Maybe the real problem here is people who assume that because only a couple of close friends talk to them about their blog, that they are the only people who read it. Or, more importantly, the only people who can read it.
Whether it feels so or not, a blog is public. Anyone can read it. That includes your boss, your MD, your legal department, your colleagues, your parents, your partner -- in short, any and all of the people you criticise, insult, or slander. If you wouldn't wish any of those people to read it, then don't put it on your blog. D'oh...
Okay, maybe I wasn't careful enough. I didn't really mean to suggest that there's no merit in the sort of TV shows we've been discussing. (A large swathe of people clearly seem to disagree!) As you say, such things are highly subjective.
I was really complaining about terminology. Lots of things get called 'science fiction', but they don't all mean the same thing by it. (Nor do they all equally deserve it.) Calling, oh, I dunno, Pink Floyd's music 'blues' for example is (apart from a couple of songs) highly inaccurate, and though both the band and the genre deserve lots of respect, it would do neither of them any favours. In the same way, I don't think calling a soap opera that's set in space 'science fiction' does either genre any favours.
The point is: people whose only experience of 'science fiction' is on the TV or at the cinema might be surprised by what goes under that name in other media; and many of those might enjoy it. So I'd recommend checking it out!
Just what I was going to say! Maybe the story should have been called 'Can Fans of TV Sci-Fi Face The Future?' (To which the obvious answer is 'Does It Matter?')
I for one am getting fed up with people equating the sort of bad space opera, alien-of-the-week stories, soap opera, and space-bound military action that we see on TV with real, hard-edged, thought-provoking, intelligent ideas-based science fiction of the sort that we see in books and especially in the 'pulp' magazines where it all started and where real talent and real ideas are still being fostered. (Personally, I prefer the short story format, as that tends to concentrate on the ideas and deliver them with real punch.)
Even in Star Trek at its best, I'd only count some of the episodes as real science fiction. (To be fair, while some of those ones were great, some weren't; and some of the non-SF ones were very good.) But none of the 'SF' programmes on (terrestrial UK) TV at the moment interest me at all.
Science fiction isn't necessarily about space, time travel, cosmology, particle physics, parallel universes, alien races, or robots -- though there've been wonderful stories about all of those. And it certainly doesn't need to involve space ships or laser pistols, despite the many films and TV series which seem to think it does. It's about ideas. It's about asking 'What if...?' It looks at the universe and says 'Why not...?' Or even 'Unless...'
To take two film examples, I consider The Truman Show to be better science fiction than Minority Report. The latter certainly looked the part, had all the trappings, and got right up to asking some really interesting and fundamental questions; but then pulled back from them and decided to be a bog-standard action film in the end. Whereas the former dared to take a Big Idea and actually explore the consequences.
So what I'd personally like to see is a science fiction TV show that's not even called science fiction, that the fans of what currently passes under that name won't notice or be interested in. I don't know if the cancellation of Enterprise will make that more likely, but it probably can't hurt...
With physical inventions, patents do what you suggest: they protect the little guy. Big companies have the resources to mass-produce products, resources that the little guy simply doesn't have. So there's a very real risk of a big company copying your invention and outproducing you; patents are arguably necessary to prevent this.
Things are different with software. Firstly, you don't need vast resources to mass-produce software. A web site is about all you need; and reasonable servers and bandwidth are within almost everyone's reach these days.
Secondly, there's already something preventing a big company from copying your work and selling it as their own: copyright.
So patents don't work for the little guy in the same way (even when they're working as designed, which they don't seem to be). What do they do for him? Why do you have them? Beats me.
...that the problems start the moment you start calling something a 'methodology'?
My experience here is limited; I've never done any proper XP or similar. But I've read quite a bit about those sorts of development practices, and used a few others (all the way back to Jackson Structured Programming), so I hope my intuition isn't completely out here.
My feeling is that just about all of these practices work much better as tools and tactics, to be chosen from and used where you feel they work and then dropped, rather than as part of a rigid methodology.
Management tends to want to treat development as a predictable, join-the-dots process -- and many methodologies seem to reduce it to that. But they don't! They just hide the creativity and unpredictability where it can't be seen. IME, a rigid methodology just gets in the way of good developers, and gives the bad ones something to blame...
So use some of these techniques and ideas, by all means: it looks like they can work very well. But don't treat them as the be-all and end-all of development. There's always a need for creativity and good judgement.
A mildly recent (Dec. 2003) article showing that Chocolate consumption was tops among the Brittish in Europe (at 10 kilos per annum per capita).
Well, I can understand that. I've tasted American 'chocolate':-p Whereas we have Cadbury's!
But yes, regardless of which country is the worst offender, most Western developed countries have a largeish intake of processed sugars, and in many opinions this is a greater and wider health worry than the intake of fat that's been so vilified over the last few decades.
BTW, does the report you mention include sources of sugar such as glucose syrup, corn syrup, invert syrup &c? (It's amazing how well sugar can be hidden in ingredients lists...)
Okay, this is silly, and may well not be worth taking at face value.
But it does raise some interesting questions. For example, the world currently pays a lot for (voice) telephone service; some places more than others, of course, but there's still a lot of revenue there.
What if all that traffic were to move over to IP? Lots of revenue lost, of course, but would the Internet cope at reasonable quality? Would it need lots more infrastructure to handle the extra traffic? If so, how does that get built and who pays? What business model should be used?
I've never used VoIP, and I don't pretend to have any answers. But just because we can now route the occasional call over the net satisfactorily and more cheaply doesn't necessarily mean what we can scale that up to the point of transferring our entire voice traffic to it.
Does anyone have any real information about these issues?
Sounds like what you hate isn't mobile phones, it's rudeness.
It's perfectly possible to use a mobile phone in a polite fashion. I try to. But a huge number of people don't, and give us all a bad name.
For example, YOU DON'T NEED TO ANSWER YOUR MOBILE EVERY TIME IT RINGS. There are times when I'm busy and decide not to take the call. I'm sure the caller would understand (just as I understand when positions are reversed). I can see who the caller was, so I can decide whether the call is likely to be urgent; I can then call them back later when it's convenient. If the message is really urgent, they can send me a text message, which I'm much more likely to read immediately.
Similarly: you don't need to have a stupid annoying beepy ringtone that starts at earsplitting volume. Vibrating alerts, progressive ringtones and plain non-tune ringtones are generally much less intrusive. Especially if you carry your phone where you can get to it in under 3 minutes.
And: you don't need to shout into a mobile that's right next to your ear. If your caller can't hear you, they'll generally tell you to speak up. But they won't tell you to speak down; you have to think to do that.
In short, if it's people's rudeness that annoys you (as it does me), then complain about that. Directly. To people's faces. Politely if possible (otherwise you're descending to their level), but don't suffer in silence, otherwise they won't learn.
And if you have a mobile phone, please use it politely! Remember: it's just a tool. You're its user, not its slave.
It amazes me how much they've developed. Problem: silly beepy tunes are annoying. Solution: a choice of more beepy tunes! Louder beepy tunes!! Polyphonic beepy tunes!!! Make up your own beepy tunes!!!!
[fx: sigh]
What makes it even more frustrating is that there must be whole classes of ringtones that are more distinctive (which is what the users want) and less annoying/intrusive (which is what everyone else wants). Sampled sounds, for instance. (After all, if phones have the processing power to generate polyphonic music from MIDI files, then they must be able to play 8-bit samples...)
I've tried a few, not on my phone, but as alarm sounds on my pocket computer. And I've found lots of sounds that are highly recognisable and distinctive and yet very unobtrusive. A genuine old-style phone ring works well (either the really old bell type, or the trimphone beeps), as do very short sound effects such as laser bursts, door squeaks, pings, buzzers, whistles, very short fanfares or chimes, harp strums, &c. Even very recognisable sounds such as the Homer Simpson 'D'oh!' or the Hitchhiker's Guide turn-on sound work well.
The single best alarm sound I found, though, was embarrassingly geeky: the Captain Kirk communicator chirp. It's extremely short, extremely easy to hear (cuts through all sorts of noise even when very quiet), and yet doesn't bother anyone; most people aren't even aware of it.
The knack with all of these sounds is that they're very short, repeat only after a long interval (30 seconds on my pocket computer, which would translate to maybe 5-10 seconds on a phone), and start quietly, getting a little louder with each repetition. Along with a vibrating alert, that should be plenty for alerting the user, without being too disruptive.
None of this is rocket science; even my many-year-old phone should be capable of this, so all the new whizz-bang phones should be able to do all this and more. But instead, we just get more, louder, and more complex beepy tunes...
Well, sugar consumption is certainly high here, maybe higher than most other European countries, but I was under the vague impression that it was even higher in the USA? (None taken, and none intended neither!) Certainly, when I've visited, I found that more things tasted sweeter and seemed to have more high-fructose corn syrup than I was used to.
There are strong arguments linking processed sugar consumption with obesity, diabetes, tooth decay, and many other health problems, and once you start looking, it's amazing how much of it there is in many processed foods and drinks these days...
So don't buy it. There is plenty of good music from independant labels, and many smaller bands give their stuff away for free on the internet.
That's a great idea generally, but it's not a solution. Sugar is sugar; whether it's granulated or caster or whatever, and whoever supplied it, it has pretty much the same effect. You wouldn't complain because someone put the wrong sort of sugar in your tea, would you?
Music's different. People don't want some music, they want some specific music. Okay, much of the time their decisions are driven by marketing, familiarity, and comfort more than by quality, originality and skill, but either way music is not a commodity in that sense.
an analogy to drug cartels doesn't make it right to steal drugs.
Erm, I never mentioned drugs! I just mentioned sugar. (Though I'd be prepared to argue that processed sugar has drug-like qualities for many people living in the Western world...)
And I'm not advocating stealing. I just think that we might want to reconsider what we define as 'stealing' in this context. Until then, the law is the the law and breaking it is by definition illegal. But laws are not immutable...
Take a commodity: sugar, say. If I sell sugar, I can do so for any price I wish. I can also sell sugar of any type or condition, provided that a) it's safe for human consumption, and b) I'm honest about what's in it. I can choose to sell for a ludicrously high price, but that's okay because someone else down the road can sell for a lower price, and unless I can provide people with a genuine reason for preferring mine, they'll buy his. So it's a free market; it tends to regulate itself.
Music isn't like that, though. If I want to buy a track from an RIAA artist (legally, in my country), then I have to buy from an RIAA-approved source. I can't go and get the same track from another source. So it's not a free market in the same sense; it's more like a cartel. Under those conditions, maybe it's not quite so just for the cartel to choose whatever price it likes?
Music is also different in another major way, as discussed in other comments: if I steal some sugar, then not only do I get to have it, I'm depriving the original owner. But if I copy music, although I get the benefit, the original owner doesn't lose anything. So copying music is only like theft of physical objects in some ways; in others, it's different.
These two reasons make me think that although music copying is wrong according to the law, it's not a wrong of the same type as physical theft. And maybe it's a wrong we need to reconsider.
Well, speaking as a non-USian, all that fits my impressions very well. But what I find even more revealing is your tacit equation of a body part with sexual activity.
The Janet Jackson incident wasn't showing people having sex. It wasn't showing sexual activity of any kind. It arguably wasn't even showing any sexual organs! All it showed was most of one breast (with the nipple covered IIRC). And I really don't understand the fuss it caused.
I'm not saying that women get their tits out all the time over here on BBC TV, of course. If they did, it might be considered unprofessional, sleazy perhaps, maybe mildly reprehensible, but hardly the focus of a national scandal.
Are USians so sex-starved that even a glimpse of part of a breast sends them into a frenzy of sexual excitement?
Maybe they should resort to covering their women up, like they do in certain other countries...
While I agree with all the posts saying that it's probably down to the human propensity for finding patterns even when there's no underlying cause, and that it's unlikely in the extreme that Apple is doing anything underhand, I think there's another point that people are missing.
People don't want true randomness. If the machine picked each song to play randomly and independently, then it might play the same song twice in a row; and it might never play a song.
Instead, what people seem to want is to hear all of their music, in an unpredictable order. And that's a random shuffle. (Hence the name!) Each individual track selection depends on the previous ones.
That's also fairly easy to do too, of course. But most of the simple algorithms will assume that the set of songs is fixed... It's much harder to keep an even shuffle when adding or removing songs from the set. Maybe this is one cause of the 'problem'?
Er, yes, of course for large data sizes, the order will predominate. But my point is that what counts as 'large' varies a lot. Some cases will rarely or never reach that size, and the constant overheads will be the dominant factor.
In the case I mentioned, we were talking in the tens or hundreds, so the overheads dominated. (In OPL, function calls are relatively expensive, so after the testing I did I'm fairly sure it was the recursion which slowed things down.)
It's true that a naive quicksort (no 'h'!) implementation is worst-case on ordered data, but most people use one of the variations such as picking the pivot from the middle element, or using median-of-three, which make ordered data best-case. (That's what I did.) And if it comes to that, a simple bubble-sort tweak can make it even better (linear) on ordered data!
As you say, there are many other sorting algorithms, each with their own features and assumptions. Do you need stability (i.e. preserving the order of records with the same key)? If so, quicksort won't do. Is the data too large to fit into random-access memory? Then you need one of the tape-based sorts such as the polyphase mergesort. Do the keys fit into a limited range? If so, a pigeonhole sort can run in linear time! (Another technique I've used to great effect.) Do you need to use no extra memory (not even stack)? Then a non-recursive in-place algorithm such as heapsort or combsort can do the job. Do you know anything about the input? If it's almost ordered to start with, a simple insertion sort can beat most others. And so on, and so on.
Even the usual big-O algorithm analysis tends to look only at comparisons and exchanges. If one of those is much more expensive than the other, or there are other operations (such as function calls) which are relatively expensive, then you have to form your own judgements, which might be different from the standard wisdom.
So don't reach for quicksort every time -- know your data, know your conditions, and use something appropriate for both!
The knack is knowing when to go for something flash, and when to use something simple, even if it theoretically performs worse.
And that knack is called profiling.
It doesn't need to be anything fancy, or use flash tools -- in fact, when it's most needed, the best method is counting seconds in your head!
For example, an application I've worked on recently started with a bubble sort, which was taking the best part of a minute to run (handheld machine). We tried a quicksort, but the slowness of recursion in this language made hardly any faster. So I ended up with a combsort, which is a bubble sort variation -- much simpler than the quicksort, and with a higher big-O order, but the much lower overhead made it run in a fraction of the time. It was nowhere near as flash, but it was a better choice for the app.
The important points here are a) I wouldn't have realised how inappropriate quicksort was if I hadn't compared it, and b) an advanced algorithm can run slower than a simpler one, especially with small numbers or bad language support). Don't rely on preconceptions.
As Michael Jackson (the systems guru, not the singer...) put it:
"The First Rule of Program Optimisation: Don't do it.
"The Second Rule of Program Optimisation (for experts only): Don't do it yet."
As Donald 'the next volume will be any decade now' Knuth said:
"Premature optimisation is the root of all evil."
And as W. A. Wulf put it:
"More computing sins are committed in the name of efficiency (without necessarily achieving it) than for any other single reason -- including blind stupidity."
Having seen a lot of code over the years, I think they might well have a point...
I don't think your Linux analogy is a good one, as many (most?) of the people involved in the large free software projects are professionals. Some are even doing it as part of their professional life; but even if others are doing it in their free time, they still apply the same skills and experience that they're employed for.
And, speaking as both a hobbyist and a professional software developer, many of the little hobby projects are of low quality...
Just what I was about to say! (And what I think I've said elsewhere.)
Using the same term for a site like Slashdot, for a serious political reportage site, for a software development status report, and for a teenager's diary seems a fairly useless way to refer to them. Newspapers, novels, reference works and junk mail are all made of paper, but we wouldn't get very far calling them all 'papers'... Maybe we should start describing them by their content, rather than their medium?
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe the real problem here is people who assume that because only a couple of close friends talk to them about their blog, that they are the only people who read it. Or, more importantly, the only people who can read it.
Whether it feels so or not, a blog is public. Anyone can read it. That includes your boss, your MD, your legal department, your colleagues, your parents, your partner -- in short, any and all of the people you criticise, insult, or slander. If you wouldn't wish any of those people to read it, then don't put it on your blog. D'oh...
I was really complaining about terminology. Lots of things get called 'science fiction', but they don't all mean the same thing by it. (Nor do they all equally deserve it.) Calling, oh, I dunno, Pink Floyd's music 'blues' for example is (apart from a couple of songs) highly inaccurate, and though both the band and the genre deserve lots of respect, it would do neither of them any favours. In the same way, I don't think calling a soap opera that's set in space 'science fiction' does either genre any favours.
The point is: people whose only experience of 'science fiction' is on the TV or at the cinema might be surprised by what goes under that name in other media; and many of those might enjoy it. So I'd recommend checking it out!
I for one am getting fed up with people equating the sort of bad space opera, alien-of-the-week stories, soap opera, and space-bound military action that we see on TV with real, hard-edged, thought-provoking, intelligent ideas-based science fiction of the sort that we see in books and especially in the 'pulp' magazines where it all started and where real talent and real ideas are still being fostered. (Personally, I prefer the short story format, as that tends to concentrate on the ideas and deliver them with real punch.)
Even in Star Trek at its best, I'd only count some of the episodes as real science fiction. (To be fair, while some of those ones were great, some weren't; and some of the non-SF ones were very good.) But none of the 'SF' programmes on (terrestrial UK) TV at the moment interest me at all.
Science fiction isn't necessarily about space, time travel, cosmology, particle physics, parallel universes, alien races, or robots -- though there've been wonderful stories about all of those. And it certainly doesn't need to involve space ships or laser pistols, despite the many films and TV series which seem to think it does. It's about ideas. It's about asking 'What if...?' It looks at the universe and says 'Why not...?' Or even 'Unless...'
To take two film examples, I consider The Truman Show to be better science fiction than Minority Report. The latter certainly looked the part, had all the trappings, and got right up to asking some really interesting and fundamental questions; but then pulled back from them and decided to be a bog-standard action film in the end. Whereas the former dared to take a Big Idea and actually explore the consequences.
So what I'd personally like to see is a science fiction TV show that's not even called science fiction, that the fans of what currently passes under that name won't notice or be interested in. I don't know if the cancellation of Enterprise will make that more likely, but it probably can't hurt...
All it claims is that MS got it from them, which is fairly well-documented by now. And it's not as if they're not still pinching Apple's ideas...
FreeType is free, open source, &c, and I thought it did hinting?
Things are different with software. Firstly, you don't need vast resources to mass-produce software. A web site is about all you need; and reasonable servers and bandwidth are within almost everyone's reach these days.
Secondly, there's already something preventing a big company from copying your work and selling it as their own: copyright.
So patents don't work for the little guy in the same way (even when they're working as designed, which they don't seem to be). What do they do for him? Why do you have them? Beats me.
My experience here is limited; I've never done any proper XP or similar. But I've read quite a bit about those sorts of development practices, and used a few others (all the way back to Jackson Structured Programming), so I hope my intuition isn't completely out here.
My feeling is that just about all of these practices work much better as tools and tactics, to be chosen from and used where you feel they work and then dropped, rather than as part of a rigid methodology.
Management tends to want to treat development as a predictable, join-the-dots process -- and many methodologies seem to reduce it to that. But they don't! They just hide the creativity and unpredictability where it can't be seen. IME, a rigid methodology just gets in the way of good developers, and gives the bad ones something to blame...
So use some of these techniques and ideas, by all means: it looks like they can work very well. But don't treat them as the be-all and end-all of development. There's always a need for creativity and good judgement.
He might mean just himself, his mate, and this guy he met down the pub...
Well, I can understand that. I've tasted American 'chocolate' :-p Whereas we have Cadbury's!
But yes, regardless of which country is the worst offender, most Western developed countries have a largeish intake of processed sugars, and in many opinions this is a greater and wider health worry than the intake of fat that's been so vilified over the last few decades.
BTW, does the report you mention include sources of sugar such as glucose syrup, corn syrup, invert syrup &c? (It's amazing how well sugar can be hidden in ingredients lists...)
But it does raise some interesting questions. For example, the world currently pays a lot for (voice) telephone service; some places more than others, of course, but there's still a lot of revenue there.
What if all that traffic were to move over to IP? Lots of revenue lost, of course, but would the Internet cope at reasonable quality? Would it need lots more infrastructure to handle the extra traffic? If so, how does that get built and who pays? What business model should be used?
I've never used VoIP, and I don't pretend to have any answers. But just because we can now route the occasional call over the net satisfactorily and more cheaply doesn't necessarily mean what we can scale that up to the point of transferring our entire voice traffic to it.
Does anyone have any real information about these issues?
It's perfectly possible to use a mobile phone in a polite fashion. I try to. But a huge number of people don't, and give us all a bad name.
For example, YOU DON'T NEED TO ANSWER YOUR MOBILE EVERY TIME IT RINGS. There are times when I'm busy and decide not to take the call. I'm sure the caller would understand (just as I understand when positions are reversed). I can see who the caller was, so I can decide whether the call is likely to be urgent; I can then call them back later when it's convenient. If the message is really urgent, they can send me a text message, which I'm much more likely to read immediately.
Similarly: you don't need to have a stupid annoying beepy ringtone that starts at earsplitting volume. Vibrating alerts, progressive ringtones and plain non-tune ringtones are generally much less intrusive. Especially if you carry your phone where you can get to it in under 3 minutes.
And: you don't need to shout into a mobile that's right next to your ear. If your caller can't hear you, they'll generally tell you to speak up. But they won't tell you to speak down; you have to think to do that.
In short, if it's people's rudeness that annoys you (as it does me), then complain about that. Directly. To people's faces. Politely if possible (otherwise you're descending to their level), but don't suffer in silence, otherwise they won't learn.
And if you have a mobile phone, please use it politely! Remember: it's just a tool. You're its user, not its slave.
It amazes me how much they've developed. Problem: silly beepy tunes are annoying. Solution: a choice of more beepy tunes! Louder beepy tunes!! Polyphonic beepy tunes!!! Make up your own beepy tunes!!!!
[fx: sigh]
What makes it even more frustrating is that there must be whole classes of ringtones that are more distinctive (which is what the users want) and less annoying/intrusive (which is what everyone else wants). Sampled sounds, for instance. (After all, if phones have the processing power to generate polyphonic music from MIDI files, then they must be able to play 8-bit samples...)
I've tried a few, not on my phone, but as alarm sounds on my pocket computer. And I've found lots of sounds that are highly recognisable and distinctive and yet very unobtrusive. A genuine old-style phone ring works well (either the really old bell type, or the trimphone beeps), as do very short sound effects such as laser bursts, door squeaks, pings, buzzers, whistles, very short fanfares or chimes, harp strums, &c. Even very recognisable sounds such as the Homer Simpson 'D'oh!' or the Hitchhiker's Guide turn-on sound work well.
The single best alarm sound I found, though, was embarrassingly geeky: the Captain Kirk communicator chirp. It's extremely short, extremely easy to hear (cuts through all sorts of noise even when very quiet), and yet doesn't bother anyone; most people aren't even aware of it.
The knack with all of these sounds is that they're very short, repeat only after a long interval (30 seconds on my pocket computer, which would translate to maybe 5-10 seconds on a phone), and start quietly, getting a little louder with each repetition. Along with a vibrating alert, that should be plenty for alerting the user, without being too disruptive.
None of this is rocket science; even my many-year-old phone should be capable of this, so all the new whizz-bang phones should be able to do all this and more. But instead, we just get more, louder, and more complex beepy tunes...
Well, sugar consumption is certainly high here, maybe higher than most other European countries, but I was under the vague impression that it was even higher in the USA? (None taken, and none intended neither!) Certainly, when I've visited, I found that more things tasted sweeter and seemed to have more high-fructose corn syrup than I was used to.
There are strong arguments linking processed sugar consumption with obesity, diabetes, tooth decay, and many other health problems, and once you start looking, it's amazing how much of it there is in many processed foods and drinks these days...
That's a great idea generally, but it's not a solution. Sugar is sugar; whether it's granulated or caster or whatever, and whoever supplied it, it has pretty much the same effect. You wouldn't complain because someone put the wrong sort of sugar in your tea, would you?
Music's different. People don't want some music, they want some specific music. Okay, much of the time their decisions are driven by marketing, familiarity, and comfort more than by quality, originality and skill, but either way music is not a commodity in that sense.
Erm, I never mentioned drugs! I just mentioned sugar. (Though I'd be prepared to argue that processed sugar has drug-like qualities for many people living in the Western world...)
And I'm not advocating stealing. I just think that we might want to reconsider what we define as 'stealing' in this context. Until then, the law is the the law and breaking it is by definition illegal. But laws are not immutable...
Take a commodity: sugar, say. If I sell sugar, I can do so for any price I wish. I can also sell sugar of any type or condition, provided that a) it's safe for human consumption, and b) I'm honest about what's in it. I can choose to sell for a ludicrously high price, but that's okay because someone else down the road can sell for a lower price, and unless I can provide people with a genuine reason for preferring mine, they'll buy his. So it's a free market; it tends to regulate itself.
Music isn't like that, though. If I want to buy a track from an RIAA artist (legally, in my country), then I have to buy from an RIAA-approved source. I can't go and get the same track from another source. So it's not a free market in the same sense; it's more like a cartel. Under those conditions, maybe it's not quite so just for the cartel to choose whatever price it likes?
Music is also different in another major way, as discussed in other comments: if I steal some sugar, then not only do I get to have it, I'm depriving the original owner. But if I copy music, although I get the benefit, the original owner doesn't lose anything. So copying music is only like theft of physical objects in some ways; in others, it's different.
These two reasons make me think that although music copying is wrong according to the law, it's not a wrong of the same type as physical theft. And maybe it's a wrong we need to reconsider.
The Janet Jackson incident wasn't showing people having sex. It wasn't showing sexual activity of any kind. It arguably wasn't even showing any sexual organs! All it showed was most of one breast (with the nipple covered IIRC). And I really don't understand the fuss it caused.
I'm not saying that women get their tits out all the time over here on BBC TV, of course. If they did, it might be considered unprofessional, sleazy perhaps, maybe mildly reprehensible, but hardly the focus of a national scandal.
Are USians so sex-starved that even a glimpse of part of a breast sends them into a frenzy of sexual excitement?
Maybe they should resort to covering their women up, like they do in certain other countries...
People don't want true randomness. If the machine picked each song to play randomly and independently, then it might play the same song twice in a row; and it might never play a song.
Instead, what people seem to want is to hear all of their music, in an unpredictable order. And that's a random shuffle. (Hence the name!) Each individual track selection depends on the previous ones.
That's also fairly easy to do too, of course. But most of the simple algorithms will assume that the set of songs is fixed... It's much harder to keep an even shuffle when adding or removing songs from the set. Maybe this is one cause of the 'problem'?
In the case I mentioned, we were talking in the tens or hundreds, so the overheads dominated. (In OPL, function calls are relatively expensive, so after the testing I did I'm fairly sure it was the recursion which slowed things down.)
It's true that a naive quicksort (no 'h'!) implementation is worst-case on ordered data, but most people use one of the variations such as picking the pivot from the middle element, or using median-of-three, which make ordered data best-case. (That's what I did.) And if it comes to that, a simple bubble-sort tweak can make it even better (linear) on ordered data!
As you say, there are many other sorting algorithms, each with their own features and assumptions. Do you need stability (i.e. preserving the order of records with the same key)? If so, quicksort won't do. Is the data too large to fit into random-access memory? Then you need one of the tape-based sorts such as the polyphase mergesort. Do the keys fit into a limited range? If so, a pigeonhole sort can run in linear time! (Another technique I've used to great effect.) Do you need to use no extra memory (not even stack)? Then a non-recursive in-place algorithm such as heapsort or combsort can do the job. Do you know anything about the input? If it's almost ordered to start with, a simple insertion sort can beat most others. And so on, and so on.
Even the usual big-O algorithm analysis tends to look only at comparisons and exchanges. If one of those is much more expensive than the other, or there are other operations (such as function calls) which are relatively expensive, then you have to form your own judgements, which might be different from the standard wisdom.
So don't reach for quicksort every time -- know your data, know your conditions, and use something appropriate for both!
And that knack is called profiling.
It doesn't need to be anything fancy, or use flash tools -- in fact, when it's most needed, the best method is counting seconds in your head!
For example, an application I've worked on recently started with a bubble sort, which was taking the best part of a minute to run (handheld machine). We tried a quicksort, but the slowness of recursion in this language made hardly any faster. So I ended up with a combsort, which is a bubble sort variation -- much simpler than the quicksort, and with a higher big-O order, but the much lower overhead made it run in a fraction of the time. It was nowhere near as flash, but it was a better choice for the app.
The important points here are a) I wouldn't have realised how inappropriate quicksort was if I hadn't compared it, and b) an advanced algorithm can run slower than a simpler one, especially with small numbers or bad language support). Don't rely on preconceptions.
As Michael Jackson (the systems guru, not the singer...) put it:
As Donald 'the next volume will be any decade now' Knuth said:And as W. A. Wulf put it:
Having seen a lot of code over the years, I think they might well have a point...And, speaking as both a hobbyist and a professional software developer, many of the little hobby projects are of low quality...
Using the same term for a site like Slashdot, for a serious political reportage site, for a software development status report, and for a teenager's diary seems a fairly useless way to refer to them. Newspapers, novels, reference works and junk mail are all made of paper, but we wouldn't get very far calling them all 'papers'... Maybe we should start describing them by their content, rather than their medium?
Personally, I blame Microsoft.
Really. They're furious at the showing of the original idiot-proof user interface that puts theirs to shame...