s I recall from my...err, never mind when that was...LSD is a relatively heavy molecule to be floating around. To have even a picogram detectable would imply a lot being manufactured.
Especially since one trip is only around 100 micrograms or so...
But the article said "lysergic acid -- a relative of LSD..." so it might just as like have been something
not related to drug use. Lots of ergot-infected grass around?
A high-rez animated monster can only ever be a high-rez animated monster, exactly as you see it on the screen. But the dashing asterisk can be whatever you imagine it to be, and that makes it better.
&
I don't know about asterisks, but ampersands give me the creeps.
It's net-zero carbon output, but not net-zero effect on global warming: methane is a much stronger greenhouse gas than CO2, and a number of animals do quite a bit of conversion of plant carbon to methane. This is a main reason that the meat industry has a non-negligible effect on global warming.
Is it clear that these goats produce any significant amount of methane?
The meat industry uses cattle (not goats), specifically bred to grow quickly on god-knows-what
they feed them (sure isn't anything like the vegetation around Google HQ).
You mean no typing on the keys. The type of the contents was clear in my example, "int".
No, it was an enum. I can see why someone would want to keep that type information
for as long as possible, and using std::map is one way.
It's a bit odd though...
I would have written my own tiny class instead, with enums in the interface
and a std::vector or even a C array internally.
Performance cost: none (unless I choose std::vector and these things are created
and copied really often).
Also, languages like C and C++ really suck if you put function calls inside tight loops. Unless the compiler "knows" the far side of the call, it has to assume memory and registers are killed (within the limits of the ABI), and so has to write variables to main storage and pull them back on either side of the function calls.
So, what you want is to hand large chunks of work around, not single values.That is, unless you make sure the compiler can inline the call
Inline -- or know enough about the function to take a shortcut past the ABI.
That's what I prefer to do too... but be careful with phrases like "really suck".
It's usually only a problem if the profiler says so.
What a horrible page you linked to. Not only do they recommend escaping the
ordinary Latin-1 character set as if it was 1995; they also cannot spell "guillemot".
The alternate model of giving the software away for free and charging for service instead adds an interesting wrinkle to the equation
A sucky one though. I doubt many programmers on this board want to be in a position that the work they produce for a company is essentially worthless and the way to move up is through the tech support department
Do you all agree that Foxit is the best of show for free PDF reader?
Free as in beer, it seems (based on its Wikipedia entry).
That's a showstopper for some of us.
(And the shoddy Linux support doesn't help either. "i386"? My main systems are AMD64 and ppc.)
Don't work around the bugs, fix the bugs. Links are designed for machines, the higher-level marked up text is for people.
No, dammit. URLs (or "links") are designed for humans and machines.
Just like file names.
You should try to find reasonably good ones: descriptive, brief names which can stay the same
for a long time.
When both of them get their heads around the idea that the Middle East doesn't belong solely to them by decree of God
Actually, if you believe in what's said in the Old Testament, God did promise that part of the Middle East to the Hebrews. About all the Arabs can claim is credit for turning a land of milk and honey into an arid wasteland.
Good thing they did that, too. Even bulldozing a few olive tree gardens is a lot of work
for the Israeli army -- imagine how hard it would be to bulldoze the land of milk and honey.
I thought I had read/heard somewhere (might have even been the documentary Revolution OS) that Finns & Swedes grow up with English Sesame Street available to them and as a result many of them are bilingual from a young age.
Not true -- when I grew up it was called Svenska Sesam and I remember being
surprised when I learned they had made an english version.
But you study the language from age ten or earlier, and TV for teens and grownups
is just subtitled.
I've also ready that being bilingual or a polyglot is beneficial to thinking and memory skills. So I would caution thinking that because Linus Torvalds chooses comments in English for any reason other than more people speak it than Finnish.
Make that trilingual, since he's of the swedish-speaking minority in.fi.
I don't know whether bilingualism is good for the brain. Perhaps.
What makes a difference is being part of a programmer culture. Everything of value
is written in English, from the JARGON file to Usenet, to all the good books, the man pages.
Being cut away from that would be like trying to be a scholar in the 18th century and not
know Latin -- you'd reinvent a few wheels and then get stuck.
... all consumers really truly need is a standards compliant remote desktop client, and that exists in RDP. All you have to do is be able to send clicks and keystrokes to a server, and get bitmaps back. No need for all this other crap we put people through, no need to shoehorn state into cookies and other crap
Partly agree. State and HTTP do not mix well, and it seems to me a lot of people earn their living
by working around this in more or less kludgy ways.
And yes, people should write custom networking protocols more often, and ship specs and/or binaries
instead of abusing web browsers.
But that doesn't imply that the web should be replaced by X11.
The web isn't all heavy-weight "web applications" run by big corporations who can pay the
for the huge CPU, RAM and network usage you suggest. Nor are all web users on recent computers
with fast, low-latency networking.
I am of the view that standards are nice in theory but impossible to achieve in practice. If we look at the track record of software standards, there's really only been one complicated standard that's actually worked out well, and that's C++. C++ works because, well, it leaves some basic things out of the standard and -doesn't- make promises about everything the way HTML tries to do.
What you write here makes me believe you know little about standards, C++ and HTML.
For example, in what way does HTML make promises "about everything"? Where does it
say what a H1 heading should look (or sound, or feel) like?
Small URLs are generally hashes and are hard to type accurately and hard to remember.
I think it's the other way around. Super-long URLs tend to be alphanumeric garbage and/or long lists of undocumented CGI-style variables. Someone who cares about URLs as names for resources/documents in the original spirit of HTTP (e.g. the Wikipedia) will come up with much shorter names, like a short sentence.
The fact that Google makes such a big deal about only hiring the best and brightest and PhDs and such also indicates this isn't 'easy'. If it took a team of people who are regarded to be the best and brightest in their industry, with numerous PhDs on the team (or at least at their disposal on campus) *18 months* to do something (even part time) that still means that this is going to be a bigger issue for most companies.
I bet most other company networks don't look like Google's (for better or worse),
Consider that the bulk of Google's apps that would need to be 'converted' have been written in the past 3-4 years (docs, maps, earth, etc.), and likely were written by people who put modularity and efficiency much higher than the average developer does (or is allowed to, in many cases)
Where in TFA or Google's PDF do you find anything about converting applications
taking much of the time? I doubt that was needed -- but it is likely that they had to test
the applications, if they had never been used with IPv6 before.
and you'll conclude that average developers who've inherited undocumented legacy code from previous average developers will have a much harder time than expected.
I suspect most of the application work was reconfiguring, and comparable to the work
it would take to switch to another IPv4 network range. Finding those odd, yet vital, scripts with hard-coded
IP addresses in them, and so on.
(I say suspect, because I've only done vaguely similar things.)
That's not a workaround, if your goal is to save power. Screensavers, especially 3D-accelerated ones, use power. If you set the 'saver to "blank screen" that is fine.
Screen savers that draw stuff on the screen is so 1992 -- flying toasters and all.
I have forgotten them so thoroughly that I read the posting but parsed the word as "going into deepest DPMS OFF mode".
Your post demonstrates my point perfectly: the colon-separated hex notion screws up URL parsing, requiring algorithm changes for everyone, and as you see, lots of people still haven't gotten it right. Dotted-quad notation wouldn't have required nearly as much effort. The new notation was an unnecessary barrier to adoption.
"Was" is the key word here: it's done, live with it.
The bug is in Slashdot, not IPv6.
We're talking about Joe Sysop and Joe Programmer, whose opinions regarding IPv6 are far more important than Joe Plumber's. These people see IPv6 as something exotic and frightening, and try to avoid it as long as they can.
Administrators will need to learn, but programmers... come on!
Stevens showed how easy it is to make applications IPv4/v6-agnostic in his network programming books, more than ten years ago.
As to his writing... I read some before I had any idea who he was, and long before I ever met the man... it's "speculative" fiction, all right, but I found it somewhere between uninteresting and annoying, even back when I would read almost anything. Style and theme over content, I guess. Turned me off to the point that I haven't touched anything of his since. Maybe it's an acquired taste, but it's not a taste I'd care to acquire.
I feel the same way about his short stories.
On the other hand, I feel the same about most of the New Wave writers.
Too little of interest under that avant-garde surface.
(And just now I noticed Dangerous Visions 1, pocket edition, is lying right beside me
on the desk.)
I believe the submitter is well aware he could use latex with svn, but his whole point was that he was looking for a way to combine version control with some editing software/process more user friendly than latex.
That's the opposite of my interpretation.
He seems to like LaTeX, use it already, and everything -- but wants to start serious collaboration
on documents, and fears adding SVN will be too hard for his coworkers.
My suggestion: go for LaTeX+SVN.
SVN used this way is not rocket science; all the really complex stuff comes from the fact
that you are collaborating with other people.
I have never experienced productivity gains in my experiments with Eclipse (the only IDE I've messed with since turbo C++).
TurboPascal and AmigaBASIC in my case.
I've never touched Eclipse or any other recent IDE.
I use Emacs and the Unix shell as my only development environment
since fifteen years. Possibly I could become more productive in Eclipse by
year 2015 or so (if I switched now). Let's just say it's not at the top of my list.
In addition to that, in the handful of times I've been on teams with a mix of IDE users and nonusers, the IDE users have always been the least productive team members. The IDEs are clearly not to blame, but it is interesting to me that it is the less capable developers who use IDEs while the more capable developers tend to ignore them.
Roughly my experience too -- newbies tend to look for tools which can automagically
solve their problems, and really dedicated programmers chose editor when they were in their teens.
(But to be fair, an inept vi(m) user is also an ugly sight.)
Another behaviour by default that C got wrong is initialisation: by default your variables are not initialised so if you forget to initialise your variables your program may act randomly which is a pain to debug, [...]
As opposed to having variables initalised by default, so your program can act randomly
when the default value is not suitable in your scenario,
and you forgot to initialise your variables?
The compiler wouldn't even be able to help you by issuing warnings about uninitialized variables,
and neither would valgrind or similar tools.
C++ solves that by letting you define your own types with cheap, user-defined, type-specific enforced initialization, i.e. constructors.
Of course there is more than a syntatic difference between a reference and a pointer in C++.
For one, references CANNOT be null, while pointers are allowed to be null.
This reminds me of an embedded project that I worked on some years ago, that was mostly coded in C. [...] a global variable declared as "extern unsigned char* physmem;", whose address was defined during linking to be zero. [...]
If it's true that C++ doesn't allow this, then that excludes the use of C++ on hardware with such properties.
Who said that it doesn't? The grandparent was talking
about C++ references which (as he pointed out) are not pointers.
C++ allows it just as much as C does (i.e. it works in many environments
with flat memory, but the language doesn't formally support it).
But it doesn't seem like a great idea;
you could probably use C++ and come up with a faster, clearer and less unsafe
way to access your hardware registers.
The "more" correct way to write such code is: if (ptr!=NULL){...} Ive worked at proyects where that was enforced. It really doesnt matter in C because NULL is defined to be zero, but its better to use "ptr!=NULL" anyways, since ptr is not a boolean value. Its an abuse of the fact that NULL==0 to write "!ptr".
How can it be abuse to do something which is readable, widely used and guaranteed to
work just as well as the longer version?
I suspect people who prefer if(p!=NULL) to if(p)
had an early love affair with some other language with a different type system,
which they never really got over.
That said, I can tolerate if(p!=NULL) if needed.
if(something==TRUE), on the other hand...
Slashdot Mirror
Especially since one trip is only around 100 micrograms or so ...
But the article said "lysergic acid -- a relative of LSD ..." so it might just as like have been something
not related to drug use. Lots of ergot-infected grass around?
&
I don't know about asterisks, but ampersands give me the creeps.
Is it clear that these goats produce any significant amount of methane? The meat industry uses cattle (not goats), specifically bred to grow quickly on god-knows-what they feed them (sure isn't anything like the vegetation around Google HQ).
No, it was an enum. I can see why someone would want to keep that type information for as long as possible, and using std::map is one way. It's a bit odd though ...
I would have written my own tiny class instead, with enums in the interface and a std::vector or even a C array internally. Performance cost: none (unless I choose std::vector and these things are created and copied really often).
Inline -- or know enough about the function to take a shortcut past the ABI. That's what I prefer to do too ... but be careful with phrases like "really suck".
It's usually only a problem if the profiler says so.
What a horrible page you linked to. Not only do they recommend escaping the ordinary Latin-1 character set as if it was 1995; they also cannot spell "guillemot".
Free software isn't worthless. It's priceless.
Not according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_mammals#Expansion_of_ecological_niches_in_the_Mesozoic.
Free as in beer, it seems (based on its Wikipedia entry). That's a showstopper for some of us. (And the shoddy Linux support doesn't help either. "i386"? My main systems are AMD64 and ppc.)
No, dammit. URLs (or "links") are designed for humans and machines. Just like file names. You should try to find reasonably good ones: descriptive, brief names which can stay the same for a long time.
Good thing they did that, too. Even bulldozing a few olive tree gardens is a lot of work for the Israeli army -- imagine how hard it would be to bulldoze the land of milk and honey.
And yet you cannot spell his name ...
By the way, is the author of the NYT article *the* Steve Crocker?
The Amiga had more capable floppy drive hardware though.
Not true -- when I grew up it was called Svenska Sesam and I remember being surprised when I learned they had made an english version. But you study the language from age ten or earlier, and TV for teens and grownups is just subtitled.
Make that trilingual, since he's of the swedish-speaking minority in .fi.
I don't know whether bilingualism is good for the brain. Perhaps. What makes a difference is being part of a programmer culture. Everything of value is written in English, from the JARGON file to Usenet, to all the good books, the man pages. Being cut away from that would be like trying to be a scholar in the 18th century and not know Latin -- you'd reinvent a few wheels and then get stuck.
Partly agree. State and HTTP do not mix well, and it seems to me a lot of people earn their living by working around this in more or less kludgy ways. And yes, people should write custom networking protocols more often, and ship specs and/or binaries instead of abusing web browsers.
But that doesn't imply that the web should be replaced by X11. The web isn't all heavy-weight "web applications" run by big corporations who can pay the for the huge CPU, RAM and network usage you suggest. Nor are all web users on recent computers with fast, low-latency networking.
What you write here makes me believe you know little about standards, C++ and HTML. For example, in what way does HTML make promises "about everything"? Where does it say what a H1 heading should look (or sound, or feel) like?
I think it's the other way around. Super-long URLs tend to be alphanumeric garbage and/or long lists of undocumented CGI-style variables. Someone who cares about URLs as names for resources/documents in the original spirit of HTTP (e.g. the Wikipedia) will come up with much shorter names, like a short sentence.
I bet most other company networks don't look like Google's (for better or worse),
Where in TFA or Google's PDF do you find anything about converting applications taking much of the time? I doubt that was needed -- but it is likely that they had to test the applications, if they had never been used with IPv6 before.
I suspect most of the application work was reconfiguring, and comparable to the work it would take to switch to another IPv4 network range. Finding those odd, yet vital, scripts with hard-coded IP addresses in them, and so on.
(I say suspect, because I've only done vaguely similar things.)
Screen savers that draw stuff on the screen is so 1992 -- flying toasters and all. I have forgotten them so thoroughly that I read the posting but parsed the word as "going into deepest DPMS OFF mode".
"Was" is the key word here: it's done, live with it. The bug is in Slashdot, not IPv6.
Administrators will need to learn, but programmers ... come on!
Stevens showed how easy it is to make applications IPv4/v6-agnostic in his network programming books, more than ten years ago.
I feel the same way about his short stories. On the other hand, I feel the same about most of the New Wave writers. Too little of interest under that avant-garde surface.
(And just now I noticed Dangerous Visions 1, pocket edition, is lying right beside me on the desk.)
That's the opposite of my interpretation. He seems to like LaTeX, use it already, and everything -- but wants to start serious collaboration on documents, and fears adding SVN will be too hard for his coworkers.
My suggestion: go for LaTeX+SVN. SVN used this way is not rocket science; all the really complex stuff comes from the fact that you are collaborating with other people.
TurboPascal and AmigaBASIC in my case. I've never touched Eclipse or any other recent IDE. I use Emacs and the Unix shell as my only development environment since fifteen years. Possibly I could become more productive in Eclipse by year 2015 or so (if I switched now). Let's just say it's not at the top of my list.
Roughly my experience too -- newbies tend to look for tools which can automagically solve their problems, and really dedicated programmers chose editor when they were in their teens.
(But to be fair, an inept vi(m) user is also an ugly sight.)
As opposed to having variables initalised by default, so your program can act randomly when the default value is not suitable in your scenario, and you forgot to initialise your variables? The compiler wouldn't even be able to help you by issuing warnings about uninitialized variables, and neither would valgrind or similar tools.
C++ solves that by letting you define your own types with cheap, user-defined, type-specific enforced initialization, i.e. constructors.
Who said that it doesn't? The grandparent was talking about C++ references which (as he pointed out) are not pointers. C++ allows it just as much as C does (i.e. it works in many environments with flat memory, but the language doesn't formally support it). But it doesn't seem like a great idea; you could probably use C++ and come up with a faster, clearer and less unsafe way to access your hardware registers.
How can it be abuse to do something which is readable, widely used and guaranteed to work just as well as the longer version? I suspect people who prefer if(p!=NULL) to if(p) had an early love affair with some other language with a different type system, which they never really got over.
That said, I can tolerate if(p!=NULL) if needed. if(something==TRUE), on the other hand ...