Major issues I have with my half-year old Sony Ericsson W850i are that it is not really useful as a portable music playback device, since:
a) there is no Mac software for managing the music library on it
b) running its Windows software on VMWare causes kernel panic as soon as I connect my camera over USB
c) simply copying my (unprotected, self-ripped from my CDs) AAC iTunes files to the phone's memory stick results in phone's "Walkman" software playing them back in random order -- it can't preserve the album order. It doesn't have this problem with MP3 files, which leads me to believe they have troubles correctly reading AAC metadata. (I'm keeping my music in AAC 'cause they have better sound quality at the same encoding rate than MP3, if you are curious.)
Makes me wonder if at least c) is remedied with these new devices.
I'm reading Slashdot daily since, like, 2002. Lately there are lots of front page articles that point to totally worthless, totally wrong, ad bait content. This article, well, it was really a new low on dezinformation. I'm seriously starting to think "why in the world am I coming to this site, anyway?"
Yea, mod me offtopic. Too bad there's no "+1 Disillusioned"
Cry me a river. I bought a 20" iMac G5 a month before Intel Core Duo iMac came out, in december 2005. Actually, I don't regret it at all -- passed it on to my wife and bought a MacBook Pro for myself in June 2006. Mind you, it's a first-gen 1.83GHz Core Duo with 80GB HDD and 2GB RAM, and a single-layer DVD and I must say I don't feel any disadvantage whatsoever compared to current models. - I don't run my CPU at 100% if I can help it, so whether I utiliize 40% of 1.83GHz or 30% of 2.2GHz is a moot point. Similarly, 800MHz FSB isn't dramatically more than 667. - I never even saw a dual-layer DVD-R, let alone wanted to write one yet. - I never came in a close proximity of a 802.11n network - I have no idea why'd I want 64-bit processing (not being able to have more than 4GB or RAM limits the utility of being able to have more than 4GB virtual memory per process, right?). - 80GB HDD is becoming small, but I can put a bigger on in myself cheaply.
Okay, the battery life. These brand new shinies have better battery life; that's about the only thing I might be interested in.
I'm a Java developer working mostly in Eclipse on Mac OS X and deploying mostly to Linux for 4 years now.
Just recently I was helping out a member of family who had to maintain something written in C#. He uses Visual Studio Express. I however downloaded SharpDevelop (and installed it into my Windows-on-VMWare). In the course of hacking my relative's code, I've used both -- sometimes the VSE on his machine, sometimes the SD on my machine, and let me tell you, SharpDevelop simply feels much better to me. And it's a GPLed open source product.
So, abandoning VSE shouldn't be too hard. The replacement product is available - it's SharpDevelop.
Going further, who is to say that (the original) dying is such a big problem? Alternatively, who is to say it isn't?
Aside from deep philosophical questions, there are some not-so deep questions of legal nature. If the original me isn't destroyed, does the copy get to claim half (or all!) of my private property? Does it inherit my citizenship with all rights and obligations? (In particular, can we both vote and be counted as two votes?) Would it have a separate SSN?
Further still, if we ignore the problem of dying (assuming it is a problem), and pretend that teleportation "transported" you in space and time, there would still remain a slight uncertainty with regard to who it is that arrived at the other end.
Even if it were identical to you who remained in the source teleport (and assuming the original isn't destroyed), at that very moment it'd start to diverge mentally, being subject to different external influences. The longer the two consciousnesses operate separately, the more they diverge up to the point you'd no longer consider them the same person, but rather two persons who happen to be sharing common memories on a very intimate level of detail up to the point of teleportation.
In order to run the OpenOffice.org you need to have X11 installed.
Okay, so it allegedly doesn't use X11, but you still need to have it installed? I can see how this is a cheap way of getting around crashes because they forgot to remove some X11 dependency, and it's actually acceptable for alpha software, but it's still really, truly far from elegant...
I've been using VMWare Fusion beta for quite some time now, and it provides hardware-accelerated DirectX 8.1 to guest Windows OS since beta 2. So, Parallels is not the "first-mover" here
It remains to be seen which product will be first to market in a non-beta state, though.
You're wrong. "Carbon" is the collective name for all native Mac OS X APIs, see http://developer.apple.com/carbon/. Quartz, Core Data, Code Audio, etc. are all parts of the umbrella technology set called "Carbon".
"Cocoa" OTOH is a handy Objective-C object-oriented abstraction layer atop of that, which is supposed to make development of applications easier. In Windows terms, Cocoa is to Carbon as MFC was to Win32 - an OO encapsulation of the API with convenience goodies. But you can program directly for Carbon if you wish, in the end you have the same capabilities available to your code, it just usually takes less time and lines of code to use Cocoa than Carbon directly. Therefore, it is a perfect solution for you app that you build from scratch. If you're however porting an existing app and it's not trivial to sneak in Objective-C into it, you'd probably go the Carbon route. Nothing to frown upon:-)
The misunderstanding comes from Apple's advertized "carbonization" of OS 9 apps ("you need to use Carbon to have your apps run on Mac OS X"). What it really meant was - replace QuickDraw calls with Quartz calls in your source code etc. Carbon is *THE* Mac OS X API, not some transitional support layer for OS 9 migration.
were used to teleport information between telescopes on the two islands.
They used photons to transfer data between two telescopes? Wow. Transmitting data to an optical receiver using - light! I would've never thought of that. Some Greeks few thousands year ago did this with mirrors and sunlight though.
(Before you mod me down, yes, I'm aware what's the real news here. Too bad the Slashdot summary turned out both braindead and utterly wrong.)
All my life (well, since I own computer displays, that is), I'm ready to bite off people's fingers if they touch the display. Fingers leave grease marks.
I just can't imagine myself interfacing with my machine by smudging grease on the display.
If I understand it correctly, merely running VB.NET apps on Mono was possible even before this. If you compiled your VB.NET application on Windows to CIL, you could run the compiled app on Linux with Mono since Day One, couldn't you?
What I believe is new is that you can now also compile VB.NET source code on Linux using Mono, basically making it possible to completely circumvent Microsoft tools (namely, their VB compiler).
What can I tell you -- I have a 1.83 GHz 15" MBP, and am not feeling my hardware got obsoleted at all, let's see a quick comparison:
- dual layer DVD burner. Given the prices of dual-layer DVD discs, I don't think I'll need this in any reasonable timeframe.
- FW-800 port. Wouldn't really be using it. Even my external HDD only has a FW-400 connector. If you're doing lots of video, you might need it though.
- 3GB max RAM. Well, you might need that one, but for *most* usage scenarios, 2GB is plenty. I'm running with 1.5GB right now, having lots of processes running while I develop and test software (Java development environment, MySQL, a JMS server, few HTTP servers), and MenuMeters shows I usually still have 400-500 MB free memory (actually inactive+free combined). Of course, if you're doing video processing, you might need it, otherwise not likely.
- 64-bit CPU. Even 32-bit ones can address 4GB of RAM, and even in the new MBPs you can't stick more than 3GB, so a 32-bit CPU isn't a limitation when it comes to handling physical RAM. Tiger is not-so-much 64 bit (64-bit processes can't interact with graphics subsystem) to make a real difference, although I heard Leopard will change that. I happen to have an iMac G5 too, which is 64-bit, and honestly, I don't feel any benefit from having a 64-bit CPU there.
- Faster CPU, bigger L2 cache: I rarely max out the CPU, so it doesn't make much difference if I'm using 30% of a 1.83 GHz or 25% of a 2.16 GHz on average. Bigger L2 cache probably helps a bit, but even 2MB in Core Duo is a huge improvement over 512K in PowerBooks (and G5 iMacs). The overall speed of all my Apple machines seems moslty limited by the disk I/O. Actually, since in the end all I/O is done by the microkernel, I often have situation where the whole machine freezes for few moments if any process is driving heavy disk I/O in microkernel. This seems like an inherent design problem with microkernel architectures to me, and until Apple figures out how to improve on that, I won't get excited about faster CPUs, since right now, the bottleneck is elsewhere. On an unrelated note, I have no idea how does the new CPU relate to battery lifetime, but I know that with conservative settings (low brightness, wireless and bluetooth off) I can get 3.5-4 hours out of my current MBP. I'll be curious to see what people with new MBPs get.
So, all-in-all, I don't feel like I'm missing out on anything by having a "plain" Core Duo MBP instead of the new Core 2 Duos.
The screenshots in the article slideshow indicate that the particular live botnet operation they used as illustration is most likely serbian.
The word "KPAJNHA" occurring in a IRC server name is actually the serbian word "KRAJINA" writen in cyrillic, using latin alphabet characters to represent similar cyrillic characters (P for R, N for I, H for N). "krajina" translates roughly to "shire" or "county" in serbian and "Krajina" with capital K was also the name of the ill-fated rogue serbian republic that existed on croatian soil between 1991-1995. In another screenshot we see an IRC channel named "armija" which is serbian for "army" -- I can imagine an operator would name his swarm of bots an "army".
Good thing this came to light before anyone spent money on buying a Zune. I guess, if you posess (not own, but just posess mind you) a big library of DRM-ed files, you could be smart about it and not buy a player that doesn't support it.
Of course, if you were stupid enough to shell out money for DRM-ed files, you might be stupid enough to buy an incompatible player too.
Incidentally, I was re-reading (and reading anew some of) the Gibson books I own a copy of during my summer vacations this year.
As far as "The Sprawl" trilogy goes I'd say "Mona Lisa Overdrive" gives about as much reading pleasure as "Neuromancer" did ("Neuromancer" still having the definite advantage of creating the genre), "Count Zero" is somewhat weaker but still worth it.
"Mona Lisa Overdrive"'s got some of the funniest dialogue lines I ever came across in a Gibson book, mostly by Sally/Molly, including but not limited to "No, fuck, I'm abducting you."
As for the "Virtual Light"/"Idoru"/"All Tomorrow's Parties": "All Tomorrow's Parties" turned out not to be page-turner to me, and frankly, I felt a bit disappointed when it ended, I kept waiting for the story to get good all the time I was reading it, and then it suddenly ended:-). I remember that I didn't find "Virtual Light" to be much good either, but it's at least ten years since I read it. I haven't read "Idoru" - I don't own a copy.
Oh, there's "Pattern Recognition" too, which to me personally was a struggle to read through (even if my sig is a paraphrase of a sentence from it). Similar to "All Tomorrow's Parties" I felt it's not as much a story, but rather a portrait of a society Gibson sees/imagines, with characters and story just serving a supporting role.
At the moment, I'm reading The Difference Engine, but it'd be too early to draw a conclusion on it. Its premise is quite weird, admittedly.
There's also a collection of short stories, "Burning Chrome" - now that one does have some real gems in it and is definitely worth a read.
Looking back at this inventory, it looks like I gave more bad grades than good grades - and there I thought I'm a Gibson fan:-)
functional programming is finally going to come out as a reasonable paradigm over the next 10 years as it will be best able to take advantage of multi-core systems without completely upheaving how you write programs
YourKit, hands down, at least for memory profiling. When I was debugging few particularly nasty cases of memory leaks ( see http://www.szegedi.org/articles/memleak.html) it was the only profiler that got the Java Memory Model assumptions right, i.e.
didn't think static fields are GC roots (they aren't, they are reachable through classes, and classes are not GC roots, unless loaded by system classloader)
recognized that classes keep a strong reference to their classloader
recognized that array classes keep a strong reference to the classloader of their component type
and maybe few others.
I've tried OptimizeIt, JProbe, HAT (I even submitted patches to it to recognize some of the above), Eclipsecolorer, and YourKit in the past, and found that YourKit is the best for me.
I wonder how much compiler optimizations contribute to the performance differences. I mean, stock PPC binaries for commercial apps and even Mac OS X clearly can't be fully optimized for G5 given that they need to run on G3 and G4 processors as well.
Looking at default XCode settings for "Cocoa Application" project template, it defaults to instruction scheduling optimization for G4, not G5, although you can switch it to G5 (that equals -mtune=970 in GCC). In XCode, the GCC switch for enabling G5 specific instructions isn't even easily accessible! You need to rewrite the architecture string from the generic "ppc" to "ppc970", and sneak in the "-mcpu=970" in the "Other C flags" setting, all manually -- XCode GUI won't assist you in any of this. Then again, probably no commercial software out there utilizes these settings in order for their software to be able to run on a pre-G5 CPU as well.
What'd be interesting if it'd be possible to build "Universal binaries" that not only carry two code versions - generic PPC and Intel, but three of them: generic PCC, G5, and Intel. I'm not sure this wouldn't work: universal binaries are built with architecture string "ppc i386", and they build if I modify it to "ppc ppc970 i386". I have no idea though how could I detect that I now actually have a three-code-version binary, as well as to detect if indeed "ppc970" is being loaded on a G5 machine in Mac OS X.
OTOH, Intel binaries can be fully optimized for the Core Duo CPU, as there's no compatibility baggage there.
Slashdot Mirror
Major issues I have with my half-year old Sony Ericsson W850i are that it is not really useful as a portable music playback device, since:
a) there is no Mac software for managing the music library on it
b) running its Windows software on VMWare causes kernel panic as soon as I connect my camera over USB
c) simply copying my (unprotected, self-ripped from my CDs) AAC iTunes files to the phone's memory stick results in phone's "Walkman" software playing them back in random order -- it can't preserve the album order. It doesn't have this problem with MP3 files, which leads me to believe they have troubles correctly reading AAC metadata. (I'm keeping my music in AAC 'cause they have better sound quality at the same encoding rate than MP3, if you are curious.)
Makes me wonder if at least c) is remedied with these new devices.
I'm reading Slashdot daily since, like, 2002. Lately there are lots of front page articles that point to totally worthless, totally wrong, ad bait content. This article, well, it was really a new low on dezinformation. I'm seriously starting to think "why in the world am I coming to this site, anyway?"
Yea, mod me offtopic. Too bad there's no "+1 Disillusioned"
Cry me a river. I bought a 20" iMac G5 a month before Intel Core Duo iMac came out, in december 2005. Actually, I don't regret it at all -- passed it on to my wife and bought a MacBook Pro for myself in June 2006. Mind you, it's a first-gen 1.83GHz Core Duo with 80GB HDD and 2GB RAM, and a single-layer DVD and I must say I don't feel any disadvantage whatsoever compared to current models.
- I don't run my CPU at 100% if I can help it, so whether I utiliize 40% of 1.83GHz or 30% of 2.2GHz is a moot point. Similarly, 800MHz FSB isn't dramatically more than 667.
- I never even saw a dual-layer DVD-R, let alone wanted to write one yet.
- I never came in a close proximity of a 802.11n network
- I have no idea why'd I want 64-bit processing (not being able to have more than 4GB or RAM limits the utility of being able to have more than 4GB virtual memory per process, right?).
- 80GB HDD is becoming small, but I can put a bigger on in myself cheaply.
Okay, the battery life. These brand new shinies have better battery life; that's about the only thing I might be interested in.
I'm a Java developer working mostly in Eclipse on Mac OS X and deploying mostly to Linux for 4 years now.
Just recently I was helping out a member of family who had to maintain something written in C#. He uses Visual Studio Express. I however downloaded SharpDevelop (and installed it into my Windows-on-VMWare). In the course of hacking my relative's code, I've used both -- sometimes the VSE on his machine, sometimes the SD on my machine, and let me tell you, SharpDevelop simply feels much better to me. And it's a GPLed open source product.
So, abandoning VSE shouldn't be too hard. The replacement product is available - it's SharpDevelop.
I'd lure a particularly annoying in-law into it.
I've been using VMWare Fusion beta for quite some time now, and it provides hardware-accelerated DirectX 8.1 to guest Windows OS since beta 2. So, Parallels is not the "first-mover" here
It remains to be seen which product will be first to market in a non-beta state, though.
You're wrong. "Carbon" is the collective name for all native Mac OS X APIs, see http://developer.apple.com/carbon/. Quartz, Core Data, Code Audio, etc. are all parts of the umbrella technology set called "Carbon". "Cocoa" OTOH is a handy Objective-C object-oriented abstraction layer atop of that, which is supposed to make development of applications easier. In Windows terms, Cocoa is to Carbon as MFC was to Win32 - an OO encapsulation of the API with convenience goodies. But you can program directly for Carbon if you wish, in the end you have the same capabilities available to your code, it just usually takes less time and lines of code to use Cocoa than Carbon directly. Therefore, it is a perfect solution for you app that you build from scratch. If you're however porting an existing app and it's not trivial to sneak in Objective-C into it, you'd probably go the Carbon route. Nothing to frown upon :-)
The misunderstanding comes from Apple's advertized "carbonization" of OS 9 apps ("you need to use Carbon to have your apps run on Mac OS X"). What it really meant was - replace QuickDraw calls with Quartz calls in your source code etc. Carbon is *THE* Mac OS X API, not some transitional support layer for OS 9 migration.
All my life (well, since I own computer displays, that is), I'm ready to bite off people's fingers if they touch the display. Fingers leave grease marks.
I just can't imagine myself interfacing with my machine by smudging grease on the display.
If I understand it correctly, merely running VB.NET apps on Mono was possible even before this. If you compiled your VB.NET application on Windows to CIL, you could run the compiled app on Linux with Mono since Day One, couldn't you?
What I believe is new is that you can now also compile VB.NET source code on Linux using Mono, basically making it possible to completely circumvent Microsoft tools (namely, their VB compiler).
What can I tell you -- I have a 1.83 GHz 15" MBP, and am not feeling my hardware got obsoleted at all, let's see a quick comparison:
- dual layer DVD burner. Given the prices of dual-layer DVD discs, I don't think I'll need this in any reasonable timeframe.
- FW-800 port. Wouldn't really be using it. Even my external HDD only has a FW-400 connector. If you're doing lots of video, you might need it though.
- 3GB max RAM. Well, you might need that one, but for *most* usage scenarios, 2GB is plenty. I'm running with 1.5GB right now, having lots of processes running while I develop and test software (Java development environment, MySQL, a JMS server, few HTTP servers), and MenuMeters shows I usually still have 400-500 MB free memory (actually inactive+free combined). Of course, if you're doing video processing, you might need it, otherwise not likely.
- 64-bit CPU. Even 32-bit ones can address 4GB of RAM, and even in the new MBPs you can't stick more than 3GB, so a 32-bit CPU isn't a limitation when it comes to handling physical RAM. Tiger is not-so-much 64 bit (64-bit processes can't interact with graphics subsystem) to make a real difference, although I heard Leopard will change that. I happen to have an iMac G5 too, which is 64-bit, and honestly, I don't feel any benefit from having a 64-bit CPU there.
- Faster CPU, bigger L2 cache: I rarely max out the CPU, so it doesn't make much difference if I'm using 30% of a 1.83 GHz or 25% of a 2.16 GHz on average. Bigger L2 cache probably helps a bit, but even 2MB in Core Duo is a huge improvement over 512K in PowerBooks (and G5 iMacs). The overall speed of all my Apple machines seems moslty limited by the disk I/O. Actually, since in the end all I/O is done by the microkernel, I often have situation where the whole machine freezes for few moments if any process is driving heavy disk I/O in microkernel. This seems like an inherent design problem with microkernel architectures to me, and until Apple figures out how to improve on that, I won't get excited about faster CPUs, since right now, the bottleneck is elsewhere. On an unrelated note, I have no idea how does the new CPU relate to battery lifetime, but I know that with conservative settings (low brightness, wireless and bluetooth off) I can get 3.5-4 hours out of my current MBP. I'll be curious to see what people with new MBPs get.
So, all-in-all, I don't feel like I'm missing out on anything by having a "plain" Core Duo MBP instead of the new Core 2 Duos.
Fortunately, they didn't delete Japanese Algorithm Dance http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YhuiDjiBigs :-)
The screenshots in the article slideshow indicate that the particular live botnet operation they used as illustration is most likely serbian.
The word "KPAJNHA" occurring in a IRC server name is actually the serbian word "KRAJINA" writen in cyrillic, using latin alphabet characters to represent similar cyrillic characters (P for R, N for I, H for N). "krajina" translates roughly to "shire" or "county" in serbian and "Krajina" with capital K was also the name of the ill-fated rogue serbian republic that existed on croatian soil between 1991-1995. In another screenshot we see an IRC channel named "armija" which is serbian for "army" -- I can imagine an operator would name his swarm of bots an "army".
Good thing this came to light before anyone spent money on buying a Zune. I guess, if you posess (not own, but just posess mind you) a big library of DRM-ed files, you could be smart about it and not buy a player that doesn't support it.
Of course, if you were stupid enough to shell out money for DRM-ed files, you might be stupid enough to buy an incompatible player too.
Incidentally, I was re-reading (and reading anew some of) the Gibson books I own a copy of during my summer vacations this year.
:-). I remember that I didn't find "Virtual Light" to be much good either, but it's at least ten years since I read it. I haven't read "Idoru" - I don't own a copy.
:-)
As far as "The Sprawl" trilogy goes I'd say "Mona Lisa Overdrive" gives about as much reading pleasure as "Neuromancer" did ("Neuromancer" still having the definite advantage of creating the genre), "Count Zero" is somewhat weaker but still worth it.
"Mona Lisa Overdrive"'s got some of the funniest dialogue lines I ever came across in a Gibson book, mostly by Sally/Molly, including but not limited to "No, fuck, I'm abducting you."
As for the "Virtual Light"/"Idoru"/"All Tomorrow's Parties": "All Tomorrow's Parties" turned out not to be page-turner to me, and frankly, I felt a bit disappointed when it ended, I kept waiting for the story to get good all the time I was reading it, and then it suddenly ended
Oh, there's "Pattern Recognition" too, which to me personally was a struggle to read through (even if my sig is a paraphrase of a sentence from it). Similar to "All Tomorrow's Parties" I felt it's not as much a story, but rather a portrait of a society Gibson sees/imagines, with characters and story just serving a supporting role.
At the moment, I'm reading The Difference Engine, but it'd be too early to draw a conclusion on it. Its premise is quite weird, admittedly.
There's also a collection of short stories, "Burning Chrome" - now that one does have some real gems in it and is definitely worth a read.
Looking back at this inventory, it looks like I gave more bad grades than good grades - and there I thought I'm a Gibson fan
Seconded. Here's an account of my first use of Shark (and XCode) that helped me speed up a program by a factor of 4: http://constc.blogspot.com/2006/01/taking-out-pain -from-c-development-on.html
- didn't think static fields are GC roots (they aren't, they are reachable through classes, and classes are not GC roots, unless loaded by system classloader)
- recognized that classes keep a strong reference to their classloader
- recognized that array classes keep a strong reference to the classloader of their component type
and maybe few others.I've tried OptimizeIt, JProbe, HAT (I even submitted patches to it to recognize some of the above), Eclipsecolorer, and YourKit in the past, and found that YourKit is the best for me.
Where are my mod points when I need them?
The price comparison page http://store.apple.com/Catalog/US/Images/compariso n_chart.html says "glossy display option" for MacBook Pros, so I think your wish is granted :-)
Cory Doctorow has a short story on this very topic, called "Printcrime" http://www.craphound.com/000573.html.
Wow, an iPod G5. Doesn't it run a little bit hot? Also, be aware that it might soon be obsoleted by an iPod Intel Core Duo.
Looking at default XCode settings for "Cocoa Application" project template, it defaults to instruction scheduling optimization for G4, not G5, although you can switch it to G5 (that equals -mtune=970 in GCC). In XCode, the GCC switch for enabling G5 specific instructions isn't even easily accessible! You need to rewrite the architecture string from the generic "ppc" to "ppc970", and sneak in the "-mcpu=970" in the "Other C flags" setting, all manually -- XCode GUI won't assist you in any of this. Then again, probably no commercial software out there utilizes these settings in order for their software to be able to run on a pre-G5 CPU as well.
What'd be interesting if it'd be possible to build "Universal binaries" that not only carry two code versions - generic PPC and Intel, but three of them: generic PCC, G5, and Intel. I'm not sure this wouldn't work: universal binaries are built with architecture string "ppc i386", and they build if I modify it to "ppc ppc970 i386". I have no idea though how could I detect that I now actually have a three-code-version binary, as well as to detect if indeed "ppc970" is being loaded on a G5 machine in Mac OS X.
OTOH, Intel binaries can be fully optimized for the Core Duo CPU, as there's no compatibility baggage there.