What about "need"? What if they NEED to come visit us for some reason? Either to satisfy their hyper-intellectual curiosity about what other life exists in the universe, or just to murder us and rape our natural resources a la Independence Day and every other Sci Fi movie about marauding alien cultures..?
Assuming that aliens will not visit us with those reasons is to assume that travelling the universe and meeting other cultures is justifiable only on a whim, a literal flight of fancy.. this is, in fact, the opening of Star Trek (to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilisations, to boldly go where no (man|one) has gone before..) but that doesn't mean to say that this is the only justification to do so and that if you were a hyper-brained hyper-culture that you just wouldn't give so much of a shit..
There are only 15 minutes of actual computer generated effects in the whole thing: all in all, not a great deal at all. Grid bugs, light cycles, tanks, the mountains in the background when on the solar sailer, but otherwise, the vast majority of the original Tron was hand-animated, pretty much in every scene where there's a person in it as well as some scenery. It's all cleverly disguised matte painting, cel shading. The light cycle scene where they escape the game grid is mostly CG but every time it cuts to the view of the cockpit.. that's traditional animation. The setup of the bikes is traditional. The glowy lines on everything.
But that's besides the point anyway, I found it on watching it again last week (after watching it every 4 or 5 years or so out of sheer curiosity to see how well it matches my nostalgia of it from watching it on VHS when I was a kid, and in preparation for the new movie just so I could be even more giddy at the new shiny CG)
What I think was much better is how Jeff Bridges has decided that Flynn, after 20 years living in exile on the Grid and a decent amount of sitting on a pillow, has turned into The Dude. I dunno it just made the character so much more fucking interesting than the 80's jerk Flynn was in the original movie. At the same time though, not enough Alan Bradley/Tron even in flashbacks. Did they really spend that much money on Jeff's face but didn't bother with any other actor? His role ends up fairly pivotal and is a setup for a sequel but they didn't even bother making it much more than a cameo. The damn movie is *CALLED* Tron.
oh so you just don't get to play your old HD-DVDs or watch DVDs in 1080p (not that they were anyway, right:) - does this affect GAMING at all? Not really in my assessment of the situation.
It still holds true that you need to manually configure your Xbox360 to display anything more than 480p (especially as a lot of cheap HDTVs don't do EDID properly over HDMI, so the Xbox decides it has no idea how to autoconfigure it) and I am betting most people don't delve into that 4-layers-down menu item, and when they GET the system for the first time and it does the setup wizard, they just go clickclickclick to get past it and run GAMES instead of dicking around.
Both consoles come with Component cables and the ability to output 1080i video on them, 720p at the very least.
The quality of the graphics from Component or HDMI is really not noticable for the vast majority of people - the REAL problem comes when you sit down and you have your HDTV with a lot of things connected, and your TV comes with 3 HDMI ports and only 1 set of Component inputs, which you may already be using for your DirecTV DVR..
The difference? Your XBox will default to 480p if it's using Component - perhaps even HDMI - and without knocking the settings up, games will play at the lower resolution. The statistics for Gears of War may be down to people just not changing their settings.
"Realizing how the world runs" should not make you depressed. It's actually very easy to get through life with clinical depression without worrying about what George W. Bush did, about terrorists, about capitalism, about DRM and other things Slashdot readers get huffy about, because you're usually more often than not mired in some personal difficulty, not something about how the world "runs". This is from experience.
I must say the whole analytical breaking down things in to small chunks fits MY worldview. But I don't concern myself with bigger world issues; not that I don't care, but they just don't affect me. Part of dealing with depression is picking what to be depressed about. And if you're spending all your time having anxiety attacks and downward slumps and moody funks about what a politician is doing in another state, or who is suing who for patent rights, or the state of Somalia, you are going to have far more personal problems hit you in the ass later on than you can probably deal with adequately.
CS4 should work. Adobe just won't be releasing patches for CS3 to update compatibility issues with the new OS. Until CS5 is out though (which probably isn't for AT LEAST 8 or 9 months considering Adobe's past release schedule) it'll only be 32-bit but, really, would you care?
I found this little gem at Best Buy (and got my girl to get me a discount;) and it really is nice and comfortable, 6 buttons (left, right, wheel click, wheel scroll, and a button on the left near the thumb) - I use the thumb button to scroll through multiple tabs in Notepad++..
The precision on it is good enough for gaming and Bluetooth means standards compliant and goes everywhere (i.e. not any stupid "2.4GHz" custom protocol USB dongles or so floating around which you need to carry with you. The MS BMfN doesn't come with any transceiver, it assumes you already got one. I got a cheap $7 pico BT 2.1 adapter (the one where it's about 1/6th of an inch bigger than a USB connector) which works great with it.
Forget it. ext4 is still not stable even though they took the "dev" tag off. The filesystem is going to have problems upon problems upon problems for months and months and months and you're going to be looking at updating and patching kernels in perpetuity to keep up with those patches. The only thing they stabilized was featureset and on-disk format.
If you want the features of ext4 for production, you should already be running XFS. You can't get much better on Linux filesystems these days. By the time ext4 gets to be "production worthy" (by this I mean has spent a year in the tree and become the default on major Linux distributions meaning thousands of people have installed on it, found all the showstopper bugs and had it patched in distro downstreams at least), you can bet Btrfs will be out and "stable" anyway, and you'll be asking about whether THAT is ready for production.
Use XFS now. Wait 18 months for Btrfs, if it is indeed any better. If not, and still looking for a filesystem challenge today, work out a way you can use ZFS - which has its problems on Linux (especially that it needs to run through FUSE - not a performance issue so much as a technical nightmare to use it as your root filesystem that no distro actually would support because of moronic non-free policies).
True though. Just like getting into the IEEE and other engineering bodies, there's all that interning to do, working under another engineer for 5 years, being sponsored and then getting your accreditation as an actual Engineer and not just some guy who breezed through a Batchelor's degree.
Take an engineering degree (even in the USA) and this is one of the first things they talk to you about, and it gets revisited before final exams.
I find it hard to believe that the Linux kernel developers never heard of ICC. Or, to take another example, never used Codewarrior or XL C (IBM's PPC compiler, especially good for POWER5 and Cell) or DIAB (or Wind River Compiler or whatever they call it now). Or even Visual C++. Personally I've had the pleasure of using them all.. they all do things differently, but when you have a development team which is using more than one.. I once worked on a team where most of the developers had DIAB, but they didn't want to pay for licenses for EVERYONE, so it was just for the team leaders and release engineering guys, so we all got GCC instead. We had to be mindful not to break the release builds.. and the work ethic meant everything went pretty much fine all round.
All of them have at one time or still today produce much better code and have much better profiling than GCC and are used a lot in industry. If the commercial compiler doesn't do what you want or is too expensive, GCC is your fallback. Linux turns this on it's head because it "wants" to use as much free, GNU software, but I don't think the development process should be so inhibited as to ignore other compilers - especially considering they are generally always far better optimized for an architecture.
As a side note, it's well known that gcc 2.95.3 generates much better code on a lot of platforms, but some apps out there are refusing to compile with gcc 2.x (I'm looking at rtorrent here.. mainly because it's C++ and gcc 2.x C++ support sucks. This is another reason why commercial compilers are still popular:) and some only build with other versions of gcc, patches flying around to make sure it builds with the vast majority, significant amounts of development time is already "wasted" on compiler differences even on the SAME compiler, so putting ICC or XCC support in there shouldn't be too much of a chore, especially since they are broadly GCC compatible anyway.
Like the article said, most of the problem, and the reason they have the wrapper, is to nuke certain gcc-specific and arch-specific arguments to the compiler, and the internal code is mostly making sure Linux has those differences implemented. There is a decent white-paper on it here. The notes about ICC being stricter in syntax checking are enlightening. If you write some really slack code, ICC will balk. GCC will happily chug along generating whatever code it likes. It's probably better all round (and might even improve code quality generated by GCC, note the quote about GCC "occasionally" doing the "right" thing when certain keywords are missing) if Linux developers are mindful of these warnings, but as I've said somewhere in this thread, Linux developers need some serious convincing on moving away from GCC (I've even heard a few say "well, you should fix GCC instead", rather than take a patch to fix their code to work in ICC)
There's no reason you can't build your code to support all the tools you could possibly use to their fullest capacity, though. No reason at all. Except when one tool doesn't do something that the other does that you find important.
I very much doubt any C compiler shipping these days misses the features required to build the kernel, but the kernel developers only care about adding in GCC options and GCC pragmas and attributes.. in spite of those who would prefer to use some other compiler.
I fully understand the limitations of the C99 standard, but there are also ways to stop your code being tied to a compiler which it seems a lot of coders simply do not bother to use because supporting GCC is their only goal.
None but you should think about the hurdles of porting it to a non-POSIX operating system like AmigaOS (yes they did..) and MorphOS (which is like AmigaOS but the GCC port supports a bunch of craaazy extra options) and OMG think of the children!!!!!!!
Both of those had to rely on a special portability library (newlib port in the first instance, and the ancient "ixemul" library in the second instance) to get it to work, notwithstanding the actual platform features and ABI support.
Maybe they're not noteworthy but there's plenty of scope for a non-POSIX operating system in the embedded space, where having a custom compiler is a part daily life. What about when you're supporting a new architecture which isn't in mainline GCC for instance, using CodeSourcery patches for a while to enable custom processor features?
There isn't one, so what you do is use pragmas (I remember #pragma pack(1)) or attributes (__attribute__((packed)) or something similar.
Of course they're compiler-specific but there's no reason that code can't be written wrapped in defines or typedefs to stop compiler-specific stuff getting into real production code nested 10 directories down in a codebase with 40,000,000 lines.
Linux does an okay job of this - but since coders usually reference the compiler manual to use these esoteric pragmas and types, they are usually told "this is specific to GCC" (GCC does a good job of this anyway) so they should be wrapping them by default to help their application be portable and maintainable to future compilers (especially if they change the attribute name or the way it works - as has been done on many a GCC, let alone other compilers).
What usually nukes it (and why linux-dna has a compiler wrapper) is because they're hardcoding options and doing other weird GCC-specific crap. This is not because they are lazy but because the Linux kernel has a "we use GCC so support that, who gives a crap about other compilers?" development policy and it usually takes some convincing - or a fork, as linux-dna is - to get these patches into mainline.
I think the point is that ICC has been made "gcc compatible" in certain areas by defining a lot of pre-baked defines, and accepting a lot of gcc arguments.
In the end, though, autoconf/automake and cmake and even a hand-coded Makefile could easily abstract the differences between compilers so that -mno-sse2 is used on gcc and --no-simd-instructions=sse2 on some esoteric (non-existent, I made that up) compiler. I used to have a couple of projects which happily ran on BSD or GNU userland (BSD make, GNU make, jot vs. seq, gcc vs. icc vs. amiga sas/c:) and all built fairly usable code from the same script automatically depending on the target platform.
The over-reliance of the Linux kernel and it's hardcoded options for GCC means you have to port GCC to your platform first, before you can use a compiler which may already be written by/for your CPU vendor (a good example was always Codewarrior.. but that's defunct now)
Of course there is always configure script abuse; just like you can't build MPlayer for a system with less features than the one you're on without specifying 30-40 hand-added options to force everything back down.
A lot of it comes down to laziness - using what you have and not considering that other people may have different tools. And of course the usual Unix philosophy that while you may never need something, it should be installed anyway just because an app CAN use it (I can imagine using a photo application for JPEGs alone, but they will still pull in every image library using the dynamic linker, at load time.. and all these plugins will be spread across by disk)
Slashdot Mirror
And the other ~150
What part of more than three-quarters of a billion dollars is "pitiful"?
What about "need"? What if they NEED to come visit us for some reason? Either to satisfy their hyper-intellectual curiosity about what other life exists in the universe, or just to murder us and rape our natural resources a la Independence Day and every other Sci Fi movie about marauding alien cultures..?
Assuming that aliens will not visit us with those reasons is to assume that travelling the universe and meeting other cultures is justifiable only on a whim, a literal flight of fancy.. this is, in fact, the opening of Star Trek (to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilisations, to boldly go where no (man|one) has gone before..) but that doesn't mean to say that this is the only justification to do so and that if you were a hyper-brained hyper-culture that you just wouldn't give so much of a shit..
There are only 15 minutes of actual computer generated effects in the whole thing: all in all, not a great deal at all. Grid bugs, light cycles, tanks, the mountains in the background when on the solar sailer, but otherwise, the vast majority of the original Tron was hand-animated, pretty much in every scene where there's a person in it as well as some scenery. It's all cleverly disguised matte painting, cel shading. The light cycle scene where they escape the game grid is mostly CG but every time it cuts to the view of the cockpit.. that's traditional animation. The setup of the bikes is traditional. The glowy lines on everything.
But that's besides the point anyway, I found it on watching it again last week (after watching it every 4 or 5 years or so out of sheer curiosity to see how well it matches my nostalgia of it from watching it on VHS when I was a kid, and in preparation for the new movie just so I could be even more giddy at the new shiny CG)
What I think was much better is how Jeff Bridges has decided that Flynn, after 20 years living in exile on the Grid and a decent amount of sitting on a pillow, has turned into The Dude. I dunno it just made the character so much more fucking interesting than the 80's jerk Flynn was in the original movie. At the same time though, not enough Alan Bradley/Tron even in flashbacks. Did they really spend that much money on Jeff's face but didn't bother with any other actor? His role ends up fairly pivotal and is a setup for a sequel but they didn't even bother making it much more than a cameo. The damn movie is *CALLED* Tron.
No, but if he wants BIOS access he's fucked unless he has a server with some kind of IPMI BIOS and service processor to handle BIOS output.
Does it have USB 2.0?
http://www.geek.com/articles/gadgets/usb-graphic-adapter-makes-adding-multiple-monitors-a-breeze-2008064/
oh so you just don't get to play your old HD-DVDs or watch DVDs in 1080p (not that they were anyway, right :) - does this affect GAMING at all? Not really in my assessment of the situation.
It still holds true that you need to manually configure your Xbox360 to display anything more than 480p (especially as a lot of cheap HDTVs don't do EDID properly over HDMI, so the Xbox decides it has no idea how to autoconfigure it) and I am betting most people don't delve into that 4-layers-down menu item, and when they GET the system for the first time and it does the setup wizard, they just go clickclickclick to get past it and run GAMES instead of dicking around.
Both consoles come with Component cables and the ability to output 1080i video on them, 720p at the very least.
The quality of the graphics from Component or HDMI is really not noticable for the vast majority of people - the REAL problem comes when you sit down and you have your HDTV with a lot of things connected, and your TV comes with 3 HDMI ports and only 1 set of Component inputs, which you may already be using for your DirecTV DVR..
The difference? Your XBox will default to 480p if it's using Component - perhaps even HDMI - and without knocking the settings up, games will play at the lower resolution. The statistics for Gears of War may be down to people just not changing their settings.
I don't agree.
"Realizing how the world runs" should not make you depressed. It's actually very easy to get through life with clinical depression without worrying about what George W. Bush did, about terrorists, about capitalism, about DRM and other things Slashdot readers get huffy about, because you're usually more often than not mired in some personal difficulty, not something about how the world "runs". This is from experience.
I must say the whole analytical breaking down things in to small chunks fits MY worldview. But I don't concern myself with bigger world issues; not that I don't care, but they just don't affect me. Part of dealing with depression is picking what to be depressed about. And if you're spending all your time having anxiety attacks and downward slumps and moody funks about what a politician is doing in another state, or who is suing who for patent rights, or the state of Somalia, you are going to have far more personal problems hit you in the ass later on than you can probably deal with adequately.
CS4 should work. Adobe just won't be releasing patches for CS3 to update compatibility issues with the new OS. Until CS5 is out though (which probably isn't for AT LEAST 8 or 9 months considering Adobe's past release schedule) it'll only be 32-bit but, really, would you care?
Who's Sam Raimito?:D
I found this little gem at Best Buy (and got my girl to get me a discount ;) and it really is nice and comfortable, 6 buttons (left, right, wheel click, wheel scroll, and a button on the left near the thumb) - I use the thumb button to scroll through multiple tabs in Notepad++..
The precision on it is good enough for gaming and Bluetooth means standards compliant and goes everywhere (i.e. not any stupid "2.4GHz" custom protocol USB dongles or so floating around which you need to carry with you. The MS BMfN doesn't come with any transceiver, it assumes you already got one. I got a cheap $7 pico BT 2.1 adapter (the one where it's about 1/6th of an inch bigger than a USB connector) which works great with it.
CSS3 does all you want: http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-page/
Forget it. ext4 is still not stable even though they took the "dev" tag off. The filesystem is going to have problems upon problems upon problems for months and months and months and you're going to be looking at updating and patching kernels in perpetuity to keep up with those patches. The only thing they stabilized was featureset and on-disk format.
If you want the features of ext4 for production, you should already be running XFS. You can't get much better on Linux filesystems these days. By the time ext4 gets to be "production worthy" (by this I mean has spent a year in the tree and become the default on major Linux distributions meaning thousands of people have installed on it, found all the showstopper bugs and had it patched in distro downstreams at least), you can bet Btrfs will be out and "stable" anyway, and you'll be asking about whether THAT is ready for production.
Use XFS now. Wait 18 months for Btrfs, if it is indeed any better. If not, and still looking for a filesystem challenge today, work out a way you can use ZFS - which has its problems on Linux (especially that it needs to run through FUSE - not a performance issue so much as a technical nightmare to use it as your root filesystem that no distro actually would support because of moronic non-free policies).
True though. Just like getting into the IEEE and other engineering bodies, there's all that interning to do, working under another engineer for 5 years, being sponsored and then getting your accreditation as an actual Engineer and not just some guy who breezed through a Batchelor's degree.
Take an engineering degree (even in the USA) and this is one of the first things they talk to you about, and it gets revisited before final exams.
Everywhere outside the USA (especially Canada) you can't call yourself an Engineer unless you have an Engineering degree :)
(that doesn't mean you can't get a job with the title "engineer", it's just a limitation on self-description).
Usually the best thing to do is rephrase Engineer to Developer or Programmer or Analyst..
I find it hard to believe that the Linux kernel developers never heard of ICC. Or, to take another example, never used Codewarrior or XL C (IBM's PPC compiler, especially good for POWER5 and Cell) or DIAB (or Wind River Compiler or whatever they call it now). Or even Visual C++. Personally I've had the pleasure of using them all.. they all do things differently, but when you have a development team which is using more than one.. I once worked on a team where most of the developers had DIAB, but they didn't want to pay for licenses for EVERYONE, so it was just for the team leaders and release engineering guys, so we all got GCC instead. We had to be mindful not to break the release builds.. and the work ethic meant everything went pretty much fine all round.
All of them have at one time or still today produce much better code and have much better profiling than GCC and are used a lot in industry. If the commercial compiler doesn't do what you want or is too expensive, GCC is your fallback. Linux turns this on it's head because it "wants" to use as much free, GNU software, but I don't think the development process should be so inhibited as to ignore other compilers - especially considering they are generally always far better optimized for an architecture.
As a side note, it's well known that gcc 2.95.3 generates much better code on a lot of platforms, but some apps out there are refusing to compile with gcc 2.x (I'm looking at rtorrent here.. mainly because it's C++ and gcc 2.x C++ support sucks. This is another reason why commercial compilers are still popular :) and some only build with other versions of gcc, patches flying around to make sure it builds with the vast majority, significant amounts of development time is already "wasted" on compiler differences even on the SAME compiler, so putting ICC or XCC support in there shouldn't be too much of a chore, especially since they are broadly GCC compatible anyway.
Like the article said, most of the problem, and the reason they have the wrapper, is to nuke certain gcc-specific and arch-specific arguments to the compiler, and the internal code is mostly making sure Linux has those differences implemented. There is a decent white-paper on it here. The notes about ICC being stricter in syntax checking are enlightening. If you write some really slack code, ICC will balk. GCC will happily chug along generating whatever code it likes. It's probably better all round (and might even improve code quality generated by GCC, note the quote about GCC "occasionally" doing the "right" thing when certain keywords are missing) if Linux developers are mindful of these warnings, but as I've said somewhere in this thread, Linux developers need some serious convincing on moving away from GCC (I've even heard a few say "well, you should fix GCC instead", rather than take a patch to fix their code to work in ICC)
There's no reason you can't build your code to support all the tools you could possibly use to their fullest capacity, though. No reason at all. Except when one tool doesn't do something that the other does that you find important.
I very much doubt any C compiler shipping these days misses the features required to build the kernel, but the kernel developers only care about adding in GCC options and GCC pragmas and attributes.. in spite of those who would prefer to use some other compiler.
yeah on a comments thread to some wanker who won't even get a Slashdot account..
in the grand scheme of things, not very important, wouldn't you say?
yes, dad.
See my other reply on the topic.
I fully understand the limitations of the C99 standard, but there are also ways to stop your code being tied to a compiler which it seems a lot of coders simply do not bother to use because supporting GCC is their only goal.
None but you should think about the hurdles of porting it to a non-POSIX operating system like AmigaOS (yes they did..) and MorphOS (which is like AmigaOS but the GCC port supports a bunch of craaazy extra options) and OMG think of the children!!!!!!!
Both of those had to rely on a special portability library (newlib port in the first instance, and the ancient "ixemul" library in the second instance) to get it to work, notwithstanding the actual platform features and ABI support.
Maybe they're not noteworthy but there's plenty of scope for a non-POSIX operating system in the embedded space, where having a custom compiler is a part daily life. What about when you're supporting a new architecture which isn't in mainline GCC for instance, using CodeSourcery patches for a while to enable custom processor features?
There isn't one, so what you do is use pragmas (I remember #pragma pack(1)) or attributes (__attribute__((packed)) or something similar.
Of course they're compiler-specific but there's no reason that code can't be written wrapped in defines or typedefs to stop compiler-specific stuff getting into real production code nested 10 directories down in a codebase with 40,000,000 lines.
Linux does an okay job of this - but since coders usually reference the compiler manual to use these esoteric pragmas and types, they are usually told "this is specific to GCC" (GCC does a good job of this anyway) so they should be wrapping them by default to help their application be portable and maintainable to future compilers (especially if they change the attribute name or the way it works - as has been done on many a GCC, let alone other compilers).
What usually nukes it (and why linux-dna has a compiler wrapper) is because they're hardcoding options and doing other weird GCC-specific crap. This is not because they are lazy but because the Linux kernel has a "we use GCC so support that, who gives a crap about other compilers?" development policy and it usually takes some convincing - or a fork, as linux-dna is - to get these patches into mainline.
:)
I think the point is that ICC has been made "gcc compatible" in certain areas by defining a lot of pre-baked defines, and accepting a lot of gcc arguments.
In the end, though, autoconf/automake and cmake and even a hand-coded Makefile could easily abstract the differences between compilers so that -mno-sse2 is used on gcc and --no-simd-instructions=sse2 on some esoteric (non-existent, I made that up) compiler. I used to have a couple of projects which happily ran on BSD or GNU userland (BSD make, GNU make, jot vs. seq, gcc vs. icc vs. amiga sas/c :) and all built fairly usable code from the same script automatically depending on the target platform.
The over-reliance of the Linux kernel and it's hardcoded options for GCC means you have to port GCC to your platform first, before you can use a compiler which may already be written by/for your CPU vendor (a good example was always Codewarrior.. but that's defunct now)
Of course there is always configure script abuse; just like you can't build MPlayer for a system with less features than the one you're on without specifying 30-40 hand-added options to force everything back down.
A lot of it comes down to laziness - using what you have and not considering that other people may have different tools. And of course the usual Unix philosophy that while you may never need something, it should be installed anyway just because an app CAN use it (I can imagine using a photo application for JPEGs alone, but they will still pull in every image library using the dynamic linker, at load time.. and all these plugins will be spread across by disk)
Amazing. You have no idea what you're talking about :D
C99 doesn't stop you writing interrupt code OR threaded code.