So now Attack of the Clones is crap because it is only the third-fastest selling movie ever? What a bullshit! The movie is a great and also a money-making monster. Yeah, George Lucas really has dug a hole for himself!
Hell, given gnome and kde, developers these days can't write acceptably fast software even in C/C++ (even on my 1.5GHz Athlon XP, KDE 3.x and GNOME 1.4 are pushing the limits of 'acceptable')
It has more to do with the effiency of the code than the language, IMHO. For example, I opened a zip-file containing 3000+ files in ark and it took about 10 minutes to display the complete index! While just unzip -v takes less than 5 seconds.
I looked at the source for ark and discovered that the contents are retrieved by spawning zip and then parsing the output using regular expressions! Of course that takes forever. If they would just have used a zip library, display could be much faster.
The source contains even a comment like "could just as well parse output of unzip command"! Of course it's going to be slow that way.
In the Netherlands, we have this already since a few years. It's a seperate tax on all electrical equipment and it has to mentioned on the pricing tag. I personally think it is a good thing.
From the article: MS tells us that the policy statement is out of date. IPs were logged for testing purposes during the XP beta period; but since the product launch, there has been no IP logging. From the privacy statement: Microsoft will occasionally update this Statement of Privacy to reflect company and customer feedback.
Somehow I don't believe Microsoft is not logging IPs any more. Why didn't they change the privacy statement and why didn't they update the program after beta testing???
Not only that, but a one-time pad needs to be as long as the communication that it's encrypting, in order to be theoretically 100% secure. So the server would have to be equipped with as much random data as all encrypted communication that's going to take place. Nonsense. I can use DES in Output Feedback mode, generating "random" numbers" based on a single 64-bit key and call it a one-time pad!
I know the Washington - Moskow hotline uses a(real:-) one-time pad, probably messages to nuclear subs also.
The US don't need lawmakers for this. G.W. will declare the ruling a terrorist act towards the American industry and will bomb the Netherlands to pieces. The makers of Kazaa will be caught and brought to Cuba and, after a secret hearing, be convicted and hanged.
There is for example memory allignment for the variables, which differs depending hardware. There are the different execution costs of certain asm comands, so the compiler can chose the best for every arch.
Ah, but that would still depend on the processor only, wouldn't it? In fact the optimal memory alignment may vary between i386 (32 bits) and P4 (where internal chip works with 64 bit numbers) but on other platforms these differences do not exist. So if you consider a P4 a different platform than a 386, there is still no reason to compile everything yourself. BTW my guess is that most people who compile their own software nowadays wouldn't even know the switches to gcc to get i<xxx>-optimized code.
The other advantage of Compiling yourself is control, you can control any aspect of the build process. Take Mozilla as an example, you can choose whether you want Mail/News client, SVG, MathML, you can prefer certain librarys over others (each of which has its own pros and cons) you can even choose which kind of garbage collection you want it to heav, if any.
The same thing can obviously be accomplished with binary packages as well. And of course, control is nice, but some libraries are better than others and I think it's nice that the distro people make the choices.
I never leard more about the inner workings of Linux, as when I first installed it manually from sources for the first time. I perfectly agree with that. If you have the time, it's a nice excersise. But then so is a good book.
Compare this with this. It's clear that not too much work was done, the site was just copied from the NBC site. As stated in the review, it has the same dull titles: "NBC Olympics" became "Olympics".
It is really sad that the IOC couldn't hire an independant site builder to create the site here.
Just think about this for minute - since the vast majority of Linux software comes with source code, why is it necessary to download binary files that somebody compiled on a particular hardware platform and included all sorts of options to run it on thousands of different hardware configurations? Would it not be more logical to compile everything on your own machine, ensuring that the code is optimised for exactly your hardware?
The whole idea of a kernel is that it provides an abstraction layer to the hardware: the optimization based on all these "thousands of hardware configurations" takes place in the kernel.
Let's take a look at the most important pieces of hardware that are in the computer:
The mainboard. It hosts some chipsets, perhaps sound chip, perhaps ethernet interface. Optimization takes place in the kernel and the binary code of any program wouldn't be any different when compiled for a different mainboard.
The video card. By selecting the correct xfree driver, you have the optimization. Standard interfaces to video card features are available through OpenGL etc. A 3d program can use the OpenGL interface and it might be implemented in the video card driver, or in software. The binary of the program wouldn't change, right?
Add-on cards. A program would be bad if the binary would depend on the kind of ethernet card you have, wouldn't it? There is exotic software for, for example, video capture cards, but they have often been written for a specific chip and don't work with other chips at all.
The CPU. Now there binaries may differ because of pipelining and special instructions. However, I don't believe the overall speed of your average system would increase that much if all binaries had been cpu-optimized (for example, the site that hosts the article lacks bandwidth...). If you really want this optimization it would make more sense (as another author suggested) to create binaries for different CPUs. (There must be a reason no other OS distributor doesn this, right?)
The conclusion is that it is really nonsense to compile _everything_ from source. Have the users compile their kernel based on their hardware. Make sure they have the correct xfree driver for their video card and a correct xfree config file. That's all the "hardware optimization" you're ever going to need.
So why do people nowadays compile programs, then? That has nothing to do with hardware, but with the myriad of libraries Out There. Binaries will of course change if you compile them on libc5 or glibc2.1. But if you stick with one distribution, that is never a problem. The problem is there if you want programs that don't come with your distro. Again, there's really no reason to compile the programs that do come with the distro.
But that's just my opinion. Of course these people should be praised, because they had a Good Idea [tm] and did something with it.
Slashdot Mirror
So now Attack of the Clones is crap because it is only the third-fastest selling movie ever? What a bullshit! The movie is a great and also a money-making monster. Yeah, George Lucas really has dug a hole for himself!
It has more to do with the effiency of the code than the language, IMHO. For example, I opened a zip-file containing 3000+ files in ark and it took about 10 minutes to display the complete index! While just unzip -v takes less than 5 seconds.
I looked at the source for ark and discovered that the contents are retrieved by spawning zip and then parsing the output using regular expressions! Of course that takes forever. If they would just have used a zip library, display could be much faster.
The source contains even a comment like "could just as well parse output of unzip command"! Of course it's going to be slow that way.
I read ./ in
light mode. Does that make me a thief?
In the Netherlands, we have this already since a few years. It's a seperate tax on all electrical equipment and it has to mentioned on the pricing tag. I personally think it is a good thing.
Somehow I don't believe Microsoft is not logging IPs any more. Why didn't they change the privacy statement and why didn't they update the program after beta testing???
Not only that, but a one-time pad needs to be as long as the communication that it's encrypting, in order to be theoretically 100% secure. So the server would have to be equipped with as much random data as all encrypted communication that's going to take place. Nonsense. I can use DES in Output Feedback mode, generating "random" numbers" based on a single 64-bit key and call it a one-time pad!
I know the Washington - Moskow hotline uses a(real :-) one-time pad, probably messages to nuclear subs also.
Ah, but that would still depend on the processor only, wouldn't it? In fact the optimal memory alignment may vary between i386 (32 bits) and P4 (where internal chip works with 64 bit numbers) but on other platforms these differences do not exist. So if you consider a P4 a different platform than a 386, there is still no reason to compile everything yourself. BTW my guess is that most people who compile their own software nowadays wouldn't even know the switches to gcc to get i<xxx>-optimized code.
The other advantage of Compiling yourself is control, you can control any aspect of the build process. Take Mozilla as an example, you can choose whether you want Mail/News client, SVG, MathML, you can prefer certain librarys over others (each of which has its own pros and cons) you can even choose which kind of garbage collection you want it to heav, if any.
The same thing can obviously be accomplished with binary packages as well. And of course, control is nice, but some libraries are better than others and I think it's nice that the distro people make the choices.
I never leard more about the inner workings of Linux, as when I first installed it manually from sources for the first time.
I perfectly agree with that. If you have the time, it's a nice excersise. But then so is a good book.
It is really sad that the IOC couldn't hire an independant site builder to create the site here.
The whole idea of a kernel is that it provides an abstraction layer to the hardware: the optimization based on all these "thousands of hardware configurations" takes place in the kernel.
Let's take a look at the most important pieces of hardware that are in the computer:
The conclusion is that it is really nonsense to compile _everything_ from source. Have the users compile their kernel based on their hardware. Make sure they have the correct xfree driver for their video card and a correct xfree config file. That's all the "hardware optimization" you're ever going to need.
So why do people nowadays compile programs, then? That has nothing to do with hardware, but with the myriad of libraries Out There. Binaries will of course change if you compile them on libc5 or glibc2.1. But if you stick with one distribution, that is never a problem. The problem is there if you want programs that don't come with your distro. Again, there's really no reason to compile the programs that do come with the distro.
But that's just my opinion. Of course these people should be praised, because they had a Good Idea [tm] and did something with it.
I believe more strongly in the right to control what I listen to
I don't care. I've got headphones.