If you don't understand and can't replicate the concepts that underpin your craft, you aren't qualified to practice it.
Well put. Saying that sorting algorithms are readily available in libraries for virtually all platforms, and thus that modern programmers need not learn them, is just wrong. It's like saying that an engineer need not know about moments of inertia when designing a beam, because he can click a button on his design software to tell him the rigidity. Or like a mechanic not knowing how to use a spanner because he has an air gun available.
I probably couldn't code a particularly efficient quicksort, for example, off the top of my head - but I certainly understand how it works. Contrary to what Unoriginal_Nickname says below, it's not like a mathematician not memorising Pi past 8dp, it's more like a mathematician not ever learning what Pi is because he has a computer program that he can use to calculate the circumference of a circle.
Yeah, I went through a phase of using Hungarian-esque notation not long after I started programming, mostly because I taught myself from Charles Petzold's excellent Programming Windows book, combined with various MS examples, all of which used Hungarian notation. Then I started realising that 90% of my variables were integers anyway, and started dropping notation where it was obvious, to the point where I now only give decoration to member/static/global variables and some pointers where it's not blatantly obvious by usage.
I think that with a clearer coding style, Hungarian notation becomes less helpful, possibly even unnecessary. It's useful when, for instance, you have a 500-line function and you can't remember all the variables and their types, but this is far better solved by simply having non-awful code structuring in the first place rather than by any kind of variable-name decoration.
From your post history, I'd say you probably fall outside the 'reasonable values of everyone' I was talking about - as in, you're probably rather more technically literate than average, and (judging by your UID) probably learned to program using a text editor and command line compiler rather than with MSVC++ 6 or later (the first IDE that I used that had IntelliSense, good god it was awesome!) Also you may not be joining large projects part way through where you are unfamiliar with most of the code.
I'd still maintain that while vi + gcc is situationally better for expert users, those of us trying not to burn too many brain cells on our daily work are almost certainly better off using a tool that can tell us what type a variable is, where it was declared, what members a struct has as we type its name, and all the other little things. They're not necessary but they most definitely speed up the arduous task of maintaining someone else's code.
Full Hungarian notation is a bit redundant, precisely because everyone (for reasonable values of 'everyone') DOES use some form of IDE to code, and any non-epic-fail IDE will at the least tell you variable types when you mouse over them, or pop up a member list for a class/struct when you go to type them.
However, specific notation on some things IS a good thing. Conventions like CONSTANTS, m_memberVariables, and so forth are good because they remind you that the variable in question is an exception to what you'd normally expect (that it's a number, a string, or an object). They're not strictly necessary any more (my current workplace just uses upper camel case for everything, for instance, and my last job used trailing underscores to denote member variables which was downright annoying) but IMO it's good to prevent brain fail errors. Recognising that the programmer is the source of all errors is the first step towards getting rid of them. Well, except in Borland Turbo C++.:)
The one thing I don't think I'll ever, ever miss is writing loaders for some of the stupider file formats out there. Sure, it's not hard, per se, to write a.bmp loader, but once you've done it once or twice it gets old. Eventually I wrote a helper image library to do it all but it still would occasionally come across some obscure variant that it wouldn't load. Far worse were early 3D model formats, even now I tend to stick with.md2 for hobby projects just because it's simple, does what I want, and EVERYTHING exports to it.
True about audiophile sound, but you must admit that onboard sound these days is more than sufficient for almost all non-professional uses. Serial I/O, ethernet, and firewire are all onboard these days (and as such, there is no market for dedicated expansion boards for them). Video will go the same way within 5 years (IMO) as general purpose processors become numerous and powerful enough to simply render on the main CPU cluster (or, contrariwise, the 'video card' will continue its evolution from 'draws polygons and outputs a video signal' to 'does brute bulk number crunching of anything you want it to', at which point I predict that we'll move entirely to onboard video).
Audiophile sound is different because it suffers, badly, from the Emperor's New Cable effect, "if you can't hear the difference then you're not a REAL audiophile". Which, of course, results in such ridiculous things as companies claiming that their brand of standalone CD duplicator gives a "better sound" than a computer CD burner. If you can get an on-board sound setup that supplies your required (digital) output and has the digital features that you need then on-board sound will have indistinguishable quality from any other board that outputs the same digital signal. If it gets the same bits out and they're interpreted as the same binary pattern by your digital decoder then it's exactly the same sound as you'd get from a $1000 pro card.
Nah, I want the Hog. That thing is awesome! (Does it still protect you from fall damage? I heard it got nerfed back to pretty much a normal mount last patch:/ ) Still, it's the epitome of cool and as such I must have one!:P
it's the silly new bling (bike, mammoth, dalaran ring, pilton bag, etc.) that requires ridiculous amounts of gold-grinding to get
You're confusing cause and effect. The 'silly new bling' doesn't require gold grinding to get. Rather, it exists solely to take money out of the economy, to curb inflation. If they didn't keep adding gold sinks, eventually gold would become virtually worthless, removing any point of having it in the in-game economy. At least the sinks are carefully designed not to give any fundamental advantages in gameplay, so that having lots of gold does't give a huge advantage.
The whole premise is silly and reaks of someone who has no experience in... well anything really. As I said, every industry has high end stuff adopted by a few, which eventually becomes standard and adopted by the masses. Welcome to the evolution of technology.
I'd think someone on slashdot would at least realize that.
I think the argument here isn't that "there is always a very expensive 'high end' and a more moderately priced and still quite adequate 'mid range'". It's more along the lines of "As technology advances, there ceases to be a 'high end' market for some products."
Look at it this way - when was the last time you bought a dedicated serial I/O card? When was the last time you bought a dedicated sound card, or network card, or firewire card? All of these are now so trivial that they're ubiquitously built in to midrange motherboards, so there is no "high end" market for them any more. TFA is just saying that video cards are next.
A blue Lamborghini is an offence against nature. Lamborghinis are, like Ferraris, either red, black, or occasionally white or yellow. Any other colour is an abomination.
I saw a dark green Ferrari in a carpark once and only just resisted my temptation to ram it.:P
I spent $500 (AUD) on an ex-display-model GeForce 6800 GT about 4 years ago. It actually lasted really well, and stayed pretty capable up until the latest WoW expansion came out and it started chugging... I replaced it with a 9800 Pro for around $150, which (by my rough estimate) is about 20 times the speed. It's a good time to be a gamer.
This is 100% true. It's exactly like mobile phone contracts - notice that they advertise "free calls" in dollars, then have a hidden layer of obfuscation converting those dollars to minutes, then add other conditions that change how much you actually get for your money? It's not so you have a wide range of deals to choose from, it's so you go "wtf... idunno" and buy the shiniest phone. They don't want you knowing whether their product is better or worse than their competitors' because actual competition involves costly things like cutting prices. Marketing is about making people choose products based on fuzzy factors rather than hard numbers, because fuzzy factors can be so much more easily swung by emotive appeals.
In the specific field of graphics cards, I got burned by nVidia's horrible, horrible "GeForce 4 MX" line. Luckily it was just a spare one at work that I borrowed for a quick upgrade - I brought it back the next day, my then-3-year-old GeForce 2 Ti was significantly faster. There should be some cardinal rule of marketing: "If it's not better you can't put a bigger number on it."
I know the "married guys get none" stereotype is pretty prevalent (hell, I got told it a LOT in the leadup to my own wedding) and I use it myself occasionally for comedic effect...
Statistically, thought, we actually get more than even the 'playa playa' single guys. I always find it amusing when a single friend of mine (with pretensions of being Mr Smooth Moves) is bragging about how he got with this hot chick on the weekend and they got it on three times. I'm just waiting for him to ask 'when I last got some' so I can reply "oh, twice last night then once this morning before work".;)
Not if you run an LCD. Native resolution tends to look MUCH nicer than anything else unless you're running at very low resolution compared to native (think 1024x768 or lower on a modern HD monitor). As a result you tend to tweak settings to get the frame rate you want at native resolution rather than dropping resolution (I've found that 2x FSAA is indistinguishable from 8x on my monitor unless I put my nose up to it, for instance).
Dunno 'bout you but I run WoW just fine (at slightly higher frame rates, in fact) on xubuntu. And last weekend I bought myself the Valve pack on Steam so I could play L4D with my friends (got the pack rather than just L4D because I've always wanted to play through Portal, the original HL, and a bunch of other games in the pack). L4D does have some performance problems, which is a little disappointing, but is still playable (albeit at half the frame rate and resolution that my machine could do under Windows).
I'm not sure which rule number it is but there's definitely a rule saying "It may not be acceptable to kill X in your game, but it's OK to kill Zombie X if the existence of such a thing isn't an automatic ban in itself". So if you can't get away with a game (I'm looking at you, Carmageddon) where you run over pedestrians, then turn their blood green and hey presto, instant zombies. And running over zombies is OK. Really.
Of course you can't have a baby-killing game by having zombie babies, because you can't have a game with zombie babies in it, full stop. Mummified pygmies, maybe, but not zombie babies. Thus is the power of tv reality.
What? Why would it be doing all that stuff with integrating with the OS, spinning up your hard drives etc? All it does is run its own internal torrent app, which you point at a tracker. It then downloads the torrent by itself, into its built-in flash memory, without needing anything out of your computer except for a 5v power supply. Then when you turn your computer on in the morning it presents itself as a flash drive containing the files... simple!
That's where privileged accounts come in. A *user* is not allowed to do things like "rm -rf/". If I went to my home computer and typed that it'd say "lol, no". If I'm sure enough about what I'm doing, I can log in as root (or sudo or su or whatever) and do whatever I want. An antivirus program doesn't have to stop code like that because that's not its job.
Yes, andue I cone iraid wierds tauihot rouie espulelied woathut eviwils, but that doesn't make it right.
I tried to fix that for you...
(actually it was a real effort to get things that didn't sound pretty similar to the sentence you were trying to write O.o I guess the lesson here isn't that "the human brain is amazing and special" but more like "vowels are all very similar and virtually interchangable").
That Windows 7 has such problems with XP apps that Microsoft thinks some users will want to run them in a virtual machine says a lot to me.
What it says to me is that the cumulative changes between Windows 3.1 and Windows 7 are now so great that it's cleaner to just calve off a small chunk of your computer and run old stuff in its own environment than it is to try and keep it integrated with the rest of the system. And I can't see how this is in any way a bad thing; if nothing else, crashes in legacy apps should be confined to those apps rather than taking your system down.
In particular, this is a great way of dealing with legacy XP apps that insist on being run as Administrator because they were written without any concept of functional file permissions. Whether or not these apps are good or "should be updated by their publisher" (who most likely no longer exists), they're a huge part of the day-to-day running of many companies. Being able to run them without risking your system stability would, I'd think, be a huge drawcard for corporate users.
I mean, wow. HOLY SHIT! Some guy hacked OS X in a contest! My fucking god, OS X's security must be TERRIBLE compared to Windows'! The fact that some guy managed to hack an OS X box PROVES it!
Because that's totally not the point that Mac fanboys wheel out every time someone demonstrates a proof-of-concept Windows exploit. Or was that your point? Sorry, I'm not on form today, think I might have flying pig flu...
Single-screen multiplayer is (IMO) the best fun you can have gaming as a group (well, crowded around a single computer playing a drinking game based on Penguin Swing notwithstanding...) Games like Smash Bros. and Bomberman on a big screen with a bunch of friends are awesome, and Nintendo is doing a great job keeping the style alive while other companies ditch the same-sofa multiplayer for "but you can bring your own XBox/PS3 and we can both play on XBox Live".
Slashdot Mirror
If you don't understand and can't replicate the concepts that underpin your craft, you aren't qualified to practice it.
Well put. Saying that sorting algorithms are readily available in libraries for virtually all platforms, and thus that modern programmers need not learn them, is just wrong. It's like saying that an engineer need not know about moments of inertia when designing a beam, because he can click a button on his design software to tell him the rigidity. Or like a mechanic not knowing how to use a spanner because he has an air gun available.
I probably couldn't code a particularly efficient quicksort, for example, off the top of my head - but I certainly understand how it works. Contrary to what Unoriginal_Nickname says below, it's not like a mathematician not memorising Pi past 8dp, it's more like a mathematician not ever learning what Pi is because he has a computer program that he can use to calculate the circumference of a circle.
Yeah, I went through a phase of using Hungarian-esque notation not long after I started programming, mostly because I taught myself from Charles Petzold's excellent Programming Windows book, combined with various MS examples, all of which used Hungarian notation. Then I started realising that 90% of my variables were integers anyway, and started dropping notation where it was obvious, to the point where I now only give decoration to member/static/global variables and some pointers where it's not blatantly obvious by usage.
I think that with a clearer coding style, Hungarian notation becomes less helpful, possibly even unnecessary. It's useful when, for instance, you have a 500-line function and you can't remember all the variables and their types, but this is far better solved by simply having non-awful code structuring in the first place rather than by any kind of variable-name decoration.
From your post history, I'd say you probably fall outside the 'reasonable values of everyone' I was talking about - as in, you're probably rather more technically literate than average, and (judging by your UID) probably learned to program using a text editor and command line compiler rather than with MSVC++ 6 or later (the first IDE that I used that had IntelliSense, good god it was awesome!) Also you may not be joining large projects part way through where you are unfamiliar with most of the code.
I'd still maintain that while vi + gcc is situationally better for expert users, those of us trying not to burn too many brain cells on our daily work are almost certainly better off using a tool that can tell us what type a variable is, where it was declared, what members a struct has as we type its name, and all the other little things. They're not necessary but they most definitely speed up the arduous task of maintaining someone else's code.
Full Hungarian notation is a bit redundant, precisely because everyone (for reasonable values of 'everyone') DOES use some form of IDE to code, and any non-epic-fail IDE will at the least tell you variable types when you mouse over them, or pop up a member list for a class/struct when you go to type them.
:)
However, specific notation on some things IS a good thing. Conventions like CONSTANTS, m_memberVariables, and so forth are good because they remind you that the variable in question is an exception to what you'd normally expect (that it's a number, a string, or an object). They're not strictly necessary any more (my current workplace just uses upper camel case for everything, for instance, and my last job used trailing underscores to denote member variables which was downright annoying) but IMO it's good to prevent brain fail errors. Recognising that the programmer is the source of all errors is the first step towards getting rid of them. Well, except in Borland Turbo C++.
The one thing I don't think I'll ever, ever miss is writing loaders for some of the stupider file formats out there. Sure, it's not hard, per se, to write a .bmp loader, but once you've done it once or twice it gets old. Eventually I wrote a helper image library to do it all but it still would occasionally come across some obscure variant that it wouldn't load. Far worse were early 3D model formats, even now I tend to stick with .md2 for hobby projects just because it's simple, does what I want, and EVERYTHING exports to it.
True about audiophile sound, but you must admit that onboard sound these days is more than sufficient for almost all non-professional uses. Serial I/O, ethernet, and firewire are all onboard these days (and as such, there is no market for dedicated expansion boards for them). Video will go the same way within 5 years (IMO) as general purpose processors become numerous and powerful enough to simply render on the main CPU cluster (or, contrariwise, the 'video card' will continue its evolution from 'draws polygons and outputs a video signal' to 'does brute bulk number crunching of anything you want it to', at which point I predict that we'll move entirely to onboard video).
Audiophile sound is different because it suffers, badly, from the Emperor's New Cable effect, "if you can't hear the difference then you're not a REAL audiophile". Which, of course, results in such ridiculous things as companies claiming that their brand of standalone CD duplicator gives a "better sound" than a computer CD burner. If you can get an on-board sound setup that supplies your required (digital) output and has the digital features that you need then on-board sound will have indistinguishable quality from any other board that outputs the same digital signal. If it gets the same bits out and they're interpreted as the same binary pattern by your digital decoder then it's exactly the same sound as you'd get from a $1000 pro card.
Nah, I want the Hog. That thing is awesome! (Does it still protect you from fall damage? I heard it got nerfed back to pretty much a normal mount last patch :/ ) Still, it's the epitome of cool and as such I must have one! :P
it's the silly new bling (bike, mammoth, dalaran ring, pilton bag, etc.) that requires ridiculous amounts of gold-grinding to get
You're confusing cause and effect. The 'silly new bling' doesn't require gold grinding to get. Rather, it exists solely to take money out of the economy, to curb inflation. If they didn't keep adding gold sinks, eventually gold would become virtually worthless, removing any point of having it in the in-game economy. At least the sinks are carefully designed not to give any fundamental advantages in gameplay, so that having lots of gold does't give a huge advantage.
And two days after three days before tomorrow, your hardware was will-have-been is shall-be became obsolete.
The whole premise is silly and reaks of someone who has no experience in ... well anything really. As I said, every industry has high end stuff adopted by a few, which eventually becomes standard and adopted by the masses. Welcome to the evolution of technology.
I'd think someone on slashdot would at least realize that.
I think the argument here isn't that "there is always a very expensive 'high end' and a more moderately priced and still quite adequate 'mid range'". It's more along the lines of "As technology advances, there ceases to be a 'high end' market for some products."
Look at it this way - when was the last time you bought a dedicated serial I/O card? When was the last time you bought a dedicated sound card, or network card, or firewire card? All of these are now so trivial that they're ubiquitously built in to midrange motherboards, so there is no "high end" market for them any more. TFA is just saying that video cards are next.
A blue Lamborghini is an offence against nature. Lamborghinis are, like Ferraris, either red, black, or occasionally white or yellow. Any other colour is an abomination.
:P
I saw a dark green Ferrari in a carpark once and only just resisted my temptation to ram it.
I spent $500 (AUD) on an ex-display-model GeForce 6800 GT about 4 years ago. It actually lasted really well, and stayed pretty capable up until the latest WoW expansion came out and it started chugging... I replaced it with a 9800 Pro for around $150, which (by my rough estimate) is about 20 times the speed. It's a good time to be a gamer.
This is 100% true. It's exactly like mobile phone contracts - notice that they advertise "free calls" in dollars, then have a hidden layer of obfuscation converting those dollars to minutes, then add other conditions that change how much you actually get for your money? It's not so you have a wide range of deals to choose from, it's so you go "wtf... idunno" and buy the shiniest phone. They don't want you knowing whether their product is better or worse than their competitors' because actual competition involves costly things like cutting prices. Marketing is about making people choose products based on fuzzy factors rather than hard numbers, because fuzzy factors can be so much more easily swung by emotive appeals.
In the specific field of graphics cards, I got burned by nVidia's horrible, horrible "GeForce 4 MX" line. Luckily it was just a spare one at work that I borrowed for a quick upgrade - I brought it back the next day, my then-3-year-old GeForce 2 Ti was significantly faster. There should be some cardinal rule of marketing: "If it's not better you can't put a bigger number on it."
I know the "married guys get none" stereotype is pretty prevalent (hell, I got told it a LOT in the leadup to my own wedding) and I use it myself occasionally for comedic effect...
;)
Statistically, thought, we actually get more than even the 'playa playa' single guys. I always find it amusing when a single friend of mine (with pretensions of being Mr Smooth Moves) is bragging about how he got with this hot chick on the weekend and they got it on three times. I'm just waiting for him to ask 'when I last got some' so I can reply "oh, twice last night then once this morning before work".
Not if you run an LCD. Native resolution tends to look MUCH nicer than anything else unless you're running at very low resolution compared to native (think 1024x768 or lower on a modern HD monitor). As a result you tend to tweak settings to get the frame rate you want at native resolution rather than dropping resolution (I've found that 2x FSAA is indistinguishable from 8x on my monitor unless I put my nose up to it, for instance).
Dunno 'bout you but I run WoW just fine (at slightly higher frame rates, in fact) on xubuntu. And last weekend I bought myself the Valve pack on Steam so I could play L4D with my friends (got the pack rather than just L4D because I've always wanted to play through Portal, the original HL, and a bunch of other games in the pack). L4D does have some performance problems, which is a little disappointing, but is still playable (albeit at half the frame rate and resolution that my machine could do under Windows).
I'm not sure which rule number it is but there's definitely a rule saying "It may not be acceptable to kill X in your game, but it's OK to kill Zombie X if the existence of such a thing isn't an automatic ban in itself". So if you can't get away with a game (I'm looking at you, Carmageddon) where you run over pedestrians, then turn their blood green and hey presto, instant zombies. And running over zombies is OK. Really.
Of course you can't have a baby-killing game by having zombie babies, because you can't have a game with zombie babies in it, full stop. Mummified pygmies, maybe, but not zombie babies. Thus is the power of tv reality.
What? Why would it be doing all that stuff with integrating with the OS, spinning up your hard drives etc? All it does is run its own internal torrent app, which you point at a tracker. It then downloads the torrent by itself, into its built-in flash memory, without needing anything out of your computer except for a 5v power supply. Then when you turn your computer on in the morning it presents itself as a flash drive containing the files... simple!
That's where privileged accounts come in. A *user* is not allowed to do things like "rm -rf /". If I went to my home computer and typed that it'd say "lol, no". If I'm sure enough about what I'm doing, I can log in as root (or sudo or su or whatever) and do whatever I want. An antivirus program doesn't have to stop code like that because that's not its job.
I'd paste several pages of rant-generator garble here but I can't be bothered. Just pretend I did, 'k? :P
Yes, andue I cone iraid wierds tauihot rouie espulelied woathut eviwils, but that doesn't make it right.
I tried to fix that for you...
(actually it was a real effort to get things that didn't sound pretty similar to the sentence you were trying to write O.o I guess the lesson here isn't that "the human brain is amazing and special" but more like "vowels are all very similar and virtually interchangable").
That Windows 7 has such problems with XP apps that Microsoft thinks some users will want to run them in a virtual machine says a lot to me.
What it says to me is that the cumulative changes between Windows 3.1 and Windows 7 are now so great that it's cleaner to just calve off a small chunk of your computer and run old stuff in its own environment than it is to try and keep it integrated with the rest of the system. And I can't see how this is in any way a bad thing; if nothing else, crashes in legacy apps should be confined to those apps rather than taking your system down.
In particular, this is a great way of dealing with legacy XP apps that insist on being run as Administrator because they were written without any concept of functional file permissions. Whether or not these apps are good or "should be updated by their publisher" (who most likely no longer exists), they're a huge part of the day-to-day running of many companies. Being able to run them without risking your system stability would, I'd think, be a huge drawcard for corporate users.
I mean, wow. HOLY SHIT! Some guy hacked OS X in a contest! My fucking god, OS X's security must be TERRIBLE compared to Windows'! The fact that some guy managed to hack an OS X box PROVES it!
Because that's totally not the point that Mac fanboys wheel out every time someone demonstrates a proof-of-concept Windows exploit. Or was that your point? Sorry, I'm not on form today, think I might have flying pig flu...
Also did anyone tell them hard drives are already less than 10 cents a gigabyte?
I'd guess that the attractiveness of holographic displays is more due to the data density, and hence read speeds, than the raw volume.
Single-screen multiplayer is (IMO) the best fun you can have gaming as a group (well, crowded around a single computer playing a drinking game based on Penguin Swing notwithstanding...) Games like Smash Bros. and Bomberman on a big screen with a bunch of friends are awesome, and Nintendo is doing a great job keeping the style alive while other companies ditch the same-sofa multiplayer for "but you can bring your own XBox/PS3 and we can both play on XBox Live".