As I'm a language freak, I like comparison between languages.
I said COMPARISON not FLAME WARS.
I understand that he must be very busy, but I think that he should take the time to look at Ruby because IMHO it competes in the "same space" (a clean scripting language).
Know thy competitor, even if it is only to steal its bests idea:-).
I view this type of services as a "super" yellow pages.
But when you look at current yellow pages, it won't be easy!
For examples, you can find a location of a shop on yellow pages, but you can't find its OPENING HOURS!
If you're lucky, there is also the address of a webpage which is usually obsolete and very UNinformative..
So maybe in the future, those agents will be everywhere, but first the "impedance mismatch" between the real world and its representation in the virtual world must be reduced..
Yes, stability comes at a price but Microsoft is one of the most profitable society, so maybe the price could have been taken on its HUGE benefits and not on the price the end-user pay..
Time to marcket is another matter, but from Windows 95 up to Windows ME, I haven't seen ANY gain in stability?
Why? Number of functionality over robustness, Microsoft may be one of the greatest software producer, as long as they insists on getting more feature instead of better feature, the situation won't improve.
Still, there is hope: the new Windows XP will be quite stable, at last!
Even if I have to buy another CPU and more memory to make it run, it will be a worthy upgrade.
Some of your points are dubious IMHO:
- points 2: Perl and Ruby are also defined by their implementations.
As these languages are still evolving, it seems quite normal!
- points 4: choosing a language is HARD, and while Ruby seems promising, Lisp is not designed to solve the same class of problems IMHO.
I don't know much about the point 1 and the point 3 is quite valid but it is the price to pay to avoid having a language full of cruft..
A nice article about SMT on the Alpha
on
Emergence of SMT
·
· Score: 1
A nice (and quite technical) article on the SMT for the Alpha can be found here
It is a 3-part article, click on "Alpha EV8 (Part x): Simultaneous Multi-Threat".
One of the things I like about SMT is that as it quite "cheap", it has a chance to spread quite effectively.
And when there will be a huge base of SMT ready CPUs, we will see AT LAST more software which takes advantage of parallelism (be it SMT or SMP).
where the price of a Radeon SDR and DDR is NOT the same.
Maybe next time you could think that not anybody lives in the US before saying stupid things.
Yes, I know I can order from the US but if I have a problem with the card, I would be out of luck, plus the shipping fee are not exactly free you know.
Yes, the perl -d to start the debugger is REALLY NICE as it means that everywhere I can run a Perl script, I can also debug it..
I hope that all the other scripts languages will duplicate this feature..
For the begin/end instead of { }, I don't like it either because it is unecessary typing which does little to improve readibiliy IMHO.
But I don't agree with your critics: first dump vi use vim instead, then if emacs (or vim) doesn't treat the same way {} and begin/end, this is a "misfeature" of the editor, it is not a fault of the language..
About your critics about the speed: frankly interpreted languages (all of them) are not used for their speed..
About the syntax, I do think that using a SmallTalk-inspired syntax is a really bad idea..
IMHO SmallTalk difficult to read syntax is the reason why the language is not more widespread..
But it is definitely nicer than Perl's syntax which I dislike utterly.
I do prefer its string syntax "xxxx #{var_name} xxxxx" than Pythons (not readable) and Perls (too easy to make an error which is ignored unless you use -w).
As for $xxx as an easy way to find variable xxx, don't forget that you can also use ${xxx} (I do it inside strings) so just searching for $xxx is not good enough.
I prefer Ruby sparse use of @ and $, it is less verbose than Python (self. everywhere) and more readable than the cluttered Perl $%@ usage..
Could you explain more precisely the Pythons problems: poor use of anonymous functions, couldn't find a way to functionalize 'use strict' ?
I'm not that impressed with Perl's CPAN, maybe I'm too difficult..
I am currently trying to decide if I go with Python (good integration with the rest) or if I choose Ruby: it has definitely some very good points, because I can't stand Perl anymore..
Both are free script language which more or less share the same goal: be a more readable Perl.
I would say from my short knowledge of both that Python is a bit more verbose and readable but that Ruby is more object-oriented and powerfull.
Python has more users (less than Perl of course) but in Japan Ruby has more users than Python..
I "fear" that we may end-up with the same situation as functionnal languages: having lots of differents languages which compete in the same workspace.
Well not quite similar, because I suspect that there is quite a big number of script written whereas functionnal languages seems to be doomed to stay quite confidential..
PS: for those who like Perl, yes you can write readable Perl but this is not really in the spirit "There is more than one way to do it" of the language.
And each time I had to maintain a Perl script written by someone else it had been a major pain..
You have to build also the "control" part in order to pilot the move of the arm, it can be as difficult to make as building the arm itself.
The next problem: how does the arm catch the needed molecules?
This may be easy if there is only one type of molecules: put the robot inside a solution of these molecules.
But if you need more than one type of molecules??
I can see an easy solution for the first arm, but for the second? How do you connect it to the energy source, to the molecules tank?
What I find strange is that nobody has designed a complete working auto-replication system with nano-bot.
Sure to a degree, the firt nano-bot design will be dependant of the way it has been built, but I think that trying to simulate as completely as how it COULD work would be an interesting baby step..
I respect Apple's works but IMHO you're a bit overenthusiastic here.
Yes, the G4/G4+ has a small die size, but the die size is only one part of the equation.
Yelds is quite important too, and I believe that Motorola has quite some problems with its yelds.
And producing small volumes (compared with 80x86) doesn't help either for having a good price.
I agree that the 500 MHz PPC is fast but I disagree when you say that the clock was "artificially" increased to 1 GHz: Apple fans should really use a good benchmarck and compare SpecInt/SpecFP instead of PhotoShop..
Anyway, the G4 low power is really, really nice for laptop, it is a pity though that the G4+ has such a bigger power consumption: it won't be as good as the G4 for the desktop.
If it is a "technical topic", the moderation system works quite correctly.
Those who knows the subject often posts interesting comments, links etc. : they are moderated up.
When someone posts a stupid thing, he mays fools the moderators at the beginning, but it won't last long: the reply will show that the post was wrong and it will be soon moderated down..
On a more "soft" topic: society, religion, politics, I do agree that the moderation system doesn't work very well..
I do remember when the NASA probe crashed due to a metric/miles conversion error, there was many posts who said that the miles/feet/.. are "more natural" than the metric system:/. was suffering from a giant case of Not Invented Here and was showing its US "roots".
But remember something: there is no "perfect" voting system: no "fair" voting system.
So there can't be a "perfect" moderation system either..
My personnal opinion is that stories submission should also be moderated because there are too many hoax,duplicates. Some stories even have WRONG URL! So as submitters are apparently too lazy to check the facts before submitting a story, they deserve to be moderated..
While exceptions is not really related to OOP, usually non-OOP languages (C,Pascal) do not have exceptions while OOP languages have them.
C++ has exceptions but there are rarely used.
Why am I so fond of exceptions?
Well, they ensure that errors are dectected, so by default you are aware of errors!
Otherwise you must hope that the programmer wasn't lazy or the error won't be noticed, if you're lucky the problem will cause a core dump if you're unlucky the programm will seem to work correctly even if it don't!
The major downside of exceptions is a performance issue, but as long as you use exceptions to send error messages only this is not really a problem..
This I can't understand.
I've read the paper about these neat tools.
They help security, with minimal loss of efficiency.
So why are they still not present in Linux?
I think that the dangerous function should be "deprecated": the Java way, it still works but upon compilation there is a warning which advise using the new function..
You can have :
- CPU A which is better than CPU B at integers calculation
- CPU B which is better than CPU A at floating-point operations
So which is the fastest?
Answer: it depends on your needs, on the apps that you are going to run on it..
So there is no absolute winner.
And this situation does happen in real life: CPU A would be a 80x86, CPU B would be a RISC.
Judging a CPU on only one "magic" number is quite meaningless and I would even say that it is stupid (no this is not a flame).
Watch those "naive" buying P4 at 1.3 GHz even if:
- there won't be no upgrade path: the socket will change in a few month so you won't be able to reuse the same motherboard.
- a 1.3GHz P4 is quite often beat by a 1GHz Athlon
- it uses some VERY expensive memory
They buy it because they believe in the magical "MHz" number.. Well not all of them, but I do suspect that for many people this is the case..
I'm sorry but to be able to compare CPU you can't use a "magical" number, you must understand a little bit how CPUs works, that's just the way it is...
Of course, it is JUST A BENCHMARK, so it is not perfect, but I think that it is quite good:
- vendor independant
- separate integers/floating-point performances (which are quite different beasts really)
Don't forget that not every component of the X-Box are standard: the videocard, the chipset, etc.. are NOT.
And all it takes is a shortage of ONE component to delay the whole box of course.
And the shipping of the X-Box in Europe have already been delayed, so yes Microsoft is quite likely to suffer from the same problems at the beginning.
Second, I don't think that the shortage of the PS2 will still be a problem when the X-Box will ship.
I do think that the X-Box will be a winner, but you'd better think twice about the shortage problems..
Slashdot Mirror
Some HURD developers are looking to replace their Mach kernel by L4, I think that it is because of performance problems.
So it seems that Mach has really performances problems: a BIG problem for a kernel!
As I'm a language freak, I like comparison between languages.
:-).
I said COMPARISON not FLAME WARS.
I understand that he must be very busy, but I think that he should take the time to look at Ruby because IMHO it competes in the "same space" (a clean scripting language).
Know thy competitor, even if it is only to steal its bests idea
I view this type of services as a "super" yellow pages.
But when you look at current yellow pages, it won't be easy!
For examples, you can find a location of a shop on yellow pages, but you can't find its OPENING HOURS!
If you're lucky, there is also the address of a webpage which is usually obsolete and very UNinformative..
So maybe in the future, those agents will be everywhere, but first the "impedance mismatch" between the real world and its representation in the virtual world must be reduced..
I had to use PVCS some times ago.
Urg, quite often I had to bypass the User Interface to manipulate directly its files!
As the PVCS we were using was under Windows, all our files under Unix were on the format 8.3..
And it was only a medium sized project!
It was in 1998 so maybe it has improved since then..(wishfull thinking)
Yes, stability comes at a price but Microsoft is one of the most profitable society, so maybe the price could have been taken on its HUGE benefits and not on the price the end-user pay..
:-)
Time to marcket is another matter, but from Windows 95 up to Windows ME, I haven't seen ANY gain in stability?
Why? Number of functionality over robustness, Microsoft may be one of the greatest software producer, as long as they insists on getting more feature instead of better feature, the situation won't improve.
Still, there is hope: the new Windows XP will be quite stable, at last!
Even if I have to buy another CPU and more memory to make it run, it will be a worthy upgrade.
Propably the last for a looongg time...
Some of your points are dubious IMHO:
- points 2: Perl and Ruby are also defined by their implementations.
As these languages are still evolving, it seems quite normal!
- points 4: choosing a language is HARD, and while Ruby seems promising, Lisp is not designed to solve the same class of problems IMHO.
I don't know much about the point 1 and the point 3 is quite valid but it is the price to pay to avoid having a language full of cruft..
A nice (and quite technical) article on the SMT for the Alpha can be found here
It is a 3-part article, click on "Alpha EV8 (Part x): Simultaneous Multi-Threat".
One of the things I like about SMT is that as it quite "cheap", it has a chance to spread quite effectively.
And when there will be a huge base of SMT ready CPUs, we will see AT LAST more software which takes advantage of parallelism (be it SMT or SMP).
Details on the subject is quite low, but it WILL have SMT.
Intel Jackson is rumoured to have SMT too.
IMHO SMT will be the next big thing: not too complicated to implement and in some case a big boost..
where the price of a Radeon SDR and DDR is NOT the same.
Maybe next time you could think that not anybody lives in the US before saying stupid things.
Yes, I know I can order from the US but if I have a problem with the card, I would be out of luck, plus the shipping fee are not exactly free you know.
First of all, I had a TNT and I'm ordering a Radeon SDR, so I'm not living on the cutting edge too.
But still you're wrong: processing more than 1024*768 pixels even for screen at this resolution IS interesting.
Why? Anti-aliasing!
And why using the number of pixels for the number of polygons?? One is a 2D-number, while polygons lives in 3D.
I don't know what is the number of polygons needed to render a tree (or worse a landscape) realistically but I think that it is quite huge!
Because waiting the tape drive was causing me stress! Much more than those fast 5,1/4 disk!!
Why? It wasn't for the time it took, it was the POOR RELIABILITY of the things.
Half the time, it didn't work..
IMHO you suffer from "rosy glass nostalgia", when we were young everything was SO much better!
Yeah right!
Yes, right now NVidia support for Linux is OK.
But will it stay the same? Who knows?
Why NVidia doesn't support BeOS ? They won't even allow Be to write their own driver!
I find this VERY disturbing..
I'm trying currently to choose a new videocard and I think that a Radeon might be a saffer bet.
Yes, the perl -d to start the debugger is REALLY NICE as it means that everywhere I can run a Perl script, I can also debug it..
I hope that all the other scripts languages will duplicate this feature..
For the begin/end instead of { }, I don't like it either because it is unecessary typing which does little to improve readibiliy IMHO.
But I don't agree with your critics: first dump vi use vim instead, then if emacs (or vim) doesn't treat the same way {} and begin/end, this is a "misfeature" of the editor, it is not a fault of the language..
About your critics about the speed: frankly interpreted languages (all of them) are not used for their speed..
About the syntax, I do think that using a SmallTalk-inspired syntax is a really bad idea..
IMHO SmallTalk difficult to read syntax is the reason why the language is not more widespread..
But it is definitely nicer than Perl's syntax which I dislike utterly.
I do prefer its string syntax "xxxx #{var_name} xxxxx" than Pythons (not readable) and Perls (too easy to make an error which is ignored unless you use -w).
As for $xxx as an easy way to find variable xxx, don't forget that you can also use ${xxx} (I do it inside strings) so just searching for $xxx is not good enough.
I prefer Ruby sparse use of @ and $, it is less verbose than Python (self. everywhere) and more readable than the cluttered Perl $%@ usage..
Could you explain more precisely the Pythons problems: poor use of anonymous functions, couldn't find a way to functionalize 'use strict' ?
I'm not that impressed with Perl's CPAN, maybe I'm too difficult..
I am currently trying to decide if I go with Python (good integration with the rest) or if I choose Ruby: it has definitely some very good points, because I can't stand Perl anymore..
If I had moderators points I would moderate you as "Insightful".
Banning child sex depiction (even if consentual!) and not banning child murder depiction says a lot about the state of minds in some parts of the US..
It reminds me of a case where a mother is prosecuted for buying condoms for her 13 year old child (he had a 15 year old girlfriend).
It is maybe because I'm French, but this sort of thing always amaze me..
Both are free script language which more or less share the same goal: be a more readable Perl.
I would say from my short knowledge of both that Python is a bit more verbose and readable but that Ruby is more object-oriented and powerfull.
Python has more users (less than Perl of course) but in Japan Ruby has more users than Python..
I "fear" that we may end-up with the same situation as functionnal languages: having lots of differents languages which compete in the same workspace.
Well not quite similar, because I suspect that there is quite a big number of script written whereas functionnal languages seems to be doomed to stay quite confidential..
PS: for those who like Perl, yes you can write readable Perl but this is not really in the spirit "There is more than one way to do it" of the language.
And each time I had to maintain a Perl script written by someone else it had been a major pain..
Let's suppose that you build a robotic arm.
You have to build also the "control" part in order to pilot the move of the arm, it can be as difficult to make as building the arm itself.
The next problem: how does the arm catch the needed molecules?
This may be easy if there is only one type of molecules: put the robot inside a solution of these molecules.
But if you need more than one type of molecules??
I can see an easy solution for the first arm, but for the second? How do you connect it to the energy source, to the molecules tank?
What I find strange is that nobody has designed a complete working auto-replication system with nano-bot.
Sure to a degree, the firt nano-bot design will be dependant of the way it has been built, but I think that trying to simulate as completely as how it COULD work would be an interesting baby step..
I respect Apple's works but IMHO you're a bit overenthusiastic here.
Yes, the G4/G4+ has a small die size, but the die size is only one part of the equation.
Yelds is quite important too, and I believe that Motorola has quite some problems with its yelds.
And producing small volumes (compared with 80x86) doesn't help either for having a good price.
I agree that the 500 MHz PPC is fast but I disagree when you say that the clock was "artificially" increased to 1 GHz: Apple fans should really use a good benchmarck and compare SpecInt/SpecFP instead of PhotoShop..
Anyway, the G4 low power is really, really nice for laptop, it is a pity though that the G4+ has such a bigger power consumption: it won't be as good as the G4 for the desktop.
If it is a "technical topic", the moderation system works quite correctly.
/. was suffering from a giant case of Not Invented Here and was showing its US "roots".
Those who knows the subject often posts interesting comments, links etc. : they are moderated up.
When someone posts a stupid thing, he mays fools the moderators at the beginning, but it won't last long: the reply will show that the post was wrong and it will be soon moderated down..
On a more "soft" topic: society, religion, politics, I do agree that the moderation system doesn't work very well..
I do remember when the NASA probe crashed due to a metric/miles conversion error, there was many posts who said that the miles/feet/.. are "more natural" than the metric system:
But remember something: there is no "perfect" voting system: no "fair" voting system.
So there can't be a "perfect" moderation system either..
My personnal opinion is that stories submission should also be moderated because there are too many hoax,duplicates. Some stories even have WRONG URL! So as submitters are apparently too lazy to check the facts before submitting a story, they deserve to be moderated..
Who is Dennis Miller?
While exceptions is not really related to OOP, usually non-OOP languages (C,Pascal) do not have exceptions while OOP languages have them.
C++ has exceptions but there are rarely used.
Why am I so fond of exceptions?
Well, they ensure that errors are dectected, so by default you are aware of errors!
Otherwise you must hope that the programmer wasn't lazy or the error won't be noticed, if you're lucky the problem will cause a core dump if you're unlucky the programm will seem to work correctly even if it don't!
The major downside of exceptions is a performance issue, but as long as you use exceptions to send error messages only this is not really a problem..
This I can't understand.
I've read the paper about these neat tools.
They help security, with minimal loss of efficiency.
So why are they still not present in Linux?
I think that the dangerous function should be "deprecated": the Java way, it still works but upon compilation there is a warning which advise using the new function..
Well, you can do this if you want, but why?
You can have :
- CPU A which is better than CPU B at integers calculation
- CPU B which is better than CPU A at floating-point operations
So which is the fastest?
Answer: it depends on your needs, on the apps that you are going to run on it..
So there is no absolute winner.
And this situation does happen in real life: CPU A would be a 80x86, CPU B would be a RISC.
Judging a CPU on only one "magic" number is quite meaningless and I would even say that it is stupid (no this is not a flame).
Watch those "naive" buying P4 at 1.3 GHz even if:
- there won't be no upgrade path: the socket will change in a few month so you won't be able to reuse the same motherboard.
- a 1.3GHz P4 is quite often beat by a 1GHz Athlon
- it uses some VERY expensive memory
They buy it because they believe in the magical "MHz" number.. Well not all of them, but I do suspect that for many people this is the case..
I'm sorry but to be able to compare CPU you can't use a "magical" number, you must understand a little bit how CPUs works, that's just the way it is...
Of course, it is JUST A BENCHMARK, so it is not perfect, but I think that it is quite good:
- vendor independant
- separate integers/floating-point performances (which are quite different beasts really)
There are many available results, look here.
Anyway, I think that it is much better than your "power rating" number..
Don't forget that not every component of the X-Box are standard: the videocard, the chipset, etc.. are NOT.
And all it takes is a shortage of ONE component to delay the whole box of course.
And the shipping of the X-Box in Europe have already been delayed, so yes Microsoft is quite likely to suffer from the same problems at the beginning.
Second, I don't think that the shortage of the PS2 will still be a problem when the X-Box will ship.
I do think that the X-Box will be a winner, but you'd better think twice about the shortage problems..
The VM will be inspired from FreeBSD.
Even the "page aging" stuff which got into the 2.4 late was inspired from FreeBSD.
Don't be so closed mind, Free software is all about sharing knowledge..