Re:Led Zeppelin != Turbo Nerds
on
American Nerd
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· Score: 1
Spock sung about it too and he's cool right? Right??
By the way some of the girls in that video are cute as hell. The full version shows even more of them (albeit in black and white). I would kill for a high quality version of this video.
Uh, OS X is based on NeXTSTEP which has been around since the 80's. On top of that NeXTSTEP itself was based on older stuff like the Mach kernel and a whole bunch of BSD stuff.
That could be an option for Microsoft too and I don't doubt they already have people researching it. That is, running Windows on top of an already established system like one of the BSD's or whatever (probably not Linux though because of the GPL infection). That probably still wouldn't fix their security holes though because a lot of their problems are not in the kernel but in the user-land stuff.
There are a huge number of very large API's in Windows that go all the way back to DOS, it must be a nightmare to try to maintain all that. Apple does things differently because they don't have any problems throwing out the old stuff or completely changing something. That has its own problems, like forcing users to upgrade the OS or even the hardware just to run certain software (I hate that and it's why I don't use Apple products unless I'm working a contract that needs it).
Interesting, I have never seen anything that cheap in the US (32" LCD is firmly in the $500 range). Does Centrum go by any other brands? I can't find anything about them.
In a similar situation I would install the 32-bit version of another browser (Opera or something) and then run that browser solely for the purpose of running the 32-bit stuff I needed.
I actually didn't know that many people actually used Java applets in the browser these days. I thought those went out of style like 10 years ago when people realized scripting made more sense than compiled stuff.;)
I was just illustrating the crap programming in the RPM based systems smartass. Testing software on low-end hardware gives a good indication of the overall design quality.
Fact is, RPM based systems are a lot less efficient. It's slower on a fast machine too, duh!
I have been using Songbird for about a year now. I really like it. Yeah it's kinda fat but no worse than iTunes. It's cool to have all the media integrated like it is. On audio-related websites it will automatically bring up a list of tunes from the web page and you just click to play/stream/download (handy for the various audio blogs). Shoutcast plug-in, Last.Fm plug-in, album art plug-in, all sorts of stuff.
Really it's my favorite choice on Linux (now if someone would get FireTray working correctly for it). It has iPod support but I haven't tried it.
Heh, you know to this day I'm still pissed about something that happened when I was in 2nd grade. We were doing some kind of group work thing and I got was this multiple choice question about what a telescope could be made out of. One of the possible answers was sand. I instantly came up with the design in my head. The question wasn't very specific so I wasn't sure if I would need to melt the sand to form the lenses but I knew I could use a glue/sand mixture for the body (shaped by a mold while it hardened).
Naturally I got the answer "wrong" and nobody would listen to me. That episode basically represents how my entire life has gone when dealing with other people...
One thing I'm most impressed with is the SVG performance. It's starting to almost become an alternative to Flash for interactive applications. I like it and I hope it gets even faster.
I'm interested in using Javascript as an embedded language, it's too bad most of the current JS engines assume they will be running in a browser. Yes, you can build standalone TraceMonkey and SquirrelFish shells but it isn't very easy on all platforms (no Visual Studio project, etc) and they aren't very easy to embed.
For general application development outside of a browser I have found V8 to be faster than the others. It's also a lot easier to build standalone or embedded in other applications. It's also very easy to add extensions to (written in C++), especially compared to the other choice.
I'm keeping my eye out but right now V8 fits my needs the best. If the other projects would do a little work towards focusing on general application development in their respective JS engine then I might switch. Switching will be a pain in the butt though because my C/C++ extensions will have to be ported to each engine. I kind of wish there was less diversity because right now it's hard to tell which engine is going to take off (eg. Google could abandon V8 for one of the other engines like SquirrelFish since they are using WebKit anyway).
Unfortunately all of them, including V8, are pretty large compared to cleaner scripting languages like Lua which makes embedding them in mobile applications kind of annoying (although we're getting more and more space on these things).
Yes! In particular check the "ondemand" CPU scaler. That thing just doesn't work very well. It takes too long to trigger the higher clock speed and if you have multiple CPU's and/or are running lots of quick processes then the clock will constantly be shifting between speeds. This totally kills the performance.
I turned off the CPU scaling on my Ubuntu workstation and I disable it on my laptop when I need maximum performance.
This can be fixed with two changes to the ondemand profile. First it should bump all CPU cores to the higher speed no matter how many processes/threads are requiring performance. This is necessary because the kernel shifts threads between cores and you don't want to keep switching speeds on the various cores as it does this. Second is to add a delay before dropping the speed of a CPU. This allows time so that new threads/processes have full speed immediately.
The best thing about this is they're finally put something with a decent resolution in a laptop. Dell has done this before (eg. my 15" Dell C840 has an excellent 1600x1200 LCD) and I'm glad to finally see a 12" screen with decent resolution. 1280x800, most laptops do 1024 max at 12" which is totally stupid with the giant pixels. ~85 DPI? LOL, what is this the 90's?
Is a 12" laptop really a netbook though? I don't think so. Now stuff a 1280x800 screen into a $500 (max) 10" netbook and get back to me (this is approximately 128 DPI screen, perfect). You might just get a customer.
(yes, I realize DPI is not calculated from the diagonal but the measurements vary so much between manufacturers that you can't calculate an exact figure without the machine sitting right in front of you)
Anyone have ideas on what the best netbook for writing code would be? All of the reviews look at them from the perspective of web browsers, media viewer and document viewer/writers. I'm more interested in a super-portable machine for writing code and using as a remote desktop viewer.
To me the Dell Mini 9 has the best specs as far as build quality, features and price but while the keyboard is nice and "large" (relatively) it puts the braces {} and brackets [] plus some others in very awkward places that seem like it would make code editing a pain. I wish you could buy the discounted Linux version with a webcam (even if it won't work in Linux).
Next on my list would be the Lenovo S10 but it's a bit more expensive and uses a hard-drive instead of SSD. Seems like a better keyboard layout but the keyboard itself has a cheap/poor feel.
Neither of those two have very good battery life. Not what I would expect from something that uses so little power. Plus they all could benefit from a higher vertical resolution (or a rotatable screen).
About 8 years ago I was running a webservers on a smartcard CPU's (both Javacard and Microsoft's discontinued.Net card). It's the size of the chip on that SIM card you use in your GSM phone (which is also a smartcard). Smaller and thinner than a US dime. These don't typically have ethernet ports but they do have USB.
Isn't it weird how developers (myself included) consider it a good thing that they fixed a whole bunch of bugs?
Personally I know it feels good to fix bugs because it feels like you're making the product perfect and somehow that feels like "development". However, the reality is that it would be better to have no bugs in the first place.
No, I will not get off your lawn. Space/speed is a tradeoff. At the moment, we have even bottom of the barrel desktops selling with large amounts of memory. With the eventual rise of 64 bit, expect the amounts to go up even more. There's no reason to avoid taking advantage of this. What's the point of having this huge (seriously, look at the memory difference from now and 10 years ago) amount of memory to just let it sit there, save the occasional multimedia editing task?
You're missing a huge part of what is happening with technology these days. The most popular computing platforms are becoming hand-held devices (cell phones, etc). These need all the help they can get as far as performance goes (memory and CPU are limited; fast and getting faster but still limited).
Designing anything for a standard old-school desktop computer these days would be a huge mistake.
I have like 20 tabs open. That's almost 3 GB of RAM Firefox is using LOL. That's more than anything else on the machine including the combined 3 or 4 entire Windows OS's running in VMware.
I am not an expert win32 programmer however, I do know for a fact fork() is not supported, and so far as I know this means there's no way to do copy on write either.
Windows does in fact support fork. It's just not well documented. Search around the Net for ZwCreateProcess and NtCreateProcess.
Kinda like how most doctors are arrogant assholes?
Certain jobs attract certain personality types. If you fired every arrogant doctor and antisocial programmer then there wouldn't be enough people left to do the job!
Plus, just because you're an arrogant doctor does not necessarily mean you are no good just like being an antisocial programmer does not necessarily make you a bad person that would do something like this guy did.
His is also the one handwriting sample that is close to my own. I'm actually quite surprised he has always been a designer, his handwriting more like a programmer.
I have a 6 year old Dell C840, 2.2 Ghz P4M, 1GB RAM, nVidia graphics, built-in wireless, 1600x1200 screen. It's still going strong and I still use it as my primary rig when doing remote consulting jobs.
Sure it's big and bulky compared to modern comps but it's got a damn nice screen and enough horsepower to run VMware and everything else I need.
The only problem is the battery is shot to hell and can only hold a charge for maybe 10 minutes. I normally have somewhere to plug in so I haven't bothered replacing it.
I agree. SVG is intended to do everything Flash does and more. Currently dynamic stuff is pretty slow but there have been some very good advancements lately in the Firefox SVG engine. The main problem is Microsoft has completely ignored SVG. Probably because of Flash being popular and proprietary (more money for all). Plus now they have Silverlight.
You still have to contend with the awful Javascript language though. The engines are slow because the language is convoluted.
SVG should be the future. It's the best choice out of all the options. The only change I would make is to ditch Javascript or at least allow the option of using another language (Lua would be my first choice, tiny and fast).
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Spock sung about it too and he's cool right? Right??
By the way some of the girls in that video are cute as hell. The full version shows even more of them (albeit in black and white). I would kill for a high quality version of this video.
I was thinking the same thing. I mean it's not uncommon to use a tether on your bag while on Earth. It would make even more sense in space.
Uh, OS X is based on NeXTSTEP which has been around since the 80's. On top of that NeXTSTEP itself was based on older stuff like the Mach kernel and a whole bunch of BSD stuff.
That could be an option for Microsoft too and I don't doubt they already have people researching it. That is, running Windows on top of an already established system like one of the BSD's or whatever (probably not Linux though because of the GPL infection). That probably still wouldn't fix their security holes though because a lot of their problems are not in the kernel but in the user-land stuff.
There are a huge number of very large API's in Windows that go all the way back to DOS, it must be a nightmare to try to maintain all that. Apple does things differently because they don't have any problems throwing out the old stuff or completely changing something. That has its own problems, like forcing users to upgrade the OS or even the hardware just to run certain software (I hate that and it's why I don't use Apple products unless I'm working a contract that needs it).
Interesting, I have never seen anything that cheap in the US (32" LCD is firmly in the $500 range). Does Centrum go by any other brands? I can't find anything about them.
In a similar situation I would install the 32-bit version of another browser (Opera or something) and then run that browser solely for the purpose of running the 32-bit stuff I needed.
I actually didn't know that many people actually used Java applets in the browser these days. I thought those went out of style like 10 years ago when people realized scripting made more sense than compiled stuff. ;)
I was just illustrating the crap programming in the RPM based systems smartass. Testing software on low-end hardware gives a good indication of the overall design quality.
Fact is, RPM based systems are a lot less efficient. It's slower on a fast machine too, duh!
I have been using Songbird for about a year now. I really like it. Yeah it's kinda fat but no worse than iTunes. It's cool to have all the media integrated like it is. On audio-related websites it will automatically bring up a list of tunes from the web page and you just click to play/stream/download (handy for the various audio blogs). Shoutcast plug-in, Last.Fm plug-in, album art plug-in, all sorts of stuff.
Really it's my favorite choice on Linux (now if someone would get FireTray working correctly for it). It has iPod support but I haven't tried it.
Heh, you know to this day I'm still pissed about something that happened when I was in 2nd grade. We were doing some kind of group work thing and I got was this multiple choice question about what a telescope could be made out of. One of the possible answers was sand. I instantly came up with the design in my head. The question wasn't very specific so I wasn't sure if I would need to melt the sand to form the lenses but I knew I could use a glue/sand mixture for the body (shaped by a mold while it hardened).
Naturally I got the answer "wrong" and nobody would listen to me. That episode basically represents how my entire life has gone when dealing with other people...
The best antitheft device on my car is the manual transmission. ;)
One thing I'm most impressed with is the SVG performance. It's starting to almost become an alternative to Flash for interactive applications. I like it and I hope it gets even faster.
I'm interested in using Javascript as an embedded language, it's too bad most of the current JS engines assume they will be running in a browser. Yes, you can build standalone TraceMonkey and SquirrelFish shells but it isn't very easy on all platforms (no Visual Studio project, etc) and they aren't very easy to embed.
For general application development outside of a browser I have found V8 to be faster than the others. It's also a lot easier to build standalone or embedded in other applications. It's also very easy to add extensions to (written in C++), especially compared to the other choice.
I'm keeping my eye out but right now V8 fits my needs the best. If the other projects would do a little work towards focusing on general application development in their respective JS engine then I might switch. Switching will be a pain in the butt though because my C/C++ extensions will have to be ported to each engine. I kind of wish there was less diversity because right now it's hard to tell which engine is going to take off (eg. Google could abandon V8 for one of the other engines like SquirrelFish since they are using WebKit anyway).
Unfortunately all of them, including V8, are pretty large compared to cleaner scripting languages like Lua which makes embedding them in mobile applications kind of annoying (although we're getting more and more space on these things).
Yes! In particular check the "ondemand" CPU scaler. That thing just doesn't work very well. It takes too long to trigger the higher clock speed and if you have multiple CPU's and/or are running lots of quick processes then the clock will constantly be shifting between speeds. This totally kills the performance.
I turned off the CPU scaling on my Ubuntu workstation and I disable it on my laptop when I need maximum performance.
This can be fixed with two changes to the ondemand profile. First it should bump all CPU cores to the higher speed no matter how many processes/threads are requiring performance. This is necessary because the kernel shifts threads between cores and you don't want to keep switching speeds on the various cores as it does this. Second is to add a delay before dropping the speed of a CPU. This allows time so that new threads/processes have full speed immediately.
The best thing about this is they're finally put something with a decent resolution in a laptop. Dell has done this before (eg. my 15" Dell C840 has an excellent 1600x1200 LCD) and I'm glad to finally see a 12" screen with decent resolution. 1280x800, most laptops do 1024 max at 12" which is totally stupid with the giant pixels. ~85 DPI? LOL, what is this the 90's?
Is a 12" laptop really a netbook though? I don't think so. Now stuff a 1280x800 screen into a $500 (max) 10" netbook and get back to me (this is approximately 128 DPI screen, perfect). You might just get a customer.
(yes, I realize DPI is not calculated from the diagonal but the measurements vary so much between manufacturers that you can't calculate an exact figure without the machine sitting right in front of you)
Anyone have ideas on what the best netbook for writing code would be? All of the reviews look at them from the perspective of web browsers, media viewer and document viewer/writers. I'm more interested in a super-portable machine for writing code and using as a remote desktop viewer.
To me the Dell Mini 9 has the best specs as far as build quality, features and price but while the keyboard is nice and "large" (relatively) it puts the braces {} and brackets [] plus some others in very awkward places that seem like it would make code editing a pain. I wish you could buy the discounted Linux version with a webcam (even if it won't work in Linux).
Next on my list would be the Lenovo S10 but it's a bit more expensive and uses a hard-drive instead of SSD. Seems like a better keyboard layout but the keyboard itself has a cheap/poor feel.
Neither of those two have very good battery life. Not what I would expect from something that uses so little power. Plus they all could benefit from a higher vertical resolution (or a rotatable screen).
About 8 years ago I was running a webservers on a smartcard CPU's (both Javacard and Microsoft's discontinued .Net card). It's the size of the chip on that SIM card you use in your GSM phone (which is also a smartcard). Smaller and thinner than a US dime. These don't typically have ethernet ports but they do have USB.
I realize that. That is why I included myself. The question was rhetorical and I was just commenting on the psychological aspects of it.
Isn't it weird how developers (myself included) consider it a good thing that they fixed a whole bunch of bugs?
Personally I know it feels good to fix bugs because it feels like you're making the product perfect and somehow that feels like "development". However, the reality is that it would be better to have no bugs in the first place.
No, I will not get off your lawn. Space/speed is a tradeoff. At the moment, we have even bottom of the barrel desktops selling with large amounts of memory. With the eventual rise of 64 bit, expect the amounts to go up even more. There's no reason to avoid taking advantage of this. What's the point of having this huge (seriously, look at the memory difference from now and 10 years ago) amount of memory to just let it sit there, save the occasional multimedia editing task?
You're missing a huge part of what is happening with technology these days. The most popular computing platforms are becoming hand-held devices (cell phones, etc). These need all the help they can get as far as performance goes (memory and CPU are limited; fast and getting faster but still limited).
Designing anything for a standard old-school desktop computer these days would be a huge mistake.
Heh, you're complaining about 300 MB?
I have like 20 tabs open. That's almost 3 GB of RAM Firefox is using LOL. That's more than anything else on the machine including the combined 3 or 4 entire Windows OS's running in VMware.
I am not an expert win32 programmer however, I do know for a fact fork() is not supported, and so far as I know this means there's no way to do copy on write either.
Windows does in fact support fork. It's just not well documented. Search around the Net for ZwCreateProcess and NtCreateProcess.
Kinda like how most doctors are arrogant assholes?
Certain jobs attract certain personality types. If you fired every arrogant doctor and antisocial programmer then there wouldn't be enough people left to do the job!
Plus, just because you're an arrogant doctor does not necessarily mean you are no good just like being an antisocial programmer does not necessarily make you a bad person that would do something like this guy did.
His is also the one handwriting sample that is close to my own. I'm actually quite surprised he has always been a designer, his handwriting more like a programmer.
I have a 6 year old Dell C840, 2.2 Ghz P4M, 1GB RAM, nVidia graphics, built-in wireless, 1600x1200 screen. It's still going strong and I still use it as my primary rig when doing remote consulting jobs.
Sure it's big and bulky compared to modern comps but it's got a damn nice screen and enough horsepower to run VMware and everything else I need.
The only problem is the battery is shot to hell and can only hold a charge for maybe 10 minutes. I normally have somewhere to plug in so I haven't bothered replacing it.
Is there a picture or something that shows roughly where it landed on the planet? I spent some time on their web site but couldn't find anything.
I agree. SVG is intended to do everything Flash does and more. Currently dynamic stuff is pretty slow but there have been some very good advancements lately in the Firefox SVG engine. The main problem is Microsoft has completely ignored SVG. Probably because of Flash being popular and proprietary (more money for all). Plus now they have Silverlight.
You still have to contend with the awful Javascript language though. The engines are slow because the language is convoluted.
SVG should be the future. It's the best choice out of all the options. The only change I would make is to ditch Javascript or at least allow the option of using another language (Lua would be my first choice, tiny and fast).