The best comments I've seen have explained why a particular string hashing algorithm was used; the algorithm used is not obvious. Or rather it's so obvious that programmers tend to think "it can't be that simple!" and go off and use a different one. Which has the same sorts of weaknesses and is slower, or avoids the weaknesses at a massive performance cost in normal deployments; the comment explains that this has already been tried and warns future programmers that repeating this particular blunder isn't worth it. (And yes, I didn't believe it the first time I read it, but I was cautious enough to performance check the code against all the "industry best practice" hashing algorithms I could find; they really are slower on our typical sample data and have the same sorts of problems.)
Another great comment I saw was just a reference to the academic paper that the implemented algorithm had been cribbed from. Some algorithms in multi-precision arithmetic and image processing are sufficiently complicated to be things that properly qualify as Non-Obvious; you need to read the literature to comprehend what's going on.
So just make sure you don't remove useful functionality with your 'improvement'. You claim X has cruft nobody uses? Fine, mark it deprecated and see if anyone actually cares (you might be surprised what is used). If nobody cares, remove it from the next version.
X has cruft that nobody sane uses except in pre-defined canned forms. Do you know what the system of visuals and colormaps does? Do you think that you should know? I've got something of an idea, and nobody's needed such a thing for at least 10 years now; hardware is such that everyone can support full color displays at any resolution you might need without any problems.
Speaking as a part-time maintainer of a toolkit library.
No one should have to give a "logical" reason to show people that they shouldn't behave like jackasses.
A fair point, but a significant minority don't seem to be wired that way, for whatever reason. If some of the jackasses keep themselves under control for personal financial gain, that's still better than nothing.
That's just weird US academia where they like to redefine words at will to win arguments and don't give a shit that they are no longer speaking English.
That's not really much of an argument-winning technique unless you give the other side an opportunity to agree to the redefinition and to refine their arguments before significantly claiming that you "won". Also known as a No True Scots(wo)man fallacy.
Strictly speaking, all a pardon does in UK law is remove the burden of the sentence.
In Turing's case, there'd also been an official apology previously, and so there was no official reason to issue an apology along with the pardon. (There won't be a declaration of innocence because he admitted committing what was a crime at the time. The myriad problems with the case weren't with the law as such, so much as everything else around it.)
It's a good thing that the law in this area was changed, even if it was changed later than some might have wished for.
Packages A and B both depend on shared library C. A critical bug is discovered in package A that requires a change to library C. Package B releases an update to stay compatible with library C. It turns out that the update to B doesn't work. There is no way to revert B to the previous version since this also requires reverting library C and package A to the version with the critical bug.
This sort of thing is why commercial apps try to avoid using system shared libraries where practical. The issue is that you just never know what sort of crappy system you're going to be dropped into. Bundling as much as you can limits the pain a lot, and the cost is just space (and time when downloading, if relevant).
Of course, if nobody ever shipped buggy updates and never broke backward compatibility, you wouldn't need this sort of thing. But on Planet Earth... <sigh>
There are rather more disciplines than that. Theoretical CS is definitely towards the math side of things, but that's really at one end of the spectrum. The study of how people and computers interact is definitely part of CS, but isn't either engineering or math; it's closer to psychology. On the other hand, Computer Engineering is definitely an engineering discipline (as you'd expect with anything doing construction of physical objects on a mass scale).
Software Engineering is unusual though, as the costs of things there are very different to when you're working with the physical. For example, the cost of mass production is functionally zero and it is actually possible to modify things in service, so there's much more of a focus on the production of market-ready prototypes. (That would never work with physical entities, of course.) Applying the same level of control regulation to software systems as in physical systems is possible, but pushes up the cost so much that hardly anyone working that way can turn a profit.
So you want the Labor party back in so Stephen Conroy can force internet censorship through for the sake of God and children? Unfortunately Liberal and Labor are just as bad as each other nowdays. I suspect the only thing that could be slightly worse would be the Palmer United Party getting in.
Just when you start to think that all the parties are as bad as each other, the other lot gets in and proves that no, they're even worse. Rinse (preferably with disinfectant) and repeat.
"Your honor, I was simply transmitting random ASCII to a friend! He replied with random PETSCII!"
Well, that sort of argument by itself will just get you into deep trouble. (Taking the piss with a court is a good way to get into trouble, and your argument is hardly plausible in the first place.) Steganography might work, but then you've got the problem of distributing the baselines so that the other party can decrypt; sending lots of visually-identical-but-not-bit-identical copies of the same image would usually be a dead giveaway that you're using steganography.
Or that you use Google+; I keep seeing the same old shit resent there.
It's far better to ask why the AG Hates Australian Business, given that he's trying to make all online commerce impossible. Or that he hates medical privacy because he's making it impossible to securely transfer patient records between doctors and hospitals. Find things that show why encryption is an important basic part of doing things online that is used for nefariousness only because it is used for masses of other things too. ("Cars are used to commit smash-and-grab raids! Ban them at once!")
If you want to use pi, then you should be using the angle subtended by the length of the diameter, not the radius, as the basis of your angle measurements. Be consistent.
The reason why radians are what they are is because then the length of the arc (of a unit circle) that subtends the angle R is exactly R. That's really convenient. (You could use diameter, but in real work you've got the radius far more often than the diameter.)
And any other ratio (especially tau!) doesn't satisfy the Eulerian identity, so can't be nearly so beautiful.
Which version of Qt did you use? There were a few releases that focused on load-time speedups.
Compared with the startup time reported (90s!) even a 10x speedup would leave it being SLOW.
Actually, it sounds like something is critically misconfigured; I can't imagine any situation where a 90s startup is acceptable. Well, not in the last 20 years. (I remember using LispWorks when I started waaay back, and that had that sort of startup time. I dropped that commercial system for a lightweight open source solution and never looked back.)
I came across this password strength detector the other day. It really cheered me up, as it uses a scientifically-justifiable approach (information entropy FTW!) and it laughs in the face of a number of tricks that many people recommend despite them being actually weak (replacing "o" with "0" only really adds one bit of security, which is nearly nothing, whereas adding another word adds far more despite being easier to remember).
And neither gasoline taxes nor road use taxes are sufficient to pay for the roads.
Anything that's actually fair should be proportional to the damage caused to the roads by the vehicle, so that's approximately the first power of the distance traveled and the fourth power of the axle weight. (I think.) Expect the road haulage industry to be utterly against any form of fairness, despite the fact that they objectively cause the majority of problems (due to miles travelled and weight moved).
For a cabled connection to your desktop, GB ethernet is probably more than you will ever need.
No, it's just more than you can currently envisage using. What about streaming 3D interactive entertainment? The bandwidth requirements of such things are rather high, beyond what is practical now (and we also don't have all the other hardware required yet) but it's still reasonable to consider how to provide that.
Expanding capacity has an additional benefit in urban areas: sharing of capacity between multiple users becomes easier. Maybe you live out in the sticks, but lots of people don't, and lots of them want fast internet.
As long a you don't intend to get work from it, there are tons of alternatives for learning the information that would be contained in the course.
One of the key differences is that taking a formal course on it forces you to study the boring and hard parts as well as the fun bits; often they're important for gaining a real level of understanding. (I suppose that's true for pretty much any subject.)
If you do intend to use it for the purposes of obtaining employment, you'll need to actually take the exams at an accredited institution. Otherwise the employers won't know you from some random jerk walking in off the street claiming something which isn't true. No accusations, but from their perspective, self-taught is indistinguishable from untaught (unless you've got a solid portfolio of work or a good history of working in the area, in which case nobody will really care about the degree).
While, CS is definitely applying math, it lies somewhere between Math and Software Engineering.
Anything to do with user interfaces will have a fair chunk of applied psychology as well (and some appreciation of parts of physiology too). What's more, people doing theoretical CS tend to go much deeper into discrete math than the normal math student does.
And there are some valid criticisms of PHP, particularly from the domain of purity.
The major problems that most people have with PHP stem from the metric buttload of problems with SQL injection and XSS bugs that they're infested with. I know these are not the language's fault exactly, but it's usually very close to the epicenter of trouble and pain. I suspect that it's the legacy of poor community practice that's the biggest troubling thing in reality (as opposed to what people perceive), and that's very hard to fix; all those badly written applications and tutorials need work.
if you can build a nuclear engine which burns 100% of it's neutron flux
True 100%? In something that can fly under its own power? Then you can use in an atmosphere and you're powering it all by fairy tears and unicorn farts, because you're using magic and not technology.
On the contrary. The only evidence we have is that it cannot yet be observed. Thus the moniker of being dark.
We can observe that there must be something there (from the gravitational effects) but we can't actually see it (though there's been a few hints of annihilations that might be consistent with something like a sterile neutrino). It's like looking for a black cat in a coal cellar: we might not see the cat, but we can feel the mice it has killed and (maybe) hear the meow.
If there is a sterile neutrino out there, directly observing it is going to be absurdly hard.
Thankfully, this is not a large area, population-wise, that this could be handled quickly. I can only imagine how difficult it could be in a large city.
While there might be more people, there are also more judges in a large city, and the problems with dealing with probate are still the same. The law in this area doesn't depend on the local density of population. (That would be ultra-dumb and against the principles of the legal system for thousands of years.)
Slashdot Mirror
Just think of it, we could eliminate almost ALL accidents if we just outlawed the carrying of passengers...
Outlawing the carrying of drivers would help more.
The best comments I've seen have explained why a particular string hashing algorithm was used; the algorithm used is not obvious. Or rather it's so obvious that programmers tend to think "it can't be that simple!" and go off and use a different one. Which has the same sorts of weaknesses and is slower, or avoids the weaknesses at a massive performance cost in normal deployments; the comment explains that this has already been tried and warns future programmers that repeating this particular blunder isn't worth it. (And yes, I didn't believe it the first time I read it, but I was cautious enough to performance check the code against all the "industry best practice" hashing algorithms I could find; they really are slower on our typical sample data and have the same sorts of problems.)
Another great comment I saw was just a reference to the academic paper that the implemented algorithm had been cribbed from. Some algorithms in multi-precision arithmetic and image processing are sufficiently complicated to be things that properly qualify as Non-Obvious; you need to read the literature to comprehend what's going on.
So just make sure you don't remove useful functionality with your 'improvement'. You claim X has cruft nobody uses? Fine, mark it deprecated and see if anyone actually cares (you might be surprised what is used). If nobody cares, remove it from the next version.
X has cruft that nobody sane uses except in pre-defined canned forms. Do you know what the system of visuals and colormaps does? Do you think that you should know? I've got something of an idea, and nobody's needed such a thing for at least 10 years now; hardware is such that everyone can support full color displays at any resolution you might need without any problems.
Speaking as a part-time maintainer of a toolkit library.
Kemalists were not under any such delusion - they were gradually moving the country into Europe, not assuming that they were already there.
So they're responsible for the North Anatolian Fault? Much is explained.
No one should have to give a "logical" reason to show people that they shouldn't behave like jackasses.
A fair point, but a significant minority don't seem to be wired that way, for whatever reason. If some of the jackasses keep themselves under control for personal financial gain, that's still better than nothing.
That's just weird US academia where they like to redefine words at will to win arguments and don't give a shit that they are no longer speaking English.
That's not really much of an argument-winning technique unless you give the other side an opportunity to agree to the redefinition and to refine their arguments before significantly claiming that you "won". Also known as a No True Scots(wo)man fallacy.
Strictly speaking, all a pardon does in UK law is remove the burden of the sentence.
In Turing's case, there'd also been an official apology previously, and so there was no official reason to issue an apology along with the pardon. (There won't be a declaration of innocence because he admitted committing what was a crime at the time. The myriad problems with the case weren't with the law as such, so much as everything else around it.)
It's a good thing that the law in this area was changed, even if it was changed later than some might have wished for.
Packages A and B both depend on shared library C. A critical bug is discovered in package A that requires a change to library C. Package B releases an update to stay compatible with library C. It turns out that the update to B doesn't work. There is no way to revert B to the previous version since this also requires reverting library C and package A to the version with the critical bug.
This sort of thing is why commercial apps try to avoid using system shared libraries where practical. The issue is that you just never know what sort of crappy system you're going to be dropped into. Bundling as much as you can limits the pain a lot, and the cost is just space (and time when downloading, if relevant).
Of course, if nobody ever shipped buggy updates and never broke backward compatibility, you wouldn't need this sort of thing. But on Planet Earth... <sigh>
That's because CS is math, not engineering.
There are rather more disciplines than that. Theoretical CS is definitely towards the math side of things, but that's really at one end of the spectrum. The study of how people and computers interact is definitely part of CS, but isn't either engineering or math; it's closer to psychology. On the other hand, Computer Engineering is definitely an engineering discipline (as you'd expect with anything doing construction of physical objects on a mass scale).
Software Engineering is unusual though, as the costs of things there are very different to when you're working with the physical. For example, the cost of mass production is functionally zero and it is actually possible to modify things in service, so there's much more of a focus on the production of market-ready prototypes. (That would never work with physical entities, of course.) Applying the same level of control regulation to software systems as in physical systems is possible, but pushes up the cost so much that hardly anyone working that way can turn a profit.
So you want the Labor party back in so Stephen Conroy can force internet censorship through for the sake of God and children? Unfortunately Liberal and Labor are just as bad as each other nowdays. I suspect the only thing that could be slightly worse would be the Palmer United Party getting in.
Just when you start to think that all the parties are as bad as each other, the other lot gets in and proves that no, they're even worse. Rinse (preferably with disinfectant) and repeat.
How would one claim plausible deniability?
"Your honor, I was simply transmitting random ASCII to a friend! He replied with random PETSCII!"
Well, that sort of argument by itself will just get you into deep trouble. (Taking the piss with a court is a good way to get into trouble, and your argument is hardly plausible in the first place.) Steganography might work, but then you've got the problem of distributing the baselines so that the other party can decrypt; sending lots of visually-identical-but-not-bit-identical copies of the same image would usually be a dead giveaway that you're using steganography.
Or that you use Google+; I keep seeing the same old shit resent there.
It's far better to ask why the AG Hates Australian Business, given that he's trying to make all online commerce impossible. Or that he hates medical privacy because he's making it impossible to securely transfer patient records between doctors and hospitals. Find things that show why encryption is an important basic part of doing things online that is used for nefariousness only because it is used for masses of other things too. ("Cars are used to commit smash-and-grab raids! Ban them at once!")
If you want to use pi, then you should be using the angle subtended by the length of the diameter, not the radius, as the basis of your angle measurements. Be consistent.
The reason why radians are what they are is because then the length of the arc (of a unit circle) that subtends the angle R is exactly R. That's really convenient. (You could use diameter, but in real work you've got the radius far more often than the diameter.)
And any other ratio (especially tau!) doesn't satisfy the Eulerian identity, so can't be nearly so beautiful.
Which version of Qt did you use? There were a few releases that focused on load-time speedups.
Compared with the startup time reported (90s!) even a 10x speedup would leave it being SLOW.
Actually, it sounds like something is critically misconfigured; I can't imagine any situation where a 90s startup is acceptable. Well, not in the last 20 years. (I remember using LispWorks when I started waaay back, and that had that sort of startup time. I dropped that commercial system for a lightweight open source solution and never looked back.)
My obvious password detector, published in 1984
I came across this password strength detector the other day. It really cheered me up, as it uses a scientifically-justifiable approach (information entropy FTW!) and it laughs in the face of a number of tricks that many people recommend despite them being actually weak (replacing "o" with "0" only really adds one bit of security, which is nearly nothing, whereas adding another word adds far more despite being easier to remember).
And neither gasoline taxes nor road use taxes are sufficient to pay for the roads.
Anything that's actually fair should be proportional to the damage caused to the roads by the vehicle, so that's approximately the first power of the distance traveled and the fourth power of the axle weight. (I think.) Expect the road haulage industry to be utterly against any form of fairness, despite the fact that they objectively cause the majority of problems (due to miles travelled and weight moved).
For a cabled connection to your desktop, GB ethernet is probably more than you will ever need.
No, it's just more than you can currently envisage using. What about streaming 3D interactive entertainment? The bandwidth requirements of such things are rather high, beyond what is practical now (and we also don't have all the other hardware required yet) but it's still reasonable to consider how to provide that.
Expanding capacity has an additional benefit in urban areas: sharing of capacity between multiple users becomes easier. Maybe you live out in the sticks, but lots of people don't, and lots of them want fast internet.
Does this come to mind, Sir?
I'd like to add to that:
Fool me every two years, politics as usual!
As long a you don't intend to get work from it, there are tons of alternatives for learning the information that would be contained in the course.
One of the key differences is that taking a formal course on it forces you to study the boring and hard parts as well as the fun bits; often they're important for gaining a real level of understanding. (I suppose that's true for pretty much any subject.)
If you do intend to use it for the purposes of obtaining employment, you'll need to actually take the exams at an accredited institution. Otherwise the employers won't know you from some random jerk walking in off the street claiming something which isn't true. No accusations, but from their perspective, self-taught is indistinguishable from untaught (unless you've got a solid portfolio of work or a good history of working in the area, in which case nobody will really care about the degree).
While, CS is definitely applying math, it lies somewhere between Math and Software Engineering.
Anything to do with user interfaces will have a fair chunk of applied psychology as well (and some appreciation of parts of physiology too). What's more, people doing theoretical CS tend to go much deeper into discrete math than the normal math student does.
And there are some valid criticisms of PHP, particularly from the domain of purity.
The major problems that most people have with PHP stem from the metric buttload of problems with SQL injection and XSS bugs that they're infested with. I know these are not the language's fault exactly, but it's usually very close to the epicenter of trouble and pain. I suspect that it's the legacy of poor community practice that's the biggest troubling thing in reality (as opposed to what people perceive), and that's very hard to fix; all those badly written applications and tutorials need work.
if you can build a nuclear engine which burns 100% of it's neutron flux
True 100%? In something that can fly under its own power? Then you can use in an atmosphere and you're powering it all by fairy tears and unicorn farts, because you're using magic and not technology.
On the contrary. The only evidence we have is that it cannot yet be observed. Thus the moniker of being dark.
We can observe that there must be something there (from the gravitational effects) but we can't actually see it (though there's been a few hints of annihilations that might be consistent with something like a sterile neutrino). It's like looking for a black cat in a coal cellar: we might not see the cat, but we can feel the mice it has killed and (maybe) hear the meow.
If there is a sterile neutrino out there, directly observing it is going to be absurdly hard.
And they're both right!
Only if you also include "venal".
Thankfully, this is not a large area, population-wise, that this could be handled quickly. I can only imagine how difficult it could be in a large city.
While there might be more people, there are also more judges in a large city, and the problems with dealing with probate are still the same. The law in this area doesn't depend on the local density of population. (That would be ultra-dumb and against the principles of the legal system for thousands of years.)
You mean cops go out and actually do work?! BAHAHAHA. They're too busy being bullies and thugs. Property theft is left to insurance companies.
Doesn't that depend on whether you're a donut shop employee?