Not to rain on your parade, but the thing with Flash RAM has been the fact that it has a limited number of write cycles. I think that you can read all you want from them, but paging would really really suck. If you've got a page being swapped out every second, you can expect to lose about 1k of storage space an hour due to writebacks, assuming a 4k page and 10000 mean writes to failure. 10800 swaps every three hours works out to a bit more than 1k an hour. My WinXP box is averaging about 3-4 page swaps a second idled, but WinXP is known to be a bit swap-happy. Of course, YMMV.
I'm the kind of guy that when I make a PPT presentation, it's black text on a white background made to emphasise what I'm doing rather than what the graphics are doing. However, if you're off selling stuff, this could be 'useful'. Not truely useful, but a piece of eyecandy that some marketeer or executive would want, earning the creators money. It's like a pop-up blocker add-in for IE. None of us are going to use it, but there's still a market for it, for better or for worse.
Well, the Chinese have one thing going for them. If they start dumping dollars, then the RMB goes up in value and the dollar drops. Invade Taiwan, and they're set. We're low on our weapon stocks, having used them to make a whole bunch of craters in the sand. We buy our weaponry. A rush on the dollar means we have to pay more for everything, and the government would have a difficult time borrowing to go to war. Net effect, the US looks bad, China gains power in the region, and trade breakdowns let the hard-liners roll back any liberalization. Highly unlikely however.
Well, unless you graded her papers, I wouldn't trust your view of her understanding of the subject matter. Frankly, tests aren't everything, either. From what it sounds like, what she lacks in aptitude, she makes up in attitude. She works hard, does her best, and doesn't get discouraged. Frankly, if I were like that, I'd be much better off.
The other problem I have is that your reading of her motivations could be completely off base, and likely is. Most people don't do all the work and the extra credit if they're not dedicated to their field of study in the slightest. Unless you're stalking her, I strongly doubt that you know what she does with computers in her spare time. Heck, I didn't find out one of my classmates was married until the last few weeks of my last semester, and it took me almost as long to figure out that another classmate was a Navy vet. Clearly, we don't know everything about everyone we know, so we shouldn't assume so.
The Insight can hold a grand total of two people, and it's still pretty small. The Prius is bigger, but it is still a fairly small car. What I'd like to see is a Crown Victoria with hybrid and reasonable performance, so all the Taxis and Police can switch over. I don't doubt that such an act would really reduce air pollution and would save a good bit of money. Perhaps Ford's next plan is to offer fleet vehicles set up like that.
Actually, making an unwinnable solitare hand every time is not as difficult as you'd think. The rest of the program is, however, but making an unwinnable game isn't. Basically, any game that can be won can be formed from undoing legal moves from a winning state. If he plays Klondike with one card turnover, unlimited times through the pile, that has the most possible winning states, and it's the only kind I play since I suck at it. The trivial way to make it unwinnable is to simply make no legal moves appear from the starting layout. Finding those layouts most easily means simply making sure that no card laying face up nor any card in the pile can be put on top of a card that is face up. If none of the cards in the pile can be laid down, there is no need for none of them to be able to be layed on eachother. Of course, any stack can have an ace on top as long as the card under it follows the rules. Starting out with four aces and no legal moves will get someone homocidal quick.
Otherwise, moving backwards from a known unwinnable position sometimes works. However, there is no guarantee that any moves taken back will not then make the game winnable. However, it is possible to make the game extremely hard to win simply by doing that only a few iterations from a known good layout. Of course, if you're feeling really mean, any card that's face down can be swapped with any other card that is also face down. You can do that if at any point you can detect a win in the next few moves.
If the logic of the program is too complex to explain in plain English, step back, take a deep breath, and look closer. If you can't put it in English, you probably can't put it in C either. This means that there is probably a bug somewhere in there. On the other hand, if you take a complex concept and reduce it to smaller parts that simply cannot be made any simpler, then you are half way to a working program. The best program is made of simple parts working together to form complex logic.
I think that it would be cheaper to take advantage of the fact that just about every PDA out there has a built in IR transmittor. Just program it to act like a universal remote and you can save yourself several hundred dollars. Heck, if I were bored enough, I'd do it myself. I do know that it's possible to do it with a Lego Mindstorms Control Brick, so this should be doable, if not easy.
I dunno, but the bugs didn't seem to last too long under the wrath of several of my guys with AK-47s in Tactics. That big momma one took a bit more work. Remember: Shoot first, and let God sort 'em out.
The inline keyword is there for a reason in C++, and it's a godsend for field accessor methods, where it turns into almost the exact same code as a direct access.
Interestingly enough, Scientific American had ads for Astroturfing your lawn back in the Sixties. Of course, everyone frolicking on the 'grass' was wearing a good solid set of shoes.
I think that it bears repeating that anything beyond 7 qbits is really not doable at this moment, and it's questionable if it ever would be economically feasible. Basically a quantum computer gets exponentially more difficult to build the more qbits you add to it. It solves polynomial problems in linear time. This is the most momentous news since my Data Structures prof came up with a O(n^2) search algorithm for an array.
What I find interesting is the way in which the Itanium gets around the problem of branches. We're all aware that the majority of conditional branches seem to be for loops or skipping small sections of code. By allowing for conditional execution of code, they can get rid of all the JMP three lines down instructions and make it so that there is less pipeline blocking going on. I'm suprised it isn't being used with all sorts of chips nowadays since it fixes the biggest problem with pipelines.
If you force the programmer to make a guess on if a branch will be followed or not when they write the code, then it's possible to get rid of much of the branch prediction code. In essence, if you put more demands on the compiler writers, then you can make much faster chips without the need for obscene numbers of transistors.
The reason that there isn't much improvement on the 80x86 architecture is that it's about as tricked out as it's going to get. I mean, a +7 blessed rubber hose is nice and all, but there's no room for improvement, but the -5 cursed Greyswandir, while inferior to the hose at the moment, has a huge amount of potential. Frankly, the 80x86 architecture is probably one of the last legacy systems I would ever want to build on top of. MIPS is much nicer except for the inability to JMP across certain memory boundaries.
Re:WHAT'S THE MATTER WITH YOU PEOPLE?
on
Is Caps Lock Dead?
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· Score: 1
I camelCaps everything. ALL_CAPS_WITH_UNDERSCORES just looks really damn tacky to me. If you need to type in all capital letters, make some Emacs escape sequence. I mean, who doesn't think that ctrl-Z, ctrl-R, Q isn't the most intuitive thing in the world? If it isn't for you, do the Slashdot thing and make some Perl script that capitializes everything in a string you pass to it.
I wouldn't get on Bill's case too much on this. The Intel could only handle that much RAM. He was hired to make an OS for it, so he was stuck with that decision wether he liked it or not. The choice for only 20-byte addressing was simple. It saved on the size and cost of the chip, and it saved memory bandwidth. 64-bit processors have pointers that are 8 bytes long, rather than the current 4 byte pointers. That means that cache has a smaller effective size, the TLB is larger, and a whole host of little things that make the processor more expensive. Remember how expensive they were back then? They'd be even more so with the ability to access more memory, and that would have really hurt the sales of the fledgling personal computer industry.
Swap files are how we are able to get those $400 computers. I don't have any idea how a modern person can put up with 128 megs of RAM and Windows XP, but some people out there do. Doing without swap is only really feasible if you aren't running many different things on your computer at once, and what you do run isn't as much of a hog as many programs are nowadays. I guess if you were to use as small of a Linux kernel as you could and didn't install X on your computer, it wouldn't be much of a problem and you could do without swap. If you really want to go light on the memory usage, just use ed.
Well, there are infinite even perfect numbers iff there are an infinite number of Mersenne primes. There are a few possibilities on how to go about this, but one method I've thought of was showing that there is an infinite 'chain' of Mersenne primes. That is if M(n) is a Mersenne prime, then M(M(n)) is also a Mersenne prime. By induction, it would hold that there are an infinite number of them. Since I don't go by the handle perdos, I have no idea if that would really work.
I can mainly see games in 2034 being much much bigger. Make some MMRPG that's the size of a decent country, give people the ability to do all sorts of stuff, and you'll get better storylines than any author could, since everyone can be their own hero.
Increased processing power allows for all sorts of new things that have been limited by a lack of oomph in game systems. Physics engines can start having more nonrigid objects in the game world.
One central thing I see happening is emergent behavior. We design things in games to act like they normally do, and their interactions eventually begin to appear spookily lifelike. Take a sheet of paper, and have it act like you'd expect in a physics engine. Stack a whole bunch of sheets together and put a rigid endcap on one side, and you have a book.
Generated terrain is also going to be a big thing. Yeah, it's easy to make a race track in a reasonable amount of time, but the Paris-Dakar rally is a completely different story. Game programmers will describe the fundamental rules of a system, and the computer will fill in the details. Any other opinions?
Well, unlike the silly superstition that photographing someone takes away their soul, the protective spirits that surround your house do have that problem. Hence, for all of our karmic safety, we must stop this diabolical plan.
Basic wasn't meant to be the end-all be-all computer language. It was a toy language with a very specific purpose in mind, and if everyone remembered it as that, things would be fine. The creators of Basic wrote a book a few years back writing about the design of Basic, and why they made it the way it is. It was meant to be used with a teletype to allow programming while on a computer, allowing quicker debugging and testing than ever before. In order to allow it to be compiled quickly, it had extremely simple syntax. If we just left things at that, there never would have been any controversy.
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Not to rain on your parade, but the thing with Flash RAM has been the fact that it has a limited number of write cycles. I think that you can read all you want from them, but paging would really really suck. If you've got a page being swapped out every second, you can expect to lose about 1k of storage space an hour due to writebacks, assuming a 4k page and 10000 mean writes to failure. 10800 swaps every three hours works out to a bit more than 1k an hour. My WinXP box is averaging about 3-4 page swaps a second idled, but WinXP is known to be a bit swap-happy. Of course, YMMV.
I'm the kind of guy that when I make a PPT presentation, it's black text on a white background made to emphasise what I'm doing rather than what the graphics are doing. However, if you're off selling stuff, this could be 'useful'. Not truely useful, but a piece of eyecandy that some marketeer or executive would want, earning the creators money. It's like a pop-up blocker add-in for IE. None of us are going to use it, but there's still a market for it, for better or for worse.
Well, the Chinese have one thing going for them. If they start dumping dollars, then the RMB goes up in value and the dollar drops. Invade Taiwan, and they're set. We're low on our weapon stocks, having used them to make a whole bunch of craters in the sand. We buy our weaponry. A rush on the dollar means we have to pay more for everything, and the government would have a difficult time borrowing to go to war. Net effect, the US looks bad, China gains power in the region, and trade breakdowns let the hard-liners roll back any liberalization. Highly unlikely however.
The other problem I have is that your reading of her motivations could be completely off base, and likely is. Most people don't do all the work and the extra credit if they're not dedicated to their field of study in the slightest. Unless you're stalking her, I strongly doubt that you know what she does with computers in her spare time. Heck, I didn't find out one of my classmates was married until the last few weeks of my last semester, and it took me almost as long to figure out that another classmate was a Navy vet. Clearly, we don't know everything about everyone we know, so we shouldn't assume so.
The Insight can hold a grand total of two people, and it's still pretty small. The Prius is bigger, but it is still a fairly small car. What I'd like to see is a Crown Victoria with hybrid and reasonable performance, so all the Taxis and Police can switch over. I don't doubt that such an act would really reduce air pollution and would save a good bit of money. Perhaps Ford's next plan is to offer fleet vehicles set up like that.
Otherwise, moving backwards from a known unwinnable position sometimes works. However, there is no guarantee that any moves taken back will not then make the game winnable. However, it is possible to make the game extremely hard to win simply by doing that only a few iterations from a known good layout. Of course, if you're feeling really mean, any card that's face down can be swapped with any other card that is also face down. You can do that if at any point you can detect a win in the next few moves.
If the logic of the program is too complex to explain in plain English, step back, take a deep breath, and look closer. If you can't put it in English, you probably can't put it in C either. This means that there is probably a bug somewhere in there. On the other hand, if you take a complex concept and reduce it to smaller parts that simply cannot be made any simpler, then you are half way to a working program. The best program is made of simple parts working together to form complex logic.
I think that it would be cheaper to take advantage of the fact that just about every PDA out there has a built in IR transmittor. Just program it to act like a universal remote and you can save yourself several hundred dollars. Heck, if I were bored enough, I'd do it myself. I do know that it's possible to do it with a Lego Mindstorms Control Brick, so this should be doable, if not easy.
I dunno, but the bugs didn't seem to last too long under the wrath of several of my guys with AK-47s in Tactics. That big momma one took a bit more work. Remember: Shoot first, and let God sort 'em out.
The inline keyword is there for a reason in C++, and it's a godsend for field accessor methods, where it turns into almost the exact same code as a direct access.
Interestingly enough, Scientific American had ads for Astroturfing your lawn back in the Sixties. Of course, everyone frolicking on the 'grass' was wearing a good solid set of shoes.
I guess that means the F in F-1 stands for Frankencar. I guess it's an America only update then.
Yeah, but you end up with all the French Missiles being launched because someone forgot that /dev/nuke0 was just an alias for /dev/lpt1.
I think that it bears repeating that anything beyond 7 qbits is really not doable at this moment, and it's questionable if it ever would be economically feasible. Basically a quantum computer gets exponentially more difficult to build the more qbits you add to it. It solves polynomial problems in linear time. This is the most momentous news since my Data Structures prof came up with a O(n^2) search algorithm for an array.
What I find interesting is the way in which the Itanium gets around the problem of branches. We're all aware that the majority of conditional branches seem to be for loops or skipping small sections of code. By allowing for conditional execution of code, they can get rid of all the JMP three lines down instructions and make it so that there is less pipeline blocking going on. I'm suprised it isn't being used with all sorts of chips nowadays since it fixes the biggest problem with pipelines. If you force the programmer to make a guess on if a branch will be followed or not when they write the code, then it's possible to get rid of much of the branch prediction code. In essence, if you put more demands on the compiler writers, then you can make much faster chips without the need for obscene numbers of transistors.
The reason that there isn't much improvement on the 80x86 architecture is that it's about as tricked out as it's going to get. I mean, a +7 blessed rubber hose is nice and all, but there's no room for improvement, but the -5 cursed Greyswandir, while inferior to the hose at the moment, has a huge amount of potential. Frankly, the 80x86 architecture is probably one of the last legacy systems I would ever want to build on top of. MIPS is much nicer except for the inability to JMP across certain memory boundaries.
I camelCaps everything. ALL_CAPS_WITH_UNDERSCORES just looks really damn tacky to me. If you need to type in all capital letters, make some Emacs escape sequence. I mean, who doesn't think that ctrl-Z, ctrl-R, Q isn't the most intuitive thing in the world? If it isn't for you, do the Slashdot thing and make some Perl script that capitializes everything in a string you pass to it.
I wouldn't get on Bill's case too much on this. The Intel could only handle that much RAM. He was hired to make an OS for it, so he was stuck with that decision wether he liked it or not. The choice for only 20-byte addressing was simple. It saved on the size and cost of the chip, and it saved memory bandwidth. 64-bit processors have pointers that are 8 bytes long, rather than the current 4 byte pointers. That means that cache has a smaller effective size, the TLB is larger, and a whole host of little things that make the processor more expensive. Remember how expensive they were back then? They'd be even more so with the ability to access more memory, and that would have really hurt the sales of the fledgling personal computer industry.
Swap files are how we are able to get those $400 computers. I don't have any idea how a modern person can put up with 128 megs of RAM and Windows XP, but some people out there do. Doing without swap is only really feasible if you aren't running many different things on your computer at once, and what you do run isn't as much of a hog as many programs are nowadays. I guess if you were to use as small of a Linux kernel as you could and didn't install X on your computer, it wouldn't be much of a problem and you could do without swap. If you really want to go light on the memory usage, just use ed.
Well, there are infinite even perfect numbers iff there are an infinite number of Mersenne primes. There are a few possibilities on how to go about this, but one method I've thought of was showing that there is an infinite 'chain' of Mersenne primes. That is if M(n) is a Mersenne prime, then M(M(n)) is also a Mersenne prime. By induction, it would hold that there are an infinite number of them. Since I don't go by the handle perdos, I have no idea if that would really work.
I can mainly see games in 2034 being much much bigger. Make some MMRPG that's the size of a decent country, give people the ability to do all sorts of stuff, and you'll get better storylines than any author could, since everyone can be their own hero. Increased processing power allows for all sorts of new things that have been limited by a lack of oomph in game systems. Physics engines can start having more nonrigid objects in the game world. One central thing I see happening is emergent behavior. We design things in games to act like they normally do, and their interactions eventually begin to appear spookily lifelike. Take a sheet of paper, and have it act like you'd expect in a physics engine. Stack a whole bunch of sheets together and put a rigid endcap on one side, and you have a book. Generated terrain is also going to be a big thing. Yeah, it's easy to make a race track in a reasonable amount of time, but the Paris-Dakar rally is a completely different story. Game programmers will describe the fundamental rules of a system, and the computer will fill in the details. Any other opinions?
But how in the Hell do you debug a virus?
Well, unlike the silly superstition that photographing someone takes away their soul, the protective spirits that surround your house do have that problem. Hence, for all of our karmic safety, we must stop this diabolical plan.
Why do you think he's for banning Doom, then?
Basic wasn't meant to be the end-all be-all computer language. It was a toy language with a very specific purpose in mind, and if everyone remembered it as that, things would be fine. The creators of Basic wrote a book a few years back writing about the design of Basic, and why they made it the way it is. It was meant to be used with a teletype to allow programming while on a computer, allowing quicker debugging and testing than ever before. In order to allow it to be compiled quickly, it had extremely simple syntax. If we just left things at that, there never would have been any controversy.