Sometimes, it seems these "removal" patches are more for religious reasons (aka break it on purpose) than any kind of technical ones. Same thing when firefox removed PPC or windows 2k support.
In fact I bet if you compiled a non SMP linux kernel it probably still works (assuming it does actually still work on a 486/pentium), as the majority of the patches are related to CAS and page invalidation, which aren't really necessary anyway.
There aren't many jobs out there that would give you the flexibility you need as a student that pay much more than minimum wage.
Yah, I will buy that. When I was going to school I was pretty lucky because I had an extremely flexible employer (software development of course). But, I often went looking for other work, and it was basically impossible to find part time/flexible employment that wasn't either an internship, or retail. I had a long talk with the HR people at seagate and a couple other companies about this. Funny thing was the university should have hired me to recruit companies for their internship programs because later I had friends get internships at those companies because the HR departments turned around and signed on with the university and started hiring people as interns.
Frankly, a lot of companies have this myopic view that nothing useful can get done by part-time employees. Which is patently false, most companies have tons of small goal, low risk projects that can add to the bottom line that are perfect for someone working 20 hours a week for 6 months. Testing is the perfect example. A good intern can automate a bunch of tests and prove his worth 10x over. Plus, in the end if the testing scripts or whatever are garbage you don't loose much by throwing them away. The friend who got hired at seagate software wrote a big chunk of their installer for one of their primary products while working part time. The product I work on now, has fairly significant parts of our web UI that were written by interns. In the end, sometimes the best value is being able to make full time offers to students that are proven good employees when they graduate.
Finally, A big choice here can be the school too. I discovered that many of the "top" schools are really unfriendly to non traditional students (read ones working during the day). Basically they are more interested in their rankings than providing an education to the students that need it the most.
Well, in fact its more than the games (maybe 100+).
Twenty years of windows application purchases/acquisitions have given me quite a large library of things I use on/off but am not willing to part with. Old legal license of matlab, protel, photoshop, anydvd, Office 2003, MS money, corel painter, etc. Then there are the metric ton of assorted electronic tools with GPIB interfaces, flash/EPROM programmers, etc that only really work in windows.
Plus, most of the best opensource/free software runs very well on windows, inkscape, blender, firefox, freemake. KEGS, The list goes on, many of them work better on windows than Linux.
The one reason I use windows has been the consistency, and the near guarantee (until vista at least) that my existing software and training investments would be maintained going forward. This is something that MS has completely forgotten. Sure there are a lot of people willing to throw their PC's away in exchange for a iPad or whatnot (have one of those too), but catering to that customer base is risky because they lose the vendor lock that put them in the position they are in today. No one buys windows or Intel because they like them. They buy them because they provided a small sense of stability
I have been running linux on machines since the days before there were distributions. But its never been on my primary desktop machine as anything other than a dual boot or a VM. I've been employed working on linux for 10+ years now, and in all that time I still find that it runs best when relegated to a VM or external server with an X server in windows. To this day, I have yet to find a linux distribution that works with multiple heads, and can rotate only a portion of the heads (its all or nothing, or its broken).
So, the effort to get Kings Quest running on my windows machine for my daughter pays for the windows license in the hours of avoiding screwing with wine, or for that matter buying it again from GOG (those guys rock! I have a bunch of GOG games now too).
And this is sort of the barb, that Apple has too, once you have spent thousands of dollars on apps/movies/music/books/etc and your standing in the store next to the geewiz new tablet from korean vendor XYZ or the ipad+1 for twice the price and 1/2 the features which one do you choose?
Yah, they could have just called it Windows 286. From what I can tell its pretty much the same single window, flat low color depth crap. Heck they probably could have re-released 286 and struck out the 2 and the 6, and saved themselves a bunch of effort. It would totally haul butt on a 16Mhz machine.
The reason is that the BIOS is limited to 1MB in size
? And how does a pure 16-bit BIOS test >1M of memory? There is the big segment hack (32-bit memory access in real mode), but that probably isn't safe. Instead its possible to flip into protected/long mode as necessary and then flip back. Ugly but if you designed a BIOS for a 64-bit machine, and ran most of it in 64-bit mode, only providing the real mode functions for the option ROMs and initial boot, then you would kill most of the memory limitations too. The flash chips on recent motherboards are many MB's so obviously the BIOS writers have gotten around the 20 bit addressing limitations of real mode.
Before that all software was written by CS people.
That is false, math, physics and engineering majors were writing software long before CS programs existed.
The first university to offer CS in the US was Purdue in '62. There were other places teaching "programming" classes but they fell under other degree programs. This means that all the major early contributions to "computer science" were made by people with degree's in other fields.
In fact, by the time formal CS appeared, computing as we know it was pretty much already defined (see S/360, LISP, FORTRAN, etc).
I've caught HP x86 servers doing the same thing with video cards. I wanted to run a PCIe video board not sold by HP. It simply failed, the BIOS refused to init it, and removed its parent bridge from the device list passed to the OS.
Also there are probably far more people capable of writing a UEFI BIOS than a traditional all-assembler BIOS.
And there isn't any reason someone couldn't have rewritten the vast majority of the traditional BIOS functionality in C, with gcc. You would simply have to have write some code to covert the assembly soft interrupt api's (named register/params) to a C calling convention.
he 16-bit limitations on the BIOS are ridiculous in this day and age and moving to a new interface that ditches the ridiculous constraints imposed by the 8086 more than 30 years ago is a good thing.
No one really gives a crap what the bios runs in, you site OpenFirmware which is another example of old crufty stuff. I should know as I worked professionally on it for a while. 16bit-x86 is a better firmware environment than forth. Let me site one of many examples of why openfirmware sucks worse than nearly any other choice. Interrupts, how do you hook/handle an interrupt in an open firmware option ROM? Yah, that is right, you don't.
At a minimum, all the BIOS needs to do, is init the motherboard hardware, provide a method to describe the hardware to the OS, find a boot device and jump to code provided by it. If you want to see a more reasonable/minimalist BIOS replacement look at U-Boot. Funny thing is that its quite possible there are more u-boot machines than their are EFI ones because u-boot is pretty much the standard for booting devices which aren't x86 PCs. In fact I happen to know that a huge number of the x86 UEFI servers out there actually have u-boot running on their service processors. So its good enough for the machine hardware, just not good enough to present to the user.
UEFI is pretty much a case of fixing what isn't broken, yet with any software project its bound to have bugs in the first few iterations.
And, oh boy does it. name brand motherboards that brick when flashed, systems that don't power off correctly, systems that take minutes to post, the usual issues with incorrect ACPI table entries, the list goes on.
Basically, its replacing one fairly stable code base, that the motherboard vendors often got wrong, with a completely new untested one that is 10x as complicated. You do the math.
Linus had another rant about it recently called "The abomination called EFI".
BTW: Gigabyte has a number of traditional motherboards that can boot GPT partitions, effectively removing the _ONE_ useful new feature in EFI.
C++ is severely lacking in expressiveness, and there is an abundance of undefined behavior in C++. Debugging a C++ program is as much about low-level program mechanics as it is about high-level logic (even when you are writing a high level application). Dealing with errors in C++ is a giant ball of confusion -- there isn't even a good way to deal with errors that occur in constructors or destructors.
C++ lacking in expressiveness? You have got to be joking, your right there are a lot of poorly defined areas in C++, but many of them stem from the fact that there are 100 different ways syntactically to solve any given problem. Of course some ways tend to be better than others, hence I'm confused about your problems with constructor error handling. You handle errors in constructors with "throw", combined with good RAII style, you get the benefit of fast code, that is robust to memory errors. Destructors aren't as clear cut, but the easy answer is not to have fatal errors in the destructor, rather pulling a java and using them more like finalize.
One of C++'s strong points (vs C) is that you can create a domain specific environment by careful class design and operator overloading. For example our database access library allows you to access a row's column similarly to the same way you might do it in some other languages with first class associative arrays. 'if (result_row["column_name"]==somevalue)' because it overrode the brackets operator. Similarly I have a big num library that operates transparently with all the built in numeric types, even going so far as to work with a template matrix library I have.
As far as debug-ability, or a programmers ability to focus on the problem at had rather than the language, I suspect that is all just a matter of experience. I've written some extremely complex algorithms in C++ over the last couple years. Not once have I had the need to do anything more complex than display some variables, or a datastructure after some portion of the alogorthm has completed. Maybe what your are describing here is more what I call C++ inverted learning curve. In a lot of languages you learn how to do things, in C++ you tend to learn how _NOT_ to do things. Get to much of this in your project it starts to fail in ways that are beyond the skills of the authors. This happens in other languages too, just in different ways.
What makes C/C++ special here? A typical FFI in a high level language let's you call functions in shared libraries
Because its horribly inefficient in most interpreted or GC languages. Time and time again, what you see in the "thunk" layers are pieces of code copying data from some language specific data structure/layout to the one defined by the native call. Or worse yet, you see giant global locks synchronizing all the other application threads. I spoke of mmap() in my earlier post. mmap() is one of those functions that can literally provide orders of magnitude performance boosts (vs explicit read()/write() type calls) in applications that are disk IO (for reasons that take a while to explain) intensive. Yet few languages outside of the C/C++/etc style languages even support it.
Well, we've seen that situation before. Orbitz was competing against hand-optimized and tuned code running on mainframes, which have lots of hardware acceleration, and speed is crucial.
Hardware acceleration to do IO, which is also "hardware accelerated" in any x86 server since about the mid 90's when IO adapters started having their own RISC processors, and mostly doing scatter/gather DMA. I have a (brand new!) mainframe, trust me if your application can't beat the pants off a mainframe running on midrange server, then your code is shit. But in a way this proves a point about efficiency. I've seen it a number of times, someone comes in and tries to replace a few hundred KLOC of COBOL, with some "newfangled" language (likely java). The end result requires a cluster of 20 PC's, consumes 10x the memory, and runs 1/2 as fast. This is why/how IBM continu
C++, Java, etc. express solutions to the big software problems we'll be solving over the next decade, and it is going to be even harder to express efficient solutions to those problems
I think you fail to understand how adaptable C and C++ is (not java). The strong point isn't how great it is at any given benchmark, but rather how good it is for solving a whole range of different problems. From low level bit banging, to heavy parallel transaction management (how many databases are written in C). Many of the C/C++ "problems" are really more reflections on the lack of standardized libraries for doing things. There are C/C++ libraries for doing everything you can imagine, but you don't have to use them. If your OS provides mmap and its 10x faster than doing read/write style ops then you have that choice. If you want to interface to lua, opencl, or even inline assembly, then you can do it with ease. Just try doing GPGPU programming in a those languages you list. If speed is an issue your application is going to fail, when your competitor figures out how to use a GPU to solve a problem at 10x the rate of a CPU, and your stuck two layers away from the hardware because its more convenient to do regex processing there than picking a high performance one (http://code.google.com/p/re2/) for C++.
The bottom line is that its rare to find a 100% C or C++ project these days. No one writes whole web apps with C++ CGI/bin files, rather using php/ruby/etc. But when you need to operate on a 100GB sparse matrix, you drop to something that can control the access patterns or utilize some hardware specific feature that gives a big performance boost. This is the problem I see with java programmers all the time, a lot of high performance computing is actually "just an exercise in caching", and when you can't control low level details like memory placement a lot of performance tends to evaporate. Even at the big web companies its not unusual to find C++ running some portion of the system where the language du jour failed.
Uh you of course know that emacs can act as an "IDE" too. Its not as well integrated for Java but for most languages the edit/compile/debug/version control/etc functionality is there. I guess the diffrence is that with emacs you have to spend a few hours hacking lisp and.emacs files to make it work the way you want. On the other hand, I have a remote build/debug cycle (edit, build, and run are all on different machines) and I find that emacs actually works better than just about everything else in that case. Of course I have a ~2KLOC.emacs config file.
Not that I would ever recommend emacs... But I felt like a complete dope when I told the new guy here to use eclipse and then had it crash like a dozen times while I was trying to show him how to checkout/edit/build.
I don't believe it was. They were using it like a normal PC running a camera app, and some patient information system. Complete with a second monitor mounted in front me so I could see the pictures/xrays/etc. Pretty slick actually. I believe the start menu said XP Pro.
What licensed RAM limits? XP like other 32-bit OSes is limited to 4 GB.
Per process! Not counting AWE type extensions.
With PAE (which is turned on in later XP service packs due to DEP) the kernel can access 64GB. All the 32-bit server versions of windows since W2k support this. XP does as well if you hack the license. Its M$ FUD that you can only access 4GB of RAM in 32-bit mode with x86. Linux could do it too, and a large number of other processors (PPC for example) are also designed this way. If nothing else you can use the extra space for a disk cache.
I went to a brand new dentist office the other day. They were running XP on their brand new xray machines.
If Microsoft were smart, they would release an XP R2, they could call it "Windows for Business" and sell if for $150 a license.
If they were feeling generous they could remove the licensed RAM limits, give it a GPT boot option (heck they don't even have to do any work, just package it with some of the 3rd party options).
Clear your cookies and try from a different IP or browser. Google definitely appears to be doing "guilty by association" type functions where people sharing IP's get similar results.
Everyone has been saying that adults need to limit their exposure to tv as well, based on the idea that sitting around for extended periods of time can cause health problems.
Based on personal experience, I suspect that those studies showing extremely low levels of brain activity in people watching TV is also going to result in eventual proof that watching TV actually makes people dumber. Your brain needs "exercise" the same way as the rest of your body. So instead of having hobbies, or playing sports people just sit around and let the TV fill their eyes/ears. Of course this is going to be reflected in a "dumbing down" of society in general as those hours are taking up time that might have been spent on more stimulating activities.
Over time, this has turned out to be the best use of the tablet devices I have.
Once I started running RDP clients on them, it became apparent that many things were just better over RDP that the local tablet apps. Surfing the web for example is significantly better/faster using a windows PC. Even without the add blocking plugins.
Frequently that it takes 1/2 to 1 second to render pages on an iPAD2 that render instantly over RDP. Same with an android device or the touchpad I have..
Having this integrated environment is nice in other ways, I can sit down and do the heavy lifting with three monitors, keyboard and mouse, while being able to stand up walk away and do lightweight things (reading email) on the tablet without having to sync anything.
In Austin where i live, its basically Time Warner or AT&T, its like two really crappy choices. I've been a TW customer for years now, but this is the company that gave me 10/1.5 in 1998. Back then it cost me $40 a month, and I was a _REALLY_ happy camper. It got faster for a few years until I had ~15/3 in ~2000, then it started getting slower and slower until it was 8/.5, and TW added another tier, Turbo, so I upgraded and now I was only paying something like $55 a month for 20/2 with "turbo boost" which regularly would hit 30/2. That is pretty much where it sat until a couple years ago when they finally announced DOCIS 3, would roll out with a 30/5 and a 50/5 tier. By the time it was available it was only 50/5 and 30/2. Sure enough as soon as those came out turbo dipped to 18/1.5, now its 15/1.5, and i'm thinking I have to pay them $75 to get 30/2.
Bottom line, my internet isn't getting faster, especially when you consider the download rates. The price is slowly creeping up. At this rate by 2025, i'm going to have 25/1 for $300 a month.
So basically TW is fucking us, especially if you consider that a basic base DOCIS is 4 channel config is 177/122, or basically at 20M down I should be getting 13M up.
So, now you can probably run your python, lua, ruby, etc scripts on the client side, you just have to provide a LLVM front-end or a language that can be compiled with one of the pre-existing ones.
And now you don't have to be left out of the web page revolution... Check out https://github.com/kripken/emscripten/wiki which is a LLVM backend for javascript. They have ported a big portion of the standard C libraries, STL, and a number of other things. Its pretty funny, but you can run boat loads of old emulators, games, you name it in a browser now.
I was trying to be fairly general in my description, I could have said, a nice dark piss yellow, or gotten out the color charts.
But... I was attempting to say that clear crap that comes in the can is too light to even be a proper pale lager. Personally, I don't tend to venture that far into the light side of the spectrum. Although, I realized after I typed the thing about seeing through the beer, someone would probably miss interpret that too because there are plenty of very good brews (including the pumpkin ale i'm drinking) that aren't high on the clarity scales and would obscure my hand even if the color was sufficiently light that one could normally see though it.
Frankly, at the start of the thread I decided what I needed was a good brew (or three).
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Sometimes, it seems these "removal" patches are more for religious reasons (aka break it on purpose) than any kind of technical ones. Same thing when firefox removed PPC or windows 2k support.
In fact I bet if you compiled a non SMP linux kernel it probably still works (assuming it does actually still work on a 486/pentium), as the majority of the patches are related to CAS and page invalidation, which aren't really necessary anyway.
There aren't many jobs out there that would give you the flexibility you need as a student that pay much more than minimum wage.
Yah, I will buy that. When I was going to school I was pretty lucky because I had an extremely flexible employer (software development of course). But, I often went looking for other work, and it was basically impossible to find part time/flexible employment that wasn't either an internship, or retail. I had a long talk with the HR people at seagate and a couple other companies about this. Funny thing was the university should have hired me to recruit companies for their internship programs because later I had friends get internships at those companies because the HR departments turned around and signed on with the university and started hiring people as interns.
Frankly, a lot of companies have this myopic view that nothing useful can get done by part-time employees. Which is patently false, most companies have tons of small goal, low risk projects that can add to the bottom line that are perfect for someone working 20 hours a week for 6 months. Testing is the perfect example. A good intern can automate a bunch of tests and prove his worth 10x over. Plus, in the end if the testing scripts or whatever are garbage you don't loose much by throwing them away. The friend who got hired at seagate software wrote a big chunk of their installer for one of their primary products while working part time. The product I work on now, has fairly significant parts of our web UI that were written by interns. In the end, sometimes the best value is being able to make full time offers to students that are proven good employees when they graduate.
Finally, A big choice here can be the school too. I discovered that many of the "top" schools are really unfriendly to non traditional students (read ones working during the day). Basically they are more interested in their rankings than providing an education to the students that need it the most.
Well, in fact its more than the games (maybe 100+).
Twenty years of windows application purchases/acquisitions have given me quite a large library of things I use on/off but am not willing to part with. Old legal license of matlab, protel, photoshop, anydvd, Office 2003, MS money, corel painter, etc. Then there are the metric ton of assorted electronic tools with GPIB interfaces, flash/EPROM programmers, etc that only really work in windows.
Plus, most of the best opensource/free software runs very well on windows, inkscape, blender, firefox, freemake. KEGS, The list goes on, many of them work better on windows than Linux.
The one reason I use windows has been the consistency, and the near guarantee (until vista at least) that my existing software and training investments would be maintained going forward. This is something that MS has completely forgotten. Sure there are a lot of people willing to throw their PC's away in exchange for a iPad or whatnot (have one of those too), but catering to that customer base is risky because they lose the vendor lock that put them in the position they are in today. No one buys windows or Intel because they like them. They buy them because they provided a small sense of stability
I have been running linux on machines since the days before there were distributions. But its never been on my primary desktop machine as anything other than a dual boot or a VM. I've been employed working on linux for 10+ years now, and in all that time I still find that it runs best when relegated to a VM or external server with an X server in windows. To this day, I have yet to find a linux distribution that works with multiple heads, and can rotate only a portion of the heads (its all or nothing, or its broken).
So, the effort to get Kings Quest running on my windows machine for my daughter pays for the windows license in the hours of avoiding screwing with wine, or for that matter buying it again from GOG (those guys rock! I have a bunch of GOG games now too).
And this is sort of the barb, that Apple has too, once you have spent thousands of dollars on apps/movies/music/books/etc and your standing in the store next to the geewiz new tablet from korean vendor XYZ or the ipad+1 for twice the price and 1/2 the features which one do you choose?
Yah, they could have just called it Windows 286. From what I can tell its pretty much the same single window, flat low color depth crap. Heck they probably could have re-released 286 and struck out the 2 and the 6, and saved themselves a bunch of effort. It would totally haul butt on a 16Mhz machine.
The reason is that the BIOS is limited to 1MB in size
? And how does a pure 16-bit BIOS test >1M of memory? There is the big segment hack (32-bit memory access in real mode), but that probably isn't safe. Instead its possible to flip into protected/long mode as necessary and then flip back. Ugly but if you designed a BIOS for a 64-bit machine, and ran most of it in 64-bit mode, only providing the real mode functions for the option ROMs and initial boot, then you would kill most of the memory limitations too. The flash chips on recent motherboards are many MB's so obviously the BIOS writers have gotten around the 20 bit addressing limitations of real mode.
Before that all software was written by CS people.
That is false, math, physics and engineering majors were writing software long before CS programs existed.
The first university to offer CS in the US was Purdue in '62. There were other places teaching "programming" classes but they fell under other degree programs. This means that all the major early contributions to "computer science" were made by people with degree's in other fields.
In fact, by the time formal CS appeared, computing as we know it was pretty much already defined (see S/360, LISP, FORTRAN, etc).
I've caught HP x86 servers doing the same thing with video cards. I wanted to run a PCIe video board not sold by HP. It simply failed, the BIOS refused to init it, and removed its parent bridge from the device list passed to the OS.
Also there are probably far more people capable of writing a UEFI BIOS than a traditional all-assembler BIOS.
And there isn't any reason someone couldn't have rewritten the vast majority of the traditional BIOS functionality in C, with gcc. You would simply have to have write some code to covert the assembly soft interrupt api's (named register/params) to a C calling convention.
he 16-bit limitations on the BIOS are ridiculous in this day and age and moving to a new interface that ditches the ridiculous constraints imposed by the 8086 more than 30 years ago is a good thing.
No one really gives a crap what the bios runs in, you site OpenFirmware which is another example of old crufty stuff. I should know as I worked professionally on it for a while. 16bit-x86 is a better firmware environment than forth. Let me site one of many examples of why openfirmware sucks worse than nearly any other choice. Interrupts, how do you hook/handle an interrupt in an open firmware option ROM? Yah, that is right, you don't.
At a minimum, all the BIOS needs to do, is init the motherboard hardware, provide a method to describe the hardware to the OS, find a boot device and jump to code provided by it. If you want to see a more reasonable/minimalist BIOS replacement look at U-Boot. Funny thing is that its quite possible there are more u-boot machines than their are EFI ones because u-boot is pretty much the standard for booting devices which aren't x86 PCs. In fact I happen to know that a huge number of the x86 UEFI servers out there actually have u-boot running on their service processors. So its good enough for the machine hardware, just not good enough to present to the user.
UEFI is pretty much a case of fixing what isn't broken, yet with any software project its bound to have bugs in the first few iterations.
And, oh boy does it. name brand motherboards that brick when flashed, systems that don't power off correctly, systems that take minutes to post, the usual issues with incorrect ACPI table entries, the list goes on.
Basically, its replacing one fairly stable code base, that the motherboard vendors often got wrong, with a completely new untested one that is 10x as complicated. You do the math.
Linus had another rant about it recently called "The abomination called EFI".
BTW: Gigabyte has a number of traditional motherboards that can boot GPT partitions, effectively removing the _ONE_ useful new feature in EFI.
C++ is severely lacking in expressiveness, and there is an abundance of undefined behavior in C++. Debugging a C++ program is as much about low-level program mechanics as it is about high-level logic (even when you are writing a high level application). Dealing with errors in C++ is a giant ball of confusion -- there isn't even a good way to deal with errors that occur in constructors or destructors.
C++ lacking in expressiveness? You have got to be joking, your right there are a lot of poorly defined areas in C++, but many of them stem from the fact that there are 100 different ways syntactically to solve any given problem. Of course some ways tend to be better than others, hence I'm confused about your problems with constructor error handling. You handle errors in constructors with "throw", combined with good RAII style, you get the benefit of fast code, that is robust to memory errors. Destructors aren't as clear cut, but the easy answer is not to have fatal errors in the destructor, rather pulling a java and using them more like finalize.
One of C++'s strong points (vs C) is that you can create a domain specific environment by careful class design and operator overloading. For example our database access library allows you to access a row's column similarly to the same way you might do it in some other languages with first class associative arrays. 'if (result_row["column_name"]==somevalue)' because it overrode the brackets operator. Similarly I have a big num library that operates transparently with all the built in numeric types, even going so far as to work with a template matrix library I have.
As far as debug-ability, or a programmers ability to focus on the problem at had rather than the language, I suspect that is all just a matter of experience. I've written some extremely complex algorithms in C++ over the last couple years. Not once have I had the need to do anything more complex than display some variables, or a datastructure after some portion of the alogorthm has completed. Maybe what your are describing here is more what I call C++ inverted learning curve. In a lot of languages you learn how to do things, in C++ you tend to learn how _NOT_ to do things. Get to much of this in your project it starts to fail in ways that are beyond the skills of the authors. This happens in other languages too, just in different ways.
What makes C/C++ special here? A typical FFI in a high level language let's you call functions in shared libraries
Because its horribly inefficient in most interpreted or GC languages. Time and time again, what you see in the "thunk" layers are pieces of code copying data from some language specific data structure/layout to the one defined by the native call. Or worse yet, you see giant global locks synchronizing all the other application threads. I spoke of mmap() in my earlier post. mmap() is one of those functions that can literally provide orders of magnitude performance boosts (vs explicit read()/write() type calls) in applications that are disk IO (for reasons that take a while to explain) intensive. Yet few languages outside of the C/C++/etc style languages even support it.
Well, we've seen that situation before. Orbitz was competing against hand-optimized and tuned code running on mainframes, which have lots of hardware acceleration, and speed is crucial.
Hardware acceleration to do IO, which is also "hardware accelerated" in any x86 server since about the mid 90's when IO adapters started having their own RISC processors, and mostly doing scatter/gather DMA. I have a (brand new!) mainframe, trust me if your application can't beat the pants off a mainframe running on midrange server, then your code is shit. But in a way this proves a point about efficiency. I've seen it a number of times, someone comes in and tries to replace a few hundred KLOC of COBOL, with some "newfangled" language (likely java). The end result requires a cluster of 20 PC's, consumes 10x the memory, and runs 1/2 as fast. This is why/how IBM continu
C++, Java, etc. express solutions to the big software problems we'll be solving over the next decade, and it is going to be even harder to express efficient solutions to those problems
I think you fail to understand how adaptable C and C++ is (not java). The strong point isn't how great it is at any given benchmark, but rather how good it is for solving a whole range of different problems. From low level bit banging, to heavy parallel transaction management (how many databases are written in C). Many of the C/C++ "problems" are really more reflections on the lack of standardized libraries for doing things. There are C/C++ libraries for doing everything you can imagine, but you don't have to use them. If your OS provides mmap and its 10x faster than doing read/write style ops then you have that choice. If you want to interface to lua, opencl, or even inline assembly, then you can do it with ease. Just try doing GPGPU programming in a those languages you list. If speed is an issue your application is going to fail, when your competitor figures out how to use a GPU to solve a problem at 10x the rate of a CPU, and your stuck two layers away from the hardware because its more convenient to do regex processing there than picking a high performance one (http://code.google.com/p/re2/) for C++.
The bottom line is that its rare to find a 100% C or C++ project these days. No one writes whole web apps with C++ CGI/bin files, rather using php/ruby/etc. But when you need to operate on a 100GB sparse matrix, you drop to something that can control the access patterns or utilize some hardware specific feature that gives a big performance boost. This is the problem I see with java programmers all the time, a lot of high performance computing is actually "just an exercise in caching", and when you can't control low level details like memory placement a lot of performance tends to evaporate. Even at the big web companies its not unusual to find C++ running some portion of the system where the language du jour failed.
BTW: Even Yahoo replaced their lisp
Uh you of course know that emacs can act as an "IDE" too. Its not as well integrated for Java but for most languages the edit/compile/debug/version control/etc functionality is there. I guess the diffrence is that with emacs you have to spend a few hours hacking lisp and .emacs files to make it work the way you want. On the other hand, I have a remote build/debug cycle (edit, build, and run are all on different machines) and I find that emacs actually works better than just about everything else in that case. Of course I have a ~2KLOC .emacs config file.
Not that I would ever recommend emacs... But I felt like a complete dope when I told the new guy here to use eclipse and then had it crash like a dozen times while I was trying to show him how to checkout/edit/build.
Any chance it was XP embedded edition?
I don't believe it was. They were using it like a normal PC running a camera app, and some patient information system. Complete with a second monitor mounted in front me so I could see the pictures/xrays/etc. Pretty slick actually. I believe the start menu said XP Pro.
What licensed RAM limits? XP like other 32-bit OSes is limited to 4 GB.
Per process! Not counting AWE type extensions.
With PAE (which is turned on in later XP service packs due to DEP) the kernel can access 64GB. All the 32-bit server versions of windows since W2k support this. XP does as well if you hack the license. Its M$ FUD that you can only access 4GB of RAM in 32-bit mode with x86. Linux could do it too, and a large number of other processors (PPC for example) are also designed this way. If nothing else you can use the extra space for a disk cache.
I went to a brand new dentist office the other day. They were running XP on their brand new xray machines.
If Microsoft were smart, they would release an XP R2, they could call it "Windows for Business" and sell if for $150 a license.
If they were feeling generous they could remove the licensed RAM limits, give it a GPT boot option (heck they don't even have to do any work, just package it with some of the 3rd party options).
Clear your cookies and try from a different IP or browser. Google definitely appears to be doing "guilty by association" type functions where people sharing IP's get similar results.
Everyone has been saying that adults need to limit their exposure to tv as well, based on the idea that sitting around for extended periods of time can cause health problems.
Based on personal experience, I suspect that those studies showing extremely low levels of brain activity in people watching TV is also going to result in eventual proof that watching TV actually makes people dumber. Your brain needs "exercise" the same way as the rest of your body. So instead of having hobbies, or playing sports people just sit around and let the TV fill their eyes/ears. Of course this is going to be reflected in a "dumbing down" of society in general as those hours are taking up time that might have been spent on more stimulating activities.
Over time, this has turned out to be the best use of the tablet devices I have.
Once I started running RDP clients on them, it became apparent that many things were just better over RDP that the local tablet apps. Surfing the web for example is significantly better/faster using a windows PC. Even without the add blocking plugins.
Frequently that it takes 1/2 to 1 second to render pages on an iPAD2 that render instantly over RDP. Same with an android device or the touchpad I have..
Having this integrated environment is nice in other ways, I can sit down and do the heavy lifting with three monitors, keyboard and mouse, while being able to stand up walk away and do lightweight things (reading email) on the tablet without having to sync anything.
In Austin where i live, its basically Time Warner or AT&T, its like two really crappy choices. I've been a TW customer for years now, but this is the company that gave me 10/1.5 in 1998. Back then it cost me $40 a month, and I was a _REALLY_ happy camper. It got faster for a few years until I had ~15/3 in ~2000, then it started getting slower and slower until it was 8/.5, and TW added another tier, Turbo, so I upgraded and now I was only paying something like $55 a month for 20/2 with "turbo boost" which regularly would hit 30/2. That is pretty much where it sat until a couple years ago when they finally announced DOCIS 3, would roll out with a 30/5 and a 50/5 tier. By the time it was available it was only 50/5 and 30/2. Sure enough as soon as those came out turbo dipped to 18/1.5, now its 15/1.5, and i'm thinking I have to pay them $75 to get 30/2.
Bottom line, my internet isn't getting faster, especially when you consider the download rates. The price is slowly creeping up. At this rate by 2025, i'm going to have 25/1 for $300 a month.
So basically TW is fucking us, especially if you consider that a basic base DOCIS is 4 channel config is 177/122, or basically at 20M down I should be getting 13M up.
Opps, that should have read SDL.
There is a LLVM backend that dumps to javascript here https://github.com/kripken/emscripten/wiki.
So, now you can probably run your python, lua, ruby, etc scripts on the client side, you just have to provide a LLVM front-end or a language that can be compiled with one of the pre-existing ones.
Sticking with C.
And now you don't have to be left out of the web page revolution... Check out https://github.com/kripken/emscripten/wiki which is a LLVM backend for javascript. They have ported a big portion of the standard C libraries, STL, and a number of other things. Its pretty funny, but you can run boat loads of old emulators, games, you name it in a browser now.
I was trying to be fairly general in my description, I could have said, a nice dark piss yellow, or gotten out the color charts.
But... I was attempting to say that clear crap that comes in the can is too light to even be a proper pale lager. Personally, I don't tend to venture that far into the light side of the spectrum. Although, I realized after I typed the thing about seeing through the beer, someone would probably miss interpret that too because there are plenty of very good brews (including the pumpkin ale i'm drinking) that aren't high on the clarity scales and would obscure my hand even if the color was sufficiently light that one could normally see though it.
Frankly, at the start of the thread I decided what I needed was a good brew (or three).
He he, its easy you just take your 5 gallon batch of pale ale and cut it with 15 gallons of water.
Then you have bud light..
That said, I've heard the same thing, the descriptions of what Bud/etc do to maintain their yeast strain borders on the impossible/insane.
and 30 years later the white house has a microbrewery
http://content.usatoday.com/communities/theoval/post/2012/08/newly-revealed-white-house-facility-a-brewery/1