I cannot wait till actors are 100% artificial. Finally we can get rid of most of those grossly overpaid attention whores. This might be the only case where I am glad when the computer destroys a job.
By using your intelligence, your senses, your common sense. By reading reviews and examining test data.
And how often do we read about manipulated test data? And reviews, when was the last time you read about astroturfing campaigns of large companies? I started to ignore reviews when more than once my own reviews were deleted because they were not too advantageous for the reviewed products. So reviews too are mostly worthless unless they come from friends you trust.
Intelligence can only be used when enough data is available. And my senses...as I said, with food I only rely on my senses.
On the contrary. Poor quality RAM is a significant cause of computer crashes and problems.
So what? When I have computer problems I test my ram. If it is faulty I return it. Cheap does not mean 'need not to work'. But this is a legal problem, which is handled differently in different countries.
That's just as stupid as always buying the most expensive thing. What you should be looking for is quality and value.
But how can I determine quality? Most THX buyers would have thought, that they bought quality.
I'm curious, though. Do you apply this philosophy to everything? For example do you always buy the cheapest food, regardless of how it tastes, or how nutritious it is? Are you posting this from a 286 or a Vic 20, rather than a more expensive modern computer?
With food it is easy: I buy what I like. If I cannot distinguish two products by taste, I take the cheaper one or the better looking one. I totally disregard statements like 'bio' or 'fresh' or 'vitamins'. I cannot verify them so I assume it is a lie. I always assume vendors lie to me. Often enough I have been proven right by one food scandal or another.
Your 286/vic 20 question is a bit provocative. Of course I have a modern computer. However, for the stuff I need a computer I don't need an expensive high-end machine. So I can take a cheaper one. Harder to cheat with computers anyways. For instance ram. When it is advertised that it contains 4gb of ram, it is easily to spot when it has only 3. Faster ram? Better quality? I would not notice the difference so I don't care. When I take the cheapest I cannot be cheated.
Still, you are not totally wrong with you question. I do buy quality, but only if I can be absolutely sure it is quality. This means I can verify it myself.
...because I always buy cheapest. Mostly people who deem themselves audiophile and cannot understand that I am not. For me a cheap player was always enough. Now I also have the satisfaction that I am not cheated. At least I get what I pay for.:-)
Most likely yes. It is not so that the European and American industries were more interested (or educated) in public health than the Chinese industry is now. I do remember several scandals in Germany when poisonous stuff was found in toys. General pollution then was much higher than today. For instance, not so long ago every car emitted lead particles or even worse organic lead compounds. It was a long and hard learning process how to force our industries to act more responsibly. China is now at the beginning of this process.
So as I said, remove the potentially dangerous stuff as soon as you learn about it, but no reason to panic or be scared shitless.
If I were a parent and I had read this article, it would probably scare me shitless. What would you do to protect your children from these kinds of threats -
Throw away the possibly poisonous stuff as soon as you learn about it and go on as always. Scared? Not at all. I am now 46. In my childhood all kinds of cool stuff was allowed, which now scare you nannies 'shitless'. I never heard of children dieing like flys then. On the contrary, it looks like the children were healthier in my time than they are now.
I mean, apart from sheer nerd value, this has absolutely no worth to science or humanity.
Are you sure? I did not read the original article. Would be useless since I doubt I would understand the math his program is based on.
But when the previous record was done on a multi million dollar machine and he did it on a single desktop computer I think it is not far fetched to assume he must have found some significant improvements to the pi calculating algorithm.
If this is possible for pi calculation, could something like that also be possible for prime number calculations? Maybe someone like him finds a tremendously faster method for prime factorizations? This definitely would affect humanity, when suddlenly a good deal of encryted data can easily decrypted on a cheap standard pc.
I do it sometimes too, when I have to understand bad code with many nested loops. However, if I am allowed to do it, and the the code and project situations allows it, I tend to refactor the code. The necessity to mark the end of a loop is definitely a code smell. Usually it is not too difficult to convert several nested loops in a group of easily readable functions. If it is, it is even a worse sign regarding code quality. Yes, exceptions exist.
Since you have never seen his code and know nothing about its application, it would seem you carry around the "refactor it!" hammer.
I don't need to see the code. Loops so big and nested that you need to mark the end of each loop to see, which end of a loop belongs to which loop header. Several developers working on one function. Pasting in a huge number of lines, which in most cases would be too many even for a stand-alone function. A function with 1000 lines always smells. Pasting it in another function spells design disaster almost for sure.
So yes, I don't know the code, and I don't know what type of program you were working on. And yes, cases in which a better design is not possible exist, but are extremely rare. So rare infact that unless I am convinced otherwise, I just assume it is the usual example of crap code found in the majority of software projects. And I have never seen a code, which could not benefit from a refactoring. I said on purpose code not project. In a project is due to time constraints a refactoring not always possible.
Wow, great. Without "#Code specific to bash or bash compatible shells. author *ME*" I would have to try dozens of script languages before I'd find out that '#!/bin/BASH' means a bash script. And of course, without '# INCLUDES' I surely would have confused the folloing lines with macro definitions.
Re:One person's myth is another person's fact.
on
Myths About Code Comments
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I work on a really big hunk of C code and one place I would like to see more comments is in the start and end of blocks. This is because during the life of the code people come in and paste maybe 1000 lines of code from elsewhere into the block and totally stuff up the indenting so its hard to see what is supposed to match to what.
If the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. You comments are in this case the nail you desperately want to hammer in, when in reality you need a refactoring. And you need to give the idiot, who pastes the additional 1000 lines, a hearty kick in the ass.
Not necessarily telepathy. But if it is possible to implant electrodes into the speech centre of the brain, is it necessary to be trained to use them? Or can those electrodes be implanted and the system can automatically transmit speech into radio waves? This way it would be possible to implant this system into every person. Using the infrastructure which is already present for cell phones it would easily possible to record and store every single conversation of all people. Wet dream of all governments.
How long or how many real or faked terrorist attacks will it take until such an electrode is mandatory and thoughts are registered and stored in central databases? Call me paranoid, but if something like this is technically possible it will be done. Of course, if not to prevent terrorist attacks then to protect our children. So the first to get this electrode will be sex offenders. The usual way to soften resistance against the removal of civil rights.
True, the first versions now are still very primitve and not usuable for such a purpose, but compare the computers today with the ones twenty years ago.
This asteroid may not pose a threat. But another one might sooner or later. So even if it does not make much sense in terms of actual threat now, I guess, it is a good opportunity to gather data on projects like this. Or to say in another way: Do you really want to wait till an asteroid is discovered, which will hit the earth for sure and then start thinking and developing?
Google is sued right and left for whatever reasons. Publishing companies lobby governments to have google pay for the "right" to make them visible. Of course, this only works well if Google is taken the power to retaliate by removing certain sites from their results at will. So search neutrality generally sounds good, but who benefits most from it?
Most package manager can automatically create a binary package out of a source package. In many cases this resolves even problems with otherwise incompatible libraries. So for whom is such a fat binary advantageous? I'd assume mostly for closed source vendors. I have nothing against closed source in general, but if I pay for a software I expect at least a minimum of support. Such a fat binary does not look too userfriendly for me. Even if I can strip it down to my architecture. I suppose it does not solve the problems of incompatible libraries. I will follow the responses to this article, maybe I overlook someting and I will be convinced otherwise, but at the moment I would say: Superfluous.
Whether or not you can be held responsible for viewing the videos does not matter. For all non-Germans who might not know: This is the court in Hamburg. When it comes to copyright and internet you cannot find a more stupid court with more imbecile or corrupt judges than the one in Hamburg. You have enough money? You can get any ruling you like. Usually it does not hold before a higher court, but this is not necessarily expected by the "plaintiffs". The main task for the court in Hamburg is to be used to threaten and intimidate the monetary weaker party. In this case Google is not the monetary weaker party, but at least there is a chance that the "plaintiff" gets the data who watched the videos. It is very unlikely they will be sued directly. Though before the court in Hamburg this might be successful. It is most likely that the people who watched the videos get some sort of 'cease and desist letter', which costs them several hundred dollar. In Germany this is a legal way blackmailing people to pay in order not to get sued. In this case, if they do not pay probably nothing will happen. The legal base is just too weak. But enough will pay out of fear to get sued so that this scam will pay off nicely.
There Nokia presented among other new techniques the 'declarative ui' for Qt. Very powerful stuff. A dozen or two lines of code and even a mediocre programmer can 'recreate' most if not all of the iPhone user interface. In the past Apple did threaten to sue groups/companies when it thought they came too close to the Apple look and feel. In countries where software patents are valid Apple should have a very good stand. So I admit I speculate, but I would not be surprised if there was some sort of thread from Apple and this is the counter reaction from Nokia. Now they probably evaluate and compare their patents and if none of them has a clear advantage the problem will be settled more or less peacefully.
Im shocked. Really shocked. Or perhaps not......
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enercon#cite_note-zeit-0
In other words: So what? Is normal competitive behaviour when the USA is spying, but evil when the USA is the victim? Cry me a river.
It goes in as a star or a chicken or a pistachio and comes out as random energy, which is a pretty clear increase in entropy.
Maybe it is an increase in entropy. But it is not a clear increase. The matter is homogenized. Isn't this a loss of entropy? Suppose you have a bag which is filled with a mixture of salt and sugar -> high entropy. Now you turn magically the sugar and the salt into a diamond. One type of matter, highly ordered -> less entropy. Isn't this the same a black hole does? You give in all kind of matter, you get out one type of radiation. I am sure this view is not correct, but where is the flaw?
Slashdot Mirror
I cannot wait till actors are 100% artificial. Finally we can get rid of most of those grossly overpaid attention whores. This might be the only case where I am glad when the computer destroys a job.
By using your intelligence, your senses, your common sense. By reading reviews and examining test data.
And how often do we read about manipulated test data? And reviews, when was the last time you read about astroturfing campaigns of large companies? I started to ignore reviews when more than once my own reviews were deleted because they were not too advantageous for the reviewed products. So reviews too are mostly worthless unless they come from friends you trust.
Intelligence can only be used when enough data is available. And my senses...as I said, with food I only rely on my senses.
On the contrary. Poor quality RAM is a significant cause of computer crashes and problems.
So what? When I have computer problems I test my ram. If it is faulty I return it. Cheap does not mean 'need not to work'. But this is a legal problem, which is handled differently in different countries.
Flat? ;-)
That's just as stupid as always buying the most expensive thing. What you should be looking for is quality and value.
But how can I determine quality? Most THX buyers would have thought, that they bought quality.
I'm curious, though. Do you apply this philosophy to everything? For example do you always buy the cheapest food, regardless of how it tastes, or how nutritious it is? Are you posting this from a 286 or a Vic 20, rather than a more expensive modern computer?
With food it is easy: I buy what I like. If I cannot distinguish two products by taste, I take the cheaper one or the better looking one. I totally disregard statements like 'bio' or 'fresh' or 'vitamins'. I cannot verify them so I assume it is a lie. I always assume vendors lie to me. Often enough I have been proven right by one food scandal or another.
Your 286/vic 20 question is a bit provocative. Of course I have a modern computer. However, for the stuff I need a computer I don't need an expensive high-end machine. So I can take a cheaper one. Harder to cheat with computers anyways. For instance ram. When it is advertised that it contains 4gb of ram, it is easily to spot when it has only 3. Faster ram? Better quality? I would not notice the difference so I don't care. When I take the cheapest I cannot be cheated.
Still, you are not totally wrong with you question. I do buy quality, but only if I can be absolutely sure it is quality. This means I can verify it myself.
...because I always buy cheapest. Mostly people who deem themselves audiophile and cannot understand that I am not. For me a cheap player was always enough. Now I also have the satisfaction that I am not cheated. At least I get what I pay for. :-)
A surrogate. ;-)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0986263/
Don't bash kindle or Amazon. It's not their fault. They are legally forbidden to do the conversion you proposed.
Most likely yes. It is not so that the European and American industries were more interested (or educated) in public health than the Chinese industry is now. I do remember several scandals in Germany when poisonous stuff was found in toys. General pollution then was much higher than today. For instance, not so long ago every car emitted lead particles or even worse organic lead compounds. It was a long and hard learning process how to force our industries to act more responsibly. China is now at the beginning of this process.
So as I said, remove the potentially dangerous stuff as soon as you learn about it, but no reason to panic or be scared shitless.
If I were a parent and I had read this article, it would probably scare me shitless. What would you do to protect your children from these kinds of threats -
Throw away the possibly poisonous stuff as soon as you learn about it and go on as always. Scared? Not at all. I am now 46. In my childhood all kinds of cool stuff was allowed, which now scare you nannies 'shitless'. I never heard of children dieing like flys then. On the contrary, it looks like the children were healthier in my time than they are now.
They will sell you anything they can get away with.
How is this different from any other company in any other country?
I mean, apart from sheer nerd value, this has absolutely no worth to science or humanity.
Are you sure? I did not read the original article. Would be useless since I doubt I would understand the math his program is based on. But when the previous record was done on a multi million dollar machine and he did it on a single desktop computer I think it is not far fetched to assume he must have found some significant improvements to the pi calculating algorithm.
If this is possible for pi calculation, could something like that also be possible for prime number calculations? Maybe someone like him finds a tremendously faster method for prime factorizations? This definitely would affect humanity, when suddlenly a good deal of encryted data can easily decrypted on a cheap standard pc.
I do it sometimes too, when I have to understand bad code with many nested loops. However, if I am allowed to do it, and the the code and project situations allows it, I tend to refactor the code. The necessity to mark the end of a loop is definitely a code smell. Usually it is not too difficult to convert several nested loops in a group of easily readable functions. If it is, it is even a worse sign regarding code quality. Yes, exceptions exist.
Since you have never seen his code and know nothing about its application, it would seem you carry around the "refactor it!" hammer.
I don't need to see the code. Loops so big and nested that you need to mark the end of each loop to see, which end of a loop belongs to which loop header. Several developers working on one function. Pasting in a huge number of lines, which in most cases would be too many even for a stand-alone function. A function with 1000 lines always smells. Pasting it in another function spells design disaster almost for sure. So yes, I don't know the code, and I don't know what type of program you were working on. And yes, cases in which a better design is not possible exist, but are extremely rare. So rare infact that unless I am convinced otherwise, I just assume it is the usual example of crap code found in the majority of software projects. And I have never seen a code, which could not benefit from a refactoring. I said on purpose code not project. In a project is due to time constraints a refactoring not always possible.
Wow, great. Without "#Code specific to bash or bash compatible shells. author *ME*" I would have to try dozens of script languages before I'd find out that '#!/bin/BASH' means a bash script. And of course, without '# INCLUDES' I surely would have confused the folloing lines with macro definitions.
I work on a really big hunk of C code and one place I would like to see more comments is in the start and end of blocks. This is because during the life of the code people come in and paste maybe 1000 lines of code from elsewhere into the block and totally stuff up the indenting so its hard to see what is supposed to match to what.
If the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. You comments are in this case the nail you desperately want to hammer in, when in reality you need a refactoring. And you need to give the idiot, who pastes the additional 1000 lines, a hearty kick in the ass.
Not necessarily telepathy. But if it is possible to implant electrodes into the speech centre of the brain, is it necessary to be trained to use them? Or can those electrodes be implanted and the system can automatically transmit speech into radio waves? This way it would be possible to implant this system into every person. Using the infrastructure which is already present for cell phones it would easily possible to record and store every single conversation of all people. Wet dream of all governments.
How long or how many real or faked terrorist attacks will it take until such an electrode is mandatory and thoughts are registered and stored in central databases? Call me paranoid, but if something like this is technically possible it will be done. Of course, if not to prevent terrorist attacks then to protect our children. So the first to get this electrode will be sex offenders. The usual way to soften resistance against the removal of civil rights. True, the first versions now are still very primitve and not usuable for such a purpose, but compare the computers today with the ones twenty years ago.
This asteroid may not pose a threat. But another one might sooner or later. So even if it does not make much sense in terms of actual threat now, I guess, it is a good opportunity to gather data on projects like this. Or to say in another way: Do you really want to wait till an asteroid is discovered, which will hit the earth for sure and then start thinking and developing?
Google is sued right and left for whatever reasons. Publishing companies lobby governments to have google pay for the "right" to make them visible. Of course, this only works well if Google is taken the power to retaliate by removing certain sites from their results at will. So search neutrality generally sounds good, but who benefits most from it?
Most package manager can automatically create a binary package out of a source package. In many cases this resolves even problems with otherwise incompatible libraries. So for whom is such a fat binary advantageous? I'd assume mostly for closed source vendors. I have nothing against closed source in general, but if I pay for a software I expect at least a minimum of support. Such a fat binary does not look too userfriendly for me. Even if I can strip it down to my architecture. I suppose it does not solve the problems of incompatible libraries. I will follow the responses to this article, maybe I overlook someting and I will be convinced otherwise, but at the moment I would say: Superfluous.
Don't tell me, tell the judges in Hamburg. Good luck. :-)
Whether or not you can be held responsible for viewing the videos does not matter. For all non-Germans who might not know: This is the court in Hamburg. When it comes to copyright and internet you cannot find a more stupid court with more imbecile or corrupt judges than the one in Hamburg. You have enough money? You can get any ruling you like. Usually it does not hold before a higher court, but this is not necessarily expected by the "plaintiffs". The main task for the court in Hamburg is to be used to threaten and intimidate the monetary weaker party. In this case Google is not the monetary weaker party, but at least there is a chance that the "plaintiff" gets the data who watched the videos. It is very unlikely they will be sued directly. Though before the court in Hamburg this might be successful. It is most likely that the people who watched the videos get some sort of 'cease and desist letter', which costs them several hundred dollar. In Germany this is a legal way blackmailing people to pay in order not to get sued. In this case, if they do not pay probably nothing will happen. The legal base is just too weak. But enough will pay out of fear to get sued so that this scam will pay off nicely.
There Nokia presented among other new techniques the 'declarative ui' for Qt. Very powerful stuff. A dozen or two lines of code and even a mediocre programmer can 'recreate' most if not all of the iPhone user interface. In the past Apple did threaten to sue groups/companies when it thought they came too close to the Apple look and feel. In countries where software patents are valid Apple should have a very good stand. So I admit I speculate, but I would not be surprised if there was some sort of thread from Apple and this is the counter reaction from Nokia. Now they probably evaluate and compare their patents and if none of them has a clear advantage the problem will be settled more or less peacefully.
Im shocked. Really shocked. Or perhaps not...... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enercon#cite_note-zeit-0 In other words: So what? Is normal competitive behaviour when the USA is spying, but evil when the USA is the victim? Cry me a river.
Maybe it is an increase in entropy. But it is not a clear increase. The matter is homogenized. Isn't this a loss of entropy? Suppose you have a bag which is filled with a mixture of salt and sugar -> high entropy. Now you turn magically the sugar and the salt into a diamond. One type of matter, highly ordered -> less entropy. Isn't this the same a black hole does? You give in all kind of matter, you get out one type of radiation. I am sure this view is not correct, but where is the flaw?