We use it fairly often to express things such as cardinalities in problems and the like, but we pretty much limit it to diagramming so we can better understand how some things interact. I've never used it to automagically generate code.
Relying on the user is the path to doom. Sure, it's the user's fault when he/she does something like this but it's still *bad*. The question is... why is Safari downloading things it shouldn't be downloading on *any* OS (OSX or Windows) and putting them *anywhere*, where they are a timebomb waiting to happen when some user clicks on it and not knows what it is (or even giving the files an enticing name like 'latest-WoW-trailer-from-next-expansion-great-video'? (answer: It shouldn't be.)
Honestly, if the bug is as described (and it looks like it is from other reports), then it is a *good* reason to shun Safari.... it doesn't matter who is saying it. Sometimes, good information *is* given by people you don't like. If you refuse to use good information because you don't like the messenger who delivered it, it only makes you a fool, not cool.
If this thing runs Ubuntu well, I'll probably get one. It should make a very nice little server type machine... especially if you can open it up and put a larger HDD in it.
Re:I hate discovering stuff before the papers...
on
Fasting May Fix Jet Lag
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Not just this, but your body does things on a schedule (basically, you eat, it takes time to digest and time to get back to being hungry again... that's fairly consistent). If you've ever owned pets, dogs particularly, you know that they know when feeding time is even though they can't read clocks! The trick to overcoming jetlag is to do things to shift your body's schedule to match your new surroundings. I've done this many times by staying awake (don't sleep on the plane) so that I can go to sleep at my 'normal' time in the new place from just being so tired. You also do this by eating your meals according to the local clock, even if you aren't necessarily hungry, just eat a little to start tricking your body into the new time zone.
Using these tricks (and others) I can usually be integrated into my new time zone within 48 hours. It's worked going to Europe and to Australia. Once, I had a rough time in Moscow but that was because it was winter and the (lack of) sun in the sky in the mornings and afternoons meant I couldn't get used to the daylight schedule as easy.
I would be very hesitant to buy things from Roku with the track record they have established. If the "Netflix player" doesn't take off, you might be the next owner of an abandoned product.
Yeah, but for $100 it's in, at least my, buy and throw away price range. I've already ordered it and I hope it works pretty good. Hopefully Netflix will get even more content for it going. If not, well, it was $100 and it might be interesting to tear open and look around a bit.
Yup... my old EQ guild is still going strong and we founded it within a couple weeks of being able to in the game. It's also spawned guilds in most of the other MMOs out there as well (WoW, LotR, EQ2, Eve, etc.)
The real point is a shot across the bow of the embedded systems makers. Atom isn't ready to replace ARM and the like, but it is nicely positioned for very small, very light, very portable laptops with long battery life, for example. Atom2 (or whatever it will be) will probably be more in line for small devices would be my guess.
For me, I wish Atom was out a lot sooner (with a good chipset). My Linux server died and I had to replace it. I definitely would have bought an Atom board for it since all it does is sit in a corner serving up files over gbe about 99% of the time. I thought about getting a C7 and such but folks who have used those didn't convince me that it was a good choice... the performance just wasn't there and several said that the boards that were popular either didn't have gbe or couldn't keep it saturated anyway.
That depends highly on what you are doing. Even "back in the day" (over 10 years ago) we saw sustained 9MiB to 10MiB sustained transfers for very large transfers (multiple GiB data transfer) using standard BSD sockets programmatically. If you use some other protocols on top of TCP/IP that's more chatty, you'll see lower rates.
I finally installed Ubuntu. The package manager is nice... but browsing through the 100s of packages there named:
aba aba-dev aba-dbg aca aca-dev aca-dbg aca-py-db ada ada-multi ada-rro
and most of the descriptions might as well have been written in Wookie for as much as my mom would understand. Even search rarely returns a single, or even small number of results. Try searching for "word processor" (just did it on Ubuntu 8.04) returns 41 entries... some of which are:
etc. My mom's first question would be "do I have to install all of those things?" and then when I said "no", she'd ask "which ones should I install, then? and why did it tell me all these things?" What's worse, for example, is that the documentation for some of these things is installed as seperate packages and not by default with the base package. IMO, it'd be better to assume documentation, for example, should be installed by default unless the user opts out, but that's not the way that the various dev groups work. They assume you want the minimal of everything unless you explicitly ask for it to be installed. And do the various package managers even have a way of asking you what parts you want installed before installing?
Most Windows users are used to running a single install per product and being given options as to what's installed related to that (dev libraries, documentation, etc.), not seeing each individual option listed among every other option for all other packages as well. It's just too much noise for someone who can't make out what all the acronyms are for. Sure, the package manager will indicate all the other required packages that will need to be installed in addition, but even that is noise, especially when you don't know which one to pick from the start, *especially* when the results of a search present you with so many things, and few of them being what you really searched for.
Linux developers assume that the end-user is a programmer/IT type person and that eventually, tools and such will be 'dumbed down' enough for Joe Six Pack (but not by them, that's not fun or interesting... but it's OSS so if you want that, do it yourself or eventually, someone may be interested in doing that and will do it... it's OSS after all and you have the source). Windows and OSX seem to have started at the other end of the spectrum (which is what probably annoys many geeks), assuming the user is Joe Six Pack and then working from there towards the other end of the spectrum.
I understand that you may want to keep them from doing queries with 19 table joins (yes, I've seen that before) and such, giving your database machines performance issues but remember, it's their data... the next thing they may be asking you for is complete backups/dumps of the data (so they can use machines/services where they can do their queries), but that may be OK for you, too.
Very hard to say. If it were a specific project (the release of the code) for a specific goal, then possibly. However, once a project is done, rarely will you find the money/time to revisit past code just to clean it up or merge source trees or whatever.
For example, if there was a business decision to release the code to the public but it had to look beautiful, then it might warrant being a 'real' project and be funded... but it would most likely have to have some gain associated with it (advertising, good-will, whatever) for the company... basically, some way for the company to profit from it.
If you're just wanting to do a general cleanup, you probably won't have time/money allocated for that... particularly when you may impact the stability of the codebase and/or regress or introduce new bugs (which will cost more money to fix).
So yeah, most of the time, you have to have to write it and you can change it when you have to fix a bug or add new features or something, otherwise, what's in the source doesn't change. However, where I work now, we are encouraged to refactor and such when we see good opportunity to do so. We also have some ATPs that we run to detect regression and bug introduction, to keep those issues at a minimum when possible.
I did too! But then I read it again as he was "gushing over the chubby", and I was line "awww.. I don't give a flip or want know about that", and then I read it again and was all like, "wtf is a chumby", so I clicked on the link.
That was pretty much my experience... when you finally got the Ada program to compile, it worked... it just sometimes took a lot of work to get it to compile;) Back then, you had to be explicit in everything you wanted to do, particularly type conversion... of course, you could get around that by just using everything the same type, but if you started out typing everything, if you got your program to compile, you knew that you were always calling the right functions and/or always doing the typecasts you needed to do.
Another reason is that the development groups are typically handed requirements for what they are supposed to do, rather than the developers sitting around dreaming up what requirements that they'd like to see (although, I'm sure devs at Microsoft can send suggestions back up the tree). The difference is that you have (at least) two different entities working on this so there is some degree of seperation in the problem. Instead of one, who can get very tied up and emotionally attached to some requirement that he/she dreamed up.
It *is* a little colder, perhaps less passionate, but it is much more controlled. This OSS project isn't the first where strong personalities with religious calibre emotional attachment to some feature or another has caused lots of 'heated discussion' (check out the Linux kernel discussions sometime - but there, there is one person who will/can trump the discussion).
"Sure," acknowledged David. "I think that if you look at any kind of computational problem that has a lot of parallelism and a lot of data, the GPU is an architecture that is better suited than that. It's possible that you could make the CPUs more GPU-like, but then you run the risk of them being less good at what they're good at now - that's one of the challenges ahead [for the CPU guys].
Yeah... so all you have to do is turn every problem into one that GPUs are good at... lots of parallelism and lots of data... but not all problems are like that (heck, the majority of problems aren't like that). GPU stream processors do fairly simple jobs compared to what a (general purpose) CPU does *and* what they do is extremely parallel (embarassingly parallel). All that OOOE, branch prediction, memory management, and all those other features take silicon to make fast. That's the reason general purpose CPUs have few cores per die.
Stream processors are very simple in comparison and don't require nearly as much silicon to implement, which is why we have over 100 of them on some chips. When you add the complexity that the general purpose CPU has to deal with to the GPU processors, you will eventually be in the same boat.
Or maybe perhaps NVIDIA has been showing their graphics cards running a database engine? or even an OS as we are used to using (memory protection, etc.) What about compiling source code?
The future is asymmetric cores on a single die. The DSPs and Cell are early forms of this but still too hard to deal with. OS kernels and compilers have to become smarter: the OS knows which cores can do what and the compiler can tell what kinds of things a program expects to do and puts that into the executable, the OS matchs the executable with the cores that best satisfy what the program needs (closest minimal match), perhaps even dynamically as different sections of a program are 'marked' by the compiler to let an OS know when to schedule the process for a different type of core.
Today, they are explicitly programmed... the 'main' CPU makes library calls, basically, that use the other cores to do stuff, more like coprocessors. All this stuff will eventually need to be done automatically.
Does this have a corresponding disadvangage of "more reliance on Apple"? Seriously... if an advantage of switching is less reliance on a single source, then more reliance on a different single source must be a disadvantage (regardless of who that single source is). This is one obvious place where OSS (and Linux) has an advantage.
It's Global Warming, er... Extreme Environmental Change (or whatever it is being called now)... everything else seems to be blamed on it, I don't see why this can't be blamed on it as well.
It's prequel was pretty good, too. But yeah, the sequels kind of blow.
Re:Ada was designed for multiple CPUs
on
The Return of Ada
·
· Score: 1
I agree with you somewhat.
However, in practice, there are basically two threading/synchronization libraries/models... POSIX and Windows. The advantage of POSIX threads is that it is supported on just about everything, even where Ada doesn't exist (some embedded systems) and has interfaces in many languages, not just one, so it's API is similar across many languages/platforms - learn it once and use it in your favorite language(s), even as your project changes and the platform/languages change.
Then there's Windows threading (and even some POSIX support) that's on... well... Windows platforms.
Sure, my coworkers who went to a tech school get to brag about how intensive their CS coursework was but I've learned what they know (if not more) a couple years into my job.
So you're saying that you went to classes and all that for some years and then had to spend a couple more years after that to be where they were after their college years?
I went to a school more known for tech and had a blast... the challenge was the fun part and all the stress meant that blowing the stress off each weekend was even more fun (and sometimes blowing off the stress made for some quite memorable times). Without the challenge and the stress, I probably would have been bored, even with parties and all that.
Also, if experiences are similar to yours, I'd rather cram more into the 4 or 5 years at a tech school than that plus a couple/few more years after. I think most geeks would enjoy the challenge more. If you don't think you'd enjoy the challenge, then I'd question your geekiness and you'd definitely be at a disadvantage if you and a "real" geek are going up for the same job, IMO.;)
Slashdot Mirror
We use it fairly often to express things such as cardinalities in problems and the like, but we pretty much limit it to diagramming so we can better understand how some things interact. I've never used it to automagically generate code.
Relying on the user is the path to doom. Sure, it's the user's fault when he/she does something like this but it's still *bad*. The question is... why is Safari downloading things it shouldn't be downloading on *any* OS (OSX or Windows) and putting them *anywhere*, where they are a timebomb waiting to happen when some user clicks on it and not knows what it is (or even giving the files an enticing name like 'latest-WoW-trailer-from-next-expansion-great-video'? (answer: It shouldn't be.)
Honestly, if the bug is as described (and it looks like it is from other reports), then it is a *good* reason to shun Safari.... it doesn't matter who is saying it. Sometimes, good information *is* given by people you don't like. If you refuse to use good information because you don't like the messenger who delivered it, it only makes you a fool, not cool.
If this thing runs Ubuntu well, I'll probably get one. It should make a very nice little server type machine... especially if you can open it up and put a larger HDD in it.
Not just this, but your body does things on a schedule (basically, you eat, it takes time to digest and time to get back to being hungry again... that's fairly consistent). If you've ever owned pets, dogs particularly, you know that they know when feeding time is even though they can't read clocks! The trick to overcoming jetlag is to do things to shift your body's schedule to match your new surroundings. I've done this many times by staying awake (don't sleep on the plane) so that I can go to sleep at my 'normal' time in the new place from just being so tired. You also do this by eating your meals according to the local clock, even if you aren't necessarily hungry, just eat a little to start tricking your body into the new time zone.
Using these tricks (and others) I can usually be integrated into my new time zone within 48 hours. It's worked going to Europe and to Australia. Once, I had a rough time in Moscow but that was because it was winter and the (lack of) sun in the sky in the mornings and afternoons meant I couldn't get used to the daylight schedule as easy.
Isn't Las Vegas.... warm? Seems like it will require lots of cooling.
Yeah, but for $100 it's in, at least my, buy and throw away price range. I've already ordered it and I hope it works pretty good. Hopefully Netflix will get even more content for it going. If not, well, it was $100 and it might be interesting to tear open and look around a bit.
Gaming has always been nerdy.
Yup... my old EQ guild is still going strong and we founded it within a couple weeks of being able to in the game. It's also spawned guilds in most of the other MMOs out there as well (WoW, LotR, EQ2, Eve, etc.)
The real point is a shot across the bow of the embedded systems makers. Atom isn't ready to replace ARM and the like, but it is nicely positioned for very small, very light, very portable laptops with long battery life, for example. Atom2 (or whatever it will be) will probably be more in line for small devices would be my guess.
For me, I wish Atom was out a lot sooner (with a good chipset). My Linux server died and I had to replace it. I definitely would have bought an Atom board for it since all it does is sit in a corner serving up files over gbe about 99% of the time. I thought about getting a C7 and such but folks who have used those didn't convince me that it was a good choice... the performance just wasn't there and several said that the boards that were popular either didn't have gbe or couldn't keep it saturated anyway.
That depends highly on what you are doing. Even "back in the day" (over 10 years ago) we saw sustained 9MiB to 10MiB sustained transfers for very large transfers (multiple GiB data transfer) using standard BSD sockets programmatically. If you use some other protocols on top of TCP/IP that's more chatty, you'll see lower rates.
I finally installed Ubuntu. The package manager is nice... but browsing through the 100s of packages there named:
aba
aba-dev
aba-dbg
aca
aca-dev
aca-dbg
aca-py-db
ada
ada-multi
ada-rro
and most of the descriptions might as well have been written in Wookie for as much as my mom would understand. Even search rarely returns a single, or even small number of results. Try searching for "word processor" (just did it on Ubuntu 8.04) returns 41 entries... some of which are:
lhs2tex
koffice
koffice-kde
kword
kword-data
libwps-0.1.1
libwps-dev
libwps-doc
libwps-tools
etc. My mom's first question would be "do I have to install all of those things?" and then when I said "no", she'd ask "which ones should I install, then? and why did it tell me all these things?" What's worse, for example, is that the documentation for some of these things is installed as seperate packages and not by default with the base package. IMO, it'd be better to assume documentation, for example, should be installed by default unless the user opts out, but that's not the way that the various dev groups work. They assume you want the minimal of everything unless you explicitly ask for it to be installed. And do the various package managers even have a way of asking you what parts you want installed before installing?
Most Windows users are used to running a single install per product and being given options as to what's installed related to that (dev libraries, documentation, etc.), not seeing each individual option listed among every other option for all other packages as well. It's just too much noise for someone who can't make out what all the acronyms are for. Sure, the package manager will indicate all the other required packages that will need to be installed in addition, but even that is noise, especially when you don't know which one to pick from the start, *especially* when the results of a search present you with so many things, and few of them being what you really searched for.
Linux developers assume that the end-user is a programmer/IT type person and that eventually, tools and such will be 'dumbed down' enough for Joe Six Pack (but not by them, that's not fun or interesting... but it's OSS so if you want that, do it yourself or eventually, someone may be interested in doing that and will do it... it's OSS after all and you have the source). Windows and OSX seem to have started at the other end of the spectrum (which is what probably annoys many geeks), assuming the user is Joe Six Pack and then working from there towards the other end of the spectrum.
I understand that you may want to keep them from doing queries with 19 table joins (yes, I've seen that before) and such, giving your database machines performance issues but remember, it's their data... the next thing they may be asking you for is complete backups/dumps of the data (so they can use machines/services where they can do their queries), but that may be OK for you, too.
Very hard to say. If it were a specific project (the release of the code) for a specific goal, then possibly. However, once a project is done, rarely will you find the money/time to revisit past code just to clean it up or merge source trees or whatever.
For example, if there was a business decision to release the code to the public but it had to look beautiful, then it might warrant being a 'real' project and be funded... but it would most likely have to have some gain associated with it (advertising, good-will, whatever) for the company... basically, some way for the company to profit from it.
If you're just wanting to do a general cleanup, you probably won't have time/money allocated for that... particularly when you may impact the stability of the codebase and/or regress or introduce new bugs (which will cost more money to fix).
So yeah, most of the time, you have to have to write it and you can change it when you have to fix a bug or add new features or something, otherwise, what's in the source doesn't change. However, where I work now, we are encouraged to refactor and such when we see good opportunity to do so. We also have some ATPs that we run to detect regression and bug introduction, to keep those issues at a minimum when possible.
Unfortunately, since the image is stored in a lossy encoding, all the information is either lost or has changed to mean something slightly different ;)
Also, some of those dots are significant, for sure.
I did too! But then I read it again as he was "gushing over the chubby", and I was line "awww.. I don't give a flip or want know about that", and then I read it again and was all like, "wtf is a chumby", so I clicked on the link.
That was pretty much my experience... when you finally got the Ada program to compile, it worked... it just sometimes took a lot of work to get it to compile ;) Back then, you had to be explicit in everything you wanted to do, particularly type conversion... of course, you could get around that by just using everything the same type, but if you started out typing everything, if you got your program to compile, you knew that you were always calling the right functions and/or always doing the typecasts you needed to do.
I'd like to see our local Apple store deal with enterprise level service from 10 or 20 of the larger companies around here...
Another reason is that the development groups are typically handed requirements for what they are supposed to do, rather than the developers sitting around dreaming up what requirements that they'd like to see (although, I'm sure devs at Microsoft can send suggestions back up the tree). The difference is that you have (at least) two different entities working on this so there is some degree of seperation in the problem. Instead of one, who can get very tied up and emotionally attached to some requirement that he/she dreamed up.
It *is* a little colder, perhaps less passionate, but it is much more controlled. This OSS project isn't the first where strong personalities with religious calibre emotional attachment to some feature or another has caused lots of 'heated discussion' (check out the Linux kernel discussions sometime - but there, there is one person who will/can trump the discussion).
Yeah... so all you have to do is turn every problem into one that GPUs are good at... lots of parallelism and lots of data... but not all problems are like that (heck, the majority of problems aren't like that). GPU stream processors do fairly simple jobs compared to what a (general purpose) CPU does *and* what they do is extremely parallel (embarassingly parallel). All that OOOE, branch prediction, memory management, and all those other features take silicon to make fast. That's the reason general purpose CPUs have few cores per die.
Stream processors are very simple in comparison and don't require nearly as much silicon to implement, which is why we have over 100 of them on some chips. When you add the complexity that the general purpose CPU has to deal with to the GPU processors, you will eventually be in the same boat.
Or maybe perhaps NVIDIA has been showing their graphics cards running a database engine? or even an OS as we are used to using (memory protection, etc.) What about compiling source code?
The future is asymmetric cores on a single die. The DSPs and Cell are early forms of this but still too hard to deal with. OS kernels and compilers have to become smarter: the OS knows which cores can do what and the compiler can tell what kinds of things a program expects to do and puts that into the executable, the OS matchs the executable with the cores that best satisfy what the program needs (closest minimal match), perhaps even dynamically as different sections of a program are 'marked' by the compiler to let an OS know when to schedule the process for a different type of core.
Today, they are explicitly programmed... the 'main' CPU makes library calls, basically, that use the other cores to do stuff, more like coprocessors. All this stuff will eventually need to be done automatically.
Does this have a corresponding disadvangage of "more reliance on Apple"? Seriously... if an advantage of switching is less reliance on a single source, then more reliance on a different single source must be a disadvantage (regardless of who that single source is). This is one obvious place where OSS (and Linux) has an advantage.
It's Global Warming, er... Extreme Environmental Change (or whatever it is being called now)... everything else seems to be blamed on it, I don't see why this can't be blamed on it as well.
It's prequel was pretty good, too. But yeah, the sequels kind of blow.
I agree with you somewhat.
However, in practice, there are basically two threading/synchronization libraries/models... POSIX and Windows. The advantage of POSIX threads is that it is supported on just about everything, even where Ada doesn't exist (some embedded systems) and has interfaces in many languages, not just one, so it's API is similar across many languages/platforms - learn it once and use it in your favorite language(s), even as your project changes and the platform/languages change.
Then there's Windows threading (and even some POSIX support) that's on... well... Windows platforms.
So you're saying that you went to classes and all that for some years and then had to spend a couple more years after that to be where they were after their college years?
I went to a school more known for tech and had a blast... the challenge was the fun part and all the stress meant that blowing the stress off each weekend was even more fun (and sometimes blowing off the stress made for some quite memorable times). Without the challenge and the stress, I probably would have been bored, even with parties and all that.
Also, if experiences are similar to yours, I'd rather cram more into the 4 or 5 years at a tech school than that plus a couple/few more years after. I think most geeks would enjoy the challenge more. If you don't think you'd enjoy the challenge, then I'd question your geekiness and you'd definitely be at a disadvantage if you and a "real" geek are going up for the same job, IMO.