C++, with its explicit variable scoping, is very good at dealing with exceptions and the consequences of cleaning up resources when they occur.
In a non OO language (and even other OO languages, such as Java, etc), you have to manually remember to unlock a resource (such as a mutex), whereas in C++, the destructor (Guard pattern) takes care of that for you. This is a direct consequence of being OO (with scoped variable lifetime).
C++ has very nearly all of the hardware accessing capabilities of C. (The only thing I know about that is 'lesser' is that you have to cast a float or a double to another type in order to perform bit manipulations. This is trivial.)
Furthermore, the assertion that OOP is too high level to describe hardware seems flawed.
Why is it 'too far from the actual Hardware'? What is it that you can model in a language such as 'C' that you cannot model in 'c++'?
Inline assembly is not a problem, various constructs for doing just that are available.
C++ is a mixed paradigm language. In fact, it does a horrible job of enforcing any paradigm on the programmer, which is both advantageous and disadvantageous.
The Daily Show is newsworthy enough to have won a Peabody (Election Coverage in 2000).
I'd forward the opinion that it is easier to determine what is fake and/or unimportant news watching the Daily Show than most other 'real' news programs.
The fact that it is News-tainment doesn't bother me as the show has a social conscience, and attacks whenever and wherever it has found someone/something wrong.
Agreement: 'Both sides' (Since when did it have to be only two sides?!) have people who are guilty of closed minds.
Disagreement: SWIFT is nothing like MoveOn, etc.
The SWIFT organization is using half-truths such as "I served with Kerry in Vietnam.." meaning that they were both in the armed forces in Vietnam at the same time, NOT that they served in the same unit, or knew each other at all-- and then using this as a basis for an attack on character.
It is my personal observation that people on the 'left' are more likely to explain their actions/opinions in ways that do not invoke private greed (i.e. look to the future).
I'm going to stop here because I can go on about this forever.
First of all, I'm not associated with the project.
However, I've read what they're talking about, and here is where many people are misinterpreting:
This is not a 'thin' client in the traditional sense. The client in this case does the computations.. i.e. it actually runs the app.
In other words, the computer is not merely a display, and as such shouldn't suffer from the traditional mainframe/client shortcomings.. (you have all the CPU power you normally have)
When you think about this, think KNOPPIX and other live-cds, that is the nearest (and quite near, imho) to what they're discussing.
So... why is this different from a normal install?
A normal install has a read-write root, whereas here they're shooting for a read-only root, even if it is still on the local harddrive.
I'd imagine its because many engineers think that business people smoke crack, and thus they are users.
In other words, People object because they're already confused enough figuring out which 'free' is 'free', having to figure out which 'user' is 'user' would be the foam on the beer..
Because the edges are now -explicit- instead of -implicit-.
Without modules, it is easy to 'cheat' by peeking at the internals of a structure that you have no business peeking into. If you're in a module, that kind of 'cheat' often becomes more work than just doing it right in the first place.
I agree that it would not have had an effect at the application level, however, the new MicrosoftApps company would have incentive to sell products for Linux/BSD, as opposed to a disincentive, which is what happens today.
Not to get into the legalities of playing with non licensed devices, but the dedicated box is often much more expensive than your dvd-drive (or blu-ray drive) in your laptop is likely to be, and the display is either separate, or lower quality.
If lawful means of preventing unlawful behaviour do not work to stop monopoly-wielding organizations from engaging in unlawful behaviour then civil disobedience seems like a very good way to go.
It isn't just a question of the quality of the AI (as in reasoning ability).
Reasoning without perception is useless.
The perceptual abilities of computers (and thus robots) are more than slightly limited in this day and age... Take, as a comparison, how sucky computers are at interpreting a picture versus a three or four year old, or at saying that a particular song was sung by Devo?
Assuming that you're traveling near the surface of the earth:
1) The receiver can use that information as a constraint to the solution of position 2) You can safely assume that you're at about the same height as the underlying map says.
This is, of course, assuming that you have a map to correlate with, and that the receiver does so.
Even if the receiver doesn't use the useful map information, the software you use -should- be able to tell you the height at any particular X,Y position. (Its not a hard calculation!)
The solution for this is either homone therapy (get rid of whatever biological imperative makes men chase after women, or give that factor to women..), or changing societal norms such that women approach men in equal numbers to men approaching women.
If a man does not approach women, he gets precisely nowhere in most cases. The men who proclaim to have the shotgun technique (often assholes) actually tend to get somewhere with women because occasionally someone will for that instant be instereted or bored. (I've heard from a few women that these men are interesting because they're obviously confident... haha.)
So, while men get to bear the brunt of inattention, women get to bear the brunt of over-attention.... and being ignored is almost always worse than having to say 'no'.... So, while I understand your point, understand mine =)... I hope that in some some far off day women would/could approach men in equal numbers to men approaching women, and then the scales would be even not only in experience.. but hopefully understanding...
I.e. you can go at angles asymptotically approaching 90 degrees to the light vector, but never can you accelerate towards the sun with a solar sail.
The reason a sail-boat can sail upwind is because of the keel shoving against the water, and the water shoving back, which works to counteract the 'away' push of the wind.
You're imply, whether or not you mean to, that its OK to stand by and let people who are lazy, etc. be unjustly promoted (or, in this case, keep their position). If the employer is unwilling to take action.. oh wait.. this is the government.. there really isn't any competition here.. so.. the market forces which would normally force this company out of business don't exist...
Which means its a very very bad idea to let such inefficiencies persist-- What else will work to correct the problem??
When you're dealing with the government, think 'socialism.' It [socialism/government] does NOT work if you allow lazy or inefficient people to stay in their position for no good reason.
Actually, most company policies I've heard of (not to mention seen), you consent to monitoring when you agree to work there, i.e. as a part of the employment agreement.
Closed source being closed, it is more difficult to make a case that the software is infringing (you'd have to subpoena the source, which requires an extra step)
However.. it would negatively impact the performance for those of us who want to use the card just to make graphics, where 24 bits of precision isn't all that bad.
You'd have to add at least another stage to every comparator, adder, etc, and that doesn't just use up more silicon.. that also increases latencies.
It takes more delta-V to get into Earth orbit than to go across the solar system from Earth orbit.
delta-V necessary to get off the moon is much much smaller, and considering that there is some gravity, construction tasks become easier. (this means that we could build stuff on the moon. Saves weight because the spacecraft necessary to boost such stuff can be more compact)
Not irrelevant. The redrawing of all the background windows causes a degradation in the "user performance", assuming that by "user performance" you mean the "user's experience".
A decrease in CPU usage in these cases has precisely the effect of a smoother user experience for non-trivial window contents.
If you mean that the productivity of the user is more of a factor of overall productivity than the user, I'd agree, however usually the productivity of the system has a multiplicative effect on overall productivity..
Keep in mind that 3d desktops have the ability to increase system performance because of rendering into pixmaps instead of rendering into the framebuffer...
Why does rendering into pixmaps possibly increase performance?
If you're rendering into a pixmap, having something occlude it onscreen (i.e. in the framebuffer) will -not- be a destructive operation, and you won't have to repaint..
In otherwords, sliding windows across the screen, animating some huge mouse cursor (larger than HW mouse accel would allow, for some strange and uncouth reason), or otherwise putting stuff up in front of windows would not cause them to redraw because their pixels would not be damaged by the operation.
This is good.
There is a negative-- You use more memory on your graphics card/AGP memory, but even this can be alleviated by switching what windows/buffers you render into offscreen pixmaps.
One could, for instance, render all but one window into the framebuffer, save the colorbuffer and depth buffer, then render things in the 'active' window into an offscreen pixmap, and render that into the scene. This would require less memory than a full-off every-window-gets-its-own-pixmap approach, and would still likely perform better than our window managers today (only one repaint of windows is needed when you switch contexts, as opposed to one every frame with the current method)
Slashdot Mirror
Strong disagreement.
C++, with its explicit variable scoping, is very good at dealing with exceptions and the consequences of cleaning up resources when they occur.
In a non OO language (and even other OO languages, such as Java, etc), you have to manually remember to unlock a resource (such as a mutex), whereas in C++, the destructor (Guard pattern) takes care of that for you. This is a direct consequence of being OO (with scoped variable lifetime).
C++ has very nearly all of the hardware accessing capabilities of C. (The only thing I know about that is 'lesser' is that you have to cast a float or a double to another type in order to perform bit manipulations. This is trivial.)
Furthermore, the assertion that OOP is too high level to describe hardware seems flawed.
Why is it 'too far from the actual Hardware'?
What is it that you can model in a language such as 'C' that you cannot model in 'c++'?
Inline assembly is not a problem, various constructs for doing just that are available.
C++ is a mixed paradigm language. In fact, it does a horrible job of enforcing any paradigm on the programmer, which is both advantageous and disadvantageous.
(e^(2 * pi * i)) - 1 = 0
Contains, e, pi, i, 2, 1, and 0.
Yes, well that, and he called Bowtie-man a dick at the very end of the program (in response to a comment about how he wasn't being funny).
Disagreement.
The Daily Show is newsworthy enough to have won a Peabody (Election Coverage in 2000).
I'd forward the opinion that it is easier to determine what is fake and/or unimportant news watching the Daily Show than most other 'real' news programs.
The fact that it is News-tainment doesn't bother me as the show has a social conscience, and attacks whenever and wherever it has found someone/something wrong.
I disagree, and agree.
Agreement:
'Both sides' (Since when did it have to be only two sides?!) have people who are guilty of closed minds.
Disagreement:
SWIFT is nothing like MoveOn, etc.
The SWIFT organization is using half-truths such as "I served with Kerry in Vietnam.." meaning that they were both in the armed forces in Vietnam at the same time, NOT that they served in the same unit, or knew each other at all-- and then using this as a basis for an attack on character.
It is my personal observation that people on the 'left' are more likely to explain their actions/opinions in ways that do not invoke private greed (i.e. look to the future).
I'm going to stop here because I can go on about this forever.
First of all, I'm not associated with the project.
However, I've read what they're talking about, and here is where many people are misinterpreting:
This is not a 'thin' client in the traditional sense. The client in this case does the computations.. i.e. it actually runs the app.
In other words, the computer is not merely a display, and as such shouldn't suffer from the traditional mainframe/client shortcomings.. (you have all the CPU power you normally have)
When you think about this, think KNOPPIX and other live-cds, that is the nearest (and quite near, imho) to what they're discussing.
So... why is this different from a normal install?
A normal install has a read-write root, whereas here they're shooting for a read-only root, even if it is still on the local harddrive.
Bruce-
I'd imagine its because many engineers think that business people smoke crack, and thus they are users.
In other words, People object because they're already confused enough figuring out which 'free' is 'free', having to figure out which 'user' is 'user' would be the foam on the beer..
*chuckle*
Ok. Modularity decreases the number of edges.
Why?
Because the edges are now -explicit- instead of -implicit-.
Without modules, it is easy to 'cheat' by peeking at the internals of a structure that you have no business peeking into. If you're in a module, that kind of 'cheat' often becomes more work than just doing it right in the first place.
Also, modules VASTLY increase ease-of-testing.
I agree that it would not have had an effect at the application level, however, the new MicrosoftApps company would have incentive to sell products for Linux/BSD, as opposed to a disincentive, which is what happens today.
Not to get into the legalities of playing with non licensed devices, but the dedicated box is often much more expensive than your dvd-drive (or blu-ray drive) in your laptop is likely to be, and the display is either separate, or lower quality.
If lawful means of preventing unlawful behaviour do not work to stop monopoly-wielding organizations from engaging in unlawful behaviour then civil disobedience seems like a very good way to go.
I'll feel sorry for the music industry when I know that they don't profit from price-fixing, and similarly nasty schemes.
Until then, I hope that damage is done to their livelyhood.
It isn't just a question of the quality of the AI (as in reasoning ability).
Reasoning without perception is useless.
The perceptual abilities of computers (and thus robots) are more than slightly limited in this day and age... Take, as a comparison, how sucky computers are at interpreting a picture versus a three or four year old, or at saying that a particular song was sung by Devo?
Assuming that you're traveling near the surface of the earth:
1) The receiver can use that information as a constraint to the solution of position
2) You can safely assume that you're at about the same height as the underlying map says.
This is, of course, assuming that you have a map to correlate with, and that the receiver does so.
Even if the receiver doesn't use the useful map information, the software you use -should- be able to tell you the height at any particular X,Y position. (Its not a hard calculation!)
The solution for this is either homone therapy (get rid of whatever biological imperative makes men chase after women, or give that factor to women..), or changing societal norms such that women approach men in equal numbers to men approaching women.
... So, while I understand your point, understand mine =)... I hope that in some some far off day women would/could approach men in equal numbers to men approaching women, and then the scales would be even not only in experience.. but hopefully understanding...
If a man does not approach women, he gets precisely nowhere in most cases. The men who proclaim to have the shotgun technique (often assholes) actually tend to get somewhere with women because occasionally someone will for that instant be instereted or bored. (I've heard from a few women that these men are interesting because they're obviously confident... haha.)
So, while men get to bear the brunt of inattention, women get to bear the brunt of over-attention.... and being ignored is almost always worse than having to say 'no'.
However, you can never sail upwind.
I.e. you can go at angles asymptotically approaching 90 degrees to the light vector, but never can you accelerate towards the sun with a solar sail.
The reason a sail-boat can sail upwind is because of the keel shoving against the water, and the water shoving back, which works to counteract the 'away' push of the wind.
Well yes and no.
You're imply, whether or not you mean to, that its OK to stand by and let people who are lazy, etc. be unjustly promoted (or, in this case, keep their position).
If the employer is unwilling to take action.. oh wait.. this is the government.. there really isn't any competition here.. so.. the market forces which would normally force this company out of business don't exist...
Which means its a very very bad idea to let such inefficiencies persist-- What else will work to correct the problem??
When you're dealing with the government, think 'socialism.' It [socialism/government] does NOT work if you allow lazy or inefficient people to stay in their position for no good reason.
Actually, most company policies I've heard of (not to mention seen), you consent to monitoring when you agree to work there, i.e. as a part of the employment agreement.
However, there is another factor to consider--
Closed source being closed, it is more difficult to make a case that the software is infringing (you'd have to subpoena the source, which requires an extra step)
However.. it would negatively impact the performance for those of us who want to use the card just to make graphics, where 24 bits of precision isn't all that bad.
You'd have to add at least another stage to every comparator, adder, etc, and that doesn't just use up more silicon.. that also increases latencies.
To further expound on the parent:
It takes more delta-V to get into Earth orbit than to go across the solar system from Earth orbit.
delta-V necessary to get off the moon is much much smaller, and considering that there is some gravity, construction tasks become easier.
(this means that we could build stuff on the moon. Saves weight because the spacecraft necessary to boost such stuff can be more compact)
You really only need one command..
"Why?"
So why bother giving people any choices in the matter? =)
Not irrelevant. The redrawing of all the background windows causes a degradation in the "user performance", assuming that by "user performance" you mean the "user's experience".
A decrease in CPU usage in these cases has precisely the effect of a smoother user experience for non-trivial window contents.
If you mean that the productivity of the user is more of a factor of overall productivity than the user, I'd agree, however usually the productivity of the system has a multiplicative effect on overall productivity..
Keep in mind that 3d desktops have the ability to increase system performance because of rendering into pixmaps instead of rendering into the framebuffer...
Why does rendering into pixmaps possibly increase performance?
If you're rendering into a pixmap, having something occlude it onscreen (i.e. in the framebuffer) will -not- be a destructive operation, and you won't have to repaint..
In otherwords, sliding windows across the screen, animating some huge mouse cursor (larger than HW mouse accel would allow, for some strange and uncouth reason), or otherwise putting stuff up in front of windows would not cause them to redraw because their pixels would not be damaged by the operation.
This is good.
There is a negative-- You use more memory on your graphics card/AGP memory, but even this can be alleviated by switching what windows/buffers you render into offscreen pixmaps.
One could, for instance, render all but one window into the framebuffer, save the colorbuffer and depth buffer, then render things in the 'active' window into an offscreen pixmap, and render that into the scene. This would require less memory than a full-off every-window-gets-its-own-pixmap approach, and would still likely perform better than our window managers today (only one repaint of windows is needed when you switch contexts, as opposed to one every frame with the current method)
And the funny thing about all of this is:
Why the hell would a terrorist go and ask permission???
(Wouldn't they just ignore the law, procure whatever they needed and just do it?)