The "graphics don't matter" argument doesn't hold much water. If we go down that route, then through backwards induction [...]
Nope. He established a baseline and said "this is good enough". I'd tend to agree. I played Jak and Daxter on the PS2 and it was stunningly beautiful. There's nothing wrong with advancing past that, but my aesthetic meter was already maxed out. As long as a new console can look that good, I'm cool with it.
I couldn't stand either of the main candidates; I voted Libertarian this time around. I the Republicans as an example because I got the impression that the OP was in favor of the Democrats having such powers.
Interesting anecdote that has nothing to do with optimization and everything to do with bad design. Optimization is great for making your program run n% faster. Design is great for making your program run in O(log n) time instead of O(n^2) time. The important part is to come up with a good design, implement it, and address the specific problem areas. I can't think of a single justification for doing it any other way.
Saying optimize at the end is just as stupid and just as costly.
There is an enormous difference between optimization and choosing appropriate algorithms. If you write a program well, it's almost always easy to optimize it later. If you write it poorly, it'll almost always be impossible to optimize at any point of its development. For example, I'd rather sort a big array with an unoptimized (but correct) quicksort than with an extremely clever (but insane) bogosort.
You certainly need to know alot about assembler and CPU architecture if you are going to write code that emits highly tuned assembler. Actually you probably do have to write those tools in assembler for all intents and purposes.
Translation: In GCC 4.2.1 as shipped with FreeBSD 8-STABLE, there are 869.c and.h files with a total of 900KLOC, and 34.asm files with 6KLOC. It seems that GCC itself isn't written with very much assembler.
so there's no reason to explicitly use shift in code (unless you're doing bit manipulation
Well, right. The general advice is to always write what you actually want the compiler to do and not how to do it, unless you have specific proof that the compiler's not optimizing it well.
That's the main reason why I want to shoot people who write "clever" code on the first pass. Always make the rough draft of a program clean and readable. If (and only if!) you need to optimize it, use a profiler to see what actually needs work. If you do things like manually unroll loops where the body is only executed 23 times during the program's whole lifetime, or use shift to multiply because you read somewhere that it's fast, then don't be surprised when your coworkers revoke your oxygen bit.
However, there ARE people out there who practice irresponsible dissent, and their sole purpose is to disrupt the lives of everyone in order to make a point which most find irrational.
You're absolutely right. If the Republicans win the next election, I hope they vote to silence irresponsible dissenters who say things like:
Global Climate Change is real.
Intellectual Property is imaginary.
Free Software is good for America.
Pot should be legalized.
Gay marriage should be legalized.
Health care reform is necessary.
Networks should be neutral.
Abortion should remain legal.
Monsanto should be limited.
Any time you wish your buddies had a power, imagine what it would be like if the other team had that same ability.
LIke you said, nothing to do with NTFS at all. It's not that "you can make NTFS filesystems that are compatible with Vista and 7 but not with XP", it's more like "you can make filesystems that are compatible with Vista and 7 but not with XP".
Yes, but as I said, to the end user, they're functionally the same thing. The OP misspoke or misunderstood, but the net effect is that he can't easily shift his data from a newer OS to an older one.
Please. Honestly, needing a > 2TB volume on XP is not a big problem anyway. It's not necessary for single drives as nobody has drives > 2TB (I'm not sure if they exist yet). So it applies mainly to drive clusters that total > 2TB.
<insert billg's purported "640k" comment here>
My wife just bought a $20,000 digital xray machine. It's only compatible with XP, and explicitly incompatible (according to the manufacturer) with Vista and 7. How's this for a chuckle: my wife's more interested in using her new xray machine than she is in conforming to your idea of how much hard drive space and which OS she should be using. Pro-tip: digital imaging takes a metric assload of storage, even though the software runs perfectly well on a standard desktop OS. We'll probably fix this by switching the Drobo to network storage so that even XP can use the full space.
If you only type a constant once or twice, then you can do it without caps lock. If you type it many times, then you should learn to use your editor's auto-completion. In Emacs, I'd much rather type LO[alt-/] than LONGCONSTANTNAME.
Encrypted data doesn't generally compress as well as plaintext, and it's quite common for web servers to compress data before sending it to the client.
...and it's quite common for security libraries to compress data before encrypting it. For instance, it's the default in GPG, and SSLv3 and TLSv1 support configuring compression in the handshake.
Total BS. The NTFS filesystem format has not changed across XP/Vista/Win7.
Total BS, as least from the end user's POV. We just bought a Drobo and had a choice between setting up a 16TB volume for use with Vista and 7, or a set of 2TB volumes for compatibility with XP. Now, my cursory understanding (as I didn't bother to dig into it beyond verifying that the issue exists) is that it involves partition table formats and not NTFS itself. As a user, though, that's a meaningless distinction. The net effect is that I can easily make NTFS filesystems that are compatible with Vista and 7 but not with XP.
That's another problem altogether - that kind of information should never be carried on one's laptop, period. It should only be accessed through a secure tunnel, and it should reside at HQ.
My wife's a doctor. She uses an electronic medical records package that runs on a dedicated, non-Internet-connected server back in her office. She also travels to nearby towns to host remote clinics maybe 6-8 times a month. For that, she uses the same software on a laptop that syncs against the server whenever she's in her main office.
The infrastructure you're so certain we should use does not exist here. Most of these clinics are in small towns, population under 1,000, and don't have any Internet access in the buildings she works out of. Instead, we use TrueCrypt full disk encryption on her laptop as the compromise between perfect security and actually being usable.
By the way, a thief stealing her laptop has nothing but a computer they could (at most) format and re-use or sell. A thief stealing your ideal laptop has VPN access into your corporate LAN until it gets reported and the VPN keys are revoked. It seems neither solution is perfect, eh?
Put another way, that would be gobbling up an Earth-shattering 2.83% of the RAM in the desktop I'm typing this on. They should drop everything and get that down to no more than 1.4% of my installed RAM.
Yeah, I know: best practices, bloat, netbooks, old computers, etc. Those are all perfectly valid reasons why all software should be well-crafted and should limit wasted resources. I just can't get excited about the raw numbers involved in this case.
Don't install things from SourceForge! Many excellent applications appear on SourceForge before being published to the Debian repositories, but some fairly questionable projects end up there as well.
Can someone put a taxpayer's money cost estimate on the 917 hours annual burden, associated with this information collection?
Let's say $100 an hour for a good salary and a nice office for the guy reading the applications. That's less than $100,000. However you feel about the idea, I can't imagine picking a less significant reason to attack it.
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Ah, so the problem isn't so much that you can't export the data as that it's kind of a mess and you're not sure what to do with it afterward?
The "graphics don't matter" argument doesn't hold much water. If we go down that route, then through backwards induction [...]
Nope. He established a baseline and said "this is good enough". I'd tend to agree. I played Jak and Daxter on the PS2 and it was stunningly beautiful. There's nothing wrong with advancing past that, but my aesthetic meter was already maxed out. As long as a new console can look that good, I'm cool with it.
I am officially quitting my job today. I am in the wrong line of work and am fixing that starting now.
Yo mama, son.
I couldn't stand either of the main candidates; I voted Libertarian this time around. I the Republicans as an example because I got the impression that the OP was in favor of the Democrats having such powers.
My first "real" programming was using a machine language monitor on a C64, so I feel your pain.
Interesting anecdote that has nothing to do with optimization and everything to do with bad design. Optimization is great for making your program run n% faster. Design is great for making your program run in O(log n) time instead of O(n^2) time. The important part is to come up with a good design, implement it, and address the specific problem areas. I can't think of a single justification for doing it any other way.
Saying optimize at the end is just as stupid and just as costly.
There is an enormous difference between optimization and choosing appropriate algorithms. If you write a program well, it's almost always easy to optimize it later. If you write it poorly, it'll almost always be impossible to optimize at any point of its development. For example, I'd rather sort a big array with an unoptimized (but correct) quicksort than with an extremely clever (but insane) bogosort.
You certainly need to know alot about assembler and CPU architecture if you are going to write code that emits highly tuned assembler. Actually you probably do have to write those tools in assembler for all intents and purposes.
That's news to GCC:
Translation: In GCC 4.2.1 as shipped with FreeBSD 8-STABLE, there are 869 .c and .h files with a total of 900KLOC, and 34 .asm files with 6KLOC. It seems that GCC itself isn't written with very much assembler.
so there's no reason to explicitly use shift in code (unless you're doing bit manipulation
Well, right. The general advice is to always write what you actually want the compiler to do and not how to do it, unless you have specific proof that the compiler's not optimizing it well.
That was Lisp. You should parse it as If(only && !if).
Someone has to write those tools.
Yeah, but they can be written in a HLL, too. You don't have to write a program in highly-tuned assembler to make it emit highly-tuned assembler.
That's the main reason why I want to shoot people who write "clever" code on the first pass. Always make the rough draft of a program clean and readable. If (and only if!) you need to optimize it, use a profiler to see what actually needs work. If you do things like manually unroll loops where the body is only executed 23 times during the program's whole lifetime, or use shift to multiply because you read somewhere that it's fast, then don't be surprised when your coworkers revoke your oxygen bit.
However, there ARE people out there who practice irresponsible dissent, and their sole purpose is to disrupt the lives of everyone in order to make a point which most find irrational.
You're absolutely right. If the Republicans win the next election, I hope they vote to silence irresponsible dissenters who say things like:
Any time you wish your buddies had a power, imagine what it would be like if the other team had that same ability.
LIke you said, nothing to do with NTFS at all. It's not that "you can make NTFS filesystems that are compatible with Vista and 7 but not with XP", it's more like "you can make filesystems that are compatible with Vista and 7 but not with XP".
Yes, but as I said, to the end user, they're functionally the same thing. The OP misspoke or misunderstood, but the net effect is that he can't easily shift his data from a newer OS to an older one.
Please. Honestly, needing a > 2TB volume on XP is not a big problem anyway. It's not necessary for single drives as nobody has drives > 2TB (I'm not sure if they exist yet). So it applies mainly to drive clusters that total > 2TB.
<insert billg's purported "640k" comment here>
My wife just bought a $20,000 digital xray machine. It's only compatible with XP, and explicitly incompatible (according to the manufacturer) with Vista and 7. How's this for a chuckle: my wife's more interested in using her new xray machine than she is in conforming to your idea of how much hard drive space and which OS she should be using. Pro-tip: digital imaging takes a metric assload of storage, even though the software runs perfectly well on a standard desktop OS. We'll probably fix this by switching the Drobo to network storage so that even XP can use the full space.
Does nobody capitalize their constants anymore?
If you only type a constant once or twice, then you can do it without caps lock. If you type it many times, then you should learn to use your editor's auto-completion. In Emacs, I'd much rather type LO[alt-/] than LONGCONSTANTNAME.
Encrypted data doesn't generally compress as well as plaintext, and it's quite common for web servers to compress data before sending it to the client.
...and it's quite common for security libraries to compress data before encrypting it. For instance, it's the default in GPG, and SSLv3 and TLSv1 support configuring compression in the handshake.
Total BS. The NTFS filesystem format has not changed across XP/Vista/Win7.
Total BS, as least from the end user's POV. We just bought a Drobo and had a choice between setting up a 16TB volume for use with Vista and 7, or a set of 2TB volumes for compatibility with XP. Now, my cursory understanding (as I didn't bother to dig into it beyond verifying that the issue exists) is that it involves partition table formats and not NTFS itself. As a user, though, that's a meaningless distinction. The net effect is that I can easily make NTFS filesystems that are compatible with Vista and 7 but not with XP.
NOTES: Fair's fair: the netbook's WiFi Linux driver (both O/S's) will not connect to WEP WiFi APs (WPA works fine).
That's a known bug with NetworkManager. Replace it with wicd and you should connect on the first try.
Is it something you wrote in-house? If not, what's the name of it?
That's another problem altogether - that kind of information should never be carried on one's laptop, period. It should only be accessed through a secure tunnel, and it should reside at HQ.
My wife's a doctor. She uses an electronic medical records package that runs on a dedicated, non-Internet-connected server back in her office. She also travels to nearby towns to host remote clinics maybe 6-8 times a month. For that, she uses the same software on a laptop that syncs against the server whenever she's in her main office.
The infrastructure you're so certain we should use does not exist here. Most of these clinics are in small towns, population under 1,000, and don't have any Internet access in the buildings she works out of. Instead, we use TrueCrypt full disk encryption on her laptop as the compromise between perfect security and actually being usable.
By the way, a thief stealing her laptop has nothing but a computer they could (at most) format and re-use or sell. A thief stealing your ideal laptop has VPN access into your corporate LAN until it gets reported and the VPN keys are revoked. It seems neither solution is perfect, eh?
Tiger Woods is getting more pussy than we do!
What's this "we" business, Napoleon?
Firefox 3.5.7 is using a whopping 174Mb of ram.
Put another way, that would be gobbling up an Earth-shattering 2.83% of the RAM in the desktop I'm typing this on. They should drop everything and get that down to no more than 1.4% of my installed RAM.
Yeah, I know: best practices, bloat, netbooks, old computers, etc. Those are all perfectly valid reasons why all software should be well-crafted and should limit wasted resources. I just can't get excited about the raw numbers involved in this case.
Don't install things from SourceForge! Many excellent applications appear on SourceForge before being published to the Debian repositories, but some fairly questionable projects end up there as well.
Can someone put a taxpayer's money cost estimate on the 917 hours annual burden, associated with this information collection?
Let's say $100 an hour for a good salary and a nice office for the guy reading the applications. That's less than $100,000. However you feel about the idea, I can't imagine picking a less significant reason to attack it.