Make no mistake, they don't do this out of some love of privacy or benevolence toward their customers. Outside the US, the phrase "Made in America" has become synonymous with "pre-cracked by the NSA". Companies have no more noble goal with efforts like whole-device encryption than not watching their global sales drop to zero over the next few years.
No, if the standard libraries include it, I wouldn't roll my own.
And I didn't mean to say that I'd roll my own rather than use a 3rd party library just to show off - More a matter of maintainability. I find it very frustrating that so many open source projects have a dozen pointless external dependencies, all of which seem to break unless you can track down exactly the right version of FredsPrettyNumberFormattingLib v1.5.27b6, which conveniently doesn't exist anywhere except as the latest stable release.;)
I forced myself to limit code to 80 characters for a looong time.
Then one day I realized I hadn't used a VT100 terminal to write code in well over a decade; and I hadn't used a PC with a CGI or MDI card in longer than that.
#2 means you don't end up with code like: a=b+c;// add 'c' to 'b' and store it in 'a'
If you really needed that comment, turn in your geek badge now.
#3 vastly improves readability in most cases. Trying to read through one statement per line feels like trying to read a book
with
one
word
per
line.
#4 means you don't need to tediously declare every loop variable. I don't care what type "i" has - If the original coder sucks so badly that a simple iterator breaks, I don't keep trying to read their code, I start rewriting it.
#7 can make for far more readable code than deeply nested branching and complex loop conditions where a simple "return" or two would have made the code effectively flat and easily readable.
#8 matters primarily in cultures guilty of the exact opposite... If you would otherwise need to scroll horizontally to fully see a line (egregious abuses of #3 aside)... Use shorter names!
#3 (overly long lines) largely depends on the language you write in. SQL, for example, pretty much forces you to either write far-too-long lines, or to use tediously tall vertical layouts. The former lets you focus on the bigger-picture logic of a procedure, while the latter only matters if you care about quickly knowing the 10th field returned in a given selection.
For #6 (reinventing data structures), gimme a frickin' break - I will not pull in a 3rd party library just to implement a data structure I can write in my sleep. Fortunately, most languages include just about every standard type imaginable in their standard libraries; but hell will get pretty frosty before I resort to an external dependency for something like a boring ol' red/black tree.
#7, flat-out guilty as charged. Yes, when the code has nothing else to do, I'll return to the caller from just about anywhere. That said, I do typically try to organize my code such that I don't need to return from anywhere other than the end; but when that means ending up with half a dozen layers of nested ifs just to avoid returning early - Just do it.
You say that as if people want to live there. There's a reason why rents are cheap in the middle of nowhere.
Plenty of people do want to live in the middle of nowhere - But yes, housing stays cheap there for a very simple reason: No jobs.
Eventually, the business world will pull the "face time" / "seat at the table" stick out of its ass (which will coincide roughly with the forced retirement of the remnants of the Boomers), and realize that a telecommuting workforce drastically lowers their overhead. Until then, we can look forward to more stories about people living in box trucks due to unaffordable housing.
nobody mentioned lynching in either article that I could find.
Remember that little thing called "Occupy Wall Street"? You seriously want to defend that hill, to claim that no one has called for lynching the rich?
This post is only interesting if you have a turtle's grasp of logic.
First, WTF does that even mean? But phrasing aside, I get your point, and largely agree - What I wrote should have gone without saying: If we consider discrimination bad, it doesn't matter which group you fill-in-the-blank with.
I feel the same sense of disgust with black that play the race card at every opportunity as I do with the rich who use their wealth to the detriment of others.It's manipulative and abusive.
Right - And just as not all black people place the race card at every opportunity - Not all rich people use their wealth to the detriment of others.
I in no way mean to imply that we should feel sorry for the rich - But Scalzi's rebuttal reads like the worst kind of hypocritical "You may only hate who I hate" rant.
"she directly makes a comparison by encouraging people to replace the word "rich" with "black" to see the problem with how she says people speak of the rich."
Sorry, John, but if you don't "like" the implications of replacing group X with group Y in a sentence, the problem exists in your own wetware, not with the underlying premise. You don't get to discriminate against "the right" groups with impunity just because it happens to better fit your world-view. Nor does the whiteness of that cohort have any relevance to the analogy (and in fact, your mentioning it actually commits the offense you accuse Kasperkevic of) - If you describe someone as "hung like a bull", their lack of actual bull-ness simply doesn't matter in the least; not even if that person makes their living as a professional butcher.
Kasperkevic didn't intend to literally equate the struggles of the rich with those of blacks (something you, as a professional author, should have grasped); rather, she used it as a literary device to highlight the fact that calling for lynching any group, whether black or Jewish or rich, should offend us as a violation of basic human dignity.
99.9% of people hailing a cab just want to get from point A to point B without walking. GPS has made that requirement nothing more than a historically cute, but completely pointless, barrier to entry.
Personally, I 100% support Uber because I firmly believe that if I want to hitch a ride with a complete stranger (whether for pay or just hitchhiking), I should have every right to do so.
That said, Uber won this for a completely ridiculous reason. Whether or not a GPS counts as a "meter"? Seriously??? Why the hell do politicians insist on making laws-by-proxy, instead of just addressing what they really mean?
Hey, what do I know? Why just say "Taxis require a special license", when you could instead ban private ownership of some obscure bit of hardware largely peripheral to the core task at hand?
The original P5 architecture used between 8 and 17W.
Although somewhat notorious at the time for counting as the first major consumer CPU that "required" active cooling, you could still get away with a big-ass heat sink.
Funny, really, how it's taken us 22 years to get back to TDPs in a range that makes passive cooling once again practical.
Well, since it's 1500 light years away, that means what we're seeing is from 1500 years ago. Yes, more than likely, if there was anyone alive at that location when what we're seeing happened, they're probably dead by now.
1500 years ago on Earth, the "real" King Arthur reigned; Clovis beat the Visigoths at Vouille; Constantinople saw the Hagia Sophia wrapped up; and Justinian ruled the Byzantine empire.
Why do you assume that a species capable of building a Dyson swarm around that time, would have died out by now? Or even that such a species hasn't effectively conquered death, potentially allowing for individual members of it to remain alive today?
what, out of interest, is your best pro-imperial argument?
Personally a fan of Metric, but Imperial does have one major thing going for it - Easy divisibility by low prime numbers.
In the modern world, almost no one "does" math anymore. We use a computer or a calculator, and just get the answer. Shifting up or down by powers of ten makes for convenient readability, but otherwise doesn't matter in the least. Computers would actually work better if we switched to all binary, and wouldn't work any worse if we still used Imperial.
For most of human history, however, having units of measurement easily divisible into 2/3/4/5/6/8/9/10/12/etc parts meant that your average math-illiterate farmer or carpenter could still successfully figure out how to use a pair of oxen to spread four bushels of seed over a virgate (with a peck left over), or five cords of wood into 128 days of winter, and so on. No one cared about the weight of supper in terms of the speed of light in a vacuum, they cared about having enough to heat and eat through the winter.
At least in the US, this serves absolutely no purpose, since even plain ol' 802.11g/a beats anything short of FTTP.
Hell, I even use a pretty kickass home media server, and streaming a 1080p Blu-Ray rip only sucks down around 20-30MBps on average (peaks at 54, IIRC). 802.11n can handle 5-10 of those simultaneously without breaking a sweat.
I don't mean to sound like "640k should be enough for anyone" - I love new toys - But we need to address the bigger problem with getting the bits to our door before we worry about how fast the bits actually move around inside our houses.
The old guy stopped learning IT in the 1990s. The new guy understands when you want to run your app in a docker container.
And on the same subject, hey, how about that moron Harold II, for not deploying his F-14 Tomcats at the Battle of Hastings? What a maroon, eh? Right up there with Pheidippides for not just pulling out his cell phone to call Athens.
You understand, of course, that the "old guy" wrote that mess of unmaintainable scripts out of necessity? And he quite likely hasn't just let his skills atrophy, but instead, now makes even more money helping companies move away from those old messes and into something more manageable (since newbies just look at them and cry)?
Oh Ya? How about SJW Linux where all resources are shared and have equal priority!
For far too long, Linux has discriminated against "differently abled" code, with all its segregationist notions of kernel-vs-userspace. And even within userspace, could the very word "permissions" get any closer to "privilege"???
At long last, viruses we have historically relegated to the slums of Windows will finally have the right to run in the ivory sandbox of Linux - We need "Runtime Justice" for all code, whether CLI or GUI, whether drivers or devices, whether signed or malware!
There is no such thing as an "illegal" instruction!
What the fuck does race have to do with whether or not the locals count as complete morons for trusting "Sir" Branson during one of his manic episodes?
I don't have the slightest clue what race makes up the majority of that area, but I too would call them "stupid and greedy".
If it is liquid as mercury then it can make corrosion to the metals or semiconductors. It is a bad notice of using liquid in the system.
Inorite? Like, just imagine if they decided to use molten sodium hydroxide, that shit'll eat just about anything you throw at it, even glass - These engineers must count as such complete morons! XD
Seriously, why the hell would you jump right to assuming they would use some sort of corrosive liquid for this system? Realistically, you just use a light mineral oil, or if you have the budget for it, something like Fluorinert.
Liquid cooling, no matter how efficient, still requires you to dump the waste heat somewhere. You don't magically get to just seal up the vents in the case because "liquid!".
That said, yes, this counts as a very cool (no pun intended) step forward, and will vastly improve the number of transistors we can pack into an arbitrary sized box - But make no mistake, that "savings" comes at the cost of needing an external radiator.
Slashdot Mirror
Did you ever hear a cowboy or lawyer complain?
Umm... Yes?
Aside from the "mobile" angle (a valid question), you asked them about a bunch of restrictions they didn't impose.
It doesn't count as stonewalling to offer no response to "have you stopped beating your wife yet?".
Bravo to them.
Make no mistake, they don't do this out of some love of privacy or benevolence toward their customers. Outside the US, the phrase "Made in America" has become synonymous with "pre-cracked by the NSA". Companies have no more noble goal with efforts like whole-device encryption than not watching their global sales drop to zero over the next few years.
Ah, good catch. Mea culpa!
No, if the standard libraries include it, I wouldn't roll my own.
;)
And I didn't mean to say that I'd roll my own rather than use a 3rd party library just to show off - More a matter of maintainability. I find it very frustrating that so many open source projects have a dozen pointless external dependencies, all of which seem to break unless you can track down exactly the right version of FredsPrettyNumberFormattingLib v1.5.27b6, which conveniently doesn't exist anywhere except as the latest stable release.
The papers author may want their cut too
The authors of journal articles actually pay the publisher, not the other way around.
Yeah, I feel just awful for those poor, poor double-dipping parasites, can you tell?
I forced myself to limit code to 80 characters for a looong time.
Then one day I realized I hadn't used a VT100 terminal to write code in well over a decade; and I hadn't used a PC with a CGI or MDI card in longer than that.
#2 means you don't end up with code like: // add 'c' to 'b' and store it in 'a'
a=b+c;
If you really needed that comment, turn in your geek badge now.
#3 vastly improves readability in most cases. Trying to read through one statement per line feels like trying to read a book
with
one
word
per
line.
#4 means you don't need to tediously declare every loop variable. I don't care what type "i" has - If the original coder sucks so badly that a simple iterator breaks, I don't keep trying to read their code, I start rewriting it.
#7 can make for far more readable code than deeply nested branching and complex loop conditions where a simple "return" or two would have made the code effectively flat and easily readable.
#8 matters primarily in cultures guilty of the exact opposite... If you would otherwise need to scroll horizontally to fully see a line (egregious abuses of #3 aside)... Use shorter names!
#3 (overly long lines) largely depends on the language you write in. SQL, for example, pretty much forces you to either write far-too-long lines, or to use tediously tall vertical layouts. The former lets you focus on the bigger-picture logic of a procedure, while the latter only matters if you care about quickly knowing the 10th field returned in a given selection.
For #6 (reinventing data structures), gimme a frickin' break - I will not pull in a 3rd party library just to implement a data structure I can write in my sleep. Fortunately, most languages include just about every standard type imaginable in their standard libraries; but hell will get pretty frosty before I resort to an external dependency for something like a boring ol' red/black tree.
#7, flat-out guilty as charged. Yes, when the code has nothing else to do, I'll return to the caller from just about anywhere. That said, I do typically try to organize my code such that I don't need to return from anywhere other than the end; but when that means ending up with half a dozen layers of nested ifs just to avoid returning early - Just do it.
You say that as if people want to live there. There's a reason why rents are cheap in the middle of nowhere.
Plenty of people do want to live in the middle of nowhere - But yes, housing stays cheap there for a very simple reason: No jobs.
Eventually, the business world will pull the "face time" / "seat at the table" stick out of its ass (which will coincide roughly with the forced retirement of the remnants of the Boomers), and realize that a telecommuting workforce drastically lowers their overhead. Until then, we can look forward to more stories about people living in box trucks due to unaffordable housing.
nobody mentioned lynching in either article that I could find.
Remember that little thing called "Occupy Wall Street"? You seriously want to defend that hill, to claim that no one has called for lynching the rich?
This post is only interesting if you have a turtle's grasp of logic.
First, WTF does that even mean? But phrasing aside, I get your point, and largely agree - What I wrote should have gone without saying: If we consider discrimination bad, it doesn't matter which group you fill-in-the-blank with.
I feel the same sense of disgust with black that play the race card at every opportunity as I do with the rich who use their wealth to the detriment of others.It's manipulative and abusive.
Right - And just as not all black people place the race card at every opportunity - Not all rich people use their wealth to the detriment of others.
I in no way mean to imply that we should feel sorry for the rich - But Scalzi's rebuttal reads like the worst kind of hypocritical "You may only hate who I hate" rant.
"she directly makes a comparison by encouraging people to replace the word "rich" with "black" to see the problem with how she says people speak of the rich."
Sorry, John, but if you don't "like" the implications of replacing group X with group Y in a sentence, the problem exists in your own wetware, not with the underlying premise. You don't get to discriminate against "the right" groups with impunity just because it happens to better fit your world-view. Nor does the whiteness of that cohort have any relevance to the analogy (and in fact, your mentioning it actually commits the offense you accuse Kasperkevic of) - If you describe someone as "hung like a bull", their lack of actual bull-ness simply doesn't matter in the least; not even if that person makes their living as a professional butcher.
Kasperkevic didn't intend to literally equate the struggles of the rich with those of blacks (something you, as a professional author, should have grasped); rather, she used it as a literary device to highlight the fact that calling for lynching any group, whether black or Jewish or rich, should offend us as a violation of basic human dignity.
99.9% of people hailing a cab just want to get from point A to point B without walking. GPS has made that requirement nothing more than a historically cute, but completely pointless, barrier to entry.
Personally, I 100% support Uber because I firmly believe that if I want to hitch a ride with a complete stranger (whether for pay or just hitchhiking), I should have every right to do so.
That said, Uber won this for a completely ridiculous reason. Whether or not a GPS counts as a "meter"? Seriously??? Why the hell do politicians insist on making laws-by-proxy, instead of just addressing what they really mean?
Hey, what do I know? Why just say "Taxis require a special license", when you could instead ban private ownership of some obscure bit of hardware largely peripheral to the core task at hand?
The original P5 architecture used between 8 and 17W.
Although somewhat notorious at the time for counting as the first major consumer CPU that "required" active cooling, you could still get away with a big-ass heat sink.
Funny, really, how it's taken us 22 years to get back to TDPs in a range that makes passive cooling once again practical.
Well, since it's 1500 light years away, that means what we're seeing is from 1500 years ago. Yes, more than likely, if there was anyone alive at that location when what we're seeing happened, they're probably dead by now.
1500 years ago on Earth, the "real" King Arthur reigned; Clovis beat the Visigoths at Vouille; Constantinople saw the Hagia Sophia wrapped up; and Justinian ruled the Byzantine empire.
Why do you assume that a species capable of building a Dyson swarm around that time, would have died out by now? Or even that such a species hasn't effectively conquered death, potentially allowing for individual members of it to remain alive today?
what, out of interest, is your best pro-imperial argument?
Personally a fan of Metric, but Imperial does have one major thing going for it - Easy divisibility by low prime numbers.
In the modern world, almost no one "does" math anymore. We use a computer or a calculator, and just get the answer. Shifting up or down by powers of ten makes for convenient readability, but otherwise doesn't matter in the least. Computers would actually work better if we switched to all binary, and wouldn't work any worse if we still used Imperial.
For most of human history, however, having units of measurement easily divisible into 2/3/4/5/6/8/9/10/12/etc parts meant that your average math-illiterate farmer or carpenter could still successfully figure out how to use a pair of oxen to spread four bushels of seed over a virgate (with a peck left over), or five cords of wood into 128 days of winter, and so on. No one cared about the weight of supper in terms of the speed of light in a vacuum, they cared about having enough to heat and eat through the winter.
At least in the US, this serves absolutely no purpose, since even plain ol' 802.11g/a beats anything short of FTTP.
Hell, I even use a pretty kickass home media server, and streaming a 1080p Blu-Ray rip only sucks down around 20-30MBps on average (peaks at 54, IIRC). 802.11n can handle 5-10 of those simultaneously without breaking a sweat.
I don't mean to sound like "640k should be enough for anyone" - I love new toys - But we need to address the bigger problem with getting the bits to our door before we worry about how fast the bits actually move around inside our houses.
The old guy stopped learning IT in the 1990s. The new guy understands when you want to run your app in a docker container.
And on the same subject, hey, how about that moron Harold II, for not deploying his F-14 Tomcats at the Battle of Hastings? What a maroon, eh? Right up there with Pheidippides for not just pulling out his cell phone to call Athens.
You understand, of course, that the "old guy" wrote that mess of unmaintainable scripts out of necessity? And he quite likely hasn't just let his skills atrophy, but instead, now makes even more money helping companies move away from those old messes and into something more manageable (since newbies just look at them and cry)?
"A modern computer without Cobol and Fortran is like a chocolate cake without the ketchup and mustard"
(Source unknown).
Oh Ya? How about SJW Linux where all resources are shared and have equal priority!
For far too long, Linux has discriminated against "differently abled" code, with all its segregationist notions of kernel-vs-userspace. And even within userspace, could the very word "permissions" get any closer to "privilege"???
At long last, viruses we have historically relegated to the slums of Windows will finally have the right to run in the ivory sandbox of Linux - We need "Runtime Justice" for all code, whether CLI or GUI, whether drivers or devices, whether signed or malware!
There is no such thing as an "illegal" instruction!
What the fuck does race have to do with whether or not the locals count as complete morons for trusting "Sir" Branson during one of his manic episodes?
I don't have the slightest clue what race makes up the majority of that area, but I too would call them "stupid and greedy".
If it is liquid as mercury then it can make corrosion to the metals or semiconductors. It is a bad notice of using liquid in the system.
Inorite? Like, just imagine if they decided to use molten sodium hydroxide, that shit'll eat just about anything you throw at it, even glass - These engineers must count as such complete morons! XD
Seriously, why the hell would you jump right to assuming they would use some sort of corrosive liquid for this system? Realistically, you just use a light mineral oil, or if you have the budget for it, something like Fluorinert.
Liquid cooling, no matter how efficient, still requires you to dump the waste heat somewhere. You don't magically get to just seal up the vents in the case because "liquid!".
That said, yes, this counts as a very cool (no pun intended) step forward, and will vastly improve the number of transistors we can pack into an arbitrary sized box - But make no mistake, that "savings" comes at the cost of needing an external radiator.
TANSTAAFL.