Exactly, my first thought on reading this was the the venue had to be reported incorrectly. A patent troll got slapped down in the Eastern District of Texas. How could that have happened?
Even worse, there are people that criticise readable code for it being too simple.
Thanks for bringing up a huge pet peeve of mine. It's one thing if the code truly needs to be optimized for speed/efficiency or to fit in some very limited resources, but for most things I've ever encountered the difference between "less efficient but more readable" and "highly optimized but I'll never grok how this works" is often no more than 2-3 lines of extra code and an execution time difference of at most a few microseconds. No matter what, that highly optimized but obfuscated code should be commented.
Perhaps you should place the blame for the shit coding on shit coders rather than the language? Because it's not particularly difficult to write good, clean code in Perl, certainly no harder than in most other languages. Perl does seem a bit more tolerant of obfuscated code, but it's far from necessary to write it that way, unless as you say somebody is trying to show off how 1337 they are.
According to the analysis I read this morning, restricting regulation to those facilities already otherwise regulated means that EPA can now set limits on CO2 emissions from 83% of all facilities vs. 86% without such restrictions. So really, EPA got much more out of this ruling than plaintiffs did, which is probably a good thing.
I didn't really feel the need to go there, but I hear you. Considering that my job relies on keeping the superconducting coils in our magnets at ~4K, I'm all too aware of this. Our prices have nearly doubled in the last few years, and there have been a handful of supply scares.
Using liquid helium would be way cost prohibitive, especially for a very small gain (8.5 GHz vs. 8 GHz in GP's post). Under a fairly good contract and purchased in relatively large quantities, our current cost of LHe is slightly less than $11/liter.
Liquid nitrogen is a different story. It's still expensive compared to a cooling fan, but we pay ~$0.40/liter for LN2. If you were doing a lot of this, the "standard" tank sizes are 160 or 180 L, one such tank carefully managed should last a bare minimum of 1-2 weeks cooling a small number of CPUs, or a few dollars/day.
So, if you really need that 8 GHz speed, and I can't think of any remotely general purpose chip that you can buy that runs anywhere near that clock speed, it could be cost effective. However, as the post just above as I'm writing this starts to point out, it's a moot point if you can't feed in enough data to keep a chip running at that speed - if you're idle 75% of the time, might as well just not bother overclocking like that unless you can also get your RAM, busses, etc. to run 4x faster than their normal rating.
"You drove 13,000 miles. Your vehicle ways 2300 pounds. Your tax is $125 for two years."
Do you realize that this is the first post in the thread about a mileage tax that also accounts for the type of vehicle used? That seems relatively fair, although I have a feeling that it would be manipulated to favor various constituencies. OTOH, given that smaller vehicles produce less wear and tear, a tax per unit of fuel really does seem to accomplish the same thing.
Most of the previous posts seemed to suggesting a flat tax per mile, and that I can't support, since those of us who drive relatively small vehicles most of the time would be greatly subsidizing the trucking industry, and I don't really expect that prices for everything else would come down as a result.
Well, let's see, the AT&T contract price will be $199 for 32 GB and $299 for 64 GB. I just recently bought a class 10 32 GB uSD card from a reputable manufacturer for <$20 delivered. I think you have your answer if you read between the lines.
Legitimate question here, truly I'm curious and don't know the answer, but there is lots of research says that at certain size/distance combos, you really can't tell the difference (too lazy to Google it).
So, are you noticing a difference because you can really tell the difference, or is it because of scaling with a 720p source and a 1080p native resolution display? Obviously, 1080 != 2x720.
Or perhaps to ask this in a different way, if you had two displays of otherwise similar size and quality but one 1080p and the other 720p (both native), with each displaying content from a source at it's native resolution, could you truly tell the difference from more than 2-3 meters away?
It could be that, if it wasn't recent, the CC companies were way less than forthcoming about breaches. It also would have been a good idea to call the company more than a day before a major trip.
Sounds about right. I've been with Verizon for a long time now. It's not that their pricing or customer service is better than anyone else's, or that I feel any particular loyalty to them, but they do one thing really right. They have at least useable coverage nearly everywhere. I've found very few places where I can't get a signal. Work is iffy (in all fairness, I'm in a basement and service quality seems to depend more on the individual phone than the carrier), and last time I was in the mountains of Colorado there are some places that don't have signal, but that's about it. They would be a bad choice if I did a lot of international travel, though.
The problem isn't that perl is old. The problem is that perl reads (and writes) like encrypted sanskrit...
I really wish people would stop saying this. It's certainly possible to write horribly obfuscated Perl, deliberately or otherwise, just as it's possible to write C, or Python, or anything else in a nearly unreadable way. I'll grant that Perl maybe allows you to get away with a bit more.
However, it's just about as easy to write clean, maintainable Perl as it is in any other language. Follow good coding practices and you'll have clean code, code badly and it'll be a train wreck regardless of language.
More than likely, I don't expect Perl 6 to ever see light of day. The big problem with it is that it's not Perl.
I don't have a huge problem with a new scripting language, but recognize that it's (for all useful purposes) something new and different and give the project a new name. Also, Perl 5 is AFAICT completely backwards compatible to at least Perl 3; Perl 6 either won't run prior code or requires a huge hack to do so.
I see one BIG problem with your proposal - what's to stop some locality from issuing lots of borderline/bogus tickets to raise revenue and/or meet quotas? As you point out, it's not really worth contesting a $10 fine. So unless they're retired and have nothing better to do, most people will just bend over and pay the fine. Not to mention, if the purpose of the fine is truly to act as a deterrent, $10 isn't going to do that for most people.
I assume you mean Firewire. And you may be correct about the license costing 10x USB, but that makes the difference look far larger than it practically was.
IIRC, when I bought my first and only Firewire peripheral, a CD-RW drive (both were relatively new technologies at the time), that drive cost me $397. I believe the cheapest USB CD-RW was on the order of $300 and painfully slow by comparison. The license cost for Firewire was $1/port. So if the manufacturer didn't want to lose money on the license fee, it could have cost $399. Firewire lost for a variety of reasons, not least of which being that only Apple and Sony really ever embraced it, but licensing cost wasn't one of them. Sad really, since it was a superior standard in all measurable ways.
But they are NOT "the same". Classes at top tier schools have... more competitive students.
Frankly, I think you could have left the rest of your list out and this would be the answer. Better/more competitive schools draw a generally better caliber of students. I've studied and/or worked at enough different institutions of higher education (small liberal arts college, Ivy League uni, 3 different state universities) that I'll say this as fact, and I know a number of people who've taken courses/gotten degrees at Phoenix or equivalent, usually because it was necessary for their continued employment.
This isn't to say that there aren't good students at these "lesser" institutions. In fact, I'd say the very top students have a similar level of talent/intelligence across the board. Many good students choose to stay local for various reasons: financial, family, etc. The real difference is in the bottom 50% or so of the student bodies. At a top school, these students are still generally decent, at least they don't struggle to walk and chew gum at the same time. At the lower tier schools, it's a very different story.
...back/forward separated and arbitrarily movable...
Well, sort of. I can't seem to move them in any way that puts any other icon between them and the URL box. Other than that, I'll echo that this addon is about the only thing that makes FF29 useable. Not sure what I'll switch to if they keep Chrome-ifying FF.
Some extensions would display things there and that's about it.
Exactly one of the things that drove me nuts about this release until I found an extension to restore the status bar. There are quite a few extensions that put things in the status bar that are otherwise not particularly interactive, if at all. So if there's no status bar, and the main toolbar is full, and the main window is displaying page content, where, pray tell, are these extensions supposed to put things? IMO, it at least partially defeats the purpose of having plugins. I have no problem with being able to toggle the status bar off if that floats your boat, or even making hidden the default, but what purpose is served by eliminating it other than fulfilling some devs desire for a "clean" interface?
No status bar. No tabs under the URL bar. That's the opposite to the way I like it.
100% agree with you. I have no problem with anyone who prefers it this way, was mildly annoyed when they changed the defaults somewhere in the early 20s version wise, but at least it was a configurable preference (for those who can type about:config at least) up through FF28. It's not so much that someone decided to change it, although there is a problem with change for the sake of change (see: new Coke).
FWIW, if anyone hasn't found it already, the "Classic Theme Restorer" add-on "fixes" the changes by allowing at least some of them to be set, in particular the two quoted above. For now, until someone decides that we shouldn't have that choice at all and Firefox completes the transformation into Chrome.
I see the same with some recipes, or even box instructions. Several other replies have focused on the fact that an onion doesn't take 10 minutes to chop, so I'll avoid that. But one of my big cooking pet peeves is that box of pasta that boldly states "ready in 8-10 minutes". Which is true, if you don't count time to boil water in the first place or for it to come back to a boil after adding the box of pasta and dropping the temperature.
True, but I surely wouldn't limit that description to the IT industry. There are LOTS of fields where the majority are barely competent and don't really care, but as you say, there are always a few experts who truly have a passion for what they do.
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Exactly, my first thought on reading this was the the venue had to be reported incorrectly. A patent troll got slapped down in the Eastern District of Texas. How could that have happened?
Even worse, there are people that criticise readable code for it being too simple.
Thanks for bringing up a huge pet peeve of mine. It's one thing if the code truly needs to be optimized for speed/efficiency or to fit in some very limited resources, but for most things I've ever encountered the difference between "less efficient but more readable" and "highly optimized but I'll never grok how this works" is often no more than 2-3 lines of extra code and an execution time difference of at most a few microseconds. No matter what, that highly optimized but obfuscated code should be commented.
Perhaps you should place the blame for the shit coding on shit coders rather than the language? Because it's not particularly difficult to write good, clean code in Perl, certainly no harder than in most other languages. Perl does seem a bit more tolerant of obfuscated code, but it's far from necessary to write it that way, unless as you say somebody is trying to show off how 1337 they are.
According to the analysis I read this morning, restricting regulation to those facilities already otherwise regulated means that EPA can now set limits on CO2 emissions from 83% of all facilities vs. 86% without such restrictions. So really, EPA got much more out of this ruling than plaintiffs did, which is probably a good thing.
I didn't really feel the need to go there, but I hear you. Considering that my job relies on keeping the superconducting coils in our magnets at ~4K, I'm all too aware of this. Our prices have nearly doubled in the last few years, and there have been a handful of supply scares.
Using liquid helium would be way cost prohibitive, especially for a very small gain (8.5 GHz vs. 8 GHz in GP's post). Under a fairly good contract and purchased in relatively large quantities, our current cost of LHe is slightly less than $11/liter.
Liquid nitrogen is a different story. It's still expensive compared to a cooling fan, but we pay ~$0.40/liter for LN2. If you were doing a lot of this, the "standard" tank sizes are 160 or 180 L, one such tank carefully managed should last a bare minimum of 1-2 weeks cooling a small number of CPUs, or a few dollars/day.
So, if you really need that 8 GHz speed, and I can't think of any remotely general purpose chip that you can buy that runs anywhere near that clock speed, it could be cost effective. However, as the post just above as I'm writing this starts to point out, it's a moot point if you can't feed in enough data to keep a chip running at that speed - if you're idle 75% of the time, might as well just not bother overclocking like that unless you can also get your RAM, busses, etc. to run 4x faster than their normal rating.
"You drove 13,000 miles. Your vehicle ways 2300 pounds. Your tax is $125 for two years."
Do you realize that this is the first post in the thread about a mileage tax that also accounts for the type of vehicle used? That seems relatively fair, although I have a feeling that it would be manipulated to favor various constituencies. OTOH, given that smaller vehicles produce less wear and tear, a tax per unit of fuel really does seem to accomplish the same thing.
Most of the previous posts seemed to suggesting a flat tax per mile, and that I can't support, since those of us who drive relatively small vehicles most of the time would be greatly subsidizing the trucking industry, and I don't really expect that prices for everything else would come down as a result.
I realize you're posting to the /. crowd, but do you realize how tremendously difficult formatting a hard drive is for most of the population?
Well, let's see, the AT&T contract price will be $199 for 32 GB and $299 for 64 GB. I just recently bought a class 10 32 GB uSD card from a reputable manufacturer for <$20 delivered. I think you have your answer if you read between the lines.
Legitimate question here, truly I'm curious and don't know the answer, but there is lots of research says that at certain size/distance combos, you really can't tell the difference (too lazy to Google it).
So, are you noticing a difference because you can really tell the difference, or is it because of scaling with a 720p source and a 1080p native resolution display? Obviously, 1080 != 2x720.
Or perhaps to ask this in a different way, if you had two displays of otherwise similar size and quality but one 1080p and the other 720p (both native), with each displaying content from a source at it's native resolution, could you truly tell the difference from more than 2-3 meters away?
It could be that, if it wasn't recent, the CC companies were way less than forthcoming about breaches. It also would have been a good idea to call the company more than a day before a major trip.
Sounds about right. I've been with Verizon for a long time now. It's not that their pricing or customer service is better than anyone else's, or that I feel any particular loyalty to them, but they do one thing really right. They have at least useable coverage nearly everywhere. I've found very few places where I can't get a signal. Work is iffy (in all fairness, I'm in a basement and service quality seems to depend more on the individual phone than the carrier), and last time I was in the mountains of Colorado there are some places that don't have signal, but that's about it. They would be a bad choice if I did a lot of international travel, though.
I think they're jockeying to be next in line for CEO of Comcast...
The problem isn't that perl is old. The problem is that perl reads (and writes) like encrypted sanskrit...
I really wish people would stop saying this. It's certainly possible to write horribly obfuscated Perl, deliberately or otherwise, just as it's possible to write C, or Python, or anything else in a nearly unreadable way. I'll grant that Perl maybe allows you to get away with a bit more.
However, it's just about as easy to write clean, maintainable Perl as it is in any other language. Follow good coding practices and you'll have clean code, code badly and it'll be a train wreck regardless of language.
More than likely, I don't expect Perl 6 to ever see light of day. The big problem with it is that it's not Perl.
I don't have a huge problem with a new scripting language, but recognize that it's (for all useful purposes) something new and different and give the project a new name. Also, Perl 5 is AFAICT completely backwards compatible to at least Perl 3; Perl 6 either won't run prior code or requires a huge hack to do so.
I see one BIG problem with your proposal - what's to stop some locality from issuing lots of borderline/bogus tickets to raise revenue and/or meet quotas? As you point out, it's not really worth contesting a $10 fine. So unless they're retired and have nothing better to do, most people will just bend over and pay the fine. Not to mention, if the purpose of the fine is truly to act as a deterrent, $10 isn't going to do that for most people.
I assume you mean Firewire. And you may be correct about the license costing 10x USB, but that makes the difference look far larger than it practically was.
IIRC, when I bought my first and only Firewire peripheral, a CD-RW drive (both were relatively new technologies at the time), that drive cost me $397. I believe the cheapest USB CD-RW was on the order of $300 and painfully slow by comparison. The license cost for Firewire was $1/port. So if the manufacturer didn't want to lose money on the license fee, it could have cost $399. Firewire lost for a variety of reasons, not least of which being that only Apple and Sony really ever embraced it, but licensing cost wasn't one of them. Sad really, since it was a superior standard in all measurable ways.
But, there, is, no, shortage, of, redundant, commas.
William Shatner, is that you?
But they are NOT "the same". Classes at top tier schools have ... more competitive students.
Frankly, I think you could have left the rest of your list out and this would be the answer. Better/more competitive schools draw a generally better caliber of students. I've studied and/or worked at enough different institutions of higher education (small liberal arts college, Ivy League uni, 3 different state universities) that I'll say this as fact, and I know a number of people who've taken courses/gotten degrees at Phoenix or equivalent, usually because it was necessary for their continued employment.
This isn't to say that there aren't good students at these "lesser" institutions. In fact, I'd say the very top students have a similar level of talent/intelligence across the board. Many good students choose to stay local for various reasons: financial, family, etc. The real difference is in the bottom 50% or so of the student bodies. At a top school, these students are still generally decent, at least they don't struggle to walk and chew gum at the same time. At the lower tier schools, it's a very different story.
...back/forward separated and arbitrarily movable...
Well, sort of. I can't seem to move them in any way that puts any other icon between them and the URL box. Other than that, I'll echo that this addon is about the only thing that makes FF29 useable. Not sure what I'll switch to if they keep Chrome-ifying FF.
I don't care what the default is to be honest; as long as it respects my choice once i've made it. Removing the option entirely is the problem.
If I hadn't already commented, I'd mod you up for this. You've stated the problem clearly and succinctly.
Some extensions would display things there and that's about it.
Exactly one of the things that drove me nuts about this release until I found an extension to restore the status bar. There are quite a few extensions that put things in the status bar that are otherwise not particularly interactive, if at all. So if there's no status bar, and the main toolbar is full, and the main window is displaying page content, where, pray tell, are these extensions supposed to put things? IMO, it at least partially defeats the purpose of having plugins. I have no problem with being able to toggle the status bar off if that floats your boat, or even making hidden the default, but what purpose is served by eliminating it other than fulfilling some devs desire for a "clean" interface?
No status bar. No tabs under the URL bar. That's the opposite to the way I like it.
100% agree with you. I have no problem with anyone who prefers it this way, was mildly annoyed when they changed the defaults somewhere in the early 20s version wise, but at least it was a configurable preference (for those who can type about:config at least) up through FF28. It's not so much that someone decided to change it, although there is a problem with change for the sake of change (see: new Coke).
FWIW, if anyone hasn't found it already, the "Classic Theme Restorer" add-on "fixes" the changes by allowing at least some of them to be set, in particular the two quoted above. For now, until someone decides that we shouldn't have that choice at all and Firefox completes the transformation into Chrome.
I see the same with some recipes, or even box instructions. Several other replies have focused on the fact that an onion doesn't take 10 minutes to chop, so I'll avoid that. But one of my big cooking pet peeves is that box of pasta that boldly states "ready in 8-10 minutes". Which is true, if you don't count time to boil water in the first place or for it to come back to a boil after adding the box of pasta and dropping the temperature.
True, but I surely wouldn't limit that description to the IT industry. There are LOTS of fields where the majority are barely competent and don't really care, but as you say, there are always a few experts who truly have a passion for what they do.