Re:Performance, anyone?
on
Lisp and Ruby
·
· Score: 1
Yeah, it's cool to virtualize, introduce dialects, interpret, etc. etc. Now, for the first time ever, we have cheap mainstream computer hardware that's capable of handling all these ideas in an acceptable way. But, isn't it a huge waste of resources? What about performance?
Ruby manages to be slower than PHP, and sometimes considerably, which is a true achievement (I can say, as a PHP developer, unfortunately).
Also from friends who had played more with Ruby and with Rails, Ruby's ability to create dialects makes developers spend too much time inventing new "domain specifics" syntaxes and new people need to have deeper understanding of the framework to get their job done.
In the end, sometimes less flexibility and more standardization is better. In C & C-derviative languages you'll never wonder if what you're looking at is a function or not.
Is that visual design supposed to be some sort of physically manifested sarcasm about "green" cars? How do they expect to win over the SUV crowd with the mirror plated SissyMobile?
That kind of reaction was also typical in the time the first automobiles started making their way. "Horses are for real men, automobiles are for sissies!".
It's best advised that you have more open mind about it, as improvements require changes.
My personal opinion of their design is: it's a concept design. Like any concept design it's experimenting with unorthodox ideas and doesn't look quite like a car you'll buy any time soon.
That said they have lots of things going on. Look at the interior. This concept car has the most inviting and soothing interior design I've ever seen in any car. I'd just increase the size of the windows. That's my only gripe with it.
Special effects showcases, mostly devoid of plot, sensical dialog, or otherwise interesting material?
I'll claim my right to see more substance in the said effects sequences.
Didn't you ever happen to enjoy a drawing or a melody without seeking some deep dialog, characters and thick plot? Star Wars isn't meant to bring world peace and cure cancer, so I prefer to enjoy it for what it is.
It's one thing to have a prototype 10 layer disk, another to be able to read it, and another to write to it, another to be able to mass produce it and another *actually* mass produce it, and the required readers/writers.
We had 10 layer DVD-s too years ago, but not surprisingly, non of them made it out "in the wild".
He turned down the part because he wants to try and do good work, he's not interested in resurrecting an old character just for a cash grab
Indiana Jones 4... ?
You know what, I actually would like to see the spin-off Star Wars with Ford. Unlike you crazy fans, I enjoy light fantasy/sci-fi movies for what they are.
The dialog and some plot lines in the prequels surely were very odd at times, but Lucas has enough feedback to know better now. He learned from Jar Jar-s feedback in the first one.
The problem here stems from insane fans with impossible to meet standards. I personally like Star Wars, like the sound track, most of the characters, and mostly, I enjoy exploring huge fantasy worlds executed in incredible detail and imagination, which is something we rarely see in movies, even for the sheer amount of people and effects required to make them a reality.
The fact Slashdot is posting a FUD article pretty much means it will be successful. I still remember the night the iPod mini article was posted, and you all complained it was too expensive, there was no market, nobody would buy it, etc. By year's end, it was the top-selling music player of all time.
I wonder though: is this really Slashdot being wrong with their FUD, or the "reality distortion field" of Apple has much wider impact that we anticipated?
Another product Slashdot has been spewing FUD about recently is PlayStation 3 / BlueRay and those seem completely justified (ok, too early to call for PS3, but the HD formats are basically confirmed now to be dead on arrival).
Studies nowadays seem to be done with the desired results in mind. Truth is nothing is as simple: some outsourcing costs US jobs, some doesn't make a difference, and some may even make US jobs.
The dynamics of this are too complex for an objective study to cover.
So we instead have tons of subjective fact-bending studies that show up on Slashdot. So what's new...
Windows Home Server = Windows XP Pro? I was under the impression that Windows 2003 was simply Windows XP with some goodies for servers
You're apparently very well informed. That would explain why Microsoft dropped the XP-based Vista code and spend two extra years porting it on top of the 2003 codebase.
Simply put: Windows 2003 is not just XP with "server goodies", it's a major improvement in terms of modularity, security and contains a lots of improvements centered around running in an enterprise environment.
If you can install a user level application and ruin the entire OS then you need to look at other more fundimental problems.
So which one OS do you know which will perform just as well as a clean install if you load a ton of crapware on every startup?
I suppose it should be a magical one, where if you load ten apps each taking 10 MB of RAM and 3% of CPU idling, you still end up with all of your free RAM and 0% CPU usage.
The Xbox 360 is about ultra realistic graphics, fast paced driving and brutal violence in which strangers are humiliated through Xbox Live. The Wii is about fun games that often can involve friends and family. One is not better than the other, they are simply very different. Which is better: a car or a sheep?
From that context I guess the car is for "fast paces driving and brutal violence", and the sheep is for "fun games that often can involve friends and family".
Seriously though, if I owned a manufacturing company of any any kind I would be scared of this thing. In 30 years you might witness the end of large scale production of small consumer goods. Throwing a party? Print up the plates and forks and chairs and tables you need. Need a gift? Print up some Barbie dolls. In 50 years the only thing that might actually be sold are the plans needed to fabricate something and the "ink" for this thing. If I was very cynical I would say this could end capitalism itself:)
Let the hype begin.
When computers were invented, typewriters died. Did that mean that typewriter manufacturers were all doomed? IBM has a different story.
A rapid prototype printer is just that: a rapid prototype printer, it's not a factory. If it even had the potential to be a tiny factory, factories would print their stuff, not manifacture it.
It can print glued powder (or silicon) colored with ink. If you're brave enough to sit on a chair made of glues powder, be my guest. But don't be surprised if the nice red printer chair colors the back of your jeans throughly.
Also this powder/ink chair will cost you roughly $200 in materials. Sounds fun yet?
Let's talk about printing other materials.. like rubber, metal, wool, or let alone basic electronics.
Anyhow, I *wish* file systems were dead. They have grown into messy trees that are unfixable because trees can only handle about 3 or 4 factors and then you either have to duplicate information (repeat factors), or play messy games, or both.
You know, I've seen my share of RDBMS designs to know the "messiness" is not the fault of the file systems (or databases in that regard).
Sets have more issues than you describe, and you know very well Vista had lots of set based features that were later downscaled, hidden and reduced, not because WinFS was dropped (because the sets in Vista don't use WinFS, they work with indexing too), but because it was terribly confusing to the users.
This was MSVC 2003 which isn't the smartest C compiler out there, but not a bad one for the architecture. Still, a few hours with the assembler and a few more hours doing some timings to help fine-tune things improved the CPU performance of this particular service by about 8%... These sophisticated CPU's don't know who wrote the machine code, they do parallel execution and branch prediction and so forth on hand-optimized assembly just like they do on compiler-generated code. Which is one reason (along with extra registers and less segment BS) that it's easier to write and maintain assembler nowadays, even well-optimized assembler.
Do you know which types of commands when ordered in quadruples will execute at once on a Core Duo? Incidentally those that won't on a Pentium 4.
I hope you're happy with your 8% improvement, enjoy it until your next CPU upgrade that requires different approach to assembly optimization.
The advantage of a compiler is that compiling for a target CPU is a matter of a compiler switch, so compiler programmers can concentrate on performance and smart use of the CPU specifics, and you can concentrate on your program features.
If you were that concerned about performance in first place, you'd use a compiler provided by the processor vendor (Intel I presume) and use the intel libraries for processor specific implementations of common math and algorithm issues needed in applications.
Most likely this would've given you more than 8% boost and still keep your code somewhat less bound to a specific CPU, than with assembler.
An example of "optimization surprise" i like, is the removal of the barrel shifter in Pentium 4 CPU-s. You see, lots of programmers know that it's faster (on most platforms) to bit shift, and not multiply by 2, 4, 8, etc (or divide).
But bit shifting on P4 is handled by the ALU, and is slightly slower than multiplication (why, I don't know, but it's a fact). Code "optimized" for bit shifting would be "antioptimized" on P4 processors.
I know some people adapted their performance critical code to meet this new challenge. But then what? P4 is obsolete and instead we're back to the P3 derived architecture, and the barrel shifter is back!
When I code a huge and complex system, I'd rather buy a 8% faster machine and use a better compiler than have to manage this hell each time a CPU comes out.
We're all sick with "new fad: X is dead?" articles. Please reduce lameness to an acceptable level! Can't we get used to the fact that specialized & new solutions don't magically kill existing popular solution to a problem?
And it's not a recent phenomenon, either, I bet it goes back to when the first proto-journalistic phenomenons formed in early uhman societies, and haunts us to this very day...
"Letters! Spoken speech dead?"
"Bicycles! Walking on foot dead?"
"Trains! Bicycles dead?"
"Cars! Trains dead?"
"Aeroplanes! Trains maybe dead again this time?"
"Computers! Brains dead?"
"Monitors! Printing dead yet?"
"Databases! File systems dead?"
"Specialized databases! Generic databases dead?"
In a nutshell. Don't forget that a database is a very specialized form of a storage system, you can think of it as a very special sort of file system. It didn't kill file systems (as noted above), so specialized systems will thrive just as well without killing anything.
"modern compilers are so good nowadays that they can beat human written assembly code in just about every case". Only people who have never programmed extensively in assembly believe that.
Only people who haven't seen recent advancements in CPU design and compiler architecture will say what you just said.
Modenr compilers apply optimizations on a so sophisticated level that would be a nightmare for a human to support such a solution optimized.
As an example, modern Intel processors can process certain "simple" commands in parallel and other commands are broken apart into simpler commands, processed serially. I'm simplifying the explanation a great deal, but anyone who read about how a modern CPU works, branch prediction algorithms and so on is familiar with the concept.
Of course "they can beat human written assembly code in just about every case" is an overstatement, but still, you gotta know there's some sound logic & real reasons behind this "myth".
IP Issues to Hit Action Figure Market. Seems inevitable. Dad, can you print me a few dozen more Ninja Turtles? If it comes with a 3d scanner, kiss Barbie Good-Bye. Mattel becomes the next Sony.
Thing is I doubt people will use a 3D silicon printer to print Barbie dolls. Have you seen the things the printer prints? They are pretty crude.
Even commercial hugely expensive 3D printers, where each model can be colored and incredibly detailed, uses combinations of special powder, glues and ink (as in ink jets), and isn't something that's safe or durable enough for a kid to play with.
Not to mention it has no any "actions", arm/leg flexibility, let alone remote controlled functionality or so on.
A mass produced toy will be always superior to what you can do with a rapid prototype printer, let alone an amateur single nozzle one, unless some totally new form of 3D printing is invented, with such diversity in materials and complexity, that I can print myself a laptop.
And if I can do this.. then Mattel won't be the only one hit by IP issues..
You may be shocked to realize that Firefox plugins and extensions don't run in any sandbox at all. They in fact have access to any resource Firefox has, which on a Windows machine is usually administrator capabilities.
So what was the beef with ActiveX again?
Oh, and in Vista, IE7 runs in limited mode even on admin accounts, so ActiveX controls are limited too. Firefox so far doesn't take advantage of this.
It's easy to open wide a big mouth and flame Microsoft, but the thing is: how is the competition better?
I won't be surprised if all it's better about (in terms of security) is that it's less popular and thus less targeted by malware authors. We've seen some of this during the Firefox adoption boom, but I'm afraid IE7 might kill the further adoption of Firefox so I can prove it.
The right direction would be running screaming away from active X entirely.
The hatred towards ActiveX is largely unfound. What would happen to sites like YouTube or movie sites, video, audio sites, if all browsers are suddenly rendered incapable of supporting plugins.
The mistake of Microsoft was that ActiveX were way too easy to install, and this is corrected in a major way in IE7. In fact, the plugin API and extensions of Firefox can do just as much damage and much easier (since people trust those) than ActiveX can in IE7, with all default settings.
IE7 will at least ask you now if a page wants to run an *already installed* control. Does Firefox do this? No.
(of course there's the question: should it, but apparently due to jerks that preinstall craps on laptops, yea..)
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, it's cool to virtualize, introduce dialects, interpret, etc. etc. Now, for the first time ever, we have cheap mainstream computer hardware that's capable of handling all these ideas in an acceptable way. But, isn't it a huge waste of resources? What about performance?
Ruby manages to be slower than PHP, and sometimes considerably, which is a true achievement (I can say, as a PHP developer, unfortunately).
Also from friends who had played more with Ruby and with Rails, Ruby's ability to create dialects makes developers spend too much time inventing new "domain specifics" syntaxes and new people need to have deeper understanding of the framework to get their job done.
In the end, sometimes less flexibility and more standardization is better. In C & C-derviative languages you'll never wonder if what you're looking at is a function or not.
Is that visual design supposed to be some sort of physically manifested sarcasm about "green" cars? How do they expect to win over the SUV crowd with the mirror plated SissyMobile?
That kind of reaction was also typical in the time the first automobiles started making their way. "Horses are for real men, automobiles are for sissies!".
It's best advised that you have more open mind about it, as improvements require changes.
My personal opinion of their design is: it's a concept design. Like any concept design it's experimenting with unorthodox ideas and doesn't look quite like a car you'll buy any time soon.
That said they have lots of things going on. Look at the interior. This concept car has the most inviting and soothing interior design I've ever seen in any car. I'd just increase the size of the windows. That's my only gripe with it.
Special effects showcases, mostly devoid of plot, sensical dialog, or otherwise interesting material?
I'll claim my right to see more substance in the said effects sequences.
Didn't you ever happen to enjoy a drawing or a melody without seeking some deep dialog, characters and thick plot? Star Wars isn't meant to bring world peace and cure cancer, so I prefer to enjoy it for what it is.
As a long time Firebug user I want to thank you the excellent product you gave to the community!
The new version is amazing as well, I just started to play with it.
It won't be an overstatement to say that this sole extension is saving web developers worldwide thousands of debugging hours: every single day.
It's one thing to have a prototype 10 layer disk, another to be able to read it, and another to write to it, another to be able to mass produce it and another *actually* mass produce it, and the required readers/writers.
We had 10 layer DVD-s too years ago, but not surprisingly, non of them made it out "in the wild".
He turned down the part because he wants to try and do good work, he's not interested in resurrecting an old character just for a cash grab
... ?
Indiana Jones 4
You know what, I actually would like to see the spin-off Star Wars with Ford. Unlike you crazy fans, I enjoy light fantasy/sci-fi movies for what they are.
The dialog and some plot lines in the prequels surely were very odd at times, but Lucas has enough feedback to know better now. He learned from Jar Jar-s feedback in the first one.
The problem here stems from insane fans with impossible to meet standards. I personally like Star Wars, like the sound track, most of the characters, and mostly, I enjoy exploring huge fantasy worlds executed in incredible detail and imagination, which is something we rarely see in movies, even for the sheer amount of people and effects required to make them a reality.
The rest is just fan snobbery.
Dear stranger, what is this "women" you speak of?
The fact Slashdot is posting a FUD article pretty much means it will be successful. I still remember the night the iPod mini article was posted, and you all complained it was too expensive, there was no market, nobody would buy it, etc. By year's end, it was the top-selling music player of all time.
I wonder though: is this really Slashdot being wrong with their FUD, or the "reality distortion field" of Apple has much wider impact that we anticipated?
Another product Slashdot has been spewing FUD about recently is PlayStation 3 / BlueRay and those seem completely justified (ok, too early to call for PS3, but the HD formats are basically confirmed now to be dead on arrival).
Studies nowadays seem to be done with the desired results in mind. Truth is nothing is as simple: some outsourcing costs US jobs, some doesn't make a difference, and some may even make US jobs.
The dynamics of this are too complex for an objective study to cover.
So we instead have tons of subjective fact-bending studies that show up on Slashdot. So what's new...
I'm having deja vu reading this article and comparing it to very similar articles on Slashdot (for iPod) few years back.
Windows Home Server = Windows XP Pro? I was under the impression that Windows 2003 was simply Windows XP with some goodies for servers
You're apparently very well informed. That would explain why Microsoft dropped the XP-based Vista code and spend two extra years porting it on top of the 2003 codebase.
Simply put: Windows 2003 is not just XP with "server goodies", it's a major improvement in terms of modularity, security and contains a lots of improvements centered around running in an enterprise environment.
The discussion revolves around:
Vista. An unnamed executive is concerned that the user will conclude the instability of the non-MS-certified applications is Vista's fault.
Bloatware != Unstable programs.
Unstable programs != Unstable OS
(exception: kernel mode drivers)
If you can install a user level application and ruin the entire OS then you need to look at other more fundimental problems.
So which one OS do you know which will perform just as well as a clean install if you load a ton of crapware on every startup?
I suppose it should be a magical one, where if you load ten apps each taking 10 MB of RAM and 3% of CPU idling, you still end up with all of your free RAM and 0% CPU usage.
The "fundimental" problem is with you.
The Xbox 360 is about ultra realistic graphics, fast paced driving and brutal violence in which strangers are humiliated through Xbox Live. The Wii is about fun games that often can involve friends and family. One is not better than the other, they are simply very different. Which is better: a car or a sheep?
From that context I guess the car is for "fast paces driving and brutal violence", and the sheep is for "fun games that often can involve friends and family".
You sick bastard.
The telescope will generate 30 TB of data a night
That's a lot of info.
Seriously though, if I owned a manufacturing company of any any kind I would be scared of this thing. In 30 years you might witness the end of large scale production of small consumer goods. Throwing a party? Print up the plates and forks and chairs and tables you need. Need a gift? Print up some Barbie dolls. In 50 years the only thing that might actually be sold are the plans needed to fabricate something and the "ink" for this thing. If I was very cynical I would say this could end capitalism itself :)
Let the hype begin.
When computers were invented, typewriters died. Did that mean that typewriter manufacturers were all doomed? IBM has a different story.
A rapid prototype printer is just that: a rapid prototype printer, it's not a factory. If it even had the potential to be a tiny factory, factories would print their stuff, not manifacture it.
It can print glued powder (or silicon) colored with ink. If you're brave enough to sit on a chair made of glues powder, be my guest. But don't be surprised if the nice red printer chair colors the back of your jeans throughly.
Also this powder/ink chair will cost you roughly $200 in materials. Sounds fun yet?
Let's talk about printing other materials.. like rubber, metal, wool, or let alone basic electronics.
Anyhow, I *wish* file systems were dead. They have grown into messy trees that are unfixable because trees can only handle about 3 or 4 factors and then you either have to duplicate information (repeat factors), or play messy games, or both.
You know, I've seen my share of RDBMS designs to know the "messiness" is not the fault of the file systems (or databases in that regard).
Sets have more issues than you describe, and you know very well Vista had lots of set based features that were later downscaled, hidden and reduced, not because WinFS was dropped (because the sets in Vista don't use WinFS, they work with indexing too), but because it was terribly confusing to the users.
man, you're a fag and an idiot.
The world's not perfect you know. You're a troll, anonymous and a coward.
I'd still pick me over you if given the chance.
This was MSVC 2003 which isn't the smartest C compiler out there, but not a bad one for the architecture. Still, a few hours with the assembler and a few more hours doing some timings to help fine-tune things improved the CPU performance of this particular service by about 8%... These sophisticated CPU's don't know who wrote the machine code, they do parallel execution and branch prediction and so forth on hand-optimized assembly just like they do on compiler-generated code. Which is one reason (along with extra registers and less segment BS) that it's easier to write and maintain assembler nowadays, even well-optimized assembler.
Do you know which types of commands when ordered in quadruples will execute at once on a Core Duo? Incidentally those that won't on a Pentium 4.
I hope you're happy with your 8% improvement, enjoy it until your next CPU upgrade that requires different approach to assembly optimization.
The advantage of a compiler is that compiling for a target CPU is a matter of a compiler switch, so compiler programmers can concentrate on performance and smart use of the CPU specifics, and you can concentrate on your program features.
If you were that concerned about performance in first place, you'd use a compiler provided by the processor vendor (Intel I presume) and use the intel libraries for processor specific implementations of common math and algorithm issues needed in applications.
Most likely this would've given you more than 8% boost and still keep your code somewhat less bound to a specific CPU, than with assembler.
An example of "optimization surprise" i like, is the removal of the barrel shifter in Pentium 4 CPU-s. You see, lots of programmers know that it's faster (on most platforms) to bit shift, and not multiply by 2, 4, 8, etc (or divide).
But bit shifting on P4 is handled by the ALU, and is slightly slower than multiplication (why, I don't know, but it's a fact). Code "optimized" for bit shifting would be "antioptimized" on P4 processors.
I know some people adapted their performance critical code to meet this new challenge. But then what? P4 is obsolete and instead we're back to the P3 derived architecture, and the barrel shifter is back!
When I code a huge and complex system, I'd rather buy a 8% faster machine and use a better compiler than have to manage this hell each time a CPU comes out.
We're all sick with "new fad: X is dead?" articles. Please reduce lameness to an acceptable level!
Can't we get used to the fact that specialized & new solutions don't magically kill existing popular solution to a problem?
And it's not a recent phenomenon, either, I bet it goes back to when the first proto-journalistic phenomenons formed in early uhman societies, and haunts us to this very day...
"Letters! Spoken speech dead?"
"Bicycles! Walking on foot dead?"
"Trains! Bicycles dead?"
"Cars! Trains dead?"
"Aeroplanes! Trains maybe dead again this time?"
"Computers! Brains dead?"
"Monitors! Printing dead yet?"
"Databases! File systems dead?"
"Specialized databases! Generic databases dead?"
In a nutshell. Don't forget that a database is a very specialized form of a storage system, you can think of it as a very special sort of file system. It didn't kill file systems (as noted above), so specialized systems will thrive just as well without killing anything.
"modern compilers are so good nowadays that they can beat human written assembly code in just about every case". Only people who have never programmed extensively in assembly believe that.
Only people who haven't seen recent advancements in CPU design and compiler architecture will say what you just said.
Modenr compilers apply optimizations on a so sophisticated level that would be a nightmare for a human to support such a solution optimized.
As an example, modern Intel processors can process certain "simple" commands in parallel and other commands are broken apart into simpler commands, processed serially. I'm simplifying the explanation a great deal, but anyone who read about how a modern CPU works, branch prediction algorithms and so on is familiar with the concept.
Of course "they can beat human written assembly code in just about every case" is an overstatement, but still, you gotta know there's some sound logic & real reasons behind this "myth".
IP Issues to Hit Action Figure Market. Seems inevitable. Dad, can you print me a few dozen more Ninja Turtles? If it comes with a 3d scanner, kiss Barbie Good-Bye. Mattel becomes the next Sony.
Thing is I doubt people will use a 3D silicon printer to print Barbie dolls. Have you seen the things the printer prints? They are pretty crude.
Even commercial hugely expensive 3D printers, where each model can be colored and incredibly detailed, uses combinations of special powder, glues and ink (as in ink jets), and isn't something that's safe or durable enough for a kid to play with.
Not to mention it has no any "actions", arm/leg flexibility, let alone remote controlled functionality or so on.
A mass produced toy will be always superior to what you can do with a rapid prototype printer, let alone an amateur single nozzle one, unless some totally new form of 3D printing is invented, with such diversity in materials and complexity, that I can print myself a laptop.
And if I can do this.. then Mattel won't be the only one hit by IP issues..
Next time you try to be sarcastic, make sure you make some sense.
You may be shocked to realize that Firefox plugins and extensions don't run in any sandbox at all. They in fact have access to any resource Firefox has, which on a Windows machine is usually administrator capabilities.
So what was the beef with ActiveX again?
Oh, and in Vista, IE7 runs in limited mode even on admin accounts, so ActiveX controls are limited too. Firefox so far doesn't take advantage of this.
It's easy to open wide a big mouth and flame Microsoft, but the thing is: how is the competition better?
I won't be surprised if all it's better about (in terms of security) is that it's less popular and thus less targeted by malware authors. We've seen some of this during the Firefox adoption boom, but I'm afraid IE7 might kill the further adoption of Firefox so I can prove it.
The right direction would be running screaming away from active X entirely.
The hatred towards ActiveX is largely unfound. What would happen to sites like YouTube or movie sites, video, audio sites, if all browsers are suddenly rendered incapable of supporting plugins.
The mistake of Microsoft was that ActiveX were way too easy to install, and this is corrected in a major way in IE7.
In fact, the plugin API and extensions of Firefox can do just as much damage and much easier (since people trust those) than ActiveX can in IE7, with all default settings.
IE7 will at least ask you now if a page wants to run an *already installed* control. Does Firefox do this? No.
(of course there's the question: should it, but apparently due to jerks that preinstall craps on laptops, yea..)