...because the damn thing kept popping up windows at random times, complaining that it hadn't been able to connect to the internet to get its updates.
Except that every place I could find a choice, I had told it to/not/ do automatic updating, to let me handle it manually. Because the machine in question was a laptop, rarely connected to anything, and when it is, I typically need/all/ the bandwidth.
I even walked through the registry by hand. I could not find whatever setting it was using to ignore me and keep trying to go out on the net, resulting in these fucking popups right when I'm trying to demonstrate some code or read a tech document.
Fuck it, I said, and uninstalled the whole damn thing. I don't care how important a piece of software/thinks/ it is, it does what I fucking tell it to do or it goes.
Having worked on applying GAs to multi-objective optimization, I don't belive that this technique can be used effectively to optimize most programs.
Good, because that's not the original intent of the project. When he first contacted the GCC maintainers about the project which would later be called Acovea, the idea was to see which underlying -f/-m options shod be turned on by the -O? options by default. More and more projects using 3.2 and 3.3 were using "-Osomething -fno-something -msomething" so he took the 3.4 (in development) code to see what should additionally be turned on and what should be turned off instead.
While you can use it to tune for particular programs, and particular patterns of use, it will mostly be useful to GCC itself.
The first rule of evolutionary techniques is: if there is a better-known, more specific optimization technique for the problem at hand, use it instead. In this case, there wasn't one.
Simulated annealing has a lot in common with GAs, but they tend to not do so well on multidimensional discontinuous fitness landscapes.
I'm sure annealing could eventually be used to come up with a solution; I'm just amazed whenever somebody does something cool with Tool X, and all of slashdot immediately jumps all over it with, "why didn't they use [my favorite tool]? why this one?"
While I don't disagree with your observations, I'm confused as to what they have to do with Ladd's project and the results shown.
Okay, find, I've written my decent quicksort. I know my basic algorithms and data structures. Now I would very much like to squeeze every last drop out of them. Here's a project that will tell me a good combination of options to use as a starting point. Don't tell me that I should just ignore all that and go re-re-re-learn basic algorithms. GCC is used by more than students.
More than that, it will tell the GCC maintainers which options should be on by default which currently might not be, and vice versa.
and yes, that really does consist of fiddling with the settings (each generation born counts as a twist to one of the control dials) until it's acceptable (Deer 2.0 can outrace Wolf 1.9, now Wolf needs to breed a 2.0 before they all starve).
Well said. Clearly I need to go read the Letters and Silmarillion again. (I wonder, then, what Jackson intends the eye-on-tower to actually be?) Christopher Lee reads the books once every year; I need to start doing the same again.
If you ever spot an eyeball with fingers, be sure to alert us all!
With cron tables, you have to keep telling the damn thing, hey, look, I'm still alive, don't freak out my family.
With "at <expected return date> + 2 days" it's an easy one shot. Just have a post-it note on your monitor reminding you to cancel the at job when you return.
Besides sending the "if you're reading this, it means I'm dead" emails -- which, frankly, I've always wanted to write, they just sound so cool -- they can also be used for useful tasks like uploading the last set of patches, posting the current working version of code, newfs'ing/dev/pr0n, etc, etc. The possibilities are endless.
The extra couple days on the at(1) timer are to allow time for delayed/canceled flights. Would suck for your gf to get the "email with the black masts" just because a storm blew through Topeka, Kansas during your layover.
Hm, I'm gonna have to try this next time I travel.:-)
...to the number of books L. Ron "If you really want to make a lot of money, invent your own religion" Hubbard has written and published after he died^Wpassed on^W^Wshed all his thetans, or whatever they're supposed to do.
Besides, the Ebert review of the Tupac movie was favorable, and he's usually got a decent eye for such things.
"throughout the entire book Lord of the Rings Sauron is in the form of a very large humanoid." Huh? Tolkien made is very plain that Sauron had lost the ability to take a humanoid shape long before. For that matter, LOTR never describes Sauron's physical shape at all; we only have the earlier texts to go on.
You make good points (I don't have the books here, or I'd check page numbers), but don't use the Wikipedia entry as a reference... Tolkien's letters, yes, but not some random unchecked web weenie.
The Matrix (at least, the Amplified Panatropic Net) was also a knowledge repository in the previous stories. In fact, I think it's been mentioned in that role in every story set on Gallifrey, even if only a brief scene or two.
It occurred to me the other day that there was a 4th Doctor story ("Deadly Assassin") involving a computer-generated world called the Matrix. One sat down, put some gear on one's head, then appeared inside this world using a virtual body. If one's Matrix body dies, one's real self dies as well. The lone hero struggles against an enemy who can take advantage of the fact that the "laws" of physics, well, aren't.
No bullet dodging, but given that the BBC's special effects budget was about the price of a cheeseburger, that should come as no surprise.
Actually, the Eye is described as a physical presence in one of the Silmarillion stories, and I think I've seen it referred to in a physical sense in Unfinished Tales as well.
Now, putting it on top of the tower is just stupid, but *shrug*. Gotta show something to the moviegoers, I guess, and the inside of Barad-dur was never described by Tolkien.
How do they not have the scouring ? They showed scenes of it in Galadrial's mirror.
And millions of moviegoers will cheerfully file those scenes under "things that may not come to pass" and forget about them. They'll assume that the Mirror was showing what might happen, or what would happen if the Ringbearer fails, etc.
and the destruction of the ring and Golem..
Ya might wanna proofread your posts a bit more there, friend. The destruction of the Ring and Gollum is one thing, the destruction of the Ring and Golem is a completely different legend.:-)
The article links are already/.ed to hell and back, but this doesn't really strike me as a surprise. (book spolier) Normally, Saruman gets kicked out of Isengard, then travels northwest to make life miserable for the Shire, which the hobbits then have to scour on their own.
Since the scouring was never going to be in the movie, there's not much point to kicking Saruman out... what's he going to do? Where's he going to go? They'd have to use more screen time to explain it. I'm vaguely interested in those seven minutes (of course I'll be viewing the DVD anyhow), but it doesn't completely rewrite the story; Saruman wasn't a major player in the final volume to start with.
There is just one thing... I wonder how they're going to get the palantir out of Isengard? (spoiler) That plays a major role in drawing Sauron out too early. Maybe they just skip the palantir and IM him instead.
...to pay the 40 grand to a hitman who will fly to Eastern Europe and put a bullet in the heads of the DDoS gang members. Problem solved for everyone, and permanently.
Heck, my weekend's free. My suitcase is right here. Anybody got $40,000?
There's a group of C++ programmers who are into abusing the template mechanism into a compile-time programming environment. This is not a good thing.
In your opinion. But this "group" is steadily growing larger and larger, and the number of critics are growing smaller, as they see the expressive power of templates.
One of the standard axioms of programming is that you know you have created a useful tool when others begin successfully using it for purposes other than that which was originally intended. Some people refuse to see templates as anything other than ways to write yet another typesafe-container-of-T. Others push a little farther into families of functions. Still others, like Alexandrescu and Veldhuizen and the entire Boost membership, have pushed on into a very different design. Automatic generation and maintenance of entire class hierarchies, to give a single example, is a big, big win.
Fine, you don't like it. Fair enough. I don't think anybody is trying to sell it as a silver bullet. But the expressive power of compile-time programming has been aptly demonstrated, and it's going to be around for a while. C++98 has some difficulties with it, because most of the techniques were discovered late in the game, almost by accident. Current proposals for C++0x contain a number of tweaks and extensions to make it easier.
Blindly unrollilng loops without understanding the target architecture at the instruction level is a lose on many modern superscalar machines. Newer machines tend to do loops faster than straight-line code.
This assertion is what made me respond. It's like saying, "All C programs suck," or something equally nebulous. Some machines do some loops faster than straight code under some conditions. But you won't see loop unrolling being disabled by default anytime soon, on any architecture. That decision has to be based on measurements, and testing, and experimentation, and hey- just the same thing you go through when making design decisions like whether to write C++ or assembly, and which kind of C++, and how to decompose the problem, etc, etc.
Sometimes these techniques will be appropriate, and sometimes they won't. Don't blindly condemn them all. Take a look at some of the examples where the template code produces the same assembly as the done-by-hand code.
If you're using a compiler which will develop templates in-line, decide if-statements at compile time, and discard unreachable code (which includes most modern compilers), it's better to write code which works that way, rather than use template specialization.
(Until, of course, you need to do it all with more than one type at a time, then it's back to copy-and-pasting everywhere.)
You assert that it's "better" to do it your way. Do you have numbers to back this up, or is it just your opinion? (It's okay if it's an opinion, I was just curious and wanted to check.)
It's a very basic introduction to a very deep subject. Anyone who knows C++ knows the vast majority of this information.
Good question. I don't know why.
Frankly, if you want to see what templates and partial specialization can really do, go get Andrei Alexandrescu's book Modern C++ Design, from the In-Depth series (which I've posted on before, somewhere). As others have said before, the third chapter alone is worth the price of the book, just for what it will do for your understanding of specializations.
I would post a link to Alexandrescu's site, but he's recently done something to it which causes mozilla to either crash instantly or hang indefinitely, requiring a kill -KILL in a console.
Looks like either Java or frames.
The strings that such a compiler are looking for aren't C keywords or macros, so the preprocessor won't change anything. Identifiers can't be broken up without breaking the program, so you can't add random white space in the middle of words. Adding random white space in between words has never affected the C family of languages (if it did; there wouldn't be any holy wars over indentation styles, because only one method would work, and we'd all have to use it.)
At some point, an implementation of login(1) has to look at "/etc/shells" and call the user ID resolver routines and drop privs and exec what will probably be one of three or four known shells. If your compiler hack detects "/etc/shells" as a string literal, then proceed to the next test.
Slashdot Mirror
...because the damn thing kept popping up windows at random times, complaining that it hadn't been able to connect to the internet to get its updates.
Except that every place I could find a choice, I had told it to /not/ do automatic updating, to let me handle it manually. Because the machine in question was a laptop, rarely connected to anything, and when it is, I typically need /all/ the bandwidth.
I even walked through the registry by hand. I could not find whatever setting it was using to ignore me and keep trying to go out on the net, resulting in these fucking popups right when I'm trying to demonstrate some code or read a tech document.
Fuck it, I said, and uninstalled the whole damn thing. I don't care how important a piece of software /thinks/ it is, it does what I fucking tell it to do or it goes.
Did you ask him?
Good, because that's not the original intent of the project. When he first contacted the GCC maintainers about the project which would later be called Acovea, the idea was to see which underlying -f/-m options shod be turned on by the -O? options by default. More and more projects using 3.2 and 3.3 were using "-Osomething -fno-something -msomething" so he took the 3.4 (in development) code to see what should additionally be turned on and what should be turned off instead.
While you can use it to tune for particular programs, and particular patterns of use, it will mostly be useful to GCC itself.
The first rule of evolutionary techniques is: if there is a better-known, more specific optimization technique for the problem at hand, use it instead. In this case, there wasn't one.
Simulated annealing has a lot in common with GAs, but they tend to not do so well on multidimensional discontinuous fitness landscapes.
I'm sure annealing could eventually be used to come up with a solution; I'm just amazed whenever somebody does something cool with Tool X, and all of slashdot immediately jumps all over it with, "why didn't they use [my favorite tool]? why this one?"
While I don't disagree with your observations, I'm confused as to what they have to do with Ladd's project and the results shown.
Okay, find, I've written my decent quicksort. I know my basic algorithms and data structures. Now I would very much like to squeeze every last drop out of them. Here's a project that will tell me a good combination of options to use as a starting point. Don't tell me that I should just ignore all that and go re-re-re-learn basic algorithms. GCC is used by more than students.
More than that, it will tell the GCC maintainers which options should be on by default which currently might not be, and vice versa.
and yes, that really does consist of fiddling with the settings (each generation born counts as a twist to one of the control dials) until it's acceptable (Deer 2.0 can outrace Wolf 1.9, now Wolf needs to breed a 2.0 before they all starve).
www.straightdope.com
Here in the Midwest we call them things "doors".
If you remove that doorknob dookickey, there's a nice hole in the desk, right along the back, for all the cables to go through.
Well said. Clearly I need to go read the Letters and Silmarillion again. (I wonder, then, what Jackson intends the eye-on-tower to actually be?) Christopher Lee reads the books once every year; I need to start doing the same again.
Be careful what you ask for. You may get it.
Rule 2: No member of the faculty is to maltreat the others in any way at all... if there's anybody watching.
Use at, not cron.
With cron tables, you have to keep telling the damn thing, hey, look, I'm still alive, don't freak out my family.
With "at <expected return date> + 2 days" it's an easy one shot. Just have a post-it note on your monitor reminding you to cancel the at job when you return.
Besides sending the "if you're reading this, it means I'm dead" emails -- which, frankly, I've always wanted to write, they just sound so cool -- they can also be used for useful tasks like uploading the last set of patches, posting the current working version of code, newfs'ing /dev/pr0n, etc, etc. The possibilities are endless.
The extra couple days on the at(1) timer are to allow time for delayed/canceled flights. Would suck for your gf to get the "email with the black masts" just because a storm blew through Topeka, Kansas during your layover.
Hm, I'm gonna have to try this next time I travel. :-)
...to the number of books L. Ron "If you really want to make a lot of money, invent your own religion" Hubbard has written and published after he died^Wpassed on^W^Wshed all his thetans, or whatever they're supposed to do.
Besides, the Ebert review of the Tupac movie was favorable, and he's usually got a decent eye for such things.
Whoever wrote the Wikipedia entry was on crack.
"throughout the entire book Lord of the Rings Sauron is in the form of a very large humanoid." Huh? Tolkien made is very plain that Sauron had lost the ability to take a humanoid shape long before. For that matter, LOTR never describes Sauron's physical shape at all; we only have the earlier texts to go on.
You make good points (I don't have the books here, or I'd check page numbers), but don't use the Wikipedia entry as a reference... Tolkien's letters, yes, but not some random unchecked web weenie.
Hear, hear!
The Matrix (at least, the Amplified Panatropic Net) was also a knowledge repository in the previous stories. In fact, I think it's been mentioned in that role in every story set on Gallifrey, even if only a brief scene or two.
It occurred to me the other day that there was a 4th Doctor story ("Deadly Assassin") involving a computer-generated world called the Matrix. One sat down, put some gear on one's head, then appeared inside this world using a virtual body. If one's Matrix body dies, one's real self dies as well. The lone hero struggles against an enemy who can take advantage of the fact that the "laws" of physics, well, aren't.
No bullet dodging, but given that the BBC's special effects budget was about the price of a cheeseburger, that should come as no surprise.
Actually, the Eye is described as a physical presence in one of the Silmarillion stories, and I think I've seen it referred to in a physical sense in Unfinished Tales as well.
Now, putting it on top of the tower is just stupid, but *shrug*. Gotta show something to the moviegoers, I guess, and the inside of Barad-dur was never described by Tolkien.
Um. That's not a sign. That's him.
They're in the DVD.
And millions of moviegoers will cheerfully file those scenes under "things that may not come to pass" and forget about them. They'll assume that the Mirror was showing what might happen, or what would happen if the Ringbearer fails, etc.
Ya might wanna proofread your posts a bit more there, friend. The destruction of the Ring and Gollum is one thing, the destruction of the Ring and Golem is a completely different legend. :-)
Sorry, I was thinking more of in-movie-mode. The book definitely depends on the scouring to really drive everything home.
The article links are already
Since the scouring was never going to be in the movie, there's not much point to kicking Saruman out... what's he going to do? Where's he going to go? They'd have to use more screen time to explain it. I'm vaguely interested in those seven minutes (of course I'll be viewing the DVD anyhow), but it doesn't completely rewrite the story; Saruman wasn't a major player in the final volume to start with.
There is just one thing... I wonder how they're going to get the palantir out of Isengard? (spoiler) That plays a major role in drawing Sauron out too early. Maybe they just skip the palantir and IM him instead.
...to pay the 40 grand to a hitman who will fly to Eastern Europe and put a bullet in the heads of the DDoS gang members. Problem solved for everyone, and permanently.
Heck, my weekend's free. My suitcase is right here. Anybody got $40,000?
In your opinion. But this "group" is steadily growing larger and larger, and the number of critics are growing smaller, as they see the expressive power of templates.
One of the standard axioms of programming is that you know you have created a useful tool when others begin successfully using it for purposes other than that which was originally intended. Some people refuse to see templates as anything other than ways to write yet another typesafe-container-of-T. Others push a little farther into families of functions. Still others, like Alexandrescu and Veldhuizen and the entire Boost membership, have pushed on into a very different design. Automatic generation and maintenance of entire class hierarchies, to give a single example, is a big, big win.
Fine, you don't like it. Fair enough. I don't think anybody is trying to sell it as a silver bullet. But the expressive power of compile-time programming has been aptly demonstrated, and it's going to be around for a while. C++98 has some difficulties with it, because most of the techniques were discovered late in the game, almost by accident. Current proposals for C++0x contain a number of tweaks and extensions to make it easier.
This assertion is what made me respond. It's like saying, "All C programs suck," or something equally nebulous. Some machines do some loops faster than straight code under some conditions. But you won't see loop unrolling being disabled by default anytime soon, on any architecture. That decision has to be based on measurements, and testing, and experimentation, and hey- just the same thing you go through when making design decisions like whether to write C++ or assembly, and which kind of C++, and how to decompose the problem, etc, etc.
Sometimes these techniques will be appropriate, and sometimes they won't. Don't blindly condemn them all. Take a look at some of the examples where the template code produces the same assembly as the done-by-hand code.
(Until, of course, you need to do it all with more than one type at a time, then it's back to copy-and-pasting everywhere.)
You assert that it's "better" to do it your way. Do you have numbers to back this up, or is it just your opinion? (It's okay if it's an opinion, I was just curious and wanted to check.)
Good question. I don't know why.
Frankly, if you want to see what templates and partial specialization can really do, go get Andrei Alexandrescu's book Modern C++ Design, from the In-Depth series (which I've posted on before, somewhere). As others have said before, the third chapter alone is worth the price of the book, just for what it will do for your understanding of specializations.
I would post a link to Alexandrescu's site, but he's recently done something to it which causes mozilla to either crash instantly or hang indefinitely, requiring a kill -KILL in a console. Looks like either Java or frames.
The strings that such a compiler are looking for aren't C keywords or macros, so the preprocessor won't change anything. Identifiers can't be broken up without breaking the program, so you can't add random white space in the middle of words. Adding random white space in between words has never affected the C family of languages (if it did; there wouldn't be any holy wars over indentation styles, because only one method would work, and we'd all have to use it.)
At some point, an implementation of login(1) has to look at "/etc/shells" and call the user ID resolver routines and drop privs and exec what will probably be one of three or four known shells. If your compiler hack detects "/etc/shells" as a string literal, then proceed to the next test.