I think I'll simply take your word for it, since I don't have occasion to write a lot of scientific programming. (Well, any.) But I think the big issue is not how hard it is to optimize C. It's how good optimizing C compilers are in practice.
My own opinion on this subject is worthless -- I don't have the CS background. But it seems to me that C compilers, as they're commonly used, don't produce code that's as optimized as it can be -- either because some of the more popular compilers don't optimize very well, or because too many programmers assume that only manual optimization will do.
The problem with OOP is not the concept itself. It's the difficulty so many OOP developers have with creating a clean, simple API. The big advantage of OOP is that it makes it very easy to create sophisticated, extensible libraries. But such a library has a complicated internal structure that most users of the library just don't need to know. Too many developers of OO libraries place the burden on the programmer/user of separating user stuff (this object enapsulates a simple input stream) from library stuff (this is how the stream objects work together; this is how you create new kinds of stream objects). And even when they don't, some idiot tech writer jumbles the concepts together.
I'm allowed to flame tech writers, since I'm one myself. Speaking of which...
You raise some good points. But if you have to hand-optimize your C code, your compiler is not very good. Optimization is a feature of the compiler, not the language.
The problem with FORTRAN is that it was the very first high-level programming language. ("High-level" meaning a language that allows you to think in formulas and variables, not operation codes and registers.) So they had to make all the mistakes that taught computer scientists how not to write a grammar. Which mistakes produced a language that is both difficult to code and difficult to parse.
Unfortunately, FORTRAN has achieved a role in scientific computing it will probably never lose. One co-worker of mine was a recent physics PhD who spent his entire academic career trying to persuade his fellow scientists that they'd save themselves a lot of grief by switching to C -- with no success.
Should have occured to me you'd have tried to buy another Psion. I would have thought that old Psions would hold together better, but apparently not.
Have you tried running this application on a Symbian device? There are a lot of those these days, though I guess they're usually more expensive than a plain PDA.
Sterling has occasionally played with the idea of "fade". The idea is that in the future some busy/powerful people use fancy AI software to mediate their interactions with the rest of humanity. Which gets interesting when the person gets old, because the software gradually assumes more and more of the person's responsibilities, until you have a totally senile individual who's delegated away his entire identity: he's "faded".
Fading is a minor element in some of Sterling's early space opera, but is only a central theme in one of his more recent stories: "Bicycle Repairman", collected in A Good Old-Fashioned Future. In this story, the AIs are known as "Mooks". I've given away rather too much of the story, but I don't think it matters, since Sterling's fiction is not very plot-driven.
Mentor does sound interesting -- I've never heard of anything that did that kind of personal scheduling. If you can't find something similar for another platform, you might look into trying to get it running on a Symbian-based cell phone. Since Symbian is basically the current version of EPOC, that's probably easier than porting the software to PalmOS, which seems to be the author's current plans.
Or you could just get another Psion off of eBay. They'll probably be available for a long time to come.
I have to mention that overdependence on "Mook" software can lead to loss of actual identity, as described in Bruce Sterling's fiction.
Be very cautious when tormenting a power-structure that has few qualms with making you vanish in the dead of night.
You read too many Tom Clancy novels. It's perfectly true that making trouble for the Chinese government is an invitation to an unpleasant interview with the local constabulary, a long prison stay, or even a bullet in the back of the head. But they don't act like bad guys in spy thriller. They're very open and aboveboard about these things. If they shoot you, they'll even send your family a bill for the bullet!
Does it really matter whether a distro comes with Firefox of Mozilla? If you don't like the packages they provide by default, you can probably find the alternative you want on the CD or Web, or build it yourself. What matters is the core functionality of the distro: how's the installation software? The admin tools? Does it come with drivers for my hardware, and are the drivers easy to install and configure? Are all those obscure little configuration files correctly written and easy to tweak? Never mind how many different Window Managers there are, is it easy to switch between them, so I can experiment?
One important difference between Mandrake and other distros is that it's compiled for recent processors instead of the works-everywhere 386 target. Which in theory should make some difference in performance, but you never hear anything about that.
Re:Give DirecTV and Dish a little competition?!?!?
on
XM and Sirius Merger?
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· Score: 1
A hoax? They just got their facts wrong. You must be one of those moderators that can't tell the difference between flamebait and a simple difference of opinion.
What's really weird is that this ended up in the Digital topic. Not the mistake -- the fact that Slashdot still has a topic for a company that disappeared 7 years ago!
One of my favorite episodes. But not applicable in this case, because (a) those were cutsie pre-Sopranos gangsters and (b) ST now insists that all aliens look alien.
One of the moderately dumb things ST has done (but not close to being the dumbest, alas) is to decide that they had to explain why Klingons didn't always have those latex ridges. The real explanation, of course, is that TOS series didn't have the budget for prosthetics. But apparently there's an official explanation, alluded to on the DS9 Tribbles episode and movie 6. (For some strange reason, this explanation has never been circulated, though it's supposed to come out in a future Enterprise episode.) This is dumb, because it means they can't bring back any of the human-looking aliens from TOS. Including my personal favorite, the Iotians.
Then again the Iotians are sort of a ripoff of Anderson and Dickson's Hokas, so what the heck.
(What idiot labeled this "troll"? I find it carefully reasoned, even though I disagree with much of what it says.)
Until the browsers converge on CSS, (which is great in theory) please use nested tables for your layouts. They work great all the way back to Netscape 4, which is all you can ask for these days.
No they don't. Pages formatted that way depend on a minimum screen resolution. And they don't comply with accesibility standards. Tables should be used for tabular data, period.
I agree that there's a convergence problem with browser support of CSS. But the intersection of CSS support you see on all the current browsers is enough for most purposes. That still leaves your legacy users in the lurch. But if legacy support is that important to your web site, it makes more sense to scale back the fancy formatting, instead of using obsolete kludges.
So instead of trusting a remote-access server company, you trust a vendor of remote access software. If that vendor happens to be Microsoft, that's way more trust than most of us are willing to give. That's not Microsoft-bashing, that's a reasonable response to their shitty record on security issues.
I agree that setting up your own remote access infrastructure, as you describe, is the most secure method -- if you have the expertise to do it right. (Using the method you describe, or something similar.) You do it wrong, and some script kiddie will use your mistakes to take over your computer.
But we're talking about technically-challenged home users seeking help from friends and family members. If they had that kind of expertise, they wouldn't need somebody looking over their shoulder in the first place. For people like that, trusting a company like GoToMyPC or LogMeIn, with a proven track record for good security and respect for privacy, is a reasonable tradeoff. It's not the most security theoretically possible, but its as much security as you'll get without making the application impractical.
Linux isn't the only platform that ActiveX doesn't run on -- it hardly runs on anything at all.
Except that "hardly anything" is 95% of the users!
This story isn't about Linux, it's about how IBM fucked themselves by not thinking.
Sure, they've done stupid shit in the past. Before Gerstner, upper management even refused to use email. But that's kind of beside the point. We're all stuck with an overdependence of Microsoft products. IBM, at least, is trying to make the change. And the difficulty of doing that is what we should focus on, not pointing fingers for past mistakes.
The average user doesn't even know what Linux is. What the average user wants is to do his or her job with a minimum of hassle. The hassle of making the transition to Linux is enormous.
It's not so much right hand not communicating with left hand. The Linux mandate came from the very top, and all hands are supposed to say, "Sir! Yes Sir!" But many hands (this metaphor is out of control, but you know what I mean) resisted, and either managment lacked the will to overcome resistance or (and this is my guess) couldn't face the necessary disruption that a total retooling would cause.
So who, if anybody is using Darwin? We don't seem to hear anything from any Darwin users that aren't also MacOS users. It's intriguing to know that Darwin runs on x86, but this doesn't seem to have an consequences in the real world.
If you haven't graduated high school, I think that a program to help you earn your GED would be particularly helpful.
And also cost-effective in terms of running the prison. Inmates in classes or doing homework are too busy to cause trouble, which means you can get by with fewer guards.
The problem is that any program that make incarceration less unpleasant arouses a kneejerk Don't-Coddle-The-Criminals backlash. I don't know about Missouri, but my own state (California) has slashed spending on educational programs for prisoners, even as we've made prison time mandatory for more and more crimes. Basically there would be no programs at all in this state if there weren't a lot of volunteers willing to donate teaching time.
Privatized prisons, which have a lot of incentive to control costs, often do so by keeping prisoners busy in educational and recreational programs. They always take flack for these programs, even though they're saving the taxpayers money. Too many people won't accept prisons as anything except a place of punishment, even if it costs more to run them. Not to mention the social costs when unrehabilitated prisoners are dumped out at the end of their terms.
It's a minor point, but banning violent video is the same kind of kneejerk nonsense. Its absurd to think that the cartoon violence in a game means anything to people who experience much nastier things every day. Until we get away from this stupid, self-righteous thinking, prisons are not going to get any better.
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My own opinion on this subject is worthless -- I don't have the CS background. But it seems to me that C compilers, as they're commonly used, don't produce code that's as optimized as it can be -- either because some of the more popular compilers don't optimize very well, or because too many programmers assume that only manual optimization will do.
I'm allowed to flame tech writers, since I'm one myself. Speaking of which...
You raise some good points. But if you have to hand-optimize your C code, your compiler is not very good. Optimization is a feature of the compiler, not the language.
Unfortunately, FORTRAN has achieved a role in scientific computing it will probably never lose. One co-worker of mine was a recent physics PhD who spent his entire academic career trying to persuade his fellow scientists that they'd save themselves a lot of grief by switching to C -- with no success.
Have you tried running this application on a Symbian device? There are a lot of those these days, though I guess they're usually more expensive than a plain PDA.
Sterling has occasionally played with the idea of "fade". The idea is that in the future some busy/powerful people use fancy AI software to mediate their interactions with the rest of humanity. Which gets interesting when the person gets old, because the software gradually assumes more and more of the person's responsibilities, until you have a totally senile individual who's delegated away his entire identity: he's "faded".
Fading is a minor element in some of Sterling's early space opera, but is only a central theme in one of his more recent stories: "Bicycle Repairman", collected in A Good Old-Fashioned Future . In this story, the AIs are known as "Mooks". I've given away rather too much of the story, but I don't think it matters, since Sterling's fiction is not very plot-driven.
Or you could just get another Psion off of eBay. They'll probably be available for a long time to come.
I have to mention that overdependence on "Mook" software can lead to loss of actual identity, as described in Bruce Sterling's fiction.
There's probably more to his job than this one assignment.
I was being sarcastic. Your post was actually very helpful.
So if somebody disagrees with you, they're a fraud? Then I'm a fraud, and you're wasting your valuable time arguing with me.
One important difference between Mandrake and other distros is that it's compiled for recent processors instead of the works-everywhere 386 target. Which in theory should make some difference in performance, but you never hear anything about that.
It makes him lazy!
What's really weird is that this ended up in the Digital topic. Not the mistake -- the fact that Slashdot still has a topic for a company that disappeared 7 years ago!
One of the moderately dumb things ST has done (but not close to being the dumbest, alas) is to decide that they had to explain why Klingons didn't always have those latex ridges. The real explanation, of course, is that TOS series didn't have the budget for prosthetics. But apparently there's an official explanation, alluded to on the DS9 Tribbles episode and movie 6. (For some strange reason, this explanation has never been circulated, though it's supposed to come out in a future Enterprise episode.) This is dumb, because it means they can't bring back any of the human-looking aliens from TOS. Including my personal favorite, the Iotians.
Then again the Iotians are sort of a ripoff of Anderson and Dickson's Hokas, so what the heck.
I agree that there's a convergence problem with browser support of CSS. But the intersection of CSS support you see on all the current browsers is enough for most purposes. That still leaves your legacy users in the lurch. But if legacy support is that important to your web site, it makes more sense to scale back the fancy formatting, instead of using obsolete kludges.
I agree that setting up your own remote access infrastructure, as you describe, is the most secure method -- if you have the expertise to do it right. (Using the method you describe, or something similar.) You do it wrong, and some script kiddie will use your mistakes to take over your computer.
But we're talking about technically-challenged home users seeking help from friends and family members. If they had that kind of expertise, they wouldn't need somebody looking over their shoulder in the first place. For people like that, trusting a company like GoToMyPC or LogMeIn, with a proven track record for good security and respect for privacy, is a reasonable tradeoff. It's not the most security theoretically possible, but its as much security as you'll get without making the application impractical.
(We need a new mod: -1 language nitpicking. Though maybe "offtopic" covers it.)
Which is not obvious to somebody who's never used Gentoo.
The average user doesn't even know what Linux is. What the average user wants is to do his or her job with a minimum of hassle. The hassle of making the transition to Linux is enormous.
It's not so much right hand not communicating with left hand. The Linux mandate came from the very top, and all hands are supposed to say, "Sir! Yes Sir!" But many hands (this metaphor is out of control, but you know what I mean) resisted, and either managment lacked the will to overcome resistance or (and this is my guess) couldn't face the necessary disruption that a total retooling would cause.
I thought it was a Linux distro.
So who, if anybody is using Darwin? We don't seem to hear anything from any Darwin users that aren't also MacOS users. It's intriguing to know that Darwin runs on x86, but this doesn't seem to have an consequences in the real world.
The problem is that any program that make incarceration less unpleasant arouses a kneejerk Don't-Coddle-The-Criminals backlash. I don't know about Missouri, but my own state (California) has slashed spending on educational programs for prisoners, even as we've made prison time mandatory for more and more crimes. Basically there would be no programs at all in this state if there weren't a lot of volunteers willing to donate teaching time.
Privatized prisons, which have a lot of incentive to control costs, often do so by keeping prisoners busy in educational and recreational programs. They always take flack for these programs, even though they're saving the taxpayers money. Too many people won't accept prisons as anything except a place of punishment, even if it costs more to run them. Not to mention the social costs when unrehabilitated prisoners are dumped out at the end of their terms.
It's a minor point, but banning violent video is the same kind of kneejerk nonsense. Its absurd to think that the cartoon violence in a game means anything to people who experience much nastier things every day. Until we get away from this stupid, self-righteous thinking, prisons are not going to get any better.