RISC CPUs and UNIX OSs are rather obscure technicalities compared to Apple's really big achievements in the eighties: Desktop Publishing and the LaserWriter. That really changed the world.
Apple has a lot of flair and a strong vision. I miss their products sometimes. What I don't miss is the difficulty in getting parts and servicing (as well as the steep prices), the increasingly obnoxious unobtrusiveness of the increasingly dully tasteful design, and the company's apparently uncontrollable urge to drive itself into the ground whenever they're being successfull.
Win95 SUCKS. It is a dumb, inconsistent graphical shell whose metaphors break down CONSTANTLY. The ONLY good thing to come out of the Win95 UI is the contextual menu!
I said farewell to Apple a long time ago, but before making statements like "The Win95 UI is pretty nice", PLEASE try a Mac circa 1995 or even 1990!
Filter by default - if you need your ports or you want to do your own firewalling then get the "advanced user" account that costs less but requires more responsibility from the user.
No, you've got it entirely backwards.
It's the "family" account that will cost less. The "family" account will include traffic filtering and it will come with a service charge for every webpage viewed and every email sent. Traffic filtering will ensure that that your Internet activity will remain limited to the viewing of webpages and the sending of emails.
It's the "professional" account, without any filtering or traffic restrictions, that will start costing more and more money.
In other words, we (the techies) will have to pay more, the non-techies will get less service, and the ISP will get all the money.
Kids aren't blank slates for the parents to write on. Kids have an innate character, their own desires and thoughts. And they're masters at deceiving their parents, in part because parents want and should trust their kids.
How a parent raises his kids has a decisive influence on their development. But it is not the only influence, and it does not account for everything.
I'll grant that my view of the past may be "rosy". But I think it's fair to say that something like Columnbine didn't happen back then. I don't think something like this would have been glossed over either.
Obviously parents are responsibility for their kids, but there is only so much they can do. Several studies exist which suggest that childrens' behavior is determined to a staggering extent by their peers rather than their parents. And we must also not underestimate the innate nature of a kid; just because the law puts all the blame with the parents, that doesn't mean kids can't think for themselves. The bottom line is that society must shoulder some of the burden if any parental guidance is going to be effective.
I don't mean to argue that the media drove these kids to do what they did. But it's hard to not see where they got the idea from.
I don't think there is a direct relationship from video games to violence. But I do believe that the violence in books, movies, sensationalist news broadcasts and (also) video games, does account for something. At any rate its ignorant to suggest it doesn't have any influence whatsoever; it's a well-known fact for example that suicide rates increase when newspapers report a suicide.
As for harsh discipline, well, I'm all for discipline, but I think its been satisfactorily proven that "beating the shit out of kids" doesn't work at all. Most violent offenders have had the shit repeatedly beaten out of them, without much success.
Parents have never been able to stop a kid from doing things like smoking, and similarly they'll never be able to monitor precisely what kind of games the kids play.
Besides, it's hardly a matter of individual choice (or, in this case, family choice). Parents, like all people, live in a society that they did not create and can only marginally control. Their ability to shield their kids from the harmful effects of that society is limited.
Finally, your argument implies that this tragedy would not have occurred had the parents paid more attention to their kids. First of all you have no way of knowing how much attention the parents paid, but more importantly, the argument isn't supported by the facts: after all, there are many, many neglected children, and very, very few of them commit these kinds of atrocities.
If it was the parents' fault for not excercising enough or the proper kind of oversight, then violence of this kind would have to have been much more prevalent in times when parents had even less oversight, i.e. our grandfather's generation. Kids fifty to eighty years ago spent lots and lots of time building rafts and treehouses, far away from their parents. Yet they did not turn into psychopaths.
Today not a year goes by without an act of serious wanton violence by kids. It's getting harder and harder to maintain that culture products such as movies, the news, and (yes) also games don't have any influence on this.
The problem with this argument is that parents used to have far less control over their children two generations ago than is widely assumed today.
Fifty to eigthy years ago, kids would spend most of their time either in school or playing with other kids, without any adults around to supervise them. Today (the rise of two-income households and other such societal developments notwithstanding) kids are almost always in the influence sphere of their parent, i.e. in or around the house. Yet this continuous oversight doesn't seem to prevent the kinds of violence we're seeking.
The original poster told us something he actually experienced for himself. You are telling us what you were taught from books. His words carry more force than yours. Even if I think you are closer to the truth than he was, donutello.
Christ, have you been permanently disfigured by a creative writing class or something? And what does any of this have to do with the topic at hand? Jeez. Do you know anything about XRender or evas? Or do you just reflexively rehash this story any time it seems vaguely appropriate? How does your meandering demented pontification contribute to the question why XRender performs slower? What "design lessons" are to be learned from a 20 year old solution to a problem that has long since been solved? Why don't you mention some actually germane examples, such as how "blitter" chips were displaced over the course of time by ever-faster CPUs? Bah humbug. Get a grip.
No, but that's not what the original poster claimed anyway. The original poster mentioned "adding robustness" through "array bounds checking" and "input sanity checking" by "taking error actions if [something goes wrong]". But by and large there is no such error action, there is only abort.
It's not a question of efficiency, it's a good solid engineering rule of thumb: don't trap errors that you don't know how to handle.
If your index runs out of your array bounds then the program contains a very serious bug and there is very little you can do about it.
You could even go so far as to verify the result of each calculation, but what do you do when the result comes back wrong? It's not a question of efficiency, it's a matter of never giving in to the belief that there's a magic bullet.
What you're describing is called eugenics, the betterment of mankind through reproductive control. It was a commonly held notion a century ago and it lingered on in the popular imagination for a number of decades, until the implementation of eugenics by various fascist regimes (and the horrible consequences) proved to most people that the idea was not only barbarous and cruel, but also deeply flawed at its core (not to mention its implementation).
You need to show why evolution produced a species which cares for and tends to its sick and disabled, and mourns them when they die.
(sarcasm) Yes, that's why all the apps that we have today are so secure! (/sarcasm)
I think we've achieved pretty good security and pretty good stability for a low cost. I don't buy into the "software crisis" view.
As for the crash, if the crash is easily reproducible, yes it is easy to fix, but how about the misterious, non-reproducible crash, that happens only when the load is high, so only when your client DOESN'T want your app to crash?
It can be very,very hard to correct..
Well, yes. C does have drawbacks of course, and some things are better done in other languages. However mysterious problems crop up no matter what the language. Most of the problems (security-wise and reliability-wise) don't occur at the language level but at the application level.
You'll copy me one thousand times: "premature optimisation is the root of all evil!"
You copy me another: Worry about performance.
Coding everything in C for a high-level app which should be doable in Python,Ruby or Java is premature optimisation..
I don't agree. Premature optimization is the practice of specializing a program to yield better performance before the performance characteristics of the generalized solution are fully understood.
The source of the misconception that "C is premature optimization" comes from an incorrect argument that follows from the observation that some optimizations are done in assembly. The argument goes a little like this: "A lot of premature optimization is done in assembly. Assembly is a low level language. C is a low level language. C is a premature optimization." But the argument is clearly fallacious.
Well the nasty surprise you're talking about are in a GC environement: too much memory usage, bad performance. When you do it by hand, a bad memory handling will usually cause crashes, security problems,etc..
True, programming errors can lead to crashes and security problems. But at least you can easily fix those.
Yes, Python is much slower than C, but is-it too slow for the application considered or is-it fast enough?
Who cares? Yeah, that will fix a few errors more quickly, at compile time. But Python is much more stringent than, say, Perl, and if you're passing in the wrong thing, it will tell you about it eventually.
And the program will collapse. So long, work.
That's my biggest point. If you're writing business logic, the last thing you should have to worry about is memory management.
You always have to worry about memory management. Doing it explicitly reduces the chances of nasty surprises later on (ballooning memory use, bad performance through to unexpected GC behavior, not being able to recover gracefully from out-of-memory errors).
Again, who cares? Python is plenty fast enough on today's hardware. UNLESS you are doing something that truly needs CPU horsepower, like ray tracing, Python is easily fast enough.
Python is slow compared to C. Not just where execution speed is concerned, but also startup time.
I don't understand a word you're saying. It's all corpspeak to me.
Content-related? Is there such a thing as non-content-related? Based on your interests? As opposed to tealeaves? Integration of links rather than the, uhhh, disintegration of links? End-user? As opposed to intermediate user? First class citizen? Meaning what?
You are basically arguing that Gentoo offers similar performance to Debian, provided Gentoo is tweaked to the point where it is almost identical to Debian. But at that point, why not just install Debian??
The problem is that it'll be the one-off-hack that'll have to be maintained for years to come, while the large programming project will just sit and collect dust in a closet.
Sigh. It's not true. What do you think loses Microsoft more money: an X-Box that doesn't get sold or an X-Box that does get sold?
It _might_ be possible that Microsoft loses money on the X-Box, but I'd wager that only a tiny part of that is on hardware costs. The rest is to amortize R&D, marketing, administrative support, etc.
If you want to compare the RIAA to horse carriage manufacturers then you should put your money where your mouth is and stop using the product the RIAA is putting out.
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RISC CPUs and UNIX OSs are rather obscure technicalities compared to Apple's really big achievements in the eighties: Desktop Publishing and the LaserWriter. That really changed the world.
Apple has a lot of flair and a strong vision. I miss their products sometimes. What I don't miss is the difficulty in getting parts and servicing (as well as the steep prices), the increasingly obnoxious unobtrusiveness of the increasingly dully tasteful design, and the company's apparently uncontrollable urge to drive itself into the ground whenever they're being successfull.
Win95 SUCKS. It is a dumb, inconsistent graphical shell whose metaphors break down CONSTANTLY. The ONLY good thing to come out of the Win95 UI is the contextual menu!
I said farewell to Apple a long time ago, but before making statements like "The Win95 UI is pretty nice", PLEASE try a Mac circa 1995 or even 1990!
Filter by default - if you need your ports or you want to do your own firewalling then get the "advanced user" account that costs less but requires more responsibility from the user.
No, you've got it entirely backwards.
It's the "family" account that will cost less. The "family" account will include traffic filtering and it will come with a service charge for every webpage viewed and every email sent. Traffic filtering will ensure that that your Internet activity will remain limited to the viewing of webpages and the sending of emails.
It's the "professional" account, without any filtering or traffic restrictions, that will start costing more and more money.
In other words, we (the techies) will have to pay more, the non-techies will get less service, and the ISP will get all the money.
Kids aren't blank slates for the parents to write on. Kids have an innate character, their own desires and thoughts. And they're masters at deceiving their parents, in part because parents want and should trust their kids.
How a parent raises his kids has a decisive influence on their development. But it is not the only influence, and it does not account for everything.
I'll grant that my view of the past may be "rosy". But I think it's fair to say that something like Columnbine didn't happen back then. I don't think something like this would have been glossed over either.
Obviously parents are responsibility for their kids, but there is only so much they can do. Several studies exist which suggest that childrens' behavior is determined to a staggering extent by their peers rather than their parents. And we must also not underestimate the innate nature of a kid; just because the law puts all the blame with the parents, that doesn't mean kids can't think for themselves. The bottom line is that society must shoulder some of the burden if any parental guidance is going to be effective.
I don't mean to argue that the media drove these kids to do what they did. But it's hard to not see where they got the idea from.
I don't think there is a direct relationship from video games to violence. But I do believe that the violence in books, movies, sensationalist news broadcasts and (also) video games, does account for something. At any rate its ignorant to suggest it doesn't have any influence whatsoever; it's a well-known fact for example that suicide rates increase when newspapers report a suicide.
As for harsh discipline, well, I'm all for discipline, but I think its been satisfactorily proven that "beating the shit out of kids" doesn't work at all. Most violent offenders have had the shit repeatedly beaten out of them, without much success.
Parents have never been able to stop a kid from doing things like smoking, and similarly they'll never be able to monitor precisely what kind of games the kids play.
Besides, it's hardly a matter of individual choice (or, in this case, family choice). Parents, like all people, live in a society that they did not create and can only marginally control. Their ability to shield their kids from the harmful effects of that society is limited.
Finally, your argument implies that this tragedy would not have occurred had the parents paid more attention to their kids. First of all you have no way of knowing how much attention the parents paid, but more importantly, the argument isn't supported by the facts: after all, there are many, many neglected children, and very, very few of them commit these kinds of atrocities.
If it was the parents' fault for not excercising enough or the proper kind of oversight, then violence of this kind would have to have been much more prevalent in times when parents had even less oversight, i.e. our grandfather's generation. Kids fifty to eighty years ago spent lots and lots of time building rafts and treehouses, far away from their parents. Yet they did not turn into psychopaths.
Today not a year goes by without an act of serious wanton violence by kids. It's getting harder and harder to maintain that culture products such as movies, the news, and (yes) also games don't have any influence on this.
The problem with this argument is that parents used to have far less control over their children two generations ago than is widely assumed today.
Fifty to eigthy years ago, kids would spend most of their time either in school or playing with other kids, without any adults around to supervise them. Today (the rise of two-income households and other such societal developments notwithstanding) kids are almost always in the influence sphere of their parent, i.e. in or around the house. Yet this continuous oversight doesn't seem to prevent the kinds of violence we're seeking.
The original poster told us something he actually experienced for himself. You are telling us what you were taught from books. His words carry more force than yours. Even if I think you are closer to the truth than he was, donutello.
Christ, have you been permanently disfigured by a creative writing class or something? And what does any of this have to do with the topic at hand? Jeez. Do you know anything about XRender or evas? Or do you just reflexively rehash this story any time it seems vaguely appropriate? How does your meandering demented pontification contribute to the question why XRender performs slower? What "design lessons" are to be learned from a 20 year old solution to a problem that has long since been solved? Why don't you mention some actually germane examples, such as how "blitter" chips were displaced over the course of time by ever-faster CPUs? Bah humbug. Get a grip.
No, but that's not what the original poster claimed anyway. The original poster mentioned "adding robustness" through "array bounds checking" and "input sanity checking" by "taking error actions if [something goes wrong]". But by and large there is no such error action, there is only abort.
It's not a question of efficiency, it's a good solid engineering rule of thumb: don't trap errors that you don't know how to handle.
If your index runs out of your array bounds then the program contains a very serious bug and there is very little you can do about it.
You could even go so far as to verify the result of each calculation, but what do you do when the result comes back wrong? It's not a question of efficiency, it's a matter of never giving in to the belief that there's a magic bullet.
Preach on brother! Celibacy ruullllezz
What you're describing is called eugenics, the betterment of mankind through reproductive control. It was a commonly held notion a century ago and it lingered on in the popular imagination for a number of decades, until the implementation of eugenics by various fascist regimes (and the horrible consequences) proved to most people that the idea was not only barbarous and cruel, but also deeply flawed at its core (not to mention its implementation).
You need to show why evolution produced a species which cares for and tends to its sick and disabled, and mourns them when they die.
(sarcasm) Yes, that's why all the apps that we have today are so secure! (/sarcasm)
I think we've achieved pretty good security and pretty good stability for a low cost. I don't buy into the "software crisis" view.
As for the crash, if the crash is easily reproducible, yes it is easy to fix, but how about the misterious, non-reproducible crash, that happens only when the load is high, so only when your client DOESN'T want your app to crash?
It can be very,very hard to correct..
Well, yes. C does have drawbacks of course, and some things are better done in other languages. However mysterious problems crop up no matter what the language. Most of the problems (security-wise and reliability-wise) don't occur at the language level but at the application level.
You'll copy me one thousand times: "premature optimisation is the root of all evil!"
You copy me another: Worry about performance.
Coding everything in C for a high-level app which should be doable in Python,Ruby or Java is premature optimisation..
I don't agree. Premature optimization is the practice of specializing a program to yield better performance before the performance characteristics of the generalized solution are fully understood.
The source of the misconception that "C is premature optimization" comes from an incorrect argument that follows from the observation that some optimizations are done in assembly. The argument goes a little like this: "A lot of premature optimization is done in assembly. Assembly is a low level language. C is a low level language. C is a premature optimization." But the argument is clearly fallacious.
Well the nasty surprise you're talking about are in a GC environement: too much memory usage, bad performance.
When you do it by hand, a bad memory handling will usually cause crashes, security problems,etc..
True, programming errors can lead to crashes and security problems. But at least you can easily fix those.
Yes, Python is much slower than C, but is-it too slow for the application considered or is-it fast enough?
Who knows? Why take chances?
Who cares? Yeah, that will fix a few errors more quickly, at compile time. But Python is much more stringent than, say, Perl, and if you're passing in the wrong thing, it will tell you about it eventually.
And the program will collapse. So long, work.
That's my biggest point. If you're writing business logic, the last thing you should have to worry about is memory management.
You always have to worry about memory management. Doing it explicitly reduces the chances of nasty surprises later on (ballooning memory use, bad performance through to unexpected GC behavior, not being able to recover gracefully from out-of-memory errors).
Again, who cares? Python is plenty fast enough on today's hardware. UNLESS you are doing something that truly needs CPU horsepower, like ray tracing, Python is easily fast enough.
Python is slow compared to C. Not just where execution speed is concerned, but also startup time.
Finally, C is more portable.
Static typing, better control over memory management, tools availability, speed.
All of the designs are green. Wow...
I don't understand a word you're saying. It's all corpspeak to me.
Content-related? Is there such a thing as non-content-related? Based on your interests? As opposed to tealeaves? Integration of links rather than the, uhhh, disintegration of links? End-user? As opposed to intermediate user? First class citizen? Meaning what?
You are basically arguing that Gentoo offers similar performance to Debian, provided Gentoo is tweaked to the point where it is almost identical to Debian. But at that point, why not just install Debian??
The problem is that it'll be the one-off-hack that'll have to be maintained for years to come, while the large programming project will just sit and collect dust in a closet.
Sigh. It's not true. What do you think loses Microsoft more money: an X-Box that doesn't get sold or an X-Box that does get sold?
It _might_ be possible that Microsoft loses money on the X-Box, but I'd wager that only a tiny part of that is on hardware costs. The rest is to amortize R&D, marketing, administrative support, etc.
If you want to compare the RIAA to horse carriage manufacturers then you should put your money where your mouth is and stop using the product the RIAA is putting out.