Numbers? Sure, how many popular desktop apps are written in Python? Zero, right? And how many in Java? Well, only Java IDEs really, then you have that BitTorrent client and I think LimeWire used to be written in it. Maybe still is. I can count them on my fingers. Now look at newly developed apps - Picasa, Skype, Google Talk, World of Warcraft etc. C++, all of them.
Yes they should and that's exactly what the current system prevents. How many people used to use Debian Unstable merely because the size of the repositories made installing/upgrading software less of a pain in the ass than with other distros. And how many jumped ship when Ubuntu came along?
Today there is little (if any) innovation in the Linux distribution space. The big desktop distros - Fedora, Ubuntu, SUSE, Gentoo are followed by a bunch of smaller ones like Debian, Slackware etc..... but they are all basically the same. The barriers to entry are very high because any new distro will not have many packages, relegating it to the "technical people with lots of time" market, which isn't that big.
If there was some standardisation of this then the market would be more liquid and newer, more innovative distros would get a lookin.
It's too slow. You say that doesn't matter in "an app like this" but performance always matters. If you are competing for users then performance matters, it's as simple as that. You can get away with crap performance only if your app is so unique or valuable that people will tolerate the lack of it. I don't know if this is still true but at one point Chandler took over a minute to start up. The whole point of a PIM application is to collate and present a potentially large amount of personal data, fast. Python is very, very, very slow compared to C unless you use tricks like Psyco which trade memory for CPU time making it merely very slow.
It's too inefficient. Python leaks memory by design. Go read up on it - the PyMalloc allocator never frees memory back to the operating system. It always holds on to the peak heap size as a misguided optimisation. What's more, data is just more expensive in Python due to its highly dynamic, reflective nature. Lots of strings are kept around where a C++ program would be using numbers instead. On a desktop machine (where you run a PIM) memory is speed: use too much and you drive the machine into swap hell. Similar problems contributed to the death of desktop Java.
It's too dynamic. This doesn't just hurt performance. There is a school of thought that claims having safety features in a language doesn't matter, because you should write unit tests for everything anyway, and they'll catch all the bugs. That doesn't tally with my own real world experience; at any rate it can be very hard to construct accurate and comprehensive unit tests even if you are very disciplined. For instance there is no reliable way a unit test can catch a race condition or mutex inversion. Compile and runtime safety checks can do. A Red Hat developer whos name I forget commented that a huge number of bugs in their Fedora tools (all Python) would have been caught by the compiler if using an alternative language. This doesn't strictly mean type safety bugs, rather, bugs that would have been caught by the features of the language that can be used to check for correctness.
It's interpreted (or just-in-time compiled if you're feeling very generous). This means NO opportunity for automatic program optimisation. These sorts of optimisations can make a huge difference, especially if whole-program optzn is used. Especially important because optimisation can remove a lot of the overhead of modern design patterns (very useful in c++).
Basically, the Chandler team allowed ideology to overrule engineering fact. There is only one language suitable for writing complex client-side software and that's C++: anything else doesn't have the performance characteristics necessary. You can also eliminate the most common sort of bugs in C++ code by using a garbage collector like Boehm GC; the Unreal engine uses this approach.
That said, Python has many tasks for which it is appropriate: prototyping ideas, simple scripting tasks, even small desktop apps like configuration applets, teaching etc. Basically anything where there's no risk of your program being undercut in the market by a tighter, more robust competitor. So no PIM suites then.
Disagree, I just played (and completed) Curse of Monkey Island which used Hollywood quality 2D animation, and then played the demo of Escape from Monkey Island which used 3D. Curse ruled, Escape demo sucked, no two ways about it. The 3D models didn't have anywhere near the charm of the 2D characters and looked incredibly ugly to boot. Walking around in a 3D environment was just a distraction.
Also, you can have fundamentally resolution independent 2D graphics, not sure why you think that's restricted to 3D (which isn't res independent anyway as textures are always bitmaps). I'd love to see a renaissance of Curse style games, and if Nintendo can do that then bring it on.
I know about the CLDC VM but if you look at model lists for the mobile phones that are actually on the market (in Europe at any rate), nearly all use the KVM. A few, like the newer Sony Ericssons, use Jazelle and they run acceptably fast but most are still KVM based even for the newer phones.
Well, it is fairly impressive. J2ME is many things, but convenient and fast are not amongst them. Getting a Java phone to do anything useful at all is quite a feat of programming, getting one to recognise barcodes in realtime is damn near a miracle. Bear in mind the "virtual machine" on most phones is in fact simply a slow interpreter - it makes BASIC look souped-up.
The software running on these laptops (sugar) bears virtually no resemblence to standard desktop Linux systems. So.... no. Also the hardware is fixed and not really upgradable, so this makes no difference to your average "should I support Linux" hardware vendor, and the requirements on software are so different it won't make any difference to the "should I port to Linux" software vendor.
Microsoft can't sue you for not paying the license fees, if you use a reverse engineered SDK. This was established by case law where a studio did exactly that to avoid paying royalties to Sega.
I think it was Vinod who thought a carbon tax would be unworkable, not Robert. Anyway, he is hardly a "shill", RR has been extremely energetic in investigating alternatives and debating the future of the oil industry. He is many things but a paid off rep is not one of them.
I'm at my work right now, where I am employed as an energy analyst. It is the opinion of every single person in the industry that there is no real possibility of replacing gasoline with ethanol.
Probably right.
It would take the entire corn harvest of the United States to make that much ethanol
Probably wrong. Cellulosic ethanol is extremely close to commercialisation and has the potential to make ethanol out of common agricultural waste (amongst other things), and also switchgrass which is far more amenable to mass production. Whilst I don't see it matching the full capacity of petroleum it could go most of the way.
You are right that nobody is seriously considering corn ethanol. Fortunately, there are other ways to make it. The articles talk about this more in depth.
Being a waitress is hardly a career though is it? I mean, loads of girls go work in restaurants/bars at some time because it's easy to get work and demands basically no skills or commitment. If you go into computing you have to have put a fair bit of work into it and that means thinking "hmm is this what I really want to do?" - so the effects of a female-unfriendly environment are magnified.
That said, I really don't see what the big deal is. These "get women into engineering" debates pop up all the time. You know what, most directors are men too. Most nurses are female, as are most models. It happens, and though I'd like to work with more women as much as any other guy I really wonder if the effort/hand-wringing that goes into all this is really worth it.
The pay in engineering jobs smacks most others around - if you are from a poor Russian or Chinese family and they have scraped together money for training or university, is anybody sane going to do an arts degree? No - because there are few well paying jobs that don't require hard/unusual skills. Better to train in some engineering/science subject where there are shortages.
The idea that women are just not interested in technology because of genetics seems silly to me. There's little evidence genetics can have such a precise effect. It's just the culture - why do not many men want to be nurses? Well they don't want other guys to think they're gay, it's a very feminine sort of environment. You know in primary schools in the UK they are desperately trying to attract men. Sometimes jobs just snowball like that and it's really hard to fix. But it's not likely to be genetic.
You missed the point of the security system - it's to stop game developers bypassing the Microsoft licensing fees. If you have to pay MS to write games for the XBox then their business model of subsidising the hardware works. If you can avoid it, then XBox is a financially losing proposition.
It should have been obvious I was talking about the consumer desktop/laptop space. Yes of course 64 bit can be useful to some people, otherwise it would not have been invented. Is there going to be some wide-spread transition in which 32 bit is phased out? No.
That diminishing returns comes from poor interconnects... the gains are linear as long the work you are doing can make use of more CPUs.
Yes exactly, that was his point. The diminishing returns comes from the difficulty of using threads in such a way that the more you have the faster you go.
Many threaded programs today are not really gaining performance through it. They are using threads to increase responsiveness etc, maybe for programmer convenience but not really for performance. Now this will change, but, some programs will improve performance by using a task based model. So whereas maybe before one thread did everything, now one thread does music, one thread does video, one thread does decompression etc... in other words there is a natural number of cores for this app at which point it cannot use any more. Commonly today this is perhaps a handful - 2/3 threads - going at full blast at once. At best.
To make multi-core CPUs with no diminishing returns you have to be running software that goes, right I have 8 cores so let's split this task up into 8 subtasks. Or maybe 16 or 32 subtasks. That's actually a very hard thing to do. Some problems just cannot parallelize like that at all. Others maybe can with creativity but would be killed by synchronisation overheads, etc. And for a few it'd be very easy.
I don't think we'll be able to easily use many cores until somebody invents a programming language that naturally lends itself to parallel programming. The way threading is integrated with todays imperative languages is awkward and messy. Pure functional has gained no traction outside of academia. So perhaps there needs to be some pragmatic combination.
Almost no desktop programs actually use 4 gigabytes of RAM. Not even allowing for rapid expansion will we reach that bottleneck anytime soon.
The Intel guys were right. What are the uses of 64 bit systems? They are removing a bottleneck that very few were hitting. The AMD64 instruction set fixes (more registers etc) are nice but not worth the hassle of losing binary compatibility. Result? Hardly anybody uses a pure64 system. Only enthusiasts.
Bear in mind Greg Stein is from Apache and whilst Apache is mostly known for the web server it also does large scale project hosting for server side Java software. So they have a fair bit of experience with svn, bug trackers and the like (i believe apache uses jira - proprietary bug tracker;)
It is listed there because it uses the Google Earth API, and this is quite clearly spelled out on the page. The "Featured Projects" section is not a list of Google open source projects, it is a list of projects that use Google APIs or code in some way.
Or, much as I may hate them, the Backstreet Boys, who, after several hugely popular albums, testified that they hadn't ever received a royalty cheque.
Unless I'm mistaken about them, the Backstreet Boys haven't produced anything that would earn them a royalty cheque anyway. You get royalties on things like songs, which they conspicuously didn't write...
That's dumb and would never fly in a court of law. The danger to people comes from the freaking criminals who write the viruses - NOT from Windows! Given how trivial it is to install adware as root on a modern Linux box the words rocks" and "glass houses" come to mind.
(consider all the Firefox exploits that have been discovered, most users don't install updates themselves, kernel exploits come out all the time etc...)
Google make pots of money because AdWords does result in a good return on investment relative to other forms of advertising.
Consider this. Imagine a fictional company that spends $10,000/month with Google on advertising, and is completely happy with the service because it results in lots of leads and sales. So it is actually profitable to spend this money. There are many companies in exactly this situation. Does it matter if 90% of clicks are fraudulent (which is probably not going to happen unless you are being deliberately targetted by a competitor)? If you are still getting a great ROI then no it doesn't matter. The invalid clicks are just noise.
Google does produce something valuable if not physical - it produces a ton of people viewing websites who then go onto buy things. Same as any form of advertising. Except the relevance of AdWords makes it more valuable than most.
Electricity costs are set to rise sharply in many parts of the world... this is especially true if recent weather trends continue. For instance in the UK many power stations are coming up to retirement age and they are not being replaced fast enough. Also consider that natural gas peaking is perhaps only a decade or so away.
Slashdot Mirror
Numbers? Sure, how many popular desktop apps are written in Python? Zero, right? And how many in Java? Well, only Java IDEs really, then you have that BitTorrent client and I think LimeWire used to be written in it. Maybe still is. I can count them on my fingers. Now look at newly developed apps - Picasa, Skype, Google Talk, World of Warcraft etc. C++, all of them.
Yes they should and that's exactly what the current system prevents. How many people used to use Debian Unstable merely because the size of the repositories made installing/upgrading software less of a pain in the ass than with other distros. And how many jumped ship when Ubuntu came along?
Today there is little (if any) innovation in the Linux distribution space. The big desktop distros - Fedora, Ubuntu, SUSE, Gentoo are followed by a bunch of smaller ones like Debian, Slackware etc ..... but they are all basically the same. The barriers to entry are very high because any new distro will not have many packages, relegating it to the "technical people with lots of time" market, which isn't that big.
If there was some standardisation of this then the market would be more liquid and newer, more innovative distros would get a lookin.
Python was a dumb choice because:
It's too slow. You say that doesn't matter in "an app like this" but performance always matters. If you are competing for users then performance matters, it's as simple as that. You can get away with crap performance only if your app is so unique or valuable that people will tolerate the lack of it. I don't know if this is still true but at one point Chandler took over a minute to start up. The whole point of a PIM application is to collate and present a potentially large amount of personal data, fast. Python is very, very, very slow compared to C unless you use tricks like Psyco which trade memory for CPU time making it merely very slow.
It's too inefficient. Python leaks memory by design. Go read up on it - the PyMalloc allocator never frees memory back to the operating system. It always holds on to the peak heap size as a misguided optimisation. What's more, data is just more expensive in Python due to its highly dynamic, reflective nature. Lots of strings are kept around where a C++ program would be using numbers instead. On a desktop machine (where you run a PIM) memory is speed: use too much and you drive the machine into swap hell. Similar problems contributed to the death of desktop Java.
It's too dynamic. This doesn't just hurt performance. There is a school of thought that claims having safety features in a language doesn't matter, because you should write unit tests for everything anyway, and they'll catch all the bugs. That doesn't tally with my own real world experience; at any rate it can be very hard to construct accurate and comprehensive unit tests even if you are very disciplined. For instance there is no reliable way a unit test can catch a race condition or mutex inversion. Compile and runtime safety checks can do. A Red Hat developer whos name I forget commented that a huge number of bugs in their Fedora tools (all Python) would have been caught by the compiler if using an alternative language. This doesn't strictly mean type safety bugs, rather, bugs that would have been caught by the features of the language that can be used to check for correctness.
It's interpreted (or just-in-time compiled if you're feeling very generous). This means NO opportunity for automatic program optimisation. These sorts of optimisations can make a huge difference, especially if whole-program optzn is used. Especially important because optimisation can remove a lot of the overhead of modern design patterns (very useful in c++).
Basically, the Chandler team allowed ideology to overrule engineering fact. There is only one language suitable for writing complex client-side software and that's C++: anything else doesn't have the performance characteristics necessary. You can also eliminate the most common sort of bugs in C++ code by using a garbage collector like Boehm GC; the Unreal engine uses this approach.
That said, Python has many tasks for which it is appropriate: prototyping ideas, simple scripting tasks, even small desktop apps like configuration applets, teaching etc. Basically anything where there's no risk of your program being undercut in the market by a tighter, more robust competitor. So no PIM suites then.
Shhhh, just because your shiny hat is invisible to most people doesn't mean it's invisible to THEM!
Disagree, I just played (and completed) Curse of Monkey Island which used Hollywood quality 2D animation, and then played the demo of Escape from Monkey Island which used 3D. Curse ruled, Escape demo sucked, no two ways about it. The 3D models didn't have anywhere near the charm of the 2D characters and looked incredibly ugly to boot. Walking around in a 3D environment was just a distraction.
Also, you can have fundamentally resolution independent 2D graphics, not sure why you think that's restricted to 3D (which isn't res independent anyway as textures are always bitmaps). I'd love to see a renaissance of Curse style games, and if Nintendo can do that then bring it on.
I know about the CLDC VM but if you look at model lists for the mobile phones that are actually on the market (in Europe at any rate), nearly all use the KVM. A few, like the newer Sony Ericssons, use Jazelle and they run acceptably fast but most are still KVM based even for the newer phones.
Well, it is fairly impressive. J2ME is many things, but convenient and fast are not amongst them. Getting a Java phone to do anything useful at all is quite a feat of programming, getting one to recognise barcodes in realtime is damn near a miracle. Bear in mind the "virtual machine" on most phones is in fact simply a slow interpreter - it makes BASIC look souped-up.
The software running on these laptops (sugar) bears virtually no resemblence to standard desktop Linux systems. So .... no. Also the hardware is fixed and not really upgradable, so this makes no difference to your average "should I support Linux" hardware vendor, and the requirements on software are so different it won't make any difference to the "should I port to Linux" software vendor.
Microsoft can't sue you for not paying the license fees, if you use a reverse engineered SDK. This was established by case law where a studio did exactly that to avoid paying royalties to Sega.
I think it was Vinod who thought a carbon tax would be unworkable, not Robert. Anyway, he is hardly a "shill", RR has been extremely energetic in investigating alternatives and debating the future of the oil industry. He is many things but a paid off rep is not one of them.
Probably right.
Probably wrong. Cellulosic ethanol is extremely close to commercialisation and has the potential to make ethanol out of common agricultural waste (amongst other things), and also switchgrass which is far more amenable to mass production. Whilst I don't see it matching the full capacity of petroleum it could go most of the way.
You are right that nobody is seriously considering corn ethanol. Fortunately, there are other ways to make it. The articles talk about this more in depth.
How the fuck is that post off-topic?
Being a waitress is hardly a career though is it? I mean, loads of girls go work in restaurants/bars at some time because it's easy to get work and demands basically no skills or commitment. If you go into computing you have to have put a fair bit of work into it and that means thinking "hmm is this what I really want to do?" - so the effects of a female-unfriendly environment are magnified.
That said, I really don't see what the big deal is. These "get women into engineering" debates pop up all the time. You know what, most directors are men too. Most nurses are female, as are most models. It happens, and though I'd like to work with more women as much as any other guy I really wonder if the effort/hand-wringing that goes into all this is really worth it.
The pay in engineering jobs smacks most others around - if you are from a poor Russian or Chinese family and they have scraped together money for training or university, is anybody sane going to do an arts degree? No - because there are few well paying jobs that don't require hard/unusual skills. Better to train in some engineering/science subject where there are shortages.
The idea that women are just not interested in technology because of genetics seems silly to me. There's little evidence genetics can have such a precise effect. It's just the culture - why do not many men want to be nurses? Well they don't want other guys to think they're gay, it's a very feminine sort of environment. You know in primary schools in the UK they are desperately trying to attract men. Sometimes jobs just snowball like that and it's really hard to fix. But it's not likely to be genetic.
You mis-spelled "man"
You missed the point of the security system - it's to stop game developers bypassing the Microsoft licensing fees. If you have to pay MS to write games for the XBox then their business model of subsidising the hardware works. If you can avoid it, then XBox is a financially losing proposition.
It should have been obvious I was talking about the consumer desktop/laptop space. Yes of course 64 bit can be useful to some people, otherwise it would not have been invented. Is there going to be some wide-spread transition in which 32 bit is phased out? No.
Yes exactly, that was his point. The diminishing returns comes from the difficulty of using threads in such a way that the more you have the faster you go.
Many threaded programs today are not really gaining performance through it. They are using threads to increase responsiveness etc, maybe for programmer convenience but not really for performance. Now this will change, but, some programs will improve performance by using a task based model. So whereas maybe before one thread did everything, now one thread does music, one thread does video, one thread does decompression etc ... in other words there is a natural number of cores for this app at which point it cannot use any more. Commonly today this is perhaps a handful - 2/3 threads - going at full blast at once. At best.
To make multi-core CPUs with no diminishing returns you have to be running software that goes, right I have 8 cores so let's split this task up into 8 subtasks. Or maybe 16 or 32 subtasks. That's actually a very hard thing to do. Some problems just cannot parallelize like that at all. Others maybe can with creativity but would be killed by synchronisation overheads, etc. And for a few it'd be very easy.
I don't think we'll be able to easily use many cores until somebody invents a programming language that naturally lends itself to parallel programming. The way threading is integrated with todays imperative languages is awkward and messy. Pure functional has gained no traction outside of academia. So perhaps there needs to be some pragmatic combination.
Almost no desktop programs actually use 4 gigabytes of RAM. Not even allowing for rapid expansion will we reach that bottleneck anytime soon.
The Intel guys were right. What are the uses of 64 bit systems? They are removing a bottleneck that very few were hitting. The AMD64 instruction set fixes (more registers etc) are nice but not worth the hassle of losing binary compatibility. Result? Hardly anybody uses a pure64 system. Only enthusiasts.
Bear in mind Greg Stein is from Apache and whilst Apache is mostly known for the web server it also does large scale project hosting for server side Java software. So they have a fair bit of experience with svn, bug trackers and the like (i believe apache uses jira - proprietary bug tracker ;)
It is listed there because it uses the Google Earth API, and this is quite clearly spelled out on the page. The "Featured Projects" section is not a list of Google open source projects, it is a list of projects that use Google APIs or code in some way.
Unless I'm mistaken about them, the Backstreet Boys haven't produced anything that would earn them a royalty cheque anyway. You get royalties on things like songs, which they conspicuously didn't write ...
That's dumb and would never fly in a court of law. The danger to people comes from the freaking criminals who write the viruses - NOT from Windows! Given how trivial it is to install adware as root on a modern Linux box the words rocks" and "glass houses" come to mind.
(consider all the Firefox exploits that have been discovered, most users don't install updates themselves, kernel exploits come out all the time etc...)
Google make pots of money because AdWords does result in a good return on investment relative to other forms of advertising.
Consider this. Imagine a fictional company that spends $10,000/month with Google on advertising, and is completely happy with the service because it results in lots of leads and sales. So it is actually profitable to spend this money. There are many companies in exactly this situation. Does it matter if 90% of clicks are fraudulent (which is probably not going to happen unless you are being deliberately targetted by a competitor)? If you are still getting a great ROI then no it doesn't matter. The invalid clicks are just noise.
Google does produce something valuable if not physical - it produces a ton of people viewing websites who then go onto buy things. Same as any form of advertising. Except the relevance of AdWords makes it more valuable than most.
Electricity costs are set to rise sharply in many parts of the world ... this is especially true if recent weather trends continue. For instance in the UK many power stations are coming up to retirement age and they are not being replaced fast enough. Also consider that natural gas peaking is perhaps only a decade or so away.