I won't explain why I think questing is better than grinding again (it's a response under this one, I believe), but suffice to say that questing gives much faster XP gains with (nearly) guaranteed gear improvement.
I find it telling that the main improvement of grinding-via-quests and grinding-without-quests is more experience, when you've defined "grinding" as "repetetive killing for exp". It's true, but that isn't an actual difference, it just means that your grinding is more efficient when you are grinding for quests -- "repetetive killing for more exp".
Some time ago WoW's quest were labeled as one of three types: kill count, gathering and FedEx quests. I would definitely like to see a wider variety of quests, but until I come up with or hear about better suggestions that we can submit to Blizzard, I've got no real complaints.
Oh, how about, "more quests that are like those in the game already that don't fall into those 3 categories". It isn't like nobody has ever thought up a better quest than "Kill 72 ninja frogs then come back". I'm not going to complain too loudly simply because I know that most of those lame grind-quests are in there to pad out the quests because they're much easier to construct than the more involved and more fun quests.
I do see a difference between questing and grinding mainly for the story parts and the purpose behind it.
"I sure do hate murlocs! Go kill 40 of the buggers!" is sure pushing the story, and oh who can beat the sense of purpose when you're someone else's tool acting out their blind hatred of another species for no reason other than they've promised you some silver and bonus exp.
There's a story to be had, but the majority of quests that push a real story are also the ones that don't fit into the simple "grind on monster X for a while, then come back". The most important aspects of the story are tied to instances, and instances are fantastic places to quest. "Infiltrate the quillboar lair to kill some lich dude (incidentally killing anything else between you and him) because he is trying to recruit the boars to help The Scourge" is way better than "kill a ton of quillboars because I need some pens to sell".
Thankfully, Blizzard was wise enough to provide plenty of monsters for both questers and grinders so each of us could play as we like.
Okay, so now grinding quests and just-plain-grinding are different playstyles blizzard is catering to? And I sure hope your "each of us could play as we like" isn't referring to me as though I'm a "grinder"! Who actually wants to grind pointlessly for exp for hours? My whole point is that grinding because an NPC told you to isn't a substantial improvement over grinding just because you need the exp as far as actually gameplay goes. The only reason anyone ever decided to not go questing and just grind their brains out was because it was thought that this would be more exp due to saving on travel time, and it turns out this isn't true. So now all the leveling guides are based upon efficient questing. And many of those quests amount to nothing more than a grind. It is those of us who wanted something more interesting out of our quests whose playstyle is not being properly catered to.
I feel like MS pussied out on the 360's design by removing the hard drive because they took that away from developers. Instead of innovating the console market again, they just seem to be riding on the success that they've already created. Now we're finally seeing a successful multi-platform developer complain about the 360's limitations. I don't think this looks very good for the 360 or for Microsoft.
I speculate that the thinking behind the decision was that Microsoft understands that game consoles are price-sensitive and that some gamers would be put off by a $500 console, but they didn't make the correct choice in how to act on that. The Core version is cheaper, yes, and I'm sure that appeals to some, but it's cheaper by being crippled. Nobody wants a crippled piece of hardware, even if it is cheaper, because it's missing functionality that made the full-price version attractive to begin with. Which, if I'm not mistaken, has translated into far fewer Core versions being sold than the full-price version despite it being cheaper.
So the end result is that they split developers, with most not wanting to alienate customers by requiring a hard drive that some won't have, while failing to substantially increase uptake with the cheaper model. Sounds like a case of "killing two birds with one stone" when those birds were your prized competition falcons.
The HD on the original xbox was a ballsy move for sure, and I would have thought MS would stick with it after proving it could work (give or take billions in losses, but it's not like the Core 360 saved them from that either).
I don't see much difference between repetetively killing for exp, and repetetively killing for a quest whose reward is exp. Either way, you're killing the same monsters over and over. While it is nice to at least have the quest as a guide for when the killing is over, all it really amounts to is grinding with an extra bonus exp reward at the end. Farming is nothing but grinding when you've reached the level cap, and as far as I'm concerned they are the same.
There are lots of good quests in WoW. Any instance quest is usually good, because instances are the best part of the game (if a terrible pain in the ass to actually do; can't wait for next patch to bring back the LFG channel). Other quests involve infiltrating some location to find an object/boss to kill. Those are fun too. You're killing the monsters because they're between you and your goal, not because it has been decreed that X of them must die.
All of those "kill X cheese beasts" and "slay weregoats until you find Y goatees" are just filler. They are grinding that you were ordered to do by an NPC. It's slightly better than just plain grinding -- in particular, if you stack quests and turn in several at once it's better exp than just grinding -- but basically the same. If the NPC instead said "Just go kill harpies until you level" would it really be any different?
I think there's a lot of room for improvement in WoW's questing. Exciting quests that require you to accomplish something are fun but rare. Quests that require nothing more than leaving a huge pile of bodies in one small section of the map -- which I'm saying I can't see any substantive difference from grinding -- are the bulk of quests.
"It wouldn't be in any meaningful way for those in charge of network security; there would just be a different vendor peddling the dominant operating system."
That's actually true in broad strokes, if you think of what a network administrator's job is relative to security. They maintain the system, keep up to date with what vulnerabilities exist, test any patches and apply them, and respond to any DoS or virus attacks that occur. They deploy spam filters and virus checkers, and keep up to date on patches for them. This won't fundamentally change -- there are still vulnerabilities for *nix whose fixes will need to be tracked -- so really they are doing the same thing with a different vendor.
In a less general "what is the nature of your job" sense, the above is absolutely not true. For instance the only reason we have a virus scanner on our *nix mail servers is to prevent viruses that depend on MS Outlook. While we've lost entire volumes to corruption by Windows viruses, nothing like that has happened to our *nix file servers. And whenever something like this happens, it means over-nighters for the sysadmins. Ask them if having to come in less often on a Saturday night is a "meaningful" change in the way they work.
There are two common couter-arguments to this. The first is the marketshare argument -- MS software isn't any more buggy, it's just more used and thus targeted more. This makes sense at first blush, but anyone putting forth this argument must explain why IIS is hacked more than Apache. Clearly there is more to it than the number of targets.
The second, more desperate argument is the "all software has bugs" mantra. I'll just be honest -- people who argue this are either idiots or extremely lazy programmers. Of course all software has bugs, the question is how many and why. All food has bugs in it, but don't tell me you can't distinguish between food with below the FDA standard for bugs and food that vastly exceeds that amount. Only a fool confuses "bugs exist" with "the quantity of bugs is the same". Only a fool thinks that you can't design a system to be more secure. The problem isn't that Microsoft's programmers just introduce more bugs, it's that the inherent design of Windows and associated software that makes it bug-prone. The worse your design, the more careful you have to be to avoid bugs. Avoiding bugs, and designing the system so that it is inherently more secure and bugs are easier to avoid, is what good programmers strive to do. You can never do it perfectly, but only lazy idiots think that means you can never succeed at all.
Well whatever. All I know is that once I got my father off Explorer and Outlook and onto Firefox and Thunderbird, I stopped having to clear spyware off his computer every single time I visited. Anecdotal for sure, but it's good enough for me.
They mean copper wire. It isn't inlaid, it's deposited, but the result is still a copper conductor. It first saw use in microprocessors in the later nineties, and now it's used by all major cpu manufacturers instead of aluminum, which is what they used before.
I don't think it being done under the auspices of the British East India Company means it wasn't done by the British Government, as the company was to a large part an extension of the government, created for the explicit purpose of exploiting trade with the east. It was pretty much a state-controlled company, but not entirely so, and is probably more akin to the USPS than Halliburton, except it had as influence on the government more like Halliburton.
That's a good point. Certainly the compiler could do something like eliminate the redundant returns or other optimizations. It is still terrible to read though.:)
Well I was going to point out that since the point of RAID is using cheaper drives whose reliability comes from redundancy that this should be included in the acronym, but then I realized that Redundant Array of Inexpensive Planets isn't any better.:(
And when you're knee deep in {'s, you'll be wondering when you started writing Lisp.
Properly structured code shouldn't need to get "knee deep" in ifs. And once you've littered your code with gotos to avoid some minimal subset of those nested ifs, then you will be wondering when you started writing in the bastard love child of Lisp and BASIC.
An "if (input>MAXVAL) return -1;" makes it explicitly clear what is happening and that nothing else will be allowed to happen.
It's no more explicit than the following.
bool inputsValid = (input > MAXVAL); if (inputsValid) {//code that requires valid inputs } return inputsValid;
Which also makes it explicit where the function exits and what its return value is, which makes future editing easier because you don't need to stare at the code forever to figure out "if I set this other variable here in this for loop, will it ever be executed?" due to early returns.
It's almost the exact same code as the } else { part of your if statement, a jump to somewhere else.
No, because the code as given already has the same number of jumps, in addition to the extra returns, and there's no need in the given example for an "else" clause. You see, if (error) return 0; is two branches. if (error) goto error_label;//stuff, including other returns
error_label: return -1
That's three branches, one for the "if", on for the "goto", and one for the "return".
Also, the first code snippet I wrote has the advantage that if in the common case the inputs are valid, then the branch that skips around the "if (inputsValid) {}" block is never taken, which means in some architectures that it will not be put into the BTB and thus not use any branche prediction resources at all. Whereas the "goto" version requires at minimum two taken branches in the case where all inputs are valid.
Which is one of the reasons why my favorite game review site was always Old Man Murray. Well, that and it was hilarious. But they didn't get review copies, they went out and bought games to play. So no reason to play it up for the sake of the game companies, and every reason to say something is a piece of crap and waste of money because they actually wasted money.
I tend to put more weight into reviews on GameFaqs than official reviews in the rags, for exactly this reason. You still get fanboyism, you get people who want to convince themselves they didn't waste $50, whatever. I think "I paid $50, so if I don't say the game is good I admit I'm a fool parted easily from their money" is a lesser influence on people than "If I don't say the game is good, I won't get paid".
We might all be using MULTICS derivatives today if Honeywell hadn't tried to compete against their own computers.
Yep, which at the very least would mean we'd be free of all those horrible UNIX puns -- UNIX being a pun on MULTICS (and of course eunuchs) which started the whole thing going.
I really don't see how you figure those 'goto's increased the understandability or maintainability of that code. 'If' statements make the control flow clear simply by the structure. "goto" makes that structure meaningless since the program can leap out of it to some arbitrary point at any time.
Just on general principle I eschew multiple returns from a function. For one, it makes control flow harder to understand (the exact same problem with goto) by creating alternative exits from a function and whatever other control structures (for loops etc) you put the return inside. For two, it can pollute branch prediction resources on some computers, specifically ones that use the BTB to identify call/returns for use with a Return Address Stack.
Your function would be trivial to refactor without using any gotos, and it would be both easier to understand and easier on the hardware.
So because morons on public servers would rather play straight-up deathmatch, the original and true "most generic" form of FPS multiplayer, that means that carries over to playing the game professionally? That makes no sense.
Yeah, whatever. I don't like the game, but unless you were born in the late 90s I don't see how you can say "most generic FPS ever". CS popularized the concept of the squad-based mission-oriented team PvP with the realism level turned up to "guns are innacurate at full auto and you die if you get shot a couple times". Q3Arena or UT are what I'd call "generic FPS".
Yeah, I was just reading the article about NASA and space-sex, so I misread the title. Reality is never as cool as my caffeine-deficient brain-damaged hallucinatory interpretation of reality.:(
Has to be, since I'm pretty sure Niven's ring didn't have a width/radius ratio of 10, since that would have made the ringworld 930 million miles wide, a veritable ringtube where the ends would be frozen and uninhabitable. I don't have the book handy, but I'm pretty sure the ring was actually fairly narrow, perhaps only a few thousand miles wide on a ring over five hundred million miles around.
I'm not convinced this type of infringement -- the kind where a pharma wants to sell a product at U.S. margins in a region where nobody will purchase the product at that price -- harms the pharma. Their revenue before infringement was basically zero, and so it is still. The same thing happened recently when a U.S. drug maker wanted to sell a vaccine to the U.K. to administer to all school children, but they wanted more money than the U.K. wanted to pay, and thus they decided not to sell at all. Since all indications are they could have sold it at a price that was still above cost, this is basically a company deciding that they'd rather have no sales than refrain from price gouging. That might set a bad precedent after all.
I'm also not convinced that hurting these companies hurts u.s. citizens. Frankly I think they could stand to be taken down a peg, and have their basic revenue stream in danger so they learn some hard lessons like Ford and IBM did: Working for the customer may not have the same ridiculous margins* as trying to control them, but in the long run it's still profitable and keeps them from revolting. Right now they're so addicted to control and monopoly pricing that they will never give it up, not when insured Americans can afford it -- and with the bargaining position of "pay or die", Americans pay. To really help Americans, this needs to be reversed, so it is the pharmas who are willing to give us good prices at only modest profit because they wish to continue being in business.
* U.S. pharma companies' profits are simply insane, and that's after paying off R&D and the even larger marketing costs, so no red herrings please.
The idea of a Dell using the threat of introducing a competitor's product to their mix so as to get preferential pricing from a monopoly vendor is not really a conspiracy theory. It's what Dell was doing with Intel for the better part of a decade. They would constantly mention the possibility of using AMD parts, and invite AMD reps over to sign the guestbook, so Intel would stay on its toes. Dell isn't a monopoly, but they are huge and their being exclusively Intel was a major help to Intel maintaining their monopoly. Thus did they get Intel to dance to their tune -- EMT64, Intel's x86-64 ISA and a knife stabbed directly into the heart of Itanium, is one major example in addition to just giving Dell really good deals. The story is a little different with Microsoft, seeing as changing processors doesn't change the end-users experience that much while obviously changing the OS does.
If Dell actually starts selling boxes with Ubuntu on them, rather than just threatening to but nothing coming of the project, then Dell definitely decided that there was indeed good reasons for selling Linux. Yet during the whole time they were considering the idea, you can bet the mortgage that they were doing it so as to let Microsoft know that the world's largest OEM was thinking about empowering MS' arch-enemy -- unless of course Dell can get Windows cheaper, in which case the project would probably be delayed. If they do pull the lever on pre-loaded Linux, then it's because they calculated that finally at this point in time the financial benefit of selling Linux outweighs the financial penalty of pissing off Microsoft and losing the preferential pricing.
And surely that can't be the case, not with our noble leaders and their "family values," "character," and such.
I'd think that turning a blind eye to patent violations in a country that wants to make cheap drugs to treat their huge number of AIDS patients who lack the funds to buy the licensed pharmeceuticals is exactly the kind of thing a good Christian would do. But, uh, that's not the way it works, because "Christian values" is something a politician sticks into their campaign literature to get votes. Instead, the decision is made by pharma lobbyists, representing an entity that would rather not sell any product at all in a country rather than sell the product without patent-monopoly prices.
I was merely talking about classes of patentable inventions, I didn't mean to imply specific instances. Of course you can't patent the concept of a computer today, physical implementations of that concept are over half a century old.
OK, and the sequence of operations used to put threads on a small piece of metal to turn it into a screw, encoded into human-readable format -- i.e. a patent -- differs from this how?
You're switching contexts mid-sentence here. You're talking in one case about the thing to be patented, and then the patent itself. Screws aren't abstractions or representations, and are patentable. The abstract description of how to make one is in your patent application. In the case of software, the thing being patented, the software, is a representation of math.
Get it? The patent is a human-readable representation in all cases, yes. The thing patented is not usually a representation of a thing, but an actual physical object. You can't patent patents, and you shouldn't be able to patent math.
Traditional patents protect novel sequences of physical processes. Other than an overzealous application of the ivory-tower mentality of academia, why should novel sequences of mathematical processes be any different?Businesspeople -- the people to whom patents matter -- deal in tangible objects.
Why shouldn't math be patentable, you ask? For the same reason novel sequences of words shouldn't be patentable. You're locking up the fundamentals of thought and progress.
"Just" that, huh? I guess you make my point, then, because it's the latter that is patentable. And of course, this ignores how completely fatuous it is for you to even accept this premise. Only scientists deal in molecules. Businesspeople -- the people to whom patents matter -- deal in tangible objects.
I was only correcting your non-parallel argument that conflated describing something with doing it. Molecules in aggregate are tangible objects, but software isn't tangible at all. "Software" doesn't even necessarily involve electrons, and you won't find that assumption anywhere in the definition of any computer language, because it is an abstract math concept. It is only the most common implementation in a silicon computer, the tangible physical object, that has anything to do with molecules.
Also, a series of formulas that describe how you run your warehouse would not have been patentable in the past, falling under the category of "business methods". Good thing too that neither Olds nor Ford were able to patent the assembly line! It wasn't until the modern regime, which acknowledges both business model and software patents, that it would have been patentable. So I'm against both, you see.
Only scientists deal in molecules. Businesspeople -- the people to whom patents matter -- deal in tangible objects. Boxes, shelves, forklifts. This is also the language of patents. They don't talk about the molecules that make up the boxes. Likewise, the language of software patents deals with the real-world outcomes of the software, not the the countless mathematical processes that are ticking away in the computer. I'm sure this must all be quite offensive to computer scientists, but this is the world we live in.
Utterly wrong! Pharmaceutical patents absolutely deal with the molecules that make up the product, the methods for making them, and as a separate claim, their pharamaceutical effects. Software patents will make claims about the real-world effects of software, and the mathematical algorithms used in the production of the effect. Each claim is separate. In most cases the algorithm itself is patented, in addition to but distinct from the desired outcome.
Really? So you designed and invented a computer, and you've patented that. And I write some software that makes your computer actually do something, so you must own that, too, then -- right? Because it falls under your patent: The computer is the only invention here.
That's not how patent law works. Patents don't absorb other inventions such that things not mentioned in the patent "fall under" it, whether they are patentable or not. You don't need a license to
However, form (2) involves less operations to perform on a computational machine. It is an optimization, so to say, which is meaningless outside the context of a Von Neumann machine.
Utter nonsense, unless you consider the human brain a "Von Neumann machine". Before the invention of computers and calculators, optimizations that reduced the number of operations were more important. In fact ease of computation by hand was one of the stated reasons I learned about simplification methods like your example in algebra class way back in 7th grade, before algebraic and graphing calculators became ubiquitous in the classroom. Or don't you remember that the original meaning of "computer" was "person whose job was to perform repeated calculations by hand"?
But I'm still not clear on the difference between a mathematical statement and a mathematical method. Why is x(x(x^3+2)+2)+7 a "method" and not a "statement"? The fact that it is equivalent to the first statement seems to me to mean there cannot be any relevent difference. If you wrote equation 2 first, then created equation 1 as the optimization (it contains more parallelism, so it isn't inconceivable), then would equation 1 be the "method" rather than the "statement"? Would 2 then be a "fact" and unpatentable?
More importantly, I'm not aware of any such distinction in U.S. patent law. You wouldn't happen to know the section of U.S. code that makes this distinction?
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I won't explain why I think questing is better than grinding again (it's a response under this one, I believe), but suffice to say that questing gives much faster XP gains with (nearly) guaranteed gear improvement.
I find it telling that the main improvement of grinding-via-quests and grinding-without-quests is more experience, when you've defined "grinding" as "repetetive killing for exp". It's true, but that isn't an actual difference, it just means that your grinding is more efficient when you are grinding for quests -- "repetetive killing for more exp".
Some time ago WoW's quest were labeled as one of three types: kill count, gathering and FedEx quests. I would definitely like to see a wider variety of quests, but until I come up with or hear about better suggestions that we can submit to Blizzard, I've got no real complaints.
Oh, how about, "more quests that are like those in the game already that don't fall into those 3 categories". It isn't like nobody has ever thought up a better quest than "Kill 72 ninja frogs then come back". I'm not going to complain too loudly simply because I know that most of those lame grind-quests are in there to pad out the quests because they're much easier to construct than the more involved and more fun quests.
I do see a difference between questing and grinding mainly for the story parts and the purpose behind it.
"I sure do hate murlocs! Go kill 40 of the buggers!" is sure pushing the story, and oh who can beat the sense of purpose when you're someone else's tool acting out their blind hatred of another species for no reason other than they've promised you some silver and bonus exp.
There's a story to be had, but the majority of quests that push a real story are also the ones that don't fit into the simple "grind on monster X for a while, then come back". The most important aspects of the story are tied to instances, and instances are fantastic places to quest. "Infiltrate the quillboar lair to kill some lich dude (incidentally killing anything else between you and him) because he is trying to recruit the boars to help The Scourge" is way better than "kill a ton of quillboars because I need some pens to sell".
Thankfully, Blizzard was wise enough to provide plenty of monsters for both questers and grinders so each of us could play as we like.
Okay, so now grinding quests and just-plain-grinding are different playstyles blizzard is catering to? And I sure hope your "each of us could play as we like" isn't referring to me as though I'm a "grinder"! Who actually wants to grind pointlessly for exp for hours? My whole point is that grinding because an NPC told you to isn't a substantial improvement over grinding just because you need the exp as far as actually gameplay goes. The only reason anyone ever decided to not go questing and just grind their brains out was because it was thought that this would be more exp due to saving on travel time, and it turns out this isn't true. So now all the leveling guides are based upon efficient questing. And many of those quests amount to nothing more than a grind. It is those of us who wanted something more interesting out of our quests whose playstyle is not being properly catered to.
I feel like MS pussied out on the 360's design by removing the hard drive because they took that away from developers. Instead of innovating the console market again, they just seem to be riding on the success that they've already created. Now we're finally seeing a successful multi-platform developer complain about the 360's limitations. I don't think this looks very good for the 360 or for Microsoft.
I speculate that the thinking behind the decision was that Microsoft understands that game consoles are price-sensitive and that some gamers would be put off by a $500 console, but they didn't make the correct choice in how to act on that. The Core version is cheaper, yes, and I'm sure that appeals to some, but it's cheaper by being crippled. Nobody wants a crippled piece of hardware, even if it is cheaper, because it's missing functionality that made the full-price version attractive to begin with. Which, if I'm not mistaken, has translated into far fewer Core versions being sold than the full-price version despite it being cheaper.
So the end result is that they split developers, with most not wanting to alienate customers by requiring a hard drive that some won't have, while failing to substantially increase uptake with the cheaper model. Sounds like a case of "killing two birds with one stone" when those birds were your prized competition falcons.
The HD on the original xbox was a ballsy move for sure, and I would have thought MS would stick with it after proving it could work (give or take billions in losses, but it's not like the Core 360 saved them from that either).
I don't see much difference between repetetively killing for exp, and repetetively killing for a quest whose reward is exp. Either way, you're killing the same monsters over and over. While it is nice to at least have the quest as a guide for when the killing is over, all it really amounts to is grinding with an extra bonus exp reward at the end. Farming is nothing but grinding when you've reached the level cap, and as far as I'm concerned they are the same.
There are lots of good quests in WoW. Any instance quest is usually good, because instances are the best part of the game (if a terrible pain in the ass to actually do; can't wait for next patch to bring back the LFG channel). Other quests involve infiltrating some location to find an object/boss to kill. Those are fun too. You're killing the monsters because they're between you and your goal, not because it has been decreed that X of them must die.
All of those "kill X cheese beasts" and "slay weregoats until you find Y goatees" are just filler. They are grinding that you were ordered to do by an NPC. It's slightly better than just plain grinding -- in particular, if you stack quests and turn in several at once it's better exp than just grinding -- but basically the same. If the NPC instead said "Just go kill harpies until you level" would it really be any different?
I think there's a lot of room for improvement in WoW's questing. Exciting quests that require you to accomplish something are fun but rare. Quests that require nothing more than leaving a huge pile of bodies in one small section of the map -- which I'm saying I can't see any substantive difference from grinding -- are the bulk of quests.
Well it's a matter of how you frame it.
"It wouldn't be in any meaningful way for those in charge of network security; there would just be a different vendor peddling the dominant operating system."
That's actually true in broad strokes, if you think of what a network administrator's job is relative to security. They maintain the system, keep up to date with what vulnerabilities exist, test any patches and apply them, and respond to any DoS or virus attacks that occur. They deploy spam filters and virus checkers, and keep up to date on patches for them. This won't fundamentally change -- there are still vulnerabilities for *nix whose fixes will need to be tracked -- so really they are doing the same thing with a different vendor.
In a less general "what is the nature of your job" sense, the above is absolutely not true. For instance the only reason we have a virus scanner on our *nix mail servers is to prevent viruses that depend on MS Outlook. While we've lost entire volumes to corruption by Windows viruses, nothing like that has happened to our *nix file servers. And whenever something like this happens, it means over-nighters for the sysadmins. Ask them if having to come in less often on a Saturday night is a "meaningful" change in the way they work.
There are two common couter-arguments to this. The first is the marketshare argument -- MS software isn't any more buggy, it's just more used and thus targeted more. This makes sense at first blush, but anyone putting forth this argument must explain why IIS is hacked more than Apache. Clearly there is more to it than the number of targets.
The second, more desperate argument is the "all software has bugs" mantra. I'll just be honest -- people who argue this are either idiots or extremely lazy programmers. Of course all software has bugs, the question is how many and why. All food has bugs in it, but don't tell me you can't distinguish between food with below the FDA standard for bugs and food that vastly exceeds that amount. Only a fool confuses "bugs exist" with "the quantity of bugs is the same". Only a fool thinks that you can't design a system to be more secure. The problem isn't that Microsoft's programmers just introduce more bugs, it's that the inherent design of Windows and associated software that makes it bug-prone. The worse your design, the more careful you have to be to avoid bugs. Avoiding bugs, and designing the system so that it is inherently more secure and bugs are easier to avoid, is what good programmers strive to do. You can never do it perfectly, but only lazy idiots think that means you can never succeed at all.
Well whatever. All I know is that once I got my father off Explorer and Outlook and onto Firefox and Thunderbird, I stopped having to clear spyware off his computer every single time I visited. Anecdotal for sure, but it's good enough for me.
Your left with make a lot of noise and pretending your doing something.
That's okay; it was our politicians' first choice anyway!
They mean copper wire. It isn't inlaid, it's deposited, but the result is still a copper conductor. It first saw use in microprocessors in the later nineties, and now it's used by all major cpu manufacturers instead of aluminum, which is what they used before.
I don't think it being done under the auspices of the British East India Company means it wasn't done by the British Government, as the company was to a large part an extension of the government, created for the explicit purpose of exploiting trade with the east. It was pretty much a state-controlled company, but not entirely so, and is probably more akin to the USPS than Halliburton, except it had as influence on the government more like Halliburton.
That's a good point. Certainly the compiler could do something like eliminate the redundant returns or other optimizations. It is still terrible to read though. :)
Not to mention solving NASA's "romance/sex on long space journeys" problem.
Well I was going to point out that since the point of RAID is using cheaper drives whose reliability comes from redundancy that this should be included in the acronym, but then I realized that Redundant Array of Inexpensive Planets isn't any better. :(
And when you're knee deep in {'s, you'll be wondering when you started writing Lisp.
//code that requires valid inputs
//stuff, including other returns
Properly structured code shouldn't need to get "knee deep" in ifs. And once you've littered your code with gotos to avoid some minimal subset of those nested ifs, then you will be wondering when you started writing in the bastard love child of Lisp and BASIC.
An "if (input>MAXVAL) return -1;" makes it explicitly clear what is happening and that nothing else will be allowed to happen.
It's no more explicit than the following.
bool inputsValid = (input > MAXVAL);
if (inputsValid) {
}
return inputsValid;
Which also makes it explicit where the function exits and what its return value is, which makes future editing easier because you don't need to stare at the code forever to figure out "if I set this other variable here in this for loop, will it ever be executed?" due to early returns.
It's almost the exact same code as the } else { part of your if statement, a jump to somewhere else.
No, because the code as given already has the same number of jumps, in addition to the extra returns, and there's no need in the given example for an "else" clause. You see, if (error) return 0; is two branches.
if (error) goto error_label;
error_label: return -1
That's three branches, one for the "if", on for the "goto", and one for the "return".
Also, the first code snippet I wrote has the advantage that if in the common case the inputs are valid, then the branch that skips around the "if (inputsValid) {}" block is never taken, which means in some architectures that it will not be put into the BTB and thus not use any branche prediction resources at all. Whereas the "goto" version requires at minimum two taken branches in the case where all inputs are valid.
Which is one of the reasons why my favorite game review site was always Old Man Murray. Well, that and it was hilarious. But they didn't get review copies, they went out and bought games to play. So no reason to play it up for the sake of the game companies, and every reason to say something is a piece of crap and waste of money because they actually wasted money.
I tend to put more weight into reviews on GameFaqs than official reviews in the rags, for exactly this reason. You still get fanboyism, you get people who want to convince themselves they didn't waste $50, whatever. I think "I paid $50, so if I don't say the game is good I admit I'm a fool parted easily from their money" is a lesser influence on people than "If I don't say the game is good, I won't get paid".
We might all be using MULTICS derivatives today if Honeywell hadn't tried to compete against their own computers.
Yep, which at the very least would mean we'd be free of all those horrible UNIX puns -- UNIX being a pun on MULTICS (and of course eunuchs) which started the whole thing going.
I really don't see how you figure those 'goto's increased the understandability or maintainability of that code. 'If' statements make the control flow clear simply by the structure. "goto" makes that structure meaningless since the program can leap out of it to some arbitrary point at any time.
Just on general principle I eschew multiple returns from a function. For one, it makes control flow harder to understand (the exact same problem with goto) by creating alternative exits from a function and whatever other control structures (for loops etc) you put the return inside. For two, it can pollute branch prediction resources on some computers, specifically ones that use the BTB to identify call/returns for use with a Return Address Stack.
Your function would be trivial to refactor without using any gotos, and it would be both easier to understand and easier on the hardware.
So because morons on public servers would rather play straight-up deathmatch, the original and true "most generic" form of FPS multiplayer, that means that carries over to playing the game professionally? That makes no sense.
"most generic FPS ever" "simplest premise"
Yeah, whatever. I don't like the game, but unless you were born in the late 90s I don't see how you can say "most generic FPS ever". CS popularized the concept of the squad-based mission-oriented team PvP with the realism level turned up to "guns are innacurate at full auto and you die if you get shot a couple times". Q3Arena or UT are what I'd call "generic FPS".
Yeah, I was just reading the article about NASA and space-sex, so I misread the title. Reality is never as cool as my caffeine-deficient brain-damaged hallucinatory interpretation of reality. :(
Has to be, since I'm pretty sure Niven's ring didn't have a width/radius ratio of 10, since that would have made the ringworld 930 million miles wide, a veritable ringtube where the ends would be frozen and uninhabitable. I don't have the book handy, but I'm pretty sure the ring was actually fairly narrow, perhaps only a few thousand miles wide on a ring over five hundred million miles around.
Good point about licensing other drugs.
I'm not convinced this type of infringement -- the kind where a pharma wants to sell a product at U.S. margins in a region where nobody will purchase the product at that price -- harms the pharma. Their revenue before infringement was basically zero, and so it is still. The same thing happened recently when a U.S. drug maker wanted to sell a vaccine to the U.K. to administer to all school children, but they wanted more money than the U.K. wanted to pay, and thus they decided not to sell at all. Since all indications are they could have sold it at a price that was still above cost, this is basically a company deciding that they'd rather have no sales than refrain from price gouging. That might set a bad precedent after all.
I'm also not convinced that hurting these companies hurts u.s. citizens. Frankly I think they could stand to be taken down a peg, and have their basic revenue stream in danger so they learn some hard lessons like Ford and IBM did: Working for the customer may not have the same ridiculous margins* as trying to control them, but in the long run it's still profitable and keeps them from revolting. Right now they're so addicted to control and monopoly pricing that they will never give it up, not when insured Americans can afford it -- and with the bargaining position of "pay or die", Americans pay. To really help Americans, this needs to be reversed, so it is the pharmas who are willing to give us good prices at only modest profit because they wish to continue being in business.
* U.S. pharma companies' profits are simply insane, and that's after paying off R&D and the even larger marketing costs, so no red herrings please.
The idea of a Dell using the threat of introducing a competitor's product to their mix so as to get preferential pricing from a monopoly vendor is not really a conspiracy theory. It's what Dell was doing with Intel for the better part of a decade. They would constantly mention the possibility of using AMD parts, and invite AMD reps over to sign the guestbook, so Intel would stay on its toes. Dell isn't a monopoly, but they are huge and their being exclusively Intel was a major help to Intel maintaining their monopoly. Thus did they get Intel to dance to their tune -- EMT64, Intel's x86-64 ISA and a knife stabbed directly into the heart of Itanium, is one major example in addition to just giving Dell really good deals. The story is a little different with Microsoft, seeing as changing processors doesn't change the end-users experience that much while obviously changing the OS does.
If Dell actually starts selling boxes with Ubuntu on them, rather than just threatening to but nothing coming of the project, then Dell definitely decided that there was indeed good reasons for selling Linux. Yet during the whole time they were considering the idea, you can bet the mortgage that they were doing it so as to let Microsoft know that the world's largest OEM was thinking about empowering MS' arch-enemy -- unless of course Dell can get Windows cheaper, in which case the project would probably be delayed. If they do pull the lever on pre-loaded Linux, then it's because they calculated that finally at this point in time the financial benefit of selling Linux outweighs the financial penalty of pissing off Microsoft and losing the preferential pricing.
So, rage all you want. You will never get "piracy" back. Nor will we get "hacker" back. It's a lost battle.
But I'm still fighting for "faggot" meaning "bundle of sticks"!
And surely that can't be the case, not with our noble leaders and their "family values," "character," and such.
I'd think that turning a blind eye to patent violations in a country that wants to make cheap drugs to treat their huge number of AIDS patients who lack the funds to buy the licensed pharmeceuticals is exactly the kind of thing a good Christian would do. But, uh, that's not the way it works, because "Christian values" is something a politician sticks into their campaign literature to get votes. Instead, the decision is made by pharma lobbyists, representing an entity that would rather not sell any product at all in a country rather than sell the product without patent-monopoly prices.
I was merely talking about classes of patentable inventions, I didn't mean to imply specific instances. Of course you can't patent the concept of a computer today, physical implementations of that concept are over half a century old.
OK, and the sequence of operations used to put threads on a small piece of metal to turn it into a screw, encoded into human-readable format -- i.e. a patent -- differs from this how?
You're switching contexts mid-sentence here. You're talking in one case about the thing to be patented, and then the patent itself. Screws aren't abstractions or representations, and are patentable. The abstract description of how to make one is in your patent application. In the case of software, the thing being patented, the software, is a representation of math.
Get it? The patent is a human-readable representation in all cases, yes. The thing patented is not usually a representation of a thing, but an actual physical object. You can't patent patents, and you shouldn't be able to patent math.
Traditional patents protect novel sequences of physical processes. Other than an overzealous application of the ivory-tower mentality of academia, why should novel sequences of mathematical processes be any different?Businesspeople -- the people to whom patents matter -- deal in tangible objects.
Why shouldn't math be patentable, you ask? For the same reason novel sequences of words shouldn't be patentable. You're locking up the fundamentals of thought and progress.
"Just" that, huh? I guess you make my point, then, because it's the latter that is patentable. And of course, this ignores how completely fatuous it is for you to even accept this premise. Only scientists deal in molecules. Businesspeople -- the people to whom patents matter -- deal in tangible objects.
I was only correcting your non-parallel argument that conflated describing something with doing it. Molecules in aggregate are tangible objects, but software isn't tangible at all. "Software" doesn't even necessarily involve electrons, and you won't find that assumption anywhere in the definition of any computer language, because it is an abstract math concept. It is only the most common implementation in a silicon computer, the tangible physical object, that has anything to do with molecules.
Also, a series of formulas that describe how you run your warehouse would not have been patentable in the past, falling under the category of "business methods". Good thing too that neither Olds nor Ford were able to patent the assembly line! It wasn't until the modern regime, which acknowledges both business model and software patents, that it would have been patentable. So I'm against both, you see.
Only scientists deal in molecules. Businesspeople -- the people to whom patents matter -- deal in tangible objects. Boxes, shelves, forklifts. This is also the language of patents. They don't talk about the molecules that make up the boxes. Likewise, the language of software patents deals with the real-world outcomes of the software, not the the countless mathematical processes that are ticking away in the computer. I'm sure this must all be quite offensive to computer scientists, but this is the world we live in.
Utterly wrong! Pharmaceutical patents absolutely deal with the molecules that make up the product, the methods for making them, and as a separate claim, their pharamaceutical effects. Software patents will make claims about the real-world effects of software, and the mathematical algorithms used in the production of the effect. Each claim is separate. In most cases the algorithm itself is patented, in addition to but distinct from the desired outcome.
Really? So you designed and invented a computer, and you've patented that. And I write some software that makes your computer actually do something, so you must own that, too, then -- right? Because it falls under your patent: The computer is the only invention here.
That's not how patent law works. Patents don't absorb other inventions such that things not mentioned in the patent "fall under" it, whether they are patentable or not. You don't need a license to
However, form (2) involves less operations to perform on a computational machine. It is an optimization, so to say, which is meaningless outside the context of a Von Neumann machine.
Utter nonsense, unless you consider the human brain a "Von Neumann machine". Before the invention of computers and calculators, optimizations that reduced the number of operations were more important. In fact ease of computation by hand was one of the stated reasons I learned about simplification methods like your example in algebra class way back in 7th grade, before algebraic and graphing calculators became ubiquitous in the classroom. Or don't you remember that the original meaning of "computer" was "person whose job was to perform repeated calculations by hand"?
But I'm still not clear on the difference between a mathematical statement and a mathematical method. Why is x(x(x^3+2)+2)+7 a "method" and not a "statement"? The fact that it is equivalent to the first statement seems to me to mean there cannot be any relevent difference. If you wrote equation 2 first, then created equation 1 as the optimization (it contains more parallelism, so it isn't inconceivable), then would equation 1 be the "method" rather than the "statement"? Would 2 then be a "fact" and unpatentable?
More importantly, I'm not aware of any such distinction in U.S. patent law. You wouldn't happen to know the section of U.S. code that makes this distinction?