There are two camps when it comes to this sort of thing. One says that developer time is more important than processor time (you seem to fall into this one) and therefore GC is a great thing. I would say that 80% of development projects fall into this category.
But in the other 20%, performance is more important than development time, and for these projects, GC is clearly a bad idea. In some situations even C++ is a bad idea. You really really wouldn't want to write an operating system with C++, much less with GC. There are times when developers need complete control, and high-level languages and features like GC take that away.
"The power requirements will be more than what ATI wants to run through the AGP port, so the card will have an extra floppy-drive sized power connection."
That's very interesting. For one thing, I don't know of many cases which come with two floppy power connections any more. Other than that, it sounds like a good idea. Finally use the legacy floppy crap for a modern purporse...
At one point, as a film student, I was interested in computer animation as a way for a single person or small group to produce a film, without the expense of locations, casting, cameras, etc. I thought that soon, as hardware and software improved, it would be possible for me to create a film on my own computer at home.
But my experience in animation in college taught me that increasing hardware capacity doesn't reduce the time it takes to produce a film or demo reel; it simply increases the quality of the final output. I imagine that the modelling, animation, and rendering of the scenes in Tron took as much human time as comparable scenes in Fellowship of the Ring. It's possible to render Tron-quality CG in realtime on a modern PC, but nobody wants to watch it.
My question is this: do you think it will ever be possible to produce a full-length CG film in about a man-year or less, with effects which are reasonbly "modern" for the time? Will the technology curve eventually flatten out, once we get to a certain point where the human eye can't really tell the difference? Or is it implausible to think that a single person or small group could provide all of the artistic input (scriptwriting, directing, modelling, animation, acting, etc) to produce a full film, even ignoring all technological constraints?
The best use of XML is when you DON'T have control over one of the ends. B2B applications can benefit greatly from DTDs/schemas and aren't going to care about bandwidth issues as much.
The "classic" example for an XML based protocol is a server which provides weather information to anonymous clients over the public net. Do you want to write your own protocol and try to explain it to everyone who wants your information? No, just package it in XML, provide a schema, and it's easy for clients to fetch.
Situations where you DO have control over both ends don't benefit from XML very much, especially when performance is important (and when isn't it?).
There is a place for technologies which consume extra CPU, memory, and bandwidth but provide something else: for example, reduced programmer development time (for some applications). Java is a good example. The benefits of XML are more limited, but they do exist.
OK, so you have the length of the string up front. And the length is encoded in ASCII, so it's theoretically unlimited. But how much space do you allocate for the length? How many bytes can it be?
It seems much simpler to assume that a 4-byte binary length will be sufficient. I haven't had to deal with strings longer than 2^32 recently. If you DO have strings that large, your ASCII-encoded length is going to be 10 bytes long.
If you want to include error checking, put a 4-byte CRC/checksum/adler32 after the length.
The corollary to Moore's law goes something like this: CPU work always expands to fill the processor time available.
I saw this in college animation courses. A project would take so many man-hours (say 400). Given a faster computer, the finished product might look better (more detailed, higher resolution, etc) but the man-hours were the same.
The effort required to produce Toy Story or Final Fantasy today is about the same effort which will be required to produce a full-length CG movie in 10 years.
If this law weren't true, we'd all be watching Tron sequels which take ten minutes to produce.
Do we fund Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie? Or Bjarne Stroustroup? No; all three of them are "funded" by having actual jobs, and the task of adding "features" to C and C++ are handled by international or ANSI committees. Is there a fund for Linus or any of the other Linux kernel hackers? No, they all have jobs with actual companies.
Dynamic linking is bad, and we should all go back to static linking? Well, why don't we get rid of this whole "networked computers" thing and go back to timeshared servers?
Dynamic linking has its problems, but the answer isn't "statically link everything". There should (and can) be a clear separation between changing the interface of a dynamic library and changing its underlying implementation. All of my applications which use zlib should benefit from upgrading the shared library to fix bugs.
Microsoft has tried to answer this with COM, where COM objects have interfaces which never change and instead create a new "version" of the interface if it needs to be updated. It's no panacea but it's the right idea.
The problem is that programming is hard. There's no quick solution that will fix all of these problems, and we don't need to go back to static linking either. Developers need the discipline to use the techniques which answer the problems effectively. And there is no way you can convince me that open source developers have more discipline in that area than proprietary developers.
It's inevitable that computers will become appliances. Anything which is marketed to, designed for, and used by the masses will eventually become simple and easy to use, and probably a commodity unless one company holds a monopoly on its production. The original Apple was the first step; this is merely another.
But that doesn't mean computers won't exist to hack on for amateurs. Did the CD eliminate HAM radio, or the amateur musician? Does an electronics geek bemoan the fact that he can't put together his own DVD player, or does he spend his time doing more interesting things? When computers become appliances, they will become boring.
It also doesn't mean that professional computing will go this way. To use the same analogy: do you think a radio broadcasting station uses an off-the shelf CD player? Do you think they go to Best Buy, see the low-end consumer hardware sold there, and say "Damn, I need something better, more customizable, but I guess I just can't buy it anywhere." Professionals will use professional products, and that means many things: high quality, no frills, and expensive. Microsoft will NOT be able to convince any computer professional to use this "Palladium" crap for a server. They won't even try. They will probably have a server OS which can serve Palladium-enabled content; but that won't be the only option, unless it's so good that it's all professionals want.
The readers of Slashdot are all amateur computing enthusiasts, and many of them are computer professionals as well. We may end up using a commodity computer appliance, just like the rest of the world; but our Linux boxes will always be around to hack on.
If the ftp server was rooted, why couldn't they just replace the md5 sums? Usually I see them as files in the same directory as the tarballs. How hard is it to generate an md5 sum which matches the hacked version?
Spielberg didn't direct Back to the Future. Roger Zemeckis did. Spielberg was executive producer, which means "person who endorses the production of the movie and has high-level input but otherwise does nothing."
Even the most die-hard/.ers have to admit...the guy is good. Good at what he does. He made Windows, and it wasn't luck. I don't know if his run is over, don't know whether Longhorn will succeed--but I wouldn't bet against it.
Which book of his has a character whose brain has been cut in half, and the narrator is the left side of that brain? I remember that the guy has control of his speech and the right side of his body, and eventually communicates with the other side of his brain through tapping Morse code on his left hand.
Now I remember..."Peace on Earth". Interesting read. The Cyberiad is also excellent.
Re:That is what killed Wordstar
on
Version Fatigue
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· Score: 2
I know most of those commands from old Borland Turbo Pascal IDEs under DOS. I believe the name for the interface is BRIEF--and modern compilers (Borland's and MSVC) still support it.
Not only that, but Visual Studio (along with most other Microsoft desktop applications) is extremely customizable in terms of keyboard shortcuts, menus, and toolbars. You can arrange everything exactly how you want. If you set a shortcut for a command, the menu will reflect that to remind you of what you set it to. And if you use a shortcut which was used by something else, the other command will pick a "backup shortcut" to use instead. In other words, if you want Ctrl-Z to be "Delete line", Undo will become Ctrl-Shift-U.
I've wondered in the past what the smallest form factor for technologies like this is, in terms of human usability. A CD isn't particularly big, and it's physically easy to insert into a player. It's considerably more difficult to insert a quarter ($.25) sized disc into a slot; how many quarters have you dropped over the years trying to feed vending machines, video games, etc? How many CDs have you dropped while trying to load them?
The same thought goes for devices like PDAs, phones, and laptops. Logic says these should be as small as possible, and probably unified into one device. But human hands require large keyboards (if keyboard input is used) and human eyes require large screens (if visual output is used). A nice thought is screens which fold up like paper, and unfold to whatever size is required. Audio output and input (voice recognition) don't require much physical size, but there are many tasks which are not well suited for voice input. Or so I think, but then I'm used to a keyboard.
I would say that he created the laws as a logical system, and then explored the ways in which that system could produce problems and mysteries. Many of the stories I recall were indeed "mysteries", where the detective at the end solves the problem through logical application of the three laws.
In some of the later Foundation books, Asimov ties the Foundation world to the Robots world, and brings in R. Daneel Olivaw, the robot detective from the Robot mysteries (Caves of Steel, Naked Sun IIRC), who has survived through the millenia. Olivaw tells a character that at some point he realized that there is an implicit "Zeroth Law", which is something along the lines of:
"A robot must not harm humanity, or through inaction, allow humanity to come to harm."
The First law had to then be obeyed only so far as it did not conflict with the Zeroth law. Therefore, Olivaw could kill a human if it was clear that doing so would save humanity (or rather, by not doing so, would harm humanity). An interesting idea, one of the better bits from the later Asimov books.
You're absolutely right, and that's capitalism and free speech at it's best.
The good news is that you don't have to shop at WalMart. You do not have a choice when it comes to laws, the government, and the constitution. And that's a major difference--really the only difference that matters.
Other powerful groups like the AARP, various lobbies, and Microsoft have major "unfair" effects on your life as well. That's just the way it is.
You're free to fight these groups, if you can get enough people to agree with you. If you can't get enough people to agree with you...tough titties.
Huh? By definition, white colors look "whitest" to our eyes when in sunlight (in the same way white looks green under flourescent light). That doesn't mean the Sun's light is white. The sun's light is yellow-orange, because of its temperature. If it were hotter, it would be bluish, and our eyes would have evolved to see white properly under that bluish light.
A completely valid reason for insisting on RedHat, even when you the expert prefer Debian (for also valid reasons) is that it's much easier to find a RedHat admin to replace or support you, because of the RHCE courses. In general it's easier to find admins for RedHat, particularly less-experienced ones. Wizards tend to be capable of dealing with any flavor of OS, but you don't always want to pay for a wizard.
If you were going to set up a large and complex shop, and then turn the maintenance over to $60,000/yr worth of support personnel (whose turnover rate might be high), which distro would you recommend?
I know a shop where the head admin is having to get rid of Linux boxes (for Windows ones), because no one else in the company knows Linux. He understands that it's not just technical superiority that matters, but supporting the technology as well.
It's obviously not theft, but it does mean that the revenue model of the media companies is going to change. TANSTAAFL. If they can't get money through advertising, they'll switch to another model. Can anyone think of a website which did this lately?
If you don't like advertisements, fine. There's obviously no requirement that you do so (yet). But don't go whining to the world when all TV is paid for up front, magazines cost $15 each, and your gasoline tax goes through the roof to pay for the roads which will fall apart without billboard revenue.
There's a much stronger law at work here than any Congress could pass.
Slashdot Mirror
There are two camps when it comes to this sort of thing. One says that developer time is more important than processor time (you seem to fall into this one) and therefore GC is a great thing. I would say that 80% of development projects fall into this category.
But in the other 20%, performance is more important than development time, and for these projects, GC is clearly a bad idea. In some situations even C++ is a bad idea. You really really wouldn't want to write an operating system with C++, much less with GC. There are times when developers need complete control, and high-level languages and features like GC take that away.
"The power requirements will be more than what ATI wants to run through the AGP port, so the card will have an extra floppy-drive sized power connection."
That's very interesting. For one thing, I don't know of many cases which come with two floppy power connections any more. Other than that, it sounds like a good idea. Finally use the legacy floppy crap for a modern purporse...
At one point, as a film student, I was interested in computer animation as a way for a single person or small group to produce a film, without the expense of locations, casting, cameras, etc. I thought that soon, as hardware and software improved, it would be possible for me to create a film on my own computer at home.
But my experience in animation in college taught me that increasing hardware capacity doesn't reduce the time it takes to produce a film or demo reel; it simply increases the quality of the final output. I imagine that the modelling, animation, and rendering of the scenes in Tron took as much human time as comparable scenes in Fellowship of the Ring. It's possible to render Tron-quality CG in realtime on a modern PC, but nobody wants to watch it.
My question is this: do you think it will ever be possible to produce a full-length CG film in about a man-year or less, with effects which are reasonbly "modern" for the time? Will the technology curve eventually flatten out, once we get to a certain point where the human eye can't really tell the difference? Or is it implausible to think that a single person or small group could provide all of the artistic input (scriptwriting, directing, modelling, animation, acting, etc) to produce a full film, even ignoring all technological constraints?
The best use of XML is when you DON'T have control over one of the ends. B2B applications can benefit greatly from DTDs/schemas and aren't going to care about bandwidth issues as much.
The "classic" example for an XML based protocol is a server which provides weather information to anonymous clients over the public net. Do you want to write your own protocol and try to explain it to everyone who wants your information? No, just package it in XML, provide a schema, and it's easy for clients to fetch.
Situations where you DO have control over both ends don't benefit from XML very much, especially when performance is important (and when isn't it?).
There is a place for technologies which consume extra CPU, memory, and bandwidth but provide something else: for example, reduced programmer development time (for some applications). Java is a good example. The benefits of XML are more limited, but they do exist.
OK, so you have the length of the string up front. And the length is encoded in ASCII, so it's theoretically unlimited. But how much space do you allocate for the length? How many bytes can it be?
It seems much simpler to assume that a 4-byte binary length will be sufficient. I haven't had to deal with strings longer than 2^32 recently. If you DO have strings that large, your ASCII-encoded length is going to be 10 bytes long.
If you want to include error checking, put a 4-byte CRC/checksum/adler32 after the length.
The corollary to Moore's law goes something like this: CPU work always expands to fill the processor time available.
I saw this in college animation courses. A project would take so many man-hours (say 400). Given a faster computer, the finished product might look better (more detailed, higher resolution, etc) but the man-hours were the same.
The effort required to produce Toy Story or Final Fantasy today is about the same effort which will be required to produce a full-length CG movie in 10 years.
If this law weren't true, we'd all be watching Tron sequels which take ten minutes to produce.
Do we fund Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie? Or Bjarne Stroustroup? No; all three of them are "funded" by having actual jobs, and the task of adding "features" to C and C++ are handled by international or ANSI committees. Is there a fund for Linus or any of the other Linux kernel hackers? No, they all have jobs with actual companies.
Dynamic linking is bad, and we should all go back to static linking? Well, why don't we get rid of this whole "networked computers" thing and go back to timeshared servers?
Dynamic linking has its problems, but the answer isn't "statically link everything". There should (and can) be a clear separation between changing the interface of a dynamic library and changing its underlying implementation. All of my applications which use zlib should benefit from upgrading the shared library to fix bugs.
Microsoft has tried to answer this with COM, where COM objects have interfaces which never change and instead create a new "version" of the interface if it needs to be updated. It's no panacea but it's the right idea.
The problem is that programming is hard. There's no quick solution that will fix all of these problems, and we don't need to go back to static linking either. Developers need the discipline to use the techniques which answer the problems effectively. And there is no way you can convince me that open source developers have more discipline in that area than proprietary developers.
It's inevitable that computers will become appliances. Anything which is marketed to, designed for, and used by the masses will eventually become simple and easy to use, and probably a commodity unless one company holds a monopoly on its production. The original Apple was the first step; this is merely another.
But that doesn't mean computers won't exist to hack on for amateurs. Did the CD eliminate HAM radio, or the amateur musician? Does an electronics geek bemoan the fact that he can't put together his own DVD player, or does he spend his time doing more interesting things? When computers become appliances, they will become boring.
It also doesn't mean that professional computing will go this way. To use the same analogy: do you think a radio broadcasting station uses an off-the shelf CD player? Do you think they go to Best Buy, see the low-end consumer hardware sold there, and say "Damn, I need something better, more customizable, but I guess I just can't buy it anywhere." Professionals will use professional products, and that means many things: high quality, no frills, and expensive. Microsoft will NOT be able to convince any computer professional to use this "Palladium" crap for a server. They won't even try. They will probably have a server OS which can serve Palladium-enabled content; but that won't be the only option, unless it's so good that it's all professionals want.
The readers of Slashdot are all amateur computing enthusiasts, and many of them are computer professionals as well. We may end up using a commodity computer appliance, just like the rest of the world; but our Linux boxes will always be around to hack on.
If the ftp server was rooted, why couldn't they just replace the md5 sums? Usually I see them as files in the same directory as the tarballs. How hard is it to generate an md5 sum which matches the hacked version?
Spielberg didn't direct Back to the Future. Roger Zemeckis did. Spielberg was executive producer, which means "person who endorses the production of the movie and has high-level input but otherwise does nothing."
Even the most die-hard /.ers have to admit...the guy is good. Good at what he does. He made Windows, and it wasn't luck. I don't know if his run is over, don't know whether Longhorn will succeed--but I wouldn't bet against it.
Which book of his has a character whose brain has been cut in half, and the narrator is the left side of that brain? I remember that the guy has control of his speech and the right side of his body, and eventually communicates with the other side of his brain through tapping Morse code on his left hand.
Now I remember..."Peace on Earth". Interesting read. The Cyberiad is also excellent.
I know most of those commands from old Borland Turbo Pascal IDEs under DOS. I believe the name for the interface is BRIEF--and modern compilers (Borland's and MSVC) still support it.
Not only that, but Visual Studio (along with most other Microsoft desktop applications) is extremely customizable in terms of keyboard shortcuts, menus, and toolbars. You can arrange everything exactly how you want. If you set a shortcut for a command, the menu will reflect that to remind you of what you set it to. And if you use a shortcut which was used by something else, the other command will pick a "backup shortcut" to use instead. In other words, if you want Ctrl-Z to be "Delete line", Undo will become Ctrl-Shift-U.
I've wondered in the past what the smallest form factor for technologies like this is, in terms of human usability. A CD isn't particularly big, and it's physically easy to insert into a player. It's considerably more difficult to insert a quarter ($.25) sized disc into a slot; how many quarters have you dropped over the years trying to feed vending machines, video games, etc? How many CDs have you dropped while trying to load them?
The same thought goes for devices like PDAs, phones, and laptops. Logic says these should be as small as possible, and probably unified into one device. But human hands require large keyboards (if keyboard input is used) and human eyes require large screens (if visual output is used). A nice thought is screens which fold up like paper, and unfold to whatever size is required. Audio output and input (voice recognition) don't require much physical size, but there are many tasks which are not well suited for voice input. Or so I think, but then I'm used to a keyboard.
I would say that he created the laws as a logical system, and then explored the ways in which that system could produce problems and mysteries. Many of the stories I recall were indeed "mysteries", where the detective at the end solves the problem through logical application of the three laws.
In some of the later Foundation books, Asimov ties the Foundation world to the Robots world, and brings in R. Daneel Olivaw, the robot detective from the Robot mysteries (Caves of Steel, Naked Sun IIRC), who has survived through the millenia. Olivaw tells a character that at some point he realized that there is an implicit "Zeroth Law", which is something along the lines of:
"A robot must not harm humanity, or through inaction, allow humanity to come to harm."
The First law had to then be obeyed only so far as it did not conflict with the Zeroth law. Therefore, Olivaw could kill a human if it was clear that doing so would save humanity (or rather, by not doing so, would harm humanity). An interesting idea, one of the better bits from the later Asimov books.
You're absolutely right, and that's capitalism and free speech at it's best.
The good news is that you don't have to shop at WalMart. You do not have a choice when it comes to laws, the government, and the constitution. And that's a major difference--really the only difference that matters.
Other powerful groups like the AARP, various lobbies, and Microsoft have major "unfair" effects on your life as well. That's just the way it is.
You're free to fight these groups, if you can get enough people to agree with you. If you can't get enough people to agree with you...tough titties.
I'll agree with you, once you stop whining.
Huh? By definition, white colors look "whitest" to our eyes when in sunlight (in the same way white looks green under flourescent light). That doesn't mean the Sun's light is white. The sun's light is yellow-orange, because of its temperature. If it were hotter, it would be bluish, and our eyes would have evolved to see white properly under that bluish light.
If your logic were correct then a dual-CPU system with a VGA card would run Quake3 as fast as a single-CPU system with a GeForce3.
A GPU is specialized, and (should) have faster access to the system bus. Just because it's as powerful as a CPU, doesn't mean it should be one.
"What 18- or 20-year-olds will do with these PDAs today is what 35-year-olds will be doing with them tomorrow."
Don't you mean, "what 35-year-olds will be doing with them in 15 to 17 years?"
A completely valid reason for insisting on RedHat, even when you the expert prefer Debian (for also valid reasons) is that it's much easier to find a RedHat admin to replace or support you, because of the RHCE courses. In general it's easier to find admins for RedHat, particularly less-experienced ones. Wizards tend to be capable of dealing with any flavor of OS, but you don't always want to pay for a wizard.
If you were going to set up a large and complex shop, and then turn the maintenance over to $60,000/yr worth of support personnel (whose turnover rate might be high), which distro would you recommend?
I know a shop where the head admin is having to get rid of Linux boxes (for Windows ones), because no one else in the company knows Linux. He understands that it's not just technical superiority that matters, but supporting the technology as well.
Use what you want. Don't submit to any Slashdot propaganda which tells you that you need to run a free operating system to be cool.
It's obviously not theft, but it does mean that the revenue model of the media companies is going to change. TANSTAAFL. If they can't get money through advertising, they'll switch to another model. Can anyone think of a website which did this lately?
If you don't like advertisements, fine. There's obviously no requirement that you do so (yet). But don't go whining to the world when all TV is paid for up front, magazines cost $15 each, and your gasoline tax goes through the roof to pay for the roads which will fall apart without billboard revenue.
There's a much stronger law at work here than any Congress could pass.