Having just spent the day with MS.NET I concur that modern Java is highly underrated. It's fast, clean, easy to learn, has great API documentation, portable, and feature-rich.
Have you ever wondered why MS.NET apps aren't more common? I suspect that there are still some significant API holes (MIDI support is the one that bit me).
Also if you don't want to pay for VS.NET I found the free development tools such as SharpDevelop to be somewhat buggy at the moment. With Java you are spoilt for choice with free, mature, industrial-grade IDEs.
If your goal is writing Windows-compatible software in a "modern" language, Java is the best choice in my opinion. It has it's problems, but from what I've seen, the grass really isn't greener on the other side.
We've been able to write rich web apps in XUL for Mozilla for years, but it hasn't caught on because it didn't work today in IE.
Microsoft really didn't want people making their OS irrelevant with rich web services, they had a long term plan which involved a proprietary system for internet applications.
They certainly weren't pleased when people found they could do it today with open standards using AJAX.
Sounds like a heap that returns unused pages to the system like this would help the problem described by John Moser in the Gnome Memory Reduction Project here.
Is it really true that the standard GNU/Linux heap implementation holds onto pages like this when it becomes fragmented? That sounds really primitive to me.
- OGG support is very limited and glitches regularly. A major drawback for audiophiles. I can only hope iRiver will fix the glitches in a future firmware version.
Hopefully someone with more knowledge about OGG playback in general will correct me, but I'm guessing the glitches are to do with the reviewer using incompatible OGG Vorbis files.
Since Vorbis files are variable bitrate and the player only supports bitrates above 96kbps, it will glitch when it encounters any frames below 96kbps in the file.
Vorbis has a different set of quantization tables for low bitrate frames which take more working memory, which is probably why the support has been left out. You need to make compatible Vorbis files yourself with the "managed bitrate" modes of the encoder.
I'm curious - were you ever able to get the digital mixer part of the 6fire working with Linux without noise?
If by that you mean the "dmix" plugin, then no, it's just white noise for me aswell. It's a known problem iirc, but nobody can be bothered to fix it right now.
Perhaps when dmix becomes more widespread it'll get fixed. I should probably look into it myself, rather than whine about it.
I think the modern solution for this would be to make use of the dbus/hal infrastructure to pass the "eject pressed" message from the cd drive to the desktop and handle it from there. I'm pretty certain this is possible.
I think Supermount is controversial (for whatever reason), it's certainly not something distributions have rushed to adopt. Kudos to Mandrake for trying to solve this, though.
I have had similar problems with sound on linux. The ICE1712 driver for my Terratec DMX 6Fire is pretty flakey at times, and the various options you get for the mixer are pretty horrible (The volume controls are "Dac" and "Dac1" for the left and right channels, and they don't tie together as a stereo pair).
I also wish I could unmount a CDROM by pressing the eject button.
I think the main culprit for little usability problems like this is lack of quality control by the distribution makers. Unfortunately these difficulties don't matter much to the large scale business installations they are targetting.
Still, this is definitely something that could be improved.
Has it not occurred to you that Debian stable is exactly this "immutable set of system APIS" you are advocating?
The purpose of the packaging system is to ensure the system is in a verifiable state and that the software can assume the existance of a specific set of APIs.
Your suggestion that software should include all of its dependencies is in direct opposition to the open source process. If code is shared it recieves testing by all the software that depends on it, and flaws are far less likely to go unpatched.
For a taste of the dangers of not sharing code, witness the recent security holes in the zlib and Windows GDI libraries.
The one thing that stands out at me is that Symphony uses Yet Another(TM) packaging system that is supposed to fix all the woes of the previous packaging system. Haven't we learned yet? In a complex system, packages are just as bad (actually worse) for users than DLL Hell.
Proper software management is a vital part of a modern operating system. The proper package management with strict dependency checking that linux systems use are the safest way of ensuring software compatibility. Are you perhaps suggesting we stop trying to use shared libraries and go back to the bad old days of enormous buggy, insecure static-linked binary packages in/opt?
Under OS X, installation consists of downloading the application, and optionally extracting it from an archive. That's it, nothing more.
And this is different from Debian how? The grass isn't that green in OSX land. If every Linux distribution was Red Hat we wouldn't have package management problems either, and linux packages would be small, portable and consistent.
"He accepted everything. The past was alterable. The past never had been altered. Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia. All happenings are in the mind. Whatever happens in all minds, truly happens. How easy it all was! Only surrender, and everything else followed. It was like swimming against a current that swept you backwards however hard you struggled, and then suddenly deciding to turn round and go with the current instead of opposing it. Nothing had changed except your own attitude: the predestined thing happened in any case. He hardly knew why he had ever rebelled."
If a radioisotope source has enough activity to match the power output of a regular cell, it has enough activity to kill several people from several metres away.
How many rusty, discarded Energizers have you seen lying around? How do you propose to design a radioisotope cell that will never break or decay during the century or more it will take to become safe?
NOTICE: Due To Its Mass, This Product Warps Space and Time in Its Vicinity.
WARNING: This Product Attracts Every Other Object in the universe, Including the Products of Other Manufacturers, with a Force Proportional to the Product of the Masses Divided by the Square of the Distance Between Them.
CAUTION: The Mass of This Product Contains the Energy Equivalent of 85 Million Tons of TNT per Net Ounce of Weight. The Manufacturer warrants that this product is to be used only as matter and will not be responsible for injury or damage if it is converted into energy.
HANDLE WITH CARE: This Product Contains Minute Electrically Charged Particles Moving at Velocities in Excess of Five Hundred Million Miles Per Hour.
CONSUMER NOTICE: Due to the "Uncertainty Principle," it is impossible for the User to know precisely and simultaneously where this product is located and how fast it is moving.
ADVISORY: There is an Extremely Remote Chance That, Through a Process Known as "Tunneling," This Product May Spontaneously Disappear from Its Present Location and Reappear at Any Other Place in the Universe, Including Your Neighbor's Domicile. The Manufacturer Will Not Be Responsible for Any Damage or Inconvenience That May Result.
READ THIS BEFORE OPENING PACKAGE: According to Certain Suggested Versions of the Grand Unified Theory, the Primary Particles Constituting this Product May Decay to Nothingness Within the Next Four Hundred Million Years.
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PUBLIC NOTICE AS REQUIRED BY LAW: Any Use of This Product, in Any Manner Whatsoever, Will Increase the Aggregate Amount of Disorder in the Universe. Although No Liability Is Assumed Herein, the Consumer Is Warned That This Process Will Ultimately Lead to a state of "Warm Death" of the Universe.
NOTE: The Most Fundamental Particles in This Product Are Held Together by a "Gluing" Force About Which Little is Currently Known and Whose Adhesive Power, therefore, Can Not Be Guaranteed Indefinitely. No responsibility is therefore assumed for the structural integrity of this product.
ATTENTION: Notwithstanding Any Listing of Product Contents Found Hereupon, the Consumer is Advised That This Product Actually Consists of 99.9999999999% Empty Space.
NEW GRAND UNIFIED THEORY DISCLAIMER: While the Manufacturer is Technically Entitled to Claim That This Product Is Ten-Dimensional, the Consumer Is Reminded That This Confers No Legal Rights Above and Beyond Those Applicable to Three-Dimensional Objects, Since the Seven New Dimensions Are "Rolled Up" into Such a Small "Area" That They Cannot Be Detected.
PLEASE NOTE: Some Quantum Physics Theories Suggest That, When Unobserved, This Product May Cease to Exist or May Exist Only in a Vague and Undetermined State. Therefore all warranties are in effect only while this product is under the direct observation of a human being.
COMPONENT EQUIVALENCY NOTICE: The Subatomic Particles (Electrons, Protons, etc.) Comprising This Product Are Exactly the Same in Every Measurable Respect as Those Used in the Products of Other Manufacturers, and Competitors' Claims to the Contrary are neither Justified nor Legitimate.
HEALTH WARNING: Care Should Be Taken When Lifting This Product, Since Its Mass, and Thus Its Weight, Is Dependent on Its Velocity Relative to the User. The manufacturer cannot be held liable for injury or damage resulting from relativistic mass increase.
IMPORTANT NOTICE TO PURCHASERS: The Entire Physical Universe,Including This Product, May One Day Collapse Back into an Infinitesimally Small Space. Should Another Universe Subsequently Reemerge, the Existence of This Product in That Universe, and its performance and suitability for any purpose, Cannot Be Guaranteed.
On chips with built in memory controllers, as you increase the number of cores on a chip the memory bandwidth per core decreases, however as you increase the number of chips in a system, the memory bandwidth per core remains the same and the number of cores increases.
Even in a multi-memory controller system the same physical memory is shared, so there has to be some performance hit when running more than one cpu, so I doubt the actual memory bandwidth per chip will be the same. Or is there some architectural trick that removes that bottleneck in practice?
Slashdot Mirror
-- Pants are Optional
Where would I pour the Hot Grits, with no pants?
Have you ever wondered why MS.NET apps aren't more common? I suspect that there are still some significant API holes (MIDI support is the one that bit me).
Also if you don't want to pay for VS.NET I found the free development tools such as SharpDevelop to be somewhat buggy at the moment. With Java you are spoilt for choice with free, mature, industrial-grade IDEs.
If your goal is writing Windows-compatible software in a "modern" language, Java is the best choice in my opinion. It has it's problems, but from what I've seen, the grass really isn't greener on the other side.
X11 will be replaced when a better alternative is available.
Microsoft really didn't want people making their OS irrelevant with rich web services, they had a long term plan which involved a proprietary system for internet applications.
They certainly weren't pleased when people found they could do it today with open standards using AJAX.
Is it really true that the standard GNU/Linux heap implementation holds onto pages like this when it becomes fragmented? That sounds really primitive to me.
Neither is the battery life.
Hopefully someone with more knowledge about OGG playback in general will correct me, but I'm guessing the glitches are to do with the reviewer using incompatible OGG Vorbis files.
Since Vorbis files are variable bitrate and the player only supports bitrates above 96kbps, it will glitch when it encounters any frames below 96kbps in the file.
Vorbis has a different set of quantization tables for low bitrate frames which take more working memory, which is probably why the support has been left out. You need to make compatible Vorbis files yourself with the "managed bitrate" modes of the encoder.
If by that you mean the "dmix" plugin, then no, it's just white noise for me aswell. It's a known problem iirc, but nobody can be bothered to fix it right now.
Perhaps when dmix becomes more widespread it'll get fixed. I should probably look into it myself, rather than whine about it.
I think Supermount is controversial (for whatever reason), it's certainly not something distributions have rushed to adopt. Kudos to Mandrake for trying to solve this, though.
I also wish I could unmount a CDROM by pressing the eject button.
I think the main culprit for little usability problems like this is lack of quality control by the distribution makers. Unfortunately these difficulties don't matter much to the large scale business installations they are targetting.
Still, this is definitely something that could be improved.
GDI: http://www.crime-research.org/news/28.09.2004/666/
The purpose of the packaging system is to ensure the system is in a verifiable state and that the software can assume the existance of a specific set of APIs.
Your suggestion that software should include all of its dependencies is in direct opposition to the open source process. If code is shared it recieves testing by all the software that depends on it, and flaws are far less likely to go unpatched.
For a taste of the dangers of not sharing code, witness the recent security holes in the zlib and Windows GDI libraries.
Proper software management is a vital part of a modern operating system. The proper package management with strict dependency checking that linux systems use are the safest way of ensuring software compatibility. Are you perhaps suggesting we stop trying to use shared libraries and go back to the bad old days of enormous buggy, insecure static-linked binary packages in /opt?
Under OS X, installation consists of downloading the application, and optionally extracting it from an archive. That's it, nothing more.
And this is different from Debian how? The grass isn't that green in OSX land. If every Linux distribution was Red Hat we wouldn't have package management problems either, and linux packages would be small, portable and consistent.
"The more they tighten their grip, the more systems will slip through their fingers."
So the enemy of my enemy is my friend?
George Orwell
If a radioisotope source has enough activity to match the power output of a regular cell, it has enough activity to kill several people from several metres away.
How many rusty, discarded Energizers have you seen lying around? How do you propose to design a radioisotope cell that will never break or decay during the century or more it will take to become safe?
Imagine not being able to walk down the street for fear of radiation poisoning. This sort of thing has already happened.
While I agree that nuclear technology is the future of power, putting radioactive sources in the hands of the general population is not the way to go.
WARNING: This Product Attracts Every Other Object in the universe, Including the Products of Other Manufacturers, with a Force Proportional to the Product of the Masses Divided by the Square of the Distance Between Them.
CAUTION: The Mass of This Product Contains the Energy Equivalent of 85 Million Tons of TNT per Net Ounce of Weight. The Manufacturer warrants that this product is to be used only as matter and will not be responsible for injury or damage if it is converted into energy.
HANDLE WITH CARE: This Product Contains Minute Electrically Charged Particles Moving at Velocities in Excess of Five Hundred Million Miles Per Hour.
CONSUMER NOTICE: Due to the "Uncertainty Principle," it is impossible for the User to know precisely and simultaneously where this product is located and how fast it is moving.
ADVISORY: There is an Extremely Remote Chance That, Through a Process Known as "Tunneling," This Product May Spontaneously Disappear from Its Present Location and Reappear at Any Other Place in the Universe, Including Your Neighbor's Domicile. The Manufacturer Will Not Be Responsible for Any Damage or Inconvenience That May Result.
READ THIS BEFORE OPENING PACKAGE: According to Certain Suggested Versions of the Grand Unified Theory, the Primary Particles Constituting this Product May Decay to Nothingness Within the Next Four Hundred Million Years.
THIS PRODUCT IS 100% MATTER: In the Unlikely Event That This Merchandise Should Contact Antimatter in Any Form, a Catastrophic Explosion Will Result. The Manufacturer cannot be held responsible for resulting injury or damages.
PUBLIC NOTICE AS REQUIRED BY LAW: Any Use of This Product, in Any Manner Whatsoever, Will Increase the Aggregate Amount of Disorder in the Universe. Although No Liability Is Assumed Herein, the Consumer Is Warned That This Process Will Ultimately Lead to a state of "Warm Death" of the Universe.
NOTE: The Most Fundamental Particles in This Product Are Held Together by a "Gluing" Force About Which Little is Currently Known and Whose Adhesive Power, therefore, Can Not Be Guaranteed Indefinitely. No responsibility is therefore assumed for the structural integrity of this product.
ATTENTION: Notwithstanding Any Listing of Product Contents Found Hereupon, the Consumer is Advised That This Product Actually Consists of 99.9999999999% Empty Space.
NEW GRAND UNIFIED THEORY DISCLAIMER: While the Manufacturer is Technically Entitled to Claim That This Product Is Ten-Dimensional, the Consumer Is Reminded That This Confers No Legal Rights Above and Beyond Those Applicable to Three-Dimensional Objects, Since the Seven New Dimensions Are "Rolled Up" into Such a Small "Area" That They Cannot Be Detected.
PLEASE NOTE: Some Quantum Physics Theories Suggest That, When Unobserved, This Product May Cease to Exist or May Exist Only in a Vague and Undetermined State. Therefore all warranties are in effect only while this product is under the direct observation of a human being.
COMPONENT EQUIVALENCY NOTICE: The Subatomic Particles (Electrons, Protons, etc.) Comprising This Product Are Exactly the Same in Every Measurable Respect as Those Used in the Products of Other Manufacturers, and Competitors' Claims to the Contrary are neither Justified nor Legitimate.
HEALTH WARNING: Care Should Be Taken When Lifting This Product, Since Its Mass, and Thus Its Weight, Is Dependent on Its Velocity Relative to the User. The manufacturer cannot be held liable for injury or damage resulting from relativistic mass increase.
IMPORTANT NOTICE TO PURCHASERS: The Entire Physical Universe,Including This Product, May One Day Collapse Back into an Infinitesimally Small Space. Should Another Universe Subsequently Reemerge, the Existence of This Product in That Universe, and its performance and suitability for any purpose, Cannot Be Guaranteed.
http://www.bellona.no/en/international/russia/navy /northern_fleet/incidents/37598.html
Mirrordotted.
Anyone else find the parent's sig ironic :)
I've heard it's not the only thing in that cafeteria that's viral...
You will be pleased to discover that Windows-64 will render plenty of programs Non-Executable.
Even in a multi-memory controller system the same physical memory is shared, so there has to be some performance hit when running more than one cpu, so I doubt the actual memory bandwidth per chip will be the same. Or is there some architectural trick that removes that bottleneck in practice?
But you can still get f*cked.