[...]but alas, libertarian nut-jobs like me never get elected to anything.
Hey, I'd vote for you! Those sound like some good policies to me:)
Wait till he starts talking about how the government monopoly on schools, roads and law enforcement is hurting america, and how state and local taxes should be eliminated to make way for corporately-owned toll-roads and private local defence militias.
I think Google makes most of their money from advertising revenue. Yahoo probably utilized their search for some kind of licensing fee... However much that fee was, it is probably dwarfed by the amount of money Google pulls in from their AdSense.
I agree that piracy can greatly help market penetration, product visibility, and so on. I think there is a much greater cost to piracy, though, for very small, independent software developers who are releasing shareware or other niche software. These people need a much, much smaller number of sales to be happy, but since their market is so much smaller, something like rampant piracy of their product could even put them out of business!
So, as much as I think big software and big media are being fairly obtuse about how to deal with piracy - in terms of how litigious they have recently become - I also think it's a huge problem for the small-time developer whose product is never going to become a de facto industry standard, and thus a long-term piracy strategy does nothing for them except reduce revenue.
There are several classes of software consumer out there:
The lawful, staunch IP-respecter, who pirates nothing.
The home user who pirates business-class software priced well outside his/her budget, but purchases personal software.
The opportunity pirate, who checks to see if a pirated copy of software can be had for little or no effort, but, failing that, will eventually break down and buy a copy.
The pirate enthusiast, who has no intention of buying anything
Most "pirate enthusiasts" are people who do not have the means to purchase the software they want. These include children, students of any sort, the unemployed, and so on. Nobody loses revenue from these people, they don't have the money to buy the product. Keeping the product out of these peoples' hands is purely an exercise in exerting one's principles.
The "opportunity pirate" is of course where developers actually lose money. In general, I think this is a small group, but when it comes to small-time developers, a statistical anomaly can put the company out of business. I think people also become more of an oppotunity pirate with this kind of software because they often do not have very strong copy protection, and there is a significant risk in purchasing software from a completely unknown vendor. This is why this kind of software has to be priced lower than software which has gone through the distribution machine.
The "business software pirate" is where you see piracy actually helping a product thrive. Software like Maya, Photoshop, and so on are very expensive for individuals, but are reasonable and neccessary purchases for businesses that utilize that kind of art production. When the business software pirate downloads some software and learns it, all of a sudden there is one more person who understands that software over a competitor's software, making that software more valuable to business who want to be able to hire people that can use it. Most of the money for this kind of software comes from business licenses, so fighting this kind of piracy is actually counter-effective. Of course, it is a long-term strategy, which isn't popular in contemporary American business culture.
Of course, it's difficult to take a "pro-piracy" or "piracy-neutral" stance as a company - there may be legal reasons why you cannot. But I think the old, innocent days where piracy was this underground system that no one talked about too much, and certainly wasn't litigated against except in extreme circumstances actually was a better environment. Software grew into a behemoth industry either despite or partially because of that environment.
Assuming you are iterating over an array of size n:
int i = n; while (i--) { // etc }
Since you are post-decrementing, the first test is while(n), but in the body of the loop, i has the value n-1, which is the last value in the array. The next test is while(n-1), but in the body, I has the value n-2. In the final iteration, the test is while(1), but i has the value 0 in the body. The final test is while(0), which is the terminating condition.
If your condition is (1 + i--), then you will perform an extra iteration with i = -1.
I wouldn't normally be that guy who corrects people, BUT If you are going to make that your *SIG*, you should note that "mannor" should be "manner." "Mannor" isn't actually a word.
I haven't read DMG2, but with 3.5 - moneygrabbing scheme or not - they actually listened to players and made a bunch of revisions and clarifications that make the game more fun than 3.0. I have no problem with that.
Also, consider that you can get all the basic d20 system information for free online, I think it's hard to accuse them of abusing their customers... That includes the player's handbook, the monster manual, and the DMG.
I've recently started reading a book called "Emotional Design" by Don Norman - who is some kind of HCI professor. From what I can tell so far, one of the basic tenets of the book is the idea that objects (or software) that are aesthetically pleasing put us (humans) into a better mood while using it, and actually increase our productivity while using them. People will often be happier and more comfortable using something that is actually harder to use than some alternatives if it speaks to them emotionally. Does transparancy fall into this category? Seems likely...
Well, okay, so again the example is a little simplistic, and you HAD to go and expose the contrivance of it.
So in the very specific situation when you are creating a local variable and assigning something you are instantiating to it unconditionally, as in the example above, there isn't any real reason to assign something you are instantiating to a supertype. But you could imagine this new contrived example:
Bomb bomb; if (year < 1945) {
bomb = new IncendiaryBomb(); } else if (year < 1952) {
bomb = new AtomBomb(); } else {
bomb = new HydrogenBomb(); }
bomb.asplode();
When you detonate the bomb, you don't need to know what type it is. Hmm, how morbid...
So, perhaps the simple unconditional assignment to a local variable case happens fairly often, but the proposed shortcut saves, what, a word that could be auto-completed in a decent editor? And is it worth damaging the consistency of the language?
A language is made up of simple constructs - assignment, calling a function, declaring a variable... The beauty is when you put together all these simple operations into something more complex and useful! I think it's potentially dangerous to start providing more and more constructs that do the same thing in a different way - then you have lots of indistinct choices and people will choose differently. Then when it comes time to look at someone else's code, they may be utilizing strange language features that you never had to learn because they were redundant.
-If
Re:Why would you use this?
on
The New C Standard
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Well, you aren't really giving the same info twice: First you are declaring that littleBoy is a reference to a ThermonuclearBomb. Second, you are pointing that reference at a new ThermonuclearBomb. But your example is very simplistic so it seems redundant. Perhaps your heirarchy looks like this:
Now littleBoy is declared as a reference to any kind of bomb. You are then assigning specifically an AtomBomb to it.
Adding all sorts of language shortcuts because you don't want programmers to type as much is inelegant. It makes the language harder to learn and read. Part of the elegance of Java is the eschewing of fancy syntactic candy-coated shortcuts in favor of a regular, predictable syntax.
I have recently switched over to Eclipse from XEmacs for all my Java development. It is quite a memory hog (not that XEmacs isn't) but I've found it to be faster in general than XEmacs. If you open too many files it starts to get sluggish, which is sort of lame. But all of the refactoring, auto-formatting, auto-importing and such is pretty awesome. I can honestly say it saves me a lot of time.
Now NetBeans I tried a while back and THAT was absurdly slow. I uninstalled it within 30 minutes.
It's a LOT easier to get modded +5 (or modded at all) if you are one of the earlier posts on a thread. I'm not trying to insinuate any value judgements on posts from any individuals, but my own experience has been my own posts that I thought were really good were ignored because there were sort of deep in the thread, and posts of mine that were fairly mediocre, but posted early in a thread, generally got a lot of attention/replies/mods. So, yeah... this isn't relevant at all to anything.
-If
Offtopic Offtopicness Meta-Discussion
on
Glass In Spaaaaace
·
· Score: 1, Insightful
"I don't think its appropriate to talk OT on Slashdot."
a) At least half of the interesting discussions on Slashdot are offtopic. b) I think that one should be prepared to participate in any discussions arising from content in one's own signature.
In general, it's in pretty bad taste to put something potentially inflammatory in your signature, because of the tendency to incite threadjackings. Religion and politics both usually fall into that category, regardless of where it falls on the spectrum.
How can someone be a former founder? Once you found something, that's it, you always will have been the founder, right? I mean the Founding Fathers of America aren't the Former Founding Fathers - they are still the Founding Fathers even though they are all dead, and don't take much of an active interest in the affairs of the country anymore.
I think it's fairly obvious that there are linked traits in personality in addition to the commonly accepted linked traits in genetics. Why is there a "geek" personality type (or any other gross categorization of people) - it is a bunch of sometimes disparate personality traits that tend, in nature, to come in a package. e.g. Math and logic skills tend to come with pendantism. I was a computer science major in college, there was a pretty high concentration of both in my CS acquaintances, and not nearly as much in other acquaintances.
We could argue all day WHY these traits tend to go together, but it's hard to argue that they DON'T. People ARE different - perhaps there's only 4 or 5 different personality buckets that people fall into, but they are very *different* buckets! I'm not going to claim that everyone is a true individual and all that, because I don't really believe it. But: Linked Personality Traits... I'm just sayin'.
Some people are more sensitive to that stuff than other people. Generally the same people who get headaches with 60Hz CRTs also can "taste the rainbow" of DLP projectors, and get really annoyed with ghosting on flat panels. I'm pretty sensitive to this stuff, and I've found I need 10ms response time to not notice ghosting anymore. For many people, 13 or 25ms is fine.
I don't know about.NET, but the Java's heap size is not really correlated to system memory. It starts off with a certain sized heap (optionally specifiable), and when a full GC doesn't free enough space for a pending allocation the VM grows the heap up to some maximum size (also optionally specifiable). So of course if you know what the working set size of your app is, you can set your initial/max heap size to be that, and hopefully that doesn't exceed your physical memory. I think, though, that Java will never shrink its heap, so that's also something to consider: if at some point your app requires a ton of memory concurrently, that will stretch your heap out for the rest of the lifetime of that VM.
I think that long-lifetime applications, native or inside a VM, have to be developed with these kinds of things in mind or they will perform badly.
Well, there is such a thing as concurrent garbage collection, which, as far as I know, is still basically experimental. The default garbage collection scheme in the Sun JVM (of which there are several) IS triggered by being unable to allocate space on top of the heap (due to its being full). When a GC is triggered, ALL threads are locked down during the GC, so nothing can be mutated which the GC goes through it's "mark" phase of flagging live objects. It then runs through the heap and compacts all the live objects, leaving all the empty space at the end of the heap. Then only at that point, does it allow the VM to continue running.
Also the way Sun's JVM's stupid thread priority system works, a lower priority thread only executes when no threads of higher priority are "runnable", meaning they are all blocked. This makes it VERY easy to starve out lower priority threads, unless you are careful to ensure that ALL threads are in a not-runnable state - asleep, blocked, etc - periodically (hopfully when they don't have any work to do). Obviously the GC works even if you do a tight while (true) { new blah[100]; } loop in a higher priority thread.
I dunno, having a huge library-sized bookstore with couches and a cafe to hang around in is pretty cool. It was a favorite spot for a girl I really liked in high school and I to hang out at. I'm all for independent business, but most of the tiny independent bookshops that I've been in have no selection, no food or drink allowed, and sort of smell funny, anyway.
"Do you want it to be terse, or do you want it to be precise?"
I'd like there to be an artful balance. Most legalese is basically a foreign language to most people, yet they are expected to read and understand it before signing anything.
I agree that the language has to be very precise, but there also seems to be a great deal of archaic words and grammar to be found in the depths of laws and contracts that really don't add any precision, only obfuscation.
Caveat: I am very much a "lay person" with no legal background. I speak from the position of the masses frustrated with the inscrutable world of law.
Slashdot Mirror
-If
I have heard that if you enlist in the armed forces you can drink, even if you are under 21. Anyone actually know?
And I think America's desperate grasp on Puritanical ideals sucks.
-If
I think Google makes most of their money from advertising revenue. Yahoo probably utilized their search for some kind of licensing fee... However much that fee was, it is probably dwarfed by the amount of money Google pulls in from their AdSense.
-If
So, as much as I think big software and big media are being fairly obtuse about how to deal with piracy - in terms of how litigious they have recently become - I also think it's a huge problem for the small-time developer whose product is never going to become a de facto industry standard, and thus a long-term piracy strategy does nothing for them except reduce revenue.
There are several classes of software consumer out there:
Most "pirate enthusiasts" are people who do not have the means to purchase the software they want. These include children, students of any sort, the unemployed, and so on. Nobody loses revenue from these people, they don't have the money to buy the product. Keeping the product out of these peoples' hands is purely an exercise in exerting one's principles.
The "opportunity pirate" is of course where developers actually lose money. In general, I think this is a small group, but when it comes to small-time developers, a statistical anomaly can put the company out of business. I think people also become more of an oppotunity pirate with this kind of software because they often do not have very strong copy protection, and there is a significant risk in purchasing software from a completely unknown vendor. This is why this kind of software has to be priced lower than software which has gone through the distribution machine.
The "business software pirate" is where you see piracy actually helping a product thrive. Software like Maya, Photoshop, and so on are very expensive for individuals, but are reasonable and neccessary purchases for businesses that utilize that kind of art production. When the business software pirate downloads some software and learns it, all of a sudden there is one more person who understands that software over a competitor's software, making that software more valuable to business who want to be able to hire people that can use it. Most of the money for this kind of software comes from business licenses, so fighting this kind of piracy is actually counter-effective. Of course, it is a long-term strategy, which isn't popular in contemporary American business culture.
Of course, it's difficult to take a "pro-piracy" or "piracy-neutral" stance as a company - there may be legal reasons why you cannot. But I think the old, innocent days where piracy was this underground system that no one talked about too much, and certainly wasn't litigated against except in extreme circumstances actually was a better environment. Software grew into a behemoth industry either despite or partially because of that environment.
Boy, this is offtopic.
-If
Assuming you are iterating over an array of size n:Since you are post-decrementing, the first test is while(n), but in the body of the loop, i has the value n-1, which is the last value in the array.
The next test is while(n-1), but in the body, I has the value n-2.
In the final iteration, the test is while(1), but i has the value 0 in the body.
The final test is while(0), which is the terminating condition.
If your condition is (1 + i--), then you will perform an extra iteration with i = -1.
"I don't doubt that in 5-10 years the average home-user will have enough bandwidth to make this feasable[...]"
Oh, *I* do...
-If
I wouldn't normally be that guy who corrects people, BUT If you are going to make that your *SIG*, you should note that "mannor" should be "manner." "Mannor" isn't actually a word.
-If
Why wouldn't she want computer(s) in the bedroom OTHER than the fact they make noise? That has always seemed to me the major complaint.
-If
Well, and then someone else said, "There are lies, damn lies, and statistics."
That would have been Mark Twain...
-If
I haven't read DMG2, but with 3.5 - moneygrabbing scheme or not - they actually listened to players and made a bunch of revisions and clarifications that make the game more fun than 3.0. I have no problem with that.
Also, consider that you can get all the basic d20 system information for free online, I think it's hard to accuse them of abusing their customers... That includes the player's handbook, the monster manual, and the DMG.
-If
I've recently started reading a book called "Emotional Design" by Don Norman - who is some kind of HCI professor. From what I can tell so far, one of the basic tenets of the book is the idea that objects (or software) that are aesthetically pleasing put us (humans) into a better mood while using it, and actually increase our productivity while using them. People will often be happier and more comfortable using something that is actually harder to use than some alternatives if it speaks to them emotionally. Does transparancy fall into this category? Seems likely...
-If
Well, okay, so again the example is a little simplistic, and you HAD to go and expose the contrivance of it.
So in the very specific situation when you are creating a local variable and assigning something you are instantiating to it unconditionally, as in the example above, there isn't any real reason to assign something you are instantiating to a supertype. But you could imagine this new contrived example:
Bomb bomb;
if (year < 1945)
{
bomb = new IncendiaryBomb();
}
else if (year < 1952)
{
bomb = new AtomBomb();
}
else
{
bomb = new HydrogenBomb();
}
bomb.asplode();
When you detonate the bomb, you don't need to know what type it is. Hmm, how morbid...
So, perhaps the simple unconditional assignment to a local variable case happens fairly often, but the proposed shortcut saves, what, a word that could be auto-completed in a decent editor? And is it worth damaging the consistency of the language?
A language is made up of simple constructs - assignment, calling a function, declaring a variable... The beauty is when you put together all these simple operations into something more complex and useful! I think it's potentially dangerous to start providing more and more constructs that do the same thing in a different way - then you have lots of indistinct choices and people will choose differently. Then when it comes time to look at someone else's code, they may be utilizing strange language features that you never had to learn because they were redundant.
-If
Well, you aren't really giving the same info twice: First you are declaring that littleBoy is a reference to a ThermonuclearBomb. Second, you are pointing that reference at a new ThermonuclearBomb. But your example is very simplistic so it seems redundant. Perhaps your heirarchy looks like this:
NuclearBomb inherits Bomb
AtomBomb inherits NuclearBomb
HydrogenBomb inherits NuclearBomb
Bomb littleBoy = new AtomBomb();
Now littleBoy is declared as a reference to any kind of bomb. You are then assigning specifically an AtomBomb to it.
Adding all sorts of language shortcuts because you don't want programmers to type as much is inelegant. It makes the language harder to learn and read. Part of the elegance of Java is the eschewing of fancy syntactic candy-coated shortcuts in favor of a regular, predictable syntax.
-If
I have recently switched over to Eclipse from XEmacs for all my Java development. It is quite a memory hog (not that XEmacs isn't) but I've found it to be faster in general than XEmacs. If you open too many files it starts to get sluggish, which is sort of lame. But all of the refactoring, auto-formatting, auto-importing and such is pretty awesome. I can honestly say it saves me a lot of time.
Now NetBeans I tried a while back and THAT was absurdly slow. I uninstalled it within 30 minutes.
-If
It's a LOT easier to get modded +5 (or modded at all) if you are one of the earlier posts on a thread. I'm not trying to insinuate any value judgements on posts from any individuals, but my own experience has been my own posts that I thought were really good were ignored because there were sort of deep in the thread, and posts of mine that were fairly mediocre, but posted early in a thread, generally got a lot of attention/replies/mods. So, yeah... this isn't relevant at all to anything.
-If
"I don't think its appropriate to talk OT on Slashdot."
a) At least half of the interesting discussions on Slashdot are offtopic.
b) I think that one should be prepared to participate in any discussions arising from content in one's own signature.
In general, it's in pretty bad taste to put something potentially inflammatory in your signature, because of the tendency to incite threadjackings. Religion and politics both usually fall into that category, regardless of where it falls on the spectrum.
-If
"Recently former founder of Gentoo Linux[...]"
How can someone be a former founder? Once you found something, that's it, you always will have been the founder, right? I mean the Founding Fathers of America aren't the Former Founding Fathers - they are still the Founding Fathers even though they are all dead, and don't take much of an active interest in the affairs of the country anymore.
-If
I think it's fairly obvious that there are linked traits in personality in addition to the commonly accepted linked traits in genetics. Why is there a "geek" personality type (or any other gross categorization of people) - it is a bunch of sometimes disparate personality traits that tend, in nature, to come in a package. e.g. Math and logic skills tend to come with pendantism. I was a computer science major in college, there was a pretty high concentration of both in my CS acquaintances, and not nearly as much in other acquaintances.
We could argue all day WHY these traits tend to go together, but it's hard to argue that they DON'T. People ARE different - perhaps there's only 4 or 5 different personality buckets that people fall into, but they are very *different* buckets! I'm not going to claim that everyone is a true individual and all that, because I don't really believe it. But: Linked Personality Traits... I'm just sayin'.
-If
Some people are more sensitive to that stuff than other people. Generally the same people who get headaches with 60Hz CRTs also can "taste the rainbow" of DLP projectors, and get really annoyed with ghosting on flat panels. I'm pretty sensitive to this stuff, and I've found I need 10ms response time to not notice ghosting anymore. For many people, 13 or 25ms is fine.
-If
I don't know about .NET, but the Java's heap size is not really correlated to system memory. It starts off with a certain sized heap (optionally specifiable), and when a full GC doesn't free enough space for a pending allocation the VM grows the heap up to some maximum size (also optionally specifiable). So of course if you know what the working set size of your app is, you can set your initial/max heap size to be that, and hopefully that doesn't exceed your physical memory. I think, though, that Java will never shrink its heap, so that's also something to consider: if at some point your app requires a ton of memory concurrently, that will stretch your heap out for the rest of the lifetime of that VM.
I think that long-lifetime applications, native or inside a VM, have to be developed with these kinds of things in mind or they will perform badly.
-If
Well, there is such a thing as concurrent garbage collection, which, as far as I know, is still basically experimental. The default garbage collection scheme in the Sun JVM (of which there are several) IS triggered by being unable to allocate space on top of the heap (due to its being full). When a GC is triggered, ALL threads are locked down during the GC, so nothing can be mutated which the GC goes through it's "mark" phase of flagging live objects. It then runs through the heap and compacts all the live objects, leaving all the empty space at the end of the heap. Then only at that point, does it allow the VM to continue running.
Also the way Sun's JVM's stupid thread priority system works, a lower priority thread only executes when no threads of higher priority are "runnable", meaning they are all blocked. This makes it VERY easy to starve out lower priority threads, unless you are careful to ensure that ALL threads are in a not-runnable state - asleep, blocked, etc - periodically (hopfully when they don't have any work to do). Obviously the GC works even if you do a tight while (true) { new blah[100]; } loop in a higher priority thread.
-If
Still, it's been a bit of a while, don't you think?
-If
I dunno, having a huge library-sized bookstore with couches and a cafe to hang around in is pretty cool. It was a favorite spot for a girl I really liked in high school and I to hang out at. I'm all for independent business, but most of the tiny independent bookshops that I've been in have no selection, no food or drink allowed, and sort of smell funny, anyway.
-If
Also because girls have such tiny bladders. I'm like a camel when playing games.
-If
"Do you want it to be terse, or do you want it to be precise?"
I'd like there to be an artful balance. Most legalese is basically a foreign language to most people, yet they are expected to read and understand it before signing anything.
I agree that the language has to be very precise, but there also seems to be a great deal of archaic words and grammar to be found in the depths of laws and contracts that really don't add any precision, only obfuscation.
Caveat: I am very much a "lay person" with no legal background. I speak from the position of the masses frustrated with the inscrutable world of law.
-If