This is the same approach taken by Swing ("lightweight" layer on top of Java AWT). Events fired by a GUI object are run in a GUI thread. For side effects from a non-GUI object, a convenience class is provide to push events into the GUI thread. Basically to make a GUI call from a non-GUI thread you throw a work request onto a queue which the Swing thread processes at an appropriate time.
-- Jack
It should be noted that the S&S was the first consumer application of a Digital Signal Processor (DSP chip). The most common application of DSPs today is the digital cell phone. Who would have thought that the S&S would lead to wireless access to prOn?
-- Jack
Secondly, the VM system allows for shared memory segments between processes. This allows for shared memory, threads and shared libraries.
Um. Don't you mean it enforces memory separation between processes?
80% of the class has no idea why they're there. And had no idea of what CS was about...
I attribute this to CS not knowing what it's role in the academic world is.
I have a BS in Computer Science and MS in Electrical Engineering. I've been in the semiconductor and embedded software industries for ten years since. From this vantage point I feel that CS is a useless anachronism, a throwback to the 70's when computers were new, expensive, and exclusive. Other than complexity theory, a standard computer science curriculum is a collection of trivia. The skills learned in an undergraduate CS program are tools which can be used to investigate real fields of study, like signals and systems, materials, or physics. A CS undergrad degree is more like being a carpenter when you wanted to be an Architect.
If you are looking for an undergrad degree that qualifies you for geek work, then I strongly urge you to find a good Computer ENGINEERING program. There you'll learn true geek skills, not useless trivia isolated from the real world.
I am a Java programmer myself (laugh it up), but Swing just plain annoys me.
I like the Swing APIs when viewed from the application developer side, but the underlying implementation is hopeless baroquen. Swing was the first GUI API to get my attention since Genera on Symbolics LISPms.
My father worked on the first geosynchronous satelites (Syncom I and II). When examining the telemetry from the first bird to make orbit, they realized that an earth station on a certain island in the south pacific was NOT where they thought it was. It took some convincing for their conclusions to be accepted, but in the end they were proven correct. Now with GPS there are many more geeks who notice that things are where we thought they were, but satelites have been "changing" the world in this way for decades!
Keep the Thinkpad, 'Taco, or better yet get a new T series. I've had both a new GR Vaio and IBM T series this spring. Unless you are content being plugged into the wall and not moving, the Vaios suck.
The GR series Vaios are heavy, battery life sucks, disk is slow, and the keyboard layout is very emacs-antagonistic. Contrast this to the Thinkpad T series, of which I've had two now. Sub five pounds, better peformance, massively better battery life, better keyboard layout for those of us who actually use our ALT keys. The only benefit to the Sony is a bigger screen. But who cares about a bigger screen when your legs are going numb from the weight and the fact that you can't move around because you are plugged in recharging the batter?
Lastly I never got sleep mode to work with XP Home on the Vaio even after spending time on the phone with Sony. The T30 has worked solid from the moment I got it. I had a small bit of trouble with W2k on my last T series, but IBM's support folk were very competant and solved the issues quickly.
I believe what he was refering to were the screens that actually create a 3d image without glasses.
From the link given in the slash post (http://news.com.com/2100-1001-922122.html)
The setup uses the same principles as those employed by an old 3D movie theater, Bresnahan said. Indeed, the system comes complete with red-and-blue-lensed glasses.
The trend seems to be toward simulating 3D with high-resolution flat screens, though
Displays that require the user to wear glasses aren't what I'd call and adequtes solution. There is a big difference between having to stand on one side of a flat 3D rendering and being able to walk around a real 3D image.
All of the drawbacks mentioned above (code bloat due to specialization, lack of good docs, inconsistant template support in compilers, differing implementations) are exactly why I really like the Java Collections APIs.
One implementation, well documented, threadsafe or not (your choice), consistant support. Yes, you suffer in performance and memory requirement compared to C++, but most software I write has a heavier weighting on time-to-implement vs run-time efficiency.
So they aren't typesafe. Big deal. I almost always put things in collection from within a typesafe member function, so this really doesn't bother me. Having to cast to the type I'm assigning is annoying, but that is is what dyn-abrevs in emacs are for.
I can't stand C++ and all of it's boroque(n) splendor. STL is just another layer of obfuscation.
Is tedium a factor?... I for one reached a point years ago where writing code and drawing schematics paled; much more fun was designing systems, inventing ways to build things, and then leaving implementation details to others. I know many engineers who bailed because of boredom.
This is exactly my deal. Once I know how the system needs to be built then the fun part is over.
be sure to include the entire costs of development before offering your opinion as to weither an expensive alternative is better. (DSP's are ungodly expensive after you factor in the programming software,devkit, and required hardware all purchased legally... TI's devkit costs over $20KUSD that has all the tools available (the student kit doesnt do 1/2 of the pro devkit.)
Which TI kit costs 20k? For $295USD you get FULL C AND DEBUG TOOLS and a board with plenty of horsepower (TI 6711@150Mhz, a 1200 MIP part). For real-time you need to build your own I/O, but that is always the case. See http://focus.ti.com/docs/tool/toolfolder.jhtml?Par tNumber=TMDS320006711
For about $3500USD you can get a PCI board instead (See http://focus.ti.com/docs/tool/toolfolder.jhtml?Par tNumber=TMDS3260D6701), again with FULL C AND DEBUG TOOLS, and you can do master/slave transfers over PCI.
Now both of these kits come with "restricted license tools". But full license tools and an emulator board (to connect to your own hardware) is still only about $7kUSD. So what tools do you mean for $20K?
Do you mean Matlab or Elanix or Hypersignal or someone elses block diagram GUI design tool? I don't believe any of these are $20k/seat. SPW from Cadence, on the other hand, is ludicrously expensive and only runs on expensive workstations, but people still buy it. You don't use the DSP very efficiently if you start from these tools (nor do you use an ASIC or FPGA efficiently using these tools) but you get there in a hurry and can optimize from there. Sometimes what you need is a solution that runs even an 10x the hardware cost, and expensive tools can get you there faster than expensive engineers.
BTW, unlike low-power DSPs (ADI 219x, TI C5x) the VLIW DSPs from TI (C6x) and Mot/Lucent (Star*Core) can actually be programmed efficiently in C by an engineer with typical embedded C programming skills.
What is limited is the BANDWIDTH of the system, not the frequency.
In most radio systems the carrier frequency is not where the processing, analog or digital is done. The modulation/demodulation is done at an intermediate frequency (IF), which is upconverted/downconverted to the carrier frequence (or Radio Frequency, RF).
So the speed of your ADC limits the width and base frequency of your IF, not the RF.
These boxes will be useless in a living room unless they are QUIET. I tried getting an iCue
Book PC (Here is a link, but not the vendor I used) for an mpeg/web browser for the living room. It has only two fans, one for the processor and another for the power supply, but it was WAAAAAAAY to loud for a piece of audio equipment. My PS/2 is almost too loud to use as a DVD player, but it is nothing compared to PC of this class.
Bottom line is don't buy an SFF machine thinking it is appropriate in the living room -- it isn't. A
PS/2 with a Linux kit, now you're getting close!
The bartender at SJC bought me a free round the day I got laid off. Marzen! If you can't get free drinks at the bar, though, then I'd recommend drinking at home. Cheaper booze, fresher snacks, and no danger of legal ramifications related to transportation. Did you know they have the good stuff at Costco? Just be sure to hit bottom before the COBRA runs out.
"Lost my job for no reason or rhyme, guess that means ITS MARTINI TIME!" -- Rev Horton Heat
The issue to me isn't if someone is reading my packets, it is that they might block them based on what they find. What many people want from their ISP, me included, is an unfettered link to the 'net. If I want to open a port to script kiddies, I mean run a service, then let me do it. The fear of a cable company analyzing traffic is what their analysis might be. Cable companies have history of deciding what you can watch on TV by limiting choices. Many cable companies already have terms of service which limit what protocols you can speak over their network. I for one do not trust cable companies to respect my desire for an unfiltered net feed.
Re:Sloppy design, sloppy coding, sloppy enforcemen
on
Why Coding Is Insecure
·
· Score: 1
This is where reasonable SPECS come in. When the coder has nothing but his own ass to refer to for what the expected behavior of a program is, then you get this type of attitude.
Personally, when in-house testers find bugs in my code my response is "Thank you, I'm glad a customer didn't find it!".
Where are my moderator points when I need them ...
on
The LSB Delivers Again
·
· Score: 1
What do library bugs have to do with LSB compliance?
If you are talking about a desktop machine, then as Jason points out it's hard to find a compelling reason (except the lack of a noisy cooling fan!). If you are designing an embedded system (TiVo, VoIP router, cell phone base station, industrial control or ispection, autonomous robot) then the power advantages of the PPC and on-chip peripheral sets offered by Motorolla make x86s not even show up on the radar. I see Linux PPC as competition to VxWorks and Embedded NT, not desktop Windows or Linux x86.
Redhat 6.2 with ipchains for basic security only exposing SMTP and HTTP. I set it up based on the linux firewall HOWTO
Sendmail for MTA. Standard RH setup.
UW IMAP, Apache, mod_ssl and IMP to provide secure remote access.
I already had the firewall and sendmail running. I estimate it took about 20 hours to add UW IMAP, mod_ssl, and IMP to my system. It was very easy for an experienced UNIX head like me. I am extremely impressed with
how easy the whole Apache, PHP, mod_ssl, thing is and how featurefull. It all just worked, and worked well. Hats off to those folk!
Slashdot Mirror
This is the same approach taken by Swing ("lightweight" layer on top of Java AWT). Events fired by a GUI object are run in a GUI thread. For side effects from a non-GUI object, a convenience class is provide to push events into the GUI thread. Basically to make a GUI call from a non-GUI thread you throw a work request onto a queue which the Swing thread processes at an appropriate time. -- Jack
It should be noted that the S&S was the first consumer application of a Digital Signal Processor (DSP chip). The most common application of DSPs today is the digital cell phone. Who would have thought that the S&S would lead to wireless access to prOn? -- Jack
-- Jack
-- Jack
I have a BS in Computer Science and MS in Electrical Engineering. I've been in the semiconductor and embedded software industries for ten years since. From this vantage point I feel that CS is a useless anachronism, a throwback to the 70's when computers were new, expensive, and exclusive. Other than complexity theory, a standard computer science curriculum is a collection of trivia. The skills learned in an undergraduate CS program are tools which can be used to investigate real fields of study, like signals and systems, materials, or physics. A CS undergrad degree is more like being a carpenter when you wanted to be an Architect.
If you are looking for an undergrad degree that qualifies you for geek work, then I strongly urge you to find a good Computer ENGINEERING program. There you'll learn true geek skills, not useless trivia isolated from the real world.
Why is it that people think laywers are sharks when there exist such civic minded public servants this this?
I like the Swing APIs when viewed from the application developer side, but the underlying implementation is hopeless baroquen. Swing was the first GUI API to get my attention since Genera on Symbolics LISPms.
My father worked on the first geosynchronous satelites (Syncom I and II). When examining the telemetry from the first bird to make orbit, they realized that an earth station on a certain island in the south pacific was NOT where they thought it was. It took some convincing for their conclusions to be accepted, but in the end they were proven correct. Now with GPS there are many more geeks who notice that things are where we thought they were, but satelites have been "changing" the world in this way for decades!
The GR series Vaios are heavy, battery life sucks, disk is slow, and the keyboard layout is very emacs-antagonistic. Contrast this to the Thinkpad T series, of which I've had two now. Sub five pounds, better peformance, massively better battery life, better keyboard layout for those of us who actually use our ALT keys. The only benefit to the Sony is a bigger screen. But who cares about a bigger screen when your legs are going numb from the weight and the fact that you can't move around because you are plugged in recharging the batter?
Lastly I never got sleep mode to work with XP Home on the Vaio even after spending time on the phone with Sony. The T30 has worked solid from the moment I got it. I had a small bit of trouble with W2k on my last T series, but IBM's support folk were very competant and solved the issues quickly.
Displays that require the user to wear glasses aren't what I'd call and adequtes solution. There is a big difference between having to stand on one side of a flat 3D rendering and being able to walk around a real 3D image.
One implementation, well documented, threadsafe or not (your choice), consistant support. Yes, you suffer in performance and memory requirement compared to C++, but most software I write has a heavier weighting on time-to-implement vs run-time efficiency.
So they aren't typesafe. Big deal. I almost always put things in collection from within a typesafe member function, so this really doesn't bother me. Having to cast to the type I'm assigning is annoying, but that is is what dyn-abrevs in emacs are for.
I can't stand C++ and all of it's boroque(n) splendor. STL is just another layer of obfuscation.
This is exactly my deal. Once I know how the system needs to be built then the fun part is over.
Which TI kit costs 20k? For $295USD you get FULL C AND DEBUG TOOLS and a board with plenty of horsepower (TI 6711@150Mhz, a 1200 MIP part). For real-time you need to build your own I/O, but that is always the case. See http://focus.ti.com/docs/tool/toolfolder.jhtml?Par tNumber=TMDS320006711
For about $3500USD you can get a PCI board instead (See http://focus.ti.com/docs/tool/toolfolder.jhtml?Par tNumber=TMDS3260D6701), again with FULL C AND DEBUG TOOLS, and you can do master/slave transfers over PCI.
Now both of these kits come with "restricted license tools". But full license tools and an emulator board (to connect to your own hardware) is still only about $7kUSD. So what tools do you mean for $20K?
Do you mean Matlab or Elanix or Hypersignal or someone elses block diagram GUI design tool? I don't believe any of these are $20k/seat. SPW from Cadence, on the other hand, is ludicrously expensive and only runs on expensive workstations, but people still buy it. You don't use the DSP very efficiently if you start from these tools (nor do you use an ASIC or FPGA efficiently using these tools) but you get there in a hurry and can optimize from there. Sometimes what you need is a solution that runs even an 10x the hardware cost, and expensive tools can get you there faster than expensive engineers.
BTW, unlike low-power DSPs (ADI 219x, TI C5x) the VLIW DSPs from TI (C6x) and Mot/Lucent (Star*Core) can actually be programmed efficiently in C by an engineer with typical embedded C programming skills.
What is limited is the BANDWIDTH of the system, not the frequency.
In most radio systems the carrier frequency is not where the processing, analog or digital is done. The modulation/demodulation is done at an intermediate frequency (IF), which is upconverted/downconverted to the carrier frequence (or Radio Frequency, RF).
So the speed of your ADC limits the width and base frequency of your IF, not the RF.
These boxes will be useless in a living room unless they are QUIET. I tried getting an iCue Book PC ( Here is a link, but not the vendor I used) for an mpeg/web browser for the living room. It has only two fans, one for the processor and another for the power supply, but it was WAAAAAAAY to loud for a piece of audio equipment. My PS/2 is almost too loud to use as a DVD player, but it is nothing compared to PC of this class. Bottom line is don't buy an SFF machine thinking it is appropriate in the living room -- it isn't. A PS/2 with a Linux kit, now you're getting close!
The bartender at SJC bought me a free round the day I got laid off. Marzen! If you can't get free drinks at the bar, though, then I'd recommend drinking at home. Cheaper booze, fresher snacks, and no danger of legal ramifications related to transportation. Did you know they have the good stuff at Costco? Just be sure to hit bottom before the COBRA runs out.
"Lost my job for no reason or rhyme, guess that means ITS MARTINI TIME!" -- Rev Horton Heat
OMAP is an ARM core with extra DSP functions.
OMAP is a single chip with BOTH an ARM core and a TI 55x DSP core (and a bunch of peripherals too).
The issue to me isn't if someone is reading my packets, it is that they might block them based on what they find. What many people want from their ISP, me included, is an unfettered link to the 'net. If I want to open a port to script kiddies, I mean run a service, then let me do it. The fear of a cable company analyzing traffic is what their analysis might be. Cable companies have history of deciding what you can watch on TV by limiting choices. Many cable companies already have terms of service which limit what protocols you can speak over their network. I for one do not trust cable companies to respect my desire for an unfiltered net feed.
This is where reasonable SPECS come in. When the coder has nothing but his own ass to refer to for what the expected behavior of a program is, then you get this type of attitude.
Personally, when in-house testers find bugs in my code my response is "Thank you, I'm glad a customer didn't find it!".
What do library bugs have to do with LSB compliance?
cypherpunks:cypherpunks almost always works at NYT.
If you are talking about a desktop machine, then as Jason points out it's hard to find a compelling reason (except the lack of a noisy cooling fan!). If you are designing an embedded system (TiVo, VoIP router, cell phone base station, industrial control or ispection, autonomous robot) then the power advantages of the PPC and on-chip peripheral sets offered by Motorolla make x86s not even show up on the radar. I see Linux PPC as competition to VxWorks and Embedded NT, not desktop Windows or Linux x86.
- 64k/256k ADSL with static IP
- Redhat 6.2 with ipchains for basic security only exposing SMTP and HTTP. I set it up based on the linux firewall HOWTO
- Sendmail for MTA. Standard RH setup.
- UW IMAP, Apache, mod_ssl and IMP to provide secure remote access.
I already had the firewall and sendmail running. I estimate it took about 20 hours to add UW IMAP, mod_ssl, and IMP to my system. It was very easy for an experienced UNIX head like me. I am extremely impressed with how easy the whole Apache, PHP, mod_ssl, thing is and how featurefull. It all just worked, and worked well. Hats off to those folk!