Stack / heap pretty (extremely) important for C/C++ programmers, but simply ghosts in the machine for Java / VB programmers or infrastructure guys.
For what it's worth - stack is where all the memory is allocated for variables that are declared when the program is initialized (compiler knows to set up the compiled code to set up a certain amount of memory local to the application to put pre-defined variables into) and the heap is a bunch of memory outside of the application's local boundry that is requested from a shared pool, given to the app to store dynamically created memory variables in, and (hopefully) given back to the system when it isn't needed anymore.
The stack is like your back yard, and the heap is like a big field that everybody in your neighborhood shares.
I spent 5 years at a company before I realized I was kissing the wrong ass.
You guys want to be recognized, even praised by the big dogs? Find out who the real boss is, the guy that can authorize a massive bonus or raise. Find out what his motivation is, and make that happen. You can make all the end users happy as pie but if you don't accomplish any of the things the guy cutting the checks wants done - you were effectively worthless to him. Actually he still had to pay your salary without getting any of the things he wanted done, so you were a drain on his balance sheet (in his head at least.)
Enable a Corporate VP succeed with one of his business goals this year and you will find yourself way better off than if you had enabled 100 secretaries to 'do email' 13% faster or saved the company $300 by driving across the state instead of flying.
You can also make modifications to their contract and initial them.
Bingo! We have a winner. Contracts are nothing more than ink on paper until both parties sign them. They are not leveraged buyout instruments, nor implements of destruction, nor are they non-negotiable. They are a boilerplate template some clown in legal copied out of a book.
If you are reading through the contract and hit a part that says 'we own every idea you have ever had in your life and you can't work for anybody in the same country after you work for us' just draw a line through that section, add a revision if you are so inclined (such as 'the company retains full rights to anything developed under contract during the contract period, on company hardware and software, during billable hours, and I will not work for any directly competing company within 60 miles for the lesser of one year after this contract expires OR the length that this contract was in effect - that last part keeps them from hiring you for one day, firing you, then making you unable to work for any other company for a full year), and initial it.
Do that once you are already in the front door and the hiring manager is hungry to get you busy on his project, be fair but firm, and be ready to walk if they balk. My experience is that when you are that far into it, honest and fair people will treat you honestly and fairly, and they understand.
Actually as long as you don't have kids, a starter marriage is a good idea. Gives you a chance to make all the stupid mistakes and get them out of your system, learn right from wrong in a semi-accurate environment.
I actually said once, during my first marriage 'When I want your opinion, I will beat it out of you.' I was pretty stupid, but at least I got all those stupid things out of my system (and learned that they were, in fact, stupid) in my first marriage. Now I'm pretty confident that my 'real' marriage, whenever that happens, will be pretty good.
Have two kids before you get it figured out though, and you are pretty well fucked.
As for taking a year off before college - if you have $40,000 in cash in the bank and can come back from your trip that covered three countries or more (not including your native land) and get into college rested and fresh with a good perspective of life, without worrying about how much college is going to cost you - go for it. If you are going to sleep in until noon every day and then play on the XBox when you aren't working at McDonalds, and need to get your financial aid paperwork in or you can't afford college... then I recommend going directly to college.
If you lack discipline or cash - perhaps spend 2 years in the miliary. Between seeing the world, getting some serious discipline... the GI Bill will pay a massive chunk towards your schooling.
Step 1. Get out checkbook. Step 2. Hire decent developers Step 3. Make the business requirements clear, valid, non-conflicting, and technically viable Step 4. Give the developers a good development environment (hardware, software, and surroundings) Step 5. Run interference, keep the end users from hassling your developers Step 6. ??? Step 7. Profit!
You are assuming I'm talking about CD-R or CD-RW... IIRC the pre-burned from the factory CDs have burned pits (or at least they used to.) Regardless, I was close enough for the general public to catch my drift : put a small scratch the top of a CD with your keys (enough to tear, wrinkle, fold, spindle, or mutilate the aluminum foil layer) and Voila! no more data.
Most burnable CDs have the clear plastic armor on the bottom and what best resembles aluminum foil on top - the laser reads through the clear bottom part, reading pits burned into the in-side part of the aluminum foil. As long as the clear side is pretty clear (ie, not scratched all to hell) the laser can read through it (if not, clean it off with warm soapy water and a soft rag) - but the aluminum foil side (aka the label side) is exposed to the elements and is about as fragile as aluminum foil. There is no plastic armor protecting it so anything (including simply putting it in the sleeve in your CD binder, or leaving it exposed to harsh fumes in the air) can damage it over time.
The solvents and chemicals in sticky notes or certain pen-inks will do bad things to the aluminum foil side, chemical reactions and all that, and then your data is gone forever.
How about Ghost the entire drive with everything installed, then make backups of his My Documents directory to a 1G USB thumbdrive. He keeps it in his pocket or drawer when he isn't doing a backup (takes care of separating the backup from the machine) and it is a no-brainer to keep his backup fresh. The 1G USB thumbdrives are cheap enough to get a few to rotate between backups for keeping a few versions in case he backs up a corrupt version of a file over a good version.
The assulting team lost three men. You know how hard it's going to be to replace those three guys, not to mention all that RDX? That stuff was a bitch to procure.
WTF! They brought 250 lbs of high explosives and only three rifles?
Jesus - next time I spend months praying for something like this, please give me the patience to include technical details in my prayers.
It's like the metric system, ok? Bring 1000 kilos of dynamite, 100 kilos of RDX, 100 men with 100 rifles and 100 bullets apiece. And a satellite phone.
It's ok, we forgive you - but get it right next week. Last thing you want is for us to outsource this job to the Chinese, Russians or Israelis.
Funny thing is that if they had gotten right, they would have caused a MASSIVE ECONOMIC CATASTROPHE to the USA.
You guys listening? Let me say it again: If the bad guys really, really wanted to hurt the USA they would destroy all the tech centers in India. The USA would never recover from such economic terrorism - never recover.
I'll tell you exactly what a BS/CS tells an employer : no matter how bad the project you get stuck on, no matter how painful, how many long nights or 72 hour weekends it takes - not only will you see it through to the end (even if quitting / dropping out is a LOT easier) and you will succeed.
Hmm - give the big four year project to someone that finished a hard four years in college, or someone that dropped out after two years?
Had to interview someone (a contractor position, six weeks) to code Java and my boss asks 'do you want a guy that can do SQL, or a guy that can do Unix?' I said 'I want a guy that speaks English.'
Unfortunately, that wasn't one of the options. Almost had to stab that fucker today after telling him the fifth time that the middle finger isn't for pointing or enumerating, it is for expressing 'fuck you'. He just likes waving that middle finger around, and I guess in a way having him in the office is a big 'fuck you' to all the American programmers that are jobless today. Shit.
Just how open minded (and at what price point?)
on
Fun Tabletop Games?
·
· Score: 1
In the mid to late '80s when I was in college I played a LOT of table-top / board games. Mostly hex-board games such as BattleTech or grid based like Steve Jackson's Car-Wars (et.al.) Incredibly stimulating, largely based on skill and tactics with enough random chance in there to make it interesting - and massive time sinks. I'm talking a real-life hour to do one in-game minute of combat (6-8 people playing.) Eight hours was a fairly average session with a few games lasting 72 hours or more.
Now all of those games have been recreated on the machine with fairly accurate attention to detail - and instead of playing rules lawyer going through all the books for twenty minutes to find out whether or not a 2600 lb car with slicks, spoilers , doing 70mph around a corner in a city will be able to maintain traction or spin out when he suffers a near-miss by a pocket artillery round - it just happens. Instead of getting through a single session / combat / game in 8 hours - you can get through an entire campaign of 80 combats in 8 hours. You get a lot more bang for your buck, as they say.
For about $600-$700 per seat, you can outfit your 'game room' with totally capable networked desktops that can handle just about anything out there (MechWarrior3 or 4, NASCAR car race games, Air Combat Sims from every era, CounterStrike-Source, Quake3, UT2004,... you name it.) Generally four machines is the minimum, and with eight boxes things get very interesting. It's expensive, but it will last you easily two years before you even start to consider something else - and if your circle is tight enough just spread the cost around. $2,500 for a 4 seat setup, or about $5k for 8 seats - expensive, but spread it across 8 guys over two years and you are talking about $10 per weekend per guy (over two years.)
Believe me - if I had friends, I would build a setup like this at home in a heart-beat.
Last company I was at said 'you can come in to work every day, or you can work from home every day provided you have the ability (ie, high speed internet, a phone, a quiet room with a door, a desk and space to put the laptop.'
Pretty simple math there.
If telecommuting is something you want to do, and if you already have all of the above (lets face it - anybody worthy of telecommuting already has high speed internet, etc) then make it real easy for your boss to say yes : tell him you want a telecommuting budget of $0.
Honestly - how much do you really stand to make? $100 per month maybe? At $6 per workday lunch in the cafe you come out ahead. Add in commute time, wear and tear on the vehicle, gas costs, just getting an extra hour or two back in your day, and the benefit of working in your fuzzy bunny slippers... it really works out in your favor.
Otherwise put down a dollar figure you are happy with - say $200 a month to be 'fair' considering cablemodem, phone, 'office rent' for the bedroom you will convert to an office, fax line, etc. What could happen other than them saying yes or them saying no and making you continue driving in to the office each day to sit in your cube.
Here's a fun one : unless her Engrish is already really, really good (ie, you guys speak English at home all the time) she will go through a phase during which she is thinking in her native language, translating on the fly back and forth to English during conversations. Discussions will be quite a bit slower with people not familiar with her accent (and with whom she isn't used to either.)
Then comes the worst part - after about a year of speaking nothing but English and thinking in English she will forget some of her native language. She won't realize it until she calls home or goes back for a visit - but that's a freaky issue to deal with.
Finally, the first three years will be great - she will be the same wonderful person she is now. Your friends will see how happy you are and you know they just have to screw it up - Americans can't stand to see an obedient wife. Between subversion from your friends (esp your friends' wives) and watching Oprah while you are at work each day... after about three years you can count on a radical change in life at home. Everybody says 'no way, not my wife' and three years later everybody says 'damn, Glo was right.'
Finally, if she doesn't already drive - send her to driving school. Those guys are professionals that can keep order in a car full of 16 year olds, they are calm enough to handle teaching her to drive (which would send you into a daily freak-show panic, introducing discord and unharmonic vibes into the family.)
Am I a fool for giving up steady work and good pay?
Survey says... YES! (Ding) Actually fool is a little tame of a word; I would have gone with something a little stronger.
Tell you what - if you get a new job with 90% or better of your last salary (full time position or better, not contract work) in less than 2 months - then you did ok or better than ok. If you are still 'a consultant' (ie, jobless, no offense to real consultants) a year from now then you pretty well screwed the pooch.
Actually, I wonder if maybe ringtones serve the same purpose as Rimz (the bling-all expensive 20" chrome rims that go on cars in the hood.) They serve exactly zero purpose functionally, contribute nothing to the economy and have exactly zero resale value - but someone has convinced all the little hood'ies that in order to be 'cool' they gotta have 'em. That's money that could be invested in a college education - a third of a billion in the US alone, estimated to double next year - pissed away. When you can rob an entire group not only of its current place in current America, but the next two generations too... that's talent.
I'm not going to say it's a conspiracy, but I'm not going to say it's not, either.
Actually I am guessing you hit the nail on the head.
I was once brought in to fix an application that randomly picked people to pee in a bottle, and a few dozen people complained that they got picked a lot more than other people (out of about 300.) Well it seems that the 'programmer' that coded the app used two digit precision on all math calls (the coder was generally assigned to fiscal apps, two decimal places in money = two decimal places in his head.)
For those not reading between the lines, a random number returns a real number somewhere between 0 and 1, this real number is then multiplied by the maximum number in your expected range to come up with a random number between 0 and your top number (300 in this instance) but since he was using 2 digits of precision (ie, two digits after the decimal place) all the random function returned was.01,.02,.03,.04,....98,.99 and there are only a hundred of those, so there were only 100 possible choices spread across the 300 people on the list, and those 100 choices were coming up a LOT (no surprise there.)
I figure it has something to do with the random number generator in the baby-iPod.
And besides, in most cases CPU doesn't matter. Faster disk, more RAM, faster net connection more RAM and more RAM go a long way before you get around to needing faster code execution.
Yes and no. I can't envision many one-line statements that either the coder or the compiler could optimize to much of an effect, but consider the difference between bubblesort and quicksort.
You can replace the computer with a machine 4x as fast with eight times as much memory and drives with seek speeds 1.5x faster than the last generation and maybe... it can run the same code 3x faster. 5x faster if you are rich or lucky.
Re-code the sort routine used on a zillion records from a bubble sort to a quicksort and it will go what, 1,000x faster (on the same hardware)?
To the OP: the difference between !p and p==NULL is all in your head. If you can do some serious algorithm analysis and approach some of the fundamental routines in your code with better (more optimized) routines... then you are getting somewhere. Other than that - just code it so you (or the guy you are responsible for when you get promoted) can figure out what it does when you need to change it, or quickly pinpoint bugs when they pop up.
Slashdot Mirror
Stack / heap pretty (extremely) important for C/C++ programmers, but simply ghosts in the machine for Java / VB programmers or infrastructure guys.
For what it's worth - stack is where all the memory is allocated for variables that are declared when the program is initialized (compiler knows to set up the compiled code to set up a certain amount of memory local to the application to put pre-defined variables into) and the heap is a bunch of memory outside of the application's local boundry that is requested from a shared pool, given to the app to store dynamically created memory variables in, and (hopefully) given back to the system when it isn't needed anymore.
The stack is like your back yard, and the heap is like a big field that everybody in your neighborhood shares.
I spent 5 years at a company before I realized I was kissing the wrong ass.
You guys want to be recognized, even praised by the big dogs? Find out who the real boss is, the guy that can authorize a massive bonus or raise. Find out what his motivation is, and make that happen. You can make all the end users happy as pie but if you don't accomplish any of the things the guy cutting the checks wants done - you were effectively worthless to him. Actually he still had to pay your salary without getting any of the things he wanted done, so you were a drain on his balance sheet (in his head at least.)
Enable a Corporate VP succeed with one of his business goals this year and you will find yourself way better off than if you had enabled 100 secretaries to 'do email' 13% faster or saved the company $300 by driving across the state instead of flying.
You can also make modifications to their contract and initial them.
Bingo! We have a winner.
Contracts are nothing more than ink on paper until both parties sign them. They are not leveraged buyout instruments, nor implements of destruction, nor are they non-negotiable. They are a boilerplate template some clown in legal copied out of a book.
If you are reading through the contract and hit a part that says 'we own every idea you have ever had in your life and you can't work for anybody in the same country after you work for us' just draw a line through that section, add a revision if you are so inclined (such as 'the company retains full rights to anything developed under contract during the contract period, on company hardware and software, during billable hours, and I will not work for any directly competing company within 60 miles for the lesser of one year after this contract expires OR the length that this contract was in effect - that last part keeps them from hiring you for one day, firing you, then making you unable to work for any other company for a full year), and initial it.
Do that once you are already in the front door and the hiring manager is hungry to get you busy on his project, be fair but firm, and be ready to walk if they balk. My experience is that when you are that far into it, honest and fair people will treat you honestly and fairly, and they understand.
What makes law firms special?
They use pirated copies of Windows and Office just like the rest of us.
Actually as long as you don't have kids, a starter marriage is a good idea. Gives you a chance to make all the stupid mistakes and get them out of your system, learn right from wrong in a semi-accurate environment.
... then I recommend going directly to college.
... the GI Bill will pay a massive chunk towards your schooling.
I actually said once, during my first marriage 'When I want your opinion, I will beat it out of you.' I was pretty stupid, but at least I got all those stupid things out of my system (and learned that they were, in fact, stupid) in my first marriage. Now I'm pretty confident that my 'real' marriage, whenever that happens, will be pretty good.
Have two kids before you get it figured out though, and you are pretty well fucked.
As for taking a year off before college - if you have $40,000 in cash in the bank and can come back from your trip that covered three countries or more (not including your native land) and get into college rested and fresh with a good perspective of life, without worrying about how much college is going to cost you - go for it.
If you are going to sleep in until noon every day and then play on the XBox when you aren't working at McDonalds, and need to get your financial aid paperwork in or you can't afford college
If you lack discipline or cash - perhaps spend 2 years in the miliary. Between seeing the world, getting some serious discipline
Step 1. Get out checkbook.
Step 2. Hire decent developers
Step 3. Make the business requirements clear, valid, non-conflicting, and technically viable
Step 4. Give the developers a good development environment (hardware, software, and surroundings)
Step 5. Run interference, keep the end users from hassling your developers
Step 6. ???
Step 7. Profit!
Google, Wiki, BurnWorld, and about 40k other sources disagree with you. Please stop spewing bogus information yourself.
...
Google - Results 1 - 10 of about 48,000 for cd burn pits.
The information on a standard CD is encoded as a spiral track of pits moulded into the top of the polycarbonate layer
Recordable and rewritable media are made of different materials. Recorders (burners) use a laser to burn pits into recordable media, which are composed of material designed for this purpose.
actually heats the surface of the blank CD up so that the chemical coating of the CD will react and form a pit.
In CD burners, a laser is used to burn the pits
You are assuming I'm talking about CD-R or CD-RW ... IIRC the pre-burned from the factory CDs have burned pits (or at least they used to.)
Regardless, I was close enough for the general public to catch my drift : put a small scratch the top of a CD with your keys (enough to tear, wrinkle, fold, spindle, or mutilate the aluminum foil layer) and Voila! no more data.
Most burnable CDs have the clear plastic armor on the bottom and what best resembles aluminum foil on top - the laser reads through the clear bottom part, reading pits burned into the in-side part of the aluminum foil. As long as the clear side is pretty clear (ie, not scratched all to hell) the laser can read through it (if not, clean it off with warm soapy water and a soft rag) - but the aluminum foil side (aka the label side) is exposed to the elements and is about as fragile as aluminum foil. There is no plastic armor protecting it so anything (including simply putting it in the sleeve in your CD binder, or leaving it exposed to harsh fumes in the air) can damage it over time.
The solvents and chemicals in sticky notes or certain pen-inks will do bad things to the aluminum foil side, chemical reactions and all that, and then your data is gone forever.
How about Ghost the entire drive with everything installed, then make backups of his My Documents directory to a 1G USB thumbdrive. He keeps it in his pocket or drawer when he isn't doing a backup (takes care of separating the backup from the machine) and it is a no-brainer to keep his backup fresh. The 1G USB thumbdrives are cheap enough to get a few to rotate between backups for keeping a few versions in case he backs up a corrupt version of a file over a good version.
Nobody died here.
The assulting team lost three men.
You know how hard it's going to be to replace those three guys, not to mention all that RDX? That stuff was a bitch to procure.
WTF! They brought 250 lbs of high explosives and only three rifles?
:
Jesus - next time I spend months praying for something like this, please give me the patience to include technical details in my prayers.
It's like the metric system, ok?
Bring 1000 kilos of dynamite, 100 kilos of RDX, 100 men with 100 rifles and 100 bullets apiece.
And a satellite phone.
It's ok, we forgive you - but get it right next week.
Last thing you want is for us to outsource this job to the Chinese, Russians or Israelis.
Funny thing is that if they had gotten right, they would have caused a MASSIVE ECONOMIC CATASTROPHE to the USA.
You guys listening? Let me say it again
If the bad guys really, really wanted to hurt the USA they would destroy all the tech centers in India.
The USA would never recover from such economic terrorism - never recover.
I'll tell you exactly what a BS/CS tells an employer : no matter how bad the project you get stuck on, no matter how painful, how many long nights or 72 hour weekends it takes - not only will you see it through to the end (even if quitting / dropping out is a LOT easier) and you will succeed.
Hmm - give the big four year project to someone that finished a hard four years in college, or someone that dropped out after two years?
Pretty simple math.
This the smartest shit I have read all day.
Had to interview someone (a contractor position, six weeks) to code Java and my boss asks 'do you want a guy that can do SQL, or a guy that can do Unix?'
I said 'I want a guy that speaks English.'
Unfortunately, that wasn't one of the options.
Almost had to stab that fucker today after telling him the fifth time that the middle finger isn't for pointing or enumerating, it is for expressing 'fuck you'.
He just likes waving that middle finger around, and I guess in a way having him in the office is a big 'fuck you' to all the American programmers that are jobless today. Shit.
In the mid to late '80s when I was in college I played a LOT of table-top / board games. Mostly hex-board games such as BattleTech or grid based like Steve Jackson's Car-Wars (et.al.) Incredibly stimulating, largely based on skill and tactics with enough random chance in there to make it interesting - and massive time sinks. I'm talking a real-life hour to do one in-game minute of combat (6-8 people playing.) Eight hours was a fairly average session with a few games lasting 72 hours or more.
... you name it.) Generally four machines is the minimum, and with eight boxes things get very interesting. It's expensive, but it will last you easily two years before you even start to consider something else - and if your circle is tight enough just spread the cost around. $2,500 for a 4 seat setup, or about $5k for 8 seats - expensive, but spread it across 8 guys over two years and you are talking about $10 per weekend per guy (over two years.)
Now all of those games have been recreated on the machine with fairly accurate attention to detail - and instead of playing rules lawyer going through all the books for twenty minutes to find out whether or not a 2600 lb car with slicks, spoilers , doing 70mph around a corner in a city will be able to maintain traction or spin out when he suffers a near-miss by a pocket artillery round - it just happens. Instead of getting through a single session / combat / game in 8 hours - you can get through an entire campaign of 80 combats in 8 hours. You get a lot more bang for your buck, as they say.
For about $600-$700 per seat, you can outfit your 'game room' with totally capable networked desktops that can handle just about anything out there (MechWarrior3 or 4, NASCAR car race games, Air Combat Sims from every era, CounterStrike-Source, Quake3, UT2004,
Believe me - if I had friends, I would build a setup like this at home in a heart-beat.
Better yet - ask yourself.
... it really works out in your favor.
Last company I was at said 'you can come in to work every day, or you can work from home every day provided you have the ability (ie, high speed internet, a phone, a quiet room with a door, a desk and space to put the laptop.'
Pretty simple math there.
If telecommuting is something you want to do, and if you already have all of the above (lets face it - anybody worthy of telecommuting already has high speed internet, etc) then make it real easy for your boss to say yes : tell him you want a telecommuting budget of $0.
Honestly - how much do you really stand to make? $100 per month maybe? At $6 per workday lunch in the cafe you come out ahead. Add in commute time, wear and tear on the vehicle, gas costs, just getting an extra hour or two back in your day, and the benefit of working in your fuzzy bunny slippers
Otherwise put down a dollar figure you are happy with - say $200 a month to be 'fair' considering cablemodem, phone, 'office rent' for the bedroom you will convert to an office, fax line, etc. What could happen other than them saying yes or them saying no and making you continue driving in to the office each day to sit in your cube.
Here's a fun one : unless her Engrish is already really, really good (ie, you guys speak English at home all the time) she will go through a phase during which she is thinking in her native language, translating on the fly back and forth to English during conversations. Discussions will be quite a bit slower with people not familiar with her accent (and with whom she isn't used to either.)
... after about three years you can count on a radical change in life at home. Everybody says 'no way, not my wife' and three years later everybody says 'damn, Glo was right.'
Then comes the worst part - after about a year of speaking nothing but English and thinking in English she will forget some of her native language. She won't realize it until she calls home or goes back for a visit - but that's a freaky issue to deal with.
Finally, the first three years will be great - she will be the same wonderful person she is now. Your friends will see how happy you are and you know they just have to screw it up - Americans can't stand to see an obedient wife. Between subversion from your friends (esp your friends' wives) and watching Oprah while you are at work each day
Finally, if she doesn't already drive - send her to driving school. Those guys are professionals that can keep order in a car full of 16 year olds, they are calm enough to handle teaching her to drive (which would send you into a daily freak-show panic, introducing discord and unharmonic vibes into the family.)
Are you happy now?
If so then it worked.
If not, shake the Magic 8-ball and try again.
Am I a fool for giving up steady work and good pay?
... YES! (Ding)
Survey says
Actually fool is a little tame of a word; I would have gone with something a little stronger.
Tell you what - if you get a new job with 90% or better of your last salary (full time position or better, not contract work) in less than 2 months - then you did ok or better than ok. If you are still 'a consultant' (ie, jobless, no offense to real consultants) a year from now then you pretty well screwed the pooch.
I remember doing it.
I remember paying $324 apiece for the privilege, too.
Six hundred and change for a couple of cards that currently best serve me two weeks a year as Christmas tree ornaments.
Consider doing it again? Yea, I'll get right on that.
I find your lack of faith ... disturbing.
... that's talent.
Actually, I wonder if maybe ringtones serve the same purpose as Rimz (the bling-all expensive 20" chrome rims that go on cars in the hood.) They serve exactly zero purpose functionally, contribute nothing to the economy and have exactly zero resale value - but someone has convinced all the little hood'ies that in order to be 'cool' they gotta have 'em. That's money that could be invested in a college education - a third of a billion in the US alone, estimated to double next year - pissed away. When you can rob an entire group not only of its current place in current America, but the next two generations too
I'm not going to say it's a conspiracy, but I'm not going to say it's not, either.
Hey - good idea. I will get right on that.
-George
Actually I am guessing you hit the nail on the head.
.01, .02, .03, .04, ... .98, .99 and there are only a hundred of those, so there were only 100 possible choices spread across the 300 people on the list, and those 100 choices were coming up a LOT (no surprise there.)
I was once brought in to fix an application that randomly picked people to pee in a bottle, and a few dozen people complained that they got picked a lot more than other people (out of about 300.) Well it seems that the 'programmer' that coded the app used two digit precision on all math calls (the coder was generally assigned to fiscal apps, two decimal places in money = two decimal places in his head.)
For those not reading between the lines, a random number returns a real number somewhere between 0 and 1, this real number is then multiplied by the maximum number in your expected range to come up with a random number between 0 and your top number (300 in this instance) but since he was using 2 digits of precision (ie, two digits after the decimal place) all the random function returned was
I figure it has something to do with the random number generator in the baby-iPod.
And besides, in most cases CPU doesn't matter. Faster disk, more RAM, faster net connection more RAM and more RAM go a long way before you get around to needing faster code execution.
... it can run the same code 3x faster. 5x faster if you are rich or lucky.
... then you are getting somewhere. Other than that - just code it so you (or the guy you are responsible for when you get promoted) can figure out what it does when you need to change it, or quickly pinpoint bugs when they pop up.
Yes and no.
I can't envision many one-line statements that either the coder or the compiler could optimize to much of an effect, but consider the difference between bubblesort and quicksort.
You can replace the computer with a machine 4x as fast with eight times as much memory and drives with seek speeds 1.5x faster than the last generation and maybe
Re-code the sort routine used on a zillion records from a bubble sort to a quicksort and it will go what, 1,000x faster (on the same hardware)?
To the OP: the difference between !p and p==NULL is all in your head. If you can do some serious algorithm analysis and approach some of the fundamental routines in your code with better (more optimized) routines
If you can't be replaced, you can't be promoted. ...
That's one good reason to document your code