that driver and have him crucified.
Ask the average person on the street what they think of poverty, homelessness, drug addiction, spousal/child abuse, etc. in their home town and you'll get commiseration about "how terrible it is" and precious little more. Ask them what they would do if someone hurt their dog/cat, though, and they'll start advocating things that would make Vlad the Impaler queasy.
Human beings are silly.
(And by "silly", I mean another word that starts with "s".)
>>accelerated quite well by something on the other end of the efficiency/generality spectrum: the GPU.
>...like a bunch of engineering/scientific computions that, in places, are embarassingly parallel and, at the same time, embarassingly simple so that dedicating entire Beowulf node to the unit computation is a waste.
>Just as example - check TimeLogic's page (http://www.timelogic.com/)- a large class of bioinformatic computations can be accelerated by 2 orders of magnitude. Note, that it translates into substituting Beowulf clusters with a single FPGA-based accelerator board. Hardly horse puckey, I'd say...
Talk about missing the point. Read what I wrote and tell me how your comment does anything but support it: "Coprocessors only provide a benefit where the algorithm can be implemented more efficiently in logic than conventional code and it's done at a high enough frequency to warrant the trouble."
(In addition to your bioinformatics example, I'll add compression accelerators and (IIRC) some EDA accelerators as examples where FPGA computing does indeed provide a benefit.)
Going back to your original post: "Have you ever stumbled on FPGAs ? It's already there. The problem is, as I see it, it does turn writing programs on it's head. Thus, very few people outside of the hardware design crowd know what to do with them."
People know how to use them; they just have no use outside of a few very specialized areas. In the context of a discussion of advances in general purpose computing, FPGA based computing is indeed horse pucky.
>Have you ever stumbled on FPGAs ? It's already there. The problem is, as I see it, it does turn writing programs on it's head. Thus, very few people outside of the hardware design crowd know what to do with them.
This is largely horse pucky. FPGAs are a trade off of efficiency for generality. FPGA based coprocessors only provide a benefit where the algorithm can be implemented more efficiently in logic than conventional code and it's done at a high enough frequency to warrant the trouble. Few situations on the desktop meet these criteria. The only situation that comes to mind is video compression/decompression but that is already accelerated quite well by something on the other end of the efficiency/generality spectrum: the GPU.
>And it needs to stick to them. Microsoft may produce buggy insecure code but I'm fed up of finding bugs in Open Source software and being told 'what do you expect, it's free'.
Well, what *do* you expect, given that it's free? Or more precisely, what do you expect a quality standards organization to do to address the issue? No organization would have the ability to compel developers to fix bugs or compel volunteers to do proper quality evaluations.
>There is a distinct qualitative difference between duplicating digital content for your own private use/entertainment and duplicating IP to create goods and services to sell.
Agreed. One is a bunch of greedy individuals leeching off of the work of others for their own benefit and the other is bunch of greedy corporations leeching off of the work of others for their own benefit.
<FX: drum fill> Thank you, thank you, I'll be here all week.
Slashdot Mirror
--From "The Ten Commandments for C Programmers"
A hundred thousand ignorant bloggers screaming at the top of their lungs won't stop you from reading whoever you want to read, exactly as if everyone else wasn't there.
On the contray, those bloggers pollute the indexes of search engines, making it that much harder to find information that is relevant to your search. The vast knowledge resources of the Internet are useful only so long as you can find what you're looking for after all.
I don't think a *nix kernel rootkit has ever existed, where a program can modify the kernel and is impossible to remove.
+ kernel&btnG=Google+Search
It would have taken all of 30 seconds to google in advance:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=unix+rootkit
--A closed mouth gathers no foot.
That sounds rather drastic.
Um, dude, a rootkit for *any* OS that hides itself by intercepting kernel calls is effectively uneradicable except by total reinstall. How the hell would a Mac save you from that?
How does your statement: refute the original poster's point:
>...ARM-like procs at 400MHz each with something like 400MBs or more available memory bandwidth per proc.
This could have been done already with ordinary procs; it hasn't because once you hit an area that's serialized, your app winds up effectively running at 400MHz on a single proc. (More of a problem for desktop applications rather than server applications.)
>Of course the extreme limit would be to have millions of 1 bit processors, but I don't think that anyone is proposing that just yet.
How about 64k worth in the form of the Thinking Machine's Connection Machine CM-1?
>If we had the adequate resources, wouldn't we choose NOT to work at all, or just work a little bit?
Yeah, just look at that chump Linus Torvalds having fun at his job working on the Linux kernel. Obviously brainwashed by his corporate masters. What a tool. </SARCASM>
I pity you and the person who modded you up.
This really isn't a troll, it's an honest statement when I sat that it was the "Monkey Boy" video that really put me off Microsoft. I remember thinking "this idiot is in charge of what happens to our Windows PC's?".
A: "Developer, developers, developers, developers!"
Q: What are Linus Torvalds, Miguel de Icaza, Larry Wall, and Brian Behlendorf
Stupid as the video is, if it isn't obvious as a kick in the crotch that a platform lives or dies by the developers it attracts, both for the platform itself and the applications that run on it, perhaps it isn't Ballmer that is the idiot... (I refer not specifically to you, but slashdot in general.)
Obviously I still have a PC but I only use that for games now.
Gee, I wonder why you don't just play games on your Mac? (Hint, the answer starts with a "D".)
>If this device was connected to his car then he would have been using his gasoline to transport it. If this was done without permission, the police have stolen (even if only a miniscule amount of) gasoline from him.
...
Hey, how many times do I have to say it? It's not theft, it's gasoline infringement...uh,
Oops, sorry, what were we talking about again?
I've also heard stories of credits expiring after ten years, but I think that may be an urban legend.
No, it's definitely not an urban legend; where I went, the academic policy handbook at the time said that credits do expire after ten years. I'm not sure if they still have that policy though.
I finished my bachelor's degree in December, eleven and a half years after I started...
Didn't you have problems with your credit-hours expiring? Where I went, they expire after 10 years.
Plot driven games, like movies, are something the player tends to go through once and then shelve. That doesn't seem likely to be compatible with the OSS model of incremental releases by which a package gets polished into an acceptable state. Non-plot driven games (e.g. the multiplayer modes of FPSes and other games) have better longevity but still tend to be relatively short lived.
It seems more likely that OSS devlopment model would succeed with game development libraries and engines.
Server? You mean, like the tens of thousands of machines Google runs? The tens of thousands of commodity-PC-based machines? That they don't even bother swapping out when they fail, until the next regular maintenance cycle?
Poor counterexample. It's rather rare at the enterprise IT level to have 10k boxes running exactly the same application with a ridiculously easy fail-over scenario. Moreover, I seriously doubt that Google runs their transaction based stuff (e.g. ad signup/payment and DBs) on commodity PCs.
Parts such that, given a list of them, you could build it yourself off-the-shelf from Pricewatch for $5k vs $20k+.
The machines are the same only if you think high-availabilty features, engineering quality, and extensive compatibilty testing are worth nothing. (Dell excluded; they probably do use commodity motherboards.) As you rightfully point out, for non-enterprise applications, mostly they do happen to be worth nothing. But that in no way makes the two machines equivalent.
>Don't you think one of the reasons why Windows is so popular is that many people can get a free illegal copy of it without any consequences ?
>If Windows users really had to pay for Windows, maybe more people would think more about real free solutions for home computing.
You know, I'd like to think there are more compelling reasons to use Linux than "I can't afford anything better."
>...so the word is Direct3D is getting ported to a non-intel architecture for the first time - so they'll able to call it bi-platform, if not truly multiplatform like OpenGL.
Not true. An implementation of DirectX existed for Sega's Dreamcast, which used a Hitachi SH4 processor, but was used by very few games.
>...it'll be interesting to see how they'll compare with FPGAs in the upcoming years since both offer what the other is looking for.
How so? FPGAs operate at the digital logic level and CPUs operate at the machine language level. Either you have an FPGA emulating a CPU, in which case the basic inefficiency of a FPGA kills you, or you recompile every bit of software into its digital logic description to be used on some sort of uber-FPGA, in which case architectural and compiler problems kill you. The cases where FPGAs perform computations faster than CPUs are where the problem maps better to the digital logic level than the machine language level.
It's also telling to note that Xilinx integrated a hard-CPU into its Virtex II Pro and its new Virtex 4 FPGAs, even though they have soft-CPU designs available.
>If i remember correctly, multi-tasking is used incorrectly even in the computer field. The processor "seems" to multi-task only because it's very rapidly switching between the tasks.
g k ing
I did a google search prior to my original post to ensure that I was correct, e.g.:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_multitaskin
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=multitas
Since the term "multi-tasking" originated in the computer industry, it seems rather unlikely that they are using it incorrectly.
>Firstly, multi-tasking is the wrong word to use as we're not simultaneously doing two or more activities, but are doing it in a round-robin, pre-emptive, or time-sharing kind of way.
Um, dude, that's the very definition of multi-tasking on a single processor system. Look it up in an OS or comp. arch. textbook.
Unless you've got more than one brain, multi-tasking is definitely the right word.
Unfortunately the single biggest problem for westerners has to be the Japanese addressing system.
If you're travelling to Tokyo, I recommend "Tokyo City Atlas: A Bilingual Guide" published by Kodansha, ISBN 4-7700-2809-1. I got mine through the Japanese Amazon.co.jp site (they have an English ordering option for the Japanese impaired); it does not show up on any of the US book sites, IIRC. It's accurate down street-level detail and has a bilingual index to allow you to translate addresses to map locations.
>I also hope you find that driver and have him crucified.
Ask the average person on the street what they think of poverty, homelessness, drug addiction, spousal/child abuse, etc. in their home town and you'll get commiseration about "how terrible it is" and precious little more. Ask them what they would do if someone hurt their dog/cat, though, and they'll start advocating things that would make Vlad the Impaler queasy.
Human beings are silly.
(And by "silly", I mean another word that starts with "s".)
>>accelerated quite well by something on the other end of the efficiency/generality spectrum: the GPU.
>...like a bunch of engineering/scientific computions that, in places, are embarassingly parallel and, at the same time, embarassingly simple so that dedicating entire Beowulf node to the unit computation is a waste.
>Just as example - check TimeLogic's page (http://www.timelogic.com/)- a large class of bioinformatic computations can be accelerated by 2 orders of magnitude. Note, that it translates into substituting Beowulf clusters with a single FPGA-based accelerator board. Hardly horse puckey, I'd say...
Talk about missing the point. Read what I wrote and tell me how your comment does anything but support it:
"Coprocessors only provide a benefit where the algorithm can be implemented more efficiently in logic than conventional code and it's done at a high enough frequency to warrant the trouble."
(In addition to your bioinformatics example, I'll add compression accelerators and (IIRC) some EDA accelerators as examples where FPGA computing does indeed provide a benefit.)
Going back to your original post:
"Have you ever stumbled on FPGAs ? It's already there. The problem is, as I see it, it does turn writing programs on it's head. Thus, very few people outside of the hardware design crowd know what to do with them."
People know how to use them; they just have no use outside of a few very specialized areas. In the context of a discussion of advances in general purpose computing, FPGA based computing is indeed horse pucky.
>Have you ever stumbled on FPGAs ? It's already there. The problem is, as I see it, it does turn writing programs on it's head. Thus, very few people outside of the hardware design crowd know what to do with them.
This is largely horse pucky. FPGAs are a trade off of efficiency for generality. FPGA based coprocessors only provide a benefit where the algorithm can be implemented more efficiently in logic than conventional code and it's done at a high enough frequency to warrant the trouble. Few situations on the desktop meet these criteria. The only situation that comes to mind is video compression/decompression but that is already accelerated quite well by something on the other end of the efficiency/generality spectrum: the GPU.
>Why is it there's this heavy tendency among some doctors to not believe the patient?
For the same reason we don't believe the user when s/he says "It broke, even though I didn't touch anything."?
>And it needs to stick to them. Microsoft may produce buggy insecure code but I'm fed up of finding bugs in Open Source software and being told 'what do you expect, it's free'.
Well, what *do* you expect, given that it's free? Or more precisely, what do you expect a quality standards organization to do to address the issue? No organization would have the ability to compel developers to fix bugs or compel volunteers to do proper quality evaluations.
>There is a distinct qualitative difference between duplicating digital content for your own private use/entertainment and duplicating IP to create goods and services to sell.
Agreed. One is a bunch of greedy individuals leeching off of the work of others for their own benefit and the other is bunch of greedy corporations leeching off of the work of others for their own benefit.
<FX: drum fill> Thank you, thank you, I'll be here all week.