I saw the film last night, and I noticed numerous dishonest things.
Before I get modded flamebait, I am not planning to vote for Bush in the fall. I think the war is wrong, that the American people have been duped, and that atrocities have been committed in the name of oil profits. Despite that, I came out of the film angry and feeling that I'd been misled.
Numerous inciddents bothered me:
* The list of the "coalition of the willing" mentioned only tiny, irrelvant countries, and skipped over really important ones: England, Spain, Poland, the Netherlands. Yes, we did 90% of the work ourselves, but the film implied that we had absolutely no international support, which is simply not true.
* The story of the man who mentioned to guys in a gym that he considered Bush a terrorist and found himself speaking to the FBI the following day rang false. Many, many people accuse Bush of being as bad as terrorists. If a call is placed to the FBI telling them that, they ignore it. Did the man's gym companions accuse him of something worse? It seems clear that there is more to the story here. Moore implies that the FBI is cracking down on people who dislike the President, and I don't think he justified that.
* A man's name was blacked out on one of Bush's army papers. The implication was that this was covering up something evil. But it doesn't appear that the relationship between this man and Bush was a secret, and the paper doesn't imply that they did anything sinister except skip out on their service. I suspect the man's name was blacked out simply because it wasn't relevant: the release concerned Bush's record, not this guy's. The other nasty bits of the relationship between this guy and Bush, like the cozy foreign investments, are irrelevant to this document.
There were others, but I'd need to go through the movie again, point by point. It's not that I disagree with Moore's overall thesis; in fact, I do believe it. But these things, which I consider dishonest, make me wonder about some of the other points he was making where I don't feel I heard the true story:
* The bin Laden family claims to have cut off contact with Osama, which makes the Bush family's cozy relationship with the Saudis far less relevant than Moore implies. His refutation in the movie consisted only of a single wedding of Osama's son, and doesn't even state that Osama was in attendance: Osama has many sons if I recall correctly, and being on the run he might not go to the wedding of each one. Moore never said that the son was a terrorist; do we lay the sins of the father at the feet of the son? It's not that I think the relationship between the Bushes and the bin Ladens is savory, but Moore overstated his point, one he spends a lot of time on.
* He points out that Amnesty International accuses the Saudis of "widespread abuses". I believe that they say the same thing about America.
* His before-the-war footage of Iraq showed happy, smiling children on playgrounds. It skips the grinding poverty, caused by Saddam's refusal to comply with international orders and his skimming of oil profits. It skips the horrific crimes of which his sons stood accused. It skips the thousands of Kurds, dead from the sort of weapons from which Bush claimed we were protecting ourselves. The weapons do not appear to have existed, and the US should not be in the habit of invading every country whose policies we don't like, but to imply that all was sweetness and light in Iraq before we showed up is dishonest.
In the end, there wasn't a single Republican in this audience. The film is designed to preach to the converted, not to make a case to the neutral or the opposition. But in my case, I felt that it wasn't just one-sided; I felt I was being manipulated. That makes me want to lean exactly the opposite way of how I'm being pushed. I won't: I consider Bush a greedy fool and a liar. But Moore's movie says he is a monster, and such an accusation requires a higher standard of proof than Moore gave.
There's a reason there are only two parties. Two parties are a stable state. Any third party, until it becomes very large, acts more like a spoiler than as a serious candidate. So whenever one arises, the party to which it is closest ideologically tends to look at it as a takeover candidate, giving basically the line that Democrats give to Greens: "If we split our vote, the other guys will win, and we'll have the worst of both worlds."
So both parties end up as an unwieldy agglomeration of special interests. (I use that not in the usual derogatory sense. Every party represents some special interest; that's what makes them a party rather than a group of random people.) The Democrats oddly join Catholics, pro-choicers, enivornmentalists, welfare activists, and labor, groups who often find themselves at odds, but who have various common agendas. The Republicans are equal-but-opposite.
So one has a choice: join the group, and submerge your agenda in the hopes of winning some authority, or remain ideologically pure but risk being stomped by a large machine.
We've always had two parties in this country, though not always the same two. Occasionally one manages to wipe itself out so thoroughly that the other party either splits into two (as the Democratic-Republicans did) or is simply replaced (as the Whigs did).
Would I love to see an alternative? Hell yeah. There is always the chance that a truly strong leader will arise and disdain both major parties, as Teddy Roosevelt did, and it nearly worked. But right now every third party I'm aware of is beating some ideological drum so loudly that they refuse to merge in with either of the two major ones. That in itself is a strike against them: how can I trust them to play the political game, which is always-always-always a matter of compromise, if they can't compromise with a party closer to their ideology?
It may be that the existing parties are simply so corrupt, so attached to power, that defeating them is more important than any other particular issue. If I see a third party who plays that point well, I'll vote for it happily. But I won't vote for the Greens, the Communists, or the People for the American Way, because I don't think they can do it. Maybe the Libertarians could, if they ever sat down and rationalized their agenda./end my own personal off-topic rant
As a bit of political gamesmanship, it's just brilliant. Declare your "bipartisanship", then nominate the most extreme candidates you can think of. When the other side objects, accuse them of being partisan.
For extra flavor, keep the country in a state of continual national emergency, then accuse the other side of treason when they object to anything you do.
Seriously, I despise the game, but, they've done an exceptional job of slapping their opponents both ways. I don't hold the Democrats in any higher regard; if they refrain from this behavior it's because they're not as good at it, not because of some higher moral ground they stand on.
This is coming from a registered Democrat. I'm used to voting for the lesser of two evils.
I do get valid calls from call centers and blocked numbers: my credit card company calling to check if a transaction is valid, a friend calling from work, headhunters when I'm looking for a job. Caller ID lets me know when it's definitely a friend, but it can't definitively identify an enemy.
I had heard that you had to say "put me on your do not call list"; merely "take me off our list" took you off that list but didn't prevent them from calling via a "different" list. That may be what a sibling post was getting it.
I dunno if it's true or not; I probably got it off the internet and that's a pretty unreliable source. But I had also found that "take me off your list" dramatically reduced telemarketing calls even before the do-not-call list (which has cut them to almost nil.)
I don't touch decaf, but who would genetically engineer decaf beans?
The Maxwell House web site has some puffery to it. When you take out the caffeine, you also take some of the other coffee flavor compounds. A "knockout" coffee plant (which was genetically identical to regular coffee except for lacking the caffeine gene) would taste more like caffeinated coffee than water-process decaffeination.
Of course you'd lose the caffeine taste, which in its pure form is very bitter but in coffee is pleasant, but you wouldn't stay up all night staring at the ceiling, either, and it would still taste pretty good.
This is true, and many good C compilers will take advantage of it.
Unfortunately, it only takes one non-const char* declaration to point anywhere in memory. Certain programs will use fancy tricks like putting non-const char arrays in the middle of a structure, and using a pointer to that to modify arbitrary parts of a structure. It's not entirely wise, and it's sure as hell not portable, but "portable" was not the goal of the C semantics.
So while a smart compiler can do such things, it can be hard while guaranteeing the same behavior as an unoptimized program.
If you're going to promote your own site on slashdot, please spend a few bucks to get some real bandwidth first.
The slashdot effect actually pretty funny when it's some guy's personal site getting unexpectedly whomped, like "American's Funniest Home Videos" for nerds.
But if you're going to do it to yourself, you just look stupid. Especially when you're "osdir", and you're supposed to know something about operating systems. Why precisely should I care about your opinion of Thunderbird when you can't even keep your own site operational against a slashdot effect that you knew was coming?
One of the sweet things about Linux is that you can assume that you're going to compile the program on the individual computer, and optimize it for the precise CPU and chipset you're working with. That gets you the best of both worlds: highly optimized code for each individual system, at a cost of making installation a nightmare.
You don't get Java's dynamic runtime optimizations, but as sibling posts have pointed out, they may be far more beneficial in theory than practice.
I personally write in Java because of its speed, not at run-time but at development-time. Because I don't have to have meetings with individual developers and hammer out an agreement about freeing each individual data structure's memory, and because I don't spend months tracking down fandango-on-core errors, the time it takes for the program to run the first time is (three months to develop plus 3 seconds to start the JVM plus 100 milliseconds to run it) versus (a year to write plus 10 milliseconds to run).
But that's just the development environment I work in and the circumstances I'm trying to optimize; yours may be different. Many slashdotters work individually, which means that they have better knowledge of the program as a whole and therefore certain memory problems don't happen.
I don't worry about questions like "Is language X faster than language Y?" I try to choose the best language for whatever task it is at hand, and I've got a lot of them to choose from.
His examples are all non-GUI things; they're pure CPU benchmarks. That's one major case where Java is certainly slower than C++.
Most of his tests are big loops (primes, string concatenation, etc.) These are cases where (as a sibling poster mentioned) hot path analysis can do you a world of good. A heavily tuned C++ program can do it just as well, or better, but the point of using a high-level language is that you don't have to do those optimizations yourself; you write the code in whatever way seems natural and you let the compiler optimize.
In a long-running Java program, you don't have that extra layer between the program and the CPU. The JIT does a real native compilation and passes control off to it. Once that's started, it runs just as fast as any other assembly code. Potentially faster, given that the JIT can look at the current run and optimize based on the way the code is going: the precise CPU it's running on, where things are in memory, how far it can afford to unroll a loop, what loop invariants it can lift, etc. It can even replace code as it runs.
The question then is, does the one-time (albeit run-time) optimization do more good than it costs?
That's especially easy on a hyperthreaded system. In a C++ program, these loops will run in a single thread on a single CPU, so if the JIT compiler runs on the other (virtual) CPU, you get its effort for free. Even the garbage collector can run on the other CPU, so you get the convenience of memory management with no total performance cost. (You do burn more CPU cycles, but you use up no extra wall-clock time.)
GCC is very mature, but it doesn't have the option of changing the code at run time. Especially on modern CPUs with their incredibly deep pipelines, arranging your code to avoid pipeline stalls will depend a lot on runtime considerations.
Also, Java has a few advantages over C++ in optimization. It's very easy to analyze Java programs to be certain that certain memory locations absolutely will not be modified. That's much harder in languages with native pointers. Those invariants allow you to compile out certain calculations that would have to be done at runtime in a C/C++ program. You can even start spreading loop cycles over multiple CPUs, but I'm pretty certain that the present JVMs aren't that smart.
These results are toy benchmarks, and not really indicative of real performance, even on purely non-GUI code. But I wanted to outline the reasons why the results aren't just silly, and they do have a theoretical basis.
I know you're joking to make a point, but you do realize that 1 isn't prime, right? That's not just a matter of arbitrary definitions; a lot of theorems that apply to primes don't apply to 1.
There is a key difference between telemarketing and spamming. Even if you had a prerecorded voice message (which is illegal) these phone calls cost money, tune the tune of a several cents a call and up. Adding an operator costs more, even with the scams they play on their own operators. So it's actually in the best interests of the telemarketers to have some sort of don't-waste-your-time list.
Spammers, on the other hand, can pay as little as $0 (0 for you foreigners) by using open relays, zombies, etc. So it's in their best interests to hit everybody, even if they're not interested. Rather than miss somebody, they'll hit everybody. A do-not-spam list would only provide a list of verified addresses.
So "never try" is definitely the right response here, at least at the moment, since it will be ignored by the spammers in a way that the do-not-call list avoids. The only question at this point is, who hasn't signed up for the do-not-call list:
* Very lonely people * Very ignorant people * People with a higher tolerance for telemarketing than me
Unfortunately, this probably just thrills the telemarketers. They can't call your grandma (since you signed her up) but it means that people who haven't signed up for the list are more likely to be scammable. (No offense to your grandma or anything. I'm sure she's a sweet lady but statistically speaking the elderly are more suceptible to scams, and less likely to take advantage of technological solutions.)
Part of the problem is with widescreen movies. You can either sacrifice part of the image (pan&scan) or you can letterbox them. If you do that, you can get as few as 300 vertical scan lines actualy playing the image, which is very poor resolution. If you have a very large TV, you'll notice the jaggies; if you have a small or mid-size TV, you simply won't see much detail.
Whether you really need improved visuals on your home theater, and whether it's worth the expense, is perhaps up to debate, but I think that once you see HD content on an HD screen, you won't believe that the "quality is great" on your TV any more.
Even before you buy a TV, you'll see it on your powerbook if you upgrade the DVD drive. Computer screens have vastly higher resolutions than TV screens.
I dunno if they'll have a DVD compatability layer on the new discs; that would certainly save them a lot of trouble producing and selling two sets of discs (three, if you produce letterbox and pan&scan on the DVD side). It would definitely be cool if they could produce one disc for both players. But I am sure the new players will support your old discs.
Rather than suffer the machanical difficulties associated with a 20k rpm drive, putting a stripe set across three 7200 rpm drives will move data very quickly and last longer. Yeah, the seek time is still slower, but the sustained rate is just as high, and smart caching will eliminate a lot of the differences in seek time.
That said, I'd adore a drive that fast for my swap space.
Whether they have guns or not, you still have ceded substantial authority to police. They are allowed to arrest you, for example, and you (for the most part) do not have the right to arrest them.
(Yes, there are citizen's arrests, but your standard of proof is much higher than theirs. If you arrest somebody falsely under a citizen's arrest you are in massive, massive trouble. A police officer who arrests an innocent person as an honest mistake is just doing his job.)
They also have the right to invade your privacy under certain circumstances (e.g probable cause).
I cannot speak for the laws of the UK (heck, I'm not even a lawyer here in the US, merely an informed civilian) but I suspect that you have ceded many rights to the police. Whether the right to test your DNA is too much, well, that's up to the voters in California to decide. This is an initiative, and it goes directly to the people to say yea or nay.
"Upon written notification from a law enforcement agency that a person is no longer a suspect in a criminal investigation, the Department of Justice DNA laboratory shall remove the supect sample from its data bank files." -- Article 3, section 297(b)(2).
Whether you trust them to do so is another point, especially given the next sentence which says that if (by accident, of course) they don't delete it, and you get convicted of something based on that evidence, that conviction stands.
Security standards for that database are somewhat underspecified.
Article 5 is all about expungment of the samples. Basically, you request in writing that you've been cleared of all charges, and if nobody objects, they have to destroy it within half a year.
Again, whether you trust them to actually do it... well, we trust the police to carry guns, don't we?
It's good that you feel outrage over the Iraqi prisoner mess. But I don't hold you personally responsible for it.
No? What about in November? If the American people re-elect the President whose policies brought you Abu Ghraib, are they not in some sense supporting it? Not necessarily "I'm glad it happened" but "I don't believe Mr Bush was responsible" or "I think that Mr Bush's responsibility is outweighed by the rest of his policies."
Individual Americans do take some responsiblity for their government. Even those (like me) who didn't vote for Mr Bush (and won't again) share the blame for not speaking up louder.
No rational person holds every Muslim to blame for terrorism. They don't even have a vote. And yet Islamic terrorists live in an infrastructure of Muslims. What do the merchants who participate in hawalas do to ensure that they are not being used to fund terrorism? To what degree do Arabic newspapers spread blame to terrorists living among civilians when those civilians are killed in an attempt to kill the terrorists? To what degree does this lead the terrorists to believe that the people support them?
That's the rub. Suppose, just for giggles, that a billion muslims minus 200 terrorists said, "We disown you, we excommunicate you, we revile you, we are disgusted by you." I'm actually very curious to know what would happen. As an American I have a forum for expressing my outrage in November, and the world will judge me on how I use it. I apply the same standards right back.
What Dick the Butcher thought he was was getting was mob rule or anarchy, not a tyrant. I don't think Shakespeare particularly thought it was wise. He presents Cade as a fool and a dupe, but neither do I think he was aiming at "the first step in installing a tyrant".
'Course, Cade was sounding pretty tyrannical, what with the "felony to drink small beer" bit. But mostly Cade was just playing to the crowd, and apparently lawyers have been pissing off the multitude for a good long time.
Cade's Rebellion, if successful, would of course have led to a tyranny. He wanted to be king, and they wanted him to be king instead of Henry VI. They were all tyrants then; the world had no democracies.
Whether Cade would have been any worse than Henry, not a particularly tyrannical king, is somewhat immaterial, since Edward York was really behind it all and would have been king himself. But since that all led to Richard III taking the throne, well, now THERE was a tyrant. At least according to Shakespeare.
I've heard about many ERP nightmares, both with Peoplesoft and SAP. Even when they work, the projects are always incredibly expensive.
What's so frickin' hard? I am a programmer, and I know how hard programming is, but (correct me if I'm wrong) the goal of ERP is to use a single integrated program to do tasks that have been written a million times before: accounting, payroll, inventory, etc.
I can't help but believe that the problem isn't on the technical side but the business side: each organization has an idiosyncratic way of doing business and believes that it's cheaper to write custom software, or expensively adapt ERP software, to its specific goals, rather than doing things in a standardized way that can be assisted cheaply by standardized software.
When you bring a program like Quickbooks into an office, you're expected to do things its way, because "its way" is a collection of well-understood accounting principles. The more you try to customize it, the more likely that it is you are simply doing the wrong thing.
ERP is, to my understanding, a scaled up version of the same thing. The scaling will always make things difficult; large organizations are going to be more different from one another than small ones. It also presents performance and reliability issues.
Still, I've heard of so many failures costing tens of millions of dollars with these programs that I start looking to blame something other than the software and software developers.
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I saw the film last night, and I noticed numerous dishonest things.
Before I get modded flamebait, I am not planning to vote for Bush in the fall. I think the war is wrong, that the American people have been duped, and that atrocities have been committed in the name of oil profits. Despite that, I came out of the film angry and feeling that I'd been misled.
Numerous inciddents bothered me:
* The list of the "coalition of the willing" mentioned only tiny, irrelvant countries, and skipped over really important ones: England, Spain, Poland, the Netherlands. Yes, we did 90% of the work ourselves, but the film implied that we had absolutely no international support, which is simply not true.
* The story of the man who mentioned to guys in a gym that he considered Bush a terrorist and found himself speaking to the FBI the following day rang false. Many, many people accuse Bush of being as bad as terrorists. If a call is placed to the FBI telling them that, they ignore it. Did the man's gym companions accuse him of something worse? It seems clear that there is more to the story here. Moore implies that the FBI is cracking down on people who dislike the President, and I don't think he justified that.
* A man's name was blacked out on one of Bush's army papers. The implication was that this was covering up something evil. But it doesn't appear that the relationship between this man and Bush was a secret, and the paper doesn't imply that they did anything sinister except skip out on their service. I suspect the man's name was blacked out simply because it wasn't relevant: the release concerned Bush's record, not this guy's. The other nasty bits of the relationship between this guy and Bush, like the cozy foreign investments, are irrelevant to this document.
There were others, but I'd need to go through the movie again, point by point. It's not that I disagree with Moore's overall thesis; in fact, I do believe it. But these things, which I consider dishonest, make me wonder about some of the other points he was making where I don't feel I heard the true story:
* The bin Laden family claims to have cut off contact with Osama, which makes the Bush family's cozy relationship with the Saudis far less relevant than Moore implies. His refutation in the movie consisted only of a single wedding of Osama's son, and doesn't even state that Osama was in attendance: Osama has many sons if I recall correctly, and being on the run he might not go to the wedding of each one. Moore never said that the son was a terrorist; do we lay the sins of the father at the feet of the son? It's not that I think the relationship between the Bushes and the bin Ladens is savory, but Moore overstated his point, one he spends a lot of time on.
* He points out that Amnesty International accuses the Saudis of "widespread abuses". I believe that they say the same thing about America.
* His before-the-war footage of Iraq showed happy, smiling children on playgrounds. It skips the grinding poverty, caused by Saddam's refusal to comply with international orders and his skimming of oil profits. It skips the horrific crimes of which his sons stood accused. It skips the thousands of Kurds, dead from the sort of weapons from which Bush claimed we were protecting ourselves. The weapons do not appear to have existed, and the US should not be in the habit of invading every country whose policies we don't like, but to imply that all was sweetness and light in Iraq before we showed up is dishonest.
In the end, there wasn't a single Republican in this audience. The film is designed to preach to the converted, not to make a case to the neutral or the opposition. But in my case, I felt that it wasn't just one-sided; I felt I was being manipulated. That makes me want to lean exactly the opposite way of how I'm being pushed. I won't: I consider Bush a greedy fool and a liar. But Moore's movie says he is a monster, and such an accusation requires a higher standard of proof than Moore gave.
There's a reason there are only two parties. Two parties are a stable state. Any third party, until it becomes very large, acts more like a spoiler than as a serious candidate. So whenever one arises, the party to which it is closest ideologically tends to look at it as a takeover candidate, giving basically the line that Democrats give to Greens: "If we split our vote, the other guys will win, and we'll have the worst of both worlds."
/end my own personal off-topic rant
So both parties end up as an unwieldy agglomeration of special interests. (I use that not in the usual derogatory sense. Every party represents some special interest; that's what makes them a party rather than a group of random people.) The Democrats oddly join Catholics, pro-choicers, enivornmentalists, welfare activists, and labor, groups who often find themselves at odds, but who have various common agendas. The Republicans are equal-but-opposite.
So one has a choice: join the group, and submerge your agenda in the hopes of winning some authority, or remain ideologically pure but risk being stomped by a large machine.
We've always had two parties in this country, though not always the same two. Occasionally one manages to wipe itself out so thoroughly that the other party either splits into two (as the Democratic-Republicans did) or is simply replaced (as the Whigs did).
Would I love to see an alternative? Hell yeah. There is always the chance that a truly strong leader will arise and disdain both major parties, as Teddy Roosevelt did, and it nearly worked. But right now every third party I'm aware of is beating some ideological drum so loudly that they refuse to merge in with either of the two major ones. That in itself is a strike against them: how can I trust them to play the political game, which is always-always-always a matter of compromise, if they can't compromise with a party closer to their ideology?
It may be that the existing parties are simply so corrupt, so attached to power, that defeating them is more important than any other particular issue. If I see a third party who plays that point well, I'll vote for it happily. But I won't vote for the Greens, the Communists, or the People for the American Way, because I don't think they can do it. Maybe the Libertarians could, if they ever sat down and rationalized their agenda.
As a bit of political gamesmanship, it's just brilliant. Declare your "bipartisanship", then nominate the most extreme candidates you can think of. When the other side objects, accuse them of being partisan.
For extra flavor, keep the country in a state of continual national emergency, then accuse the other side of treason when they object to anything you do.
Seriously, I despise the game, but, they've done an exceptional job of slapping their opponents both ways. I don't hold the Democrats in any higher regard; if they refrain from this behavior it's because they're not as good at it, not because of some higher moral ground they stand on.
This is coming from a registered Democrat. I'm used to voting for the lesser of two evils.
I do get valid calls from call centers and blocked numbers: my credit card company calling to check if a transaction is valid, a friend calling from work, headhunters when I'm looking for a job. Caller ID lets me know when it's definitely a friend, but it can't definitively identify an enemy.
I had heard that you had to say "put me on your do not call list"; merely "take me off our list" took you off that list but didn't prevent them from calling via a "different" list. That may be what a sibling post was getting it.
I dunno if it's true or not; I probably got it off the internet and that's a pretty unreliable source. But I had also found that "take me off your list" dramatically reduced telemarketing calls even before the do-not-call list (which has cut them to almost nil.)
I don't touch decaf, but who would genetically engineer decaf beans?
The Maxwell House web site has some puffery to it. When you take out the caffeine, you also take some of the other coffee flavor compounds. A "knockout" coffee plant (which was genetically identical to regular coffee except for lacking the caffeine gene) would taste more like caffeinated coffee than water-process decaffeination.
Of course you'd lose the caffeine taste, which in its pure form is very bitter but in coffee is pleasant, but you wouldn't stay up all night staring at the ceiling, either, and it would still taste pretty good.
"Captain, we've lost attitude control."
"Well fix the f*cking thing!"
I miss the old Apple days (before they became a fashion statement)
Yeah, the Apple ][ was one heck of a computer.
This is true, and many good C compilers will take advantage of it.
Unfortunately, it only takes one non-const char* declaration to point anywhere in memory. Certain programs will use fancy tricks like putting non-const char arrays in the middle of a structure, and using a pointer to that to modify arbitrary parts of a structure. It's not entirely wise, and it's sure as hell not portable, but "portable" was not the goal of the C semantics.
So while a smart compiler can do such things, it can be hard while guaranteeing the same behavior as an unoptimized program.
Hey, "offtopic" I'd understand "offtopic", but "flamebait" seems a bit extreme.
This post, on the other hand, is very offtopic.
If you're going to promote your own site on slashdot, please spend a few bucks to get some real bandwidth first.
The slashdot effect actually pretty funny when it's some guy's personal site getting unexpectedly whomped, like "American's Funniest Home Videos" for nerds.
But if you're going to do it to yourself, you just look stupid. Especially when you're "osdir", and you're supposed to know something about operating systems. Why precisely should I care about your opinion of Thunderbird when you can't even keep your own site operational against a slashdot effect that you knew was coming?
One of the sweet things about Linux is that you can assume that you're going to compile the program on the individual computer, and optimize it for the precise CPU and chipset you're working with. That gets you the best of both worlds: highly optimized code for each individual system, at a cost of making installation a nightmare.
You don't get Java's dynamic runtime optimizations, but as sibling posts have pointed out, they may be far more beneficial in theory than practice.
I personally write in Java because of its speed, not at run-time but at development-time. Because I don't have to have meetings with individual developers and hammer out an agreement about freeing each individual data structure's memory, and because I don't spend months tracking down fandango-on-core errors, the time it takes for the program to run the first time is (three months to develop plus 3 seconds to start the JVM plus 100 milliseconds to run it) versus (a year to write plus 10 milliseconds to run).
But that's just the development environment I work in and the circumstances I'm trying to optimize; yours may be different. Many slashdotters work individually, which means that they have better knowledge of the program as a whole and therefore certain memory problems don't happen.
I don't worry about questions like "Is language X faster than language Y?" I try to choose the best language for whatever task it is at hand, and I've got a lot of them to choose from.
His examples are all non-GUI things; they're pure CPU benchmarks. That's one major case where Java is certainly slower than C++.
Most of his tests are big loops (primes, string concatenation, etc.) These are cases where (as a sibling poster mentioned) hot path analysis can do you a world of good. A heavily tuned C++ program can do it just as well, or better, but the point of using a high-level language is that you don't have to do those optimizations yourself; you write the code in whatever way seems natural and you let the compiler optimize.
In a long-running Java program, you don't have that extra layer between the program and the CPU. The JIT does a real native compilation and passes control off to it. Once that's started, it runs just as fast as any other assembly code. Potentially faster, given that the JIT can look at the current run and optimize based on the way the code is going: the precise CPU it's running on, where things are in memory, how far it can afford to unroll a loop, what loop invariants it can lift, etc. It can even replace code as it runs.
The question then is, does the one-time (albeit run-time) optimization do more good than it costs?
That's especially easy on a hyperthreaded system. In a C++ program, these loops will run in a single thread on a single CPU, so if the JIT compiler runs on the other (virtual) CPU, you get its effort for free. Even the garbage collector can run on the other CPU, so you get the convenience of memory management with no total performance cost. (You do burn more CPU cycles, but you use up no extra wall-clock time.)
GCC is very mature, but it doesn't have the option of changing the code at run time. Especially on modern CPUs with their incredibly deep pipelines, arranging your code to avoid pipeline stalls will depend a lot on runtime considerations.
Also, Java has a few advantages over C++ in optimization. It's very easy to analyze Java programs to be certain that certain memory locations absolutely will not be modified. That's much harder in languages with native pointers. Those invariants allow you to compile out certain calculations that would have to be done at runtime in a C/C++ program. You can even start spreading loop cycles over multiple CPUs, but I'm pretty certain that the present JVMs aren't that smart.
These results are toy benchmarks, and not really indicative of real performance, even on purely non-GUI code. But I wanted to outline the reasons why the results aren't just silly, and they do have a theoretical basis.
I know you're joking to make a point, but you do realize that 1 isn't prime, right? That's not just a matter of arbitrary definitions; a lot of theorems that apply to primes don't apply to 1.
Your VCR still needs you to call in and vote for American Idol.
But your next VCR will tell you who to vote for.
There is a key difference between telemarketing and spamming. Even if you had a prerecorded voice message (which is illegal) these phone calls cost money, tune the tune of a several cents a call and up. Adding an operator costs more, even with the scams they play on their own operators. So it's actually in the best interests of the telemarketers to have some sort of don't-waste-your-time list.
Spammers, on the other hand, can pay as little as $0 (0 for you foreigners) by using open relays, zombies, etc. So it's in their best interests to hit everybody, even if they're not interested. Rather than miss somebody, they'll hit everybody. A do-not-spam list would only provide a list of verified addresses.
So "never try" is definitely the right response here, at least at the moment, since it will be ignored by the spammers in a way that the do-not-call list avoids. The only question at this point is, who hasn't signed up for the do-not-call list:
* Very lonely people
* Very ignorant people
* People with a higher tolerance for telemarketing than me
Unfortunately, this probably just thrills the telemarketers. They can't call your grandma (since you signed her up) but it means that people who haven't signed up for the list are more likely to be scammable. (No offense to your grandma or anything. I'm sure she's a sweet lady but statistically speaking the elderly are more suceptible to scams, and less likely to take advantage of technological solutions.)
The Quality is great on my TV
Then you need a better TV.
Part of the problem is with widescreen movies. You can either sacrifice part of the image (pan&scan) or you can letterbox them. If you do that, you can get as few as 300 vertical scan lines actualy playing the image, which is very poor resolution. If you have a very large TV, you'll notice the jaggies; if you have a small or mid-size TV, you simply won't see much detail.
Whether you really need improved visuals on your home theater, and whether it's worth the expense, is perhaps up to debate, but I think that once you see HD content on an HD screen, you won't believe that the "quality is great" on your TV any more.
Even before you buy a TV, you'll see it on your powerbook if you upgrade the DVD drive. Computer screens have vastly higher resolutions than TV screens.
I dunno if they'll have a DVD compatability layer on the new discs; that would certainly save them a lot of trouble producing and selling two sets of discs (three, if you produce letterbox and pan&scan on the DVD side). It would definitely be cool if they could produce one disc for both players. But I am sure the new players will support your old discs.
The Mac may not break, but the users...
A friend of mine is a Mac repair technician. Mac people tend to be artsy types, and artsy types (unlike programmers) tend to smoke.
He posted a photo of a Mac motherboard owned by a smoker next to a picture of the anchor from the Titanic. Guess which had less accumulated grime.
Rather than suffer the machanical difficulties associated with a 20k rpm drive, putting a stripe set across three 7200 rpm drives will move data very quickly and last longer. Yeah, the seek time is still slower, but the sustained rate is just as high, and smart caching will eliminate a lot of the differences in seek time.
That said, I'd adore a drive that fast for my swap space.
Whether they have guns or not, you still have ceded substantial authority to police. They are allowed to arrest you, for example, and you (for the most part) do not have the right to arrest them.
(Yes, there are citizen's arrests, but your standard of proof is much higher than theirs. If you arrest somebody falsely under a citizen's arrest you are in massive, massive trouble. A police officer who arrests an innocent person as an honest mistake is just doing his job.)
They also have the right to invade your privacy under certain circumstances (e.g probable cause).
I cannot speak for the laws of the UK (heck, I'm not even a lawyer here in the US, merely an informed civilian) but I suspect that you have ceded many rights to the police. Whether the right to test your DNA is too much, well, that's up to the voters in California to decide. This is an initiative, and it goes directly to the people to say yea or nay.
"Upon written notification from a law enforcement agency that a person is no longer a suspect in a criminal investigation, the Department of Justice DNA laboratory shall remove the supect sample from its data bank files." -- Article 3, section 297(b)(2).
Whether you trust them to do so is another point, especially given the next sentence which says that if (by accident, of course) they don't delete it, and you get convicted of something based on that evidence, that conviction stands.
Security standards for that database are somewhat underspecified.
Article 5 is all about expungment of the samples. Basically, you request in writing that you've been cleared of all charges, and if nobody objects, they have to destroy it within half a year.
Again, whether you trust them to actually do it... well, we trust the police to carry guns, don't we?
It's good that you feel outrage over the Iraqi prisoner mess. But I don't hold you personally responsible for it.
No? What about in November? If the American people re-elect the President whose policies brought you Abu Ghraib, are they not in some sense supporting it? Not necessarily "I'm glad it happened" but "I don't believe Mr Bush was responsible" or "I think that Mr Bush's responsibility is outweighed by the rest of his policies."
Individual Americans do take some responsiblity for their government. Even those (like me) who didn't vote for Mr Bush (and won't again) share the blame for not speaking up louder.
No rational person holds every Muslim to blame for terrorism. They don't even have a vote. And yet Islamic terrorists live in an infrastructure of Muslims. What do the merchants who participate in hawalas do to ensure that they are not being used to fund terrorism? To what degree do Arabic newspapers spread blame to terrorists living among civilians when those civilians are killed in an attempt to kill the terrorists? To what degree does this lead the terrorists to believe that the people support them?
That's the rub. Suppose, just for giggles, that a billion muslims minus 200 terrorists said, "We disown you, we excommunicate you, we revile you, we are disgusted by you." I'm actually very curious to know what would happen. As an American I have a forum for expressing my outrage in November, and the world will judge me on how I use it. I apply the same standards right back.
Preferably, aljazeera.com.
What Dick the Butcher thought he was was getting was mob rule or anarchy, not a tyrant. I don't think Shakespeare particularly thought it was wise. He presents Cade as a fool and a dupe, but neither do I think he was aiming at "the first step in installing a tyrant".
'Course, Cade was sounding pretty tyrannical, what with the "felony to drink small beer" bit. But mostly Cade was just playing to the crowd, and apparently lawyers have been pissing off the multitude for a good long time.
Cade's Rebellion, if successful, would of course have led to a tyranny. He wanted to be king, and they wanted him to be king instead of Henry VI. They were all tyrants then; the world had no democracies.
Whether Cade would have been any worse than Henry, not a particularly tyrannical king, is somewhat immaterial, since Edward York was really behind it all and would have been king himself. But since that all led to Richard III taking the throne, well, now THERE was a tyrant. At least according to Shakespeare.
I've heard about many ERP nightmares, both with Peoplesoft and SAP. Even when they work, the projects are always incredibly expensive.
What's so frickin' hard? I am a programmer, and I know how hard programming is, but (correct me if I'm wrong) the goal of ERP is to use a single integrated program to do tasks that have been written a million times before: accounting, payroll, inventory, etc.
I can't help but believe that the problem isn't on the technical side but the business side: each organization has an idiosyncratic way of doing business and believes that it's cheaper to write custom software, or expensively adapt ERP software, to its specific goals, rather than doing things in a standardized way that can be assisted cheaply by standardized software.
When you bring a program like Quickbooks into an office, you're expected to do things its way, because "its way" is a collection of well-understood accounting principles. The more you try to customize it, the more likely that it is you are simply doing the wrong thing.
ERP is, to my understanding, a scaled up version of the same thing. The scaling will always make things difficult; large organizations are going to be more different from one another than small ones. It also presents performance and reliability issues.
Still, I've heard of so many failures costing tens of millions of dollars with these programs that I start looking to blame something other than the software and software developers.