Slashdot Mirror

If it weren't for language advocacy, I wouldn't find out nearly as many cool things about programming languages.

Everyone has their pet peeves, and their favorite features, and usually they have reasons for it. For instance, I don't like Java; I think it's unnecessarily bloated, contrived, and non-intuitive. So when someone showed me how simple it was to make a little GUI app, (far simpler than the text version, I might add) I was suitably impressed. I still hate Java, but I have a better idea of where it should be used, and what it can do, thanks to that advocacy.

When it comes to type systems, I like Scheme; it has a nice, clean type system. Perl can accomplish all the same nifty tricks as Scheme can, (it has closures, yay!) but you have to at least use a lot of references, and the syntax can get pretty grotty.

I used Pascal for a long time, and a decent programmer often spends a lot of time getting around the Strong Typing--it interferes with what they actually want to do a *lot*, like when they want to create a dynamic arry, for example. C at least doesn't bug you about it, but they can both pretty much accomplish the same things. I can't stand the Java type system; they definitely broke the notion of what should be an Object or not.

But that's just my opinion, and it doesn't stand in my way when I'm looking for a tool. Lately, I've been writing in C, because I've been doing Operating Systems programming for class, on Unix, in C, and it works quite well. But when I was doing web development and system administration this summer, I learned Perl and PHP, and it was far less work for what I was doing at the time. I also got to see how much work it is to implement a complex CGI in C, and although I think it'd be a neat experiment, I'd start out writing it in Perl, thankyouverymuch. I haven't had to use Java because I haven't done any real GUI programming, but I might try it out just because the API looks a little cleaner than some other GUI APIs I've seen. (I'm not about to write in straight XLib yet; even "Hello World" is huge!)

So yes, do your advocacy. Tell people which tools you like, and tell them why. Pick the right tool for the job. I don't think these things have to be incompatible. Just try to stay rational about it; that's why Linux has an Advocacy-HOWTO. When done right, it really isn't bad at all, it's quite informative, actually. :)
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

For the record, it's "Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, Start". :)

Also, this is third in a series? Where? Not that I'm complaining that it wasn't on the Front Page (that's fine with me) but if you're going to start posting to Features, then stay there...
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

That's what happens when things get taken for granite...

(sorry, couldn't resist!)
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Well, I agree that any site that sends spam should be blocked. Or, rather, destroyed in a pilliar of fire whenever possible. But if it just sells spamming software, and doesn't actually spam, I don't see a problem with that.

But then I went to their website.

My GOD, have you ever seen anything so awful?

So then I turned Java off.

There were still broken images, blinking links, I couldn't read the text...

Could we have a web proxy that blocks UGLY web pages? Becuase I'd blackhole these guys in a heartbeat!

Are they actually trying to run a business? If I saw a "business" site that looked like that, I'd run the other way!

Ugh. Unclean. Please block that site, whatever your reasoning.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I took the second (out of three) Operating System course here at state.

The first one (CSC202) is basically threads and stuff. Maybe you'll get to modify a fake scheduler; woo hoo.

The one I just took (CSC451) is pretty cool. Everything we did was usermode, but still... The course is taught in C. We wrote a typical utility (sortuniq -- roughly equivalent to 'sort | uniq -c', but as one command; I just used a binary tree), a simple file system ("MiniMinix"; it's the Minix filesystem with stuff taken out), a shell (implements pipes and redirection, but no other real metacharacters or built-ins) and a tftp client-server (that should work with real tftp; the server is threaded).

The next class, CSC452, is being discontinued in favor of CSC492, I think. This basically gets students working on projects with industry. However, I don't know what kinds of OS projects we're going to find; it should be interesting...
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

That's all you had to say; I'm going back there!

Now who's next? Yahoo?

Damn cheesy portal sites.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Nah.

I'm a slacker, and generally my partner is too, so we both end up screwing around. But we get stuff finished in time. However, I can do that by myself, too. :)

The only thing I can think of that working in pairs might really help is the design. Since you have to agree on stuff to write code, you have to decide on a standard way to do things, and that will help you a lot more in the end...
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I can believe that.

I often find myself going to the Operating Systems lab to get stuff done, just because it's quiet, it's locked, (to only let the real nerds in) and there are lots of computers there, and comfy chairs, and a big table in the middle and stuff...

Now if only I could get to the article. Anyone have it mirrored or cached or something?
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

No way!

At least, not if I buy www.letter.com you won't!

In other news, Microsoft Word Charges By The Letter...
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Well, maybe. You can't trust most big companies, and it's hard to stay a small, popular chip company.

I started getting annoyed with Intel slightly before the Pentium release, but I loved my 386; I had that thing for years, and it ran great. Well, ok, jpeg decompression was slow, but come on. My Pentium 133 was pretty decent too.

As for AMD, I was satisfied with my K6/300; I got it for the value and the integer performance, but the slow cache definitely hurt.

However, now that I've got an 800Mhz Thunderbird, I'm happy as a clam. It's faster than I need at the moment, and a pleasure to use. And I won't have to worry about slow cache performance for a while yet.

So, yeah; Intel makes decent chips, although they've been messing up lately. AMD has beaten them in the short term. But basically Intel is a sore loser, and has been acting more objectionably for a long time. If Intel dies and AMD takes over, I'll be happy. If AMD starts to abuse their newfound power, well... there's always Transmeta, right? ;)
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Because they don't know any better.

You also shouldn't buy a computer from Radio Shack, either, but people do...

(well, unless it's a Tandy... ;)
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

It still sounds like a good alternative for people who don't know any better.

In the meantime, the rest of us will be waiting for multiprocessor boards for the Athlon...
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Dude, I'll be 23 on April 25th! You bastards!

Oh well, I guess I won't have to learn German now....
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

What does the timeline look like for Plex86? I can tell it's pretty much alpha-level now...

Also, are there any other GPLed projects that you think could help out, or vice versa? I think DOSEmu could benefit a lot from some Bochs code, for instance. (I know DOSEmu has its own CPU Emulator, but I have yet to see it do a whole lot...)

The last time I tried Plex86 out, it looked like Bochs was actually faster, and that's saying something. Maybe there was a parameter I needed to tweak in the configuration file. I couldn't get Plex86 to boot Win98, although DOS worked.

Oh, and I had a fun time trying to determine how much of my Windows partition consisted of the MBR. (comparing the first chunk of /dev/hda with the first chunk of /dev/hda1; woo...) Could you put whatever tool made a partition for Bochs into Plex86? I swear there was one once; maybe I just can't find it....

---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I agree. :)

And yes, using a bank of hard-drives would be much better than using tapes. Mostly I was objecting to the amazingly slow seek and write times involved...

I'd like to have some sort of IDE-RAID; I'm actually running RAID-0 on one (or two :) of my partitions in linux, but I'd much rather use RAID-5. The thing is, I'd probably end up buying at least another IDE controller for something like that, and I doubt the performance improvement would be worth it. However, I'd like that added safety net in case of drive failure.

And yes, a large distributed filesystem project would be very cool. I guess you could look into Coda; I wouldn't recommend NFS for something like that, though.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Well, they're pretty different. But fault-tolerance is most of what I want in a backup. If I had that, then I'd only backup the really important stuff.

Also, tape access is really slooow. I'd back up onto actual hard drives before I'd back anything up onto VHS...
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I believe my C64 could do this.

Or you could record an actual modem, like Information Society did.

But if you were sane, you'd just buy backup tapes instead. Or for that matter, use RAID-5.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Hey, that's better than ftp.cs.helsinki.fi!
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Hell yeah, So obviously NetWare is far superior to Linux. :)

However, if this CORBA stuff is done right, eventually we'll be able to run DOS entirely in kernel-space anyhow!

If they really have as little security as they claim, then this will give us a nice performance boost for some tasks, (no bothersome scheduler or swapper, say) and better backwards-compatibility than DOSEmu! (I can run Cubic! I can run the Second Reality Demo, perhaps with sound! Yay!)
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

That actually *is* pretty funny. :)

The sad thing is, I remember some of the old "performance tricks" we'd do in DOS.

Like, if you've got a tight loop that you want to run quickly, make sure you put some inline assembler around it...

cli

sti

That way, you aren't bothered by those useless "interrupts" that the Operating System is always doing. I mean, really, what good are those? ;)
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I suppose you could just store the low 640k-1MB or so somewhere else (say, the highest 1MB), and just not tell the kernel about it (set memsize to one less whatever is detected). Then, at shutdown, have it try to copy that back. :)

And yes, I try not to use Windows, but I just got a new computer, and I figured I'd test out all my hardware. Playing DVDs under Linux doesn't work yet, at least with my drive. Incidentally, I've heard that one way to solve *that* problem is to try playing them under VMWare...

User-mode Linux sounds cool, but is it that mature already? I might try it sometime, but... not yet. Also, I know Plex86 isn't there yet, because I've tried it. Heck, I couldn't even get Bochs to boot Win98, and that's supposed to emulate everything! :)
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Actually, Linux is a DOS App. I know, because Loadlin is a protected-mode program that runs Linux from DOS! DOS lets the program do whatever it wants. I mean, it's the running program, right?

Like I said, Linux has the framebuffer driver. But you hit upon the key point: "third party". One reason why Linux can be so much more stable than NT is because all the kernel programs are developed together, with source. It's much harder to track down a rogue, third-party, binary-only driver.

Case in point: after removing my TV Card, my SB Live! card doesn't work at all. Under Windows, the card gets detected, and then the system locks. Hard. Under Linux, the drivers try to load, and then fail, but the system keeps going. The same is true for Alsa as well, though, so go figure...

The Hurd looks like it has a lot of potential. But it also has a lot of maturing to do, as well. I like the design of RT-Linux, myself; I think a lot more could be done with a model like that.

And yes, I was joking, and going for first post, *and* I love talking about systems, in general. :)
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

That is very cool.

With this, and khttpd and the frame buffer support and just a few other patches, I might not have to run in userland ever again!!

Just like DOS!!! ;)
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Ever heard of the EFF?

Pro Bono?

Better me than them; I don't have much to lose...
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Let them try.

I want to see them sue every library in existence.

(I think we'll have some prior art here.)
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Try a telnet BBS. It isn't quite the same, but it's definitely just as cool. I was amazed at the blast of nostalgia I got when I tried to navigate it all again, as if for the first time...

We had lots of BBSes running WWIV, and some Renegade and other stuff. Oblivion was really cool, and I remember one BBS that was run off of OS/2; I don't remember what the software was, but it was pretty impressive.

And yes, there was extra stuff I didn't mention, like "Time Banks". Actually, I wish I could set a daily time limit for slashdot posting; that would be interesting!

And yes, I love my T3... Boy, we're spoiled these days! Even sending Internet E-mail from a BBS was a royal pain!
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

The biggest problem with government websites is government. My personal example is the FCC.

They obviously don't understand the web or the Internet, and probably never will. Frightening, eh?
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

The biggest problem with government websites is government. My personal example is the FCC.

They obviously don't understand the web or the Internet, and probably never will. Frightening, eh?
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I'll just claim that I was trying to get work done, and cite Windows itself as an "illegal circumvention device".

The DMCA is ludicrous; I hope it gets overturned faster than the CDA did...
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Heh. Build a web cache; tell people to go there.

I'd *love* to see them try to sue over *that*.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

There goes half their traffic.

Well, who cares? You always see it on BugTraq before it gets back to Microsoft, even when you tell them about it first...
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I loved BBSes. I loved them even when I had a 14.4 modem, 'cause I'd still connect at 2400 just to chat to the same people all the time...

Maybe slashdot was like this. In the beginning. A little. But I'm sure I could configure a machine to be much more like a BBS, on the web, or not. I think that having a small community of quirky people is a requirement as well...

But if it had to be a web page, then I suppose you'd have to have topics and comment threads (we have those, but the topics are somewhat regulated). You'd also have to "Login" and "Logout", and optionally be able to post silly comments that show up at Login. You'd have a file area, with lots of useful stuff (freshmeat.net?) random text files ("How to get HBO for free" => textfiles.com?) and funny stuff. Of course we always had polls...

So yes, the Internet has elements of the BBS community, and places like slashdot have it more than most, but it still isn't the same, and every BBS feels different, too, with a very unique, ingrown sense of community.

I remember Another World felt very friendly and homey, and Cedar Republic felt more serious, (but it had TWO lines! You could chat with a friend!) and Psychotronic was basically a nest of Trolls... :)

In retrospect, I wouldn't give that up for anything. Maybe not even for the computer I have now instead of my 386 back then...
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I want to be able to run all my old gamez. ;)

Basically, it's all about making the perfect x86 emulator. Bochs and MESS are good examples for supporting slow x86 processor emulation (MESS being more accurate in some instances for game support, but both are pretty bleeding-edge).

I mean, really, what's the point of having the latest 986DX4/2GHz processor if you can't run SPACEWAR without getting a divide by zero error, or the Second Reality demo doesn't work with the SB Emulation, or your Mario game in Assembler is jerky?
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

No, that doesn't follow at all.

I just looked it up; the 286 apparently had 24 address bits; 2^24 == 16 MB.

Also, I seem to remember that under normal circumstances (real mode => backwards compatibility) you could only use 20 bits, which would bring you back down to 1 MB. But I could be wrong...

The 386 actually did have 32 address bits, though, which gives us the current 4GB limit...
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Some people don't seem to get why a 64-bit architecture would be useful. Let me say that it's not just about doing 64-bit computations and having a larger address space.

I'd say that transferring more data and having more registers to play with are more important features, as well as being able to do 32-bit computations in paralell. (having 64-bit computations in hardware is nice too; that makes it all possible)

Also, remember that the Itanium is an architecture that's designed to grow. Much like how Transmeta's chips will improve in speed as the software is being fine-tuned, the Itanium's software should show massive speedups once (a) the compiler is optimized, (b) everything is recompiled natively, and (c) code is rewritten (as needed) to exploit the architectural featueres.

I'd say that we've already seen a preview of what sort of difference this sort of thing can make with the Pentium 4. (if you missed it, it's on Tom's Hardware) It can make a huge difference. I'll be interested in seeing how Linux stacks up, and how optimized gcc is at the moment; I'm sure we'll have our work cut out for us.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Yes; I thought it was 54 bits, but I could be wrong.

Regardless, this is a correct assessment. Intel released an 8-bit processor that could address 640k and a 16-bit processor that could address what, 4MB? It definitely wasn't 2^8 or 2^16 in either case.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Heh heh. That's pretty funny.

Next, you'll be hearing "Ask Jeeves is pushing to become a challenger to popular rival search services such as Yahoo and CNet"...

PS: does anyone else find the MySimon.commercials to be incrediby moronic?
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

STFU, Impostor.

I already saw this 50,000 UIDs before yours, and it was stupid then.

Could someone *please* go through his history and mod his posts down to -837,425 for me?
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I liked altavista back when they were just a damn good search engine, and not a cheesy portal site. If I wanted a cheesy portal site, I'd go to "Yahoo!".

At least Google has managed to handle everything tastefully so far; I definitely respect them more for it. Heck, they don't even have banner ads, unlike some other sites...
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Thanks; it's been a while since I've been to that website, maybe I should check it out again. :)
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Well, I might have to try Delphi out again; I remember getting a copy of Delphi 1.0 (it was free with some magazine) and trying to write a text editor. It was relatively easy to do most of it, but then I couldn't figure out what extra code it wanted me to write. Then it came out to be 200k because Borland had to use their own DLL's and compile it all statically. Then I gave up. :)

And yes, I was going for a huge Java flamewar with this one; apparently I got a lot of bites, but the moderators didn't agree with me. I did try to defend a few things that seem indefensible, but all in all I thought it was quite fun.

...and, at the moment, for what I'm doing, I still hate Java; it ain't got nuthin' on C... ;)
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I spent a long time writing code in Turbo Pascal 7, and some of it was object oriented. Basically, it took me a while to figure out how it worked, and I liked it, but it still had some problems.

However, I'm fairly convinced that those problems stem more from hacking an object-oriented model on top of a procedural programming language than anything else; I'll find out if I ever re-implement that code on top of C++.

(I had a pretty cool screensaver that I wrote in a week in Pascal to test out and learn the OOP stuff; however, I had some memory leaks because it wasn't easy to identify which type I was deallocating... I'm pretty sure I could fix that now, though.)

Borland codes some pretty impressive stuff, but no one notices. I'd kill for a better linker, for gcc...
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

That's what protected is *supposed* to mean. That's what it means in C++, but not what it means in Java.

In Java, anything in the same package ALSO has access to your protected variables. Therefore, I think whoever designed that into the Java spec also had too much to drink. :)
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

That's awesome!

Do you have the source available anywhere?
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Well, how about having a single function call with a descriptive name that performs a simple task like this?

How about open()? Or fopen()?

If you must, then file_open().

But Java avoids this entirely. They don't even have a macro^H^H^H^H^Hmethod that expands out to this, for when people want to do this simple task.

Why make it any harder than it has to be?
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I should really dig out the old test question that I had to rewrite to use setters and getters, (although it was unspecified, and more complicated...) but I can tell you that I had an assignment where I implemented everything that was specified by the assignment, and used protected variables, and lost ten points for not using setter/getter methods of any sort.

Basically, if I can implement the spec for a program and have it run perfectly, and lose points for A(n unspecified, quiche-eating, useless, philosophical) CODING DIFFERENCE, well... then the instructor has some explaining to do.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Well, yes, but you'll still need the C libraries for it; that'll take many cycles. I guess you could statically link it, but it'd be nice if gcc had a smarter linker. (300k???)

P.S. printf() is slow; use puts() or write() instead.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Actually, most planes are car-planes, if you will. Otherwise, they could never take off (unless they're VTOLs)

The real world is much more complicated than Java would have you believe... :)
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

No; I want the children to have access as well, just not anything else.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I agree. But when would it matter?
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.