Pick up any Forth book from the early 1980s and a major theme is that of properly factoring your code. I was always surprised that no one ever picked up on the term--until the last several years, that is.
Overall, in terms of smoothness and trouble-free browsing, Internet Explorer is the best option there is. Having to switch to Mozilla or Opera is just painful.
(BTW, the proper name of the browser is "Internet Explorer." "Explorer" is the name of the Windows file manager.)
Software development, at least many types of software development, has changed, in that programmers are much more dependent on large APIs and libraries than they used to be. In theory this is good, because it saves work. In reality, it has turned many types of programming into scavenger hunts for information. Now you have to hang huge posters on your wall showing object heirarchies (you didn't remember that a Button is a subclass of BaseButton which is a sublcass of ButtonControl which is a subclass of WindowControl?). Now you need online forums so you can get a consensus about how a certain API call is supposed to behave in certain circumstances. Quite often I feel I could write a new function faster than locating information about how an existing function is supposed to work.
Are you out of your mind? I do tech support for lusers all the time, and charge like $50 for a simple reinstall and defrag. You wouldnt believe the speed increase.
We're talking about different things. You're talking about people with all kinds of spyware and nutty stuff installed, like RealPlayer and those "weather on your desktop" things and so on. Sure, it's probably easier to reinstall than to manually remove all that trash. But if you keep your machine relatively clean, then defragging rarely buys you anything, unless maybe you've got a very old and slow hard drive and you're doing something extremely disk intensive, like compiling gcc from sources.
Or at least it's to the point where there's no point to it all, except for the people who just have to buy an $75,000 Lexus, because they perceive it as being better than a $25,000 Toyota. Sure, it may be better but it isn't three times better, nor is it worth the higher maintenance costs and poorer fuel efficiency. But you really can't argue with those people anyway.
Here's where we stooped to: Intel reports a 9% increase in raw clock speed, which translates to a 4% increase in synthetic benchmark performance, and the power consumption increases by 15% at the same time. Great. Or NVidia ships a new graphics card that requires an external power supply and has all these great features that are effectively worthless, because it's just barely getting to the point where a game can require hardware T&L--something that's several generations old--and still make a small profit. Never mind all the stuff in later generation cards. Unless you're John Carmack, there's no incentive for developers to support this stuff, especially when an entire game console costs half as much as new video card.
"Faster" is not coming for free. We're seeing boxes with five fans in them and several pound heatsinks. Good grief, the new NVidia card requires an external power supply. So not only are we not needing the extra performance, but we're paying for it in other ways.
Intel should just give up developing new processors until they stop buying more speed with what may be a greater than linear increase in wattage. When something much better comes along, like optical processors perhaps, then we'll have something.
As it stands, Moore's Law is going to prematurely fail in another generation or two, when the cooling system is prohibitively expensive and/or large.
I'm a heavy computer user and re-install windows at minimum twice a year.
For goodness sakes, WHY? I'm a software developer. I work all day with Windows. I have multiple compilers installed. I use obscure tools that normal users don't need. I'm always installing demos of interesting software. And yet my machine is fast and stable. It hasn't crashed in two years. I've never had to reinstall Windows. My gut feeling is that you're reinstalling Windows for one of two reasons:
1. It's easier than cleaning up all the junk you've accumulated on your machine. 2. It's a knee-jerk reaction to any problem, just like defragging your hard drive (which I also never do; it makes no perceptible difference).
Just to keep people from saying it's always been useless: COMDEX was _the_ big computer show in the early to mid-1980s, the one that all the magazines would run stories about.
Getting more people & software written for the (highly portable and relatively standardized) Unix-based operating systems is going to facilitate moving to this new computing platform as long as your 'quantum leap' in computing technology doesn't completely obsolete current ideas of OS design.
I'd argue that UNIX is hardly a "current idea" of OS design. UNIX is holding us back, not moving us forward.
There's this trend in computing to make everything faster, more featureful, hotter, and more energy consuming.
I agree. We're not getting huge, usable leaps in computing capabilities, we're getting continual, incremental improvements. Even these incremental improvements are not coming for free, we're getting them at the cost of increased power consumption, and millions of people throwing away motherboards and video cards every few years. And the incremental nature of it all keeps developers back a couple of generations. It's just barely getting to the point where you can realistically ignore everyone who doesn't have hardware T&L, several years after the introduction of the GeForce 2. But this is still a questionable choice, as a large number of PCs from Dell and Gateway still ship with generic video chipsets that don't have hardware support for T&L. Doom 3, which isn't even on the release radar yet (2003? 2004?), is the first game that's going to require the pixel shaders of the GeForce 3 and beyond. No other developer is going out on such a limb, as cool as shaders may be.
I'd love to see a quantum leap in desktop PC capability that isn't a one-to-one trade of MIPS for wattage. It's very possible, but we're running down this bizarre path where everyone gets all excited about a 9% increase in raw clockspeed (which translates into maybe 4% in benchmarks), even though it increases power consumption by 9% or more.
I'm at the point where I'd be willing to chuck the historic trappings of desktop PCs--x86, UNIX-like operating systems, C++, gcc, etc--for something simpler and cooler running, whose blatant wrongness doesn't eat away at your soul every time you use it. The whole Windows vs. Linux nonsense is a complete red herring in that regard.
I'm rebooting this machine probably four and five times a week
This smacks of an installation problem, or something specific to your hardware. With Windows 2000 and Windows XP I've never had trouble like this. It's rock solid. I'd check all the usual culprits first, like video card drivers.
You might also consider turning off your computer at night and when the kids are at school, etc. With the amount of power a modern PC uses, it's always a win to turn it off when you're not using it for an extended period. (This used to be a point of debate, but no longer.)
I guess you shot out of the womb with coding skills (doubtful).
Realize, though, that's it's often the so-called experienced programmers who are making mistakes, and these are the people that the article is criticizing. The newbie programmer will write a typical program in Python, because it's just so much damn easier. The e\33+ programmer will write it in C++, because C++ is a Manly Language. (In case you didn't read the article, one of the key points is that languages like C++ should be avoided.)
If you think the final thing will run acceptably on a sub ghz P3.. then wtf are you smoking..
Doom 3 is a leap in graphics, not, by all accounts, gameplay. To do all the fancy vertex shader stuff, you'll need a GF3 or better. And textures are not an issue, because you can cram a lot of 8:1 compressed textures into 128MB (that's effectively 1GB of video memory memory--256 times what that PlayStation 2 has). How much work does the CPU need to do? Remember, all of the skinning and multiple passes and all that is happening on the video card. So, sure, there's a lot to do on the CPU side, but maybe much less than you are expecting. The AI in Quake 3 was barely a leap above the AI in DOOM, for example.
Bottom line: It is possible that DOOM 3 will be just fine on an 866MHz P3.
3.06GHz is a 9.28% increase in raw clockrate over the last fastest chip at 2.8GHz. That everyone is going nuts over this shows how sad PC hardware fanatics have become.
The need is driven by games. I'm a gamer, so I have to have all of this bleeding edge hardware.
That was true back in 1999, but no longer. The sweet spot was around an 866MHz Pentium III and a GeForce 2. There's just about nothing that needs more power than that, even recently released games. Sure, you could come up with a counter example, but the law of diminishing returns has kicked-in in a severe way.
I think you're stretching it here. Just because a program falls apart in some cases (programmer uses an N^3 algorithm; program written for 100K files is run on 100 gigabyte file) does not mean that the abstraction is leaky.
Part of using regular expressions, for example, is to know when they exhibit poor performance. And in that case you can change your approach. A classic example is to do 10 different searches instead of using one big expression with ten possibilities in it. This is not a leaky abstraction. It would be leaky if there was no clean way to do it properly, other than to chuck Perl and write it in C.
Please tell me what you think of this - I would honestly like to know.
I've worked in a way similar to you, and I might still if it were as mindlessly simple to write assembly language programs under Windows as it was back in the day of smaller machines (i.e. no linker, no ugly DLL calling conventions, smaller instruction set, etc.). In addition to being fun, I agree in that assembly language is very useful when you need to develop your own abstractions that are very different from other languages, but it's a fine line. First, you have to really gain something substantial, not just a few microseconds of execution time and an executable that's ten kilobytes smaller. And second, sometimes you *think* you're developing a simpler abstraction, but by the time you're done you really haven't gained anything. It's like the classic newbie mistake of thinking that it's trivial to write a faster memcpy.
These days, I prefer to work the opposite way in these situations. Rather than writing directly in assembly, I try to come up with a workable abstraction. Then I write a simple interpreter for that abstraction in as high a level language as I can (e.g. Lisp, Prolog). Then I work on ways of mechanically optimizing that symbolic representation, and eventually generate code (whether for a virtual machine or an existing assembly language). This is the best of both worlds: You get your own abstraction, you can work with assembly language, but you can mechanically handle the niggling details. If I come up with an optimization, then I can implement it, re-convert my symbolic code, and there it is. This assumes you're comfortable with the kind of programming promoted in books the _Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs_ (maybe the best programming book ever written). To some extent, this is what you are doing with your macros, but you're working on a much lower level.
Ah, but they are! Look at how much you can now get done more productively by using Perl, Python, REBOL, or any of a dozen similar languages. Ten years ago, C was the only real option for software development. Now you have Mitch Kapor and friends writing an Outlook replacement in Python, for example.
The paranoia among C programmers is similar to the early 1970s paranoia among assembly language programmers.
Slashdot Mirror
It's that time again to do the thing we all love to do, compile your shiny new kernel. This time its 2.4.20.
then I don't know what is.
Pick up any Forth book from the early 1980s and a major theme is that of properly factoring your code. I was always surprised that no one ever picked up on the term--until the last several years, that is.
do you think the answer to having an massive and unreliable network is to build a second identical network?
Am I the only person getting tired of story submitters using Slashdot to support their personal agendas?
Overall, in terms of smoothness and trouble-free browsing, Internet Explorer is the best option there is. Having to switch to Mozilla or Opera is just painful.
(BTW, the proper name of the browser is "Internet Explorer." "Explorer" is the name of the Windows file manager.)
Software development, at least many types of software development, has changed, in that programmers are much more dependent on large APIs and libraries than they used to be. In theory this is good, because it saves work. In reality, it has turned many types of programming into scavenger hunts for information. Now you have to hang huge posters on your wall showing object heirarchies (you didn't remember that a Button is a subclass of BaseButton which is a sublcass of ButtonControl which is a subclass of WindowControl?). Now you need online forums so you can get a consensus about how a certain API call is supposed to behave in certain circumstances. Quite often I feel I could write a new function faster than locating information about how an existing function is supposed to work.
Are you out of your mind? I do tech support for lusers all the time, and charge like $50 for a simple reinstall and defrag. You wouldnt believe the speed increase.
We're talking about different things. You're talking about people with all kinds of spyware and nutty stuff installed, like RealPlayer and those "weather on your desktop" things and so on. Sure, it's probably easier to reinstall than to manually remove all that trash. But if you keep your machine relatively clean, then defragging rarely buys you anything, unless maybe you've got a very old and slow hard drive and you're doing something extremely disk intensive, like compiling gcc from sources.
Or at least it's to the point where there's no point to it all, except for the people who just have to buy an $75,000 Lexus, because they perceive it as being better than a $25,000 Toyota. Sure, it may be better but it isn't three times better, nor is it worth the higher maintenance costs and poorer fuel efficiency. But you really can't argue with those people anyway.
Here's where we stooped to: Intel reports a 9% increase in raw clock speed, which translates to a 4% increase in synthetic benchmark performance, and the power consumption increases by 15% at the same time. Great. Or NVidia ships a new graphics card that requires an external power supply and has all these great features that are effectively worthless, because it's just barely getting to the point where a game can require hardware T&L--something that's several generations old--and still make a small profit. Never mind all the stuff in later generation cards. Unless you're John Carmack, there's no incentive for developers to support this stuff, especially when an entire game console costs half as much as new video card.
"Faster" is not coming for free. We're seeing boxes with five fans in them and several pound heatsinks. Good grief, the new NVidia card requires an external power supply. So not only are we not needing the extra performance, but we're paying for it in other ways.
Intel should just give up developing new processors until they stop buying more speed with what may be a greater than linear increase in wattage. When something much better comes along, like optical processors perhaps, then we'll have something.
As it stands, Moore's Law is going to prematurely fail in another generation or two, when the cooling system is prohibitively expensive and/or large.
I'm a heavy computer user and re-install windows at minimum twice a year.
For goodness sakes, WHY? I'm a software developer. I work all day with Windows. I have multiple compilers installed. I use obscure tools that normal users don't need. I'm always installing demos of interesting software. And yet my machine is fast and stable. It hasn't crashed in two years. I've never had to reinstall Windows. My gut feeling is that you're reinstalling Windows for one of two reasons:
1. It's easier than cleaning up all the junk you've accumulated on your machine.
2. It's a knee-jerk reaction to any problem, just like defragging your hard drive (which I also never do; it makes no perceptible difference).
Power consumption is also reduced by a full 36% according to NVIDIA.
If that's true, then why does this card require an external power supply? Yikes.
And what's your grand idea of a "current" OS design? 3D file drawers with lickable handles?
You must be one of those people who think that there are three operating systems in the world, four if you count BeOs.
Just to keep people from saying it's always been useless: COMDEX was _the_ big computer show in the early to mid-1980s, the one that all the magazines would run stories about.
Getting more people & software written for the (highly portable and relatively standardized) Unix-based operating systems is going to facilitate moving to this new computing platform as long as your 'quantum leap' in computing technology doesn't completely obsolete current ideas of OS design.
I'd argue that UNIX is hardly a "current idea" of OS design. UNIX is holding us back, not moving us forward.
There's this trend in computing to make everything faster, more featureful, hotter, and more energy consuming.
I agree. We're not getting huge, usable leaps in computing capabilities, we're getting continual, incremental improvements. Even these incremental improvements are not coming for free, we're getting them at the cost of increased power consumption, and millions of people throwing away motherboards and video cards every few years. And the incremental nature of it all keeps developers back a couple of generations. It's just barely getting to the point where you can realistically ignore everyone who doesn't have hardware T&L, several years after the introduction of the GeForce 2. But this is still a questionable choice, as a large number of PCs from Dell and Gateway still ship with generic video chipsets that don't have hardware support for T&L. Doom 3, which isn't even on the release radar yet (2003? 2004?), is the first game that's going to require the pixel shaders of the GeForce 3 and beyond. No other developer is going out on such a limb, as cool as shaders may be.
I'd love to see a quantum leap in desktop PC capability that isn't a one-to-one trade of MIPS for wattage. It's very possible, but we're running down this bizarre path where everyone gets all excited about a 9% increase in raw clockspeed (which translates into maybe 4% in benchmarks), even though it increases power consumption by 9% or more.
I'm at the point where I'd be willing to chuck the historic trappings of desktop PCs--x86, UNIX-like operating systems, C++, gcc, etc--for something simpler and cooler running, whose blatant wrongness doesn't eat away at your soul every time you use it. The whole Windows vs. Linux nonsense is a complete red herring in that regard.
I'm rebooting this machine probably four and five times a week
This smacks of an installation problem, or something specific to your hardware. With Windows 2000 and Windows XP I've never had trouble like this. It's rock solid. I'd check all the usual culprits first, like video card drivers.
You might also consider turning off your computer at night and when the kids are at school, etc. With the amount of power a modern PC uses, it's always a win to turn it off when you're not using it for an extended period. (This used to be a point of debate, but no longer.)
I guess you shot out of the womb with coding skills (doubtful).
Realize, though, that's it's often the so-called experienced programmers who are making mistakes, and these are the people that the article is criticizing. The newbie programmer will write a typical program in Python, because it's just so much damn easier. The e\33+ programmer will write it in C++, because C++ is a Manly Language. (In case you didn't read the article, one of the key points is that languages like C++ should be avoided.)
If you think the final thing will run acceptably on a sub ghz P3.. then wtf are you smoking..
Doom 3 is a leap in graphics, not, by all accounts, gameplay. To do all the fancy vertex shader stuff, you'll need a GF3 or better. And textures are not an issue, because you can cram a lot of 8:1 compressed textures into 128MB (that's effectively 1GB of video memory memory--256 times what that PlayStation 2 has). How much work does the CPU need to do? Remember, all of the skinning and multiple passes and all that is happening on the video card. So, sure, there's a lot to do on the CPU side, but maybe much less than you are expecting. The AI in Quake 3 was barely a leap above the AI in DOOM, for example.
Bottom line: It is possible that DOOM 3 will be just fine on an 866MHz P3.
A 10% increase is pretty impressive, considering the increases we used to get out of Intel (2%ish) ...
It's a 9.28% increase in raw clockrate. The actual performance increase is less than 9.28%.
Doom 3
Wow, so you've actually run an official, finished, optimized version of Doom 3? Impressive, considering that id hasn't even gotten that far yet.
3.06GHz is a 9.28% increase in raw clockrate over the last fastest chip at 2.8GHz. That everyone is going nuts over this shows how sad PC hardware fanatics have become.
The need is driven by games. I'm a gamer, so I have to have all of this bleeding edge hardware.
That was true back in 1999, but no longer. The sweet spot was around an 866MHz Pentium III and a GeForce 2. There's just about nothing that needs more power than that, even recently released games. Sure, you could come up with a counter example, but the law of diminishing returns has kicked-in in a severe way.
But this is still a leaky abstraction:
I think you're stretching it here. Just because a program falls apart in some cases (programmer uses an N^3 algorithm; program written for 100K files is run on 100 gigabyte file) does not mean that the abstraction is leaky.
Part of using regular expressions, for example, is to know when they exhibit poor performance. And in that case you can change your approach. A classic example is to do 10 different searches instead of using one big expression with ten possibilities in it. This is not a leaky abstraction. It would be leaky if there was no clean way to do it properly, other than to chuck Perl and write it in C.
Please tell me what you think of this - I would honestly like to know.
I've worked in a way similar to you, and I might still if it were as mindlessly simple to write assembly language programs under Windows as it was back in the day of smaller machines (i.e. no linker, no ugly DLL calling conventions, smaller instruction set, etc.). In addition to being fun, I agree in that assembly language is very useful when you need to develop your own abstractions that are very different from other languages, but it's a fine line. First, you have to really gain something substantial, not just a few microseconds of execution time and an executable that's ten kilobytes smaller. And second, sometimes you *think* you're developing a simpler abstraction, but by the time you're done you really haven't gained anything. It's like the classic newbie mistake of thinking that it's trivial to write a faster memcpy.
These days, I prefer to work the opposite way in these situations. Rather than writing directly in assembly, I try to come up with a workable abstraction. Then I write a simple interpreter for that abstraction in as high a level language as I can (e.g. Lisp, Prolog). Then I work on ways of mechanically optimizing that symbolic representation, and eventually generate code (whether for a virtual machine or an existing assembly language). This is the best of both worlds: You get your own abstraction, you can work with assembly language, but you can mechanically handle the niggling details. If I come up with an optimization, then I can implement it, re-convert my symbolic code, and there it is. This assumes you're comfortable with the kind of programming promoted in books the _Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs_ (maybe the best programming book ever written). To some extent, this is what you are doing with your macros, but you're working on a much lower level.
Here [kuro5hin.org]. Yeah, it's basically the same thing.
Yes, and your point is? Hint: Slashdot gets most of it's stories from elsewhere.
C/C++ aint going anywhere.
Ah, but they are! Look at how much you can now get done more productively by using Perl, Python, REBOL, or any of a dozen similar languages. Ten years ago, C was the only real option for software development. Now you have Mitch Kapor and friends writing an Outlook replacement in Python, for example.
The paranoia among C programmers is similar to the early 1970s paranoia among assembly language programmers.