i was quite pissed off when he said theres no reason to use byte, short or int anymore since all machines have memory to spare we should store every variable as a long.
Well... For most current computers, long takes as much space as int, 32 bits (or 64 bits for 64 bit CPUs). And for any individual variable, it'll take at least that amount of memory even if it's 1 bit bitfield (not sure if common x86 compilers by default pack variables to take less space if they can, though).
So using anything else doesn't really gain you anything in space, but it may well hurt you in peformance (and code re-use).
Bloat comes from copy-paste coding, and slowness comes from incorrectly chosen data structures and algorithms. This all arises from poor design, so for example the programmer is often faced with decision to change entire existing code to make some piece of it more generic, or copy-pasting that piece and modifying it a bit to fill the new need.
Another interesting note; dividing the volume by mass gives average density. The density will be much less at the surface and much greater in the middle (IIRC it's typically an exponential curve). So the maximum density is even greater then the BOTE calculation would indicate.
Or then the density could be just about the same at the surface of the core and at the middle of the core. Just like water is about as dense at the surface as it is at the depth of 11km. Because I think the ordinary matter is as compressed in a white star as it ever can be. For it to compress any further, it needs to change form, electrons melding into protons, and the whole thing becoming a neutron star.
No quite all the cards... They need to survive between free software and MS software. Trying to compete with MS with closed source software and closed technologies might not be the way...
WHOULD YOU PLEASE EXPLAIN TO THE LESS ENLIGHTENED AUDIENCE WHY THE F**K DID YOU DECIDE THAT THIS IS THE SAME AUTHOR
Mydoom.(A|B) was widely available for download and still is. Figuring out how to use its zombie network does not require stellar intelligence and guru level programming. So any lamer could get this one to work. In fact I am confident that this is a L4M3R because there is no commercial motive and it does not seem to be related to SPAM, viagra and penile patches.
You seem a bit touchy on the subject... It wasn't, by any chance, you who wrote the.A and.B? And now you're pissed of 'cos somebody (who you call L4M3R with less than stellar intelligence) exploited the backdoor before you could? Hmm;-)
(For humour impaired: above is meant as a poor joke.)
There's no evidence that EM from HV lines is harmful AT ALL
Yet at least I have no difficulty in believing that constant exposure to HV line EM fields can affect human body, especially growing human body.
I would not want to live under one myself for very long, say, more than a year. And I'd never allow my children to live or go to school under one even for that long. There certainly are enough "anecdotal evidence" that I rather not take the chance... To me, it would seem totally idiotic to voluntarily take the risk, "be a guinea pig", considering that it's not exactly difficult to find a place to live that is not under a HV line...
I mean, for decades, it was well known and advertised fact that smoking is actually good for you, and only anecdotal evidence that it might have some bad side effects...
Which would you choose if you had to choose between - a free society with terrorists occasionally being able to carry out their strike and people occasionally breaking law (eg music piracy) and - a police state where people have no privacy and can be easily imprisoned/executed/deported/"made to disappear" ?
Note: this is just a general question in the context, specifically *not* referring to any particular legislation (such as Patriot Act) or country (such as US or China).
Wrong. With a digital watch, you read in 4 numbers and instantly know the time. With an analog watch, you have to do mental arithmetic to figure out exactly what time it is. Even somebody who's really gotten used to an analog watch has to glance at one longer than he or she would with a digital watch.
I meant situations where you actually don't ever convert the time to numbers, you just look at what time it is, not the numbers that represent the time. If you have to convert the time to actual numbers (for example to tell it to someone), then it's slower.
But for just *knowing* the time, the conversion actually goes the other way around, you convert the numbers into actual "internal" idea of current time, an analog concept in your brain. I don't think it's possible for brain to internally understand time as numbers, but if you've learned the concept of time from analog clock as a child, the internal idea of time in your brain probably matches quite well to analog clock (ie a circle, not the 12 hours and 60 minutes thing).
Analog watches require power to luminate as well. Unless you mean glow in the dark, which has to be 'charged' by light in the first place.
Yes, I meant glow in the dark, but more precisely I meant situation where you don't want to press the light button on a digital watch (for example you have big gloves and pressing just one button might be next to impossible or cover the display with your hand). Sure you can have big stay-on light button on the front panel of the digital watch if that's a common situation, but that requires special design and makes an ugly watch.
But with analog watch you can have the feature built in without any extra constraints. Same thing as with dive computers with integrated digital air gauge, where you have to press a button to turn on light, using them is a (minor) PITA compared to good old self-illuminating analog display....but overall, I think we pretty much agree on the subject:-). As for myself, I don't wear a watch at all, digging out my cell phone to check the time when needed is overall less hassle than always wearing a watch.
Digital accommodates just about everybody's needs so Analog can safely die. The only thing really keeping it alive these days is style.
Not completely true, analog has some clear advantages. Like it's more intuitive, you can for example more easily tell how much time you have until some other time. And it's faster to read, with digital watch you need to read four numbers, while with analog watch you just need to see the position of the two arms. And especially in dark, you can make analog watch to be self-illuminating, while doing it with digital watch eats up power.
As a every day device to read time from, analog display is IMHO better than digital, even if only slightly. That's why it hasn't died, even though digital has more features.
Guess what? I just want a watch that tells time. I don't want that's tacky, but most digital watches come with this ungainly feature.
As a contrast, I and most of my friends have actually stopped using wrist watches because the cell phone tells the time, and having a watch is a bit of a bother really. Not much, but a bit, in a lot of small ways.
So suddenly, when forgetting to put on your watch isn't a bad thing (such as waiting 20 minutes for a bus or being late for a meeting), eventually you just stop wearing it. That's what has happened to a lot of people around here, anyway. If you're one of those who feel as naked without a watch as I feel naked without a cell phone, you're unlikely to develop the habit of forgetting to put it on, I suppose:-)
The point of backwards compatiblity is that if it's non-existent, current owners of XBox have no particular reason to prefer XBox2 over PS3 (for example). Believe it or not, but XBox has enough installed base that this will be a factor. And just a few million units one way or another is a big deal during the first year of a console's life.
Of course the important question is, why would you want to go to Mars? Tourist trips, sure, but there's little real benefit to living in a big gravity well if you're advanced enough to build free-flying habitats.
Well, if Mars was terraformed, or sufficiently advanced nanotech was available to build closed habitats fast enough, then providing living conditions for 10 billion people on Mars is much more practical than having free-flying space habitats for 10 billion people...
Thats kinda why I find it more surprising that people use the older versions of the kernel, considering its not costing you more than a few minutes time to download the latest tarball from your local mirror, and setup a new kernel!
What! And lose uptime! Are you nuts!
On a more serious note, for production systems, if it is not broken (eg security vulnerability) and still does what's needed, don't touch it. If you have to touch it, touch only the part that needs to be touched.
Well, presumably, if it's being addressed directly, it's not being used as cache. And if it's being used as cache for external memory, it's not addressed directly.
This type of book does no good what-so-ever except spawn new breeds of armchair physicists.
And this is bad because...? To put it bluntly, that's a bit elitist attitude, "if you can't understand this thing, you shouldn't even think about it, just go and do your daily work and pay your taxes so scientists get their grants and particle accelerators, don't bother your little brain with this stuff".
Anything that makes layman more familiar with basic scientific research and principles and generally interested in those is good IMHO, even if they get it a bit wrong.
Maybe, but how will you tell the real quantum physicists from the myriad of armchair quantum physicists who think they know what it's all about.
Why, by making an observation of course! After that their quantum state collapses to just one state, either a real or an armchair quantum physicist.
There are some experiments underway to use this to encrypt articles about quantum physics, so that only intended recipients can decrypt the text, even.
So everyone should employ morons because its good for the economy?
No. It's everyones responsibility to get rid of the morons. For good.
Just think of those working around you, in the next cubicle or in the next room... Are they morons? Some morons are obivious, some hide their moronity well, so look carefully! Even your family members or friends could be morons... So stay vigilant at all times!
After you've identified a moron, it's your national duty to get rid of him... Some poison slipped into his/her coffee cup, rigging their keyboard with AC power, a little push at the train station... Whatever it takes, your country depends on you!
Well, by rotting yes, scratch that over from my previous post, my bad.
But normal decomposing produces a lot of carbon dioxide. Only if there's a lack of oxygen you get significant amounts of methane. If a compost produces a lot of methane, it's not properly maintained. You don't want things to rot in a compost, you want them to decompose.
Paying too much would invite other people to try and cash in on similar stuff. Paying just right amount, and especially paying in something other than cash is both decent PR, and discourages false claims.
And it's not too bad a deal for the kid either, as far as I can see. Being bogged down in a courtroom against MS at that age (or at any age) is something I wouldn't do if it was just about a domain name, especially when there's a chance of losing the case (and losing your financial future at the same time)...
1. Grow trees, grass and stuff 2. Cut the grown trees, grass and stuff 3. Bury the cut down trees grass and stuff
Keep doing this at same scale as we use fossil fuels, and make oil companies to pay for it (and add it to the price of fossil fuels). For extra value, turn trees into paper, use it, then bury the scrap paper.
Now there must be something seriously wrong with this, since I haven't seen this suggested anywhere. Is it sheer scale, us using far more fossil fuels than we can practically grow and harvest plants for burial?
Well, according to some carbon budget calculations we'll run out of carbon in a few hundred thousand years. Without carbon dioxide in the air, all plants will die. Followed shortly by oxygen-using life forms. I hate when that happens.
Without carbon dioxide in the air, plants start to die, then decompose/rot/burn, and suddenly we'll have loads of carbon dioxide in the air...
Unless you can figure out a way to kill all plants pretty much simultaneusly with lack of carbon dioxide, I don't see running out of carbon dioxide as immediate, serious threat...
Sorry to be a pedantic, but that's something you really can't disprove beyond reasonable doubt until we have pretty much combed all different areas of the planet surface, and under it to quite a depth. Conclusively proving that there's never been no life on Mars will not happend in a long long time yet. And we can never be absolutely sure there's been no life ever. Perhaps life appeared in one small pool of water which then dried out abefore it could spread, and then any organic remains got destroyed by a volcano or a metor impact, or whatever).
Of course if there has been life (which I personally think is unlikely, but anyway), proving it is much simpler, you just need to find one reliable sample of it:-)
Job isn't the only concern. For example you might need to take care of your grandparents, or your spouse or boy/girlfriend has a job (s)he doesn't want to leave, or you don't want your kids to grow up in a poor area of a city with high crime etc.
The worst case is, you move to get a new job but then you don't get it or get fired very soon. That's how slums grow around big cities, from people who MOVED in hopes of a better life. The thing is, not everybody makes it, in some cases the vast majority doesn't make it but ends up worse.
Unless you're a very highly skilled professional who can get a job quite easily by just moving to a right area, then moving at all can be a very risky proposition...
Slashdot Mirror
I definitely second that!
Mod parent up!
Most annoying when it happens, which fortunately isn't all the time...
Well... For most current computers, long takes as much space as int, 32 bits (or 64 bits for 64 bit CPUs). And for any individual variable, it'll take at least that amount of memory even if it's 1 bit bitfield (not sure if common x86 compilers by default pack variables to take less space if they can, though).
So using anything else doesn't really gain you anything in space, but it may well hurt you in peformance (and code re-use).
Bloat comes from copy-paste coding, and slowness comes from incorrectly chosen data structures and algorithms. This all arises from poor design, so for example the programmer is often faced with decision to change entire existing code to make some piece of it more generic, or copy-pasting that piece and modifying it a bit to fill the new need.
Or then the density could be just about the same at the surface of the core and at the middle of the core. Just like water is about as dense at the surface as it is at the depth of 11km. Because I think the ordinary matter is as compressed in a white star as it ever can be. For it to compress any further, it needs to change form, electrons melding into protons, and the whole thing becoming a neutron star.
No quite all the cards... They need to survive between free software and MS software. Trying to compete with MS with closed source software and closed technologies might not be the way...
But what if giving that away (at least partially) would actually be just the way to save the company from bankruptcy...?
Mydoom.(A|B) was widely available for download and still is. Figuring out how to use its zombie network does not require stellar intelligence and guru level programming. So any lamer could get this one to work. In fact I am confident that this is a L4M3R because there is no commercial motive and it does not seem to be related to SPAM, viagra and penile patches.
You seem a bit touchy on the subject... It wasn't, by any chance, you who wrote the
(For humour impaired: above is meant as a poor joke.)
Yet at least I have no difficulty in believing that constant exposure to HV line EM fields can affect human body, especially growing human body.
I would not want to live under one myself for very long, say, more than a year. And I'd never allow my children to live or go to school under one even for that long. There certainly are enough "anecdotal evidence" that I rather not take the chance... To me, it would seem totally idiotic to voluntarily take the risk, "be a guinea pig", considering that it's not exactly difficult to find a place to live that is not under a HV line...
I mean, for decades, it was well known and advertised fact that smoking is actually good for you, and only anecdotal evidence that it might have some bad side effects...
Which would you choose if you had to choose between
- a free society with terrorists occasionally being able to carry out their strike and people occasionally breaking law (eg music piracy)
and
- a police state where people have no privacy and can be easily imprisoned/executed/deported/"made to disappear"
?
Note: this is just a general question in the context, specifically *not* referring to any particular legislation (such as Patriot Act) or country (such as US or China).
I meant situations where you actually don't ever convert the time to numbers, you just look at what time it is, not the numbers that represent the time. If you have to convert the time to actual numbers (for example to tell it to someone), then it's slower.
But for just *knowing* the time, the conversion actually goes the other way around, you convert the numbers into actual "internal" idea of current time, an analog concept in your brain. I don't think it's possible for brain to internally understand time as numbers, but if you've learned the concept of time from analog clock as a child, the internal idea of time in your brain probably matches quite well to analog clock (ie a circle, not the 12 hours and 60 minutes thing).
Yes, I meant glow in the dark, but more precisely I meant situation where you don't want to press the light button on a digital watch (for example you have big gloves and pressing just one button might be next to impossible or cover the display with your hand). Sure you can have big stay-on light button on the front panel of the digital watch if that's a common situation, but that requires special design and makes an ugly watch.
But with analog watch you can have the feature built in without any extra constraints. Same thing as with dive computers with integrated digital air gauge, where you have to press a button to turn on light, using them is a (minor) PITA compared to good old self-illuminating analog display.
Not completely true, analog has some clear advantages. Like it's more intuitive, you can for example more easily tell how much time you have until some other time. And it's faster to read, with digital watch you need to read four numbers, while with analog watch you just need to see the position of the two arms. And especially in dark, you can make analog watch to be self-illuminating, while doing it with digital watch eats up power.
As a every day device to read time from, analog display is IMHO better than digital, even if only slightly. That's why it hasn't died, even though digital has more features.
As a contrast, I and most of my friends have actually stopped using wrist watches because the cell phone tells the time, and having a watch is a bit of a bother really. Not much, but a bit, in a lot of small ways.
So suddenly, when forgetting to put on your watch isn't a bad thing (such as waiting 20 minutes for a bus or being late for a meeting), eventually you just stop wearing it. That's what has happened to a lot of people around here, anyway. If you're one of those who feel as naked without a watch as I feel naked without a cell phone, you're unlikely to develop the habit of forgetting to put it on, I suppose
The point of backwards compatiblity is that if it's non-existent, current owners of XBox have no particular reason to prefer XBox2 over PS3 (for example). Believe it or not, but XBox has enough installed base that this will be a factor. And just a few million units one way or another is a big deal during the first year of a console's life.
Well, if Mars was terraformed, or sufficiently advanced nanotech was available to build closed habitats fast enough, then providing living conditions for 10 billion people on Mars is much more practical than having free-flying space habitats for 10 billion people...
What! And lose uptime! Are you nuts!
On a more serious note, for production systems, if it is not broken (eg security vulnerability) and still does what's needed, don't touch it. If you have to touch it, touch only the part that needs to be touched.
Well, presumably, if it's being addressed directly, it's not being used as cache. And if it's being used as cache for external memory, it's not addressed directly.
And this is bad because...? To put it bluntly, that's a bit elitist attitude, "if you can't understand this thing, you shouldn't even think about it, just go and do your daily work and pay your taxes so scientists get their grants and particle accelerators, don't bother your little brain with this stuff".
Anything that makes layman more familiar with basic scientific research and principles and generally interested in those is good IMHO, even if they get it a bit wrong.
Why, by making an observation of course! After that their quantum state collapses to just one state, either a real or an armchair quantum physicist.
There are some experiments underway to use this to encrypt articles about quantum physics, so that only intended recipients can decrypt the text, even.
No. It's everyones responsibility to get rid of the morons. For good.
Just think of those working around you, in the next cubicle or in the next room... Are they morons? Some morons are obivious, some hide their moronity well, so look carefully! Even your family members or friends could be morons... So stay vigilant at all times!
After you've identified a moron, it's your national duty to get rid of him... Some poison slipped into his/her coffee cup, rigging their keyboard with AC power, a little push at the train station... Whatever it takes, your country depends on you!
Well, by rotting yes, scratch that over from my previous post, my bad.
But normal decomposing produces a lot of carbon dioxide. Only if there's a lack of oxygen you get significant amounts of methane. If a compost produces a lot of methane, it's not properly maintained. You don't want things to rot in a compost, you want them to decompose.
Paying too much would invite other people to try and cash in on similar stuff. Paying just right amount, and especially paying in something other than cash is both decent PR, and discourages false claims.
And it's not too bad a deal for the kid either, as far as I can see. Being bogged down in a courtroom against MS at that age (or at any age) is something I wouldn't do if it was just about a domain name, especially when there's a chance of losing the case (and losing your financial future at the same time)...
I wonder what's wrong this idea:
1. Grow trees, grass and stuff
2. Cut the grown trees, grass and stuff
3. Bury the cut down trees grass and stuff
Keep doing this at same scale as we use fossil fuels, and make oil companies to pay for it (and add it to the price of fossil fuels). For extra value, turn trees into paper, use it, then bury the scrap paper.
Now there must be something seriously wrong with this, since I haven't seen this suggested anywhere. Is it sheer scale, us using far more fossil fuels than we can practically grow and harvest plants for burial?
Without carbon dioxide in the air, plants start to die, then decompose/rot/burn, and suddenly we'll have loads of carbon dioxide in the air...
Unless you can figure out a way to kill all plants pretty much simultaneusly with lack of carbon dioxide, I don't see running out of carbon dioxide as immediate, serious threat...
Uh... Doesn't patenting it already mean nobody else can patent it...?
Sorry to be a pedantic, but that's something you really can't disprove beyond reasonable doubt until we have pretty much combed all different areas of the planet surface, and under it to quite a depth. Conclusively proving that there's never been no life on Mars will not happend in a long long time yet. And we can never be absolutely sure there's been no life ever. Perhaps life appeared in one small pool of water which then dried out abefore it could spread, and then any organic remains got destroyed by a volcano or a metor impact, or whatever).
Of course if there has been life (which I personally think is unlikely, but anyway), proving it is much simpler, you just need to find one reliable sample of it
Job isn't the only concern. For example you might need to take care of your grandparents, or your spouse or boy/girlfriend has a job (s)he doesn't want to leave, or you don't want your kids to grow up in a poor area of a city with high crime etc.
The worst case is, you move to get a new job but then you don't get it or get fired very soon. That's how slums grow around big cities, from people who MOVED in hopes of a better life. The thing is, not everybody makes it, in some cases the vast majority doesn't make it but ends up worse.
Unless you're a very highly skilled professional who can get a job quite easily by just moving to a right area, then moving at all can be a very risky proposition...