Too true. The original Internet worm had only 99 lines of source code, yet incorporated encryption, password guessing, vulnerability-injection, and so on. Except for a bug, I think the author was a genius - a true "hacker" in the original sense of the word.
(well, but without IE how will I download firefox?)
You use Internet Exploiter to download Firefox?! What an atrocity!
Why don't you do what everyone else does, and use 'ftp' from shell (which was included in an out-of-the-box Windows installation last time I checked.) Or better yet, use FTP to download wget, and use that to download Firefox, since I'm not sure Microsoft's FTP tool can actually handle the whopping multi-mebibyte size of Firefox.
What makes you think C/C++ programmers can't do something at run-time themselves? I'm not talking about cost/performance ratio here, I'm just saying that there's no program written in another non-compiled language that can be faster than the same program, written in C/C++, by competent programmers with enough time.
Any technology you might fancy today in your pet VM or JIT-compiler is simply there for the C programmer, if she has the time and ability to employ it.
And your example really doesn't show anything. Even in vanilla C++, the vtable lookup is exactly that: a single table lookup added to the cost of a function call through a pointer. Considering the potential for a cache miss, this can indeed be considered slow, but only by the standard of the people living on the bleeding edge of performance. Incrementing a simple integer variable potentially costs more in Java or C#. The prediction you mention that can replace this horribly slow (it can take as much as 50 CPU cycles!) virtual function call would hardly be free either, and wouldn't be much cheaper (if cheaper at all.)
I'm sure you can take advantage of this in C/C++, but only in a very theoretical sense of the word "can".
Well, I'd say the key point here is that people at least can use these methods in C/C++. I don't know about you, but I would call that power.
I don't know why people say that any interpreted/JITed/VMed/etc. program can be as fast (or faster! The audacity!) than C code. Whatever tricks and shortcuts your favorite language's interpreter/whatever is taking, can also be exploited in a C program by any decent programmer (absolutely all of them if you count using a bit of inline assembly to still be C.)
Sure, you can write bad programs in C, ones that even beat Java's record-bearing slowness, but the point is that you can write programs that run as fast as possible on the target architecture. I'm pretty positive that this is not possible in most other languages.
And all the bulls*** people say about C++ being slow and bloated is exactly that, bulls***. C++ is again only as good as you are. It does exactly what you tell it too. If you don't know about the constructor/destructor calls, the exception handling and stack unwinding mechanisms, the virtual function call procedure, etc., and you are too lazy (or too restricted in time) to read the standard library source code or the assembly listing, then you probably should forego the use of C++ in favour of another more luser-friendly language. This is not an insult, this is simply what most people should do, and they should stop whining.
(The assembly advocates can make the same argument, but I don't think the efficiency gain from writing programs all in assembly is as drastic when compared to C/C++ when contrasted with performance gain of C in comparison with Java and whatnot.)
To save myself some flame-bombs, I should probably mention that in many (most?) normal cases, C/C++ is not the way to go. In most programs, the development cost increase (paying much better programmers more hours) would dwarf the benefit of having leaner, meaner and faster programs (that last chunk of performance more often than not may even be a non-issue.)
In a few words, repeat this with yourself 10 times every morning: C++ is not a bad language, it's just not for me!
Maybe not, but Vista does have a particularly strong anti-SEP field (it's a huge problem, and guess what, it's yours!) that along with usual effects, makes you age slightly faster.
Hopefully, by annoying the hell out of many users, it will drive them out of their seemingly safe M$-made "Ignoshells"(TM) and into the light of... (insert the name of your favorite non-brain dead OS here.)
What amuses me is the sheer awfulness of Vista. I mean, how bad an OS has to be for people to start praising XP!
The only problem with a one-dimensional "PC-Spec" or whatnot mark would be that different games, like almost any other kind of program, do not utilize all the various hardware in a PC to the same extent.
Their bottlenecks, required latencies and bandwidths, memory sizes, etc. can vary greatly from one engine to the next (heck, they might vary from one title to the next with the same engine.)
And not even a multidimensional specification documenting every relevant aspect of the hardware would be enough (even if it was practical, sticking a 42-number label on each PC.) Because some components may mask or reduce the effects of other components (obviously only some of the time!) For example, a very low-latency VRAM, on a narrow bus might perform the same as a higher-latency VRAM with higher bus width, but this very much depends on the game's access patterns.
So, what might work would be to issue the mentioned label with 42 (at least) numbers each describing a single relevant aspect of the hardware, and also labeling each game with a formula with the same 42 variables (and a lot of coefficients, powers, etc.) that would give a score for that game running on that hardware. If the score was positive, the game would be runnable. The higher the score, the better the gamer's experience.
(I know you are going to say that a gamer's experience of a game is not a one dimensional thing, and we should actually have a function from R^42 domain to R^7 range. I agree! But then, the people would have to be carrying a formula on their foreheads mapping the 7 dimensions of the game experience to their personal liking. Which depends on their many moods...)
Now, the only remaining issue would be convincing game developers to spend 6-18 months trying to calculate the required formula.
Well done sir! That's much more secure than my own strategy of setting all my passwords to the reverse of "drowssap" (I reversed it here to deter those password-harvesting bots, obviously) and copy/pasting off the label that says "password" that is right next to the password field most of the time.
By the way, I looked at your password file at the given address to have you FTP password so I can upload my own password file to your server (with your permission, of course!) Now, is your FTP password the reverse of "404"?
It was wise of you to stop at only 19 items. Had you added a 20th, your extract of D&D rules would no longer have been covered by "fair use" laws and the Lawyers of the Coast would be upon you before you could have said "d20"!
Knife of Dreams (book 11) was not that bad (or was it "Harry Potter and the Knife of Dreams"?) It was even comparable to the first 4 books (OK, not quite, but a little bit...)
On the other hand, maybe the wait for book eleven and the disaster that was book ten made KoD look better than it actually was.
First I have to say this: The prices over here are very low, you can get Visual Studio.NET Enterprise Edition (pardon me for the example) for $1 here (the price of the blank CDs + copying!) but open-source software (those that are too big for individual download, consider a Debian distro) are actually more expensive, due to their being hard to come-by (can you believe that??!!!)
Anyways, the use of open source software in academic applications is becoming (yes, BECOMING) standard, although not in many universities, and the public remains untouched by the trend, although everybody have heard about Linux, but Linux is something only heard of, and it is known for its security mostly (not being free), because Windows is highly regarded as an insecure mess, even by the public. And you must understand this, freedom of software (as Stallman advocates) is something unheard-of, and Iranian developers (including myself) are reluctant to shift towards it, as there are no functioning copyright (or copyleft, for that matter) protection laws.
Oh, and if you want to by a computer, you have to go and pick the parts one-by-one, which suits me fine, but causes horror in the hearts of general public. This issue has caused this (selling computers to average people) to become such a big industry.
About the Internet, although it is correct that many people use it on a regular basis, it is not considered a mainstream technology, due to the fact that many people (understandably) don't have a functional English, and that's the language their machine's gonna through information at them. And very few people use Internet for anything business, it's all chat and surfing (and slash-dotting) and blogging.
Unfortunately, you seem to be quite unaware of what's going on here (in Iran.)
I am one of those students which are children of the students who revolted in 1979, which now regard that as a bad move. The thing that is important for everybody to realize is that nobody (except probably a few radical percentage,) wants another revolution. And certainly nobody wants foreign interference (consider it this way : Would you tolerate another nation (or the UN, or anyone not American) to interfere when there were questions about the last presidency election over at the US? Well, we wouldn't either.)
Of course there are disagreements over here like anywhere else about the course of action that should be taken towards A Better Future and its pace, and for that matter, a lot of it, but trust me, we want to handle our own problems ourselves.
Well, to you, it might sound like: "Yes, give those poor, ignorant bastards over there a chance to surf the net, since they got no clue about which mouse button is the left one." But it's not like that. It's very naive of our government trying to censor internet, and of course it's not working. Even the masses have found ways to circumvent these measures and also not all ISPs block all these addresses.
It's by all means the US government's right to try whatever it sees fit to oppose what it calls "Axis of Evil," but don't expect us to appreciate that. It may not have occured to you, and I'm just trying to illuminate the situation here, that although the government is not exactly popular over here (I wonder if it is anywhere,) it's still our government and although we strive for reforms, we do not seek another revolution, or war.
Whether you believe it or not, there are people over here that check Slashdot every other hour, have kernel.org as their homepage and curse when they face EULAs.
I think the best way to simulate the universe (not just human world) is to simulate the most basic particles and the forces that work on them (the forces are four, or by some accounts two and people try to unify them (read brief history of time,).)
The benefit would be simplicity, but the problem would be the number of basic particles in the universe.
Come on, they are not training their whole population. In such a country, there's a gap between two classes of people : normal (and above) and below normal (Hell, this gap exists everywhere.) There's no evidence that North Korea can't supply an average life to - say - 30% percent of its population, so why it cannot be?
Slashdot Mirror
Too true. The original Internet worm had only 99 lines of source code, yet incorporated encryption, password guessing, vulnerability-injection, and so on.
Except for a bug, I think the author was a genius - a true "hacker" in the original sense of the word.
Robert Morris, is that you again?!
KDE 4 is not yet in alpha stage, which is fine for those that like the bleeding edge.
Seems to me like you don't know the meaning of alpha stage for software. It does not mean production quality. It does not come after beta!
You know what there are also some really smart people who Like Vista!
That statement is a contradiction almost by definition!
You use Internet Exploiter to download Firefox?! What an atrocity!
Why don't you do what everyone else does, and use 'ftp' from shell (which was included in an out-of-the-box Windows installation last time I checked.) Or better yet, use FTP to download wget, and use that to download Firefox, since I'm not sure Microsoft's FTP tool can actually handle the whopping multi-mebibyte size of Firefox.
Chris Wilson, program manager for IE, is trying to do The Right Thing.
Personally I think he gets away with it only because Ballmer hasn't noticed.
What are you doing man?! You just gave away Wilson's true allegiance to Darth Ballmer!
I'm sure you can take advantage of this in C/C++, but only in a very theoretical sense of the word "can".
Well, I'd say the key point here is that people at least can use these methods in C/C++. I don't know about you, but I would call that power.
I don't know why people say that any interpreted/JITed/VMed/etc. program can be as fast (or faster! The audacity!) than C code. Whatever tricks and shortcuts your favorite language's interpreter/whatever is taking, can also be exploited in a C program by any decent programmer (absolutely all of them if you count using a bit of inline assembly to still be C.) Sure, you can write bad programs in C, ones that even beat Java's record-bearing slowness, but the point is that you can write programs that run as fast as possible on the target architecture. I'm pretty positive that this is not possible in most other languages. And all the bulls*** people say about C++ being slow and bloated is exactly that, bulls***. C++ is again only as good as you are. It does exactly what you tell it too. If you don't know about the constructor/destructor calls, the exception handling and stack unwinding mechanisms, the virtual function call procedure, etc., and you are too lazy (or too restricted in time) to read the standard library source code or the assembly listing, then you probably should forego the use of C++ in favour of another more luser-friendly language. This is not an insult, this is simply what most people should do, and they should stop whining. (The assembly advocates can make the same argument, but I don't think the efficiency gain from writing programs all in assembly is as drastic when compared to C/C++ when contrasted with performance gain of C in comparison with Java and whatnot.) To save myself some flame-bombs, I should probably mention that in many (most?) normal cases, C/C++ is not the way to go. In most programs, the development cost increase (paying much better programmers more hours) would dwarf the benefit of having leaner, meaner and faster programs (that last chunk of performance more often than not may even be a non-issue.) In a few words, repeat this with yourself 10 times every morning: C++ is not a bad language, it's just not for me!
Maybe not, but Vista does have a particularly strong anti-SEP field (it's a huge problem, and guess what, it's yours!) that along with usual effects, makes you age slightly faster. ... (insert the name of your favorite non-brain dead OS here.)
Hopefully, by annoying the hell out of many users, it will drive them out of their seemingly safe M$-made "Ignoshells"(TM) and into the light of
What amuses me is the sheer awfulness of Vista. I mean, how bad an OS has to be for people to start praising XP!
I think the guy is interested in a database program like Base or Access *shudders*, not a database engine like SQLite or MySQL.
The only problem with a one-dimensional "PC-Spec" or whatnot mark would be that different games, like almost any other kind of program, do not utilize all the various hardware in a PC to the same extent.
Their bottlenecks, required latencies and bandwidths, memory sizes, etc. can vary greatly from one engine to the next (heck, they might vary from one title to the next with the same engine.)
And not even a multidimensional specification documenting every relevant aspect of the hardware would be enough (even if it was practical, sticking a 42-number label on each PC.) Because some components may mask or reduce the effects of other components (obviously only some of the time!) For example, a very low-latency VRAM, on a narrow bus might perform the same as a higher-latency VRAM with higher bus width, but this very much depends on the game's access patterns.
So, what might work would be to issue the mentioned label with 42 (at least) numbers each describing a single relevant aspect of the hardware, and also labeling each game with a formula with the same 42 variables (and a lot of coefficients, powers, etc.) that would give a score for that game running on that hardware. If the score was positive, the game would be runnable. The higher the score, the better the gamer's experience.
(I know you are going to say that a gamer's experience of a game is not a one dimensional thing, and we should actually have a function from R^42 domain to R^7 range. I agree! But then, the people would have to be carrying a formula on their foreheads mapping the 7 dimensions of the game experience to their personal liking. Which depends on their many moods...)
Now, the only remaining issue would be convincing game developers to spend 6-18 months trying to calculate the required formula.
Well done sir! That's much more secure than my own strategy of setting all my passwords to the reverse of "drowssap" (I reversed it here to deter those password-harvesting bots, obviously) and copy/pasting off the label that says "password" that is right next to the password field most of the time.
By the way, I looked at your password file at the given address to have you FTP password so I can upload my own password file to your server (with your permission, of course!) Now, is your FTP password the reverse of "404"?
It was wise of you to stop at only 19 items. Had you added a 20th, your extract of D&D rules would no longer have been covered by "fair use" laws and the Lawyers of the Coast would be upon you before you could have said "d20"!
Knife of Dreams (book 11) was not that bad (or was it "Harry Potter and the Knife of Dreams"?) It was even comparable to the first 4 books (OK, not quite, but a little bit...) On the other hand, maybe the wait for book eleven and the disaster that was book ten made KoD look better than it actually was.
First I have to say this: The prices over here are very low, you can get Visual Studio .NET Enterprise Edition (pardon me for the example) for $1 here (the price of the blank CDs + copying!) but open-source software (those that are too big for individual download, consider a Debian distro) are actually more expensive, due to their being hard to come-by (can you believe that??!!!)
Anyways, the use of open source software in academic applications is becoming (yes, BECOMING) standard, although not in many universities, and the public remains untouched by the trend, although everybody have heard about Linux, but Linux is something only heard of, and it is known for its security mostly (not being free), because Windows is highly regarded as an insecure mess, even by the public. And you must understand this, freedom of software (as Stallman advocates) is something unheard-of, and Iranian developers (including myself) are reluctant to shift towards it, as there are no functioning copyright (or copyleft, for that matter) protection laws.
Oh, and if you want to by a computer, you have to go and pick the parts one-by-one, which suits me fine, but causes horror in the hearts of general public. This issue has caused this (selling computers to average people) to become such a big industry.
About the Internet, although it is correct that many people use it on a regular basis, it is not considered a mainstream technology, due to the fact that many people (understandably) don't have a functional English, and that's the language their machine's gonna through information at them. And very few people use Internet for anything business, it's all chat and surfing (and slash-dotting) and blogging.
The above was not my sig block.
Unfortunately, you seem to be quite unaware of what's going on here (in Iran.)
I am one of those students which are children of the students who revolted in 1979, which now regard that as a bad move. The thing that is important for everybody to realize is that nobody (except probably a few radical percentage,) wants another revolution. And certainly nobody wants foreign interference (consider it this way : Would you tolerate another nation (or the UN, or anyone not American) to interfere when there were questions about the last presidency election over at the US? Well, we wouldn't either.)
Of course there are disagreements over here like anywhere else about the course of action that should be taken towards A Better Future and its pace, and for that matter, a lot of it, but trust me, we want to handle our own problems ourselves.
Well, to you, it might sound like: "Yes, give those poor, ignorant bastards over there a chance to surf the net, since they got no clue about which mouse button is the left one."
But it's not like that. It's very naive of our government trying to censor internet, and of course it's not working. Even the masses have found ways to circumvent these measures and also not all ISPs block all these addresses.
It's by all means the US government's right to try whatever it sees fit to oppose what it calls "Axis of Evil," but don't expect us to appreciate that. It may not have occured to you, and I'm just trying to illuminate the situation here, that although the government is not exactly popular over here (I wonder if it is anywhere,) it's still our government and although we strive for reforms, we do not seek another revolution, or war.
Whether you believe it or not, there are people over here that check Slashdot every other hour, have kernel.org as their homepage and curse when they face EULAs.
I think the best way to simulate the universe (not just human world) is to simulate the most basic particles and the forces that work on them (the forces are four, or by some accounts two and people try to unify them (read brief history of time,).) The benefit would be simplicity, but the problem would be the number of basic particles in the universe.
Come on, they are not training their whole population. In such a country, there's a gap between two classes of people : normal (and above) and below normal (Hell, this gap exists everywhere.) There's no evidence that North Korea can't supply an average life to - say - 30% percent of its population, so why it cannot be?