Oh my, please hold my head up while I vomit! Are you people f*ing deluded??? How has JavaFX magically solved the problem of ridiculous loading times? I really do love Java. I do! But this is ridiculous. Hello!!! Pretending that the problem doesn't exist is not going to solve it.
You do know what "efficiency" means, right? Right??:-)
These "measurements" would only make sense when playing the same latest generation game on the three consoles, looking the same on the three consoles. Or when playing the same BlueRay disk on the three consoles... What do you mean the Wii can't play HD BlueRay?
Or, lets put it another way: an Apple II also plays games and consumes a lot less power than a Wii. Is it more efficient?
Or perhaps we could divide the complexity of a game and its visual quality by the power consumption. Interesting... the $5 watch with built-in Tetris comes out as the bestest most efficientest.
(In reality I don't own any console nor I plan to... ever)
Amen. Mod me troll if you like, but even with the desktop version of Ubuntu I have had nothing but trouble: - every upgrade without exception has failed and I have had to fix it manually, meaning I have lost one full work day every 6 months. - it really has gotten progressively slower to the point where 8.04 is actually unusable on some machines. There was a recent story on Slashdot about this actually.
In our organization we are planning to migrating all Ubuntu desktops to Debian when the new stable comes out.
As for servers, I would never ever dream of putting Ubuntu on a server. What a joke. Debian has worked for our servers perfectly for years and I believe will continue to do so.
I only hope that Ubuntu doesn't completely destroy Debian by stealing mindshare away. It is paradoxical because Ubuntu does not have the capability of maintaining a whole OS on their own.
You are onto something here!:-) I tried a few other words - ass, f*ck, sh*t, etc. Surprise, surprise - they are all taken too! Sadly, none of them seem to have have any activity recently.
The truth is it is getting slower, which is causing serious problems, and is annoying the sh*t out of me.
I recently upgraded my laptop to Kubuntu 8.4. I am not imagining it - it really is noticeably slower than before. Applications start slower, there is more disk activity and the disk itself feels slower. The laptop in question has Intel Core Duo and 2 Gigs of RAM, which should be plenty.
I haven't investigated in detail why it seems so slow, but it is not something obvious: the disk UDMA is enabled, there is available RAM, there isn't a background process running and taking all CPU time.
A co-worker's computer, which is somewhat less powerful than my laptop, became practically unusable after the upgrade to Kubuntu 8.10.
So beyond mere annoyance this is creating real problems. We are seriously considering migrating all our [K]Ubuntu machines to Debian. Besides the speed, it has the important advantage that you don't need to upgrade your OS every 6 months (which is utter idiocy: I don't have time to upgrade my OS twice in a year, I have work to do. If you ask why I don't use the LTS - the previous LTS is too outdated and the new one is too slow).
he code in Q1-Q3 is your standard stuff, nothing special in there and in fact it's too limited in many areas that could use a little more flexibility (ie. it was a bad design)...Nothing brilliant about that though.
Nonsense. I didn't see you write it. Brilliance means having the vision and persistence to get the job done when it needs to be done. To know what has to be done, to be able to make the right compromises, etc. Carmack really is f*ing brilliant.
Looking at the job that somebody else has done successfully and thinking that you could have done it, now that you have seen it, is ridiculous. Technically I get the same thoughts what I look at Carmack's sources (or at the Linux kernel sources for that matter). But the point is, you or I didn't write those things.
Remember, most brilliant ideas appear obvious in hindsight.
Mod parent up! He is showing considerable insight. I should add that the sense of entitlement and loose ethics are also typical of other Eastern European nations - my own in particular - which I will not mention in order to protect the guilty. Sometimes I am really ashamed of how I myself used to think about a decade ago, before I moved to the "west".
The only redeeming note here is that people do change - I have observed this in many expatriates.
This is completely ridiculous. "Machines almost pass Turing test" my ass! The journalist who was fooled is an idiot. Am I the only one who noticed that none of these bots can answer simple questions like "what were we just talking about two sentences ago?", or solve a simple puzzle? Clearly they cannot hold the subject of the conversation, often use canned generic responses, etc. This whole thing would be a big joke, if it wasn't scary that so many people seem to be taking it seriously (but again, many people voted for Bush twice, so no big surprise).
The only way one could possibly mistake such a bot for a human is if comparing against a human who is deliberately pretending to be a machine. Which is absurd.
This direction, which I don't think justifies the label "A.I.", is completely misguided. Perhaps a fun hobby, or a primitive interactive replacement for a FAQ, but nothing more.
TThis is somewhat odd though. The original NT Posix subsystem at the very least, was not an independent subsystem. It translated some calls into the NT kernel Native API, but for others, it translated them into Win32 System calls, leaving the POSIX subsytem dependent on the win32 subsystem. I would find it hard to believe then that the programs could not directly call the Win32 API.
I wouldn't be surprised if it was possible using some kind of a hack (e.g. loading system DLL manually, invoking system calls directly, whatever), but as far as I know there isn't a "legal" way for an application to use APIs from a different subsystem. Note that you can't set more than one subsystem in the PE image.
I guess a subsystem could expose the API of another one by duplicating the calls (internally redirecting to the originals), but firstly this is not the case, and secondly it is not quite the same thing - there is no guarantee that the APIs will be kept synchronized, etc.
Generally, my understanding is that subsystems were deliberately designed to be completely isolated from one another.
For what it is worth, cygwin 1.7 is propping support for non-NT versions of windows, which will allow it to use NT native API's in many places. This should notably improve performance, but it is a shame that the SUA subsystem is not good enough to eliminate the need for Cygwin.
Well, the strength of Cygwin has always been that you can mix Win32 and POSIX. My recollection from several years ago is that "Windows Services for Unix" was good enough to port anything POSIX to it, but since you couldn't call Win32 APIs, it was useless for interesting development.
Let me clarify a common misconception. Windows is _NOT_ POSIX compliant for all practical intents and purpose for one simple reason: an application using the POSIX subsystem doesn't have access to the Win32 subsystem, making it completely useless.
For example, you cannot use POSIX functions (fork, etc) and use Win32 GUI at the same time. Thus the need for solutions like Cygwin, which emulate POSIX with enormous performance cost.
I hope this puts the Windows POSIX compatibility myth to rest forever and nobody on SlashDot will make it ever again:-)
I trust nobody. With the prices as low as they are, everything is garbage. The "cheap computer" manufactured in China destroyed the market. I mean, what do you expect for f*cking $300 ??? Who is going to buy a PC for $2000, no matter how well built, when you have the same specs in a $800 box ? So now instead of $2000 it is going to cost you $5000.
It is all down the drain people. Or may be I am just getting too old. Note to moderators: I am not trolling, I am complaining:-)
I know a company which had to purchase batches of specialized PCs manufactured in China. They got three completely different models from three different suppliers to be safe (of course nobody knows who the real manufacturer is - quite possibly it is one and the same). More than 70% of them failed within six months !! Do you realize what the odds of this are ? A computer failing within six months ? How about _dozens_ of computers ?
To be honest though I have never had a problem with anything Dell, no matter how cheap. I feel sorry for them trying to compete at these prices and still succeeding in delivering something that doesn't fail within six months.
I saw this in several comments already. Think, people, think !:-) How the f*ck can be considered a domain name squatter if the domain carries his own name ??
It's interesting that nobody uses Java applets much any more. It's worth understanding why that failed. But that's another subject.
It is really very simple. A Java applet takes extremely long to load even on a very fast machine. It is ridiculous. In all other respects Java applets are vastly superior to JavaScript and Flash, but who cares ? Alas, the speed of loading and initializing a JVM cannot be addressed without a major re-design of the entire language.
This is exactly what all Windows developers need. After they had to move from one incompatible API to the next greatest one DOS->Win16->Win32(+ODBC)->OLE(+ADO)->DCOM->GDI+->.NET (or whatever), now it is time to abandon all that and start over with yet something completely different. This time it will be perfect, I promise !
Of course the submission itself is full of sensationalist crap. When I read "web based", "Windows replacement" and "virtualization" in the same article, it all becomes clear... The only thing missing is XML! Hold on... I've got it ! The micro-kernel will use SOAP for inter-process communication. There you go. Now it is perfect.
Work computers ? You do know that Avira is free only for personal use, right ?:-)
(The banners are indeed annoying, but I am assuming that they are not present in the paid-for version, and that is the only one that you can install on work computers)
As another poster noted, I was thinking more of Scheme, and not Lisp in general. The power of Scheme, (and what I perhaps incorrectly projected to all Lisp) lies in being able to express anything (multiple-entry-exit procedures, indexed jumps, switch/case, loops, while/break, gotos, exceptions, co-routines, etc) using just the fundamental language constructs - lambdas with tail-recursion and continuations. Perhaps more importantly, besides emulating most constructs from other languages, it allows for powerful new ways of expression which are impossible in other languages. Combine that with macros and you have the ultimate power. (Of course, it is a pity that there isn't a single usable Scheme implementation (well, probably with the exception of Bigloo http://www-sop.inria.fr/mimosa/fp/Bigloo/ )
So, from that angle, JavaScript is much closer to Java and C than Lisp-1.
On the other hand, closures and higher order functions are not necessarily Lisp specific. You can write the Y Combinator in SML, etc.
So, ANSI Common Lisp doesn't have macros now ? As far tail recursion, it is true that typical CL programming style doesn't require tail recursion, but many (most?) implementations do offer it.
Was your point that JavaScript really is CL in disguise ?
But, yes, the original poster (and the referenced links) said LISP-1 (Scheme), so I should have been more explicit.
BTW, the lack of tail recursion _and_ goto in the same language is a fundamental limitation. (I am referring to the well known paper)
As far as your last point regarding how Javascript is being widely taught and used, all it states is a major problem with the way the language is understood. Just because a language is taught a certain way doesn't mean that the language IS that way. If you delve deeper into Javascript you'll see that it's more like lisp and less like C or Java.
But I have. If you delve deeper into LISP you will see that calling a language without tail recursion and macros LISP-like is an exaggeration...
The links you have provided concentrate on closures, and closures, while no doubt very useful, are not the one defining characteristic of LISP. The first link (the PDF) is the only one that actually contains any data to justify the claim, but it simply ends up repeating the same thing several times for stronger effect. "Functions are first class objects" - no more than in most other languages including C. "Functions can be higher order" - duh, this is implied by closures. In short, while the individual arguments are true, the whole PDF loses credibility because it doesn't objectively discuss the important differences between LISP and JavaScript. It is not sufficient to simply emphatically claim something:-)
I do agree that JavaScript has some important LISP-like traits, and that it is more powerful than many people really realize, but calling it a LISP is just exploiting the unfortunate fact that almost nobody knows LISP.
You make be taking this claim that JavaScript is a LISP language a little too far. A couple fundamental things that are missing are macros, tail recursion... Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, this is not how JavaScript is widely being taught and used.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh my, please hold my head up while I vomit! Are you people f*ing deluded??? How has JavaFX magically solved the problem of ridiculous loading times? I really do love Java. I do! But this is ridiculous. Hello!!! Pretending that the problem doesn't exist is not going to solve it.
Dude, you rule!
You got me. I have no idea how much power an Apple II drew. So, take a Game Boy instead of an Apple II :-)
You do know what "efficiency" means, right? Right?? :-)
These "measurements" would only make sense when playing the same latest generation game on the three consoles, looking the same on the three consoles. Or when playing the same BlueRay disk on the three consoles... What do you mean the Wii can't play HD BlueRay?
Or, lets put it another way: an Apple II also plays games and consumes a lot less power than a Wii. Is it more efficient?
Or perhaps we could divide the complexity of a game and its visual quality by the power consumption. Interesting ... the $5 watch with built-in Tetris comes out as the bestest most efficientest.
(In reality I don't own any console nor I plan to ... ever)
Amen. Mod me troll if you like, but even with the desktop version of Ubuntu I have had nothing but trouble:
- every upgrade without exception has failed and I have had to fix it manually, meaning I have lost one full work day every 6 months.
- it really has gotten progressively slower to the point where 8.04 is actually unusable on some machines. There was a recent story on Slashdot about this actually.
In our organization we are planning to migrating all Ubuntu desktops to Debian when the new stable comes out.
As for servers, I would never ever dream of putting Ubuntu on a server. What a joke. Debian has worked for our servers perfectly for years and I believe will continue to do so.
I only hope that Ubuntu doesn't completely destroy Debian by stealing mindshare away. It is paradoxical because Ubuntu does not have the capability of maintaining a whole OS on their own.
You are onto something here! :-) I tried a few other words - ass, f*ck, sh*t, etc. Surprise, surprise - they are all taken too! Sadly, none of them seem to have have any activity recently.
The truth is it is getting slower, which is causing serious problems, and is annoying the sh*t out of me.
I recently upgraded my laptop to Kubuntu 8.4. I am not imagining it - it really is noticeably slower than before. Applications start slower, there is more disk activity and the disk itself feels slower. The laptop in question has Intel Core Duo and 2 Gigs of RAM, which should be plenty.
I haven't investigated in detail why it seems so slow, but it is not something obvious: the disk UDMA is enabled, there is available RAM, there isn't a background process running and taking all CPU time.
A co-worker's computer, which is somewhat less powerful than my laptop, became practically unusable after the upgrade to Kubuntu 8.10.
So beyond mere annoyance this is creating real problems. We are seriously considering migrating all our [K]Ubuntu machines to Debian. Besides the speed, it has the important advantage that you don't need to upgrade your OS every 6 months (which is utter idiocy: I don't have time to upgrade my OS twice in a year, I have work to do. If you ask why I don't use the LTS - the previous LTS is too outdated and the new one is too slow).
Nonsense. I didn't see you write it. Brilliance means having the vision and persistence to get the job done when it needs to be done. To know what has to be done, to be able to make the right compromises, etc. Carmack really is f*ing brilliant.
Looking at the job that somebody else has done successfully and thinking that you could have done it, now that you have seen it, is ridiculous. Technically I get the same thoughts what I look at Carmack's sources (or at the Linux kernel sources for that matter). But the point is, you or I didn't write those things.
Remember, most brilliant ideas appear obvious in hindsight.
Mod parent up! He is showing considerable insight. I should add that the sense of entitlement and loose ethics are also typical of other Eastern European nations - my own in particular - which I will not mention in order to protect the guilty. Sometimes I am really ashamed of how I myself used to think about a decade ago, before I moved to the "west".
The only redeeming note here is that people do change - I have observed this in many expatriates.
Then it is clear that your son is a bot! That will teach you not to think about algorithms while having sex ... :-)
This is completely ridiculous. "Machines almost pass Turing test" my ass! The journalist who was fooled is an idiot. Am I the only one who noticed that none of these bots can answer simple questions like "what were we just talking about two sentences ago?", or solve a simple puzzle? Clearly they cannot hold the subject of the conversation, often use canned generic responses, etc. This whole thing would be a big joke, if it wasn't scary that so many people seem to be taking it seriously (but again, many people voted for Bush twice, so no big surprise).
The only way one could possibly mistake such a bot for a human is if comparing against a human who is deliberately pretending to be a machine. Which is absurd.
This direction, which I don't think justifies the label "A.I.", is completely misguided. Perhaps a fun hobby, or a primitive interactive replacement for a FAQ, but nothing more.
I wouldn't be surprised if it was possible using some kind of a hack (e.g. loading system DLL manually, invoking system calls directly, whatever), but as far as I know there isn't a "legal" way for an application to use APIs from a different subsystem. Note that you can't set more than one subsystem in the PE image.
I guess a subsystem could expose the API of another one by duplicating the calls (internally redirecting to the originals), but firstly this is not the case, and secondly it is not quite the same thing - there is no guarantee that the APIs will be kept synchronized, etc.
Generally, my understanding is that subsystems were deliberately designed to be completely isolated from one another.
Well, the strength of Cygwin has always been that you can mix Win32 and POSIX. My recollection from several years ago is that "Windows Services for Unix" was good enough to port anything POSIX to it, but since you couldn't call Win32 APIs, it was useless for interesting development.
Let me clarify a common misconception. Windows is _NOT_ POSIX compliant for all practical intents and purpose for one simple reason: an application using the POSIX subsystem doesn't have access to the Win32 subsystem, making it completely useless.
For example, you cannot use POSIX functions (fork, etc) and use Win32 GUI at the same time. Thus the need for solutions like Cygwin, which emulate POSIX with enormous performance cost.
I hope this puts the Windows POSIX compatibility myth to rest forever and nobody on SlashDot will make it ever again :-)
I trust nobody. With the prices as low as they are, everything is garbage. The "cheap computer" manufactured in China destroyed the market. I mean, what do you expect for f*cking $300 ??? Who is going to buy a PC for $2000, no matter how well built, when you have the same specs in a $800 box ? So now instead of $2000 it is going to cost you $5000.
It is all down the drain people. Or may be I am just getting too old. Note to moderators: I am not trolling, I am complaining :-)
I know a company which had to purchase batches of specialized PCs manufactured in China. They got three completely different models from three different suppliers to be safe (of course nobody knows who the real manufacturer is - quite possibly it is one and the same). More than 70% of them failed within six months !! Do you realize what the odds of this are ? A computer failing within six months ? How about _dozens_ of computers ?
To be honest though I have never had a problem with anything Dell, no matter how cheap. I feel sorry for them trying to compete at these prices and still succeeding in delivering something that doesn't fail within six months.
I saw this in several comments already. Think, people, think ! :-) How the f*ck can be considered a domain name squatter if the domain carries his own name ??
It's interesting that nobody uses Java applets much any more. It's worth understanding why that failed. But that's another subject.
It is really very simple. A Java applet takes extremely long to load even on a very fast machine. It is ridiculous. In all other respects Java applets are vastly superior to JavaScript and Flash, but who cares ? Alas, the speed of loading and initializing a JVM cannot be addressed without a major re-design of the entire language.
Is that Austria or Australia ?
Seriously though, this sucks.
This is exactly what all Windows developers need. After they had to move from one incompatible API to the next greatest one DOS->Win16->Win32(+ODBC)->OLE(+ADO)->DCOM->GDI+->.NET (or whatever), now it is time to abandon all that and start over with yet something completely different. This time it will be perfect, I promise !
Of course the submission itself is full of sensationalist crap. When I read "web based", "Windows replacement" and "virtualization" in the same article, it all becomes clear ... The only thing missing is XML! Hold on ... I've got it ! The micro-kernel will use SOAP for inter-process communication. There you go. Now it is perfect.
Work computers ? You do know that Avira is free only for personal use, right ? :-)
(The banners are indeed annoying, but I am assuming that they are not present in the paid-for version, and that is the only one that you can install on work computers)
I think we are basically in agreement.
As another poster noted, I was thinking more of Scheme, and not Lisp in general. The power of Scheme, (and what I perhaps incorrectly projected to all Lisp) lies in being able to express anything (multiple-entry-exit procedures, indexed jumps, switch/case, loops, while/break, gotos, exceptions, co-routines, etc) using just the fundamental language constructs - lambdas with tail-recursion and continuations. Perhaps more importantly, besides emulating most constructs from other languages, it allows for powerful new ways of expression which are impossible in other languages. Combine that with macros and you have the ultimate power. (Of course, it is a pity that there isn't a single usable Scheme implementation (well, probably with the exception of Bigloo http://www-sop.inria.fr/mimosa/fp/Bigloo/ )
So, from that angle, JavaScript is much closer to Java and C than Lisp-1.
On the other hand, closures and higher order functions are not necessarily Lisp specific. You can write the Y Combinator in SML, etc.
So, ANSI Common Lisp doesn't have macros now ? As far tail recursion, it is true that typical CL programming style doesn't require tail recursion, but many (most?) implementations do offer it.
Was your point that JavaScript really is CL in disguise ?
But, yes, the original poster (and the referenced links) said LISP-1 (Scheme), so I should have been more explicit.
BTW, the lack of tail recursion _and_ goto in the same language is a fundamental limitation. (I am referring to the well known paper)
But I have. If you delve deeper into LISP you will see that calling a language without tail recursion and macros LISP-like is an exaggeration ...
The links you have provided concentrate on closures, and closures, while no doubt very useful, are not the one defining characteristic of LISP. The first link (the PDF) is the only one that actually contains any data to justify the claim, but it simply ends up repeating the same thing several times for stronger effect. "Functions are first class objects" - no more than in most other languages including C. "Functions can be higher order" - duh, this is implied by closures. In short, while the individual arguments are true, the whole PDF loses credibility because it doesn't objectively discuss the important differences between LISP and JavaScript. It is not sufficient to simply emphatically claim something :-)
I do agree that JavaScript has some important LISP-like traits, and that it is more powerful than many people really realize, but calling it a LISP is just exploiting the unfortunate fact that almost nobody knows LISP.
You make be taking this claim that JavaScript is a LISP language a little too far. A couple fundamental things that are missing are macros, tail recursion ... Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, this is not how JavaScript is widely being taught and used.
In fact Java the language is absurdly primitive. The culmination of cut & paste. It is the libraries that make it bearable.
I completely agree.