Dude, nobody's threatening to write an entire application in assembly. The debate is about whether assembly language programming is an obsolete skill.
You're also overlooking something called "debugging". You think you'd be using a nice, modern web browser or game if nobody involved had any understanding of assembly language? When testers send crash dumps back to the developers of IE & Firefox, what do you think those developers are looking at? Same thing for games. The latest few months of any project are dedicated to stability. A game written by a team with no assembly knowledge is a game that doesn't ship. Nothing more to it. I don't know if you consider shipping a product to be something practical, but in my mind that makes ASM programming count as pretty practical.
I agree with you. Understanding assembler is the difference between shipping a stable product, and not shipping it. It takes an academic to call it an obsolete skill. Academics don't have to ship anything.
I disagree. Both are the real world because they affect each other. In a sense the world of abstractions, symbols, logic and ideas affects what you can see, hear, taste, etc and experience directly.
It's totally fair for you to disagree on this definition/usage of the word "real". I only wanted to distinguish two different ways person can focus their attention: on direct experience, or on thoughts about experience. To dwell on which word applies to which thing is just more playing with thoughts about experience.
I would be more specific than just to say, "profound emotional problems." I think the real problem (for both guys) was obsessive thinking. These guys lived in a non-stop world of abstractions, symbols, logic and ideas. And that's a useful world in many ways, but it's not the real world. The real world is the world you see, hear, taste, smell, feel & experience directly.
Personally I think the best thing that could have helped these guys would have been to grasp the correct (or more correctly, one particular) definition of the word "meditation", and to practice that. This is the best medicine for any person with an out-of-control, overactive intellect. It bothers me a little that the people with the most aptitude for terms & definition often go through life never learning this particular term & definition. I would guess that if you scan their giant A.I. database for the word "meditation" you would find some reference to Descartes' essays, but nothing about the more practical meaning of the word.
Fire up the application, start it on one of its typical tasks, and then interrupt it in the debugger to catch it. While the process is stopped mid-flight, take note of the call stack.
Good advice -- breaking randomly. However, it works best in CPU-intensive applications. If the app is mostly idle and event-driven, you're best off searching the code and looking for a place to set breakpoints.
Also, when I use the debugger to help understand some new code, often I'll open a text file and build a "trace" as I go. As I explore things in the debugger and find new call stacks, I add more detail to the trace, in a hierarchical (indented) style. Then I save the traces in case I forget something later.
As for the original question, I would recommend staying focused. Don't go all over the program trying to understand every system at once. Pick a specific part you really need to understand (say, based on a task you have to do) and focus on understanding that.
Unfortunately, the best tool for understanding code is experience. Not theory and not some fancy visualization program. Once you've seen a lot of different code, you come to recognize what each person was thinking when they wrote it. Once that kind of thing comes easily, you no longer find it necessary to bitch about each different programmer's coding style (as some do). So in a way, the guy who posts this question is lucky to have such a big pile of code in front of him.
I truly love how people see intelligence as some linear scale where right is "better" (genius) and left is "worse" (retard).
Can you blame them? These are highly intelligent people. Intelligence demands the ability to quickly sort through vast swaths of information, exclude 95% of it, and focus on the narrow subset deemed useful. In this case, they are focusing on the subject of intelligence. Being intelligent people, this, for them, is the most useful subject in the world.
The only thing "brilliant" about these thinkers is that fact that they are able to draw attention to themselves while talking rubbish. That's brilliant.
I clicked the link for the "Singularity Summit", and I get the feeling that the goal of these people is to put pictures of their own faces on the same page as Bill Gates and Stephen Hawking. Looking good there, boys.
Meanwhile, is there going to be a single robot at this conference? Nope. Just a lot of people talking more rubbish.
I can comprehend the idea of time not existing. We made it up. It's a concept. It's not real.
I realize this sounds like New Age crap and has nothing to do with the Big Bang, so take it or leave it! Just thought it was worth throwing out there...
Yeah, I think the submitter should go with RAID 5. Redundancy matters: You only need to lose your data once to regret your decision. But he raises an interesting point - the array cannot grow incrementally through hardware upgrades.
Surely, somebody could invent a system/algorithm with the properties of RAID 5 (or even 6), but with the added capabilities of different-sized disks, and total available space which automatically grows as you gradually swap or add bigger disks.
But that system doesn't exist today. So he should go with RAID 5, and make as big an array as he can afford. When the day comes that he runs out space, he could build a second RAID 5 array, or, if he's feeling cheap, add additional drives outside the array.
What if a building were equipped with sensors to track your movement through a space and could adapt its shape, texture, light, sounds, and heat to your presence?
So, we're talking about a thousand-ton slab of moving floors and sliding walls, changing its heat and lighting... with you inside it? Constantly transforming and shapeshifting, all running off some intern's Java program?
All I can picture is that garbage-compactor scene from Star Wars.
The topic here is not just the story. The topic is the fact that the linked story is FUD. It should be pretty clear from the summary, but I guess it could have been clearer.
It's been posted here so that the Slashdot community can iron out the details, and decide how much truth there is to the story, using facts and figures. That's the interesting part.
And I would also add that when developers indiscriminately build their applications in 64-bit mode, it usually results in a performance drop. Storing all pointers as 64-bit values results in a bigger data structures, bigger stacks, and therefore less L1/L2 cache coherence, and worse overall performance. This won't change for a while.
For today's applications, 32-bit is the sweet spot. 64-bit addressing has its place, but that place is pretty limited right now.
I wonder what their store will "look" like. Will it exist entirely within the web browser? Will they help organize your.mp3 library on your computer? Are they going to try to create their own music "ecosystem" to compete with iTunes/iTMS? Amazon could do anything here.
Personally, I think making the store web-based would be a plus. But I think if they don't help manage your library, that's a minus. This being Amazon, I'm going to guess it will be web-based: click to download, and they'll forgo any attempts to help manage your library, unless you install some kind of browser plugin. The plugin would be optional, but if you had it, it would manage your downloads and organize your library for you. I'm just speculating, though. It'll be interesting to see how they actually do it.
I'll make a blind guess. I bet they'll be 256 Kbps.mp3s for $1.29 each. This is only a guess, based on EMI's existing DRM-free offerings at iTunes, the fact that EMI calls them "premium DRM-free downloads" in the press release, and the fact that nobody is reporting any more details. I think if there were any more details that made Amazon's offering better than iTunes, they'd be reported. However, it would be really interesting if I were wrong, and the price was lower than that.
I'd also guess that EMI will be the only major label available in Amazon's online store at all. Sony BMG, Universal and Warner will be absent. They day they become available on Amazon, I'd bet they'd also start offering "premium" DRM-free music on iTunes as well. Again, these are all guesses, though. Someone prove me wrong!
Theoretically, a store could use the mp3PRO format to get the best of all worlds, couldn't they? A 128 bps mp3PRO file would play on every MP3-compatible device with quality comparable to MP3. And any device (like the PC, or a media center of some kind) which is mp3PRO-aware would automatically play them with superior sound quality.
From the end-user's point of view, I think this would be an awesome idea. But then again, the format doesn't have a very good track record of adoption so far, and there may be licensing issues which make it infeasible. But I don't know. It's a good idea which nobody talks about, so I doubt it'll go anywhere.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh man, this comment is HOT!!!! ... *sizzle*
How interesting to hear this news that game developers don't use assembly language. Just what the hell was I doing last week?
Dude, nobody's threatening to write an entire application in assembly. The debate is about whether assembly language programming is an obsolete skill.
You're also overlooking something called "debugging". You think you'd be using a nice, modern web browser or game if nobody involved had any understanding of assembly language? When testers send crash dumps back to the developers of IE & Firefox, what do you think those developers are looking at? Same thing for games. The latest few months of any project are dedicated to stability. A game written by a team with no assembly knowledge is a game that doesn't ship. Nothing more to it. I don't know if you consider shipping a product to be something practical, but in my mind that makes ASM programming count as pretty practical.
I agree with you. Understanding assembler is the difference between shipping a stable product, and not shipping it. It takes an academic to call it an obsolete skill. Academics don't have to ship anything.
http://www.google.com/search?q=irony
It's totally fair for you to disagree on this definition/usage of the word "real". I only wanted to distinguish two different ways person can focus their attention: on direct experience, or on thoughts about experience. To dwell on which word applies to which thing is just more playing with thoughts about experience.
I would be more specific than just to say, "profound emotional problems." I think the real problem (for both guys) was obsessive thinking. These guys lived in a non-stop world of abstractions, symbols, logic and ideas. And that's a useful world in many ways, but it's not the real world. The real world is the world you see, hear, taste, smell, feel & experience directly.
Personally I think the best thing that could have helped these guys would have been to grasp the correct (or more correctly, one particular) definition of the word "meditation", and to practice that. This is the best medicine for any person with an out-of-control, overactive intellect. It bothers me a little that the people with the most aptitude for terms & definition often go through life never learning this particular term & definition. I would guess that if you scan their giant A.I. database for the word "meditation" you would find some reference to Descartes' essays, but nothing about the more practical meaning of the word.
Good advice -- breaking randomly. However, it works best in CPU-intensive applications. If the app is mostly idle and event-driven, you're best off searching the code and looking for a place to set breakpoints.
Also, when I use the debugger to help understand some new code, often I'll open a text file and build a "trace" as I go. As I explore things in the debugger and find new call stacks, I add more detail to the trace, in a hierarchical (indented) style. Then I save the traces in case I forget something later.
As for the original question, I would recommend staying focused. Don't go all over the program trying to understand every system at once. Pick a specific part you really need to understand (say, based on a task you have to do) and focus on understanding that.
Unfortunately, the best tool for understanding code is experience. Not theory and not some fancy visualization program. Once you've seen a lot of different code, you come to recognize what each person was thinking when they wrote it. Once that kind of thing comes easily, you no longer find it necessary to bitch about each different programmer's coding style (as some do). So in a way, the guy who posts this question is lucky to have such a big pile of code in front of him.
What's your point?
There's no way the Wii mote compares to a mouse and keyboard for shooters.
The only reason it's usable at all in Metroid Prime 3 is because the Z button auto-locks your view onto the target.
If it wasn't for that feature, the controls would be hopeless.
Accomplishment and progress can be pretty subjective... Seems more accurate to say they come from the attitude of the observer.
Can you blame them? These are highly intelligent people. Intelligence demands the ability to quickly sort through vast swaths of information, exclude 95% of it, and focus on the narrow subset deemed useful. In this case, they are focusing on the subject of intelligence. Being intelligent people, this, for them, is the most useful subject in the world.
The only thing "brilliant" about these thinkers is that fact that they are able to draw attention to themselves while talking rubbish. That's brilliant.
I clicked the link for the "Singularity Summit", and I get the feeling that the goal of these people is to put pictures of their own faces on the same page as Bill Gates and Stephen Hawking. Looking good there, boys.
Meanwhile, is there going to be a single robot at this conference? Nope. Just a lot of people talking more rubbish.
I can comprehend the idea of time not existing. We made it up. It's a concept. It's not real. I realize this sounds like New Age crap and has nothing to do with the Big Bang, so take it or leave it! Just thought it was worth throwing out there...
Yeah, I think the submitter should go with RAID 5. Redundancy matters: You only need to lose your data once to regret your decision. But he raises an interesting point - the array cannot grow incrementally through hardware upgrades.
Surely, somebody could invent a system/algorithm with the properties of RAID 5 (or even 6), but with the added capabilities of different-sized disks, and total available space which automatically grows as you gradually swap or add bigger disks.
But that system doesn't exist today. So he should go with RAID 5, and make as big an array as he can afford. When the day comes that he runs out space, he could build a second RAID 5 array, or, if he's feeling cheap, add additional drives outside the array.
So, we're talking about a thousand-ton slab of moving floors and sliding walls, changing its heat and lighting... with you inside it? Constantly transforming and shapeshifting, all running off some intern's Java program?
All I can picture is that garbage-compactor scene from Star Wars.
And the CEO is hot.
Just a matter of time before Microsoft announces its Orga-Zune. (In brown.)
Wait till you hear Ballmer's quote about THAT one!
Sounds like a case for Mythbusters.
Scientists can get into politics, too. It's allowed.
The topic here is not just the story. The topic is the fact that the linked story is FUD. It should be pretty clear from the summary, but I guess it could have been clearer.
It's been posted here so that the Slashdot community can iron out the details, and decide how much truth there is to the story, using facts and figures. That's the interesting part.
Most informative post in this discussion so far.
And I would also add that when developers indiscriminately build their applications in 64-bit mode, it usually results in a performance drop. Storing all pointers as 64-bit values results in a bigger data structures, bigger stacks, and therefore less L1/L2 cache coherence, and worse overall performance. This won't change for a while.
For today's applications, 32-bit is the sweet spot. 64-bit addressing has its place, but that place is pretty limited right now.
I wonder what their store will "look" like. Will it exist entirely within the web browser? Will they help organize your .mp3 library on your computer? Are they going to try to create their own music "ecosystem" to compete with iTunes/iTMS? Amazon could do anything here.
Personally, I think making the store web-based would be a plus. But I think if they don't help manage your library, that's a minus. This being Amazon, I'm going to guess it will be web-based: click to download, and they'll forgo any attempts to help manage your library, unless you install some kind of browser plugin. The plugin would be optional, but if you had it, it would manage your downloads and organize your library for you. I'm just speculating, though. It'll be interesting to see how they actually do it.
I'll make a blind guess. I bet they'll be 256 Kbps .mp3s for $1.29 each. This is only a guess, based on EMI's existing DRM-free offerings at iTunes, the fact that EMI calls them "premium DRM-free downloads" in the press release, and the fact that nobody is reporting any more details. I think if there were any more details that made Amazon's offering better than iTunes, they'd be reported. However, it would be really interesting if I were wrong, and the price was lower than that.
I'd also guess that EMI will be the only major label available in Amazon's online store at all. Sony BMG, Universal and Warner will be absent. They day they become available on Amazon, I'd bet they'd also start offering "premium" DRM-free music on iTunes as well. Again, these are all guesses, though. Someone prove me wrong!
Theoretically, a store could use the mp3PRO format to get the best of all worlds, couldn't they? A 128 bps mp3PRO file would play on every MP3-compatible device with quality comparable to MP3. And any device (like the PC, or a media center of some kind) which is mp3PRO-aware would automatically play them with superior sound quality.
From the end-user's point of view, I think this would be an awesome idea. But then again, the format doesn't have a very good track record of adoption so far, and there may be licensing issues which make it infeasible. But I don't know. It's a good idea which nobody talks about, so I doubt it'll go anywhere.