If ever there was a reason to stop buying Micro$oft products, this is it. I like capitalism, but when I see the rich pissing away money like this, it just makes me angry. Capitalism fosters productivity and gives monetary rewards in return. Sadly, it goes all out of proportion at some point and we get to watch the overly rich play with our money.
I usually reserve this sort of angst for the self-centered, dim-witted Hollywood crowd.
Somehow, something is terribly wrong. These guys are crash testing race cars while the rest of the world starves. No wonder the rest of the world is mad at us.
I have the book "Web Services Essentials", also from O'Reilly. I'm curious how the Nutshell book differs. The review makes it sound quite similar.
At any rate, the Essentials book is a good overview of all the relevant technologies and can help you start to see the "forest". I would actually recommend it for PHBs who have 1/2 a technical clue.
I used to work on debuggers. The hardest bugs to find were bugs in the debugger. Why? You have to debug the debugger.
The absolute hardest bug I ever tracked down was actually a kernel bug. When single-stepping in assembly over a branch-shadow instruction, the application state was corrupted. It only happened on one particular model of RISC chip and only with a certain version of the kernel. Bleh!
Obviously I cannot allieve you of your delusions. I'll just say this. I've been a software engineer for 20+ years. My experience with COM was one of the most painful in my career. Apparently you did not suffer the same fate.
I will say that I have not seen ANY remote call interface that was easy to use. CORBA has it's own issues. In fact, I wrote my own lightweight RPC interface for a debugger I was working on so I could avoid using CORBA.
BTW, please enlighten me on what IDE I should have used?
I never made any comments regarding the benefits of other technologies.
In answer to your question, I was using VStudio 6. Sure, all the COM stuff is great if you play within your own little box. It's when you integrate with other COM objects and things go wrong. It is when you try to decipher the insane implementation behind the "smoke and mirrors" that the true evil of COM rears it's ugly head.
I have always admired Microsoft's COM architecture and the relative simplicity...
Are you high? Did you actually use COM or DCOM, or just admire it from afar? I have used COM and barely survived. I have not coded to DCOM, but I had to to install someone else's DCOM programs. That was torture enough.
That's what meta-moderation is for. Obviously, the majority of moderators and meta-moderators feel differently than you.
Besides, you can just glance past any comment rated as funny. If you want to go on an anti-humor jihad, why don't you flame all the "In Soviet Russia...", and "I don't have a... you insensitive clod" comments? Or perhaps you already have.
Personally, I think these comments are funny. Why? Because it is sad that we are willing to dump so much money into something that is so clearly overpriced. The world has been duped, but no one man is willing to be the one to tell his fiencee that she's not getting the big rock because of DeBeers. Maybe when the girls wake up and smell the rotten diamonds the problem will go away. Meanwhile, we have to crack jokes to console ourselves.
I had to sit through 3 days of meetings listening to a.NET borg monkey feed his PHB the.NET mantra. Every problem we discussed could be solved by.NET.
It got really bad when we were debating whether to go with a Web interface or a traditional windows interface. Monkey-boy says, "No problem. The windows forms can be cut and pasted to ASP forms. It will _only_ take us 3 months to convert the GUI." ONLY 3 months! I told my boss later that I could write the GUI from SCRATCH in JSP in 3 months! My blood pressure is rising just typing this. It took all my energy to stop myself from strangling the guy.
I used 3D Home Architect about 4 years ago to redesign the floor plan to our new house. It's not the greatest program out there, but I was actually delighted that I was able to accomplish my goal in a short amount of time.
The nice thing about it is that the whole program is centered around house design, so it makes many tasks easier than if you used a more generalized, expert tool like AutoCAD.
The one thing I remember having trouble with is getting wall segments to line up just right to account for the thickness of the lumber being used. It just meant you had to double check all your dimensions and tweak things occasionally.
The real kicker for me was that I went through all the trouble of doing this work and then the builder turned around and charged us $1000 for the design changes. All they had to do was transcribe my work into their drafting software. He should have paid me!
I have exactly the opposite reaction. I never finished Q2. After getting my ass kicked countless times early on in the game, I gave up with indifference. I guess after playing Quake 1 to completion, I was expecting something better than an ass-whooping.
Quake3 changed everything for me. It made me WANT to play online. I still play Q3 at least once a week. To be fair, I never tried Q2 online. I've heard that QuakeWorld was better than Q3, in some respects.
Seriously, though, I just spent 3 days in meetings listening to a.Net borg-monkey tell me how.Net solves all our development problems. It was all I could do to stop myself from jumping over the table and strangling him. The worst part is, his PHB believes every word he says. I am no advocate of Winblows, but if a game I like runs on it, then I will suffer the necessary evil.
Anyway, I was just pushing the buttons of you purebreds.:-)
Maybe I'm missing the point, but I thought he was referring to mining of that data for something like spam lists. Nobody is going jump on you for doing a
I use Netscape (on W2K) as my primary browser and email client. The 7.1 integrated junk filtering is AWESOME! (I've turned off spamassassin in my.procmailrc)
Why?
I've been using Netscape since v1.x (started with Mosaic). It's just been a habit. I haven't tried Mozilla, so I don't know how Netscape differs. The main reason I've stuck with them instead of going to Mozilla is the same reason I use RedHat Linux - a reliable, known quantity.
This is a good point that I think was not emphasized enough. Removing kernel calls, especially something as pervasive as accessing file attributes, can have a significant performance advantage.
Kernel calls require context switching, which means significant overhead (relatively speaking) in modern CPUs, when compared to a similar operation without a context switch.
It is the aggregate of all these calls across a single process and across all system processes that will make it a performance benefit.
A real world example showing evidence of this problem is in my CD burning app - Nero (as well as others, I presume). It goes out of it's way to cache small files. Why? Because the overhead of fetching small files is too great, compared to their size. If it didn't cache the small files - especially if there are a lot of them, the CD burner cache would run dry while the burner app loads the small files off the hard disk.
You are correct in pointing out all of the positive aspects of the Amiga filesystem and OS. That is part of why I bought one at the time. There was also cost - I paid ~$2k for a loaded Amiga2000 vs. ~$5k that Apple wanted for a color Mac. I could have bought a loaded Pee Cee, but the software at the time tended to target the lowest common demoninator (i.e. non-loaded).
What I was objecting to was the incredible gronking noise that emitted from the drive every time you accessed an Amiga formatted disc. Using the DOS disc emulation, the drive was much quieter, hence my critique of the Amiga's filesystem.
I presume the (seek) noise was due to a poor data layout algorithm. Maybe I'm way off base. That's just my take on it. Believe me, I hate FAT and NTFS! I just couldn't stand the inefficiency of Amiga floppies.
I wasn't part of that scene, but I fondly remember the FISH DISCS. It was like a comic book collection. I tried getting them all, but some were hard to find.
I acquired some discs at the local Amiga store. I also used to use the Internet. In the late 80's I worked at Wang, which had a net connection. I would:
Find ftp servers hosting Fish images
Download them to a Wang VS
Copy them to a Wang PC
Copy them on a PC floppy
Load them on my Amiga using DOS floppy emulation.
BTW, was AmigaDOS the worst filesystem ever? Using DOS emulation made it obvious how bad the Amiga filesystem was. It actually made FAT look good.
I still contend that if they are going to purchase a computer and want to make a good choice, they must educate themselves.
Extending the auto analogy, if you go to buy a car and the sales-creep convinces you that you need the Corvette because it is faster, then it is up to you to refute his claims and understand that faster isn't necessarily better or useful (how often do you really make use of that speed?).
This is akin to Intel convincing the public that they must upgrade to the latest super-duper-herz computer to surf the web. An educated consumer will understand that his/her 1.5Ghz system is sufficient and that they do not need to get the 3Ghz system.
I guess my point is, if you wish to remain ignorant on a subject, then you are at the mercy of the marketeers who dumb things down to improve sales.
Perhaps we are going in different tangents. Another post put it best - the general public is lazy.
The A/V cable industry is a freakin' scam! I built my home theatre using mostly Monster Cable, despite my shock at the price. I figured I had just laid out $6K for compoents/TV, am I going to go cheap now?
Here's where it gets really good. I was in Best Buy picking up some cables to complete the home theatre. I needed an A/V cable for my kid's Pico game (we're talking Z80 here). A sale clerk leeched onto me as I was grabbing what I needed:
Clerk: You should get better cables.
Me: No thanks, this is just for a cheap game system.
Clerk: Yes, but the cables will wear out over time. The better ones won't wear out.
Me: (flummoxed beyond comprehension)
I wasn't even going to argue the point. Where should I start?
C'mon! You're justifying the stupidity of the average person. I understand your point, but you've taken it to an extreme. Are we supposed to kill ourselves catering to an ignorant public as they empty their drool cups? I guess it will be like "Logan's Run". It will be easier to zap them because they don't know what a "laser" is.
Getting back to the discussion... They don't need to know what Mhz is, in terms of CPU cycles, but they should know that it determines the speed of the core part of a computer. All they really need to know is that bigger is better. Using the auto analogy, most people don't know the true definition of horsepower, but they know that bigger is better.
If you want to jump in the AMD camp, you can argue that Mhz is the wrong measure. Nice try, but Intel isn't going to educate the public on why a 2Ghz P4 is no faster than a 1.5Ghz PIII. Using the auto analogy, people very rarely talk about torque, even though it is just as important as horsepower in determining an engine's power.
Considering the popularity of MP3, I don't see what could be done to make it better. Sure, not everyone knows the details, but most should know that it is a music file. Should we call it "Em Pee Three"? Would that make it better?
Your point is well taken. I can't speak for the "elitist trolls", but I can share their concerns.
There are those of us that know better than to rely on a college class project to read and write critical files over a network connection. As soon as I read the nature of the project, I knew it wasn't for me. I need something that is well tested and likely to be updated/fixed.
The concern lies in those less experienced users that will jump on this thing and then cry when their pr0n collection is all trashed with random bits.
Elitist trolls? Maybe. Seasoned veterans? Maybe. U decide.
The short of it is that nVidia added hard-coded clipping of the scenes for everything that the banchmark doesn't show in its normal run, and which gets exposed as soon as you move the camera away from its regular path.
That is all speculation. Circumstantial evidence. Just because some d00dz at ExtremeTech think this is what happened does not mean it is true.
Slashdot Mirror
If ever there was a reason to stop buying Micro$oft products, this is it. I like capitalism, but when I see the rich pissing away money like this, it just makes me angry. Capitalism fosters productivity and gives monetary rewards in return. Sadly, it goes all out of proportion at some point and we get to watch the overly rich play with our money.
I usually reserve this sort of angst for the self-centered, dim-witted Hollywood crowd. Somehow, something is terribly wrong. These guys are crash testing race cars while the rest of the world starves. No wonder the rest of the world is mad at us.
I have the book "Web Services Essentials", also from O'Reilly. I'm curious how the Nutshell book differs. The review makes it sound quite similar.
At any rate, the Essentials book is a good overview of all the relevant technologies and can help you start to see the "forest". I would actually recommend it for PHBs who have 1/2 a technical clue.
I used to work on debuggers. The hardest bugs to find were bugs in the debugger. Why? You have to debug the debugger.
The absolute hardest bug I ever tracked down was actually a kernel bug. When single-stepping in assembly over a branch-shadow instruction, the application state was corrupted. It only happened on one particular model of RISC chip and only with a certain version of the kernel. Bleh!
Obviously I cannot allieve you of your delusions. I'll just say this. I've been a software engineer for 20+ years. My experience with COM was one of the most painful in my career. Apparently you did not suffer the same fate.
I will say that I have not seen ANY remote call interface that was easy to use. CORBA has it's own issues. In fact, I wrote my own lightweight RPC interface for a debugger I was working on so I could avoid using CORBA.
BTW, please enlighten me on what IDE I should have used?
I never made any comments regarding the benefits of other technologies.
In answer to your question, I was using VStudio 6. Sure, all the COM stuff is great if you play within your own little box. It's when you integrate with other COM objects and things go wrong. It is when you try to decipher the insane implementation behind the "smoke and mirrors" that the true evil of COM rears it's ugly head.
I have always admired Microsoft's COM architecture and the relative simplicity...
Are you high? Did you actually use COM or DCOM, or just admire it from afar? I have used COM and barely survived. I have not coded to DCOM, but I had to to install someone else's DCOM programs. That was torture enough.
That's what meta-moderation is for. Obviously, the majority of moderators and meta-moderators feel differently than you.
... you insensitive clod" comments? Or perhaps you already have.
Besides, you can just glance past any comment rated as funny. If you want to go on an anti-humor jihad, why don't you flame all the "In Soviet Russia...", and "I don't have a
Personally, I think these comments are funny. Why? Because it is sad that we are willing to dump so much money into something that is so clearly overpriced. The world has been duped, but no one man is willing to be the one to tell his fiencee that she's not getting the big rock because of DeBeers. Maybe when the girls wake up and smell the rotten diamonds the problem will go away. Meanwhile, we have to crack jokes to console ourselves.
Feel free. It is not protected by any DRM. :-|
I had to sit through 3 days of meetings listening to a .NET borg monkey feed his PHB the .NET mantra. Every problem we discussed could be solved by .NET.
It got really bad when we were debating whether to go with a Web interface or a traditional windows interface. Monkey-boy says, "No problem. The windows forms can be cut and pasted to ASP forms. It will _only_ take us 3 months to convert the GUI." ONLY 3 months! I told my boss later that I could write the GUI from SCRATCH in JSP in 3 months! My blood pressure is rising just typing this. It took all my energy to stop myself from strangling the guy.
This isn't an article. It's a marketing page.
I used 3D Home Architect about 4 years ago to redesign the floor plan to our new house. It's not the greatest program out there, but I was actually delighted that I was able to accomplish my goal in a short amount of time.
The nice thing about it is that the whole program is centered around house design, so it makes many tasks easier than if you used a more generalized, expert tool like AutoCAD.
The one thing I remember having trouble with is getting wall segments to line up just right to account for the thickness of the lumber being used. It just meant you had to double check all your dimensions and tweak things occasionally.
The real kicker for me was that I went through all the trouble of doing this work and then the builder turned around and charged us $1000 for the design changes. All they had to do was transcribe my work into their drafting software. He should have paid me!
Good luck!
I have exactly the opposite reaction. I never finished Q2. After getting my ass kicked countless times early on in the game, I gave up with indifference. I guess after playing Quake 1 to completion, I was expecting something better than an ass-whooping.
Quake3 changed everything for me. It made me WANT to play online. I still play Q3 at least once a week. To be fair, I never tried Q2 online. I've heard that QuakeWorld was better than Q3, in some respects.
Check out the LOVE DUMP for fun Q3 action
YES!
.Net borg-monkey tell me how .Net solves all our development problems. It was all I could do to stop myself from jumping over the table and strangling him. The worst part is, his PHB believes every word he says. I am no advocate of Winblows, but if a game I like runs on it, then I will suffer the necessary evil.
:-)
Seriously, though, I just spent 3 days in meetings listening to a
Anyway, I was just pushing the buttons of you purebreds.
Am I the only one left on SlashDot who doesn't even run Windows for gaming?
Yes.
I use Netscape (on W2K) as my primary browser and email client. The 7.1 integrated junk filtering is AWESOME! (I've turned off spamassassin in my .procmailrc)
Why?
I've been using Netscape since v1.x (started with Mosaic). It's just been a habit. I haven't tried Mozilla, so I don't know how Netscape differs. The main reason I've stuck with them instead of going to Mozilla is the same reason I use RedHat Linux - a reliable, known quantity.
This is a good point that I think was not emphasized enough. Removing kernel calls, especially something as pervasive as accessing file attributes, can have a significant performance advantage.
Kernel calls require context switching, which means significant overhead (relatively speaking) in modern CPUs, when compared to a similar operation without a context switch.
It is the aggregate of all these calls across a single process and across all system processes that will make it a performance benefit.
A real world example showing evidence of this problem is in my CD burning app - Nero (as well as others, I presume). It goes out of it's way to cache small files. Why? Because the overhead of fetching small files is too great, compared to their size. If it didn't cache the small files - especially if there are a lot of them, the CD burner cache would run dry while the burner app loads the small files off the hard disk.
Did she make you say that?
You are correct in pointing out all of the positive aspects of the Amiga filesystem and OS. That is part of why I bought one at the time. There was also cost - I paid ~$2k for a loaded Amiga2000 vs. ~$5k that Apple wanted for a color Mac. I could have bought a loaded Pee Cee, but the software at the time tended to target the lowest common demoninator (i.e. non-loaded).
What I was objecting to was the incredible gronking noise that emitted from the drive every time you accessed an Amiga formatted disc. Using the DOS disc emulation, the drive was much quieter, hence my critique of the Amiga's filesystem.
I presume the (seek) noise was due to a poor data layout algorithm. Maybe I'm way off base. That's just my take on it. Believe me, I hate FAT and NTFS! I just couldn't stand the inefficiency of Amiga floppies.
I acquired some discs at the local Amiga store. I also used to use the Internet. In the late 80's I worked at Wang, which had a net connection. I would:
- Find ftp servers hosting Fish images
- Download them to a Wang VS
- Copy them to a Wang PC
- Copy them on a PC floppy
- Load them on my Amiga using DOS floppy emulation.
BTW, was AmigaDOS the worst filesystem ever? Using DOS emulation made it obvious how bad the Amiga filesystem was. It actually made FAT look good.Ok, you are right. Calling them stupid is unfair.
I still contend that if they are going to purchase a computer and want to make a good choice, they must educate themselves.
Extending the auto analogy, if you go to buy a car and the sales-creep convinces you that you need the Corvette because it is faster, then it is up to you to refute his claims and understand that faster isn't necessarily better or useful (how often do you really make use of that speed?).
This is akin to Intel convincing the public that they must upgrade to the latest super-duper-herz computer to surf the web. An educated consumer will understand that his/her 1.5Ghz system is sufficient and that they do not need to get the 3Ghz system.
I guess my point is, if you wish to remain ignorant on a subject, then you are at the mercy of the marketeers who dumb things down to improve sales.
Perhaps we are going in different tangents. Another post put it best - the general public is lazy.
The A/V cable industry is a freakin' scam! I built my home theatre using mostly Monster Cable, despite my shock at the price. I figured I had just laid out $6K for compoents/TV, am I going to go cheap now?
Here's where it gets really good. I was in Best Buy picking up some cables to complete the home theatre. I needed an A/V cable for my kid's Pico game (we're talking Z80 here). A sale clerk leeched onto me as I was grabbing what I needed:
Clerk: You should get better cables.
Me: No thanks, this is just for a cheap game system.
Clerk: Yes, but the cables will wear out over time. The better ones won't wear out.
Me: (flummoxed beyond comprehension)
I wasn't even going to argue the point. Where should I start?
C'mon! You're justifying the stupidity of the average person. I understand your point, but you've taken it to an extreme. Are we supposed to kill ourselves catering to an ignorant public as they empty their drool cups? I guess it will be like "Logan's Run". It will be easier to zap them because they don't know what a "laser" is.
Getting back to the discussion... They don't need to know what Mhz is, in terms of CPU cycles, but they should know that it determines the speed of the core part of a computer. All they really need to know is that bigger is better. Using the auto analogy, most people don't know the true definition of horsepower, but they know that bigger is better.
If you want to jump in the AMD camp, you can argue that Mhz is the wrong measure. Nice try, but Intel isn't going to educate the public on why a 2Ghz P4 is no faster than a 1.5Ghz PIII. Using the auto analogy, people very rarely talk about torque, even though it is just as important as horsepower in determining an engine's power.
Considering the popularity of MP3, I don't see what could be done to make it better. Sure, not everyone knows the details, but most should know that it is a music file. Should we call it "Em Pee Three"? Would that make it better?
Sheesh!
Your point is well taken. I can't speak for the "elitist trolls", but I can share their concerns.
There are those of us that know better than to rely on a college class project to read and write critical files over a network connection. As soon as I read the nature of the project, I knew it wasn't for me. I need something that is well tested and likely to be updated/fixed.
The concern lies in those less experienced users that will jump on this thing and then cry when their pr0n collection is all trashed with random bits.
Elitist trolls? Maybe. Seasoned veterans? Maybe. U decide.
Survival instinct in the modern world means justifying your job.
It's the corallary to "Give a boy a hammer, and everything looks like a nail."
Give a lawyer a legal system and everything looks like a lawsuit.
The best measure of success of the legal system would be to have less lawsuits, but that flies in contrast to lawyers justifying their existence.
The short of it is that nVidia added hard-coded clipping of the scenes for everything that the banchmark doesn't show in its normal run, and which gets exposed as soon as you move the camera away from its regular path.
That is all speculation. Circumstantial evidence. Just because some d00dz at ExtremeTech think this is what happened does not mean it is true.