I thought the most disturbing part of the game is when you find out that the Kzer-Za are not your real enemies, and that, in their own twisted way were actually trying to protect humanity and the other sentient species, and that, worst of all, you've been undermining their struggle with the Kohr-Ah. It's worst the first time you play, because if you've taken too many years in the game, that realization will hit you right before the Kzer-Za begin to lose the war, and the Kohr-Ah begin to annihilate every sentient species one by one...
But, yeah... the Orz and the Arilou were pretty damn creepy, too. And the neo-Dynarri...
Yes, I've often noticed that an unsightly lump of organic goo accretes in the empty space between keyboard and chair.
Apparently it's some sort of minor parasite that uses a small amount of the computer's power to play FreeCell or Minesweeper, generally without killing the host outright for at least a month.
Frankly, given the fact that outer space is like FIVE TIMES bigger than the Earth, I'd say that Occam's Razor puts the burden of proof squarely on the "It came from Earth" crowd.;-)
if it were printed out as a single line of text, it would stretch around the world more than 250 times. Printing it out on pages of A4 would produce a stack of paper two-and-a-half times as high as Mount Everest.
Such claims should be taken with a grain of salt until they reveal what fonts and point sizes they use.
"Use vi, too. And vote Democrat. Oh, and cats are better than dogs. You know what else? Abortion should be legal. So should euthenasia. And as for toast? Butter side up!
You, sir, are open-minded, fair, generous, and wise. Except that you're also vi-using scum.
How can you possibly use vi, when any sane man knows the One True Editor is Tux Racer!
If you don't CONS, you never need to collect garbage. *rimshot*
More seriously, GC isn't so much about pros and cons, as it is about tradeoffs between the various GC algorithms: time vs. space, low-latency vs. high-throughput, parallelism, etc.
If you're designing a new language, it should include garbage collection, or nobody will use it (i.e., your target audience can already program in C). You may wish to have multiple GC implementations available for different purposes, perhaps to be selected at compile-time.
My personal favorite is the good old Cheney semi-space collector (and Ephemeral/Generational Garbage Collectors, which are more advanced versions designed to generally have low latency), as it is very straightforward (both to understand and to implement), compacting (it defragments memory, and can perhaps improve cache locality by grouping related objects), and it has high throughput (work is proportional to the amount of live data, not total data).
If memory usage is of more concern than fragmentation and throughput, a mark-sweep collector may be more your style.
There are also "real-time" (and "soft-real-time", i.e. bounded latency [see Henry Baker's Treadmill]) collectors, parallel collectors [including an interesting case for reference counting, usually considered a dog performance-wise, as a viable parallel/remote GC method], "conservative" collectors for C/C++ (see Hans-J Boehm's libgc), collectors for real and hypothetical computers with special hardware and/or OS support for GC features, and some collectors that are just plain weird.
Note also that garbage collection algorithms are considered hard to measure for performance, especially with regard to wall-time latency, so just because a paper(*) claims that a certain GC has certain performance characteristics, be sure to benchmark if it really matters.
(*) Did I mention papers? If you're serious about implementing GC, getting comfortable reading CS research papers is a must. The book "Garbage Collection" is your best friend here, as it provides a very good overview/survey of said papers and algorithms, and it discusses a lot of pros and cons between various algorithms, and useful variants or adaptations that have been applied to previously-published work.
"But, if you read some Trolls here on Slashdot they would state that Java not only ate all their computer memory but also kicked sand in their face at the beach and stole their lunch money."
The same Java that surrendered West Point to the hated British?*
Slashdot Mirror
Wikipedia is great and all, but are you really ready to trust your life to it? :P
[more spoilers:]
I thought the most disturbing part of the game is when you find out that the Kzer-Za are not your real enemies, and that, in their own twisted way were actually trying to protect humanity and the other sentient species, and that, worst of all, you've been undermining their struggle with the Kohr-Ah. It's worst the first time you play, because if you've taken too many years in the game, that realization will hit you right before the Kzer-Za begin to lose the war, and the Kohr-Ah begin to annihilate every sentient species one by one...
But, yeah... the Orz and the Arilou were pretty damn creepy, too. And the neo-Dynarri...
"I think Badger is the name of the new version that came out last month. You may want to try the livecd to see if it works on your laptop."
Breezy Badger is the old one. You want Dapper Drake ("Dapper").
"the fault lies in the keyboard-chair interface."
Yes, I've often noticed that an unsightly lump of organic goo accretes in the empty space between keyboard and chair.
Apparently it's some sort of minor parasite that uses a small amount of the computer's power to play FreeCell or Minesweeper, generally without killing the host outright for at least a month.
Just have your answering machine's message say,
Frankly, given the fact that outer space is like FIVE TIMES bigger than the Earth, I'd say that Occam's Razor puts the burden of proof squarely on the "It came from Earth" crowd. ;-)
Five times bigger, folks. That's a lot of space!
Mod parent up to a million.
We hopefully won't have a game named "Super Mario Wiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii!"
Are you kidding? I would play that in a heartbeat!
Multitask, baby!
It used to be called Herschel! :-D
"Those who use essential PHP and expect security deserve neither."
(*sniff, sniff*... mmm... do I smell karma roasting?)
if it were printed out as a single line of text, it would stretch around the world more than 250 times. Printing it out on pages of A4 would produce a stack of paper two-and-a-half times as high as Mount Everest.
Such claims should be taken with a grain of salt until they reveal what fonts and point sizes they use.
"Such cause would be a violation of the "License Must Not Restrict Other Software" rule in the Open Source definition."
The FSF cares about Free Software, not Open Source.
... two hunters meet to discuss their predicament:
Ubuntu: Did you hear that? They took my name and made a Linux distro out of it! It's time to sue!
Jumanji: Hell yeah! That's what I've been saying all along!
"Please, just tell people to use KDE.
"Use vi, too. And vote Democrat. Oh, and cats are better than dogs. You know what else? Abortion should be legal. So should euthenasia. And as for toast? Butter side up!
You, sir, are open-minded, fair, generous, and wise. Except that you're also vi-using scum.
How can you possibly use vi, when any sane man knows the One True Editor is Tux Racer!
Blizzard?
Havoc?
Linus?
Where do these people get such cool names?
Whoops! Sorry...
:P
And all this time I thought it was just a very clever nick....
"You probably just shouldn't pay much attention to those "three letter" people anyway.
:)
KFG"
Heh, heh, heh.
Slightly OT, but... Every time I see the nick "kfg", I think it must mean "Kentucky Fried Goat". And that makes me smile.
"... this has the makings of the longest Slashdot flamewar in history. I suppose the only remaining question is, does it run faster in Gnome or KDE?"
Emacs!
M-x don-asbestos-underpants
C-x C-c
There's no cost like opportunity cost... :-)
Pros and cons of garbage collection?
If you don't CONS, you never need to collect garbage. *rimshot*
More seriously, GC isn't so much about pros and cons, as it is about tradeoffs between the various GC algorithms: time vs. space, low-latency vs. high-throughput, parallelism, etc.
If you're designing a new language, it should include garbage collection, or nobody will use it (i.e., your target audience can already program in C). You may wish to have multiple GC implementations available for different purposes, perhaps to be selected at compile-time.
For a good overview of what's available, see http://www.memorymanagement.org/
My personal favorite is the good old Cheney semi-space collector (and Ephemeral/Generational Garbage Collectors, which are more advanced versions designed to generally have low latency), as it is very straightforward (both to understand and to implement), compacting (it defragments memory, and can perhaps improve cache locality by grouping related objects), and it has high throughput (work is proportional to the amount of live data, not total data).
If memory usage is of more concern than fragmentation and throughput, a mark-sweep collector may be more your style.
There are also "real-time" (and "soft-real-time", i.e. bounded latency [see Henry Baker's Treadmill]) collectors, parallel collectors [including an interesting case for reference counting, usually considered a dog performance-wise, as a viable parallel/remote GC method], "conservative" collectors for C/C++ (see Hans-J Boehm's libgc), collectors for real and hypothetical computers with special hardware and/or OS support for GC features, and some collectors that are just plain weird.
Note also that garbage collection algorithms are considered hard to measure for performance, especially with regard to wall-time latency, so just because a paper(*) claims that a certain GC has certain performance characteristics, be sure to benchmark if it really matters.
(*) Did I mention papers? If you're serious about implementing GC, getting comfortable reading CS research papers is a must. The book "Garbage Collection" is your best friend here, as it provides a very good overview/survey of said papers and algorithms, and it discusses a lot of pros and cons between various algorithms, and useful variants or adaptations that have been applied to previously-published work.
Also check out Henry Baker's papers, because he is a memory management demigod: http://home.pipeline.com/~hbaker1/home.html.
"But, if you read some Trolls here on Slashdot they would state that Java not only ate all their computer memory but also kicked sand in their face at the beach and stole their lunch money."
;-)
The same Java that surrendered West Point to the hated British?*
*
I'd rather play a game with Donald in Mathemagic Land.... ;-)
With RSSOwl, I can watch for software releases on Freshmeat, so no one will ever, ever again need to post software release announcements to Slashdot!
Thanks, RSSOwl!
[Gauntlet announcer] Use Paragraphs to Save Eyes!