All of the wireless carriers, when you boil it down, offer the same thing, dial tone over a radio.
At some point, in any competitive environment you have to be able to differentiate yourself from the other carrier, so really what are the options?
Coverage? Well that one is a pretty level playing field. Yes any one carrier can expand their coverage by putting up more cell towers, but most of the metro area's have pretty decent coverage and trying to improve that can be daunting. I live in the San Francisco Bay Area and I can tell that trying to put up a cell tower in the City of San Francisco is a at best a 3 year process from birth of the idea to taking the cell live.
Price, at some point that becomes a non-issue. In the SF Bay Area you can can get a cell phone with unlimited calling in the SF Bay Area for $35.00 a month with Metro-PCS
Features, well thats a horse of a different color since features basically come down to bandwidth capacity.
Cool Factor. This is where the handset makes the difference, and the central point of carrier lock-in
With all of those factors except the cool factor being pretty much equal this is how they differentiate themselves from the next carrier. They go to the handset manufacturers and ask, "Hey what do you have that is really cool?", the look at whats out their and evaluate it and then pick the best platform that will allow them to create the best combination of experiences that add up to the all important cool factor.
Lest anyone be confused, the carriers invest a LOT of money in brining this handset to market and its is not like they make a lot of money on the handsent. They make the money on the service they provide be it providing higher bandwidth, storage services, fancy voice mail or whatever.
It is their money they are spending to do all of this, and the notion of creating a network that lets all this cool factor happen just to have someone else duplicate it, or worse duplicate it badly and sell at a lower price point is NOT a winning business model, in fact it is a model for going out of business.
You are asking a machine to make a comparison between "good" and "not good" or "OK" and "fantastic" when all of these choices are by their very nature illusory at best.
Consider a photo of a person. I may prefer a softer focus some my prefer sharper, other more color saturation of a pastoral scene others less. Individuals judge an image in many many different ways.
In my youth I did a lot of photography. I was taking pictures of the Winternationals at Fremont Raceway ( when it still existed. ) and was shooting a funny car as it came off the line. I was shooting tri-x and pushing it a full stop which resulted in a grainy negative. I did some darkroom magic and came up with a very eye catching and award winning photo. But if you mechanically compared it to the straight shot it would haev been inferior.
The point is you can use an computer to compare some things, but you cannot use a computer to judge "better" in an artistic sense or a "pleasing to the eye" sense.
With the typical rantings of the vast majority of/.'rs this is NOT about an e-mail system.
What this IS about is integration. Love it or hate it, Exchange / Outlook are tightly integrated into the entire office product line. The API's ( for better or worse ) are there to make an entire ecosystem of applications work together. Your data is in Access? It is extraordinary simple to create a notification system for events that are built into your database, it is all just there, it just works.
Yes this is why it is insanely easy to exploit it, but it is what makes a business process run. Sorry you don't get that with Oo or any of the rest of them.
Exchange servers are notoriously flaky, GroupWise from Novell is rock fucking solid but their API's in their present form just suck and I have been a devote' of the Big Red Box or what seems like a lifetime.
Until something with this kind of functionality comes along to the open source world, then it will continue to be a curiosity and no amount of proclaiming that "I can do the same thing with 14 bash scripts a couple of Perl scripts and some python connected to a Ruby app" will sway anyone.
I am not saying it is good, I am simply saying it is reality.
So I went digging around in the garage and found my IBM-PC (8088 64K RAM - Green Screen two 360K floppies ) and I figured I would see if the damn thing would even power on. Un-boxed it, hooked up the original keyboard and display plugged in the power cord for the cpu and display and thought for a minute... Hit the monitor power switch and after a few seconds or static crackle I saw a raster line. Then I hit the power for the CPU. The fan started to whir, the drives looked for disks sequentially, then up popped ROM basic!
I am in your age group. Having turned 50 recently, I look ahead to what is the next Big Thing for me. I did the management tour early on in my late 30's and found it distasteful since it involves trying to motivate people to get the job done and coddling upper management.
As one poster said, It is trying to get adults who act like children to act like adults, and dealing with squabbles between developers, one who is is bound and determined to use Ruby and another who is just as determined to use something else, and trying to make everyone happy and productive and satisfy the sales weenies.
Although i hate to say it because it makes me sound like more of a gray hair then I am, it is really time to sit back and take stock. I don't know if you have a family or not but this is a crucial decision and they have to be taken into account since your decision ultimately effects them as well.
There is no pat answer for this, the answer has to come from you and your desires for your future. Although I am not sure I recommend it, if you are well known enough and have the hutspa to really sell yourself, do the ultimate sell out and become a consultant, it has worked for me.
What that does not talk about are all the other times when the record company invested the same amount of money and lost all of it do to any number of reasons including talent that simply goes south and is never heard from again.
I am unsure of your point, are you suggesting that artists tend to steal lots of expensive equipment? because I fail to see how else the record company could make a significant enough loss for this to be an issue. Perhaps you are instead suggesting that the record companies pay for the artists to use a studio without supervising them? In which case I would suggest that they are a bit less business wise than you seem to think.
My point is simple and you are trying to uphold an argument that will fail. For every Nervana, for every Tom Petty, for every [insert name of wildly successful band] there are many that simply fail to launch. Record companies make their best guess at the level of success that will be achieved, but are often wrong. The same 250K invested can q2uickly turn to a 250K loss because the record simply does not sell. The artist did his part, the record company did their part the music was professionally recorded, but the record just failed to take off. So for every story like the one referred to in the link there are many others that are the exact opposite.
Idealistic kids should never sign shit without someone advising them of exactly what they are signing. The dollar signs are flashing in their eyes just as much as the A&R guys and that is the simple truth of it, they are both greedy.
What does idealistic have to do with it? I agree that people of limited experience should never sign 'shit' (what an apt use of that word), without independent advice. The suggestion that all ignorant people are greedy is insubstantial though.
There is a local kid here in Oakland that has some pretty good chops and makes pretty good music. He was offered a letter of intent. He showed it to me before he signed it. I told him just write on it, in your hand-writing, "The term of this letter shall not exceed three months from the sate of signing."
Bully for you, maybe there is hope for the world if such a cynical person as yourself can be so altruistic. In fact, I'd say that supports my view that systems rewarding good intention are preferable to systems that reward exploitation and limit the effect of good intention.
They don't call it the music business for nothing.
They don't have to call it the music business at all, I'm all for them calling it 'get rich quick'. I don't think it would be any more or less relevant.
I think perhaps Steve Albini [negativland.com] answered that one well enough some 15 or so years ago.
What that does not talk about are all the other times when the record company invested the same amount of money and lost all of it do to any number of reasons including talent that simply goes south and is never heard from again.
Idealistic kids should never sign shit without someone advising them of exactly what they are signing. The dollar signs are flashing in their eyes just as much as the A&R guys and that is the simple truth of it, they are both greedy.
There is a local kid here in Oakland that has some pretty good chops and makes pretty good music. He was offered a letter of intent. He showed it to me before he signed it. I told him just write on it, in your hand-writing, "The term of this letter shall not exceed three months from the sate of signing."
They don't call it the music business for nothing.
I personally believe IP law needs serious reform, but you have to draw the line someplace.
And least you forget, all record companies are evil ( even though they lay out huge sums of money and make a suckers bet every time they back a new artist ) and deserve absolutely no return on their investment.
Yes, at that extreme you are correct. The photo in question was not at that
extreme. The room was fairly well lit, and it was lit with what appear to be halogen lights,
but that is not really the point.
While digital has come a long way, it still has quite a ways to go before it catches up with film in things like shadow detail. Also because film is not a simple on/off digital still has jaggies and such when you start looking really close. Additionally digital will never have the ability to handle very fine gradations of color or gradient color transitions simply because a pixel is either on or off and nothing in between.
Digital camera's in the mid price range take acceptable quality photo's for pretty much anyone. The ones in the higher price range are fine for advertising shots, news photography and the like. For fine art ( well if one sees a photograph as fine art, which I do being a very big fan of the great classical photographers ) nothing really beats film so far. Do I expect digital to someday get there? Yeah I do, but it will be quite a few years and in the mean time to get the BEST digital photography you have to spend a very LARGE amount of money.
Notice the light levels. There is no falloff. The lighting is pretty even throughout the photograph. There are some bright spots where a point source of light seems to be directly above someone, but there is no gradual darkening as the distance from the lens increases. If all the lights where of equal intensity the farthest point of the rook would be markedly darker then the front of the room. Instead this images brightness levels are pretty consistent regardless of the distance to the subject.
No camera regardless of the recording media can "make more light".
I suppose a passive set of blades which are symmetrical airfoils with a millimeter or so of angle of attack in relation to airflow "could" deflect some foreign objects, but I think that it would at some point become a problem in and of itself. It will more then likely eventually reach something like 90% N2. So when the foreign object strikes it, it will already have massive stress on it and break leading to the ingestion of metal rather then bird bits.
Military fighter jets have ducting into the intake of their engines and still suffer from bird strikes. It is really hard to say how one could design an engine that gulps in massive amounts of air to avoid ingesting birds.
I like your idea. The issues come into play when you start screwing around with air flow into the engine. I am not sure you could treat it like a turboprop engine. Turbo props use 100% of the air they intake for combustion or whatever bleed air takes their are whereas in a large turbo-fan bypass ratios are starting to hit 11 to 1 and over, interrupting air flow into the engine could give a drastic and very sudden reduction in thrust.
A lot of TurboProp engines use centrifugal rather then axial compressors or a combination of both making air intake much less critical.
I have written from the very lowest level ( microcode ) to the very highest level ( web scripting ) and everything in between.
So lets talk titles here, because that is really all this is talking about, really.
I have written code that has then been realized in hard circuits, what is my title?
I have written code that has then been burned into a PROM, what is my title?
I have written code that has then been been used in hand held products, what is my title?
I have written code that has then been been used to process mortgages, what is my title?
I have written code that has then been used to process medical Claims, what is my title?
I have written code that has then been used to monitor patient vitals in a hospital, what is my title?
I have written code that has then been used to run nuclear power plants, what is my title?
I have written code that has then been used in military weapons, what is my title?
In all of this I have drawn on experience, technical publications, Worth, K&R and many other sources, and I have published some of the methods I have used. Am I a scientest, engineer, dreamer, artist, designer or am I all of these things?
Your are correct, but your correctness is supported by a poor argument and here is why:
Here's what I mean: strictly speaking, with unlimited intelligence on the compiler's part, the compiler can understand what a program does and rewrite it completely as it wishes to conform to the same behavior. This means any turing-complete language can have the same performance, with a sufficiently intelligent compiler.
All statements in any language must resolve to a set of correct machine instructions either by way of a compiler or an interpreter for the given platform. One can test a set of machine instructions to determine if it is the efficient way to accomplish a given task, be it a simple add or to index memory to obtain the details of a set of objects or a set of chars in the representation of string. It can be done, it has been done, and should be done every time there is a substantive change to the grammar of a language.
In practice and in current times, however, a language's features determine how well the state-of-the-art in compilers can optimize a program. To give a very simple example... You don't see compilers inserting statements to free memory in Java programs, even though that would sometimes make them faster than running them with a garbage collector as happens in practice.
Is it then the job of the compiler to write correct code or is it the job of the programmer? This is an interesting question, which is complex and arguable until the proverbial cows come home.
I normally don't feed the trolls but in your case, your overwhelming lack of logic and a real view of the world needs correcting.
To represent as you have, that the line of succession in perceived talent follows the progression that you have outlined, is simply pure foolishness as each has it's own difficulties and the more complex the language, the more difficult the task is of turning them into machine readable code.
So not to put too fine a point on it, not only is your concept wrong, you got the basic assumption backwards.
Oh dear, your argument is not even to the point, but I will reply anyway, if for nothing else then for your edification and to hopefully dissuade you from trying to sound intelligent again in the future.
Passing by reference is always faster ( with few exceptions ), but there are times when passing by value is more appropriate, so there is not a hard and fast rule, but a rule of thumb. So if you want to speak to that fine although I would direct your attention to the various evaluation methods that have been or are currently used.
As to the rest of your reply, it only supports my point ( although you don't seem to recognize that ) in as much as programmer efficiency is in almost all instances directly related to programmer enjoyment. I truly enjoy writing in Borland's version of pascal and I am quite efficient, but also enjoy writing in C as well and am not quite as efficient as pascal, but C supports a few language constructs that pascal does not, so again it comes down to programmer enjoyment.
The verbs, nouns, semantics and such used in a given programming language have nothing, I repeat... NOTHING to do with performance!
What does have to do with performance is the talent of the compiler / interpreter author, nothing more, nothing less.
C implements ++ and so forth and so on. Pascal does not, you have to express it as var:= var + x or in some implementations as inc(var) or inc(var,100). The smart compiler / interpreter author would implement those in the fastest possible way regardless of the particular language.
The one metric that has real meaning is programmer enjoyment. Do you prefer terseness over verbosity or something in between. Does this languages flow amke you truly appreciate working with it.
The only other real metric that has any true meaning is again the talent of the compiler / interpreter author. Was the the language parser built so that it can unfold complex statements that are often required to express certain ideas and perform certain operations. Does the language implement your favorite expression, eg: ++ , or something like that, which again harkens back to programmer enjoyment.
So what it really leaves us with is, "Do you enjoy using that language?" and only you, the programmer can asnwer that question.
I agree with you. Unfortunately the solution to the problem would more then likely quadruple the cost of a collage education. GSI's teach, they grade, they do all the stuff the professor should be doing instead of having to publish, write grants and beg for money to fund relevant research so the department will stay afloat.
Why do you think lecture halls have 200 students in them? I know four tenured professors at UC Berkeley, two in the chemistry department, two in the Anthropology Department, those 4 people would LOVE to teach more, but they have to be rainmakers instead of teachers.
And when I say rain makers I don't mean just money, that also means luring people into their programs so the departments stay afloat.
Slashdot Mirror
All of the wireless carriers, when you boil it down, offer the same thing, dial tone over a radio.
At some point, in any competitive environment you have to be able to differentiate yourself from the other carrier, so really what are the options?
With all of those factors except the cool factor being pretty much equal this is how they differentiate themselves from the next carrier. They go to the handset manufacturers and ask, "Hey what do you have that is really cool?", the look at whats out their and evaluate it and then pick the best platform that will allow them to create the best combination of experiences that add up to the all important cool factor.
Lest anyone be confused, the carriers invest a LOT of money in brining this handset to market and its is not like they make a lot of money on the handsent. They make the money on the service they provide be it providing higher bandwidth, storage services, fancy voice mail or whatever.
It is their money they are spending to do all of this, and the notion of creating a network that lets all this cool factor happen just to have someone else duplicate it, or worse duplicate it badly and sell at a lower price point is NOT a winning business model, in fact it is a model for going out of business.
You are asking a machine to make a comparison between "good" and "not good" or "OK" and "fantastic" when all of these choices are by their very nature illusory at best.
Consider a photo of a person. I may prefer a softer focus some my prefer sharper, other more color saturation of a pastoral scene others less. Individuals judge an image in many many different ways.
In my youth I did a lot of photography. I was taking pictures of the Winternationals at Fremont Raceway ( when it still existed. ) and was shooting a funny car as it came off the line. I was shooting tri-x and pushing it a full stop which resulted in a grainy negative. I did some darkroom magic and came up with a very eye catching and award winning photo. But if you mechanically compared it to the straight shot it would haev been inferior.
The point is you can use an computer to compare some things, but you cannot use a computer to judge "better" in an artistic sense or a "pleasing to the eye" sense.
With the typical rantings of the vast majority of /.'rs this is NOT about an e-mail system.
What this IS about is integration. Love it or hate it, Exchange / Outlook are tightly integrated into the entire office product line. The API's ( for better or worse ) are there to make an entire ecosystem of applications work together. Your data is in Access? It is extraordinary simple to create a notification system for events that are built into your database, it is all just there, it just works.
Yes this is why it is insanely easy to exploit it, but it is what makes a business process run. Sorry you don't get that with Oo or any of the rest of them.
Exchange servers are notoriously flaky, GroupWise from Novell is rock fucking solid but their API's in their present form just suck and I have been a devote' of the Big Red Box or what seems like a lifetime.
Until something with this kind of functionality comes along to the open source world, then it will continue to be a curiosity and no amount of proclaiming that "I can do the same thing with 14 bash scripts a couple of Perl scripts and some python connected to a Ruby app" will sway anyone.
I am not saying it is good, I am simply saying it is reality.
So I went digging around in the garage and found my IBM-PC (8088 64K RAM - Green Screen two 360K floppies ) and I figured I would see if the damn thing would even power on. Un-boxed it, hooked up the original keyboard and display plugged in the power cord for the cpu and display and thought for a minute... Hit the monitor power switch and after a few seconds or static crackle I saw a raster line. Then I hit the power for the CPU. The fan started to whir, the drives looked for disks sequentially, then up popped ROM basic!
Fine little machine that IBM-PC
I am in your age group. Having turned 50 recently, I look ahead to what is the next Big Thing for me. I did the management tour early on in my late 30's and found it distasteful since it involves trying to motivate people to get the job done and coddling upper management.
As one poster said, It is trying to get adults who act like children to act like adults, and dealing with squabbles between developers, one who is is bound and determined to use Ruby and another who is just as determined to use something else, and trying to make everyone happy and productive and satisfy the sales weenies.
Although i hate to say it because it makes me sound like more of a gray hair then I am, it is really time to sit back and take stock. I don't know if you have a family or not but this is a crucial decision and they have to be taken into account since your decision ultimately effects them as well.
There is no pat answer for this, the answer has to come from you and your desires for your future. Although I am not sure I recommend it, if you are well known enough and have the hutspa to really sell yourself, do the ultimate sell out and become a consultant, it has worked for me.
Science Channel, NGC or one of those just ran the thing, I watched it with my 8 year old. Pretty cool.
So is this "editor" just KDawson in disguise or what?
Just google for fireworks and chemistry and you too can learn how to make theses things.
What that does not talk about are all the other times when the record company invested the same amount of money and lost all of it do to any number of reasons including talent that simply goes south and is never heard from again.
I am unsure of your point, are you suggesting that artists tend to steal lots of expensive equipment? because I fail to see how else the record company could make a significant enough loss for this to be an issue. Perhaps you are instead suggesting that the record companies pay for the artists to use a studio without supervising them? In which case I would suggest that they are a bit less business wise than you seem to think.
My point is simple and you are trying to uphold an argument that will fail. For every Nervana, for every Tom Petty, for every [insert name of wildly successful band] there are many that simply fail to launch. Record companies make their best guess at the level of success that will be achieved, but are often wrong. The same 250K invested can q2uickly turn to a 250K loss because the record simply does not sell. The artist did his part, the record company did their part the music was professionally recorded, but the record just failed to take off. So for every story like the one referred to in the link there are many others that are the exact opposite.
Idealistic kids should never sign shit without someone advising them of exactly what they are signing. The dollar signs are flashing in their eyes just as much as the A&R guys and that is the simple truth of it, they are both greedy.
What does idealistic have to do with it? I agree that people of limited experience should never sign 'shit' (what an apt use of that word), without independent advice. The suggestion that all ignorant people are greedy is insubstantial though.
There is a local kid here in Oakland that has some pretty good chops and makes pretty good music. He was offered a letter of intent. He showed it to me before he signed it. I told him just write on it, in your hand-writing, "The term of this letter shall not exceed three months from the sate of signing."
Bully for you, maybe there is hope for the world if such a cynical person as yourself can be so altruistic. In fact, I'd say that supports my view that systems rewarding good intention are preferable to systems that reward exploitation and limit the effect of good intention.
They don't call it the music business for nothing.
They don't have to call it the music business at all, I'm all for them calling it 'get rich quick'. I don't think it would be any more or less relevant.
Yes I have read this many times...
I think perhaps Steve Albini [negativland.com] answered that one well enough some 15 or so years ago.
What that does not talk about are all the other times when the record company invested the same amount of money and lost all of it do to any number of reasons including talent that simply goes south and is never heard from again.
Idealistic kids should never sign shit without someone advising them of exactly what they are signing. The dollar signs are flashing in their eyes just as much as the A&R guys and that is the simple truth of it, they are both greedy.
There is a local kid here in Oakland that has some pretty good chops and makes pretty good music. He was offered a letter of intent. He showed it to me before he signed it. I told him just write on it, in your hand-writing, "The term of this letter shall not exceed three months from the sate of signing."
They don't call it the music business for nothing.
Don't waste your breath on these miscreants. These people create no artistic works, they make nothing of artistic value, they simply believe they can take what they want when they want it. They believe © means they have a right to copy and give away anything they please.
I personally believe IP law needs serious reform, but you have to draw the line someplace.
And least you forget, all record companies are evil ( even though they lay out huge sums of money and make a suckers bet every time they back a new artist ) and deserve absolutely no return on their investment.
Yes, at that extreme you are correct. The photo in question was not at that extreme. The room was fairly well lit, and it was lit with what appear to be halogen lights, but that is not really the point.
While digital has come a long way, it still has quite a ways to go before it catches up with film in things like shadow detail. Also because film is not a simple on/off digital still has jaggies and such when you start looking really close. Additionally digital will never have the ability to handle very fine gradations of color or gradient color transitions simply because a pixel is either on or off and nothing in between.
Digital camera's in the mid price range take acceptable quality photo's for pretty much anyone. The ones in the higher price range are fine for advertising shots, news photography and the like. For fine art ( well if one sees a photograph as fine art, which I do being a very big fan of the great classical photographers ) nothing really beats film so far. Do I expect digital to someday get there? Yeah I do, but it will be quite a few years and in the mean time to get the BEST digital photography you have to spend a very LARGE amount of money.
Then why is one of Photoshop's best filters called "Noise Removal"?
Sophisticated filtering algorithms can and do remove noise artifacts from digital images.
Neither!
Notice the light levels. There is no falloff. The lighting is pretty even throughout the photograph. There are some bright spots where a point source of light seems to be directly above someone, but there is no gradual darkening as the distance from the lens increases. If all the lights where of equal intensity the farthest point of the rook would be markedly darker then the front of the room. Instead this images brightness levels are pretty consistent regardless of the distance to the subject.
No camera regardless of the recording media can "make more light".
That looks heavily "shop'd"... There is no falloff, which in any photograph with any kind of camera will occur.
I suppose a passive set of blades which are symmetrical airfoils with a millimeter or so of angle of attack in relation to airflow "could" deflect some foreign objects, but I think that it would at some point become a problem in and of itself. It will more then likely eventually reach something like 90% N2. So when the foreign object strikes it, it will already have massive stress on it and break leading to the ingestion of metal rather then bird bits.
Military fighter jets have ducting into the intake of their engines and still suffer from bird strikes. It is really hard to say how one could design an engine that gulps in massive amounts of air to avoid ingesting birds.
Ever installed Picasa? It immediately starts finding AND displaying every image on your hard drive/
I like your idea. The issues come into play when you start screwing around with air flow into the engine. I am not sure you could treat it like a turboprop engine. Turbo props use 100% of the air they intake for combustion or whatever bleed air takes their are whereas in a large turbo-fan bypass ratios are starting to hit 11 to 1 and over, interrupting air flow into the engine could give a drastic and very sudden reduction in thrust.
A lot of TurboProp engines use centrifugal rather then axial compressors or a combination of both making air intake much less critical.
I have written from the very lowest level ( microcode ) to the very highest level ( web scripting ) and everything in between.
So lets talk titles here, because that is really all this is talking about, really.
In all of this I have drawn on experience, technical publications, Worth, K&R and many other sources, and I have published some of the methods I have used. Am I a scientest, engineer, dreamer, artist, designer or am I all of these things?
Sigh... Kid I have been doing this for 30 years, I have programmed in most all of them at one time or another. Were done.
Your are correct, but your correctness is supported by a poor argument and here is why:
Here's what I mean: strictly speaking, with unlimited intelligence on the compiler's part, the compiler can understand what a program does and rewrite it completely as it wishes to conform to the same behavior. This means any turing-complete language can have the same performance, with a sufficiently intelligent compiler.
All statements in any language must resolve to a set of correct machine instructions either by way of a compiler or an interpreter for the given platform. One can test a set of machine instructions to determine if it is the efficient way to accomplish a given task, be it a simple add or to index memory to obtain the details of a set of objects or a set of chars in the representation of string. It can be done, it has been done, and should be done every time there is a substantive change to the grammar of a language.
In practice and in current times, however, a language's features determine how well the state-of-the-art in compilers can optimize a program. To give a very simple example... You don't see compilers inserting statements to free memory in Java programs, even though that would sometimes make them faster than running them with a garbage collector as happens in practice.
Is it then the job of the compiler to write correct code or is it the job of the programmer? This is an interesting question, which is complex and arguable until the proverbial cows come home.
I normally don't feed the trolls but in your case, your overwhelming lack of logic and a real view of the world needs correcting.
To represent as you have, that the line of succession in perceived talent follows the progression that you have outlined, is simply pure foolishness as each has it's own difficulties and the more complex the language, the more difficult the task is of turning them into machine readable code.
So not to put too fine a point on it, not only is your concept wrong, you got the basic assumption backwards.
Oh dear, your argument is not even to the point, but I will reply anyway, if for nothing else then for your edification and to hopefully dissuade you from trying to sound intelligent again in the future.
Passing by reference is always faster ( with few exceptions ), but there are times when passing by value is more appropriate, so there is not a hard and fast rule, but a rule of thumb. So if you want to speak to that fine although I would direct your attention to the various evaluation methods that have been or are currently used.
As to the rest of your reply, it only supports my point ( although you don't seem to recognize that ) in as much as programmer efficiency is in almost all instances directly related to programmer enjoyment. I truly enjoy writing in Borland's version of pascal and I am quite efficient, but also enjoy writing in C as well and am not quite as efficient as pascal, but C supports a few language constructs that pascal does not, so again it comes down to programmer enjoyment.
These sorts of things never fail to to amaze me.
The verbs, nouns, semantics and such used in a given programming language have nothing, I repeat... NOTHING to do with performance!
What does have to do with performance is the talent of the compiler / interpreter author, nothing more, nothing less.
C implements ++ and so forth and so on. Pascal does not, you have to express it as var := var + x or in some implementations as inc(var) or inc(var,100). The smart compiler / interpreter author would implement those in the fastest possible way regardless of the particular language.
The one metric that has real meaning is programmer enjoyment. Do you prefer terseness over verbosity or something in between. Does this languages flow amke you truly appreciate working with it.
The only other real metric that has any true meaning is again the talent of the compiler / interpreter author. Was the the language parser built so that it can unfold complex statements that are often required to express certain ideas and perform certain operations. Does the language implement your favorite expression, eg: ++ , or something like that, which again harkens back to programmer enjoyment.
So what it really leaves us with is, "Do you enjoy using that language?" and only you, the programmer can asnwer that question.
No need to get all gay ( not saying there is anything wrong with that ) I mean they had Megan up there, she could have done the boys a turn.
I agree with you. Unfortunately the solution to the problem would more then likely quadruple the cost of a collage education. GSI's teach, they grade, they do all the stuff the professor should be doing instead of having to publish, write grants and beg for money to fund relevant research so the department will stay afloat.
Why do you think lecture halls have 200 students in them? I know four tenured professors at UC Berkeley, two in the chemistry department, two in the Anthropology Department, those 4 people would LOVE to teach more, but they have to be rainmakers instead of teachers.
And when I say rain makers I don't mean just money, that also means luring people into their programs so the departments stay afloat.
I have been a private pilot for 10 years now.
I feel ya pal. Keep using that license to learn every time you push the balls to the wall.