Obviously what is happening is that the Shredder and Krang have been creating magma in their magma-factory inside the Technodrome. They are obviously planning something sinister, so we need to send some turtles, perhaps turtles trained in ninjutsu, down there to set things straight.
Programmers, meanwhile, are writing code that sometimes violates the C standard, particularly in corner cases
It's no so much a violation as assuming behaviour is defined when it is not. Case in point, integer overflows, there actually is nothing in the C language spec that defines what the result is when signed integers overflow. The result is compiler, and perhaps even hardware dependent. That's C's double edged-sword, the amount of undefined behaviour is what makes it so flexible, running on almost every single hardware/software platform imaginable. It also means that you have to be really, really careful about what you are doing.
If you want to see all the interesting ways C's undefined behaviour can manifest itself you should do what I did, teach a freshman programming course:P Through doing so I learned that C functions don't actually need a return statement, it's just that the behaviour is undefined when it doesn't have one. And here is the kicker, the student who didn't have the return statement actually produced the correct output. It's a fluke that apparently works on Intel platforms, but probably won't on most others. The return statement on an intel machine apparently just sets a register, the same register holds the most recently calculated value so provided your compiler doesn't optimise out the code(which is what this article it talking about) the following code can actually print 19:
#include
int bob() {
int a;
a=7+12;
}
void main() {
printf("%d\n",bob());
}
Actually older technology is only cheap if it's still widespread. The more esoteric a technology becomes, the less price pressure there is, largely because fewer and fewer companies are willing to make the investments in the factories necessary to produce the product. Case in point, floppy disks. Floppies are actually more expensive now then they were back in 1994, largely because almost nobody is using them. The few companies still making them can charge more for them because there is no competition. The people that are left with floppies are pretty much left with them out of necessity, because they are tied to legacy equipment that only accepts them etc.
While optical media isn't quite there yet, I wouldn't expect optical drives to fall much farther in price. More and more companies are going to drop out(or barring that, collude with the other manufacturers to fix the prices, as we are seeing here). Eventually causing the price of optical media and drives to bottom out then start creeping upward.
That's true in cities...a lot less so in more rural areas. While Europe is lauded(and for good reason, at least compared to the US) for its public transport system, that system mostly exists only in the big cities. When you get to the more rural parts of Europe bus services are incredibly infrequent if they exist at all. As such there are parts of Germany and Finland where a car is almost a requirement. However a bus that can be called on demand and allows people to split the costs can be quite beneficial, esp. when it comes to shuttling people between where they live and the closest rail station.
This isn't odd at all. People staying at budget and midscale hotel chains are more price sensitive, so they're going to not come to your hotel if you don't have free wifi. The people staying a luxury hotels are not as price sensitive and are more likely to be worried about other things beside a charge for internet access when selecting a hotel.
You also have to look at who is footing the bill. At a lot of business hotels everything is on the expense account or corporate card, people won't really care what they have to pay as someone else is paying it(and it's often all on one bill).
Also helps if they have a large defense industry in their district/state. John Boener is a perfect example of this. A few days later after saying "so be it" in response to someone saying that cutting the budget will result in lost jobs, he complained that abandoning the f-16 project will result in job losses.... primarily in his district.
One thing that is often overlooked in the technology v. jobs argument is how technology enables us to do "less with more", not only with workers but natural resources as well. A lot of the original applications of IT were improving accuracy in factories, and this has enabled a tremendous savings in resources, which in turn helps create/preserve jobs. I used to do IT in a steel mill, and technology has allowed us to produce steel that can be rolled within an incredibly small tolerance, which is crucial to building lighter, more fuel efficient appliances/vehicles. This simply would not be possible without the tech. But not only that, the factory automation means we waste a hell of a lot less steel than we did back in the 1950s. That reduction in waste makes the product more affordable and thus means that companies can produce more.
As another example look at airplane manufacturers. Boeing and Airbus produce some amazingly fuel efficient planes, but the design and production of those planes relies on highly precise machinery. If we had to use the same machining tech that was around in the 1950s there is no way there could be as many planes in the sky today as there are now. There simply isn't enough fuel. Without tech unemployment would be even higher today, there simiply aren't enough resources.
I have no qualms with the copy constructor, if only it were made explicit. The fact that C++ makes way too much implicit(like in the example above) is probably what I find most objectionable about the language. It makes code much harder to read if in addition to evaluating the logic you also have to keep a million rules about what is really going on in your head.
The US is the only one that does this because the US is the only one powerful enough to do this. How quickly you seem to forget what the world was like before Pax Americana, here's a hint, it was a HELL of a lot bloodier than it is today. The rest of the western world accepts what the US does, often times begrudgingly, because regardless of what any self-righteous European says, Pax Americana is much better than what we had when Europe ruled the world. Ah Europeans, self-righteous unrepentant mass murders. Gotta love them.
Did you actually read the post dipshit? I said Brazil is probably better at keeping what they do a secret, thus I wouldn't have any hard evidence. What you said says more about your inability to actually read than it does about what I said. You seriously think that only the US has spy agencies that violate people's privacy? You sir are a certified tool.
The culture will eventually obviate the need for such laws, but its going to be a rough transition. As a wiser man than me(Dan Savage) pointed out, admitting to smoking pot used to be a career killer, but the culture changed and it became more and more acceptable. Bill Clinton was the first to admit to using it at all, but he "didn't inhale". 16 years later Obama was asked the same question and said he did inhale, that was the entire point. Eventually posting youthful hijinks online will be the norm, just like trying pot.
However, as with any cultural shift, the "pioneers" are often the ones who get shafted. I feel bad for the generation born between roughly 1990 and 2005, they are young enough that their youthful digressions are often posted online, but not old enough to avoid the blowback from the older generation who refuses to admit that they once did stupid shit....However those born after 2005 or so will grow up in a world where sexting and posting stupid stuff you did while drunk is the accepted norm.
C++ tends to make way too much implicit making the code much harder to read at a logical level, as you always have to keep all of C++s quirks in mind when reading. For instance, C++ is the only language I know of where the following is not equivalent:
Widget foo;
foo=bar;
And:
Widget foo=bar;
Having to keep in mind one evokes the default constructor and the other invokes the copy constructor makes it much more difficult to focus on what the code is actually doing, and things like that tend to lead to a lot of subtle bugs in C++ code.
I know you are being snarky, but this is actually sort of true. Cell phone systems are only designed to serve something like 20% of the users at any given time. However, in an emergency EVERYONE is using their phone, so anything that is data-intensive(voice, loading web pages) tends to fail or timeout.
I was in Japan when the big earthquake struck(far enough north that it was incredibly strong but far enough inland that the tsunami didn't reach me) and while the towers switched to backup power and remained up, they were basically unusable except in short bursts. You could send sms messages and whatnot, but voice was impossible and even most web pages timed out. Something that could push a small amount of data in the event of an emergency could be quite useful.
Sure, it's not wide-spread mass surveillance, it's just regular police state concerns
THAT YOU KNOW OF....
The funny thing is I'm sure Brazil(as almost any large state actor) has plenty of spies, both domestic and foreign. They just have to feign outrage when another country's spies get caught with their hand in the cookie jar and of course claim that they would never EVER do such a thing*
*such a thing is defined as actually letting their spy program leak to the general public.
Nice troll for ayatollah, but the fact remains they appointed as president of the University of Tehran a man who has no academic qualifications but he does believe really hard in an imaginary man in the sky and a child rapist who claims to have spoken for the imaginary man in the sky.
which is a shame because before the fundies started changing everything Iranian schools were pretty good. Ironic that one of the biggest impediments to the religious fundamentalists getting a homegrown atomic weapon is their own religious fundamentalism.
Though this is hardly the first time ideological purity has ruined a once great educational system. Supposedly a lot of German scientists complained that during the war they found it almost impossible to do research because all their graduate assistants could do is recite Nazi propaganda and not much else.
Because the Iranian government has done to the post-secondary education system in Iran what the Republicans have attempted to do(and in some cases succeeded) in doing to secondary education in the US, i.e. hand it over to the religious fundamentalists who only care about promoting whatever imaginary being they happen to believe in. The University of Tehran appointed as president a guy who had no post secondary education but lots and lots of Islamic bona fides. If they want an education that is more rigorous than "Muhammed is great!" they have to look elsewhere.
The bigger issue is that they often times force you to call them for stuff you shouldnt need to call them for(ie stuff you SHOULD be able to do online). They force you to call them to do things that may cost them money(warranty repairs etc) hoping that the frustration of forcing people to wade through menu after menu, spend massive amounts of time on hold, and maybe even the inscrutable accents will convince people to give up. You give up and Dell doesnt have to uphold its end of the bargain.
Slashdot Mirror
Now we can finally start betting on sperm races. All you need to do is the following:
1. Put a tiny bit of compute power in each sperm cell that identifies the sperm.
2. Proceed to give odds, take bets
3. Fuck
4. Profit! After the egg has been fertilised you can use the tracking chip in the sperm to see which one "won".
Obviously what is happening is that the Shredder and Krang have been creating magma in their magma-factory inside the Technodrome. They are obviously planning something sinister, so we need to send some turtles, perhaps turtles trained in ninjutsu, down there to set things straight.
Programmers, meanwhile, are writing code that sometimes violates the C standard, particularly in corner cases
:P Through doing so I learned that C functions don't actually need a return statement, it's just that the behaviour is undefined when it doesn't have one. And here is the kicker, the student who didn't have the return statement actually produced the correct output. It's a fluke that apparently works on Intel platforms, but probably won't on most others. The return statement on an intel machine apparently just sets a register, the same register holds the most recently calculated value so provided your compiler doesn't optimise out the code(which is what this article it talking about) the following code can actually print 19:
It's no so much a violation as assuming behaviour is defined when it is not. Case in point, integer overflows, there actually is nothing in the C language spec that defines what the result is when signed integers overflow. The result is compiler, and perhaps even hardware dependent. That's C's double edged-sword, the amount of undefined behaviour is what makes it so flexible, running on almost every single hardware/software platform imaginable. It also means that you have to be really, really careful about what you are doing.
If you want to see all the interesting ways C's undefined behaviour can manifest itself you should do what I did, teach a freshman programming course
#include int bob() { int a; a=7+12; } void main() { printf("%d\n",bob()); }
Long live C!
Actually older technology is only cheap if it's still widespread. The more esoteric a technology becomes, the less price pressure there is, largely because fewer and fewer companies are willing to make the investments in the factories necessary to produce the product. Case in point, floppy disks. Floppies are actually more expensive now then they were back in 1994, largely because almost nobody is using them. The few companies still making them can charge more for them because there is no competition. The people that are left with floppies are pretty much left with them out of necessity, because they are tied to legacy equipment that only accepts them etc.
While optical media isn't quite there yet, I wouldn't expect optical drives to fall much farther in price. More and more companies are going to drop out(or barring that, collude with the other manufacturers to fix the prices, as we are seeing here). Eventually causing the price of optical media and drives to bottom out then start creeping upward.
Considering he worked at amazon during the boom years my guess is he has a significant stake in amazon...
(2) optimization isn't pretty and doesn't sell, so Microsoft is not cleaning house.
Cupertino would disagree with you there, basically the biggest selling point of the new version of OS X is how much power it saves.
That's true in cities...a lot less so in more rural areas. While Europe is lauded(and for good reason, at least compared to the US) for its public transport system, that system mostly exists only in the big cities. When you get to the more rural parts of Europe bus services are incredibly infrequent if they exist at all. As such there are parts of Germany and Finland where a car is almost a requirement. However a bus that can be called on demand and allows people to split the costs can be quite beneficial, esp. when it comes to shuttling people between where they live and the closest rail station.
And protect it with blowfish!
Thank you, thank you, I will be here all week, and remember, download the fish!
This isn't odd at all. People staying at budget and midscale hotel chains are more price sensitive, so they're going to not come to your hotel if you don't have free wifi. The people staying a luxury hotels are not as price sensitive and are more likely to be worried about other things beside a charge for internet access when selecting a hotel.
You also have to look at who is footing the bill. At a lot of business hotels everything is on the expense account or corporate card, people won't really care what they have to pay as someone else is paying it(and it's often all on one bill).
Also helps if they have a large defense industry in their district/state. John Boener is a perfect example of this. A few days later after saying "so be it" in response to someone saying that cutting the budget will result in lost jobs, he complained that abandoning the f-16 project will result in job losses.... primarily in his district.
One thing that is often overlooked in the technology v. jobs argument is how technology enables us to do "less with more", not only with workers but natural resources as well. A lot of the original applications of IT were improving accuracy in factories, and this has enabled a tremendous savings in resources, which in turn helps create/preserve jobs. I used to do IT in a steel mill, and technology has allowed us to produce steel that can be rolled within an incredibly small tolerance, which is crucial to building lighter, more fuel efficient appliances/vehicles. This simply would not be possible without the tech. But not only that, the factory automation means we waste a hell of a lot less steel than we did back in the 1950s. That reduction in waste makes the product more affordable and thus means that companies can produce more.
As another example look at airplane manufacturers. Boeing and Airbus produce some amazingly fuel efficient planes, but the design and production of those planes relies on highly precise machinery. If we had to use the same machining tech that was around in the 1950s there is no way there could be as many planes in the sky today as there are now. There simply isn't enough fuel. Without tech unemployment would be even higher today, there simiply aren't enough resources.
Wht are you tlking about? Vowls are for chumps.
Considering the ROI on security bug bounties, they really should have one that just has a Yahoo! logo and the text "I'm with stupid"
I have no qualms with the copy constructor, if only it were made explicit. The fact that C++ makes way too much implicit(like in the example above) is probably what I find most objectionable about the language. It makes code much harder to read if in addition to evaluating the logic you also have to keep a million rules about what is really going on in your head.
The US is the only one that does this because the US is the only one powerful enough to do this. How quickly you seem to forget what the world was like before Pax Americana, here's a hint, it was a HELL of a lot bloodier than it is today. The rest of the western world accepts what the US does, often times begrudgingly, because regardless of what any self-righteous European says, Pax Americana is much better than what we had when Europe ruled the world. Ah Europeans, self-righteous unrepentant mass murders. Gotta love them.
Did you actually read the post dipshit? I said Brazil is probably better at keeping what they do a secret, thus I wouldn't have any hard evidence. What you said says more about your inability to actually read than it does about what I said. You seriously think that only the US has spy agencies that violate people's privacy? You sir are a certified tool.
The culture will eventually obviate the need for such laws, but its going to be a rough transition. As a wiser man than me(Dan Savage) pointed out, admitting to smoking pot used to be a career killer, but the culture changed and it became more and more acceptable. Bill Clinton was the first to admit to using it at all, but he "didn't inhale". 16 years later Obama was asked the same question and said he did inhale, that was the entire point. Eventually posting youthful hijinks online will be the norm, just like trying pot.
However, as with any cultural shift, the "pioneers" are often the ones who get shafted. I feel bad for the generation born between roughly 1990 and 2005, they are young enough that their youthful digressions are often posted online, but not old enough to avoid the blowback from the older generation who refuses to admit that they once did stupid shit....However those born after 2005 or so will grow up in a world where sexting and posting stupid stuff you did while drunk is the accepted norm.
C++ tends to make way too much implicit making the code much harder to read at a logical level, as you always have to keep all of C++s quirks in mind when reading. For instance, C++ is the only language I know of where the following is not equivalent:
Widget foo; foo=bar;
And:
Widget foo=bar;
Having to keep in mind one evokes the default constructor and the other invokes the copy constructor makes it much more difficult to focus on what the code is actually doing, and things like that tend to lead to a lot of subtle bugs in C++ code.
I know you are being snarky, but this is actually sort of true. Cell phone systems are only designed to serve something like 20% of the users at any given time. However, in an emergency EVERYONE is using their phone, so anything that is data-intensive(voice, loading web pages) tends to fail or timeout.
I was in Japan when the big earthquake struck(far enough north that it was incredibly strong but far enough inland that the tsunami didn't reach me) and while the towers switched to backup power and remained up, they were basically unusable except in short bursts. You could send sms messages and whatnot, but voice was impossible and even most web pages timed out. Something that could push a small amount of data in the event of an emergency could be quite useful.
Sure, it's not wide-spread mass surveillance, it's just regular police state concerns
THAT YOU KNOW OF....
The funny thing is I'm sure Brazil(as almost any large state actor) has plenty of spies, both domestic and foreign. They just have to feign outrage when another country's spies get caught with their hand in the cookie jar and of course claim that they would never EVER do such a thing*
*such a thing is defined as actually letting their spy program leak to the general public.
Nice troll for ayatollah, but the fact remains they appointed as president of the University of Tehran a man who has no academic qualifications but he does believe really hard in an imaginary man in the sky and a child rapist who claims to have spoken for the imaginary man in the sky.
which is a shame because before the fundies started changing everything Iranian schools were pretty good. Ironic that one of the biggest impediments to the religious fundamentalists getting a homegrown atomic weapon is their own religious fundamentalism.
Though this is hardly the first time ideological purity has ruined a once great educational system. Supposedly a lot of German scientists complained that during the war they found it almost impossible to do research because all their graduate assistants could do is recite Nazi propaganda and not much else.
Because the Iranian government has done to the post-secondary education system in Iran what the Republicans have attempted to do(and in some cases succeeded) in doing to secondary education in the US, i.e. hand it over to the religious fundamentalists who only care about promoting whatever imaginary being they happen to believe in. The University of Tehran appointed as president a guy who had no post secondary education but lots and lots of Islamic bona fides. If they want an education that is more rigorous than "Muhammed is great!" they have to look elsewhere.
The bigger issue is that they often times force you to call them for stuff you shouldnt need to call them for(ie stuff you SHOULD be able to do online). They force you to call them to do things that may cost them money(warranty repairs etc) hoping that the frustration of forcing people to wade through menu after menu, spend massive amounts of time on hold, and maybe even the inscrutable accents will convince people to give up. You give up and Dell doesnt have to uphold its end of the bargain.
Yeah, because per capita electoral in North Dakota is SO equivalent to that of CA. Republican "logic" at its finest.