You know, I've always resisted comparing RMS to a communist, but this sounds like what the Soviet Union would do. "We must expunge all references to evil Capitalism from our literature so the people are not poisoned with impure thoughts. They will only be exposed to the beauty that is the communist ideal."
Sorry for pulling out the "instant flamebait" of the C-word, but I find this unbelievably appalling.
It isn't enough for RMS to promote his ideas of what "free software" should be about. Now he has to censor everyone else and become the thought police?
I agree with the mailing list poster who said if RMS doesn't like it, let him publish his own "pure" list, sanitized and "approved" for reading by the ignorant masses.
Whatever happened to Heathkit? They used to rock when it came to supplying do-it-yourself electronic kits. It looks like heathkit.com does primarily educational stuff. It's a shame. It guess there isn't much room for soldering in a surface mount world, but it would still be cool if more companies had kits like this.
Re:problem with large storage mp3 players
on
80 Gig MP3 Player
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· Score: 2
What, you don't think a single line display with some buttons is going to cut it for potentially 10,000 songs?:)
Seriously, it could be done. If you had a drill-down interface that let you skip to first letters, then second letters, etc, it's possible it might be practical.
I guess it depends on what compression, but at the rule-of-thumb compression of 1 meg/minute, 30 gig is 30,720 minutes of music, or 21+ contiguous days (64 days of 8 hours).
you may want to look up Nazis and "Neo-Nazis" under the heading "right-wing extremists." Everyone agrees on that, numbnut.
Yeah, and what "everyone believes" is always correct. Forget the propaganda, look at what the Nazis believed. Look at what the Soviets believed. Look at what the left wing believes. What they have in common is the love of centralized government control over the lives of citizens.
Hey, genius, I'm not talking about the White House. I'm talking about the intelligence agencies and the military.
Um, you might want to break out a civics book sometime. The president appoints the CIA director and the military chiefs of staff.
The Nazis were right-wing.
That's certainly what the left-wing propagandizers have wanted you to believe. It's simply not true. The Nazis were socialists. Isn't it remarkable that the more socialist a country is, the less freedom it has? Learn a little bit of history before you simply believe whatever you are told.
Over the entire length of Clinton's presidency the right used every power at their disposal to try to bring him down.
That's called "law enforcement", as I said. Maybe you think it's no big deal for the man who signs laws to lie under oath in a court, but there are many of us who believe that the man who signs laws should be held to the highest standards, not the lowest.
The Republicans have tried to regulate speech, the press, and sex for a long time.
I have many problems with the religious wing of the Republican Party, but on balance they consistently vote for smaller government and less restrictions on personal freedom. It's generally a minority fringe that do the religious nonsense. On the other hand, Democrats consistently vote to expand the power of government and its control over other people's lives. From LBJ's "Great Society" (the greatest damaging laws to American society ever passed) to Clinton's attempted government takeover of the American medical system. The left wing are the enemies of freedom.
Now you're just not coming to terms with basic facts here. The 97th, 98th, and 99th Congresses were controlled by the Republicans.
Sheesh, were you born yesterday? Note the "40+ years" of my comment. That refers to prior to the Republicans taking back congress.
The fact that over the past 40 years Congress has mostly been controlled by the Democrats is simply because more Americans believe the same things as the party promotes.
LOL! You really need to learn some history of the Democratic party's redistricting policies, purchasing of local campaigns, and the passing of pro-incumbent laws. I have a feeling you're pretty young.
Um, genius, in 1966 LBJ (liberal Democrat) was in power.
In any case, got news for you: it's left wingers that have always been interested in mind control. The Soviet Union and Hitler ring a bell? Who constantly wants larger and larger governments? That would be the left wing.
Of course, you will respond with "well, why are they trying to expand the FBI's powers? Huh? Huh?"
The difference between right wing politics and left wing politics is that the right wing generally wants to expand the power of law enforcement to catch criminals, whereas the left wing generally wants to expand the power of government to control the opposition party and enhance their own power. If you want to see this in action, take a look at how Democrats manipulated local elections for 40+ years to keep control of congress.
Re:Use it as a tool, not a crutch
on
Java IDEs?
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· Score: 1
For one thing, stepping through code is a good way to prove your code is doing what you think it is.
To tell you the truth, I think that printf debugging is superior for just this reason, except for all but the most trivial programs. You can't single step through everything, but it's pretty easy to put in printf statements strategically throughout the code as your writing it. Then you can examine the output and see exactly what the program did when you run it. I've caught many an unexpected bug by seeing debug output that shouldn't have been there in obscure cases.
And I have solved some extremely obscure and difficult bugs with patient and creative use of the debugger; setting a variety of conditional breakpoints until the problem was found. Asking each equivalent question about the code would have involved a tedious recompile.
I agree. There are times that debuggers are definitely lifesavers.
Re:Debuggers
on
Java IDEs?
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· Score: 3, Interesting
than a good IDE should have good debugger support...
I'm not saying that there shouldn't be a debugger at all. In fact, I think I said that occasionally one is useful (particularly for analyzing core dumps). I'm mostly taking issue with the AC who ignores the advice anyone who doesn't use a debugger, which is absurd.
I know I'll never convince people who use debuggers, because it sounds so counter-intuitive, but I have to put out the seed every now and then. I used to go through it with my employees all the time. It used to drive me crazy watching them stare blindly at the debugger, when all they had to do was put in some printf statements and then analyze the program flow to see the problem.
And that's the big advantage of printf-style debugging. It lets you see the flow of your program at a higher level, rather than micro-watching it at the line-by-line level. It lets you selectively output what's important, rather than having to deal with all the trivial details. Also, when you leave in all the tracing, you get a debug log everytime you run it to see what happened when something else blows up.
Oh well, I know from experience that this is one of those debates that you can't win.:)
I agree with him. Take a look at the top developers (Linus Torvalds for example); almost all the best programmers use printf's (or the equivalent) and only fire up the debugger if its absolutely necessary. It's very often the case that debuggers make programmers lazy. They will spend an hour single stepping through the code rather than actually looking at the code and figuring out where to put a few well-placed printf's.
There are certainly top programmers who use debuggers (Carmack, for example, uses one I believe), but in my experience it's more the exception than the rule.
And yes, I've developed both ways. I always end up returning to simple printf's because it ends up using much less aggregate time than using the debugger.
I have to admit, that this is a great point. Being able to edit the posts would be open to huge abuse.
Even appending comments would be pretty open game -- as another poster pointed out, the trolls could put up a normal post, and then just add "Oh! by the way, I forgot this link (which is goatse.cx).
Annoying. I think you're probably right that we're better off the way it is now.
How about comment editing capability??? There's nothing worse than posting a comment, even using preview, and realize you screwed it up somehow.
It might even be interesting to add a "previous version" capability. Just stick the message in some other dump table and have a different screen to dump them out.
The journals have editing capability, so I don't see why normal messages can't do the same.
Keep in mind that pornography literally means "A visual reproduction created solely for pleasure" Wouldn't the enjoyment of watching a graph wiggle be considered porn?
What? What a word "literally" means is totally irrelevent. What is generally agreed a word means is relevent. For example, "sarcasm" literally means "to cut (or rip) flesh", but who gives a crap? When I say "sarcasm", I don't mean literally ripping someone's flesh.
When you say object, are you speaking of objects as in OOP? Because that wouldn't make any sense. It would be the language and frameworks that define the cohesiveness of objects.
What I'm really talking about is COM, which is (semi-) language independent. The strength of Windows is that just about everything is a COM object, which creates enormous flexibility. Unfortunately, it also creates incredible complexity and interdependency.
RISC architecture is far superior to x86, look at the performance of MAC compared to Intel.
Actually, that's a very good thing to look at. Clock-for-clock, the Power architecture is only about 20% faster than Intel. Of course, nothing lies like benchmarks, but that appears to be about the average case.
Or, for an example that is very popular here, Windows vs. Linux. Which is technically superior and which is most commonly used?
Depends on what you define as "technically superior". If you are talking about object integration with the operating system, Windows blows Linux (and Unix) out of the water. The flexibility of objects in Windows is its greatest strength. On the other hand, if you are talking about architecture, Unix is (possibly) superior primarily because of the very isolated nature of its components. The latter is also why Unix is generally more stable than Windows.
Well, that's true and it's not true. There is no doubt that modern Intel design borrowed some tricks from RISC architectures, but RISC itself ("Reduced Instruction Set Computer") refers to making a processor fast by reducing the instruction set in order to gain speed through simplicity of the core. This idea has basically failed. You would think that a simpler architecture would allow much higher clock speeds, but it didn't happen.
Incidently, Intel has used microcode since (I think) the 486 (386?). Microcode and RISC instruction sets are two different concepts.
You assertion that X86 processors are 'brilliant engineering' is a but odd - X86 processors have a lot of cruft around to deal with old 8-Bit,16-Bit (Real and Protected) and 32-Bit modes.
While there is no doubt that there is lot of cruft in the x86, you have to give Intel credit for getting way more performance out of it than anyone thought they wood. I remember back in the early 90s everyone kept talking about how RISC was going to kick Intel's ass for these very reasons: they would never be able to overcome the limitations of having to support backward compatibility. Yet, they are still standing, and RISC's advantages are very small in real terms.
A friend of mine told me that he went to one of the very early screenings of The Matrix, and there were a whole slew of Star Wars freaks who watch the Ep1 trailer and then left.
Little did they realize that they left a movie that was, oh, 10 times better?
I was thinking in terms of "price/performance ratio", not just raw performance. But still, even when you factor in power consumption, it's advantages are not that much better than the latest Intel low-power chips.
When you also factor in that the processor is far from the biggest power consumer in a laptop, Transmeta is just not going to be a player there, either.
As for the embedded market, that's where I think Transmeta has a shot. It's possible that due to the simpler nature of their processor, they might be able to get the price low enough to be a contender. But again, that's where their only hope lies -- in niche markets. The technology is interesting and unique, but the advantages are just not there for them to be dominant in any particular market.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes. That post was what I was specifically referring to. RMS is whining that non-free (by his definition) software is being mentioned in the context of "free" software.
You know, I've always resisted comparing RMS to a communist, but this sounds like what the Soviet Union would do. "We must expunge all references to evil Capitalism from our literature so the people are not poisoned with impure thoughts. They will only be exposed to the beauty that is the communist ideal."
Sorry for pulling out the "instant flamebait" of the C-word, but I find this unbelievably appalling.
It isn't enough for RMS to promote his ideas of what "free software" should be about. Now he has to censor everyone else and become the thought police?
I agree with the mailing list poster who said if RMS doesn't like it, let him publish his own "pure" list, sanitized and "approved" for reading by the ignorant masses.
Maybe I have tin ears, but I've always found 128kb to be fine and I listen to a lot of instrumentals (including classical).
Whatever happened to Heathkit? They used to rock when it came to supplying do-it-yourself electronic kits. It looks like heathkit.com does primarily educational stuff. It's a shame. It guess there isn't much room for soldering in a surface mount world, but it would still be cool if more companies had kits like this.
What, you don't think a single line display with some buttons is going to cut it for potentially 10,000 songs? :)
Seriously, it could be done. If you had a drill-down interface that let you skip to first letters, then second letters, etc, it's possible it might be practical.
I guess it depends on what compression, but at the rule-of-thumb compression of 1 meg/minute, 30 gig is 30,720 minutes of music, or 21+ contiguous days (64 days of 8 hours).
Maybe your work days are REALLY long?
you may want to look up Nazis and "Neo-Nazis" under the heading "right-wing extremists." Everyone agrees on that, numbnut.
Yeah, and what "everyone believes" is always correct. Forget the propaganda, look at what the Nazis believed. Look at what the Soviets believed. Look at what the left wing believes. What they have in common is the love of centralized government control over the lives of citizens.
Hey, genius, I'm not talking about the White House. I'm talking about the intelligence agencies and the military.
Um, you might want to break out a civics book sometime. The president appoints the CIA director and the military chiefs of staff.
The Nazis were right-wing.
That's certainly what the left-wing propagandizers have wanted you to believe. It's simply not true. The Nazis were socialists. Isn't it remarkable that the more socialist a country is, the less freedom it has? Learn a little bit of history before you simply believe whatever you are told.
Over the entire length of Clinton's presidency the right used every power at their disposal to try to bring him down.
That's called "law enforcement", as I said. Maybe you think it's no big deal for the man who signs laws to lie under oath in a court, but there are many of us who believe that the man who signs laws should be held to the highest standards, not the lowest.
The Republicans have tried to regulate speech, the press, and sex for a long time.
I have many problems with the religious wing of the Republican Party, but on balance they consistently vote for smaller government and less restrictions on personal freedom. It's generally a minority fringe that do the religious nonsense. On the other hand, Democrats consistently vote to expand the power of government and its control over other people's lives. From LBJ's "Great Society" (the greatest damaging laws to American society ever passed) to Clinton's attempted government takeover of the American medical system. The left wing are the enemies of freedom.
Now you're just not coming to terms with basic facts here. The 97th, 98th, and 99th Congresses were controlled by the Republicans.
Sheesh, were you born yesterday? Note the "40+ years" of my comment. That refers to prior to the Republicans taking back congress.
The fact that over the past 40 years Congress has mostly been controlled by the Democrats is simply because more Americans believe the same things as the party promotes.
LOL! You really need to learn some history of the Democratic party's redistricting policies, purchasing of local campaigns, and the passing of pro-incumbent laws. I have a feeling you're pretty young.
I'm sure you realize that would totally break DNS. Just imagine the load on the world root servers if they couldn't delegate down?
Considering that probably 85-90% of the traffic is for .com, we effectively already have that world.
Um, genius, in 1966 LBJ (liberal Democrat) was in power.
In any case, got news for you: it's left wingers that have always been interested in mind control. The Soviet Union and Hitler ring a bell? Who constantly wants larger and larger governments? That would be the left wing.
Of course, you will respond with "well, why are they trying to expand the FBI's powers? Huh? Huh?"
The difference between right wing politics and left wing politics is that the right wing generally wants to expand the power of law enforcement to catch criminals, whereas the left wing generally wants to expand the power of government to control the opposition party and enhance their own power. If you want to see this in action, take a look at how Democrats manipulated local elections for 40+ years to keep control of congress.
For one thing, stepping through code is a good way to prove your code is doing what you think it is.
To tell you the truth, I think that printf debugging is superior for just this reason, except for all but the most trivial programs. You can't single step through everything, but it's pretty easy to put in printf statements strategically throughout the code as your writing it. Then you can examine the output and see exactly what the program did when you run it. I've caught many an unexpected bug by seeing debug output that shouldn't have been there in obscure cases.
And I have solved some extremely obscure and difficult bugs with patient and creative use of the debugger; setting a variety of conditional breakpoints until the problem was found. Asking each equivalent question about the code would have involved a tedious recompile.
I agree. There are times that debuggers are definitely lifesavers.
than a good IDE should have good debugger support...
I'm not saying that there shouldn't be a debugger at all. In fact, I think I said that occasionally one is useful (particularly for analyzing core dumps). I'm mostly taking issue with the AC who ignores the advice anyone who doesn't use a debugger, which is absurd.
I know I'll never convince people who use debuggers, because it sounds so counter-intuitive, but I have to put out the seed every now and then. I used to go through it with my employees all the time. It used to drive me crazy watching them stare blindly at the debugger, when all they had to do was put in some printf statements and then analyze the program flow to see the problem.
And that's the big advantage of printf-style debugging. It lets you see the flow of your program at a higher level, rather than micro-watching it at the line-by-line level. It lets you selectively output what's important, rather than having to deal with all the trivial details. Also, when you leave in all the tracing, you get a debug log everytime you run it to see what happened when something else blows up.
Oh well, I know from experience that this is one of those debates that you can't win. :)
I agree with him. Take a look at the top developers (Linus Torvalds for example); almost all the best programmers use printf's (or the equivalent) and only fire up the debugger if its absolutely necessary. It's very often the case that debuggers make programmers lazy. They will spend an hour single stepping through the code rather than actually looking at the code and figuring out where to put a few well-placed printf's.
There are certainly top programmers who use debuggers (Carmack, for example, uses one I believe), but in my experience it's more the exception than the rule.
And yes, I've developed both ways. I always end up returning to simple printf's because it ends up using much less aggregate time than using the debugger.
The problem with this is if you could change your comment after it was moderated.
Hm; this gives rise to another idea: What if you could edit it only until it was moderated or comments were added to it?
I have to admit, that this is a great point. Being able to edit the posts would be open to huge abuse.
Even appending comments would be pretty open game -- as another poster pointed out, the trolls could put up a normal post, and then just add "Oh! by the way, I forgot this link (which is goatse.cx).
Annoying. I think you're probably right that we're better off the way it is now.
How about comment editing capability??? There's nothing worse than posting a comment, even using preview, and realize you screwed it up somehow.
It might even be interesting to add a "previous version" capability. Just stick the message in some other dump table and have a different screen to dump them out.
The journals have editing capability, so I don't see why normal messages can't do the same.
Keep in mind that pornography literally means "A visual reproduction created solely for pleasure" Wouldn't the enjoyment of watching a graph wiggle be considered porn?
What? What a word "literally" means is totally irrelevent. What is generally agreed a word means is relevent. For example, "sarcasm" literally means "to cut (or rip) flesh", but who gives a crap? When I say "sarcasm", I don't mean literally ripping someone's flesh.
When you say object, are you speaking of objects as in OOP? Because that wouldn't make any sense. It would be the language and frameworks that define the cohesiveness of objects.
What I'm really talking about is COM, which is (semi-) language independent. The strength of Windows is that just about everything is a COM object, which creates enormous flexibility. Unfortunately, it also creates incredible complexity and interdependency.
Don't know if these google group links will work for you, but I found at least two people talking about it...
Number 1
Number 2
If they don't go through, try searching for "matrix saw episode 1 trailer". Why were you so sure that it wasn't shown with The Matrix?
RISC architecture is far superior to x86, look at the performance of MAC compared to Intel.
Actually, that's a very good thing to look at. Clock-for-clock, the Power architecture is only about 20% faster than Intel. Of course, nothing lies like benchmarks, but that appears to be about the average case.
Or, for an example that is very popular here, Windows vs. Linux. Which is technically superior and which is most commonly used?
Depends on what you define as "technically superior". If you are talking about object integration with the operating system, Windows blows Linux (and Unix) out of the water. The flexibility of objects in Windows is its greatest strength. On the other hand, if you are talking about architecture, Unix is (possibly) superior primarily because of the very isolated nature of its components. The latter is also why Unix is generally more stable than Windows.
HAH! the P6 arch is RISC!
Well, that's true and it's not true. There is no doubt that modern Intel design borrowed some tricks from RISC architectures, but RISC itself ("Reduced Instruction Set Computer") refers to making a processor fast by reducing the instruction set in order to gain speed through simplicity of the core. This idea has basically failed. You would think that a simpler architecture would allow much higher clock speeds, but it didn't happen.
Incidently, Intel has used microcode since (I think) the 486 (386?). Microcode and RISC instruction sets are two different concepts.
"Wood"? Sheesh, preview is my friend.
You assertion that X86 processors are 'brilliant engineering' is a but odd - X86 processors have a lot of cruft around to deal with old 8-Bit,16-Bit (Real and Protected) and 32-Bit modes.
While there is no doubt that there is lot of cruft in the x86, you have to give Intel credit for getting way more performance out of it than anyone thought they wood. I remember back in the early 90s everyone kept talking about how RISC was going to kick Intel's ass for these very reasons: they would never be able to overcome the limitations of having to support backward compatibility. Yet, they are still standing, and RISC's advantages are very small in real terms.
A friend of mine told me that he went to one of the very early screenings of The Matrix, and there were a whole slew of Star Wars freaks who watch the Ep1 trailer and then left.
Little did they realize that they left a movie that was, oh, 10 times better?
Depends on what you define as "performance".
I was thinking in terms of "price/performance ratio", not just raw performance. But still, even when you factor in power consumption, it's advantages are not that much better than the latest Intel low-power chips.
When you also factor in that the processor is far from the biggest power consumer in a laptop, Transmeta is just not going to be a player there, either.
As for the embedded market, that's where I think Transmeta has a shot. It's possible that due to the simpler nature of their processor, they might be able to get the price low enough to be a contender. But again, that's where their only hope lies -- in niche markets. The technology is interesting and unique, but the advantages are just not there for them to be dominant in any particular market.