Thanks for the link. I always like to look at what other people have tried. However, I highly doubt those results. Besides, C++ still came out on top.. eh?
For one thing they don't really test anything useful as the tests are just tight loops of very basic math stuff. His C code doesn't even compile with the VC++ compiler because he's using C99 syntax (Microsoft's compiler is not C99 compliant). And even when I fixed those problems there where a lot of warnings due to questionable variable usage. The C++ version isn't even written in C++, I wonder why there are even two separate files. Not a good start and makes me seriously question this programmers abilities.
Just a quick glance at the code suggests at least the trig benchmarks are more a test of the standard math library rather than the language. C# is going to use the same version as C/C++.
His timing methods are also questionable. Using CPU time can be highly inaccurate. It's much better to use the high precision timing functions.
I will need to take a more detailed look and do some testing of my own to see if these results are valid. Off the top of my head I will say there seems to be something screwy going on because I've never seen properly written code run faster in C#. It's just not possible. C and C++ are so close to the hardware that when written properly it is near impossible to make it faster without going to assembly. The best C# can hope for is something close to C/C++, but never better.
I'll make another post if I get time to take a more detailed look but I'm not optimistic about these tests being worth anything. Try the Language Shootout (or the win32 version) benchmarks for broader benchmarks where a lot of them have actually been looked at by programmers that know what they are doing. If you know what you are doing then you might want to really try them, don't just go by the results on the pages because some of them are skewed because the run times are way too short to be meaningful.
Again, I ask you to design a vector class in C# that uses the same or less memory than C++ and performs the same or better. It's not even close to possible.
You are assuming that C# is slow. That is not a good assumption.
Maybe they weren't assuming anything but had actually done testing?
I don't know about that, but I have in fact done testing and C# is slower at almost everything when compared to C/C++ and it gets really bad at the high end.
Try making the equivalent (in terms of performance and memory usage) of a C++ std::vector in C#.
Because the driver sits on the left hand side of the car there is slightly less centrifugal force trying to pull the car off the road when making left turns. This is due to the weight being more towards the center of the pivot rather than the outside edge.
Magnetic media like cassettes, VCR tapes, and floppies will all degrade with time, just like CDR's. It's probably hard to tell with your old tape but I seriously doubt it sounds as good as it did back then. It's just not that big a deal because our brians are excellent audio decoders. Every time I have to use a floppy I literally go through 5 to 10 floppies just to find one that works because they are all 6+ years old.
Unlike analog data, digital data does not degrade. The media might degrade but the actual data does not (it either works or it doesn't).
I just upgrade formats every couple years. For example, I had a bunch of digital pictures on floppy many years ago. When CD recorders got cheap enough I moved them to CDRW. Just recently, when DVD recorders got cheap enough I moved them to DVD+RW. Next will probably be to the new 8GB DVD-R's. Even though I have more data, I still use less media because the new formats always hold way more than the old versions. I never have to worry about quality degradation because they are exactly as they were when I originally made them.
True, but I'm still interested in seeing where technology is at.
I never got on the ATI boat. I've always maintained that (IMO) their drivers suck too much to be useful. In my experience nVidia works better and is better supported on Linux also, which is where I spend most of my time.
Ahh! When did Tom's do away with the Q3 benchmarks?
It's still the only game that can push the hardware to its limits reliably. All those other games tend to have bottlenecks that are algorithm/code related rather than hardware related (like the scripting engine in UT).
Too bad, I found Quake3 to be one of the most accurate because it ran at such a low level and could pretty push the hardware. It's not like those other games are using the hardware shaders yet anyway (or are they?).
Hmmm.. I don't know, I found the sniping in UT to be even worse. Hell, when I could run around and just snap-shot and instantly kill people it felt a lot like cheating. Plus you can't even tell where such an all-powerful shot came from. The sniper rifle is stupid and the head-shot stuff is even more stupid.
Tribes wasn't much better with the laser rifle but it didn't seem quite as bad as UT.
The main problem I have with the whole UT series is that there are too many weapons/fire modes. You never really know which weapon to use and end up just randomly picking one since it doesn't really matter. Many of them are also too powerful. You just die too quickly no matter how pumped up you get so the whole idea of "pumping up" becomes pointless.
The vehicles in UT2004 feel great, but again they do too much damage. Funny how I can take 2 or 3 rockets to the face but just lightly touching a vehicle kills me instantly. Stupid.
I'm hoping the new Tribes will bring some good gameplay to the Unreal engine.
This could be cool because I bought Tribes2 for Windows without realizing you needed to buy the Linux version if you wanted to play on Linux (I was on the Linux beta)... D'oh. So I never really played it much since I mostly just run Windows in VMware. Hopefully the Linux version will be available to download. However, are people even playing it any more? Last time I checked there were about 300 servers and 200 or less players playing.
The new Tribes should be interesting because it's using the Unreal engine. I'm very interested in seeing if it can handle maps of Tribes scale (hopefully they didn't make them smaller to keep the engine happy). The vehicles in UT2004 are the best of just about any game with vehicles so I hope they carry that over to the new Tribes.
I don't care for UT2003/2004's gameplay much so I'm hoping the new Tribes will bring a better feel to the game.
Haha, in the past I've been very vocal about how sucky the sbp2/1394 drivers are. They have never worked right from the very first version.
However, as of 2.6.3 or so they actually started working mostly normally for me. It detects all the drives and I don't have to go through the whole disconnect/reconnect routine every time I boot up. I haven't had any time-out errors like what used to plague the system. Not to say that is fixed, I haven't tried a full fschk on a large ext2 drive recently. That used to always fail with timeout errors and would completely bork the drive.
Interesting that other people are now having problems. All version previous to 2.6.3 were a huge pain in the ass for me to use.
So I guess I can continue my rant on how Ben Collins doesn't seem like a very good programmer (or he has too much on his plate or something). I wish someone with more time (or more talented) would once and for all fix the damn 1394/sbp2 system.
Now, I'm not complaining about the quality: if I want working 1394 drivers I ought to write some or shut up about it...
Well it depends. I'm sure as usual I'll catch more flak for saying the drivers suck and that I should write them myself. However, I just don't have time to learn all those subsystems. Nor do I want to use precious brain power on commodity items like that. Drivers should "just work", I don't care how they work. Remember, that's just my personal desires. I like application programming and I'm good at it because I'm dedicated to it (just like drivers writers like doing their thing).
The reason I think complaining is OK is because I don't think you should write software if it's going to be half-assed. Even if it's free/volunteer work. Because if you do, it might keep someone else that wouldn't do a half-assed job from working on it. They think you're taking care of it or "it works good enough" and it just sits there and rots while you diddle around.
Look, folks, I guarantee you that if all you've ever used is Windows, if you sit down at a good OS X machine, it will take you about half an hour to get used to the differences and be up to speed
True.
and after that you'll be discovering new and better ways to do things and saying, "That's so cool! Why didn't Microsoft ever think of that?"
Uh, I had the opposite response. "Why in the f*&k did they do it that way?!" Keyboard control is practically nonexistant. And Finder blows... Damn I hate the way it works. It doesn't allow to see where you are in the filesystem very well. It's just awkward and slow to use.
The killer feature Apple has is that they have a GUI for everything in the system and it hides a lot of complex stuff so the end-user doesn't have to worry about every little detail (of course sometimes that backfires when I simply can't do something because it's hiding the details).
Back on topic...
I've found ROX is very similar to Finder. I hate it also.
The ROX "all in one directory" is the exact same concept as Apple bundles. I can't believe how many people don't even know what they are. I guess that's what happens when you hide all the details. Anyway, the bundle concept is pretty cool. Just copy/move a directory to install your application.
Heh, I did the same thing for a couple years. I heated my den and office with the servers.
Then I got wise. It's too loud and takes up too much room. Not to mention the fire hazard (even quality components go bad; having all that stuff just increases the risk). You can replace most of those weak machines with one single newer, faster, and cheap machine. The same goes for all those power sucking drives. The only reason I have multiple machines now is for the multiple architectures.
I got my main PC (high powered laptop) A single server (also a MythTV box) An Apple box (OS X) A Sun box (Sparc Solaris)
Uh, right. Just like Corel's Java Office suite? Remember that? Maybe not. Java sucks.
Corel bit it hard on that one. It has always been my feeling that the reason WordPefect is not that great is because it was suppose to be replaced with the Java version but that never happened and then there wasn't any money left over to enhance/fix WordPerfect. So it is what it is and it ain't that great because it hasn't been developed seriously in ages.
There are more problems than that though. WordPerfect has never been very cross-platform friendly and they continue to struggle with that today. The latest Linux version sounds like it's using Wine for some parts and other kludgy stuff like that.
None of the API's are any more daunting than they were back then. Makes me think this person wasn't really ever a serious programmer. At least not one that spent very much time programming the standard stuff. They mentioned system administrator. Sounds like it has been more than 10 years. My guess is that they never did more than diddle around with the computer. Small-time programming.
So what's so daunting? Java and.NET are big but they provide all sorts of functionality. They aren't complicated. Just start looking at the documentation for whatever it is you want to do.
Are you trying learn C/C++ and it's the language that's daunting? Maybe trying to learn object-oriented programming?
No joke. I tried Fedora the other day with SElinux turned on. Some stuff worked (like the machine booted) but tons of stuff was broken.
Even with SElinux turned off I didn't care for Fedora too much. It takes forever to startup and shutdown. It also seemed a bit wonky... after the install some stuff just didn't work and often the machine wouldn't even boot up. I tried it on two different machines with the same results.
I'll stick with Debian or Arch Linux for now. Gentoo is OK but there is no way in hell I'm going to sit there and spend hours compiling stuff every time a new version comes out or I need to do an install; I have work to do dammit.
I believe an XBox might make a nice Mame (prefer) or MythTV box.
Is it expensive to get the thing running Linux? I saw someone in this thread mention modchips being more expensive than $150. Do you need a modchip to run Linux? Is there a cheaper "hacker" way? I can solder.
Can you add more RAM to it? How about hard-drives? Does it have a free PCI slot?
I mean, $150 for a 1 Ghz (?) P3 and nVidia card sounds like a good deal to me since I need more of these cheap "weak" machines for common stuff like MythTV and arcade machines.
In normal PC terms, $150 would only buy a 1.3 Ghz Celeron+Motherboard with GF440MX video. You'd still need to add RAM, a hard-drive, power supply, and a case.
Will generic.NET apps routinely work on Linux? Or is all developed code going to be toolkit specific?
It's been a long time since I looked at this stuff but this is what I knew back then.
C# is a lot like Java in that is it "portable" but not really. That is, all the underlying API's have to be there or it won't work and Mono does not currently have all the stuff that you get with Microsoft.
For example, on Windows the default C# GUI API is using the Windows.Forms interface (or whatever it is called). Mono doesn't have that interface yet. Last I heard they were planning to use Wine to provide the GUI.Forms interface. Good luck is all I have to say. Seems like it would be better to make a Forms-to-Gtk (prefer) or Forms-to-Qt interface.
And the same holds for other API's not yet in Mono.
So some apps will work but most won't even though the bytecode is compatible.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks for the link. I always like to look at what other people have tried. However, I highly doubt those results. Besides, C++ still came out on top.. eh?
For one thing they don't really test anything useful as the tests are just tight loops of very basic math stuff. His C code doesn't even compile with the VC++ compiler because he's using C99 syntax (Microsoft's compiler is not C99 compliant). And even when I fixed those problems there where a lot of warnings due to questionable variable usage. The C++ version isn't even written in C++, I wonder why there are even two separate files. Not a good start and makes me seriously question this programmers abilities.
Just a quick glance at the code suggests at least the trig benchmarks are more a test of the standard math library rather than the language. C# is going to use the same version as C/C++.
His timing methods are also questionable. Using CPU time can be highly inaccurate. It's much better to use the high precision timing functions.
I will need to take a more detailed look and do some testing of my own to see if these results are valid. Off the top of my head I will say there seems to be something screwy going on because I've never seen properly written code run faster in C#. It's just not possible. C and C++ are so close to the hardware that when written properly it is near impossible to make it faster without going to assembly. The best C# can hope for is something close to C/C++, but never better.
I'll make another post if I get time to take a more detailed look but I'm not optimistic about these tests being worth anything. Try the Language Shootout (or the win32 version) benchmarks for broader benchmarks where a lot of them have actually been looked at by programmers that know what they are doing. If you know what you are doing then you might want to really try them, don't just go by the results on the pages because some of them are skewed because the run times are way too short to be meaningful.
Again, I ask you to design a vector class in C# that uses the same or less memory than C++ and performs the same or better. It's not even close to possible.
You are assuming that C# is slow. That is not a good assumption.
Maybe they weren't assuming anything but had actually done testing?
I don't know about that, but I have in fact done testing and C# is slower at almost everything when compared to C/C++ and it gets really bad at the high end.
Try making the equivalent (in terms of performance and memory usage) of a C++ std::vector in C#.
Hmmm, maybe the parent is partly correct.
Because the driver sits on the left hand side of the car there is slightly less centrifugal force trying to pull the car off the road when making left turns. This is due to the weight being more towards the center of the pivot rather than the outside edge.
This allows you to go faster.
Magnetic media like cassettes, VCR tapes, and floppies will all degrade with time, just like CDR's. It's probably hard to tell with your old tape but I seriously doubt it sounds as good as it did back then. It's just not that big a deal because our brians are excellent audio decoders. Every time I have to use a floppy I literally go through 5 to 10 floppies just to find one that works because they are all 6+ years old.
Unlike analog data, digital data does not degrade. The media might degrade but the actual data does not (it either works or it doesn't).
I just upgrade formats every couple years. For example, I had a bunch of digital pictures on floppy many years ago. When CD recorders got cheap enough I moved them to CDRW. Just recently, when DVD recorders got cheap enough I moved them to DVD+RW. Next will probably be to the new 8GB DVD-R's. Even though I have more data, I still use less media because the new formats always hold way more than the old versions. I never have to worry about quality degradation because they are exactly as they were when I originally made them.
The Simpsons is the only reason Fox is still on the air.
"Wouldn't be the first time" -- Bart
1 x VGA-cable extension coord
Or if you're on DVI then you can get a much better signal over a longer distance.
True, but I'm still interested in seeing where technology is at.
I never got on the ATI boat. I've always maintained that (IMO) their drivers suck too much to be useful. In my experience nVidia works better and is better supported on Linux also, which is where I spend most of my time.
Ahh! When did Tom's do away with the Q3 benchmarks?
It's still the only game that can push the hardware to its limits reliably. All those other games tend to have bottlenecks that are algorithm/code related rather than hardware related (like the scripting engine in UT).
Too bad, I found Quake3 to be one of the most accurate because it ran at such a low level and could pretty push the hardware. It's not like those other games are using the hardware shaders yet anyway (or are they?).
I was thinking the same thing. This install isn't that clean and looks pretty bad. A nice first try though!
The good stuff is in formed Lexan, Fiberglass, or sheet metal and looks factory perfect.
The type of install done in this article is one of a million others just like it. Nothing special or newsworthy.
Hmmm.. I don't know, I found the sniping in UT to be even worse. Hell, when I could run around and just snap-shot and instantly kill people it felt a lot like cheating. Plus you can't even tell where such an all-powerful shot came from. The sniper rifle is stupid and the head-shot stuff is even more stupid.
Tribes wasn't much better with the laser rifle but it didn't seem quite as bad as UT.
The main problem I have with the whole UT series is that there are too many weapons/fire modes. You never really know which weapon to use and end up just randomly picking one since it doesn't really matter. Many of them are also too powerful. You just die too quickly no matter how pumped up you get so the whole idea of "pumping up" becomes pointless.
The vehicles in UT2004 feel great, but again they do too much damage. Funny how I can take 2 or 3 rockets to the face but just lightly touching a vehicle kills me instantly. Stupid.
I'm hoping the new Tribes will bring some good gameplay to the Unreal engine.
This could be cool because I bought Tribes2 for Windows without realizing you needed to buy the Linux version if you wanted to play on Linux (I was on the Linux beta)... D'oh. So I never really played it much since I mostly just run Windows in VMware. Hopefully the Linux version will be available to download. However, are people even playing it any more? Last time I checked there were about 300 servers and 200 or less players playing.
The new Tribes should be interesting because it's using the Unreal engine. I'm very interested in seeing if it can handle maps of Tribes scale (hopefully they didn't make them smaller to keep the engine happy). The vehicles in UT2004 are the best of just about any game with vehicles so I hope they carry that over to the new Tribes.
I don't care for UT2003/2004's gameplay much so I'm hoping the new Tribes will bring a better feel to the game.
Which micro-ATX cases did you use?
800k?! You must be thinking Amiga.
The 1541 held a massive 170kB (per side; disk had to be flipped manually) and transfered data at a blazing 400 bytes per second.
The site seems kinda bare to me. The "About" page doesn't really have anything about the project at all.
Do you have to have a mod-chip or something to develop? Do you need the official PS2 developers disc? Linux PS2 stuff? Or what?
Haha, in the past I've been very vocal about how sucky the sbp2/1394 drivers are. They have never worked right from the very first version.
...
However, as of 2.6.3 or so they actually started working mostly normally for me. It detects all the drives and I don't have to go through the whole disconnect/reconnect routine every time I boot up. I haven't had any time-out errors like what used to plague the system. Not to say that is fixed, I haven't tried a full fschk on a large ext2 drive recently. That used to always fail with timeout errors and would completely bork the drive.
Interesting that other people are now having problems. All version previous to 2.6.3 were a huge pain in the ass for me to use.
So I guess I can continue my rant on how Ben Collins doesn't seem like a very good programmer (or he has too much on his plate or something). I wish someone with more time (or more talented) would once and for all fix the damn 1394/sbp2 system.
Now, I'm not complaining about the quality: if I want working 1394 drivers I ought to write some or shut up about it
Well it depends. I'm sure as usual I'll catch more flak for saying the drivers suck and that I should write them myself. However, I just don't have time to learn all those subsystems. Nor do I want to use precious brain power on commodity items like that. Drivers should "just work", I don't care how they work. Remember, that's just my personal desires. I like application programming and I'm good at it because I'm dedicated to it (just like drivers writers like doing their thing).
The reason I think complaining is OK is because I don't think you should write software if it's going to be half-assed. Even if it's free/volunteer work. Because if you do, it might keep someone else that wouldn't do a half-assed job from working on it. They think you're taking care of it or "it works good enough" and it just sits there and rots while you diddle around.
Look, folks, I guarantee you that if all you've ever used is Windows, if you sit down at a good OS X machine, it will take you about half an hour to get used to the differences and be up to speed
True.
and after that you'll be discovering new and better ways to do things and saying, "That's so cool! Why didn't Microsoft ever think of that?"
Uh, I had the opposite response. "Why in the f*&k did they do it that way?!" Keyboard control is practically nonexistant. And Finder blows... Damn I hate the way it works. It doesn't allow to see where you are in the filesystem very well. It's just awkward and slow to use.
The killer feature Apple has is that they have a GUI for everything in the system and it hides a lot of complex stuff so the end-user doesn't have to worry about every little detail (of course sometimes that backfires when I simply can't do something because it's hiding the details).
Back on topic...
I've found ROX is very similar to Finder. I hate it also.
The ROX "all in one directory" is the exact same concept as Apple bundles. I can't believe how many people don't even know what they are. I guess that's what happens when you hide all the details. Anyway, the bundle concept is pretty cool. Just copy/move a directory to install your application.
Who needs central heating?
Heh, I did the same thing for a couple years. I heated my den and office with the servers.
Then I got wise. It's too loud and takes up too much room. Not to mention the fire hazard (even quality components go bad; having all that stuff just increases the risk). You can replace most of those weak machines with one single newer, faster, and cheap machine. The same goes for all those power sucking drives. The only reason I have multiple machines now is for the multiple architectures.
I got my main PC (high powered laptop)
A single server (also a MythTV box)
An Apple box (OS X)
A Sun box (Sparc Solaris)
Quiet and simple. I make heavy use of VMware.
you never know until you try.
Uh, right. Just like Corel's Java Office suite? Remember that? Maybe not. Java sucks.
Corel bit it hard on that one. It has always been my feeling that the reason WordPefect is not that great is because it was suppose to be replaced with the Java version but that never happened and then there wasn't any money left over to enhance/fix WordPerfect. So it is what it is and it ain't that great because it hasn't been developed seriously in ages.
There are more problems than that though. WordPerfect has never been very cross-platform friendly and they continue to struggle with that today. The latest Linux version sounds like it's using Wine for some parts and other kludgy stuff like that.
This was exactly my thought.
.NET are big but they provide all sorts of functionality. They aren't complicated. Just start looking at the documentation for whatever it is you want to do.
None of the API's are any more daunting than they were back then. Makes me think this person wasn't really ever a serious programmer. At least not one that spent very much time programming the standard stuff. They mentioned system administrator. Sounds like it has been more than 10 years. My guess is that they never did more than diddle around with the computer. Small-time programming.
So what's so daunting? Java and
Are you trying learn C/C++ and it's the language that's daunting? Maybe trying to learn object-oriented programming?
I don't understand.
Note that all diagrams are not flowcharts.
English is usually what I use by the way.
Whoa, hold on there bud.
.
I didn't say anything about designing, planning, or whatnot. I specifically said FLOWCHARTS
Note that a flowchart is not a design.
Flowcharts are a throwback to when computer programming was considered the same as other disciplines like mathematics or engineering.
As we know now, computer programming is something else. It's a combination of stuff and software is almost a living entity that is always changing.
The only people I see using flowcharts are engineers that think they can program or old farts who refuse to accept new ideas.
SELinux should create some fun errors.
No joke. I tried Fedora the other day with SElinux turned on. Some stuff worked (like the machine booted) but tons of stuff was broken.
Even with SElinux turned off I didn't care for Fedora too much. It takes forever to startup and shutdown. It also seemed a bit wonky... after the install some stuff just didn't work and often the machine wouldn't even boot up. I tried it on two different machines with the same results.
I'll stick with Debian or Arch Linux for now. Gentoo is OK but there is no way in hell I'm going to sit there and spend hours compiling stuff every time a new version comes out or I need to do an install; I have work to do dammit.
I believe an XBox might make a nice Mame (prefer) or MythTV box.
Is it expensive to get the thing running Linux? I saw someone in this thread mention modchips being more expensive than $150. Do you need a modchip to run Linux? Is there a cheaper "hacker" way? I can solder.
Can you add more RAM to it? How about hard-drives? Does it have a free PCI slot?
I mean, $150 for a 1 Ghz (?) P3 and nVidia card sounds like a good deal to me since I need more of these cheap "weak" machines for common stuff like MythTV and arcade machines.
In normal PC terms, $150 would only buy a 1.3 Ghz Celeron+Motherboard with GF440MX video. You'd still need to add RAM, a hard-drive, power supply, and a case.
Will generic .NET apps routinely work on Linux? Or is all developed code going to be toolkit specific?
.Forms interface. Good luck is all I have to say. Seems like it would be better to make a Forms-to-Gtk (prefer) or Forms-to-Qt interface.
It's been a long time since I looked at this stuff but this is what I knew back then.
C# is a lot like Java in that is it "portable" but not really. That is, all the underlying API's have to be there or it won't work and Mono does not currently have all the stuff that you get with Microsoft.
For example, on Windows the default C# GUI API is using the Windows.Forms interface (or whatever it is called). Mono doesn't have that interface yet. Last I heard they were planning to use Wine to provide the GUI
And the same holds for other API's not yet in Mono.
So some apps will work but most won't even though the bytecode is compatible.