I've ran into people who've been working with Java and C# for years who haven't learned a damned thing about the craft of writing decent code since leaving school
At least they went to school.:)
And I'm sorry but what language doesn't have lowest-common denominator programmers.
That's not the point. Javascript however was picked up by non-programmers. C is a terrible language for non-programmers too, but there aren't literally millions of people who don't know the first thing about programming writing C. You have that with Javascript, not because their is anything particularly intrinsicly good about javascript, but because javascript is what's embedded in the browser, and they want to manipulate the browser.
If the browser had embedded Pascal, we'd have a bunch of non-programmers writing shitty Pascal, but at least with Pascal there's less to hang yourself with.
. I just think people should start with languages like C and JS via text editor before they're allowed to touch an IDE.
Actual programmers? In an academic environment? Absolutely.
Self taught web "programmers" and "designers"? Never going to happen. So they should have simpler tools.
Forbidding people from signing contracts that both parties deem as mutually beneficial is wrong and destructive to the economy.
Right. Because the unemployed guy with a mortgage and family; he's on an equal footing when negotiating his wage with Walmart.
If he doesn't like the terms walmart offers, he can gamble that he'll find something better before the bank takes his home.
Seriously, to talk of equals signing mutally agreeable contracts is bullshit. These people are in a "take what they can get" position.
There is nothing wrong with a young, unskilled worker not making as much as a man or woman in the prime years of their earning power.
So are you in favor of a rising minimum wage with age then? So that every "man or woman in the prime years of their earning power" are making more than the high school kid dipping fries after school?
I found the combat in TSW to be incredibly boring, with most fights taking too long. It got to the point where it was taking 30-45 seconds to kill a mob,
Fascinating. I blame modern MMORPG flaws on you then. lol. Just kidding of course, but I find the pace of modern MMO battles to be ABSURDLY fast paced.
I remember spending 30+ seconds solo killing level 5 rats in Everquest 1 back in the day, and the sometimes spending multiple minutes taking down a routine deep dungeon pull. And I'm not talking a tank or healer soloing, I'm for that I'm talking a group -- with the tank tanking, healers keeping everyone alive -- pacing their output not just for aggro but to ensure they have mana to make it through the fight, and not be OOM for the add that wanders up post fight. Fights with the enchanter and bard working over time to drop slows and roots and mezes to reduce the incoming dps so that the healers could pace themselves.
Where mob positioning really mattered, and the fights lasted long enough that people could actually position and get into position.
The entire thing was a group balancing act with all kinds of feedback, and it took place at a pace where you could make adjustments, see the results, and then adjust it again.
Nowadays in modern MMOs regular fights over in less than 5 seconds, mana and health regenerate like crazy between fights so there is no consideration or need to consider things like resources, or position, or anything. And 50 fights like that is THAT is FAR more boring than 5 fights that take 10x a long time but are each a balancing act.
These days even the boss fights are frequently over in less than 10 or 20 seconds rarely 30. I have to take a 3 man group up against raid mobs from old expansions in EQ2 for example to see a fight last over a minute. The pacing is all wrong in my opinion.
I want a game with 5 to 10 minute group boss fights, and 1 minute trash mob fights. I want to *think* about what I'm doing, and why I'm doing it. I want there to be cases where I sprint through a fight to maximize my DPS to end it quickly because this particular mobs DPS is especially high, and other cases where its far more sensible to hold back and pace the fight -- because if I go all out, I'll finish the fight depleted while the healers are still full and that will cause downtime, but if I pace my output to what the healers can sustain, there isn't any. I want tactics, and positioning, and people thinking, and communicating during fights.
Especially since I was more or less just using one skill 5 times in a row, followed by two finishers (one for each weapon)
Clearly more mob variety is needed. And this is where slower fights can be an advantage. In EQ1, spells took long enough to cast that you could see them casting, identify what kind of spell it was and react to it, cooldowns likewise we often quite long, so you'd save up for the mob doing a complete heal etc and then that's when you'd go for the stun; and there was time that if you missed it someone else in the group could still try instead of you both burning your cooldown to stop the same case. Things were a lot more interactive. Some mobs would enrage (riposte all attacks) so you needed to pay attention and stop attacking when they did that, others would run at low health so you needed to pay attention for that, others would run at low health if they were the last mob in the fight otherwise they'd fight to the death... so you'd pay attention and kill them in a particular order to minimize runners etc.
Of course, some people would gravitate towards the easiest simplest least complicated mobs, that had no special tricks or traits and then grind on those, and then complain it was boring and slow...
Last news I have (from the time GrockLaw still existed), most of the patents were already invalidated - but the judge decided that this small fact shouldn't change the veredict.
My impression was that the judge assumed that would be sorted out in the appeal.
but they can't fix a nearly ten year old bug with find
I looked at the bug; its for a bug with find in an xml document. In ten years of using firefox I can't remember the last time I opened an xml document with it; and I've probably opened fewer than a dozen. And I'm a software dev (there are just much better dedicated tools for the job than firefox). The average user doesn't open xml directly at all, except by accident.
That's not to say its not a bug or that it shouldn't be fixed, but I can sort of understand why nobody's gotten around to addressing this.
I do wonder if its a stupid easy to fix bug, or something more involved that is just way more effort than benefit to anyone, and the only reason to really close it would be so people like you couldn't point to it as a 10 year old bug with find.:)
"After 3 days of deliberations, a jury has ordered Samsung to pay $290 million to Apple for infringement of several of its patents in multiple Samsung smartphones and tablets."
Ok.
"The verdict is the second victory for Apple in its multiyear patent fight against Samsung in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. Last year a jury in the same San Jose courtroom ruled Samsung should pay just over $1 billion for infringement of five Apple patents in multiple Samsung phones and tablets."
So, first they one a billion in court, then this win for 290 million.
"But afterward, Judge Lucy Koh ordered a new trial to reconsider $450 million of the damages after finding the previous jury had applied an 'impermissible legal theory' to its calculations."
Oh... ok... so not really a billion. 450million is being reconsidered, but there is this 290 million win. Still good for apple, though right?
"Thursday's verdict is the result of that new trial."
Wait what? So this isn't new money they won, but rather that of the 450M of previous win they we're fighting to keep, they've just lost 160M.
Wouldn't that have been the correct way to start?
Something like "Trial to reconsider $450M of previous $1B settlement has been reduced by $160M to $290M."
And that's assuming the patents stand up long enough for the checks to get written, something I understand may not happen as the patents themselves are facing invalidation.
Seriously, this article made it sound like another big win for apple, when in reality its really news that their one big win has been cut down...yet again.
You will still need the 3 years of college math just to understand what you did.
Sometimes yes, and sometimes no.
For a simple example:
You need integral calculus to find the area underneath a curve, and a good understanding of limits and other pre-calculus to understand how the integration itself works.
Wolfram et al doesn't change that.
However, you don't need integral calculus to ask: "what's the area under this curve" and understand the answer.
Similarly carbon dating uses ODEs, but even a child can understand the question "How old is this fossil?, and the answer, "50 million years". Even if they never know what an ODE is.
Work arounds to flaws in the language do not make it a better language.
It should be clear from the way it's used
Except when it isn't.
or by the documentation (if it exists)
You know it won't.
This is true of not only Javascript, but every dynamic language.
JavaScript is worse than others. In part because its used by some of the lowest common denenominator programmers. "script kids who copy-pasta shit together".
You don't give people with the least discipline or skill at programming a language that has the least rules. Yes, it makes programming something that "works" easier. But it does so by making the programs themselves unmaintainable garbage.
Its not a bad language per se, but its a terrible language for the role it gained dominance in.
One thing I thought was interesting about the WiiMote was that it was one of the only (probably the only popular one) controller which was ambidextrous.
Interesting point. It was physically ambidextrous in the sense that it was symmetrical, but it was far from ambidextrous.
Any game that required you to hold it like a gamepad presumed it would be the same orientation, (ie like an NES gamepad). To reprogrammit to work the 'other way' would require both the buttons to be swapped and the d-pad inverted. I don't think many (if any) titles supported that.
And when held like a remote, it was more ambidextrous than most games, but often the game needed to be designed for lefties, or allow for it.
Wii Sports for example let you set left and right handed use, for each sport individually. (Kudos to Nintendo there; I do most of the sports left handed, but I golf right handed (and not especially well) due to having grown up in a house with only right handed clubs.)
But many of the 3rd party mini-games & party games did not allow for left handed use. Usually things were fine, but there'd always be one or two spots where it would go all wrong.
The one that leaps to mind was a frisbee toss minigame in one of the titles we had.
The game was expecting a left to right-up flick. So attempting it left handed was a right to left flick, and it went all wrong. Most of the time it didn't even recognize the flick at all, would react half-assed before or after the actual flick. You could hold it upside down, but that was still botched because down was now up. And it would react like you just threw it into the ground.
I just switched to doing it right handed. Kind of annoying really.
For what its worth as background, as a lefty I liked the xbox 360 controller (don't have an xbox, but have a controller paired with my PC); and I liked the wii-u classic controller. I FPS with my right hand on WASD, and my left on the mouse. The mouse I'm currently using is a razer deathadder left handed model, with the buttons programmed so that the left mouse button is on the left. (I like the left mouse for the ergo comfort, but after years of using RH mice, my middle finger is my 'left click', and my index finger is 'right'. (The fact that Razer defaults them 'backwards' drives me nuts, as after a reboot, the buttons are backwards until the razer programmability software is loaded, which is retarded.)
I also tried switching them in the windows mouse control panel, but that had all kinds of side effects... they were right on my desktop, but backwards when I RDP into another unit... which was far more annoying than the couple seconds of stupid at startup.
If Razer is reading this, save which button is left and right right on the mouse itself. But I'm well and off on a tangent now.:)
all the while you know the media industry would automate that mail process in no time
They'd still pay $5.00+ per notice sent. That ought to motivate them to eliminate duplicates, and bogus nonsense. It would be be millions of dollars a year.
Your right of course, that getting the documents in paper might still be an extra cost for the ISP.
Is charging a handling fee for eaach takedown request you handle prohibited? I don't mind paying someone to open the mail and process it, if I'm paid $5 per item. Go ahead, knock yourself out.
We had several organizations that sent us so much bogus info that we ended up blocking their domain.
That raises an interesting question:
Are you required to take takedown notices via email? Given the glut of garbage, bogus information, and so forth, coupled with the fact that take down requests are a legal obligation
I almost wonder if you could have required they be sent by registered, traceable, mail or courier.
It shouldn't be your job to filter someone elses raw automated garbage, even if you have an obligation to respond in good faith to proper takedown requests.
It should read "Thus you cannot imply from the existence of an element 0, that the first element is element 0.
The enumeration of memory cells by the pattern of bits that accesses them is the most natural way to enumerate them.
The lowest element is the first element in any natural ordering of things.
Its an arbitrary assignment, but its the most natural arbitrary assignment possible.
2s complement interpretations of the address lines, or mathematical overflow/underflow is all valid, but is a more complex interpretation. And no normal human being would ever default to using 4 bit to enumerate objects from -8 to 7.
Which, due to 20 bit addressing and wrap-around is directly followed by the address 0.
So you agree there's an address 0? The rest is just a lot of handwaving to try and avoid admitting that its counting from zero.
Sorry, but that address I was speaking about at that point (first address of BIOS ROM in the original IBM PC) is definitely not represented by FFFF:0000.
The reset vector for the 8086 processor is at address FFFF0h (16 bytes below 1 MB). The value of the CS register at reset is FFFFh and the value of the IP register at reset is 0000h to form the segmented address FFFFh:0000h, which maps to physical address FFFF0h.
Anyway, this segmentation is a speciality of the 8086; it is in no way natural
Its somewhat clumsy, but there is nothing unnatural about the actual numbering itself. the segment and offset overlap in a very simple logical way.
If you go to a single stick of RAM, you'll find that for any address there is a corresponding memory cell. Which one is the first is therefore simply a question of declaration, not a question of naturalness. Indeed, if you look at early memory chips without all the modern optimizations, you'll see that if you exchange two address lines on the chip it won't really matter, because while it will read a different physical memory cell, it will do so consistently. Which demonstrates that at this level the address isn't even a number, but just a bit pattern.
Semantics.
If I draw a 4 x 4 grid, and label the cells 0 to 15 on a transparecy, and then rotate the transparency 90 degrees the cells are still numbered 0 to 15. That doesn't number them 1 to 16.
That's all switching address lines around does; swaps rows and columns around. They're still numbered from 0 to n.
No. 0,0,0,0 is one address, and 0,0,0,1 is another address. Also, why do you consider 0,0,0,1 the second address, and not e.g. 1,0,0,0?
As if you don't know the answer:
0000 = 0 0001 = 1 0010 = 2 0011 = 3
That's not blind luck. Hardware is designed that way. We don't have to declaratively "assign" the cells ordinal numbers as its an inherent property of the design. Whatever is 0000 is logical 0. Whatever is 0001 is logical 1. Whatever cell 1111 wired to is logical 15.
As to why I consider 0 first, then 1, and all the way 15 last? That is the natural ordering.
Plus as you know by treating the address lines as a binary representation of the address, we also benefit from being able to do things like address arithmetic and binary shifting, directly against the address encoding and have it have meaningful semantics.
After all, all I did here was to write down the bits in a different order.
For example, the 8086 expects to be able to read instructions starting at address FFFF0 (note that 8086 physical addresses had 20 bits). Therefore if you interpret addresses as signed values, you could say that the natural base of 8086 memory is -16.
That's the reset vector, and its not the 'first address' it can read, its simply the address it reads from by default after a reset.
Therefore you could also say the original IBM PC had a natural base of -65536.
Yes, clearly that would be the most natural way of interpreting that... no. wait. That would be a pointlessly convoluted way of interpreting it. Ditto for treating FFFF0 as -16, which is just plain silly because its probably more accurate to write it as FFFF:0000. That would be address 0, in segment FFFF.
Of course that neglects the video memory mapped in a region
Sorry. No. That all happens on top of the physical address space. Think about the RAM or ROMs, not the more complicated stuff layered on top of them.
Therefore (a) the interpretation of memory as an array is not a perfect match,
A stick of RAM as an array of cells is really about as perfect as it gets.
and (b) even if you do so, there's absolutely no reason to assume it is 0-based.
How are the physical addresses in a DRAM chip numbered? (and what signals would you need to put on the wire to read or write to the cell? )
That's right, they start at 0, always. Whether its a 128 byte rom from 1976 to a 4GB DDR3-DRAM from 2013.
And the why? Goes down to how you signal on the wire itself. If you have 4 wires to use for the address line, then 0,0,0,0 is the first address, 0001 the second, and so forth.
Everything you've listed is *an artifact of C*, at least in the context of the gamut of languages also thus far mentioned.
Everything is an artifact of the hardware. The fundamental properties of the computer itself. C is just closer to the hardware. Its not artifacts of C its artifacts of the hardware.
You're too stuck in C-think to realise how different other languages are, and how Algoloid-specific your knowledge is.
I've worked with LISP and ML and Smalltalk and XSL and SQL... but that's beside the point. I'm not stuck in C-think. I'm "stuck" in assembler and binary think; you know the actual hardware itself. Registers and opcodes, where memory itself is just an array of cells. You mistake it as "C-think" because C is quite close to the hardware, but the point is that zero based counting is not an aritfact of C, its an artifact of the hardware itself, its reflected in C because C is close to the hardware.
What is "allocating" and "an address" in LISP? Or in Forth? Or in prolog?
The further from the hardware you get the less of it you see. But LISP uses zero based counting (AREF, CHAR). And numbering conventionally begins with zero in Forth too.
You misunderstood what I wrote about the virtual pointer table. The elements of the pointer table itself is accessed by offset. (its an array of function pointers) Yes the *contents* of the table are function pointers.
For someone who clearly knows C++ much better than most, I'm surprised you didn't realize what I meant.
Since the computer doesn't know arrays at the fundamental level, every property of an array (including its existence) is an artefact of the language.
At the fundamental level, computer memory itself is an array. Its pretty much the ONLY thing the computer does know.
The code itself does nothing but arithmetic and indirect memory accesses.
On physical arrays of memory.
The properties of language array abstractions are mapped to that physical array.
Because the physical array is zero based, any language mapping of the abstract concept on to memory is either going to inherit that, or do extra work to hide it.
No. It is trivial to code an 1-based array (or a 42-based array) in assembly: Instead of the true address of your array, use a value that differs by the element size[...].
So instead of using the address, which you start with, you do something extra.
And are you REALLY advocating that passing an address to "not the array" and relying on adding indexes to that along with possibly overflow arithmetic to result in an address that is in the array is as "simple" and "trivial" as 0 based indexing?
In any case through this discussion it seems to reveal that my argument that 0 based indexing is natural rests on the assumption and agreement that physical memory itself is arranged / accessed as zero based array(s).
You seem to argue that arrays are purely a language construct. I disagree with that.
The abstract concept of a type and the implementation details of that type are not the same thing, although they are both important for a programmer to know.
Agreed.
Languages that have a richer abstract model for arrays, rather than having arrays be merely syntaxic sugar for pointer arithmetic, also allow far more static analysis, allowing opportunities for the elimination, optimization or parallelization of processing that a C compiler would struggle to identify.
That tries to argue the point by suggesting that a richer language and more abstract models hides the implementation details. It hides the implementation detail that its still zero based.
Things are still zero based. You can jump through some hoops to try and hide this from the programmer if you want, but that's all you are doing, and if the programmer ever has to dig into the real guts of what's going on he or she is faced with the cold reality that everything is zero based behind the scenes.
And its not just arrays. Its strings. Its the virtual pointer table internal to a c++ class object instance. If they dig all the way down to assembly language its the stack, its the member offsets of class/object members. Anything and everything that uses offsets.
If we want to mostly hide that for programmer convenience in high level languages that's fine. But lets not pretend its some "artifact of C". Its how computers really work. And a good programmer should know that, even they use a higher level language where they don't have to think about it most of the time.
Oh no, we might have to treat it like a struct, the horror, the humanity.
Wait, what are you storing in the struct? Remember, X is the address of the array, and x_base is address-1 so that you can add n for x[n] to get the element. You are NOT planning to actually store x_base in the struct are you?
You've just suggested we implement a simple array as a struct that contains a pointer to an address outside the struct so that we can add offsets to it to get addresses back inside the struct!!
How you can't see that this is a terrible idea and a lot more complicated I can't understand. For example, now you can't pass the array (now a struct) by value, or make a simple copy of it by just doing a memcpy. You'd have to manually fix the x_base otherwise it'll point to the original structure.
Performance-wise then, recursive calls are no better than they were before because you still have to recalculate x_base for each copy placed on the stack. Same overhead as just recalculating x_base on the fly in each call.
What did you think it was accomplishing exactly?
I've looked into this issue for a long time The rest of your comments show equal lack of thought.
Yeah. I'm going to have to disagree with you here.
and for every piece of code that works better with a zero based array I can show you another that works best with one based array, so in the end is a wash. Either one is fine.
Look, zero based indexing is the natural implementation. You are jumping through serious contortions just to TRY and cram one based indexing into it, and you aren't even succeeding with a compelling easy to use implementation.
Ruining an arrays simple memory copy semantics just so you can count from one is probably the most poorly thought out suggestion I've heard in a while.
You might as well just go whole hog Ada and specify index extents, because its pretty much the same amount of EXTRA work. Its not a bad idea, but make no mistake, it is extra work.
0 based indexing is the least work anything else is extra work to implement ergo 0 based indexing is the natural state
what I'm saying is that is ridiculous to assert that they have to be there or that they are even preferable.
All your contortions just hide the fact that they are zero based to the machine from the programmer. That doesn't change the fact that they are 0 based in the final analysis.
I myself don't know that it preferable, because that's how the hardware works. It wasn't a "choice" to make things zero based. They just are. We could jump through some hoops to try and hide that from the programmer, but their is a complexity cost to that in space (memory), and time (performance).
but the simple statistical fact is that people who habitually exceed the speed limit by a considerable margin do have more accidents.
Cite please.
This says that driving faster absolutely increases the odds of an accident. The faster you are going the less time you can react, this is intuitively true and no one disputes this. If we all drove 10mph, there would be fewer accidents, virtually nobody would be injured in them when they occur.
And that speed differences between drivers leads to more accidents. In other words, overtaking is dangerous, and lane changes are dangerous. Again, I don't think there is any disagreement here.
Although changes in vehicle speeds were small, driver violations of the speed limits increased when the posted speed limits were lowered. Conversely, violations decreased when limits were raised. This does not reflect a change in driver behavior, but a change in how compliance is measured, i.e., from the posted speed limit.
Read that again, they raised and lowered the speed limits in places, and found that drivers for the most part did not change their speed by very much (although did record that it went up slightly when the limits went up and down slightly when speed limits went down). But primarily there were simply more people speeding when they lowered them, and fewer people speeding when they raised them.
Accident rates were not affected.
Thus there are plenty of indications that driving too fast for the conditions (just excessively fast, or significantly faster (or slower) than the cars around you) is dangerous and leads to more accidents.
However it strongly refutes the idea that exceeding the posted speed limit is itself a significant predictor of accidents. As you can lower the speed limit 10mph, and suddenly a lot of people are speeding, and the accident rate doesn't move.
because history has given it reason to and it'll keep selecting for it until there's a stronger selection pressure to the contrary.
No, that's not how evolution works.
In rainy years, they all live. They all reproduce. And taller giraffes will not reproductively fare any better than shorter ones, everything else being equal.
"Selection" is not a concious effort, nor even a subconcious effort, nor even an instinctual biological response at a cellular level. There is no "selection in anticipation" of some future.
Really the organism does not "select" at all. Nature "selects" by literally killing off the less fit, inhibiting them from reproducing.
Slashdot Mirror
I've ran into people who've been working with Java and C# for years who haven't learned a damned thing about the craft of writing decent code since leaving school
At least they went to school. :)
And I'm sorry but what language doesn't have lowest-common denominator programmers.
That's not the point. Javascript however was picked up by non-programmers. C is a terrible language for non-programmers too, but there aren't literally millions of people who don't know the first thing about programming writing C. You have that with Javascript, not because their is anything particularly intrinsicly good about javascript, but because javascript is what's embedded in the browser, and they want to manipulate the browser.
If the browser had embedded Pascal, we'd have a bunch of non-programmers writing shitty Pascal, but at least with Pascal there's less to hang yourself with.
. I just think people should start with languages like C and JS via text editor before they're allowed to touch an IDE.
Actual programmers? In an academic environment? Absolutely.
Self taught web "programmers" and "designers"? Never going to happen. So they should have simpler tools.
Forbidding people from signing contracts that both parties deem as mutually beneficial is wrong and destructive to the economy.
Right. Because the unemployed guy with a mortgage and family; he's on an equal footing when negotiating his wage with Walmart.
If he doesn't like the terms walmart offers, he can gamble that he'll find something better before the bank takes his home.
Seriously, to talk of equals signing mutally agreeable contracts is bullshit. These people are in a "take what they can get" position.
There is nothing wrong with a young, unskilled worker not making as much as a man or woman in the prime years of their earning power.
So are you in favor of a rising minimum wage with age then? So that every "man or woman in the prime years of their earning power" are making more than the high school kid dipping fries after school?
Because right now, they are not.
Not really, the $450 was vacated a while ago and there was already a lot of stories about that. There was a new trial with a new jury.
Its still an overall reduction to their first win. To claim it is as *another* victory for apple is silly.
Its not a new win, its a lesser award from the original win.
Samsung claimed they should pay $52 million and Apple claimed like $342 million...
So they just took the difference and awarded that to apple? (342-52 = 290) Lol
I found the combat in TSW to be incredibly boring, with most fights taking too long. It got to the point where it was taking 30-45 seconds to kill a mob,
Fascinating. I blame modern MMORPG flaws on you then. lol. Just kidding of course, but I find the pace of modern MMO battles to be ABSURDLY fast paced.
I remember spending 30+ seconds solo killing level 5 rats in Everquest 1 back in the day, and the sometimes spending multiple minutes taking down a routine deep dungeon pull. And I'm not talking a tank or healer soloing, I'm for that I'm talking a group -- with the tank tanking, healers keeping everyone alive -- pacing their output not just for aggro but to ensure they have mana to make it through the fight, and not be OOM for the add that wanders up post fight. Fights with the enchanter and bard working over time to drop slows and roots and mezes to reduce the incoming dps so that the healers could pace themselves.
Where mob positioning really mattered, and the fights lasted long enough that people could actually position and get into position.
The entire thing was a group balancing act with all kinds of feedback, and it took place at a pace where you could make adjustments, see the results, and then adjust it again.
Nowadays in modern MMOs regular fights over in less than 5 seconds, mana and health regenerate like crazy between fights so there is no consideration or need to consider things like resources, or position, or anything. And 50 fights like that is THAT is FAR more boring than 5 fights that take 10x a long time but are each a balancing act.
These days even the boss fights are frequently over in less than 10 or 20 seconds rarely 30. I have to take a 3 man group up against raid mobs from old expansions in EQ2 for example to see a fight last over a minute. The pacing is all wrong in my opinion.
I want a game with 5 to 10 minute group boss fights, and 1 minute trash mob fights. I want to *think* about what I'm doing, and why I'm doing it. I want there to be cases where I sprint through a fight to maximize my DPS to end it quickly because this particular mobs DPS is especially high, and other cases where its far more sensible to hold back and pace the fight -- because if I go all out, I'll finish the fight depleted while the healers are still full and that will cause downtime, but if I pace my output to what the healers can sustain, there isn't any. I want tactics, and positioning, and people thinking, and communicating during fights.
Especially since I was more or less just using one skill 5 times in a row, followed by two finishers (one for each weapon)
Clearly more mob variety is needed. And this is where slower fights can be an advantage. In EQ1, spells took long enough to cast that you could see them casting, identify what kind of spell it was and react to it, cooldowns likewise we often quite long, so you'd save up for the mob doing a complete heal etc and then that's when you'd go for the stun; and there was time that if you missed it someone else in the group could still try instead of you both burning your cooldown to stop the same case. Things were a lot more interactive. Some mobs would enrage (riposte all attacks) so you needed to pay attention and stop attacking when they did that, others would run at low health so you needed to pay attention for that, others would run at low health if they were the last mob in the fight otherwise they'd fight to the death... so you'd pay attention and kill them in a particular order to minimize runners etc.
Of course, some people would gravitate towards the easiest simplest least complicated mobs, that had no special tricks or traits and then grind on those, and then complain it was boring and slow...
I hate those people... :p
Last news I have (from the time GrockLaw still existed), most of the patents were already invalidated - but the judge decided that this small fact shouldn't change the veredict.
My impression was that the judge assumed that would be sorted out in the appeal.
Now, given that, the six million dollar question: how many Chevy Volts have caught fire so far?
Good question... I don't know, but apparently enough that it was investigated:
http://articles.latimes.com/2012/jan/21/business/la-fi-autos-volt-20120121
I more or less expect them to reach the same conclusion with tesla btw.
but they can't fix a nearly ten year old bug with find
I looked at the bug; its for a bug with find in an xml document. In ten years of using firefox I can't remember the last time I opened an xml document with it; and I've probably opened fewer than a dozen. And I'm a software dev (there are just much better dedicated tools for the job than firefox). The average user doesn't open xml directly at all, except by accident.
That's not to say its not a bug or that it shouldn't be fixed, but I can sort of understand why nobody's gotten around to addressing this.
I do wonder if its a stupid easy to fix bug, or something more involved that is just way more effort than benefit to anyone, and the only reason to really close it would be so people like you couldn't point to it as a 10 year old bug with find. :)
"After 3 days of deliberations, a jury has ordered Samsung to pay $290 million to Apple for infringement of several of its patents in multiple Samsung smartphones and tablets."
Ok.
"The verdict is the second victory for Apple in its multiyear patent fight against Samsung in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. Last year a jury in the same San Jose courtroom ruled Samsung should pay just over $1 billion for infringement of five Apple patents in multiple Samsung phones and tablets."
So, first they one a billion in court, then this win for 290 million.
"But afterward, Judge Lucy Koh ordered a new trial to reconsider $450 million of the damages after finding the previous jury had applied an 'impermissible legal theory' to its calculations."
Oh... ok... so not really a billion. 450million is being reconsidered, but there is this 290 million win. Still good for apple, though right?
"Thursday's verdict is the result of that new trial."
Wait what? So this isn't new money they won, but rather that of the 450M of previous win they we're fighting to keep, they've just lost 160M.
Wouldn't that have been the correct way to start?
Something like "Trial to reconsider $450M of previous $1B settlement has been reduced by $160M to $290M."
And that's assuming the patents stand up long enough for the checks to get written, something I understand may not happen as the patents themselves are facing invalidation.
Seriously, this article made it sound like another big win for apple, when in reality its really news that their one big win has been cut down...yet again.
This is about right...
http://xkcd.com/435/
You will still need the 3 years of college math just to understand what you did.
Sometimes yes, and sometimes no.
For a simple example:
You need integral calculus to find the area underneath a curve, and a good understanding of limits and other pre-calculus to understand how the integration itself works.
Wolfram et al doesn't change that.
However, you don't need integral calculus to ask: "what's the area under this curve" and understand the answer.
Similarly carbon dating uses ODEs, but even a child can understand the question "How old is this fossil?, and the answer, "50 million years". Even if they never know what an ODE is.
Work arounds to flaws in the language do not make it a better language.
It should be clear from the way it's used
Except when it isn't.
or by the documentation (if it exists)
You know it won't.
This is true of not only Javascript, but every dynamic language.
JavaScript is worse than others. In part because its used by some of the lowest common denenominator programmers. "script kids who copy-pasta shit together".
You don't give people with the least discipline or skill at programming a language that has the least rules. Yes, it makes programming something that "works" easier. But it does so by making the programs themselves unmaintainable garbage.
Its not a bad language per se, but its a terrible language for the role it gained dominance in.
esides, where is all the electricity going to come from to do from pure water?
Seems like a good application for solar.
Possibly eventually even bypass the electricity step and just use solar energy to produce hydrogen directly.
http://cleantechnica.com/2013/09/27/solar-hydrogen-production-efficiency-world-record-broken-wormlike-hematite-photoanode-crushes-old-record/
5% efficiency so we're not exactly there yet, but its a possible direction for future breakthroughs.
In the meantime, solar electric arrays to power electrolysis seems like it beats "coal plants".
One thing I thought was interesting about the WiiMote was that it was one of the only (probably the only popular one) controller which was ambidextrous.
Interesting point. It was physically ambidextrous in the sense that it was symmetrical, but it was far from ambidextrous.
Any game that required you to hold it like a gamepad presumed it would be the same orientation, (ie like an NES gamepad). To reprogrammit to work the 'other way' would require both the buttons to be swapped and the d-pad inverted. I don't think many (if any) titles supported that.
And when held like a remote, it was more ambidextrous than most games, but often the game needed to be designed for lefties, or allow for it.
Wii Sports for example let you set left and right handed use, for each sport individually. (Kudos to Nintendo there; I do most of the sports left handed, but I golf right handed (and not especially well) due to having grown up in a house with only right handed clubs.)
But many of the 3rd party mini-games & party games did not allow for left handed use. Usually things were fine, but there'd always be one or two spots where it would go all wrong.
The one that leaps to mind was a frisbee toss minigame in one of the titles we had.
The game was expecting a left to right-up flick. So attempting it left handed was a right to left flick, and it went all wrong. Most of the time it didn't even recognize the flick at all, would react half-assed before or after the actual flick. You could hold it upside down, but that was still botched because down was now up. And it would react like you just threw it into the ground.
I just switched to doing it right handed. Kind of annoying really.
For what its worth as background, as a lefty I liked the xbox 360 controller (don't have an xbox, but have a controller paired with my PC); and I liked the wii-u classic controller. I FPS with my right hand on WASD, and my left on the mouse. The mouse I'm currently using is a razer deathadder left handed model, with the buttons programmed so that the left mouse button is on the left. (I like the left mouse for the ergo comfort, but after years of using RH mice, my middle finger is my 'left click', and my index finger is 'right'. (The fact that Razer defaults them 'backwards' drives me nuts, as after a reboot, the buttons are backwards until the razer programmability software is loaded, which is retarded.)
I also tried switching them in the windows mouse control panel, but that had all kinds of side effects... they were right on my desktop, but backwards when I RDP into another unit... which was far more annoying than the couple seconds of stupid at startup.
If Razer is reading this, save which button is left and right right on the mouse itself. But I'm well and off on a tangent now. :)
all the while you know the media industry would automate that mail process in no time
They'd still pay $5.00+ per notice sent. That ought to motivate them to eliminate duplicates, and bogus nonsense. It would be be millions of dollars a year.
Your right of course, that getting the documents in paper might still be an extra cost for the ISP.
Is charging a handling fee for eaach takedown request you handle prohibited? I don't mind paying someone to open the mail and process it, if I'm paid $5 per item. Go ahead, knock yourself out.
We had several organizations that sent us so much bogus info that we ended up blocking their domain.
That raises an interesting question:
Are you required to take takedown notices via email? Given the glut of garbage, bogus information, and so forth, coupled with the fact that take down requests are a legal obligation
I almost wonder if you could have required they be sent by registered, traceable, mail or courier.
It shouldn't be your job to filter someone elses raw automated garbage, even if you have an obligation to respond in good faith to proper takedown requests.
It should read "Thus you cannot imply from the existence of an element 0, that the first element is element 0.
The enumeration of memory cells by the pattern of bits that accesses them is the most natural way to enumerate them.
The lowest element is the first element in any natural ordering of things.
Its an arbitrary assignment, but its the most natural arbitrary assignment possible.
2s complement interpretations of the address lines, or mathematical overflow/underflow is all valid, but is a more complex interpretation. And no normal human being would ever default to using 4 bit to enumerate objects from -8 to 7.
Which, due to 20 bit addressing and wrap-around is directly followed by the address 0.
So you agree there's an address 0? The rest is just a lot of handwaving to try and avoid admitting that its counting from zero.
Sorry, but that address I was speaking about at that point (first address of BIOS ROM in the original IBM PC) is definitely not represented by FFFF:0000.
The reset vector for the 8086 processor is at address FFFF0h (16 bytes below 1 MB). The value of the CS register at reset is FFFFh and the value of the IP register at reset is 0000h to form the segmented address FFFFh:0000h, which maps to physical address FFFF0h.
Anyway, this segmentation is a speciality of the 8086; it is in no way natural
Its somewhat clumsy, but there is nothing unnatural about the actual numbering itself. the segment and offset overlap in a very simple logical way.
If you go to a single stick of RAM, you'll find that for any address there is a corresponding memory cell. Which one is the first is therefore simply a question of declaration, not a question of naturalness. Indeed, if you look at early memory chips without all the modern optimizations, you'll see that if you exchange two address lines on the chip it won't really matter, because while it will read a different physical memory cell, it will do so consistently. Which demonstrates that at this level the address isn't even a number, but just a bit pattern.
Semantics.
If I draw a 4 x 4 grid, and label the cells 0 to 15 on a transparecy, and then rotate the transparency 90 degrees the cells are still numbered 0 to 15. That doesn't number them 1 to 16.
That's all switching address lines around does; swaps rows and columns around. They're still numbered from 0 to n.
No. 0,0,0,0 is one address, and 0,0,0,1 is another address. Also, why do you consider 0,0,0,1 the second address, and not e.g. 1,0,0,0?
As if you don't know the answer:
0000 = 0
0001 = 1
0010 = 2
0011 = 3
That's not blind luck. Hardware is designed that way. We don't have to declaratively "assign" the cells ordinal numbers as its an inherent property of the design. Whatever is 0000 is logical 0. Whatever is 0001 is logical 1. Whatever cell 1111 wired to is logical 15.
As to why I consider 0 first, then 1, and all the way 15 last? That is the natural ordering.
Plus as you know by treating the address lines as a binary representation of the address, we also benefit from being able to do things like address arithmetic and binary shifting, directly against the address encoding and have it have meaningful semantics.
After all, all I did here was to write down the bits in a different order.
you mean like "LTROL" ?
Wow.
For example, the 8086 expects to be able to read instructions starting at address FFFF0 (note that 8086 physical addresses had 20 bits). Therefore if you interpret addresses as signed values, you could say that the natural base of 8086 memory is -16.
That's the reset vector, and its not the 'first address' it can read, its simply the address it reads from by default after a reset.
Therefore you could also say the original IBM PC had a natural base of -65536.
Yes, clearly that would be the most natural way of interpreting that... no. wait. That would be a pointlessly convoluted way of interpreting it. Ditto for treating FFFF0 as -16, which is just plain silly because its probably more accurate to write it as FFFF:0000. That would be address 0, in segment FFFF.
Of course that neglects the video memory mapped in a region
Sorry. No. That all happens on top of the physical address space. Think about the RAM or ROMs, not the more complicated stuff layered on top of them.
Therefore (a) the interpretation of memory as an array is not a perfect match,
A stick of RAM as an array of cells is really about as perfect as it gets.
and (b) even if you do so, there's absolutely no reason to assume it is 0-based.
How are the physical addresses in a DRAM chip numbered? (and what signals would you need to put on the wire to read or write to the cell? )
That's right, they start at 0, always. Whether its a 128 byte rom from 1976 to a 4GB DDR3-DRAM from 2013.
And the why? Goes down to how you signal on the wire itself. If you have 4 wires to use for the address line, then 0,0,0,0 is the first address, 0001 the second, and so forth.
And really, I'm sure you already know this.
good idea, we could use an onion panade!
Seems like we've gone in a circle...
Everything you've listed is *an artifact of C*, at least in the context of the gamut of languages also thus far mentioned.
Everything is an artifact of the hardware. The fundamental properties of the computer itself. C is just closer to the hardware. Its not artifacts of C its artifacts of the hardware.
You're too stuck in C-think to realise how different other languages are, and how Algoloid-specific your knowledge is.
I've worked with LISP and ML and Smalltalk and XSL and SQL... but that's beside the point. I'm not stuck in C-think. I'm "stuck" in assembler and binary think; you know the actual hardware itself. Registers and opcodes, where memory itself is just an array of cells. You mistake it as "C-think" because C is quite close to the hardware, but the point is that zero based counting is not an aritfact of C, its an artifact of the hardware itself, its reflected in C because C is close to the hardware.
What is "allocating" and "an address" in LISP? Or in Forth? Or in prolog?
The further from the hardware you get the less of it you see. But LISP uses zero based counting (AREF, CHAR). And numbering conventionally begins with zero in Forth too.
I don't disagree with everything you said.
You misunderstood what I wrote about the virtual pointer table. The elements of the pointer table itself is accessed by offset. (its an array of function pointers) Yes the *contents* of the table are function pointers.
For someone who clearly knows C++ much better than most, I'm surprised you didn't realize what I meant.
Since the computer doesn't know arrays at the fundamental level, every property of an array (including its existence) is an artefact of the language.
At the fundamental level, computer memory itself is an array. Its pretty much the ONLY thing the computer does know.
The code itself does nothing but arithmetic and indirect memory accesses.
On physical arrays of memory.
The properties of language array abstractions are mapped to that physical array.
Because the physical array is zero based, any language mapping of the abstract concept on to memory is either going to inherit that, or do extra work to hide it.
No. It is trivial to code an 1-based array (or a 42-based array) in assembly: Instead of the true address of your array, use a value that differs by the element size[...].
So instead of using the address, which you start with, you do something extra.
And are you REALLY advocating that passing an address to "not the array" and relying on adding indexes to that along with possibly overflow arithmetic to result in an address that is in the array is as "simple" and "trivial" as 0 based indexing?
In any case through this discussion it seems to reveal that my argument that 0 based indexing is natural rests on the assumption and agreement that physical memory itself is arranged / accessed as zero based array(s).
You seem to argue that arrays are purely a language construct. I disagree with that.
The abstract concept of a type and the implementation details of that type are not the same thing, although they are both important for a programmer to know.
Agreed.
Languages that have a richer abstract model for arrays, rather than having arrays be merely syntaxic sugar for pointer arithmetic, also allow far more static analysis, allowing opportunities for the elimination, optimization or parallelization of processing that a C compiler would struggle to identify.
That tries to argue the point by suggesting that a richer language and more abstract models hides the implementation details. It hides the implementation detail that its still zero based.
Things are still zero based. You can jump through some hoops to try and hide this from the programmer if you want, but that's all you are doing, and if the programmer ever has to dig into the real guts of what's going on he or she is faced with the cold reality that everything is zero based behind the scenes.
And its not just arrays. Its strings. Its the virtual pointer table internal to a c++ class object instance. If they dig all the way down to assembly language its the stack, its the member offsets of class/object members. Anything and everything that uses offsets.
If we want to mostly hide that for programmer convenience in high level languages that's fine. But lets not pretend its some "artifact of C". Its how computers really work. And a good programmer should know that, even they use a higher level language where they don't have to think about it most of the time.
In the cloud?
Some sort of joke? I missed it.
Oh no, we might have to treat it like a struct, the horror, the humanity.
Wait, what are you storing in the struct? Remember, X is the address of the array, and x_base is address-1 so that you can add n for x[n] to get the element. You are NOT planning to actually store x_base in the struct are you?
You've just suggested we implement a simple array as a struct that contains a pointer to an address outside the struct so that we can add offsets to it to get addresses back inside the struct!!
How you can't see that this is a terrible idea and a lot more complicated I can't understand. For example, now you can't pass the array (now a struct) by value, or make a simple copy of it by just doing a memcpy. You'd have to manually fix the x_base otherwise it'll point to the original structure.
Performance-wise then, recursive calls are no better than they were before because you still have to recalculate x_base for each copy placed on the stack. Same overhead as just recalculating x_base on the fly in each call.
What did you think it was accomplishing exactly?
I've looked into this issue for a long time
The rest of your comments show equal lack of thought.
Yeah. I'm going to have to disagree with you here.
and for every piece of code that works better with a zero based array I can show you another that works best with one based array, so in the end is a wash. Either one is fine.
Look, zero based indexing is the natural implementation. You are jumping through serious contortions just to TRY and cram one based indexing into it, and you aren't even succeeding with a compelling easy to use implementation.
Ruining an arrays simple memory copy semantics just so you can count from one is probably the most poorly thought out suggestion I've heard in a while.
You might as well just go whole hog Ada and specify index extents, because its pretty much the same amount of EXTRA work. Its not a bad idea, but make no mistake, it is extra work.
0 based indexing is the least work
anything else is extra work to implement
ergo 0 based indexing is the natural state
what I'm saying is that is ridiculous to assert that they have to be there or that they are even preferable.
All your contortions just hide the fact that they are zero based to the machine from the programmer. That doesn't change the fact that they are 0 based in the final analysis.
I myself don't know that it preferable, because that's how the hardware works. It wasn't a "choice" to make things zero based. They just are. We could jump through some hoops to try and hide that from the programmer, but their is a complexity cost to that in space (memory), and time (performance).
but the simple statistical fact is that people who habitually exceed the speed limit by a considerable margin do have more accidents.
Cite please.
This says that driving faster absolutely increases the odds of an accident. The faster you are going the less time you can react, this is intuitively true and no one disputes this. If we all drove 10mph, there would be fewer accidents, virtually nobody would be injured in them when they occur.
And that speed differences between drivers leads to more accidents. In other words, overtaking is dangerous, and lane changes are dangerous. Again, I don't think there is any disagreement here.
http://erso.swov.nl/knowledge/content/20_speed/speed_and_accident_risk.htm
This next link however is really interesting:
Although changes in vehicle speeds were small, driver violations of the speed limits increased when the posted speed limits were lowered. Conversely, violations decreased when limits were raised. This does not reflect a change in driver behavior, but a change in how compliance is measured, i.e., from the posted speed limit.
http://www.motorists.org/speed-limits/effects-raising-lowering
Read that again, they raised and lowered the speed limits in places, and found that drivers for the most part did not change their speed by very much (although did record that it went up slightly when the limits went up and down slightly when speed limits went down). But primarily there were simply more people speeding when they lowered them, and fewer people speeding when they raised them.
Accident rates were not affected.
Thus there are plenty of indications that driving too fast for the conditions (just excessively fast, or significantly faster (or slower) than the cars around you) is dangerous and leads to more accidents.
However it strongly refutes the idea that exceeding the posted speed limit is itself a significant predictor of accidents. As you can lower the speed limit 10mph, and suddenly a lot of people are speeding, and the accident rate doesn't move.
because history has given it reason to and it'll keep selecting for it until there's a stronger selection pressure to the contrary.
No, that's not how evolution works.
In rainy years, they all live. They all reproduce. And taller giraffes will not reproductively fare any better than shorter ones, everything else being equal.
"Selection" is not a concious effort, nor even a subconcious effort, nor even an instinctual biological response at a cellular level. There is no "selection in anticipation" of some future.
Really the organism does not "select" at all. Nature "selects" by literally killing off the less fit, inhibiting them from reproducing.