How did the mouse stand up against the PC trucks? Hmm, maybe TruckRolloverMarks will be the next meaningless benchmark cited by PC trolls in comp.sys.mac.advocacy?;)
I am fully aware that not all of the following issues are issues with the language itself - BUT - other languages *do not have* these issues.
- Garbage collection. This is a *bad* thing. It encourages people to write bad code and not clean up after themselves. It means they don't learn what's really going on, which is going to kill them if they ever have to write in anything lower level. But more importantly, how does the VM know that I *want* to free something? Just because nothing cast as a pointer points to that struct anymore, doesn't mean I don't have its address stored (possibly in an obfuscated way) in a string somewhere or something like that - I might want to get at it again. Gc means that the implementation is doing something I did *not* explicitly ask for.
- VMs. Everyone's saying "XXX is the fault of your specific implementation / your browser / etc." - but where are the VMs that *don't have these problems*? I know that Sun can hardly be faulted if say Netscape's *original* implementation of Java wasn't *perfect*. But I'm running *4.5* on a Mac and *half the applets I run across* crash the browser *on their first run*. Maybe it's just the developer's faults - but I thought Java was supposed to be higher level and make it easier to write correct code?
- Which brings me to the next point: there seems to be this culture of "whatever works" surrounding Java programmers. At my university computer science courses are offered in an advanced engineering stream (which I am taking), in computer engineering and in computer science proper. My program teaches C/C++ exclusively, and half the marks on each assignment basically are for coding style. The computer engineers are taught Java exclusively, and get their marks based entirely (from what I've heard anyway) on the results of automatic testing. It doesn't even matter if there are 10 input cases on the autotest, and the program would run the system out of memory on the 11th. Admittedly I don't know much about what the comp sci students do.
- Bloated runtime environments and very messy app design. I have tried monitoring WebRPG for Mac's memory usage over time. It requests 3.9 megs of RAM as the base allocation. The *very next time MacOS updates memory usage statistics*, this has jumped to 7.5 megs. By the time memory usage appears to have stabilized (after around 10 minutes of usage perhaps) it is using over 18 megs of RAM. That is more than NetScape [before it starts Java;)] and comparable with what *MacOS* uses.
How big is the app itself, you ask? 8*k*. The main code block takes up about a quarter of that, the rest being GUI resources like icons etc. AFAICT it's basically just a class loader, which feeds the.class files to MRJ. All those classes are in a separate folder. But even those classes only take up 1.2 megs of HD space. There is another folder called "cache" which appears to contain some other resources including ".rpg" files, but even that only takes up 3.9 megs.
Let me toss in my personal bias here. I generally hack in C and Perl. I use Perl for the high-level stuff, no sense mucking around with pseudo-high-level stuff.
I don't personally like C++ because:
(a) It went just a bit too far for my tastes. I do actually like operator overloading, but what the fsck is multiple inheritance good for? I haven't even found many good reasons to use inheritance at all yet. Most things work very nicely in the form Class Foo {... Bar* baz;}.
(b) I have worked out how to implement virtually all of the things I like about C++ using C and am working on my personal library, so it's useless for me.
And (c) C++ is *impossible on the order of escaping the event horizon of a black hole* to debug using vanilla command-line compilers (such as g++) under *ix, whereas doing the equivalent for C (with gcc) is merely *difficult the first few times you try it*. I got used to debugging C that way, but there's *just no way* I can fix up my C++ code when the compiler spits out "Confused by earlier errors, bailing out" - as the FIRST AND ONLY error. And heaven help you if you ever accidentally try to insert a Foo into an STL vector (when you meant to insert a Foo* and haven't defined insertion of Foos). Hope you like really long expressions with lots of angle brackets in them.
I have had to use assembly this term in university and I agree that it can be a real chore to get it right, but I personally find C *easier* to deal with than many higher level languages. It has its faults, and it certainly can't easily be made to do what Perl does, but I definitely find it to be the right tool for the job much of the time (especially if you put in the effort to do proper top-down code design).
Most Microsoft apps are broken within a year due to M$ BitDecay anyway;) What they need to do is buy out Norton or something, and make you pay through the nose to reformat your HD and reinstall everything;)
The point (I believe) was that those actions are bad because they constitute a hardware upgrade treadmill that breaks compatibility and limits choice. MacOS is a better product than it would have been had backwards compatibility been more rigorously maintained. Repeat as needed. Anyway, good old code still runs. I have games (traditionally the easiest-broken apps) for Mac written in *'84* that work just fine on my G4. His mentioning the fact that you can't emulate a 1GHz OS on a 500MHz Celeron
"1GHz OS"? Apple and MSFT have specifically rewritten their new Operating Systems to target the problems that have been leveled at them in the past (multitasking in Apple's case, instability in MSFT's case) and did not and should not have considered whether the improvements to their Operating Systems suddenly make emulation software more difficult to write
So, improving one's own software is a Bad Thing(TM) now, just because some whiny third party developer doesn't like the added complexity of the changes? He *wants* MacOS to have bad multitasking and Windows to be unstable, just because it's harder to emulate a properly-multitasking or stable OS than a highly modal or buggy one? That's absolutely ridiculous. Personally, I'd like to know why these two huge companies (with greater resources than a lot of smaller countries) can't make an OS that solves these "problems" without requiring a hardware platform that costs more than any car I've ever owned!
I can make this claim too, but only because I've never owned a car. No home computer EVER made by Apple (barring upgrades to ridiculous amounts of RAM or whatever) has at any time had MSRP > 10k US ($9,995 for the Apple III, IIRC), and I know of no case in which the top-of-the-line box from Apple was ever required to run the latest OS from Apple. The VAST majority of Macs in history (at least, ever since I can remember getting prices quoted in ads) have been under $4k Cdn, about $2700 US nowadays. I suppose you only buy used cars?
If there can only be one tester, it should be the developer, if he is consciencious.
I agree with this entirely. I speak from the experience of being downright masochistic about my own coding, and knowing that I don't work particularly well with others when it comes to programming. I've always felt the only way to get your program right, however impractical, is to do it yourself (while writing everything modularly and basically pretending, every day that you work, that you're a different person on your "development team"). To an extent this goes for testing too.
But I agree with the previously-made point about interface testing. You need real (non-CS) people for that. But, as was recently pointed out over at Alertbox, you don't need more than about 5 people for that.
d00d, if those $3 "original Macs" are functional, *get some*! They're bound to be collector's items soon! Some time ago I saw the market price for the Mac Classic quoted at $200, and it may have actually gone *up* since then.
Dual G4 in a cube. Linux on PPC. Repeat. Nope, sorry. A tour of the Apple Store reveals there are indeed dual G4s, and that the Cube is real, but the two Cube models are single-processor - the dual models are all in the original "silver and black" (really light grey and dark blue-grey - I have one) cases. You didn't really think a fanless 8" cube could provide enough convection cooling for two processors? I doubt even Apple is capable of that, even with the low power draw of the Motorola chips.
Because the games almost certainly wouldn't know about the current state of the driver, so there'd be no way to tell what "cheat options" the other players have set... unless I'm missing something?
It can't possibly "propagate at c^2" because the units would be wrong. Propagation is how fast the effect goes from being felt at A to being felt at B, so it has units of m/s, just like c. Squaring a quantity squares its units too.
Who says our normally observable dimensions are strengthening gravity, though? Does the theory predict weaker gravity in a 1- or 2-dimensional universe?
I doubt there's any way even for an "outside observer" to tell if we're "in the centre of it", as opposed to the "first three or last three" dimensions. Why do I say this? Well, every dimension is supposedly orthogonal to each other (neglecting curvature), so who's to say there's any real "ordering" of the dimensions anyway? I agree, it's a matter of perspective. Scientists will likely consider us to be "in the center of it" - whatever that means in terms of multiple dimensional analysis - unless and until some genius comes up with an argument that some other view makes the math simpler.
Gee, in the time it took me to read over that, fully seven people commented, including one comment which appears to be computer-generated random moronity. Blah. Am I just a slow reader or am I the only one who actually cares to read these things carefully?
for the web designers to make one common series of pictures for the participants, plus one 'overlay' image which would be a transparent gif with just the 'X' in the corner?
Why would I buy a home console running off a PIII and not really taking advantage of other special hardware, running a variety of emulators for other home console systems, when I can just buy a PIII *computer* with those emulators (which will be dirt cheap by the time the X-Box actually gets into production)? Or better yet, something with a chip from Motorola?
Slashdot Mirror
Devide by 1024*1024 == 95 Mbytes.
...
"You are the product of a mutational union of ~640Mbytes of genetic information."
You contradict yourself.
How did the mouse stand up against the PC trucks? Hmm, maybe TruckRolloverMarks will be the next meaningless benchmark cited by PC trolls in comp.sys.mac.advocacy? ;)
Hands up, who would rather see a movie based on Knights of the Dinner Table? ;)
Hey, whatever turns you on...
I am fully aware that not all of the following issues are issues with the language itself - BUT - other languages *do not have* these issues.
;)] and comparable with what *MacOS* uses.
.class files to MRJ. All those classes are in a separate folder. But even those classes only take up 1.2 megs of HD space. There is another folder called "cache" which appears to contain some other resources including ".rpg" files, but even that only takes up 3.9 megs.
- Garbage collection. This is a *bad* thing. It encourages people to write bad code and not clean up after themselves. It means they don't learn what's really going on, which is going to kill them if they ever have to write in anything lower level. But more importantly, how does the VM know that I *want* to free something? Just because nothing cast as a pointer points to that struct anymore, doesn't mean I don't have its address stored (possibly in an obfuscated way) in a string somewhere or something like that - I might want to get at it again. Gc means that the implementation is doing something I did *not* explicitly ask for.
- VMs. Everyone's saying "XXX is the fault of your specific implementation / your browser / etc." - but where are the VMs that *don't have these problems*? I know that Sun can hardly be faulted if say Netscape's *original* implementation of Java wasn't *perfect*. But I'm running *4.5* on a Mac and *half the applets I run across* crash the browser *on their first run*. Maybe it's just the developer's faults - but I thought Java was supposed to be higher level and make it easier to write correct code?
- Which brings me to the next point: there seems to be this culture of "whatever works" surrounding Java programmers. At my university computer science courses are offered in an advanced engineering stream (which I am taking), in computer engineering and in computer science proper. My program teaches C/C++ exclusively, and half the marks on each assignment basically are for coding style. The computer engineers are taught Java exclusively, and get their marks based entirely (from what I've heard anyway) on the results of automatic testing. It doesn't even matter if there are 10 input cases on the autotest, and the program would run the system out of memory on the 11th. Admittedly I don't know much about what the comp sci students do.
- Bloated runtime environments and very messy app design. I have tried monitoring WebRPG for Mac's memory usage over time. It requests 3.9 megs of RAM as the base allocation. The *very next time MacOS updates memory usage statistics*, this has jumped to 7.5 megs. By the time memory usage appears to have stabilized (after around 10 minutes of usage perhaps) it is using over 18 megs of RAM. That is more than NetScape [before it starts Java
How big is the app itself, you ask? 8*k*. The main code block takes up about a quarter of that, the rest being GUI resources like icons etc. AFAICT it's basically just a class loader, which feeds the
Let me toss in my personal bias here. I generally hack in C and Perl. I use Perl for the high-level stuff, no sense mucking around with pseudo-high-level stuff.
I don't personally like C++ because:
(a) It went just a bit too far for my tastes. I do actually like operator overloading, but what the fsck is multiple inheritance good for? I haven't even found many good reasons to use inheritance at all yet. Most things work very nicely in the form Class Foo {... Bar* baz;}.
(b) I have worked out how to implement virtually all of the things I like about C++ using C and am working on my personal library, so it's useless for me.
And (c) C++ is *impossible on the order of escaping the event horizon of a black hole* to debug using vanilla command-line compilers (such as g++) under *ix, whereas doing the equivalent for C (with gcc) is merely *difficult the first few times you try it*. I got used to debugging C that way, but there's *just no way* I can fix up my C++ code when the compiler spits out "Confused by earlier errors, bailing out" - as the FIRST AND ONLY error. And heaven help you if you ever accidentally try to insert a Foo into an STL vector (when you meant to insert a Foo* and haven't defined insertion of Foos). Hope you like really long expressions with lots of angle brackets in them.
I have had to use assembly this term in university and I agree that it can be a real chore to get it right, but I personally find C *easier* to deal with than many higher level languages. It has its faults, and it certainly can't easily be made to do what Perl does, but I definitely find it to be the right tool for the job much of the time (especially if you put in the effort to do proper top-down code design).
Most Microsoft apps are broken within a year due to M$ BitDecay anyway ;) What they need to do is buy out Norton or something, and make you pay through the nose to reformat your HD and reinstall everything ;)
there can't be 43 of the same digit in a row in pi
You mean the longest possible run of the same decimal digit in pi is... 42???
Could *this* be The Question?
...But the idea is to drink several cans of the beer first, before you start crushing, to numb your nerves so you don't feel the pain ;)
...But, I .... *like* ICQ!
I don't *want* to be an AOLuser! Aaugh!
The point (I believe) was that those actions are bad because they constitute a hardware upgrade treadmill that breaks compatibility and limits choice.
MacOS is a better product than it would have been had backwards compatibility been more rigorously maintained. Repeat as needed.
Anyway, good old code still runs. I have games (traditionally the easiest-broken apps) for Mac written in *'84* that work just fine on my G4.
His mentioning the fact that you can't emulate a 1GHz OS on a 500MHz Celeron
"1GHz OS"?
Apple and MSFT have specifically rewritten their new Operating Systems to target the problems that have been leveled at them in the past (multitasking in Apple's case, instability in MSFT's case) and did not and should not have considered whether the improvements to their Operating Systems suddenly make emulation software more difficult to write
So, improving one's own software is a Bad Thing(TM) now, just because some whiny third party developer doesn't like the added complexity of the changes? He *wants* MacOS to have bad multitasking and Windows to be unstable, just because it's harder to emulate a properly-multitasking or stable OS than a highly modal or buggy one? That's absolutely ridiculous.
Personally, I'd like to know why these two huge companies (with greater resources than a lot of smaller countries) can't make an OS that solves these "problems" without requiring a hardware platform that costs more than any car I've ever owned!
I can make this claim too, but only because I've never owned a car. No home computer EVER made by Apple (barring upgrades to ridiculous amounts of RAM or whatever) has at any time had MSRP > 10k US ($9,995 for the Apple III, IIRC), and I know of no case in which the top-of-the-line box from Apple was ever required to run the latest OS from Apple. The VAST majority of Macs in history (at least, ever since I can remember getting prices quoted in ads) have been under $4k Cdn, about $2700 US nowadays. I suppose you only buy used cars?
If there can only be one tester, it should be the developer, if he is consciencious.
I agree with this entirely. I speak from the experience of being downright masochistic about my own coding, and knowing that I don't work particularly well with others when it comes to programming. I've always felt the only way to get your program right, however impractical, is to do it yourself (while writing everything modularly and basically pretending, every day that you work, that you're a different person on your "development team"). To an extent this goes for testing too.
But I agree with the previously-made point about interface testing. You need real (non-CS) people for that. But, as was recently pointed out over at Alertbox, you don't need more than about 5 people for that.
d00d, if those $3 "original Macs" are functional, *get some*! They're bound to be collector's items soon! Some time ago I saw the market price for the Mac Classic quoted at $200, and it may have actually gone *up* since then.
:)
Hmm... I want a C64 tho
Dual G4 in a cube. Linux on PPC. Repeat.
Nope, sorry. A tour of the Apple Store reveals there are indeed dual G4s, and that the Cube is real, but the two Cube models are single-processor - the dual models are all in the original "silver and black" (really light grey and dark blue-grey - I have one) cases.
You didn't really think a fanless 8" cube could provide enough convection cooling for two processors? I doubt even Apple is capable of that, even with the low power draw of the Motorola chips.
Because the games almost certainly wouldn't know about the current state of the driver, so there'd be no way to tell what "cheat options" the other players have set... unless I'm missing something?
It can't possibly "propagate at c^2" because the units would be wrong. Propagation is how fast the effect goes from being felt at A to being felt at B, so it has units of m/s, just like c. Squaring a quantity squares its units too.
Who says our normally observable dimensions are strengthening gravity, though? Does the theory predict weaker gravity in a 1- or 2-dimensional universe?
I doubt there's any way even for an "outside observer" to tell if we're "in the centre of it", as opposed to the "first three or last three" dimensions. Why do I say this? Well, every dimension is supposedly orthogonal to each other (neglecting curvature), so who's to say there's any real "ordering" of the dimensions anyway? I agree, it's a matter of perspective. Scientists will likely consider us to be "in the center of it" - whatever that means in terms of multiple dimensional analysis - unless and until some genius comes up with an argument that some other view makes the math simpler.
Subject says it all. (Drat, can't do a -nt here.)
A vaguely amusing bit of censorship from that article:
"Somebody must have (messed) up at the company," the PR person said.
Gee, in the time it took me to read over that, fully seven people commented, including one comment which appears to be computer-generated random moronity. Blah. Am I just a slow reader or am I the only one who actually cares to read these things carefully?
Agreed. I would be *extremely* happy to see Apple upgrade the video card performance.
I'm also happy about this news just cuz I cheer for ATI (a Canadian company IIRC, hence my loyalty).
Woo, this is as close to first post as I've come yet...
How come a kid with that kind of hacking expertise has been using *AOL* *long-term*?
Ok, how in Gehennom does that rate (4, Funny)???
for the web designers to make one common series of pictures for the participants, plus one 'overlay' image which would be a transparent gif with just the 'X' in the corner?
Why would I buy a home console running off a PIII and not really taking advantage of other special hardware, running a variety of emulators for other home console systems, when I can just buy a PIII *computer* with those emulators (which will be dirt cheap by the time the X-Box actually gets into production)?
Or better yet, something with a chip from Motorola?