Inefficient code will do that. Why do we need 2Ghz+ just to make a graphic display to show web pages?
Because a modern web browser has to parse several different markup languages and a horde of style sheet features - it needs to run a Javascript engine capable of changing any part of the document structure or source at any time, and the rendering component must be able to gracefully handle these changes... And people want features like auto-complete and suggestion in address and search bars, intelligent pre-fetching of certain content, and so on. Meanwhile there's plug-ins like Flash which are also considered part of "the web" by most people...
The code of the web has basically scaled to fit the capabilities of the machines it runs on, because people always want nicer things.
If it's truly private, Rocket Lab should get all credit, not New Zealand.
If you were a born and bred New Zealander as I am you would realise that the people behind this are the same. Ask anyone from NZ what they are, and I guarantee you they're a kiwi ahead of all other things.
But if you're going to work with them - and especially if this other programmer is going to be reviewing and possibly rejecting your code - wouldn't the snob be a real hassle to work with?:)
Not if you're coding correctly yourself.
But that's the point: the snob may reject your code even if nothing's wrong with it...
Only if you're not also responsible for fixing the code in a few months when it comes back to you anyway with a serious bug.
What if you're made responsible for fixing your non-broken changes to the code because the previously-mentioned snob programmer has some vague dislike of its style?
As someone who grew up in the Portland (Maine) area it annoys me to no end when people talk about things in "Portland" and neglect to disambiguate - especially when they're talking about the other Portland.:)
The real reason who those bridges are standing while the Bay Bridge keeps going down is called "cars". The Bay Bridge is under much greater load than any Roman bridge ever was. Tectonic activity in the Bay Area probably doesn't help either...
Wait... I'm confused... Is this a car analogy or not?
You sir, are a snob. A programming snob at that, congrats.
I'd rather follow up on the work of a programming snob than a programming slob.
Sure, but which would you rather work with? Which programmer, I mean?
If you were just going to take over a project previously maintained by another programmer, then the snob is possibly the best choice. But if you're going to work with them - and especially if this other programmer is going to be reviewing and possibly rejecting your code - wouldn't the snob be a real hassle to work with?:)
Comments are a sign of bad code. That's because the more comments you have, the more errors you have in your comments. Uncommented programs have zero errors in comments, which points to excellent code.
Naw, you've got it backwards...
See, any given block of code is bound to have a certain number of errors - say, at a rate of 2 errors per thousand characters. The comments don't really impact the number of errors you'll get in the code itself. If the odds of any given program byte being in error is "r", and the length of the program code is given by "s", then the number of errors is "r*s" - so the only way to minimize the number of errors in your program is to make it as small as possible!
The problem with this idea is that the actors in play don't lend themselves to a very compelling narrative. I mean, suppose I've got a data line that I've previously pulled low, and now I'm allowing it to float high - but I want to make sure it's actually floated high so I can be sure there's not somebody else pulling it low...
What is the data line's motivation for floating high? Apart from a current-driver driving the line high, I mean... Will the reader actually be able to relate to this conflict between two different slaves trying to assert different states on the data line? And, if we do make a narrative about this conflict, won't we have to explore the individual slaves' motivations for the conflict? Won't we need some depth of background information about the source of the address collision? Wouldn't the narrative demand proper explanation of the first slave's feelings upon learning he's lost arbitration, and condemned to forever remain in the shadow of the second slave? And what about the narrative of the second slave, who doesn't even know there was a conflict, because he's won it? These don't sound like very appealing characters to me...
This is manned space exploration and colonization we're talking about here...brand new territory. In the early stages, it's going to be expensive, and it's prolly gonna REALLY suck for somebody. But the money exists, and so do those willing to take the risks. Or perhaps we should limit the human race by keeping it Earthbound because the economic gains aren't immediate and the people who signed up knowing the danger might die. Life might be 99% safe bets and cheap thrills, but that ain't the shit that makes history a good read.
Seems like a false dichotomy: either we stick our heads in the sand and negate any possibility of exploring the universe, or we charge ahead madly into the unknown, pushing ourselves to feats for which we're not actually ready... The thing is, technology is moving forward regardless of whether we go on this mad crusade of yours or not. Material science advances, computer technology advances, every thing we've ever learned to do, we're on a regular basis learning to do it better. And meanwhile, as we're doing all this "boring" stuff like launching satellites into orbit, we're learning to do that better, too. Taking on a massive undertaking like a permanent lunar station would be a lot more sensible when the requisite technology is ready.
It would be a massive feat to get a lunar station established. To go a step further and make that station largely self-sustaining may not even be possible at present. We could spend trillions of dollars to get the place up and running and then trillions more sending rockets up every few days to resupply anyone fool enough to go there... And, for what? To build a base whose yield will never match the investment? To build a base which will be embarassingly obsolete in 20 years' time? What if, instead of investing all that money into trying to rush ahead and build that junk now, we invested that money into developing the technology that would get us a really good moon base in 100 years or so? That may not sound like a cool way to proceed at present - but 100 years from now, or whenever the technology is truly ready to exploit the moon - it's going to be the folks to prepared for that time who benefit. Those who got there first will have nothing but bragging rights.
The value of experience and exploration is not judged from the present, holmes. We build the first one on the moon so we learn as many of the painful lessons up front as we can, in a location that's relatively easy to access.
I'm sure there would be no shortage of painful lessons for us if we tried establishing a permanent presence on the Moon. The point is, we don't actually need to relearn those lessons, despite the alluring glow of the promise of pain that would be involved.
At present, with the monumental cost and low yield, it would be foolish to try to establish a semi-permanent presence on the Moon.
Can't we use materials that exist on the moon instead of sending them from Earth? We could probably dig some tunnels there and live under the ground, safe from the radiation. Solar panels, lights, plants, water, air. We could bring microchips, perhaps some plastics from earth, get the metals and fuel from the Moon. Also having a colony there wouldn't hurt human kind.
It's hard to imagine any kind of mining operation on the moon being economically viable at this point in time. For what we'd have to pay (and you can think of this as a cost of "money" or of "energy" - the two concepts are equivalent to some degree) to send work crews (robotic or human) to the moon, provide them with necessary supplies, maintain them... extract the raw materials, refine them, turn them into a useful form... Sending rockets up periodically to resupply them... At the present time it would simply be far cheaper to build what we need here. Even if you figure in the cost of launching that built equipment from Earth instead of from the Moon, the benefits of not stretching our supply chain to (or beyond) practical limits during the preparatory phase of an interplanetary expedition make up for any extra cost of launching from Earth.
Here's a simple one. How about the ABA problem with a concurrent linked list. GC takes care of it.
Mamma Mia! This scenario, that's me down to the last detail... My project, my love, my life, my obsession, whatever you'd call it.... The solution I came up with wasn't elegant at all, it went on and on and on... So long... Time is money, as they say, and this work was money, money, money, slipping through my fingers. And when I thought I had it going the right way... Bang! a boomerang, it came back and hit me in the face (figuratively speaking, of course...) When my co-worker Fernando reviewed my code I felt like I was under attack, my own personal Waterloo. I was really starting to feel that one of us was going to have to leave my office, and it sure wasn't me... But he suggested what you suggested - a fresh approach using GC... Just like that it was as good as new. GC really is the name of the game when it comes to the ABA problem in a concurrent scenario... I could have spent all our last summer at the company trying to make my non-GC approach work, knowing me. Knowing you, you probably would have gone straight to the GC approach in the first place and got it working just as well in a week.:)
When all is said and done I think that GC has a lot to offer. I still think explicit resource management has its place, but people ignore the merits of GC because they're head-over-heels for the traditional approach, or because they believe GC is inherently more cost than it's worth... I have a dream that someday the programming industry will move as a whole beyond that mindset...
He's arguing that, because Microsoft code works on just about all 32-bit x86 processors, then the same must be true of Mac OS X. This is generally how people target their software: avoiding strict dependence on any processor features they can't rely on their customers' machines having. But it's not strictly true - the 32-bit instruction set goes back to the 80386 in 1985 - but every new generation of processors has added something - often including some new instructions.
Apple makes their OS for their hardware - if all their Intel processors supported SSE4 (Some of the older ones don't...) or 64-bit mode or some other extension the Atom (or rather, certain Atoms, like the N270 and N280 used in netbooks) didn't support, then it's possible some of their code would rely upon these features, too.
Honestly, I find it hard to care. I did the Mac thing and it was fun for a while, but I'm done with that now.
Slashdot Mirror
Inefficient code will do that. Why do we need 2Ghz+ just to make a graphic display to show web pages?
Because a modern web browser has to parse several different markup languages and a horde of style sheet features - it needs to run a Javascript engine capable of changing any part of the document structure or source at any time, and the rendering component must be able to gracefully handle these changes... And people want features like auto-complete and suggestion in address and search bars, intelligent pre-fetching of certain content, and so on. Meanwhile there's plug-ins like Flash which are also considered part of "the web" by most people...
The code of the web has basically scaled to fit the capabilities of the machines it runs on, because people always want nicer things.
Hopefully it will look something like this...
Flight of the Conchords, Bowie's In Space:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4zV4pJ8MwM
Or like a rocket takin' off to the moon!
That name was chosen to make it a top destination for a manned mission. I can see the mission decal now.... "To Eris, Human!"
It sounds more like a slave colony the aliens will ship humans off to in order to mine their precious... um... whatever it is they have on Eris...
If it's truly private, Rocket Lab should get all credit, not New Zealand.
If you were a born and bred New Zealander as I am you would realise that the people behind this are the same. Ask anyone from NZ what they are, and I guarantee you they're a kiwi ahead of all other things.
New Zealanders are all un-hygienic!
Depends on how many turn up to the LAN party. C'mon, have you SEEN the new Quake 8 graphics?
Does that mean they've finally gotten the hang of optimizing game code for parallelism?
Microsoft knows that mobile development is booming
Drum boom bass and the party is boomin'!
Ugh, I guess we'll have to eat this boring oatmeal...
It's A Trap!
But if you're going to work with them - and especially if this other programmer is going to be reviewing and possibly rejecting your code - wouldn't the snob be a real hassle to work with? :)
Not if you're coding correctly yourself.
But that's the point: the snob may reject your code even if nothing's wrong with it...
You wouldn't happen to code in Perl, by any chance?
Hey, the math speaks for itself... What can I say?
Only if you're not also responsible for fixing the code in a few months when it comes back to you anyway with a serious bug.
What if you're made responsible for fixing your non-broken changes to the code because the previously-mentioned snob programmer has some vague dislike of its style?
Can I just say... FUCK YES. Thank you!
As someone who grew up in the Portland (Maine) area it annoys me to no end when people talk about things in "Portland" and neglect to disambiguate - especially when they're talking about the other Portland. :)
Come on, that's just silly. I can understand why we might a few million-core supercomputers, but who would need 100 of them?
The real reason who those bridges are standing while the Bay Bridge keeps going down is called "cars". The Bay Bridge is under much greater load than any Roman bridge ever was. Tectonic activity in the Bay Area probably doesn't help either...
Wait... I'm confused... Is this a car analogy or not?
You sir, are a snob. A programming snob at that, congrats.
I'd rather follow up on the work of a programming snob than a programming slob.
Sure, but which would you rather work with? Which programmer, I mean?
If you were just going to take over a project previously maintained by another programmer, then the snob is possibly the best choice. But if you're going to work with them - and especially if this other programmer is going to be reviewing and possibly rejecting your code - wouldn't the snob be a real hassle to work with? :)
Comments are a sign of bad code. That's because the more comments you have, the more errors you have in your comments. Uncommented programs have zero errors in comments, which points to excellent code.
Naw, you've got it backwards...
See, any given block of code is bound to have a certain number of errors - say, at a rate of 2 errors per thousand characters. The comments don't really impact the number of errors you'll get in the code itself. If the odds of any given program byte being in error is "r", and the length of the program code is given by "s", then the number of errors is "r*s" - so the only way to minimize the number of errors in your program is to make it as small as possible!
Your code should be a narrative. How about
checkParamaters(...);
setupConnection(...);
submitQueries(...);
checkReturnValues(...);
The problem with this idea is that the actors in play don't lend themselves to a very compelling narrative. I mean, suppose I've got a data line that I've previously pulled low, and now I'm allowing it to float high - but I want to make sure it's actually floated high so I can be sure there's not somebody else pulling it low...
What is the data line's motivation for floating high? Apart from a current-driver driving the line high, I mean... Will the reader actually be able to relate to this conflict between two different slaves trying to assert different states on the data line? And, if we do make a narrative about this conflict, won't we have to explore the individual slaves' motivations for the conflict? Won't we need some depth of background information about the source of the address collision? Wouldn't the narrative demand proper explanation of the first slave's feelings upon learning he's lost arbitration, and condemned to forever remain in the shadow of the second slave? And what about the narrative of the second slave, who doesn't even know there was a conflict, because he's won it? These don't sound like very appealing characters to me...
This is manned space exploration and colonization we're talking about here...brand new territory. In the early stages, it's going to be expensive, and it's prolly gonna REALLY suck for somebody. But the money exists, and so do those willing to take the risks. Or perhaps we should limit the human race by keeping it Earthbound because the economic gains aren't immediate and the people who signed up knowing the danger might die. Life might be 99% safe bets and cheap thrills, but that ain't the shit that makes history a good read.
Seems like a false dichotomy: either we stick our heads in the sand and negate any possibility of exploring the universe, or we charge ahead madly into the unknown, pushing ourselves to feats for which we're not actually ready... The thing is, technology is moving forward regardless of whether we go on this mad crusade of yours or not. Material science advances, computer technology advances, every thing we've ever learned to do, we're on a regular basis learning to do it better. And meanwhile, as we're doing all this "boring" stuff like launching satellites into orbit, we're learning to do that better, too. Taking on a massive undertaking like a permanent lunar station would be a lot more sensible when the requisite technology is ready.
It would be a massive feat to get a lunar station established. To go a step further and make that station largely self-sustaining may not even be possible at present. We could spend trillions of dollars to get the place up and running and then trillions more sending rockets up every few days to resupply anyone fool enough to go there... And, for what? To build a base whose yield will never match the investment? To build a base which will be embarassingly obsolete in 20 years' time? What if, instead of investing all that money into trying to rush ahead and build that junk now, we invested that money into developing the technology that would get us a really good moon base in 100 years or so? That may not sound like a cool way to proceed at present - but 100 years from now, or whenever the technology is truly ready to exploit the moon - it's going to be the folks to prepared for that time who benefit. Those who got there first will have nothing but bragging rights.
Glenn Beck admits it all
Jason Beck strikes back!
What's the hold up?
Sadly, it is the elephant in the room; Mineral Rights.
Bah! Small potatoes, I tell you...
There's sovereignty at stake. Remember the Larkin decision?
The value of experience and exploration is not judged from the present, holmes. We build the first one on the moon so we learn as many of the painful lessons up front as we can, in a location that's relatively easy to access.
I'm sure there would be no shortage of painful lessons for us if we tried establishing a permanent presence on the Moon. The point is, we don't actually need to relearn those lessons, despite the alluring glow of the promise of pain that would be involved.
At present, with the monumental cost and low yield, it would be foolish to try to establish a semi-permanent presence on the Moon.
Can't we use materials that exist on the moon instead of sending them from Earth? We could probably dig some tunnels there and live under the ground, safe from the radiation. Solar panels, lights, plants, water, air. We could bring microchips, perhaps some plastics from earth, get the metals and fuel from the Moon. Also having a colony there wouldn't hurt human kind.
It's hard to imagine any kind of mining operation on the moon being economically viable at this point in time. For what we'd have to pay (and you can think of this as a cost of "money" or of "energy" - the two concepts are equivalent to some degree) to send work crews (robotic or human) to the moon, provide them with necessary supplies, maintain them... extract the raw materials, refine them, turn them into a useful form... Sending rockets up periodically to resupply them... At the present time it would simply be far cheaper to build what we need here. Even if you figure in the cost of launching that built equipment from Earth instead of from the Moon, the benefits of not stretching our supply chain to (or beyond) practical limits during the preparatory phase of an interplanetary expedition make up for any extra cost of launching from Earth.
Base on the moon!
How did it get there? Secret data. Pictures of the Moon. Secret Data, never before outside the Kremlin. Man’s first base on the Moon.
cue the aliens on the Moon, landing there and using the water to mix with the scotch and other lame ass jokes.
The aliens have set themselves up with a nice little night-club on the moon...
Here's a simple one. How about the ABA problem with a concurrent linked list. GC takes care of it.
Mamma Mia! This scenario, that's me down to the last detail... My project, my love, my life, my obsession, whatever you'd call it.... The solution I came up with wasn't elegant at all, it went on and on and on... So long... Time is money, as they say, and this work was money, money, money, slipping through my fingers. And when I thought I had it going the right way... Bang! a boomerang, it came back and hit me in the face (figuratively speaking, of course...) When my co-worker Fernando reviewed my code I felt like I was under attack, my own personal Waterloo. I was really starting to feel that one of us was going to have to leave my office, and it sure wasn't me... But he suggested what you suggested - a fresh approach using GC... Just like that it was as good as new. GC really is the name of the game when it comes to the ABA problem in a concurrent scenario... I could have spent all our last summer at the company trying to make my non-GC approach work, knowing me. Knowing you, you probably would have gone straight to the GC approach in the first place and got it working just as well in a week. :)
When all is said and done I think that GC has a lot to offer. I still think explicit resource management has its place, but people ignore the merits of GC because they're head-over-heels for the traditional approach, or because they believe GC is inherently more cost than it's worth... I have a dream that someday the programming industry will move as a whole beyond that mindset...
He's arguing that, because Microsoft code works on just about all 32-bit x86 processors, then the same must be true of Mac OS X. This is generally how people target their software: avoiding strict dependence on any processor features they can't rely on their customers' machines having. But it's not strictly true - the 32-bit instruction set goes back to the 80386 in 1985 - but every new generation of processors has added something - often including some new instructions.
Apple makes their OS for their hardware - if all their Intel processors supported SSE4 (Some of the older ones don't...) or 64-bit mode or some other extension the Atom (or rather, certain Atoms, like the N270 and N280 used in netbooks) didn't support, then it's possible some of their code would rely upon these features, too.
Honestly, I find it hard to care. I did the Mac thing and it was fun for a while, but I'm done with that now.