For simple manual stepping, etc. debugger speed is probably not that important. Have you ever tried to really use watchpoints? Given up after your program slowed to a crawl?
We had a debugger that could run many watchpoints at almost full program speed some time ago, see http://www.netilium.org/~mad/dtj/DTJ/DTJK07/ for details. The key point is that Parasight was fast enough to make tools like this useable.
Re:Why is this review on /. ?
on
Space Vulture
·
· Score: 1
I wish it had been here before I finally succumbed to curiosity and bought this piece of junk. It's really, truly awful. The worst excuse for a book I've bought in quite a while -- and I buy a lot of books.
Maybe Negroponte should just pull off the gloves and make a deal with Wal-Mart and Costco to carry OLPC's. Use the profits to donate machines to developing nations. Or use the profits to cut schools in this country a big discount. If Intel and MS want a war, give them a war.
Actually the original state plans were for there to be a complete enormous ugly elevated freeway ("The Embarcadero Freeway") that cut off the waterfront. San Francisco stopped it, but it was a long, ugly fight and the Embarcadero piece got built before the end. Needless to say, there was little interest in rebuilding it after the quake.
Direct-compile model looks dangerous
on
The State of OpenGL
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The article says that the programmable features will be based the direct-compile model in which the compiler will be included as part of the driver.
Given the current less than good state of open source drivers for graphics chips this may well mean that most of the useful (i.e. works with your hardware) compilers may only be available in the Linux world as part of tainted binary drivers. It seems pretty likely that vendors who believe that their current drivers contain deep secrets than open source would reveal to their competition will be even more convinced of deep secrets of their compiler technology.
Remember that the 28-135mm IS lens will act much more like a 45-216mm lens on the 10D because the sensor is smaller than a 35mm negative. Canon has introduced a new wide angle L series zoom with the 10D in mind that will give you roughly a 28-60mm zoom with excellent quality for $800.
I really like the flexibility of a true SLR and love my 28-135mm IS lens on my Canon film body, but the effective cost of a 10D based outfit with lenses that match the range of the Sony's lens is about twice the price of the Sony.
"So far, I still see MySQL and some of the other open-source databases as really niche players," said Sheryl Tullis, product manager for the SQL Server database at Microsoft.
"With open-source, you're not going to get a platform that's as reliable or scalable or as secure as what you're going to get with a leading vendor," Tullis said.
This is a perfect example of attacking an easy target (MySQL) in an attempt to tar more serious competitors (PostgreSQL, SAP DB) with the same brush.
A number of replies have correctly pointed out that MySQL is missing too many features to compete with SQL Server or DB2 (or Oracle), but that's much less true of other open source databases.
Clever, slimy marketing and the reporter fell for it hook, line and sinker.
No, MFC is not based on Model-View-Controller, it's
based on Document-View, which is a misguided attempt to simplify MVC by:
1. Restricting the pattern to one level. In MFC,
Documents and Views are top level application objects. There is no standard support for implementing a complex widget with it's own set of them (don't get me wrong, it is *possible* to hack MFC to do this. I've done it, it isn't pretty).
2. Merging the Controller into the Model (Document) and View. This works for simple applications but breaks down for more complex ones where the Controller logic becomes large and complex.
Having lived through Doc-View, I'll take real MVC any day.
True. Fortunately it's becoming less and less
necessary in more recent Zopes. Python Scripts
now give you through the web programming for
logic that used to be done by the hardest to
maintain type of DTML. Presentation Templates
provide an alternative to DTML that is based
on legal HTML (or XHTML) pages and is compatible
with sufficiently smart HTML gui tools. They're
available now and will be built into Zope 2.5.
The main problem is that Guido can't really do anything about this. It's the CNRI lawyers talking to the FSF lawyers. He doesn't work for either. Neither is depending on him for anything important to them.
I think he's doing a remarkable job of remaining cool in the middle of a legal firefight he has almost no influence over.
I'd reorder things a bit. While the first major use of computers was number crunching, it was number crunching for crytography. WWII code breaking was why the U.K. developed the first digital computers (and what Turing was doing). It was also a major cause of the U.S. work, though I wonder how much was also done for the Manhattan Project, does anyone know?
Eiffel: He describes this as one of the noble but failed attempts to oust C/C++ because they don't have automatic memory management. Garbage collection is one of the core features of Eiffel. Read Chapter 9 of Object-Oriented Software Construction by Myers to understand how absolutely vital he considers it.
Tcl: Has had a clean, well documented interface for adding new functionality in C longer than Python or Perl. It was one of the original features of the language. That's how Tk is implemented.
I've seen a number of embedded projects hit serious and expensive delays because of bugs that only manifested deep in a kernel for which no source was available (or was not available at a cost a small company could afford). This has two effects that will promote Linux:
1. Proprietary real time OSs can add substantially to project cost and time. Further, this is hard to predict. This is especially true if the project is not exactly what the OS vendor initially had in mind in terms of target hardware and application.
2. Engineers HATE long unpredictable delays in their projects caused by lack of access to stuff they think they could fix if it was available. This is driving a lot of internal motivation to try Linux for embedded projects whereever possible.
Of course the Linux hype is a factor. For example, it may well be one of the reasons that some projects look at Linux instead of eCos, which is also open source.
Actually, this is remarkably similar to the strident protests of used car sellers, automobile manufacturers, etc. when the disclosure laws for those industries were passed. As usual, the sky failed to fall and business seems to be continuing just fine.
There is now way for a function defined in frotz to see the definition of foo in frotz. The losest you can get is the bar_kludge trick which results in a local variable of bar_kludge named foo that is initialized to the value of the foo in frotz.
When someone can come up with a 16.8Mpixel digital camera *body* that will let me use all my store-bought Canon lenses and costs less than $25K, then I'll start going digital.
Close but not enough. It's also very important to me that the digital body maintain a 1:1 magnification ratio with the current lenses. The current set of Nikon and Canon bodies that are close to the above specs have a ratio of about 1:1.4 which means that all of my wide angle lens (:-), but I'll be getting a 20-35 zoom soon) will suddenly move much closer to normal.
IMHO, one of the significant advantages of 35mm system cameras is a much wider range of lens viewing angles; moving either up or down in "negative" size reduces the available options considerably. If digital bodies for 35mm cameras throw away this advantage it will be very unfortunate and keep a lot of serious photographers in film longer.
First of all, I'm just a Python user. For official infomation look in comp.lang.python or on the beopen.com Python website. Here is what Guido and others have described:
Guido spend the last several years working at CNRI. During this time, the only Python license was the original CWI one however CNRI says that they have copyright to versions of Python produced while Guido worked for them.
Guido and others left CNRI (and other places:-)) to work on Python at BeOpen.com. This caused a looonnngggg discussion between CNRI and BeOpen.com about a new Python license. The discussion took place largely at CNRI's insistence, IMHO.
CNRI and BeOpen.com (lawyers) agreed on what they thought was a GPL compatible license and asked RMS about it. They made several changes at his request. This eventually became the current license which CNRI agreed to release Python 1.6 under. BeOpen.com agreed that Python 2.0 was/is a derivative work of Python 1.6 so they have to live with the Python 1.6 license terms. This does not mean that they have to release Python 2.0 or any later version under the CNRI license though.
CNRI lawyers insist that the license contain a jurisdiction clause because of fear that someone will abuse the license (hard to do) and bring suit in some strange jurisdicion with laws or court rulings that would pervert the license (or some such -- I have trouble thinking like a paranoid lawyer). RMS objects to this clause. It is unclear whether the fact that the jurisdiction in question is the state of Virginia is relevant to either party. At last word, discussions were continuing...
The main Python developers are now at BeOpen.com where they have no control and little influence on either side of this disagreement. They'd really like to see a fully GPL compatible resolution but there is nothing they can do about it.
Furthermore, VMS (at least the older versions) always shipped with the source on microfiche. Machine readable source code was a very expensive option because of the support costs from customers who would then modify the OS, break it, and expect DEC to support it (while denying that they'd ever changed anything).
Slashdot Mirror
For simple manual stepping, etc. debugger speed is probably not that important. Have you ever tried to really use watchpoints? Given up after your program slowed to a crawl?
We had a debugger that could run many watchpoints at almost full program speed some time ago, see http://www.netilium.org/~mad/dtj/DTJ/DTJK07/ for details. The key point is that Parasight was fast enough to make tools like this useable.
I wish it had been here before I finally succumbed to curiosity and bought this piece of junk. It's really, truly awful. The worst excuse for a book I've bought in quite a while -- and I buy a lot of books.
Well now we know who had better be one of the first layoffs. If they keep this moron around it says a lot about the future of Microsoft.
http://laptop.org/vision/people/MaryLouJepsen/
Much easier for a photographer to use, IMHO.
Here are a couple more prior art candidates references:
e sourcePath=/dl/mags/co/&toc=comp/mags/co/1990/11/r ytoc.xml&DOI=10.1109/2.60879& pg=PP1&ots=xNhr72NKWt&sig=n8bM_SOzg7Trzj04Y1Xgx2tb dng&prev=http://www.google.com/search%3Fq%3Dreacti ve%2Bkeyboard%26ie%3Dutf-8%26oe%3Dutf-8%26rls%3Dor g.mozilla:en-US:official%26client%3Dfirefox-a&sa=X &oi=print&ct=title#PPP1,M1
http://csdl2.computer.org/persagen/DLAbsToc.jsp?r
http://books.google.com/books?id=obxCY0wcaTgC&dq=
A friend of mine's card used to say "Software Thaumaturgist". He deserved it too.
Actually the original state plans were for there to be a complete enormous ugly elevated freeway ("The Embarcadero Freeway") that cut off the waterfront. San Francisco stopped it, but it was a long, ugly fight and the Embarcadero piece got built before the end. Needless to say, there was little interest in rebuilding it after the quake.
The article says that the programmable features will be based the direct-compile model in which the compiler will be included as part of the driver.
:-(
Given the current less than good state of open source drivers for graphics chips this may well mean that most of the useful (i.e. works with your hardware) compilers may only be available in the Linux world as part of tainted binary drivers. It seems pretty likely that vendors who believe that their current drivers contain deep secrets than open source would reveal to their competition will be even more convinced of deep secrets of their compiler technology.
Not good news
Remember that the 28-135mm IS lens will act much
more like a 45-216mm lens on the 10D because the
sensor is smaller than a 35mm negative. Canon
has introduced a new wide angle L series zoom with
the 10D in mind that will give you roughly a 28-60mm
zoom with excellent quality for $800.
I really like the flexibility of a true SLR and love
my 28-135mm IS lens on my Canon film body, but the
effective cost of a 10D based outfit with lenses
that match the range of the Sony's lens is about twice the price of the Sony.
This is a perfect example of attacking an easy target (MySQL) in an attempt to tar more serious competitors (PostgreSQL, SAP DB) with the same brush.
A number of replies have correctly pointed out that MySQL is missing too many features to compete with SQL Server or DB2 (or Oracle), but that's much less true of other open source databases.
Clever, slimy marketing and the reporter fell for it hook, line and sinker.
Yes, the language is Limbo. It's basically a C
descendant with a fairly small number of targeted
enhancements.
I'd go into more detail but I loaned my docs to
someone else around here and don't have the time
to go hunt them up right now.
It's time to bring up Guy Steele's parsing of C++ again:
Take C, "improve" it, throw it away and use C.
No, MFC is not based on Model-View-Controller, it's
based on Document-View, which is a misguided attempt to simplify MVC by:
1. Restricting the pattern to one level. In MFC,
Documents and Views are top level application objects. There is no standard support for implementing a complex widget with it's own set of them (don't get me wrong, it is *possible* to hack MFC to do this. I've done it, it isn't pretty).
2. Merging the Controller into the Model (Document) and View. This works for simple applications but breaks down for more complex ones where the Controller logic becomes large and complex.
Having lived through Doc-View, I'll take real MVC any day.
No, an MCSE is to meaningful certification what McDonalds is to food.
True. Fortunately it's becoming less and less
necessary in more recent Zopes. Python Scripts
now give you through the web programming for
logic that used to be done by the hardest to
maintain type of DTML. Presentation Templates
provide an alternative to DTML that is based
on legal HTML (or XHTML) pages and is compatible
with sufficiently smart HTML gui tools. They're
available now and will be built into Zope 2.5.
I think he's doing a remarkable job of remaining cool in the middle of a legal firefight he has almost no influence over.
I'd reorder things a bit. While the first major use of computers was number crunching, it was number crunching for crytography. WWII code breaking was why the U.K. developed the first digital computers (and what Turing was doing). It was also a major cause of the U.S. work, though I wonder how much was also done for the Manhattan Project, does anyone know?
Eiffel: He describes this as one of the noble but failed attempts to oust C/C++ because they don't have automatic memory management. Garbage collection is one of the core features of Eiffel. Read Chapter 9 of Object-Oriented Software Construction by Myers to understand how absolutely vital he considers it.
Tcl: Has had a clean, well documented interface for adding new functionality in C longer than Python or Perl. It was one of the original features of the language. That's how Tk is implemented.
I've seen a number of embedded projects hit serious and expensive delays because of bugs that only manifested deep in a kernel for which no source was available (or was not available at a cost a small company could afford). This has two effects that will promote Linux:
1. Proprietary real time OSs can add substantially to project cost and time. Further, this is hard to predict. This is especially true if the project is not exactly what the OS vendor initially had in mind in terms of target hardware and application.
2. Engineers HATE long unpredictable delays in their projects caused by lack of access to stuff they think they could fix if it was available. This is driving a lot of internal motivation to try Linux for embedded projects whereever possible.
Of course the Linux hype is a factor. For example, it may well be one of the reasons that some projects look at Linux instead of eCos, which is also open source.
Actually, this is remarkably similar to the strident protests of used car sellers, automobile manufacturers, etc. when the disclosure laws for those industries were passed. As usual, the sky failed to fall and business seems to be continuing just fine.
Python has two scopes: the current local scope and the global scope. Given the following useless code:
foo = 'This'
def frotz():
foo = 'The other'
def bar():
print foo
def foobar():
foo = 'Yet another'
print foo
def gbar():
global foo
print foo
def bar_kludge(foo = foo):
print foo
bar()
foobar()
gbar()
bar_kludge()
There is now way for a function defined in frotz to see the definition of foo in frotz. The losest you can get is the bar_kludge trick which results in a local variable of bar_kludge named foo that is initialized to the value of the foo in frotz.
Is it all clear as mud now?
When someone can come up with a 16.8Mpixel digital camera *body* that will let me use all my store-bought Canon lenses and costs less than $25K, then I'll start going digital.
Close but not enough. It's also very important to me that the digital body maintain a 1:1 magnification ratio with the current lenses. The current set of Nikon and Canon bodies that are close to the above specs have a ratio of about 1:1.4 which means that all of my wide angle lens (:-), but I'll be getting a 20-35 zoom soon) will suddenly move much closer to normal.
IMHO, one of the significant advantages of 35mm system cameras is a much wider range of lens viewing angles; moving either up or down in "negative" size reduces the available options considerably. If digital bodies for 35mm cameras throw away this advantage it will be very unfortunate and keep a lot of serious photographers in film longer.
First of all, I'm just a Python user. For official infomation look in comp.lang.python or on the beopen.com Python website. Here is what Guido and others have described:
:-)) to work on Python at BeOpen.com. This caused a looonnngggg discussion between CNRI and BeOpen.com about a new Python license. The discussion took place largely at CNRI's insistence, IMHO.
Guido spend the last several years working at CNRI. During this time, the only Python license was the original CWI one however CNRI says that they have copyright to versions of Python produced while Guido worked for them.
Guido and others left CNRI (and other places
CNRI and BeOpen.com (lawyers) agreed on what they thought was a GPL compatible license and asked RMS about it. They made several changes at his request. This eventually became the current license which CNRI agreed to release Python 1.6 under. BeOpen.com agreed that Python 2.0 was/is a derivative work of Python 1.6 so they have to live with the Python 1.6 license terms. This does not mean that they have to release Python 2.0 or any later version under the CNRI license though.
CNRI lawyers insist that the license contain a jurisdiction clause because of fear that someone will abuse the license (hard to do) and bring suit in some strange jurisdicion with laws or court rulings that would pervert the license (or some such -- I have trouble thinking like a paranoid lawyer). RMS objects to this clause. It is unclear whether the fact that the jurisdiction in question is the state of Virginia is relevant to either party. At last word, discussions were continuing...
The main Python developers are now at BeOpen.com where they have no control and little influence on either side of this disagreement. They'd really like to see a fully GPL compatible resolution but there is nothing they can do about it.
Furthermore, VMS (at least the older versions) always shipped with the source on microfiche. Machine readable source code was a very expensive option because of the support costs from customers who would then modify the OS, break it, and expect DEC to support it (while denying that they'd ever changed anything).