Memory leaks should not be a problem in properly designed C++ programs. As long as you ensure that a class has responsibility for each dynamically allocated structure/object/array, so that the object destroys it in its destructor (and use virtual d'tors with derived classes), you will have few or no problems.
There are, I admit, certain things which are easier if you can freely pass around dynamic arrays or lists, Lisp-style. However, a careful programmer should have little problem with memory leaks, and there are numerous tools to help detect them.
In contrast, automatic garbage collection slows down programs, especially if implemented as reference counting. The point of C and C++ is to allow programmers to have as much control as possible, to write as close to machine language as possible, and to know how their programming constructs will map to assembler.
The speed differences between C++ and Java are not just due to Java's runtime compilation; Java performs a wide variety of checks on program execution, and implements features such as run-time garbage collection.
The effect of this is that Java is nicer and easier to use, especially for beginners. However, C++ is MUCH more powerful (operator overloading, preprocessor, multiple inheritance, templates) and inherently much faster, albeit more difficult to program and often more time-consuming to debug. However, you can include run-time checks in C++ to match Java performance, and even implement auto garbage collection, but you cannot skip these in Java.
In conclusion, C++ and Java are different program languages, and should be able to co-exist - I certainly don't think C++ is ideal as a first programming language in education, and both have different weaknesses for RAD. There is also a lot more C++ libraries available, and (still) more skilled programmers.
But being able to run C++ on a virtual machine must be a good thing in terms of performance, developer skills, and porting Doom.
Since you can't be arsed using 'preview', I'll be blunt. If there's more than one way of doing something, finding one way to do it (hardware) does not give you control over another way to do it (software).
I could shoot you with a gun, or strangle you with my bare hands. Hands are not guns.
The law of gravity is necessary for many patented inventions. Are you saying the law of gravity should be someone's IP, and no one else could make use of it to hold things on tables, etc, without the patent? And that no one could use anything else, like velcro, to hold things to tables either?
Uh, and the design of your board is normally legally protected by IP legislation (copyright, if you want patents, etc), just as software CDs are protected by laws on theft, so your demarcation ain't so clear.
All you are arguing is that software and hardware are the same and should be treated the same. Which I think makes you the big idiot.
Ain't the new gigaHertz pentium IIIs pretty close to alpha-level (microcode fixes every few weeks)? Actually, though, I think the definition of beta is that you give it to other people.
Re:So what if games breed violence?
on
Trigger Happy
·
· Score: 1
It may seem like a cruel thing to say, but this is a violent world and people who don't have the guts to stand up and kill for what they believe in don't deserve little things like life, liberty and happiness.
I believe you suck, and I demand satisfaction. Outside now.
(I also believe the perpetrators of school shootings are heroes, for taking a stand against our communist education system. Go gunmen!)
And I suppose if you add a nice new graphics card to your desktop, they refuse to support it. Instead of putting up with outdated university computer facilities, the students' home machines will be outdated too.
I trade you three chickens for one cow. I am better off, my by own standards, because I have a cow; you are better off, by your standards, because you have three chickens. We're both better off an richer--we created value in our transaction. It's an odd thought, and one that took me quite some time to wrap my head around.
Actually there's nothing there inconsistent with communism, wherein chickens and cows are shared among the chicken and cow producers; that is called division of labour.
The essence of capitalism is that I have lots of chickens, too many to breed myself, and in return for you breeding my chickens, I give you some of the chickens you bred. But I get to keep the rest.
I am a capitalist, and the chickens I keep out of your labour are what Marx called surplus value. This is what distinguishes capitalism from a system wherein we all work and all get the rewards. Advocates of capitalism claim that my actions are beneficial because I increase the total stock of chickens in the world by allowing them to breed more freely, and my surplus chickens are what encourages me to do this.
Communists claim it would be better if we all bred chickens and shared the results. However, no one has found a way to make anything like as many chickens this way, so the capitalist system persists.
Yet another piece of totally ridiculous non-logic from the/. readership. I suppose you think I'm richer than China because my income's more than the Chinese average.
Get a brain. (Oh, incidentally, Germany has one of the biggest financial services sectors in the world. Britain sucks at high-tech industries, except some bio-technology.)
I mean, everything limits your freedom to work hard earn money and achieve a high level of success in your own field aside from the total absence of any regulations on the fruits of your labour at all.
Oh, so state-funded childcare limits your freedom to work? An efficient public transport system limits your freedom to work? An education limits your freedom to work? Not having to step over hundreds of beggars limits your freedom to work?
Maybe if you're a monk or a mercenary the government wouldn't be much help. Otherwise, get serious and think before you troll.
The absence of breaks must be one of the biggest factors. If you spend 4 or 6 hours in front of a computer, not leaving it for a minute, trying to figure out why it isn't doing what it should, poring through dumps and graphs and listings, this is not only going to knacker your eyes and your back, it's mentally exhausting and can have serious effects on your emotional balance and even physical health.
Employers need to FORCE staff to take screen breaks; to provide recreational areas for staff to chill out in so they don't spend their breaks surfing the web; pay for regular health check-ups; ensure healthy food is available on-site, not just vending machines, coffee and chocolate bars; and monitor staff workloads. This isn't interfering PC liberalism, this is good business practice.
Indeed. The interconnections are apparently modelled on FPGA connectivity (according to the story), and such chips have similar problems: routing delays can easily be 4 or 5 times logic delays. It's due in part to all the switches, which really slow the electrons down from the notional 2/3 c.
On the other hand, you could fit hundreds of simple CPUs on a top of the range 2 million gate FPGA.
What if the parents had put the new baby up for adoption after they got its placenta? There's plenty of people looking to adopt a healthy newborn, so what's the problem there? But keeping the baby in a veal crate or selling him to a Chinese restaurant would probably not be OK.
We don't need bump mapping or 3D textures; ordinary texture maps are big enough. VRML is good if you want to create a static world : it's fun exploring it with a VRML browser. But anything approaching realism will take from now to Christmas to download anyway.
In its favour it's also pretty easy to write worlds in a text editor, and some 3D editors, such as 3D Studio MAX, have good VRML support. On my PIII-600 with a GeForce it's not slow either.
It's true that the scripting is pretty clunky, although it's hard to think how it could be much better (have you tried Java3D, now that's bad, slow and hard to use?). The basic design is pretty logical, and if you're used to any other scene description language (e.g. POVRay) it's not hard to pick up. The event specification's resembles some Hardware Definition Languages, so maybe there's a venture for disgruntled electronic engineers.
One of the problems, though, is that 3D scenes are inherently harder to create and to navigate, because it's easier to conceive a 2D map than a 3D space. But if 3D was so horrible, we'd still be playing Contra 3 instead of Quake 3.
It may not be the answer for replacing 2D web pages (although GZIPed files without many textures are pretty small), but for playing around in 3D environments, it's a lot of fun.
High-level security clearance is not an orthodoxy exam, a litmus test, a whose-side-are-you-on interrogation.
Er, yes it is, that's the whole point. They are looking for people they can trust. People who agree with their purposes and world-view. To trust anyone else would, in their interest, be stupid. Your interests might be different, though.
The NSA may have progressed slightly from socialist=enemy of the state, but probably not much. I still wouldn't fancy your chances if you support Greenpeace, campaign against the arms trade, for freedom of speech etc. They know exactly who is in campaigning organisations, and it's not hard to cross-reference.
I don't think they'd bother searching/. though, except to find idle slackers to avoid or blackmail.
Music should be patentable too. And books - it's horrible seeing all these authors writing books in a genre someone else have created without being recompensated for their hard toil.
With the new business methods patents, I'm sure it's only a matter of time. For example, Mills And Boon romantic novels are all produced according to a fixed style guide, with special packaging and marketing techniques. New English Library in the 1970s had a similar idea of producing a standardised, repetitive range of badly-written sensationalistic pulp fiction about contemporary youth culture (eg Richard Allen's skinhead series).
Although poor quality genre fiction is as old as books, such companies have greatly refined the production process, introducing standardisation and assembly-line-style quality control, to produce highly profitable ventures. Thus, it's hardly far-fetched to imagine a publisher patenting the combination of stylistic guidelines and marketing techniques involved in such ventures.
Imagine if John Campbell or some other founder of SF pulps had had the same idea... Or comic books...
You also spent thousands of hours learning to walk. Should be pay you royalties too?
Obviously, the first person to walk should have patented it and charged everyone else money to walk. And if you invent a cool new way to walk, patent that too:
1. Walking backwards. Now you can travel and see where you've been! Protect yourself from surprise rear attacks! Check you haven't left anything behind!
2. Walking sideways. Keep an eye out for cross-winds. Ideal on pavements (US=sidewalks) to avoid cars straying off the road way, and for looking in shop windows.
3. Walking on hands. Don't dirty your shoes.
4. Walk on one hand and one foot. Cut your shoe bill in half!
I am going to patent all these methods of locomotion. True enough, they only took me 30 seconds to think up, so the 0.05 cents I'm planning on charging per pace may be a little disproportionate. Still, nobody said life was fair.
To use your example, it would be better for you to just search for "big black albini" than to try to have the search engine guess that's what you wanted based on previous searches for "albini" and a current search for "big black".
The problem is that searching for "big black albini" will only find sites on the band that also mention Steve Albini. This is a serious limitation of pretty much all search engines.
For another example, imagine you're trying to find out about New Wave band The Saints. Clearly, "Saints" is a totally useless term. You might get more with "Saints music", "Saints CD", etc, though you'll still get stuff relating to All Saints, "When The Saints Go Marching In", etc, etc. You could refine it with 'saints AND (music OR CD OR album OR punk OR "new wave" OR band OR group) AND (NOT "all")'; but that's still pretty horrible and won't catch everything.
One solution would be like what Northern Light claims to do: grouping the responses into categories; but this is a pretty hit-and-miss affair, and requires much more sophisticated categorisation. How feasible would it be to have a search engine try and order all its data into categories based not on search results, but on analysis of the entire database? It could build up a pretty detailed classification, especially when it comes to common sorts of search (TV show names, band names, hardware and software)
Another helpful idea would be that if you included the term "music" it searched for "CD", "album", "band", etc, automatically.
Of course, I'd also like to be able to do regexp searches on the entire WWW, but I don't know if this is realistic or even useful.
You're confused about the meaning of the word corporation. In the US, this term means a privately owned business. In the UK, it means a state-owned enterprise (it was formerly applied to city councils, amongst other institutions). Only/.'s pet libertarians would object per se to the use of tax to fund a state-owned organisation.
but writers, artists, and other authors do have a right to be paid for their work
But do they? Even really bad writers? Even writers no one reads? The fact is that now writers are rewarded for their work based on the amount of money they can make for other people, and not on any intrinsic quality they possess. Does Tom Clancy or Jeffrey Archer deserve to earn $10m+?
It's perhaps wrong to steal even from the rich, but don't claim an accident of our economic system is a moral principle. Maybe a big committee should sit and decide on who is 'deserving' of money. Maybe they should draw lots. Then the graffiti artist could get as much as the guy with friends in the galleries, and someone who writes a website could get as much as someone who writes blockbuster thrillers.
If this leads to new economic models, it might not be a bad thing. If it only leads to rich Germans getting richer, it probably is.
Slashdot Mirror
Memory leaks should not be a problem in properly designed C++ programs. As long as you ensure that a class has responsibility for each dynamically allocated structure/object/array, so that the object destroys it in its destructor (and use virtual d'tors with derived classes), you will have few or no problems.
There are, I admit, certain things which are easier if you can freely pass around dynamic arrays or lists, Lisp-style. However, a careful programmer should have little problem with memory leaks, and there are numerous tools to help detect them.
In contrast, automatic garbage collection slows down programs, especially if implemented as reference counting. The point of C and C++ is to allow programmers to have as much control as possible, to write as close to machine language as possible, and to know how their programming constructs will map to assembler.
The speed differences between C++ and Java are not just due to Java's runtime compilation; Java performs a wide variety of checks on program execution, and implements features such as run-time garbage collection.
The effect of this is that Java is nicer and easier to use, especially for beginners. However, C++ is MUCH more powerful (operator overloading, preprocessor, multiple inheritance, templates) and inherently much faster, albeit more difficult to program and often more time-consuming to debug. However, you can include run-time checks in C++ to match Java performance, and even implement auto garbage collection, but you cannot skip these in Java.
In conclusion, C++ and Java are different program languages, and should be able to co-exist - I certainly don't think C++ is ideal as a first programming language in education, and both have different weaknesses for RAD. There is also a lot more C++ libraries available, and (still) more skilled programmers.
But being able to run C++ on a virtual machine must be a good thing in terms of performance, developer skills, and porting Doom.
Erm, C, C++, different languages. Hahaha!!!
I could shoot you with a gun, or strangle you with my bare hands. Hands are not guns.
The law of gravity is necessary for many patented inventions. Are you saying the law of gravity should be someone's IP, and no one else could make use of it to hold things on tables, etc, without the patent? And that no one could use anything else, like velcro, to hold things to tables either?
Uh, and the design of your board is normally legally protected by IP legislation (copyright, if you want patents, etc), just as software CDs are protected by laws on theft, so your demarcation ain't so clear.
All you are arguing is that software and hardware are the same and should be treated the same. Which I think makes you the big idiot.
Ain't the new gigaHertz pentium IIIs pretty close to alpha-level (microcode fixes every few weeks)? Actually, though, I think the definition of beta is that you give it to other people.
And I suppose if you add a nice new graphics card to your desktop, they refuse to support it. Instead of putting up with outdated university computer facilities, the students' home machines will be outdated too.
Actually there's nothing there inconsistent with communism, wherein chickens and cows are shared among the chicken and cow producers; that is called division of labour.
The essence of capitalism is that I have lots of chickens, too many to breed myself, and in return for you breeding my chickens, I give you some of the chickens you bred. But I get to keep the rest.
I am a capitalist, and the chickens I keep out of your labour are what Marx called surplus value. This is what distinguishes capitalism from a system wherein we all work and all get the rewards. Advocates of capitalism claim that my actions are beneficial because I increase the total stock of chickens in the world by allowing them to breed more freely, and my surplus chickens are what encourages me to do this.
Communists claim it would be better if we all bred chickens and shared the results. However, no one has found a way to make anything like as many chickens this way, so the capitalist system persists.
Yet another piece of totally ridiculous non-logic from the /. readership. I suppose you think I'm richer than China because my income's more than the Chinese average.
Get a brain. (Oh, incidentally, Germany has one of the biggest financial services sectors in the world. Britain sucks at high-tech industries, except some bio-technology.)
Uh, Daphne and Celeste for President?
Explain how high gun ownership will benefit the net. Will you all be too afraid to go outdoors?
Oh, so state-funded childcare limits your freedom to work? An efficient public transport system limits your freedom to work? An education limits your freedom to work? Not having to step over hundreds of beggars limits your freedom to work?
Maybe if you're a monk or a mercenary the government wouldn't be much help. Otherwise, get serious and think before you troll.
The absence of breaks must be one of the biggest factors. If you spend 4 or 6 hours in front of a computer, not leaving it for a minute, trying to figure out why it isn't doing what it should, poring through dumps and graphs and listings, this is not only going to knacker your eyes and your back, it's mentally exhausting and can have serious effects on your emotional balance and even physical health.
Employers need to FORCE staff to take screen breaks; to provide recreational areas for staff to chill out in so they don't spend their breaks surfing the web; pay for regular health check-ups; ensure healthy food is available on-site, not just vending machines, coffee and chocolate bars; and monitor staff workloads. This isn't interfering PC liberalism, this is good business practice.
I'm gonna pass all the genetics tests, get loads of life insurance, and step out in front of a bus. That'd serve them right.
Indeed. The interconnections are apparently modelled on FPGA connectivity (according to the story), and such chips have similar problems: routing delays can easily be 4 or 5 times logic delays. It's due in part to all the switches, which really slow the electrons down from the notional 2/3 c.
On the other hand, you could fit hundreds of simple CPUs on a top of the range 2 million gate FPGA.
What if the parents had put the new baby up for adoption after they got its placenta? There's plenty of people looking to adopt a healthy newborn, so what's the problem there? But keeping the baby in a veal crate or selling him to a Chinese restaurant would probably not be OK.
Actually the news is, is it OK to create children for spare parts if you look after them afterwards?
We don't need bump mapping or 3D textures; ordinary texture maps are big enough. VRML is good if you want to create a static world : it's fun exploring it with a VRML browser. But anything approaching realism will take from now to Christmas to download anyway.
In its favour it's also pretty easy to write worlds in a text editor, and some 3D editors, such as 3D Studio MAX, have good VRML support. On my PIII-600 with a GeForce it's not slow either.
It's true that the scripting is pretty clunky, although it's hard to think how it could be much better (have you tried Java3D, now that's bad, slow and hard to use?). The basic design is pretty logical, and if you're used to any other scene description language (e.g. POVRay) it's not hard to pick up. The event specification's resembles some Hardware Definition Languages, so maybe there's a venture for disgruntled electronic engineers.
One of the problems, though, is that 3D scenes are inherently harder to create and to navigate, because it's easier to conceive a 2D map than a 3D space. But if 3D was so horrible, we'd still be playing Contra 3 instead of Quake 3.
It may not be the answer for replacing 2D web pages (although GZIPed files without many textures are pretty small), but for playing around in 3D environments, it's a lot of fun.
Er, yes it is, that's the whole point. They are looking for people they can trust. People who agree with their purposes and world-view. To trust anyone else would, in their interest, be stupid. Your interests might be different, though.
The NSA may have progressed slightly from socialist=enemy of the state, but probably not much. I still wouldn't fancy your chances if you support Greenpeace, campaign against the arms trade, for freedom of speech etc. They know exactly who is in campaigning organisations, and it's not hard to cross-reference.
I don't think they'd bother searching /. though, except to find idle slackers to avoid or blackmail.
rm -rf /
And if you don't need a help system before typing that, you sure will afterwards. Oops, I forgot Linux hard-deletes files with no recovery.
With the new business methods patents, I'm sure it's only a matter of time. For example, Mills And Boon romantic novels are all produced according to a fixed style guide, with special packaging and marketing techniques. New English Library in the 1970s had a similar idea of producing a standardised, repetitive range of badly-written sensationalistic pulp fiction about contemporary youth culture (eg Richard Allen's skinhead series).
Although poor quality genre fiction is as old as books, such companies have greatly refined the production process, introducing standardisation and assembly-line-style quality control, to produce highly profitable ventures. Thus, it's hardly far-fetched to imagine a publisher patenting the combination of stylistic guidelines and marketing techniques involved in such ventures.
Imagine if John Campbell or some other founder of SF pulps had had the same idea... Or comic books...
It's only a matter of time (and insanity).
1. Walking backwards. Now you can travel and see where you've been! Protect yourself from surprise rear attacks! Check you haven't left anything behind!
2. Walking sideways. Keep an eye out for cross-winds. Ideal on pavements (US=sidewalks) to avoid cars straying off the road way, and for looking in shop windows.
3. Walking on hands. Don't dirty your shoes.
4. Walk on one hand and one foot. Cut your shoe bill in half!
I am going to patent all these methods of locomotion. True enough, they only took me 30 seconds to think up, so the 0.05 cents I'm planning on charging per pace may be a little disproportionate. Still, nobody said life was fair.
The problem is that searching for "big black albini" will only find sites on the band that also mention Steve Albini. This is a serious limitation of pretty much all search engines.
For another example, imagine you're trying to find out about New Wave band The Saints. Clearly, "Saints" is a totally useless term. You might get more with "Saints music", "Saints CD", etc, though you'll still get stuff relating to All Saints, "When The Saints Go Marching In", etc, etc. You could refine it with 'saints AND (music OR CD OR album OR punk OR "new wave" OR band OR group) AND (NOT "all")'; but that's still pretty horrible and won't catch everything.
One solution would be like what Northern Light claims to do: grouping the responses into categories; but this is a pretty hit-and-miss affair, and requires much more sophisticated categorisation. How feasible would it be to have a search engine try and order all its data into categories based not on search results, but on analysis of the entire database? It could build up a pretty detailed classification, especially when it comes to common sorts of search (TV show names, band names, hardware and software)
Another helpful idea would be that if you included the term "music" it searched for "CD", "album", "band", etc, automatically.
Of course, I'd also like to be able to do regexp searches on the entire WWW, but I don't know if this is realistic or even useful.
You're confused about the meaning of the word corporation. In the US, this term means a privately owned business. In the UK, it means a state-owned enterprise (it was formerly applied to city councils, amongst other institutions). Only /.'s pet libertarians would object per se to the use of tax to fund a state-owned organisation.
but writers, artists, and other authors do have a right to be paid for their work
But do they? Even really bad writers? Even writers no one reads? The fact is that now writers are rewarded for their work based on the amount of money they can make for other people, and not on any intrinsic quality they possess. Does Tom Clancy or Jeffrey Archer deserve to earn $10m+?
It's perhaps wrong to steal even from the rich, but don't claim an accident of our economic system is a moral principle. Maybe a big committee should sit and decide on who is 'deserving' of money. Maybe they should draw lots. Then the graffiti artist could get as much as the guy with friends in the galleries, and someone who writes a website could get as much as someone who writes blockbuster thrillers.
If this leads to new economic models, it might not be a bad thing. If it only leads to rich Germans getting richer, it probably is.
You forgot to close your tags