Then how the hell did changing to an ergonomic keyboard and trackball stop the excruciating pain in my wrists that I experienced when using my old keyboard and mouse?
Technically speaking, I probably had tendinitis rather than carpal tunnel. Still, it's rather upsetting when you tell your doctor you have RSI and he doesn't have a clue what your talking about. God damn medical racket.
Ethernet is not suited for realtime. Random delays in cases of collision are bad, though perhaps not as bad on switched networks. Ethernet's large message sizes increase latency, which is also bad. TCP is also not suited for realtime. You could use UDP, but then you have to guarantee delivery yourself. CAN handles collisions based on message priority guaranteeing delivery. Messages are limited to 8 bytes, so latency is low.
If you only need soft realtime, then ethernet would probably be easier. However, CAN was designed specifically for hard realtime systems in noisy environments. If that's what your system looks like, ethernet seems like a poor choice.
You have apparently not seen Matlab's Realtime Workshop, which translates from Simulink to C for running on embedded systems. Of course, using this does mean that you have to program in Simulink. Unless your one of those (disturbingly common) engineers who just DON'T GET computers, it can make you want to stab things.
PC (maybe mini-itx) running *nix talking via Ethernet/IP to a Netburner Microcontroller talking via CAN to several PICs/AVRs with some extra circuitry (amplifiers, voltage dividers, etc) to interface with the sensors and actuators.
There are PICs and AVRs that have ethernet, but the NetBurner is damn easy to use. They also have some micros with GPIO, ADCs, and maybe PWM generation, so it might be easiest to skip the 8-bit micros altogether. I don't have any affiliation with NetBurner; I've just used their product and was sufficiently impressed that I might voluntarily choose to use it again.
To repeat myself again, I don't claim to understand the intricate economics of peering agreements, but as I pointed out to another, less polite, poster, technology is different from infrastructure.
Quoth our James Madison "To promote the progress of science and useful arts." Specifically, to pay the fixed cost necessary to produce an invention by allowing the inventor to temporarily charge monopoly prices. Publicly funded research is a nice alternative when the patent approach is less than optimal at benefiting the public good. Subsidized research does not need patent protection because the subsidy has paid the fixed cost. Asking the CSIRO to support itself seems like a confused approach. If their work can be supported through patents, it could probably be done just as well or better by a private group.
Now, perhaps the royalties CSIRO wants are only 30% of the fixed cost of the invention as compared to standard 100% plus Ferraris for the board. I suppose this is better, but it is still bad compared to ARPA, UC, and CERN.
I don't claim to understand the intricate economics of peering agreements, but as I pointed out to another, less polite, poster, technology is different from infrastructure.
I think you might have some arguments from the Mesopotamians, Indians (both flavors), and Chinese on that one. Maybe you guys could start a licensing consortium. Let me know where to send the check.
Infrastructure is different from technology. Technology is free to share. Infrastructure costs money to maintain. Anyone is free to use the technology of the Internet without paying the US a dime (ignoring the problem of getting a copy of the BSD source code which is most easily available over the Internet). It is, however, expected and reasonable for companies in the US to charge something for use of their infrastructure. Whether the rates charged are reasonable, though, is another question.
<flame>
Why don't you try taking a course in micro-economics before acting self righteous, or maybe you've been too occupied with whatever mind altering substances your inferior government has failed to outlaw?
</flame>
Patents exist to pay the fixed cost of invention by granting a temporary monopoly. The other option to cover the fixed cost is subsidy. Publicly funded research organizations like the CSIRO work based on the subsidy method. The cost is paid by the public, so the public should have use of the invention. The only question here is whether Australia is going to act like other nations where public means WORLD (considering the actions of ARPA, UC Berkeley, and INRIA), or whether they're going to be dicks.
I'm one of the (~20 million) people who pays for the CSIRO, so don't be calling me greedy for wanting some payback.
As an American whose tax dollars fund (D)ARPA, I demand payback from all other nations using the Internet. Also, I think the good citizens of California whose tax dollars helped fund BSD would like some too.
Actually... Some people got mad that SI prefixes, kilo/mega/..., were being used to mean something other than 10^3/10^6/... so they made up some new prefixes, kibi/mebi/..., that mean 2^10, 2^20... in the interest of clarity. Whether anyone actually seems to care about this is another matter entirely.
The majority of the UK's General Medical Council members are doctors too. Again, I don't think this is something that really sets the US apart. And who better to judge the competence of a doctor than another doctor, anyway?
The GMC is part of the UK government, so they are sort of accountable to somebody. I'm not aware of anyone that the AMA is accountable to.
Well, considering that this actually happened, most people seem to agree that you should have to pay for your neighbor's phone, just like you also pay for his schools, libraries, parks, etc. (and he pays for yours).
Education is a public good and anybody can go to a public park. The only people who benefit from a Universal Service Fee are the people who live out in the boonies. The total cost to society would be less if they lived closer to a population center. Making them pay the true cost for service, or even a differential price, would encourage them to live closer.
The whole "why should I have to spend a dime to help anyone else?" line of argument has not been very successful.
You're right, there are plenty of people seeking handouts and they've pushed through laws to provide them. Now, I think it's great to help out the less fortunate, but what I strongly dislike is when people demand part of my earnings for purely their own benefit through force of law.
Also, thanks for the point about medicare costs. It does seem that they are close to 5%, though private insurance costs may also be close to 9%(pdf warning). I will have to look into this further.
I see that you mentioned health care later in your post, but I don't think the factors you mentioned are enough to explain the sorry state of our system compared to others. We're hardly the only country that regulates doctors or allows malpractice suits.
The point is not that healthcare is regulated at all. The point is that it is regulated by CURRENT DOCTORS who have a strong incentive to keep supply low so that they will receive higher pay. The AMA is a private, unelected group. An independent set of standards for medical schools that the public had some at least indirect control over would be better. Competing private raters without governmental force of law may work (it does in the bond industry), but healthcare is a more dangerous game. This is an all too common example of crappy regulation causing higher costs. An example of more decent regulation promoting competition is the forcing of dsl monopolies to let competitors colo their equipment; this is what let SpeakEasy work. Also I do believe we tend to be more litigious in this country, and while I don't know whether our patent system is more broken than others, it is broken.
Phone service could not be provided there at a price that would allow the phone company to turn a profit. Without government intervention, it simply wouldn't have been available there, but we the people decided telecom was important enough to subsidize.
Should I have to pay for my (very far away) neighbor's phone? Or should he move closer to other people so it wouldn't cost so much? Though if an entire small community wants to pool their resources to provide service for all of them, that's a different story.
And sure, Brad could receive more value for his money from the private sector... but real-world comparisons show that he probably doesn't.
Please show me any any such comparisons. I would be very interested in a formal study comparing private/government efficiency. All anecdotal evidence I've heard, and my personal experience, is that government tends to be much less efficient than private industry.
My point is that Sven and Brad are in the same boat, so it's stupid to complain about the amount Sven pays in taxes. Sure, Brad could choose not to have health insurance or send his kid to college... but, like most people, he doesn't.
A private company will only do what can be done profitably, which is why it took government subsidies to provide phone and electrical service to rural areas that otherwise wouldn't be profitable.
Telecomm/utilities are a natural monopoly, so you do need some type of regulation to keep the customers from getting screwed by the local monopoly. Healthcare, though, should operate like a normal commodity, but our clusterfucked regulatory system here has put a stop to that. Since that AMA controls the number of new doctors, the supply side for healthcare is kept artificially low. Trivial patents keep drug prices high. And I'm sure the rampaging malpractice lawyers don't help much either. Whether the solution to these problems is more regulation is left as an exercise for the reader. Whether all citizens should have the same level of healthcare is an icky moral question with no easy answer.
The government, however, does what voters ask for, even if it has to operate at a loss.
Unfortunately, I think both major parties here are competing over who's better at operating the government at a loss.
That's a strange way of looking at it. After I pay my taxes, I can do whatever I want with my money where whatever I want consists basically of buying stuff (ie paying money to private companies) or investing it. However, I get to choose where I buy and the ratio of buying and investing which I cannot (directly) do with my taxes.
So when you say "keep any more of their paycheck," do you must know mean whatever is left after taxes to be spent or saved as one chooses. Do you only mean what's saved? Do you mean what I have left after spending for the basic necessities?
The better question is whether the government can provide better service per dollar/euro than private industry. For rival/exclusive goods in competitive markets, I don't there there's anybody (reasonable) who would say government can do a better job. Things get more complicated with other goods, uncompetitive markets, or when people try to define something as a public good.
This isn't strictly true, at least not on the Apple JVM,...
Based on this non marketroid page, it seems that apple's jvm compiles the java standard library at install time. Then it can just mmap the library at execution. It also seems to mark all memory in this file as uncollectable. It would be nice to do this for other java libraries as well, but then you may start to wonder why, exactly, you were using JIT in the first place.
Apple developed an innovative new technology that allows Java code to be shared across multiple applications.
New and innovative? Hardly. Shared libraries were implemented by Multics in the 1960's. Apple's just doing what everybody else (except, I guess, some folks at Sun) realized was a good idea years ago. As for making some objects uncollectable, Lisp was doing that and many other very cool things, long before java.
Native (.so) libraries are loaded using mmap. The means that even though every program links to libc, there's only one copy of it in memory. It also means that a new process that gets to run doesn't have to reload libc from disk.
Since java has to decompress/JIT it's libraries each time a program runs, each process will have its own copy of all the libraries. Making better use of the shared memory facilities provided by the OS is one possible benefit of compiling java to native code.
Slashdot Mirror
The only reason why CTS and RSIs appear to be more common in computer users is because we're more likely to aggrevate the situation.
And some people smoke till they're 90 and don't get cancer, yet there doesn't seem to be any confusion about what's causing what there.
Then how the hell did changing to an ergonomic keyboard and trackball stop the excruciating pain in my wrists that I experienced when using my old keyboard and mouse?
Technically speaking, I probably had tendinitis rather than carpal tunnel. Still, it's rather upsetting when you tell your doctor you have RSI and he doesn't have a clue what your talking about. God damn medical racket.
Have you tried webmin?
Ethernet is not suited for realtime. Random delays in cases of collision are bad, though perhaps not as bad on switched networks. Ethernet's large message sizes increase latency, which is also bad. TCP is also not suited for realtime. You could use UDP, but then you have to guarantee delivery yourself. CAN handles collisions based on message priority guaranteeing delivery. Messages are limited to 8 bytes, so latency is low.
If you only need soft realtime, then ethernet would probably be easier. However, CAN was designed specifically for hard realtime systems in noisy environments. If that's what your system looks like, ethernet seems like a poor choice.
You have apparently not seen Matlab's Realtime Workshop, which translates from Simulink to C for running on embedded systems. Of course, using this does mean that you have to program in Simulink. Unless your one of those (disturbingly common) engineers who just DON'T GET computers, it can make you want to stab things.
PC (maybe mini-itx) running *nix talking via Ethernet/IP to a Netburner Microcontroller talking via CAN to several PICs/AVRs with some extra circuitry (amplifiers, voltage dividers, etc) to interface with the sensors and actuators.
There are PICs and AVRs that have ethernet, but the NetBurner is damn easy to use. They also have some micros with GPIO, ADCs, and maybe PWM generation, so it might be easiest to skip the 8-bit micros altogether. I don't have any affiliation with NetBurner; I've just used their product and was sufficiently impressed that I might voluntarily choose to use it again.
Nothing quite like plastic softeners killing brain cells. Personally, though, I prefer glue.
To repeat myself again, I don't claim to understand the intricate economics of peering agreements, but as I pointed out to another, less polite, poster, technology is different from infrastructure.
Quoth our James Madison "To promote the progress of science and useful arts." Specifically, to pay the fixed cost necessary to produce an invention by allowing the inventor to temporarily charge monopoly prices. Publicly funded research is a nice alternative when the patent approach is less than optimal at benefiting the public good. Subsidized research does not need patent protection because the subsidy has paid the fixed cost. Asking the CSIRO to support itself seems like a confused approach. If their work can be supported through patents, it could probably be done just as well or better by a private group.
Now, perhaps the royalties CSIRO wants are only 30% of the fixed cost of the invention as compared to standard 100% plus Ferraris for the board. I suppose this is better, but it is still bad compared to ARPA, UC, and CERN.
I don't claim to understand the intricate economics of peering agreements, but as I pointed out to another, less polite, poster, technology is different from infrastructure.
I think you might have some arguments from the Mesopotamians, Indians (both flavors), and Chinese on that one. Maybe you guys could start a licensing consortium. Let me know where to send the check.
Infrastructure is different from technology. Technology is free to share. Infrastructure costs money to maintain. Anyone is free to use the technology of the Internet without paying the US a dime (ignoring the problem of getting a copy of the BSD source code which is most easily available over the Internet). It is, however, expected and reasonable for companies in the US to charge something for use of their infrastructure. Whether the rates charged are reasonable, though, is another question.
<flame>Why don't you try taking a course in micro-economics before acting self righteous, or maybe you've been too occupied with whatever mind altering substances your inferior government has failed to outlaw?
</flame>
Patents exist to pay the fixed cost of invention by granting a temporary monopoly. The other option to cover the fixed cost is subsidy. Publicly funded research organizations like the CSIRO work based on the subsidy method. The cost is paid by the public, so the public should have use of the invention. The only question here is whether Australia is going to act like other nations where public means WORLD (considering the actions of ARPA, UC Berkeley, and INRIA), or whether they're going to be dicks.
As an American whose tax dollars fund (D)ARPA, I demand payback from all other nations using the Internet. Also, I think the good citizens of California whose tax dollars helped fund BSD would like some too.
You've obviously never tried to compile OO.o
Actually... Some people got mad that SI prefixes, kilo/mega/..., were being used to mean something other than 10^3/10^6/... so they made up some new prefixes, kibi/mebi/..., that mean 2^10, 2^20... in the interest of clarity. Whether anyone actually seems to care about this is another matter entirely.
Wikipedia Article
The AMA accredits med schools, seldomly.
The GMC is part of the UK government, so they are sort of accountable to somebody. I'm not aware of anyone that the AMA is accountable to.
Education is a public good and anybody can go to a public park. The only people who benefit from a Universal Service Fee are the people who live out in the boonies. The total cost to society would be less if they lived closer to a population center. Making them pay the true cost for service, or even a differential price, would encourage them to live closer.
You're right, there are plenty of people seeking handouts and they've pushed through laws to provide them. Now, I think it's great to help out the less fortunate, but what I strongly dislike is when people demand part of my earnings for purely their own benefit through force of law.
Also, thanks for the point about medicare costs. It does seem that they are close to 5%, though private insurance costs may also be close to 9%(pdf warning). I will have to look into this further.
No kidding.
Eight Megs and Constantly Swapping. Well, it's still just eight megs, which is, for better or worse, quite lean nowadays.
The point is not that healthcare is regulated at all. The point is that it is regulated by CURRENT DOCTORS who have a strong incentive to keep supply low so that they will receive higher pay. The AMA is a private, unelected group. An independent set of standards for medical schools that the public had some at least indirect control over would be better. Competing private raters without governmental force of law may work (it does in the bond industry), but healthcare is a more dangerous game. This is an all too common example of crappy regulation causing higher costs. An example of more decent regulation promoting competition is the forcing of dsl monopolies to let competitors colo their equipment; this is what let SpeakEasy work. Also I do believe we tend to be more litigious in this country, and while I don't know whether our patent system is more broken than others, it is broken.
Should I have to pay for my (very far away) neighbor's phone? Or should he move closer to other people so it wouldn't cost so much? Though if an entire small community wants to pool their resources to provide service for all of them, that's a different story.
Please show me any any such comparisons. I would be very interested in a formal study comparing private/government efficiency. All anecdotal evidence I've heard, and my personal experience, is that government tends to be much less efficient than private industry.
Telecomm/utilities are a natural monopoly, so you do need some type of regulation to keep the customers from getting screwed by the local monopoly. Healthcare, though, should operate like a normal commodity, but our clusterfucked regulatory system here has put a stop to that. Since that AMA controls the number of new doctors, the supply side for healthcare is kept artificially low. Trivial patents keep drug prices high. And I'm sure the rampaging malpractice lawyers don't help much either. Whether the solution to these problems is more regulation is left as an exercise for the reader. Whether all citizens should have the same level of healthcare is an icky moral question with no easy answer.
Unfortunately, I think both major parties here are competing over who's better at operating the government at a loss.
That's a strange way of looking at it. After I pay my taxes, I can do whatever I want with my money where whatever I want consists basically of buying stuff (ie paying money to private companies) or investing it. However, I get to choose where I buy and the ratio of buying and investing which I cannot (directly) do with my taxes.
So when you say "keep any more of their paycheck," do you must know mean whatever is left after taxes to be spent or saved as one chooses. Do you only mean what's saved? Do you mean what I have left after spending for the basic necessities?
The better question is whether the government can provide better service per dollar/euro than private industry. For rival/exclusive goods in competitive markets, I don't there there's anybody (reasonable) who would say government can do a better job. Things get more complicated with other goods, uncompetitive markets, or when people try to define something as a public good.
The idea was that "window" is a generic computing term. You trademark a generic term in your industry.
Based on this non marketroid page, it seems that apple's jvm compiles the java standard library at install time. Then it can just mmap the library at execution. It also seems to mark all memory in this file as uncollectable. It would be nice to do this for other java libraries as well, but then you may start to wonder why, exactly, you were using JIT in the first place.
New and innovative? Hardly. Shared libraries were implemented by Multics in the 1960's. Apple's just doing what everybody else (except, I guess, some folks at Sun) realized was a good idea years ago. As for making some objects uncollectable, Lisp was doing that and many other very cool things, long before java.
Native (.so) libraries are loaded using mmap. The means that even though every program links to libc, there's only one copy of it in memory. It also means that a new process that gets to run doesn't have to reload libc from disk.
Since java has to decompress/JIT it's libraries each time a program runs, each process will have its own copy of all the libraries. Making better use of the shared memory facilities provided by the OS is one possible benefit of compiling java to native code.