Have you seen Macromedia's Central? Soon to be released, Central allows Flash applications to run offline and outside IE/Mozilla. It sounds sorta like the Flash-based, Macromedia browser you're talking about..?
but couldn't Yahoo have created their own sponsored search results business arm for less than $1.6B?? Sure, Overture brings a (PHB-facing) brand name and FAST/AllTheWeb's search tech, but Yahoo is huge brand name and already owns Inktomi's search tech. I don't see where the $1.6B value is in Overture.
There are blog-oriented search engines. The idea is pretty cool, but I find the results to be pretty garbled. Their results remind me of the early days of search engines. I guess I've been spoiled by Google.:-)
blogging can be officially declared out, just as the newsgroups was when someone let the hordes from AOL in.
Newsgroups are a shared medium. AOL users flooded the Usenet news groups, degrading the experience for all newsgroup readers. Blogs are written by one person or group. Nobody is forcing you to read AOL Journals. Nobody is forcing AOL Journal entries into YOUR blog.
Social Security is indeed a retirement plan, regardless of who pays for it. Social Security was created in 1933 by FDR and the New Dealers as a "universal public pension." At the time, retirement was pretty uncommon. With massive unemployment, FDR wanted to encourage the older workers to retire and make room for the millions of unemployed young people to work.
As Sam pointed out, the switch statement does not have to use a jump table. A "computed jump" can be compute to figure out how far to jump in the switch statement body (i.e., to which case label). And the switch statement probably has good code locality, so the code pages are "hot" and kept in the processor cache. Add some help from the processor's branch prediction for the most common switch cases and your code (might) really be flying. The processor's branch prediction is absolutely no help if you are indexing into a giant data table.:-)
People are noting that NASA's program was created using genetic algorithms, but there is nothing preventing the use a data table to store the genetically evolving data. In fact, that might be a much better host because the evolving data is located in a single section of data.
Anyways, the table lookup is NOT necessarily faster than huge switch statement. The table lookup requires the data table to be loaded. If the table is large and has poor reference locality, then your program could end up thrashing the processor cache. The switch statement(s), however, can compute the jumps without loading stuff from the data segment (and flooding the processor cache).
> > gcc 3.4 will have a __builtin_ctz function which can be used for this. > It will emit special instructions on CPUs that support it (i386, Alpha > EV67), and use a lookup table on others, which is very boring, but > also faster.
Classic mistake. Lookup tables are only faster in benchmarks, they are almost always slower in real life. You only need to miss in the cache _once_ on the lookup to lose all the time you won on the previous one hundred calls.
"Small and simple" is almost always better than the alternatives. I suspect that's one reason why older versions of gcc often generate code that actually runs faster than newer versions: the newer versions _look_ like they do a better job, but..
Linus
Re:Uhh huh. I see it coming
on
AOL: Amazon Who?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
or a more legal method might be to secretly slow down all traffic to amazon.com from AOL's Walled Garden. How would anyone find out? Amazon.com still works; it's just twice as slow.
so why doesn't Red Hat or Mandrake write those "easy to resolve" scripts? I've been hearing that Linux will kill Windows on the desktop "Real Soon Now" since 1995.
XML sucks because it's being used wrongly. It is being used by people who view it as being an encapsulation of semantics and data, and it's not. XML is purely a way of structuring files, and as such, really doesn't add much to the overall picture. XML came from a document preparation tradition. First there was GML, a document preparation system, then SGML, a document preparation system, then HTML, a document preparation system, and now XML. All were designed as ways humans could structure documents. Now we've gotten to the point where XML has become so obscure and so complex to write, that it can no longer be written by people. If you talk to people in Sun about their libraries that generate XML, they say humans cannot read this. It's not designed for human consumption. Yet we're carrying around all the baggage that's in there, because it's designed for humans to read. So XML is a remarkably inefficient encoding system. It's a remarkably difficult to use encoding system, considering what it does. And yet it's become the lingua franca for talking between applications, and that strikes me as crazy.
People think, "Once I've got my data in XML that's all I've got to do. I've now got self-describing data," but the reality is they don't. They're just assuming that the tags that are in there somehow give people all the information they need to be able to deal with the data. Now, for some things there are standards. For example, there are some standards like RSS and RDF, which give you very simple ways of describing web page content. But a random XML file, especially machine generated XML files, can be as obscure as binary data.
Ant is a really good example, because in that case you're using XML as a user-specified input language, which is really inappropriate in that context. I'd much rather have a genuine grammar. I want to be able to type something simple and easy for me. I don't care if it's easy for the tool to parse, that's the tool's problem. I want it to be easy for me to write. And in cases like that, it's really the case of the programmer saying, "Oh look, here's an XML parser. I can just take XML files. That's easier." So one programmer in one context puts a burden on the other 100,000 programmers trying to use it.
so Venice has been sinking for decades? But in the 1970s, "scientists" feared global COOLING, an impending ice age. Did global cooling (at the time), cause the ice caps to melt and flood Vencie?
I like to think of static typing as the variable NAME has a type (regardless of value) and dynamic typing as the variable VALUE has a type (regardless of name).
Vote with your dollars. At least you can FREELY CHOOSE which corporations' products you buy. Tell them you don't want RFID products and that you will buy from their competitor.
At least corporations don't have the power to imprison you or apply the death penalty.
If the gub'mint is so worried about creating jobs, then why are they sending millions of telemarketers and spammers to the unemployment lines with these new do-not-call lists and anti-spam laws?
I have played with LCLint (now called Splint). Does anyone know any non-trivial programs (open or closed source) that have used LCLint/Splint? Their C language annocations are cumbersome at first, but the benefit is huge (especially for secure software like web servers).
Imagine if the Linux kernel adopted LCLint/Splint's annotations. They would help find some kernel bugs, but I think the biggest benefit would be for people writing device drivers. The kernel core is well understood by a privileged few. These kernel gurus could use the LCLint/Splint annotations to add extra SEMANTIC information to the device driver APIs. The annotations would be like extra device driver documentation.. that is checked by the compiler! And the annotations add no runtime performance penalty.
Slashdot Mirror
Have you seen Macromedia's Central? Soon to be released, Central allows Flash applications to run offline and outside IE/Mozilla. It sounds sorta like the Flash-based, Macromedia browser you're talking about..?
I'm at the point now where I am starting up my own web venture
I can't wait to see the web venture at AssFace's myclownpenis.com.
I agree completely that the emergence of the internet should not put aside your copyright on the material you publish.
Isn't that what the much maligned RIAA has been saying?
Most spam I get are to my _actual_ Email-adress which has me a bit confused.
that's because AOL sold your troed102527@aol.com email address to many spam lists. bon appetit!
but couldn't Yahoo have created their own sponsored search results business arm for less than $1.6B?? Sure, Overture brings a (PHB-facing) brand name and FAST/AllTheWeb's search tech, but Yahoo is huge brand name and already owns Inktomi's search tech. I don't see where the $1.6B value is in Overture.
There are blog-oriented search engines. The idea is pretty cool, but I find the results to be pretty garbled. Their results remind me of the early days of search engines. I guess I've been spoiled by Google.
Daypop (seems to be offline at the moment...)
Feedster
blogging can be officially declared out, just as the newsgroups was when someone let the hordes from AOL in.
Newsgroups are a shared medium. AOL users flooded the Usenet news groups, degrading the experience for all newsgroup readers. Blogs are written by one person or group. Nobody is forcing you to read AOL Journals. Nobody is forcing AOL Journal entries into YOUR blog.
Social Security is indeed a retirement plan, regardless of who pays for it. Social Security was created in 1933 by FDR and the New Dealers as a "universal public pension." At the time, retirement was pretty uncommon. With massive unemployment, FDR wanted to encourage the older workers to retire and make room for the millions of unemployed young people to work.
As Sam pointed out, the switch statement does not have to use a jump table. A "computed jump" can be compute to figure out how far to jump in the switch statement body (i.e., to which case label). And the switch statement probably has good code locality, so the code pages are "hot" and kept in the processor cache. Add some help from the processor's branch prediction for the most common switch cases and your code (might) really be flying. The processor's branch prediction is absolutely no help if you are indexing into a giant data table.
People are noting that NASA's program was created using genetic algorithms, but there is nothing preventing the use a data table to store the genetically evolving data. In fact, that might be a much better host because the evolving data is located in a single section of data.
Anyways, the table lookup is NOT necessarily faster than huge switch statement. The table lookup requires the data table to be loaded. If the table is large and has poor reference locality, then your program could end up thrashing the processor cache. The switch statement(s), however, can compute the jumps without loading stuff from the data segment (and flooding the processor cache).
And Linus Torvalds seems to agree with me: http://www.ussg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/030
>
> gcc 3.4 will have a __builtin_ctz function which can be used for this.
> It will emit special instructions on CPUs that support it (i386, Alpha
> EV67), and use a lookup table on others, which is very boring, but
> also faster.
Classic mistake. Lookup tables are only faster in benchmarks, they are
almost always slower in real life. You only need to miss in the cache
_once_ on the lookup to lose all the time you won on the previous one
hundred calls.
"Small and simple" is almost always better than the alternatives. I
suspect that's one reason why older versions of gcc often generate code
that actually runs faster than newer versions: the newer versions _look_
like they do a better job, but..
Linus
or a more legal method might be to secretly slow down all traffic to amazon.com from AOL's Walled Garden. How would anyone find out? Amazon.com still works; it's just twice as slow.
and "D" is short for Donnie?
Since C was not making B more like BCPL, I cannot believe that the name C was chosen because it was the next letter in the name BCPL.
well, at least you didn't need to recompile your kernel! These days, Linux is EASY!
I've been hearing that Linux will kill Windows on the desktop "Real Soon Now" since 1995.
so why doesn't Red Hat or Mandrake write those "easy to resolve" scripts? I've been hearing that Linux will kill Windows on the desktop "Real Soon Now" since 1995.
XML sucks because it's being used wrongly. It is being used by people who view it as being an encapsulation of semantics and data, and it's not. XML is purely a way of structuring files, and as such, really doesn't add much to the overall picture. XML came from a document preparation tradition. First there was GML, a document preparation system, then SGML, a document preparation system, then HTML, a document preparation system, and now XML. All were designed as ways humans could structure documents. Now we've gotten to the point where XML has become so obscure and so complex to write, that it can no longer be written by people. If you talk to people in Sun about their libraries that generate XML, they say humans cannot read this. It's not designed for human consumption. Yet we're carrying around all the baggage that's in there, because it's designed for humans to read. So XML is a remarkably inefficient encoding system. It's a remarkably difficult to use encoding system, considering what it does. And yet it's become the lingua franca for talking between applications, and that strikes me as crazy.
People think, "Once I've got my data in XML that's all I've got to do. I've now got self-describing data," but the reality is they don't. They're just assuming that the tags that are in there somehow give people all the information they need to be able to deal with the data. Now, for some things there are standards. For example, there are some standards like RSS and RDF, which give you very simple ways of describing web page content. But a random XML file, especially machine generated XML files, can be as obscure as binary data.
Ant is a really good example, because in that case you're using XML as a user-specified input language, which is really inappropriate in that context. I'd much rather have a genuine grammar. I want to be able to type something simple and easy for me. I don't care if it's easy for the tool to parse, that's the tool's problem. I want it to be easy for me to write. And in cases like that, it's really the case of the programmer saying, "Oh look, here's an XML parser. I can just take XML files. That's easier." So one programmer in one context puts a burden on the other 100,000 programmers trying to use it.
the call is probably still routed through HQ for deducting the callers' minutes.
I'm testing 802.1u (power over wireless ethernet) right now. Man, is it just me or is it getting really warm in here?
so Venice has been sinking for decades? But in the 1970s, "scientists" feared global COOLING, an impending ice age. Did global cooling (at the time), cause the ice caps to melt and flood Vencie?
I like to think of static typing as the variable NAME has a type (regardless of value) and dynamic typing as the variable VALUE has a type (regardless of name).
and suddenly IBM has a monopoly on legal Linux distros! Then what about Red Hat et al?
Where I work, we still use cfront to port some C++ code to some embedded platforms that only have a C tool chain. Long live cfront!
Vote with your dollars. At least you can FREELY CHOOSE which corporations' products you buy. Tell them you don't want RFID products and that you will buy from their competitor.
At least corporations don't have the power to imprison you or apply the death penalty.
If the gub'mint is so worried about creating jobs, then why are they sending millions of telemarketers and spammers to the unemployment lines with these new do-not-call lists and anti-spam laws?
I have played with LCLint (now called Splint). Does anyone know any non-trivial programs (open or closed source) that have used LCLint/Splint? Their C language annocations are cumbersome at first, but the benefit is huge (especially for secure software like web servers).
Imagine if the Linux kernel adopted LCLint/Splint's annotations. They would help find some kernel bugs, but I think the biggest benefit would be for people writing device drivers. The kernel core is well understood by a privileged few. These kernel gurus could use the LCLint/Splint annotations to add extra SEMANTIC information to the device driver APIs. The annotations would be like extra device driver documentation.. that is checked by the compiler!
And the annotations add no runtime performance penalty.