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It also depends on the test. MCP by itself is kind of a meaningless certification as it simply means that you have passed one of the many tests, and not all of them even have to do with programming - e.g. there are some Office certifications that'll give you that.

She, on the other hand, qualified by taking a C# WinForms exam. Also according to the same, she passed an exam for ASP.NET two years later - judging by this, she was on her track to become an MCAD (MS certified app developer), with only one exam remaining. I went through that myself, albeit at an older age (started in 14, got my MCAD by 16) - it's not exactly hard, but it does require that you know how to code, and know C# reasonably well. Doing it at 9 is certainly quite impressive - heck, back at tat age I was still trying to figure out how to write Tetris in Turbo BASIC, without much success at that.

And not to forget that she was born and raised in Pakistan, which is not exactly a first world country - so it's not like she had many opportunities and lots of free time to waste.

Agreed. They got soooo close with when concepts almost made it into C++ 0x: http://www.devx.com/cplus/Article/42365

-Chris

That used to be a joke, but today you can run Microsoft Robotics Studio on your Roomba.

It's pretty common for the contents of a table to be encrypted. The administrator might see, for example, that ten new patients were added today, but there is no reason for that data to be available in plaintext. A quick google for references gave this practical introduction.

PS3s are big endian machines. Xbox 360s are little endian. Q.E.D They can't talk to each other.

Gee, if only someone would discover the mystical secret of translating between big and little endian.

more like office 2000... which might not be such a bad thing. It seems to be getting worse every version.

Maybe not. Office 2000 Word files use XML:

Office uses XML in a very specific wayâ"to structure the non-viewable contents of Word, PowerPoint, and Excel files. It has developed a set of tags and a data schema that defines the Office 2000 document set, much as you or I might create a set of tags and data schema for our "Flying Widget documentation set" or our inventory of tropical fish.

Whether or not that's within scope is unclear.

Uncluttered article, without any extra crap and multiple pages. Printable == readable.

There fixed that for you.

You know, this tends to bug me a bit...

I mean, yeah, here we are talking about C++ in which "=" means assignment and "==" means an equality test... But the world at large is not governed by these definitions. An equation like "y = 3*x + 4" establishes a relationship in which the two sides of the equation are equal.

If you want to apply the meanings of C operators to English text, then really neither meaning is correct:
"Printable = Readable" - means "Henceforth, until further notice, 'Printable' will have the value that 'Readable' has now" (Assignment)
"Printable == Readable" - means "I want to know if 'Printable' and 'Readable' have the same value". (It's an equality test, not an equality assertion)

Uncluttered article, without any extra crap and multiple pages. Printable == readable.

There fixed that for you.

Uncluttered article, without any extra crap and multiple pages. Printable = readable.

This is the key that sucks with SQL, once you commit to one vendor, its hard to escape.

This is laughably false if you stick to ANSI/ISO SQL. SQL is itself vendor-agnostic, it's a promise for an api.

Don't use vendor specific queries and you'll be completely portable.

This article, along with my own experience with Oracle, suggests this is frequently impossible due to vendor-specific quirks. Have you tried a comparison involving an empty string, for instance? Or case-sensitive and case-insensitive string comparisons?

And, really, who wants an office suite written in pure Java? Didn't Corel try that once upon a time?

Oracle, apparently. Perhaps not on Android's not-quite-Java Dalvik VM but nevertheless delivering office functionality to devices using a re-badged applet technology known as JavaFX.

Larry made a song and dance how web applications using AJAX were no longer flavour of the month and that JavaFX was the panacea.

As for Corel failing, advances in virtual machine technology since that time and that most of Swing is now rendered using DirectX/OpenGL mean performance is unlikely to be a factor this time.

It's pretty simple to implement if you have access to the DFA for the regular expression by just adding a transition to an empty accepting state when the end-of-string symbol is encountered in any existing state, and returning the position in the string at which the match fails. This would be hard to do in general by re-using an existing regular expression engine, unless it allows manipulation of the DFA state machine and returns the character position that caused a potential string to fail to match, since it would basically involve building the DFA from the regular expression, modifying it, and then translating it back into a regular expression that could be passed to the engine. PCRE supports partial matches and can return the partially matched string in some circumstances, which would allow one to find the problem character by chopping characters off the end of the string until a partial match occurs.

See this post about the problem that at least predates the patent by a few years. Unfortunately, no one mentions how to solve the problem in the regexp library.

The IBM patent includes some other features such as ignoring invalid characters in an input string and continuing to match the remaining characters. This could be accomplished by further modifying the regular expression engine to not return failure when there is no transition from a state for a particular character in the trial string, but to merely flag the character as invalid and remain in the same state and trying the next character in the string. The return value for such a function could just be a array of boolean flags for each character in the trial string identifying it as valid or invalid.

Overall, it looks like a novel use of DFAs for user interface feedback. Still, not something I'd consider worthy of a patent.

A couple such comparisons already exist. They may be a year or two out of date however.

Put solaris 10 on a PC (or vmware or what not). Then, start tracing function (& method) call invocations. Use ustack() to save the stack at the point of invocation.
For C++: http://developers.sun.com/solaris/articles/dtrace_cc.html
Java: http://www.devx.com/Java/Article/33943
C: The dtrace docs :-)

Debuggers are useful here & there, but 90% of the figuring out in a program is complexity spread over way too much code to try and figure out single-stepping in a debugger.

DTrace has taken over for both the debugger & printf() for me. Also, as I can change my script and rerun it on the same running process, my round-trip time has reduced quite a bit.

There's an art to Java Client-side apps. Over time, the easy path is allowing larger & larger apps to run pretty close to native speed. Partially due to cpu speed increases, JVM enhancements, and better understanding of how to write responsive java client-side apps.

Honest to God, my sun ultra runs eclipse so fast it feels native.

As for Java 6, it's got it's own share of performance enhancements, one of the big ones is DTrace Support. At least we can tell why something's taking so long, and adapt the app to remove or mitigate the problem.

There are many misunderstandings about parallelism, as it is evident from this discussion. Some posters said that "my O/S already runs in multicore/multicpu systems, thank you very much"...some others said that some tasks are like word processing is non-parallelizable etc.

The misunderstandings lie not in what parallelism is, but what Intel and other companies are trying to achieve. The quest for parallelism is not about running lots of programs in parallel, but extracting the parallelism out of sequentially written programs, including kernels. In order to improve performance, any parallelism that lies in our applications but is not exploited right now must be utilized, if we want to see real improvements in the future.

Modern CPUs do many tricks in order to increase parallelism, like pipelining and out-of-order execution. Current research at Intel has produced an 80-core CPU. It is highly unlikely that any of us will run 80 programs simultaneously tomorrow, so either this research is for servers only (highly unlikely because Intel will need to sell a lot of these chips to cover research expenses), or Intel knows that programs can be parallelized even more.

Compilers can not identify all possible parallel paths of execution, because it is an intractable problem. Writing complicated multithreaded programs using threads, semaphores and mutexes is quite difficult. So what is needed is another software architecture that allows programs to be easily parallelized.

Ericsson has dealt with these problems a lot time ago, and the result was Erlang. Based on the Actor model, Erlang programs can contain thousands of objects working in parallel, and the programmer need not worry about how to lock/unlock resources.

Microsoft's only option is to ditch C and use another language for their O/S. C can not work with the Actor model, unless modified. The best option for them is to make a C-like low-level language that includes the Actor model as part of the language specification. They can combine Cyclone, a version of C which is safe, with the best parts of ADA and Erlang, and come up with a language which allows the easiest possible path to writing parallelizable programs. And there is a big opportunity for them to put bounds checking and garbage collection to all their code, so as that two basic problems (buffer overflows and wild pointers) are solved at last.

It's not really a major player.

Reference 1. Reference 2.

Java is a major player. C is a major player. .NET, maybe in a few more years, but I doubt it. They will have to do something truly innovative.

Today, .NET is marketing hype - and as I said, that hype is now getting tired.

My judgment that it's dead-end isn't really so pejorative. It goes for just about everything like it that isn't truly open. I say the same for VB, though they add features to it every year. Sure, MS would be crazy to drop .NET. Right? Never happen. It sounds familiar because the VB guys said the same thing. Look what happened to them.

The landscape is littered with the graves of proprietary systems like these. Most languages we use widely today are truly open. These days the world is finally learning you have to be crazy to hitch your wagon to a single vendor, let alone the world's most notorious. Who wants to have their platform supported only at the pleasure of the king? And you don't have to.

If Microsoft wanted to beat the crap out of Java all they'd need to do would be to put down the patent gun, open up their sources, and let .NET embrace cross platform. They could perhaps out-Java Java.

We both know very well they wont. It's because .NET is not designed to win the language wars or be the best language. It is designed to stop the bleeding from developers breaking out of MS's jail, by providing a new way of locking developers (and their code) into the proprietary Microsoft platform.

Sounds like someone dosn't know much about the linux enviroment to program in it in the first place. This easily sounds like a case of I don't know it and don't understand it so I will not work with it. This is easy seen even when people try Open Office. Because they don't understand the differences between it and MS Office. They are not willing to spend the learning curve time it takes to be perficiant in it. Thing is no matter what you deal with and decided to switch to something else, you will always have a learning curve.

First off, if it is about a GUI. Well then pick one of the more popular ones - KDE or GNOME You don't have to pick all of them. Second, this talk about "Windows provides all that. Free. Built in" and "OSX. Nice GUI layer, free, built-in.". Last time I worked with developing programs and stuff, I had to either purchase the package, and install it (or at least download it to install). In any case with most Linux developement tooks it is either builtin or you download it (moslty) for free and install.

Not sure what your trying to prove except the fact that you are uncomfortable about change. "linux core gets BUILT-IN windowing and graphics" - just becuase Linux has differnet windows managers and you will not pick one to program through, and because you don't want a learning curve, or are to lazy to take the time to actually learn how to program for cross-platforming OS developement you want to blame it on Linux's desktop?

"That's been the unanimous decision of the linux community: no coherence." - Hmmm, sounds to me like another excuse here. Man addmit it, you are wanting to change programing or any

I don't know how many times the Linux community has pushed for commercial to take a hold of what it has to offer. Examples...

http://www.devx.com/racetolinux/Door/33508

http://www.linux-watch.com/news/NS8802144045.html

Seems to me that the Linux community / Open Source Community can only do so much. It's up to company's like your self to jump in and stop making excuses of why you won't do what needs to be done!

I don't feel like your position is valid for anyone to take against linux, infact to me it sounds like you are wanting more then your fair share of the work.

It never ceases to amaze me how much developement tools and realestate is attainable on the Linux desktop for free and you get people with this type of additude that feels Linux owes them more. Unreal!

Today Gosling says the "immense amount of testing and design work" is not thought to be "anywhere near as good as having thousands of talented eyeballs just stare at it and think about it", but he didn't always say this and Sun didn't always license Java software in line with this sentiment. Gosling's claim might be true, but I think the freedom Sun's relicensing gives users is far more significant. Also important for the free software community is the lesson of free software pressure.

Not long ago, Gosling poo-pooed the idea of turning Java into an "open source project": "If Java turned into an open source project, the enterprise development community would go screaming into the hills.". In the same article, author Glen Kunene described Gosling as being "ambivalent about Apache's Harmony".

Similarly, Richard Stallman once described Java as being a trap because one could write free software programs in Java that depended on features only non-free Java software provided. He also wrote about what a non-event it was that Sun allowed more people to distribute its then non-free Java software.

Taking all of these quotes and descriptions at face value, assuming nobody was lying, what explains the change in view? I believe that the competitive pressure created by free software Java implementations pushed Sun to stay relevant. As the free software Java implementations became more functional and more likely to replace Sun's Java software, Sun saw they could free their implementation and continue to compete. In so doing, Sun also became a top contributor to the free software community and got free software luminaries (Stallman and Eben Moglen) to speak in support of their relicensing.

Did you even try searching for an answer before posting or was this a sad excuse for trolling?

==> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Linux_d istributions
much lower comprehension level ==> http://www.devx.com/opensource/Article/30781/0/pag e/2


Although, comparing a table of differing versions of Vista to "ALL current linux distros" is like apples to apples vs oranges to orangutans. You wouldn't run LEAF as a desktop OS, just as you wouldn't use Ubuntu as a clustered server OS. Taken from the opposite angle, you would't host a high-availability site on Vista|XP and you wouldn't use 2003 Datacenter as a desktop OS.

If you don't know, please leave your geek-card at the door on your way out.

To safely allow a process (or guest OS) direct access to hardware devices, the hardware architecture and OS needs to be designed so that a DMA from the hardware device can only access memory owned by the process that ordered the DMA.

So you knew the answer all the time :) You know about AMD's IOMMU ;). I'm sure Intel has something like this...

So, there's no problem in giving direct access to the hardware :p

The specialized media has been aghast with the result of such fruitful collaboration.

People are clamoring, no, begging, for more of it.

The strange thing about supposedly ironic and sarcastic comments is that very occasionally they are, in contrast to the intentions of the author.

One of the results of the collaboration has been Java 6 integration with Windows. No matter what the common belief, Java desktop development is widespread, but what is really needed is GUI integration and performance that makes it comparable to other Windows applications. This has been one of the areas of collaboration, with Sun providing, in Java 6, such capabilities.

Here is one such 'specialised media' article:

http://www.devx.com/Java/Article/30722
"Java SE 6 First Impressions: A Desktop Winner"

here is another:
http://www.builderau.com.au/program/java/soa/Java_ SE_6_in_a_nutshell/0,339024620,339266522,00.htm
"Java SE6: A Desktop Revolution?"

So yes, there is publicity about what this collaboration has delivered for desktop Java. And many developers have indeed been 'begging' for it; Java on the desktop has been held back, many say.

So, before posting ironic comments, it is a good idea to make sure you have your facts straight....

• Community forums
• Tutorials - both from members and you guys.
• Tips and tricks - Maybe done like a code database

Well, since we're skipping over the "get the rootkit there in the first place" part, wouldn't TC make a VM-based rootkit easier to produce?

Would it be so hard to fathom that Apple kept Red Box in development along with Rhapsody on Intel? And is it so hard to imagine that they might use that trusted computing stuff for something besides FairPlay? Just an idle thought...

Microsoft would be absolutely insane to even think about dropping .NET

Just like they'd be crazy to break backwards compatibility with VB?

What, pray tell, is encumbering about C#? It's almost exactly like Java.

I don't get it. Why does nobody understand this?

Java is a language, and a runtime, and an API.

The standardized portions of .NET are the language and the runtime.

Notice the critical missing piece?

What do you think happens when you want to leave MS?

I can just picture the post now. "Hey ECMA said it's a standard but strangely when I tried to leave MS I got all these errors about missing classes? I don't understand."

You didn't write an app to add numbers forever without doing input or output. You wrote an actual app that uses the API. And now you can't leave. You are locked in.

What do you think MS does when they've got you locked in? What they always do. What any vendor that gets you locked in does. They bend you over a barrel.

You will be stuck watching Java people migrate from machine to machine, OS to OS, VM to VM, App Server to App Server... taking advantage of actual marketplaces full of innovation and competition... while you stagnate in MS's walled garden.

What numbers are you looking at? In Dallas at least, there is extremely high demand for C#/.NET developers.

I never refuse to provide sources, but I can't believe you have the audacity to ask me this.

Have you even picked up a newspaper?

The picture is abundantly clear... I doubt it's even that different in Dallas (although it's possible I suppose)...

(Reference 1) (Reference 2)

Unsafe code is rarely used throughout the actual framework itself, but when it is, it's primary purpose is performance.

I've already produced references for others to prove Microsoft itself actively promotes the use of interop and unmanaged code.

Of course, people may recognize that it's a bad feature and not use it... Not exactly a badge of honor for .NET though.

I've already made my rather obvious point about why this is bad... now you have the same loss of guarantees and stability of native, with all the overhead of the VM... so this begs the question...

I suppose that they should have bit the bullet and used a slower method, so you could complain about performance instead? ...why use the VM?

the runtime can, theoretically, support any language

Theoretically has nothing to do with practicality; if you read me, I am speaking about performance. I have no doubt you can shoehorn a shitty implementation of anything you want onto CLR or the JVM for that matter...

Not surprisingly, people are more interested in optimizing C code.

So you apparently concede the point that CLR is not as flexible in terms of practical support for other languages that significantly different from C/C++/Java as its proponents sometimes claim...?

Which is unfortunate, I've had occasion to want to use Mono, and I'd love to run ASP.NET 2.0 code on a linux box (I still think Apache > IIS).

It comes down to pure, hardboiled obstinancy.

If Microsoft wanted to beat the crap out of Java all they'd need to do would be to put down the patent gun, open up their sources, and let .NET embrace cross platform. They could perhaps out-Java Java.

We both know very well they wont. It's because .NET is not designed to win the language wars or be the best language. It is designed to stop the bleeding from developers breaking out of MS's jail, by providing a new way of locking developers (and their code) into the proprietary Microsoft platform.

http://www.devx.com/asp/Article/29617
http://www.port80software.com/200ok/archive/2005/0 4/29/393.aspx

My opinion I would think folks haven't done enough apps to know what is what and the only people saying much are going to be the Web2.0 folks themselves (unlikely to own up to it quite yet) or the few folks like these sitting at an interesting vantage point to see lots of application and site efforts in conjunction with acceleration, caching, compression, etc. knowledge. Anybody else seen similar postings, thoughts, papers? It does concern me a bit given how I have seen polling abused in JS.

-M.J.F.

From an intro on stored procedures:

"What is a Stored Procedure?
If a procedure is encapsulated logic that can be invoked from within your application, then a stored procedure is simply a procedure that is stored on the database server. Usually written in SQL, the stored procedure benefits from the power and proximity of the database from which it is managed."

The problem with Java applets is they require too much to be installed on the client side. This has big security and performance implications

Security? XMLHttpRequest is very cool, but (albeit for reasons not the same as those you gave for Java), it's likely to fall off its pedestal very soon in the face of these security problems.

In short, assuming you have the functionality turned on (I assume there is a way to turn it off in present browsers, though I haven't checked), XMLHttpRequest breaks the assumption that web pages only record what you're doing when you "submit" a request (don't think this applies to Flash, but it's normally obvious when a flash app is being used).

In short, it's theoretically possible for a site to be receiving information about pretty much every action you carry out within a browser window, and practically *quite* possible (and likely) for less than trustworthy sites to be receiving information you'd rather they didn't (if you knew about it); I could go further, but the article pretty much explains it well.

Ugh. There's a lot to like about C#, but I would never call it beautiful. It's got more keywords than C++, it's chock full of silly features (did you know you can use a keyword as an identifier if you prefix it with @?), and, most egregiously, Microsoft commonly pollutes the language to make up for deficiencies in their toolset.

(Oh, and Spotlight is a lot deeper than just a nice interface on top of the existing search.)

You might also be surprised by what AppleScript is capable of. It has support for very modern features, including inheritance, exceptions, closures, eval... It's not meant to be the shell - that's why OS X ships with bash, tcsh, and zsh. It's more like VB Script, except vastly nicer and easier to write. (Your criticism of its syntax is dead on, but believe it or not, AppleScript really does have a syntax, which as far as I know has only been fully documented once.)

Apple definitely has the in-house people to write an OS. The guy who wrote Mach works at Apple. The author of one of the slickest filesystems ever works there too. Oh yeah, and remember this guy? Seriously, Apple has been out-delivering Microsoft since 2001; you can't pick on them for not knowing how to write an OS.

(And, just to be snarky, Microsoft got their kernel folks from somewhere else too.)

I'm glad my OS was designed by, err, designers, incidentally. Apple has some computer science folk, but a computer scientist designing an OS is like a physicist designing a car.

I'm eagerly awaiting Longhorn, incidentally.

Also, I wrote a DevX article on Lucene:

http://www.devx.com/Java/Article/27728/0

Lucene is so well documented and simple to use that I am surprised that this subject would fill an entire book :-) Just kidding.

Lucene can be used as is, or you can extend it with your own document type handlers, etc.

As a programmer, I way prefer dynamic languages like Common Lisp, Ruby, Python, Smalltalk, etc. However, one of the things that keeps me firmly in the "Java camp" is the great free infrastructure software tools (like Lucene, Tomcat, JBoss, etc.) As a programming language, Java is kind-of weak.

~ make the captcha Java code that generates the warped image dynamically. Reponse: send the JS to the unwitting human.

Also note that the only CPU dedicated memory (outside of the register file) in a multi-processor system is the caches for each processor. So each AMD processor does have a dedicated link to its own caches, the bandwidth to that cache is reserved for that processor. But caches are relatively small, and switching tasks on a single core will flush out the cache about as much as moving to the other core anyway.

Putting the GPU on the HT bus would be interesting. It would have the negative side effect of causing the GPU to go through the CPU when it needs to access memory. That is because the memory controller is in the CPU on AMD systems. But it would seem that when accessing VRAM, the HT bus speed could be useful.

Sounds like YOU'RE using AJAX for the purposes of EVIL! Good on you!

If I am not mistaken, I think .NET 2.0 was pulled (or at least significantly scaled back)and would be included as a later stand alone addition/download (a la WinFS).

XAML, if you want to do a little reading for fun, there is a good review of it that concludes:

Examined superficially, XAML tags have many of the features of traditional Web standards like HTML, as well as those of newer Web approaches like Mozilla's XUL. Alas, it lacks proper CSS stylesheet support. Examined more deeply, however, XAML tags reuse, reinvent, and renew many standard idioms from the software development world in a highly integrated way.

There are also people out there who see XAML as just a proprietary XML and MS will try to do to XML what they did with JScript/JavaScript

That doesn't count loads of other features, like the explorer, IE 7, a ton of security features, better search, better web services through Indigo (try doing web services with PHP now - I've done it, and it's such a pain that it's not really worth it. Microsoft nailed web services in 2002, and the new stuff is even better!).

I have alway been happy with SOAP/XML and it seems like they are doing pretty well Also, it seems like Indigo isn't what it used to be, or at least not yet. We also do not know how these new services will affect other internet users, presumably they will be a Vista only feature and in that case, how many developers will fully embrace them with MS's current adoption rate for XP. Will the Vista adoption rate be better or worse? One could argue not as good due to the increased system requirements for the "full" Vista experience, compared to the 98/2000 upgrade path. We went from 66MHz/16MB/225MB to 133MHz/64MB/2GB to "current processor, current computer". From that I guess 2GHz/512MB-1GB/64MB-128MB-256 VRAM, (hard drive space is not an issue anymore) That is quite an increase in specs, though I admit that is extrapolation from this:

Will my PC run Vista? That depends on how recently you bought it. Microsoft Allchin said in an April interview that he expects Vista will need about 512MB of memory and "today's level" of processor. The ability to display all the fancy new graphics will depend on what type of graphics card one has. On some older machines, the graphics may look similar to today's Windows.

Apple is doing the slapdash hacks, and Microsoft leads the way in beautifully architected software.

Now you are just tossing out some flamebait. "Slapdash hacks" is a disservice to the wonderful integretion of OOS into OS X. Also OS X has been lauded by many (I hate to do this, but this was the best all-in-one collection I could find without searching/cutting/pasting all night. This is only slightly bigger than the attention Apple was given for Panther.

Also, MS has been accused of many, many things, but has never been accused of creating "beautifully architected software". Seriously, XP SP2 took some important steps, but I am not going to say any such words until I see a final p

Care to comment on http://www.devx.com/amd/Article/28001 ??

Take a look at this page for an example. Also, try here.

Not new issue as many have observed. See slightly technical article at:

http://www.devx.com/amd/Article/28001

"SPEC is subject to all kinds of problems."

All benchmarks are subject to problems. If you are testing for the CPU, somehow you must control for variables of compiler, OS, system architecture, and the amount of time and expertise of the tester.

Uh, how exactly do you get "GCC, is said to generate code that less well optimised than Intel's" from "GCC, is said to generate code that less well optimised for x86"?

Sigh. read: "Dell's own figures were calculated using different compilers and host operating system: Windows XP Pro, Intel's own C++ and Fortran compilers, and the MicroQuill SmartHeap Library 6.01. Secondly, the compiler used by VeriTest, GCC, is said to generate code that less well optimised for x86." QED less well than intels compiler in the previous sentence

GCC for PowerPC is not as mature: "The gcc scheduler is not really designed ideally for a processor like the 970 and the Power4...that was one of the things that we're continuing to work on to try to get the best performance out of the processor."

GCC on intel is far more mature with a long history, read a little of the history: "...When Intel released the Pentium some of their team produced a version of gcc with enhancements which gave 30% speed improvements on some benchmarks..."

Look at these redhat GCC 3.3/4.0 benchmarks. Notice how the 2-way PPC970 is twice as fast as the 4-way P4 on many tests and at close to par on the others. Now this is not the end all, am I'm sure you could come up with a different test that shows the P4 beating the G5, but certianly the G5 is not a "peice of crap".

You arguement about standardizing compilers is equivalent...

Standardizing of compilers is scientific method. Ideally you'd do a bank of tests, and unroll the variables: Standard compilers, standard OS, standard CPUs. Or you could tune each system to the max and then compare, that was LinPack and you didn't like that one either.

Hmm, does this appear to be vector processing done by a compiler?

Exactly my point! Intels compiler does auto-vectorization. GCC doesn't. If you test C code, P4+intel against GCC+G5, you are crippling the G5 by leaving out the altivec unit, which is a more capacble vector unit than SSE2

"hand coding...becomes completely out of reach for humans"

Hand coding is still done frequently on high performance algorithms:

• "I've also recently started hand coding the low level math kernels... P4, this gives a ~30% boost to performance on this particular MILC code."
• "However, once that level of optimization becomes necessary it's generally just easiest to hand-code the instructions, rather than jumping through a bunch of hoops to try to trick the compiler into doing what you want."
• "In some cases, complete vectorization is not possible and you may want to include hand coded SIMD instructions for the best possible performance"
• "Altivec requires hand-coding to exploit"

But, how do you deal with something as:
a+= b+++c;
is it:
a+= b++ + c;
or is it:
a+=b + ++c;

1. Learn the rule of maximal munch
2. If you ever write code like that in my project, you're fired.

Hands up how many of you work for large Enterprises? (You know the ones that are the bread and butter of the technology companies)
Ok. Now, how many of you have mixed deployments? You know, Wintels running pre .NET application, Wintels running .NET applications and App Servers of Some ilk running Java and J2EE applications on various operating systems. And some poor sods (probably you) trying to hold it all together?
Ok. Good. Now, I'm not sure how many still have their hands up, but in my travels I have encountered *lots* of Enterprises with such data centers.
Ok, now, how many of you are development managers? Probably not so many. Well, I have been one, and I have known many, and I can say with almost 100% certainty that those who managed groups of junior to mid level devs, building web applications using VS.NET finished more projects, on time and under budget than those that didn't. Fact. You might think that 'real' developers don't use IDE's, and I applaud you that don't, but the fact is the majority of developers who get paid to program do use IDE's and without doubt the most productive ones have been using VS.NET and its predeccessors. Lots of people love Eclipse et al, but, show me a person who can write 500 function points a month in Eclipse and I will show you a VS.NET who can be equally productive, but cost the employer half as much.
Sure J2EE runtime characteristics are *much* better than the .NET framework ones. But to bean counters that doesn't mean squat.
So now, these guys, Mainsoft come up with a way to have those same junior developers run the same applications, in many cases without modification, on the J2EE platform.
And this is a bad thing?
And once it is on J2EE, it can run on Linux too.
And this is a bad thing?
Skepticism is healthy, but only if tempered by fact. For you guys who are knocking this, do yourself a favor -- download it and try it out. It's great.
Now if only they supported the Windows Forms workspace, then I could look at migrating client apps as well as web apps and web services....surely there is no better way of migrating that using something like this? Despite the similarities between C# and Java on the surface, the language isn't as important as the class libraries that support that language. Not all .NET namespaces are implemented in Java by mainsoft, but the majority of the ones for Web Applications and Web Services seem to be. That makes this a real winner in my book.
I reviewed this product for devx.com some time ago (a previous version of the product), and have to say I found the experience VERY positive, in particular the facility to consume EJBs in .NET web applictions with the same simplicity, using proxies, that you can consume Web Services.
http://www.devx.com/dotnet/Article/20540/0
http://www.devx.com/dotnet/Article/20866/0
Thumbs way up!
Laurence

Hands up how many of you work for large Enterprises? (You know the ones that are the bread and butter of the technology companies)
Ok. Now, how many of you have mixed deployments? You know, Wintels running pre .NET application, Wintels running .NET applications and App Servers of Some ilk running Java and J2EE applications on various operating systems. And some poor sods (probably you) trying to hold it all together?
Ok. Good. Now, I'm not sure how many still have their hands up, but in my travels I have encountered *lots* of Enterprises with such data centers.
Ok, now, how many of you are development managers? Probably not so many. Well, I have been one, and I have known many, and I can say with almost 100% certainty that those who managed groups of junior to mid level devs, building web applications using VS.NET finished more projects, on time and under budget than those that didn't. Fact. You might think that 'real' developers don't use IDE's, and I applaud you that don't, but the fact is the majority of developers who get paid to program do use IDE's and without doubt the most productive ones have been using VS.NET and its predeccessors. Lots of people love Eclipse et al, but, show me a person who can write 500 function points a month in Eclipse and I will show you a VS.NET who can be equally productive, but cost the employer half as much.
Sure J2EE runtime characteristics are *much* better than the .NET framework ones. But to bean counters that doesn't mean squat.
So now, these guys, Mainsoft come up with a way to have those same junior developers run the same applications, in many cases without modification, on the J2EE platform.
And this is a bad thing?
And once it is on J2EE, it can run on Linux too.
And this is a bad thing?
Skepticism is healthy, but only if tempered by fact. For you guys who are knocking this, do yourself a favor -- download it and try it out. It's great.
Now if only they supported the Windows Forms workspace, then I could look at migrating client apps as well as web apps and web services....surely there is no better way of migrating that using something like this? Despite the similarities between C# and Java on the surface, the language isn't as important as the class libraries that support that language. Not all .NET namespaces are implemented in Java by mainsoft, but the majority of the ones for Web Applications and Web Services seem to be. That makes this a real winner in my book.
I reviewed this product for devx.com some time ago (a previous version of the product), and have to say I found the experience VERY positive, in particular the facility to consume EJBs in .NET web applictions with the same simplicity, using proxies, that you can consume Web Services.
http://www.devx.com/dotnet/Article/20540/0
http://www.devx.com/dotnet/Article/20866/0
Thumbs way up!
Laurence

I would say that with certain extensions, you're completely wrong. PostgreSQL comes with an extension that you can install which implements a vector-based full text search.

Tsearch2 Homepage

Quick and dirty HOWTO

For those question Netbeans as platform, or wonder how to create a Netbeans plugin, there's a very nice tutorial (short) for create a plugin in both Netbeans and Eclipse. With Netbeans 4.1, I think it rocks. I am looking forward to future releases, because I know they're on a roll for alot of new and great stuffs to come. Tutorial

Um, going from x86 emulation to native x86-64 code does require OS support, yes, but that doesn't mean the performance increase is due to a change in the OS. In fact, it's due to a change in the chip. Switching from Windows-32 to Windows-64 on an Opteron means you're switching from the Opteron's legacy x86-support to its native instruction set. That's as big a change as swapping out the CPU.

Ok, you have sufficiently proven you know very little about how the x86 64bit CPUs from AMD work.

Secondly, my whole point was why a 64bit OS is IMPORTANT. You just confirmed that IT IS IMPORTANT... Maybe you should join with some of the others in asking Apple to really make a 64bit verion of OSX. (And yes the PPC architecture would ALSO greatly improve if ran in the native 64bit mode.

Geesh.

Here also go read up on the performance differences and modes of the x86-64bit architecture.

http://www.devx.com/amd/Article/16101

Uh. int64_t && uint64_t?

Model-Glue: MVC for Object Oriented CFMX

MVC with Fusebox

MVC with Mach-II

And if you're using CFMX J2EE: Streamlining Application Development Using Struts in ColdFusionMX

Stop span?

Why would I want to stop the inline alternative to the harmful font tag?

...but yeah, definitely crimp those e-mails to realistic amounts. I for one would quickly welcome our spam-restricting ISP overlords.

Seriously, when each packet is encrypted with a different key, it seems like this would become a lot more difficult.

A lot of APs and hubs are coming with it now.

It would make life better for the rest of us, and thus encourage html/xhtml development for web applications. I wouldn't be surprised though if msft by not supporting CSS is trying to make xaml into the next big webapp platform. The deal there being, if people have failed to learn from history and bite, they'll be locked into Windows yet all over again.