Windows XP/2000 is not a "hack" on a single user, non-networked DOS based OS. Windows 98 was, definetly, but XP/2k (and NT) definitely have a fully functional multi-user system with working file permissions.
A lot of older software was coded to require administrator access, but most new software should run fine without it. You should be able to run, and "install" any well-written program as a non-admin user on XP or 2000.
Is it just me, or have all the stories on Slashdot today/yesterday been extremely boring. Were all the submitters out partying friday/saturday or what.
Surely, interesting things have happened in the world.
I think it has a lot to do with the fact that there was a major 'break' between the 2600 days and the Nintendo days. For a couple years, no one did much in the game industry, atari killed it with a glut of bad games.
Since the NES, the game intrustry has been running continusly, and well.
"Oldschool" HTML pages, without any fancy stuff or graphics look better on a grey background. This is probably due to nostalga for "the way things used to be" back when I started surfing the web aboud a decade ago.
So I have IE set to default to grey. I like it. Once in a while, you'll come across a page that the designer had expected a white background.
Also, as a matter of fact, IE does not default to white, it defaults to the "Window" color specified in display properties. Certan people with goofy color schemes in windows will also have problems.
Someone once wrote on an academic review that I shouldn't look to programming as a future. I was in middle school. Now I'm about to graduate with a CS degree.
It sounds like this guy is a kid playing around, or at least he was when he wrote the program.
Anyway, yield is actually only needed on OSs that do not have preemptive multithreading, which NT does. Yield wouldn't have solved his base problem anyway, just that he could have seen it didn't work when he set the thread to real-time, rather then seeing his machine lock up. (When you set a thread to real time, it's like running it on an OS without preemption, sort of).
In java, the threading behavior is determined by the underlying OS. If it has preemption, your java code works, if it doesn't, it doesn't. Back in the 1.1 days, Macs didn't have preemption (didn't get it until OS X(!)), and since java might want to run there, they you needed to yield.
First of all, why didn't you use your soundcard's buffer? Normally, you'd ask the soundcard to record, and poll the data every once in a while. If you needed a higher sampling frequency or something, well... you're not really using the hardware the way it's supposed to be used, and you can hardly blame the documentation for that. Buy some real data acquisition hardware.
And basically, the problem you described has nothing to do with the API. You probably would have had the same problems if you yielded or not. Yielding would not have prevented the low level file IO drivers from disabling interrupts for whatever reason. What yielding would have done was keep your program from locking up the computer. I'm not sure that you can give a process "real time" priority on Linux the same way you can in windows, but if you could it would also cause the machine to lock up just the same, if you're lacking a yield.
Again, this was a problem with the OS core, and possibly even the physical hardware (was this program run on the same machine), not the API, and definitely not the documentation.
I just wanted to let you know that you seem not to have any idea what you're talking about, and you definitely don't have any idea what the article is talking about.
I'm surprised no one's done this before, actually. Good texture maps, and especially bump maps can alleviate the need for a lot of triangles. I wonder if this compression routine takes those things into account. It would be great if you could pass in a detailed mesh, and get a simple mesh + texture + bump map back out.
1) No sessions. No good way to store state. Cookies, etc are ugly kludges.
APIs can abstract this away. Give the user a single session ID, that references a complex server-side object.
2) Designed for unidirectional, or, at best, asymmetric data transfers. There isn't a really good way to upload data.
Ever heard of POST? But what kind of applications need that much data transferred from the user? If you're doing a program where all the work is done on the server, you're golden. On the other hand, not being able to take advantage of the client side processing is pretty retarded.
3) Privacy and encryption are an add-on, not built in.
SSL is fine, and well supported.
4) No widgets other than those in the browser.
You can easily roll your own with DHTML, and use DHTML/JS libraries of other widges.
The real problem is that most of the extended features aren't well supported.
I don't know much about Carbon, but Win32 and MacOS classic are both very old apis. You really ought to try something new like wxWindows, QT, or whatever. The Java API, which I'm very familiar with is light-years ahead of Win32 for doing 'computer' tasks like networking, file access, or cryptography. but Swing has it's own quirks, especially when you're trying to make your layouts 'pretty', but it's still much easier to use then Win32
The win32 api, especially from a modern standpoint is just a bizarre creation. Certainly a lot more complex then the stdio, and other Unix libraries. It's grown in strange ways, by using the 'reserved' bits for new things, cramming weird structures in other structures.
but I've always been able to find documentation on every part of it. Microsoft documentation is very good, and has always been.
I'm sure there are a lot of bizzare hacks and special modes that are not documented, but if you base your code off the documented APIs, you'll be fine.
Given the cost of Raid-5 capable drivers, you'll probably get more storage for your dollar with raid-1 then a raid-5 solution, if you're a home user wanting to use IDE drives.
A modest fee would most likely have been paid, especially if new functionality came with pay accounts. Look at Livejournal - you can sign up for free, but paying users get more features. In fact Slashdot could learn a lot from Livejournal.
Slashdot has a paid subscription service. Mostly it's just a way to sell extra impressions that they don't have advertisers for. They let you 'buy' the ads that you'd see and replace them with nothing. They don't explain it that way, of course. They also give you access to features that you should probably get anyway, like seeing all of your comments rather then just the last 50.
That's just a bizarre ruling. I mean, just because you don't read the fine print doesn't mean you can't assume some things are in there.
If a customer not reading a privacy policy means it's void, we've got a real problem. I could see websites figuring out how long a person looked at a privacy policy, or if they even clicked on one, and then selling their information willy-nilly if they think the customer didn't.
Honestly, these privacy policies (and EULAs) are legal constructs anyway, I think there ought to be some regulation of these things (after all, the government is required to enforce them).
What I'd like to see is simple 'ratings' for privacy policies. you could call them A, B, C, level 1-9 whatever. And they would correspond to specific guidelines indicating what you can and can't do with the data. Any deviation from the standard would only be to increase your privacy.
That way, rather then page after page of legal jargon, customers would see "This website follows level 3 privacy standards, with the exception that we won't email you." Or something.
I'd like to see the same thing done for EULAs, as well.
you have no idea what you're talking about
on
Java Faster Than C++?
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· Score: 2, Informative
Are you trolling or what?
This is known as the "halting problem". No, the compiler cannot guarantee the ability to transform a recursive solution to a non-recursive one. The case of the fibonacci algorithm is a particularly difficult one to transform properly if the compiler hasn't special cased it.
No it's not. In fact, it's not even close to the definition of the "halting problem". The Halting Problem is "Given input X, and program Y, will Y ever finish it's calculation, and halt on when given X as an input". It's a 'problem' for which no computer program can be written to solve.
It has nothing to do with whether or not a compiler can convert a recursive algorithm into a non-recursive one.
That it's possible to convert looping programs into recursive programs is trivially true, because recursive functions alone are Turing complete. Similarly, because any recursive program can run on a Turing machine, which has no concept of a 'stack' needed for recursive calls can run any recursive program by emulating the stack on it's tapes.
If you want a real world example, just compile any recursive code in any language to MIPS or some other RISC instruction set without push/pop and call functions like those found on X86 chips. You don't "call" functions directly, you just move around in memory and jump all over the place, just the same as you would in looping code.
Wow, I can't believe you could be so arrogant. it's one thing to call yourself "bright" for not believing in god (which is still extremely arrogant, and not at all like calling a homosexual "gay").
But asking people not to use a word the way everyone has been using it for years is the height of arrogance and extremely obnoxious. Gay people didn't ask people to stop using Gay to mean happy, it just happened, because people talk about homosexuality much more often then they do about being happy. They certainly discuss it more then they do people who are atheist/agnostic, except with certain obnoxious people who join atheist clubs, and go around telling everyone how atheist they are, and getting all offended about religion.
And anyway, if you wanted a term that would catch on, you should have gone with something like "unbound" or "freeminded" or whatever. It's still a positive term, but it doesn't put you above anyone else. Like "bright" does.
I personally don't believe in anything, but you people are just obnoxious.
You can go to collage whenever you want, no reason not to go now if you'd really like to know what it ads to your life. You can go to school part time and keep working, although the lost productivity in your job might cost a lot more to you now then then.
For one thing, it'll cost a lot of money. You don't want to be saddled with lots of student loans, especialy if you're lazy (as the poster obviously is, I am too).
Secondly, for lazy people structure is good. If a school is "freeform" you'll just end up slacking off the entire time.
Finaly, if they're that lazy, they probably don't have a very good faculty. I mean, people who are really good go to good schools with high standards.
Slashdot Mirror
Windows XP/2000 is not a "hack" on a single user, non-networked DOS based OS. Windows 98 was, definetly, but XP/2k (and NT) definitely have a fully functional multi-user system with working file permissions.
A lot of older software was coded to require administrator access, but most new software should run fine without it. You should be able to run, and "install" any well-written program as a non-admin user on XP or 2000.
Is it just me, or have all the stories on Slashdot today/yesterday been extremely boring. Were all the submitters out partying friday/saturday or what.
Surely, interesting things have happened in the world.
A conductive mesh layer in some wall paper.
Isn't that contrary to a few computer crime statutes currently in effect in the USA?
Wether it's contrary to US law is rather irrelevant, as the only 'treated' CDs are those sold outside the US.
not run as administrator, that way they wouldn't be able to 'install' anything. Nor could any holes in IE, general spyware, etc.
I think it has a lot to do with the fact that there was a major 'break' between the 2600 days and the Nintendo days. For a couple years, no one did much in the game industry, atari killed it with a glut of bad games.
Since the NES, the game intrustry has been running continusly, and well.
"Oldschool" HTML pages, without any fancy stuff or graphics look better on a grey background. This is probably due to nostalga for "the way things used to be" back when I started surfing the web aboud a decade ago.
So I have IE set to default to grey. I like it. Once in a while, you'll come across a page that the designer had expected a white background.
Also, as a matter of fact, IE does not default to white, it defaults to the "Window" color specified in display properties. Certan people with goofy color schemes in windows will also have problems.
Someone once wrote on an academic review that I shouldn't look to programming as a future. I was in middle school. Now I'm about to graduate with a CS degree.
It sounds like this guy is a kid playing around, or at least he was when he wrote the program.
Anyway, yield is actually only needed on OSs that do not have preemptive multithreading, which NT does. Yield wouldn't have solved his base problem anyway, just that he could have seen it didn't work when he set the thread to real-time, rather then seeing his machine lock up. (When you set a thread to real time, it's like running it on an OS without preemption, sort of).
In java, the threading behavior is determined by the underlying OS. If it has preemption, your java code works, if it doesn't, it doesn't. Back in the 1.1 days, Macs didn't have preemption (didn't get it until OS X(!)), and since java might want to run there, they you needed to yield.
First of all, why didn't you use your soundcard's buffer? Normally, you'd ask the soundcard to record, and poll the data every once in a while. If you needed a higher sampling frequency or something, well... you're not really using the hardware the way it's supposed to be used, and you can hardly blame the documentation for that. Buy some real data acquisition hardware.
And basically, the problem you described has nothing to do with the API. You probably would have had the same problems if you yielded or not. Yielding would not have prevented the low level file IO drivers from disabling interrupts for whatever reason. What yielding would have done was keep your program from locking up the computer. I'm not sure that you can give a process "real time" priority on Linux the same way you can in windows, but if you could it would also cause the machine to lock up just the same, if you're lacking a yield.
Again, this was a problem with the OS core, and possibly even the physical hardware (was this program run on the same machine), not the API, and definitely not the documentation.
I still think the Linux kernel is more important. There are other browsers, they don't take that long to develop, look at KHTML.
And anyway, you actualy can push aps that look totaly native to moz using XUL. But the problem is, hardly anyone will be able to use them.
Standards are good, and the w3c is moving things forward.
I just wanted to let you know that you seem not to have any idea what you're talking about, and you definitely don't have any idea what the article is talking about.
This isn't about compressing the data required to store a mesh, although it will help.
This is about reducing the complexity of meshes so that they can render faster.
I'm surprised no one's done this before, actually. Good texture maps, and especially bump maps can alleviate the need for a lot of triangles. I wonder if this compression routine takes those things into account. It would be great if you could pass in a detailed mesh, and get a simple mesh + texture + bump map back out.
1) No sessions. No good way to store state. Cookies, etc are ugly kludges.
APIs can abstract this away. Give the user a single session ID, that references a complex server-side object.
2) Designed for unidirectional, or, at best, asymmetric data transfers. There isn't a really good way to upload data.
Ever heard of POST? But what kind of applications need that much data transferred from the user? If you're doing a program where all the work is done on the server, you're golden. On the other hand, not being able to take advantage of the client side processing is pretty retarded.
3) Privacy and encryption are an add-on, not built in.
SSL is fine, and well supported.
4) No widgets other than those in the browser.
You can easily roll your own with DHTML, and use DHTML/JS libraries of other widges.
The real problem is that most of the extended features aren't well supported.
I don't know much about Carbon, but Win32 and MacOS classic are both very old apis. You really ought to try something new like wxWindows, QT, or whatever. The Java API, which I'm very familiar with is light-years ahead of Win32 for doing 'computer' tasks like networking, file access, or cryptography. but Swing has it's own quirks, especially when you're trying to make your layouts 'pretty', but it's still much easier to use then Win32
What were you trying to do in QT that you were not able to do on NT?
The win32 api, especially from a modern standpoint is just a bizarre creation. Certainly a lot more complex then the stdio, and other Unix libraries. It's grown in strange ways, by using the 'reserved' bits for new things, cramming weird structures in other structures.
but I've always been able to find documentation on every part of it. Microsoft documentation is very good, and has always been.
I'm sure there are a lot of bizzare hacks and special modes that are not documented, but if you base your code off the documented APIs, you'll be fine.
Given the cost of Raid-5 capable drivers, you'll probably get more storage for your dollar with raid-1 then a raid-5 solution, if you're a home user wanting to use IDE drives.
I mean, you'd been paying them to back up your site, and they didn't. Sounds like lawsuit fodder to me. Really, they completely screwed you.
A modest fee would most likely have been paid, especially if new functionality came with pay accounts. Look at Livejournal - you can sign up for free, but paying users get more features. In fact Slashdot could learn a lot from Livejournal.
Slashdot has a paid subscription service. Mostly it's just a way to sell extra impressions that they don't have advertisers for. They let you 'buy' the ads that you'd see and replace them with nothing. They don't explain it that way, of course. They also give you access to features that you should probably get anyway, like seeing all of your comments rather then just the last 50.
That's just a bizarre ruling. I mean, just because you don't read the fine print doesn't mean you can't assume some things are in there.
If a customer not reading a privacy policy means it's void, we've got a real problem. I could see websites figuring out how long a person looked at a privacy policy, or if they even clicked on one, and then selling their information willy-nilly if they think the customer didn't.
Honestly, these privacy policies (and EULAs) are legal constructs anyway, I think there ought to be some regulation of these things (after all, the government is required to enforce them).
What I'd like to see is simple 'ratings' for privacy policies. you could call them A, B, C, level 1-9 whatever. And they would correspond to specific guidelines indicating what you can and can't do with the data. Any deviation from the standard would only be to increase your privacy.
That way, rather then page after page of legal jargon, customers would see "This website follows level 3 privacy standards, with the exception that we won't email you." Or something.
I'd like to see the same thing done for EULAs, as well.
Are you trolling or what?
This is known as the "halting problem". No, the compiler cannot guarantee the ability to transform a recursive solution to a non-recursive one. The case of the fibonacci algorithm is a particularly difficult one to transform properly if the compiler hasn't special cased it.
No it's not. In fact, it's not even close to the definition of the "halting problem". The Halting Problem is "Given input X, and program Y, will Y ever finish it's calculation, and halt on when given X as an input". It's a 'problem' for which no computer program can be written to solve.
It has nothing to do with whether or not a compiler can convert a recursive algorithm into a non-recursive one.
That it's possible to convert looping programs into recursive programs is trivially true, because recursive functions alone are Turing complete. Similarly, because any recursive program can run on a Turing machine, which has no concept of a 'stack' needed for recursive calls can run any recursive program by emulating the stack on it's tapes.
If you want a real world example, just compile any recursive code in any language to MIPS or some other RISC instruction set without push/pop and call functions like those found on X86 chips. You don't "call" functions directly, you just move around in memory and jump all over the place, just the same as you would in looping code.
Wow, I can't believe you could be so arrogant. it's one thing to call yourself "bright" for not believing in god (which is still extremely arrogant, and not at all like calling a homosexual "gay").
But asking people not to use a word the way everyone has been using it for years is the height of arrogance and extremely obnoxious. Gay people didn't ask people to stop using Gay to mean happy, it just happened, because people talk about homosexuality much more often then they do about being happy. They certainly discuss it more then they do people who are atheist/agnostic, except with certain obnoxious people who join atheist clubs, and go around telling everyone how atheist they are, and getting all offended about religion.
And anyway, if you wanted a term that would catch on, you should have gone with something like "unbound" or "freeminded" or whatever. It's still a positive term, but it doesn't put you above anyone else. Like "bright" does.
I personally don't believe in anything, but you people are just obnoxious.
You can go to collage whenever you want, no reason not to go now if you'd really like to know what it ads to your life. You can go to school part time and keep working, although the lost productivity in your job might cost a lot more to you now then then.
For one thing, it'll cost a lot of money. You don't want to be saddled with lots of student loans, especialy if you're lazy (as the poster obviously is, I am too).
Secondly, for lazy people structure is good. If a school is "freeform" you'll just end up slacking off the entire time.
Finaly, if they're that lazy, they probably don't have a very good faculty. I mean, people who are really good go to good schools with high standards.