Comment Re: Perl is more expressive (Score 1) 192
Personally, I find the Perl version a little clearer, but to a c++ geek, the familiarity probably makes the construct obvious and the Perl version ugly; a Perl geek draws the opposite conclusion.
Personally, I find the Perl version a little clearer, but to a c++ geek, the familiarity probably makes the construct obvious and the Perl version ugly; a Perl geek draws the opposite conclusion.
I particularly like the mounds of broken sticks that accumulate on the sideline during the game, mostly broken over the head of an opposing player.
Has been known to result in injuries to players.
I've also got my magnifier configured so that I can use CTRL+ALT + Mousewheel or WIN+Mousewheel to zoom in/out very quickly, and CTRL+ALT+Middleclick to toggle invert.
The zoom feature in OS X is configurable, but the default combination is control+mousewheel, so I'm not sure what it is that you prefer about the Windows one.
They'd have had to dig underground ducting in to everybody's garden. How did they do it without us noticing?
Presumably people did notice. The telephone connection to both of my last two houses comes in at the front, but there was a telegraph pole in the back of both with a wire going into the back (and then terminating). In both houses, the wire eventually fell off the back. I presume that the previous owners did notice when they re-did their telephone wiring...
JRRM does not write books to make people happy.
My favourite book that he's written was Tuf Voyaging. Far lighter than the Song of Fire and Ice and the endings did make me happy...
When people say coding is the new literacy they are not suggesting that everyone become professional programmers anymore then saying someone should be able to read and write means they should become professional writers.
Exactly. Go back a couple of hundred years and you even have well-off people saying 'I don't need to learn to write, I can afford to hire a scribe'. You had people saying 'not everyone needs to learn to read and write, there aren't enough jobs for that many scribes anyway'.
Before he retired, my stepfather was the head groundskeeper on a golf course. Not exactly the kind of job you think of as requiring coding skills. Except that they had a computerised irrigation system that could trigger sprinklers in response to various events (humidity sensors, motion sensors, time, and so on). It came with a partly-graphical domain-specific programming language for controlling it. It's going to be very hard in the next 50 years to find a job that doesn't require some programming to do it competently - even this kind of stereotypically low-tech job requires it now.
It's really the only viable answer to piracy that's left and publishers are embracing it wholeheartedly.
I used to pirate games and I used to buy games. I eventually couldn't be bothered with pirating and worrying about malware or with trying to jump through the hoops that the publishers wanted, so I stopped playing games altogether. Then gog.com launched and sold me games that I was nostalgic about, cheaply. Then they started selling newer games. I spent more with them last six months than I did on total on games in the five years since Steam was launched and the industry wend DRM-happy. I can download DRM-free installers for all of the games, often in OS X, Windows, and Linux versions.
It turns out that there's another answer to piracy that works: sell your product in a way that's easy to use at a reasonable price. Stop worrying about pirates and start worrying about customers. Someone who wouldn't buy your game anyway who pirates it is not a lost sale, but someone who can't be bothered to put up with your treating them like a criminal and so doesn't buy from you is. Buying a game from gog.com is easier than pirating and, if you factor in the cost of your time, probably cheaper as well.
Give me a product I want for a reasonable price and I will happily hand over my money, because I feel that I'm getting something valuable in return. Don't, and... well, computer games are not the only form of entertainment available.
Your typical GPU driver is about 10MB of object code. It contains a complex optimising compiler and controls a device that has complete DMA access to your computer. It is written with speed as the only significant goal. Making a GPU driver 1% faster contributes enough to sales to pay the salaries of several driver developers. Making the GPU driver more secure generates zero additional sales.
The shader code that's fed into this stack from WebGL is sanitised and is completely safe to run, assuming that your driver stack is 100% bug free. Still feel safe?
With your bare hands?!?