Testing for what is supposed to be impossible is not invalid.
Imagine that if() was inside a macro, but the code before it wasn't. The macro is fully OK to test for a null reference even if in the context that it is employed (in specific cases) that it should never recieve one. Thats one of the reasons why optimizing compilers are important.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you people are making it out to be.
For the most part, programmers DO WANT this kind of optimization, which is why they use an optimizing compiler. Things like dead-code elimination, constant propogation, and whole program optimizations are important to programmers.
If you don't want this stuff done, you don't reach for an optimizing compiler and then enable those optimizations. Its their purpose. If (something we know at compile time) should *always* be eliminated in a decent optimizing compiler.
Now, should GCC make assumptions in this specific case about the state of the pointer? Probably not. This isnt actualy a case of "something we know at compile time" so its a bug in the optimizer.
An online multiplayer RPG without most of the MMO horseshit. You can group up, play solo, or mix the two up.
In this game, the fun is the journey more than the destination. There are always monsters along the way that your character will have trouble with, regardless of your "build."
So what? You're trying to tell me that you know more about it than a bunch of guys who were there at the time, who worked for Microsoft, and who commited their opinions on the subject to writing. And I'm the one refusing to address the point? Really?
It doesnt matter what these guys say, or even did.
Netscape died specifically because the developers commited project suicide.
Period.
You can change the subject again and again, but it doesnt change that fact. Let me repeat this for you. Netscape died because the developers decided to take several years to rewrite the whole thing, and in that time they lost the feature war against Internet Explorer and other browsers, and the long delayed final product turned out to be a piece of buggy crap.
Less features, crashed all the time, yeah.. that was going to win the market over with its superiority...
Yes, I WAS THERE. We old timers watched the whole thing go down. Netscape commited SUICIDE. AOL, the owners of Netscape, was so disappointed with it that they sued microsoft for a distribution rights deal to Internet Explorer. AOL then began shipping Internet Explorer.. thats right.. the owners of Netscape shipped Internet Explorer to its customers.
You can change the subject all you want, but these are the facts of the matter. Netscape turned into a big sucky piece of shit, and thats why it lost. Period. There is no debate on the matter. Thats exactly what happened. You can try to rewrite history all you want that Microsoft somehow forced Netscape out of the market, but the truth is, and let me state this ONE MORE TIME for you since you clearly dont get it... NETSCAPE COMMITED SUICIDE.
Would you please care to address the point, or is your entire world view based on changing the subject?
You can blah blah all you want about how standards makes this or that better, but the fact remains that users dont give a fuck.
Internet Explorer is still bundled with windows, correct?
Why is it that Firefox is #1 in many countries?
Why is it that Opera is #1 in many countries?
So on one hand we have a new entry into the market which is beating up on Internet Explorer.
On the other hand we have one of the first Windows browsers *still* beating up on Internet Explorer.
...yet Internet Explorer is bundled with windows...
What is obvious is that the success if Internet Explorer had nothing to do with bundling but instead had to do with something else. The facts speak for themselves. Its not stopping competiton now. It didn't stop competition in the past. The only product which is claimed to have been hurt is Netscape, yet that product actualy commited suicide.
You are worried about standard, not features. Do you honestly think that Joe User cared about CSS and XHTML support in 2001? or 2003?
You are trying to claim that features unimportant to the user made the browser competitive. Thats not how markets work.
Funny how the Mozilla fans seem to think that the bundling of IE ruined it for them, while Opera didnt have any such problem with the very same situation. Opera has been, and is *still* the #1 browser in many countries, in spite of IE being bundled with Windows.
You are re-writing history, and I'm not afraid to say that you dont get to do that. The facts are clear. Netscape couldn't compete because it sucked. The users voted with their feet, and even its *owner* voted with its feet.
What about them?
I pointed out that even the owners of Netscape, AOL, wanted something better.. if you didnt know, Netscape 6 and 7 were both based on the Mozilla suite.
It all begins with Netscape fucking up and doing a full 100% rewrite, putting them almost a decade behind.
I didnt rewrite history. I stated the pertinent stuff. You are trying to rewrite history if you are claiming that Mozilla had a good competitive browser before FireFox 1.5. Are you claiming that?
MS's announcement that they are excluding IE in Windows 7 was a preemptive strike by MS in the hopes the EU would not order a more effective remedy,
What could possibly be more effective than the removal of IE from the OS?
Isn't the complaint that IE is included in the OS, and that this is the problem?
There is NOTHING more effective than that. I'm sorry but the whole "include other browsers" thing is pretty laughable. It isnt a remedy for anything.. it is instead a bunch of bullshit pretending to be a remedy.
Sure.. the end users in the E.U. are of course NOT going to be choosing a browserless OS.. because they want a fucking browser! The tragedy here is that the company is being fucked with precisely because it is giving the customers what they want, as if that is some sort of crime.
In other news, Google announces a Browser with an OS bundled.
If you don't see the problem, then you are blind. What is the last 10 years ?
Well lets see now. You want me to start in 1998? Ok, thats the year that Netscape created the Mozilla foundation.
FireFox wasnt released until late 2004. Thats 6 years of nothing from the competition.
Now, what was the point you were trying to make again?
There is the real history, and then there is the imaginary history you zealots seem to have invented.
Netscape failed because its developers fucked up and took several years to do a full 100% rewrite. This turned out so badly (duh!) that Netscape then created Mozilla. Move forward another 6 years and FireFox is at version 1.0 and still isnt objectively better than Internet Explorer 6 yet.
Even AOL, which had purchased the latest and greatest Netscape, negotiated for Internet Explorer licensing rights in a settlement with Microsoft. Thats how fucking bad the competition was. Even Netscape's owners wanted an alternative.
Cart before the horse. I can't saturate it because nobody is making drives that can.
I claim that it is no coincedence that SSD's, once performance became a comodity (thank you MTRON), quickly shot up from ~16MB/sec and leveled off at 200+MB/sec sequential read speeds. In this time there was no substantial technological breakthrough that made this possible, and we dont need one to go faster. What we need is a faster pipe.
As evidence of this fact, I will draw your attention to the future. Once SATA600 is standard on more that a few motherboards, one of the major SSD manufacturers will put out a drive that does 500+MB/sec, and the others will quickly follow.
What manufacturer is going to make SATA SSD's that can saturate the fastest SATA port?
Sounds to me like a bad idea. Surely there are some tradeoffs between speed and some other also important metric. Ex, faster might mean larger erase block sizes.
It is likely that Intel could have made their product much faster, but without any benefit at all to doing so, they wouldn't.
This new SATA, while important, it sort of too-little-too-late. We need a much higher ceiling, and we need it yesterday.
I go over to the psychologist, and he says, "Emo, what does this inkblot look like to you?" I said, "Oh, it's kind of embarrassing." He said, "Emo, everyone sees something, so don't be embarrassed. Tell me what the inkblot looks like to you." I said, "Well, to me it looks like standard pattern #3 in the Rorschach series to test obsessive compulsiveness." And he gets kind of depressed. I said, "Okay, it's a butterfly." And he cheers up. He said, "What does this inkblot look like?" I said, "It looks like a horrible ugly blob of pure evil that sucks the souls of man into a vortex of sin and degradation." He said, "No, um, the inkblot's over there. That's a photo of my wife you're looking at." "Oh," I said, "was I far off?" He said, "No. That's the sad part."
NEVER EVER LEARN ABOUT ANY SORTING ALGORITHMS, EVER!, BECAUSE BLAKEY RAT IN A DESPERATE ATTEMPT TO DEFEND HIS OWN IGNORANCE, CLAIMS TO KNOW WHAT THE VAST MAJORITY OF PROJECTS NEED.
How would you know, since you dont know shit about sort algorithms? Thats the entire fucking point right there. You don't know until you know. You took someone elses word for it.
There's no way you can beat the built-in Sort() in enough cases to make that worthwhile.
You are making a terrible assuption here. Your assumption is that all cases are similar to the one that the built-in Sort() tackles (sort key + data), and even that a sort is the best solution.
We (good programmers) learn about various algorithms in order to make intelligent choices about what solution is best, sometimes inventing new and novel ones while at other times implementing ones already known (but not necessarily built-in)
If you choose to be completely ignorant, yours second best move is to always use built-in solutions as best you can...
..your best move is to stop being ignorant.
Regardless of the move you make, don't suggest that its OK for others be as ignorant as you are.
Picking the lowest priced object on the shelf at Best Buy, which happens to have had a big advertising campaign attached, is not how you find a good deal. Those advertised "deals" are how you find shitty things.
We really havent been keeping good track of all storms until the start of commercial aviation, which is post World War I at the earliest.
Prior to that, commercial shipping kept piece-meal track, but not very accurate track because only suicidal captains will sail into the middle of a storm (even today!) Of those that do, not all of them live to tell the tail.
If you look at historic hurricane data, you will see that there is a huge increase in historic tracks ramping up between 1920 and 1940, and this represents the very phenomena I am speaking about. Then between 1970 and 1990 there is another similar ramp up in detections as weather satelites started being used. At best we have about 70 years of relatively decent data, and only about 25 or so years of actual "good" data with no observational bias relative to our current abilities.
Now, if you look at the data you will see that even over the entire atlantic the number of yearly hurricane-class storms is a small number with a high variance.
Given that we have about 25 years at best of good data, I would dare claim that unless we spend a lot more time just looking, that it will indeed be impossible to say with any certainty anything about the effectiveness of something like this.
To convert from an upper case letter to a lower case letter in ascii, you simply add 32 decimal (0x20 in C-hex-speak, 20h in ASM-hex-speak, or 0010 0000 in binary.)
Since this is a power-of-two, it becomes painfully obvious that "0101 0101" and "1010 0101" are not the upper and lower cases of the same letter, and further..
... "1010 0101" has its high bit set, so it cannot be any alpha-numeric character at all, which is also painfully obvious to any nerd.
..and finally... all nerds worldwide have an ascii chart, complete with hex and binary representation, taped up behind their monitor on their parents basement wall.
Slashdot Mirror
Testing for what is supposed to be impossible is not invalid.
Imagine that if() was inside a macro, but the code before it wasn't. The macro is fully OK to test for a null reference even if in the context that it is employed (in specific cases) that it should never recieve one. Thats one of the reasons why optimizing compilers are important.
The code is valid. Crappy? Yes.. Invalid? No.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you people are making it out to be.
For the most part, programmers DO WANT this kind of optimization, which is why they use an optimizing compiler. Things like dead-code elimination, constant propogation, and whole program optimizations are important to programmers.
If you don't want this stuff done, you don't reach for an optimizing compiler and then enable those optimizations. Its their purpose. If (something we know at compile time) should *always* be eliminated in a decent optimizing compiler.
Now, should GCC make assumptions in this specific case about the state of the pointer? Probably not. This isnt actualy a case of "something we know at compile time" so its a bug in the optimizer.
Diablo II.
An online multiplayer RPG without most of the MMO horseshit. You can group up, play solo, or mix the two up.
In this game, the fun is the journey more than the destination. There are always monsters along the way that your character will have trouble with, regardless of your "build."
So what? You're trying to tell me that you know more about it than a bunch of guys who were there at the time, who worked for Microsoft, and who commited their opinions on the subject to writing. And I'm the one refusing to address the point? Really?
It doesnt matter what these guys say, or even did.
Netscape died specifically because the developers commited project suicide.
Period.
You can change the subject again and again, but it doesnt change that fact. Let me repeat this for you. Netscape died because the developers decided to take several years to rewrite the whole thing, and in that time they lost the feature war against Internet Explorer and other browsers, and the long delayed final product turned out to be a piece of buggy crap.
Less features, crashed all the time, yeah.. that was going to win the market over with its superiority...
Yes, I WAS THERE. We old timers watched the whole thing go down. Netscape commited SUICIDE. AOL, the owners of Netscape, was so disappointed with it that they sued microsoft for a distribution rights deal to Internet Explorer. AOL then began shipping Internet Explorer.. thats right.. the owners of Netscape shipped Internet Explorer to its customers.
You can change the subject all you want, but these are the facts of the matter. Netscape turned into a big sucky piece of shit, and thats why it lost. Period. There is no debate on the matter. Thats exactly what happened. You can try to rewrite history all you want that Microsoft somehow forced Netscape out of the market, but the truth is, and let me state this ONE MORE TIME for you since you clearly dont get it... NETSCAPE COMMITED SUICIDE.
Blah blah blah.
...yet Internet Explorer is bundled with windows...
Would you please care to address the point, or is your entire world view based on changing the subject?
You can blah blah all you want about how standards makes this or that better, but the fact remains that users dont give a fuck.
Internet Explorer is still bundled with windows, correct?
Why is it that Firefox is #1 in many countries?
Why is it that Opera is #1 in many countries?
So on one hand we have a new entry into the market which is beating up on Internet Explorer. On the other hand we have one of the first Windows browsers *still* beating up on Internet Explorer.
What is obvious is that the success if Internet Explorer had nothing to do with bundling but instead had to do with something else. The facts speak for themselves. Its not stopping competiton now. It didn't stop competition in the past. The only product which is claimed to have been hurt is Netscape, yet that product actualy commited suicide.
I'm not sure that they can just drop the case now, since judgement has already been handed down.
..and just to be clear, just a quick list of some of the Opera dominated countries:
Country: Belarus
50.57% Opera
28.04% IE
19.15% Firefox
Country: Georga
41.81% Opera
40.32% IE
15.03% Firefox
Country: Kazakhstan
38.42% Opera
37.18% IE
22.26% Firefox
Country: Russia
36.55% Opera
35.92% IE
24.78% Firefox
Country: Ukraine
43.45% Opera
28.74% IE
25.17% Firefox
Now.. what were you saying about the bundling of IE forcing the competition out of the market?
You are worried about standard, not features. Do you honestly think that Joe User cared about CSS and XHTML support in 2001? or 2003?
You are trying to claim that features unimportant to the user made the browser competitive. Thats not how markets work.
Funny how the Mozilla fans seem to think that the bundling of IE ruined it for them, while Opera didnt have any such problem with the very same situation. Opera has been, and is *still* the #1 browser in many countries, in spite of IE being bundled with Windows.
You are re-writing history, and I'm not afraid to say that you dont get to do that. The facts are clear. Netscape couldn't compete because it sucked. The users voted with their feet, and even its *owner* voted with its feet.
What about them?
I pointed out that even the owners of Netscape, AOL, wanted something better.. if you didnt know, Netscape 6 and 7 were both based on the Mozilla suite.
It all begins with Netscape fucking up and doing a full 100% rewrite, putting them almost a decade behind.
I didnt rewrite history. I stated the pertinent stuff. You are trying to rewrite history if you are claiming that Mozilla had a good competitive browser before FireFox 1.5. Are you claiming that?
Mozilla didnt have a good competitive browser before that because they started from the position of having recently made the single worst strategic mistake that any software company can make.
MS's announcement that they are excluding IE in Windows 7 was a preemptive strike by MS in the hopes the EU would not order a more effective remedy,
What could possibly be more effective than the removal of IE from the OS?
.. because they want a fucking browser! The tragedy here is that the company is being fucked with precisely because it is giving the customers what they want, as if that is some sort of crime.
Isn't the complaint that IE is included in the OS, and that this is the problem?
There is NOTHING more effective than that. I'm sorry but the whole "include other browsers" thing is pretty laughable. It isnt a remedy for anything.. it is instead a bunch of bullshit pretending to be a remedy.
Sure.. the end users in the E.U. are of course NOT going to be choosing a browserless OS
In other news, Google announces a Browser with an OS bundled.
If you don't see the problem, then you are blind. What is the last 10 years ?
Well lets see now. You want me to start in 1998? Ok, thats the year that Netscape created the Mozilla foundation.
FireFox wasnt released until late 2004. Thats 6 years of nothing from the competition.
Now, what was the point you were trying to make again?
There is the real history, and then there is the imaginary history you zealots seem to have invented.
Netscape failed because its developers fucked up and took several years to do a full 100% rewrite. This turned out so badly (duh!) that Netscape then created Mozilla. Move forward another 6 years and FireFox is at version 1.0 and still isnt objectively better than Internet Explorer 6 yet.
Even AOL, which had purchased the latest and greatest Netscape, negotiated for Internet Explorer licensing rights in a settlement with Microsoft. Thats how fucking bad the competition was. Even Netscape's owners wanted an alternative.
I am not convinced that SATA600 is intentionally slow.
I think its more likely that when SATA600 was on the drawing board, that nobody predicted this new market.
Stupidity is more likely than malice.
If you can't saturate...
Cart before the horse. I can't saturate it because nobody is making drives that can.
I claim that it is no coincedence that SSD's, once performance became a comodity (thank you MTRON), quickly shot up from ~16MB/sec and leveled off at 200+MB/sec sequential read speeds. In this time there was no substantial technological breakthrough that made this possible, and we dont need one to go faster. What we need is a faster pipe.
As evidence of this fact, I will draw your attention to the future. Once SATA600 is standard on more that a few motherboards, one of the major SSD manufacturers will put out a drive that does 500+MB/sec, and the others will quickly follow.
Take a long hard think about this.
What manufacturer is going to make SATA SSD's that can saturate the fastest SATA port?
Sounds to me like a bad idea. Surely there are some tradeoffs between speed and some other also important metric. Ex, faster might mean larger erase block sizes.
It is likely that Intel could have made their product much faster, but without any benefit at all to doing so, they wouldn't.
This new SATA, while important, it sort of too-little-too-late. We need a much higher ceiling, and we need it yesterday.
Part of an Emo Phillips skit:
I go over to the psychologist, and he says, "Emo, what does this inkblot look like to you?" I said, "Oh, it's kind of embarrassing." He said, "Emo, everyone sees something, so don't be embarrassed. Tell me what the inkblot looks like to you." I said, "Well, to me it looks like standard pattern #3 in the Rorschach series to test obsessive compulsiveness." And he gets kind of depressed. I said, "Okay, it's a butterfly." And he cheers up. He said, "What does this inkblot look like?" I said, "It looks like a horrible ugly blob of pure evil that sucks the souls of man into a vortex of sin and degradation." He said, "No, um, the inkblot's over there. That's a photo of my wife you're looking at." "Oh," I said, "was I far off?" He said, "No. That's the sad part."
Thats it then.. the case is settled...
NEVER EVER LEARN ABOUT ANY SORTING ALGORITHMS, EVER!, BECAUSE BLAKEY RAT IN A DESPERATE ATTEMPT TO DEFEND HIS OWN IGNORANCE, CLAIMS TO KNOW WHAT THE VAST MAJORITY OF PROJECTS NEED.
How would you know, since you dont know shit about sort algorithms? Thats the entire fucking point right there. You don't know until you know. You took someone elses word for it.
There's no way you can beat the built-in Sort() in enough cases to make that worthwhile.
You are making a terrible assuption here. Your assumption is that all cases are similar to the one that the built-in Sort() tackles (sort key + data), and even that a sort is the best solution.
..your best move is to stop being ignorant.
We (good programmers) learn about various algorithms in order to make intelligent choices about what solution is best, sometimes inventing new and novel ones while at other times implementing ones already known (but not necessarily built-in)
If you choose to be completely ignorant, yours second best move is to always use built-in solutions as best you can...
Regardless of the move you make, don't suggest that its OK for others be as ignorant as you are.
Picking the lowest priced object on the shelf at Best Buy, which happens to have had a big advertising campaign attached, is not how you find a good deal. Those advertised "deals" are how you find shitty things.
Or, "the damages couldn't have been 10% of the revenue these crappy songs generated"
Here is the thing....
We really havent been keeping good track of all storms until the start of commercial aviation, which is post World War I at the earliest.
Prior to that, commercial shipping kept piece-meal track, but not very accurate track because only suicidal captains will sail into the middle of a storm (even today!) Of those that do, not all of them live to tell the tail.
If you look at historic hurricane data, you will see that there is a huge increase in historic tracks ramping up between 1920 and 1940, and this represents the very phenomena I am speaking about. Then between 1970 and 1990 there is another similar ramp up in detections as weather satelites started being used. At best we have about 70 years of relatively decent data, and only about 25 or so years of actual "good" data with no observational bias relative to our current abilities.
Now, if you look at the data you will see that even over the entire atlantic the number of yearly hurricane-class storms is a small number with a high variance.
Given that we have about 25 years at best of good data, I would dare claim that unless we spend a lot more time just looking, that it will indeed be impossible to say with any certainty anything about the effectiveness of something like this.
Time to school the Coward in the ways of Nerd.
... "1010 0101" has its high bit set, so it cannot be any alpha-numeric character at all, which is also painfully obvious to any nerd.
..and finally... all nerds worldwide have an ascii chart, complete with hex and binary representation, taped up behind their monitor on their parents basement wall.
To convert from an upper case letter to a lower case letter in ascii, you simply add 32 decimal (0x20 in C-hex-speak, 20h in ASM-hex-speak, or 0010 0000 in binary.)
Since this is a power-of-two, it becomes painfully obvious that "0101 0101" and "1010 0101" are not the upper and lower cases of the same letter, and further..
Lets say they implement this sort of thing..
How will they ever know that they reduced the number of storms?
The number of storms on a yearly basis is anything but consistent.
in combination with Visual Studio of course
On windows, this is the biggest selling point hands down. C# and VB.NET in tandem with the Visual Studio IDE has WINNER written all over it.
If this combo had been released 10 years ago, every developer in the world would have creamed their underwear simultaneously.
Oh crap, now I'm a sock puppet.
I don't understand why the natural evolution of the hybrid doesn't include plug-in capacity already.
Because batteries expensive and heavy.