It's kinda ironic that you should say this, since threads are the wrong [usenix.org] way [berkeley.edu] to write "large-scale" network servers
Read the post again. Didn't say I used threads to handle network IO.
By the nature of the app, we had a single thread handling all network IO - it was a single feed of financial data. This data was built up into an internal queue to get it off the network as quickly as possible. Following that, a subscription thread would post notifiers to all objects that had subscribed to this data that information was available, and it would take it off the queue and hand it to the object. Each object was its own thread, and what operations it did were up to it (usually calculations followed by writing to a database).
Non-blocking IO would be a non-issue here - the network is not the bottleneck, and it isn't there that the hundreds of threads operated.
What good is this platform really?...It seems to me that Java is nothing but slower than other languages
The platform is not the language.
Java is good partly because of its pragmatic syntax (C++ish with some sugar added, some sugar taken away), but mostly it's good because of its excellent class library.
Though I haven't written anything serious for a year or so due to a job switch, I used to write large-scale multithreaded network servers, where somthing like three to four hundred threads could be running at any given moment inside the server. Java's class library made this really quite easy, and it's syntax is pleasant enough to work with.
They did break some stuff with legacy code. If you ever named a class 'URI' your code will now fail to compile because they put this class in the java.net package which everyone imports anyway.
Not really a 'breakage'. If you imported only what you needed (java.net.URL, java.net.Socket etc.) your code will continue to work. Only if you used the statement "import java.net.*" will it now fail, and that's down to the individual coder, not the JDK.
But then how would you find out about new shows? You'd lose the ability to just casually browse and run into something you didn't know about but which you find you like.
...unless, of course, you either compile or interpret it into executable form and then use the resulting software tool to create lecture notes containing the text 'source code is useless'...
I don't know if it's a good thing linus is changing how he works.
I also used to think like this. The sum extent of my source control was cp -r currrent vX.x. Source control was for wimps.
I'm of a rather different view today. I now utterly insist on using it, even in tiny little things that I think are one-offs at the time (quite often it turns out they aren't).
I think I can understand Linus' dislike. It sounds like you're less free, and as if the whole coding thing is suddenly less enjoyable. However, having gone through exactly the same feelings I can say that in my case it certainly isn't true that things are less enjoyable. In fact, in some ways it's easier as I can go wandering off in my own direction for a while, before hitting a dead end and backtracking safe in the knowledge that I have a defined state to fall back on should I need to.
Personally, I'd recommend taking the plunge. Somesystems are better than others, but any system use injects a bit more organisation and confidence into the process of coding.
I have yet to meet a woman who I would consider a hardcore hacker.
It's been my luck to know a couple. However, one of the funniest things I remember was a rather patronising social experiment, done in a psychology course for the Open University. I caught this programme on television - I wasn't part of the course. It's all quite a few years ago now as well - maybe 90/91? Don't know for sure.
The experiment gave an internet connection, via modem, to three women - one in her early twenties and a member of the women's darts team, one a working professional single mother in her mid-forties, and the final one looked like everybody's favourite grandmother.
The woman in her twenties discovered internet chat rooms (yes, plenty were there then. Anyone remember Cheeseplant's House?). The woman in her forties spent time with her child doing educational things. Next came the grandmother.
Of course, everyone expected her to have used the machine as a tea-cosy or something, so it came as rather a shock to find she had been participating in various freeware projects, running technical simulators and tweaking her connection parameters to get better throughput. You could feel the researcher slipping into shock...
Completely without knowing, the team had accidently picked one of the original Colossus team members, and she was putting her sudden luck to good use...
Evolution or no evolution, may sarah have a happy life
Thank you very much - Sarah is currently having a very happy life. She cries and gets fed, then she goes back to sleep again. Occassionally, she looks around first and then goes back to sleep again.
Look at the height records, for example. Humans today tend to be much taller than their fifteenth century counterparts. Even taller than just the 1950s generation, in fact.
On Wednesday I became a father for the first time. It's a great feeling to have our new daughter Sarah, but to keep on topic with this thread as a process I have to say that birth is rubbish. Anything that causes that much pain for the mother is just plain wrong, and humans could do with a fair amount of evolving to try and get that bit right.
For those who don't know, the reason that childbirth is even worse in humans than for most other creatures is that our brains have out evolved our bodies. A human baby essentially comes out of the womb a year too early - it is incapable of doing anything for itself, whereas if you look at the young of many other creatures they're up and walking in about in a few hours.
The reason ours arrive early is because any later and the head would be unable to fit through the pelvic area. The head is so large in order to contain our brain, which is freakishly large compared to the rest of nature (Yes - even in RIAA employees).
The upshot? Our bodies can no longer cope with the enlarged brain, and so we have to deliver early. Now, some really useful evolution would be if we could evolve to cope better with this. I imagine that eventually we will.
Of course, an interesting counter-argument would be that we already have evolved to cope better - we evolved to the level where we devised painkillers...
MediaXW is doing the trick for me. Adds the required mime-type handling, so clicking in your browser opens up media player and starts to play the stream.
it doesn't bode well for mass acceptance if it takes more than a miniscule amount of effort to make it work.
With this, it's no more effort than, say, Quicktime. Download the player/plugin - install it, the end.
"...the Intel compiler...is a little more pedantic than the default settings for either the GNU or the Microsoft compilers."
I don't get it - why is that important?
Warnings should never be swept under the carpet, they should always be dealt with. They have a habit of biting later on, particularly when switching between architectures.
One thing I always hate about linking with many third-party libraries is the way they often require dubious casting which generates warnings. I like nice clean code, and I like my compilers to wear jackboots when dishing out warnings.
Of course non-free apps are not where the world should be headed, but we should start with the OS.
Personally, I use an OS to run apps. I don't choose apps because of my OS. Consequently, I rather take the other point of view. There are enough OS already, it needs more non-proprietary apps. There are some, but they do not yet cover enough areas.
Example? Nothing as good as Quicken yet, GnuCash not being there on the reporting side yet. Nothing up to the standards of Cubase yet. And despite the Gimp, there's still nothing of the quality of Photoshop yet.
OS writers will write OSes because that's what they enjoy. However, from a user point of view it's time to start concentrating on polishing up those apps.
Names changed to protect the guilty, but a product I worked on in a previous company used a contractor to write some of the code. The contractor and the guy that ordered it really didn't get on, mainly because the manager was a fool who was rubbish at paying the contractor on time.
After yet another silly dictact, the line #ifdef JOHN_SMITHS_PAPAL_DECREE started creeping into the code...
I'm using 'quality' for want of a better word, I'm not implying that the code doesn't work.
Personally, I find the number of warnings that scroll past whilst compiling kernel code to be quite worrying - particularly simple ones such as unused variables or casting errors.
It would be nice if people made the effort to write code that would compile in all environments (GCC/Borland/anyone else out there), and to try and make that code warning free. Having another compiler about might help people to check that.
Cheers,
Ian
Welcome to Usenet, circa internet year dot.
on
The End of Cyber BS
·
· Score: 2
Weinberger proposes four concepts...that the Web is altering:...a Web space that occupies no space, whose links are based not on contiguity but on human interest.
Hmm. Imagine that - hundreds of groups available based soley on common interest and not geographical location. You could have hundreds of different groups of people, all just banded for common goals.
Of course, such a system would need a hierarchy of some sort, or you could never find the group you wanted. How about something like comp.*, alt.*, uk.local.* etc..
Oh wait on a minute, it's possible I've heard of something similar before...
However, it still begs an important question: How can wealth "evaporate"?
b
Wealth measured in stock is purely a matter of belief and confidence. If everyone believes your stocks are worth something, then they will be willing to pay a price for them.
If circumstances change and confidence goes, then people no longer believe your stocks are worth anything and so no-one will pay any more. The upshot? Your wealth has evaporated.
Of course, a counter argument would be that, with stocks, you never had any wealth in the first place. You merely had the potential to try and convert paper figures into reality.
One of things I like about my TiVo is that it will happily get on with its job whilst I put in some hours on the PS2 (mostly Dark Cloud, to be precise). This means I can play games and not miss the TV that I wanted to watch.
Putting these two systems, the games and PVR, into one box would be detrimental to that, since it's unlikely that the PVR and game components could function at the same time. Personally, I'd still prefer two separate boxes for these bits of functionality.
Most commercial (application) servers are priced per so-many clients. These are measured in client access licenses. The most commonly encountered ones would be things like MS Exchange servers, but non-MS server software can use this model too.
Really? I find it almost unwatchable because of the bias and purely American domestic viewpoint. I realise it's an American network, but for example the BBC is a British network yet it provides a far more impartial view of British affairs than CNN does of American.
Cheers,
Ian
...Michael Schumacher he had no remorse over that deliberate lunge at Jacques Villeneuve's Williams at Jerez in 1997.
I'd certainly call that 'unconventional thinking' - most people would be bothered about it. Mind you, it wouldn't exactly have been his first, as a certain Damon Hill could probably testify...
Cheers,
Ian
PS: Can't tell I'm an F1 fan, can you? Oh no, not me. Honest.
...left wing rhetoric about how much we should care about how many thousands of Somalis died (who were trying to kill US soldiers, and therefore got the logical result they could have expected).
What could they expect? Perhaps they expected to live their lives without being invaded by the US, ie. without ever being put in a position where they needed to attack US soldiers.
The US force was invading their country. Check a map - Somalia is not part of the US. What were US troops doing there? What result would you expect, if foreign troops landed next to where you lived? I would expect the armed forces of my country, and probably me as well, to fight against the invaders.
From the article: "More competitive chess players have been shown to score highly for unconventional thinking and paranoia, both of which have been shown to relate to sensation-seeking."
Surely this is the same for anyone who's any good at nearly anything? For example, re-writing as:
More competitive F1 drivers have been shown to score highly for unconventianal thinking and paranoia
...makes exactly the same amount of sense. Aren't they just saying that to be good in most things you need to have a mind? Why should Chess be unique in this?
Slashdot Mirror
Read the post again. Didn't say I used threads to handle network IO.
By the nature of the app, we had a single thread handling all network IO - it was a single feed of financial data. This data was built up into an internal queue to get it off the network as quickly as possible. Following that, a subscription thread would post notifiers to all objects that had subscribed to this data that information was available, and it would take it off the queue and hand it to the object. Each object was its own thread, and what operations it did were up to it (usually calculations followed by writing to a database).
Non-blocking IO would be a non-issue here - the network is not the bottleneck, and it isn't there that the hundreds of threads operated.
Cheers,
Ian
The platform is not the language.
Java is good partly because of its pragmatic syntax (C++ish with some sugar added, some sugar taken away), but mostly it's good because of its excellent class library.
Though I haven't written anything serious for a year or so due to a job switch, I used to write large-scale multithreaded network servers, where somthing like three to four hundred threads could be running at any given moment inside the server. Java's class library made this really quite easy, and it's syntax is pleasant enough to work with.
Cheers,
Ian
Not really a 'breakage'. If you imported only what you needed (java.net.URL, java.net.Socket etc.) your code will continue to work. Only if you used the statement "import java.net.*" will it now fail, and that's down to the individual coder, not the JDK.
Cheers,
Ian
But then how would you find out about new shows? You'd lose the ability to just casually browse and run into something you didn't know about but which you find you like.
Cheers,
Ian
Cheers,
Ian
I also used to think like this. The sum extent of my source control was cp -r currrent vX.x. Source control was for wimps.
I'm of a rather different view today. I now utterly insist on using it, even in tiny little things that I think are one-offs at the time (quite often it turns out they aren't).
I think I can understand Linus' dislike. It sounds like you're less free, and as if the whole coding thing is suddenly less enjoyable. However, having gone through exactly the same feelings I can say that in my case it certainly isn't true that things are less enjoyable. In fact, in some ways it's easier as I can go wandering off in my own direction for a while, before hitting a dead end and backtracking safe in the knowledge that I have a defined state to fall back on should I need to.
Personally, I'd recommend taking the plunge. Some systems are better than others, but any system use injects a bit more organisation and confidence into the process of coding.
Cheers,
Ian
It's been my luck to know a couple. However, one of the funniest things I remember was a rather patronising social experiment, done in a psychology course for the Open University. I caught this programme on television - I wasn't part of the course. It's all quite a few years ago now as well - maybe 90/91? Don't know for sure.
The experiment gave an internet connection, via modem, to three women - one in her early twenties and a member of the women's darts team, one a working professional single mother in her mid-forties, and the final one looked like everybody's favourite grandmother.
The woman in her twenties discovered internet chat rooms (yes, plenty were there then. Anyone remember Cheeseplant's House?). The woman in her forties spent time with her child doing educational things. Next came the grandmother.
Of course, everyone expected her to have used the machine as a tea-cosy or something, so it came as rather a shock to find she had been participating in various freeware projects, running technical simulators and tweaking her connection parameters to get better throughput. You could feel the researcher slipping into shock...
Completely without knowing, the team had accidently picked one of the original Colossus team members, and she was putting her sudden luck to good use...
Cheers,
Ian
Thanks a lot. We (Carolyn and I) are currently enjoying being new parents a lot.
Pictures of Sarah, for any that are interested, may be seen by going here and selecting Sarah's area from the left.
Cheers,
Ian
Thank you very much - Sarah is currently having a very happy life. She cries and gets fed, then she goes back to sleep again. Occassionally, she looks around first and then goes back to sleep again.
Not a bad life, really...
Cheers,
Ian
On Wednesday I became a father for the first time. It's a great feeling to have our new daughter Sarah, but to keep on topic with this thread as a process I have to say that birth is rubbish. Anything that causes that much pain for the mother is just plain wrong, and humans could do with a fair amount of evolving to try and get that bit right.
For those who don't know, the reason that childbirth is even worse in humans than for most other creatures is that our brains have out evolved our bodies. A human baby essentially comes out of the womb a year too early - it is incapable of doing anything for itself, whereas if you look at the young of many other creatures they're up and walking in about in a few hours.
The reason ours arrive early is because any later and the head would be unable to fit through the pelvic area. The head is so large in order to contain our brain, which is freakishly large compared to the rest of nature (Yes - even in RIAA employees).
The upshot? Our bodies can no longer cope with the enlarged brain, and so we have to deliver early. Now, some really useful evolution would be if we could evolve to cope better with this. I imagine that eventually we will.
Of course, an interesting counter-argument would be that we already have evolved to cope better - we evolved to the level where we devised painkillers...
Cheers,
Ian
MediaXW is doing the trick for me. Adds the required mime-type handling, so clicking in your browser opens up media player and starts to play the stream.
it doesn't bode well for mass acceptance if it takes more than a miniscule amount of effort to make it work.
With this, it's no more effort than, say, Quicktime. Download the player/plugin - install it, the end.
Cheers,
Ian
I don't get it - why is that important?
Warnings should never be swept under the carpet, they should always be dealt with. They have a habit of biting later on, particularly when switching between architectures.
One thing I always hate about linking with many third-party libraries is the way they often require dubious casting which generates warnings. I like nice clean code, and I like my compilers to wear jackboots when dishing out warnings.
Cheers,
Ian
Personally, I use an OS to run apps. I don't choose apps because of my OS. Consequently, I rather take the other point of view. There are enough OS already, it needs more non-proprietary apps. There are some, but they do not yet cover enough areas.
Example? Nothing as good as Quicken yet, GnuCash not being there on the reporting side yet. Nothing up to the standards of Cubase yet. And despite the Gimp, there's still nothing of the quality of Photoshop yet.
OS writers will write OSes because that's what they enjoy. However, from a user point of view it's time to start concentrating on polishing up those apps.
Cheers,
Ian
Names changed to protect the guilty, but a product I worked on in a previous company used a contractor to write some of the code. The contractor and the guy that ordered it really didn't get on, mainly because the manager was a fool who was rubbish at paying the contractor on time.
After yet another silly dictact, the line #ifdef JOHN_SMITHS_PAPAL_DECREE started creeping into the code...
Cheers,
Ian
Personally, I find the number of warnings that scroll past whilst compiling kernel code to be quite worrying - particularly simple ones such as unused variables or casting errors.
It would be nice if people made the effort to write code that would compile in all environments (GCC/Borland/anyone else out there), and to try and make that code warning free. Having another compiler about might help people to check that.
Cheers,
Ian
Hmm. Imagine that - hundreds of groups available based soley on common interest and not geographical location. You could have hundreds of different groups of people, all just banded for common goals.
Of course, such a system would need a hierarchy of some sort, or you could never find the group you wanted. How about something like comp.*, alt.*, uk.local.* etc..
Oh wait on a minute, it's possible I've heard of something similar before...
Cheers,
Ian
Wealth measured in stock is purely a matter of belief and confidence. If everyone believes your stocks are worth something, then they will be willing to pay a price for them.
If circumstances change and confidence goes, then people no longer believe your stocks are worth anything and so no-one will pay any more. The upshot? Your wealth has evaporated.
Of course, a counter argument would be that, with stocks, you never had any wealth in the first place. You merely had the potential to try and convert paper figures into reality.
Cheers,
Ian
Putting these two systems, the games and PVR, into one box would be detrimental to that, since it's unlikely that the PVR and game components could function at the same time. Personally, I'd still prefer two separate boxes for these bits of functionality.
Cheers,
Ian
You know, sometimes typing errors are simply worth it. Thanks for the laugh (and for the rest of the story).
Cheers,
Ian
Client Access License.
Most commercial (application) servers are priced per so-many clients. These are measured in client access licenses. The most commonly encountered ones would be things like MS Exchange servers, but non-MS server software can use this model too.
Cheers,
Ian
Really? I find it almost unwatchable because of the bias and purely American domestic viewpoint. I realise it's an American network, but for example the BBC is a British network yet it provides a far more impartial view of British affairs than CNN does of American.
Cheers,
Ian
I'd certainly call that 'unconventional thinking' - most people would be bothered about it. Mind you, it wouldn't exactly have been his first, as a certain Damon Hill could probably testify...
Cheers,
Ian
PS: Can't tell I'm an F1 fan, can you? Oh no, not me. Honest.
What could they expect? Perhaps they expected to live their lives without being invaded by the US, ie. without ever being put in a position where they needed to attack US soldiers.
The US force was invading their country. Check a map - Somalia is not part of the US. What were US troops doing there? What result would you expect, if foreign troops landed next to where you lived? I would expect the armed forces of my country, and probably me as well, to fight against the invaders.
Cheers,
Ian
Surely this is the same for anyone who's any good at nearly anything? For example, re-writing as:
...makes exactly the same amount of sense. Aren't they just saying that to be good in most things you need to have a mind? Why should Chess be unique in this?
More competitive F1 drivers have been shown to score highly for unconventianal thinking and paranoia
Cheers,
Ian
The Prisoner was by Polygram, currently owned by Carlton TV. It was a commercial TV series, not from the BBC.
Cheers,
Ian