Assembly is best for optimizing limited sections of code where your specific domain knowledge can allow you to make optimizations the compiler wouldn't know about. It makes sense in those situations, and that's it. Writing an entire, non-trivial application (or OS in this case) is a waste of time since
you're going to spend far more time coding than you would in a high-level language
your chance of introducing bugs is far greater
your code loses portability
And most importantly, for everything except the most critical number-crunching algorithms your app deals with, any performance edge you may gain against a compiler will be so minuscule as to not matter.
It's not *that* far fetched. A successful software engineer can pull down $100-200K per year in the USA, and if s/he's single, it's quite easy to buy a $100K car on that kind of salary.
Err, yeah. There's not THAT many software engineers making >$100K, and if they are, you have to consider that they're certainly in higher cost of living areas and, more importantly, you can expect the number of software engineers getting paid that kind of money to decrease dramatically as jobs are shipped overseas.
There are many people who can afford a $100K car without breaking the bank. On a 5 year loan, financing $80K of the price, it's around $1500/month at 6% loan rate. Plenty of people can do that.
Plenty of highly paid doctors and lawyers, perhaps. But even then they'd probably think twice about it. $1500 a month is more than a mortgage/insurance/tax payment on a $200K house, and you think people who aren't EXTREMELY wealthy would be willing to drop that much a month for five years ON TOP of a $20K downpayment? On a depreciating asset? In an economy that's going to stay ugly for years to come? Get real. It's out of reach for a large percentage of the population.
Hmm, I'd venture to say that your bosses got mad because they came to rely on a piece of software that would cause them to have to open source their entire project. And as for re-implementing it, I wonder what the GPL says, as anyone who's worked with the code in question is effectively contaminated.
Precisely. That's why you say "if you don't do X, Y, and Z, you can't say you're compliant with the spec." Sun does this all the time to Java EE appserver vendors and what do you know? They all implement the specs fully (with the inevitable bugs of course).
The problem with standards is that if you leave too much open to "interpretation" you get a mess of incompatibilities. I'm a firm believer that standards organizations need to make the truly important parts of the spec completely mandatory, i.e., if you don't support <video> and all the listed codecs, you can't claim HTML5 compatibility.
However, California and other states acted like the boom times would never end, and budgeted accordingly. Now that revenues have fallen to more realistic levels, they can't afford boom time spending. Instead of accepting this fact, they're trying to increase revenue.
Your whole argument that SS isn't a ponzi scheme boils down to "hey, if the government finds other sources of money to pay into it, it's still viable!" You can tweak the system all you want, all you're going to do is delay the inevitable implosion. Social Security is inherently inviable program. It depends on more and more workers every year to support an ever-growing number of retirees. At the time the program was implemented the numbers worked out fairly well, but now life expectancy is WAY higher than it was in the 30s and as a result there are far too many people drawing SS checks than the system can support. This isn't just my opinion, this is well documented and EVEN THE GOVERNMENT admits the problems:
I hear that Social Security has a big financial problem? Why?
Social Security's financing problems are long term and will not affect today's retirees and near-retirees for many years, but they are very large and serious. People are living longer, the first baby boomers are nearing retirement, and the birth rate is lower than in the past. The result is that the worker-to-beneficiary ratio has fallen from 16.5-to-1 in 1950 to 3.1-to-1 today. Within 20 years it will be 2.1-to-1. At this ratio there will not be enough workers to pay scheduled benefits at current tax rates.
Hmm, at the risk of sounding racist I wouldn't say it's all about the lack of health care. Blacks typically have very poor diet and exercise habits compared to the rest of the population.
There will be waste and corruption no matter what, but leaving private companies involved will double waste, corruption and cost at the bare minimum.
Seriously? Compared to the US government? Surely you jest.
I love how the same people that laugh at government waste ($500 hammers, anyone?) can seriously think government-run healthcare would be anything but a complete disaster with respect to finances and efficiency.
It's popular with the people currently receiving benefit from it. Social Security is a complete ponzi scheme. Every generation it takes more and more workers to support the people receiving benefits, and the system will eventually collapse. This is not a secret at all, and the government is well aware of it.
So yeah, it's popular with the elderly (a major voting block) because they get SS checks every month, but it's unpopular with every who's oh, 50 or younger because we're literally paying for grandpa with no expectation of having SS actually take care of us when the time comes.
I know this will be an INCREDIBLY unpopular thing to say, but the parent has a valid point. Blacks in America are incredibly unhealthy. The reasons for this can be argued, but the fact remains. I don't doubt that they drag down our nation's life expectancy.
Yeah, and guess what? If you bought in the late 70's, you STILL haven't recouped your investment. ~$750/oz in 1980 equates to ~$2100/oz adjusted for inflation. Gold reached its all time high a year or two ago at... ~$1000/oz. Oops.
So yeah, in the short term it's possible to make money with gold. But again, talk to the people who bought and held 30 years ago how their investment is doing.
WebSphere is still stuck in Java 1.4 land (circa 2002 for non-Java heads) and is punishing many companies who simply cannot take advantage of some of the new Java technologies developed in the last decade.
I never thought the ongoing "Here's why Europeans are better than Americans" saga would include "use of open source" as a bullet point, but, here we are.
Yeah it sounds like a good idea in theory, but you're relying on other people to be the arbiters of "truth". What you'll end up with is something like Digg, where any opinion or information contrary to the majority's will immediately be dismissed and labeled "untrue".
Oh, and also, that's not really a true "suspend", i.e., where your thread of execution is simply paused until you resume. You're basically telling the app that it's exiting and that you should try to save as much context as possible to disk and load it up the next time the app is started, which may or may not work well (e.g., an online game -- you can't exactly save the state of the OTHER players online!).
So you should please stop talking out of your ass... it's not true suspend capability, it's "please try your best to make it look like your app went into the background seamlessly".
Well, what I had read initially indicated that the iPhone will kill your app when you try to switch to anything else, bar none. I believe they still won't let your app "truly" go to the background, meaning chat clients and the like are out.
You can release an SDK and still have a locked-down platform, you know. Not letting apps compiled with the SDK suspend to the background because of Apple's obsession with battery life and the "perfect" user experience is just one example (and you can bet "preferred" business partners will be able to write apps that get around this restriction). Only allowing apps to be distributed via the App Store is another. Let's not forget that Apple was dead set against releasing an SDK AT ALL in the first place.
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Assembly is best for optimizing limited sections of code where your specific domain knowledge can allow you to make optimizations the compiler wouldn't know about. It makes sense in those situations, and that's it. Writing an entire, non-trivial application (or OS in this case) is a waste of time since
And most importantly, for everything except the most critical number-crunching algorithms your app deals with, any performance edge you may gain against a compiler will be so minuscule as to not matter.
It's not *that* far fetched. A successful software engineer can pull down $100-200K per year in the USA, and if s/he's single, it's quite easy to buy a $100K car on that kind of salary.
Err, yeah. There's not THAT many software engineers making >$100K, and if they are, you have to consider that they're certainly in higher cost of living areas and, more importantly, you can expect the number of software engineers getting paid that kind of money to decrease dramatically as jobs are shipped overseas.
There are many people who can afford a $100K car without breaking the bank. On a 5 year loan, financing $80K of the price, it's around $1500/month at 6% loan rate. Plenty of people can do that.
Plenty of highly paid doctors and lawyers, perhaps. But even then they'd probably think twice about it. $1500 a month is more than a mortgage/insurance/tax payment on a $200K house, and you think people who aren't EXTREMELY wealthy would be willing to drop that much a month for five years ON TOP of a $20K downpayment? On a depreciating asset? In an economy that's going to stay ugly for years to come? Get real. It's out of reach for a large percentage of the population.
A good book to read on copyrights and other IP related matters would be Boldrin and Levine's Against Intellectual Monopoly.
Is there somewhere I can download that book for free?
Hmm, I'd venture to say that your bosses got mad because they came to rely on a piece of software that would cause them to have to open source their entire project. And as for re-implementing it, I wonder what the GPL says, as anyone who's worked with the code in question is effectively contaminated.
So... the picture is located where?
Precisely. That's why you say "if you don't do X, Y, and Z, you can't say you're compliant with the spec." Sun does this all the time to Java EE appserver vendors and what do you know? They all implement the specs fully (with the inevitable bugs of course).
The problem with standards is that if you leave too much open to "interpretation" you get a mess of incompatibilities. I'm a firm believer that standards organizations need to make the truly important parts of the spec completely mandatory, i.e., if you don't support <video> and all the listed codecs, you can't claim HTML5 compatibility.
That's all correct.
However, California and other states acted like the boom times would never end, and budgeted accordingly. Now that revenues have fallen to more realistic levels, they can't afford boom time spending. Instead of accepting this fact, they're trying to increase revenue.
It's a spending problem, not a revenue problem.
Your whole argument that SS isn't a ponzi scheme boils down to "hey, if the government finds other sources of money to pay into it, it's still viable!" You can tweak the system all you want, all you're going to do is delay the inevitable implosion. Social Security is inherently inviable program. It depends on more and more workers every year to support an ever-growing number of retirees. At the time the program was implemented the numbers worked out fairly well, but now life expectancy is WAY higher than it was in the 30s and as a result there are far too many people drawing SS checks than the system can support. This isn't just my opinion, this is well documented and EVEN THE GOVERNMENT admits the problems:
I hear that Social Security has a big financial problem? Why?
Social Security's financing problems are long term and will not affect today's retirees and near-retirees for many years, but they are very large and serious. People are living longer, the first baby boomers are nearing retirement, and the birth rate is lower than in the past. The result is that the worker-to-beneficiary ratio has fallen from 16.5-to-1 in 1950 to 3.1-to-1 today. Within 20 years it will be 2.1-to-1. At this ratio there will not be enough workers to pay scheduled benefits at current tax rates.
That's straight from the horse's mouth, at http://www.ssa.gov/qa.htm, BTW.
Hmm, at the risk of sounding racist I wouldn't say it's all about the lack of health care. Blacks typically have very poor diet and exercise habits compared to the rest of the population.
There will be waste and corruption no matter what, but leaving private companies involved will double waste, corruption and cost at the bare minimum.
Seriously? Compared to the US government? Surely you jest.
I love how the same people that laugh at government waste ($500 hammers, anyone?) can seriously think government-run healthcare would be anything but a complete disaster with respect to finances and efficiency.
It's popular with the people currently receiving benefit from it. Social Security is a complete ponzi scheme. Every generation it takes more and more workers to support the people receiving benefits, and the system will eventually collapse. This is not a secret at all, and the government is well aware of it.
So yeah, it's popular with the elderly (a major voting block) because they get SS checks every month, but it's unpopular with every who's oh, 50 or younger because we're literally paying for grandpa with no expectation of having SS actually take care of us when the time comes.
I know this will be an INCREDIBLY unpopular thing to say, but the parent has a valid point. Blacks in America are incredibly unhealthy. The reasons for this can be argued, but the fact remains. I don't doubt that they drag down our nation's life expectancy.
Sort of like the plateau housing prices reached in 2005? Or the one gold prices reached in the late 70's?
Yeah, and guess what? If you bought in the late 70's, you STILL haven't recouped your investment. ~$750/oz in 1980 equates to ~$2100/oz adjusted for inflation. Gold reached its all time high a year or two ago at... ~$1000/oz. Oops.
So yeah, in the short term it's possible to make money with gold. But again, talk to the people who bought and held 30 years ago how their investment is doing.
Gold holds its value like nothing else
Tell that to the people who bought in the late 70's/early 80's.
If this isn't a "sell" signal, I don't know what is.
WebSphere is still stuck in Java 1.4 land (circa 2002 for non-Java heads) and is punishing many companies who simply cannot take advantage of some of the new Java technologies developed in the last decade.
Excuse me? WebSphere 7.0 uses Java 1.6.
Uh, no. You're dead wrong on that.
I never thought the ongoing "Here's why Europeans are better than Americans" saga would include "use of open source" as a bullet point, but, here we are.
Yeah it sounds like a good idea in theory, but you're relying on other people to be the arbiters of "truth". What you'll end up with is something like Digg, where any opinion or information contrary to the majority's will immediately be dismissed and labeled "untrue".
Of course, you wouldn't be buying the phone in the first place since it's not "ethically produced", right?
Oh, and also, that's not really a true "suspend", i.e., where your thread of execution is simply paused until you resume. You're basically telling the app that it's exiting and that you should try to save as much context as possible to disk and load it up the next time the app is started, which may or may not work well (e.g., an online game -- you can't exactly save the state of the OTHER players online!).
So you should please stop talking out of your ass... it's not true suspend capability, it's "please try your best to make it look like your app went into the background seamlessly".
Well, what I had read initially indicated that the iPhone will kill your app when you try to switch to anything else, bar none. I believe they still won't let your app "truly" go to the background, meaning chat clients and the like are out.
You can release an SDK and still have a locked-down platform, you know. Not letting apps compiled with the SDK suspend to the background because of Apple's obsession with battery life and the "perfect" user experience is just one example (and you can bet "preferred" business partners will be able to write apps that get around this restriction). Only allowing apps to be distributed via the App Store is another. Let's not forget that Apple was dead set against releasing an SDK AT ALL in the first place.