Story seperates Baldurs Gate 2, a masterpiece, from the gorgeous but hollow Neverwinter Nights.
That is soooo true. I loved BG2. I have NWN installed on my PC at the moment, and got most of the way through to what I assume is the end of the first chapter. I haven't played it in several weeks now, though, and have bought two new games in the interim. BG2 didn't have the same snazzy 3D rendering engine, but it had two things so many games lack: playability and storyline. And for that, I played it for hours and hours, twice through, and may yet play it again to see a different selection of the sub-plots.
Of course, BG2 and NWN are both RPGs, where storyline matters a lot more. One of those new things was Quake III Gold, which I finally got around to buying now my system is up to playing the games. Plot: zero. Playability: a good 8/10, IMHO. Sometimes story just doesn't matter.
Companies demand experience on all posts, and then whine about lack of "qualified" applicants. While ignoring the fact that they themselves are creating a qualification that's impossible to get.
Or it could just be that many games programmers work stupidly long hours, particularly as stupidly close deadlines approach, while being expected to write code of a quality unseen in most of the programming industry because of the need to keep performance up and support the latest and greatest AI algorithms, without much of the fun and glamour they thought would come with the job because the production people get most of that, in exchange for financial compensation that barely beats what a Mickey Mouse business apps developer can pick up in his first job, assuming the company lasts long enough to get the game finished and published so there's any pay cheque at all. Nah, that's a silly idea...
5. There are some very good HCI people and some very good programmers, but the final decisions on UI are made by management figures, whose decisions are likely to be influenced (rightly or wrongly) by more than just what the HCI and programming people tell them.
While I certainly agree with you that following standards may not lead to a good user interface for all applications, I would submit that (at least for end user applications on mainstream PCs) it is usually better than not following the standards, and that most attempts to "innovate" are usability failures. To wit:
Apple and Microsoft seem to throw out their own guidelines whenever they feel the need to "innovate".
This is true. And as a professional developer using Visual Studio.Net, I'd like to thank Microsoft personally for giving us:
properties dialogs with non-standard, or effectively non-supported, keyboard navigation;
properties dialogs that change focus behind your back if you switch to another application and then switch back again;
"context-sensitive" features, particularly the help system, that make it far harder than it ever used to be to do things because the software is constantly second-guessing you;
non-standard File Open dialogs that freeze your system for half a minute while they scan a directory with thousands of files in it, when the default dialog in any other app takes a second to populate;
a macro system so powerful that my one-liner "There is a hack here" comment macro takes 30 seconds to load the first time I hit the shortcut key, when it used to be instant;
and all the other "innovations" that cost me several minutes of my valuable time every day.
To their credit, Microsoft's developers (at least those I've talked to) do seem to have a genuine interest in improving this, and their hearts are in the right place. Some of the nasty context-sensitive stuff can be disabled in the 2003 version, for example. But a lot of these "usability innovations" gain me nothing, while slowing me down and/or wasting valuable screen real estate.
Since it would be difficult to build a spreadsheet that has 10x the features of Excel and still call it a spreadsheet, obviously Gnome should start charging $10 a copy for Gnumeric if they want to increase their marketshare.
Sorry, I think you misunderstand. The 10x doesn't have to be feature count; in fact, typically it's not. It could also be, for example, due to usability improvements that make staff using a product at your company more productive, or better support for automating existing features, perhaps by a central support group rather than individual users, so that they can be used more efficiently in the context of your own organisation. IMHO, this is where OSS has a chance to overtake MS, not in a straight feature-for-feature cloning exercise.
If I had to use MS-Excel to manipulate serious figures, for instance huge budgets, I wonder how well I would sleep.
Hopefully if you were manipulating serious figures, you'd be using serious tools and serious techniques, starting with redundant cross-checking of any calculations. It doesn't matter whether it's Excel's RAND() function, Pentium's inability to divide or Pentium IV's inability to calculate sines properly, you're always at risk of a numerical error when using computers, and much more so if you rely on a single method of calculation.
By the way, if your business goes into troubles because of MS-Excel bugs which have been well known for years, can you sue MS ?
If the bug's been known for years and you still let your business depend on its non-existence, it's your own fault if you kill the business. Risk management is a key skill in running any commercial organisation, and you failed at step one: doing your homework.
Fixed in later versions means the customer had to buy a new version to get the bug fixes.
Not necessarily. You don't pay for MS service packs, you have to pay little or nothing for new versions of several MS products, and those who've bought a support contract from Microsoft get a lot of the serious stuff for no further charges, too. I don't agree with a lot of MS practices, but your comment is simply wrong.
If I weren't posting on this thread, I'd mod that up as Insightful.
Advocates of new software, particularly OSS, often seem to forget that market share counts for a huge amount. Some studies we looked at back when I was in academia suggested that you need the "10x factor" to force a switch from an established product: your alternative must provide 10x the perceived benefits, or be 1/10 the price. That's a very big barrier to entry, and having a product that's only just become a challenger on technical merit and reliability is nowhere near it. (It's a good start, though!)
I've e-mailed a well-informed and helpful Microsoft developer, whom I first encountered on this very forum, on several occasions. I'm told a number of bug reports have been filed against the application in question as a result of my e-mails, and some of the things I've mentioned to him have certainly been fixed in a later version of the product.
Some people at Microsoft do listen, you just have to make a bit of an effort to find them. Curiously, a comment from the developer in question was that the dev teams love direct contact with customers prepared to give them helpful information about bugs or feature requests, they just wish the PR people would stop getting in the way.:-)
The only way to get a cop to treat you like a person is to either be a cop, or a rich white guy.
I saw a fascinating video clip on one of the US cop camera shows we get over here in the UK. IIRC a couple of state troopers had pulled a car over, alleging that it was committing some minor traffic violation. The driver, who happened to be a senior officer with a neighbouring force, clearly stated that he disagreed. During the following "discussions" he also identified himself as another police officer, and acknowledged that he was armed. He kept his composure pretty well considering, simply denying the charge and requesting that a supervising officer attend the scene.
The state troopers became more and more agitated, muttering things about "He's got a gun" and "Call for back-up" every couple of seconds. Eventually, they sprayed the guy who was pulled over, and managed to restrain him; he didn't actually threaten them verbally, draw his weapon, or otherwise give any indication of impending violence or resistance, mind, just disagreed with the charge and asked for a supervisor to attend, and then sat on a fence at the side of the road waiting.
It's all on tape from the arresting cops' car, but I'd love to know how it turned out; looks to me like two over-ego'd cops picked on the wrong guy, then got aggressive and wrongfully arrested him. They were pretty lucky the reasonable senior officer didn't decide to exercise his legal rights, probably resulting in a firefight (which, given the apparent incompetence of the arresting cops in negotiation, and the rather pathetic skills in unarmed restraint and use of spray that they demonstrated, probably wouldn't have turned out well for them, I'm thinking). The senior guy probably figured it wasn't worth the risk to all concerned, but I hope everyone got what they deserved out of that incident.
I don't know the laws in Nevada, but here in PA they would have gotten her on SOMETHING. Perhaps "Assault on a police officer" when she slammed the door into him. THEN you get her for resisting arrest.
Hmm... I guess what legally constitutes making an arrest is relevant here. In some countries, the act of trapping her in the car might well have been interpreted by a court as making an arrest itself. If that is the case here (I don't know, I'm not from the US) then that "assault" might have been interpreted as legitimately resisting a wrongful arrest, and the police officer would have been the one in trouble (and rightly so, IMNSHO).
Let's PLEASE avoid the whole "copying isn't theft" argument... it's old and a waste of time. The judge most likely would say that they are the same.
Before five million slashbots jump in here, I'll point out that the above is clearly untrue: there are enormous legal differences between infringing copyright and theft, and the judges haven't, don't and probably won't say they are the same. Ethically, it's an entirely different question, of course; I'm surprised none of the big media groups has yet started campaigning to make knowingly viewing illegally copied material an offence.
Don't mess with Microsoft, they have the money and the power to track you down, even on Internet and through P2P networks. And they will, this is just an example and a warning.
Right, just like the **AA have been doing. I'm betting they have a comparable amount of money, and they're certainly willing to use legal muscle, but look where that's got them...
A more interesting spin I didn't see anybody mention yet is that if, as P2P music-sharing advocates constantly claim, it's legal to download and only illegal to distribute under US copyright law, then Microsoft's claims are unfounded (and probably incorrect legal advice -- oops). Alternatively, the P2P music-sharing advocates have been talking a crock all along, and are about to see a rather unfortunate legal precedent set from a surprising direction. Any takers?
I do not think I should have to pay some organazation every time i hear a tune.
Of course you don't. You're a consumer, and presumably you're not the one putting in the effort to produce that material. You have an entirely one-sided perspective. Fortunately, what you think does not define the laws you are required to observe.
As usual, the problem here is that most people are aiming for the wrong target. The behaviour of the **AA groups is pretty despicable, but what's despicable is that they have effectively formed complex monopolies guilty of price fixing, and thus keeping the costs of music unreasonably high for legitimate, law-abiding users.
The correct answer to this situation is not to go out and break other laws en masse, or to try to undermine very useful general legal principles (copyright, for a start) based on one particular situation. The correct answer is not to buy CDs and DVDs at rip-off prices, to write to the manufacturers of copy-protected CDs you can't use in your car and tell them why you won't be buying any more, to write to your representatives with a view to legally enforcing anti-competition laws against the big media groups abusing their dominant position, etc.
I'm still sticking with my assertion that building local expertise through OSS is a good thing for governments [...]
That I could certainly agree with, for many of the reasons you gave before. I'd like to think that governments really were supporting OSS for the benefits it brings to the community as a whole. I don't always buy the hype about OSS, nor agree with the philosophy of some of its more zealous advocates, but it strikes me that governments who should be acting to benefit their people as a whole are a natural fit for an OSS approach.
For now, I'll settle for supporting OSS purely for a monetary advantage, though: before you can get the movers and shakers to see the philosophical merits of OSS, you have to open minds that are conditioned to use the de-facto standard software by default, and have almost forgotten that better alternatives might exist. The only way to open minds is exposure to alternative possibilities, and if a monetary advantage leads to that exposure, it's a step along the path.
BTW, I agree entirely with your point about argument vs. contradiction. I just stick with something my dear daddy told me when I was but a youngster: it's hard to beat an honest man.:-)
Re:C AND C++ ARE THE WORST LANGUAGES EVER DEVELOPE
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These two languages have caused more pain and suffering than any others.
And without them, there probably wouldn't be any others.
Re:Why such a fat book?
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Practical C++
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All that verbiage just confuses people.
I take your point, and I agree with it. However, I note that your own description also contains several significant technical errors, if only by omission in most cases. Complex and powerful tools require a certain level of detail to explain them, and while I certainly agree that you can go too far (and ~1,000 pages is probably some way too far here) you can also go too short (e.g., Accelerated C++, while generally very good, almost completely ignores exceptions). As ever, there's a balance to be found, and the best book won't be the longest or the shortest, but the one that gets that balance right.
Accelerated C++ --> Modern C++ Design?!
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Practical C++
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Interesting perspective. Both Accelerated C++ and Modern C++ Design are very good for their intended audiences, but I'd have recommended about five or six other books and several years of experience using C++ between one and the other!
Re:C++ had its day...and it is today
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Practical C++
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I find that those who write off C++ really don't know the language, or at least the "modern" standardized language.
Perhaps more significantly, I find that those who write off C++ because only a "small subset of commercial programming" can benefit from it don't know much about the world of commercial programming.
The thing is, I'm not sure any of those stories do support your case. Your original contention that I challenged was:
One of the main reasons for governments to use Open Source is that they can train and employ their own people in it's use, mainenance, and development.
The articles you cited are about "statements of intent" or "initiatives". Sometimes they're about subsidising OSS development by third parties. These may all be admirable things, but none of them is really about governments getting together teams of their own people to deploy/maintain OSS.
In fact, some of those stories appear to be excellent arguments supporting my own case: governments are investigating OSS primarily because it's cheaper.
The interfaces you know as Internet Explorer, Outlook Express, and Windows Media Player are a relatively small piece of the puzzle.
That's true, but there's no technical reason Gecko couldn't support the same HTML-based help format, and thus no technical reason a component installed with the Mozilla suite couldn't offer the same interface to other applications as the IE-based one, with all the attendant improvements in standards compliance, reliability and flexibility that would come with that.
The user interfaces may be only 1/10 of the issue, but that doesn't mean you couldn't replace the other 9/10 with something superior as well. Microsoft simply chooses to structure their OS and its included services in such a way that it's not easy, and to withhold information that would make it easy.
And the damn thing is, you end up with piles of crap in your memory on boot-up that you never will use, but they include "Just In Case" so if you do fire up apps they appear to just start right up, unlike those clunky competitors products.
I've been wondering about this. I visited the Microsoft Update site the other day, to download something for my WinXP box. While there, I noticed that some of the security patches go out of their way to say that they are necessary for any PC with Internet Explorer version n installed, even if you don't use it as your web browser.
If the very presence of the software on my machine can cause a security vulnerability, that's surely a compelling argument that just optionally removing the front-end (basically a couple of icons and some menu entries) but still leaving the back-end around is not an adequate standard of "independence".
That's on top of the irritating way that options in Outlook Express now seem to be affected by what the user does in Office, and can't be changed back within OE itself, or the way that resizing the text in IE seems to affect help viewed in numerous other apps, again requiring some relatively fiddly setting to revert it to normal, which in turn reverts IE anyway.
One of these days, I really will get around to intalling a Linux distro on that 25GB partition I've been leaving aside on my new (a year ago...) PC.:-)
Thank you for the contrived example all because I neglected to put "probably" in there.
My point is precisely that it's not contrived. In many languages, particularly lower-level ones, there are numerous "optimisations" like this that will pretty much always lead to a significant performance boost, or at worst a break-even prospect, and that require negligible effort to use instead of the alternatives. They should, and by experienced developers will, be used routinely, without reference to a profiler.
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That is soooo true. I loved BG2. I have NWN installed on my PC at the moment, and got most of the way through to what I assume is the end of the first chapter. I haven't played it in several weeks now, though, and have bought two new games in the interim. BG2 didn't have the same snazzy 3D rendering engine, but it had two things so many games lack: playability and storyline. And for that, I played it for hours and hours, twice through, and may yet play it again to see a different selection of the sub-plots.
Of course, BG2 and NWN are both RPGs, where storyline matters a lot more. One of those new things was Quake III Gold, which I finally got around to buying now my system is up to playing the games. Plot: zero. Playability: a good 8/10, IMHO. Sometimes story just doesn't matter.
Or it could just be that many games programmers work stupidly long hours, particularly as stupidly close deadlines approach, while being expected to write code of a quality unseen in most of the programming industry because of the need to keep performance up and support the latest and greatest AI algorithms, without much of the fun and glamour they thought would come with the job because the production people get most of that, in exchange for financial compensation that barely beats what a Mickey Mouse business apps developer can pick up in his first job, assuming the company lasts long enough to get the game finished and published so there's any pay cheque at all. Nah, that's a silly idea...
Actually, yes it is, just not in English.
One appropriate context, given the whoring reference, would be "kama sutra", of course.
Personally, I rather like the alternative; trying to shag one of these sounds like just desserts for posting that sort of crap here to me...
I suspect it's actually:
5. There are some very good HCI people and some very good programmers, but the final decisions on UI are made by management figures, whose decisions are likely to be influenced (rightly or wrongly) by more than just what the HCI and programming people tell them.
While I certainly agree with you that following standards may not lead to a good user interface for all applications, I would submit that (at least for end user applications on mainstream PCs) it is usually better than not following the standards, and that most attempts to "innovate" are usability failures. To wit:
This is true. And as a professional developer using Visual Studio .Net, I'd like to thank Microsoft personally for giving us:
and all the other "innovations" that cost me several minutes of my valuable time every day.
To their credit, Microsoft's developers (at least those I've talked to) do seem to have a genuine interest in improving this, and their hearts are in the right place. Some of the nasty context-sensitive stuff can be disabled in the 2003 version, for example. But a lot of these "usability innovations" gain me nothing, while slowing me down and/or wasting valuable screen real estate.
Sorry, I think you misunderstand. The 10x doesn't have to be feature count; in fact, typically it's not. It could also be, for example, due to usability improvements that make staff using a product at your company more productive, or better support for automating existing features, perhaps by a central support group rather than individual users, so that they can be used more efficiently in the context of your own organisation. IMHO, this is where OSS has a chance to overtake MS, not in a straight feature-for-feature cloning exercise.
Hopefully if you were manipulating serious figures, you'd be using serious tools and serious techniques, starting with redundant cross-checking of any calculations. It doesn't matter whether it's Excel's RAND() function, Pentium's inability to divide or Pentium IV's inability to calculate sines properly, you're always at risk of a numerical error when using computers, and much more so if you rely on a single method of calculation.
If the bug's been known for years and you still let your business depend on its non-existence, it's your own fault if you kill the business. Risk management is a key skill in running any commercial organisation, and you failed at step one: doing your homework.
Not necessarily. You don't pay for MS service packs, you have to pay little or nothing for new versions of several MS products, and those who've bought a support contract from Microsoft get a lot of the serious stuff for no further charges, too. I don't agree with a lot of MS practices, but your comment is simply wrong.
If I weren't posting on this thread, I'd mod that up as Insightful.
Advocates of new software, particularly OSS, often seem to forget that market share counts for a huge amount. Some studies we looked at back when I was in academia suggested that you need the "10x factor" to force a switch from an established product: your alternative must provide 10x the perceived benefits, or be 1/10 the price. That's a very big barrier to entry, and having a product that's only just become a challenger on technical merit and reliability is nowhere near it. (It's a good start, though!)
I've e-mailed a well-informed and helpful Microsoft developer, whom I first encountered on this very forum, on several occasions. I'm told a number of bug reports have been filed against the application in question as a result of my e-mails, and some of the things I've mentioned to him have certainly been fixed in a later version of the product.
Some people at Microsoft do listen, you just have to make a bit of an effort to find them. Curiously, a comment from the developer in question was that the dev teams love direct contact with customers prepared to give them helpful information about bugs or feature requests, they just wish the PR people would stop getting in the way. :-)
I saw a fascinating video clip on one of the US cop camera shows we get over here in the UK. IIRC a couple of state troopers had pulled a car over, alleging that it was committing some minor traffic violation. The driver, who happened to be a senior officer with a neighbouring force, clearly stated that he disagreed. During the following "discussions" he also identified himself as another police officer, and acknowledged that he was armed. He kept his composure pretty well considering, simply denying the charge and requesting that a supervising officer attend the scene.
The state troopers became more and more agitated, muttering things about "He's got a gun" and "Call for back-up" every couple of seconds. Eventually, they sprayed the guy who was pulled over, and managed to restrain him; he didn't actually threaten them verbally, draw his weapon, or otherwise give any indication of impending violence or resistance, mind, just disagreed with the charge and asked for a supervisor to attend, and then sat on a fence at the side of the road waiting.
It's all on tape from the arresting cops' car, but I'd love to know how it turned out; looks to me like two over-ego'd cops picked on the wrong guy, then got aggressive and wrongfully arrested him. They were pretty lucky the reasonable senior officer didn't decide to exercise his legal rights, probably resulting in a firefight (which, given the apparent incompetence of the arresting cops in negotiation, and the rather pathetic skills in unarmed restraint and use of spray that they demonstrated, probably wouldn't have turned out well for them, I'm thinking). The senior guy probably figured it wasn't worth the risk to all concerned, but I hope everyone got what they deserved out of that incident.
Hmm... I guess what legally constitutes making an arrest is relevant here. In some countries, the act of trapping her in the car might well have been interpreted by a court as making an arrest itself. If that is the case here (I don't know, I'm not from the US) then that "assault" might have been interpreted as legitimately resisting a wrongful arrest, and the police officer would have been the one in trouble (and rightly so, IMNSHO).
Before five million slashbots jump in here, I'll point out that the above is clearly untrue: there are enormous legal differences between infringing copyright and theft, and the judges haven't, don't and probably won't say they are the same. Ethically, it's an entirely different question, of course; I'm surprised none of the big media groups has yet started campaigning to make knowingly viewing illegally copied material an offence.
Well, if it's good enough for Fox... ;-)
Right, just like the **AA have been doing. I'm betting they have a comparable amount of money, and they're certainly willing to use legal muscle, but look where that's got them...
A more interesting spin I didn't see anybody mention yet is that if, as P2P music-sharing advocates constantly claim, it's legal to download and only illegal to distribute under US copyright law, then Microsoft's claims are unfounded (and probably incorrect legal advice -- oops). Alternatively, the P2P music-sharing advocates have been talking a crock all along, and are about to see a rather unfortunate legal precedent set from a surprising direction. Any takers?
Of course you don't. You're a consumer, and presumably you're not the one putting in the effort to produce that material. You have an entirely one-sided perspective. Fortunately, what you think does not define the laws you are required to observe.
As usual, the problem here is that most people are aiming for the wrong target. The behaviour of the **AA groups is pretty despicable, but what's despicable is that they have effectively formed complex monopolies guilty of price fixing, and thus keeping the costs of music unreasonably high for legitimate, law-abiding users.
The correct answer to this situation is not to go out and break other laws en masse, or to try to undermine very useful general legal principles (copyright, for a start) based on one particular situation. The correct answer is not to buy CDs and DVDs at rip-off prices, to write to the manufacturers of copy-protected CDs you can't use in your car and tell them why you won't be buying any more, to write to your representatives with a view to legally enforcing anti-competition laws against the big media groups abusing their dominant position, etc.
That I could certainly agree with, for many of the reasons you gave before. I'd like to think that governments really were supporting OSS for the benefits it brings to the community as a whole. I don't always buy the hype about OSS, nor agree with the philosophy of some of its more zealous advocates, but it strikes me that governments who should be acting to benefit their people as a whole are a natural fit for an OSS approach.
For now, I'll settle for supporting OSS purely for a monetary advantage, though: before you can get the movers and shakers to see the philosophical merits of OSS, you have to open minds that are conditioned to use the de-facto standard software by default, and have almost forgotten that better alternatives might exist. The only way to open minds is exposure to alternative possibilities, and if a monetary advantage leads to that exposure, it's a step along the path.
BTW, I agree entirely with your point about argument vs. contradiction. I just stick with something my dear daddy told me when I was but a youngster: it's hard to beat an honest man. :-)
And without them, there probably wouldn't be any others.
I take your point, and I agree with it. However, I note that your own description also contains several significant technical errors, if only by omission in most cases. Complex and powerful tools require a certain level of detail to explain them, and while I certainly agree that you can go too far (and ~1,000 pages is probably some way too far here) you can also go too short (e.g., Accelerated C++, while generally very good, almost completely ignores exceptions). As ever, there's a balance to be found, and the best book won't be the longest or the shortest, but the one that gets that balance right.
Interesting perspective. Both Accelerated C++ and Modern C++ Design are very good for their intended audiences, but I'd have recommended about five or six other books and several years of experience using C++ between one and the other!
Perhaps more significantly, I find that those who write off C++ because only a "small subset of commercial programming" can benefit from it don't know much about the world of commercial programming.
The thing is, I'm not sure any of those stories do support your case. Your original contention that I challenged was:
The articles you cited are about "statements of intent" or "initiatives". Sometimes they're about subsidising OSS development by third parties. These may all be admirable things, but none of them is really about governments getting together teams of their own people to deploy/maintain OSS.
In fact, some of those stories appear to be excellent arguments supporting my own case: governments are investigating OSS primarily because it's cheaper.
That's true, but there's no technical reason Gecko couldn't support the same HTML-based help format, and thus no technical reason a component installed with the Mozilla suite couldn't offer the same interface to other applications as the IE-based one, with all the attendant improvements in standards compliance, reliability and flexibility that would come with that.
The user interfaces may be only 1/10 of the issue, but that doesn't mean you couldn't replace the other 9/10 with something superior as well. Microsoft simply chooses to structure their OS and its included services in such a way that it's not easy, and to withhold information that would make it easy.
I've been wondering about this. I visited the Microsoft Update site the other day, to download something for my WinXP box. While there, I noticed that some of the security patches go out of their way to say that they are necessary for any PC with Internet Explorer version n installed, even if you don't use it as your web browser.
If the very presence of the software on my machine can cause a security vulnerability, that's surely a compelling argument that just optionally removing the front-end (basically a couple of icons and some menu entries) but still leaving the back-end around is not an adequate standard of "independence".
That's on top of the irritating way that options in Outlook Express now seem to be affected by what the user does in Office, and can't be changed back within OE itself, or the way that resizing the text in IE seems to affect help viewed in numerous other apps, again requiring some relatively fiddly setting to revert it to normal, which in turn reverts IE anyway.
One of these days, I really will get around to intalling a Linux distro on that 25GB partition I've been leaving aside on my new (a year ago...) PC. :-)
My point is precisely that it's not contrived. In many languages, particularly lower-level ones, there are numerous "optimisations" like this that will pretty much always lead to a significant performance boost, or at worst a break-even prospect, and that require negligible effort to use instead of the alternatives. They should, and by experienced developers will, be used routinely, without reference to a profiler.