> The sample code will copy a and b twice, once to put them in the lambda closure, and then to pass them as arguments to do_something. Some may consider this wasteful (the easiest fix is to modify do_something to take the values as const references).
No, the easiest fix is for a & b to be moveable types, which they may well be, in which case one of those copies becomes a move, and all is right in the universe.
> So we all program in different dialects, and then scratch our heads when we read other peoples' code.
The practice of programming in dialects is more a function of the origins of the language than the size of the language. Stroustrup's most recent book does a marvelous job of demonstrating how little you have to know to program in C++ effectively: http://www.stroustrup.com/prog...
C++'s C compatibility is both its strength and its weakness, and the weakness primarily comes from people treating it as a bunch of add ons to C. If you scrap that attitude, it is entirely possible to be proficient in the language after a year of use and capable of reading most anyone's code (assuming they aren't shooting for obscurity) in another year or two. That's longer than some simpler languages, but it is hardly sufficient to excuse people's ignorance.
Regarding repeatability: the language is fully deterministic, and compilers have as much of an incentive to be consistent as they do otherwise. If you can't get repeatable builds, then the problem is with your build environment/process more than anything else. Aside from hardware entropy sources, computers are, by design, deterministic, so if you can't reproduce a build it is because you haven't constructed a proper build closure. Certainly there is nothing about C++ that makes builds any more non-deterministic than say, C. Debian actually has a project for this: https://wiki.debian.org/Reprod..., and you may find some helpful information there. You'll notice nothing they've run in to is specific to C++.
Regarding code-to-binary structural coverage analysis. Certainly I can imagine the argument that as you get to higher and higher levels of abstraction, it becomes harder for humans to track all the transformations all the way through to assembly. One solution is to restrict the levels of abstraction you work with. I would argue that is still error prone and you are better off with using theorem prover type automated solutions (and in general, languages built around provability like ML or Coq) rather than manual verification. Even better would be to perform the verification on the compiler itself rather than the code it compiles. That said, C++ compilers do a pretty good job of tracking the origin of each bit of code they generate, which ought to make it easy to have the machine inform you of the origin of any particular code block, and C++ also does a great job of letting the programmer decide what level of abstraction they want to work with and only making the runtime pay for the abstractions they are using. Its stronger type safety also helps ensure that there aren't "hidden" code paths do to programmer error. Of course, optimizers really complicate this, so you may need to turn them off as you mentioned.
Internationalization. That sounds like an old project... one that predates the C++ standard (which means a lot of bad C habits are involved). C++ is actually very well set up for internationalization, particularly because it is so agnostic about how stings are handled. Languages like Python, Perl & surprisingly Ruby have made all kinds of unfortunate decisions around internationalization that make it look like you are fine with internationalization, but it actually blows up in your face. As an example, ICU is probably one of the foremost libraries out there, and its primary language targets are C++ & Java. The C++ target has the virtue that you can pretty much just drop in ICU strings in to a well structured C++ program and all is well in the world, where as the Java one is a bit of a pain to take advantage of (fortunately, Oracle periodically syncs the ICU code in with the JDK, but that means you have to wait for a JDK update to get the latest ICU solution).
I seem to recall that a number of airlines were now using the "Flying V", which actually does address all these problems in a manner that works. The idea is that you assign a "V" of seats (i.e. deepest row is near the isle, nearer rows are closer to the window until you run out of columns). It has been shown to be *much* faster than other methods, although obviously the whole thing breaks down if people don't board in the specified order.
It looks to me like the '97 patent actually might have some merit. The continuations area pain/annoyance, but it seems like either way, this guy might be owed some money.
The one thing that annoys me about this is I remember seeing promotional videos for PCS when the technology first came out (prior to '97) which suggested that some day basically everything covered in this patent would happen. At some point we just need to recognize that some things are just an inevitable result of progress, rather than innovations in their own light?
Overture bought FAST's search arm before Yahoo in turn bought Overture.
Now they grew a new arm, and are selling that one to Microsoft?
No. Overture bought FAST's *web search* arm. They didn't buy the enterprise search stuff, which was actually FAST's more profitable business, and the only part that could run on Windows. Microsoft bought the enterprise search division, which makes a heck of a lot of sense to integrate in to SharePoint (and integrating web search in to SharePoint would just be stupid).
For this scenario to play out, you'd have to click on "share" an article from these feeds. Free advice: if you are worried about privacy, don't click on things that say "share". If you do, you might want to unclick them quickly.
Dude, it is only sharing articles that you clicked on the "share" icon for, and only with your contacts. If you never click on the share icon, nobody sees anything.
This isn't one of those international conglomerate conspiracy theories.
I'm sorry, but I'm with Google on this one. I was using Reader for a while after it was activated before I noticed it. It shares exactly what I expect with exactly who I expect. I've been using it for about a week now and I haven't felt like there was any violation of privacy.
> As for $300 hammers, someone connected to the California school system, or married to someone who is, should SHUT THE FUCK UP when is comes to criticizing government waste.
Dude, that is so out of line it isn't even funny. First of all, "someone connected to the California school system" is a pretty broad brush. I'm going to presume you weren't including parents and students in with that, and probably not volunteers. Still you're talking about literally hundreds, if not thousands, of school districts (LAUSD just happens to be by far the largest), each of which is administered and run fairly independently of the others. You're throwing in the kindergardens in with the university system, etc. Secondly, most of the people who are part of the system are actually victims of the waste rather than causes of it. I know plenty of teachers who spend their own money (how beautifully inefficient is that eh? spending after tax money on something that should be an expense, but not being able to expense it) buying supplies for their classroom in order to compensate for inadequate supplies (all the while staring at a $2000 computer in their classroom that collects dust because a contractor hasn't show up yet to hook it up). They deal with "lockdowns" that occur once a month because someone in the neighbourhood (often one of the students) exchanges gunfire, and of course they feel horribly unsafe when that happens because most of the security money is spent on metal detectors, which provide little to no protection once a gunfight has actually broken out. They deal with students whose attendance can best be described as "erratic", often because they move from neighbourhood to neighbourhood (or even state to state or country to country) multiple times over the course of the year. On top of that they get to deal with parents who are completely uninvolved in their kids schooling, all the while they are expected to produce results. Those parents that do show up may very well not speak english and in fact may speak any of over 100 languages as their native tongue (and I'm not even talking about the ones that can't read or write, because that is a comparatively minor impediment for a teacher to overcome) and their kids may be similarly disadvantaged.
It's fun to sit back and take pot shots from the sidelines without actually getting involved, but if you get down in the trenches and learn what is actually going on, you'll find the problem is very complex and way more fucked up than you can possibly imagine. No question there is waste, but part of the frustrating aspect of the situation is most of the people involved in the system can do little to correct it.
The irony, is that the article really just reads like the typical article you read about ERP deployments at any business. The only thing that makes it especially tragic is that it it involves the school system. It is *normal* with ERP deployments to have the whole thing be massively over budget, massively behind schedule, have the bidding process be entirely corrupted (heck, it is hard for it not to be, as it is terribly difficult to get direct access to the innards of the systems), and for the whole thing to be strung around a consulting company's neck (typically they deserve half the blame, but far from all), and they're willing to take it because they are laughing all the way to the bank as they bill their way through the fiasco.
If you think this whole mess wouldn't have happened without California's education system being involved, you are profoundly ill informed.
> This dumb-ass girl took a shirt with a bomb-looking device attached to it to a place where you are not allowed to say the word "Bomb"
Umm.. did you look at the picture of it? That doesn't look like a bomb. It's a bread board with some wires in it. You know what looks more like a bomb? A cell phone. Fortnately they didn't arrest everyone who had one of those!
Hiring more people != Hiring more people to work in the US.
Sigh... Running out of H1B's doesn't mean Google can't hire any more people. It just means they can't hire any more people from outside the US to work inside the US. You may have noticed Google's non-US offices are growing rather dramatically.... Every one of those folks *not* brought to the US is lost income taxes for the US, not to mention the benefits of having those folks spending some of their earnings in the US (gee, what's the net effect of having someone do the same job in their home country instead of coming to the US to do the job... you think it is a employment gain?!), not to mention this putting Google further and further outside the reach of US labor laws, and of course this also reduces the interest in the best and the brightest coming to the US.
It's a brilliant plan. Keep up the good work guys. We don't want any more of those really smart people coming to work here in the US. It might make it harder for some lazy idiot to get a job.
His problem though is that those were internal forecasts, and since they weren't public they could always have been adjusted after the fact to make it sound better than it was.
The submission implies that a relatively modest increase in sales on the heels of the first new OS release in 6 years means that everything is fantastic over at Redmond.
I think you are reading too much in to one word: thriving. If you look at the context of the post, it was only referring to business performance in this past quarter. They had a good quarter.
I don't particularly care about MS, but lack of logic skills in reporting bugs me. The headline of the submission "Vista Sales Strong, Higher Than Expected" is simply not supported by the only externally available evidence ("Profits jumped 65% from the previous year") because Vista DIDN'T EXIST last year..
There aren't a lot of external projections about Vista sales. However, there were projections about overall Microsoft revenue, and they beat those estimates by >$500 million. Maybe there is some other explanation for that beat, but you'd think Microsoft wouldn't try to suppress whatever revenue source is kicking butt.
You may poo-poo a 65% jump in profits because of a new OS being out, but you should recognize that Microsoft gets a huge profit even if nothing new comes in, because they may a sizable chunk of change on each PC that is sold. New OS's actually can cut in to that if they don't sell well, because support costs go up during a launch. Generally Microsoft doesn't charge more for the new OS than they did for the old one a year ago, so the only way for profits to increase substancially is a) a lot more computers are sold or b) a lot of people pay for an upgrade. They added ~$2 billion in profit. That's nothing to sneeze at.
And then one of the lower guys on the totem pole will climb to the top in china. Either an engine with a lower market share, such as Ask/AltaVista/etc will step up, or perhaps google.cn will just magically DNS resolve to a state-run search engine.
Hehe. For the record AltaVista *is* Yahoo.
I love how we think in such western terms. In terms of search engines, the largest market share is *already* a Chinese company. With auctions, it's also a Chinese company (although one that Yahoo now owns a non-controlling interest in). They got a billion people over there. Some of them can do a pretty good job building an Internet company. Companies from outside China don't need to worry so much about competition from the usual competitors, they need to worry about domestic competition. That competition isn't going to have the kind of leverage to sign up for a pledge.
Ah yes, another one of those people who is unaware of Yahoo's Search page (if you really need a.com domain name to get to it there is always AlltheWeb) or My Yahoo. How ironic that Yahoo should suffer from, of all things, lousy marketing.
Slashdot Mirror
> The sample code will copy a and b twice, once to put them in the lambda closure, and then to pass them as arguments to do_something. Some may consider this wasteful (the easiest fix is to modify do_something to take the values as const references).
No, the easiest fix is for a & b to be moveable types, which they may well be, in which case one of those copies becomes a move, and all is right in the universe.
> So we all program in different dialects, and then scratch our heads when we read other peoples' code.
The practice of programming in dialects is more a function of the origins of the language than the size of the language. Stroustrup's most recent book does a marvelous job of demonstrating how little you have to know to program in C++ effectively: http://www.stroustrup.com/prog...
C++'s C compatibility is both its strength and its weakness, and the weakness primarily comes from people treating it as a bunch of add ons to C. If you scrap that attitude, it is entirely possible to be proficient in the language after a year of use and capable of reading most anyone's code (assuming they aren't shooting for obscurity) in another year or two. That's longer than some simpler languages, but it is hardly sufficient to excuse people's ignorance.
Perhaps not the best example of a successful software project. ;-)
Regarding repeatability: the language is fully deterministic, and compilers have as much of an incentive to be consistent as they do otherwise. If you can't get repeatable builds, then the problem is with your build environment/process more than anything else. Aside from hardware entropy sources, computers are, by design, deterministic, so if you can't reproduce a build it is because you haven't constructed a proper build closure. Certainly there is nothing about C++ that makes builds any more non-deterministic than say, C. Debian actually has a project for this: https://wiki.debian.org/Reprod..., and you may find some helpful information there. You'll notice nothing they've run in to is specific to C++.
Regarding code-to-binary structural coverage analysis. Certainly I can imagine the argument that as you get to higher and higher levels of abstraction, it becomes harder for humans to track all the transformations all the way through to assembly. One solution is to restrict the levels of abstraction you work with. I would argue that is still error prone and you are better off with using theorem prover type automated solutions (and in general, languages built around provability like ML or Coq) rather than manual verification. Even better would be to perform the verification on the compiler itself rather than the code it compiles. That said, C++ compilers do a pretty good job of tracking the origin of each bit of code they generate, which ought to make it easy to have the machine inform you of the origin of any particular code block, and C++ also does a great job of letting the programmer decide what level of abstraction they want to work with and only making the runtime pay for the abstractions they are using. Its stronger type safety also helps ensure that there aren't "hidden" code paths do to programmer error. Of course, optimizers really complicate this, so you may need to turn them off as you mentioned.
Internationalization. That sounds like an old project... one that predates the C++ standard (which means a lot of bad C habits are involved). C++ is actually very well set up for internationalization, particularly because it is so agnostic about how stings are handled. Languages like Python, Perl & surprisingly Ruby have made all kinds of unfortunate decisions around internationalization that make it look like you are fine with internationalization, but it actually blows up in your face. As an example, ICU is probably one of the foremost libraries out there, and its primary language targets are C++ & Java. The C++ target has the virtue that you can pretty much just drop in ICU strings in to a well structured C++ program and all is well in the world, where as the Java one is a bit of a pain to take advantage of (fortunately, Oracle periodically syncs the ICU code in with the JDK, but that means you have to wait for a JDK update to get the latest ICU solution).
Supposedly it is reasonably priced, but I couldn't find any information on price anywhere.
I did a fairly detailed analysis of an instantiation of typical Javascript malware these days.
I seem to recall that a number of airlines were now using the "Flying V", which actually does address all these problems in a manner that works. The idea is that you assign a "V" of seats (i.e. deepest row is near the isle, nearer rows are closer to the window until you run out of columns). It has been shown to be *much* faster than other methods, although obviously the whole thing breaks down if people don't board in the specified order.
It looks to me like the '97 patent actually might have some merit. The continuations area pain/annoyance, but it seems like either way, this guy might be owed some money.
The one thing that annoys me about this is I remember seeing promotional videos for PCS when the technology first came out (prior to '97) which suggested that some day basically everything covered in this patent would happen. At some point we just need to recognize that some things are just an inevitable result of progress, rather than innovations in their own light?
University of Waterloo, right?
Dan Kegel of C10K fame has an excellent web page on this topic.
No. Overture bought FAST's *web search* arm. They didn't buy the enterprise search stuff, which was actually FAST's more profitable business, and the only part that could run on Windows. Microsoft bought the enterprise search division, which makes a heck of a lot of sense to integrate in to SharePoint (and integrating web search in to SharePoint would just be stupid).
For this scenario to play out, you'd have to click on "share" an article from these feeds. Free advice: if you are worried about privacy, don't click on things that say "share". If you do, you might want to unclick them quickly.
Dude, it is only sharing articles that you clicked on the "share" icon for, and only with your contacts. If you never click on the share icon, nobody sees anything.
This isn't one of those international conglomerate conspiracy theories.
I'm sorry, but I'm with Google on this one. I was using Reader for a while after it was activated before I noticed it. It shares exactly what I expect with exactly who I expect. I've been using it for about a week now and I haven't felt like there was any violation of privacy.
> As for $300 hammers, someone connected to the California school system, or married to someone who is, should SHUT THE FUCK UP when is comes to criticizing government waste.
Dude, that is so out of line it isn't even funny. First of all, "someone connected to the California school system" is a pretty broad brush. I'm going to presume you weren't including parents and students in with that, and probably not volunteers. Still you're talking about literally hundreds, if not thousands, of school districts (LAUSD just happens to be by far the largest), each of which is administered and run fairly independently of the others. You're throwing in the kindergardens in with the university system, etc. Secondly, most of the people who are part of the system are actually victims of the waste rather than causes of it. I know plenty of teachers who spend their own money (how beautifully inefficient is that eh? spending after tax money on something that should be an expense, but not being able to expense it) buying supplies for their classroom in order to compensate for inadequate supplies (all the while staring at a $2000 computer in their classroom that collects dust because a contractor hasn't show up yet to hook it up). They deal with "lockdowns" that occur once a month because someone in the neighbourhood (often one of the students) exchanges gunfire, and of course they feel horribly unsafe when that happens because most of the security money is spent on metal detectors, which provide little to no protection once a gunfight has actually broken out. They deal with students whose attendance can best be described as "erratic", often because they move from neighbourhood to neighbourhood (or even state to state or country to country) multiple times over the course of the year. On top of that they get to deal with parents who are completely uninvolved in their kids schooling, all the while they are expected to produce results. Those parents that do show up may very well not speak english and in fact may speak any of over 100 languages as their native tongue (and I'm not even talking about the ones that can't read or write, because that is a comparatively minor impediment for a teacher to overcome) and their kids may be similarly disadvantaged.
It's fun to sit back and take pot shots from the sidelines without actually getting involved, but if you get down in the trenches and learn what is actually going on, you'll find the problem is very complex and way more fucked up than you can possibly imagine. No question there is waste, but part of the frustrating aspect of the situation is most of the people involved in the system can do little to correct it.
The irony, is that the article really just reads like the typical article you read about ERP deployments at any business. The only thing that makes it especially tragic is that it it involves the school system. It is *normal* with ERP deployments to have the whole thing be massively over budget, massively behind schedule, have the bidding process be entirely corrupted (heck, it is hard for it not to be, as it is terribly difficult to get direct access to the innards of the systems), and for the whole thing to be strung around a consulting company's neck (typically they deserve half the blame, but far from all), and they're willing to take it because they are laughing all the way to the bank as they bill their way through the fiasco.
If you think this whole mess wouldn't have happened without California's education system being involved, you are profoundly ill informed.
Honestly, I'd recommend Yahoo Maps. I like their API's the best, and the whole YDN network provides lots of bits for getting the job done.
With the tax write-off, the prices are nearly the same, and at first glance at least, the XO seems to have a nicer feature set.
> This dumb-ass girl took a shirt with a bomb-looking device attached to it to a place where you are not allowed to say the word "Bomb"
Umm.. did you look at the picture of it? That doesn't look like a bomb. It's a bread board with some wires in it. You know what looks more like a bomb? A cell phone. Fortnately they didn't arrest everyone who had one of those!
Hiring more people != Hiring more people to work in the US.
Sigh... Running out of H1B's doesn't mean Google can't hire any more people. It just means they can't hire any more people from outside the US to work inside the US. You may have noticed Google's non-US offices are growing rather dramatically.... Every one of those folks *not* brought to the US is lost income taxes for the US, not to mention the benefits of having those folks spending some of their earnings in the US (gee, what's the net effect of having someone do the same job in their home country instead of coming to the US to do the job... you think it is a employment gain?!), not to mention this putting Google further and further outside the reach of US labor laws, and of course this also reduces the interest in the best and the brightest coming to the US.
It's a brilliant plan. Keep up the good work guys. We don't want any more of those really smart people coming to work here in the US. It might make it harder for some lazy idiot to get a job.
Somebody mod parent up. Then mod me up for mentioning that the basis for all of this is covered in Chapter 3 of Mr. Fowler's Analysis Patterns.
His problem though is that those were internal forecasts, and since they weren't public they could always have been adjusted after the fact to make it sound better than it was.
The submission implies that a relatively modest increase in sales on the heels of the first new OS release in 6 years means that everything is fantastic over at Redmond.
I think you are reading too much in to one word: thriving. If you look at the context of the post, it was only referring to business performance in this past quarter. They had a good quarter.
I don't particularly care about MS, but lack of logic skills in reporting bugs me. The headline of the submission "Vista Sales Strong, Higher Than Expected" is simply not supported by the only externally available evidence ("Profits jumped 65% from the previous year") because Vista DIDN'T EXIST last year..
There aren't a lot of external projections about Vista sales. However, there were projections about overall Microsoft revenue, and they beat those estimates by >$500 million. Maybe there is some other explanation for that beat, but you'd think Microsoft wouldn't try to suppress whatever revenue source is kicking butt.
You may poo-poo a 65% jump in profits because of a new OS being out, but you should recognize that Microsoft gets a huge profit even if nothing new comes in, because they may a sizable chunk of change on each PC that is sold. New OS's actually can cut in to that if they don't sell well, because support costs go up during a launch. Generally Microsoft doesn't charge more for the new OS than they did for the old one a year ago, so the only way for profits to increase substancially is a) a lot more computers are sold or b) a lot of people pay for an upgrade. They added ~$2 billion in profit. That's nothing to sneeze at.
Actually, hasn't Intel had integrated L2 cache since the Pentium Pro?
Hehe. For the record AltaVista *is* Yahoo.
I love how we think in such western terms. In terms of search engines, the largest market share is *already* a Chinese company. With auctions, it's also a Chinese company (although one that Yahoo now owns a non-controlling interest in). They got a billion people over there. Some of them can do a pretty good job building an Internet company. Companies from outside China don't need to worry so much about competition from the usual competitors, they need to worry about domestic competition. That competition isn't going to have the kind of leverage to sign up for a pledge.
Ah yes, another one of those people who is unaware of Yahoo's Search page (if you really need a .com domain name to get to it there is always AlltheWeb) or My Yahoo. How ironic that Yahoo should suffer from, of all things, lousy marketing.