GCC 4.x is designed to enable optimizations that will work across architectures, by providing an intermediate code layer for compiler hackers to work with.
There are still optimizations possible at the assembly level for each architecture that depend on the quirks and features of those architectures and even their specific implementations.
The intermediate level optimizations are intended to reduce code duplication by allowing optimizations common across all architectures to be applied to a common intermediate architecture.
PC architecture sits in a local minima where the fastest route to greater profits lies in improving existing designs, rather than developing new approaches.
The reason "We" use x86 is because "we" use PCs, where x86 technology is dominant and obvious. However, "we" also use PDAs, cell phones, TiVos and even game console systems. As the functions of those devices melt into a new class of unified devices, other architectures will advance.
The real irony is that, for most of these other devices, the underlying architecture is invisible. Few know that Palm switched processors a few years back. Fewer still know what kind of cpu powers their cell phone.
If your reason for pirating books is honestly a derivative of your need for an electronic format, may I suggest O'Reilly's Safari service? For $10/month, I get searchable, bookmarkable access to the best programming books I've had the privilege to use.
Best of all, it works over the web, even over dial-up, so I have access from anywhere I can get to the Internet. It works well on any resolution I happen to use, which is a far cry from PDFs or eBooks. Finally, you can print hard copies of any section of interest.
P.P.S. i don't really think recursion is the right word. but the fact that an 'older' user is declared 'new' by a newer user on each child post should lead to a division by zero, a black hole, or at least a bazzarro world somewhere... or it might just be my bed time.
I'll take issue with your usage of the word "older"; I'll have you know that, at a measly 23 years old, I'm probably younger than/. users with a higher UID number.
And I'm too tired to really care that I really don't need to get involved in another log(UID)-based pissing match. (But hey, isn't that what posting on Slashdot at 2:30AM is all about? Besides, I already made a constructive comment over in the article about embedding DB authentication credentials on software.)
(And this ends my stupid and over-explained attempt at being funny May a future potential employer find this comment and giggle.)
What you're describing is effective--and as easy as wrapping your communication with your db with libssl.
What the user appears to be trying to accomplish is allowing db access without querying the user for a password. To do this, he believes he needs to embed the authentication credentials in the application or its configuration files. To that end, he's asking how Slashdot folk do this securely.
If it's assumed that a person using the software is authorized to access the DB, because the person has access to the software, then it's a fair request. Perhaps the best way to go about it isn't to depend on secure db passwords, but to use on another authentication mechanism. A couple ideas come to mind, including host-based authentication (The simplest way would be by IP address.) and user-based authentication. (If the user has a unique username on the computer or network, authenticate against that; he had to know his own password to log in.)
Another possibility could be that anonymous usage of the software is allowed, but anonymous usage of the DB is not. As in, there are tables or fields in the database that contain confidential information that shouldn't normally be accessed. Worse, you may not want some idiot intern writing his own software to make changes to tables in the database.
In this case, in this case, I'd consider how the database is structured, and see if it isn't possible to grant access to some data and fields, and not to others. If it's a freshly-created DB, it might be worthwhile structuring the database with that aim. I'm not a DB expert, though; I couldn't tell you all the RDBMSs that support table-based permissions. (Though I happen to know IBM's UDB/DB2 does.) In such a system, one could have different username/password combinations depending on how much access should be granted. Read-only access to certain tables could be possible with a non-secret username/password combination, while higher degrees of security would require more secure authentication. (Bringing us back to a password prompt or a non-password authentication technique.)
However, if the software may be run by both authorized and unauthorized users, then you probably don't want to make access to the DB automatically possible just from running the software. Requiring a prompted password or other individual-based authentication system becomes necessary.
I assumed that the APU concept referred to something I've been hoping for for years: on-chip FPGAs. Or at least, something reprogrammable in software.
If you can dump a complicated logic design to the CPU core and pump data through it for half a millisecond, you'll get the benefit of an ASIC without the cost.
It seems like the best way to get commodity behavior is for one company to win and push a homogenous platform. Of course, it sucks when you have 10 vendors trying to do that and none of them have any majority marketshare. Microsoft's neat because they won, and won so well.
Homogeneous platforms suck for their own reasons. First, everyone develops for one version, and then the platform gets changed from underneath them. Try running Masters of Orion 2 on a Windows XP machine. DirectX incompatibilities will kill you.
Second, once the platform becomes homogeneous, the technology stagnates. Look at IPv4, and all the network-layer attack vectors possible. Sure, you have IPv6 out there with IPsec, but it's not widespread, and it will never be ubiquitous on this incarnation of the Internet.
The really sad thing about homogeneous environments is that you can't fix both points One and Two at the same time. Either your technology is going to stagnate, or you're going to have to periodically pull the rug out from under the feet of your developers. With heterogeneous environments, at least, developers can write applications for the environment most suited for the task.
The same multi-image problems apply to 3D models as well, if your engine doesn't support skeletal modeling. And, really, vector motion systems are already available for 2D modelling. Just look at all those flash animations out there.
Not a game developer, per se, but I did spend a couple hundred hours poking at the source code and game data for the original Quake, and I've spent more time than that chatting about such things with actual developers.
Yes, it takes a while to pixel paint sprites for 2D games, and to develop levels for them. However, you spend more time trying to build 3D models that will have the same level of on-screen detail when rendered. And you spend more on tools aimed at making that process easier.
But again, I'm not a professional, I'm just a hanger-on.
My DPI is 108, IIRC. (Not at home, and I can't check from here.)
Yes, Opera has a decent zoom functionality. I've got Opera 9 installed, but I don't use it much. For some reason, I keep going back to Firefox. (Probably for the extensions.)
Firefox doesn't support zooming, it supports changing page-wide font sizes. (Unless the pages have specifically-set font sizes as part of their formatting.)
I've already done that. It works for some pages, fails on others. GMail typically renders great, Slashdot usually renders well, but sites like popular online retailers tend to fail miserably.
What I've ended up doing is setting a minimum font size (I forget what), and hitting Ctrl(+) whenever I have difficulty reading a page, and Ctrl(-) when done with the page.
Opera's zoom feature works very well for my situation, and I have it installed, but I still find myself tending towards Firefox, despite the rendering issues.
If it means decent Zoom...
on
Firefox 3 In Alpha
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
If this means Firefox will have decent support for higher dpi displays, then I just might jump at it once it goes Beta.
As it stands, the rest of my Linux desktop is perfectly readable at 1280x1024 on a 21" monitor from 10' away. The browser is the only part of the experience that gives me trouble. Sure, I can increase or decrease my font sizes to make the text readable, but that seriously borks most sites' CSS layouts, and doesn't do squat for image-based text.
The name "Jet Propulsion" hails from the days before we generally called things rockets...and even then, the lab was heavily invested in probe and satellite work. From what I remember, they were heavily involved in the V2 "sounding rocket" tests, and the Ranger, Mariner and Voyager probe series. And certainly more that I've forgotten.
Satellites are space-based machinery whose focus of attention happens to generally be the Earth. JPL's skill and experience with space-based electronics and machinery makes them the ideal lab for work on satellites, especially since we've stopped really focusing on sending probes to other planets and planetoids.
Would you rather the labor pool for satellite work be balkanized between different labs? You'll hurt communication and, as a result, product quality. We'll end up with stupid mistakes borne of mis communications.
I joined my school's team for all of two weeks, along with a friend of mine. It was entirely seniority based, with the staff advisor taking the Seniors and Juniors off into a corner and talking with them, leaving us Freshmen and Sophomores to put around doing nothing until they told us.
At the time, I knew more than most of the rest of them about math, physics, electronics, programming...I hadn't joined any other student organizations before, and those were my hobbies. To be shunted to doing absolutely nothing that required my mind offended and bored me. So my friend and I left after the second week, and joined Science Olympiad with my brother.
In Science Olympiad, I played a support role to Mission Possible, adding several energy changes, from mechanical->electrical->electromagnetic(infrared light)>electrical->magnetic->mechanical. All in a tiny box of two or three inches on a side. Build six of those, and I made a significant contribution to that project that helped it go on to State.
My brother and I also joined an experimental event that required the creation of creative musical instruments. We took the concepts behind brass instruments and applied them to garden hose, making a rather odd equivalent to a trumpet. It worked fine; my brother was 1st chair trumpet in whichever music division he was in at school. (He was in Varsity or Symphonic winds, the top two tiers, during all of high school. He was in Jazz Band, for a couple years, too.) I could fake it, to a point.
When we left the event chambers at State, the laughter rang in our ears. And through the closed door, "A trumpet made out of GARDEN HOSE?! (uproarious laughter)"
If you're up for the challenge, building your own kernel is again no longer simple on some distros. Sure, if you're running Debian, stock kernel sources from kernel.org will do, but if you're running Ubuntu, well, God be with you.
When I ran Debian, I'd download the latest sources and compile them, just to play with the new features. I started using the 2.6 kernel tree at 2.6.0-test1, to see what all the hype about the O(1) scheduler, was.
I'll have you know that none of those animals were small. The System Reference Document doesn't list them, but I'm confident they'd be identified as "diminutive," or smaller still.
Slashdot Mirror
And Cell was intended for Sony's PS3...IBM's Xenon was used the XBox 360.
Interestingly enough, both the Cell and Xenon are PPC-based.
GCC 4.x is designed to enable optimizations that will work across architectures, by providing an intermediate code layer for compiler hackers to work with.
There are still optimizations possible at the assembly level for each architecture that depend on the quirks and features of those architectures and even their specific implementations.
The intermediate level optimizations are intended to reduce code duplication by allowing optimizations common across all architectures to be applied to a common intermediate architecture.
Until someone replaces the PC.
PC architecture sits in a local minima where the fastest route to greater profits lies in improving existing designs, rather than developing new approaches.
The reason "We" use x86 is because "we" use PCs, where x86 technology is dominant and obvious. However, "we" also use PDAs, cell phones, TiVos and even game console systems. As the functions of those devices melt into a new class of unified devices, other architectures will advance.
The real irony is that, for most of these other devices, the underlying architecture is invisible. Few know that Palm switched processors a few years back. Fewer still know what kind of cpu powers their cell phone.
If your reason for pirating books is honestly a derivative of your need for an electronic format, may I suggest O'Reilly's Safari service? For $10/month, I get searchable, bookmarkable access to the best programming books I've had the privilege to use.
Best of all, it works over the web, even over dial-up, so I have access from anywhere I can get to the Internet. It works well on any resolution I happen to use, which is a far cry from PDFs or eBooks. Finally, you can print hard copies of any section of interest.
I'll take issue with your usage of the word "older"; I'll have you know that, at a measly 23 years old, I'm probably younger than
And I'm too tired to really care that I really don't need to get involved in another log(UID)-based pissing match. (But hey, isn't that what posting on Slashdot at 2:30AM is all about? Besides, I already made a constructive comment over in the article about embedding DB authentication credentials on software.)
(And this ends my stupid and over-explained attempt at being funny May a future potential employer find this comment and giggle.)
What you're describing is effective--and as easy as wrapping your communication with your db with libssl.
What the user appears to be trying to accomplish is allowing db access without querying the user for a password. To do this, he believes he needs to embed the authentication credentials in the application or its configuration files. To that end, he's asking how Slashdot folk do this securely.
If it's assumed that a person using the software is authorized to access the DB, because the person has access to the software, then it's a fair request. Perhaps the best way to go about it isn't to depend on secure db passwords, but to use on another authentication mechanism. A couple ideas come to mind, including host-based authentication (The simplest way would be by IP address.) and user-based authentication. (If the user has a unique username on the computer or network, authenticate against that; he had to know his own password to log in.)
Another possibility could be that anonymous usage of the software is allowed, but anonymous usage of the DB is not. As in, there are tables or fields in the database that contain confidential information that shouldn't normally be accessed. Worse, you may not want some idiot intern writing his own software to make changes to tables in the database.
In this case, in this case, I'd consider how the database is structured, and see if it isn't possible to grant access to some data and fields, and not to others. If it's a freshly-created DB, it might be worthwhile structuring the database with that aim. I'm not a DB expert, though; I couldn't tell you all the RDBMSs that support table-based permissions. (Though I happen to know IBM's UDB/DB2 does.) In such a system, one could have different username/password combinations depending on how much access should be granted. Read-only access to certain tables could be possible with a non-secret username/password combination, while higher degrees of security would require more secure authentication. (Bringing us back to a password prompt or a non-password authentication technique.)
However, if the software may be run by both authorized and unauthorized users, then you probably don't want to make access to the DB automatically possible just from running the software. Requiring a prompted password or other individual-based authentication system becomes necessary.
Just my 25 cents. (Inflation, you know...)
I assumed that the APU concept referred to something I've been hoping for for years: on-chip FPGAs. Or at least, something reprogrammable in software.
If you can dump a complicated logic design to the CPU core and pump data through it for half a millisecond, you'll get the benefit of an ASIC without the cost.
It seems like the best way to get commodity behavior is for one company to win and push a homogenous platform. Of course, it sucks when you have 10 vendors trying to do that and none of them have any majority marketshare. Microsoft's neat because they won, and won so well.
Homogeneous platforms suck for their own reasons. First, everyone develops for one version, and then the platform gets changed from underneath them. Try running Masters of Orion 2 on a Windows XP machine. DirectX incompatibilities will kill you.Second, once the platform becomes homogeneous, the technology stagnates. Look at IPv4, and all the network-layer attack vectors possible. Sure, you have IPv6 out there with IPsec, but it's not widespread, and it will never be ubiquitous on this incarnation of the Internet.
The really sad thing about homogeneous environments is that you can't fix both points One and Two at the same time. Either your technology is going to stagnate, or you're going to have to periodically pull the rug out from under the feet of your developers. With heterogeneous environments, at least, developers can write applications for the environment most suited for the task.
Money and furniture layouts, mostly. That, and no chair can replace the comfort of sitting sideways on a love seat.
The same multi-image problems apply to 3D models as well, if your engine doesn't support skeletal modeling. And, really, vector motion systems are already available for 2D modelling. Just look at all those flash animations out there.
Not a game developer, per se, but I did spend a couple hundred hours poking at the source code and game data for the original Quake, and I've spent more time than that chatting about such things with actual developers.
Yes, it takes a while to pixel paint sprites for 2D games, and to develop levels for them. However, you spend more time trying to build 3D models that will have the same level of on-screen detail when rendered. And you spend more on tools aimed at making that process easier.
But again, I'm not a professional, I'm just a hanger-on.
Ah. I never noticed article.pl, for some reason.
Check the robots.txt file on Slashdot. Google never sees your comments or journals.
On Slashdot, that's irrelevant.
My DPI is 108, IIRC. (Not at home, and I can't check from here.)
Yes, Opera has a decent zoom functionality. I've got Opera 9 installed, but I don't use it much. For some reason, I keep going back to Firefox. (Probably for the extensions.)
Firefox doesn't support zooming, it supports changing page-wide font sizes. (Unless the pages have specifically-set font sizes as part of their formatting.)
I've already done that. It works for some pages, fails on others. GMail typically renders great, Slashdot usually renders well, but sites like popular online retailers tend to fail miserably.
What I've ended up doing is setting a minimum font size (I forget what), and hitting Ctrl(+) whenever I have difficulty reading a page, and Ctrl(-) when done with the page.
Opera's zoom feature works very well for my situation, and I have it installed, but I still find myself tending towards Firefox, despite the rendering issues.
If this means Firefox will have decent support for higher dpi displays, then I just might jump at it once it goes Beta.
As it stands, the rest of my Linux desktop is perfectly readable at 1280x1024 on a 21" monitor from 10' away. The browser is the only part of the experience that gives me trouble. Sure, I can increase or decrease my font sizes to make the text readable, but that seriously borks most sites' CSS layouts, and doesn't do squat for image-based text.
Nothing new. I distinctly remember ads piped into my middle-school homeroom that said, "Get N, or get out."
"...leaves a good impression."
*wince*
But each to their own...
When in Rome? (*ducks*)
The name "Jet Propulsion" hails from the days before we generally called things rockets...and even then, the lab was heavily invested in probe and satellite work. From what I remember, they were heavily involved in the V2 "sounding rocket" tests, and the Ranger, Mariner and Voyager probe series. And certainly more that I've forgotten.
Satellites are space-based machinery whose focus of attention happens to generally be the Earth. JPL's skill and experience with space-based electronics and machinery makes them the ideal lab for work on satellites, especially since we've stopped really focusing on sending probes to other planets and planetoids.
Would you rather the labor pool for satellite work be balkanized between different labs? You'll hurt communication and, as a result, product quality. We'll end up with stupid mistakes borne of mis communications.
I joined my school's team for all of two weeks, along with a friend of mine. It was entirely seniority based, with the staff advisor taking the Seniors and Juniors off into a corner and talking with them, leaving us Freshmen and Sophomores to put around doing nothing until they told us.
At the time, I knew more than most of the rest of them about math, physics, electronics, programming...I hadn't joined any other student organizations before, and those were my hobbies. To be shunted to doing absolutely nothing that required my mind offended and bored me. So my friend and I left after the second week, and joined Science Olympiad with my brother.
In Science Olympiad, I played a support role to Mission Possible, adding several energy changes, from mechanical->electrical->electromagnetic(infrared light)>electrical->magnetic->mechanical. All in a tiny box of two or three inches on a side. Build six of those, and I made a significant contribution to that project that helped it go on to State.
My brother and I also joined an experimental event that required the creation of creative musical instruments. We took the concepts behind brass instruments and applied them to garden hose, making a rather odd equivalent to a trumpet. It worked fine; my brother was 1st chair trumpet in whichever music division he was in at school. (He was in Varsity or Symphonic winds, the top two tiers, during all of high school. He was in Jazz Band, for a couple years, too.) I could fake it, to a point.
When we left the event chambers at State, the laughter rang in our ears. And through the closed door, "A trumpet made out of GARDEN HOSE?! (uproarious laughter)"
So, yeah. I'm a little bitter.
If you're up for the challenge, building your own kernel is again no longer simple on some distros. Sure, if you're running Debian, stock kernel sources from kernel.org will do, but if you're running Ubuntu, well, God be with you.
When I ran Debian, I'd download the latest sources and compile them, just to play with the new features. I started using the 2.6 kernel tree at 2.6.0-test1, to see what all the hype about the O(1) scheduler, was.
I'll have you know that none of those animals were small. The System Reference Document doesn't list them, but I'm confident they'd be identified as "diminutive," or smaller still.