Some software just costs that much. Hell, a lot of software used by businesses cost much more.
When a company needs a certain functionality that just plain doesn't exist anywhere else, it has to be paid for somehow. I'm not sure you have a good understanding of how much time is actually put into developing software--an engineer who gets paid $80k/year costs the company about $160k/year. If that engineer works on a problem for 3 lousy weeks, that software cost $10,000. Just to develop. That's $0.00 profit for the company.
Some special functionality is very easy. Huge changes from a user perspective can be made in minutes with just a couple lines of code. On the other hand, stuff that seems like it should take no time at all can require an entire re-architecture of a project and take years. Now, your first instinct if you're not a software developer, or a new one, will be to say "if it was made right it wouldn't require re-architecture", but that's just not true in a lot of cases. The only absolutely flexible architecture is an unwritten program, every line of code is a constraint.
Microsoft Office costs so little because it's used by millions of people, but if only 25 developers worked on it (a lot more did) for only 5 years (it's been around for twice that long, and Microsoft doesn't like to throw out code), and they had no managers (they had lots), no testers (there were lots), and no corporate scaffolding (more than you can probably imagine), there are more than a hundred years of human effort in that piece of software. When you look at it, does it look like the culmination of hundreds of years of effort? Not intuitively, not even to me, and I have a very good idea of how hard it was. Specialized software costs a lot. It might sound silly to you, but that's just because you are--don't take this the wrong way I'm not trying to be insulting, it's just the word that best fits--ignorant of the actual costs.
How about a super-refrigerated none-more-black panel out on a long stick facing the enemy? Sure, the power it would take would generate even more heat to dump out the other side, but there's very little to scatter the radiation in space, so as long as that panel is between the enemy and a nearly straight line to all of your panels, you're invisible.
You make fair points given the state of, well, every OS. I think your way is the best alternative short of sinking tons of development time into trying to do something the OS doesn't natively support. I certainly appreciate the honest approach.
But! The OSes should be providing a simple mechanism to delay library loading until after the app has gotten a chance to become responsive. To do things the "right" way, you'd currently have to muck around with dynamic library loading, error handling around the dynamic library loading, and all the nasty timing issues that go along with it.
What should happen is that a library isn't actually loaded until one of its functions is called, each library should be small enough to load in milliseconds, and a way to force immediate loading should be provided. Apple, in developing an entirely new framework and API, had a chance to do that and make it a core part of the experience, and threw it away in favor of encouraging sales-demo-friendly illusions.
Splash screens are a nearly-mandatory part of any iOS app. The thing is, you're supposed to supply a bitmap of the unchanging parts of the screen to display while the actual app is loading. I'm annoyed every time I open iBooks or Mint. It makes no sense, it's just absolutely useless. Since it's a static picture it adds no more information than a splash screen would, so it's not even like it gives you something to process while you're waiting for the app to become responsive--the only purpose is to fool people into thinking it's fast, but they'll only be fooled until they're familiar enough with the initial static image that they've already planned their next move. The first time they try to "buffer" that next move, they'll realize just how worthless the image is.
Show me something worthwhile, like a progress bar, so I can estimate how long I have to wait. Or, better yet, don't load every damn thing when you start up. Load up the UI, whose libraries are typically loaded into the OS already, and then spawn a low-priority thread to do all that other loading in the background.
It's really stupid that we're locked into splash screens now. Because lazy-loading wasn't added at the very beginning of a project, when it would be easy, it's now practically impossible to switch over to it due to all the subtle timing issues that are essentially hard-coded into the apps. If lazy-loading had been the default, and it wasn't fast enough at any point, the background cache method would be easy to implement. Oh well, just makes it easier for my own projects to stand out.
Laptops have thermal issues because every laptop manufacturer does a terrible job of applying thermal paste. Go google it, this isn't debatable, it's a fact. Just tonight, coincidentally, I had a friend complaining that his laptop was overheating. It was stable for 5-10 minutes. I cracked it open, cleaned the old gobs of paste off, put on a nice thin layer, boom, cool as a cucumber, ran 8 hours straight.
The cooling system isn't inadequate, it's put together wrong. If you look at the specs, it's specced to handle the processor's thermal output just fine, but because of its incredibly poor manufacturing process, it performs far under spec. The very definition of defective.
However, none of that was the original argument, let's not move the goalposts here. The original argument was that a heavy ray-tracing load isn't an appropriate load for consumer-grade CPUs. Bullshit.
There was also an implication that ray-tracing is somehow different enough from compiling that rock-solid stability from a long-running compile is to be expected. Also bullshit. And that you should expect ray-tracing to crash unless you spend thousands on a Xeon or something. Yet. More. Bullshit. That's not the current state of CPUs, and unless idiots keep saying that's the way it should be, it won't ever be the case. Stop begging for worse value!
If you don't like it, you can just put any CPU you pay less than $600 for in the microwave for 3 seconds and use whatever comes out. Let the rest of us actually get what appears in the spec.
What? Why? That's crazy, I've run compiles for days (yes, I'm still a Gentoo user) on 10-year-old, crappy, about-to-be-tossed-in-the-trash, filled with dust, consumer hardware more times than I can count. I'm currently running a compile on my new(ish) consumer-grade CPU under a virtual machine, while typing this response, that'll be going for hours on end, and if anything went wrong because of the CPU I'd consider it a broken CPU.
Thank god more people don't think the way you do, if they did we'd already be buying "unlimited" CPUs. Your viewpoint is an asinine one that is just begging to be charged more for no reason other than you've outright told them they can get away with it.
Like jc42 said, I was mostly playing it up to be funny. I know I didn't make a solid argument; I wasn't trying to.
That said, your your point about keyboards being the best is explicitly circular logic, which among its other flaws is what led me to "target" your post. You should lose the persecution complex, and investigate the poor arguments you've made. Communication is much more satisfying when you can do it effectively, and while a little ethos and pathos goes a long way when it surrounds a solid logos, they go even further in the other direction when paired with a flawed argument. For example, your current post--you're appealing to the idea that you're being "picked on" to support your fundamentally weak post, which just makes it (and you) look worse. When you find yourself in such a losing situation, the best thing is a tactical withdrawal.
Apply this lesson to real life. It won't make you hate people any less, but it will get you your way more often.
Huh. I enjoyed the splitting up. I felt it gave characters who normally wouldn't be investigated their own chance to shine in a way that they just can't when they're always playing second fiddle to the godlike protagonist.
Having read the thing cover-to-cover at least three times, I'm probably not the most objective judge about how hard the plotlines are to follow, but I don't remember ever having a problem except when I took a year or two break between books. It's definitely not something you can pick up again when a new book comes out without a refresher.
Read The Way of Kings. I love me some WoT, but I think The Stormlight Archives (TWoK series name) has the potential to be even better. And judging from his latest novel, Brandon Sanderson's writing made a huge jump in quality since he started on WoT.
I have to disagree, I specifically liked the series because it's as different from LotR as you can get while still being an epic fantasy.
Count the number of times the words "wizard" or "magic" appear in the books. Then go hunt down the amount of terrible, terrible, terrible songs and poetry. Jordan purposefully avoided the hyper-nerd stuff, and actually gave us a story with interesting, capable main characters, instead of a story where the "heroes" essentially stumble their way to victory because they're so utterly useless.
I know the "ordinary people extraordinary things" is appealing to some people, and art is always a subjective thing, so please don't take it as if I'm literally saying the books are awful--I know they're probably great (except for the poetry, that stuff was flat-out terrible and the subjective rule of art be damned), I just use hyperbole to make my points and personally didn't like them.
And if you didn't like LotR the same as me, you might like WoT.
Using a GUI necessitates giving up the keyboard. Because of shadows.
The keyboard is the best because the keyboard is the best.
You can't wait for the old people to die because, once they're all dead and there are no more old people, CLIs will come back into vogue.
The skill level required for texting while driving is roughly equivalent to the skill level to comfortably use a CLI.
You don't know much about Ubuntu's Head-Up Display, but it heralds "the return of the keyboard", because, and this is pure conjecture but I imagine it must be your line of reasoning because it's the only thing that... makes sense... 2012 is the year of Linux on the desktop.
Will the tragedies of the amphetamine shortage never end?
Haha! I don't care! In fact, I love the idea that they might get fucked out of all the time and money they spent. I hope their "invention" ends up saving the world and at the same time Monsanto is reviled throughout history. There is absolutely, positively nothing negative that could happen to that company that I wouldn't love. Their rank-and-file employees, I feel for, and the worst they deserve is a brief period of unemployment. Their executives, I'd like to see impoverished, but nothing worse for the ones who were merely greedy. The ones who've broken the law can be individually prosecuted. The company itself, as an entity incapable of suffering? There is no limit whatsoever to the misfortune I wish on it. Complete and utter annihilation is the only thing that would make me happy.
You seem to think I care about what's fair to a corporation. Hah! That's rich! They can start getting fair when they start giving fair.
If only brainwashing citizens into being corporate shills were patentable.
I don't give a flying fuck how "legal" what they're doing is, it's wrong. The farmers' unethical labor and business practices is a completely separate issue, and your implication that they somehow deserve Monsanto's lawyer brigade for anything short of literally breaking into Monsanto granaries and stealing seed is ridiculous, as in you deserve to be ridiculed for holding such a stupid belief. Allowing them to be sued for bullshit because they did something else wrong is the very antithesis of justice.
While you're cheering your masters, those of us with a brain in our heads will be laughing them off at every struggle Monsanto and any other company that tries to patent life faces.
Until their cyborg police come bashing in our doors, anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
The real lesson is, never bang a waitress without a rubber.
According to TFA its gravity is 6.5 times Earth's.
Don't forget un-deletable supercookies!
Some software just costs that much. Hell, a lot of software used by businesses cost much more.
When a company needs a certain functionality that just plain doesn't exist anywhere else, it has to be paid for somehow. I'm not sure you have a good understanding of how much time is actually put into developing software--an engineer who gets paid $80k/year costs the company about $160k/year. If that engineer works on a problem for 3 lousy weeks, that software cost $10,000. Just to develop. That's $0.00 profit for the company.
Some special functionality is very easy. Huge changes from a user perspective can be made in minutes with just a couple lines of code. On the other hand, stuff that seems like it should take no time at all can require an entire re-architecture of a project and take years. Now, your first instinct if you're not a software developer, or a new one, will be to say "if it was made right it wouldn't require re-architecture", but that's just not true in a lot of cases. The only absolutely flexible architecture is an unwritten program, every line of code is a constraint.
Microsoft Office costs so little because it's used by millions of people, but if only 25 developers worked on it (a lot more did) for only 5 years (it's been around for twice that long, and Microsoft doesn't like to throw out code), and they had no managers (they had lots), no testers (there were lots), and no corporate scaffolding (more than you can probably imagine), there are more than a hundred years of human effort in that piece of software. When you look at it, does it look like the culmination of hundreds of years of effort? Not intuitively, not even to me, and I have a very good idea of how hard it was. Specialized software costs a lot. It might sound silly to you, but that's just because you are--don't take this the wrong way I'm not trying to be insulting, it's just the word that best fits--ignorant of the actual costs.
How about a super-refrigerated none-more-black panel out on a long stick facing the enemy? Sure, the power it would take would generate even more heat to dump out the other side, but there's very little to scatter the radiation in space, so as long as that panel is between the enemy and a nearly straight line to all of your panels, you're invisible.
Is it as bad as the character-defining rape that occurs at the beginning of The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant?
You make fair points given the state of, well, every OS. I think your way is the best alternative short of sinking tons of development time into trying to do something the OS doesn't natively support. I certainly appreciate the honest approach.
But! The OSes should be providing a simple mechanism to delay library loading until after the app has gotten a chance to become responsive. To do things the "right" way, you'd currently have to muck around with dynamic library loading, error handling around the dynamic library loading, and all the nasty timing issues that go along with it.
What should happen is that a library isn't actually loaded until one of its functions is called, each library should be small enough to load in milliseconds, and a way to force immediate loading should be provided. Apple, in developing an entirely new framework and API, had a chance to do that and make it a core part of the experience, and threw it away in favor of encouraging sales-demo-friendly illusions.
Splash screens are a nearly-mandatory part of any iOS app. The thing is, you're supposed to supply a bitmap of the unchanging parts of the screen to display while the actual app is loading. I'm annoyed every time I open iBooks or Mint. It makes no sense, it's just absolutely useless. Since it's a static picture it adds no more information than a splash screen would, so it's not even like it gives you something to process while you're waiting for the app to become responsive--the only purpose is to fool people into thinking it's fast, but they'll only be fooled until they're familiar enough with the initial static image that they've already planned their next move. The first time they try to "buffer" that next move, they'll realize just how worthless the image is.
Show me something worthwhile, like a progress bar, so I can estimate how long I have to wait. Or, better yet, don't load every damn thing when you start up. Load up the UI, whose libraries are typically loaded into the OS already, and then spawn a low-priority thread to do all that other loading in the background.
It's really stupid that we're locked into splash screens now. Because lazy-loading wasn't added at the very beginning of a project, when it would be easy, it's now practically impossible to switch over to it due to all the subtle timing issues that are essentially hard-coded into the apps. If lazy-loading had been the default, and it wasn't fast enough at any point, the background cache method would be easy to implement. Oh well, just makes it easier for my own projects to stand out.
I expect you'll want to take the piss out of our food next . . .
Guess who's never drinking tea again. Please don't tell us what bangers and mash is made from.
Approximately 50,000–100,000 people die in America
WHICH America? North or South?
--
"You can always count on Americans to do the right thing - after they've tried everything else." - W. Churchill
WHICH America? North or South?
Laptops have thermal issues because every laptop manufacturer does a terrible job of applying thermal paste. Go google it, this isn't debatable, it's a fact. Just tonight, coincidentally, I had a friend complaining that his laptop was overheating. It was stable for 5-10 minutes. I cracked it open, cleaned the old gobs of paste off, put on a nice thin layer, boom, cool as a cucumber, ran 8 hours straight.
The cooling system isn't inadequate, it's put together wrong. If you look at the specs, it's specced to handle the processor's thermal output just fine, but because of its incredibly poor manufacturing process, it performs far under spec. The very definition of defective.
However, none of that was the original argument, let's not move the goalposts here. The original argument was that a heavy ray-tracing load isn't an appropriate load for consumer-grade CPUs. Bullshit.
There was also an implication that ray-tracing is somehow different enough from compiling that rock-solid stability from a long-running compile is to be expected. Also bullshit. And that you should expect ray-tracing to crash unless you spend thousands on a Xeon or something. Yet. More. Bullshit. That's not the current state of CPUs, and unless idiots keep saying that's the way it should be, it won't ever be the case. Stop begging for worse value!
If you don't like it, you can just put any CPU you pay less than $600 for in the microwave for 3 seconds and use whatever comes out. Let the rest of us actually get what appears in the spec.
What? Why? That's crazy, I've run compiles for days (yes, I'm still a Gentoo user) on 10-year-old, crappy, about-to-be-tossed-in-the-trash, filled with dust, consumer hardware more times than I can count. I'm currently running a compile on my new(ish) consumer-grade CPU under a virtual machine, while typing this response, that'll be going for hours on end, and if anything went wrong because of the CPU I'd consider it a broken CPU.
Thank god more people don't think the way you do, if they did we'd already be buying "unlimited" CPUs. Your viewpoint is an asinine one that is just begging to be charged more for no reason other than you've outright told them they can get away with it.
*nods*
Have fun now, off ya go!
Huh. I share the same opinion on Sanderson, books 9 & 10 of WoT, Weiss, Hickman, and Dragonlance. Wait. Did I write this post?
Like jc42 said, I was mostly playing it up to be funny. I know I didn't make a solid argument; I wasn't trying to.
That said, your your point about keyboards being the best is explicitly circular logic, which among its other flaws is what led me to "target" your post. You should lose the persecution complex, and investigate the poor arguments you've made. Communication is much more satisfying when you can do it effectively, and while a little ethos and pathos goes a long way when it surrounds a solid logos, they go even further in the other direction when paired with a flawed argument. For example, your current post--you're appealing to the idea that you're being "picked on" to support your fundamentally weak post, which just makes it (and you) look worse. When you find yourself in such a losing situation, the best thing is a tactical withdrawal.
Apply this lesson to real life. It won't make you hate people any less, but it will get you your way more often.
Huh. I enjoyed the splitting up. I felt it gave characters who normally wouldn't be investigated their own chance to shine in a way that they just can't when they're always playing second fiddle to the godlike protagonist.
Having read the thing cover-to-cover at least three times, I'm probably not the most objective judge about how hard the plotlines are to follow, but I don't remember ever having a problem except when I took a year or two break between books. It's definitely not something you can pick up again when a new book comes out without a refresher.
Last I heard he was planning on hitting book 5 of Stormlight before starting the "real" second Mistborn trilogy. There might be other novellas though.
After the editing job on the last two books, I'm personally glad for this extra time. It's been 23 years. I can wait another 6 months.
Read The Way of Kings. I love me some WoT, but I think The Stormlight Archives (TWoK series name) has the potential to be even better. And judging from his latest novel, Brandon Sanderson's writing made a huge jump in quality since he started on WoT.
GRRM is great if you love reading about all the various forms rape. Underage rape, gang rape, sibling rape, it's all there.
I have to disagree, I specifically liked the series because it's as different from LotR as you can get while still being an epic fantasy.
Count the number of times the words "wizard" or "magic" appear in the books. Then go hunt down the amount of terrible, terrible, terrible songs and poetry. Jordan purposefully avoided the hyper-nerd stuff, and actually gave us a story with interesting, capable main characters, instead of a story where the "heroes" essentially stumble their way to victory because they're so utterly useless.
I know the "ordinary people extraordinary things" is appealing to some people, and art is always a subjective thing, so please don't take it as if I'm literally saying the books are awful--I know they're probably great (except for the poetry, that stuff was flat-out terrible and the subjective rule of art be damned), I just use hyperbole to make my points and personally didn't like them.
And if you didn't like LotR the same as me, you might like WoT.
Let's sum up this post:
Will the tragedies of the amphetamine shortage never end?
Haha! I don't care! In fact, I love the idea that they might get fucked out of all the time and money they spent. I hope their "invention" ends up saving the world and at the same time Monsanto is reviled throughout history. There is absolutely, positively nothing negative that could happen to that company that I wouldn't love. Their rank-and-file employees, I feel for, and the worst they deserve is a brief period of unemployment. Their executives, I'd like to see impoverished, but nothing worse for the ones who were merely greedy. The ones who've broken the law can be individually prosecuted. The company itself, as an entity incapable of suffering? There is no limit whatsoever to the misfortune I wish on it. Complete and utter annihilation is the only thing that would make me happy.
You seem to think I care about what's fair to a corporation. Hah! That's rich! They can start getting fair when they start giving fair.
This will happen with every customer. Use them responsibly or lose them permanently.
If only brainwashing citizens into being corporate shills were patentable.
I don't give a flying fuck how "legal" what they're doing is, it's wrong. The farmers' unethical labor and business practices is a completely separate issue, and your implication that they somehow deserve Monsanto's lawyer brigade for anything short of literally breaking into Monsanto granaries and stealing seed is ridiculous, as in you deserve to be ridiculed for holding such a stupid belief. Allowing them to be sued for bullshit because they did something else wrong is the very antithesis of justice.
While you're cheering your masters, those of us with a brain in our heads will be laughing them off at every struggle Monsanto and any other company that tries to patent life faces.
Until their cyborg police come bashing in our doors, anyway.