If you ask me, odds are 70% he was just using "Screen Size" as a proxy for "Resolution" in the first place, either because he doesn't know the difference, or (more likely) was talking down to the audience.
Seriously, if the CEO of Dreamworks Animation doesn't know the difference, he's not qualified to hold the position.
Either way, I think this falls into the category of "just how much more can we screw the customers before they leave".
wouldn't they really want to charge on # of viewers?
Long term, they absolutely want that.
If they could, when you pop in a DVD, you'd submit your credit card to pay for the view, and charge according to the number of people in the room.
They want all sorts of things where they keep gouging us for the price and keep their revenue stream constant.
But, they might find people suddenly saying "to hell with that", and go read a book.
And, of course, the book publishers want the same damned model where you pay to re-read your book, because clearly owning books and not compensating the publisher every time you read it is theft, right?
And, since they basically pay the lawmakers to give them what they want, I won't be at all surprised if the assholes at the *AA manage to make it law that every time I watch a DVD I bought I have to pay them, and also pay for screen size, and also pay for # of viewers.
This push to make IP and copyright laws drive everything we do is eroding our concept of property, and turning it into a rent-every-time model. And, I'll stop watching before that happens.
These clowns are just more or less determined to destroy the whole business of downloading, as well as killing their own revenue stream.
They think I'm going to pay more to download a video to my 55" TV than my 27" TV (and correspondingly more than my tablet)? All at the same resolution? How does *that* work? Can we charge him more for being a bigger idiot?
They're already gouging me to rent it, then my internet company is gouging me for the bandwidth to get it, and *then* they want a premium to play the exact same content on a slightly different device at the same resolution because the physical dimensions of the screen are larger?
These guys are drunk, rent-seeking assholes who have lost touch with their customers if they think this is going to work.
It seems like the movie studios are so focused on leveraging their synergies in order to opimitaly maximize revenue that they're going to destroy the very market they're hoping to make money from.
If Dreamworks and the other movie studios go this route, they're going to drive away customers.
I already think going to a movie is too damned expensive, and would rather watch movies at home. But it sounds like they're just trying to add more rent seeking/price gouging along the chain here.
But if that's the case, wouldn't we still be better off letting those entities take their cut, and avoiding the waste of building these HFT systems?
What, exactly, entitles them to a cut? I would say nothing entitles them to a cut.
You're suggesting we just fork over a fraction of all trades to spare the large banks and trading houses the expense of building the HFT systems to rip us off?
Hell no.
I have a better solution, and it doesn't involve keeping HFT or the trading houses getting a guaranteed cut.
If they want to make money on the stock market, they can do it by buying low and selling high based on the same kind of information available to me. Not by sitting in the middle skimming off money from the market by executing a zillion trades on a computer.
The market doesn't exist to guarantee profits for large trading houses. And if we're supposed to believe it does, the market is completely fucked, unfair, and dishonest.
I'm largely of the opinion that HFT is a chance for the banks and trading houses to skim off the top of the stock market, at the expense of the 'normal' investors, and using information and access we couldn't possibly have.
I don't believe at all that the "retail investor is very well-served by the current market structure". In fact, I believe the retail investor gets fleeced by these trading programs.
And since there are several well known examples, including the one in the summary, in which these trading programs themselves distort the market and significantly changes the valuations of the stocks.
HFT is the large trading houses using the money of investors (their own and everyone else in the market) like a Vegas casino slot machine.
No, in between vapor and not vapor... we have alpha and beta builds as intermediate states.
Of course, it can transition to either vapor or not vapor from those. I've seen a couple of alpha builds turn back into vapor in my time, and I've seen Google have stuff in beta for years.
So, it's the least terrible solution (which is debatable) so therefore it's good?
Sorry, but Flash has been a giant security hole for about as long as it has existed.
You want to play casual games in Flash, that's your choice.
But I've been happily avoiding Flash for a decade or so, and have yet to find a single website I cared enough about to install Flash. Occasionally I need to use it for work, which means a very specific machine, running IE -- which is only used for these kinds of garbage that HR thinks I'm required to use.
If I hit a page which gives me nothing but "You need Flash to run this site", all it's ever going to see from me is the back button.
If you were interviewing for the position, would your first thought be, "I so don't want to work there as that guy is going to be second guessing my every move, countermanding my decisions, ruining my job satisfaction and making me regret ever joining there"?
I would contend that any new sysadmin who is thinking the above is the last bloody person you want working for you.
The days of the IT prima donna are over in most sane places, and the company needs to look out for its own interests, and not merely coddle the fragile ego of someone who thinks the job means they get carte blanche to do as they please.
We'll trust your decisions after we see how you make out for a while, and if your job satisfaction precludes following the procedures we've laid out for you... find someplace else.
You, however, need to stop looking backward, and look forward instead.
Trust, but verify. And after you've verified, you can trust more. But if you think you can just walk away from the job and leave the new guy to sort everything out, you're just asking for Really Bad Things.
Trust me on this. Even when you've interviewed your candidate, the last thing you want to do is hand over the keys to the kingdom and let the new guy have at it to do whatever he/she wants.
Years ago we hired someone who was meant to be part developer and part sysadmin.
His development skills were showing to be so lacking, and some of the things he thought he wanted to do started to make the people who had been doing the admin duty a little nervous. We didn't let him have full access to the systems for a while.
He was describing making some pretty reckless changes, that he couldn't convince anybody of why we'd do them, and kept saying how he disagreed with how we did things, or said things which made us all think he was a cowboy who had no real sense of why things were done the way they had been, and why we couldn't just re-do everything to look like the way he had it at his last job.
Eventually we more or less decided we couldn't really trust him, and he got neither development tasks, nor sys admin tasks from us. Eventually my manager had to show him the door, because he started getting really aggressive and agitated that the people who had been the admins for several years weren't prepared to just hand him the passwords and let him do as he pleased. But, this was based on the stuff he himself was saying, which more or less amounted to "I don't care, as the admin it's how I want it to be". Yeah, no there skippy.
The more he tried to do things, and the more we saw the results of the tasks we had given him, we became quite convinced he had bullshitted his way into the job, and was trying to take the opportunity to prove (to us or him I don't know) just how much he really knew.
You may need to disengage, but don't do it all at once. Because you're just putting yourself and your company more at risk.
Once you're sure you can trust the new person to do the job, and under the constraints/rules you've laid out... then you can pull back a lot more.
Re:Is it going to break the API?
on
Firefox 29: Redesign
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Around the time that memory became $8 per fucking gigabyte, you fucking tool.
Two things:
1) So, Firefox et al haven't "solved" a damned thing, they've just assumed that RAM is cheap and plentiful? I hope nobody is taking credit for that bullshit reasoning.
2) It's my fucking memory, and I may or may not be using it for other things. I've got 8GB on my machine, and every day or so I need to shut down Firefox to reclaim the memory it's been leaking. Firefox starts at around 300MB of RAM, and grows to 1GB if I let it.
This, along with the standard "Firefox uses too much memory", have not been even slightly relevant for years now. Firefox solved those particular issues, thanks mainly due to competition from Chrome.
Oh, when did Firefox (or Chome, or Safari) fix the issue of using too much memory?
In my experience, all three of them gradually grow over time, suck up more and more memory, and eventually need to be restarted to reset them back to something sane.
I hate to break it to you, but in my experience, this complaint has been more than slightly relevant for years now.
I currently have twice as many chrome.exe processes running as I do open tabs, and closing tabs doesn't always seem to free memory.
Firefox gets bigger when it's sitting idle, as does Safari, as does Chrome.
So I have no idea of what you're basing this notion that they don't consume too much memory comes from. Because it sure as heck doesn't match what I see.
giving each MIT undergrad $100 in Bitcoin (or about 0.22 Bitcoins) starting next Fall
So, how does this work? Every time I see reference to fractional bitcoins I get confused.
Is a bitcoin an atomic or a divisible unit? I'd thought it was an atomic unit, and there wouldn't be things like 0.22 Bitcoins. How do you spend a fraction of a bitcoin?
Are there bitpennies? I don't think I understand this new fangled stuff well enough yet.
How do you get enough B12? You know you need that for blood cell production and mylenation, right?
Nutritional yeast flakes in cooking (a vegetarian staple), marmite spread occasionally, fortified milk and soy milk, cheese, some breakfast cereals, eggs, multivitamins/supplements...
I've been a vegetarian for 14 years now, and the last time I had a blood test the doctor was like "wow, you're not anemic or anything". And I basically said "because I know what I'm doing".
If you just eat crap and don't take that into account, you might have bad outcomes. In fact, I've known a couple of vegans who still had a carry over as being a fussy eater from being a kid -- and they quite often ate what I'd call junk, but that was animal free. The things people call "vegan egg replacers" are mostly starches I wouldn't go anywhere near, because it's got little nutritional value.
But, in general, very few vegans or vegetarians are actually suffering from a deficiency of B12 if they have a well balanced diet.
Yes, it is true that our physiology makes us omnivores, there's no denying that. But, you can still safely avoid eating meat and still get all the nutrition you need if you so choose.
In general, if you're eating a good balance of fruits and vegetables, legumes, green leafy things, grains and the like... you will get enough nutrition.
Yes. With increasing CPU speed, it makes sense to sacrifice "performance" for ease of programming.
I worked with a guy who used to say that.
He wrote shitty, un-maintainable code which he thought was elegant, and which in practice was garbage, full of ridiculous assumptions, and giant inefficiencies all in the name of him being able to invoke something in as few lines of code as possible, or without consideration for the cost of his framework. Half of his code went through massive setup tasks every time it was invoked or naively did something assuming it wasn't expensive. Over and over and over again.
He said you should write first, and the optimize later. By the time we realized his code was so slow as to be unusable, he had painted himself into a corner, and there was no way to optimize his code except to get rid of it.
Sometimes the things passed off as "ease" of programming is a thinly veiled decision to use known terrible methods in the expectation they're prettier.
In my experience, some of these claims don't produce good code. They produce things the coder believes to be pretty, but which in practice is quite a mess.
I've yet to be convinced you should start writing your code in a way you know is inefficient because your belief in your elegant solution, which is anything but. I've seen an O(n^2) algorithm called O(n^2) times, all because it was "cleaner" code, and the code assumed everything was a zero cost operation (or had hidden all of the aspects of that, so you don't find it until later).
Performance is a real thing. I lament that people have now decided it's irrelevant to consider it.
Someone actually using a watch to tell time, smart or otherwise, is new to me.
Then I assume you live in a cave.
I have about 50+ watches, and, oddly enough, their function is to tell time. Yes, they're obviously also jewelry/fashion, but they are used to tell time. All of my watches can also go swimming with me, and most of my watches are up for some pretty rough service. Show me a smart watch rated for 200m of water depth, or one which is as rugged as my G-Shock watches, and I might consider it. For now, they're expensive, gimmicky, fragile, and of limited use. I can hear my cell phone if I get a text, I don't need to see it on my watch.
I wear my watches far more often than I carry my cell phone.
Last I checked we all have smart phones that are constantly linked to the internet and synchronized with the most precise time sources physicists can come up with.
Then you have a very small sample size. I own a smart phone, but I don't have a data plan for it. I don't keep it attached to me 24/7, nor do I want to.
I view the smart watch as the updated version of the calculator watch... a very nerdy accessory, but not something most people have any interest in.
but a tablet is less useful as a mobile device than a phone and more hassle than a laptop
Again, what?
My tablet is far less hassle than my laptop, and when I travel I no longer bring my laptop most of the time. I can get into my company VPN with my tablet, I can pull out my tablet in a lot of places that a laptop would be a bloody nuisance, and I can go through airport security with my tablet without taking it out of the bag. I wouldn't want to do all of my work on my tablet, but for checking on my email when I'm travelling, it's far far more convenient.
I view a laptop as a necessary evil, but a tablet as a far more convenient thing most of the time.
10 years from now there won't be watches without some sort of connectivity except for specialty pieces designed from the outset to satisfy luddites.
Bullshit. Not everybody wants a smart watch. That doesn't make you a luddite... you may in fact be a fan of time pieces.
I have a couple of skeleton watches, meaning you can see through the watch face to the actual gears and mechanical bits of the watch.
The aesthetics of the watch itself is the point. Just because someone doesn't feel the need to use every shiny bauble and gew gaw the tech industry comes up with doesn't make them a luddite.
I'm completely surrounded by electronics and technology already, and I don't see a smart watch as being something I'm particularly interested in. In fact, it's something I can't see the point of for me... I don't text enough to need to have it constantly attached to me, any more than I can't be away from my phone (which I refuse to buy a data plan for, because wifi covers my needs). I also don't need Apple (or whoever) to be able to track every little I thing I do throughout my day.
If you think the big name watch makers all need to get on board with this or die, you're overly fetishizing technology. There will always be a market for mechanical watches. You really think suddenly nobody is going to want to own a Rolex because there exist smartwatches? If you do, you don't know anything about people who buy watches.
Some people still have plain old-fashioned analog sex too, and haven't embraced teledildonics. And, thankfully, most of us never will.
For many of us, technology is a tool, but not the be all and end all of our existence. Knowing when to draw the line and walk away from it doesn't make you a luddite, it means you have a better perspective on shit that really matters.
What's going to make collecting energy on the ground from a satellite more efficient than collecting it from the sun?
Probably the ability to do it for more hours than you would have daylight?
If there exists an orbital path which can see the sun 24 hours/day, and that same orbital path lets you see the receiving stations, say, 18 hours/day... you get more access to sunlight than you would otherwise.
Besides, it has the added benefit that if your neighbors get a little uppity, you let your mirrors slide a little off course and get a little more tightly focused... bam, instant death ray. And, that's where the real money is.;-)
That's going to limit your nimbleness and opportunity.
Well, in some industries, there is little opportunity in nimbleness. In some, risk is OK and pays off in terms of what that gets you. Depends on what you do, and what the systems are used for.
If your architecture will put lives at risk when a bad firmware update for a subset of the servers comes in, then it's too brittle.
Who said anything about architecture? I'm talking about end-to-end systems. If a production system went offline because the NICs were all hosed, and even a few hours of outage can have a run on effect on company operations, that's a pretty significant thing.
Do you know where I learned rigor in change management? On systems which scheduled maintenance on aircraft. You can't go to the FAA and say "ooops, we had a little issue and might have forgotten to re-attach the wings".
I currently work in another heavily regulated industry, where outages can be very costly and have legal implications. If you stop production of the company's core business, you quickly rack up large losses. I'm not prepared to be the one to cause that from lack of due diligence.
I work in environments where risk tolerance can be exceedingly small, and unless the risk of applying a steaming fresh patch outweighs the overall risks, it can wait until it's been tested properly. So, we apply changes in a lab, then we apply in smaller test systems, then we move to full scale test system, then we move on to the Production instances.
We have systems which we can be a little more 'adventurous' with because they're not mission critical. But, for things which are mission critical, we apply a level of rigor which some people would find oppressive.
If your systems touch your finance, your production, or anything involving human safety, the cost of fixing can outweigh the cost of testing very fast, and you test the bejeezus out of it.
Me, I come down heavily on the side of managing the hell out of risks, minimizing as much as you possibly can, and making damned sure the decision makers understand them. And you know what? My employers periodically say "in this case we're okay with it, you're being too paranoid this time". But generally they understand precisely why I do that, and even if I periodically sound like a broken record, they accept that is part of my job. They understand I'm doing it to maximize chance of success and minimize disruptions.
I knew a developer once who realized a bug in his code, and applied a "quick fix" to a live environment, despite having previously been told that was almost a hanging offense. And then it was a much larger undertaking to correct the issue and put things back to where they needed to be.
I knew a sysadmin once who would apply changes to environments in the middle of a workday without telling anybody, and then all of a sudden people start popping up from their cubicles looking around to see if anybody else suddenly can't reach something. In a few cases, an entire small office was dead in the water because of this until it could be fixed.
It all comes down to "what is this system used for, and what are the consequences of an outage". Not every system has the same risks and costs associated, but it is important to know which ones do.
As in, prints only one color. I have no need for color printing.
Brother has some very nice laser printers out there for the consumer market. We have one which is just a printer, and one which is an all-in-one with scanning, photocopying, and faxing. The two use the exact same cartridge.
And those printers have been in use for several years in our house, and work quite well.
If you want just a basic black and white laser printer, I will happily recommend a Brother HL-2140.
Slashdot Mirror
My Nexus 7 tablet has full 1080p.
I have no reason to doubt that people are streaming full HD content to small screens.
Well, speaking only for myself, I will never own a Kinect 2, because I refuse to connect my video game console to the interwebs.
Precisely for crap like this. I'm not installing an always on camera in my living room. Not now, not ever.
Seriously, if the CEO of Dreamworks Animation doesn't know the difference, he's not qualified to hold the position.
Either way, I think this falls into the category of "just how much more can we screw the customers before they leave".
Long term, they absolutely want that.
If they could, when you pop in a DVD, you'd submit your credit card to pay for the view, and charge according to the number of people in the room.
They want all sorts of things where they keep gouging us for the price and keep their revenue stream constant.
But, they might find people suddenly saying "to hell with that", and go read a book.
And, of course, the book publishers want the same damned model where you pay to re-read your book, because clearly owning books and not compensating the publisher every time you read it is theft, right?
And, since they basically pay the lawmakers to give them what they want, I won't be at all surprised if the assholes at the *AA manage to make it law that every time I watch a DVD I bought I have to pay them, and also pay for screen size, and also pay for # of viewers.
This push to make IP and copyright laws drive everything we do is eroding our concept of property, and turning it into a rent-every-time model. And, I'll stop watching before that happens.
These clowns are just more or less determined to destroy the whole business of downloading, as well as killing their own revenue stream.
They think I'm going to pay more to download a video to my 55" TV than my 27" TV (and correspondingly more than my tablet)? All at the same resolution? How does *that* work? Can we charge him more for being a bigger idiot?
They're already gouging me to rent it, then my internet company is gouging me for the bandwidth to get it, and *then* they want a premium to play the exact same content on a slightly different device at the same resolution because the physical dimensions of the screen are larger?
These guys are drunk, rent-seeking assholes who have lost touch with their customers if they think this is going to work.
It seems like the movie studios are so focused on leveraging their synergies in order to opimitaly maximize revenue that they're going to destroy the very market they're hoping to make money from.
If Dreamworks and the other movie studios go this route, they're going to drive away customers.
I already think going to a movie is too damned expensive, and would rather watch movies at home. But it sounds like they're just trying to add more rent seeking/price gouging along the chain here.
What, exactly, entitles them to a cut? I would say nothing entitles them to a cut.
You're suggesting we just fork over a fraction of all trades to spare the large banks and trading houses the expense of building the HFT systems to rip us off?
Hell no.
I have a better solution, and it doesn't involve keeping HFT or the trading houses getting a guaranteed cut.
If they want to make money on the stock market, they can do it by buying low and selling high based on the same kind of information available to me. Not by sitting in the middle skimming off money from the market by executing a zillion trades on a computer.
The market doesn't exist to guarantee profits for large trading houses. And if we're supposed to believe it does, the market is completely fucked, unfair, and dishonest.
But then, many of us already knew that.
I'm largely of the opinion that HFT is a chance for the banks and trading houses to skim off the top of the stock market, at the expense of the 'normal' investors, and using information and access we couldn't possibly have.
I don't believe at all that the "retail investor is very well-served by the current market structure". In fact, I believe the retail investor gets fleeced by these trading programs.
And since there are several well known examples, including the one in the summary, in which these trading programs themselves distort the market and significantly changes the valuations of the stocks.
HFT is the large trading houses using the money of investors (their own and everyone else in the market) like a Vegas casino slot machine.
Basically, HFT is vigorish.
No, in between vapor and not vapor ... we have alpha and beta builds as intermediate states.
Of course, it can transition to either vapor or not vapor from those. I've seen a couple of alpha builds turn back into vapor in my time, and I've seen Google have stuff in beta for years.
So, it's the least terrible solution (which is debatable) so therefore it's good?
Sorry, but Flash has been a giant security hole for about as long as it has existed.
You want to play casual games in Flash, that's your choice.
But I've been happily avoiding Flash for a decade or so, and have yet to find a single website I cared enough about to install Flash. Occasionally I need to use it for work, which means a very specific machine, running IE -- which is only used for these kinds of garbage that HR thinks I'm required to use.
If I hit a page which gives me nothing but "You need Flash to run this site", all it's ever going to see from me is the back button.
I would contend that any new sysadmin who is thinking the above is the last bloody person you want working for you.
The days of the IT prima donna are over in most sane places, and the company needs to look out for its own interests, and not merely coddle the fragile ego of someone who thinks the job means they get carte blanche to do as they please.
We'll trust your decisions after we see how you make out for a while, and if your job satisfaction precludes following the procedures we've laid out for you ... find someplace else.
Trust, but verify. And after you've verified, you can trust more. But if you think you can just walk away from the job and leave the new guy to sort everything out, you're just asking for Really Bad Things.
Trust me on this. Even when you've interviewed your candidate, the last thing you want to do is hand over the keys to the kingdom and let the new guy have at it to do whatever he/she wants.
Years ago we hired someone who was meant to be part developer and part sysadmin.
His development skills were showing to be so lacking, and some of the things he thought he wanted to do started to make the people who had been doing the admin duty a little nervous. We didn't let him have full access to the systems for a while.
He was describing making some pretty reckless changes, that he couldn't convince anybody of why we'd do them, and kept saying how he disagreed with how we did things, or said things which made us all think he was a cowboy who had no real sense of why things were done the way they had been, and why we couldn't just re-do everything to look like the way he had it at his last job.
Eventually we more or less decided we couldn't really trust him, and he got neither development tasks, nor sys admin tasks from us. Eventually my manager had to show him the door, because he started getting really aggressive and agitated that the people who had been the admins for several years weren't prepared to just hand him the passwords and let him do as he pleased. But, this was based on the stuff he himself was saying, which more or less amounted to "I don't care, as the admin it's how I want it to be". Yeah, no there skippy.
The more he tried to do things, and the more we saw the results of the tasks we had given him, we became quite convinced he had bullshitted his way into the job, and was trying to take the opportunity to prove (to us or him I don't know) just how much he really knew.
You may need to disengage, but don't do it all at once. Because you're just putting yourself and your company more at risk.
Once you're sure you can trust the new person to do the job, and under the constraints/rules you've laid out ... then you can pull back a lot more.
Two things:
1) So, Firefox et al haven't "solved" a damned thing, they've just assumed that RAM is cheap and plentiful? I hope nobody is taking credit for that bullshit reasoning.
2) It's my fucking memory, and I may or may not be using it for other things. I've got 8GB on my machine, and every day or so I need to shut down Firefox to reclaim the memory it's been leaking. Firefox starts at around 300MB of RAM, and grows to 1GB if I let it.
Oh, and 3), go fuck yourself.
Oh, when did Firefox (or Chome, or Safari) fix the issue of using too much memory?
In my experience, all three of them gradually grow over time, suck up more and more memory, and eventually need to be restarted to reset them back to something sane.
I hate to break it to you, but in my experience, this complaint has been more than slightly relevant for years now.
I currently have twice as many chrome.exe processes running as I do open tabs, and closing tabs doesn't always seem to free memory.
Firefox gets bigger when it's sitting idle, as does Safari, as does Chrome.
So I have no idea of what you're basing this notion that they don't consume too much memory comes from. Because it sure as heck doesn't match what I see.
Well, it's called ScriptSafe, and I'm running it right now.
It certainly does exist.
So, how does this work? Every time I see reference to fractional bitcoins I get confused.
Is a bitcoin an atomic or a divisible unit? I'd thought it was an atomic unit, and there wouldn't be things like 0.22 Bitcoins. How do you spend a fraction of a bitcoin?
Are there bitpennies? I don't think I understand this new fangled stuff well enough yet.
Steam turbine with wooden cogs would be my guess.
Nutritional yeast flakes in cooking (a vegetarian staple), marmite spread occasionally, fortified milk and soy milk, cheese, some breakfast cereals, eggs, multivitamins/supplements ...
I've been a vegetarian for 14 years now, and the last time I had a blood test the doctor was like "wow, you're not anemic or anything". And I basically said "because I know what I'm doing".
If you just eat crap and don't take that into account, you might have bad outcomes. In fact, I've known a couple of vegans who still had a carry over as being a fussy eater from being a kid -- and they quite often ate what I'd call junk, but that was animal free. The things people call "vegan egg replacers" are mostly starches I wouldn't go anywhere near, because it's got little nutritional value.
But, in general, very few vegans or vegetarians are actually suffering from a deficiency of B12 if they have a well balanced diet.
Yes, it is true that our physiology makes us omnivores, there's no denying that. But, you can still safely avoid eating meat and still get all the nutrition you need if you so choose.
In general, if you're eating a good balance of fruits and vegetables, legumes, green leafy things, grains and the like ... you will get enough nutrition.
I worked with a guy who used to say that.
He wrote shitty, un-maintainable code which he thought was elegant, and which in practice was garbage, full of ridiculous assumptions, and giant inefficiencies all in the name of him being able to invoke something in as few lines of code as possible, or without consideration for the cost of his framework. Half of his code went through massive setup tasks every time it was invoked or naively did something assuming it wasn't expensive. Over and over and over again.
He said you should write first, and the optimize later. By the time we realized his code was so slow as to be unusable, he had painted himself into a corner, and there was no way to optimize his code except to get rid of it.
Sometimes the things passed off as "ease" of programming is a thinly veiled decision to use known terrible methods in the expectation they're prettier.
In my experience, some of these claims don't produce good code. They produce things the coder believes to be pretty, but which in practice is quite a mess.
I've yet to be convinced you should start writing your code in a way you know is inefficient because your belief in your elegant solution, which is anything but. I've seen an O(n^2) algorithm called O(n^2) times, all because it was "cleaner" code, and the code assumed everything was a zero cost operation (or had hidden all of the aspects of that, so you don't find it until later).
Performance is a real thing. I lament that people have now decided it's irrelevant to consider it.
Yawn, as usual you have nothing of value to add other than one of your screeds.
If you have anything intelligent to add, I might listen. Otherwise, as usual, I don't give a shit what you have to say.
Then I assume you live in a cave.
I have about 50+ watches, and, oddly enough, their function is to tell time. Yes, they're obviously also jewelry/fashion, but they are used to tell time. All of my watches can also go swimming with me, and most of my watches are up for some pretty rough service. Show me a smart watch rated for 200m of water depth, or one which is as rugged as my G-Shock watches, and I might consider it. For now, they're expensive, gimmicky, fragile, and of limited use. I can hear my cell phone if I get a text, I don't need to see it on my watch.
I wear my watches far more often than I carry my cell phone.
Then you have a very small sample size. I own a smart phone, but I don't have a data plan for it. I don't keep it attached to me 24/7, nor do I want to.
I view the smart watch as the updated version of the calculator watch ... a very nerdy accessory, but not something most people have any interest in.
Again, what?
My tablet is far less hassle than my laptop, and when I travel I no longer bring my laptop most of the time. I can get into my company VPN with my tablet, I can pull out my tablet in a lot of places that a laptop would be a bloody nuisance, and I can go through airport security with my tablet without taking it out of the bag. I wouldn't want to do all of my work on my tablet, but for checking on my email when I'm travelling, it's far far more convenient.
I view a laptop as a necessary evil, but a tablet as a far more convenient thing most of the time.
Bullshit. Not everybody wants a smart watch. That doesn't make you a luddite ... you may in fact be a fan of time pieces.
I have a couple of skeleton watches, meaning you can see through the watch face to the actual gears and mechanical bits of the watch.
The aesthetics of the watch itself is the point. Just because someone doesn't feel the need to use every shiny bauble and gew gaw the tech industry comes up with doesn't make them a luddite.
I'm completely surrounded by electronics and technology already, and I don't see a smart watch as being something I'm particularly interested in. In fact, it's something I can't see the point of for me ... I don't text enough to need to have it constantly attached to me, any more than I can't be away from my phone (which I refuse to buy a data plan for, because wifi covers my needs). I also don't need Apple (or whoever) to be able to track every little I thing I do throughout my day.
If you think the big name watch makers all need to get on board with this or die, you're overly fetishizing technology. There will always be a market for mechanical watches. You really think suddenly nobody is going to want to own a Rolex because there exist smartwatches? If you do, you don't know anything about people who buy watches.
Some people still have plain old-fashioned analog sex too, and haven't embraced teledildonics. And, thankfully, most of us never will.
For many of us, technology is a tool, but not the be all and end all of our existence. Knowing when to draw the line and walk away from it doesn't make you a luddite, it means you have a better perspective on shit that really matters.
I don't have a barn you insensitive clod. ;-)
Probably the ability to do it for more hours than you would have daylight?
If there exists an orbital path which can see the sun 24 hours/day, and that same orbital path lets you see the receiving stations, say, 18 hours/day ... you get more access to sunlight than you would otherwise.
Besides, it has the added benefit that if your neighbors get a little uppity, you let your mirrors slide a little off course and get a little more tightly focused ... bam, instant death ray. And, that's where the real money is. ;-)
Well, in some industries, there is little opportunity in nimbleness. In some, risk is OK and pays off in terms of what that gets you. Depends on what you do, and what the systems are used for.
Who said anything about architecture? I'm talking about end-to-end systems. If a production system went offline because the NICs were all hosed, and even a few hours of outage can have a run on effect on company operations, that's a pretty significant thing.
Do you know where I learned rigor in change management? On systems which scheduled maintenance on aircraft. You can't go to the FAA and say "ooops, we had a little issue and might have forgotten to re-attach the wings".
I currently work in another heavily regulated industry, where outages can be very costly and have legal implications. If you stop production of the company's core business, you quickly rack up large losses. I'm not prepared to be the one to cause that from lack of due diligence.
I work in environments where risk tolerance can be exceedingly small, and unless the risk of applying a steaming fresh patch outweighs the overall risks, it can wait until it's been tested properly. So, we apply changes in a lab, then we apply in smaller test systems, then we move to full scale test system, then we move on to the Production instances.
We have systems which we can be a little more 'adventurous' with because they're not mission critical. But, for things which are mission critical, we apply a level of rigor which some people would find oppressive.
If your systems touch your finance, your production, or anything involving human safety, the cost of fixing can outweigh the cost of testing very fast, and you test the bejeezus out of it.
Me, I come down heavily on the side of managing the hell out of risks, minimizing as much as you possibly can, and making damned sure the decision makers understand them. And you know what? My employers periodically say "in this case we're okay with it, you're being too paranoid this time". But generally they understand precisely why I do that, and even if I periodically sound like a broken record, they accept that is part of my job. They understand I'm doing it to maximize chance of success and minimize disruptions.
I knew a developer once who realized a bug in his code, and applied a "quick fix" to a live environment, despite having previously been told that was almost a hanging offense. And then it was a much larger undertaking to correct the issue and put things back to where they needed to be.
I knew a sysadmin once who would apply changes to environments in the middle of a workday without telling anybody, and then all of a sudden people start popping up from their cubicles looking around to see if anybody else suddenly can't reach something. In a few cases, an entire small office was dead in the water because of this until it could be fixed.
It all comes down to "what is this system used for, and what are the consequences of an outage". Not every system has the same risks and costs associated, but it is important to know which ones do.
See, I specifically said "laser printer".
As in, prints only one color. I have no need for color printing.
Brother has some very nice laser printers out there for the consumer market. We have one which is just a printer, and one which is an all-in-one with scanning, photocopying, and faxing. The two use the exact same cartridge.
And those printers have been in use for several years in our house, and work quite well.
If you want just a basic black and white laser printer, I will happily recommend a Brother HL-2140.