Well, long term at least. The printing press made cheap paper useful, and that encouraged and enabled literacy, and the main government of the day, the Roman Church, could no longer keep the actual Bible contents secret. The result was a decentralizing of power from Rome to individual nation states. It has continued to decentralize into smaller and smaller communities. The spread of information robs those in power of their control over information, which makes it that much harder to steer things their way. The US had 3 national networks for a long time, but cable brought in more, and now the US gov can't control news as easily as it used to. The cheap computer was the next step, first bulletin boards and now the internet.
Sure there are wobbles in the trend towards "information wants to be free", but the overall trend is unmistakeable and unstoppable: less centralized control of information means less centralized control of people.
David Brin wrote a book, The Transparent Society (I think), which considered what will happen as webcams shrink. Neal Stephenson (sp?) wrote The Diamond Age along the same lines. Scott McNealy is right: privacy is dying, get used to it. It will hurt the powerful more than the poor. Look what cheap videocams did for police brutality in the Rodney King case. Now lots of cop cars have cameras, more for self protection against false claims than for evidence of crime or for TV ratings. Imagine what will happen when ordinary people have access to floating dust mite webcams, ten to the dollar. What would you rather watch on the internet spy cams: someone getting banged in a trailer in Kansas, or back room deals at the White House? Well, maybe individuals will watch the Kansas coupling, but the press and volunteer watchdogs will opt for the White House every time.
Because rephrasing your question as above is what synchronous looks like; every word has to be padded to the longest word length. Asynchronous is like normal written language; words end when they end, not when some 5 char clock says so. Another crude analogy is sync vs async serial comm, except using hoffman(sp?) encoded chars, so async can use variable length chars, but sync has to padd the short ones out to the length of the longest.
I tried underline instead of x but the stupid lameness filter objected/
Didn't the BBC get in trouble earlier this year by deciding to not carry some broadcast of some royal happening? I thought maybe this was the typical late slashdot news.
If the forms are mostly checkboxes, you can probably scan it as a picture, then look in the right areas for crud in checkboxes. Might need some alignment with known markings in corners. If there is some writing or text (serial number, name), enter that manually while displaying the picture on screen. This is also a good time to ask about questions which seem to have no or multiple boxes checked. "Please clarify question 3C."
I have seen comparisons over the years of various forms of Win32 compared to various commercial Unix variants, cost wise, and it has always been my impression that once you get to more than a few users, or into serious serving, Win32 was more expensive than Unix. Win32 only one for small print or email servers, that kind of thing, say for an office with 10 clients. It all came down to Win32 per-seat charges, where Unix has always had unlimited sendmail and print servers.
Is / was this actually true? Did / does it also apply to databases and other packages which have per-seat charges? I realize hardware confuses the comparisons, because commerical Unix has always been tied to specific hardware, making it hard to separate the prices.
Probably not phrased right. I personally have avoided M$ products as much as possible, because first, they have been obnoxiously buggy, second, they have only been useful if you want to do things their way, not if you want to do things just a little bit different, and lastly, because they have lousy business ethics. So I don't have any real world knowledge of how much Win32 systems cost. I am just curious about general cost comparisons.
I hope I don't come off as an elitist, but don't we have enough "non-mechanics" acting as mechanics? I have full respect for a farmer or tradesman wishing to learn auto repair and design. However, teaching them the tools first is not going to make them a good mechanic. I'm afraid that books like this will lead towards more poorly designed and built cars. A car is mechanical and should be treated as such. Is it just me, or does anyone else share this feeling?
Not if the trademark lawyers have a say
on
Robot Wars
·
· Score: 2
I'm sure the orange juice company would get their lawyers into that fight pretty quickly.
Everything NASA has ever done has been underestimated and underfunded. What makes you think someone would have gotten that $30B figure correct? What makes you think NASA's first-ever on-time on-budget project would be its most ambitious one ever?
Probably not. Probably even senior software engineer isn't good enough.
If I want to use an algorithm from Knuth's book I will give the book to an engineer and tell him to give me C# or Java classes that implement the ones I might want to use. Privilege of rank.
Seems like you don't want to LEARN, you just want to ape the procedure and never have to exercise the gray cells.
Knuth's book are for learning IDEAS not copying code blindly.
Two examples really get me foaiming at the mouth on this. 1977 or so, worked on a 16K 8 bitter, datapoint 2200, similiar to 8080 or z80. One routine set the cursor position from D (x) and E (y) registers. One guy could not think below the Algol level (shows how dated this example is!). Instead of just setting D and E and calling the cursor set routine, which would write D and E to the appriopriate I/O registers, he pushed addresses of the values onto the (hardware limited) 16 level stack, then called the routine, which popped off the addresses one by one, loaded the values, wrote them to the I/O registers. On a 16K machine! Simply could not adapt to anything less than a Burroughs mainframe.
Much more recently, worked on some code from the 1990s, where someone had written some semi-cute memory allocate / free routines. You passed a size and the address of a free routine. It allocated 8 bytes extra, storing the free routine address and size there, but returned the address + 8 to skip the semi-hidden header. The main free routine called the saved routine address if not NULL, then freed the actual memory.
Some bozo had to compare two data structures. Instead of simply comparing various fields, he built up a string representation of each. About a dozen times for each, he determined how many extra bytes to add to the built up string, allocated that many more bytes, used strcat and sprintf to append the conversion representation, and finally used strcmp to tell if the strings differed! Then freed the two built up strings. Gaaak! Gave me the shudders every time I saw crap like that, but it was a legacy product, soon to be obsoleted.
C# didn't exist when he started volume 4. Java didn't exist when he started 1-3. Are you suggesting that he should rewrite each volume every time a new language becomes fashionable?
The point of a bare bones old language is that it favors nothing. If you have to see an idea in C# or Java to understand it, then you are a piss poor programmer.
Too too many programmers think a line of code is a line of code. They think strcat is just hunky-dory, and append great gobs of strings this way, without realizing that each append traverses the entire string from the beginning each time. They use malloc and free, new and delete, with abandon, not realizing how much they are thrashing the malloc heap, when local variables on the stack would do just as well 99% of the time.
They DO NOT UNDERSTAND the concept of finite resources, that machine cycles cost time.
I believe the first programming course should be a very few weeks of something akin to LOGO, or BASIC, just to get the concept of bugs and such out of the way, weed out those who can't stand thinking. Then a good grounding in a z80 or some other simple 8 bitter, where counting cycles and bytes is part of the course (learn how expensive those cute index registers really are). Only then, when an understanding of machine cycles and bytes has been established, should students move on to a higher level.
Too many ivory towers out there, too many straight-A-can't-tie-their-shoelaces types.
Liam Neeson is proof positive. He was dynamite in Schindler's List (directed by Spielberg), and wooden as a pirate's leg in Episode 1 (directed by Lucas). Lucas sucks when he has to deal with people, which is probably why he relies so much on techno whiz.
Pricey, but heavy and built solid. http://www.cvtinc.com/. The Stellar, with extra F-keys down the side, is a disappointment: I wanted extra keys, but the side F-keys send the same codes as the top F-keys. They have a Windows program to change key codes, but won't release the protocol and aren't interested in anyone writing a Linux version ("somebody else wrote it; we just re-sell it").
I have two phones plugged into my Pipeline 75, and get probably one a day or so. PacBell (California) provides 12000 minutes (200 hours) per month with the basic service; after that it's 3 cents the first minute and 1 cent per minute afterwards. Any idea if this counts towards that $500? That would be a lot of fun!
Driving from Texas to California via Kansas and Denver, got stuck in a surprise snowstorm. After 3 hours of first gear (in an MR2 with summer tires!) and no place to pull off and put on my chains, finally did a 360, a 180, and another 180, and decided my luck had run out, so I dumped it off the side in a snowbank. No damage, not hurt, but decided it was time to get my money's worth from AAA. While waiting for them to call back, a telemarketer called! "Hello Mr Smith, how are you doing today?" I said I was stuck in a snowback. "Oh, you live in the mountains? We have a special offer today on credit card insurance..." and I hung up. Clueless.
100% markup doubles the price (n + 1.00 * n). 17000% markup multiplies the price by 171. Still a formidable value. I had always heard the street value of drugs was inflated roughly 100 times due to being illegal. Not much real difference between 100 and 171:-)
Ground crew. People who made the balloon, equipment, and supplies.
It's like the space program -- people act as if the money is just shot into space and lost. It wasn't -- it is spent on the designers, builders, support crew.
Whether or not those people should have considered getting "real" jobs is another question which you seem to know the answer to. I personally would rather they got it than some jacknape too lazy to get off his ass and look for a job. And if it comes down to a spacecraft or balloon engineer or ground crew, vs someone equally deserving in some other country, I'd just as soon it went to the locals.
When MySQL made no bones about it, before they tacked on a lot of bandaids to make it LOOK as if it supported transactions, before they decided to pretend they weren't just a simple DB with a hacked up SQL front end -- they were a great, simple, lightweight, read-mostly DB.
But then they got defensive, tried to claim that transactions weren't really necessary or even useful, tacked on transactions anyway, added other gorp to make it look like they could compete with PostgreSQL (the ACID free source DB), and that's when I lost all respect for them.
It was bad enough they made all their own little extensions to SQL (timestamps in a row automatically update even if not part of the update statement, etc). At least they had the lightweight speed king crown. Now I won't touch it, because they are going to slow it down with all this tacked on overhead. I simply don't believe that stuff can be added on afterwards while retaining the speed it was famous for. Those fancy features have to be designed in from the start, not riveted on afterwards. They are going to lose the niche they have all to themselves, by trying to compete in the ACID world, with established polished competitors. They will lose what they have by trying to grab what they can't win.
What an attitude! You are so full of yourself that all you have really done is prove that you don't know jack.
If you can't explain something in ordinary words to a layman, then you really don't understand it. It isn't until you teach something that you really begin to understand it.
A guy in our shop programmed it for us, I never did more than look at the code. My vague memory is that this may have been a certain version(s) only. Wish I had references. It was some story about odd hardware features for various chips, the most common being the relative branch where the opcode and branch offset were on different pages, which several others have mentioned.
So maybe it's just another unfounded rumour. But it's a good one:-)
If those two words are so trivial as to be ignorable by those who are offended, then the reverse is also true: christians should be able to ignore NOT having those two words.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, long term at least. The printing press made cheap paper useful, and that encouraged and enabled literacy, and the main government of the day, the Roman Church, could no longer keep the actual Bible contents secret. The result was a decentralizing of power from Rome to individual nation states. It has continued to decentralize into smaller and smaller communities. The spread of information robs those in power of their control over information, which makes it that much harder to steer things their way. The US had 3 national networks for a long time, but cable brought in more, and now the US gov can't control news as easily as it used to. The cheap computer was the next step, first bulletin boards and now the internet.
Sure there are wobbles in the trend towards "information wants to be free", but the overall trend is unmistakeable and unstoppable: less centralized control of information means less centralized control of people.
David Brin wrote a book, The Transparent Society (I think), which considered what will happen as webcams shrink. Neal Stephenson (sp?) wrote The Diamond Age along the same lines. Scott McNealy is right: privacy is dying, get used to it. It will hurt the powerful more than the poor. Look what cheap videocams did for police brutality in the Rodney King case. Now lots of cop cars have cameras, more for self protection against false claims than for evidence of crime or for TV ratings. Imagine what will happen when ordinary people have access to floating dust mite webcams, ten to the dollar. What would you rather watch on the internet spy cams: someone getting banged in a trailer in Kansas, or back room deals at the White House? Well, maybe individuals will watch the Kansas coupling, but the press and volunteer watchdogs will opt for the White House every time.
withoutxxxx axxxxxxxxxx clockxxxxxx signalxxxxx ,xxxxxxxxxx howxxxxxxxx canxxxxxxxx youxxxxxxxx tellxxxxxxx whenxxxxxxx onexxxxxxxx instruction stopsxxxxxx andxxxxxxxx anotherxxxx beginsxxxxx ?xxxxxxxxxx
Because rephrasing your question as above is what synchronous looks like; every word has to be padded to the longest word length. Asynchronous is like normal written language; words end when they end, not when some 5 char clock says so. Another crude analogy is sync vs async serial comm, except using hoffman(sp?) encoded chars, so async can use variable length chars, but sync has to padd the short ones out to the length of the longest.
I tried underline instead of x but the stupid lameness filter objected/
Didn't the BBC get in trouble earlier this year by deciding to not carry some broadcast of some royal happening? I thought maybe this was the typical late slashdot news.
If the forms are mostly checkboxes, you can probably scan it as a picture, then look in the right areas for crud in checkboxes. Might need some alignment with known markings in corners. If there is some writing or text (serial number, name), enter that manually while displaying the picture on screen. This is also a good time to ask about questions which seem to have no or multiple boxes checked. "Please clarify question 3C."
Sometimes simple brute force does wonders.
I have seen comparisons over the years of various forms of Win32 compared to various commercial Unix variants, cost wise, and it has always been my impression that once you get to more than a few users, or into serious serving, Win32 was more expensive than Unix. Win32 only one for small print or email servers, that kind of thing, say for an office with 10 clients. It all came down to Win32 per-seat charges, where Unix has always had unlimited sendmail and print servers.
Is / was this actually true? Did / does it also apply to databases and other packages which have per-seat charges? I realize hardware confuses the comparisons, because commerical Unix has always been tied to specific hardware, making it hard to separate the prices.
Probably not phrased right. I personally have avoided M$ products as much as possible, because first, they have been obnoxiously buggy, second, they have only been useful if you want to do things their way, not if you want to do things just a little bit different, and lastly, because they have lousy business ethics. So I don't have any real world knowledge of how much Win32 systems cost. I am just curious about general cost comparisons.
I hope I don't come off as an elitist, but don't we have enough "non-mechanics" acting as mechanics? I have full respect for a farmer or tradesman wishing to learn auto repair and design. However, teaching them the tools first is not going to make them a good mechanic. I'm afraid that books like this will lead towards more poorly designed and built cars. A car is mechanical and should be treated as such. Is it just me, or does anyone else share this feeling?
I'm sure the orange juice company would get their lawyers into that fight pretty quickly.
Everything NASA has ever done has been underestimated and underfunded. What makes you think someone would have gotten that $30B figure correct? What makes you think NASA's first-ever on-time on-budget project would be its most ambitious one ever?
Probably not. Probably even senior software engineer isn't good enough.
If I want to use an algorithm from Knuth's book I will give the book to an engineer and tell him to give me C# or Java classes that implement the ones I might want to use. Privilege of rank.
Seems like you don't want to LEARN, you just want to ape the procedure and never have to exercise the gray cells.
Knuth's book are for learning IDEAS not copying code blindly.
but it would have been nicer if you'd converted it for this post.
Two examples really get me foaiming at the mouth on this. 1977 or so, worked on a 16K 8 bitter, datapoint 2200, similiar to 8080 or z80. One routine set the cursor position from D (x) and E (y) registers. One guy could not think below the Algol level (shows how dated this example is!). Instead of just setting D and E and calling the cursor set routine, which would write D and E to the appriopriate I/O registers, he pushed addresses of the values onto the (hardware limited) 16 level stack, then called the routine, which popped off the addresses one by one, loaded the values, wrote them to the I/O registers. On a 16K machine! Simply could not adapt to anything less than a Burroughs mainframe.
Much more recently, worked on some code from the 1990s, where someone had written some semi-cute memory allocate / free routines. You passed a size and the address of a free routine. It allocated 8 bytes extra, storing the free routine address and size there, but returned the address + 8 to skip the semi-hidden header. The main free routine called the saved routine address if not NULL, then freed the actual memory.
Some bozo had to compare two data structures. Instead of simply comparing various fields, he built up a string representation of each. About a dozen times for each, he determined how many extra bytes to add to the built up string, allocated that many more bytes, used strcat and sprintf to append the conversion representation, and finally used strcmp to tell if the strings differed! Then freed the two built up strings. Gaaak! Gave me the shudders every time I saw crap like that, but it was a legacy product, soon to be obsoleted.
C# didn't exist when he started volume 4. Java didn't exist when he started 1-3. Are you suggesting that he should rewrite each volume every time a new language becomes fashionable?
The point of a bare bones old language is that it favors nothing. If you have to see an idea in C# or Java to understand it, then you are a piss poor programmer.
Too too many programmers think a line of code is a line of code. They think strcat is just hunky-dory, and append great gobs of strings this way, without realizing that each append traverses the entire string from the beginning each time. They use malloc and free, new and delete, with abandon, not realizing how much they are thrashing the malloc heap, when local variables on the stack would do just as well 99% of the time.
They DO NOT UNDERSTAND the concept of finite resources, that machine cycles cost time.
I believe the first programming course should be a very few weeks of something akin to LOGO, or BASIC, just to get the concept of bugs and such out of the way, weed out those who can't stand thinking. Then a good grounding in a z80 or some other simple 8 bitter, where counting cycles and bytes is part of the course (learn how expensive those cute index registers really are). Only then, when an understanding of machine cycles and bytes has been established, should students move on to a higher level.
Too many ivory towers out there, too many straight-A-can't-tie-their-shoelaces types.
Liam Neeson is proof positive. He was dynamite in Schindler's List (directed by Spielberg), and wooden as a pirate's leg in Episode 1 (directed by Lucas). Lucas sucks when he has to deal with people, which is probably why he relies so much on techno whiz.
Pricey, but heavy and built solid. http://www.cvtinc.com/. The Stellar, with extra F-keys down the side, is a disappointment: I wanted extra keys, but the side F-keys send the same codes as the top F-keys. They have a Windows program to change key codes, but won't release the protocol and aren't interested in anyone writing a Linux version ("somebody else wrote it; we just re-sell it").
I have two phones plugged into my Pipeline 75, and get probably one a day or so. PacBell (California) provides 12000 minutes (200 hours) per month with the basic service; after that it's 3 cents the first minute and 1 cent per minute afterwards. Any idea if this counts towards that $500? That would be a lot of fun!
Driving from Texas to California via Kansas and Denver, got stuck in a surprise snowstorm. After 3 hours of first gear (in an MR2 with summer tires!) and no place to pull off and put on my chains, finally did a 360, a 180, and another 180, and decided my luck had run out, so I dumped it off the side in a snowbank. No damage, not hurt, but decided it was time to get my money's worth from AAA. While waiting for them to call back, a telemarketer called! "Hello Mr Smith, how are you doing today?" I said I was stuck in a snowback. "Oh, you live in the mountains? We have a special offer today on credit card insurance..." and I hung up. Clueless.
100% markup doubles the price (n + 1.00 * n). :-)
17000% markup multiplies the price by 171. Still a formidable value. I had always heard the street value of drugs was inflated roughly 100 times due to being illegal. Not much real difference between 100 and 171
Ground crew. People who made the balloon, equipment, and supplies.
It's like the space program -- people act as if the money is just shot into space and lost. It wasn't -- it is spent on the designers, builders, support crew.
Whether or not those people should have considered getting "real" jobs is another question which you seem to know the answer to. I personally would rather they got it than some jacknape too lazy to get off his ass and look for a job. And if it comes down to a spacecraft or balloon engineer or ground crew, vs someone equally deserving in some other country, I'd just as soon it went to the locals.
When MySQL made no bones about it, before they tacked on a lot of bandaids to make it LOOK as if it supported transactions, before they decided to pretend they weren't just a simple DB with a hacked up SQL front end -- they were a great, simple, lightweight, read-mostly DB.
But then they got defensive, tried to claim that transactions weren't really necessary or even useful, tacked on transactions anyway, added other gorp to make it look like they could compete with PostgreSQL (the ACID free source DB), and that's when I lost all respect for them.
It was bad enough they made all their own little extensions to SQL (timestamps in a row automatically update even if not part of the update statement, etc). At least they had the lightweight speed king crown. Now I won't touch it, because they are going to slow it down with all this tacked on overhead. I simply don't believe that stuff can be added on afterwards while retaining the speed it was famous for. Those fancy features have to be designed in from the start, not riveted on afterwards. They are going to lose the niche they have all to themselves, by trying to compete in the ACID world, with established polished competitors. They will lose what they have by trying to grab what they can't win.
What an attitude! You are so full of yourself that all you have really done is prove that you don't know jack.
If you can't explain something in ordinary words to a layman, then you really don't understand it. It isn't until you teach something that you really begin to understand it.
We at Airbus calculate that our double decker A380 will carry more passengers further while burning less fuel than the 747 which is available today...
Or any other announcement about future products from any other manufacturer.
Been out in the real world lately? Newly fallen off the turnip truck?
Let's see, steal billions, defraud 401K pension plans, no problem. Steal otherwise-unused bandwith, get arrested.
Yep, One Nation, Under God has sure served as a good moral compass these last 48 years.
A guy in our shop programmed it for us, I never did more than look at the code. My vague memory is that this may have been a certain version(s) only. Wish I had references. It was some story about odd hardware features for various chips, the most common being the relative branch where the opcode and branch offset were on different pages, which several others have mentioned.
:-)
So maybe it's just another unfounded rumour. But it's a good one
If those two words are so trivial as to be ignorable by those who are offended, then the reverse is also true: christians should be able to ignore NOT having those two words.