There are lots of things in C that make it very difficult to get good performance when you go beyond about 16 threads (e.g. no differentiation between thread-private and shared data, no immutable-after-creation data types) but which were not a problem for single-threaded performance.
So, extend C(++) with libraries that perform those functions, or spend 3 months "researching available languages" to try to understand which ones do what you want, or an extra 6 months "creating a language" that essentially does the same thing you could accomplish with good set of library functions.
And as far as you don't understand what a buffer overflow is (and a load of other things), your employer shouldn't allow you to code.
I code mostly in C/C++, I know full well what a buffer overflow is, that doesn't mean that I don't appreciate libraries (tantamount to languages, in my opinion), that do garbage collection, protect me from buffer overflows and otherwise take care of the obvious stuff without effort on my part.
Just because any idiot can write simple code with a bit of training doesn't mean any idiot SHOULD be writing code. Any idiot could probably learn to fly a plane but I wouldn't want them at the controls of a 747 I'm in.
Absolutely, but, also recognize that most code written and deployed more closely resembles toy RC cars than 747s in terms of life safety, capital investment, and potential for collateral damage. The hobby landscape provides a rich training and development ground that ultimately leads to better products at the serious end of the scale.
Hiring a high-school dropout script kiddie to work on a "big time serious system" would be an instant red-flag. What we also need to recognize is that some PhDs with "coding experience" are just as ignorant of best practices and as dangerous to a project as the script kiddie, potentially moreso if you don't give them adequate oversight and review.
Note that programming language is totally absent in the discussion of safety above, you could attempt to throw it in there, but it's not really a significant component of safety compared to the people using the language, and the processes they use to ensure safety.
None of that much matters having an itor on something like 5 does not really alter the design of my program it's just little shorter to type than for I=0 to 5; dosomething(I); endfor.
None of this bad as developer I rather like it, but I agree with the author it's not really innovative
I disagree, something like foreach( item, list ) {... } is an innovation over for( int i = 0 ; i list.size() ; i++ ) { item = list[i];... }, it is recognizing the common task and expressing it in a more convenient, compact, intuitive, and less error prone form, same as the evolution of pronouns and other shortenings in natural language.
Design-by-committee languages tend to feel like they've taken a blind guess at what problems need to be solved without consulting the people experiencing those problems.
It's not a blind guess, it's an informed guess by committee consensus, which is worse.
"We don't have time to discuss this in committee,sweetheart.
On at least two projects (each being more than 50 man years of design and coding effort) it was worth devising a new language with a syntax suited to the problem and writing the compiler.
Hmmmph.... I guess that's what I've been doing with.XML (and, things very much like.XML before it was named as such) all these years.
'one striking commonality in all modern programming languages, especially the popular ones, is how little innovation there is in them!' and 'We require scientific evidence for the claimed value of experimental drugs. Should we require scientific evidence for the value of experimental software?' Is she right?
Absolutely on point #1 - what dope smoking communist closet did she just stagger out of to come up with point #2? If it works and you like it, use it.
Of course, of the languages listed (PHP, JavaScript, Python, Ruby), I've never done anything "real" in any of them (meaning, sustained development & support > 6 man months) though JavaScript is trying to weasel its way into my Qt world via Quick....
Even if this asteroid hits, it is not likely to hit a populated area. The money spent on trying to deflect it would likely save more lives on average if spent on medicine, water purification, food distribution, or some such thing.
The only real reason to try to deflect this asteroid is to practice for a larger one, but techniques that work on small asteroids like this one won't necessarily work on large ones.
If the calculated target is the North Atlantic Ocean, it'll be cheaper to deflect it than to reconstruct the Tsunami damaged New England coastal areas.
by then i will be 81 years old if i am still alive so it wont make any difference to me, maybe my children or grandchildren will be concerned about it
Does your post imply that you don't care about what happens to your children or grandchildren?
I appreciate several of the things my grandparents and their generation did for me, specifically: fighting World War II, the TVA electric dam construction projects, and the interstate highway system. Moving this asteroid to a safe orbit (if necessary) is a relatively smaller task by comparison.
I'll take those odds. I bet my life savings we survive.
I'll be 73 when the payout date comes, I'd rather have use of my life savings between now and then, instead of 100x as much money when I'm too old and feeble to enjoy it properly.
It's (practically) slavery all over again. Is it really much better to run someone for $1/hr. / 12 hours a day compared to having them as actual slaves?
Ummm, yes, the $1/hr is optional, you only take it if it's better than your other alternatives. Slaves are not allowed to pursue other alternatives.
Sorry to weigh in with an insensitive elitist perspective, but this 1/10th of a McJob salary is injecting money into an economy that wouldn't have it otherwise. If you're a champion of economic equality, it's better for them to get some pay than none at all, especially when that money is coming from outside the country.
Pity about the type of work they're offering. I'd be in favor of requiring companies that export this kind of crap work to also export decent (more desirable to the local population) work to the same labor pool.
Go read about the "Broken Window Fallacy". Our country is failing because of wars for oil, having to import oil, etc. Not to mention all the good citizens it loses to auto accidents. You want people to be killed and maimed just so that the medical industries can do better? This country needs to do anything it can to reduce oil usage; telecommuting is a good first step. Personal rapid transit like SkyTran is a good second step.
"I" don't want people sacrificed on the Eisenhower Interstate altar of profits, but I have worked for many companies whose leaders gleefully rub their hands together at the thought of more customers for their products, even when their products are medical devices addressing terrible conditions, and I imagine the energy companies don't even bat an eyelash at the true cost of their non-renewable raw materials - something about being thankful for God's bounty which He hath provided them, I'm sure...
SkyTran is cute, but I prefer to live where the dust in my air is pollen from the trees instead of the dust kicked up by millions of neighbors, and public transit systems of any quality won't reach my neighborhood with any kind of efficiency as long as we're still maintaining a system of privately owned vehicles, I think this applies to well over 50% of the U.S. population - good luck getting the American public to vote yes on giving up their private cars.
I'd love to telecommute, and I have done it for about 6 months (aggregate) of the past 4 years, what I haven't been able to get is any feeling of job security while I'm telecommuting - the job that I have now permits roughly 10% telecommute "as necessary" and pays a reasonably reliable salary. My previous job was 90% telecommute, paid just as well, but was hourly and worked from one $10K pool of money to the next, in the middle of the 2nd pool - with no 3rd pool clearly in sight, I jumped back to the salary situation. Most telecommute opportunities I have had are similar, good money but in unreliable splashes instead of a steady rain that you can pay a 15 year mortgage with.
You need both (portability and capacity) - I had a Diamond Rio, pretty small, light and portable, but the storage capacity was dismal, shrink it to the size of a fingernail and it's still useless if it only holds 2 hours of music - especially if it's a pain to get the music on it (which was the case for ALL music players in 2001).
You're not using the tools available to you then. Phone. IM, chat rooms, teleconferences available at a moments notice.
Reread the bit about spread over 4 Continents... remember time zones?
And, beyond that, in an office environment, if I have a minor need, I can take a break go for a walk, look and see which of the three people who might help me looks least engrossed at that moment and talk with them for a minute.
Even though I truly believe in telecommuting, there are problems with all of the available tools, they really aren't a 100% substitute for "being there."
Phones demand instant attention (and interruption of the callee) with no real "I'm busy" capability beyond flat out ignoring the caller with no explanation.
E-mail has a tendency to be over-answered and suck up more time than a simple conversation might.
A webcam looking at your workspace is just too creepy, especially not knowing who's looking when you really need to scratch somewhere...
And, I refuse to constantly update "my status," now GET OFF MY LAWN.
...It would be a boost to the economy, I would think, if more places would do this.
Call your auto insurance and see if you can get a discount for not having a "daily commute car". We did... both of our cars (wife doesn't work) are considered "secondary". Saved a couple hundred bucks.
It will reduce energy demands (good for the economy as long as we are making energy from non-renewable resources), but it will also reduce long term demand for new cars, auto service, road construction, medical services for car accidents, and any number of other industries that benefit when you drive - those are mostly domestic industries that are suffering.
Fancy new computers, monitors, tele-presence camera/microphones, and most of the trappings of new telecommuters are all imported. Guess how many elected officials are pushing telecommuting as "Good for America"?
...what CmdrTaco missed was exactly what Apple eventually saw.
FTFY. When Taco panned the iPod, it still had a lot of growing to do, and Jobs could have as easily mandated the next iPod to be the next Newton or the next NeXT (right products, at the wrong time.) Jobs hit the contemporarily correct spot between price, cool and performance and now he is a saint to all who worship monetary success. Doesn't mean that CmdrTaco was wrong in his evaluation of that generation of iPod at that time.
...but this guy goes to jail for 20 years for scamming cable companies.
He's an anomaly. The rest of 'em were just sheep in the herd - fat, stupid, evil sheep that deserve to be butchered for their avarice and greed, but there are just too many of them to do that, the rest of us would drown in their blood.
That question is also your answer. There is a very large chain of people involved in the financial crisis, and it's unlikely that any single one of them can be apportioned enough blame to go to jail.
I think there's plenty of blame to go around to justify jail time for the lot of 'em, just not enough space in the jails.
So then don't call it unlimited? it's not that hard -_-
The bandwidth is not capped though, it's THROTTLED.
I agree that this is the definition AT&T wants to use, but it's not advertised as "uncapped," it's advertised as "unlimited." Throttling is limiting. I'm sure there are many synonymous ways you could define "bandwidth throttling" which doesn't include the word "limit," but by reducing the available bandwith, you are limiting. Something which is limited cannot be called unlimited.
When AT&T first started throttling, it was supposed to be the top 5% of users, who apparently consumed something like 90% of the overall data. Now this seems to have come to serve another purpose.
*Big dopey grin from sales dweeb* While I walked away happily - I enjoy wasting salespeople's time when I have nothing better to do.
I had some phone sales rep yell at me for politely letting him go through his spiel before shooting him down. He basically asked me why I would listen to his whole spiel, and then he dramatically hung up on me.
As I was putting down the phone receiver, I was thinking to myself, "because you never gave me a chance to talk..."
A actually cut in on an AT&T rep once & told her to take me off all marketing lists, she sounded genuinely shocked that I would give the great AT&T the C&D finger.
You make it sound like you're some brave freedom fighter struggling in deadly secret against a brutal oppressor. You're not, you're just another kid downloading films they can't be bothered to pay for.
Funny thing is, the same principles apply - and with $100K+ lawsuits flying around like V2 terror rockets in the blitz, literally destroying the families they hit, I'd expect a deadly secret response from the targets. Sure, they could just watch the movies they pay for, but why? What else do they really have to do with their time?
It's a sort of insurgency training for youth, like Army of One and so many other video games are military training and recruiting tools. If I were King, I'd try to restructure the system so that we don't end up training a generation of kids in methods useful for overthrowing the establishment...
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There are lots of things in C that make it very difficult to get good performance when you go beyond about 16 threads (e.g. no differentiation between thread-private and shared data, no immutable-after-creation data types) but which were not a problem for single-threaded performance.
So, extend C(++) with libraries that perform those functions, or spend 3 months "researching available languages" to try to understand which ones do what you want, or an extra 6 months "creating a language" that essentially does the same thing you could accomplish with good set of library functions.
And as far as you don't understand what a buffer overflow is (and a load of other things), your employer shouldn't allow you to code.
I code mostly in C/C++, I know full well what a buffer overflow is, that doesn't mean that I don't appreciate libraries (tantamount to languages, in my opinion), that do garbage collection, protect me from buffer overflows and otherwise take care of the obvious stuff without effort on my part.
Just because any idiot can write simple code with a bit of training doesn't mean any idiot SHOULD be writing code. Any idiot could probably learn to fly a plane but I wouldn't want them at the controls of a 747 I'm in.
Absolutely, but, also recognize that most code written and deployed more closely resembles toy RC cars than 747s in terms of life safety, capital investment, and potential for collateral damage. The hobby landscape provides a rich training and development ground that ultimately leads to better products at the serious end of the scale.
Hiring a high-school dropout script kiddie to work on a "big time serious system" would be an instant red-flag. What we also need to recognize is that some PhDs with "coding experience" are just as ignorant of best practices and as dangerous to a project as the script kiddie, potentially moreso if you don't give them adequate oversight and review.
Note that programming language is totally absent in the discussion of safety above, you could attempt to throw it in there, but it's not really a significant component of safety compared to the people using the language, and the processes they use to ensure safety.
None of that much matters having an itor on something like 5 does not really alter the design of my program it's just little shorter to type than for I=0 to 5; dosomething(I); endfor.
None of this bad as developer I rather like it, but I agree with the author it's not really innovative
I disagree, something like foreach( item, list ) { ... } is an innovation over for( int i = 0 ; i list.size() ; i++ ) { item = list[i]; ... }, it is recognizing the common task and expressing it in a more convenient, compact, intuitive, and less error prone form, same as the evolution of pronouns and other shortenings in natural language.
Design-by-committee languages tend to feel like they've taken a blind guess at what problems need to be solved without consulting the people experiencing those problems.
It's not a blind guess, it's an informed guess by committee consensus, which is worse.
"We don't have time to discuss this in committee,sweetheart.
I am not a committee."
On at least two projects (each being more than 50 man years of design and coding effort) it was worth devising a new language with a syntax suited to the problem and writing the compiler.
Hmmmph.... I guess that's what I've been doing with .XML (and, things very much like .XML before it was named as such) all these years.
'one striking commonality in all modern programming languages, especially the popular ones, is how little innovation there is in them!' and 'We require scientific evidence for the claimed value of experimental drugs. Should we require scientific evidence for the value of experimental software?' Is she right?
Absolutely on point #1 - what dope smoking communist closet did she just stagger out of to come up with point #2? If it works and you like it, use it.
Of course, of the languages listed (PHP, JavaScript, Python, Ruby), I've never done anything "real" in any of them (meaning, sustained development & support > 6 man months) though JavaScript is trying to weasel its way into my Qt world via Quick....
Even if this asteroid hits, it is not likely to hit a populated area. The money spent on trying to deflect it would likely save more lives on average if spent on medicine, water purification, food distribution, or some such thing.
The only real reason to try to deflect this asteroid is to practice for a larger one, but techniques that work on small asteroids like this one won't necessarily work on large ones.
If the calculated target is the North Atlantic Ocean, it'll be cheaper to deflect it than to reconstruct the Tsunami damaged New England coastal areas.
by then i will be 81 years old if i am still alive so it wont make any difference to me, maybe my children or grandchildren will be concerned about it
Does your post imply that you don't care about what happens to your children or grandchildren?
I appreciate several of the things my grandparents and their generation did for me, specifically: fighting World War II, the TVA electric dam construction projects, and the interstate highway system. Moving this asteroid to a safe orbit (if necessary) is a relatively smaller task by comparison.
Given 20 years and one of these, I think we could make it hit the moon, if we tried.
I'll take those odds. I bet my life savings we survive.
I'll be 73 when the payout date comes, I'd rather have use of my life savings between now and then, instead of 100x as much money when I'm too old and feeble to enjoy it properly.
Wherever it hits, those are the people that God hates most. End of debate.
Send a ship with a nuclear powered ion thruster engine, with 20 years of course corrections, we can determine exactly which city God hates the most.
It's (practically) slavery all over again. Is it really much better to run someone for $1/hr. / 12 hours a day compared to having them as actual slaves?
Ummm, yes, the $1/hr is optional, you only take it if it's better than your other alternatives. Slaves are not allowed to pursue other alternatives.
Sorry to weigh in with an insensitive elitist perspective, but this 1/10th of a McJob salary is injecting money into an economy that wouldn't have it otherwise. If you're a champion of economic equality, it's better for them to get some pay than none at all, especially when that money is coming from outside the country.
Pity about the type of work they're offering. I'd be in favor of requiring companies that export this kind of crap work to also export decent (more desirable to the local population) work to the same labor pool.
Go read about the "Broken Window Fallacy". Our country is failing because of wars for oil, having to import oil, etc. Not to mention all the good citizens it loses to auto accidents. You want people to be killed and maimed just so that the medical industries can do better? This country needs to do anything it can to reduce oil usage; telecommuting is a good first step. Personal rapid transit like SkyTran is a good second step.
"I" don't want people sacrificed on the Eisenhower Interstate altar of profits, but I have worked for many companies whose leaders gleefully rub their hands together at the thought of more customers for their products, even when their products are medical devices addressing terrible conditions, and I imagine the energy companies don't even bat an eyelash at the true cost of their non-renewable raw materials - something about being thankful for God's bounty which He hath provided them, I'm sure...
SkyTran is cute, but I prefer to live where the dust in my air is pollen from the trees instead of the dust kicked up by millions of neighbors, and public transit systems of any quality won't reach my neighborhood with any kind of efficiency as long as we're still maintaining a system of privately owned vehicles, I think this applies to well over 50% of the U.S. population - good luck getting the American public to vote yes on giving up their private cars.
I'd love to telecommute, and I have done it for about 6 months (aggregate) of the past 4 years, what I haven't been able to get is any feeling of job security while I'm telecommuting - the job that I have now permits roughly 10% telecommute "as necessary" and pays a reasonably reliable salary. My previous job was 90% telecommute, paid just as well, but was hourly and worked from one $10K pool of money to the next, in the middle of the 2nd pool - with no 3rd pool clearly in sight, I jumped back to the salary situation. Most telecommute opportunities I have had are similar, good money but in unreliable splashes instead of a steady rain that you can pay a 15 year mortgage with.
You need both (portability and capacity) - I had a Diamond Rio, pretty small, light and portable, but the storage capacity was dismal, shrink it to the size of a fingernail and it's still useless if it only holds 2 hours of music - especially if it's a pain to get the music on it (which was the case for ALL music players in 2001).
Mod parent up.
I telecommute two days a week to take care of my wife. I find it much easier to focus when I'm in the office.
And, I have 2 young boys who get home from school at 2pm, they're a little distracting too.
You're not using the tools available to you then. Phone. IM, chat rooms, teleconferences available at a moments notice.
Reread the bit about spread over 4 Continents... remember time zones?
And, beyond that, in an office environment, if I have a minor need, I can take a break go for a walk, look and see which of the three people who might help me looks least engrossed at that moment and talk with them for a minute.
Even though I truly believe in telecommuting, there are problems with all of the available tools, they really aren't a 100% substitute for "being there."
Phones demand instant attention (and interruption of the callee) with no real "I'm busy" capability beyond flat out ignoring the caller with no explanation.
E-mail has a tendency to be over-answered and suck up more time than a simple conversation might.
A webcam looking at your workspace is just too creepy, especially not knowing who's looking when you really need to scratch somewhere...
And, I refuse to constantly update "my status," now GET OFF MY LAWN.
...It would be a boost to the economy, I would think, if more places would do this.
Call your auto insurance and see if you can get a discount for not having a "daily commute car". We did... both of our cars (wife doesn't work) are considered "secondary". Saved a couple hundred bucks.
It will reduce energy demands (good for the economy as long as we are making energy from non-renewable resources), but it will also reduce long term demand for new cars, auto service, road construction, medical services for car accidents, and any number of other industries that benefit when you drive - those are mostly domestic industries that are suffering.
Fancy new computers, monitors, tele-presence camera/microphones, and most of the trappings of new telecommuters are all imported. Guess how many elected officials are pushing telecommuting as "Good for America"?
...what CmdrTaco missed was exactly what Apple eventually saw.
FTFY. When Taco panned the iPod, it still had a lot of growing to do, and Jobs could have as easily mandated the next iPod to be the next Newton or the next NeXT (right products, at the wrong time.) Jobs hit the contemporarily correct spot between price, cool and performance and now he is a saint to all who worship monetary success. Doesn't mean that CmdrTaco was wrong in his evaluation of that generation of iPod at that time.
...but this guy goes to jail for 20 years for scamming cable companies.
He's an anomaly. The rest of 'em were just sheep in the herd - fat, stupid, evil sheep that deserve to be butchered for their avarice and greed, but there are just too many of them to do that, the rest of us would drown in their blood.
That question is also your answer. There is a very large chain of people involved in the financial crisis, and it's unlikely that any single one of them can be apportioned enough blame to go to jail.
I think there's plenty of blame to go around to justify jail time for the lot of 'em, just not enough space in the jails.
So then don't call it unlimited? it's not that hard -_-
The bandwidth is not capped though, it's THROTTLED.
I agree that this is the definition AT&T wants to use, but it's not advertised as "uncapped," it's advertised as "unlimited." Throttling is limiting. I'm sure there are many synonymous ways you could define "bandwidth throttling" which doesn't include the word "limit," but by reducing the available bandwith, you are limiting. Something which is limited cannot be called unlimited.
When AT&T first started throttling, it was supposed to be the top 5% of users, who apparently consumed something like 90% of the overall data. Now this seems to have come to serve another purpose.
So, sue them.
*Big dopey grin from sales dweeb* While I walked away happily - I enjoy wasting salespeople's time when I have nothing better to do.
I had some phone sales rep yell at me for politely letting him go through his spiel before shooting him down. He basically asked me why I would listen to his whole spiel, and then he dramatically hung up on me.
As I was putting down the phone receiver, I was thinking to myself, "because you never gave me a chance to talk..."
A actually cut in on an AT&T rep once & told her to take me off all marketing lists, she sounded genuinely shocked that I would give the great AT&T the C&D finger.
You make it sound like you're some brave freedom fighter struggling in deadly secret against a brutal oppressor. You're not, you're just another kid downloading films they can't be bothered to pay for.
Funny thing is, the same principles apply - and with $100K+ lawsuits flying around like V2 terror rockets in the blitz, literally destroying the families they hit, I'd expect a deadly secret response from the targets. Sure, they could just watch the movies they pay for, but why? What else do they really have to do with their time?
It's a sort of insurgency training for youth, like Army of One and so many other video games are military training and recruiting tools. If I were King, I'd try to restructure the system so that we don't end up training a generation of kids in methods useful for overthrowing the establishment...