How about forging evidence that Iraq had WMDs ? How about invading another country, putting the live of the civilian population at risk, for no real proof of anything ? Where are all those WMDs ?
There's no proof that Bush lied about WMDs. We had bad intel because past presidents gutted our operations in the middle east. Being misinformed, making a judgment call based on imperfect information...these things are not lying. No one--even the New York Times or sensible left-wing Democrats, say Bush "lied". But he did have to do something to cripple terrorism, and it does seem to be working. Egypt just opened their elections, Syria is pulling out of Lebanon, Iraq had elections, Qudaffi gave up the ghost. There's way too much evidence the Bush administration is doing the right thing to ignore.
So why do you choose to focus on the unsubstantiated point that "Bush lied" while ignoring all of these substantiated points that what he's doing is having the exact effect that any good American should want?
How about those pictures of tortures everyone saw ? Isn't that enough proof ?
We slipped up there a little. Oh well. Bad things happen in war when the chain of command breaks down. Blame Karpinski or whoever put her in charge for that. But even Al Jazeera dropped reporting Abu Ghraib to the Arab people because it wasn't the fodder they'd hoped for to inflame everyone. When sensible Arabs got wind of what Americans think torture is, most of them laughed and said what a quaint people we are.
My attitude about Abu Ghraib is that we had people in the field that screwed up, we're dealing with it, and these things happen. Make an omelet, break a few eggs. It's war.
...there [are] a lot of people (not all) held at Gitmo whose status is questionable, is enough to make me worry.
I'm down with every last detainee at Gitmo. I certainly wouldn't want the govt to release them and have them turn up in my neighborhood six months down the road. I think they should be given closed military tribunals and Bush doesn't seem to be doing that, so I do have points of disagreement on the details. But broad strokes, I think it's being handled in a way that protects us and doesn't compromise human rights to any degree we should be worried about.
how about the fact that the USA governemnt DEMANDS that every country in the whole damn world allow them to inspect their facilities, while denying access to USA facilities even to USA human rights organizations ?
Ok, I want to understand your argument, so let me get this straight. In your mind, countries like Iran and North Korea have moral equivalency with the United States?
Um, perspective much?
And, while you are at that, what would you call a good reason to cut a person's head off ?
I don't think there are any terribly good reasons to cut people's heads off. So, if I read you right, you're rationalizing the behavior of the terrorists? You're saying, "Hey, this stuff they're doing, flying planes into buildings and lopping off our heads, that's totally reasonable."
I'm done with this thread, then. You're either a troll, an idiot, or a disloyal American to make that statement when we have people out in the field risking their lives to protect this kind of stupidity.
Excuse me, but how...do you know all these guys being held are bad guys without due process? Due process is the way that we determine if someone is guilty or not.
Let me explain the way war works. If someone is on the battlefield sniping at you, that person is a Bad Guy. If that person identifies himself with an organization that has guys on the battlefield sniping at you, then he also is a Bad Guy.
Do you think we put every Nazi we captured in WWII through due process? No, if you're wearing that uniform, you're a Bad Guy. It's kind of simple, really.
Things work differently in wartime. I'm surprised how many people here on/. are taking such issue with this idea--apparently they haven't read their history, and they have no idea what the Founding Fathers' thoughts are on this issue. Liberty and freedom and due process is what we get to keep for ourselves by going to war and protecting our way of life from outsiders. Whenever someone mounts a large-scale organized movement against the United States, like a jihad, we have every right and responsibility to go into war mode and suspend some rights of those who are trying to suspend ours.
Gitmo isn't just some jail. It doesn't contain a collection of guys that cops pulled over because they had a broken taillight and then said, hey, you know, a murder just happened in this area and you might have done it. The conditions of the capture of these people are drastically different than what you're probably thinking. This is where getting informed might help you make up your mind.
I don't think they've heard of the golden rule. That was Jesus who said that...they don't believe in him.
You're right about Abu Ghraib though. We committed some of the worst acts of torture and terrorism those walls have ever seen.
Oh wait. No we didn't. What we did was actually kind of a joke compared to what it used to be used for.
I'm not saying it wasn't wrong. I'm saying, let's have some perspective. Not only was that stuff torture lite compared to what Saddam used to do there, the people who did it are going to jail for it. Perspective means that we let our govt try to protect us and we give them the benefit of the doubt until they actually do something wrong. Abu Ghraib wasn't *that* big of a story...it deserved the front page 2, maybe 3 days. The New York times put it on the front page maybe 50 times. It's all we heard about. All I ever hear lately is how bad and evil the US is and how we're kicking everyone's rights out the window. What about the millions of people who voted a few weeks ago? What about the women who can now go to school? What about them?
No, we're not angels. We're only human, trying to do the right thing. And we're in the right here. Get some perspective.
Dude, only American citizens get due process. Only POWs get due process. You have to qualify as a POW...you don't get it automatically because you were fighting. You have to, like, be in uniform and stuff.
These are bad guys we're dealing with. They don't get the benefit of the doubt. They are not the people that the framers of the Geneva Convention had in mind when they wrote it (you can tell by the fact that the GC specifically excludes them on a number of criteria).
God almighty, when did the US Bill of Rights start applying to everyone? Did I miss that memo? We've even in our own history not applied it to people in this very country!!! Now we're giving it to terrorists that aren't fighting in uniform as part of an organized army in a declared war??? No, I think not.
[Cartman voice]: you hippies are really starting to piss me off!
Actually, you're right. When you put it this way, it got me wondering...what is going on there!? Why, those US soldiers could be doing terrible things, like cutting off people's heads for no good reason.
Or, like, forcing people to go around covered from head to toe just because they were born without the right genatalia. Or stoning those people for committing adultery.
When are people like you going to wise up and start giving our government and our country the benefit of the doubt? They haven't done anything wrong yet! Wait until they do before we start getting worried...after all, we're dealing with people who crash airplanes into buildings full of civilians and cut people's heads off "just because".
Actually, it wouldn't be illegal to detain the suspected terrorists at Gitmo even on US soil. I suspect the only reason the Bush Administration is doing it in Cuba is to quell fires from the extreme left before the start. The fact is, these were all people captured on the battlefield engaged in some kind of resistance or another. There's no need for a trial, there's no need for Geneva Conventions, etc. They were foreign nationals committing organized acts of war against the US, most or all of them weren't in battlefiend dress, none of them are operating as part of a foreign army.
We have to have some way of protecting ourselves against things like this. Why wouldn't we throw these people in the can and forget about them? Who cares about civil rights? It's not like these are citizens that we picked up off the street on suspicion of doing something--we got these guys red-handed, on the battlefield. They don't operate under our Constitution. I just don't see any problem with this whole thing. Can someone explain it to me?
George Carlin should take his own advice about how some words just are not needed to get a point across.
I think Carlin's point was that we ought to initially give the benefit of the doubt to the speaker to use the correct words to convey meaning. If after we understand the point, we judge it to be inarticulately put, then the speaker has violated the shred of trust we invested in conversatin' with that person.
Carlin is saying, I think, that the sentiment and the semantics used to express a thought must be considered as a whole before the listener can judge the point. Judging the whole of a statement by myopically focusing on one or two or the semantics places undue importance on the mechanism of communication, rather than the thing itself...the "meeting of the minds" or whatever you want to call it. This isn't judgement at all...it's prejudgement.
Watch a movie on TV once it has been censored and see if the explosions or the naked women (different topic) look any different or the plot is scarred somehow. I'm not talkin about the stupid words that get inserted because of the censorship but when the sound is totally blanked out I can still get the full plot just fine.
I wholeheartedly disagree. This is a bit like saying, "I don't understand it...whether you eat each course of a fine meal separately or put them all in a blender and drink it through a straw, you get the same number of calories and nutritional elements."
Yes, you can understand the plot. But it won't be an immersive, authentic experience if you have Mafia hit men running around saying things like, "Frick! I'm going to god-darned squeeze your flippin' neck until blood pours out of your gosh-darned eye sockets!" Is this a hit man speaking or a grade school teacher? Entertainment is about immersion in the experience. If any part of the experience doesn't ring true, it's as distracting as if the guy in the movie theater won't stop babbling to his friend about his trip to Japan all the way through The Last Samarai.
More to the point, we all know that the type of censorship you propose is taken up as a half-hearted measure. Semantics aren't usually the most offensive part of ostensibly offensive works--as you yourself imply, the most offending parts of such a work can be maintained if the author is artful enough. In fact, if you yourself didn't believe this, you'd likely have not responded to my post in the first place (or at least not in the way you did), too offended to engage me. What the pro-censorship crowd is really after (and I'm not necessarily you're of the same mind) is banning the sentiments, not just the semantics...today it's this word and that word, tomorrow it's this thought and that idea. This issue can't be approached frontally though because of that pesky First Amendment.
Normally I shy away from using the slippery slope argument...99% of the time it's employed not as an argument but a rationalization. In this case, though, we have much precedent already existing of sentiment and semantic going hand-in-hand. For instance, if a movie uses the f-word or the c-word, it gets an R rating (semantics). But a movie can also land an R if the content is overly sexual or concerned with excretory bodily functions (sentiment). In other words, I could write a movie script that would get a G rating if the individual words of the script were delivered in random order. But put them in the correct order, and it gets an R.
Now, I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with our rating system. I'm all for labelling movies according to content because that's a useful measure. (Creating numerous categories and restricting the audience by age is another matter, for a different post, perhaps.) But it makes the point that our society considers the grouping of certain sentiments and semantics under the same "offensiveness heading" is consistent and sensible.
This means, of course, that if it makes sense to ban particular semantics, it also makes sense to ban the sentiments with which they are normally grouped. I don't know about you, but I don't want my Quentin Tarantino movies gimp-free.
This is ridiculous. Are they going to start regulating pay-TV channels next, like HBO? You can't say the f-word anymore in movies?
One thing I've never understood about this censorship was articulated by George Carlin best. His sentiments are something along the lines of, why is it ok to use profanity as long as at least the key vowels are left out? For instance, "f*ck" is perfectly acceptable in most censored media, even though it still clearly expresses the idea, the concept behind the word, just as clearly as if that little asterisk were replaced by the "u" it "censors".
S*ck my fat f*cking c*ck, *ssh*le. Do you really feel protected from my sentiment because I've applied the appropriate amount of "censorship"? (Or am I simply not allowed to express certain sentiments at all under this new bill? Isn't that unConstitutional?)
See, that's one of those very special circumstances where optimization is the only way to go. In graphics, that's the case more often than in any other branch of code development.
At every place I've worked, I've always had a standing bet open to any and all takers. You branch your code and I'll branch mine, you preoptimize and I'll write legible code that sticks religiously to good OO design principles. After the development cycle ends, if a profiling tool proves that your way is better in a significantly demonstrable fashion to the product, you win $100. If not, you owe me $50. (You can hammer out the terms of "significantly demonstrable," but it basically means that the code we're talking about falls into the 20% of the codebase--per the 80/20 rule about where execution flow spends most of its time--and my way is so much more grossly inefficient than yours it actually causes consternation in the end user.)
Put like this, no one ever takes the bet. It's easy money for me. Even the strongest preoptimization advocates get pretty silent once the discussion is framed this way.
Here's the thing. Except in certain, specific circumstances, e.g. real-time or embedded high-performance systems, lack of performance comes from bad design 99.9% of the time. If the design of the product accommodates the performance requirements properly, no optimization is usually necessary.
Does optimization help in these situations? It depends on what you mean by "help". If you mean, does it make it faster, then yes. If you mean, does it make a better product, then the answer is most cases is indubitably: no. Faster, more fragile, less maintainable, and more poorly documented usually means worse for the product. And the kicker is, in most cases it doesn't improve performance in any meaningful way.
Much better is to approach your architecture and design with an eye towards the specific performance factors and requirements of your product, and design things properly. This will get the big stuff (that you can't usually optimize your way out of anyway). Then somewhere near code freeze, set aside time to do profiling to the extent that gives you a good idea of where the CPU is burning most of its cycles. Usually that's somewhere between 5% and 10% of your code, and usually it's only reasonable to optimize in 5%-10% of that code, and usually there are only opportunities to do intelligent optimization in 5%-10% of that code. (Of course, this doesn't take into account all of the boneheaded code that somehow found its way into the product where just sticking to best practices shows not only markedly better code in terms of performance, but also in every other sense.)
If you're still finding problems performance-wise, chances are you started off without addressing the right requirements in the first place. Go back to architecture, do not pass Go, do not collect $200.
Well, because...this is opening the door to having the chip permanently implanted in your forehead. That way, whenever you want to make a purchase, the cashier can just ring everything up and then point the register gun at your face and charge it to you. I just hope it scans the first time because I've seen one too many clerks smash the item against the scanner (or the gun against the item) out of frustration.
Does it qualify as situational irony if they require you to prove you're doing a legal reinstall of an OS that suffers from OS rot to such an extent that users like myself find they must blow off and reinstall everything every 3 to 6 months? No, that's not irony...that's just idiocy.
Every business needs to know their installed user base. So to help out Firefox, let's all help out. On the count of three, everyone reading this using Firefox post a message containing your last core dump.
Basically, if you can hear music, you can steal it. It's just a matter of the quality you're willing to put up with. It's amazing to me that anyone thinks they can set up a situation where you ultimately send an unencrypted digital stream of data to your audio card, but no one's going to divert that stream to the hard disk.
You're missing my point, I think. Roads in Europe are built to last with 2-3 times the thickness of the roadbed, and as a result they don't get potholes for 20 years. We develop potholes in our roads almost as soon as it's open to traffic--before it's even finished in some cases. The worst part is, the concrete and materials is fairly cheap compared to the labor and setup cost, all of which we've already paid for. So our average road life is 3 years instead of 20 or 30.
How about they squeeze every penny they can out of the current taxes they're hitting us for in terms of efficiency? I had a buddy that laid roads for a summer, and he told me they intentionally lay less roadbed in the left lane because trucks stay only in the right lanes. I asked why don't they just double the thickness of the roadbad across the board and make them all the same? Because then the roads wouldn't break down and the road crews wouldn't have any work.
People from third world countries come to the US and laugh at our roads. It's a corrupt system that will eat as much money as we make available. The only solution to this one is to starve the beast.
Huh. I think it would be a much more fruitful endeavor to establish a fiscal policy that will expand the money multiplier without raising interest rates. But that's not what this thread is about, is it?
The Digital Rebel and the 20D are totally different animals. 6.2 vs 8.2 megapixels, the 20D has more advanced noise reduction, etc. I could go on...
In any case, I'm pretty sure that if camera companies opened up their platforms to open source, for instance, cameras would quickly start to have all sorts of strange features. Not that I'm against that, someone could come out with something cool...but I doubt I would load anything not approved by Canon onto my 20D, personally.
Re:That is why CSI sucks
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Forensic Discovery
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· Score: 5, Informative
I especially hate it when (this seems to predominate on CSI, but I've seen it on other shows as well) they "digitally enhance" security camera video to identify an attacker, read a license plate, etc. Usually, I can overlook it for the sake of the plotline every now and again. But, the final straw came for me a few weeks ago on CSI when they had an ATM security cam and the pulled a reflection off of the pupil of the third person in line and enhanced it to ID the criminal (second in line) who was facing away from the camera. They literally took a single grey pixel from the video and "enhanced" it to a beautifully rendered, studio-lit 8"x10" black and white portrait of the criminal.
And, oh yea, if you put deer feces into an NMR, it's not going to spit out a graph with a bunch of peaks on it and print below the graph: "deer feces". On the other hand, I'm not sure which is worse...when they do that with the NMR, or when they NMR identifies 50 compounds in a sample, all with names like "n-methyl hydride deoxynitrate", and the CSI goes, "Oh, yea, those are the major components of plumber's grease that was used between 1970 and 1978 in the Western United States." They might as well have the NMR spit out a graph with a caption: "The bus driver did it! The motorcyclist was only his *accomplice*."
Then, of course, there's the small issue of unlimited budget. If real CSIs solved crimes like they do on TV, they'd be spending somewhere between $15M and $50M per case.:-)
Re:Newsweek: The Cooling World - April 28, 1975
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BBC on Global Dimming
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· Score: 1
I know the Earth is in trouble because I read it every other day. I just wish they would decide if it's warming up or cooling off. Either way, I believe it! (Because I'm stupid.)
Slashdot Mirror
So why do you choose to focus on the unsubstantiated point that "Bush lied" while ignoring all of these substantiated points that what he's doing is having the exact effect that any good American should want?
We slipped up there a little. Oh well. Bad things happen in war when the chain of command breaks down. Blame Karpinski or whoever put her in charge for that. But even Al Jazeera dropped reporting Abu Ghraib to the Arab people because it wasn't the fodder they'd hoped for to inflame everyone. When sensible Arabs got wind of what Americans think torture is, most of them laughed and said what a quaint people we are.My attitude about Abu Ghraib is that we had people in the field that screwed up, we're dealing with it, and these things happen. Make an omelet, break a few eggs. It's war.
I'm down with every last detainee at Gitmo. I certainly wouldn't want the govt to release them and have them turn up in my neighborhood six months down the road. I think they should be given closed military tribunals and Bush doesn't seem to be doing that, so I do have points of disagreement on the details. But broad strokes, I think it's being handled in a way that protects us and doesn't compromise human rights to any degree we should be worried about. Ok, I want to understand your argument, so let me get this straight. In your mind, countries like Iran and North Korea have moral equivalency with the United States?Um, perspective much?
I don't think there are any terribly good reasons to cut people's heads off. So, if I read you right, you're rationalizing the behavior of the terrorists? You're saying, "Hey, this stuff they're doing, flying planes into buildings and lopping off our heads, that's totally reasonable."I'm done with this thread, then. You're either a troll, an idiot, or a disloyal American to make that statement when we have people out in the field risking their lives to protect this kind of stupidity.
Do you think we put every Nazi we captured in WWII through due process? No, if you're wearing that uniform, you're a Bad Guy. It's kind of simple, really.
Things work differently in wartime. I'm surprised how many people here on /. are taking such issue with this idea--apparently they haven't read their history, and they have no idea what the Founding Fathers' thoughts are on this issue. Liberty and freedom and due process is what we get to keep for ourselves by going to war and protecting our way of life from outsiders. Whenever someone mounts a large-scale organized movement against the United States, like a jihad, we have every right and responsibility to go into war mode and suspend some rights of those who are trying to suspend ours.
Gitmo isn't just some jail. It doesn't contain a collection of guys that cops pulled over because they had a broken taillight and then said, hey, you know, a murder just happened in this area and you might have done it. The conditions of the capture of these people are drastically different than what you're probably thinking. This is where getting informed might help you make up your mind.
I don't think they've heard of the golden rule. That was Jesus who said that...they don't believe in him.
You're right about Abu Ghraib though. We committed some of the worst acts of torture and terrorism those walls have ever seen.
Oh wait. No we didn't. What we did was actually kind of a joke compared to what it used to be used for.
I'm not saying it wasn't wrong. I'm saying, let's have some perspective. Not only was that stuff torture lite compared to what Saddam used to do there, the people who did it are going to jail for it. Perspective means that we let our govt try to protect us and we give them the benefit of the doubt until they actually do something wrong. Abu Ghraib wasn't *that* big of a story...it deserved the front page 2, maybe 3 days. The New York times put it on the front page maybe 50 times. It's all we heard about. All I ever hear lately is how bad and evil the US is and how we're kicking everyone's rights out the window. What about the millions of people who voted a few weeks ago? What about the women who can now go to school? What about them?
No, we're not angels. We're only human, trying to do the right thing. And we're in the right here. Get some perspective.
Dude, only American citizens get due process. Only POWs get due process. You have to qualify as a POW...you don't get it automatically because you were fighting. You have to, like, be in uniform and stuff.
These are bad guys we're dealing with. They don't get the benefit of the doubt. They are not the people that the framers of the Geneva Convention had in mind when they wrote it (you can tell by the fact that the GC specifically excludes them on a number of criteria).
God almighty, when did the US Bill of Rights start applying to everyone? Did I miss that memo? We've even in our own history not applied it to people in this very country!!! Now we're giving it to terrorists that aren't fighting in uniform as part of an organized army in a declared war??? No, I think not.
[Cartman voice]: you hippies are really starting to piss me off!
Actually, you're right. When you put it this way, it got me wondering...what is going on there!? Why, those US soldiers could be doing terrible things, like cutting off people's heads for no good reason.
Or, like, forcing people to go around covered from head to toe just because they were born without the right genatalia. Or stoning those people for committing adultery.
When are people like you going to wise up and start giving our government and our country the benefit of the doubt? They haven't done anything wrong yet! Wait until they do before we start getting worried...after all, we're dealing with people who crash airplanes into buildings full of civilians and cut people's heads off "just because".
Actually, it wouldn't be illegal to detain the suspected terrorists at Gitmo even on US soil. I suspect the only reason the Bush Administration is doing it in Cuba is to quell fires from the extreme left before the start. The fact is, these were all people captured on the battlefield engaged in some kind of resistance or another. There's no need for a trial, there's no need for Geneva Conventions, etc. They were foreign nationals committing organized acts of war against the US, most or all of them weren't in battlefiend dress, none of them are operating as part of a foreign army.
We have to have some way of protecting ourselves against things like this. Why wouldn't we throw these people in the can and forget about them? Who cares about civil rights? It's not like these are citizens that we picked up off the street on suspicion of doing something--we got these guys red-handed, on the battlefield. They don't operate under our Constitution. I just don't see any problem with this whole thing. Can someone explain it to me?
Carlin is saying, I think, that the sentiment and the semantics used to express a thought must be considered as a whole before the listener can judge the point. Judging the whole of a statement by myopically focusing on one or two or the semantics places undue importance on the mechanism of communication, rather than the thing itself...the "meeting of the minds" or whatever you want to call it. This isn't judgement at all...it's prejudgement.
I wholeheartedly disagree. This is a bit like saying, "I don't understand it...whether you eat each course of a fine meal separately or put them all in a blender and drink it through a straw, you get the same number of calories and nutritional elements."Yes, you can understand the plot. But it won't be an immersive, authentic experience if you have Mafia hit men running around saying things like, "Frick! I'm going to god-darned squeeze your flippin' neck until blood pours out of your gosh-darned eye sockets!" Is this a hit man speaking or a grade school teacher? Entertainment is about immersion in the experience. If any part of the experience doesn't ring true, it's as distracting as if the guy in the movie theater won't stop babbling to his friend about his trip to Japan all the way through The Last Samarai.
More to the point, we all know that the type of censorship you propose is taken up as a half-hearted measure. Semantics aren't usually the most offensive part of ostensibly offensive works--as you yourself imply, the most offending parts of such a work can be maintained if the author is artful enough. In fact, if you yourself didn't believe this, you'd likely have not responded to my post in the first place (or at least not in the way you did), too offended to engage me. What the pro-censorship crowd is really after (and I'm not necessarily you're of the same mind) is banning the sentiments, not just the semantics...today it's this word and that word, tomorrow it's this thought and that idea. This issue can't be approached frontally though because of that pesky First Amendment.
Normally I shy away from using the slippery slope argument...99% of the time it's employed not as an argument but a rationalization. In this case, though, we have much precedent already existing of sentiment and semantic going hand-in-hand. For instance, if a movie uses the f-word or the c-word, it gets an R rating (semantics). But a movie can also land an R if the content is overly sexual or concerned with excretory bodily functions (sentiment). In other words, I could write a movie script that would get a G rating if the individual words of the script were delivered in random order. But put them in the correct order, and it gets an R.
Now, I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with our rating system. I'm all for labelling movies according to content because that's a useful measure. (Creating numerous categories and restricting the audience by age is another matter, for a different post, perhaps.) But it makes the point that our society considers the grouping of certain sentiments and semantics under the same "offensiveness heading" is consistent and sensible.
This means, of course, that if it makes sense to ban particular semantics, it also makes sense to ban the sentiments with which they are normally grouped. I don't know about you, but I don't want my Quentin Tarantino movies gimp-free.
This is ridiculous. Are they going to start regulating pay-TV channels next, like HBO? You can't say the f-word anymore in movies?
One thing I've never understood about this censorship was articulated by George Carlin best. His sentiments are something along the lines of, why is it ok to use profanity as long as at least the key vowels are left out? For instance, "f*ck" is perfectly acceptable in most censored media, even though it still clearly expresses the idea, the concept behind the word, just as clearly as if that little asterisk were replaced by the "u" it "censors".
S*ck my fat f*cking c*ck, *ssh*le. Do you really feel protected from my sentiment because I've applied the appropriate amount of "censorship"? (Or am I simply not allowed to express certain sentiments at all under this new bill? Isn't that unConstitutional?)
See, that's one of those very special circumstances where optimization is the only way to go. In graphics, that's the case more often than in any other branch of code development.
It's because it's easy money that no one ever takes the bet. Get it? In other words, it would be easy money.
At every place I've worked, I've always had a standing bet open to any and all takers. You branch your code and I'll branch mine, you preoptimize and I'll write legible code that sticks religiously to good OO design principles. After the development cycle ends, if a profiling tool proves that your way is better in a significantly demonstrable fashion to the product, you win $100. If not, you owe me $50. (You can hammer out the terms of "significantly demonstrable," but it basically means that the code we're talking about falls into the 20% of the codebase--per the 80/20 rule about where execution flow spends most of its time--and my way is so much more grossly inefficient than yours it actually causes consternation in the end user.)
Put like this, no one ever takes the bet. It's easy money for me. Even the strongest preoptimization advocates get pretty silent once the discussion is framed this way.
Here's the thing. Except in certain, specific circumstances, e.g. real-time or embedded high-performance systems, lack of performance comes from bad design 99.9% of the time. If the design of the product accommodates the performance requirements properly, no optimization is usually necessary.
Does optimization help in these situations? It depends on what you mean by "help". If you mean, does it make it faster, then yes. If you mean, does it make a better product, then the answer is most cases is indubitably: no. Faster, more fragile, less maintainable, and more poorly documented usually means worse for the product. And the kicker is, in most cases it doesn't improve performance in any meaningful way.
Much better is to approach your architecture and design with an eye towards the specific performance factors and requirements of your product, and design things properly. This will get the big stuff (that you can't usually optimize your way out of anyway). Then somewhere near code freeze, set aside time to do profiling to the extent that gives you a good idea of where the CPU is burning most of its cycles. Usually that's somewhere between 5% and 10% of your code, and usually it's only reasonable to optimize in 5%-10% of that code, and usually there are only opportunities to do intelligent optimization in 5%-10% of that code. (Of course, this doesn't take into account all of the boneheaded code that somehow found its way into the product where just sticking to best practices shows not only markedly better code in terms of performance, but also in every other sense.)
If you're still finding problems performance-wise, chances are you started off without addressing the right requirements in the first place. Go back to architecture, do not pass Go, do not collect $200.
Well, because...this is opening the door to having the chip permanently implanted in your forehead. That way, whenever you want to make a purchase, the cashier can just ring everything up and then point the register gun at your face and charge it to you. I just hope it scans the first time because I've seen one too many clerks smash the item against the scanner (or the gun against the item) out of frustration.
Does it qualify as situational irony if they require you to prove you're doing a legal reinstall of an OS that suffers from OS rot to such an extent that users like myself find they must blow off and reinstall everything every 3 to 6 months? No, that's not irony...that's just idiocy.
I have an idea. Why don't we take something that's nontrivial for businesses to do and see if the *government* fares any better.
Ha! Ha! Ha!
Every business needs to know their installed user base. So to help out Firefox, let's all help out. On the count of three, everyone reading this using Firefox post a message containing your last core dump.
One, two, ...
Just kidding. :-)
Basically, if you can hear music, you can steal it. It's just a matter of the quality you're willing to put up with. It's amazing to me that anyone thinks they can set up a situation where you ultimately send an unencrypted digital stream of data to your audio card, but no one's going to divert that stream to the hard disk.
You're missing my point, I think. Roads in Europe are built to last with 2-3 times the thickness of the roadbed, and as a result they don't get potholes for 20 years. We develop potholes in our roads almost as soon as it's open to traffic--before it's even finished in some cases. The worst part is, the concrete and materials is fairly cheap compared to the labor and setup cost, all of which we've already paid for. So our average road life is 3 years instead of 20 or 30.
How about they squeeze every penny they can out of the current taxes they're hitting us for in terms of efficiency? I had a buddy that laid roads for a summer, and he told me they intentionally lay less roadbed in the left lane because trucks stay only in the right lanes. I asked why don't they just double the thickness of the roadbad across the board and make them all the same? Because then the roads wouldn't break down and the road crews wouldn't have any work.
People from third world countries come to the US and laugh at our roads. It's a corrupt system that will eat as much money as we make available. The only solution to this one is to starve the beast.
Maybe it's a bit too obscure...I've written in assembly and I thought that's what they might be, but I couldn't be bothered to research it. :-)
Huh. I think it would be a much more fruitful endeavor to establish a fiscal policy that will expand the money multiplier without raising interest rates. But that's not what this thread is about, is it?
I don't get your sig. What's it mean?
The Digital Rebel and the 20D are totally different animals. 6.2 vs 8.2 megapixels, the 20D has more advanced noise reduction, etc. I could go on...
In any case, I'm pretty sure that if camera companies opened up their platforms to open source, for instance, cameras would quickly start to have all sorts of strange features. Not that I'm against that, someone could come out with something cool...but I doubt I would load anything not approved by Canon onto my 20D, personally.
I especially hate it when (this seems to predominate on CSI, but I've seen it on other shows as well) they "digitally enhance" security camera video to identify an attacker, read a license plate, etc. Usually, I can overlook it for the sake of the plotline every now and again. But, the final straw came for me a few weeks ago on CSI when they had an ATM security cam and the pulled a reflection off of the pupil of the third person in line and enhanced it to ID the criminal (second in line) who was facing away from the camera. They literally took a single grey pixel from the video and "enhanced" it to a beautifully rendered, studio-lit 8"x10" black and white portrait of the criminal.
And, oh yea, if you put deer feces into an NMR, it's not going to spit out a graph with a bunch of peaks on it and print below the graph: "deer feces". On the other hand, I'm not sure which is worse...when they do that with the NMR, or when they NMR identifies 50 compounds in a sample, all with names like "n-methyl hydride deoxynitrate", and the CSI goes, "Oh, yea, those are the major components of plumber's grease that was used between 1970 and 1978 in the Western United States." They might as well have the NMR spit out a graph with a caption: "The bus driver did it! The motorcyclist was only his *accomplice*."
Then, of course, there's the small issue of unlimited budget. If real CSIs solved crimes like they do on TV, they'd be spending somewhere between $15M and $50M per case. :-)
I know the Earth is in trouble because I read it every other day. I just wish they would decide if it's warming up or cooling off. Either way, I believe it! (Because I'm stupid.)
...so? Every now and then, these story synopses here on /. don't really make the point of why we should care. This is one of those.