You have first hand experience which I respect, however Ada was not mandated to replace just C, but the hundreds of other languages (including dialects) with custom tools, compilers etc spread across all of the DoD. They decided to standardise on just one language and AT&T refused to submit C (they said it was not suitable).
As for "elephantine bulk", well the language definition for Ada95 is about the same or smaller than C++. Guess which language many contractors switched to from Ada? You got it. I've heard that they've had at best mixed success mindlessly switching from one complex language to an even more complex language even though in many cases they already had working systems.
He just wanted to get a rise out of people by saying something completely stupid and inflamatory.
Something like that. I've been to the x.org site many times looking for news or interesting stuff. It just never happens. They don't fix typos and as trivial as that is, it fits in with the overall impression the site gives - X is dead, it's all over. Compare this with the hotbed of activity at sites like XFree, UtahGLX etc. Then of course there was the attempt to take X11R6.4 proprietary, everyone should laugh at them for that. A friend of mine said it was a way to stop all the freeloading of those free software types who never had the decency to cough up for the Motif license all X users were supposed to need. Needless to say he and I don't see eye-to-eye on these issues.
Of course since I've only been working full time on X apps for 6 years maybe I don't understand the true subtlety and greatness of x.org's stealth approach, unlike all you X programming demigods hanging out here flaming on slashdot (heh).
And the very worst part is that the game is now so old and outdated (I got the full windows version for free with my video card over a year ago) that nobody will buy it, and game companies will say "see, there is no interest in games on linux"
I've probably got it somewhere with one of my video cards too, however since I don't run Windows, Descent 3 is certainly new to me, that's why I ordered my copy straight away. Don't assume everyone uses Windows for games and Linux for the rest - I've never had my own WindowsPC in my life.
Excuse me, but Ada was not designed by committee. There was a large requirements gathering process, but the design of the language was by a small tightly focussed design team led by Tucker S. Taft at Intermetrics who had final say, and used it.
For what it's worth, Larry Wall publically said that Ada might be a good choice for the Perl6 implementation language.
The Topaz project chose C++ instead (which is probably fine) however the reason they gave for dropping Ada off the candidate list was due to bootstrapping worries which were, in my view, unfounded now that we have GNAT (also see this). I hope they reconsider.
Also do not forget, it's "Ada" not "ADA". ADA is the American Dental Association, whereas Ada is a language named after Ada Byron, Countess of Lovelace, world's first programmer, thanks!
Other than webserving via TUX or khttpd or what-have-you, what other functions that traditionally run in user-mode do you think might be usefully moved (optionally, of course) into the kernel. One that comes to mind is Quake Arena servers (I could be way off base though!), and perhaps other services where latency is critical (is NFS in the kernel yet? I forget).
Whilst I'm replying to myself I should probably add that not only does the DSL from BA work with linux, but yesterday I had no problems getting a 400kbit stream from real.com which compares favourably with the advertised max. speed of 640kbit. Of course it was Christina Aguilera so once I proved it could be done I turned it off...
I installed my DSL myself. They sent me a box with the equipment and a CD for Windows. I got it running with Windows and then switched over to plugging the external DSL modem into my linux gateway (dual network cards, IP masquerading).
During severe high-end cpu shortages a couple of months ago, the only tier one manufacturer to claim to have no problems getting the chips it wanted was Dell, which happened to be the last tier one manufacturer to not offer AMD products.
My guess is Dell got guaranteed supplies in exchange for agreeing not to open up to AMD.
From the look of this page here there can be quite a significant price difference. I'm not qualified to comment on whether "PE4400 - Highly Scalable Departmental Server" for $11,515 (forth box down) is a better solution that "PowerEdge[tm] 4400 with Red Hat Linux" for $7144, but if I was buying a departmental server it would be my job to find out before I paid all that extra money for the Microsoft solution. As far as I can tell the hardware is equivalent. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
nobody could be bothered to give you any dead tree-ware documentation anymore
Some vendors still sell printed documentation e.g. Sun.
I ordered a big set of manuals from Sun earlier this year. After a really long time I asked them where they had gone. They told me they had been shipped and delivered but they checked the label and they had got my name wrong. They had my first name right but had randomly mispelled my surname. Turns out there was someone here by that name. She threw them away. DOH!
I have limited experience of Visual Source Safe, but I do have one very strong criticism - it's not good over high latency networks. I collaborate with a colleague in London who does most of the coding on some of our modules. Because our repository is in New York, he had to stop using Visual Source Safe for day-to-day source code control as it was taking WAY too long to do simple operations. By contrast, our shared CVS repository on my Sun workstation here in NY works fine when he is dialled in from home in London even!
Type 'free' and make sure linux is using all 256megs of RAM.... Sounds like its only using the first 64megs and swapping.... Even in the 2.2.x series, you sometimes still have to specifically put the APPEND="mem=256m" in lilo.conf....
HOLY SHIT!!!!!
Ok sorry about that, I just got a free memory upgrade from 64M to 256M. Thank you so much - I never knew that. I never had a machine where it was an issue until this one.
Also thanks to other info on this page I now don't seem to get crashes from my Asus K7M + Athlon 750 + GeForce DDR (previously just running xlock -mode random for a while could do it). Thanks again.
I was surprised nobody mentioned the old NeXT cubes - solid magnesium alloy case!
I never heard of anyone shooting one, but they could be burnt!"
Re:Obselence -- Something to fear?
on
Too Old To Code?
·
· Score: 1
I've found that in order to stay competitive, one must never stop learning.
Well said - this is the crux of the matter as far as I'm concerned. As long as you stay "humble" in terms of your own inner assessment of your knowledge vs. your potential level things can be very good.
I'm 31 and never used some of my current tools until last year. I've done some of my best work this year.
Chris Morgan
- had a good memorial day - fixed a bug that lurked for nearly a year
I have to take issue with the above. Just because I have to be sensible when (if) I chose a computer for work, it doesn't mean we need that on Ace's Hardware (or Slashdot). You can find the mature business focussed coverage elsewhere.
To use your analogy, your complaint seems to be that a Porsche is an unrealistic car. Yeah, but it's MUCH more fun to read about than the Neon I might actually be able to afford. It's also a lot more beautiful.
Like a Porsche Turbo with that amazing four-wheel drive system, the Alpha gets a lot of "traction" in high end boxes - it really gets the power "down onto the road", better even than the Athlon with more MHz (which I suppose is a bit like the McLaren - sky-high power output but not much faster along real roads).
Stuff like the wide, point-to-point memory link, beefy cache and killer compiler really is more interesting than raw MHz and that's why this is a good read and a worthwile (informative) review.
The nice thing about the mismatch is it really highlights the power of the alpha when fed properly optimised executables.
As the article shows, using the C|O|M|P|A|Q compiler, the Alpha still defeats the Athlon at floating point work. Pretty amazing stuff.
As a long term fan of the alpha, I am so pleased to see the architecture entering the consciousness of the enthusiasts. Perhaps someone can lend these guys an XP1000 (XP stands for "Extreme Performance") or even an ES40, just for fun.
Course it would be more fun if they had started pumping out 0.18 micron Alphas so they could return to the days of eye-popping clock speeds - rumour has it the 21264 could hit 1.6GHz!!!
Just don't mention the cost - always the weak spot of the Alpha.
Of course you can go on Napster and find it, Coolio - Gangstas Paradise,
Of course you all know that Gangsta's Paradise is really just Pastime Paradise by Stevie Wonder with different lyrics, don't you? Please?
That's why it was so funny when Coolio complained about Weird Al's Amish Paradise...
Re:I speak for myself when I say...
on
Athlons Sold Out
·
· Score: 1
1 out of three aint... good.
SMP - yes there you have a point.
GeForce DDR with Athlon - well this computer I'm using right now works just fine - I nearly fell off my chair when I saw how fast 'xlock -mode sproingies' runs on it. It's an Athlon 750 with GeForce 256 DDR 32MB.
Can't buy an athlon? Hmmm, have you tried? I bought this one last week!
Don't worry about this story, you certainly can get an Athlon/GeForce right now, and it will work.
'Tis a shame about no SMP though, I do sympathise.
RMS is not a member of the Open Source movement. He founded the Free Software "movement" and has never changed his mind about that. I think that's his right. The reason he gets the attention he does is that the Linux project, whilst not explicily founded with the same goals, has always been based on GCC and released under the GPL. Linus said he was fine with the term GNU/Linux.
Given all this, people who want to use all this great software but ditch the "tiresome" (my paraphrase) politics have MISSED THE ENTIRE POINT.
I would recommend looking into the book "Linux A-Z" by Phil Cornes. He starts off with an introduction to Linux for the complete beginner, but later on introduces neat little projects like Tiny Socket Library, Tiny Shell, Tiny Daemon and Tiny Device Driver. The writing is spare, accurate and elegant, and the book is even typeset (as far as I can tell) in Latex (love those computer modern fonts, just like the GNU manuals).
Of course the material might have to be updated a little here and there to make sure it doesn't lead the students down any blind alleys, but the beauty of the self-contained "Tiny" case studies is that they contain enough code to illustrate the principles being expounded - just tweak them a little if the system interfaces have changed and they'll still be great teaching material.
Slashdot Mirror
Just to be pedantic, that was Arthur C. Clarke. But it's ok, he wrote some good Sci-Fi too.
You have first hand experience which I respect, however Ada was not mandated to replace just C, but the hundreds of other languages (including dialects) with custom tools, compilers etc spread across all of the DoD. They decided to standardise on just one language and AT&T refused to submit C (they said it was not suitable).
As for "elephantine bulk", well the language definition for Ada95 is about the same or smaller than C++. Guess which language many contractors switched to from Ada? You got it. I've heard that they've had at best mixed success mindlessly switching from one complex language to an even more complex language even though in many cases they already had working systems.
Otherwise you are quite right.
He just wanted to get a rise out of people by saying something completely stupid and inflamatory. Something like that. I've been to the x.org site many times looking for news or interesting stuff. It just never happens. They don't fix typos and as trivial as that is, it fits in with the overall impression the site gives - X is dead, it's all over. Compare this with the hotbed of activity at sites like XFree, UtahGLX etc. Then of course there was the attempt to take X11R6.4 proprietary, everyone should laugh at them for that. A friend of mine said it was a way to stop all the freeloading of those free software types who never had the decency to cough up for the Motif license all X users were supposed to need. Needless to say he and I don't see eye-to-eye on these issues.
Of course since I've only been working full time on X apps for 6 years maybe I don't understand the true subtlety and greatness of x.org's stealth approach, unlike all you X programming demigods hanging out here flaming on slashdot (heh).
Like you know anything about me...
And the very worst part is that the game is now so old and outdated (I got the full windows version for free with my video card over a year ago) that nobody will buy it, and game companies will say "see, there is no interest in games on linux"
I've probably got it somewhere with one of my video cards too, however since I don't run Windows, Descent 3 is certainly new to me, that's why I ordered my copy straight away. Don't assume everyone uses Windows for games and Linux for the rest - I've never had my own WindowsPC in my life.
Ada was designed by committees
Excuse me, but Ada was not designed by committee. There was a large requirements gathering process, but the design of the language was by a small tightly focussed design team led by Tucker S. Taft at Intermetrics who had final say, and used it.
For what it's worth, Larry Wall publically said that Ada might be a good choice for the Perl6 implementation language.
The Topaz project chose C++ instead (which is probably fine) however the reason they gave for dropping Ada off the candidate list was due to bootstrapping worries which were, in my view, unfounded now that we have GNAT (also see this). I hope they reconsider.
Also do not forget, it's "Ada" not "ADA". ADA is the American Dental Association, whereas Ada is a language named after Ada Byron, Countess of Lovelace, world's first programmer, thanks!
Chris Morgan
Other than webserving via TUX or khttpd or what-have-you, what other functions that traditionally run in user-mode do you think might be usefully moved (optionally, of course) into the kernel. One that comes to mind is Quake Arena servers (I could be way off base though!), and perhaps other services where latency is critical (is NFS in the kernel yet? I forget).
Whilst I'm replying to myself I should probably add that not only does the DSL from BA work with linux, but yesterday I had no problems getting a 400kbit stream from real.com which compares favourably with the advertised max. speed of 640kbit. Of course it was Christina Aguilera so once I proved it could be done I turned it off...
I think your information is out-of-date and/or misleading. I've had no problems with Roaring Penguin's free PPPoE implementation for linux
Sorry, that should have been DSL diary
I installed my DSL myself. They sent me a box with the equipment and a CD for Windows. I got it running with Windows and then switched over to plugging the external DSL modem into my linux gateway (dual network cards, IP masquerading).
I've got more of the ins and outs on my DSL diary
During severe high-end cpu shortages a couple of months ago, the only tier one manufacturer to claim to have no problems getting the chips it wanted was Dell, which happened to be the last tier one manufacturer to not offer AMD products.
My guess is Dell got guaranteed supplies in exchange for agreeing not to open up to AMD.
From the look of this page here there can be quite a significant price difference. I'm not qualified to comment on whether "PE4400 - Highly Scalable Departmental Server" for $11,515 (forth box down) is a better solution that "PowerEdge[tm] 4400 with Red Hat Linux" for $7144, but if I was buying a departmental server it would be my job to find out before I paid all that extra money for the Microsoft solution. As far as I can tell the hardware is equivalent. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
Cheers,
Chris Morgan
Some vendors still sell printed documentation e.g. Sun.
I ordered a big set of manuals from Sun earlier this year. After a really long time I asked them where they had gone. They told me they had been shipped and delivered but they checked the label and they had got my name wrong. They had my first name right but had randomly mispelled my surname. Turns out there was someone here by that name. She threw them away. DOH!
I don't bother any more.
p.s. Sun did give me a new set.
I have limited experience of Visual Source Safe, but I do have one very strong criticism - it's not good over high latency networks. I collaborate with a colleague in London who does most of the coding on some of our modules. Because our repository is in New York, he had to stop using Visual Source Safe for day-to-day source code control as it was taking WAY too long to do simple operations. By contrast, our shared CVS repository on my Sun workstation here in NY works fine when he is dialled in from home in London even!
If you have a K7M motherboard make sure you update your BIOS to version 1009 or later.
Can this be done from Linux?
specifically put the APPEND="mem=256m" in lilo.conf
HOLY SHIT!!!!!
Ok sorry about that, I just got a free memory upgrade from 64M to 256M. Thank you so much - I never knew that. I never had a machine where it was an issue until this one.
Also thanks to other info on this page I now don't seem to get crashes from my Asus K7M + Athlon 750 + GeForce DDR (previously just running xlock -mode random for a while could do it). Thanks again.
Chris Morgan
I was surprised nobody mentioned the old NeXT cubes - solid magnesium alloy case!
I never heard of anyone shooting one, but they could be burnt!"
Well said - this is the crux of the matter as far as I'm concerned. As long as you stay "humble" in terms of your own inner assessment of your knowledge vs. your potential level things can be very good.
I'm 31 and never used some of my current tools until last year. I've done some of my best work this year.
Chris Morgan
- had a good memorial day - fixed a bug that lurked for nearly a year
I have to take issue with the above. Just because I have to be sensible when (if) I chose a computer for work, it doesn't mean we need that on Ace's Hardware (or Slashdot). You can find the mature business focussed coverage elsewhere.
To use your analogy, your complaint seems to be that a Porsche is an unrealistic car. Yeah, but it's MUCH more fun to read about than the Neon I might actually be able to afford. It's also a lot more beautiful.
Like a Porsche Turbo with that amazing four-wheel drive system, the Alpha gets a lot of "traction" in high end boxes - it really gets the power "down onto the road", better even than the Athlon with more MHz (which I suppose is a bit like the McLaren - sky-high power output but not much faster along real roads).
Stuff like the wide, point-to-point memory link, beefy cache and killer compiler really is more interesting than raw MHz and that's why this is a good read and a worthwile (informative) review.
The nice thing about the mismatch is it really highlights the power of the alpha when fed properly optimised executables.
As the article shows, using the C|O|M|P|A|Q compiler, the Alpha still defeats the Athlon at floating point work. Pretty amazing stuff.
As a long term fan of the alpha, I am so pleased to see the architecture entering the consciousness of the enthusiasts. Perhaps someone can lend these guys an XP1000 (XP stands for "Extreme Performance") or even an ES40, just for fun.
Course it would be more fun if they had started pumping out 0.18 micron Alphas so they could return to the days of eye-popping clock speeds - rumour has it the 21264 could hit 1.6GHz!!!
Just don't mention the cost - always the weak spot of the Alpha.
Of course you all know that Gangsta's Paradise is really just Pastime Paradise by Stevie Wonder with different lyrics, don't you? Please?
That's why it was so funny when Coolio complained about Weird Al's Amish Paradise...
1 out of three aint ... good.
SMP - yes there you have a point.
GeForce DDR with Athlon - well this computer I'm using right now works just fine - I nearly fell off my chair when I saw how fast 'xlock -mode sproingies' runs on it. It's an Athlon 750 with GeForce 256 DDR 32MB.
Can't buy an athlon? Hmmm, have you tried? I bought this one last week!
Don't worry about this story, you certainly can get an Athlon/GeForce right now, and it will work.
'Tis a shame about no SMP though, I do sympathise.
Cheers,
Chris Morgan
RMS is not a member of the Open Source movement. He founded the Free Software "movement" and has never changed his mind about that. I think that's his right. The reason he gets the attention he does is that the Linux project, whilst not explicily founded with the same goals, has always been based on GCC and released under the GPL. Linus said he was fine with the term GNU/Linux.
Given all this, people who want to use all this great software but ditch the "tiresome" (my paraphrase) politics have MISSED THE ENTIRE POINT.
"Go figure"
I would recommend looking into the book "Linux A-Z" by Phil Cornes. He starts off with an introduction to Linux for the complete beginner, but later on introduces neat little projects like Tiny Socket Library, Tiny Shell, Tiny Daemon and Tiny Device Driver. The writing is spare, accurate and elegant, and the book is even typeset (as far as I can tell) in Latex (love those computer modern fonts, just like the GNU manuals).
Of course the material might have to be updated a little here and there to make sure it doesn't lead the students down any blind alleys, but the beauty of the self-contained "Tiny" case studies is that they contain enough code to illustrate the principles being expounded - just tweak them a little if the system interfaces have changed and they'll still be great teaching material.
Chris Morgan