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Order of includes is tricky? Usually you include what you need, and if they need anything, they include it for themselves, and they don't include it twice...

When would order matter?

Also, I haven't messed with win32, but would that be like using AWT *and* Swing? Even if you could do it, why would you want to? Actually, scratch that, that's my opinion of win32 coding anyhow! :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Well, that's a problem with a conditional branch, but a goto is an unconditional branch. You should be able to place that code in memory right after the goto, if desired, especially if you're doing any run-time profiling.

At a low level, I'd say an if statement would be more bothersome than a goto; also, a lot of times even a regular ol' compiler could do loop unrolling...

But yes, that is a fascinating aspect of it, IMO; it probably isn't a huge issue in Java, though. When Java's that close to the hardware, I'll be quite happy for them! :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Cool; I had to write that for class, basically. (actually we did that and some File I/O, too)

But since System.in isn't actually the same sort of stream as System.out or System.err, it's definitely a mess to use... Heck, you have to learn about exceptions to use it, too!

So remind me not to write a command shell in Java; why, I wrote less code in C, and implemented that readLine() function there, without exceptions! ;)

And no, I didn't use an IDE until the GUI-building stuff came along...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Did you intend to reply to my post?

I don't use Microsoft products, ever, if I can at all help it. (although I did just write something in GW-BASIC 3.20, but that's just because it's easier to use than Java :) If I gave you that impression, then I'm sorry.

I program in C, on Unix, where possible. I'm open to trying new things, but so far GUI programming doesn't look like that much fun. Yes, I like to have performance and simplicity in my language. Java is a huge, complicated mess, and nothing you say will make it any smaller.

Maybe you're right, in that someone who has been a hardcore C++ coder for over 10 years would appreciate what Java has to offer, but don't you think that's a pretty steep learning curve? I'm pretty happy with what C and Unix have to provide; I'm still learning about it, but that isn't because there's a huge API; that's because the API is exceedingly useful, flexible, and powerful.

I like to try out different lanugages to see what they have to offer, and I can program decently in even a reasonable subset of Lisp, C, Pascal, BASIC, Scheme, Perl, and what have you, but Java isn't nearly that simple.

In fact, Java is quite non-intuitive, and full of special-purpose hacks. I'd be completely lost if I didn't already know how whacked-out C++ is in the first place, and know something about the STL (which is missing--templates, that is). The fact that it has lots of "Objects" doesn't reassure me, because I don't see much in the way of a consistent interface, either. The sheer breadth of Java will definitely turn away the language enthusiast.

Yes, I remember when it was about programming, not money. But you'd definitely have to pay me to write in Java. I might still try to find a use for it, though, despite its designers and an API. I'll let you know if I find a good place where it shines. But apparently you've made up your mind already.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Actually, that's not inefficiency at all, which is my point.

That's one thing they can't implement properly in Kawa *because* of Java.

That's what that section on 'full-tail-calls' means; they don't have a 'goto' in Java; therefore, however they had to do it, it's slower, and not up to spec. (like a giant switch statement, say; that would be pretty bad...)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I don't see how making a malicious macro tweak somewhere would be any different from changing the behavior of a method in a base class that gets inherited, say...

Either way, you have some hidden code that gets run, all in the name of code reuse. The point is, you shouldn't be maliciously editing code!

Macros and inheritance are both powerful tools to be used and abused. Therefore, they should be used carefully, not forbidden completely.

Also, you should get at least warnings about macros that get redefined...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Yeah, that is pretty handy. I did similar things in Perl and PHP over the summer; I never looked to see what sort of tools were available for that in other languages because (a) we weren't using those for development and (b) it was alreaedy built-in! I was pretty proud of the encrypted database fields I created for credit card processing, along with a simple search interface, writing a credit card processing module, etc., etc... My Perl is probably somewhat rusty now, but it was easy to learn and incredibly handy for that job.

And although this is probably somewhat different (but still web stuff), we did look at implementing Java Servelets; I tried to run the free server for that on top of Apache, and I couldn't get it to work. I asked for help on the list, and read all the documentation, but they weren't much help at all. But everything else compiled fine for Apache (mod_perl, PHP4, even mod_frontpage, and some extra security extensions...), so I wasn't too impressed with the free Java Servelet support for Apache on Linux at the time...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Well, I'd feel better about hiding data if it were 'protected' in the first place, but I understand the rest of it; data hiding is really handy in OOP, I remember doing it with dotted pairs in Scheme. :)

And yes, Java can break to a label; that takes care of the case where you need to get out of a couple of nested loops. But there's still that 1% they forgot, and didn't even put in the bytecode. (continuing on with Scheme, just try to implement it in Java/Java bytecode, and handle tail recursion efficiently and to the spec; I'm curious as to what you'd come up with...)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I know; that's why I'd have to put each class in a separate package.

I generally only WANT class scope, and not package scope, and there's no clean way to do this in Java; it involves the inane process that I have listed above.

Here's actually one example where the C++ object system is superior, in my opinion. Scary, huh?
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I did indeed.

And I was marked down for it.

-10, willing to learn; I'm sure they're all laughing about it now.

No, the fact of the matter is, my instructor is sold on getter/setter methods in any and all forms, regardless of how they may compromise a design, and any design other than that is suspect.

Surely you've heard similar Zealotry from the Extreme Programming people who think that no method should be longer than three lines of code?

Anyhow, if you haven't seen incompetence in action in the Java world, then congratulations. Maybe I should move to where you are. But it exists, and it is widespread. Maybe when it becomes more standardized and less buzzword-compliant, we'll see a reduction in the current level of cluelessness in the Java community.

But I'm not holding my breath.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Really? Cool. I've seen C compilers do this with C-style commments, but I can't seem to replicate that behavior now.

I would have hoped they'd stripped the comments first, but I swear I've seen it expanded the other way. Maybe that was indeed an ancient, buggy compiler... :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

For our other projects I managed to get by with a text editor, but they didn't tell us how to write all the Swing stuff we needed to write for the project without using their crappy recommended tools. I was much happier programming with a simple text editor and the JDK, although their style requirements got *very* tiresome, and I lost points for style regardless, no matter how vague the specifications...

Well, once you wrap a class instance over another class instance over another class instance. (for stdin, actually, I don't think I'm exaggerating here) And it's different depending on if that's Java 2^H1.2 or not.

I also don't see how this is *that* much different from getting a socket connection or a pipe in C. It's still just a file descriptor, and you use different methods to access it. In Java, you wrap the 'descriptor' (actually some sort of object) in another class that implements different methods, and use them...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

She actually claims that the way she teaches Java is somehow related to Smalltalk, which convinces me that she's never really used Smalltalk in her life.

I haven't either, mind you, but I know enough about it, and I know at least one programmer who has, and that's why he's working on compiler technology (I think), and she's teaching my course. That's my theory, anyhow. :)

I guess I haven't found a good use for Java yet, and she definitely hasn't shown me one, either. I don't really like their error handling model either, since there are so *many* exceptions out there that have to be caught... If I don't need to handle them specifically, I find myself writing a big 'try' around it all, and having catch do a stack trace on your basic exception, which definitely defeats the purpose.

Still, if I needed to catch a specific exception and handle it differently, I suppose I could, but doing it for the hell of it (even with basic I/O) is just bothersome.

I'd like to mention, by the way, that exceptions are covered in our book in at least Chapter 10 (not that I own the book; "Thinking in Java" is also online). Therefore, using stdin was covered after that. (???)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Well, maybe you'll understand when I say that C programming style wasn't precisely *encouraged* in my Java class.

Then again, maybe you won't, judging from your encouragement so far...

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

I think Garbage Collection has gotten a bad rap, actually. Just because some Lisp implementations in the past have had bad garbage collection doesn't mean that all modern tools do now.

Although I love programming in C, I think that Scheme is a beautiful language too. I couldn't find that many uses for it besides writing Scheme in Scheme, but maybe that's just because I'm not used to it in the first place.

But making everything an Object (including functions) is a very cool approach, and having lists built-in to the syntax is very handy as well. I think that with a Scheme-like approach to this sort of thing, data structure building would become trivial.

Since this sort of thing was hacked on to Perl later, it makes Scheme style programming very ugly. It's possible, because I've tried it out, but not pretty. However, Java doesn't really support this well. Inner classes are not the same, and you can't really get a closure...

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

Thanks, actually, that makes me feel a lot better.

I'm not sold on Java yet, but it's nice to have some confirmation that she actually is a fool! ;)

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

Maybe you missed that 'public' keyword. It's easy to do; Java has a lot of keywords. This is how I was *taught* to "hide" data in Java. It isn't hidden at all. I agree that if done properly and sparsely, accessor methods can be useful. But this is at best difficult to do in Java, and people aren't even encouraged to do it correctly.

And yes, operator overloading in C++ can be infinitely abused; that's because it's powerful. You can build very intuitive interfaces with it, but you don't have to. Similarly, the fact that Java doesn't have an actual 'goto' command means that when you actually need it, it isn't there. As much as people hate it, 'goto' still has some valid uses, when you want to implement proper tail-recursion, for example...

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

You're right; 'public static final' is much more complicated. In fact, 'final' itself is a much more complicated keyword than const. Could they at least have provided a 'const' keyword, since it had a simple, clear meaning, and I use it all the time? No...

Hey, want to be really evil? I'm sure you can randomly edit someone's java file to screw it up... Heck, leave a comment open somewhere. Randomly editing source is bad no matter what language you do it in. Heck, randomly delete a line from a BASIC program. Or for that matter, take a random byte out of the middle of your OS kernel; you didn't need that byte! So don't tell me that my examples are bad, now... ;)

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

Interesting. Since we were encouraged to use Visual Age for Java, and it explicitly bugs us about capitalization conventions, (as well as the fact that all of our project have to follow the same fascist style guidelines) I figured this sort of thing would be promoted to a compiler error, or at least a warning.

Also, while I'm at it, I'd like to say that the implementation of 'stdin' is completely hideous in Java. Did they actually expect anyone to use this?

I mean, try to write this in Java...

10 PRINT "What is your name?"
20 INPUT NAME$
30 PRINT "Hello, ";NAME$

...and then explain to me how 'friendly' it is. :)

For all its faults, that's one task I'd gladly do even in C++...

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

I will agree with you completely if you can explain to me why our "professional in the industry" insists on teaching like this because "that's how it's done in the industry". That frightens me more than anything else. You would indeed get points taken off for writing intelligent code, and not having setters and getters for everything, blindly and preferably auto-generated, and entirely public...

Yes, I know how OOP should work, but that's apparently not the recommended approach according to Java, or at least IBM.

And no, I'm not confused; I explicitly mentioned the different parts of "Java" (it's all nebulously called "Java", and that's a trademark anyhow, but I did specify...) that I was blaming.

And when I tried to make methods protected with JavaBeans, (to protect my data; at least the 'set' method on our NINE identical variables, mind you) it all stopped working, but that might be due to my lack of understanding, and not Visual Age. (does JavaBeans allow a protected method? Please tell me it does...)

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

Well, you're right that if designed correctly, they can provide that benefit, but first it would have to be *taught* correctly, which is a separate problem.

However, since I generally do not wish to provide get/set methods for everything, my argument is that if you want to extend my class, then you can inherit it, and provide accessor methods for all of my *protected* variables.

...which, by the way, have to be in a separate *package*, and therefore a separate DIRECTORY just because I don't want anything else in the same *package* messing with it because it's supposed to be PROTECTED, and therefore only have CLASS SCOPE and not *package* scope!!! (my point being that Java itself makes it almost impossible for people to write good code in Java; in any case, it certainly isn't intuitive, and it isn't taught properly yet, either...)

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

;) Yeah, actually, that would be REALLY bad in C++, but my point was that it all wouldn't work in Java.

Do real /* C-style */ comments even work in Java? I didn't think they did; either that, or maybe they're "considered use^H^H^Hharmful" as well. :)

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

Is it me, or is Java worse than the B&D-style languages that have come before it? I think it actually has more annoying keywords that always must be strung together than any other language I've ever seen. And I can't fix that, because it has no macro system!

#define const public static final // considered harmful in Java

Then I had to use a useless GUI-building tool that generated horrific code... In all fairness, I shouldn't blame the "Java Language" for that, so I'll blame the "Java API" and "JavaBeans" and IBM for that one. But still, the generated code was really ugly, and the suggested design methodology is horrible.

Am I the only one who remembers the 'data-hiding' portion of OOP, where you don't have public getFoo and setFoo methods for everything?

And what's with the fascist standards with regards to var^H^H^Hfield and func^H^H^H^Hmethod naming conventions? Really, WHAT IS THE DEAL?

For a language that is theoretically based on C++ and then C-style syntax, Sun has managed to break every single decent convention we ever had, and introduce several new, painful ones. And they aren't finished redesigning it, either, so why try to target a language that's slow, bloated, and constantly in flux in the first place? Managers are just dying to sign up!

So, I blame Sun for trying to embrace-and-extend C++ of all horrible things, and I blame Microsoft for trying to follow their lead. Whatever the "next-generation" programming language is, it'll be far uglier and slower than attempting to hack it all on top of C again...

But heck, maybe it'll increase the demand for programmers again, right?

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

Well, I do random binary hacks that assume twos-complement, but only in integer math...

I think the PDP-11 had both implemented; in any case, that's why C has ++ and -- today.

Oh, and I haven't done many big projects yet, but I definitely agree with you about the language design. :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Ah, but you'd think that being able to fake intelligence would be much harder to do than merely being intelligent.

Therefore, anyone who could fake it would be quite intelligent indeed.

Heck, just watch the moderation on my posts sometime! ;)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Hey, I resent that.

Slashdot just sucks lately, and getting karma is just too easy to be a worthwhile game for a while. It was hard for a while, and Siggy had to fight to get his insightful comments modded up; that was entertaining.

But if MEEPT!! was here (more) today (and not posting shit at -1) I guarantee you he'd be +5 material, yes siree.

Dude, one time I got a +1 bonus on a new account in a day. Mostly from one post. (I think I did get enough karma from that one post to get the +1 bonus, actually...) Oh, and if you don't know how that's possible, then just understand that the karma system is much more whacked out than you think it is; it surprised me...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Since they did name NCSU the open source university most of the on campus help materials have been converted away from the Solaris platform to RedHat with KDE/Gnome.

Anyway... the intro course at the school E115 is available online for independent study and all the training docs are pretty well done although there may be some ncsu specific stuff there.

Introduction to computing environments

I also used to have weekly seminars at one of my previous employers and I had my "students" purchase a copy of the best O'Reilly book, Essential System Administration by AELeen Frisch.
This book takes a broader look at how to accomplish the task you need on XYZ variant of UNIX/Linux. It is an easy to read book and covers 90% of administration/user needs.

Yes, they did patent some techniques.

So now the question is, what patent rights did IBM get out of them?
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Wow. I pretty much rely on everything being two's-complement these days, I guess I'm spoiled by only having one zero in my number system...

I wish x86 had adopted auto-increment mode from the PDP; it would have made implementing C a lot cleaner. (C is portable, but it's biased too :)

Nowadays, we've got x86 assembly, C++, and Java. I'm actually very happy that I managed to find the courses that still really teach C...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

...after all, that *is* what it's designed for!

That way, if nuclear war breaks out in the US, you can still send a message to the other side of the country that says "NE1 HERE??? A/S/L???" on IRC...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I'd like to see more Fuzz results. Maybe I'm just a benchmark nut, but I'd like to see some more real benchmarks. I always liked the BYTEMarks over whatever Intel was pushing this week, too...

Maybe if they used Fuzz to test the Cygwin utilities, versus the regular NT (DOS) utilities?
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

...is a large, spinning mirror, and a tracking device...

...and we could vaporize a human target from space!

Yeah, *sure*, that's why you want it. We believe you...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

More people voted for Not Bush than for Bush or Gore; therefore, Not Bush wins.

However, more people also voted for Not Gore than for Gor or Bush; therefore, Not Gore wins.

So, with Not Bush and Not Gore in office, I guess we're stuck with someone else. But who? Nader? BRAK? OOG? Slashdot Cruiser?

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

Yeah, that's about what I expect from slashdot.

Want to reply to me next time, you coward?
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

What, with all the votes split? What margin of error are you using?

Bush has 271 with Florida already, so there are some votes missing; sounds like some "fuzzy math". :)

Of course, I haven't done the math at all, so I'd like to see your reasoning, if you don't mind. I think less than half a percent would be small enough margin.

Either that, or split the representative votes by district (the way Maine does it already; it's up to the state) or ignore that state entirely (which would be less than ideal).

But there isn't much we can do for this election; it just proves that the system is broken.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

1) This is all bullshit anyhow.
2) When the margin of error is greater than the margin of victory, statistically, no one wins.
3) I'm ashamed we could elect a moron like Dubya. Even Jeb would have made a better president. (Is he 35 yet?)

Fake Example:
-------------
Bush: 49%
Gore: 49%
Nader: 1%
Other: 1%
Margin of error: +/- 4%

Who won?

Well, I know the American people lost.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

That's why they asked Tom not to release it.

If he distributed it, then they would be obligated to provide the source.

I think their goodwill is probably more important to Tom (and the community) in this case. If they default on that, then Tom might as well distribute the program.

But until then, I'd rather he keep reviewing with their help.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I still don't think the Pentium 4 is worth it yet, because a clock-for-clock comparison would put it about even with the current generation of chips, and a dollar-for-dollar comparison would show that it is still way too expensive, but...

It's a start, at least. I guess we'll see where it goes from here.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Eh, I didn't check all the bugs to see whose they were, you're right, I just figured that the vast majority of them were Intel's. (actually, I recognized at least three of them as such; hlt isn't just Intel, though...)

However, I knew they were all bugs that my Athlon Thunderbird didn't have... ;)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I've written code like this:

n1 db ? ; most significant digit
n2 db ? ; .
n3 db ? ; .
n4 db ? ; least significant digit
[...]
mov si,offset n1 ;starting at the string
;--------------------------------------- Better sort code... (worst case 17)
bsort: mov ax,[word ptr n2] ;use al, ah as n2, n3

Data as laid out by me in the program: [n1|n2|n3|n4]

What I'm grabbing from memory: a word of data, starting at n2.

Note that when I do this, al gets n2, and ah gets n3!
___ax___
[ ah|al ]
[ n3|n2 ]

Is that funky, or what? I'm sure I could find the exact quote about this from my assembler lecture notes, but suffice it to say that these sorts of tricks aren't really necessary or desired nowadays.

The chips in question are the 8008 and the 4004. We are pretty much backwards-compatible to them TO THIS DAY (that's why DOS had those 64k segments). I don't know about you, but I would at least like a few more GPR's to play with... (AMD is at least going to do this)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

This isn't a real top 10; it's a half-hearted attempt. A complete list couldn't fit in the margin of this webpage, though.

Let's start looking...

* Segmented Memory
* Byte-swapping
* To this day, ensuring backwards compatibility with chips no one used
* Screwing over their customers
* Screwing over their employees (see Inside Intel)
* RAMBUS (ha ha ha!)

I'm sure I missed a bunch...

...oh yeah:

[pb@Lee-12-240 pb]$ cat /proc/cpuinfo
processor : 0
vendor_id : AuthenticAMD
cpu family : 6
model : 4
model name : AMD Athlon(tm) Processor
stepping : 2
cpu MHz : 800.060074
cache size : 256 KB
fdiv_bug : no
hlt_bug : no
sep_bug : no
f00f_bug : no
coma_bug : no
fpu : yes
fpu_exception : yes
cpuid level : 1
wp : yes
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 psn mmxext mmx fxsr 3dnowext 3dnow
bogomips : 1595.80
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

First, you can indeed make up for lost sleep by sleeping more; it'll make you feel better the next day; it just won't help you remember the previous day.

Therefore, if you had a traumatic experience in your life, don't sleep! Then, after about a day of this, get really drunk. 14 hours later, you'll have slept like a baby and you won't remember a damn thing. Isn't science great?
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I don't know, where are you going to be?

The alternative to a bar is, of course, a coffee house.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I'm in the Research Triangle Park area of NC, so I see no reason to move; we have lots of tech jobs open here.

Then again, I figure my prospects are pretty good wherever I go, these days.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Now if only they could get it to use particles, instead of waves... :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I agree, latency is very important. But I was pointing out that article writing is important as well, and that one was atrocious.

However, my fellow slashdotters didn't catch on, so I guess I shouldn't expect anyone else to notice, except maybe my old high-school Physics class, for instance...

Incidentally, latencies with combination satellite/modem services are absolutely *horrible* for some services, like a second sometimes...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I'd like to see how an entirely native system does. Of course, this will be a *lot* more expensive than your average system, especially with the weird RAMBUS requirements, but a lot of people will be happy that it's not x86, and that it's faster than 500Mhz...

However, my 800Mhz, non-RAMBUS Athlon should last me quite a while, thankyouverymuch. :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I love to see Science Fiction coming true.

In Earth, by David Brin, there's a global network of computers, and the interface to it generally consists of a giant screen: entire sections of the wall can be used as a display. On that display, users interact with the 'net...

So this would be, what, local-area bandwidth, at least? Now all we need is for the displays to get cheaper. (that'll take at least 10 years, probably...)

However, this is all well before, what, 2040? Keep up the good work, Mr. Brin!
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Ah, that's right! Thanks, Dorsey.

Incidentally, I've gotten to see my former arch-nemesis (or maybe she was second only to her sister at the time) more since she started hanging out with some of my friends; I consider her to be much cooler now.

Strange how the world works, eh?
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Hey, cool... :)

I'm in the Raleigh/Durham area, I saw him once at a Barnes & Noble in Durham, when he was signing Homebody, and once in some (I forget exactly which) bookstore in Raleigh when he was signing Ender's Shadow.

Each time, I went up to him later, and asked him a question, and had him sign stuff, (ok, his new book :) well actually just about everybody did. The first time he told me he didn't intend for Ender to be an actual genetic cross between Peter and Valentine, he was just saying that Ender had that capacity for Good and Evil. The second time, I asked him if The Time Machine had an influence on his fourth book of Homecoming; he about smacked himself. He didn't do it intentionally, but now that I mentioned it, he definitely saw the obvious parallel.

Unfortunately, my girlfriend had my copy of Ender's Game, so I couldn't get that signed. But I'm glad she read it, 'cause it's a great book...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.