Comment Re:June 1, 2015 is it (Score 1) 281
Hah -- good one!
This seems pretty perverse. If a developer doesn't write documentation because he doesn't like to, how does that make him an asshole? You're the one who is asking him to do more work, for your benefit, for free.
Eeh. I agree that, as a user, it's frustrating when software doesn't have proper documentation.
On the other hand, if someone donates his time to develop a program and makes it free software, it seems hardly fair to fault him for not writing documentation to go along with it.
Someone who really cares could, of course, do it themselves, or offer to pay the developer to do it. If most people don't care enough to do that, then maybe that's the problem to focus on.
If someone comes along and gives you a free hamburger, you don't complain that they didn't bring fries and a drink.
Not really.
A single "calculation" such as moving data between registers ("mov ax, cx") actually takes many clock cycles. The instruction has to be fetched and decoded, which may itself take several cycles. Then the instruction has to be scheduled, the operands have to be fetched from the register file, and eventually the result of the operation gets written back into the register file.
Thanks to pipelining, branch prediction, result forwarding, and so on, much of this latency can be hidden and, under ideal conditions, your processor might achieve an average throughput of many instructions per cycle because it is decoding and executing many instructions simultaneously. But, if you track any particular instruction from start to finish, it takes several cycles.
And of course, in practice there are much harder instructions than register moves. Division can take dozens of clock cycles. Waiting for data from main memory can take hundreds of core clocks. Mispredicting a branch stalls you out while you figure out where to start decoding from again...
By analogy: how much use would you get out of being able to drive your car at 1000 miles per hour?
My family lives almost exactly 1000 miles away, so once every few years I drive a thousand miles to visit them. So I suppose I'd get some use out of this, but of course I'm very reluctant to drive 1000 miles.
But the only reason I'm reluctant is because it (currently) sucks! It takes all day long and I have to plan it out. If I could make that drive in an hour, it would be so easy that I could just visit anytime, maybe every weekend.
It's silly to predict how much you'd use a connection like this based on what you're doing today, because your habits and the very marketplace of websites and services that you have to choose from is so very heavily influenced by the speeds that we currently have to put up with.
It's about how much you're not doing today that you could be doing, if you had a much, much faster connection.
Today's internet would be unusable if we had it ten years ago on dialup. Hopefully tomorrow's internet will be equally unusable on our current equipment.
We are in the 21st century. We need to get rid of diversity quotas. Let the most qualified person get the job. Bill Cosby is right in that Blacks need to rid themselves of the ghetto mentality and educate themselves. Blacks (everyone, really) need to take responsibility for their own situation instead of blaming it on events from the 1800s.
What have the 1800s to do with anything? Look back no further than the 1960s to find grossly horrible things like segregated schools and restrooms and so on. While the civil rights movement made many impressive accomplishments, instantly curing the land of inequality was not among them.
Even today in the 21st century, Blacks still seem to have a lot going against them. Their unemployment rates are far worse than those for whites. Law enforcement seems to be out to get them, e.g., look at prison demographics, drug sentencing disparities, stop and frisk, stand your ground laws, etc. The "ghetto mentality" as you put it---by which I infer you mean, e.g., absent fathers, gangs and guns, drugs, learning to be "street-smart", hiding your intelligence to avoid getting beaten up---is tragic, and seems to me to be both a symptom and a cause.
Many people would like to see a more diverse tech culture. There have been countless articles on Slashdot, for instance, about why there aren't more women in computing and whether that's bad and why that is and what can be done about it. I assume Mr. Jackson wants to have a similar discussion with these tech leaders. Maybe he has some ideas, or maybe it's a stunt to raise some money and publicity. Whatever the motive, it doesn't seem like an altogether bad thing to think a bit about what the tech industry could do to help out.
TFA says nothing about quotas.
Damn straight you should count yourself lucky.
There are seriously terrible things out there. Cancer. Parkinson's. MS. But do go on. Complain about paying more than your share, you always-healthy person, with your great genes, with your great personal character and intelligence that have kept you away from drugs, cigarettes, alcohol, with your even temperament that has shielded you from depression. Complain, with your good job, where you aren't exposed to toxins, which pays for your good house in your nice neighborhood, where gang violence is the farthest thing from your mind, where you have a great grocery store that enables your fully organic diet, where you have a great gym just up the road that you work out at five days a week.
The whole point of insurance is that we all get screwed a little, so that when someone gets really fucking boned, they don't get screwed sideways on top of it. Even a perfect person like you can fall off a bike or get hit by a car.
Of course, you're also right. We're all getting screwed way more than we should because we didn't have balls to say to hell with wall street and insist on a single-payer system.
Putting a gun in the locked cockpit seems basically reasonable. Maybe it could provide a last line of defense against terrorists who somehow manage to take over the cabin and pacify the passengers, and start working to bust down the door.
Giving guns to the cabin crew sounds like a terrible idea. Then, instead of having to try to sneak a weapon onto the plane (possibly getting caught, which could ruin any sort of 9/11 style simultaneous multi-plane conspiracy), the terrorists merely need to overpower a crew member to obtain a firearm.
If we're really worried about this sort of thing, well---the Air Force can have operators fly drones over Iraq from New Mexico. Can't we put some kind of emergency button in the cockpit that gives control of the plane to a remote operator, so if terrorists do storm the cockpit, the pilots can push the button to disable all local control of the plane?
Full disclosure: I don't own a firearm and don't really understand people who do.
In a related study, thinking about religion has been linked to abuse of parentheses.
God protects Lisp programmers, little children, and ships named Enterprise?
My excuse: web apps are way better to deploy than native apps, both for me and my users (computer engineers at my company).
Native software is fast, sure, but deployment sucks for everyone. How many times a day are you being pestered to update this or that, right when you're in the middle of trying to look up something for or check your email. It's like sitting down for dinner with your family after a long day, just to be called by a telemarketer.
Any circuit design must contain at least one part which is obsolete, two parts which are unobtainable, and three parts which are still under development.
