The economies of the Middle and Late Kingdoms certainly ran on slavery, and used slaves "en masse". But the Early Kingdom, which built the Pyramids, had much less contact with the outside world (i.e. they did not conquer vast swaths of their neighbors as the latter kingdoms did). So one might reasonably assume they had less in the way of foreign slaves to press into pyramid building labor. All that said, when you have peasants in a theocracy who are building Pyramids at the direction of a deified monarch, and who presumably could not choose to go do something else if they wanted to, whether you call them "slaves" or not is fairly academic.
After generations of theocracy, you're going to have a fair number of willing local laborers. The entire society was directed at pyramid building to such a degree it eventually collapsed under the economic weight of so much effort going to non-productive use.
It seems to me the Early Kingdom would not have had massive numbers of unwilling foreign laborers, but would have had massive numbers of willing locals. So it seems reasonable to me to that most of the people pulling those blocks up to the top were pulling because they thought it was a good thing to do; or at least, because everyone else was doing it; but probably not because some taskmaster was whipping them into pulling harder. Anyway, I'll happily debate whether foriegn slaves played a significant part in pyramid building, and happily admit I don't know for sure.
What gets me annoyed is I know a depressing number of people who think the image from "The Ten Commandments" of the Egyptian taskmaster whipping the jewish slaves into pulling the blocks up the pyramid is established historical fact. Dreck. When Egypt conquered Judea, the last pyramids were already 500-1000 year old ruins being stripped to build cities.
"Pyramids may be cool to us, but at the time they weren't cool to the people who built them."
Just for some random nit-picking: Pyramids may well have been cool to the people who built them. While the slaves-under-the-taskmasters-whip theory has been popular with Hollywood, there's not much evidence that's how it was. Many experts would suggest that the experience of those who built the pyramids might not have been "slavery" but "religious fervor".
Re:Not the right product for Linux
on
Kylix in Limbo
·
· Score: 1
What does it mean to target a platform in units shipped? Or to target a platform in turnover? Or to target a platform in profit?
I'll guess you're saying: - You agree that most software, by units shipped, is for Windows. (OK, that's pretty obviously true). - You think that more profit is made writing software packages non-Windows systems. (I think that's what you're saying. I also think you're smoking something.) -Hmm, "turnover"... nope I give up, I haven't a clue what the hell you're talking about with that one.
How many individuals buy any proffessional class development environment for personal use? Not many (though it sounds like you're an exception). The target market is companies buying it for their developers. Assuming you're already paying the salary of a decent developer, you'd have to be out of your mind to choose which dev environment to buy for them based on price (at current levels). Borland can't compete on price, because they could give it away free and even the full ~$1000 price for VS wouldn't make most development shops bat an eye.
Well, digital records are not, in fact, real. If one tamperer manages to get into your process anywhere along the way, they could change thousands of votes and you would have no way at all to detect this after the fact. This would be incredibly more difficult with paper records. With paper ballots, you can go back and look at the actual marks made by the voter. With digital ballots you must assume that the vote was recorded properly in the first place (better inspect every line of code and computer chip along the way), that it wasn't changed after that (which would be relatively easy to do, yet impossible to detect), and that it is being read properly (can't use your eyeballs). I almost never use paper for anything. But if you want a record that is hard to forge, and easy to go back and check up on later, give me a piece of paper locked in a box.
"It has not been proven either that the weapons did NOT exist"
But the question is whether the PROOF existed. Bush said it did. It did not. Bush lied, whether WMDs are found now or not.
"Even the UN, which disagreed with our actions, never formally declared them 'illegal' because past resolutions gave us enough room to do what we did."
And because we get a veto. The UN (well, the Security Council, which is the meaningful part) never formally declares anything it's permanent, veto-weilding members do 'illegal'. Supposedly, these 5 countries should be politically and diplomaticly mature enough not to do anything that would be so declared in the first place; i.e. to get formal Security Council approval before doing anything questionable. So much for that.
"Heroin abuse is associated with serious health conditions, including fatal overdose, spontaneous abortion, collapsed veins, and infectious diseases, including HIV/AIDS and hepatitis."
Not that using heroin is anything but brain-stampingly stupid, but all of those problems would be easier to deal with from a public health standpoint if heroin were decriminalized.
"I can't remember the last time I heard of anyone dying from a fatal overdose of nicotine"
Yeah, but how about having a "serious health condition". Arguing whether heroin or tobacco is worse for you is silly. Illegality warps the usage patterns, and however you slice it, cigarettes are just fantastically bad for you. The point is it's pretty hard to justify banning something because it's bad for you if you don't advocate banning cigarettes.
If you want to argue we should ban things because they're bad for you, well, I disagree, but I can see where you're coming from. But a lot of people seem to want to argue that our current policies (alchohol, tobacco, coffee legal; a bunch of other stuff illegal) actually makes logical sense, rather than being an accident of history. That's stupid.
"The high drivers will have an increased risk of having an accident"
The small number of studies that have been done do not support this statemnet.
In any case, if you support the banning of pot based on the DUI argumnet, you presuambly support prohibition of alchohol as well? The same arguments work at least as well, if not better.
"Statistics would show otherwise, and I'm not your sugar. 9 of every 10 fatalities involve a driver under the influence of drugs or alcohol."
Statistics don't show anything when you make them up. A quick bit of googleing, and I get various numbers for percent of accidents that involve a driver under the influence of drugs or alcohol. All pretty close to 40%. So I don't know if you're delusional, but you're definitely wrong.
It actually makes sense. As a developer, I need to call a project something, and it's going to be a huge PITA to change names once I've picked one and it has propagated through code and directory names, etc. The name the project will eventually be shipped under will be picked by marketing and/or client types, but they won't pick something until I'm well into development, and they'll probably change their minds a few times.
As for MS, they certainly can't call it "Windows", that's the name of all their OS projects. They could call it "Windows 2006" or "Windows FX" or whatever, but again, any number of unforseen factors could force a change for marketing reasons, so why should developers set themselves up for problems?
I understand "Longhorn" is the name of a bar. This is a fine tradition; several of my projects have been code-named for the bar on whose napkins the original idea was first sketched out.
"Unless SCO wins their case against IBM, ESR is pretty safe from libel suits"
He's safe regardless. SCO would have to show not only that ESR made false, defamatory statements about them, but that he knew (or that any semi-informed, semi-sane person should have known) those statements to be false. It's pretty hard to show libel here in the US. In the UK as I understand it, SCO could show the statements to be defamatory, and ESR would have to show good reason to beleive them true... libel is much more restrictive there.
Four way red is in fact what happens at several intersections near me (maybe the whole town/county, but I've seen it at two intersections).
From what I've seen, and what makes sense to me, Ambulance drivers don't drive like maniacs, no matter what assurances they have of the right of way. While they want to get there fast, it's more crucial that they get there at all. And going the other way, getting the guy to the hospital seconds faster is probably no advantage if you've slammed him all around the back on the way.
Is that sites wild-ass guess supposed to be more convincing because it is backed up by a couple pages of pages full of numbers, all of which are themselves wild-ass guesses?
We know life emerged once. Any calculation showing that to be fantastically unlikely must be somewhat suspect. And that page makes a lot of assumptions such that it's trying to calculate the odds of life developing pretty much exactly the way it did here.
I quite agree. The point I was trying to make was this:
Without disputing your right to have a loaded firearm about your person, I don't think it's a very smart way to mitigate the risk of someone stealing your data; or a very smart way to mitigate almost any risk for that matter. Unless you're in law enforcement or the army, the risk from being armed (accident, escalation of otherwise non-fatal assault, etc.) far outweighs the very small chance that being armed will actually be helpful.
I understand that life is full of risks, and I don't cower in fear. I go where I want and do what I want. But I don't increase my risk in order to feel a false sense of security or machismo by carrying a firearm. I've never been in a situation where, in hindsight, I've wished I had a gun. Nor do I expect to ever be in such a situation. I have been in a couple situations where, in hindsight, I'm quite thankful I didn't have a gun.
So, someone wanting your data badly enough to take it by force can still take it. But you've ensured that they have to kill you in the bargain. Good thinking.
You're actually saying there's no great economic value to office space in lower Manhattan? No one could be that misinformed; I conclude you are entirely uninformed. That is probably the most valuable real estate on the planet.
While we're at it, "economical" isn't the word you want, and "symbolical" is not a word at all. Try "economic" and "symbolic".
"... the Pentagon (have they rebuilt the part that was damaged?),"
Yes.
"Should new buildings be built in their place..."
"Should" is subjective. "Will" is a a certainty. I say again: most valuable real estate on the planet.
"But really, there is no extra work here, unless a couple extra characters per keyword bother you immensely."
Not at all, but the aforementioned "constructor invocation and implying garbage collection" bug the hell out of me. I realise and agree that in the vast majority of applications, it's not a big deal. But I deal with at least a few situations where it is a big deal. And in that vast majority of situations where it just doesn't make enough difference to remotely matter... It still bugs the hell out of me:)
"Easy as C++... easier, in fact, since you don't need the separate.h file"
Who needs a seperate.h file? In C++, I can put whatever I want in whatever files I want.
So let's imagine I have three classes, two of which are unrelated except that they both use the third. In Java, what are my choices for how many files to put them in, assuming some particular division makes the most sense to me? (This isn't rhetorical, I really don't know) In C++ the answer would be "1 or more files".
"In C++ the entity that is introduced by the struct keyword is in fact a class."
Yes. Technically class and struct differ only by default access type. Traditionally, they are used somewhat differently, but everyone has slightly different (though similar) rules about which to use. (Mine: structs have naught but public data members, classes are everything else, but the presence of any public data members in a class is discouraged)
"It has constructors, destructors and (at least one) assignment operator."
No. Unless you're saying "int" has a constructor and a destructor because it allocates memory when declared and frees it when it goes out of scope. But that's not the typical sense of constructor/destructor.
struct Foo { int Bar; }; no more has a constructor/destructor than "int" does. And it doesn't have an assignment operator at all, while "int" has a pile of them.
"Getting back to the interview, I thought this section was a bit confused. First he starts out defending the use of structs by giving an example. Then he goes on to show that as things get more complex you start to discover a deeper abstraction with some invariants that need to be enforced. So, you end up with a class in the end. So, where is the supposed 'abuse' of OO?"
The abuse of OO is using a class right off the bat every time. You might well go to a class (and should) when things become more complex, but a lot of the time, things don't get any more complex. One key to good C++ (or OOP in general) is to keep the simple stuff simple. You can throw 10 levels of abstraction onto HelloWord if you want, but you shouldn't. You should save it for when it's needed.
I agree entirely that most comments are lame, and more clearly written code would eliminate the need for them. I just think judicious use of hungarian is part of clearly written code. I have a much easier time keeping track of which variables are which if they're broken down into broad categories by their prefix. Anyway, there are certainly some cases where comments are definitely waranted. Like when it says:/* These next two lines may seem wrong, and while it's counterintuitive, doing it this way produces a significant performance gain because.... */
"It's good idea to use a double for everything anyway, unless you've got a compelling reason not to" Perhaps this is part of why using "f" for generic floating points isn't a problem with me. I can't recall the last time I used an actual "float".
"I take your point about labelling references in a class type. I was thinking more of the aliases used for convenience in functions."
I think the same argument holds there. If I write: string &rsName = m_aVariableMap["Name"]; so that I can use a shorter (and perhaps clearer) identifier, then later on if I'm looking at the code, it's important to me to know that rsName is a reference, not a simple local variable. If I change its value, that difference will be significant. But I don't do that all that much. The realy classic example is the function argument passed by non-const reference. There the "r" helps the function writer, but also alerts the function user that this argument may be changed by the function (and presumably will).
I can show you lots of examples where someone changed some code, but didn't change the comment describing that code, so now the comment is just wrong. That's a lot worse than a wrong hungarian. Should I stop commenting altogether to avoid this?
FWIW, I described my notation system in another branch of this thread; I wouldn't use "w" in this context, nor whatever you'd use for DWORD. Don't know what I would use because what the hells a WORD/DWORD? (sure, I could guess, and if I actually needed to know I guess I'd look it up, but suffice it to say it doesn't come up in my code much.
Hmm, is DWORD the type windows process stuff uses for proc handles? I think it might be. See in that case, I'd use some descriptive var name prefixed with "handle". I don't care that it might be (guessing) a 64 bit unsigned integer, that's irrelevant to it's use. The fact that it's a handle is relevant.
I hate to see a variable named "total" if it's used more than a dozen lines away from its declaration. "nTotal", "fTotal" or "sTotal" tells me what I'm dealing with. And I'm definitely going to want the extra info if it's "m_psTotal".
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The economies of the Middle and Late Kingdoms certainly ran on slavery, and used slaves "en masse". But the Early Kingdom, which built the Pyramids, had much less contact with the outside world (i.e. they did not conquer vast swaths of their neighbors as the latter kingdoms did). So one might reasonably assume they had less in the way of foreign slaves to press into pyramid building labor.
All that said, when you have peasants in a theocracy who are building Pyramids at the direction of a deified monarch, and who presumably could not choose to go do something else if they wanted to, whether you call them "slaves" or not is fairly academic.
After generations of theocracy, you're going to have a fair number of willing local laborers. The entire society was directed at pyramid building to such a degree it eventually collapsed under the economic weight of so much effort going to non-productive use.
It seems to me the Early Kingdom would not have had massive numbers of unwilling foreign laborers, but would have had massive numbers of willing locals. So it seems reasonable to me to that most of the people pulling those blocks up to the top were pulling because they thought it was a good thing to do; or at least, because everyone else was doing it; but probably not because some taskmaster was whipping them into pulling harder.
Anyway, I'll happily debate whether foriegn slaves played a significant part in pyramid building, and happily admit I don't know for sure.
What gets me annoyed is I know a depressing number of people who think the image from "The Ten Commandments" of the Egyptian taskmaster whipping the jewish slaves into pulling the blocks up the pyramid is established historical fact. Dreck. When Egypt conquered Judea, the last pyramids were already 500-1000 year old ruins being stripped to build cities.
You're like, way wrong, dude.
Which kind of explains... well... everything.
"Pyramids may be cool to us, but at the time they weren't cool to the people who built them."
Just for some random nit-picking: Pyramids may well have been cool to the people who built them. While the slaves-under-the-taskmasters-whip theory has been popular with Hollywood, there's not much evidence that's how it was. Many experts would suggest that the experience of those who built the pyramids might not have been "slavery" but "religious fervor".
What does it mean to target a platform in units shipped? Or to target a platform in turnover? Or to target a platform in profit?
I'll guess you're saying:
- You agree that most software, by units shipped, is for Windows. (OK, that's pretty obviously true).
- You think that more profit is made writing software packages non-Windows systems. (I think that's what you're saying. I also think you're smoking something.)
-Hmm, "turnover"... nope I give up, I haven't a clue what the hell you're talking about with that one.
Try complete sentences next time.
How many individuals buy any proffessional class development environment for personal use? Not many (though it sounds like you're an exception). The target market is companies buying it for their developers. Assuming you're already paying the salary of a decent developer, you'd have to be out of your mind to choose which dev environment to buy for them based on price (at current levels). Borland can't compete on price, because they could give it away free and even the full ~$1000 price for VS wouldn't make most development shops bat an eye.
Well, digital records are not, in fact, real. If one tamperer manages to get into your process anywhere along the way, they could change thousands of votes and you would have no way at all to detect this after the fact. This would be incredibly more difficult with paper records.
With paper ballots, you can go back and look at the actual marks made by the voter. With digital ballots you must assume that the vote was recorded properly in the first place (better inspect every line of code and computer chip along the way), that it wasn't changed after that (which would be relatively easy to do, yet impossible to detect), and that it is being read properly (can't use your eyeballs).
I almost never use paper for anything. But if you want a record that is hard to forge, and easy to go back and check up on later, give me a piece of paper locked in a box.
"It has not been proven either that the weapons did NOT exist"
But the question is whether the PROOF existed. Bush said it did. It did not. Bush lied, whether WMDs are found now or not.
"Even the UN, which disagreed with our actions, never formally declared them 'illegal' because past resolutions gave us enough room to do what we did."
And because we get a veto. The UN (well, the Security Council, which is the meaningful part) never formally declares anything it's permanent, veto-weilding members do 'illegal'. Supposedly, these 5 countries should be politically and diplomaticly mature enough not to do anything that would be so declared in the first place; i.e. to get formal Security Council approval before doing anything questionable. So much for that.
"Why don't they ban cell phones alltogether?"
They do.
"Have you *seen* the photos of the massive bike "jams" in China and India? They look no better than the current situation"
And how would they look if every one of those people on bikes was taking up ten times the space in a big car?
"Heroin abuse is associated with serious health conditions, including fatal overdose, spontaneous abortion, collapsed veins, and infectious diseases, including HIV/AIDS and hepatitis."
Not that using heroin is anything but brain-stampingly stupid, but all of those problems would be easier to deal with from a public health standpoint if heroin were decriminalized.
"I can't remember the last time I heard of anyone dying from a fatal overdose of nicotine"
Yeah, but how about having a "serious health condition". Arguing whether heroin or tobacco is worse for you is silly. Illegality warps the usage patterns, and however you slice it, cigarettes are just fantastically bad for you. The point is it's pretty hard to justify banning something because it's bad for you if you don't advocate banning cigarettes.
If you want to argue we should ban things because they're bad for you, well, I disagree, but I can see where you're coming from. But a lot of people seem to want to argue that our current policies (alchohol, tobacco, coffee legal; a bunch of other stuff illegal) actually makes logical sense, rather than being an accident of history. That's stupid.
"The high drivers will have an increased risk of having an accident"
The small number of studies that have been done do not support this statemnet.
In any case, if you support the banning of pot based on the DUI argumnet, you presuambly support prohibition of alchohol as well? The same arguments work at least as well, if not better.
"Statistics would show otherwise, and I'm not your sugar. 9 of every 10 fatalities involve a driver under the influence of drugs or alcohol."
Statistics don't show anything when you make them up. A quick bit of googleing, and I get various numbers for percent of accidents that involve a driver under the influence of drugs or alcohol. All pretty close to 40%. So I don't know if you're delusional, but you're definitely wrong.
Right. And the level of violence related to this activity is of a comparable scale to the level of violence related to the illegal drug trade? Please.
It actually makes sense. As a developer, I need to call a project something, and it's going to be a huge PITA to change names once I've picked one and it has propagated through code and directory names, etc. The name the project will eventually be shipped under will be picked by marketing and/or client types, but they won't pick something until I'm well into development, and they'll probably change their minds a few times.
As for MS, they certainly can't call it "Windows", that's the name of all their OS projects. They could call it "Windows 2006" or "Windows FX" or whatever, but again, any number of unforseen factors could force a change for marketing reasons, so why should developers set themselves up for problems?
I understand "Longhorn" is the name of a bar. This is a fine tradition; several of my projects have been code-named for the bar on whose napkins the original idea was first sketched out.
"Unless SCO wins their case against IBM, ESR is pretty safe from libel suits"
He's safe regardless. SCO would have to show not only that ESR made false, defamatory statements about them, but that he knew (or that any semi-informed, semi-sane person should have known) those statements to be false. It's pretty hard to show libel here in the US. In the UK as I understand it, SCO could show the statements to be defamatory, and ESR would have to show good reason to beleive them true... libel is much more restrictive there.
Four way red is in fact what happens at several intersections near me (maybe the whole town/county, but I've seen it at two intersections).
From what I've seen, and what makes sense to me, Ambulance drivers don't drive like maniacs, no matter what assurances they have of the right of way. While they want to get there fast, it's more crucial that they get there at all. And going the other way, getting the guy to the hospital seconds faster is probably no advantage if you've slammed him all around the back on the way.
Is that sites wild-ass guess supposed to be more convincing because it is backed up by a couple pages of pages full of numbers, all of which are themselves wild-ass guesses?
We know life emerged once. Any calculation showing that to be fantastically unlikely must be somewhat suspect. And that page makes a lot of assumptions such that it's trying to calculate the odds of life developing pretty much exactly the way it did here.
I quite agree. The point I was trying to make was this:
Without disputing your right to have a loaded firearm about your person, I don't think it's a very smart way to mitigate the risk of someone stealing your data; or a very smart way to mitigate almost any risk for that matter. Unless you're in law enforcement or the army, the risk from being armed (accident, escalation of otherwise non-fatal assault, etc.) far outweighs the very small chance that being armed will actually be helpful.
I understand that life is full of risks, and I don't cower in fear. I go where I want and do what I want. But I don't increase my risk in order to feel a false sense of security or machismo by carrying a firearm. I've never been in a situation where, in hindsight, I've wished I had a gun. Nor do I expect to ever be in such a situation. I have been in a couple situations where, in hindsight, I'm quite thankful I didn't have a gun.
So, someone wanting your data badly enough to take it by force can still take it. But you've ensured that they have to kill you in the bargain. Good thinking.
You're actually saying there's no great economic value to office space in lower Manhattan? No one could be that misinformed; I conclude you are entirely uninformed. That is probably the most valuable real estate on the planet.
While we're at it, "economical" isn't the word you want, and "symbolical" is not a word at all. Try "economic" and "symbolic".
"... the Pentagon (have they rebuilt the part that was damaged?),"
Yes.
"Should new buildings be built in their place..."
"Should" is subjective. "Will" is a a certainty. I say again: most valuable real estate on the planet.
"But really, there is no extra work here, unless a couple extra characters per keyword bother you immensely."
:)
Not at all, but the aforementioned "constructor invocation and implying garbage collection" bug the hell out of me. I realise and agree that in the vast majority of applications, it's not a big deal. But I deal with at least a few situations where it is a big deal. And in that vast majority of situations where it just doesn't make enough difference to remotely matter... It still bugs the hell out of me
"Easy as C++... easier, in fact, since you don't need the separate .h file"
.h file? In C++, I can put whatever I want in whatever files I want.
Who needs a seperate
So let's imagine I have three classes, two of which are unrelated except that they both use the third. In Java, what are my choices for how many files to put them in, assuming some particular division makes the most sense to me? (This isn't rhetorical, I really don't know) In C++ the answer would be "1 or more files".
"In C++ the entity that is introduced by the struct keyword is in fact a class."
Yes. Technically class and struct differ only by default access type. Traditionally, they are used somewhat differently, but everyone has slightly different (though similar) rules about which to use. (Mine: structs have naught but public data members, classes are everything else, but the presence of any public data members in a class is discouraged)
"It has constructors, destructors and (at least one) assignment operator."
No. Unless you're saying "int" has a constructor and a destructor because it allocates memory when declared and frees it when it goes out of scope. But that's not the typical sense of constructor/destructor.
struct Foo { int Bar; };
no more has a constructor/destructor than "int" does. And it doesn't have an assignment operator at all, while "int" has a pile of them.
"Getting back to the interview, I thought this section was a bit confused. First he starts out defending the use of structs by giving an example. Then he goes on to show that as things get more complex you start to discover a deeper abstraction with some invariants that need to be enforced. So, you end up with a class in the end. So, where is the supposed 'abuse' of OO?"
The abuse of OO is using a class right off the bat every time. You might well go to a class (and should) when things become more complex, but a lot of the time, things don't get any more complex. One key to good C++ (or OOP in general) is to keep the simple stuff simple. You can throw 10 levels of abstraction onto HelloWord if you want, but you shouldn't. You should save it for when it's needed.
Well, we're pretty close to the same page.
/*
I agree entirely that most comments are lame, and more clearly written code would eliminate the need for them. I just think judicious use of hungarian is part of clearly written code. I have a much easier time keeping track of which variables are which if they're broken down into broad categories by their prefix. Anyway, there are certainly some cases where comments are definitely waranted. Like when it says:
These next two lines may seem wrong, and while it's counterintuitive, doing it this way produces a significant performance gain because....
*/
"It's good idea to use a double for everything anyway, unless you've got a compelling reason not to"
Perhaps this is part of why using "f" for generic floating points isn't a problem with me. I can't recall the last time I used an actual "float".
"I take your point about labelling references in a class type. I was thinking more of the aliases used for convenience in functions."
I think the same argument holds there. If I write:
string &rsName = m_aVariableMap["Name"];
so that I can use a shorter (and perhaps clearer) identifier, then later on if I'm looking at the code, it's important to me to know that rsName is a reference, not a simple local variable. If I change its value, that difference will be significant. But I don't do that all that much. The realy classic example is the function argument passed by non-const reference. There the "r" helps the function writer, but also alerts the function user that this argument may be changed by the function (and presumably will).
So why wasn't the name changed when the type was?
I can show you lots of examples where someone changed some code, but didn't change the comment describing that code, so now the comment is just wrong. That's a lot worse than a wrong hungarian. Should I stop commenting altogether to avoid this?
FWIW, I described my notation system in another branch of this thread; I wouldn't use "w" in this context, nor whatever you'd use for DWORD. Don't know what I would use because what the hells a WORD/DWORD? (sure, I could guess, and if I actually needed to know I guess I'd look it up, but suffice it to say it doesn't come up in my code much.
Hmm, is DWORD the type windows process stuff uses for proc handles? I think it might be. See in that case, I'd use some descriptive var name prefixed with "handle". I don't care that it might be (guessing) a 64 bit unsigned integer, that's irrelevant to it's use. The fact that it's a handle is relevant.
I hate to see a variable named "total" if it's used more than a dozen lines away from its declaration. "nTotal", "fTotal" or "sTotal" tells me what I'm dealing with. And I'm definitely going to want the extra info if it's "m_psTotal".