Re:Shouldn't this be posted Anonymously...
on
Preview of KDE 3.4
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Not necessarily. The effort spent writing C++ would have been more profitably spent integrating C with higher level (but still compiled) languages. This is not a criticism of C++ implementors, it's obviously up to them how they spend their time.
Well, for one, at the time C++ was designed, I doubt there were many (if at all) higher level, compiled languages around. And if C was integrated with such a language, wouldn't that language have suffered from the same backward compatibility problems that C++ has ?
GC is almost always a good thing given a decently optimized implementation (i.e., we're not talking Perl5/Python/Tcl here, more like OCaml, Lisp, etc.) The overhead is small and tends to be less than that of reference counting smart pointers and their ilk. Reference counting is not particularly efficient, especially when implemented manually.
The advantage of garbage collection over reference counting is something I never understood.
Yes, there are overhead to reference counting, but on the other hand, I understand that garbage collection has to find out whether objects are still used or not at a time where there isn't any informations around to help this, thus it has to walk through all objects in memory to check which are to be deleted.
Granted, it frees speed critical code from wasting time deleting objects, but what about non-memory resources ? If a garbage collector is run only when memory pressure increase, how do you manage other kind of resources like files, sockets, mutexes and so on ?
You can have terminate functions in your objects to make them free these kind of resources, but doesn't it defeat the whole purpose of garbage collection, which is to automatize resource management ?
Exactly, backwards compatibility with C is a major source of security bugs.
Yes, but if C++ wasn't backward compatible with C, most of the stuff today would still be in C. Or would be in another language which would have been backward compatible with C.
Ah, another arrogant C++ programmer who thinks the only reason there are bugs in C++ programs is "improper" usage of the language. If a tool is rarely used properly, this is often a sign that the tool sucks, or at least that it's too hard to use properly.
Or only that proper usage of the tool just isn't widely enough documented...
In the case of C++, I'd say it's sometimes practically impossible to use properly. Why not use a better tool?
Just for the same reason that people won't just rewrite their existing code in java, or c#, or whatever else you consider a better tool.
Besides, what would constitute a better tool is highly debatable. A lot of the allegedly better tools enforce the usage of stuff (like garbage collectors) that are not suited for everything using C or C++ today.
Using container libraries costs extra time and effort
No, it doesn't. The first times, when you don't know how to do it, perhaps, but after that, using them is much faster and easier than developing ad-hoc solutions everywhere.
and it is less efficient than error checking that is built into the compiler, for example.
And less efficient than error checking built into the compiler ? Why ? It's error checking done by the compiler, only the error checks aren't hardcoded in the compiler, but implemented by the standard library.
Also, using container libraries is not something that the C/C++ compilers help enforce; that is, if some module doesn't use it, nobody ever gets warned about it.
It's because of backwards compatibility with C. If you program in C++, you're supposed to use the standard library containers. The thing is, without the backward compatibility with C, C++ wouldn't have been quite as successful, anyway.
We need better tools to help people avoid it, and plain C/C++ apparently isn't enough for real-world programmers not to make these mistakes.
It's enough, only if properly used. There's no need for new tools. What's the point of creating new tools when the old one are rarely ever used properly, anyway ? I also though that C++ sucked until I learned to use it properly.
There was a filesystem repairing utility on old versions of AmigaOS called diskdoctor.
This thing was awful, and you ended up with a blank floppy or an even more screwed one most of the times you used it.
I recall an interview from one of the amigaos guys, where he explained why it did disappear from later version of the os. As they were pondering whether fixing it or removing it, they got an idea: letting it choose its own fate.
They put the source on a floppy, erased it from their harddisk, then ran diskdoctor on the floppy.
The filesystem got screwed and the sources lost. It had just commited suicide.
Well, actually, reading the claims, what they call "spherical panning" (it's not planning btw, there's an error in the article) is simply the fact of defining a camera position, relative to an object, using three angles, a distance, and a projection type. They say it is done by going from one space to another. Well, it's called transformation, it's done by multiplying matrices. In fact, what they describe are the minimum math needed to display 3d on a computer screen.
It's way too broad. It's almost like they're patenting basic 3d math.
There are a some games that were released before 1988, like starglider and elite, that displayed wireframe 3d, and that had to apply what's claimed in the patent.
In fact, by 1988, a lot of things had already been done in the field of 3d computer graphics... And this patent is trying to protect the basic stuff that all these things had to do at some point to be able to render 3d stuff.
They include representing 3d data by defining an orientation, a distance from the viewer, a projection type and so on, as well as manipulating the orientation using three angles, by transforming the data from a space to another... This is very basic and covers roughly anything displaying interactive 3d on a 2d screen...
Not really. You actually build your own stuff by assembling geometrical primitives and attaching scripts to them, written in some heavily modified C like language. You can also upload your own textures.
There's also a physic engine. It means that everything you see in the game has been designed and built by players.
The result are impressive in terms of what can be done. There are even people who have bought a sim (a world parcel) to build a mmorpg in it.
What's impressive also is how people who are not necessarily technical-minded achieve to build stuff and actually write scripts.
Downside is that performances is rather bad. It's very slow, caches a lots of stuff locally all the time, etc.
Also, it's really just a giant sandbox, and there are no definite goals, which can be a big downside for a lot of people. I can't find anything that I would like to do in SL, although I find it an interesting experience.
Except that code generated by txx is probably quite not as optimized as code generated by gcc. TCC's goal is to be small, and fast, not to generate very optimized code.
I havea hard time seeing the usefulness of this boot-time compile thing, except for coolness factor. It's slower, takes way more space on disk than a binary kernel, and the kernel probably doesn't run quite as good as with a regular compiler.
You could just have a fairly vanilla kernel handy to boot from.
Of course, you could, for whatever reason, not being able to use it and screw up your regular kernel config at the same time.
But then, you'd have the same risk with tccboot.
It is in release status. And Eclipse has lots of amazing features that makes it a serious alternative to visual studio.net.
Downside is that swt (eclipse's gui toolkit) is a bit slow on linux at the moment.
As funny as it is, saying you don't say most letters in a word is exagerated. I think you could say "don't say most letters in SOME words", although most of the time, it's not so much that you don't say them that they form a particular sound in combination with other letters.
I can give you that some of such combinations are a little weird and redundant (like o, au, and eau all sounding the same), but hey, we're french:p
According to another article, Renault's ceo said that on first examination on the premises, they noticed no particular marks on the brake disks and on the brake pads.
If it's true, it's fishy indeed. They also say that the car seemed to behave normally when a mechanic drove it from his truck to a garage, but if it was some kind of rare sftware malfunction and the computer reset itself, they wouldn't notice anything anyway.
I don't even know if they have logs in these car computers.
A computer is not a closed environment, otherwise it wouldn't serve any purpose.
A lot of things that happen in a computer are tied to external factors.
For instance, the adresses where the various structures and objects are allocated by an application depends on the order in which they have been allocated and freed. And this, in turns, depends heavily on what the user does. What file he opens, what function he uses, and so on.
Now imagine a buffer overflow bug. Depending on what is located beyond the buffer, which is simply random due to the reaosns outlined above, the buffer overflow can either crash the app, make the app behave weirdly, can corrupt some data, or can do nothing noticeable.
This is just one example. If you factor in the various synchronisation problems that can occur between threads, interruptions triggered by peripherals and so on, you can understand that what occurs in a computer isn't entirely predictable.
Actually, I prefer that IBM defends Linux because of their business interest and not out of generosity is good, because that's a much more powerful relation.
I don't see IBM dropping Linux or turning against it anytime soon, except of course if it stops being more profitable for them than a proprietary solution, and I don't see how it could happen.
Java is slow - This is a myth. A long-running Java app running under HotSpot will over time grow to be faster than nearly any simmilar C or C++ app. Why? Because the Vm can over time learn how the codepath actually is executing and optimize it at the assembly level. The only way you could consistantly achive performance as good would be to hand-code the whole app in assembly, and thati s assuming you already know in advance exactly how the program will be used so you know what paths to optimize. This is highly unlikely.
While there might be some optimisation opportunities for a JIT virtual machine that aren't available to compilers, I don't see how this would work (although I Am Not A Virtual Machine Coder).
Let's say the JVM translates a block of code in native assembler. The first time, it doesn't have any information from the program execution to guide the optimisations.
Then, once it's translated in native code, how does it obtain these informations about which function is most called, which conditional branches are taken, etc. ? Does it have to instrument the code the first time it's translated ? But if so, isn't there some execution overhead that you don't have with precompiled native code ?
Anyway, I think another reason why it's slower than C++ is the garbage collector, and various things in the language that aren't designed with runtime efficiency in mind.
In C++, for instance, you don't have to use a garbage collector. And for a lots of apps, smart pointers with reference counter are perfectly enough for the job. There's lots of applications where you want the object destruction to be deterministic, and not to occur sometime when the garbage collector feels like it.
I believe that's also why C++ is often prefered over java: it's a compromise between having modern programming paradigms and still be able to know exactly what happens at runtime, which makes it easier to optimize. Lots of people aren't willing to throw out all control and understanding of what occurs under the hood for the sake of having a nice programming model.
I think it all come down to Java being too strict in enforcing what its creators think are good programming practise, at the expense of performances, instead of trying, like C++, to be a compromise that can have some benefit for about everyone.
That said, I think Java can be pretty cool too, just for different usages than C++.
For instance, I think that a lot of applications would be best done in java, using the eclipse platform, rather than in C++, because it's easier and faster to do (especially when also using eclipse as ide) and much easier to maintain and to update.
That's one thing AO got right: there's tons of characters development choices, and you can make up to eigth characters per account.
So, people tend to roll new chars a lot, and you can find a fair amount of people at all level ranges.
Not everything is in the CVS. They keep the CVS version outdated, just not too much so people can still contribute patches to make their favorite game work, improving the code for them for free, but enough to keep it crippled compared to the commercial version.
For instance, take VBO support. It has been disabled in the latest CVS for about three month. If you want to enable it in the cvs version, you have to fetch a couple of files in their previous version, and even then it doesn't work, you have to fix a very stupid bug for it to display anything correct.
Yet, if you grep the official binaries for the relevant strings, you can easily verify that VBO support is enabled.
Of course, users contributing to commercial open-source products is not unheard of, but transgaming seem to try very hard not to give anything back.
Linux + KDE is basically the same thing as windows, complete with the browser/filemanager/desktop environment integration thing.
Is that a bad thing ? No. The reason I switched to this is because it's like windows done right, in terms of performance. I wasn't using anything windows specific these days, so I thought I didn't have to bear the poor performance of my (admitedly messy) XP installation, slowass filesystem, and crappy virtual memory management. And most of all, the hugely bloated explorer who takes ages to do anything.
However, linux is far from perfect and has outstanding inconvenances on its own (one of them being the outstanding number of fanboys using it). Actually, if I could just have just launched the install and let it do everything needed automatically, I'd have been happy. I already installed enough linuxes on various platforms to be no longer thrilled by all the manual configuration and crap that is needed. I wanted to have a system up and running quickly. I just followed the gentoo installation guide, seldom altering anything from the suggested defaults. Everyone says linux is all about choices, so where's the "just choose a desktop manager, enter a couple settings and install the goddamned thing automatically" choice ? Of course, perhaps another distro would have been easier to install. But then, I didn't want to download 3 or 4 iso images full of crap that I mostly didn't need.
I'm now reading the alsa installation instruction, and I wonder: why do I have to configure it and select the driver manually ? I have to select the one appropriate driver anyway, so it's not a choice. Instead of putting up a large page on their site with a list of boards and the name of the drivers, why didn't they put it directly in a database along with an automated installer ? What extraneous flexibility and power does that kind of things brings to me ?
It just doesn't make sense. You have people, like the KDE team on one side who make huge efforts to render the thing as easy to configure and use as possible, but you have to endure mandatory complicated installation procedures to get to that point.
Sure, maybe windows takes much longer to install, but at least you can just fire the damn thing and do something else in the meantime. It's not like you install your os everyday. And it wouldn't prevent a package system to be used later on to install things as they're needed anyway.
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The whole karma system is supposed to favor people who post pertinent stuff, and respect good etiquette. And this is important, because people with high karma are more likely to get moderation point.
I didn't know you could program in hungarian language... And that people were shooting videos of it, and offering them on the net.
...And USB was used as a data port.
Well, it *is* natural navigation. In real life there's no back button that takes you back in time.
Not necessarily. The effort spent writing C++ would have been more profitably spent integrating C with higher level (but still compiled) languages. This is not a criticism of C++ implementors, it's obviously up to them how they spend their time.
Well, for one, at the time C++ was designed, I doubt there were many (if at all) higher level, compiled languages around. And if C was integrated with such a language, wouldn't that language have suffered from the same backward compatibility problems that C++ has ?
GC is almost always a good thing given a decently optimized implementation (i.e., we're not talking Perl5/Python/Tcl here, more like OCaml, Lisp, etc.) The overhead is small and tends to be less than that of reference counting smart pointers and their ilk. Reference counting is not particularly efficient, especially when implemented manually.
The advantage of garbage collection over reference counting is something I never understood.
Yes, there are overhead to reference counting, but on the other hand, I understand that garbage collection has to find out whether objects are still used or not at a time where there isn't any informations around to help this, thus it has to walk through all objects in memory to check which are to be deleted.
Granted, it frees speed critical code from wasting time deleting objects, but what about non-memory resources ? If a garbage collector is run only when memory pressure increase, how do you manage other kind of resources like files, sockets, mutexes and so on ?
You can have terminate functions in your objects to make them free these kind of resources, but doesn't it defeat the whole purpose of garbage collection, which is to automatize resource management ?
Exactly, backwards compatibility with C is a major source of security bugs. Yes, but if C++ wasn't backward compatible with C, most of the stuff today would still be in C. Or would be in another language which would have been backward compatible with C. Ah, another arrogant C++ programmer who thinks the only reason there are bugs in C++ programs is "improper" usage of the language. If a tool is rarely used properly, this is often a sign that the tool sucks, or at least that it's too hard to use properly. Or only that proper usage of the tool just isn't widely enough documented... In the case of C++, I'd say it's sometimes practically impossible to use properly. Why not use a better tool? Just for the same reason that people won't just rewrite their existing code in java, or c#, or whatever else you consider a better tool. Besides, what would constitute a better tool is highly debatable. A lot of the allegedly better tools enforce the usage of stuff (like garbage collectors) that are not suited for everything using C or C++ today.
Using container libraries costs extra time and effort
No, it doesn't. The first times, when you don't know how to do it, perhaps, but after that, using them is much faster and easier than developing ad-hoc solutions everywhere.
and it is less efficient than error checking that is built into the compiler, for example.
And less efficient than error checking built into the compiler ? Why ? It's error checking done by the compiler, only the error checks aren't hardcoded in the compiler, but implemented by the standard library.
Also, using container libraries is not something that the C/C++ compilers help enforce; that is, if some module doesn't use it, nobody ever gets warned about it.
It's because of backwards compatibility with C. If you program in C++, you're supposed to use the standard library containers. The thing is, without the backward compatibility with C, C++ wouldn't have been quite as successful, anyway.
We need better tools to help people avoid it, and plain C/C++ apparently isn't enough for real-world programmers not to make these mistakes.
It's enough, only if properly used. There's no need for new tools. What's the point of creating new tools when the old one are rarely ever used properly, anyway ? I also though that C++ sucked until I learned to use it properly.
There was a filesystem repairing utility on old versions of AmigaOS called diskdoctor. This thing was awful, and you ended up with a blank floppy or an even more screwed one most of the times you used it. I recall an interview from one of the amigaos guys, where he explained why it did disappear from later version of the os. As they were pondering whether fixing it or removing it, they got an idea: letting it choose its own fate. They put the source on a floppy, erased it from their harddisk, then ran diskdoctor on the floppy. The filesystem got screwed and the sources lost. It had just commited suicide.
Well, actually, reading the claims, what they call "spherical panning" (it's not planning btw, there's an error in the article) is simply the fact of defining a camera position, relative to an object, using three angles, a distance, and a projection type.
They say it is done by going from one space to another. Well, it's called transformation, it's done by multiplying matrices. In fact, what they describe are the minimum math needed to display 3d on a computer screen.
It's way too broad. It's almost like they're patenting basic 3d math.
There are a some games that were released before 1988, like starglider and elite, that displayed wireframe 3d, and that had to apply what's claimed in the patent.
In fact, by 1988, a lot of things had already been done in the field of 3d computer graphics... And this patent is trying to protect the basic stuff that all these things had to do at some point to be able to render 3d stuff.
The claims are very broad.
They include representing 3d data by defining an orientation, a distance from the viewer, a projection type and so on, as well as manipulating the orientation using three angles, by transforming the data from a space to another...
This is very basic and covers roughly anything displaying interactive 3d on a 2d screen...
I'm pretty sure that there's some prior art.
Not really. You actually build your own stuff by assembling geometrical primitives and attaching scripts to them, written in some heavily modified C like language. You can also upload your own textures.
There's also a physic engine. It means that everything you see in the game has been designed and built by players.
The result are impressive in terms of what can be done. There are even people who have bought a sim (a world parcel) to build a mmorpg in it.
What's impressive also is how people who are not necessarily technical-minded achieve to build stuff and actually write scripts.
Downside is that performances is rather bad. It's very slow, caches a lots of stuff locally all the time, etc.
Also, it's really just a giant sandbox, and there are no definite goals, which can be a big downside for a lot of people. I can't find anything that I would like to do in SL, although I find it an interesting experience.
Except that code generated by txx is probably quite not as optimized as code generated by gcc. TCC's goal is to be small, and fast, not to generate very optimized code. I havea hard time seeing the usefulness of this boot-time compile thing, except for coolness factor. It's slower, takes way more space on disk than a binary kernel, and the kernel probably doesn't run quite as good as with a regular compiler.
TCC can only generate x86 code anyway.
You could just have a fairly vanilla kernel handy to boot from. Of course, you could, for whatever reason, not being able to use it and screw up your regular kernel config at the same time. But then, you'd have the same risk with tccboot.
It is in release status. And Eclipse has lots of amazing features that makes it a serious alternative to visual studio .net.
Downside is that swt (eclipse's gui toolkit) is a bit slow on linux at the moment.
As funny as it is, saying you don't say most letters in a word is exagerated. I think you could say "don't say most letters in SOME words", although most of the time, it's not so much that you don't say them that they form a particular sound in combination with other letters. I can give you that some of such combinations are a little weird and redundant (like o, au, and eau all sounding the same), but hey, we're french :p
According to another article, Renault's ceo said that on first examination on the premises, they noticed no particular marks on the brake disks and on the brake pads.
If it's true, it's fishy indeed.
They also say that the car seemed to behave normally when a mechanic drove it from his truck to a garage, but if it was some kind of rare sftware malfunction and the computer reset itself, they wouldn't notice anything anyway.
I don't even know if they have logs in these car computers.
A computer is not a closed environment, otherwise it wouldn't serve any purpose.
A lot of things that happen in a computer are tied to external factors.
For instance, the adresses where the various structures and objects are allocated by an application depends on the order in which they have been allocated and freed. And this, in turns, depends heavily on what the user does. What file he opens, what function he uses, and so on.
Now imagine a buffer overflow bug. Depending on what is located beyond the buffer, which is simply random due to the reaosns outlined above, the buffer overflow can either crash the app, make the app behave weirdly, can corrupt some data, or can do nothing noticeable.
This is just one example. If you factor in the various synchronisation problems that can occur between threads, interruptions triggered by peripherals and so on, you can understand that what occurs in a computer isn't entirely predictable.
Actually, I prefer that IBM defends Linux because of their business interest and not out of generosity is good, because that's a much more powerful relation. I don't see IBM dropping Linux or turning against it anytime soon, except of course if it stops being more profitable for them than a proprietary solution, and I don't see how it could happen.
Let's say the JVM translates a block of code in native assembler. The first time, it doesn't have any information from the program execution to guide the optimisations.
Then, once it's translated in native code, how does it obtain these informations about which function is most called, which conditional branches are taken, etc. ? Does it have to instrument the code the first time it's translated ? But if so, isn't there some execution overhead that you don't have with precompiled native code ?
Anyway, I think another reason why it's slower than C++ is the garbage collector, and various things in the language that aren't designed with runtime efficiency in mind.
In C++, for instance, you don't have to use a garbage collector. And for a lots of apps, smart pointers with reference counter are perfectly enough for the job. There's lots of applications where you want the object destruction to be deterministic, and not to occur sometime when the garbage collector feels like it.
I believe that's also why C++ is often prefered over java: it's a compromise between having modern programming paradigms and still be able to know exactly what happens at runtime, which makes it easier to optimize. Lots of people aren't willing to throw out all control and understanding of what occurs under the hood for the sake of having a nice programming model.
I think it all come down to Java being too strict in enforcing what its creators think are good programming practise, at the expense of performances, instead of trying, like C++, to be a compromise that can have some benefit for about everyone.
That said, I think Java can be pretty cool too, just for different usages than C++.
For instance, I think that a lot of applications would be best done in java, using the eclipse platform, rather than in C++, because it's easier and faster to do (especially when also using eclipse as ide) and much easier to maintain and to update.
That's one thing AO got right: there's tons of characters development choices, and you can make up to eigth characters per account. So, people tend to roll new chars a lot, and you can find a fair amount of people at all level ranges.
Not everything is in the CVS. They keep the CVS version outdated, just not too much so people can still contribute patches to make their favorite game work, improving the code for them for free, but enough to keep it crippled compared to the commercial version.
For instance, take VBO support. It has been disabled in the latest CVS for about three month. If you want to enable it in the cvs version, you have to fetch a couple of files in their previous version, and even then it doesn't work, you have to fix a very stupid bug for it to display anything correct.
Yet, if you grep the official binaries for the relevant strings, you can easily verify that VBO support is enabled.
Of course, users contributing to commercial open-source products is not unheard of, but transgaming seem to try very hard not to give anything back.
There's a PHP development plugin for eclipse that looks pretty good: http://phpeclipse.de/
Linux + KDE is basically the same thing as windows, complete with the browser/filemanager/desktop environment integration thing.
Is that a bad thing ? No. The reason I switched to this is because it's like windows done right, in terms of performance. I wasn't using anything windows specific these days, so I thought I didn't have to bear the poor performance of my (admitedly messy) XP installation, slowass filesystem, and crappy virtual memory management. And most of all, the hugely bloated explorer who takes ages to do anything.
However, linux is far from perfect and has outstanding inconvenances on its own (one of them being the outstanding number of fanboys using it).
Actually, if I could just have just launched the install and let it do everything needed automatically, I'd have been happy.
I already installed enough linuxes on various platforms to be no longer thrilled by all the manual configuration and crap that is needed. I wanted to have a system up and running quickly. I just followed the gentoo installation guide, seldom altering anything from the suggested defaults.
Everyone says linux is all about choices, so where's the "just choose a desktop manager, enter a couple settings and install the goddamned thing automatically" choice ?
Of course, perhaps another distro would have been easier to install. But then, I didn't want to download 3 or 4 iso images full of crap that I mostly didn't need.
I'm now reading the alsa installation instruction, and I wonder: why do I have to configure it and select the driver manually ? I have to select the one appropriate driver anyway, so it's not a choice. Instead of putting up a large page on their site with a list of boards and the name of the drivers, why didn't they put it directly in a database along with an automated installer ? What extraneous flexibility and power does that kind of things brings to me ?
It just doesn't make sense. You have people, like the KDE team on one side who make huge efforts to render the thing as easy to configure and use as possible, but you have to endure mandatory complicated installation procedures to get to that point.
Sure, maybe windows takes much longer to install, but at least you can just fire the damn thing and do something else in the meantime. It's not like you install your os everyday.
And it wouldn't prevent a package system to be used later on to install things as they're needed anyway.