As a side note, Kent, don't you think it a little churlish to denigrate Java as merely 'an abstract, high level assembly language'?;-)
FWIW he did in fact mention Java under several categories.
Does nobody read the GNU Manifesto anymore??
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SourceForge Drifting
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· Score: 1, Insightful
http://www.gnu.org/gnu/manifesto.html:
"Don't people have a right to control how their creativity is used?"
"Control over the use of one's ideas really constitutes control over other
people's lives; and it is usually used to make their lives more difficult.
This is getting completely out of hand, from the GNU/Linux thing (what else is that if not an attempt to control your own idea?) to the willfull exclusion of users who need or want to run binary kernel modules. Bah.
It's still bullshit that BeOS is any sort of competition for Windows tho. Where are the apps? Where are the fonts? Where is the support? Hell, where is the company, for that matter... What you think is bloat other people think of as value.
This article is so full of bullshit I don't even know where to start. The Register is your favorite news website? They are even more unreliable then/. Did you even read the article? It doesn't mention clock speeds. Just the "performance ratings". AMD is planning to compete with some hypothetical 4.4GHz CPU. Bus and hard drive speeds aren't improving at all. In fact they are lagging considerably behind CPU speeds, which is why benchmarks such as STREAMS were invented. And even if they improve dramatically, (or at all), then the software will just grow to absorb this extra capacity. Finally, why do you think Windows is a hog? Is this just something you like to say? Can you name another OS that does the same and is not a hog?
Sheesh. I love Linux and AMD as much as the next guy but this kind of cheerleaderism is just exhausting.
Great points, but remember this stuff can change very fast. Software rarely dies and develops slowly, especially open source software. It was not so long ago that KDE was playing catchup. GNOME has some comparatively massive backing from people who are in it for the long haul. Many important GTK/GNOME apps are only just now starting to take full advantage of the architecture. And some of these are excellent, perhaps best-of-breed: galeon, gthumb, dia, gnumeric, evolution...
It'll be interesting to see how it plays out. FWIW, I like GNOME.
OK, I don't mean to be imply that it doesn't work. However, it did take Transmeta a long time to get it to work. Long enough for several important partners to give up on them and for Intel to acquire the 2 GHz target. And this is supporting just the x86 ISA.
Besides, it seems a bit of a stretch to expect that an (emulated) SPARC CPU inside a machine that is otherwise an x86 based will "just work" without some (significant) systems integration effort. I'm not sure if the market for a dual personality CPU warrants that kind of effort.
The centerpiece is the Monsters, Inc factory which has a look that is sorta like a factory with a bit of airport stirred in. But then all skewed.
Very descriptive, Taco. Sort of like an airport or a factory but all skewed, eh. Right. That really works to drive the image home. Yet once again have you applied your steady hand and unwavering eye commandingly to the razorsharp scythe that is your pen, burning with great precision this image unto my inner eye!
Your writing is so lame, Taco. Also the dept's you use, always the same tired "gee-that's-nice", "well-isn't-that-special" claptrap.
I don't hate Java. In fact I've probably written more lines of Java code in the past few years than you have used sheets of toilet paper in your entire life.
But I mention it because it has failed to accomplish most of the things that it set out to do: e.g. the lack of a "delete" operator is supposed to make memory management easier, but instead you just end up with enormous memory leaks if you're not careful; the VM is supposed to make your code run anywhere, but in reality you can only run on platforms that Sun makes JVM's for; the class libraries should make your code richer, but in reality you cannot even get the creation/modification date of a file; the language and bytecode are designed to allow tiny programming, but in reality you need at least 50MB to run a simple GUI app. Built-in and pervasive threading is supposed to make your code more responsive and scaleable, but in reality it means always having to worry about locking and having your 3000 client server die because the system runs out of memory to create new threads. And then there's bugs, bugs, bugs, bugs, bugs: there is no way to close the audio device once you've used it; input fields randomly acquire and lose focus (but this depends on the platform); the virtual machine never releases memory back to the OS (but, again, may depend on the platform); NullPointerExceptions in java.io.* code; copy & paste mostly doesn't work; drag and drop mostly doesn't work, etc. etc..
So Java is either not yet finished, or simply failing to live up to its promises. The fact that Java has gained some popularity with lazy college teachers who want to be able to pull entire tutorials off the web and business drones who can't even distinguish between megabyte and megabit just means that Sun has done a great job marketing Java as a convenience language (i.e. a simple language with most of the nasty-looking bits removed) for convenience people.
We have these languages every once in a while in the industry. Remember Pascal? Java is the Pascal of the nineties.
As for the CPU examples... Even the Motorola 680x0 series used microcode to map their ISA onto the hardware that they had, and microcode-based chips go back way farther than that. So it's not "translation" per se that I think is a bad idea.
The bad idea is to wed yourselves to a "Code Morphing Layer" when what your customers want is a fast, silent and cheap computer. Because while the "Code Morphing Layer" promises to deliver that (just like e.g. Java), in reality _it does not do so yet_, and you lose out to Moore's law and simple economics.
You are a moron for thinking that buying a video card online, from somebody who you do not know, who you can't visit to get a replacement in case the card is faulty, that you have to wait for to arrive in the mail (which increases the risk that it gets broken in transport), saves you $25.
People keep trying this again and again and again, from Smalltalk, LISP and USCD p-code through Digital's FX!32 and Apple's 68K/PPC Mixed Mode Manager to Java, but again and again and again these interpreted solutions lose out to economics and Moore's law, turning them into liabilities instead of advantages. Give it up already.
You are missing the point entirely. Arranging two disks in a striped RAID is just like having one big fast disk, and this is exactly what the spec sets out to avoid.
If you disagree with the reasons given for going with two (logically) separate disks that that's an orthogonal issue. But to make the point, they do recognize that in day to day operation, there are many kinds of breakage that can keep a system from working properly and still not afford a full backup restore or reinstall. Having an extra disk to boot from and search the Internet helps in almost all of those cases.
Having trouble putting two and two together, grasshopper? Has the shining light of RAID technology pierced your eyelids and penetrated beyond them into your brain to burn away the last remaining active nervecell? The machine is specced 1) to not include RAID because of cooling issues, 2) to survive the loss of either drive without complete loss of data. So using RAID to meet these specs would mean that you end up with exactly the same system, only slower and with half the disk space. Moron. Also the idiots who modded this up are morons.
The West is peaceful because it is rich. And it is rich because it is safe. And because it is safe, we can don our high hats and have these wonderfully exciting/. discussions about "freedom", which I for one would certainly not have if I were hungry and saw you eating a salami sandwich. Yum.
So when you have the gall to maintain a standing army you are conspiring against liberty herself? I suppose liberty is better served by having foreign soldiers stamp their boots into your face?
Slashdot Mirror
WTF is this modded down as flamebait? Can you read it?
Welcome to the Machine!
OK, I get it. Eight or so.
This is getting completely out of hand, from the GNU/Linux thing (what else is that if not an attempt to control your own idea?) to the willfull exclusion of users who need or want to run binary kernel modules. Bah.
It's still bullshit that BeOS is any sort of competition for Windows tho. Where are the apps? Where are the fonts? Where is the support? Hell, where is the company, for that matter... What you think is bloat other people think of as value.
Sheesh. I love Linux and AMD as much as the next guy but this kind of cheerleaderism is just exhausting.
Ehhh? XFS has been around in IRIX for ages or so they say. What do I know, but it works for me.
Pious, pious!
It'll be interesting to see how it plays out. FWIW, I like GNOME.
OK, I don't mean to be imply that it doesn't work. However, it did take Transmeta a long time to get it to work. Long enough for several important partners to give up on them and for Intel to acquire the 2 GHz target. And this is supporting just the x86 ISA. Besides, it seems a bit of a stretch to expect that an (emulated) SPARC CPU inside a machine that is otherwise an x86 based will "just work" without some (significant) systems integration effort. I'm not sure if the market for a dual personality CPU warrants that kind of effort.
Apparently they barely got the x86 stuff to work. Given that's the case, why would they want to branch out to other ISA's, and who would want to buy?
Very descriptive, Taco. Sort of like an airport or a factory but all skewed, eh. Right. That really works to drive the image home. Yet once again have you applied your steady hand and unwavering eye commandingly to the razorsharp scythe that is your pen, burning with great precision this image unto my inner eye!
Your writing is so lame, Taco. Also the dept's you use, always the same tired "gee-that's-nice", "well-isn't-that-special" claptrap.
Just some criticism.
Emacs can do that, and it's actually a little bit better than BBEdit's FTP support. Try opening a file like /user@host:/path/file.
Whoa! Somebody grew a brain!
But I mention it because it has failed to accomplish most of the things that it set out to do: e.g. the lack of a "delete" operator is supposed to make memory management easier, but instead you just end up with enormous memory leaks if you're not careful; the VM is supposed to make your code run anywhere, but in reality you can only run on platforms that Sun makes JVM's for; the class libraries should make your code richer, but in reality you cannot even get the creation/modification date of a file; the language and bytecode are designed to allow tiny programming, but in reality you need at least 50MB to run a simple GUI app. Built-in and pervasive threading is supposed to make your code more responsive and scaleable, but in reality it means always having to worry about locking and having your 3000 client server die because the system runs out of memory to create new threads. And then there's bugs, bugs, bugs, bugs, bugs: there is no way to close the audio device once you've used it; input fields randomly acquire and lose focus (but this depends on the platform); the virtual machine never releases memory back to the OS (but, again, may depend on the platform); NullPointerExceptions in java.io.* code; copy & paste mostly doesn't work; drag and drop mostly doesn't work, etc. etc..
So Java is either not yet finished, or simply failing to live up to its promises. The fact that Java has gained some popularity with lazy college teachers who want to be able to pull entire tutorials off the web and business drones who can't even distinguish between megabyte and megabit just means that Sun has done a great job marketing Java as a convenience language (i.e. a simple language with most of the nasty-looking bits removed) for convenience people.
We have these languages every once in a while in the industry. Remember Pascal? Java is the Pascal of the nineties.
As for the CPU examples... Even the Motorola 680x0 series used microcode to map their ISA onto the hardware that they had, and microcode-based chips go back way farther than that. So it's not "translation" per se that I think is a bad idea.
The bad idea is to wed yourselves to a "Code Morphing Layer" when what your customers want is a fast, silent and cheap computer. Because while the "Code Morphing Layer" promises to deliver that (just like e.g. Java), in reality _it does not do so yet_, and you lose out to Moore's law and simple economics.
You are a moron for thinking that buying a video card online, from somebody who you do not know, who you can't visit to get a replacement in case the card is faulty, that you have to wait for to arrive in the mail (which increases the risk that it gets broken in transport), saves you $25.
I suppose if you're willing to trust total strangers to save $11 then you are lawful prey, as well.
People keep trying this again and again and again, from Smalltalk, LISP and USCD p-code through Digital's FX!32 and Apple's 68K/PPC Mixed Mode Manager to Java, but again and again and again these interpreted solutions lose out to economics and Moore's law, turning them into liabilities instead of advantages. Give it up already.
Oh. Yeah. Right. Just like we all feel pretty silly using shittier-than-original JPEG's. Right.
You are missing the point entirely. Arranging two disks in a striped RAID is just like having one big fast disk, and this is exactly what the spec sets out to avoid. If you disagree with the reasons given for going with two (logically) separate disks that that's an orthogonal issue. But to make the point, they do recognize that in day to day operation, there are many kinds of breakage that can keep a system from working properly and still not afford a full backup restore or reinstall. Having an extra disk to boot from and search the Internet helps in almost all of those cases.
Having trouble putting two and two together, grasshopper? Has the shining light of RAID technology pierced your eyelids and penetrated beyond them into your brain to burn away the last remaining active nervecell? The machine is specced 1) to not include RAID because of cooling issues, 2) to survive the loss of either drive without complete loss of data. So using RAID to meet these specs would mean that you end up with exactly the same system, only slower and with half the disk space. Moron. Also the idiots who modded this up are morons.
The West is peaceful because it is rich. And it is rich because it is safe. And because it is safe, we can don our high hats and have these wonderfully exciting /. discussions about "freedom", which I for one would certainly not have if I were hungry and saw you eating a salami sandwich. Yum.
So when you have the gall to maintain a standing army you are conspiring against liberty herself? I suppose liberty is better served by having foreign soldiers stamp their boots into your face?
Before people start quoting Franklin, let me point out:
a) The Army. What do people do in the army, except sacrifice freedom in return for safety?
b) Franklin was talking about "essential" liberty and "temporary" safety. Think about that.