The gcc compiler is quite horrible on Itanium as the Itanium architecture does not map well onto the gcc internal abstractions. However, the Intel compiler has very good performance on Itanium. We found as much as 10 times better performance for the Intel compiler on our in-house benchmarks. This demonstrates at least that it is possible to produce good compilers for Itanium. God knows when gcc will be one of them, though.
I agree, those are excellent./.'ers can at least feel good that Seirawan complains in the Introduction to his outstanding "Winning Chess Brilliancies" that Microsoft limited him to only 2/3 of the games he wanted to put in. Also, Microsoft has let most of this excellent series go out of print, which is a travesty.
If you buy the keyboard and mouse separately, you can use them with the same transmitter as long as they are from the same manufacturer. I combined a Logitech wireless mouse and wireless keyboard this way. There's a FAQ on doing this at the Logitech website.
Unfortunately, even if your country rejects software patents, your smart and feisty IT community will still need to deal with US-style software patents, at least if they want to sell their products in the US. In fact, you can bet that many of your local companies are already applying for US software patents to lock their competitors out of international markets.
It's certainly worth pressing your legislature to avoid software patents (or at least adopt minimal versions), but I doubt it will make much difference.
I couldn't agree with you more. Fortunately, the theme you asked for is available. Fool your friends with this IE skin for Mozilla and hide your embarrasing open-source habit from the world.
Then you aren't listening very hard (but I guess that's the point).
Many people now own 5.1 speaker systems for home theatre or computer games and would like more than stereo sound. Also, the quantization noise of the Redbook standard is audible on a good stereo and audiophiles have been pushing for higher-resolution digital recordings for years. A quick search of Stereophile gives about 100 articles hosted on that site alone. Whatever you think about audiophiles (and some of their beliefs are rather dubious to say the least), they represent a significant group of wealthy people who are willing to spend a lot of money on music.
At first, I couldn't understand why it was newsworthy to post graphs of x and log x, but when I read that log x remains bounded as x goes to infinity, I realized this is truly revolutionary news.
The case won't reach trial. These people are rolling the dice on threatening Intel with some negative publicity and getting a settlement. Remember how much money Intel lost on the PR fallout from the F00F bug? Intel does, too.
If you support the Internet Radio Fairness Act to protect small webcasters, it's worth spending two minutes at SAVE INTERNET RADIO! to automatically fax your support to congress.
What's your point? No grandmaster ever plays a serious game without reviewing all of their opponents recent past games from a computer database. Are you suggesting the machines shouldn't do the same?
Consider a simple public key encryption algorithm based on the fact proved in any beginning number theory book that for primes p, q
a^x = a (mod pq) if x = 1 (mod m)
where m = (p - 1)(q - 1)
Now choose your favorite number f and use Euclidean algorithm to efficiently find a number g such that
fg = 1 (mod m)
You may have to try another value of f if the Euclidean algorithm terminated before reaching 1, but it won't take many guesses. Now publish the number f and mod m as your public key and keep g private.
Someone sends text t to you by sending t^f (mod m). Now you just raise that message to the power g and reduce mod m to recover the original text. (This follows immediately by combining the above statements).
Finally, I'll get to the point. This algorithm is simply busted if p and q are not prime because t^fg will not equal t mod m unless you are very lucky. In fact, if you want to add a bunch of nines to your percentage certainty, just encrypt and decrypt a sample message text and verify that it works.
If you read the actual review and not/.'s summary, the reviewer is complaining about the lack of UI features, not appearance: Can't customize toolbars, can't change icon sizes, can't use Windows' accessiblity features, etc. I don't know if Mozilla has these features, but as a longtime Mozilla user, I can say I haven't seen any of them. For the average user, that means they don't exist.
I can just imagine telling my Mom to edit UserChrome.css, which is how the Internet Explorer-style Mozilla skin instructions recommends changing settings.
There is also an Emacs client for Perforce. It's not completely full-featured, but it means you don't have to bother with any of the standalone clients when doing basic editing and version control tasks (You are using Emacs as your editor, aren't you?). When I need to do something fancy, you still need to use one of the standalone clients (GUI, commandline, or web).
Besides the Emacs integration, there are integrations for Developer Studio, Windows explorer, Perl, Python, Forte, Eclipse, etc. These are all available at Perforce User Interfaces & Integrations.
I think this shows Perl doesn't. Any commercial project with anything close to the adoption of Perl would have no trouble paying their top three guys without asking for donations. Maybe Perl operations that actually generate revenue, like ActiveState, based on their work could help.
Needing to beg to fund these guys should cause serious introspection among open-source advocates about sustainable models for open-source development.
That's what StarOffice is for. Same software. Commercial support. Still much cheaper than MSOffice. Personally, I'd rather just use the OpenOffice source code and newsgroups, but I can understand why a company would want a commercially supported binary product.
If you want bug-free software, you won't get there just by testing. According to "DeMarco. Controlling Software Projects, Management, Measurement, and Evaluation. Yourdon Press, 1982", at least half of all bugs cannot be identified no matter how much testing is done. Another classic reference is "Thayer, Lipow, and Nelson. Software Reliability, A Study of Large Project Reality, North-Holland, 1978", which studies the residual bugs in a large programming project and concludes that even full path and parameter testing would not have identified about 30% of the bugs that were experienced in the field.
This problem, like the decision to use Bitkeeper, reflects the attitude of the original developer of Linux, a person who thinks that "technically better" is more important than freedom.
Value your freedom, or you will lose it, teaches history. "Don't bother us with politics," respond those who don't want to learn.
In other words, even if our software is crap, you must use it. This sounds like the kind of drivel put out by Microsoft.
If you want people to use free software, make the free software as good or better than the alternatives. Whining that people are evil if they won't use your software even when it is admittedly technically inferior is insulting and twisted.
I do value my freedom, so I won't waive my right to use the software I choose, free or commercial.
Symbol names are generally a better place to put in comments than explicit comments. They are less likely to suffer bitrot and produce more readable code that almost looks like executable pseudo code.
For example (In a full-width program screen, one-line functions would only take a single line, so the code bloat here is an illusion),
Actually, they sort of did compare it to running the actual OS. The review stated that the GUI desktop was very usable with VMWare, but not with the others. In other words, people used to running the native desktops will not get a rude shock with VMWare.
I can also give my experience. First of all, VMWare is awesome! I use both Windows and Linux on my PC. I didn't like the idea of dual-booting and wanted to be able to run both Linux and Windows apps simultaneously. My fear was that running Linux in a VMWare machine would be so inferior to running native that I wouldn't be able to do it. In fact, I saw no real difference from running it native, with a BIG qualifier. I use Linux for fairly light applications: hobbyist stuff such as learning how to administer Apache, playing with the different desktops, occasional compiles, etc. If I was doing something that really pushed the machine, I'm sure I would notice a difference. For example, if I had chosen to make Linux the host OS and ran Windows in a VMWare machine, I would have been very disappointed. Modern 3D-Games would be killed by the very poor display adapters provided in the VMs, and the virtualization would consume too much CPU to keep up with heavy action.
Another interesting comparison would be to compare running Windows apps in a VMWare virtual machine under a Linux host, and running Wine under Linux because those are both reasonable ways to run Windows apps simultaneously with Linux apps. My bet is that the VMWare approach would rule. The only question would be whether the difference is worth the money.
The item you neglected is that a lot of specialized software needed by many companies will never get developed if it must be given away for free.
Many software programs are very expensive to develop. The open-source community can subsidize a few of them that are exciting and important enough to virtually everyone to attract many volunteers, such as Operating Systems, Office Suites, and SQL databases. Open-source is best suited to widely needed software like this but not to specialized software except when it is inexpensive to develop. The specialized software will not attract a large enough community of volunteers.
"Boring" programs that are expensive to develop with a narrow but deep market must be paid for. For example, software for managing dental offices, utility billing software, programs requiring expensive certification for use in medical equipment, etc. There are companies that spend millions of dollars developing these programs and need to recover their costs. If they couldn't sell the software, all the startups you describe so eloquently would need to develop them internally, unless they can count on the production-quality Sourceforge release of the blood-gas chromatography package coming out Real Soon Now. This will squash the startups, because they can't just buy the boring software they need that has little open-source appeal. I lived through the bad old days of internally developed software, and know what a drag it is on companies.
Bottom-line. Open-Source has a role to play. Commercial software has a role to play. Either one is harmful when it is used in the other's role.
Slashdot Mirror
The gcc compiler is quite horrible on Itanium as the Itanium architecture does not map well onto the gcc internal abstractions. However, the Intel compiler has very good performance on Itanium. We found as much as 10 times better performance for the Intel compiler on our in-house benchmarks. This demonstrates at least that it is possible to produce good compilers for Itanium. God knows when gcc will be one of them, though.
I agree, those are excellent. /.'ers can at least feel good that Seirawan complains in the Introduction to his outstanding "Winning Chess Brilliancies" that Microsoft limited him to only 2/3 of the games he wanted to put in. Also, Microsoft has let most of this excellent series go out of print, which is a travesty.
If you buy the keyboard and mouse separately, you can use them with the same transmitter as long as they are from the same manufacturer. I combined a Logitech wireless mouse and wireless keyboard this way. There's a FAQ on doing this at the Logitech website.
You don't suppose they'll rely on the honor system for license fees, do you?
Unfortunately, even if your country rejects software patents, your smart and feisty IT community will still need to deal with US-style software patents, at least if they want to sell their products in the US. In fact, you can bet that many of your local companies are already applying for US software patents to lock their competitors out of international markets.
It's certainly worth pressing your legislature to avoid software patents (or at least adopt minimal versions), but I doubt it will make much difference.
I couldn't agree with you more. Fortunately, the theme you asked for is available. Fool your friends with this IE skin for Mozilla and hide your embarrasing open-source habit from the world.
Then you aren't listening very hard (but I guess that's the point).
Many people now own 5.1 speaker systems for home theatre or computer games and would like more than stereo sound. Also, the quantization noise of the Redbook standard is audible on a good stereo and audiophiles have been pushing for higher-resolution digital recordings for years. A quick search of Stereophile gives about 100 articles hosted on that site alone. Whatever you think about audiophiles (and some of their beliefs are rather dubious to say the least), they represent a significant group of wealthy people who are willing to spend a lot of money on music.
At first, I couldn't understand why it was newsworthy to post graphs of x and log x, but when I read that log x remains bounded as x goes to infinity, I realized this is truly revolutionary news.
The case won't reach trial. These people are rolling the dice on threatening Intel with some negative publicity and getting a settlement. Remember how much money Intel lost on the PR fallout from the F00F bug? Intel does, too.
If you support the Internet Radio Fairness Act to protect small webcasters, it's worth spending two minutes at SAVE INTERNET RADIO! to automatically fax your support to congress.
What's your point? No grandmaster ever plays a serious game without reviewing all of their opponents recent past games from a computer database. Are you suggesting the machines shouldn't do the same?
Oops! But with your correction, it works.
Um... No automatic online bank downloads is a pretty big "but". I think I'll wait.
No, most messages will decode incorrectly.
Consider a simple public key encryption algorithm based on the fact proved in any beginning number theory book that for primes p, q
a^x = a (mod pq) if x = 1 (mod m)
where m = (p - 1)(q - 1)
Now choose your favorite number f and use Euclidean algorithm to efficiently find a number g such that
fg = 1 (mod m)
You may have to try another value of f if the Euclidean algorithm terminated before reaching 1, but it won't take many guesses. Now publish the number f and mod m as your public key and keep g private.
Someone sends text t to you by sending t^f (mod m).
Now you just raise that message to the power g and reduce mod m to recover the original text. (This follows immediately by combining the above statements).
Finally, I'll get to the point. This algorithm is simply busted if p and q are not prime because t^fg will not equal t mod m unless you are very lucky. In fact, if you want to add a bunch of nines to your percentage certainty, just encrypt and decrypt a sample message text and verify that it works.
If you read the actual review and not /.'s summary, the reviewer is complaining about the lack of UI features, not appearance: Can't customize toolbars, can't change icon sizes, can't use Windows' accessiblity features, etc. I don't know if Mozilla has these features, but as a longtime Mozilla user, I can say I haven't seen any of them. For the average user, that means they don't exist.
I can just imagine telling my Mom to edit UserChrome.css, which is how the Internet Explorer-style Mozilla skin instructions recommends changing settings.
There is also an Emacs client for Perforce. It's not completely full-featured, but it means you don't have to bother with any of the standalone clients when doing basic editing and version control tasks (You are using Emacs as your editor, aren't you?). When I need to do something fancy, you still need to use one of the standalone clients (GUI, commandline, or web).
Besides the Emacs integration, there are integrations for Developer Studio, Windows explorer, Perl, Python, Forte, Eclipse, etc. These are all available at Perforce User Interfaces & Integrations.
I think this shows Perl doesn't. Any commercial project with anything close to the adoption of Perl would have no trouble paying their top three guys without asking for donations. Maybe Perl operations that actually generate revenue, like ActiveState, based on their work could help.
Needing to beg to fund these guys should cause serious introspection among open-source advocates about sustainable models for open-source development.
If you like Cyberiad, you'll probably like "Mortal Engines" even better. Same type of story, even more mindful.
Mike
That's what StarOffice is for. Same software. Commercial support. Still much cheaper than MSOffice.
Personally, I'd rather just use the OpenOffice source code and newsgroups, but I can understand why a company would want a commercially supported binary product.
Mike
If you want bug-free software, you won't get there just by testing. According to "DeMarco. Controlling Software Projects, Management, Measurement, and Evaluation. Yourdon Press, 1982", at least half of all bugs cannot be identified no matter how much testing is done. Another classic reference is "Thayer, Lipow, and Nelson. Software Reliability, A Study of Large Project Reality, North-Holland, 1978", which studies the residual bugs in a large programming project and concludes that even full path and parameter testing would not have identified about 30% of the bugs that were experienced in the field.
In other words, even if our software is crap, you must use it. This sounds like the kind of drivel put out by Microsoft.
If you want people to use free software, make the free software as good or better than the alternatives. Whining that people are evil if they won't use your software even when it is admittedly technically inferior is insulting and twisted.
I do value my freedom, so I won't waive my right to use the software I choose, free or commercial.
Symbol names are generally a better place to put in comments than explicit comments. They are less likely to suffer bitrot and produce more readable code that almost looks like executable pseudo code.
// Not optimal
// Get next customer array index
For example (In a full-width program screen, one-line functions would only take a single line, so the code bloat here is an illusion),
---
i++;
// Spam customer
mail(customers[i]->email_address, mtext);
// Lose customer
delete customers[i];
---
// No comments, but better
inline customer_t *
next_customer(customer_t *currentCustomer)
{
return ++currentCustomer;
}
void
spam_customer(customer_t *customer)
{
mail(currentCustomer->email_address,
exciting_offer);
}
void lose_customer(customer_t *customer)
{
delete customer;
}
customer = nextCustomer(customer);
spam_customer(customer);
lose_customer(customer);
----
Note that inline functions can always be used to create new function names without overhead.
The most famous comment I know of is "You are not expected to understand this code" in the Version 6 Unix Sources.
I am not sure if it is a good comment or a bad comment. It certainly let me know that the lines needed careful examination.
Actually, they sort of did compare it to running the actual OS. The review stated that the GUI desktop was very usable with VMWare, but not with the others. In other words, people used to running the native desktops will not get a rude shock with VMWare.
I can also give my experience. First of all, VMWare is awesome! I use both Windows and Linux on my PC. I didn't like the idea of dual-booting and wanted to be able to run both Linux and Windows apps simultaneously. My fear was that running Linux in a VMWare machine would be so inferior to running native that I wouldn't be able to do it. In fact, I saw no real difference from running it native, with a BIG qualifier. I use Linux for fairly light applications: hobbyist stuff such as learning how to administer Apache, playing with the different desktops, occasional compiles, etc. If I was doing something that really pushed the machine, I'm sure I would notice a difference. For example, if I had chosen to make Linux the host OS and ran Windows in a VMWare machine, I would have been very disappointed. Modern 3D-Games would be killed by the very poor display adapters provided in the VMs, and the virtualization would consume too much CPU to keep up with heavy action.
Another interesting comparison would be to compare running Windows apps in a VMWare virtual machine under a Linux host, and running Wine under Linux because those are both reasonable ways to run Windows apps simultaneously with Linux apps. My bet is that the VMWare approach would rule. The only question would be whether the difference is worth the money.
The item you neglected is that a lot of specialized software needed by many companies will never get developed if it must be given away for free.
Many software programs are very expensive to develop. The open-source community can subsidize a few of them that are exciting and important enough to virtually everyone to attract many volunteers, such as Operating Systems, Office Suites, and SQL databases. Open-source is best suited to widely needed software like this but not to specialized software except when it is inexpensive to develop. The specialized software will not attract a large enough community of volunteers.
"Boring" programs that are expensive to develop with a narrow but deep market must be paid for. For example, software for managing dental offices, utility billing software, programs requiring expensive certification for use in medical equipment, etc. There are companies that spend millions of dollars developing these programs and need to recover their costs. If they couldn't sell the software, all the startups you describe so eloquently would need to develop them internally, unless they can count on the production-quality Sourceforge release of the blood-gas chromatography package coming out Real Soon Now. This will squash the startups, because they can't just buy the boring software they need that has little open-source appeal. I lived through the bad old days of internally developed software, and know what a drag it is on companies.
Bottom-line. Open-Source has a role to play. Commercial software has a role to play. Either one is harmful when it is used in the other's role.