Not only that, but even if you don't get paid directly it's worth a lot to have a stable system to live and work in. People who are starving will steal to feed their families. People who are dying will steal to pay for medical care. A huge part of the reason for bare-bottom safety nets is so that society as a whole remains stable and functional, which pays especially large dividends to the rich and the settled even though the food stamps and medicaid aren't going into their pockets..
And "begs the question" doesn't mean "raises the question" or "ducks the issue". It refers to a specific form of argument which _does_, in fact, attempt to answer the question--but does so by assuming the conclusion in one of the premises. Specifically it's an argument of the form
p implies q suppose p -> q
Where "suppose p" really is "suppose my side of what we're arguing about is true".
The problem with that is that coders get used to saying "here's the boilerplate to shut up that warning" rather than taking all warnings seriously.
Early lints had significant similar problems. Linus has railed against (and successfully gotten the devs to turn off) warnings in "gcc -Wall" that were prone to false positives.
Fals positives (e.g. flagging "no alt" as an error if, as you say, "not every image needs alternate text") should be considered a _major_ problem in validators, since they're only really useful inasmuch as they help make code better.
Not a chance. And even if there was, California is a state with death penalty, and for a crime like this, it's quite likely he'll be executed.
Since 1976, there have been over 50,000 murders. There have been thousands of convictions for first-degree murder. There have been 13 executions. The most recent was over 2 years ago. There is currently a moratorium on executions in the state.
Yeah, I'm not saying that it's the best thing to have huge loops that go on for pages, but at least when it happens, it's nice to have a little comment at the end to tell you what's going on. I really wish that every programmer I worked with could be an uber-elite programmer, and wouldn't create these 1000 line functions in the first place, but let's face it. Not all programmers are uber-elite, and many are only slightly better than not being there at all. Any construct of the language that forces them to be a little more explicit in what they are doing is a help to everyone. Ugh no. Those kinds of comments/verbose delimiters make it harder to read code, not easier.
Really, any decent editor automatically tells you which brackets you're closing in the (rare) case that it's not immediately obvious from looking at the code.
There are places where the language forcing conventions are good. They are normally when the convention being enforced is one that is beneficial in good code written by good programmers. For instance, there's almost never a reason to indent code wrongly. Python's white-space enforcement works very nicely in real life. But enforcing things that make good code _harder_ to read is just madness, even when they might make bad code slightly easier to read.
You really don't seem to see the implications in a mmorpg. The bot doesn't need to be competive with a human, it just needs to be competitive with not being there at all. That's why I said that in an endurance/farming game things are different...
As long as your server enforces the game rules, the bot is still constrained to play within the rules. And designing good bots is _hard_; with the exception of incredibly popular games that have had a ton of engineering and CS effort aimed at them (chess, checkers) I've yet to see a non-simple strategy game where a bot can compete with even a moderately experience human (barring games that have badly designed rules such that there's a trivially implementable best strategy).
But if your game is more of a UI experience than a rules-constrained experience (e.g. a twitch game, or an endurance/farming game), then you're probably going to have to either trust the participants or have control over the clients (most likely by having tournaments be physically co-located). The former hasn't really been a problem in my experience, but for MMPOGs things are different.
In my opinion, Monster cable has been taking advantage of the lack of technical knowledge of the general public to convince people to buy EXTREMELY expensive cables, when much cheaper cables would provide equal performance.
Performance of audio systems is not heavily affected by cables, if only the size of the wires is adequate. I agree with your basic point, but I'd add "And the connections are all solid." (including good soldering/other connection from the wire to the plug and good contact plug-to-jack, or good direct wire-to-component connections for plugless cables)
But yeah, there are standing offers out there from a number of sources for anyone who can consistently double-blind ABX the difference between various "high-end" cables and much cheaper large gauge copper wires.
It wouldnt be a problem for PvE games, but PvP needs the same client for all.
Or needs to do validation on the server-side of all game-balance-affecting stuff--which is really the only way to ensure fairness, since clients can always be hacked.
The ridiculous memory use is the #1 reason that it's sometimes 30 seconds between when I click and when Firefox responds. Swapping is _slooooow_, and even if you don't hit swap you're trashing the cache and killing responsiveness (which you seem to value).
I'm appalled at how people downplay the effect of rm -rf ~ . A Linux install can be reinstalled in a couple hours, but the important documents people have usually aren't backed up at all, and are therefore much more valuable than the contents of/usr or/etc. Absolutely. FWIW, it's not hard if you're user "john" to create a "johnbrowser" user, set the preferred browser to "sudo su - johnbrowser firefox", and "chown -R johnbrowser:john ~/.mozilla ~/Downloads". There are a few details, but distributions could very easily set it up.
Then your browser doesn't have access to your documents; you can save stuff in ~/Downloads and that's about it. Well, in reality johnbrowser has access to connect to your X Server so there may be some avenues of attack there, but it gets that much trickier to just wipe out all your stuff.
The problem with evil is that it is ultimately subjective, even though there are actions which the vast majority of people living on this planet would consider to be evil. That's hardly a problem unique to evil. It's true of almost any public policy decision made. It is precisely because people vary in their thoughts that we have invested so much effort in coming up with representative governments.
In the case of the corporation "amoral profit maximizer" results in a more accurate and complete analysis of why certain actions are taken It also fails to characterize anything but why they were taken, so it's horribly incomplete for describing the actions themselves--let alone making public policy decisions.
And at any rate, you need to do the value judgement just to do that "amoral profit maximizer" analysis in the first place. Even if something isn't illegal, companies do worry about whether it's likely to be outlawed in the future, whether public outcry could hurt the bottom line, whether certain actions make them look like "good guys" or not, etc.
However, the actions of a particular corporation, should not be viewed in a good or evil way, but rather from the standpoint of a completely amoral and dispassionate entity who seeks to maximize his profits. You assert this but give no reason for it. And to a lot of people (I'd venture to say _most_ people), seeking to maximize profits without considering the other repercussions of your actions can easily be evil (depending on the actions it leads you to take).
The rational (i.e. profit maximizing) behavior for a monopoly firm in any market is to price discriminate or in other words they charge each customer the maximum amount that he or she is willing to pay for a particular amount of goods or services (or as close to that amount as their metered pricing schemes and various contracts can get). Most people believe that to be bad, hence the heavier legal regulation of firms that have monopolies.
I'm sorry, but you must be a horribly lowly paid programmer if the value of your time spent compiling is less than the cost of upgrade your pc to something that will do it in a fraction of the time.
Um, that was kind of the point. 10 years ago an upgrade every 2 years might take things from 2 minutes to 30 second compile cycles and saved a ton of my time. Nowadays the compilation time just isn't a factor; it takes me longer to move my mouse to hit the "compile and run" button than it does to do the new build (if I'm even using compiled languages any more), so getting a machine 10 or 100 times faster isn't going to save any of my time.
Like I said, if you're doing game development, CAD, or whatever then things are significantly different. And we do still upgrade the database servers frequently. On most desktops, though, the returns have been diminishing for quite a whilel; certainly when we do upgrade we don't buy 3 year old machines. But there's no real reason for most desktops to be upgraded every 1-2 years anymore, other than custom. Obviously _some_ desktops get used for beefier purposes, but in general it's far less useful than in days past.
I still find it scary that 1ghz and 512mb is considered low end for an office PC.
It's not low-end in absolute terms, it's just low end for a brand new office machine.
Really, once machines passed about the 200 mhz/64MB of RAM mark they got fast enough for most non-CAD/number crunching uses. I'm a computer programmer; before that I'd upgrade every couple of years just because the new machines let me do so much more. Now, my office machine is an 850mhz PIII with 512MB of RAM; we've gone through a few upgrades at work in the past couple years, but until it's no longer fast enough there's no reason to replace it. Since about 2000 I've gone to the "new machine every 5 years or so" model, as the gains are greatly diminished over the old days.
And it's not like we skimp on the money; I've got dual 21" widescreen LCDs attached to it (as a full-time programmer, it's very useful to have a lot of screen real estate). It's just that there's not really any way the faster machine would help me code any better, and the day or two it takes to re-configure your desktop to taste after you replace it isn't something I want to do every year or two.
So, yeah, it was changing for us combat arms types, but nothing near the point where we had our own rooms.
FWIW, my (Air Force) neighbor just got back from a deployment at Bagram. She lived in a (non-air-conditioned) tent without her own room. Her husband started Army and switched to Air Force, and there's certainly a difference but you're exaggerating how cushy the Air Force actually is by a fair bit.
If not the DoD, then who advises the President on what would be considered an act of war? Some DC think tank?
My guess would be the National Security Council, which consists of the Secretaries of State, Treasury, and Defense, the National Security Advisor, President's Chief of Staff, chief counsel, and economic policy advisor, the Director of National Intelligence (formerly the CIA chief), and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs (along with the president and vice president). The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs is DoD but doesn't have command authority over combat forces, and their role in such meetings tends to be non-policy (ie they'll outline the options available and discuss different possible approaches, but they generally don't make public policy recommendations).
Okay. I will. That line was added as a blatant pandering move to the way it's assumed we communicate. He (or rather whoever he showed this to before it got to us) obviously thought that he could get in with us that way without realizing that we, as a whole, aren't anything like the cast of a Verizon commercial. It's as offensive to me as a white guy speaking "black" to a black coworker out of the blue and just as effective.
Given that "YGTBKM! LOL!" is 14-year-old-girl text message speak and not techie slang, it's more like a white guy speaking using Hispanic slang to an Asian coworker out of the blue.
I thought it was intended for humor rather than anything else, though it wasn't all that funny and the mixing up of text messaging and techie slang was probably unintentional. But if it had been "YGTBKM! LOL! OMG PONIES!" then I would've laughed.
I suspect because they may think it has a camera on it too. But once the nature of this beast is known, it'll find itself stripped of interesting parts and the rest in a metal recycle bin.
I wonder why they'd think that.
It's a barbecue smoker mounted on a three-wheeled scooter, and armed with an infrared camera
You should drop it when there's another platform that's so much better than yours as to justify the effort of moving away (ie not just slightly better unless your code base is tiny). Normally any decent developer won't have a tough time adjusting to any decent platform, so the reason to switch isn't really that developers are hard to find who can work on your platform (unless it's something really unsuited to the job), it's that developers are hard to find who _want_ to work on your platform.
If you're running on platform X and you keep advertising for developers with 3 years of platform X experience or turning away really skilled people who have been working on some other, similar platform, the problem is your hiring. If you're advertising for good developers in your application domain and they're not accepting offers, then the platform may be at least a marketing problem (which can be a serious problem indeed).
But if, say, you're using Ruby heavily, there's no significant reason not to hire experienced Python or Perl developers (or vice-versa); if they're any good, they'll pick it up very quickly. There are limits; obviously if you're doing C development on an MMU-less embedded system, you don't want a great Visual Basic developer who's never worked with explicit memory management before. But if the developer is skilled in the application domain that you're working in, that's a lot more significant than knowing even the language (let alone the IDE or libraries) that you're using.
The super delegates will decide it all - the actual raw numbers don't make much difference. Winning Ohio and Texas wasn't important to Clinton due to the number of delegates she would win, but rather has very strongly reinforced the stall she is going to set out to the supers
And frustratingly, the press is reporting it as her winning Texas when in fact it's still too close to call but it looks like Obama will get more delegates than Clinton in Texas. At least they can spin it as "Clinton won the Texas primary", which is a better defense than they had in Nevada.
There, in a _caucus_, Obama picked up 13 delegates to Clinton's 12 and the press reported it as a Clinton win. In a primary it is slightly reasonable to talk about winning the popular vote, though that's still not the real win that matters--normally the press will differentiate, saying "Bush won the election but Gore won the popular vote", they won't outright say "Gore won the election". But in a caucus, there isn't any meaningful popular vote--the delegates awarded is the only halfway meaningful result.
Slashdot Mirror
Not only that, but even if you don't get paid directly it's worth a lot to have a stable system to live and work in. People who are starving will steal to feed their families. People who are dying will steal to pay for medical care. A huge part of the reason for bare-bottom safety nets is so that society as a whole remains stable and functional, which pays especially large dividends to the rich and the settled even though the food stamps and medicaid aren't going into their pockets..
It's a bit awkward, though, and we already have the perfectly legitimate phrase "raises the question".
"couldn't care less" not "could,"
And "begs the question" doesn't mean "raises the question" or "ducks the issue". It refers to a specific form of argument which _does_, in fact, attempt to answer the question--but does so by assuming the conclusion in one of the premises. Specifically it's an argument of the form
p implies q
suppose p
-> q
Where "suppose p" really is "suppose my side of what we're arguing about is true".
All available tags can be drilled down (assuming you've not already drilled them down and there's something in the sub-intersection).
So at the top, you could go bank->visa or visa->bank and you'd see message3.
It's not a hierarchy.
Top level is
bank
credit
visa
credit
bank
visa
visa
credit
bank
The problem with that is that coders get used to saying "here's the boilerplate to shut up that warning" rather than taking all warnings seriously.
Early lints had significant similar problems. Linus has railed against (and successfully gotten the devs to turn off) warnings in "gcc -Wall" that were prone to false positives.
Fals positives (e.g. flagging "no alt" as an error if, as you say, "not every image needs alternate text") should be considered a _major_ problem in validators, since they're only really useful inasmuch as they help make code better.
Not a chance. And even if there was, California is a state with death penalty, and for a crime like this, it's quite likely he'll be executed.
Since 1976, there have been over 50,000 murders. There have been thousands of convictions for first-degree murder. There have been 13 executions. The most recent was over 2 years ago. There is currently a moratorium on executions in the state.
I wouldn't say it's "quite likely" at all.
Really, any decent editor automatically tells you which brackets you're closing in the (rare) case that it's not immediately obvious from looking at the code.
There are places where the language forcing conventions are good. They are normally when the convention being enforced is one that is beneficial in good code written by good programmers. For instance, there's almost never a reason to indent code wrongly. Python's white-space enforcement works very nicely in real life. But enforcing things that make good code _harder_ to read is just madness, even when they might make bad code slightly easier to read.
As long as your server enforces the game rules, the bot is still constrained to play within the rules. And designing good bots is _hard_; with the exception of incredibly popular games that have had a ton of engineering and CS effort aimed at them (chess, checkers) I've yet to see a non-simple strategy game where a bot can compete with even a moderately experience human (barring games that have badly designed rules such that there's a trivially implementable best strategy).
But if your game is more of a UI experience than a rules-constrained experience (e.g. a twitch game, or an endurance/farming game), then you're probably going to have to either trust the participants or have control over the clients (most likely by having tournaments be physically co-located). The former hasn't really been a problem in my experience, but for MMPOGs things are different.
Performance of audio systems is not heavily affected by cables, if only the size of the wires is adequate. I agree with your basic point, but I'd add "And the connections are all solid." (including good soldering/other connection from the wire to the plug and good contact plug-to-jack, or good direct wire-to-component connections for plugless cables)
But yeah, there are standing offers out there from a number of sources for anyone who can consistently double-blind ABX the difference between various "high-end" cables and much cheaper large gauge copper wires.
It wouldnt be a problem for PvE games, but PvP needs the same client for all.
Or needs to do validation on the server-side of all game-balance-affecting stuff--which is really the only way to ensure fairness, since clients can always be hacked.
She shouldn't have to know about it--distributions should set it up so it's that way out of the box.
You're implying a logical fallacy. "Microsoft creates bloated software" does not imply "Non-Microsoft does not create bloated software".
The ridiculous memory use is the #1 reason that it's sometimes 30 seconds between when I click and when Firefox responds. Swapping is _slooooow_, and even if you don't hit swap you're trashing the cache and killing responsiveness (which you seem to value).
Then your browser doesn't have access to your documents; you can save stuff in ~/Downloads and that's about it. Well, in reality johnbrowser has access to connect to your X Server so there may be some avenues of attack there, but it gets that much trickier to just wipe out all your stuff.
And at any rate, you need to do the value judgement just to do that "amoral profit maximizer" analysis in the first place. Even if something isn't illegal, companies do worry about whether it's likely to be outlawed in the future, whether public outcry could hurt the bottom line, whether certain actions make them look like "good guys" or not, etc.
I'm sorry, but you must be a horribly lowly paid programmer if the value of your time spent compiling is less than the cost of upgrade your pc to something that will do it in a fraction of the time.
Um, that was kind of the point. 10 years ago an upgrade every 2 years might take things from 2 minutes to 30 second compile cycles and saved a ton of my time. Nowadays the compilation time just isn't a factor; it takes me longer to move my mouse to hit the "compile and run" button than it does to do the new build (if I'm even using compiled languages any more), so getting a machine 10 or 100 times faster isn't going to save any of my time.
Like I said, if you're doing game development, CAD, or whatever then things are significantly different. And we do still upgrade the database servers frequently. On most desktops, though, the returns have been diminishing for quite a whilel; certainly when we do upgrade we don't buy 3 year old machines. But there's no real reason for most desktops to be upgraded every 1-2 years anymore, other than custom. Obviously _some_ desktops get used for beefier purposes, but in general it's far less useful than in days past.
I still find it scary that 1ghz and 512mb is considered low end for an office PC.
It's not low-end in absolute terms, it's just low end for a brand new office machine.
Really, once machines passed about the 200 mhz/64MB of RAM mark they got fast enough for most non-CAD/number crunching uses. I'm a computer programmer; before that I'd upgrade every couple of years just because the new machines let me do so much more. Now, my office machine is an 850mhz PIII with 512MB of RAM; we've gone through a few upgrades at work in the past couple years, but until it's no longer fast enough there's no reason to replace it. Since about 2000 I've gone to the "new machine every 5 years or so" model, as the gains are greatly diminished over the old days.
And it's not like we skimp on the money; I've got dual 21" widescreen LCDs attached to it (as a full-time programmer, it's very useful to have a lot of screen real estate). It's just that there's not really any way the faster machine would help me code any better, and the day or two it takes to re-configure your desktop to taste after you replace it isn't something I want to do every year or two.
So, yeah, it was changing for us combat arms types, but nothing near the point where we had our own rooms.
FWIW, my (Air Force) neighbor just got back from a deployment at Bagram. She lived in a (non-air-conditioned) tent without her own room. Her husband started Army and switched to Air Force, and there's certainly a difference but you're exaggerating how cushy the Air Force actually is by a fair bit.
If not the DoD, then who advises the President on what would be considered an act of war?
Some DC think tank?
My guess would be the National Security Council, which consists of the Secretaries of State, Treasury, and Defense, the National Security Advisor, President's Chief of Staff, chief counsel, and economic policy advisor, the Director of National Intelligence (formerly the CIA chief), and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs (along with the president and vice president). The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs is DoD but doesn't have command authority over combat forces, and their role in such meetings tends to be non-policy (ie they'll outline the options available and discuss different possible approaches, but they generally don't make public policy recommendations).
Okay. I will. That line was added as a blatant pandering move to the way it's assumed we communicate. He (or rather whoever he showed this to before it got to us) obviously thought that he could get in with us that way without realizing that we, as a whole, aren't anything like the cast of a Verizon commercial. It's as offensive to me as a white guy speaking "black" to a black coworker out of the blue and just as effective.
Given that "YGTBKM! LOL!" is 14-year-old-girl text message speak and not techie slang, it's more like a white guy speaking using Hispanic slang to an Asian coworker out of the blue.
I thought it was intended for humor rather than anything else, though it wasn't all that funny and the mixing up of text messaging and techie slang was probably unintentional. But if it had been "YGTBKM! LOL! OMG PONIES!" then I would've laughed.
I wonder why they'd think that.
You should drop it when there's another platform that's so much better than yours as to justify the effort of moving away (ie not just slightly better unless your code base is tiny). Normally any decent developer won't have a tough time adjusting to any decent platform, so the reason to switch isn't really that developers are hard to find who can work on your platform (unless it's something really unsuited to the job), it's that developers are hard to find who _want_ to work on your platform.
If you're running on platform X and you keep advertising for developers with 3 years of platform X experience or turning away really skilled people who have been working on some other, similar platform, the problem is your hiring. If you're advertising for good developers in your application domain and they're not accepting offers, then the platform may be at least a marketing problem (which can be a serious problem indeed).
But if, say, you're using Ruby heavily, there's no significant reason not to hire experienced Python or Perl developers (or vice-versa); if they're any good, they'll pick it up very quickly. There are limits; obviously if you're doing C development on an MMU-less embedded system, you don't want a great Visual Basic developer who's never worked with explicit memory management before. But if the developer is skilled in the application domain that you're working in, that's a lot more significant than knowing even the language (let alone the IDE or libraries) that you're using.
The super delegates will decide it all - the actual raw numbers don't make much difference. Winning Ohio and Texas wasn't important to Clinton due to the number of delegates she would win, but rather has very strongly reinforced the stall she is going to set out to the supers
And frustratingly, the press is reporting it as her winning Texas when in fact it's still too close to call but it looks like Obama will get more delegates than Clinton in Texas. At least they can spin it as "Clinton won the Texas primary", which is a better defense than they had in Nevada.
There, in a _caucus_, Obama picked up 13 delegates to Clinton's 12 and the press reported it as a Clinton win. In a primary it is slightly reasonable to talk about winning the popular vote, though that's still not the real win that matters--normally the press will differentiate, saying "Bush won the election but Gore won the popular vote", they won't outright say "Gore won the election". But in a caucus, there isn't any meaningful popular vote--the delegates awarded is the only halfway meaningful result.