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When you write Objective-C code, it eventually turns into machine code – the raw 1s and 0s that the ARM CPU understands. In between Objective-C code and machine code, though, is the still human-readable assembly language. Understanding assembly gives you insight into your code for debugging and optimizing, helps you decipher the Objective-C runtime, and also satisfies that inner nerd curiosity. Think iOS is a toy OS? Hate all those square brackets in Obj-C? A little Assembly might help.
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We have this trope in programming that you should hate the code you wrote six months ago. This is a figurative way of saying that you should be constantly learning and assimilating new ideas, so that you can look at what you were doing earlier this year and have new ways of doing it. It would be more accurate, though less visceral, to say “you should be proud that the code you wrote six months ago was the best you could do with the knowledge you then had, and should be able to ways to improve upon it with the learning you’ve accomplished since then”. Beware of Setting the Bozo Bit, including on your younger self.
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This session provides an overview of several Sysinternals tools, including Process Monitor, Process Explorer, and Autoruns, focusing on the features useful for malware analysis and removal. These utilities enable deep inspection and control of processes, file system and registry activity, and autostart execution points. You will see demos for their malware-hunting capabilities through several real-world cases that used the tools to identify and clean malware, and conclude by performing a live analysis of a Stuxnet infection’s system impact. Mark Russinovich goes hunting for malware.
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You can offer too much code. By this I mean something subtly but critically different from “you can write too much code,” as when you are needlessly complicated or verbose. Offering too much code means that you’re giving users of the public interface of your classes too many options. Before my TDD days, this was something with which I constantly struggled. Consider carefully where your classes fall on the functional-immutable-mutable spectrum.
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Oh yeah, I hear you, I hear you. "My StringUtils class, has this toUppercase() method and I test this very method, right?" Well, not really. What you really test is the functionality that the StringUtils provides, and because this functionality is so trivial that it fits within one method, this makes you think that you test a method. But in reality you test a functionality. Isn't it exactly the difference between the test-first and test-last approaches?
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Associating numbers with specific characters has proved necessary to allow automated telegraph printers (teleprinters) and then computers to represent text. The most widely used mapping between numbers and letters was that approved on June 17, 1963, by the American Standards Association. It is the American Standard Code for Information Interchange, better known as ASCII. Make a wish and blow out the candles: iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii
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Once at a picnic, I saw mathematicians crowding around the last game I would have expected: Tic-tac-toe. As you may have discovered yourself, tic-tac-toe is terminally dull. There’s no room for creativity or insight.... But the mathematicians at the picnic played a more sophisticated version... The extra dimensions add a little challenge to a dusty old game.
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Today, pretty much everyone has a CPU, a DSP and a GPU, buried somewhere in their PC, phone, car, etc. Most don't know or care that they bought any of these, but they did. Will everyone, at some future point, also buy an FPGA? The market size of FPGAs today is about 1% of the annual global semiconductor sales (~$3B vs ~$300B). Will FPGA eventually become a must-have, or will its volume remain relatively low? Programmability is a feature, not just a tax on efficiency.
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While your quote there is a good one the article is not that well. I had trouble getting past his gaping error in power consumption:
Quote: …we estimated that high-end FPGAs implementing demanding DSP applications … consume on the order of 10 watts, while high-end DSPs consume roughly 2-3 watts. Our benchmark results have shown that high-end FPGAs can support roughly 10 to 100 times more channels on this benchmark than high-end DSPs…
So for that benchmark, FPGAs offer 10x-100x the runtime performance, and 2x-30x the energy efficiency of DSPs - quite impressive!
Ahhh... the FPGA is actually 3x worse on power is what that says.
Anyway, I continued. He then went into to say how it "cheats" but not really by including DSP slices and refers back to how much faster it is now etc.
What it seems the writers is failing to realize is FPGAs MUST be better than high end DSPs and many other chips sets because of the purpose (which he claimed in the beginning is not their purpose). Putting a fixed chip set on them to enhance them makes sense. Especially to further enhance/design new DSP chips.
Programmability is a feature. However FPGAs will never make it to the consumer. It simply does not make sense. Thats not to say that some other technology won't come along and provide us reprogramable CPUs and such. But FPGAs as they stand are intended to design such circutry.
WITH THAT SAID, there are cases where there are FPGAs on board various devices and users are already using them and unaware. However this is not because they are intended to be reprogrammed. It is purely separation of design and development. On company will make a board with various chips and hand of to another and give them better hardware control with an on-board FPGA. That company will then program the FPGA and resell the board in some other device. That company could also strap another FPGA on for other companies to integrate with.
Once design is done however anywhere in the chain it is likely cheaper to remove the FPGA and have the company sell you their component with a provided chip set.
Truth is though technology moves so fast we never get to that phase. We end up with the tech being obsoleted before the SOC (system on chip) can be made and provided. HOWEVER, we also obsolete it before the FPGA is ever "reporgrammed". The only purpose of it was for design parallelism.
Computers have been intelligent for a long time now. It just so happens that the program writers are about as effective as a room full of monkeys trying to crank out a copy of Hamlet.
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By day, David Auld is an Offshore Installation Manager (OIM) in the oil and gas industry. But when the production platform is humming along without him, Auld indulges his hobby as a devout “petrol-head” (car enthusiast). He also finds time to feed a passion for programming, which led to him earning a 2012 BSC Honours Degree in Computing. Surprisingly, these three facets of the native Scotsman all converged when Auld won the Entertainment Category of the Intel App Innovation Contest. From Top Gear to Top Winner: Our own Dave Auld wins!
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Congratulations, Dave!
/ravi
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Thomas Ptacek tweeted yesterday that "If you're not learning crypto by coding attacks, you might not actually be learning crypto." Judging by the number of twitter "favourites" and "retweets" of this comment, it seems to have struck a chord; but with all respect to Thomas, I absolutely disagree. Not only is it possible to learn cryptography without writing a line of code, but coding attacks is entirely useless for learning about modern cryptography; the best route to learning modern cryptography is a study of mathematical proofs. Attacking modern security is mostly looking for bugs in code, not the underlying cryptography.
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We are shocked, shocked…[^]
Is it just me or does the entire news media — as well as all the agitators and self-righteous bloviators on both sides of the aisle — not understand even the rudiments of electronic intercepts and the manner in which law enforcement actually uses such intercepts? It would seem so.
If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.-John Q. Adams You must accept one of two basic premises: Either we are alone in the universe, or we are not alone in the universe. And either way, the implications are staggering.-Wernher von Braun Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.-Albert Einstein
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and he lost me immediately at "inevitable and understandable"
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Bit long and rambling but he makes a good point.
"If you think it's expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur." Red Adair.
Those who seek perfection will only find imperfection
nils illegitimus carborundum
me, me, me
me, in pictures
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TL;DR; The police have been "data gathering" for years! What's your beef!??!
If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.-John Q. Adams You must accept one of two basic premises: Either we are alone in the universe, or we are not alone in the universe. And either way, the implications are staggering.-Wernher von Braun Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.-Albert Einstein
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I think we all need to buy those applications we can find at the Apple AppStore which enable us to summarize our daily activities and post it on Facebook.
Rather, we might as well mail it straight to NSA so that they are spared the effort of going through Facebook.
I have always felt that rather than carrying cellphones which report our whereabouts to the provider which data has to be summoned by the NSA we might as well have a chip implanted in our bodies powered by our own muscle movements that directly transmits our locations to the NSA.
One chip to rule them all!
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I'm interested in people's current predictions on what will happen to the various languages over the next few years. Java has had a bad press in recent years but has a major new release. Is this a new lease of life, particularly with Android taking off so rapidly? What languages and frameworks are on your radar today... and tomorrow?
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Did that get lost in the mail for a few years?
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Terrence Dorsey wrote: What languages and frameworks are on your radar today... and tomorrow?
Still learning Python - a nice but boring language. I like Perl better, crazy as it sounds.
Also C++ 11.
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Terrence Dorsey wrote: What languages and frameworks are on your radar today... and tomorrow?
Java and Android.
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Norm .droid wrote: Java and Android.
At least do yourself a favor and ditch Eclipse. They introduced something based on IntelliJ: Android Studio[^]
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At the moment its .net but then I write in house software where I work and Windows 8 is a very very long way off (years more than likely).
Every day, thousands of innocent plants are killed by vegetarians.
Help end the violence EAT BACON
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Many years ago, back in Uni, I saw 2 guys in a computer lab writing a whole programming assignment without running it even once. The program was of relatively decent size written in C and consequently there were hundreds of compilation errors. That’s so silly, I thought.... After graduation I used to be a C++ programmer. The syntax sometimes was quite tricky and you would often compile after every new line of code. Sometimes, you would dare to write a whole function, just to find 10 compilation errors. Since then the way I code has changed with help of modern IDE... Do IDEs help you code better, or just keep up with ever more complicated systems?
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