I come from a programming background, and I wanted to get into electronics. So I bought an Arduino, a breadboard, and some LEDs. Write some C code, compile it and throw it on there, and blinkenlights galore.
But wait! It can also read analog values. Hook up a potentiometer and a LED, and dim it based on the pot's position. Or grab a 7-segment display and map the pot to the display's 0-9.
All of these use the microcontroller, and since I already knew how to program I knew how to make that part of the circuit do what I wanted. I had to learn how to safely connect the micro and the other components together - but I wasn't starting from nothing.
I'm working through RC circuits now, which requires a strong working knowledge of resistors and capacitors and how they interact with the system. Wikipedia is your friend
Basically, take what you already know and use it as a wedge to push your way into something new. For me, the wedge was programming.
A word of caution - You should know enough about electricity to avoid killing yourself before you even start. Internalize the difference between voltage and amperage, for one. But if all you're working with is the small side of a 9v transformer, you should be OK.
Perhaps they could use light as the energy source required. You could even make sugar with it! But you'd need to collect the sunlight - since red and blue are the highest-energy colors, it would need to be a green pigment.
You should watch Avatar. For all its (many many) flaws regarding plot, you really can't fault the 3D. The only gimmicky thing they had was some soot in the air that was 'in front' of the screen.
The 'supertaskers' thing doesn't really mention training. It's possible that one can learn to multitask safely, or perhaps the most effective drivers were born supertaskers.
But you're right. Before I learned how to drive this thing, I would not (and did not) consider myself safe enough to attempt something else while driving. So the training was crucial - but I don't know if it expressed something I already had, or taught m to manage it.
Perhaps most crucially: why isn't 'the average dickhead' aware that lives are on the line the moment *he* gets behind the wheel?
The siren works sometimes, but more as a filter. The people who are left as an intersection clears are the fools who can't drive. So in one sense it's easier to keep an eye on them.
But you're discounting the rest of it, which is by no means trivial.
Personally, I think the benefit of having a large warning device is outweighed by the difficulty of safely driving in the wrong lane on a major street at rush hour.
Exactly. I probably am one of these 'supertaskers'. I'm an EMT and often drive an ambulance. A 14,000 lb 20 ft long vehicle, at speeds in excess of the speed limit. On the wrong side of the road. While navigating, and running the siren and talking on the radio. And telling my crew what to do.
And I've never even once come close to having an accident. Part of this is the training - I've received formal, rigorous training in conducting an emergency vehicle.
So I probably am one of these supertaskers - hell, I basically need to be.
But the key is: DON'T ACT LIKE IT! When you start acting like you're special, you'll screw it up. Even if you *can* manage many things at once, while driving, *DON'T ASSUME YOU CAN!* You still need to check your mirrors, look for pedestrians or other drivers, watch your widths, nt clip the curb, etc.
My point is, it's not so much talking on the phone/doing something else while driving as *assuming* that you can do it safely, because then you won't. You'll take it for granted that the car ahead won't switch lanes, because you've come to the conclusion that you won't mess it up.
So do I talk on the phone while driving? Yes. In the last two years, I think I've spent a grand total of 15 minutes on the phone. Have I ever come close to driving unsafely? No, because I focused on driving. I usually ignore the phone completely while making a turn or shifting lanes, or really doing anything other than going straight with plenty of room in front of me.
I don't think phone use while driving should be illegal, but you should lose your license the first time you're caught driving like a jackass. Though I'm full of crazy ideas, like "the test for driving a 3000lb weapon shouldn't be a mere formality".
I hate to sound like an ass, but if you're so scared of what your kids are going to do when you leave for 5 minutes, you're not doing your job as a parent. If they're 2, sure, hover over them - my brother got into our fireplace and covered with ash, as well as took every big sharp steak knife out of a childproofed door in about 30 seconds of 'not there'.
But if your kids are old enough to use the internet, and you're seriously worried they'll burn the house down while you're in the can - you and your kids have a problem that a firewall won't fix.
My parents raised me with the assumption that I wouldn't pull any stupid shit, made sure I knew what was stupid, and made me dislike coming off as stupid. That's really all it took.
BS. Even if he already had Chrome downloaded, it would take at a minimum 10 seconds to install, and 10 seconds to go to the site and log in. If Firefox takes 20 seconds to start up, that's not Firefox's fault. Cut some of the extensions or use a new profile.
They're making it use the underlying OS for codec support to get around the licensing issues. OSX ships with a mpeg4 codec, as does Window 7 (I think). It's trivial to add to Linux or older Windows, also.
Who coded the robot to determine how to machine the piece?
Sculptors used to imagine shapes and then carve that out of stone. These programmers are taking that a step further - by programming the computer to do that.
Here's hoping it's indicative - or will lead to - a groundswell of public opinion.
What us nerds need to do is remind people that copyright is a trade. I've explained to people that Disney nor your favorite band 'deserve' any protection, which they find crazy. But when I explain the idea of copyright is to promote new works by allowing the creative types to make a living - with the understanding that we'll all get it in the end - they start to look at copyright how it was originally intended.
We would still have books and music and art without copyright - people do those for free all the time - but big movies, etc legitimately take a lot of money to make. So I think copyrights are necessary, but drastically limited in length. It's a travesty that the Beatles' work doesn't belong to the world yet, and it's obscene that Mickey Mouse doesn't.
Copyrights were much shorter at the founding of our nation - and that was when a significant portion of the time allotted was used in physically moving stuff around. Now that that's almost instantaneous - or perhaps a few days - it should be shorter than that.
I love signals and slots. They require a bit of a different way of thinking, and a semi-proprietary compiler (it's open source but still).
It's really the first time since Visual Basic where I think a language has really 'gotten' event-driven programming. Everything else has you writing your own event loops to switch on a message type. Signals/slots let you use a single statement as a patchboard. It's the reason they can have an example where a slider changes a text box in one line of code.
Is it different? Sure. It's slightly different than straight C++, but not by much. It definitely demands a new way of thinking about how to program graphical applications. But if you can manage it, I think it's far superior.
Though I'd also agree that Mono's crapulence is Gnome's biggest problem. I don't want the whole damn framework for some note-app
If this is done properly, I think it'll be good for GNOME. From where I sit, they sound like they're shooting for a major architecture redesign. In other words, this 2.30 release is analogous to the 3.5 releases of KDE.
And I think starting largely from scratch will be a net benefit. I've never personally used GNOME (though I've recommended it to others) and I've found it to be technologically lacking compared to KDE (KParts and KIOSlaves are awesome, and while there are GNOME counterparts they aren't as used).
One thing I think GNOME does very well is their HIG - probably the best outside of Apple. The new release is very simple - dump a lot of legacy code and keep the HIG. Maybe drop the old-fashioned look too.
Depends. My Dad had a story about how he bought a VCR from a slightly shady place about 20 years ago. When he plugged it in, it didn't work. He took it back for a refund, and they wouldn't take it. He called AMEX from a payphone and told them the story, and the rep told them "take it inside and try to return it again. If they don't take it, leave it on the counter and leave".
He got his chargeback. So it's not necessarily fraud. But the GP makes it sound like it.
Well and more importantly, they spend a lot of effort just trying to travel in a straight line. Remember Grant trying to jump that bus? He took like 30 tries.
Though it's quite possible that the bigger difficulty was driving-by-joystick. When they set up that rig for full-size steering, they did alright. (does anybody know the name of that? it's driving me crazy).
Which interestingly goes right back to this 'story'. Perhaps the problem is people driving with joystick, instead of the point of view.
First of all, we didn't 'ask' for anything. K&R invented C, and coded Unix in it. Everybody adopted it after that.
If you read "The C Programming Language" (white book), they do mention lack of bounds-checking. And yes, it is for speed. And yes, they do acknowledge that this is dangerous. But consider this - if they had built it in, you'd be stuck with that performance waste even when you didn't need it. There's a ton of ways to use arrays where it's impossible to overrun (such as a constant-bound loop or an input with "if" statement bounds-checking). And a smart compiler will optimize away the checks where they're not needed.
But C was developed on the PDP-11. To say this computer was limited would be an understatement. IIRC C was designed to be a single-pass language, so that the compiler could keep only a few lines in memory. And storage space was minuscule.
There's a lot of "safety/convenience vs speed/size" tradeoff in the early days of computing. Sometimes, even today, that's still the right tradeoff. When it's not, we should blame the developers for using an unsuitable language.
What I think you're being snide about (how Java still depends on C) is misguided. That's the point - nobody's saying your system programming languages are dead. At the end of the day, something needs to be a straight sequence of 0s and 1s that the processor can just run, and that's where C dominates. There's a lot of things (like scheduling algorithms) that really can't be written in a higher level language, either.
But at this point, the only reasons you'd need to use C would be for low-level systems programming, as a base for another language (interpreter/JIT VM), or anywhere where you *really* need to manage your own memory or get close-to-assembly performance. (not) Coincidentally, this covers just about everything C is used for nowadays. Many small utilities are now written in Python, particularly small accessory GUI programs on Linux.
Fact is, a higher level language like Java is just faster to program in, and for a basic application it's more than fast enough. But we'll never lose C, at least because all these higher-level fancy applications need to run on something, and nobody wants to write that "something" in straight assembly.
Hey... so I was not really awake when I typed this comment. I know C4 was a terrible example - they used to burn it in campfires in Vietnam, for example.
Exactly. They're much safer than conventional bombs. A friend of mine did (among other things) munitions decomission in the Army (throw the bomb in a big pit and blow it up). Apparently, the expanding foam "Great Stuff" was invented to decomission nuclear weapons - you used it to fill the bomb's trigger component. Since the trigger was useless, the weapon was useless.
And, of course, you can drop them, bump them, hammer them, shock them, etc... without blowing it up. Try that with C4
I don't have a copy of the manual, so I'll take your word for it. That disclaimer doesn't necessarily have any meaning though - it's up to the courts. For example, a disclaimer in the manual to the effect "we may just turn off everybody's PS3s forever one day" wouldn't stand up.
But the fact that it's not on the box doesn't mean it wasn't advertised. It was all over the Internet before the release, and it would be more than a stretch to say that none of the people who bought it cared about the feature's availability.
I don't have a PS3, but I was considering getting one. The ability to play around with Cell programming was a big reason why, but now I can't. I probably wouldn't sue if I could, but it's not right.
Slashdot Mirror
I come from a programming background, and I wanted to get into electronics. So I bought an Arduino, a breadboard, and some LEDs. Write some C code, compile it and throw it on there, and blinkenlights galore.
But wait! It can also read analog values. Hook up a potentiometer and a LED, and dim it based on the pot's position. Or grab a 7-segment display and map the pot to the display's 0-9.
All of these use the microcontroller, and since I already knew how to program I knew how to make that part of the circuit do what I wanted. I had to learn how to safely connect the micro and the other components together - but I wasn't starting from nothing.
I'm working through RC circuits now, which requires a strong working knowledge of resistors and capacitors and how they interact with the system. Wikipedia is your friend
Basically, take what you already know and use it as a wedge to push your way into something new. For me, the wedge was programming.
A word of caution - You should know enough about electricity to avoid killing yourself before you even start. Internalize the difference between voltage and amperage, for one. But if all you're working with is the small side of a 9v transformer, you should be OK.
Real-time co-driving? That's crazy! What'll they do next, put it into a plane?
This was even funnier the first time I read it: http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1515326&cid=30818328
Both are fine with me. And more amusing than the alternative.
Perhaps they could use light as the energy source required. You could even make sugar with it! But you'd need to collect the sunlight - since red and blue are the highest-energy colors, it would need to be a green pigment.
If only such a thing existed...
You should watch Avatar. For all its (many many) flaws regarding plot, you really can't fault the 3D. The only gimmicky thing they had was some soot in the air that was 'in front' of the screen.
The 'supertaskers' thing doesn't really mention training. It's possible that one can learn to multitask safely, or perhaps the most effective drivers were born supertaskers.
But you're right. Before I learned how to drive this thing, I would not (and did not) consider myself safe enough to attempt something else while driving. So the training was crucial - but I don't know if it expressed something I already had, or taught m to manage it.
Perhaps most crucially: why isn't 'the average dickhead' aware that lives are on the line the moment *he* gets behind the wheel?
The siren works sometimes, but more as a filter. The people who are left as an intersection clears are the fools who can't drive. So in one sense it's easier to keep an eye on them.
But you're discounting the rest of it, which is by no means trivial.
Personally, I think the benefit of having a large warning device is outweighed by the difficulty of safely driving in the wrong lane on a major street at rush hour.
Exactly. I probably am one of these 'supertaskers'. I'm an EMT and often drive an ambulance. A 14,000 lb 20 ft long vehicle, at speeds in excess of the speed limit. On the wrong side of the road. While navigating, and running the siren and talking on the radio. And telling my crew what to do.
And I've never even once come close to having an accident. Part of this is the training - I've received formal, rigorous training in conducting an emergency vehicle.
So I probably am one of these supertaskers - hell, I basically need to be.
But the key is: DON'T ACT LIKE IT! When you start acting like you're special, you'll screw it up. Even if you *can* manage many things at once, while driving, *DON'T ASSUME YOU CAN!* You still need to check your mirrors, look for pedestrians or other drivers, watch your widths, nt clip the curb, etc.
My point is, it's not so much talking on the phone/doing something else while driving as *assuming* that you can do it safely, because then you won't. You'll take it for granted that the car ahead won't switch lanes, because you've come to the conclusion that you won't mess it up.
So do I talk on the phone while driving? Yes. In the last two years, I think I've spent a grand total of 15 minutes on the phone. Have I ever come close to driving unsafely? No, because I focused on driving. I usually ignore the phone completely while making a turn or shifting lanes, or really doing anything other than going straight with plenty of room in front of me.
I don't think phone use while driving should be illegal, but you should lose your license the first time you're caught driving like a jackass. Though I'm full of crazy ideas, like "the test for driving a 3000lb weapon shouldn't be a mere formality".
I hate to sound like an ass, but if you're so scared of what your kids are going to do when you leave for 5 minutes, you're not doing your job as a parent. If they're 2, sure, hover over them - my brother got into our fireplace and covered with ash, as well as took every big sharp steak knife out of a childproofed door in about 30 seconds of 'not there'.
But if your kids are old enough to use the internet, and you're seriously worried they'll burn the house down while you're in the can - you and your kids have a problem that a firewall won't fix.
My parents raised me with the assumption that I wouldn't pull any stupid shit, made sure I knew what was stupid, and made me dislike coming off as stupid. That's really all it took.
BS. Even if he already had Chrome downloaded, it would take at a minimum 10 seconds to install, and 10 seconds to go to the site and log in. If Firefox takes 20 seconds to start up, that's not Firefox's fault. Cut some of the extensions or use a new profile.
They're making it use the underlying OS for codec support to get around the licensing issues. OSX ships with a mpeg4 codec, as does Window 7 (I think). It's trivial to add to Linux or older Windows, also.
Who coded the robot to determine how to machine the piece?
Sculptors used to imagine shapes and then carve that out of stone. These programmers are taking that a step further - by programming the computer to do that.
Here's hoping it's indicative - or will lead to - a groundswell of public opinion.
What us nerds need to do is remind people that copyright is a trade. I've explained to people that Disney nor your favorite band 'deserve' any protection, which they find crazy. But when I explain the idea of copyright is to promote new works by allowing the creative types to make a living - with the understanding that we'll all get it in the end - they start to look at copyright how it was originally intended.
We would still have books and music and art without copyright - people do those for free all the time - but big movies, etc legitimately take a lot of money to make. So I think copyrights are necessary, but drastically limited in length. It's a travesty that the Beatles' work doesn't belong to the world yet, and it's obscene that Mickey Mouse doesn't.
Copyrights were much shorter at the founding of our nation - and that was when a significant portion of the time allotted was used in physically moving stuff around. Now that that's almost instantaneous - or perhaps a few days - it should be shorter than that.
I love signals and slots. They require a bit of a different way of thinking, and a semi-proprietary compiler (it's open source but still).
It's really the first time since Visual Basic where I think a language has really 'gotten' event-driven programming. Everything else has you writing your own event loops to switch on a message type. Signals/slots let you use a single statement as a patchboard. It's the reason they can have an example where a slider changes a text box in one line of code.
Is it different? Sure. It's slightly different than straight C++, but not by much. It definitely demands a new way of thinking about how to program graphical applications. But if you can manage it, I think it's far superior.
Though I'd also agree that Mono's crapulence is Gnome's biggest problem. I don't want the whole damn framework for some note-app
If this is done properly, I think it'll be good for GNOME. From where I sit, they sound like they're shooting for a major architecture redesign. In other words, this 2.30 release is analogous to the 3.5 releases of KDE.
And I think starting largely from scratch will be a net benefit. I've never personally used GNOME (though I've recommended it to others) and I've found it to be technologically lacking compared to KDE (KParts and KIOSlaves are awesome, and while there are GNOME counterparts they aren't as used).
One thing I think GNOME does very well is their HIG - probably the best outside of Apple. The new release is very simple - dump a lot of legacy code and keep the HIG. Maybe drop the old-fashioned look too.
Though my fantasy is to see them use Qt.
some really popular book that people think too much about.
Twilight?
Depends. My Dad had a story about how he bought a VCR from a slightly shady place about 20 years ago. When he plugged it in, it didn't work. He took it back for a refund, and they wouldn't take it. He called AMEX from a payphone and told them the story, and the rep told them "take it inside and try to return it again. If they don't take it, leave it on the counter and leave".
He got his chargeback. So it's not necessarily fraud. But the GP makes it sound like it.
Well and more importantly, they spend a lot of effort just trying to travel in a straight line. Remember Grant trying to jump that bus? He took like 30 tries.
Though it's quite possible that the bigger difficulty was driving-by-joystick. When they set up that rig for full-size steering, they did alright. (does anybody know the name of that? it's driving me crazy).
Which interestingly goes right back to this 'story'. Perhaps the problem is people driving with joystick, instead of the point of view.
First of all, we didn't 'ask' for anything. K&R invented C, and coded Unix in it. Everybody adopted it after that.
If you read "The C Programming Language" (white book), they do mention lack of bounds-checking. And yes, it is for speed. And yes, they do acknowledge that this is dangerous. But consider this - if they had built it in, you'd be stuck with that performance waste even when you didn't need it. There's a ton of ways to use arrays where it's impossible to overrun (such as a constant-bound loop or an input with "if" statement bounds-checking). And a smart compiler will optimize away the checks where they're not needed.
But C was developed on the PDP-11. To say this computer was limited would be an understatement. IIRC C was designed to be a single-pass language, so that the compiler could keep only a few lines in memory. And storage space was minuscule.
There's a lot of "safety/convenience vs speed/size" tradeoff in the early days of computing. Sometimes, even today, that's still the right tradeoff. When it's not, we should blame the developers for using an unsuitable language.
Your point is?
What I think you're being snide about (how Java still depends on C) is misguided. That's the point - nobody's saying your system programming languages are dead. At the end of the day, something needs to be a straight sequence of 0s and 1s that the processor can just run, and that's where C dominates. There's a lot of things (like scheduling algorithms) that really can't be written in a higher level language, either.
But at this point, the only reasons you'd need to use C would be for low-level systems programming, as a base for another language (interpreter/JIT VM), or anywhere where you *really* need to manage your own memory or get close-to-assembly performance. (not) Coincidentally, this covers just about everything C is used for nowadays. Many small utilities are now written in Python, particularly small accessory GUI programs on Linux.
Fact is, a higher level language like Java is just faster to program in, and for a basic application it's more than fast enough. But we'll never lose C, at least because all these higher-level fancy applications need to run on something, and nobody wants to write that "something" in straight assembly.
Hey... so I was not really awake when I typed this comment. I know C4 was a terrible example - they used to burn it in campfires in Vietnam, for example.
Replace C4 with, say, dynamite.
Exactly. They're much safer than conventional bombs. A friend of mine did (among other things) munitions decomission in the Army (throw the bomb in a big pit and blow it up). Apparently, the expanding foam "Great Stuff" was invented to decomission nuclear weapons - you used it to fill the bomb's trigger component. Since the trigger was useless, the weapon was useless.
And, of course, you can drop them, bump them, hammer them, shock them, etc... without blowing it up. Try that with C4
Finally my home state shows some common sense. Though this is a state supreme court, not federal, so I don't know how much precedet it will be.
I don't have a copy of the manual, so I'll take your word for it. That disclaimer doesn't necessarily have any meaning though - it's up to the courts. For example, a disclaimer in the manual to the effect "we may just turn off everybody's PS3s forever one day" wouldn't stand up.
But the fact that it's not on the box doesn't mean it wasn't advertised. It was all over the Internet before the release, and it would be more than a stretch to say that none of the people who bought it cared about the feature's availability.
I don't have a PS3, but I was considering getting one. The ability to play around with Cell programming was a big reason why, but now I can't. I probably wouldn't sue if I could, but it's not right.