I worked out that it had to be a beach. I further figured that since it probably wasn't anything to do with islands in the English Channel, it had to be either jumpers or that place where The Sopranos was set.
As I understood it, cheap practical circular polarising filters are more recent than that. Linear polarising filters aren't very good for cinema because they dim the image if you tilt your head.
Incidentally, I also forgot to mention the kinematoscope, which predates cinema.
It's been around since the early-to-mid 50s, not long after colour became cheap. Queen Elizabeth's coronation was filmed in 3D. Hitchcock's Dial M for Murder was filmed in 3D. You may or may not recall a character in Back to the Future (set in 1955) who wore 3D glasses everywhere as a nod from the filmmakers on just how trendy it was at the time.
What's new is digital cameras and digital projection (because synchronisation was always the hardest technical challenge) and cost-effective circular polarising filters which allow 3D movies to be seen in full colour in both eyes.
Leap seconds, in contrast, are completely pointless. They exist because the SI day is slightly shorter than the solar day, by a tiny fraction of a second.
Wrong. They exist because the mean solar day is not constant and is affected by unpredictable events, such as seismic events.
In the short term, they introduce a lot of disruption (see air traffic control problems for a good reason why we shouldn't have them - safety-critical systems that depend on time synchronisation and don't reliably work with leap seconds. Great).
If your time is that critical, your system really needs to designed properly. For example, you could make your safety-critical timebase work on absolute seconds only, and correct when reporting the time to the user if that's a desired feature. GPS works that way, and there haven't been any problems with it that I've heard of, because it's part of the GPS specification that the internal working timebase counts all seconds including leap ones.
No. I'm a polling official (which is not the same thing as a "scrutineer"), and it most certainly does not come down to mood. If the voter's intention is clear, and it isn't disqualified for any other reason (e.g. writing which identifies the elector), then it's a valid vote.
The specific rules do change from election to election, and state elections have different rules from federal elections, but the basic idea is the same: If we can tell what you meant, it's usually a valid vote.
I think he was thinking about auto_ptr, scoped_ptr, shared_ptr, weak_ptr and the like.
Incidentally, by the same measure, there is no "automatic" memory management in a non-declarative garbage collected language like Java. It's less manual, for sure, but you still find yourself having to null out references sometimes.
In 10 years of professional programming, I don't think I've ever seen RTTI not disabled.
The usual place you'd see this is where memory is tight. OS kernels (e.g. L4/Fiasco) and firmware are the only cases I've seen.
As for the X_cast functions- no point to them. If I want to cast, I'll just use (type).
I agree with you about dynamic_cast. If you ever find yourself needing this, chances are you probably need a real meta-object protocol.
But if you never use static_cast and const_cast, I hope I never have to maintain your code, because you are being discourteous to the next maintainer who is losing valuable information about what you intended by this cast.
I rarely use C-style casts. The compiler never checks them properly.
I take it you've never had the pleasure of using structured exception handling.
Also, C++ code is only marginally worse than C (but it is worse, one need only look at the compiler's asm output of a basic hello world program to see why).
At the risk of stating the obvious: If you're being paid to write Hello World, then C++ is indeed probably the wrong language for the job.
Please, deliver us from pompous assholes who think they can write professional grade code after a cs-101 class. They get a passing grade from their prof because the prof is a ducking fummy, drop the project half done, and I get to clean up the fscking mess and actually make it work.
I agree with what you're trying to say, but you're being way too harsh on CS-101 professors.
Software development is a trade, and most of it is learned during an apprenticeship on the job, preferably under the wing of a good mentor or two, and in the lifetime that follows. Someone who has graduated an undergraduate-level CS course is like someone who has graduated a trade school. It means they can probably wield the tools of the trade without hurting themselves or others. It does not mean that they can produce anything of quality yet.
The attitude that the compiler cannot make a mistake is pure BS and we all know it.
Welcome to the 21st century, where network latency, caches, instruction ordering and register renaming have a bigger effect on performance of most applications than whether the CPU has a Booth or Wallace tree multiplier.
Compilers almost always do better than even good assembler programmers, all other things being equal. Or, to put it another way, assembler programmers can always beat high-level programmers because they can also use a compiler.
Don't get me wrong. For any task that isn't systems integration (i.e. anything that's interesting and worth doing), assembler is still important, but only because you can use it to track down and solve problems after they are found.
Some people learned how to program outside of academia. I have heard of Knuth, but don't really know anything about him nor do I care to. It hasn't hindered my ability to write software one bit.
The difference between the best of the best and the worst of the worst is that the best of the best are not afraid to break the rules, but the worst of the worst don't even know what the rules are.
Did I need to study these fine CS giants to write my first compiler? No, I did not. My first assembler? No. Linker? No. Did I need to study them to figure out high performance dithering? No.
Chances are good that you did, indirectly.
To pick a random example, you probably used a parser generator to write your first compiler. The documentation probably didn't mention in its documentation that Knuth invented LL and LR parsing, and as long as everything worked, you probably didn't need to know this. But if you'd come across a problem with your grammar (e.g. it was LR(1) but not LALR(1)), you would have been better off knowing this than not knowing this.
The overwhelming majority of airline pilots get through their career without ever having to abort a landing under real conditions. But would you hire one that didn't know how?
It doesn't take a fundamentalist to claim that all of the Bible is the inspired word of God.
Indeed. I did assume that you meant the phrase "inspired word of God" as something specific which you may not have intended. Almost every theologian will agree with the statement but interpret it differently.
I would claim that anyone who thinks that any part of it isn't the word of God isn't really a Christian.
The bible is interpreted however best suits the person reading it on the day.
There's a difference between interpretation and application. Anyone with the knowledge and skills can understand (as well as anyone can) what the author of some ancient text meant. How you might apply that today (assuming you're Christian or Jewish and feel bound to apply it today) is a completely different question. Case in point:
Something in there made it seem like slavery was OK for a long time, remember?
Because nobody ever questioned it.
Three thousand years ago, before the advent of international law and reliable prisons, slavery probably was a good idea, because the alternative was a massacre. Before the invention of slavery, when you invaded a city, you basically had to kill everyone of conscriptable age to subdue it. Slavery was arguably an improvement.
The Christian part of the Bible never questions the conventional thinking of how to organise a state government partly because it didn't occur to them (slavery was just a fact of life), but mostly because unlike Judaism, Christianity wasn't a state religion.
Slashdot Mirror
What's two floors beneath you? The announcement or the lab?
On the plus side, maybe CSSE won't have to move yet again...
(I work over the road.)
X-Bender: It's like looking in a smelly mirror!
I'm an Omnist, you insensitive clod.
Got it, thanks.
I worked out that it had to be a beach. I further figured that since it probably wasn't anything to do with islands in the English Channel, it had to be either jumpers or that place where The Sopranos was set.
What's "jersey shore"?
As I understood it, cheap practical circular polarising filters are more recent than that. Linear polarising filters aren't very good for cinema because they dim the image if you tilt your head.
Incidentally, I also forgot to mention the kinematoscope, which predates cinema.
There's no $q. What you're seeing is q{}, which is one of the Perl quote operators.
It's been around since the early-to-mid 50s, not long after colour became cheap. Queen Elizabeth's coronation was filmed in 3D. Hitchcock's Dial M for Murder was filmed in 3D. You may or may not recall a character in Back to the Future (set in 1955) who wore 3D glasses everywhere as a nod from the filmmakers on just how trendy it was at the time.
What's new is digital cameras and digital projection (because synchronisation was always the hardest technical challenge) and cost-effective circular polarising filters which allow 3D movies to be seen in full colour in both eyes.
Thousands bought it, hundreds read it, dozens understood it.
The most used artificial language (as opposed to the most spoken) is arguably the Morse abbreviation sublanguage.
Leap seconds, in contrast, are completely pointless. They exist because the SI day is slightly shorter than the solar day, by a tiny fraction of a second.
Wrong. They exist because the mean solar day is not constant and is affected by unpredictable events, such as seismic events.
In the short term, they introduce a lot of disruption (see air traffic control problems for a good reason why we shouldn't have them - safety-critical systems that depend on time synchronisation and don't reliably work with leap seconds. Great).
If your time is that critical, your system really needs to designed properly. For example, you could make your safety-critical timebase work on absolute seconds only, and correct when reporting the time to the user if that's a desired feature. GPS works that way, and there haven't been any problems with it that I've heard of, because it's part of the GPS specification that the internal working timebase counts all seconds including leap ones.
Are you suggesting that people who look at child porn are intelligent? Seriously?
Anyone who is that dumb and looks at child porn has already been caught, or will be within the week.
No. I'm a polling official (which is not the same thing as a "scrutineer"), and it most certainly does not come down to mood. If the voter's intention is clear, and it isn't disqualified for any other reason (e.g. writing which identifies the elector), then it's a valid vote.
The specific rules do change from election to election, and state elections have different rules from federal elections, but the basic idea is the same: If we can tell what you meant, it's usually a valid vote.
I think he was thinking about auto_ptr, scoped_ptr, shared_ptr, weak_ptr and the like.
Incidentally, by the same measure, there is no "automatic" memory management in a non-declarative garbage collected language like Java. It's less manual, for sure, but you still find yourself having to null out references sometimes.
In 10 years of professional programming, I don't think I've ever seen RTTI not disabled.
The usual place you'd see this is where memory is tight. OS kernels (e.g. L4/Fiasco) and firmware are the only cases I've seen.
As for the X_cast functions- no point to them. If I want to cast, I'll just use (type).
I agree with you about dynamic_cast. If you ever find yourself needing this, chances are you probably need a real meta-object protocol.
But if you never use static_cast and const_cast, I hope I never have to maintain your code, because you are being discourteous to the next maintainer who is losing valuable information about what you intended by this cast.
I rarely use C-style casts. The compiler never checks them properly.
Visual C++ doesn't really exist [...]
I take it you've never had the pleasure of using structured exception handling.
Also, C++ code is only marginally worse than C (but it is worse, one need only look at the compiler's asm output of a basic hello world program to see why).
At the risk of stating the obvious: If you're being paid to write Hello World, then C++ is indeed probably the wrong language for the job.
Grace Murray Hopper invented the compiler.
Someone else needs to get back to polishing turds.
Please, deliver us from pompous assholes who think they can write professional grade code after a cs-101 class. They get a passing grade from their prof because the prof is a ducking fummy, drop the project half done, and I get to clean up the fscking mess and actually make it work.
I agree with what you're trying to say, but you're being way too harsh on CS-101 professors.
Software development is a trade, and most of it is learned during an apprenticeship on the job, preferably under the wing of a good mentor or two, and in the lifetime that follows. Someone who has graduated an undergraduate-level CS course is like someone who has graduated a trade school. It means they can probably wield the tools of the trade without hurting themselves or others. It does not mean that they can produce anything of quality yet.
Welcome to the 21st century, where network latency, caches, instruction ordering and register renaming have a bigger effect on performance of most applications than whether the CPU has a Booth or Wallace tree multiplier.
Compilers almost always do better than even good assembler programmers, all other things being equal. Or, to put it another way, assembler programmers can always beat high-level programmers because they can also use a compiler.
Don't get me wrong. For any task that isn't systems integration (i.e. anything that's interesting and worth doing), assembler is still important, but only because you can use it to track down and solve problems after they are found.
Some people learned how to program outside of academia. I have heard of Knuth, but don't really know anything about him nor do I care to. It hasn't hindered my ability to write software one bit.
The difference between the best of the best and the worst of the worst is that the best of the best are not afraid to break the rules, but the worst of the worst don't even know what the rules are.
Did I need to study these fine CS giants to write my first compiler? No, I did not. My first assembler? No. Linker? No. Did I need to study them to figure out high performance dithering? No.
Chances are good that you did, indirectly.
To pick a random example, you probably used a parser generator to write your first compiler. The documentation probably didn't mention in its documentation that Knuth invented LL and LR parsing, and as long as everything worked, you probably didn't need to know this. But if you'd come across a problem with your grammar (e.g. it was LR(1) but not LALR(1)), you would have been better off knowing this than not knowing this.
The overwhelming majority of airline pilots get through their career without ever having to abort a landing under real conditions. But would you hire one that didn't know how?
Must anyone who works with life have heard of read LaPlace, Darwin, Watson and Crick, and Latour?
Depends what kind of work you're talking about. For most professional-level careers, the answer is "yes".
Indeed. I did assume that you meant the phrase "inspired word of God" as something specific which you may not have intended. Almost every theologian will agree with the statement but interpret it differently.
So Martin Luther wasn't really a Christian?
I did say "mainstream", not "fundamentalist".
There's a difference between interpretation and application. Anyone with the knowledge and skills can understand (as well as anyone can) what the author of some ancient text meant. How you might apply that today (assuming you're Christian or Jewish and feel bound to apply it today) is a completely different question. Case in point:
Because nobody ever questioned it.
Three thousand years ago, before the advent of international law and reliable prisons, slavery probably was a good idea, because the alternative was a massacre. Before the invention of slavery, when you invaded a city, you basically had to kill everyone of conscriptable age to subdue it. Slavery was arguably an improvement.
The Christian part of the Bible never questions the conventional thinking of how to organise a state government partly because it didn't occur to them (slavery was just a fact of life), but mostly because unlike Judaism, Christianity wasn't a state religion.