Performance of g++ vs. competition under Linux
on
GCC 2.95 Released
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· Score: 2
Anyone want to comment on the speed of g++ compiled code compared to other C++ compilers? I'm writing a performance-critical C++ application and wouldn't mind getting 10-20% speedup for free. But if g++ is within 1-2% of the fastest out there, it's not worth messing with for now.
KAI C++ makes grand performance claims, and Comeau is another compiler built on the same ECG backend (but much cheaper). I'm mainly interested in the Linux platform for now.
Notes:
Language trolls can buzz off, I'm aware of the performance issues of using C++ vs. C.
I know KCC has a time-limited demo, and I've downloaded it, but it looks like it's much stricter about the C++ it accepts; it might take a while to get my code to compile with it, which is why I'd like to get some feedback before deciding whether or not to mess with it.
I suggested to my ISP that they set up 2 web servers, one for unregulated content and one "safe-surfing" where people could sign an agreement to keep content clean in trade for an unblocked server
I do hope you're offering to move your own page to a "safe" server, not suggesting that they kick other people onto an "adult" server. If I were at an ISP that did the latter, they would immediately lose my business. Just because I have the word "bisexual" on my page and some idiot filtering program doesn't like it, doesn't mean that I should bear the burden of moving my page, changing my links, breaking other peoples links to my page, etc.
If you want to move your page to www-safe.isp.com, that should be fine; but you are aware that there's no way for users to comply with that "keep content clean" clause, right? Many of these filtering programs keep their criteria secret, and there's no way to know whether that reference to breast cancer or Middlesex County or shitake mushrooms is going to trigger it. And on the administration side, dealing with monitoring content for N different users for M different filtering programs can't possibly be cost-effective unless they're charging really high rates.
Out of curiosity, do most ISPs get banned by CyberPatrol? If not, why not?
Although it isn't the ISP's fault that Cyber Patrol is blocking my site, it is my ISP's fault that they KNEW ABOUT IT and didn't tell me, or any of their users! [...] Anyway, I'm figuring I should just ask my ISP for my money back for the whole time they've known my pages were being banned.
I'm sorry, but that's ridiculous. You are asking your ISP to implement a workaround for someone else's voluntary usage of one particular blatantly broken software package? Or to refund your money if they don't do so? Sheesh.
(Yes, this is voluntary. In this case, the decision was made by the agency, not the individual; the principle remains. They are knowingly using a product which prevents them from viewing web pages relevant to their business. That's their problem.)
Incidentally, how many of these fucking babysitter programs block all of Slashdot? Most of them, I'd imagine, for reasons which the preceding sentence should make clear.
Does anyone know if work is being done to support the NeoMagic MagicGraph 256ZX (NM2260) chipset? A friend of mine recently bought a Dell Inspiron 3500 that has this chipset, and if no X servers support it, it's completely useless to her.
I went to www.resellerratings.com, and CPU Micromart had a dismally low average rating of 1.7 on a scale from 1 to 7. Many many comments from people who didn't receive what they ordered, received dead-on-arrival machines, had huge trouble dealing with staff trying to return things, simply got ripped off and didn't receive anything, etc...
What supercheap-preinstalled-Linux-box vendors would people here actually recommend based on personal experience?
This is only tangentially relevant, but the article mentioned SmartMedia memory cards as a first application. How does SmartMedia differ from Compact Flash? Is it just another case of pointless incompatibility between two standards doing the same thing?
Red Hat wants to bring Linux to the masses. Raster wants to write really cool code. These are both worthy goals, and they often overlap; but often they don't, such as when the masses want something boring.
So it makes sense for Raster to go his own way, and I don't think it's a disaster or a tragedy or a commentary on free software development; he and the company just didn't fit together well, that's all. He's variably sized and curvy, Red Hat is 64x64 and square.
People change jobs. It happens. Often it's good.
Alan
who prefers his windows rectangular and opaque, but still appreciates Raster's work
A centralised "remove" database does not work either. The majority of spammers ignore this information, since they don't really give a rats ass if you don't want to receive their junk. Some spammers may use this information to *create* lists.
One-way hash functions are your friends. Submit your address to a central remove database, they store the MD5 hash. Spammers can MD5 each address on their list and see which hash to something on the remove list, but they can't take the remove list and reconstruct addresses. (Government and/or ISPs publish "trap" addresses and add them to the list to catch spammers who ignore the list; well-publicized free services exist to strip opt-outs from an arbitrary list of addresses.)
Why can't a centralized opt-out method be made to work in this way?
>My wrists have started really aching lately, and I'd love to get an ergo keyboard or something,
This is not the correct response to the situation. The correct response is to SEE A DOCTOR, IMMEDIATELY. Every day you spend on self-treatment with a particular solution which may or may not be appropriate is another day in which you could be doing irreversible damage to your body. You do NOT want to do this.
(Trust me; I spent nine months largely incapacitated and in great pain thanks to delaying proper treatment, and while I can work again, there are still a lot of things I can't do with my hands and arms. This is not something to screw around with.)
Which particular keyboard you use is only a tiny aspect of your behavior which is causing this damage. Posture at *and away from* the keyboard, work habits and breaks, typing in non-strenuous ways, ergonomic workstation setup, and so forth are all important.
Furthermore, if you're already experiencing pain, it's quite possible that you can't type normally without causing more damage. In my case, by the time I saw a doctor, repeated microtears, scarring, and healing had shortened my extensor tendons to the point where I no longer had anywhere near a normal range of motion. Even if I'd adopted perfect ergonomics, I still wouldn't have been able to type without pain and worsening my condition. I needed a lot of physical therapy to get back to normal.
In short, don't assume you can treat this yourself. See a doctor.
Recommended reading: Pascarelli and Quilter, Repetitive Strain Injury.
After reading this discussion, I decided to give up QWERTY cold turkey... after all, I'm going to be typing for decades, I might as well invest some time in learning a more comfortable layout.
Unfortunately, I've had recurring trouble with RSIs. One of the first places I notice it is in my pinky fingers. And right now, my right pinky is howling.
No surprise. Insanely, Dvorak puts two of the 10 most common letters in English text (L and S) on the right pinky. Maybe this wasn't so bad in typewriter days, but on a keyboard, the pinkies are already burdened with Return and meta keys and a whole slew of punctuation. QWERTY gives the fingers an unbalanced load, but at least the extra burden is on the relatively strong and flexible index fingers.
I suppose I could design my own layout; I did a long time ago, and even swapping L and K in Dvorak would be a huge improvement; but then I'd be really screwed trying to use anyone else's machine. (At least with standard Dvorak, "loadkeys dvorak" works on any Linux box, and most Windows machines have it as an option.)
The hell with it. I'm sticking with QWERTY.
Alan
Has Java Progressed wrt Generic Programming?
on
Java for EGCS
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· Score: 1
The number of times I've actually encountered the ClassCastException you describe would have to be less than 5. I don't tend to create a Vector (say) and pass it around to every class under the sun and just hope they don't add a Dog object to my Vector of Windows.
Yes, and that's the problem. There are a lot of situations where a Vector is the appropriate structure to use, but you use an array instead because you don't want to lose type safety (and obfuscate the code with a zillion casts). Proper generic containers would be a lot more useful. I often wish Java had them. (No, don't bother mentioning Pizza/GJ; they're unusable for me because they compile to bytecode, not standard Java, so I can't use my choice of compiler.)
Alan
who has written around 25k lines of Java, and has never used C++.
I tried to switch to Dvorak a couple of years ago, and gave it up. I was doing sysadmin work which forced me to use a lot of different machines, and it was impossible to completely avoid QWERTY, and switching back and forth is just a huge pain.
However, I now control all the machines I use, and so I'd like to give it another shot. I remember the lovely way words like T-H-E rolled off the fingers in Dvorak, and I can feel how much travel my fingers are doing now and would like to reduce it. The big problem is programs that depend on physical location of keys.
For instance, emacs uses Control-X heavily, and Control-X is a pain to reach on a Dvorak keyboard. All you Dvorak fans, what do you do for C-x? Grin and bear it, or do you have elisp to globally swap C-x and C-t, or what? It'll still be a huge pain to reflash my fingers with the new chord locations, of course...
For another example, countless games use IJKL or equivalent; and sure, I can usually reconfigure the keys within the program or with X resources, but man would it be a pain to have to do that manually for every single game I play. Being able to use the defaults occasionally is nice. Is there some way to click a window and say "QWERTY in this window" when you're using Dvorak everywhere else?
Suggestions, or pointers to web resources, would be most welcome. Thanks.
The GSA studies are fatally flawed if you're trying to determine "which is better, QWERTY or Dvorak?" To get an answer for that question, you'd need to compare performance of novice typists; give one group N hours of QWERTY training, the other group N hours of Dvorak training, let them each use that layout exclusively for a year, and study performance and comfort after that year. To my knowledge, no unbiased study has done that. Taking someone who's done a few hundred or thousand hours of QWERTY typing, and then testing them on Dvorak after a few dozen hours of Dvorak typing, is absurd.
(That said, I personally use QWERTY, and feel that Dvorak is overrated. The speed increase is minor, and takes a long time to develop if you're already experienced at QWERTY; and recommending it as a primary treatment for encroaching RSI symptoms, which far too many Dvorak advocates and ignorant doctors do, is nothing short of insane. I'd be surprised if it weren't a superior layout, but it's far less important than many other aspects of ergonomics and typing technique.)
Alan
Stable, fast, and ergonomic.
on
Opera for Linux
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· Score: 1
Opera is sweet. It's small, it's fast, it rarely crashes, and it's the only browser (other than Lynx) that can really be used without the mouse. For users who prefer not to use the mouse (or find it difficult or painful thanks to RSI), this is a godsend.
It also lets you optimize your real estate by killing the scroll bars and menu bars when you don't need them (keyboard users!), and has one-key or one-click ways to turn on/off colors and backgrounds and images and such, which is a huge win for browsing all those unreadable or ad-intensive sites.
It's the only browser that I've felt was developed for me and not for Joe Random or for major corporate entities who want to control the user's experience. Except for Lynx; and, well, sometimes you need images and decent frame support.
Yes, it's not quite as slick as Netscape in some ways. I DON'T CARE. It's so much better 95% of the time that the occasional awkwardness or Javascript glitch (I usually have javascript turned off anyway) doesn't bother me.
Yes, I'd like it to be free, and I don't like Opera's attitude about free software, but life goes on.
Yes, Mozilla may well be a wonderful browser, and I hope it will be, but it's not there yet; while Opera is a port of a browser which is already wonderful.
Whether with Mozilla or Opera, a future without Netscape 4.* sluggishness and bloat and a bus error every 30 damn minutes of browsing will be an excellent thing. My life will be better.
Last I checked, I couldn't bring a television, PlayStation, and FF7 to the coffeeshop. And the PlayStation costs around $150 after you add the memory card and taxes, while this is $50, or likely less in a bundle. And for those of us without TV, that's a big extra expense for the console.
On the other hand, I wouldn't want to invite friends over to gather around the 13" LCD screen and play Tekken 2 with two people sharing the keyboard.
As for CVGS vs. PSEMU, you can't legally use PSEMU without owning a real PlayStation. No comparison, regardless of the other relative merits of the products. So it appears that the Mac *does* have the first full PSX emulation.
Not that it matters to me, my laptop being a PC... But CVGS for Linux would rock.
Slashdot Mirror
KAI C++ makes grand performance claims, and Comeau is another compiler built on the same ECG backend (but much cheaper). I'm mainly interested in the Linux platform for now.
Notes:
I do hope you're offering to move your own page to a "safe" server, not suggesting that they kick other people onto an "adult" server. If I were at an ISP that did the latter, they would immediately lose my business. Just because I have the word "bisexual" on my page and some idiot filtering program doesn't like it, doesn't mean that I should bear the burden of moving my page, changing my links, breaking other peoples links to my page, etc.
If you want to move your page to www-safe.isp.com, that should be fine; but you are aware that there's no way for users to comply with that "keep content clean" clause, right? Many of these filtering programs keep their criteria secret, and there's no way to know whether that reference to breast cancer or Middlesex County or shitake mushrooms is going to trigger it. And on the administration side, dealing with monitoring content for N different users for M different filtering programs can't possibly be cost-effective unless they're charging really high rates.
Out of curiosity, do most ISPs get banned by CyberPatrol? If not, why not?
I'm sorry, but that's ridiculous. You are asking your ISP to implement a workaround for someone else's voluntary usage of one particular blatantly broken software package? Or to refund your money if they don't do so? Sheesh.
(Yes, this is voluntary. In this case, the decision was made by the agency, not the individual; the principle remains. They are knowingly using a product which prevents them from viewing web pages relevant to their business. That's their problem.)
Incidentally, how many of these fucking babysitter programs block all of Slashdot? Most of them, I'd imagine, for reasons which the preceding sentence should make clear.
Does anyone know if work is being done to support the NeoMagic MagicGraph 256ZX (NM2260) chipset? A friend of mine recently bought a Dell Inspiron 3500 that has this chipset, and if no X servers support it, it's completely useless to her.
I went to www.resellerratings.com, and CPU Micromart had a dismally low average rating of 1.7 on a scale from 1 to 7. Many many comments from people who didn't receive what they ordered, received dead-on-arrival machines, had huge trouble dealing with staff trying to return things, simply got ripped off and didn't receive anything, etc...
What supercheap-preinstalled-Linux-box vendors would people here actually recommend based on personal experience?
This is only tangentially relevant, but the article mentioned SmartMedia memory cards as a first application. How does SmartMedia differ from Compact Flash? Is it just another case of pointless incompatibility between two standards doing the same thing?
Red Hat wants to bring Linux to the masses. Raster wants to write really cool code. These are both worthy goals, and they often overlap; but often they don't, such as when the masses want something boring.
So it makes sense for Raster to go his own way, and I don't think it's a disaster or a tragedy or a commentary on free software development; he and the company just didn't fit together well, that's all. He's variably sized and curvy, Red Hat is 64x64 and square.
People change jobs. It happens. Often it's good.
Alan
who prefers his windows rectangular and opaque, but still appreciates Raster's work
A centralised "remove" database does not work either. The majority of spammers ignore this information, since they don't really give a rats ass if you don't want to receive their junk. Some spammers may use this information to *create* lists.
One-way hash functions are your friends. Submit your address to a central remove database, they store the MD5 hash. Spammers can MD5 each address on their list and see which hash to something on the remove list, but they can't take the remove list and reconstruct addresses. (Government and/or ISPs publish "trap" addresses and add them to the list to catch spammers who ignore the list; well-publicized free services exist to strip opt-outs from an arbitrary list of addresses.)
Why can't a centralized opt-out method be made to work in this way?
Alan
>My wrists have started really aching lately, and I'd love to get an ergo keyboard or something,
This is not the correct response to the situation. The correct response is to SEE A DOCTOR, IMMEDIATELY. Every day you spend on self-treatment with a particular solution which may or may not be appropriate is another day in which you could be doing irreversible damage to your body. You do NOT want to do this.
(Trust me; I spent nine months largely incapacitated and in great pain thanks to delaying proper treatment, and while I can work again, there are still a lot of things I can't do with my hands and arms. This is not something to screw around with.)
Which particular keyboard you use is only a tiny aspect of your behavior which is causing this damage. Posture at *and away from* the keyboard, work habits and breaks, typing in non-strenuous ways, ergonomic workstation setup, and so forth are all important.
Furthermore, if you're already experiencing pain, it's quite possible that you can't type normally without causing more damage. In my case, by the time I saw a doctor, repeated microtears, scarring, and healing had shortened my extensor tendons to the point where I no longer had anywhere near a normal range of motion. Even if I'd adopted perfect ergonomics, I still wouldn't have been able to type without pain and worsening my condition. I needed a lot of physical therapy to get back to normal.
In short, don't assume you can treat this yourself. See a doctor.
Recommended reading: Pascarelli and Quilter, Repetitive Strain Injury.
After reading this discussion, I decided to give up QWERTY cold turkey... after all, I'm going to be typing for decades, I might as well invest some time in learning a more comfortable layout.
Unfortunately, I've had recurring trouble with RSIs. One of the first places I notice it is in my pinky fingers. And right now, my right pinky is howling.
No surprise. Insanely, Dvorak puts two of the 10 most common letters in English text (L and S) on the right pinky. Maybe this wasn't so bad in typewriter days, but on a keyboard, the pinkies are already burdened with Return and meta keys and a whole slew of punctuation. QWERTY gives the fingers an unbalanced load, but at least the extra burden is on the relatively strong and flexible index fingers.
I suppose I could design my own layout; I did a long time ago, and even swapping L and K in Dvorak would be a huge improvement; but then I'd be really screwed trying to use anyone else's machine. (At least with standard Dvorak, "loadkeys dvorak" works on any Linux box, and most Windows machines have it as an option.)
The hell with it. I'm sticking with QWERTY.
Alan
The number of times I've actually encountered the ClassCastException you describe would have to be less than 5. I don't tend to create a Vector (say) and pass it around to every class under the sun and just hope they don't add a Dog object to my Vector of Windows.
Yes, and that's the problem. There are a lot of situations where a Vector is the appropriate structure to use, but you use an array instead because you don't want to lose type safety (and obfuscate the code with a zillion casts). Proper generic containers would be a lot more useful. I often wish Java had them. (No, don't bother mentioning Pizza/GJ; they're unusable for me because they compile to bytecode, not standard Java, so I can't use my choice of compiler.)
Alan
who has written around 25k lines of Java, and has never used C++.
I tried to switch to Dvorak a couple of years ago, and gave it up. I was doing sysadmin work which forced me to use a lot of different machines, and it was impossible to completely avoid QWERTY, and switching back and forth is just a huge pain.
However, I now control all the machines I use, and so I'd like to give it another shot. I remember the lovely way words like T-H-E rolled off the fingers in Dvorak, and I can feel how much travel my fingers are doing now and would like to reduce it. The big problem is programs that depend on physical location of keys.
For instance, emacs uses Control-X heavily, and Control-X is a pain to reach on a Dvorak keyboard. All you Dvorak fans, what do you do for C-x? Grin and bear it, or do you have elisp to globally swap C-x and C-t, or what? It'll still be a huge pain to reflash my fingers with the new chord locations, of course...
For another example, countless games use IJKL or equivalent; and sure, I can usually reconfigure the keys within the program or with X resources, but man would it be a pain to have to do that manually for every single game I play. Being able to use the defaults occasionally is nice. Is there some way to click a window and say "QWERTY in this window" when you're using Dvorak everywhere else?
Suggestions, or pointers to web resources, would be most welcome. Thanks.
Alan
(That said, I personally use QWERTY, and feel that Dvorak is overrated. The speed increase is minor, and takes a long time to develop if you're already experienced at QWERTY; and recommending it as a primary treatment for encroaching RSI symptoms, which far too many Dvorak advocates and ignorant doctors do, is nothing short of insane. I'd be surprised if it weren't a superior layout, but it's far less important than many other aspects of ergonomics and typing technique.)
Alan
Opera is sweet. It's small, it's fast, it rarely crashes, and it's the only browser (other than Lynx) that can really be used without the mouse. For users who prefer not to use the mouse (or find it difficult or painful thanks to RSI), this is a godsend.
It also lets you optimize your real estate by killing the scroll bars and menu bars when you don't need them (keyboard users!), and has one-key or one-click ways to turn on/off colors and backgrounds and images and such, which is a huge win for browsing all those unreadable or ad-intensive sites.
It's the only browser that I've felt was developed for me and not for Joe Random or for major corporate entities who want to control the user's experience. Except for Lynx; and, well, sometimes you need images and decent frame support.
Yes, it's not quite as slick as Netscape in some ways. I DON'T CARE. It's so much better 95% of the time that the occasional awkwardness or Javascript glitch (I usually have javascript turned off anyway) doesn't bother me.
Yes, I'd like it to be free, and I don't like Opera's attitude about free software, but life goes on.
Yes, Mozilla may well be a wonderful browser, and I hope it will be, but it's not there yet; while Opera is a port of a browser which is already wonderful.
Whether with Mozilla or Opera, a future without Netscape 4.* sluggishness and bloat and a bus error every 30 damn minutes of browsing will be an excellent thing. My life will be better.
Reasons to have long hair:
1) It's pretty.
2) It's sexy. It attracts MOTAS. (Members of the appropriate sex.)
3) It feels nice to brush it.
4) It gives your SO something fun to play with while you're sitting at the computer ignoring them.
If you get it trimmed a few times a year, and use conditioner when you wash it, it's not even a pain to take care of, and it looks MUCH better.
I've seen very few geekboys who didn't look better with long hair. Some geekgirls are better off with it short, but not many.
Last I checked, I couldn't bring a television, PlayStation, and FF7 to the coffeeshop. And the PlayStation costs around $150 after you add the memory card and taxes, while this is $50, or likely less in a bundle. And for those of us without TV, that's a big extra expense for the console.
On the other hand, I wouldn't want to invite friends over to gather around the 13" LCD screen and play Tekken 2 with two people sharing the keyboard.
As for CVGS vs. PSEMU, you can't legally use PSEMU without owning a real PlayStation. No comparison, regardless of the other relative merits of the products. So it appears that the Mac *does* have the first full PSX emulation.
Not that it matters to me, my laptop being a PC... But CVGS for Linux would rock.