"conventional modes of democracy could be extinct within two decades"
At present "conventional democracy" has a vote every 4-5 years (perhaps with mid-term or local elections halfway) in which your bit of information (if that!) ends upo with a single bit of who leads for the next 4-5 years, during which politicians tend to drop their campaign promises.
Internet technology allows for finer-tuned democracy, yes, but if anything "election day" should be an annual day on which everybody does physically go to the polls and cast a secret ballot. Because although technology does allow secrecy (not necessary for all votes, but essential for some), the risk of back doors will always be greater than when a simpler and less technological procedure is used.
I'm in my forties now and want to be able to vote issues, not parties. I'd also like to be able to vote for individuals who have proven leadership qualities without them being beholden to a party. Not that I could vote Perot - being European - nor that I would want his finger on the button anymore than anybody else, and at least Obama comes across as somewhat statesmanlike even if his mantra of "Change" never really happened, but you should see the bunch of twits in Europe nowadays (on all sides of the political spectrum).
Almost as if we are forgetting what populism brought in the 1930s.
Apples and oranges are age 5 concepts of counting, at which point children aren't necessarily learning even to subtract yet. As a child I lived at #17, so #13 was two doors to the left, and #21 was two doors to the right. They were two doors away from my house, and from each other they were four doors! But my house was no doors from my house, it was (in more formal mathematical terms) O, the Origin, for me.
Next thing you will be telling me that Quaternions are a purely mathematical construct, with no physical analogue. Oh wait, how about Spacetime, you know, the natural universe we live in?
Now, defining Zero to be the equivalent of the empty set {} and then using the Peano axioms, THAT is a mathematical construct which can help us (mathematicians) to be rigorous (at least until Kurt F.ing Goedel comes along) without a direct physical analogue.
What confused you in your previous post is that the Romans had a perfectly good CONCEPT of zero (nullus) but lacked the notation for it, because they were (in CS terms) overloading their alphabet to do numbers too. Just as hexadecimal notitation does, feed face?
The reason that calculus is so common (not that I did it in my CS diploma, but then I have an M.A. in natural philosophy) a requirement is that Euler's formula brings together many of the (non-discrete) mathematical topics. I'm not sure to what degree (ha!) multiple differentiation (let alone integration) is relevant to a CS student, but a sound mathetical grounding is most certainly to be expected, just as biology and chemistry are to medical students, language to law and arts student, and ouija board usage to economists.
Furthermore, in a liberal (arts/science) degree, if you choose to be a science major of any kind, it would make sense that there is some sort of core curriculum which you are expected to be aware of at least, and where say a medical student might get away with slightly less on the maths front, I'd certainly hope they'd be able to understand that none/zero is one less than one in much the same way as one is one less than two.
Perhaps you are confused between ordinals and cardinals. It makes sense to say "I ate my first apple, then my second apple." It makes significantly less sense to then say "But before that, I ate my zeroth apple". If I have an apple, and you have an orange, then in the vector space of apples and oranges, I have (1, 0) and you have (0, 1). Those look remarkably different to me. However, if we both had 42 apples and 13 oranges, then the difference between our possessions would be NONE.
2+2=4 is indeed a theorem of arithmetic, but it does not preclude it from being an axiom or the only member of a theory.
Ah, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. What are these "+", "2", "=" and "4" things?
Over ZZ3 (integers modulo 3), 2+2=1.
When you learned to count (pre-school) you were actually learning what mathematicians call the successor function, and although the concept of zero was hard to understand, not only in Roman times, but even in the early Renaissance, current the symbol "2" is defined to be the successor of the successor of "0", and "+" is defined as moving an s() from one side to the other until a "0" has been reached on one side, at which point it can be dropped. So "2+2" = s(s(0)) + s(s(0)) = s(s(s(0))) + s(0) = s(s(s(s(0)))) + 0 = "4". IIRC, 0 can be defined as {} the empty set, s(s(x)) as {{x} u s(x)} or summat like that (not being rigorous, just lazy).
Anyway, a theorem of set theory may turn out to be used as an axiom for arithmetic, and that in turn used as an axiom (or given) for say calculus. But that doesn't make "2+2=4" a theorem at any sensible level, not even a lemma, but rather the definition of the symbols being used.
It turns out that many of the axioms of used in mathematics correspond to our natural understanding at an early level, and that in physics somewhat weird axioms can predict actual results, as in relativity and QM. When counting sheep jumping fences, integer arithmetic is enough. When counting cats in boxes, it isn't.
I scrolled down to see if there were any more relevant posts to reply to, but most of them also boasted about 80+ wpm.
I am by no means a touch typer, but I don't watch my keyboard either. So I correct a lot, and am about half your speed at best (say 50 wpm).
Still probably around 12 cps, but hitting Delete 3 times lowers the average, hehehe.
I still type faster than I can think, whether I am programming, translating, or writing for fun and pleasure. As the GP post said, any more is overkill for anything but data entry or transcribing.
As it happens, I didn't make many mistakes in the previous para, but I can regularly type stuff like: To be oare nto teo be, thatr ais the quzesition.
Thing is, when I'm typing text (using 9 fingers, not the right pinky for some reason, although I do sometimes use my left hand for control (thumb to C for copy, for example), I am aware of my mistakes and often want to change for other reasons anyway. And when programming, I want to type two or three letters and then code-complete.
British mathematicians (from primary school to professor) place the decimal point not at the base, but half way up, at the same level as the minus sign, the space between the lines of an equal sign, or the intersection of the small "x" used as a multiplication sign.
This seriously confused an Italian boy who joined my school at age 14 and eventually was the other person from my year to go to Cambridge.
Unfortunately, despite his intelligence when he was first tested to see what group he should be in, he mistook the dot for a multiplication symbol. He'd been to American schools a lot, since his father was a diplomat. So he answered such simple questions as what is 1.2 + 3.4 (which should be 4.6) as 14 (1x2 + 3x4).
At least the GP understands that confusion is the issue. He is not 100% correct, but it isn't nonsense either.
Don't forget that not only written and spoken are important, but that the limitations of the ASCII/ANSI character set(s) mean that we use "full stops" rather than "points", and similarly combine multiplication into the asterisk.
Interestingly, the x87 FPU has instructions for loading and storing BCD values, but internally computes everything using binary arithmetic. That lets you combine the accuracy of binary floats with the storage efficiency of BCD. To my knowledge, no one has ever wanted to do that.
That isn't very interesting, since it is the x86 (not the maths coprocessor) which has opcodes such as AAA and (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_BCD_opcodes). The accuracy is the same, the performance of arithmetic operations is worse, but the important advantage of BCD on old architectures - including even the 4.77 MHz 8088 - is that they only had at best 16-bit registers, so the most you could represent unsigned was $655.35 (more than enough for anybody). Allowing a packed byte for the cents, and another for ones and tens, etc, may not have been the computationally most efficient, but without an '87, it was better than strings!
I wouldn't be surprised if I had said syndrome, and I certainly have peeped with discontent often enough, but only at incompetent management.
But I'm going to disagree with both "maturity" and "creativity", although I'll stick fairly close to the latter.
Rather than maturity, what is important is the competence to be able to make a good estimate about when something will be finished (including documentation). Unfortunately the vast majority (80%+) of programmers aren't very good programmers when working in teams. I'll get back to that in a bit.
And rather than creativity, I find imagination, lateral thinking and problem solving in particular, to be more important. A similar 80%+ majority of programmers who's work I've had the pleasure to maintain are extremely creative in using the wrong tool for the job, etc. Again, competence is most important.
I'm going to make it more personal now: I'm unemployed and haven't worked with Delphi for more than 5 years professionally. Unfortunately that's where I put all my eggs. Although after 2020 I'll probably be able to find some maintenance work (just as the COBOL guys did in 1999, hehe), I'd like to be developing new stuff again. I had one agency who I had worked through to mutual profit regularly in the past, only for the incompetent agent to - after saying I couldn't get the job because my French wasn't good enough reversing that when I wrote her in French - then tell me I couldn't get the job because my Delphi experience wasn't recent enough DESPITE the version being asked for (5) being 2 years prior to the end of my professional usage (7), and this being clearly visible on my CV.
Somewhat ironically, for my very first Delphi job opportunity, when I'd waited for 32-bit Delphi (2), the job agency (a temping one back then) had been asked for someone with 5 years Delphi experience, so I didn't get that job either. My 10 years (at the time) Pascal experience counted for nothing, and I sometimes wonder if they ever found a bullshitter who claimed 5 years experience with a product which had existed for only a year. Competence.
The reason I stopped developing was stress-related. I was working for a seemingly friendly guy on a niche product (version 5) of which the source to version 4 had been lost. This was at half my usual rate, but with the understanding I might take the company over when he retired. I told him up front that although I am an excellent developer and test my own code, if I were to develop from scratch I needed a tester, and since he was the only other person, that meant him. The first thing I didn't know is that he was supremely competent at the art of fine bullshit, and for the first six months I hammered out functionality at an extremely fast pace, while he supposedly tested it. Actually, he only did so cursorily, and instead spent most of his time fighting the tax man on his evasion and bullshitting customers into upgrading to the new (as yet non-existent) product. But the second thing I didn't know is that he actually had a demo CD of a competing product, which I tested on a lazy day in summer to see what the opposition was up to. And this may be why this post gets moderated funny: the opposition were on version 3.0 of their product, and not only had a development team of about 100 for this product alone (recall we were about 1.1), but their functionality and data were both at least an order of magnitude higher, and similarly the price was an order of magnitude lower. Not only that, but their budget was, on researching, discovered to be 9 figures. Yes, that's a hundred million dollars. The only bright side is that presumably they used their own tools to develop this competing program. The name of their tools probably started with the word "Visual". Yeah. Laugh with me or cry for me;)
But let me return to what is important: competence. I know what I'm competent at. I also know what I'm incompetent at, although I've learned the hard way. Note that competence is unrelated to brilliance: I've met many comp
Seriously, it's pretty fucking hard to get that kind of tax system going without a civilization! You need a whole city full of accountants... barbarians could never manage that.
Bernard Madoff (Great Merchant) has been born in New York (Dubya).
Backup your internal HDD to an external one, and if your data is really important, have two externals and swap one off-site once a week. Is there any better advice these days?"
There isn't any better advice, but you ALWAYS have "really important" data.
The most likely things you are going to want to back up are documents and spreadsheets, pictures, videos and of course code. If you can't afford more than one external drive, or even don't want to spend anything at all, the big G (yeah, I'm a fanboy, but there are probably equivalent options) provides help. Google Docs for the first two: search for "google docs synch" and the first option is freeware (not that I've used it - nowadays I just use Docs itself). Picasa allows you to keep pictures unpublished, not so sure about youtube etc. And code you can mail to yourself, (g)zipped, although it might be on your home test/dev machine and also on your commercial web server.
That aside, isn't this patent a good thing? It means that only Amazon's products will be crippled with advertising inserted in this manner.
Patents get licensed. In terms of your description, $10 product would get sold for $6 by other publishers - $5 "up front" and $1 to cover the patent royalty.
Amazon has an interesting self-publishing business (forget what it is called and I'm certainly not going to advertise for them), but I can imagine them offering trade-quality books which aren't otherwise available (out of copyright, let alone print) at a discount if they can use 1 page in 20 for adverts.
"The Scarlet Pimpernel" might be $10 if printed without ads, but less if the buyer chooses that option. Amazon could advertise it's own related goods (perhaps a Hornblower video, to suggest something not directly related but close enough) and provide a discount voucher (with unique code) either per book printed or per advert.
Of course, some time soon, printing on demand will become efficient for individual books. If Amazon wants a slice of advertising in any of them, then a patent "works" - but as far as I can see it is a business method.
In short: if they want to put ads in books printed to demand to cut end-user costs, fine. If every left=even page had an ad and books were free, I'd love it. But patent? Printed media have sufficient prior art for advertising, tyvm.
Internet in the Netherlands is already taxed with 19% BTW (VAT, not quite sales tax), let alone all the other taxes - Water is taxed about 6 times if you count 'em all (at least the rate is 6% after drinking water, what a fucking great silver lining that is).
I can understand the concept of having certain taxes being related to usage - no road tax unless you own a car etc. - but in the Netherlands you pay anything up to 50%+ income tax (which has been pre-taxed by employer's tax), and THEN everything you want after that is taxed extra already.
If - as a nation - you have fucking (50%+) high income tax, then fucking budget it to cover basic needs, like sewers and roads. If you have fucking (19%) high sales tax (more for cigarettes), then fucking use it to cover whatever is being taxed.
I can even live with the idea that old media and new media are part of the same thing, and thus some of the sales taxes on the lot of them might be spent disproportionately on ailing media. But the real problem for the "quality" print media is that every station in the major cities has free print media, which readers can consume during a commute and typically leave on the seats of buses and trams everywhere.
metronieuws.nl and spitsnieuws.nl are getting sufficient print readers to encourage advertisers to read.
Fuck the Dutch and their fucking tax attitudes, though.
The problem with proofs has nothing to do with logic.
It is necessary to be able to understand proofs, but duplicating them under exam conditions means you have to memorize them by rote.
At a certain point (for me it was the Cambridge maths tripos part IB) you are going to get exposed to maths you have to do but don't fully understand.
People who can memorise the proofs but only understand them partially do better than people than those who understand the material better, but prefer to "solve a problem" and struggle to memorize a proof verbatim.
You have some insight, but not into how compilers work, nor how good programmers improve code. It has been a very long time since I wrote any C, but it was writing much of a (non-optimizing) C compiler. It must be said though that one reason I didn't finish it was looking at all the cool ways to optimise:)
If I were writing/designing a BIOS (which I must admit I am glad I am not) I would also pick C as the "best" language for the job. I'd then write the cleanest possible implementation of the design, using assembler only where absolutely necessary - which would likely be for platform dependent bits in >90% of the cases anyway.
The code need not be fast (as long as it performs), and it need not be tiny. But it needs to be 100% accurate, and sufficiently well documented to be easily readable.
By not using assembler, developer time until now has been relatively low. No premature optimisation has taken place. The next step is profiling, for which a benchmark suite is set up. This suite will ALSO be used to test that alternative implementations return the same results!
In parallel, the BIOS would be used in Virtual Machines; no ROMs need to be created, to get a good picture of how often various functions are called.
On the basis of this, it can be decided where to focus optimisation efforts. The historical target used to be primarily to get size down to 64k, since the 8088/6 booted to F000:FFF0. Assuming this is still a primary issue on many platforms, the first point of call for optimisation is to reduce any "big" functions - like those which use large (lookup) tables as their easiest/cleanest implementation (an obvious example might be the ascii characters in raster format).
Simply writing multiple versions of a routine in a HL language and then profiling may be enough to achieve the desired performance level (IIRC Jon Bentley wrote on this as one of his "Programming Pearls"), but even then an improvement may be possible by going right down to the silicon.
Admittedly it takes people like John Carmack and Michael Abrash to get everything out of it, but if everybody has a week to optimise a 20 line C "inner loop" function for speed, those who can read the produced assembler will do better than those who cannot, and those who can edit it will do even better.
Of course, over 20,000 lines of code, the C expert will manage better in a month, since rather than fixing 4 functions to perfection, they may be fixing 20 to 95%.
One final thing to note: optimising C compilers are known to have occasional bugs in their optimisation. When you are going to eventually write something to a (flash) ROM responsible for booting your computer, that is not an acceptable risk. That means that you don't want to rely purely on an optimising compiler to do your work for you.
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Capital, old chap!
(Capital P in Pound implies Stirling, since you didn't understand the first time. Nice try at covering up though!)
"conventional modes of democracy could be extinct within two decades"
At present "conventional democracy" has a vote every 4-5 years (perhaps with mid-term or local elections halfway) in which your bit of information (if that!) ends upo with a single bit of who leads for the next 4-5 years, during which politicians tend to drop their campaign promises.
Internet technology allows for finer-tuned democracy, yes, but if anything "election day" should be an annual day on which everybody does physically go to the polls and cast a secret ballot. Because although technology does allow secrecy (not necessary for all votes, but essential for some), the risk of back doors will always be greater than when a simpler and less technological procedure is used.
I'm in my forties now and want to be able to vote issues, not parties. I'd also like to be able to vote for individuals who have proven leadership qualities without them being beholden to a party. Not that I could vote Perot - being European - nor that I would want his finger on the button anymore than anybody else, and at least Obama comes across as somewhat statesmanlike even if his mantra of "Change" never really happened, but you should see the bunch of twits in Europe nowadays (on all sides of the political spectrum).
Almost as if we are forgetting what populism brought in the 1930s.
Hint: There is no amount of radiation that is "healthy" to be exposed to.
http://xkcd.com/radiation/
Oh dear, you actually do need a refresher course in mathematics.
What do you call an abelian group with an associative, distributive secondary operator and the power to corrupt mortals?
Answer here: http://www.irregularwebcomic.net/470.html
Apples and oranges are age 5 concepts of counting, at which point children aren't necessarily learning even to subtract yet. As a child I lived at #17, so #13 was two doors to the left, and #21 was two doors to the right. They were two doors away from my house, and from each other they were four doors! But my house was no doors from my house, it was (in more formal mathematical terms) O, the Origin, for me.
Next thing you will be telling me that Quaternions are a purely mathematical construct, with no physical analogue. Oh wait, how about Spacetime, you know, the natural universe we live in?
Now, defining Zero to be the equivalent of the empty set {} and then using the Peano axioms, THAT is a mathematical construct which can help us (mathematicians) to be rigorous (at least until Kurt F.ing Goedel comes along) without a direct physical analogue.
What confused you in your previous post is that the Romans had a perfectly good CONCEPT of zero (nullus) but lacked the notation for it, because they were (in CS terms) overloading their alphabet to do numbers too. Just as hexadecimal notitation does, feed face?
The reason that calculus is so common (not that I did it in my CS diploma, but then I have an M.A. in natural philosophy) a requirement is that Euler's formula brings together many of the (non-discrete) mathematical topics. I'm not sure to what degree (ha!) multiple differentiation (let alone integration) is relevant to a CS student, but a sound mathetical grounding is most certainly to be expected, just as biology and chemistry are to medical students, language to law and arts student, and ouija board usage to economists.
Furthermore, in a liberal (arts/science) degree, if you choose to be a science major of any kind, it would make sense that there is some sort of core curriculum which you are expected to be aware of at least, and where say a medical student might get away with slightly less on the maths front, I'd certainly hope they'd be able to understand that none/zero is one less than one in much the same way as one is one less than two.
Perhaps you are confused between ordinals and cardinals. It makes sense to say "I ate my first apple, then my second apple." It makes significantly less sense to then say "But before that, I ate my zeroth apple". If I have an apple, and you have an orange, then in the vector space of apples and oranges, I have (1, 0) and you have (0, 1). Those look remarkably different to me. However, if we both had 42 apples and 13 oranges, then the difference between our possessions would be NONE.
There's no ready analog (to zero) in the natural world.
None?
There'll be a Beowulf Cluster of these along soon!
2+2=4 is indeed a theorem of arithmetic, but it does not preclude it from being an axiom or the only member of a theory.
Ah, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. What are these "+", "2", "=" and "4" things?
Over ZZ3 (integers modulo 3), 2+2=1.
When you learned to count (pre-school) you were actually learning what mathematicians call the successor function, and although the concept of zero was hard to understand, not only in Roman times, but even in the early Renaissance, current the symbol "2" is defined to be the successor of the successor of "0", and "+" is defined as moving an s() from one side to the other until a "0" has been reached on one side, at which point it can be dropped. So "2+2" = s(s(0)) + s(s(0)) = s(s(s(0))) + s(0) = s(s(s(s(0)))) + 0 = "4". IIRC, 0 can be defined as {} the empty set, s(s(x)) as {{x} u s(x)} or summat like that (not being rigorous, just lazy).
Anyway, a theorem of set theory may turn out to be used as an axiom for arithmetic, and that in turn used as an axiom (or given) for say calculus. But that doesn't make "2+2=4" a theorem at any sensible level, not even a lemma, but rather the definition of the symbols being used.
It turns out that many of the axioms of used in mathematics correspond to our natural understanding at an early level, and that in physics somewhat weird axioms can predict actual results, as in relativity and QM. When counting sheep jumping fences, integer arithmetic is enough. When counting cats in boxes, it isn't.
Unfortunately,
Hey! Which side are you on?
and DOM, don't forget the DOM.
I've been trying to for years and then you mentioned it, you insensitive clod
All motherboards have em.
I scrolled down to see if there were any more relevant posts to reply to, but most of them also boasted about 80+ wpm.
I am by no means a touch typer, but I don't watch my keyboard either. So I correct a lot, and am about half your speed at best (say 50 wpm).
Still probably around 12 cps, but hitting Delete 3 times lowers the average, hehehe.
I still type faster than I can think, whether I am programming, translating, or writing for fun and pleasure. As the GP post said, any more is overkill for anything but data entry or transcribing.
As it happens, I didn't make many mistakes in the previous para, but I can regularly type stuff like: To be oare nto teo be, thatr ais the quzesition.
Thing is, when I'm typing text (using 9 fingers, not the right pinky for some reason, although I do sometimes use my left hand for control (thumb to C for copy, for example), I am aware of my mistakes and often want to change for other reasons anyway. And when programming, I want to type two or three letters and then code-complete.
My ThinkPad is dead you insensitive clod.
British mathematicians (from primary school to professor) place the decimal point not at the base, but half way up, at the same level as the minus sign, the space between the lines of an equal sign, or the intersection of the small "x" used as a multiplication sign.
This seriously confused an Italian boy who joined my school at age 14 and eventually was the other person from my year to go to Cambridge.
Unfortunately, despite his intelligence when he was first tested to see what group he should be in, he mistook the dot for a multiplication symbol. He'd been to American schools a lot, since his father was a diplomat. So he answered such simple questions as what is 1.2 + 3.4 (which should be 4.6) as 14 (1x2 + 3x4).
At least the GP understands that confusion is the issue. He is not 100% correct, but it isn't nonsense either.
Don't forget that not only written and spoken are important, but that the limitations of the ASCII/ANSI character set(s) mean that we use "full stops" rather than "points", and similarly combine multiplication into the asterisk.
Interestingly, the x87 FPU has instructions for loading and storing BCD values, but internally computes everything using binary arithmetic. That lets you combine the accuracy of binary floats with the storage efficiency of BCD. To my knowledge, no one has ever wanted to do that.
That isn't very interesting, since it is the x86 (not the maths coprocessor) which has opcodes such as AAA and (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_BCD_opcodes). The accuracy is the same, the performance of arithmetic operations is worse, but the important advantage of BCD on old architectures - including even the 4.77 MHz 8088 - is that they only had at best 16-bit registers, so the most you could represent unsigned was $655.35 (more than enough for anybody). Allowing a packed byte for the cents, and another for ones and tens, etc, may not have been the computationally most efficient, but without an '87, it was better than strings!
There is an urban legend that unified Cameroon (French/British) did trucks one month, and cars the next.
I'm pretty sure it was a joke, but my grandfather (who died in '76) did work there at the time it would have happened.
As Roger Needham quipped, Multics was design for the real-time processes of geological processes.
I'm still waiting for the pun.
I wouldn't be surprised if I had said syndrome, and I certainly have peeped with discontent often enough, but only at incompetent management.
But I'm going to disagree with both "maturity" and "creativity", although I'll stick fairly close to the latter.
Rather than maturity, what is important is the competence to be able to make a good estimate about when something will be finished (including documentation). Unfortunately the vast majority (80%+) of programmers aren't very good programmers when working in teams. I'll get back to that in a bit.
And rather than creativity, I find imagination, lateral thinking and problem solving in particular, to be more important. A similar 80%+ majority of programmers who's work I've had the pleasure to maintain are extremely creative in using the wrong tool for the job, etc. Again, competence is most important.
I'm going to make it more personal now: I'm unemployed and haven't worked with Delphi for more than 5 years professionally. Unfortunately that's where I put all my eggs. Although after 2020 I'll probably be able to find some maintenance work (just as the COBOL guys did in 1999, hehe), I'd like to be developing new stuff again. I had one agency who I had worked through to mutual profit regularly in the past, only for the incompetent agent to - after saying I couldn't get the job because my French wasn't good enough reversing that when I wrote her in French - then tell me I couldn't get the job because my Delphi experience wasn't recent enough DESPITE the version being asked for (5) being 2 years prior to the end of my professional usage (7), and this being clearly visible on my CV.
Somewhat ironically, for my very first Delphi job opportunity, when I'd waited for 32-bit Delphi (2), the job agency (a temping one back then) had been asked for someone with 5 years Delphi experience, so I didn't get that job either. My 10 years (at the time) Pascal experience counted for nothing, and I sometimes wonder if they ever found a bullshitter who claimed 5 years experience with a product which had existed for only a year. Competence.
The reason I stopped developing was stress-related. I was working for a seemingly friendly guy on a niche product (version 5) of which the source to version 4 had been lost. This was at half my usual rate, but with the understanding I might take the company over when he retired. I told him up front that although I am an excellent developer and test my own code, if I were to develop from scratch I needed a tester, and since he was the only other person, that meant him. The first thing I didn't know is that he was supremely competent at the art of fine bullshit, and for the first six months I hammered out functionality at an extremely fast pace, while he supposedly tested it. Actually, he only did so cursorily, and instead spent most of his time fighting the tax man on his evasion and bullshitting customers into upgrading to the new (as yet non-existent) product. But the second thing I didn't know is that he actually had a demo CD of a competing product, which I tested on a lazy day in summer to see what the opposition was up to. And this may be why this post gets moderated funny: the opposition were on version 3.0 of their product, and not only had a development team of about 100 for this product alone (recall we were about 1.1), but their functionality and data were both at least an order of magnitude higher, and similarly the price was an order of magnitude lower. Not only that, but their budget was, on researching, discovered to be 9 figures. Yes, that's a hundred million dollars. The only bright side is that presumably they used their own tools to develop this competing program. The name of their tools probably started with the word "Visual". Yeah. Laugh with me or cry for me ;)
But let me return to what is important: competence. I know what I'm competent at. I also know what I'm incompetent at, although I've learned the hard way. Note that competence is unrelated to brilliance: I've met many comp
Seriously, it's pretty fucking hard to get that kind of tax system going without a civilization! You need a whole city full of accountants... barbarians could never manage that.
Bernard Madoff (Great Merchant) has been born in New York (Dubya).
Backup your internal HDD to an external one, and if your data is really important, have two externals and swap one off-site once a week. Is there any better advice these days?"
There isn't any better advice, but you ALWAYS have "really important" data.
The most likely things you are going to want to back up are documents and spreadsheets, pictures, videos and of course code. If you can't afford more than one external drive, or even don't want to spend anything at all, the big G (yeah, I'm a fanboy, but there are probably equivalent options) provides help. Google Docs for the first two: search for "google docs synch" and the first option is freeware (not that I've used it - nowadays I just use Docs itself). Picasa allows you to keep pictures unpublished, not so sure about youtube etc. And code you can mail to yourself, (g)zipped, although it might be on your home test/dev machine and also on your commercial web server.
That aside, isn't this patent a good thing? It means that only Amazon's products will be crippled with advertising inserted in this manner.
Patents get licensed. In terms of your description, $10 product would get sold for $6 by other publishers - $5 "up front" and $1 to cover the patent royalty.
Amazon has an interesting self-publishing business (forget what it is called and I'm certainly not going to advertise for them), but I can imagine them offering trade-quality books which aren't otherwise available (out of copyright, let alone print) at a discount if they can use 1 page in 20 for adverts.
"The Scarlet Pimpernel" might be $10 if printed without ads, but less if the buyer chooses that option. Amazon could advertise it's own related goods (perhaps a Hornblower video, to suggest something not directly related but close enough) and provide a discount voucher (with unique code) either per book printed or per advert.
Of course, some time soon, printing on demand will become efficient for individual books. If Amazon wants a slice of advertising in any of them, then a patent "works" - but as far as I can see it is a business method.
In short: if they want to put ads in books printed to demand to cut end-user costs, fine. If every left=even page had an ad and books were free, I'd love it. But patent? Printed media have sufficient prior art for advertising, tyvm.
Internet in the Netherlands is already taxed with 19% BTW (VAT, not quite sales tax), let alone all the other taxes - Water is taxed about 6 times if you count 'em all (at least the rate is 6% after drinking water, what a fucking great silver lining that is).
I can understand the concept of having certain taxes being related to usage - no road tax unless you own a car etc. - but in the Netherlands you pay anything up to 50%+ income tax (which has been pre-taxed by employer's tax), and THEN everything you want after that is taxed extra already.
If - as a nation - you have fucking (50%+) high income tax, then fucking budget it to cover basic needs, like sewers and roads. If you have fucking (19%) high sales tax (more for cigarettes), then fucking use it to cover whatever is being taxed.
I can even live with the idea that old media and new media are part of the same thing, and thus some of the sales taxes on the lot of them might be spent disproportionately on ailing media. But the real problem for the "quality" print media is that every station in the major cities has free print media, which readers can consume during a commute and typically leave on the seats of buses and trams everywhere.
metronieuws.nl and spitsnieuws.nl are getting sufficient print readers to encourage advertisers to read.
Fuck the Dutch and their fucking tax attitudes, though.
The problem with proofs has nothing to do with logic.
It is necessary to be able to understand proofs, but duplicating them under exam conditions means you have to memorize them by rote.
At a certain point (for me it was the Cambridge maths tripos part IB) you are going to get exposed to maths you have to do but don't fully understand.
People who can memorise the proofs but only understand them partially do better than people than those who understand the material better, but prefer to "solve a problem" and struggle to memorize a proof verbatim.
"... and lower than all but three Asian countries (Japan, Australia, and New Zealand)"
I read the fine article, but not the whole report. Wondering where this came from!
You have some insight, but not into how compilers work, nor how good programmers improve code. It has been a very long time since I wrote any C, but it was writing much of a (non-optimizing) C compiler. It must be said though that one reason I didn't finish it was looking at all the cool ways to optimise :)
If I were writing/designing a BIOS (which I must admit I am glad I am not) I would also pick C as the "best" language for the job. I'd then write the cleanest possible implementation of the design, using assembler only where absolutely necessary - which would likely be for platform dependent bits in >90% of the cases anyway.
The code need not be fast (as long as it performs), and it need not be tiny. But it needs to be 100% accurate, and sufficiently well documented to be easily readable.
By not using assembler, developer time until now has been relatively low. No premature optimisation has taken place. The next step is profiling, for which a benchmark suite is set up. This suite will ALSO be used to test that alternative implementations return the same results!
In parallel, the BIOS would be used in Virtual Machines; no ROMs need to be created, to get a good picture of how often various functions are called.
On the basis of this, it can be decided where to focus optimisation efforts. The historical target used to be primarily to get size down to 64k, since the 8088/6 booted to F000:FFF0. Assuming this is still a primary issue on many platforms, the first point of call for optimisation is to reduce any "big" functions - like those which use large (lookup) tables as their easiest/cleanest implementation (an obvious example might be the ascii characters in raster format).
Simply writing multiple versions of a routine in a HL language and then profiling may be enough to achieve the desired performance level (IIRC Jon Bentley wrote on this as one of his "Programming Pearls"), but even then an improvement may be possible by going right down to the silicon.
Admittedly it takes people like John Carmack and Michael Abrash to get everything out of it, but if everybody has a week to optimise a 20 line C "inner loop" function for speed, those who can read the produced assembler will do better than those who cannot, and those who can edit it will do even better.
Of course, over 20,000 lines of code, the C expert will manage better in a month, since rather than fixing 4 functions to perfection, they may be fixing 20 to 95%.
One final thing to note: optimising C compilers are known to have occasional bugs in their optimisation. When you are going to eventually write something to a (flash) ROM responsible for booting your computer, that is not an acceptable risk. That means that you don't want to rely purely on an optimising compiler to do your work for you.