Are you seriously unable to think of any reason why a program might need more than one thread of execution?
No, and that isn't what I said. I would admit that I really didn't say much, but if I had said something I would have said that in the majority of cases, processes are more managable, and easier to debug than threads.
The number one reason to use multiple threads (or processes) is to isolate operations that block from the parts of the program that need to remain interactive.
Which in many cases can also be done with separate processes, select() or poll().
For example, the first web browsers were single threaded and would block waiting for a DNS query to complete.
Something that can easily be done as a separate process. Since the browser would have to listen on multiple file-descriptors anyway, in order to listen to both network and GUI events, this would have minimal overhead on the design of the webbrowser. And the increased modularity would help you in both designing and debugging both applications.
Another reason to use more than one thread is if a part of your program has to sit on a socket waiting for packets or connection requests - you couldn't write a useful web server without multiple threads or processes.
There exists several useful single-threaded webservers that select() or poll() instead of using threads. And there exists many that use processes instead of threads.
Finally, a lot of applications involve calculations that take a long time and it's usually desirable to let them run in the background rather than freezing up the whole UI while the calculation completes.
And most of those background calculations could just as well be put into a stupid background process. Leaving you with a simple, and dumb GUI to control them, and simple to write easily replacable background processes that can be developed and debugged independently.
I could go on, but I hope you get the point by now.
And so could I, but I doubt you get the point anyway.
And can be programmed for more. Whats too bad however is that it costs a lot, and I'm fairly uncertain whether I would actually like to type on the darn thing.
Debugging multi-threaded programs is much easier. For one thing, how many debuggers let you attach to & debug more than one process at a time in the same set of debugger windows (or at all)?
Now, why on earth would you do that? The reason for putting things in separate processes is to have them separated. There is no reason to treat two entirely separate things as one. How many word processors do you see that allows you to edit two documents in the same window/pane?
No, what you need to do is to design your application to not use any memory, since that will undoubtedly trash the cache. But of course, reordering instructions for lower performance, so the CPU can interleave another process will also help (not that it's going to increase performance in any way).
On the other hand, this might finally be an argument in support of threads versus processes, since that former avoids the cache issues.
Not perfect, but at least the lizard has a verifiable codebase.
Not in the sense people who talk about verifying means. Mozilla would probably take at least 1k man years to verify. If you don't understand what I mean, take a look at e.g. this, which should give you an idea of what verifyable programming means.
Well, outlook would have to come before IE. Sure, stupid users can be prompted to execute any trojan in IE (and it has some very bad security faults as well). But with Outlook, you simply send them a mail, and you're in...
Well, IIS is no more installed by default on w2k, than rpc, apache or ssh is installed by default on linux systems. I have never had much of a problem not installing either of them.
But if it was your son/daughter that had the disease, I'm sure you wouldn't hesitate to buy snake^H^H^H^H^HLorenzo's oil, even based only on anecdotical evidence. And in this case you would base your purchase not only on anecdotical evidence, but statistical evidence too.
The problem with such wonder-drugs nobody understands, is that it after a while becomes very difficult to find a group not taking the drug, so you can know it's effects. And thus, you may never find out why it works.
This misses the point. We do not need a new WYSIWYG word processor that saves stuff in.xml instead of.doc
True, that would wouldn't be of much help (it would help some, but not much).
But there are so many other neat possibilites. For end users, writing a document should be like filling out a form. it should not require having understood LaTeX, HTML, XML, or any other insane markup system.
And that's why all XML editors suck. Because an XML editor intended for end-user should be WYSIWYG. It should not require knowledge of tags. And it should be easy to configure for the local IT people.
The way it should work was this. Local IT people write DTD/Schema and stylesheets for common document-types. Then they feed DTD/Schema and stylesheet (possibly with some more info) to a nifty XML editor, and the end result looks like expensive custom-written application.
If XML can't do that, I really don't know what the purpose of using it is. Because you will never, ever, ever, get everyone in your company to convert from Word to something less userfriendly just because you prefer to work that way.
But then again, we will get this. Whether it will be called Mozilla or IE or something else, is still an open question, though...
There is no such thing as a universal skill-set, that will be good enough for any kind of job. You will have to be more specific about what kind of job you want, and work on that skill-set. This is usually simple if you are a nerd, because then you want to work with what you are interested, and refining those skills are you hobby anyway.
Finally, don't believe some of those job-ads will ever find their ideal candidate. Most of them just lists every three-letter-acronym they've heard about, and expect the ideal candidate to just walk in the door. It will never happen. Use common sense, and decide for yourself whether it would be worth applying for the job you are looking at.
If you are intelligent, knowledgeable, and a quick learner, you should get a job pretty soon, but the times have made it a lot worse for newly educated to land a good job.
Well, there is nothing inherently wrong with TV. But it is certainly not so fabulous that I would go to this length just to be able to get my daily dose of undubbed "friends" in Singapore. And that was the point I was trying to make.
Sometimes I am amazed at the resources people put into their TV-viewing. They schedule their life around TV programs (personally, I have never been able to follow a series for more than two consecutive episodes). But hey, that's just me....
I've got a better idea. Don't watch so much TV, it will hurt your eyes (insert obvious Monty Python reference here).
Or, as an alternative, you could try learning the language while you are there, and try to watch local TV instead.
And being an asian country, maybe you'll find an abundance of cheap DVD's there. That while surely give you more quality entertainment than the option of the usual stuff they send on TV.
And what's wrong with books? Newspapers? Magazines? Having a social life instead? IMHO you should be happy to have a reason to cut down on TV.
Root mean square is not a communist, nor even a person, it is a common way of measuring the departure from the null value of a set of numbers.
Oh, by the way, if you meant Richard Stallman, he is not a communist either. Just ask him. If that isn't enough, examine his beliefs (and while some of them may be similar to communism (as most people have some beliefs similar to communism, otherwise it would never have been popular), many are not).
Probably 7 or 8 years ago I had two X-based workstations sitting next to each other on my desk, running different brands of Unix. For convenience I wrote two little Xlib programs:
Sounds neat.
I suppose moving the pointer between displays could get hairy with recent window managers that treat the edge of the screen as a request to switch virtual desktops:-)
Yes, that's nice, and any remote desktop software will allow you to do the same. But copy&paste between different desktops is not something X has had for 15 years (at least afaik)
Physical education? I'm quite sure that if you can't teach, and is therefore teaching physical education, and you want to use computer-based training instead of a gymnasium, then you are right in that you don't know how to teach.
On the other hand, you might have some other meaning for P.E. than the first one that popped into my head. Might I be so bold as to ask you to define your abbreviations at least once?
I was part of the board for a local volunteer radio station in Norway some years back. We covered an area of about 20x20km (actually we covered a lot more, but that was what we had a license to cover), with very rough terrain on two 10W transmitters. Unless you where as unlucky as we where with the terrain, one would be more than e enough.
Another interesting fact about radio-transmitters is that boosting up the effect isn't really going to buy you that much. The signal-strength X kilometers away decreases by at least the square of the distance.
Lastly, unless you are a commercial radio-station, there is no reason why you would want to broadcast in stereo. People listening to the radio usually don't care much about that. We had some people complaining about the stereo-light on their radio not lighting up, so we fixed that (making the stereo light shine up, while still broadcasting in mono) and heard no more complaints.
Royalties however, are a problem. In Norway, there are no differences for royalties for songs whether you define yourself commercial or for-profit. Most local radio-stations solve this by having some kind of income. This would either be commercials (which are really boring to sell), or the much simpler concept of "radio-bingo". The last is an attempt to squeeze money out of poor old people instead of wealthy corporations, and is thus much easier. Student-radios usually get too much money from the student-organizations anyway, so they do neither.
I don't know about FCC in the US, but in Norway, our equivalent (whatever it's called these days) actually care about content. If you don't have a certain percentage of self-produced content, royalties suddenly jump to the roof. So most local radio stations will at least attempt to do some actual journalism.
This makes a lot of sense to me, if all you are going to do is to send music, there's no reason why the FCC is going to prefer your music over anyone elses to fill up the available spectrum with. So you either pay, or you send something of interest! But I have no idea if this is true in other countries (although I find it a nice arrangement).
But my guess is that factors such as these probably will come into play, if you ask the FCC for bandwidth. They will probably ask you what you are going to do with it, and check up on that at random intervals. And if all you are going to do is to stream mp3's out of your home-box, chances are that they aren't going to be thrilled. On the other hand, if you ask them to get some bandwidth for an actual student-radio, with actual student content, it's likely (or at least it should be that way), that they will be much more interested in cooperating with you.
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No, and that isn't what I said. I would admit that I really didn't say much, but if I had said something I would have said that in the majority of cases, processes are more managable, and easier to debug than threads.
The number one reason to use multiple threads (or processes) is to isolate operations that block from the parts of the program that need to remain interactive.
Which in many cases can also be done with separate processes, select() or poll().
For example, the first web browsers were single threaded and would block waiting for a DNS query to complete.
Something that can easily be done as a separate process. Since the browser would have to listen on multiple file-descriptors anyway, in order to listen to both network and GUI events, this would have minimal overhead on the design of the webbrowser. And the increased modularity would help you in both designing and debugging both applications.
Another reason to use more than one thread is if a part of your program has to sit on a socket waiting for packets or connection requests - you couldn't write a useful web server without multiple threads or processes.
There exists several useful single-threaded webservers that select() or poll() instead of using threads. And there exists many that use processes instead of threads.
Finally, a lot of applications involve calculations that take a long time and it's usually desirable to let them run in the background rather than freezing up the whole UI while the calculation completes.
And most of those background calculations could just as well be put into a stupid background process. Leaving you with a simple, and dumb GUI to control them, and simple to write easily replacable background processes that can be developed and debugged independently.
I could go on, but I hope you get the point by now.
And so could I, but I doubt you get the point anyway.
And can be programmed for more. Whats too bad however is that it costs a lot, and I'm fairly uncertain whether I would actually like to type on the darn thing.
Now, why on earth would you do that? The reason for putting things in separate processes is to have them separated. There is no reason to treat two entirely separate things as one. How many word processors do you see that allows you to edit two documents in the same window/pane?
On the other hand, this might finally be an argument in support of threads versus processes, since that former avoids the cache issues.
Not really. It would give you a list of things to lock down for outgoing connections, to make sure your users behave nice.
Not in the sense people who talk about verifying means. Mozilla would probably take at least 1k man years to verify. If you don't understand what I mean, take a look at e.g. this, which should give you an idea of what verifyable programming means.
Well, outlook would have to come before IE. Sure, stupid users can be prompted to execute any trojan in IE (and it has some very bad security faults as well). But with Outlook, you simply send them a mail, and you're in...
Well, IIS is no more installed by default on w2k, than rpc, apache or ssh is installed by default on linux systems. I have never had much of a problem not installing either of them.
Yeah, and on Unix, Apache is #2, and ssh is #3. It amazes me how hard this seems to be to grasp for most unix administrators...
Yeah, right. By putting my old IDE disk in this controller it will be faster? Right.
Not that it couldn't be useful, but this is marketroid speak at its worst...
The problem with such wonder-drugs nobody understands, is that it after a while becomes very difficult to find a group not taking the drug, so you can know it's effects. And thus, you may never find out why it works.
True, that would wouldn't be of much help (it would help some, but not much).
But there are so many other neat possibilites. For end users, writing a document should be like filling out a form. it should not require having understood LaTeX, HTML, XML, or any other insane markup system.
And that's why all XML editors suck. Because an XML editor intended for end-user should be WYSIWYG. It should not require knowledge of tags. And it should be easy to configure for the local IT people.
The way it should work was this. Local IT people write DTD/Schema and stylesheets for common document-types. Then they feed DTD/Schema and stylesheet (possibly with some more info) to a nifty XML editor, and the end result looks like expensive custom-written application.
If XML can't do that, I really don't know what the purpose of using it is. Because you will never, ever, ever, get everyone in your company to convert from Word to something less userfriendly just because you prefer to work that way.
But then again, we will get this. Whether it will be called Mozilla or IE or something else, is still an open question, though...
It would make more sense, if it wasn't for the fact that all XML editors suck. Users want WYSIWYG, and I have yet to see a usable WYSIWYG XML editor.
There is no such thing as a universal skill-set, that will be good enough for any kind of job. You will have to be more specific about what kind of job you want, and work on that skill-set. This is usually simple if you are a nerd, because then you want to work with what you are interested, and refining those skills are you hobby anyway.
Finally, don't believe some of those job-ads will ever find their ideal candidate. Most of them just lists every three-letter-acronym they've heard about, and expect the ideal candidate to just walk in the door. It will never happen. Use common sense, and decide for yourself whether it would be worth applying for the job you are looking at.
If you are intelligent, knowledgeable, and a quick learner, you should get a job pretty soon, but the times have made it a lot worse for newly educated to land a good job.
Considering all the crapware I have installed, I think that is about acceptable. So, yes, I would say w2k is pretty stable.
On the other hand, I never reboot my linux box except for when I've had a power-failure, or kernel-upgrade.
Sometimes I am amazed at the resources people put into their TV-viewing. They schedule their life around TV programs (personally, I have never been able to follow a series for more than two consecutive episodes). But hey, that's just me....
Or, as an alternative, you could try learning the language while you are there, and try to watch local TV instead.
And being an asian country, maybe you'll find an abundance of cheap DVD's there. That while surely give you more quality entertainment than the option of the usual stuff they send on TV.
And what's wrong with books? Newspapers? Magazines? Having a social life instead? IMHO you should be happy to have a reason to cut down on TV.
Oh, by the way, if you meant Richard Stallman, he is not a communist either. Just ask him. If that isn't enough, examine his beliefs (and while some of them may be similar to communism (as most people have some beliefs similar to communism, otherwise it would never have been popular), many are not).
Agreed (first point, the latter, you better know yourself :-)
Sounds neat.
I suppose moving the pointer between displays could get hairy with recent window managers that treat the edge of the screen as a request to switch virtual desktops :-)
Ahh, but that is a bad feature :-)
Yes, that's nice, and any remote desktop software will allow you to do the same. But copy&paste between different desktops is not something X has had for 15 years (at least afaik)
No of course not. I'm just trolling.
Bah, if you weren't around when they were 4.7Hz (around Konrad Suse's time, probably), you've got nothing to brag about...
On the other hand, you might have some other meaning for P.E. than the first one that popped into my head. Might I be so bold as to ask you to define your abbreviations at least once?
I was part of the board for a local volunteer radio station in Norway some years back. We covered an area of about 20x20km (actually we covered a lot more, but that was what we had a license to cover), with very rough terrain on two 10W transmitters. Unless you where as unlucky as we where with the terrain, one would be more than e enough.
Another interesting fact about radio-transmitters is that boosting up the effect isn't really going to buy you that much. The signal-strength X kilometers away decreases by at least the square of the distance.
Lastly, unless you are a commercial radio-station, there is no reason why you would want to broadcast in stereo. People listening to the radio usually don't care much about that. We had some people complaining about the stereo-light on their radio not lighting up, so we fixed that (making the stereo light shine up, while still broadcasting in mono) and heard no more complaints.
Royalties however, are a problem. In Norway, there are no differences for royalties for songs whether you define yourself commercial or for-profit. Most local radio-stations solve this by having some kind of income. This would either be commercials (which are really boring to sell), or the much simpler concept of "radio-bingo". The last is an attempt to squeeze money out of poor old people instead of wealthy corporations, and is thus much easier. Student-radios usually get too much money from the student-organizations anyway, so they do neither.
I don't know about FCC in the US, but in Norway, our equivalent (whatever it's called these days) actually care about content. If you don't have a certain percentage of self-produced content, royalties suddenly jump to the roof. So most local radio stations will at least attempt to do some actual journalism.
This makes a lot of sense to me, if all you are going to do is to send music, there's no reason why the FCC is going to prefer your music over anyone elses to fill up the available spectrum with. So you either pay, or you send something of interest! But I have no idea if this is true in other countries (although I find it a nice arrangement).
But my guess is that factors such as these probably will come into play, if you ask the FCC for bandwidth. They will probably ask you what you are going to do with it, and check up on that at random intervals. And if all you are going to do is to stream mp3's out of your home-box, chances are that they aren't going to be thrilled. On the other hand, if you ask them to get some bandwidth for an actual student-radio, with actual student content, it's likely (or at least it should be that way), that they will be much more interested in cooperating with you.