The Desktop Fishbowl
Charles blogs all the random nerd stuff he can find.

Thursday, 31 January 2002

Found in a comment on JavaLobby, which I rarely visit because the noise and rabid advocacy overwhelm any attempt at serious discusson, a link to a DeveloperWorks article on The pros and cons of generating native code from Java source. Summary of the findings - compiling Java bytecodes into native code for execution may make a program faster. It may also make it slower. JVM-executed Java tends to use more memory than natively compiled Java, but not very much. Bytecode class-files take up less disk space then natively compiled executables, but only if you ignore the size of the JVM (which is huge). Why is this important? Well, one of the differences between the compilation model of Java and Microsoft's Common Language Runtime (into which C# is compiled, for example) is that the CLR natively compiles everything before execution. These tests show that on the Java side, such an approach would give no appreciable benefit, from which we can extrapolate that it probably doesn't help C# much either. 2:33:25 PM

Apple already have 150,000 pre-orders for the new iLamp^H^H^H^HMac. I just realised that the ^H^H^H^H thing must be totally incomprehensible to most people. You see, on a lot of Unix terminals, ctrl-H is the same as backspace. This caused some problems in some programs (such as the "talk" installed on our University servers), because you'd hit backspace and instead of seeing some nice deletions, you'd just get a line of ^H^H^H^H across the screen. A more web-friendly headline would have been: Apple already have 150,000 pre-orders for the new iLampMac. (In emacs, ^H means "help", which was also very annoying. When telnetting in from home I had to either remap my keyboard, or learn to never use backspace in emacs.) 2:16:38 PM

IBM: Linux investment nearly recouped. (CNet) Although the article says the figures are a bit dodgy, that's still not bad given they allegedly put a billion dollars into something that everybody says you can't make money from. 11:21:36 AM