If you don't leave a tip, the waitress might think you forgot, or maybe that you left cash on the table for her and someone else swiped it. Leaving a tiny tip says, "yes, I remembered - you just don't deserve more than this."
I'm a great tipper, to the point that the wait staff at a certain local restaurant argues about who gets my wife and me. I've seen a fist-pump and "YES!" when the winner didn't know we were watching. I'm willing and ready to leave a $0.04 tip when appropriate, though.
You are obviously too young to remember the days when programmers wrote optimised and intelligent code. These days all of the lazy fucks that call themselves programmers just point and click in pretty drag and drop IDEs that require 10MB of RAM just to print "hello fucking world".
I worked with a nice fellow. Let's call him Fritz. Fritz is kind of a COBOL-on-mainframe master; if I ever want an accounting system that will work for the next 80 years, I'll give him a call. His problem is that he can't not optimize, even when it's totally inappropriate.
For example, he was tasked to write a Python program to take a flat text file of invoice line items and match them up to the invoices in our system. When he proudly debuted the "working" product, it made the database cry for several hours as it looped across the text file one line at a time, queried the DB for the matching invoice, inserted the line item, then moved on to the next. Once I recovered from shock and looked at his code (which I'm convinced was also valid COBOL), I realized that it didn't cache anything. If two adjacent lines would've matched the same invoice, his code didn't care. It just repeated that query as many times as necessary.
I finally got it through to Fritz that I would not allow that code in production and to please add some memoizing. His response was to spend the next week optimizing for the special case where those two adjacent lines (in an unsorted text file) went to the same invoice. That got runtimes down to just a few hours. I finally gave up on asking him to do it, spent a morning adding a hash that mapped invoice numbers to their database rows, and saw the program run in 8 seconds (I have witnesses).
So I gave it back to Fritz and asked him to make a couple of minor adjustments before rolling it out live. When he was finished, runtimes were back up to several hours. I was horrified and furious to learn that he'd stripped out all my caching code. When I asked why, he laughed and shook his head at my naivety because my program wasted over 250MB of RAM, but his ran in under 1MB.
In production, it was going onto a server with 16GB of RAM.
I tried to explain that I'd much rather "waste" 1/64 of the machine's RAM for 8 seconds than 1/16000th for 5 hours of database pain, but he never really got it.
Notice where I started by saying that I worked with Fritz? Well, I'm still at the same job, but we're no longer coworkers.
My point in all this is that you see every saved byte as a moral victory over today's decadent youth. I see it as an old man tilting at windmills. Memory leaks need to be caught, of course - even a low drip adds up to gallons over time. Embedded programming still has a place for clever coding that saves bits whenever possible. But in general-purpose desktop code, I couldn't possibly care less whether a program I'll be practically living in uses 1/60th of my computer's RAM (100MB) instead of merely 1/120th (50MB). If that "laziness" lets the authors add handy features to it and fix bugs in a more timely manner than if they had to micro-optimize for every nibble, then more power to 'em.
i want you to listen to reason: we need to get off oil now, or we will suffer
I know you and I disagree on a lot of political topics, but I'm 100% with you here. I'm a greedy capitalist who's far more interested in my own lifestyle than in a spotted owl, but I want us to get off oil and onto something long-term sustainable, and ASAP. I'd happily encourage Congress to fund a Manhattan Project-style national security-motivated investment to make it happen. Forget about carbon dioxide and all that (even if I do think those things are important) - I just don't want to depend on the good graces of countries who hate us to keep my country running.
Either we invest in alternative energy development now and eat the research costs for the next X years until it comes online, or we wait until gas gets ludicrously expensive and then start research - and then wait X years after that until we can use it. Maybe if we'd taken this stuff seriously in the 70s and 80s, X would almost be up and we'd have viable alternatives available today. Thanks, previous generation.
Out of curiosity, why would you take that away from it? Couldn't it also mean that perpetual motion is only impossible within a confined space? I mean, to my (admittedly untrained) eye, it seems like you're begging the question by proving that C is constant by presuming that the consequences of C being constant are necessarily true.
I think the question is not that certain words are evil, but that profanity can be valuable. This value is lost from overuse.
I agree completely. I think the FCC should lift the ban (and in fact encourage) profanity in specific situations. Imagine the difference in effectiveness between:
This is a tornado warning. This is not a drill. You should seek shelter immediately.
and
This is a tornado warning! We're not kidding! Get the fuck inside!
Replacing the vowel in profanity with some other character doesn't fool anyone. Everyone knows still you're swearing.
I had a Mormon friend in the Navy who could pseudo-cuss up a storm. "I fleekin' hate these shimpty flarking pieces of carp." One day I pointed out that he was replacing one specific symbol with a similar symbol that meant the exact same thing, and was therefore still cussing. He told me to fuck off. I was so proud of him.
The huge problem with this argument is where was this outrage when we had 8 years of unchecked infringement on our civil liberty's, government expansion, insane government spending, and a host of other issues. (I'm not going to even go in to your "help" bit as that rebuttal could fill up a whole other post.)
Take a poll of how the average Texan felt about Janet Reno's delegation to Waco. I assure you that Federal jackassery did not start in 2000.
By the way, don't interpret that as an endorsement of Bush; I reserve my right to dislike our last few presidents, regardless of their party.
I'm quite certain math geeks are beavering away at new compression algorithms in corporate labs. Much of that research will screech to a halt if there's no prospect of making money licensing the resulting patents. Not all of it, just a lot.
And I'm damn sure that none of those are as hard as cranking out the physics underlying the semiconductors that their toys will run on, but that math wasn't patented - and a good thing, too!
There are no valid defenses for patenting math. It's just ludicrous. For every spiffy new algorithm that might not be invented if it couldn't be patented, we have 10,000 software projects that can't implement the most basic, obviously functionality because some jackass patented XOR. Nope, screw 'em. Scorched earth, salted ground, and all that. Software patents are fundamentally dumb and I'd be willing to give up a hypothetical H.265 in exchange for being allowed to do my job without worrying that someone locked up the math.
Read the explanatory post I made. She was defending the illegalization of distributing depictions of illegal acts - in this case, of animal cruelty. While I abhor animal cruelty, it already carries significant penalties. If you film someone killing a dog and then sell that film, you're already an accessory to an illegal act and should be prosecuted for it.
If I value the integrity of data stored in a database, I'm going to use an RDBMS that is designed and built from the ground up on tried and true concepts (ACID mainly).
But what if you don't value the integrity? What if you're mapping expensive aggregate functions on enormous data sets, and the error from losing a few entries is provably lower than the random noise floor? Claiming that there's no use for NoSQL is as ignorant as claiming that it's appropriate replacement for an RDBMS for all applications.
BTW, I'm a PostgreSQL junkie. I can still appreciate a clever solution to a problem set that doesn't directly affect me, though.
I know it's dumb and petty, but there's no way I ever would have installed something named "Mandriva" on a machine I control. It's like they deliberately picked it to make it as embarrassing as possible to say in public.
Friend: What'cha doin'?
User: Oh, just fiddling with The Gimp on my Mandriva.
Friend: I have to be somewhere. [departs quickly looking over shoulder]
I know we all laugh about focus groups, but a good one could've avoided this debacle.
(a) Creation, Sale, or Possession.— Whoever knowingly creates, sells, or possesses a depiction of animal cruelty with the intention of placing that depiction in interstate or foreign commerce for commercial gain, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 5 years, or both.
[...]
(c) Definitions.— In this section—
(1) the term “depiction of animal cruelty” means any visual or auditory depiction, including any photograph, motion-picture film, video recording, electronic image, or sound recording of conduct in which a living animal is intentionally maimed, mutilated, tortured, wounded, or killed, if such conduct is illegal under Federal law or the law of the State in which the creation, sale, or possession takes place, regardless of whether the maiming, mutilation, torture, wounding, or killing took place in the State; [...]
That sounds good on the face of it, but consider the edge cases. Like the fake child porn laws, it sounds like you could get busted for creating a Photoshopped depiction of killing an animal (remember, the law bans depictions, possibly regardless of whether they actually happened). Put it on your website that has a Google Ad block and now you're doing it for profit.
Let's take that a step further. Suppose you're an animal rights activist and you film someone killing a bald eagle, then put the movie on your organization's site (which has a donation link) and draw attention to it. The local prosecutor hates you and claims that your site lacks "serious religious, political, scientific, educational, journalistic, historical, or artistic value". Have fun defending yourself for the next five bankrupting years.
If you think either of those are far-fetched and unlikely, then you haven't been paying attention to the news.
This is the kind of limitation of free speech Kagan advocated. I can't stand the idea of someone torturing animals, but the idea of a prosecutor getting to decide whether I can even talk about it is even worse.
For instant-on, you could have the computer boot in a completely clean state then freeze that state to file. I practically guarantee that unthawing that state, then tweaking it afterwards (kill -HUP is your friend) will be faster than any staged booting or threaded booting could ever be.
It takes Lucid 23 seconds from power-on to a usable desktop on my HP Mini 110. Its WD Scorpio 160GB hard drive (model WD1600BEVS) benchmarks at 49MB/s sequential read, assuming large contiguous chunks.
What you're suggesting is basically restoring from hibernation each time, which can be done today. On my hardware, if the restoration process has no overhead above just streaming the hibernation file to RAM (including delays that the cold boot has to deal with, like BIOS testing), and the state file is completely defragmented (as if it had been saved to a pristine swap partition), it can be faster than a cold boot only if I've saved less than 1.1GB of state. If I'm saving more state than that, or if it takes time to bring the network up, or any hardware has changed and has to be redetected, or [...], then it's actually faster just to reboot the whole thing.
Granted, I could have elaborated more. But I assumed any reader would know what I meant.
I know what you meant, but still disagree with your conclusion.
And how much of that was actually her? Or how much of it was her job as Solicitor General?
I don't think that's a good excuse because it removes all personal responsibility. Compare with "Bush didn't really think we should invade Iraq, but he only did so because it was his job." Or more recently, "Obama really wanted to close Gitmo, but he kept it open because it was his job." I don't think either of those statements are more outlandish than the executive's top lawyer arguing that speech is too free.
There's a time and a place to go along with work duties you disagree with, but there's also a time to stand up and say "this is wrong and I can't do this in good conscience." In my opinion, lobbying the Supreme Court for a position you disagree with is poor form if you eventually want people to trust that you don't agree with that position. It's bad morally, and it's bad politically.
Slashdot Mirror
Why on earth did you leave her a tip at all?
If you don't leave a tip, the waitress might think you forgot, or maybe that you left cash on the table for her and someone else swiped it. Leaving a tiny tip says, "yes, I remembered - you just don't deserve more than this."
I'm a great tipper, to the point that the wait staff at a certain local restaurant argues about who gets my wife and me. I've seen a fist-pump and "YES!" when the winner didn't know we were watching. I'm willing and ready to leave a $0.04 tip when appropriate, though.
You are obviously too young to remember the days when programmers wrote optimised and intelligent code. These days all of the lazy fucks that call themselves programmers just point and click in pretty drag and drop IDEs that require 10MB of RAM just to print "hello fucking world".
I worked with a nice fellow. Let's call him Fritz. Fritz is kind of a COBOL-on-mainframe master; if I ever want an accounting system that will work for the next 80 years, I'll give him a call. His problem is that he can't not optimize, even when it's totally inappropriate.
For example, he was tasked to write a Python program to take a flat text file of invoice line items and match them up to the invoices in our system. When he proudly debuted the "working" product, it made the database cry for several hours as it looped across the text file one line at a time, queried the DB for the matching invoice, inserted the line item, then moved on to the next. Once I recovered from shock and looked at his code (which I'm convinced was also valid COBOL), I realized that it didn't cache anything. If two adjacent lines would've matched the same invoice, his code didn't care. It just repeated that query as many times as necessary.
I finally got it through to Fritz that I would not allow that code in production and to please add some memoizing. His response was to spend the next week optimizing for the special case where those two adjacent lines (in an unsorted text file) went to the same invoice. That got runtimes down to just a few hours. I finally gave up on asking him to do it, spent a morning adding a hash that mapped invoice numbers to their database rows, and saw the program run in 8 seconds (I have witnesses).
So I gave it back to Fritz and asked him to make a couple of minor adjustments before rolling it out live. When he was finished, runtimes were back up to several hours. I was horrified and furious to learn that he'd stripped out all my caching code. When I asked why, he laughed and shook his head at my naivety because my program wasted over 250MB of RAM, but his ran in under 1MB.
In production, it was going onto a server with 16GB of RAM.
I tried to explain that I'd much rather "waste" 1/64 of the machine's RAM for 8 seconds than 1/16000th for 5 hours of database pain, but he never really got it.
Notice where I started by saying that I worked with Fritz? Well, I'm still at the same job, but we're no longer coworkers.
My point in all this is that you see every saved byte as a moral victory over today's decadent youth. I see it as an old man tilting at windmills. Memory leaks need to be caught, of course - even a low drip adds up to gallons over time. Embedded programming still has a place for clever coding that saves bits whenever possible. But in general-purpose desktop code, I couldn't possibly care less whether a program I'll be practically living in uses 1/60th of my computer's RAM (100MB) instead of merely 1/120th (50MB). If that "laziness" lets the authors add handy features to it and fix bugs in a more timely manner than if they had to micro-optimize for every nibble, then more power to 'em.
Hans weeps quietly into his pillow.
i want you to listen to reason: we need to get off oil now, or we will suffer
I know you and I disagree on a lot of political topics, but I'm 100% with you here. I'm a greedy capitalist who's far more interested in my own lifestyle than in a spotted owl, but I want us to get off oil and onto something long-term sustainable, and ASAP. I'd happily encourage Congress to fund a Manhattan Project-style national security-motivated investment to make it happen. Forget about carbon dioxide and all that (even if I do think those things are important) - I just don't want to depend on the good graces of countries who hate us to keep my country running.
Either we invest in alternative energy development now and eat the research costs for the next X years until it comes online, or we wait until gas gets ludicrously expensive and then start research - and then wait X years after that until we can use it. Maybe if we'd taken this stuff seriously in the 70s and 80s, X would almost be up and we'd have viable alternatives available today. Thanks, previous generation.
I've been on an elevator with you and beg to differ.
Out of curiosity, why would you take that away from it? Couldn't it also mean that perpetual motion is only impossible within a confined space? I mean, to my (admittedly untrained) eye, it seems like you're begging the question by proving that C is constant by presuming that the consequences of C being constant are necessarily true.
I think the question is not that certain words are evil, but that profanity can be valuable. This value is lost from overuse.
I agree completely. I think the FCC should lift the ban (and in fact encourage) profanity in specific situations. Imagine the difference in effectiveness between:
This is a tornado warning. This is not a drill. You should seek shelter immediately.
and
This is a tornado warning! We're not kidding! Get the fuck inside!
Replacing the vowel in profanity with some other character doesn't fool anyone. Everyone knows still you're swearing.
I had a Mormon friend in the Navy who could pseudo-cuss up a storm. "I fleekin' hate these shimpty flarking pieces of carp." One day I pointed out that he was replacing one specific symbol with a similar symbol that meant the exact same thing, and was therefore still cussing. He told me to fuck off. I was so proud of him.
What's funny (to me) is that I had to read that about 5 times before I saw the fucking fix.
these fucking morons in the south ruining this country with neocon presidents,
The current neocon president is from Illinois. I've never heard of that state being referred to as "southern" before.
The huge problem with this argument is where was this outrage when we had 8 years of unchecked infringement on our civil liberty's, government expansion, insane government spending, and a host of other issues. (I'm not going to even go in to your "help" bit as that rebuttal could fill up a whole other post.)
Take a poll of how the average Texan felt about Janet Reno's delegation to Waco. I assure you that Federal jackassery did not start in 2000.
By the way, don't interpret that as an endorsement of Bush; I reserve my right to dislike our last few presidents, regardless of their party.
Texas buys the most textbooks, and thus has undue influence on the industry.
Why would that be, anyway? California has 50% more people, and New York has 75% as many. It's not like Texas is the only state with kids.
I'm quite certain math geeks are beavering away at new compression algorithms in corporate labs. Much of that research will screech to a halt if there's no prospect of making money licensing the resulting patents. Not all of it, just a lot.
And I'm damn sure that none of those are as hard as cranking out the physics underlying the semiconductors that their toys will run on, but that math wasn't patented - and a good thing, too!
There are no valid defenses for patenting math. It's just ludicrous. For every spiffy new algorithm that might not be invented if it couldn't be patented, we have 10,000 software projects that can't implement the most basic, obviously functionality because some jackass patented XOR. Nope, screw 'em. Scorched earth, salted ground, and all that. Software patents are fundamentally dumb and I'd be willing to give up a hypothetical H.265 in exchange for being allowed to do my job without worrying that someone locked up the math.
Maybe we should consider changing one of these prefixes so they don't both begin with "m".
Or spelling them out when it matters: "use 53 micrograms of Vitamin Foo".
Yeah, that made more sense when I first wrote it.
Now most of Slashdot will be up in arms, I’m sure.
I don't think their arms will be up.
While you're technically accurate, I'm thinking more along the lines of "3rd cousin".
As part of an old family with a lot of branches that changed the surname spelling, I can only say:
Please don't let him be related. Please don't let him be related. Please don't let him be related.
Read the explanatory post I made. She was defending the illegalization of distributing depictions of illegal acts - in this case, of animal cruelty. While I abhor animal cruelty, it already carries significant penalties. If you film someone killing a dog and then sell that film, you're already an accessory to an illegal act and should be prosecuted for it.
But what if you don't value the integrity? What if you're mapping expensive aggregate functions on enormous data sets, and the error from losing a few entries is provably lower than the random noise floor? Claiming that there's no use for NoSQL is as ignorant as claiming that it's appropriate replacement for an RDBMS for all applications.
BTW, I'm a PostgreSQL junkie. I can still appreciate a clever solution to a problem set that doesn't directly affect me, though.
I know it's dumb and petty, but there's no way I ever would have installed something named "Mandriva" on a machine I control. It's like they deliberately picked it to make it as embarrassing as possible to say in public.
Friend: What'cha doin'?
User: Oh, just fiddling with The Gimp on my Mandriva.
Friend: I have to be somewhere. [departs quickly looking over shoulder]
I know we all laugh about focus groups, but a good one could've avoided this debacle.
You could, you know, click the link. :-)
The statute being debated was USC Title 18, Section 48, which says:
That sounds good on the face of it, but consider the edge cases. Like the fake child porn laws, it sounds like you could get busted for creating a Photoshopped depiction of killing an animal (remember, the law bans depictions, possibly regardless of whether they actually happened). Put it on your website that has a Google Ad block and now you're doing it for profit.
Let's take that a step further. Suppose you're an animal rights activist and you film someone killing a bald eagle, then put the movie on your organization's site (which has a donation link) and draw attention to it. The local prosecutor hates you and claims that your site lacks "serious religious, political, scientific, educational, journalistic, historical, or artistic value". Have fun defending yourself for the next five bankrupting years.
If you think either of those are far-fetched and unlikely, then you haven't been paying attention to the news.
This is the kind of limitation of free speech Kagan advocated. I can't stand the idea of someone torturing animals, but the idea of a prosecutor getting to decide whether I can even talk about it is even worse.
For instant-on, you could have the computer boot in a completely clean state then freeze that state to file. I practically guarantee that unthawing that state, then tweaking it afterwards (kill -HUP is your friend) will be faster than any staged booting or threaded booting could ever be.
It takes Lucid 23 seconds from power-on to a usable desktop on my HP Mini 110. Its WD Scorpio 160GB hard drive (model WD1600BEVS) benchmarks at 49MB/s sequential read, assuming large contiguous chunks.
What you're suggesting is basically restoring from hibernation each time, which can be done today. On my hardware, if the restoration process has no overhead above just streaming the hibernation file to RAM (including delays that the cold boot has to deal with, like BIOS testing), and the state file is completely defragmented (as if it had been saved to a pristine swap partition), it can be faster than a cold boot only if I've saved less than 1.1GB of state. If I'm saving more state than that, or if it takes time to bring the network up, or any hardware has changed and has to be redetected, or [...], then it's actually faster just to reboot the whole thing.
More precisely: conservative means: "do whatever the oil industry wants", and liberal means: "do whatever Hollywood wants".
The oil industry likes Democrats just fine. It's a mistake to believe otherwise.
Granted, I could have elaborated more. But I assumed any reader would know what I meant.
I know what you meant, but still disagree with your conclusion.
And how much of that was actually her? Or how much of it was her job as Solicitor General?
I don't think that's a good excuse because it removes all personal responsibility. Compare with "Bush didn't really think we should invade Iraq, but he only did so because it was his job." Or more recently, "Obama really wanted to close Gitmo, but he kept it open because it was his job." I don't think either of those statements are more outlandish than the executive's top lawyer arguing that speech is too free.
There's a time and a place to go along with work duties you disagree with, but there's also a time to stand up and say "this is wrong and I can't do this in good conscience." In my opinion, lobbying the Supreme Court for a position you disagree with is poor form if you eventually want people to trust that you don't agree with that position. It's bad morally, and it's bad politically.