>> In all honesty, relatively few people are doing classic programming any more. Most programmers do things like database interfacing, GUI tool building using Delphi or Visual Basic
I guess this is a pretty obvious point, but it explains the market share perfectly. The millions of people who need to write GUI database front ends severly outnumber the few that need to make Lexer/Parsers.
Somehow, the choice of languages to do the db programming is more bounded and focused, despite the larger market for users.
A highly moderaetd thread above dismissed Xerox PARC's effort to promote Aspect Oriented Programming, as something plain and obvious that Lisp can do. Their presentation managed to impress me though.
Corporate Research Centers take an approach that's more conducive to public acceptance of CS research. I don't really need to elaborate why, but the University approach seems only interested in impressing other academics.
Actually, they all seem to be good at the same job, judging by the example code and libraries that come with them.
My guess as to why there are so many, is their developers could not understand or were too aggrevated with each others syntax, so they rolled their own:)
>> Who actually uses Eiffel for anything? I've don't think I've seen anything created for either linux or any of the bsd's that really use it.
Eiffel is the most feature complete declarative OO language, that has decent performance. Its drawbacks are that it requires a lot of typing, and has minor commercial and Unix backing.
ISE is rolling out Eiffel# btw.
Design by contract can easily be added to any language, through an Icontract interface. It appears as though MS is going to make it an optional feature in all its languages.
Operator overloading is different than overloading.
Overloading is a very useful feature. It lets you provide functions of the same name with different parameters.
From the link you provided, its true there's a possiblity of operator overloading in VB, but I doubt it, and the suggestion of it in the article is probably a mistake.
Operator overloading is being able to redefine keywords and operators (like + * - mod) so that your classes (like bigIntegers) can respond to them. Its useful but not a showstopper.
One major hard to notice improvement in VB is that addressOf now works on methods inside of classes, so you get firstclass functions without going through the roundabout reflection engine (callbyname)
my 31173 windows hacking skills permit me to access and copy each of your precious files with the mysterious and undocumented Ctrl-Esc Ctrl-C Ctrl-V magic keys.... muhahahaha
The fingerprint is used for login and screensaver passwords. I guess that's useful 95% of the time.
A boot flopppy or mounting the harddrive on another machine should gain access to the files.
I believe the corporate desktop will eventually have linux as the market share leader.
MS is pricing itself out of the market. Its.Net strategy even more so. However, IE, Media player, and Direct X are still compelling apps that make it better for consumers.
getting back on topic, I haven't seen the following recommendation for deploying to 2500 desktops. Is anything wrong with it?
1. Use whatever distribution is best at detecting hardware.
2. next, run a customizing script that sets network home directories for standard packages, and other centralizations of users, policies and data.
Is that possible/easy to have a mix of custom desktop settings, and standardized server based packages and user settings?
If they go down it will be because of the wordperfect kiss of death that kills every company that foolishly touches it.
Its too bad they don't have inprise with them. Being in ottawa, you'd think they could lobby for some government sales, or even canadian subsidies for providing greater access to software to its citizens.
Most reviews on everything are positive. In technology, its usually 90%+ positive. Much like research reports commissioned by a company on its products.
If its complete crap, there's no review. If its just half crap, the best possible spin is put on it.
Usually though, if there are glaring problems they are mentioned, and simply downplayed.
Also the article tried to just accuse the small sites. But the big linux sites are irresponsibly fanatical, as well, IMO.
You can write off the electricity cost you paid, as a personal or corporate charitable donation.
Seti could give you an audited receipt that you donated say 10k mips hours to the project. You would then have the right to write off your 500 mips p2 at 20 hours of.3kw x 7 cents/kw = 42 cents as a charitable donation.
You could claim it, and the revenue agency would have to accept it. The same way that if you make free T shirts for a charity, you can write off direct costs (not what you could have sold them for).
or seti@home could build an auditor in the client that logs time spent on the project, and prints out a receipt locally.
I don't think SETI will find alien radio communications.
If a civilization discovers analog radio, they will eventually discover digital radio, and compressed digital streams. Compressed digital streams are indistinguishable from random noise. Our planet will cease analog broadcasting within 5-30 years. So there is a very short window available to eavesdrop on analog civilizations.
>> What worries me is that they probably put a lot of extra pressure on joints, specially the knees, that they where not constructed for. Olympic sprinters train their muscles to take the added hits and jolts of running at 23mph.
I'm sure the springs absorb much of the shock of landing.
From the description, you make another step whenever your foot touches ground again. Are you supposed to land face first to stop?
>> Okay, it looks nice and has a lot of interesting effects, but I'm really wondering what the whole point of being able to do linear transforms on windows is, other than for purely cosmetic reasons. Who here would ever really need windows tilted at some neck-wrenching angle whilst actually trying to get something done?
The advantage is saving screen space. A straightforward application would be apps with layout managers (top/left,center, right, bottom regions as in Java), and multiple frames/dockable windows where the region under the mouse automatically flattens, and the other regions tilt automatically to accomodate the increase in size of the active region.
That is pretty cute. Sending authorization requests to 'cock' a gun.
A server system would make DOS attacks in coordination with terrorist strikes a vulnerability.
Here's a simpler idea. A pin number that unlocks a gun for 30 minutes. transmits gps data through teh cell hone network. Could even have a '911' (send help here) button on the gun. Basically add cheap cell phone and gps guts to a gun without headset and lcd panels, so it shouldn't even be that expensive.
The court order suggested opening up the APIs mostly.
If MS published the full source code, then pennyless 16 year old geeks would put out a release for free. MS would lose more revenue that it could get back suing those who infringe its copyright.
Actually, it may mean studying certain parts of the source code.
Knowing a function signature does not tell you what that function does... and if its undocumented, then reviewing the implementation is a 'relevant' part of what's needed to understand it.
One way to get around it thoough would be for MS to just document it all.
incidently, encapsulation is not an OO feature. Its a restraint.
k7 thunderbird is a better cpu than a p3. That doesn't mean systems based on it, are necessarily better though. There are no shipping KT mbs yet anyway, so the pre-release numbers have a chance of improving
What tom does is most relevant. Comparing systems as a whole. He along with every other mainstream techy site thinks his readers just want to play games. Tbird's only advantage is faster L2 cache speed, and games don't care about cache.
You shouldn't be asking him to root for the same processor you would like to win.
Anyways, if you want to just focus on the processors, and not the mbs, then just compare the KT to the apollo. Your pecker enhancing athlon measures as long as you think it does.
The viewperf benchmarks show 20-30% difference over the apollo P3.
Thunderbird should be good when the 760 comes out. You have to wonder how committed mb makers can get to the KT chipset, when 760 is 2-3 months away.
By benchmarking a short loop, you are guaranteeing that all of the code that executes has been converted to native by the JIT or Hotspot.
That 1 second test run is plenty long enough to get hotspot to see it as "hot" code, and precompile it before it gets benchmarked. I believe the threshold is about 50 code passes before it gets converted to native. These programs should be hitting 100K iterations/second easily.
I think hotspot and dynamo are great technology. Their strength though lies in their ability to trade off memory consumption in order to improve cpu throughput.
Some of the techniques used by run-time compilers that aren't available to static ones is the ability to compile several versions of each function (much like a template) for each combination of semi-constant parameters. This eliminates branches and even unconditional jumps, and keeps the Athlons pipelines from stalling.
Its great technology and it works, and its why dynamic compilers aren't some marketing fluff, and serve a useful purpose, but they need lots of available memory to do their best, and they don't help me run forte on a 64mb wintel machine.
Much negative sentiment towards java stems from people experiencing nightmarish swap file delays from apps whose native alternatives run smoothly.
Slashdot Mirror
They'd sell a lot more of these thingies if you could use the unused RAM while in X or win32 as the first swapfile.
You might be saddened to hear that that project will be windows only... ie: use MS's common language runtime.
>>
For this reason, I think the best way to incorporate functional paradigms is to extend our imperative languages with functional features:
There is nothing incompatible with having both things in a language. Try Common Lisp, it embraces both models fully.
The point I was trying to make is to overcome corporate resistance, compatibility with tool sets, and the job appeal of a language:
Java + functional has a better chance of success than Visual CLOS + Tk.
>>
In all honesty, relatively few people are doing classic programming any more. Most programmers do things like database interfacing, GUI tool building using Delphi or Visual Basic
I guess this is a pretty obvious point, but it explains the market share perfectly. The millions of people who need to write GUI database front ends severly outnumber the few that need to make Lexer/Parsers.
Somehow, the choice of languages to do the db programming is more bounded and focused, despite the larger market for users.
A highly moderaetd thread above dismissed Xerox PARC's effort to promote Aspect Oriented Programming, as something plain and obvious that Lisp can do. Their presentation managed to impress me though.
Corporate Research Centers take an approach that's more conducive to public acceptance of CS research. I don't really need to elaborate why, but the University approach seems only interested in impressing other academics.
Actually, they all seem to be good at the same job, judging by the example code and libraries that come with them.
:)
My guess as to why there are so many, is their developers could not understand or were too aggrevated with each others syntax, so they rolled their own
For this reason, I think the best way to incorporate functional paradigms is to extend our imperative languages with functional features:
First class functions, tail recursion optimizations, generics, and so on.
this would leverage GUIs, debuggers, and not force everyone to shoehorn all problems into a functional solution.
You're right. Their tools are better if you get them for free. If you use them though, you are locked into continuing to use them.
Seeking alternatives is worth trying.
>>
Who actually uses Eiffel for anything? I've don't think I've seen anything created for either linux or any of the bsd's that really use it.
Eiffel is the most feature complete declarative OO language, that has decent performance. Its drawbacks are that it requires a lot of typing, and has minor commercial and Unix backing.
ISE is rolling out Eiffel# btw.
Design by contract can easily be added to any language, through an Icontract interface. It appears as though MS is going to make it an optional feature in all its languages.
Operator overloading is different than overloading.
Overloading is a very useful feature. It lets you provide functions of the same name with different parameters.
From the link you provided, its true there's a possiblity of operator overloading in VB, but I doubt it, and the suggestion of it in the article is probably a mistake.
Operator overloading is being able to redefine keywords and operators (like + * - mod) so that your classes (like bigIntegers) can respond to them. Its useful but not a showstopper.
One major hard to notice improvement in VB is that addressOf now works on methods inside of classes, so you get firstclass functions without going through the roundabout reflection engine (callbyname)
my 31173 windows hacking skills permit me to access and copy each of your precious files with the mysterious and undocumented Ctrl-Esc Ctrl-C Ctrl-V magic keys.... muhahahaha
The fingerprint is used for login and screensaver passwords. I guess that's useful 95% of the time.
A boot flopppy or mounting the harddrive on another machine should gain access to the files.
I believe the corporate desktop will eventually have linux as the market share leader.
.Net strategy even more so. However, IE, Media player, and Direct X are still compelling apps that make it better for consumers.
MS is pricing itself out of the market. Its
getting back on topic, I haven't seen the following recommendation for deploying to 2500 desktops. Is anything wrong with it?
1. Use whatever distribution is best at detecting hardware.
2. next, run a customizing script that sets network home directories for standard packages, and other centralizations of users, policies and data.
Is that possible/easy to have a mix of custom desktop settings, and standardized server based packages and user settings?
Its not obvious whether Carmack will make MS use OpenGL more, or if MS can buy him off to kill OpenGL.
If Carmack could get all that he wants in D3D, MS wouldn't even have to get him another ferrari.
If they go down it will be because of the wordperfect kiss of death that kills every company that foolishly touches it.
Its too bad they don't have inprise with them. Being in ottawa, you'd think they could lobby for some government sales, or even canadian subsidies for providing greater access to software to its citizens.
Most reviews on everything are positive. In technology, its usually 90%+ positive. Much like research reports commissioned by a company on its products.
If its complete crap, there's no review. If its just half crap, the best possible spin is put on it.
Usually though, if there are glaring problems they are mentioned, and simply downplayed.
Also the article tried to just accuse the small sites. But the big linux sites are irresponsibly fanatical, as well, IMO.
Thats a feature that might cause me to actually install the thing!!!
You can write off the electricity cost you paid, as a personal or corporate charitable donation.
.3kw x 7 cents/kw = 42 cents as a charitable donation.
Seti could give you an audited receipt that you donated say 10k mips hours to the project. You would then have the right to write off your 500 mips p2 at 20 hours of
You could claim it, and the revenue agency would have to accept it. The same way that if you make free T shirts for a charity, you can write off direct costs (not what you could have sold them for).
or seti@home could build an auditor in the client that logs time spent on the project, and prints out a receipt locally.
this is off topic, but:
I don't think SETI will find alien radio communications.
If a civilization discovers analog radio, they will eventually discover digital radio, and compressed digital streams. Compressed digital streams are indistinguishable from random noise. Our planet will cease analog broadcasting within 5-30 years. So there is a very short window available to eavesdrop on analog civilizations.
>>
What worries me is that they probably put a lot of extra pressure on joints, specially the knees, that they where not constructed for. Olympic sprinters train their muscles to take the added hits and jolts of running at 23mph.
I'm sure the springs absorb much of the shock of landing.
From the description, you make another step whenever your foot touches ground again. Are you supposed to land face first to stop?
I think golf is the sport that would benefit the most.
For amateurs, it will mean fewer lost balls, and pros it will help reading greens.
it think my handicap would be 5 strokes better if I could see what I was doing. Putting in particular is hopeless for me.
>>
Okay, it looks nice and has a lot of interesting effects, but I'm really wondering what the whole point of being able to do linear transforms on windows is, other than for purely cosmetic reasons. Who here would ever really need windows tilted at some neck-wrenching angle whilst actually trying to get something done?
The advantage is saving screen space. A straightforward application would be apps with layout managers (top/left,center, right, bottom regions as in Java), and multiple frames/dockable windows where the region under the mouse automatically flattens, and the other regions tilt automatically to accomodate the increase in size of the active region.
That is pretty cute. Sending authorization requests to 'cock' a gun.
A server system would make DOS attacks in coordination with terrorist strikes a vulnerability.
Here's a simpler idea. A pin number that unlocks a gun for 30 minutes. transmits gps data through teh cell hone network. Could even have a '911' (send help here) button on the gun. Basically add cheap cell phone and gps guts to a gun without headset and lcd panels, so it shouldn't even be that expensive.
The court order suggested opening up the APIs mostly.
If MS published the full source code, then pennyless 16 year old geeks would put out a release for free. MS would lose more revenue that it could get back suing those who infringe its copyright.
Actually, it may mean studying certain parts of the source code.
Knowing a function signature does not tell you what that function does... and if its undocumented, then reviewing the implementation is a 'relevant' part of what's needed to understand it.
One way to get around it thoough would be for MS to just document it all.
incidently, encapsulation is not an OO feature. Its a restraint.
k7 thunderbird is a better cpu than a p3. That doesn't mean systems based on it, are necessarily better though. There are no shipping KT mbs yet anyway, so the pre-release numbers have a chance of improving
What tom does is most relevant. Comparing systems as a whole. He along with every other mainstream techy site thinks his readers just want to play games. Tbird's only advantage is faster L2 cache speed, and games don't care about cache.
You shouldn't be asking him to root for the same processor you would like to win.
Anyways, if you want to just focus on the processors, and not the mbs, then just compare the KT to the apollo. Your pecker enhancing athlon measures as long as you think it does.
The viewperf benchmarks show 20-30% difference over the apollo P3.
Thunderbird should be good when the 760 comes out. You have to wonder how committed mb makers can get to the KT chipset, when 760 is 2-3 months away.
I might get a Duron.
By benchmarking a short loop, you are guaranteeing that all of the code that executes has been converted to native by the JIT or Hotspot.
That 1 second test run is plenty long enough to get hotspot to see it as "hot" code, and precompile it before it gets benchmarked. I believe the threshold is about 50 code passes before it gets converted to native. These programs should be hitting 100K iterations/second easily.
I think hotspot and dynamo are great technology. Their strength though lies in their ability to trade off memory consumption in order to improve cpu throughput.
Some of the techniques used by run-time compilers that aren't available to static ones is the ability to compile several versions of each function (much like a template) for each combination of semi-constant parameters. This eliminates branches and even unconditional jumps, and keeps the Athlons pipelines from stalling.
Its great technology and it works, and its why dynamic compilers aren't some marketing fluff, and serve a useful purpose, but they need lots of available memory to do their best, and they don't help me run forte on a 64mb wintel machine.
Much negative sentiment towards java stems from people experiencing nightmarish swap file delays from apps whose native alternatives run smoothly.