Ok, I admit it. Maybe I'm not a part of the most average type of web-user. But I like to have a lot of tabs/windows open, not just 1-3 like a lot of people seem to have. We're talking about at least 5, and often around 15. iCab under OS 9 never had a problem with this. OmniWeb 4.0.6 got pretty slow with a lot of windows open, but the newer sneaky peaks haven't been. Opera kept it's pace with 15 windows being used, but it increased the probabilty that it would crash.
Mozilla though, is an entirely another story. On my iBook500 with 320 MB RAM, or a 500 MHz UltraSparc II w/ 256 MB RAM, it crawls as soon as I've got either a few tabs or a few windows open. By the time I've got 8-9 tabs or windows open, it's unusably slow, often taking 1-5 *seconds* just to open a new window!
One of my biggest complaints with Mozilla in the past was that it took so damn long for new windows or tabs to open. As a person who is always cmd-clicking to open links in new windows (so I can continue reading things in the last page, I read many pages at the same time, non-linearily), Mozilla is a pain in the ass to use.
After moving to Mac OS X, I was becoming frustrated with iCab. It's the best on OS 9, but on OS X, it seemed to have issues with event-locking (all of the windows in iCab would be unresonsive while page was in it's last stage of rendering). I used to use OmniWeb in my NeXTSTEP/OpenStep/Rhapsody days, so gave that a try. After running it for a few weeks, there seemed to be some sort of rotting going on, and getting progressively slower. OmniWeb displays pages absolutely beautifully, and initially did so at a satisfactory speed.
So, I thought I'd try Mozilla. This was after 0.9.8. I tried both that release, and a bunch of nightly builds, including ones that people said were "fast and stable." Man, Mozilla still blows. Under Slowaris and OS X, it still uses a huge amount of RAM and CPU time. I very disapointed.
Then I found Opera for OS X. It was great on all fronts except stability. At least a few times a day, Opera just crashes out of nowhere. Not surprising, considering it is a beta version. But this was getting annoying- everytime it'd crash, I'd loose any new bookmarks I made in the session.
Then a friend pointed me to OmniWeb's SneakyPeek releases, which are more or less weekly builds. Compared to OW 4.0.6, the last two SPs I've been running have been really great- faster and more stable than all previous OmniWeb versions I've run. I'll be sticking with it, even.:)
NetWinders weren't just servers...
on
Netwinder is Back
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· Score: 2
They had a desktop version too. Tiny computer, about the size of one of those lil' DEC Multias. Back in '98, I considered buying one over the K62-350 I was planning on getting. I'm a sucker for elegance, power efficiency and a small computer. And the StrongARM processor. Two things kept me from doing it: the price (buying a Mac was far more cost effective- did that a year later) and the fact that GCC for ARM can't do any optimizations without crashing and burning. A damn shame, 'tis.
Perhaps I should've said that better- what do any of the mainstream languages that Smalltalk doesn't? CL + CLOS is an incredible system, full of all sorts of interesting, useful, and just plain neat features. Smalltalk is the language in which I do most of my work, be it scripting or ecology research, but CL is my second most used language.
But there's other ways of programming [besides OOP], whatever marketting hype might tell you.
In Smalltalk, everything is an object. However, this doesn't mean you have to program using OOP. I've written functional and procedural programs in Smalltalk, usually small scripts.
Macros are one of the things that Lisp really has over Smalltalk. Indeed, Lisp is a meta-language.
Complex argument-lists not supported
In Smalltalk, if you needed this functionality, you can work around it. It won't be as bootiful as in CL, but it's better than nothing. I assume you're speaking of using an arglist like (a b &rest). In Smalltalk, that could be something akin to the message header "do: a to: b with: anArray", of course, naming your keywords something that makes more sense than #do:to:with:.:)
Method dispatch determined statically at runtime (a killer for dynamic languages)
This has never been a problem with Smalltalk, since the begining. Cf. Object>>#doesNotUnderstand:, which allow you to do any sort of whacky message proxing or method dispatch at runtime.
(yes, I know you mean the CLR, not sure which ones you mean to apply to Smalltalk)
Good to see a couple kindred spirits on here, compared to the monotony of C/C++/Perl/PHP/Java sheep that hate parens or are confused by object-verb syntax.:)
I thought Yahoo still used CLISP? Just curious, how is it funny that Yahoo would use a proven, fast, feature-filled, dynamic, and programmer-time efficient language to write their store code?
Having.class or.so files is very much so more practical for most people's situations. A monolithic Smalltalk image doesn't bother me, but I am used to Smalltalk. For a person coming from magical-60s land, where everyone lives in the past and still uses files, the way Smalltalk does this is pretty foreign.
Yes, indeed, Self is/was quite the awesome project. It's a shame it had to turn into Java, rather than being in the position where Java is today.
Actually, a while back I read somewhere about someone using COBOL to do shoppingcart/ASP stuff, as a part of some.NET/ASP.NET intro/demo. So yeah, you probably will be able to do Fortran.NET ASP crap, as scary as that is.
B) Java and C# are not the logical successors to C/C++. They're more like a smalltalk with a C-syntax and some trade-offs for efficiency. In terms of providing system calls and API's that are cross-platform... Well, even more like smalltalk!!
Not really. If anything, Java and C# are logical steps backward, but they certainly aren't successors. Neither of them have anywhere near the level of dynamic runtime, reflexion, meta-programming, or general flexibility that Smalltalk has.
It makes many good points about how cs is more the same than different now as compare to 10, 15 even 20 years ago!
It really hasn't progressed. No language, other than things like multiple inheritance (which was tried in Smalltalk, but ditched) and sugared syntax, really has features that surpass something like Smalltalk-80, a language standardized in 1980. Even then, the research was done in the years previous to 1980. It's kind of sad, really. I watched the Alan Kay lecture tape "Doing with Images make Symbols" again last weekend, and it really illustrates this point; between the Smalltalk group at Xerox PARC, Doug Englebert, and the Flex visual programming language, we've not had any real advances, other than making things cheaper, smaller, and crappier. By crappier, I mean taking Smalltalk and Lisp, and perverting them into the hacks known as C++, C#, and Java.
But you still have only so many junky things to make, filling your finite living space. There is also a finite set of people willing to go and take their old crap and make it into useless things such as business card holders. Even more, there's still a finite number of people who'd buy this reworked junk. So, yes, it's still obsolete, unless it's been processed by someone like yourself.
Heh. On the Squeak mailing list, there have been cracks about how Zope is essentially trying to make themselves a bloated implementation of Smalltalk out of Python. This interview makes it a lot clearer that may be precisely the case.:)
But why would you want to do that? I can see the purpose of Jython in and of itself, but why Phabric? It's not like this would allow Python/Zope in places where Java is required, like is often the argument for Jython. If your boss is letting you use Phabric for some app, I'd assume she'd let you use real Zope with real Python.
The main limiting factor for most plants is CO2 supply.
I find it hard to believe that you studied botany. CO2 is not the main limiting factor in almost any system on this planet. There are exceptions in some systems, but overwhelmingly, usable nitrogen is the limiting factor. If CO2 were a limiting factor, it would be in short demand, but it's in great excess. I'm not sure what you NY money analogy is meant to convey, but CO2 is very readily available at the elevations in the atmosphere where it's required. N and P on the otherhand, are in demand, and usually not in great surplus. This is very easy to support, experimentally in your own home. The idea that CO2 is a limiting factor for most ecosystems is laughable.
That's really the only point that's refutable; all else are based in subjectivity.
Not the only portable Trash-80!
on
Tandys Never Die
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· Score: 2
This model just happened to be the most portable of the Trash-80 line. I ran into a TRS-80 4P when I was in high school. Yes, this is the TRS-80 model 4 - portable. 30 pound behemoth that needed to be plugged into the wall. Ok, it wasn't very portable, but on the bottom of the machine, it claimed to be portable! C'mon, it had a handle!
Well, capitalism only works on paper as well. The fact is, proven again and again by thousands of years of human civilization, our planned governments and economies do not work. They all work on paper, but do not in real life. This is because they only work if the same silly assumptions that are down on paper are present in the real world implementation, which never happens.
We don't have a completely free-market economy, so I really couldn't slam it.
Christ. I wasn't complaining about our socialist reality. It was a statement of fact. I like having roads. There's no need to assume that anyone who mentions socialism is using it in a negative way.
Sorry - not everything is free and we don't live in a socialist economy.
Actually, we do. Ever heard of wellfare? Taxes? Roads built by the government? The US economic system is socialist, however, not to the extent that it is in Europe. We don't live in a communist economy, however.
Actually, LittleSmalltalk and GNU Smalltalk excluded, all of the Smalltalk systems have somewhat similar IDEs, more or less in their features. For 'professional' app development, VisualAge for Smalltalk is great, but your apps will be stuck on Win32, AIX, and Solaris. VisualWorks (http://www.cincom.com) is very cross-platform, supporting every major desktop and server platform. VW also has "enterprise" level features for those that can only see buzzwords.
For me, Smalltalk would really be the only option. Tools like Python will only take you so far; after a while, you'll be at a loss trying to manage a huge application. With tools like ENVY/Developer for Smalltalk, working on a large app in a team is quite natural. It has a real IDE, not like those found in the world of C/C++. There's a reason a lot of non-Smalltalk coders say that IDEs are mostly worthless- it's because a truly useful IDE hasn't gone far outside of Smalltalk.
No, but when developments come to pass, be it in the field of programming languages or building materials, they are tested and applied in ways that approach their potential. If this didn't happen, and wasn't supposed to happen, we'd have nothing more than COBOL, FORTRAN, and LISP (forget about one of the nice lisps, like CL, MacLisp, ISLISP, Scheme - just the original). Maybe Algol-60, but with your reasoning, we would've just stuck with the first three.
Real closures aren't available in.NET?! I must admit, I was quite excited to hear that you and/or Ximian were serious about.NET, and I applaud your efforts. If that's the case, how does Mondrian deal with it?
Deluded scientists? Bullshit.
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Arguing A.I.
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· Score: 2
Or is A.I. yet another overhyped, self-serving fantasy by deluded scientists and technocrats talking mostly to one another, foisting their ill-conceived, poorly-engineered creations on an unsuspecting public?
Oh, please! That sounds like one of those typical rants against science, where science works hard, and either a rogue scientist with green eyes, or some company, takes their work, and hypes it to the "unsuspecting public." Among the scientists who do AI that I know (5 CS faculty), none of them seem to have deluted fantasies about what the current AI, esp that they're working on, can do. They don't benefit from making promises that they cannot follow up on- corporations do.
Slashdot Mirror
iBook and www.lowendmac.com. :)
(not a troll serious question)
How can you stand to use ChatZilla? Do you only IRC on a rare occasion?
Ok, I admit it. Maybe I'm not a part of the most average type of web-user. But I like to have a lot of tabs/windows open, not just 1-3 like a lot of people seem to have. We're talking about at least 5, and often around 15. iCab under OS 9 never had a problem with this. OmniWeb 4.0.6 got pretty slow with a lot of windows open, but the newer sneaky peaks haven't been. Opera kept it's pace with 15 windows being used, but it increased the probabilty that it would crash.
Mozilla though, is an entirely another story. On my iBook500 with 320 MB RAM, or a 500 MHz UltraSparc II w/ 256 MB RAM, it crawls as soon as I've got either a few tabs or a few windows open. By the time I've got 8-9 tabs or windows open, it's unusably slow, often taking 1-5 *seconds* just to open a new window!
One of my biggest complaints with Mozilla in the past was that it took so damn long for new windows or tabs to open. As a person who is always cmd-clicking to open links in new windows (so I can continue reading things in the last page, I read many pages at the same time, non-linearily), Mozilla is a pain in the ass to use.
After moving to Mac OS X, I was becoming frustrated with iCab. It's the best on OS 9, but on OS X, it seemed to have issues with event-locking (all of the windows in iCab would be unresonsive while page was in it's last stage of rendering). I used to use OmniWeb in my NeXTSTEP/OpenStep/Rhapsody days, so gave that a try. After running it for a few weeks, there seemed to be some sort of rotting going on, and getting progressively slower. OmniWeb displays pages absolutely beautifully, and initially did so at a satisfactory speed.
:)
So, I thought I'd try Mozilla. This was after 0.9.8. I tried both that release, and a bunch of nightly builds, including ones that people said were "fast and stable." Man, Mozilla still blows. Under Slowaris and OS X, it still uses a huge amount of RAM and CPU time. I very disapointed.
Then I found Opera for OS X. It was great on all fronts except stability. At least a few times a day, Opera just crashes out of nowhere. Not surprising, considering it is a beta version. But this was getting annoying- everytime it'd crash, I'd loose any new bookmarks I made in the session.
Then a friend pointed me to OmniWeb's SneakyPeek releases, which are more or less weekly builds. Compared to OW 4.0.6, the last two SPs I've been running have been really great- faster and more stable than all previous OmniWeb versions I've run. I'll be sticking with it, even.
They had a desktop version too. Tiny computer, about the size of one of those lil' DEC Multias. Back in '98, I considered buying one over the K62-350 I was planning on getting. I'm a sucker for elegance, power efficiency and a small computer. And the StrongARM processor. Two things kept me from doing it: the price (buying a Mac was far more cost effective- did that a year later) and the fact that GCC for ARM can't do any optimizations without crashing and burning. A damn shame, 'tis.
Perhaps I should've said that better- what do any of the mainstream languages that Smalltalk doesn't? CL + CLOS is an incredible system, full of all sorts of interesting, useful, and just plain neat features. Smalltalk is the language in which I do most of my work, be it scripting or ecology research, but CL is my second most used language.
:)
:)
But there's other ways of programming [besides OOP], whatever marketting hype might tell you.
In Smalltalk, everything is an object. However, this doesn't mean you have to program using OOP. I've written functional and procedural programs in Smalltalk, usually small scripts.
Macros are one of the things that Lisp really has over Smalltalk. Indeed, Lisp is a meta-language.
Complex argument-lists not supported
In Smalltalk, if you needed this functionality, you can work around it. It won't be as bootiful as in CL, but it's better than nothing. I assume you're speaking of using an arglist like (a b &rest). In Smalltalk, that could be something akin to the message header "do: a to: b with: anArray", of course, naming your keywords something that makes more sense than #do:to:with:.
Method dispatch determined statically at runtime (a killer for dynamic languages)
This has never been a problem with Smalltalk, since the begining. Cf. Object>>#doesNotUnderstand:, which allow you to do any sort of whacky message proxing or method dispatch at runtime.
(yes, I know you mean the CLR, not sure which ones you mean to apply to Smalltalk)
Good to see a couple kindred spirits on here, compared to the monotony of C/C++/Perl/PHP/Java sheep that hate parens or are confused by object-verb syntax.
I thought Yahoo still used CLISP? Just curious, how is it funny that Yahoo would use a proven, fast, feature-filled, dynamic, and programmer-time efficient language to write their store code?
Having .class or .so files is very much so more practical for most people's situations. A monolithic Smalltalk image doesn't bother me, but I am used to Smalltalk. For a person coming from magical-60s land, where everyone lives in the past and still uses files, the way Smalltalk does this is pretty foreign.
Yes, indeed, Self is/was quite the awesome project. It's a shame it had to turn into Java, rather than being in the position where Java is today.
Actually, a while back I read somewhere about someone using COBOL to do shoppingcart/ASP stuff, as a part of some .NET/ASP.NET intro/demo. So yeah, you probably will be able to do Fortran.NET ASP crap, as scary as that is.
Not really. If anything, Java and C# are logical steps backward, but they certainly aren't successors. Neither of them have anywhere near the level of dynamic runtime, reflexion, meta-programming, or general flexibility that Smalltalk has.
It makes many good points about how cs is more the same than different now as compare to 10, 15 even 20 years ago!
It really hasn't progressed. No language, other than things like multiple inheritance (which was tried in Smalltalk, but ditched) and sugared syntax, really has features that surpass something like Smalltalk-80, a language standardized in 1980. Even then, the research was done in the years previous to 1980. It's kind of sad, really. I watched the Alan Kay lecture tape "Doing with Images make Symbols" again last weekend, and it really illustrates this point; between the Smalltalk group at Xerox PARC, Doug Englebert, and the Flex visual programming language, we've not had any real advances, other than making things cheaper, smaller, and crappier. By crappier, I mean taking Smalltalk and Lisp, and perverting them into the hacks known as C++, C#, and Java.
But you still have only so many junky things to make, filling your finite living space. There is also a finite set of people willing to go and take their old crap and make it into useless things such as business card holders. Even more, there's still a finite number of people who'd buy this reworked junk. So, yes, it's still obsolete, unless it's been processed by someone like yourself.
LISt Processing? Why not just use CLISP?
(most of you slashkiddies won't get this joke, but kudos to those that do!)
Heh. On the Squeak mailing list, there have been cracks about how Zope is essentially trying to make themselves a bloated implementation of Smalltalk out of Python. This interview makes it a lot clearer that may be precisely the case. :)
But why would you want to do that? I can see the purpose of Jython in and of itself, but why Phabric? It's not like this would allow Python/Zope in places where Java is required, like is often the argument for Jython. If your boss is letting you use Phabric for some app, I'd assume she'd let you use real Zope with real Python.
The main limiting factor for most plants is CO2 supply.
I find it hard to believe that you studied botany. CO2 is not the main limiting factor in almost any system on this planet. There are exceptions in some systems, but overwhelmingly, usable nitrogen is the limiting factor. If CO2 were a limiting factor, it would be in short demand, but it's in great excess. I'm not sure what you NY money analogy is meant to convey, but CO2 is very readily available at the elevations in the atmosphere where it's required. N and P on the otherhand, are in demand, and usually not in great surplus. This is very easy to support, experimentally in your own home. The idea that CO2 is a limiting factor for most ecosystems is laughable.
That's really the only point that's refutable; all else are based in subjectivity.
This model just happened to be the most portable of the Trash-80 line. I ran into a TRS-80 4P when I was in high school. Yes, this is the TRS-80 model 4 - portable. 30 pound behemoth that needed to be plugged into the wall. Ok, it wasn't very portable, but on the bottom of the machine, it claimed to be portable! C'mon, it had a handle!
Well, capitalism only works on paper as well. The fact is, proven again and again by thousands of years of human civilization, our planned governments and economies do not work. They all work on paper, but do not in real life. This is because they only work if the same silly assumptions that are down on paper are present in the real world implementation, which never happens.
We don't have a completely free-market economy, so I really couldn't slam it.
Christ. I wasn't complaining about our socialist reality. It was a statement of fact. I like having roads. There's no need to assume that anyone who mentions socialism is using it in a negative way.
Moron. Where did he say anything about Apple caring if he runs "real" OS X rather than Darwin/XFree86?
Sorry - not everything is free and we don't live in a socialist economy.
Actually, we do. Ever heard of wellfare? Taxes? Roads built by the government? The US economic system is socialist, however, not to the extent that it is in Europe. We don't live in a communist economy, however.
For me, Smalltalk would really be the only option. Tools like Python will only take you so far; after a while, you'll be at a loss trying to manage a huge application. With tools like ENVY/Developer for Smalltalk, working on a large app in a team is quite natural. It has a real IDE, not like those found in the world of C/C++. There's a reason a lot of non-Smalltalk coders say that IDEs are mostly worthless- it's because a truly useful IDE hasn't gone far outside of Smalltalk.
Through ugly hacks. You can support all of the features Java provides in assembly using similar ugly hacks, but you're still stuck using ugly hacks.
No, but when developments come to pass, be it in the field of programming languages or building materials, they are tested and applied in ways that approach their potential. If this didn't happen, and wasn't supposed to happen, we'd have nothing more than COBOL, FORTRAN, and LISP (forget about one of the nice lisps, like CL, MacLisp, ISLISP, Scheme - just the original). Maybe Algol-60, but with your reasoning, we would've just stuck with the first three.
Real closures aren't available in .NET?! I must admit, I was quite excited to hear that you and/or Ximian were serious about .NET, and I applaud your efforts. If that's the case, how does Mondrian deal with it?
Oh, please! That sounds like one of those typical rants against science, where science works hard, and either a rogue scientist with green eyes, or some company, takes their work, and hypes it to the "unsuspecting public." Among the scientists who do AI that I know (5 CS faculty), none of them seem to have deluted fantasies about what the current AI, esp that they're working on, can do. They don't benefit from making promises that they cannot follow up on- corporations do.