And in all honesty, I was using a Perl from 1998 up until late last year, and (1) I never found any bugs, (2) I never had any other problems whatsoever. Having the latest version could be an issue for webservers, but it's mostly irrelevant in all other cases. Perl is a stable beast.
It's not us nerds who have the problem - we use Linux because it's better. Someone uses Windows and we tell them it's not as good, they laugh in our faces. I was bullied pretty badly at school for exactly this sort of thing, but I realised that it's not my fault, it's their fault for not being as smart as me
Is that trying to be funny? I thought so at first, but then...no, it has to be funny. No one would really write that and be serious about it.
These days anything that isn't related to Linux or Windows or a new video card is considered hype or hoax. It's sad how close minded and unexciting computers have become. We have huge debates about whether X11 should be retired, which dates from 1984, and the end result is always "well, we've gotten this far with it so let's keep going." And so it goes.
I'm getting tired of stories like this and "Home Depot to use Linux in cash registers." First, we're just talking about the Linux kernel and some device drivers. We're not talking about X11, bash, a window manager, KDE, Mesa, or anything like that. Just a kernel and some device drivers.
This has nothing to do with the general "popularity" of Linux. Test time: Name any of the 10+ other operating systems used in embedded devices? Can't name them? Exactly.
There's getting to be a more than a little annoying "Linux is the only operating system and should be used in everything from PCs to microwaves" rally. Doesn't that sound a whole lot like what Microsoft has been saying since the mid 1990s?
This comment struck a chord with me. One of the things I cannot stand about the way articles are posted on Slashdot is that every chance is taken to put MS in the worst possible light
I agree completely. It's not just Microsoft either, but any of a number of perceived enemies. Quite frequently a submitted story looks intriquing, then the final line comes out of nowhere to either zing one of these "enemies" or to support the submitters mostly unrelated personal agenda. Slashdot is a support group for people with certain beliefs rather than a news forum. I suspect the slantedness and bitterness is going to ruin a number of careers.
No one understands the brain
on
Going Cyberpunk
·
· Score: 3, Informative
can't help but wonder how far we are from literally being able to record dreams and thoughts?
If you read material on brain research, you'll quickly come to the realize that we have no idea at all how the brain works. The theories are widely varying and contradictory. The chip in this story is a hack, like shocking a dead frog and watching its muscles twitch. You can do it without any kind of clue, but going from there to a full understanding of things is a gargantuan leap.
Couldn't it be that the people developing the Itanium recognise the truth of your first statement, and are fixing that problem? In that case, isn't the need for new compilers a good thing?
The Itanium comments have been along the lines of the instruction set being very difficult to optimize, and that current optimization technology is not up to the challenge. That doesn't sound like they've addressed anything.
The issue is not that people don't need faster computers, it's that we've been going for a do-everything general solution at all costs. Now we have video cards whose cooling systems create 73 decibels of sound, and PCs with five fans and giant heat sinks in them. This is the wrong approach.
For specialized applications, a team of graduate students could create an FPGA in six months that outperforms the Pentium 4 by a large margin. The key word is "specialized." Desktop CPUs are big and huge because they're designed to do everything, and not designed to do anything well. They execute x86 machine code, that's all. That's not a noble endeavor, because no one programs in x86 machine code, we program in C++ and Python and Perl and Delphi/Kylix. x86 code is a horrible match for C, as anyone who has ever written a compiler will tell you. So it's not even what we need and an industry is based upon it, but hey, let's make it go faster even if it means that every desk in every insurance office in the country ends up with a 200 watt processor.
The Itanium is the same way. It's hot, it's complex, and it was designed in a vaccuum. Just that we keep hearing about how it will require a next generation of compilers that don't exist yet...that's a bad sign.
In the late 1970s, this is what fueled home computing. Sure, a VAX or IBM mainframe was better than a Commodore PET or Apple II in some technical ways, but even if a VAX was the same price and same size as an Apple II, who would really want one at home? It's too complex a beast to put in your den.
I say if a Mac is better than a PC at *home*, then that's all I want to hear. That's good enough reason for Apple to stay in business and for people to buy Macs by the millions. No one really wants to have to download the constant Windows security updates, deal with the ever growing number of DirectX releases, and so on, unless that person *likes* fiddling with a computer in lieu of using it as a tool. When it comes right down to it, a computer is a tool, one that you use to do something else.
You're off the mark. You pick your language, the primary candidates being VB and C#. VB isn't really reccommended, it's more of a migration path for old VB users. If you're starting fresh, stick with C#.
Arcade games were violent back in the day as well. Think about Robotron, Defender, Missile Command, Tempest, Galaga, Centipede, Scramble, Space Invaders, etc. They all involve killing things for points. There were other types of games, too, but most were decidedly violent. Even in Pac-Man you eat your enemies, and in Burger Time and Pengo you crush them. The difference is that the violence came across as abstract, whereas now it's pseudo-realistic.
That so many games were violent 20+ years ago was annoying to a number of game designers, and some people tried to branch out just for the sake of doing so. It's disappointing that violence has remained the core of the video game experience for so long, if only because it shows a total lack of original thinking.
Not everyone wants a console. There are lots of reasons for this but the bottom line is some people would rather play games on their PC
Of course you can't get most games on the PC these days. If you like a variety of games, and you want to play everything that's cutting edge, then you also need a console. If you like to buy $400 video cards, then buying a $150-$200 console is no biggie.
I know, I know, I'm a troll. Moderate away. But, geez, does tech really matter any more. You can't buy a system, console or PC, that doesn't draw millions of texture mapped triangles per second, doesn't have awesome sound, and so on. It's all so pointless. If money is not an issue, as it certainly wouldn't be to someone who constantly upgrades video cards and such, $160 will get you a nice Game Cube and Mario Sunshine. Or get an X-Box with Splinter Cell. Or whatever.
The bottom line is that the PC tech race has lost all purpose, except to stroke the ego of hardware fanboys. And, man, do those guys need the ego stroking.
That's not true. VMS was very popular, as were some other vendor-specific operating systems. And the home computers of the day (GNU got started around 1984, IIRC)--which were very popular--were running minimal "operating systems" on top of the hardware. This includes the IBM PC.
I'm seeing a lot of comments about how Linux or OS X or whatever is easier to use than Windows. That's not relevant! No one really "uses an OS" in the sense of getting work done. In an office, most people are running one application all day, whether it be Freehand or a front-end to a database. Or they switch between a few applications, but they still don't spend the day futzing about in a desktop explorer thingy. So we're talking about how well applications are designed, not OS interfaces.
(As an aside, I think that 90% of the people promoting "Linux" are actually promoting a window manager or desktop environment, and it makes very little difference what's running beneath it.)
Why waste putting floppy drives in 100% of computers when 2% at most of all users make use of them? It's that simple.
Now I wish this general principle would carry over to PC design in general. We've gotten to where hospitals and insurance agencies use PCs with Pentium 4s and GeForce 4s, simply because that's what you get from Dell. It would be easy to dismiss this with "well, it doesn't matter that you don't need all that computing power," except that you pay for it with increased power consumption and it's just more junk to end up in a landfill one day.
In the end, I went to OSX and I haven't looked back!
This is off topic, but I've been considering going the OS X route as well. What hardware are you running it on? How has the performance been in general, for various geeky tasks like compiling code?
How many people do you know copy illegl versions of Windows XP?
In all honesty? None. You get Windows when you buy a PC; very few people bother upgrading otherwise. Besides, you have to contact Microsoft to activate XP, so casual piracy is not so easy.
A computer is a complicated piece of machinery, not unlike your VCR (which may or may not be blinking 12:00 at the moment). You cannot drive a car without taking a class, and learning something about how it works.
Right, but there are different levels. With most OSes these days, you have to understand way more than you should. Too much nonsense is exposed that could be handled automatically and cleanly. Currently, it is helpful for users to be able to know this stuff, but it's horrible that they have to in the first place.
It's quite an insightful article, recognising that the vast majority of computer users just want a system that works and don't care about issues of open- or closed-source and don't even want to know about dependencies
I'm an experienced software engineer, and I don't care either! I want to work on developing my products, I don't want to be a full-time system administrator, constantly having to fiddle with things. And I don't care about open vs. closed in most cases either; I'll go with the better product.
the sort of thing that's meaningless to an enterprise middleware programmer (for the most part), but everything to a game designer.
It mattered to game designers then, but not now. It's rare indeed to need to twiddle on that level these days. When you have hundreds of millions of cycles per second, and multiple instructions executing at the same time, many so-called optimizations are just noise. With complex programs, they key is to keep the code clean and understandable.
Slashdot Mirror
And in all honesty, I was using a Perl from 1998 up until late last year, and (1) I never found any bugs, (2) I never had any other problems whatsoever. Having the latest version could be an issue for webservers, but it's mostly irrelevant in all other cases. Perl is a stable beast.
It's not us nerds who have the problem - we use Linux because it's better. Someone uses Windows and we tell them it's not as good, they laugh in our faces. I was bullied pretty badly at school for exactly this sort of thing, but I realised that it's not my fault, it's their fault for not being as smart as me
Is that trying to be funny? I thought so at first, but then...no, it has to be funny. No one would really write that and be serious about it.
These days anything that isn't related to Linux or Windows or a new video card is considered hype or hoax. It's sad how close minded and unexciting computers have become. We have huge debates about whether X11 should be retired, which dates from 1984, and the end result is always "well, we've gotten this far with it so let's keep going." And so it goes.
at the time it was head and shoulders above the blocky, aliased, 256 color look of anything else in the arcade
You mean the "16 color look." Just load up games from the era in MAME and count 'em.
I'm getting tired of stories like this and "Home Depot to use Linux in cash registers." First, we're just talking about the Linux kernel and some device drivers. We're not talking about X11, bash, a window manager, KDE, Mesa, or anything like that. Just a kernel and some device drivers.
This has nothing to do with the general "popularity" of Linux. Test time: Name any of the 10+ other operating systems used in embedded devices? Can't name them? Exactly.
There's getting to be a more than a little annoying "Linux is the only operating system and should be used in everything from PCs to microwaves" rally. Doesn't that sound a whole lot like what Microsoft has been saying since the mid 1990s?
This comment struck a chord with me. One of the things I cannot stand about the way articles are posted on Slashdot is that every chance is taken to put MS in the worst possible light
I agree completely. It's not just Microsoft either, but any of a number of perceived enemies. Quite frequently a submitted story looks intriquing, then the final line comes out of nowhere to either zing one of these "enemies" or to support the submitters mostly unrelated personal agenda. Slashdot is a support group for people with certain beliefs rather than a news forum. I suspect the slantedness and bitterness is going to ruin a number of careers.
can't help but wonder how far we are from literally being able to record dreams and thoughts?
If you read material on brain research, you'll quickly come to the realize that we have no idea at all how the brain works. The theories are widely varying and contradictory. The chip in this story is a hack, like shocking a dead frog and watching its muscles twitch. You can do it without any kind of clue, but going from there to a full understanding of things is a gargantuan leap.
Couldn't it be that the people developing the Itanium recognise the truth of your first statement, and are fixing that problem? In that case, isn't the need for new compilers a good thing?
The Itanium comments have been along the lines of the instruction set being very difficult to optimize, and that current optimization technology is not up to the challenge. That doesn't sound like they've addressed anything.
The issue is not that people don't need faster computers, it's that we've been going for a do-everything general solution at all costs. Now we have video cards whose cooling systems create 73 decibels of sound, and PCs with five fans and giant heat sinks in them. This is the wrong approach.
For specialized applications, a team of graduate students could create an FPGA in six months that outperforms the Pentium 4 by a large margin. The key word is "specialized." Desktop CPUs are big and huge because they're designed to do everything, and not designed to do anything well. They execute x86 machine code, that's all. That's not a noble endeavor, because no one programs in x86 machine code, we program in C++ and Python and Perl and Delphi/Kylix. x86 code is a horrible match for C, as anyone who has ever written a compiler will tell you. So it's not even what we need and an industry is based upon it, but hey, let's make it go faster even if it means that every desk in every insurance office in the country ends up with a 200 watt processor.
The Itanium is the same way. It's hot, it's complex, and it was designed in a vaccuum. Just that we keep hearing about how it will require a next generation of compilers that don't exist yet...that's a bad sign.
In the late 1970s, this is what fueled home computing. Sure, a VAX or IBM mainframe was better than a Commodore PET or Apple II in some technical ways, but even if a VAX was the same price and same size as an Apple II, who would really want one at home? It's too complex a beast to put in your den.
I say if a Mac is better than a PC at *home*, then that's all I want to hear. That's good enough reason for Apple to stay in business and for people to buy Macs by the millions. No one really wants to have to download the constant Windows security updates, deal with the ever growing number of DirectX releases, and so on, unless that person *likes* fiddling with a computer in lieu of using it as a tool. When it comes right down to it, a computer is a tool, one that you use to do something else.
You're off the mark. You pick your language, the primary candidates being VB and C#. VB isn't really reccommended, it's more of a migration path for old VB users. If you're starting fresh, stick with C#.
Arcade games were violent back in the day as well. Think about Robotron, Defender, Missile Command, Tempest, Galaga, Centipede, Scramble, Space Invaders, etc. They all involve killing things for points. There were other types of games, too, but most were decidedly violent. Even in Pac-Man you eat your enemies, and in Burger Time and Pengo you crush them. The difference is that the violence came across as abstract, whereas now it's pseudo-realistic.
That so many games were violent 20+ years ago was annoying to a number of game designers, and some people tried to branch out just for the sake of doing so. It's disappointing that violence has remained the core of the video game experience for so long, if only because it shows a total lack of original thinking.
Not everyone wants a console. There are lots of reasons for this but the bottom line is some people would rather play games on their PC
Of course you can't get most games on the PC these days. If you like a variety of games, and you want to play everything that's cutting edge, then you also need a console. If you like to buy $400 video cards, then buying a $150-$200 console is no biggie.
I know, I know, I'm a troll. Moderate away. But, geez, does tech really matter any more. You can't buy a system, console or PC, that doesn't draw millions of texture mapped triangles per second, doesn't have awesome sound, and so on. It's all so pointless. If money is not an issue, as it certainly wouldn't be to someone who constantly upgrades video cards and such, $160 will get you a nice Game Cube and Mario Sunshine. Or get an X-Box with Splinter Cell. Or whatever.
The bottom line is that the PC tech race has lost all purpose, except to stroke the ego of hardware fanboys. And, man, do those guys need the ego stroking.
the time, everybody used UNIX
That's not true. VMS was very popular, as were some other vendor-specific operating systems. And the home computers of the day (GNU got started around 1984, IIRC)--which were very popular--were running minimal "operating systems" on top of the hardware. This includes the IBM PC.
I'm seeing a lot of comments about how Linux or OS X or whatever is easier to use than Windows. That's not relevant! No one really "uses an OS" in the sense of getting work done. In an office, most people are running one application all day, whether it be Freehand or a front-end to a database. Or they switch between a few applications, but they still don't spend the day futzing about in a desktop explorer thingy. So we're talking about how well applications are designed, not OS interfaces.
(As an aside, I think that 90% of the people promoting "Linux" are actually promoting a window manager or desktop environment, and it makes very little difference what's running beneath it.)
As long as the PC is really fast, gets really hot, and uses up tons of electricity.
Why waste putting floppy drives in 100% of computers when 2% at most of all users make use of them? It's that simple.
Now I wish this general principle would carry over to PC design in general. We've gotten to where hospitals and insurance agencies use PCs with Pentium 4s and GeForce 4s, simply because that's what you get from Dell. It would be easy to dismiss this with "well, it doesn't matter that you don't need all that computing power," except that you pay for it with increased power consumption and it's just more junk to end up in a landfill one day.
In the end, I went to OSX and I haven't looked back!
This is off topic, but I've been considering going the OS X route as well. What hardware are you running it on? How has the performance been in general, for various geeky tasks like compiling code?
How many people do you know copy illegl versions of Windows XP?
In all honesty? None. You get Windows when you buy a PC; very few people bother upgrading otherwise. Besides, you have to contact Microsoft to activate XP, so casual piracy is not so easy.
In four days?
A computer is a complicated piece of machinery, not unlike your VCR (which may or may not be blinking 12:00 at the moment). You cannot drive a car without taking a class, and learning something about how it works.
Right, but there are different levels. With most OSes these days, you have to understand way more than you should. Too much nonsense is exposed that could be handled automatically and cleanly. Currently, it is helpful for users to be able to know this stuff, but it's horrible that they have to in the first place.
It's quite an insightful article, recognising that the vast majority of computer users just want a system that works and don't care about issues of open- or closed-source and don't even want to know about dependencies
I'm an experienced software engineer, and I don't care either! I want to work on developing my products, I don't want to be a full-time system administrator, constantly having to fiddle with things. And I don't care about open vs. closed in most cases either; I'll go with the better product.
the sort of thing that's meaningless to an enterprise middleware programmer (for the most part), but everything to a game designer.
It mattered to game designers then, but not now. It's rare indeed to need to twiddle on that level these days. When you have hundreds of millions of cycles per second, and multiple instructions executing at the same time, many so-called optimizations are just noise. With complex programs, they key is to keep the code clean and understandable.
The RAM (256 bytes IIRC)
128 bytes.