I asked this question a month ago and I’m still wondering now.
When can we all agree about the proper form of garbage collection? Will there ever be an interface or middle ground to a garbage collected heap that will perform within the contraints needed for an OS or a game?
Why hasn’t this happened?
The other day I had to build a binary for a major open source project at work. The project relied on configure and make, and this had to be built on windows.
6 hours later.. the binary finally ran.
Why do things have to be this difficult?
Because those tools “configure” and “make” just do not scale well. Rather than pick a decent programming language, configure is written in shell. Why shell? Because it is the only programming language that doesn’t require an arm and a leg to install on a system. No libraries or config files… just /bin/sh.
We as programmers have let our tools rot. You either buy into a language religion or you use commercial tools (Java & Ant). Why can’t we start looking at our tools and come up with some better solutions that are cross platform?
There is too much religion in the world.
I tried out Google Earth today. Overall, I’m not that impressed. Its probably because I tried out Keyhole about 3 years ago after seeing it at an Nvidia shareholder meeting. The app today vs. then is not that different. For people seeing this for the first time, I’m sure they will feel impressed, but after about 10 minutes, it loses it’s luster. You really want the data set to be truly 3d. I want to see the buildings in true 3d when you go down to the street level.
Anyways, this is just my ‘humble opinion’
Sun just released their Ultra 20 workstation. If I ever needed a ‘it must work, no questions asked’ kind of Unix box, this could be it.
Every programmer I know doesn’t like this name for XMLHttpRequest style programming.
Can we come up with a new name already?
When I got in the car this morning, right as I turned on the ignition I was greeted to the sounds of Dressy Bessy. Good ole NPR was doing a review of their new album Electrified on Fresh Air. The reviewer gave them the big thumbs up (even over some band called ‘Coldplay’ which he was also reviewing.) I liked it too, plain and simple indie-pop.
Here is a link to an mp3 called Side 2 that they have on their site.
Although I was thinking this would be at least 2-3 years out, my mind has changed.
Today Nvidia released a new graphics card, the 7800 series. It’s basically a good rev of the 6800 architecture. Overall the price is a bit high, but not too too high if you are in the performance game. People will move towards using that new hardware, and what is high-end today, will be common tomorrow.
These cards are looking at supporting high-resolution, wide-screen displays and having larger textures in memory. In one article they mention that the footprint should be about 144megs for a large widescreen. This means that 256meg cards are not far behind.
When we start looking at video cards with 256 or 512 megs (with 1 gig coming), we are talking about a lot of address space. Based on that, it would look like it makes sense to start moving to 64 bit OS’s in order to handle these newer cards.
The other day I wanted to contact a fairly famous person because of an article they wrote. What is cool about the internet as opposed to 10 years ago (holy crap, this is sounding old)… is that you can actually contact them after a few searches on google. People are making themselves more accessible. This is good stuff.
