It's sort of the opposite of how religious people thank God for everything good that happens in their lives, but don't seem to blame him when things go terribly wrong.
I'm still on the lookout for all those C++ compilers written in python.
Or any of the games in my library, which all appear to be C or C++, with a few C#.
Python is great... for toy programs.
These sort of rankings are meaningless except for a very broad view of a language's overall popularity. Obviously, C++ absolutely dominates the videogame industry (btw, almost no one uses straight C either). Python dominates where it well should, in areas where you don't need the raw performance as you do when creating huge, performance-critical applications like videogames. For instance, at one employer, I used Python and Groovy in a game's build system, but obviously, the game itself was all written in C++ (and parts were in Objective-C for the Mac port). The game's content creation tools were written in C#, while it used a custom scripting language for some client-side content.
These sorts of lists are like making a ranking of the most popular carpenter's tools. Most popular: the hammer! Followed by: the screwdriver. Ooh, looks like the the nail gun has moved up, while the planer has dropped in our rankings! The circular saw remains steady, while the hand saw continues its plunge - no surprise there. etc... The point is that each tool, just like programming language has pros and cons, and tends to be most useful in pretty specific situations.
What would be far more useful is a general breakdown of popular languages within specific industries or for specific types of applications. But of course, it's far easier to pull together a simple "popularity" list.
We accepted the one sided nature of trade with China with the hopes of liberalizing China through interaction. That failed.
No, we turned a blind eye to it because of the seemingly unlimited access to dirt-cheap labor.
Now that we better understand the true costs of this: rampant IP theft, corporate and military espionage, China as an emerging semi-hostile superpower to rival the US, and yes, a decades long one-sided trade war.... yeah, it's probably time to attempt to rectify the situation. But let's not paint a pretty picture about what the true reasons for opening up factories in China was all about.
Cell connections have to be paid for, which would largely negate whichever small per-user amount they actually earn for this data. It's the reason Amazon was willing to give their higher-end Kindles cell access, because they understood those are profit-making devices. It has nothing to do with the cost or capabilities of the electronics, and hasn't been for a long time.
Remember that this spying is for profit, not for any other reason.
How long before companies just stand up and say "No" to this kind of buttinsky BS?
Won't happen. Because money.
We've already seen how companies are all too willing to bend over for the Chinese govt in order to gain access to that huge market. I'm sure this will be the same. Netflix or Prime won't want to give their competitors an edge in the EU market.
This is why many sites are eliminating stars or percent or x/10 as a rating, and just giving users a choice of thumbs up or thumbs down. From what I've seen, except for a very few conscientious individuals, most users use 1-star to mean "I don't like it", and a five-star rating is "I like it".
I've occasionally felt bad giving a four-star rating to a product simply for being "good", because many times ratings are so skewed that anything with a four-star rating or worse is likely to be considered suspect - even though I feel nothing is wrong with four out of five stars for merely "good" products.
Oh, there's no doubt about the vast improvement of cameras over the past few years. There's a HUGE difference in the pictures I took and that of my brother (who has a recent iPhone w/ its excellent camera). Like I said, I'm looking forward to a better camera myself. But I'm not sure how much cameras can realistically improve beyond the current excellent state of the art. Once you can't tell the difference in quality anymore with the naked eye like with screen resolution, it just becomes a numbers bragging-rights game, and people (aside from enthusiasts) will quickly tire of that.
And as for being a phone developer... well, yeah, I can see you wanting a current phone for dev work.
Completely agree. Many game development environments I've worked in have been darkened, with windows mostly covered and overhead lights mostly off. Both programmers and artists alike seem to prefer a dim environment, where they can view their monitors all day without headache-inducing glare. It's especially important for artists to be able to see color and contrast properly, so their areas tend to be the darkest, in my recollection.
It would be nice to not have to work in a cave, but it's more practical, at least for me. I keep my home office somewhat dimly lit, with shades drawn and a single 30 watt bulb (equivalent) in a shaded lamp for illumination.
I guess it depends where you go. I occasionally visit some of the smaller, more technically-oriented subreddits, like for programming languages and game development, and I've found most people there to be pretty nice and helpful.
Two years? The technology isn't moving that fast anymore. I spent $600 on a premium phone over five years ago, and consider it money very well spent. I still haven't found an app that won't run on it because it's too old or slow.
But the battery is old and a bit worn out now, and I'm no longer getting security updates, so I'm going to upgrade soon. I'm looking forward to getting a phone with a more convenience locking mechanism (fingerprint reader or facial camera - we'll see) and a better camera, but other than that, there are really no new significant features from what was available five years ago.
I think I wasn't clear on this, but I was talking about breaking up large-ish tasks, not the project as a whole, so I guess we probably agree. Like, I've got a task (or even a sub-task) that I think will take maybe two weeks. If the task is a single monolithic feature, I'll then break it up into a number of smaller chunks, because that's how development typically works anyhow (as you mentioned).
On that super detailed schedule the publisher insisted on? We just ignored the "official" schedule and used a simple spreadsheet as a basic task list, adjusting it as we went according to the reality of the project. Whenever a task came due in the crapola official tracking software we used, we dutifully marked it as "finished", because it typically bore no resemblance to reality, and was literally too much work to try to change it (it all had to go through a manager, as we couldn't even adjust the schedule ourselves).
Fortunately, we delivered a solid game in the time allotted, so no one scrutinized our method too much. This was before Agile really took off (at least within the videogame industry), but it just goes to show you that it's far better to give people enough latitude to do what works best, so long as you have a good team. We didn't know any of the terms commonly used now, but we employed a lot of the same general principles.
People have been predicting the lego-block coding future for the last thirty years at least, and it's still not here. Thirty years from now, it will still be "just around the corner."
Oh, I'm sure it will happen to some degree eventually, but if you've ever worked in a complex production environment with thousands of fragile moving parts, you'd understand how terribly far away from that dream we really are. Essentially, it's still a complete fantasy for all but the most trivial of toy projects.
I agree that splitting a 6 month work item into 4-16h sub-tasks is retarded. That's a classic example of putting dogmatic adherence to methodology before common sense. I worked for a videogame publisher that insisted on a super-detailed schedule like this at the very start of the project - before the game's design was even finalized. Idiocy.
At most sane places where I've worked, the rule of thumb was to avoid tasks longer than 5 days, and preferably shorter, but it's ONLY a rule of thumb. Sometimes you're just working on very big, complex systems, and trying to get too specific is simply counter-productive. If it comes to that, I'll break the task into "research/prototyping", "implementation" (sometimes in several chunks), "fine-tuning", "integration and testing", and "alterations and bug-fixing" phases (or approximations of those). Almost every significant feature has these development phases anyhow, so you might as well take advantage of it to split up your big tasks.
That "visual guide" is very misleading because it's only showing the discretionary budget, making it look like defense spending is by far the largest part of the total budget. Here's a more accurate, if less visually pleasing, set of charts.
People might like to complain about how everything these days is about graphics over substance
This was a popular argument a few years ago. These days, it's tough to make that argument with a straight face when Minecraft and the resurgence of pixel-art-styled games clearly demonstrates otherwise.
I can go on Steam / GOG, the PS store, or Xbox store and find a bunch of old-school side-scrollers, RPGs, beat-up-ups, or whatever genre you like, all with graphics and gameplay teleported from many decades back in addition to the most modern, slickest of AAA productions, and just about everything in-between. So, "whatever we have now" encompasses a broader and more diverse range of games than we've ever had before. And I can legally browse and download a vast selection of it over the internet, which is pretty much as convenient as things could possibly get.
Personally, I think gamers are living in a fantastic time, with more access to a broader range of games than we've ever had before. Yes, there are trends which are annoying or even alarming, but all in all, things are pretty great for modern gamers. If you're not enjoying games like you use to, maybe it's just you, not the games.
Oh man, I just got a wave of nostalgia thinking just from you mentioning those. They were amazing for building working models of all sorts of things, and I absolutely loved playing with those. You're correct that they were extremely well engineered.
Lego countered with it's own Technic series, like the Auto Chassis set I had, with which you could build a working car chassis with rack and pinion steering, working suspension, and even gear shifts. I actually built a working robotic arm out of that kit. Fun stuff. Arguably less well built, but it did have the advantage of working with all my existing legos.
I've been watching Hulu for months and I don't know what "annoying bugs they pasted in the corners" you are talking about. I pay for the commercial-free Hulu.
I paid for the commercial-free version myself. Before that, there was no way I'd pay for a service that also showed me ads. Hulu would often display the logo of a local affiliate station, like the local Fox station when I was watching the X-Files, or they'd display the distributor (Viz Media) when I was watching some anime. I cancelled a few years ago, so maybe they're not doing it as often. Or maybe just not on the shows you've watched. It apparently doesn't bother many people, but I tend to find it extremely distracting.
When companies do things like this, they degrade the viewing experience from what you get from pirating a show, which is typically a nice ad-free, watermark-free experience. People generally don't mind paying for a service if it's a high quality experience, is convenient, and is reasonably priced. Take away any aspect of that trifecta, and you can expect illicit streaming to go on the rise.
If they start showing me unskippable ads, I'll immediately cancel my subscription simply to send them a message. Maybe even skippable ones. I don't want them to think they can crack the door open on this crap at all. It's just a tiny slide from there to a few "relevant sponsored messages" here and there.
I unsubscribed from Hulu because of those annoying bugs they pasted in the corners. I unsubscribed immediately from Prime's anime channel because their subtitles were terrible. Maybe I'm more picky than most, but I'm not going to pay for something that's actively annoying me. I'd rather do without. There are plenty of other things vying for my entertainment time and money.
A bit off topic, but I was somewhat surprised to learn that cold northern waters actually contain a lot more nutrients for the undersea ecosystem than warmer oceans further south (I think I learned this from Blue Planet?). We think of those ocean regions as life-rich because of the niche areas of coral reefs or shallows, but in the open ocean, it's much less so.
Back on topic, I notice that these are designed for deployment for up to five years without maintenance. I'll be interested to hear if they can hit that target, or perhaps take it even further. Since these are reasonably small modules (by data center standards), it seems like it might be feasible to deploy things like this en masse, and if a single module has issues, it's not going to be an insurmountable problem. Obviously, they'd have to figure out if it makes any economic sense to do this, but it's pretty neat as an experiment.
Slashdot Mirror
It's sort of the opposite of how religious people thank God for everything good that happens in their lives, but don't seem to blame him when things go terribly wrong.
So... C, the language the python interpreter is written in then?
I'm still on the lookout for all those C++ compilers written in python.
Or any of the games in my library, which all appear to be C or C++, with a few C#.
Python is great... for toy programs.
These sort of rankings are meaningless except for a very broad view of a language's overall popularity. Obviously, C++ absolutely dominates the videogame industry (btw, almost no one uses straight C either). Python dominates where it well should, in areas where you don't need the raw performance as you do when creating huge, performance-critical applications like videogames. For instance, at one employer, I used Python and Groovy in a game's build system, but obviously, the game itself was all written in C++ (and parts were in Objective-C for the Mac port). The game's content creation tools were written in C#, while it used a custom scripting language for some client-side content.
These sorts of lists are like making a ranking of the most popular carpenter's tools. Most popular: the hammer! Followed by: the screwdriver. Ooh, looks like the the nail gun has moved up, while the planer has dropped in our rankings! The circular saw remains steady, while the hand saw continues its plunge - no surprise there. etc... The point is that each tool, just like programming language has pros and cons, and tends to be most useful in pretty specific situations.
What would be far more useful is a general breakdown of popular languages within specific industries or for specific types of applications. But of course, it's far easier to pull together a simple "popularity" list.
My employer and I have established exactly how much money I'm worth to them per year. It's a silly premise to begin with.
We accepted the one sided nature of trade with China with the hopes of liberalizing China through interaction. That failed.
No, we turned a blind eye to it because of the seemingly unlimited access to dirt-cheap labor.
Now that we better understand the true costs of this: rampant IP theft, corporate and military espionage, China as an emerging semi-hostile superpower to rival the US, and yes, a decades long one-sided trade war.... yeah, it's probably time to attempt to rectify the situation. But let's not paint a pretty picture about what the true reasons for opening up factories in China was all about.
Cell connections have to be paid for, which would largely negate whichever small per-user amount they actually earn for this data. It's the reason Amazon was willing to give their higher-end Kindles cell access, because they understood those are profit-making devices. It has nothing to do with the cost or capabilities of the electronics, and hasn't been for a long time.
Remember that this spying is for profit, not for any other reason.
Hillary was torpedoed by Comey.
What, like with a submarine or something?
How long before companies just stand up and say "No" to this kind of buttinsky BS?
Won't happen. Because money.
We've already seen how companies are all too willing to bend over for the Chinese govt in order to gain access to that huge market. I'm sure this will be the same. Netflix or Prime won't want to give their competitors an edge in the EU market.
This is why many sites are eliminating stars or percent or x/10 as a rating, and just giving users a choice of thumbs up or thumbs down. From what I've seen, except for a very few conscientious individuals, most users use 1-star to mean "I don't like it", and a five-star rating is "I like it".
I've occasionally felt bad giving a four-star rating to a product simply for being "good", because many times ratings are so skewed that anything with a four-star rating or worse is likely to be considered suspect - even though I feel nothing is wrong with four out of five stars for merely "good" products.
Oh, there's no doubt about the vast improvement of cameras over the past few years. There's a HUGE difference in the pictures I took and that of my brother (who has a recent iPhone w/ its excellent camera). Like I said, I'm looking forward to a better camera myself. But I'm not sure how much cameras can realistically improve beyond the current excellent state of the art. Once you can't tell the difference in quality anymore with the naked eye like with screen resolution, it just becomes a numbers bragging-rights game, and people (aside from enthusiasts) will quickly tire of that.
And as for being a phone developer... well, yeah, I can see you wanting a current phone for dev work.
Completely agree. Many game development environments I've worked in have been darkened, with windows mostly covered and overhead lights mostly off. Both programmers and artists alike seem to prefer a dim environment, where they can view their monitors all day without headache-inducing glare. It's especially important for artists to be able to see color and contrast properly, so their areas tend to be the darkest, in my recollection.
It would be nice to not have to work in a cave, but it's more practical, at least for me. I keep my home office somewhat dimly lit, with shades drawn and a single 30 watt bulb (equivalent) in a shaded lamp for illumination.
I guess it depends where you go. I occasionally visit some of the smaller, more technically-oriented subreddits, like for programming languages and game development, and I've found most people there to be pretty nice and helpful.
Two years? The technology isn't moving that fast anymore. I spent $600 on a premium phone over five years ago, and consider it money very well spent. I still haven't found an app that won't run on it because it's too old or slow.
But the battery is old and a bit worn out now, and I'm no longer getting security updates, so I'm going to upgrade soon. I'm looking forward to getting a phone with a more convenience locking mechanism (fingerprint reader or facial camera - we'll see) and a better camera, but other than that, there are really no new significant features from what was available five years ago.
I think I wasn't clear on this, but I was talking about breaking up large-ish tasks, not the project as a whole, so I guess we probably agree. Like, I've got a task (or even a sub-task) that I think will take maybe two weeks. If the task is a single monolithic feature, I'll then break it up into a number of smaller chunks, because that's how development typically works anyhow (as you mentioned).
On that super detailed schedule the publisher insisted on? We just ignored the "official" schedule and used a simple spreadsheet as a basic task list, adjusting it as we went according to the reality of the project. Whenever a task came due in the crapola official tracking software we used, we dutifully marked it as "finished", because it typically bore no resemblance to reality, and was literally too much work to try to change it (it all had to go through a manager, as we couldn't even adjust the schedule ourselves).
Fortunately, we delivered a solid game in the time allotted, so no one scrutinized our method too much. This was before Agile really took off (at least within the videogame industry), but it just goes to show you that it's far better to give people enough latitude to do what works best, so long as you have a good team. We didn't know any of the terms commonly used now, but we employed a lot of the same general principles.
People have been predicting the lego-block coding future for the last thirty years at least, and it's still not here. Thirty years from now, it will still be "just around the corner."
Oh, I'm sure it will happen to some degree eventually, but if you've ever worked in a complex production environment with thousands of fragile moving parts, you'd understand how terribly far away from that dream we really are. Essentially, it's still a complete fantasy for all but the most trivial of toy projects.
I agree that splitting a 6 month work item into 4-16h sub-tasks is retarded. That's a classic example of putting dogmatic adherence to methodology before common sense. I worked for a videogame publisher that insisted on a super-detailed schedule like this at the very start of the project - before the game's design was even finalized. Idiocy.
At most sane places where I've worked, the rule of thumb was to avoid tasks longer than 5 days, and preferably shorter, but it's ONLY a rule of thumb. Sometimes you're just working on very big, complex systems, and trying to get too specific is simply counter-productive. If it comes to that, I'll break the task into "research/prototyping", "implementation" (sometimes in several chunks), "fine-tuning", "integration and testing", and "alterations and bug-fixing" phases (or approximations of those). Almost every significant feature has these development phases anyhow, so you might as well take advantage of it to split up your big tasks.
That "visual guide" is very misleading because it's only showing the discretionary budget, making it look like defense spending is by far the largest part of the total budget. Here's a more accurate, if less visually pleasing, set of charts.
2018:
https://www.usgovernmentspendi...
2007:
https://www.usgovernmentspendi...
TL;DR version: the budget for defense spending in 2018 was 21%, and in 2007 was 24%.
People might like to complain about how everything these days is about graphics over substance
This was a popular argument a few years ago. These days, it's tough to make that argument with a straight face when Minecraft and the resurgence of pixel-art-styled games clearly demonstrates otherwise.
I can go on Steam / GOG, the PS store, or Xbox store and find a bunch of old-school side-scrollers, RPGs, beat-up-ups, or whatever genre you like, all with graphics and gameplay teleported from many decades back in addition to the most modern, slickest of AAA productions, and just about everything in-between. So, "whatever we have now" encompasses a broader and more diverse range of games than we've ever had before. And I can legally browse and download a vast selection of it over the internet, which is pretty much as convenient as things could possibly get.
Personally, I think gamers are living in a fantastic time, with more access to a broader range of games than we've ever had before. Yes, there are trends which are annoying or even alarming, but all in all, things are pretty great for modern gamers. If you're not enjoying games like you use to, maybe it's just you, not the games.
My dad stepped on a Pyraminx on my bedroom floor. He was hopping mad about that!
Oh man, I just got a wave of nostalgia thinking just from you mentioning those. They were amazing for building working models of all sorts of things, and I absolutely loved playing with those. You're correct that they were extremely well engineered.
Lego countered with it's own Technic series, like the Auto Chassis set I had, with which you could build a working car chassis with rack and pinion steering, working suspension, and even gear shifts. I actually built a working robotic arm out of that kit. Fun stuff. Arguably less well built, but it did have the advantage of working with all my existing legos.
I've been watching Hulu for months and I don't know what "annoying bugs they pasted in the corners" you are talking about. I pay for the commercial-free Hulu.
I paid for the commercial-free version myself. Before that, there was no way I'd pay for a service that also showed me ads. Hulu would often display the logo of a local affiliate station, like the local Fox station when I was watching the X-Files, or they'd display the distributor (Viz Media) when I was watching some anime. I cancelled a few years ago, so maybe they're not doing it as often. Or maybe just not on the shows you've watched. It apparently doesn't bother many people, but I tend to find it extremely distracting.
When companies do things like this, they degrade the viewing experience from what you get from pirating a show, which is typically a nice ad-free, watermark-free experience. People generally don't mind paying for a service if it's a high quality experience, is convenient, and is reasonably priced. Take away any aspect of that trifecta, and you can expect illicit streaming to go on the rise.
If they start showing me unskippable ads, I'll immediately cancel my subscription simply to send them a message. Maybe even skippable ones. I don't want them to think they can crack the door open on this crap at all. It's just a tiny slide from there to a few "relevant sponsored messages" here and there.
I unsubscribed from Hulu because of those annoying bugs they pasted in the corners. I unsubscribed immediately from Prime's anime channel because their subtitles were terrible. Maybe I'm more picky than most, but I'm not going to pay for something that's actively annoying me. I'd rather do without. There are plenty of other things vying for my entertainment time and money.
A bit off topic, but I was somewhat surprised to learn that cold northern waters actually contain a lot more nutrients for the undersea ecosystem than warmer oceans further south (I think I learned this from Blue Planet?). We think of those ocean regions as life-rich because of the niche areas of coral reefs or shallows, but in the open ocean, it's much less so.
Back on topic, I notice that these are designed for deployment for up to five years without maintenance. I'll be interested to hear if they can hit that target, or perhaps take it even further. Since these are reasonably small modules (by data center standards), it seems like it might be feasible to deploy things like this en masse, and if a single module has issues, it's not going to be an insurmountable problem. Obviously, they'd have to figure out if it makes any economic sense to do this, but it's pretty neat as an experiment.
I guess humor causes cancer in California as well.
Is that roundup doesn't cause cancer.
Nonsense. Everything causes cancer in California.