Hopefully the teacher knows his stuff and is a good editor.
Speaking from experience, C++ is complex enough to fool you into thinking you're good at it early on when you've really only just began to scratch at the surface to see what's underneath.
The students may be writing with the best of intentions, but there's a good chance they'll give bad information. Learning to not fool yourself about your limits is an underrated skill.
On the other hand, writing documentation for things is one of the best ways I've found to really flesh out my understanding of something, so I bet these students will come out of the project with a significantly improved understanding of the language.
I picked up Saints Row 3 on a whim when it was something like $10 for the game and all its DLC on Steam. Before that I'd known little of the series and the advertising/reviews hadn't really been compelling enough for me to try it out.
As if ripped from the brain of an acid-tripping Mark Millar, SR3's balls to the wall ridiculousness somehow works, and co-op support takes it to a whole other level. I'm hooked. Give me more.
C++ isn't lacking for libraries, but it is lacking in consistently designed standards-quality libraries. That's all I meant. A UI, I think, shouldn't be built into C++. The majority of the stuff in the.NET framework certainly could and should be.
Re: off-topic opiniony things:
WPF is quite pleasant to use after you get the hang of it. Not to imply that you haven't got the hang of it, of course. I've never used MFC (just stuck with plain Win32) so I can't compare to that, but it's by far the best of the UI frameworks I've seen in terms of flexibility and ease of use. It is definitely not as performant as I'd like.
I've not used gSoap enough to have a qualified opinion on it, but the handful of times I've done something with it I found it remarkably terrible.
LINQ is about making things easy for the developer. It's not super efficient and shouldn't be used in places where perf matters. Its compositional nature can definitely make code easier to follow, though, and has turned out to be pretty flexible with regards to Rx, EF, and Parallel all being able to expose the exact same interface.
As someone who absolutely loves C++ and hacks on it all night and weekends, but writes C# at work, I have to agree with you. It has nothing to do with the language, really, but the libraries.
C# has far better libraries available than C++ does. I think if C++ got WPF, LINQ, and all the networking libraries like C# has, I'd be just as happy to work in it. Actually, it does have LINQ now.
It sounds like you're missing the significance of Boost. I cant think of any other thing like it, CPAN included. Yes, it's a collection of libraries. That's not the interesting part. There's a reason so many of the C++11 library additions were taken directly from it with little to no changes.
Most projects you'll find code to the standards of the one or two people making them. The good ones are fairly flexible, but many of them fulfill just the specific needs of those authors.
Boost lies somewhere between that typical project design and a standards body. Its review process demands high-quality standards-worthy code without taking years to debate on something before anyone actually writes any code. Once libraries actually get in, it serves as an incubator to find out what works and what doesn't. Because it is coded to such a high quality and people are actually using it, it gives the standards body a lot of data to work with in deciding what should be next for the language. That's what makes it special.
Sure they do make (and mostly give away) some FOSS software, but it's very little and you really have to look for it.
ASP.NET, Entity Framework, and Rx are all non-trivial Open Source projects by Microsoft which I use daily at work. They are all under the Apache License 2.0, not one of those ridiculous "shared source" licenses. They make use of existing third-party Open Source libraries. They manage the projects in the open and accept contributions from non-Microsofties.
Additionally, Microsoft has embraced NuGet, a third-party dpkg/apt for.NET libraries which has thousands of projects in it. It's integrated into the latest Visual Studio, and Microsoft uses it as their primary distribution point for nearly all of their Open Source projects.
Microsoft has a pretty shitty history when it comes to Open Source, but they really have turned over a new leaf on the subject. I think they've come to realize that it's better to foster than to dictate -- you're still using their product (.NET) in the end, after all. Some purists won't be happy with that, I guess.
Interesting. Do you use sub-pixel anti-aliasing? On Windows, many of the newer fonts (Segoe, Calibri/etc.) have been optimized for use with ClearType -- I'm curious how well these look when the sub-pixels are stacked vertically.
So what exactly is gonna differentiate this from a mid-level to high-end gaming rig?
Using unified GDDR5 memory is going to be really interesting. They quote 176GB/s -- the DDR3 in your high-end gaming rig is pushing maybe 50GB/s. It's not going to excel at purely GPU-bound stuff compared to a PC, but for things which require the GPU and CPU to work together (like, say, games), it should be incredibly fast.
There's also the thing about OS overhead -- Windows/Linux do a lot to ensure the kernel won't be brought down by a driver/GPU failure. John Carmack and others have lamented about how terribly inefficient it is, and that it allows console games to look remarkably close to much higher-speced PCs.
I think this demo, with huge amounts of instancing, is mainly designed to stress the vertex pipeline of modern videocard.
It actually uses quite a lot of LOD -- even at the highest settings there aren't ever very many triangles on screen. As TFS says, this isn't meant to be a synthetic benchmark. It's not made to stress any one specific thing, and it really doesn't.
Some of the tech it is demoing is pretty cool, even if the resulting image isn't very impressive. In the hands of proper designers, this stuff could be awesome.
Almost every game has some fundamental real-world skill underneath it, just with some pretty graphics or social aspect to make exercising it fun.
Fast-paced shooters have been shown to have long-lasting positive effects for reaction time and observation skills. I imagine the sorts of puzzle and memory games in TFA could have their own positive effects.
Will they help you live longer? Prevent Alzheimer's? Turn a couch potato into a Nobel laureate? Probably not. But can they improve other useful, real-world skills? Absolutely.
This might not be as big of a thing as TFS is making it out to be. AMD has yet to give any details on their truly next-gen GPUs. AnandTech reports that all of the currently announced HD 8000 parts are simple rebadges for OEMs.
At the one-million-core level, previously innocuous parts of the computer code can suddenly become bottlenecks.
When they say this, they mean it. To put this in perspective: with 1,572,864 cores, an application which is 99.9999% scalable will use LESS THAN HALF of the hardware! Over 60% of the hardware will be tied up waiting for that 0.0001% of serial code to execute.
This problem is explained by Amdahl's law, an important (yet depressing) observation which shows just how difficult writing an effective parallel algorithm actually is -- even when you're only writing for 4 cores.
Threading is a form of async, but not the one I meant.
I was referring to async I/O, where you can request the OS perform some I/O and then notify you when it's complete without blocking any of your threads. This enables you to write apps with co-operative multitasking where you switch between tasks while you wait for I/O, which is far more efficient than switching between threads.
With this model you can (somewhat) easily service 10,000 clients per-thread.
Typically this form of async is done using callbacks or eventing, which is doable with some practice but creates code which is really gnarly to anyone lacking experience with async..NET has supported this form of async for many years, and I believe Java's NIO library provides the same thing.
C# 5.0 takes it a step further and gives an incredibly useful syntax sugar -- basically hiding all the callbacks, making it look like a simple synchronous method. Behind the scenes, the C# compiler generates a state machine class that does all the heavy lifting.
C# 5.0 (the latest version) has language-integrated async functionality that makes writing vertically scalable software a snap. It looks and behaves almost exactly like sync code, but actually runs async. Talking about server-side async here, not client-side.
Doing the same thing with Java or an older version of C#, where you have only the base libraries to help you, is really quite tedious to do properly.
So, for a test like this involving web development, I'd say language is actually a pretty relevant topic. Unless you've got lots of money to spend and can throw more hardware at something, the kind of perf improvement that can be provided by this is pretty astounding.
But, there are problems with this test. He says explicitly that he's looking for a real-world test, but then goes and basically times a Hello World. There is no database access, no concurrent users. No real-world anything.
Most of the people who disrupt movies are not jerks, just forgetful, or they came in a few seconds late and missed the ever present "Cell Phone Off" request that appears on the screen in every theater I've been to in the last 5 years.
*Raises hand*
I'm someone who chastises friends who look at text messages or answer their phones during a movie. A couple weeks ago for the first time in my life, I forgot to silence my phone before a movie started. It's startling and embarrassing as all hell, but not intentional.
That said, I have met people who seriously just do not care -- they think having it on vibrate is good enough, and if they duck down and talk low enough that nobody will see or hear them. I'd guess there are probably more assholes like this than forgetfuls like me.
I think this looks like a pretty terrible one. First, I'm not looking for an Ikea case. if I build it myself, I expect it to be customizable -- I should be able to piece together various parts like an erector set to build something unique and perfect for the parts I put inside, not have only a single design. What's the point?
Second, an open-air case sounds like a bad idea. There's going to be no control over airflow here so despite what the woman in the video says, I think cooling will probably actually be worse. Being open-air also means it's going to be a lot louder when your GPU or HDDs start going. As someone who once had cases full of ridiculously noisy high-speed fans, I now cherish a silent PC above all else.
The next case I get will probably cost $200+, but I'll end up using it for 10 years like I have my current one.
If it was all copyrighted to the Obama campaign then yes, it might be excellent code that the owners have no interest in releasing -- regardless of the wishes of the people who engineered it.
The ODAC implements the UAC1 (USB Audio Class 1) interface and works without any drivers on all major OSes. Great pains were taken to maintain this property -- many higher-end DACs require a proprietary driver or use UAC2 which isn't supported everywhere.
For me it Just Worked (tm) on the Pi. Highly recommend it!
For me, I've got a Raspberry Pi hooked up to an ODAC/O2 (audiophile DAC/amp) in a comfortable location for listening to music with headphones. Connected to Wifi, it reads the music from a NAS in another room and runs a mpd server controlled by my phone or tablet.
It's really nice to have a noiseless, compact music server that can be hidden away rather easily.
You must not have known what you were doing or something. My PC is 2 years old and it's still fast enough to run any modern game at medium to maxed specs at 1920x1080 while running Netflix in HD on monitor 2. It cost about $790.
This is only possible because games are designed for console specs. If consoles had the graphics cards of today, Windows PCs would simply not be able to keep up due to severe driver safety overhead.
This is particularly hilarious to me because AIG just started airing TV commercials giving themselves a nice big PR pat on the back for explicitly "paying back with interest".
One of the first apps for Windows Phone was MetroTube (originally LazyTube). It's provided great YouTube support from the beginning and continues to be updated regularly. It embraces the Windows Phone style completely and is always fast and fluid -- really a model app.
So do I care about a first-party app, or even one from Microsoft? Not really.
The only problem here is that they need to use APIs which are unsupported by YouTube -- I don't remember why, it's been a long time. I think to get at HD videos -- and thus the app can potentially break without notice. This is pretty rare, but it happens -- the most recent was about a week ago, and they fixed it within a few days. So I can see an API argument from Microsoft might have some truth to it.
I would love Youtube to be integrated into the phone like other social networks are. I'm guessing this is what Microsoft is actually after.
Slashdot Mirror
Hopefully the teacher knows his stuff and is a good editor.
Speaking from experience, C++ is complex enough to fool you into thinking you're good at it early on when you've really only just began to scratch at the surface to see what's underneath.
The students may be writing with the best of intentions, but there's a good chance they'll give bad information. Learning to not fool yourself about your limits is an underrated skill.
On the other hand, writing documentation for things is one of the best ways I've found to really flesh out my understanding of something, so I bet these students will come out of the project with a significantly improved understanding of the language.
I think Walmart has that patented.
I picked up Saints Row 3 on a whim when it was something like $10 for the game and all its DLC on Steam. Before that I'd known little of the series and the advertising/reviews hadn't really been compelling enough for me to try it out.
As if ripped from the brain of an acid-tripping Mark Millar, SR3's balls to the wall ridiculousness somehow works, and co-op support takes it to a whole other level. I'm hooked. Give me more.
C++ isn't lacking for libraries, but it is lacking in consistently designed standards-quality libraries. That's all I meant. A UI, I think, shouldn't be built into C++. The majority of the stuff in the .NET framework certainly could and should be.
Re: off-topic opiniony things:
WPF is quite pleasant to use after you get the hang of it. Not to imply that you haven't got the hang of it, of course. I've never used MFC (just stuck with plain Win32) so I can't compare to that, but it's by far the best of the UI frameworks I've seen in terms of flexibility and ease of use. It is definitely not as performant as I'd like.
I've not used gSoap enough to have a qualified opinion on it, but the handful of times I've done something with it I found it remarkably terrible.
LINQ is about making things easy for the developer. It's not super efficient and shouldn't be used in places where perf matters. Its compositional nature can definitely make code easier to follow, though, and has turned out to be pretty flexible with regards to Rx, EF, and Parallel all being able to expose the exact same interface.
As someone who absolutely loves C++ and hacks on it all night and weekends, but writes C# at work, I have to agree with you. It has nothing to do with the language, really, but the libraries.
C# has far better libraries available than C++ does. I think if C++ got WPF, LINQ, and all the networking libraries like C# has, I'd be just as happy to work in it. Actually, it does have LINQ now.
It sounds like you're missing the significance of Boost. I cant think of any other thing like it, CPAN included. Yes, it's a collection of libraries. That's not the interesting part. There's a reason so many of the C++11 library additions were taken directly from it with little to no changes.
Most projects you'll find code to the standards of the one or two people making them. The good ones are fairly flexible, but many of them fulfill just the specific needs of those authors.
Boost lies somewhere between that typical project design and a standards body. Its review process demands high-quality standards-worthy code without taking years to debate on something before anyone actually writes any code. Once libraries actually get in, it serves as an incubator to find out what works and what doesn't. Because it is coded to such a high quality and people are actually using it, it gives the standards body a lot of data to work with in deciding what should be next for the language. That's what makes it special.
Sure they do make (and mostly give away) some FOSS software, but it's very little and you really have to look for it.
ASP.NET, Entity Framework, and Rx are all non-trivial Open Source projects by Microsoft which I use daily at work. They are all under the Apache License 2.0, not one of those ridiculous "shared source" licenses. They make use of existing third-party Open Source libraries. They manage the projects in the open and accept contributions from non-Microsofties.
Additionally, Microsoft has embraced NuGet, a third-party dpkg/apt for .NET libraries which has thousands of projects in it. It's integrated into the latest Visual Studio, and Microsoft uses it as their primary distribution point for nearly all of their Open Source projects.
Microsoft has a pretty shitty history when it comes to Open Source, but they really have turned over a new leaf on the subject. I think they've come to realize that it's better to foster than to dictate -- you're still using their product (.NET) in the end, after all. Some purists won't be happy with that, I guess.
Interesting. Do you use sub-pixel anti-aliasing? On Windows, many of the newer fonts (Segoe, Calibri/etc.) have been optimized for use with ClearType -- I'm curious how well these look when the sub-pixels are stacked vertically.
So what exactly is gonna differentiate this from a mid-level to high-end gaming rig?
Using unified GDDR5 memory is going to be really interesting. They quote 176GB/s -- the DDR3 in your high-end gaming rig is pushing maybe 50GB/s. It's not going to excel at purely GPU-bound stuff compared to a PC, but for things which require the GPU and CPU to work together (like, say, games), it should be incredibly fast.
There's also the thing about OS overhead -- Windows/Linux do a lot to ensure the kernel won't be brought down by a driver/GPU failure. John Carmack and others have lamented about how terribly inefficient it is, and that it allows console games to look remarkably close to much higher-speced PCs.
I think this demo, with huge amounts of instancing, is mainly designed to stress the vertex pipeline of modern videocard.
It actually uses quite a lot of LOD -- even at the highest settings there aren't ever very many triangles on screen. As TFS says, this isn't meant to be a synthetic benchmark. It's not made to stress any one specific thing, and it really doesn't.
Some of the tech it is demoing is pretty cool, even if the resulting image isn't very impressive. In the hands of proper designers, this stuff could be awesome.
Xbox is red, Windows is blue, And Microsoft's tablet is full of glue!
Almost every game has some fundamental real-world skill underneath it, just with some pretty graphics or social aspect to make exercising it fun.
Fast-paced shooters have been shown to have long-lasting positive effects for reaction time and observation skills. I imagine the sorts of puzzle and memory games in TFA could have their own positive effects.
Will they help you live longer? Prevent Alzheimer's? Turn a couch potato into a Nobel laureate? Probably not. But can they improve other useful, real-world skills? Absolutely.
This might not be as big of a thing as TFS is making it out to be. AMD has yet to give any details on their truly next-gen GPUs. AnandTech reports that all of the currently announced HD 8000 parts are simple rebadges for OEMs.
At the one-million-core level, previously innocuous parts of the computer code can suddenly become bottlenecks.
When they say this, they mean it. To put this in perspective: with 1,572,864 cores, an application which is 99.9999% scalable will use LESS THAN HALF of the hardware! Over 60% of the hardware will be tied up waiting for that 0.0001% of serial code to execute.
This problem is explained by Amdahl's law, an important (yet depressing) observation which shows just how difficult writing an effective parallel algorithm actually is -- even when you're only writing for 4 cores.
with the database being the sync point.
Which is a big problem. Would you like to block a thread on a database call, or have it do something useful in the meantime?
Except that it does not solve the shared data access issues, the thing that makes it hard to write parallel code.
You're right, C#'s async support doesn't try to solve sharing issues. But should it? After all, async does not mean concurrency, or even threading.
Threading is a form of async, but not the one I meant.
I was referring to async I/O, where you can request the OS perform some I/O and then notify you when it's complete without blocking any of your threads. This enables you to write apps with co-operative multitasking where you switch between tasks while you wait for I/O, which is far more efficient than switching between threads.
With this model you can (somewhat) easily service 10,000 clients per-thread.
Typically this form of async is done using callbacks or eventing, which is doable with some practice but creates code which is really gnarly to anyone lacking experience with async. .NET has supported this form of async for many years, and I believe Java's NIO library provides the same thing.
C# 5.0 takes it a step further and gives an incredibly useful syntax sugar -- basically hiding all the callbacks, making it look like a simple synchronous method. Behind the scenes, the C# compiler generates a state machine class that does all the heavy lifting.
C# 5.0 (the latest version) has language-integrated async functionality that makes writing vertically scalable software a snap. It looks and behaves almost exactly like sync code, but actually runs async. Talking about server-side async here, not client-side.
Doing the same thing with Java or an older version of C#, where you have only the base libraries to help you, is really quite tedious to do properly.
So, for a test like this involving web development, I'd say language is actually a pretty relevant topic. Unless you've got lots of money to spend and can throw more hardware at something, the kind of perf improvement that can be provided by this is pretty astounding.
But, there are problems with this test. He says explicitly that he's looking for a real-world test, but then goes and basically times a Hello World. There is no database access, no concurrent users. No real-world anything.
Most of the people who disrupt movies are not jerks, just forgetful, or they came in a few seconds late and missed the ever present "Cell Phone Off" request that appears on the screen in every theater I've been to in the last 5 years.
*Raises hand*
I'm someone who chastises friends who look at text messages or answer their phones during a movie. A couple weeks ago for the first time in my life, I forgot to silence my phone before a movie started. It's startling and embarrassing as all hell, but not intentional.
That said, I have met people who seriously just do not care -- they think having it on vibrate is good enough, and if they duck down and talk low enough that nobody will see or hear them. I'd guess there are probably more assholes like this than forgetfuls like me.
I think this looks like a pretty terrible one. First, I'm not looking for an Ikea case. if I build it myself, I expect it to be customizable -- I should be able to piece together various parts like an erector set to build something unique and perfect for the parts I put inside, not have only a single design. What's the point?
Second, an open-air case sounds like a bad idea. There's going to be no control over airflow here so despite what the woman in the video says, I think cooling will probably actually be worse. Being open-air also means it's going to be a lot louder when your GPU or HDDs start going. As someone who once had cases full of ridiculously noisy high-speed fans, I now cherish a silent PC above all else.
The next case I get will probably cost $200+, but I'll end up using it for 10 years like I have my current one.
If it was all copyrighted to the Obama campaign then yes, it might be excellent code that the owners have no interest in releasing -- regardless of the wishes of the people who engineered it.
The ODAC implements the UAC1 (USB Audio Class 1) interface and works without any drivers on all major OSes. Great pains were taken to maintain this property -- many higher-end DACs require a proprietary driver or use UAC2 which isn't supported everywhere.
For me it Just Worked (tm) on the Pi. Highly recommend it!
For me, I've got a Raspberry Pi hooked up to an ODAC/O2 (audiophile DAC/amp) in a comfortable location for listening to music with headphones. Connected to Wifi, it reads the music from a NAS in another room and runs a mpd server controlled by my phone or tablet.
It's really nice to have a noiseless, compact music server that can be hidden away rather easily.
You must not have known what you were doing or something. My PC is 2 years old and it's still fast enough to run any modern game at medium to maxed specs at 1920x1080 while running Netflix in HD on monitor 2. It cost about $790.
This is only possible because games are designed for console specs. If consoles had the graphics cards of today, Windows PCs would simply not be able to keep up due to severe driver safety overhead.
This is particularly hilarious to me because AIG just started airing TV commercials giving themselves a nice big PR pat on the back for explicitly "paying back with interest".
One of the first apps for Windows Phone was MetroTube (originally LazyTube). It's provided great YouTube support from the beginning and continues to be updated regularly. It embraces the Windows Phone style completely and is always fast and fluid -- really a model app.
So do I care about a first-party app, or even one from Microsoft? Not really.
The only problem here is that they need to use APIs which are unsupported by YouTube -- I don't remember why, it's been a long time. I think to get at HD videos -- and thus the app can potentially break without notice. This is pretty rare, but it happens -- the most recent was about a week ago, and they fixed it within a few days. So I can see an API argument from Microsoft might have some truth to it.
I would love Youtube to be integrated into the phone like other social networks are. I'm guessing this is what Microsoft is actually after.