Yes I have read it. And you are in part right but at the same time it claims that no one has any responsibility but to their self. And in that is where it all falls down. Take the book Fountainhead. The "Hero" rapes the heroine but it is okay because she likes it. All women want a strong man that will take what they want. Now the parts where Roark would rather work in a quarry than build what he considers to be unworthy buildings isn't terrible. I am all for not compromising in one what you really believe in your heart. But then he takes another mans wife that he claims is his friend. And in the end he blows up a building that he doesn't own because someone went back on a none legally binding deal. That takes being being true to your ideals to an extreme from of narcissism. He knew that Peter Keating was weak and only a fool would think that he wouldn't cave. Roark made a stupid error to trust Keating and should have been a man and sucked it up. Yes he didn't get his way because his ego and desire to design Cortlandt Homes lead him to make a deal with someone he knew was weak as water and without any integrity. And in the end instead of living with the consequence of his actions he blew up the building while being careful to not kill anyone. Then he got off the hook in the trial because he jury was full good hard men like him. No it is a clear case of ego tripping. I am so great that I can do what ever I want and if you are as great as me you will like it! Throw on all the negative value of charity and compassion and you have an ego trip. I do like the book as entertainment but not a way of life. But here is the problem. Not everything has value right now. Research may not pay off in someones life time but may be of huge benefit. Charity. A student may be too poor to go to college but may be brilliant. That student may contribute greatly to society but only if they get charity to go to school. A rich child may have no value to society but the money his parents has made. It is a way of life that is attractive on the surface but fails when you look at deeply. Just as Marx. But does it have no truth in it? Of course not just as Marx has truth in it. The best lies are mostly the truth. That is why they are so effective. Back to Fountainhead. Ellsworth Toohey does represent a real villain type that runs around in society. The professional critic. They are here and are easy to spot. They do nothing but complain that this or that could be better but do nothing to make anything better themselves. The find fault with all and create nothing. You will often run into them on Slashdot. They are the ones that will complain that this or that FOSS program doesn't have this feature in it but they have never written a line of code for the project or donated a single cent to it. Oh they think they contribute because they use FOSS... They are also the ones that will say that x Should be free and claim that they support FOSS but then pirate music, movies, and software and justify it as standing up for FREEDOM of speech. What they want is stuff for nothing. Now the book Anthem.. Nice bit of science fiction.
You may not agree with my feelings about Ayn Rand and that is your right but to claim I have never read her works is not fair. I read Fountainhead when I was 17 and have read it a few more times over the last 23 years. Atlas Shrugged I just couldn't get into. So there!
"1. Garbage collection interacts very badly with swap. Once your Java program starts hitting the disk, it will stand still for minutes. Bigger memory sizes are solving this problem nowadays." That is where the bad programs really come in. I have seen people just load huge structures into memory for no good reason other than they can.
Two I will give you. Three the huge isn't a bad thing. Complicated and odd I would say are not fair if you compare it it say MFC and all the other half baked APIs for Windows! Windows is just a huge complex mess of decades of stacked APIs.
Actually it was needed because 100 years ago we had manual typewriters and it to took a lot of effort to hold down the shift. We kept it because for some reason people wanted some forms to have fields in all upper case. Now with computers it takes very little effort to hold down the shift key and if a field needs to be in all upper the software should do it for you. For people that want to use it in data base work well I just hold down the shift but that is just me. but being a programmer I can see other options. An all caps mode that you go into by double tapping the shift key and you get out by tapping the shift key? It would free up the space and give you the same functionality. The one exception is for those that really tick me off and when they are in all caps they put the c in McDONALD in lower case!
Actually Ayn Rand is very seductive to a lot of young intelligent people. Tech types are often big fans. Young smart liberal arts people used to and still might but sucked in to Marx. They reasons are simple. For tech types it is "the people that build and create new stuff are better than everyone else". When you are young it is good to be better then everyone else. In Ayn Rand's world Geeks rule the earth. After all they are the ones that make everything and do the real work. All those artsy folks and money men are just keeping you down! For the liberal arts folks it must be "everything is of equal value, an engineer or a doctor is no better than an artist". Plus it seems so "nice". Hey and those silly people that think that they are better than you just because the make cars or treat the sick are put in their place! They are no better than the artist or dancer! That is right we are all EQUAL!
When I was young I read Rand's books because I liked Rush. When one grows in wisdom or in many cases if one grows in wisdom you realize that both Marx and Rand are crap. There is nothing wrong with some compensation and nothing wrong with help out people that need help. Or if you want to be view me in the light of Ayn Rand. I choose to do good because I want to. I choose to donate food to a food bank because it is mine to give. I choose help build homes for Habitat for humanity because I want to. I do these things not out of fear but out of joy. If you think that Rand and or Marx are anything but mildly interesting you lack wisdom and common sense but when you are young they both paint a world where certain classes of people are attracted because there works speak to your feelings of persecution. Hey I still like Fountainhead and Anthem and Rush. They are fun reads and I enjoy Rush's music. Thing is that they sure are not guides to live my life! I don't want to be Howard Rourke. How the book Illusions is how I want to live my life... It would be so much fun to be a barnstormer. Funny thing is other people that read that book seem to think that is not the correct conclusion.
Really? What free alternative to Java exist? Most Java haters never developed with it, where bad with it, and or used a bad written program possibly written by them. Java desktop apps only real issue tends to be start up time but has gotten a lot better of late. The real problem with Java is that it allows some really crappy programs to actually work vs c where they would have long ago self destructed.
StarOffice? Well OpenOffice is the FOSS version of StarOffice that was supported by Sun. So what free alternative is better than OpenOffice? Get back to me on that one will you. Oh and not based off of OpenOffice just to keep it from getting stupid. Solaris? Linux and the BSDs are very good but Solaris and OpenSolaris still have a big performance lead using ZFS. The limited software support for OpenSolaris is really it's only down side when compared with Linux so I would have to say that even Solaris in some use cases is better then the FOSS alternatives.
Sun really blew it with Java. Sun gave away too much IMHO with Java. Giving away the JVM was great. All the tutorals and docs where also great but where was the revenue stream? They gave away a really good dev system called Netbeans so how was Sun going to make money with Java? Their hope was that Java on the desktop and the internet push people to buy the Sun light clients and servers. That failed. StarOffice and OpenOffice where really a way to attack Microsoft. In that way it really has failed. OpenOffice didn't capture the user base that Sun hoped it would. It did force Microsoft to offer cheaper versions of Office. The problem with StarOffice and OpenOffice to this day is that Microsoft Office is better. And Yes I am an OO.org users but ony because I am not a big user. OO.org Calc is super slow. So slow that I actually installed gnumeric to use with a small office spreadsheet! As painful as Access is for me to use there still isn't a good FOSS way to run those apps that I have seen and there is a good number of them. There is still value in non FOSS software. Microsoft, Adobe, Quicken and Oracle all are making money selling software not to mention Valve and EA. Sun just really missed many chances over time. They could have gotten into so many markets but a lot of them would have been seen as competing with their own customers. In that respect Sun was like Digital Research. Notice that Microsoft never cares who it goes after. Developers? They are great unless they make too much money then it is a market that Microsoft should own!
Well not all apps scale well to clusters. Things like billing apps are a good example. For anything involving money you want and ACID data base. If Facebook forgets a few thousand status updates or if they don't show up on some friends wall it isn't a big deal. If a few thousand credit card transactions don't make it into the system.... That is why you Power, Sparc, and ZSystems are still in use.
They are selling to people that make choices based on hard numbers and not buzz words. Hopefully that is. There is still a market for big iron like IBMs Power and ZSystems as well as Sparc.
Thanks that is why I said I wasn't sure. I know that early versions did not use the JIT. I am not a fan of the NDK concept. It seems to be a band-aid for short comings in the the Java system and now you need to worry about differences in the different CPUs. Done correctly the NDK would generate fat binaries for the different levels of ARM. Maybe it does but I see versions of some of the NDK programs in the app store. One should not have to know what ISA your phone supports.
Never ran because the code would have blown chunks. Managed code can let terrible code run that would have suffered massive memory leaks or other issues with under c.
It can but C#, Java, Python, and VB.net can all be compiled to assembly.
Native and low level are really very nebulous terms. It used to be just assembly,compiled, and interpreted. Compiled and interpreted had everything to do with implementation and not the language. I have used interpreted COBOL and compiled Basic. Then you had the virtual machine languages. The first famous one was Pascal. Pascal originally compiled down to P code. Those systems where all the rage for a while in universities between Pascal and the MIX. Now you have Assembly which isn't used very often anymore. Interpreted which now often are tokenized at run time and resemble the older virtual machine systems like P-Code that traditional interpreters. The new "managed code" which now often have use a just in time compiler so they are getting more and more like compiled languages. And then you have traditional compilers that with things like LLVM are becoming more like virtual machines! But in the end unless you are writing in assembly language you are not programming really doing anything "native". Every modern compiler takes whats you write and then applies optimizations. What you write and what the CPU sees tend to very different which is a good thing. But what it comes down too is optimization. Frankly managed code on modern systems tends to be pretty dang good. The one down side is that it allows for sloppy programming. In the end managed code doesn't usually have a large impact on the speed of a program. What it often does is allow a program that would have never ran run slowly. If you write good tight code it will run very fast unless the tools just suck.
"Regards organic salt, although it pisses me off, the chemistry definition is relatively new"
Actually organic salt fails from the stand point of the older definitions as well. There are two classical terms for Organic. One is "From the living". Think of things like fruit and meat. Salt is a crystal that can be mined and or gotten from salt water. While things on the water may be alive the salt water it's self is not. The second is "Changed by heat" early scientists noticed that living things where changed by heat. Food cooks, wood burns, even fresh bone was changed by heat. A classic example of the day of in organic material was salt. No matter how hot you got it salt was salt. Of course they didn't have the the heat sources we have today but you get the idea. Fire doesn't change salt.
The way that organic is abused often today is the newest use of the term organic. Frankly it is just the dumbest marketing abuse of a word I have seen in a long time. My guess is that it is just sea salt.
Yes I did know about Mini computers. Not only did you have Mini computers but you had Super minicomputers like the VAX and Maybe the DEC-10 and DEC-20 depending on who you asked. Then you had main frames like the IBM 360 and then you had the Super computers from CDC and Cray. And at one time you even had supermicrocomputers that used 32 bit cpus before they became mainstream. But that is kind of the point. Micro and Nano do not always mean a certain power of ten but have been used for a while as a general indicator of size.
"I am actually a game developer who wishes to remain anonymous. I code strictly in native code. " Really you code in straight x86 assembly language? You don't use any game engines? Do you really? "I tend to code for x86 and PPC both all the time. The only difference in a well designed codebase is the extra compile time. " I guess not. You probably code in c or c++ those are not low level languages. C++ sure isn't. I have heard c called a mid level language but low level means assembly as does native.
So now that we have established that you code in a higher level language what it comes down to is the compiler. Here Android does have an issue. The java system on it has not in the past been all that optimized. I am not even sure that it uses a JIT compiler. Your statment proves that a high level language need not be slower than a low level one. It all comes down to a problem of code optimization and in this case Android has been at a real disadvantage. If Google can get a really good JIT compiler added to Android it will really help them performance wise.
BTW just a bit of information on code optimization. C and C++ are terrible languages to try and do code optimization for. The syntax is so flexible that it is actually a rather difficult problem to write a good optimizer for them. That is one of the reasons that even today you still see a lot of HPC apps written in FORTRAN. FORTRAN really optimizes very well and that fact combined with the large number of really good HPC legacy libraries and software means that it still is popular in the HPC community.
Yes but that is the problem with Android. I have a one year old Android phone. When I picked it because at the time it was the fastest CPU, had an OLED screen, and used stock Android. Now it can not play Angry birds and is not getting 2.2 much less 2.3! This is not a super old phone but the Samsung Moment is is a dead end device. It was the best phone I could get at the time. So if you were to write a game for Android what do you target as the lowend? The Droid? The Epic? The Nexus S? I like Android but Google needs to "lock down" the manufactures a bit more IMHO. Right now I would buy a Nexus S if Google offered it on Sprint. I am tired of dinking about with vendors skinning Android and with Vendors and Carriers not updating the OS. What I would like to see is for Google to certify some phones as Google Prime or some such thing. They would have stock Android and would get updates right from Google. Sort of a Nexus but one that any manufacture can make and any carrier can carry.
It is called a living language micro means small and nano means even smaller just as mega means big. Microcomputers where not an order of magnitude smaller then centicomputers. In fact we didn't have centicomputers or decicomputers. But wait you did have microprocessors and microcomputers used them so it makes sense... Nope just shifts it because we didn't have centiprocessors... So Microsats and Nanosats are just as valid as microcomputers, microcars, megaprojects and iPod Nanos. It is just a living language co-opting a word. And if that bothers too bad. I am still ticked off whenever I see organic salt for sale in a market! There IS NO CARBON IN TABLE SALT!!!!!!!
And that is the whole point of the orignal article. If you say "I have this great idea I just need a programmer" odds are very high that you have only a trivial understanding of the problem.
Ideas are a beginning. They are really cheap. Let's take some good ideas and I will show you what I mean. A house that uses less power by monitoring it's environment. That is a good idea. Now someone needs to design a the building, create the sensors "if they are needed" and then get it built. Now think about this step by step. Now you need to decide what needs to be done and how. You may want to control how much sunlight gets into the home in the summer to limit heating and in the winter for solar gain. So do you use sensors and electric blinds or do you use the over hang of the roof? Passive vs active controls. Plus how long will it work before it breaks? How much to fix it over the life of the home? That was my point the idea is cheap and useless without the ability to actually execute. What this professor was getting at is he is tired of fools that don't get it. I have this great idea I just need a programmer "Code monkey" that can do what I tell them. That is a fool. Someone that is wise would look at it like this. I have this great project and I need some talented team members that can pull it off.
That was my point. And idea without ability is fantasy. If you come up with a good idea and can say to do this we need to do x, y, and z then it is worth something.
The problem is that we live in a world full of fools. A fool thinks that everything they do not know how to do is easy. So some bozo comes up with an idea that will take a team of 10 people two years to code and debug but doesn't see the value in it.
I would like to see that as well. The real kicker is that one of the reasons that Moore's law works is that raw maternal input is not fixed by the task. It simply states that the number of components on a given area of a chip will double every 18 months. That can not possibly apply to something like a rocket or a solar cell! both require a more or less fixed amount of material to do a task while the same chip can get smaller and smaller. And what really makes me go nuts is when people treat it like some magic wand! "If we just apply Moore's law to x..." Just bit me!
They are all lazy or they are in pay of the oil companies. If not they would just whip it up for you.
Kind of like those super cheap and efficient solar cells I have want.
Back to the real world. What drives me nuts is when people on Slashdot try to apply Moore's law to things it just can not apply too. Everything from rockets, to solar cells, to goodness knows what else.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes I have read it. And you are in part right but at the same time it claims that no one has any responsibility but to their self.
And in that is where it all falls down. Take the book Fountainhead.
The "Hero" rapes the heroine but it is okay because she likes it. All women want a strong man that will take what they want.
Now the parts where Roark would rather work in a quarry than build what he considers to be unworthy buildings isn't terrible. I am all for not compromising in one what you really believe in your heart. But then he takes another mans wife that he claims is his friend. And in the end he blows up a building that he doesn't own because someone went back on a none legally binding deal. That takes being being true to your ideals to an extreme from of narcissism. He knew that Peter Keating was weak and only a fool would think that he wouldn't cave. Roark made a stupid error to trust Keating and should have been a man and sucked it up. Yes he didn't get his way because his ego and desire to design Cortlandt Homes lead him to make a deal with someone he knew was weak as water and without any integrity. And in the end instead of living with the consequence of his actions he blew up the building while being careful to not kill anyone. Then he got off the hook in the trial because he jury was full good hard men like him.
No it is a clear case of ego tripping. I am so great that I can do what ever I want and if you are as great as me you will like it!
Throw on all the negative value of charity and compassion and you have an ego trip.
I do like the book as entertainment but not a way of life.
But here is the problem. Not everything has value right now. Research may not pay off in someones life time but may be of huge benefit. Charity. A student may be too poor to go to college but may be brilliant. That student may contribute greatly to society but only if they get charity to go to school. A rich child may have no value to society but the money his parents has made.
It is a way of life that is attractive on the surface but fails when you look at deeply.
Just as Marx.
But does it have no truth in it? Of course not just as Marx has truth in it. The best lies are mostly the truth. That is why they are so effective.
Back to Fountainhead. Ellsworth Toohey does represent a real villain type that runs around in society. The professional critic. They are here and are easy to spot. They do nothing but complain that this or that could be better but do nothing to make anything better themselves.
The find fault with all and create nothing.
You will often run into them on Slashdot. They are the ones that will complain that this or that FOSS program doesn't have this feature in it but they have never written a line of code for the project or donated a single cent to it. Oh they think they contribute because they use FOSS...
They are also the ones that will say that x Should be free and claim that they support FOSS but then pirate music, movies, and software and justify it as standing up for FREEDOM of speech.
What they want is stuff for nothing.
Now the book Anthem.. Nice bit of science fiction.
You may not agree with my feelings about Ayn Rand and that is your right but to claim I have never read her works is not fair. I read Fountainhead when I was 17 and have read it a few more times over the last 23 years.
Atlas Shrugged I just couldn't get into.
So there!
"1. Garbage collection interacts very badly with swap. Once your Java program starts hitting the disk, it will stand still for minutes. Bigger memory sizes are solving this problem nowadays."
That is where the bad programs really come in. I have seen people just load huge structures into memory for no good reason other than they can.
Two I will give you. Three the huge isn't a bad thing. Complicated and odd I would say are not fair if you compare it it say MFC and all the other half baked APIs for Windows!
Windows is just a huge complex mess of decades of stacked APIs.
Actually it was needed because 100 years ago we had manual typewriters and it to took a lot of effort to hold down the shift.
We kept it because for some reason people wanted some forms to have fields in all upper case.
Now with computers it takes very little effort to hold down the shift key and if a field needs to be in all upper the software should do it for you.
For people that want to use it in data base work well I just hold down the shift but that is just me. but being a programmer I can see other options.
An all caps mode that you go into by double tapping the shift key and you get out by tapping the shift key? It would free up the space and give you the same functionality. The one exception is for those that really tick me off and when they are in all caps they put the c in McDONALD in lower case!
Actually Ayn Rand is very seductive to a lot of young intelligent people. Tech types are often big fans. Young smart liberal arts people used to and still might but sucked in to Marx.
They reasons are simple. For tech types it is "the people that build and create new stuff are better than everyone else". When you are young it is good to be better then everyone else. In Ayn Rand's world Geeks rule the earth. After all they are the ones that make everything and do the real work. All those artsy folks and money men are just keeping you down!
For the liberal arts folks it must be "everything is of equal value, an engineer or a doctor is no better than an artist".
Plus it seems so "nice". Hey and those silly people that think that they are better than you just because the make cars or treat the sick are put in their place! They are no better than the artist or dancer! That is right we are all EQUAL!
When I was young I read Rand's books because I liked Rush. When one grows in wisdom or in many cases if one grows in wisdom you realize that both Marx and Rand are crap. There is nothing wrong with some compensation and nothing wrong with help out people that need help.
Or if you want to be view me in the light of Ayn Rand. I choose to do good because I want to. I choose to donate food to a food bank because it is mine to give. I choose help build homes for Habitat for humanity because I want to. I do these things not out of fear but out of joy.
If you think that Rand and or Marx are anything but mildly interesting you lack wisdom and common sense but when you are young they both paint a world where certain classes of people are attracted because there works speak to your feelings of persecution.
Hey I still like Fountainhead and Anthem and Rush. They are fun reads and I enjoy Rush's music. Thing is that they sure are not guides to live my life! I don't want to be Howard Rourke.
How the book Illusions is how I want to live my life... It would be so much fun to be a barnstormer. Funny thing is other people that read that book seem to think that is not the correct conclusion.
Really? What free alternative to Java exist? Most Java haters never developed with it, where bad with it, and or used a bad written program possibly written by them. Java desktop apps only real issue tends to be start up time but has gotten a lot better of late. The real problem with Java is that it allows some really crappy programs to actually work vs c where they would have long ago self destructed.
StarOffice? Well OpenOffice is the FOSS version of StarOffice that was supported by Sun. So what free alternative is better than OpenOffice? Get back to me on that one will you. Oh and not based off of OpenOffice just to keep it from getting stupid.
Solaris? Linux and the BSDs are very good but Solaris and OpenSolaris still have a big performance lead using ZFS. The limited software support for OpenSolaris is really it's only down side when compared with Linux so I would have to say that even Solaris in some use cases is better then the FOSS alternatives.
Sun really blew it with Java. Sun gave away too much IMHO with Java. Giving away the JVM was great. All the tutorals and docs where also great but where was the revenue stream? They gave away a really good dev system called Netbeans so how was Sun going to make money with Java?
Their hope was that Java on the desktop and the internet push people to buy the Sun light clients and servers. That failed.
StarOffice and OpenOffice where really a way to attack Microsoft. In that way it really has failed. OpenOffice didn't capture the user base that Sun hoped it would. It did force Microsoft to offer cheaper versions of Office. The problem with StarOffice and OpenOffice to this day is that Microsoft Office is better. And Yes I am an OO.org users but ony because I am not a big user. OO.org Calc is super slow. So slow that I actually installed gnumeric to use with a small office spreadsheet!
As painful as Access is for me to use there still isn't a good FOSS way to run those apps that I have seen and there is a good number of them.
There is still value in non FOSS software. Microsoft, Adobe, Quicken and Oracle all are making money selling software not to mention Valve and EA.
Sun just really missed many chances over time. They could have gotten into so many markets but a lot of them would have been seen as competing with their own customers. In that respect Sun was like Digital Research. Notice that Microsoft never cares who it goes after. Developers? They are great unless they make too much money then it is a market that Microsoft should own!
Well not all apps scale well to clusters. Things like billing apps are a good example. For anything involving money you want and ACID data base. If Facebook forgets a few thousand status updates or if they don't show up on some friends wall it isn't a big deal. If a few thousand credit card transactions don't make it into the system....
That is why you Power, Sparc, and ZSystems are still in use.
They are selling to people that make choices based on hard numbers and not buzz words. Hopefully that is.
There is still a market for big iron like IBMs Power and ZSystems as well as Sparc.
Thanks that is why I said I wasn't sure. I know that early versions did not use the JIT.
I am not a fan of the NDK concept. It seems to be a band-aid for short comings in the the Java system and now you need to worry about differences in the different CPUs.
Done correctly the NDK would generate fat binaries for the different levels of ARM. Maybe it does but I see versions of some of the NDK programs in the app store.
One should not have to know what ISA your phone supports.
Never ran because the code would have blown chunks.
Managed code can let terrible code run that would have suffered massive memory leaks or other issues with under c.
What a fool. You will accomplish nothing but invoke the wrath of AC that wish to pretend that they are rebels and making a difference.
It can but C#, Java, Python, and VB.net can all be compiled to assembly.
Native and low level are really very nebulous terms. ,compiled, and interpreted. Compiled and interpreted had everything to do with implementation and not the language. I have used interpreted COBOL and compiled Basic.
It used to be just assembly
Then you had the virtual machine languages. The first famous one was Pascal. Pascal originally compiled down to P code. Those systems where all the rage for a while in universities between Pascal and the MIX.
Now you have
Assembly which isn't used very often anymore.
Interpreted which now often are tokenized at run time and resemble the older virtual machine systems like P-Code that traditional interpreters.
The new "managed code" which now often have use a just in time compiler so they are getting more and more like compiled languages.
And then you have traditional compilers that with things like LLVM are becoming more like virtual machines!
But in the end unless you are writing in assembly language you are not programming really doing anything "native".
Every modern compiler takes whats you write and then applies optimizations. What you write and what the CPU sees tend to very different which is a good thing.
But what it comes down too is optimization. Frankly managed code on modern systems tends to be pretty dang good. The one down side is that it allows for sloppy programming.
In the end managed code doesn't usually have a large impact on the speed of a program. What it often does is allow a program that would have never ran run slowly.
If you write good tight code it will run very fast unless the tools just suck.
"Regards organic salt, although it pisses me off, the chemistry definition is relatively new"
Actually organic salt fails from the stand point of the older definitions as well.
There are two classical terms for Organic.
One is "From the living". Think of things like fruit and meat. Salt is a crystal that can be mined and or gotten from salt water. While things on the water may be alive the salt water it's self is not.
The second is "Changed by heat" early scientists noticed that living things where changed by heat. Food cooks, wood burns, even fresh bone was changed by heat. A classic example of the day of in organic material was salt. No matter how hot you got it salt was salt. Of course they didn't have the the heat sources we have today but you get the idea. Fire doesn't change salt.
The way that organic is abused often today is the newest use of the term organic. Frankly it is just the dumbest marketing abuse of a word I have seen in a long time.
My guess is that it is just sea salt.
Yes I did know about Mini computers.
Not only did you have Mini computers but you had Super minicomputers like the VAX and Maybe the DEC-10 and DEC-20 depending on who you asked.
Then you had main frames like the IBM 360 and then you had the Super computers from CDC and Cray.
And at one time you even had supermicrocomputers that used 32 bit cpus before they became mainstream.
But that is kind of the point. Micro and Nano do not always mean a certain power of ten but have been used for a while as a general indicator of size.
"I am actually a game developer who wishes to remain anonymous. I code strictly in native code. "
Really you code in straight x86 assembly language?
You don't use any game engines?
Do you really?
"I tend to code for x86 and PPC both all the time. The only difference in a well designed codebase is the extra compile time. "
I guess not.
You probably code in c or c++ those are not low level languages. C++ sure isn't. I have heard c called a mid level language but low level means assembly as does native.
So now that we have established that you code in a higher level language what it comes down to is the compiler.
Here Android does have an issue. The java system on it has not in the past been all that optimized. I am not even sure that it uses a JIT compiler.
Your statment proves that a high level language need not be slower than a low level one. It all comes down to a problem of code optimization and in this case Android has been at a real disadvantage. If Google can get a really good JIT compiler added to Android it will really help them performance wise.
BTW just a bit of information on code optimization. C and C++ are terrible languages to try and do code optimization for. The syntax is so flexible that it is actually a rather difficult problem to write a good optimizer for them. That is one of the reasons that even today you still see a lot of HPC apps written in FORTRAN. FORTRAN really optimizes very well and that fact combined with the large number of really good HPC legacy libraries and software means that it still is popular in the HPC community.
Yes but that is the problem with Android. I have a one year old Android phone. When I picked it because at the time it was the fastest CPU, had an OLED screen, and used stock Android.
Now it can not play Angry birds and is not getting 2.2 much less 2.3! This is not a super old phone but the Samsung Moment is is a dead end device.
It was the best phone I could get at the time. So if you were to write a game for Android what do you target as the lowend? The Droid? The Epic? The Nexus S?
I like Android but Google needs to "lock down" the manufactures a bit more IMHO. Right now I would buy a Nexus S if Google offered it on Sprint. I am tired of dinking about with vendors skinning Android and with Vendors and Carriers not updating the OS.
What I would like to see is for Google to certify some phones as Google Prime or some such thing. They would have stock Android and would get updates right from Google. Sort of a Nexus but one that any manufacture can make and any carrier can carry.
A large amount of the savings should come from hardware.
Windows must use and X86 while Chrome can run on ARM or maybe even MIPS
maybe you can get a humor transplant.
It is called a living language micro means small and nano means even smaller just as mega means big. Microcomputers where not an order of magnitude smaller then centicomputers. In fact we didn't have centicomputers or decicomputers.
But wait you did have microprocessors and microcomputers used them so it makes sense... Nope just shifts it because we didn't have centiprocessors...
So Microsats and Nanosats are just as valid as microcomputers, microcars, megaprojects and iPod Nanos. It is just a living language co-opting a word.
And if that bothers too bad. I am still ticked off whenever I see organic salt for sale in a market!
There IS NO CARBON IN TABLE SALT!!!!!!!
And that is the whole point of the orignal article.
If you say "I have this great idea I just need a programmer" odds are very high that you have only a trivial understanding of the problem.
That is what I use on my windows machine and it works well for me. Frankly I am not sure why anybody pays for security software anymore.
So they spy on their pirates...
Always a good tactic.
Ideas are a beginning. They are really cheap.
Let's take some good ideas and I will show you what I mean.
A house that uses less power by monitoring it's environment.
That is a good idea. Now someone needs to design a the building, create the sensors "if they are needed" and then get it built. Now think about this step by step. Now you need to decide what needs to be done and how. You may want to control how much sunlight gets into the home in the summer to limit heating and in the winter for solar gain.
So do you use sensors and electric blinds or do you use the over hang of the roof?
Passive vs active controls. Plus how long will it work before it breaks? How much to fix it over the life of the home?
That was my point the idea is cheap and useless without the ability to actually execute.
What this professor was getting at is he is tired of fools that don't get it.
I have this great idea I just need a programmer "Code monkey" that can do what I tell them.
That is a fool.
Someone that is wise would look at it like this.
I have this great project and I need some talented team members that can pull it off.
That was my point. And idea without ability is fantasy.
If you come up with a good idea and can say to do this we need to do x, y, and z then it is worth something.
The problem is that we live in a world full of fools. A fool thinks that everything they do not know how to do is easy.
So some bozo comes up with an idea that will take a team of 10 people two years to code and debug but doesn't see the value in it.
I would like to see that as well.
The real kicker is that one of the reasons that Moore's law works is that raw maternal input is not fixed by the task.
It simply states that the number of components on a given area of a chip will double every 18 months.
That can not possibly apply to something like a rocket or a solar cell! both require a more or less fixed amount of material to do a task while the same chip can get smaller and smaller.
And what really makes me go nuts is when people treat it like some magic wand! "If we just apply Moore's law to x..."
Just bit me!
They are all lazy or they are in pay of the oil companies. If not they would just whip it up for you.
Kind of like those super cheap and efficient solar cells I have want.
Back to the real world. What drives me nuts is when people on Slashdot try to apply Moore's law to things it just can not apply too. Everything from rockets, to solar cells, to goodness knows what else.