A point against Apple is that Apple has been allergic to publishing SPECmarks for its processors for the past couple of years (the only PPC-ish benchmarks are IBM's benchmarks of the Power series of chips, which forked after the G3 IIRC). This removes a very consistent (if somewhat flawed) means of comparison.
That, and Apple seems to have this delusion that Photoshop (highly optimized for the Macintosh) is everything. That's akin to arguing that the P4 is infinitely faster than the G4 just because something written for x86 doesn't run on the G4.
Someone should create a site debunking the Photoshop myth. I would if I weren't so lazy...
The truth, as usual, probably lies between the megahertz and Photoshop camps and is about what a resaonable person would expect: the G4 is roughly equivalent in performance to the P4 and Athlon, code can be highly optimized for any of those processors, and most users don't need that much computational power anyway.
Re:Wow...a sane commercial license...
on
Looking At Gobe
·
· Score: 1
Yeah, but what about the Windows to run the Office? What about multiple desktop computers in a household (say computer for the parents and a computer for the kids)? Where is your EULA savior now?
Wow...a sane commercial license...
on
Looking At Gobe
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Gobe Productive will be $124.95, with the "Gobe Family License" which allows you to install on every computer in your home plus one installation where you work
If Microsoft and most other software companies weren't so greedy, this would be a far better way than Windows Product Activation to combat piracy (real, not "casual").
The physicist Richard Feynman wrote in his book Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman that when he was a fledgling professor at Cornell he started to burn out. Then he saw someone in the cafeteria toss a plate up into the air and noticed that the Cornell logo on the plate spun faster than the plate wobbled. He was curious why it did that, so he worked out the physics. It was a totally meaningless calculation, but it helped him remember why he got into physics and why he liked it. As you may or may not know, he went on to win the Nobel Prize in Physics for the work in quantum electrodynamics that he did, mostly at Cornell. And now you've know the rest of the story...
The moral of the story is to do something that you want to do rather than something that you have to do for school or for class or whatever. It doesn't matter if it's been done before or if it's useless: have fun!
(My apologies to Feynmanics if I butchered the plate story--my copy of Surely You're Joking is a two hour drive away--but I think I got the gist of it right)
The node mapping in Gnucleus does not seem to be real time, although it is kinda hard for me to tell since Gnucleus is not stable under Windows 2000. I like GnuTellaVision's visualization a lot better.
I can say, without reservation, that the HP calculators are of the highest quality and last for decades. The TI keypads are doubling up numbers and missing keystrokes in a fraction of that time.... You remind me of someone saying "I'm glad Ferrari is going out of business. Chevy for life!"
I'm not sure using Ferrari as a paragon of reliability is a good idea...;-)
I'm taking a class right now where the professor has banned graphing/programmable calculators, so I just do all the math either in my head or by pencil and paper to two digits precision. After all, it is his fault that he has to deal with my roundoff errors...;-)
On Mandrake 8.0, I was able to work around this after mucking around in/etc and seeing that the network configuration had two independent hostname parameters: HOSTNAME and DHCP_HOSTNAME, if I remember correctly. Changing HOSTNAME and leaving DHCP_HOSTNAME as the gibberish that my cable provider gave me let me have my preferred hostname and my cable access too.
How exactly does "tabbed browsing" differ from simply doing "open link in new window"? From the name it sounds like it simply provide a single window interface to multiple pages.
Because some of us want to view another page without opening another window...;-)
I can't seem to run the netscape installer binary for 6.2, or 6.1 for that manner. The file itself looks like it's compiled for an i686 architechture, so am I, running Yellow Dog Linux on a PPC, screwed? Thanks for any help...
If you read the system requirements page, you'll discover that the Linux version is targeted at RedHat on x86. There really are no advantages, and probably more disadvantages, to using Netscape instead of Mozilla on a Linux box, anyway.
Re:Interesting point of departure...
on
Netscape 6.2
·
· Score: 1
It used to be that Netscape offered official builds of Netscape for anything from AIX to Solaris. Now it looks like they are switching gears and only offering official builds for Windows, MacOS, and Linux.
The only things added by Netscape are things that aren't available on those platforms (Winamp, Net2Phone, RealPlayer, etc.) and that sysadmins probably don't want to deal with anyway.
That being said, I tried to read the first Harry Potter book once, and I wasn't particularly impressed with the language, or the plot that was unravelling in the first few pages I read. So I never bothered to read any more of those books.
I had similar impressions a few pages in, but I kept reading and before I knew it, I was hooked.
Give them another chance. You'll thank yourself for it later.
Since LinuxWorld seems to be/.ed already, here's the story:
Open source programmers stink at error handling
Commercial programmers stink at it too, but that's not the point. We should be better.
Summary
Why are we subjected to so many errors? Shouldn't open source be better at this than commercial software? Where are the obsessive-compulsive programmers? Plus, more reader PHP tips. (1,400 words) By Nicholas Petreley
(LinuxWorld) -- Thanks to my very talented readers I've been able to start almost every recent column with a reader's PHP tip. I'm tempted to make it a regular feature, but with my luck the tips would stop rolling in the moment I made it official. So I want you to be aware that this week's tip is not part of any regular practice. It is purely coincidental that PHP tips appear in column after column. Now that I've jinx-proofed the column, I'll share the tip.
Reader Michael Anderson wrote in with an alternative to using arrays to pass database information to PHP functions. As you may recall from the column Even more stupid PHP tricks, you can retrieve the results of a query into an array and pass that array to a function this way:
Michael pointed out that you can also retrieve the data as an object and reference the fields as the object's properties. Here's the above example rewritten to use objects:
name;
echo $CUST->address;
}
?>
I can't help but agree with Michael that this is a preferable way to handle the data, but only because it feels more natural to me to point to an object property than to reference an element of an array using the string name or address. It's purely a personal preference, probably stemming from habits I learned using C++.
OCD programmers unite
Nothing could be a better segue into the topic I had planned for this week. I'm thinking about starting a group called OLUG, the Obsessive Linux User Group. Although I know enough about psychology to know I don't meet the qualifications of a person with full-fledged OCD (Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder), I confess that I went back and rewrote my PHP code to use objects instead of arrays even there was no technical justification for doing so.
Certain things bring out the OCD in me. Warning messages, for example. It doesn't matter if my programs seem to work perfectly. If a compiler issues warnings when I compile my code, I feel compelled to fix the code to get rid of the warnings even if I know the code works fine. Likewise, if my program generates warnings or error messages at run time, I feel driven to look for the reasons and get rid of them.
Now I don't want you to get the wrong impression. My PHP and C++ code stand as testimony to the fact that my programming practices don't even come within light years of perfection. But just because I do not live up to the standards I am about to demand isn't going to stop me from demanding them. It's my right as a columnist. Those who can, do. Those who can't, write columns.
I'll be blunt. Open source programmers need to stop being so darned lazy about error handling. That obviously doesn't include all open source programmers. You know who you are.
If you want a demonstration of what I mean, start your favorite GUI-based open source applications from the command line of an X terminal instead of a menu or icon. In most cases this will cause the errors and warnings that the application generates to appear in the terminal window where you started it. (There are exceptions, depending on the application or the script that launches the application.)
Many of the applications I use on a daily basis generate anywhere from a few warnings or error messages to a few hundred. And I'm not just talking about the debug messages that programmers use to track what a program is doing. I mean warning messages about missing files, missing objects, null pointers, and worse.
These messages raise several questions. Doesn't anyone who works on these programs check for such things? Why do they go unfixed for so long? Are these problems something that should be of concern to users? Worse, what if these messages appear because of a problem with my installation or configuration, and not because the program hasn't been fully debugged? But even if it is my installation that is broken, shouldn't the application report the errors? Why do I have to start the application from a terminal window to see the messages?
Getting a handle on errors
At first I wondered if this was a problem that you would be more likely to find when developers use one graphical toolkit rather than another. But I see both good and bad error handling no matter which tools people use. For example, the GNOME/Gtk word processor AbiWord has been flawless lately. Not a single warning or error message appears in the console. It's possible that AbiWord simply isn't directing output to the console, but I'm guessing that it's simply a well-tested and well-behaved application.
On the other hand, GNOME itself has been a nightmare for me lately. At one point I got so frustrated that I deleted all the configuration files for all of GNOME and GTK applications in my home directory in disgust, determined never to use them again. When I regained my composure and restarted GNOME with the intent of finding the cause of the problems, the problems had already disappeared. Obviously one or more of my configuration files had been at fault. Which one, I may never know, because GNOME or some portion of it lacked the proper error handling that should have told me.
In this case I was lucky that the problems were so bad I lost my temper and deleted the configuration files. In most cases, the applications appear to function normally. Aside from being ignorant of any messages unless you start the application from a terminal, there's no way of knowing why the warnings exist, or if they are cause for concern. The warnings could be harmless, or they could mean the application will eventually crash, corrupt data, or worse.
Examples
Just so you know I'm not making this up, here are some samples of the console messages that appeared after just a couple of minutes of toying with various programs. By the way, did you know you can actually configure the Linux kernel from the KDE control panel? Bravo to whoever added this feature. Nevertheless, when I activate that portion of the control panel, I get the message:
QToolBar::QToolBar main window cannot be 0.
Is there supposed to be a toolbar that isn't displayed as a result? I may never know.
The e-mail client sylpheed generates this informative message after about a minute of use:
The KDE Aethera client generates even more warning messages than Evolution, but many of them are simply debug messages about what the program is doing. By the way, I finally figured out why I couldn't login to my IMAP server with Aethera. The Aethera client couldn't deal with the asterisks in my password. I could log in after I changed my password, but I still can't see my mail. The program simply leaves the folder empty and says there's nothing to sync. Here are just a few of the countless warnings I get from Aethera, including the sync message.
Warning: ClientVFS::_fact_ref could not create object vfolderattribute:/Magellan/Mail/default.fattr
Reason(s): -- object does not exist on server
Warning: VFolder *_new() was called on an already registered path
clientvfs: warning: could not create folder [spath:imap_00141, type:imap]
RemoteMailFolder::sync() : Nothing to sync!
The spreadsheet Kspread reports these errors all the time, even though what I'm doing has nothing to do with dates or times:
QTime::setHMS Invalid time -1:-1:-1.000
QDate::setYMD: Invalid date -001/-1/-1
The e-mail client Balsa popped up these messages just moments after using it:
changing server settings for '' ((nil))
** WARNING **: Cannot find expected file "gnome-multipart-mixed.png" (spliced with "pixmaps") with no extra prefixes
The Gnumeric spreadsheet only reported that it couldn't find the help file, as shown below:
Bonobo-WARNING **: Could not open help topics file NULL for app gnumeric
Many of these problems could easily have been handled more intelligently. For example, Gnumeric could have asked for the correct path to the help file, perhaps adding an option so a user can decide not to install the help files and disable the message. Unless GTK and Bonobo are a lot more complicated than they should be, it should be easy to create a generic component for handling things like this and then use the component to handle all optional help files as a rule.
The only conclusion I can draw is that, like most commercial software developers, many open source programmers are just plain lazy about proper error handling. But we're supposed to be better than that, and it's time we started to live up to the reputation. I realize that most of these programs are works in progress. But good error handling is not something that should be left for last. It should be part of the development process. Although I may not practice it myself, I'm not the least bit ashamed to preach it.
A friend of mine who worked at a homeless shelter in San Jose over Spring Break a few years ago indicated that the shelter there had a computer lab where guests could develop marketable skills. Then again, San Jose is one of those places where you could make $40,000/year and still be homeless because the cost of living is so damned high, so it may not really be analogous to this program in Milwaukee.
Is there a way to configure Mozilla to report a specific user-agent string just to specific sites, similar to the way that it is possible to disable popups for specific sites?
Slashdot Mirror
Apparently the Leonid Flux Estimator has moved. It's now here. You'll need a Java-capable browser to use it.
...using the Leonid Flux Estimator.
Someone should create a site debunking the Photoshop myth. I would if I weren't so lazy...
The truth, as usual, probably lies between the megahertz and Photoshop camps and is about what a resaonable person would expect: the G4 is roughly equivalent in performance to the P4 and Athlon, code can be highly optimized for any of those processors, and most users don't need that much computational power anyway.
Yeah, but what about the Windows to run the Office? What about multiple desktop computers in a household (say computer for the parents and a computer for the kids)? Where is your EULA savior now?
The physicist Richard Feynman wrote in his book Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman that when he was a fledgling professor at Cornell he started to burn out. Then he saw someone in the cafeteria toss a plate up into the air and noticed that the Cornell logo on the plate spun faster than the plate wobbled. He was curious why it did that, so he worked out the physics. It was a totally meaningless calculation, but it helped him remember why he got into physics and why he liked it. As you may or may not know, he went on to win the Nobel Prize in Physics for the work in quantum electrodynamics that he did, mostly at Cornell. And now you've know the rest of the story...
The moral of the story is to do something that you want to do rather than something that you have to do for school or for class or whatever. It doesn't matter if it's been done before or if it's useless: have fun!
(My apologies to Feynmanics if I butchered the plate story--my copy of Surely You're Joking is a two hour drive away--but I think I got the gist of it right)
Thank you for clearing that up. :-)
The node mapping in Gnucleus does not seem to be real time, although it is kinda hard for me to tell since Gnucleus is not stable under Windows 2000. I like GnuTellaVision's visualization a lot better.
The care given to the interface is not entirely surprising since one of them (Danyel Fisher) is specializing in human-computer interaction...
WTF is ducktape?
Despite my aversion to backwards polish notation, I have to agree that pipes would probably be easier to implement and understand in RPN.
I'm taking a class right now where the professor has banned graphing/programmable calculators, so I just do all the math either in my head or by pencil and paper to two digits precision. After all, it is his fault that he has to deal with my roundoff errors... ;-)
On Mandrake 8.0, I was able to work around this after mucking around in /etc and seeing that the network configuration had two independent hostname parameters: HOSTNAME and DHCP_HOSTNAME, if I remember correctly. Changing HOSTNAME and leaving DHCP_HOSTNAME as the gibberish that my cable provider gave me let me have my preferred hostname and my cable access too.
Give them another chance. You'll thank yourself for it later.
That would make an interesting infinite loop test, now wouldn't it... ;-)
If you install Junkbuster and configure Mozilla or Konqueror properly, you could probably increase that number to three... :-p
Since LinuxWorld seems to be /.ed already, here's the story:
Open source programmers stink at error handling
Commercial programmers stink at it too, but that's not the point. We should be better.
Summary
Why are we subjected to so many errors? Shouldn't open source be better at this than commercial software? Where are the obsessive-compulsive programmers? Plus, more reader PHP tips. (1,400 words) By Nicholas Petreley
(LinuxWorld) -- Thanks to my very talented readers I've been able to start almost every recent column with a reader's PHP tip. I'm tempted to make it a regular feature, but with my luck the tips would stop rolling in the moment I made it official. So I want you to be aware that this week's tip is not part of any regular practice. It is purely coincidental that PHP tips appear in column after column. Now that I've jinx-proofed the column, I'll share the tip.
Reader Michael Anderson wrote in with an alternative to using arrays to pass database information to PHP functions. As you may recall from the column Even more stupid PHP tricks, you can retrieve the results of a query into an array and pass that array to a function this way:
Michael pointed out that you can also retrieve the data as an object and reference the fields as the object's properties. Here's the above example rewritten to use objects:
name;
echo $CUST->address;
}
?>
I can't help but agree with Michael that this is a preferable way to handle the data, but only because it feels more natural to me to point to an object property than to reference an element of an array using the string name or address. It's purely a personal preference, probably stemming from habits I learned using C++.
OCD programmers unite
Nothing could be a better segue into the topic I had planned for this week. I'm thinking about starting a group called OLUG, the Obsessive Linux User Group. Although I know enough about psychology to know I don't meet the qualifications of a person with full-fledged OCD (Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder), I confess that I went back and rewrote my PHP code to use objects instead of arrays even there was no technical justification for doing so.
Certain things bring out the OCD in me. Warning messages, for example. It doesn't matter if my programs seem to work perfectly. If a compiler issues warnings when I compile my code, I feel compelled to fix the code to get rid of the warnings even if I know the code works fine. Likewise, if my program generates warnings or error messages at run time, I feel driven to look for the reasons and get rid of them.
Now I don't want you to get the wrong impression. My PHP and C++ code stand as testimony to the fact that my programming practices don't even come within light years of perfection. But just because I do not live up to the standards I am about to demand isn't going to stop me from demanding them. It's my right as a columnist. Those who can, do. Those who can't, write columns.
I'll be blunt. Open source programmers need to stop being so darned lazy about error handling. That obviously doesn't include all open source programmers. You know who you are.
If you want a demonstration of what I mean, start your favorite GUI-based open source applications from the command line of an X terminal instead of a menu or icon. In most cases this will cause the errors and warnings that the application generates to appear in the terminal window where you started it. (There are exceptions, depending on the application or the script that launches the application.)
Many of the applications I use on a daily basis generate anywhere from a few warnings or error messages to a few hundred. And I'm not just talking about the debug messages that programmers use to track what a program is doing. I mean warning messages about missing files, missing objects, null pointers, and worse.
These messages raise several questions. Doesn't anyone who works on these programs check for such things? Why do they go unfixed for so long? Are these problems something that should be of concern to users? Worse, what if these messages appear because of a problem with my installation or configuration, and not because the program hasn't been fully debugged? But even if it is my installation that is broken, shouldn't the application report the errors? Why do I have to start the application from a terminal window to see the messages?
Getting a handle on errors
At first I wondered if this was a problem that you would be more likely to find when developers use one graphical toolkit rather than another. But I see both good and bad error handling no matter which tools people use. For example, the GNOME/Gtk word processor AbiWord has been flawless lately. Not a single warning or error message appears in the console. It's possible that AbiWord simply isn't directing output to the console, but I'm guessing that it's simply a well-tested and well-behaved application.
On the other hand, GNOME itself has been a nightmare for me lately. At one point I got so frustrated that I deleted all the configuration files for all of GNOME and GTK applications in my home directory in disgust, determined never to use them again. When I regained my composure and restarted GNOME with the intent of finding the cause of the problems, the problems had already disappeared. Obviously one or more of my configuration files had been at fault. Which one, I may never know, because GNOME or some portion of it lacked the proper error handling that should have told me.
In this case I was lucky that the problems were so bad I lost my temper and deleted the configuration files. In most cases, the applications appear to function normally. Aside from being ignorant of any messages unless you start the application from a terminal, there's no way of knowing why the warnings exist, or if they are cause for concern. The warnings could be harmless, or they could mean the application will eventually crash, corrupt data, or worse.
Examples
Just so you know I'm not making this up, here are some samples of the console messages that appeared after just a couple of minutes of toying with various programs. By the way, did you know you can actually configure the Linux kernel from the KDE control panel? Bravo to whoever added this feature. Nevertheless, when I activate that portion of the control panel, I get the message:
QToolBar::QToolBar main window cannot be 0.
Is there supposed to be a toolbar that isn't displayed as a result? I may never know.
The e-mail client sylpheed generates this informative message after about a minute of use:
Sylpheed-CRITICAL **: file main.c: line 346 (get_queued_message_num): assertion `queue != NULL' failed.
The Ximian Evolution program generates tons of warnings, but most are repetitions. They begin with the following:
evolution-shell-WARNING **: Cannot activate Evolution component -- OAFIID:GNOME_Evolution_Calendar_ShellComponent
evolution-shell-WARNING **: e_folder_type_registry_get_icon_for_type() -- Unknown type `calendar'
evolution-shell-WARNING **: e_folder_type_registry_get_icon_for_type() -- Unknown type `tasks'
The KDE Aethera client generates even more warning messages than Evolution, but many of them are simply debug messages about what the program is doing. By the way, I finally figured out why I couldn't login to my IMAP server with Aethera. The Aethera client couldn't deal with the asterisks in my password. I could log in after I changed my password, but I still can't see my mail. The program simply leaves the folder empty and says there's nothing to sync. Here are just a few of the countless warnings I get from Aethera, including the sync message.
Warning: ClientVFS::_fact_ref could not create object vfolderattribute:/Magellan/Mail/default.fattr
Reason(s): -- object does not exist on server
Warning: VFolder *_new() was called on an already registered path
clientvfs: warning: could not create folder [spath:imap_00141, type:imap]
RemoteMailFolder::sync() : Nothing to sync!
The spreadsheet Kspread reports these errors all the time, even though what I'm doing has nothing to do with dates or times:
QTime::setHMS Invalid time -1:-1:-1.000
QDate::setYMD: Invalid date -001/-1/-1
The e-mail client Balsa popped up these messages just moments after using it:
changing server settings for '' ((nil))
** WARNING **: Cannot find expected file "gnome-multipart-mixed.png" (spliced with "pixmaps") with no extra prefixes
The Gnumeric spreadsheet only reported that it couldn't find the help file, as shown below:
Bonobo-WARNING **: Could not open help topics file NULL for app gnumeric
Many of these problems could easily have been handled more intelligently. For example, Gnumeric could have asked for the correct path to the help file, perhaps adding an option so a user can decide not to install the help files and disable the message. Unless GTK and Bonobo are a lot more complicated than they should be, it should be easy to create a generic component for handling things like this and then use the component to handle all optional help files as a rule.
The only conclusion I can draw is that, like most commercial software developers, many open source programmers are just plain lazy about proper error handling. But we're supposed to be better than that, and it's time we started to live up to the reputation. I realize that most of these programs are works in progress. But good error handling is not something that should be left for last. It should be part of the development process. Although I may not practice it myself, I'm not the least bit ashamed to preach it.
The difference is that MSN is breaking compatibility and using W3 standards as an excuse; /. makes no such claim.
A friend of mine who worked at a homeless shelter in San Jose over Spring Break a few years ago indicated that the shelter there had a computer lab where guests could develop marketable skills. Then again, San Jose is one of those places where you could make $40,000/year and still be homeless because the cost of living is so damned high, so it may not really be analogous to this program in Milwaukee.
...and has the ancillary benefit of inflating the percieved number of Linux installations...yay!
Is there a way to configure Mozilla to report a specific user-agent string just to specific sites, similar to the way that it is possible to disable popups for specific sites?