The economy was not booming. It was a "false" boom, at the expense of what we are now experiencing - a correction.
The only way an economy can grow is to produce useful things, to build useful services. It is true that alot of the Internet companies which were invested in were doing useful things, but then again, many were not, and ALL were vastly overfunded. The result is that lots of money and value looks like it is being produced on paper, but in the end, we get the expected "correction" (i.e. the entire last year's stock market, and probably more to come) and we see that all of that paper gain was really nothing.
This is a waste of resources, a complete and utter waste. For two years or more we had lots of people employed doing basically worthless stuff. That is NOT good for the economy and it does not produce sustainable growth.
On my more cynical days I theorize that the strings of the entire economy are pulled by some very smart people who know how to make money when it is booming and when it is busting, so they alternate boom and bust cycles and get richer and richer while everyone else gets poorer.
But when I am more clear-headed I typically chalk it up to the greed and stupidity of the common man.
I have to correct you here - the first dot-com hype company was Netscape, not Yahoo. Netscape started the whole Internet dot-com thing, before it was even called "dot-com". I was working at a small, doomed-to-failure Internet software company down the street from Netscape on the day Netscape went public and their shares quadrupled or so within hours. The air around the office was, "wow - we didn't expect that!" Nobody really expected it and it started the insane internet stock frenzy that occurred over the next few years.
The end of the dot-com insanity was LNUX - VA Linux. Their stock opened at something like $184 and plummeted within a day or two. It didn't take long before it was at 10% of its opening value.
These are very convenient, symmetrical bookends for bracketing the "internet bubble". We have Netscape's soaring first few days and VA Linux's plummeting first few.
In the end, a bunch of idiots got richer, and a bunch more idiots got poorer. The final result will be a negative impact on the economy as a whole resulting from the money that was burned on useless crap during the internet hype days.
So, as usual, it is the average joe who will bear the burden of this foolishness.
I will be happy to see Yahoo, Amazon, and all of the other favorites of the internet hype days fall by the wayside. Hopefully everyone will have learned a lesson, and we won't have to go through something like this again.
Of course, the snake oil salesman will always be waiting in the wings for another opportunity to feast on stupidity and greed...
My TWM is configured for no title bars, and all windowing functions are controlled by key presses or by key presses in conjunction with mouse movements.
I have not come across anything faster in my 11+ years of writing code for flipping between xterms and emacs windows during coding.
If I may offer a suggestion... you need to use the -print0 argument to find, and the -0 argument to xargs. This will allow filenames with spaces in them to work properly. This comes in handy quite frequently especially with Samba mounted shares, as Unix people would never do something as stupid as put spaces in a filename:) but Windows people do it all the time...
I first saw Akira in 1990, when my Japanese roommate had it on tape. I watched it once or twice and it was my first Anime, and I loved it.
I saw Ghost in the Shell this summer, and while I liked it, I didn't think the animation was as good as Akira, and with Ghost in the Shell I had the most tanglible feeling of "that was IT?!?!" that I have ever had with a movie. Meaning that I was enjoying Ghost in the Shell when it suddently and abruptly ended. I've never had a movie end in the middle of the interesting bit before, and when it didn't even feel close to having come to any kind of conclusion.
Now I saw Akira again this summer as well, and I have to say it was even better than I remembered. Why? Because the other times I saw it, there were no subtitles - it was all Japanese. Akira is hard to follow as it is. Finally being able to understand what was really going on was great.
All that being said, I am not an Anime fanatic. I have seen only a few Anime movies, and many of them I thought were not worth watching. The three that were, though, were Akira, Ghost in the Shell, and Princess Mononoke. Akira and Princess were definitely the best.
Whoops I mean 1000 square foot apartments. 200 square foot is more like 4 million.
The amazing thing is that there are plenty of real estate storefronts with advertisements for 2000 square foot apartments that only rent for 50 grand a month... whoo hoo..
I pay $1800/mo for a 371 square foot apartment in NYC's SOHO district, and everyone I know thinks I am really, really lucky... if that makes you feel any better...
Also, 2000 square foot apartments in my area can be bought for around 2 million.
Disclaimer: I know almost nothing about the stock market or economics other than what I have observed. I am generally clueless when it comes to these things.
Now, I generally don't invest in the stock market. The reason is that the value of a stock is not determined by perceived value. While it is true (in my limited knowledge) that stockholders have some chance of getting the assets of a company that has gone bankrupt, it can be safely be said that the owner of a stock owns little more than the paper that the certificate is written on.
The value of that piece of paper goes up and down with public perception of the company. The actual assets of the company may have some effect on this perception, but it is always the case that in buying and selling the stock, the price is ultimitely determined by the general perception of the stock.
I personally don't like the idea of my money being tied up in something whose values go up and down based upon public perception, because, well, frankly, most people are idiots.
Here is how I think that stock markets should work:
When you buy stock, you own a percentage of the company. Typically, this would be only a fraction of a fraction of a percent. You therefore get that exact percentage of the company's gross revenue each year. If the company makes 500 million dollars, and you own.0001% of the company, then you get $500 that year. The company is not taxed on the money that goes to its shareholders, but its shareholders are. Whatever the company is left with can be used for operating expenses, salaries, R & D, etc.
This is basically forced dividends. It follows the principle that if you own a percentage of a company, then you get that percentage of the take.
There are a couple of upshots to this:
1) Companies would never want to sell more than a fixed, and probably small (25%), percentage of themselves to the public, because otherwise there would not be enough money left over for the company to pay for its operating costs.
2) The amount of money you initially pay for your share of the company is determined by market economics. You could sell your share in the company if you wanted to, and might make a profit or lose money in the transaction. But the value of the stock would be much more closely tied to the actual value of the company as a money-making entity and much less to arbitrary perception.
3) I believe that the market would then become a much more effective means of promoting economic growth, as the value of a company's stock, and therefore the distribution of investment money to companies, would, I believe, be much more closely tied to the actual value of the company as a money making entity, which itself is an indication of its value to the economy.
Anyway, that's how I think the market should work. I would invest alot more money in a company if I knew that the return would be based on its actual performance, and not on (typically off-base) perception public perception.
X is simply a protocol for describing how clients and servers may communicate so that clients can draw window contents onto servers' screens. Period. It is a well-defined problem space, and X, as a solution, is pretty much IT. There have not been fundamental changes to X in 10 years because it is a correct, complete, efficient solution to the problem. Period.
Yes, there are areas in which X can be improved, such as font support, but this is NO reason to chuck X. You try designing a network-transparent windowing system and see how far you get before all of the problems that X solves with respect to race conditions, efficiency, performance, correctness, etc, bite you in the butt and you give up and go with X.
Xlib is a problem. It represents the minimal set of C API calls necessary to expose the full functionality of the X protocol to a client program. But it does not provide any kind of higher-level windowing system functionality such as buttons and scrollbars. Thus, many people have implemented these things in many different ways, most of them poor, and the result is that the typical X program looks and runs like crap.
This is NOT the fault of X. It is the fault of the people who released X without releasing any kind of standardized, effective toolkit that won over a broad base of usage. It is the fault of the people who have and will continue to ruin Unix by refusing to engage in any kind of standardization whatsoever.
The fragmentation of Unix systems and Unix desktops is a problem, but it IS NOT THE FAULT OF X!
So stop blaming X already!
X is state of the art because the "art" (network transparent windowing) has not changed, and will not change, in the same way that algebra is state of the art because the fundamental facts of mathematics do not change.
BTW, there are resolutions for which jaggies do not occur, despite your assertion to the contrary - any resolution where the pixel is too small to be seen by the naked eye, will not have jaggies and will not require antialiasing. I predict that 95% of all computers will meet this criterion within 10 years.
In the meantime, YES, we need support for antialising in X. There are standardized mechanisms for extending X to support things like this. The problem once again is that there is no common toolkit API that all X programs are using such that simply adding an antialiasing extension to the X server will magically fix X programs.
Once again, not X's fault - it's the fault of toolkits and the general X developer community which failed to produce a single viable toolkit (and GTK makes me barf, by the way).
And another thing - the reason that VNC is slow is because it is basically pumping over all of the bits necessary to refresh any window which changes. X is a MUCH smarter protocol that sends over "meta" information about what to draw and how to draw it, instead of sending over every pixel as VNC does multiple times per second.
In my mind, X is a "problem solved". There are improvements to be made to X, for sure, but it is the Right Way to do windowing systems. The only reason it is not used in Windows and OSX is because the companies that make these products have an agenda, and that agenda includes locking software into properietary APIs rather than using standardized open protocols like X.
"Any mouse click requires at least two context switches (server to client, client to server)..."
This is NOT true. X buffers requests and responses so multiple X messages (including user input messages) may be handled by the server or client at a time. Therefore, rather than a context switch per mouse click, you have a context switch per N mouse clicks and other X events.
Context switch overhead is a factor, for sure, but it's not as bad as you make it out to be.
I personally find X performance to be more than adequate for 100% of what I do. I guess if I were doing realtime 3d rendering (including 3d games) I would have something to complain about.
But of course the advantages of X far outweigh its disadvantages, as everyone ought to know by now...
What do you mean when you say that the problem with Java is that you can "push an integer on the stack and pop it as a pointer"?
First of all, in Java there are no pointers, only references, but I assume that that was just a typo and you really meant reference.
I've just scanned through the list of Java bytecodes. I stopped after the first half dozen I saw that popped values off of the stack because every single one of them stated that there is a requirement that the type of the value popped off of the stack must match the type expected by the bytecode.
In other words, Java's bytecodes as defined by Sun REQUIRE that the values on the stack be of the correct type. It's up to the VM to implement whatever checks are necessary to ensure that this is the case, and to throw an Error if a value on the stack is not of the right type (and I've seen it happen, with mangled code, so I know that VM's do it).
Exactly what bytecode do you think allows an integer to be popped as a reference? Please let me know, because I'd love to check my copy of the VM instruction set spec and verify your claim.
But I think you're confused. There is NO Java bytecode that allows such a thing.
And furthermore, this fictituous problem would have no bearing on the GC whatsoever. When a reference goes out of scope, but has been stored somewhere in the heap, then there are only two ways that it can ever be reclaimed:
1) There is a "free" opcode in the VM that the user can invoke to free the reference because they know that they are done with it. Sun does not provide such an opcode in the Java VM so we have to rely upon:
2) The GC tracks this reference and frees it when it has determined that is no longer reachable from any reachable data structure in the heap.
It would have been nice if Sun had made the GC optional, by allowing for manual freeing, but so be it.
Now as for the verifier - it also has nothing to do with the scenario you describe. The verifier does its work at link time, ensuring that the basic structure of the class file is correct. It is at RUNTIME that this scenario that you describe might happen. And it's not the verifier that handles this - it is the VM itself when, by following the letter of the VM instruction set spec, checks the type of values on the stack to ensure that they are of the right type for the instruction which is popping them, and throws an Error if not.
Your makes no sense and is clearly false.
I would really be interested in hearing a further explanation of your position though, if you still feel that you are correct after reading and considering the above.
I am NOT talking "out of my hat" (a phrase I am unfamiliar with, but which I assume means, making things up).
We have had:
* A Dell system which would shut itself off after 3 or 4 minutes, every single time it was powered on. After being patient with Dell tech support over the course of several weeks while they tried sending new memory, a new motherboard, and a new power supply (not all at once, but over the course of several weeks), they finally took back the whole system, after determining that it was their goofy power switch (I suspected this from the beginning). The good news is that they replaced a two year old Pentium 233 system with a brand new Pentium II 400 system at no cost to us.
* Dell's audio cards in their Dimension models of two years ago used this crummy, Dell-only version of the Montego sound card which the Turtle Beach people would not provide support for. Dell had cut a special deal with Turtle Beach to provide a cheaper version of their card that Dell would support, so that Dell could save a couple of bucks. The only drivers that Dell could provide for Windows NT would blue screen the system when you tried to install them.
* We have had many, many of the mice on Dell systems go bad. OK, they are Microsoft Mice, not really Dell's fault, but still. They could have chosen better mice.
* We have had two or three Dell monitors go bad. They were replaced without cost to us by Dell but it was a bit of a pain.
We have about 65 Dell systems where I work. Maybe the above problems are par for the course for PC's, but I would have a hard time believing that they are better than average.
Furthermore, Dell's cases DO suck. Trust me. Let one age for about a year and a half and then try to open it. You WILL bust your thumbs. Their case design is STUPID. I have worked with many cases. Screwless cases are not a big deal anymore. They are a dime a dozen. But 99% of them are designed MUCH better than Dell's cases. We have at least three or four systems on which the case no longer fits properly because of the force required to open them after they have frozen shut, and the fact that they are held in place by some rather soft plastic.
I have an Enlight case at home and it is by no means special or unique. It is FAR easier to work with than any Dell case I have ever used. No modern case is going to make it difficult to add hard drives. Trust me, I work on these things ALOT, I know a crappy case when I see one, and Dell's really suck.
I am NOT "spouting hackneyed Slashdot wisdom". I have quite a bit of experience supporting Dell systems. I know what I am talking about. Dell has its good points and bad points, but the original poster did not hit on the good points and spoke of some of Dell's bad points as being good.
A while ago. I started reading Slashdot when it was pretty young, probably one or two months old. I would have a lower user number but I didn't bother getting a user ID for the first week or two that they were available. But alot of people could say that as well.
I was searching for the Linux Web Watcher (couldn't remember the name of the site) when I stumbled upon Slashdot.
You named exactly the opposite reasons that one should consider buying a Dell. They are not quality systems (really - they use lesser quality components, unless you pay big bucks for their higher grade models). They are not easy to maintain (their "thumb-buster" case design is my arch nemesis). Or at least, not any easier than any other PC in the world, and in many cases harder, with their poor case design.
They are not even homogenous. Go to Dell's site, and look up a given model, then check, say, audio drivers. There will be 15 different audio drivers mentioned. Yes, they really do use different audio chipsets in systems with the exact same badge designation (i.e. Dimension XPS600R). And no, they can't tell you what chipset you have in your system if you go to their web site and punch in your unique "service code" from the back of your system.
About the only thing homogenous about Dells are the ugly, thumb-busting, nasty cases.
The ONLY reason to buy Dell is that they will replace any nonfunctioning part of your system, at their cost (shipping included), if you are patient enough to sit through 3 or 4 tech calls and go through their standardized rigamarole (sp?) for determining what component is bad (yeah, you may know that it is the video card, but the Dell techie has to convince himself as well).
OK, this is certainly going to get lost in the shuffle but...
I have a titanium wedding ring, made of the Ti6Al4V alloy, which is the alloy that they use in those wonderful military applications. In other words, this is the really strong alloy; regular Titanium is, to my understanding, not all that strong.
Titanium is nice and light and I think it makes for a great, somewhat exclusive, cheap ($200) wedding ring. But... if your finger ever swells up you will lose it (the finger), as standard tools will not be able to cut the ring from your finger.
Furthermore, it's not really what I was going for - I wanted the ultimate ring, the most indestructible I could find, but I settled on Titanium because it was cheap and easy to get a ring made out of it (www.titaniumrings.com).
If I had it to do all over again, and I had the gumption to get going on the project early, I would have a tool steel ring made and have it coated with a TiN or TiCN layer, which should give it the strength and hardness to cut steel. Throw it in a wood chipper, and it would break the chipper and come out unscathed. That was my goal and I fell short with Titanium.
If there are any entrepeneurs out there listening, I will give you a free business idea: get yourself a foundry which is good at working with tool steel, and a jewelry designer, and start cranking out indestrucible wedding rings. If you can use the green tint or blue tint Titanium Nitride coatings, so much the better. I think people would go nuts over "indestructible" wedding rings. The symbolism is great - the commmittment is indestructible, and so is the ring.
Let me know when you have done so as I will be your first customer:)
Don't forget that the other reason that x86 will not die is that the dominant OS (Windoze) is not ported to other architectures, not to mention any of the Windoze programs that people want to use.
If MS ported their stuff to other platforms, and Windoze software companies did as well, then there would be a mechanism for the obsolescence of x86. But as long as MS is tied to x86, it will live as long as MS does. And that looks like a depressingly long time to me.
For the record, I have no idea what kind of Sinclair the first computer I ever used was, but I remember it as a Timex-Sinclair 2000. It had a chiclet keyboard and I used to plug it into a small black and white TV and write BASIC programs, mostly Mad-Lib type things and random pattern generators (the easy kind you can make with "10 print something stupid, 20 goto 10". My friend had a tape deck and we managed to waste alot of time typing in stupid little programs like one that gave you an ASCII-graphics drawing of dice and randomly "rolled" them for you, and then saving them onto tape cassettes and loading them back in. Woohoo.
Slashdot Mirror
The economy was not booming. It was a "false" boom, at the expense of what we are now experiencing - a correction.
The only way an economy can grow is to produce useful things, to build useful services. It is true that alot of the Internet companies which were invested in were doing useful things, but then again, many were not, and ALL were vastly overfunded. The result is that lots of money and value looks like it is being produced on paper, but in the end, we get the expected "correction" (i.e. the entire last year's stock market, and probably more to come) and we see that all of that paper gain was really nothing.
This is a waste of resources, a complete and utter waste. For two years or more we had lots of people employed doing basically worthless stuff. That is NOT good for the economy and it does not produce sustainable growth.
On my more cynical days I theorize that the strings of the entire economy are pulled by some very smart people who know how to make money when it is booming and when it is busting, so they alternate boom and bust cycles and get richer and richer while everyone else gets poorer.
But when I am more clear-headed I typically chalk it up to the greed and stupidity of the common man.
I have to correct you here - the first dot-com hype company was Netscape, not Yahoo. Netscape started the whole Internet dot-com thing, before it was even called "dot-com". I was working at a small, doomed-to-failure Internet software company down the street from Netscape on the day Netscape went public and their shares quadrupled or so within hours. The air around the office was, "wow - we didn't expect that!" Nobody really expected it and it started the insane internet stock frenzy that occurred over the next few years.
...
The end of the dot-com insanity was LNUX - VA Linux. Their stock opened at something like $184 and plummeted within a day or two. It didn't take long before it was at 10% of its opening value.
These are very convenient, symmetrical bookends for bracketing the "internet bubble". We have Netscape's soaring first few days and VA Linux's plummeting first few.
In the end, a bunch of idiots got richer, and a bunch more idiots got poorer. The final result will be a negative impact on the economy as a whole resulting from the money that was burned on useless crap during the internet hype days.
So, as usual, it is the average joe who will bear the burden of this foolishness.
I will be happy to see Yahoo, Amazon, and all of the other favorites of the internet hype days fall by the wayside. Hopefully everyone will have learned a lesson, and we won't have to go through something like this again.
Of course, the snake oil salesman will always be waiting in the wings for another opportunity to feast on stupidity and greed
The first two lines of my .twmrc file:
.twmrc Prefs File
#
# Nov 4, 1990
I still use it every day.
My TWM is configured for no title bars, and all windowing functions are controlled by key presses or by key presses in conjunction with mouse movements.
I have not come across anything faster in my 11+ years of writing code for flipping between xterms and emacs windows during coding.
TWM rules!
If I may offer a suggestion ... you need to use the -print0 argument to find, and the -0 argument to xargs. This will allow filenames with spaces in them to work properly. This comes in handy quite frequently especially with Samba mounted shares, as Unix people would never do something as stupid as put spaces in a filename :) but Windows people do it all the time ...
Where did you get #6 from? I would love to read more about this if it is really a possibility ...
What did he throw?
... the existing three Pentium 4 owners about this?
For an opposing perspective ...
I first saw Akira in 1990, when my Japanese roommate had it on tape. I watched it once or twice and it was my first Anime, and I loved it.
I saw Ghost in the Shell this summer, and while I liked it, I didn't think the animation was as good as Akira, and with Ghost in the Shell I had the most tanglible feeling of "that was IT?!?!" that I have ever had with a movie. Meaning that I was enjoying Ghost in the Shell when it suddently and abruptly ended. I've never had a movie end in the middle of the interesting bit before, and when it didn't even feel close to having come to any kind of conclusion.
Now I saw Akira again this summer as well, and I have to say it was even better than I remembered. Why? Because the other times I saw it, there were no subtitles - it was all Japanese. Akira is hard to follow as it is. Finally being able to understand what was really going on was great.
All that being said, I am not an Anime fanatic. I have seen only a few Anime movies, and many of them I thought were not worth watching. The three that were, though, were Akira, Ghost in the Shell, and Princess Mononoke. Akira and Princess were definitely the best.
Whoops I mean 1000 square foot apartments. 200 square foot is more like 4 million.
... whoo hoo ..
The amazing thing is that there are plenty of real estate storefronts with advertisements for 2000 square foot apartments that only rent for 50 grand a month
I pay $1800/mo for a 371 square foot apartment in NYC's SOHO district, and everyone I know thinks I am really, really lucky ... if that makes you feel any better ...
Also, 2000 square foot apartments in my area can be bought for around 2 million.
Disclaimer: I know almost nothing about the stock market or economics other than what I have observed. I am generally clueless when it comes to these things.
.0001% of the company, then you get $500 that year. The company is not taxed on the money that goes to its shareholders, but its shareholders are. Whatever the company is left with can be used for operating expenses, salaries, R & D, etc.
Now, I generally don't invest in the stock market. The reason is that the value of a stock is not determined by perceived value. While it is true (in my limited knowledge) that stockholders have some chance of getting the assets of a company that has gone bankrupt, it can be safely be said that the owner of a stock owns little more than the paper that the certificate is written on.
The value of that piece of paper goes up and down with public perception of the company. The actual assets of the company may have some effect on this perception, but it is always the case that in buying and selling the stock, the price is ultimitely determined by the general perception of the stock.
I personally don't like the idea of my money being tied up in something whose values go up and down based upon public perception, because, well, frankly, most people are idiots.
Here is how I think that stock markets should work:
When you buy stock, you own a percentage of the company. Typically, this would be only a fraction of a fraction of a percent. You therefore get that exact percentage of the company's gross revenue each year. If the company makes 500 million dollars, and you own
This is basically forced dividends. It follows the principle that if you own a percentage of a company, then you get that percentage of the take.
There are a couple of upshots to this:
1) Companies would never want to sell more than a fixed, and probably small (25%), percentage of themselves to the public, because otherwise there would not be enough money left over for the company to pay for its operating costs.
2) The amount of money you initially pay for your share of the company is determined by market economics. You could sell your share in the company if you wanted to, and might make a profit or lose money in the transaction. But the value of the stock would be much more closely tied to the actual value of the company as a money-making entity and much less to arbitrary perception.
3) I believe that the market would then become a much more effective means of promoting economic growth, as the value of a company's stock, and therefore the distribution of investment money to companies, would, I believe, be much more closely tied to the actual value of the company as a money making entity, which itself is an indication of its value to the economy.
Anyway, that's how I think the market should work. I would invest alot more money in a company if I knew that the return would be based on its actual performance, and not on (typically off-base) perception public perception.
Doesn't mean it's not CORRECT.
X is simply a protocol for describing how clients and servers may communicate so that clients can draw window contents onto servers' screens. Period. It is a well-defined problem space, and X, as a solution, is pretty much IT. There have not been fundamental changes to X in 10 years because it is a correct, complete, efficient solution to the problem. Period.
Yes, there are areas in which X can be improved, such as font support, but this is NO reason to chuck X. You try designing a network-transparent windowing system and see how far you get before all of the problems that X solves with respect to race conditions, efficiency, performance, correctness, etc, bite you in the butt and you give up and go with X.
Xlib is a problem. It represents the minimal set of C API calls necessary to expose the full functionality of the X protocol to a client program. But it does not provide any kind of higher-level windowing system functionality such as buttons and scrollbars. Thus, many people have implemented these things in many different ways, most of them poor, and the result is that the typical X program looks and runs like crap.
This is NOT the fault of X. It is the fault of the people who released X without releasing any kind of standardized, effective toolkit that won over a broad base of usage. It is the fault of the people who have and will continue to ruin Unix by refusing to engage in any kind of standardization whatsoever.
The fragmentation of Unix systems and Unix desktops is a problem, but it IS NOT THE FAULT OF X!
So stop blaming X already!
X is state of the art because the "art" (network transparent windowing) has not changed, and will not change, in the same way that algebra is state of the art because the fundamental facts of mathematics do not change.
BTW, there are resolutions for which jaggies do not occur, despite your assertion to the contrary - any resolution where the pixel is too small to be seen by the naked eye, will not have jaggies and will not require antialiasing. I predict that 95% of all computers will meet this criterion within 10 years.
In the meantime, YES, we need support for antialising in X. There are standardized mechanisms for extending X to support things like this. The problem once again is that there is no common toolkit API that all X programs are using such that simply adding an antialiasing extension to the X server will magically fix X programs.
Once again, not X's fault - it's the fault of toolkits and the general X developer community which failed to produce a single viable toolkit (and GTK makes me barf, by the way).
And another thing - the reason that VNC is slow is because it is basically pumping over all of the bits necessary to refresh any window which changes. X is a MUCH smarter protocol that sends over "meta" information about what to draw and how to draw it, instead of sending over every pixel as VNC does multiple times per second.
In my mind, X is a "problem solved". There are improvements to be made to X, for sure, but it is the Right Way to do windowing systems. The only reason it is not used in Windows and OSX is because the companies that make these products have an agenda, and that agenda includes locking software into properietary APIs rather than using standardized open protocols like X.
"Any mouse click requires at least two context switches (server to client, client to server) ..."
...
This is NOT true. X buffers requests and responses so multiple X messages (including user input messages) may be handled by the server or client at a time. Therefore, rather than a context switch per mouse click, you have a context switch per N mouse clicks and other X events.
Context switch overhead is a factor, for sure, but it's not as bad as you make it out to be.
I personally find X performance to be more than adequate for 100% of what I do. I guess if I were doing realtime 3d rendering (including 3d games) I would have something to complain about.
But of course the advantages of X far outweigh its disadvantages, as everyone ought to know by now
Dude, you are way out there.
What do you mean when you say that the problem with Java is that you can "push an integer on the stack and pop it as a pointer"?
First of all, in Java there are no pointers, only references, but I assume that that was just a typo and you really meant reference.
I've just scanned through the list of Java bytecodes. I stopped after the first half dozen I saw that popped values off of the stack because every single one of them stated that there is a requirement that the type of the value popped off of the stack must match the type expected by the bytecode.
In other words, Java's bytecodes as defined by Sun REQUIRE that the values on the stack be of the correct type. It's up to the VM to implement whatever checks are necessary to ensure that this is the case, and to throw an Error if a value on the stack is not of the right type (and I've seen it happen, with mangled code, so I know that VM's do it).
Exactly what bytecode do you think allows an integer to be popped as a reference? Please let me know, because I'd love to check my copy of the VM instruction set spec and verify your claim.
But I think you're confused. There is NO Java bytecode that allows such a thing.
And furthermore, this fictituous problem would have no bearing on the GC whatsoever. When a reference goes out of scope, but has been stored somewhere in the heap, then there are only two ways that it can ever be reclaimed:
1) There is a "free" opcode in the VM that the user can invoke to free the reference because they know that they are done with it. Sun does not provide such an opcode in the Java VM so we have to rely upon:
2) The GC tracks this reference and frees it when it has determined that is no longer reachable from any reachable data structure in the heap.
It would have been nice if Sun had made the GC optional, by allowing for manual freeing, but so be it.
Now as for the verifier - it also has nothing to do with the scenario you describe. The verifier does its work at link time, ensuring that the basic structure of the class file is correct. It is at RUNTIME that this scenario that you describe might happen. And it's not the verifier that handles this - it is the VM itself when, by following the letter of the VM instruction set spec, checks the type of values on the stack to ensure that they are of the right type for the instruction which is popping them, and throws an Error if not.
Your makes no sense and is clearly false.
I would really be interested in hearing a further explanation of your position though, if you still feel that you are correct after reading and considering the above.
Why does every BSD article I have ever read deem it necessary to take potshots at Linux?
In this case, they're touting how much better then BSD development model is than Linux.
Lame.
Well, if it helps, I'm not forgiving. I think that TransMeta's technologies are very unimpressive and that their results are disappointing.
I am NOT talking "out of my hat" (a phrase I am unfamiliar with, but which I assume means, making things up).
We have had:
* A Dell system which would shut itself off after 3 or 4 minutes, every single time it was powered on. After being patient with Dell tech support over the course of several weeks while they tried sending new memory, a new motherboard, and a new power supply (not all at once, but over the course of several weeks), they finally took back the whole system, after determining that it was their goofy power switch (I suspected this from the beginning). The good news is that they replaced a two year old Pentium 233 system with a brand new Pentium II 400 system at no cost to us.
* Dell's audio cards in their Dimension models of two years ago used this crummy, Dell-only version of the Montego sound card which the Turtle Beach people would not provide support for. Dell had cut a special deal with Turtle Beach to provide a cheaper version of their card that Dell would support, so that Dell could save a couple of bucks. The only drivers that Dell could provide for Windows NT would blue screen the system when you tried to install them.
* We have had many, many of the mice on Dell systems go bad. OK, they are Microsoft Mice, not really Dell's fault, but still. They could have chosen better mice.
* We have had two or three Dell monitors go bad. They were replaced without cost to us by Dell but it was a bit of a pain.
We have about 65 Dell systems where I work. Maybe the above problems are par for the course for PC's, but I would have a hard time believing that they are better than average.
Furthermore, Dell's cases DO suck. Trust me. Let one age for about a year and a half and then try to open it. You WILL bust your thumbs. Their case design is STUPID. I have worked with many cases. Screwless cases are not a big deal anymore. They are a dime a dozen. But 99% of them are designed MUCH better than Dell's cases. We have at least three or four systems on which the case no longer fits properly because of the force required to open them after they have frozen shut, and the fact that they are held in place by some rather soft plastic.
I have an Enlight case at home and it is by no means special or unique. It is FAR easier to work with than any Dell case I have ever used. No modern case is going to make it difficult to add hard drives. Trust me, I work on these things ALOT, I know a crappy case when I see one, and Dell's really suck.
I am NOT "spouting hackneyed Slashdot wisdom". I have quite a bit of experience supporting Dell systems. I know what I am talking about. Dell has its good points and bad points, but the original poster did not hit on the good points and spoke of some of Dell's bad points as being good.
Are you serious?
A while ago. I started reading Slashdot when it was pretty young, probably one or two months old. I would have a lower user number but I didn't bother getting a user ID for the first week or two that they were available. But alot of people could say that as well.
I was searching for the Linux Web Watcher (couldn't remember the name of the site) when I stumbled upon Slashdot.
OK, New York City:
Anywhere, and everywhere, any time of day or night.
The city does not sleep.
From Silicon Alley,
Bryan
You named exactly the opposite reasons that one should consider buying a Dell. They are not quality systems (really - they use lesser quality components, unless you pay big bucks for their higher grade models). They are not easy to maintain (their "thumb-buster" case design is my arch nemesis). Or at least, not any easier than any other PC in the world, and in many cases harder, with their poor case design.
They are not even homogenous. Go to Dell's site, and look up a given model, then check, say, audio drivers. There will be 15 different audio drivers mentioned. Yes, they really do use different audio chipsets in systems with the exact same badge designation (i.e. Dimension XPS600R). And no, they can't tell you what chipset you have in your system if you go to their web site and punch in your unique "service code" from the back of your system.
About the only thing homogenous about Dells are the ugly, thumb-busting, nasty cases.
The ONLY reason to buy Dell is that they will replace any nonfunctioning part of your system, at their cost (shipping included), if you are patient enough to sit through 3 or 4 tech calls and go through their standardized rigamarole (sp?) for determining what component is bad (yeah, you may know that it is the video card, but the Dell techie has to convince himself as well).
OK, this is certainly going to get lost in the shuffle but ...
... if your finger ever swells up you will lose it (the finger), as standard tools will not be able to cut the ring from your finger.
:)
I have a titanium wedding ring, made of the Ti6Al4V alloy, which is the alloy that they use in those wonderful military applications. In other words, this is the really strong alloy; regular Titanium is, to my understanding, not all that strong.
Titanium is nice and light and I think it makes for a great, somewhat exclusive, cheap ($200) wedding ring. But
Furthermore, it's not really what I was going for - I wanted the ultimate ring, the most indestructible I could find, but I settled on Titanium because it was cheap and easy to get a ring made out of it (www.titaniumrings.com).
If I had it to do all over again, and I had the gumption to get going on the project early, I would have a tool steel ring made and have it coated with a TiN or TiCN layer, which should give it the strength and hardness to cut steel. Throw it in a wood chipper, and it would break the chipper and come out unscathed. That was my goal and I fell short with Titanium.
If there are any entrepeneurs out there listening, I will give you a free business idea: get yourself a foundry which is good at working with tool steel, and a jewelry designer, and start cranking out indestrucible wedding rings. If you can use the green tint or blue tint Titanium Nitride coatings, so much the better. I think people would go nuts over "indestructible" wedding rings. The symbolism is great - the commmittment is indestructible, and so is the ring.
Let me know when you have done so as I will be your first customer
Don't forget that the other reason that x86 will not die is that the dominant OS (Windoze) is not ported to other architectures, not to mention any of the Windoze programs that people want to use. If MS ported their stuff to other platforms, and Windoze software companies did as well, then there would be a mechanism for the obsolescence of x86. But as long as MS is tied to x86, it will live as long as MS does. And that looks like a depressingly long time to me.
Heh. Nice DeVo play in the .sig there, my friend.
For the record, I have no idea what kind of Sinclair the first computer I ever used was, but I remember it as a Timex-Sinclair 2000. It had a chiclet keyboard and I used to plug it into a small black and white TV and write BASIC programs, mostly Mad-Lib type things and random pattern generators (the easy kind you can make with "10 print something stupid, 20 goto 10". My friend had a tape deck and we managed to waste alot of time typing in stupid little programs like one that gave you an ASCII-graphics drawing of dice and randomly "rolled" them for you, and then saving them onto tape cassettes and loading them back in. Woohoo.
He's proud of that? Still touting that as an accomplishment?
...
WAIS was the biggest piece of sh** to ever get steamrolled by the web