some apps are back end systems that are maxed out all the working day and for that you can't beat C and C++
If your systems are maxed out constantly then your problem is higher up the foodchain, probably with management trying to save money. Buy a faster machine and use Java. The difference in speed these days between Java and C is minimal. People are using Java everywhere for the high throughput server systems you describe.
I think you'll find that the Guardian will be secretly hoping that Murdoch leads the way. As this Henry Porter article demonstrates (and which was reflected elsewhere in the paper last year) there is a lot of unhappiness with the way people like Google can repackage their content.
Objective-C with it's "message passing" abstraction is perhaps getting closer to the idea of a data flow. While one might complain that well objective-C message passing is just a different sugar coating of C just like C++ is. This would be true from the user's point of view. But it's not as true from the Operating system's point of view. IN OSX, these messages are passing more like actual socket programming at the kernel level.
Not true. Objective-C messages are more like traditional C function pointer calls. The message selector gets turned into an offset into a table of function call pointers. Think about it: if it was really using the kernel for every single message/function call it would absolutely kill performance.
The prospect of learning from another civilization [...] could be utterly revolutionary.
Would the people who first decoded that incoming stream of useful information have the right to patent any resulting inventions? Who would own the copyright on the alien messages?
For a long time, the only supported platforms were Solaris and Windows. Then came Linux support. Some vendors, like IBM and HP, offered support on AIX and HP-UX, but it always trailed the features of the latest releases from Sun. Even Apple didn't have a good implementation of the JVM for Mac OS X for quite some time.
Pah, I ported Java to NeXTStep (the precursor to OS X) back in 1995. Wasn't that hard. I was also part of the two-person team who ported Java to Acorn's RISC machine in 1997. Then moved to IBM to help out with the port to the mainframe. Java is (or was) a doddle to port. But then even back in 95 there were people who were saying it would be "impossible" to implement Java on top of Mach threads.
Oh and to the person who claimed "Java was aggressively marketed as a flagship product" - at the beginning it was anything but. We just thought it was a cool new language.
Let them have their little law if it makes them feel better then let's see them try and enforce it. The first time they try it will become a cause célèbre via Twitter etc and they'll become a laughing stock with more people reading the banned site than would otherwise.
Just out of interest, is it possible to do this with train track and junctions? I.e. the kind of junction where if you come from the two-ended side it switches to that side. (See here for instance).
If you don't live in the USA you hardly stand much a chance of getting fair trial if you are extradited. Firstly you need money for a private attorney if you want a real shot at a fair trial (public defenders are a joke most of the time; innocent people go to jail all the time - just look at he innocence project).
A mate of mine who is somewhat on the Asperger's side of normal went to the US to work for Sun. He tended to work late and one day he got arrested - a cleaner at the office had been molested in an elevator and had picked his picture out. (The top left one in a sheet of photos of people working late that evening). She also said he had a motorbike helmet and spoke Spanish. Whole thing was obviously a mis-identification and when it came to the court hearing we expected it to be thrown out. To our horror she (presumably under pressure) identified him again in court. That meant he had to get tens of thousands of dollars for an attorney then face a jury where it was his word against hers. Him with his slightly strange manner (very geeky). I think the charges were kidnapping (trapped in the elevator) and molestation. He could have faced years in jail.
His employer Sun washed their hands of him, banned his brother from speaking to work colleagues and even collecting his latest pay cheque (still in his office drawer - doh!). Eventually he managed to borrow the bail money and got the hell out of there.
The US can be a scary place for a foreigner if you get in trouble with the law.
A flawed, but illustrative example that should explain why this is so: imagine you have a friend who is flipping a coin... if it comes up heads, he writes an X on two sheets of paper, if it comes up tails, he writes a checkmark on both instead. Both are immediately sealed inside envelopes and mailed to opposites sides of the planet. If you open one letter and see an X, you instantly know the other has an X also. That doesn't require any communication.
Not a good example IMO because it suggests hidden variables and experiments based on Bell's theorem have shown that class of theories to be false. Your other example is better so long as you make it clear that what is being written on the paper is not either an X or a tick, but a quantum combination of both and nothing is decided until the point when one envelope is opened and the other instantaneously ("faster than light") stops dithering and shows the same mark.
Although it can't be used to communicate anything, the fact remains that QM is acting at a distance.
It's also pretty arrogant to think that each of us just by looking at the world around us causes the probabilistic wave functions to collapse. The world goes all wavy and blurry as soon as we stop looking and when we turn around - snap! - everything solidifies. Yet that's what QM teaches us and it's not some half-baked philosophical notion like the Higgs boson cloaking thing.
Besides which, what is the universe actually _for_? We are all with our consciousness and our arrogance just bits and blobs of the universe. Maybe the universe is becoming self-aware and we are just a part of that process. Personally I think the universe is a machine for creating stories.
When I tried to stage a protest in the street, others were unwilling to participate because of the cameras. When I explained that they weren't important enough, that they should "stop being so self-important," they were strangely unconvinced.
So you don't want CCTV cameras to "intrude upon the privacy" of your street protest? Fine, get rid of them then. I'm sure it would never occur to the police to just film the protesters using a normal camcorder.
Android applications are writen in Java, with the shortcomings this brings with it (anybody want to write a game and see how the GC kills the framerate by processing stuff that has nothing to do with your application?
Not disputing this but just curious how you know that it is GC that is killing your framerate? Do you see pauses and have you correlated that with verbosegc? If it's just slow in general how do you know it's due to GC?
You could presumably write the critical parts of your game using your own object reuse/allocation policy (unless the problems are in the standard Android libs). I.e. don't use "new" all the time, just cache and reuse a pool of objects.
How can something so demonstrably ineffective also at the same time be a "huge intrusion on privacy"? If they can't catch criminals with it, how come it is so much easier to "intrude upon your privacy"? (Whatever that means - I mean, you're walking along the street minding your own business - you're not invisible and other people can see you, but you don't mind - other people can take high-resolution photos in which you appear, but you don't mind - but that fact that a CCTV camera gets some blurry image of you that nobody's ever going to look at and suddenly it's "help, help, Big Brother is watching me!" Stop being so self-important, nobody gives a damn)
I totally agree that Java isn't fun. It's very restrictive and almost forces even the simplest task to be forced into a complex object oriented structure.
"Score:5, Insightful"? Try saying that on a weekday, pal!
And how do we differentiate between elites and retards? Remember that for years we were told that all the brightest mathematicians and physicists were now working on financial derivatives because only "rocket scientists" could understand them.
The fact is, some things are too complicated to form an informed opinion on without graduate level study. It is OK to have elites.
Phew, that's ok then. I was beginning to worry that investment bankers might not have actually known what they were doing in the run up to the credit crunch.
Interesting. I wonder if part of the problem is that modern GUI debuggers just make it too easy for people to poke around in the internals of an object? Without the debugger they are restricted to using the API as intended and would never have gone down that rabbit hole.
Have you worked with contractors? [...] the lack of ownership in the product, of knowledge of the history, business purpose, and architecture of the product, the lack of sense of long-term commitment, of common goal, of responsibility for the outcome [...]
Your point is very valid. But in this case it's not the director. Danny Boyle wasn't a bankable name, or, indeed, a successful director. Or indeed, a good director. He's a hack who steals ideas from other movies. Slumdog would have been much better with a talented artist at the helm.
How on earth did this ridiculous troll ever get modded up to "5, Insightful"? Have you actually seen Slumdog or any of Danny Boyle's other films?
When I went to see it I thought it was probably over-hyped and was expecting it to be slightly dull but worthy. I came out of the cinema just gobsmacked by the sheer verve and originality. I've never seen a film like it before.
BTW I'd love to see your version with a "talented artist at the helm". Maybe they could have introduced some CGI to add a bit of drama - a Tsunami for instance, and maybe a geeky American backpacker who has it all figured out but nobody listens to him, etc etc.
Slashdot Mirror
If your systems are maxed out constantly then your problem is higher up the foodchain, probably with management trying to save money. Buy a faster machine and use Java. The difference in speed these days between Java and C is minimal. People are using Java everywhere for the high throughput server systems you describe.
I think you'll find that the Guardian will be secretly hoping that Murdoch leads the way. As this Henry Porter article demonstrates (and which was reflected elsewhere in the paper last year) there is a lot of unhappiness with the way people like Google can repackage their content.
Not true. Objective-C messages are more like traditional C function pointer calls. The message selector gets turned into an offset into a table of function call pointers. Think about it: if it was really using the kernel for every single message/function call it would absolutely kill performance.
Would the people who first decoded that incoming stream of useful information have the right to patent any resulting inventions? Who would own the copyright on the alien messages?
Pah, I ported Java to NeXTStep (the precursor to OS X) back in 1995. Wasn't that hard. I was also part of the two-person team who ported Java to Acorn's RISC machine in 1997. Then moved to IBM to help out with the port to the mainframe. Java is (or was) a doddle to port. But then even back in 95 there were people who were saying it would be "impossible" to implement Java on top of Mach threads.
Oh and to the person who claimed "Java was aggressively marketed as a flagship product" - at the beginning it was anything but. We just thought it was a cool new language.
The SDK might be free but the hardware to run it costs hundreds of quid, even second hand.
Let them have their little law if it makes them feel better then let's see them try and enforce it. The first time they try it will become a cause célèbre via Twitter etc and they'll become a laughing stock with more people reading the banned site than would otherwise.
E.g. see what happened over the Trafigura Super-injunction.
My youngest could name all the engines in Thomas The Tank Engine at age 3.
Just out of interest, is it possible to do this with train track and junctions? I.e. the kind of junction where if you come from the two-ended side it switches to that side. (See here for instance).
Sounds like something out of a Dilbert cartoon. I suspect the engineer was having a bit of fun with Bradley.
A mate of mine who is somewhat on the Asperger's side of normal went to the US to work for Sun. He tended to work late and one day he got arrested - a cleaner at the office had been molested in an elevator and had picked his picture out. (The top left one in a sheet of photos of people working late that evening). She also said he had a motorbike helmet and spoke Spanish. Whole thing was obviously a mis-identification and when it came to the court hearing we expected it to be thrown out. To our horror she (presumably under pressure) identified him again in court. That meant he had to get tens of thousands of dollars for an attorney then face a jury where it was his word against hers. Him with his slightly strange manner (very geeky). I think the charges were kidnapping (trapped in the elevator) and molestation. He could have faced years in jail.
His employer Sun washed their hands of him, banned his brother from speaking to work colleagues and even collecting his latest pay cheque (still in his office drawer - doh!). Eventually he managed to borrow the bail money and got the hell out of there.
The US can be a scary place for a foreigner if you get in trouble with the law.
Nearly a second, wow, that's a long time just for a few k of text. Any idea why, is it easy to profile PHP?
BTW I thought most such web apps used caching to ease the load?
Not a good example IMO because it suggests hidden variables and experiments based on Bell's theorem have shown that class of theories to be false. Your other example is better so long as you make it clear that what is being written on the paper is not either an X or a tick, but a quantum combination of both and nothing is decided until the point when one envelope is opened and the other instantaneously ("faster than light") stops dithering and shows the same mark.
Although it can't be used to communicate anything, the fact remains that QM is acting at a distance.
It's also pretty arrogant to think that each of us just by looking at the world around us causes the probabilistic wave functions to collapse. The world goes all wavy and blurry as soon as we stop looking and when we turn around - snap! - everything solidifies. Yet that's what QM teaches us and it's not some half-baked philosophical notion like the Higgs boson cloaking thing. Besides which, what is the universe actually _for_? We are all with our consciousness and our arrogance just bits and blobs of the universe. Maybe the universe is becoming self-aware and we are just a part of that process. Personally I think the universe is a machine for creating stories.
That's not a statement you see very often.
So you don't want CCTV cameras to "intrude upon the privacy" of your street protest? Fine, get rid of them then. I'm sure it would never occur to the police to just film the protesters using a normal camcorder.
Not disputing this but just curious how you know that it is GC that is killing your framerate? Do you see pauses and have you correlated that with verbosegc? If it's just slow in general how do you know it's due to GC?
You could presumably write the critical parts of your game using your own object reuse/allocation policy (unless the problems are in the standard Android libs). I.e. don't use "new" all the time, just cache and reuse a pool of objects.
How can something so demonstrably ineffective also at the same time be a "huge intrusion on privacy"? If they can't catch criminals with it, how come it is so much easier to "intrude upon your privacy"? (Whatever that means - I mean, you're walking along the street minding your own business - you're not invisible and other people can see you, but you don't mind - other people can take high-resolution photos in which you appear, but you don't mind - but that fact that a CCTV camera gets some blurry image of you that nobody's ever going to look at and suddenly it's "help, help, Big Brother is watching me!" Stop being so self-important, nobody gives a damn)
"Score:5, Insightful"? Try saying that on a weekday, pal!
And how do we differentiate between elites and retards? Remember that for years we were told that all the brightest mathematicians and physicists were now working on financial derivatives because only "rocket scientists" could understand them.
Phew, that's ok then. I was beginning to worry that investment bankers might not have actually known what they were doing in the run up to the credit crunch.
Interesting. I wonder if part of the problem is that modern GUI debuggers just make it too easy for people to poke around in the internals of an object? Without the debugger they are restricted to using the API as intended and would never have gone down that rabbit hole.
*sigh* I miss those days
How on earth did this ridiculous troll ever get modded up to "5, Insightful"? Have you actually seen Slumdog or any of Danny Boyle's other films?
When I went to see it I thought it was probably over-hyped and was expecting it to be slightly dull but worthy. I came out of the cinema just gobsmacked by the sheer verve and originality. I've never seen a film like it before.
BTW I'd love to see your version with a "talented artist at the helm". Maybe they could have introduced some CGI to add a bit of drama - a Tsunami for instance, and maybe a geeky American backpacker who has it all figured out but nobody listens to him, etc etc.