Re:Smalltalk misconceptions
on
Opencroquet
·
· Score: 1
In that language performance shootout everyone was looking at a year or so ago, whatever implementation of SmallTalk he was using ended up near the top of the ranks, usually only a couple of times slower than the compiled C version (and, iirc, somewhat faster than whatever JVM was being used).
Write your speed critical inner loops in C/assm, write the rest in SmallTalk, you'd probably end up with a system with perfectly decent performance, with the advantage of being far more stable and maintainable.
Post ASCII art; some of Slash's regexp based filters will trip over (i.e. eat literally years of CPU time if allowed to run indefinately) on certain strings, and such comments are allowed to pass. Just run your informative comment through cowsay(1);)
You can look at the filter runner and the compression check in Slash/Utility/Access/Access.pm (filterOK()/compressOK()), but I can't seem to find the actual regexp's they use (should be in the db schema, but I guess you have to make your own).
It's pretty difficult to cool off when there's 100 million atmospheres of pressure acting on you; the center of Jupiter is more likely to be hotter than the surface of the sun, never mind "cooled off":)
Wasn't Firefly also screwed over because it's timeslot coincided with some major sports thing in the US?
I'm pretty pissed at how Fox screwed it up. It had interesting characters who worked really well together, decent dialog, some resemblence of a story arc, a cool style, and I was really looking forward to seeing how it developed. All lost because of Fox's incompetence and impatience; they didn't even air the last three episodes!
<wanders off to find a Fox executive to use as a punchbag>
Yes, I know you have to deal with refraction and diffraction and turbulance and clouds, but we've got technology to deal with all of that now.
All the technology in the world isn't going to help you get around the atmosphere filtering out certain interesting wavelengths of ratiation. Not unless you get said technology outside of said atmosphere;)
Are all US government sites so badly done? After seeing the isonews DOJ page that looked like it was done by a colourblind 8 year old with minimal HTML clue, I looked at a few other.gov sites and found that pretty much all of them were up to similar standards, especially the joke that is cybercrime.gov.
Not only do they look bad, they're written badly, with practically zero concession to accessibility; whatever happened to Section 508?
Methinks the DoJ should be investigated on suspicion of child labour;)
By the way, a similar anomoly is seen in Pioneer 11 and another distant satelite (Ulysses perhaps???).
The Voyager probes, probably; they're still functional, and have encountered this effect, being a similar distance away (they're also going to overtake Pioneer iirc).
That's 1GB/day, and it's a very soft limit, mainly for hitting real abusers (200G/month weenies); I used about 3.5G in the past two days. Provided I don't do it every day, ntl don't care.
The 3-6GB limits you're talking about are, I believe, monthly, are they not? One more reason to avoid moving to Australia (right after 1. fucking huge spiders and 2. fucking huge fires:)
Your teachers aren't as smart nor as important as you think they are. Show a bit more contempt, you damn teachers pet.
Your suspicions about all that Christianity stuff that's been forced down your throat by school since you were 7 are about right. Next time your teachers turn an assembly into church, walking out is the right thing to do.
No, it's not just you; most of the kids around you do suck. Stop beating yourself up about not fitting in and go read some more.
Pay more attention to that girl in Astronomy class!
Avoid Teesside Uni like the plague. Anyone who says they have a good CS department are damn liers!
It depends on your userbase. Certainly on mine, Netscape 4 users make up less than 1% of users, and even that can probably cope with text-indent.
Who cares if a bunch of weenies who haven't updated their browser in 6 years gets indented paragraphs or not? I don't even care if they get any layout provided a site works reasonably well, and even that's open for argument. Between Netscape 4 and lynx, I concider lynx to be far more important, since it's much more representative of future fringe UA's.
People who follow that advice to the letter end up with very standards compliant pages that look like crap to the 99% of people who just use the default browser on the default settings.
Er, no, people who do that end up with very standards compliant pages that look identical to the 99% of people who have a browser that understands text-indent, and the other 1% get normal paragraphs without any indent. Better than that, the rest of that 1% will include screenreaders, lynx users, etc, who will be much happier with the cleaner markup that actually lets them understand the structure of the document, rather than having to skip over thousands of spacer gifs.
Even better, in 3 years time when users of older browsers is sub-0.1%, and users of alternative devices like mobile phones and aural browsers are more common, your compliant markup is even more readable, rather than less so.
A lot of cases now do really good in terms of heat. I know for instance Antec and Cheiftec (clones) have a fan that you can put directly in front of the drive bay.
Yes, that's nice; mine, unfortunately, doesn't have any space for such a fan, so I just leave the side off the case and have a pair of 80mm fans blowing over the bays. Keeps the drives cool to the touch, but isn't exactly tidy:)
A lot of the really cheap cases (£15-25) these days come with metal bars going from the main 3.5" bays to the bottom of the case, usually leaving room for one or two fans in front of them and making sure the drives get the first go of the cool air coming into the case. Even without extra fans, they work well in keeping a drive relatively cool.
Don't be fooled by cheap finnish imitations ; BSD is the One True Code
So, what are the options for a home user, who wants to buy a reliable hard drive? I know three people who have had hard drives fail in the last 2 years.
The Seagate Barracuda IV seems to be about the most reliable ATA drive about at the moment, with the assumption that the Barracuda V will behave similarly. While Maxtor (creeping bad sectors) and WD (crappy bearings) seem to have some common problems which crop up a lot, the 'cuda has been around for a while and I've heard nothing but good about it (aside from some RAID issues, which they fixed in the 'cuda V); from significantly smaller return rates in places which sell various makes in largeish quantities, to the simple lack of "my Seagate is failing!" posts on various forums.
Not very scientific, but certainly compelling evidence:)
Either way, I think a big issue with drives these days is heat; a lot of cases have the 3.5" bays in a deadzone where heat can build up quickly, and a lot of heat can massively reduce the lifetime of a drive. Either get a case where you can put them right at the bottom, near the air inlets and with lots of space around them for the air to circulate, or actively cool them. I've seen drives mounted in the top bays run at 50c which ran at 30c when mounted at the bottom; where do *you* think it's most likely to achieve and exceed it's 5 year design life?:)
1) Destroy a nuclear warhead storage facility in China ("The dragon awakes...")
China vs Terrorists -- Chinese destroyed facility to avoid terrorists gaining control of it.
2) Destroy a damn in Shymkent, Kazakhstan.
China vs Terrorists -- Chinese destroy dam to destroy terrorists.
3) Destroy all enemy forces in Iraq ("Operation: Final Justice")
Probably USA vs Terrorists. Not got that far yet;)
If a company in China or Russian or wherever released a game about invading and destroying things in the USA, I'm sure many people in the USA - and especially elements of the press - would be outraged.
Um, you realise, of course, in this game, the USA and China are portrayed as co-operating in the fight against the GLA (terrorists).
Of course -- it was just a crummy joke, which is why I turned off my karma bonus:)
Personally I'd be more concerned with the storage space required to store every possible combination of 700MB of data. And, of course, the processing power required to search it. Time for a really big quantum computer;)
No, the only problem I've had was with the CM deciding it didn't like full-duplex after a powercut; it'd error most packets and my performance dropped to about 5k/s. Dropping to 10baseT fixed it, though. I imagine it'll work properly again once I reboot both, but on a 600k connection, there's not a whole lot of difference between 10Mbit and 100Mbit:)
I do have a Surfboard SB4100, though; I have conciderably less faith in the nasty little CM ntl use now. The ethernet connector barely works in half of them.
Every linux distro I've tried so far DOES NOT want to connect to the net through NTL anyway. It sets up my ethernet card fine, but won't allow any connections out. I'm thinking this is NTL's fault and not mine, but I dunno. So I'm still stuck with WinXP.
I use FreeBSD with no problems whatsoever. You are running a DHCP client and allowing all it's stuff through your firewall, right?
let me have my promised 'unlimited' bandwidth
ntl never promised you 'unlimited' bandwidth, they promised you a 24/7 connection with no bandwidth caps and a set of T&C's which include restricting your use to not disrupting other users. This change is merely stating explicitly what ntl think is fair.
It's handy ammunition for them to use against the top 0.1% of users who are constantly eating 2-300GB/month on a line they pay peanuts for.
Actually, it looks suspiciously like someone setting margin in a misguided attempt to work around a "problem" with padding; in the CSS box model, each box has two measurements to define how things flow around it; padding, which is inside the box but outside the content, and margin, which is outside the box.
The problem is not all browsers apply margin and padding the same to elements; for example, Mozilla and IE give the body tag a margin, Opera gives it padding (as recommended by the W3C and common sense). Web weenies often try to remove this by setting margin: 0; while neglecting to set padding. A naive way to fix this would be to serve a stylesheet specifically to Opera setting margin to a *negitive* value of whatever padding happens to be set to, thus pulling the padding outside the viewport; the correct solution is obviously to just set padding: 0;.
Lists are similar; if you don't set margin *and* padding, you're liable to have things like this happen, because you've not defined what you want fully. This is especially true of lists, which are often built up quite differently in different browsers.
So, no need to go overboard on the conspiracy theories; this looks more like a web weenie who doesn't quite know what he's doing. I guess this is what happens when you hire graduates straight out of college;)
The older generation remembers Apollo 11 as a defining moment. I was 2. For me, it was the wildly successful twin Viking landings in 1977
Personally, I've always thought Voyager was the coolest thing NASA ever did. Never mind putting a bunch of men on a barren boring-ass piece of rock; Voyager gathered truckloads of data on *four* major planets and their moons for something like 1% of the cost of Apollo, and for that matter, the ISS.
I agree, we should be studying our solar system, perfecting our launch and return and automation methods, and getting yet higher resolution images of all the wonderful objects in our sky to use as wallpapers (never mind Hubble, we want Wallpaper Imager 1, gathering sharp, colourful 1600*1200 images of every nebula and planet we can see!;)
I wrote anti-banner.css ages ago which uses some of these tricks to remove banners, although it mostly goes with object sizes, since I use Opera, which doesn't yet support the more fancy CSS 3 selectors.
I wonder how well CF deals with defects.. would suck to have half of your 3GB of award winning photography lost because one of the [n] billion components have failed. Do they have HD-alike sector remapping or so?
Well, that's ok: very few sites use HTML, but rather use a HTML-like language commonly refered to as tag soup.
http://www.museumtour.com/ claims to use HTML 4.01 Transitional, but even a quick glace at the header shows two closing HEAD tags; hence they're not using "a predefined structure [that conforms] to the Hyper-Text Markup Language (HTML)."
Slashdot Mirror
In that language performance shootout everyone was looking at a year or so ago, whatever implementation of SmallTalk he was using ended up near the top of the ranks, usually only a couple of times slower than the compiled C version (and, iirc, somewhat faster than whatever JVM was being used).
Write your speed critical inner loops in C/assm, write the rest in SmallTalk, you'd probably end up with a system with perfectly decent performance, with the advantage of being far more stable and maintainable.
Post ASCII art; some of Slash's regexp based filters will trip over (i.e. eat literally years of CPU time if allowed to run indefinately) on certain strings, and such comments are allowed to pass. Just run your informative comment through cowsay(1) ;)
You can look at the filter runner and the compression check in Slash/Utility/Access/Access.pm (filterOK()/compressOK()), but I can't seem to find the actual regexp's they use (should be in the db schema, but I guess you have to make your own).
It's pretty difficult to cool off when there's 100 million atmospheres of pressure acting on you; the center of Jupiter is more likely to be hotter than the surface of the sun, never mind "cooled off" :)
Wasn't Firefly also screwed over because it's timeslot coincided with some major sports thing in the US?
I'm pretty pissed at how Fox screwed it up. It had interesting characters who worked really well together, decent dialog, some resemblence of a story arc, a cool style, and I was really looking forward to seeing how it developed. All lost because of Fox's incompetence and impatience; they didn't even air the last three episodes!
<wanders off to find a Fox executive to use as a punchbag>
Or use LOC
All the technology in the world isn't going to help you get around the atmosphere filtering out certain interesting wavelengths of ratiation. Not unless you get said technology outside of said atmosphere
Are all US government sites so badly done? After seeing the isonews DOJ page that looked like it was done by a colourblind 8 year old with minimal HTML clue, I looked at a few other .gov sites and found that pretty much all of them were up to similar standards, especially the joke that is cybercrime.gov.
;)
Not only do they look bad, they're written badly, with practically zero concession to accessibility; whatever happened to Section 508?
Methinks the DoJ should be investigated on suspicion of child labour
The Voyager probes, probably; they're still functional, and have encountered this effect, being a similar distance away (they're also going to overtake Pioneer iirc).
That's 1GB/day, and it's a very soft limit, mainly for hitting real abusers (200G/month weenies); I used about 3.5G in the past two days. Provided I don't do it every day, ntl don't care.
The 3-6GB limits you're talking about are, I believe, monthly, are they not? One more reason to avoid moving to Australia (right after 1. fucking huge spiders and 2. fucking huge fires
Er, no, people who do that end up with very standards compliant pages that look identical to the 99% of people who have a browser that understands text-indent, and the other 1% get normal paragraphs without any indent. Better than that, the rest of that 1% will include screenreaders, lynx users, etc, who will be much happier with the cleaner markup that actually lets them understand the structure of the document, rather than having to skip over thousands of spacer gifs.
Even better, in 3 years time when users of older browsers is sub-0.1%, and users of alternative devices like mobile phones and aural browsers are more common, your compliant markup is even more readable, rather than less so.
DEATH TO KLUDGES.
Yes, that's nice; mine, unfortunately, doesn't have any space for such a fan, so I just leave the side off the case and have a pair of 80mm fans blowing over the bays. Keeps the drives cool to the touch, but isn't exactly tidy
A lot of the really cheap cases (£15-25) these days come with metal bars going from the main 3.5" bays to the bottom of the case, usually leaving room for one or two fans in front of them and making sure the drives get the first go of the cool air coming into the case. Even without extra fans, they work well in keeping a drive relatively cool.
Three True Codes, surely?
The Seagate Barracuda IV seems to be about the most reliable ATA drive about at the moment, with the assumption that the Barracuda V will behave similarly. While Maxtor (creeping bad sectors) and WD (crappy bearings) seem to have some common problems which crop up a lot, the 'cuda has been around for a while and I've heard nothing but good about it (aside from some RAID issues, which they fixed in the 'cuda V); from significantly smaller return rates in places which sell various makes in largeish quantities, to the simple lack of "my Seagate is failing!" posts on various forums.
Not very scientific, but certainly compelling evidence
Either way, I think a big issue with drives these days is heat; a lot of cases have the 3.5" bays in a deadzone where heat can build up quickly, and a lot of heat can massively reduce the lifetime of a drive. Either get a case where you can put them right at the bottom, near the air inlets and with lots of space around them for the air to circulate, or actively cool them. I've seen drives mounted in the top bays run at 50c which ran at 30c when mounted at the bottom; where do *you* think it's most likely to achieve and exceed it's 5 year design life?
I think he meant From_, not From: - i.e. the envelope address.
China vs Terrorists -- Chinese destroyed facility to avoid terrorists gaining control of it.
China vs Terrorists -- Chinese destroy dam to destroy terrorists.
Probably USA vs Terrorists. Not got that far yet
Um, you realise, of course, in this game, the USA and China are portrayed as co-operating in the fight against the GLA (terrorists).
Of course -- it was just a crummy joke, which is why I turned off my karma bonus :)
;)
Personally I'd be more concerned with the storage space required to store every possible combination of 700MB of data. And, of course, the processing power required to search it. Time for a really big quantum computer
No, the only problem I've had was with the CM deciding it didn't like full-duplex after a powercut; it'd error most packets and my performance dropped to about 5k/s. Dropping to 10baseT fixed it, though. I imagine it'll work properly again once I reboot both, but on a 600k connection, there's not a whole lot of difference between 10Mbit and 100Mbit :)
I do have a Surfboard SB4100, though; I have conciderably less faith in the nasty little CM ntl use now. The ethernet connector barely works in half of them.
I use FreeBSD with no problems whatsoever. You are running a DHCP client and allowing all it's stuff through your firewall, right?
ntl never promised you 'unlimited' bandwidth, they promised you a 24/7 connection with no bandwidth caps and a set of T&C's which include restricting your use to not disrupting other users. This change is merely stating explicitly what ntl think is fair.
It's handy ammunition for them to use against the top 0.1% of users who are constantly eating 2-300GB/month on a line they pay peanuts for.
Actually, it looks suspiciously like someone setting margin in a misguided attempt to work around a "problem" with padding; in the CSS box model, each box has two measurements to define how things flow around it; padding, which is inside the box but outside the content, and margin, which is outside the box.
;)
The problem is not all browsers apply margin and padding the same to elements; for example, Mozilla and IE give the body tag a margin, Opera gives it padding (as recommended by the W3C and common sense). Web weenies often try to remove this by setting margin: 0; while neglecting to set padding. A naive way to fix this would be to serve a stylesheet specifically to Opera setting margin to a *negitive* value of whatever padding happens to be set to, thus pulling the padding outside the viewport; the correct solution is obviously to just set padding: 0;.
Lists are similar; if you don't set margin *and* padding, you're liable to have things like this happen, because you've not defined what you want fully. This is especially true of lists, which are often built up quite differently in different browsers.
So, no need to go overboard on the conspiracy theories; this looks more like a web weenie who doesn't quite know what he's doing. I guess this is what happens when you hire graduates straight out of college
Personally, I've always thought Voyager was the coolest thing NASA ever did. Never mind putting a bunch of men on a barren boring-ass piece of rock; Voyager gathered truckloads of data on *four* major planets and their moons for something like 1% of the cost of Apollo, and for that matter, the ISS.
I agree, we should be studying our solar system, perfecting our launch and return and automation methods, and getting yet higher resolution images of all the wonderful objects in our sky to use as wallpapers (never mind Hubble, we want Wallpaper Imager 1, gathering sharp, colourful 1600*1200 images of every nebula and planet we can see!
I wrote anti-banner.css ages ago which uses some of these tricks to remove banners, although it mostly goes with object sizes, since I use Opera, which doesn't yet support the more fancy CSS 3 selectors.
/. now? :P
So, do I get a front page post on
Already there (nearly): "Pretec 3GB Compact Flash Card Available for pre-order", although given the 1GB eXpansys is nearly $500 I'm not sure how practical they'll be for most users
I wonder how well CF deals with defects.. would suck to have half of your 3GB of award winning photography lost because one of the [n] billion components have failed. Do they have HD-alike sector remapping or so?
Well, that's ok: very few sites use HTML, but rather use a HTML-like language commonly refered to as tag soup.
http://www.museumtour.com/ claims to use HTML 4.01 Transitional, but even a quick glace at the header shows two closing HEAD tags; hence they're not using "a predefined structure [that conforms] to the Hyper-Text Markup Language (HTML)."