For image processing (film/video), real-time audio or any serious signal processing, the overhead of anything but C/C++ is killer.
As a signal processing programming hobbyist (see link in my sig), I've gotta say, C is not just faster, it's ideal. Basically when it comes to C people grieve about lots of things, like poor text string handling or whatever. But when all you do is crunch numbers on big ass arrays using more or less advanced mathematical concepts and formulas in a fairly linear way, C is ideal and doesn't suffer any real flaw. Well that's coming from someone who learnt C through making signal processing programs, so YMMV.
80x25?! You young'uns has the easy life! We thought we were living in luxury when we got our 40-column displays after having been forced to eek out on 22-columns for years.
Funny because although I'm only 21 I learnt to code in BASIC on a 20x2 screen. Yup, 20x2, on my little sister's V-Tech Genius 2000. That was in 1999.
I'm often left guessing what the compiler will do with my C code, especially on an unfamiliar platform.
Duh, no shit! The beauty of C is that it's about as powerful as assembly languages (usually there's little you can gain by writing in assembly that you can't gain by writing good C), but isn't hardware specific at all. I like to see C as some sort of pure form of expression of algorithms, in that I quite naturally turn algorithms into C code without having to worry about things I shouldn't have to worry about. But of course you can't know what the compiler will output on an unfamiliar platform, because that's entirely up to the compiler to decide what to do out of your code. So yes, you've gotta know that in GCC 4.x for ARM the output for 64-bit integers will be pretty fucked up, and that's GCC's fault.
You can't blame it on C for not letting you deal with every arcane and intricate aspect of each platform's architectural detail, because that's the job of assembly programming. C is meant to be a portable language.
As for your example, that was really fucked up, make me wanna scream "Haha stfu and rtfm namely the C99 draft that's been out for 10 years, noob!". Besides even if you'll ignore stdint.h or can't afford to use it you can still use sizeof(int) and using sizeof you'll surely even be able to define your own fixed-size integer types using a few #if and #define statements. No need for a debugger here. Google for n1124.pdf, you really seem to need it.
And what's that thing about implicit conversion you're grieving about?
Less vertical space = less lines of code in the screen = more scrolling = less productivity.
Muahaha, who ever scrolls? I don't scroll when I code, when I look for something I/ or * it, n/N my way through occurrences etc.. Surely I'd rather have it occupy my entire screen than a 80x25 terminal, but when I code I care more about horizontal space because when line breaks things look more confusing, so if anything you'd rather see me coding in an elongated window, something like 140x25.
What about you just RTFA for once instead of dismissing the entire thing right away? It's not even the article that you're dismissing, it's the title, because that's all you needed to read to come up with that comment.
Muahaha, you're new here aren't you? Why look anything up when you can just ask knowledgable people who'll be happy to tell you and in the process inform people who'd be interested to know too?
You know what's worse? The unreliability of the results they show. Basically they get the number of pageviews right, and that's all they get. Because somehow they fail at telling who's the same visitor and who's a new visitor, a single visitor going through ten pages in 5 minutes (you can tell it's the same one by the hour, the city, or any other characteristic) might appear as such, or as 10 different visitors who only visited one page to never return. Which means that all the other indicators, number of unique visitors, pages/visits, bounce rate and time on site are meaningless.
But to be honest, I don't think Google cares, just like they don't care about Google Groups. They just add some features every now and then to make you happy, but they won't fix the big problems, they're all about marketshare and AdWords. In the case of Google Groups that's the search function. At some point they messed it up and now you'll have every single page of a discussion appearing in no precise order in your results. But I guess they care about Groups only to "own" USENET and be THE search engine for it.
A less-than-2-hour battery life is a huge problem for a machine touting itself as an ultra-portable.
Which is why I can't wait for that one. Well it's a tad bit more DSish than the EEE and it's ARM and not x86, but they're putting the biggest battery they can fit into that thing so that it can run for 10 hours (they're using the least leaky version of TI's OMAP 3530 too, that helps)
Jobs has to know that Apple is going to be out of the hardware business one day
I for one highly doubt it. Apple will always strive to push its shiny boxes. Part of the "Apple experience" Jobs tries to keep on delivering is a shiny box + a shiny OS, and both most work greatly together to provide the user with that good experience. Jobs will never stop making these machines to try to make the OS work on every other (ugly) PC out there. Apple is not a software company or a hardware company, it's an user experience-delivering company.
What sort of system leaves the application running after all its windows have been closed? To what purpose? It's retarded.
No it's not, you're just not used to it and so you don't understand. The Windows equivalent to that behaviour is when a program stays open with an empty window and just its menu. You can still switch to it and either quit it or start something new from it. The difference on Mac is that since the menu is not bound to windows, you can do away with the useless empty window, and thus leave a program running even if you have no document opened.
You know what's the best about sites that support suicide? User testimonials, like this one I found on suicideisthebest.com:
"A year ago, after my two children died in a helter skelter accident, I was so miserable, I lost my job, and found out that my husband was cheating on me with my father. I considered suicide, but I hesitated for a few months. I just wasn't sure it was the right thing to do. Everybody around me was against that idea. That's when I visited your website and felt compelled to act up. So I drove to a bridge above the freeway and hung myself with a piano string! My life is so much better than before since I killed myself! I get to spend all my time with my children and I regularly visit my ex-husband to scare the shit out of him! Suicide is the best thing that's happened to me in my entire life! Thank you so much SuicideIsTheBest.com!!!"
While this is definitely cool, I prefer the simple and elegant solution of walking inside a sphere.
Yeah, cause walking on a curved surface feels exactly like walking on a plane. Makes me wonder why I don't take walks in that giant hamster ball whenever it's raining outside..
Phobos looks to be not much more than just another egg shaped asteroid like object.
Another egg shaped asteroid? Got any example of these? All the asteroids we've seen from pretty close up have had interesting shapes like Phobos'. The only asteroid I can think of as even remotely egg shaped is the very round Ceres, which is probably round because it's huge. And actually it's now considered a minor (or dwarf?) planet like Pluto.
what is the minmum possible size/mass of a planet according to the new definition of 'planet'?
I don't know about that (well I do know but you could just look it up) but if a planet 4.7 times as heavy and 50% bigger than Earth was considered too small/lightweight to be considered a planet I'd seriously consider packing my bags and moving to a real planet like Uranus (to live in an airship of some sort that is, I'm very aware that you can't actually stand on Uranus, thank you!).
And those stupid ringtones!!! Start fining these assholes!
I agree, it's about time the government does something about these people are obviously unable to decide what's a ringtone and what's a cheesy song you should only listen to when you're home alone and with headphones on.
I suggest a few categories in order to define fines. Category A would be stupid rap and pop songs, with a $10 fine, Category B would be really cheesy love songs and the likes, $25 fine, and Category C would be Crazy Frog, make it a 3-strike felony.
Anyone caught in 2008 with Crazy Frog as their cell phone ringtone deserves 25-to-life. Really.
At 120db signal-to-noise ratio, to hear the difference you need
Superman's ears (besides the fact that I'd be quite surprised if any sound system could actually deliver that). Considered that hardly anyone is supposed to hear any sounds under 0 dB, and that I wouldn't recommend you to play anything as loud as 100 dB, you don't actually need anywhere near a 120 dB SNR, never mind the fact that a CD has a ~96 dB range (which also means a 96 dB SNR).
What does Yahoo! have that Microsoft prizes so highly?
Well see, the boxers I'm wearing right now are worth $2. But if you offered me to buy them for $3.24 (a 62% premium), there's no way in hell I would accept. Surely that's way more than they are worth though, but I still wouldn't accept. However, I would accept if you made an offer I would deem good enough, something way above my boxers' real value, somewhere around $50.
So what's so worthy about my boxers so that I wouldn't let them go for less than 20 times their true value? Nothing, I just would hate to give you my bloody underpants, so I would only let them go for a ridiculously high price.
Of course it's not. It's 5,000 bloody light years away. There are stars 1,000 times closer to us than that. And 1,000 times closer to us would mean that we'd receive the same radio signals 1 million times better.
Using that microlensing technique, and knowing that we can detect a Saturn in a twin solar system 5,000 light years away, how close would a star have to be for us to be able to detect an Earth?
Slashdot Mirror
For image processing (film/video), real-time audio or any serious signal processing, the overhead of anything but C/C++ is killer.
As a signal processing programming hobbyist (see link in my sig), I've gotta say, C is not just faster, it's ideal. Basically when it comes to C people grieve about lots of things, like poor text string handling or whatever. But when all you do is crunch numbers on big ass arrays using more or less advanced mathematical concepts and formulas in a fairly linear way, C is ideal and doesn't suffer any real flaw. Well that's coming from someone who learnt C through making signal processing programs, so YMMV.
80x25?! You young'uns has the easy life! We thought we were living in luxury when we got our 40-column displays after having been forced to eek out on 22-columns for years.
Funny because although I'm only 21 I learnt to code in BASIC on a 20x2 screen. Yup, 20x2, on my little sister's V-Tech Genius 2000. That was in 1999.
I'm often left guessing what the compiler will do with my C code, especially on an unfamiliar platform.
Duh, no shit! The beauty of C is that it's about as powerful as assembly languages (usually there's little you can gain by writing in assembly that you can't gain by writing good C), but isn't hardware specific at all. I like to see C as some sort of pure form of expression of algorithms, in that I quite naturally turn algorithms into C code without having to worry about things I shouldn't have to worry about. But of course you can't know what the compiler will output on an unfamiliar platform, because that's entirely up to the compiler to decide what to do out of your code. So yes, you've gotta know that in GCC 4.x for ARM the output for 64-bit integers will be pretty fucked up, and that's GCC's fault.
You can't blame it on C for not letting you deal with every arcane and intricate aspect of each platform's architectural detail, because that's the job of assembly programming. C is meant to be a portable language.
As for your example, that was really fucked up, make me wanna scream "Haha stfu and rtfm namely the C99 draft that's been out for 10 years, noob!". Besides even if you'll ignore stdint.h or can't afford to use it you can still use sizeof(int) and using sizeof you'll surely even be able to define your own fixed-size integer types using a few #if and #define statements. No need for a debugger here. Google for n1124.pdf, you really seem to need it.
And what's that thing about implicit conversion you're grieving about?
Less vertical space = less lines of code in the screen = more scrolling = less productivity.
Muahaha, who ever scrolls? I don't scroll when I code, when I look for something I / or * it, n/N my way through occurrences etc.. Surely I'd rather have it occupy my entire screen than a 80x25 terminal, but when I code I care more about horizontal space because when line breaks things look more confusing, so if anything you'd rather see me coding in an elongated window, something like 140x25.
Do No Anvils
Sorry, I know..
Fill in the blank:
Windows _____________ Can Hurt Security
as well as paving the way for practical magnetic levitation
Awesome! Can't wait for my superconductor magnetic levitation bed!
null pointers exploiting excited researchers?
What else can you expect from people whose job is to find security holes, study them and, dare I say, "fill" them.
What about you just RTFA for once instead of dismissing the entire thing right away? It's not even the article that you're dismissing, it's the title, because that's all you needed to read to come up with that comment.
God, then look it up.
Muahaha, you're new here aren't you? Why look anything up when you can just ask knowledgable people who'll be happy to tell you and in the process inform people who'd be interested to know too?
You know what's worse? The unreliability of the results they show. Basically they get the number of pageviews right, and that's all they get. Because somehow they fail at telling who's the same visitor and who's a new visitor, a single visitor going through ten pages in 5 minutes (you can tell it's the same one by the hour, the city, or any other characteristic) might appear as such, or as 10 different visitors who only visited one page to never return. Which means that all the other indicators, number of unique visitors, pages/visits, bounce rate and time on site are meaningless.
But to be honest, I don't think Google cares, just like they don't care about Google Groups. They just add some features every now and then to make you happy, but they won't fix the big problems, they're all about marketshare and AdWords. In the case of Google Groups that's the search function. At some point they messed it up and now you'll have every single page of a discussion appearing in no precise order in your results. But I guess they care about Groups only to "own" USENET and be THE search engine for it.
A less-than-2-hour battery life is a huge problem for a machine touting itself as an ultra-portable.
Which is why I can't wait for that one. Well it's a tad bit more DSish than the EEE and it's ARM and not x86, but they're putting the biggest battery they can fit into that thing so that it can run for 10 hours (they're using the least leaky version of TI's OMAP 3530 too, that helps)
So, the question remains, how do they write these so-called recommendation algorithms?
For now I'm more interested to know how they quantify these improvements.
Jobs has to know that Apple is going to be out of the hardware business one day
I for one highly doubt it. Apple will always strive to push its shiny boxes. Part of the "Apple experience" Jobs tries to keep on delivering is a shiny box + a shiny OS, and both most work greatly together to provide the user with that good experience. Jobs will never stop making these machines to try to make the OS work on every other (ugly) PC out there. Apple is not a software company or a hardware company, it's an user experience-delivering company.
What sort of system leaves the application running after all its windows have been closed? To what purpose? It's retarded.
No it's not, you're just not used to it and so you don't understand. The Windows equivalent to that behaviour is when a program stays open with an empty window and just its menu. You can still switch to it and either quit it or start something new from it. The difference on Mac is that since the menu is not bound to windows, you can do away with the useless empty window, and thus leave a program running even if you have no document opened.
You know what's the best about sites that support suicide? User testimonials, like this one I found on suicideisthebest.com :
"A year ago, after my two children died in a helter skelter accident, I was so miserable, I lost my job, and found out that my husband was cheating on me with my father. I considered suicide, but I hesitated for a few months. I just wasn't sure it was the right thing to do. Everybody around me was against that idea. That's when I visited your website and felt compelled to act up. So I drove to a bridge above the freeway and hung myself with a piano string! My life is so much better than before since I killed myself! I get to spend all my time with my children and I regularly visit my ex-husband to scare the shit out of him! Suicide is the best thing that's happened to me in my entire life! Thank you so much SuicideIsTheBest.com!!!"
While this is definitely cool, I prefer the simple and elegant solution of walking inside a sphere.
Yeah, cause walking on a curved surface feels exactly like walking on a plane. Makes me wonder why I don't take walks in that giant hamster ball whenever it's raining outside..
Phobos looks to be not much more than just another egg shaped asteroid like object.
Another egg shaped asteroid? Got any example of these? All the asteroids we've seen from pretty close up have had interesting shapes like Phobos'. The only asteroid I can think of as even remotely egg shaped is the very round Ceres, which is probably round because it's huge. And actually it's now considered a minor (or dwarf?) planet like Pluto.
what is the minmum possible size/mass of a planet according to the new definition of 'planet'?
I don't know about that (well I do know but you could just look it up) but if a planet 4.7 times as heavy and 50% bigger than Earth was considered too small/lightweight to be considered a planet I'd seriously consider packing my bags and moving to a real planet like Uranus (to live in an airship of some sort that is, I'm very aware that you can't actually stand on Uranus, thank you!).
And those stupid ringtones!!! Start fining these assholes!
I agree, it's about time the government does something about these people are obviously unable to decide what's a ringtone and what's a cheesy song you should only listen to when you're home alone and with headphones on.
I suggest a few categories in order to define fines. Category A would be stupid rap and pop songs, with a $10 fine, Category B would be really cheesy love songs and the likes, $25 fine, and Category C would be Crazy Frog, make it a 3-strike felony.
Anyone caught in 2008 with Crazy Frog as their cell phone ringtone deserves 25-to-life. Really.
"Hello, you never guess where I'm calling from."
"Can.. Can you hear me now? ... Can you hear me now?"
At 120db signal-to-noise ratio, to hear the difference you need
Superman's ears (besides the fact that I'd be quite surprised if any sound system could actually deliver that). Considered that hardly anyone is supposed to hear any sounds under 0 dB, and that I wouldn't recommend you to play anything as loud as 100 dB, you don't actually need anywhere near a 120 dB SNR, never mind the fact that a CD has a ~96 dB range (which also means a 96 dB SNR).
What does Yahoo! have that Microsoft prizes so highly?
Well see, the boxers I'm wearing right now are worth $2. But if you offered me to buy them for $3.24 (a 62% premium), there's no way in hell I would accept. Surely that's way more than they are worth though, but I still wouldn't accept. However, I would accept if you made an offer I would deem good enough, something way above my boxers' real value, somewhere around $50.
So what's so worthy about my boxers so that I wouldn't let them go for less than 20 times their true value? Nothing, I just would hate to give you my bloody underpants, so I would only let them go for a ridiculously high price.
Of course it's not. It's 5,000 bloody light years away. There are stars 1,000 times closer to us than that. And 1,000 times closer to us would mean that we'd receive the same radio signals 1 million times better.
Using that microlensing technique, and knowing that we can detect a Saturn in a twin solar system 5,000 light years away, how close would a star have to be for us to be able to detect an Earth?