Overly simplistic.
Both the tools and the products are more complex, but the increase in complexity of the former is lower than the increase in complexity of the latter.
Mod parent up please--compared to most of the other posts here, this is actually a valid criticism.
I think a partial justification here is whole-program optimization/link-time code generation which can span multiple object files and is necessarily compiler specific.
This can go either way. I've interviewed people who, when asked to write a test program, produced a C program disguised as C++--with all the old-fashioned C crap like variables declared at the top of the function etc.
Taking the "syntactic sugar" argument to its conclusion, everything above machine language is syntactic sugar. Accomplish the same task you can already do with an older standard? You can accomplish the same task with any turing-complete language. Such as assembly. Basically, your argument fails a pretty basic sanity check because, by extension, it implies that punched cards are as good as a high-level language.
Indeed, C++ is just as easy as C to use for low-level programming, as not only do you have the option of inline assembly which mixes easily with the rest of your code, but you even rarely need to resort to it as in the major compilers (MSVC, gcc, Intel C++) there is a plethora of compiler intrinsics which almost directly map to assembly instructions while providing a type-safe interface. It's quite easy to write synchronization primitives, for example, using interlocked operation intrinsics--while the same have a nice object-oriented interface.
Just because C++ is large and has a multitude of features in no way implies that you need to try to use all of these features. You might as well complain that the library has too many books! It's ultimately a matter of programmer discipline; stop shifting the blame.
So let's see--you basically wrote that high level programming is confusing compared to assembly.
Well yes, primitive operations like mov and sub and push are indeed quite trivial to reason about compared to multiple inheritance and template metaprogramming. So? Flying to the moon is more complicated than driving to the local Walmart as well--it doesn't make it any less worthy.
I wrote C for about 5 years and then switched to C++ with which I've stuck for the last dozen years. With that perspective, the article you linked to is such a lousy attempt at humor that it made me cringe. C++ has, like many other large entities with significant history, become a bit messy due to the need for legacy support given its huge installed base. This does not mean that you cannot write neat programs with it! It's easy to blame the language instead of the software developer. It is just a matter of a bit of attention and discipline to do great stuff with C++ even while using what some may refer to its more esoteric features like template metaprogramming etc. I could never give up things like multiple inheritance, which may require a bit of care during usage, but I've found to be the way to go in many situations. The majority of the C++0x additions are very welcome as well. What's really needed is a completely modern reference text that minimizes time spent on legacy issues. It's basically the same situation with OpenGL, which has become much larger in the 3.x and 4.x versions, while still supporting all the legacy code--and there is no proper reference so one usually sees a messy mix of 2.x and 3/4.x in most current projects, rather than a clean, organized design following the most recent variant. A proper text (other than the standards document itself) would make a huge difference.
Sometimes the listed difficult personalities can be tempered by the character traits of other team members. I'm a bit of the Heretic, but that's balanced out by my boss' unbridled optimism, something I expected would simply annoy me, yet it has become strangely infectious.
Note where I wrote "blind listening tests". That is what placebo is there to account for. That THD does not in general correlate with perception of distortion has been published in papers in the Journal of the Audio Engineering Society, which is the audio engineering equivalent of the IEEE.
The primary differences are that there is no central bank that can print more money on a whim
Thus giving up the primary means of governmental macroeconomic control. Supporting this is akin to supporting extremist libertarianism or anarchy. Come on, you don't have to be Paul Krugman to believe that government should be able to do at least some monetary interventions.
I built an analog PID temperature controller for my espresso machine (as every coffee geek knows, grouphead temperature variation over about a degree C during the ~25 s extraction noticeably affects the taste). It's one of the rare cases I use opamps. The analog part of all my audio projects always uses transistors or tubes, as chip amps have the problem of thermal variation in the latter stages affecting the input stages which are in the same thermal package. This doesn't show up in a steady signal harmonic distortion measurement but there are specific tests for it. Plus, you can't really experiment with new topologies when you use an IC.
Anyway, as a software developer in my day job, I find it a great thing to do analog in my hobby, as it adds a sort of Zen balance. I do now some digital in audio as well, but more out of necessity due to my dissatisfaction with the performance of current digital-analog converters. There is an interesting interplay between the two, though, as well as between electronics in general and the neuropsychology of human hearing which makes perception of distortion poorly correlated with typical engineering metrics such as THD in blind listening tests. 2nd harmonic is inaudible to as much as 1% for most people, for example, while some higher than 3rd harmonics and other distortions suchas crossover (class B or AB amps) and amplitude-to-frequency modulation effects which though tiny occur in many amplifiers, are audible at as little as several ppm (a healthy ear has a 120 dB dynamic range)
The holographic principle and the Bekenstein bound show the opposite is the case and the world, including any analog quantity or signal, does not have arbitrary precision. The Planck scale means that spacetime itself is not infinitely differentiable. Your satatement has been knowably wrong since QM was discovered.
Wrong: sailing boats require crosswind to do this and cannot outrun the wind directly downwind. This cart can, however. It goes faster than the wind _directly_ downwind, and that is completely new. It is possible because of the mechanical advantage of the gearing between the wheels and propeller (a sail is only 1:1).
This is why Tesla coils seem a lousy way to get high voltage. I've bought not-too-large 250 kV transformers from industrial portable X-ray machine power supply on eBay previously and you can chain a few together (in an oil tank, of course) to get in the megavolt range--at significantly higher _continuous_ power levels than with a Tesla coil of the same size. TCs are way oversized for what they accomplish.
Uh, first of all, alumina is not toxic to humans as it's quite an inert material (as are many other inorganic oxides in general). It's only dangerous in physical terms if you inhale a quantity of very fine powder. Second, you don't need induction heating to be amazed by steel wool. If you spread it out (reduce the density so it has lots of air within its volume) it is fairly easy to light with a torch and it looks a bit like fireworks.
The US has significant amount of rare earth metal deposits, but it has little currently developed mining infrastructure. This is because of significant health hazard issues, and because of economic reasons (importing them from China has been cheaper). As the need arises, mining for rare earths in the US will resume in full force.
It would not bother me if the end result is a healthy human and a healthy colony of bacteria, but the healthy human cannot be guaranteed because relying on the bacteria, a genetically unstable and easily disturbed (with negative consequences for the host) collection, is basically rolling a dice. It is accepting uncertainty instead of finding ways to reach a state where the health is assured by dependency solely upon artifacts with clear and direct human control--chemicals etc. Life and evolution is fickle, and more so in the case of microflora. Not continuing progress in relieving our dependency upon it is irresponsible.
From my point of view, the defining feature of a machine is that it is describable by a computable model. There is a well known discovery in physics, the Bekenstein bound, which says that there is a finite number of distinguishable quantum states that can be within a region of space with a finite surface area. This means that the universe has only countable infinities, and arbitrary real numbers have no possible physical representation. It also means that any finite physical entity can be represented exactly by a computational model. So in fact, we are very much like machines in the sense that in theory our function can be equated to a sufficiently complex mathematical model. While we are not as well-understood now as needed in no way means we won't be in the future. The understanding is constantly improving with every advance of physiology and molecular biology.
I never made any deal with any microflora. Happenstance did, but there's no reason not to opt out when we have the ability to do so--and there is, I repeat, no theoretical reason why we won't be able to do so. My problem here is that the article and other such writings take the lazy way out, giving up in the face of complexity rather than continuing work in how to fully disentangle ourselves from organisms whose evolutionary drive only sometimes overlaps with ours, and thus we remain dependent on a dice that often rolls not in our favor.
Can someone comment on the comparative efficiencies of photovoltaic and solar thermal sources of energy? How much better is this really than using thermal-driven evaporative desalination? I mean, other than lacking in the "new and cool" factor
Slashdot Mirror
Regarding your signature: why would a nation worry about "debt" enumerated in a currency of which it is the monopoly issuer? Krugman is right.
Overly simplistic.
Both the tools and the products are more complex, but the increase in complexity of the former is lower than the increase in complexity of the latter.
Mod parent up please--compared to most of the other posts here, this is actually a valid criticism. I think a partial justification here is whole-program optimization/link-time code generation which can span multiple object files and is necessarily compiler specific.
I often wish Slashdot had an option whereby one could hide all posts moderated as 'Funny'--after all, it's Slashdotters making a judgment of humor...
This can go either way. I've interviewed people who, when asked to write a test program, produced a C program disguised as C++--with all the old-fashioned C crap like variables declared at the top of the function etc.
Taking the "syntactic sugar" argument to its conclusion, everything above machine language is syntactic sugar. Accomplish the same task you can already do with an older standard? You can accomplish the same task with any turing-complete language. Such as assembly. Basically, your argument fails a pretty basic sanity check because, by extension, it implies that punched cards are as good as a high-level language.
Indeed, C++ is just as easy as C to use for low-level programming, as not only do you have the option of inline assembly which mixes easily with the rest of your code, but you even rarely need to resort to it as in the major compilers (MSVC, gcc, Intel C++) there is a plethora of compiler intrinsics which almost directly map to assembly instructions while providing a type-safe interface. It's quite easy to write synchronization primitives, for example, using interlocked operation intrinsics--while the same have a nice object-oriented interface. Just because C++ is large and has a multitude of features in no way implies that you need to try to use all of these features. You might as well complain that the library has too many books! It's ultimately a matter of programmer discipline; stop shifting the blame.
So let's see--you basically wrote that high level programming is confusing compared to assembly. Well yes, primitive operations like mov and sub and push are indeed quite trivial to reason about compared to multiple inheritance and template metaprogramming. So? Flying to the moon is more complicated than driving to the local Walmart as well--it doesn't make it any less worthy.
I wrote C for about 5 years and then switched to C++ with which I've stuck for the last dozen years. With that perspective, the article you linked to is such a lousy attempt at humor that it made me cringe. C++ has, like many other large entities with significant history, become a bit messy due to the need for legacy support given its huge installed base. This does not mean that you cannot write neat programs with it! It's easy to blame the language instead of the software developer. It is just a matter of a bit of attention and discipline to do great stuff with C++ even while using what some may refer to its more esoteric features like template metaprogramming etc. I could never give up things like multiple inheritance, which may require a bit of care during usage, but I've found to be the way to go in many situations. The majority of the C++0x additions are very welcome as well. What's really needed is a completely modern reference text that minimizes time spent on legacy issues. It's basically the same situation with OpenGL, which has become much larger in the 3.x and 4.x versions, while still supporting all the legacy code--and there is no proper reference so one usually sees a messy mix of 2.x and 3/4.x in most current projects, rather than a clean, organized design following the most recent variant. A proper text (other than the standards document itself) would make a huge difference.
Problem is, this hypothesis may be nondisprovable.
Popper's turning in his grave.
Sometimes the listed difficult personalities can be tempered by the character traits of other team members. I'm a bit of the Heretic, but that's balanced out by my boss' unbridled optimism, something I expected would simply annoy me, yet it has become strangely infectious.
Note where I wrote "blind listening tests". That is what placebo is there to account for. That THD does not in general correlate with perception of distortion has been published in papers in the Journal of the Audio Engineering Society, which is the audio engineering equivalent of the IEEE.
The primary differences are that there is no central bank that can print more money on a whim
Thus giving up the primary means of governmental macroeconomic control. Supporting this is akin to supporting extremist libertarianism or anarchy.
Come on, you don't have to be Paul Krugman to believe that government should be able to do at least some monetary interventions.
I built an analog PID temperature controller for my espresso machine (as every coffee geek knows, grouphead temperature variation over about a degree C during the ~25 s extraction noticeably affects the taste). It's one of the rare cases I use opamps. The analog part of all my audio projects always uses transistors or tubes, as chip amps have the problem of thermal variation in the latter stages affecting the input stages which are in the same thermal package. This doesn't show up in a steady signal harmonic distortion measurement but there are specific tests for it. Plus, you can't really experiment with new topologies when you use an IC. Anyway, as a software developer in my day job, I find it a great thing to do analog in my hobby, as it adds a sort of Zen balance. I do now some digital in audio as well, but more out of necessity due to my dissatisfaction with the performance of current digital-analog converters. There is an interesting interplay between the two, though, as well as between electronics in general and the neuropsychology of human hearing which makes perception of distortion poorly correlated with typical engineering metrics such as THD in blind listening tests. 2nd harmonic is inaudible to as much as 1% for most people, for example, while some higher than 3rd harmonics and other distortions suchas crossover (class B or AB amps) and amplitude-to-frequency modulation effects which though tiny occur in many amplifiers, are audible at as little as several ppm (a healthy ear has a 120 dB dynamic range)
The holographic principle and the Bekenstein bound show the opposite is the case and the world, including any analog quantity or signal, does not have arbitrary precision. The Planck scale means that spacetime itself is not infinitely differentiable. Your satatement has been knowably wrong since QM was discovered.
One great tool against this problem is raising the estate tax.
which other free AV is good? How does Antivir compare to AVG?
Wrong: sailing boats require crosswind to do this and cannot outrun the wind directly downwind. This cart can, however. It goes faster than the wind _directly_ downwind, and that is completely new. It is possible because of the mechanical advantage of the gearing between the wheels and propeller (a sail is only 1:1).
This is why Tesla coils seem a lousy way to get high voltage. I've bought not-too-large 250 kV transformers from industrial portable X-ray machine power supply on eBay previously and you can chain a few together (in an oil tank, of course) to get in the megavolt range--at significantly higher _continuous_ power levels than with a Tesla coil of the same size. TCs are way oversized for what they accomplish.
Uh, first of all, alumina is not toxic to humans as it's quite an inert material (as are many other inorganic oxides in general). It's only dangerous in physical terms if you inhale a quantity of very fine powder. Second, you don't need induction heating to be amazed by steel wool. If you spread it out (reduce the density so it has lots of air within its volume) it is fairly easy to light with a torch and it looks a bit like fireworks.
The US has significant amount of rare earth metal deposits, but it has little currently developed mining infrastructure. This is because of significant health hazard issues, and because of economic reasons (importing them from China has been cheaper). As the need arises, mining for rare earths in the US will resume in full force.
It would not bother me if the end result is a healthy human and a healthy colony of bacteria, but the healthy human cannot be guaranteed because relying on the bacteria, a genetically unstable and easily disturbed (with negative consequences for the host) collection, is basically rolling a dice. It is accepting uncertainty instead of finding ways to reach a state where the health is assured by dependency solely upon artifacts with clear and direct human control--chemicals etc. Life and evolution is fickle, and more so in the case of microflora. Not continuing progress in relieving our dependency upon it is irresponsible.
From my point of view, the defining feature of a machine is that it is describable by a computable model. There is a well known discovery in physics, the Bekenstein bound, which says that there is a finite number of distinguishable quantum states that can be within a region of space with a finite surface area. This means that the universe has only countable infinities, and arbitrary real numbers have no possible physical representation. It also means that any finite physical entity can be represented exactly by a computational model. So in fact, we are very much like machines in the sense that in theory our function can be equated to a sufficiently complex mathematical model. While we are not as well-understood now as needed in no way means we won't be in the future. The understanding is constantly improving with every advance of physiology and molecular biology.
I never made any deal with any microflora. Happenstance did, but there's no reason not to opt out when we have the ability to do so--and there is, I repeat, no theoretical reason why we won't be able to do so. My problem here is that the article and other such writings take the lazy way out, giving up in the face of complexity rather than continuing work in how to fully disentangle ourselves from organisms whose evolutionary drive only sometimes overlaps with ours, and thus we remain dependent on a dice that often rolls not in our favor.
For example, vs approaches such as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_humidification
Can someone comment on the comparative efficiencies of photovoltaic and solar thermal sources of energy? How much better is this really than using thermal-driven evaporative desalination? I mean, other than lacking in the "new and cool" factor