You may be able to get a 256Meg Compact flash from costco, but in order to get 1.5 gigs of memory, you would have to stick 6 of them together and also have 6 compact flash interfaces.
So most likley it would be more expensive and be larger.
I guess my point should be more that MS should either say 'we support PNGs' and fully implement all the features of PNGs. Or say 'we don't support PNGs' and drop support. Half implementing is the same as saying we don't support pngs while being slightly Politicially Correct.
What about those direct to video movies? The movies that are so bad that the only way to recoup any money is to send them directly to video. The only reason that movies are sent direct to video is that if there was a theater release it would cost more then it would make.
" I honestly can't see a cash-strapped AOL paying for Netscape engineers and QA to continue working on Seamonkey -- especially if MS plays nice "
Why not, it's not like netscape is especially expensive? I'm sure that in all of AOL/Time Warner, they could easily fund all of netscape's development by just NOT spending money on a single movie. AOL/TW is a huge company and development of Netscape is a tiny tiny fraction of their cost to run their business. I doubt that it will be dropped.
Certs are IMO, ways for management to get 'qualified' induhviduals that they can pay less.
Face it, A Cisco cert without a Comp Sci degree is just a way to pay you less money and still get the job done. While it varies from person to person, a degree is a more of a guarentee that the person is able to perform to a higher level then the cert says.
A cert says that a person can pass a test and at least knows enough to bubble in all the answers correctly. A degree says that they are able to deal with the crazy lifestyle of a student and pass all their classes. You get some crazy profs who are out of touch with reality at some schools and those ones assign you the hardest problems. The people who can pass those are the ones you want to hire.
They should really remove all buildings from the flight simulator, that way the terrorists can't practice running into the Sears Tower, the White House, etc.. etc...
right now you can process 64-bit integers on your 32 bit computer. You can even do math on 64-bit integers on 16 or 8 bit computers. It just takes more instructions then on a computer that has 64 bit registers and 64 bit integer instructions.
It might even be faster on a 32-bit computer if the 32-bit computer can process those instructions faster and arrive at the same result in less time.
If you're talking about addressing space, then a computer that can address 64 bits of space actually is 2^32 times more powerful. Since it can address 2^64 bytes of ram instead of 2^32.
This article is the fluffiest piece of fluff ever to fluff the internet.
The only tidbit of info is that the article claims that IBM confirmed the chip was made for Apple. Other then that it's all fluff.
No news, you've read it all before if you know anything about it, then you already know this. 64-bits does not equals twice the computing power, PPCs do not divide up tasks in parallel better then intel chips, nor are better suited for multimedia.
Also, I doubt that this chip will even put the mac platform far enough on top to warrent more then a meh from current PC users. Intel is already ahead in bandwidth again, and unless the 970 scales into at least 2.5 ghz, intel's chips will be faster.
Not to say that it won't help the ailing macs. The G4 is much too slow by todays standards to warrent the cost. They are useful in laptops because of their low power consumption, but other then that not so great.
Also, he has no information about when or if Quark will come out. And even if it came out today, most shops wouldn't switch right away unless it was faster then the current version on the new hardware.
I think that the real reason that swing is single threaded is because it's easier to program with if you only have one thread dispatching events and doing drawing.
That way the application programmer doesn't have to bother with syncing on the data properly.
Say that you had one swing thread that dispatched events, and another that only drew the screen.
Fine and dandy right? Well this is a PITA for all application programmers. While this will probably give you maximum responsiveness to the GUI, it's also the larger source of problems for a programmer who doesn't know anything about multi-threaded programming (like most people).
First off you must sync on every change an event causes to the data that is accessed for drawing. Any data that the drawing code requires must be locked before modification. The other choice is to copy ALL display data and then fire it off to the display thread, not the best idea in the case of say, JTables.
Secondly, the likleyhood for deadlock is high. Of course there would be defined protocols for locking on shared objects between the display and event threads, but programmers would either be ignorant of them or ignore them. (but it runs faster! even if it doesn't work half the time)
Swing is IMO designed well but it suffers from bloat. Bloat of having the AWT beneth it and bloat from having to run on ANY platform. This causes it's responsiveness to go down overall.
As far as running multiple independent applications at the same time in on JVM, it's possiable but you have to re-write the AWT shared classes (like Toolkit) so that they expect it. With the ability to have multiple event threads for seperate applications and also you would probably have to create a generic library for sharing data among the different applications. I wish it were as easy as creating different class loaders for each seperate application, but the Native code assumes only one event loop per application, and dlls can not be dynamically loaded in the same way as classes. ( they cannot be linked to multiple times, while you can load multiple versions of the same class with the class loader)
BTW, the Swing event loop and the AWT event loop are the same.
Maybe, but what's on TV is not long deep introspective programming, but rather short, mindless drivel.
TV is a product driven by ratings, if long tv shows were what people wanted, then they would keep them on more.. How many shows longer then an hour are on TV that are not live or talk shows?
TV is for the ADD generation. Most of what is on TV is fast paced quick cut nonsence. MTV being the extreme, but everything on TV has moved twords a faster paced program.
Actually I don't watch more then a couple of hours of TV a week, most of which is the simpsons. I try to watch the news, but LA local news is the worst.
The Simpsons is a great, amazing show because you can step in and out of it with no consequence. It doesn't matter if you miss an epoisode or twenty because every episode can stand on it's own without the need to watch 20 billion hours of crap to get the point of it all. It's just funny, or not funny.
If the whole reason that buffy is good requires me to watch 50 hours of tv to understand then forget it. I think many people feel this way about long running shows like this. Farscape was the same to me as was B5.
Only because software is so young and the technology moves fast.
Also, most software written for PCes at least won't run on current machines without kludges. I mean it kinda works, but it's hard to integrate WordStar into a workflow with any new program. Basically, if you want to use old programs, you can only use old programs.
And of course, most old games just don't work any more. Maybe wing commander one still works, but I don't know. Anyone tried to play Ultima One for the PC lately?
PC software makers innovate because that's what everyone else is doing and it hasn't stagnated like movies have.
my employer won't even let me read the article because it's a potential waste of time to go to 'those' websites. So I would say that the time would be much better used on work! I don't but my co-workers do spent a good amount of time playing minesweeper though.
Also don't forget that just because you are using the final keyword doesn't mean that the method suddenly becomes non-virtual. That makes no sense.
If you have class a { public void fun() {
} } and class b extends a { public final void fun() { System.out.println("b.a"); } } is perfectly valid code and A a = new B(); a.fun(); will execute B.fun() not A.fun() because it's still virtual. The only advantage the runtime system has is that it no longer has to do a vtable lookup when you KNOW that you are dealing with a B. This is only because you know that a later class cannot override the function fun().
This does not mean that the function is non-virtual anymore though.
The 970 if not used by Apple has had some very strange design decisions. This is the first chip that IBM has made that has the Altivec/VMX implemented. Maybe they want it for linux. But common sense tells us that it's more likely that Apple has indeed requested that feature be implemented because they rely heavily on it in their OS. Having encouraged everyone to use the instructions has kinda locked them into useing them.
Also, as everyone knows, Apple is famous for not saying anything until the product is in trucks, and heading to stores. So while it is not a guarentee that they will be using it, I would put money on the fact that the next step in the evolution of Apple computers will be twords the PPC 970.
I do agree that 980/990 prediction is a little early at this stage in the game though.
So you think that since very few artists are capable of making good line art (line art is perhaps the hardest of the Western artistic styles), we should forbid artists to have pencils, in the name of improving the average quality of art? Yeah, I'd say that it as always, depends on the people that you are working with. If you are an amazing programmer with an amazing team of people who are also amazing programmers, then Java might not be the best choice. But if you are a bumbling fool and have fools for co-workers then Java or another simple language might be a better choice. There will never be a language or tool that is good for everyone, that will fit any problem perfectly.
Java is IMO, a good balance a lot of the time. Not always, and sometimes I do want much more power. However, anytime that I use a new library in Java it is almost always simpler then using a library designed in 'harder' languages like C++.
A good example is that I needed to read excel files in my current java application. There is a libarary that is maintained at the apache site. It took me a whole day to download, read and implement the basic functionality of reading and writing excel files. This task was made much easier by the fact that Java handles things like memory for me. That the APIs were simple due to the simplicity of the language.
We could argue all day over which language has the best tradeoff of features for power. I do agree that redefining the language is required if you want to create more advanced code that is more efficient and powerful.
I'm not saying that Operator Overloading is evil, I'm saying that it's complex. Well, more complex then just having functions.
Overall, I do wish that it were in Java, being a full time java programmer. (Though I would rather have covarient return types first;) )
The only real complaint that I have about operator overloading is that it starts out as a good idea, then gets shoehorned into ideas that it cannot easily describe.
Since operator overloading is just another way to call functions and is exactly the same as redefining the way that functions are called, people can use it instead of functions. Say that you create a class that has no functions, just operator overloading. ++, --, $,& , + , * whatever every time you do something to an object it would be some crazy shortcut. Now I agree that only the truely insane would go to this length to avoid all real function names,, and you could do the same thing with functions by using nonsense names like ZAZAZA for function names.
So I say that by limiting the options of all programmers you make it simpler for everyone, but at the expense of those few programers that actually know what they are doing.
Object x,y x == y This means that x is pointing to the same instance as y, or that the value of x is equal to the value of y. x.equals(y) This means that the value that x points to is the same in every functional respect as the value that y points to. But it does not mean that x == y.
int x,y x == y this means that the value contained in x is equal to y.
Remember that all 'Object' variables are actually pointers and thus you need the distinction of == and equals.
BTW, you never need to write x==y for checking equality in objects. If you ever overload an equals function, that should be the first thing you do. And if you say that it's inefficient to do it that way then I say you are prematurely optimizing your code.
Slashdot Mirror
You may be able to get a 256Meg Compact flash from costco, but in order to get 1.5 gigs of memory, you would have to stick 6 of them together and also have 6 compact flash interfaces.
So most likley it would be more expensive and be larger.
I guess my point should be more that MS should either say 'we support PNGs' and fully implement all the features of PNGs. Or say 'we don't support PNGs' and drop support. Half implementing is the same as saying we don't support pngs while being slightly Politicially Correct.
Why can't they just release a browser that supports transparent PNGs?
MS is moving twords DRM because it will allow them to control the entire platform more easily and even hurt other OSes in the process.
They don't make money from every movie.
What about those direct to video movies? The movies that are so bad that the only way to recoup any money is to send them directly to video. The only reason that movies are sent direct to video is that if there was a theater release it would cost more then it would make.
If anything, IE has 95% of the public mindshare.
But then again people also think "websites are teh internet." So you have to fight stupidity on multiple fronts.
" I honestly can't see a cash-strapped AOL paying for Netscape engineers and QA to continue working on Seamonkey -- especially if MS plays nice "
Why not, it's not like netscape is especially expensive? I'm sure that in all of AOL/Time Warner, they could easily fund all of netscape's development by just NOT spending money on a single movie. AOL/TW is a huge company and development of Netscape is a tiny tiny fraction of their cost to run their business. I doubt that it will be dropped.
How is that a downside? If your boss can't see you playing games at work or surfing on slashdot all the better right?
Though I expect that you can still see something if you're not the user of the system right?
I bet the original author thought he was so clever too.
Look ma, assembly... in C!!!
Certs are IMO, ways for management to get 'qualified' induhviduals that they can pay less.
Face it, A Cisco cert without a Comp Sci degree is just a way to pay you less money and still get the job done. While it varies from person to person, a degree is a more of a guarentee that the person is able to perform to a higher level then the cert says.
A cert says that a person can pass a test and at least knows enough to bubble in all the answers correctly. A degree says that they are able to deal with the crazy lifestyle of a student and pass all their classes. You get some crazy profs who are out of touch with reality at some schools and those ones assign you the hardest problems. The people who can pass those are the ones you want to hire.
Disclaimer. I hate certs.
Not the 15"inchers.
Personally I think the 15"inchers are the best form factor and they are still TiBooks.
They should really remove all buildings from the flight simulator, that way the terrorists can't practice running into the Sears Tower, the White House, etc.. etc...
Since I can't edit my own post, I'll just reply to myself.
As said elsewhere, this actually has no facts in it whatsoever. Not even the tidbit about the 970.
But it doesn't mean twice the computing power,
right now you can process 64-bit integers on your 32 bit computer. You can even do math on 64-bit integers on 16 or 8 bit computers. It just takes more instructions then on a computer that has 64 bit registers and 64 bit integer instructions.
It might even be faster on a 32-bit computer if the 32-bit computer can process those instructions faster and arrive at the same result in less time.
If you're talking about addressing space, then a computer that can address 64 bits of space actually is 2^32 times more powerful. Since it can address 2^64 bytes of ram instead of 2^32.
So really, the author is just wrong.
This article is the fluffiest piece of fluff ever to fluff the internet.
The only tidbit of info is that the article claims that IBM confirmed the chip was made for Apple. Other then that it's all fluff.
No news, you've read it all before if you know anything about it, then you already know this. 64-bits does not equals twice the computing power, PPCs do not divide up tasks in parallel better then intel chips, nor are better suited for multimedia.
Also, I doubt that this chip will even put the mac platform far enough on top to warrent more then a meh from current PC users. Intel is already ahead in bandwidth again, and unless the 970 scales into at least 2.5 ghz, intel's chips will be faster.
Not to say that it won't help the ailing macs. The G4 is much too slow by todays standards to warrent the cost. They are useful in laptops because of their low power consumption, but other then that not so great.
Also, he has no information about when or if Quark will come out. And even if it came out today, most shops wouldn't switch right away unless it was faster then the current version on the new hardware.
I think that the real reason that swing is single threaded is because it's easier to program with if you only have one thread dispatching events and doing drawing.
That way the application programmer doesn't have to bother with syncing on the data properly.
Say that you had one swing thread that dispatched events, and another that only drew the screen.
Fine and dandy right? Well this is a PITA for all application programmers. While this will probably give you maximum responsiveness to the GUI, it's also the larger source of problems for a programmer who doesn't know anything about multi-threaded programming (like most people).
First off you must sync on every change an event causes to the data that is accessed for drawing. Any data that the drawing code requires must be locked before modification. The other choice is to copy ALL display data and then fire it off to the display thread, not the best idea in the case of say, JTables.
Secondly, the likleyhood for deadlock is high. Of course there would be defined protocols for locking on shared objects between the display and event threads, but programmers would either be ignorant of them or ignore them. (but it runs faster! even if it doesn't work half the time)
Swing is IMO designed well but it suffers from bloat. Bloat of having the AWT beneth it and bloat from having to run on ANY platform. This causes it's responsiveness to go down overall.
As far as running multiple independent applications at the same time in on JVM, it's possiable but you have to re-write the AWT shared classes (like Toolkit) so that they expect it. With the ability to have multiple event threads for seperate applications and also you would probably have to create a generic library for sharing data among the different applications. I wish it were as easy as creating different class loaders for each seperate application, but the Native code assumes only one event loop per application, and dlls can not be dynamically loaded in the same way as classes. ( they cannot be linked to multiple times, while you can load multiple versions of the same class with the class loader)
BTW, the Swing event loop and the AWT event loop are the same.
Maybe, but what's on TV is not long deep introspective programming, but rather short, mindless drivel.
TV is a product driven by ratings, if long tv shows were what people wanted, then they would keep them on more.. How many shows longer then an hour are on TV that are not live or talk shows?
TV is for the ADD generation. Most of what is on TV is fast paced quick cut nonsence. MTV being the extreme, but everything on TV has moved twords a faster paced program.
Actually I don't watch more then a couple of hours of TV a week, most of which is the simpsons. I try to watch the news, but LA local news is the worst.
You need to give it time? Screw that.
The Simpsons is a great, amazing show because you can step in and out of it with no consequence. It doesn't matter if you miss an epoisode or twenty because every episode can stand on it's own without the need to watch 20 billion hours of crap to get the point of it all. It's just funny, or not funny.
If the whole reason that buffy is good requires me to watch 50 hours of tv to understand then forget it. I think many people feel this way about long running shows like this. Farscape was the same to me as was B5.
Only because software is so young and the technology moves fast.
Also, most software written for PCes at least won't run on current machines without kludges. I mean it kinda works, but it's hard to integrate WordStar into a workflow with any new program. Basically, if you want to use old programs, you can only use old programs.
And of course, most old games just don't work any more. Maybe wing commander one still works, but I don't know. Anyone tried to play Ultima One for the PC lately?
PC software makers innovate because that's what everyone else is doing and it hasn't stagnated like movies have.
my employer won't even let me read the article because it's a potential waste of time to go to 'those' websites. So I would say that the time would be much better used on work! I don't but my co-workers do spent a good amount of time playing minesweeper though.
Also don't forget that just because you are using the final keyword doesn't mean that the method suddenly becomes non-virtual. That makes no sense.
If you have
class a {
public void fun() {
}
}
and
class b extends a {
public final void fun() {
System.out.println("b.a");
}
}
is perfectly valid code and
A a = new B();
a.fun();
will execute B.fun() not A.fun() because it's still virtual.
The only advantage the runtime system has is that it no longer has to do a vtable lookup when you KNOW that you are dealing with a B. This is only because you know that a later class cannot override the function fun().
This does not mean that the function is non-virtual anymore though.
The 970 if not used by Apple has had some very strange design decisions. This is the first chip that IBM has made that has the Altivec/VMX implemented. Maybe they want it for linux. But common sense tells us that it's more likely that Apple has indeed requested that feature be implemented because they rely heavily on it in their OS. Having encouraged everyone to use the instructions has kinda locked them into useing them.
Also, as everyone knows, Apple is famous for not saying anything until the product is in trucks, and heading to stores. So while it is not a guarentee that they will be using it, I would put money on the fact that the next step in the evolution of Apple computers will be twords the PPC 970.
I do agree that 980/990 prediction is a little early at this stage in the game though.
So you think that since very few artists are capable of making good line art (line art is perhaps the hardest of the Western artistic styles), we should forbid artists to have pencils, in the name of improving the average quality of art?
Yeah, I'd say that it as always, depends on the people that you are working with. If you are an amazing programmer with an amazing team of people who are also amazing programmers, then Java might not be the best choice. But if you are a bumbling fool and have fools for co-workers then Java or another simple language might be a better choice. There will never be a language or tool that is good for everyone, that will fit any problem perfectly.
Java is IMO, a good balance a lot of the time. Not always, and sometimes I do want much more power. However, anytime that I use a new library in Java it is almost always simpler then using a library designed in 'harder' languages like C++.
A good example is that I needed to read excel files in my current java application. There is a libarary that is maintained at the apache site. It took me a whole day to download, read and implement the basic functionality of reading and writing excel files. This task was made much easier by the fact that Java handles things like memory for me. That the APIs were simple due to the simplicity of the language.
We could argue all day over which language has the best tradeoff of features for power. I do agree that redefining the language is required if you want to create more advanced code that is more efficient and powerful.
I'm not saying that Operator Overloading is evil, I'm saying that it's complex. Well, more complex then just having functions.
;) )
,& , + , * whatever every time you do something to an object it would be some crazy shortcut. Now I agree that only the truely insane would go to this length to avoid all real function names,, and you could do the same thing with functions by using nonsense names like ZAZAZA for function names.
Overall, I do wish that it were in Java, being a full time java programmer. (Though I would rather have covarient return types first
The only real complaint that I have about operator overloading is that it starts out as a good idea, then gets shoehorned into ideas that it cannot easily describe.
Since operator overloading is just another way to call functions and is exactly the same as redefining the way that functions are called, people can use it instead of functions. Say that you create a class that has no functions, just operator overloading. ++, --, $
So I say that by limiting the options of all programmers you make it simpler for everyone, but at the expense of those few programers that actually know what they are doing.
Object x,y
x == y
This means that x is pointing to the same instance as y, or that the value of x is equal to the value of y.
x.equals(y)
This means that the value that x points to is the same in every functional respect as the value that y points to. But it does not mean that x == y.
int x,y
x == y
this means that the value contained in x is equal to y.
Remember that all 'Object' variables are actually pointers and thus you need the distinction of == and equals.
BTW, you never need to write x==y for checking equality in objects. If you ever overload an equals function, that should be the first thing you do. And if you say that it's inefficient to do it that way then I say you are prematurely optimizing your code.