Then out of that group you have to eliminate those who don't want use a non-GPL'd program and those who don't want to buy software.
Either there's a lot of hypocrites, or that's a tiny, tiny fraction of the Linux userbase.
Go look at the GNewSense distribution. Find out how many users are actually using it. Those are the ones you have to worry about -- the rest are very likely willing to tolerate a proprietary program when there's no free equivalent.
I don't know if I can really explain how a trigger file is hackish, if you don't see it already.
You're creating a file -- and with most filesystems, it's likely hitting a disk -- for the sole purpose of triggering a task. A task which, again, could have easily been launched by simply backgrounding something with whatever connection you had.
Maybe I'm just OCD, but that just seems wasteful and unreliable... I mean, there's going to be a delay, and some wasted CPU polling it, unless you're watching it with something like inotify.
The only case I can see where I'd prefer a trigger file is for things like Passenger, which is designed to bring Rails hosting to the level of PHP hosting -- that is, to a place where you could conceivably give someone something like FTP access (instead of SSH access). In such an environment, being able to touch a file is... still a brutal hack, but at least has a purpose.
And I kind of like daemontools in theory, but gave up on them after too long struggling with them in Debian/Ubuntu. DJB writes some good stuff, but it became irrelevant for the same reasons Minix did.
If you never reinvent the wheel, you do not get any better wheels.
Very true. The question is whether it's worth the investment at a given time, and whether the guy who's designing the navigation system needs to know about it.
Rather, remove non-thinking academically trained compiler monkeys from the loop,
I think you missed the point widely here.
The point is not that I don't want to have to think. It's that I don't want to have to think about such inane, minute, insignificant details as memory allocation, when I should instead be thinking about things which are actually important to my application. Like, oh, business logic.
As for throwing more hardware at it, that's just a crutch. I've already seen some competitors of mine collapse because they ran into situations where a doubling of the hardware only lead to 10% improved performance.
Guessing they didn't design for horizontal scalability.
You're right, performance must be considered at the beginning. However, the details we're talking about -- again, memory allocation -- are a vertical scalability problem. Not wholly unimportant, but secondary to horizontal scalability -- mostly because you can always buy more hardware (and space, power, and cooling), even ondemand, while you cannot always count on Moore's Law to provide you with a faster CPU, and when you can, it gets progressively more expensive for the performance you get.
Yes, tweaking malloc and free, and tuning for performance, all helps with vertical scalability, which means fewer servers to buy. That is a good thing, and I am not disputing it.
However, this eventually runs into the physical limitations -- if there is a theoretically most efficient algorithm, there is also a theoretical maximum for how much load any one server can handle.
And having things be modular, flexible, maintainable, even stable and portable, are all things that can help with horizontal scalability.
The time to consider vertical scalability, and that two weeks of extra programmer time, and squeezing out even 20 or 30%, is once you already have a product, and some traffic, and you're looking to cut down on operating costs. Because done right, that's all you'll be doing -- spending a little less on hosting.
I'd actually go so far as to say that most companies have a waste approaching 50% when you actually analyze how much flooring space is used, how much power, how much cooling, how much unnecessary cabling.
Now, compare the expense there with a typical programmer salary. Sometimes it's worth it, sometimes it's not.
long-term thinking has, just like in economy, been told to "go to hell", for short-term comfort.
What happened to this, then?
Modularity and flexibility is evaluated for necessity at this stage too. Not all software needs to be either of those.
In the long term, all sufficiently complex software needs to either be both of those, or be eventually replaced with something which is.
We've read recently about Twitter looking at replacing some things with Scala -- being able to replace part of your software with something written in an entirely different language is pretty damned flexible.
In the short term, deliver or die. And I'll deliver a hell of a lot faster with Ruby than you will with C. And Twitter again illustrates this -- call them lazy, call them unreliable, but you can't call them unsuccessful, and they now have the cash to do something about the other two.
I think this actually vindicates what I was trying to say. Had Ted bothered to test it empirically, he would've found what the rest of us already know -- that it doesn't save you anything.
I would like to hear these people's description of how a hashtable is 'supposed' to work.
Store the keys with the values. Then, every lookup, do direct comparisons between keys. That way, you only have the value overridden when the keys are actually equal, not just when there's a collision.
Some of your logic is based on the premise that "or I have to also write that algorithm in C" is a difficult proposition.
I write Ruby.
It is not necessarily difficult to go to C, although it's a massive context switch for me -- I almost never touch C. But it does lose me a few of the advantages of Ruby -- for example, if I don't write a C extension, I could port my app to JRuby, and get a performance boost and access to Java libraries instead.
Never mind that C is likely to be more code, and less maintainable. There's a reason I was using the higher-level language in the first place.
Parent and grand-parent's point is that you should be good enough at this stuff that having to write a replacement in C is a quick no-brainer
The fact that I haven't had to do it yet suggests that developing my C skills (and knowledge of this language's C bindings) to the point where it's a "quick no-brainer" is a waste of time.
I doubt I would find either a bubble sort or a hash table particularly difficult.
I would find it tedious. I wouldn't know how to do it offhand. I'd have to read Wikipedia, and it might take me a bit, since I do frequently work a few levels above it.
being several levels above that so it is as easy as computing six times seven or reading road signs.
How about this: Can you multiply 385*192 without a calculator? Can you do it in your head?
Indeed, mathematicians may often make mistakes in computation. That's why we have computers. Certainly, the above mental math would be useful, but not nearly as useful as mastering a general purpose calculator.
It's like a physicist who can't understand force, or a mathematician who doesn't understand the first fundamental theory of calculus.
In this case, I think it's more like a carpenter who doesn't understand genetics, or botany. He doesn't know how to grow the trees, why should he be qualified to work with the wood?
Granted, I think any decent programmer should be able to create a hash table, given the resources required. That doesn't mean they need to ever do so, or that they need the working knowledge of how to do so.
Which is still one step closer to Apple than it is to Microsoft.
Apple is like Dell. Microsoft licenses software to Dell. That's the difference.
Not that they don't invent anything themselves. Who else has a magneticly-attached power cord? (If you know of one, please let me know -- it's a very cool idea, but I don't want to buy a Mac.)
Actually, wasn't Kirk in Rura Penthe in Star Trek VI? And I don't recall any klingon-on-federation action, so I don't see why this would be any different.
Bumpy, most likely. Scroll up a bit, and you'll find that there's actually a canonical explanation for why klingons were smooth-headed in all their TOS appearances -- this is apparently an unusual situation.
If you don't know them, you're not a programmer. If you don't ever implement them, you're likely shipping more library code than application code.
If you're shipping more library code than application code, that's a good thing. It means you're not reinventing the wheel.
All the time. select() is your friend, learn it.
Nah, I'd rather use eventmachine if I'm going for cooperative multithreading, and I'd like to be able to use Erlang-style processes for pre-emptive.
plus he mentions "modifying the code while it's running"
Yeah, that was the one that made me go "wtf"? The examples given certainly aren't needed often anymore. However, modern scripting languages do this almost by definition. Sufficiently high-level metaprogramming can be very good. (It can also be very bad, but so can anything.)
I've written my own implementations of malloc/free/realloc and gotten better memory performance.
Great! Put em in the GC library, so the rest of us don't have to think about it.
* Math and date conversions
Really? This should be in the standard library for just about anything. In Rails, the example given would be calculated as: 3.weeks.from_now
* Hungarian notation
Ew.
Every fucking day. If you don't do this then you're a dweeb who might as well be coding in php.
Or Ruby. PHP sucks for reasons other than slowness and its potential to attract noobs.
However, "making code run faster" is what you do after the code runs, and does what it's supposed to do, and is modular, flexible, and maintainable. And even then, you're often faced with a very clear question of programmer time vs CPU time. Sometimes it's worth it (games, embedded systems) -- often times, you do the simplest performance hacks you can, and throw hardware at the rest.
"Sure, it'll take me about 120 hours to get to it with a debug build."
Yeah... I don't have this problem. Ever. But then, I'm a web developer, so I probably have things a bit easier...
any programmer who can't do a list, hash table, bubble sort, or btree at the drop of a hat ought to be kicked out of the industry.
Why?
Lists, hash tables, and sorting is already built in to many languages, including my language of choice. The rest, I can easily find in a library.
When performance starts to matter, and my profiling tool indicates that the sorting algorithm is to blame, then I'll consider using an alternate algorithm. But even then, there's a fair chance I'll leave it alone and buy more hardware -- see, the built-in sorting algorithm is in C. Therefore, to beat it, it has to be really inappropriate, or I have to also write that algorithm in C.
It's far more important that I know the performance quirks of my language of choice -- for instance, string interpolation is faster than any sort of string concatenator, which is faster than straight-up string concatenation ('foo' + 'bar').
And it's far more important that I know when to optimize.
Now, any programmer who couldn't do these at all should be kicked out of the industry. I could very likely code one quickly from the Wikipedia article on the subject. But by and large, the article is right -- there's a vast majority of places where these just don't matter anymore.
Not that there's nowhere they matter at all -- there are still places where asm is required. They're just a tiny minority these days.
...or at least, it's a "game" the way The Sims is. Which is to say, it's a simulation.
I have no problem with Second Life operating with real-world dollars. My problem with Second Life is that for what it is, it should not be tied to a single controlling entity (Linden).
But in an actual game, like WoW, well, this is just the next level of gold farming. The result is the same -- status in the game is no longer driven by anything resembling skill, or even time invested, but by how much money you're willing to spend on the game.
Because, for example, Star Wars Galaxies was a lot more fun before everyone could be a Jedi.
Or, in the case of WoW, if I did do ridiculous amounts of gold-grinding and ended up with a shiny new bike, it would piss me off to no end if every noob with a credit card suddenly had them.
And because, in general, this is an opportunity for financial might to not matter at all.
Personally, I find real games boring for precisely this reason.
Even so, all the sports you mentioned require a certain amount of skill. In a game, to a certain extent, you can buy skill.
A company has a decent plan to try and level the playing field and get farmers out of games
I fail to see how this "levels" anything. In fact, it creates exactly the same problem for "fairness" -- it ruins the in-game economy for attempting to sell things to other players (since other players can simply buy those items outright from the in-game store), and it creates the same problem of newbies buying their way to the top, while a legit player struggles.
In fact, it brings the whole class system in the real world into the game, which just sucks. What makes the game fun in the first place is that it's not the real world.
I have seen this happen, in a few limited ways. I play Nexus TK, which has only recently begun to follow the Korean business model of giving the game away (or at least, of keeping it at the same $9.95/mo), and selling other things. Most of these other things, I have no problem with, as they're purely decorative. A few are actually useful.
They do try, however, to prevent these from affecting the in-game economy. They cannot be dropped or traded in any way.
Even so, the very existence of that shop has impacted the economy in a few ways. The most obvious are the Equipment Restoration items. Some players can repair items, and they charge an arbitrary fee. This fee halved when people could simply pay a few pennies (of real money) to repair their items -- the demand had simply dried up overnight.
I've greatly simplified the above for the purposes of this comment, but the result is the same.
As to your idea of retaliation in kind, that theory of morals has been dead in the water for the last 2000 years, because all it ever does is escalate a minor incident into a major incident and people getting killed.
So it's better to escalate it the legal means?
I'm not encouraging actual vigilante justice, of the violent, illegal kind. I'm just saying -- again, like getting teased on the playground. Someone teases you on the playground, you tease them back, or you learn to deal, or you talk to their parents. You don't get your parents to sue the school.
Simple test here, really. If you think you can ignore something that's happened to you, then it didn't really cause much emotional damage. Some things just are not like that - for example, rape really causes very little physical harm, but rape victims are often seriously emotionally damaged.
And other people have rape fantasies.
That's not because they chose to be, it's because they couldn't ignore what happened to them.
Let me be clear: I am not suggesting that we should tell rape victims to "lie back and enjoy it". Nor do I think that a rape victim needs to hear that she may have had a choice. (Or he -- there are a few male victims. Not many.)
But rape is also a real, physical violation of a person, of a sort that they (by definition) could not stop.
And even in this case, different rape victims deal with it differently, and I do believe there's a lot of choice involved, certainly after the fact.
In this case, with this image, we're already seeing one example: They've chosen to make this a legal fight, and they're taking out a second mortgage on their home to do so, rather than working on keeping their family together, and creating something good out of this. And...
If you don't understand this, you're lucky so far,
My grandfather died fairly recently. Perhaps I have been lucky, relatively speaking, but I'm not sure "lucky" is the right word...
But there is an essential flaw, at least in this post: At least twice, you've presented the "it's obvious" fallacy. That is, if I disagree with you, I must be stupid or ignorant, because of course you are right -- without explaining why.
What's probably going to happen is that the second that the OGP starts to get a decent graphics card, some of the major vendors will start releasing documentation and/or much better Free Software drivers.
While ATI is attempting to do this, frankly, I don't see why you would assume that. It seems to me that the more likely outcome is a patent lawsuit.
I made sure the DOS licenses were were stored under the floor boards so that they would never get lost. We had to have them in case we ever got inspected...
I'd expect them to be using FreeDOS, at the very least. Wow!
there will always be loopholes and things that are forbidden that shouldn't be if you try it.
That is true. However, you can usually be more specific than "I know it when I see it."
More importantly, laws should be written to avoid false positives. "Better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer."
Given you did read it, and you don't seem to have liked reading it
Actually, I was quite amused.
you can stop me doing this again, but you've already suffered some very small emotional harm,
Perhaps. I'm also somewhat immunized to this sort of thing in the future.
none of the fixes you suggest would stop me using another identity and a rewording of the same text to be similarly offensive in future.
True. But if it barely affected me now, and now I'm ready for it, it's certainly not going to have much more effect in the future.
If on the other hand I'd somehow found out that you'd recently split up with someone, and I sent you that sentence in a private email, then it would probably hurt you a lot more.
"A lot more" isn't saying much. I'll concede that, but it still generally wouldn't hurt me unless there was some truth to it. Even then, there's still a lot of choice in how to react.
Again, sticks and stones. We've raised a generation of children who have never been spanked, so now we have to invent emotional harm.
Of course, it's an amendment that's been ignored by various governments, with arguments like 'oh but freedom of speech isn't important compared to the war on terror',
Which is precisely my point.
basically there should be a default position that you can do (publish, or act) whatever you like, with the restriction that if a reasonable person believes your action is clearly bad for society you should expect to get a kicking for it.
How do you define "reasonable person"?
I can certainly expect retaliation along the same lines, but I don't see why I should expect a legal issue.
But seriously... go back and read what you wrote. Why is freedom of speech important compared to the war on terror -- that is, to people actually dying -- but not important compared to a little emotional pain that they'll get over?
I am willing to put my life, and the lives of my family, indeed my entire civilization, at risk for this value. You're not even willing to let someone else suffer some emotional pain.
there are things which you clearly should not publish to the whole world; like a list of account and PIN numbers, or in general personal secrets which the person in question should reasonably expect to remain secret
Granted. A majority of these should rely on more than just easily-disclosed secrets -- for example, a PIN just strikes me as an incredibly weak form of security.
But take this example:
if your neighbour leaves his blow-up sheep out in his back garden, then he might want to keep its existence a secret but he loses the reasonable expectation, if he keeps it in a locked room and you find out only by breaking in to his house, then you should expect to get in trouble if you publish its existence
Well, you already broke into his house.
But let's run with this for a minute. Suppose I find this funny picture of a sheep online. Suppose I then start putting captions on it, and distributing it. Maybe I make it a lolsheep -- I CAN HAS PENIS? Is that allowed?
Alright, suppose I find out the guy's email address, and mail that photo to him with the caption. Is that allowed?
Suppose I don't send him a photo. Suppose I just mail him out of the blue and say "I know your terrible secret, and you are a sick, sick man." I'm playing a numbers game -- quite a lot of people have one sick fetish or another. I
Slashdot Mirror
Then out of that group you have to eliminate those who don't want use a non-GPL'd program and those who don't want to buy software.
Either there's a lot of hypocrites, or that's a tiny, tiny fraction of the Linux userbase.
Go look at the GNewSense distribution. Find out how many users are actually using it. Those are the ones you have to worry about -- the rest are very likely willing to tolerate a proprietary program when there's no free equivalent.
unless people who already have these managers' attention can make a convincing case ("convincing" in the PHB sense, not the reasonable-person sense),
Hows this:
- Unreal Tournament, UT 2003, UT 2004
- Quake 3, Doom 3, Quake 4
- Penny Arcade Adventures
- Valve Source servers
- Defcon, Uplink, Darwinia, World of Goo...
Does that work? Citing how all of their competitors are doing it, and not being required to release source? And it's not just games...
- Skype
- Flash
- Maya
I understand your point that PHBs need it dumbed down, but isn't that dumb enough for them?
I don't know if I can really explain how a trigger file is hackish, if you don't see it already.
You're creating a file -- and with most filesystems, it's likely hitting a disk -- for the sole purpose of triggering a task. A task which, again, could have easily been launched by simply backgrounding something with whatever connection you had.
Maybe I'm just OCD, but that just seems wasteful and unreliable... I mean, there's going to be a delay, and some wasted CPU polling it, unless you're watching it with something like inotify.
The only case I can see where I'd prefer a trigger file is for things like Passenger, which is designed to bring Rails hosting to the level of PHP hosting -- that is, to a place where you could conceivably give someone something like FTP access (instead of SSH access). In such an environment, being able to touch a file is... still a brutal hack, but at least has a purpose.
And I kind of like daemontools in theory, but gave up on them after too long struggling with them in Debian/Ubuntu. DJB writes some good stuff, but it became irrelevant for the same reasons Minix did.
If you never reinvent the wheel, you do not get any better wheels.
Very true. The question is whether it's worth the investment at a given time, and whether the guy who's designing the navigation system needs to know about it.
Rather, remove non-thinking academically trained compiler monkeys from the loop,
I think you missed the point widely here.
The point is not that I don't want to have to think. It's that I don't want to have to think about such inane, minute, insignificant details as memory allocation, when I should instead be thinking about things which are actually important to my application. Like, oh, business logic.
As for throwing more hardware at it, that's just a crutch. I've already seen some competitors of mine collapse because they ran into situations where a doubling of the hardware only lead to 10% improved performance.
Guessing they didn't design for horizontal scalability.
You're right, performance must be considered at the beginning. However, the details we're talking about -- again, memory allocation -- are a vertical scalability problem. Not wholly unimportant, but secondary to horizontal scalability -- mostly because you can always buy more hardware (and space, power, and cooling), even on demand, while you cannot always count on Moore's Law to provide you with a faster CPU, and when you can, it gets progressively more expensive for the performance you get.
Yes, tweaking malloc and free, and tuning for performance, all helps with vertical scalability, which means fewer servers to buy. That is a good thing, and I am not disputing it.
However, this eventually runs into the physical limitations -- if there is a theoretically most efficient algorithm, there is also a theoretical maximum for how much load any one server can handle.
And having things be modular, flexible, maintainable, even stable and portable, are all things that can help with horizontal scalability.
The time to consider vertical scalability, and that two weeks of extra programmer time, and squeezing out even 20 or 30%, is once you already have a product, and some traffic, and you're looking to cut down on operating costs. Because done right, that's all you'll be doing -- spending a little less on hosting.
I'd actually go so far as to say that most companies have a waste approaching 50% when you actually analyze how much flooring space is used, how much power, how much cooling, how much unnecessary cabling.
Now, compare the expense there with a typical programmer salary. Sometimes it's worth it, sometimes it's not.
long-term thinking has, just like in economy, been told to "go to hell", for short-term comfort.
What happened to this, then?
Modularity and flexibility is evaluated for necessity at this stage too. Not all software needs to be either of those.
In the long term, all sufficiently complex software needs to either be both of those, or be eventually replaced with something which is.
We've read recently about Twitter looking at replacing some things with Scala -- being able to replace part of your software with something written in an entirely different language is pretty damned flexible.
In the short term, deliver or die. And I'll deliver a hell of a lot faster with Ruby than you will with C. And Twitter again illustrates this -- call them lazy, call them unreliable, but you can't call them unsuccessful, and they now have the cash to do something about the other two.
I think this actually vindicates what I was trying to say. Had Ted bothered to test it empirically, he would've found what the rest of us already know -- that it doesn't save you anything.
I would like to hear these people's description of how a hashtable is 'supposed' to work.
Store the keys with the values. Then, every lookup, do direct comparisons between keys. That way, you only have the value overridden when the keys are actually equal, not just when there's a collision.
And this is precisely why you'd want to go higher level, not lower level. In Ruby, I do this:
I don't have to care whether array is an actual array or a linked list. It will just do the right thing.
Some of your logic is based on the premise that "or I have to also write that algorithm in C" is a difficult proposition.
I write Ruby.
It is not necessarily difficult to go to C, although it's a massive context switch for me -- I almost never touch C. But it does lose me a few of the advantages of Ruby -- for example, if I don't write a C extension, I could port my app to JRuby, and get a performance boost and access to Java libraries instead.
Never mind that C is likely to be more code, and less maintainable. There's a reason I was using the higher-level language in the first place.
Parent and grand-parent's point is that you should be good enough at this stuff that having to write a replacement in C is a quick no-brainer
The fact that I haven't had to do it yet suggests that developing my C skills (and knowledge of this language's C bindings) to the point where it's a "quick no-brainer" is a waste of time.
I doubt I would find either a bubble sort or a hash table particularly difficult.
I would find it tedious. I wouldn't know how to do it offhand. I'd have to read Wikipedia, and it might take me a bit, since I do frequently work a few levels above it.
being several levels above that so it is as easy as computing six times seven or reading road signs.
How about this: Can you multiply 385*192 without a calculator? Can you do it in your head?
Indeed, mathematicians may often make mistakes in computation. That's why we have computers. Certainly, the above mental math would be useful, but not nearly as useful as mastering a general purpose calculator.
It's like a physicist who can't understand force, or a mathematician who doesn't understand the first fundamental theory of calculus.
In this case, I think it's more like a carpenter who doesn't understand genetics, or botany. He doesn't know how to grow the trees, why should he be qualified to work with the wood?
Granted, I think any decent programmer should be able to create a hash table, given the resources required. That doesn't mean they need to ever do so, or that they need the working knowledge of how to do so.
Which is still one step closer to Apple than it is to Microsoft.
Apple is like Dell. Microsoft licenses software to Dell. That's the difference.
Not that they don't invent anything themselves. Who else has a magneticly-attached power cord? (If you know of one, please let me know -- it's a very cool idea, but I don't want to buy a Mac.)
Actually, there's a definitive answer. Only one small group of klingons ever looked like the TOS klingons, and it was some sort of medical condition.
Therefore, only wannabe trekkies would be complaining about either one.
Actually, wasn't Kirk in Rura Penthe in Star Trek VI? And I don't recall any klingon-on-federation action, so I don't see why this would be any different.
Bumpy, most likely. Scroll up a bit, and you'll find that there's actually a canonical explanation for why klingons were smooth-headed in all their TOS appearances -- this is apparently an unusual situation.
If you don't know them, you're not a programmer. If you don't ever implement them, you're likely shipping more library code than application code.
If you're shipping more library code than application code, that's a good thing. It means you're not reinventing the wheel.
All the time. select() is your friend, learn it.
Nah, I'd rather use eventmachine if I'm going for cooperative multithreading, and I'd like to be able to use Erlang-style processes for pre-emptive.
plus he mentions "modifying the code while it's running"
Yeah, that was the one that made me go "wtf"? The examples given certainly aren't needed often anymore. However, modern scripting languages do this almost by definition. Sufficiently high-level metaprogramming can be very good. (It can also be very bad, but so can anything.)
I've written my own implementations of malloc/free/realloc and gotten better memory performance.
Great! Put em in the GC library, so the rest of us don't have to think about it.
* Math and date conversions
Really? This should be in the standard library for just about anything. In Rails, the example given would be calculated as: 3.weeks.from_now
* Hungarian notation
Ew.
Every fucking day. If you don't do this then you're a dweeb who might as well be coding in php.
Or Ruby. PHP sucks for reasons other than slowness and its potential to attract noobs.
However, "making code run faster" is what you do after the code runs, and does what it's supposed to do, and is modular, flexible, and maintainable. And even then, you're often faced with a very clear question of programmer time vs CPU time. Sometimes it's worth it (games, embedded systems) -- often times, you do the simplest performance hacks you can, and throw hardware at the rest.
"Sure, it'll take me about 120 hours to get to it with a debug build."
Yeah... I don't have this problem. Ever. But then, I'm a web developer, so I probably have things a bit easier...
Just what is it you do?
Not everyone uses an IDE. There's a hell of a lot of us who still use emacs and vi.
I suppose if it's 'vi' and not 'vim', you might have a point. But emacs absolutely should be able to do something like that.
IDE's features tend to make it sputter on lower end computers and/or large projects, and there advantages are minimal to nill.
However, one thing they have over Notepad: Syntax highlighting.
I hear you -- I use Kate for development these days. But even there, I've at least got syntax highlighting and code folding.
I can grep and find all references to a variable faster than most IDEs will find them for me.
Then for you, hungarian notation should be equally redundant.
any programmer who can't do a list, hash table, bubble sort, or btree at the drop of a hat ought to be kicked out of the industry.
Why?
Lists, hash tables, and sorting is already built in to many languages, including my language of choice. The rest, I can easily find in a library.
When performance starts to matter, and my profiling tool indicates that the sorting algorithm is to blame, then I'll consider using an alternate algorithm. But even then, there's a fair chance I'll leave it alone and buy more hardware -- see, the built-in sorting algorithm is in C. Therefore, to beat it, it has to be really inappropriate, or I have to also write that algorithm in C.
It's far more important that I know the performance quirks of my language of choice -- for instance, string interpolation is faster than any sort of string concatenator, which is faster than straight-up string concatenation ('foo' + 'bar').
And it's far more important that I know when to optimize.
Now, any programmer who couldn't do these at all should be kicked out of the industry. I could very likely code one quickly from the Wikipedia article on the subject. But by and large, the article is right -- there's a vast majority of places where these just don't matter anymore.
Not that there's nowhere they matter at all -- there are still places where asm is required. They're just a tiny minority these days.
...or at least, it's a "game" the way The Sims is. Which is to say, it's a simulation.
I have no problem with Second Life operating with real-world dollars. My problem with Second Life is that for what it is, it should not be tied to a single controlling entity (Linden).
But in an actual game, like WoW, well, this is just the next level of gold farming. The result is the same -- status in the game is no longer driven by anything resembling skill, or even time invested, but by how much money you're willing to spend on the game.
Because, for example, Star Wars Galaxies was a lot more fun before everyone could be a Jedi.
Or, in the case of WoW, if I did do ridiculous amounts of gold-grinding and ended up with a shiny new bike, it would piss me off to no end if every noob with a credit card suddenly had them.
And because, in general, this is an opportunity for financial might to not matter at all.
Personally, I find real games boring for precisely this reason.
Even so, all the sports you mentioned require a certain amount of skill. In a game, to a certain extent, you can buy skill.
A company has a decent plan to try and level the playing field and get farmers out of games
I fail to see how this "levels" anything. In fact, it creates exactly the same problem for "fairness" -- it ruins the in-game economy for attempting to sell things to other players (since other players can simply buy those items outright from the in-game store), and it creates the same problem of newbies buying their way to the top, while a legit player struggles.
In fact, it brings the whole class system in the real world into the game, which just sucks. What makes the game fun in the first place is that it's not the real world.
I have seen this happen, in a few limited ways. I play Nexus TK, which has only recently begun to follow the Korean business model of giving the game away (or at least, of keeping it at the same $9.95/mo), and selling other things. Most of these other things, I have no problem with, as they're purely decorative. A few are actually useful.
They do try, however, to prevent these from affecting the in-game economy. They cannot be dropped or traded in any way.
Even so, the very existence of that shop has impacted the economy in a few ways. The most obvious are the Equipment Restoration items. Some players can repair items, and they charge an arbitrary fee. This fee halved when people could simply pay a few pennies (of real money) to repair their items -- the demand had simply dried up overnight.
I've greatly simplified the above for the purposes of this comment, but the result is the same.
As to your idea of retaliation in kind, that theory of morals has been dead in the water for the last 2000 years, because all it ever does is escalate a minor incident into a major incident and people getting killed.
So it's better to escalate it the legal means?
I'm not encouraging actual vigilante justice, of the violent, illegal kind. I'm just saying -- again, like getting teased on the playground. Someone teases you on the playground, you tease them back, or you learn to deal, or you talk to their parents. You don't get your parents to sue the school.
Simple test here, really. If you think you can ignore something that's happened to you, then it didn't really cause much emotional damage. Some things just are not like that - for example, rape really causes very little physical harm, but rape victims are often seriously emotionally damaged.
And other people have rape fantasies.
That's not because they chose to be, it's because they couldn't ignore what happened to them.
Let me be clear: I am not suggesting that we should tell rape victims to "lie back and enjoy it". Nor do I think that a rape victim needs to hear that she may have had a choice. (Or he -- there are a few male victims. Not many.)
But rape is also a real, physical violation of a person, of a sort that they (by definition) could not stop.
And even in this case, different rape victims deal with it differently, and I do believe there's a lot of choice involved, certainly after the fact.
In this case, with this image, we're already seeing one example: They've chosen to make this a legal fight, and they're taking out a second mortgage on their home to do so, rather than working on keeping their family together, and creating something good out of this. And...
If you don't understand this, you're lucky so far,
My grandfather died fairly recently. Perhaps I have been lucky, relatively speaking, but I'm not sure "lucky" is the right word...
But there is an essential flaw, at least in this post: At least twice, you've presented the "it's obvious" fallacy. That is, if I disagree with you, I must be stupid or ignorant, because of course you are right -- without explaining why.
Point well taken, but it seems to me that touching a tempfile and having a cron job pick it up is incredibly hackish.
The one flaw you've identified with my suggestion could be corrected with a fork, or a & in the command.
What's probably going to happen is that the second that the OGP starts to get a decent graphics card, some of the major vendors will start releasing documentation and/or much better Free Software drivers.
While ATI is attempting to do this, frankly, I don't see why you would assume that. It seems to me that the more likely outcome is a patent lawsuit.
I made sure the DOS licenses were were stored under the floor boards so that they would never get lost. We had to have them in case we ever got inspected...
I'd expect them to be using FreeDOS, at the very least. Wow!
there will always be loopholes and things that are forbidden that shouldn't be if you try it.
That is true. However, you can usually be more specific than "I know it when I see it."
More importantly, laws should be written to avoid false positives. "Better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer."
Given you did read it, and you don't seem to have liked reading it
Actually, I was quite amused.
you can stop me doing this again, but you've already suffered some very small emotional harm,
Perhaps. I'm also somewhat immunized to this sort of thing in the future.
none of the fixes you suggest would stop me using another identity and a rewording of the same text to be similarly offensive in future.
True. But if it barely affected me now, and now I'm ready for it, it's certainly not going to have much more effect in the future.
If on the other hand I'd somehow found out that you'd recently split up with someone, and I sent you that sentence in a private email, then it would probably hurt you a lot more.
"A lot more" isn't saying much. I'll concede that, but it still generally wouldn't hurt me unless there was some truth to it. Even then, there's still a lot of choice in how to react.
Again, sticks and stones. We've raised a generation of children who have never been spanked, so now we have to invent emotional harm.
Of course, it's an amendment that's been ignored by various governments, with arguments like 'oh but freedom of speech isn't important compared to the war on terror',
Which is precisely my point.
basically there should be a default position that you can do (publish, or act) whatever you like, with the restriction that if a reasonable person believes your action is clearly bad for society you should expect to get a kicking for it.
How do you define "reasonable person"?
I can certainly expect retaliation along the same lines, but I don't see why I should expect a legal issue.
But seriously... go back and read what you wrote. Why is freedom of speech important compared to the war on terror -- that is, to people actually dying -- but not important compared to a little emotional pain that they'll get over?
I am willing to put my life, and the lives of my family, indeed my entire civilization, at risk for this value. You're not even willing to let someone else suffer some emotional pain.
there are things which you clearly should not publish to the whole world; like a list of account and PIN numbers, or in general personal secrets which the person in question should reasonably expect to remain secret
Granted. A majority of these should rely on more than just easily-disclosed secrets -- for example, a PIN just strikes me as an incredibly weak form of security.
But take this example:
if your neighbour leaves his blow-up sheep out in his back garden, then he might want to keep its existence a secret but he loses the reasonable expectation, if he keeps it in a locked room and you find out only by breaking in to his house, then you should expect to get in trouble if you publish its existence
Well, you already broke into his house.
But let's run with this for a minute. Suppose I find this funny picture of a sheep online. Suppose I then start putting captions on it, and distributing it. Maybe I make it a lolsheep -- I CAN HAS PENIS? Is that allowed?
Alright, suppose I find out the guy's email address, and mail that photo to him with the caption. Is that allowed?
Suppose I don't send him a photo. Suppose I just mail him out of the blue and say "I know your terrible secret, and you are a sick, sick man." I'm playing a numbers game -- quite a lot of people have one sick fetish or another. I