Larkin, Power BASIC cannot be THAT good:

No it isn't. A 32 bit fixed point or scaled integer can represent and specify a position with 1 micron resolution over a 4km range.

The largest commonly used plotters are about A0 or a couple of metres wide. You can do 1000ppi and 65.535" width in 16 bits though it tends to be limiting.

It only gets really hairy if you want to zoom in dynamically. Floating point for graphics is certainly *easier* to work with but it isn't essential.

Integer or fixed point implementations are one of the ways it is done - especially on smaller portable systems with limited grunt like phones.

Regards, Martin Brown

On a sunny day (Tue, 9 Jun 2009 16:01:21 -0700 (PDT)) it happened snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com wrote in :

Nice site :-) Too bad the moron did everythin gin .pdf that loads slow and is useless in a browser. Blame that o adobe (WTF source code in pdf??????). So I deleted that bookmark again.

On a sunny day (Tue, 9 Jun 2009 16:00:51 -0700 (PDT)) it happened snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com wrote in :

I use PostgresQL, IIRC it is written in C. And I use PhpPgAdmin as frontend (written in php). Who needs MS SQL server? The whole source is small: -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 11609501 2006-05-24 11:20 postgresql-8.1.4.tar.bz2 Here is some more info on their site:

Runs on MS windows too it seems. Did you by any chance *pay* anything for the MS SQL thing?

On a sunny day (Tue, 09 Jun 2009 16:58:05 -0700) it happened John Larkin wrote in :

Good business decision.

Google "spreadsheet errors." It's hard to imagine a more dangerous way to program important stuff.

My hardware and my software work. Both are reliable, documented, reproducible, formerly controlled, bug-free, and profitable.

Do you find that amusing?

You can only reasonably hash on one field, and I know of no way to, say, search for embedded substrings using hashing.

A lot of old tricks made up for limited memory or slow CPUs. Nowadays, with GHz processors and Gbyte rams and 7200 RPM disks, brute force is better than that stuff. It's not elegant, but it works. Some people love the tricks for their own sake.

John

Yes. Most programming, as a process, is broken.

John

I recently hired our first official Software Engineer. Up to now, various engineers programmed as needed. He's very good - does some good hobby-level electronics already - and really wants to learn more about hardware. We're going to let him do a pc board, layout and all, by himself. Rare animal.

Still scary, though, letting the software culture into our shop.

John

bz2

Our data are hosted by MS SQL Server. I didn't personally buy it - my department did, from various outside contractors. If I told you the full story your eyes would burn out in horror.

Michael

n a browser.

You're impatient. Consider that the book, new, costs US$100+ on amazon.com.

In Firefox I just right-click, Save Link As. I did it while reading the various chapters.

Check out Chapter 6, and re-evaluate whether this is junk to you. I had no idea the LEA instruction could add so efficiently.

Michael

^^^^^^^ formally

Good one, huh?

John

Databases can be problematical. Lots of big organizations have been pitched into chaos for a year or so by signing up with Oracle.

John

Only if you look at it from a technical or academic perspective. From a business perspective, the process is quite well tuned.

Like anything, performance and reliability are worth whatever the market is willing to pay for them, no more and no less. If the market prefers cheap crap over paying for quality, you get cheap crap.

ar.bz2

Ah, Oracle. We may go there yet.

Michael

But in my experience, the worst software is the most expensive. A lot of the best software is free.

John

One of my biggish customers, in one annual report, notes that "we have almost recovered from the Oracle conversion." Occasionally I get their ECOs and they make absolutely no sense; they don't seem to understand them either.

Wasn't it Oracle that trashed HP server deliveries for about 6 months?

John

On a sunny day (Wed, 10 Jun 2009 08:42:12 -0700 (PDT)) it happened snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com wrote in :

So I looked up that chapter. But you know. these days, I write in C, and use gcc as compiler. I have come to trust gcc, its code generation, its libraries. So I could not care less if the processor targeted (I use other platforms then x86 too) had a hardware instruction to do every thing my program needs, As long the as the compiler knows it :-)

This is the advantage of C, or as J. Larkin would state: 'Power BASIC', or any high level language. I did some asm programming of x86 in the long ago past, but since 486 DX2 66 MHz I have not kept up with what Intel did, and do not care. The only time I may ever look at x86 or similar complex processor's asm is for fun at the gcc output to see what it generates.

I use asm on PIC (only asm, I have that C compiler, but asm is closer to the hardware for me). In my view with good compilers for the sort of thing I do no asm is needed. It may be needed if you write a codec and need max speed perhaps.

There are several useful graphics APIs that can be called from C.

How fast do you have to go anyways? The latest H264 encoders use Nvidia graphics cards as hardware accelerator. that is so specialised, if you design that sort of soft, then yes, maybe you need to be wizard in x86 asm:

See what happens when you send too much time arguing with dimbulb?

that

for

No kidding. We had a half dozen programmers at Microdyne. They had to be separated from everyone else in the complex. I always found it quite odd that any decent tech or engineer can remember the details on dozens of products, but most programmers can't remember anything from the last program they completed. My guess is that real engineering requires real logic, and most programmers just fake it.

Then tell Sloman. No one would miss him.