I have choices? Show me how to run Photoshop and Groupwise in a Linux enviroment. Any don't offer me alternative programs that are incompatible... I'm not the head IT guy that mandated these programs and their file formats.
If Adobe won't port their software to your platform, surely it's Adobe you should be complaining about, and not Microsoft?
It's not that there aren't any choices, it's that there aren't enough super convenient choices.
Wait a minute. You have a free compiler, and all of the Linux source code. If Linux isn't 'super convenient' enough, then snap to it and get working - MAKE it super convenient.
You can't blame other people because their stuff is better than yours. That's just jealousy.
OS from a company that thinks that the media player is a core part of the system that cannot be removed? I never realized Microsoft thought the ability to play mp3 music should be an integral part of any server functionality-- maybe that's why Windows Datacenter isn't selling very well.
Try streaming live video on a server without something that encodes that video. You won't get very far. Windows Media Player covers this.
If you _were_ a developer you would know that you could (would) still have only one team working on the HTML/XML engine, it's just that it would be compiled in statically to each product mentioned above. Either that or hell, include the engine with Windows, but does that mean you _have_ to include IE too? No. Engines and applications are different things. This is called having a modular system, and yes, Windows works like this too, hence the.dll.
So you're saying that Microsoft should be forced to Remove Internet Explorer?
That is, you mean the 64KB Internet Explorer executable file?
Well, heck, why didn't you say so?
Microsoft offered to do this during the trial. Jackson turned around and said he wanted the WHOLE thing with ALL of its dependencies pulled out of the OS.
The ridiculous claims that windows won't work without these components are disproven on a daily basis by myself and other users who actually know how to make windows work.
When was the last time you ran:
Quicken. Family Tree Maker. Generations Liberty Edition Generations Beginner's Edition Generations Deluxe DVD
?
I'm sure I can add to the list. Heck, even WinAmp uses IE.
Simon is an ex-Microsoft employee. He used to post incessantly to the am-info mailing list, always taking the MS-is-Infallible line, and he seems to pop up everywhere MS is discussed to defend the Great Satan. Don't take him seriously.
You haven't read some of my posts regarding.NET then - which I worked on - on the LeeOS bulletin boards. Where I personally called for the entire Developer Tools team to be fired.
Finding several bugs in 15 minutes, several of which were in the framework when I worked there, is not good.
Finding several bugs which I reported to them during Beta 2 in the finished product ($1800 worth) is not good either.
But hey, wear your blinkers. I just don't like seeing people talking trash when they don't know what they're talking about. I happen to know a lot about how MS does things (having worked there), and a lot about how Windows works (having developed for it for a long time). If you don't like that, poor you.
Ok, so it was the hub. It wasn't windows fault. But, it WAS microsoft's fault. Ever heard of product testing? Did they even test the machine with the scanner before shipping it to the show? Seems windows was shipped in the same way.
The answer is: Yes, they did do tests, but the equipment tested wasn't what got shipped out to the show. Microsoft now have strict rehearsal policies before demos to prevent that happening again - which means that the equipment they test on gets tested on before the show, and presumably works first time.
As for product testing - they do it. A heck of a lot of it actually - they have a 1:1 tester to developer mapping at MS. And these testers are *highly intelligent* software engineers (at least, all the one's I've met were). Unlike the QA department at another company I worked at, where they were mostly games testers who accidentally got put on home productivity apps, and complained about punctuation before they would complain about broken functionality.
Quite how bugs still make it through MS's test process, I don't know. But sure, they do. I personally think they're too big, have a too-many-cooks kind of problem, and don't spend the time to communicate between themselves enough.
That, and each team has an ego the size of a barn, so if two teams have to work together, it's going to be bad juju all round.
This would be great at a ms demonstration show. Remember what happened when Bill Gates demonstrated windows98 in front of 40,000 people in Chicago and it crashed.:-)
Actually, yes I do recall. It was a badly manufactured USB hub that was being used, that claimed to handle higher current requirements than it actually could, thus crashing the USB hub when the scanner was plugged in.
A friend of mine actually has that hub in his office.
I want a digital camera with integrated GPS and digital compass. When I get home from a trip, I should be able to download all of my images and see them as icons on a map, indicating where the picture was taken, in what direction, and at what time
Interesting. Have you read the book Inner Navigation, perchance?
For an example of a really well thought out IDE, take a look at Metrowerks. If only VC++ had the user interface of CodeWarrior and the reliability of GCC (not to mention the price), it'd be unbeatable.
Damnit. I'd be cleaning vomit off my keyboard for weeks if that happened. CodeWarrior, quite literally, sucks ass. But hey, I get the feeling this is a religious war/personal taste thing at this point:)
BTW: Internal Compiler Errors are *rare* for Visual C++. Make sure you have the latest patches installed, and delete the intermediate files.
Wow. You haven't even used MSVC++, have you? Not once, by the sound of it.
Something things MSVC++ doesn't have that Emacs does:
1) Keyboard macros - anything can be assigned to a keyboard macro and macros can be executed n number of times. I used to work with a traditional IDE and I cannot even begin to tell you how much time this saves. This is usually the thing that makes people love Emacs.
Tools -> Record Quick Macro Tools -> Play Quick Macro
That gives you simple ones. They can be assigned to specific keys using Tools -> Customize...
You can also write your own macros in script - which can do a lot more than the keyboard ones.
You can also write your own add-in tools (in any language you care to use) that plug into the IDE and allow you to customize it at such a level that you can do *ANYTHING* with it.
2) Built in commands for navigating the source by statements or keywords. This lets me write really advanced macros that can say skip five parameters in a function and then do something.
This isn't in there that I can see; but I'm certain that you could write a macro to do it. Certainly, you can use the source browser to walk through it instead.
3) Regular expression searching.
What kind of crack are you smoking? This is built into BOTH the *STANDARD* Find box and the Find In Files box. Check the "Regular Expression" checkbox, and hey presto - regexp searches.
4) Fully customizable via LISP. There are incredibly things that can be done with LISP. We have commenting standards at my work and someone just wrote a quick LISP script that inserts the proper comments in all the right places in a C/C++ source file.
Fully customizable via VBScript, C++, C, Visual Basic, PERL, Java, etc etc etc etc etc etc etc. Just write an addin. Or any other script.
but the general market is not a big market for servers, usually only businesses will buy a server, and hence chances are real good you talked to someone on the corporate side, or switched the salesman into corporate mode
What salesman?
I went to their website, priced out their cheapest ($499) server, under the Small Business section.
Windows 2000 Server,5 Client Access Licenses,English,4GB, Partition [add $799]
MS Windows NT Server 4.0 [add $799]
Windows NT4,Primary Domain Controller [add $799]
Windows NT4,Backup Domain Controller [add $799]
Red Hat LINUX 7.2 [add $159]
Red Hat LINUX 7.2,NO DOCS [add $119]
Netware 5.1 with 5 New User Licenses, NFI Image [add $749]
Netware 5.1 with 5 User Upgrade Licenses, NFI Image [add $399]
No Operating System(OTHER)
Netware 5.1 with 5 User Upgrade Licenses for Higher Education, NFI Image [add $399]
You know, if the JRE didn't screw up several parts of my system every time I installed it, I wouldn't have an issue with it. But as it stands, it seems to make things (like IE) unstable.
You've obviously never patched binary code where you didn't have the source. I've had to do that, and yes I had an assembler at the time. Had a disassembler, too:-)
Nice assumption. Wrong, but a good shot anyway.
Yes, I have patched binary code where I didn't have the source. Both recently on production Windows code where we had lost the source, and back when I was hacking Sinclair Spectrum games.
I'm pretty sure what you call microcode he calls machine language; what you call machine code is BASIC -- that is, a human language that another program can interpret and run, not a machine language that runs on its own. Indeed, your BASIC program does not do what you think it does; the values in the DATA statement are the same program as the assembler example you give, but the BASIC program you say is "identical" is mearly the loader -- a loader that needs an interpreter to work! Your example is twice removed from machine code
Well, duh. I'm so sorry for providing a tool as well as a description. Don't you think I knew that?
Would you also like to point out that it should have been FOR I = 0 TO 11 instead of 0 TO 19?
No, the floating frog was showing how super-massive electromagnets can magnetize nonferrus(sp?) materials, to the point they can suspend them.
Oxygen is paramagnetic. Any dipole molecule will act as a magnet in a magnetic field. Heck, even single electron spins act in that way (line-splitting, for example, in spectroscopy works this way).
All this was known forever. It was the first time, though, that anyone tried doing it with an object. And let's face it, levitation is cool - and highly news-worthy.
Basically, though, with a big enough magnet, you can float pretty much anything you'd come across in every-day life.
Java isn't an OS. The main limitation for video game systems is always the graphics speed, which as others have stated, is something Sun has been working to improve. The question then is, do you believe vendors will trust MS enough to support.NET's intermediate language in their consoles? Maybe X-Box developers, but who knows how X-Box will fair in the future.
Yet again though, the same issue comes up:
Why would you want to run.NET on a console?
Now, admittedly,.NET makes it easier to switch between the two schemes, so you could (say) write all your game control logic in script and run it through the.NET engine, banging through to native code for the real work, but that's still a lot of wasted cycles.
.NET's VM is still non-deterministic. You can't force cleanup of objects, unless there's something I've missed. You also can't force objects to be allocated out of a memory pool. And it's tricks like this that people do to make games run smoothly and fast.
If they were the SAME you would not need an assembler.
Arguing that assembly language and machine code are the same is like arguing that English and French are the "same", since you can translate one into the other, often with a 1-1 mapping of words (the analogy fails slightly, since there isn't always a 1-1 mapping, but generally a word in one language will map directly to a word in the other).
If one form requires translation (human or machine) to be put into the other form, the two forms are not the same. That is all.
Assembly and Machine Code are equivalent.
Higher-level languages are not.
For example:
typedef struct tagData {
int data1;
char data2; } TAGDATA;
void DoSomething (TAGDATA* a) {
a + 1;
*a.data = 1; } ----------------
This cannot be expressed directly (typically) in assembly language or machine code, with a 1:1 mapping of constructs.
Why am I bothering? It's quite clear that you're arguing semantics here, when the fact is that they ARE equivalent, and generate IDENTICAL results. So what if you have to put assembly language through a translator? Machine code typically has to go through translation too (or are you forgetting microcode?). The only difference being that in one case you're doing it in your head, and in the other you're getting something else to do the grunt work for you.
It's like saying that there's a difference between pins on an IC and the labels you give those pins, because the pins themselves are the lowest level data.
Well, sure, but you try putting data through the voltage rails and see how far you get. You're constrained by the design of the system. Assembly language is an expression of that design.
Next thing you're going to say is that ASCII is less efficient than binary, because binary can represent any number, but ASCII only represents the codes that have been assigned to it.
Guy who's done a lot of programming in assembly language AND a lot of programming in machine language, and is boggling at the notion that anyone could think that they're the "same".
Couldn't afford an assembler at the time, huh?
10 FOR I = 0 TO 19: READ A: POKE 16384 + I, A: NEXT I 20 CALL 16384 30 DATA 33, 0, 0, 17, 0, 1, 1, 0, 32, 233, 171, 201
That is Machine Code.
It is DIRECTLY EQUIVALENT AND IDENTICAL TO:
LD HL, 0 LD DE, 1 LD BC, 32 LDIR RET
There is no difference between the two. Are you sure you're not mixing it up with microcode?
C++ will NEVER be as fast as Assembler. Assembler will NEVER NEVER be as fast as pure machine code.... Sound familar. Who programs in machine code anymore? Not me.
You're a schmuck. Assembler IS machine code. There is *no* difference, other than one is written as binary, the other as text.
Now go away and stop acting like you know what you're talking about.
The guy in my local computer games store telling me I should replace my ps2 with an XBox because 'Microsoft are far more reliable at fixing bugs and delivering patches' and apparently 'No, they wouldn't charge gamers for said updates or release an in-compatible games box in 6 months to replace it'
And you're claiming this is a lie why?
I don't see Microsoft charging for updates (no updates yet - although the next issue or so of XBox mag should have an expansion pack for DOA3), and news for you: it has been six months. Where's the incompatible games box?
But yes, rebooting the development process is phase II:) Ultimately, all this code is only for our prototype system anyway (the production system has a completely different architecture, processor, et al), so it's not that big a deal.
The firm I'm working for hired a contractor to write the system software for their scientific instrument.
They later hired me.
It is now my job to maintain, expand and rewrite his original code as the device gets further from the prototyping stage.
Here's some metrics for you:
4000 lines of C code
Avg. Variable name length: 3 to 4 characters
Avg. Function Name Length: 3 to 4 characters
Total number of functions (not including state-machine functions): 9
Amount of documentation: nearly 0. Comments are laughable.
Total number of functions, including state-machine functions labelled from stsws0 through stsws30 - 40.
Total number of constant values used without #defines or assigned names: Too many to count.
Amount of documentation of constant values that aren't obviously for buffer/scratch space, but actually do something important: Zero.
Amount of dead code: Current investigation indicates somewhere between 30% and 60%.
Amount of dead code interspered with live code, so it's really difficult to work out what's a dead function, and what's live: All of it.
Level of interweaving of dead code and live code: pretty damn high.
Use of pound-defines for code switching and giving alternate code paths: Zero.
Use of pound-defines to switch blocks on and off that really you want to keep on ALL THE TIME (particularly as the app crashes if you turn them off): 10
Interesting idioms: -- Use of pound-if(0) and pound-endif to bracket (useless) comment sections, eg: pound-if(0)
This is a comment. pound-endif
-- Use of a while loop to do error handling. Eg;
while (TRUE) {
if (condition) { error = 5; break; } ... other conditional code
break;// to exit }
if (error)...
Number of pound-includes that are actually totally unneeded: 5.
Number of Windows 3.1 programming idioms used: 2 found so far. In a piece of code that *requires* NT4 and as such is Win32 only.
Other interesting idioms: Massively nested if's EVERYWHERE. Very little modularisation. Grabbing an HDC at that start of the app and not letting it go until shutdown, without specifying a Class DC.
The guy REWROTE FROM SCRATCH button controls and edit controls, using WM_MOUSExxx message and WM_CHAR handling, as part of the main frame window. Each edit/button has a separate cut/paste if statement block to handle it. There are about 80 controls on the main screen. This code is cut and pasted for each single control.
And for the final piéce de resistance;
Total number of local variables used: ZERO. 0. Nada. Zilch. EVERYTHING IS A GLOBAL VARIABLE.
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I have choices? Show me how to run Photoshop and Groupwise in a Linux enviroment. Any don't offer me alternative programs that are incompatible... I'm not the head IT guy that mandated these programs and their file formats.
If Adobe won't port their software to your platform, surely it's Adobe you should be complaining about, and not Microsoft?
Simon
It's not that there aren't any choices, it's that there aren't enough super convenient choices.
Wait a minute. You have a free compiler, and all of the Linux source code. If Linux isn't 'super convenient' enough, then snap to it and get working - MAKE it super convenient.
You can't blame other people because their stuff is better than yours. That's just jealousy.
Simon
OS from a company that thinks that the media player is a core part of the system that cannot be removed?
I never realized Microsoft thought the ability to play mp3 music should be an integral part of any server functionality-- maybe that's why Windows Datacenter isn't selling very well.
Try streaming live video on a server without something that encodes that video. You won't get very far. Windows Media Player covers this.
Simon
If you _were_ a developer you would know that you could (would) still have only one team working on the HTML/XML engine, it's just that it would be compiled in statically to each product mentioned above. .dll.
Either that or hell, include the engine with Windows, but does that mean you _have_ to include IE too? No. Engines and applications are different things. This is called having a modular system, and yes, Windows works like this too, hence the
So you're saying that Microsoft should be forced to Remove Internet Explorer?
That is, you mean the 64KB Internet Explorer executable file?
Well, heck, why didn't you say so?
Microsoft offered to do this during the trial. Jackson turned around and said he wanted the WHOLE thing with ALL of its dependencies pulled out of the OS.
That includes all of the DLLs it imported.
Simon
The ridiculous claims that windows won't work without these components are disproven on a daily basis by myself and other users who actually know how to make windows work.
When was the last time you ran:
Quicken.
Family Tree Maker.
Generations Liberty Edition
Generations Beginner's Edition
Generations Deluxe DVD
?
I'm sure I can add to the list. Heck, even WinAmp uses IE.
Simon
Simon is an ex-Microsoft employee. He used to post incessantly to the am-info mailing list, always taking the MS-is-Infallible line, and he seems to pop up everywhere MS is discussed to defend the Great Satan. Don't take him seriously.
.NET then - which I worked on - on the LeeOS bulletin boards. Where I personally called for the entire Developer Tools team to be fired.
You haven't read some of my posts regarding
Finding several bugs in 15 minutes, several of which were in the framework when I worked there, is not good.
Finding several bugs which I reported to them during Beta 2 in the finished product ($1800 worth) is not good either.
But hey, wear your blinkers. I just don't like seeing people talking trash when they don't know what they're talking about. I happen to know a lot about how MS does things (having worked there), and a lot about how Windows works (having developed for it for a long time). If you don't like that, poor you.
Simon
Ok, so it was the hub. It wasn't windows fault. But, it WAS microsoft's fault. Ever heard of product testing? Did they even test the machine with the scanner before shipping it to the show? Seems windows was shipped in the same way.
The answer is: Yes, they did do tests, but the equipment tested wasn't what got shipped out to the show. Microsoft now have strict rehearsal policies before demos to prevent that happening again - which means that the equipment they test on gets tested on before the show, and presumably works first time.
As for product testing - they do it. A heck of a lot of it actually - they have a 1:1 tester to developer mapping at MS. And these testers are *highly intelligent* software engineers (at least, all the one's I've met were). Unlike the QA department at another company I worked at, where they were mostly games testers who accidentally got put on home productivity apps, and complained about punctuation before they would complain about broken functionality.
Quite how bugs still make it through MS's test process, I don't know. But sure, they do. I personally think they're too big, have a too-many-cooks kind of problem, and don't spend the time to communicate between themselves enough.
That, and each team has an ego the size of a barn, so if two teams have to work together, it's going to be bad juju all round.
Simon
This would be great at a ms demonstration show. Remember what happened when Bill Gates demonstrated windows98 in front of 40,000 people in Chicago and it crashed. :-)
Actually, yes I do recall. It was a badly manufactured USB hub that was being used, that claimed to handle higher current requirements than it actually could, thus crashing the USB hub when the scanner was plugged in.
A friend of mine actually has that hub in his office.
I want a digital camera with integrated GPS and digital compass. When I get home from a trip, I should be able to download all of my images and see them as icons on a map, indicating where the picture was taken, in what direction, and at what time
Interesting. Have you read the book Inner Navigation, perchance?
Simon
For an example of a really well thought out IDE, take a look at Metrowerks. If only VC++ had the user interface of CodeWarrior and the reliability of GCC (not to mention the price), it'd be unbeatable.
:)
Damnit. I'd be cleaning vomit off my keyboard for weeks if that happened. CodeWarrior, quite literally, sucks ass. But hey, I get the feeling this is a religious war/personal taste thing at this point
BTW: Internal Compiler Errors are *rare* for Visual C++. Make sure you have the latest patches installed, and delete the intermediate files.
Wow. You haven't even used MSVC++, have you? Not once, by the sound of it.
Something things MSVC++ doesn't have that Emacs does:
1) Keyboard macros - anything can be assigned to a keyboard macro and macros can be executed n number of times. I used to work with a traditional IDE and I cannot even begin to tell you how much time this saves. This is usually the thing that makes people love Emacs.
Tools -> Record Quick Macro
Tools -> Play Quick Macro
That gives you simple ones. They can be assigned to specific keys using Tools -> Customize...
You can also write your own macros in script - which can do a lot more than the keyboard ones.
You can also write your own add-in tools (in any language you care to use) that plug into the IDE and allow you to customize it at such a level that you can do *ANYTHING* with it.
2) Built in commands for navigating the source by statements or keywords. This lets me write really advanced macros that can say skip five parameters in a function and then do something.
This isn't in there that I can see; but I'm certain that you could write a macro to do it. Certainly, you can use the source browser to walk through it instead.
3) Regular expression searching.
What kind of crack are you smoking? This is built into BOTH the *STANDARD* Find box and the Find In Files box. Check the "Regular Expression" checkbox, and hey presto - regexp searches.
4) Fully customizable via LISP. There are incredibly things that can be done with LISP. We have commenting standards at my work and someone just wrote a quick LISP script that inserts the proper comments in all the right places in a C/C++ source file.
Fully customizable via VBScript, C++, C, Visual Basic, PERL, Java, etc etc etc etc etc etc etc. Just write an addin. Or any other script.
Sheesh.
Simon
but the general market is not a big market for servers, usually only businesses will buy a server, and hence chances are real good you talked to someone on the corporate side, or switched the salesman into corporate mode
What salesman?
I went to their website, priced out their cheapest ($499) server, under the Small Business section.
Dell Power Edge 500 SC
It comes with a choice of:
Windows 2000 Server,5 Client Access Licenses,English,4GB, Partition [add $799]
MS Windows NT Server 4.0 [add $799]
Windows NT4,Primary Domain Controller [add $799]
Windows NT4,Backup Domain Controller [add $799]
Red Hat LINUX 7.2 [add $159]
Red Hat LINUX 7.2,NO DOCS [add $119]
Netware 5.1 with 5 New User Licenses, NFI Image [add $749]
Netware 5.1 with 5 User Upgrade Licenses, NFI Image [add $399]
No Operating System(OTHER)
Netware 5.1 with 5 User Upgrade Licenses for Higher Education, NFI Image [add $399]
Dell stopped support for Linux?
Not the last time I tried to buy a server from them, they hadn't. And this was 2 weeks ago. You can even buy a server with no OS at all, if you want.
Simon
You know, if the JRE didn't screw up several parts of my system every time I installed it, I wouldn't have an issue with it. But as it stands, it seems to make things (like IE) unstable.
Simon
You've obviously never patched binary code where you didn't have the source. I've had to do that, and yes I had an assembler at the time. Had a disassembler, too :-)
Nice assumption. Wrong, but a good shot anyway.
Yes, I have patched binary code where I didn't have the source. Both recently on production Windows code where we had lost the source, and back when I was hacking Sinclair Spectrum games.
I'm pretty sure what you call microcode he calls machine language; what you call machine code is BASIC -- that is, a human language that another program can interpret and run, not a machine language that runs on its own. Indeed, your BASIC program does not do what you think it does; the values in the DATA statement are the same program as the assembler example you give, but the BASIC program you say is "identical" is mearly the loader -- a loader that needs an interpreter to work! Your example is twice removed from machine code
Well, duh. I'm so sorry for providing a tool as well as a description. Don't you think I knew that?
Would you also like to point out that it should have been FOR I = 0 TO 11 instead of 0 TO 19?
Simon
No, the floating frog was showing how super-massive electromagnets can magnetize nonferrus(sp?) materials, to the point they can suspend them.
Oxygen is paramagnetic. Any dipole molecule will act as a magnet in a magnetic field. Heck, even single electron spins act in that way (line-splitting, for example, in spectroscopy works this way).
All this was known forever. It was the first time, though, that anyone tried doing it with an object. And let's face it, levitation is cool - and highly news-worthy.
Basically, though, with a big enough magnet, you can float pretty much anything you'd come across in every-day life.
Java isn't an OS. The main limitation for video game systems is always the graphics speed, which as others have stated, is something Sun has been working to improve. The question then is, do you believe vendors will trust MS enough to support .NET's intermediate language in their consoles? Maybe X-Box developers, but who knows how X-Box will fair in the future.
.NET on a console?
.NET makes it easier to switch between the two schemes, so you could (say) write all your game control logic in script and run it through the .NET engine, banging through to native code for the real work, but that's still a lot of wasted cycles.
Yet again though, the same issue comes up:
Why would you want to run
Now, admittedly,
.NET's VM is still non-deterministic. You can't force cleanup of objects, unless there's something I've missed. You also can't force objects to be allocated out of a memory pool. And it's tricks like this that people do to make games run smoothly and fast.
Simon
"LD HL,0" is not the same as "33,0".
If they were the SAME you would not need an assembler.
Arguing that assembly language and machine code are the same is like arguing that English and French are the "same", since you can translate one into the other, often with a 1-1 mapping of words (the analogy fails slightly, since there isn't always a 1-1 mapping, but generally a word in one language will map directly to a word in the other).
If one form requires translation (human or machine) to be put into the other form, the two forms are not the same. That is all.
Assembly and Machine Code are equivalent.
Higher-level languages are not.
For example:
typedef struct tagData {
int data1;
char data2;
} TAGDATA;
void DoSomething (TAGDATA* a) {
a + 1;
*a.data = 1;
}
----------------
This cannot be expressed directly (typically) in assembly language or machine code, with a 1:1 mapping of constructs.
Why am I bothering? It's quite clear that you're arguing semantics here, when the fact is that they ARE equivalent, and generate IDENTICAL results. So what if you have to put assembly language through a translator? Machine code typically has to go through translation too (or are you forgetting microcode?). The only difference being that in one case you're doing it in your head, and in the other you're getting something else to do the grunt work for you.
It's like saying that there's a difference between pins on an IC and the labels you give those pins, because the pins themselves are the lowest level data.
Well, sure, but you try putting data through the voltage rails and see how far you get. You're constrained by the design of the system. Assembly language is an expression of that design.
Next thing you're going to say is that ASCII is less efficient than binary, because binary can represent any number, but ASCII only represents the codes that have been assigned to it.
Simon
*cough*Win98SE*cough*
No, it's not Xbox related, but Microsoft has in the past charged for what should have been free updates.
They only charged for the new features. You could get all of the bugfixes and service updates as a free download.
Guy who's done a lot of programming in assembly language AND a lot of programming in machine language, and is boggling at the notion that anyone could think that they're the "same".
Couldn't afford an assembler at the time, huh?
10 FOR I = 0 TO 19: READ A: POKE 16384 + I, A: NEXT I
20 CALL 16384
30 DATA 33, 0, 0, 17, 0, 1, 1, 0, 32, 233, 171, 201
That is Machine Code.
It is DIRECTLY EQUIVALENT AND IDENTICAL TO:
LD HL, 0
LD DE, 1
LD BC, 32
LDIR
RET
There is no difference between the two. Are you sure you're not mixing it up with microcode?
C++ will NEVER be as fast as Assembler. Assembler will NEVER NEVER be as fast as pure machine code.... Sound familar. Who programs in machine code anymore? Not me.
You're a schmuck. Assembler IS machine code. There is *no* difference, other than one is written as binary, the other as text.
Now go away and stop acting like you know what you're talking about.
Um, have you looked that full screen mode support in JDK 1.4? Faster than C++, my man.
Check it out.
BULL SHIT.
If for no other reaso than because memory pooling is a bitch on Java.
Tell ya what... why not crawl back into your hole you Sun Astroturfer?
The guy in my local computer games store telling me I should replace my ps2 with an XBox because 'Microsoft are far more reliable at fixing bugs and delivering patches' and apparently 'No, they wouldn't charge gamers for said updates or release an in-compatible games box in 6 months to replace it'
And you're claiming this is a lie why?
I don't see Microsoft charging for updates (no updates yet - although the next issue or so of XBox mag should have an expansion pack for DOA3), and news for you: it has been six months. Where's the incompatible games box?
Simon
Not yet. First I have to understand what it does.
:) Ultimately, all this code is only for our prototype system anyway (the production system has a completely different architecture, processor, et al), so it's not that big a deal.
The amazing thing is... the code actually works!
But yes, rebooting the development process is phase II
The firm I'm working for hired a contractor to write the system software for their scientific instrument.
... other conditional code // to exit
...
They later hired me.
It is now my job to maintain, expand and rewrite his original code as the device gets further from the prototyping stage.
Here's some metrics for you:
4000 lines of C code
Avg. Variable name length: 3 to 4 characters
Avg. Function Name Length: 3 to 4 characters
Total number of functions (not including state-machine functions): 9
Amount of documentation: nearly 0. Comments are laughable.
Total number of functions, including state-machine functions labelled from stsws0 through stsws30 - 40.
Total number of constant values used without #defines or assigned names: Too many to count.
Amount of documentation of constant values that aren't obviously for buffer/scratch space, but actually do something important: Zero.
Amount of dead code: Current investigation indicates somewhere between 30% and 60%.
Amount of dead code interspered with live code, so it's really difficult to work out what's a dead function, and what's live: All of it.
Level of interweaving of dead code and live code: pretty damn high.
Use of pound-defines for code switching and giving alternate code paths: Zero.
Use of pound-defines to switch blocks on and off that really you want to keep on ALL THE TIME (particularly as the app crashes if you turn them off): 10
Interesting idioms:
-- Use of pound-if(0) and pound-endif to bracket (useless) comment sections, eg:
pound-if(0)
This is a comment.
pound-endif
-- Use of a while loop to do error handling. Eg;
while (TRUE) {
if (condition) { error = 5; break; }
break;
}
if (error)
Number of pound-includes that are actually totally unneeded:
5.
Number of Windows 3.1 programming idioms used: 2 found so far. In a piece of code that *requires* NT4 and as such is Win32 only.
Other interesting idioms: Massively nested if's EVERYWHERE. Very little modularisation. Grabbing an HDC at that start of the app and not letting it go until shutdown, without specifying a Class DC.
The guy REWROTE FROM SCRATCH button controls and edit controls, using WM_MOUSExxx message and WM_CHAR handling, as part of the main frame window. Each edit/button has a separate cut/paste if statement block to handle it. There are about 80 controls on the main screen. This code is cut and pasted for each single control.
And for the final piéce de resistance;
Total number of local variables used: ZERO. 0. Nada. Zilch. EVERYTHING IS A GLOBAL VARIABLE.