What on earth does this have to do with free speech? ...
Your right, it has nothing to do with free speach. I was mixing a few related thoughts, and screwed up in my post. And although the offeror of warez may not be protected by the law, I believe gamedev.net is.
Mike
Edited by - Vetinari on October 4, 2000 8:25:13 PM
"Unintentional death of one civilian by the US is a tragedy; intentional slaughter of a million by Saddam - a statistic." - Unknown
Your right, it has nothing to do with free speach. I was mixing a few related thoughts, and screwed up in my post. And although the offeror of warez may not be protected by the law, I believe gamedev.net is.
Mike
Edited by - Vetinari on October 4, 2000 8:25:13 PM
Perhaps, but look at the whole Napster fiasco going on right now. You wouldn''t think that Napster should be held accountable because other people are offering warez MP3''s (instead of the legal ones) through their program, but they still might be…
I guess I''m a little surprised of the lack of profilers available. Here''s the low-down on prices that I''ve found.
VTune $429.00
NuMega TrueTime $800* academic_discount = $600
The thing is that you can''t just buy TrueTime, you have to buy the ''DevPartner for Visual C++'' which comes with BoundsChecker®, TrueTime and TrueCoverage. I called up NuMega(the only way to get an evaluation copy) and I''m going to try it out. I''m not exactly sure where all this money is going to come from...maybe I''ll buy a couple of nice optimization books, stick with the VC++ profiler, buy an expensive pizza from that Itailan place and still come out a couple hundred ahead.
Vtune is a passive profiler. It samples the running executable at very short intervals and records what code was hit. The advantage is that the profiler is not invasive (i.e. it doesn''t instrument your code) and it tends to run at the speed the app normally runs at.
Active profilers (MSVC profiler, High-Prof), on the other hand, instrument your code which can mess with cache behaviour and other things. They also tend to run _very_ slow when profiling. The advantage, however, is that they provide extremely accurate counts of what is going on in your exe, rather than sampled data which can be skewed at times.
Personally I have used them all. I have found VTune is great for really low-level cache and assembly optimization, and active profilers are much better at higher level analyis of code blocks.
Personally can''t see what the problem with the standard vc++ profiler is. Works fine for me, with lots of detailed (useful!) info being spewed from it. And it didn''t cost me another £400 on top of a £300 compiler.
Well, I was going to give an update on what I thought of Numega''s profiling products. I emailed them and they called me and said it was on it''s way but low-and-behold I never received any thing after that. I got the impression that I was wasting their time and I had to try and prove to their represenatatives that I was actually considering buying it(which I was) because I was a student. Your milage may vary but I''m not going to spend any more time emailing or calling to try out a program I''ve never even seen or heard of as of a couple weeks ago. Maybe someone else wants to. I don''t understand why they would make it so hard to get an evaluation version...what are they really losing?
I thought NuMega''s products all come unbundled now (for VC6.0)? I could be mistaken. Somebody else in our group is responsible for getting the tools.
I LOVE (LUV LUV LUV) NuMega''s stuff. The profiler rocks. The bounds checker''s pretty cool. SoftICE is a must for us because we develop NT drivers. It''s the best thing.
I''ve never been able to get MS''s built-in profiler to do anything useful. I get line coverage, and with a LOT of trial and error I can get function time, but it doesn''t seem to handle multi-threaded apps at ALL. No use to me (call me thread-boy).
