Even if such a tool only catches a couple errors, it is probably worth the investment. If there is one intermittent error on a subset of your target platforms, and if this tool catches that error it can easily save hours of debugging work. Considering engineering rates, these will pay for themselves quickly.
Unless, engineers begin to rely on them! If I stop thinking about referencing null pointers because my tool catches 90% of them, I haven't gained a thing.
Christianity was a cult when it first started, but over the years it integrated more into society to the point that it isn't considered a cult now. This is really confusion due to a misnomer. Any religious beliefs that elevate a human to god-like status is a cult by definition. Yes, this includes worshiping Jesus or Mohammad. What you are referring to is how fringe religious groups are also called cults.
So in short, every new religion is a cult. Christianity (so long as it worships a Christ) is a cult. Modern Judaism is probably not a cult, so long as they believe only in a God which no idol can display. Meanwhile, the deistic beliefs held by many thinkers (Einstein for instance) and many of the framers of the US of A would generally not be considered a cult.
Painting all of Mormonism as somehow wrong because of one fringe group is like claiming all of Christianity is tainted because of those psycho pricks in the Westboro Baptist Church. I think you might fairly make both claims. Each fringe group holds beliefs which fall within the realm of belief in their derivative religions. FLDS beliefs follow those of older Mormonism (which is less than 200 years old by the way). While WBC's exhibitionism is an exercise in free speech coupled with the belief that there is a wrathful and jealous god hanging over their shoulder demanding to be worshiped exclusively.
The fact that most Christian parishioners disavow WBC and that LDS has expunged polygamy from it's theology tells me more about how the modern zeitgeist has had a moderating influence on humanity. WBC and FLDS are perhaps just predictable results of religious fundamentalism and anti-social behavior on a group level.
You think Christianity in the time of Christ wasn't weird? All new religions are weird. Weird is just a way of saying "different from the norm".
Mormonism isn't weird because it's new per say, it's weird because it is so well documented. Mainstream Christianity can (and does) state (in not so many words) that Jesus went like a lamb to slaughter. Since we don't have other accounts outside the bible, it is difficult to argue for or against that statement.
But when Mormonism makes the same argument about Joseph Smith, we have historical accounts that include him fighting back (injuring or killing some in the mob that killed him with a pistol).
It's these types of accounts that mean Mormonism will always sound wrong to outsiders.
Mormonism has another (I would say) major problem going against it; it fails Occam's Razor more badly than most other monotheistic religions. Judaism has Abraham, Moses, and the prophets all talking with God, but at least these stories seem simple and straight forward. Christianity posits God coming to earth as a man and presenting truth in spoken language. And Islam presents a prophet who hears messages directly from God.
But Mormonism presents a convoluted story about a tribe of Israelites crossing the globe and settling in USA. Then it presents an angel who can't give Smith the message directly, but must instead show him were to get some tablets...tablets nobody else can see. He is given wisdom to translate the tablets, but not the ability to write it all down, so he gets someone else to do the writing while he reads them out of a hat or from behind a screen.
In short, Mormonism is just too well documented and not widespread enough to be taken seriously. It's not so different from people who believe Elvis is still alive.
I agree. Were it not for christianity, we could have stronger, Roman values, and could merely justify the extermination of our enemies because they were weaker.
Your snarky response makes little sense. If not for Christianity, the only single possible alternative source of morals would be the Romans? What about Hinduism, Buddhism, humanism, or even economic theory.
Further, the Bible only real presents two (diametrically opposed) approaches to international politics. 1) Commit genocide against anyone who gets in your way (for reference see the old testament). 2) Ignore politics (for reference see Jesus' quote "give to Caesar what is Caesar's"). I guess the third option is having your nation overrun and all your people enslaved. So which of those options is the US currently employing? If none, which of them should the US employ?
Yes, of course. But what does that have to do with the submitter's claim that banning genetic discrimination means the end of private insurance?
This is about the expected behavior of consumers. If the insurance has nothing to distinguish my likelihood of getting cancer from Adam's, they can't charge me more for it. But if I have taken a test that assures me I'll have cancer by age 40, then I know I need to take out a rather large policy covering me in case of cancer. However, if I take a gene test that says 0% chance of cancer every, I won't take that policy out.
In short, less people will take out policies (cutting revenue) while the people who do take out policies will be the most expensive customers (steady costs). If your costs are flat and your revenue declines it can destroy your business model.
There are things which C/C++ can't actually generate -- I believe chunks of bootloader code, and certain drivers. OS-level stuff.
I've never heard this before, and I don't quite understand why C couldn't generate bootloader code or particular drivers. But if it's true, I concede the point.
And there are places where it makes sense to use inline assembly in an otherwise C/C++ program, just as there are places where it makes sense to compile a C/C++ extension for a language like Ruby, Python, or Perl. It's just not what you should be doing for most of the application.
This is the part I oppose. It's not a fair comparison. In higher level languages, the only 100% justifiable reason to implement features in a lower level language is to access hardware you can't get to from the language your in. If you've got some new USB device, you won't be able to interface with it in Ruby.
But this problem doesn't really exist in C/C++, because you can always get to the hardware. Shoot, you can touch every port on the chip if you want to (and know what chip you'll be running on). The rest of the time, when people implement C/C++ code for a higher level language, they are using a heuristic approach. Something like "I think function X will be important, so I'll implement in C to make it faster." In my experience this behavior is overdone (as uncommon as it is) and falls into the category of "premature optimization is the root of all evil."
Queue the angry responses from all 3 people in the world who truly have justifiable reasons for writing C functions in assembly.
What I love about such studies is that they can confirm any theory you want.
How about this theory. I think C/C++ are loosing ground because they have names which are difficult to search Google with. Type in C and you get Citigroup/Wikipedia(programming, celsius)/vitamin/subway lines...the list goes on. Now type in PHP and every link is about the language.
In short, if you don't know how to do something, it's better if your language's name uses more than one letter. So how is 'D' increasing then, I wonder?
Why do these programming language discussions always end with people professing their unhealthy obsession with assembly?
Machine language will always be there. That's an actual fact. I don't see any justifiable reason for assembly to stick around except for the part where you C/C++ application switches to it when displaying disassembly code. If assembly is nothing more than a debugging tool, that hardly counts for anything.
Inane? Are you nuts? The world is actually reaching a food shortage, and I hate to say it but carnivorous preferences are among the biggest causes. It takes far more corn to get to a hamburger by conventional means than it does to get the same calories from fresh ears of corn.
If an efficient system for growing meat could be developed, it could raise the standard of life in all of those 3rd world places significantly. I disagree with PETA a lot, but I've long thought this would be a great idea, and I appreciate that they are putting the money up to fund a prize for it.
I think, that if such a thing as freewill exists, it would need to be defined as the brain's ability to alter its own state. Time for a bad analogy; consider the "Evil Dead" when Ash's hand gets possessed. The hand has it's own 'will' because it is now capable of acting independent of the state that the rest of his brain is now doubt stimulating.
So, if a region of the brain is ever proved to (consciously?) alter the brain's state, without conforming to determinism, I think we would be forced to call that freewill.
Alternatively, even if no such part is discovered, we might figure out that such a region simulates freewill via a massive probability function.
I'm real confused here. The rest of us just get automatic passes to be senior engineers, but minorities need to work for it? If so, I need to go mention to my boss that I'm white.
Every year, Bill Gates announces there aren't enough (cheap) programmers graduating from our colleges. I graduated from a major program only 5 years ago, and it was literally filled with minorities. I would estimate less than half the program was Caucasian.
But guess what, essentially none of those people were black. We had tons of Asians, we had people from South America, Latinos, etc. But only like 1% of the program was black.
Essentially everyone who graduated got a job in the field. So whatever the skew is, I doubt it's a hiring problem when it can be explained so much more accurately by looking at graduation rates.
Why the knock on photon mapping? After all, ray tracing only work like real life if you define "like real life" to mean exactly the opposite of real life. So really, pure photon mapping is the only technology that would be 'completely pure'. Too bad it scales so horribly.
So me, I'll get excited when Intel announces on-the-chip real-time photon mapping is imminent.
Not true at all. There is a lot of information which can be gleamed from motion sensors, although it is probably most useful when coupled with video rather than detached from it.
For example, if you track a person circling a building (or car or bicycle or backpack...) that is suspicious. Let's say controversial company X has a large office building. Most people either walk past (on their way to other places) or go into the main entrance. If someone circles the building once or twice, that's suspicious and you should send security to go talk to them.
Just because you don't realize the value of something doesn't mean it has none.
Seriously, at this point it is time to call a halt to C++ education. Treat it like COBOL, Fortran or any other legacy language that still has demand for programmers but is long since past utility.
In the similar vein, I advocate we halt the manufacturing and sale of automobiles. Treat them like other legacy modes of transportation like the horse-and-buggy and walking.
int avg = std::accumulate(v.begin(), v.end(), 0) / v.size();
...
And yet, it gives wrong result for certain input data. Now, who'll be the first one to spot and explain the problem here, preferrably without actually running it?
People keep bring up Moore's Law, as if it's some immutable law of physics.
You are correct that this is not any true law, but rather a rule of thumb. Further, it is unclear what impact Moore's Law actually has on the speed of development. It is possible the industry has spent extra money ensuring we stayed 'on track' and it is equally plausible that the industry has held off on some expensive research which could have produced faster results on account of the law.
However, what I find fascinating is Raymond Kurzweil's theory that all computation advances at an exponential pace. There is ample evidence to support his premise. First, consider that computing increased at a rate similar to Moore's Law prior to the invention of the integrated circuit. Then consider that prior to that the amount of human computation was also increasing at approximately an exponential rate. Prior to the computer we invented adding machines used for censuses for example. Prior to that, people had to do all the computations...but the total population grew at a low exponential rate.
Of course, the full theory isn't that total world computation will grow exponentially, but rather that all technology improves exponentially. Taken to the extreme, you might even generalized this theory to include genome complexity. It took billions of years, for instance, to get from the first spark of life to the first eukaryotes, but only 65 million to get from some primitive mammal to a human. In this framework, Moore's Law is perhaps too restrictive rather than being too generally applied as you seem to believe.
Does it have to be the storage medium? Aren't ultracapacitors with their rapid charge/discharge capability and unlimited reusability an alternative to hydrogen storage? Research indicates ultracapacitors should be capable of storing as much energy as batteries. They aren't there yet, but they are improving at a rapid rate.
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Even if such a tool only catches a couple errors, it is probably worth the investment. If there is one intermittent error on a subset of your target platforms, and if this tool catches that error it can easily save hours of debugging work. Considering engineering rates, these will pay for themselves quickly.
Unless, engineers begin to rely on them! If I stop thinking about referencing null pointers because my tool catches 90% of them, I haven't gained a thing.
So in short, every new religion is a cult. Christianity (so long as it worships a Christ) is a cult. Modern Judaism is probably not a cult, so long as they believe only in a God which no idol can display. Meanwhile, the deistic beliefs held by many thinkers (Einstein for instance) and many of the framers of the US of A would generally not be considered a cult.
cheers
The fact that most Christian parishioners disavow WBC and that LDS has expunged polygamy from it's theology tells me more about how the modern zeitgeist has had a moderating influence on humanity. WBC and FLDS are perhaps just predictable results of religious fundamentalism and anti-social behavior on a group level.
But when Mormonism makes the same argument about Joseph Smith, we have historical accounts that include him fighting back (injuring or killing some in the mob that killed him with a pistol).
It's these types of accounts that mean Mormonism will always sound wrong to outsiders.
Mormonism has another (I would say) major problem going against it; it fails Occam's Razor more badly than most other monotheistic religions. Judaism has Abraham, Moses, and the prophets all talking with God, but at least these stories seem simple and straight forward. Christianity posits God coming to earth as a man and presenting truth in spoken language. And Islam presents a prophet who hears messages directly from God.
But Mormonism presents a convoluted story about a tribe of Israelites crossing the globe and settling in USA. Then it presents an angel who can't give Smith the message directly, but must instead show him were to get some tablets...tablets nobody else can see. He is given wisdom to translate the tablets, but not the ability to write it all down, so he gets someone else to do the writing while he reads them out of a hat or from behind a screen.
In short, Mormonism is just too well documented and not widespread enough to be taken seriously. It's not so different from people who believe Elvis is still alive.
Your snarky response makes little sense. If not for Christianity, the only single possible alternative source of morals would be the Romans? What about Hinduism, Buddhism, humanism, or even economic theory.
Further, the Bible only real presents two (diametrically opposed) approaches to international politics. 1) Commit genocide against anyone who gets in your way (for reference see the old testament). 2) Ignore politics (for reference see Jesus' quote "give to Caesar what is Caesar's"). I guess the third option is having your nation overrun and all your people enslaved. So which of those options is the US currently employing? If none, which of them should the US employ?
But this problem doesn't really exist in C/C++, because you can always get to the hardware. Shoot, you can touch every port on the chip if you want to (and know what chip you'll be running on). The rest of the time, when people implement C/C++ code for a higher level language, they are using a heuristic approach. Something like "I think function X will be important, so I'll implement in C to make it faster." In my experience this behavior is overdone (as uncommon as it is) and falls into the category of "premature optimization is the root of all evil."
Queue the angry responses from all 3 people in the world who truly have justifiable reasons for writing C functions in assembly.
In short, if you don't know how to do something, it's better if your language's name uses more than one letter. So how is 'D' increasing then, I wonder?
Machine language will always be there. That's an actual fact. I don't see any justifiable reason for assembly to stick around except for the part where you C/C++ application switches to it when displaying disassembly code. If assembly is nothing more than a debugging tool, that hardly counts for anything.
Inane? Are you nuts? The world is actually reaching a food shortage, and I hate to say it but carnivorous preferences are among the biggest causes. It takes far more corn to get to a hamburger by conventional means than it does to get the same calories from fresh ears of corn.
If an efficient system for growing meat could be developed, it could raise the standard of life in all of those 3rd world places significantly. I disagree with PETA a lot, but I've long thought this would be a great idea, and I appreciate that they are putting the money up to fund a prize for it.
I think, that if such a thing as freewill exists, it would need to be defined as the brain's ability to alter its own state. Time for a bad analogy; consider the "Evil Dead" when Ash's hand gets possessed. The hand has it's own 'will' because it is now capable of acting independent of the state that the rest of his brain is now doubt stimulating.
So, if a region of the brain is ever proved to (consciously?) alter the brain's state, without conforming to determinism, I think we would be forced to call that freewill.
Alternatively, even if no such part is discovered, we might figure out that such a region simulates freewill via a massive probability function.
I'm real confused here. The rest of us just get automatic passes to be senior engineers, but minorities need to work for it? If so, I need to go mention to my boss that I'm white.
Every year, Bill Gates announces there aren't enough (cheap) programmers graduating from our colleges. I graduated from a major program only 5 years ago, and it was literally filled with minorities. I would estimate less than half the program was Caucasian.
But guess what, essentially none of those people were black. We had tons of Asians, we had people from South America, Latinos, etc. But only like 1% of the program was black.
Essentially everyone who graduated got a job in the field. So whatever the skew is, I doubt it's a hiring problem when it can be explained so much more accurately by looking at graduation rates.
Why the knock on photon mapping? After all, ray tracing only work like real life if you define "like real life" to mean exactly the opposite of real life. So really, pure photon mapping is the only technology that would be 'completely pure'. Too bad it scales so horribly.
So me, I'll get excited when Intel announces on-the-chip real-time photon mapping is imminent.
Not true at all. There is a lot of information which can be gleamed from motion sensors, although it is probably most useful when coupled with video rather than detached from it. For example, if you track a person circling a building (or car or bicycle or backpack...) that is suspicious. Let's say controversial company X has a large office building. Most people either walk past (on their way to other places) or go into the main entrance. If someone circles the building once or twice, that's suspicious and you should send security to go talk to them. Just because you don't realize the value of something doesn't mean it has none.
My vote is for segmentation fault on divide by 0!
However, what I find fascinating is Raymond Kurzweil's theory that all computation advances at an exponential pace. There is ample evidence to support his premise. First, consider that computing increased at a rate similar to Moore's Law prior to the invention of the integrated circuit. Then consider that prior to that the amount of human computation was also increasing at approximately an exponential rate. Prior to the computer we invented adding machines used for censuses for example. Prior to that, people had to do all the computations...but the total population grew at a low exponential rate.
Of course, the full theory isn't that total world computation will grow exponentially, but rather that all technology improves exponentially. Taken to the extreme, you might even generalized this theory to include genome complexity. It took billions of years, for instance, to get from the first spark of life to the first eukaryotes, but only 65 million to get from some primitive mammal to a human. In this framework, Moore's Law is perhaps too restrictive rather than being too generally applied as you seem to believe.
Does it have to be the storage medium? Aren't ultracapacitors with their rapid charge/discharge capability and unlimited reusability an alternative to hydrogen storage? Research indicates ultracapacitors should be capable of storing as much energy as batteries. They aren't there yet, but they are improving at a rapid rate.
http://www.greencarcongress.com/2006/02/mit_carbon_nano.html