I just add to my collection of tools. I have several boxes and run more than one OS on them. I use the tool that fits the job rather than waste my time trying to make the tool fit the job or making the job fit the tool. I have no OS religion and all OSs are lacking in some area or another.
After you've written the code 10 times to create a button in your GUI, how many more times do you need to do it? Do you *really* learn anything new that 20th time you implemented your button code?
Do you have to memorize every function in a library, including the parameters that they require? Why not have something that can instantly bring up the information for you? You remember the operation and it simply reminds you of the parameters.
Tools like VS take the tedium out and let you quickly get to the meat of your application. Why spend tons of time writing stuff that you've written a thousand times before and is pretty much cookie-cutter anyway? These types of things scream to be automated. Drag-n-drop buttons and the code is made for you is the way to go. Spend your time on the hard parts of your application - the parts that you are *really* writing the application for in the first place.
Use automated tools to build the cookie-cutter parts of the GUI and application and then sit down and write the real meat of the application. It doesn't rot your brain, it relieves/removes the tedium typically found in writing code.
Yeah, but that's stupid reasoning. If you have/pay for cable TV, you are not watching TV for "free". You are only watching it for free if you have an antena and catch it off the airwaves.
The other thing about rationalization is in the definition... you can rationalize anything you want to make it sound reasonable... that's the point of rationalizing your actions... to ease your conscience.
I know a number of people who download lots of movies off the 'net and watch them. I don't know of any who do this to prescreen. They do it because it's "free" mostly and some do it because it makes them feel like they are "in the know" of Internet 'stuff'... they think it makes them geeky in some way.
Yeah... it sounds like telemarketing in reverse. In order to call your friend, you have to call a telemarketer first and they'll patch you through. No. Thanks.
Yeah... I find it extremely interesting that many people say: get away from the Microsoft Monopoly and use a Mac. Microsoft just controls maybe 1/2 the equation for a Windows machine (multitudes of 3rd party software that are in no way controlled by Microsoft). Apple controls not only the Mac but they also try to dictate how you can use the Mac (it isn't "Think Different", it's "Think how we tell you to think").
Although most sites I've worked at ban them to keep their product flexible for moving between DB applications.
Until you realize that each RDBMS has a different dialect of SQL and may require entirely different SQL code for optimization or syntactical reasons. You have to put the different SQL somewhere... whether you put it into your code (RDBMS specific query classes that are in-effect stored procedure libraries in application code form) or into stored procedures (your application opens up a new ODBC class at the start depending on configuration and chugs along), it has to be done somewhere. Stored procedures can sometimes be a performance gain over embedded SQL, as well.
I've done it both ways a number of times and neither one is *always* the solution. Sometimes one is better than the other. Unless you are also targeting MySQL in which you must embed your queries even if that's not the best way... and is especially a pain if you've already developed using stored procedures. For an application relying on a DB, you may tend to architect it so that the least-common-denominator is well taken care of so that you can move it around easy. If MySQL is in your list to support, well, that is your least-common-denominator as far as stored procedures are concerned.
Extra Deep Out of Order Asynchronous Processor Developed
I read the article, the only thing "new" was that it delivers a "block" of instructions at a time that is a bit bigger than current CPUs. They take this and combine it with standard asynchronous logic design and call it by a silly acronym.
On a side note... I bet a page fault is pretty exciting;)
A product which works on its own doesn't need a spec. It just needs to work.
How do you know *how* it is supposed to work without at least an informal spec? And after you've made it, how do you know what you build *does* work?
You may not type up a formal Specification for the product, but you surely have gone through an informal spec in your head (requirements) to even start the thing. You know you want to write a program that does X. That's the beginning of your spec. Then, you understand that there are several parameters to doing X so you have to account for that. In the end, you judge whether your program successfully does task X against what you set out to do. Whether that is written or all in your head, those are specs.
The hard part is that when you have more than one person writing a product, you both/all have to agree on what the product has to do. You can confirm this orally or in a written document - both are specs. If you think you are writing a program to do X one way but the others think you are doing X in different ways, or even worse, they think you are doing Y, then you've got a problem. Ever hear of the expression "You've got to all be on the same page" or "You've all got to be reading from the same page"? Those "pages" are Specs.
I think what is being said by Linus is that he doesn't like specs that are rigidly defined at the start and aren't flexible over time as you work through the problem. Some of those are typically called "Standards", which most would agree are "good things" - just look at the stuff recently in the headlines about "open document standards".
Standards and specs, as other posters have said, are contracts between the parties involved to define something that expected to be done and a set of criteria to measure against when the product is finished. Linus has the luxury of not having to agree to specs and delivering whatever he wants. Few of us are so lucky:)
My first "real" Internet connection was in the early 80s at a university that was one of the first 200 sites that *existed* on the Internet (including govt research and military sites).
Yeah... you forget "veto power" though. A UN organization would never be allowed to do something like that because one or more of the veto powers can just keep it completely lummoxed and ineffectual.
No, the UN isn't but plenty of "single countries" have lots of power (called "Veto Power") in the UN. China is one of those countries that even if every other attendee of the UN voted "yes" to something, China could say "no" and whatever it was that was voted on gets "no" as the end result and *that* is the issue. Of course, the US, UK, France, and Russia are also veto powers.
Personally I think the internet is broke. back in the day the internet was free. Napster was legal. A dial-up connection got you anywhere. Email was important. I think the US did break it. Though, I believe the UN can do nothing to fix it.
The Internet was never "free" in either sense of the word. You may have had an Internet connection but someone paid for it. In my case, the university I attended paid for the connection and we got use of it in exchange for going to school there.
Napster was never declared "legal". It simply wasn't noticed and when it was, some people had problems with it. Just like if you steal a candybar from a store and never get caught, does that mean you didn't break the law?
A dialup connection can still get you anywhere if you have the right service provider.
Email is important, still. Just like anything else, there's always someone out there who will piss in the pool - spammers looking to make a quick buck or virus writers who do it for the hell of it.
Do you have any specific examples of where the US broke the Internet?
I'm entirely convinced that the UN can't even fix itself, which it needs to do badly before worring about taking on more responsibility (for anything).
The FSF (well, RMS) has stated in the past that Free is more important than Good.
And this is where he is wrong. Bad software makes me waste time, which can never be regained. Bad software makes me waste my life and fills me with negative emotions. I'd much rather pay for something that makes my life easier and makes my work easier (i.e. Good Software) than get a piece of crap for free that makes me waste the one thing that no one can give back to me.
My first concern is that once given away, a very poor family might look towards selling the laptop on the black market for food, clothing, etc.
Priorities? Why are you giving laptops to people who have no food? Food is more important than a laptop in that a corpse cannot operate a laptop even with the nifty handle crank for when there's no electricity. Otherwise, *anything* you give them that isn't food is traded for food. It's only common sense.
I guess the next thing folks will be saying is "let them eat cake".
Many of the FOSS operating systems have a memory requirement sitting between 64 and 128mb of RAM, and that is running X Windows. Granted, they may not be the fastest, but at least they run.
My "full featured" Linux installations (read: desktop/workstation configurations complete with a "standard" window manager) are intollerable with anything less than 256M of memory. Personally, I refuse to use a machine with less than 512M in such a configuration.
Yes, it is an interface standard. Open protocols are defined so that different implementations of the protocol can still interact with each other. There's no such requirement for different MPI implementations (in fact, very few MPI implementations will interact with any other MPI implementation). It's just an interface definition so that you can write portable code. For example, I can write a program using MPI on my cluster of x86s and then recompile on a Cray for better performance.
MPI means Message Passing Interface. MPI1.x has no provisions for forking/joining/threading or anything like that. It's mostly sends/receives some collective operations (broadcast, scatter, gather, etc), and communictor building functions. MPI-2 added support for threading (among other things).
MPI is explicit in that you will explicitly call an MPI library function when you want to send/receive data between parallel processes.
OMP is more about threading, which isn't the same thing as message passing.
If you are making it just to play with and just as a general speed bump, I'd suggest going Athlon64 and have fun. If, for some reason, you don't like 64-bit (some apps/drivers don't work right) you can always install the 32-bit version of the OS (any of them) with no penalties. I personally wouldn't use Gentoo but that's a whole 'nother topic:)
Slashdot Mirror
[quote] but when it is a review of a movie with some meaning/impact to society, then it may be news.[/quote]
Can you name one movie that would meet your qualifications for being "news"?
I just add to my collection of tools. I have several boxes and run more than one OS on them. I use the tool that fits the job rather than waste my time trying to make the tool fit the job or making the job fit the tool. I have no OS religion and all OSs are lacking in some area or another.
Check out the power usage for the system and cooling.... 10MW of power (out of the 45MW the place has dedicated...)
After you've written the code 10 times to create a button in your GUI, how many more times do you need to do it? Do you *really* learn anything new that 20th time you implemented your button code?
Do you have to memorize every function in a library, including the parameters that they require? Why not have something that can instantly bring up the information for you? You remember the operation and it simply reminds you of the parameters.
Tools like VS take the tedium out and let you quickly get to the meat of your application. Why spend tons of time writing stuff that you've written a thousand times before and is pretty much cookie-cutter anyway? These types of things scream to be automated. Drag-n-drop buttons and the code is made for you is the way to go. Spend your time on the hard parts of your application - the parts that you are *really* writing the application for in the first place.
Use automated tools to build the cookie-cutter parts of the GUI and application and then sit down and write the real meat of the application. It doesn't rot your brain, it relieves/removes the tedium typically found in writing code.
Yeah, but that's stupid reasoning. If you have/pay for cable TV, you are not watching TV for "free". You are only watching it for free if you have an antena and catch it off the airwaves.
The other thing about rationalization is in the definition... you can rationalize anything you want to make it sound reasonable... that's the point of rationalizing your actions... to ease your conscience.
I know a number of people who download lots of movies off the 'net and watch them. I don't know of any who do this to prescreen. They do it because it's "free" mostly and some do it because it makes them feel like they are "in the know" of Internet 'stuff'... they think it makes them geeky in some way.
Yeah... it sounds like telemarketing in reverse. In order to call your friend, you have to call a telemarketer first and they'll patch you through. No. Thanks.
Maybe we can build Wonder Woman's invisible plane now!
I hope James Doohan knew about this stuff in the works.
Yeah... I find it extremely interesting that many people say: get away from the Microsoft Monopoly and use a Mac. Microsoft just controls maybe 1/2 the equation for a Windows machine (multitudes of 3rd party software that are in no way controlled by Microsoft). Apple controls not only the Mac but they also try to dictate how you can use the Mac (it isn't "Think Different", it's "Think how we tell you to think").
Although most sites I've worked at ban them to keep their product flexible for moving between DB applications.
Until you realize that each RDBMS has a different dialect of SQL and may require entirely different SQL code for optimization or syntactical reasons. You have to put the different SQL somewhere... whether you put it into your code (RDBMS specific query classes that are in-effect stored procedure libraries in application code form) or into stored procedures (your application opens up a new ODBC class at the start depending on configuration and chugs along), it has to be done somewhere. Stored procedures can sometimes be a performance gain over embedded SQL, as well.
I've done it both ways a number of times and neither one is *always* the solution. Sometimes one is better than the other. Unless you are also targeting MySQL in which you must embed your queries even if that's not the best way... and is especially a pain if you've already developed using stored procedures. For an application relying on a DB, you may tend to architect it so that the least-common-denominator is well taken care of so that you can move it around easy. If MySQL is in your list to support, well, that is your least-common-denominator as far as stored procedures are concerned.
Summary of article:
;)
Extra Deep Out of Order Asynchronous Processor Developed
I read the article, the only thing "new" was that it delivers a "block" of instructions at a time that is a bit bigger than current CPUs. They take this and combine it with standard asynchronous logic design and call it by a silly acronym.
On a side note... I bet a page fault is pretty exciting
A product which works on its own doesn't need a spec. It just needs to work.
:)
How do you know *how* it is supposed to work without at least an informal spec? And after you've made it, how do you know what you build *does* work?
You may not type up a formal Specification for the product, but you surely have gone through an informal spec in your head (requirements) to even start the thing. You know you want to write a program that does X. That's the beginning of your spec. Then, you understand that there are several parameters to doing X so you have to account for that. In the end, you judge whether your program successfully does task X against what you set out to do. Whether that is written or all in your head, those are specs.
The hard part is that when you have more than one person writing a product, you both/all have to agree on what the product has to do. You can confirm this orally or in a written document - both are specs. If you think you are writing a program to do X one way but the others think you are doing X in different ways, or even worse, they think you are doing Y, then you've got a problem. Ever hear of the expression "You've got to all be on the same page" or "You've all got to be reading from the same page"? Those "pages" are Specs.
I think what is being said by Linus is that he doesn't like specs that are rigidly defined at the start and aren't flexible over time as you work through the problem. Some of those are typically called "Standards", which most would agree are "good things" - just look at the stuff recently in the headlines about "open document standards".
Standards and specs, as other posters have said, are contracts between the parties involved to define something that expected to be done and a set of criteria to measure against when the product is finished. Linus has the luxury of not having to agree to specs and delivering whatever he wants. Few of us are so lucky
ISTR that MS tried doing immediate free and it broke some programs that depend on the memory still being sround after being freed,
Sounds like those programs were broke from the start.
Our first connection in the early 90's
My first "real" Internet connection was in the early 80s at a university that was one of the first 200 sites that *existed* on the Internet (including govt research and military sites).
Yeah... you forget "veto power" though. A UN organization would never be allowed to do something like that because one or more of the veto powers can just keep it completely lummoxed and ineffectual.
No, the UN isn't but plenty of "single countries" have lots of power (called "Veto Power") in the UN. China is one of those countries that even if every other attendee of the UN voted "yes" to something, China could say "no" and whatever it was that was voted on gets "no" as the end result and *that* is the issue. Of course, the US, UK, France, and Russia are also veto powers.
Personally I think the internet is broke. back in the day the internet was free. Napster was legal. A dial-up connection got you anywhere. Email was important. I think the US did break it. Though, I believe the UN can do nothing to fix it.
The Internet was never "free" in either sense of the word. You may have had an Internet connection but someone paid for it. In my case, the university I attended paid for the connection and we got use of it in exchange for going to school there.
Napster was never declared "legal". It simply wasn't noticed and when it was, some people had problems with it. Just like if you steal a candybar from a store and never get caught, does that mean you didn't break the law?
A dialup connection can still get you anywhere if you have the right service provider.
Email is important, still. Just like anything else, there's always someone out there who will piss in the pool - spammers looking to make a quick buck or virus writers who do it for the hell of it.
Do you have any specific examples of where the US broke the Internet?
I'm entirely convinced that the UN can't even fix itself, which it needs to do badly before worring about taking on more responsibility (for anything).
The FSF (well, RMS) has stated in the past that Free is more important than Good.
And this is where he is wrong. Bad software makes me waste time, which can never be regained. Bad software makes me waste my life and fills me with negative emotions. I'd much rather pay for something that makes my life easier and makes my work easier (i.e. Good Software) than get a piece of crap for free that makes me waste the one thing that no one can give back to me.
My first concern is that once given away, a very poor family might look towards selling the laptop on the black market for food, clothing, etc.
Priorities? Why are you giving laptops to people who have no food? Food is more important than a laptop in that a corpse cannot operate a laptop even with the nifty handle crank for when there's no electricity. Otherwise, *anything* you give them that isn't food is traded for food. It's only common sense.
I guess the next thing folks will be saying is "let them eat cake".
Many of the FOSS operating systems have a memory requirement sitting between 64 and 128mb of RAM, and that is running X Windows. Granted, they may not be the fastest, but at least they run.
My "full featured" Linux installations (read: desktop/workstation configurations complete with a "standard" window manager) are intollerable with anything less than 256M of memory. Personally, I refuse to use a machine with less than 512M in such a configuration.
Yes, it is an interface standard. Open protocols are defined so that different implementations of the protocol can still interact with each other. There's no such requirement for different MPI implementations (in fact, very few MPI implementations will interact with any other MPI implementation). It's just an interface definition so that you can write portable code. For example, I can write a program using MPI on my cluster of x86s and then recompile on a Cray for better performance.
MPI means Message Passing Interface. MPI1.x has no provisions for forking/joining/threading or anything like that. It's mostly sends/receives some collective operations (broadcast, scatter, gather, etc), and communictor building functions. MPI-2 added support for threading (among other things).
MPI is explicit in that you will explicitly call an MPI library function when you want to send/receive data between parallel processes.
OMP is more about threading, which isn't the same thing as message passing.
Most /. readers already had to worry about making themselves go blind... now they have to worry about going deaf as well????
Man I hate autoconf... in all ways for all things.
I do the same except I hate underscores so I have a header file of typedefs that define:
...
int8
uint8
int64
uint64
and pretty much do the same as you describe.
If you are making it just to play with and just as a general speed bump, I'd suggest going Athlon64 and have fun. If, for some reason, you don't like 64-bit (some apps/drivers don't work right) you can always install the 32-bit version of the OS (any of them) with no penalties. I personally wouldn't use Gentoo but that's a whole 'nother topic :)