maybe that's what you see. my analysis of the numbers says that if the trend of the last 11 months keeps up for the next 12-13, at the end of that period we'll have more iPhone OS usage than linux. 2024 might well be the year of iPhone OS on the Desktop!

wait a minute...

gah! bad geek!

The most effective debugging tool is still careful thought, coupled with judiciously placed print statements.

Brian Kernighan, true as it ever was, and always will be.

you think the problem of hardware not working as promised is gone? wow, i want to come live in your world. fun survey: check the correctness of the MP table on a motherboard with ACPI support. get a decent sample size and i'm betting you'll score about 60%, and that number's dropping.

i think the issue isn't really the size of the project, but the size of the environment. i have worked on projects in C, built using make (mk, but close enough), around 100 files without any issues. follow good coding standards and simple things like grep are far more powerful than what most IDEs give you. but as the environment gets more complex, things get different. i'm working with Objective C now, and while i'm enjoying the language proper, the build system and organization of frameworks is something of a nightmare to work with by hand. having an IDE there is proving very helpful, but that's because of the structure and complexity of the environment, not the code i'm working on.

i think we're mostly in agreement, but i take issue with how you're formulating this "ideal case" argument:

In theory, people shouldn't know more than what collection to use...

i think the theory and practice in your statement are exactly backwards. in theory, people shouldn't use tools they don't understand the implications of. if you don't know how some library is going to behave in all cases your program could conceivably encounter (and many it couldn't), you shouldn't be using it. in practice, we all end up doing so, if only because of the volume and scope of what we're dealing with, and the fact that what we're doing shifts over time. still, i think we'd want that gap to be as small as possible.

amen, brother, amen.

you're missing the point, which is understandable since this thread has gone totally stupid. but hey, i'm up early.

My argument is that learning to implement a sorting algorithm will not impart special knowledge beyond the experience that can be attained by completing virtually any other task. Like I said above, I see absolutely zero value in the ability to recite a particular solution from memory.

the problem is that you're conflating two different things. the "ability to recite a particular solution from memory" is largely, i'd agree, useless in most cases. but that's not really what this is about. the process of learning imparts special knowledge beyond what is learned. you begin to understand the "whys" of things in ways that you simply cannot if you've never learned the thing.

in most ways, statements of the form "you must know X" are really proxies for statements of the form "you must have learned X" (even current retention is less important), mostly because they're so much easier to verify.

The one who threatens to stop delivering cargo to country-X if it can't defend itself against piracy.

not likely, at least not in the face of competition not making such demands. see below.

The other will never make it to any ports.

well, now that's fairly obviously false, isn't it? given that the prevailing rule is that conventionally armed ships are not allowed into many ports, and most ships comply to get into most ports, and most ships get to their destination, your claim looks pretty foolish.

you have this idea that Maersk could simply dictate terms, but that's not true (or they would have done it already). as long as there's enough competition (and you only need a handful of companies, not a diverse ecosystem), someone will be willing to say "we'll take our chances with the water cannon and oversized loud speaker in exchange for Maersk's share of your traffic".
mind you, i think it's quite likely that the government in question would, in fact, cave to Maersk's demands, but there isn't really an economic reason to do so, at least in this market. we've just built a global culture where governments are afraid to stand up to corporate interests.

and your last paragraph seems like a total non sequitur to me. what does what you said have to do with your inability to imagine any plausible motivations for this "anything but guns" mandate other than hippy love? i just don't follow.

A few people have made the obvious jokes about the RIAA vs. pirates, followed by things like "oh, those pirates? never mind then." but, really that just misses the point. the RIAA is best deployed against exactly those type of pirates. think about it, what're your options?

• RIAA wipes out pirates. no more pirates. world's better.
• Pirates wipe out RIAA. no more RIAA. world's better.

we need more of these head-to-head jackass elimination contests!

obstacle? i thought it was a prerequisite.

You carry a squirt gun, I'll take a fully-armed crew carrying M-16s.

okay. but only one of us will be able to enter many international ports. know which one?

this isn't about "feelgood BS", it's about international and local laws, primarily, and the safety of crew and innocents they come into contact with.

look, i've not seen anyone get particularly defensive of the pirates. if you're raiding, kidnaping, ransoming, and killing, well, you take your chances with getting mowed down. but i find it really interesting that you can't come up with a single good reason why a traditional firearm might not be the best plan other than some straw man hippie love.

If the movie Aliens taught us anything, it's that sheer rough-n-ready manpower is not always the answer.

no, Alien taught us that. Aliens taught us the opposite: best response is to take off and nuke the site from orbit. weren't you paying attention?

as penance, you now have to go watch Alien 3.

the income tax does nothing to prove Satan. giving part of your earnings to the community is an altruistic gesture, is found throughout human history, and may even be biologically wired into our brain, inherited from our ancestors.

no, the IRS proves Satan.

fair enough, in at least some of the books. i do wish the authors were less interested in establishing and appealing to authority. that's why i like John better than the first three gospels. in addition to focusing more on the core than the surround, i don't recall hell being mentioned much or at all.

you're correct that the Bible contains that picture of hell, but you're incorrect in the claim that it only contains that picture or contains it consistently. particularly in the old testament, there's no uniformity in what hell is. the more common descriptions there are of being separated from God by a vast chasm.
also, even sections that talk about "burning" often get retroactively cast as "eternal damnation". for most of Judaism's history and at least part of Christianity's, those were interpreted as simply burning the soul away; nothing "eternal" about it. you burn it up, and then it's done.
you're correct that the Catholic church (Roman, anyway; I don't recall the Orthodox church's stance on hell) teaches that hell is eternal, but saying Protestant gets murkier. all of them? in official doctrine, not just what people happen to toss around? i find that hard to believe, just because of the impressive diversity. our conception of hell is as much social as it is theological, and there's no shortage of layering our current cultural context on top of theological claims to get something somewhat different than intended.