Can't find the best place to shout this loud enough "Valgrind is AMAZING!":-)
It really is awesome. I used it on my library of portable data structures (C++ XML parser, compression and encryption stuff). I tested on Linux and still got the benefit on Symbian and Win Mobile when I recompiled it for those platforms.
I had a test suite that exercised a fair it of the library and ran the tests on Linux under Valgrind. The test suite would often run perfectly but Valgrind would spot memory handling errors that didn't have any consequences in that particular test but would have in other circumstances.
You don't have to compile special support for it into your programs. It produces some useful output even for non-debug versions of your code.
What Valgrind does is take you 50% of the way towards the convenience of a garbage collected language. You spend a lot less time farting around with minor details but still more than if you were using a GC langage. Valgrind generously rewards people who write representative test code.
I am sure that AH hated Jews but I also think that dictators need an internal enemy to blame for things. I think that ideology was the tool that he used to influence people but I think that the cornerstone of his belief was to to with how great he himself was. I don't think he really cared about Germans or Germany at all - he used them and when they "failed him" he was angry. I think he was a typical power-seeker but in charge of a very powerful country.
He took chances all throughout his career and could have failed any number of times before he came to power and after. What I am saying about this is that he just carried on doing ambitious things until eventually he had to fail. His own generals were alarmed at his plans for Russia and they saw the writing on the wall long before he did.
I think that there are quite a lot of potential AH's in the world but thank goodness they have either failed in their gambles and chances or they are in control of countries whose potential to damage the world is not so great.
No, A.H. only got to power by taking tremendous risks and winning. He was an opportunist and to expect him to stop gambling is unreasonable - if he was the kind of person who stopped he might never have got anywhere.
He and N Bonaparte were inevitably bound to bring their countries to destruction eventually. The best thing that could have happened for the Axis would have been for the bomb to have killed him. They could have had a chance to do some kind of advantageous deal then.
The phone as a computer replacement idea has been going for ages. Unfortunately smartphone usage in America is so minimal that statements like this Microsoft one might seem new and even insightful. It's someone else's insight, though.
Nokia smartphones (high CPU power basically) have been called "Multimedia Computers" for a while now and the idea is exactly that there will be no real need for a personal computer for many people who get these things. Perhaps you might have a big machine at work or a games console at home but not necessarily a pc.
TV out is hardly a new feature on phones - you can buy a Nokia N93 with it right now.
The interesting part is that it's ip aware and is basically a big router in the sky. This is new-ish stuff. It has other cool tech but software people wouldn't be terribly interested in e.g. the snazzy electronically steerable antenna etc.
It's a slight shame the Hollywood has given everyone unrealistic expectations of, among other things, the state of the art in military satellite systems. It's rather like the Stealth Fighter - an awesome achievement despite the fact that it was far from having the all-aspect stealth that it is generally portrayed to have. Another example would be those f***ng moronic films where someone breaks "128-bit encryption" in 60 seconds because he has a gun to his head (or whatever).
The interesting part of it is that Satellites of the Skynet 4 era need teams of people to fly them and make constant adjustments to their orientation and orbit but that commercial satellite tech has become so good now that one person can fly many satellites and each satellite can manage itself for up to 28 days. I never knew how much effort it was until hearing this.
Although it's not obvious to Americans, English Premier League Football is a huge international business. Even in the most remote "two-goat" towns throughout Southern Africa (where I'm from) one can find Coca-cola, AK-47s and Manchester United fans.
In a way I don't think it's great that there is so much money involved because teams with the biggest budgets tend to dominate. It's also one of the drivers of corruption. Anyhow they are just defending that phenomenal income source - they have to be seen to defend it too.
I think their business model is a bit of a dinosaur and that it has to change (to their disadvantage) but I wouldn't expect them to be pleased about it or to let it go quietly. Just about every industry has to expect that however important it *was* once, other things come along that make it less important.
I think that they should do a deal with YouTube rather than suing them.
If "Alice" has a right to be educated, then whose responsibility is it to provide that education?
The answer is that it's the responsibility of all humans.
Human rights are a contract saying what kind of treatment we expect from each other.
The problem with chimps is that we can't give them responsibilities because we think they are not quite clever enough to take them on. So we probably need a slightly different contract.
x86 may persist in desktops but it is probably already vastly outnumbered by ARM instruction-set chips in phones.
They probably won't make you use your PC less but there are a lot of people who don't have computers and may never get them because a handheld will be good enough.
Please mod the parent up. This is *the* critical issue with Qt.
Not all commercial applications succeed or make large amounts of money and people don't want to invest in expensive tools unless their return is fairly certain. So Qt is limited to bigger companies, perhaps with existing products.
AFAIK it is also difficult for an open source product built with QT to "go commercial" and I think that this is very unattractive for those cases where a copyright holder may wish to work full-time on a project and might need to pay the bills by selling an enhanced version.
Not in all countries. Horizontally cut thin potato slices are crisps in British English. Fries don't exist in BE unless you work at McD's - they are called chips.
Computer Science seems to me to be about how to model one system (e.g. a bank account) using some completely different system such as a NAND gate.
The science part of it depends utterly on what tools are available. If it was incredibly efficient to represent lists in electronic components then we would all be LISP programmers and Computer Science would be about how to transform problems into functional computations.
It seems completely practical, really.
I think that the difference is that in CS one shouldn't think that tomorrows "answers" won't be today's plus a bit. Tomorrow we might do stuff that's completely different and we might rethink all our assumptions. We should know what things are assumptions, therefore, and why they were chosen and when to throw them out. Theory should be our weapon in doing this - it arms us against becoming conventional and acting without really thinking.
I think CS is really about how to address complexity and we aren't looking at it from the right perspective yet. I suppose that thinking about this could be a pure, mathematical issue.
Re:Needs to evolve into Computer Sciences (plural)
on
Is Computer Science Dead?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I think it's more like: Mechanical Engineers and Mechanics or Electrical engineers and Electricians
Each job has its problems but focuses on a different end of the product lifecycle.
Some software doesn't die and merely needs to be maintained, so naturally, after a while there is less need for hardcore Computer Scientists to develop new things. Open source probably accelerates this trend - e.g why write a portable runtime library for your app when you can use the NSPR or the Apache one?
I went to a talk about it recently at the Royal Aeronautical Society in Hamilton place. The main points of interest are:
1) It's a PFI contract. This basically means that the MoD has specified that it wants a particular service (so much bandwidth deliverable to so many locations etc) and the company involved, Paradigm, has designed and will operate a system to provide the service. This kind of stuff is happening throughout the UK military and is supposedly offering tremendous cost savings (e.g. the MoD buys X hours of flight on it's jets and a logistics company arranges all the maintenance and spares for that to happen). It's a bit like privatisation which was done on a major scale in Britain and then copied elsewhere - this may be widely copied.
2) Previous Skynets were not internet enabled - they were circuit switched. Skynet is apparently IP based (packet switched, I assume) and will bring internet "goodness" to it's users in an efficient way. Naturally this will lead to very significantly improved operational abilities - not impressive by commercial standards of bandwidth etc but very impressive from a military point of view in being available in lots of odd locations and being secure.
2) It's interesting that Astrium has a standard platform - kind of cheaper to develop. The old Skynets needed a team of people to fly them - the new ones can be left for 28 days without any outside interference. It was interesting to see their actual simulator showing how the satellite does three burns to get into geosynchronous orbit, stopping between each to rotate and "find the earth" and then re-orient itself very accurately for the next burn.
3) It can apparently carry commercial traffic or military traffic for friendly countries in such a way that it is protected from British MoD traffic. This is a scary idea in a way - Paradigm making more money by selling off spare capacity. In theory this is all fine as long as they supply the desired service level to the MoD.
You might want to update the firmware on your e61. They are operator-specific, unfortunately, and there might not be one for your operator yet. One has to take precautions when doing this (such as backing up contacts and making sure you have copies of your installed software) but if something goes wrong then you can take it to a service centre.
It is bad that such a thing should be needed but at least stuff does get fixed.
Symbian's main "competitors" are OSes that most people have never heard of (e.g. OSE). These provide the OS for low end phones which sell in far greater numbers than any smartphone.
They are internal products at Nokia and Sony Ericsson and as such those parts of Nokia and Sony have something to fear from Symbian - that they might be lose "market share". For it's incredible feature set, Symbian is very lean and getting leaner in terms of the cost it adds to a device (the cost of the hardware needed to support it). So it's not as if all of Nokia or SE love Symbian - it's a threat to some.
The iPhone is an interesting example of what you can do with expensive hardware, and it may sell very well and make Apple a handsome profit but as it is their expected volumes look very small indeed so I can't see how they will make themselves the standard smartphone platform.
I think that many people don't "get" the scale of the phone market in comparison to PCs. There are a lot more people with phones in the world than with computers.
------ This posting contains only my own personal opinions etc.
You're really complaining about Series 60 - the platform and not so much about the OS, Symbian.
Th N93 does rather a lot more than the average phone too - so it's not all that surprising, really. All that high quality video recording etc require more than the average embedded OS.
Your scorn was right - gecko's raison d'etre was not so much to be faster as to have a future. On the other hand your pal's enthusiasm was far sighted - consider the success of Gecko now. You may feel it doesn't add anything for you but clearly other people don't feel that way.
Netscape 4 was unreliable for me - on Solaris - so I agree about that not being great but it was also a an architecture that was on it's last legs. The early releases of Mozilla were even less reliable and gobbled memory but they rendered new standards and allowed one to visit sites that NS4 couldn't render. "So what," I hear you cry - what has CSS2 support done for me? Well it's made it possible for web designers to make pages more easily and that's ultimately good for you.
Safari has made a place for itself, and hurray for that - but I think that the battle for open standards vs proprietary ones has been fought by Mozilla and is only being won thus far because of it's success. So whatever happens, I think that it and gecko deserve great credit.
The only way to be universally tolerated is if everyone thinks you aren't a competitor. In the past you might have avoided competition by expanding into areas that were uninhabited and keeping out of other people's way. The world is only so big though and it isn't possible to avoid competition any more.
So the only way to be liked by everyone would be if they thought you were such total wimps that they didn't have to worry about you. The best you can hope for is to be powerful and have *some* friends.
Slashdot Mirror
Can't find the best place to shout this loud enough "Valgrind is AMAZING!" :-)
It really is awesome. I used it on my library of portable data structures (C++ XML parser, compression and encryption stuff). I tested on Linux and still got the benefit on Symbian and Win Mobile when I recompiled it for those platforms.
I had a test suite that exercised a fair it of the library and ran the tests on Linux under Valgrind. The test suite would often run perfectly but Valgrind would spot memory handling errors that didn't have any consequences in that particular test but would have in other circumstances.
You don't have to compile special support for it into your programs. It produces some useful output even for non-debug versions of your code.
What Valgrind does is take you 50% of the way towards the convenience of a garbage collected language. You spend a lot less time farting around with minor details but still more than if you were using a GC langage. Valgrind generously rewards people who write representative test code.
Hi,
I am sure that AH hated Jews but I also think that dictators need an internal enemy to blame for things. I think that ideology was the tool that he used to influence people but I think that the cornerstone of his belief was to to with how great he himself was. I don't think he really cared about Germans or Germany at all - he used them and when they "failed him" he was angry. I think he was a typical power-seeker but in charge of a very powerful country.
He took chances all throughout his career and could have failed any number of times before he came to power and after. What I am saying about this is that he just carried on doing ambitious things until eventually he had to fail. His own generals were alarmed at his plans for Russia and they saw the writing on the wall long before he did.
I think that there are quite a lot of potential AH's in the world but thank goodness they have either failed in their gambles and chances or they are in control of countries whose potential to damage the world is not so great.
No, A.H. only got to power by taking tremendous risks and winning. He was an opportunist and to expect him to stop gambling is unreasonable - if he was the kind of person who stopped he might never have got anywhere.
He and N Bonaparte were inevitably bound to bring their countries to destruction eventually. The best thing that could have happened for the Axis would have been for the bomb to have killed him. They could have had a chance to do some kind of advantageous deal then.
The phone as a computer replacement idea has been going for ages. Unfortunately smartphone usage in America is so minimal that statements like this Microsoft one might seem new and even insightful. It's someone else's insight, though.
Nokia smartphones (high CPU power basically) have been called "Multimedia Computers" for a while now and the idea is exactly that there will be no real need for a personal computer for many people who get these things. Perhaps you might have a big machine at work or a games console at home but not necessarily a pc.
TV out is hardly a new feature on phones - you can buy a Nokia N93 with it right now.
Big deal, Microsoft.
The interesting part is that it's ip aware and is basically a big router in the sky. This is new-ish stuff. It has other cool tech but software people wouldn't be terribly interested in e.g. the snazzy electronically steerable antenna etc.
It's a slight shame the Hollywood has given everyone unrealistic expectations of, among other things, the state of the art in military satellite systems. It's rather like the Stealth Fighter - an awesome achievement despite the fact that it was far from having the all-aspect stealth that it is generally portrayed to have. Another example would be those f***ng moronic films where someone breaks "128-bit encryption" in 60 seconds because he has a gun to his head (or whatever).
The interesting part of it is that Satellites of the Skynet 4 era need teams of people to fly them and make constant adjustments to their orientation and orbit but that commercial satellite tech has become so good now that one person can fly many satellites and each satellite can manage itself for up to 28 days. I never knew how much effort it was until hearing this.
Although it's not obvious to Americans, English Premier League Football is a huge international business. Even in the most remote "two-goat" towns throughout Southern Africa (where I'm from) one can find Coca-cola, AK-47s and Manchester United fans.
In a way I don't think it's great that there is so much money involved because teams with the biggest budgets tend to dominate. It's also one of the drivers of corruption. Anyhow they are just defending that phenomenal income source - they have to be seen to defend it too.
I think their business model is a bit of a dinosaur and that it has to change (to their disadvantage) but I wouldn't expect them to be pleased about it or to let it go quietly. Just about every industry has to expect that however important it *was* once, other things come along that make it less important.
I think that they should do a deal with YouTube rather than suing them.
. . . already.
Adobe donated a JIT Javascript so it should be quite quick.
The Firefox API is huge and hugely powerful.
So perhaps it's mainly some development tools that are required?
I must say that MS seems to be repackaging other people's ideas again.
Select Tools->Buddy pounce.
Your client must be left on and running for this to work. It has been in GAIM for a while now.
Wish I could mod you up. Very interesting.
If "Alice" has a right to be educated, then whose responsibility is it to provide that education?
The answer is that it's the responsibility of all humans.
Human rights are a contract saying what kind of treatment we expect from each other.
The problem with chimps is that we can't give them responsibilities because we think they are not quite clever enough to take them on. So we probably need a slightly different contract.
Cheers,
Tim
x86 may persist in desktops but it is probably already vastly outnumbered by ARM instruction-set chips in phones.
They probably won't make you use your PC less but there are a lot of people who don't have computers and may never get them because a handheld will be good enough.
Its architecture is far too sophisticated for a "simple" browser.
Thank goodness they put so much forethought into it or it would not have had a future.
Please mod the parent up. This is *the* critical issue with Qt.
Not all commercial applications succeed or make large amounts of money and people don't want to invest in expensive tools unless their return is fairly certain. So Qt is limited to bigger companies, perhaps with existing products.
AFAIK it is also difficult for an open source product built with QT to "go commercial" and I think that this is very unattractive for those cases where a copyright holder may wish to work full-time on a project and might need to pay the bills by selling an enhanced version.
Not in all countries. Horizontally cut thin potato slices are crisps in British English.
Fries don't exist in BE unless you work at McD's - they are called chips.
Computer Science seems to me to be about how to model one system (e.g. a bank account) using some completely different system such as a NAND gate.
The science part of it depends utterly on what tools are available. If it was incredibly efficient to represent lists in electronic components then we would all be LISP programmers and Computer Science would be about how to transform problems into functional computations.
It seems completely practical, really.
I think that the difference is that in CS one shouldn't think that tomorrows "answers" won't be today's plus a bit. Tomorrow we might do stuff that's completely different and we might rethink all our assumptions. We should know what things are assumptions, therefore, and why they were chosen and when to throw them out. Theory should be our weapon in doing this - it arms us against becoming conventional and acting without really thinking.
I think CS is really about how to address complexity and we aren't looking at it from the right perspective yet. I suppose that thinking about this could be a pure, mathematical issue.
I think it's more like:
Mechanical Engineers and Mechanics
or
Electrical engineers and Electricians
Each job has its problems but focuses on a different end of the product lifecycle.
Some software doesn't die and merely needs to be maintained, so naturally, after a while there is less need for hardcore Computer Scientists to develop new things. Open source probably accelerates this trend - e.g why write a portable runtime library for your app when you can use the NSPR or the Apache one?
I went to a talk about it recently at the Royal Aeronautical Society in Hamilton place. The main points of interest are:
1) It's a PFI contract. This basically means that the MoD has specified that it wants a particular service (so much bandwidth deliverable to so many locations etc) and the company involved, Paradigm, has designed and will operate a system to provide the service. This kind of stuff is happening throughout the UK military and is supposedly offering tremendous cost savings (e.g. the MoD buys X hours of flight on it's jets and a logistics company arranges all the maintenance and spares for that to happen). It's a bit like privatisation which was done on a major scale in Britain and then copied elsewhere - this may be widely copied.
2) Previous Skynets were not internet enabled - they were circuit switched. Skynet is apparently IP based (packet switched, I assume) and will bring internet "goodness" to it's users in an efficient way. Naturally this will lead to very significantly improved operational abilities - not impressive by commercial standards of bandwidth etc but very impressive from a military point of view in being available in lots of odd locations and being secure.
2) It's interesting that Astrium has a standard platform - kind of cheaper to develop. The old Skynets needed a team of people to fly them - the new ones can be left for 28 days without any outside interference. It was interesting to see their actual simulator showing how the satellite does three burns to get into geosynchronous orbit, stopping between each to rotate and "find the earth" and then re-orient itself very accurately for the next burn.
3) It can apparently carry commercial traffic or military traffic for friendly countries in such a way that it is protected from British MoD traffic. This is a scary idea in a way - Paradigm making more money by selling off spare capacity. In theory this is all fine as long as they supply the desired service level to the MoD.
Cheers,
Tim
You might want to update the firmware on your e61. They are operator-specific, unfortunately, and there might not be one for your operator yet. One has to take precautions when doing this (such as backing up contacts and making sure you have copies of your installed software) but if something goes wrong then you can take it to a service centre.
It is bad that such a thing should be needed but at least stuff does get fixed.
Cheers,
Tim
Symbian's main "competitors" are OSes that most people have never heard of (e.g. OSE). These provide the OS for low end phones which sell in far greater numbers than any smartphone.
They are internal products at Nokia and Sony Ericsson and as such those parts of Nokia and Sony have something to fear from Symbian - that they might be lose "market share". For it's incredible feature set, Symbian is very lean and getting leaner in terms of the cost it adds to a device (the cost of the hardware needed to support it). So it's not as if all of Nokia or SE love Symbian - it's a threat to some.
The iPhone is an interesting example of what you can do with expensive hardware, and it may sell very well and make Apple a handsome profit but as it is their expected volumes look very small indeed so I can't see how they will make themselves the standard smartphone platform.
I think that many people don't "get" the scale of the phone market in comparison to PCs. There are a lot more people with phones in the world than with computers.
------
This posting contains only my own personal opinions etc.
You're really complaining about Series 60 - the platform and not so much about the OS, Symbian.
Th N93 does rather a lot more than the average phone too - so it's not all that surprising, really. All that high quality video recording etc require more than the average embedded OS.
There are 3 user interface platforms for Symbian:
S60 (Most common)
UIQ
MOAP (Japan only)
An app written for an S60 device will run on another S60 device whether it's from Nokia or not.
Your scorn was right - gecko's raison d'etre was not so much to be faster as to have a future. On the other hand your pal's enthusiasm was far sighted - consider the success of Gecko now. You may feel it doesn't add anything for you but clearly other people don't feel that way.
Netscape 4 was unreliable for me - on Solaris - so I agree about that not being great but it was also a an architecture that was on it's last legs. The early releases of Mozilla were even less reliable and gobbled memory but they rendered new standards and allowed one to visit sites that NS4 couldn't render. "So what," I hear you cry - what has CSS2 support done for me? Well it's made it possible for web designers to make pages more easily and that's ultimately good for you.
Safari has made a place for itself, and hurray for that - but I think that the battle for open standards vs proprietary ones has been fought by Mozilla and is only being won thus far because of it's success. So whatever happens, I think that it and gecko deserve great credit.
Intriguing idea. Have you got a website for this effort?
I have been thinking about making a FUSE filesystem for Linux and having it on Windows as well would be a great advantage.
The only way to be universally tolerated is if everyone thinks you aren't a competitor. In the past you might have avoided competition by expanding into areas that were uninhabited and keeping out of other people's way. The world is only so big though and it isn't possible to avoid competition any more.
So the only way to be liked by everyone would be if they thought you were such total wimps that they didn't have to worry about you. The best you can hope for is to be powerful and have *some* friends.