You're right some types of program will never be suitable for concurrent programming. That's down to the nature of the problem rather than the skill of the programmer.
I also didn't mean to imply there were 'enough' solutions the concurrency issues. More elegant and sophisticated ideas will always be searched for.
The only thing I don't agree with is that concurrent programming is hard. To some people printing "Hello World" is hard, it's all about the learning curve. Personally I think anyone who calls themselves a (competent) programmer needs to be able to handle concurrency, if not it's a major tool lacking from their skill set.
Perhaps if you could give me an example of one way that a game engine would be hindered by multithreading I'd be more convinced. I don't mean current engines, I mean ones written correctly, to take advantage of multiple cores or processors.
I'm shocked, just shocked! All this time I thought programming was for the masses and it turns out that when you just copy stuff books and websites, it doesn't always work.
Really when are people going to get over this multithreading problem? Concurrency issues have been around for years with plenty of solutions for those who bother to learn about the principles. While the parent poster mentioned Tanenbaum's Minix book with his tongue in his cheek, I think it's actually a very good introduction. "Principles of Concurrent and Distributed Programming" by M. Ben-Ari is also worth a read for anyone serious about programming these days.
Well I don't know how good the U.S. maps are in the TomTom, I can tell you all the European ones are excellent.
My Mother was visiting me in England recently from Spain and bought herself a TomTom 700 while she was here and was planning to drive a car back. After I showed her how to program in a few routes and find Points Of Interest along the way, she was able to navigate from my front door in Manchester to her door on the Costa Blanca _and_ be taken to couple of hotels along the route to break up the journey. She's no techie and she loves the simplicity, and no it doesn't really bother her that the U.S. maps are a bit old.
You were so close to a great post. You're right on almost everything except one small, but important point.
-java runs on just about any OS,.net only windows
In fact.Net runs on any OS that wants to implement it. I can point to one such project as Mono. We also use it on another OS at my company. Really.NET is just a little behind but I would think it's going to catch up pretty quick.
Other than that you are very much correct.
It's probably easier to think of the CLR (.NET is Microsoft's brand name for the same thing) as helper libraries. These libraries collaborate with Managed Code, which is just a special file format. The libraries (and helper apps I suppose) don't run the app in a secure environment, like chroot, but rather perform tests to ensure it won't do anything bad in the normal environment, like access null pointers or manipulate buffers to get to code that should be protected. You can either do these tests at execution time and JIT compile the code, or you can run the verification tests when you install the app in a particular machine. Making it native code before execution just like a traditional compile cycle. I guess you could verify the code before installation but it would only work if you knew exactly what systems you were writing for.
So where does it say that managed code can't be native? It is still managed as long as it retains the metadata describing it. I can't stand Microsoft as much as the next Slashdotter but they've not renamed interpreted code. Managed means something very different. The.Net framework isn't a compiler or interpreter, it's a fully fledged virtual machine. The usual way of running that machine is alongside the code you want to execute, doing JIT compilation. An alternative is to create a managed executable running under the.Net framework, with access to libraries and CLR features, but using native code.
By the way I couldn't care less what you say about "the mantra", I just don't like it when false information gets spread. So until you can find proof that "managed code" running under the CLR requires that it be interpreted, I'm going to stick with the impression you're wrong.
Sources: The Common Language Infrastructure Annotated Standard [1st edition] pg 8.
How and when the CIL is compiled to machine code are not specified as part of the standard, and those determinations rest with the implemention of the VES. The most frequently used model is just-in-time (JIT) compilers... Install-time compilers are another option...
Figure 1-4 (Execution Model) on the following page clearly shows "unmanaged native code" and "managed native code" existing along side each other. Since this book is basically an expanded version of the ECMA CLR specification the quote and figure are probably available online for you to check but the page numbers are probably different.
Please cite your sources that show managed code==interpreted and hence satisfy your premise before drawing the conclusion that MS have redefined terminology.
Wow, how did this get modded insightful?
I'm the furthest thing from a Microsoft Zealot, I don't use any MS products and don't recommend them in my consultations, but I still know that Managed != Interpreted. You've mistaken the term "Just In Time compilation" (JIT) for "Managed Code". You even have the nerve to call other people idiots! Mono has an option for performing Ahead of Time (AOT) compiliation to produce native binaries that can still be considered managed because they have been through the verification process. I think the Microsoft equivalent is called Bartok.
May I suggest you spend a little less time reading anti-MS propaganda and either read some of these books you are so keen to suggest or spend some time actually thinking about what you say, before you say it.
WOW, being British, I have to call BS on this whole "report". I wouldn't be at all surprised to find those same people who agree with I.D. to think they have the ability to fly. I've only had 1 conversation with someone my entire life who didn't believe in evolution. Now, I don't much care what they choose to believe. That's up to them. To say that as a country we reject evolution is crazy. My take on it is that it's a bogus report designed to bolster U.S. religious nuts and give them something to point at and say "look, we're not the only ones."
Thank god we still have proper User Interface journals to cut out rubbish like this. There's nothing wrong with experimenting with 3D interfaces but to suggest that for them to become efficient and desirable enough for use we need to start projecting images onto retinas is going a step too far.
Somehow restricting rendering to the surfaces of an object might help, but it sounds tricky.
If the author finds this idea "tricky" then perhaps he should re-evaluate his line of work.
LOL
That's a good one. Without knowing which country the OP is talking about we don't know exactly what the deal is, but for a lot of countries everything created whilst working for your a company becomes property of the company. Even if it is in your own time. The only exception is when your job has no relation to your "hobby project". For example, writing some software while working as a waiter. This clearly isn't the case as the OP states they are writing to make their job easier. It's sad but that's just the way things turned out.
check out all the differences between C# 3.0's spec and the old ones
I hope you're kidding. C# is not the same as the Common Language Runtime (CLR). Mono is an implementation of the CLR, C# is a language. Pointing out the differences between C# 3.0 and C# 1.0 is about as useful as pointing out there is a difference between C and C++.
There is no point in mandating that a standard must always be used. If everyone had been forced to use MP3 when it came out then we wouldn't have progressed on to OGG. Improvements will always be sought in all formats.
What we need is for governments to help curb the insane number of standards that are closed. The only realistic way of doing this is by having cooperation and agreement to only use OPEN (and free) standards in ALL areas of the government. Almost every citizen needs to communicate with their government at some point. Even if it's just to fill out some forms. This way everyone will have access to their government without restriction. Frankly I'm disgusted this isn't already the case.
This way everyone is free to create new formats and by opening them to all, when something truly better does come along the gov. can adopt it and so will the people. A similar thing is done with shipping companies worldwide already. When people realise that file formats are for shipping data then maybe the same regulations will be applied.
Standards should not restrict private communication, but private comms. usually follow a standard anyway because it's easier. Sadly things like the Word2000 "standard" came about because governments were slow off the mark and businesses were happily communicating in that format. It's time for them to correct the problem!
Being European myself (but prefering to be called British, that's a whole different matter), I have NEVER known another European to consider Canada another part of "America" unless specifically talking about the continent. I won't go into which country most of us prefer, I'll leave that to your imaginations.
I wouldn't mind hosting the torrent for a discount in the monthly fee paid for online services. If I don't rack up enough hours (or MB) of hosting a month then I pay the full whack. I know some peple will say that those with faster connections will get cheaper gaming but they would be paying extra for the additional upload bandwith in the first place.
The critic in me says they'll just expect everyone to "play nice" and help them drop their costs with no corresponding drop in game prices.
My apartment has a dead bolt lock on the door. Does this mean it's impossible to break into my apartment? Of course not - it just makes it harder. Being able to break security on a locked computer with a USB drive is like leaving the key to your apartment under your door mat.
Taking the analogy further it's actually more like buying an apartment with a deadlock from a disreputable source (No, not just Microsoft) who always leave a key under the mat without telling you. 1 savvy burglar and the whole building is at risk.
Whilst I've got to agree that any radical re-write or completely new OS must have a very good reason for being done, that doesn't mean there isn't one. I'm not sure I can agree with your analogy to the automotive industry though. During the early years of development many models were redesigned from scratch. Some believed they had good reason, just take the Reliant Robin http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliant_Robin which had only 3 wheels.
I don't know if I should comment but if we must use the car analogy, perhaps in the future we'll look back on today's OS offerings and think of them more like the way we think of the invention of the wheel - A good starting point but hardly the end of development.
In the U.K. only patent applications which contain a "technical contribution" can (should?) be granted. What this means is a poorly defined but for the most part does keep out the really bad patents. It's not perfect as from time to time worthy inventions are excluded too.
Also killing the bill outright would not be a good thing in my opinion. Huge companies can afford to patent things globally, and by the sounds of the US patent process this isn't hard. For the small business here in the U.K. that sort of protection is impossible. Realistically though all we need is to protect one market and any major player that wishes to do business here needs to respect our patents. We might not be able to stop another company copying our ideas accross the pond but they sure shouldn't be able to bring that stolen IP over here.
Slashdot Mirror
You're right some types of program will never be suitable for concurrent programming. That's down to the nature of the problem rather than the skill of the programmer.
I also didn't mean to imply there were 'enough' solutions the concurrency issues. More elegant and sophisticated ideas will always be searched for.
The only thing I don't agree with is that concurrent programming is hard. To some people printing "Hello World" is hard, it's all about the learning curve. Personally I think anyone who calls themselves a (competent) programmer needs to be able to handle concurrency, if not it's a major tool lacking from their skill set.
Perhaps if you could give me an example of one way that a game engine would be hindered by multithreading I'd be more convinced. I don't mean current engines, I mean ones written correctly, to take advantage of multiple cores or processors.
I'm shocked, just shocked! All this time I thought programming was for the masses and it turns out that when you just copy stuff books and websites, it doesn't always work.
Really when are people going to get over this multithreading problem? Concurrency issues have been around for years with plenty of solutions for those who bother to learn about the principles.
While the parent poster mentioned Tanenbaum's Minix book with his tongue in his cheek, I think it's actually a very good introduction. "Principles of Concurrent and Distributed Programming" by M. Ben-Ari is also worth a read for anyone serious about programming these days.
Well I don't know how good the U.S. maps are in the TomTom, I can tell you all the European ones are excellent.
My Mother was visiting me in England recently from Spain and bought herself a TomTom 700 while she was here and was planning to drive a car back. After I showed her how to program in a few routes and find Points Of Interest along the way, she was able to navigate from my front door in Manchester to her door on the Costa Blanca _and_ be taken to couple of hotels along the route to break up the journey.
She's no techie and she loves the simplicity, and no it doesn't really bother her that the U.S. maps are a bit old.
In fact
Other than that you are very much correct.
It's probably easier to think of the CLR (.NET is Microsoft's brand name for the same thing) as helper libraries. These libraries collaborate with Managed Code, which is just a special file format. The libraries (and helper apps I suppose) don't run the app in a secure environment, like chroot, but rather perform tests to ensure it won't do anything bad in the normal environment, like access null pointers or manipulate buffers to get to code that should be protected. You can either do these tests at execution time and JIT compile the code, or you can run the verification tests when you install the app in a particular machine. Making it native code before execution just like a traditional compile cycle. I guess you could verify the code before installation but it would only work if you knew exactly what systems you were writing for.
I hope that clears things up for you.
By the way I couldn't care less what you say about "the mantra", I just don't like it when false information gets spread. So until you can find proof that "managed code" running under the CLR requires that it be interpreted, I'm going to stick with the impression you're wrong.
Sources: The Common Language Infrastructure Annotated Standard [1st edition] pg 8. Figure 1-4 (Execution Model) on the following page clearly shows "unmanaged native code" and "managed native code" existing along side each other. Since this book is basically an expanded version of the ECMA CLR specification the quote and figure are probably available online for you to check but the page numbers are probably different.
Please cite your sources that show managed code==interpreted and hence satisfy your premise before drawing the conclusion that MS have redefined terminology.
Wow, how did this get modded insightful?
I'm the furthest thing from a Microsoft Zealot, I don't use any MS products and don't recommend them in my consultations, but I still know that Managed != Interpreted. You've mistaken the term "Just In Time compilation" (JIT) for "Managed Code". You even have the nerve to call other people idiots! Mono has an option for performing Ahead of Time (AOT) compiliation to produce native binaries that can still be considered managed because they have been through the verification process. I think the Microsoft equivalent is called Bartok.
May I suggest you spend a little less time reading anti-MS propaganda and either read some of these books you are so keen to suggest or spend some time actually thinking about what you say, before you say it.
WOW, being British, I have to call BS on this whole "report". I wouldn't be at all surprised to find those same people who agree with I.D. to think they have the ability to fly. I've only had 1 conversation with someone my entire life who didn't believe in evolution. Now, I don't much care what they choose to believe. That's up to them. To say that as a country we reject evolution is crazy. My take on it is that it's a bogus report designed to bolster U.S. religious nuts and give them something to point at and say "look, we're not the only ones."
Codswallop! That's all I have to say.
If the author finds this idea "tricky" then perhaps he should re-evaluate his line of work.
LOL
That's a good one. Without knowing which country the OP is talking about we don't know exactly what the deal is, but for a lot of countries everything created whilst working for your a company becomes property of the company. Even if it is in your own time. The only exception is when your job has no relation to your "hobby project". For example, writing some software while working as a waiter.
This clearly isn't the case as the OP states they are writing to make their job easier. It's sad but that's just the way things turned out.
I hope you're kidding. C# is not the same as the Common Language Runtime (CLR). Mono is an implementation of the CLR, C# is a language. Pointing out the differences between C# 3.0 and C# 1.0 is about as useful as pointing out there is a difference between C and C++.
There is no point in mandating that a standard must always be used. If everyone had been forced to use MP3 when it came out then we wouldn't have progressed on to OGG. Improvements will always be sought in all formats.
What we need is for governments to help curb the insane number of standards that are closed. The only realistic way of doing this is by having cooperation and agreement to only use OPEN (and free) standards in ALL areas of the government. Almost every citizen needs to communicate with their government at some point. Even if it's just to fill out some forms. This way everyone will have access to their government without restriction. Frankly I'm disgusted this isn't already the case.
This way everyone is free to create new formats and by opening them to all, when something truly better does come along the gov. can adopt it and so will the people. A similar thing is done with shipping companies worldwide already. When people realise that file formats are for shipping data then maybe the same regulations will be applied.
Standards should not restrict private communication, but private comms. usually follow a standard anyway because it's easier. Sadly things like the Word2000 "standard" came about because governments were slow off the mark and businesses were happily communicating in that format. It's time for them to correct the problem!
Being European myself (but prefering to be called British, that's a whole different matter), I have NEVER known another European to consider Canada another part of "America" unless specifically talking about the continent. I won't go into which country most of us prefer, I'll leave that to your imaginations.
I wouldn't mind hosting the torrent for a discount in the monthly fee paid for online services. If I don't rack up enough hours (or MB) of hosting a month then I pay the full whack.
I know some peple will say that those with faster connections will get cheaper gaming but they would be paying extra for the additional upload bandwith in the first place.
The critic in me says they'll just expect everyone to "play nice" and help them drop their costs with no corresponding drop in game prices.
Unless those sites use their bandwidth for torrents.
My apartment has a dead bolt lock on the door. Does this mean it's impossible to break into my apartment? Of course not - it just makes it harder.
Being able to break security on a locked computer with a USB drive is like leaving the key to your apartment under your door mat.
Taking the analogy further it's actually more like buying an apartment with a deadlock from a disreputable source (No, not just Microsoft) who always leave a key under the mat without telling you. 1 savvy burglar and the whole building is at risk.
no
Whilst I've got to agree that any radical re-write or completely new OS must have a very good reason for being done, that doesn't mean there isn't one. I'm not sure I can agree with your analogy to the automotive industry though. During the early years of development many models were redesigned from scratch. Some believed they had good reason, just take the Reliant Robin http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliant_Robin which had only 3 wheels.
I don't know if I should comment but if we must use the car analogy, perhaps in the future we'll look back on today's OS offerings and think of them more like the way we think of the invention of the wheel - A good starting point but hardly the end of development.
In the U.K. only patent applications which contain a "technical contribution" can (should?) be granted. What this means is a poorly defined but for the most part does keep out the really bad patents. It's not perfect as from time to time worthy inventions are excluded too.
Also killing the bill outright would not be a good thing in my opinion. Huge companies can afford to patent things globally, and by the sounds of the US patent process this isn't hard. For the small business here in the U.K. that sort of protection is impossible. Realistically though all we need is to protect one market and any major player that wishes to do business here needs to respect our patents. We might not be able to stop another company copying our ideas accross the pond but they sure shouldn't be able to bring that stolen IP over here.
allows for more than 4gb of ram.
So do many 32 bit cpus with the right OS. What a 32 bit processor can't do as well is handle 64 bit intergers etc...