Driver to drive?

[Bill Sloman]

On Friday, 18 April 2014 01:10:04 UTC+10, haitic...@gmail.com wrote:

<snip>

> &&& Below - Aha The personal attack when you lose your grasp of the subject. Free speech and intellectual inquiry are an impossibility around you.

I do try to discourage "free speech" in the sense speech that propagates nonsense, free from any constraining real-world evidence. Recycling money-grubbing propaganda from health food websites isn't exactly "intellectual inquiry". Half-wits do tend to label their vapourings as "intellectual inquiry" which would be funny if it wasn't pathetic.

> I will respond to your points.

You may think you are responding, but actually you are reacting. There's no intellectual component to your reaction - it's just more half-baked prejudice being paraded as if it were fact.

Your own ignorance is impressive. If you expose milk to sunlight the 7-dehydrocholesterol present in the milk gets converted to cholecalciferol.

&& Wrong. The amount too low to make any difference in blood levels. Nutritional rickets a problem in minority communities, and the prevention requires vitamin D supplementation.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B9780122526879500681

The abstract doesn't seem to identify skin pigmentation as the major problem.
Minority communities also tend to get too much of their calorific intake from junk food, which is likely to be short on Vitamin D and 7-dehydrocholesterol.

If you drink milk and expose your skin to sunlight, the same conversion takes place, so your informants were almost certainly telling you the truth.

&&& Nonsense again. Ordinary sunlight does not do the conversion. It requires UVB at 311 nm., and that wavelength is not present in geographical locations above 30 latitude, and gets less during winter months. This lack of 311 nm. radiation is responsible for the widespread deficiency, as well as the obvious fact that people don't walk around unclothed most of the year there. This problem is most severe in dark-skinned minorities. So your ideas are a form of racial prejudice against them, as their risk highest.

https://www.fh-muenster.de/fb1/downloads/personal/juestel/juestel
/12-InkohaerenteLichtquellen-UV-Strahlungsquellen_english_.pdf

There's nothing magic about 311nm. Vitamin D synthesis does need wavelengths shorter than 320nm, and there isn't as much of that in "ordinary sunlight" at higher latitudes, but the difference between Trondheim, Norway at 60 degrees North and Ghadames, Libya at 30 degrees North is a factor of three, so there's still quite a bit present.

My Russian friend (who now devises penguin-weighing machines for the British Antarctic Survey) assured me that spending ten minutes per day outdoors without gloves on Sakhalin Island (roughly 50 degrees North) was enough to saturate your vitamin D photosynthesis system.

If you had a more heavily pigmented skin than the average Russian you might need a bit longer, but the real problem there would be the higher susceptibility to frost-bite that is usually associated with the extra pigmentation (which is documented for US servicemen in Korea during the Korean War). The more heavily pigmented people would be less prone to take their gloves off.

snipped the rest of the twaddle that haitic probably got from a "health food" website aka money-making hoax

&&& There you go again!

You are consistently gullible and ill-informed. I do find myself pointing this out relatively frequently.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

Bill Sloman <bill.sloman@gmail.com> wrote:

My Russian friend (who now devises penguin-weighing machines for the
British Antarctic Survey)

Do they ever get volunteers? http://i.imgur.com/AoDcfzS.jpg

Matt Roberds

 

[Bill Sloman]

On Friday, 18 April 2014 01:41:31 UTC+10, George Herold wrote:

On Thursday, April 17, 2014 10:56:18 AM UTC-4, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Thursday, 17 April 2014 17:09:15 UTC+10, whit3rd wrote:

On Wednesday, April 16, 2014 6:12:40 PM UTC-7, Ralph Barone wrote:
My suspicion is that the increased burden in the primary circuit from
adding a Hall effect sensor is probably unmeasurable, which is why I
asked about a theoretical solution. And it is just out of
curiosity,but I thought that somebody else with better analytical
chops than me and better knowledge of Hall effect device design might
take up the challenge.

I'm pretty sure the Hall effect is due to electron drift velocity
and deflection of the moving electrons by a magnetic field. There's
no work whatever done by the magnetic field on such a moving charge.

IIRR Hall-effect sensors depend on having roughly equal currents being carried by positive and negative charge-carriers.

I don't think so.. OK I'm not hall effect expert. But I have been measuring it recently in Si and Ge wafers. (I need to start a thread about that....later.) So if you had equal pos. and neg. charge carriers (each with the same mobility*)> then in theory you'd get no Hall voltage. The sign of the Hall voltage gives you the sign of the charge carriers.

This doesn't sound right to me. The two different kinds of charge carriers would be diverted to opposite sides of the Hall plate, adding to the Hall voltage rather than cancelling it out.

http://books.google.com.au/books?id=R8VAjMitH1QC&printsec=frontcover&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false

let me read enough to make it clear that I hadn't remembered right - the crucial point seems to be that you need a relatively low number of charge carriers, so that they are moving fast, to give you a respectable Hall voltage.. There's no obligation to even roughly balance the numbers of positive and negative charge carriers, so I definitely remembered that part wrong.

<snipped okay stuff which is irrelevant to this point>

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[George Herold]

On Thursday, April 17, 2014 7:13:25 PM UTC-4, Bill Sloman wrote:

On Friday, 18 April 2014 01:41:31 UTC+10, George Herold wrote:
snip
I don't think so.. OK I'm not hall effect expert. But I have been measuring it recently in Si and Ge wafers. (I need to start a thread about that...later.) So if you had equal pos. and neg. charge carriers (each with the same mobility*)> then in theory you'd get no Hall voltage. The sign of the Hall voltage gives you the sign of the charge carriers.

This doesn't sound right to me. The two different kinds of charge carriers would be diverted to opposite sides of the Hall plate, adding to the Hall voltage rather than cancelling it out.

Grin, Well I always have to draw pictures.
So put the current in one direction,
then if there's both type of charge carrier's they are going in opposite directions.
And q.vxB points in the same direction.
The hall voltage relates to the charge density,
but only if you've got a doped sample.

http://books.google.com.au/books?id=R8VAjMitH1QC&printsec=frontcover&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false



let me read enough to make it clear that I hadn't remembered right - the crucial point seems to be that you need a relatively low number of charge carriers, so that they are moving fast, to give you a respectable Hall voltage. There's no obligation to even roughly balance the numbers of positive and negative charge carriers, so I definitely remembered that part wrong.



snipped okay stuff which is irrelevant to this point



--

Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[John Larkin]

On Thu, 17 Apr 2014 13:12:08 -0500, Tim Wescott
<tim@seemywebsite.really> wrote:

On Thu, 17 Apr 2014 09:26:12 -0700, John Larkin wrote:

On Thu, 17 Apr 2014 00:03:04 -0500, Tim Wescott
tim@seemywebsite.really> wrote:

I have a customer who wants a USB-powered battery charger designed, with
certification -n- all. I figure the certification part will be harder
than the charger part, so I have to give it a pass.

Anyone do that and have spare cycles, or know someone? He wants someone
with a track record, or I'd talk him into using me!

What certs? UL/CSA/CE? FCC?

A test lab will do those, for a moderate pile of money.

Is there a USB certification standard?

You have to pass their compatibility tests if you want to use their logos
& such. I'm not sure whether you can even use "USB", but I suspect by
now that you can if you use the right wording.

You can use something like the FTDI chips and (maybe) inherit the
certs.


--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

 

[Jasen Betts]

On 2014-04-15, David Brown <david.brown@hesbynett.no> wrote:

And the language here was SQL, not C. Probably the underlying
application was in Perl or Python - it's highly unlikely it was in C.

probably Perl or PHP, Python's database interface makes SQL injection
hard to code.

--
umop apisdn


--- news://freenews.netfront.net/ - complaints: news@netfront.net ---

 

[Martin Riddle]

On Thu, 17 Apr 2014 13:56:01 -0700, John Larkin
<jlarkin@highlandtechnology.com> wrote:

On Thu, 17 Apr 2014 13:12:08 -0500, Tim Wescott
tim@seemywebsite.really> wrote:

On Thu, 17 Apr 2014 09:26:12 -0700, John Larkin wrote:

On Thu, 17 Apr 2014 00:03:04 -0500, Tim Wescott
tim@seemywebsite.really> wrote:

I have a customer who wants a USB-powered battery charger designed, with
certification -n- all. I figure the certification part will be harder
than the charger part, so I have to give it a pass.

Anyone do that and have spare cycles, or know someone? He wants someone
with a track record, or I'd talk him into using me!

What certs? UL/CSA/CE? FCC?

A test lab will do those, for a moderate pile of money.

Is there a USB certification standard?

You have to pass their compatibility tests if you want to use their logos
& such. I'm not sure whether you can even use "USB", but I suspect by
now that you can if you use the right wording.

You can use something like the FTDI chips and (maybe) inherit the
certs.

I think its $3K just for the PID and VID alone.

Cheers

 

[Jasen Betts]

On 2014-04-16, Tim Williams <tmoranwms@charter.net> wrote:
> Sounds like cutting force.

that was me domonstrating what a 1hp saw would be acapable of

Kick back sounds much more like, say, a 5 kilo rotating mass going from
3000 RPM to 1500 RPM in, oh, 1/4 rotation or less.

yeah, like i said

> Do the acceleration and force figures on that..

the only time that happens the blade is stuck in the slot and much of
the force goes into the baseplate,


--
umop apisdn


--- news://freenews.netfront.net/ - complaints: news@netfront.net ---

 

On Thursday, April 17, 2014 10:32:50 PM UTC-4, Jasen Betts wrote:

On 2014-04-16, ha5itqicare2011@gmail.com <haitieecare2011@gmail.com> wrote:



The determining factor for me about "Hoaxes" is the following:



1. they involve a large amount of money in the perps pockets

2. they involve disinformation to a large group of people

3. official bodies are usually involved.

4. "true believer" advocates push the beliefs in public as proven fact





sounds like Apple.



--

umop apisdn





--- news://freenews.netfront.net/ - complaints: news@netfront.net ---

I hear you! That Ipad - eek! No file system, no direct printer output,
expen$ive, captive battery. What a mess!

 

On Thu, 17 Apr 2014 08:41:20 +0100, Martin Brown
<|||newspam|||@nezumi.demon.co.uk> wrote:

On 17/04/2014 01:07, krw@attt.bizz wrote:
On Wed, 16 Apr 2014 09:50:17 +0100, Martin Brown
|||newspam|||@nezumi.demon.co.uk> wrote:


My mother has no valid UK passport and has never driven a car in her
life. The closest to "government photoID" she has is a local council
issued Bus Pass and Blue Disabled Parking badge with her photo on it.

No NHS ID?

It is just a random number and can be looked up from Nation Insurance
number or Name and Date of Birth. She has one but I have no idea what it
is and nor does she. We do get issued with NHS cards but no-one knows
where theirs is or what numbers are on them & no photo on it.

So there is no way to tell who is who? Amazing.

NHS cards are so insignificant and irrelevant that the banks would not
accept one as proof of ID (either on list A or list B).

We take slightly better care of the EU wide medical cards which allow
you to access free medical services or use hospitals within the EU when
on holiday (although it is wise to also have travel insurance).

If you aren't required to identify yourself, how do they know?

 

[josephkk]

On Thu, 17 Apr 2014 00:09:15 -0700 (PDT), whit3rd <whit3rd@gmail.com>
wrote:

On Wednesday, April 16, 2014 6:12:40 PM UTC-7, Ralph Barone wrote:

My suspicion is that the increased burden in the primary circuit from

adding a Hall effect sensor is probably unmeasurable, which is why I asked

about a theoretical solution. And it is just out of curiosity, but I

thought that somebody else with better analytical chops than me and better

knowledge of Hall effect device design might take up the challenge.

I'm pretty sure the Hall effect is due to electron drift velocity
and deflection of the moving electrons by a magnetic field. There's
no work whatever done by the magnetic field on such a moving charge.
No work, zero power, zero resistive-like energy losses.

Magnetic force on a moving charge is perpendicular to velocity,
the power is zero because F-vector and V-vector are orthogonal.

Stuff and nonsense. If you change the path of a particle you have
accelerated it. That takes work. However the amount involved in a hall
effect sensor is mighty low.

?-)

 

[Tim Williams]

"John Larkin" <jjlarkin@highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote in
message news:rob1l9pdckp692i45l42h23fnhjs1btm30@4ax.com...
> QuickBasic compiled to byte code, which is opcodes for a pseudo-machine.

I've never heard that before; cite?

Perhaps you're thinking of compressed .BAS files, and presumably, QB's
internal structure? Every time you write a keyword and switch lines, it
parses the line and translates it into symbols, operations and keywords.
Any changes detected in the string space (say you wrote xPOS instead of
xPos) are detected by case insensitivity (all instances magically change
to the latest capitalization). I'm guessing that same form is saved into
their compressed format (possibly with some text compression as well, for
the variable names).

From what little I've played with debugging QB programs, there doesn't
appear to be some abstract instruction space it draws from. The output is
clearly recognizable as the product of that sort of procedure, though: FAR
CALLs *eeeeeverywhere*. It's like Minecraft for instructions. Before
Minecraft was even a thing. (Minecraft, speaking of, is written in
Java...)

Basic INTEGER arithmetic operations, I think, were at least done in
"main", but woe unto you if you accidentally perform floating point
arithmetic: it goes through something like 20 calls for one operation. If
you had a math co, it was sort of tolerable. Amazingly, the typical
savings (fixed over floating point) was something like double speed
(including a math co). Needless to say, any kind of number crunching is
*slow*.

Tim

--
Seven Transistor Labs
Electrical Engineering Consultation
Website: http://seventransistorlabs.com

 

[John Larkin]

On 18 Apr 2014 03:56:12 GMT, Jasen Betts <jasen@xnet.co.nz> wrote:

On 2014-04-18, Joe Gwinn <joegwinn@comcast.net> wrote:
In article <9vuvk9h784223h07kd6bs5o0hp0ul19ln3@4ax.com>, John Larkin
jjlarkin@highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote:

PowerBasic is a very good optimized compiler. It can run useful FOR loops at
hundreds of MHz.

Be careful with that word "compiler". Interpreted languages compile
to byte code, not to native machine code. The byte code is executed by
a bit of software. In Java, this machine is called the JVM (Java
Virtual Machine).

Power basic (and quickbasic, turbo-basic and probably several others)
compile to machine code.

While one can compile some originally interpreted languages to machine
code, it isn't common because some of the nicest features of
interpreted languages cannot be compiled to machine code in advance.

Compilable basics often don't have those features.

QuickBasic compiled to byte code, which is opcodes for a pseudo-machine.
TurboBasic was the predecessor of PowerBasic, both true compilers.

I think Pythyon is usually a byte-code compiler, roughly 1/3 as fast as a real
machine-code compiler.


--

John Larkin Highland Technology Inc
www.highlandtechnology.com jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com

Precision electronic instrumentation

 

[Jasen Betts]

On 2014-04-18, Joe Gwinn <joegwinn@comcast.net> wrote:

In article <9vuvk9h784223h07kd6bs5o0hp0ul19ln3@4ax.com>, John Larkin
jjlarkin@highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote:

PowerBasic is a very good optimized compiler. It can run useful FOR loops at
hundreds of MHz.

Be careful with that word "compiler". Interpreted languages compile
to byte code, not to native machine code. The byte code is executed by
a bit of software. In Java, this machine is called the JVM (Java
Virtual Machine).

Power basic (and quickbasic, turbo-basic and probably several others)
compile to machine code.

While one can compile some originally interpreted languages to machine
code, it isn't common because some of the nicest features of
interpreted languages cannot be compiled to machine code in advance.

Compilable basics often don't have those features.

--
umop apisdn

 

On Thu, 17 Apr 2014 18:37:09 -0400, Martin Riddle
<martin_rid@verizon.net> wrote:

On Thu, 17 Apr 2014 13:56:01 -0700, John Larkin
jlarkin@highlandtechnology.com> wrote:

On Thu, 17 Apr 2014 13:12:08 -0500, Tim Wescott
tim@seemywebsite.really> wrote:

On Thu, 17 Apr 2014 09:26:12 -0700, John Larkin wrote:

On Thu, 17 Apr 2014 00:03:04 -0500, Tim Wescott
tim@seemywebsite.really> wrote:

I have a customer who wants a USB-powered battery charger designed, with
certification -n- all. I figure the certification part will be harder
than the charger part, so I have to give it a pass.

Anyone do that and have spare cycles, or know someone? He wants someone
with a track record, or I'd talk him into using me!

What certs? UL/CSA/CE? FCC?

A test lab will do those, for a moderate pile of money.

Is there a USB certification standard?

You have to pass their compatibility tests if you want to use their logos
& such. I'm not sure whether you can even use "USB", but I suspect by
now that you can if you use the right wording.

You can use something like the FTDI chips and (maybe) inherit the
certs.

I think its $3K just for the PID and VID alone.

Cheers

I think the minimum is to get the drivers signed if for windoze.
Otherwise it' can be al PITA to install the drivers, especially in
windows 8

Actually, it's mainly the .inf file that tells the system what to
install and any additional driver.sys (etc) files that may go along in
addition to the drivers that already come with windows.

This supposedly costs a few hundred dollars and is good for a year or
two (or 3 ?).

We are looking into this aspect now.

boB

 

[Joe Gwinn]

In article <9vuvk9h784223h07kd6bs5o0hp0ul19ln3@4ax.com>, John Larkin
<jjlarkin@highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote:

On Thu, 17 Apr 2014 08:18:36 -0400, Joe Gwinn <joegwinn@comcast.net> wrote:

In article <amcpk9tcn9459ce0qoik7kvcm8cafq3qj3@4ax.com>, John Larkin
jjlarkin@highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote:

On Mon, 14 Apr 2014 17:39:01 +0100, Martin Brown
|||newspam|||@nezumi.demon.co.uk> wrote:

On 14/04/2014 16:47, John Larkin wrote:
On 14 Apr 2014 10:34:55 GMT, Jasen Betts <jasen@xnet.co.nz> wrote:

On 2014-04-14, Tim Williams <tmoranwms@charter.net> wrote:
"Sylvia Else" <sylvia@not.at.this.address> wrote in message
news:br0tf2Fs854U1@mid.individual.net...

Of all the dubious aspects of the language, that's one that should
recieve
the most ire. What a stupid idea. Other languages (I'm only familiar
with QuickBasic offhand) store strings with a length prefix. And do
bounds checking besides.

yeah, but doesn't it put some stupid arbitrary limit on string length?

PowerBasic doesn't put a limit on string length, allows embedded nulls,
and has
groovy inherent string functions. Without hazards. Ask for a substring
out
of
the range of a string and you get the null string. Append to a string
and
it
just works.

I think you will find it limits maximum string lengths at 2^31-1 or
possibly 2^32-1. Older basics tend to limit it at 2^16-1 = 65535.

Well, in a 32-bit program, strings won't get much bigger than that.

It's not usually much of a limitation.


Memory was a rare expensive commodity when these languages were born.

I've written PB programs that manipulate huge data arrays, using
subscripts,
that run 4x as fast as the obvious c pointer equivalents. With an
afternoon of
playing with code and compiler optimizations, the c got close.

Only because you don't know what you are doing.


Oh, it was a senior c programmer who wrote the c version. It ran slower
than I
thought reasonable, so I tried it in PowerBasic, which only took a couple
of
minutes to write and run. It was a fairly simple signal averaging thing,
but on
big data sets.

Something is fishy here. Basic is an interpreted language.

PowerBasic is a very good optimized compiler. It can run useful FOR loops at
hundreds of MHz.

Be careful with that word "compiler". Interpreted languages compile
to byte code, not to native machine code. The byte code is executed by
a bit of software. In Java, this machine is called the JVM (Java
Virtual Machine).

While one can compile some originally interpreted languages to machine
code, it isn't common because some of the nicest features of
interpreted languages cannot be compiled to machine code in advance.

If the
program has high locality, aggressive caching of repeated bits can make
it only one tenth as fast as the same algorithm coded in a compiled
language like C. If the program has low locality (like lots of
realtime stuff), interpreted code is more like one 50th of the speed of
compiled code.

I'd look at the C code with a profiler, and find the bug.

It was, like, 20 lines of code. It didn't have a bug, it was just slow. As I
noted, futzing with c compiler optimizations helped.

Sure it had a bug, a performance bug. All languages have easy
directions and hard directions, and if one tries to move along a hard
direction, one will get the correct answer, but very slowly.

The standard approach is to profile the code and find out what it's
doing. Most likely you'll groan when you find out.

The PowerBasic compiler gives you one choice: size or speed. Compiled programs
are so small that I always go for speed.

In all truth, these optimizer mode switches often make little
difference.


Joe Gwinn

(who made his living as an embedded realtime programmer for almost 30
years)

 

[Jasen Betts]

On 2014-04-16, haiticare2011@gmail.com <haiticare2011@gmail.com> wrote:

The determining factor for me about "Hoaxes" is the following:

1. they involve a large amount of money in the perps pockets
2. they involve disinformation to a large group of people
3. official bodies are usually involved.
4. "true believer" advocates push the beliefs in public as proven fact

sounds like Apple.

--
umop apisdn


--- news://freenews.netfront.net/ - complaints: news@netfront.net ---

 

[Joe Gwinn]

In article <ijQ3v.14995$X41.9844@fx15.am4>, Martin Brown
<|||newspam|||@nezumi.demon.co.uk> wrote:

On 17/04/2014 13:18, Joe Gwinn wrote:
In article <amcpk9tcn9459ce0qoik7kvcm8cafq3qj3@4ax.com>, John Larkin
jjlarkin@highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote:

On Mon, 14 Apr 2014 17:39:01 +0100, Martin Brown
|||newspam|||@nezumi.demon.co.uk> wrote:

On 14/04/2014 16:47, John Larkin wrote:
On 14 Apr 2014 10:34:55 GMT, Jasen Betts <jasen@xnet.co.nz> wrote:

On 2014-04-14, Tim Williams <tmoranwms@charter.net> wrote:
"Sylvia Else" <sylvia@not.at.this.address> wrote in message
news:br0tf2Fs854U1@mid.individual.net...

Of all the dubious aspects of the language, that's one that should
recieve
the most ire. What a stupid idea. Other languages (I'm only familiar
with QuickBasic offhand) store strings with a length prefix. And do
bounds checking besides.

yeah, but doesn't it put some stupid arbitrary limit on string length?

PowerBasic doesn't put a limit on string length, allows embedded nulls,
and has
groovy inherent string functions. Without hazards. Ask for a substring
out
of
the range of a string and you get the null string. Append to a string and
it
just works.

I think you will find it limits maximum string lengths at 2^31-1 or
possibly 2^32-1. Older basics tend to limit it at 2^16-1 = 65535.

Well, in a 32-bit program, strings won't get much bigger than that.

It's not usually much of a limitation.

Memory was a rare expensive commodity when these languages were born.

I've written PB programs that manipulate huge data arrays, using
subscripts,
that run 4x as fast as the obvious c pointer equivalents. With an
afternoon of
playing with code and compiler optimizations, the c got close.

Only because you don't know what you are doing.

Oh, it was a senior c programmer who wrote the c version. It ran slower
than I
thought reasonable, so I tried it in PowerBasic, which only took a couple
of
minutes to write and run. It was a fairly simple signal averaging thing,
but on
big data sets.

Something is fishy here. Basic is an interpreted language. If the

Not necessarily.

PowerBasic is a decent optimising native code compiler. And in some ways
it has more freedom to optimise its loop code than a C compiler!

Basic and Lisp are usually interpreted languages but there are
optimising native code compilers for both of them on some platforms.

http://www.powerbasic.com/products/

Interpreted languages generally compile to bytecode, while compiled
languages compile to native machine code, which is a whole lot faster.

program has high locality, aggressive caching of repeated bits can make
it only one tenth as fast as the same algorithm coded in a compiled
language like C. If the program has low locality (like lots of
realtime stuff), interpreted code is more like one 50th of the speed of
compiled code.

From memory the data was just about big enough and involved words and
integers to go I/O bound and their C code was decidedly non-optimal.

On the current crop of optimising compilers there is seldom much to
choose between different ways of implementing vector dot products.

I'd look at the C code with a profiler, and find the bug.

Joe Gwinn

C code isn't quite as fast at some things as you might like to believe,
but ISTR the slowness in this case was mostly down to user error.

Well, there you are - isn't "user error" another word for performance
bug?

The software world has periodic language wars.

I particularly recall Ada83 versus C. Both are compiled languages, but
Ada is far more complex a language, as judged by the sizes of their
respective compilers. We would read article after article where a
world class Ada expert would produce Ada programs that ran circles
around the C programs produced by some duffer C programmers, and
declare that Ada was therefore the better language.

Ten or twenty years before, the spectacle was Fortran compiler vendors
claiming that their compilers generated executable code that was faster
than that produced by assembly programmers. Well, not if you get a
real assembly programmer. But hardware got fast enough that we no
longer had to care.

Joe Gwinn

 

[John Larkin]

On Thu, 17 Apr 2014 22:53:20 -0400, Joe Gwinn <joegwinn@comcast.net> wrote:

In article <9vuvk9h784223h07kd6bs5o0hp0ul19ln3@4ax.com>, John Larkin
jjlarkin@highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote:

On Thu, 17 Apr 2014 08:18:36 -0400, Joe Gwinn <joegwinn@comcast.net> wrote:

In article <amcpk9tcn9459ce0qoik7kvcm8cafq3qj3@4ax.com>, John Larkin
jjlarkin@highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote:

On Mon, 14 Apr 2014 17:39:01 +0100, Martin Brown
|||newspam|||@nezumi.demon.co.uk> wrote:

On 14/04/2014 16:47, John Larkin wrote:
On 14 Apr 2014 10:34:55 GMT, Jasen Betts <jasen@xnet.co.nz> wrote:

On 2014-04-14, Tim Williams <tmoranwms@charter.net> wrote:
"Sylvia Else" <sylvia@not.at.this.address> wrote in message
news:br0tf2Fs854U1@mid.individual.net...

Of all the dubious aspects of the language, that's one that should
recieve
the most ire. What a stupid idea. Other languages (I'm only familiar
with QuickBasic offhand) store strings with a length prefix. And do
bounds checking besides.

yeah, but doesn't it put some stupid arbitrary limit on string length?

PowerBasic doesn't put a limit on string length, allows embedded nulls,
and has
groovy inherent string functions. Without hazards. Ask for a substring
out
of
the range of a string and you get the null string. Append to a string
and
it
just works.

I think you will find it limits maximum string lengths at 2^31-1 or
possibly 2^32-1. Older basics tend to limit it at 2^16-1 = 65535.

Well, in a 32-bit program, strings won't get much bigger than that.

It's not usually much of a limitation.


Memory was a rare expensive commodity when these languages were born.

I've written PB programs that manipulate huge data arrays, using
subscripts,
that run 4x as fast as the obvious c pointer equivalents. With an
afternoon of
playing with code and compiler optimizations, the c got close.

Only because you don't know what you are doing.


Oh, it was a senior c programmer who wrote the c version. It ran slower
than I
thought reasonable, so I tried it in PowerBasic, which only took a couple
of
minutes to write and run. It was a fairly simple signal averaging thing,
but on
big data sets.

Something is fishy here. Basic is an interpreted language.

PowerBasic is a very good optimized compiler. It can run useful FOR loops at
hundreds of MHz.

Be careful with that word "compiler". Interpreted languages compile
to byte code, not to native machine code. The byte code is executed by
a bit of software. In Java, this machine is called the JVM (Java
Virtual Machine).

PB is a real compiler. It lets you do inline assembly, too. In assembly, you can
refer to Basic variables and labels by name, so linkages are easy.


--

John Larkin Highland Technology Inc
www.highlandtechnology.com jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com

Precision electronic instrumentation

 

[josephkk]

On Wed, 16 Apr 2014 15:40:20 -0400, rickman <gnuarm@gmail.com> wrote:

I do this for anything fragile since it removes one less step in the
transmit, i.e. the guy on the delivery truck.

UPS customer center addresses are online. I don't know if this works
in the
UK.

Fedex always accepted will call shipments. UPS does it kind of
reluctantly.

They might, but they would still require photo-ID for the pickup to the
successful.

I don't think you are going to get around the photo-id thing. I still
don't get why you don't have a driver license with you. That is pretty
mandatory here in the US for most anything. I can't imagine being able
to go anywhere without it. I obviously must have it to drive and it is
required for flying as well. So how can you be working remotely without
it? I guess trains are a lot more practical in the UK, but I think you
need photo ID to board a train here as well.... not sure as I haven't
been on a train in years.

Nope, not unless you have to check baggage. Buy the ticket with your
computer, print it and get to the station on time and go board your train.
Not much worse than getting on the Muni or the light rail.

?-)