Some good, but kind of off hand you throw away all options except fusion, which doesn't work yet. I'm all for fusion, but it seems like on this very website, other alternatives have been discussed that give us options in the meantime, including Thermal Solar, mentioned here: http://www.sandia.gov/Renewable_Energy/solarthermal/NSTTF/index2.htm.
Also, more words not necessarily better, looks more like raving/emotional venting...
And the pyramids were built when the government had absolute power.;)
Especially because there are many examples of sweet heart deals set up by the haves, as well as things like the current mortgage crisis, where it is clear in many cases the real estate agent, and the lawyer, who are supposed to be looking out for the buyers best interests, sat idly by while the mortgage company sold the buyer a bad loan, that they didn't really qualify for.
Not everyone in the world understands the idea of an adjustable rate mortgage, and/or believes they can pray their way out of any bad situation. Those people need to be protected from the swine who think they should be able to get ahead by preying on them.
Population growth has ceased in modern countries, and is only still going up in places where there is immigration supplying new people. The existing modern populations are actually shrinking. This is part of the reason why progressives believe we need to export our modernity to the rest of the world- as we lift them up, it solves many issues for them, and is win-win- markets for our products, and new products from them for our consumers.
You can babble about whatever you want, but at least back it up with something.
And most of us here at slashdot know that the blue areas contain, say : Silicon Valley, NY, etc. The things that separate america from the rest of the world. How come?
Why do you think the capitalism beat out central planning communism? Because capitalism puts more decision making in the hands of the slightly less dumb business leaders. And occasionally a Steve Jobs type.
Hence, we are better of with societal pressures for now, given that we continue to help the 3rd world make it over the hump to where they stop megaproducing babies. This has already happened with the west, and places like Japan, etc. So there is a future going this route.
There are huge language changes with support for things like generics and autoboxing.. Those are in Java 1.5, I should know, I've used those things for quite a while on my macbook pro, with intelliJ.
You need to learn to program, thats the deal. Thats a whole separate topic, what it is to learn to program. But especially with the web today, you have lots of stuff at your hands to supplement what is at a particular school.
Make sure where you go lets you code large programs though, and start doing so as soon as you can. The biggest difference between the typical collegiate level program and professional work is typically scale. So you need to get your hands on writing code in larger projects, and managing that complexity yourself, and listening to others who also manage that complexity. Hacks that work at the small scale tend to cause confusion, brittleness, and performance issues when put into larger scale projects... Also, try looking at code you wrote 2 or 3 months ago, and see if you can understand it.:)
What comes with this as well is cohabiting that code with others, which guess what, means talking to them.
You are also going to have to drop the "I'm smarter than everyone else" thing you picked up in highschool, because chances are there will be other semi-intelligent people around in your CS program. You may even like hanging out with other intelligent people. Take it as a chance for kinship, not a sudden realization that you aren't some kind of god among men. Having friends you can talk to is good.;)
Also its not cool to tell the liberal arts majors that your major is harder than theirs. You are right, it is, but in America every child is above average, so let them have their dreams. And besides difficulty isn't the same as important, just like arrogance isn't the same as competence.
Oh, and for god's sake, go out on weekends, do intramural sports, or at least hang out where its loud and there are attractive members of the opposite sex. One of them might think you are attractive, if you brush your teeth.
And leave your D&D stuff at home.
4) your work is open (For me its dev tools, for my wife is video editing)
Thats 4 things already, working concurrently in separate apps. And to emphasize, most of the apps mentioned use at least 2 threads. So thats 8 things going on at least some of the time.
Further, Apple has announced for Leopard that OpenGL will use a thread for pumping data to the GPU. So that means for any App that uses GL (lots in Leopards modern hardware accelerated world) thats already 2 threads.
I could go on, but you see my point, hopefully. With quad cores, you are going to have a smoother, faster experience.
Our user experience today is not just the app in front of our eyes, its the window to the side, the music in the background, the effects, the email, the web.
All at once.
Many streams of graphics (apps, effects...),
many streams of information from the web (email, chat, webpages, RSS...),
many streams of sound (Music, webpages, email alerts, incoming chat sounds....),.
All at once. All at once. All at once.
I want more Cores!
Seems like there is alot of action in this space. Anyone get this stuff working? I was thinking of grabbing a Nokia if so. Although the rumored iPhone ( http://www.appleinsider.com/article.php?id=791) is supposed to have wifi too.
Whatever you think about this, and any other news, please VOTE. Study it, study anything, but VOTE!
America needs its "nerds" to stop bickering about how the 2 party system is a waste of time, how both parties suck, how what we really need is a new party, and any other thing, and just pick one of the candidates for each office running, and vote for him or her.
Go ahead and talk amongst yourselves the rest of the cycle, but right now we need your VOTE.
In many midterm elections, vote turnout can be especially light, so your vote will matter even more.
You are missing the point of stream processing. GPU's excel at filling pixels with data- which is to say they are good at doing the same thing to a whole bunch of pixels. The idea of a stream is to visualize all of those pixels flying by. Also, to carry the metaphor forward, the stream flows one direction, hence the end of stream is not flowing back to start of the stream. For graphics, that means the destination pixels (ie. the screen) depend on things upstream from them (what you are drawing, ie. pictures (textures)). Also, this means that one destination pixel is not dependent on the contents of the one next to it.
This is not what CPU's are good at. CPU's are general purpose processing units. They do bad code well. In fact Intel is particularly good at running crazying branching all over every where code with no particular sense to it. CPU's are good at doing un-predictable things to a few memory locations. Even the MMX/altivec etc code really only are set up for doing 4-16 memory locations at a time. Not much compared to GPU's, which are designed for doing 256x256 to 2048x2048 things at a time. That's several orders of magnitude more.
So again, GPU's do a single thing to a bunch of things well. Their memory model is setup with that in mind. Its all about keeping the stream running as fast as possible.
So what other things might this be used for? Check the GPGPU sites for specifics, but mesh based simulations come to mind, and as another poster said, the same kinds of things as the physics cards. The thing is, gaming keeps getting higher levels of graphic fidelity, to the point where if the underlying physics is wrong, its distracting. People don't need to know physics to know something looks funny. So game titles, and others, are increasingly spending time on simulations.
Today's GPU's can run a program for each and every pixel with 60fps+ framerates. These programs can do more than just set a color, or read a value out of an image, and write it to the destination pixel. They can calculate accelerations, velocites, etc, based on force applied. There really is alot of freedom. My personal favorite flavor of talking to GPU's is this one: http://www.opengl.org/documentation/glsl/
And the other thing is, the GPU is powerful, and a BIG part of the total budget for a PC now. So it seems like it should be used for more than high end games, and the thing is, with the exception of the occasional high end graphics professional, it really isn't right now.
MacOSX changed that to some extent, but seriously programmable GPU's can do a lot right now. Notice that MacOSX runs well on the iBooks, which don't have high end GPU's, but integrated Intel graphics. But games like BattleField2 requires the high end GPU. The point is there is ALOT of room to run in the high end GPU's, and it is basically idle for everyone not playing BF2 http://www.ea.com/official/battlefield/battlefield 2/us/ or some other modern game title.
So you can see why ATI (and NVidia, etc) would want to find other reasons for these cards to exist. Otherwise, the game market will go even more to XBox/PS2, etc, because marketing aside, there is little reason to put a high end graphics card in most peoples machines. The GPU hardware will go to those boxes, and Intel's integrated stuff will win the day. (cheaper, easier to build a system around)
The days of NASA designing their own systems from scratch using proprietary stuff should be just about over.
While in days of yore, there really wasn't much in the way of "off the shelf" parts, and NASA (had to/ could get a way with) large R&D budgets for designing tech gear, at this point its better they focused their thing (exploration/safer rockets/advanced propulsion) and let the tech community do the computer hardware/software design. Its a function of ROI- Apple/MS/Intel/IBM/Moto/Linux etc. have spent billions, and more importantly, thousands of man hours perfecting stuff- I would rather NASA spent its man hours doing user applications, device drivers, etc., than designing a new computing platform whose relative youth could cause a mishap.
That simple user app from Linux's view point, protected from doing harm to the OS or itself by micro kernels, memory protection, etc., might actually be a rover AI. That simple device driver might be a USB rover mandible.
Its all about fighting the common foe of all engineers : Complexity. There is enough of that in NASA's domain to keep them busy for a long time:)
Maybe instead of teaching the "theory" of evolution in backward states, we should just show them a bunch of old bone fossils, and tell them how old they are. It would be interesting to see what the response would be anyway.
Even this seemingly innocuous one: "Evolving ODF Environment: Spotlight on SoftMaker" http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/07/05/20 15243 becomes- "Intelligently designing the new SoftMaker", with a soundtrack directly from a B-karate movie: (lips moving, gesturing, now speech: "New SoftMaker, Good" now more lips moving, nods, scene ends.)
1) Make sure you know what you are building. Many project delays are because the "customer"- the manager, corporate head, you? doesn't actually know what they want.
2) Make sure you only work on things that you need to ship version 1.0 of that.
3) Make sure you keep the prototype running always.
4) Show Demos every few days to make sure noone is confused about what is going on.
5) Tell them they can ship it whenever they want, they write the check.
6) In the meantime, work towards the goallline like a football player, do not circle it like a lion waiting for it to die.
7) Don't make any project your time to show how clever, cute, or interesting you can be...
8) Keep Teams/Egos/Methods/Files/Modules/Projects/build times small. Small is good.
9) If someone is not clicking with the rest of the team:
- talk to them privately
- reassign them
- if this person is you, read #11, and consider if you want to build this project, or do something else. Follow your heart.
10) Do the riskiest part of the project first.
11) Remember that the enemy of the better is the best.
12) Don't worry about it. If you are working hard, and follow 1-11, you are doing your part.
That's enough to chew on. As homework, go build a paper mache model of the project, complete with testers whizzing around, filing bugs that are actually feature requests.
Nobody is going to make me buy a ford. They don't fit with us in these parts. No I don't care if they ride longer, and don't break down. No I don't care if they look better, drive smoother, or nuthin. And don't go bring that them there thing around here either. Makin people feel funny about themselves, like they are not payin attention. Honey, lets go... He doesn't know we are chevy people.
Given that Vista is probably going to generate a round of hardware upgrades for everyone, and given that the new MacOS X Leopard runs windows apps,via either via the Parallels thing http://www.parallels.com/en/products/workstation/m ac/ or via some top secret Apple grown version of the same tech ( in which case giving great control, and probably running Windows apps in a window or something), ---- THEN IT SEEMS LIKE A GREAT UPGRADE IS TO BUY THE NEW HARDWARE FROM APPLE INSTEAD OF DELL/HP/etc, and GET THE NEW OS FROM APPLE INSTEAD.
---You get more security, etc, and you will get your next cool OS upgrade 1-2 years later instead of 5. (And you get to wear black turtle necks and jeans)
And if Apple did something like put a firewall around the Windows instead, and not let it make internet connections except with user warning first, and you did all of your surfing and email in Apple land, wouldn't that be just fine?
You get your windows XP apps running at ~ full speed, and you get your new OS, and you get security.
How does Vista compete with that? Apple would have the same compatibility with XP apps (maybe more, XP would be running natively on the Leopard system, vista is a new version of the OS, and might have compatibility issues) Apple could even throw in an upgrade sticker kicker to make it even more cost competitive. Like if you show proof of purchase of XP you get an upgrade discount buying the Apple hardware.
As a bonus you get iLife with the Mac: http://www.apple.com/ilife/, which could be better than most if not all of what is available on Windows for entry level photo/music/iPod Casting/Movie making, etc, and is FREE.
You can always turn the mac into a beautiful windows Vista only machine later if you desire, so there is no Vendor lock in on stuff. You are basically trading the cost of the (Apple machine + Free iLife + MacOSX Tiger/Leopard + Free More Security) vs (new Vista Machine+Vista+Security headaches).
To me this is the reason why the Mac argument works vs. the other OS choices, and in addition you have most of the important software Mac Native as well, so you can wean yourself off of Windows versions of other stuff at your convenience, trading increasing vendor dependency for more Mac native stuff (some people think that stuff is better, Ill leave that to you to make up your own mind).
Well nice job on the IntelliJ work- whats really great about it is the integration- the very things the guys have been talking about here. Also, the easy UI to turn off the religious ones your particular team doesn't like, which removes the chaff enough so you get commentary you need, and not the stuff you don't. Any issues or new things for the discussion here?
As a part of MacOSX dev tools, you get shark, which includes java profiling. What is nice about Shark is it is the tied to the kernel profiler as well, so you can switch from java to native profiling in a flash, with the same UI. Also, it includes a bunch of data mining features, such as filtering out small methods (profile time http://developer.apple.com/tools/sharkoptimize.htm l
IntelliJ Idea (http://www.jetbrains.com/), a java IDE, has had "custom bug detectors" in it for a while. And you can add your own, via the plugin api, and you can select which ones you want on/off, and its part of the tool, like it should be. You get a GUI for fixing it, that matches compiler based syntax errors, etc.
Makes me wonder if IntelliJ features came first, or this open-source project did. Anyone know?
Slashdot Mirror
Some good, but kind of off hand you throw away all options except fusion, which doesn't work yet. I'm all for fusion, but it seems like on this very website, other alternatives have been discussed that give us options in the meantime, including Thermal Solar, mentioned here:
;)
http://www.sandia.gov/Renewable_Energy/solarthermal/NSTTF/index2.htm.
Also, more words not necessarily better, looks more like raving/emotional venting...
And the pyramids were built when the government had absolute power.
Especially because there are many examples of sweet heart deals set up by the haves, as well as things like the current mortgage crisis, where it is clear in many cases the real estate agent, and the lawyer, who are supposed to be looking out for the buyers best interests, sat idly by while the mortgage company sold the buyer a bad loan, that they didn't really qualify for.
Not everyone in the world understands the idea of an adjustable rate mortgage, and/or believes they can pray their way out of any bad situation.
Those people need to be protected from the swine who think they should be able to get ahead by preying on them.
Population growth has ceased in modern countries, and is only still going up in places where there is immigration supplying new people. The existing modern populations are actually shrinking. This is part of the reason why progressives believe we need to export our modernity to the rest of the world- as we lift them up, it solves many issues for them, and is win-win- markets for our products, and new products from them for our consumers.
Whoa- more and more the democrats are the party of the cities.
compare this: http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap970830.html
and this: http://www.usatoday.com/news/politicselections/vote2004/countymap.htm
You can babble about whatever you want, but at least back it up with something. And most of us here at slashdot know that the blue areas contain, say : Silicon Valley, NY, etc. The things that separate america from the rest of the world. How come?
Why do you think the capitalism beat out central planning communism? Because capitalism puts more decision making in the hands of the slightly less dumb business leaders. And occasionally a Steve Jobs type.
Hence, we are better of with societal pressures for now, given that we continue to help the 3rd world make it over the hump to where they stop megaproducing babies.
This has already happened with the west, and places like Japan, etc. So there is a future going this route.
You need to learn to program, thats the deal. Thats a whole separate topic, what it is to learn to program. But especially with the web today, you have lots of stuff at your hands to supplement what is at a particular school.
:)
;)
Make sure where you go lets you code large programs though, and start doing so as soon as you can. The biggest difference between the typical collegiate level program and professional work is typically scale. So you need to get your hands on writing code in larger projects, and managing that complexity yourself, and listening to others who also manage that complexity. Hacks that work at the small scale tend to cause confusion, brittleness, and performance issues when put into larger scale projects... Also, try looking at code you wrote 2 or 3 months ago, and see if you can understand it.
What comes with this as well is cohabiting that code with others, which guess what, means talking to them.
You are also going to have to drop the "I'm smarter than everyone else" thing you picked up in highschool, because chances are there will be other semi-intelligent people around in your CS program. You may even like hanging out with other intelligent people. Take it as a chance for kinship, not a sudden realization that you aren't some kind of god among men. Having friends you can talk to is good.
Also its not cool to tell the liberal arts majors that your major is harder than theirs. You are right, it is, but in America every child is above average, so let them have their dreams. And besides difficulty isn't the same as important, just like arrogance isn't the same as competence.
Oh, and for god's sake, go out on weekends, do intramural sports, or at least hang out where its loud and there are attractive members of the opposite sex. One of them might think you are attractive, if you brush your teeth.
And leave your D&D stuff at home.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKZ5rYttJkE
1) listening to music
2) your email is open
3) your web browser is open
4) your work is open (For me its dev tools, for my wife is video editing)
Thats 4 things already, working concurrently in separate apps. And to emphasize, most of the apps mentioned use at least 2 threads. So thats 8 things going on at least some of the time.
Further, Apple has announced for Leopard that OpenGL will use a thread for pumping data to the GPU. So that means for any App that uses GL (lots in Leopards modern hardware accelerated world) thats already 2 threads. I could go on, but you see my point, hopefully. With quad cores, you are going to have a smoother, faster experience.
Our user experience today is not just the app in front of our eyes, its the window to the side, the music in the background, the effects, the email, the web.
All at once.
Many streams of graphics (apps, effects...) ,
many streams of information from the web (email, chat, webpages, RSS...),
many streams of sound (Music, webpages, email alerts, incoming chat sounds....),.
All at once. All at once. All at once. I want more Cores!
http://www.truphone.com/
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/communications/wireless/0, 39020348,39283143,00.htm
John
We are searching for the lost tribe of humanity.
America needs its "nerds" to stop bickering about how the 2 party system is a waste of time, how both parties suck, how what we really need is a new party, and any other thing, and just pick one of the candidates for each office running, and vote for him or her.
Go ahead and talk amongst yourselves the rest of the cycle, but right now we need your VOTE.
In many midterm elections, vote turnout can be especially light, so your vote will matter even more.
SO VOTE.
Please. Our future depends on it.
How do you say "Love it or Leave it" in swallow?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_Compound
http://www.inforain.org/Northslope/anwr_3.htm
This is not what CPU's are good at. CPU's are general purpose processing units. They do bad code well. In fact Intel is particularly good at running crazying branching all over every where code with no particular sense to it. CPU's are good at doing un-predictable things to a few memory locations. Even the MMX/altivec etc code really only are set up for doing 4-16 memory locations at a time. Not much compared to GPU's, which are designed for doing 256x256 to 2048x2048 things at a time. That's several orders of magnitude more.
So again, GPU's do a single thing to a bunch of things well. Their memory model is setup with that in mind. Its all about keeping the stream running as fast as possible.
So what other things might this be used for? Check the GPGPU sites for specifics, but mesh based simulations come to mind, and as another poster said, the same kinds of things as the physics cards. The thing is, gaming keeps getting higher levels of graphic fidelity, to the point where if the underlying physics is wrong, its distracting. People don't need to know physics to know something looks funny. So game titles, and others, are increasingly spending time on simulations.
Today's GPU's can run a program for each and every pixel with 60fps+ framerates. These programs can do more than just set a color, or read a value out of an image, and write it to the destination pixel. They can calculate accelerations, velocites, etc, based on force applied. There really is alot of freedom. My personal favorite flavor of talking to GPU's is this one: http://www.opengl.org/documentation/glsl/
And the other thing is, the GPU is powerful, and a BIG part of the total budget for a PC now. So it seems like it should be used for more than high end games, and the thing is, with the exception of the occasional high end graphics professional, it really isn't right now.
MacOSX changed that to some extent, but seriously programmable GPU's can do a lot right now. Notice that MacOSX runs well on the iBooks, which don't have high end GPU's, but integrated Intel graphics. But games like BattleField2 requires the high end GPU. The point is there is ALOT of room to run in the high end GPU's, and it is basically idle for everyone not playing BF2 http://www.ea.com/official/battlefield/battlefield 2/us/ or some other modern game title.
So you can see why ATI (and NVidia, etc) would want to find other reasons for these cards to exist. Otherwise, the game market will go even more to XBox/PS2, etc, because marketing aside, there is little reason to put a high end graphics card in most peoples machines. The GPU hardware will go to those boxes, and Intel's integrated stuff will win the day. (cheaper, easier to build a system around)
The days of NASA designing their own systems from scratch using proprietary stuff should be just about over. While in days of yore, there really wasn't much in the way of "off the shelf" parts, and NASA (had to/ could get a way with) large R&D budgets for designing tech gear, at this point its better they focused their thing (exploration/safer rockets/advanced propulsion) and let the tech community do the computer hardware/software design. Its a function of ROI- Apple/MS/Intel/IBM/Moto/Linux etc. have spent billions, and more importantly, thousands of man hours perfecting stuff- I would rather NASA spent its man hours doing user applications, device drivers, etc., than designing a new computing platform whose relative youth could cause a mishap. That simple user app from Linux's view point, protected from doing harm to the OS or itself by micro kernels, memory protection, etc., might actually be a rover AI. That simple device driver might be a USB rover mandible. Its all about fighting the common foe of all engineers : Complexity. There is enough of that in NASA's domain to keep them busy for a long time :)
Sallah: Indy, why does the floor move?
Indiana: Give me your torch.
[Sallah does, and Indy drops it in]
Indiana: Snakes. Why'd it have to be snakes?
Sallah: Asps. Very dangerous. You go first.
Maybe instead of teaching the "theory" of evolution in backward states, we should just show them a bunch of old bone fossils, and tell them how old they are. It would be interesting to see what the response would be anyway.
Blank front page, except the words George W Bush, scattered randomly about the page.
Slashdot....
"Human Genes Still Evolving" http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/0 8/0247257 becomes ..... BEEEEEEEEP....
"Study Explains Evolution's Molecular Advance" ....BEEEP BEEP BEEEEEEEP (with angry overtones).... (http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/04/ 08/1749225
Even this seemingly innocuous one: "Evolving ODF Environment: Spotlight on SoftMaker" http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/07/05/20 15243 becomes- "Intelligently designing the new SoftMaker", with a soundtrack directly from a B-karate movie: (lips moving, gesturing, now speech: "New SoftMaker, Good" now more lips moving, nods, scene ends.)
2) Make sure you only work on things that you need to ship version 1.0 of that.
3) Make sure you keep the prototype running always.
4) Show Demos every few days to make sure noone is confused about what is going on.
5) Tell them they can ship it whenever they want, they write the check.
6) In the meantime, work towards the goallline like a football player, do not circle it like a lion waiting for it to die.
7) Don't make any project your time to show how clever, cute, or interesting you can be...
8) Keep Teams/Egos/Methods/Files/Modules/Projects/build times small. Small is good.
9) If someone is not clicking with the rest of the team:
- talk to them privately
- reassign them
- if this person is you, read #11, and consider if you want to build this project, or do something else. Follow your heart.
10) Do the riskiest part of the project first.
11) Remember that the enemy of the better is the best.
12) Don't worry about it. If you are working hard, and follow 1-11, you are doing your part.
That's enough to chew on. As homework, go build a paper mache model of the project, complete with testers whizzing around, filing bugs that are actually feature requests.
Nobody is going to make me buy a ford. They don't fit with us in these parts. No I don't care if they ride longer, and don't break down. No I don't care if they look better, drive smoother, or nuthin. And don't go bring that them there thing around here either. Makin people feel funny about themselves, like they are not payin attention. Honey, lets go... He doesn't know we are chevy people.
---You get more security, etc, and you will get your next cool OS upgrade 1-2 years later instead of 5. (And you get to wear black turtle necks and jeans)
And if Apple did something like put a firewall around the Windows instead, and not let it make internet connections except with user warning first, and you did all of your surfing and email in Apple land, wouldn't that be just fine?
You get your windows XP apps running at ~ full speed, and you get your new OS, and you get security.
How does Vista compete with that? Apple would have the same compatibility with XP apps (maybe more, XP would be running natively on the Leopard system, vista is a new version of the OS, and might have compatibility issues) Apple could even throw in an upgrade sticker kicker to make it even more cost competitive. Like if you show proof of purchase of XP you get an upgrade discount buying the Apple hardware.
As a bonus you get iLife with the Mac: http://www.apple.com/ilife/, which could be better than most if not all of what is available on Windows for entry level photo/music/iPod Casting/Movie making, etc, and is FREE. You can always turn the mac into a beautiful windows Vista only machine later if you desire, so there is no Vendor lock in on stuff. You are basically trading the cost of the (Apple machine + Free iLife + MacOSX Tiger/Leopard + Free More Security) vs (new Vista Machine+Vista+Security headaches). To me this is the reason why the Mac argument works vs. the other OS choices, and in addition you have most of the important software Mac Native as well, so you can wean yourself off of Windows versions of other stuff at your convenience, trading increasing vendor dependency for more Mac native stuff (some people think that stuff is better, Ill leave that to you to make up your own mind).
Well nice job on the IntelliJ work- whats really great about it is the integration- the very things the guys have been talking about here. Also, the easy UI to turn off the religious ones your particular team doesn't like, which removes the chaff enough so you get commentary you need, and not the stuff you don't. Any issues or new things for the discussion here?
As a part of MacOSX dev tools, you get shark, which includes java profiling. What is nice about Shark is it is the tied to the kernel profiler as well, so you can switch from java to native profiling in a flash, with the same UI. Also, it includes a bunch of data mining features, such as filtering out small methods (profile time http://developer.apple.com/tools/sharkoptimize.htm l
IntelliJ Idea (http://www.jetbrains.com/), a java IDE, has had "custom bug detectors" in it for a while. And you can add your own, via the plugin api, and you can select which ones you want on/off, and its part of the tool, like it should be. You get a GUI for fixing it, that matches compiler based syntax errors, etc. Makes me wonder if IntelliJ features came first, or this open-source project did. Anyone know?