The difference between a list and dictionary is huge, and both have situations where they are the right and wrong system to use. However, they can both do the same thing, and if you choose a dictionary instead of a list when a list is the better choice.. it won't matter if you only have 10 elements in it that are accessed infrequently.
So the choice of which algorithm falls down to "whatever works within the requirements", not "what is the most efficient".
The key word in your sentences is "can". As in, "in some cases". And in those cases, optimization is important because it's important to meet the requirements. There is nothing wrong with optimizing code that needs it in order to meet requirements. The problem is the 97% of the rest of the code that doesn't need to be optimized to meet the requirements, but programmers want to spend all their time on making it "perfect".
If optimizing does actually save significant time and resources, then it should be done. But 97% of the time (Knuth's made up statistic) is that those optimizations don't matter, so doing them is a waste of time. You should be concentrating on the 3% where it does matter.
First, you're assuming that if the user finishes their job faster, they will be more productive. Chances are, they'll just spend that extra millisecond texting someone or posting to facebook.
What you're suggesting is the equivelent of claiming 9 women can make a baby in 1 month. Your logic is severely flawed.
Those are important... *IF* they are important. Duh. Most of the time, they are not. Thus, complaining that developers who don't need to write lean apps aren't writing lean apps is kind of pointless.
"We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil" - Donald Knuth
Most developers will never need for their apps to run in constrained environments, and most employers don't want to spend money to eek out performance when average performance is perfectly fine.
Too many programmers get caught up in trying to make something the fastest, or most memory efficient, or makes the best use of bandwidth. When most of the time, it just doesn't matter. Such things are expensive, and in the long run it's cheaper to be fast and sloppy than slow and lean.
Re:Could Someone Help Me Out With This?
on
Debt Deal Reached
·
· Score: 1
You seem to be confused. I was only commenting on the "Not spending more than you take in" comment. A mortgage is very much spending way more than you take in. Certainly, if you have enough money to cover the payments you're fine.. but that doesn't change the fact you bought something you couldn't afford outright. And by the time you could afford to buy it outright, you'd probably be a very old person.
Re:Could Someone Help Me Out With This?
on
Debt Deal Reached
·
· Score: 1
Whoever advised you about the house was a moron. First, while it's true that interest is paid on loans, it's also tax deductable in the case of most home loans. That can lower the amount of tax you owe. Second, a portion of your payment is principle, and as time goes on you build equity. So at the end of that 20 years, you still have a huge asset that you can sell... and if housing prices rise faster than inflation you might even earn back some of that interest you paid.
What's more, your money may work harder for you if can invest it in a higher yeild endeavor and pay a mortgage instead. Consider, if your interst rate is 5%, but you can get 7% somewhere else.. you gain a net 2% by paying a mortgage and investing that money.
Things just aren't as cut and dried as you want to pretend.
Re:Could Someone Help Me Out With This?
on
Debt Deal Reached
·
· Score: 1
I'm not sure what universe you live in where you can find a $500 car that even runs, or a $1000 car that's reliable. Around here, a salvage yard will give you almost $500 for car that doesn't run, and a $1000 car means you're going to be paying out lots for repairs every other month. You can get a fairly reliable car for $3000-5000, but only if you're really careful.
A friend of mines son bought one of those $1000 wonders about a year ago, and he's now spent more in repairs than buying a semi-reliable one. Second hand cheap cars are risky, expensive, and dangerous. I had the wheel bearing go out on a car going 65 and nearly flipped it. Second hand cheapies are great if you can afford the time and money to keep it safe, or are knowledgable enough to do it yourself.
Re:Could Someone Help Me Out With This?
on
Debt Deal Reached
·
· Score: 1
Really? You don't spend more than you take in? You don't have a car loan, or a mortgage, or student loans?
If not, then you're probably lucky enough to be in a situation where that's possible. Jobs that pay well enough to put yourself through school are few and far between for those with no experience. Living month to month, paying rent rather than owning is money going out that you will never see again.. while owning a home gives you equity and investment.
But most people find it hard to function well in society without some kind of debt.
It's actually not that mysterious as to why they did this. Android has a "nifty" feature that uses WIFI access point triangulation to improve location accuracy of the handsets, and it works even when GPS is turned off.
No way this was "accidental", as they're using the fruits of it quite readily.
SVN can use apache, but it doesn't require it. There is an svn server that runs without apache.
Yes, you're right. SVN does require a bit more up front work, but this is done by one person. the SVN clients work a lot more smoothly for the end user.
I haven't been able to get TortoiseGit to work. It's been a while, about 6 months.. but I had problem after problem (don't remember what they were anymore) and finally gave up on it. The only gui that worked for me was git extensions... Maybe things have improved with tg.
Regarding the "forget to push", that's not quite what i mean. I mean, I like to checkin things to a branch regularly, whether it's broken or not. When i'm finally ready, i merge my changes with the root as a single changeset. That's not something you want to push to your primary repository. You could setup a remote repository just for your working area, but that's just a pain and a waste of space.
Let me give you a little example. I recently worked on a project that was written in Visual Studio 2008. On my development machine I have Visual Studio 2010. For 99.999% of things, I can develop in VS 2010 and commit the source changes no problem. However, loading the project in VS 2010 converts the project to the 2010 format.
So, I want to check in (and push) the source file changes, but not the solution and project file changes. And i don't simply want to ignore the solution and project files, i just don't want to *push* them. I still want them versioned locally. This sort of thing sucks.
You also can't just get one file from a git repository like you can from svn.
I wasn't talking about the command line. The command line is probably roughly equal, annoying wise that is..
I'm talking abou the GUI tools that are currently available. They suck, and doing tasks like cherry picking files is a pain in the but. Of course, the fact that there's a term called "Cherry Pick Commit" that has nothing to do with "Cherry picking" files for commit.. might be part of the reason... You are right, though.. not having to checkin all files in one command is nice.
My beefs with GIT include some of yours. The huge amount of time to download. With SVN, you just download the latest.. but with Git, you have to download the entire change tree locally. Also, i find the git terminology to be (what seems to me) deliberately obscure. Terminology that has been in use for decades is changed for no apparent reason, other than to say "Hey, we're different". This leads to making mistakes when you confuse similar terminology between systems that do different things.
My other major beef is that, while it's nice to be able to do version control disconnected, I dislike having my check ins local.. version control is also a "save my ass", and if my laptop takes a trip down a flight of stairs, anything that's not pushed is lost as well.
Git has some nice advantages, especially in distributed environments.. but I still prefer svn because it's just a lot easier to use. I'm sure it's good for merging, but as a developer it ends up being a headache. For instance, if you want to check in a group of specific files and not every change you've made.. PITA
Pitch Black was classic sci/horror with the evil monster in space. If you liked Alien, it's got all the same elements, plus a pretty interesting anti-hero. It's certainly not 2001, but it's what you expect it to be. Critics don't generally understand that concept.
Chronicles of Riddick takes the same anti-hero, and adds a mythology around it and an evil race of space faring pirates who hijack entire worlds. Thow in some techno magery, and some class warfare for good measure. It was interesting in that in that it had a lot of elements of things like Dune and even Firefly (minus the witty whedonesque dialogue), but mixed it up in a fairly unique new way. Again, nothing new, just a good execution in my book. Again, the critics didn't see it the same way.
Then again, the Critics hated The Matrix.. shame they never made any sequels.
Star Wars and Indiana Jones were not comic books (or at least they weren't until after the movies).
Watchmen was largely an origins movie, because it dealt with things that happened in previous incarnations of the characters, and with characters past lives. You learned about the characters as the movie went along because it delved into their histories.
The point of The Avengers movie is that they don't want to have to introduce the characters (not even the villian). They just deal with the formation of the group to fight the enemy, rather than the individual members.
Actually, Inception really falls more into the realm of fantasy than Science Fiction. However, Science fiction is a broad topic, and often includes fantasy. Most of what seems to come out these days is fantasy with technology. True, it's science fiction.. but not in a traditional sense. Science Fiction has always been about fiction based in realistic futures.. I mean, come on.. there's a huge difference between Blade Runner and Priest.
Never made any sequels? Are you being sarcastic? Is that some jab at how bad the sequels were? Or are you seriously unaware that there were 2 sequels?
I do miss movies such as Outland, 2001, 2010, etc.. The first few Alien films were fantastic, but I hate how so many sci-fi films have to be horror films to succeed.
I think what you mean is "Hard Science Fiction". There's been rumors of an Enders game adaptation for ages. Avatar was fantastic (in more ways than one), but was part fantasy, part sci fi.
They're still being made, just not as often. In the last 10 years or so.. I recall Pitch Black, Chronicles of Riddick, Pandorum (That was just last year)..
No, it decays differently. As security flaws are found in software, they need patches to keep them from being compromised. A 10 year old OS from any vendor is swiss cheese today without patches. The question is, how long must the vendor keep patching?
If I put the money that goes into social security into a long term savings account, then I expect that this money would at least keep up with inflation due to the interest acrued. Why can't social security be at least equivelent to a high yield savings account?
All flourescents flicker, though most people can't consciously notice it. They flicker because of the way the phospor is charged based on alternating current. Unlike incandescent, which give off light because of a heating element, the phosphor itself gives off the light, which can only happen when charged.
I do like LED lighting, but it's typically not cost effective for normal house lights these days, although over the long run they're probably just as, if not more cost effective.. most people don't want to pay the up front cost.
Incandescent light is warmer, and the lack of flicker makes it less prone to eye strain. Flicker, just like in CRT's causes strain.
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The difference between a list and dictionary is huge, and both have situations where they are the right and wrong system to use. However, they can both do the same thing, and if you choose a dictionary instead of a list when a list is the better choice.. it won't matter if you only have 10 elements in it that are accessed infrequently.
So the choice of which algorithm falls down to "whatever works within the requirements", not "what is the most efficient".
The key word in your sentences is "can". As in, "in some cases". And in those cases, optimization is important because it's important to meet the requirements. There is nothing wrong with optimizing code that needs it in order to meet requirements. The problem is the 97% of the rest of the code that doesn't need to be optimized to meet the requirements, but programmers want to spend all their time on making it "perfect".
Dude.
If optimizing does actually save significant time and resources, then it should be done. But 97% of the time (Knuth's made up statistic) is that those optimizations don't matter, so doing them is a waste of time. You should be concentrating on the 3% where it does matter.
First, you're assuming that if the user finishes their job faster, they will be more productive. Chances are, they'll just spend that extra millisecond texting someone or posting to facebook.
What you're suggesting is the equivelent of claiming 9 women can make a baby in 1 month. Your logic is severely flawed.
Those are important... *IF* they are important. Duh. Most of the time, they are not. Thus, complaining that developers who don't need to write lean apps aren't writing lean apps is kind of pointless.
"We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil" - Donald Knuth
Most developers will never need for their apps to run in constrained environments, and most employers don't want to spend money to eek out performance when average performance is perfectly fine.
Too many programmers get caught up in trying to make something the fastest, or most memory efficient, or makes the best use of bandwidth. When most of the time, it just doesn't matter. Such things are expensive, and in the long run it's cheaper to be fast and sloppy than slow and lean.
You seem to be confused. I was only commenting on the "Not spending more than you take in" comment. A mortgage is very much spending way more than you take in. Certainly, if you have enough money to cover the payments you're fine.. but that doesn't change the fact you bought something you couldn't afford outright. And by the time you could afford to buy it outright, you'd probably be a very old person.
Whoever advised you about the house was a moron. First, while it's true that interest is paid on loans, it's also tax deductable in the case of most home loans. That can lower the amount of tax you owe. Second, a portion of your payment is principle, and as time goes on you build equity. So at the end of that 20 years, you still have a huge asset that you can sell... and if housing prices rise faster than inflation you might even earn back some of that interest you paid.
What's more, your money may work harder for you if can invest it in a higher yeild endeavor and pay a mortgage instead. Consider, if your interst rate is 5%, but you can get 7% somewhere else.. you gain a net 2% by paying a mortgage and investing that money.
Things just aren't as cut and dried as you want to pretend.
I'm not sure what universe you live in where you can find a $500 car that even runs, or a $1000 car that's reliable. Around here, a salvage yard will give you almost $500 for car that doesn't run, and a $1000 car means you're going to be paying out lots for repairs every other month. You can get a fairly reliable car for $3000-5000, but only if you're really careful.
A friend of mines son bought one of those $1000 wonders about a year ago, and he's now spent more in repairs than buying a semi-reliable one. Second hand cheap cars are risky, expensive, and dangerous. I had the wheel bearing go out on a car going 65 and nearly flipped it. Second hand cheapies are great if you can afford the time and money to keep it safe, or are knowledgable enough to do it yourself.
Really? You don't spend more than you take in? You don't have a car loan, or a mortgage, or student loans?
If not, then you're probably lucky enough to be in a situation where that's possible. Jobs that pay well enough to put yourself through school are few and far between for those with no experience. Living month to month, paying rent rather than owning is money going out that you will never see again.. while owning a home gives you equity and investment.
But most people find it hard to function well in society without some kind of debt.
I can understand how you might be a little short on money, what with having to run out and buy all those licenses you didn't have in the first place ;)
Yeah, ok.. bad joke.. but hey, maybe you can become the next Ernie Ball, Linux advocates have been dragging that dead horse around for a while now.
It's actually not that mysterious as to why they did this. Android has a "nifty" feature that uses WIFI access point triangulation to improve location accuracy of the handsets, and it works even when GPS is turned off.
No way this was "accidental", as they're using the fruits of it quite readily.
Snowcrash is slowly coming true....
SVN can use apache, but it doesn't require it. There is an svn server that runs without apache.
Yes, you're right. SVN does require a bit more up front work, but this is done by one person. the SVN clients work a lot more smoothly for the end user.
I haven't been able to get TortoiseGit to work. It's been a while, about 6 months.. but I had problem after problem (don't remember what they were anymore) and finally gave up on it. The only gui that worked for me was git extensions... Maybe things have improved with tg.
Regarding the "forget to push", that's not quite what i mean. I mean, I like to checkin things to a branch regularly, whether it's broken or not. When i'm finally ready, i merge my changes with the root as a single changeset. That's not something you want to push to your primary repository. You could setup a remote repository just for your working area, but that's just a pain and a waste of space.
The whole workflow is just different.
Let me give you a little example. I recently worked on a project that was written in Visual Studio 2008. On my development machine I have Visual Studio 2010. For 99.999% of things, I can develop in VS 2010 and commit the source changes no problem. However, loading the project in VS 2010 converts the project to the 2010 format.
So, I want to check in (and push) the source file changes, but not the solution and project file changes. And i don't simply want to ignore the solution and project files, i just don't want to *push* them. I still want them versioned locally. This sort of thing sucks.
You also can't just get one file from a git repository like you can from svn.
I wasn't talking about the command line. The command line is probably roughly equal, annoying wise that is..
I'm talking abou the GUI tools that are currently available. They suck, and doing tasks like cherry picking files is a pain in the but. Of course, the fact that there's a term called "Cherry Pick Commit" that has nothing to do with "Cherry picking" files for commit.. might be part of the reason... You are right, though.. not having to checkin all files in one command is nice.
My beefs with GIT include some of yours. The huge amount of time to download. With SVN, you just download the latest.. but with Git, you have to download the entire change tree locally. Also, i find the git terminology to be (what seems to me) deliberately obscure. Terminology that has been in use for decades is changed for no apparent reason, other than to say "Hey, we're different". This leads to making mistakes when you confuse similar terminology between systems that do different things.
My other major beef is that, while it's nice to be able to do version control disconnected, I dislike having my check ins local.. version control is also a "save my ass", and if my laptop takes a trip down a flight of stairs, anything that's not pushed is lost as well.
Git has some nice advantages, especially in distributed environments.. but I still prefer svn because it's just a lot easier to use. I'm sure it's good for merging, but as a developer it ends up being a headache. For instance, if you want to check in a group of specific files and not every change you've made.. PITA
Ok, so yeah, not an xkcd regular. Shoot me.
Pitch Black was classic sci/horror with the evil monster in space. If you liked Alien, it's got all the same elements, plus a pretty interesting anti-hero. It's certainly not 2001, but it's what you expect it to be. Critics don't generally understand that concept.
Chronicles of Riddick takes the same anti-hero, and adds a mythology around it and an evil race of space faring pirates who hijack entire worlds. Thow in some techno magery, and some class warfare for good measure. It was interesting in that in that it had a lot of elements of things like Dune and even Firefly (minus the witty whedonesque dialogue), but mixed it up in a fairly unique new way. Again, nothing new, just a good execution in my book. Again, the critics didn't see it the same way.
Then again, the Critics hated The Matrix.. shame they never made any sequels.
Star Wars and Indiana Jones were not comic books (or at least they weren't until after the movies).
Watchmen was largely an origins movie, because it dealt with things that happened in previous incarnations of the characters, and with characters past lives. You learned about the characters as the movie went along because it delved into their histories.
The point of The Avengers movie is that they don't want to have to introduce the characters (not even the villian). They just deal with the formation of the group to fight the enemy, rather than the individual members.
Actually, Inception really falls more into the realm of fantasy than Science Fiction. However, Science fiction is a broad topic, and often includes fantasy. Most of what seems to come out these days is fantasy with technology. True, it's science fiction.. but not in a traditional sense. Science Fiction has always been about fiction based in realistic futures.. I mean, come on.. there's a huge difference between Blade Runner and Priest.
Never made any sequels? Are you being sarcastic? Is that some jab at how bad the sequels were? Or are you seriously unaware that there were 2 sequels?
I do miss movies such as Outland, 2001, 2010, etc.. The first few Alien films were fantastic, but I hate how so many sci-fi films have to be horror films to succeed.
I think what you mean is "Hard Science Fiction". There's been rumors of an Enders game adaptation for ages. Avatar was fantastic (in more ways than one), but was part fantasy, part sci fi.
They're still being made, just not as often. In the last 10 years or so.. I recall Pitch Black, Chronicles of Riddick, Pandorum (That was just last year)..
No, it decays differently. As security flaws are found in software, they need patches to keep them from being compromised. A 10 year old OS from any vendor is swiss cheese today without patches. The question is, how long must the vendor keep patching?
If I put the money that goes into social security into a long term savings account, then I expect that this money would at least keep up with inflation due to the interest acrued. Why can't social security be at least equivelent to a high yield savings account?
All flourescents flicker, though most people can't consciously notice it. They flicker because of the way the phospor is charged based on alternating current. Unlike incandescent, which give off light because of a heating element, the phosphor itself gives off the light, which can only happen when charged.
I do like LED lighting, but it's typically not cost effective for normal house lights these days, although over the long run they're probably just as, if not more cost effective.. most people don't want to pay the up front cost.
Incandescent light is warmer, and the lack of flicker makes it less prone to eye strain. Flicker, just like in CRT's causes strain.