The Windows kernel hasn't changed significantly since the NT4 -> Win2K change. The biggest improvement in the XP kernel was pre-faulting the pages of large processes. Meanwhile, in 2.6, the block I/O layer, VM layer, scheduler, and sound system are brand new. And the whole kernel was made preemptible! Shortly after 2.6, ReiserFS 4 (which looks very promising from initial benchmarks) will be released. In all, 2.4 -> 2.6 will be like NT4 -> XP!
PS> Before anyone bitches about rewrites being a bad thing, look at things this way. Such extensive changes are necessary for the continually growing range of systems Linux is expected to run on. 2.0 and 2.2 were greatfor single CPU servers, or SMP machines with only a few processors. 2.4 is very usable for heavy-duty machines with many more processors. 2.6 (along with the changes that help interactivity) will make an excellent kernel for desktop machines and workstations. In 2.8, the focus will be on optimizing the core algorithms to run on large-scale NUMA machines.
You cannot do that in strongly typed languages. Like Python or Lisp. >>>>>>> I consider that a bug, not a feature. I don't buy into the "bind the hands of the programmer" argument. reinterpret_cast isn't something you write by accident. If you use it, you have a damn good reason to use it. And outside of the runtime support, or in the kernel, you have no reason to use it. Its a matter of moral typesaftey vs theoretical typesaftey. I guess C++ isn't theoretically type safe because it has unsafe casts. However, it is morally typesafe because unless the programmer makes a concious decision to bypass the type system, the system is fully typesafe. Theoretical typesaftey buys you nothing. It eliminates the language from being useful for a significant amount of code (hardware-level programming, kernels, runtime support, etc) while gaining you nothing in terms of actual saftey. If I want to go around purposefully messing up my program, I can easily just write while(1): pass in Python as I can write reinterpret_cast in C++.
Then again, I don't write kernels too often, but I guess I'm the exception, because every PFY writing his Instant Messaging client in C explains that it's because C is the only language you can write a kernel in. >>>>>>>>>> GUIs are one of the places a dynamically typed language works really nicely. I certainly wouldn't write a GUI in C++, I'd write it in Python. However, most of my work goes nowhere near that close to the user. My hobby is working on an OS kernel (in C++!) and my job involves embedded programming.
That's because the standard Windows APIs for C++ are utter shit. The only half-decent C++ GUI library to come out of Redmond was WTL, and (surprise) nobody's ever heard of it. Try Qt (or if you can find a copy) BeOS's API. Much easer, much cleaner. Even FLTK is pretty nice (much more C++-ish than the others).
This C++ is a weakly typed language is bullshit. I get far more type errors in Python (which I love, btw) than in C++. Dynamic typing is both a blessing and a curse, as is static typing. Now the Java-heads like to say that C++ is a weakly typed language because it lets your do unsafe casts. Well of course it lets you do unsafe casts! How else would you write kernels in C++ if it didn't? The point is that you don't have to use unsafe casts in regular programming.
PS> I have a feeling most of the "wealky typed" arguements come from people who only see the "C" side of C++. For example, I was doing a messaging system the other day. What's the first instinct of a C programmer turned C++ programmer in a situation like that? Have a message contain a void pointer to an untyped buffer, of course. My solution? Use boost::any to encapsulate the message data and use boost::any_cast to do typesafe conversions when the message data needs to be unpacked. Throw in placement new and a sane copy constructor, and you have a perfectly type-safe way to send objects from point A to point B. It's this kind of stuff that you don't see when reading all the legacy C++ code out there, and its largely because of that that C++ gets such a bad rep.
Sigh. Everyone *knows* that exist wounds are the ones that cause the real damage! Nice neat hole in your forhead, gaping crevace at the base of your skull...
The difference between a synthetic benchmark and a real game is that the real game has all sorts of other things going on. It has to handle user input, much more extensive collision physics, etc. It's much harder to cheat at real benchmarks because they're not static. Most (good) review sites can and do come up with their own demo scripts for popular games. As a result, cheating is harder because there is much less that the manufacturer can assume about what will be running. And you don't need advanced diagnostic tools to see if a manufacturer is cheating. Just watch the demo, take screenshots, and see if you notice anything odd. If you don't notice anything odd, then even if the manufacturer did do something, its an optimization rather than a cheat. Remember, a large part of graphics programming involves taking quality shortcuts in ways that (you hope) the viewer doesn't notice.
It is nice to see a language designed by linguists rather than mathematicians or engineers. Typical Slashdotters will scoff, but suffice it to say that Shakespeare did not write in Scheme:)
If you read the benchmarks, you'd see that these cards are just good enough to run current games (like UT2003) at 70fps at their highest detail levels. So among gamers with disposable income, a lot of people might buy these cards. If not these specific flagship (think advertising_ models, then certainly the more affordable versions in the same product lines.
A lot of the verbosity has to do with the fact that cards are faster at different things. PC Magazine used to (still does?) review a graphics card by running one stupid synthetic benchmark and using it as the number. Running a whole suite of tests gives a prospective buyer a much better idea of which card will be faster for the games he plays.
Am I the only one who automatically ignores any benchmark whose result isn't in FPS? I learned a long ago, from PC Mags 3d benchmarks, that synthetic benchmarks are absolutely useless!
Perhaps some day you'll be a minority in a group of people whom your job requires you to associate with and who make a regular practice of making fun of that minority and then come to know the difference between a joke and a verbal assault. >>>>>>>>> Dude, I'm a Muslim Indian. Don't give me any crap about being a minority. Every time an article on Slashdot comes out about programmers, you get some anti-Indian people crawling out of the woodworks. However, its quite easy to distinguish between those who are joking, and those who sound like they mean it.
In a forum like this one, no amount of smilies conveys those cues. >>>> A smily takes place of physically smiling while saying something. Between that, and the cues inherent to sarcastic language (from my original post --- "it's not like", and the exclamation mark) only people who can't read well should have a problem discerning a joke from a statement.
Is it an accident that there are more women doctors and scientists than there are women programmers even though all three fields require technical skills? Do you feel no sense of responsibility to provide a welcoming atmosphere to encourage more women to join our field? >>>>>>> In school I used to help run projects that tried to get young kids interested in robotics. One of the goals, in particular, was to get little girls interested in technology. Again, don't give me shit about "welcoming atmosphere." We're among adults here, and adults should be mature enough to tell the difference between a joke and a personal attack. Besides, in my experience, the problems with getting girls interested in technology runs a lot deeper than some jokes, or a welcoming atmosphere. There are systematic biases in our society that penetrate to the very value systems of traditional families. It's these biases that are keeping girls out of technology. It's the fact that every commercial involving Stoffers or WalMart involves a "mom taking care of her family." It's the fact that to this day, there are men who believe that women can't do their job just as well. The only things jokes do is take the edge off an otherwise harsh and bitter reality.
Imagine for a minute that you are my fifteen year old daughter surfing the net while trying to figure out what field to enter. Do you think these jokes, whatever their intent, will encourage her to become a programmer? >>>>>>>>> At fifteen, your daughter should be mature enough to realize the difference between humor and personal attacks. If she can't, then she should read more and get a full understanding of how language conveys intention. I have a brother who is 13 years old. He finds all the Flash videos on the internet about muslims hilarious. However, the one time somebody made an intentionally hurtful comment to him, he was very offended. If you can't distinguish between what somebody says, and what he means, you can't expect others to refrain from saying certain things just because you might misinterpret it.
I remember trying to install a new modem in Win 3.1. *That* was hell. Took weeks. Hell, it still takes forever to install modems in Windows. Dial Up Networking is a POS. IRQs and all that bat-shit still can bite you in the ass.
I think a lot of Linux user's experiences are like this. I remember that I started using Linux around Slack 3.5 (maybe 3.4?). I played with that and RedHat 5.x for awhile, but I mainly used Windows. In 1998, I started using BeOS, bouncing between it and Windows for several months. Early in 1999, I switched over entirely to BeOS until early 2001. For several months, I reverted to Windows, but was dissatisfied. Late in 2001, I started playing with Debian, and switched over to Linux full time somewhere in early 2002. I used Debian for several months, but after the KDE 3.0 thing, I tried Gentoo. It's finally settled down, and I've been using Gentoo full-time more than a year. It's gotten to the point where I'm uncomfortable with Windows machines because they changed a whole lot of stuff in XP, which I never used on my machine. Ditching something you're used to (I had been using Windows since 1992) can take awhile, and I'm not at all surprised that early users to Linux bounce around so much.
If you knew me in person, you'd know I treat women with a great deal of respect. It just goes to show you how utterly stupid taking someone's jokes so damn seriously can be!
For somebody who has the money to play with the equipment necessary to descramble DTV signals, I'm guessing its not too much of a burden. Besides, if you can't afford to get caught, don't do the crime. Remeber, these judgements take into account how much these people make, and what they can afford to pay.
You, sir, are what we call in certain cirlces a "kill-joy." There is nothing wrong with the occasional off-color joke. It's not like we're in mixed company, right:)
Maybe for you in your nice cushy job, but some of us barely make that at all >>>>>> Even a minimum wage job pays about $1000 a month. I'd really like to know how you managed to make less than $500 a month...
Nope, I have to throw in a plug for SWT here too. The Java LAF's in Linux suck badly. Crappy font rendering, no anti-aliasing, totally non-native looking, etc. Eclipse, OTOH, looks completely native, and follows my GTK2 theme:)
It depends on the task. Portage is just glue code. The bottleneck is in the download and compilation of programs. If an embedded machine can handle gcc and compiling the Linux kernel, it can sure as hell handle Python, which has a much smaller footprint than either of those tasks.
Slashdot Mirror
The Windows kernel hasn't changed significantly since the NT4 -> Win2K change. The biggest improvement in the XP kernel was pre-faulting the pages of large processes. Meanwhile, in 2.6, the block I/O layer, VM layer, scheduler, and sound system are brand new. And the whole kernel was made preemptible! Shortly after 2.6, ReiserFS 4 (which looks very promising from initial benchmarks) will be released. In all, 2.4 -> 2.6 will be like NT4 -> XP!
PS> Before anyone bitches about rewrites being a bad thing, look at things this way. Such extensive changes are necessary for the continually growing range of systems Linux is expected to run on. 2.0 and 2.2 were greatfor single CPU servers, or SMP machines with only a few processors. 2.4 is very usable for heavy-duty machines with many more processors. 2.6 (along with the changes that help interactivity) will make an excellent kernel for desktop machines and workstations. In 2.8, the focus will be on optimizing the core algorithms to run on large-scale NUMA machines.
You cannot do that in strongly typed languages. Like Python or Lisp.
>>>>>>>
I consider that a bug, not a feature. I don't buy into the "bind the hands of the programmer" argument. reinterpret_cast isn't something you write by accident. If you use it, you have a damn good reason to use it. And outside of the runtime support, or in the kernel, you have no reason to use it. Its a matter of moral typesaftey vs theoretical typesaftey. I guess C++ isn't theoretically type safe because it has unsafe casts. However, it is morally typesafe because unless the programmer makes a concious decision to bypass the type system, the system is fully typesafe. Theoretical typesaftey buys you nothing. It eliminates the language from being useful for a significant amount of code (hardware-level programming, kernels, runtime support, etc) while gaining you nothing in terms of actual saftey. If I want to go around purposefully messing up my program, I can easily just write while(1): pass in Python as I can write reinterpret_cast in C++.
Then again, I don't write kernels too often, but I guess I'm the exception, because every PFY writing his Instant Messaging client in C explains that it's because C is the only language you can write a kernel in.
>>>>>>>>>>
GUIs are one of the places a dynamically typed language works really nicely. I certainly wouldn't write a GUI in C++, I'd write it in Python. However, most of my work goes nowhere near that close to the user. My hobby is working on an OS kernel (in C++!) and my job involves embedded programming.
That's because the standard Windows APIs for C++ are utter shit. The only half-decent C++ GUI library to come out of Redmond was WTL, and (surprise) nobody's ever heard of it. Try Qt (or if you can find a copy) BeOS's API. Much easer, much cleaner. Even FLTK is pretty nice (much more C++-ish than the others).
Just like to say I agree with you 100% Love Modern C++, and I think Python is really neat too. The two actually complement each other rather nicely :)
This C++ is a weakly typed language is bullshit. I get far more type errors in Python (which I love, btw) than in C++. Dynamic typing is both a blessing and a curse, as is static typing. Now the Java-heads like to say that C++ is a weakly typed language because it lets your do unsafe casts. Well of course it lets you do unsafe casts! How else would you write kernels in C++ if it didn't? The point is that you don't have to use unsafe casts in regular programming.
PS> I have a feeling most of the "wealky typed" arguements come from people who only see the "C" side of C++. For example, I was doing a messaging system the other day. What's the first instinct of a C programmer turned C++ programmer in a situation like that? Have a message contain a void pointer to an untyped buffer, of course. My solution? Use boost::any to encapsulate the message data and use boost::any_cast to do typesafe conversions when the message data needs to be unpacked. Throw in placement new and a sane copy constructor, and you have a perfectly type-safe way to send objects from point A to point B. It's this kind of stuff that you don't see when reading all the legacy C++ code out there, and its largely because of that that C++ gets such a bad rep.
Sigh. Everyone *knows* that exist wounds are the ones that cause the real damage! Nice neat hole in your forhead, gaping crevace at the base of your skull...
NetBSD doesn't scale to large way SMP machines.
The difference between a synthetic benchmark and a real game is that the real game has all sorts of other things going on. It has to handle user input, much more extensive collision physics, etc. It's much harder to cheat at real benchmarks because they're not static. Most (good) review sites can and do come up with their own demo scripts for popular games. As a result, cheating is harder because there is much less that the manufacturer can assume about what will be running. And you don't need advanced diagnostic tools to see if a manufacturer is cheating. Just watch the demo, take screenshots, and see if you notice anything odd. If you don't notice anything odd, then even if the manufacturer did do something, its an optimization rather than a cheat. Remember, a large part of graphics programming involves taking quality shortcuts in ways that (you hope) the viewer doesn't notice.
IIRC, many demos these days *do* report lowest FPS score. I think the UT benchmark does, and many sites have started reporting it.
Right. Which is why ILM uses ATI cards in their Linux workstations?
It is nice to see a language designed by linguists rather than mathematicians or engineers. Typical Slashdotters will scoff, but suffice it to say that Shakespeare did not write in Scheme :)
If you read the benchmarks, you'd see that these cards are just good enough to run current games (like UT2003) at 70fps at their highest detail levels. So among gamers with disposable income, a lot of people might buy these cards. If not these specific flagship (think advertising_ models, then certainly the more affordable versions in the same product lines.
A lot of the verbosity has to do with the fact that cards are faster at different things. PC Magazine used to (still does?) review a graphics card by running one stupid synthetic benchmark and using it as the number. Running a whole suite of tests gives a prospective buyer a much better idea of which card will be faster for the games he plays.
Am I the only one who automatically ignores any benchmark whose result isn't in FPS? I learned a long ago, from PC Mags 3d benchmarks, that synthetic benchmarks are absolutely useless!
Perhaps some day you'll be a minority in a group of people whom your job requires you to associate with and who make a regular practice of making fun of that minority and then come to know the difference between a joke and a verbal assault.
>>>>>>>>>
Dude, I'm a Muslim Indian. Don't give me any crap about being a minority. Every time an article on Slashdot comes out about programmers, you get some anti-Indian people crawling out of the woodworks. However, its quite easy to distinguish between those who are joking, and those who sound like they mean it.
In a forum like this one, no amount of smilies conveys those cues.
>>>>
A smily takes place of physically smiling while saying something. Between that, and the cues inherent to sarcastic language (from my original post --- "it's not like", and the exclamation mark) only people who can't read well should have a problem discerning a joke from a statement.
Is it an accident that there are more women doctors and scientists than there are women programmers even though all three fields require technical skills? Do you feel no sense of responsibility to provide a welcoming atmosphere to encourage more women to join our field?
>>>>>>>
In school I used to help run projects that tried to get young kids interested in robotics. One of the goals, in particular, was to get little girls interested in technology. Again, don't give me shit about "welcoming atmosphere." We're among adults here, and adults should be mature enough to tell the difference between a joke and a personal attack. Besides, in my experience, the problems with getting girls interested in technology runs a lot deeper than some jokes, or a welcoming atmosphere. There are systematic biases in our society that penetrate to the very value systems of traditional families. It's these biases that are keeping girls out of technology. It's the fact that every commercial involving Stoffers or WalMart involves a "mom taking care of her family." It's the fact that to this day, there are men who believe that women can't do their job just as well. The only things jokes do is take the edge off an otherwise harsh and bitter reality.
Imagine for a minute that you are my fifteen year old daughter surfing the net while trying to figure out what field to enter. Do you think these jokes, whatever their intent, will encourage her to become a programmer?
>>>>>>>>>
At fifteen, your daughter should be mature enough to realize the difference between humor and personal attacks. If she can't, then she should read more and get a full understanding of how language conveys intention. I have a brother who is 13 years old. He finds all the Flash videos on the internet about muslims hilarious. However, the one time somebody made an intentionally hurtful comment to him, he was very offended. If you can't distinguish between what somebody says, and what he means, you can't expect others to refrain from saying certain things just because you might misinterpret it.
I remember trying to install a new modem in Win 3.1. *That* was hell. Took weeks. Hell, it still takes forever to install modems in Windows. Dial Up Networking is a POS. IRQs and all that bat-shit still can bite you in the ass.
I think a lot of Linux user's experiences are like this. I remember that I started using Linux around Slack 3.5 (maybe 3.4?). I played with that and RedHat 5.x for awhile, but I mainly used Windows. In 1998, I started using BeOS, bouncing between it and Windows for several months. Early in 1999, I switched over entirely to BeOS until early 2001. For several months, I reverted to Windows, but was dissatisfied. Late in 2001, I started playing with Debian, and switched over to Linux full time somewhere in early 2002. I used Debian for several months, but after the KDE 3.0 thing, I tried Gentoo. It's finally settled down, and I've been using Gentoo full-time more than a year. It's gotten to the point where I'm uncomfortable with Windows machines because they changed a whole lot of stuff in XP, which I never used on my machine. Ditching something you're used to (I had been using Windows since 1992) can take awhile, and I'm not at all surprised that early users to Linux bounce around so much.
If you knew me in person, you'd know I treat women with a great deal of respect. It just goes to show you how utterly stupid taking someone's jokes so damn seriously can be!
For somebody who has the money to play with the equipment necessary to descramble DTV signals, I'm guessing its not too much of a burden. Besides, if you can't afford to get caught, don't do the crime. Remeber, these judgements take into account how much these people make, and what they can afford to pay.
You, sir, are what we call in certain cirlces a "kill-joy." There is nothing wrong with the occasional off-color joke. It's not like we're in mixed company, right :)
Maybe for you in your nice cushy job, but some of us barely make that at all
>>>>>>
Even a minimum wage job pays about $1000 a month. I'd really like to know how you managed to make less than $500 a month...
Dude. I'd hardly call $500 a month "financially crippling" somebody for life. Actually, its seems rather fair.
Nope, I have to throw in a plug for SWT here too. The Java LAF's in Linux suck badly. Crappy font rendering, no anti-aliasing, totally non-native looking, etc. Eclipse, OTOH, looks completely native, and follows my GTK2 theme :)
Intel should stop reusing acronyms. PAT = Page Attribute Table, a feature in PIII+ processors that helps manage caching of memory ranges.
It depends on the task. Portage is just glue code. The bottleneck is in the download and compilation of programs. If an embedded machine can handle gcc and compiling the Linux kernel, it can sure as hell handle Python, which has a much smaller footprint than either of those tasks.