There are however problems when your 'simple dedicated system' is based on hardware that is now so obsolete that it's no longer manufactured; meaning that any hardware failures means that you're having to source unproven used hardware in increasingly limited quantities, or go to shady 3rd party manufacturers that don't have the quality control of the original.
I think the words you're looking for there are “decreasing limited quantities.”
The cost to provide you internet is inversely proportional to the density of the population where you live. Google is only installing fiber in very dense areas. As a result it's very very cheap for them to do this.
You wrote "512kiB". This is incorrect. It should be "512KiB". Although "k" is the prefix for "kilo-", there is nothing such as an "iB", so the use of "k" is inappropriate here. Note that the prefix "Ki" is for "kibi-" and it applies here to "B" for "bytes."
Teenage protagonists wouldn't be all that bad, honestly. Mark Hammil and Carrie Fisher were only in their early 20s when A New Hope released, and that panned out alright.
Switch the functionality of the '.' and ';' characters in C style languages.
Egad, you are seriously suggesting the use of ';' for accessing members of a structure? Or do you not mean swap the two?
[...] the number 1 complaint was how they were upset with how the program wouldn't compile because they were missing a ';' at the end of a statement. But if the character which represented the end of a statement was a '.', that would make sense to them because it's same character that represents the end of a statement in written communication.
This might be a clue that their brain isn't suited for programming. It's not a difficult concept that different languages use different punctuation, especially in different contexts. A '.' character in C can be a radix point in a number, a structure member accessor, or a component separator of a filename, e.g., stdio.h. A person needs to be able to understand this extremely basic concept from the get-go or they are not cut out for programming, plain and simple. It shouldn't matter what symbols are used. Now if you're talking 5-year-olds, then ok, sure, maybe ';' is confusing. But if it confuses an 18-year-old CS student, well,... they should probably be flipping burgers instead.
But when someone talks about the travel of electricity, the thing that people think about is the flow of electrons, not the electromagnetic waves.
Speak for yourself, eh? I don't think it ever once even remotely occurred to me that someone meant the flow of electrons when they talked about the travel of electricity. I have always thought of the travel of electricity as the flow of the electromagnetic waves.
(Note: I am not an electrical engineer and have not studied electricity intimately.)
General multidimensional arrays are trivial to implment in both C and C++, due to the syntax of [].
You have no idea what you're talking about.
Actually, I do. I have implemented multidimensional arrays in C many times.
General multidimensional arrays, together with all the operations Fortran supports on them, are extremely hard to implement efficiently.
Ok, you go ahead and continue to believe that. Meanwhile, I'll continue to be happy with the multidimensional arrays I have in C.
Several C++ libraries have tried, and they have all failed. Eigen probably is closest, but it only manages 2D, and is messy and inelegant compared to modern Fortran.
A friend of mine 20 years ago wrote a general N-dimensional array allocator in C when I showed him how to do 2-dimensional arrays. It worked great then and it still works great now.
A big problem is that C and C++ don't have real multidimensional arrays.
I don't think that's a big problem.
There are arrays of arrays, and fixed-sized multidimensional arrays, but not general multidimensional arrays.
General multidimensional arrays are trivial to implment in both C and C++, due to the syntax of [].
FORTRAN was designed from the beginning to support multidimensional arrays efficiently.
Both C and C++ support hand-made multidimensional arrays quite efficiently. You simply allocate a block of memory and set up the appropriate intermediate pointers. The syntax and the compiler take care of the rest.
They can be declared, passed to subroutines, and iterated over efficiently along any axis.
Multidimensional arrays in C and C++ can be iterated over efficiently along any axis of your choosing. You simply choose which axis when you create the array. (Of course, the ordering of dimensions is important during the array setup phase.)
The compilers know a lot about the properties of arrays, allowing efficient vectorization, parallization, and subscript optimization.
That's pretty nifty. It would be cool if C and C++ had that.
C people do not get this. There have been a few attempts to bolt multidimensional arrays as parameters or local variables onto C, (mostly in C99) but they were incompatible with C++, Microsoft refused to implement them, and they're deprecated in the latest revision of C.
Yeah, but what C and C++ do have is still plenty good for 99% of real-life computation tasks.
That's part of the problem, not the solution. These half-functional 'features' makes people believe that somehow it's acceptable to indent with spaces instead of tabs.
Acceptable to whom? I am fine with spaces instead of tabs. I haven't used tabs in 15 years.
True, they will lose 950,000 jars in sale if the would donate.
Your statement is ludicrous. If they donate the peanut butter to the exact people who shop at Costco and who would have bought peanut butter anyway, then yes, they would lose sales. But that's not even remotely what would happen. What would happen is they would donate the peanut butter to people who wouldn't have bought it at Costco anyway. They would not lose out on one cent of sales./P.
Daylight Saving Time (DST) is a Good Thing. What is terrible and awful is anti-DST (the wintertime schedule). We should be on DST all year around and never switch our clocks forward or backward. Nobody needs extra light in the morning; extra light in the evening is what is good.
Having knowledge that EOF == -1 is disgusting. And using it in a formulas? Even more disgusting. IMHO, that code makes me sick. I would write it instead as:
Slashdot Mirror
There are however problems when your 'simple dedicated system' is based on hardware that is now so obsolete that it's no longer manufactured; meaning that any hardware failures means that you're having to source unproven used hardware in increasingly limited quantities, or go to shady 3rd party manufacturers that don't have the quality control of the original.
I think the words you're looking for there are “decreasing limited quantities.”
The cost to provide you internet is inversely proportional to the density of the population where you live. Google is only installing fiber in very dense areas. As a result it's very very cheap for them to do this.
FTFY.
Only if you're looking at it too closely.
There is no such thing as too closely.
I don't believe that - unless you have a screen the size of a small movie theatre your eye cannot distinguish between 4k and 1080p resolution pixels.
You must have poor eyesight. The difference is actually profound.
I agree with you, but I have a nit to pick:
You wrote "512kiB". This is incorrect. It should be "512KiB". Although "k" is the prefix for "kilo-", there is nothing such as an "iB", so the use of "k" is inappropriate here. Note that the prefix "Ki" is for "kibi-" and it applies here to "B" for "bytes."
Seriously, this was one of the most interesting comments I've ever read here on Slashdot. Thanks for taking the time to write it.
See, my ISP gives me a 60GB/month cap, and $10/GB over that every month. Netflix was never an option for me.
Wait. Wait wait wait. You're saying $10 per Gigabyte overage charges???
Ten dollars per gigabyte?
What godawful ISP charges THAT? And how do you self-meter?
As a 26 year old, I choose to believe that 26 is still "early 20s"
Hahah, fair enough. :)
Teenage protagonists wouldn't be all that bad, honestly. Mark Hammil and Carrie Fisher were only in their early 20s when A New Hope released, and that panned out alright.
Mark Hamill was 26. Carrie Fisher was 20.
The semicolon in English is perfectly valid as an end-of-statement punctuator; English has many ways to separate thoughts.
Switch the functionality of the '.' and ';' characters in C style languages.
Egad, you are seriously suggesting the use of ';' for accessing members of a structure? Or do you not mean swap the two?
[...] the number 1 complaint was how they were upset with how the program wouldn't compile because they were missing a ';' at the end of a statement. But if the character which represented the end of a statement was a '.', that would make sense to them because it's same character that represents the end of a statement in written communication.
This might be a clue that their brain isn't suited for programming. It's not a difficult concept that different languages use different punctuation, especially in different contexts. A '.' character in C can be a radix point in a number, a structure member accessor, or a component separator of a filename, e.g., stdio.h. A person needs to be able to understand this extremely basic concept from the get-go or they are not cut out for programming, plain and simple. It shouldn't matter what symbols are used. Now if you're talking 5-year-olds, then ok, sure, maybe ';' is confusing. But if it confuses an 18-year-old CS student, well, ... they should probably be flipping burgers instead.
They unfreeze me in the Apple Store? Cool!
Speak for yourself, eh? I don't think it ever once even remotely occurred to me that someone meant the flow of electrons when they talked about the travel of electricity. I have always thought of the travel of electricity as the flow of the electromagnetic waves.
(Note: I am not an electrical engineer and have not studied electricity intimately.)
This must have been before 1994??
Because I never once paid a cent for any version of Netscape or Mozilla — and they were coming out rapidly.
I call is MS-Abscess.
Actually, I do. I have implemented multidimensional arrays in C many times.
Ok, you go ahead and continue to believe that. Meanwhile, I'll continue to be happy with the multidimensional arrays I have in C.
A friend of mine 20 years ago wrote a general N-dimensional array allocator in C when I showed him how to do 2-dimensional arrays. It worked great then and it still works great now.
A big problem is that C and C++ don't have real multidimensional arrays.
I don't think that's a big problem.
There are arrays of arrays, and fixed-sized multidimensional arrays, but not general multidimensional arrays.
General multidimensional arrays are trivial to implment in both C and C++, due to the syntax of [].
FORTRAN was designed from the beginning to support multidimensional arrays efficiently.
Both C and C++ support hand-made multidimensional arrays quite efficiently. You simply allocate a block of memory and set up the appropriate intermediate pointers. The syntax and the compiler take care of the rest.
They can be declared, passed to subroutines, and iterated over efficiently along any axis.
Multidimensional arrays in C and C++ can be iterated over efficiently along any axis of your choosing. You simply choose which axis when you create the array. (Of course, the ordering of dimensions is important during the array setup phase.)
The compilers know a lot about the properties of arrays, allowing efficient vectorization, parallization, and subscript optimization.
That's pretty nifty. It would be cool if C and C++ had that.
C people do not get this. There have been a few attempts to bolt multidimensional arrays as parameters or local variables onto C, (mostly in C99) but they were incompatible with C++, Microsoft refused to implement them, and they're deprecated in the latest revision of C.
Yeah, but what C and C++ do have is still plenty good for 99% of real-life computation tasks.
That's part of the problem, not the solution. These half-functional 'features' makes people believe that somehow it's acceptable to indent with spaces instead of tabs.
Acceptable to whom? I am fine with spaces instead of tabs. I haven't used tabs in 15 years.
True, they will lose 950,000 jars in sale if the would donate.
Your statement is ludicrous. If they donate the peanut butter to the exact people who shop at Costco and who would have bought peanut butter anyway, then yes, they would lose sales. But that's not even remotely what would happen. What would happen is they would donate the peanut butter to people who wouldn't have bought it at Costco anyway. They would not lose out on one cent of sales./P.
Any idiot can shoot people.
Assuming you're not a stormtrooper.
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=Michael+A...
Daylight Saving Time (DST) is a Good Thing. What is terrible and awful is anti-DST (the wintertime schedule). We should be on DST all year around and never switch our clocks forward or backward. Nobody needs extra light in the morning; extra light in the evening is what is good.
[...] except with only single inheritance and with templates!
Java has templates??
Actually, I would write it like this:
int putw(int x, FILE *f)
{
bool success = (fwrite(&x, sizeof x, 1, f) == 1);
return success? 0 : EOF;
}
Having knowledge that EOF == -1 is disgusting. And using it in a formulas? Even more disgusting. IMHO, that code makes me sick. I would write it instead as:
return (fwrite(&x, sizeof x, 1, f) == 1)? 0 : EOF;
which to me is much clearer.