Computers may be deterministic, but the number of inputs may be so large that this is not always the most practical way to deal with them.
There are many more nondeterministic influences on a program than your list acknowledges. For example, if you access an uninitialized variable, the data you get back won't necessarily be consistent. And such a mistake can cause failures that are quite remote from the ultimate cause.
Good languages and compilers can help eliminate a lot of these sources of nondeterministic influence -- any decent compiler will warn you about accessing an uninitialized variable, and getting rid of pointers or at least putting them on a short leash can eliminate a whole class of programmer mistakes that can lead to apparently random failures.
We're talking about compiling a version control system here, not a rendering engine. Extra speed from an optimized build would be nice, but it's nowhere near a must-have.
I'd love to see a credible source for your "slow as a scripting language" claim.
At the end of the day, the utility of a material good is what counts.
Uh, intrinsic 'utility' has nothing to do with the value of a wealth-display luxury good like jewelry.
If DeBeers introduces a system involving certificates of authenticity and strict tracking of the origins of a stone, the sort of women who really care about getting diamonds as gifts will likely also begin to care about getting the certificate that goes with it. The real point of a diamond as a gift is not the intrinsic value or utility of the stone, but rather as a demonstration of the giver's ability to blow a significant chunk of money on something that is fundamentally useless. Inexpensive synthetic stones won't provide the same demonstration, and thus may turn out pointless.
To put it tersely: Diamonds aren't expensive because they're useful; They're useful (as signifiers of wealth), because they're expensive.
When development time runs over schedule, push the damned ship date back!
Not gonna happen. The vast majority of the time, the economic penalty associated with being late is much greater than the economic penalty associated with being buggy.
Yeah, but that was just standard weasely boilerplate. The guy obviously intended for readers to come away with the idea that most or all Linux users are fanatical zealots.
Using flash isn't likely to save MS much money. The stuff runs quite a bit more expensive per gig than an HD. Look at how compact MP3 players, using some of the most expensive HDs on the market (in gigs per dollar) are able to compete on price with flash players with a fraction of the storage.
IMO, desire to limit hacking is probably the real reason.
That cuts both ways, too; I mostly job-hunt through friends and former coworkers because those guys can give me a much better picture of what I can expect from a company that I can get through HR materials and the interview process.
I got my very first job when I got out of school on my own, with no recommendation.
It was, in a word, awful.
Every one of the 3 jobs I've had since then was obtained with a recommendation from a former classmate or coworker who was at the company. These 3 jobs have varied in quality, but all 3 were far and away better than that first job.
Spend some time working with a codebase where correct indention isn't generally respected, and you'll have much more appreciation for a language that would have enforced such a restriction on indention.
And Python's rules aren't particularly rigid -- they're no different than what you ought to be doing, anyways. And as a bonus, they let you save the occasional line of code that would have otherwise contained only a '}'.
Dude, it's TV. It's all about entertainment. If you're not entertained simply change the channel. I'm sure a real starship Captain would not risk... Oh wait... It's fantasy.
Sigh. You miss the point entirely. Sure, it's sci-fi, so it makes no sense to judge some aspects of the show by a 'realism' metric. For example, pointing out that warp drive violates our current understanding of physics would be silly, because warp is one of the basic conceits that makes this science fiction.
But the fact that this is sci-fi doesn't mean that there are no aspects of the show that can't be judged by their realism. In the example at hand, the unrealism that the OP is complaining about has nothing to do with the SF conceits on which the show is founded: That commanders of naval vessels are risk averse and will not put the entire ship at significant risk to save a couple of crewmen is an observable fact of the world in which we live. The fact that Enterprise is a starship rather than a ship at sea has little or no bearing on how a captain would make a decision in this kind of situation.
And this really cuts to the core of what annoys me about most of the post-TNG Trek series: None of them ever really seem to subject the captains to any serious moral dilemmas -- or rather, they never acknowledge that many of these situations are serious moral dilemmas. Captains do stupid, irresponsible things that endanger many of the people under their command. And the shows let them get away with it, because it would just be too damned downbeat to actually show the captain making the hard decision to leave Crewman Bob behind because of the risk involved in rescuing him.
Re-read my comment, in particular this line: "I try to better document why I make the design decisions I do". That means, among other things, commenting.
I was already in the habit of commenting my code, and was plenty clueful on how it worked. But what I really needed to know, and what I usually focus on in my comments these days, is the why.
Incidentally, when someone relates a mistake they made and how they learned from it, it takes a special kind of ass to fixate on the mistake itself and use it as an opportunity to berate the person for their 'cluelessness'.
And often, you're mistaken when you think you have a better implementation.
Here's an experience I used to have somewhat often: I'd be revisiting a piece of code I'd written a few months earlier. I'd think "Wait, this makes no sense. It shouldn't work at all. New approach X is much better." So I'd start refactoring it, and when I'm about 3 hours into the implementation of 'X', I begin to understand why I chose the original solution, and realize it remains the best approach. And so I nuke my changes.
I don't tend to let that happen so much, any more. Partly I try to better document why I make the design decisions I do, and partly I try to have a little more faith in myself, and partly I stick to the attitude of "Don't fix what you don't empirically know to be broken."
The point of my story is this: If someone can misunderstand their own design decisions after the fact (and talking to fellow programmers, I'm not the only one with this kind of experience), think how much easier it is to misunderstand someone else's.
Some of his points are valid. But his comment on the trash makes no sense to me: How is the Dock not a stable location for the Trash? One of the things I really like about OS/X is the location of the Trash -- it's always easy to drag something there, because it's always near at hand, even with the dock on auto-hide. Neither OS 9 nor Windows makes the trash so easy to get to. (You can put a shortcut to it in the quicklaunch bar in windows, but dropping items on the shortcut doesn't actually do what you want.)
Sure, a desktop location would be slightly more stable. But up until the advent of Expose, getting to my desktop was a pain in the neck, as I usually have several windows consuming most of the screen. I really wonder if Tog just isn't in the habit of running multiple apps at once.
Aside from that, Tog's tone is as smug and full of himself as ever ("I'm giving Apple some free advice, from someone whose advice is normally screamingly expensive"), he provides little solid empirical data to give his opinions any greater merit than, say, mine, and his dismissal of the significance of power users is short-sighted and asinine.
Of course, you have a choice as to which car to drive. You also have a choice as to where you want to live, so to say it is required to have a car means you haven't asked yourself the important questions: can I be employed in my field while living here? If not, should I change professions? If not should I move elsewhere where I can live on less and get a job in my field?
Moving to someplace where you don't need a car probably isn't going to save you any money, overall; The only places in the US where you can reasonably get away without owning a car are urban centers like NYC or Boston. And the high rents in those places will blow away any savings you achieve by getting rid of your car.
Apple wants everyone to have the latest iPhoto, especially considering the performance problems of earlier versions. (Though Steve didn't make any mention of improved performance, only improved capacity.)
I think he meant performance. It's not like iPhoto has some sort of hardwired limit on the number of photos it can manage. It's just that once you've got a lot of photos, it gets unusably slow. At 1800 photos, I find it almost useless. If it turns out that I can't get the new version for free, then I'll happily buy iLife just for the iPhoto update alone.
I have mixed feelings about this; I thought the original iPod was merely an "okay" idea. Not useful to me personally, and not deserving of the hype it was getting. I now have the 3rd gen 20 gig model, and have to acknowledge that it was and is an amazing product.
So I'm hesitant to strongly trash the mini iPod, just because I was wrong, before. I can sort of see where Apple is going with this -- most people either don't have huge CD collections, or don't see it as a big win to carry everything with them. Continuing to grow the HD sizes on the big iPods isn't going to make the things any more appealing these people. Shrinking it will, even though existing iPods are incredibly compact.
But there are two things I can't get away from:
First, it's a small step pricewise from the mini iPod to the 15 gig version, a far better deal, in my eyes. OTOH, it's not exactly a problem if one of your products' sales are being cannibalized by one of your more expensive products. If the mini iPod gets people who were previously considering a flash-based player to consider an iPod, and they end up with a 15 gig model, that's hardly a loss for Apple. Maybe Apple doesn't even plan to sell that many of these at $250. As the price of the guts comes down, they can price-drop these way down, and reuse much of the R&D they did for them when larger HD sizes are available in the appropriate form factor. And in the meantime, they're acting as a weird sort of advertisement for their big brothers.
But the thing that bugs me more is the simple thought that a $150 2 gigabyte model would have absolutely cleaned up in the marketplace. Overnight, sales of flash based players over $100 would have vanished.
Not that it's particularly important as the Earth is over-crowded anyway, but you do realize that if you replace 25 workers with 25 robots, that those 25 robots will likely require perhaps just 1 maintenance person, right ?
And where did those 25 robots come from? Did they just spring, fully-formed, from the maintenance person's head? Or were they maybe manufactured by some other company that employs tens of thousands of people?
(Yeah, yeah, I know that not all of those 10s of thousands of people are directly traceable to the 25 robots, but my point is that your accounting is far from complete.)
Hence, Fritz is disturbed when Kasparov changes its strategy and start playing a different kind of game. It cannot adapt.
This falls far short of demonstrating that no computer can adapt. Fritz wasn't built to make those sorts of adaptations on its own. Some future computer will be.
Incidentally, this same failure to recognize and adapt to shifts in an opponent's strategy can be observed in plenty of human players of various games and sports.
Slashdot Mirror
Computers may be deterministic, but the number of inputs may be so large that this is not always the most practical way to deal with them.
There are many more nondeterministic influences on a program than your list acknowledges. For example, if you access an uninitialized variable, the data you get back won't necessarily be consistent. And such a mistake can cause failures that are quite remote from the ultimate cause.
Good languages and compilers can help eliminate a lot of these sources of nondeterministic influence -- any decent compiler will warn you about accessing an uninitialized variable, and getting rid of pointers or at least putting them on a short leash can eliminate a whole class of programmer mistakes that can lead to apparently random failures.
We're talking about a version control system targeted at programmers. Why shouldn't he think like a programmer, in this context?
We're talking about compiling a version control system here, not a rendering engine. Extra speed from an optimized build would be nice, but it's nowhere near a must-have.
I'd love to see a credible source for your "slow as a scripting language" claim.
Uh, intrinsic 'utility' has nothing to do with the value of a wealth-display luxury good like jewelry.
If DeBeers introduces a system involving certificates of authenticity and strict tracking of the origins of a stone, the sort of women who really care about getting diamonds as gifts will likely also begin to care about getting the certificate that goes with it. The real point of a diamond as a gift is not the intrinsic value or utility of the stone, but rather as a demonstration of the giver's ability to blow a significant chunk of money on something that is fundamentally useless. Inexpensive synthetic stones won't provide the same demonstration, and thus may turn out pointless.
To put it tersely: Diamonds aren't expensive because they're useful; They're useful (as signifiers of wealth), because they're expensive.
Uh, the whole point of the article is that with these jamming devices being sold to private, unlicensed individuals, he can't be sure of that.
Sure. But why should any random Joe Blow get to decide what constitutes an inappropriate context?
Not gonna happen. The vast majority of the time, the economic penalty associated with being late is much greater than the economic penalty associated with being buggy.
Yeah, but that was just standard weasely boilerplate. The guy obviously intended for readers to come away with the idea that most or all Linux users are fanatical zealots.
Using flash isn't likely to save MS much money. The stuff runs quite a bit more expensive per gig than an HD. Look at how compact MP3 players, using some of the most expensive HDs on the market (in gigs per dollar) are able to compete on price with flash players with a fraction of the storage.
IMO, desire to limit hacking is probably the real reason.
That cuts both ways, too; I mostly job-hunt through friends and former coworkers because those guys can give me a much better picture of what I can expect from a company that I can get through HR materials and the interview process.
I got my very first job when I got out of school on my own, with no recommendation.
It was, in a word, awful.
Every one of the 3 jobs I've had since then was obtained with a recommendation from a former classmate or coworker who was at the company. These 3 jobs have varied in quality, but all 3 were far and away better than that first job.
Well, apparently the process allows you to get a lot more usable energy out of your hydrocarbons -- a 3x improvement in MPG is mentioned.
So while this certainly won't end the problems related to fossil fuel consumption, it has the potential to mitigate them quite a bit.
Spend some time working with a codebase where correct indention isn't generally respected, and you'll have much more appreciation for a language that would have enforced such a restriction on indention.
And Python's rules aren't particularly rigid -- they're no different than what you ought to be doing, anyways. And as a bonus, they let you save the occasional line of code that would have otherwise contained only a '}'.
Sigh. You miss the point entirely. Sure, it's sci-fi, so it makes no sense to judge some aspects of the show by a 'realism' metric. For example, pointing out that warp drive violates our current understanding of physics would be silly, because warp is one of the basic conceits that makes this science fiction.
But the fact that this is sci-fi doesn't mean that there are no aspects of the show that can't be judged by their realism. In the example at hand, the unrealism that the OP is complaining about has nothing to do with the SF conceits on which the show is founded: That commanders of naval vessels are risk averse and will not put the entire ship at significant risk to save a couple of crewmen is an observable fact of the world in which we live. The fact that Enterprise is a starship rather than a ship at sea has little or no bearing on how a captain would make a decision in this kind of situation.
And this really cuts to the core of what annoys me about most of the post-TNG Trek series: None of them ever really seem to subject the captains to any serious moral dilemmas -- or rather, they never acknowledge that many of these situations are serious moral dilemmas. Captains do stupid, irresponsible things that endanger many of the people under their command. And the shows let them get away with it, because it would just be too damned downbeat to actually show the captain making the hard decision to leave Crewman Bob behind because of the risk involved in rescuing him.
Re-read my comment, in particular this line: "I try to better document why I make the design decisions I do". That means, among other things, commenting.
I was already in the habit of commenting my code, and was plenty clueful on how it worked. But what I really needed to know, and what I usually focus on in my comments these days, is the why.
Incidentally, when someone relates a mistake they made and how they learned from it, it takes a special kind of ass to fixate on the mistake itself and use it as an opportunity to berate the person for their 'cluelessness'.
And often, you're mistaken when you think you have a better implementation.
Here's an experience I used to have somewhat often: I'd be revisiting a piece of code I'd written a few months earlier. I'd think "Wait, this makes no sense. It shouldn't work at all. New approach X is much better." So I'd start refactoring it, and when I'm about 3 hours into the implementation of 'X', I begin to understand why I chose the original solution, and realize it remains the best approach. And so I nuke my changes.
I don't tend to let that happen so much, any more. Partly I try to better document why I make the design decisions I do, and partly I try to have a little more faith in myself, and partly I stick to the attitude of "Don't fix what you don't empirically know to be broken."
The point of my story is this: If someone can misunderstand their own design decisions after the fact (and talking to fellow programmers, I'm not the only one with this kind of experience), think how much easier it is to misunderstand someone else's.
By this logic, Windows 3.1 had the best UI on the market, in its day.
Some of his points are valid. But his comment on the trash makes no sense to me: How is the Dock not a stable location for the Trash? One of the things I really like about OS/X is the location of the Trash -- it's always easy to drag something there, because it's always near at hand, even with the dock on auto-hide. Neither OS 9 nor Windows makes the trash so easy to get to. (You can put a shortcut to it in the quicklaunch bar in windows, but dropping items on the shortcut doesn't actually do what you want.)
Sure, a desktop location would be slightly more stable. But up until the advent of Expose, getting to my desktop was a pain in the neck, as I usually have several windows consuming most of the screen. I really wonder if Tog just isn't in the habit of running multiple apps at once.
Aside from that, Tog's tone is as smug and full of himself as ever ("I'm giving Apple some free advice, from someone whose advice is normally screamingly expensive"), he provides little solid empirical data to give his opinions any greater merit than, say, mine, and his dismissal of the significance of power users is short-sighted and asinine.
Moving to someplace where you don't need a car probably isn't going to save you any money, overall; The only places in the US where you can reasonably get away without owning a car are urban centers like NYC or Boston. And the high rents in those places will blow away any savings you achieve by getting rid of your car.
I think he meant performance. It's not like iPhoto has some sort of hardwired limit on the number of photos it can manage. It's just that once you've got a lot of photos, it gets unusably slow. At 1800 photos, I find it almost useless. If it turns out that I can't get the new version for free, then I'll happily buy iLife just for the iPhoto update alone.
I have mixed feelings about this; I thought the original iPod was merely an "okay" idea. Not useful to me personally, and not deserving of the hype it was getting. I now have the 3rd gen 20 gig model, and have to acknowledge that it was and is an amazing product.
So I'm hesitant to strongly trash the mini iPod, just because I was wrong, before. I can sort of see where Apple is going with this -- most people either don't have huge CD collections, or don't see it as a big win to carry everything with them. Continuing to grow the HD sizes on the big iPods isn't going to make the things any more appealing these people. Shrinking it will, even though existing iPods are incredibly compact.
But there are two things I can't get away from:
First, it's a small step pricewise from the mini iPod to the 15 gig version, a far better deal, in my eyes. OTOH, it's not exactly a problem if one of your products' sales are being cannibalized by one of your more expensive products. If the mini iPod gets people who were previously considering a flash-based player to consider an iPod, and they end up with a 15 gig model, that's hardly a loss for Apple. Maybe Apple doesn't even plan to sell that many of these at $250. As the price of the guts comes down, they can price-drop these way down, and reuse much of the R&D they did for them when larger HD sizes are available in the appropriate form factor. And in the meantime, they're acting as a weird sort of advertisement for their big brothers.
But the thing that bugs me more is the simple thought that a $150 2 gigabyte model would have absolutely cleaned up in the marketplace. Overnight, sales of flash based players over $100 would have vanished.
I can think of a way: "Longhorn isn't done until iTunes won't run!"
And where did those 25 robots come from? Did they just spring, fully-formed, from the maintenance person's head? Or were they maybe manufactured by some other company that employs tens of thousands of people?
(Yeah, yeah, I know that not all of those 10s of thousands of people are directly traceable to the 25 robots, but my point is that your accounting is far from complete.)
Uh, maybe it still was. If they do this enough, sooner or later an article like this one gets published...
Geez, man, don't go giving them ideas like that...
This falls far short of demonstrating that no computer can adapt. Fritz wasn't built to make those sorts of adaptations on its own. Some future computer will be.
Incidentally, this same failure to recognize and adapt to shifts in an opponent's strategy can be observed in plenty of human players of various games and sports.