"We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil" - Donald Knuth
Most developers will never need for their apps to run in constrained environments, and most employers don't want to spend money to eek out performance when average performance is perfectly fine.
Too many programmers get caught up in trying to make something the fastest, or most memory efficient, or makes the best use of bandwidth. When most of the time, it just doesn't matter. Such things are expensive, and in the long run it's cheaper to be fast and sloppy than slow and lean.
Do you even know what the full quote is, or what the paper Donald Knuth wrote that in is about?
Here is the full quote:
"We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%. A good programmer will not be lulled into complacency by such reasoning, he will be wise to look carefully at the critical code; but only after that code has been identified." - Donald Knuth
So the quote you've used to back yourself up is completely and utterly against your argument. It actually makes a point for the skills that you say don't matter. I really can't even believe people modded this as insightful.....
Billboards would be impossible, but nobody in the United States nor most western nations would stop anyone from sitting in the streets protesting. The DDoS attacks were (in some cases) actively disrupting the companies ability to do business, and thus were illegal. Mubarak's regime had no concept of freedom of speech, but most of the western nations do, including the ones they were targeting, so they would have no problems here.
Nothing is stopping any of the anon people from holding a legal protest rally at multiple locations all over the world, the fact is that they didn't and they chose instead to attack these businesses. The sit-in metaphor doesn't work because a sit-in is legal as long as it doesn't cause a complete disruption of business. That is, you picket outside the front of the building, but people (if they want to try depending on the size of the crowd) can still get into the business. What Anon did is closer to sitting inside the lobby of a building making sure nobody could get past them.
The truth of the matter is that they're just children having tantrums. I'm guessing the lot of them have a distorted view of how the world works.
Of course, anyone who likes Android, Apple or well, anything that isn't Microsoft, should be overjoyed at this news. MS is a dead company, but like the proverbial dinosaur the neural impulses havn't travelled all the way from the tail to the brain yet - MS, being the dinosaur that it is, doesn't yet realise its day is over.
I love Mac OS X, I think my Android phone is fantastic, and I've been a Linux advocate for years, but I'm not thrilled at this news at all. It doesn't matter where you work, the common workstation has Microsoft products on it and STB is the last business unit of Microsoft that has been putting out good stuff consistently. If Microsoft goes belly up it will have a negative effect on the technology industry by costing businesses tons of money to readjust, and anything that threatens the tech industry threatens my chance of having fun toys like Apple computers, Android phones, or home servers I can run Linux on, by threatening my source of income.
Seriously people, Microsoft products generally stink, but a sudden or quick change of the status quo can mean negative things for the entire industry. The very slow, gradual failure that Microsoft has been going through these past few years (thanks to successes the of STB) are a good way for it to disappear.
Not if it goes nuclear. If it goes nuclear, NATO will retaliate nuclear as well. There is a strong chance that a second major conflict in Korea would result in a total nuclear war.
Exactly. I would say the thread on Penny-Arcade alone has probably driven more traffic to his website (and influenced people to purchase the game) than anything else. In March Gamasutra ran an interview with Notch discussing the game's development. Just because you didn't know about the game doesn't mean that it isn't popular. I can't believe ANYONE modded this guy insightful.
This is completely true. Those who have the money ultimately can drive the decision making in their favor. Unfortunately its also one of the reasons our government is the unhealthiest its been since the time of the Rail Barons. Same reason its unhealthy too, money has once again, become too important in the decision making process.
Also, I've never met a German who didn't know what Nazism was about... Its something that sadly still causes some severe pain and embarrassment in their culture.
You make an excellent point about social anthropology, however there are most likely much more reliable sources for doing research on Neo-Nazism (especially since websites aren't considered by most academics to be first-hand accounts).
As for trolling them, I would hope anti-racism and anti-fascism groups would have better things to do rather than try to debate politics with a bunch of skinheads.
If you need to go to Neo-Nazi sites you need to really get help....... The Nazi ideology is one that you can't really defend unless you're seriously messed up in your head.
I don't have the power to force anyone to do anything, and I don't recall ever attempting to do so. Are you confusing me with someone else?
I was referring to Morton's (and company's) attempt at banning binary blobs from being loaded into the Kernel. That is totally forcing an ideal on someone else. I didn't mean to accuse you of this (heinous) act; I just couldn't get off my soap box and I had to recap my argument.:p
There is nothing wrong or newbish about using proprietary kernel drivers.
Distributing proprietary kernel drivers in compiled form does, however, violate the copyrights of many of the people who complained.
How? They have absolutely no copyright over any of the code that nVidia provides, unless of course it has some stolen code within it, which I would love to see them try to prove. That's how the GPL was written; the author keeps the copyright over his portion of the code unless he specifically assigns the copyright to the FSF. So, nVidia holds the copyright to their code for their card driver, the FSF has not and will never hold the copyright for this code until nVidia assigns it to them, and it doesn't violate the Linux copyright since nVidia wrote their own original code for the drivers.
Security can be argued, but the chances of a security loophole (either accidental or on purpose) being put into some proprietary drivers are improbable, and the chance that a security researcher would miss it is fairly improbable too. If you don't want to use a binary blob, then don't. Nobody is forcing you to, so why do you want to force people to not use a binary blob?
The true issue here is that while Linux wants to grow and become more popular, half of the community wants to alienate people by pushing their ideals on others, which is what Linux, especially at the beginning of this decade, was never about. The FSF and GNU have become just as bad as Microsoft and Apple. Until the Linux community can work past that, it will continue to grow too slowly for it to surpass Microsoft or Apple.
I will also say, it's gratifying to have the *option* to install a proprietary driver clearly presented, with a commentary about what "proprietary driver" actually means, and why / why not I should install this driver. Some will choose to use the nvidia driver, and some will not, but educating the end user about what their options are and what they mean is really a great feature in Ubuntu, and I think nicely bridges the gap between "must be free" and "just do it for me".
$.02
Neil
Totally, and I think Ubuntu's approach is a wiser one both to educate people and keep freedom within Linux. I've been using Linux for 11 years now, and it seems each and every year the FSF wants to take more and more freedom from the user, specifically their freedom of choice. A great example was when in 2006 Morton and some other GNU/FSF pundits made a very big push to ban proprietary kernel modules by making the kernel refuse to load binary kernel modules. Thankfully Torvalds squashed the idea and essentially said "over my dead body".
There is nothing wrong or newbish about using proprietary kernel drivers. I don't get why so many people make it like they're about to die because nVidia and AMD/ATi don't release their driver code... which is probably full of trade secrets. They have to keep proprietary to keep competitive.
Seriously, they're people. You make it sound like you're some exotic zoo keeper and you need to know what to do when they present their glowing red ass.
Extremely true. Stop looking at them as subordinates and start looking at them as team mates on the same team and morale will improve. If someone slips though, make sure that they understand that you still are in charge, and you've got the last say in any business matter.
Yes. We wouldn't want anyone setting those off in the middle of an airport would we! Can you imagine the mess?! While we're at it, ban all mentos and diet coke in airports.
I think you're missing the point here though. It sounds to me like he's more pissed off with the fact that Dell, HP, and the other vendors are slapping the cheapest video card they can into the computers, ripping out the PCI-X slots, then selling the computer for $800 and marketing it as a "Entertainment PC". I admit I agree with you a little, but the Intel chipsets really are pretty terrible. Usually they pull out most of the flashy shaders and such for video games leaving the developers a tiny toolset that they could make an engine reminiscent of the Quake engine.
If any of the sites he contacted weren't in California then it falls under the FBI's jurisdiction since it (loosely) qualifies as attempting to transport stolen goods through interstate commerce.
Seriously! Besides being a nuisance to the entire game industry including the gamers themselves, he goes and he does stuff like this. Wasn't he on trial just a few months ago for being in contempt of court? He's a nuisance to the entire legal system of the United States; all he does is create more troubles and headaches for everyone, and makes himself look like a complete asshole in the process. Worse, he gives people who don't want to blame thinks such as poverty or psychological issues a way to use the legal system to blame other, mostly unrelated activities, such as gaming.
They really need to disbar Thompson. This has gotten rather ludicrous.
Amen! I currently live in the Bible Belt and I'm from Pennsylvania. Before my family moved down here, we assumed the same "they're all religious nuts!" out of ignorance. Having lived here for almost 10 years, I think you'd be hard pressed to find a lot of people who "blindly" support the ESRB and support government censorship. Hell, I'd be surprised if you find ANYONE who wants the Government to interfere.
The ESRB, in fact, is something that a lot of people down here don't concern themselves with unless your a gamer, and being a gamer myself, I know that most gamers down here don't agree with the ESRB too awful much. Heck, I'm trying to think of the number of people I know in Church who support censorship and I can't name a single one, although I admit I go to a small (very conservative) Methodist church with about 40 people who regularly attend. So guys, quit it with the stereotypes. Its just making the/. community look worse.
If you're running XP Home or XP Business with the Welcome Screen enabled Ctrl-Alt-Del does open the Task Manager, as does Ctrl-Alt-Esc. If you've turned the Welcome Screen off, which is common in a business environment, you get a Windows 2000 style Security Screen where you can Log Off, open Task Manager, change your password, or even shutdown/reset the computer. So thats why XP has "two" methods for opening Task Manager using they keyboard; there's really only one dedicated method, but the other fills the spot when Welcome Screen is enabled.
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"We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil" - Donald Knuth
Most developers will never need for their apps to run in constrained environments, and most employers don't want to spend money to eek out performance when average performance is perfectly fine.
Too many programmers get caught up in trying to make something the fastest, or most memory efficient, or makes the best use of bandwidth. When most of the time, it just doesn't matter. Such things are expensive, and in the long run it's cheaper to be fast and sloppy than slow and lean.
Do you even know what the full quote is, or what the paper Donald Knuth wrote that in is about?
Here is the full quote:
"We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%. A good programmer will not be lulled into complacency by such reasoning, he will be wise to look carefully at the critical code; but only after that code has been identified." - Donald Knuth
So the quote you've used to back yourself up is completely and utterly against your argument. It actually makes a point for the skills that you say don't matter. I really can't even believe people modded this as insightful.....
Billboards would be impossible, but nobody in the United States nor most western nations would stop anyone from sitting in the streets protesting. The DDoS attacks were (in some cases) actively disrupting the companies ability to do business, and thus were illegal. Mubarak's regime had no concept of freedom of speech, but most of the western nations do, including the ones they were targeting, so they would have no problems here.
Nothing is stopping any of the anon people from holding a legal protest rally at multiple locations all over the world, the fact is that they didn't and they chose instead to attack these businesses. The sit-in metaphor doesn't work because a sit-in is legal as long as it doesn't cause a complete disruption of business. That is, you picket outside the front of the building, but people (if they want to try depending on the size of the crowd) can still get into the business. What Anon did is closer to sitting inside the lobby of a building making sure nobody could get past them.
The truth of the matter is that they're just children having tantrums. I'm guessing the lot of them have a distorted view of how the world works.
Of course, anyone who likes Android, Apple or well, anything that isn't Microsoft, should be overjoyed at this news. MS is a dead company, but like the proverbial dinosaur the neural impulses havn't travelled all the way from the tail to the brain yet - MS, being the dinosaur that it is, doesn't yet realise its day is over.
I love Mac OS X, I think my Android phone is fantastic, and I've been a Linux advocate for years, but I'm not thrilled at this news at all. It doesn't matter where you work, the common workstation has Microsoft products on it and STB is the last business unit of Microsoft that has been putting out good stuff consistently. If Microsoft goes belly up it will have a negative effect on the technology industry by costing businesses tons of money to readjust, and anything that threatens the tech industry threatens my chance of having fun toys like Apple computers, Android phones, or home servers I can run Linux on, by threatening my source of income.
Seriously people, Microsoft products generally stink, but a sudden or quick change of the status quo can mean negative things for the entire industry. The very slow, gradual failure that Microsoft has been going through these past few years (thanks to successes the of STB) are a good way for it to disappear.
Not if it goes nuclear. If it goes nuclear, NATO will retaliate nuclear as well. There is a strong chance that a second major conflict in Korea would result in a total nuclear war.
Exactly. I would say the thread on Penny-Arcade alone has probably driven more traffic to his website (and influenced people to purchase the game) than anything else. In March Gamasutra ran an interview with Notch discussing the game's development. Just because you didn't know about the game doesn't mean that it isn't popular. I can't believe ANYONE modded this guy insightful.
Name one single media technology that has killed off any previous media technologies.
The cassette tape killed off the 8-track. By 1988 8-tracks were no longer being made.
This is completely true. Those who have the money ultimately can drive the decision making in their favor. Unfortunately its also one of the reasons our government is the unhealthiest its been since the time of the Rail Barons. Same reason its unhealthy too, money has once again, become too important in the decision making process.
Also, I've never met a German who didn't know what Nazism was about... Its something that sadly still causes some severe pain and embarrassment in their culture.
You make an excellent point about social anthropology, however there are most likely much more reliable sources for doing research on Neo-Nazism (especially since websites aren't considered by most academics to be first-hand accounts).
As for trolling them, I would hope anti-racism and anti-fascism groups would have better things to do rather than try to debate politics with a bunch of skinheads.
no neo nazi sites).
If you need to go to Neo-Nazi sites you need to really get help....... The Nazi ideology is one that you can't really defend unless you're seriously messed up in your head.
Uh... I think not. $20 that Vista SP2 still won't achieve EAL6+ by the NSA. Apparently he's never heard of INTEGRITY.
I don't have the power to force anyone to do anything, and I don't recall ever attempting to do so. Are you confusing me with someone else?
I was referring to Morton's (and company's) attempt at banning binary blobs from being loaded into the Kernel. That is totally forcing an ideal on someone else. I didn't mean to accuse you of this (heinous) act; I just couldn't get off my soap box and I had to recap my argument. :p
Distributing proprietary kernel drivers in compiled form does, however, violate the copyrights of many of the people who complained.
How? They have absolutely no copyright over any of the code that nVidia provides, unless of course it has some stolen code within it, which I would love to see them try to prove. That's how the GPL was written; the author keeps the copyright over his portion of the code unless he specifically assigns the copyright to the FSF. So, nVidia holds the copyright to their code for their card driver, the FSF has not and will never hold the copyright for this code until nVidia assigns it to them, and it doesn't violate the Linux copyright since nVidia wrote their own original code for the drivers.
Security can be argued, but the chances of a security loophole (either accidental or on purpose) being put into some proprietary drivers are improbable, and the chance that a security researcher would miss it is fairly improbable too. If you don't want to use a binary blob, then don't. Nobody is forcing you to, so why do you want to force people to not use a binary blob?
The true issue here is that while Linux wants to grow and become more popular, half of the community wants to alienate people by pushing their ideals on others, which is what Linux, especially at the beginning of this decade, was never about. The FSF and GNU have become just as bad as Microsoft and Apple. Until the Linux community can work past that, it will continue to grow too slowly for it to surpass Microsoft or Apple.
I will also say, it's gratifying to have the *option* to install a proprietary driver clearly presented, with a commentary about what "proprietary driver" actually means, and why / why not I should install this driver. Some will choose to use the nvidia driver, and some will not, but educating the end user about what their options are and what they mean is really a great feature in Ubuntu, and I think nicely bridges the gap between "must be free" and "just do it for me".
$.02
Neil
Totally, and I think Ubuntu's approach is a wiser one both to educate people and keep freedom within Linux. I've been using Linux for 11 years now, and it seems each and every year the FSF wants to take more and more freedom from the user, specifically their freedom of choice. A great example was when in 2006 Morton and some other GNU/FSF pundits made a very big push to ban proprietary kernel modules by making the kernel refuse to load binary kernel modules. Thankfully Torvalds squashed the idea and essentially said "over my dead body". There is nothing wrong or newbish about using proprietary kernel drivers. I don't get why so many people make it like they're about to die because nVidia and AMD/ATi don't release their driver code... which is probably full of trade secrets. They have to keep proprietary to keep competitive.
Seriously, they're people. You make it sound like you're some exotic zoo keeper and you need to know what to do when they present their glowing red ass.
Extremely true. Stop looking at them as subordinates and start looking at them as team mates on the same team and morale will improve. If someone slips though, make sure that they understand that you still are in charge, and you've got the last say in any business matter.
Yes. We wouldn't want anyone setting those off in the middle of an airport would we! Can you imagine the mess?! While we're at it, ban all mentos and diet coke in airports.
I think you're missing the point here though. It sounds to me like he's more pissed off with the fact that Dell, HP, and the other vendors are slapping the cheapest video card they can into the computers, ripping out the PCI-X slots, then selling the computer for $800 and marketing it as a "Entertainment PC". I admit I agree with you a little, but the Intel chipsets really are pretty terrible. Usually they pull out most of the flashy shaders and such for video games leaving the developers a tiny toolset that they could make an engine reminiscent of the Quake engine.
If any of the sites he contacted weren't in California then it falls under the FBI's jurisdiction since it (loosely) qualifies as attempting to transport stolen goods through interstate commerce.
Seriously! Besides being a nuisance to the entire game industry including the gamers themselves, he goes and he does stuff like this. Wasn't he on trial just a few months ago for being in contempt of court? He's a nuisance to the entire legal system of the United States; all he does is create more troubles and headaches for everyone, and makes himself look like a complete asshole in the process. Worse, he gives people who don't want to blame thinks such as poverty or psychological issues a way to use the legal system to blame other, mostly unrelated activities, such as gaming. They really need to disbar Thompson. This has gotten rather ludicrous.
Amen! I currently live in the Bible Belt and I'm from Pennsylvania. Before my family moved down here, we assumed the same "they're all religious nuts!" out of ignorance. Having lived here for almost 10 years, I think you'd be hard pressed to find a lot of people who "blindly" support the ESRB and support government censorship. Hell, I'd be surprised if you find ANYONE who wants the Government to interfere.
/. community look worse.
The ESRB, in fact, is something that a lot of people down here don't concern themselves with unless your a gamer, and being a gamer myself, I know that most gamers down here don't agree with the ESRB too awful much. Heck, I'm trying to think of the number of people I know in Church who support censorship and I can't name a single one, although I admit I go to a small (very conservative) Methodist church with about 40 people who regularly attend. So guys, quit it with the stereotypes. Its just making the
If you're running XP Home or XP Business with the Welcome Screen enabled Ctrl-Alt-Del does open the Task Manager, as does Ctrl-Alt-Esc. If you've turned the Welcome Screen off, which is common in a business environment, you get a Windows 2000 style Security Screen where you can Log Off, open Task Manager, change your password, or even shutdown/reset the computer. So thats why XP has "two" methods for opening Task Manager using they keyboard; there's really only one dedicated method, but the other fills the spot when Welcome Screen is enabled.