We can pay artists and scientists through other means than copyright, and they aren't necessarily radical and new. Been using patronage for centuries. With modern communication, we can do patronage much, much better than in the past. It is now practical for the public to engage in direct patronage, pool small amounts from individuals into large payments or rewards. We've been calling this "crowdfunding" of course.
Copyright has lots of problems. It is only supposed to promote the arts and sciences by providing a mechanism to set payment amounts. It's not supposed to stop plagiarism, that is a separate problem best handled apart from copyright. It's not supposed to grant total control over what others may do with the copyrighted information. We shouldn't have to have an exception for parody, because there shouldn't be any control at all!
Copyright hurts researchers greatly. Traditionally, academic publishers have demanded that researchers turn over all rights, just for the privilege of being published. Researchers get no money from publishers, no percentage, no royalties, nothing. Technically, researchers have no right to hand out copies of their own published works even to fellow researchers, that's just how extreme copyright is. Most everyone ignores that restriction, and academic publishers have mostly shown the sense not to make a stink about this "violation" of their rights, but still. Now academic publishers have been offering another option, a sort of copyleft, for a price, a one time, large lump sum payment up front that is probably much more than they would ever have made in a century of collecting payments with a paywall. At $1 or more per page ($3 per page is not unusual), to read this and that research paper just to learn if they are relevant would quickly run up a huge bill. So lots of research stays locked away, unread. A particularly galling fact is that we, the taxpayers, already paid for almost all of this research through our patronage of higher education. We ought to already have free and unlimited access! These academic publishers are total parasites. Often, we must use pirate sites such as sci-hub.
Copyright costs us all hugely. Our public libraries ought to be allowed to go fully digital, but they can't because it's illegal. It would make our libraries much, much better and at the same time save us taxpayers a great deal of money. But no, they have to keep storing and managing printed books and other physical media, and to use it we have to keep doing the two step dance of travel to the library to check out the media, then travel to the library again to return it. It's like ignoring the telephone in favor of hand writing letters, and personally delivering them, on horseback or foot!
My thought too. It strikes me as depending upon the thief, finder, or police inspector not knowing about that "feature", which makes it another "security by obscurity" method. And it shows a lack of confidence in encryption methods. If encryption works, then this wipe feature is at best useless, isn't it?
It enables toddlers to accidentally wipe your phone by imitating your use of the phone. Of course they could also drop your phone in the toilet. But this-- even the cat could wipe your phone. However, in my own experience, the battery going bad is still the number one way to fry a smartphone and lose its data.
Can do that, yes, and I've thought of going that route. But why not have a programming language that's expressive enough so that you don't have to resort to code generation, if it's not hard to do? And it's not hard. Many already do it in limited ways. In C/C++, macros and templates come to mind as means of generating code. Why not do more? Are they afraid of the compiler having to make multiple passes over the source code?
Yes and no. I agree that wordy version reminiscent of COBOL or Pascal is bad. Just because English is currently the language of choice for international communication doesn't mean we should accept gratuitous use of it in programming languages. Imagine that in Latin. Still readable?
The key isn't in avoiding symbols
Oh yes it is! Lots of Idiotic Spurious Parentheses? Tell me which format for accessing an element of a multidimensional array is easier to read, [a][b][c] or [a,b,c]? How about XML and HTML, especially properly written markup with every closing tag included?
while(*d++=*s++);
That's antiquated string.h style library crap that doesn't even use the appropriate library function, strcpy(d,s);! Yeah, yeah, it computes the length as it copies, but better to have kept the length which was surely available somewhere somehow beforehand. Did you know that the null terminated string format required to make that work is regarded as one of the biggest mistakes of C? Maybe d and s are not char, but if they are, one byte at a time is a really rotten, slow way to copy a block of memory. Should at the least copy a 32bit word at a time. Or use the memcpy library function, which just might contain a whole lot of optimizations.
I've been complaining about a similar problem. Even with constexpr, it's still a pain to initialize complicated structures. What I end up doing is letting them be variables and computing their values first thing at runtime, though I wanted constants initialized during compile time. For instance, I might have the data all specified in YAML, then use a YAML library function to load all that into the program when it starts.
Here's a simple JavaScript example of the sort of thing I mean. Suppose I want a list of the elements. Using just the first 8, I could have:
const ELEMENTS=["-","H","He","Li","Be","B","C","N","O"]; or I could do this: const ELEMENTS="- H He Li Be B C N O".split(" "); I much prefer the 2nd way, for clarity of code, and I thought everyone would, but I've found not everyone was sold on that. The good part is that at least they're constants. The bad part is that it's initialized at runtime.
Get more complicated, like, suppose I wanted an array of objects instead of strings, and each object is all the data about one element, the atomic weight, a list of isotopes and whether they are stable or what their half lives are, the full name, and so on, and it gets involved. Of course I'd want all that to be constant. If some of that data could be computed from other data at compile time, I'd prefer to do so, rather than do the calculations offline, so to speak, and plug the numbers in to the code. For instance, the atomic weight can be computed from the weights of the stable and long term radioactive isotopes and their percentages in nature, so why directly enter that value in the code and risk a mismatch from a typo? If the reason to take that chance is that the programming language pushed the coder into that compromise, then that's a deficiency in the language.
I used to read a lot of SF/Fantasy. Now I write more than I read. No, I haven't published any fiction. I write for my own amusement. It's way cheaper than reading.
As a teen I had a hopeful view that if it was published and in print, it had to be at least okay if not good. Of course I ran into a few stinkers. But most of the books I read were decent. The whole concept of a UBG that I first encountered in Tolkien was at the time marvelous and novel. Before that, evil was just kind of scattered all over in small, disorganized, unconnected events. Some of my favorites are Zelazny, Asimov, Heinlein, LeGuin, Leiber, Niven. Some I have changed my mind about, seemed good at the time but now I can only stand to read them if in the mood for cheesy writing and plotting, such as Brooks' Shannara stuff. McCaffrey's Pern has held up better, but what I find irksome is the deus ex machina in so many of her plots. I am thoroughly sick of unlimited time travel into the past. It is the ultimate tool to fix any problem or issue. Just pop back in time and nip the problem, whatever it is, in the bud. Another problem I have with so many stories is that they are too pat. The protagonists overcome problems entirely too easily, their plans no matter how harebrained tend to work out successfully. Yeah, in real life, if we are ever shot at, it won't be by a squad of stormtroopers who are such bad shots that they couldn't hit the Death Star if it was in front of their noses.
In the 1990s I dropped out. For me, what drove it was in large part the price. I can't forget that in the early 80s, a paperback was $1.95, and I've seen prices of $0.75 on books printed in the 60s and 70s. Dropping $2 on a paperback didn't feel like a big deal, but still, I stayed cool and never bought more than 5 at a time. By the end of the 80s, paperbacks were pushing past the $5 point, and that's when I quit. That's about double the rate of inflation. Would still browse, and saw prices just keep on climbing to about $7, at which point I stopped even looking. I used to be familiar with most titles in the SF/Fantasy section. Now I'm not.
Oh, we have a pretty good idea what they could be doing. I don't worry about it much. Yes, I agree, go ahead and use them, just be a little cautious. The data it can collect is not important, if you are careful not to give it account info that is linked to your credit card. And don't do anything serious on them, in case they really are spying on you, maybe sending screenshots to their manufacturers' secret data collection project.
A smart TV is a highly limited, locked down, and crippled Internet browser that happens to be able to receive broadcast signals from TV stations, connect to cable, and act as a plain old monitor for a DVD player, game console, or a real computer. The programming of the smart TV itself is highly, highly corporate. You can access only a handful of big corporate sites related to video, stuff like Youtube, Hulu, Amazon Prime, Netflix, and about a dozen other sites. It will try to encourage you to pay for things that are free elsewhere. The most dangerous feature of a smart TV is that, similar to a smartphone, it can connect to your account at pay for video sites if you have such and give it your account info, and if a kid gets hold of the controls, buy lots and lots of shows for lots of money, very quickly.
Perhaps the most aggravating crippling is that you know it could surf anywhere on the Internet, if only it wasn't programmed not to. You can do searches on a tiny selection of approved sites only, if you can stand the terrible interface that lets you pick keys from a virtual keyboard with the arrow buttons on a remote control. A search is limited to only the site the TV is on at the moment, for instance, can't simultaneously search Youtube and Netflix. There isn't any ad blocking of course, so if you use the TV to watch videos on Youtube, the device forces you to sit through several seconds of an ad. It will allow you skip the rest of the ad after a few seconds.
Smart TVs are usable, and okay for just watching broadcast or Netflix, but better to use a real computer, as long as you're not running Windows. Perhaps one of those tiny stick computers or a Raspberry Pi. Only thing it would need to be a better TV than a smart TV is TV reception.
That's why I was suggesting docking his pay. Surely there is some middle ground between a warning and a firing? He doesn't get off scot-free, and Apple doesn't have to go through the large expense of replacing him.
What's with management at so many companies acting like mindless, soulless bureaucrats? Rules is rules. no exceptions! Might as well replace them all with AIs, since they seem to lack discretion and a human touch.
Firing is still harsh. Plus, if he was an important employee, it will be costly to replace him. It's possible he was already on the edge, one more mistake from being fired, and this was the last straw. But it doesn't sound like that at all. His daughter could be totally mistaken, her parents could have spun a big illusion to keep her from worrying, but she claims Apple liked him.
Apple could have docked him some pay. Have him not get the bonus, accept a pay cut, even demand he take an unpaid leave of absence. Summarily firing him sends all kinds of bad messages, like that they think great engineers grow on trees and everyone leaps at the opportunity to work for the great, mighty Apple, and that they don't care about morale and expect the rest their employees to drink deep of the company Koolaid that this firing was totally justified. Must be a stressful place to work, a worse sweatshop than most top tech companies, many of which have a bad reputation that way.
There's also a small risk this could backfire on Apple. Apple's fans and customers could feel bad about what happened, and punish Apple for it. Apple is acting just like you say, smug and self-righteous, and that too could become part of this issue which comes back to haunt them. I doubt this though. Their customers probably will never notice, and that's a shame.
I am giving PCLinuxOS a try. It doesn't use systemd. It has fewer packages, so get used to finding a project's home page, and building and installing source whenever you want something less common. I don't feel too sure of its network management. Messed up the connection to a public network that uses a web page redirect, and must have mangled its configuration very greatly, because afterwards, it wouldn't even connect to a wired network. First time, it didn't even find the correct WiFi network, listing a dozen different ones but not the guest one I was trying to use. Fortunately, the problem cleared with two reboots, and now it finds and connects to the public network, and connects with the wired interface when I use that. Other than that, so far PCLinuxOS works fine.
These days, computers are so much more impressively fast and powerful, I'm thinking maybe I should give Gentoo a try again. 15 years ago, all the compiling took so much resources the system was busy and draggy doing that about 1/3 of its uptime.
Of course there will still be new movies! There _are_ other business models upon which movie makers can profit. This clinging to copyright is sheer greed, brought to us all by the same people responsible for the theft known as "Hollywood Accounting". They've fought nearly every technological advance, and lost, and the world is a better place for it. They tried to kill the player piano, AM radio, the cassette tape, and the VCR, among others. Now, 25 years into this revolution, they're still trying to figure out how to lock down or shut down the Internet, turn the clock back to the 1980s, but only for us, not for themselves. They happily use the fruits of technology to reduce their costs, while hypocritically still trying to charge us prices based on the wishful thinking that there haven't been any advances.
Take a moment to appreciate just how much copyright costs us all. We should have digital public libraries by now, which never run out of copies, can actually stay current instead of never having anything newer than 3 years old, are totally searchable, and which do not require lots of travel to utilize. Surf to the Library of Congress website, and download anything they have, any time, and don't worry about returning it. No more late fines. The content in an entire wall of books can fit on one hard drive. All that is huge, huge savings and far better and more usability, but thanks to copyright, we can't have it.
Instead, research we financed is locked behind the paywalls of dozens of academic publishers. Those scumbags charge $30 for a 10 page article, and pass along precisely zero of that to the researchers who actually produced the content they've locked away.
Keep copyright the way it is? Maybe even strengthen it? Might as well ask that we stick with horses and never upgrade to the automobile.
What's with the management at big companies that so many could think stack ranking was a good idea?
It shows that management doesn't know the first thing about managing. How could they be so utterly incompetent at it? Did they skip business management in college, skip college altogether, think they don't need no book learning? How could such people be chosen for management? I can think of several ways: Nepotism, favoritism, Good Old Boys Club, and groupthink in mistaking clueless, pushy loudmouths as go-getters, and still adhering to the religion of The Stick, that is, trying to push people into being more productive with threats, employing slave-driving tactics. Yeah, that worked so great for the Confederacy. Memo to management: the Confederacy lost the war.
A big problem is that the law holds back libraries and tech.
Public libraries ought to be mostly digital by now. Going digital solves all kinds of issues. And it's a huge enhancement. Don't have to travel to and from a branch to get a book, just surf the website and download books. There'd be no more need to return a book, no more late fines, no having to wait because all copies are checked out. And that's the least of it. Books would be far more searchable, no need for those massive card files, Reader's Guide, and such. An entire bookshelf worth of print can fit onto one hard drive the size of a paperback book, or on a flash drive that's smaller than 2 fingers-- depending on how wastefully the information is encoded of course.
But libraries aren't allowed to really go digital, thanks to copyright law. They have websites which may offer a fraction of their catalog for downloading, and that's about it. Instead, we have to rely on ResearchGate, Sci-Hub, arXiv, figshare, dryad (datadryad), Orcid, scholar.google, and even direct contact with authors to beg for a copy, for access to current research. Weak.
Copyright law is not as valuable as fully digital public libraries. If these academic publishers push too hard and succeed, the rest of us may move faster to hugely reform or outright abolish copyright to shut them and their rent seeking schemes down permanently.
Like the danger of fires after a long drought, the low UID mentions are high today. Throwing cigs or bombs out your window might start a flamewar,
Obligatory: I could've had a 5 digit UID, maybe even 4 digit. But I lurked for a long time before I finally signed up. Try not to let low UIDs impress you much. Wonder if they have more friends and fewer foes, because everyone is sooo impressed by a low UID. In fact I first used this handle in the late 90s on AIM, which I just read will soon close down. Without AIM, it's harder to prove I was bzipitidoo before 2000.
The main reason I dual boot is for all the games that aren't available on Linux. Wine isn't a good answer. Even if I can get a game to work under Wine, and can get decent performance, the next update to Wine is too likely to break it.
Plus, decent 3d accelerated graphics is still a pain to get working in Linux. Best chance is to get whatever card from a generation or 2 ago that is the most standard and tested. Without hardware acceleration, a lot of games are unplayable. Too often, open source drivers fall back on dog slow software emulation. Proprietary drivers have even more bugs. Nvidia and AMD (ATI Radeon) haven't been friendly enough. Possibly Intel's integrated HD graphics may be the best supported, because Intel is trying to upgrade their offerings in this market and seeks ways to differentiate themselves. But those are barely adequate low end performers.
You could always be accused of being a liberal, just for being a Star Trek fan. There are crazy dangerous, anti-intellectual trolls who would hand out the death penalty for that. Wearing a Star Trek t-shirt probably would have got you executed in the late 1970s Cambodia when it was ruled by the Khmer Rouge. They murdered people just for wearing glasses, because that meant you might be smart and educated.
Freedom has to be defended. The powerful are always pushing and testing to see what more power and wealth they can grab, and many aren't scrupulous or ethical about it. They use scare tactics, dangling the possibility of extreme punishment. The rest of us must push back. Downloading is just one way. By all means, use a VPN if you want. No sense handing additional information to enemies.
But also realize they can't throw half the world into jail. They could single out a few and try to make examples out of them. When that happens, we should fight back. I wrote to the Swedish government to complain that they should not have arrested and imprisoned the Pirate Bay founders. Didn't get any response, not that was I expecting any. Vote for the Pirate Party. Philip Danks really went overboard, doing all he could to provoke legal retaliation, and he got it to the tune of 33 months in prison. Nevertheless, people should have helped him. Write letters protesting these gross injustices. Denounce the Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT), not least for having ownership propaganda baked into its very name. FACT should never have been allowed control of Mr. Danks' inquisition. Allowing that is no better than allowing the KKK to conduct trials of black people. I wish more people would keep authorities clear on what is and is not a heinous crime. It shouldn't be a crime at all merely to use recording equipment and share recordings, or even just point others to existing recordings. Another egregious case was that of Dmitry Sklyarov, briefly jailed merely for showing that some DRM could be broken.
Copying belongs to the masses now. It's taken time to get the law to understand this, and many of them still don't. Tell them. Every day, tell them through our actions.
If you use Proper Indentation for C code or whatever curly brace language you prefer, then you do care how your code is positioned. At the least, you are influenced by the fact that many people prefer to read properly indented code.
Positioning to denote structure is not a flawed system. It is quite venerable. For instance, accounting has used double entry bookkeeping for centuries, with the data in neat columns. Your claim that punctuation has superior efficiency is only true when the methods for indicating position are limited to those available in ASCII.
I was thinking of HTML mainly, but the point applies to any markup language that supports nested lists, such as Markdown. ASCII should have had control characters to support nested lists, and tables as well, from the beginning. That's hindsight of course. It would have been remarkably foresighted if the ASCII committee had perceived the need and value of some minimal markup support in the 1960s. Instead, ASCII has the mess known as the tab character, an ugly combined purpose character that, like a typical 6 tools in one, fails to do any of its purposes well. Parentheses do not position text at all. The purpose of these additional control characters is positioning, for displaying hierarchical info. Brackets denote hierarchy one way, without using position. There is no elegant way in ASCII to position text in order to denote hierarchy, and there should be.
That's the point. Whitespace in the form of fixed width blank characters is a terrible way to position text. You say solve it by using punctuation, by which you mean some visible marking. That's not a solution, that's an evasion of the problem of how to position text, so that position alone can be used to denote structure.
But to that you say positioning is a bad way to denote structure, and shouldn't be used, and so it doesn't matter that ASCII is bad at it. If positioning is so terrible, why is Python so popular? Surely not for the other features of the language!
The way markup languages handle indentation is elegant, and wouldn't be hard to incorporate in ASCII. Just 2 control characters is enough, though should consider having a few more for some additional markup to better support tables for instance. Classic parentheses can't handle the same task, need distinct and separate characters for that.
Positioning is a major technique for denoting structure. Most programming languages use the other major technique, punctuation. Seems the grip of that dogma is so strong that people will trash talk Python solely for daring to require positioning.
You argue that positioning is antiquated and stupid because data must be positioned in the correct column. That is not the fault of the idea of positioning, that is the fault of the way ASCII does positioning. Fixed width fonts and placing data in the correct column wouldn't be necessary if ASCII didn't do positioning that way. One simple idea to fix the issue that so upsets you is to repurpose 2 of the currently unused and useless ASCII control characters to mean "indent++" and "indent--". Those characters would be analogous to parentheses. Then there would be much, much less need for leading spaces and tabs, much less need to use a monospace font for coding.
Markup languages demonstrate more sophisticated ways to position text: metadata. I don't know about you, but I am perfectly happy with the default way browsers display HTML, in "presentation mode", without the tags being visible.
You are criticizing Python where you should be criticizing ASCII. Python uses positioning, specifically indentation, to indicate structure. Nothing wrong with that.
What sucks are the ASCII methods for positioning text. The tab character is a mess, and everyone appreciates that. What isn't so appreciated is the lack of any succinct way to indicate indentation. Leading spaces is a horrible way to do it, but it's the only way ASCII can do it. It's extremely redundant, it forces the use of a fixed width font to make the columns line up, and it's prone to error. UTF did nothing to address this, simply repeating the mistakes made with ASCII.
One solution is better control characters. An "indent++" and "indent--" control character can solve this issue.
What's so exasperating is that manufacturers and the public still aren't taking aerodynamics seriously enough. How smooth is the underside of your electric car? Probably nowhere near as smooth as it could be. Last time I looked, the Leaf had a structural crosshatch pattern showing on the underside. Overlarge grill openings at the front are still quite common. Many people feel that wheel skirts are ugly and will even take them off though that causes 5% more fuel consumption. The fuel economy could be doubled just with better aero. Take a look at the Aerocivic. 95 mpg! The electric version of the Very Light Car gets more than double the range of the Leaf.
But no. That low hanging fruit is left to rot on the tree, while people whine about and sweat over range anxiety.
A more basic question: "Do you understand recursion?"
Lot of programmers really struggle with recursion, and avoid it like the plague. A common mistake is thinking that exiting the function means exactly that, rather than exiting only the current invocation of the function.
Take the effect of the media into account. They thrive on drama. They're the experts at slanting coverage to make a civil discourse seem as vicious and dramatic as they can make it. Even skeptics have a hard time figuring out what to believe. I have come to realize the media has reported the Right's philosophy in ways that make it appear more extreme and ugly than it really is. Sadly, that hasn't been hard to do, as there seems to be no shortage of lunatics and total hypocrites among the Right. One could easily get the impression that the entire Right has gone off the rails to crazy town. The Right has not helped matters, and as far as I can tell, really has spoiled somewhat. This denial of fact, science, and climate change, what's with that? That so does not fit the Eisenhower Republican model. They respected science as a means to win wars, if for no other reason. Bipartisan respect of science was what got America to the moon. But now? You hear an echo of that respect in calls to put a man on Mars. But mostly, the Right looks to have abandoned fact for propaganda. The Right and the media seem to be stuck in a negative feedback loop.
Possibly a new low for media cynicism was all the free coverage they gave Trump when he was a candidate, because his outrageousness was good for ratings. Just read what Les Moonves had to say about it. The impression I have is that a great many who voted for Trump did so out of desperation to find someone, anyone, who didn't seem to be a creature of the status quo, an establishment politician, totally owned by entrenched corporate interests. They didn't vote for the crazy nonsense Trump says. They voted to upend the system that is unfairly diverting most of our wealth to the 1%, or more like the 0.01%.
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I want copyright abolished.
We can pay artists and scientists through other means than copyright, and they aren't necessarily radical and new. Been using patronage for centuries. With modern communication, we can do patronage much, much better than in the past. It is now practical for the public to engage in direct patronage, pool small amounts from individuals into large payments or rewards. We've been calling this "crowdfunding" of course.
Copyright has lots of problems. It is only supposed to promote the arts and sciences by providing a mechanism to set payment amounts. It's not supposed to stop plagiarism, that is a separate problem best handled apart from copyright. It's not supposed to grant total control over what others may do with the copyrighted information. We shouldn't have to have an exception for parody, because there shouldn't be any control at all!
Copyright hurts researchers greatly. Traditionally, academic publishers have demanded that researchers turn over all rights, just for the privilege of being published. Researchers get no money from publishers, no percentage, no royalties, nothing. Technically, researchers have no right to hand out copies of their own published works even to fellow researchers, that's just how extreme copyright is. Most everyone ignores that restriction, and academic publishers have mostly shown the sense not to make a stink about this "violation" of their rights, but still. Now academic publishers have been offering another option, a sort of copyleft, for a price, a one time, large lump sum payment up front that is probably much more than they would ever have made in a century of collecting payments with a paywall. At $1 or more per page ($3 per page is not unusual), to read this and that research paper just to learn if they are relevant would quickly run up a huge bill. So lots of research stays locked away, unread. A particularly galling fact is that we, the taxpayers, already paid for almost all of this research through our patronage of higher education. We ought to already have free and unlimited access! These academic publishers are total parasites. Often, we must use pirate sites such as sci-hub.
Copyright costs us all hugely. Our public libraries ought to be allowed to go fully digital, but they can't because it's illegal. It would make our libraries much, much better and at the same time save us taxpayers a great deal of money. But no, they have to keep storing and managing printed books and other physical media, and to use it we have to keep doing the two step dance of travel to the library to check out the media, then travel to the library again to return it. It's like ignoring the telephone in favor of hand writing letters, and personally delivering them, on horseback or foot!
My thought too. It strikes me as depending upon the thief, finder, or police inspector not knowing about that "feature", which makes it another "security by obscurity" method. And it shows a lack of confidence in encryption methods. If encryption works, then this wipe feature is at best useless, isn't it?
It enables toddlers to accidentally wipe your phone by imitating your use of the phone. Of course they could also drop your phone in the toilet. But this-- even the cat could wipe your phone. However, in my own experience, the battery going bad is still the number one way to fry a smartphone and lose its data.
Can do that, yes, and I've thought of going that route. But why not have a programming language that's expressive enough so that you don't have to resort to code generation, if it's not hard to do? And it's not hard. Many already do it in limited ways. In C/C++, macros and templates come to mind as means of generating code. Why not do more? Are they afraid of the compiler having to make multiple passes over the source code?
Yes and no. I agree that wordy version reminiscent of COBOL or Pascal is bad. Just because English is currently the language of choice for international communication doesn't mean we should accept gratuitous use of it in programming languages. Imagine that in Latin. Still readable?
The key isn't in avoiding symbols
Oh yes it is! Lots of Idiotic Spurious Parentheses? Tell me which format for accessing an element of a multidimensional array is easier to read, [a][b][c] or [a,b,c]? How about XML and HTML, especially properly written markup with every closing tag included?
while(*d++=*s++);
That's antiquated string.h style library crap that doesn't even use the appropriate library function, strcpy(d,s);! Yeah, yeah, it computes the length as it copies, but better to have kept the length which was surely available somewhere somehow beforehand. Did you know that the null terminated string format required to make that work is regarded as one of the biggest mistakes of C? Maybe d and s are not char, but if they are, one byte at a time is a really rotten, slow way to copy a block of memory. Should at the least copy a 32bit word at a time. Or use the memcpy library function, which just might contain a whole lot of optimizations.
I've been complaining about a similar problem. Even with constexpr, it's still a pain to initialize complicated structures. What I end up doing is letting them be variables and computing their values first thing at runtime, though I wanted constants initialized during compile time. For instance, I might have the data all specified in YAML, then use a YAML library function to load all that into the program when it starts.
Here's a simple JavaScript example of the sort of thing I mean. Suppose I want a list of the elements. Using just the first 8, I could have: const ELEMENTS=["-","H","He","Li","Be","B","C","N","O"]; or I could do this: const ELEMENTS="- H He Li Be B C N O".split(" "); I much prefer the 2nd way, for clarity of code, and I thought everyone would, but I've found not everyone was sold on that. The good part is that at least they're constants. The bad part is that it's initialized at runtime.
Get more complicated, like, suppose I wanted an array of objects instead of strings, and each object is all the data about one element, the atomic weight, a list of isotopes and whether they are stable or what their half lives are, the full name, and so on, and it gets involved. Of course I'd want all that to be constant. If some of that data could be computed from other data at compile time, I'd prefer to do so, rather than do the calculations offline, so to speak, and plug the numbers in to the code. For instance, the atomic weight can be computed from the weights of the stable and long term radioactive isotopes and their percentages in nature, so why directly enter that value in the code and risk a mismatch from a typo? If the reason to take that chance is that the programming language pushed the coder into that compromise, then that's a deficiency in the language.
I used to read a lot of SF/Fantasy. Now I write more than I read. No, I haven't published any fiction. I write for my own amusement. It's way cheaper than reading.
As a teen I had a hopeful view that if it was published and in print, it had to be at least okay if not good. Of course I ran into a few stinkers. But most of the books I read were decent. The whole concept of a UBG that I first encountered in Tolkien was at the time marvelous and novel. Before that, evil was just kind of scattered all over in small, disorganized, unconnected events. Some of my favorites are Zelazny, Asimov, Heinlein, LeGuin, Leiber, Niven. Some I have changed my mind about, seemed good at the time but now I can only stand to read them if in the mood for cheesy writing and plotting, such as Brooks' Shannara stuff. McCaffrey's Pern has held up better, but what I find irksome is the deus ex machina in so many of her plots. I am thoroughly sick of unlimited time travel into the past. It is the ultimate tool to fix any problem or issue. Just pop back in time and nip the problem, whatever it is, in the bud. Another problem I have with so many stories is that they are too pat. The protagonists overcome problems entirely too easily, their plans no matter how harebrained tend to work out successfully. Yeah, in real life, if we are ever shot at, it won't be by a squad of stormtroopers who are such bad shots that they couldn't hit the Death Star if it was in front of their noses.
In the 1990s I dropped out. For me, what drove it was in large part the price. I can't forget that in the early 80s, a paperback was $1.95, and I've seen prices of $0.75 on books printed in the 60s and 70s. Dropping $2 on a paperback didn't feel like a big deal, but still, I stayed cool and never bought more than 5 at a time. By the end of the 80s, paperbacks were pushing past the $5 point, and that's when I quit. That's about double the rate of inflation. Would still browse, and saw prices just keep on climbing to about $7, at which point I stopped even looking. I used to be familiar with most titles in the SF/Fantasy section. Now I'm not.
Oh, we have a pretty good idea what they could be doing. I don't worry about it much. Yes, I agree, go ahead and use them, just be a little cautious. The data it can collect is not important, if you are careful not to give it account info that is linked to your credit card. And don't do anything serious on them, in case they really are spying on you, maybe sending screenshots to their manufacturers' secret data collection project.
A smart TV is a highly limited, locked down, and crippled Internet browser that happens to be able to receive broadcast signals from TV stations, connect to cable, and act as a plain old monitor for a DVD player, game console, or a real computer. The programming of the smart TV itself is highly, highly corporate. You can access only a handful of big corporate sites related to video, stuff like Youtube, Hulu, Amazon Prime, Netflix, and about a dozen other sites. It will try to encourage you to pay for things that are free elsewhere. The most dangerous feature of a smart TV is that, similar to a smartphone, it can connect to your account at pay for video sites if you have such and give it your account info, and if a kid gets hold of the controls, buy lots and lots of shows for lots of money, very quickly.
Perhaps the most aggravating crippling is that you know it could surf anywhere on the Internet, if only it wasn't programmed not to. You can do searches on a tiny selection of approved sites only, if you can stand the terrible interface that lets you pick keys from a virtual keyboard with the arrow buttons on a remote control. A search is limited to only the site the TV is on at the moment, for instance, can't simultaneously search Youtube and Netflix. There isn't any ad blocking of course, so if you use the TV to watch videos on Youtube, the device forces you to sit through several seconds of an ad. It will allow you skip the rest of the ad after a few seconds.
Smart TVs are usable, and okay for just watching broadcast or Netflix, but better to use a real computer, as long as you're not running Windows. Perhaps one of those tiny stick computers or a Raspberry Pi. Only thing it would need to be a better TV than a smart TV is TV reception.
That's why I was suggesting docking his pay. Surely there is some middle ground between a warning and a firing? He doesn't get off scot-free, and Apple doesn't have to go through the large expense of replacing him.
What's with management at so many companies acting like mindless, soulless bureaucrats? Rules is rules. no exceptions! Might as well replace them all with AIs, since they seem to lack discretion and a human touch.
Firing is still harsh. Plus, if he was an important employee, it will be costly to replace him. It's possible he was already on the edge, one more mistake from being fired, and this was the last straw. But it doesn't sound like that at all. His daughter could be totally mistaken, her parents could have spun a big illusion to keep her from worrying, but she claims Apple liked him.
Apple could have docked him some pay. Have him not get the bonus, accept a pay cut, even demand he take an unpaid leave of absence. Summarily firing him sends all kinds of bad messages, like that they think great engineers grow on trees and everyone leaps at the opportunity to work for the great, mighty Apple, and that they don't care about morale and expect the rest their employees to drink deep of the company Koolaid that this firing was totally justified. Must be a stressful place to work, a worse sweatshop than most top tech companies, many of which have a bad reputation that way.
There's also a small risk this could backfire on Apple. Apple's fans and customers could feel bad about what happened, and punish Apple for it. Apple is acting just like you say, smug and self-righteous, and that too could become part of this issue which comes back to haunt them. I doubt this though. Their customers probably will never notice, and that's a shame.
I am giving PCLinuxOS a try. It doesn't use systemd. It has fewer packages, so get used to finding a project's home page, and building and installing source whenever you want something less common. I don't feel too sure of its network management. Messed up the connection to a public network that uses a web page redirect, and must have mangled its configuration very greatly, because afterwards, it wouldn't even connect to a wired network. First time, it didn't even find the correct WiFi network, listing a dozen different ones but not the guest one I was trying to use. Fortunately, the problem cleared with two reboots, and now it finds and connects to the public network, and connects with the wired interface when I use that. Other than that, so far PCLinuxOS works fine.
These days, computers are so much more impressively fast and powerful, I'm thinking maybe I should give Gentoo a try again. 15 years ago, all the compiling took so much resources the system was busy and draggy doing that about 1/3 of its uptime.
Of course there will still be new movies! There _are_ other business models upon which movie makers can profit. This clinging to copyright is sheer greed, brought to us all by the same people responsible for the theft known as "Hollywood Accounting". They've fought nearly every technological advance, and lost, and the world is a better place for it. They tried to kill the player piano, AM radio, the cassette tape, and the VCR, among others. Now, 25 years into this revolution, they're still trying to figure out how to lock down or shut down the Internet, turn the clock back to the 1980s, but only for us, not for themselves. They happily use the fruits of technology to reduce their costs, while hypocritically still trying to charge us prices based on the wishful thinking that there haven't been any advances.
Take a moment to appreciate just how much copyright costs us all. We should have digital public libraries by now, which never run out of copies, can actually stay current instead of never having anything newer than 3 years old, are totally searchable, and which do not require lots of travel to utilize. Surf to the Library of Congress website, and download anything they have, any time, and don't worry about returning it. No more late fines. The content in an entire wall of books can fit on one hard drive. All that is huge, huge savings and far better and more usability, but thanks to copyright, we can't have it.
Instead, research we financed is locked behind the paywalls of dozens of academic publishers. Those scumbags charge $30 for a 10 page article, and pass along precisely zero of that to the researchers who actually produced the content they've locked away.
Keep copyright the way it is? Maybe even strengthen it? Might as well ask that we stick with horses and never upgrade to the automobile.
What's with the management at big companies that so many could think stack ranking was a good idea?
It shows that management doesn't know the first thing about managing. How could they be so utterly incompetent at it? Did they skip business management in college, skip college altogether, think they don't need no book learning? How could such people be chosen for management? I can think of several ways: Nepotism, favoritism, Good Old Boys Club, and groupthink in mistaking clueless, pushy loudmouths as go-getters, and still adhering to the religion of The Stick, that is, trying to push people into being more productive with threats, employing slave-driving tactics. Yeah, that worked so great for the Confederacy. Memo to management: the Confederacy lost the war.
A big problem is that the law holds back libraries and tech.
Public libraries ought to be mostly digital by now. Going digital solves all kinds of issues. And it's a huge enhancement. Don't have to travel to and from a branch to get a book, just surf the website and download books. There'd be no more need to return a book, no more late fines, no having to wait because all copies are checked out. And that's the least of it. Books would be far more searchable, no need for those massive card files, Reader's Guide, and such. An entire bookshelf worth of print can fit onto one hard drive the size of a paperback book, or on a flash drive that's smaller than 2 fingers-- depending on how wastefully the information is encoded of course.
But libraries aren't allowed to really go digital, thanks to copyright law. They have websites which may offer a fraction of their catalog for downloading, and that's about it. Instead, we have to rely on ResearchGate, Sci-Hub, arXiv, figshare, dryad (datadryad), Orcid, scholar.google, and even direct contact with authors to beg for a copy, for access to current research. Weak.
Copyright law is not as valuable as fully digital public libraries. If these academic publishers push too hard and succeed, the rest of us may move faster to hugely reform or outright abolish copyright to shut them and their rent seeking schemes down permanently.
Like the danger of fires after a long drought, the low UID mentions are high today. Throwing cigs or bombs out your window might start a flamewar,
Obligatory: I could've had a 5 digit UID, maybe even 4 digit. But I lurked for a long time before I finally signed up. Try not to let low UIDs impress you much. Wonder if they have more friends and fewer foes, because everyone is sooo impressed by a low UID. In fact I first used this handle in the late 90s on AIM, which I just read will soon close down. Without AIM, it's harder to prove I was bzipitidoo before 2000.
The main reason I dual boot is for all the games that aren't available on Linux. Wine isn't a good answer. Even if I can get a game to work under Wine, and can get decent performance, the next update to Wine is too likely to break it.
Plus, decent 3d accelerated graphics is still a pain to get working in Linux. Best chance is to get whatever card from a generation or 2 ago that is the most standard and tested. Without hardware acceleration, a lot of games are unplayable. Too often, open source drivers fall back on dog slow software emulation. Proprietary drivers have even more bugs. Nvidia and AMD (ATI Radeon) haven't been friendly enough. Possibly Intel's integrated HD graphics may be the best supported, because Intel is trying to upgrade their offerings in this market and seeks ways to differentiate themselves. But those are barely adequate low end performers.
What are you afraid of? A $150,000 fine plus additional fees and jail time? Really?
8th Amendment: Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.
You could always be accused of being a liberal, just for being a Star Trek fan. There are crazy dangerous, anti-intellectual trolls who would hand out the death penalty for that. Wearing a Star Trek t-shirt probably would have got you executed in the late 1970s Cambodia when it was ruled by the Khmer Rouge. They murdered people just for wearing glasses, because that meant you might be smart and educated.
Freedom has to be defended. The powerful are always pushing and testing to see what more power and wealth they can grab, and many aren't scrupulous or ethical about it. They use scare tactics, dangling the possibility of extreme punishment. The rest of us must push back. Downloading is just one way. By all means, use a VPN if you want. No sense handing additional information to enemies.
But also realize they can't throw half the world into jail. They could single out a few and try to make examples out of them. When that happens, we should fight back. I wrote to the Swedish government to complain that they should not have arrested and imprisoned the Pirate Bay founders. Didn't get any response, not that was I expecting any. Vote for the Pirate Party. Philip Danks really went overboard, doing all he could to provoke legal retaliation, and he got it to the tune of 33 months in prison. Nevertheless, people should have helped him. Write letters protesting these gross injustices. Denounce the Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT), not least for having ownership propaganda baked into its very name. FACT should never have been allowed control of Mr. Danks' inquisition. Allowing that is no better than allowing the KKK to conduct trials of black people. I wish more people would keep authorities clear on what is and is not a heinous crime. It shouldn't be a crime at all merely to use recording equipment and share recordings, or even just point others to existing recordings. Another egregious case was that of Dmitry Sklyarov, briefly jailed merely for showing that some DRM could be broken.
Copying belongs to the masses now. It's taken time to get the law to understand this, and many of them still don't. Tell them. Every day, tell them through our actions.
If you use Proper Indentation for C code or whatever curly brace language you prefer, then you do care how your code is positioned. At the least, you are influenced by the fact that many people prefer to read properly indented code.
Positioning to denote structure is not a flawed system. It is quite venerable. For instance, accounting has used double entry bookkeeping for centuries, with the data in neat columns. Your claim that punctuation has superior efficiency is only true when the methods for indicating position are limited to those available in ASCII.
I was thinking of HTML mainly, but the point applies to any markup language that supports nested lists, such as Markdown. ASCII should have had control characters to support nested lists, and tables as well, from the beginning. That's hindsight of course. It would have been remarkably foresighted if the ASCII committee had perceived the need and value of some minimal markup support in the 1960s. Instead, ASCII has the mess known as the tab character, an ugly combined purpose character that, like a typical 6 tools in one, fails to do any of its purposes well. Parentheses do not position text at all. The purpose of these additional control characters is positioning, for displaying hierarchical info. Brackets denote hierarchy one way, without using position. There is no elegant way in ASCII to position text in order to denote hierarchy, and there should be.
That's the point. Whitespace in the form of fixed width blank characters is a terrible way to position text. You say solve it by using punctuation, by which you mean some visible marking. That's not a solution, that's an evasion of the problem of how to position text, so that position alone can be used to denote structure.
But to that you say positioning is a bad way to denote structure, and shouldn't be used, and so it doesn't matter that ASCII is bad at it. If positioning is so terrible, why is Python so popular? Surely not for the other features of the language!
The way markup languages handle indentation is elegant, and wouldn't be hard to incorporate in ASCII. Just 2 control characters is enough, though should consider having a few more for some additional markup to better support tables for instance. Classic parentheses can't handle the same task, need distinct and separate characters for that.
Positioning is a major technique for denoting structure. Most programming languages use the other major technique, punctuation. Seems the grip of that dogma is so strong that people will trash talk Python solely for daring to require positioning.
You argue that positioning is antiquated and stupid because data must be positioned in the correct column. That is not the fault of the idea of positioning, that is the fault of the way ASCII does positioning. Fixed width fonts and placing data in the correct column wouldn't be necessary if ASCII didn't do positioning that way. One simple idea to fix the issue that so upsets you is to repurpose 2 of the currently unused and useless ASCII control characters to mean "indent++" and "indent--". Those characters would be analogous to parentheses. Then there would be much, much less need for leading spaces and tabs, much less need to use a monospace font for coding.
Markup languages demonstrate more sophisticated ways to position text: metadata. I don't know about you, but I am perfectly happy with the default way browsers display HTML, in "presentation mode", without the tags being visible.
You are criticizing Python where you should be criticizing ASCII. Python uses positioning, specifically indentation, to indicate structure. Nothing wrong with that.
What sucks are the ASCII methods for positioning text. The tab character is a mess, and everyone appreciates that. What isn't so appreciated is the lack of any succinct way to indicate indentation. Leading spaces is a horrible way to do it, but it's the only way ASCII can do it. It's extremely redundant, it forces the use of a fixed width font to make the columns line up, and it's prone to error. UTF did nothing to address this, simply repeating the mistakes made with ASCII.
One solution is better control characters. An "indent++" and "indent--" control character can solve this issue.
You think that array declaration is elegant? Tell me which snippet of code you think is easier to work with:
['a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 'e', 'f']
or
"a b c d e f".split(' ')
What's so exasperating is that manufacturers and the public still aren't taking aerodynamics seriously enough. How smooth is the underside of your electric car? Probably nowhere near as smooth as it could be. Last time I looked, the Leaf had a structural crosshatch pattern showing on the underside. Overlarge grill openings at the front are still quite common. Many people feel that wheel skirts are ugly and will even take them off though that causes 5% more fuel consumption. The fuel economy could be doubled just with better aero. Take a look at the Aerocivic. 95 mpg! The electric version of the Very Light Car gets more than double the range of the Leaf.
But no. That low hanging fruit is left to rot on the tree, while people whine about and sweat over range anxiety.
A more basic question: "Do you understand recursion?" Lot of programmers really struggle with recursion, and avoid it like the plague. A common mistake is thinking that exiting the function means exactly that, rather than exiting only the current invocation of the function.
Take the effect of the media into account. They thrive on drama. They're the experts at slanting coverage to make a civil discourse seem as vicious and dramatic as they can make it. Even skeptics have a hard time figuring out what to believe. I have come to realize the media has reported the Right's philosophy in ways that make it appear more extreme and ugly than it really is. Sadly, that hasn't been hard to do, as there seems to be no shortage of lunatics and total hypocrites among the Right. One could easily get the impression that the entire Right has gone off the rails to crazy town. The Right has not helped matters, and as far as I can tell, really has spoiled somewhat. This denial of fact, science, and climate change, what's with that? That so does not fit the Eisenhower Republican model. They respected science as a means to win wars, if for no other reason. Bipartisan respect of science was what got America to the moon. But now? You hear an echo of that respect in calls to put a man on Mars. But mostly, the Right looks to have abandoned fact for propaganda. The Right and the media seem to be stuck in a negative feedback loop.
Possibly a new low for media cynicism was all the free coverage they gave Trump when he was a candidate, because his outrageousness was good for ratings. Just read what Les Moonves had to say about it. The impression I have is that a great many who voted for Trump did so out of desperation to find someone, anyone, who didn't seem to be a creature of the status quo, an establishment politician, totally owned by entrenched corporate interests. They didn't vote for the crazy nonsense Trump says. They voted to upend the system that is unfairly diverting most of our wealth to the 1%, or more like the 0.01%.