ccache only skips recompiling if the preprocessed output is the same. It makes no difference in this case.
or more jobs in your make,
The C++ compiler uses 500MB-1GB of RAM in each instance on nontrivial C++ code. Increasing the number of jobs is more likely to cause swapping and make it even slower than to give a real speedup.
or move those frequently changing headers to a private class so other code objects don't know when there is a change.
Sure, refactor 500,000 lines of (mostly) someone else's code. Good solution.
The x is a placeholder. C99 was C9x before it was standardised. The two digits specify the year (See: C89, Fortran77, and so on) in which the standard is finalised. This is the version of the standard that will be finalised some time between '00 and '09. In common with all other C++ projects, this one was completed late.
You mean like how C encourages you to use opaque types in the header and hide implementation details, while C++ requires you to use the Pimpl pattern to do the same thing and forces you to expose implementation details in the header by default?
Polymorphism
See Apple's CoreFoundation framework for a good example of how this is done in C.
Productivity
Yup. Long compile times certainly make me more productive. Posting on Slashdot while a big C++ project takes 10 minutes to recompile because I added a field to one class in a header and triggered a complete recompile definitely makes me more productive.
Not really. The main advantage of objects is the loose coupling. C++, by requiring you to put the implementation details in the header, lacks that. Adding a single method to a class in C++ can require you to recompile the entire code base. This makes code reuse very hard, and the C++ type system makes it even harder. There are a few things that C++ is good for, but not many.
You're looking at it the wrong way. Handset manufacturers don't care about openness as an abstraction, they care about two things:
Their ability to differentiate their phones from their competitors.
The license fees that they need to pay for the OS.
Openness helps with the first part, but Microsoft also allows handset makers to customise their offering a lot, so it's not a huge advantage. The free-beer side effect of being open source helps a lot with the latter, but if you're paying $1 per handset for a software license that lets you sell the phone for $10 more then free isn't an advantage.
The OHA sounds great on paper, but Google is still responsible for writing the vast majority of the code in Android. If Google is now making handsets, then this means that future versions of Android are likely to be tailored to the capabilities of the Google devices, making it harder for other manufacturers to differentiate their offerings.
Of course, since it's open, they can hire developers to improve their version, but that costs money. The question that they will be asking is whether it costs more to do this than it costs to pay MS for their OS.
I didn't forget about the JooJoo - I never heard of it in the first place. Now that I have, I'm pretty sure I wasn't missing anything important earlier.
The really big change? Poor people have access to to information now. When 80% of the population was illiterate, the target market for anything written was the privileged elite who could afford to spend most of their time contemplating abstract ideas. There weren't more big ideas, but they made up a much higher percentage of total material. No one was publishing mass-market trash when there was no mass market.
Except that you're not paying attention to the scenario. The person was having his wheelie bin stolen. He was not in a live-threatening situation until after he decided to intervene, at which point he was stabbed. If the rioters had been armed, he'd have been shot instead. The rioters would most likely have already had their guns in their hands, so the only way for him to gain an advantage is to open fire from inside the house first.
If you think having a gun makes you safe against a gang of thugs with guns, then you're delusional.
most stories have the ending spoiled (only notable exception would George R.R. Martin who lets your favorite characters just die mid-book).
Well, the series hasn't ended yet, but I don't think Arya's dead...
The concept of a favourite character brings up something that I think this study missed: emotional investment. When you read a long book, you become emotionally invested in some characters, and care about their success. This is why killing them off is so effective. In the Game of Thrones, thousands of people die, but you only really care about a few of them. When there's a battle and ten thousand anonymous characters die, it's just backdrop. When your favourite character is fatally wounded in the same battle, you care. If, however, you know before you start reading that this character will die part way through, then would you care as much? Most people distance themselves from potential emotional pain, and so the natural reaction would be to think of this character much more objectively. You may still enjoy the story, but you'd lose some immersion.
My advice is to stop watching at the end of Season 3. From there, it starts to go downhill (an entire episode in Season 4 about a boxing match? Did they really think the worst episode in the whole of Babylon 5 - TKO - was worth copying?) and then the ending is so truly bad it's makes you regret watching the rest. Just pretend that it was cancelled after Season 3, and there was a really great ending that they never got around to writing.
Bullshit. Guns give the advantage to the person who draws first. Is that likely to be the gang of looters running around with guns in hand, or the guy sitting in his house? Sure, he could open fire from his window, but if he did then he'd see half a dozen people shooting back. Who is more likely to want to shoot to kill: Someone who is defending their not-very-valuable property, or someone who is on an adrenalin high from smashing, burning, and stealing?
Most of British society was at war with the rioters. Let's not pretend that these were brave freedom fighters standing up to the government. They didn't give a damn about the government - they wanted to smash stuff and steal from their neighbours. They were criminals, pure and simple. And, in most societies, criminals do lose some of the rights that normal citizens enjoy. In the USA, they lose both the right to liberty and, in some cases, the right to life.
He's either an idiot or a shill. He's frequently accused of being a shill, but I find it hard to believe. If I had a large marketing department and the budget to hire corporate shills, I'd hire ones who weren't so trivial to dismiss as idiots. It's possible to spread quite effective FUD about pretty much anything if you actually try, but Florian always jumps on things that are so obviously wrong that he's easy to discount.
Is illiteracy somehow fashionable in Slashdot now? Or is it a new form of trolling to take a valid sentence and say that you don't understand it? Look in the current poll for a lot of other examples...
I'd be surprised if there were many bicycle owners who didn't do 400 miles in one year, especially if they're using them for a daily commute. 2 miles each way every weekday will do that in 6 months. And bikes last for years. Mine used to belong to my father, who did 20 mile rides on it on a regular basis.
The 'instead of driving' thing makes this a bit more complex though. I don't have a car, so most of the time I use the bike the alternatives would be walking or getting a bus. The energy usage of the bike versus walking is difficult - going in to town I need to pedal about three times to coast there. Coming back, there's a gentle slope where it's about as much effort as walking, followed by a steep hill where the wheels aren't much help and I have to lift the mass of the bike as well as myself up the hill. If I bought a car, then I'd have to factor the cost of producing the car into the calculations.
House of Suns got some poor reviews, with people claiming that it was hard to tell the two main characters apart (not really surprising, since they were clones that had spent most of their lives together and exchanged memories regularly), but I really enjoyed it. I'd recommend The Prefect as a good entry point into the Revelation Space universe. I really struggled with the first 50-100 pages of Revelation Space, and to a lesser degree, with the start of Absolution Gap - they stories in that trilogy start slowly, then build momentum, and by the end you're thinking 'just one more chapter...'
I dont' understand why we still have 40 hour weeks. Surely with all the technical improvements over the past few decades we can still be wealthy enough without as much work.
So work freelance. You can choose how much you work, and your income directly correlates with how much work you do. Live somewhere cheap, and you can work a lot less than 30 hours a week.
Noone else seems to have picked up on the fact that squeezing about 20,000 kg of petrol's worth of energy into 8grams, without a nuclear reactor, isnt a miracle, its an explosive.
It is a nuclear reactor. It's basically a radiothermal generator. The Viking space probes used them and the Russians used to use them to power lighthouses. Getting that much energy out of a material like thorium isn't that difficult. The problem is not energy, it's power. Radiothermal generators depend on decay, which is slow. A big RTG will typically generate something under 50W. It will generate this power for 40+ years, but there's no way of making it generate more power than that. They seem to be claiming that they can use a laser to increase the rate of alpha decay. Unless my physics is out of date, there's no known way of increasing the rate of decay. If they've found a way of doing it, then it's a game changer for power. Catalysed alpha or beta decay are far more interesting potential power sources than fusion or fission, but we don't even have a theory that says it's possible, let alone a practical way of doing it, unless they've stumbled on one by accident.
If it worked, you wouldn't want to put it in power plants. There would be no point in being connected to the grid if you could buy a small nuclear generator that could power your house for years without refuelling. You'd replace a huge amount of infrastructure with small local power stations (generator in the basement for an entire city block, smaller ones in rural houses). Which, of course, doesn't mean that it's any less likely to be a scam.
And at that energy density, if you can actually extract power efficiently, it's crazy to use it in a car. Put it in a light aircraft. In a small plane, fuel is easily 10% or more of the total mass. Replacing a big fuel tank with a tiny cube of thorium and ending up with something that can fly for as long as the pilot can stay awake would be amazing.
Blame Slashdot 2.0. With the old interface, there was a checkbox for applying the karma bonus. Now it's a global setting, so you can't turn it off for a single post. I used to turn it off for replies that were most likely to only be interesting to the person I was replying to, for example, but now it's always on.
It uses up valuable farm land to take 1 unit of "energy" and create 1.01 units of "energy".
Even for corn, which has an insanely low EROI, you're getting 1.1 units of energy out. For more something like switchgrass, it's 6.4. And you can run farm equipment on biodiesel quite easily, since most of it's diesel anyway.
You're being pretty optimistic there. My old laser printer had a 50MHz MIPS CPU and processing was the bottleneck when printing. It could print PCL (which is much simpler) at 3-4 times the speed it could print PostScript. 8MB of RAM is also a bit low. Unless you're printing at 300dpi colour or 600dpi mono, that probably isn't enough for the frame buffer. I'd want a 250MHz ARM core with 32MB of RAM in a modern printer. Not a huge requirement, but a lot more than you seem to require.
Slashdot Mirror
So compile using ccache,
ccache only skips recompiling if the preprocessed output is the same. It makes no difference in this case.
or more jobs in your make,
The C++ compiler uses 500MB-1GB of RAM in each instance on nontrivial C++ code. Increasing the number of jobs is more likely to cause swapping and make it even slower than to give a real speedup.
or move those frequently changing headers to a private class so other code objects don't know when there is a change.
Sure, refactor 500,000 lines of (mostly) someone else's code. Good solution.
The x is a placeholder. C99 was C9x before it was standardised. The two digits specify the year (See: C89, Fortran77, and so on) in which the standard is finalised. This is the version of the standard that will be finalised some time between '00 and '09. In common with all other C++ projects, this one was completed late.
Encapsulation
You mean like how C encourages you to use opaque types in the header and hide implementation details, while C++ requires you to use the Pimpl pattern to do the same thing and forces you to expose implementation details in the header by default?
Polymorphism
See Apple's CoreFoundation framework for a good example of how this is done in C.
Productivity
Yup. Long compile times certainly make me more productive. Posting on Slashdot while a big C++ project takes 10 minutes to recompile because I added a field to one class in a header and triggered a complete recompile definitely makes me more productive.
Not really. The main advantage of objects is the loose coupling. C++, by requiring you to put the implementation details in the header, lacks that. Adding a single method to a class in C++ can require you to recompile the entire code base. This makes code reuse very hard, and the C++ type system makes it even harder. There are a few things that C++ is good for, but not many.
Openness helps with the first part, but Microsoft also allows handset makers to customise their offering a lot, so it's not a huge advantage. The free-beer side effect of being open source helps a lot with the latter, but if you're paying $1 per handset for a software license that lets you sell the phone for $10 more then free isn't an advantage.
The OHA sounds great on paper, but Google is still responsible for writing the vast majority of the code in Android. If Google is now making handsets, then this means that future versions of Android are likely to be tailored to the capabilities of the Google devices, making it harder for other manufacturers to differentiate their offerings.
Of course, since it's open, they can hire developers to improve their version, but that costs money. The question that they will be asking is whether it costs more to do this than it costs to pay MS for their OS.
I didn't forget about the JooJoo - I never heard of it in the first place. Now that I have, I'm pretty sure I wasn't missing anything important earlier.
The really big change? Poor people have access to to information now. When 80% of the population was illiterate, the target market for anything written was the privileged elite who could afford to spend most of their time contemplating abstract ideas. There weren't more big ideas, but they made up a much higher percentage of total material. No one was publishing mass-market trash when there was no mass market.
Except that you're not paying attention to the scenario. The person was having his wheelie bin stolen. He was not in a live-threatening situation until after he decided to intervene, at which point he was stabbed. If the rioters had been armed, he'd have been shot instead. The rioters would most likely have already had their guns in their hands, so the only way for him to gain an advantage is to open fire from inside the house first.
If you think having a gun makes you safe against a gang of thugs with guns, then you're delusional.
most stories have the ending spoiled (only notable exception would George R.R. Martin who lets your favorite characters just die mid-book).
Well, the series hasn't ended yet, but I don't think Arya's dead...
The concept of a favourite character brings up something that I think this study missed: emotional investment. When you read a long book, you become emotionally invested in some characters, and care about their success. This is why killing them off is so effective. In the Game of Thrones, thousands of people die, but you only really care about a few of them. When there's a battle and ten thousand anonymous characters die, it's just backdrop. When your favourite character is fatally wounded in the same battle, you care. If, however, you know before you start reading that this character will die part way through, then would you care as much? Most people distance themselves from potential emotional pain, and so the natural reaction would be to think of this character much more objectively. You may still enjoy the story, but you'd lose some immersion.
My advice is to stop watching at the end of Season 3. From there, it starts to go downhill (an entire episode in Season 4 about a boxing match? Did they really think the worst episode in the whole of Babylon 5 - TKO - was worth copying?) and then the ending is so truly bad it's makes you regret watching the rest. Just pretend that it was cancelled after Season 3, and there was a really great ending that they never got around to writing.
Bullshit. Guns give the advantage to the person who draws first. Is that likely to be the gang of looters running around with guns in hand, or the guy sitting in his house? Sure, he could open fire from his window, but if he did then he'd see half a dozen people shooting back. Who is more likely to want to shoot to kill: Someone who is defending their not-very-valuable property, or someone who is on an adrenalin high from smashing, burning, and stealing?
Most of British society was at war with the rioters. Let's not pretend that these were brave freedom fighters standing up to the government. They didn't give a damn about the government - they wanted to smash stuff and steal from their neighbours. They were criminals, pure and simple. And, in most societies, criminals do lose some of the rights that normal citizens enjoy. In the USA, they lose both the right to liberty and, in some cases, the right to life.
Actually, they just showed two iPads side by side and said 'the left one is a Galaxy Tab'.
He's either an idiot or a shill. He's frequently accused of being a shill, but I find it hard to believe. If I had a large marketing department and the budget to hire corporate shills, I'd hire ones who weren't so trivial to dismiss as idiots. It's possible to spread quite effective FUD about pretty much anything if you actually try, but Florian always jumps on things that are so obviously wrong that he's easy to discount.
You have two choices when you come across a phrase you don't understand. You can either look it up and learn something, or claim that it doesn't make sense and advertise your ignorance to everyone.
Is illiteracy somehow fashionable in Slashdot now? Or is it a new form of trolling to take a valid sentence and say that you don't understand it? Look in the current poll for a lot of other examples...
I'd be surprised if there were many bicycle owners who didn't do 400 miles in one year, especially if they're using them for a daily commute. 2 miles each way every weekday will do that in 6 months. And bikes last for years. Mine used to belong to my father, who did 20 mile rides on it on a regular basis.
The 'instead of driving' thing makes this a bit more complex though. I don't have a car, so most of the time I use the bike the alternatives would be walking or getting a bus. The energy usage of the bike versus walking is difficult - going in to town I need to pedal about three times to coast there. Coming back, there's a gentle slope where it's about as much effort as walking, followed by a steep hill where the wheels aren't much help and I have to lift the mass of the bike as well as myself up the hill. If I bought a car, then I'd have to factor the cost of producing the car into the calculations.
House of Suns got some poor reviews, with people claiming that it was hard to tell the two main characters apart (not really surprising, since they were clones that had spent most of their lives together and exchanged memories regularly), but I really enjoyed it. I'd recommend The Prefect as a good entry point into the Revelation Space universe. I really struggled with the first 50-100 pages of Revelation Space, and to a lesser degree, with the start of Absolution Gap - they stories in that trilogy start slowly, then build momentum, and by the end you're thinking 'just one more chapter...'
I dont' understand why we still have 40 hour weeks. Surely with all the technical improvements over the past few decades we can still be wealthy enough without as much work.
So work freelance. You can choose how much you work, and your income directly correlates with how much work you do. Live somewhere cheap, and you can work a lot less than 30 hours a week.
Noone else seems to have picked up on the fact that squeezing about 20,000 kg of petrol's worth of energy into 8grams, without a nuclear reactor, isnt a miracle, its an explosive.
It is a nuclear reactor. It's basically a radiothermal generator. The Viking space probes used them and the Russians used to use them to power lighthouses. Getting that much energy out of a material like thorium isn't that difficult. The problem is not energy, it's power. Radiothermal generators depend on decay, which is slow. A big RTG will typically generate something under 50W. It will generate this power for 40+ years, but there's no way of making it generate more power than that. They seem to be claiming that they can use a laser to increase the rate of alpha decay. Unless my physics is out of date, there's no known way of increasing the rate of decay. If they've found a way of doing it, then it's a game changer for power. Catalysed alpha or beta decay are far more interesting potential power sources than fusion or fission, but we don't even have a theory that says it's possible, let alone a practical way of doing it, unless they've stumbled on one by accident.
If it worked, you wouldn't want to put it in power plants. There would be no point in being connected to the grid if you could buy a small nuclear generator that could power your house for years without refuelling. You'd replace a huge amount of infrastructure with small local power stations (generator in the basement for an entire city block, smaller ones in rural houses). Which, of course, doesn't mean that it's any less likely to be a scam.
And at that energy density, if you can actually extract power efficiently, it's crazy to use it in a car. Put it in a light aircraft. In a small plane, fuel is easily 10% or more of the total mass. Replacing a big fuel tank with a tiny cube of thorium and ending up with something that can fly for as long as the pilot can stay awake would be amazing.
Blame Slashdot 2.0. With the old interface, there was a checkbox for applying the karma bonus. Now it's a global setting, so you can't turn it off for a single post. I used to turn it off for replies that were most likely to only be interesting to the person I was replying to, for example, but now it's always on.
It uses up valuable farm land to take 1 unit of "energy" and create 1.01 units of "energy".
Even for corn, which has an insanely low EROI, you're getting 1.1 units of energy out. For more something like switchgrass, it's 6.4. And you can run farm equipment on biodiesel quite easily, since most of it's diesel anyway.
You're being pretty optimistic there. My old laser printer had a 50MHz MIPS CPU and processing was the bottleneck when printing. It could print PCL (which is much simpler) at 3-4 times the speed it could print PostScript. 8MB of RAM is also a bit low. Unless you're printing at 300dpi colour or 600dpi mono, that probably isn't enough for the frame buffer. I'd want a 250MHz ARM core with 32MB of RAM in a modern printer. Not a huge requirement, but a lot more than you seem to require.