So long as your code is not unnecessarily convoluted often the machine optimizations are better than the human brain optimizations.
That's not what optimising is. It is a logic problem, one that a computer cannot solve. It is organization, it involves using your mind. It is making sure that your code isn't doing more work that it should. Restructuring code to remove redundant operations. Finding a better way to do the things you need to do.
Claiming that a compiler can do a better job of optimizing than a human is exactly the same thing as claiming that a computer makes a better opponent in UT2k3 than a human.
The first was to get a SQL query to run faster: a simple matter of creating a view and supporting indexes.
Every database programmer out there is cringing right now. Throwing indexes at a poorly designed table is not going to solve your problem. You'll find that as your table grows, your insert time is going to start bogging down the table heavily.
Eventually you'll find that a simple insert locks up the table for several seconds, and the requests will start to pile up.
By all means, don't spend days optimizing useless things, but spending a few hours planning good table structure will save you a lot of headaches a few years down the line.
Is the time it takes me to do the performance optimization worth it in time or money.
The question I ask is, can the server handle the load any other way? As far as my company is concerned, my time is worth nothing. They pay me either way. The only issue is, and will always be, will it work? Throwing more hardware at the problem has never solved a single performance problem, ever.
We've been slashdotted twice. In the pipeline is a database request, a SOAP interaction, a custom apache module, and an XSLT transform.
Our server never even came close to its breaking point. I attribute it to optimizing for performance.
Apple has known about these problems for weeks, and the announcements were timed to follow the patches.
Months actually.. this hole was discovered in february. It took Apple 3 months to patch it, and when they did patch it, eEye called foul because Apple neglected to tell anyone that if you don't apply the patch, you are vulnerable to a remote root exploit.
What's wrong with just saying, "We fixed an exploit discovered by someone at some company in this component of the operating system." ?
Because I can download the patch and see EXACTLY what was patched.. and know EXACTLY how to exploit it.
No hacker uses MS security announcements to devise exploits.. they use the patch itself.
That's the problem. Apple releases security patches, and doesn't tell the end-user how severe they really are. But the hackers can tell just from looking at the patch itself.
Hiding the severity from the users in the name of protecting them is the most dumbass thing I've ever heard.
Comparing an OS with hardware.. good move. Otherwise you might notice that linux has gotten easier and faster with every release.
We've been benchmarking a dual g5 XServe against a Sun 450 and a 220 to see if it can handle the load... for completeness, I've been also benchmarking one of my linux workstations.
The 2.6.5 kernel out performs solaris8, solaris9 and OSX by huge margins (osx does outperform solaris, in terms of speed, but it can't handle the load.. it starts breaking down when the load hits 3). There's something wrong with OSX if a dual g5 xserve is getting spanked by a single processor P4 2.4ghz.
And I think the claim that linux is getting easier stands on its own.
OK, so this is all stuff that's been in OS X since day one.
It has? OSX didn't have a popup blocking browser, bluetooth support, or wifi support on day 600 let alone day 1.
It didn't get any of that until 10.2 (well, wifi support showed up in 10.1.5), and the wifi support is only for airport cards... it doesn't support non-apple 802.11b cards.
It will never happen, Gecko use that is. They passed on Gecko specifically for the fact KHTML is much lighter and allowed them to augment it without having to fork and blow it up/rip out what they don't like.
It's true that it will never happen.. because it would just be too much work for apple. But gecko is no longer the bloated mess that it was back in 2000 (when Apple was starting on Safari).
Firefox actually starts faster than Safari on my machine... and it still has better standards support (border-collapse anyone?)
DO NOT ADD Virtual Desktops as part of the Manager--Add command key options ala NeXTSTEP that commandkey-dblclick autohides ALL OTHER APPS BUT THE ONE YOU WANT TO WORK ON
Ick. I like virtual desktops. I can have a few terminal windows open (one for editing a php file, the other for editing a css file), arranged next to a browser window with the page I'm editing. On another desktop, I can have another browser window open to a different page, and another terminal window. On another desktop, I can have my email and another browser window with our php-based project manager open.
Having to rearrange all these windows every time I switch focus would suck.
Expose doesn't work for this situation, and your proposal is even worse.
You might as well not even have the concept of windows and have every application take up the entire screen. In fact, I think that's probably how most Mac users must work if they think Expose is the greatest thing since sliced bread.
I'm having real difficulty gearing up to your level of outrage.
Understandable, but wait until Tiger comes out, and all application updates for Panther stop. Not only that, but all security updates for Jaguar will stop at the same time (just as Apple no longer releases security updates for 10.1)
Apple releases apps that artificially require the latest OS just to force you to upgrade. For example, there is no special feature in Panther that X11 relies on.
.unless you happen to have a machine with Nvidia display adapter (try any 12" PBook), in which case the sleep won't work, as the kernel does not know how to wake up the display adapter from sleep.
I didn't know that, hopefully they'll come up with a fix for that.
However, to be fair, a co-worker has a 12" iBook that always goes to sleep when you close the lid, even if you have an external monitor, kb and mouse hooked up. That's under Panther.
ummm no one said you HAD to upgrade the software... they are still supporting Jag in system updates.
Only security patches. No new software. In order to get newer versions of Safari, iChat, iPhoto, iMovie, etc etc you need to buy Panther. As soon as Tiger comes out, don't expect any software updates for Panther.
Power management and all these kinds of functions are well supported by Linux itself and the GUI systems. The problems are hardware inconsistency,
That's true. The power management on PPC Linux for powerbooks works wonderfully. Probably because the power management for powerbooks is all the same.
By wonderfully I mean that the LCD will dim after a few minutes of being idle, it will suspend after 10 minutes of being idle, it will suspend and wakeup correctly when the lid is shut and opened.
The heap overflow vulnerability mentioned here only applies to the Windows version of the Quicktime player, not the Mac OS version.
Actually, that's a completely seperate vulnerability. The one talked about here is the one discovered by eEye and not the one discovered by iDefense.
This is not suprising, just 1 month ago I mentioned that quicktime was vulnerable to buffer overflows left and right because there is absolutely no input validation done. I was flamed for saying that, but here we have 3 different buffer overflows patched all at once.
Every benchmark I've run shows linux to be faster than darwin on the same hardware.
On a Dual G4 1.25ghz with 512 megs of ram, dual booting yellowdog and panther:
UnixBench has a final score of 316.4 on Linux and 131.0 on Panther.
LMBench shows the same thing. Things like creating a TCP connection take 80 microseconds on linux, and 151 microseconds on panther. Pipes have a bandwidth of 419 MB/s on linux, and 216 MB/s on Panther.
I have yet to find a benchmark that doesn't show linux having a significant speed advantage over panther on the exact same hardware.
Slashdot Mirror
So long as your code is not unnecessarily convoluted often the machine optimizations are better than the human brain optimizations.
That's not what optimising is. It is a logic problem, one that a computer cannot solve. It is organization, it involves using your mind. It is making sure that your code isn't doing more work that it should. Restructuring code to remove redundant operations. Finding a better way to do the things you need to do.
Claiming that a compiler can do a better job of optimizing than a human is exactly the same thing as claiming that a computer makes a better opponent in UT2k3 than a human.
Humans have creativity on their side.
The first was to get a SQL query to run faster: a simple matter of creating a view and supporting indexes.
Every database programmer out there is cringing right now. Throwing indexes at a poorly designed table is not going to solve your problem. You'll find that as your table grows, your insert time is going to start bogging down the table heavily.
Eventually you'll find that a simple insert locks up the table for several seconds, and the requests will start to pile up.
By all means, don't spend days optimizing useless things, but spending a few hours planning good table structure will save you a lot of headaches a few years down the line.
Is the time it takes me to do the performance optimization worth it in time or money.
The question I ask is, can the server handle the load any other way? As far as my company is concerned, my time is worth nothing. They pay me either way. The only issue is, and will always be, will it work? Throwing more hardware at the problem has never solved a single performance problem, ever.
We've been slashdotted twice. In the pipeline is a database request, a SOAP interaction, a custom apache module, and an XSLT transform.
Our server never even came close to its breaking point. I attribute it to optimizing for performance.
Apple has known about these problems for weeks, and the announcements were timed to follow the patches.
Rosemary Jane.
Apple has known about these problems for weeks, and the announcements were timed to follow the patches.
Months actually.. this hole was discovered in february. It took Apple 3 months to patch it, and when they did patch it, eEye called foul because Apple neglected to tell anyone that if you don't apply the patch, you are vulnerable to a remote root exploit.
What's wrong with just saying, "We fixed an exploit discovered by someone at some company in this component of the operating system." ?
Because I can download the patch and see EXACTLY what was patched.. and know EXACTLY how to exploit it.
No hacker uses MS security announcements to devise exploits.. they use the patch itself.
That's the problem. Apple releases security patches, and doesn't tell the end-user how severe they really are. But the hackers can tell just from looking at the patch itself.
Hiding the severity from the users in the name of protecting them is the most dumbass thing I've ever heard.
Apple doesn't ignore security holes, they fix them quickly and quietly before anybody realizes where they are. that's a BIG difference.
Not really. If they don't tell the end user that the patch is critical, the end user doesn't install it as quickly as if they had been informed.
When software update pops up and says there's 50 megs of crap to download and a reboot or two will be required, I definately think twice about it.
I don't think people on dial up ever patch.. because downloading the 100 megs of updates that both Jaguar, Panther, and XP require has got to be hell.
"How many of u expect your cars to be engineered such that they will run safely and properly 99.9% of the time"
Your college professor has a very strange accent. Does he normally sound like a 13 year old AOL user?
I can't say I've ever seen that trend in PCs.
Comparing an OS with hardware.. good move. Otherwise you might notice that linux has gotten easier and faster with every release.
We've been benchmarking a dual g5 XServe against a Sun 450 and a 220 to see if it can handle the load... for completeness, I've been also benchmarking one of my linux workstations.
The 2.6.5 kernel out performs solaris8, solaris9 and OSX by huge margins (osx does outperform solaris, in terms of speed, but it can't handle the load.. it starts breaking down when the load hits 3). There's something wrong with OSX if a dual g5 xserve is getting spanked by a single processor P4 2.4ghz.
And I think the claim that linux is getting easier stands on its own.
OK, so this is all stuff that's been in OS X since day one.
It has? OSX didn't have a popup blocking browser, bluetooth support, or wifi support on day 600 let alone day 1.
It didn't get any of that until 10.2 (well, wifi support showed up in 10.1.5), and the wifi support is only for airport cards... it doesn't support non-apple 802.11b cards.
talk about your revisionist history.
It will never happen, Gecko use that is. They passed on Gecko specifically for the fact KHTML is much lighter and allowed them to augment it without having to fork and blow it up/rip out what they don't like.
It's true that it will never happen.. because it would just be too much work for apple. But gecko is no longer the bloated mess that it was back in 2000 (when Apple was starting on Safari).
Firefox actually starts faster than Safari on my machine... and it still has better standards support (border-collapse anyone?)
DO NOT ADD Virtual Desktops as part of the Manager--Add command key options ala NeXTSTEP that commandkey-dblclick autohides ALL OTHER APPS BUT THE ONE YOU WANT TO WORK ON
Ick. I like virtual desktops. I can have a few terminal windows open (one for editing a php file, the other for editing a css file), arranged next to a browser window with the page I'm editing. On another desktop, I can have another browser window open to a different page, and another terminal window. On another desktop, I can have my email and another browser window with our php-based project manager open.
Having to rearrange all these windows every time I switch focus would suck.
Expose doesn't work for this situation, and your proposal is even worse.
You might as well not even have the concept of windows and have every application take up the entire screen. In fact, I think that's probably how most Mac users must work if they think Expose is the greatest thing since sliced bread.
Also, once again. Its a jedi (or potential jedi) who is torn between light and dark and can go either way. Good idea, but its becoming cliche.
Becoming? It's been cliche since 1977.
What else Apple doesn't give you: Product Activation.
True, however Apple does give you mandatory product registration.
I'm having real difficulty gearing up to your level of outrage.
Understandable, but wait until Tiger comes out, and all application updates for Panther stop. Not only that, but all security updates for Jaguar will stop at the same time (just as Apple no longer releases security updates for 10.1)
Apple releases apps that artificially require the latest OS just to force you to upgrade. For example, there is no special feature in Panther that X11 relies on.
.unless you happen to have a machine with Nvidia display adapter (try any 12" PBook), in which case the sleep won't work, as the kernel does not know how to wake up the display adapter from sleep.
I didn't know that, hopefully they'll come up with a fix for that.
However, to be fair, a co-worker has a 12" iBook that always goes to sleep when you close the lid, even if you have an external monitor, kb and mouse hooked up. That's under Panther.
Is XCode all you can come up with that doesn't run on Jaguar?
These apps all require 10.3:
Apple's X11, Safari 1.2, Final Cut Pro HD, DVD Studio Pro, Shake, Motion.
And those are just the apps made by apple!
Apple has a year's head start on Sony -- what makes you think Sony can catch up now?
Years and years of past experiences.
I have an older Mac that's still running Jaguar, and it's fine, it works great, it runs all the latest software,
It does? How's XCode working for you?
ummm no one said you HAD to upgrade the software... they are still supporting Jag in system updates.
Only security patches. No new software. In order to get newer versions of Safari, iChat, iPhoto, iMovie, etc etc you need to buy Panther. As soon as Tiger comes out, don't expect any software updates for Panther.
Power management and all these kinds of functions are well supported by Linux itself and the GUI systems. The problems are hardware inconsistency,
That's true. The power management on PPC Linux for powerbooks works wonderfully. Probably because the power management for powerbooks is all the same.
By wonderfully I mean that the LCD will dim after a few minutes of being idle, it will suspend after 10 minutes of being idle, it will suspend and wakeup correctly when the lid is shut and opened.
crackmonkey mods...
hey, i mirrored them too! here they are:
Knoppix 3.4 Deutsch
Knoppix 3.4 English
Where's my +5 informative?
I think we can guess why BeOS doesn't get holes found
Is it because no one is able to get their ethernet cards to work under BeOS?
The heap overflow vulnerability mentioned here only applies to the Windows version of the Quicktime player, not the Mac OS version.
Actually, that's a completely seperate vulnerability. The one talked about here is the one discovered by eEye and not the one discovered by iDefense.
This is not suprising, just 1 month ago I mentioned that quicktime was vulnerable to buffer overflows left and right because there is absolutely no input validation done. I was flamed for saying that, but here we have 3 different buffer overflows patched all at once.
bah, that wasn't flamebait.
Every benchmark I've run shows linux to be faster than darwin on the same hardware.
On a Dual G4 1.25ghz with 512 megs of ram, dual booting yellowdog and panther:
UnixBench has a final score of 316.4 on Linux and 131.0 on Panther.
LMBench shows the same thing. Things like creating a TCP connection take 80 microseconds on linux, and 151 microseconds on panther. Pipes have a bandwidth of 419 MB/s on linux, and 216 MB/s on Panther.
I have yet to find a benchmark that doesn't show linux having a significant speed advantage over panther on the exact same hardware.