In single threaded programs, just one type of profiling needs to be done, the kind that standard profiling tools measure. In multi-threaded programs, the relative execution times of the various threads may be more important. The first thing to do is to figure out which threads are using most of the resources. After this is done, and any optimizations made, the old-style profiling and optimizing of slow methods is just as important as ever. If your program is spending 80% of its time sorting, then optimize your sorting code.
Of course, for many applications, multi-threading achieves the vast majority of the speed increase, and profiling will only be of marginal utility. The profiler is just one tool of many, and is not a silver bullet.
People may remember that it cost billions of dollars to fix software for the year 2000. That was just the software written by people too stupid to know that years have four digits in them. If the method of keeping time changes, every piece of software in use would have to be modified. The cost of this would probably be trillions of dollars, unless it was phased in over 20 years.
I have an HP Photosmart scanner, which will scan negatives or slides. The nice thing about this approach is that you have the full quality of film with the advantages of digital as well. Digital photography is just not as good as film yet, so I think that this is a good solution for the foreseeable future.
If you have all slides instead of negatives, the Nikon high-end scanner is pretty nice. It is 4000dpi, and has a bulk loader so that you can scan 50 slides at a time. It doesn't do negatives though, and will run you $2000.
Stories of this type have appeared numerous times over the last 5 years or so. There was a Wired article from the late 90's that talked about urban underground exploration. There are universities on the east coast of the US that have been around for 200 - 300 years with many old steam tunnels that are no longer used.
There are also organized tours of underground Rome. I never did this, but the article sounded quite interesting. Unfortunately, I don't have the reference. Since Rome has been continually inhabited for over 2000 years, one layer is built on the next. If you go down 20 feet below ground, you can see all kinds of ancient, interesting stuff.
People do all kinds of other weird stuff, like walking through train tunnels, exploring old abandoned buildings, etc. Of course, the classic is finding abandonded subway lines in NYC.
If you try any of this, make sure you go with someone who knows what they are doing. Homeless people, flooding, and electrocution are only a few of the possible dangers.
I believe that all M@crosoft got out of the deal is that Bill is now on the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China. They finally realized that their core values are the same.
Hey, can I get me some of them tanks and run over some pesky Linux users?
The Washington Post column was truly frightening. Are they owned by M@cr#s$ft now? Do people care about freedom anymore? Freedom is hard, I am glad that someone else will do it for me
Of course, you can always wear sunglasses,
to prevent casual scanning of your eye as
you walk down the street. It has already
gotten to the point with webcams where you
can walk one mile in Manhattan, and be on
the net 10 different times. In Denver, they
use photo radar, but they must be able to
prove that the photograph is of you. I am
tempted to put on a ski mask, and drive by
a few hundred times really really fast..
Re:Yeah, we think highly of foreigners here.
on
Greenbacks No More
·
· Score: 1
Perhaps all of the bills printed in a year that add up to the size of the budget deficit could be printed in bright red.
This guy has obviously worked at better companies than I have. The solution to your problem in my opinion is to find a job at a company where the management doesn't have its head up its butt. It is unlikely that reason will work with these people, but I would try (while I was looking for another job). When giving an estimate of how long something will take, always include test and documentation time. If the PM's are giving you a hard time about that, refuse to cooperate. If necessary, send out detailed emails refuting their time estimates, with your reasoning as to why their estimates are not right. Email the offending PM, and copy upper management. Be sure that you are aggressively looking for another job while you are doing this. One way or another, this will solve your problem.
If you like science fiction old and new, check out the
Internet Top 100 SF/Fantasy List They have lists of both novels and short stories. No reviews, just the results of polls over the internet.
Using modern software development techniques, you can design high quality code that is modular and much easier to test. You can't test quality in; it has to be designed in from the start. With the proper design work, and design and code reviews, the testers job is much much easier. Without that upfront effort, it is almost impossible to produce a decent product with any amount of testing.
It has been pointed out many times, both from the context of computer security and from software engineering in general that software purchasers won't pay for quality. This is not just true of software, as McDonalds, Ford, Budweiser, etc prove.
Yes, it is impossible to completely test software because of the number of execution paths. With modern object-oriented software development technology, it is possible to do a much better job than we are doing.
At my current job, the CEO is a medical doctor who doesn't know anything about software development. That is why he is insisting on high quality. It is a pleasure to have the opportunity to work for someone like that. An experienced software manager would never allow the amount of testing that we are doing before going to market. That is a sad commentary on the software industry.
It is also a sad commentary on the consumer. If a company consistently makes buggy, insecure software over decades, people should stop buying it. Until that happens, nothing else is going to change.
Yeah, it will take over a minute to travel that
two thirds of a mile at a measly 40mph. If they
cranked in up to 500kph, they could do it in 8
seconds. That would be cool.
I once had a job interview where they asked me to
write a C program on paper. They gave us an hour,
and it took me 57 minutes. Writing code makes sense as a homework assignment. I feel that multiple choice questions are best for computer science examinations. There is no point in trying to write a program under that kind of time pressure.
If you are able to get a good job offer in this this economy, then you don't really need to worry. Stay where you are if you like it there. If they turn psycho and lay you off, you can always find another job. The chances are that they are matching the offer because they don't want to lose you. Most businesses are too busy doing actual work to start playing mind games with people. Uh, you don't work at M@cros@ft, do you?
My impression of open source projects in general is that while anyone can contribute code, the architecuture of the software does not differ significantly from that of a proprietary solution.
For developers to be motivated to contribute to a project, a more distributed architecture needs to be used where a larger group can contribute to the high level design as well as just submit bug fixes. This is obviously a very challenging problem, and some projects are more suited to this approach than others.
Is there any doubt that M@cr&s*ft is the greatest proponent of open source software out there? Through their incredible licensing and marketing policies, they have greatly spread the use of open source throughout the world. I think that they should get a Turing award.
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Of course, for many applications, multi-threading achieves the vast majority of the speed increase, and profiling will only be of marginal utility. The profiler is just one tool of many, and is not a silver bullet.
People may remember that it cost billions of dollars to fix software for the year 2000. That was just the software written by people too stupid to know that years have four digits in them. If the method of keeping time changes, every piece of software in use would have to be modified. The cost of this would probably be trillions of dollars, unless it was phased in over 20 years.
If you have all slides instead of negatives, the Nikon high-end scanner is pretty nice. It is 4000dpi, and has a bulk loader so that you can scan 50 slides at a time. It doesn't do negatives though, and will run you $2000.
There are also organized tours of underground Rome. I never did this, but the article sounded quite interesting. Unfortunately, I don't have the reference. Since Rome has been continually inhabited for over 2000 years, one layer is built on the next. If you go down 20 feet below ground, you can see all kinds of ancient, interesting stuff.
People do all kinds of other weird stuff, like walking through train tunnels, exploring old abandoned buildings, etc. Of course, the classic is finding abandonded subway lines in NYC.
If you try any of this, make sure you go with someone who knows what they are doing. Homeless people, flooding, and electrocution are only a few of the possible dangers.
The Washington Post column was truly frightening. Are they owned by M@cr#s$ft now? Do people care about freedom anymore?
Freedom is hard, I am glad that someone else will do it for me
Of course, you can always wear sunglasses, to prevent casual scanning of your eye as you walk down the street. It has already gotten to the point with webcams where you can walk one mile in Manhattan, and be on the net 10 different times. In Denver, they use photo radar, but they must be able to prove that the photograph is of you. I am tempted to put on a ski mask, and drive by a few hundred times really really fast..
Perhaps all of the bills printed in a year that add up to the size of the budget deficit could be printed in bright red.
This guy has obviously worked at better companies than I have. The solution to your problem in my opinion is to find a job at a company where the management doesn't have its head up its butt. It is unlikely that reason will work with these people, but I would try (while I was looking for another job). When giving an estimate of how long something will take, always include test and documentation time. If the PM's are giving you a hard time about that, refuse to cooperate. If necessary, send out detailed emails refuting their time estimates, with your reasoning as to why their estimates are not right. Email the offending PM, and copy upper management. Be sure that you are aggressively looking for another job while you are doing this. One way or another, this will solve your problem.
If you like science fiction old and new, check out the Internet Top 100 SF/Fantasy List They have lists of both novels and short stories. No reviews, just the results of polls over the internet.
I vaguely remember enjoying this book when I read it 25 years ago. Perhaps book reviews on more recent works would be more useful.
Using modern software development techniques, you can design high quality code that is modular and much easier to test. You can't test quality in; it has to be designed in from the start. With the proper design work, and design and code reviews, the testers job is much much easier. Without that upfront effort, it is almost impossible to produce a decent product with any amount of testing.
The book Programming Pearls by Jon Bently is an excellent book on programming practices, interesting to read, not too heavy.
Yes, it is impossible to completely test software because of the number of execution paths. With modern object-oriented software development technology, it is possible to do a much better job than we are doing.
At my current job, the CEO is a medical doctor who doesn't know anything about software development. That is why he is insisting on high quality. It is a pleasure to have the opportunity to work for someone like that. An experienced software manager would never allow the amount of testing that we are doing before going to market. That is a sad commentary on the software industry.
It is also a sad commentary on the consumer. If a company consistently makes buggy, insecure software over decades, people should stop buying it. Until that happens, nothing else is going to change.
Actually, I believe that Sharpies are in violation of the RIAA law.
Yeah, it will take over a minute to travel that two thirds of a mile at a measly 40mph. If they cranked in up to 500kph, they could do it in 8 seconds. That would be cool.
I once had a job interview where they asked me to write a C program on paper. They gave us an hour, and it took me 57 minutes. Writing code makes sense as a homework assignment. I feel that multiple choice questions are best for computer science examinations. There is no point in trying to write a program under that kind of time pressure.
If you are able to get a good job offer in this this economy, then you don't really need to worry. Stay where you are if you like it there. If they turn psycho and lay you off, you can always find another job. The chances are that they are matching the offer because they don't want to lose you. Most businesses are too busy doing actual work to start playing mind games with people. Uh, you don't work at M@cros@ft, do you?
Are they also debating whether to call it just Linux, or GNU/Linux?
Also, running your software on these different flavors of UNIX will shake out some bugs that you might not find on just one or two platforms.
If airplanes are going to fly into buildings, let it be because of good old American software.
For developers to be motivated to contribute to a project, a more distributed architecture needs to be used where a larger group can contribute to the high level design as well as just submit bug fixes. This is obviously a very challenging problem, and some projects are more suited to this approach than others.
I heard that the GIMP can be used to view pictures of child pornography.
Is there any doubt that M@cr&s*ft is the greatest proponent of open source software out there? Through their incredible licensing and marketing policies, they have greatly spread the use of open source throughout the world. I think that they should get a Turing award.