We had an intern who wrote a bunch of stuff in Python and Ruby. He was all gung-ho on those languages and made a big deal about how they were "it". When he left, no one had the time to learn how to support these languages, so we ended up re-writing them in Perl so that everyone could support them.
FYI: his scripts sucked, too. He'd make lots of dumb mistakes like assigning a variable called "retval" and then checking "ret"!!! Duh. gcc would have caught this immediately, so would "use strict".
Thanks for the M$ marketing hype. Sure that's what all the boxes and packaging say, but there's more too it than that.
Ever used a pointer? Ever taken the size of a struct? Ever assumed a certain page size? Ever written a mask for MMIO? Check your sign extension so your masks don't barf? These are some issues you encounter when your machine word size or address size changes.
Emulation has always been a joke not to be taken seriously.... in that vein, Intel's IA64 compatibility mode is slower than feces rolling up hill.
Applications don't just magically work in a 64-bit O/S, except maybe, hello world or stuff that sticks entirely to LIBC.
well, i think matthew broderick was pretty close to the typical nerd, except he was too attractive and not skinny/fat enough (most nerds have weight problems in one direction or the other, i was 6ft/135lbs until i was 29). whereas the goons that knock on neo's door were way off base: since when did skaterpunks get into programming?
i think the Newman character in Jurrasic Park was close to some of the computer geeks i see at surplus hardware stores and gaming conventions: overweight, overintelligent, egocentric.
then there was Whiz Kids. The albert-from-little-house character was probably pretty close. but that was a TV show, not a movie.
there was another movie, based in the future, i think with the same kid. it was very much like the RUSH song Red Barchetta -- a totalitarian society where a little nerd boy hacks into the main computers and escapes to the country where he finds a car burried under his uncle's barn. It was waaay like the RUSH song, but the nerd boy was pretty close. Anybody remember that movie? I think Lee Majors was the uncle character.
hm. i was thinking. would it make sense for the/. community at large to start an anti-turbotax campaign to reach the minds of the non-techie community?
i was thinking we could print up thousands of 3x4" flyers that point out the security hazards of turbotax (in layspeak), and then sneak around to OfficeMAX's and affix them to the point-of-sale display racks, or stuff them into boxes.
i don't know exactly what they would say that would get the message across correctly. "spyware inside", "or user beware: this program does bad things to your machine"... eh, i'm bad at slogans, but it seems like the people should know. and it wouldn't be to hard for a handful of people each major city get some bad press for intuit.
...of course, even after your update, there remains the first half of my orignal post, you know, the one that points out my legitimate statement about profit motives?
That's one of the reasons AMD is losing hundreds of millions each quarter. They may have a 5% boost in perf from a fat cache, but they can only play that card once per architecture and it costs BUCKS to make it work. It's a stopgap measure AMD had to pull otherwise they'd have no product until spring, which would have been even more bad news for them. It's a sign AMD is flailing. Hopefully their new core will alleviate their suffering.
Let's kill off that MHz myth once and for all shall we?
Well, not so fast. Intel isn't playing its hand, but I sincerely believe Banias can hit current Penitum 4 speeds, which means at 2.8 GHz, it will be performing like a 3.4 GHz machine. So MHz will always be important, just maybe not across brands.
I didn't see any "bright spots" in the review. Sounds like a waste of time and money. If they aren't mentioning STL, why would you even review it?
It's funny how many crappy books on C++ dribble from the presses like a chowdery diarrehea. Sorry for the analogy, but I've seen waaaay too many books just like the one the reader describes.
Stick with Scott Meyer's books, you really can't beat 'em.
A lot of people complain about the lack of innovation today, ignoring games like those I linked above. I'll bet most of you didn't even know that those games exist, all the while lamenting about how the present game publishing system doesn't allow the "little guy" to make any headway at breaking established formulas.
heh heh. i do complain a little bit about lack of innovation. AND, i had no idea those games existed. true, i have been lamenting for a few weeks now.
however, much like indie music, indie games are very hard to find unless you're plugged into the scene.
i just read about REZ, and damn, it's exactly what I was talking about.
again, much like indie music, word of mouth is how games like this spread.
1. the number of programmers has exponentially ballooned since the early 80s, leading to a larger number of less godlike programmers, AND programmers have become more reliant on fat libraries and limitless resources, so coding something this small would bend my brain for sure.
2. game content has changed dramatically. q bert was weird. space invaders was weird. pac man was weird. (yes, sports games did exist, but they weren't mainstream then). games today are less weird. it's either a first person shootemup, sports, or a linear fiction w/some combat.
Focusing on #2, I'd like to see if there really is some creative game writing locked away in some programmer's brain out there, or if we've become a nation of UnReal, GTO, Final Fantasy, and Madden XFL clones.
I don't mean to put down these fine games, I enjoy many console games. What I'm trying to get at is the utter weirdness of what people come up with when severly limited by resources. Facsimile and simulation are out the window, so you really have to dig deep for a good game.
We'll see, I'm very interested in the outcome. Maybe the winners of the IOCCC should check this out.
In my opinion --- the book was so obviously written to be a movie. Many of the scenes are scripted action scenes unlike any I've read in Crichton's early works (Andromed, Sphere, Park, etc...). You can smell franchise in this book, which except for the science, is pretty lame. It's like Finney's "Time and Again" except with better science and less heart.
There is a book by Baxter and Clark called "The Light of Other Days" where a company develops a wormhole camera that can travel to any point in x,y,z,t. It eventually becomes public domain and anyone can access it from the web. It actually distorts the quantum fabric of Golgotha at 33 CE b/c so many people want to see christ's crucifiction.
Anyway, some braniac combines the camera with facial recognition / dna recognition software and they point the camera at a woman's face and follow the de-evolution of a matriarchal strand of DNA -- back in time 4 billion years! It's an amazing chapter.
Well, at least if Kasparov loses, I won't have to worry about fans rioting and burning the town, like in Oakland last night. That is, unless chess becomes the national past time of the lowest strata of society.
not to mention the extensive computer science back ground
Robin and Rand Miller (Myst) didn't have a comp-sci background. Nor did Roberta Williams (King's Quest). And Moru Iwatani (Pac-Man) was a graphic designer! Some of the best computer games in history came from non Comp-sci, non-engineers.
Linear algebra only become hot in computer games in the past decade, with the 3D glut. Q3 is fancy, but boring and one dimensional, same with Wolfenstein to some extent
A good game starts with a vision, not physics and math. Most of these computer games classes are teaching design skills so that game content gets better.
Just because you have a PhD in physics and compsci doesn't mean you will make the world's best game.
It's like classical musicians: they master their instrument, but hardly any of them [can] actually compose!
Yeah, there were limits, anytime a bunch of fish or clams etc washed up on the beach dead we couldn't go swimming
Ha! You just made my point for me! Thanks. Anti-enviromentalists see no limit. That's what environmentalists are for. They ask the question: "When does it stop?"
wow, for once pollution is a good thing, if you're a historian.
speaking as a former resident of Troy, i think the O2 free hudson should be more of a concern than mapping the shipwrecks. not to get all partison, but the next time an anti-environmentalist raves that pollution isn't a problem, have him/her go for a dip in the hudson and see how many simultaneous illnesses they come down with. eeew.
, isn't it the Law that the companies that are doing the cutting MUST replant the trees they remove, and aren't they constrained to do the removal and replanting in such a way that they DON'T destroy the surrounding ecosystems?
I'll see if I can dig up an info on this. However, laws and corporations don't mix, as we all know. This is where I lean even further left. For example, there have been antipollution laws on the books for decades, but that doesn't stop a company like Monsanto from dumping PCBs into a lake for 30 years and causing a community of 3,500 to be displaced. Later Monsanto spun off that division as Solutia, and neither side would take responsibilty until about 10 months ago. So it did take years for the laws to work, but by that point, the polluted land was unlivable.
So yes, EPA laws regulating this are a great idea, unfortunately the current administration has been "easing" and "relaxing" just about every law that has to do with the environment or pollution. Which makes sense: the bulk of the money donated to President Bush's campaing came from the companies who profit from lifting EPA laws and regulations.
Clinton did this too, but not to such a dramatic extent as the last 3 republican presidents, in fact, Clinton set aside the largest national forest preserve in US history just before he left office, which the Bush team tried to block from day one.
Regardless, there are ways around laws if you know the right folks. That's why it's so important to find congresspeople with a conscience. Law makers really fuck things up when money is involved.
1. Massive logging on the peaks of the mountains (which is easiest to log) destroys the root systems that sustain the topography. After the loggers are done stripping the peaks, they move on. A few years of rains and the entire hillside washes away, destroying everything below it. THis happens repeatedly. Landowners get fucked by giant mudslides and erosion due to overlogging. I won't even start with the impact of the dirt/mud runnoff into the drinking supplies of people that live near ridge logging operations. Some people do get their water from streams and not the a municiple water company, like city folk. Don't they have rights to clean water? Think joe blow in colorado has a chance to sue BoiseCascade for the damage done to their drinking water a few years after a logging campaign completes? Fat chance.
2. Yes, there are natural forest fires. Nature moves on. But when nature has to absorb the stress of natural deforestation AND man-made deforestation, it can't handle it.
3. The logging companies themselves have no problem clearcutting forests, and then moving on. Suppose you live in a small town of 1,000 people, and Boise Cascade decides to set up shop. They spend 5 years clearcutting all the trees around you, then move on, leaving their abandoned mills, and nothing but dry arid stumpy land. This happens quite a bit. I supposed you don't mind the sight thousands of acres of stumps and dried up land, but many millions of americans enjoy nature.
4. Before you rant about 'everything is made of wood', that's not the point. Some logging companies use sustainable tree farms. This is costly, but eco-groovy. However, we all know it is easier to clear cut old growth than manage your own. Bush lifting national protections is just a field day for loggers to tear through wildlife and destroy at will. Tree sitters are trying to protect the most endangered flora on earth, eg. 1000+ year old forests. If that means nothing to you, then I guess I'm wasting my breath.
5. Next time you're in Arcadia, california, drop by the Sequoia National Park. It looks beautiful on rte 1 while driving, until you hike in a half a mile and witness the stumps as far as the eye can see.
6. When does the greed end? They may not log an entire forest, but ridge-logging effectively destroys everything. Should we just let logging companies blow off sustainability to make an extra buck? Or should we actually do something to protect the shrinking environment?
The issue here is sustainability, and not giving loggers a free pass to clear cut ancient forests.
Again, if you see no value in nature, I'm wasting my breath.
All intel has been doing for a while is finding ways to increase clock rates.
Oh yes, your right, this requires NO INNOVATION at all.
Repeat after me, "Duhhhh."
There's no difference between Intel and AMD. AMD chose the IPC path and has hit the frequency wall with their architecture. Intel chose the frequency path and once they hit their wall, they'll be able to go back and rearchitect for those frequencies. It was a gamble w.r.t. marketing roadmaps, and it appears Intel's strategy won. However, this goes to show that Intel isn't a monopoly, they realize the very real threat of AMD and are innovating just as hard.
One method of debugging silicon is to shave off the back of the die and monitor photon emissions to watch the gates switch. So yes, the die does give off light.
Slashdot Mirror
No kidding!
We had an intern who wrote a bunch of stuff in Python and Ruby. He was all gung-ho on those languages and made a big deal about how they were "it". When he left, no one had the time to learn how to support these languages, so we ended up re-writing them in Perl so that everyone could support them.
FYI: his scripts sucked, too. He'd make lots of dumb mistakes like assigning a variable called "retval" and then checking "ret"!!! Duh. gcc would have caught this immediately, so would "use strict".
Thanks for the M$ marketing hype. Sure that's what all the boxes and packaging say, but there's more too it than that.
Ever used a pointer? Ever taken the size of a struct? Ever assumed a certain page size? Ever written a mask for MMIO? Check your sign extension so your masks don't barf? These are some issues you encounter when your machine word size or address size changes.
Emulation has always been a joke not to be taken seriously.
Applications don't just magically work in a 64-bit O/S, except maybe, hello world or stuff that sticks entirely to LIBC.
well, i think matthew broderick was pretty close to the typical nerd, except he was too attractive and not skinny/fat enough (most nerds have weight problems in one direction or the other, i was 6ft/135lbs until i was 29). whereas the goons that knock on neo's door were way off base: since when did skaterpunks get into programming?
i think the Newman character in Jurrasic Park was close to some of the computer geeks i see at surplus hardware stores and gaming conventions: overweight, overintelligent, egocentric.
then there was Whiz Kids. The albert-from-little-house character was probably pretty close. but that was a TV show, not a movie.
there was another movie, based in the future, i think with the same kid. it was very much like the RUSH song Red Barchetta -- a totalitarian society where a little nerd boy hacks into the main computers and escapes to the country where he finds a car burried under his uncle's barn. It was waaay like the RUSH song, but the nerd boy was pretty close. Anybody remember that movie? I think Lee Majors was the uncle character.
hm. i was thinking. would it make sense for the
i was thinking we could print up thousands of 3x4" flyers that point out the security hazards of turbotax (in layspeak), and then sneak around to OfficeMAX's and affix them to the point-of-sale display racks, or stuff them into boxes.
i don't know exactly what they would say that would get the message across correctly. "spyware inside", "or user beware: this program does bad things to your machine"... eh, i'm bad at slogans, but it seems like the people should know. and it wouldn't be to hard for a handful of people each major city get some bad press for intuit.
any ideas?
Yup. I remember that whole brouhaha a few years back.
But actaully, Vermont is mostly happy and hippy.
I mean, you can't blame them. their job is to make money for their shareholders, not impress /.ers with their honesty.
Yup. Just like Apple, AMD, IBM, Oracle, Sun, Motorola, Microsoft, RedHat, and just about every other corporation except maybe Ben & Jerry's.
A-yup.
That's one of the reasons AMD is losing hundreds of millions each quarter. They may have a 5% boost in perf from a fat cache, but they can only play that card once per architecture and it costs BUCKS to make it work. It's a stopgap measure AMD had to pull otherwise they'd have no product until spring, which would have been even more bad news for them. It's a sign AMD is flailing. Hopefully their new core will alleviate their suffering.
Let's kill off that MHz myth once and for all shall we?
Well, not so fast. Intel isn't playing its hand, but I sincerely believe Banias can hit current Penitum 4 speeds, which means at 2.8 GHz, it will be performing like a 3.4 GHz machine. So MHz will always be important, just maybe not across brands.
I didn't see any "bright spots" in the review. Sounds like a waste of time and money. If they aren't mentioning STL, why would you even review it?
It's funny how many crappy books on C++ dribble from the presses like a chowdery diarrehea. Sorry for the analogy, but I've seen waaaay too many books just like the one the reader describes.
Stick with Scott Meyer's books, you really can't beat 'em.
A lot of people complain about the lack of innovation today, ignoring games like those I linked above. I'll bet most of you didn't even know that those games exist, all the while lamenting about how the present game publishing system doesn't allow the "little guy" to make any headway at breaking established formulas.
heh heh. i do complain a little bit about lack of innovation. AND, i had no idea those games existed. true, i have been lamenting for a few weeks now.
however, much like indie music, indie games are very hard to find unless you're plugged into the scene.
i just read about REZ, and damn, it's exactly what I was talking about.
again, much like indie music, word of mouth is how games like this spread.
Thanks for filling me in!
-s
I see two angles here.
1. the number of programmers has exponentially ballooned since the early 80s, leading to a larger number of less godlike programmers, AND programmers have become more reliant on fat libraries and limitless resources, so coding something this small would bend my brain for sure.
2. game content has changed dramatically. q bert was weird. space invaders was weird. pac man was weird. (yes, sports games did exist, but they weren't mainstream then). games today are less weird. it's either a first person shootemup, sports, or a linear fiction w/some combat.
Focusing on #2, I'd like to see if there really is some creative game writing locked away in some programmer's brain out there, or if we've become a nation of UnReal, GTO, Final Fantasy, and Madden XFL clones.
I don't mean to put down these fine games, I enjoy many console games. What I'm trying to get at is the utter weirdness of what people come up with when severly limited by resources. Facsimile and simulation are out the window, so you really have to dig deep for a good game.
We'll see, I'm very interested in the outcome. Maybe the winners of the IOCCC should check this out.
In my opinion --- the book was so obviously written to be a movie. Many of the scenes are scripted action scenes unlike any I've read in Crichton's early works (Andromed, Sphere, Park, etc...). You can smell franchise in this book, which except for the science, is pretty lame. It's like Finney's "Time and Again" except with better science and less heart.
There is a book by Baxter and Clark called "The Light of Other Days" where a company develops a wormhole camera that can travel to any point in x,y,z,t. It eventually becomes public domain and anyone can access it from the web. It actually distorts the quantum fabric of Golgotha at 33 CE b/c so many people want to see christ's crucifiction.
Anyway, some braniac combines the camera with facial recognition / dna recognition software and they point the camera at a woman's face and follow the de-evolution of a matriarchal strand of DNA -- back in time 4 billion years! It's an amazing chapter.
In fact, 64-bit is actually slightly more error-prone then 32-bit processing (but the other improvements should offset this.)
What the hell are you talking about? That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard w.r.t. processors. Please elaborate, I'd love to hear your explaination.
Dang, in 1989 all they had for undergrads was a mainframe running MTS! Wasn't till '90 that they got SparcStations and IBM RISC 6000s...
Cool deal with the laptop, but , for 25k+ a year, it should be gold plated!
Well, at least if Kasparov loses, I won't have to worry about fans rioting and burning the town, like in Oakland last night. That is, unless chess becomes the national past time of the lowest strata of society.
Boycott any hardware!? HA HA HA!
AMD, Intel and Transmeta have all gone DRM. What are you going to use, IBM Power4? Apple will follow suit next, I assure you.
Again, we've been fukked by lobbyists and a greedy congress. Free market my ass.
not to mention the extensive computer science back ground
Robin and Rand Miller (Myst) didn't have a comp-sci background. Nor did Roberta Williams (King's Quest). And Moru Iwatani (Pac-Man) was a graphic designer! Some of the best computer games in history came from non Comp-sci, non-engineers.
Linear algebra only become hot in computer games in the past decade, with the 3D glut. Q3 is fancy, but boring and one dimensional, same with Wolfenstein to some extent
A good game starts with a vision, not physics and math. Most of these computer games classes are teaching design skills so that game content gets better.
Just because you have a PhD in physics and compsci doesn't mean you will make the world's best game.
It's like classical musicians: they master their instrument, but hardly any of them [can] actually compose!
Yeah, there were limits, anytime a bunch of fish or clams etc washed up on the beach dead we couldn't go swimming
Ha! You just made my point for me! Thanks. Anti-enviromentalists see no limit. That's what environmentalists are for. They ask the question: "When does it stop?"
wow, for once pollution is a good thing, if you're a historian.
speaking as a former resident of Troy, i think the O2 free hudson should be more of a concern than mapping the shipwrecks. not to get all partison, but the next time an anti-environmentalist raves that pollution isn't a problem, have him/her go for a dip in the hudson and see how many simultaneous illnesses they come down with. eeew.
, isn't it the Law that the companies that are doing the cutting MUST replant the trees they remove, and aren't they constrained to do the removal and replanting in such a way that they DON'T destroy the surrounding ecosystems?
I'll see if I can dig up an info on this. However, laws and corporations don't mix, as we all know. This is where I lean even further left. For example, there have been antipollution laws on the books for decades, but that doesn't stop a company like Monsanto from dumping PCBs into a lake for 30 years and causing a community of 3,500 to be displaced. Later Monsanto spun off that division as Solutia, and neither side would take responsibilty until about 10 months ago. So it did take years for the laws to work, but by that point, the polluted land was unlivable.
So yes, EPA laws regulating this are a great idea, unfortunately the current administration has been "easing" and "relaxing" just about every law that has to do with the environment or pollution. Which makes sense: the bulk of the money donated to President Bush's campaing came from the companies who profit from lifting EPA laws and regulations.
Clinton did this too, but not to such a dramatic extent as the last 3 republican presidents, in fact, Clinton set aside the largest national forest preserve in US history just before he left office, which the Bush team tried to block from day one.
Regardless, there are ways around laws if you know the right folks. That's why it's so important to find congresspeople with a conscience. Law makers really fuck things up when money is involved.
I'm so ranting, sorry...
1. Massive logging on the peaks of the mountains (which is easiest to log) destroys the root systems that sustain the topography. After the loggers are done stripping the peaks, they move on. A few years of rains and the entire hillside washes away, destroying everything below it. THis happens repeatedly. Landowners get fucked by giant mudslides and erosion due to overlogging. I won't even start with the impact of the dirt/mud runnoff into the drinking supplies of people that live near ridge logging operations. Some people do get their water from streams and not the a municiple water company, like city folk. Don't they have rights to clean water? Think joe blow in colorado has a chance to sue BoiseCascade for the damage done to their drinking water a few years after a logging campaign completes? Fat chance.
2. Yes, there are natural forest fires. Nature moves on. But when nature has to absorb the stress of natural deforestation AND man-made deforestation, it can't handle it.
3. The logging companies themselves have no problem clearcutting forests, and then moving on. Suppose you live in a small town of 1,000 people, and Boise Cascade decides to set up shop. They spend 5 years clearcutting all the trees around you, then move on, leaving their abandoned mills, and nothing but dry arid stumpy land. This happens quite a bit. I supposed you don't mind the sight thousands of acres of stumps and dried up land, but many millions of americans enjoy nature.
4. Before you rant about 'everything is made of wood', that's not the point. Some logging companies use sustainable tree farms. This is costly, but eco-groovy. However, we all know it is easier to clear cut old growth than manage your own. Bush lifting national protections is just a field day for loggers to tear through wildlife and destroy at will. Tree sitters are trying to protect the most endangered flora on earth, eg. 1000+ year old forests. If that means nothing to you, then I guess I'm wasting my breath.
5. Next time you're in Arcadia, california, drop by the Sequoia National Park. It looks beautiful on rte 1 while driving, until you hike in a half a mile and witness the stumps as far as the eye can see.
6. When does the greed end? They may not log an entire forest, but ridge-logging effectively destroys everything. Should we just let logging companies blow off sustainability to make an extra buck? Or should we actually do something to protect the shrinking environment?
The issue here is sustainability, and not giving loggers a free pass to clear cut ancient forests.
Again, if you see no value in nature, I'm wasting my breath.
That third paragraph started wrong it meant to say "There's A difference" not "NO" difference.
Now I'll repeat after myself... "Duhhhh".
All intel has been doing for a while is finding ways to increase clock rates.
Oh yes, your right, this requires NO INNOVATION at all.
Repeat after me, "Duhhhh."
There's no difference between Intel and AMD. AMD chose the IPC path and has hit the frequency wall with their architecture. Intel chose the frequency path and once they hit their wall, they'll be able to go back and rearchitect for those frequencies. It was a gamble w.r.t. marketing roadmaps, and it appears Intel's strategy won. However, this goes to show that Intel isn't a monopoly, they realize the very real threat of AMD and are innovating just as hard.
Just trying to enlighten you.
One method of debugging silicon is to shave off the back of the die and monitor photon emissions to watch the gates switch. So yes, the die does give off light.