China installed 12GW of solar in 2013. That's with current technology and production. From what I've heard (that I have no links to, sorry--this may actually be hearsay, but from what I know of the Chinese, it's certainly plausible), China basically cribbed the notes of companies from other countries that were manufacturing solar panels in Chinese factories. They turned around and started using all that tech to build their own stuff, and in one year installed more solar than anyone.
But China being able bring that manufacturing capacity to bear, regardless of how they did it, means that prices are going to plummet. The cost for solar comes down steadily every year and the efficiency keeps creeping up. Because China is already behind it, that makes it a reasonable proposition for building out more capacity in other countries. We've already dammed up a lot of rivers (and there's a lot of environmental concerns about that already) and wind has problems with killing migratory birds and bats (can be mitigated, but takes some extra planning; people seem to hate windmills, too). We know that you can generate a fair amount of power through solar, even in countries where there's a lot of cloud cover (see: Germany).
It's the most scalable, and the production is the most scalable as well. I think that's "why solar?".
Well, particularly because beekeepers are fighting actively to keep their hives alive. Hives that collapse are gone, but the hives that remain are, unsurprisingly, very well tended to. Then the hives that collapsed are replaced by getting a new queen from somewhere else and starting over.
In the wild, I could see aggressive parasites (and combinations of parasites) wiping out much greater swathes of the population, but in this case, human intervention is providing an additional buffer.
I'm still more worried about wild bees. They don't have anyone looking after them, but they're still important.
Yes, it's important that the ads be clearly labelled as ads, and not as editorial content. The brilliance of the Digg model is that everything is basically just a link, a picture, and a small bit of explanatory context. Even if you were to mistake it as a real story, it would become obvious instantly that you weren't getting any news from the site you went to.
And since the advertisers are curated, you're also not going to have any trouble where going to the site is going to be some sort of miserable spam-fest with popups and terrible auto-play videos. The Digg model is currently the best one. Unobtrusive, but obvious. It's good brand advertising, and it keeps their lights on. It's a really good compromise.
First, Wente is the least believable so-called journalist at the G&M. I ignore her articles out of hand because she's usually so wrong that the articles are hard to read without getting angry.
The conclusion? Beekeepers are working hard to keep hives alive and keep populations up. Their livelihood is at stake here, after all.
Interestingly, I think this might serve as a long-term selection for more robust bees. Bees that are just strong enough to survive under ideal circumstances probably will, since the beekeepers will be trying to make sure that the conditions are right for their bees to last to another season. If a hive collapses, they buy a queen and replace the hive. (This is my hypothesis; it isn't backed by anything other than my intuition.)
So while we're probably having a massive impact on honeybee survival, it probably swings both ways.
The REAL issue is how populations of non-cultivated bees are doing. Bumblebees and all the other sorts of bees that we don't use to commercially produce honey or pollinate farms are also important, even if no human is directly making a dollar from the bees' work.
I think the best ads are the native ads--that is, ads that resemble content, but are clearly marked as ads. Digg is currently the best example of this. There's one story box dedicated to an ad. It's easy to find, so it's easy to ignore. But because the advertisers aren't just some random weight loss spammer, the advertising box is actually something that I look at every day, just in case. I've clicked on more than one of those 'stories', but I NEVER click on standard banner ads.
Curation makes for better ads than trying to pin-point what I want through tracking, it turns out. Ads need to be for things that I didn't know that I needed, not things that I've previously searched for. I get ads for things that I've ALREADY BOUGHT all the time. Yeah, I searched for that thing yesterday. Then I found it. And bought it. Your ads are useless now, stop showing them to me. But if I didn't know about your product before (like KeySmart!), and a site that I visit every day has a little space dedicated to it, I'm a lot more likely to check it out.
That's not what she's saying; that's a gross misrepresentation.
The fact of the matter is that Gamergate, from its inception, was largely a misogynistic endeavour that wildly eclipsed anything legitimate buried way underneath. It started with an insane screed by a jilted ex-boyfriend and continued on as an excuse for hundreds of people to harass women. It MAY be possible to feel that Gamergate had legitimate points, but there's so much hate swirling around it that it was hard to get down to those points.
It is undeniable that many women (and some anti-GG men) were doxxed, threatened physically and sexually and were basically forced off the internet all together. You can't be neutral on GG, honestly. Even if you ultimately feel like maybe someone in there had a point about money and corruption in game reviews, the overall context of the whole thing was just awful. There are many reasonable ways to have a conversation about a contentious point, and GG was precisely zero of them.
It's certainly the case that they're taking up memory, but it's hard to help that. The tools teams are constantly working to make that stuff better, but sometimes you just need more memory. Even without visual assist running (I don't like it as much as my colleagues), VS has a 1.5GB memory footprint.
I didn't see anything useful on their page--have they made the bloody application 64-bit yet? We've had tonnes of problems with it crashing with extensions like Visual Assist and a couple custom plugins. The whole environment runs out of memory and brings everything attached down with it. It's pretty ridiculous.
The really, actually simple solution is to change the terms for subscriptions and be done with it.
Realistically, Apple's not competing on price. I could've signed up for Rdio or Spotify ages ago and I know enough to do it online and save myself the 'convenience' cost of doing it in the application. Apple has already got the power of defaults working for it, really strong industry ties, and the fact that it doesn't bleed money hand over fist by having a free tier that can't pay for itself. Spotify loses money because so few of its users convert to paid subscriptions, but still makes the majority of its income off of those few (20%, I think?) subscribers.
I'm paying for Apple music (or I will be, when the 3 month trial is up) because it's integrated with the applications that I already use to listen to music, and my library is available to me without any extra effort on my part. It's too good to pass up, assuming I'm going to pay for a service at all.
Spotify (and everyone else) will NEVER make good advertising revenue because the people that the advertisers want to reach most—the people with money that are willing to spend it—are the people that have selectively removed themselves from the pool of people being advertised too. All they're left with is people that are either unable to pay, or don't think they should have to pay. It's a poor value proposition.
Apple doesn't need to bleed money off of Spotify anymore, and it's silly to keep doing it. The possibility of a lawsuit shouldn't be worth anyone's time.
Jail time just makes criminals worse. This is fairly well established.
What I want out of a jail sentence (as a Canadian) is rehabilitation and some path to them becoming a person in my society that shows up as a net benefit when all the accounting is done.
There are bound to be some people that are irretrievable, but I'd like to take the chance on fixing them.
I think swatting is insanely dangerous, and I'm not unaware that this was a crime mainly perpetrated against women. I'm a fairly ardent feminist and I think that detail of the case is pertinent. All the same, I have hopes that if we invest in his rehabilitation, maybe the person that exits the system will be better than the person that went in.
For iOS users that somehow haven't heard, it'll be possible to write content blockers for Safari in iOS 9, and someone has already implemented one as a test that significantly reduces the amount of data that mobile sites use. (Using iMore as a test, he got page load times down from 11s to 2s, and reduced the amount of data transfer from something as high as 14MB in some cases down to 4MB.)
That seems like something that those of us that are concerned about data limits should immediately get on.
Perhaps not, but there's no reason to be a jerk about it. Some people prefer to ask about the alternatives rather than hunt through the zillions of possibilities on app stores and reading through the dozens of utterly useless online reviews from sketchy sites that have names like "manage-your-mobile-data.net", etc.
The submitter trusts the/. community to give better than average advice on this sort of thing. Humour them or don't respond, but maybe don't be so disparaging. Asking is more often the right thing to do than blundering around without much direction.
I have an app (Human) that uses the GPS to track me a little more precisely to see how much I'm moving. My phone regularly gets 11+ hours of usage time per day before I'm down to about 10%. I've seen it as high as 13.5 hours. The real battery killer, for whatever reason, was Facebook. Even with background updates disabled, it was still killing me. But that was the only app that I've seen fit to remove for the sake of my battery.
It's really hard to master the entirety of C++, so you're better off knowing just a meaningful subset of it. Go and pick up Effective C++ and the sequel—they're basically just filled with the pitfalls of C++ to avoid and some decent things worth knowing. That's the stuff that tends to show up on C++ interviews. There's basic stuff in there and less basic stuff, but all of it is useful.
My company has a course on advanced C++ and C++ pitfalls, and even after 15 years, some of them caught me. Lots of them did, really. It was interesting because the room had a dozen or so programmers, and we all fell for completely different things.
C++ gives you a lot of rope to hang yourself with. The trick to using it well is to limit how much rope is around your neck at any given time—never do something cleverly that can be done simply, even if the simple way takes up a few more lines.
Oh, and comment your damn code. I don't care what language you're in, you're not a master of it until you know how to leave a trail of comments that even a new programmer can follow. When you're on your third 18-hour day, you have an imminent deadline and you're starting to go crosseyed, you'll either love or hate yourself based solely on the amount of good comments you left in your code. Things that are obvious when you're awake and well rested become muddy when you're tired and hungry and want to go to bed.
I remember reading slashdot the day that there was news that the C++ grammar had officially been proven to NOT have a bad left recursion in it. That was around 12 or 13 years ago, if I remember right. Up until then, nobody was actually sure, and every compiler writer had to take a slightly different approach to the things they were going to leave out of the compiler.
When you start with that as a foundation—20 years of having a language grammar that nobody is sure can be completely implemented—you're starting from a pretty bad place. The language was badly designed to begin with.
Then you've got the issue of Templates. Powerful? Yeah, for sure. But that's because the template language is turing complete on its own, and nobody realized THAT at the time either. I'd reckon (wildly, I admit) that 95% of the functionality of templates and template meta-programming is discovered functionality. ANY language becomes hyper powerful when you bolt another entire language to the side of it. They were just supposed to solve a problem with generics, and instead created a couple new ropes to hang yourself with.
C++ is a language that isn't so much as designed by committee as designed by falling down rabbit holes. What new, bizarre, unconfronted thing will we see next? Who knows?
Clearly you haven't been modded into oblivion, but honestly, this is a dumb question. That's like asking, "Who the fuck cares about Google?"
Literally over a billion people care. And the advertisers care. And the shareholders care. There're a lot of people that care about Facebook.
Whether you like it or not, and whether you use it or not, to many people, Facebook is becoming all they know of the internet. For all intents and purposes, it IS the internet for a segment of the population. There are mobile providers that will sell you a plan that gives you virtually no data for free, but you DO get Facebook access for free. Facebook's Messenger chat service has something like 700 million users and is the single most popular chat application in the USA. We hear stories about the NYT doing a deal for instant loading articles and a share of ad revenue because Facebook is also becoming the place where most people read their news.
So yeah, LOTS of people care. YOU should care, even if you don't use it, because it's becoming the sort of behemoth that warps space around it. I hardly use Google's services at all anymore, but I definitely care about what Google is doing in the world. Most people with PCs and Android phones care about Apple and the influence it brings to hardware and mobile—even if they purport to hate every single change Apple brings to hardware or mobile. People that don't live in the USA definitely care what the USA is up to. There are plenty of reasons to care about Facebook and even weird things like this because they really do serve to show us the state of the internet today and give us hints to the future, or at the very least, what we DON'T want the future to look like.
People have been threatening to abandon Facebook for various minor transgressions every year that it's been around, and it keeps getting bigger. It's not going anywhere for a while.
I don't have any others off the top of my head, but the point isn't that you can find it eventually, it's that the operator itself isn't included and I want it to be. If I run the search as I gave it, the link you gave is in there, but what I'm looking for is in literally only one of the other links, and none of them are official documentation (which may be important for other reasons). Part of the reason why we're able to find the result at all is because we happen to understand that/= is an operator and we're including that as part of the search. For beginners or for unspecified bits of syntax, I might not have that sort of clarifying term.
I'm searching for something very precisely, and I want all the terms respected when I do, that's all. Hunting through 10 links with none of the normal highlighting of terms is cumbersome.
I don't fault google specifically for this; none of the other engines do a better job, and as you point out, I CAN eventually find what I'm looking for. It may be an intractable problem, I admit; indexing every "/=" may not be super practical.
Look, in mathematics, dividing by zero makes no sense and that's fine. But I'm not working in the realm of pure math, I'm doing some actual work in a little universe of my own construction here. I don't need the value to be some sort of infinity. The value is undefined on our computers because we say so.
I'm a games programmer, and there are plenty of situations where we might accidentally end up with 0 as the denominator, and it would have no bad effects at all to treat that as a zero. In most cases, that's actually the expected result. That is, I end up writing ternaries like:
float foo = x != 0 ? y / x : 0;
foo will be zero if x is zero, otherwise it's some fraction. Why is x zero? I don't know, maybe it was a countdown timer, or I'm just trying to find some fractional interpolation along some curve or something. NaN is a MEANINGLESS answer. Zero is the only answer I want out of this equation when x is zero.
Your understanding of math is correct for our normal every day situation, but in broad strokes, you're wrong. I can easily define a new mathematical system where division by 0 is both allowed and defined. Algebra is very flexible this way. That's why when you add 25 hours to 2pm, you end up at 3pm the next day, and not 27pm. We've defined math in this daytime context to wrap around. There's no such thing as 27-o-clock. In this algebraic system, 2 + 25 != 27.
So what this programmer is asking isn't about whether or not dividing by zero in the purest mathematical sense is correct, they're asking whether or not it makes sense to have an alternate system where division by zero just gives you zero, since zero is almost always the answer that they (and that I) want.
These queries are far too simplistic in that they're composed almost entirely of words. The queries of mine that fail are usually syntax issues in something like elisp. Sometimes, I'm just looking for the elisp manual page that I KNOW exists, but my searches (on all engines, not just google) will fail hopelessly.
If you're looking for operators, or occasionally weird function names or specifiers like "let*" (the current results for let* are better than the last time I tried it, I admit), the search will often leave those bits out, even though they're critical. Searching for "elisp/= operator" for instance doesn't take me anywhere near the right result. Even turning on verbatim search doesn't help.
I admit, I have to wonder if Apple's markup is to encourage manufacturers to make cheaper cables.
I can buy MFi certified cables from Monoprice or even off of Amazon, and they're much cheaper than Apple's stuff. It's certified, so I'll trust it not to light on fire. If Apple made cables and sold them at cost, which they could surely do, they'd price everyone else out of the market. Apple has economies of scale that these other guys can only dream of.
So Apple marks up the prices on the adaptors, takes the abuse, makes a few bucks, but opens up the market to anyone that wants to make a peripheral and pay a small fee to be certified (whatever that means). As a result, I've got Anker cables and hubs at home. They work well, look nice and are easy to come by. I wouldn't have even considered them if Apple's cables were cheaper.
The guy asking about the "dragonfly's what" was being a dick and pointing out that you used an apostrophe to pluralise "dragonflies". He didn't really have a point at all.
Whenever you post to/., remember that YOU'RE the weird one. You've got more rigorous demands than most people. There are lots and lots of people that don't need more than one port, and will be delighted that they don't have to even think about what sort of connector they'll need for whatever peripheral they have. Everything will come with USB-C, they've only got one port and nothing to sort out.
For those of us that need more, there are plenty of options, but man, I have lots of people in my life that need ZERO ports on their laptop.
The two statements you made are kind of at odds with one another.
Coders ARE too often one-trick ponies, I agree. But at least they learned some other subjects while they were at school. Literature, biology, chemistry. Even if they don't use them, they know a few things here and there.
The biologists, chemists and writers of the future will now know a little bit of coding. They won't remember much, probably, but they'll know a little. Nobody's trying to teach these kids to be experts any more than school is trying to teach kids to be materials scientists before they get to University. A little exposure can go a long way.
You don't get well-rounded individuals by teaching FEWER subjects.
Slashdot Mirror
In a word: China.
China installed 12GW of solar in 2013. That's with current technology and production. From what I've heard (that I have no links to, sorry--this may actually be hearsay, but from what I know of the Chinese, it's certainly plausible), China basically cribbed the notes of companies from other countries that were manufacturing solar panels in Chinese factories. They turned around and started using all that tech to build their own stuff, and in one year installed more solar than anyone.
But China being able bring that manufacturing capacity to bear, regardless of how they did it, means that prices are going to plummet. The cost for solar comes down steadily every year and the efficiency keeps creeping up. Because China is already behind it, that makes it a reasonable proposition for building out more capacity in other countries. We've already dammed up a lot of rivers (and there's a lot of environmental concerns about that already) and wind has problems with killing migratory birds and bats (can be mitigated, but takes some extra planning; people seem to hate windmills, too). We know that you can generate a fair amount of power through solar, even in countries where there's a lot of cloud cover (see: Germany).
It's the most scalable, and the production is the most scalable as well. I think that's "why solar?".
Well, particularly because beekeepers are fighting actively to keep their hives alive. Hives that collapse are gone, but the hives that remain are, unsurprisingly, very well tended to. Then the hives that collapsed are replaced by getting a new queen from somewhere else and starting over.
In the wild, I could see aggressive parasites (and combinations of parasites) wiping out much greater swathes of the population, but in this case, human intervention is providing an additional buffer.
I'm still more worried about wild bees. They don't have anyone looking after them, but they're still important.
Yeah, okay, I can buy this as a position. This is a much better explanation of why to be neutral than the comment I responded to.
Yes, it's important that the ads be clearly labelled as ads, and not as editorial content. The brilliance of the Digg model is that everything is basically just a link, a picture, and a small bit of explanatory context. Even if you were to mistake it as a real story, it would become obvious instantly that you weren't getting any news from the site you went to.
And since the advertisers are curated, you're also not going to have any trouble where going to the site is going to be some sort of miserable spam-fest with popups and terrible auto-play videos. The Digg model is currently the best one. Unobtrusive, but obvious. It's good brand advertising, and it keeps their lights on. It's a really good compromise.
First, Wente is the least believable so-called journalist at the G&M. I ignore her articles out of hand because she's usually so wrong that the articles are hard to read without getting angry.
But published in the Washington Post yesterday is similar information about US hives: http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
The conclusion? Beekeepers are working hard to keep hives alive and keep populations up. Their livelihood is at stake here, after all.
Interestingly, I think this might serve as a long-term selection for more robust bees. Bees that are just strong enough to survive under ideal circumstances probably will, since the beekeepers will be trying to make sure that the conditions are right for their bees to last to another season. If a hive collapses, they buy a queen and replace the hive. (This is my hypothesis; it isn't backed by anything other than my intuition.)
So while we're probably having a massive impact on honeybee survival, it probably swings both ways.
The REAL issue is how populations of non-cultivated bees are doing. Bumblebees and all the other sorts of bees that we don't use to commercially produce honey or pollinate farms are also important, even if no human is directly making a dollar from the bees' work.
I think the best ads are the native ads--that is, ads that resemble content, but are clearly marked as ads. Digg is currently the best example of this. There's one story box dedicated to an ad. It's easy to find, so it's easy to ignore. But because the advertisers aren't just some random weight loss spammer, the advertising box is actually something that I look at every day, just in case. I've clicked on more than one of those 'stories', but I NEVER click on standard banner ads.
Curation makes for better ads than trying to pin-point what I want through tracking, it turns out. Ads need to be for things that I didn't know that I needed, not things that I've previously searched for. I get ads for things that I've ALREADY BOUGHT all the time. Yeah, I searched for that thing yesterday. Then I found it. And bought it. Your ads are useless now, stop showing them to me. But if I didn't know about your product before (like KeySmart!), and a site that I visit every day has a little space dedicated to it, I'm a lot more likely to check it out.
That's not what she's saying; that's a gross misrepresentation.
The fact of the matter is that Gamergate, from its inception, was largely a misogynistic endeavour that wildly eclipsed anything legitimate buried way underneath. It started with an insane screed by a jilted ex-boyfriend and continued on as an excuse for hundreds of people to harass women. It MAY be possible to feel that Gamergate had legitimate points, but there's so much hate swirling around it that it was hard to get down to those points.
It is undeniable that many women (and some anti-GG men) were doxxed, threatened physically and sexually and were basically forced off the internet all together. You can't be neutral on GG, honestly. Even if you ultimately feel like maybe someone in there had a point about money and corruption in game reviews, the overall context of the whole thing was just awful. There are many reasonable ways to have a conversation about a contentious point, and GG was precisely zero of them.
It's certainly the case that they're taking up memory, but it's hard to help that. The tools teams are constantly working to make that stuff better, but sometimes you just need more memory. Even without visual assist running (I don't like it as much as my colleagues), VS has a 1.5GB memory footprint.
I didn't see anything useful on their page--have they made the bloody application 64-bit yet? We've had tonnes of problems with it crashing with extensions like Visual Assist and a couple custom plugins. The whole environment runs out of memory and brings everything attached down with it. It's pretty ridiculous.
The really, actually simple solution is to change the terms for subscriptions and be done with it.
Realistically, Apple's not competing on price. I could've signed up for Rdio or Spotify ages ago and I know enough to do it online and save myself the 'convenience' cost of doing it in the application. Apple has already got the power of defaults working for it, really strong industry ties, and the fact that it doesn't bleed money hand over fist by having a free tier that can't pay for itself. Spotify loses money because so few of its users convert to paid subscriptions, but still makes the majority of its income off of those few (20%, I think?) subscribers.
I'm paying for Apple music (or I will be, when the 3 month trial is up) because it's integrated with the applications that I already use to listen to music, and my library is available to me without any extra effort on my part. It's too good to pass up, assuming I'm going to pay for a service at all.
Spotify (and everyone else) will NEVER make good advertising revenue because the people that the advertisers want to reach most—the people with money that are willing to spend it—are the people that have selectively removed themselves from the pool of people being advertised too. All they're left with is people that are either unable to pay, or don't think they should have to pay. It's a poor value proposition.
Apple doesn't need to bleed money off of Spotify anymore, and it's silly to keep doing it. The possibility of a lawsuit shouldn't be worth anyone's time.
Jail time just makes criminals worse. This is fairly well established.
What I want out of a jail sentence (as a Canadian) is rehabilitation and some path to them becoming a person in my society that shows up as a net benefit when all the accounting is done.
There are bound to be some people that are irretrievable, but I'd like to take the chance on fixing them.
I think swatting is insanely dangerous, and I'm not unaware that this was a crime mainly perpetrated against women. I'm a fairly ardent feminist and I think that detail of the case is pertinent. All the same, I have hopes that if we invest in his rehabilitation, maybe the person that exits the system will be better than the person that went in.
For iOS users that somehow haven't heard, it'll be possible to write content blockers for Safari in iOS 9, and someone has already implemented one as a test that significantly reduces the amount of data that mobile sites use. (Using iMore as a test, he got page load times down from 11s to 2s, and reduced the amount of data transfer from something as high as 14MB in some cases down to 4MB.)
That seems like something that those of us that are concerned about data limits should immediately get on.
Perhaps not, but there's no reason to be a jerk about it. Some people prefer to ask about the alternatives rather than hunt through the zillions of possibilities on app stores and reading through the dozens of utterly useless online reviews from sketchy sites that have names like "manage-your-mobile-data.net", etc.
The submitter trusts the /. community to give better than average advice on this sort of thing. Humour them or don't respond, but maybe don't be so disparaging. Asking is more often the right thing to do than blundering around without much direction.
I have an app (Human) that uses the GPS to track me a little more precisely to see how much I'm moving. My phone regularly gets 11+ hours of usage time per day before I'm down to about 10%. I've seen it as high as 13.5 hours. The real battery killer, for whatever reason, was Facebook. Even with background updates disabled, it was still killing me. But that was the only app that I've seen fit to remove for the sake of my battery.
It's really hard to master the entirety of C++, so you're better off knowing just a meaningful subset of it. Go and pick up Effective C++ and the sequel—they're basically just filled with the pitfalls of C++ to avoid and some decent things worth knowing. That's the stuff that tends to show up on C++ interviews. There's basic stuff in there and less basic stuff, but all of it is useful.
My company has a course on advanced C++ and C++ pitfalls, and even after 15 years, some of them caught me. Lots of them did, really. It was interesting because the room had a dozen or so programmers, and we all fell for completely different things.
C++ gives you a lot of rope to hang yourself with. The trick to using it well is to limit how much rope is around your neck at any given time—never do something cleverly that can be done simply, even if the simple way takes up a few more lines.
Oh, and comment your damn code. I don't care what language you're in, you're not a master of it until you know how to leave a trail of comments that even a new programmer can follow. When you're on your third 18-hour day, you have an imminent deadline and you're starting to go crosseyed, you'll either love or hate yourself based solely on the amount of good comments you left in your code. Things that are obvious when you're awake and well rested become muddy when you're tired and hungry and want to go to bed.
I remember reading slashdot the day that there was news that the C++ grammar had officially been proven to NOT have a bad left recursion in it. That was around 12 or 13 years ago, if I remember right. Up until then, nobody was actually sure, and every compiler writer had to take a slightly different approach to the things they were going to leave out of the compiler.
When you start with that as a foundation—20 years of having a language grammar that nobody is sure can be completely implemented—you're starting from a pretty bad place. The language was badly designed to begin with.
Then you've got the issue of Templates. Powerful? Yeah, for sure. But that's because the template language is turing complete on its own, and nobody realized THAT at the time either. I'd reckon (wildly, I admit) that 95% of the functionality of templates and template meta-programming is discovered functionality. ANY language becomes hyper powerful when you bolt another entire language to the side of it. They were just supposed to solve a problem with generics, and instead created a couple new ropes to hang yourself with.
C++ is a language that isn't so much as designed by committee as designed by falling down rabbit holes. What new, bizarre, unconfronted thing will we see next? Who knows?
Clearly you haven't been modded into oblivion, but honestly, this is a dumb question. That's like asking, "Who the fuck cares about Google?"
Literally over a billion people care. And the advertisers care. And the shareholders care. There're a lot of people that care about Facebook.
Whether you like it or not, and whether you use it or not, to many people, Facebook is becoming all they know of the internet. For all intents and purposes, it IS the internet for a segment of the population. There are mobile providers that will sell you a plan that gives you virtually no data for free, but you DO get Facebook access for free. Facebook's Messenger chat service has something like 700 million users and is the single most popular chat application in the USA. We hear stories about the NYT doing a deal for instant loading articles and a share of ad revenue because Facebook is also becoming the place where most people read their news.
So yeah, LOTS of people care. YOU should care, even if you don't use it, because it's becoming the sort of behemoth that warps space around it. I hardly use Google's services at all anymore, but I definitely care about what Google is doing in the world. Most people with PCs and Android phones care about Apple and the influence it brings to hardware and mobile—even if they purport to hate every single change Apple brings to hardware or mobile. People that don't live in the USA definitely care what the USA is up to. There are plenty of reasons to care about Facebook and even weird things like this because they really do serve to show us the state of the internet today and give us hints to the future, or at the very least, what we DON'T want the future to look like.
People have been threatening to abandon Facebook for various minor transgressions every year that it's been around, and it keeps getting bigger. It's not going anywhere for a while.
I don't have any others off the top of my head, but the point isn't that you can find it eventually, it's that the operator itself isn't included and I want it to be. If I run the search as I gave it, the link you gave is in there, but what I'm looking for is in literally only one of the other links, and none of them are official documentation (which may be important for other reasons). Part of the reason why we're able to find the result at all is because we happen to understand that /= is an operator and we're including that as part of the search. For beginners or for unspecified bits of syntax, I might not have that sort of clarifying term.
I'm searching for something very precisely, and I want all the terms respected when I do, that's all. Hunting through 10 links with none of the normal highlighting of terms is cumbersome.
I don't fault google specifically for this; none of the other engines do a better job, and as you point out, I CAN eventually find what I'm looking for. It may be an intractable problem, I admit; indexing every "/=" may not be super practical.
Ugh.
Look, in mathematics, dividing by zero makes no sense and that's fine. But I'm not working in the realm of pure math, I'm doing some actual work in a little universe of my own construction here. I don't need the value to be some sort of infinity. The value is undefined on our computers because we say so.
I'm a games programmer, and there are plenty of situations where we might accidentally end up with 0 as the denominator, and it would have no bad effects at all to treat that as a zero. In most cases, that's actually the expected result. That is, I end up writing ternaries like:
float foo = x != 0 ? y / x : 0;
foo will be zero if x is zero, otherwise it's some fraction. Why is x zero? I don't know, maybe it was a countdown timer, or I'm just trying to find some fractional interpolation along some curve or something. NaN is a MEANINGLESS answer. Zero is the only answer I want out of this equation when x is zero.
Your understanding of math is correct for our normal every day situation, but in broad strokes, you're wrong. I can easily define a new mathematical system where division by 0 is both allowed and defined. Algebra is very flexible this way. That's why when you add 25 hours to 2pm, you end up at 3pm the next day, and not 27pm. We've defined math in this daytime context to wrap around. There's no such thing as 27-o-clock. In this algebraic system, 2 + 25 != 27.
So what this programmer is asking isn't about whether or not dividing by zero in the purest mathematical sense is correct, they're asking whether or not it makes sense to have an alternate system where division by zero just gives you zero, since zero is almost always the answer that they (and that I) want.
These queries are far too simplistic in that they're composed almost entirely of words. The queries of mine that fail are usually syntax issues in something like elisp. Sometimes, I'm just looking for the elisp manual page that I KNOW exists, but my searches (on all engines, not just google) will fail hopelessly.
If you're looking for operators, or occasionally weird function names or specifiers like "let*" (the current results for let* are better than the last time I tried it, I admit), the search will often leave those bits out, even though they're critical. Searching for "elisp /= operator" for instance doesn't take me anywhere near the right result. Even turning on verbatim search doesn't help.
I admit, I have to wonder if Apple's markup is to encourage manufacturers to make cheaper cables.
I can buy MFi certified cables from Monoprice or even off of Amazon, and they're much cheaper than Apple's stuff. It's certified, so I'll trust it not to light on fire. If Apple made cables and sold them at cost, which they could surely do, they'd price everyone else out of the market. Apple has economies of scale that these other guys can only dream of.
So Apple marks up the prices on the adaptors, takes the abuse, makes a few bucks, but opens up the market to anyone that wants to make a peripheral and pay a small fee to be certified (whatever that means). As a result, I've got Anker cables and hubs at home. They work well, look nice and are easy to come by. I wouldn't have even considered them if Apple's cables were cheaper.
The guy asking about the "dragonfly's what" was being a dick and pointing out that you used an apostrophe to pluralise "dragonflies". He didn't really have a point at all.
Not everyone needs more than one.
Whenever you post to /., remember that YOU'RE the weird one. You've got more rigorous demands than most people. There are lots and lots of people that don't need more than one port, and will be delighted that they don't have to even think about what sort of connector they'll need for whatever peripheral they have. Everything will come with USB-C, they've only got one port and nothing to sort out.
For those of us that need more, there are plenty of options, but man, I have lots of people in my life that need ZERO ports on their laptop.
I should've included journals more explicitly in my definition of 'nobody'; they are, of course, a huge part of the problem.
The two statements you made are kind of at odds with one another.
Coders ARE too often one-trick ponies, I agree. But at least they learned some other subjects while they were at school. Literature, biology, chemistry. Even if they don't use them, they know a few things here and there.
The biologists, chemists and writers of the future will now know a little bit of coding. They won't remember much, probably, but they'll know a little. Nobody's trying to teach these kids to be experts any more than school is trying to teach kids to be materials scientists before they get to University. A little exposure can go a long way.
You don't get well-rounded individuals by teaching FEWER subjects.