That's obviously a completely irrelevant, and shockingly callous statement. Don't you find it a little strange that the more disadvantaged someone in your society is, the more difficult and expensive everything becomes? Live in a poor neighbourhood, pay more in insurance. Suffer poor health, pay more in health insurance, if you can even get it. Wind up in jail, be unable to afford a telephone call to your family, who may very well be the only people you have left.
The whole thing is tilted, so that once you start falling, you tend to keep going, and there may be no way back. Whatever good fortune you have experienced in your lifetime, I'd wager much of it came from luck. Perhaps I'm wrong, perhaps you pulled yourself out of the gutter, perhaps you were born into poverty, suffered ill-health, wound up in jail through no real fault of your own, and still managed to survive, and eventually to overcome.
But that's pretty vanishingly unlikely. I certainly didn't. I was born with good health, a reasonable brains, into a comfortable situation. Education was both provided for free, and I was expected to undertake it. When I completed it, a job was easy to come by. I bumped into a wonderful girl by accident, and how I have a beautiful family, and a good and happy life. All of that, all of it, was nothing better than luck. That luck could change any day. I am not so conceited and blind to imagine otherwise.
Well, that's a very good point. The first rule of optimisation is that you'll always get a surprise.
However, in many cases performance has to be designed into a system, which isn't quite the same thing as 'premature optimisation', but it's a case of choosing algorithms sensibly etc.
But, back to the point, please show me the real-world java program that outperforms the equivalent real-world C++ program.... Because I design and write high-performance software for constrained environments for a living, and we would never use Java in a million years. But, if it could outperform the C++ that we do write, well, that would make me think again.
Actually, the opposite is true. Today, nearly a majority of computing tasks are carried out on battery powered devices. Performance gains of even a few percent directly translate to battery life, and since computers aren't really getting any faster anymore, we need people to look harder at performance. The choice of using java (ok, Dalvik, or whatever google decided to call their stolen version of java) on a mobile device is exactly why we need quad-core monster devices with massive batteries. If they'd done the work to design an API in a fast language, like C++ or something, the global energy savings would not be insignificant. They would have been a couple of years, at least, later to market - and that might have killed the entire project - but the fact remains.
Car analogy: Energy is expensive. Build efficient vehicles.
it becomes economical to statistically analyse the code and alter it based on workload
While that *might* be true in very specific use-cases, I'd wager that the overhead of monitoring the workload in order to properly inform some optimisation algorithm, would defeat any minor gains that the optimisation might have delivered.
The trouble with all these arguments around bench-marks, and theoretical performance gains of dynamically compiled languages, is that the advantages simply never show up in real life. Game engines are written in C++, almost exclusively, and those guys are on the cutting edge when it comes to performance. Why are they not using Java?
I personally see it slightly differently. Naturally we can all agree that languages evolve, but they do so under pressure from way in which language is used. In this particular instance, it seems that the change in the way 'literally' is used coincides with a lack of focus on the actual truth of things. Now that 'literally', does not any longer appear to mean 'of or pertaining to the real and genuine truth of something', what word might we use in its place?
No, private industry with a profit motive will always be more efficient
If by efficient, you mean make more money, more quickly, and employ fewer people. Then yes, private enterprise will probably be more efficient.
If by efficient, you mean look after people better, and provide better healthcare outcomes - which remember means that people wind up needing less healthcare - then no. Private enterprise will not be more efficient. It's hardly in the interest of a private healthcare outfit to need to provide less, and cheaper, healthcare, but greater public health is the goal of any healthcare system, which ought to mean exactly that.
Ok, fine. Enlighten us regarding your preferred cultural experiences. Personally, I regard the notion than we have slipped a few rungs as nothing more than laziness - out there, in the real world, beyond Bachelorette and super-hero reboots, which are important cultural artifacts in their own right - there is a vast universe of creative endeavor with which you might engage. Or you could just sit at home at talk to your friend. Your call.
That's not much of a discussion. You haven't seen the film, and are therefore in no position to comment on it. Added to which, the assumption running through all the above comments is that you actually do want to see it, but can't go to the cinema for whatever reason, and don't want to have to wait a year for it to come out on DVD. The Cinema's monopoly on newly released material will end soon in any case - Netflix at Cannes is a good example of one of the ways things are going to change. Arbitrarily restricting new releases to cinemas only doesn't make any sense, unless you consider that to be the only way of delaying the inevitable piracy.
Social standing isn't the same thing as a desire to have seen a film that your friends are talking about, so that you may enjoy a conversation about it with them. It's great that you consider yourself so separate from other human beings, that making some effort to be on the same page as them is beneath you. The rest of humanity, meanwhile, is interested in a shared cultural experience - and is willing to pay a bit of money for that too.
Like a lot of software, much of Cast's internal data is stored in JSON,
Yeah, not really eh. XML, JSON, etc etc are all serialisation formats, and 'internal' data isn't normally how we refer to the data stored on disk. Podcast feeds are XML, stop trying to break them. Do you want to serve HTML up as JSON too?
We had a fire. Burnt the whole place down. Fortunately, we had backups on tape, and we'd tested the backups using the tape drive, to make sure that they extracted correctly.
Trouble was, the only tape drive that seemed to be able to extract the tapes, was melted in the fire. Other tape drives appeared unable to do so, due to some subtle misalignment of the tape drive itself. Luckily, the data turned out to be available in other places, and our (frankly, pretty great) IT guys had us back up in a couple of days.
But I thought they were the same thing? You said they were, earlier on. I'm trying to learn from you, Kelvin, but if you keep on changing your tune, it's going to be very hard.
Luckily, just like every single other objection in your entire screed, this one is totally irrelevant. Hash the empty string, if you really want a hash, since that must be what git does with an empty file, right? Or - how about it stores some extra metadata? Who cares? Implementation detail. Figure it out, you're a smart guy. Point is, git doesn't handle the situation that I argued it should, and you banged on for ages about how I was wrong, and when you finally troubled yourself to read my original point, you told me that what I think should happen is impossible. Which is nonsense, of course.
Also, the irony that what you claim is impossible for directories, is already implemented for files, while earlier explaining to me how directories and files were the same thing, is making me smile. This means you have made one person smile today, which is probably a fairly unusual outcome for you, given how rude you seem to normally be.
It is a problem, I admit. I have to regularly replace my keyboard, since the drool-proof ones are nowhere near as impervious to saliva as you might expect.
It's weird though, isn't it? I mean, I know how git works, know all about the hashes and the merging and the lack of branch metadata, etc etc etc. Despite that, here I am believing that because I renamed a directory on one branch, and merged that action back into another, the directory should actually be re-named. Or, at least, a conflict should be generated if someone added new files to that (now renamed) directory. Such a strange idea. It must be the massive amounts of alcohol that I consume while working on this software for the airline industry, that'll probably cause the damn thing to fall out of the sky. Don't fly, Zero, don't fly, it's not safe up there. You know they have three identical computer systems in planes? And they, like, vote to see which one says what? And if they all disagree, well, god knows what happens. Plane probably bloody explodes, I expect.
Now, where was I? Oh, I remember, having a pointless argument with a rude and arrogant internet human. Right. So, your defense for not understanding what I was talking about, despite my perfectly clear explanations, was that you didn't think anybody could be so stupid to have advanced an argument that you didn't actually try to understand, and thus were in no position to judge the stupidity of? Gotcha.
You're quite a sophisticated a probably genius-level troll, really. What are you working on at the moment?
Slashdot Mirror
That's obviously a completely irrelevant, and shockingly callous statement. Don't you find it a little strange that the more disadvantaged someone in your society is, the more difficult and expensive everything becomes? Live in a poor neighbourhood, pay more in insurance. Suffer poor health, pay more in health insurance, if you can even get it. Wind up in jail, be unable to afford a telephone call to your family, who may very well be the only people you have left.
The whole thing is tilted, so that once you start falling, you tend to keep going, and there may be no way back. Whatever good fortune you have experienced in your lifetime, I'd wager much of it came from luck. Perhaps I'm wrong, perhaps you pulled yourself out of the gutter, perhaps you were born into poverty, suffered ill-health, wound up in jail through no real fault of your own, and still managed to survive, and eventually to overcome.
But that's pretty vanishingly unlikely. I certainly didn't. I was born with good health, a reasonable brains, into a comfortable situation. Education was both provided for free, and I was expected to undertake it. When I completed it, a job was easy to come by. I bumped into a wonderful girl by accident, and how I have a beautiful family, and a good and happy life. All of that, all of it, was nothing better than luck. That luck could change any day. I am not so conceited and blind to imagine otherwise.
Well, that's a very good point. The first rule of optimisation is that you'll always get a surprise.
However, in many cases performance has to be designed into a system, which isn't quite the same thing as 'premature optimisation', but it's a case of choosing algorithms sensibly etc.
But, back to the point, please show me the real-world java program that outperforms the equivalent real-world C++ program.... Because I design and write high-performance software for constrained environments for a living, and we would never use Java in a million years. But, if it could outperform the C++ that we do write, well, that would make me think again.
. If they detect a computer-aided game (it's not difficult)
I'm very interested in how detecting computer-assistance is so easy.
many of the advantages of the older language are becoming moot.
Except that inefficient software in datacentres directly translates into your power bill.
Well, they add new keywords from time to time, which can break existing code. But it's pretty rare, and nothing a search-and-replace can't fix.
It matters very little today.
Actually, the opposite is true. Today, nearly a majority of computing tasks are carried out on battery powered devices. Performance gains of even a few percent directly translate to battery life, and since computers aren't really getting any faster anymore, we need people to look harder at performance. The choice of using java (ok, Dalvik, or whatever google decided to call their stolen version of java) on a mobile device is exactly why we need quad-core monster devices with massive batteries. If they'd done the work to design an API in a fast language, like C++ or something, the global energy savings would not be insignificant. They would have been a couple of years, at least, later to market - and that might have killed the entire project - but the fact remains.
Car analogy: Energy is expensive. Build efficient vehicles.
it becomes economical to statistically analyse the code and alter it based on workload
While that *might* be true in very specific use-cases, I'd wager that the overhead of monitoring the workload in order to properly inform some optimisation algorithm, would defeat any minor gains that the optimisation might have delivered.
The trouble with all these arguments around bench-marks, and theoretical performance gains of dynamically compiled languages, is that the advantages simply never show up in real life. Game engines are written in C++, almost exclusively, and those guys are on the cutting edge when it comes to performance. Why are they not using Java?
thus, like Java, can potentially run faster than static-compiled programs.
And yet, it never actually does.
I personally see it slightly differently. Naturally we can all agree that languages evolve, but they do so under pressure from way in which language is used. In this particular instance, it seems that the change in the way 'literally' is used coincides with a lack of focus on the actual truth of things. Now that 'literally', does not any longer appear to mean 'of or pertaining to the real and genuine truth of something', what word might we use in its place?
No, in real life, that's what happened. Who do you think built all the roads you drive around on? Microsoft?
No, private industry with a profit motive will always be more efficient
If by efficient, you mean make more money, more quickly, and employ fewer people. Then yes, private enterprise will probably be more efficient.
If by efficient, you mean look after people better, and provide better healthcare outcomes - which remember means that people wind up needing less healthcare - then no. Private enterprise will not be more efficient. It's hardly in the interest of a private healthcare outfit to need to provide less, and cheaper, healthcare, but greater public health is the goal of any healthcare system, which ought to mean exactly that.
I hope you've seen It Follows. If not, do yourself a favor, don't read about it, just watch it.
Ok, fine. Enlighten us regarding your preferred cultural experiences. Personally, I regard the notion than we have slipped a few rungs as nothing more than laziness - out there, in the real world, beyond Bachelorette and super-hero reboots, which are important cultural artifacts in their own right - there is a vast universe of creative endeavor with which you might engage. Or you could just sit at home at talk to your friend. Your call.
That's not much of a discussion. You haven't seen the film, and are therefore in no position to comment on it. Added to which, the assumption running through all the above comments is that you actually do want to see it, but can't go to the cinema for whatever reason, and don't want to have to wait a year for it to come out on DVD. The Cinema's monopoly on newly released material will end soon in any case - Netflix at Cannes is a good example of one of the ways things are going to change. Arbitrarily restricting new releases to cinemas only doesn't make any sense, unless you consider that to be the only way of delaying the inevitable piracy.
Social standing isn't the same thing as a desire to have seen a film that your friends are talking about, so that you may enjoy a conversation about it with them. It's great that you consider yourself so separate from other human beings, that making some effort to be on the same page as them is beneath you. The rest of humanity, meanwhile, is interested in a shared cultural experience - and is willing to pay a bit of money for that too.
Er, I mean, "That'll teach them to not leave things to the last minute".
Kids' last minute homework projects etc
Send them to school without it done. That'll teach them to leave things to the last minute.
Like a lot of software, much of Cast's internal data is stored in JSON,
Yeah, not really eh. XML, JSON, etc etc are all serialisation formats, and 'internal' data isn't normally how we refer to the data stored on disk. Podcast feeds are XML, stop trying to break them. Do you want to serve HTML up as JSON too?
We had a fire. Burnt the whole place down. Fortunately, we had backups on tape, and we'd tested the backups using the tape drive, to make sure that they extracted correctly.
Trouble was, the only tape drive that seemed to be able to extract the tapes, was melted in the fire. Other tape drives appeared unable to do so, due to some subtle misalignment of the tape drive itself. Luckily, the data turned out to be available in other places, and our (frankly, pretty great) IT guys had us back up in a couple of days.
You can't drastically dumb-down the process of getting a passenger jet into the sky.
But I thought they were the same thing? You said they were, earlier on. I'm trying to learn from you, Kelvin, but if you keep on changing your tune, it's going to be very hard.
Luckily, just like every single other objection in your entire screed, this one is totally irrelevant. Hash the empty string, if you really want a hash, since that must be what git does with an empty file, right? Or - how about it stores some extra metadata? Who cares? Implementation detail. Figure it out, you're a smart guy. Point is, git doesn't handle the situation that I argued it should, and you banged on for ages about how I was wrong, and when you finally troubled yourself to read my original point, you told me that what I think should happen is impossible. Which is nonsense, of course.
Also, the irony that what you claim is impossible for directories, is already implemented for files, while earlier explaining to me how directories and files were the same thing, is making me smile. This means you have made one person smile today, which is probably a fairly unusual outcome for you, given how rude you seem to normally be.
It's only an impossible problem if you try to do it before breakfast.
I believe that would be a conflict, sir.
It is a problem, I admit. I have to regularly replace my keyboard, since the drool-proof ones are nowhere near as impervious to saliva as you might expect.
It's weird though, isn't it? I mean, I know how git works, know all about the hashes and the merging and the lack of branch metadata, etc etc etc. Despite that, here I am believing that because I renamed a directory on one branch, and merged that action back into another, the directory should actually be re-named. Or, at least, a conflict should be generated if someone added new files to that (now renamed) directory. Such a strange idea. It must be the massive amounts of alcohol that I consume while working on this software for the airline industry, that'll probably cause the damn thing to fall out of the sky. Don't fly, Zero, don't fly, it's not safe up there. You know they have three identical computer systems in planes? And they, like, vote to see which one says what? And if they all disagree, well, god knows what happens. Plane probably bloody explodes, I expect.
Now, where was I? Oh, I remember, having a pointless argument with a rude and arrogant internet human. Right. So, your defense for not understanding what I was talking about, despite my perfectly clear explanations, was that you didn't think anybody could be so stupid to have advanced an argument that you didn't actually try to understand, and thus were in no position to judge the stupidity of? Gotcha.
You're quite a sophisticated a probably genius-level troll, really. What are you working on at the moment?