One can see that, as Microsoft has failed horribly to reach OS decency, and Unix has failed far less horribly, that we are duty-bound to learn from the lessons and mistakes of Unix and progress along the path towards true OS perfection. On the one path, madness and misery. On the other, freedom and frolic. Which is the obvious, and correct, choice?
Getting a life, turning off the computer, and enjoying vigorous recreational sex until 5am would be the obvious, correct choice.
Alcohol and gender are optional; pick what you want...
You guys started it. Microsoft finally noticed that not a day has gone by since 1996 (or earlier) without some zealot calling repeatedly for Bill Gates' head on a platter.
So after all that namecalling, threats to throw grenades at the Redmond campus (I remember reading THAT one in 1998, and nearly called the FBI)... what do you expect?
You think this is *bad*? What if they lowered themselves to the average Slashdot poster's level? Wouldn't that be scary...
Owning "intellectual property" may be similar to owning people, a little ownership is good but a lot of ownership is bad.
You argument breaks down at this line and switches tracks randomly. You're comparing two completely separate objects.
Just thought you should know.
Re:Not aliens, but robots
on
Review: A.I.
·
· Score: 3
Precisely. They talked about David as an "original" robot, which made it seem to me that the robots we were seeing weren't created directly by humans, but instead were created by other robots who were created by other robots, who somewhere down the line had been created by humans, but none of these original robots had survived, so there wasn't any lasting direct contact or knowledge of humans.
Everyone should take the time to run, not walk, to Amazon and pick up a copy of Brian Aldiss's short story collection "Super-Toys Last All Summer Long" (taking the name of the 'story' that AI took its plot from - it's actually three stories). Other stories in the trilogy actually deal with this - IIRC, they were indeed aliens, picking through the ruins of human (and robotic) society, after the robots had died out (after they had built a society after the *humans* had died out).
The 'original' reference refers to the fact that this was a robot made by *humans*, not by other robots.
2. *THINK* for a second! You have this A.I. that you're programming, and you decide that the three Laws of Robotics need to be ingrained at a basic level in your piece of hardware. How do you write these requirements? To just say them in English is one thing, but to make them as basic to the Robot's being as possible you need to *code* this up, in no ambiguous terms. Anything less gives robots wiggle room. I say the Three Laws Of Robotics cannot be implemented as written. Period.
Even Asimov acknowledges this; a lot of his stories deal with the results of the laws and how they can be bent, broken or confused.
Simon
Re:Dear God!!! You LIKED it??!!
on
Review: A.I.
·
· Score: 1
The movie contained enough plot for approx. 15 minutes of lame TV crap. I feel as though 2.5 hours of my precious youth have been taken away forever!!
Why do I get the feeling that you felt the movie was too long? Or that it moved too slowly?
Unfortunately, movie-goers have nanosecond attention spans these days. It takes guts to make a movie that DELIBERATELY takes its time -- and believe me, there wasn't anything that he could have done to speed up that movie and still have the same depth of emotional effect. (It's obvious if you watch carefully that there was a large amount of editing done to the Flesh Fair and Rouge City sequences - and possibly even more when David actually makes it to Man Hattan... but the other sequences *couldn't* be cut down... the few times it was done, you can see the joins).
I said to my wife as we walked back to the car after seeing AI that the Kubrick story was clearly the first 2/3, and the Speilberg influence was unmistakable for the last 1/3.
And which bit, pray tell, was the original author, Brian Aldiss?
Sheesh. It takes MUCH more than a director to make a movie. Any director with an "A film by XXXX" who didn't do the entire thing himself is conning himself.
The ending (after he goes into the ocean) has apparentlly been in the script since Kubrick started developing it. It went through various revisions but it's not a Spielberg add-on, as much as it might seem so
A variant of the ending was in the original Aldiss stories... (note the plural; there's three of them - Super-Toys Last All Summer Long is just the *first*)
Looks like MS just wants to own all code and exterminate cods that it can't own.
You don't own their source code - their libraries (such as their implementation of STL, or the C runtime library, or ATL or so on and so forth).
So yes, you don't 'fully own' your compiled output (note: in some cases, you do). But Microsoft allow you to distribute their stuff with yours, so it's not an issue.
In light of the Register article about Microsoft doctoring the WSJ article and then restoring it, maybe you should reexamine your perceptions of who has more integrity?
I guess it's a pity that The Register was pulling that entire story out of their ass then (par for the course for them).
All I know is that MSNBC stories have in the past often had user polls where only IE users could see the poll, or only IE users could vote on it, but afterwards the pollresults got showed to everyone. (And yes, I did verify this for myself, I in fact discovered it once by accident.)
You know, when this happened, I worked with the MSNBC guys to get it fixed. I reported the problem. They fixed it.
What if instead of bitching about it two years after it's fixed, YOU had reported the bug?
I think is deliberate: there is no reason why calls like malloc, creat, mmap, poll, whatever, couldn't have been tuned to get similar performance to the Windows specific VirtualAlloc, CreateFile, etc.
... apart from the fact that they expose different paradigms entirely?
Malloc - heap based allocation
VirtualAlloc - allocates entire pages from the VMM. Allows you to reserve or commit pages when and as you need them.
fopen - opens a file handle
CreateFile - Allows you to open a file handle, specifying buffers to use, etc etc etc.
poll - you sit there waiting and doing nothing most of the time because you're asking all your connections "are we there yet?"
CompletionPorts - the OS comes back to you when it's done, and tells you that it's finished. You can now use those spare cycles doing something else - like another 1000 network connections.
So you're saying that if you want good performance from Linux, you just code it normally - but if you want good performance from windows, you have to use all the platform dependent nonportable operating system extensions.
If that were the case for Linux, the Tux guys wouldn't be trying to put an http daemon in the kernel. They'd just keep it in user-mode and 'just code it normally'
I'm sorry, but I can't see how this is a valid benchmark.
"As a real-world test, we measured how quickly email could be sent using our MailEngine software. MailEngine is an email delivery server, ships on all the tested platforms (plus on Solaris for Sparc), and uses an asynchronous architecture (with non-blocking TCP/IP using
the poll () system call). So that email was not actually delivered to our 200,000-member test list, we ran MailEngine in test mode. In this mode, MailEngine performs all the steps of sending mail, but sends the RSET command instead of the DATA command at the last moment. The SMTP connection is then QUIT, and no email is
delivered to the recipient. Our workload consisted of a single message being delivered to 200,000 distinct email addresses spread across 9113 domains. Because the same message was queued in memory for every recipient, disk I/O was not a significant factor. We slowly raised the number of simultaneous connections to see how the increased load altered performance."
Nice! So in other words, they used straight BSD sockets for their
implementation - which is NOT the way to get performance from Windows. You
need to use:
1. Asynchronous, Event based socket handling.
2. Completion ports.
3. Scatter/Gather buffering.
Polling is lousy no matter what way you do it. You'll lose most of your
performance spent going round a small loop.
Similarly you can infer that they used straight malloc() for their memory
handling, and most likely file handling - again very lousy
performance-wise on windows compared to the alternatives, such as
VirtualAlloc, CreateFile(), scatter-gather file handling and more.
As for the second test, we can guess (from their comments) that they're
using straight C++/C file operations under windows instead of tuning them to
the architecture, so of course performance is going to be lousy -- they're
benchmarking Microsoft's C runtime implementation, nothing more, nothing
less.
Also note that:
1. They don't provide details of which compiler they're using.
2. They don't provide details of the actual benchmark code for test 2.
3. They only tuned the Linux, FreeBSD and Solaris setups -- they should have
tuned Win2k server as well.
Unix systems have the concept of a version -- you change the API, you rev the major version of the library. The old one's still there if you need it, but apps will get (dynamically) linked against the version of the library they were originally linked against.
As does Windows - it's not an 'exclusively Unix' kind of thing. The problem only arises when developers DO NOT follow the convention that you change the filename when the version changes.
Part of the DLL hell is the vast amount of them that are unnecessarily created by people who don't understand when static linking will work just fine. I still hear people claim that DLL's magically keep the executable size small. DUH! All it does is unnecessarily chunk up your program, increase file count, and increase loading time.
Hmmm... increase loading time? Imperceptibly if you use Rebase and Bind to tidy up your DLL use.
Unnecessarily chunk up your program? Not if it's done on functional divisions; one big advantage this has is that you can in-situ replace DLLs that are faulty by ONLY replacing the DLL - not the entire file (which software designed to patch files might not necessarily be able to do).
Besides... who's worried? I've been told since 1998 by all KINDS of people that Linux has never and NEVER WOULD have ANY problems of this nature, because it's not fundamentally flawed like Windows. Surely they weren't all wrong?
And they forked linux because they could it being open source and all. They would undoubtedly have done the same with win2k, but they can not because it is closed source.
The NSA has the Win2k source code. It's very easy for universities and other establishments to get the source, slightly less easy for large companies, and slightly less easy still for small companies and individuals (although they're changing this as we speak...)
So, while you're away camping for a week, your 16-year old brings his friends over and they watch the playboy channel. When you come back, how do you get rid of all the 'directed' pornography adds on your TV? "Fear not the path of truth for the lack of people walking it."
Well, one way would be to child-lock the Playboy channel...
I first realized they (i.e., Comcast Cablevision in MD) could do this when my wife had a phone conversation with one of their service reps that went something like:
[Rep]: Maam, please tune to channel 3
[Wife]: I am on 3
[Rep]: No...you're on 5
I returned the digital cable box the next day. (This was a year or so ago.)
Well, yeah... I mean, digital cable is really nothing more than multi-cast UDP packets, with authorization packets on a per-channel basis that pass the key you need to decode the signal. Your box asks for authorization from home base, and then you get the key back.
You take it with food. Food first; buffered analgesic afterwards. That way it doesn't attack the stomach lining so quick. Best to avoid coffee with it too.
And the movie in question was a hollywood travesty. They took the basis for the series and destroyed it with love interest and special effects. We would do well to forget this incarnation of our friend from Galafrey...
Actually, the BBC explicitly wanted the love interest - believe it or not.
Check amazon.co.uk for the book "Regeneration" by Segal & Russell.
Slashdot Mirror
One can see that, as Microsoft has failed horribly to reach OS decency, and Unix has failed far less horribly, that we are duty-bound to learn from the lessons and mistakes of Unix and progress along the path towards true OS perfection. On the one path, madness and misery. On the other, freedom and frolic. Which is the obvious, and correct, choice?
Getting a life, turning off the computer, and enjoying vigorous recreational sex until 5am would be the obvious, correct choice.
Alcohol and gender are optional; pick what you want...
Si
Who's the one picking a fight here?
You guys started it. Microsoft finally noticed that not a day has gone by since 1996 (or earlier) without some zealot calling repeatedly for Bill Gates' head on a platter.
So after all that namecalling, threats to throw grenades at the Redmond campus (I remember reading THAT one in 1998, and nearly called the FBI)... what do you expect?
You think this is *bad*? What if they lowered themselves to the average Slashdot poster's level? Wouldn't that be scary...
Si
The thing that makes Java WORA is the fact that the API goes with the language and the runtime enviroment.
Java isn't WORA in general - or rather, when it is, it works badly.
But that's besides the point.
Java being WORA and C# being 'not-WORA' doesn't have ANYTHING to do with C# being cross-platform.
Cross Platform != WORA. Get that through your head.
Simon
Owning "intellectual property" may be similar to owning people, a little ownership is good but a lot of ownership is bad.
You argument breaks down at this line and switches tracks randomly. You're comparing two completely separate objects.
Just thought you should know.
Precisely. They talked about David as an "original" robot, which made it seem to me that the robots we were seeing weren't created directly by humans, but instead were created by other robots who were created by other robots, who somewhere down the line had been created by humans, but none of these original robots had survived, so there wasn't any lasting direct contact or knowledge of humans.
Everyone should take the time to run, not walk, to Amazon and pick up a copy of Brian Aldiss's short story collection "Super-Toys Last All Summer Long" (taking the name of the 'story' that AI took its plot from - it's actually three stories). Other stories in the trilogy actually deal with this - IIRC, they were indeed aliens, picking through the ruins of human (and robotic) society, after the robots had died out (after they had built a society after the *humans* had died out).
The 'original' reference refers to the fact that this was a robot made by *humans*, not by other robots.
Simon
2. *THINK* for a second! You have this A.I. that you're programming, and you decide that the three Laws of Robotics need to be ingrained at a basic level in your piece of hardware. How do you write these requirements? To just say them in English is one thing, but to make them as basic to the Robot's being as possible you need to *code* this up, in no ambiguous terms. Anything less gives robots wiggle room. I say the Three Laws Of Robotics cannot be implemented as written. Period.
Even Asimov acknowledges this; a lot of his stories deal with the results of the laws and how they can be bent, broken or confused.
Simon
The movie contained enough plot for approx. 15 minutes of lame TV crap. I feel as though 2.5 hours of my precious youth have been taken away forever!!
... the few times it was done, you can see the joins).
Why do I get the feeling that you felt the movie was too long? Or that it moved too slowly?
Unfortunately, movie-goers have nanosecond attention spans these days. It takes guts to make a movie that DELIBERATELY takes its time -- and believe me, there wasn't anything that he could have done to speed up that movie and still have the same depth of emotional effect. (It's obvious if you watch carefully that there was a large amount of editing done to the Flesh Fair and Rouge City sequences - and possibly even more when David actually makes it to Man Hattan... but the other sequences *couldn't* be cut down
Simon
I said to my wife as we walked back to the car after seeing AI that the Kubrick story was clearly the first 2/3, and the Speilberg influence was unmistakable for the last 1/3.
And which bit, pray tell, was the original author, Brian Aldiss?
Sheesh. It takes MUCH more than a director to make a movie. Any director with an "A film by XXXX" who didn't do the entire thing himself is conning himself.
Simon
The ending (after he goes into the ocean) has apparentlly been in the script since Kubrick started developing it. It went through various revisions but it's not a Spielberg add-on, as much as it might seem so
A variant of the ending was in the original Aldiss stories... (note the plural; there's three of them - Super-Toys Last All Summer Long is just the *first*)
Simon
Do we "fully own" compiled output of Visual C++?
Looks like MS just wants to own all code and exterminate cods that it can't own.
You don't own their source code - their libraries (such as their implementation of STL, or the C runtime library, or ATL or so on and so forth).
So yes, you don't 'fully own' your compiled output (note: in some cases, you do). But Microsoft allow you to distribute their stuff with yours, so it's not an issue.
Simon
In light of the Register article about Microsoft doctoring the WSJ article and then restoring it, maybe you should reexamine your perceptions of who has more integrity?
I guess it's a pity that The Register was pulling that entire story out of their ass then (par for the course for them).
Simon
It already looks better than the last Windows financial software I used, MS Money 2.0, although I don't know what MS Money $LATEST looks like.
r ted.htm
Oh, Money 2001? Try this link:
http://www.microsoft.com/money/dlxtour/gettingsta
Simon
I've seen a weird trend from /. moderators. Anytime someone makes a good point about or appears to support Microsoft, it gets labels as "Funny".
Well, you know what they say -
First they laugh at you...
Then they fight...
Simon
All I know is that MSNBC stories have in the past often had user polls where only IE users could see the poll, or only IE users could vote on it, but afterwards the pollresults got showed to everyone. (And yes, I did verify this for myself, I in fact discovered it once by accident.)
You know, when this happened, I worked with the MSNBC guys to get it fixed. I reported the problem. They fixed it.
What if instead of bitching about it two years after it's fixed, YOU had reported the bug?
Sound more productive? I think so.
Simon
I think is deliberate: there is no reason why calls like malloc, creat, mmap, poll, whatever, couldn't have been tuned to get similar performance to the Windows specific VirtualAlloc, CreateFile, etc.
... apart from the fact that they expose different paradigms entirely?
Malloc - heap based allocation
VirtualAlloc - allocates entire pages from the VMM. Allows you to reserve or commit pages when and as you need them.
fopen - opens a file handle
CreateFile - Allows you to open a file handle, specifying buffers to use, etc etc etc.
poll - you sit there waiting and doing nothing most of the time because you're asking all your connections "are we there yet?"
CompletionPorts - the OS comes back to you when it's done, and tells you that it's finished. You can now use those spare cycles doing something else - like another 1000 network connections.
Simon
So you're saying that if you want good performance from Linux, you just code it normally - but if you want good performance from windows, you have to use all the platform dependent nonportable operating system extensions.
If that were the case for Linux, the Tux guys wouldn't be trying to put an http daemon in the kernel. They'd just keep it in user-mode and 'just code it normally'
Simon
Nice! So in other words, they used straight BSD sockets for their
implementation - which is NOT the way to get performance from Windows. You
need to use:
1. Asynchronous, Event based socket handling.
2. Completion ports.
3. Scatter/Gather buffering.
Polling is lousy no matter what way you do it. You'll lose most of your
performance spent going round a small loop.
Similarly you can infer that they used straight malloc() for their memory
handling, and most likely file handling - again very lousy
performance-wise on windows compared to the alternatives, such as
VirtualAlloc, CreateFile(), scatter-gather file handling and more.
As for the second test, we can guess (from their comments) that they're
using straight C++/C file operations under windows instead of tuning them to
the architecture, so of course performance is going to be lousy -- they're
benchmarking Microsoft's C runtime implementation, nothing more, nothing
less.
Also note that:
1. They don't provide details of which compiler they're using.
2. They don't provide details of the actual benchmark code for test 2.
3. They only tuned the Linux, FreeBSD and Solaris setups -- they should have
tuned Win2k server as well.
Sheesh. Talk about a crappy way to benchmark.
Simon
Unix systems have the concept of a version -- you change the API, you rev the major version of the library. The old one's still there if you need it, but apps will get (dynamically) linked against the version of the library they were originally linked against.
As does Windows - it's not an 'exclusively Unix' kind of thing. The problem only arises when developers DO NOT follow the convention that you change the filename when the version changes.
Simon
Part of the DLL hell is the vast amount of them that are unnecessarily created by people who don't understand when static linking will work just fine. I still hear people claim that DLL's magically keep the executable size small. DUH! All it does is unnecessarily chunk up your program, increase file count, and increase loading time.
Hmmm... increase loading time? Imperceptibly if you use Rebase and Bind to tidy up your DLL use.
Unnecessarily chunk up your program? Not if it's done on functional divisions; one big advantage this has is that you can in-situ replace DLLs that are faulty by ONLY replacing the DLL - not the entire file (which software designed to patch files might not necessarily be able to do).
Besides... who's worried? I've been told since 1998 by all KINDS of people that Linux has never and NEVER WOULD have ANY problems of this nature, because it's not fundamentally flawed like Windows. Surely they weren't all wrong?
Simon
And they forked linux because they could it being open source and all. They would undoubtedly have done the same with win2k, but they can not because it is closed source.
The NSA has the Win2k source code. It's very easy for universities and other establishments to get the source, slightly less easy for large companies, and slightly less easy still for small companies and individuals (although they're changing this as we speak...)
Simon
So, while you're away camping for a week, your 16-year old brings his friends over and they watch the playboy channel. When you come back, how do you get rid of all the 'directed' pornography adds on your TV? "Fear not the path of truth for the lack of people walking it."
Well, one way would be to child-lock the Playboy channel...
Simon
I first realized they (i.e., Comcast Cablevision in MD) could do this when my wife had a phone conversation with one of their service reps that went something like:
[Rep]: Maam, please tune to channel 3
[Wife]: I am on 3
[Rep]: No...you're on 5
I returned the digital cable box the next day. (This was a year or so ago.)
Well, yeah... I mean, digital cable is really nothing more than multi-cast UDP packets, with authorization packets on a per-channel basis that pass the key you need to decode the signal. Your box asks for authorization from home base, and then you get the key back.
*shrugs*
Simon
You take it with food. Food first; buffered analgesic afterwards. That way it doesn't attack the stomach lining so quick. Best to avoid coffee with it too.
Simon
And the movie in question was a hollywood travesty. They took the basis for the series and destroyed it with love interest and special effects. We would do well to forget this incarnation of our friend from Galafrey...
Actually, the BBC explicitly wanted the love interest - believe it or not.
Check amazon.co.uk for the book "Regeneration" by Segal & Russell.
Simon
Isn't that _exactly_ what FX32 did?
AFAIK it dynamically translated binary
code for Pentium to Alpha processors
with runtime optimazation.
Yep, apart from it did it for x386 and up --> Alpha.
I think it was released in or before 1997.
Before - 1996 or 1995, IIRC.
Simon