Re: What up with the mac
On Monday, October 14, 2002, at 04:12 PM, Sherm Pendley wrote: Time to jump in here with my own two cents. I don't think Gregory is referring to folks like Unsanity or Stick, whose products represent a serious amount of work at a rock-bottom price. That's shareware done well. There is another side to shareware, though. I'm referring to authors who take advantage of the fact that many Mac users won't touch Terminal.app with a ten-foot pole. They spend fifteen minutes with Apple's dev tools knocking together a half-assed GUI interface that does nothing but sit on top of a command-line tool and/or fiddle with the defaults database. Then, they release their work while implying that their program offers some great new capabilities that OS X didn't have, and they have the gall to demand $10, $20, or even $50 for it. Don't forget -- the prime issue behind shareware is try it before you buy it. If you think it's crap, you don't have to pay for it. Unlike shrink wrapped software where you are stuck with a hole in your wallet. As Spider Robinson once said -- 99% of everything is crap. Personally, in my 30 years on the net, I've had far too much freeware that clearly was NOT worth the price I paid for it -- a LOT of time and agony installing, hacking, and un-installing at it trying to get it to work. The so called open source community does NOT generate software that works every time or is better than commercial alternatives. A lot of the code generated by the Open Source community is just as much crap as the Shareware or Commercial alternatives. It is NOT alternative in anything but cost. Today, it is better than it was, but not much. One still has to sweat bullets because some IDIOT did the port to your platform and OS. And as for the folks who wrap a GUI around something like say traceroute ... so what. Personally, whatroute is a LOT easier to use for most Personal Computer users than any command line application. The vast majority of the motoring public not only is incapable of cranking a car to get it started, but can't shift gears on one either. And as to the list of first rate Shareware, don't forget Avernum and its fellows! Some of us don't like twitch, first-person-shooter games. T.T.F.N. William H. Magill [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: What up with the mac
Uh, that's crap. ;-) It was Ted Sturgeon, not Spider. See http://www.cpuidle.de/murphy.shtml, and note the change of 'crud' in the original to the form more usually cited. On Monday, October 14, 2002, at 08:18 PM, William H. Magill wrote: As Spider Robinson once said -- 99% of everything is crap.
Re: What up with the mac
On Monday, October 14, 2002, at 11:26 AM, Gregory Cranz wrote: It's exactly this ideology, or lack thereof, that has caused business columnists and pundits alike to compare the Open-Source and Freeware markets (I'm not lumping the two together, but they are) with outright Communism. This is much the chagrin of developers like me who now have to ask during a job interview what the company's position is regarding the Open Source movement i.e. can I participate on open projects while I work for you? And yes, just asking the question has an impact on the good first impression you're trying to make. I've even had recruiters give me crap about mentioning it during the interview. Then I have to launch into an explanation using someone like Ben Tilly of Perlmonks.com (handle: Tilly) as an example of how you can get screwed by this. All of this while trying to boil it down to fit into their attention span and sound credible... Don't ask it on the first interview, or any interview. Even if you would unconditionally refuse to work for someone who would say no. Wait until they offer you the job, that way it won't weigh in on their decision and you still have just as much power to say no if they give you the unfavored response when you do ask. Erik -- Erik Price (zombies roam) email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] jabber: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: What up with the mac
On Friday, October 11, 2002, at 07:48 AM, Ask Solem Hoel wrote: And I really do miss multiple workspaces. The dock isn't really great when you have LOTS of windows. I miss the window-shading thing when you double click in GNOME, MacOS 9 etc, I know I can pay for it in shareware but never /ever/ will I pay for shareware. Shareware sucks, and there is too much of it in the Mac world. That is why we need to re-create every useful shareware application as free software and kill those egomaniac shareware authors. The Daring Fireball wrote an interesting op piece about shareware developer Unsanity. Not that you'll change your mind (you sound pretty dogmatic about it), but he makes a good point -- $7 isn't a lot to ask. http://daringfireball.net/2002/10/labels_x.html On second thought, perhaps Apple will just do what they did with Watson, and appropriate the work of their 3rd-party developers into the next $130 feature release. So you can wait another year or so and pay for it then. From the perspective of free software, either way you lose -- you did realize you were purchasing a proprietary platform when you moved to OS X, right? Erik -- Erik Price (zombies roam) email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] jabber: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: [OT] Shareware (was: Re: What up with the mac)
On 11 Oct 2002, Ask Solem Hoel wrote: Now if there were a console mode I could use that instead of a virtual desktop for programming. You mean logging in from the system prompt as console and then, when you get the text prompt, logging in as whoever? At that point you can fire up XDarwin have all the virtual desktops you want. But then, at that point, you might as well use Linux/BSD/Unix... The terminal is still painfully slow, or maybe it doesn't support people that write faster than the refresh rate :) Constructive criticism is great an all, but come on, it's not *that* bad. If the system is bothering you that much why aren't you using something else? If the system is bothering you that much why are you complaining about it on a Perl list instead of telling Apple how you feel? What are we going to do about it -- commiserate? No thanks. -- Chris Devers[EMAIL PROTECTED]
[OT] Shareware (was: Re: What up with the mac)
On Fri, 2002-10-11 at 14:47, zampino wrote: Wow, I've never seen a more negative comment on shareware. In fact, I've rarely seen anyone criticize shareware... it was the shareware authors who made it possible for me to switch to OSX 10.0, as they quickly provided support for things like the application menu, windowshade, tinkertool's options... Most of these pieces of software were $15 or less, far less than if a well-known developer had introduced them. Egomaniacs? I'd say useful opportunists at worst, but I for one have payed for each of the shareware titles I use HAPPILY. How can there ever be too much inexpensive software?... philz Sorry. For most of the shareware programs I've seen for the mac, I cannot really see any difference between shareware and software demos. I'll refer to them as annoyware in the rest of my flames :) It's sad to come from a free software environment and find that the things you rely on come as dozens of small programs you don't know the reliability of for $20 each. Now if there were a console mode I could use that instead of a virtual desktop for programming. The terminal is still painfully slow, or maybe it doesn't support people that write faster than the refresh rate :) -- Ask Solem Hoel[+4722808579 | +4797962181] ABC Startsiden AS [ http://www.startsiden.no]
Re: What up with the mac
Replying to the groups b/c some may find this useful On Friday, October 11, 2002, at 07:48 AM, Ask Solem Hoel wrote: And I really do miss multiple workspaces. Code Tek Virtual Desktop, best 20USD spent ever http://www.codetek.com/php/virtual.php -- Lou Moran http://ellem.dyn.dhs.org:5281/resume/lmoran2002.html
Re: What up with the mac
On 10/11/02 7:48 AM, Ask Solem Hoel [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I know I can pay for it in shareware but never /ever/ will I pay for shareware. Shareware sucks, and there is too much of it in the Mac world. That is why we need to re-create every useful shareware application as free software and kill those egomaniac shareware authors. Wow, I've never seen a more negative comment on shareware. In fact, I've rarely seen anyone criticize shareware... it was the shareware authors who made it possible for me to switch to OSX 10.0, as they quickly provided support for things like the application menu, windowshade, tinkertool's options... Most of these pieces of software were $15 or less, far less than if a well-known developer had introduced them. Egomaniacs? I'd say useful opportunists at worst, but I for one have payed for each of the shareware titles I use HAPPILY. How can there ever be too much inexpensive software?... philz
What up with the mac
Hello Perhaps someone can fill me in on this one. I am comparing the run time of a perl program I wrote. Using my Mac G4 which has a 1.5 ghz processor and a 1.3 ghz PC computer (processor chip type I don't know but could find out) I am seeing that the Mac takes 14 seconds to complete what the PC does in 6! What's up with that?
Re: What up with the mac
Quoting Brigham Mecham [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Hello Perhaps someone can fill me in on this one. I am comparing the run time of a perl program I wrote. Using my Mac G4 which has a 1.5 ghz processor and a 1.3 ghz PC computer (processor chip type I don't know but could find out) I am seeing that the Mac takes 14 seconds to complete what the PC does in 6! What's up with that? That could be hard to guess without the detailt of your program. Remember There could be other things than the CPU slowing it down. o The operating system (differences in implementation of systemcalls etc) o The amount of memory, the bus speed of the memory. o The file system (if the program finds files i.e) Without knowing anything about the program, it's impossible to tell. -- [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: What up with the mac
What is the script? If you truly think you have an optimization problem on the Mac, then send us the script -- assuming it is of reasonable size. Are you doing something in Perl that is really a Windows-specific task...are you running Perl within Mac OS X or through Fink packages...do you have the same versions of Perl...are you running Perl on OS X or OS 9...do the computers have the same amount of RAM, similar HDs, running one locally vs off a networked HD??? Also, 1.5 GHz Apple?!? Do you mean dual-1.25 GHz Apple? it is difficult to even comment with so little information to go by. On 2002.10.9, at 12:31 午後, Brigham Mecham wrote: Hello Perhaps someone can fill me in on this one. I am comparing the run time of a perl program I wrote. Using my Mac G4 which has a 1.5 ghz processor and a 1.3 ghz PC computer (processor chip type I don't know but could find out) I am seeing that the Mac takes 14 seconds to complete what the PC does in 6! What's up with that?
Re: What up with the mac
--- Brigham Mecham [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hello Perhaps someone can fill me in on this one. I am comparing the run time of a perl program I wrote. Using my Mac G4 which has a 1.5 ghz processor and a 1.3 ghz PC computer (processor chip type I don't know but could find out) I am seeing that the Mac takes 14 seconds to complete what the PC does in 6! What's up with that? My question is where did you get a 1.5 GHz mac considering 1.25 Dual is top of the line? James __ Do you Yahoo!? Faith Hill - Exclusive Performances, Videos More http://faith.yahoo.com
Re: What up with the mac
On Wednesday, October 9, 2002, at 03:31 PM, Brigham Mecham wrote: Hello Perhaps someone can fill me in on this one. I am comparing the run time of a perl program I wrote. Using my Mac G4 which has a 1.5 ghz processor and a 1.3 ghz PC computer (processor chip type I don't know but could find out) I am seeing that the Mac takes 14 seconds to complete what the PC does in 6! What's up with that? There are so many things wrong with this question that I would normally not respond to it but I think buried under the mess you wrote is a legit question. Since 1.25 Ghz is as fast as Macs are currently going I wonder if you are on 25 Mhz machine. What does the script do? Memory? HD? What else is running when you are doing this? Many questions to answer -- Lou Moran http://ellem.dyn.dhs.org:5281/resume/lmoran2002.html
Re: What up with the mac
Has anyone ran a Benchmark test on their OS X Mac? I'm a bit curious to see how Perl on OS X stacks up against other systems. I can try to run it on my iBook 366 ;) -- Bill Stephenson From: Gregory Cranz [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2002 09:54:42 -0400 To: Brigham Mecham [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: What up with the mac Comparing an arbitrary script is not necessarily a 'fair' or 'clean' test from one system to another. I would suggest working with the Benchmark module available from CPAN. This is designed to function in this capacity and is more appropriate for performance testing. As has been noted previously in responses to this query, there are a lot of things that a script might do, without divulging your script, this would probably be your best course of action. On Wednesday, October 9, 2002, at 03:31 PM, Brigham Mecham wrote: -- From: Brigham Mecham[SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Wednesday, October 09, 2002 3:31:50 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: What up with the mac Auto forwarded by a Rule Hello Perhaps someone can fill me in on this one. I am comparing the run time of a perl program I wrote. Using my Mac G4 which has a 1.5 ghz processor and a 1.3 ghz PC computer (processor chip type I don't know but could find out) I am seeing that the Mac takes 14 seconds to complete what the PC does in 6! What's up with that?
Re: What up with the mac
On Thu, 10 Oct 2002, Bill Stephenson wrote: Has anyone ran a Benchmark test on their OS X Mac? I'm a bit curious to see how Perl on OS X stacks up against other systems. Particularly interesting would be a cross comparison among, say, OSX, pure Darwin, a PPC version of Linux, and maybe PPC BSD. For comparison, these can be tried against x86 versions of the same systems. The ultimate idea being to get an idea of how OSX compares to other systems that use this hardware, and how this hardware compares to it's big brother alternative. -- Chris Devers[EMAIL PROTECTED] I had pancake makeup for brunch!
Re: What up with the mac
I didn't write to scripts below, but they are fun to play with.
Obviously some adjustment would be needed to compare across systems.
#
#!/usr/bin/perl Benchmark_demo1
#Measure CPU usage of a some portion of a program
use Benchmark;
# generate list of all text files in /etc
text_files = grep { -f and -T } glob('/etc/*');
timethis(100, 'sort_by_size(text_files)');
# sort the files names according to file sizes
sub sort_by_size {
my files = _;
files = sort { -s $a = -s $b } files;
return files;
}
#
#
#!/usr/bin/perl Benchmark_demo2
#Can confirm that one technique is faster than another
use Benchmark;
# generate list of all text files in /etc
text_files = grep { -f and -T } glob('/etc/*');
timethis(100, 'faster_sort_by_size(text_files)');
# sort the files names according to file sizes,
# stat'ing each file just once
sub faster_sort_by_size {
my files = _;
files = map { $_-[1] }
sort { $a-[0] = $b-[0] }
map { [ -s $_, $_ ] } files;
return files;
}
#
OT Java pseudo-benchmark (was Re: What up with the mac)
Okay, here's the Java program I was talking about, since someone might
want it and I'm going to be off-list for a while:
-begin code
/**
* Let's try the Factorial in BigInteger
*
* @author Joel Rees, Altech Corporation, Esaka, Japan
* Copyright September 2002
* May be copied, modified, and/or used freely.
* No warranty. Use at your own risk.
*
* @version 0.1
*/
import java.lang.Class;
import java.math.BigInteger;
public class BigFactorial
{
public static void main( String[] args )
{ if ( ( args.length 1 ) || ( args[ 0 ].charAt( 0 ) == '-' ) )
{ System.out.println( Usage:
/* Okay, this is ridiculous. */
+ BigFactorial.class.getName()
+ integer {, integer } );
}
else
{ for ( int i = 0; i args.length; ++i )
{ BigInteger input = new BigInteger( args[ i ] );
System.out.println(
(
+ input.toString()
+ )! == + factorial( input ).toString() );
}
}
}
/* Let's not try to blow the stack with the old
* forced example of recursion, at any rate.
*/
public static BigInteger factorial( BigInteger n )
{ if ( n.compareTo( BigInteger.ZERO ) 0 )
{ return new BigInteger( 0 );
}
BigInteger result = new BigInteger( 1 );
while ( n.compareTo( BigInteger.ONE ) 0 )
{ result = result.multiply( n );
n = n.subtract( BigInteger.ONE );
}
return result;
}
}
--end code-
Should be easy to re-write in Perl.
--
Joel Rees [EMAIL PROTECTED]
