its all about the encoders !

google can quite easily make reference but until there is High quality encoders then its pretty pointless

making decoder plugins for IE and mac is actually pretty easy in comparison

hardware reference designes need to be seeded also to the likes of TI and STMicroelectronics before it will even start to be useful after all where do all the camera's now do mp4 come from...

its all about the encoders !

regards

John Jones

I started programming in HP Basic around 1974. Line numbers, gosub, the whole bit. I taught myself how to program from the tutorial programs included with the language. TUT01, ....

As I learned how to program I learned what not to do if you want to maintain your code. I learned how to program in blocks, subroutines, etc. virtually while still using BASIC as the tool. If you didn't learn how to be systematic in your coding, you would never be able to build large programs in BASIC. By large programs I mean 1000's to 10's of thousands of lines of code. (I wrote two large programs during this time in BASIC, a chess program and a FORTRAN emulator to do arbitrary precision arithmetic, which I wrote to be able to solve diff eq's to do solar system modeling among other things).

If I had written spaghetti code I never would've been able to debug these monsters. If you are a good programmer you build your own style and mechanisms to manage the complexity. When I went to college, I learned PASCAL, and then I ported my chess program to it in just a few weeks. I loved the structure, but also felt it straightjacketed me with some of its limitations.

Now, my favorite language is LISP, but I program more in C++ as it is the language most of the students I work with know. Over the years I've programmed in more languages than I can recall.

In looking at all the languages, each has its uses. Knowing many languages lets you think in more metaphors, and styles, so you can choose the best one for the problem you encounter. You can program horribly in any language, and you can code elegantly in any language. Learning how to think about how to solve problems logically, efficiently, and elegantly is the key to being a good programmer, not the particular language you are currently using.

In high school in 1974 our district (8 schools) used an HP access timesharing system. It ran the BASIC language. I was able to write a very short program that would cause the system to crash. Having discovered this bug in the system, I was able to bring down the entire district's computers at will. I had discovered this capability while exploring a new feature of BASIC. Fortunately for them, I was ethical and informed my teacher who at first didn't believe the exploit until I demonstrated it in front of her. We then contacted HP, gave them the code, and they came up with a patch within a couple of months. I'm not sure if anyone at HP can confirm this at this point.

I am sure that there are probably earlier exploits as well.

And as a side note, I was also a PLATO author in 1975 and greatly enjoyed working on that system.

The problem has been fixed, it was interference by some bolts.

"Late Saturday, the space station's commander, Jeffrey Williams, reported that bolts seemed to be causing the interference. He removed all eight bolts, saying the clearance would be tight but that the cover likely would fit. It did, with some coaxing Sunday."

http://apnews.excite.com/article/20100214/D9DS3UOO1.html

Wouldn't that depend on what else you got with it? Perhaps a romantic getaway after you turn it on to clean while you are away?

I like gifts that go together to tell a story, or set a mood.

My wife (she's an engineer, not quite a nerd), loves our roomba. I work in robotics, but she is much more into the roomba than I am. I guess it depends on the person.

Perhaps I need to get an iPad to calculate this -- lol

Crashed on my mac :) In any case, when emacs crashed for me it was well below the available memory limits on my machine. Not sure why it crashed though.

I just tried calculating log(500!) and it crashed emacs! Arbitrary precision up to its internal limits.

There's a difference?

I entirely disagree, depending on your definition of "smart." A program can be "smarter" than its smartest programmer in a particular field. For example, I can program a computer to play chess better than I can. I can program a computer to solve algebraic and calculus problems I'd never be able to tackle, and I am a good mathematician. I can foresee a program that can drive a car better than I can (smoother, fewer accidents, better gas mileage, etc.). Already there are programs that fly airplanes as good or better than fallible human pilots, or their programmers (who may not be able to fly at all). There are even adaptive algorithms that can cope with the loss of part of a wing, an engine, etc. very well (> human performance).

Even early AI showed that a program could diagnose diseases better than any given physician.

All of these are examples of programs "smarter" than their programmers. In the case of disease diagnosis, I doubt any of the programmers could do even a poor job at the task the program was good at.

What about hybrid cars, and electric vehicles? They have automatic transmission and achieve among the top fuel efficiencies. Would it even make sense for a prius to have a manual transmission?

Two books to look at Cormen et. al Intro to Algorithms, and Bentley's Programming Pearls. The second is more practical, the former is used in many CS Algorithms courses.

That's why they invented the size_t type!

I use this type to ref all arrays, etc. whenever possible.