My Vintage Dream PC

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On Tue, 02 Jun 2009 18:18:16 -0400, Peter Flass

No, you lose. Remember, this is *core*, not that newfangled
semiconductor stuff. When you plug it back in, the memory is still
there. ISTR some people running a standalone dump after a power-up to
see what was happening when it shut down.

I already said most of that.

 

[Kim Enkovaara]

Some of my guys like to use a VCS, for reasons I can't understand.
That's OK, as long as real, solid file sets are released that don't
depend on the VCS.

Version control systems are quite handy in storing data. You don't have
to keep hundreds of releases of the design in some file hierarchy. Also
all the tools can be stored in to the VCS. And with proper VCS including
configuration management the same enviroment can be brought up in a
few seconds (the time it takes to edit configspec etc.).

VCS is quite nice also while figuring out when a bug was fixed by
browsing trough version history, or who to blame for the bug And in
multisite environments VCS can be used to replicate data reliably.

--Kim

 

[Richard Cranium]

On Tue, 02 Jun 2009 20:41:38 -0700, Archimedes' Lever

Funny. That sounds like the most comprehensive, proper use of technology
I have observed you making use of yet. Aside from your immature,
jackassed, peanut gallery remarks, which you seem to incessantly have an
urge to spew occasionally, I'd almost say that there may be hope for you
yet. Alas, the depth of that immaturity tells me that you will be
forever stuck in your hard wired John Larkin mouthy pre-teen mentality.

You are far better when you stick to the technology, and keep your
mouth off of people.

Just who do you think you are? You talk in a condescending tone as if
you are above John and everyone else here. The reality is you are an
insignificant speck of fly shit. You are a liar and a phony. You
claim to have accomplished a great deal by age 12 (see your prior
rants). Well, you did become an asshole at age 13 and have wallowed
in that phase ever since. You avoid taking the puzzle challenge
because you fear not being able to solve it and the massive
embarassment it would cause you. Even though you are avoiding
alt.video.dvd because of the pounding you take every time you post
your crap, you will forever be known as the group piñata - always
ready to give us all a laugh at your expense - the ultimate buffoon.
You owe John an apology. Deliver it now, before the streaks in your
underwear dry.

 

[Richard Cranium]

On Tue, 02 Jun 2009 21:25:03 -0700, FatBytestard

Remember WYSIWYG, Johnny?

Application of WYSIWYG to you Archie yields an asshole fer sure!

 

[Richard Cranium]

On Tue, 02 Jun 2009 21:04:36 -0700, FatBytestard

So... I still win.


I am still the winner.

Oh yeah Archie ... you are the winner ... by a wide margin.

You're ugly, your dick is small, and everybody fucked your mother.

 

[Archimedes' Lever]

There is no power, therefore it's zero? That is a strange
conclusion. I would say, there is no power, therefore the bits are
undefined.

-- Patrick

For all intents and purposes, a computer that is OFF has zero potential
to compute, so zero is how its state can be described.

 

[Archimedes' Lever]

Make sure you get all his current nyms:

Right. The bitch lies, and I call her on her lie, and all you little
whimpy twits want to set your filters because the bad man called the poor
woman a ditz for making up one of her lies about him?

Go right ahead. I do not want to have any discourse with any such
dumbasses anyway.

 

[Archimedes' Lever]

Just who do you think you are?

Stop stalking me, retard Cranium.

 

[Archimedes' Lever]

Oh yeah Archie ...

Stop stalking me, retard.

 

[jmfbahciv]

A bit clearer. Make that 2 bits.

[relieved emoticon here] Good.

The anti-security consequences of
M$ design decisions is quite well documented. This get closer to the
why.

If you look at them with the assumption of their primary business, it
gets even clearer.

And still they (M$) wonder why there is the likes of wine. And the
growing willingness to lock them up in a VM.

None of their work, AFAICT, has enough paranoia. Putting pieces
of an app's context directly into the kernel would have given
us the willies.

/BAH

 

[jmfbahciv]

What scanning are you thinking about, virus scanning, memory
protections, memory scrubbing of what.

None of the above. I was thinking about xray scanning at
airports, etc.

That is more a question of how the equipment casing works and
how good the power supply is. To fullfill the EMC requirements
the equipment must not leak out radio frequency emissions and
that means that those don't leak in either.

I have no faith in EMC requirements. I had a stove in Southboro
which had to be unplugged in order to tune the radio to any AM
station. The tech who was called about this problem made the
comment, "Nobody listens to AM radio anymore."

that's what the kiddies are getting taught these days.

/BAH

 

[jmfbahciv]

Eventually. Whether user needs increase or not, the programmers will
see to that.

I doubt it will be eventually. You'ld see it almost overnight.
Coders do not code well if the resource seems to be unlimited.

And, of course, eventually user needs do increase. But not very fast,
in the absence of new killer apps.

<grin> You haven't been out in that cold cruel world much.

TW lost a bet with Jim when TW commented that the RP07 couldn't
ever get filled up. It only took us about 3 months before
we had to start deleting files on that structure.

/BAH

 

[FatBytestard]

WYSIWYG+AYASNY = A Flip Wilson comedy sketch.

However in your and RichTard's case, it wasn't the devil that made you
wear that dress you got on, and you could never even come close to Flip
with that immature crap you call humor.

 

[jmfbahciv]

The hardware is faster than ever, the speed just comes in
different form. The machines are fast enough for most of the
users. How many users are actually complaining about the
computer speed anymore, maybe gamers and there the GPU is
more critical.


The direction just shifts to parallelism, which is not that
familiar area for the software people. And there is still steam
left in the silicon area.

Let me see if I can explain better. When we increased the
CPU speed, the system became I/O bound. When we increased
the disk controller speed, the same system would become
CPU-bound. When we increased the speed of the CPU, the
same system became I/O bound... The same things happen
in today's biz. Hardware developers concentrate on the
solving the problem of today. So if the CPU needs to
be speeded up, they'll work on speeding up the CPU. Then,
when that's done, the performance lags show that the
I/O needs to be sped up. So the next project is to produce
a faster peripheral. This gets out to the field and, all
of a sudden, the CPU performance sucks. It's a cycle.

/BAH

 

[jmfbahciv]

True, I've only done RTOSs and embedded systems.

I noticed. This is why your OS ideas have, as the top priority,
to have complete control of all aspects of system computing.

But timesharing is
dead.

You have no idea what you're talking about. Do you really believe
that a system cannot print a listing, retrieve mail, transfer a file,
allow the users to edit, play music, calculate a standard deviation,
and run a screen saver at the same time? To do all of this requires
sharing all system resources, including the CPU(s) during the same
wallclock time slice.

Multicore will change all the tradeoffs.

Sigh! You still don't know what tradeoffs mean.

and I don't know how to explain it better to somebody
who has your mindset.

/BAH

 

[jmfbahciv]

If it is that safety critical you have at least two chips and the
second one takes over.

But the second one is the one who is doing the I/O that is required
to "save" the data. [I'm using John's proposal of master/slave].

After the restart the chip may recover.

Watchdog timer on the entire chip is total crash, infinity loop
or too small a timeout.

/BAH

 

[jmfbahciv]

I learned a lot from what was successful. I've run timeshare systems,
written RTOSs and compilers and a million or two lines of code, run
all sorts of pc's from Commodore to WinXP, and designed a lot of
computer systems and interfaces and electronics. I even interfaced an
ADC (that I designed) to an IBM 1401, and this week I'm interfacing an
ADC (that I didn't design) to a Linux board via PCI Express.

What have you done?

The question I raised was merely, what do you think OSs will be like
in 10 or 20 years, given that computer chips are headed to multiple
CPU cores (tens, hundreds) surrounding a central cache?

One other person has so far contributed constructive suggestions, and
it wasn't you.

Fine. I quit.

/BAH

 

[jmfbahciv]

No, you lose. Remember, this is *core*, not that newfangled
semiconductor stuff. When you plug it back in, the memory is still
there. ISTR some people running a standalone dump after a power-up to
see what was happening when it shut down.

He doesn't have to do core; let him try the exercise with the
newfangled stuff.

/BAH

 

[jmfbahciv]

No. A guy burns them.

Our M:\LIB folder, the company release library, is about 2.8 Gbytes.
That's all the schematics, pcb layouts, FPGA designs, Autocad stuff,
embedded firmware, manuals, and test programs/procedures for about 600
circuit boards, around 100 top-assembly products. The embedded product
code doesn't take a lot of space.

Much worse is our J: drive, where engineers dump local backups of
stuff that they are working on, before it's formally released. That's
about 35G. It's a constant battle to get them to clean it up.

We also back up accounting and inventory stuff, another DVD.

We're currently doing an embedded Linux-based system, and expect to
release whole system images, at several G each. A few revs of that
will get to be serious amounts of stuff. We may have to not release
them to the system library and come up with some other release/backup
strategy.

Hard drives costing what they do, we could almost dump it all to a
hot-plug drive and physically archive them.

How often do you test your restore procedures?

/BAH

 

[jmfbahciv]

With the machine in "Pull Power Cord state, all are at zero. If you
attach a device to read the logic levels, or re-energize the unit, you
are no longer in "PullPower Cord" state.

Bah indeed. Bah ha ha, in fact.

Do you know what an instruction is?

/BAH