Probably more than 25 years ago, as a young child, German television had some kind of "american tv week" running, where they showed original US TV all night. Which was radical different from German TV at that time.
One of the cartoons they showed was an episode of the original Sea Lab 2020. I was very impressed of it because it was bit like Star Trek but under the sea. To bad this stuff never made it over.
Imagine my surprise, when I stumbled over a Sea Lab 2021 episode on the net, the one with the Feng Shui master, some weeks ago.
Not only brought it back some pleasant youth memories, but this kind of recycling was so cool and funny, I nearly wet my pants laughing.:-)
How I want that Cartoon Network/Toonami/Adult Swim (but with no anime censorship!!) over here.
German pay tv is struggling to get subscribers, but they bet only on traditional horses (like formula one racing, Bundesliga soccer, softp0rn and early tv showings of movie blockbusters - a very boring setup).
No, for Windows you can either choose a version
using Direct X or one using OpenGL for
rendering.
Yes, that means that there is C code running at a low level (i.e., the OpenGL implementation
provided by each graphics card provider), but
that is no different that *any* language other than C that uses the OpenGL standard, including C++.
My complaint is that there is no Java3D version that is portable and free at the same time.
But that is my general problem with Sun's Java
licensing.
I agree that Java may have missed the mark, as far as performance-intensive applications like games are concerned, but given that people are seriously interested in Python-based game
development (as evidenced by pygame, PyOpenGL, etc.), I think it's hardly reasonable to attack it on the basis of performance.
The present Java games are not bad.
But they are the same league, like games written
in Flash are. Hard to imagine a Java title would show up in the games top 10, and this mainly
due to the fact, that most top titles try to really use the hardware at its limits, thus performance is an issue.
Personally, I'd rather hear the opinion of
someone who had actually worked on commercial-
scale gaming projects.
Java gaming is a good resource.
Several of my colleagues are former game professionals. They watch the Java game development community with great interest.
As far as I can tell, their opinion on Java for gaming seems to range from promising to not suitable (at least not for Quake III like games, where state of the art 3d engines are needed that squeeze out every cycle).
The crucial question for them is if you can make money with such a title, which seems to be not easy in the games industry.
Perhaps it will be in the mobile phone market?
1. The slowdown is less [than 20%] in 3D applications.
Java3D is written in C/C++.
Thus the Java program feeds the C/C++ layer with the necessary data and control, which in turn feeds the graphics processor, which does the work.
The additional time is needed to transform Java Objects out of the VM into C Objects and back.
Is this bad? I don't think so. What I don't like is that Java is marketed as plattform independent, which it is not, large parts are implemented as native code. Java is easy to use on the 4 supported main platforms (Solaris, Windows, Linux, Mac OS X), otherwise one has to hope that a porting effort is underway (like in case of FreeBSD).
2. There is a 65% increase in productivity.
Most good Java programs I have seen yet are integrated development environments. It is really amazing how many IDEs are written in Java. Some of them being very good ones.
Add to this the large, standardized libraries, and the dumbed down syntax in many areas, compared to C++.
While I judge 65% a bit high, development with Java sure is quite comfortable.
> That's like saying HTML never added anything to a
> site. 100% true. It's the content that matters, > not how it's delivered.
HTML has two important ideas/areas:
structured content (semantic markup, like in LaTeX)
easy presentation (it's easy to get a nice rendering)
HTML both was successful and sucks at the same time because it works in both areas moderately well.
People have worked on improving both areas.
The first part, holding content, led to the development of XML, which holds great promise of standardized logical markups.
The second part, focussing on pretty display lead to stuff like Java Applets and indeed Flash.
The interesting thing is that Sun, for a long time, didn't manage to provide users with painless to install and use Java VMs, while Flash had no trouble at all providing Flash Players to all major platforms. While Java Applets very often do not work, I can't remember having encountered any faulty Flash presentation yet.
However Sun seems to have woken up lately. Since 1.3, and the introduction of the Java plug in, it has been much less pain to use Java than before.
Then there is Java Web Start, which made it really, really easy to get, install and use Java applications.
See some demos
here
to experience Web Start.
This stuff is an example how web applications look like. Note that these apps are no longer confined to a square area in the browser (however even applets benefit from Java Web Start execution, because it is easier to update and version them).
Plus the 2D Api of Java introduced high quality graphical rendering (it was written by Sun and Adobe initially).
It has the potential to create better looking graphics than what Flash offers.
But here we have the potential reason why Flash took off, while Java didn't:
Flash was targeted at the community of graphical designers, people that use Photo Shop, with good graphical design talent. What they lack in programming talent, Macromedia helped out with creating authoring software.
Java however was targeted at the programming community. Sun could have created software that helped the programmers to create great looking apps. But execept for the visual brush up that came with Swing, and the aforementioned 2D API, there is much lacking. Example: a Java lib with the graphical capabilities of the GIMP or Photo Shop is something I would wish, plus tutorials in interface design to bring that graphical power to an
esthetic use.
As a programmer, I would love to see more Java than Flash. But I believe this is not going to happen until Sun would create authoring software similiar to Macromedia's, that would enable graphic artists with low programming skills to create high quality graphics output, but where the result is not some flash file, but a Java jar instead.
This is possible, but would require a definite commitment from Sun. Too bad they don't cooperate with Adobe on this one.
I saw one where the graphical menu system had
failed, and I'm fairly sure there was a little SCO OpenServer message. This is totally off-topic, I know, I just get a little thrill from seeing UNIX used in weird places...
:-) Some weeks ago, when the German Mark to Euro current conversion took place, I had a simliar experience - nearly every 2nd ticket vending automaton was not working properly.
It was very enlighting to finally see one of them to display a Windows message box on its touch screen.:)
So much for the theory (e.g. extreme programming methodology).
Yes, it should be like this, but in reality it will be done by teams only that have either enough man power to have spare time for this test implementation or that have an established product in a consolidation phase.
Java Web Start is an execllent solution to deploy and update Java apps.
Be they pure web centric apps (thus client apps to some server with JWS just doing the network caching and using the clients CPU power in end effect) or full apps (signed JWS apps) that
run on the client like any other program as well.
To me it is the easiest means to get Java stuff installed and running on a box.
I believe.NET's global assembly cache will go for the same (the configuration file allows for assembly download from servers as well).
So we get rid of the old setup/install from some medium paradigma and install from an URL rather (be it a web server in Australia, or a web server that is on the dvd, start by autorun.inf:)
However XUL and similiar systems might be easier to program and not require some Java GUI programmer.
Another reason is GUI changing at runtime.
Plus it might be nicer/easier/better to write GUI designers that operate on XML rather than generating and reverse engineering Java Swing code.
XUL was invented by the Mozilla folks for two reasons
to allow non C++ coders to do create GUI
apps by using simpler (ok, this is debatable)
XML and JavaScript coding
to change the GUI at runtime, which is a big deal if you consider how huge the mozilla code base is (it is called like Godzilla for a reason:), where resynching from cvs and recompiling takes a considerable amount of time - thus changing some menus is possible without redesitribution large binaries
The chatzilla IRC client is such an app.
By the way it is possible to upgrade this part
of Mozilla at run time, by getting a jar file (a zip that has the necessary xml and xul files).
Nice thing.
Flash to my knowledge is a tool for non programmers as well, primarily people with some graphic design background, to create interactive content using quality graphics (sharp antialiased fonts, animation,..) and sounds.
Thus not prior hackers, but rather Photo shop users.:)
This started at a time when Java applets were the only means to achieve this. And the Java graphics libs were far less advanced than they are today.
My guess from recent nice Flash sites is that the graphics toolbox available to Flash programmers is still somewhat better than the Java2D API.:)
However I have no clue how Flash programming works, I guess it is done in some GUI designer
rather than using procedural programming.
Thus the only connection I see, is that both XUL and Flash offer to use GUI designer software.
Otherwise it is different technology, with different focus.
really like assembly _because_ of the preference
of the jmp statements. I always look for it in
higher-level languages, too, as one actually even
can produce structured code with jmp/goto statements,
if you're a bit careful. The linux kernel includes
several occurences of goto, if I may cite this,
in order to make the code more readable.
The major point is that the conventional digital cuircuit logic is based on a certain ideal model.
Some of the assumptions of this model are:
we have two states 0 and 1
states evolve over time controlled by a regular clock signal
signals propagate by conventional electric current (moving electrons)
But guess what, a typical phyiscal device implements only an approximation of this model.
For example we say a certain voltage range is interpreted as a logical 0, a certain different higher volatage range is interpreted as a logical 1.
But the evolutionary algorithm was not constrained in any fashion to make use of this ideal digital model only. It can and will make use of the full available degrees of freedom the physical system, that the fpga device is, offers.
With the result that there might evolve analog cuircuits (which use more than 0 or 1 values), or that we might have electro-magnetic signal transport (Thompson reported some spiral structures which might work as electro-magnetic wave guides), yes it might even employ some quantum mechanical effect that could explained by advanced semiconductor physics only.
One might say that the approximation process that the evolution algorithm is, has started in the domain of digital devices and converged out of that domain into the wider domain of physical
devices.
This has a couple of draw backs:
the resulting design is harder to understand
individual fgpa chips vary slightly, which is no problem in a digital world, where ranges in the specification allow for slight variations among individual chips, but the resulting evolutionary design migh work only with certain chips, because it has much narrower tolerances than the production spec takes into account
I wonder what would have been happend if the algoritm had a control step after each evolution step which ensured that the next generation design would operate strictly under the assumptions of a conventional digital device model, in that case the evolution process should evolve towards a classical design.
Would it have been stil something that is hard to understand?
Perhaps in that case it is easier to stick to software simulation of the design.
[1] Hugo de Garis. Evolvable Hardware: Principles and Practice.
http://www.hip.atr.co.jp/~degaris/CACM-EHard.html
(link is not available today)
[2] Adrian Thompson. Evolving Electronic Robot Controllers that Exploit Hardware Resources.
CSRP 368 In: Advances in Artificial Life, Proceedings of the 3rd European Conference on Artificial Life (ECAL95) pp640-656. Springer-Verlag Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence number 929, 1995.
[3] Adrian Thompson. Evolving Fault Tolerant Systems. CSRP 385. In: Proceedings of The
First IEE/IEEE International Conference on Genetic Algorithms in Engineering Systems: Innovations and Applications (GALESIA'95), pp524-520, IEE Conference Publication No. 414, 1995.
[4] Adrian Thompson. Silicon Evolution. In: Proceedings of Genetic Programming 1996
(GP96), J.R. Koza et al. (Eds), pages 444-452, MIT Press 1996.
[5] Adrian Thompson. Through the Labyrinth Evolution Finds a Way: A Silicon Ridge. Inman
Harvey and Adrian Thompson. In: Proceedings of The First International Conference on Evolvable Systems: from Biology to Hardware (ICES96). Higuchi, T. and Iwata, M. (eds.), 406-422, Springer Verlag LNCS 1259, 1997.
[6] Adrian Thompson. An evolved circuit, intrinsic in silicon, entwined with physics. In:
Proceedings of The First International Conference on Evolvable Systems: from Biology to Hardware (ICES96). Higuchi, T. and Iwata, M. (eds.), 390-405, Springer Verlag LNCS 1259, 1997.
[7] Adrian Thompson. Artificial Evolution in the Physical World. In: Evolutionary Robotics:
From Intelligent Robots to Artificial Life (ER'97), T. Gomi (Ed.), pages 101-125. AAI Books, 1997.
[8] Adrian Thompson. On the Automatic Design of Robust Electronics Through Artificial
Evolution. In: Proc. 2nd Int. Conf. on Evolvable Systems: From biology to hardware (ICES98), M. Sipper, D. Mange & A. Pe'res-Uribe (Eds.), pp13-24, Springer-Verlag,1998.
The problems IMHO are more the technologies that are inheritantly proprietary, like media formats
or certain netservices (IM, passport,..) with no
popular free alternative.
As a former FreeBSD committer, I worked extensively with the team that produced the JRE/JDK project. Since programming languages can only be protected by patents (not copyrights), our original intention was to craft a clean-room version of Java that we could release under the BSD license, just like everything else in our distribution.
But Java isn't just a programming language.
When we talk about Java, this includes a decent VM, the huge libraries plus a couple of tools
that need to be provided.
The naked Java isn't very attractive.
It would look similiar to what the GCC java
offers.
Alone implementing the standard libs, plus AWT and SWING from scratch would have been a huge
task.
Ok, now there will be "blessed" version of Java, will this hinder any effort to create a 100% free version (any legal hook in the Sun community license?).
Mirror sites enable client requests to be serviced by any of a number of servers, reducing load at individual servers and dispersing network load.
But where to get the mirror sites from? For example if a new Star Wars trailer hits the net?
An interesting idea here is to distribute the
server workload onto the clients downwards:
Swarmcast is such a protocol.
It uses forward error correction as well, and I believe some of the guys whose names were mentioned in this discussion, are involved in this as well.
Mozilla (slightly OT too)
on
GTK-- vs. QT
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Another alternative is using Mozilla as IDE.
This might sound a bit crazy right now, but I believe this idea will get more followers, if Mozilla gets more and more stable.
An example is
the Komodo IDE by ActiveState, which uses XUL.
XUL is the next generation browser application platform. Simply speaking, the Mozilla team chose an approach very similiar to
JAVA
to come closer to a platform independent graphical user interface:
implement a set of base compenents on the most popular platforms (Win32, Mac, UNIX,..), that render your JAVA specific widgets in terms
of the native GUI.
implement your applications in your JAVA language
compile application
distribute JAVA binaries
XUL goes one step farther, as there is no compilation step.
The XUL application implementation language is a XML language
that together with cascading style sheets and JavaScript glue
will yield an application one starts in the browser by opening
the.xul document.
A possible advantage of XUL might become the relative ease
of application development, change and distribution.
Possible problems will be similiar to the ones known from
JAVA. The qualitiy of XUL applications will stand and fall
with the quality of the XUL implementation for a specific
platform, which right now means the quality of its Mozilla
or Netscape implementation.
Of course, compared to JAVA, which has underwent several
larger development cycles and now features mighty libraries,
XUL is a bleeding edge technology at its beginnings.
However it is still possible to make direct use of the various Mozilla widgets as well from C++.
The difference in performance between the early VMs and todays Hot Spot VMs is impressive, yes.
Those code optimizations at run time are however not a Hot Spot only domain, I have heard recent
Intel C++ compilers offer similiar optimizations.
I agree as well that Hot Spot + Moore's law have made some Java apps possible, that were unthinkable a few years ago.
I have seen some very nice "demos" (demos in the sense of stunning/teasing graphics + sound bits) written in Java lately.
smooth and stable execution under Win32 and Linux, perhaps Solaris one day
flawless access to the OODB we use and
some goodies like Java3D and web deployment,
(right now Java Web Start)
If the development environment (Editor, Debugger, Profiler, Testing, Architecture, Configuration Management) would work under Win32 and Linux
equally well, it would be a plus
The experience so far with all points (except security related stuff) was, that it either was less hassle under Win32 to achieve than under Linux, or it didn't work under Linux
for various reasons.
There is definitly a difference in maturity
of both plattforms at this time.
I would love to see it the other way, but I have to acknowledge reality.
Are you aware of how many companies actually rely on Java for really critical stuff, and use it accross platforms?
Sure. Java has its strong sides and its weak sides. J2EE reputation eg is excellent.
We have
production systems that run a whole slew of Java software on AIX (yes, IBM AIX!), Windows, and Solaris (client applications, servlet engines w/
servlets/jsp, backended by Java CORBA objects and JDBC database connections)
Again, I don't said, Java is worthless junk.
I however wrote down my opinion on some of its hyped ascpects.
Is using QT really that less difficult than a Java GUI in the first place?
I believe QT will give more trouble programming it
(less mature development tools for example, smaller development community) but it will save some gray hairs if the application is demanding regarding performance and memory.
Where's your evidence?
The only time I've seen incompatibilities is when Mac OS added an extra Help menu (oh horrors).
I wrote some not too complicated data visualization applets which at some time stopped to compile cleanly (ok, apis get deprecated at some point), did behave differently under different VMs and plattforms in some unexpected
areas (eg like scrollbar behaviour) and at some time didn't work correctly anymore because the changed security model prevented correct access to the applet's data resources.
Seriously, have you looked at
Java since the mid nineties?
I only paused between mid 1998 and mid 2000, otherwise I developped fulltime under Java as well.
APIs changing is a *version* issue, not a *platform* issue, and is an identical problem encountered by C and C++ programs
(what version of libc, what version of GCC, etc. etc.).
True, but Java is always not only "Java the language" but also had a "Java the platform" aspect. And it turned out that is not as downward compatible as initially promised. A change 1.3.x
to a 1.4 VM for example should not require recompilation or even recoding of a once running
application. Guess what will happen once 1.4 final shows up?:)
And Java multiplattform is certainly not "write once, run everywhere".
Multithreading is "complicated" period. A native language would painfully expose you to all those incompatibilities *anyway*, so I don't see how the case is any different.
My point was that using Java here makes things
a bit easier (you don't have to choose
some lib like QT, NSPR or whatever, you know
you do it with your Java implementation)
but not really easier, because MT is complicated.
Sounds simliliar to your statement.
Java security policy files. You set it, you forget it. Your code WILL NOT access resources you have not given it permission to.
That's theory.
The Java interpreter and its byte code verifier
are prone to implementation errors like any
other product. There exist exploits as well.
Not to speak of native libs who work in the background. (eg 1.4 on Win32 will improve
Swing performance by resorting to Direct X
use)
So, in conclusion Java *does* meet all the requirements he posted. Perhaps C or C++ meets some more and some less than others but that wasn't the
argument.
Fine, but that is what i said as well.
Java is an option. However it is not automatically the better option. If you have a bunch of fairly experienced Java hackers go for it.
But you noted that I did not only criticize some of the hype arguments ("write once, run everywhere", or "Java is better than C++"), but that I said some nice things as well? (modern libs, nice tools).:)
And I didn't say that Java programs are not able
to do their job - what I said was that programming a non trivial Java app is not as easy as some Java advocates tell.
There are some very nice examples of good Java apps. The clients I like most are JBuilder and Together, both IDEs.
But take JBuilder as example, this program is crafted very well and even if it is said to be a pure Java app you will find three seperate distributions one the installation CD (one Win32, one Solaris, one Linux:)
Regarding server programming: one of the interesting uses of Java here is to enable to get applications written at all.:)
How many programmers for example have experience in C on a S/390 mainframe or have access to such a box to learn? In that case developing the app e.g. under NT first and then moving it over to the mainframe and tweaking it there is considerably easier.
Slashdot Mirror
Imagine my surprise, when I stumbled over a Sea Lab 2021 episode on the net, the one with the Feng Shui master, some weeks ago. Not only brought it back some pleasant youth memories, but this kind of recycling was so cool and funny, I nearly wet my pants laughing. :-)
How I want that Cartoon Network/Toonami/Adult Swim (but with no anime censorship!!) over here. German pay tv is struggling to get subscribers, but they bet only on traditional horses (like formula one racing, Bundesliga soccer, softp0rn and early tv showings of movie blockbusters - a very boring setup).
No, for Windows you can either choose a version using Direct X or one using OpenGL for rendering.
Yes, that means that there is C code running at a low level (i.e., the OpenGL implementation provided by each graphics card provider), but that is no different that *any* language other than C that uses the OpenGL standard, including C++.
My complaint is that there is no Java3D version that is portable and free at the same time. But that is my general problem with Sun's Java licensing.
I agree that Java may have missed the mark, as far as performance-intensive applications like games are concerned, but given that people are seriously interested in Python-based game development (as evidenced by pygame, PyOpenGL, etc.), I think it's hardly reasonable to attack it on the basis of performance.
The present Java games are not bad. But they are the same league, like games written in Flash are. Hard to imagine a Java title would show up in the games top 10, and this mainly due to the fact, that most top titles try to really use the hardware at its limits, thus performance is an issue.
Personally, I'd rather hear the opinion of someone who had actually worked on commercial- scale gaming projects.
Java gaming is a good resource. Several of my colleagues are former game professionals. They watch the Java game development community with great interest. As far as I can tell, their opinion on Java for gaming seems to range from promising to not suitable (at least not for Quake III like games, where state of the art 3d engines are needed that squeeze out every cycle).
The crucial question for them is if you can make money with such a title, which seems to be not easy in the games industry. Perhaps it will be in the mobile phone market?
Java3D is written in C/C++. Thus the Java program feeds the C/C++ layer with the necessary data and control, which in turn feeds the graphics processor, which does the work. The additional time is needed to transform Java Objects out of the VM into C Objects and back.
Is this bad? I don't think so. What I don't like is that Java is marketed as plattform independent, which it is not, large parts are implemented as native code. Java is easy to use on the 4 supported main platforms (Solaris, Windows, Linux, Mac OS X), otherwise one has to hope that a porting effort is underway (like in case of FreeBSD).
2. There is a 65% increase in productivity.
Most good Java programs I have seen yet are integrated development environments. It is really amazing how many IDEs are written in Java. Some of them being very good ones.
Add to this the large, standardized libraries, and the dumbed down syntax in many areas, compared to C++. While I judge 65% a bit high, development with Java sure is quite comfortable.
Every first name is a palindrome!
Regarding he is a computer scientist, I doubt that this is an accident. :)
Regards,
Marc
HTML has two important ideas/areas:
HTML both was successful and sucks at the same time because it works in both areas moderately well.
People have worked on improving both areas. The first part, holding content, led to the development of XML, which holds great promise of standardized logical markups. The second part, focussing on pretty display lead to stuff like Java Applets and indeed Flash.
The interesting thing is that Sun, for a long time, didn't manage to provide users with painless to install and use Java VMs, while Flash had no trouble at all providing Flash Players to all major platforms. While Java Applets very often do not work, I can't remember having encountered any faulty Flash presentation yet.
However Sun seems to have woken up lately. Since 1.3, and the introduction of the Java plug in, it has been much less pain to use Java than before. Then there is Java Web Start, which made it really, really easy to get, install and use Java applications. See some demos here to experience Web Start.
This stuff is an example how web applications look like. Note that these apps are no longer confined to a square area in the browser (however even applets benefit from Java Web Start execution, because it is easier to update and version them).
Plus the 2D Api of Java introduced high quality graphical rendering (it was written by Sun and Adobe initially). It has the potential to create better looking graphics than what Flash offers.
But here we have the potential reason why Flash took off, while Java didn't:
As a programmer, I would love to see more Java than Flash. But I believe this is not going to happen until Sun would create authoring software similiar to Macromedia's, that would enable graphic artists with low programming skills to create high quality graphics output, but where the result is not some flash file, but a Java jar instead. This is possible, but would require a definite commitment from Sun. Too bad they don't cooperate with Adobe on this one.
I agree. It is just about staying ahead for a certain time, making it hard enough. Impossibility would be nice, but is not required.
Regards,
Marc
This comic series is a classic.
Probably another case of turning art into a commercial mess.
Wasn't Emacs originally written by James Gosling (of Java Fame)?
Regards,
Marc
Yes, it should be like this, but in reality it will be done by teams only that have either enough man power to have spare time for this test implementation or that have an established product in a consolidation phase.
Be they pure web centric apps (thus client apps to some server with JWS just doing the network caching and using the clients CPU power in end effect) or full apps (signed JWS apps) that run on the client like any other program as well.
To me it is the easiest means to get Java stuff installed and running on a box.
I believe .NET's global assembly cache will go for the same (the configuration file allows for assembly download from servers as well).
So we get rid of the old setup/install from some medium paradigma and install from an URL rather (be it a web server in Australia, or a web server that is on the dvd, start by autorun.inf :)
However XUL and similiar systems might be easier to program and not require some Java GUI programmer.
Another reason is GUI changing at runtime.
Plus it might be nicer/easier/better to write GUI designers that operate on XML rather than generating and reverse engineering Java Swing code.
Regards,
Marc
XUL was invented by the Mozilla folks for two reasons
The chatzilla IRC client is such an app. By the way it is possible to upgrade this part of Mozilla at run time, by getting a jar file (a zip that has the necessary xml and xul files). Nice thing.
Flash to my knowledge is a tool for non programmers as well, primarily people with some graphic design background, to create interactive content using quality graphics (sharp antialiased fonts, animation, ..) and sounds.
Thus not prior hackers, but rather Photo shop users. :)
This started at a time when Java applets were the only means to achieve this. And the Java graphics libs were far less advanced than they are today. My guess from recent nice Flash sites is that the graphics toolbox available to Flash programmers is still somewhat better than the Java2D API. :)
However I have no clue how Flash programming works, I guess it is done in some GUI designer rather than using procedural programming.
Thus the only connection I see, is that both XUL and Flash offer to use GUI designer software. Otherwise it is different technology, with different focus.
Regards,
Marc
In fact Knuth wrote an article under the title Structured Programming with Go To Statements :-)
Regards,
Marc
There is more :-)
Some of the assumptions of this model are:
- we have two states 0 and 1
- states evolve over time controlled by a regular clock signal
- signals propagate by conventional electric current (moving electrons)
But guess what, a typical phyiscal device implements only an approximation of this model.For example we say a certain voltage range is interpreted as a logical 0, a certain different higher volatage range is interpreted as a logical 1.
But the evolutionary algorithm was not constrained in any fashion to make use of this ideal digital model only. It can and will make use of the full available degrees of freedom the physical system, that the fpga device is, offers.
With the result that there might evolve analog cuircuits (which use more than 0 or 1 values), or that we might have electro-magnetic signal transport (Thompson reported some spiral structures which might work as electro-magnetic wave guides), yes it might even employ some quantum mechanical effect that could explained by advanced semiconductor physics only.
One might say that the approximation process that the evolution algorithm is, has started in the domain of digital devices and converged out of that domain into the wider domain of physical devices.
This has a couple of draw backs:
I wonder what would have been happend if the algoritm had a control step after each evolution step which ensured that the next generation design would operate strictly under the assumptions of a conventional digital device model, in that case the evolution process should evolve towards a classical design. Would it have been stil something that is hard to understand?
Perhaps in that case it is easier to stick to software simulation of the design.
[1] Hugo de Garis. Evolvable Hardware: Principles and Practice. http://www.hip.atr.co.jp/~degaris/CACM-EHard.html (link is not available today)
[2] Adrian Thompson. Evolving Electronic Robot Controllers that Exploit Hardware Resources. CSRP 368 In: Advances in Artificial Life, Proceedings of the 3rd European Conference on Artificial Life (ECAL95) pp640-656. Springer-Verlag Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence number 929, 1995.
[3] Adrian Thompson. Evolving Fault Tolerant Systems. CSRP 385. In: Proceedings of The First IEE/IEEE International Conference on Genetic Algorithms in Engineering Systems: Innovations and Applications (GALESIA'95), pp524-520, IEE Conference Publication No. 414, 1995.
[4] Adrian Thompson. Silicon Evolution. In: Proceedings of Genetic Programming 1996 (GP96), J.R. Koza et al. (Eds), pages 444-452, MIT Press 1996.
[5] Adrian Thompson. Through the Labyrinth Evolution Finds a Way: A Silicon Ridge. Inman Harvey and Adrian Thompson. In: Proceedings of The First International Conference on Evolvable Systems: from Biology to Hardware (ICES96). Higuchi, T. and Iwata, M. (eds.), 406-422, Springer Verlag LNCS 1259, 1997.
[6] Adrian Thompson. An evolved circuit, intrinsic in silicon, entwined with physics. In: Proceedings of The First International Conference on Evolvable Systems: from Biology to Hardware (ICES96). Higuchi, T. and Iwata, M. (eds.), 390-405, Springer Verlag LNCS 1259, 1997.
[7] Adrian Thompson. Artificial Evolution in the Physical World. In: Evolutionary Robotics: From Intelligent Robots to Artificial Life (ER'97), T. Gomi (Ed.), pages 101-125. AAI Books, 1997.
[8] Adrian Thompson. On the Automatic Design of Robust Electronics Through Artificial Evolution. In: Proc. 2nd Int. Conf. on Evolvable Systems: From biology to hardware (ICES98), M. Sipper, D. Mange & A. Pe'res-Uribe (Eds.), pp13-24, Springer-Verlag,1998.
The problems IMHO are more the technologies that are inheritantly proprietary, like media formats or certain netservices (IM, passport, ..) with no
popular free alternative.
Regards,
Marc
But Java isn't just a programming language. When we talk about Java, this includes a decent VM, the huge libraries plus a couple of tools that need to be provided.
The naked Java isn't very attractive. It would look similiar to what the GCC java offers.
Alone implementing the standard libs, plus AWT and SWING from scratch would have been a huge task.
Ok, now there will be "blessed" version of Java, will this hinder any effort to create a 100% free version (any legal hook in the Sun community license?).
Regards,
Marc
http://www.technetcast.com/tnc_play_stream.html?st ream_id=310
Check the slides too at:
http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/rob/qcintro.pdf
Regards,
Marc
But where to get the mirror sites from? For example if a new Star Wars trailer hits the net?
An interesting idea here is to distribute the server workload onto the clients downwards:
Swarmcast is such a protocol. It uses forward error correction as well, and I believe some of the guys whose names were mentioned in this discussion, are involved in this as well.
Any expert who can comment on this one?
http://www.usenix.org/publications/library/procee
http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=153
http://www.freebsd-fr.org/docs/fr/others/systeme-
http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/libra
http://docs.freebsd.org/44doc/smm/05.fastfs/paper
An example is the Komodo IDE by ActiveState, which uses XUL.
XUL is the next generation browser application platform. Simply speaking, the Mozilla team chose an approach very similiar to JAVA to come closer to a platform independent graphical user interface:
XUL goes one step farther, as there is no compilation step.
The XUL application implementation language is a XML language that together with cascading style sheets and JavaScript glue will yield an application one starts in the browser by opening the .xul document.
A possible advantage of XUL might become the relative ease of application development, change and distribution.
Possible problems will be similiar to the ones known from JAVA. The qualitiy of XUL applications will stand and fall with the quality of the XUL implementation for a specific platform, which right now means the quality of its Mozilla or Netscape implementation.
Of course, compared to JAVA, which has underwent several larger development cycles and now features mighty libraries, XUL is a bleeding edge technology at its beginnings.
However it is still possible to make direct use of the various Mozilla widgets as well from C++.
Those code optimizations at run time are however not a Hot Spot only domain, I have heard recent Intel C++ compilers offer similiar optimizations.
I agree as well that Hot Spot + Moore's law have made some Java apps possible, that were unthinkable a few years ago. I have seen some very nice "demos" (demos in the sense of stunning/teasing graphics + sound bits) written in Java lately.
The ones I need are:
- smooth and stable execution under Win32 and Linux, perhaps Solaris one day
- flawless access to the OODB we use and
- some goodies like Java3D and web deployment,
(right now Java Web Start)
-
If the development environment (Editor, Debugger, Profiler, Testing, Architecture, Configuration Management) would work under Win32 and Linux
equally well, it would be a plus
The experience so far with all points (except security related stuff) was, that it either was less hassle under Win32 to achieve than under Linux, or it didn't work under Linux for various reasons. There is definitly a difference in maturity of both plattforms at this time. I would love to see it the other way, but I have to acknowledge reality.Are you aware of how many companies actually rely on Java for really critical stuff, and use it accross platforms?
Sure. Java has its strong sides and its weak sides. J2EE reputation eg is excellent.
We have production systems that run a whole slew of Java software on AIX (yes, IBM AIX!), Windows, and Solaris (client applications, servlet engines w/ servlets/jsp, backended by Java CORBA objects and JDBC database connections)
Again, I don't said, Java is worthless junk. I however wrote down my opinion on some of its hyped ascpects.
Is using QT really that less difficult than a Java GUI in the first place?
I believe QT will give more trouble programming it (less mature development tools for example, smaller development community) but it will save some gray hairs if the application is demanding regarding performance and memory.
Where's your evidence? The only time I've seen incompatibilities is when Mac OS added an extra Help menu (oh horrors).
I wrote some not too complicated data visualization applets which at some time stopped to compile cleanly (ok, apis get deprecated at some point), did behave differently under different VMs and plattforms in some unexpected areas (eg like scrollbar behaviour) and at some time didn't work correctly anymore because the changed security model prevented correct access to the applet's data resources.
Seriously, have you looked at Java since the mid nineties?
I only paused between mid 1998 and mid 2000, otherwise I developped fulltime under Java as well.
APIs changing is a *version* issue, not a *platform* issue, and is an identical problem encountered by C and C++ programs (what version of libc, what version of GCC, etc. etc.).
True, but Java is always not only "Java the language" but also had a "Java the platform" aspect. And it turned out that is not as downward compatible as initially promised. A change 1.3.x to a 1.4 VM for example should not require recompilation or even recoding of a once running application. Guess what will happen once 1.4 final shows up? :)
And Java multiplattform is certainly not "write once, run everywhere".
Multithreading is "complicated" period. A native language would painfully expose you to all those incompatibilities *anyway*, so I don't see how the case is any different.
My point was that using Java here makes things a bit easier (you don't have to choose some lib like QT, NSPR or whatever, you know you do it with your Java implementation) but not really easier, because MT is complicated. Sounds simliliar to your statement.
Java security policy files. You set it, you forget it. Your code WILL NOT access resources you have not given it permission to.
That's theory. The Java interpreter and its byte code verifier are prone to implementation errors like any other product. There exist exploits as well. Not to speak of native libs who work in the background. (eg 1.4 on Win32 will improve Swing performance by resorting to Direct X use)
So, in conclusion Java *does* meet all the requirements he posted. Perhaps C or C++ meets some more and some less than others but that wasn't the argument.
Fine, but that is what i said as well. Java is an option. However it is not automatically the better option. If you have a bunch of fairly experienced Java hackers go for it.
Regards,
Marc
And I didn't say that Java programs are not able to do their job - what I said was that programming a non trivial Java app is not as easy as some Java advocates tell.
There are some very nice examples of good Java apps. The clients I like most are JBuilder and Together, both IDEs.
But take JBuilder as example, this program is crafted very well and even if it is said to be a pure Java app you will find three seperate distributions one the installation CD (one Win32, one Solaris, one Linux :)
Regarding server programming: one of the interesting uses of Java here is to enable to get applications written at all. :)
How many programmers for example have experience in C on a S/390 mainframe or have access to such a box to learn? In that case developing the app e.g. under NT first and then moving it over to the mainframe and tweaking it there is considerably easier.
Regards,
Marc