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Comment Re:Brainteasers and Interviews (Score 1) 496

Most of the time you'll chose wrong, so you'd like to switch if only you had a clue of which one to switch to. Monty (because he already knows which one is the big prize) has conveniently given you a clue. Even though he's shown you one of the wrong doors, it's still true that your first choice was probably wrong. If your choice is probably wrong, and there's only one choice remaining, it's probably the right choice. Switch!

Comment Re:Sounds like 6 strikes is terrible (Score 1) 186

If I was taking someone's exclusivity, then I'd have some of it. Guess what I DON'T have if I copy something, with or without permission?

If I take something from you, then I have it and you don't (despite various idiomatic phrases, e.g. to take someone's virginity). If I haven't taken something from you, it isn't theft. If I copy something, I haven't taken anything. It may be copyright violation, but it isn't theft.

Comment Re:Have you actually tried using Rust? (Score 1) 211

I was programming in Pascal on a Lisa (dual boot to the Lisa command-line OS (Lisa Workshop) for development and MacOS for testing, occassionally booting to the Office environment). I bought it shortly before it came out as the MacXL, so had non-square pixels. I wasn't rich, and it wasn't any more expensive than a PC would have been with the same capacity.

The entire thing (Office 7/7, Workshop, MacWorks) plus system partitions for each was 10MB. System RAM was 1MB. I can compress and copy that whole system in a few seconds across a network now.

I'm sorry you were stuck with BASIC, but that wasn't exactly cutting edge in 1985, and there was lots of development in better environments.

A couple years later I started using Lightspeed/THINK C. No NEAR/FAR pointers thankfully. I avoided Intel stupidity for many years.

C really hasn't changed very much. The biggest change has been function prototypes. POSIX and ANSI certainly helped, especially with esoteric details of things like real-time and multi-threading/multi-processing, but that didn't enable much, just made it more portable. There are still plenty of incompatibilities despite all of that standardization (e.g. autoconf).

C++ as on object model was there. It was a poor model, and it still is. There are a lot more features now, but a lot of the "extra complexity" that modern hardware enables is spent dealing with the extra complexity C++ adds. I never used it, but maybe the world would be in a better place if THINK Object Pascal had caught on more.

CVS started out as shell scripts working with RCS. There were also plenty of other revision systems that had been around for a long time (eg NOS MODIFY). It's not that the concepts were unknown, just that the hardware simply didn't have the capacity and speed, and networking it all together was much slower and less available.

Comment Re:Have you actually tried using Rust? (Score 1) 211

In the meantime, plenty of people were writing things in Pascal for the Mac. You had a resource compiler with resource files. You could write things in C, on a Unix system. You could build things with "make". Most of the software tools used to compile Linux and most of the current standard software was already in existence. There were source code control systems. There was X Windows. There was TeX. There was PostScript. There were a LOT of things that make up the majority of the software tools still in use today, and most are very little changed since then.

Sure, git is better than CVS. A large part of that is due to the constraints of the available hardware, you simply couldn't have done git in 1985 with available hardware.

The basis for Object Oriented Languages was well established, as was the basis for multi-threading (see Path Pascal, C++, Smalltalk).

What's been done since then is to take advantage of the massive increase in speed and storage available. Sure, there have been some incremental improvements to languages and utilities and development environments, but the impact that's had compared to the hardware improvements is fairly small.

The main advances in programming have been with encryption and compression. Everything else would have fast-forwarded within a few years if today's hardware had all of a sudden been made available back then.

Comment Re:Have you actually tried using Rust? (Score 1) 211

Your average desktop computer, compared to a system from 30 years ago, is over 7,000 times faster, has 3-6,000 times as much RAM and 1.5 million times as much persistent storage available, and can communicate over 4,000 times faster, and that's not even getting into graphics capabilities.

There's more code in the boot ROM than there was in the boot ROM plus OS plus several applications.

It's not that programming tools are so much better, or that programming techniques have advanced, it's that you can write programs with many fewer restraints.

Comment Re:Oh this is easy .... (Score 1) 394

Hmph, I've been using e-mail, online chat, forums, multi-player games for over 40 years, but I don't have a cell phone. I was telling relatives how cool things like e-mail and on-line communities were, but I barely have a Facebook account (created just so my family could share photos).

I was reisisting LinkedIn, finally gave in when an uncle sent me an invitation, and then I added my brother. No one else. My brother is an HR/headhunter type, so I guess I can forgive him using it.

I have a Twitter account. I've never posted to it, I barely check the one group I follow.

When the GlobalNet-connected AR/wearable tech finally gets here I may jump in, but so far everything I've seen has been so boring and stupid that Slashdot and the occasional Ars Technica post is about as Social Media as I get.

Comment Re:The new antipattern (Score 1) 486

I wouldn't say the results are invalid, but the relevance is restricted to people who don't understand algorithms or statements such as "disk is slower than memory".

I once had to fix a program that was reading all the file names in a directory into a linked list, sorting it (using operations to retrieve, remove, and insert elements using an index, which worked by starting at the beginning of each list and counting elements until it got to the correct one), then using the resulting sorted list to process the first 10 files.

Rather than fix the abominably slow sort, I used the fact that all the file names were decimal numbers, and all the numbers were sequential, to scan the directory for the smallest number, then just increment that to find the next one. Needless to say, it was both much faster and used very little memory.

Algorithms matter, and the shame of ever faster processors and "more productive" languages is that too many programmers don't understand them.

Comment Re:HOWTO (Score 1) 1081

Certainly CO2 shouldn't be used without previously rendering the person unconscious. I read that some studies had some indications of distress from straight N2 suffocation, hence using N2O first might be more humane.

Since part of the "humane" aspect of it is how it appears to observers, that should be taken into account as well. I don't know if CO2 would cause a faster death than N2 when used in conjunction with N2O, or if there's a difference in visible signs while it's happening.

Comment Re:HOWTO (Score 4, Insightful) 1081

Nitrous Oxide isn't a bad idea, followed by CO2 or N2 displacing all the O2, or simply lowering the pressure. Valium drip followed by ex-sanguination might be an effective method as well.

I'm generally not happy with the death penalty for various reasons, but if you're going to do it, do it right.

Comment Re:Issue will be resolved... (Score 1) 347

The section I quoted defines "Broadband Internet access sevice". What you're talking about is irrelevant for the purposes of this rule.

What the 25 Mbps / 3 Mbps defines is not "broadband" but "advanced telecommunications capability". See the actual rule (actually "Broadband Progress Report and Notice of Inquiry"):

http://www.fcc.gov/document/fc...

Comment Re:But the MEANING is hundreds of pages (Score 1) 347

The actual regulation is 8.5 pages, about 22K characters. The rest is commentary. You'll find the commentary in the Federal Register. You won't find it in the actual regulations (Code of Federal Regulations, CFR).

There's the index, 576 paragraphs of commentary of various sorts, 12 paragraphs of procedural stuff, APPENDIX A which contains the actual rule, and APPENDIX B which contains a required analysis of the rules. APPENDIX B alone is 110 pages long.

The 8.5 pages is the actual program. The rest is the README and HOWTO combined with the man/info page, the makefile, the comments that would be in the code and a code review. The code itself is presented as a diff onto the existing codebase. Since it's a scripting language, there is no binary.

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