On most "local" stations it doesn't switch to another stations when traffic reports are broadcast but it will turn up the volume or switch from CD to radio when there is a traffic report.
In the UK if you are tuned to a BBC station it will automatically switch to another BBC local or national station when they broadcast traffic information. This seems to use something called EON but I've no idea what that is.
It's javascript not java. There is a big difference. And it appears to work fine on netscape on linux.. I agree that a animatated graphics would be better.
Why would you be writting checks any more, this is the 21st century?
Seriously though I don't expect to be using any checks ever again, there is just no need with credit/debit cards and online banking money transfers. I did wonder at my sanity for joining such a bank with one month to go until the y2k problem but it seems to have worked out.
Yeah it's not a millennium bug because it happens a year before the change of millennium.
And it's not a millennium bug because it was designed that way. The word bug usually describes a mistake in implementation not an inapropriate design decision.
A small point, but it's important in softwar engineering to be precise.
Most of the work I've done it java has been fairly "thin" client work connecting over a network to a server and displaying results in a fairly simple graphical form in real time as they update. This is probably ideas for java in some ways as the network code probably is IO bound in any language, and the graphics code translated into drawing lots of rectangles mostly which are probably calling the same native code in both cases anyway. I find that a similar client uses about twice as much cpu time in java than in C++ but I agree this is probably an unusual case.
The caching problem you describe is a fair point. However a virtual function call generally replaces an ordinary conditional jump and so a smart enough compiler could arrange for the code to be arranged properly to help with the cache problem. It just a quality of implementation issue. I guess compilers don't do this because it's too hard so it's a real valid point.
I suspect that the java virtual machine takes enough of the cache memory up itself to make any measurements on the java code meaningless.
I agree with your opinion about games and operating systems. Games will always be looking for top speed and java isn't sufficiently "better" than c or c++ to make it worth the slowdown in run time performance. I'm guessing that some games, I'm thinking of things like civilization where speed is important but not critical could be written in java without the performance being too much of an issue. I can't see any particular reason why you'd want to do so though.
I'm finding that I use java quite a lot for quick test programs now. It's quicker to write and build java code than c++ code but it's sufficiently similar to c++ that the ideas can be reused when it's time to write 'real' code.
Re:Why no private individuals use JAVA/Corba
on
Java Success Stories
·
· Score: 1
I think you've exagerated the difference here to a large degree, but there is a grain of truth in what you are saying.
I've also noticed there is far more take up of c++ amongst commercial projects whereas many open source project seem to be using ordinary c.
Re:These benchmarks disagree... I disagre...
on
Java Success Stories
·
· Score: 1
I have to say that I'm somewhat suspicious of these results. I'd expect java to be slowered by at least a factor two or three than equivilent c++ code but not this much slower.
What is causing it to be so slow?
It be very suspicious about using lines of code as a measurement of development speed. You can write those 18 lines of perl quickly but it's really hard to understand and maintain even when it's well written. It's a nice language for quick 'hacks' but I wouldn't want to maintain a large system in it. Java is probably the easiest language from this point of view followed by c++ then C. Awk and perl are good at what they do but they are not for writting anything more complext than this.
No seriously the point is that there is room for two different processor families. The fact that the alpha is faster is not going to stop anyone buying an intel processor if that's more appropriate for their use.
It's like these processors used in macs (I forget what they are called). By most standards they are faster than x86 series processors yet relativly few people buy macs because there are other factors that are more important.
My orignal post was too short to make my point properly which is that it's good that intel are bringing out new great processors and it's great that there are others just as good or better so we can decide on more appropriate things than raw processor speed.
Nobody seems to have made the point that it's not patents that are "evil", it's using thge courts to extort money out of people for using an obvious technique.
Patents were originally intended to support the free exchange of ideas by giving people a short period of protection for the ideas which might have taken a lot of time and money to develop to ensure that it was worth people investing time and effort in new ideas.
Things like one-click ordering would take about 15 seconds to think up and about a day to implement and so are not deserving of patent protection. And anyone who uses the courts to enforce such a patent has basically just found a way to make money undeservidly and deserves the contempt they get.
You have to look at each patent on it's own merits. It's hard for a software patent to be reasonable because software ideas just are not that expensive to develop that they need protection.
All I need is a large flat desk at a reasonable height. Probably slightly higher than you would need for ordinary work. A monitor at eye level or very slightly below.
And most importantly lots of space. Computer desks are always too small. You need lots of space to spead out books, papers, notes etc so you're not cramped up while working.
Considering that this was just a routine maintenance mission that shouldn't really be that interesting in itself it seems to have got quite a lot of coverage in the uk.
Routine servicing mission doesn't fail is never going to grab the headlines, but it did seem to get quite a lot of coverage here.,
Congratulations to all involved, it's nice to see something going right for nasa. It's interesting how the british media always say "British born Michael Foale" as if that somehow means that we are involved in this. It would be nice if Britain actualy had some real contribution to something like this, but do they really need to say this every time the story is mentioned.
Is there anything that prevents us from implementing a java compiler and run time environment without sun's blessing as long as we don't call it java?
If sun don't want to release their implementation as open source then that's up to them, they have the freedom to choose under what conditions they provide their work to us, but how could they stop us form implementing the language ourselves and releasing it open source.
I would imagine the compiler would be fairly difficult but it is a nice regular language so shouldn't be impossibly hard and the libraries are a perfect open source project as anyone can contribute different parts.
I can't believe there isn't a project like this already. Is there one that I missed?
Well I have some sympathy for this but consider that when a company sues for breach of copyright their loss is loss of income so it's reasonable for the court to award damages to make up that loss.
When an open source developer sues a company for breach of copyright, their loss is loss of freedom of the code so the court needs to restore that by forcing the company to either make their work open source or to stop using the code.
If the court wished to award punative charges then that's a separate issue but the damages are not supposed to be some sort of punishment, they are meant to be compensation for the loss of meney caused by illegal actions.
If restoration of the free status of the code is not what you are after then the GPL isn't the correct license for you to apply to your code.
I wonder what the statistics are for goods and services ordered by telephone?
Many of the same things can go wrong with the orders there and yet I'd bet that nobody would think to somehow "blame" the telephone. Because there is a computer involved this becomes news.
I personally have ordered many goods and services over the internet both from the UK where I live and the USA and have never had any serious problems at all. On a related topic I use a new internet bank and I have had a few problems with their systems. When I've contacted them they have all been sorted out efficiently though. The real issue is how many online 'transactions' fail and can't easily be resolved.
It's much better to plan increments of functionality rather than "modules" as you can implement, test and ship code at any point.
For some reason, many "management" people still seem to want to define and develop "modules" instead. So you have *no* working functionallity until the end of the project when in theory you have 100%. In fact this is the point you test and discover the faults but have no time left to fix them.
XP works in fairly short iterations. At the start of each iteration have a planning meeting where tasks for the next iteration are handed out. Your best bet is to pair somebody with database skills with sombody who know little about databases (for a database related task, obviously). That way all of your team will gain a minimum proficiency with all of the code fairly quickly. Perhaps you don't want your user interface designers to become database experts but you'd like them to be at least good enough to fix simple problems with database code.
I would guess that XP does not work well with more than about 10-20 developers partly for the reason you stated, people tend to be more specialised in such an environment. This isn't necessarily a good thing!
I think that you have to be very diciplined indeed to make this work. If you can stick to the principles it's probably a big gain over traditional methodologies. With a poor team, or one that's too big, or that just doesn't stick to the principles I can see how it might fail horribly.
It's not about skipping the design phase, it's about doing things differently. Don't design things until you need them because the chances are that by that time you'll have either changes the specification or else have thought of a better way.
It's about breaking down a big project into lots of tiny ones where you get a bit of functionallity designed and implemented and working and with automated tests before moving onto the next bit of functionallity. So you always know where you are and how much there is left to do. You always know what you've done so far works because you have tests to prove it. You know that you can easily change what you've done when you need to because you have automated tests which will tell you if anything has broken.
It's very strong on getting requirements and testing your code against those requirements, it just doesn't require a lot of up-front effort that will probably be wasted.
What sets it apart in my opinion from a code/fix methodology is that there are strong customer driven requirements to ensure that you build the right thing, and an emphasis on automated testing so you know that what you build works.
No, the whole point is that you make it easier and safer to make changes to the code by having extensive unit tests for example, so that you can afford to make changes to the code to keep it well designed.
Most code starts off well designed and becomes worse over time because either you don't have time to keep the design "clean" when adding new stuff, or because you don't dare to change existing working code to fit in with your new code because you might break it.
This book shows you how to organise things so you don't need to be afraid to change your code and are able to keep it well designed as it evolves.
Slashdot Mirror
I believe that RDS already has an emergency facility but I've never seen it used.
In the UK if you are tuned to a BBC station it will automatically switch to another BBC local or national station when they broadcast traffic information. This seems to use something called EON but I've no idea what that is.
Not for another year
Bah. It's usually me saying that.
It's javascript not java. There is a big difference. And it appears to work fine on netscape on linux.. I agree that a animatated graphics would be better.
Seriously though I don't expect to be using any checks ever again, there is just no need with credit/debit cards and online banking money transfers. I did wonder at my sanity for joining such a bank with one month to go until the y2k problem but it seems to have worked out.
And it's not a millennium bug because it was designed that way. The word bug usually describes a mistake in implementation not an inapropriate design decision.
A small point, but it's important in softwar engineering to be precise.
The caching problem you describe is a fair point. However a virtual function call generally replaces an ordinary conditional jump and so a smart enough compiler could arrange for the code to be arranged properly to help with the cache problem. It just a quality of implementation issue. I guess compilers don't do this because it's too hard so it's a real valid point.
I suspect that the java virtual machine takes enough of the cache memory up itself to make any measurements on the java code meaningless.
I agree with your opinion about games and operating systems. Games will always be looking for top speed and java isn't sufficiently "better" than c or c++ to make it worth the slowdown in run time performance. I'm guessing that some games, I'm thinking of things like civilization where speed is important but not critical could be written in java without the performance being too much of an issue. I can't see any particular reason why you'd want to do so though.
I'm finding that I use java quite a lot for quick test programs now. It's quicker to write and build java code than c++ code but it's sufficiently similar to c++ that the ideas can be reused when it's time to write 'real' code.
I've also noticed there is far more take up of c++ amongst commercial projects whereas many open source project seem to be using ordinary c.
What is causing it to be so slow?
It be very suspicious about using lines of code as a measurement of development speed. You can write those 18 lines of perl quickly but it's really hard to understand and maintain even when it's well written. It's a nice language for quick 'hacks' but I wouldn't want to maintain a large system in it. Java is probably the easiest language from this point of view followed by c++ then C. Awk and perl are good at what they do but they are not for writting anything more complext than this.
It's like these processors used in macs (I forget what they are called). By most standards they are faster than x86 series processors yet relativly few people buy macs because there are other factors that are more important.
My orignal post was too short to make my point properly which is that it's good that intel are bringing out new great processors and it's great that there are others just as good or better so we can decide on more appropriate things than raw processor speed.
They both look like good CPUs so who cares which one is the "best". They'll both be good for most things so buy the one you like best.
Patents were originally intended to support the free exchange of ideas by giving people a short period of protection for the ideas which might have taken a lot of time and money to develop to ensure that it was worth people investing time and effort in new ideas.
Things like one-click ordering would take about 15 seconds to think up and about a day to implement and so are not deserving of patent protection. And anyone who uses the courts to enforce such a patent has basically just found a way to make money undeservidly and deserves the contempt they get.
You have to look at each patent on it's own merits. It's hard for a software patent to be reasonable because software ideas just are not that expensive to develop that they need protection.
And most importantly lots of space. Computer desks are always too small. You need lots of space to spead out books, papers, notes etc so you're not cramped up while working.
Routine servicing mission doesn't fail is never going to grab the headlines, but it did seem to get quite a lot of coverage here.,
Congratulations to all involved, it's nice to see something going right for nasa. It's interesting how the british media always say "British born Michael Foale" as if that somehow means that we are involved in this. It would be nice if Britain actualy had some real contribution to something like this, but do they really need to say this every time the story is mentioned.
Yes I saw him interviewed on television about a year ago and he seemed like a really nice person.
Interesting, I've not seen any publicity for this, is it new?
If sun don't want to release their implementation as open source then that's up to them, they have the freedom to choose under what conditions they provide their work to us, but how could they stop us form implementing the language ourselves and releasing it open source.
I would imagine the compiler would be fairly difficult but it is a nice regular language so shouldn't be impossibly hard and the libraries are a perfect open source project as anyone can contribute different parts.
I can't believe there isn't a project like this already. Is there one that I missed?
When an open source developer sues a company for breach of copyright, their loss is loss of freedom of the code so the court needs to restore that by forcing the company to either make their work open source or to stop using the code.
If the court wished to award punative charges then that's a separate issue but the damages are not supposed to be some sort of punishment, they are meant to be compensation for the loss of meney caused by illegal actions.
If restoration of the free status of the code is not what you are after then the GPL isn't the correct license for you to apply to your code.
Many of the same things can go wrong with the orders there and yet I'd bet that nobody would think to somehow "blame" the telephone. Because there is a computer involved this becomes news.
I personally have ordered many goods and services over the internet both from the UK where I live and the USA and have never had any serious problems at all. On a related topic I use a new internet bank and I have had a few problems with their systems. When I've contacted them they have all been sorted out efficiently though. The real issue is how many online 'transactions' fail and can't easily be resolved.
It's much better to plan increments of functionality rather than "modules" as you can implement, test and ship code at any point.
For some reason, many "management" people still seem to want to define and develop "modules" instead. So you have *no* working functionallity until the end of the project when in theory you have 100%. In fact this is the point you test and discover the faults but have no time left to fix them.
XP works in fairly short iterations. At the start of each iteration have a planning meeting where tasks for the next iteration are handed out. Your best bet is to pair somebody with database skills with sombody who know little about databases (for a database related task, obviously). That way all of your team will gain a minimum proficiency with all of the code fairly quickly. Perhaps you don't want your user interface designers to become database experts but you'd like them to be at least good enough to fix simple problems with database code.
I would guess that XP does not work well with more than about 10-20 developers partly for the reason you stated, people tend to be more specialised in such an environment. This isn't necessarily a good thing!
I think that you have to be very diciplined indeed to make this work. If you can stick to the principles it's probably a big gain over traditional methodologies. With a poor team, or one that's too big, or that just doesn't stick to the principles I can see how it might fail horribly.
You need to read the book.
It's not about skipping the design phase, it's about doing things differently. Don't design things until you need them because the chances are that by that time you'll have either changes the specification or else have thought of a better way.
It's about breaking down a big project into lots of tiny ones where you get a bit of functionallity designed and implemented and working and with automated tests before moving onto the next bit of functionallity. So you always know where you are and how much there is left to do. You always know what you've done so far works because you have tests to prove it. You know that you can easily change what you've done when you need to because you have automated tests which will tell you if anything has broken.
It's very strong on getting requirements and testing your code against those requirements, it just doesn't require a lot of up-front effort that will probably be wasted.
What sets it apart in my opinion from a code/fix methodology is that there are strong customer driven requirements to ensure that you build the right thing, and an emphasis on automated testing so you know that what you build works.
No, the whole point is that you make it easier and safer to make changes to the code by having extensive unit tests for example, so that you can afford to make changes to the code to keep it well designed.
Most code starts off well designed and becomes worse over time because either you don't have time to keep the design "clean" when adding new stuff, or because you don't dare to change existing working code to fit in with your new code because you might break it.
This book shows you how to organise things so you don't need to be afraid to change your code and are able to keep it well designed as it evolves.