That was exactly my idiom for years. Lately I've started adding a new twist though. Now when I'm done coding I go back, delete the comments, and only put in new comments where I find the code itself unclear or tricky. Sometimes the design comments can get a new life as method header comments, sometimes those are rewritten to.
Actually, I'm in full support of this particular patent. As long as they don't actually use it themselves, don't license it, and vigorously enforce it.
I'm not saying I can't be convinced. However, I decidedly do *not* trust the WSJ, and they didn't provide any links to those studies of theirs. One of the three was a self-report, which I wouldn't trust at all anyway. Who in this country really wants to admit to being an inheritance baby?
Not all of them, really. Larry Ellison was born to a 19 year old unwed mother. Bloomberg's family were recent jewish immigrants from eastern europe. Similarly, Brin immigrated from the Soviet Union at age 6 with the rest of his (Jewish) family. His dad scored a job as a univeristy professor, so they weren't destitute, but hardly weathly either.
You are onto one thing though. A superior education seems to be a common theme with all of them.
It's a simple fact (at least in the United States) that MOST millionaires are NOT millionaires through inheritance.
That's a nice theory. Let's try applying facts to it. This obviously isn't representative of all millionaries, but if your theory is correct it should have *more* "earners" than an average sample, as these are the top folk:
America's top 20 Richest people:
Bill Gates - Earned
Warren Buffet - Earned
Larry Ellison - Earned
Jim Walton - Inerhited
S. Robson Walton - Inherited
Alice Walton - Inherited
Christy Walton - Inherited
Michael Bloomberg - Earned
Charles Koch - Inherited
David Koch - Inherited
Michael Dell - Earned
Paul Allen - Earned
Sergey Brin - Earned (Google)
Larry Page - Earned (Google)
Abigail Johnson - Inherited
Jack Taylor - Earned (I think. Enterprise Rental Car)
Anne Cox Chambers - Inherited
Donald Bren - Inherited (Made a bit more)
That's 9 of the top 20 who inherited fortunes. A bare minority, I'll grant you, but not really much to hang your rhetorical hat on. Someone looking over this could be forgiven for thinking that the only way to get that kind of money in America is to either strike it rich in computers somehow, invest in those who do, or inherit it.
Below this level, I'd expect to see far more inheritance babies, as the very top is where the fortunes should still be fresh and undiluted. If the balance comes out with a majority "earned", I'd be suprised.
Atlantis was a story made up by Plato in his dialogs to make a rhetorical point. It doesn't even qualify as a "myth". Either way, its story bears no resemblance whatsoever to the story of Noah (other than there was water involved I suppose). That Welsh myth might be similar to Plato's story, but that means it also bears no resemblance whatsoever to Noah's flood.
There are some similarities between the Jewish flood myth and the Sumerian one. However, the two peoples lived awfully close together (they shared a border), so it could just be a story one picked up from the other.
If we apply Occham's razor, the simplest explanation is that the Jews borrowed the Sumerian flood myth. Plato made Atlantis up, and the Welsh had a completely unrelated submerged city story. Oh, and all these stories are myths. They aren't history.
But don't let that stop you from renting subs and searching for Lemuria...
Perhaps because they mostly messed with the Eastern (non-european) half of the Empire. The Byzantine Empire in general gets a real short shrift out of history books.
Essentially what happened was that the easternmost Gothic tribes learned pastorilsim and horsemanship from the Iranian steppe tribes to their east, and started expanding eastward onto the good pasture land. The western tribes kept to their farms (but still got very handy with horses and lances). Thus we got Ostrogoths (eastern) and Visigoths (western).
Then one fine day Attilla came to their pastures. His folk were even better with horses and lances. The Goths (both kinds) had the choice of submitting to Hun rule, or moving to all that nice Roman land where the people weren't any good with horses and lances at all...
Most of this is quite correct, but the part about the Goths is horribly wrong. Goths were Germanic people (a quite different language group). Celts were actually much more closely related to the Romans than they were to the Goths. In fact, you could perhaps look at the Romans as a Celtic offshoot that was heavily influenced by Greek and Etruscan cultures (this is contravesial though).
Germanic langugages like those of the Goths seem to be closer related to Greek than either Latin or Celtic languages.
Not every IBM PC game was a sim. Ever heard of Lemmings? Or Populous? Or Shadow of the Beast?
Kind of bad examples. Those were all Amiga games that got ported to the PC after they became hits. Its coincidece enough to make one wonder if the GP wasn't right.
Or Wolfenstein?
OK, ya got me on that one. That wasn't an Amiga game...that was an Apple II game.
I was thinking more of the Eisenhower era. Taxes on someone in my bracket (in real dollars), and I suspect on yours as well, were not all that different. However, there were more brackets above me, and their taxes could go all the way up to 70%.
In other words, taxes were in line with the rest of the world, and far more fair than today.
How about this: We tax the ludicrously rich, like the options traders and bank executives getting million+ dollar bonuses, and the useless inherited riches of people like Paris Hilton and the Walmart kids. That's where all of this contry's wealth went over the last two decades anyway. Might as well go where our money is.
Funny thing is, we can make a great start on both just by repealing Bush's income and inheritance tax cuts. If we instead take the "conservative" step of going back to the tax system we 40 years ago (the last time we had middle class in this country and unprecidented prosperity), we'd have more tax money than we'd know what to do with.
Sharding or instancing is the only possible solution to this. Less updates = lag. When you get to somewhere like Ironforge, the lag gets unbearable. If you don't display some characters, mobs would be dying for no apparent reason (perhaps even ones you attack). Players might pop in and out like Christmas lights. That just won't work.
You could try to design the game with no natural chokepoints, but that means you can't have quest givers or quest items/mobs with a specific game location. In fact, you couldn't have any special locations at all. Perhaps doable, but it would be a weird and awkward game.
Thank you so much for posting this. As a professional software developer myself, most of these arguments I'm seeing in posts like the GP look very familiar: They are the kind of stuff you hear when somebody unfamiliar with the gritty details of a problem just cannot accept that it is not easy to solve.
It is a pretty good bet that some professional has taken the time to look deeply into every "good idea" that a slashot poster is liable to come up with in 5 minutes of thought. If nobody's doing it, it is probably because there are problems with that approach.
To mitigate player lag you can distribute update packets based on the density of the update vs the distance of the events from the player vs the player's average data rate.
That isn't going to help one bit with The Ironforge Auction House Problem. No matter what you do, there are going to be places where large numbers of players are going to want to be at the same time; more than a client PC and/or its network connection can be expected to handle.
Slashdot Mirror
That was exactly my idiom for years. Lately I've started adding a new twist though. Now when I'm done coding I go back, delete the comments, and only put in new comments where I find the code itself unclear or tricky. Sometimes the design comments can get a new life as method header comments, sometimes those are rewritten to.
Actually, I'm in full support of this particular patent. As long as they don't actually use it themselves, don't license it, and vigorously enforce it.
FOX News doesn't distort the facts for their agenda as much as this guy has. (Well, not all the time, anyway).
Ooooooh. Now that's a low blow.
I guarantee you some enterprising squatter has already gone out and registered the .com and .org for every alternate name mentioned in that thread too.
Ah yes. That language was called Fortran, children.
Gather around the campfire now, and I'll tell you a really scary story about computed gotos.
I'm not saying I can't be convinced. However, I decidedly do *not* trust the WSJ, and they didn't provide any links to those studies of theirs. One of the three was a self-report, which I wouldn't trust at all anyway. Who in this country really wants to admit to being an inheritance baby?
Not all of them, really. Larry Ellison was born to a 19 year old unwed mother. Bloomberg's family were recent jewish immigrants from eastern europe. Similarly, Brin immigrated from the Soviet Union at age 6 with the rest of his (Jewish) family. His dad scored a job as a univeristy professor, so they weren't destitute, but hardly weathly either.
You are onto one thing though. A superior education seems to be a common theme with all of them.
It's a simple fact (at least in the United States) that MOST millionaires are NOT millionaires through inheritance.
That's a nice theory. Let's try applying facts to it. This obviously isn't representative of all millionaries, but if your theory is correct it should have *more* "earners" than an average sample, as these are the top folk:
America's top 20 Richest people:
That's 9 of the top 20 who inherited fortunes. A bare minority, I'll grant you, but not really much to hang your rhetorical hat on. Someone looking over this could be forgiven for thinking that the only way to get that kind of money in America is to either strike it rich in computers somehow, invest in those who do, or inherit it.
Below this level, I'd expect to see far more inheritance babies, as the very top is where the fortunes should still be fresh and undiluted. If the balance comes out with a majority "earned", I'd be suprised.
A computer with a bullet hole in it is a paperweight. A map with a bullet hole in it is still a map.
...however the soldier who was holding the map up to look at it is now a paperweight.
No, the GP is entirely correct.
Atlantis was a story made up by Plato in his dialogs to make a rhetorical point. It doesn't even qualify as a "myth". Either way, its story bears no resemblance whatsoever to the story of Noah (other than there was water involved I suppose). That Welsh myth might be similar to Plato's story, but that means it also bears no resemblance whatsoever to Noah's flood.
There are some similarities between the Jewish flood myth and the Sumerian one. However, the two peoples lived awfully close together (they shared a border), so it could just be a story one picked up from the other.
If we apply Occham's razor, the simplest explanation is that the Jews borrowed the Sumerian flood myth. Plato made Atlantis up, and the Welsh had a completely unrelated submerged city story. Oh, and all these stories are myths. They aren't history.
But don't let that stop you from renting subs and searching for Lemuria...
Perhaps because they mostly messed with the Eastern (non-european) half of the Empire. The Byzantine Empire in general gets a real short shrift out of history books.
Essentially what happened was that the easternmost Gothic tribes learned pastorilsim and horsemanship from the Iranian steppe tribes to their east, and started expanding eastward onto the good pasture land. The western tribes kept to their farms (but still got very handy with horses and lances). Thus we got Ostrogoths (eastern) and Visigoths (western).
Then one fine day Attilla came to their pastures. His folk were even better with horses and lances. The Goths (both kinds) had the choice of submitting to Hun rule, or moving to all that nice Roman land where the people weren't any good with horses and lances at all...
Most of this is quite correct, but the part about the Goths is horribly wrong. Goths were Germanic people (a quite different language group). Celts were actually much more closely related to the Romans than they were to the Goths. In fact, you could perhaps look at the Romans as a Celtic offshoot that was heavily influenced by Greek and Etruscan cultures (this is contravesial though).
Germanic langugages like those of the Goths seem to be closer related to Greek than either Latin or Celtic languages.
Mine's been more like a Last American Hero version of that:
At the very beginning I lost the manual, so really I spend most of my time flying sidways into walls.
The only people who ever watched were mostly looking to laugh at me, and after a while even they moved on to more entertaining fare.
Not every IBM PC game was a sim. Ever heard of Lemmings? Or Populous? Or Shadow of the Beast?
Kind of bad examples. Those were all Amiga games that got ported to the PC after they became hits. Its coincidece enough to make one wonder if the GP wasn't right.
Or Wolfenstein?
OK, ya got me on that one. That wasn't an Amiga game...that was an Apple II game.
..as opposed to British tourists in Europe, who are the very models of restrained sobriety.
I was thinking more of the Eisenhower era. Taxes on someone in my bracket (in real dollars), and I suspect on yours as well, were not all that different. However, there were more brackets above me, and their taxes could go all the way up to 70%.
In other words, taxes were in line with the rest of the world, and far more fair than today.
How about this: We tax the ludicrously rich, like the options traders and bank executives getting million+ dollar bonuses, and the useless inherited riches of people like Paris Hilton and the Walmart kids. That's where all of this contry's wealth went over the last two decades anyway. Might as well go where our money is.
Funny thing is, we can make a great start on both just by repealing Bush's income and inheritance tax cuts. If we instead take the "conservative" step of going back to the tax system we 40 years ago (the last time we had middle class in this country and unprecidented prosperity), we'd have more tax money than we'd know what to do with.
MMO's where the players spend nearly the entire game inside vehicles don't tend to do so hot. Witness AutoAssault and Pirates of the Burning Sea.
Sharding or instancing is the only possible solution to this. Less updates = lag. When you get to somewhere like Ironforge, the lag gets unbearable. If you don't display some characters, mobs would be dying for no apparent reason (perhaps even ones you attack). Players might pop in and out like Christmas lights. That just won't work.
You could try to design the game with no natural chokepoints, but that means you can't have quest givers or quest items/mobs with a specific game location. In fact, you couldn't have any special locations at all. Perhaps doable, but it would be a weird and awkward game.
Nah, oranges and apples here: the gaming is much more tightly regulated.
You my friend win today's prize for the saddest fact posted on Slashdot.
I've been using it for years now, and have yet to bump into any "major problems".
I've had to reinstall my Wife's XP about 5 times since then to wipe malware, and only had to reinstall Vista once since then. Thank you, UAC!
Thank you so much for posting this. As a professional software developer myself, most of these arguments I'm seeing in posts like the GP look very familiar: They are the kind of stuff you hear when somebody unfamiliar with the gritty details of a problem just cannot accept that it is not easy to solve.
It is a pretty good bet that some professional has taken the time to look deeply into every "good idea" that a slashot poster is liable to come up with in 5 minutes of thought. If nobody's doing it, it is probably because there are problems with that approach.
To mitigate player lag you can distribute update packets based on the density of the update vs the distance of the events from the player vs the player's average data rate.
That isn't going to help one bit with The Ironforge Auction House Problem. No matter what you do, there are going to be places where large numbers of players are going to want to be at the same time; more than a client PC and/or its network connection can be expected to handle.
I'm guessing this won't sell too well in Finland.