Another reason why I enjoy using Objective-C and the Cocoa libraries. Unicode everywhere - only time you ever have to consider ASCII is when interacting with raw files or C/C++.
Yet the same people who complain about GOTO because they have to scroll around the source to see what'll happen
That is of course a straw man. People don't complain about goto because they they to scroll around. Even in properly structured non-oo programming you have to scroll around to see subroutines. And that's fine.
The argument against goto is that it tends to produce buggy and unmaintainable code. Where maintenance isn't just scrolling around to understand what's going on, but making fixes and changes to the functionality.
Of course the oop approach is also complex, but it's complication derives from the actual complexity of the problem domain of writing event driven applications. Goto complexity (spaghetti programming) is accidental and unnecessary complexity.
That code snippet requires no comment. As a utility function it's completely self explanatory. In a less obvious utility function it might need the what or the how explaining, but rarely the why.
At places where you call the utility you might need a comment on why, but not here. That is where the why might be an issue.
Even then commenting should be the last resort. If you can explain the necessary why or how by choosing meaningful identifiers, then that is better.
Yes indeed, those are the lies, in a rather longer form.
Reads rather like global warning deniers nonsense doesn't it. "We just don't have enough data." Whereas of course scientists have been studying orcas in the wild for a long time.
Did you miss the part where I said I doubted the practicality of the panels. I was just pointing out a single point in your argument that didn't hold water. The panels don't have to generate the electricity for the heating.
Your calculations, I'm happy to accept at face value as I don't care enough to check them.
I read Code Complete in the 90s after 10+ years of coding. At that stage it was the best book on coding I'd ever read, covering material that no one else had written about. Unfortunately I leant my copy out to someone now forgotten who didn't return it, so I can't check it out to see if it's stood the test of time 20 years on.
It would be a mistake to avoid it, though it may be that in the intervening years there are other books that have covered the topics and are more up to date.
So, how much snow can this melt per day? Call it 6.5 cm. In practice, I'm guessing the answer is closer to "0", because the instant the panel is covered by snow it will cease generating energy.
Whilst I doubt the practicality of these panels, this is not an issue, as the panels are connected to the grid. They may or may not be generating more power than they use over the course of the year, but they certainly don't have to be at a single point in time.
because it dies sooner than in the wild (which btw is not proven by this single grandmother killer whale).
Existing scientific observations of Orcas in the wild give their average lifespan as 60 to 70 years. Vs about 20 in captivity. It's not even close.
And to add insult to injury, the staff as SeaWorld are trained to lie about this: they claim the average expectancy in the wild is about 20 years. (ref: the documentary Blackfish has video evidence of this.)
But I am just curious: the beef and pork you eat is also 'grown' in cages.
As I'm sure your mother told you, two wrongs don't make a right. Generally people make a distinction between captive wild animals, and domesticated animals bred as livestock. Whether that is a justifiable distinction is a mater of personal morality.
I do not think there is a problem with Sea World.
Then you should seek out Blackfish and watch it.
Of course I agree that out abuse of the natural environment and the animals in it is a huge problem. But that doesn't let SeaWorld off the hook.
Don't be an asshole. The OP is right. Of course there are varying kinds of intelligence, but Orcas are near relations to dolphins, and both show higher intelligence than wolves or dogs in pretty much any measure.
Wolves which range hundreds of miles are kept in captivity by humans in small areas (dogs), and they live far longer with humans than in the wild.
Dogs get taken out for walkies at least once per day, or they start to go crazy and become unhealthy. Captive orcas never have the equivalent. It's the equivalent of a dog getting all it's exercise by walking round and round the coffee table. I wouldn't expect such a dog to have the same lifespan as a dog that's been out for walks.
I meant, like iTunes, Safari began as a focused and snappy product. Over time it lost focus and became bloated. Not to the extent that iTunes bloated, but still it lost a lot of what made it good.
I don't see that. I use reading list every day. Favourites Bar every hour, Reader about once a week, Web Inspector whenever I'm researching how a web page works. Autofill whenever I'm creating a new account.
All these things are extras over and above basic browser, and are useful to me. Where's the bloat? How did it used to be better?
And it's not in WebKit either. That just gets better, and at least until the fork of Blink was leading the way. And may still be.
I was hoping to find one of Robert Llewellyn's videos to link for you, but I can't find it as he's done so many, and you can't search in videos!
But here's a recent article about some best in class green homes. One is not only self sufficient but sell half it's electricity to the power companies. The other is quoted as earning the houseowner 3500 UKP per year from selling electricity back to the grid. Which much be far more than half, considering bills for even inefficient houses. Yes, these are exceptions, but ones that show the limit is not just self-sufficiency but you can go far beyond that.
What you're describing is honestly green-washed fantasy. Any solution needs to minimize distribution losses, must be available 24/7, and must be able to scale, and most importantly cannot try to coerce people to give up their standard of living.
Again, if you followed Robert Llewellyn's video blog Fully Charged, you wouldn't have that belief. In and amongst the EV reviews he visits universities, power stations and people with green homes, all who know far more than you or I on the topic. And all of them know this is coming.
One thing we haven't yet mentioned here: The smart grid: Rather than simply generating according to demand, devices which are non-time critical communicate with the grid and switch of and on to help regulate the demand to closer match the supply. Current items like fridges, freezers and AC are obvious candidates. But also EV charging falls into this category. Indeed the power companies talk of EVs as helping them match demand, because they can be charged overnight when demand from everything else is at a minimum. There's even talk of them being used for power smoothing - when you finish with your car for the day, the remaining power in the batteries can be fed into the grid, when electricity is expensive, and then the battery charged up fully when electricity is cheap overnight, ready for the next day.
If you want consumption of fossil fuels to decrease, carpeting the world in solar farms and windmills isn't going to suffice.
OK, you're starting to get annoying. I don't mind discussing this stuff, if we're going to keep it real. But I've already mentioned tidal, hydro and nuclear. Empty assertions which ignore more than have the sources I've already mentioned is not constructive.
And at no stage have I talked about giving up a standard of living. For sure reduction of usage is part of the answer, but things like insulation and more efficient technology does not lower the standard of living it enhances it.
The green movement is not a step back into history, it's progress into the future. It's fossil fuels that are the backward looking technology.
If restarting Firefox and reloading all the same pages again is enough to significantly drop the memory-consumption, that implies Firefix is leaking memory.
Not necessarily. It could be memory fragmentation or in-memory caching. (Not knowing anything about FF in particular, but remembering a friend who was a developer for another web engine talking about these issues.)
If your perspective is as a Windows user, it used to be. In that Safari for Windows, like iTunes for Windows was the same code base as the OSX version, run with a library that gave the necessary OSX apis in Windows.
However, Safari for Windows was dropped a year or two ago. It had never got significant marketshare on Windows. So Safari is now only OSX and iOS.
And there is nothing about this particular news of LLVM tech being used for Javascript in WebKit that makes Safari any more like iTunes.
that's hand-waving away some really pretty difficult technical hurdles. Namely the generation capabilities near cities.
Suburban houses can generate most or all of their own electricity with solar panels. Indeed UK householders that already have solar panels manage to generate power for their EVs and still feed power back into the grid. And the UK has cloud cover most of the time.
The average householder won't do that well, because part of the trick is minimising electricity use. But still, most of their power can come that way.
All of the cities that are near the seaboard could use tidal for much of their power.
And how many cities are there without surrounding rural areas, for either wind or solar or both?
Nuclear, with reprocessing spent fuel seems like the most sane solution -- but sadly to many people that's not 'green'.
Well I don't have to answer for the opinions of others. Plenty of leading green thinkers accept nuclear is part of the answer for controlling carbon emissions. And so do I.
Or the fringe environmental groups who seem to think the real solution is a drastic reduction in consumption (not going to happen.)
If the green infrastructure isn't built up it'll certainly happen. If only because people can't afford the amount of energy they used to use. Again, fossil fuels are finite. As more of the easy sources are used up, the price will continue to go up. There's only so many wars you can fight to ensure the continuation of cheap energy. When you're facing finite fossil fuels, and a global population that's going to rise to about 9 billion, with extreme poverty being rarer, something's got to give.
Continuing as things are now is not an option. It never was.
You simply have to provide enough infrastructure to supply the base load you need. There's no reason it can't be green tech.
You use a mixture of green sources, in a variety of geographical locations, such that variability of cloud cover, wind and tides doesn't ever leave you without other forms of power that are still generating.
And you smooth it out to meet the varying demand with hydro and nuclear.
Slashdot Mirror
As programmers need to have clear analytical thought, they'd be much better off reading The Blind Watchmaker or The God Delusion than The Bible.
Another reason why I enjoy using Objective-C and the Cocoa libraries. Unicode everywhere - only time you ever have to consider ASCII is when interacting with raw files or C/C++.
Yet the same people who complain about GOTO because they have to scroll around the source to see what'll happen
That is of course a straw man. People don't complain about goto because they they to scroll around. Even in properly structured non-oo programming you have to scroll around to see subroutines. And that's fine.
The argument against goto is that it tends to produce buggy and unmaintainable code. Where maintenance isn't just scrolling around to understand what's going on, but making fixes and changes to the functionality.
Of course the oop approach is also complex, but it's complication derives from the actual complexity of the problem domain of writing event driven applications. Goto complexity (spaghetti programming) is accidental and unnecessary complexity.
That code snippet requires no comment. As a utility function it's completely self explanatory. In a less obvious utility function it might need the what or the how explaining, but rarely the why.
At places where you call the utility you might need a comment on why, but not here. That is where the why might be an issue.
Even then commenting should be the last resort. If you can explain the necessary why or how by choosing meaningful identifiers, then that is better.
It is quite funny. But not actually true.
http://www.catonmat.net/blog/d...
Yes indeed, those are the lies, in a rather longer form.
Reads rather like global warning deniers nonsense doesn't it. "We just don't have enough data." Whereas of course scientists have been studying orcas in the wild for a long time.
Good luck with that. Depending on the state or country you're in, it may be illegal to title yourself "engineer".
My country doesn't try to regulate the dictionary in this way.
Even if they did, they wouldn't be stopping people who have qualified as software engineers from calling themselves software engineers.
Is it worth the risk just so you can continue to pretend that "software engineering" is an actual discipline?
It is an actual discipline. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
Good luck trying to impose your personal dictionary on others.
Did you miss the part where I said I doubted the practicality of the panels. I was just pointing out a single point in your argument that didn't hold water. The panels don't have to generate the electricity for the heating.
Your calculations, I'm happy to accept at face value as I don't care enough to check them.
Engineer: a person who designs, builds, or maintains engines, machines, or structures.
That certainly covers what software engineers do. So we'll keep on using the term.
I read Code Complete in the 90s after 10+ years of coding. At that stage it was the best book on coding I'd ever read, covering material that no one else had written about. Unfortunately I leant my copy out to someone now forgotten who didn't return it, so I can't check it out to see if it's stood the test of time 20 years on.
It would be a mistake to avoid it, though it may be that in the intervening years there are other books that have covered the topics and are more up to date.
If meth heads can manage to perform organic chemistry
It's not the meth-heads that do the organic chemistry, it's down on their luck chemistry teachers...
So, how much snow can this melt per day? Call it 6.5 cm. In practice, I'm guessing the answer is closer to "0", because the instant the panel is covered by snow it will cease generating energy.
Whilst I doubt the practicality of these panels, this is not an issue, as the panels are connected to the grid. They may or may not be generating more power than they use over the course of the year, but they certainly don't have to be at a single point in time.
Unless a modern whaler has been hunting with an antique harpoon, your analogy isn't too good.
because it dies sooner than in the wild (which btw is not proven by this single grandmother killer whale).
Existing scientific observations of Orcas in the wild give their average lifespan as 60 to 70 years. Vs about 20 in captivity. It's not even close.
And to add insult to injury, the staff as SeaWorld are trained to lie about this: they claim the average expectancy in the wild is about 20 years. (ref: the documentary Blackfish has video evidence of this.)
But I am just curious: the beef and pork you eat is also 'grown' in cages.
As I'm sure your mother told you, two wrongs don't make a right. Generally people make a distinction between captive wild animals, and domesticated animals bred as livestock. Whether that is a justifiable distinction is a mater of personal morality.
I do not think there is a problem with Sea World.
Then you should seek out Blackfish and watch it.
Of course I agree that out abuse of the natural environment and the animals in it is a huge problem. But that doesn't let SeaWorld off the hook.
Don't be an asshole. The OP is right. Of course there are varying kinds of intelligence, but Orcas are near relations to dolphins, and both show higher intelligence than wolves or dogs in pretty much any measure.
Wolves which range hundreds of miles are kept in captivity by humans in small areas (dogs), and they live far longer with humans than in the wild.
Dogs get taken out for walkies at least once per day, or they start to go crazy and become unhealthy. Captive orcas never have the equivalent. It's the equivalent of a dog getting all it's exercise by walking round and round the coffee table. I wouldn't expect such a dog to have the same lifespan as a dog that's been out for walks.
Chromium has the same crappy Windows like UI of Google's Chrome build.
I meant, like iTunes, Safari began as a focused and snappy product. Over time it lost focus and became bloated. Not to the extent that iTunes bloated, but still it lost a lot of what made it good.
I don't see that. I use reading list every day. Favourites Bar every hour, Reader about once a week, Web Inspector whenever I'm researching how a web page works. Autofill whenever I'm creating a new account.
All these things are extras over and above basic browser, and are useful to me. Where's the bloat? How did it used to be better?
And it's not in WebKit either. That just gets better, and at least until the fork of Blink was leading the way. And may still be.
I was hoping to find one of Robert Llewellyn's videos to link for you, but I can't find it as he's done so many, and you can't search in videos!
But here's a recent article about some best in class green homes. One is not only self sufficient but sell half it's electricity to the power companies. The other is quoted as earning the houseowner 3500 UKP per year from selling electricity back to the grid. Which much be far more than half, considering bills for even inefficient houses. Yes, these are exceptions, but ones that show the limit is not just self-sufficiency but you can go far beyond that.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/pro...
What you're describing is honestly green-washed fantasy. Any solution needs to minimize distribution losses, must be available 24/7, and must be able to scale, and most importantly cannot try to coerce people to give up their standard of living.
Again, if you followed Robert Llewellyn's video blog Fully Charged, you wouldn't have that belief. In and amongst the EV reviews he visits universities, power stations and people with green homes, all who know far more than you or I on the topic. And all of them know this is coming.
One thing we haven't yet mentioned here: The smart grid: Rather than simply generating according to demand, devices which are non-time critical communicate with the grid and switch of and on to help regulate the demand to closer match the supply. Current items like fridges, freezers and AC are obvious candidates. But also EV charging falls into this category. Indeed the power companies talk of EVs as helping them match demand, because they can be charged overnight when demand from everything else is at a minimum. There's even talk of them being used for power smoothing - when you finish with your car for the day, the remaining power in the batteries can be fed into the grid, when electricity is expensive, and then the battery charged up fully when electricity is cheap overnight, ready for the next day.
If you want consumption of fossil fuels to decrease, carpeting the world in solar farms and windmills isn't going to suffice.
OK, you're starting to get annoying. I don't mind discussing this stuff, if we're going to keep it real. But I've already mentioned tidal, hydro and nuclear. Empty assertions which ignore more than have the sources I've already mentioned is not constructive.
And at no stage have I talked about giving up a standard of living. For sure reduction of usage is part of the answer, but things like insulation and more efficient technology does not lower the standard of living it enhances it.
The green movement is not a step back into history, it's progress into the future. It's fossil fuels that are the backward looking technology.
If restarting Firefox and reloading all the same pages again is enough to significantly drop the memory-consumption, that implies Firefix is leaking memory.
Not necessarily. It could be memory fragmentation or in-memory caching. (Not knowing anything about FF in particular, but remembering a friend who was a developer for another web engine talking about these issues.)
I can't say that I've noticed any problems using multiple tabs with Safari.
For me Chrome isn't an option, partly because I can't bear it's Windows like UI. But mostly because Google is a spyware company.
If your perspective is as a Windows user, it used to be. In that Safari for Windows, like iTunes for Windows was the same code base as the OSX version, run with a library that gave the necessary OSX apis in Windows.
However, Safari for Windows was dropped a year or two ago. It had never got significant marketshare on Windows. So Safari is now only OSX and iOS.
And there is nothing about this particular news of LLVM tech being used for Javascript in WebKit that makes Safari any more like iTunes.
Suburban houses can generate most or all of their own electricity with solar panels. Indeed UK householders that already have solar panels manage to generate power for their EVs and still feed power back into the grid. And the UK has cloud cover most of the time.
The average householder won't do that well, because part of the trick is minimising electricity use. But still, most of their power can come that way.
All of the cities that are near the seaboard could use tidal for much of their power.
And how many cities are there without surrounding rural areas, for either wind or solar or both?
Well I don't have to answer for the opinions of others. Plenty of leading green thinkers accept nuclear is part of the answer for controlling carbon emissions. And so do I.
If the green infrastructure isn't built up it'll certainly happen. If only because people can't afford the amount of energy they used to use. Again, fossil fuels are finite. As more of the easy sources are used up, the price will continue to go up. There's only so many wars you can fight to ensure the continuation of cheap energy. When you're facing finite fossil fuels, and a global population that's going to rise to about 9 billion, with extreme poverty being rarer, something's got to give.
Continuing as things are now is not an option. It never was.
Wrong quarter you fool.
http://www.gsmarena.com/lg_q1_...
You simply have to provide enough infrastructure to supply the base load you need. There's no reason it can't be green tech.
You use a mixture of green sources, in a variety of geographical locations, such that variability of cloud cover, wind and tides doesn't ever leave you without other forms of power that are still generating.
And you smooth it out to meet the varying demand with hydro and nuclear.