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In what way is RISC (a horizontal encoding designed to be efficient to decode) different from a 118-bit uop (a horizontal encoding of microarchitectural to-dos in subsequent pipeline stages)? If you can explain without adding yet another shape-shifting definition of what RISC is, or without pigeon-holing it, that would be awesome. From my perspective, a uOP and a RISC instruction are absolutely identical in intent, which is the point of RISC to begin with: the intent to be efficient to decode.

I'd like to try my hand at building my own iCE40-based motherboard for the Kestrel some day, but something like that would be at least two to three years into the future minimum, especially at my current rate of progress working solo. It's best to not have any expectations.

No, it went out of stock after I'd put the site up. I'll remove the link (or find an alternative to something that describes what the Nexys-2 is) when I go to update docs.

I have not selected a replacement board yet (since my Nexys-2 still works fine, I intend on continuing to use it for the time being). If, after I post a complete set of Verilog sources, someone wants to try porting to the hardware of their choice, I'll be happy to include relevant links on the site. (Or until I change boards myself, whichever comes first.)

I tried to port Oberon, but was not yet successful in getting the compiler fully debugged. I also need to finish the system image linker so I can generate bootable images. For this reason, I pushed ahead with putting Forth in firmware.

However, I do intend on completing Oberon at some point (or trying to solicit help in that area; porting OSes is most definitely NOT my strong suit). Instead of putting in ROM, though, it'll be bootable off of SD card.

Kestrel-3 is software emulation only at this point. However, after making some last minute touches to the system firmware (a dialect of eForth for both simplicity and hackability), I will switch over to working on Verilog. I already have video, keyboard, and GPIO cores written, so I only need to focus on the CPU.

That's the plan.

I'm planning on using a soft-core processor because FPGA dev boards are plentiful and relatively inexpensive. My plans are to await silicon from LowRISC project before considering real glass.

Yes, Kestrel-4 (at least as documented on that page) is an April Fools joke. :)

Oh, I'm thick! I see what's happening now!

The problem is it doesn't produce any gain in clarity for the purposes I'm using it for. I think for the acceptance tests, it's use is fine.

I can see if it were part of the public API, there's an argument that an interface could be used, but even there, I'm not sure it'd aid readability.

Semantically, however, they're of course identical.

Goodness, I'm confused. I'm going to need a lot of time to digest this. That said, much discussion about ideal way of writing Gophercloud happened on the #go-nuts IRC channel, and nobody objected to what I have now as being unidiomatic. You're the first!

Deeply nested closures are definitely a problem, but I usually solve that by factoring closures out into top-level functions of their own.

That said, one of Gophercloud's goals is to be as idiomatic as possible. Are you available on #go-nuts if I have questions? I'd like to play with this technique some more and get a feel for it before applying it to (and risk breaking) gophercloud's existing API.

Both Erlang and Go's concurrency models are strongly influenced by Hoare's work in Communicating Sequential Processes. That certainly qualifies. You appear to be interpreting "some attributes" as a deep-dive analysis into the unique traits of what makes Erlang, well, Erlang. That was never the intention, and I'm not sure what motivated this.

Actor model libraries exist in various states of maturity for Go, as well.

I'd also like to point out that having a base-line level of functionality often allows for domain-specific extensions to be written, either as adjunct libraries (c.f., libcloud and rackspace-monitoring libraries for Python), or as integrated extensions in succeeding versions (how Emacs evolved over time).

You're right to think it's impossible to keep up; even getting this far, I've heard rumors and tremors about up-coming V3 APIs in several areas. I'm sure by the time V3 support is contributed, V4 will be on the drawing board. Thankfully, the general availability of a V3 API does not usually preclude the continuing support for V2.

All we can do is deliver value to our users in a consumable format while trying to remain aware of any changes in our ecosystem.

I reached out to the gcloud team by opening a Github issue making them aware of Gophercloud's URL. I'd love to see more contributors to Gophercloud. So far, though, haven't heard anything back.

We're currently ahead of gcloud in that we have working code for server creation and actions. Much yet remains to be finished/implemented, however.

That's a positive for Ruby only when you're not running on a cloud server, or when you are cost-conscious about the amount of electricity you're sucking in a data center somewhere.

That being said, that Ruby is 10x slower than Go isn't that much of a surprise. It's not a string-interpreted language like the BASICs of old. It's interpreting byte-codes, and anyone who's ever written a 6502 or Z-80 emulator (essentially the same thing) can tell you, on average, most byte-codes take 10x as long to run as the corresponding function written in in-line C.

Computer science -- it works!

If I may ask, how long ago was this? Thanks.

I have to go through several levels to do that, but I'll try. :)

Just a head's up though -- I'm considering migrating the repository to the github.com/rackerlabs organization within a week or so, for consistency with other, more officially supported, API bindings.

While Gorax isn't on the "official" list of bindings supported, I'm taking it upon myself, as a Racker and Go enthusiast, to maintain the Gorax project.

Please see the project page at github.com/racker/gorax. Thanks!

Hello; Sam Falvo here, a Rackspace quality engineer. I'm working on the Gorax project to offer Go bindings to Rackspace's APIs. I encourage you to watch the github.com/racker/gorax project to remain informed of updates.

Progress is kind of slow at the moment, but is proceeding more or less steadily. It's also the newest language binding, so it will of course not be as feature complete as, say, the Python or Node bindings.

Ahh, remember back in the good old days when programs had .PRG extensions or file-types? Nobody cared what language a program was written in back then either, as long as it just worked.

Computers and programming don't have to be so complicated. People make them complicated.

Correct definition of 'cat' -- a tool to concatenate one or more files sequentially into a single output stream. E.g., cat file1 file2 file3 >output-file

what is wrong with... -- "grep word file" takes fewer keys to type and uses fewer resources (important on a heavily loaded server with tons of processes which may well prove compromised and you're trying to peruse the logs for evidence. Been there, done that, got the t-shirt, and donated it to the local shelter).

It's Google's service, it's Google's web-spiders, and it's Google's attempt to deliver useful content to their own customers. How is it NOT in Google's interest to police the links they present to visitors of Google's own properties?

If you don't like it, use Yahoo!.

That's more of a standard tool, not a standard library. Rather, a library is a collection of reusable components. A Standard Library, then, are pre-equipped collections of reusable components. Here, we define "reusable" as invokable from within the language, as first-class constructs.

Even if CPAN was a standard library, that which you install from it is clearly not, which is what the argument to date has centered around.

To prove a point.

I don't believe this effect is restricted to the computer-related industries. I distinctly remember there being some rather vicious altercations between artists, particularly during the Renaissance period, over whose style was better.

What it boils down to is reputation. Trolls seek only to reduce the reputation of his victim.

What are the stakes, why are they low, and what can be done to elevate them?

"I am getting really sick of people ragging on TV."

I would suggest getting a bucket then.

"Have you been watching TV lately?"

Have you observed the people who regularly watch TV? As a general rule, people know far more about what diet plan their latest football jocks are on than they know about world geography. I particularly loved this demonstration of this simple fact: http://youtube.com/watch?v=qUYm50jQscw

Heh, all I can say is, "Poor Australia."

Learning to sit seiza will obsolete this solution.

"Excercising my freedom does not give me the right to take away someone elses freedom."

Nonetheless, in this hypothetical situation, you failed in your quest to lay Megan. Therefore, by your own words, it is your own fault.

This myth, that it is your own fault if you fail to achieve your own goals, forms the foundation for conservative viewpoint in this nation. I'm not here to preach the gospel of the Left (they have their own mistaken views too), but you have to concede, as heart-breaking as it is, that the Right isn't always either.

Recognizing a situation for what it actually is necessitates that we take human behavior as an animal into consideration when observing our own behavior. Taken in the original context of the statement, the author's claim that our failures are "our" fault is an indictment, not merely an observation.

"Failure" is never just a black-and-white situation. We live in a complex, chaotic world. It's time it's addressed as such.

An excellent post. I'm finding this is increasingly a problem too. I often find my greatest productivity in coding comes when there is a power outage. Not only am I forced to not browse the Internet, I'm just plain forced to NOT use a computer at ALL. Pencil and paper only.

If you need to have a network in place, while still preventing the urge to browse, you might want to try using some alternative networking infrastructure. Consider using AX.25 to transfer files, for example. Unless you configure TCP/IP to tunnel through AX.25, you won't be able to browse or use the Internet. But, you still have connectivity to your work-related file servers, since they'll (presumably also) have connectivity via AX.25 too.

The point is that philosophy is not about getting a claim and considering it substantial to eliminate other probabilities.

But this is precisely what PG identified as being wrong with philosophy as it is currently taught.

Metaphysics is not feasible they are part of a material world.

What?

they react with it of course but it exists whether you can accept it or not.

If it reacts with the material world, it leaves the realm of philosophy, and enters the realm of testability (and hence, science). It ceases to be metaphysics, and becomes normal physics.

Everyone is trying to understand what happened to all that antimatter that was created during the bing bang. For every molecule there is another anti.

As I understand it, we have a pretty good idea as to what happened to all the anti-particles. Nature seeks the state of equilibrium at all times. Anti-particles would be attracted to their opposites, and destroy each other; this would be detected today as the cosmic background radiation, and represents the boundary in time at which the universe ceases to be opaque.

The question should be, why is there more matter than anti-matter? This is the actual question that is being pondered by cosmologists.

And what about time? who can explain that mystical concept?

Einstein.

In all these strange ideas, it's impossible to be satisfied that everything is only molecules.

These ideas happen to be testable in a laboratory, and the results are reproducable.

If everything is a chemical random chain reaction how can we all have similar ideas or visions of the future?

Because we communicate with each other. You didn't learn what you know today in a total vacuum. You were raised in a family. You went to school. Everything you know and value in your life is through indoctrination via institutions external to you. As you grow older, you internalize them. And as we all know from studying everything from perceptrons to propeganda, the more you beat something into someone's brain, the more they're going to accept it as truth.

This is what happened in philosophy. Three Greeks decided to write down what they thought they knew. Three people. Only three. Yet, they shaped the course of ALL humanity, directly or indirectly. We're still feeling the repurcussions of their thoughts today. The very fact we're having this discussion is because of them.

Only recently did Chemistry claim it's independence.

You state this as if it were some kind of political movement, just in its ways, and noble in its endeavors. In fact, most chemists of yesteryear thought that chemistry (which evolved from alchemy, remember, and had nothing to do with physics at all) was not related to physics. But as time progressed, there was an ever-increasing unification between physics and chemistry. Today, a chemist will more often than not agree that it's a narrow subset of what we call physics.

It's very highly specialized, but it is still physics. When I was most recently going through college, that was the first thing that the instructor mentioned. Chemistry is so thoroughly influenced by quantum mechanics that to deny it is itself pseudo-science. Nearly all of the early atomic research was performed by chemists (who, at the time, did NOT think of chemistry as a branch of physics). It was only when chemists wanted to peer into the behavior of their chemical reactions (from ionic bonds to fission, and all points in between) that the seeds for what we now call Quantum Physics were planted.

No, the realization that (quantum) physics and chemistry are essentially concerned with the same things is itself a very recent phenomina -- late 20th century at the earliest.