How relevant or useful is it to learn Assembly programming language in the current era?
If you're trying to do anything in the microcontroller/DSP world and aren't willing to at least look at you device's assembly dialect, your colleagues will consider you a C-idiot.
Assembly is very useful for things that need to be fast (as in: X needs to happen within Y processor cycles of event Z), fast (as in: this calculation may only take X% of the CPU cycles), small (as in: the whole program needs to fit in 2 kB and use less than 128 bytes of RAM), to check if your compiler is buggy (yes, that really happens), or if your compiler simply doesn't know 50% of the processors instructions (yes, that really happens. And yes, the compiler was made by the company that also makes the chip in question).
Of course, much of the uC/DSP code can and is written in C. But the programmer needs to keep the assembly in mind when writing C (it's hilarious to see people try to program an 8051 who have only learned "C on the PC"), and know when assembly will do a better job.
Programmers must begin to develop applications that take full advantage of the increasing number of cores present in modern computers.
No. Whether something can be done effectively on multiple cores doesn't depend on the programmer, but on the type of processing. Some things have to be done in a certain order, and there's nothing even the best programmer in the world can change about that, period. If you try hacking something together that uses multiple threads for this type of processing, you'll just end up making things slower and messier.
On the other hand, there are other types of processing that just lend themselves fantastically to being done multithreaded.
Stopping will surely break it so you have nothing to loose. Or do they?
Yes, they don't want to have a large piece of space junk loose in a random orbit. This isn't the first space race - putting something into a random orbit doesn't win prizes, but might smash things that are already up there on purpose.
Is there an actuall graphics card out there that IS capable of doing the eyecandy stuff, it don't have to do games, that is fully opensource with absolutely no binary bits.
Intels i810 and above are. Of course you can't get any graphics cards with them, since they're onboard solutions, so you're stuck with an Intel processor too. Which may or may not be a drawback.
20 seconds to unconsciousness, stop breathing or to death or to needing medical help to survive?
20 seconds to unconsciousness, after that it's 3-5 minutes to irreversible brain damage. After seven minutes, you're dead or definitely don't want to be resuscitated anymore, unless you enjoy an existence with the mental capacities of a garden vegetable.
Alarms typically start going off in industrial air quality monitoring systems at 19.5%.
That's most likely because these systems are installed in areas where a sudden, sharp drop of oxygen concentration is expected in case of accident (for example near the pressurized nitrogen tanks in nuclear power plants that store the energy used for emergency shutdown). In these cases, you want the alarm to go off as soon as possible since it'll be only seconds before bad things happen. It has nothing to do with the oxygen level needed for humans.
If this is the oxygen equivalent of a 6,000-ft altitude, that's high enough to cause altitude sickness in susceptible individuals on the low side of the bell curve.
It won't be as severe as really being at 6,000 ft. Altitude sickness is mostly caused by respiratory alkalosis, i.e. the loss of too much CO2 from the bloodstream due to hyperventilation, which will start to affect the acid/base balance. Since the partial pressure of CO2 in the server room will not be as low as it would be at 6,000 ft, loss of CO2 occurs more slowly.
And the "rate of ascent" is going to be instantaneous, as you open a door and step into your new environment.
Altitude sickness isn't something that "just hits you". You get plenty of warning from early symptoms, enough to just leave the server room.
Your red cell count will increase, along with your erythropoetin levels.
Only if you're frequently lugging heavy servers around (exercise) and/or spend complete days in the server room.
Co2 ( carbon dioxide ) is not a poison, it simply does not support life. It is heavier then O2 and displaces it.
The level of CO2 in the blood must be kept inside upper and lower limits for the acid/base buffer to work correctly. Too much CO2 in the bloodstream will make your blood too acidic and definitely cause toxic side effects. Whoever you're echoing in the above line, he either has absolutely no clue about physiology or is a liar.
If you breathe a gas mixture with about 10%-15% CO2 at atmospheric pressure (you can pick the remaining 85%-90% as you like, it won't make a difference), you'll die.
Co ( carbon monoxide ) on the other hand IS a toxin.
It's toxic in much smaller concentrations than CO2.
Three breaths, huh? He must be a really slow breather.
Not really. It takes about 20 seconds for blood from the lungs to reach the brain. If the blood is desaturated, you'll pretty much pass out instantly when this happens.
N2 is inert. It is not poison. The worst it will do is displace oxygen, giving about the same effect as holding your breath.
No. No. No. It's absofrigginlutely not the same. If you hold your breath, the blood can still take up oxygen from the air in your lungs, and the partial pressure of oxygen in the air in your lungs drops very slowly.
If, on the other hand, the gas in your lungs contains no oxygen (i.e. the partial pressure of oxygen is zero), then the blood will actually release oxygen instead of taking it up while travelling through the lungs, effectively becoming desaturated.
Roughly twenty seconds after you start breathing a gas mixture without oxygen, desaturated blood will reach your brain and it's lights out. Period.
History has proven over and over again that people do not work for the common good.
It has also proven the opposite, over and over again. You'll find people who will work for the common good, and those who don't. And then there's quite a lot of them in between. "Selfish bastard" isn't a binary thing.
2) These discussions are normally about how NOT to make cures and how to spread out research and development so that cures do not destroy "market potential" or profit margins. More to the point, how can we understand the problem in the context of a "subscription" medication so that if anyone does make a product from the disease, the individual has to continually buy the product to maximize profit stability.
Since when did profit stability become important for todays execs ? Stable profits don't do anything to the share prices. You want as much profit as you can have _right now_.
If you find a cure, you merely need to make it expensive enough that it makes up for the "lost" revenue from a continuous supply of "management medication". Make the cure 25x as expensive as a year of "management", and you're getting the better deal (provided you can get 4% interest).
Even better, every patient you cure will never, ever be able (or need) to switch to a competitor. Kill the competition while racking up profits.
So, you're a selfish prick who has/will probably have huge medical bills, and the only way for you to compensate is to saddle your coworkers with the bill, since the insurance company isn't in a position to mitigate risk. Good for you.
Uh huh. Really great analysis. How about preexisting conditions that will most likely not cause any huge medical bills, but the insurance salesdrone doesn't have a clue ? How about medical costs that don't have anything to do with the preexisting condition ? It's not as simple as you try to make it seem.
I've got a preexisting condition that most likely will not cause any further costs (any "treatment" will just make it worse, and if it worsens by itself I'll probably not have enough time to worry about it). However, every time I talked to one of the salesdrones, they pretty much stopped listening after hearing the three words that make up the general description.
The same way I did - start a company without insurance.
In short: "Hope that you're lucky, it works for me."
s a raft of new DNA tests are revealing predispositions to all kinds of conditions, including breast cancer, depression and dementia, little is known about what it is like to live with such knowledge.
.. to your chances of ever getting life or health insurance.
The reason Mars has so little atmosphere now is because it's been stripped away by solar wind. Earth would have met the same fate if it were not for it's magnetic field.
... and the fact that Earth has three times Mars' gravity has nothing to do with it ?
Venus doesn't have a significant magnetic field, is closer to the sun than Earth, and seems to be able to hang on to a high-pressure atmosphere just fine.
that cell originated from, I think, is incomprehendable by your or my monkey brains.
The first cell probably originated from molecules that were most successful at creating copies of themselves (for example through auto-catalytic reactions) before being broken up again by radiation.
Are you really suggesting that we move planet-sized chunks of mass around the solar system?
That's probably very inefficient, but we could look for suitable chunks of matter that are going to miss Mars, and give them a little nudge to make sure they don't.
Still, the process of increasing a planets gravity would most likely take centuries or millenia, during which no one should set foot on the planet in question (unless they want to get hit by large chunks of space rock). I doubt humanity has the ability to plan in these time dimensions just yet.
I can't wait to surf Mars. With moons that close, there ought to be tidal swells that one could ride forever.
Bah.. surfing is such an Earth-bound sport. I can't wait to strap on a pair of wings and fly through the atmosphere on Titan. Low gravity + fairly thick atmosphere = lots of fun.
I don't know, but they're stupid if they don't. Let's take for instance the case that indeed they introduced a highly toxic agent, and not something that's barely toxic. What happens? People eat it, and they die or get ill. So? Monsanto is prosecuted for malpractice. Obviously it's not in their interest to produce toxic food.
When you take a plant, bombard it with massive amounts of radiation, until you get wild mutations that cannot occur in nature - or when you take a plant, soak it in toxic cancer causing chemicals until you get wild mutations that cannot occure in nature
Please put down the latest pop-science novel and read a book on biology. Please.
Radiation and "toxic cancer causing chemicals" (huh ?) will kill stuff much, much more often than producing any kind of viable mutation. And to be viable, that mutation has to work with the rest of the biochemistry in the plant, which usually means that only small changes from the original are allowed.
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If you're trying to do anything in the microcontroller/DSP world and aren't willing to at least look at you device's assembly dialect, your colleagues will consider you a C-idiot.
Assembly is very useful for things that need to be fast (as in: X needs to happen within Y processor cycles of event Z), fast (as in: this calculation may only take X% of the CPU cycles), small (as in: the whole program needs to fit in 2 kB and use less than 128 bytes of RAM), to check if your compiler is buggy (yes, that really happens), or if your compiler simply doesn't know 50% of the processors instructions (yes, that really happens. And yes, the compiler was made by the company that also makes the chip in question).
Of course, much of the uC/DSP code can and is written in C. But the programmer needs to keep the assembly in mind when writing C (it's hilarious to see people try to program an 8051 who have only learned "C on the PC"), and know when assembly will do a better job.
No. Whether something can be done effectively on multiple cores doesn't depend on the programmer, but on the type of processing. Some things have to be done in a certain order, and there's nothing even the best programmer in the world can change about that, period. If you try hacking something together that uses multiple threads for this type of processing, you'll just end up making things slower and messier.
On the other hand, there are other types of processing that just lend themselves fantastically to being done multithreaded.
Yes, they don't want to have a large piece of space junk loose in a random orbit. This isn't the first space race - putting something into a random orbit doesn't win prizes, but might smash things that are already up there on purpose.
Intels i810 and above are. Of course you can't get any graphics cards with them, since they're onboard solutions, so you're stuck with an Intel processor too. Which may or may not be a drawback.
20 seconds to unconsciousness, after that it's 3-5 minutes to irreversible brain damage. After seven minutes, you're dead or definitely don't want to be resuscitated anymore, unless you enjoy an existence with the mental capacities of a garden vegetable.
That's most likely because these systems are installed in areas where a sudden, sharp drop of oxygen concentration is expected in case of accident (for example near the pressurized nitrogen tanks in nuclear power plants that store the energy used for emergency shutdown). In these cases, you want the alarm to go off as soon as possible since it'll be only seconds before bad things happen. It has nothing to do with the oxygen level needed for humans.
It won't be as severe as really being at 6,000 ft. Altitude sickness is mostly caused by respiratory alkalosis, i.e. the loss of too much CO2 from the bloodstream due to hyperventilation, which will start to affect the acid/base balance. Since the partial pressure of CO2 in the server room will not be as low as it would be at 6,000 ft, loss of CO2 occurs more slowly.
And the "rate of ascent" is going to be instantaneous, as you open a door and step into your new environment.
Altitude sickness isn't something that "just hits you". You get plenty of warning from early symptoms, enough to just leave the server room.
Your red cell count will increase, along with your erythropoetin levels.
Only if you're frequently lugging heavy servers around (exercise) and/or spend complete days in the server room.
The level of CO2 in the blood must be kept inside upper and lower limits for the acid/base buffer to work correctly. Too much CO2 in the bloodstream will make your blood too acidic and definitely cause toxic side effects. Whoever you're echoing in the above line, he either has absolutely no clue about physiology or is a liar.
If you breathe a gas mixture with about 10%-15% CO2 at atmospheric pressure (you can pick the remaining 85%-90% as you like, it won't make a difference), you'll die.
Co ( carbon monoxide ) on the other hand IS a toxin.
It's toxic in much smaller concentrations than CO2.
Not really. It takes about 20 seconds for blood from the lungs to reach the brain. If the blood is desaturated, you'll pretty much pass out instantly when this happens.
N2 is inert. It is not poison. The worst it will do is displace oxygen, giving about the same effect as holding your breath.
No. No. No. It's absofrigginlutely not the same. If you hold your breath, the blood can still take up oxygen from the air in your lungs, and the partial pressure of oxygen in the air in your lungs drops very slowly.
If, on the other hand, the gas in your lungs contains no oxygen (i.e. the partial pressure of oxygen is zero), then the blood will actually release oxygen instead of taking it up while travelling through the lungs, effectively becoming desaturated.
Roughly twenty seconds after you start breathing a gas mixture without oxygen, desaturated blood will reach your brain and it's lights out. Period.
There. If you make a platform that fits the application better than Linux, you can make this guy switch over.
Scratch an entrepreneur who is willing to ignore good business practices and ethics to get rich quickly, and you'll most likely find a criminal.
From the Wikipedia article you cited:
Venus' magnetosphere is too weak to protect the atmosphere from cosmic radiation.
It has also proven the opposite, over and over again. You'll find people who will work for the common good, and those who don't. And then there's quite a lot of them in between. "Selfish bastard" isn't a binary thing.
Since when did profit stability become important for todays execs ? Stable profits don't do anything to the share prices. You want as much profit as you can have _right now_.
If you find a cure, you merely need to make it expensive enough that it makes up for the "lost" revenue from a continuous supply of "management medication". Make the cure 25x as expensive as a year of "management", and you're getting the better deal (provided you can get 4% interest).
Even better, every patient you cure will never, ever be able (or need) to switch to a competitor. Kill the competition while racking up profits.
Uh huh. Really great analysis. How about preexisting conditions that will most likely not cause any huge medical bills, but the insurance salesdrone doesn't have a clue ? How about medical costs that don't have anything to do with the preexisting condition ? It's not as simple as you try to make it seem.
I've got a preexisting condition that most likely will not cause any further costs (any "treatment" will just make it worse, and if it worsens by itself I'll probably not have enough time to worry about it). However, every time I talked to one of the salesdrones, they pretty much stopped listening after hearing the three words that make up the general description.
The same way I did - start a company without insurance.
In short: "Hope that you're lucky, it works for me."
Venus doesn't have a significant magnetic field, is closer to the sun than Earth, and seems to be able to hang on to a high-pressure atmosphere just fine.
You would need to be exploding the equivalent of 6 of these devices on the planet EVERY SECOND to generate enough energy.
Put some big freakin' mirrors in space to direct more sunlight to Mars.
The first cell probably originated from molecules that were most successful at creating copies of themselves (for example through auto-catalytic reactions) before being broken up again by radiation.
That's probably very inefficient, but we could look for suitable chunks of matter that are going to miss Mars, and give them a little nudge to make sure they don't.
Still, the process of increasing a planets gravity would most likely take centuries or millenia, during which no one should set foot on the planet in question (unless they want to get hit by large chunks of space rock). I doubt humanity has the ability to plan in these time dimensions just yet.
It's not as if we don't have centuries worth of experience in that.
"Death to the heathens !"
Bah
Oh, like, similar to tobacco companies ?
That doesn't really matter to the farmer on some other continent who's just trying to feed his family.
Please put down the latest pop-science novel and read a book on biology. Please.
Radiation and "toxic cancer causing chemicals" (huh ?) will kill stuff much, much more often than producing any kind of viable mutation. And to be viable, that mutation has to work with the rest of the biochemistry in the plant, which usually means that only small changes from the original are allowed.