I'm talking about Grammatical constructions of headlines. You're talking about TFA. It appears that one of us has forgotten what Slashdot threads are for.

"Aardvark Oppressed Anthill Insects in Fed Excavation Forages."

That's about as much as I understood from that headline. Is the headline talking about China-prosecuted Internet-Policement or how China Prosecuated an Internet Policeman. Or did China Prosecute the Internt, by paying a policeman to do it.

I'm sick of these Lumpen-Intelligentia creative disasters appearing everywhere like buzzfeed headlines on a sidebar. For god's sake, try to write something people can read without needing to do double takes.

As somebody who studies language - I agree. You can't make analogies in the first place without a functional language. And if you have a functional language, why make up analogies? And seriously, how can the communicate complex ideas? Can you imagine them trying to write a book explaining microprocessor design?

Well I'm a mathematician, and basically you're wrong. It is far easier for me to present 3 concrete examples of a problem, the method of solution, and then write down the general case than it is to bother with trying to define the minutae of required to functionally explain the general case and how the method actually works. Most people will learn by following the examples and through them "grokking" the general method than will ever learn from reading a formally descriptive algorithm of the process.

Concrete example: Demonstrate base ten addition by writing the examples (152+27 , 132+45, 174+19, 199+36, 999+1) on the board, vs demonstrate base ten addition by discussing the properties of carrying units, overflow, and adding columns.

Even more conrete example: Demonstrate a triangle by drawing one, vs demonstrate a triangle by decribing it as a three sided figure made by straight line segements whose endpoints are joined cyclically.

One of the things that made Picard such a memorable character is that, once or twice a season, he would break out of the British Sea captain shell and reveal the character beneath, particularly the flaws and weaknesses.

In this regard, some of the best Picard Episodes are, to obviously begin with

- Chain of Command II (There are Four Lights!)
- Family (Picard reveals how much his Bord capture affected him)
- Tapestry (Reveals Picard's stabbing and its effect on his life)

However, I find one of the most striking aspects of Picard's character is revealed while he is offscreen, by Worf, in an otherwise fairly corny 5th season episode called "The Perfect Mate".

PAR LENOR: Perhaps your captain would care to invite us to join him for dinner this evening...

WORF: The captain dines alone.

It's almost a throwaway line, but manages to crystalise a lot about Picard's behaviour and relationships with the rest of the crew. He's never too close to any of them, or anyone, personally, but instead lives and relates to people through his leadership role as Captain, an effectively Father figure to the crew. There's a pay-off made on this during the last Episode (All Good Things - II) where Picard finally joins one of the poker games.

However, I think that the single best Picard moment related to this is his wordless reaction on hearing of Ensign Ro's defection, at the very end of the penultimate episode (Preemptive Strike). Ro betrays Star Fleet for personal, patriotic, emotional reasons, and does so precisely because Picard professionally pushed her into an undercover mission.

Here Picard finally tastes the bitter pill of consequence that he's been dishing out to aliens and miscreants for seven seasons, as his adoptive officer-daughter Ro finally makes her personal, matured, self-determined choice to not live the rest of her life in his perfect Star Fleet family, or by his cherished Federation rules. And after being betrayed by someone he trusted, for reasons he understands but cannot accept, Picard's livid silence makes for a deliciously dramatic conclusion. A crowning moment, no doubt.

You sir, are a technology brat, not a geek.

We called 'em script kiddies back in the day.

While you are right about the limited applicability of Abrash's programming techniques, I think it is unfair to reduce his collective contributions to a "book of tricks".

I think the challenge was not merely optimization but also optimization within the limited realm of graphics programming, which had different challenges. You sound like someone who understands the basics needed to successfully optimize hardware and software performance, so I am sure you can appreciate how using a couple of otherwise vacant registers or figuring out the order of correct order of stacks/heaps could play a huge role in performance, at least back in the day.

Abrash's contributions were a combination of old-school tricks (especially his stuff from DDJ), an understanding of graphics programming from an algorithmic standpoint (and how to optimize them within the limitations of the hardware available), and were geared specifically towards optimizing game engines (and corresponding hardware recommendations). Sure, it's not quite the scope and scale of K&R's contributions, but that's like saying Feynman's work pales in comparison to Einstein's and Bohr's, so he was a hack.

That just shows how much the demographics of Slashdot have changed.

You must be kidding me.

When I was in high school, I discovered Abrash's Zen of Graphics Programming, filled with all kinds of gems. And then, Quake came out and there was his Graphics Programming Black Book.

Between x86 optimization, BSP trees, and assorted C/C++ tricks, Abrash's books were bibles at a time when graphics programming was just taking off.

I remember writing my own ray-tracer and 3d engine based on what I learned in his books.

Then there was his book on Zen of Code Optimization, which was amazing and filled with all kinds of computational optimization techniques for a time when not using a memory register effectively meant your render would stop halfway.

Michael Abrash and John Carmack were legends -- their techniques in optimizing rendering engines and their efforts in making graphics programming accessible to wider audiences were instrumental in enabling high end graphics. In fact, makers of graphics cards were known to design features based on optimization techniques that were used in Quake and other rendering engines.

And there was also something called "demo scene", where people built amazing programming snippets of graphics, media, and art. Between that and Abrash and Carmack's work, graphics got to where we are today.

So, yeah. Your question shows an unfortunate level of ignorance on the origins of the graphics programming industry.

Or maybe, in order to play Minecraft, etc with an Occulus Rift, or eventually play them at all, everyone would first need to sign up for a Facebook account. Notch made the right call on this one.

Freedom of speech doesn't give you the right to use a microphone to drown out everyone else.

Too late. The Nazi book has become the story. Dotcom's launch of a political party has become a side-story.

The false sense of urgency people have simply because they can is getting ridiculous. I can accept that probably 1% of phone calls are actually urgent. What I can't accept is the 75% of calls that people think are ugent. What's the old saying, "Your lack of planning does not constitute an emergency on my part."

Wow. That must be one handy number of a job you've landed for yourself. I take it you don't have children either.

To fix that problem you're going to have to fix the disparity in wealth, and the tax codes have only ever been a part of that disparity.

Thank you for pointing out the true source of the problems in the industrial sector when it comes to ages, emplyment, and compensation.

The declining fortunes of industrial workers have nothing to do with automation. They have everything to do with the siphoning of wealth from productive industries and workers towards the financial ascendancy and its backers. Wealth has been transfered upwards to the point where there is not enough of it to reward work in the way it was 40 years ago.

If you are not actually producing wealth, by adding value, then the distribution of wealth in society becomes a zero sum game. No level of automation can have an effect on this basic reality. If neither man nor robot is actually making "things", then stagnation becomes inevitable.

All of these are fundamentally positive changes.

So me having to wait for the shop attendant to come back from the john, or fumble to check out my out groceries, or wait longer for a waiter at a restaurant are all positive changes?

Positive for who exactly? All I see on my end is even more of my time being wasted.

A major grocery chain where I live brought in automated checkout machines. So instead of having by shopping scanned in by a trained professional, I was expected to scan in items myself in a poorly designed working area while a computer with the voice of a calm genteel London accept patiently and repeatedly insisted I scan the items again and again as the queue grew longer and longer behind me.

So, I started going to the shop down the road with people still behind the tills. The food is generally better there too.