andars

This was my understanding of that comment. How else could that be read? I am not able to think of another interpretation of that statement or a context when increased access times would be desired.

> ... just, you know ... you know ...

Yes, I know. Do you? You made the suggestion that skip lists are inferior to ordered lists, not me. (good for "increasing access times on ordered lists") I'm still perplexed as to your rationale for that statement.

what's your method for quickly searching an ordered list? Binary search falls apart since you don't have free random access.

If you are interested in this, I would recommend looking up the Extempore programming language/environment and some of Andrew Sorensen's live coding performances. Even if live coding is not your thing, it's definitely interesting.

This link: http://www.sunburst-design.com/papers/CummingsSNUG2002SJ_FIF... was posted in the previous discussion on ring buffers. It provides a solution that seems to me to be the best of any I have seen. See page 2, section 2.2. For a buffer of size 2^N, use N+1 bit indices. If all bits of the indices are equal, the buffer is empty. If all but the most significant are equal, the buffer is full.

It's a dangerous business, going onto the internet. You step into a site, and if you don't keep your feet, there is no knowing what you might hear.

It shouldn't. 'Assembly' is the textual code, 'assembler' is the tool used to convert the text to machine code. I don't think the name is worth an argument, but your suggestion is no more correct than that is already in the title.

This proof's use of "clear" is sorta reasonable, since they are probably assuming the reader is familiar with alternating series with decreasing terms.

I would agree that it is sometimes fairly annoying. "Proof by intimidation"

A: "it is clear that X"

B: "Sorry, why is it clear?"

A: "No, it is CLEAR that X!"

Could you explain why the left hand side must be zero?

No. The Feynman Lectures were the lectures in his physics classes at Caltech in the 60s. The notes were adapted into the three volumes of the book.

(2014)

And thus the boolean algebra entered digital circuit design. Shannon was such a boss.

That wasn't the purpose of the war. Here's Lincoln, 1862: "I would save the Union. … If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it; and if could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it."

Japan was "repeatedly slapped in the face" because of their increasing militarization, invasion of China (also Rape of Nanking), alliance with Italy and Germany, desire for control of all of East Asian (the Co-Prosperity Sphere), etc. The US response seems totally reasonable to me.

I appreciate this comment, but I disagree with your statement that "pithy quotes are stupid". Perhaps nothing has changed, but it certainly seems that pessimism, worry, and fear are far more prevalent than optimism now, so I see nothing wrong with a hope for an increase in widespread hope and optimism.

I understand. I was asking for an elucidation of the comment that it was "not what the astronauts or flight controllers believed" and is a "poor abbreviation".

Sure, but it wasn't just any room.

As a sidenote, it wasn't a Saturn V.

For an alternate take on it, see this positive review: http://www.maa.org/press/maa-reviews/zero-the-biography-of-a....

Important to note that the "closed room" was the Command Module on top of a Saturn launch vehicle.

I've read the book, and Kranz definitely says at least once that the phrase "failure is not an option" is a good summary of what the flight controllers believed. Could you perhaps elaborate on what you mean by your comment?

It certainly isn't uncommon. I didn't mean that it is strange in comparison to other microcontrollers, just that Harvard can be strange for the author of an emulator, depending on their background.

I'm guessing you meant to comment on the vm thread.

They probably aren't describing them very succinctly, because there isn't really a benefit to dropping information in the complete instruction set reference. If you don't want all of the information, look at the instruction set summary instead (~40 pages in volume 1).

These things aren't written to be brief, they are written to be complete.

I can't comment on the difficulty of emulation, but it's probably 'annoying' because it isn't von Neumann, which makes it a tad bit strange.

FYI, your first function in `rcc.c` returns a pointer to a stack-allocated array, which will likely cause you problems.

"Intel loves complexity"

Intel loves performance, because people want performance. Complexity is the cost of increased performance. As an example, I would guess that of the ~2000 pages of the instruction set reference, at a minimum 1000 pages document the various SIMD instructions. You don't need those, or the floating point operations, or SHA instructions, but I don't see any harm done by making them available.

Famous? Are you referring to performance or just clock frequency? The Z80 takes more cycles to do the same operation as the 6502, but it also (typically) had a higher max clock frequency, mostly making up for it.

Another interesting fact: If I'm remembering correctly, some models of the PDP8 had only a 1 bit ALU to reduce the purchase price. I thought this was pretty wild when I first heard it, but I guess the performance hit was ok if you could gain access to a computer at all.

Cool project. Virtual machines and assembly are always fun.

Not sure if the C compiler is quite ready for the headline, though. I was trying to get the test.c program to run on the vm, but after compiling and assembling, the vm just hangs. Is that expected?

Got it. I would have been happiest with this on the front page, but I just happen to really like reading lists. No matter.