A friggin' "slide in" dock connector in my car console. So I can just insert the iPod and go. I don't want cables, and I'm certainly tired of the FM iTrip transmitter that fades out whenever you get near a strong radio station.
It's ironic that a "retro-tech" tape-cassette car stereo would afford me better sound than my CD player which has no external line inputs. (It has internal ones at the back but they want about as much money as my iPod for an adapter!)
Okay, ultimately what I want is a universal and OPEN dock connector so we can all have car stereos that will handle all of our Minidisc, MP3 or XM or whatever portable sound system players we have in the future. The connectors should handle hardware connections as well as provide a standardized software interface (uPNP maybe?) to display and select the track/album information inside.
(And it should handle cellphones too!)
(I think I'm going to switch to decaf for the rest of the afternoon now...)
In the bulk of his results, C++ on an i686 beat out the CLIENT JVM every time except in two tests. Object creation and word count. In the object creation test the code is biased towards Java. He's creating the objects AND DELETING THEM in C++, but Java's garbage collection probably isn't doing the deletion at all.
The other test is the word count. This one is interesting because he sets the streambuffer to 4k in both Java and C++. But in the C++ version the stream won't preload to fill the buffer. So the amount being cached is UNKNOWN. I can't speak for the Java version but I bet it preloads the entire file.
That leaves the Server JVM switch. In which case I think you're seeing alot more code inlining then the standard C++ compiler generates.
That somebody has to write an article to state this obvious point shows the sad state of programming that the 90's guerilla engineering training has brought us.
(You too can earn a 6 digit salary in computer programming after our simple 2 week course that guarantees certification!)
Microsoft is trying to get a jump start on the competition by going for the XBox 2. But I'm concerned that they're going to slice off the existing market by not offering backwards compatibility and screwing over the current generation of XBox owners. (Myself included)
"Additionally, when your computer is connected to an access point that is not broadcasting its SSID, and another access point that is broadcasting its SSID is enabled nearby, your computer automatically connects to the access point that is broadcasting its SSID."
Here's the scenario I experienced: I had a friend in an apartment building with a netgear router not broadcasting an SSID. I setup a PREFERRED network for his router (coz you have to). I would connect and then consistently lose the connection and then reconnect to his downstairs neighbors router broadcasting its SSID which was NOT on my PREFERRED network list.
But in retrospect, my friend (who's apartment I had this trouble at) was using Windows 2000 and using a netgear wireless card's app and didn't have this problem... But we attributed it to Windows XP's new behavior over 2000... (which is sort of true...) I hadn't thought about using the linksys app... (which I had uninstalled because I didn't want all the icons cluttering up my start bar and, geez, Windows XP already provides those services anyway...)
The point is that if you have an SSID broadcasting WAP with a stronger signal than a non-SSID broadcasting WAP, XP will drop the non-SSID one for the SSID one.
I thought the same thing. The problem I found is that XP will select based upon signal strength. In my case, I was at a friend's apartment. His router was in the next room, but his neighbor's router was immediately behind us next to the wall. So I could specify the non-SSID connection and have it at the top of the priority list, but it would eventually drop it in favor of the SSID one because it had a stronger signal strength.
I finally got them to use a phrase using l33tspeek for a password: (IE l33tm0m)
Still not as good as your technique, but easy enough for them to remember and not as bad as what they were using.
Mom: (entering password) click, click Me: "That's an awfully short password mom, what're you using?" Mom: "My birthdate: 1217" Me: "AAAUUUGGGHHH!" Mom: "What's wrong with that? I don't give it out."
(Note: Birthdate changed to protect the innocent.)
Editors like Emacs, Visual SlickEdit and even the loved/loathed MS Visual Studio have plug-in frameworks.
As for XML being the "glue" for holding things together... No. It'll be a data neutral "modulator" you emit your data from your program by name in a particular format. Transmitting and receipt by the other programs will be handled by a remodulator. In between it might be XML, it might be binary, it might be whatever you feel like using that day. (and no I haven't read the artile (FORBIDDEN)
And if you do a search on Teen, Mature and Adults Only titles you get:
474 titles for the PS2 (54%) 305 titles for the XBox (60%) 181 titles for the Gamecube (45%)
And if you use the following settings: where ratings are like Early Childhood, Everyone, Kids to Adults, Teen, Mature, Adults Only; descriptors are not like Animated Blood, Blood, Blood and Gore, Cartoon Violence, Crude Humor, Drug Reference, Fantasy Violence, Intense Violence, Mature Humor, Mature Sexual Themes, Mild Animated Violence, Mild Cartoon Violence, Mild Fantasy Violence, Mild Language, Mild Lyrics, Mild Realistic Violence, Mild Violence, Nudity, Partial Nudity, Sexual Violence, Strong Language, Strong Lyrics, Strong Sexual Content, Suggestive Themes, Tobacco Reference, Use of Alcohol, Use of Drugs, Use of Tobacco, Use of Tobacco & Alcohol, Violence; You get: 265 - PS2 (30%) 119 - XBox (23%) 115 - Gamecube (28%)
Have you looked around at the game market recently? The problem isn't just as simple as "Well, don't let your kid play violent video games". The problem is that there's little ALTERNATIVE CHOICE. There are lots more violent games than non-violent ones and if you want your child to play video games you're limited to girl games (Barbie gets dressed up) or educational ones (Putt-putt goes to the moon).
So it sorta makes it hard to find something for your kid to play.
Alternatively, he could just read a book or go outside and play. But do we really want to push this poor kid into sports?:)
So they've made a perfect competitor virus to HIV. That's transmittable using the same vectors as HIV.
Evolutionarily speaking, this means the HIV virus goes extinct, or (as its proven to do) develop even stronger abilities. Say maybe to go... airborn.
Which means the human race may have just taken its first step into becoming irreversibly bound to our technology to continue our existence and evolution as a species.
(Not that we weren't already to a certain extent with food, energy, medicine, etc... But this is a far more intrinsic problem.)
First off, the summary puts words in his mouth: "As agents of free-will, the aliens are self-aware of good and evil, thus convertible to some terrestrial religion." He doesn't even IMPLY that.
What he SAYS is that if we can communicate intelligently with the aliens the question becomes, are religious concepts of right and wrong UNIVERSAL, and if so would their concepts match ours? He hopes so.
Later on, he states: "The other thing that happens is that each side learns from the other, inevitably. And the sense of acculturation continually goes on. It went on when the missionaries from Italy showed up in Ireland. Irish sensibilities became part of the Christian milieu. German sensibilities. Russian sensibilities. Every culture has added something to the mix, and brought something out of the mix. It's inevitable. You can't pretend that it's a one-way street. Even if you wanted it to be a one-way street, it wouldn't be."
He also answered the reverse question (Aliens converting us):
My first knee-jerk reaction upon reading the Slashdot summary was:
"We find that this information isn't really important to terrorists" >boom "oops. uh... guess we were wrong..."
But after reading the article it sounds like they're making a perfectly valid statement. Sure, some information like large military bases off the beaten path shouldn't have their details published. But it makes no sense to remove maps of public utility Nuclear Reactors because that information is commonly available from about a dozen other sources. Like, street maps! So removing it from the federal records doesn't make it "secure". Or from the example in the article where the feds removed offshore oil sites from their public records. Turns out Scuba diving maps sold to divers were showing where those were ANYWAY. Rand is calling for the government to redefine what needs to be "secret" and it it does, work with local companies to have all sources removed.
So much as an attempt to "prove" that programming to the metal is no longer necessary or desireable. (IE "After all, if a C++ programmer was truly concerned with reliability above all else, would he still be using C++?" )
The analogy is all wrong. These days there are distinctly two types of "optimization". Algorithmic and the traditional "to the metal" style.
During college I worked with the English department training English students to use computers as their work had to be done on a computer. (This was before laptops were commonplace) The theory was that word processing allowed students a new window into language communication. To be able to quickly and painlessly reorganize phrases, sentences and paragraphs showed the students how context, clarity and meaning could change just by moving stuff around.
This is what the author has discovered. That by being able to move code actions around, he can experiment and "play" with the algorithm to boost speed while keeping error introduction to a minimum. (Ye olde basic anyone?)
He mistakenly equates this to "advanced technologies" like virtual machines and automatic memory buffer checking. In reality, we've just removed the "advanced technologies" from the process. (IE Like pointers, dynamic memory allocation, etc) (IE, ye olde basic anyone?)
There's nothing wrong with this. Though I am a C++ programmer by trade, I was far more productive when I was professionally programming Java. But that was because I had LESS creative control over the solution because of the language syntax. No passed in variable changing, no multiple inheritance, etc. So I'm thinking of how to layout the code, there's pretty much a limited way of how I'm going to go about doing that.
It's like the difference between having the Crayola box of 8 crayons and the mondo-uber box of 64. If you're going to color the green grass with the box of 8, you've got: Green. If you've got 64 colors, you're going to agonize over blue-green, green-blue, lime green, yellow-green, pine green and GREEN.
That doesn't make C++ less "safe" than Java. Sure, you can overwrite memory. But you can also create a Memory class in C++ ONCE which will monitor the overflow situation FOR you and never have to worry again.
But back to optimization: 66 fps seems really fast. But in game context it's still kind of meaningless. Here's why. You're not just displaying uncompressed images. You're also doing AI, physics, scoring, digital sound generation, dynamic music, User input, possibly networking. As a game programmer, you don't stop at 66 fps. Because if you do 132 fps, then you can really do 66 fps, and still have half a second left over to do some smarter AI or pathfind. Or if you get it up to 264 fps than you can spend 1/4 of the cycle doing rendering, maybe you can add true Dynamic voice synthesis so you don't have to prerecord all your speech!
Ultimately, my point is this. (and I think this is what the author intended) You're going to get bugs in whatever language you write in. That's the nature of the beast. VM's and 4th generation languages take away the nitty gritty of programming while still providing alot of performance power. And in alot of cases, that's a good thing. But it's still nothing more than a "model" of what's really going on in the hardware. If you're really going to push the limits of the machine you have to be able to control all aspects of it. Now, it's getting harder to do that in Windows. We spend more time coding to the OS than the metal. But in the embeddes systems category, and in console video game systems the metal still reigns and if you're going to develop a game that will push the hardware, you're going to need a programming language that will let you speak machine language. Not one that's going to protect you from yourself.
As it was in the beginning, as it always will be: Right tool for the right job.
We were incredibly sensitive when dealing with products that involved peoples' life/health. As engineers, we were very ethical about that. Informally, there was a "line" where you absolutely adhered to process. More accurately, you have a core algorithm that the scientists R&D'd and you don't screw around with that. But the further away from that algorithm you were, the more likely that it would be adjusted to meet budget, time, resource constraints, etc.
The problem with "process" was that it didn't take into account a creative factor. Basically, you'd have development plan section A, B and then C is where a miracle occurs and then you get D (profit). But the government (and its process) wants you to document specifically what you're going to do BEFORE you know how to do it. So basically you "sketch" out what you're going to do. "I'm going to store this data in X database with Y format". But then when you start implementing it, you discover that the database tables are wrong. So you change them, but you don't have time to update the documentation... Then you realize that a database is overkill and you can get by with a set of updated XML files and oh wouldn't it be great if you could HTTP to the unit and view these files on the fly. Oh wait, nevermind, we won't even keep the XML files on the unit, they'll be uploaded to a central location and stored in a database... You chain enough of these events together in a do-it-yesterday fashion and documentation gets further and further behind so that it doesn't even represent what you're currently doing. Now, this can only happen if your particular development is significantly isolated or you can keep the team notified informally (say about 10-20 people which is what we usually had). Try doing this with a larger group, or with an integral code piece and you'll get strung up by the developers. (but that's my.02 cents)
Slashdot Mirror
A friggin' "slide in" dock connector in my car console. So I can just insert the iPod and go. I don't want cables, and I'm certainly tired of the FM iTrip transmitter that fades out whenever you get near a strong radio station.
It's ironic that a "retro-tech" tape-cassette car stereo would afford me better sound than my CD player which has no external line inputs. (It has internal ones at the back but they want about as much money as my iPod for an adapter!)
Okay, ultimately what I want is a universal and OPEN dock connector so we can all have car stereos that will handle all of our Minidisc, MP3 or XM or whatever portable sound system players we have in the future. The connectors should handle hardware connections as well as provide a standardized software interface (uPNP maybe?) to display and select the track/album information inside.
(And it should handle cellphones too!)
(I think I'm going to switch to decaf for the rest of the afternoon now...)
In the bulk of his results, C++ on an i686 beat out the CLIENT JVM every time except in two tests. Object creation and word count. In the object creation test the code is biased towards Java. He's creating the objects AND DELETING THEM in C++, but Java's garbage collection probably isn't doing the deletion at all.
The other test is the word count. This one is interesting because he sets the streambuffer to 4k in both Java and C++. But in the C++ version the stream won't preload to fill the buffer. So the amount being cached is UNKNOWN. I can't speak for the Java version but I bet it preloads the entire file.
That leaves the Server JVM switch. In which case I think you're seeing alot more code inlining then the standard C++ compiler generates.
Either way, this is hardly a definitive test.
That somebody has to write an article to state this obvious point shows the sad state of programming that the 90's guerilla engineering training has brought us.
(You too can earn a 6 digit salary in computer programming after our simple 2 week course that guarantees certification!)
Microsoft is trying to get a jump start on the competition by going for the XBox 2. But I'm concerned that they're going to slice off the existing market by not offering backwards compatibility and screwing over the current generation of XBox owners. (Myself included)
"Additionally, when your computer is connected to an access point that is not broadcasting its SSID, and another access point that is broadcasting its SSID is enabled nearby, your computer automatically connects to the access point that is broadcasting its SSID."
Here's the scenario I experienced:
I had a friend in an apartment building with a netgear router not broadcasting an SSID. I setup a PREFERRED network for his router (coz you have to). I would connect and then consistently lose the connection and then reconnect to his downstairs neighbors router broadcasting its SSID which was NOT on my PREFERRED network list.
please explain Microsoft's link in my original post.
"In response, Microsoft Game Studios has decided to streamline its portfolio, making fewer bets in this genre."
And those would be... uh... all those... uh... online fantasy titles like...uh...
(Unless, like the EA Sports line, Microsoft is whacking their internal Fantasy RPG's to attract Square-Enix?)
But in retrospect, my friend (who's apartment I had this trouble at) was using Windows 2000 and using a netgear wireless card's app and didn't have this problem... But we attributed it to Windows XP's new behavior over 2000... (which is sort of true...)
I hadn't thought about using the linksys app... (which I had uninstalled because I didn't want all the icons cluttering up my start bar and, geez, Windows XP already provides those services anyway...)
The point is that if you have an SSID broadcasting WAP with a stronger signal than a non-SSID broadcasting WAP, XP will drop the non-SSID one for the SSID one.
Read the Microsoft link...
I thought the same thing. The problem I found is that XP will select based upon signal strength. In my case, I was at a friend's apartment. His router was in the next room, but his neighbor's router was immediately behind us next to the wall. So I could specify the non-SSID connection and have it at the top of the priority list, but it would eventually drop it in favor of the SSID one because it had a stronger signal strength.
See Microsoft Link
Microsoft even tells you that this is a "good thing" at the link:
Disabling SSID broadcasts on an access point is not considered a valid method for securing a wireless network.
I finally got them to use a phrase using l33tspeek for a password: (IE l33tm0m)
Still not as good as your technique, but easy enough for them to remember and not as bad as what they were using.
Mom: (entering password) click, click
Me: "That's an awfully short password mom, what're you using?"
Mom: "My birthdate: 1217"
Me: "AAAUUUGGGHHH!"
Mom: "What's wrong with that? I don't give it out."
(Note: Birthdate changed to protect the innocent.)
We've come full circle...
The C64 and the Atari 400/800 were marketed as combo/home computer advanced game machines..
Although oddly enough I remember the C64 only being $200.. of course it didn't have a CD-Rom drive which I guess is the extra $399...
"I gave the monster a dollar"
And suddenly he's propheysing the future?
Editors like Emacs, Visual SlickEdit and even the loved/loathed MS Visual Studio have plug-in frameworks.
As for XML being the "glue" for holding things together... No. It'll be a data neutral "modulator" you emit your data from your program by name in a particular format. Transmitting and receipt by the other programs will be handled by a remodulator. In between it might be XML, it might be binary, it might be whatever you feel like using that day.
(and no I haven't read the artile (FORBIDDEN)
Why do I have a vision of tiny little robots running on thousands of little treadmills...
Oh wait, that's a perpetual motion machine...
And if you do a search on Teen, Mature and Adults Only titles you get:
474 titles for the PS2 (54%)
305 titles for the XBox (60%)
181 titles for the Gamecube (45%)
And if you use the following settings:
where ratings are like Early Childhood, Everyone, Kids to Adults, Teen, Mature, Adults Only; descriptors are not like Animated Blood, Blood, Blood and Gore, Cartoon Violence, Crude Humor, Drug Reference, Fantasy Violence, Intense Violence, Mature Humor, Mature Sexual Themes, Mild Animated Violence, Mild Cartoon Violence, Mild Fantasy Violence, Mild Language, Mild Lyrics, Mild Realistic Violence, Mild Violence, Nudity, Partial Nudity, Sexual Violence, Strong Language, Strong Lyrics, Strong Sexual Content, Suggestive Themes, Tobacco Reference, Use of Alcohol, Use of Drugs, Use of Tobacco, Use of Tobacco & Alcohol, Violence;
You get:
265 - PS2 (30%)
119 - XBox (23%)
115 - Gamecube (28%)
Is known for its "family friendly" system...
Now name the PS/2 kid games.
The XBox kid games.
There's alot less there.
Have you looked around at the game market recently? The problem isn't just as simple as "Well, don't let your kid play violent video games". The problem is that there's little ALTERNATIVE CHOICE. There are lots more violent games than non-violent ones and if you want your child to play video games you're limited to girl games (Barbie gets dressed up) or educational ones (Putt-putt goes to the moon).
:)
So it sorta makes it hard to find something for your kid to play.
Alternatively, he could just read a book or go outside and play. But do we really want to push this poor kid into sports?
That after this third movie they're dumping the cast and going with a whole new cast except for the droids and Yoda?
That can't be smart.
So they've made a perfect competitor virus to HIV. That's transmittable using the same vectors as HIV.
Evolutionarily speaking, this means the HIV virus goes extinct, or (as its proven to do) develop even stronger abilities. Say maybe to go... airborn.
Which means the human race may have just taken its first step into becoming irreversibly bound to our technology to continue our existence and evolution as a species.
(Not that we weren't already to a certain extent with food, energy, medicine, etc... But this is a far more intrinsic problem.)
First off, the summary puts words in his mouth: "As agents of free-will, the aliens are self-aware of good and evil, thus convertible to some terrestrial religion."
He doesn't even IMPLY that.
What he SAYS is that if we can communicate intelligently with the aliens the question becomes, are religious concepts of right and wrong UNIVERSAL, and if so would their concepts match ours? He hopes so.
Later on, he states: "The other thing that happens is that each side learns from the other, inevitably. And the sense of acculturation continually goes on. It went on when the missionaries from Italy showed up in Ireland. Irish sensibilities became part of the Christian milieu. German sensibilities. Russian sensibilities. Every culture has added something to the mix, and brought something out of the mix. It's inevitable. You can't pretend that it's a one-way street. Even if you wanted it to be a one-way street, it wouldn't be."
He also answered the reverse question (Aliens converting us):
"We can't even convert ourselves"
My first knee-jerk reaction upon reading the Slashdot summary was:
"We find that this information isn't really important to terrorists"
>boom
"oops. uh... guess we were wrong..."
But after reading the article it sounds like they're making a perfectly valid statement. Sure, some information like large military bases off the beaten path shouldn't have their details published. But it makes no sense to remove maps of public utility Nuclear Reactors because that information is commonly available from about a dozen other sources. Like, street maps! So removing it from the federal records doesn't make it "secure". Or from the example in the article where the feds removed offshore oil sites from their public records. Turns out Scuba diving maps sold to divers were showing where those were ANYWAY. Rand is calling for the government to redefine what needs to be "secret" and it it does, work with local companies to have all sources removed.
Where is planet Kamino, anyway?
So much as an attempt to "prove" that programming to the metal is no longer necessary or desireable. (IE "After all, if a C++ programmer was truly concerned with reliability above all else, would he still be using C++?" )
The analogy is all wrong. These days there are distinctly two types of "optimization". Algorithmic and the traditional "to the metal" style.
During college I worked with the English department training English students to use computers as their work had to be done on a computer. (This was before laptops were commonplace) The theory was that word processing allowed students a new window into language communication. To be able to quickly and painlessly reorganize phrases, sentences and paragraphs showed the students how context, clarity and meaning could change just by moving stuff around.
This is what the author has discovered. That by being able to move code actions around, he can experiment and "play" with the algorithm to boost speed while keeping error introduction to a minimum. (Ye olde basic anyone?)
He mistakenly equates this to "advanced technologies" like virtual machines and automatic memory buffer checking. In reality, we've just removed the "advanced technologies" from the process. (IE Like pointers, dynamic memory allocation, etc) (IE, ye olde basic anyone?)
There's nothing wrong with this. Though I am a C++ programmer by trade, I was far more productive when I was professionally programming Java. But that was because I had LESS creative control over the solution because of the language syntax. No passed in variable changing, no multiple inheritance, etc. So I'm thinking of how to layout the code, there's pretty much a limited way of how I'm going to go about doing that.
It's like the difference between having the Crayola box of 8 crayons and the mondo-uber box of 64. If you're going to color the green grass with the box of 8, you've got: Green. If you've got 64 colors, you're going to agonize over blue-green, green-blue, lime green, yellow-green, pine green and GREEN.
That doesn't make C++ less "safe" than Java. Sure, you can overwrite memory. But you can also create a Memory class in C++ ONCE which will monitor the overflow situation FOR you and never have to worry again.
But back to optimization:
66 fps seems really fast. But in game context it's still kind of meaningless. Here's why. You're not just displaying uncompressed images. You're also doing AI, physics, scoring, digital sound generation, dynamic music, User input, possibly networking. As a game programmer, you don't stop at 66 fps. Because if you do 132 fps, then you can really do 66 fps, and still have half a second left over to do some smarter AI or pathfind. Or if you get it up to 264 fps than you can spend 1/4 of the cycle doing rendering, maybe you can add true Dynamic voice synthesis so you don't have to prerecord all your speech!
Ultimately, my point is this. (and I think this is what the author intended) You're going to get bugs in whatever language you write in. That's the nature of the beast. VM's and 4th generation languages take away the nitty gritty of programming while still providing alot of performance power. And in alot of cases, that's a good thing. But it's still nothing more than a "model" of what's really going on in the hardware. If you're really going to push the limits of the machine you have to be able to control all aspects of it. Now, it's getting harder to do that in Windows. We spend more time coding to the OS than the metal. But in the embeddes systems category, and in console video game systems the metal still reigns and if you're going to develop a game that will push the hardware, you're going to need a programming language that will let you speak machine language. Not one that's going to protect you from yourself.
As it was in the beginning, as it always will be: Right tool for the right job.
We were incredibly sensitive when dealing with products that involved peoples' life/health. As engineers, we were very ethical about that. Informally, there was a "line" where you absolutely adhered to process. More accurately, you have a core algorithm that the scientists R&D'd and you don't screw around with that. But the further away from that algorithm you were, the more likely that it would be adjusted to meet budget, time, resource constraints, etc.
.02 cents)
The problem with "process" was that it didn't take into account a creative factor. Basically, you'd have development plan section A, B and then C is where a miracle occurs and then you get D (profit). But the government (and its process) wants you to document specifically what you're going to do BEFORE you know how to do it. So basically you "sketch" out what you're going to do. "I'm going to store this data in X database with Y format". But then when you start implementing it, you discover that the database tables are wrong. So you change them, but you don't have time to update the documentation... Then you realize that a database is overkill and you can get by with a set of updated XML files and oh wouldn't it be great if you could HTTP to the unit and view these files on the fly. Oh wait, nevermind, we won't even keep the XML files on the unit, they'll be uploaded to a central location and stored in a database... You chain enough of these events together in a do-it-yesterday fashion and documentation gets further and further behind so that it doesn't even represent what you're currently doing. Now, this can only happen if your particular development is significantly isolated or you can keep the team notified informally (say about 10-20 people which is what we usually had). Try doing this with a larger group, or with an integral code piece and you'll get strung up by the developers.
(but that's my