Science converges asymptotically to the truth. Even if scientists can never be absolutely certain of the truth, they are always getting nearer to absolute truth.
"absolute truth" is a can of philosophical worms. Who even knows if such a thing exists? Even an absolute truth did exist, you can imagine that science might only lead you to a local optimum of truth, and you could be stuck there forever. It's a standard hill climbing problem in search.
There are plenty of good designs that work in a single threaded environment that do not in multi-threaded environment. It's just a completely different ballgame when you allow multiple threads to be running on the same piece of code. With threading, the complexity goes up an order of magnitude and so does the penalty for failure.
Anyways, I'm out. This is the standard debate about "good" programmers and "good" designs vs dangerous techniques that should be avoided.
I've done it too, and your experience doesn't match mine. It is far too easy to make a mistake that won't be caught in testing. The compiler won't help you. Testing might not trip it.
It really isn't that hard. If you have your data reasonably managed and your system reasonably abstracted, then determining the portions that can safely run on other threads (or safely with some synchronization) should be easy. If it's not, your design is borked to begin with and should be rethought.
Yeah right, and you know what every library call does with respect to thread-safety? Your design won't be accidentally violated later on down the road? Chances are, if you are a heavy user of threads, you have bugs that are not reproducible and people dismiss these bugs as one-offs.
The single most important rule of threading is to require as little as possible and to isolate your use of it. It's just toxic waste.
Something as simple as tossing function calls off on a background thread to deal with some of these tasks would do a great deal to improve latency from the user's perspective, and is really quite trivial to implement. Most programmers don't do it, though. Part of that is that in most situations there aren't ready-made solutions- you can't just say "run this function call on a background thread", you've got to go through the pthread creation process, etc. (Apple's Cocoa framework is actually an exception to this with it's NSOperation).
That's a recipe for disaster. You can't just run arbitrary functions on background threads. You have to make sure they are thread-safe, and it is NOT trivial to do this. Plus any mistakes you make will wind up as bugs that are hard to reproduce and cause bizarre behavior. Also, even if you verify the code is thread-safe, every maintenance programming coming after you (and possibly you yourself) has a good chance of writing some code to break this thread-safety.
Writing concurrent code is hard, and that is why we continue to see articles about it. The best advice when it comes to writing threaded code is to use as little as possible.
It's a serious crime, and deserves many years in jail, but capital punishment should be reserved for violent criminals. Somebody who illegally seizes power by might actually turn out to be a good official. The serial killer, has well, killed people.
Frankly, it's the only crime I can think of worthy of the death penalty at a federal level, and this is coming from someone who doesn't support capital punishment in practice because the system is too flawed to carry it out equitably.
Which just goes to show you how emotional and reactionary people can be. You think claims of voter fraud will be carried out equitably, that you're willing to kill people? Get out your lynching rope.
At least with Linux you know the regression was likely intentional. Stupid, but intentional. The Windows folk just don't know what they're doing.
That's a bunch of crap. I've run both Windows and Linux and they both have their share of bugs. I have experienced clean upgrades with both, and broken upgrades with both. Software is complex, and so is the mix of hardware that operating systems have to support.
I prefer to support the websites that bring me great content =)
That's fine, but not everybody else has to. I hope you can admit your original statement was brash and incorrect: "You agree to use it at the cost of viewing ads. No ads, and the internet won't exist."
The Internet was around a lot longer than advertisements on the Internet. The web is, by design, meant for users to display content as they see fit. I browse without Javascript or Flash enabled, and I don't view images linked from 3rd party sites. That alone means there's a good chance I won't see ads, and there's nothing unethical about what I'm doing.
This thing? No, by full screen I mean there are no buttons so you get more screen real estate. What phone was doing this when the iPhone came out? Give them credit where it's due. Their design was innovative for the time.
As I recall, when it came out the iPhone was the only phone that had a full screen touch display. I think lots of people were sick of messing with tiny buttons and small displays.
Have you ever heard the expression "preaching to the choir" when somebody is advocating their opinion? It's looking at some facet of life, saying "this is stupid", or "this is the way it should be", or whatever. I already mentioned Dilbert. It manages to make a point in a way I consider cute, charming, and interestingly drawn. With xkcd I can just imagine the nerd behind it and I get tired of "listening" to him.
Slashdot Mirror
Have you looked at Verified by Visa? If you use it you're not supposed to be liable for chargebacks due to fraud.
Do you have some proof for these claims?
I don't know about the original poster's claims, but there are several well-known cases where supposedly anonymous services gave up info:
Science converges asymptotically to the truth. Even if scientists can never be absolutely certain of the truth, they are always getting nearer to absolute truth.
"absolute truth" is a can of philosophical worms. Who even knows if such a thing exists? Even an absolute truth did exist, you can imagine that science might only lead you to a local optimum of truth, and you could be stuck there forever. It's a standard hill climbing problem in search.
I'd rather eat my cake and have it too, then I can have seconds.
There are plenty of good designs that work in a single threaded environment that do not in multi-threaded environment. It's just a completely different ballgame when you allow multiple threads to be running on the same piece of code. With threading, the complexity goes up an order of magnitude and so does the penalty for failure.
Anyways, I'm out. This is the standard debate about "good" programmers and "good" designs vs dangerous techniques that should be avoided.
I've done it too, and your experience doesn't match mine. It is far too easy to make a mistake that won't be caught in testing. The compiler won't help you. Testing might not trip it.
It really isn't that hard. If you have your data reasonably managed and your system reasonably abstracted, then determining the portions that can safely run on other threads (or safely with some synchronization) should be easy. If it's not, your design is borked to begin with and should be rethought.
Yeah right, and you know what every library call does with respect to thread-safety? Your design won't be accidentally violated later on down the road? Chances are, if you are a heavy user of threads, you have bugs that are not reproducible and people dismiss these bugs as one-offs.
The single most important rule of threading is to require as little as possible and to isolate your use of it. It's just toxic waste.
Something as simple as tossing function calls off on a background thread to deal with some of these tasks would do a great deal to improve latency from the user's perspective, and is really quite trivial to implement. Most programmers don't do it, though. Part of that is that in most situations there aren't ready-made solutions- you can't just say "run this function call on a background thread", you've got to go through the pthread creation process, etc. (Apple's Cocoa framework is actually an exception to this with it's NSOperation).
That's a recipe for disaster. You can't just run arbitrary functions on background threads. You have to make sure they are thread-safe, and it is NOT trivial to do this. Plus any mistakes you make will wind up as bugs that are hard to reproduce and cause bizarre behavior. Also, even if you verify the code is thread-safe, every maintenance programming coming after you (and possibly you yourself) has a good chance of writing some code to break this thread-safety.
Writing concurrent code is hard, and that is why we continue to see articles about it. The best advice when it comes to writing threaded code is to use as little as possible.
To a passionate free software advocate, M$ is a concise, efficient and - IMO - accurate moniker.
It's also meaningless, since every business is out for dollars. You might as well say $un too, and same goes for any business with an "s" in its name.
You mean, "It's from Microsoft! It must not be labeled as open source, even if it is!"
If you aren't saying this, then maybe you can say in what aspect the license doesn't meet the Open Source Definition
.
It's a serious crime, and deserves many years in jail, but capital punishment should be reserved for violent criminals. Somebody who illegally seizes power by might actually turn out to be a good official. The serial killer, has well, killed people.
Frankly, it's the only crime I can think of worthy of the death penalty at a federal level, and this is coming from someone who doesn't support capital punishment in practice because the system is too flawed to carry it out equitably.
Which just goes to show you how emotional and reactionary people can be. You think claims of voter fraud will be carried out equitably, that you're willing to kill people? Get out your lynching rope.
How would releasing the full source code indicate they're trying to get more control?
Google has not released the full source for Chrome. Google fooled a great deal of people with their almost-true lies.
Chrome = chromium (open source) + proprietary bits
At least with Linux you know the regression was likely intentional. Stupid, but intentional. The Windows folk just don't know what they're doing.
That's a bunch of crap. I've run both Windows and Linux and they both have their share of bugs. I have experienced clean upgrades with both, and broken upgrades with both. Software is complex, and so is the mix of hardware that operating systems have to support.
It seems like a silly, pointless waste of time to reword a summary.
I prefer to support the websites that bring me great content =)
That's fine, but not everybody else has to. I hope you can admit your original statement was brash and incorrect: "You agree to use it at the cost of viewing ads. No ads, and the internet won't exist."
Or in the United States in violation of the DMCA.
No ads, and the internet won't exist.
The Internet was around a lot longer than advertisements on the Internet. The web is, by design, meant for users to display content as they see fit. I browse without Javascript or Flash enabled, and I don't view images linked from 3rd party sites. That alone means there's a good chance I won't see ads, and there's nothing unethical about what I'm doing.
I've noticed is that talking about being modded down for your daring, iconoclastic views is the surest way to get modded up.
I know I'll get modded down for this, but you're right.
From your link:
"The concept for "Beat The Burglar" is that an ex-burglar (Mike Fraser) attempts to break into the houses of volunteers" (emphasis mine).
(s)he
This just sucks. How do you even pronounce that when reading aloud? Singulary they" sounds so much more natural.
And our society often does marginalize people and make them poor (I'm not totally sure why).
http://www.shirky.com/writings/powerlaw_weblog.html
Short answer: Network effect. Power/money/wealth is sticky, and tends to snowball.
This thing? No, by full screen I mean there are no buttons so you get more screen real estate. What phone was doing this when the iPhone came out? Give them credit where it's due. Their design was innovative for the time.
As I recall, when it came out the iPhone was the only phone that had a full screen touch display. I think lots of people were sick of messing with tiny buttons and small displays.
Right now the theaters hand all their revenue from movie ticket sales to the studios.
I've heard only about half of ticket sales goes to the studio.
Have you ever heard the expression "preaching to the choir" when somebody is advocating their opinion? It's looking at some facet of life, saying "this is stupid", or "this is the way it should be", or whatever. I already mentioned Dilbert. It manages to make a point in a way I consider cute, charming, and interestingly drawn. With xkcd I can just imagine the nerd behind it and I get tired of "listening" to him.