It's not so much that they're damaged; it's that they're essentially bacteria, and (without a nice hardened nucleus) every little thing (including all of lovely chemicals that they themselves produce) rips into their DNA, causing them to evolve at an absurd rate. Sperm mitochondria aren't broken, they just aren't likely to be very useful outside of sperm cells (or whatever their progenitors are called).

Neat how you failed to read (or perhaps understand) the sentence immediately following the one you quoted.

Huh? Wite-man's burden? Where in my post did you manage to read a call for Western nations to expand their empires and bring the light of god and civilization to the savages?

Or do you think I'm trying to tell you to feel guilty about something? That would be your own idea because I never wrote that anywhere.

No, it couldn't, because history doesn't record Iran having significantly contributed to any of the recognized major causes of that war. There is, however, record of the US and UK overthrowing Iran's progressive government with a tyrant so brutal that the current Iranian government started to look like a good idea to the locals. So one can indeed say that the US and UK had a significant hand in creating today's Iran without also blaming the Great Depression on Genghis Khan (whee! hyperbole is fun!).

I mean, honestly, by your "logic" (scare quotes are fun, too) WWII was all one hundred percent Hitler's fault and the deplorable conditions in Germany (imposed by the Allies at the end of WWI) had nothing to do with how such a madman could possibly have risen to power.

So was I. How'd you manage to miss the endless, "Oh no, we never disappeared our own people ourselves, the Russians did that. And all those people with local last names that worked for the Party and the secret police, uh, Russian conspiracy. And the Russians made us call in all those false accusations against the irritating downstairs neighbor. And the Russians depressed our industry by dumping their cheap crap on our markets. And the Russians built the huge industries that have polluted our land. And it's the Russians' fault that the stucco is falling off the buildings. And the Russians are the reason our government is still corrupt (especially the anti-Russian faction of our government, which may also be a Russian conspiracy)...

On and on ad nauseum. Anything to avoid admitting that some of "us" are opportunistic assholes and some of "them" are good decent folk, because then you'd have to judge people by more than their accent, and that's just so difficult...

My point is simple: people are the same wherever you go. For every flag-waving fanatic there's someone blaming the same country for their cat dying. The US is big, like Russia, and attracts a lot of both parties. Try, if you truly value logic and objectivity, to not to be too firmly in either camp.

Given that Afghanistan and Iran were some of the most liberal and progressive societies in the region before the US, UK and USSR fucked them over for oil and a military pissing-match, that may well have been the case. Had those nations not been destroyed, they may have had a significant positive influence in the region.

A lot of progressive movements in the nations around Israel, which were fairly strong early in the century, were also abandoned when the violence (enabled to a great extent by US and UK military aid) really took off.

It is, of course, entirely possible that the tyranny we see today would have emerged on its own without any foreign intervention, but that doesn't negate the fact that most of the tyrannical regimes in the region are directly traceable to Western sponsorship.

The US has done a lot of good and it's done a lot of evil in the world. If you're well and truly sick of it, move to Eastern Europe for a bit, where everything is Russia's fault in pretty much exactly the way that you describe.

What any of that has to do with cloud is rather beyond me. I personally blame bad weather on arctic lichen, Australian butterflies, and the eldest of all living men named Henry :)

You have one large project that compiles quickly and that somehow contradicts me saying that there exist cases where one gets stuck with ridiculously long compile times (attributable to use of complex language features, as opposed to merely the number of tokens in a compilation unit)? If you aren't trolling then I'd love to know how you maintain a 120 K LoC project with such a poor grasp of basic logic.

Not everything is a real-time app. The odd 1 ms stall is often a very acceptable exchange for time otherwise spent thinking really deeply about memory (and cleaning up after people who misused a smart pointer because he has real problems to deal with). And over a long enough run, the impact of GC is certainly "fixed" at some small percent of overall time. And I've yet to see a live object graph so pathologically bad that GC costs become unbearable that doesn't translate into something with fairly complex lifetime management in C++ (circular references with no clear and obvious owner object are a bitch).

The set of ways that one can hide a bug in Java (C and C# in my case) is far smaller than that for C++. That might not affect you much when you're writing the code and have it all fresh in your mind, but some of us have to go back and review that code later on.

Occasionally I find things like the wrong operator being called due to an implicit conversion to a compatible type in some silly header intended for some other task, added after the code I'm looking at was written. That shit takes time to find and fix. And neither the coder that wrote the routine, nor the coder that amended the header, nor I are idiots.

And getting bit by some of C++'s more esoteric little rules hardly makes one a "shitty" coder. It happens to the best of us out here in the real world. (I assume, by your outright disbelief at what I find to be common issues in C++ development, that you work with actual gods or something.)

Yeah, that was a silly typo.

How is it that a few percent of GC overhead spread over the whole app bother you so much while a few percent of exception-handling overhead spread over everything you haven't specifically sanitized is fine? Do you only work on exceptions-are-free-(except-a-bit-of-cold-memory)-until-you-throw platforms?

How have you used C++ to the point where you feel confident enough that none of what I'm saying could possibly be true to call me a liar and a plagiarist and yet completely ignore the reason that every decent C++ compiler has a switch to disable that entire language feature?

The code clarity that GCC 4.5 affords you says little about what other vendors are doing. Still, you may be right. I'm still in pain from years of maintaining code that had to compile under MSVC, GCC, and a handful of the lesser compilers - each with their own unique and precious way of breaking your code.

I have on the other monitor a (sorry, closed-source) plugin to export polygonal models from Maya into a custom triangle mesh format. Mesh data is kept in simple STL vectors. We use basic algorithms methods like sort, binary search and copy.

In any build made with inlining disabled, a given test mesh (in this case 200,000 triangles) takes five minutes to export, as opposed to two and a half seconds in builds made with inlining on (so no, we're clearly not retards that can't pick the right algorithm for the task). I also have some pathologically bad models where the numbers are forty-two minutes to about fifteen seconds.

Careful profiling shows that the time is mostly lost in operators on various iterators (the sort that optimize away with inlining), followed by dispatches through multiple levels of overload discriminated by traits type that are used to optimize std::algorithm implementations (turning some copies into a memcpy instead of a *dst++=*src++ loop), followed by our vector math operators.

Yes, we could drop down to raw pointers and hand-inline everything in the hot loops, but in a project like that everything is in a hot loop, so what's the point of using C++ over plain C (besides Maya's plugin framework requiring C++)?

That's funny, I don't see any quote tags in what you were responding to.

Could it possibly be that I have a brain and that these are my opinions based on my experiences? That the opinions resembling those you've read elsewhere were reached independently or are held because the other's words are well-enough validated by my own experience that I legitimately hold them as my own? Could it be that none of that occurred to you, or is it the case that you mindlessly assume anyone that differs in opinion from you is just dumb (which I understand, as such is common on Slashdot)?

It takes far longer to properly review a piece of C++ code which uses C++'s features to any significant extent than it does a piece of C# code of equivalent task complexity. It may not be "difficult" to keep up on code reviews and enforce rules, but difficulty has little to do with time spent.

No, you're just saying that I must be stupid, a shitty programmer (or that my colleagues are such), lying, and mindlessly copy-pasting other people's (stupid, in your view) comments because the ways in which C++ has wasted my time differ from the ways it's wasted yours.

That depends on who's header files you have to include. Often someone's API will be so template-heavy that it takes a full minute (per compilation unit) just to parse their silly headers. Which is sad because I've never had the same issue with enormous C headers or when referencing a good half of the .NET runtime in a C# compilation.

And yeah, that's a minute on a modern compiler on a fast machine.

The real problem there, which the GP missed, is the fact that every type must include the header of every type it contains a value member of in its own header. So if I want to keep d3d11.h out of my UI code, then my bridge renderer classes must either dispatch through virtuals, a tedious PIMPL, or not actually use any D3D types as value members, complicating other code for no good reason.

Java is stupid, agreed. But C++ is retarded too. Link-time code generation is old news, object sizes could be resolved then.

Superior? With GC I pay a fixed performance cost (and not even a very large one on modern VMs) upfront for the whole project and start writing code. With RAII I have to go around making sure everyone is actually using shared_ptr (or whatever) at every single call site.

Now Finalization, I agree, isn't the most amazing thing, but I've spent no more time chasing down finalization bugs than I have going after people who use a raw fopen despite having a nice file class with a destructor available. Depends on what you're used to, I suppose.

Leveraging RIAA kind of demands that such destructors exist.

Sure, if they don't delay it another five years while all the compiler vendors run off and implement incompatible subsets of the proposals because they're tired of waiting for the committee to stop bickering.

Boost? I thought we were being careful about what we include so as to keep compile times down.

Templates are useful, until someone goes nuts with traits types and multiple levels of tag-type-param-to-overloaded-function and your debug build ends up six or more orders of magnitude slower than your release because inlining is off.

Yes, I use them, but the time spent making sure they aren't being misused is non-trivial and needs to be counted against the time saved by using them.

So have I. But don't forget the bit where someone spent countless hours making sure everybody else was following the rules and sticking to those libraries, rather than wandering off into std:: or inventing their own little subdomain off in their own little corner. That's a big cost of C++ dev on large teams.

But here, at least, we have some common ground. Agreed. :)

I agree emphatically with everything you said.

I'll add one more thing: debug performance. Most C++ libraries (certainly the STL) are written for prettiness more than performance and thus rely heavily on compile-time optimizations. Now, it's true, a fully optimized iterator generates the same code as a raw pointer, but that's irrelevant when you've got a debug build that runs several orders of magnitude slower than a release, and the bug you're tracking down is on the third pass over vertex 892,472 of a 2,000,000 triangle mesh.

I mean, yeah, I could rewrite the standard containers and algorithms (etc) into a form that doesn't require heavy inlining to be even remotely performant, but then what was the point of using C++ in the first place?

In my experience the customers are nowhere near that bad. The employees, on the other hand... In just a few years I've seen two receivers, three managers, four department leads, two members of the stock crew, and eight or so (I'm starting to forget) sales reps get fired because entire pallets of very expensive merchandise vanished on their watch. That's just the ones that got fired, mind you, there were about a half dozen more that got away with it for years and even got promoted.

That sort of thing probably varies a lot by region, though.

Ah, but if one is well known for often preferring complex put-downs, then a simple "go fuck yourself" picks up this lovely overtone of "you're not worth the minimal effort it would take to properly insult you", and may be precisely what the speaker intends...

I can see how that's possible. The case I'm thinking of involves the realization that there's a big performance gain to be had if we could just rearrange our data and start doing interesting things with vtxfetch (or whatever the instruction was, it's been a while). The embedded framebuffer also imposed some fairly serious rearranging of the overall render process.

Well, you don't go making a Wii game intending that it look like something running a decade ago on GL 1.2, do you? A lot of the more interesting effects involve setting states that have never had an OpenGL equivalent of any sort. As you say, it's not exactly hard, but it's enough work that one doesn't save much time having started with an OpenGL engine as opposed to a DX engine (and before we wander too far off topic, the context of this thread is porting).

There are other issues, too, but they're hard to explain without getting into the sort of specifics that Nintendo's NDA covers.

The PS2 was honestly a nightmare. The only way to get it to perform decently was to go straight to the hardware, which means mapped registers and the DMA unit. We did crazy things like making our model format be mostly raw DMA control commands which the CPU would minimally touch up and fire off. Manually managing texture memory was also a bit of a pain. And of course there were synchronization issues everywhere. And one of the common blend modes was broken, so that needed to be worked around...

If Sony ever put together a decent GL layer on top of that, it's news to me, because the mini-GL layer I saw was a total joke.

The parent is right. Console graphics are so different from PC graphics that it's absurd to compare the APIs.

On a PC, you call some functions and the driver manages memory for you and builds a nice command buffer for the GPU to execute. On a console, you obsess about flushing caches and waiting for VSync and keeping track of which buffers the GPU may or may not be reading out of at any given moment. Or you fuck it up and get some awesome crashes as the GPU tries to render uninitialized memory noise.

On a PC, your graphics API manages things like texture and vertex memory for you. You say "make me a texture of this size" and it does. You say "I'm done with that texture" and it frees it. Those functions don't exist on a console; you manage that yourself, jumping through all sorts of loops to make sure it's aligned right and in the proper memory bank. On a PC, that texture goes up to the GPU as a nice row-major array of RGBA data. On a console, you have to tile it and reorder it and encode it into crazy hardware-native formats yourself. And make sure you've flushed the CPU cache before you pass it to the GPU!

PC and console GPUs are almost impossible to drive properly using "compatible" shaders. All shaders pretty much always end up rewritten, because the console APIs don't do magic optimizations like the PC APIs do, and you're expected to write in use of specialized chip features yourself if you want to do anything particularly spectacular. God help you when you hit the Wii and it's fixed-function madness.

These differences alone impact engine design to such a degree that any residual similarities between $CONSOLE_API and $PC_API are worth nothing to a porting effort.

Further:

The original XBOX implements an API which resembles DirectX inasmuch as the entry points are similarly named. And for most "serious" uses you just grab a pointer to the raw command buffer and dump bytes into that.

The XBOX 360 is similarly set up, only it's even more different since it uses a crazy (and pretty awesome, IMO) framebuffer setup.

The PS2 has nothing like any sort of PC GPU. You drive it with a set of memory-mapped registers and properly formatted DMA commands. The PSP is, I believe, similar to the PS2.

Poor choice of words, that, but I have wondered roughly the same thing for quite some time, now.

OK, this is a bad example. We drive 60, 70,-100 miles per hour because that happens to be what our cars can safely operate at when driven by a creature with our reaction speeds. If we had the reflexes of a cat, we'd be driving faster.

But you do raise an interesting point, and I'd like to point it out for anyone that might miss it because of that bad example: our intelligence predates our use of it by a very large margin. The brain, as far as we can tell, has been the same organ for the past few hundred thousand years. However, we've only very recently invented things like agriculture, mathematics, and technology, grown our vocabularies by an absurd degree as we've named all the new stuff we make, we've become literate, and reinvented our social structures many times to cope with both technological to the basis of our survival (agriculture, industrial revolution, modern automation, etc) and our ever denser populations (imagine: in a city you might bump into more people in a day than your ancient ancestors would have known in a lifetime). And if we care to, we can still go out and learn to live in a forest as hunter-gatherers and primitive tool-makers in addition to all of that.

So what were all those neurons doing for the hundred thousand years (or more) or so before the rise of what we consider to be civilization? How were they earning their keep? I mean, they must have been good for something, as there were certainly strong pressures against being wasteful with food energy at that time. And why did we live so long with these modern brains before we did put them to what we'd call a modern use? Did it seriously take a hundred thousand years for some random dude somewhere to figure out the whole "oh seeds grow into plants!" thing? Shouldn't someone have noticed a bunch of fruit-bearing plants growing where everybody was throwing the pits the year before a little quicker than that?

Eh, evolution is a powerful idea, and looking at all of the other crazy stuff it's produced our intelligence isn't that shocking.

For example, imagine that the new brain matter was just badly organized by some gene that recently broke, either due to some tiny and truly recent mutation or perhaps the introduction of some new substance into our bodies (this would have to be something like being colonized by a new bacteria - an external agent would be obvious by now).

Or maybe the recent revolution has to do with language and ideas. The capacities we have were never "spare", but we lacked the means to link them together and teach our children to similarly link theirs until some seemingly trivial construct of modern language was invented.

Our ancestors might also have had a much easier life than we imagine. We can be sure there were many famines in ancient times, but maybe not so many in the history of our direct ancestors that the energy cost would have been worthwhile overall, even for only marginal increases of intelligence, until some critical point is reached, and then...

Or maybe big brains really were just a genuinely broken design that somehow, by sheer dumb and unfathomably stupid luck, managed to survive long enough that some other line of evolution happened to take what's there and make it useful. Genetic history is full of similar events on the cellular level, where redundant copies of critical genes are regularly made, allowing the "useless" extra set to become the basis of some completely new mechanism while the other carried on performing $CRITICAL_TASK. Three billion years is almost a long time for that to not happen on a larger scale.

And that's just a non-expert guessing randomly and without much thought or care. I'd be interested to read what real science has to say on the topic. Anyone got links to a good book that doesn't need a degree in evolutionary biology to follow?

Good!

Possibly. It's hard to say for the specific case we've been discussing. I'd chalk the people's willingness to accept it up to education and upbringing (keep in mind that, as bad as they were, the commies were in many ways better than the disaster the Czar had been - and Stalin came into power at a time when most people could judge that for themselves). Their history also afforded them other opportunities: look at how effective it's been for each American government to claim that it's idiocy is necessitated by the previous government's idiocy or tragedies like 9/11 - the communists had the Czar's reign and both world wars to hide behind - if not for that then people might have gone from disillusioned to outright hostile a lot quicker, and the Cold War may never have happened.

Look at what 9/11 was morphed into and imagine what Bush (since you mention him, you could substitute many others) could have done with a history like that!

Eh. They said one thing when it got them what they wanted, and then they said the opposite when they wanted something else. Now their PR department writes articles in their defense saying, "Who could possibly have predicted it would go as badly as it did?" as though none of us have memories. The only thing that changed in between was 9/11 causing a shift in public opinion, which they opportunistically picked up and ran with as fast as they could. Shrinking government? Balancing the budget? Where was all of that when Bush gave his little speech about how great it was that he expanded Medicare to ridiculously unsustainable levels? Why did the DHS grow while the military had to delegate even more of its non-essential functions to contractors? Not nation-building? OK, then why did Secretary [I forget which] spend the week after 9/11 berating his intelligence officers for not giving him something he could attack Iraq with? And how is it that their "principles" suddenly matter again now that Obama's in the White House?

The only consistent thing about them is doing whatever looks like the easiest way to shift power and influence to their friends. And you can claim that that is their real ideology, but then water is also wet and the sky is occasionally dark, so...

The Democrats hold as opposing an ideology to Neo-Conservatism as is possible in US politics, but their behavior is identical. Compare Obama going on and on about how evil Guantanamo and warantless wiretapping and torture and rendition and Bush's other power grabs are to his administration's current apathy towards Guantanamo and the expansion of the ideas Bush pioneered to include it being OK for the executive to order someone killed without running their evidence and reasoning past a judge. They said they support accountability and whistle blowers, and now look at the Wikileaks debacle. They can't even say they tried their ideas and found they had to temper their idealism since they discarded all principle a couple of Novembers ago, the moment they ceased to be useful.

Does the bit after "pollution" describe the start of the sentence or propose a better system? If the latter, in what particular way does it differ from Cap and Trade?

I say Clinton balanced the budget. You say he cheated. The government ignores the constitution while we bicker over the meaning of the word "is".

Oh come on! You want to limit the length of the tax code to a number of words that you picked based on nothing but a sentimental attachment to a document that nobody with power gives a shit about these days? Let's not even get into the real reasons that limiting the tax code of a nation as large and diverse as yours to a few pages is a bad idea, that's just silly...

Such agencies already exist. The GAO is one of them. They publish reports. The reports are often surprisingly candid. Nobody seems to care, or even know that they exist. I don't think attaching blue ribbons would be much use.

Ok, no argument there.

A clique within the party saw an opportunity to personally profit and they pushed it until Stalin himself decided to run with it. "Experts" were found to write articles. "Academics" rewrote them in prettier language. "Polls" were held to determine popular support. When collectivization took off, they went out and got really really drunk and had a fantastic time cheering their own success. As sociopaths of all races and ideologies are wont to do, should opportunity present itself.

Keep in mind, there was an agricultural crisis at the time (still fairly early in the post-revolution period), several of the government's attempts to fix it had failed and been abandoned (some of them quite brutal in themselves - a lot of people died when Stalin decided that the peasants had simply betrayed "Mother Russia"), and the idea had been kicking around since before the revolution, so if you're a sociopathic fuck on the lookout for a quick boost to your career, pushing collectivization is a no-brainer.

Obviously communism.

It's fair to point out that the ideology's premise leads to such absurd ends, yes. And this is where you and I could both go on all day picking over various idiocies - like the inherent brittleness of highly centralized systems and the lack of incentive to innovate and excel under the Soviet system or its simple incompatibility with basic human nature.

This is my point. It's the people that get power who make all the difference. The ideas are whatever happens to be lying around at the time.

Ignoring the fact that a vast number of Soviet citizens were already disillusioned with the new government and didn't actually really believe in them...

I'll agree that it led to the idea, and even to the idea getting government sponsorship and support rather than being outright laughed into oblivion.

The bit where the government didn't do something to backpedal or fix things when the obvious problems began? Stalin's stubbornness. The bit where people reporting actual starvation back to Moscow were vanished? Stalin's precious ego. Well, his and those of the sycophants he elevated. If someone comes to you and says "you're causing millions to die a slow and terrible death, and here's the proof" and you shoot him it really doesn't matter what you believe, you're just plain sociopathic and insane.

I understand where you're coming from, I do. Ideas aren't all equal and they certainly influence things. Yes. Agreed.

But when you're looking at evil people doing evil things, the ideas are minor details. Communism isn't evil because Stalin did shit in his name any more than free-market capitalism is evil because Yeltsin and his cronies utterly destroyed what was left of the Soviet economy (which also killed a lot of people, if less directly) in the name of privatization and free enterprise. It's wrong in its own rite, and I wish people would stop confusing that because it makes it impossible for us to learn from history, whether it be copying the few things they did right or being able to publicly draw parallels between our sociopaths and theirs without being dismissed with a shallow, "but they're commies and we're [any other label], and those are opposites, so your example is trivially inapplicable (you moron)".

You think people naturally want to be gang members? As in they grow up shooting and being shot at and their first thought when they see their baby is, "I want you to grow up to be just as miserable as I've been and live just as short as I'm likely to"?

<morbo>THAT IS NOT HOW HUMAN PSYCHOLOGY WORKS</morbo>

I mean you can say they should all go and get jobs, but the unemployment rate is 11% with likely half as many more unreported. The people with the money to have things made clearly have no need for more production, so where do you propose they find this work they should be doing to support themselves? It's not like they can start growing food in the middle of the city or form their own little economy amongst themselves when they're terribly dependent on goods (like food) sold at prices intended for the rest of us...

And what's your solution, anyway?