To be fair, it's Microsoft's fault for coming up with such a shitty name. "Project Natal" might be a good code name for some engineer from India, but as a product brand for the U.S., it sucks balls.
The article states that this is just a code name and that the actual name will be announced next month:
We were also told that Microsoft’s camera definitely won’t be called Natal, that its proper title will be revealed at E3 next month, and that It will be heavily targeted at causal players and families.
Good interviewing skills should get one a great position in sales but that's about it.
Not really. You need to have great coding skills, but you also need to have exceptional interpersonal skills.
As programmers, we document and automate processes, sometimes these processes describe things that are out of our comfort zone or knowledge (accounting, business, engineering, medical or advanced maths).
We need to be able to communicate effectively and understand the aspects of a project before writing a single line of code.
If you lack the personal skills to be able to ask questions of stakeholders you will forever be categorized as a code monkey requiring a manager to relay information and ask questions for you or a team lead to design the system and tell you what to code.
If that's the kind of position you're shooting for then, sure, suit yourself. But for a Senior/Lead position (or to start your own business) you must have great interpersonal skills and great coding/design skills at the same time.
It's not really that hard either. People are not that hard to figure out, you just need to "debug" them and observe how they interact with you/others and emulate behaviors that seem to work.
This is what happens when people who aren't competent in a field start dictating the activities in it.
No, they talk to people who are experts, if not gurus, in the field.
Yes. And I'm sure they are all well educated on the subject to form opinions and make crucial decisions just by talking to experts, while making sure whatever happens is in the best interest of the American people.
Much like how Ted Stevens was on net neutrality and how the internet works in general. No?
They are definitely not twiddling their thumbs and surfing porn all day.
Imagine a doctor in London performing surgery on your heart in New York!
Yes. Imagine, indeed. What could possibly go wrong?
From: l33t h4xxor Mesho To: Daughter Subject: Your father's surgery
Hi Michelle!
We hacked into your father's machine and we know who he is. We know he's having a remote heart surgery at 12:32pm.
We also happen to control a bot net of about 100,000 machines.
Kindly, forward 6 million dollars to account #432532511155 in Bank Xyz in Switzerland, or else, we will instruct all 100k machines to DDOS the hospital.
But encryption of live servers and databases is a farce. Encryption without key management is itself a farce, and a servers which require keys to operate necessarily lack key management. Furthermore, server encryption is absurd because it can only protects against physical theft of the servers, not against hacking.
I'm not a lawyer and I didn't read the entire law that was passed (grain of salt, etc.), but from my layman interpretation nothing in here says that you have to encrypt data on your live servers.
The penalties are assigned based on breaches, that is, if someone hacks into your server and steals Massachusetts residents' records, you owe $5k for each non-encrypted record that was stolen (as well as notify the person and the state). Also if you have employees taking un-encrypted data off site on laptops that get stolen, similar penalties apply if the laptop was stolen.
Make sure your servers are secure, up to date, and fire walled, encrypt roaming laptops and you'll be fine.
If my understanding is correct, I think this is a great law. If more states implement it, we won't have companies leaving sensitive data on laptops that get stolen because of a careless contractor/employee.
The damages to a company would be so real and enormous that they will have to implement stringent security protocols, or one breach can very possibly take them out of business.
But what do I know, I no rocket scientist accountant.
I hear you. My knowledge approaches zero when it comes to space exploration and human flights to the moon. The thing that ticks me off in this entire debacle is "why is Obama (or any other president) deciding what can NASA do with its budget?".
The way I see it: the white house should say "According to the economy we can afford x dollars for NASA's budget".
Program cancellation or over funding should be left up to the geeks at NASA who know this stuff and are really good at it.
Don't get me wrong, I think Obama is a very bright guy. If I could vote, I would have probably voted for him (if Ron Paul wasn't running).
As a country we should decide how much can we afford given the circumstances, and let them decide which direction to go.
General populace vote on issues like this are almost entirely irrelevant. The average layman wouldn't know if government should mandate use of ODF vs. OOXML. Why should they/we be able to tell NASA what to do?
I'm not encouraging average voter laziness, we should all learn about where our tax money is going. All I'm saying is: let the decision makers be the people who really know what's going on and are passionate enough to lose sleep over it (sprinkle some patriotism in there too and we're golden).
I hope that whatever Obama is doing is in-line with what the space community is rooting for. But I disagree that Obama; or any other president for that matter; should have a say in what the space-geeks with a 190 IQ think is best.
I completely agree with your disappointment in the "spin-full" way Wikileaks presented this. For example, take the screen in the short video that says:
The treating soldier eventually decides to evacuate the children to the medical center at the nearby U.S. base of Rustamiyah. However, higher command orders that the children are instead to be handed to Iraqi Police and be taken to an Iraqi hospital.
This could mean poorer standards of medical treatment and additional delay.
I completely disagree with that statement. This should be handled by the Iraqi police. The last thing the U.S. needs there is another sexual scandal involving a little girl (or a rumor of one started to riot people up and increase violence).
Wikileaks should have just posted the video and left the judgment and interpretations to someone else. Or if Julian Assange felt so strongly about it, he should have started his collateraldamage.com campaign under his own name and left Wikileaks out of it.
Not only is his presentation sensationalist and questionable, he's taking Wikileaks integrity and neutrality down with him.
How nice he's now embracing the underhanded collection and exploitation personal data that is Google's business plan, very "open source" and egalitarian of him.
If you read his blog post you would have noticed that he said:
On Google It’s now too big to be purely good or in fact purely anything. I’m sure that tendrils of stupidity and evil are even now finding interstitial breeding grounds whence they will emerge to cause grief. And there are some Google initiatives that I feel no urge to go near.
If there are more guys like him at Google calling the shots like they did before, things would be very different today.
Why don't start trying to find signs of intelligent life on Earth? Intelligence don't have to mean technology, and some species right here (dolphins? whales?) could be as intelligent or more than us, but while we see intelligence as use of tools we will keep ignoring them.
We are already doing that though. The way I see it, we all have an "itch that we scratch". I'm into computers and my wife on the other hand is into anthropology/history.
As a species, I think we're doing pretty good. We have researchers in all sorts of fields. It's true that I don't care so much about the past, and as far as my wife is concerned, HTML5 doesn't mean anything.
But collectively we're actively seeking knowledge and forms of intelligence to enhance our lives, be it our ancestors, map/reduce, or dolphins in the ocean.
I appreciate SETI as much as I appreciate Jane Goodall, and in some sense they're both doing the same thing only in different contexts.
So, to sum it up (tl;dr): We are already doing that, and we will keep doing it:)
However I wouldn't blame MS for this quite yet. The W3C was supposed to come out with something conclusive by now. Sure we have a good idea of what will be in HTML 5, but a good idea and a couple of dollars might get you a cup coffee at Starbucks. i.e. good ideas disappear out of final specs and products all the time.
But see, web standards (or at least HTML5's) are really based on what browser vendors and content producers are doing right now.
The process roughly goes like this: - Someone throws and idea on the mailing list and maybe a demo/implementation - People argue back and forth - Someone possibly comes up with a better solution that satisfies some other vendor - More bitching and moaning - Some consensus/compromise is reached with a few implementations of it already in browsers and it becomes part of the standard
No one sits around dreaming up what HTML should be like and then dictate that to all the browser vendors as the ultimate implementation, it's totally the other way around.
This is basically why we had the Ogg Theora vs. H.264 war going on. Apple and Google went with (that is, implemented) H.264 while Mozilla went with Ogg Theora. What ended up happening was the codec specification was dropped from the spec because a consensus could not be reached between all parties involved.
MS needs to get off of its high horse and start implementing and suggesting features _today_, they can argue the merits of the spec all they want but they have one of two options, be a road block and passively ignore the discussion or take the community head-on, actively engage them and offer superior solutions.
Chris Wilson from Microsoft wrote an essay on the mailing list arguing the dropping of the version number in HTML5. I agree with him that we need a version in there, but his argument is coming from the wrong reasons (not wanting to break lousy IE specific hacked websites).
But honestly I hope they are actively evaluating the standards. Just because it's a "standard" doesn't mean it's good and worth using.
Evaluating? They're effectively making it.
Ian Hickson, the author and maintainer of HTML5, is a Google employee.
Not that this is a bad thing, I mean, I'm very excited about some of the stuff (like background workers) that are basically Google's finger print on the draft. But make no mistake about it, they are evaluating it very well as they're writing it:)
This just goes to show how much IE is holding us back. According to the Blog post, Google won't be dropping Gears' maintenance support for IE for the foreseen future:
We will not be investing resources in active development of new features. Likewise, there are some platforms that would require a significant engineering effort to support due to large architectural changes. Specifically, we cannot support Gears in Safari on OS X Snow Leopard and later. Support for Gears in Firefox (including 3.6, which will be supported shortly) and Internet Explorer will continue.
I'm guessing they'll want that around as a fall back for IE when they start depending more and more on HTML5's new features.
Had IE been keeping up with HTML5's development, we wouldn't be in a situation where we need external plug-ins to make sure our Apps are cross-platform.
I’d like to stress that the Update is voluntary, which means that you can choose not to install it when you see it appear on Windows Update.
I'm running Windows 7 on my home workstation and on my new laptop (Ubuntu in VirtualBox).
This WAT thing is just stupid, all my Windows 7 installations are genuine so I don't see how they would become counterfeit in 3-6 or 9 months from now.
It's pointless and so I won't be installing it when it's offered via Windows update. Simple as that.
The tiger version of web kit isnt being changed though. It works on tiger and the new version only has to support leopard.
So, if I'm understanding you correctly, Safari 4+ for Tiger is (or going to be) merely a chrome update without actually updating the rendering engine?
If that's the case then this is horrible for web developers, I can imagine the headaches of making sure that the website works in Safari 4, only to find out that a client is running 4 on Tiger. At that point good luck explaining the rendering engine differences to them.
It ought to be that Safari 4 is Safari 4, even if you run it in a toaster.
Thanks for the information by the way, and please correct me if my understanding is wrong here.
It's because both Safari and Chrome rely on WebKit for rendering. Mozilla relies on Gecko (their own engine).
I know that. But WebKit still supports Tiger, or Apple is hacking in backwards compatibility. Either way, it sounds a bit disingenuous to say that Safari doesn't have to deal with Tiger when it clearly does on one level or another.
I'm not a Mac person so I don't keep track of every update, but why is it that OSX 10.4, a version which only came out in 2005 according to Wikipedia, has so much code that prevents Mozilla from trivially continuing to maintain compatibility in Firefox?
According to the article:
Adding 10.4 support back to mozilla-central would mean switching back to ATSUI from Core Text, switching back to gcc-4.0 from gcc-4.2, and doing a bit of porting work for code that has been added to the tree since we dropped support for 10.4. Other areas where 10.4 support consumes our time, makes our code more complex or error-prone, and/or limits our capabilities include complex text input (IME), out-of- process plugins, printing, native menus, and Core Animation. Furthermore, Apple's upcoming JavaPlugin2 will not support Mac OS X 10.4.
Sounds like OS X's API has evolved quite a bit in the last 5 years.
The weird part in the article was when the Mozilla platform engineer said "Neither Safari nor Chrome have to deal with this". I don't know about Chrome but from Apple's website it looks like Tiger is still supported for Safari 4:
Tiger System Requirements
Mac OS X Tiger 10.4.11 and Security Update 2009-002 or later
Your speed benchmark is absolutely meaningless - running that code will take literal nanoseconds, virtually your entire execution time is taken up with program setup, program shutdown, console output, and benchmarking overhead.
Yes it is, which is why I didn't use it for anything. I didn't have time to create something that will iterate over this code a million times with different values, nor did I care that much about it.
I just looked at the binary file sizes produced and shared what I found.
Slashdot Mirror
How about using Arj Barker for prior art? :)
To be fair, it's Microsoft's fault for coming up with such a shitty name. "Project Natal" might be a good code name for some engineer from India, but as a product brand for the U.S., it sucks balls.
The article states that this is just a code name and that the actual name will be announced next month:
We were also told that Microsoft’s camera definitely won’t be called Natal, that its proper title will be revealed at E3 next month, and that It will be heavily targeted at causal players and families.
Good interviewing skills should get one a great position in sales but that's about it.
Not really. You need to have great coding skills, but you also need to have exceptional interpersonal skills.
As programmers, we document and automate processes, sometimes these processes describe things that are out of our comfort zone or knowledge (accounting, business, engineering, medical or advanced maths).
We need to be able to communicate effectively and understand the aspects of a project before writing a single line of code.
If you lack the personal skills to be able to ask questions of stakeholders you will forever be categorized as a code monkey requiring a manager to relay information and ask questions for you or a team lead to design the system and tell you what to code.
If that's the kind of position you're shooting for then, sure, suit yourself. But for a Senior/Lead position (or to start your own business) you must have great interpersonal skills and great coding/design skills at the same time.
It's not really that hard either. People are not that hard to figure out, you just need to "debug" them and observe how they interact with you/others and emulate behaviors that seem to work.
This is what happens when people who aren't competent in a field start dictating the activities in it.
No, they talk to people who are experts, if not gurus, in the field.
Yes. And I'm sure they are all well educated on the subject to form opinions and make crucial decisions just by talking to experts, while making sure whatever happens is in the best interest of the American people.
Much like how Ted Stevens was on net neutrality and how the internet works in general. No?
They are definitely not twiddling their thumbs and surfing porn all day.
</sarcasm>
Damn it! I lost my mod points by the time I finished reading this hilarious post.
Someone mod this up for $deity's sake!
Thank you for sharing this.
and they have notified me that remote surgeries are done via a dedicated connection, not the public Internet
You make a valid point, but, you also seem to have a lot more faith in hospitals being security conscious than I do :)
Imagine a doctor in London performing surgery on your heart in New York!
Yes. Imagine, indeed. What could possibly go wrong?
From: l33t h4xxor Mesho
To: Daughter
Subject: Your father's surgery
Hi Michelle!
We hacked into your father's machine and we know who he is. We know he's having a remote heart surgery at 12:32pm.
We also happen to control a bot net of about 100,000 machines.
Kindly, forward 6 million dollars to account #432532511155 in Bank Xyz in Switzerland, or else, we will instruct all 100k machines to DDOS the hospital.
Yours truly,
Meshko
But encryption of live servers and databases is a farce. Encryption without key management is itself a farce, and a servers which require keys to operate necessarily lack key management. Furthermore, server encryption is absurd because it can only protects against physical theft of the servers, not against hacking.
I'm not a lawyer and I didn't read the entire law that was passed (grain of salt, etc.), but from my layman interpretation nothing in here says that you have to encrypt data on your live servers.
The penalties are assigned based on breaches, that is, if someone hacks into your server and steals Massachusetts residents' records, you owe $5k for each non-encrypted record that was stolen (as well as notify the person and the state). Also if you have employees taking un-encrypted data off site on laptops that get stolen, similar penalties apply if the laptop was stolen.
Make sure your servers are secure, up to date, and fire walled, encrypt roaming laptops and you'll be fine.
If my understanding is correct, I think this is a great law. If more states implement it, we won't have companies leaving sensitive data on laptops that get stolen because of a careless contractor/employee.
The damages to a company would be so real and enormous that they will have to implement stringent security protocols, or one breach can very possibly take them out of business.
But what do I know, I no rocket scientist accountant.
I hear you. My knowledge approaches zero when it comes to space exploration and human flights to the moon. The thing that ticks me off in this entire debacle is "why is Obama (or any other president) deciding what can NASA do with its budget?".
The way I see it: the white house should say "According to the economy we can afford x dollars for NASA's budget".
Program cancellation or over funding should be left up to the geeks at NASA who know this stuff and are really good at it.
Don't get me wrong, I think Obama is a very bright guy. If I could vote, I would have probably voted for him (if Ron Paul wasn't running).
As a country we should decide how much can we afford given the circumstances, and let them decide which direction to go.
General populace vote on issues like this are almost entirely irrelevant. The average layman wouldn't know if government should mandate use of ODF vs. OOXML. Why should they/we be able to tell NASA what to do?
I'm not encouraging average voter laziness, we should all learn about where our tax money is going. All I'm saying is: let the decision makers be the people who really know what's going on and are passionate enough to lose sleep over it (sprinkle some patriotism in there too and we're golden).
I hope that whatever Obama is doing is in-line with what the space community is rooting for. But I disagree that Obama; or any other president for that matter; should have a say in what the space-geeks with a 190 IQ think is best.
Why was this modded troll?
I completely agree with your disappointment in the "spin-full" way Wikileaks presented this. For example, take the screen in the short video that says:
The treating soldier eventually decides to evacuate the children to the medical center at the nearby U.S. base of Rustamiyah. However, higher command orders that the children are instead to be handed to Iraqi Police and be taken to an Iraqi hospital.
This could mean poorer standards of medical treatment and additional delay.
I completely disagree with that statement. This should be handled by the Iraqi police. The last thing the U.S. needs there is another sexual scandal involving a little girl (or a rumor of one started to riot people up and increase violence).
Wikileaks should have just posted the video and left the judgment and interpretations to someone else. Or if Julian Assange felt so strongly about it, he should have started his collateraldamage.com campaign under his own name and left Wikileaks out of it.
Not only is his presentation sensationalist and questionable, he's taking Wikileaks integrity and neutrality down with him.
How nice he's now embracing the underhanded collection and exploitation personal data that is Google's business plan, very "open source" and egalitarian of him.
If you read his blog post you would have noticed that he said:
On Google It’s now too big to be purely good or in fact purely anything. I’m sure that tendrils of stupidity and evil are even now finding interstitial breeding grounds whence they will emerge to cause grief. And there are some Google initiatives that I feel no urge to go near.
If there are more guys like him at Google calling the shots like they did before, things would be very different today.
P.S.: Watch this instead of reading the Wikipedia article. I hope you'll come to appreciate Dr. Jane a bit more.
Why don't start trying to find signs of intelligent life on Earth? Intelligence don't have to mean technology, and some species right here (dolphins? whales?) could be as intelligent or more than us, but while we see intelligence as use of tools we will keep ignoring them.
We are already doing that though. The way I see it, we all have an "itch that we scratch". I'm into computers and my wife on the other hand is into anthropology/history.
As a species, I think we're doing pretty good. We have researchers in all sorts of fields. It's true that I don't care so much about the past, and as far as my wife is concerned, HTML5 doesn't mean anything.
But collectively we're actively seeking knowledge and forms of intelligence to enhance our lives, be it our ancestors, map/reduce, or dolphins in the ocean.
I appreciate SETI as much as I appreciate Jane Goodall, and in some sense they're both doing the same thing only in different contexts.
So, to sum it up (tl;dr): We are already doing that, and we will keep doing it :)
However I wouldn't blame MS for this quite yet. The W3C was supposed to come out with something conclusive by now. Sure we have a good idea of what will be in HTML 5, but a good idea and a couple of dollars might get you a cup coffee at Starbucks. i.e. good ideas disappear out of final specs and products all the time.
But see, web standards (or at least HTML5's) are really based on what browser vendors and content producers are doing right now.
The process roughly goes like this:
- Someone throws and idea on the mailing list and maybe a demo/implementation
- People argue back and forth
- Someone possibly comes up with a better solution that satisfies some other vendor
- More bitching and moaning
- Some consensus/compromise is reached with a few implementations of it already in browsers and it becomes part of the standard
No one sits around dreaming up what HTML should be like and then dictate that to all the browser vendors as the ultimate implementation, it's totally the other way around.
This is basically why we had the Ogg Theora vs. H.264 war going on. Apple and Google went with (that is, implemented) H.264 while Mozilla went with Ogg Theora. What ended up happening was the codec specification was dropped from the spec because a consensus could not be reached between all parties involved.
MS needs to get off of its high horse and start implementing and suggesting features _today_, they can argue the merits of the spec all they want but they have one of two options, be a road block and passively ignore the discussion or take the community head-on, actively engage them and offer superior solutions.
Chris Wilson from Microsoft wrote an essay on the mailing list arguing the dropping of the version number in HTML5. I agree with him that we need a version in there, but his argument is coming from the wrong reasons (not wanting to break lousy IE specific hacked websites).
Here's a link to that essay, take a look and count how many times he said "the market leader" in there.
But honestly I hope they are actively evaluating the standards. Just because it's a "standard" doesn't mean it's good and worth using.
Evaluating? They're effectively making it.
Ian Hickson, the author and maintainer of HTML5, is a Google employee.
Not that this is a bad thing, I mean, I'm very excited about some of the stuff (like background workers) that are basically Google's finger print on the draft. But make no mistake about it, they are evaluating it very well as they're writing it :)
Way to ignore Firefox there.
Support for Gears in Firefox (including 3.6, which will be supported shortly ) and Internet Explorer will continue.
This just goes to show how much IE is holding us back. According to the Blog post, Google won't be dropping Gears' maintenance support for IE for the foreseen future:
We will not be investing resources in active development of new features. Likewise, there are some platforms that would require a significant engineering effort to support due to large architectural changes. Specifically, we cannot support Gears in Safari on OS X Snow Leopard and later. Support for Gears in Firefox (including 3.6, which will be supported shortly) and Internet Explorer will continue.
I'm guessing they'll want that around as a fall back for IE when they start depending more and more on HTML5's new features.
Had IE been keeping up with HTML5's development, we wouldn't be in a situation where we need external plug-ins to make sure our Apps are cross-platform.
According to the article:
I’d like to stress that the Update is voluntary, which means that you can choose not to install it when you see it appear on Windows Update.
I'm running Windows 7 on my home workstation and on my new laptop (Ubuntu in VirtualBox).
This WAT thing is just stupid, all my Windows 7 installations are genuine so I don't see how they would become counterfeit in 3-6 or 9 months from now.
It's pointless and so I won't be installing it when it's offered via Windows update. Simple as that.
The tiger version of web kit isnt being changed though. It works on tiger and the new version only has to support leopard.
So, if I'm understanding you correctly, Safari 4+ for Tiger is (or going to be) merely a chrome update without actually updating the rendering engine?
If that's the case then this is horrible for web developers, I can imagine the headaches of making sure that the website works in Safari 4, only to find out that a client is running 4 on Tiger. At that point good luck explaining the rendering engine differences to them.
It ought to be that Safari 4 is Safari 4, even if you run it in a toaster.
Thanks for the information by the way, and please correct me if my understanding is wrong here.
Linus appears to have less hysterical take on the Android Linux fork [blogspot.com] than most people
Very smart your argument! I also wait Android Linux Fork hear in Brazil!
This ought to be a new Slashdot meme.
It's because both Safari and Chrome rely on WebKit for rendering. Mozilla relies on Gecko (their own engine).
I know that. But WebKit still supports Tiger, or Apple is hacking in backwards compatibility. Either way, it sounds a bit disingenuous to say that Safari doesn't have to deal with Tiger when it clearly does on one level or another.
I'm not a Mac person so I don't keep track of every update, but why is it that OSX 10.4, a version which only came out in 2005 according to Wikipedia, has so much code that prevents Mozilla from trivially continuing to maintain compatibility in Firefox?
According to the article:
Adding 10.4 support back to mozilla-central would mean switching back
to ATSUI from Core Text, switching back to gcc-4.0 from gcc-4.2, and
doing a bit of porting work for code that has been added to the tree
since we dropped support for 10.4. Other areas where 10.4 support
consumes our time, makes our code more complex or error-prone, and/or
limits our capabilities include complex text input (IME), out-of-
process plugins, printing, native menus, and Core Animation.
Furthermore, Apple's upcoming JavaPlugin2 will not support Mac OS X
10.4.
Sounds like OS X's API has evolved quite a bit in the last 5 years.
The weird part in the article was when the Mozilla platform engineer said "Neither Safari nor Chrome have to deal with this". I don't know about Chrome but from Apple's website it looks like Tiger is still supported for Safari 4:
Tiger System Requirements
Mac OS X Tiger 10.4.11 and Security Update 2009-002 or later
Wrong summary. I emailed the editors a minute too late I guess.
The domain is 1e100.net:
Domain Name: 1E100.NET
Registrar: MARKMONITOR INC.
Whois Server: whois.markmonitor.com
Referral URL: http://www.markmonitor.com/
Name Server: NS1.GOOGLE.COM
Name Server: NS2.GOOGLE.COM
Name Server: NS3.GOOGLE.COM
Name Server: NS4.GOOGLE.COM
Status: clientDeleteProhibited
Status: clientRenewProhibited
Status: clientTransferProhibited
Status: clientUpdateProhibited
Status: serverDeleteProhibited
Status: serverRenewProhibited
Status: serverTransferProhibited
Status: serverUpdateProhibited
Updated Date: 13-oct-2009
Creation Date: 25-sep-2009
Expiration Date: 25-sep-2019
But it's 20% OFF!!!
No honey, we can't buy it because it's too expensive and we don't need it!
Now, Can we keep this off of Slashdot please?
Your speed benchmark is absolutely meaningless - running that code will take literal nanoseconds, virtually your entire execution time is taken up with program setup, program shutdown, console output, and benchmarking overhead.
Yes it is, which is why I didn't use it for anything. I didn't have time to create something that will iterate over this code a million times with different values, nor did I care that much about it.
I just looked at the binary file sizes produced and shared what I found.