Game designers do it all the time. Compiler writers do it all the time. For 99.5% of the programmers out there, the underlying architecture is a black box; they only use the capabilities of the high-level language they happen to be using. But the final performance and capabilities of the system as a whole depend on that underlying architecture, which has been a single-accumulator, short-on-registers, byzantine instruction set (must. take. deep. breaths...) anachronism for far too long.
If only because it keeps us tied to the x86 instruction set. If we didn't have the luxury of increasing the transistor count by an order of magnitude every few years, we'd have to rely on better processor design.
"Have you tried rebooting your spacecraft?"
"Do you have your Emergency Repair CD?" ...long, forehead whapping, circular conversation, going nowhere...
"I am most sorry that I am unable to help you with your meteorite damage problem."
"Is there anything else I can help you with?"
There once was a man who went to a computer trade show. Each day as he entered, the man told the guard at the door:
``I am a great thief, renowned for my feats of shoplifting. Be forewarned, for this trade show shall not escape unplundered.''
This speech disturbed the guard greatly, because there were millions of dollars of computer equipment inside, so he watched the man carefully. But the man merely wandered from booth to booth, humming quietly to himself.
When the man left, the guard took him aside and searched his clothes, but nothing was to be found.
On the next day of the trade show, the man returned and chided the guard saying: ``I escaped with a vast booty yesterday, but today will be even better.'' So the guard watched him ever more closely, but to no avail.
On the final day of the trade show, the guard could restrain his curiosity no longer. ``Sir Thief,'' he said, ``I am so perplexed, I cannot live in peace. Please enlighten me. What is it that you are stealing?''
Life of the author plus 70 years. For corporate works, 95 years from date of publication or 120 tears from date of creation, whichever is shorter. Of course, most authors are incorporated and the corporation holds the copyright. The whole world needs to use this formula - because Sony and Disney and George Lucas aren't making enough money.
At least where I live, people don't stand around on street corners singing at each other. Broadway musicals and opera need a more mythical story than Spiderman to work with. West Side Story notwithstanding.
"What is troubling is this person's ability to access the software after his employment at the site ended."
Having UNIX sysadmined at large companies, I can tell you I've gone round and round with HR to let us know when somebody left employment. It was usually much easier to pay attention to gossip to find out who had left, so I could disable their accounts. I remember one case where an accountant who had some pretty serious access was let go for malfeasance - and I didn't find out until three weeks later.
That assumes that the loader is going to try to bring the whole program into memory at load time, which is almost never the case. It completely ignores the notion of working sets, or how they change over the lifetime of a process. As an example, why should a program keep its "open all files" code in memory once all the files are opened? Vomit Making System loaded the first page of a program (the entry point) and forced the program to demand in other (512 byte) pages as required. Picking a (code) page to discard was simply done LRU. The working set size was an OS tunable parameter which was affected by things like average number of users, average process size, average process runtime, etc.
Damn you. I completely agree with you. I was going to post a smart-ass "toner wars anyone?" comment with a link to Wikipedia; but I find, to my complete slack-jawed amazement, that there is no Wikipedia entry for "toner war". There is, which I thought a great touch, a link from "Gray goo" to "Ice-nine", a relationship which had never occured to me, but no "toner war". Now I'm going to have to write (OK, start) a Wikipedia entry for "toner war". This if you have no idea WTF I'm talking about.
The CASE deals with the Internet. The STORY is about the judiciary. We can look forward to lots of "IANAL" posts about how this is a Bad Thing, but it's got nothing to do with technology.
Slashdot Mirror
Game designers do it all the time. Compiler writers do it all the time. For 99.5% of the programmers out there, the underlying architecture is a black box; they only use the capabilities of the high-level language they happen to be using. But the final performance and capabilities of the system as a whole depend on that underlying architecture, which has been a single-accumulator, short-on-registers, byzantine instruction set (must. take. deep. breaths...) anachronism for far too long.
If only because it keeps us tied to the x86 instruction set. If we didn't have the luxury of increasing the transistor count by an order of magnitude every few years, we'd have to rely on better processor design.
Indeed, where is Charlie Chaplin's tramp?
Whoooosh
Two words: loop unwinding. This critter is perfect to run all iterations of (certain) loops in parallel, which would be determinable at compile time.
"Have you tried rebooting your spacecraft?"
...long, forehead whapping, circular conversation, going nowhere...
"Do you have your Emergency Repair CD?"
"I am most sorry that I am unable to help you with your meteorite damage problem."
"Is there anything else I can help you with?"
From The Tao of Programming
There once was a man who went to a computer trade show. Each day as he entered, the man told the guard at the door:
``I am a great thief, renowned for my feats of shoplifting. Be forewarned, for this trade show shall not escape unplundered.''
This speech disturbed the guard greatly, because there were millions of dollars of computer equipment inside, so he watched the man carefully. But the man merely wandered from booth to booth, humming quietly to himself.
When the man left, the guard took him aside and searched his clothes, but nothing was to be found.
On the next day of the trade show, the man returned and chided the guard saying: ``I escaped with a vast booty yesterday, but today will be even better.'' So the guard watched him ever more closely, but to no avail.
On the final day of the trade show, the guard could restrain his curiosity no longer. ``Sir Thief,'' he said, ``I am so perplexed, I cannot live in peace. Please enlighten me. What is it that you are stealing?''
The man smiled. ``I am stealing ideas,'' he said.
Life of the author plus 70 years. For corporate works, 95 years from date of publication or 120 tears from date of creation, whichever is shorter. Of course, most authors are incorporated and the corporation holds the copyright. The whole world needs to use this formula - because Sony and Disney and George Lucas aren't making enough money.
What GP meant was that
(void *) 0 != 0
I have to concur. They're not necessarily the same thing.
At least where I live, people don't stand around on street corners singing at each other. Broadway musicals and opera need a more mythical story than Spiderman to work with. West Side Story notwithstanding.
"What is troubling is this person's ability to access the software after his employment at the site ended."
Having UNIX sysadmined at large companies, I can tell you I've gone round and round with HR to let us know when somebody left employment. It was usually much easier to pay attention to gossip to find out who had left, so I could disable their accounts. I remember one case where an accountant who had some pretty serious access was let go for malfeasance - and I didn't find out until three weeks later.
Science reporting like this from the "The International Academy of Science"???
I never realized before that the medeivals had included video cameras in the ornamentation on the steeples of Westminster Abbey.
Damn you. I completely agree with you. I was going to post a smart-ass "toner wars anyone?" comment with a link to Wikipedia; but I find, to my complete slack-jawed amazement, that there is no Wikipedia entry for "toner war". There is, which I thought a great touch, a link from "Gray goo" to "Ice-nine", a relationship which had never occured to me, but no "toner war". Now I'm going to have to write (OK, start) a Wikipedia entry for "toner war". This if you have no idea WTF I'm talking about.
The CASE deals with the Internet. The STORY is about the judiciary. We can look forward to lots of "IANAL" posts about how this is a Bad Thing, but it's got nothing to do with technology.