Actually, I'm not talking about the embedded space. I'm talking about programming on x86 CPUs; the Cypress.NET API I was discussing was the API for communicating with the device from the host computer.
Well, since we're whipping it out, I started with Pascal, then C++, C, Java, multiple flavors of assembly, and finally C# (and VHDL, but that doesn't really count...). Learning a new language is not hard, and I'm not disputing that. Clearly, Cypress' C++ developers were able to learn C#, and it compiled, and even ran!
Knowing how to use the language properly and being able to debug the problems that you run into are what make this process terrible.
You think it's easy to move from COBOL through C/C++ to managed languages like C#? That's a riot. You have to learn marshaling, boxing, garbage collection, forms, the CLR. And that's assuming you don't have to do any mixed-mode code, use any interop functions, etc.
I have seen the results of C++ programmers who thought that they could just start programming in C# like it was C++. It's not pretty.
Cypress makes an IC called the FX2LP. It's a USB microcontroller. They write an API for it and updated it to C#. Well, the guys who did it were clearly C++ programmers, because they don't understand how arguments are passed in C# and why you don't need to pass a byte[] using a ref parameter.
Worse, there's a simply catastrophic bug in their managed API. The garbage collector can run and move your managed variables around, and then the unmanaged code (specifically, the USB drivers) doesn't know, and you start getting weird exceptions that the CLR can't catch on threads that aren't transmitting to the USB...I had to employ a work-around that pins every buffer that gets passed to their API because the Cypress developers didn't bother learning how to marshal properly.
If managed is easy and unmanaged is hard, you might think that mixed-mode would be in between. It's not. Mixed mode is way, way harder than even unmanaged code.
Logical Failacy - false dichotomy. I can use mass transit and keep my car. If it existed, I would leave my car parked.
It's quite the chicken and egg problem, yes? Without any mass transit for me to ride, how am I to pay them? Personally, I think mass transit is the kind of thing that the government should be subsidizing. There's your chicken. If you want some money to seed it, how about all that money we blow on subsidies to big oil companies?
Now, to be fair, some places have decent mass transit. I've had friends from DC tell me that it's really easy to take a bus to just about anywhere; DC was built for with mass transit in mind. But try being born in the rural area around Pittsburgh. The only buses my town had were school buses. The city's buses themselves take 2-3 hours for a 20-30 minute drive, if they go where you need to go, and you don't have to do two or three connections.
If you don't believe me, look at Google maps. Here's a 20 minute drive in a place around Pittsburgh. Now click on the "Public Transit" link. Roughly 2 hour minimums, with two to three connections.
And just FYI, in regards to your "put up or shut up" mentality, there are other ways to reduce fossil fuel consumption. Like living close to work instead of far away. I could drive a Hummer on a 2-mile commute for a week and use as much gas as your 20-mile commute in a car twice as fuel efficient in a day.
Aww, what's the matter, AC? Are you too afraid to flame someone with your name attached? Don't want to get modded down and lose your precious karma?
It's "Big Pharma ".
Hm...yes, I do remember saying Big Pharma right before I said Big Farma. I would imagine someone with a command of the English language such as yourself would be able to infer that I was discussing three separate lobbies - oil, pharmaceuticals, and agriculture - instead of repeating one twice.
I considered "Big Agriculture" but it had too many syllables and ruined the flow (much as we shorten Pharmaceuticals/Pharmacy to Pharma). Certainly, though, there is an agriculture lobby, and they are there to push for their own profits even at the public's expense. There are a lot of folks who consider High Fructose Corn Syrup a terrible thing made possible only by the agricultural lobbies' push for insane corn subsidies and tariffs on sugar from abroad.
I'll admit that the bit at the end, about the War on Drugs, veers a bit towards hyperbole. There are many reasons for that war, and maintaining the prison business is just one. I'm sure police like having jobs, too. Judges certainly like to collect fines. Politicians like to be elected. Lots of various little selfish reasons.
If you think this is a half-ass conspiracy theory, then there's a story in the NYT I'd like you to read, about a judge who was being paid by a juvenile detention facility to trump up charges and increase the number of kids being sent to the facility because the state paid the facility per head.
If some people don't mind unnecessarily imprisoning teenagers for cash, certainly there are many, many more people who wouldn't mind imprisoning adults.
the Federal reserve prints-up trillions and trillions of US dollars wildly inflating the money supply
Though the Fed doesn't publish it anymore, there's a group who tracks M3, one of the measures of the money supply. While M0, M1, and M2 all dropped precipitously, M3 held steady.
The money supply is not being wildly inflated. To the contrary, their "printing" has kept the money supply from deflating. As dollars are destroyed by the financial crisis, the Fed's printed dollars replace them, and the system on-the-whole stays roughly the same.
The cause for concern is that when the banks start lending again, the fractional-reserve-lending-multiplier thing will mean that the banks can inflate the money supply by using too much of their reserves for loans. That's why the Fed is paying the banks interest on their reserves - the interest means the banks are less interested in loaning their reserves out.
The average sentence for rape is less than half of that (six years).
While 13 years does seem a bit large, the guy stole a lot of money. And he's done this kinda thing before.
He ruined a lot of lives, and the lives he ruined are average people who can't go running to Washington for new laws or bailouts. Who knows what kind of damage he wrecked on innocent families. He deserves a big punishment.
Actually, 3-year recidivism is something like 50% in the UK and US.
And the prison system is not a failure. It has been a wild success. At least 1% of our population is in prison, many for non-violent and victimless crimes. The prison lobby has been so successful that you never hear anyone talk about Big Prison the way you hear Big Oil or Big Pharma or Big Farma.
The reason you think the prison system is a failure is because you are under the mistaken impression that it's primary purpose is to rehabilitate criminals. The system is designed to generate a profit; imprisoning and/or rehabilitating criminals is an accidental side effect.
If you don't believe me, then imagine if we had under-used prisons. In order to protect their business model, the prison lobby would pay for a whole new set of laws, preferably ones that many people already violate, so we can keep imprisoning Americans...much like the War on Drugs has made sure to keep prisons in business despite the continuous drop in violent crime over the past two decades.
Fixed it is. Didn't have to delete the old Windows partitions. The data is still there. And it does everything it did before - stream videos through the S-Video output to the TV, view the TV tuner card, browse the Internet, play Flash games, read email/facebook, etc.
Sure, if it breaks she probably won't be able to fix it. But it hasn't broke yet, and after all I did have to come fix Windows, too. The computer can install security updates and it doesn't need to reboot. No more virus scanner. No more malware, trojans, or rootkits.
Several weeks ago, I worked on a PC that was probably infected after doing a few Google Image Searches or browsing DeviantArt or something of that nature. I tried multiple virus/malware programs (AVG, Avast, Adaware, MalwareBytes, Spybot). I thought I got rid of the infection...then a Windows Update caused her computer to blue screen on boot.
There's the standard arguments about: pirates weren't going to buy the game anyway; legitimate customers don't like to do illegal things to begin with; some people will buy it even after pirating it once it actually comes out; some people will play their friends' pirated version and buy their own.
All of that aside...why do they need the passwords to his email/facebook/etc? That seems like a massive invasion of privacy. Would they ask for all of the snail mail correspondence that he's had for the last few years, too? Logs of his telephone calls?
Yes. The guy was stupid. He got caught. He should be punished. But ordered to hand over all of your passwords? Doesn't anyone else see anything wrong with this?
I'm not saying they don't have GPIO. But you need to roll your own PCB if you want to use those ARM chips. My point was that you can't just jam the thing into a breadboard and go and, even if you could, the several dozens of MHz that you don't need will destroy your battery-powered application.
Yeah, I hate both parties, too. I might identify with what Democrats say they want to do, but in practice they screw things up still, just less than Republicans, IMNSHO.
But, honestly? Have you considered the lost productivity that was squandered by spending all of that blood, sweat, money, and tears in those foreign countries, chasing people who do less damage to the US than just colon cancer in just Wisconsin? Green is what the threat level should be. By making it anything else, we're giving Teh Terrarists more power over us than they would otherwise have.
We have hurt ourselves more chasing them than they could ever hope to do to us. All of the money we spent blowing up Iraq and Afghanistan could have been spent on saving the economy, creating jobs, or paying for health care. All of the money we spent fixing Iraq and Afghanistan could have been spent fixing our own roads, bridges, and schools.
That's not to say that we should get rid of all the intelligence agencies and go all pacifist hippie. But when it comes to Guns and Butter, I think we're almost out of butter...
You're on the right track. Torture backfires in a variety of ways on a regular basis. When it comes to effective interrogation, I always like to cite the FBI agent who interrogated Saddam Hussein.
As far as politicizing counter terrorism, it was the Obama administration that made it political
I have this vague memory about some color coded threat level that was never green, and seemed to go from yellow to orange any time there was an election...
Essentially, the shift instructions must do a read/modify/write on the flags
Your posts contain some awesome information, but I must say that I would be quite surprised if processors do read-modify-writes on the flag register. That just feels...dangerous, especially if two instructions want to touch different bits in the flags register.
I vaguely remember, back when I was an undergrad designing a simple MIPS processor for my computer architecture class, that we ran a copy of the ALU's output to a gigantic NOR gate, which then hit an SR latch attached to the "zero" bit of the flags register. The "negative" bit was just the MSB run through a clock-enabled D flip flop, and so on.
Now, you do prefix with "essentially", which implies to me that you're white-lying for brevity. Would you care to expand on this?
Slower, yes. Harder to program...sometimes. But much easier to actually connect the physical goods together.
You can take a 8-pin DIP-sized PIC, hook it up to a regulator, a battery, a button, an LED, and make it blink. It doesn't have fancy power requirements. It doesn't even need an external oscillator.
There will always be a niche for the smallest, cheapest, simplest way to turn bits on and off.
Iit (sic) doesn't make sense to code in ASM anymore.
Good thing they weren't talking about coding in ASM. But, if one wishes to talk about what's going on under the hood of a processor, and ASM is what's actually running under the hood, then one will likely see ASM.
On July 1, 2001, a nationwide law in Portugal took effect that decriminalized all drugs, including cocaine and heroin. Under the new legal framework, all drugs were "decriminalized," not "legalized." Thus, drug possession for personal use and drug usage itself are still legally prohibited, but violations of those prohibitions are deemed to be exclusively administrative violations and are removed completely from the criminal realm. Drug trafficking continues to be prosecuted as a criminal offense....
More significantly, none of the nightmare scenarios touted by preenactment decriminalization opponents — from rampant increases in drug usage among the young to the transformation of Lisbon into a haven for "drug tourists" — has occurred.
Actually, I think he said that legalizing it won't cause new problems in the form of a wave of new addicts for whom the only thing that was holding them back was criminalization. I don't see anything in his comment about legalization solving problems.
That said, does Holland have the same prison over-population problem due to locking away large quantities of non-violent drug offenders as we do here in the US?
I hope you aren't trying to place all of the blame on Monsanto. Certainly, they can share in the blame for not being upfront about all of this, which would certainly help promote discussion. One can also make the argument that it's immoral and/or unethical to get patents and then squeeze profits out of an industry as important to human survival as agriculture.
But is it that hard for some scientists to go buy some of this corn and roll their own study? Would you really even trust whatever data Monsanto provided?
Our inability to have a rational discussion about this isn't solely the result of any stone-walling. I would say it's more about those folks who feel that we shouldn't be "playing God"; how exactly do you reason with people who don't care about facts or science?
It is a growing perception that there is no proper oversight of GMO development.
Maybe if people would stop freaking out about the idea of GM food, we could have a rational discussion about what kind of oversight is appropriate. Instead, everyone panics, labels GM food the devil, and the debate is snuffed out.
There's this stuff called Golden Rice, it's rice that has a Vitamin A gene. It will help lots of Chinese kids stop going blind. Maybe those researchers should study whether that rice kills rats.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, I'm not talking about the embedded space. I'm talking about programming on x86 CPUs; the Cypress .NET API I was discussing was the API for communicating with the device from the host computer.
http://www.cypress.com/?rID=34870
Well, since we're whipping it out, I started with Pascal, then C++, C, Java, multiple flavors of assembly, and finally C# (and VHDL, but that doesn't really count...). Learning a new language is not hard, and I'm not disputing that. Clearly, Cypress' C++ developers were able to learn C#, and it compiled, and even ran!
Knowing how to use the language properly and being able to debug the problems that you run into are what make this process terrible.
You think it's easy to move from COBOL through C/C++ to managed languages like C#? That's a riot. You have to learn marshaling, boxing, garbage collection, forms, the CLR. And that's assuming you don't have to do any mixed-mode code, use any interop functions, etc.
I have seen the results of C++ programmers who thought that they could just start programming in C# like it was C++. It's not pretty.
Cypress makes an IC called the FX2LP. It's a USB microcontroller. They write an API for it and updated it to C#. Well, the guys who did it were clearly C++ programmers, because they don't understand how arguments are passed in C# and why you don't need to pass a byte[] using a ref parameter.
Worse, there's a simply catastrophic bug in their managed API. The garbage collector can run and move your managed variables around, and then the unmanaged code (specifically, the USB drivers) doesn't know, and you start getting weird exceptions that the CLR can't catch on threads that aren't transmitting to the USB...I had to employ a work-around that pins every buffer that gets passed to their API because the Cypress developers didn't bother learning how to marshal properly.
If managed is easy and unmanaged is hard, you might think that mixed-mode would be in between. It's not. Mixed mode is way, way harder than even unmanaged code.
Why is JavaScript so easily exploitable?
Probably because it's a weakly typed language and therefore programmers are sloppy when they use it.
Logical Failacy - false dichotomy. I can use mass transit and keep my car. If it existed, I would leave my car parked.
It's quite the chicken and egg problem, yes? Without any mass transit for me to ride, how am I to pay them? Personally, I think mass transit is the kind of thing that the government should be subsidizing. There's your chicken. If you want some money to seed it, how about all that money we blow on subsidies to big oil companies?
Now, to be fair, some places have decent mass transit. I've had friends from DC tell me that it's really easy to take a bus to just about anywhere; DC was built for with mass transit in mind. But try being born in the rural area around Pittsburgh. The only buses my town had were school buses. The city's buses themselves take 2-3 hours for a 20-30 minute drive, if they go where you need to go, and you don't have to do two or three connections.
If you don't believe me, look at Google maps. Here's a 20 minute drive in a place around Pittsburgh. Now click on the "Public Transit" link. Roughly 2 hour minimums, with two to three connections.
And just FYI, in regards to your "put up or shut up" mentality, there are other ways to reduce fossil fuel consumption. Like living close to work instead of far away. I could drive a Hummer on a 2-mile commute for a week and use as much gas as your 20-mile commute in a car twice as fuel efficient in a day.
Baka! I'm pretty sure he meant that we should focus on mass transit instead of individual transit.
Aww, what's the matter, AC? Are you too afraid to flame someone with your name attached? Don't want to get modded down and lose your precious karma?
It's "Big Pharma ".
Hm...yes, I do remember saying Big Pharma right before I said Big Farma. I would imagine someone with a command of the English language such as yourself would be able to infer that I was discussing three separate lobbies - oil, pharmaceuticals, and agriculture - instead of repeating one twice.
I considered "Big Agriculture" but it had too many syllables and ruined the flow (much as we shorten Pharmaceuticals/Pharmacy to Pharma). Certainly, though, there is an agriculture lobby, and they are there to push for their own profits even at the public's expense. There are a lot of folks who consider High Fructose Corn Syrup a terrible thing made possible only by the agricultural lobbies' push for insane corn subsidies and tariffs on sugar from abroad.
I'll admit that the bit at the end, about the War on Drugs, veers a bit towards hyperbole. There are many reasons for that war, and maintaining the prison business is just one. I'm sure police like having jobs, too. Judges certainly like to collect fines. Politicians like to be elected. Lots of various little selfish reasons.
If you think this is a half-ass conspiracy theory, then there's a story in the NYT I'd like you to read, about a judge who was being paid by a juvenile detention facility to trump up charges and increase the number of kids being sent to the facility because the state paid the facility per head.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/13/us/13judge.html
If some people don't mind unnecessarily imprisoning teenagers for cash, certainly there are many, many more people who wouldn't mind imprisoning adults.
the Federal reserve prints-up trillions and trillions of US dollars wildly inflating the money supply
Though the Fed doesn't publish it anymore, there's a group who tracks M3, one of the measures of the money supply. While M0, M1, and M2 all dropped precipitously, M3 held steady.
The money supply is not being wildly inflated. To the contrary, their "printing" has kept the money supply from deflating. As dollars are destroyed by the financial crisis, the Fed's printed dollars replace them, and the system on-the-whole stays roughly the same.
The cause for concern is that when the banks start lending again, the fractional-reserve-lending-multiplier thing will mean that the banks can inflate the money supply by using too much of their reserves for loans. That's why the Fed is paying the banks interest on their reserves - the interest means the banks are less interested in loaning their reserves out.
The average sentence for rape is less than half of that (six years).
While 13 years does seem a bit large, the guy stole a lot of money. And he's done this kinda thing before.
He ruined a lot of lives, and the lives he ruined are average people who can't go running to Washington for new laws or bailouts. Who knows what kind of damage he wrecked on innocent families. He deserves a big punishment.
Actually, 3-year recidivism is something like 50% in the UK and US.
And the prison system is not a failure. It has been a wild success. At least 1% of our population is in prison, many for non-violent and victimless crimes. The prison lobby has been so successful that you never hear anyone talk about Big Prison the way you hear Big Oil or Big Pharma or Big Farma.
The reason you think the prison system is a failure is because you are under the mistaken impression that it's primary purpose is to rehabilitate criminals. The system is designed to generate a profit; imprisoning and/or rehabilitating criminals is an accidental side effect.
If you don't believe me, then imagine if we had under-used prisons. In order to protect their business model, the prison lobby would pay for a whole new set of laws, preferably ones that many people already violate, so we can keep imprisoning Americans...much like the War on Drugs has made sure to keep prisons in business despite the continuous drop in violent crime over the past two decades.
Fixed it is. Didn't have to delete the old Windows partitions. The data is still there. And it does everything it did before - stream videos through the S-Video output to the TV, view the TV tuner card, browse the Internet, play Flash games, read email/facebook, etc.
Sure, if it breaks she probably won't be able to fix it. But it hasn't broke yet, and after all I did have to come fix Windows, too. The computer can install security updates and it doesn't need to reboot. No more virus scanner. No more malware, trojans, or rootkits.
Several weeks ago, I worked on a PC that was probably infected after doing a few Google Image Searches or browsing DeviantArt or something of that nature. I tried multiple virus/malware programs (AVG, Avast, Adaware, MalwareBytes, Spybot). I thought I got rid of the infection...then a Windows Update caused her computer to blue screen on boot.
My solution?
http://www.ubuntu.com/GetUbuntu/download
I multiply all time estimates by pi, to account for running around in circles.
There's the standard arguments about: pirates weren't going to buy the game anyway; legitimate customers don't like to do illegal things to begin with; some people will buy it even after pirating it once it actually comes out; some people will play their friends' pirated version and buy their own.
All of that aside...why do they need the passwords to his email/facebook/etc? That seems like a massive invasion of privacy. Would they ask for all of the snail mail correspondence that he's had for the last few years, too? Logs of his telephone calls?
Yes. The guy was stupid. He got caught. He should be punished. But ordered to hand over all of your passwords? Doesn't anyone else see anything wrong with this?
I'm not saying they don't have GPIO. But you need to roll your own PCB if you want to use those ARM chips. My point was that you can't just jam the thing into a breadboard and go and, even if you could, the several dozens of MHz that you don't need will destroy your battery-powered application.
Yeah, I hate both parties, too. I might identify with what Democrats say they want to do, but in practice they screw things up still, just less than Republicans, IMNSHO.
But, honestly? Have you considered the lost productivity that was squandered by spending all of that blood, sweat, money, and tears in those foreign countries, chasing people who do less damage to the US than just colon cancer in just Wisconsin? Green is what the threat level should be. By making it anything else, we're giving Teh Terrarists more power over us than they would otherwise have.
We have hurt ourselves more chasing them than they could ever hope to do to us. All of the money we spent blowing up Iraq and Afghanistan could have been spent on saving the economy, creating jobs, or paying for health care. All of the money we spent fixing Iraq and Afghanistan could have been spent fixing our own roads, bridges, and schools.
That's not to say that we should get rid of all the intelligence agencies and go all pacifist hippie. But when it comes to Guns and Butter, I think we're almost out of butter...
You're on the right track. Torture backfires in a variety of ways on a regular basis. When it comes to effective interrogation, I always like to cite the FBI agent who interrogated Saddam Hussein.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/01/24/60minutes/main3749494.shtml
As far as politicizing counter terrorism, it was the Obama administration that made it political
I have this vague memory about some color coded threat level that was never green, and seemed to go from yellow to orange any time there was an election...
Essentially, the shift instructions must do a read/modify/write on the flags
Your posts contain some awesome information, but I must say that I would be quite surprised if processors do read-modify-writes on the flag register. That just feels...dangerous, especially if two instructions want to touch different bits in the flags register.
I vaguely remember, back when I was an undergrad designing a simple MIPS processor for my computer architecture class, that we ran a copy of the ALU's output to a gigantic NOR gate, which then hit an SR latch attached to the "zero" bit of the flags register. The "negative" bit was just the MSB run through a clock-enabled D flip flop, and so on.
Now, you do prefix with "essentially", which implies to me that you're white-lying for brevity. Would you care to expand on this?
Slower, yes. Harder to program...sometimes. But much easier to actually connect the physical goods together.
You can take a 8-pin DIP-sized PIC, hook it up to a regulator, a battery, a button, an LED, and make it blink. It doesn't have fancy power requirements. It doesn't even need an external oscillator.
There will always be a niche for the smallest, cheapest, simplest way to turn bits on and off.
Iit (sic) doesn't make sense to code in ASM anymore.
Good thing they weren't talking about coding in ASM. But, if one wishes to talk about what's going on under the hood of a processor, and ASM is what's actually running under the hood, then one will likely see ASM.
how do you know? I think a lot of people might be more willing to try it if they see it sold at the local 7-11, which will result in more addicts.
Instead of talking hypotheticals, why don't we talk real world examples?
Drug Decriminalization in Portugal: Lessons for Creating Fair and Successful Drug Policies
On July 1, 2001, a nationwide law in Portugal took effect that decriminalized all drugs, including cocaine and heroin. Under the new legal framework, all drugs were "decriminalized," not "legalized." Thus, drug possession for personal use and drug usage itself are still legally prohibited, but violations of those prohibitions are deemed to be exclusively administrative violations and are removed completely from the criminal realm. Drug trafficking continues to be prosecuted as a criminal offense. ...
More significantly, none of the nightmare scenarios touted by preenactment decriminalization opponents — from rampant increases in drug usage among the young to the transformation of Lisbon into a haven for "drug tourists" — has occurred.
Actually, I think he said that legalizing it won't cause new problems in the form of a wave of new addicts for whom the only thing that was holding them back was criminalization. I don't see anything in his comment about legalization solving problems.
That said, does Holland have the same prison over-population problem due to locking away large quantities of non-violent drug offenders as we do here in the US?
I hope you aren't trying to place all of the blame on Monsanto. Certainly, they can share in the blame for not being upfront about all of this, which would certainly help promote discussion. One can also make the argument that it's immoral and/or unethical to get patents and then squeeze profits out of an industry as important to human survival as agriculture.
But is it that hard for some scientists to go buy some of this corn and roll their own study? Would you really even trust whatever data Monsanto provided?
Our inability to have a rational discussion about this isn't solely the result of any stone-walling. I would say it's more about those folks who feel that we shouldn't be "playing God"; how exactly do you reason with people who don't care about facts or science?
It is a growing perception that there is no proper oversight of GMO development.
Maybe if people would stop freaking out about the idea of GM food, we could have a rational discussion about what kind of oversight is appropriate. Instead, everyone panics, labels GM food the devil, and the debate is snuffed out.
There's this stuff called Golden Rice, it's rice that has a Vitamin A gene. It will help lots of Chinese kids stop going blind. Maybe those researchers should study whether that rice kills rats.