Garbage collection is more efficient than reference counting most of the time. There are a number of tests that demonstrate that Java programs spend less time allocating and deallocating memory than C++ programs.
Interesting -- can you post a link to these tests? That sounds counterintuitive to me, and I'd like to understand how it could be.
As soon as the police insert themselves into the equation, the social dynamics will change and eventually invalidate their predictions.
Hopefully the form of the changes will be fewer people committing crimes, because it's harder to get away with crimes after the program is in place.
Remember, the police system doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to be effective enough to deter your average potential criminal. It's not like people have an an infinitely large incentive to commit crimes at all costs; they choose to commit a crime, or not, based largely on risk and cost-benefit analysis.
What ever happened to innocent till proven guilty?
Still a basis of modern law, AFAIK. But that doesn't mean the police can't keep an eye on people they have reason to believe are likely to break the law... at least when those people are out in public.
There not criminals even if they have a "record" until they have committed a crime.
From Mirriam-Webster: Criminal (noun): one who has committed a crime.
If a person has a "record" (we'll assume for the moment they were justly convicted), then they are a criminal, because they have committed a crime.
After a month of coding Java and never having to worry every time I typed "new" I never looked back.
Modern C++ programmers don't need worry about typing "new" either; they use smart pointers to handle the "garbage collection" for them. Works great, and avoids the unpredictability, overhead, and performance problems of a garbage collection thread.
(yes, I know it's possible for reference-counting to leak if you introduce a cycle into the graph. That said, in the last ten years of C++ program, that problem has bit me exactly zero times)
As soon as it's shown that all the accidents occuring involve human drivers; government will identify it as a safety feature, and require all new cars be fully robotic within some number of years.
Dunno what country you're in, but here in the USA I can just imagine how the "Tea Party" types (or their intellectual descendants) would react to that proposal. Good luck!:^D
The cars could weave into the cross traffic at full speed without incident. It might be scary for us old timers but not for long.
I think such a system would depend on all of the cars' software and hardware (speed/location/distance sensors, etc) working accurately at all times.
All it would take is one robot-jalopy's speedometer or GPS to be off by a few percent to cause a ginormous accident, with fatalities all around.
Therefore I would imagine a system like this would start out scary for us old timers, and quickly become terrifying for everyone involved. Every trip through an intersection would be a high-speed game of Russian roulette.
But if the victim is crippled, the driver would have to pay for his living cost, medical cost, etc, for the rest of the victim's life. It's less expensive to finish him off, you can get away as long as it is "not intentional".
This might make sense if the driver had only compensatory damage payments to worry about... but surely deliberate murder counts as a criminal (and I would imagine, capital) offense in China?
If robot cars become the norm, we can get rid of 'traffic lights', stop signs, etc, and use a network protocol to determine which cars get to enter the intersection in which order, in order to optimize the aggregate cars-per-second rate of the road system.
You won't be able to get rid of traffic lights (etc) until all manually-driven cars have been banned from public streets. Which will happen sometime between "when your great grandchildren are old", and "never".
And even then, there would still be pedestrians, bicycles, motorcycles, etc, to worry about. So I think traffic lights won't be going away anytime soon.
How does it determine whether the other person is looking at you, waiting for you to go, with his foot off of the brake, or actually preparing to move before you?
I don't think it can -- we're a long way from a computer being able to read a driver's intentions from looking at his (distant) face behind a window.
On the other hand, I don't think it really has to. As long as its reaction times are quick enough that it can stop itself before the human's car and the automatic car collide, that will probably be sufficient to avoid accidents. (if perhaps not sufficient to avoid getting the finger from the human)
...filed under category "self-serving exaggeration"
True, but it's not exaggerated by much.
Yes, other companies had the technology to make iPad/iPhone style products before Apple did theirs. It's telling, however, that none of them actually came out with such a product until after they had seen the iPhone/iPad's example. Until then, the tablet companies all thought that simply installing Windows on a tablet PC was sufficient, and all the smartphone companies.... well, the less said about them, the better.
20 years from now 2 or 4GB of RAM will look like 'resource constrained' environments, and all of us who are 20-year olds now will be thinking "Herp derp, this new generation won't understand the resource constrained 32MB days!"
I like the aesthetics of this idea, but I'm not sure that the needs of computing are going to keep up with the supply of computing resources much longer.
For example, the last time I really had to worry about running out of disk storage was in 2005 or so. Since then, the size of the hard drives on the computers I use has always been "sufficiently large" that I've never run out of disk space -- from my perspective, modern hard drives are effectively infinitely large.
And in 2010 or so, I upgraded my computer to 20GB of RAM, and since then I've never had any issues with running out of RAM... even with multiple virtual OS's running, I still have plenty of RAM free. So for me, RAM scarcity has become a non-issue as well.
Of course I'm not saying it's impossible to run a 2011-era computer out of resources; it's easy to do if you try. But it's getting increasingly more difficult to do it without meaning to.
I'd imagine that by 2020 or 2030, the storage and processing capacity of computers will be so profoundly huge that people literally won't be able to come up with any effective new ways to waste it all. Even if they encoded all their spam emails as super-high-definition 3D holograms -- just because they can -- they still won't run out of resources.
At that point, people will simply stop thinking about gigabytes and gigahertz and so on, just as people no longer think about the starter motors or chokes in their automobiles. Computers will "just work", and if you ask someone how much space they have left on their drive, they won't know... or care.
This article should really read: "Crotchety old programmers fail to pass on tricks of the trade, then complain anyways"
Damn right we failed to pass on the tricks of the trade... the day after you do that, you're laid off and replaced by a 19-year-old H1B who's willing to work for Jolt and Fritos.
As for the complaining... that's an important part of being crotchety.
There's an inherent conflict between the prime directive of the Google auto-driving software ("drive safely"), and the prime directive of the Toyota firmware ("drive safely until the human isn't paying attention, then accelerate to top speed for as long as possible").
It was only a matter of time before the Toyota side of the car's character came to the fore.;^)
Wouldn't you be better off building all of the buildings in the area with, say, 15 or 20 floors, vs. trying to have a few mega-structures like this?
Yes, of course you would, if practicality and usefulness was your goal. But of course this building isn't about those things, it's about showing the world that the Saudis have the world's biggest, um, buildings.
Slashdot Mirror
And no, few patents on squares and rectangles is NOT innovation.
What, then, would you point to as an example of real innovation? Bonus points if your example is something developed in the last 20 years.
If I run Linux as a host and FreeBSD and Windows in kvm or VirtualBox, to whom have I given up my control too?
The Chinese government, of course.
(ducks)
The reason they charge it is because they CAN charge it.
OMG capitalism!
Garbage collection is more efficient than reference counting most of the time. There are a number of tests that demonstrate that Java programs spend less time allocating and deallocating memory than C++ programs.
Interesting -- can you post a link to these tests? That sounds counterintuitive to me, and I'd like to understand how it could be.
However, as an asset it has no intrinsic value because you can't do anything with it except trade it.
Hey, can I have your baseball card collection?
As soon as the police insert themselves into the equation, the social dynamics will change and eventually invalidate their predictions.
Hopefully the form of the changes will be fewer people committing crimes, because it's harder to get away with crimes after the program is in place.
Remember, the police system doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to be effective enough to deter your average potential criminal. It's not like people have an an infinitely large incentive to commit crimes at all costs; they choose to commit a crime, or not, based largely on risk and cost-benefit analysis.
What ever happened to innocent till proven guilty?
Still a basis of modern law, AFAIK. But that doesn't mean the police can't keep an eye on people they have reason to believe are likely to break the law... at least when those people are out in public.
There not criminals even if they have a "record" until they have committed a crime.
From Mirriam-Webster: Criminal (noun): one who has committed a crime.
If a person has a "record" (we'll assume for the moment they were justly convicted), then they are a criminal, because they have committed a crime.
After a month of coding Java and never having to worry every time I typed "new" I never looked back.
Modern C++ programmers don't need worry about typing "new" either; they use smart pointers to handle the "garbage collection" for them. Works great, and avoids the unpredictability, overhead, and performance problems of a garbage collection thread.
(yes, I know it's possible for reference-counting to leak if you introduce a cycle into the graph. That said, in the last ten years of C++ program, that problem has bit me exactly zero times)
Smaller and simpler seem to be a better way to go.
Nobody is stopping anyone from using plain old C, if that's what they want.
Of course, many people just end up re-inventing portions of C++ when they do that.
As soon as it's shown that all the accidents occuring involve human drivers; government will identify it as a safety feature, and require all new cars be fully robotic within some number of years.
Dunno what country you're in, but here in the USA I can just imagine how the "Tea Party" types (or their intellectual descendants) would react to that proposal. Good luck! :^D
Suddenly I don't think people are giving Google enough support, if China's cars can't drive at night what good are they,
Seems like there is an easy fix for the driving-at-night issue.... turn on the headlights?
The cars could weave into the cross traffic at full speed without incident. It might be scary for us old timers but not for long.
I think such a system would depend on all of the cars' software and hardware (speed/location/distance sensors, etc) working accurately at all times.
All it would take is one robot-jalopy's speedometer or GPS to be off by a few percent to cause a ginormous accident, with fatalities all around.
Therefore I would imagine a system like this would start out scary for us old timers, and quickly become terrifying for everyone involved. Every trip through an intersection would be a high-speed game of Russian roulette.
But if the victim is crippled, the driver would have to pay for his living cost, medical cost, etc, for the rest of the victim's life. It's less expensive to finish him off, you can get away as long as it is "not intentional".
This might make sense if the driver had only compensatory damage payments to worry about... but surely deliberate murder counts as a criminal (and I would imagine, capital) offense in China?
If robot cars become the norm, we can get rid of 'traffic lights', stop signs, etc, and use a network protocol to determine which cars get to enter the intersection in which order, in order to optimize the aggregate cars-per-second rate of the road system.
You won't be able to get rid of traffic lights (etc) until all manually-driven cars have been banned from public streets. Which will happen sometime between "when your great grandchildren are old", and "never".
And even then, there would still be pedestrians, bicycles, motorcycles, etc, to worry about. So I think traffic lights won't be going away anytime soon.
How does it determine whether the other person is looking at you, waiting for you to go, with his foot off of the brake, or actually preparing to move before you?
I don't think it can -- we're a long way from a computer being able to read a driver's intentions from looking at his (distant) face behind a window.
On the other hand, I don't think it really has to. As long as its reaction times are quick enough that it can stop itself before the human's car and the automatic car collide, that will probably be sufficient to avoid accidents. (if perhaps not sufficient to avoid getting the finger from the human)
We can get $500 smartphones that can do substantially more than any $30000 car.
I can just picture you riding your smartphone to work. Balancing on one foot must be difficult.
Silly user, you don't need a manual for that, just consult the meta-avatar!
...filed under category "self-serving exaggeration"
True, but it's not exaggerated by much.
Yes, other companies had the technology to make iPad/iPhone style products before Apple did theirs. It's telling, however, that none of them actually came out with such a product until after they had seen the iPhone/iPad's example. Until then, the tablet companies all thought that simply installing Windows on a tablet PC was sufficient, and all the smartphone companies.... well, the less said about them, the better.
Time to start cutting Federal programs we can no longer afford.
Works for me. We can start by cutting the military budget in half. No need to be the world's policeman anymore.
20 years from now 2 or 4GB of RAM will look like 'resource constrained' environments, and all of us who are 20-year olds now will be thinking "Herp derp, this new generation won't understand the resource constrained 32MB days!"
I like the aesthetics of this idea, but I'm not sure that the needs of computing are going to keep up with the supply of computing resources much longer.
For example, the last time I really had to worry about running out of disk storage was in 2005 or so. Since then, the size of the hard drives on the computers I use has always been "sufficiently large" that I've never run out of disk space -- from my perspective, modern hard drives are effectively infinitely large.
And in 2010 or so, I upgraded my computer to 20GB of RAM, and since then I've never had any issues with running out of RAM... even with multiple virtual OS's running, I still have plenty of RAM free. So for me, RAM scarcity has become a non-issue as well.
Of course I'm not saying it's impossible to run a 2011-era computer out of resources; it's easy to do if you try. But it's getting increasingly more difficult to do it without meaning to.
I'd imagine that by 2020 or 2030, the storage and processing capacity of computers will be so profoundly huge that people literally won't be able to come up with any effective new ways to waste it all. Even if they encoded all their spam emails as super-high-definition 3D holograms -- just because they can -- they still won't run out of resources.
At that point, people will simply stop thinking about gigabytes and gigahertz and so on, just as people no longer think about the starter motors or chokes in their automobiles. Computers will "just work", and if you ask someone how much space they have left on their drive, they won't know... or care.
This article should really read: "Crotchety old programmers fail to pass on tricks of the trade, then complain anyways"
Damn right we failed to pass on the tricks of the trade... the day after you do that, you're laid off and replaced by a 19-year-old H1B who's willing to work for Jolt and Fritos.
As for the complaining... that's an important part of being crotchety.
There's an inherent conflict between the prime directive of the Google auto-driving software ("drive safely"), and the prime directive of the Toyota firmware ("drive safely until the human isn't paying attention, then accelerate to top speed for as long as possible").
It was only a matter of time before the Toyota side of the car's character came to the fore. ;^)
Wouldn't you be better off building all of the buildings in the area with, say, 15 or 20 floors, vs. trying to have a few mega-structures like this?
Yes, of course you would, if practicality and usefulness was your goal. But of course this building isn't about those things, it's about showing the world that the Saudis have the world's biggest, um, buildings.
With one caveat -- you have to think in Russian.
High value on sex [...] (generally conservatives)
(insert David Vitter joke here)