Wikipedia gives the figures Budget $936,000 (estimated) [This is in agreement with the IMDb figure] Box office $1.6 million (US/Canada rentals, 1951) Compared to a lot of other movies, that is a rather low ROI. So I guess you are onto something.

As the Universe is still expanding, going from small to big, I think the answer is obvious. At least on the scale of the Universe.

They are "unnecessary" only if you accept indents and undents with no supporting braces. Braces and indents are the 2-factor element of program layout. You can equally well say that 2-factor authentication is "unneccessary" when you have already supplied a password. Some of us nevertheless think 2-factor is a good idea, both in authentication and in code layout.

In my student days, "correctness proofs" were the rage. Everyone were convinced that soon, a program would be able to prove (or disprove) that a program behaved according to specifications. The first real proof we learned in that course was not a program, but a logical proof that no program analyzer can, in the general case, detect every possible infinte loop. I did understand the proof then; I don't remember the details today, and even if I found the text, I would probably be unable to explain it to someone unfamiliar with it. But I know the proof exists (just like I know that there exists a proof that you cannot trisect an arbitrary angle); I trust the experts that the proof still holds.

To me, it seems obvious that you never have been in touch with a high quality static code analyzer. It also sounds like you most likely would turn down an offer to try a good one, because you know in advance that no good analyzers can exist. So it is a waste of time. You are in your full right to think so. I am in my full right to disagree with you.

I have similar problems stopping all these cries of "Censor him! Quiet him! Get him away from here! I do not want opposing arguments to what I say!" If these cries for censorship would cease, it would be much more quiet in here.

Hey, this is your third attempt in an hour to post this - the previous two has been removed. Expect this one to be removed as well! The problem is that your definition of "harassment" includes stating opinions and arguments that do not agree with yours. You obviously do not want any opposition, but demand the right to have the last word. When I do state opposition, you tell me to shut up, go away, silence. You do not accept my opinions but will censor them from the discussion. When I refer to the right to free speech, Universal Declaration of Human Righs Article 19, you take that as "abuse", "following you around", and "insults". It doesn't look like the admins agree with your judgement. Stating differing opinions in a follow up post, and defending it by referring to UDHR-19 (which is roughly corresponding to the First Amendment, in case you refuse to look up something non-American), seems to be within limits of the acceptable on CP. And there is no reason to keep my user name secret. Look up all the posts I have made the last few days, but don't forget to, in every single case, look up the post I am answering to, and include that in your judgement. I also suggest that you do not use trump case if you want to follow up.

Funny thing - getting the hangover before your night out.

englebart wrote:

One great feature of FTP is that a control node (C) can initiate a transfer from server A to sever B. Very useful if C was on a slower WAN. I am not sure if GOPHER supports that operation.

This is long ago, so my memory is a little rusty ... But I think Gopher mainly served as an FTP wrapper without any FTP protocol machine of its own. So if it just let all options through to the 'real' FTP, I guess that what you describe might have been available. But this is 30+ years ago! I must admit that I do not clearly remember neither Gopher/ftp user interface nor the protocol elements involved.

Do they call the candidate that?? That is next to unbelievable.

Eternal Flame:

I know God had six days to work. So he wrote it all in Lisp.

I never managed to find out what he did on day six. According to my copy of the Bible, on day five he first created the animals, then man (verse 24-30). Verse 31: And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day. That is the end of chapter 1. Chapter 2 starts: Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. And on the seventh day God finished his work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work that he had done. So what happened on day six? To me, it seems as if he had a 5 working days week!

But I bought two new CDs on Saturday, and the fee for my fiber connection is due today! What should I do???

The most interesting part is when he was asked about this quote. He didn't positively confirm that he had said it, but if so, it must have been in in discussions about how much of the 8086 1Mbyte total address space should be reserved for for the OS, drivers and such, and how much should the user control. His opinion was that it was fair to reserve 6/16 of the address space for OS & drivers, with 10/16 of the address space for user programs. In that context, the statement makes perfect sense. I am willing to stand up and defend Bill Gates.

Probably wouldn't help you much

Richard Deeming wrote:

But if it's a homework assignment to teach the student about recursion, as jschell suggested...

... it is a very poor choice. :-) When teaching, I did give my students a recursive problem statement to solve. Most of the solutions were recursive. The main point of this exercise was to, in the next round, show how some recursions could be rolled out to loops; the problem statement was selected for this specific purpose: Learning when not to use recursion, even when it looks like the straightforward, obvious solution. I never wold give my students a 'linear' problem statement (such as the one in the subject line), hoping that they would discover 'Hey, this iteration can be reformualated as a recursive method! Let's do that!' If I were a teacher of higher math, I might use something in that direction to teach them to identify recursive structures. But I was a programming teacher. That is very different.

You seem to suggest that a higher pitched voiced conveys more information, thus requiring more bits. I dare to challenge that assumption.

Reminds me of a simulator I was in touch with (as the councellor for a student project using it - the students did all the work :-)), for the 8051. So it was not a general simulator but specific for this one controller. This had the great advantage that the simulator knew all the internal working of the chip and could provide a graphical display of how a pulse flowed from one internal unit to the other on, as we single stepped through the clock cycles. The simulator was so well made that even when you single stepped by clock pulses, it managed to generate 'real' output on the PC's COM port, where another PC was hooked up for displaying it (and also provide character input). 8051 is a simple processor, but an actual, industrial level one that I believe is still in use (at least it was five years ago). It is not a toy, not historical (well, that may be argued), not experimental - that gives the experience some real value. I am surprised that you were able to obtain the schematics for Mark I and Eniac, though! Mark I wasn't an electronic computer, but built from relays. So I guess you had to re-interpret the relay signals and mechanical equipment controlled by the relays as if they were logic gates ... Must have been fun! For being curious: With the Eniac, did you model it valve-by-valve (there were 18000+ of them!), or did you see them as groups performing a function (such as a flip-flop) to model that function as such, independent of the original valve realization of the same? (Since both Mark I and Eniac were decimal machines, not binary ones, I guess you couldn't condsider adders etc. as logical units, simulating them by binary addition!) Do you happen to have any links to this software package (I suspect that would be to a technical museum!), and to the Mark I and Eniac descriptions you based your implementation on?

I guess that obermd is essentially referring to various effects of pipelining. Each individual instruction may spend 5-6 (or more) clock cycles total in various stages of processing: Instruction fetch, instruction decoding, operand fetch, *instruction execution*, storing results, ... The *instruction execution* (e.g. adding) is done in a single clock cycle, but that is only a part of the processing. In parallell with this instruction doing its add (say), the previous instruction is stuffing away its results, the next instruction is having operands fetched, the one two steps behind is being decoded and the one three steps behind is being fetched. So the CPU may be doing one add (say) per cycle, and in the same cycle one of each of the other operations, on different instructions. For one given instruction, it takes a number of cycles to have all the different processing steps done, though.

obermd wrote:

An example of this would be PUSH AX, POP AX, which older processors would dutifully execute and newer processors would simply cut out of the execution stream.

I wasn't aware of this optimization. What surprises me, though, is that compilers let anything like this through their optimization stages at the code generating level. More specifically: That code generators lets such things through so frequently that it justifies CPU mechanisms to compensate for the lack of compile time optimzation. I guess it takes quite a handful of gates to analyze the instruction stream to identify such noop sequences and pick them out of the instruction stream. I was working (at instruction level, not hardware) on a machine which in its first version had a few hardware optimization for special cases, that were removed in later versions: The special cases occured so rarely that on a given gate budget (which you always have when designing a CPU), you could gain a much larger general speedup by spending your gates in other parts. Do you have specific examples of CPUs that eliminate 'noop sequences' like the one you describe? (Preferably with link to documentation.)

In my student days - this was in 1979 - one of the lab exercises were with an AMD 2901 Evaluation Kit. The 2901 was a 4-bit "bit slice" ALU, with carry in and out, so you could hook two of them together for an 8-bit machine, four for a 16-bit or 8 for a 32-bit. We had only a single one. With the ALU came a memory for 64 words of 16 bit microcode: Flip 16 switches, press Deposit, flip again, press Deposit ... 64 times to fill the entire microcode memory. We hooked up each of the 16 bits to the control lines for the ALU: Load accumulator from bus, dump accumulator to bus ... actually, today I have only a vague memory of what the control signals were. The 'sequencer' was a separate chip that selected one word from microcode RAM, transferring it to the ALU control inputs. It had a microcode address counter; one of the control signals incremented this counter. We did succeed in microcoding an instruction for reading four switches (the "bus") as data, adding another 4 bit value, and display the result on 4 LEDs (plus one for the carry line). This was an exceptionally valuable lab exercize to learn what (an extremely simpified) CPU is like in its very basic mechanisms. If 2901 Evaluation Kits were still on the market, I would recommend it to anyone who wants a true hands on experience with a CPU. (If you happen to find one on eBay: Be prepared to do some thorough studying of the ALU before trying to microcode it; microcoding is not to be don on intuition!) Of course: Anything like the 2901 kit can teach you only the basic techniques of simple, unsophisticated computers, the way they were built in the old days. I see other people refer to 'modern' CPUs as if they have little to do with what an evaluation kit can teach you - but you can immediately forget jumping directly onto a 'modern' CPU. It is so complex, contains so many fancy tricks for speeding it up, that you will be be completely blown down. Better start with something that you have a chance to really understand, and then add the fancy techniques one by one. If you get as far as to thoroughly understand even a third of them, you will be qualified as Chief Engineer at AMD or Intel :-) Or, to phrase it differently: Don't expect to understand the fancy techniques. You may get as far as to understand what they want to achieve, but don't expect to understand how.