buggy123

• Stephan T. Lavavej: Digging into C++ Technical Report 1 (TR1)

  Feb 28, 2008 at 10:04 AM

  >My primary argument against GC is that it doesn't do anything
  >for non-memory resources (finalizers are an abomination).
  
  Why is there any debate?  Ref counting is universal (release when done works with any resource type), GC is only for memory (release when memory pressure).  Therefore GC can not be a drop in replacement for ref counting, case closed.  There is no amount of performance or any other straw man  that can change that.
  
  Yet that's precisely what was done from vb6 to vb.net
  
  Since you are on the inside, can you find out why Microsoft's .NET people appear to not understand this?  Do they really believe that another abomination, the dispose pattern (which is nothing more than manual malloc, free) is really a "solution?"  Are there plans to change that?
  

• Stephan T. Lavavej: Digging into C++ Technical Report 1 (TR1)

  Feb 25, 2008 at 10:44 PM

  The following point, made in this video, needs to be stressed,
  
  deterministic reference counting is a universal resource management technique, whereas garbage collection is useless for anything other than memory.  For that reason GC is simply not a replacement for ref counting no matter how much Patrick Dussud congratulates himself.
  
  Cycles can be worked around but total lack of support for managing non memory resources in .net, can't be, you are back in the C world of malloc (new), free (dispose) with absolutely no help from the compiler/runtime.
  

• Jesse Lewin on knowing Steve Jobs, working at Apple, and posing with Bono

  May 10, 2007 at 6:02 PM

  I think you lost the adult audience with this interviewing guy, but I'm sure kids 2-6 will enjoy his antics. It's great you're thinking about the children as well.
  
  OMG he met Steve Jobs! He met Steve Jobs! He was his best buddy, OMG OMG!!!
  
  Right...
  

• Sumit Chauhan: Developing Microsoft Access, Running a Dev Team

  Apr 24, 2007 at 10:51 AM

  really she is looking hot .............just i was looking @ her 00 ..
  

• Programming in the Age of Concurrency: The Accelerator Project

  Sep 23, 2006 at 1:19 AM

  First a question: what were all those programs used? I think I saw cygwin and emacs being used, but what was the shell that would highlight the old commands on mouse over?
  
  And then a comment: my problem with offloading stuff to the GPU is that the numerical environment is a joke. You don't know anything about the radix, the range of fp values, if +, -, *, /, and sqrt follows the sane rounding rules of IEEE, controlling any reorderings or fusions (i.e. a*b+c -> fma(a,b,c)) that are allowed to take place, NaNs, -0, Inf (if so, affine or projected?), what happens on overflow/underflow/etc., all the nice functions in the latest draft IEEE standard or C99, controlling directed rounding, etc., etc., etc.
  
  It's fine for doing things like CoreImage or accelerating game physics, but not for some of the things I'd love to offload that requires careful analysis. I hope you guys nag the DX people (at least) for some pragmas or mode that will tighten up the fp environment and/or the ability to set/query anything interesting (see limits.h or float.h from C99 as an example).
  
  
  And the use of functional type stuff scares me. Do you guys automatically break data down into smaller tiles to keep the memory usage more manageable?
  

• Paul Vick and Erik Meijer - Dynamic Programming in Visual Basic

  May 04, 2006 at 1:32 PM

  Oh joy. Only 2 more versions of dotNet to go before we're capable of writing VB6 code. What progress that is! Plus, all that wait and we'll still have crappy dotNet performance. "dotNet... like running from the internet, no matter what!"

• Robert Fripp - Behind the scenes at Windows Vista recording session

  Jan 06, 2006 at 5:47 AM

  Not only do I only use 100 percent pirated copies of Windows in massive OS rollouts, I also disable all sounds upon installation.  Eat it, Micro(I need to watch my language).
  
  
  Larry Osterman: Watch your language.

• Robert Fripp - Behind the scenes at Windows Vista recording session

  Jan 05, 2006 at 5:43 PM

  It sounds good, im using Vista like sounds packet since long time. Im wondered how the final Sounds will sound like
  

• Windows Vista Tattoo

  Dec 05, 2005 at 4:58 PM

  That is the dumbest thing I've seen in a while
  

• Carolyn Napier and Tyler Robinson (MSI team) - Installing apps in Windows Vista

  Nov 09, 2005 at 6:03 AM

  If this Restart Manager functionality is taken up, it could potentially mean that Windows could gain the feature that Gnome and other Linux window managers currently have that lets you save the whole desktop state across reboots. Basically, upon shutdown you use the Restart Manager interfaces to persist the state of all running processes, which is restored when you log in again after the computer comes back up. This would be cool, and it seems a shame to relegate the functionality to being part of the Windows Installer component rather than a wider Windows metaphor.
  
  BSP
  

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