Not sure exactly what the grandparent was referring to. However there are some issues with garbase collection that make it unworkable for embedded systems.
The first is it destroys RAII. When I free memory my destructer runs, which can also release a lock. With the lock released some other code can now run. Without RAII I have to manage resources, which is just as difficult as memory management, but has many different interfaces to do that. (the procedure for releasing a file lock is different from closing a socket is different from releasing a semaphore, and so on) Good programing means other code should not know those internal details of a class. Even if I use a destructer (which isn't always called as you pointed out), it isn't called right away, meaning the next thing that wants that resource has to wait.
The next problem is it is not deterministic when the collector will kick in. In many embedded systems that code must run at certain times. When the collector is running your code cannot run. You partially alluded to this with your comment on using different garbage collectors, but that isn't a full fix to the problem.
Garbage collection is nice. However it does not solve all problems, and it causes other problems. Depending on what your requirements are it may or may not be worth having. In most projects you are best off mixing and matching - except that switching languages is often more of a cost (in complex code and performance) than sticking to one language and suffering where some things are not optimal.
There is still no code that cannot be done without goto. Sometimes goto is justified because it is faster which performance counts (which must be decided by a profiler, not a human!), or because all the if(error) checks you use instead end up making the code less readable than a simple goto. Those are the two most common reasons for goto, and so far the only two that I can accept. (though I'm open to more if you can defend it)
Several of the people behind boost also sit on the C++ stand committie. They have suggested that boost is a proving grounds for things that will be in the next standard.
I can't speak for the rest, but it didn't take me long to get into KDE development. KDE is designed well enough that I don't need to know the entire project to work on it. I've submitted a couple patches here and there. I've never looked at 99% of the source code, but I don't need to, since I can quickly find the area of code I'm interested in for the patch, fix it, test and submit.
Now KDE does need some experts who understand the entire thing, to make sure I'm not adding something that should be done elsewhere. However a good programmer should be able to jump in and fix things.
You were so close to it, yet you missed the obvious solution: have more men enter computer science.
Yes more women should get into computer science. However the number of women in computer science is not directly related to the total number of people in CS.
You don't want to mess with cables between buildings unless you are an electrical engineer qualified to deal with ground issues. This is much harder than you would think. Most network gear is not designed to handle this and will fry your computers. However it may work for a long time before trouble happens.
There are some wired networks that can handle it, but CAT-5 is not one. The length limits on CAT-5 is enough that your network may not work between buildings anyway.
There is any easy solution: glass fiber. You can get stuff on ebay cheap enough, and you won't have to worry, you know it will work.
To expand on your post: there is too much wrong intelligence out there. The US for a while honestly believed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. How many other reports are there? We cannot take action on them all - trying will make it easier for the terrorists, they just make lots of plans and let the spies get them. Pretty soon 7 out of 8 people are working only to stop threats, most of which are just plans designed by the terrorists to as a wild goose chase. Soon the economy grinds to a halt, and the terrorists win without doing anything really bad.
They are not useing the junk tape drives that you were using, but quality stuff. Mainframes have always put most of their data on tapes drives, and they rarely have problems.
Course a mainframe tape drive can cost $30,000 each, (not counting the robots that load them) so you can see why home users don't get that quality.
If you are looking for an Oracle replacement try postgresql. Depending on what your needs are it might be better than Oracle, though if you needs are typical of what a business wants Oracle is likely better. Being open source (and more free than MySQL is, as the license is BSD) people do hack it to add weird things to their database.
There are a number of open source databases. MySQL gets the press. That does not mean it is best for your purpose, so you really should examine them all yourself.
Which is best is partially a matter of opinion. Mine is that between sqlite on the low end and postgresql on the high end there isn't much room for more general purpose SQL databases. Of course there are others, I'm not going to list them all because I'll forget at least one if I try.
It has been on slashdot before. Shared Source does not mean what you think it does. In fact shared source is so bad that I have to recommend you quit your job if ever told to look at something under that license.
Shared source licenses cannot touch Samba. It isn't clear if you could touch Samba if you look at code completely unrelated to networking. It is not clear that someone who has ever seen shared source code can ever hack linux. I wouldn't recommend trying, at least not without a lawyer advising you.
The name shared source was chosen to confuse people who know about open source and make you think it is a variation. The whole idea behind them is different.
You paid your doctor as long as you were healthy and stopped the payment as soon as you felt sick. This forced the doctor to get you feeling better as soon as possible.
Well if generally you were healthy, or the doctor was ethical. If you often get sick it is in the doctors best interests to give you a strong dose of poison so he can devote more of his time to people who rarely need him, so they spend most of the time paying. (or have more vacation time depending)
Of course social Darwinists (do they exist outside of science fiction?) would call this a good thing as it keeps the unhealthy from breading.
When I was a little kid WordStar was the word processor to use, with 75% of the market. Everyone used it.
When I got to high school the teachers were proud of their lab which was running WordPerfect 5.1 - the same thing industry was using, so my skills would be up to date when I graduated.
When I entered college all the computer labs were running Microsoft Word, the dominate word processor of the day. (On windows for workgroups)
When I got my first real job it was at a company standardized on Adobe Framemaker. (Running on SunOS and Solaris - as an engineer Windows was not a useable platform for engineers)
All but the last one were easily number one of the day, holding at least 70% market share, often more.
I can't remember which function key was required to save in WordPerfect 5.1, but at one time my teachers made that part of my tests. Fortunately most of my class time was spent on writing papers. I still write papers today, and I still try for good grammar. Those writing and grammar skills are still important. The specific program doesn't matter. Do not let the school loose sight of the important part: teaching English skills.
Not all data set operations can be split up. If your operation can be split, then great. Clearly when you see operations running at 1/14th the time on a 16 CPU, your data set needs operations that scale well. At somepoint you will hit a wall though. Eventially adding more processors will make no difference at all (Unless you also add data).
Brute force encryption cracking scales to 2^key size processors (perhaps a little less cause you have to get code and keys to the processors), but after that adding more processors will make not difference because every operation now depends on the previous one.
Traversing a linked list does not scale because every operation depends on the previous. (though one would question why a linked list was used in a multiple CPU environment)
Great until I'm elected. I'll save a lot of money by pumping chlorine gas into your chamber instead of the normal hibernation drugs. Then I'll live a normal life without having to go back to sleep. My scientists won't spend half of their waking time figging out what happened while they were asleep so they will get more done than those who lived under your plan.
I will be unpopular, but only among the dead, so who cares? The living will be happy they lived. The only hard part is making sure nobody else comes up with this idea before I'm elected and gets me in hibernation. In short: I'm compelled to do this first because someone will get me otherwise.
Yes I live just fine with lots of stuff in me. However some of what is in me is harmful. When I'm operating normally my immune system takes care of that harmful stuff. (Some of the worst cases put in bed for a while, and somethings are deadly, but most of it is just taken care of without my knowledge) When I'm in 'suspended animation' my immune system is not functioning. Anything harmful that gets into the hibernation room can kill me because I'm not taking of it automatically.
Your child will only be a child for a short time. I know it is hard when the kid is crying in your face and won't shut up, but take the time to enjoy it. In just a few years the kid will be crying about something else, and a few years latter wrecking your car (unless you teach safe driving by example now, and even then good luck). Then suddenly he is gone and you will realize how much you miss the kid crying in your face.
It is hard to keep proper perspective, but when you are in that situation remind yourself of it.
Those were work arounds for 2.95 bugs
on
GCC 4.0.0 Released
·
· Score: 1
My code doesn't compile on 3.0 because it contains 2.95 specific work code, because 2.95 didn't support the C++ as I wanted to use it. So I was forced to use the 2.95 bugs to work around the lack of support for the language.
Seriously, 2.95 really sucked for C++. You could make it work, but don't try to do anything tricky. (Though when 2.x was released nothing was very good at C++, 2.x just hung on a lot longer than the competition) Gcc 3.x isn't perfect and I suspect 4.0 will not be perfect either. Gcc 3.0 is a lot better for C++ than 2.95.
Re:"Paltry" is probably a poor choice of words
on
GCC 4.0.0 Released
·
· Score: 1
For starters there is only one Mac vendor in the world: Apple. (IIRC there might be a clone left out there, but if Apple limits them to such a small market we can ignore them) There are hundreds of linux vendors. RedHat, Slackware, Mandrake, and Suse come to mind instantly. The latter two are making money selling desktop systems. Then there are the non-vendors: Debian, and Gentoo really aren't companies but many people use their product on their desktop.
Add it all up and linux could have double the number of desktops while still allowing Apple to be the largest vendor.
Don't forget that linux is Free - it is hard to count Linux installations because there is no legal requirement to do something trackable. Some people buy/download a distribution once, and install it on 100+ machines legally. The free ones often come from ftp servers or bit torrents that do not give individual file download information out (it might be logged, but the logs are private).
Really? Let me see... Looks like I'm safe as all the software I use doesn't have the provisions. Even software that I refuse to use because of the license doesn't have such provisions. Where are you getting you software that you see lots of software with such a provision?
My guess is that this study is examined by a medical ethics board and run by legitimate researchers. IF they ask the guys wife what her breast size is, it is because they have a reasonable reason to believe that breast size affects something related to allergies. Since this is unlikely, ethics boards will require proof that there is a reason to ask.
I'm much the same. Except that I try to be a 6 year old girl, because there are laws to protect the privacy of children that do not apply to adults. As soon as websites solve the Y2k issue I will be a newborn, but everyone assumes that I must have been born in the 1900's.
Mental note, write a book about how to survive this in 12 years, just in time for those first children to start turning 18.
Doesn't look to me like the AOPA had much power at Meigs field.
My local congressman, Mark Kennedy claimed on some radio call interview a few years back that he was the only one in congress who cared about it. (His son is a private pilot) Don't know if it is true, but an interesting claim. At least he instantly understood the issue when a caller got on the air about it.
Well maybe not for all congressmen, but most are paranoid about paper mail. Remember the anthrax scares of a few years ago? Staffers are still afraid. When mail arrives at their office they don't open it, they send it to an irradiation plant, then open it. The process intentionally takes weeks. (Some poisons are better destroyed by time than irradiation)
A post card is better because there is no easy way to hide poison on it (without killing everyone in the post office anyway). Still best is an email or fax, which cannot be tampered with by the sender.
Bill Frist's web site has a side bar "PLEASE NOTE: security restrictions now cause considerable delay in processing postal mail sent to the offices of Senator Frist. Accordingly, please consider e-mail, fax"
CUPS was developed by Easy software products. They have GPLed it, but they also sell support. (Apple licensed CUPS from them, though I don't know what terms were used)
Nobody wants to contribute software for free that they will then turn around and make a product out of. So you would have to fork the project, and that means you can't easily stay in sink with whatever updates they do make.
The germans did develop crumple zones. However that was so long ago that even if they did patent them (I'm not sure), the patent would have expired long ago.
Slashdot Mirror
Not sure exactly what the grandparent was referring to. However there are some issues with garbase collection that make it unworkable for embedded systems.
The first is it destroys RAII. When I free memory my destructer runs, which can also release a lock. With the lock released some other code can now run. Without RAII I have to manage resources, which is just as difficult as memory management, but has many different interfaces to do that. (the procedure for releasing a file lock is different from closing a socket is different from releasing a semaphore, and so on) Good programing means other code should not know those internal details of a class. Even if I use a destructer (which isn't always called as you pointed out), it isn't called right away, meaning the next thing that wants that resource has to wait.
The next problem is it is not deterministic when the collector will kick in. In many embedded systems that code must run at certain times. When the collector is running your code cannot run. You partially alluded to this with your comment on using different garbage collectors, but that isn't a full fix to the problem.
Garbage collection is nice. However it does not solve all problems, and it causes other problems. Depending on what your requirements are it may or may not be worth having. In most projects you are best off mixing and matching - except that switching languages is often more of a cost (in complex code and performance) than sticking to one language and suffering where some things are not optimal.
There is still no code that cannot be done without goto. Sometimes goto is justified because it is faster which performance counts (which must be decided by a profiler, not a human!), or because all the if(error) checks you use instead end up making the code less readable than a simple goto. Those are the two most common reasons for goto, and so far the only two that I can accept. (though I'm open to more if you can defend it)
Several of the people behind boost also sit on the C++ stand committie. They have suggested that boost is a proving grounds for things that will be in the next standard.
I can't speak for the rest, but it didn't take me long to get into KDE development. KDE is designed well enough that I don't need to know the entire project to work on it. I've submitted a couple patches here and there. I've never looked at 99% of the source code, but I don't need to, since I can quickly find the area of code I'm interested in for the patch, fix it, test and submit.
Now KDE does need some experts who understand the entire thing, to make sure I'm not adding something that should be done elsewhere. However a good programmer should be able to jump in and fix things.
You were so close to it, yet you missed the obvious solution: have more men enter computer science.
Yes more women should get into computer science. However the number of women in computer science is not directly related to the total number of people in CS.
You don't want to mess with cables between buildings unless you are an electrical engineer qualified to deal with ground issues. This is much harder than you would think. Most network gear is not designed to handle this and will fry your computers. However it may work for a long time before trouble happens.
There are some wired networks that can handle it, but CAT-5 is not one. The length limits on CAT-5 is enough that your network may not work between buildings anyway.
There is any easy solution: glass fiber. You can get stuff on ebay cheap enough, and you won't have to worry, you know it will work.
To expand on your post: there is too much wrong intelligence out there. The US for a while honestly believed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. How many other reports are there? We cannot take action on them all - trying will make it easier for the terrorists, they just make lots of plans and let the spies get them. Pretty soon 7 out of 8 people are working only to stop threats, most of which are just plans designed by the terrorists to as a wild goose chase. Soon the economy grinds to a halt, and the terrorists win without doing anything really bad.
They are not useing the junk tape drives that you were using, but quality stuff. Mainframes have always put most of their data on tapes drives, and they rarely have problems.
Course a mainframe tape drive can cost $30,000 each, (not counting the robots that load them) so you can see why home users don't get that quality.
If you are looking for an Oracle replacement try postgresql. Depending on what your needs are it might be better than Oracle, though if you needs are typical of what a business wants Oracle is likely better. Being open source (and more free than MySQL is, as the license is BSD) people do hack it to add weird things to their database.
There are a number of open source databases. MySQL gets the press. That does not mean it is best for your purpose, so you really should examine them all yourself.
Which is best is partially a matter of opinion. Mine is that between sqlite on the low end and postgresql on the high end there isn't much room for more general purpose SQL databases. Of course there are others, I'm not going to list them all because I'll forget at least one if I try.
It has been on slashdot before. Shared Source does not mean what you think it does. In fact shared source is so bad that I have to recommend you quit your job if ever told to look at something under that license.
Shared source licenses cannot touch Samba. It isn't clear if you could touch Samba if you look at code completely unrelated to networking. It is not clear that someone who has ever seen shared source code can ever hack linux. I wouldn't recommend trying, at least not without a lawyer advising you.
The name shared source was chosen to confuse people who know about open source and make you think it is a variation. The whole idea behind them is different.
You paid your doctor as long as you were healthy and stopped the payment as soon as you felt sick. This forced the doctor to get you feeling better as soon as possible.
Well if generally you were healthy, or the doctor was ethical. If you often get sick it is in the doctors best interests to give you a strong dose of poison so he can devote more of his time to people who rarely need him, so they spend most of the time paying. (or have more vacation time depending)
Of course social Darwinists (do they exist outside of science fiction?) would call this a good thing as it keeps the unhealthy from breading.
When I was a little kid WordStar was the word processor to use, with 75% of the market. Everyone used it.
When I got to high school the teachers were proud of their lab which was running WordPerfect 5.1 - the same thing industry was using, so my skills would be up to date when I graduated.
When I entered college all the computer labs were running Microsoft Word, the dominate word processor of the day. (On windows for workgroups)
When I got my first real job it was at a company standardized on Adobe Framemaker. (Running on SunOS and Solaris - as an engineer Windows was not a useable platform for engineers)
All but the last one were easily number one of the day, holding at least 70% market share, often more.
I can't remember which function key was required to save in WordPerfect 5.1, but at one time my teachers made that part of my tests. Fortunately most of my class time was spent on writing papers. I still write papers today, and I still try for good grammar. Those writing and grammar skills are still important. The specific program doesn't matter. Do not let the school loose sight of the important part: teaching English skills.
Not all data set operations can be split up. If your operation can be split, then great. Clearly when you see operations running at 1/14th the time on a 16 CPU, your data set needs operations that scale well. At somepoint you will hit a wall though. Eventially adding more processors will make no difference at all (Unless you also add data).
Brute force encryption cracking scales to 2^key size processors (perhaps a little less cause you have to get code and keys to the processors), but after that adding more processors will make not difference because every operation now depends on the previous one.
Traversing a linked list does not scale because every operation depends on the previous. (though one would question why a linked list was used in a multiple CPU environment)
Great until I'm elected. I'll save a lot of money by pumping chlorine gas into your chamber instead of the normal hibernation drugs. Then I'll live a normal life without having to go back to sleep. My scientists won't spend half of their waking time figging out what happened while they were asleep so they will get more done than those who lived under your plan.
I will be unpopular, but only among the dead, so who cares? The living will be happy they lived. The only hard part is making sure nobody else comes up with this idea before I'm elected and gets me in hibernation. In short: I'm compelled to do this first because someone will get me otherwise.
Yes I live just fine with lots of stuff in me. However some of what is in me is harmful. When I'm operating normally my immune system takes care of that harmful stuff. (Some of the worst cases put in bed for a while, and somethings are deadly, but most of it is just taken care of without my knowledge) When I'm in 'suspended animation' my immune system is not functioning. Anything harmful that gets into the hibernation room can kill me because I'm not taking of it automatically.
Your child will only be a child for a short time. I know it is hard when the kid is crying in your face and won't shut up, but take the time to enjoy it. In just a few years the kid will be crying about something else, and a few years latter wrecking your car (unless you teach safe driving by example now, and even then good luck). Then suddenly he is gone and you will realize how much you miss the kid crying in your face.
It is hard to keep proper perspective, but when you are in that situation remind yourself of it.
My code doesn't compile on 3.0 because it contains 2.95 specific work code, because 2.95 didn't support the C++ as I wanted to use it. So I was forced to use the 2.95 bugs to work around the lack of support for the language.
Seriously, 2.95 really sucked for C++. You could make it work, but don't try to do anything tricky. (Though when 2.x was released nothing was very good at C++, 2.x just hung on a lot longer than the competition) Gcc 3.x isn't perfect and I suspect 4.0 will not be perfect either. Gcc 3.0 is a lot better for C++ than 2.95.
For starters there is only one Mac vendor in the world: Apple. (IIRC there might be a clone left out there, but if Apple limits them to such a small market we can ignore them) There are hundreds of linux vendors. RedHat, Slackware, Mandrake, and Suse come to mind instantly. The latter two are making money selling desktop systems. Then there are the non-vendors: Debian, and Gentoo really aren't companies but many people use their product on their desktop.
Add it all up and linux could have double the number of desktops while still allowing Apple to be the largest vendor.
Don't forget that linux is Free - it is hard to count Linux installations because there is no legal requirement to do something trackable. Some people buy/download a distribution once, and install it on 100+ machines legally. The free ones often come from ftp servers or bit torrents that do not give individual file download information out (it might be logged, but the logs are private).
Really? Let me see... Looks like I'm safe as all the software I use doesn't have the provisions. Even software that I refuse to use because of the license doesn't have such provisions. Where are you getting you software that you see lots of software with such a provision?
My guess is that this study is examined by a medical ethics board and run by legitimate researchers. IF they ask the guys wife what her breast size is, it is because they have a reasonable reason to believe that breast size affects something related to allergies. Since this is unlikely, ethics boards will require proof that there is a reason to ask.
I'm much the same. Except that I try to be a 6 year old girl, because there are laws to protect the privacy of children that do not apply to adults. As soon as websites solve the Y2k issue I will be a newborn, but everyone assumes that I must have been born in the 1900's.
Mental note, write a book about how to survive this in 12 years, just in time for those first children to start turning 18.
Doesn't look to me like the AOPA had much power at Meigs field.
My local congressman, Mark Kennedy claimed on some radio call interview a few years back that he was the only one in congress who cared about it. (His son is a private pilot) Don't know if it is true, but an interesting claim. At least he instantly understood the issue when a caller got on the air about it.
Well maybe not for all congressmen, but most are paranoid about paper mail. Remember the anthrax scares of a few years ago? Staffers are still afraid. When mail arrives at their office they don't open it, they send it to an irradiation plant, then open it. The process intentionally takes weeks. (Some poisons are better destroyed by time than irradiation)
A post card is better because there is no easy way to hide poison on it (without killing everyone in the post office anyway). Still best is an email or fax, which cannot be tampered with by the sender.
Bill Frist's web site has a side bar "PLEASE NOTE: security restrictions now cause considerable delay in processing postal mail sent to the offices of Senator Frist. Accordingly, please consider e-mail, fax"
CUPS was developed by Easy software products. They have GPLed it, but they also sell support. (Apple licensed CUPS from them, though I don't know what terms were used)
Nobody wants to contribute software for free that they will then turn around and make a product out of. So you would have to fork the project, and that means you can't easily stay in sink with whatever updates they do make.
The germans did develop crumple zones. However that was so long ago that even if they did patent them (I'm not sure), the patent would have expired long ago.