how can allocating and freeing and garbage collector sweeps and compacting be faster than just allocating and freeing memory?
I know you're trolling, C++ allocators work pretty much the same way, with a memory block that is pre-allocated and then divided up for subsequent memory requests, the slowness in the default allocator comes from having to walk to heap for the next free block, which can be a problem after significant fragmentation. However, that's the simple allocator, there are plenty of alternatives including fixed-block sized ones that are much more efficient, that work more like Java's "only allocate at the end until you run out of ram" but still have the advantage of not requiring all that slow garbage collection and compaction. Note that the slowest thing you can do with memory is move it around, and that's exactly what a GC compact does!
I haven't seen any Java (or.net) app that runs faster than a native one that isn't reasonably trivial or a benchmark.
a S3 isn't the greatest processor by any means - it still uses a ARM A9 design.
ARM came out with the A15, the jump in numbering was simply because there was a corresponding jump in performance. Now they're just about to come out with the A57 (which is a 64-bit CPU) and apparently has 3x the performance of the A15.
mobile CPUs are really still in their infancy, in the next few years we'll have much more capable ones, in much the same way that today an old Phenom 2 is perfectly good enough, unlike the days where a leapfrog upgrades from Pentiums to Athlons were happening every year.
the difference is that in 2009 people thought the decline in PC sales was simply becuase of the economy - people were just not upgrading as often as they used to, but it'd b ok because those sales will come back sooner or later....
today, they know that this is not going to happen, the PC sales will continue to decline (even Ballmer gets it) as tablets and phones increase sales. That's why they've gone all out to make a tablet OS and they stupidly decided to help the PC decline by putting it on the desktop too. Its pretty obvious they don't care about the desktop anymore, but they just can't bring themselves to admit it yet.
BTW, Lenovo does sell Windows 7 machines, you get the win8 DVD along with it but they will happily 'downgrade' it for you by default. Looking at the sales figures, HP and Dell and others have all plummeted... guess which solitary manufacturer increased its sales share.
on Windows, I'd always recommend more RAM, even today. I think most of the speed increase from a SSD is because the drive is formatted (ie all the old cruft and fragmentation and other built-up crap suddenly goes with the reformat).
Still, a SSD is a good thing, and easy to do, but as all the programs I run seem to suck up more and more RAM, I'd always try to upgrade that first. Boot times aside, once you get it all running it stays cached in RAM anyway so a SSDs performance for the OS isn't necessarily as great in the real world as hyped.
step 1: embrace the social networks desires and give them full access to your details for, umm, "personalisation" reasons while also allowing the networks to claim better privacy.
step 2: enhance the social networks privacy settings to allow a single user to present multiple 'views' of himself to the networks users whilst still allowing the network to see a single person for, umm, "personalisation" reasons.
step 3: extinguish the pretend privacy offered by the social network by further enhancing the user details so the user can set which persona the social network gets to see.
worked well for a certain other company, why not here:)
I have a new netgear router, the username and password was printed on the bottom along with the serial number (which I assume is unique). If they can do this, then making a random default password of 2 or 3 words concatenated together (as is the case with the netgear password) can't be too hard.
In the case of a truly lost password, like the serial number sticker was damaged or stupidly removed for "safekeeping", then you could always re-flash the firmware with an update, last I remember you only need physical access to the emergency reset pinhole on the device (after all, sometimes the device is unwilling to let you logon even if you do know the password - I've had this happen to me after a power blackout)
Besides, you think the companies won't be happy with a policy of "we're sorry, but you need to purchase another one, here's a link to our online store".
they'll be proven to be very un-useless if someone discovers oil around them. Why else do you think the Argentinian government wants a couple of scraggy rocks back? They never showed an interest in them when they were used as outposts for whaling stations.
Strange to see this comment on a techies' site because the "shift" you praise was away from technology, in which the UK had excelled since the industrial revolution, to "service" industries
in many respects this is perfectly suited to techie's site - as we're nearly all now employed writing.net code for yet another financial service provider.:-)
I guess the rest of the western world is in the same position - but at least we can sell each other financial "products", think of poor Greece and Spain, they couldn't even do that, past their exports of olives and erm, not sure what else, the whole western world is declining in favour of the Chinese and Korean industries... and even they are failing now no-one can afford to buy their junk! I suppose if you looked at the situation back then you would realise that the 3rd world would produce everything you did only much cheaper, so why would you even bother trying to support anything but the most specialised industries (which we still have).
The railways were already screwed in the 60s, British Rail was a loss-making industry and they thought (probably wrongly) that privatising them would make the subsequent competing rail franchises be more efficient - after all, worked for the gas, electricty, etc industries. I think it was a privatisation too far and we should just scrap the rail entirely, trains have been replaced with cars and trucks anyway, but still - we've been giving our technology to the rest of the world for decades before she came along - you think we'd be quite good with computers given we invented them and almost all the early software practices, so the biggest computer companies would be British.. but strangely.. they're not.
In short, none of your complaints have got anything to do with Thatcher and more to do with the gradual opening up of globalisation. Maybe we should have kept the iron curtain up!
I suppose it is today - with all the "inherit from child, but not those except the ones the system wants" kind of permission structures but the basic underlying it, the ACLs, are quite straightforward. Then there's the "its just like ACL security but its not because the.NET team wanted their own security subsystem and they didn't want to play nicely with the Windows team who knew what they were doing".
Or to put it another way, if MS had left the sensible architecture that they inherited with NT 3.51 alone, this wouldn't be an issue at all.
wireshark hasn't been ported, but you can still do network captures in pcap format using an app called pirni (you need a jailbroken iPad though) or you can use a "Remote Virtual Interface" (iOS 5+)
1. all tablets and most phones have a HDMI-out capability, so I use my phone on a 42" display. All have bluetooth, and you can easily get bluetooth keyboards that are real.
5. I can do software development on a raspberry pi, which is way underpowered compared to my S3. what makes you think I couldn't do it on any Android device?
7. got it already. 8. got it already.
anyway, while there is a lack of software for these things, that's because no-one with a phone really wants to do these things. They will have a PC or laptop for that and will work happily on it.
The thing to understand is that this is the future we've moving towards and tablets and phones as 'development' computing devices are in their infancy. That doesn't mean they will continue to be which is why MS is running scared and is what we should be thinking about. I would drop my PC in a second if I could dock a more powerful phone into a docking station on my desk just like I do with my laptop. I think the CPUs are almost there (the upcoming 64-bit ARM A57 is 3x the power of the A15, which in turn was loads more powerful than the A9s that most phones run). We do need more storage capability, but I suppose you could add that to the dock if you didn't store it on a network. The point I'm making is that this isn't sci-fi fantasy anymore.
erm... if they've got nuclear fusion working, couldn't they just forget about Mars and work on making it available as a power source to replace conventional powerplants to solve the world's energy needs?
no, *I* won't... but then I'm not the problem, its the millions of "ordinary" people who will, unfortunately I end up with only 1 choice of cheezypoofs as that's all they'll end up stocking thanks to my fellow idiot humans:(
I'll truly give up when facebook starts to sponsor education (or TV, which is much the same difference for many people).
imperative procedural - obviously concurrent actor - well, depends what you mean by that, but the new standard has std::async and lambdas that's easy to use. (eg) object-oriented - obviously functional styles - had this for years in the STL.
take note kids, this is what happens when you only eat lentils. Get some beer, sausage and cake down your throat and prevent yourselves from this kind of miserable existence.:)
but it isn't any discrimination, *everyone* pays the same rate - ie your weight (plus that of your luggage) times the route markup.
So there's no discrimination of fatties here. Their ticket will be more than a child with no luggage, but they are not being targeted with any special, extra cost that others do not have to pay.
I doubt that'll stop the lawsuits from flying though.
no, RDP forwards all the bits that have changed - now simpler versions of it will happily forward everything (eg VNC at least in early incarnations, and Microsoft's own RDP protocol) but Citrix did a load of work reducing the amount of screen that was transferred over the network. Microsoft since took that and built it into the kernel (or graphics bits that are in the kernel) so that it became even more optimised - after all, if the OS only redraws a small section, only that section needs to be transferred.
So the MS version is very well built - because it was done by someone other than MS, as usual.
I doubt the FreeRDP is more capable, but it certainly shouldn't be any less capable.
I wish people would stop thinking this is about Java. Its about Java Mobile Edition.
Now Oracle (or Sun, whatever) released Java with a permissive licence that said you can use it pretty much freely, but they kept the Java ME version to themselves, if you wanted the phone edition, then you had to buy a licence form Oracle. Google didn't feel they wanted to give Oracle a percentage of each Android sale so made their own very-compatible version.
Much as I dislike Oracle, I don't feel Google played fair on this, they took someone else's technology and effectively stole it. It doesn't have anything to do with Java the language, or Java that everyone (no longer) uses. Its all about the proprietary ME version.
Its not like Microsoft who used patents (IIRC) to extort a cut of each Android sale.
Its still good news for developers though, so the big boys - now all of us can copy whatever APIs we want. I guess any API that's out there is now effectively an open standard, all you have to do is write your own implementation. I wonder if Google'll see the funny side when someone creates a map and exposes it to developers using an identical google maps API. The Samba boys can write their own Active Directory with exactly the same external surface, just with their own internal mechanisms and there's nothing MS can do about it. Anyone could write a Facebook API as long as it uses their own internal implementation. This is still good news for us, but I still can't help thinking its feels like we'd be thieving someone else's designs.
doubt it, Microsoft never asserted copyright claims to the.NET API words, they do however claim to have a shed-load of patents that they won't use against mono should be become successful, honest.
Patent law being a lot more screwed than copyright law is, I wouldn't count on it.
absolutely. I wish the time spent inventing Java and.NET had been spent making libraries and patterns that improved the existing efficient language.
I doubt anyone will change it, but it needs to be continually re-emphasised. Its not just saving the planet, but saving your electricity bill that matters. We all need to be evangelists on scrapping the in-efficient software. Microsoft had a little push towards this with their C++ renaissance but I think its fizzled out when Sinofsky left.
it'll reduce CPU processing requirements by a relatively small amount. One place I worked, we had a XML protocol for storing our data, replacing it with a binary one increased performance by 20%. Now that's not to be sniffed at, but it isn't a panacea.
What we can do however, is get rid of the script language based web sites. I know there's a low entry barrier when using them, but every site that needs performance ends up writing it in a compiled language, and then C/C++ if they've got sense (Java, and.NET are better, but still not good enough for this problem).
Now if we had all server computing based on an efficient language, we'd see energy consumption reduced by quite a bit.The super computers we have nowadays could run a great many sites instead of just a handful. And yes, they'd also use a binary protocol by default instead of the XML based stuff almost every "easy to use" system and framework uses.
Even commercial software has the same problem, though the bigger products do tend to become a single entity simply because no-one else has the resource to work on it.
eg. look at Microsoft's data access technologies - ADO, RDO, ODBC, Jet, DAO, OLEDB, LINQ2SQL, EF3, EF4.
Then look at commercial companies - you want a DB, you can have Oracle, SqlServer, DB2, just to name the 3 most popular.
The "trouble" with FOSS is that there are enough people who want different things and can modify what exists rather than work with the existing teams, but also that the existing teams think they know best and have an arrogant dismissive attitude to others. Mind you, that also applies to the new contributors who think they know better than the "morons" currently managing the project.
I guess we all need a better sense of professionalism in the industry, but until that matures to the point where continually churning technology is seen as a good thing, we'll just have to put up with the way things are and let evolution decide which product becomes the one everyone uses.
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how can allocating and freeing and garbage collector sweeps and compacting be faster than just allocating and freeing memory?
I know you're trolling, C++ allocators work pretty much the same way, with a memory block that is pre-allocated and then divided up for subsequent memory requests, the slowness in the default allocator comes from having to walk to heap for the next free block, which can be a problem after significant fragmentation. However, that's the simple allocator, there are plenty of alternatives including fixed-block sized ones that are much more efficient, that work more like Java's "only allocate at the end until you run out of ram" but still have the advantage of not requiring all that slow garbage collection and compaction. Note that the slowest thing you can do with memory is move it around, and that's exactly what a GC compact does!
I haven't seen any Java (or .net) app that runs faster than a native one that isn't reasonably trivial or a benchmark.
a S3 isn't the greatest processor by any means - it still uses a ARM A9 design.
ARM came out with the A15, the jump in numbering was simply because there was a corresponding jump in performance. Now they're just about to come out with the A57 (which is a 64-bit CPU) and apparently has 3x the performance of the A15.
mobile CPUs are really still in their infancy, in the next few years we'll have much more capable ones, in much the same way that today an old Phenom 2 is perfectly good enough, unlike the days where a leapfrog upgrades from Pentiums to Athlons were happening every year.
the difference is that in 2009 people thought the decline in PC sales was simply becuase of the economy - people were just not upgrading as often as they used to, but it'd b ok because those sales will come back sooner or later....
today, they know that this is not going to happen, the PC sales will continue to decline (even Ballmer gets it) as tablets and phones increase sales. That's why they've gone all out to make a tablet OS and they stupidly decided to help the PC decline by putting it on the desktop too. Its pretty obvious they don't care about the desktop anymore, but they just can't bring themselves to admit it yet.
BTW, Lenovo does sell Windows 7 machines, you get the win8 DVD along with it but they will happily 'downgrade' it for you by default. Looking at the sales figures, HP and Dell and others have all plummeted ... guess which solitary manufacturer increased its sales share.
on Windows, I'd always recommend more RAM, even today. I think most of the speed increase from a SSD is because the drive is formatted (ie all the old cruft and fragmentation and other built-up crap suddenly goes with the reformat).
Still, a SSD is a good thing, and easy to do, but as all the programs I run seem to suck up more and more RAM, I'd always try to upgrade that first. Boot times aside, once you get it all running it stays cached in RAM anyway so a SSDs performance for the OS isn't necessarily as great in the real world as hyped.
step 1: embrace the social networks desires and give them full access to your details for, umm, "personalisation" reasons while also allowing the networks to claim better privacy.
step 2: enhance the social networks privacy settings to allow a single user to present multiple 'views' of himself to the networks users whilst still allowing the network to see a single person for, umm, "personalisation" reasons.
step 3: extinguish the pretend privacy offered by the social network by further enhancing the user details so the user can set which persona the social network gets to see.
worked well for a certain other company, why not here :)
not if you're accessing it from, say, North Korea.
I have a new netgear router, the username and password was printed on the bottom along with the serial number (which I assume is unique). If they can do this, then making a random default password of 2 or 3 words concatenated together (as is the case with the netgear password) can't be too hard.
In the case of a truly lost password, like the serial number sticker was damaged or stupidly removed for "safekeeping", then you could always re-flash the firmware with an update, last I remember you only need physical access to the emergency reset pinhole on the device (after all, sometimes the device is unwilling to let you logon even if you do know the password - I've had this happen to me after a power blackout)
Besides, you think the companies won't be happy with a policy of "we're sorry, but you need to purchase another one, here's a link to our online store".
CentOS minimal is 342Mb, which isn't as small as the Ubuntu, but I guess it comes with more "what you'd install anyway" packages.
There's the netinstall too, which is 230Mb. Nowadays if it can fit on a CD, its considered insignificant in size.
they'll be proven to be very un-useless if someone discovers oil around them. Why else do you think the Argentinian government wants a couple of scraggy rocks back? They never showed an interest in them when they were used as outposts for whaling stations.
Strange to see this comment on a techies' site because the "shift" you praise was away from technology, in which the UK had excelled since the industrial revolution, to "service" industries
in many respects this is perfectly suited to techie's site - as we're nearly all now employed writing .net code for yet another financial service provider. :-)
I guess the rest of the western world is in the same position - but at least we can sell each other financial "products", think of poor Greece and Spain, they couldn't even do that, past their exports of olives and erm, not sure what else, the whole western world is declining in favour of the Chinese and Korean industries... and even they are failing now no-one can afford to buy their junk! I suppose if you looked at the situation back then you would realise that the 3rd world would produce everything you did only much cheaper, so why would you even bother trying to support anything but the most specialised industries (which we still have).
The railways were already screwed in the 60s, British Rail was a loss-making industry and they thought (probably wrongly) that privatising them would make the subsequent competing rail franchises be more efficient - after all, worked for the gas, electricty, etc industries. I think it was a privatisation too far and we should just scrap the rail entirely, trains have been replaced with cars and trucks anyway, but still - we've been giving our technology to the rest of the world for decades before she came along - you think we'd be quite good with computers given we invented them and almost all the early software practices, so the biggest computer companies would be British.. but strangely.. they're not.
In short, none of your complaints have got anything to do with Thatcher and more to do with the gradual opening up of globalisation. Maybe we should have kept the iron curtain up!
I suppose it is today - with all the "inherit from child, but not those except the ones the system wants" kind of permission structures but the basic underlying it, the ACLs, are quite straightforward. Then there's the "its just like ACL security but its not because the .NET team wanted their own security subsystem and they didn't want to play nicely with the Windows team who knew what they were doing".
Or to put it another way, if MS had left the sensible architecture that they inherited with NT 3.51 alone, this wouldn't be an issue at all.
wireshark hasn't been ported, but you can still do network captures in pcap format using an app called pirni (you need a jailbroken iPad though) or you can use a "Remote Virtual Interface" (iOS 5+)
1. all tablets and most phones have a HDMI-out capability, so I use my phone on a 42" display. All have bluetooth, and you can easily get bluetooth keyboards that are real.
5. I can do software development on a raspberry pi, which is way underpowered compared to my S3. what makes you think I couldn't do it on any Android device?
7. got it already.
8. got it already.
anyway, while there is a lack of software for these things, that's because no-one with a phone really wants to do these things. They will have a PC or laptop for that and will work happily on it.
The thing to understand is that this is the future we've moving towards and tablets and phones as 'development' computing devices are in their infancy. That doesn't mean they will continue to be which is why MS is running scared and is what we should be thinking about. I would drop my PC in a second if I could dock a more powerful phone into a docking station on my desk just like I do with my laptop. I think the CPUs are almost there (the upcoming 64-bit ARM A57 is 3x the power of the A15, which in turn was loads more powerful than the A9s that most phones run). We do need more storage capability, but I suppose you could add that to the dock if you didn't store it on a network. The point I'm making is that this isn't sci-fi fantasy anymore.
erm... if they've got nuclear fusion working, couldn't they just forget about Mars and work on making it available as a power source to replace conventional powerplants to solve the world's energy needs?
no, *I* won't... but then I'm not the problem, its the millions of "ordinary" people who will, unfortunately I end up with only 1 choice of cheezypoofs as that's all they'll end up stocking thanks to my fellow idiot humans :(
I'll truly give up when facebook starts to sponsor education (or TV, which is much the same difference for many people).
that and C++.
imperative procedural - obviously
concurrent actor - well, depends what you mean by that, but the new standard has std::async and lambdas that's easy to use. (eg)
object-oriented - obviously
functional styles - had this for years in the STL.
women fly for less than men?
the weight that is used for the ticket price includes luggage, so the above is definitely not the case, not even close.
take note kids, this is what happens when you only eat lentils. Get some beer, sausage and cake down your throat and prevent yourselves from this kind of miserable existence. :)
but it isn't any discrimination, *everyone* pays the same rate - ie your weight (plus that of your luggage) times the route markup.
So there's no discrimination of fatties here. Their ticket will be more than a child with no luggage, but they are not being targeted with any special, extra cost that others do not have to pay.
I doubt that'll stop the lawsuits from flying though.
no, RDP forwards all the bits that have changed - now simpler versions of it will happily forward everything (eg VNC at least in early incarnations, and Microsoft's own RDP protocol) but Citrix did a load of work reducing the amount of screen that was transferred over the network. Microsoft since took that and built it into the kernel (or graphics bits that are in the kernel) so that it became even more optimised - after all, if the OS only redraws a small section, only that section needs to be transferred.
So the MS version is very well built - because it was done by someone other than MS, as usual.
I doubt the FreeRDP is more capable, but it certainly shouldn't be any less capable.
I wish people would stop thinking this is about Java. Its about Java Mobile Edition.
Now Oracle (or Sun, whatever) released Java with a permissive licence that said you can use it pretty much freely, but they kept the Java ME version to themselves, if you wanted the phone edition, then you had to buy a licence form Oracle. Google didn't feel they wanted to give Oracle a percentage of each Android sale so made their own very-compatible version.
Much as I dislike Oracle, I don't feel Google played fair on this, they took someone else's technology and effectively stole it. It doesn't have anything to do with Java the language, or Java that everyone (no longer) uses. Its all about the proprietary ME version.
Its not like Microsoft who used patents (IIRC) to extort a cut of each Android sale.
Its still good news for developers though, so the big boys - now all of us can copy whatever APIs we want. I guess any API that's out there is now effectively an open standard, all you have to do is write your own implementation. I wonder if Google'll see the funny side when someone creates a map and exposes it to developers using an identical google maps API. The Samba boys can write their own Active Directory with exactly the same external surface, just with their own internal mechanisms and there's nothing MS can do about it. Anyone could write a Facebook API as long as it uses their own internal implementation. This is still good news for us, but I still can't help thinking its feels like we'd be thieving someone else's designs.
doubt it, Microsoft never asserted copyright claims to the .NET API words, they do however claim to have a shed-load of patents that they won't use against mono should be become successful, honest.
Patent law being a lot more screwed than copyright law is, I wouldn't count on it.
absolutely. I wish the time spent inventing Java and .NET had been spent making libraries and patterns that improved the existing efficient language.
I doubt anyone will change it, but it needs to be continually re-emphasised. Its not just saving the planet, but saving your electricity bill that matters. We all need to be evangelists on scrapping the in-efficient software. Microsoft had a little push towards this with their C++ renaissance but I think its fizzled out when Sinofsky left.
it'll reduce CPU processing requirements by a relatively small amount. One place I worked, we had a XML protocol for storing our data, replacing it with a binary one increased performance by 20%. Now that's not to be sniffed at, but it isn't a panacea.
What we can do however, is get rid of the script language based web sites. I know there's a low entry barrier when using them, but every site that needs performance ends up writing it in a compiled language, and then C/C++ if they've got sense (Java, and .NET are better, but still not good enough for this problem).
Now if we had all server computing based on an efficient language, we'd see energy consumption reduced by quite a bit.The super computers we have nowadays could run a great many sites instead of just a handful. And yes, they'd also use a binary protocol by default instead of the XML based stuff almost every "easy to use" system and framework uses.
Even commercial software has the same problem, though the bigger products do tend to become a single entity simply because no-one else has the resource to work on it.
eg. look at Microsoft's data access technologies - ADO, RDO, ODBC, Jet, DAO, OLEDB, LINQ2SQL, EF3, EF4.
Then look at commercial companies - you want a DB, you can have Oracle, SqlServer, DB2, just to name the 3 most popular.
The "trouble" with FOSS is that there are enough people who want different things and can modify what exists rather than work with the existing teams, but also that the existing teams think they know best and have an arrogant dismissive attitude to others. Mind you, that also applies to the new contributors who think they know better than the "morons" currently managing the project.
I guess we all need a better sense of professionalism in the industry, but until that matures to the point where continually churning technology is seen as a good thing, we'll just have to put up with the way things are and let evolution decide which product becomes the one everyone uses.