What's your contention, that there's no such thing as skill or ability and anyone who's been sufficiently trained to perform a task is equally good at it? If so, that's obviously bullshit.
I've been coding C for a while now and recursion has always been presented to me as hell on earth. I'm sure most of the people who has ever created a recursive pow had a stack overflow at some point due to the amount of calls made.
The two cases where recursion is the cleanest solution are A.) when you would have needed an explicit stack or tree anyway and B.) when the obvious implementation is tail-recursive. This ends up being true for a surprisingly large number of algorithms, but "pow" really isn't one of them. Still, you might occasionally see something like the following:
double pow_iter(double x, double n, double r) { if(n <= 0) return r; else return pow_iter(x, n - 1, r * x); }
Encouraging suicide _would_ be assisting if you believe they are listening to you and would follow that instruction.
Who on the web seriously thinks that anyone's going to follow that instruction. Go over to/b/ on 4chan and post that you're thinking about committing suicide... see what responses you get.
No, it will take four years at most. I bet for 2012.
In 2012, AMD is talking about shipping 8 and 12 core processors with DDR3 RAM. I haven't looked at the Intel roadmaps, but let's give them the benifit of the doubt and say they're shipping shipping 16 core processors with each core twice as fast as a Core i7 core today.
Assuming everything scales linearly, that's about 30 fps at minimum graphics settings in Crysis - and that's for a top of the line single socket workstation. My bet is that in 2012, gamers will still buy $200 video cards and mainstream machines will have quad core processors with reasonably powerful dedicated graphics hardware on-die.
As P. J. O'Rourke said, giving money to governments is like giving whiskey and car keys to adolescents. The proper role for taxation is to raise the funds necessary for the government's constitutional powers, not to manipulate the behavior of the public.
We're a bit beyond that. The government can give itself however much money it wants, and has been doing so for a long time now. I can't see any way that having more tax money could make the federal government of the US any more dangerous than it is now.
On the other hand, anything that reduces our reliance on gasoline will reduce the incentive for militarism. And that would be a very significant win for freedom in the US.
Just because something is regressive taxation *does not* mean that it's a bad idea. Especially in the case of taxes designed to change economic incentives, the regressiveness of the tax is solidly a secondary concern - and one that can be easily solved by cutting income tax further for the lower brackets.
Either their biz plan works or it doesn't - the government ought not pick winners and losers in the marketplace.
That's great, unless the government has already massively screwed up the market in question. Given that the government is investing in the big-3 automakers, *not* investing in Tesla would be "picking a loser in the marketplace".
There is an alternative: A set of free and fair markets where individual investors invest in promising companies instead of paying taxes and letting congress decide who to invest in. This doesn't seem to "drive society forward" as quickly as progressivist socialists might like, but it also doesn't hold things back as much as real world socialist policies actually do.
Unfortunately, what we have is real-world socialist policies - which basically consist of corporate welfare to the largest and least competitive companies. Given that, giving some money to smaller companies just works to balance things back out.
The "rights" that the legal system of the United States recognizes certainly don't come with any obligation to pay taxes. "All people are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights..."
No. They understand that their market does not understand science fiction.
And this is the basic problem with only having a couple of huge-budget film studios to serve the entire movie market. If something isn't fit for the lowest common denominator it can only be made as a fluke.
Being prevented from being able to do something even though there's a freely available solution there simply on the grounds that you can't look at the source code where you wouldn't know what the fuck you were looking at or what to do with it in the first place is utter madness.
1.) You aren't being prevented from doing anything.
2.) Having access to software source code is extremely valuable even to people who are not themselves programmers. Have you ever tried to get a specific bug fixed or feature added to a piece of proprietary software? When the software is produced by a large company, it's basically impossible. In contrast, with FOSS software, if the change is actually important you can hire a programmer to make the change for you.
I'm as big an enemy of censorship as you're likely to find. I've had my current slashdot sig for something like 10 years now. But a non-profit organization issuing guidelines about how they're going to label things cannot possibly be censorship.
Try again when a government passes a law saying that all distributors of software must meet these guidelines, or maybe when there are roving bands of vigilantes assaulting people who talk about distributing proprietary software.
Proponents of free / libre software shouldn't act like they're afraid of proprietary software. It just makes us look stupid and weak. The grandparent poster is exactly right. It's the same with the GPLv2 vs. GPLv3 wars - GPLv3 is "necessary" because of TiVO? Because of lard-arses who want to watch TV? Fuck that.
There's no GPLv2 vs GPLv3 "wars", just rational people making rational license choices. It's certainly not in the interest of the FSF to allow their software to be distributed in such a way that it can't be modified by end users.
Whether a given distribution choses to meet these guidelines or not is entirely voluntary. If they chose not to, all they miss out on is being endorsed as a "free distribution" by the FSF. Hint: They weren't being endorsed before either.
Sometimes there are simply no good alternatives to binary blobs available.
If that's true, then you can't accomplish your task using only free software. You apparently care more about "Overscan adjustment for dvi to hdmi adapters" than about using 100% free software - and that's your choice - but not everyone agrees with you. Even for people who do agree with you, there's still some value in *knowing* when you're using binary blobs.
These are the FSF's policies for determining what GNU+Linux distributions that they directly promote. If they promote Ubuntu and Canonical promotes Adobe Flash Player then the FSF would be drastically more likely to take a credibility hit than if they remain consistent with the principles that the organization was founded upon.
Or do you think that they have some sort of obligation to endorse random distros?
Translation: If I don't personally need something right this minute to accomplish my short term goals, nobody needs it and anyone who wants it is crazy.
Again, depends on the situation... if you're not dealing with a web app that needs to ensure, for the sake of consistency, that users don't hit the back button, then "breaking" the back button is a "Good Thing".
If your application breaks when the user uses the basic interface functionality in their browsers (back button is the most obvious, but multiple windows/tabs is the other main example) then it's been built wrong - not unlike the way a Windows application that uses "right click and drag" to select text and "hold down enter and left click" to pop up a context menu is built wrong.
Proper session and form handling probably isn't built into your web framework. But that doesn't mean that doing it right is especially difficult. If there's a business rule that says that forms can't be double-submitted then assign a form key each time you display the form, and make sure that there are no duplicate form keys submitted. But constraining the user to always move forward on a single path through the application just makes you look incompetent.
What I'd have to wonder is if you're really 2' away or if the screen is really 25".
Tape measure says that the screen is 25.5" diagonal and my head is about 26" away. Would you really expect motion sickness from watching video on a decent sized computer monitor?
My guess is if you blow a standard picture up to 80" and call it HD, and most of them will be perfectly happy, and even prefer it over a 36" HD image.
You're right. There exist "sports fans" who are perfectly happy watching random blobs of color because they're there to get drunk with their loud buddies. That's completely irrelevant to my point. For those who are actually interested seeing the action in a football game (specifically football, somewhat less for basketball and hardly at all for baseball) HD is drastically better than SD.
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At a small company, it's frequently possible to find those people and stop them from writing any more code.
What's your contention, that there's no such thing as skill or ability and anyone who's been sufficiently trained to perform a task is equally good at it? If so, that's obviously bullshit.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tailcall
The two cases where recursion is the cleanest solution are A.) when you would have needed an explicit stack or tree anyway and B.) when the obvious implementation is tail-recursive. This ends up being true for a surprisingly large number of algorithms, but "pow" really isn't one of them. Still, you might occasionally see something like the following:
Which is more elegant than the while-loop solution if you look at things from a certain programming mindset.
Who on the web seriously thinks that anyone's going to follow that instruction. Go over to /b/ on 4chan and post that you're thinking about committing suicide... see what responses you get.
Wait a second. What's wrong with recursion?
In 2012, AMD is talking about shipping 8 and 12 core processors with DDR3 RAM. I haven't looked at the Intel roadmaps, but let's give them the benifit of the doubt and say they're shipping shipping 16 core processors with each core twice as fast as a Core i7 core today.
Assuming everything scales linearly, that's about 30 fps at minimum graphics settings in Crysis - and that's for a top of the line single socket workstation. My bet is that in 2012, gamers will still buy $200 video cards and mainstream machines will have quad core processors with reasonably powerful dedicated graphics hardware on-die.
We're a bit beyond that. The government can give itself however much money it wants, and has been doing so for a long time now. I can't see any way that having more tax money could make the federal government of the US any more dangerous than it is now.
On the other hand, anything that reduces our reliance on gasoline will reduce the incentive for militarism. And that would be a very significant win for freedom in the US.
Just because something is regressive taxation *does not* mean that it's a bad idea. Especially in the case of taxes designed to change economic incentives, the regressiveness of the tax is solidly a secondary concern - and one that can be easily solved by cutting income tax further for the lower brackets.
That's great, unless the government has already massively screwed up the market in question. Given that the government is investing in the big-3 automakers, *not* investing in Tesla would be "picking a loser in the marketplace".
There is an alternative: A set of free and fair markets where individual investors invest in promising companies instead of paying taxes and letting congress decide who to invest in. This doesn't seem to "drive society forward" as quickly as progressivist socialists might like, but it also doesn't hold things back as much as real world socialist policies actually do.
Unfortunately, what we have is real-world socialist policies - which basically consist of corporate welfare to the largest and least competitive companies. Given that, giving some money to smaller companies just works to balance things back out.
When was this election when I got to vote on individual federal expenditures? Hell, no congressperson that I've voted for has ever been elected.
The "rights" that the legal system of the United States recognizes certainly don't come with any obligation to pay taxes. "All people are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights..."
And this is the basic problem with only having a couple of huge-budget film studios to serve the entire movie market. If something isn't fit for the lowest common denominator it can only be made as a fluke.
1.) You aren't being prevented from doing anything.
2.) Having access to software source code is extremely valuable even to people who are not themselves programmers. Have you ever tried to get a specific bug fixed or feature added to a piece of proprietary software? When the software is produced by a large company, it's basically impossible. In contrast, with FOSS software, if the change is actually important you can hire a programmer to make the change for you.
What GNU+Linux distro currently has instructions on how to install Windows on their web site?
I'm as big an enemy of censorship as you're likely to find. I've had my current slashdot sig for something like 10 years now. But a non-profit organization issuing guidelines about how they're going to label things cannot possibly be censorship.
Try again when a government passes a law saying that all distributors of software must meet these guidelines, or maybe when there are roving bands of vigilantes assaulting people who talk about distributing proprietary software.
There's no GPLv2 vs GPLv3 "wars", just rational people making rational license choices. It's certainly not in the interest of the FSF to allow their software to be distributed in such a way that it can't be modified by end users.
That's nonsense.
Whether a given distribution choses to meet these guidelines or not is entirely voluntary. If they chose not to, all they miss out on is being endorsed as a "free distribution" by the FSF. Hint: They weren't being endorsed before either.
It sounds like you're confused in at least two ways.
What goals are being harmed by what actions on the part of who here?
If that's true, then you can't accomplish your task using only free software. You apparently care more about "Overscan adjustment for dvi to hdmi adapters" than about using 100% free software - and that's your choice - but not everyone agrees with you. Even for people who do agree with you, there's still some value in *knowing* when you're using binary blobs.
You don't seem to understand the issue at hand.
These are the FSF's policies for determining what GNU+Linux distributions that they directly promote. If they promote Ubuntu and Canonical promotes Adobe Flash Player then the FSF would be drastically more likely to take a credibility hit than if they remain consistent with the principles that the organization was founded upon.
Or do you think that they have some sort of obligation to endorse random distros?
Translation: If I don't personally need something right this minute to accomplish my short term goals, nobody needs it and anyone who wants it is crazy.
If your application breaks when the user uses the basic interface functionality in their browsers (back button is the most obvious, but multiple windows/tabs is the other main example) then it's been built wrong - not unlike the way a Windows application that uses "right click and drag" to select text and "hold down enter and left click" to pop up a context menu is built wrong.
Proper session and form handling probably isn't built into your web framework. But that doesn't mean that doing it right is especially difficult. If there's a business rule that says that forms can't be double-submitted then assign a form key each time you display the form, and make sure that there are no duplicate form keys submitted. But constraining the user to always move forward on a single path through the application just makes you look incompetent.
No. No it's not. Cookies exist. There's no reason to break people's browser UI in an incompetent attempt to avoid using them.
Tape measure says that the screen is 25.5" diagonal and my head is about 26" away. Would you really expect motion sickness from watching video on a decent sized computer monitor?
You're right. There exist "sports fans" who are perfectly happy watching random blobs of color because they're there to get drunk with their loud buddies. That's completely irrelevant to my point. For those who are actually interested seeing the action in a football game (specifically football, somewhat less for basketball and hardly at all for baseball) HD is drastically better than SD.