> I definitely noticed a jump in performance between 2.2.16 and 2.4.0 so they must be missing something here.
I use a "real world" benchmark (which of course might be completely irrelevant to you, however relevant it happens to be to me).
Here are some recent observations regarding this specific benchmark, ranked in order of effect:
Changing BIOS memory setting from CAS 2 to CAS 3 : 3.7% speedup.
Changing to a different brand motherboard, and matching the original's BIOS settings as well as possible : 2.1% speedup.
Upgrading 2.4.3 to 2.4.4 : 1.1% speedup.
Running under kernel compiled as "Athlon" rather than "i686" : no substantial difference.
Moreover, although I have not had time to test it, a well-informed friend tells me that using certain recent versions of gcc rather than certain older ones can give a whopping 30% slowdown, even using the same flags for compilation. (N.B. - He did not say "gcc is getting worse with time". He merely remarked re two specific versions, whose numbers escape me at the moment.)
If performance tuning is your forte, then clearly you've got your work cut out for you.
> No matter what the population here thinks, M$ will still keep the ajority of its (l)users. ostly because people are to ignorant to see that this suscription based software isn't worth it.
What's happening there, boiscout? Did you forget to pay the rent on your m key?
Much as I despise Microsoft, I feel obliged to "defend" them by pointing out that this is another one of their non-innovations. I worked in an all-VMS shop over a decade ago, and everything was on limited time licenses.
The general scheme was price = product_base * machine_speed * number_of_users * how_long_do_you_want_it
The only news regarding MS adopting the plan is -
a probable symptom of their cash flow problems (aka "market saturation")
they think they can start acting like the big kids now
> I may be speaking a few days too soon since the Texas Legislature doesn't go into it's two-year recess until mid next week, but UCITA seems to have died in Committee.
Perhaps my many friends in Texas will forgive me for saying...
Since it doesn't have anything to do with beef, football, firearms, or petrochemicals, the average member of the Texas legislature probably doesn't know what the heck UCITA is talking about, let alone give a damn.
> I hope the five "Demon Princes" novels get reprinted soon, too; they deserve to be read by a younger generation.
Orb put the 5 Demon Princes novels out in a two-volume trade-sized paperback edition in the late '90s, and I happened to notice them on the shelf in my local bookstore earlier this week.
Ditto for Planet of Adventure, new Orb edition in the early '90s, four short novels in a single trade-sized volume. I've spotted it fairly recently as well.
All these are somewhat old fashioned SciFi, but whacking good fun, and I highly recommend them.
For heroic fantasy, track down his Lyonesse trilogy, which is more recent than the originals of the above, but has not been reprinted AFAIK.
Another pseudo-SciFi that you might be able to find in a used book store is his Maske:Thaery [sp?], which also provides a great good time.
While almost anything Vance ever wrote is worth reading, the above are, IMO, the cream of the cream.
> Sword Against Death by Fritz Leiber. Nice. Thanks for the excerpt. I think I'll get the book.
It's actually part of a seven volume series about a pair of heroes, usually with several stories per volume. The first one starts off a bit slow for my tastes, but it gets better as you go. (You may enjoy it best if you're just a wee bit warped.)
Also, let it be clear that the excerpt is just the ground for one story among many; the Devourers do not occur elsewhere in the series.
Still, if you like the Swords & Sorcery genre, I highly recommend the series.
I was astonished to find this prophecy in a book by Fritz Leiber, published way back in '70:
[Ningauble speaking:] "The Devourers are the most accomplished merchants in all the know universes--so accomplished, indeed, that they sell only trash. There is a deep necessity in this, for the Devourers must occupy all their cunning in perfecting their methods of selling and so have not an instant to spare in considering the worth of what they sell. Indeed, they dare not concern themselves with such matters for a moment, for fear of losing their golden touch--and yet such are their skills that their wares are utterly irresistible, indeed the finest wares in all the many universes--if you follow me?"
[...]
"The method of the Devourers is to set up shop in a new world and entice the bravest and the most adventuresome and the supplest-minded of its people--who have so much imagination that with just a touch of suggestion they themselves do most of the work of selling themselves."
[...]
"When these are safely ensnared the Devourers proceed to deal with the rest of the population: meaning simply that they sell and sell and sell!--sell trash and take good money and even finer things in exchange."
[...]
"All this is very bad, My Gentle Son [...], but natural enough in universes administered by gods such as we have--natural enough and perhaps endurable. However"--he paused--"there is worse to come! The Devourers want not only the patronage of all beings in all universes, but--doubtless because they are afraid someone will someday raise the ever-unpleasant question, of the true worth of things--they want all their customers reduced to a state of slavish and submissive suggestibility, so that they are fit for nothing whatever but to gawk at and buy the trash the Devourers offer for sale. This means of course that eventually the Devourers' customers will have nothing wherewith to pay the Devourers for their trash, but the Devourers do not seem to be concerned with this eventuality. Perhaps they feel that there is always a new universe to exploit. And perhaps there is!"
[...]
"The Devourers want only to amass cash and raise little ones like themselves to amass more cash and the want to compete with each other at cash-amassing. [...] And the Devourers want to brood about their great services to the many universes--it is their claim that servile customers make the most obedient subjects for the gods--and to complain about how the work of amassing cash tortures their minds and upsets their digestions. Beyond this, each of the Devourers also secretly collects and hides away forever, to delight no eyes but his own, all the finest objects and thoughts created by true men and women (and true wizards and true demons) and bought by the Devourers at bankruptcy prices and paid for with trash or--this is their ultimate preference--with nothing at all."
Leiber, Fritz. "Bazaar of the Bizarre", in Swords Against Death, pp. 232-234 --
I've really liked it so far, and I seem to like it better as I get more familiar with it.
> how easy is to create and access objects from the other language?
Supposedly pretty easy, though I haven't tried that yet. You might want to google SWIG and see what it will do for you.
Also, I haven't tried GUILE with C++, but I think I've seen messages about that on their mailing list, so I would ass-u-me that it works OK.
> Know what the compiled code size of GUILE is?
Sorry, no. FWIW, it looks like libguile.a is about 3/4 Mb and libguile.so is about 1/2 Mb.
> How does it do garbage collection?
I hear the technical term for the kind of GC they do now and then, but I haven't had time to read up on it, so it doesn't mean anything to me and I haven't bothered trying to remember it. I think it's supposed to be pretty aggressive, but still shy of precise. (Don't quote me on that.)
From the above, it should be obvious that I'm nothing near an expert. You might want to subscribe to their mailing list and post your questions there.
> Now that XML is around and the world is saying it?s the greatest thing since sliced bread - I have an analogy.
FWIW...
I have an as-yet unreleased OSS project that I tinker with when time allows. Last summer I implemented an XML system for storing external data. My thoughts upon reviewing it: Ugh-ly!
Since then I have ripped out all the XML and replaced it with GUILE [= Scheme = a dialect of Lisp = on topic], and I find that it's much cleaner, more readable/maintainable, and incredibly easy to parse. As a free bonus, now that I've started on the user-level scripting part of the application, I can load Scheme code directly from my config files and use all the pattern matching / symbol substitution / code writing stuff that Lisp and its ilk are so good at.
YMMV, but it sure as heck works for me -- as a data language, a data-description metalanguage, and a scripting language.
As a side note, interested parties might want to investigate the use of a Lisp-style language by Xconq for specifing game variants.
Slashdot Mirror
> Changing BIOS memory setting from CAS 2 to CAS 3 : 3.7% speedup.
Oops. Make the obvious correction.
--
> "Let's see the bad kid who sits next to me, who isn't named Sloppy, explain why his paper also has that mathmatical feature."
Prof: "Unfortunately, Sloppy describes that next kid's work quite accurately, so I still don't know who copied from whom!"
--
I use a "real world" benchmark (which of course might be completely irrelevant to you, however relevant it happens to be to me).
Here are some recent observations regarding this specific benchmark, ranked in order of effect:
- Changing BIOS memory setting from CAS 2 to CAS 3 : 3.7% speedup.
- Changing to a different brand motherboard, and matching the original's BIOS settings as well as possible : 2.1% speedup.
- Upgrading 2.4.3 to 2.4.4 : 1.1% speedup.
- Running under kernel compiled as "Athlon" rather than "i686" : no substantial difference.
Moreover, although I have not had time to test it, a well-informed friend tells me that using certain recent versions of gcc rather than certain older ones can give a whopping 30% slowdown, even using the same flags for compilation. (N.B. - He did not say "gcc is getting worse with time". He merely remarked re two specific versions, whose numbers escape me at the moment.)If performance tuning is your forte, then clearly you've got your work cut out for you.
--
Where does moderation go when it disappears?
(Granted, maybe I should be asking this on the Slash 2.0 thread.)
--
Hope he doesn't analyse my Slashdot posts!
--
> Want to see good C?
I thought the French all programmed in Système D.
--
> Plus, I hope I give some admins a good laugh now and then. If you ever see this in your server logs, you'll know it's me: Mozilla/6.666 (Atari 2600)
Mine's been running on an Apple][ for the last couple of years. According to your logs, that is.
--
> No matter what the population here thinks, M$ will still keep the ajority of its (l)users. ostly because people are to ignorant to see that this suscription based software isn't worth it.
What's happening there, boiscout? Did you forget to pay the rent on your m key?
--
The general scheme was
price = product_base * machine_speed * number_of_users * how_long_do_you_want_it
The only news regarding MS adopting the plan is -
--
I think this author's style of analysis is commonly called "blush lit".
--
> According to Everything, RSS is an acronym for Rich Site Summary, an XML format for distributing news headlines on the Web
Now that we're in the post-new economy, can you recommend a tool for doing Poor Site Summaries?
ps - Please recommend something cheap.
--
> With the exception of the stultifying Lyonesse series (I suppose Someone liked them)
I did. In fact it has the position of honor on my bookshelf.
There's no accounting for taste, eh?
--
> I may be speaking a few days too soon since the Texas Legislature doesn't go into it's two-year recess until mid next week, but UCITA seems to have died in Committee.
Perhaps my many friends in Texas will forgive me for saying...
Since it doesn't have anything to do with beef, football, firearms, or petrochemicals, the average member of the Texas legislature probably doesn't know what the heck UCITA is talking about, let alone give a damn.
--
> I hope the five "Demon Princes" novels get reprinted soon, too; they deserve to be read by a younger generation.
Orb put the 5 Demon Princes novels out in a two-volume trade-sized paperback edition in the late '90s, and I happened to notice them on the shelf in my local bookstore earlier this week.
Ditto for Planet of Adventure, new Orb edition in the early '90s, four short novels in a single trade-sized volume. I've spotted it fairly recently as well.
All these are somewhat old fashioned SciFi, but whacking good fun, and I highly recommend them.
For heroic fantasy, track down his Lyonesse trilogy, which is more recent than the originals of the above, but has not been reprinted AFAIK.
Another pseudo-SciFi that you might be able to find in a used book store is his Maske:Thaery [sp?], which also provides a great good time.
While almost anything Vance ever wrote is worth reading, the above are, IMO, the cream of the cream.
--
> Kudo's to the author for the clever linking of GPL with a negative tem like 'viral'.
Some of us advocate the term 'inductive' instead. Partly because it's less negative; partly because it's more accurate.
--
> Sword Against Death by Fritz Leiber. Nice. Thanks for the excerpt. I think I'll get the book.
It's actually part of a seven volume series about a pair of heroes, usually with several stories per volume. The first one starts off a bit slow for my tastes, but it gets better as you go. (You may enjoy it best if you're just a wee bit warped.)
Also, let it be clear that the excerpt is just the ground for one story among many; the Devourers do not occur elsewhere in the series.
Still, if you like the Swords & Sorcery genre, I highly recommend the series.
--
--
> You mean I've been decieved by those nasty GNU hippies all this time?
Remember what Ballmer said a couple of months ago: Free software cheats people out of the opportunity to pay for their software.
--
> How do you find GUILE?
"Works for me; YMMV."
I've really liked it so far, and I seem to like it better as I get more familiar with it.
> how easy is to create and access objects from the other language?
Supposedly pretty easy, though I haven't tried that yet. You might want to google SWIG and see what it will do for you.
Also, I haven't tried GUILE with C++, but I think I've seen messages about that on their mailing list, so I would ass-u-me that it works OK.
> Know what the compiled code size of GUILE is?
Sorry, no. FWIW, it looks like libguile.a is about 3/4 Mb and libguile.so is about 1/2 Mb.
> How does it do garbage collection?
I hear the technical term for the kind of GC they do now and then, but I haven't had time to read up on it, so it doesn't mean anything to me and I haven't bothered trying to remember it. I think it's supposed to be pretty aggressive, but still shy of precise. (Don't quote me on that.)
From the above, it should be obvious that I'm nothing near an expert. You might want to subscribe to their mailing list and post your questions there.
--
> Now that XML is around and the world is saying it?s the greatest thing since sliced bread - I have an analogy.
FWIW...
I have an as-yet unreleased OSS project that I tinker with when time allows. Last summer I implemented an XML system for storing external data. My thoughts upon reviewing it: Ugh-ly!
Since then I have ripped out all the XML and replaced it with GUILE [= Scheme = a dialect of Lisp = on topic], and I find that it's much cleaner, more readable/maintainable, and incredibly easy to parse. As a free bonus, now that I've started on the user-level scripting part of the application, I can load Scheme code directly from my config files and use all the pattern matching / symbol substitution / code writing stuff that Lisp and its ilk are so good at.
YMMV, but it sure as heck works for me -- as a data language, a data-description metalanguage, and a scripting language.
As a side note, interested parties might want to investigate the use of a Lisp-style language by Xconq for specifing game variants.
--
> Lisp (along with ML and Scheme) is dearly loved by theoretical computer scientists.
Theoreticians do love functional languages, but Lisp is primarily popular among AI researchers.
--
> What is "Lisp" based off of? Is it a C++ style code or something else, and why have I not heard of it before?
Actually, it's one of the oldest computer languages still in (semi-)common use. Vintage 1958, IIRC.
> What are some other "famous" applications that are using Lisp?
Lisp.
--
I wonder how many net.admins noticed the sudden traffic spike and thought, "Oh, Crap! Another weekend e-mail virus attack!"
--
Then we could have "enjoyed" hearing phone conversations in the theatre during the original Star Wars, rather than having to wait for the prequels.
--
For surfing p()orn sites and playing Tomb Raider, I have found that a life-size inflatable doll makes the best gesture-based "input" device.
--