For the most part I don't ever uninstall an app. I get a new phone every year and a half or so, so why bother? If I don't use it, I just won't reinstall it on the new phone.
No. The creators of C were not terribly concerned about the extra compilation time - they were concerned about generating efficient code and representing it efficiently in the source.
Yes. But what made C such a universal language was the incidental fact that this made the compiler easier to implement. That allowed people to easily create C compilers for any new architecture; even all those newfangled 8-bit home computers with only 16K of addressable RAM. This is what popularized C's syntax, and thus the 0-based array.
So today, it is essentially a historical accident.
The most concrete detail I could find anywhere on his web about it was his repeated characterization of the language as "knowledge-based".
Now, unless he has some whole new meaning in mind, that isn't a totally new concept in languages. We generally call such languages "AI languages" (or more technically, Inference Engines or Reasoning Engines or whatever.
The general idea is that the programmer's job is to write rules. Then you feed the engine your rules and a set of facts (or an operating environment it can go get "facts" from), and it will follow what rules it needs to. The language/system of this kind that programmers here will probably be most familiar with is make
It sounds cool, but I think a lot of folks here might find the concept of something like make being the answer to all their programming difficulties a case of the cure being worse than the disease.
Yes, but it that case, we should all be using base 11 for our human numbering system (with our 10 fingers we can count from 0 to 10.) Or perhaps base 6, and use the second hand as the 6^1 digit.
I'll tell you what. You start off with base-11/base-6 numbering and math, and get back to the rest of us when you can honestly report how much better that is working for you.
No, its not "a computer thing" computers don't "count". They increment binary numbers. They don't have arrays; they have RAM and indexing features.
Nearly all programmers don't interface directly with computers, they use programming languages. How programming languages index their arrays is entirely up to the programming language designers. Different ones do it differently. C's designers chose to do it in a way that allowed their compiler writers to do as little work as possible (which is how they made most every language decision). C became popular, so a lot of languages copied it. But a lot more did not. (Ada for example allows the user to pick their own array indices for their own convenience, rather than the compiler writer's.)
Don't confuse historical accidents with holy writ.
It's a "C" thing. Try Pascal or other Wirth family languages instead if you want to start at 1.
...or pretty much any language that didn't crib its syntax from C.
Thinking that counting from 0 is a programming thing is a sure indication of a person with a very narrow experience with programming languages. The most programmer-abusive set of them at that.
No. Ada begins iterating wherever you tell it to. You can index your arrays from -100 to 0 if you like.
Its a more useful language that way.
It is quite true though that the 0-based thing is entirely an artifact of C (and of course languages that cribbed its syntax). Thinking that's a feature of programming is a sure sign of a inexperienced programmer.
What Blockbuster management didn't understand was that the choice wasn't between making lots of money and making a little less money. Their choice was between making less money and making no money at all.
What this is missing is that a "company" is a legal fiction, covering the accumulated action of a bunch of people. The employees of Blockbuster were in a position where any change (including buying Netflix or making their own) would wind up losing them money (and thus people) in the short and medium term. So the most logical move for them was to fight against change tooth-and-nail.
Now in the long run, yes that's a course for going out of business. However, that long-term benefit to "the company" wouldn't have been much consolation to all the employees and their families (aka: human beings) thrown out of work early if BB had embraced the paradigm shift. Netflix doesn't have nearly the amount of employees that Blockbuster had, and they are totally different types of jobs, held by different types of people.
So really it was just a choice for how they as employees were going to find themselves out of jobs. Their choice was to fight it.
I disagree. You take any committed employee of a company like Polariod, from the CEO on down to the mailroom clerks, and you will find that they truly honestly believed in the company's polaroid market and the need to protect it at all costs.
Think about it this way: Imagine the alternative. You start a new subdivision to work on developing business under the new paradigm. The harder everyone in that subdivision works, and the better they do their jobs, the more money the company is going to lose. How popular do you think that will make them?
Actually, you don't have to even use your imagination. IBM did exactly this with the PC in the early 80's when their business was all Mainframe-based. The upshot is that the group working on it had to do it pretty much without any support whatsoever from the main company, like they were a startup with an IBM benefits package. When they finished and presented the company a product, IBM did commit marketing resources to it. However, the amount of esteem they held it in is easily illustrated by what happened next. Within 10 years the market had grown through the roof, but very little of it belonged to IBM.
I hear this argument every time for companies that fail to shift to a new market reality. Examples are Xerox (with their PARC stuff), Polariod, Blackberry, IBM back in the day, record companies, etc. That's a complete misreading of the issue. It isn't about having some misguided sense of humor, its about fear.
The problem entrenched companies have is that while they have a market that they dominate that is acting as the company gravy-train, all the incentives in the world are acting upon them to protect that gravy train. This works well for them with normal competitors, but if someone finds a way to undermine the entire system (eg: online distribution for music), no matter how inevitable the coming change may be, it is a direct attack on their gravy train, and they will attack it back. If they tried to do the same thing themselves, at best they'd only cannibalize their own sales. What good is that?
Yes, it may be short-sighted. But we are a short-sighted species. A company's employees don't take their salary "in the long run", and their families don't eat "in the long run" either.
Can someone please transcribe this into 6502 binary instructions and place it onto punch cards for easier reading?
Seriously? 6502's and punched-cards together? What a wretched anachronism.
Any halfway competent nerd knows that 6502 binaries were almost always distributed on 5.25 inch floppies. Before that Z80 systems were used that typically distributed their programs on cassette tape (while some rarer more expensive systems like Wang used 8 inch floppies). Punch cards were used mostly on mainframes from companies like DEC and IBM that produced their own CPU chips.
Gah. Next thing you know you'll be mixing up Princess Bride and Monty Python and the Holy Grail quotes. Some people...
My Blue Cross is being cancelled.... just like all people in power try to hide the dissenters who are in trouble.
But are you in fact in trouble? I'm hearing it reported that almost every "canceled" policy is due to either that policy doing things that are illegal under the ACA, like having ridiculous its-hardly-insurance-at-all deductibles and caps, or due to them just being a really crappy deal compared to what you can get from the exchanges. Every concrete example I've seen proffered so far has ended up falling into one of those two categories.
Now "reporting" is admittedly often a load of malarkey. However, I notice there's nothing whatsoever in your message/rant that implies that you are unable to get a better policy from the exchanges. Is that the case?
One of the major sticking points about HealthCare.gov was that you had to create an account.
...and that is precisely where they failed. Commercial websites that have to do this kind of thing let you shop around all you want and only force you to create an account when its time for money to change hands. Yes, prices of some things are based on personal info like income. But when a person is shopping around, it doesn't hurt anyone but them if they are wrong/lying about that. You just do your checking when its time to "check out", and if you find out the user was wrong about something that affects price, you present them with the updated price for them to accept or reject and go back to shopping.
Healthcare.gov instead forces you to create an account immediately and then does all its checking and remote database accessing up front. That's a massive PITA for those "just shopping", overloads the remote databases with unnecessary accesses for people who aren't planning on deciding this session, and front-loads the biggest sources of possible delays and failures.
Actually, she says "Mew Mew" which was a call back to a gag in the first film where she can't remember what the actual name is
Exactly. It was a half-second long throw-off line in the middle of a huge action sequence. Judging by the reaction of my seat-mates around me when I suddenly burst out laughing there, I was the only one in my viewing who caught it.
Actually, if I read that right, it would have been almost exactly a year, assuming no further losses, to get back up to rough parity. One would imagine the Japanese would do whatever they could to inflict those "further losses" in the meantime, but I agree that sooner or later their luck would have run out. It just happened sooner.
Did anyone else notice that they cribbed a scene wholesale from the SWTOR "Decieved" trailer? That bit where the troop ship crashed directly in through the building was the Bioware trailer almost shot for shot and angle for angle. When the ship's doors opened, I half expected a bunch of light-sabers to light up.
At the end of the meeting, it was agreed that the developers would spend the next week sitting with us at our desks, watching us use the software.
This was the most important part of the note. Frankly, this should have happened before a single line of code was written.
However, failing that, I think it is an entirely fitting punishment for software developers to be forced to use their own software. In fact, there ought to be some diety of software engineers that forces exactly this on you when you die. You are doomed to use your own software into eternity. Whether that's hell or heaven is entirely up to the developer. So think before you code.:-)
There was a nice discussion about this (tipped off by little old me) on CodingHorror a few years back
Slashdot Mirror
...I replace the entire phone instead.
For the most part I don't ever uninstall an app. I get a new phone every year and a half or so, so why bother? If I don't use it, I just won't reinstall it on the new phone.
No. The creators of C were not terribly concerned about the extra compilation time - they were concerned about generating efficient code and representing it efficiently in the source.
Yes. But what made C such a universal language was the incidental fact that this made the compiler easier to implement. That allowed people to easily create C compilers for any new architecture; even all those newfangled 8-bit home computers with only 16K of addressable RAM. This is what popularized C's syntax, and thus the 0-based array.
So today, it is essentially a historical accident.
The most concrete detail I could find anywhere on his web about it was his repeated characterization of the language as "knowledge-based".
Now, unless he has some whole new meaning in mind, that isn't a totally new concept in languages. We generally call such languages "AI languages" (or more technically, Inference Engines or Reasoning Engines or whatever.
The general idea is that the programmer's job is to write rules. Then you feed the engine your rules and a set of facts (or an operating environment it can go get "facts" from), and it will follow what rules it needs to. The language/system of this kind that programmers here will probably be most familiar with is make
It sounds cool, but I think a lot of folks here might find the concept of something like make being the answer to all their programming difficulties a case of the cure being worse than the disease.
Yes, but it that case, we should all be using base 11 for our human numbering system (with our 10 fingers we can count from 0 to 10.) Or perhaps base 6, and use the second hand as the 6^1 digit.
I'll tell you what. You start off with base-11/base-6 numbering and math, and get back to the rest of us when you can honestly report how much better that is working for you.
No, its not "a computer thing" computers don't "count". They increment binary numbers. They don't have arrays; they have RAM and indexing features.
Nearly all programmers don't interface directly with computers, they use programming languages. How programming languages index their arrays is entirely up to the programming language designers. Different ones do it differently. C's designers chose to do it in a way that allowed their compiler writers to do as little work as possible (which is how they made most every language decision). C became popular, so a lot of languages copied it. But a lot more did not. (Ada for example allows the user to pick their own array indices for their own convenience, rather than the compiler writer's.)
Don't confuse historical accidents with holy writ.
It's a "C" thing. Try Pascal or other Wirth family languages instead if you want to start at 1.
...or pretty much any language that didn't crib its syntax from C.
Thinking that counting from 0 is a programming thing is a sure indication of a person with a very narrow experience with programming languages. The most programmer-abusive set of them at that.
No. Ada begins iterating wherever you tell it to. You can index your arrays from -100 to 0 if you like.
Its a more useful language that way.
It is quite true though that the 0-based thing is entirely an artifact of C (and of course languages that cribbed its syntax). Thinking that's a feature of programming is a sure sign of a inexperienced programmer.
What Blockbuster management didn't understand was that the choice wasn't between making lots of money and making a little less money. Their choice was between making less money and making no money at all.
What this is missing is that a "company" is a legal fiction, covering the accumulated action of a bunch of people. The employees of Blockbuster were in a position where any change (including buying Netflix or making their own) would wind up losing them money (and thus people) in the short and medium term. So the most logical move for them was to fight against change tooth-and-nail.
Now in the long run, yes that's a course for going out of business. However, that long-term benefit to "the company" wouldn't have been much consolation to all the employees and their families (aka: human beings) thrown out of work early if BB had embraced the paradigm shift. Netflix doesn't have nearly the amount of employees that Blockbuster had, and they are totally different types of jobs, held by different types of people.
So really it was just a choice for how they as employees were going to find themselves out of jobs. Their choice was to fight it.
Surely he's sold more than 5,000 copies of that book. Books on noodling (an activity primarily carried out by illiterate people) sell more than 5,000.
Interesting. Are they going back and censoring Hansard too?
The sun is not a type of star that we thought would go nova
FTFY.
I disagree. You take any committed employee of a company like Polariod, from the CEO on down to the mailroom clerks, and you will find that they truly honestly believed in the company's polaroid market and the need to protect it at all costs.
Think about it this way: Imagine the alternative. You start a new subdivision to work on developing business under the new paradigm. The harder everyone in that subdivision works, and the better they do their jobs, the more money the company is going to lose. How popular do you think that will make them?
Actually, you don't have to even use your imagination. IBM did exactly this with the PC in the early 80's when their business was all Mainframe-based. The upshot is that the group working on it had to do it pretty much without any support whatsoever from the main company, like they were a startup with an IBM benefits package. When they finished and presented the company a product, IBM did commit marketing resources to it. However, the amount of esteem they held it in is easily illustrated by what happened next. Within 10 years the market had grown through the roof, but very little of it belonged to IBM.
I hear this argument every time for companies that fail to shift to a new market reality. Examples are Xerox (with their PARC stuff), Polariod, Blackberry, IBM back in the day, record companies, etc. That's a complete misreading of the issue. It isn't about having some misguided sense of humor, its about fear.
The problem entrenched companies have is that while they have a market that they dominate that is acting as the company gravy-train, all the incentives in the world are acting upon them to protect that gravy train. This works well for them with normal competitors, but if someone finds a way to undermine the entire system (eg: online distribution for music), no matter how inevitable the coming change may be, it is a direct attack on their gravy train, and they will attack it back. If they tried to do the same thing themselves, at best they'd only cannibalize their own sales. What good is that?
Yes, it may be short-sighted. But we are a short-sighted species. A company's employees don't take their salary "in the long run", and their families don't eat "in the long run" either.
"...or it could be fixing to go nova early, and kill us all."
In the meantime, here's a cute video we found of a cat playing piano...
So I guess we can add one more thing to the list of benefits for bossless offices: A more secure network.
Can someone please transcribe this into 6502 binary instructions and place it onto punch cards for easier reading?
Seriously? 6502's and punched-cards together? What a wretched anachronism.
Any halfway competent nerd knows that 6502 binaries were almost always distributed on 5.25 inch floppies. Before that Z80 systems were used that typically distributed their programs on cassette tape (while some rarer more expensive systems like Wang used 8 inch floppies). Punch cards were used mostly on mainframes from companies like DEC and IBM that produced their own CPU chips.
Gah. Next thing you know you'll be mixing up Princess Bride and Monty Python and the Holy Grail quotes. Some people...
Actually, I'd be happy if they did both. Consider Healthcare.gov the "reference implementation".
Bullshit, bullshit, BULLSHIT! Your problem is your problem, not mine
Here you have it folks: The modern Republican Party in a nutshell. Enjoy!
My Blue Cross is being cancelled. ... just like all people in power try to hide the dissenters who are in trouble.
But are you in fact in trouble? I'm hearing it reported that almost every "canceled" policy is due to either that policy doing things that are illegal under the ACA, like having ridiculous its-hardly-insurance-at-all deductibles and caps, or due to them just being a really crappy deal compared to what you can get from the exchanges. Every concrete example I've seen proffered so far has ended up falling into one of those two categories.
Now "reporting" is admittedly often a load of malarkey. However, I notice there's nothing whatsoever in your message/rant that implies that you are unable to get a better policy from the exchanges. Is that the case?
One of the major sticking points about HealthCare.gov was that you had to create an account.
...and that is precisely where they failed. Commercial websites that have to do this kind of thing let you shop around all you want and only force you to create an account when its time for money to change hands. Yes, prices of some things are based on personal info like income. But when a person is shopping around, it doesn't hurt anyone but them if they are wrong/lying about that. You just do your checking when its time to "check out", and if you find out the user was wrong about something that affects price, you present them with the updated price for them to accept or reject and go back to shopping.
Healthcare.gov instead forces you to create an account immediately and then does all its checking and remote database accessing up front. That's a massive PITA for those "just shopping", overloads the remote databases with unnecessary accesses for people who aren't planning on deciding this session, and front-loads the biggest sources of possible delays and failures.
Actually, she says "Mew Mew" which was a call back to a gag in the first film where she can't remember what the actual name is
Exactly. It was a half-second long throw-off line in the middle of a huge action sequence. Judging by the reaction of my seat-mates around me when I suddenly burst out laughing there, I was the only one in my viewing who caught it.
Actually, if I read that right, it would have been almost exactly a year, assuming no further losses, to get back up to rough parity. One would imagine the Japanese would do whatever they could to inflict those "further losses" in the meantime, but I agree that sooner or later their luck would have run out. It just happened sooner.
Did anyone else notice that they cribbed a scene wholesale from the SWTOR "Decieved" trailer? That bit where the troop ship crashed directly in through the building was the Bioware trailer almost shot for shot and angle for angle. When the ship's doors opened, I half expected a bunch of light-sabers to light up.
In fact, here's the same article written much better back in 2001 by Jakob Nielsen: First Rule of Usability? Don't Listen to Users
At the end of the meeting, it was agreed that the developers would spend the next week sitting with us at our desks, watching us use the software.
This was the most important part of the note. Frankly, this should have happened before a single line of code was written.
However, failing that, I think it is an entirely fitting punishment for software developers to be forced to use their own software. In fact, there ought to be some diety of software engineers that forces exactly this on you when you die. You are doomed to use your own software into eternity. Whether that's hell or heaven is entirely up to the developer. So think before you code. :-)
There was a nice discussion about this (tipped off by little old me) on CodingHorror a few years back