IIRC Gandalf's current age is about 300 lifetimes of a regular man (according to Jackson's version), so a couple of years one way or the other won't make a difference.
...That work seems to have been mostly scrapped, as its leader Dave Custer wanted to break backwards compatibility to save MS-WNT from the big problems it still has.
I can't attest to the accuracy of your statements, but I am sure that are referring to Dave Cutler who was hired away from DEC in 1988 to architect Windows NT
One of the challenges of C++ as a programming language, is that it requires the developer to truly understand what the compiler is doing or going to do in various conditions. In fact. there are many cases where you need to know what a compiler will do when you dont do something (e.g. when you dont write a copy constructor).
I cannot think of a another programming language that does this to the same degree.
According to this article at Techweb, the head park time was not "specified" in IDE drives, so they had to get drive manufacturers to meet their 200-300 millisecond requirement...
Writing drivers for windows has gotten so complex the Microsoft is working on a new driver framework called the "Windows Driver Framework" to try and simplify it and to get more robust drivers from 3rd party developers. You can read an introductory article here by Walter Oney... it is very enlightening and highlights the various issues that a driver writer has to know at a very deep level to write even the simplest driver these days.
fscanf can be used in a safe manner in conjunction with sprintf to dynamically format and constrain the input buffer length. See the following code snippet:
char inbuf[80], format[10];
sprintf(format,"%%%ds", sizeof(inbuf)-1);
if (fscanf(fp, format, inbuf)!=EOF) // do stuff
See "The practice of programming" by Kernighan and Pike, for more details.
I also took up Aikido at age 30 and did it for 5 years. I agree it is a great martial art to take up.
My experience suggests that the "no macho shit" is highly dependent on your Sensei... certain dojo's we used to train with at seminars had a penchant for the "macho shit". As with all martial arts, check out the sensei and dojo and make sure that the style and emphasis is consistent with your needs and desires
WP for Windows - a disaster from the first release; I went through 5.1, 6.0, 6.1, and 7.0
I have also used WP since the DOS days. I actually hated WP 5.1 for DOS because of the crappy interface... but tech support, printer support, and features were great. I have since gone through the many WP for Windows versions with varying degrees of likes/dislikes.
WP for Windows 9 (with the latest service packs applied) running on Win2K is quite stable and I am very pleased with it for what I use it for... WP 10 on WinXp pro is also quite good. I havent tried WP 11 though. However, if truth be told, it's lack of success has nothing to do with its feature comparison with MS Word. I much prefer the feature set in WP compared to Word.
Re:PkWare has already published the file INFO!!!!
on
.ZIP Standard to Fragment?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
...never mind.
I finally got through to the original IGN news article posting (and not just the slashdot replies) and it clarifies what the actual issues are. My parent post here didnt add anything useful.
If you go to PkWare's web site there is a link
on their front page which says they have published the file format changes so everyone can play nice. This page then links to another
application note with the actual format spec inside.
Note also, Pkware actually added their new encryption, authentication, and extra compression options in V5.0 last year. Their newest release is V6.0. To be fair, I dont know when they published the spec?
It was dropped in the 1.5 trunk not the 1.4 branch. So you wont see it unless you pick up a nightly build of the 1.5 trunk which was built in the last couple of nights.
It will be in the 1.4 release
Re:THAT'S considered an acceptible release bug???
on
Mozilla 1.4 RC1
·
· Score: 1
That ATI driver warning has been in place for ages. It was first reported in Sep 2001.
It seemed to effect Rage Pro and Rage 128's and early Radeons (remember there are at least 3 generations of Radeons). If you read the bug comments, ATI (and Sun in the Java crash case) have released new drivers that seem to have fixed the problems (at least for some of the cards). This confirms for me that the bug was in fact in the drivers. In which case, there is not much Mozilla can do.
What would be nice is if Mozilla would at least list the problem cards, instead of just ATI. I know I have never had a problem with my ATI 9700 Pro
Interesing... there is another article here. It seems that they just announced this 12 year plan to switch over all their local phone traffic.
The timing makes me wonder whether they are announcing this in response to what Telus is doing so as to be able to claim they are on the cutting edge. It sounds like Telus is quite far ahead in terms of progress not just plans; albiet for long distance traffic for now
Let's get real here... SLAM ain't the solution in the near term. MS has finally realized that it is way too difficult to write rock solid drivers for all but the most expert of driver writers.
The areas they seem to be working on to address this issue include the following:
the DDK - which up till recently has been horrible to get info from - it still needs work
Driver Verifier - this verification tool was created during Win2000 days and keeps improving enabling driver writers to have another tool to test for correctness of key code
Debuggers- WinDbg is finally as good (or better) than SoftICE
Driver Model - MS has finally realized it is way to complicated to build even a simple driver. To address this they are introducing the "Driver Framework for Windows" (DFW) which is an "object-oriented" programming model for writing drivers (using C not C++). They just released a beta of this at the recent WinHEC conference. For an excellent introduction, see this article by Walter Oney.
I have used various graphics cards over the years including those made by ATI/Nvidia/Matrox/Pixelorks/Nth/S3/Artist/etc. so I dont have a particular bias one way or the other.
I must admit that I am currently quite pleased with my ATI 9700 Pro. The latest Catalyst 3.2 drivers have been working very well for me under Win XP Pro. I have had NO problems at all!
Speaking of brain sprain... the book that comes to mind is Umberto Ecco's "Foucaults Pendulum". Although, it may be a different type of sprain than Faulkner provides.
A quick search at Amazon (sorting by publication date) shows:
The Prince (Pournelle + Stirling) - Sept 2002
The Burning City (Pounelle and Niven) - May 2001
His web site also lists the following:
"BURNING TOWER, sequel to The Burning City by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, is in its final stages, and we will have a draft soon."
Also it's worth pointing out that memory allocation and garbage collection is actually far faster using managed code than C++ use of malloc and free which are a huige overhead
Do you have some benchmarks to back this up?... I am aware that Jeffrey Richter wrote 2 articles in MSDN on.NET garbage collection, and he mentioned that "Microsoft's performance tests show that managed heap allocations are faster than standard allocations performed by the Win32 HeapAlloc function." The malloc function uses an algorithm which calls HeapAlloc. Does this mean that malloc is slower than what.NET does for memory allocation? I dont think you can conclude that, because you need to measure the entire algorithm". If you have further references or benchmarks, I would be interested.
Note, malloc is a "general purpose" memory allocator, in that it tries to be do something that suits a wide variety of uses. Can one write something better?... of course! For example, it is easy to write a special purpose allocator that is way faster, but more specialized. For a C++ example, check out the book "Modern C++ Design" by Andre Alexandrescu... he develops a small object memory allocator which is an example of one of these (note this is just an example of some info, not a recommendation on the worlds fastest small object allocator).
The truth is that Visual Studio 7 is the most comprehensively advanced programming environment I've ever seen and it easily supports a 10 fold increase in programmer productivity versus VS97...
Interesting... if so, why then did I just read the following from the ms vc.ide newsgroup (posted by one of the MVP's)"...
"I, and a lot of people I know, are overcoming these problems by using VC6. VC2003 is about to ship and I am looking forward (hopefully?) to early reports on whether or not the "improved" IDE in VC2003 is as uasble as VC6."
It is also in Vivendi's shareholders interests for this to happen. It wouldnt be the first time that a company brought in (and possibly paid) a "potential competitor" in order to raise the selling price.
I wss a little confused by the term "statechart," but it turns out he's talking about finite state machines
The term statechart has been in the Comp Sci and then OO literature for a number of years, it was later adopted by the UML group. IIRC they often refer to David Harel as a source of much of the background on the concepts.
A quick google search shows the following reference:
D. Harel. Statecharts: A Visual Formalism for Complex Systems. Science of Computer Programming, July 1987, pp. 231-274
Slashdot Mirror
IIRC Gandalf's current age is about 300 lifetimes of a regular man (according to Jackson's version), so a couple of years one way or the other won't make a difference.
you need to supply a link to their company logo...
I can't attest to the accuracy of your statements, but I am sure that are referring to Dave Cutler who was hired away from DEC in 1988 to architect Windows NT
One of the challenges of C++ as a programming language, is that it requires the developer to truly understand what the compiler is doing or going to do in various conditions. In fact. there are many cases where you need to know what a compiler will do when you dont do something (e.g. when you dont write a copy constructor).
I cannot think of a another programming language that does this to the same degree.
According to this article at Techweb, the head park time was not "specified" in IDE drives, so they had to get drive manufacturers to meet their 200-300 millisecond requirement...
Thats a little slower than a 1/10 of a second.
I went to engineering school... I still have my trusty HP 41CV calculator.
Once you get a baseline of understanding, I highly recommend Herb Sutter's "Exceptional C++" and "More exceptional C++" books.
Writing drivers for windows has gotten so complex the Microsoft is working on a new driver framework called the "Windows Driver Framework" to try and simplify it and to get more robust drivers from 3rd party developers. You can read an introductory article here by Walter Oney... it is very enlightening and highlights the various issues that a driver writer has to know at a very deep level to write even the simplest driver these days.
fscanf can be used in a safe manner in conjunction with sprintf to dynamically format and constrain the input buffer length. See the following code snippet:
char inbuf[80], format[10];
// do stuff
sprintf(format,"%%%ds", sizeof(inbuf)-1);
if (fscanf(fp, format, inbuf)!=EOF)
See "The practice of programming" by Kernighan and Pike, for more details.
I also took up Aikido at age 30 and did it for 5 years. I agree it is a great martial art to take up.
My experience suggests that the "no macho shit" is highly dependent on your Sensei... certain dojo's we used to train with at seminars had a penchant for the "macho shit". As with all martial arts, check out the sensei and dojo and make sure that the style and emphasis is consistent with your needs and desires
WP for Windows - a disaster from the first release; I went through 5.1, 6.0, 6.1, and 7.0
I have also used WP since the DOS days. I actually hated WP 5.1 for DOS because of the crappy interface... but tech support, printer support, and features were great. I have since gone through the many WP for Windows versions with varying degrees of likes/dislikes.
WP for Windows 9 (with the latest service packs applied) running on Win2K is quite stable and I am very pleased with it for what I use it for... WP 10 on WinXp pro is also quite good. I havent tried WP 11 though. However, if truth be told, it's lack of success has nothing to do with its feature comparison with MS Word. I much prefer the feature set in WP compared to Word.
...never mind.
I finally got through to the original IGN news article posting (and not just the slashdot replies) and it clarifies what the actual issues are. My parent post here didnt add anything useful.
What are you talking about?
If you go to PkWare's web site there is a link on their front page which says they have published the file format changes so everyone can play nice. This page then links to another application note with the actual format spec inside.
Note also, Pkware actually added their new encryption, authentication, and extra compression options in V5.0 last year. Their newest release is V6.0. To be fair, I dont know when they published the spec?
It was dropped in the 1.5 trunk not the 1.4 branch. So you wont see it unless you pick up a nightly build of the 1.5 trunk which was built in the last couple of nights.
It will be in the 1.4 release
That ATI driver warning has been in place for ages. It was first reported in Sep 2001.
It seemed to effect Rage Pro and Rage 128's and early Radeons (remember there are at least 3 generations of Radeons). If you read the bug comments, ATI (and Sun in the Java crash case) have released new drivers that seem to have fixed the problems (at least for some of the cards). This confirms for me that the bug was in fact in the drivers. In which case, there is not much Mozilla can do.
What would be nice is if Mozilla would at least list the problem cards, instead of just ATI. I know I have never had a problem with my ATI 9700 Pro
Interesing... there is another article here. It seems that they just announced this 12 year plan to switch over all their local phone traffic.
The timing makes me wonder whether they are announcing this in response to what Telus is doing so as to be able to claim they are on the cutting edge. It sounds like Telus is quite far ahead in terms of progress not just plans; albiet for long distance traffic for now
Let's get real here... SLAM ain't the solution in the near term. MS has finally realized that it is way too difficult to write rock solid drivers for all but the most expert of driver writers.
The areas they seem to be working on to address this issue include the following:
I have used various graphics cards over the years including those made by ATI/Nvidia/Matrox/Pixelorks/Nth/S3/Artist/etc. so I dont have a particular bias one way or the other.
I must admit that I am currently quite pleased with my ATI 9700 Pro. The latest Catalyst 3.2 drivers have been working very well for me under Win XP Pro. I have had NO problems at all!
Speaking of brain sprain... the book that comes to mind is Umberto Ecco's "Foucaults Pendulum". Although, it may be a different type of sprain than Faulkner provides.
Author Neil Gaiman, who also blogs, has some comments on this point in his blog.
It may not be as much bollox as you might thinkA quick search at Amazon (sorting by publication date) shows:
His web site also lists the following: "BURNING TOWER, sequel to The Burning City by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, is in its final stages, and we will have a draft soon."
Also it's worth pointing out that memory allocation and garbage collection is actually far faster using managed code than C++ use of malloc and free which are a huige overhead
Do you have some benchmarks to back this up?... I am aware that Jeffrey Richter wrote 2 articles in MSDN on .NET garbage collection, and he mentioned that "Microsoft's performance tests show that managed heap allocations are faster than standard allocations performed by the Win32 HeapAlloc function." The malloc function uses an algorithm which calls HeapAlloc. Does this mean that malloc is slower than what .NET does for memory allocation? I dont think you can conclude that, because you need to measure the entire algorithm". If you have further references or benchmarks, I would be interested.
Note, malloc is a "general purpose" memory allocator, in that it tries to be do something that suits a wide variety of uses. Can one write something better?... of course! For example, it is easy to write a special purpose allocator that is way faster, but more specialized. For a C++ example, check out the book "Modern C++ Design" by Andre Alexandrescu... he develops a small object memory allocator which is an example of one of these (note this is just an example of some info, not a recommendation on the worlds fastest small object allocator).
The truth is that Visual Studio 7 is the most comprehensively advanced programming environment I've ever seen and it easily supports a 10 fold increase in programmer productivity versus VS97...
Interesting... if so, why then did I just read the following from the ms vc.ide newsgroup (posted by one of the MVP's)"...
"I, and a lot of people I know, are overcoming these problems by using VC6. VC2003 is about to ship and I am looking forward (hopefully?) to early reports on whether or not the "improved" IDE in VC2003 is as uasble as VC6."
It is also in Vivendi's shareholders interests for this to happen. It wouldnt be the first time that a company brought in (and possibly paid) a "potential competitor" in order to raise the selling price.
I wss a little confused by the term "statechart," but it turns out he's talking about finite state machines
The term statechart has been in the Comp Sci and then OO literature for a number of years, it was later adopted by the UML group. IIRC they often refer to David Harel as a source of much of the background on the concepts.
A quick google search shows the following reference: