I use it sometimes, for simple things. Most of the time I do my own threading though - VC2005 requires you to distribute a vcomp.dll with your app which is a bit of a turnoff.
For the majority of apps, OpenMP is enough. That is what this looks like - a proprietary OpenMP. It might make it easier than creating and managing your own threads but calling it "auto" parallelizing when you need to mark what to execute in parallel is a bit of a stretch.
For apps that need more, it is probably a big enough requirement that someone knowledgable is already on the coding team. Which isn't to say that a compiler/lang/lib lowering the "experience required" bar wouldn't be welcomed, just that I wish these people would work on solving some new problems instead of re-tackling old ones.
The main purpose of these extensions seems to be finding a way to restrict the noob developer enough that they won't be able to abuse threading like some apps love to do. That is a very good thing in my book! (Think Freenet, where 200-600 threads is normal.)
I remember demoing something like that at Fry's. They told you to think of numbers/words to move a mouse on the screen. I never got it to do anything significant and was immediately told I was doing something wrong by the reps! Hopefully this will be better.
Either we'll have a good migration path, or Microsoft will demonstrate its definition of "Open" very clearly to governments and ODF will win over a lot more governments.
The amount of games that have useless "cinematic" cutscenes, just for the hell of it it seems, seem to be growing.
It doesn't only affect FPS games either: Neverwinter Nights 2 - even though it is more in a "stop and talk" genre was full of trying-to-be-cinematic-but-not-quite-there cutscenes. The kind that tweak the camera position every time a new sentence begins, and don't really add anything significant to the story.
These are the kinds of things I can't stand! If you are going to jolt me out of playing and have cutscenes, you'd better give me something damned interesting to look at/listen to, something that is imperative in telling the story.
I've often wondered why the ISPs don't allow uncapped speeds if you don't go out of their network. It wouldn't cost them anything extra and I'm sure marketing could manipulate it to bring in more customers.
I've been using Vista for quite a while now for primarily programming and gaming. "faster" has two areas for me:
When using desktop applications- Vista does feel more responsive. This is probably a combination of the I/O optimizations they have done (actual speedup) and the 3d desktop keeping window movements smooth and removing that ugly redraw affect XP has (percieved speedup). Vista also seems to go from cold boot to functional desktop faster. The only OS component which is slower is explorer, because it tries to preview everything (this can be turned off).
When gaming, however- Vista is slower. Not by a huge amount, but it is noticable. This is probably because of the 3D drivers using a new API that doesn't seem to give games exclusive access to the card anymore.
I think Microsoft may have unknowingly shot themselves in the foot by making some of the betas public. This made a lot of the "almost-enthusiast, but not really knowledgable" people decide that because the beta had some performance quirks, the RTM must too. And they've been surprisingly loud with it.
Other than some old hardware not having drivers yet, every person I've talked to who has actually ran Vista for a week agreed it is an improvement.
Stop regulating content completely and let parents do the regulating with parental control settings that are on pretty much every digital cable box nowdays.
If IBM was doing anything, it was informing the public and standards board about how OpenXML is a poor standard for reinventing the wheel on everything.
ODF had a long open development period. Microsoft could have participated in this if they really cared about standards and a backward compatibile feature set. Instead they chose to develop their own format. So why should I have sympathy if they cry about IBM saying ODF is better?
I think the main reason people say "don't use threads" is because while single threaded apps are easy to debug, multi-threaded ones will crash and burn at seemingly random places if the programmer didn't plan ahead and use proper locking. This is probably good advice to a noob programmer but I otherwise can't stand people who are of the "absolutely, never, ever, use threads" mindset.
Some applications have no need to be multithreaded, but when they do it is a lot easier than people make it out to be. Taking advantage of lock-free algorithms and NUMA for maximum scalability *can* be hard, but the people who need these will have the proper experience to tackle it.
Language extensions for threading would be great, and I'm sure somebody is working on it. But until that magical threading language (maybe c++1x) comes along the current ones work just fine.
He said it because he wants to shift the blame and he knows there is no chance in hell that the *AA will stop insisting on DRM being used.
The two outcomes of this are probably win-win for consumers: a) Some miracle happens and music companies realize DRM is hurting everyone, and we get interoperability back. b) They stick to Apple and force them to start licensing their DRM, and we finally get interoperability with other players/stores.
Or, of course, Apple could just pick up and leave..
Multi-core designs aren't that different from multi-CPU configurations
While a good multi-core design will also get a perf boost from multi-cpu, it is quite different if you are aiming for top performance. Multi-core design doesn't really have to worry about NUMA but multi-cpu does, especially as the number of cpus goes up.
How is that false? The simple truth is that no music store will be able to sell un-DRMed music if they want to sell music from the big labels. Sure there is indy music but that is a minority and I'm pretty sure you are smart enough to realize I was talking about mainstream music, the stuff that most people care about (even if it's complete shit).
Apple is *locking out other vendors*, plain and simple. Mod away, iPeople.
So many people own ipods and only one store is able to sell music to them. How is that a good thing? Monopolys suck - opening it up for other stores to start competing is great.
There is no "allow this driver to run". Under normal operation on Vista x64, drivers must be signed by a "trusted" authority (making your own root cert doesn't work), or they won't load. Period. The only way to get past it is to hit F8 when the computer boots, which only turns off mandatory signing for that session.
Perhaps I should have said "the RPM experience" instead of just RPM. I realize it's just a package, like.deb, but that doesn't change how hard it used to be to work with them, even with websites dedicated to hosting every dependancy you could find. I was just curious to know how the overall experience has improved.
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I already knew C and C++, so I can't speak from a beginners point of view. Inside C# did the trick for me.
I use it sometimes, for simple things. Most of the time I do my own threading though - VC2005 requires you to distribute a vcomp.dll with your app which is a bit of a turnoff.
Don't forget the other end of the development spectrum - Visual C++ 2005 has builtin OpenMP support too.
For the majority of apps, OpenMP is enough. That is what this looks like - a proprietary OpenMP. It might make it easier than creating and managing your own threads but calling it "auto" parallelizing when you need to mark what to execute in parallel is a bit of a stretch.
For apps that need more, it is probably a big enough requirement that someone knowledgable is already on the coding team. Which isn't to say that a compiler/lang/lib lowering the "experience required" bar wouldn't be welcomed, just that I wish these people would work on solving some new problems instead of re-tackling old ones.
The main purpose of these extensions seems to be finding a way to restrict the noob developer enough that they won't be able to abuse threading like some apps love to do. That is a very good thing in my book! (Think Freenet, where 200-600 threads is normal.)
I remember demoing something like that at Fry's. They told you to think of numbers/words to move a mouse on the screen. I never got it to do anything significant and was immediately told I was doing something wrong by the reps! Hopefully this will be better.
Am I thought only one who thought: Multiplayer Microsoft Bob!
A* is a path finding algorithm. It is used in many games, such as Starcraft.
Coming from Sagittarius A*, the gamma radiation will obviously have little difficulty finding a path to earth.
Don't worry - this ends good either way.
Either we'll have a good migration path, or Microsoft will demonstrate its definition of "Open" very clearly to governments and ODF will win over a lot more governments.
The amount of games that have useless "cinematic" cutscenes, just for the hell of it it seems, seem to be growing.
It doesn't only affect FPS games either: Neverwinter Nights 2 - even though it is more in a "stop and talk" genre was full of trying-to-be-cinematic-but-not-quite-there cutscenes. The kind that tweak the camera position every time a new sentence begins, and don't really add anything significant to the story.
These are the kinds of things I can't stand! If you are going to jolt me out of playing and have cutscenes, you'd better give me something damned interesting to look at/listen to, something that is imperative in telling the story.
You're in luck-
Vista comes with APIs for condition variables and reader-writer locks so you don't have to spend 15 minutes writing your own.
I've often wondered why the ISPs don't allow uncapped speeds if you don't go out of their network. It wouldn't cost them anything extra and I'm sure marketing could manipulate it to bring in more customers.
I've been using Vista for quite a while now for primarily programming and gaming. "faster" has two areas for me:
I think Microsoft may have unknowingly shot themselves in the foot by making some of the betas public. This made a lot of the "almost-enthusiast, but not really knowledgable" people decide that because the beta had some performance quirks, the RTM must too. And they've been surprisingly loud with it.
Other than some old hardware not having drivers yet, every person I've talked to who has actually ran Vista for a week agreed it is an improvement.
Stop regulating content completely and let parents do the regulating with parental control settings that are on pretty much every digital cable box nowdays.
No interface for you!
If IBM was doing anything, it was informing the public and standards board about how OpenXML is a poor standard for reinventing the wheel on everything.
ODF had a long open development period. Microsoft could have participated in this if they really cared about standards and a backward compatibile feature set. Instead they chose to develop their own format. So why should I have sympathy if they cry about IBM saying ODF is better?
They could be comparing it to this.
I think the main reason people say "don't use threads" is because while single threaded apps are easy to debug, multi-threaded ones will crash and burn at seemingly random places if the programmer didn't plan ahead and use proper locking. This is probably good advice to a noob programmer but I otherwise can't stand people who are of the "absolutely, never, ever, use threads" mindset.
Some applications have no need to be multithreaded, but when they do it is a lot easier than people make it out to be. Taking advantage of lock-free algorithms and NUMA for maximum scalability *can* be hard, but the people who need these will have the proper experience to tackle it.
Language extensions for threading would be great, and I'm sure somebody is working on it. But until that magical threading language (maybe c++1x) comes along the current ones work just fine.
He said it because he wants to shift the blame and he knows there is no chance in hell that the *AA will stop insisting on DRM being used.
The two outcomes of this are probably win-win for consumers:
a) Some miracle happens and music companies realize DRM is hurting everyone, and we get interoperability back.
b) They stick to Apple and force them to start licensing their DRM, and we finally get interoperability with other players/stores.
Or, of course, Apple could just pick up and leave..
While a good multi-core design will also get a perf boost from multi-cpu, it is quite different if you are aiming for top performance. Multi-core design doesn't really have to worry about NUMA but multi-cpu does, especially as the number of cpus goes up.
How is that false? The simple truth is that no music store will be able to sell un-DRMed music if they want to sell music from the big labels. Sure there is indy music but that is a minority and I'm pretty sure you are smart enough to realize I was talking about mainstream music, the stuff that most people care about (even if it's complete shit).
Apple is *locking out other vendors*, plain and simple. Mod away, iPeople.
You're kidding, right?
So many people own ipods and only one store is able to sell music to them. How is that a good thing? Monopolys suck -
opening it up for other stores to start competing is great.
From what I've heard Paypal can be pretty sleazy. Them beating Google of all people... blows my mind.
Is it just really buggy? I havn't used it yet.
There is no "allow this driver to run". Under normal operation on Vista x64, drivers must be signed by a "trusted" authority (making your own root cert doesn't work), or they won't load. Period. The only way to get past it is to hit F8 when the computer boots, which only turns off mandatory signing for that session.
Perhaps I should have said "the RPM experience" instead of just RPM. I realize it's just a package, like .deb, but that doesn't change how hard it used to be to work with them, even with websites dedicated to hosting every dependancy you could find. I was just curious to know how the overall experience has improved.