This has happened like ten times with this President.
He does something that looks somewhat stupid.
People rush in to explain that it was not incredibly stupid, and the story they give makes him look worse. Maybe smarter, but still worse.
Like that 'locked door' thing that was just on the news this week. Okay, he tried to go out a door that was locked. Ha. Who hasn't done that?
I'm sure, any day now, there will be some really lame excuse about how the President was jet lagged and didn't have enough sleep, or was having a panic attack, or something.
Seriously, what the hell is with his PR team? How about saying he 'slipped' because his shoes were too worn?
Oh, I know. His PR team is too busy attacking other people then to make up even vaguely non-lame excuses.
This is due to Windows' FUCKING STUPID autorun. They should be sued for everything they have for that one single idea.
How secure your OS is a tradeoff. Automatically running random software of any inserted CD or thumbdrive or anything is not a tradeoff, it is a huge fucking error. This is not some obscure debate point, it was simply 100% wrong, and it still is 100% wrong.
They could have made a 'restricted' autorun that would have been a million times safer...allow already installed applications to say 'I want to run when this specific CD is inserted'.
And even the 'run a program when the CD is double-clicked' isn't really a problem, although it should be prompted for. Or standardize the install location and filename, and pop up a box 'Do you wish to install applications from this CD?' if that's found.
Combine that with the first thing and we've got autorun functionality.
But nooooo. We absolutely had to have that magical autorun because users are too dumb to click 'Yes, I want to install from the CD'. Despite them managing to bring up File/Run and typing 'a:install' in Program Manager for years.
MS is, in fact, to blame for a hell of a lot of this 'music CD copy-protection' crap, because almost no user wants to install things things off a music CD, and yet, it magically happens with no prompting.
The fact it happens with the logged-in user's permission and everyone runs as admin is just icing on the cake. And if they don't run as admin, priviledge escalation is trivial with quite a few programs. But complaining about that is like complaining that, at the back of your bank vault, the cheap wooden door that opens to the outside doesn't lock right.
Numb3rs had an episode with an inaccurate fingerprint match, and someone who was serving time due to it because he'd plead guilty to get a shorter sentence.
I.e., it not only raised issues with the accuracy of fingerprints, it brought in 'defense lawyers gettting their clients to plead guilty when they aren't'.
There is some stupid fantasy on Bones, like the 3D image thing, but what 'analysis' are they faking?
Seriously. Name one of them.
They're usually so simply I understand them. 'Hey, look, whatever cut off this guy's hand had regular teeth, ergo, it was a hacksaw, not an animal.'
The evidence on Bones is usually physical evidence, in fact it is usually bones. (Duh.)
Unless you're complaining about the 'visualize skin back on people's faces' tech, in which case, you're rather ignorant, as that's been around quite a few years, although it is as much an art as a science. (Hence the, you know, artist, on the staff.)
What I always laugh about is people recycling paper...and not wood. Be sure to give back that two feet tall stack of newspapers, and just throw that rocking chair away.
At some point there became a fundamental disconnect in people's heads between paper and trees, and I don't know when that happened.
Paper is, almost literally, the least of our worries. We can't run out of paper. Growing a tree, making it into paper, and then throwing it away wastes nothing except energy, and it costs more energy to recycle. (Growing trees is pretty automatic, and they grow them right next to the lumber mills.)
Oh, I said 'almost' literally. That's right, there is something that is even more stupid to recycle than paper.
I'll give you a hint: If we were to run out of this substance, we would all immediately die, because we'd be walking around on molten iron.
That's right. We're recycling fucking glass, aka, silicon dioxide, aka, the surface of the damn planet. 25 damn miles of the stuff under our feet.(1)
At some point, I suspect we will be asked to collect the nitrogen our cars give off, and 'recycle' that.
1) Hey, the minute it becomes cheaper or easier to recycle glass than to make more, you tell me, and I'll start selling you my used glass. No, 'deposits' don't count...those were mandated by law because glass companies didn't really want the old glass back.
Even if GTA was a real portrayal of crime, it doesn't matter.
The claim was that video games and TV don't influence behavior. Presumably this means 'in non-rational ways'.
No one would assert that learning things can't rationally influence behavior, despite the medium. Including if those things were falsehoods. A lot of our behavior is due to our knowledge.
I.e., it is not crazy to say 'X gives incorrect factual information about something' and, at the same time, say 'X does not influence people to become criminals'.
Now, there might be a slight problem if the claim was 'FPS #274 teaches kids how to go on a shooting spree, how to avoid ambushes, how to ambush, how to create distractions, etc'. Even if it's not claimed it influences them how to do that, arguably kids shouldn't know how to do that at all, in case they decide to do it for some other reason.
In case of that claim, it is a valid objection that GTA doesn't teach kids a damn thing about how to actually commit crimes. I can just imagine kids driving getaway cars through red lights and speeding, or randomly killing hookers in their car and thinking people won't object.
While it may or may not be a valid protrayal of the criminal underground, kids cannot walk up the criminal underground and get in if they know the secret handshake, and that is a fairly absurd worry. A much bigger worry is them actually getting a gang of people and going out and committing crimes, and GTA is almost completely silent on any actual methods of doing that.
In fact, CSI portrays a lot more of the ins-and-outs of criminal behavior than GTA.
This is the second time I've seen this, so I have to ask: How the hell do you cheat on a test with a laptop?
In what university are you allowed to operate a laptop during a test, even pretending that would be more useful than looking at your notes or looking in the book?
A laptop is a billion times harder to cheat with than some folded notes slipped in your pocket or carefully hidden under the test paper.
The alternative of 'students dropping out early' was presented to 'students dropping out later', not to 'not admitting them'.
You two are saying the same thing...get rid of lazy students as soon as possible.
Obviously the ideal would be to keep them out...but people doing good or bad in college is almost never a function of how much knowledge they have when they enter it, thus entrance exams are of limited use.
However, this is an opposite to this...you don't want to wash them out too fast. You have to give them notice they are slacking off and going to leave, and hopefully some of them will buckle down and choose not to.
Problem: Students are skipping classes because classes are boring and pointless and they can pass just by reading the book.
Solution: Requires students to attend classes
Problem: Students are ignoring the teacher in the classes they are now required to attend.
Solution:...
Well, I dunno. Maybe they should fix the first fucking problem and stop making people show up to classes if they don't want to be there. They are, indeed, distracting other students, but an equally logical argument could be that the teacher is distracting them and wasting their time.
If people would rather play computer games than listen in class, they should be allowed to...they're the ones paying for the class. We can argue if it's rude to do that inside of the classroom when they actually have a choice about their location.
OTOH, once they do have a choice, the teacher should ask them to be quiet or leave if they're distracting anyone, no matter what the reason. And not ask them to leave if they aren't, even if they clearly aren't paying attention. Leaving is for when their behavior is interfering with learning.
And it'd be nice if they'd designate a 'computer free' area of the class room. It could be as simple as the first two rows or whatever.
I say this as someone who never used a laptop in class outside of a computer lab, because it would distract me.
If you have between 3 and 5 oranges, guess what? You have 4 oranges, assuming 'between' was exclusive.
And you also have three oranges. If you have four oranges, you have three oranges, because you cannot have four oranges without having three oranges, and you even need another one.
Dumbass.
If there is a scale with a 'nice guy' at some end, 'total asshole' somewhere in the middle, and 'criminal' at the end, then everyone between 'total asshole' and 'criminal' are, in fact, total assholes.
Alternately, the order might be reversed, in which case everyone between is a criminal.
Do people not even understand English anymore? unik seemed to get it.
No, you run into this cache problem anyway. You have this problem if the application has been optimized to use the cache, because the cache, mysteriously, has other threads of execution, either within the same program, or another program, using it and undoing all that careful work of optimizing the code so it fits.
Granted, it is possibly possible for you to go and fix your other threads so they don't do this on hyperthreading, although I don't know how. But you certainly can't fix other people's code from running. (And, hell, they have as much right to the cache as you.)
Now, this problem has always existed, but it used to happen at process switch, and thus was under the control of the OS, so could be tuned. Now the damn processor say 'Hey, I've got an idle second while doing memory access, let me run this other code', thus knocking a tiny bit of your process out of cache, so when your process restarts, it has to do another memory access, at least to L2 cache.
Basically, this is the 'timeslice question'...how long should we let each process control the CPU. Except, you know, removed from the control of the OS and applications. I don't think hyperthreading is a good idea at all.
Now, if they are different processes, however, you can run into a whole nother set of problems. Like those driver blue-screens other people were talking about. I'm sure the driver ius doing something it shouldn't do, but I have a feeling the crash has something to do with hyperthreading and ring 0 access.
Why? Because CPU-intensive applications can't help but work better under dual-core systems. Even if MSSQL server was inexplicably designed for a single CPU, you'd end up with it running on one CPU and the OS and everything else on the other, and it would, indeed, be faster.
Under hyperthreading, of course, that doesn't work at all.
I always thought the idea of hyperthreading was a little dodgy, but I didn't know enough about CPU design to prove it. I'm glad other people are saying the same thing. It always seemed like it would be faster to introduce a new instruction that's basically 'save and restore context', and then rewrite the process scheduler to use it instead of doing that manually, then do it how Intel did it, which is to switch back and forth between two specific contexts outside of software control.
I think you need to go look at the defination of 'thread' the person you responded to was using, and I think you need to realize that hyperthreading is an instance of stealing an already existing terminology name to sound cool.
Absolutely nothing requires both 'halves' of a hyperthreaded CPU to be executing 'threads' that belong to the same process. Which, in fact, makes those not threads, but that is what they are called.
The problem isn't really outdated pages. The problem that every edit results in a new page.
Let's say I'm at point X. And I want to check the list of data at Y. So I click on Y.
Sure enough, entry 4 is incorrect. So I click on that, get a new page we will call Y4 for editing entry 4, edit it, submit, and end up back at Y.
And now I can't get 'back' to X, because that edit was a POST.
And even if it was a POST redirect to a GET, I first pass through the incorrect old Y. And the subpage to I used to edit Y4.
Solution? Rewrite Y as AJAX, so you can update in place. When you add something, you don't go anywhere...the Javascript goes and calls server-side functions to edit the DB, and then updates the page.
And it's faster because you don't have to give them subpage page Yn where they can just edit whatever Yn they clicked on, but neither do you need to put every single piece of data in a form. They can click on the the right entry on page Y and 'pull it down' to edit boxes below, or magically convert it to edit boxes in place.
AJAX lets you present a screen to the user, and edit changes within it. They can, at any time, go forward and backwards to other pages, and edit changes there, and the other pages are always current, exactly like users expect.
To put it simply: The ability to go backwards and forward within the editting process is a misfeature. No one, programmers or users, wants users to be able to back up to an edit screen from 20 minutes ago. (For example, if they changed the primary key value on that edit screen, none of those changes will take.)
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He does something that looks somewhat stupid.
People rush in to explain that it was not incredibly stupid, and the story they give makes him look worse. Maybe smarter, but still worse.
Like that 'locked door' thing that was just on the news this week. Okay, he tried to go out a door that was locked. Ha. Who hasn't done that?
I'm sure, any day now, there will be some really lame excuse about how the President was jet lagged and didn't have enough sleep, or was having a panic attack, or something.
Seriously, what the hell is with his PR team? How about saying he 'slipped' because his shoes were too worn?
Oh, I know. His PR team is too busy attacking other people then to make up even vaguely non-lame excuses.
No, seriously, you are 100% correct, but sadly you are not angry enough.
This is due to Windows' FUCKING STUPID autorun. They should be sued for everything they have for that one single idea.
How secure your OS is a tradeoff. Automatically running random software of any inserted CD or thumbdrive or anything is not a tradeoff, it is a huge fucking error. This is not some obscure debate point, it was simply 100% wrong, and it still is 100% wrong.
They could have made a 'restricted' autorun that would have been a million times safer...allow already installed applications to say 'I want to run when this specific CD is inserted'.
And even the 'run a program when the CD is double-clicked' isn't really a problem, although it should be prompted for. Or standardize the install location and filename, and pop up a box 'Do you wish to install applications from this CD?' if that's found.
Combine that with the first thing and we've got autorun functionality.
But nooooo. We absolutely had to have that magical autorun because users are too dumb to click 'Yes, I want to install from the CD'. Despite them managing to bring up File/Run and typing 'a:install' in Program Manager for years.
MS is, in fact, to blame for a hell of a lot of this 'music CD copy-protection' crap, because almost no user wants to install things things off a music CD, and yet, it magically happens with no prompting.
The fact it happens with the logged-in user's permission and everyone runs as admin is just icing on the cake. And if they don't run as admin, priviledge escalation is trivial with quite a few programs. But complaining about that is like complaining that, at the back of your bank vault, the cheap wooden door that opens to the outside doesn't lock right.
Start with 0.
Add 1 and repeat this step.
You will eventually hit all positive integers, both primes and non-primes. Subtract instead to get smaller ones.
You can do other operations and get decimal numbers, and even irrational ones.
We don't even have any way to write numbers that doesn't require smaller numbers to write them, except for the numbers -9 to 9.
I would opt for old age.
And it's named CSI:Miami.
NO ONE LIKES FURRIES.
Heh. Even GTA is set in a fictional city. ;)
I.e., it not only raised issues with the accuracy of fingerprints, it brought in 'defense lawyers gettting their clients to plead guilty when they aren't'.
There is some stupid fantasy on Bones, like the 3D image thing, but what 'analysis' are they faking?
Seriously. Name one of them.
They're usually so simply I understand them. 'Hey, look, whatever cut off this guy's hand had regular teeth, ergo, it was a hacksaw, not an animal.'
The evidence on Bones is usually physical evidence, in fact it is usually bones. (Duh.)
Unless you're complaining about the 'visualize skin back on people's faces' tech, in which case, you're rather ignorant, as that's been around quite a few years, although it is as much an art as a science. (Hence the, you know, artist, on the staff.)
And they don't do that, anyway. They magically 'clean up' an image.
At some point there became a fundamental disconnect in people's heads between paper and trees, and I don't know when that happened.
Paper is, almost literally, the least of our worries. We can't run out of paper. Growing a tree, making it into paper, and then throwing it away wastes nothing except energy, and it costs more energy to recycle. (Growing trees is pretty automatic, and they grow them right next to the lumber mills.)
Oh, I said 'almost' literally. That's right, there is something that is even more stupid to recycle than paper.
I'll give you a hint: If we were to run out of this substance, we would all immediately die, because we'd be walking around on molten iron.
That's right. We're recycling fucking glass, aka, silicon dioxide, aka, the surface of the damn planet. 25 damn miles of the stuff under our feet.(1)
At some point, I suspect we will be asked to collect the nitrogen our cars give off, and 'recycle' that.
1) Hey, the minute it becomes cheaper or easier to recycle glass than to make more, you tell me, and I'll start selling you my used glass. No, 'deposits' don't count...those were mandated by law because glass companies didn't really want the old glass back.
The claim was that video games and TV don't influence behavior. Presumably this means 'in non-rational ways'.
No one would assert that learning things can't rationally influence behavior, despite the medium. Including if those things were falsehoods. A lot of our behavior is due to our knowledge.
I.e., it is not crazy to say 'X gives incorrect factual information about something' and, at the same time, say 'X does not influence people to become criminals'.
Now, there might be a slight problem if the claim was 'FPS #274 teaches kids how to go on a shooting spree, how to avoid ambushes, how to ambush, how to create distractions, etc'. Even if it's not claimed it influences them how to do that, arguably kids shouldn't know how to do that at all, in case they decide to do it for some other reason.
In case of that claim, it is a valid objection that GTA doesn't teach kids a damn thing about how to actually commit crimes. I can just imagine kids driving getaway cars through red lights and speeding, or randomly killing hookers in their car and thinking people won't object.
While it may or may not be a valid protrayal of the criminal underground, kids cannot walk up the criminal underground and get in if they know the secret handshake, and that is a fairly absurd worry. A much bigger worry is them actually getting a gang of people and going out and committing crimes, and GTA is almost completely silent on any actual methods of doing that.
In fact, CSI portrays a lot more of the ins-and-outs of criminal behavior than GTA.
Problem: Every part of the language is too wordy in COBOL.
Solution: Shorten the only thing you can control, variable names.
If COBOL programmers had to type:
ACCEPT InterestRate
CALL "MultiplyNums" USING BY CONTENT InterestRate, TotalBalance
DISPLAY "Interest due is " InterestDue
CalculateInterest.
MULTIPLY InterestRate BY TotalBalance GIVING InterestDue.
they'd haul off and kill someone. Possibly themselves. Hence using short variable names.
He was, however, philosophically opposed to the idea that things happened 'randomly' in the universe.
They were more philosophical beliefs.
The next logical thing for Amazon is, of course, to remove the book from its listing.
In what university are you allowed to operate a laptop during a test, even pretending that would be more useful than looking at your notes or looking in the book?
A laptop is a billion times harder to cheat with than some folded notes slipped in your pocket or carefully hidden under the test paper.
The alternative of 'students dropping out early' was presented to 'students dropping out later', not to 'not admitting them'.
You two are saying the same thing...get rid of lazy students as soon as possible.
Obviously the ideal would be to keep them out...but people doing good or bad in college is almost never a function of how much knowledge they have when they enter it, thus entrance exams are of limited use.
However, this is an opposite to this...you don't want to wash them out too fast. You have to give them notice they are slacking off and going to leave, and hopefully some of them will buckle down and choose not to.
Solution: Requires students to attend classes
Problem: Students are ignoring the teacher in the classes they are now required to attend. ...
Solution:
Well, I dunno. Maybe they should fix the first fucking problem and stop making people show up to classes if they don't want to be there. They are, indeed, distracting other students, but an equally logical argument could be that the teacher is distracting them and wasting their time.
If people would rather play computer games than listen in class, they should be allowed to...they're the ones paying for the class. We can argue if it's rude to do that inside of the classroom when they actually have a choice about their location.
OTOH, once they do have a choice, the teacher should ask them to be quiet or leave if they're distracting anyone, no matter what the reason. And not ask them to leave if they aren't, even if they clearly aren't paying attention. Leaving is for when their behavior is interfering with learning.
And it'd be nice if they'd designate a 'computer free' area of the class room. It could be as simple as the first two rows or whatever.
I say this as someone who never used a laptop in class outside of a computer lab, because it would distract me.
And you also have three oranges. If you have four oranges, you have three oranges, because you cannot have four oranges without having three oranges, and you even need another one.
Dumbass.
If there is a scale with a 'nice guy' at some end, 'total asshole' somewhere in the middle, and 'criminal' at the end, then everyone between 'total asshole' and 'criminal' are, in fact, total assholes.
Alternately, the order might be reversed, in which case everyone between is a criminal.
Do people not even understand English anymore? unik seemed to get it.
Granted, it is possibly possible for you to go and fix your other threads so they don't do this on hyperthreading, although I don't know how. But you certainly can't fix other people's code from running. (And, hell, they have as much right to the cache as you.)
Now, this problem has always existed, but it used to happen at process switch, and thus was under the control of the OS, so could be tuned. Now the damn processor say 'Hey, I've got an idle second while doing memory access, let me run this other code', thus knocking a tiny bit of your process out of cache, so when your process restarts, it has to do another memory access, at least to L2 cache.
Basically, this is the 'timeslice question'...how long should we let each process control the CPU. Except, you know, removed from the control of the OS and applications. I don't think hyperthreading is a good idea at all.
Now, if they are different processes, however, you can run into a whole nother set of problems. Like those driver blue-screens other people were talking about. I'm sure the driver ius doing something it shouldn't do, but I have a feeling the crash has something to do with hyperthreading and ring 0 access.
Why? Because CPU-intensive applications can't help but work better under dual-core systems. Even if MSSQL server was inexplicably designed for a single CPU, you'd end up with it running on one CPU and the OS and everything else on the other, and it would, indeed, be faster.
Under hyperthreading, of course, that doesn't work at all.
I always thought the idea of hyperthreading was a little dodgy, but I didn't know enough about CPU design to prove it. I'm glad other people are saying the same thing. It always seemed like it would be faster to introduce a new instruction that's basically 'save and restore context', and then rewrite the process scheduler to use it instead of doing that manually, then do it how Intel did it, which is to switch back and forth between two specific contexts outside of software control.
Absolutely nothing requires both 'halves' of a hyperthreaded CPU to be executing 'threads' that belong to the same process. Which, in fact, makes those not threads, but that is what they are called.
Let's say I'm at point X. And I want to check the list of data at Y. So I click on Y.
Sure enough, entry 4 is incorrect. So I click on that, get a new page we will call Y4 for editing entry 4, edit it, submit, and end up back at Y.
And now I can't get 'back' to X, because that edit was a POST.
And even if it was a POST redirect to a GET, I first pass through the incorrect old Y. And the subpage to I used to edit Y4.
Solution? Rewrite Y as AJAX, so you can update in place. When you add something, you don't go anywhere...the Javascript goes and calls server-side functions to edit the DB, and then updates the page.
And it's faster because you don't have to give them subpage page Yn where they can just edit whatever Yn they clicked on, but neither do you need to put every single piece of data in a form. They can click on the the right entry on page Y and 'pull it down' to edit boxes below, or magically convert it to edit boxes in place.
AJAX lets you present a screen to the user, and edit changes within it. They can, at any time, go forward and backwards to other pages, and edit changes there, and the other pages are always current, exactly like users expect.
To put it simply: The ability to go backwards and forward within the editting process is a misfeature. No one, programmers or users, wants users to be able to back up to an edit screen from 20 minutes ago. (For example, if they changed the primary key value on that edit screen, none of those changes will take.)