Any coders here?

[grrr223]

I love it so far, I'm not doing so well academically, but I'm having fun. I'm majoring in Course 6 Option 2, which to the rest of the world lucky enough not to know what our course numbers stand for, that's Computer Science and Electrical Engineering with a humanities concentration in economics which may become a minor depending on how motivated I become.

I don't actually know scheme. Our entire freshman year is pass/no record (although I think that will change with next year's incoming freshmen class) which means if you get an A, B, or C in a class, a P appears on your transcript indicating that you passed it. Otherwise it disspears and the worst that's going to happen is that you have to take it over again. Anyway, I only needed to get a C in the class, so I didn't learn most of it.

 

[Redwoood]

CS and EE...hmm... I guess this would be computer engineering anywhere else in the world, but you MIT guys, you are just too elite for this, eh?

Well, sounds like fun to me.
Being almost done with my CS I'm trying to educate myself in EE a little bit. My dad is a EE andI guess it's in the genes...


Bye

Redwoood

 

[ai0tron]

Uhh, I should have qualified that statement as windows *NT* being superior to mac OS. What do you mean blanket statements?? Its one product versus another, its a small blanket eh? One is better than the other, one is faster, one has better features. MAC OS is not as stable as NT/2000 in my experience. Nor is it as fast. In fact MAC OS is slow, very slow. IT boots up very slow, it does not manage memory worth a damn, when a program crashes the system generally goes down with it. I like the networking features of MAC OS and thats about it. I also think you should reconsider your claim that OSX is going to be the new top dog. Linus Torvalds claims that the implementation of Unix they chose for OSX was poor. I don't know if you should trust the guy who wrote linux or not. Maybe he said this as from the viewpoint of a competitor although I seriously doubt that.

PS the funniest thing I ever saw when using MAC OS was when I first got into using macs. The system crashed on me but this time it went down hard and when I tried to reboot it hung and all I got on the screen was a little icon of a mac with a question mark where the monitor would be. I was thinking, "You tell me you sorry block of silicon!"

 

[grrr223]

Oh, we must be mistaken, the blue screen of death is vastly better way of crashing a system than a sad face.

 

[Redwoood]

This Linus quote is not entirely correct.
He said he doesn't like the BSD/Mach architecture.
But this has more philosophical reasons since he doesn't like micro kernels at all. This goes waaaay back to the famous discussions with AST (Andrew S. Tanenbaum)
keyword: Linux is obsolete.

'nuff said

Bye


Redwoood

 

[MacDEF]

I'm not trying to get into an OS war, but it's hard not to respond to so much misinformation...

>Uhh, I should have qualified that statement as windows *NT* being
>superior to mac OS. What do you mean blanket statements?? Its one
>product versus another, its a small blanket eh? One is better than
>the other, one is faster, one has better features.

And that's simply not true. NT isn't "better" nor is it "faster" nor does it have "better features." Better for whom? Faster doing what? NT has better multi-user support than Mac OS, but Mac OS has more useful features for the average single-user machine. Neither is "better." Speed? Doing what? I got news for you, NT's memory management isn't all it's cracked up to be, and even a good NT machine can bog down to the point where my old C64 was faster

I just have a big problem with these blanket X is better than Y statements.


>MAC OS is not as stable as NT/2000
>in my experience.

Key words: "in my experience" -- I'm willing to bet that you've never used a Mac that has been set up properly. You should ask any NT guru if he/she uses NT out of the box. They'll say "NO WAY!" and explain how they spend time getting it up and running well. Same with any other computer. In real-life use, NT and OS 9 are pretty comparable. They each have their problems and their advantages. Heck, even Lockergnome published an article a couple weeks ago about how Mac OS is as stable as NT, and much easier to troubleshoot. UNIX, on the other hand, is a completely different beast, and *far* more stable than either.


>Nor is it as fast.

Doing what? You mean like copying files from a Zip disk to the hard drive, where 400 files that take up 80MB take 15 minutes to copy vs. 2 on a Mac?

Again, blanket statements just don't fly. Scrolling on Word, sorts in Excel, those are things that are much faster on NT, because Microsoft writes the OS and the apps. Scrolling and sorts in AppleWorks fly on a Mac for the same reason. Heck I could list 100 things for each platform that are faster on that platform.


>In fact MAC OS is slow, very slow. IT boots up very slow,
>it does not manage memory worth a damn, when a program
>crashes the system generally goes down with it.

It seems obvious to me that you haven't used Mac OS much, since all the statements you make would apply to 1994 but not today. I could say the same about Windows 3.1

. For a real-world example, I have a G4/400 running OS 9, and a PIII 733 running NT. The NT machine takes FAR longer to boot into the desktop than the Mac. Both are pretty well optimized. As for memory management, while you're wrong when you say that a program crash generally takes the whole system down (it usually doesn't, especially under OS 9), I completely agree that OS 9 and earlier don't manage memory that well. On the other hand, neither does NT -- it's horrible compared to a good UNIX system, and in every day use, not much better than a Mac.

>I also think you should reconsider your claim that OSX is going to be
>the new top dog. Linus Torvalds claims that the implementation of
>Unix they chose for OSX was poor. I don't know if you should trust
>the guy who wrote linux or not. Maybe he said this as from the
>viewpoint of a competitor although I seriously doubt that.

That's his opinion -- lots of people who know just as much about UNIX as he does disagree. That's why we have different variants of UNIX.

As for his motivations, of COURSE he said it from the viewpoint of a competitor. He dislikes microkernals, which is what Mach/BSD uses. He chose not to go with a microkernal-based system, so of course he's going to say that his way is better. Plus, and this is a bigger issue IMO, the fact of the matter is that Mac OS X is the biggest competition Linux has. The two biggest stumbling blocks to getting more people to use UNIX/Linux are 1) ease of use; and 2) software availability. The Linux community has been struggling for years now to convince people that Linux is a viable alternative to Windows. Unfortunately, their main inroads have been in the server market and in the "geek" market. Along comes Mac OS X, a UNIX-based OS that offers a much better interface, much better ease of use, a bigger software base, and commitments from most of the major developers to provide versions of the major software packages for OS X. Here's an OS that will be useable by a newbie, but powerful enough to run high-end graphics and scientific solutions, plus the ability to natively run professional, scalable e-commerce solutions like WebObjects. Don't you think that's going to take some steam out of Linux, and make people like Torvalds try to talk it down?

 

[Redwoood]

Guys, calm down.

This is really not worth it.

Mac OS is good, but has some weak points.
W2kis good, but has some weak points
OS X is good, but has some weak points
Linux is good, but has some weak points
....
...

Now, that we all agree, let's be a bunch of happy people again and talk about headphones, ok?

Bye

Redwoood

 

[MacDEF]

Quote:

This is really not worth it. Mac OS is good, but has some weak points. W2kis good, but has some weak points OS X is good, but has some weak points Linux is good, but has some weak points

Redwood, I completely agree -- in fact, that's pretty much what I said (well, I didn't explicitly say OS X has some, but it does

).

 

[Jacobh]

Quote:

Assembly probably isn't used much by anyone other than Demo coders or game programmers who what to get that last bit of performance.

Assembly isn't always about speed or size. I worked in a group of BIOS programmers this summer and we coded exclusively in assembly. As someone pointed out, there are things you can pretty much only do in assembly. From a debug standpoint it is realy crappy though.

As for the guy who said the pentium 4 is a joke since there is something that a 200 mhz pentium can do faster, he clearly doesn't know what he's talking about.

As for CS/EE program at MIT being like computer engineering at most schools. You learn pretty much all the stuff that goes under computer engineering, but you also learn all the stuff you would learn as a CS or EE major at most other schools. This way is you go option 1 you're a EE who knows CS theory and if you go option 3 your a CS major who understands computer architecture. Option 2 allows you to be a little more choosy in whether you want more EE or CS knowledge.

 

[sackley]

I agree. All operating systems have strengths and weaknesses. When it comes down to it, it comes down to personal preference. I work on both mac's and pc's. At the end of the day, I prefer Windows 2k. It is my personal preference. It is what I like. But whenever I do graphics work or such, I use a mac. I am still trying to get Linux down, so I cannot honestly make an accurate opinion on that. But then again, those are my two cents.

 

[neil]

[hucking my two pennies in well]

Linux and FreeBSD are my bag when it comes to server OSes. For desktop stuff, hell, just about anything will work. But when I can look at the uptime on a server, and it's 431 days -- I know, for a fact, it's not Windows 95/98/NT/2000.

Coding language preferences? I often say I don't have a preference, but I find that most of my stuff I like doing in Perl. But when it comes to backend database stuff, it's all C++.

I love the OS and language wars. It's fun to hear why people love their native language so much. I, for one, wish to learn LISP.

Re: assembly -- yep, other than the people who are trying to streamline code for embedded systems, it's not often that you see people trying to whip up a program in such a low-level environment. Even my buddies at Ford that work on the hardware components there -- they start with higher level languages and when its time to throw it on the tiny little component, that's when they head for the assembler lever stuff.

 

[aos]

Even people coding DSPs don't use assembly these days. A friend of mine complained a few years ago that all they care was to be first to market, and programs were unoptimized for size and speed. I think C is used, or was used then; I guess they might use embedded Java now if they feel adventurous.

Of exotic languages I only use Tcl/Tk. I managed to push it into some commercial programs, as it's really easy to integrate, is portable and you can do powerful scripting and powerful GUI very fast. Some friends use Perl. I however found that almost everything that calls for a script can be done with a quick C program (or Java) or a VI editor script (the power of that editor is just insane). I know AWK and SED are out there if needed as well.