My father had an issue with his XP machine, an USB device was not recognized. He ended up re-installing XP, everything was fine, the device worked. He then added a few other devices, and everything broke again. Turned out that it was a shitty Belkin USB hub, that basically killed parts of the USB in windows as soon as it was plugged in. The devices that stopped functioning were NOT on that hub. You just had to connect it to any port to screw other devices.
Yeah. No doubt they need to pay people to get good reviews...
How exactly do you think that divisions are implemented ? Even in silicon ? Did you realize that the number of cycle for a DIV instruction is high and dependent on the operand size ?
Ever wondered why the x86 DIV was 14 cycles for 8bits operands, 22 cycles for 16bits and 38 cycles for 32bits ? (hint 6 cycles constant data access + 1 cycle per bit in the subtract/shift loop)
And if the time your teacher told you that was a few years ago, before processor had hardware divide instruction that implemented the loop in silicon, then the pascal run time had to implement division by a series of subtractions and halving...
Now, if he told you that it just subtracted (without halving) then, yeah, he was wrong...
That is actually an obfuscated goto. And it is difficult to use if you have a loop in your code, because C can't break from inner loops to outer loops.
There is no good solutions for this in C. Personally I go with:
if (condition1_opposite) {
do_something();
if (condition2_opposite)
do_something_else(); } cleanup();
But it depends on the complexity of the various parts. I could also very well end up writing it like:
do_stuff( stuff ); cleanup();
with:
do_stuff( stuff ) {
if (condition1) return;
do_something();
if (condition2) return;
do_something_else(); }
depending on: * the likelihood of adding additional conditions, additional do_something() * the amount of stuff passed around * the semantic of the conditions (are those stuff we are looking for [better to go with solution 1], or corner cases that should be avoided [better go with solution 2])
There are a lot of modern inventions that originally came from Belgium. It is little known that Turkish Toilets were original Belgium Toilet, and were found in Belgium as early as 2000 BC. It is much much later that Turks improved the invention by adding the hole...
> Yet it's one of the highest ranked games at that site which averages out other reviews.
> How come?
Well, the things is extremely well designed and executed. There are virtually no bugs. Story flows logically. The quality of the design is astounding (for instance, in the Minish Cap, you will go through the same level at different size, solving different puzzles with different items).
I really think that Zelda works because of the quality of the design & attention to details.
My important passwords are hard to break, and written nowhere. I don't let the browser password manager remember those.
My less important passwords are written in an encrypted file. I let the browser remember those.
Passwords that are not important and may be accessed from other places, are generated with http://www.angel.net/~nic/passwd.html, so I can avoid storing them (and looking them up, if I change browser).
> George Reese is the founder of [...] enStratus Networks LLC (maker of high-end cloud infrastructure management tools)
So, it is just that the guy don't want to be pushed out f business. Of course, auto-scaling is good, unless you are an infrastructure management tools vendor...
Then, ask you CEO about open sourcing the applications that were made at his previous company, Lighthouse Design, bought and buried by Sun.
Yes, Diagram!, Quantrix and WetPaint, I am looking at you. If such apps would have been open sourced 10 years ago, the computing landscape would be very different today...
a) Is better because if you miss a '=' sign it'll fail
b) Is better because it is more readable.
A good compiler/interpreter will issue a warning if variable are changed in tests, unless you use a double set of parentheses.
I will, like most people, use b) because:
* It is readable, which is of paramount importance when you write code in scripting languages * By using a language that create variables on the go, you have already showed total disregard to error checking (ie: if you write "if (true==$varable)" the code will fail silently), so rendering the code unreadable to guard against a comparatively rare error is useless.
At each new windows version, it is the same story: "it is going to run faster, it will run on older hardware, etc, etc". I remember that for win95 (was supposed to run on ridiculously low end hardware), NT4 ("with graphics in the kernel it will be faster and lighter"), XP ("if you turn off the fisher-price UI, you;ll get a faster 2k"), etc, etc.
And, at the end, windows7 will be a bigger and bloated os.
> After all, the basic blocks haven't changed for probably 50 years. It can't cost much to make plastic blocks from standard dies.
This is not true. Lego bricks changed for the better until the 80's, then stayed at constant quality. 3 or 4 years ago, Lego opened new factories (moved to cheaper countries), and bricks quality went down (most visible thing is color differences between bricks, but the feel of the plastic, the quality, and the tolerance went down too). New bricks don't fit as firmly as old ones.
I stopped buy Lego due to that, so I can't comment if they fixed that or not. It lasted at least a couple of years, until I gave up buying sets for my children.
Consider yourself lucky that Disney changed the ending of The Little Mermaid...:-)
> I mean, I've seen it before but I guess I'm desensitized to violence and don't realize how bad it is until my daughter starts crying.
My sons are a little over 10. They used to be very sensitive to violence in movies, but they are less and less because, well, just every movie is amazingly violent these days. Same goes for comics/mangas. There isn't much I can do about that... In the same vein, it is extremely difficult to find a movie without a gun in the plot.
> I think that people are just, in general, more comfortable with violence because it's not something private.
That is entirely possible, but it doesn't explains the rise of violence in movies, and the parallel removing of nudity.
Last year, I was re-watching the whole James Bond saga, and you can just see the violence getting up and up with each installment. I saw the last one recently, and I just can't grasp how anybody can have greenlighted that. For the fun, it is PG-13:
> My daughter will someday have sex. I have accepted this, and you should too. Hopefully she will not get shot.
100% agreed. I don't have a girl, only two boys, so it is easier for me to agree in the social environment.
I suspect that the preference of violence over sex is also due to most parents being uneasy to talk about sexual subjects with their children.
Watching a movie together where there is a violent scene will generally not raise questions. A sex scene on the other hand will provoke reactions. Many parents will take the easy way and filter movies based on sexual content, because that is the easy path...
> Axioms are a lot more like rules than assumptions
When you are "in the system", you view your axioms as the kernel of truth.
You chess example doesn't really relate to the discussion, as chess is much simpler than math, and all truth can be deduced from the rules + a gigantic computer. Godel proved that it wasn't the case in math -- to Russell dismay...
But I can't resist a chess analogy:-)
> You wouldn't say that an intricate forcing mate in chess is 'based on the assumptions of the game', it's the rules
but nobody plays like that. The bishop sacrifice on h7, for instance, is based on the assumptions of the game (if you have your Nf3 and the castled rook is on f8, and a few other things, you just sacrifice without calculating -- an axiom of chess will tell you that it'll gain you something).
And then, you'll have a lot of additional axioms, controlling the 7th rank with two rooks, as a key to victory, good bishop vs bad bishop, bishop pair, control of files, etc, etc...
Those are not in the rules, but are truth nonetheless. And if you look at, for instance the hypermodern chess players (Reti, Nimzowitch) against the classical ones (like Tarrasch), you'll see that they really play with different assumptions.
> Any field of mathematics deals with objects, properties of which are defined by such axioms. No other objects exist in mathematics
I welcome you to study Kurt Godel
> "oh you know, they thought parallel lines do not intersect but then discovered they do!". Nope, parallel lines as defined in Euclidean geometry still do not intersect
That is a strawman. The controversy was that the// axiom was believed to be a consequence of the other 4 postulates/axioms. In the 19th century it was proven that it wasn't the case, and that it really was an independant axiom. So, in Euclidian geometry, there is the assumption that// don't cross.
I am not going to pursue this discussion, as you'll obviously keep playing on words.
Furthermore, as you believe that axioms are definitions, you should go straight to wikipedia and update the axiom page (oh, and do the postulates, propositions and theorems pages too). Let us know how well it goes.
One that easily comes to mind is the axiom of choice ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axiom_of_choice ). I remember, during my math topology studies, having to actually assume the axiom of choice for certain demonstrations (ie: the demonstration would be invalid if you don't consider the axiom of choice true).
Such an axiom, can be chosen as true or false, but cannot be demonstrated. Nowadays, the axiom of choice is generally assumed (ie: the mathematics branches that we generally studies include that axiom), because there are so many results that depends on it.
Another classic is the parallel postulate ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_postulate ). It took hundred and hundred of years to finally prove that if you assume it as false you don't have any contradictions (just a different geometry).
> You are confused - there are no assumptions in mathematics because mathematics does not deal with any real entities. There are only definitions and what you are talking about applies to them: depending on your definitions properties of defined entities will differ. Quite a trivial conclusion most sane people already realize.
*You* are confused and are mixing definitions and axioms. There are assumptions in mathematics, they are called axioms.
So, if you were coding 3d engines at that time, you were following the carmack's.plan update at this time, didn't you ?
Just tell me that you were not impressed at the extraordinary/speed/ at which he rewrote the engine a couple of time, or when he hacked together a virtual virtual machine/jit for quake mods ?
Of course, his code is nothing extraordinary, and I have been impressed a few times by the fact that he didn't knew things I considered self-evident. But the truth is being able to actually sit down and write down everything, "make it happen", is what makes him so great. Oh, that and the fact that I am quite a fast coder, but I think he he still an order of magnitude faster than I am...
Slashdot Mirror
My father had an issue with his XP machine, an USB device was not recognized. He ended up re-installing XP, everything was fine, the device worked. He then added a few other devices, and everything broke again. Turned out that it was a shitty Belkin USB hub, that basically killed parts of the USB in windows as soon as it was plugged in. The devices that stopped functioning were NOT on that hub. You just had to connect it to any port to screw other devices.
Yeah. No doubt they need to pay people to get good reviews...
Same here. I thought that google changed their favicon for some temporary reason, and that my browser cached it.
Big G was ok. Small g was not necessary. And the random colored dots is just ugly.
Oh, in that case I hope he prevented you do divide negative numbers...
Btw, I think there are some additional astute stuff in modern x86 processor, and the use of tables. I'm not 100% sure, though.
How exactly do you think that divisions are implemented ? Even in silicon ? Did you realize that the number of cycle for a DIV instruction is high and dependent on the operand size ?
Ever wondered why the x86 DIV was 14 cycles for 8bits operands, 22 cycles for 16bits and 38 cycles for 32bits ? (hint 6 cycles constant data access + 1 cycle per bit in the subtract/shift loop)
And if the time your teacher told you that was a few years ago, before processor had hardware divide instruction that implemented the loop in silicon, then the pascal run time had to implement division by a series of subtractions and halving...
Now, if he told you that it just subtracted (without halving) then, yeah, he was wrong...
That is actually an obfuscated goto. And it is difficult to use if you have a loop in your code, because C can't break from inner loops to outer loops.
There is no good solutions for this in C. Personally I go with:
if (condition1_opposite)
{
do_something();
if (condition2_opposite)
do_something_else();
}
cleanup();
But it depends on the complexity of the various parts. I could also very well end up writing it like:
do_stuff( stuff );
cleanup();
with:
do_stuff( stuff )
{
if (condition1) return;
do_something();
if (condition2) return;
do_something_else();
}
depending on:
* the likelihood of adding additional conditions, additional do_something()
* the amount of stuff passed around
* the semantic of the conditions (are those stuff we are looking for [better to go with solution 1], or corner cases that should be avoided [better go with solution 2])
There are a lot of modern inventions that originally came from Belgium. It is little known that Turkish Toilets were original Belgium Toilet, and were found in Belgium as early as 2000 BC. It is much much later that Turks improved the invention by adding the hole...
> Yet it's one of the highest ranked games at that site which averages out other reviews.
> How come?
Well, the things is extremely well designed and executed. There are virtually no bugs. Story flows logically. The quality of the design is astounding (for instance, in the Minish Cap, you will go through the same level at different size, solving different puzzles with different items).
I really think that Zelda works because of the quality of the design & attention to details.
My important passwords are hard to break, and written nowhere. I don't let the browser password manager remember those.
My less important passwords are written in an encrypted file. I let the browser remember those.
Passwords that are not important and may be accessed from other places, are generated with http://www.angel.net/~nic/passwd.html, so I can avoid storing them (and looking them up, if I change browser).
> George Reese is the founder of [...] enStratus Networks LLC (maker of high-end cloud infrastructure management tools)
So, it is just that the guy don't want to be pushed out f business. Of course, auto-scaling is good, unless you are an infrastructure management tools vendor...
That is C++, not C.
You can have void main(), and save the "return 0;" line
That'll get you to 61. But for any further improvment, I have no idea...
> disclaimer: I work for Sun.
Then, ask you CEO about open sourcing the applications that were made at his previous company, Lighthouse Design, bought and buried by Sun.
Yes, Diagram!, Quantrix and WetPaint, I am looking at you. If such apps would have been open sourced 10 years ago, the computing landscape would be very different today...
As most things, they have pro and cons.
a) Is better because if you miss a '=' sign it'll fail
b) Is better because it is more readable.
A good compiler/interpreter will issue a warning if variable are changed in tests, unless you use a double set of parentheses.
I will, like most people, use b) because:
* It is readable, which is of paramount importance when you write code in scripting languages
* By using a language that create variables on the go, you have already showed total disregard to error checking (ie: if you write "if (true==$varable)" the code will fail silently), so rendering the code unreadable to guard against a comparatively rare error is useless.
At each new windows version, it is the same story: "it is going to run faster, it will run on older hardware, etc, etc". I remember that for win95 (was supposed to run on ridiculously low end hardware), NT4 ("with graphics in the kernel it will be faster and lighter"), XP ("if you turn off the fisher-price UI, you;ll get a faster 2k"), etc, etc.
And, at the end, windows7 will be a bigger and bloated os.
Wanna bet ?
> Lego has been able to keep Mega Blocks from selling in Europe until now via this bogus trademark law, but that was the last holdout.
Uh ? I have seen Mega Blocks everywhere in France, since at least 2002...
> After all, the basic blocks haven't changed for probably 50 years. It can't cost much to make plastic blocks from standard dies.
This is not true. Lego bricks changed for the better until the 80's, then stayed at constant quality. 3 or 4 years ago, Lego opened new factories (moved to cheaper countries), and bricks quality went down (most visible thing is color differences between bricks, but the feel of the plastic, the quality, and the tolerance went down too). New bricks don't fit as firmly as old ones.
I stopped buy Lego due to that, so I can't comment if they fixed that or not. It lasted at least a couple of years, until I gave up buying sets for my children.
Consider yourself lucky that Disney changed the ending of The Little Mermaid... :-)
> I mean, I've seen it before but I guess I'm desensitized to violence and don't realize how bad it is until my daughter starts crying.
My sons are a little over 10. They used to be very sensitive to violence in movies, but they are less and less because, well, just every movie is amazingly violent these days. Same goes for comics/mangas. There isn't much I can do about that... In the same vein, it is extremely difficult to find a movie without a gun in the plot.
> I think that people are just, in general, more comfortable with violence because it's not something private.
That is entirely possible, but it doesn't explains the rise of violence in movies, and the parallel removing of nudity.
Last year, I was re-watching the whole James Bond saga, and you can just see the violence getting up and up with each installment. I saw the last one recently, and I just can't grasp how anybody can have greenlighted that. For the fun, it is PG-13:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0381061/parentalguide
I have weird and useless theories on that, but I'll save that rant for another time...
Anyway, good luck raising your kids!
Mmm. http://www.the-underdogs.info/company.php?id=69&sort=year gives also Breakers, Brimstone and Captain Goodnight and the Islands of Fear
So ?
> (c) 1985 Br0derbund Software
Where in World is Carmen San Diego ? I don't think Br0derbund released any other title in 1985...
> My daughter will someday have sex. I have accepted this, and you should too. Hopefully she will not get shot.
100% agreed. I don't have a girl, only two boys, so it is easier for me to agree in the social environment.
I suspect that the preference of violence over sex is also due to most parents being uneasy to talk about sexual subjects with their children.
Watching a movie together where there is a violent scene will generally not raise questions. A sex scene on the other hand will provoke reactions. Many parents will take the easy way and filter movies based on sexual content, because that is the easy path...
> I was listening to Pink Floyd playing "Money". They bleeped out "do goody good bullshit".
I bet they don't censor the cash register sound...
> Axioms are a lot more like rules than assumptions
When you are "in the system", you view your axioms as the kernel of truth.
You chess example doesn't really relate to the discussion, as chess is much simpler than math, and all truth can be deduced from the rules + a gigantic computer. Godel proved that it wasn't the case in math -- to Russell dismay...
But I can't resist a chess analogy :-)
> You wouldn't say that an intricate forcing mate in chess is 'based on the assumptions of the game', it's the rules
but nobody plays like that. The bishop sacrifice on h7, for instance, is based on the assumptions of the game (if you have your Nf3 and the castled rook is on f8, and a few other things, you just sacrifice without calculating -- an axiom of chess will tell you that it'll gain you something).
And then, you'll have a lot of additional axioms, controlling the 7th rank with two rooks, as a key to victory, good bishop vs bad bishop, bishop pair, control of files, etc, etc...
Those are not in the rules, but are truth nonetheless. And if you look at, for instance the hypermodern chess players (Reti, Nimzowitch) against the classical ones (like Tarrasch), you'll see that they really play with different assumptions.
> Any field of mathematics deals with objects, properties of which are defined by such axioms. No other objects exist in mathematics
I welcome you to study Kurt Godel
> "oh you know, they thought parallel lines do not intersect but then discovered they do!". Nope, parallel lines as defined in Euclidean geometry still do not intersect
That is a strawman. The controversy was that the // axiom was believed to be a consequence of the other 4 postulates/axioms. In the 19th century it was proven that it wasn't the case, and that it really was an independant axiom. So, in Euclidian geometry, there is the assumption that // don't cross.
I am not going to pursue this discussion, as you'll obviously keep playing on words.
Furthermore, as you believe that axioms are definitions, you should go straight to wikipedia and update the axiom page (oh, and do the postulates, propositions and theorems pages too). Let us know how well it goes.
One that easily comes to mind is the axiom of choice ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axiom_of_choice ). I remember, during my math topology studies, having to actually assume the axiom of choice for certain demonstrations (ie: the demonstration would be invalid if you don't consider the axiom of choice true).
Such an axiom, can be chosen as true or false, but cannot be demonstrated. Nowadays, the axiom of choice is generally assumed (ie: the mathematics branches that we generally studies include that axiom), because there are so many results that depends on it.
Another classic is the parallel postulate ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_postulate ). It took hundred and hundred of years to finally prove that if you assume it as false you don't have any contradictions (just a different geometry).
> You are confused - there are no assumptions in mathematics because mathematics does not deal with any real entities. There are only definitions and what you are talking about applies to them: depending on your definitions properties of defined entities will differ. Quite a trivial conclusion most sane people already realize.
*You* are confused and are mixing definitions and axioms. There are assumptions in mathematics, they are called axioms.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axiom
So, if you were coding 3d engines at that time, you were following the carmack's .plan update at this time, didn't you ?
Just tell me that you were not impressed at the extraordinary /speed/ at which he rewrote the engine a couple of time, or when he hacked together a virtual virtual machine/jit for quake mods ?
Of course, his code is nothing extraordinary, and I have been impressed a few times by the fact that he didn't knew things I considered self-evident. But the truth is being able to actually sit down and write down everything, "make it happen", is what makes him so great. Oh, that and the fact that I am quite a fast coder, but I think he he still an order of magnitude faster than I am...