The last time I wrote any graphics code, OpenGL was much easier to write than DirectX. Granted that was during DirectX 7. I suspect MS has gone to a lot of trouble making DirectX much simpler for accelerated 2d (probably happened as they went to start writing Aero).
Implementing either OpenGL or DirectX for a particular card isn't that difficult, but doing so efficiently without significant bugs for every single card that driver is supposed to support is. The documentation for any 1 revision of the Radeon series is hundreds of pages long.
"The best I hope can be done with child porn is that the perpetrators are burned alive on worldwide television."
After their hands, feet and privates are repeatedly cut and dipped in vats of boiling sulfuric acid and they are force-fed a mixture of broken glass, rusty nails and diesel fuel.
# Count the number equal letters (in same positions) in two strings a and b. $n =()= ($a ^ $b) =~/\0/g;
outside of =()=, I find that code to be pretty simple:
($a ^ $b)
$a bitwise xor $b (thus the result contains \0 in each char that is the same)
/\0/g
regex looking for null chars in a string
($a ^ $b) =~/\0/g
thus this returns a list of null chars
My guess is that this =()= set of operators causes the $n variable to be the result of the list evaluated in scalar context (resulting in the length of this list).
Indeed if you look closely you can see that that is 2 assignment operators and an empty list. You could rewrite it as:
$n = () = ($a ^ $b) =~/\0/g;
thus:
() = ($a ^ $b) =~/\0/g;
() = causes the regex to be matched in a list context. Had you straight up written $n=($a..., then $n would be given either true or false. It is slightly confusing that you are using the empty list as an lvalue, but then again this is perl. This empty list means you don't care about the matches, only that the matching is done in list context. The final assignment evaluates the resulting list in scalar context, returning the length of the list.
I would have written it as:
$n = ($a ^ $b) =~ tr/\0//;
because actual regex matching is not necessary here.
agreed. these are serious bugs. although it is surprising that so many crash bugs have been fixed only in the 8th beta, but okay.
Beta 7 is basically where JM landed for the beta. I have a feeling that this was a significant part of the actual bugfixes that have happened.
you are saying that sunspider test results are bull. that's a new one, because i thought everyone considered that to be a real test of js performance.
no I am saying find me a reference that says the stable version of chrome is beating beta8 or a comparable nightly release in terms of performance. The DEV build is certainly faster, but the stable build (8.0.552.224)?
the whole reason why chrome is considered to be fast is that it scores way ahead on sunspider and sunspider-like tests. i find firefox 3.6 to have the same load times as chrome on almost every page. and then there are some pages (like slashdot discussions with >1000 comments) that load and scroll much faster on firefox 3.6 than chrome. so, if you disregard sunspider scores then you can't compare js performance objectively at all.
Again I am not disregarding sunspider scores. In fact I linked you to the mozilla site which is testing 10 tip builds a day for 3 compile options of Firefox and a built from source version of the chrome engine using the latest source for that. Very clearly in the sunspider chart there, the version of Firefox's javascript engine which will be in the official release is beating the absolute newest publicly available version of the v8 engine used in chrome by 9.4 milliseconds. On the kraken benchmark (sunspider was built by apple, kraken was built by mozilla, v8-bench was built by google), ff4 is over 9 seconds faster. The v8-bench test is favoring google but it is the only one I have seen.
If you haven't gotten the memo here yet, MichaelKristopeit### is trolling many different parts of this page (roughly 10% of the comments here are his).
He has proceeded through several sets of insults via multiple different posts from multiple users. He is getting by the moderation system a little bit by the aspect that he is a new user and thus has neutral karma. I think he gets a new user id (increasing the number) whenever his karma becomes negative so that his trolls continue to show up. I am pretty sure that there is a way to apply a negative bonus to new users so that you could avoid seeing him and those like him, but that would cause you to stop seeing other users who are saying something useful but do not post often.
This person is exploiting a weakness in the current moderation system. I don't know how it could be improved to get rid of him without adversely affecting other users. One way to do it would be to make all new users wait a period of time before they are allowed to post. That would raise the level of commitment that this person would need to continue his trolling but might not stop it. It also may have too much of an impact on other users that the/. devs may not want to implement it.
Actually (I have been running minefield since beta4): * several of them at least were actual full browser crashes * others were partial crashes (eg youtube stopped working for a few days in there because the flash plugin kept crashing) * odd bugs like the addon bar disappearing (and without it there was no way to get to some extensions) * bad UX in the panorama functionality (you could close panorama and lose all of the tabs you had open) * app tabs were (and might still be, I haven't verified it yet) loading the page that they saw out of cache instead of online (resulting in when/. is an app tab me seeing the stories from weeks ago every time the browser is restarted)
On your "points": @1: while this is true, the new ui is more consistent from a themer's perspective and so this is easier to do
@2: Bull. The JM engine (JM+TM actually) is only currently beaten by the last few revisions of the v8 engine trunk repository, and only in the v8-bench tests (which feature very repeated tests that are benefited most by the v8 optimization set, which progressively further optimizes as lines of code are repeated): http://www.arewefastyet.com/awfy2.php; the IE9 beta engine doesn't actually appear to be any faster than the IE8 engine, but it does have some new dead code matching algorithms so that it seems faster on the benchmarks (that is to say it looks much faster on sunspider because a lot of that code never even gets run due to it being recognized as dead code, but on a site with heavy js usage the changes are insignificant).
@3: Perhaps I don't understand what is so great here. Could someone enlighten me as to why we should care (as users and as web developers) about what particular windows specific hardware acceleration tech is being used?
Actual new features that matter IMO in ff4: 1. JM engine 2. css border radius (proper support in all browsers will affect page sizes on a significant part of the internet) 3. css background image options (background-clip, background-origin, background-size) 4. css calc() function 5. html5 form elements 6. session history management (history.pushState,...) 7. indexedDb 8. shipping sync with ff4 9. multitouch api 10. HSTS 11. JS typed arrays 12. considerable refactoring and deprecated code removal from Gecko (which will allow future development to happen faster)
While this beta is indeed far better than the last one, there still are some problems that need to be ironed out before it is ready for everyone. It still has some teething issues in the UI that take some getting used to (the status bar is gone, hyperlinks show the new url in the awesomebar, the context menu items for open in new tab and open in new window have swapped, etc.). I believe some of these are still changing. There are still 180+ bugs targeting ff4 and the underlying gecko 2.0 infrastructure (note ff4 is using a major upgrade of the underlying engine which it hasn't done a major upgrade since before ff1):
I've always liked the idea of one-way time travel:
You can get into the past, and change it, but never in a way to affect your own past or the past in the universe you were in before.
Like stepping through a door into the past, then changing something. Back on the original side of the door, the past hasn't been altered but through the door a different future may unfold. Fortunately most of the time travel in Stargate is of this type. It is the Dr. Who style time travel which I have problems with.
My bet would be that they are simply looking not to give others any help in SEO rankings. This very simple cipher would make it so that any potential search engine wouldn't see a url to pornhub.com on their site.
A beautiful sentiment, but naïve. A lot of these "I want to live forever" statements lack wisdom which usually comes with aging, at some point.
It's about time. Time is the most valuable currency we have. We have a finite amount of it. It helps define us and give each moment meaning.
Hypothetical immortality (think Tolkien's elves) would remove all value in time.
Time has value because it allows energy to do work. This property of time would still exist regardless of how long we live. It is fundamental to the nature of the universe and cannot be removed without removing the rest of the universe.
We do not value it because we currently have an upper bound on the amount of potential work which may be done in our lifetimes.
Can you imagine a world where people no longer cared about time any longer? They no longer cared about change? I don't think we've met a true conservative until we've met someone who is a thousand years old.
Actually, I can. In fact there have been books on the idea conceived thousands of years ago. They came up with this notion that no matter what you do with the first part of your life, you wind up in one of two places. You then proceed to stay in this place forever.
I am ok with dying because I absolutely believe there is no possibility of such a fate and that instead when I die, I will cease to exist and that the unchanging nature of that non-existence doesn't matter. I would rather prolong this death as long as possible but I admit that I ultimately do not have free will and that my concept of existence (and free will) is merely a quirky side affect of the universe tending towards maximum entropy (and as such, I will die when I die and any thought I have to avoid it is a result of time allowing energy to equalize).
If I were to postulate that any religion involving such fates were true, I want to live forever out of the possibility that I would wind up in either place. The mere idea of being aware of an eternal unchanging existence is horrifying.
Let's say we needed to both write the same application. I wrote mine in Python and you wrote it in C. I am willing to bet that I will have a solution written faster than you (shorter time to market), it will be smaller than yours (less code to maintain) and it will have fewer bugs than yours. Granted yours will be faster, but after profiling (in some of the time I have saved by getting to market sooner) I can recover most of that speed difference.
This does not include: Database access (although the.NET Entity Framework may address much of this; from what I've seen it's a lot like JPA), Concurrent collections
Granted, that list is just things I can think of off the top of my head.
Entity Framework is only barely usable right now (never trust the first or second version of something to come from MS; they usually get it mostly right on the 3rd). NHibernate is very good.
Concurrent collections are something I would guess as one of the weakest points of the framework right now, though I haven't used the ones in System.Collections.Concurrent yet (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd997305.aspx) because we aren't going to get to.net 4 until probably q3 2011. Even still I generally don't work on anything where these algorithms and data structures will have a big impact.
Visual Studio + Resharper is by far the best development environment I have ever worked in.
By comparison Eclipse and NetBeans are slow and feel bulky and BlueJ is nearly unuseable. If I had to give it up, I think I would go straight back to vi; Every "modern" ide I've used (other than VS+R#) I have found to be quite frustrating. The only thing that would make VS better is for it to have a better interactive mode (like snippets compiler built in).
(Currently a C# developer and Python hobbyist; have previously spent 6 years in Java-world and I am happy to not still be there.)
It all works for me and I don't remember doing anything special to get it to work. I wouldn't know about blurays, but dvds work just fine here. I watch blurays (and dvds as well) on my ps3 though because the bluetooth remote provides a better interface than my keyboard and mouse.
Oddly I guess, Windows is where my sound problems are all at. Every time my background changes (according to the default win7 style), I get a static sound. There is constant background static in every 3d game. My friends say my mic has a lot of static as well.
If I watch enough youtube videos then my speakers start making a very loud static noise (doesn't matter what my volume is at unless it is muted). The only way to get rid of this is to reboot. None of these issues are there when I boot into Ubuntu.
Most computer users I come across need 4 applications: an internet browser, a pdf viewer, a program that can open word and a program that can open excel files. I haven't seen a Linux desktop that doesn't provide these out of the box in the past few years.
So, what is missing from getting Linux to the masses? 1. retail distribution channels (walmart, dell,...) 2. marketing presence 3. easy to use, consolidated app store with a way for users to actually pay for stuff
Google could easily fix all 3 of those issues; why hasn't it yet?... ChromeOS. Expect a solid windows competitor in the next few years.
That might not mean your mac systems are worse, just that the users of them are more noisy. 10% of our users are using OSX, but 60% of the complaints in company come from them. I (am not in the IT dept) personally know of dozens of problems in the windows side that are never reported; these users sit there and pretend the problem isn't there. These are common issues too, like accidentally deleting a folder on the start menu, so that the only way they can run a program is from their desktop, or losing the formatting toolbar in word 2003 and not knowing how to put it back (one particular user has 2 documents open at all times, one that she copies text from and the one she is working on; whenever she needs to bold text or put in a title, she copies and pastes it from the old document; she wouldn't know how to create some formatting that wasn't already in a document she has somewhere). These people will just sit it out until the next upgrade cycle. That is when they get a "new" computer which IT reset to company settings.
We aren't talking about computer savvy people here, we are talking about the general workforce over 30 right now. In my experience the difference between the windows users and the mac users are that the mac users complain more. The users have just as many problems on macs as they do on windows, but the mac users tend not to put up with it.
Slashdot Mirror
The last time I wrote any graphics code, OpenGL was much easier to write than DirectX. Granted that was during DirectX 7. I suspect MS has gone to a lot of trouble making DirectX much simpler for accelerated 2d (probably happened as they went to start writing Aero).
Implementing either OpenGL or DirectX for a particular card isn't that difficult, but doing so efficiently without significant bugs for every single card that driver is supposed to support is. The documentation for any 1 revision of the Radeon series is hundreds of pages long.
Can someone explain why we might want to not let mosquitoes carrying a vaccine for malaria reproduce?
For me the module is Firebug. Chromebug is not nearly good enough yet (it is getting there).
You set your hopes too low.
Do it like this:
"The best I hope can be done with child porn is that the perpetrators are burned alive on worldwide television."
After their hands, feet and privates are repeatedly cut and dipped in vats of boiling sulfuric acid and they are force-fed a mixture of broken glass, rusty nails and diesel fuel.
outside of =()=, I find that code to be pretty simple:
$a bitwise xor $b (thus the result contains \0 in each char that is the same)
regex looking for null chars in a string
thus this returns a list of null chars
My guess is that this =()= set of operators causes the $n variable to be the result of the list evaluated in scalar context (resulting in the length of this list).
Indeed if you look closely you can see that that is 2 assignment operators and an empty list. You could rewrite it as:
thus:
() = causes the regex to be matched in a list context. Had you straight up written $n=($a..., then $n would be given either true or false. It is slightly confusing that you are using the empty list as an lvalue, but then again this is perl. This empty list means you don't care about the matches, only that the matching is done in list context. The final assignment evaluates the resulting list in scalar context, returning the length of the list.
I would have written it as:
because actual regex matching is not necessary here.
agreed. these are serious bugs. although it is surprising that so many crash bugs have been fixed only in the 8th beta, but okay.
Beta 7 is basically where JM landed for the beta. I have a feeling that this was a significant part of the actual bugfixes that have happened.
you are saying that sunspider test results are bull. that's a new one, because i thought everyone considered that to be a real test of js performance.
no I am saying find me a reference that says the stable version of chrome is beating beta8 or a comparable nightly release in terms of performance. The DEV build is certainly faster, but the stable build (8.0.552.224)?
the whole reason why chrome is considered to be fast is that it scores way ahead on sunspider and sunspider-like tests. i find firefox 3.6 to have the same load times as chrome on almost every page. and then there are some pages (like slashdot discussions with >1000 comments) that load and scroll much faster on firefox 3.6 than chrome. so, if you disregard sunspider scores then you can't compare js performance objectively at all.
Again I am not disregarding sunspider scores. In fact I linked you to the mozilla site which is testing 10 tip builds a day for 3 compile options of Firefox and a built from source version of the chrome engine using the latest source for that. Very clearly in the sunspider chart there, the version of Firefox's javascript engine which will be in the official release is beating the absolute newest publicly available version of the v8 engine used in chrome by 9.4 milliseconds. On the kraken benchmark (sunspider was built by apple, kraken was built by mozilla, v8-bench was built by google), ff4 is over 9 seconds faster. The v8-bench test is favoring google but it is the only one I have seen.
If you haven't gotten the memo here yet, MichaelKristopeit### is trolling many different parts of this page (roughly 10% of the comments here are his).
He has proceeded through several sets of insults via multiple different posts from multiple users. He is getting by the moderation system a little bit by the aspect that he is a new user and thus has neutral karma. I think he gets a new user id (increasing the number) whenever his karma becomes negative so that his trolls continue to show up. I am pretty sure that there is a way to apply a negative bonus to new users so that you could avoid seeing him and those like him, but that would cause you to stop seeing other users who are saying something useful but do not post often.
This person is exploiting a weakness in the current moderation system. I don't know how it could be improved to get rid of him without adversely affecting other users. One way to do it would be to make all new users wait a period of time before they are allowed to post. That would raise the level of commitment that this person would need to continue his trolling but might not stop it. It also may have too much of an impact on other users that the /. devs may not want to implement it.
Actually (I have been running minefield since beta4): /. is an app tab me seeing the stories from weeks ago every time the browser is restarted)
* several of them at least were actual full browser crashes
* others were partial crashes (eg youtube stopped working for a few days in there because the flash plugin kept crashing)
* odd bugs like the addon bar disappearing (and without it there was no way to get to some extensions)
* bad UX in the panorama functionality (you could close panorama and lose all of the tabs you had open)
* app tabs were (and might still be, I haven't verified it yet) loading the page that they saw out of cache instead of online (resulting in when
On your "points":
@1: while this is true, the new ui is more consistent from a themer's perspective and so this is easier to do
@2: Bull. The JM engine (JM+TM actually) is only currently beaten by the last few revisions of the v8 engine trunk repository, and only in the v8-bench tests (which feature very repeated tests that are benefited most by the v8 optimization set, which progressively further optimizes as lines of code are repeated): http://www.arewefastyet.com/awfy2.php; the IE9 beta engine doesn't actually appear to be any faster than the IE8 engine, but it does have some new dead code matching algorithms so that it seems faster on the benchmarks (that is to say it looks much faster on sunspider because a lot of that code never even gets run due to it being recognized as dead code, but on a site with heavy js usage the changes are insignificant).
@3: Perhaps I don't understand what is so great here. Could someone enlighten me as to why we should care (as users and as web developers) about what particular windows specific hardware acceleration tech is being used?
Actual new features that matter IMO in ff4: ...)
1. JM engine
2. css border radius (proper support in all browsers will affect page sizes on a significant part of the internet)
3. css background image options (background-clip, background-origin, background-size)
4. css calc() function
5. html5 form elements
6. session history management (history.pushState,
7. indexedDb
8. shipping sync with ff4
9. multitouch api
10. HSTS
11. JS typed arrays
12. considerable refactoring and deprecated code removal from Gecko (which will allow future development to happen faster)
While this beta is indeed far better than the last one, there still are some problems that need to be ironed out before it is ready for everyone. It still has some teething issues in the UI that take some getting used to (the status bar is gone, hyperlinks show the new url in the awesomebar, the context menu items for open in new tab and open in new window have swapped, etc.). I believe some of these are still changing. There are still 180+ bugs targeting ff4 and the underlying gecko 2.0 infrastructure (note ff4 is using a major upgrade of the underlying engine which it hasn't done a major upgrade since before ff1):
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?query_format=advanced&bug_status=UNCONFIRMED&bug_status=NEW&bug_status=ASSIGNED&bug_status=REOPENED&target_milestone=Firefox%204.0b9&target_milestone=Firefox%204.0&target_milestone=mozilla2.0b9&target_milestone=mozilla2.0&product=Core&product=Firefox
I've always liked the idea of one-way time travel:
You can get into the past, and change it, but never in a way to affect your own past or the past in the universe you were in before.
Like stepping through a door into the past, then changing something. Back on the original side of the door, the past hasn't been altered but through the door a different future may unfold. Fortunately most of the time travel in Stargate is of this type. It is the Dr. Who style time travel which I have problems with.
V8 is an embeddable engine.
.NET apps: http://javascriptdotnet.codeplex.com/
IMO it is actually easier to use than Rhino.
From C++: http://code.google.com/apis/v8/embed.html
For
python: http://code.google.com/p/pyv8/
ruby: https://github.com/cowboyd/therubyracer
...
The way to do it without javascript (so that it would work in Firefox 3 as well with NoScript enabled) was to do it purely with css:
in html:
<a class='linktestgoogle' href='www.google.com'> </a>
in css:
.linktestgoogle {visibility: hidden;}
.linktestgoogle:visited { background-url: url('pagevisited.php?url=google'); }
(correcting for mistakes made in typing into this textarea)
My bet would be that they are simply looking not to give others any help in SEO rankings. This very simple cipher would make it so that any potential search engine wouldn't see a url to pornhub.com on their site.
A beautiful sentiment, but naïve. A lot of these "I want to live forever" statements lack wisdom which usually comes with aging, at some point.
It's about time. Time is the most valuable currency we have. We have a finite amount of it. It helps define us and give each moment meaning.
Hypothetical immortality (think Tolkien's elves) would remove all value in time.
Time has value because it allows energy to do work. This property of time would still exist regardless of how long we live. It is fundamental to the nature of the universe and cannot be removed without removing the rest of the universe.
We do not value it because we currently have an upper bound on the amount of potential work which may be done in our lifetimes.
Can you imagine a world where people no longer cared about time any longer? They no longer cared about change? I don't think we've met a true conservative until we've met someone who is a thousand years old.
Actually, I can. In fact there have been books on the idea conceived thousands of years ago. They came up with this notion that no matter what you do with the first part of your life, you wind up in one of two places. You then proceed to stay in this place forever.
I am ok with dying because I absolutely believe there is no possibility of such a fate and that instead when I die, I will cease to exist and that the unchanging nature of that non-existence doesn't matter. I would rather prolong this death as long as possible but I admit that I ultimately do not have free will and that my concept of existence (and free will) is merely a quirky side affect of the universe tending towards maximum entropy (and as such, I will die when I die and any thought I have to avoid it is a result of time allowing energy to equalize).
If I were to postulate that any religion involving such fates were true, I want to live forever out of the possibility that I would wind up in either place. The mere idea of being aware of an eternal unchanging existence is horrifying.
Let's say we needed to both write the same application. I wrote mine in Python and you wrote it in C. I am willing to bet that I will have a solution written faster than you (shorter time to market), it will be smaller than yours (less code to maintain) and it will have fewer bugs than yours. Granted yours will be faster, but after profiling (in some of the time I have saved by getting to market sooner) I can recover most of that speed difference.
This does not include: Database access (although the .NET Entity Framework may address much of this; from what I've seen it's a lot like JPA), Concurrent collections
Granted, that list is just things I can think of off the top of my head.
Entity Framework is only barely usable right now (never trust the first or second version of something to come from MS; they usually get it mostly right on the 3rd). NHibernate is very good.
Concurrent collections are something I would guess as one of the weakest points of the framework right now, though I haven't used the ones in System.Collections.Concurrent yet (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd997305.aspx) because we aren't going to get to .net 4 until probably q3 2011. Even still I generally don't work on anything where these algorithms and data structures will have a big impact.
Visual Studio + Resharper is by far the best development environment I have ever worked in.
By comparison Eclipse and NetBeans are slow and feel bulky and BlueJ is nearly unuseable. If I had to give it up, I think I would go straight back to vi; Every "modern" ide I've used (other than VS+R#) I have found to be quite frustrating. The only thing that would make VS better is for it to have a better interactive mode (like snippets compiler built in).
(Currently a C# developer and Python hobbyist; have previously spent 6 years in Java-world and I am happy to not still be there.)
It all works for me and I don't remember doing anything special to get it to work. I wouldn't know about blurays, but dvds work just fine here. I watch blurays (and dvds as well) on my ps3 though because the bluetooth remote provides a better interface than my keyboard and mouse.
Oddly I guess, Windows is where my sound problems are all at. Every time my background changes (according to the default win7 style), I get a static sound. There is constant background static in every 3d game. My friends say my mic has a lot of static as well.
If I watch enough youtube videos then my speakers start making a very loud static noise (doesn't matter what my volume is at unless it is muted). The only way to get rid of this is to reboot. None of these issues are there when I boot into Ubuntu.
Most computer users I come across need 4 applications: an internet browser, a pdf viewer, a program that can open word and a program that can open excel files. I haven't seen a Linux desktop that doesn't provide these out of the box in the past few years.
So, what is missing from getting Linux to the masses? ...)
1. retail distribution channels (walmart, dell,
2. marketing presence
3. easy to use, consolidated app store with a way for users to actually pay for stuff
Google could easily fix all 3 of those issues; why hasn't it yet? ... ChromeOS. Expect a solid windows competitor in the next few years.
That might not mean your mac systems are worse, just that the users of them are more noisy. 10% of our users are using OSX, but 60% of the complaints in company come from them. I (am not in the IT dept) personally know of dozens of problems in the windows side that are never reported; these users sit there and pretend the problem isn't there. These are common issues too, like accidentally deleting a folder on the start menu, so that the only way they can run a program is from their desktop, or losing the formatting toolbar in word 2003 and not knowing how to put it back (one particular user has 2 documents open at all times, one that she copies text from and the one she is working on; whenever she needs to bold text or put in a title, she copies and pastes it from the old document; she wouldn't know how to create some formatting that wasn't already in a document she has somewhere). These people will just sit it out until the next upgrade cycle. That is when they get a "new" computer which IT reset to company settings.
We aren't talking about computer savvy people here, we are talking about the general workforce over 30 right now. In my experience the difference between the windows users and the mac users are that the mac users complain more. The users have just as many problems on macs as they do on windows, but the mac users tend not to put up with it.