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No, I'm saying it performs as well as C++ in most cases. Virtual method handling is one example as to why, the JIT has a better view at execution time as to what can and can't be inlined, so it can inline much more than a statically compiled C++ program possibly can.

You realize that JIT is inherently limited to a tiny bit of program which it compiles? JVM cannot spend neither time nor RAM building a whole program tree and making global optimizations like compilers can. And by the way, if you think that compilers are limited to static analysis only - there's also profile-guided optimization.

Well that's precisely the problem you face if you don't have an explosion of optimised binaries, unless you want to accept that the JVM is going to optimise more efficiently. It's not just about compiling for different architectures, it's about the JIT automatically being able to optimise to take advantage of extensions, and other hardware that may be present too. It can optimise dependent on amount of RAM, cache sizes etc. - something that just isn't known when you compile a plain old generic C++ binary for, say, the generic x86 platform.

But there are a number of other things it can do better too - better loop vectorisation (as a result of better inlining of virtual functions) and more efficient heap allocations for example.

In theory, it could do that. But if you do a reality check, you'll find out that JVMs right now are pretty mediocre compilers that lack even basic optimizations. Again, everything that JVM does, can be done by a compiler, but not vice versa. Compilers have nearly unlimited time and can spend gobs of RAM analyzing the program. They can use profile-guided optimization, allowing you to gather stats from a compiled program and then recompile it to better account for runtime behavior - if needed.

Oh, and while we're at it, fine-tuning assembly with specific CPU in mind does not matter these days except for SIMD ops. Waiting for memory accesses dominates CPU time - and here Java is at inherent disadvantage because you cannot really control memory layout of your data.

"Server software does not [need to] have single-thread performance because it's more often I/O bound - that means that CPU vendors can get away with CPUs like Bulldozer or SPARCs that suck at IPC (instruction per clock) performance."

This is nonsense. It depends entirely on the application. A heavy load web server for example may not really be I/O bound in the slightest depending on the size and what it does. Bulldozer is designed for optimisation of performance per watt, you're again confusing cause and effect as to why some things are the way they are.

Before you call this nonsense, go read some analysis and check benchmarks.

"That's not a problem of Java, though, but all managed languages - .NET also sucks."

Really, the problem is simply that you don't understand managed languages. Your understanding of the optimisations performed by JIT compilers is clearly woefully inadequate to being making this sort of comment. Your comments on server applications just don't even make sense for the most part to the point I'm not even sure you have the slightest grasp of what sort of things servers commonly serve.

"Microsoft tried to build an OS which would be .NET based - they wasted like 6 years on that and ultimately had to abandon the idea. Now they are going native :)"

This is just further nonsense. There was a Microsoft research project to try and build such a thing, and they did, and open sourced it. I don't know what you mean by "Now they are going native :)", they've always been native with

I agree. The Darwin Awards are just not funny. Laughing when somebody slips on a banana skin loses it's edge when they slide to their death if you ask me.

That said I have long enjoyed laughing at heroic failures of the kind listed in this book and its sequel. Some of them are listed here.
e.g.

The least successful animal rescue
The [UK] firemens strike of 1978 made possible one of the great animal rescue attempts of all time. Valiantly, the British Army had taken over emergency fire fighting and on 14 January they were called out by an elderly lady to retrieve her cat which had become trapped up a tree. They arrived quickly and soon discharged their duty. So grateful was the lady that she invited them all for tea (and Sherry?). Driving off later, with fond farewells completed, they ran over the cat and killed it.

I recall a great one about an escaped lion being beaten up by an old lady and having to be treated for shock (I guess Dreamworks based the Madagascar scene on it) and also the least successful attempt to light a fire in which the guy burns down the house and his car and garden.

Although Gestapo was "owned" by SS, it was administered by the Reich Security Service.

The Reich Security Head Office (Reichssicherheitshauptamt) was part of the SS:

"The RSHA was the central SS-department; all official and secret police and security organs of the Third Reich were led by the RSHA"

The fact of German V-men has been a myth. Even in 1939, Gestapo employed only about 60-90 informers in Saar-Brucken area.

I don't find this statistic particularly compelling: Saarbrucken is quite a small place and 1939 was early the war.

Am just stating facts: yes in wartime people do get shot for stealing maps.

You misunderstand me. The resistance stole the map, the SS shot some innocent old men in reprisal. Because of this the resistance in the village were unable to operate in the area until after D-Day when they captured several tanks armed only with civilian weapons.

The same way iraqis are "collaterally killed" by US troops.

Reprisal attacks are not the same as 'collateral damage'. In fact the British RAF killed many times more French citizens in the area where I live than the Germans did: 14,800 in La Manche alone. That was 'collateral damage'.

What Britain is doing is very very frightful.

I quite agree, as stated in my post.

I just think that if you make statements which suggest the UK government passing laws (even as draconian as this one) is 'worse than the Gestapo ever was,' you undermine the credibility of your argument. The Gestapo weren't even subject to rule of law: the organisation was granted immunity from any judicial action by a law passed in 1936.

The Gestapo took people who had been denounced as enemies, and executed them without trial. By any objective measure that is worse than what the UK government is doing.

The reality is that Hitler didn't even succeed in rallying the Church around him any more or less then the rest of the German population. The earliest documentation of Hitler's anti-semeticism came in the post war years, where the Jews were blamed for the sudden inconceivable loss of World War I. You can speculate on earlier sources

Starting in second half of the 19th century, a new form of anti-semitism, a political one, arose in addition to the traditional anti-semitism of the Roman Catholic institutions (which is sometimes called "anti-judaism", in order to distinguish it from the newer ones) in Austria which was one of the leading powers on the continent these days.

Towards the end of the 19th century, The Alldeutsche Partei (Pan-German Party), a right-wing populistic party lead by Georg von Schoenerer was one of the the major players in the Reichsrat, the parliament of the "Austrian" half of the Austrian-Hungarian empire. This party was mainly based on (german-oriented) nationalism and an already fierce form of anti-semitism, politically as well as racially oriented.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg_Ritter_von_Sch% C3%B6nerer

In 1914, before World War I broke out, the Austrian Reichsrat was dominated by the Christlich-Soziale Partei, until 1910 under the leadership of Dr. Karl Lueger who was an outspoken and fierce anti-semite of the christian (Roman Catholic) variant, and so was his whole party.

http://bob.swe.uni-linz.ac.at/Ebensee/Betrifft/58/ Schubert58.php

So in the first decades of the 20th century, in the years of his youth, sadly, Adolf Hitler even had a choice of well-established sources to pick anti-semitic ideas from and later to build on them.

I was pretty impressed with Courseware for .NET and C#. C# Tutorial looks like it'd be good for a developer to come up to speed on the language, and Application Development with C# and .NET covers the major APIs of the framework (plus more).

Then again, sometimes it's easier having a book you can read in bed, on the train, etc, etc..

..but isn't this just a Bluetooth dongle with some additional software? This piece of Linux software
http://www.soft.uni-linz.ac.at/_wiki/tiki-index.ph p?page=ProjectBluezHandsfree
seems to do basically the same..

The people at the Risc Institute are creating cool stuff like Theorema, which helps in automatically proofing things. Some of these people teach math at a university in Hagenberg where I got the chance to see this thing in action, it is really amazing how well this works.

Oberon-2 is a great language (though I'm not a fan of the Oberon OS) - it's low-level like C, but with safety, objects, and GC. It is, in my opinion, much better than Pascal or Modula (and I used to be a Pascal fan).

Anyway, quick links:
POW! - Oberon-2 IDE/Compiler for Windows.
OOC command-line compiler for Unix.
Oberon home page at ETH

Can't speak for Cobol, though. What school do you go to? I'm interested to know where they teach Oberon

-rob

Tiling windows, which is how I always arrange my windows in practice anyway, have been around at least since the late eighties in Niklaus Wirth's original Oberon system. I'm not sure what it looks like now that others have gone jumping on bandwagons since Wirth's retirement. (here and here)

Pretty fucking bad. I kill ten jews every morning just for fun. Check out my handiwork.

PySol, which comes standard with many Linux distributions, has a very nice version of Freecell (not to mention every other solitaire card game in the world).

there is of course post-boolean logic: fuzzy logic.

UPX is great for executables compression.

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When an OS runs short on RAM, maybe it should first attempt to compress LRU pages. Only once some threshold percentage of RAM is compressed, would it start swapping, and obviously the first pages to be swapped out will be the ones that are compressed, so you get more pages out to disk in a given time.

Although compressing pages when there are few CPU cycles to spare may not a good idea, often when a machine starts to swap, CPU utilization drops so there would be cycles to spare. Remember that swapping a single page can cost millions of CPU instructions. If you can compress/decompress a page in fewer instructions, it might be worth it. Hardware accellerated compression would be nice, but maybe not needed.

For fast compression, see: http://wildsau.idv.uni-linz.ac.at/mf x/lzo.html.

Java IMHO is a hardcore OO language.

Some have dared go further

That "go" question was really cool. I wish I played it well enough to attempt to write a great computer player, as this is a classic hard problem in AI, with a $2,000,000 reward, IIRC...

Of course, his "compression" is generally expressed in terms of "rules", and even some tips from image compression might help here. (recognize similar configurations, whether they be rotated, translated, etc., and adjust your strategy accordingly)

bzip2 is a really great program, generally offering better compression than gzip at least for large bodies of text. What I'd really like to see is a meta-compression format that has some heuristic to identify the type of file, and use the appropriate (optimal) algorithm. I know most modern compression programs do something like this already, (like RAR and its multimedia compression) but it's still neat. The few bits to identify the compression methods can be well worth it...

Also, hopefully those compression patches will eventually make it into Linux; it'd be great to see something like that working at the VFS level.

If it used something like LZO, there'd be up to gzip levels of compression with practically no performance hit on even a modest system. Maybe even speed improvements would be possible, due to having to read less data from the disk...

Under those situations, I'd advocate comressing swap (and even memory!) where it would help (not recently used data), and maybe merging more of that into the filesystem too...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.