Pharmaceutical companies may sometimes spend years trying to find a drug that works, but a sizable percentage of the drugs coming out these days are just slight modifications to existing drugs to make them more easily tolerated. That's short-term ROI.
Further, the only reason the pharmaceutical industry does much R&D at all is that drug patents are very short in duration and the cost of manufacturing generic drugs is relatively cheap. The threat of a generic equivalent coming out and taking away their ability to make any real profit from their drugs forces continuous innovation that would probably not occur in an industry with a higher manufacturing startup costs and fewer competitors.
Private industry does innovate, but very, very, very rarely does anything approaching pure scientific research. I find your seeming trust in the generosity of private industry baffling.
Fair enough. On the other hand, badly written code is self-limiting in size. It almost never gets particularly large because if it is that hard to maintain, it will also be extremely hard to expand in any useful way. Usually by the time it gets past about 10-15,000 LOC, it has to be at least somewhat sensible.
I tend to agree that 30,000 LOC is not at all large. My trivial little web photo gallery is 8k lines of code. At work, I maintain and periodically enhance a relatively small tool that's about 37k lines. It's fairly simple and straightforward and it's a tiny fraction of my job; I don't consider it large at all. Facebook is a medium-sized piece of software at 300,000 LOC. The Linux kernel is a large piece of software at 2.4 million LOC.
Science attempts to explain what the rules of the universe are. Philosophy and religion attempt to explain why the rules of the universe are. The two are largely orthogonal except in the rare cases where religion or philosophy overstep their bounds and try to explain that which is falsifiable, and even then, only when taken too literally.
You can't understand the complaints about the lack of a camera because your view of the iPad's potential is way, way too narrow. You see it as a pad that sits in your lap. We see it as a highly portable device that could be used anywhere:
With a built-in camera and the right software, the iPad would be the ultimate video conferencing device. Hang one on every wall of your house, and it could follow you from room to room. Granted, the price would have to come way down, but economies of scale have a tendency to cause that to happen over time.
When not in use, they double as high-end digital picture frames that can periodically download new photos from your iPhoto library.
Sans the camera, a waterproof version could be used for watching TV while you take a bath (or, for you perverts, with a camera).
Use them on an airplane over the in-flight Wi-Fi to video conference with work or family. Maybe even mount one to the back of every airline seat and also use them for in-flight movies.
Use the camera to detect gestures above the screen so that you can perform tasks without getting your greasy fingerprints on it.
Place them conspicuously around businesses as security cameras, showing the webcam footage live on the screen and simultaneously feeding it back to a central server.
Use face recognition to identify users. You might display different music libraries for different people who pick it up. You might lock the device if you don't recognize the person. You might play the sound of a dog barking when the cat stands on your screen. And so on.
Use the camera to detect when the user is getting pissed off and display Clippy.:-D
The list goes on and on.
The other point you're missing is that for many people, this device has the potential to eliminate the need for owning a computer, and a webcam is apparently considered a key feature in a computer these days. Why? I have no idea; in ten years, we'll all probably have iPad-like devices hanging from our walls and we'll wonder what we were thinking with all these stupid webcams. But apparently some people think it is important for the time being, so I guess it's important to humor them....
Yeah. Fry's is my first stop for components because they're usually cheaper, but quite frequently Rat Shack is the second stop because Fry's stocks their component section about as well as a saloon in a ghost town.
Look at male nipples. There is nothing intelligent or "by design" about it.
Think about it a little harder. You're having to code up the program for an entire universe. At some point, you need to create life. Do you create eighty million different forms of life, each with a completely different set of programming, or do you take advantage of code reuse and only change the bits that matter? I mean ostensibly yes, you could pull that functionality down into the subclass from the superclass, but there's a risk associated with it in that you now have greater code divergence between the two subclasses and thus your testing requirements go up.
They must have used the for loop to figure out where to insert the new entry as well. If they had used a binary search to find the insertion point, their algorithm would have massively outperformed yours. Quicksort's worst case performance is on already sorted lists, and you were really close to that. By contrast, an insert-and-shift would be O(log(n)) to find the location to put the new value and O(n/2) to copy the other values out of the way. It's mathematically provable that Quicksort cannot do fewer swaps than that because by definition it must move each of the old values one position to the right. And they could have gone one step further and vectorized the shift by calling a decent bcopy or memcpy or similar and further increased their lead.
The best choice for that is probably a balanced binary tree using a linked data structure (pointers). The performance there is O(log(n)) with no copying of data around at all.
The end result and ulterior motive of the groups pushing these laws isn't banning CP, it's banning all porn, period. They're just taking a small, incremental approach to their end goal.
No, sadly that's not the end goal. That's just another step. Banning porn criminalizes a third of the population. Banning drugs criminalizes another huge chunk. And so on. The end goal is for everyone to be a criminal so that nobody can speak up without fear of arrest for some crime. The inherent endgame for government is tyranny, and the only thing preventing any government from degrading into tyranny is a strong, informed population who won't stand for it.
In any given week, it's almost inevitable that 60-80% of my time will get sucked away by a project other than the one I planned to work on. So I estimate the worst case time that it would take if I worked on nothing but that project, then multiply by 5.:-D
Yeah. Just to put this in perspective, both in terms of percentage of the platform's users and age of the OS, this is roughly equivalent to dropping support for Vista.
As best I can tell, surprising girls with flowers on other days after having never done so usually makes girls think you're having an affair. Probably not the brightest thing you can do.
Troll? Sorry some folks with thin skins and mod points can't handle the reality check, but 62 million and 67 million are not hugely different numbers, and with 3 million of these things (on average) selling in an average month, that's a little over a month worth of sales. The numbers don't lie.
The fact is that console gaming is a fairly limited market. Not that many people are willing to spend hundreds of bucks for a device that just plays games. The market for console games is shrinking; the market for cell phones and MP3 players is increasing. The total market for cell phones dwarfs the console gaming market. Even a tiny percentage of that market is still more units than a third of the console gaming market. Thus, the odds are strongly in favor of iPhone and iPod Touch devices vastly outnumbering any given console game. It's almost an inevitability short of the rate of console game sales increasing dramatically.
Yes. That's what makes this so bizarre; historically Open Source projects have continued to support old OSes and hardware for years after Apple drops support. This is very surreal.
Depends on which iPhone/iPod Touch numbers you believe; I've also seen claims that the iPhone platform is slightly ahead of Wii. Either way, my point was that if your numbers for Wii are right, the Wii platform is not dramatically bigger than the iPhone platform; it's about the same size to within about a month worth of sales.
The whole point of the HTML5 video tag is that you can include multiple versions of content, and the browser chooses the best one. In fact, you really need to do this anyway---a low bitrate version for mobile devices, a nominal bitrate version for typical network connections, and a high bitrate high def version for people whose connections can take it (or who don't mind waiting a while for it to download).
It's not significantly harder to throw a second encoder into your output batch job and generate both Theora and H.264. If you really can't figure out how to do something that simple, then IMHO you probably shouldn't be publishing video on the web, as you're almost guaranteed to make a mess of it no matter what your delivery platform.
You kid, but just the fact that they were talking about creating databases of kiddie porn a few years back is creepy and makes me really wonder about the mental stability of the person or people who first came up with that idea. After all, it's generally believed that gay bashers are quite frequently closet homosexuals. What does this imply about politicians who are constantly bashing pedophiles and harping about kiddie porn?
I wish everyone would use the word "pervert" to describe any politician who brings up such subjects without being explicitly asked about them. It would be pretty accurate. Even if they don't like kiddie porn, they obviously have deep-seated psychological issues or they wouldn't spend so many hours of their day thinking about it. The same goes for the politicians jumping up and down about video game violence, sex on TV, etc. Pretty much any desire to censor others is a telltale sign of self loathing and inner perversion. Maybe if we started calling these politicians what they are, they'd crawl back under their rocks.
With modern nuclear plants, I'd agree. Unfortunately, the U.S. has no modern nuclear plants, and the existing reactors are often well past the age where any conventional plant would have been completely gutted and rebuild, but they don't do that because these things are so darn expensive and you'd never be able to get permission to start it up again once you shut it down anyway. We should be building new nuclear power plants and shutting down these fossils.
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Pharmaceutical companies may sometimes spend years trying to find a drug that works, but a sizable percentage of the drugs coming out these days are just slight modifications to existing drugs to make them more easily tolerated. That's short-term ROI.
Further, the only reason the pharmaceutical industry does much R&D at all is that drug patents are very short in duration and the cost of manufacturing generic drugs is relatively cheap. The threat of a generic equivalent coming out and taking away their ability to make any real profit from their drugs forces continuous innovation that would probably not occur in an industry with a higher manufacturing startup costs and fewer competitors.
Private industry does innovate, but very, very, very rarely does anything approaching pure scientific research. I find your seeming trust in the generosity of private industry baffling.
Fair enough. On the other hand, badly written code is self-limiting in size. It almost never gets particularly large because if it is that hard to maintain, it will also be extremely hard to expand in any useful way. Usually by the time it gets past about 10-15,000 LOC, it has to be at least somewhat sensible.
I tend to agree that 30,000 LOC is not at all large. My trivial little web photo gallery is 8k lines of code. At work, I maintain and periodically enhance a relatively small tool that's about 37k lines. It's fairly simple and straightforward and it's a tiny fraction of my job; I don't consider it large at all. Facebook is a medium-sized piece of software at 300,000 LOC. The Linux kernel is a large piece of software at 2.4 million LOC.
Or the program in question is evolution.
Science attempts to explain what the rules of the universe are. Philosophy and religion attempt to explain why the rules of the universe are. The two are largely orthogonal except in the rare cases where religion or philosophy overstep their bounds and try to explain that which is falsifiable, and even then, only when taken too literally.
Let's see you design a universe with a hard release deadline six days out.
You can't understand the complaints about the lack of a camera because your view of the iPad's potential is way, way too narrow. You see it as a pad that sits in your lap. We see it as a highly portable device that could be used anywhere:
The list goes on and on.
The other point you're missing is that for many people, this device has the potential to eliminate the need for owning a computer, and a webcam is apparently considered a key feature in a computer these days. Why? I have no idea; in ten years, we'll all probably have iPad-like devices hanging from our walls and we'll wonder what we were thinking with all these stupid webcams. But apparently some people think it is important for the time being, so I guess it's important to humor them....
Yeah. Fry's is my first stop for components because they're usually cheaper, but quite frequently Rat Shack is the second stop because Fry's stocks their component section about as well as a saloon in a ghost town.
Think about it a little harder. You're having to code up the program for an entire universe. At some point, you need to create life. Do you create eighty million different forms of life, each with a completely different set of programming, or do you take advantage of code reuse and only change the bits that matter? I mean ostensibly yes, you could pull that functionality down into the subclass from the superclass, but there's a risk associated with it in that you now have greater code divergence between the two subclasses and thus your testing requirements go up.
They must have used the for loop to figure out where to insert the new entry as well. If they had used a binary search to find the insertion point, their algorithm would have massively outperformed yours. Quicksort's worst case performance is on already sorted lists, and you were really close to that. By contrast, an insert-and-shift would be O(log(n)) to find the location to put the new value and O(n/2) to copy the other values out of the way. It's mathematically provable that Quicksort cannot do fewer swaps than that because by definition it must move each of the old values one position to the right. And they could have gone one step further and vectorized the shift by calling a decent bcopy or memcpy or similar and further increased their lead.
The best choice for that is probably a balanced binary tree using a linked data structure (pointers). The performance there is O(log(n)) with no copying of data around at all.
You do realize that you responded seriously to a post clearly made in jest, right?
Emphasis mine.
Sending a spaceship to the sun for science without a politician or a lawyer in it? What a waste of a perfectly good sun-bound craft.
No, sadly that's not the end goal. That's just another step. Banning porn criminalizes a third of the population. Banning drugs criminalizes another huge chunk. And so on. The end goal is for everyone to be a criminal so that nobody can speak up without fear of arrest for some crime. The inherent endgame for government is tyranny, and the only thing preventing any government from degrading into tyranny is a strong, informed population who won't stand for it.
No one expects the...
Uh... never mind.
In any given week, it's almost inevitable that 60-80% of my time will get sucked away by a project other than the one I planned to work on. So I estimate the worst case time that it would take if I worked on nothing but that project, then multiply by 5. :-D
True. It sounded like the answers to those questions in this case were "a long time" and "never except on Valentine's Day". :-)
Yeah. Just to put this in perspective, both in terms of percentage of the platform's users and age of the OS, this is roughly equivalent to dropping support for Vista.
I'd settle for 10! dollars.
As best I can tell, surprising girls with flowers on other days after having never done so usually makes girls think you're having an affair. Probably not the brightest thing you can do.
Troll? Sorry some folks with thin skins and mod points can't handle the reality check, but 62 million and 67 million are not hugely different numbers, and with 3 million of these things (on average) selling in an average month, that's a little over a month worth of sales. The numbers don't lie.
The fact is that console gaming is a fairly limited market. Not that many people are willing to spend hundreds of bucks for a device that just plays games. The market for console games is shrinking; the market for cell phones and MP3 players is increasing. The total market for cell phones dwarfs the console gaming market. Even a tiny percentage of that market is still more units than a third of the console gaming market. Thus, the odds are strongly in favor of iPhone and iPod Touch devices vastly outnumbering any given console game. It's almost an inevitability short of the rate of console game sales increasing dramatically.
Yes. That's what makes this so bizarre; historically Open Source projects have continued to support old OSes and hardware for years after Apple drops support. This is very surreal.
Depends on which iPhone/iPod Touch numbers you believe; I've also seen claims that the iPhone platform is slightly ahead of Wii. Either way, my point was that if your numbers for Wii are right, the Wii platform is not dramatically bigger than the iPhone platform; it's about the same size to within about a month worth of sales.
You forgot to include iPod Touch and projected iPad sales.
The whole point of the HTML5 video tag is that you can include multiple versions of content, and the browser chooses the best one. In fact, you really need to do this anyway---a low bitrate version for mobile devices, a nominal bitrate version for typical network connections, and a high bitrate high def version for people whose connections can take it (or who don't mind waiting a while for it to download).
It's not significantly harder to throw a second encoder into your output batch job and generate both Theora and H.264. If you really can't figure out how to do something that simple, then IMHO you probably shouldn't be publishing video on the web, as you're almost guaranteed to make a mess of it no matter what your delivery platform.
You kid, but just the fact that they were talking about creating databases of kiddie porn a few years back is creepy and makes me really wonder about the mental stability of the person or people who first came up with that idea. After all, it's generally believed that gay bashers are quite frequently closet homosexuals. What does this imply about politicians who are constantly bashing pedophiles and harping about kiddie porn?
I wish everyone would use the word "pervert" to describe any politician who brings up such subjects without being explicitly asked about them. It would be pretty accurate. Even if they don't like kiddie porn, they obviously have deep-seated psychological issues or they wouldn't spend so many hours of their day thinking about it. The same goes for the politicians jumping up and down about video game violence, sex on TV, etc. Pretty much any desire to censor others is a telltale sign of self loathing and inner perversion. Maybe if we started calling these politicians what they are, they'd crawl back under their rocks.
With modern nuclear plants, I'd agree. Unfortunately, the U.S. has no modern nuclear plants, and the existing reactors are often well past the age where any conventional plant would have been completely gutted and rebuild, but they don't do that because these things are so darn expensive and you'd never be able to get permission to start it up again once you shut it down anyway. We should be building new nuclear power plants and shutting down these fossils.
Odds are they'll just ramp up capacity at a more expensive power plant.