most of us do no not think in a way that maps easily to functional programming.
I'm kind of surprised that virtually all of the comments so far focus on concision and functional programming.
To me, the overriding theme of the article is that static typing is good, and that type inference makes it less annoying.
Sure, it's a debate older than Emacs vs. vi, but this is Slashdot.
Although Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, JavaScript, and others have swung the pendulum towards dynamic typing, I'm really sympathetic to static typing.
Unfortunately, Java makes a less than compelling case without type inference.
I gather that C# and Go provide it to some extent.
Steve Maguire's Writing Solid Code makes a pretty good argument for catching as many mistakes as possible in the compiler, and making liberal use of asserts to verify preconditions.
Most of my time is spent with dynamically typed languages, and I'm increasingly frustrated by bugs that could have been caught by a compiler in another language.
memory management (after closing 40 tabs):
* firefox: 438MB immediately after, 161MB five minutes later
* chrome: 134MB immediately after, 94MB five minutes later
You're misinterpreting the "memory management" chart, because of the poorly worded lead in.
The actual "light load" numbers from the first chart (one tab) are Firefox 43.2 MB, Chrome 72.5 MB.
Slight edge to Firefox.
The "heavy load" numbers from the second chart (forty tabs) are Firefox 475.3 MB, Chrome 1,057.2 MB.
Big (and, frankly, surprising) win for Firefox.
The "memory management" numbers in the third chart show memory usage after closing thirty-nine of the forty tabs.
This looks like a big win for Chrome.
I don't know why Adam wrote, "We combined the two memory management tests into a single chart," or why he declared Firefox the winner of this test.
Memory usage has long been my biggest disappointment with Safari, Firefox, and Chrome (in that order).
Safari may win the occasional benchmark sprint, but it eventually slows to a crawl, dragging my system down with it.
Firefox is pretty much the same, but less so.
Too soon to tell how Firefox 7 is faring.
(Maybe the real point of rapid releases is to force you to restart the browser periodically.)
Chrome is better about releasing memory, but it just seems to fall apart with too many tabs: too high a water mark and lots of spurious redraws (a nuisance that Safari 5.1 has also acquired).
JavaScript has made huge strides due to renewed competition.
Hopefully memory usage will too.
I've been shopping at Borders for fifteen years or so. The stores have gone bland over the years, and the selection less varied, to say nothing of the incredible shrinking music section.
They launched a half-decent web store fairly late in the game, shuttered it to partner with Amazon, then re-launched a half-decent web store of their own.
The thing that has made me shop almost exclusively at Borders the last few years is the constant stream of coupons.
It started out as a trickle, with 20% - 33% off once every week or two.
Lately, Borders has been carpet bombing the Internet with coupons.
With a free Borders Rewards account, you could get 33% - 50% off once or twice a week, with very few restrictions.
Upgrade to Borders Rewards Plus for $20, and you got free shipping and an additional 10% off.
If $74.99 sounds too expensive for the latest volume of Knuth, how does $34.74 (55% off) sound?
Borders had some of the best deals around, and I will miss them.
I hope they find a way to maintain an online presence, because I do not want to give my business to Amazon.
The last couple of times a story like this was posted, I went straight to SpamCop's statistics for corroboration.
You're right: the touted decrease in spam is real, but temporary.
However, the yearly chart does seem to show a downward trend.
All I can say is that Amazon... had better lawyer up.
Unless it violates their contracts, I'm not sure what the labels can do. I imagine it will be a sticking point when the time comes to renew those contracts.
There are already plenty of online backup services (including some based on EC2) filled with personal music libraries (including MP3s downloaded from Amazon).
I wonder whether the back end employs any kind of de-duplication.
Does Amazon use watermarking that would interfere with that?
Wow, lots more commenters than moderators on this thread. I'll add my voice to the din. Sound quality articles catch my interest, from coat hangers to codecs, but I haven't paid much attention to this particular topic. Here's a short list of 24-bit FAQs for end users.
Existing sites like HDtracks.com, linnrecords.com, naimlabel.com, and Society of Sound offer 24-bit files with sample rates ranging from 44.1 KHz to 192 KHz, with 96 KHz being the most popular. Popular formats (in decreasing order of popularity) include FLAC, Apple lossless (ALAC), and WMA lossless.
FLAC seems to have more diverse support, but ALAC has arguably broader support, including iTunes and iPods. WMA appears to compress better than FLAC, which appears to compress better than ALAC. (FLAC's compression levels don't seem to change the ratio much, except at the lowest/fastest levels.) FLAC seems to have the fastest decoder, but ALAC has the handy property that you can simply discard the eight low-order bits (as iPods apparently do). [Sources: Hydrogenaudio Knowledgebase, hvdh at inter.nl.net, and FLAC comparison.]
I also came across some discussion of high-definition compatible digital (HDCD), a patented mastering fad from the late 90s that encodes about twenty bits on a CD, subsequently bought and buried by Microsoft. Apparently there are only two models of machines in the world that can encode HDCD, and they're both discontinued, with replacement parts in jeopardy as well.
Scrounging through CDs in the attic, I found some HDCD CDs from Capitol, High Street (Windham Hill), Red House, Sony, and Warner Bros. Goodwin's High End has an extensive list. As a quick test, I ripped Deana Carter's "Strawberry Wine" to a 16-bit WAV (51.4 MB) with XLD, converted to a 24-bit WAV (77.1 MB) with hdcd.exe (Windows only, but seems to work in WINE), then converted to 24-bit ALAC (56.4 MB) with XLD. I don't have the time or gear for an ABX test right now. The HDCD conversion is noticably quieter, for what it's worth.
Another quick way to try this at home is to torrent the 24/96 FLACs of the The Slip from nin.com (email registration required).
I guess that's what I get for tuning out the whole GPL 3 debate. Section 7 specifically governs the additional terms applicable to RTCW. Actually understanding what section 7 means is an exercise for another day.
The COPYING.txt included in RTCW-SP-GPL.zip begins with a copy of version 3 of the GNU GPL, but is then followed by additional and modified terms, which suggests to me that it is not actually GPLed.
Does O'Reilly sell any of its books through ebook intermediaries? Since they sell DRM-free versions direct, usually in multiple formats, I've never bothered to look. The only exception I've noticed is the occasional iPhone app.
As for price, discounts aren't too hard to find. I ordered one book for half its listed ebook price. I've since gotten a couple of "deal of the day" ebooks for $10 each. Today's deal, listed prominently at oreilly.com, is Learning the vi and Vim Editors (PDF only, unfortunately).
how about long-term performance?
on
Safari 5 Released
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Although Safari benchmarks well, it degrades severely over time. Memory usage climbs, even after closing tabs, and the beach ball becomes a constant companion. Firefox is a little better, but I've had the best luck with Chrome. I'll try Safari 5, but I'm not optimistic that it will be any better than previous versions.
I was still using Windows when Steam came out. I avoided it, and Half-Life 2 by extension, because of the DRM. A free copy of Portal sounds pretty good, though, so I figured I'd give it a try. It turns out that the game will run (poorly) with NVIDIA 9400M integrated video, but it refuses to start with NVIDIA 7600GT discrete video. Anyone know a way around that? This game is older than my computer, which had decent specs. at the time (for an iMac, anyway).
I've noticed two quirks about the Steam client itself: steam.sh opens in Xcode each time I reboot, and Steam asks for my administrative password every time it starts. My best guess is that it writes data files of some kind in the.app bundle, which would be a big no-no.
As an Mac user who's tried out the OS X version of Chrome, I can assure you that no one is abandoning Safari for it.
I have indeed all but abandoned Safari in favor of Chrome, warts and all.
While Safari does well in synthetic benchmarks, it chews up memory and slows to a beach-ball inducing crawl.
Firefox is slightly better, but suffers from essentially the same problem.
Chrome's process-per-tab model, on the other hand, really seems to work as promised.
I've been using it on three computers since the beta came out, and it is unquestionably more responsive.
Multiple windows, with multiple tabs each, open for days, and I can switch to any of them with no appreciable delay (let alone beach balls!).
I use the Zenitani Carbon Emacs port on OS X, and I noticed a while back that the Carbon wrapper for OS X had been removed. Can anyone describe the differences in Emacs 23? The NEWS file says: "The Nextstep port is not as stable as the other existing
ports."
If you can find an identical drive (should be pretty easy in a corporate environment, could be tricky for a home user), just carefully remove the board from the good drive and install it on the bad one.
I gave up on a drive that had a visible burn mark on one of the chips.
My brother-in-law, who usually comes to me for advice, found a similar drive and swapped the circuit board, recovering irreplaceable pictures.
As impressed as I was by this technical feat, it only encouraged me to be ever vigilant in backing up my data.
I think Slashdot's Fall Geek TV Lineup was the first I heard about Big Bang Theory. I remember thinking at the time that it was not remotely appealing to the presumably geek target audience. I have to admit, though, that one of the comic book jokes was pretty funny. Sheldon comes back from the store with the latest issue of Flash. He asks his fictional hero, "Want to watch me read your comic?" A second later he asks, "Want to watch me read it again?"
Let me just say "thank you" to Steve Zaske, a Microsoft employee who helped the OpenOffice.org team make an order-of-magnitude performance improvement. What Excel and Calc can now do in less than two seconds takes over a minute with Numbers 2.0.1 on my 2.33 GHz iMac.
Google Software Update (which is surreptitiously installed along with Picasa for the Mac, and reinstalls itself if you remove it) doesn't work with a non-administrative account. That's okay, though, because it's just a beta.
[Stallman] has a very rigid definition of [free]... it doesn't include the freedom to take something and make it not free.
Actually, Stallman's definition of free is straightforward and intuitive, and it does include BSD, MIT, public domain, etc.
What you may find objectionable is that he prefers copyleft.
As a practical matter, due to the nature of copyleft, he prefers licenses that are compatible with the GNU GPL.
Take a look a the FSF's page on licenses for more information.
I'm very disappointed in the iGoogle change. The first thing that I noticed, obviously, is the useless sidebar. I spent an hour trying to undo the damage, so I read all about canvas view and Google's plan for world domination through gigantic gadgets; I'm not impressed. The second thing I noticed is that the font size has gotten even smaller. I guess the downside to Google hiring every smart person under the age of thirty is that its employees have 20/20 eyesight, but no vision.
I've switched to google.ie/ig for now, but the news gadget now shows headlines from Ireland. I haven't found a suitable replacement.
I toyed with the idea of writing one, but the news gadget apparently takes advantage of some features that are only available to built-in gadgets.
Besides, as you point out, the Irish will eventually share our misfortune, at which point I'll probably ditch iGoogle altogether.
By the way, I too have a 24" monitor (two of them actually), and I despise wide pages.
I run two browsers side by side on one monitor, so that's about 950 pixels wide by about 1,100 pixels tall, which should be plenty for almost any web page.
I tried My Yahoo, but it has its own width problems.
Pageflakes has a big, unremovable advertisement widget.
Netvibes is slow.
Dashboard is super slow.
I want my iGoogle back.
Slashdot Mirror
Nokia Has a Billion Reasons To Love WP7.
I'm kind of surprised that virtually all of the comments so far focus on concision and functional programming. To me, the overriding theme of the article is that static typing is good, and that type inference makes it less annoying.
Sure, it's a debate older than Emacs vs. vi, but this is Slashdot. Although Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, JavaScript, and others have swung the pendulum towards dynamic typing, I'm really sympathetic to static typing. Unfortunately, Java makes a less than compelling case without type inference. I gather that C# and Go provide it to some extent.
Steve Maguire's Writing Solid Code makes a pretty good argument for catching as many mistakes as possible in the compiler, and making liberal use of asserts to verify preconditions. Most of my time is spent with dynamically typed languages, and I'm increasingly frustrated by bugs that could have been caught by a compiler in another language.
You're misinterpreting the "memory management" chart, because of the poorly worded lead in.
The actual "light load" numbers from the first chart (one tab) are Firefox 43.2 MB, Chrome 72.5 MB. Slight edge to Firefox.
The "heavy load" numbers from the second chart (forty tabs) are Firefox 475.3 MB, Chrome 1,057.2 MB. Big (and, frankly, surprising) win for Firefox.
The "memory management" numbers in the third chart show memory usage after closing thirty-nine of the forty tabs. This looks like a big win for Chrome. I don't know why Adam wrote, "We combined the two memory management tests into a single chart," or why he declared Firefox the winner of this test.
Memory usage has long been my biggest disappointment with Safari, Firefox, and Chrome (in that order). Safari may win the occasional benchmark sprint, but it eventually slows to a crawl, dragging my system down with it. Firefox is pretty much the same, but less so. Too soon to tell how Firefox 7 is faring. (Maybe the real point of rapid releases is to force you to restart the browser periodically.) Chrome is better about releasing memory, but it just seems to fall apart with too many tabs: too high a water mark and lots of spurious redraws (a nuisance that Safari 5.1 has also acquired).
JavaScript has made huge strides due to renewed competition. Hopefully memory usage will too.
I've been shopping at Borders for fifteen years or so. The stores have gone bland over the years, and the selection less varied, to say nothing of the incredible shrinking music section. They launched a half-decent web store fairly late in the game, shuttered it to partner with Amazon, then re-launched a half-decent web store of their own.
The thing that has made me shop almost exclusively at Borders the last few years is the constant stream of coupons. It started out as a trickle, with 20% - 33% off once every week or two. Lately, Borders has been carpet bombing the Internet with coupons. With a free Borders Rewards account, you could get 33% - 50% off once or twice a week, with very few restrictions. Upgrade to Borders Rewards Plus for $20, and you got free shipping and an additional 10% off.
If $74.99 sounds too expensive for the latest volume of Knuth, how does $34.74 (55% off) sound? Borders had some of the best deals around, and I will miss them. I hope they find a way to maintain an online presence, because I do not want to give my business to Amazon.
The last couple of times a story like this was posted, I went straight to SpamCop's statistics for corroboration. You're right: the touted decrease in spam is real, but temporary. However, the yearly chart does seem to show a downward trend.
Unless it violates their contracts, I'm not sure what the labels can do. I imagine it will be a sticking point when the time comes to renew those contracts.
There are already plenty of online backup services (including some based on EC2) filled with personal music libraries (including MP3s downloaded from Amazon). I wonder whether the back end employs any kind of de-duplication. Does Amazon use watermarking that would interfere with that?
Wow, lots more commenters than moderators on this thread. I'll add my voice to the din. Sound quality articles catch my interest, from coat hangers to codecs, but I haven't paid much attention to this particular topic. Here's a short list of 24-bit FAQs for end users.
Existing sites like HDtracks.com, linnrecords.com, naimlabel.com, and Society of Sound offer 24-bit files with sample rates ranging from 44.1 KHz to 192 KHz, with 96 KHz being the most popular. Popular formats (in decreasing order of popularity) include FLAC, Apple lossless (ALAC), and WMA lossless.
FLAC seems to have more diverse support, but ALAC has arguably broader support, including iTunes and iPods. WMA appears to compress better than FLAC, which appears to compress better than ALAC. (FLAC's compression levels don't seem to change the ratio much, except at the lowest/fastest levels.) FLAC seems to have the fastest decoder, but ALAC has the handy property that you can simply discard the eight low-order bits (as iPods apparently do). [Sources: Hydrogenaudio Knowledgebase, hvdh at inter.nl.net, and FLAC comparison.]
I also came across some discussion of high-definition compatible digital (HDCD), a patented mastering fad from the late 90s that encodes about twenty bits on a CD, subsequently bought and buried by Microsoft. Apparently there are only two models of machines in the world that can encode HDCD, and they're both discontinued, with replacement parts in jeopardy as well.
Scrounging through CDs in the attic, I found some HDCD CDs from Capitol, High Street (Windham Hill), Red House, Sony, and Warner Bros. Goodwin's High End has an extensive list. As a quick test, I ripped Deana Carter's "Strawberry Wine" to a 16-bit WAV (51.4 MB) with XLD, converted to a 24-bit WAV (77.1 MB) with hdcd.exe (Windows only, but seems to work in WINE), then converted to 24-bit ALAC (56.4 MB) with XLD. I don't have the time or gear for an ABX test right now. The HDCD conversion is noticably quieter, for what it's worth.
Another quick way to try this at home is to torrent the 24/96 FLACs of the The Slip from nin.com (email registration required).
Microsoft just doesn't make my blood boil the way they used to.
I don't know about "we," but Microsoft's crass manipulation of the ISO standards process sure pissed me off.
I guess that's what I get for tuning out the whole GPL 3 debate. Section 7 specifically governs the additional terms applicable to RTCW. Actually understanding what section 7 means is an exercise for another day.
The COPYING.txt included in RTCW-SP-GPL.zip begins with a copy of version 3 of the GNU GPL, but is then followed by additional and modified terms, which suggests to me that it is not actually GPLed.
Does O'Reilly sell any of its books through ebook intermediaries? Since they sell DRM-free versions direct, usually in multiple formats, I've never bothered to look. The only exception I've noticed is the occasional iPhone app.
As for price, discounts aren't too hard to find. I ordered one book for half its listed ebook price. I've since gotten a couple of "deal of the day" ebooks for $10 each. Today's deal, listed prominently at oreilly.com, is Learning the vi and Vim Editors (PDF only, unfortunately).
Although Safari benchmarks well, it degrades severely over time. Memory usage climbs, even after closing tabs, and the beach ball becomes a constant companion. Firefox is a little better, but I've had the best luck with Chrome. I'll try Safari 5, but I'm not optimistic that it will be any better than previous versions.
I was still using Windows when Steam came out. I avoided it, and Half-Life 2 by extension, because of the DRM. A free copy of Portal sounds pretty good, though, so I figured I'd give it a try. It turns out that the game will run (poorly) with NVIDIA 9400M integrated video, but it refuses to start with NVIDIA 7600GT discrete video. Anyone know a way around that? This game is older than my computer, which had decent specs. at the time (for an iMac, anyway).
I've noticed two quirks about the Steam client itself: steam.sh opens in Xcode each time I reboot, and Steam asks for my administrative password every time it starts. My best guess is that it writes data files of some kind in the .app bundle, which would be a big no-no.
The League for Programming Freedom advocated something like this in 1994: "Mutual Defense Against Software Patents."
I also see a headline from June 2006, "Chinese Mathematicians Prove Poincare Conjecture," but the link is broken.
I have indeed all but abandoned Safari in favor of Chrome, warts and all. While Safari does well in synthetic benchmarks, it chews up memory and slows to a beach-ball inducing crawl. Firefox is slightly better, but suffers from essentially the same problem.
Chrome's process-per-tab model, on the other hand, really seems to work as promised. I've been using it on three computers since the beta came out, and it is unquestionably more responsive. Multiple windows, with multiple tabs each, open for days, and I can switch to any of them with no appreciable delay (let alone beach balls!).
For what it's worth, Acorn 2.0 is 10.6 only.
I use the Zenitani Carbon Emacs port on OS X, and I noticed a while back that the Carbon wrapper for OS X had been removed. Can anyone describe the differences in Emacs 23? The NEWS file says: "The Nextstep port is not as stable as the other existing ports."
I gave up on a drive that had a visible burn mark on one of the chips. My brother-in-law, who usually comes to me for advice, found a similar drive and swapped the circuit board, recovering irreplaceable pictures. As impressed as I was by this technical feat, it only encouraged me to be ever vigilant in backing up my data.
I think Slashdot's Fall Geek TV Lineup was the first I heard about Big Bang Theory. I remember thinking at the time that it was not remotely appealing to the presumably geek target audience. I have to admit, though, that one of the comic book jokes was pretty funny. Sheldon comes back from the store with the latest issue of Flash. He asks his fictional hero, "Want to watch me read your comic?" A second later he asks, "Want to watch me read it again?"
Let me just say "thank you" to Steve Zaske, a Microsoft employee who helped the OpenOffice.org team make an order-of-magnitude performance improvement. What Excel and Calc can now do in less than two seconds takes over a minute with Numbers 2.0.1 on my 2.33 GHz iMac.
I thought that ioquake3 was GPL. Anyone know why the .dmg displays Id's old EULA?
Google Software Update (which is surreptitiously installed along with Picasa for the Mac, and reinstalls itself if you remove it) doesn't work with a non-administrative account. That's okay, though, because it's just a beta.
Actually, Stallman's definition of free is straightforward and intuitive, and it does include BSD, MIT, public domain, etc. What you may find objectionable is that he prefers copyleft. As a practical matter, due to the nature of copyleft, he prefers licenses that are compatible with the GNU GPL. Take a look a the FSF's page on licenses for more information.
I'm very disappointed in the iGoogle change. The first thing that I noticed, obviously, is the useless sidebar. I spent an hour trying to undo the damage, so I read all about canvas view and Google's plan for world domination through gigantic gadgets; I'm not impressed. The second thing I noticed is that the font size has gotten even smaller. I guess the downside to Google hiring every smart person under the age of thirty is that its employees have 20/20 eyesight, but no vision.
I've switched to google.ie/ig for now, but the news gadget now shows headlines from Ireland. I haven't found a suitable replacement. I toyed with the idea of writing one, but the news gadget apparently takes advantage of some features that are only available to built-in gadgets. Besides, as you point out, the Irish will eventually share our misfortune, at which point I'll probably ditch iGoogle altogether.
By the way, I too have a 24" monitor (two of them actually), and I despise wide pages. I run two browsers side by side on one monitor, so that's about 950 pixels wide by about 1,100 pixels tall, which should be plenty for almost any web page. I tried My Yahoo, but it has its own width problems. Pageflakes has a big, unremovable advertisement widget. Netvibes is slow. Dashboard is super slow. I want my iGoogle back.