At the risk of feeding an obvious troll, who decides who gets how big a share, and who anointed that person the Arbiter of Shares?
The Government, and We The People.
That's how it goes right now, actually, since any set of laws - or the absence of any - always favours one set of people over another.
As an example: One of the Scandinavian countries tried a very egalitarian experiment.
I like how this is starting: an unnamed town in an unnamed country in an unnamed time period made an experiment. That should prevent anyone from checking the facts and seeing if they agree with the anecdote.
Guess who became, overnight, the most powerful man in town, with the hottest, most desirable women in town immediately ready and willing to do WHATEVER he wanted, in the hopes of getting a nice apartment?
I live in Scandinavia, and have never heard of anything like this happening. Also, all of Scandinavian countries are small enough to drive across in a single day, so I find it very hard to believe that anyone would be obsessed with living at city center, rather than the surrounding countryside. Also, most apartments around here aren't rented, but rather owned by their residents.
So, care to give references, or did you pull this out of your ass?
There is, however, a limit on how far Wal-Mart can cut salaries: if they cut too far, employees notice that they can get paid better working for, say, CostCo, or slinging burgers at McNasty's, and they vote with their feet. There's a balancing act in there.
Except that McNasty and CostCo are also cutting salaries. After all, we have massive unemployment, and thus a surplus of labour, which means that its costs will fall. Why do you think Wal-Mart and its ilk want to remove minimum wage laws?
The real balancing act is that pushing people to the point where they can't afford food anymore causes them to resort to violence, first in scattered riots and then in an organized manner (unions). This is what led to minimum wage laws in the first place, and will restore them should W-M be succesful in having them removed; the only question is how many people get hurt this time around.
Personally, I root for the home team regardless. It's a Hobbesian war of all vs. all, not some United Federation of Planets, kid.
Hobbes mainly concerned himself with the question of how to avoid things from coming to that, since it leads to lives that are "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short". This, of course, doesn't stop malicious imbeciles from referencing him in vain attempts to justify contributing to the problem.
And if it's really all vs. all, then there's no "home team", now is there?
If a nuke goes off in a US city, we have an excuse for stalling on identifying who's responsible while politicians have a knee-jerk reaction and send US soldiers (or missiles, or UAV's) off on another enormously profitable foreign adventure.
Which is probably preferable to correctly identifying which nuclear power the bomb was stolen from and attacking them instead.
Er, wasn't half the problem with the banking crisis that the people getting paid big bucks to take risky decisions *didn't* have to deal with the pain if the shit hit the fan, although they got their money if everything was okay?
And the other half was that they got their money even if everything wasn't okay. But I guess personal responsibility is for the serfs, not lords...
When do we move on from whether or not the planet is warming up to why it's warming up?
Presumably once oil companies's astroturfers give up claiming it's not as a lost cause and retreat to their second line of defence. Shouldn't take long anymore
The simple fact is, we still don't know very much about how the Earth's climate regulates itself.
So therefore, because we don't have absolute certainty, let's continue as we have on the off chance that it'll be okay. Also, let's do some irrelevant car analogies to pass the time.
That pretty much sums up the anthropogenic global warming sceptic position. Any sceptic care to summarize the AGW proponent position, so we can get to the real meat of this conversation: the insane conspiracy theories involving an evil secret empire consisting of all of the world's climatologists fighting the brave band of climate rebels backed up by the poor and weak oil companies.
Under what conditions would you believe a scientist who presented findings about man-induced global warming?
I suspect the answer is "none". This is not about having reasonable doubts about whether some particular theory is correct, this is about finding some excuse to disbelieve something you don't want to believe, because to believe it would suggest a course of action "global warming sceptics" find undesirable.
No. Auto garbage collectors can use reference counting. But when the programmer is using it it is most certainly manual. Obj-C/Cocoa has always used reference counting, but no one would say it had automatic memory management until the GC was introduced recently.
The former is manual reference counting, the latter is automatic.
Circular references are not a problem. Circular references can be unlinked by the programmer just as easily as they've been linked. The only reason they are a problem for GCs is that they break cascading deallocs.
Circular references are not a problem for GCs. They are only a problem for reference counting, since the count never goes to zero for any object in the cycle.
You do realize that reference counting and garbage collection are different algorithms, right?
In a manual reference counted system, if a programmer leaves a circular reference undeleted when it's no longer needed, that's simply a bug caused by his oversight, not a limitation of the system, as it would be for a GC.
Obviously any mistake is a programmer mistake in a manually managed system.
I'm afraid it only proves that you are not familiar with manual reference counting.
Could be. I prefer using garbage collected languages, after all:).
If your sole measure of quality is gameplay (and that's a damn good thing to base your judgment of a game on incidentally) then you don't need any of the above. Hell, there are games made fifteen years ago I still play. Bells and whistles don't age as well as core game mechanics.
However, bells and whistles are necessary to represent those core mechanics in an appealing manner. Many older games have awful interfaces, and most sprite-based ones run into the problem of low resolution making it hard to figure out what's happening since everything becomes a pixelated mess.
Because otherwise, the cost of making games gets spread around that many less legitimate customers, and I think the people who do pay have a right to be a little pissed off paying for someone else to play for free.
60 dollars for a single game is too much. At this point, even if BitTorrent were to disappear entirely, sales would not go up. People simply don't have that kind of money to spend on entertainment. So please don't pretend that you are paying for the pirates; you aren't, you are paying for the development costs.
Game development costs have gotten completely out of hand while quality tends towards mediocre, and the result will be the same it has been before: a market crash.
Obj-C on Cocoa uses manual reference counting. If you are interested in an object you retain it (increase the reference count by one.) If you create, copy or retain an object, then you release it. When everyone has released it, it is freed.
Reference counting is a form of automatic, not manual, memory management. It also requires memory and has an overhead - all those counts need to be kept somewhere and updated. It also can't deal with cyclic references without the programmer manually using soft references. On the good side, it frees objects - and calls any associated destructors - as soon as possible, and doesn't require reading through the whole memory space like GC does. Ref counting is optimized for low, predictable latency, while GC is (usually) optimized for correctness and throughput.
In other words, you aren't arguing for manual memory management here, you're arguing for one automation technique over another. That kinda proves my original point:).
If the VM can grow to use all available memory, that threshold won't ever be reached, until java is taking over all physical memory: even with the limit it tends to do so anyways, but i'm just saying.....
*Sigh*
If you run out of memory, perform garbage collection. If you still don't have enough memory to satisfy an allocation request, allocate more from the OS. Also, if it's been less than a certain treshold, allocate anyway. If it's been more than a certain other treshold, and you have enough memory to perform the allocation, release memory to the OS.
And if this was really too difficult for you to figure out, you shouldn't be allowed anywhere near C/C++.
It was poor planning on the specification of the JVM that there is not a standard way to specify the requested heap size.
It was poor planning on the implementation of the JVM that the heap size needs to be specified. I'd understand if it was a matter of optimization: request a specific heap size right from the beginning to avoid garbage collecting as often. However, if the choice is between throwing an OutOfMemoryError or growing the heap size, the default should be to grow the damn heap, and only throw the error if that fails.
The only reason I can imagine why anyone could possibly consider this a good idea is that garbage collection and swap interact badly, but surely it's better that the application trashes than outright dies? Unless, of course, we have a memory leak, but surely that would be the expection rather than the norm?
And why is GC allowed on the Android platform, whose applications are written in Java, and run flawlessly on hardware which costs half as much as the one of the iPhone?
How do you know how much iPhone's hardware costs, as opposed to the Apple logo?
But programmers are probably better at releasing garbage promptly than garbage collectors.
For trivial applications with exactly one developer, that might be true. For anything more complex than that, you run into problems of who should free what when.
Or, in other words: top 1% of programmers might be able to do better than compilers, but for the rest 99% of you, please use all the help you can.
So manual memory management will generally need less memory than GCs.
Actually, no: garbage collected languages can compact the heap, while manually managed can't. That means that a garbage collector has potentially smaller memory usage than a manually managed one, where heap fragmentation tends to cause gaps of wasted memory to appear.
The real problem with garbage collection is its interaction with swap/cache: full garbage collection basically requires going through all application memory in random order, following all pointers to objects, then all pointers in them, and so forth. As a result, it requires reading a lot of stuff to either main memory or caches, most of which is not accessed again anytime soon.
From the bug reports I gather that in this specific case, the problematic checks were a workaround for other JVMs that did not implement a specific option ("-XX:MaxPermSize=256m") and did not start at all when it was used.
According to docs, MaxPermSize is "Size of the Permanent Generation". So... Why does Eclipse care about this? In my experience needing any of the XX options to work, as opposed to Xmx (which sets the maximum memory the VM will allocate), is a sign of the program breaking Java Memory Model - in other words, a (stupid) bug.
So, how old is the oldest piece of software in this download? Now, how old are the pyramids of Egypt?
Older than the world, according to Young Earth Creationists;).
How much other software was created in the same time frame as the stuff in this download? How much of that is still available?
Most of it, I'd imagine. Dunno about anyone else, but I still have diskettes from NES era. And of course, once I switched to hard drives, I began copying the contents of the old drive to the new one whenever I switched.
Here, for example, is a site that offers general-purpose C-64 software for download.
Maybe you don't understand that the games in that download only represent a tiny fraction of all of the things that were produced in that time frame. When I said it is not practical to preserve everything, I meant everything, not just video games.
Understood. However, whether it's technologically feasible to store everything and whether someone actually went to the bother of storing every single thing in pre-Internet times are two different things.
I'm basically arguing that storage capacity grows faster than human ability to produce culture, since the former is a function of technology while the latter is a function of the number of people in existence.
See, I don't get that. *Nothing* beats the old ones? Mass Effect.
OK as a game, but it's really the story and universe that drive it.
Heavy Rain. Limbo. Civilization. Starcraft II.
Isn't Civilization quite a bit older than the rest of these ?-) It was released at 1991, after all...
Silly Wii party games. WOW. Western RPGs. Japanese RPGs.
All of these, with the expection of WoW, are game genres. In fact Western RPGs are amongst the oldest games (Colossal Cave Adventure), and Japanese ones date to the NES era.
And party games existed before Wii. In fact Pinball dates back to 1777 (!)
The range is enormous. There's so many games out these days that there has to be something for everyone.
True, however the size and scope of modern games tends to work against them. An old classic had so few elements it could get everything perfect; a modern game almost certainly has problems in some aspects simply because there's so bloody many of them.
Also, old games were relatively cheap to make, while all the bling - and the actual gameplay, too - requires a lot of money. This, in turn, means that it pretty much takes the resources of a corporation to make a game, and since corporations are huge organizations, they tend towards mediocrity. Add the fact that games are an artform, and art and beancounting don't tend to mix well yet the latter is absolutely unavoidable to produce a modern game with a $10,000,000+ budget, and of course we don't get as many true game-changers as we used to.
Well, that and the fact that games were younger then, and fewer of them had and were being released, so of course it was easier to stand apart from the crowd.
Well, everyone except those weirdos who don't like to play games. Ever meet one of those? Seriously, what's up with those poeple? Not even card games or checkers. It's like they are missing some part of what makes us human.:-\
Good luck finding Action Maxx emulators or ROMs. You needed a VCR to play.
Here, emulator and all released games. It took all of 2 minutes of Googling "Action Maxx" and following a link from the Wikipedia entry, which was the first hit.
I have a few hundred C-64 games in my attic. They won't go out of copyright until, what, 2100? Maybe longer if there are more copyright extensions.
Disney doesn't look like it's going to go bankrupt anytime soon.
So, I copy them, then what? I have to hang on to them for another 90 years before I can give a copy to a museum to preserve?
Or you could simply screw copyright and put a torrent on the Pirate Bay. If you are afraid of copyright cartels coming after you, you could use Freenet.
Museums are places to keep old physical items; for computer games, the best way is to simply let anyone who pleases copies for themselves and run them with an emulator./p
If there are 700 violations of safety regulations that someone approved of, which let an oil platform rot to the point where it exploded killing 10, why are they not liable for manslaughter?
Because they are rich enough to own an oil platform.
Everyone is equal before the law, but some are more equal than others.
Except they mentioned possible exceptions for small businesses...which to me, means they ARE considering forcing these regulations on NON-govt. websites.
Then again, big business is pretty much running the government nowadays, so legislating accordingly might be seen as the appropriate course of action.
Slashdot Mirror
The Government, and We The People.
That's how it goes right now, actually, since any set of laws - or the absence of any - always favours one set of people over another.
I like how this is starting: an unnamed town in an unnamed country in an unnamed time period made an experiment. That should prevent anyone from checking the facts and seeing if they agree with the anecdote.
I live in Scandinavia, and have never heard of anything like this happening. Also, all of Scandinavian countries are small enough to drive across in a single day, so I find it very hard to believe that anyone would be obsessed with living at city center, rather than the surrounding countryside. Also, most apartments around here aren't rented, but rather owned by their residents.
So, care to give references, or did you pull this out of your ass?
Except that McNasty and CostCo are also cutting salaries. After all, we have massive unemployment, and thus a surplus of labour, which means that its costs will fall. Why do you think Wal-Mart and its ilk want to remove minimum wage laws?
The real balancing act is that pushing people to the point where they can't afford food anymore causes them to resort to violence, first in scattered riots and then in an organized manner (unions). This is what led to minimum wage laws in the first place, and will restore them should W-M be succesful in having them removed; the only question is how many people get hurt this time around.
Hobbes mainly concerned himself with the question of how to avoid things from coming to that, since it leads to lives that are "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short". This, of course, doesn't stop malicious imbeciles from referencing him in vain attempts to justify contributing to the problem.
And if it's really all vs. all, then there's no "home team", now is there?
Which is probably preferable to correctly identifying which nuclear power the bomb was stolen from and attacking them instead.
And the other half was that they got their money even if everything wasn't okay. But I guess personal responsibility is for the serfs, not lords...
Presumably once oil companies's astroturfers give up claiming it's not as a lost cause and retreat to their second line of defence. Shouldn't take long anymore
So therefore, because we don't have absolute certainty, let's continue as we have on the off chance that it'll be okay. Also, let's do some irrelevant car analogies to pass the time.
That pretty much sums up the anthropogenic global warming sceptic position. Any sceptic care to summarize the AGW proponent position, so we can get to the real meat of this conversation: the insane conspiracy theories involving an evil secret empire consisting of all of the world's climatologists fighting the brave band of climate rebels backed up by the poor and weak oil companies.
I suspect the answer is "none". This is not about having reasonable doubts about whether some particular theory is correct, this is about finding some excuse to disbelieve something you don't want to believe, because to believe it would suggest a course of action "global warming sceptics" find undesirable.
Do you use something like
obj.increaseRefCount();
obj2 = obj;
obj2.doSomething(); obj2.decreaseRefCount(); obj2 = null;
or
obj2 = obj; obj2.doSomething(); obj2 = null;
The former is manual reference counting, the latter is automatic.
Circular references are not a problem for GCs. They are only a problem for reference counting, since the count never goes to zero for any object in the cycle.
You do realize that reference counting and garbage collection are different algorithms, right?
Obviously any mistake is a programmer mistake in a manually managed system.
Could be. I prefer using garbage collected languages, after all :).
However, bells and whistles are necessary to represent those core mechanics in an appealing manner. Many older games have awful interfaces, and most sprite-based ones run into the problem of low resolution making it hard to figure out what's happening since everything becomes a pixelated mess.
60 dollars for a single game is too much. At this point, even if BitTorrent were to disappear entirely, sales would not go up. People simply don't have that kind of money to spend on entertainment. So please don't pretend that you are paying for the pirates; you aren't, you are paying for the development costs.
Game development costs have gotten completely out of hand while quality tends towards mediocre, and the result will be the same it has been before: a market crash.
Reference counting is a form of automatic, not manual, memory management. It also requires memory and has an overhead - all those counts need to be kept somewhere and updated. It also can't deal with cyclic references without the programmer manually using soft references. On the good side, it frees objects - and calls any associated destructors - as soon as possible, and doesn't require reading through the whole memory space like GC does. Ref counting is optimized for low, predictable latency, while GC is (usually) optimized for correctness and throughput.
In other words, you aren't arguing for manual memory management here, you're arguing for one automation technique over another. That kinda proves my original point :).
*Sigh*
If you run out of memory, perform garbage collection. If you still don't have enough memory to satisfy an allocation request, allocate more from the OS. Also, if it's been less than a certain treshold, allocate anyway. If it's been more than a certain other treshold, and you have enough memory to perform the allocation, release memory to the OS.
And if this was really too difficult for you to figure out, you shouldn't be allowed anywhere near C/C++.
It was poor planning on the implementation of the JVM that the heap size needs to be specified. I'd understand if it was a matter of optimization: request a specific heap size right from the beginning to avoid garbage collecting as often. However, if the choice is between throwing an OutOfMemoryError or growing the heap size, the default should be to grow the damn heap, and only throw the error if that fails.
The only reason I can imagine why anyone could possibly consider this a good idea is that garbage collection and swap interact badly, but surely it's better that the application trashes than outright dies? Unless, of course, we have a memory leak, but surely that would be the expection rather than the norm?
I guess we just identified the true source of the bug.
Seriously, who's the lazerbrain who thought it would be a good idea to implement memory limits as a default?
How do you know how much iPhone's hardware costs, as opposed to the Apple logo?
For trivial applications with exactly one developer, that might be true. For anything more complex than that, you run into problems of who should free what when.
Or, in other words: top 1% of programmers might be able to do better than compilers, but for the rest 99% of you, please use all the help you can.
Actually, no: garbage collected languages can compact the heap, while manually managed can't. That means that a garbage collector has potentially smaller memory usage than a manually managed one, where heap fragmentation tends to cause gaps of wasted memory to appear.
The real problem with garbage collection is its interaction with swap/cache: full garbage collection basically requires going through all application memory in random order, following all pointers to objects, then all pointers in them, and so forth. As a result, it requires reading a lot of stuff to either main memory or caches, most of which is not accessed again anytime soon.
According to docs, MaxPermSize is "Size of the Permanent Generation". So... Why does Eclipse care about this? In my experience needing any of the XX options to work, as opposed to Xmx (which sets the maximum memory the VM will allocate), is a sign of the program breaking Java Memory Model - in other words, a (stupid) bug.
Older than the world, according to Young Earth Creationists ;).
Most of it, I'd imagine. Dunno about anyone else, but I still have diskettes from NES era. And of course, once I switched to hard drives, I began copying the contents of the old drive to the new one whenever I switched.
Here, for example, is a site that offers general-purpose C-64 software for download.
Understood. However, whether it's technologically feasible to store everything and whether someone actually went to the bother of storing every single thing in pre-Internet times are two different things.
I'm basically arguing that storage capacity grows faster than human ability to produce culture, since the former is a function of technology while the latter is a function of the number of people in existence.
OK as a game, but it's really the story and universe that drive it.
Isn't Civilization quite a bit older than the rest of these ?-) It was released at 1991, after all...
All of these, with the expection of WoW, are game genres. In fact Western RPGs are amongst the oldest games (Colossal Cave Adventure), and Japanese ones date to the NES era.
And party games existed before Wii. In fact Pinball dates back to 1777 (!)
True, however the size and scope of modern games tends to work against them. An old classic had so few elements it could get everything perfect; a modern game almost certainly has problems in some aspects simply because there's so bloody many of them.
Also, old games were relatively cheap to make, while all the bling - and the actual gameplay, too - requires a lot of money. This, in turn, means that it pretty much takes the resources of a corporation to make a game, and since corporations are huge organizations, they tend towards mediocrity. Add the fact that games are an artform, and art and beancounting don't tend to mix well yet the latter is absolutely unavoidable to produce a modern game with a $10,000,000+ budget, and of course we don't get as many true game-changers as we used to.
Well, that and the fact that games were younger then, and fewer of them had and were being released, so of course it was easier to stand apart from the crowd.
Maybe they just like playing with your head ?-)
Here, emulator and all released games. It took all of 2 minutes of Googling "Action Maxx" and following a link from the Wikipedia entry, which was the first hit.
Welcome to the Third Millenium.
Disney doesn't look like it's going to go bankrupt anytime soon.
Or you could simply screw copyright and put a torrent on the Pirate Bay. If you are afraid of copyright cartels coming after you, you could use Freenet.
Museums are places to keep old physical items; for computer games, the best way is to simply let anyone who pleases copies for themselves and run them with an emulator./p
Maybe he lives near the Gulf?
I'd imagine US is not very popular within its southern neighbourhood right now...
Because they are rich enough to own an oil platform.
Everyone is equal before the law, but some are more equal than others.
Then again, big business is pretty much running the government nowadays, so legislating accordingly might be seen as the appropriate course of action.
This broke my irony meter :).