what is this obsession with making things thin, the space it saves is almost irrelevant and tactile feed back is a wonderful thing.
There are plenty of thicker laptops available, and at lower prices to boot. So if you don't care about thinness, then don't pay a premium to buy it. Problem solved.
In the past, many cities dealt with excessive demand for existing space by creating more space. The most obvious way to do this is to build taller buildings. We need to find a way to sideline the NIMBYs and BANANAs so that core cities can grow again, instead of sprawling into the suburbs.
Follow the money. This will fail for the same reason the Clipper Chip failed. It was/will be bad for American business and destroy American jobs. NOBODY outside America is going to buy tech with FBI backdoors. Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and nearly every other tech company, representing trillions in market cap, and billions in campaign contributions, are lined up against it. They can not only buy as many politicians as they need, but they can also use ad dollars to go direct to the people. Apple and Facebook are way better at manipulating public opinion than the FBI, and they have far greater resources.
The "adult conversation" the FBI says it's planning is a call for criminalization of any encryption that the FBI can't break. They want a back door and if you won't give it to them, they will put you in jail.
They already tried that 20 years ago, and failed. People today are way more aware of the issue, and more willing to push back. Secure encryption is already widespread and will soon be ubiquitous. The FBI is just throwing a temper tantrum because they didn't get what they wanted.
Being that Uber is already a minimum wage job outside of the weekend bar hours
My sister drives for Uber and averages about $18/hr. That is way more than minimum wage, and is pretty good for a no skill job with flexible hours. Like most Uber drivers, she does it part time, and it is not her main source of income.
With assertions enabled, my most speed-critical code runs 2x or 3x slower.
That is odd. An assertion should just be the evaluation of a boolean expression. You should use a profiler to identify your hotspots and then figure out a way to move the assertion out of the loop. If you have 1000 assertions in your code, it is silly to disable 998 of them because the other 2 are causing performance issues. I have rarely seen assertions cause more than a 10% performance penalty, and typically even less than that.
I'll stick to proper error handling.
Assertions and exception handling are two completely different things. Exceptions are to identify and handle things like read errors that are expected to happen occasionally, and should be handled gracefully. Assertions are to detect things that should never happen, such as flaws in your program's logic.
I've not tried Lyft yet, I'm assuming they're on par with Uber price wise?
I use Lyft and avoid Uber. The prices are about the same, and the responsiveness is about the same. Even many of the drivers are the same, since many drivers do both. I use Lyft for two reasons: 1. They treat their drivers better, not necessarily with more money, but at least with more respect. 2. By using the smaller company I am helping to keep the market competitive.
Excellent point. As more tools like this appear from the aether, the value of developers will decline.
History says otherwise. Tools that make people more productive cause those people to be more valuable, not less. A developer that produces 10 apps per year is going to bring in more profit than a developer that produces one app per year, and can thus command a higher salary.
Rising productivity does not cause poverty. It causes prosperity. If your brain is too dysfunctional to realize that through logic, then just open your eyes and look at the world: Countries/regions with high productivity: America, Western Europe, East Asia. Countries with low productivity: Ethiopia, Niger, Pakistan, North Korea. Do you really think the latter group have benefited by avoiding "job killing" productivity improvements?
Urgh, no. Never, ever do this. assert() usually becomes a no-op when compiling stuff without debug flags, so binaries shipped to the field will mysteriously ignore errors in ways that can't be reproduced in a debugger.
Urgh, no. Never do this. Binaries shipped to the field should almost always have assertions left enabled. End users will find ways to trigger errors that you never thought of, and assertions will give you a clear message, usually very close to the cause, with file name and line number. The run time performance hit is usually negligible, and if it isn't then maybe, maybe, remove a few asserts from inner loop hotspots.
When I ship a product, the only thing I change is that in addition to printing to the console, an assertion failure also emails me the error log and stack trace (with the customer's consent). That is enormously valuable in nailing bugs.
Those other countries should have been taxing revenue, or payrolls, or dividends. "Profit" is something that can be easily manipulated or shifted to another jurisdiction. It is the dumbest thing to try and tax.
I ran my own business for many years, and it was amazingly easy to pay zero taxes on profits. I put a pool in my backyard, and declared it an "employee recreation facility" (I held a company BBQ there just to be sure I had all my bases covered) and wrote the whole thing off against profit.
From TFS, "c's problems": c doesn't have "problems"; programmers who don't use c have problems.
That is actually what TIOBE measures. It counts Google searches. C programmers are smart enough that they don't need to search for answers on Google, or they use a better website, such as Stackoverflow. A high TIOBE index can mean a language is popular, or it can mean that language has dumb programmers.
One huge difference is that you can get thrown in jail for crossing someone.
I assume you are referring to the teachers arrested and jailed last month in Minnesota. But similar things have happened in China, so the situation is not as different as you think.
yet it's only Apple built products we hear about. Why?
People buy devices from Samsung, Microsoft, Dell, etc. for pragmatic reasons, and aren't much concerned about how they are made. Many people buy Apple products for the image and status they project. So people care more about the Apple brand being besmirched. If "Apple" was replaced by "Samsung" this story would have never been posted on Slashdot, because no one would care.
Perhaps both communism and free-market capitalism are only abstract ideals that can never be fully demonstrated in the real world?
Absolute zero Kelvin is also an abstract idea. But that doesn't mean Minnesota isn't colder than Florida. In the real world, there is no country that is completely capitalist, and none that are completely communist. But if you look at the top three capitalist countries based on the ease of starting and running a private business, they are Singapore, New Zealand, and Denmark. If you look at the three most communist, they are Cuba, North Korea, and Eritrea. Where would you rather live?
There are a variety of online articles that contradict your claim that independent labor unions are allowed in China
The ACFTU is a government run umbrella organization for labor unions in China. But unions do NOT have to join. Even for unions that do join, they have the right to independently declare strikes. The links you provide point out (correctly) that unions in China face big challenges. How is that different than America, where union membership has dramatically declined, and service workers are proving difficult to organize?
These factories tend to offer better jobs than any alternative available, and many workers come from the countryside, work for a few years to build up a nest egg, and then return home to their families. The transient nature of the workforce means they aren't willing to sacrifice now for future gains.
I am more inclined to believe the accusations of dissidents than the wealthy authoritarian party's propaganda.
These accusations do NOT come from Chinese dissidents. China Labor Watch is an American organization based in New York.
No, we don't know. There are only rumors. If the rumors come from American media "experts" then they have no more credibility than random babbling. If the rumors come from China, where the new products are already being assembled, then they are likely correct. For this event, the rumors are mostly from the former, and those can be ignored.
Independent unions are not banned in China. They were before 2008, but labor rights in China have changed a lot since then. Most importantly, unions now have the right to declare strikes against private companies (but not at SOEs). These strikes are generally tolerated by the government, especially at foreign owned companies. Pegatron is a foreign company (Taiwanese).
I am skeptical about the claims made in TFA for several reasons. First, in the past, these sorts of claims have often turned out to be fabricated. Second, the only actual evidence is some photos of employees drying their clothes by hanging them up. News flash: 90% of the world dries clothes that way. Third, most labor centers in China, including Shenzhen, Shanghai, etc. are suffering from labor shortages, and if conditions at Pegatron were really bad, the employees could cross the street and get a better job in about 10 minutes.
Indeed. You can buy a 1TB USB thumb drive on Amazon. So all this data will fit on two of them. If all your data will fit in your pocket, with room left for both your cellphone and wallet, then it is not "large amounts of data".
Once thieves start wearing masks, the only use of facial recognition will be to track non-criminals
RTFA. The main use of this tech (so far) is to prevent people from getting additional drivers licenses under false names. You can't wear a mask while getting your DL photo. Another common use of facial recognition is to identify people that have warrants while they are in public places. Actually identifying a perp in the process of committing a crime is much less common, and is not what this system is designed to do.
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what is this obsession with making things thin, the space it saves is almost irrelevant and tactile feed back is a wonderful thing.
There are plenty of thicker laptops available, and at lower prices to boot. So if you don't care about thinness, then don't pay a premium to buy it. Problem solved.
In the past, many cities dealt with excessive demand for existing space by creating more space. The most obvious way to do this is to build taller buildings. We need to find a way to sideline the NIMBYs and BANANAs so that core cities can grow again, instead of sprawling into the suburbs.
Follow the money. This will fail for the same reason the Clipper Chip failed. It was/will be bad for American business and destroy American jobs. NOBODY outside America is going to buy tech with FBI backdoors. Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and nearly every other tech company, representing trillions in market cap, and billions in campaign contributions, are lined up against it. They can not only buy as many politicians as they need, but they can also use ad dollars to go direct to the people. Apple and Facebook are way better at manipulating public opinion than the FBI, and they have far greater resources.
The "adult conversation" the FBI says it's planning is a call for criminalization of any encryption that the FBI can't break. They want a back door and if you won't give it to them, they will put you in jail.
They already tried that 20 years ago, and failed. People today are way more aware of the issue, and more willing to push back. Secure encryption is already widespread and will soon be ubiquitous. The FBI is just throwing a temper tantrum because they didn't get what they wanted.
There were encryption wars in the 1990s?
Yes there was.
The government lost.
The people won.
Being that Uber is already a minimum wage job outside of the weekend bar hours
My sister drives for Uber and averages about $18/hr. That is way more than minimum wage, and is pretty good for a no skill job with flexible hours. Like most Uber drivers, she does it part time, and it is not her main source of income.
With assertions enabled, my most speed-critical code runs 2x or 3x slower.
That is odd. An assertion should just be the evaluation of a boolean expression. You should use a profiler to identify your hotspots and then figure out a way to move the assertion out of the loop. If you have 1000 assertions in your code, it is silly to disable 998 of them because the other 2 are causing performance issues. I have rarely seen assertions cause more than a 10% performance penalty, and typically even less than that.
I'll stick to proper error handling.
Assertions and exception handling are two completely different things. Exceptions are to identify and handle things like read errors that are expected to happen occasionally, and should be handled gracefully. Assertions are to detect things that should never happen, such as flaws in your program's logic.
I've not tried Lyft yet, I'm assuming they're on par with Uber price wise?
I use Lyft and avoid Uber. The prices are about the same, and the responsiveness is about the same. Even many of the drivers are the same, since many drivers do both. I use Lyft for two reasons: 1. They treat their drivers better, not necessarily with more money, but at least with more respect. 2. By using the smaller company I am helping to keep the market competitive.
Excellent point. As more tools like this appear from the aether, the value of developers will decline.
History says otherwise. Tools that make people more productive cause those people to be more valuable, not less. A developer that produces 10 apps per year is going to bring in more profit than a developer that produces one app per year, and can thus command a higher salary.
Rising productivity does not cause poverty. It causes prosperity. If your brain is too dysfunctional to realize that through logic, then just open your eyes and look at the world: Countries/regions with high productivity: America, Western Europe, East Asia. Countries with low productivity: Ethiopia, Niger, Pakistan, North Korea. Do you really think the latter group have benefited by avoiding "job killing" productivity improvements?
Urgh, no. Never, ever do this. assert() usually becomes a no-op when compiling stuff without debug flags, so binaries shipped to the field will mysteriously ignore errors in ways that can't be reproduced in a debugger.
Urgh, no. Never do this. Binaries shipped to the field should almost always have assertions left enabled. End users will find ways to trigger errors that you never thought of, and assertions will give you a clear message, usually very close to the cause, with file name and line number. The run time performance hit is usually negligible, and if it isn't then maybe, maybe, remove a few asserts from inner loop hotspots.
When I ship a product, the only thing I change is that in addition to printing to the console, an assertion failure also emails me the error log and stack trace (with the customer's consent). That is enormously valuable in nailing bugs.
Which is why ALL deductions are BS.
If you allow NO deductions, then you are just taxing revenue. So it is a sales tax.
Those other countries should have been taxing revenue, or payrolls, or dividends. "Profit" is something that can be easily manipulated or shifted to another jurisdiction. It is the dumbest thing to try and tax.
I ran my own business for many years, and it was amazingly easy to pay zero taxes on profits. I put a pool in my backyard, and declared it an "employee recreation facility" (I held a company BBQ there just to be sure I had all my bases covered) and wrote the whole thing off against profit.
C doesn't have a corporate sponsor.
Why is that a bad thing? Is Java better because Oracle owns it?
From TFS, "c's problems": c doesn't have "problems"; programmers who don't use c have problems.
That is actually what TIOBE measures. It counts Google searches. C programmers are smart enough that they don't need to search for answers on Google, or they use a better website, such as Stackoverflow. A high TIOBE index can mean a language is popular, or it can mean that language has dumb programmers.
Can you provide a specific example of someone in China jailed for "crossing someone" as a result of union activity?
Overall, American citizens are more than four times as likely to be incarcerated by their government as Chinese citizens.
One huge difference is that you can get thrown in jail for crossing someone.
I assume you are referring to the teachers arrested and jailed last month in Minnesota. But similar things have happened in China, so the situation is not as different as you think.
yet it's only Apple built products we hear about. Why?
People buy devices from Samsung, Microsoft, Dell, etc. for pragmatic reasons, and aren't much concerned about how they are made. Many people buy Apple products for the image and status they project. So people care more about the Apple brand being besmirched. If "Apple" was replaced by "Samsung" this story would have never been posted on Slashdot, because no one would care.
Perhaps both communism and free-market capitalism are only abstract ideals that can never be fully demonstrated in the real world?
Absolute zero Kelvin is also an abstract idea. But that doesn't mean Minnesota isn't colder than Florida. In the real world, there is no country that is completely capitalist, and none that are completely communist. But if you look at the top three capitalist countries based on the ease of starting and running a private business, they are Singapore, New Zealand, and Denmark. If you look at the three most communist, they are Cuba, North Korea, and Eritrea. Where would you rather live?
There are a variety of online articles that contradict your claim that independent labor unions are allowed in China
The ACFTU is a government run umbrella organization for labor unions in China. But unions do NOT have to join. Even for unions that do join, they have the right to independently declare strikes. The links you provide point out (correctly) that unions in China face big challenges. How is that different than America, where union membership has dramatically declined, and service workers are proving difficult to organize?
These factories tend to offer better jobs than any alternative available, and many workers come from the countryside, work for a few years to build up a nest egg, and then return home to their families. The transient nature of the workforce means they aren't willing to sacrifice now for future gains.
I am more inclined to believe the accusations of dissidents than the wealthy authoritarian party's propaganda.
These accusations do NOT come from Chinese dissidents. China Labor Watch is an American organization based in New York.
Are the factories building Google, Samsung & Microsoft devices so much better?
Pegatron is a contract manufacturer, and the Apple, Google, Samsung & Microsoft devices are all made in the same factories by the same workers.
With the amount of money that I spend on tech, I want it to be heavier and solid. I want it to dent the floor when I drop it.
Obvious solution: Buy a robust case for your laptop. Just go to Amazon, and there are dozens to choose from.
We already know what's coming...
No, we don't know. There are only rumors. If the rumors come from American media "experts" then they have no more credibility than random babbling. If the rumors come from China, where the new products are already being assembled, then they are likely correct. For this event, the rumors are mostly from the former, and those can be ignored.
Where independent unions are banned.
Independent unions are not banned in China. They were before 2008, but labor rights in China have changed a lot since then. Most importantly, unions now have the right to declare strikes against private companies (but not at SOEs). These strikes are generally tolerated by the government, especially at foreign owned companies. Pegatron is a foreign company (Taiwanese).
I am skeptical about the claims made in TFA for several reasons. First, in the past, these sorts of claims have often turned out to be fabricated. Second, the only actual evidence is some photos of employees drying their clothes by hanging them up. News flash: 90% of the world dries clothes that way. Third, most labor centers in China, including Shenzhen, Shanghai, etc. are suffering from labor shortages, and if conditions at Pegatron were really bad, the employees could cross the street and get a better job in about 10 minutes.
2 Terabytes is nothing.
Indeed. You can buy a 1TB USB thumb drive on Amazon. So all this data will fit on two of them. If all your data will fit in your pocket, with room left for both your cellphone and wallet, then it is not "large amounts of data".
Once thieves start wearing masks, the only use of facial recognition will be to track non-criminals
RTFA. The main use of this tech (so far) is to prevent people from getting additional drivers licenses under false names. You can't wear a mask while getting your DL photo. Another common use of facial recognition is to identify people that have warrants while they are in public places. Actually identifying a perp in the process of committing a crime is much less common, and is not what this system is designed to do.