None of my CFL's has failed. There are ten of them I can think of, two of them improperly installed in outdoor fixtures where they are exposed to weather. In the same time I have replaced about half the incandescent bulbs (with other incandescent ones). I agree about other problems with CFL's (such as the color of the cheapo ones I bought from Home Depot) but your claim that they fail often for everybody is a lie.
I believe the GP was posting an alternative scenario to compare with the current situation, not a description of what actually happened after Watergate. He is saying that the current situation is as though Nixon fired the innocent members of the secret service and somehow saved himself and the plumbers.
Your graph at http://www.cbo.gov/docimages/35xx/doc3521/352101.gif shows not just Defense, but also "Other" and "Non Defense Discretionary" decreasing at pretty much the same "consistent decrease" (all three show a few periods where they increase). Also "interest" is also showing a decrease though more recently, which shows how much this graph is dependent on the GDP size. The graph also ends at 2001 which is a bit of some time ago...
I agree the graph shows how alarming the increase in Medicare/Medicaid/Social Security, which I think is your point. Your point could be made quite effectively without lying (saying that "only defense has decreased in percentage of GDP", which is clearly a lie from your OWN graph!).
It will have to account for all the years this was done, but there will be no unpredictable changes in the future. The difference between atomic time and current time will be a constant from now on. This is a lot easier, because you can write a self-contained program to do 100% of the conversion right now, rather than having to write a program that can update the conversion from an outside source.
It was for mechanical clocks. It was easy to make an AC motor that turned around exactly once for N (2?) cycles of the AC current. Gearing with the exact correct number of teeth on each gear was used to slow this down to a second hand that rotated once per minute, a minute hand that rotated once per hour, and an hour hand that rotated once every 12 hours.
I thought part of the design of bitcoin is that it is untracable. Though you have -1 added to your bitcoin total, and +1 is added to the candidate, there is nothing connecting these operations after they happen. I believe this is what the original poster was getting at.
The idea would be to somehow give every person a coin (that may be the tricky part so that every voter gets one and not more or less...). They can then "pay" that coin to who they want elected. There would have to be a modification to bitcoin so no other transaction is possible (otherwise I would think your boss/union/etc will insist that everybody transfer their coins to them so they pay).
If bitcoin really works as advertised (ignoring it's usability as money) this seems like it may be a good idea.
Apparently leaving a typical wallwart in the plug when not charging anything still wastes power and heats it up. In fact I heard unused but plugged-in wallwarts are wasting many many times as much power as all the usage of them to recharge devices.
It should be possible to detect that no device is plugged in and somehow disconnect so the power usage is zero. I'm sure the reason this is not done is because it may require a relay or other expensive bit of hardware. It might help if any kind of standard required this.
Supposedly reserve() followed by push_back() calls will produce an efficient writable string. However I believe the Windows version was screwed up and this did not produce anything efficient (basically it ignored reserve()). Probably more to the point, this was useless if you had existing code that wrote to a char* pointer, which I think is the usage you are interested in.
The usage you want, where the entire contents of the string are written (rather than a replacement where some of the old contents are preserved), it would be possible to make work with a copy-on-write std::string. The cleanest I can think of is to make a writable_data() that makes a unique copy and does a resize() to the desired size as an atomic operation. Something like this:
insure this thread is the only one using s; barrier;
s.erase();// this makes writable_data() not have to copy previous data
char* p = s.writable_data(n);// atomic resize(n) except data is garbage, but unique buffer
c_function(p);// write the data into the string
barrier; s can now be read by multiple threads again;
The reason for a new call is that resize() will waste time writing zeros to the buffer, and does guarantee a unique buffer (ie if the string is already the right size it does nothing).
I would then have made data() and operator[] return const so they cannot be used to modify the string.
The usage I was complaining about was not what you are asking for. What I would have liked to prevent was things like in-place toupper() implementations. First of all they prevent copy-on-write strings. Also they assume upper and lower case are exactly the same number of bytes, can be converted by replacing single bytes, and the conversion is invertible. With these changes it would not be possible to write such things, the programmer would then have to construct a new string with the toupper() result, allowing length changes and not destroying the old string.
I use std::string all the time. 99.999% of the manipulations are string append and string copy. push_back is also useful for building strings occasionally, for some reason you think this is done by "resize the string first and then assign to it". You may be confusing resize with reserve.
My objection is to the idea that string[N] = 'c' is a useful operation. Not to string.push_back('c') or string+'c' or 'c'+string or iterator =string.find('c') or a bunch of other things you seem to think I am complaining about.
Assigning a character makes assumptions that the replacable units of a string are exactly the same size. This is not true for Unicode and not true for UTF-8 or UTF-16 even for simple precomposed characters. It also assumes there is 1:1 mapping from old to new characters, such as lowercaseuppercase, which is certainly false for a lot of languages.
A read-only pointer would be ok (well it is true that a C function could write to the pointer, but it would be easy to say that is disallowed).
The problem is the ability to assign to the pointer, which serves no purpose except to replace characters. And I think the idea that you can "replace a character" is what makes I18N not work.
I don't think inefficiency was the problem, none of the solutions attempted locking. The reasonable assumption was that if you did s=t to assign two strings, the programmer was responsible for knowing that both s and t were "owned" by the current thread, in that no other thread was looking at or modifying them. This is actually quite reasonable.
The problem was this:
const char* p = &s[n];... stuff here...
f(*p);
This is impossible to do in a thread-safe way unless the thread "owns" not only s, but all the strings that were assigned to and from s. That was not reasonable. Most std::string implementations either ignored this, or they "uniquified" s when the pointer was taken, which removed the speed advantage of the reference counted implementation.
IMHO what they did was a mistake. I would have preferred if they removed the ability to take a pointer into a string. All such uses are bad anyway, as they assume that "characters" are simple small units that should be looked at individually. The fact that stupid programmers have the ability to use this is destroying I18N by making UTF-8 and correct UTF-16 impossible and making decomposed characters not work.
I agree that an app to do what a web page does is pretty stupid.
However I wonder if it would be possible to make an app that actually did what is promised: "produce the Senator's position on a current political topic". Ideally the user could type in an arbitrary question and it would say what the Senator would think. This must be done without actually asking the Senator or any other human.
The first version could be an interesting experiment in AI. It has to produce "approve" or "disapprove" or "I did not understand" to all questions, and the positions have to be consistent and make sense. The easiest version would be to make an extreme right-wing or extreme left-wing version first, then try to adjust it to actually match the Senator (maybe it could be "trained" by the Senator by him answering specific questions generated by the program so it could fill in it's weighting tables).
I thought also a much harder problem would be to have the AI actually produce an explanation of why it approves or disapproves of an idea. But in fact to match current politicians it is trivial: anything you disapprove of is "job killing", anything you approve of "helps small businesses". These rules seem to work for every single argument by any political party nowadays.
Yea I don't know where that started, but it was not just Obama. Some time in the middle of the last Bush administration all news articles, from all political persuasions, started saying "Mr Bush" (and then "Mr Obama"). What happened to "President Bush" and "President Obama"?
In fact it would help if they did this for historical reasons. Most presidents get in the news when they are not president, and future readers of news articles could tell immediately if the action/statement/whatever was from the person while they were president or when they were out of office.
I think his claim is that it *was* innovative, just "not that much".
The reason nobody has copied it is because all copies need to be interoperable with it, and Microsoft tries as hard as possible to thwart that. The inability to copy it has nothing to do with how "innovative" it is. In fact the biggest innovations are often some of the easiest to copy, they are the ones where you go "why the hell did I never think of that???". Microsoft's cleartype use of the LCD color sub-pixels I think falls into that catagory.
That 4-color thing is the WINDOWS logo, not Microsoft's.
Long ago they had the O in the middle of the name rendered something like the AT&T death star, perhaps that should be used? Of course the company was also named "MicroSoft", something which the ms-trolls here vigoursly deny to this day, as though it was an insult (possibly because it makes the "M$" that they hate so vigorously more obvious why it was chosen).
You can get better antialiasing (ie actually filtered images of the letter shapes) by changing some settings on Windows.
The problem is that a huge number of people are used to "smooth type" or worse antialiasing. These are the same people who complain that the Mac and Linux are "blurry", they would have the same complaint about Windows if Microsoft defaulted to correct antialiasing.
Alt-F4 does not work until after the window is open and responding to commands.
What he is asking for is some sort of shortcut that means "kill the program I just launched". He wants it to work even if the program is starting up, perhaps before it even executes any code.
The close button was not always together on Windows either.
The top-left "icon" is actually a button. Double-click will close the window, pushing it will pop up a menu of window actions. Few users seem to know this. But that is unchanged from original Windows. What did change is that originally there was *no* close button, just maximize and minimize on the right.
I agree with the article that the old way was better. However I think the double-click was not newbie-friendly so they added the button on the right. Likely they did not put it on the left because they panicked about back-compatibility and did not want to remove the menu, which remains there today, unused by anybody.
Wasn't it a big deal where a game and a movie both changed the invading hordes of America from the Chinese to North Korea, to avoid offending China?
I think that is pretty stupid. First of all it would be a lot more realistic for the invaders to be Chinese. North Korea is not going to get very far, so any scenario where it ends up being the lone American with a big supply of guns killing the invaders off one by one is incredibly unrealistic. China at least is somewhat plausible.
Conversely the most formidable and realistic invading force into China would be the Americans (or perhaps NATO which would be led by the Americans). So I can't blame them for using America if they want their game to be at all plausible.
Furthermore all the worry about upsetting the Chinese seems misplaced. This does not seem to be upsetting us, just making us laugh.
Hell for all the work they did changing China to North Korea, the game developers should have reversed it to America invading China and sold the same game in the Chinese market! That would have been brilliant, actually.
You are correct that all systems now offer a command to do the double-click.
OS/X is probably the best, they have a command called "open".
Windows officially has "dllopen/a/b/gobblygook/x=..." (I don't know what it is, actually, but it is a command to locate a function in a dll and run it). I thought they also had a command called "open" but I have been informed that this is more like a built-in alias in cmd.exe. Because this is actually in the shell, it is perhaps getting the closest to my request.
Linux finally has one, with the amazingly intuitive name of "xdg-open". They did not use "open" because they did their usual blind panic about compatibilty and worried that somebody somewhere was using the ancient "open" command that has something to do with screen (besides the new open could probably detect this and call the old one).
I think also you can make a reasonable claim that executable files with "#!" at the start on Linux/Unix work this way.
NONE of them are doing what I want, where you type the name of a file and it selects what to run. There is no reason for executable files to be special. This would get the effect that the powershell wannabes think is so kool, while allowing prefixed commands to be used for "nerdy" stuff, like "cat" meaning "stream the bytes to stdout", which I admit is not something users normally want.
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None of my CFL's has failed. There are ten of them I can think of, two of them improperly installed in outdoor fixtures where they are exposed to weather. In the same time I have replaced about half the incandescent bulbs (with other incandescent ones). I agree about other problems with CFL's (such as the color of the cheapo ones I bought from Home Depot) but your claim that they fail often for everybody is a lie.
Note that in Pink Unicorn hell everybody gets fruitcake instead of normal cake, so it really is not that bad no matter what you do.
GDP : space shuttle program :: my salary : cost of new car
The government's "salary" (ie tax income) is 100% of the GDP? Dammit I'm going to join the Tea Party right now if that is true!
I believe the GP was posting an alternative scenario to compare with the current situation, not a description of what actually happened after Watergate. He is saying that the current situation is as though Nixon fired the innocent members of the secret service and somehow saved himself and the plumbers.
Your graph at http://www.cbo.gov/docimages/35xx/doc3521/352101.gif shows not just Defense, but also "Other" and "Non Defense Discretionary" decreasing at pretty much the same "consistent decrease" (all three show a few periods where they increase). Also "interest" is also showing a decrease though more recently, which shows how much this graph is dependent on the GDP size. The graph also ends at 2001 which is a bit of some time ago...
I agree the graph shows how alarming the increase in Medicare/Medicaid/Social Security, which I think is your point. Your point could be made quite effectively without lying (saying that "only defense has decreased in percentage of GDP", which is clearly a lie from your OWN graph!).
As a good republican, you need to get rid of all ... healthcare
I assume you mean the current us government health plan, but your typo speaks a lot about Republican world view.
It will have to account for all the years this was done, but there will be no unpredictable changes in the future. The difference between atomic time and current time will be a constant from now on. This is a lot easier, because you can write a self-contained program to do 100% of the conversion right now, rather than having to write a program that can update the conversion from an outside source.
It was for mechanical clocks. It was easy to make an AC motor that turned around exactly once for N (2?) cycles of the AC current. Gearing with the exact correct number of teeth on each gear was used to slow this down to a second hand that rotated once per minute, a minute hand that rotated once per hour, and an hour hand that rotated once every 12 hours.
I thought part of the design of bitcoin is that it is untracable. Though you have -1 added to your bitcoin total, and +1 is added to the candidate, there is nothing connecting these operations after they happen. I believe this is what the original poster was getting at.
The idea would be to somehow give every person a coin (that may be the tricky part so that every voter gets one and not more or less...). They can then "pay" that coin to who they want elected. There would have to be a modification to bitcoin so no other transaction is possible (otherwise I would think your boss/union/etc will insist that everybody transfer their coins to them so they pay).
If bitcoin really works as advertised (ignoring it's usability as money) this seems like it may be a good idea.
Apparently leaving a typical wallwart in the plug when not charging anything still wastes power and heats it up. In fact I heard unused but plugged-in wallwarts are wasting many many times as much power as all the usage of them to recharge devices.
It should be possible to detect that no device is plugged in and somehow disconnect so the power usage is zero. I'm sure the reason this is not done is because it may require a relay or other expensive bit of hardware. It might help if any kind of standard required this.
Supposedly reserve() followed by push_back() calls will produce an efficient writable string. However I believe the Windows version was screwed up and this did not produce anything efficient (basically it ignored reserve()). Probably more to the point, this was useless if you had existing code that wrote to a char* pointer, which I think is the usage you are interested in.
The usage you want, where the entire contents of the string are written (rather than a replacement where some of the old contents are preserved), it would be possible to make work with a copy-on-write std::string. The cleanest I can think of is to make a writable_data() that makes a unique copy and does a resize() to the desired size as an atomic operation. Something like this:
insure this thread is the only one using s; barrier; // this makes writable_data() not have to copy previous data // atomic resize(n) except data is garbage, but unique buffer // write the data into the string
s.erase();
char* p = s.writable_data(n);
c_function(p);
barrier; s can now be read by multiple threads again;
The reason for a new call is that resize() will waste time writing zeros to the buffer, and does guarantee a unique buffer (ie if the string is already the right size it does nothing).
I would then have made data() and operator[] return const so they cannot be used to modify the string.
The usage I was complaining about was not what you are asking for. What I would have liked to prevent was things like in-place toupper() implementations. First of all they prevent copy-on-write strings. Also they assume upper and lower case are exactly the same number of bytes, can be converted by replacing single bytes, and the conversion is invertible. With these changes it would not be possible to write such things, the programmer would then have to construct a new string with the toupper() result, allowing length changes and not destroying the old string.
I use std::string all the time. 99.999% of the manipulations are string append and string copy. push_back is also useful for building strings occasionally, for some reason you think this is done by "resize the string first and then assign to it". You may be confusing resize with reserve.
My objection is to the idea that string[N] = 'c' is a useful operation. Not to string.push_back('c') or string+'c' or 'c'+string or iterator =string.find('c') or a bunch of other things you seem to think I am complaining about.
Assigning a character makes assumptions that the replacable units of a string are exactly the same size. This is not true for Unicode and not true for UTF-8 or UTF-16 even for simple precomposed characters. It also assumes there is 1:1 mapping from old to new characters, such as lowercaseuppercase, which is certainly false for a lot of languages.
A read-only pointer would be ok (well it is true that a C function could write to the pointer, but it would be easy to say that is disallowed).
The problem is the ability to assign to the pointer, which serves no purpose except to replace characters. And I think the idea that you can "replace a character" is what makes I18N not work.
I don't think inefficiency was the problem, none of the solutions attempted locking. The reasonable assumption was that if you did s=t to assign two strings, the programmer was responsible for knowing that both s and t were "owned" by the current thread, in that no other thread was looking at or modifying them. This is actually quite reasonable.
The problem was this:
const char* p = &s[n]; ... stuff here ...
f(*p);
This is impossible to do in a thread-safe way unless the thread "owns" not only s, but all the strings that were assigned to and from s. That was not reasonable. Most std::string implementations either ignored this, or they "uniquified" s when the pointer was taken, which removed the speed advantage of the reference counted implementation.
IMHO what they did was a mistake. I would have preferred if they removed the ability to take a pointer into a string. All such uses are bad anyway, as they assume that "characters" are simple small units that should be looked at individually. The fact that stupid programmers have the ability to use this is destroying I18N by making UTF-8 and correct UTF-16 impossible and making decomposed characters not work.
I agree that an app to do what a web page does is pretty stupid.
However I wonder if it would be possible to make an app that actually did what is promised: "produce the Senator's position on a current political topic". Ideally the user could type in an arbitrary question and it would say what the Senator would think. This must be done without actually asking the Senator or any other human.
The first version could be an interesting experiment in AI. It has to produce "approve" or "disapprove" or "I did not understand" to all questions, and the positions have to be consistent and make sense. The easiest version would be to make an extreme right-wing or extreme left-wing version first, then try to adjust it to actually match the Senator (maybe it could be "trained" by the Senator by him answering specific questions generated by the program so it could fill in it's weighting tables).
I thought also a much harder problem would be to have the AI actually produce an explanation of why it approves or disapproves of an idea. But in fact to match current politicians it is trivial: anything you disapprove of is "job killing", anything you approve of "helps small businesses". These rules seem to work for every single argument by any political party nowadays.
No it is zero. The leaf would travel zero miles even if provided with 1 gallon of gas. 0/1 is zero.
Yea I don't know where that started, but it was not just Obama. Some time in the middle of the last Bush administration all news articles, from all political persuasions, started saying "Mr Bush" (and then "Mr Obama"). What happened to "President Bush" and "President Obama"?
In fact it would help if they did this for historical reasons. Most presidents get in the news when they are not president, and future readers of news articles could tell immediately if the action/statement/whatever was from the person while they were president or when they were out of office.
I think his claim is that it *was* innovative, just "not that much".
The reason nobody has copied it is because all copies need to be interoperable with it, and Microsoft tries as hard as possible to thwart that. The inability to copy it has nothing to do with how "innovative" it is. In fact the biggest innovations are often some of the easiest to copy, they are the ones where you go "why the hell did I never think of that???". Microsoft's cleartype use of the LCD color sub-pixels I think falls into that catagory.
Maybe if Microsoft had a logo?
That 4-color thing is the WINDOWS logo, not Microsoft's.
Long ago they had the O in the middle of the name rendered something like the AT&T death star, perhaps that should be used? Of course the company was also named "MicroSoft", something which the ms-trolls here vigoursly deny to this day, as though it was an insult (possibly because it makes the "M$" that they hate so vigorously more obvious why it was chosen).
You can get better antialiasing (ie actually filtered images of the letter shapes) by changing some settings on Windows.
The problem is that a huge number of people are used to "smooth type" or worse antialiasing. These are the same people who complain that the Mac and Linux are "blurry", they would have the same complaint about Windows if Microsoft defaulted to correct antialiasing.
What part of "I gave it credit for Active Directory" did you not understand?
Alt-F4 does not work until after the window is open and responding to commands.
What he is asking for is some sort of shortcut that means "kill the program I just launched". He wants it to work even if the program is starting up, perhaps before it even executes any code.
The close button was not always together on Windows either.
The top-left "icon" is actually a button. Double-click will close the window, pushing it will pop up a menu of window actions. Few users seem to know this. But that is unchanged from original Windows. What did change is that originally there was *no* close button, just maximize and minimize on the right.
I agree with the article that the old way was better. However I think the double-click was not newbie-friendly so they added the button on the right. Likely they did not put it on the left because they panicked about back-compatibility and did not want to remove the menu, which remains there today, unused by anybody.
Wasn't it a big deal where a game and a movie both changed the invading hordes of America from the Chinese to North Korea, to avoid offending China?
I think that is pretty stupid. First of all it would be a lot more realistic for the invaders to be Chinese. North Korea is not going to get very far, so any scenario where it ends up being the lone American with a big supply of guns killing the invaders off one by one is incredibly unrealistic. China at least is somewhat plausible.
Conversely the most formidable and realistic invading force into China would be the Americans (or perhaps NATO which would be led by the Americans). So I can't blame them for using America if they want their game to be at all plausible.
Furthermore all the worry about upsetting the Chinese seems misplaced. This does not seem to be upsetting us, just making us laugh.
Hell for all the work they did changing China to North Korea, the game developers should have reversed it to America invading China and sold the same game in the Chinese market! That would have been brilliant, actually.
You are correct that all systems now offer a command to do the double-click.
OS/X is probably the best, they have a command called "open".
Windows officially has "dllopen /a /b/gobblygook /x=..." (I don't know what it is, actually, but it is a command to locate a function in a dll and run it). I thought they also had a command called "open" but I have been informed that this is more like a built-in alias in cmd.exe. Because this is actually in the shell, it is perhaps getting the closest to my request.
Linux finally has one, with the amazingly intuitive name of "xdg-open". They did not use "open" because they did their usual blind panic about compatibilty and worried that somebody somewhere was using the ancient "open" command that has something to do with screen (besides the new open could probably detect this and call the old one).
I think also you can make a reasonable claim that executable files with "#!" at the start on Linux/Unix work this way.
NONE of them are doing what I want, where you type the name of a file and it selects what to run. There is no reason for executable files to be special. This would get the effect that the powershell wannabes think is so kool, while allowing prefixed commands to be used for "nerdy" stuff, like "cat" meaning "stream the bytes to stdout", which I admit is not something users normally want.