You do realize that the term "network" can apply to more things than physical devices such as CAT-5, switches, and routers...
How would you like someone to reverse engineer the ATM network for your bank, then use their own unauthenticated clients to connect to your bank's ATM network and submit transactions to your bank?
Policy: "Notices to employees: don't take pictures of the campus and post them for public viewing without permission from the management or you'll get fired because it's a security concern." Employee: (takes pictures of campus and posts on a public forum without permission from employer) Microsoft: (fires said employee for violating policy) Slashbots: (don tinfoil hats and lights torches in preparation for a barn burning!)
How many years has Microsoft developed software for the Mac? How do you develop software on a Mac without having a Mac? You'd have to be some kind of idiot to think that he got fired for taking a picture of Macs being delivered to a company that *has been making software for Macs for 15+ years* prior!
Policy: "Notices to employees: don't take pictures of the campus and post them for public viewing without permission from the management or you'll get fired because it's a security concern." Employee: Microsoft: Slashbots:
This to me indicates more of a simple evolution then revolution...
Yeah... that's what I was trying to say. The thing I saw said that this was the first that combined the two and that was about it. CPU+FPGA co-processing is nothing new.
...not really. This thing doesn't do anything that isn't doable today with other parts. This thing just combines a general purpose CPU with an FPGA on a single chip. People have been using FPGAs fed by host CPUs for a long time.
When a function is defined in code, you have to use multiple processor cycles to complete the function. However, when the funciton is "on the chip", that entire function can be completed in just one assembly-level call to the processor.
But you cannot say that one "assembly level call" to the processor will take (even) fewer "processor cycles" to complete. Hint: very few instructions in even today's CPUs take a single clock cycle to execute, most take several, it's just with pipelining, many instructions have a retirement rate of one (or more) per-clock.
This isn't a silver bullet. In fact, the big deal about this thing is that it combines an FPGA and the processor onto a single chip. Before this, you'd write it all and implement it on a single FPGA, where it would be generally slow/simple for the general purpose part or you'd use an FPGA as a co-processor and feed it with a host CPU.
I didn't say anything about.Net being more portable. I'm just saying that Java is not the end-all, be-all of portability itself, despite the Java mantra. Been there, done that, and it didn't live up to the hype.
Re:The flagship...
on
D&D Is 30
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I think every geek who grew up in the 70s and 80s made their own "D&D program" that either was just for character sheets or for rolling all sorts of die.
My first was on my Micro-ColorComputer3 and it filled my 4K memory and I bought a 16K RAM expansion and filled it too! I had to load the program from a casette player. My program even let you type in stuff like 8d8+3 (for monster HP rolls) and had some treasure allocation tables in it. I rewrote several versions of it on the Apple ][ series and the Atari ST using GFA Basic. The Atari one was menu driven and had multiple methods for rolling up character stats (including the Unearthed Arcana "by race" way) and would verify class/race combinations that required a 7 dimensional array!:)
Yeah... but the argument only holds for so long. Do you know how all of your appliances in your home work? Do you know how your automobile works? Do you (or have you) examined the PROMs in your car that control fuel mixture, ABS, and the like? What about the way the street lights work around town? What about the software your bank uses? or your police? or your military? or are you using alternatives for those as well since you can't see their source?
Good points. I have programmed a fair amount in C# and on Linux/Unix platforms. Funny thing is that on Windows I program C# almost exclusively while on Linux I use almost only Perl and C. I'm not sure exactly why though. I guess for cross platform stuff Perl fits my needs enough.
I drove this car out of the car show because I could and felt pretty cool knowing I had in my possession the car not released in retail yet. So how would I rate this car? Oh I coudln't say. I dont even listen/watch/use it". Would I buy it in retail if it was for $1? Probably not. How is it that me having possession is a lost revenue case? I haven't the slightest clue.
The only difference here is that you are talking about copying something that doesn't have physical materials. I worked to make my software and depend on its sales. If you can't afford my software, then do without maybe? If you can't afford a car, you find alternative means of transportation like a bus, train, or subway and you do without the car. Both are still products of someone else's time and effort, and in some cases, materials.
A: Security (you know Microsoft code will be riddled with holes here).
I can write insecure software on Linux just as fast as I can on Windows.
B: Realiability
See above. I've had Windows boxes that are very stable (a year of uptime).
C: Peer review, I, John Q random engineer can verify it.
When was the last time you looked over every line of any OSS package?
D: Speed, basically Windows is bloated and slow.
Funny... my benchmarks in the past don't show this. Compilers from Microsoft (which are what most folks use) tend to do much better optimization that gcc (which is what everybody uses on Linux even though Intel compilers are much better and also free). Some benchmarks I have run on FP intensive code have shown to be 2X as fast on Windows with Microsoft compilers than with using gcc.
Also, X tends to be slow as a pig even on my high end graphics cards.
E: Continuity, a user of the original Unix would be able to navigate and use Linux desktop in hours, you cannot say the same thing about Microsoft software.
And exactly how many of those folks are around? You may not say the same for a Unix person migrating to Windows, you mean? Also, because XWindows folks tend to customize their desktops a lot, I would say that X users attempting to use one anothers desktops is a large hurdle.
Eventually people will get tired of continuously shelling out for the same regurgiatated Windows 95 core functionality.
Obviously you haven't used Windows since the Windows95 era, which was 7+ years ago, which is why you posted all of the above outdated noise.
It will be the likes of the Chinese, Japanese, Germans and developing nations, which will, break away from Windows with force, it's already happening...
Which oddly enough has much less to do with any "technical" reasons other than political and economic.
1. Other countries don't like seeing their money go to the USA. (economic and political) 2. Other countries are possibly afraid of "back doors" in an OS that is provided by another country. (political and defense) 3. Other countries would rather put money into projects in their own country or region, such as a Linux distribution (political and economic). 4. Other countries want to do whatever they can to switch control of things from a central controller to something that they have more control over (Microsoft controls a lot, knock them down a notch or two and make us stronger) (political).
This is very evident in such things as AirBus, who is 1/3 subsidized by the European community in order to compete with Boeing and other US based aircraft manufacturers. This is done to bring the economy of those industries back to Europe and politically, to break the dominance of the US aircraft manufacturers. The same is happening with Linux distributors because Linux is an OS that is "Open", already underway and working, and is easy for any country/region to support a "local" enterprise to get started.
Provide 'analagous' and seamless cloned functionality for less and Microsoft has *no* market.
Yeah... still waiting for anyone (Microsoft, Linux, or otherwise) to provide that.
Disclaimer: I am a Linux developer. I have used Unix/Linux since ~1986 in a variety of flavors. I have yet to be "satisfied" by any Unix/Linux or Windows offering. They all suck, it's just a matter of picking the least sucking one for what you are trying to do at any given time for a given problem. At times in the past, that has been any number of Unix/Linux flavors, Windows, or other embedded platforms.
You forget that at the time of Windows95, Macs were still 2X+ the cost of an equivalent Windows box and ran only about 1/4 of the software and none of the games, as well as having the image of Mac owners being tree-hugging, sandal wearing, gay pride marching hippies.
The OS is just an OS. It's what you do (and can do) with it that matters. Folks don't sit around (well, most don't) all day watching their OS schedule the various processes/threads that are running or watching it providing APIs to hardware. They use the software that runs on the OS to do stuff.
Lisp has already been done... a long time ago, in fact. A friend of mine got his PhD designing such a machine. His conclusion was that while it was possible, it wasn't practical.
We've tried being "cross-platform" with Java and it isn't easy with anything "real". Incompatibilities and "wierd" behavior in JVMs all over the place. Either that or you have to "lock in" anyone who wants to use your software into a single JVM, which is kind of hypocritical of Java to require "lock in".
As far as JBuilder being the best IDE for Java, that is what we used. It brought my 850MHz P3 w/ 768M memory to its knees being so slow and huge, but at least it was as buggy as an ant farm. I can't even try to compare it to something... well... useful. I eventually gave up on JBuilder and switched back to emacs/command line to be productive.
"Not to mention the on-the-fly compiling."
-- This feature has been around for a long time (not just in Java or.NET stuff and before both). Besides, VS.NET 2001 did this so both have it. I'll be honest that I don't know what this "lightbulb" feature is.
In any case... it is still C# that is the public standard and Java which is proprietary, which shows the hypocracy of many folks and exposes them for just being Microsoft haters rather than the "Software should be Free (as in speech)" hippies that they try to make you believe.
We've tried to use Java to be "cross-platform". On much of anything more complicated than "hello world", it isn't as easy as you are fanboi-ing it out to be.
So why must you have IE to view Help? Download patches? Keep your system working? Get the Key to unlock your software?... as opposed to how it used to be when you had to run an executable delivered with the software and provided by the folks who wrote the software in order to do any of those things?
that it's none of their fucking business what I download or why I do it.
Actually... if it's software that I sell for a living, it *is* my business (in multiple senses of the word) when you download my software and use it for free. But you are right, I wouldn't care *why* you did it because the end result is the same regardless of your rationalizations to ease your conscience.
But MySQL's very simplicity made it so small and fast that it quickly won over small users who wouldn't even understand what they were missing and how to use the fancy features offered by "real" database engines. In particular, MySQL proved ideal for the exploding area of dynamic Web content.
and immediately thought that the people this is talking about don't know WHY they need those features either. For example, they won't use transactions because they don't know WHY they should, until after something horrible happens and someone comes in to clean up their mess and explain WHY they needed to do what they didn't.
We use MySQL at work for many things, but I never forget for an instant what a house of cards it can be if we use it somewhere we shouldn't (where we need some of those "fancy" features).
Giving someone respect for what he/she has done is certainly a good thing. Extrapolating that respect into idolatry isn't. Don't let someone else form your opinions for you.
Slashdot Mirror
You do realize that the term "network" can apply to more things than physical devices such as CAT-5, switches, and routers...
How would you like someone to reverse engineer the ATM network for your bank, then use their own unauthenticated clients to connect to your bank's ATM network and submit transactions to your bank?
Should read:
Policy: "Notices to employees: don't take pictures of the campus and post them for public viewing without permission from the management or you'll get fired because it's a security concern."
Employee: (takes pictures of campus and posts on a public forum without permission from employer)
Microsoft: (fires said employee for violating policy)
Slashbots: (don tinfoil hats and lights torches in preparation for a barn burning!)
How many years has Microsoft developed software for the Mac? How do you develop software on a Mac without having a Mac? You'd have to be some kind of idiot to think that he got fired for taking a picture of Macs being delivered to a company that *has been making software for Macs for 15+ years* prior!
Policy: "Notices to employees: don't take pictures of the campus and post them for public viewing without permission from the management or you'll get fired because it's a security concern."
Employee:
Microsoft:
Slashbots:
MO-Rons.
This to me indicates more of a simple evolution then revolution...
Yeah... that's what I was trying to say. The thing I saw said that this was the first that combined the two and that was about it. CPU+FPGA co-processing is nothing new.
man... unlike those pesky FPGAs where you can... er... wait a minute... :)
...not really. This thing doesn't do anything that isn't doable today with other parts. This thing just combines a general purpose CPU with an FPGA on a single chip. People have been using FPGAs fed by host CPUs for a long time.
When a function is defined in code, you have to use multiple processor cycles to complete the function. However, when the funciton is "on the chip", that entire function can be completed in just one assembly-level call to the processor.
But you cannot say that one "assembly level call" to the processor will take (even) fewer "processor cycles" to complete. Hint: very few instructions in even today's CPUs take a single clock cycle to execute, most take several, it's just with pipelining, many instructions have a retirement rate of one (or more) per-clock.
This isn't a silver bullet. In fact, the big deal about this thing is that it combines an FPGA and the processor onto a single chip. Before this, you'd write it all and implement it on a single FPGA, where it would be generally slow/simple for the general purpose part or you'd use an FPGA as a co-processor and feed it with a host CPU.
I didn't say anything about .Net being more portable. I'm just saying that Java is not the end-all, be-all of portability itself, despite the Java mantra. Been there, done that, and it didn't live up to the hype.
I think every geek who grew up in the 70s and 80s made their own "D&D program" that either was just for character sheets or for rolling all sorts of die.
:)
My first was on my Micro-ColorComputer3 and it filled my 4K memory and I bought a 16K RAM expansion and filled it too! I had to load the program from a casette player. My program even let you type in stuff like 8d8+3 (for monster HP rolls) and had some treasure allocation tables in it. I rewrote several versions of it on the Apple ][ series and the Atari ST using GFA Basic. The Atari one was menu driven and had multiple methods for rolling up character stats (including the Unearthed Arcana "by race" way) and would verify class/race combinations that required a 7 dimensional array!
Yeah... but the argument only holds for so long. Do you know how all of your appliances in your home work? Do you know how your automobile works? Do you (or have you) examined the PROMs in your car that control fuel mixture, ABS, and the like? What about the way the street lights work around town? What about the software your bank uses? or your police? or your military? or are you using alternatives for those as well since you can't see their source?
Good points. I have programmed a fair amount in C# and on Linux/Unix platforms. Funny thing is that on Windows I program C# almost exclusively while on Linux I use almost only Perl and C. I'm not sure exactly why though. I guess for cross platform stuff Perl fits my needs enough.
What about:
I drove this car out of the car show because I could and felt pretty cool knowing I had in my possession the car not released in retail yet. So how would I rate this car? Oh I coudln't say. I dont even listen/watch/use it". Would I buy it in retail if it was for $1? Probably not. How is it that me having possession is a lost revenue case? I haven't the slightest clue.
The only difference here is that you are talking about copying something that doesn't have physical materials. I worked to make my software and depend on its sales. If you can't afford my software, then do without maybe? If you can't afford a car, you find alternative means of transportation like a bus, train, or subway and you do without the car. Both are still products of someone else's time and effort, and in some cases, materials.
I think that was intentionally left in... It kind of makes a point on its own that way.
A: Security (you know Microsoft code will be riddled with holes here).
I can write insecure software on Linux just as fast as I can on Windows.
B: Realiability
See above. I've had Windows boxes that are very stable (a year of uptime).
C: Peer review, I, John Q random engineer can verify it.
When was the last time you looked over every line of any OSS package?
D: Speed, basically Windows is bloated and slow.
Funny... my benchmarks in the past don't show this. Compilers from Microsoft (which are what most folks use) tend to do much better optimization that gcc (which is what everybody uses on Linux even though Intel compilers are much better and also free). Some benchmarks I have run on FP intensive code have shown to be 2X as fast on Windows with Microsoft compilers than with using gcc.
Also, X tends to be slow as a pig even on my high end graphics cards.
E: Continuity, a user of the original Unix would be able to navigate and use Linux desktop in hours, you cannot say the same thing about Microsoft software.
And exactly how many of those folks are around? You may not say the same for a Unix person migrating to Windows, you mean? Also, because XWindows folks tend to customize their desktops a lot, I would say that X users attempting to use one anothers desktops is a large hurdle.
Eventually people will get tired of continuously shelling out for the same regurgiatated Windows 95 core functionality.
Obviously you haven't used Windows since the Windows95 era, which was 7+ years ago, which is why you posted all of the above outdated noise.
It will be the likes of the Chinese, Japanese, Germans and developing nations, which will, break away from Windows with force, it's already happening...
Which oddly enough has much less to do with any "technical" reasons other than political and economic.
1. Other countries don't like seeing their money go to the USA. (economic and political)
2. Other countries are possibly afraid of "back doors" in an OS that is provided by another country. (political and defense)
3. Other countries would rather put money into projects in their own country or region, such as a Linux distribution (political and economic).
4. Other countries want to do whatever they can to switch control of things from a central controller to something that they have more control over (Microsoft controls a lot, knock them down a notch or two and make us stronger) (political).
This is very evident in such things as AirBus, who is 1/3 subsidized by the European community in order to compete with Boeing and other US based aircraft manufacturers. This is done to bring the economy of those industries back to Europe and politically, to break the dominance of the US aircraft manufacturers. The same is happening with Linux distributors because Linux is an OS that is "Open", already underway and working, and is easy for any country/region to support a "local" enterprise to get started.
Provide 'analagous' and seamless cloned functionality for less and Microsoft has *no* market.
Yeah... still waiting for anyone (Microsoft, Linux, or otherwise) to provide that.
Disclaimer: I am a Linux developer. I have used Unix/Linux since ~1986 in a variety of flavors. I have yet to be "satisfied" by any Unix/Linux or Windows offering. They all suck, it's just a matter of picking the least sucking one for what you are trying to do at any given time for a given problem. At times in the past, that has been any number of Unix/Linux flavors, Windows, or other embedded platforms.
You forget that at the time of Windows95, Macs were still 2X+ the cost of an equivalent Windows box and ran only about 1/4 of the software and none of the games, as well as having the image of Mac owners being tree-hugging, sandal wearing, gay pride marching hippies.
The OS is just an OS. It's what you do (and can do) with it that matters. Folks don't sit around (well, most don't) all day watching their OS schedule the various processes/threads that are running or watching it providing APIs to hardware. They use the software that runs on the OS to do stuff.
Built on open standards (XUL / Java / J2EE) and are in production now. Runs in almost any JVM...
:)
Heh... That last bit is implied/redundant when talking about *any* Java app more complex than "hello world"
Lisp has already been done... a long time ago, in fact. A friend of mine got his PhD designing such a machine. His conclusion was that while it was possible, it wasn't practical.
We've tried being "cross-platform" with Java and it isn't easy with anything "real". Incompatibilities and "wierd" behavior in JVMs all over the place. Either that or you have to "lock in" anyone who wants to use your software into a single JVM, which is kind of hypocritical of Java to require "lock in".
.NET stuff and before both). Besides, VS.NET 2001 did this so both have it. I'll be honest that I don't know what this "lightbulb" feature is.
As far as JBuilder being the best IDE for Java, that is what we used. It brought my 850MHz P3 w/ 768M memory to its knees being so slow and huge, but at least it was as buggy as an ant farm. I can't even try to compare it to something... well... useful. I eventually gave up on JBuilder and switched back to emacs/command line to be productive.
"Not to mention the on-the-fly compiling."
-- This feature has been around for a long time (not just in Java or
In any case... it is still C# that is the public standard and Java which is proprietary, which shows the hypocracy of many folks and exposes them for just being Microsoft haters rather than the "Software should be Free (as in speech)" hippies that they try to make you believe.
We've tried to use Java to be "cross-platform". On much of anything more complicated than "hello world", it isn't as easy as you are fanboi-ing it out to be.
...and how does this help someone do their job? ...by having to learn and recognize even more things that are tangential to what they are doing?
So why must you have IE to view Help? Download patches? Keep your system working? Get the Key to unlock your software? ... as opposed to how it used to be when you had to run an executable delivered with the software and provided by the folks who wrote the software in order to do any of those things?
that it's none of their fucking business what I download or why I do it.
Actually... if it's software that I sell for a living, it *is* my business (in multiple senses of the word) when you download my software and use it for free. But you are right, I wouldn't care *why* you did it because the end result is the same regardless of your rationalizations to ease your conscience.
Exactly... I read this in the article:
But MySQL's very simplicity made it so small and fast that it quickly won over small users who wouldn't even understand what they were missing and how to use the fancy features offered by "real" database engines. In particular, MySQL proved ideal for the exploding area of dynamic Web content.
and immediately thought that the people this is talking about don't know WHY they need those features either. For example, they won't use transactions because they don't know WHY they should, until after something horrible happens and someone comes in to clean up their mess and explain WHY they needed to do what they didn't.
We use MySQL at work for many things, but I never forget for an instant what a house of cards it can be if we use it somewhere we shouldn't (where we need some of those "fancy" features).
Giving someone respect for what he/she has done is certainly a good thing. Extrapolating that respect into idolatry isn't. Don't let someone else form your opinions for you.
The rest of us will have vidio cards that don't resemble vacuum cleaners, and keep us from going deaf.
And some of us actually RTA. None of the reviews I read said that it was loud. Most said that it was surprisingly, and acceptably, quiet.