What has being able to afford it got to do with anything? I buy pretty much everything with a credit card that's paid off automatically by direct debit. I get 1% of everything I spend directly as cashback, I get 15-45 days of interest-free loan so that the money that I've earned can be sitting in an interest-earning account for longer, and I get various forms of consumer protection (the card company will reverse transactions if the seller doesn't comply with various regulations regarding after-sale support, for example). I can afford to buy everything that I buy with my card in cash, but I'd end up with less money if I did.
Oh, and the way the banking system is set up, having a credit card and paying it off every month helps build credit rating. When we applied for a mortgage recently on a new house the bank was willing to lend us about double what we wanted to borrow.
These things happen when the government represents the interests of its own people instead of the interests of the globalist elite
Uh, what? You mean the referendum didn't benefit people who made a killing from the Murdoch press backing Leave? That the outcome won't benefit the people who were pushing for TTIP, whose strongest backer in the EU was the British prime minister and who are now pushing for a direct US/UK treaty that won't have the strong opposition from the European Parliament able to block it? That voting to take power from the people who just passed the General Data Protection Regulation and giving it to the people who just voted to pass the Investigatory Powers Bill is good for the people?
That voting more power to the people in Westminster, who have consistently underspent per capita on the poorest areas in the EU at the expense of the City of London, and taking it away from the organisation that has been redressing that balance will help the people?
UK academics are already seeing strong proposals for EU funding rejected with notes saying that 'other factors' are now being weight in their evaluation. Other EU universities are starting to regard UK universities as too high a risk as partners for EU funds (and most of the funds require that you partner with organisations in multiple EU institutions). That's restricting access to EU funds, while we're still part of the EU and still paying into the pot that the funding comes from.
On the plus side, we're now an even more attractive place for DARPA to fund - we were already cheap compared to most US institutions and just became 10% cheaper...
I notice also that large non-EU economies are tripping over themselves to position for new trade deals with the UK.
Of course they are. That's because the bit of 'free trade' that politicians don't often talk about is free movement of capital. While the pound is weak, any country that has a treaty that permits free movement of capital is in a position to buy up British assets at bargain basement prices. We've already seen a big spike in foreign investments in UK property since the referendum, which has made the housing shortage even worse. Or was 'foreign ownership of Britain' what you meant by 'independence'?
And yet the areas that had benefitted most from this bought the lie that they'd be better off voting more power to the people who'd been screwing them for the last few decades.
The statistic from last week: the loss in value of the UK taxpayer-owned portion of RBS since the referendum is more than the total that we paid to the EU in a year.
And the one party leader who had the guts to say that they were both bad choices and that 'remain and reform' should be the way forward was subsequently crucified by his MPs for doing so.
Not that hard. JavaScript has TypedArray objects that allow you to have an object that encapsulates a range of memory and allows values to be read from and written to it at arbitrary offsets. The real problem is that JavaScript doesn't have a 64-bit integer type, so you'd have to read a double from the register, write it back to another TypedArray, read it back as two 32-bit integers, and perform your own carry operations.
Taking C code, compiling it with Emscripten into JavaScript, then running the result in a modern JavaScript implementation will give you faster code than taking the same C code and compiling it with a C compiler form 10-20 years ago.
CSS 3 selectors are a Turing-complete language (and, in WebKit at least, have their own JIT in the browser). Of course, using it as such would be completely insane...
It might result in fewer immigrants. Or, at least, fewer immigrants with marketable skills. We saw this a decade or so back when the Polish economy improved and a load of Polish plumbers decided to go back there, leaving the UK with a skills shortage. There still aren't enough British plumbers to make up the shortfall, but we've benefitted from importing them from other countries so plumbing work is now only very expensive to get done and not totally extortionate.
That doesn't seem like a particularly believable reason. ARM SoCs that might end up in tablets and phones all have at least moderately competent GPUs and the requirements of Aero Glass are pretty trivial even by modern mobile GPU standards (compositing, a token amount of pixel shader). More importantly, offloading rendering to the GPU is more power efficient (which is why Apple pushed as much as possible there starting when laptop sales began to outnumber desktops and continued when iDevices started to become popular).
Is it any wonder that UX designers are getting a horrible reputation among some segments of the tech-savvy crowd?
The main reason for this is that people who self-describe as UX experts, as opposed to HCI experts, tend to be the ones that favour form over function and ignore the last 40 or so years of research into how to design useable interfaces. Most of them wouldn't know Fitts' Law if it dragged them to the corner of the screen and made them infinitely long.
There isn't much testing of the C bindings. They're also in the process of being deprecated in favour of machine-generated ones that are less API stable and have no ABI stability guarantees (precisely because most people don't actually use them from C, they use them from some other language with C bindings). For everything else, there's a bit regression test suite that works by feeding some code (source code when testing clang, IR or assembly when testing bits of LLVM) into one of the tools and then checking that the output matches. Bugs still slip in quite easily, unfortunately. The second tier of tests involves compiling and running a bunch of benchmarks and similar sample code and checking that they haven't got slower (by a statistically significant margin) and that they still produce the right answers. There's a network of buildbots that runs on a variety of operating systems and architectures that first builds and runs the regression test suite on every commit and then (less frequently) runs the executable tests. These catch most regressions, but not all - the rest are caught by users testing betas and filing bug reports.
There's been a lot of research work on improving this. The LLVM Miscompilation Detector, for example, had a semantic model of LLVM IR and would feed real and randomly-generated IR through the optimisation pipeline and then use a theorem prover to attempt to prove that the semantics of the before and after versions were the same. This could then be combined with the LLVM bugpoint tool to find the optimisation pass that performed an invalid transform.
It's a tradeoff. Blowing away the i-cache is a good way of killing performance, but so is having a load of function calls that do almost no work. If you had to do a virtual method call for comparing two unsigned integers and a different virtual function call for comparing two signed integers when inserting them into a set then you'd have a lot more overhead. In a typical std::set implementation, the compare operations are inlined and so the costs are very low.
The real problem with C++ is that the programmer has to make the decision about whether to use static or dynamic dispatch up front and the syntax for both is very different, so you can't trivially switch between them when it makes sense to do so.
Exactly. I bought a fairly decent set of speakers, a projector, and a DVD player for a total of around £450 in 2003. Back then, a ticket at my local cinema cost £4.50 (it's gone up), so roughly the same as going to the cinema 100 times. Popcorn was another £4 or so (drinks another £2-3), so that brought it down to about 50 trips - one a week for a year. I split the cost of the projector with my housemates back then and we'd have friends bring a DVD and food / beer around. By the end of the year, it had more or less paid for itself. One of my housemates bought the other shares in the projector when he moved and I bought a new one and have replaced the bulb once, so I've spent a total of about £500 (plus electricity) over a period of 13 years. The up-front cost was a lot higher, but over 13 years it's been cheaper than going to the cinema once a month and not having anything to eat / drink there. And that's just the cost for me: for the first few years when living with housemates and for the last few living with my partner the benefits have been shared by multiple people. Oh, and we get to watch TV shows in the same environment.
I stopped buying DVDs for a while because renting was a lot cheaper, but as BluRay and streaming start to see adoption the second-hand market is flooded with DVDs so it's easy to pick up a film for £1 or a season of a TV show for £3-5.
The real answer to piracy? Give people the product that they want for a reasonable price. Give me a service that let's me download DRM-free movies in a standard format that will work on the FreeBSD media centre box connected to my projector, my Mac laptop, my old WebOS tablet and my new iPad and I'll happily hand over money. Until then, I'll stick to DVDs.
Right, because old people are the ones that have good hearing. I had a similar experience the last time I went to a cinema. Sound settings so ludicrous that any base drowned out people talking and caused distortion in the speakers. I've not been to the cinema near where I live now, but they've just done a big refurbishment that ended up with a quarter the seating space that they had before. Apparently it's doing pretty well (people like the big comfy seats), but a apparently decade ago it was able to sell out most of the screens on a regular basis. Now they always have empty seats, even with a quarter the capacity.
I look into the witness guy's background, he has UK security clearance FFS!
Having UK security clearance is not that hard. I did for a while (though it's long-since lapsed). Anyone who works on any defence-related project is likely to have security clearance. Remember when Snowden released all of the things he could access and it turned out that over a million people in the USA had security clearance? The UK isn't that much more restrictive in who it hands our clearance to.
C11 threads are also a horrible API full of mistakes that other threading libraries learned from and fixed two decades ago. It exists solely because someone thought that you can't have atomics in a language without a mechanism in the standard library for creating threads. C++11 threads are actually quite sensible. The only significant addition in C11 is the addition of a half-arsed port of C++11 atomics (right down to accidentally including a joke footnote from the C++11 draft spec that was removed before the C++11 spec was finalised). _Generic is vaguely useful.
As that article shows, the core of OO that Alan Kay describes is still useful (and even used in the current buzzwordy functional languages), it's just a bunch of cruft that's grown up around it that turns out to be not so useful.
It's very useful to be able to create presentations with multiple paths through them. You can embed deep-dives into things that you're trying to explain and skip over them if the audience either isn't interested in that part or that they want more information about. Quite a few other presentation tools provide support for non-linear presentations, PowerPoint is playing catchup.
Look at LLVM as an instructive example. It's a large complex beast written in heavy C++, but there are bindings for every language you'd ever want to seriously write a compiler in.
Not a great counterexample - The LLVM C bindings are maintained by hand and all of the other bindings are machine-generated from the C bindings.
If you're using zlib as an example of high-quality code, then I'd hate to see what you consider low-quality code. It has a horrible security record, poor layering, and badly designed interfaces. About the only thing it has going for it is performance.
Using C++ without templates is missing the point. One of the things I miss the most when writing C is the lack of efficient generic data structures. C equivalents of things like std::list, std::dequeue, and std::unordered_map all require lots of macros that cast things through void* (and therefore avoid any possibility of compile-time errors) and typically extra layers of indirection which hurt performance from d-cache misses more than templates will hurt from increased i-cache usage.
Apple's CoreFoundation is probably the nicest-designed C library providing core features, but it is a lot harder to work with than its Objective-C equivalent for similar performance and less efficient than a C++ version (though with stronger binary compatibility guarantees).
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What has being able to afford it got to do with anything? I buy pretty much everything with a credit card that's paid off automatically by direct debit. I get 1% of everything I spend directly as cashback, I get 15-45 days of interest-free loan so that the money that I've earned can be sitting in an interest-earning account for longer, and I get various forms of consumer protection (the card company will reverse transactions if the seller doesn't comply with various regulations regarding after-sale support, for example). I can afford to buy everything that I buy with my card in cash, but I'd end up with less money if I did.
Oh, and the way the banking system is set up, having a credit card and paying it off every month helps build credit rating. When we applied for a mortgage recently on a new house the bank was willing to lend us about double what we wanted to borrow.
These things happen when the government represents the interests of its own people instead of the interests of the globalist elite
Uh, what? You mean the referendum didn't benefit people who made a killing from the Murdoch press backing Leave? That the outcome won't benefit the people who were pushing for TTIP, whose strongest backer in the EU was the British prime minister and who are now pushing for a direct US/UK treaty that won't have the strong opposition from the European Parliament able to block it? That voting to take power from the people who just passed the General Data Protection Regulation and giving it to the people who just voted to pass the Investigatory Powers Bill is good for the people? That voting more power to the people in Westminster, who have consistently underspent per capita on the poorest areas in the EU at the expense of the City of London, and taking it away from the organisation that has been redressing that balance will help the people?
On the plus side, we're now an even more attractive place for DARPA to fund - we were already cheap compared to most US institutions and just became 10% cheaper...
I notice also that large non-EU economies are tripping over themselves to position for new trade deals with the UK.
Of course they are. That's because the bit of 'free trade' that politicians don't often talk about is free movement of capital. While the pound is weak, any country that has a treaty that permits free movement of capital is in a position to buy up British assets at bargain basement prices. We've already seen a big spike in foreign investments in UK property since the referendum, which has made the housing shortage even worse. Or was 'foreign ownership of Britain' what you meant by 'independence'?
And yet the areas that had benefitted most from this bought the lie that they'd be better off voting more power to the people who'd been screwing them for the last few decades.
The statistic from last week: the loss in value of the UK taxpayer-owned portion of RBS since the referendum is more than the total that we paid to the EU in a year.
And the one party leader who had the guts to say that they were both bad choices and that 'remain and reform' should be the way forward was subsequently crucified by his MPs for doing so.
Not that hard. JavaScript has TypedArray objects that allow you to have an object that encapsulates a range of memory and allows values to be read from and written to it at arbitrary offsets. The real problem is that JavaScript doesn't have a 64-bit integer type, so you'd have to read a double from the register, write it back to another TypedArray, read it back as two 32-bit integers, and perform your own carry operations.
Taking C code, compiling it with Emscripten into JavaScript, then running the result in a modern JavaScript implementation will give you faster code than taking the same C code and compiling it with a C compiler form 10-20 years ago.
How the hell is CSS a programming language?
CSS 3 selectors are a Turing-complete language (and, in WebKit at least, have their own JIT in the browser). Of course, using it as such would be completely insane...
It might result in fewer immigrants. Or, at least, fewer immigrants with marketable skills. We saw this a decade or so back when the Polish economy improved and a load of Polish plumbers decided to go back there, leaving the UK with a skills shortage. There still aren't enough British plumbers to make up the shortfall, but we've benefitted from importing them from other countries so plumbing work is now only very expensive to get done and not totally extortionate.
That doesn't seem like a particularly believable reason. ARM SoCs that might end up in tablets and phones all have at least moderately competent GPUs and the requirements of Aero Glass are pretty trivial even by modern mobile GPU standards (compositing, a token amount of pixel shader). More importantly, offloading rendering to the GPU is more power efficient (which is why Apple pushed as much as possible there starting when laptop sales began to outnumber desktops and continued when iDevices started to become popular).
Is it any wonder that UX designers are getting a horrible reputation among some segments of the tech-savvy crowd?
The main reason for this is that people who self-describe as UX experts, as opposed to HCI experts, tend to be the ones that favour form over function and ignore the last 40 or so years of research into how to design useable interfaces. Most of them wouldn't know Fitts' Law if it dragged them to the corner of the screen and made them infinitely long.
There isn't much testing of the C bindings. They're also in the process of being deprecated in favour of machine-generated ones that are less API stable and have no ABI stability guarantees (precisely because most people don't actually use them from C, they use them from some other language with C bindings). For everything else, there's a bit regression test suite that works by feeding some code (source code when testing clang, IR or assembly when testing bits of LLVM) into one of the tools and then checking that the output matches. Bugs still slip in quite easily, unfortunately. The second tier of tests involves compiling and running a bunch of benchmarks and similar sample code and checking that they haven't got slower (by a statistically significant margin) and that they still produce the right answers. There's a network of buildbots that runs on a variety of operating systems and architectures that first builds and runs the regression test suite on every commit and then (less frequently) runs the executable tests. These catch most regressions, but not all - the rest are caught by users testing betas and filing bug reports.
There's been a lot of research work on improving this. The LLVM Miscompilation Detector, for example, had a semantic model of LLVM IR and would feed real and randomly-generated IR through the optimisation pipeline and then use a theorem prover to attempt to prove that the semantics of the before and after versions were the same. This could then be combined with the LLVM bugpoint tool to find the optimisation pass that performed an invalid transform.
It's a tradeoff. Blowing away the i-cache is a good way of killing performance, but so is having a load of function calls that do almost no work. If you had to do a virtual method call for comparing two unsigned integers and a different virtual function call for comparing two signed integers when inserting them into a set then you'd have a lot more overhead. In a typical std::set implementation, the compare operations are inlined and so the costs are very low.
The real problem with C++ is that the programmer has to make the decision about whether to use static or dynamic dispatch up front and the syntax for both is very different, so you can't trivially switch between them when it makes sense to do so.
Exactly. I bought a fairly decent set of speakers, a projector, and a DVD player for a total of around £450 in 2003. Back then, a ticket at my local cinema cost £4.50 (it's gone up), so roughly the same as going to the cinema 100 times. Popcorn was another £4 or so (drinks another £2-3), so that brought it down to about 50 trips - one a week for a year. I split the cost of the projector with my housemates back then and we'd have friends bring a DVD and food / beer around. By the end of the year, it had more or less paid for itself. One of my housemates bought the other shares in the projector when he moved and I bought a new one and have replaced the bulb once, so I've spent a total of about £500 (plus electricity) over a period of 13 years. The up-front cost was a lot higher, but over 13 years it's been cheaper than going to the cinema once a month and not having anything to eat / drink there. And that's just the cost for me: for the first few years when living with housemates and for the last few living with my partner the benefits have been shared by multiple people. Oh, and we get to watch TV shows in the same environment.
I stopped buying DVDs for a while because renting was a lot cheaper, but as BluRay and streaming start to see adoption the second-hand market is flooded with DVDs so it's easy to pick up a film for £1 or a season of a TV show for £3-5.
The real answer to piracy? Give people the product that they want for a reasonable price. Give me a service that let's me download DRM-free movies in a standard format that will work on the FreeBSD media centre box connected to my projector, my Mac laptop, my old WebOS tablet and my new iPad and I'll happily hand over money. Until then, I'll stick to DVDs.
Right, because old people are the ones that have good hearing. I had a similar experience the last time I went to a cinema. Sound settings so ludicrous that any base drowned out people talking and caused distortion in the speakers. I've not been to the cinema near where I live now, but they've just done a big refurbishment that ended up with a quarter the seating space that they had before. Apparently it's doing pretty well (people like the big comfy seats), but a apparently decade ago it was able to sell out most of the screens on a regular basis. Now they always have empty seats, even with a quarter the capacity.
I look into the witness guy's background, he has UK security clearance FFS!
Having UK security clearance is not that hard. I did for a while (though it's long-since lapsed). Anyone who works on any defence-related project is likely to have security clearance. Remember when Snowden released all of the things he could access and it turned out that over a million people in the USA had security clearance? The UK isn't that much more restrictive in who it hands our clearance to.
C11 threads are also a horrible API full of mistakes that other threading libraries learned from and fixed two decades ago. It exists solely because someone thought that you can't have atomics in a language without a mechanism in the standard library for creating threads. C++11 threads are actually quite sensible. The only significant addition in C11 is the addition of a half-arsed port of C++11 atomics (right down to accidentally including a joke footnote from the C++11 draft spec that was removed before the C++11 spec was finalised). _Generic is vaguely useful.
As that article shows, the core of OO that Alan Kay describes is still useful (and even used in the current buzzwordy functional languages), it's just a bunch of cruft that's grown up around it that turns out to be not so useful.
It's very useful to be able to create presentations with multiple paths through them. You can embed deep-dives into things that you're trying to explain and skip over them if the audience either isn't interested in that part or that they want more information about. Quite a few other presentation tools provide support for non-linear presentations, PowerPoint is playing catchup.
Look at LLVM as an instructive example. It's a large complex beast written in heavy C++, but there are bindings for every language you'd ever want to seriously write a compiler in.
Not a great counterexample - The LLVM C bindings are maintained by hand and all of the other bindings are machine-generated from the C bindings.
If you're using zlib as an example of high-quality code, then I'd hate to see what you consider low-quality code. It has a horrible security record, poor layering, and badly designed interfaces. About the only thing it has going for it is performance.
Using C++ without templates is missing the point. One of the things I miss the most when writing C is the lack of efficient generic data structures. C equivalents of things like std::list, std::dequeue, and std::unordered_map all require lots of macros that cast things through void* (and therefore avoid any possibility of compile-time errors) and typically extra layers of indirection which hurt performance from d-cache misses more than templates will hurt from increased i-cache usage.
Apple's CoreFoundation is probably the nicest-designed C library providing core features, but it is a lot harder to work with than its Objective-C equivalent for similar performance and less efficient than a C++ version (though with stronger binary compatibility guarantees).
No one should mention bcopy, or any other function that uses source, destination argument order.