Just remember: It's okay to be a monopoly, it's not okay to act monopolistically. Basically, you can be the only one on the market to sell widgets, but if you act to prevent another company from entering the widget market you are breaking the law.
It's also good to remember that C was not designed for general application writing; it was designed to write low-level controllers and operating systems and to be a portable assembly language. This is what most people forget when they laud or lament C.
What I see as the most problematic aspect of C is the refusal of the ISO committee from keeping up with hardware changes. We still, as you have noted, do not have standardized SIMD primitives or access to common SIMD operations (fuse-multiply-add, for example). They finally added the __thread (a valid hardware/OS construct) attribute but only years after all the compilers had it and developers were using it. Unfortunately that same committee also decided to add a threading model to C on which Poul-Henning Kamp wrote a scathing report.
So to wrap up, remember the purpose of C and keep it doing that purpose.
Back in the day there was a product from VentureCom that added a real-time HAL to Windows NT. It used a green screen of death to differentiate between crashes due to Windows and those due to RTX.
Saccromyces pastorianus (aka "effing lager yeast") IS a bottom-fermenting yeast. It was discovered by brewers who put their casks of beer in cold mountain caves, in the days before refrigeration.
Learn something on the subject, beer-snob wannabe.
I think Rupert Giles in Buffy the Vampire Slayer said it best when confronted about books vs. computers:
Jenny Calendar: Honestly, what is it about [computers] that bothers you so much?
Giles: The smell.
Jenny Calendar: Computers don't smell, Rupert.
Giles: I know. Smell is the most powerful trigger to the memory there is. A certain flower, or a-a whiff of smoke can bring up experiences long forgotten. Books smell musty and-and-and rich. The knowledge gained from a computer is a - it, uh, it has no-no texture, no-no context. It's-it's there and then it's gone. If it's to last, then-then the getting of knowledge should be, uh, tangible, it should be, um, smelly.
Chewing the manioc doesn't trigger fermentation; the saliva and maceration triggers the conversion of starches into sugars. It is the yeast (and bacteria) in the environment (especially the skin of the vegetable) which ferments the resulting sugars into alcohol.
..without the consent or knowledge of the consumer.
Why should it be illegal for an ISP to provide a network in which non-real time transfers (eg. streaming video, VOIP) are not allowed and optimizes its network for offline or bulk transfers?
General rule of thumb for any career path: Figure out what math you need for that career and go one step further.
Your career needs only algebra? Take Pre-calc.
Your career needs only single-variable calc? Take multivariable-calc.
The experience you'll get from working with what is required in a grander scheme will help you to appreciate what you are doing and give you greater insight of how to go from point A to point C without necessarily going through point B. For the work that I do discrete math was the maximum of what I needed but taking that course in fractal analysis has been crucial in shaping the way I vew problems.
A thread-local variable resolves to a single instruction on x86 and 3 instructions each on ARM and PPC. Using the pthread thread-specific API requires a function call (at the minimum, potentially an OS call at worst case) and all save/restore instructions that this implies. In an application that is vulnerable to performance issues and one has to make multiple references to function-global, thread-specific variables then using pthread thread-specific data is murder on timing characteristics. Your general Windows/Linux/MacOS application may not need this level of performance but an embedded, real-time app requires this level of detail.
The Iranian government has outlawed independent thought. All citizens will be required to only think the phrase, "There is only one god and his prophet is Muhammed," repeatedly during the day.
I agree that biking to work is a great way to wake up in the morning and the endorphins and adrenalin from riding home is a great stress reliever in the evening (you can also use it as an excuse if you don't want to stay late in the day for a meeting if you don't want to drive home in the dark).
Additionally I've started doing push-ups every hour on the hour that I'm at work; it's a good complement to the bike riding (works your upper body), it gets you off your butt for a minute or two and exercises the core muscles.
The real difference is that in a stand-in/sit-in the protestors aren't anonymous (pun not intended). It is far more effective if the group of people protesting have faces that the public can identify with. Otherwise the protestors are just a bunch of masked hooligans.
One of these days I want to get a bunch of my friends together and start printing our MP3s to see how long it will take all the various *IAAs around the world to start levying a tax on printer paper.
My rule of thum for science and math is that you should learn at least one step further than what you absolutely need. The extra skills gained makes what you are doing seem less like magic and makes you feel less like just a cog in a machine.
As to the complaints about math being hard, students (and the public in general) needs to learn that life is hard and you won't always have someone there to hold your hand so suck it up and dealt with it.
And if instead the patent application had used 'chocolate donuts' as their example instead of 'comic books' the fact that this is a non-story would not change.
While I was watching the CLU scenes I felt that the slight un-realism to be purposeful. To me the slight rubberiness put CLU in the "uncanny valley" of visual effects where the almost-but-not-quite perfection puts us off, thereby making a statement about man trying to achieve perfection. Maybe I read to much into it but I appreciated CLU's inherent imperfection in the search for perfection.
For comparison I looked up what Encyclopedia Britannica charges for a year-long subscription and they ask for $103.48 US. Just in case anyone wants a comparison.
There is another effect that needs to be considered: the clean-room effect.
Consider someone working on a clean-room implementation of software. That person must be disallowed from viewing or experiencing the source code to a competing product. By viewing that code the developer may become in violation of copyright and/or patents that the original software contains. This is a serious concern in the software/hardware industry and shouldn't be dismissed lightly. Allowing the analysts to access the leaked data to may taint their conclusions when examining data.
So, to carry on with the barn door analogy, this is like closing the barn door after the horses have run away so your veterinarians and trainers can't go over to the neighbouring farm and see how the other farmer is training his thoroughbred racehorses.
But the difference is that the Pentagon Papers was the culmination of a study that was done by the military. What WikiLeaks released is raw data with no investigation, no analysis and no context. We aren't seeing how one cable was rejected because the sender was a loon or another needs to be taken in context of some other document. This is why comparing the Pentagon Papers to the diplomatic papers is laughable at best.
Actually there are quite a few errors. At no time did the "journalist" have concrete confirmation that the youth has actually been banned, only his assertion that that was the case. Without followup, fact-checked information I am not going to expend any emotional response on this story.
Even by Slashdot's standards this story should not have been posted.
Instead of just making anything less than 'C' a failing grade, why don't we just completely redefine what the grades mean? For example:
* F - the student has failed to demonstrate that they have the minimum knowledge taught in the course
* C - the student has demonstrated that they have the minimum knowledge taught in the course
* B - the student has demonstrated either exemplary knowledge (eg. >95%) of the course or minimal knowledge and have applied that knowledge outside of class (eg. a non-class assigned project)
* A - the student has both demonstrated exemplary knowledge of the material covered in class and applied that knowledge outside of class
I'd be more impressed with grades if the above were used since I've run across more than a few people that got 'A's in college that were complete idiots when it came to doing real work.
Slashdot Mirror
Just remember: It's okay to be a monopoly, it's not okay to act monopolistically. Basically, you can be the only one on the market to sell widgets, but if you act to prevent another company from entering the widget market you are breaking the law.
Or at least, that's how I understand it.
It's also good to remember that C was not designed for general application writing; it was designed to write low-level controllers and operating systems and to be a portable assembly language. This is what most people forget when they laud or lament C.
What I see as the most problematic aspect of C is the refusal of the ISO committee from keeping up with hardware changes. We still, as you have noted, do not have standardized SIMD primitives or access to common SIMD operations (fuse-multiply-add, for example). They finally added the __thread (a valid hardware/OS construct) attribute but only years after all the compilers had it and developers were using it. Unfortunately that same committee also decided to add a threading model to C on which Poul-Henning Kamp wrote a scathing report.
So to wrap up, remember the purpose of C and keep it doing that purpose.
Back in the day there was a product from VentureCom that added a real-time HAL to Windows NT. It used a green screen of death to differentiate between crashes due to Windows and those due to RTX.
My interest is piqued.
Saccromyces pastorianus (aka "effing lager yeast") IS a bottom-fermenting yeast. It was discovered by brewers who put their casks of beer in cold mountain caves, in the days before refrigeration.
Learn something on the subject, beer-snob wannabe.
I think Rupert Giles in Buffy the Vampire Slayer said it best when confronted about books vs. computers:
Jenny Calendar: Honestly, what is it about [computers] that bothers you so much?
Giles: The smell.
Jenny Calendar: Computers don't smell, Rupert.
Giles: I know. Smell is the most powerful trigger to the memory there is. A certain flower, or a-a whiff of smoke can bring up experiences long forgotten. Books smell musty and-and-and rich. The knowledge gained from a computer is a - it, uh, it has no-no texture, no-no context. It's-it's there and then it's gone. If it's to last, then-then the getting of knowledge should be, uh, tangible, it should be, um, smelly.
Chewing the manioc doesn't trigger fermentation; the saliva and maceration triggers the conversion of starches into sugars. It is the yeast (and bacteria) in the environment (especially the skin of the vegetable) which ferments the resulting sugars into alcohol.
..without the consent or knowledge of the consumer.
Why should it be illegal for an ISP to provide a network in which non-real time transfers (eg. streaming video, VOIP) are not allowed and optimizes its network for offline or bulk transfers?
General rule of thumb for any career path: Figure out what math you need for that career and go one step further.
Your career needs only algebra? Take Pre-calc.
Your career needs only single-variable calc? Take multivariable-calc.
The experience you'll get from working with what is required in a grander scheme will help you to appreciate what you are doing and give you greater insight of how to go from point A to point C without necessarily going through point B. For the work that I do discrete math was the maximum of what I needed but taking that course in fractal analysis has been crucial in shaping the way I vew problems.
A thread-local variable resolves to a single instruction on x86 and 3 instructions each on ARM and PPC. Using the pthread thread-specific API requires a function call (at the minimum, potentially an OS call at worst case) and all save/restore instructions that this implies. In an application that is vulnerable to performance issues and one has to make multiple references to function-global, thread-specific variables then using pthread thread-specific data is murder on timing characteristics. Your general Windows/Linux/MacOS application may not need this level of performance but an embedded, real-time app requires this level of detail.
The Iranian government has outlawed independent thought. All citizens will be required to only think the phrase, "There is only one god and his prophet is Muhammed," repeatedly during the day.
I agree that biking to work is a great way to wake up in the morning and the endorphins and adrenalin from riding home is a great stress reliever in the evening (you can also use it as an excuse if you don't want to stay late in the day for a meeting if you don't want to drive home in the dark).
Additionally I've started doing push-ups every hour on the hour that I'm at work; it's a good complement to the bike riding (works your upper body), it gets you off your butt for a minute or two and exercises the core muscles.
The real difference is that in a stand-in/sit-in the protestors aren't anonymous (pun not intended). It is far more effective if the group of people protesting have faces that the public can identify with. Otherwise the protestors are just a bunch of masked hooligans.
One of these days I want to get a bunch of my friends together and start printing our MP3s to see how long it will take all the various *IAAs around the world to start levying a tax on printer paper.
Who's with me?
I think this takes the concept of "heavy metal" music a little too far, don't you think?
My rule of thum for science and math is that you should learn at least one step further than what you absolutely need. The extra skills gained makes what you are doing seem less like magic and makes you feel less like just a cog in a machine.
As to the complaints about math being hard, students (and the public in general) needs to learn that life is hard and you won't always have someone there to hold your hand so suck it up and dealt with it.
And if instead the patent application had used 'chocolate donuts' as their example instead of 'comic books' the fact that this is a non-story would not change.
Yes, but when will they release pictures of the sun in Imax?
While I was watching the CLU scenes I felt that the slight un-realism to be purposeful. To me the slight rubberiness put CLU in the "uncanny valley" of visual effects where the almost-but-not-quite perfection puts us off, thereby making a statement about man trying to achieve perfection. Maybe I read to much into it but I appreciated CLU's inherent imperfection in the search for perfection.
For comparison I looked up what Encyclopedia Britannica charges for a year-long subscription and they ask for $103.48 US. Just in case anyone wants a comparison.
There is another effect that needs to be considered: the clean-room effect.
Consider someone working on a clean-room implementation of software. That person must be disallowed from viewing or experiencing the source code to a competing product. By viewing that code the developer may become in violation of copyright and/or patents that the original software contains. This is a serious concern in the software/hardware industry and shouldn't be dismissed lightly. Allowing the analysts to access the leaked data to may taint their conclusions when examining data.
So, to carry on with the barn door analogy, this is like closing the barn door after the horses have run away so your veterinarians and trainers can't go over to the neighbouring farm and see how the other farmer is training his thoroughbred racehorses.
But the difference is that the Pentagon Papers was the culmination of a study that was done by the military. What WikiLeaks released is raw data with no investigation, no analysis and no context. We aren't seeing how one cable was rejected because the sender was a loon or another needs to be taken in context of some other document. This is why comparing the Pentagon Papers to the diplomatic papers is laughable at best.
Great, now we have to worry about global warming on Mars!
Actually there are quite a few errors. At no time did the "journalist" have concrete confirmation that the youth has actually been banned, only his assertion that that was the case. Without followup, fact-checked information I am not going to expend any emotional response on this story.
Even by Slashdot's standards this story should not have been posted.
Instead of just making anything less than 'C' a failing grade, why don't we just completely redefine what the grades mean? For example:
* F - the student has failed to demonstrate that they have the minimum knowledge taught in the course
* C - the student has demonstrated that they have the minimum knowledge taught in the course
* B - the student has demonstrated either exemplary knowledge (eg. >95%) of the course or minimal knowledge and have applied that knowledge outside of class (eg. a non-class assigned project)
* A - the student has both demonstrated exemplary knowledge of the material covered in class and applied that knowledge outside of class
I'd be more impressed with grades if the above were used since I've run across more than a few people that got 'A's in college that were complete idiots when it came to doing real work.