Maybe I need to change my opinion about American cars. I came of age in the 80's when Japanese cars were so much superior to American cars that it wasn't even funny. And so I've carried this prejudice against American cars for 30 years now.
I bought my first new car this year and I made a point to buy only a Japanese car made in Japan. I didn't even want it to be assembled in the USA. It's a 2016 Subaru Impreza. The 2017 model year moved assembly to the USA so I squeaked in just in time.
But I'm not entirely certain that this Subaru's manufacture quality is really better than the equivalent Ford really. I've seen new Fords and they look nice. And some of the smaller Ford hatchbacks actually look like very good value for the money when compared to my Subaru.
I just can't shake the feeling that American = bad engineering, poor manufacturing, and bad assembly. I need to work on it. Maybe if every crappy economy rental car weren't a low quality piece of junk Chevy/Ford I might be able to forcefully shift my point of view.
One thing is true though -- lots of American cars, especially low cost SUVs, come with ridiculously ugly interiors. The buttons and switches look like they are made for Flintstones cars.
It's a term that has a well understood meaning. You don't get to choose what terms people use, sorry. Piracy means making copies of digital goods without paying for the right to make that copy. It's pretty simple really.
Think of making copies of copyrighted digital goods as a service. You have to pay for that service. If you don't pay for a service, you are cheating tho service provider. Piracy is cheating the provider of the "creating movies/music/software" service by not paying for the use of that service.
It's typically engaged in by cheap asses with low moral standards.
Thank you for filling out my statements with much greater detail. I agree with everything that you say and I appreciate your even tone and fair viewpoint.
For those anonymous cowards who like to sling insults rather than making coherent statements, please read the parent post and be informed.
Just because the entertainment industry is making record breaking money doesn't mean that they are also not losing alot to piracy. The "despite" term in the Slashdot headline is inaccurate and clearly shows a leech slant.
There are always winners and losers. But in California the winners have outnumbered the losers when compared to the results in most other areas, and the winners have won more spectacularly than they have in most other areas. The net result is a huge GDP.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but CA is doing really well. Whether or not the "liberal policies" have anything to do with that, I really don't know, but the implication that CA has suffered under liberal rule is absurd.
Pretty sure that increased housing prices are an inevitable consequence of economic success. More people with jobs making more money are willing to pay more for their homes and anyone who doesn't keep up has to settle for less desirable living conditions.
And California (at least, the parts that we're talking about, with housing crunches) has been spectacularly successful economically since "those liberals" took over.
Did you hear that California if considered by itself would be the 7th largest economy in the world?
People here in SV are just going to have to accept a different standard of housing than they think they are entitled to. I know I have done so.
So the entire population of the UK is 1.7 Tokyo-greater-metropolitan-areas.
But the entire population of Japan is only 3.3 Tokyo-greater-metropolitan areas.
The greater Tokyo metropolitan areas is sizeable when compared to the UK, but it's also sizeable when compared to the entire population of Japan itself.
I'm really failing to understand what the point of all of this is, and what the O.P. was even trying to say.
I actually consider Windows 10 to be completely flawed due to its forced and frequent update scheme.
I often only boot up my Windows PC every week or two. Invariably, there will be updates to process. What this means is that just about every boot takes multiple minutes to complete.
I consider an operating system that takes many minutes to start up in the year 2016 when using a fast SSD drive, to be fundamentally flawed.
Additionally, there have been times when I have left a long-running boot up and had the operating system force-reboot my system for updates while I was in the middle of actively using it.
That is 100% unacceptable. Even if by design, I consider it to be intrinsically flawed as an operating system.
These issues are so onerous to me that they lead me to hate Windows 10 with a white-hot passion. The only reason I am using it is because I have to for my VR PC...
I didn't read that article, but I can see a reasonable justifcation for the rating. Maybe sometimes people bump the turn signal stalk the wrong way and indicate the incorrect turn direction, and the indicator would help them to know that they're indicating incorrectly, thus avoiding an unexpected (from the point of other drivers) turn.
Not saying that I think it's worth dinging a car's rating over, but there might be some sense to it, especially if you consider the very limits of safety features to be an important component of a car.
I don't know the specific code in question, but I have seen enough code to have a theory.
Long-lived software projects that implement programs with complex features (and web browsers have an astounding array of features), especially those that interact directly with users, who put programs into a position of continually having to respond to extremely complex sets of inputs (just think of how many valid inputs there are to a web browser at any one moment), tend towards a style of implementation that can best be described as "layers upon layers upon layers of framework".
One aspect of programming that many engineers are, in my experience, not very good at, is deciding when to simplify frameworks versus making them more complex. I think it comes from a fear that many people have of painting themselves into a corner -- we've all seen code so inflexible that it makes extending it at a later time difficult, and I think that many people respond by going too far in the opposite direction - to avoid painting themselves into a corner, they put 100 doors in every room so that there is always a way out.
The end result is that every aspect of the complex program is designed to be extensible well beyond anything that will ever likely occur in practice. And the interactions between these complex layers of framework become so complex themselves that new layers have to be invented just to try to simplify things and allow any hope of rationally moving forward.
So what you end up with is incredibly deep stacks of function calls for almost any action, as various extensibility layers are passed through, along with the layers that consolidate previously implemented extensibility layers into simplified layers that more directly match the actual requirements of the program.
I have occasionally seen stack traces from programs like Firefox, and I expect Chrome is no different, and the depth of the stack at the point of a crash is always somewhat breathtaking. You may end up going 30 - 40 layers deep before you actually get to a piece of code that has a tangible effect on the state of the program.
Now imagine that a particular user input requires running through a function that has to call out to several parts of another framework layer, and you're going to be paying the deep stack penalty multiple times.
What you end up with is a large code base that does everything necessary, but in a way that is embellished to a nearly pathological degree, where every action takes 10 - 20 times longer than it would had that action been encoded much more directly and with far fewer framework layers.
The advantage of such a large code base is that it has enough flexibility to rarely, if ever, require a complete redesign as new feature requirements come up.
The disadvantage is that it will never operate as efficiently as a more directly coded program, and you get user interfaces that require executing literally billions of machine instructions just to effect fairly simple changes to its internal state machine.
And may I further point out that the reason that the O.P.'s sig is dumb is that it is self-contradictory... it is trying to encode a known English phrase in a way that is identifiable as program code, to make some kind of "joke". The further you get from known, identifiable, and common code syntax, the less effective the "joke".
For example, I could define a computer language where the specific string of characters:
"2thineOWN selfbe TRUE"
has some specific and complex meaning, like say "pop the top numeric value off the stack, add 7, and push the result back on the stack".
Then I could put that mishmash of characters in my.sig as a "joke" about a Shakespearean phrase encoded in a programming language. Now anyone who read my "joke" would have to know the esoteric details of my own made-up programming language to get the "joke".
Surely you can see how self-defeating this attempt at humor would be. I'd be saying "Hey, I'm encoding some English in a programming language, isn't that funny -- oh, but to get the joke, you have to know something that nobody reading the joke would ever actually know."
I claim that encoding "to be or not to be" using variables "2b" is very similar to this. You have to know some esoteric, uncommon language that allows naming variables with leading numerals in order to accept the joke as actually making any sense.
Alternately, you have to accept that the "joke" suggests its meaning by using pseudocode that doesn't actually even make sense in 99% of computer languages in wide use.
Which is why I call it a "dumb" joke. It's either completely self-inconsistent, or it's just lazy by using pseudocode where actual code would be a much more effective and complete expression of the "joke".
It's uncommon. You've named three languages, all of them many decades old, and all of them arguably dead to varying degrees (Forth definitely dead, Lisp mostly dead, Fortran kinda dead). Compare that with hundreds of existing living languages that don't allow this syntax.
None of those examples have syntax that even approximates the syntax of the code snippet in question.
Also, language features that are hard for compilers to handle are often hard for humans to read as well. Not always, but often. It's a reasonable guiding principle that if the compiler would have a really hard time figuring out some syntax, humans are likely to have to pause as well.
Allowing numeric identifiers at the beginning of variable names would just replace one restriction with another - surely you can't have a variable name that is purely a number, so you'd instead have to have a rule that no variable name could be composed only of numbers.
Also, it's pretty clear from context that I was talking about computer languages, nice stretch there though.
Except the people who worked on the Mac team that displaced the Apple II resources are almost certainly not working on the Mac anymore so they never had to feel it.
Also, your sig is dumb. There is no language I have ever heard of that allows a variable name to begin with a number.
Wow you held out for a long time. I let mine lapse about 10 years ago for the same reason. I was by that point already calling the publication "Scientific Omnimerican", because it had essentially already morphed into Omni magazine. Pseudoscience and science fiction from cover to cover, meh.
I can't quite figure out what you're saying. Is the "something" that is "up" some kind of covered-up evidence of the supernatural and/or UFOs or other science fiction? Or is the "something" that is "up" some kind of government conspiracy to mislead people into ???I'm not sure what??? believing in UFOs via weirdly timed stories?
I genuinely don't understand what you are trying to say.
"He's a firm believer in the underlying tech and the blockchain as a source of value in itself"
Hm, therein lies perhaps some of the difference between him and me. I was enamoured with the tech early but when I saw the problem of ever increasing blockchain sizes and the pretty much unsustainable quantity of bytes that needs to be shuffled around once the number of transactions increases to anything even approaching a globally accepted scale, and when I wrote a white paper proposing some mechanisms for mitigating this that went completely ignored by the bitcoin developers, I decided that the whole thing, while a great idea in principle, was going to collapse under the weight of the mostly intractible problem of bandwidth.
I still think it's not likely to succeed in the long term, but man was it a clever idea.
How brave was he in holding onto the bitcoins? I bought mine at $30 but got too nervous when they hit $600 and cashed out. I only had about three so it's not like it was a huge windfall. But if I had 1000 bought at 25 cents apiece... man I am not sure I would have had the guts to stay in past even $10.
What do you say to the fundamental criticism that deflation decreases incentive to work? If I have a huge nugget of gold, there is little or no more being mined out of the ground, and the size of the economy is increasing, then effectively all I will need to do to live comfortably is shave off smaller and smaller pieces of gold each year to pay for my needs.
Deflation seems like it helps people who have already accumulated wealth. Inflation seems like it helps people who have not accumulated wealth.
Also Slashdot SUCKS because it makes me wait to post because "it's only been 6 seconds since I hit reply". SCREW YOU SLASHDOT, YOUR COMMENT SYSTEM HAS SUCKED FOR 18 YEARS NOW. AND I KNOW BECAUSE I'VE BEEN HERE THE WHOLE TIME.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe I need to change my opinion about American cars. I came of age in the 80's when Japanese cars were so much superior to American cars that it wasn't even funny. And so I've carried this prejudice against American cars for 30 years now.
I bought my first new car this year and I made a point to buy only a Japanese car made in Japan. I didn't even want it to be assembled in the USA. It's a 2016 Subaru Impreza. The 2017 model year moved assembly to the USA so I squeaked in just in time.
But I'm not entirely certain that this Subaru's manufacture quality is really better than the equivalent Ford really. I've seen new Fords and they look nice. And some of the smaller Ford hatchbacks actually look like very good value for the money when compared to my Subaru.
I just can't shake the feeling that American = bad engineering, poor manufacturing, and bad assembly. I need to work on it. Maybe if every crappy economy rental car weren't a low quality piece of junk Chevy/Ford I might be able to forcefully shift my point of view.
One thing is true though -- lots of American cars, especially low cost SUVs, come with ridiculously ugly interiors. The buttons and switches look like they are made for Flintstones cars.
Regardless of how you feel about politicians, I think we can all agree that Slashdot editors are retards.
His/her logic is sound. Read it again.
That's quite a lot of straw men you have there.
It's a term that has a well understood meaning. You don't get to choose what terms people use, sorry. Piracy means making copies of digital goods without paying for the right to make that copy. It's pretty simple really.
Think of making copies of copyrighted digital goods as a service. You have to pay for that service. If you don't pay for a service, you are cheating tho service provider. Piracy is cheating the provider of the "creating movies/music/software" service by not paying for the use of that service.
It's typically engaged in by cheap asses with low moral standards.
Thank you for filling out my statements with much greater detail. I agree with everything that you say and I appreciate your even tone and fair viewpoint.
For those anonymous cowards who like to sling insults rather than making coherent statements, please read the parent post and be informed.
Just because the entertainment industry is making record breaking money doesn't mean that they are also not losing alot to piracy. The "despite" term in the Slashdot headline is inaccurate and clearly shows a leech slant.
There are always winners and losers. But in California the winners have outnumbered the losers when compared to the results in most other areas, and the winners have won more spectacularly than they have in most other areas. The net result is a huge GDP.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but CA is doing really well. Whether or not the "liberal policies" have anything to do with that, I really don't know, but the implication that CA has suffered under liberal rule is absurd.
Pretty sure that increased housing prices are an inevitable consequence of economic success. More people with jobs making more money are willing to pay more for their homes and anyone who doesn't keep up has to settle for less desirable living conditions.
And California (at least, the parts that we're talking about, with housing crunches) has been spectacularly successful economically since "those liberals" took over.
Did you hear that California if considered by itself would be the 7th largest economy in the world?
People here in SV are just going to have to accept a different standard of housing than they think they are entitled to. I know I have done so.
So the entire population of the UK is 1.7 Tokyo-greater-metropolitan-areas.
But the entire population of Japan is only 3.3 Tokyo-greater-metropolitan areas.
The greater Tokyo metropolitan areas is sizeable when compared to the UK, but it's also sizeable when compared to the entire population of Japan itself.
I'm really failing to understand what the point of all of this is, and what the O.P. was even trying to say.
I actually consider Windows 10 to be completely flawed due to its forced and frequent update scheme.
I often only boot up my Windows PC every week or two. Invariably, there will be updates to process. What this means is that just about every boot takes multiple minutes to complete.
I consider an operating system that takes many minutes to start up in the year 2016 when using a fast SSD drive, to be fundamentally flawed.
Additionally, there have been times when I have left a long-running boot up and had the operating system force-reboot my system for updates while I was in the middle of actively using it.
That is 100% unacceptable. Even if by design, I consider it to be intrinsically flawed as an operating system.
These issues are so onerous to me that they lead me to hate Windows 10 with a white-hot passion. The only reason I am using it is because I have to for my VR PC ...
Is there something after the ellipsis in that translation?
Because as written it doesn't mean much.
I didn't read that article, but I can see a reasonable justifcation for the rating. Maybe sometimes people bump the turn signal stalk the wrong way and indicate the incorrect turn direction, and the indicator would help them to know that they're indicating incorrectly, thus avoiding an unexpected (from the point of other drivers) turn.
Not saying that I think it's worth dinging a car's rating over, but there might be some sense to it, especially if you consider the very limits of safety features to be an important component of a car.
I don't know the specific code in question, but I have seen enough code to have a theory.
Long-lived software projects that implement programs with complex features (and web browsers have an astounding array of features), especially those that interact directly with users, who put programs into a position of continually having to respond to extremely complex sets of inputs (just think of how many valid inputs there are to a web browser at any one moment), tend towards a style of implementation that can best be described as "layers upon layers upon layers of framework".
One aspect of programming that many engineers are, in my experience, not very good at, is deciding when to simplify frameworks versus making them more complex. I think it comes from a fear that many people have of painting themselves into a corner -- we've all seen code so inflexible that it makes extending it at a later time difficult, and I think that many people respond by going too far in the opposite direction - to avoid painting themselves into a corner, they put 100 doors in every room so that there is always a way out.
The end result is that every aspect of the complex program is designed to be extensible well beyond anything that will ever likely occur in practice. And the interactions between these complex layers of framework become so complex themselves that new layers have to be invented just to try to simplify things and allow any hope of rationally moving forward.
So what you end up with is incredibly deep stacks of function calls for almost any action, as various extensibility layers are passed through, along with the layers that consolidate previously implemented extensibility layers into simplified layers that more directly match the actual requirements of the program.
I have occasionally seen stack traces from programs like Firefox, and I expect Chrome is no different, and the depth of the stack at the point of a crash is always somewhat breathtaking. You may end up going 30 - 40 layers deep before you actually get to a piece of code that has a tangible effect on the state of the program.
Now imagine that a particular user input requires running through a function that has to call out to several parts of another framework layer, and you're going to be paying the deep stack penalty multiple times.
What you end up with is a large code base that does everything necessary, but in a way that is embellished to a nearly pathological degree, where every action takes 10 - 20 times longer than it would had that action been encoded much more directly and with far fewer framework layers.
The advantage of such a large code base is that it has enough flexibility to rarely, if ever, require a complete redesign as new feature requirements come up.
The disadvantage is that it will never operate as efficiently as a more directly coded program, and you get user interfaces that require executing literally billions of machine instructions just to effect fairly simple changes to its internal state machine.
That's your web browser.
And may I further point out that the reason that the O.P.'s sig is dumb is that it is self-contradictory ... it is trying to encode a known English phrase in a way that is identifiable as program code, to make some kind of "joke". The further you get from known, identifiable, and common code syntax, the less effective the "joke".
For example, I could define a computer language where the specific string of characters:
"2thineOWN selfbe TRUE"
has some specific and complex meaning, like say "pop the top numeric value off the stack, add 7, and push the result back on the stack".
Then I could put that mishmash of characters in my .sig as a "joke" about a Shakespearean phrase encoded in a programming language. Now anyone who read my "joke" would have to know the esoteric details of my own made-up programming language to get the "joke".
Surely you can see how self-defeating this attempt at humor would be. I'd be saying "Hey, I'm encoding some English in a programming language, isn't that funny -- oh, but to get the joke, you have to know something that nobody reading the joke would ever actually know."
I claim that encoding "to be or not to be" using variables "2b" is very similar to this. You have to know some esoteric, uncommon language that allows naming variables with leading numerals in order to accept the joke as actually making any sense.
Alternately, you have to accept that the "joke" suggests its meaning by using pseudocode that doesn't actually even make sense in 99% of computer languages in wide use.
Which is why I call it a "dumb" joke. It's either completely self-inconsistent, or it's just lazy by using pseudocode where actual code would be a much more effective and complete expression of the "joke".
It's uncommon. You've named three languages, all of them many decades old, and all of them arguably dead to varying degrees (Forth definitely dead, Lisp mostly dead, Fortran kinda dead). Compare that with hundreds of existing living languages that don't allow this syntax.
None of those examples have syntax that even approximates the syntax of the code snippet in question.
Also, language features that are hard for compilers to handle are often hard for humans to read as well. Not always, but often. It's a reasonable guiding principle that if the compiler would have a really hard time figuring out some syntax, humans are likely to have to pause as well.
Allowing numeric identifiers at the beginning of variable names would just replace one restriction with another - surely you can't have a variable name that is purely a number, so you'd instead have to have a rule that no variable name could be composed only of numbers.
Also, it's pretty clear from context that I was talking about computer languages, nice stretch there though.
Except the people who worked on the Mac team that displaced the Apple II resources are almost certainly not working on the Mac anymore so they never had to feel it.
Also, your sig is dumb. There is no language I have ever heard of that allows a variable name to begin with a number.
Wow you held out for a long time. I let mine lapse about 10 years ago for the same reason. I was by that point already calling the publication "Scientific Omnimerican", because it had essentially already morphed into Omni magazine. Pseudoscience and science fiction from cover to cover, meh.
I can't quite figure out what you're saying. Is the "something" that is "up" some kind of covered-up evidence of the supernatural and/or UFOs or other science fiction? Or is the "something" that is "up" some kind of government conspiracy to mislead people into ???I'm not sure what??? believing in UFOs via weirdly timed stories?
I genuinely don't understand what you are trying to say.
"He's a firm believer in the underlying tech and the blockchain as a source of value in itself"
Hm, therein lies perhaps some of the difference between him and me. I was enamoured with the tech early but when I saw the problem of ever increasing blockchain sizes and the pretty much unsustainable quantity of bytes that needs to be shuffled around once the number of transactions increases to anything even approaching a globally accepted scale, and when I wrote a white paper proposing some mechanisms for mitigating this that went completely ignored by the bitcoin developers, I decided that the whole thing, while a great idea in principle, was going to collapse under the weight of the mostly intractible problem of bandwidth.
I still think it's not likely to succeed in the long term, but man was it a clever idea.
How brave was he in holding onto the bitcoins? I bought mine at $30 but got too nervous when they hit $600 and cashed out. I only had about three so it's not like it was a huge windfall. But if I had 1000 bought at 25 cents apiece ... man I am not sure I would have had the guts to stay in past even $10.
What do you say to the fundamental criticism that deflation decreases incentive to work? If I have a huge nugget of gold, there is little or no more being mined out of the ground, and the size of the economy is increasing, then effectively all I will need to do to live comfortably is shave off smaller and smaller pieces of gold each year to pay for my needs.
Deflation seems like it helps people who have already accumulated wealth. Inflation seems like it helps people who have not accumulated wealth.
I'm in preference of the latter.
Hm, you think maybe knowledge of that incident is the reason that the OP said that?
That was actually funny.
Also Slashdot SUCKS because it makes me wait to post because "it's only been 6 seconds since I hit reply". SCREW YOU SLASHDOT, YOUR COMMENT SYSTEM HAS SUCKED FOR 18 YEARS NOW. AND I KNOW BECAUSE I'VE BEEN HERE THE WHOLE TIME.