Self-taught programmers might not know design patterns by name, but they will likely stumble upon the more common ones on their own. When they finally learn about design patterns, they will understand the topic better because they "invented" some of the design patterns themselves. That's how it was for me at least. One day I was explaining something to another programmer, and after my long explanation he just looked at me and said "Oh, so you're using the visitor pattern." I tilted my head, went online, and learned a new name for something I had been using for years.
Pretty much the same for me - although I mostly code as a hobby.
I was trying to help a friend taking CS with some C# project. It was taking about 35 seconds to run, and I couldn't make heads nor tales out of it. I asked him what he wanted to do, several times, and he finally explained what his goal was. 10 mins later I sent him back some working code that did the task in about 20 miliseconds. (timer limitation)
He looked at the code and said it worked great - but it didn't really fit what he was supposed to do according to his instructions. I didn't understand, so he sent me his assignment. I couldn't make heads nor tales out of that - completely foreign terminology - so I wished him luck with whatever it meant.:P
I think I gained the skills necessary for that when I toyed around with a 24bit pallette system. I can't even remember why I wanted to manipulate a 24bit pallette, but I got it to the point where I could do millions of colour and index manipulations per second - in java. At that point it was fast enough that I considered it a success, so then I figured out how to compress it to roughly 1/8th the memory usage. (Guess)
What's it called? I have no clue! It's my fast low-mem 24bit pallette thingy! I can just imagine trying to explain that to an employer, or fellow programmer.:P
Their Solid Series 2 is pretty good. Ridiculously cheap. It's reliably fast for read speeds, at least. But stay away from any of the older SSDs that had those horrible JMicron controllers.
>8GB FusionIO cache with a bunch of spinning magnetic domains in the background that we can't get rid of fast enough
Is that supposed to be TB? Don't ioDrives come in 160GB multiples?
Mind you, if I had 8TB of ioDrives, there'd be no need for anything else. Each one of those has read speeds of close to 1GB/sec, and enough IOPS to beat a dozen of the next best competitor. Now if only they cost 15x less per GB.
Why doesn't the US company stop them? Cause the markets that they really care about and make profit in (US and Europe) have heavy enough disincentives to make bootlegging insignificant in comparison to the costs of further stopping them. Plus, the majority of the bootlegging sector can't or won't afford your product anyway. They aren't a customer to begin with, so why stop them from subsidizing your purchasing costs to the 3 shift vendor.
Why can't game developers figure this out? It's not worth the cost.
The right to a phone call is a TV police show myth. There is no such right. It is custom, but not a right, and by no means universal. In some jurisdictions, you may not make phone calls. You have the right to have someone notified, to the extent that you can summon counsel. If the police merely notify the public defender, they have satisfied every legal obligation.
This is correct. I know someone that was questioned for 48 hours and then released, no phone call. They did give him a sandwich, though.
Might be different in the US, but up here in Canada I've seen it happen a few times. The police tend not to abuse their power, but they do have quite a lot. It's necessary in order to break real criminals.
Until I need a disk in my CD/DVD drive and/or an Internet connection for single player mode. Or until it's used as an excuse to inflate the price of entertainment.
Pirates never caused that. That was game developers.
the Xbox 360 has yet to be prone to a single aimbot or radar cheat for example.
LOL!
I wish I could give you examples, but I don't own that shitty console. I do know that Left4Dead had horribly rampant cheating, and my friends with consoles were complaining about all the cheaters. But like I said, I don't have one and don't know what games they were. Just that every week it was a different game and more cheater complaints.
If we banned them all, we'd have like 2 servers left, full of people who are actually good at the game.
Hey... I enjoy those servers!
On random public servers, I often get 20-30 kill streaks. (almost daily) Then I join my favourite Jening server, and am lucky to stay at 1:1. It's way more fun, though.
I met two cheaters. One guy was an engi running around pistolling everyone to death. His ally was a kritz medic. He kept killing snipers from across the map.
But I feel for cheating to be "rampant", you have to spot them everywhere.
Left 4 Dead has/had rampant cheating. (the community has mostly died) I think I've lost perhaps 4 rounds in a year of play where the other side wasn't cheating. Cheaters are obvious though - they do stuff like locking on to unspawned boomers behind trucks, one-shotting a hunter that's pouncing from behind, then instantly shooting a zombie in front, etc.; another good clue is lag hax, where the player or infected warps around as soon as you shoot them, thus dodging you. Or when they noclip into the air and start gunning your tank down with an autoshotty that they pulled from nowhere, that's another good clue.
A few cheaters are more discreet, but most cheaters can be spotted with ease if you spec for a couple minutes. Either break out the ban hammer or mark it down as another loss (or sometimes win) to cheaters.:P
Team Fortress is overrun with cheaters and Valve seems completely unable to do anything about it.
At least VAC has no false positives.
Punkbuster...hah! That shit kicked me from servers a thousand times, and then started instant-crashing my games. At least it didn't BSOD my computer. >_>
Is TF2 really overrun by cheaters? I must be really good, then.
This is a common line fed by the media to anyone that will believe it.
RAM does have a limited amount of bandwidth. Dumping all those memory pages (and zeroing them) does take a measurable amount of bandwidth. How much bandwidth does your RAM have - 25.6GB/sec? Zeroing out 2GB to use it could potentially take up to ~100 miliseconds. Definitely measurable.
I will agree that memory is wasted when it isn't used - but we need mechanisms in place to direct programs in how they should behave.
Got two HDDs? Started defrag on one? It'll use up a TON of RAM (1+ GB) to defrag a bit faster, when it could probably get by just fine with 30MB. Now start a game. What's that you hear? That's your HDD swapping.
If programs could constantly register and update the amount of low-priority and normal-priority freeable ram they have with a daemon, that daemon could invoke freemem calls for apps based on the amount a program needs, and the amount other programs claim to be able to free.
A paint program might advertise memory for all the plugins it uses, and any open images, but only when not in focus.
A game might advertise the amount of memory it uses for textures that weren't used in the past few frames, and perhaps map or level data that isn't visible. Obviously this data should have a higher priority, because reloading it during play could cause stutters or framerate drop. HDD IO could be another factor in priority. If data can be re-generated without HDD IO, that memory is prioritized higher when some needs to be freed.
The daemon could have access to CPU usage stats, ensuring active programs never get tripped up by other active programs, as long as an idle program is available.
A web browser might advertise all hidden tabs, thus allowing games or other high demand apps to usurp hundreds of megabytes. When you alt+tab and the game frees its memory, the web browser could automatically start regenerating stuff in RAM, so that when you flip tabs the next page pops right up.
Until we provide the tools to developers, nobody will be able to envision all the uses, or how to do it properly. But we do know that doing nothing isn't working, since every new OS release it's the same thing all over again. Something like this could grow to vastly improve memory usage, but only if we let programmers evolve it. The kernel is not smart enough to page only unimportant stuff to the HDD with 100% accuracy. We need to let programs help out, by offering them the chance to literally dump data that isn't deemed necessary, when necessary. In the process we save HDD IO - done properly it could be a huge speedup.
P.S. Linux has some sort of kernel memory compression that could boost memory capacity by about 60%. The Pandora devs were eying it, since it'd push 256MB to about 400MB effective. I have a quad-core, so memory compression probably wouldn't hurt, especially if it was smart about compressing memory from idle processes. It's got to be faster than paging to HDD.
Wow, that was quite a well of text. I hope I articulated that well enough.
If it gets hotter it is because of Global Warming.
If a hurricane hits it is because of Global Warming.
If there is a drought anywhere it is because of Global Warming.
But if we get a blizzard it is bacause of Global Climate Change.
If it floods it is because of Global Warming/Climate Change.
If the North polar ice shrinks it is Global Warming.
Yet when the Antarctic ice grows it is Climate Change.
These ones were predicted by various hippy scientists decades ago. That they're happening now, and are swamping the news, only serves to indicate that they may have been right. Also, the timescale may have been off a bit, but the events are proving somewhat accurate.
When scientists can make fairly accurate predictions 2-3 decades into the future, they may be worth listening to. Even if they're off by a decade - being able to pinpoint regions that'll suffer from increasingly devasting hurricanes 30 years in advance means at least a bunch aren't total nutjobs.
Ignore the fudged numbers bought by big oil (there's twice as many studies with falsified info and conclusions than legit ones), and look up the older studies published decades ago by reputable climate change experts. A ton of their claims did happen or are happening.
Also keep in mind that many of these experts have been fighting to prove climate change for decades - a huge chunk of their lives. That'll drive anyone a bit batty, especially if they see impending problems that other people don't. It's no surprise some make outlandish claims to get noticed, to try to boost support. Dull quotes like "These trends suggest southern states like Louisiana will suffer from increased hurricane activity within a few decades." just don't cut it for the media. It's either apocalyptic sounding, or it doesn't go mainstream.
I just find it a bit sad when I run across people like you, calling them "True Believers" - aka a cult. I suppose it's just more shit they have to slough through. But after reading the headlines the media spits out, it's difficult not to have a tainted perspective.
When the Northern ice returns it is nothing to see here, move along.
Mushkin DDR2 didn't work with my last two motherboards. I ended up trying OCZ XTC Platinum Rev2, Crucial Ballistix, and Kingston ValueRAM. Those three worked fine in both. Right now I'm using Corsair XMS.
@Sexconker: This Corsair stuff is only rated at 1.8v. Heatspreaders spread heat, which helps if one chip is slightly weaker than the others. You also have to factor in that every single memory operation won't be spread between all 8 chips on a DIMM. It might even be possible to have a relatively high throughput program(like a video encoder) running off a single RAM chip, heating up just that one. (or two if you have two DIMMs) I don't know too much about memory allocation, but slapping a cheap chunk of metal on it seems like a good way to solve it, which doesn't involve any OS overhead.
P.S. I love rebates when combined with pricematching. One site will have a $30 rebate, on a $70 PSU, but another site has that PSU for $50. Pricematch, and you end up with a $20 Corsair VX450.
Combine these, and you have a recipe for success: 1) New HDD controllers. 2) Gigabytes of cache. 3) Massive capacities. 4) Low price.
I eagerly await my 6TB WD Black with 280MB/sec read/write speeds. Bring it!
SSDs will dominate the low end computer and laptop markets - but not for a few years. It'll take a little while to get enough space for Windows, your apps, and your docs, but at a competitive price point. Right now the cheapest SSD is around $100, but you can get a 160GB HDD for about $40. OEMs like that, so that means a lot of money is still going to HDD manufacturers. Actually, it's even cheaper for an OEM, which buys by the hundreds of thousands.
Once SSDs are cheap like camera cards, every company will be using them, and marketing them as "Silent", "Shock immune", "blazing fast", "power efficient", etc... As soon as that happens, HDD manufacturers better have their R&D complete on huge cache HDDs or SSDs, or they won't be able to compete, and a large chunk of their OEM market and revenue will be gone.
After that, it'll still be at least a decade before the technology is obsolete. Assuming something revolutionary comes around, you still have to expect ~4 years to engineer a prototype, then ~3 more to commercialize it, and 2-3 more before it's affordable.
WD and Seagate would have to play a lot of cards wrong to go out of business any time soon. Their time to correct mistakes is measured in years rather than quarters. They'll probably manage.
Both are chugging along just fine. I think they're about 5 years old now?
I use my computers daily. Those raptors are hearty drives. I've had to RMA four seagates once, and two other seagates twice, in the same time period. This is just for my own PCs.
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You're both correct. That's the problem. The drivers need to be taught - clearly some haven't been.
Self-taught programmers might not know design patterns by name, but they will likely stumble upon the more common ones on their own. When they finally learn about design patterns, they will understand the topic better because they "invented" some of the design patterns themselves. That's how it was for me at least. One day I was explaining something to another programmer, and after my long explanation he just looked at me and said "Oh, so you're using the visitor pattern." I tilted my head, went online, and learned a new name for something I had been using for years.
Pretty much the same for me - although I mostly code as a hobby.
I was trying to help a friend taking CS with some C# project. It was taking about 35 seconds to run, and I couldn't make heads nor tales out of it. I asked him what he wanted to do, several times, and he finally explained what his goal was. 10 mins later I sent him back some working code that did the task in about 20 miliseconds. (timer limitation)
He looked at the code and said it worked great - but it didn't really fit what he was supposed to do according to his instructions. I didn't understand, so he sent me his assignment. I couldn't make heads nor tales out of that - completely foreign terminology - so I wished him luck with whatever it meant. :P
I think I gained the skills necessary for that when I toyed around with a 24bit pallette system. I can't even remember why I wanted to manipulate a 24bit pallette, but I got it to the point where I could do millions of colour and index manipulations per second - in java. At that point it was fast enough that I considered it a success, so then I figured out how to compress it to roughly 1/8th the memory usage. (Guess)
What's it called? I have no clue! It's my fast low-mem 24bit pallette thingy! I can just imagine trying to explain that to an employer, or fellow programmer. :P
Their Solid Series 2 is pretty good. Ridiculously cheap. It's reliably fast for read speeds, at least. But stay away from any of the older SSDs that had those horrible JMicron controllers.
So use a regular SSD for the OS, and multiple ioDrives for heavy DB work, and whatever else you can throw at it?
>8GB FusionIO cache with a bunch of spinning magnetic domains in the background that we can't get rid of fast enough
Is that supposed to be TB? Don't ioDrives come in 160GB multiples?
Mind you, if I had 8TB of ioDrives, there'd be no need for anything else. Each one of those has read speeds of close to 1GB/sec, and enough IOPS to beat a dozen of the next best competitor. Now if only they cost 15x less per GB.
Why doesn't the US company stop them? Cause the markets that they really care about and make profit in (US and Europe) have heavy enough disincentives to make bootlegging insignificant in comparison to the costs of further stopping them. Plus, the majority of the bootlegging sector can't or won't afford your product anyway. They aren't a customer to begin with, so why stop them from subsidizing your purchasing costs to the 3 shift vendor.
Why can't game developers figure this out? It's not worth the cost.
The right to a phone call is a TV police show myth. There is no such right. It is custom, but not a right, and by no means universal. In some jurisdictions, you may not make phone calls. You have the right to have someone notified, to the extent that you can summon counsel. If the police merely notify the public defender, they have satisfied every legal obligation.
This is correct. I know someone that was questioned for 48 hours and then released, no phone call. They did give him a sandwich, though.
Might be different in the US, but up here in Canada I've seen it happen a few times. The police tend not to abuse their power, but they do have quite a lot. It's necessary in order to break real criminals.
You're saying they're evil based on what they could do.
It's more likely that they want to release a Google branded program, or something along that line.
Both BR and HDDVD support TrueHD audio, so I'm not sure where your misinformation on audio comes from.
For someone complaining about misinformation, I'm surprised you'd fall into the same trap:
Now as to capacity, most BR disks use the less than optimal MPEG2 encoding which is a space hog
I haven't seen an MPEG2 BD in quite some time.
Even two years ago, most of the titles I saw were MPEG4 encoded.
Until I need a disk in my CD/DVD drive and/or an Internet connection for single player mode. Or until it's used as an excuse to inflate the price of entertainment.
Pirates never caused that. That was game developers.
the Xbox 360 has yet to be prone to a single aimbot or radar cheat for example.
LOL!
I wish I could give you examples, but I don't own that shitty console. I do know that Left4Dead had horribly rampant cheating, and my friends with consoles were complaining about all the cheaters. But like I said, I don't have one and don't know what games they were. Just that every week it was a different game and more cheater complaints.
If we banned them all, we'd have like 2 servers left, full of people who are actually good at the game.
Hey... I enjoy those servers!
On random public servers, I often get 20-30 kill streaks. (almost daily) Then I join my favourite Jening server, and am lucky to stay at 1:1. It's way more fun, though.
I met two cheaters. One guy was an engi running around pistolling everyone to death. His ally was a kritz medic. He kept killing snipers from across the map.
But I feel for cheating to be "rampant", you have to spot them everywhere.
Left 4 Dead has/had rampant cheating. (the community has mostly died) I think I've lost perhaps 4 rounds in a year of play where the other side wasn't cheating. Cheaters are obvious though - they do stuff like locking on to unspawned boomers behind trucks, one-shotting a hunter that's pouncing from behind, then instantly shooting a zombie in front, etc.; another good clue is lag hax, where the player or infected warps around as soon as you shoot them, thus dodging you. Or when they noclip into the air and start gunning your tank down with an autoshotty that they pulled from nowhere, that's another good clue.
A few cheaters are more discreet, but most cheaters can be spotted with ease if you spec for a couple minutes. Either break out the ban hammer or mark it down as another loss (or sometimes win) to cheaters. :P
Team Fortress is overrun with cheaters and Valve seems completely unable to do anything about it.
At least VAC has no false positives.
Punkbuster...hah! That shit kicked me from servers a thousand times, and then started instant-crashing my games. At least it didn't BSOD my computer. >_>
Is TF2 really overrun by cheaters? I must be really good, then.
I think I heard a while back that various Pandora devs had OpenGL ES accelerated compositing working - tested on Beagleboards, mostly.
That's OMAP3530 with the SGX 530 IGP.
Or maybe it was just the video playback and blitting that was accelerated - not compositing? Meh.
I can't remember if they're using E17 or XFCE right now. They flipped between four of them, and settled on the "best" one - whatever that means. ;)
RAM is wasted when it isn't in use.
This is a common line fed by the media to anyone that will believe it.
RAM does have a limited amount of bandwidth. Dumping all those memory pages (and zeroing them) does take a measurable amount of bandwidth. How much bandwidth does your RAM have - 25.6GB/sec? Zeroing out 2GB to use it could potentially take up to ~100 miliseconds. Definitely measurable.
I will agree that memory is wasted when it isn't used - but we need mechanisms in place to direct programs in how they should behave.
Got two HDDs? Started defrag on one? It'll use up a TON of RAM (1+ GB) to defrag a bit faster, when it could probably get by just fine with 30MB. Now start a game. What's that you hear? That's your HDD swapping.
If programs could constantly register and update the amount of low-priority and normal-priority freeable ram they have with a daemon, that daemon could invoke freemem calls for apps based on the amount a program needs, and the amount other programs claim to be able to free.
A paint program might advertise memory for all the plugins it uses, and any open images, but only when not in focus.
A game might advertise the amount of memory it uses for textures that weren't used in the past few frames, and perhaps map or level data that isn't visible. Obviously this data should have a higher priority, because reloading it during play could cause stutters or framerate drop. HDD IO could be another factor in priority. If data can be re-generated without HDD IO, that memory is prioritized higher when some needs to be freed.
The daemon could have access to CPU usage stats, ensuring active programs never get tripped up by other active programs, as long as an idle program is available.
A web browser might advertise all hidden tabs, thus allowing games or other high demand apps to usurp hundreds of megabytes. When you alt+tab and the game frees its memory, the web browser could automatically start regenerating stuff in RAM, so that when you flip tabs the next page pops right up.
Until we provide the tools to developers, nobody will be able to envision all the uses, or how to do it properly. But we do know that doing nothing isn't working, since every new OS release it's the same thing all over again. Something like this could grow to vastly improve memory usage, but only if we let programmers evolve it. The kernel is not smart enough to page only unimportant stuff to the HDD with 100% accuracy. We need to let programs help out, by offering them the chance to literally dump data that isn't deemed necessary, when necessary. In the process we save HDD IO - done properly it could be a huge speedup.
P.S. Linux has some sort of kernel memory compression that could boost memory capacity by about 60%. The Pandora devs were eying it, since it'd push 256MB to about 400MB effective. I have a quad-core, so memory compression probably wouldn't hurt, especially if it was smart about compressing memory from idle processes. It's got to be faster than paging to HDD.
Wow, that was quite a well of text. I hope I articulated that well enough.
Ever resized a blurry image to be smaller? It gets sharper.
Same thing applies to video. 720p on 1024x600 looks very sharp! At its native size, it might look a tad less nice.
I agree. I've had GPU accelerated decoding for over a year now. I had it before it was even available in common codec packs like Klite.
This seems like a plug for CoreAVC. A great codec, for sure, but it's still a plug.
Canadian law does not apply to the IOC.
http://www.cbc.ca/sports/amateur/story/2009/04/22/sp-skijumping-olympic-women.html
Utter bullshit.
If it gets hotter it is because of Global Warming.
If a hurricane hits it is because of Global Warming.
If there is a drought anywhere it is because of Global Warming.
But if we get a blizzard it is bacause of Global Climate Change.
If it floods it is because of Global Warming/Climate Change.
If the North polar ice shrinks it is Global Warming.
Yet when the Antarctic ice grows it is Climate Change.
These ones were predicted by various hippy scientists decades ago. That they're happening now, and are swamping the news, only serves to indicate that they may have been right. Also, the timescale may have been off a bit, but the events are proving somewhat accurate.
When scientists can make fairly accurate predictions 2-3 decades into the future, they may be worth listening to. Even if they're off by a decade - being able to pinpoint regions that'll suffer from increasingly devasting hurricanes 30 years in advance means at least a bunch aren't total nutjobs.
Ignore the fudged numbers bought by big oil (there's twice as many studies with falsified info and conclusions than legit ones), and look up the older studies published decades ago by reputable climate change experts. A ton of their claims did happen or are happening.
Also keep in mind that many of these experts have been fighting to prove climate change for decades - a huge chunk of their lives. That'll drive anyone a bit batty, especially if they see impending problems that other people don't. It's no surprise some make outlandish claims to get noticed, to try to boost support. Dull quotes like "These trends suggest southern states like Louisiana will suffer from increased hurricane activity within a few decades." just don't cut it for the media. It's either apocalyptic sounding, or it doesn't go mainstream.
I just find it a bit sad when I run across people like you, calling them "True Believers" - aka a cult. I suppose it's just more shit they have to slough through. But after reading the headlines the media spits out, it's difficult not to have a tainted perspective.
When the Northern ice returns it is nothing to see here, move along.
I don't know anything about this one. Yay!...?
Apparently 31,000+ scientists are holding the same doubts as you: http://www.petitionproject.org/
So that's like... 1% of the ones that know anything about global climate change?
31000 sounds big, but it needs some context.
Mushkin DDR2 didn't work with my last two motherboards. I ended up trying OCZ XTC Platinum Rev2, Crucial Ballistix, and Kingston ValueRAM. Those three worked fine in both. Right now I'm using Corsair XMS.
@Sexconker: This Corsair stuff is only rated at 1.8v. Heatspreaders spread heat, which helps if one chip is slightly weaker than the others. You also have to factor in that every single memory operation won't be spread between all 8 chips on a DIMM. It might even be possible to have a relatively high throughput program(like a video encoder) running off a single RAM chip, heating up just that one. (or two if you have two DIMMs) I don't know too much about memory allocation, but slapping a cheap chunk of metal on it seems like a good way to solve it, which doesn't involve any OS overhead.
P.S. I love rebates when combined with pricematching. One site will have a $30 rebate, on a $70 PSU, but another site has that PSU for $50. Pricematch, and you end up with a $20 Corsair VX450.
A ridiculous amount of the linux kernel code is written by programmers paid by IBM, Intel, RedHat, etc.
Someone pays. I'm just glad it isn't me.
The writing is on the wall.
No it isn't. At least not this decade.
Combine these, and you have a recipe for success:
1) New HDD controllers.
2) Gigabytes of cache.
3) Massive capacities.
4) Low price.
I eagerly await my 6TB WD Black with 280MB/sec read/write speeds. Bring it!
SSDs will dominate the low end computer and laptop markets - but not for a few years. It'll take a little while to get enough space for Windows, your apps, and your docs, but at a competitive price point. Right now the cheapest SSD is around $100, but you can get a 160GB HDD for about $40. OEMs like that, so that means a lot of money is still going to HDD manufacturers. Actually, it's even cheaper for an OEM, which buys by the hundreds of thousands.
Once SSDs are cheap like camera cards, every company will be using them, and marketing them as "Silent", "Shock immune", "blazing fast", "power efficient", etc... As soon as that happens, HDD manufacturers better have their R&D complete on huge cache HDDs or SSDs, or they won't be able to compete, and a large chunk of their OEM market and revenue will be gone.
After that, it'll still be at least a decade before the technology is obsolete. Assuming something revolutionary comes around, you still have to expect ~4 years to engineer a prototype, then ~3 more to commercialize it, and 2-3 more before it's affordable.
WD and Seagate would have to play a lot of cards wrong to go out of business any time soon. Their time to correct mistakes is measured in years rather than quarters. They'll probably manage.
I've got one old 36GB raptor and 72GB raptor.
Both are chugging along just fine. I think they're about 5 years old now?
I use my computers daily. Those raptors are hearty drives. I've had to RMA four seagates once, and two other seagates twice, in the same time period. This is just for my own PCs.