I think I see where we're going wrong here. I agree you don't want to edit the original picture data, but you're conflating that with the notion of editing the image *file*, which occurs when you edit the embedded metadata. That's what I was referring to. Those are two totally different things.

Anyhow, of course, you can do what you feel works best for you, so long as you're happy with the results.

I'm guessing that's where I originally picked this information up, but I couldn't remember the exact source, so I didn't cite it. Thank you for the reminder and the links to those sources. I also recall one of Bjarne's talks discussing another reason why C++ performs better than managed languages, and that's because of better cache coherency, which is a pretty crucial for modern processors.

Anyhow, as someone who relies on both C++ and C#, I'm glad to see them both moving forward with solid support from MS.

From someone who uses both C++ and C# on a regular basis, my experience has been that the difference is fairly significant, not just 4%. That aside... you ask who cares? Examples:

Demanding Applications
If your app is extremely large, complex, or graphically intensive, you can probably benefit from a native performance boost. There's a reason office suites and graphics programs are written in C or C++. Games, of course, fall into this category as well.

Simulations
In scientific simulations, there's no such thing as "fast enough". These guys still require supercomputers on occasion, and you can bet they're concerned with the efficiency of their code, since they typically have to rent time on them.

Small-form Devices
For more computationally constrained platforms, such as in tablets, phones, and now even watches or other in-home smart devices benefit from improved speed and tighter control of memory. Also, keep in mind that lower CPU usage means more efficient battery use, which is critical for many small devices.

Large-scale Server Applications
For server-side applications, run-time efficiency can actually trump programmer productivity in importance when scaling up to very large numbers of users, like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, or Amazon has to do. A 10% increase in efficiency leads directly to a non-trivial savings in power costs of your server farm, so in these scenarios, efficiency can be very important. Of course, when Microsoft is renting you it's servers, it's more than happy to have you use C#, since you're the one paying for the servers. My bet is that their own command and control code is completely native.

Today's programming world is especially diverse - much more so than it used to be. Not everyone is writing business apps for desktop PCs.

Personally, I definitely want metadata to be stored in the image file itself, because if you do it any other way, there's always a risk of losing that association. I feel you're setting yourself up for a disaster if you use a hash, because the moment anything touches that file for *any reason*, poof, that metadata is now gone. You're highlighted the huge weakness in your system, but then created a tautology by saying "but modifying the original files is a bad idea anyway". It's only a bad idea if you've got a fragile system that depends on the exact file hash to reference critical metadata.

I think there's a reason that the XMP standard goes through great pains to embed metadata inside the image files themselves rather than resorting to external sidecar files, which is typically considered a last resort and a very poor alternative solution. If you use the image's own embedded metadata as the original and authoritative source, then you can rebuild your database from scratch automatically, no matter what you've done with your image files, or how you've folded, spindled, or mutilated them.

De-duplication is trivial if you use proper tools which compare visual features and don't rely on exact matches. Also, I don't consider the backup issue to be significant, because if you make a change to the file's metadata, then I want that file re-backed up, because I consider it to have been changed. However, since you're not changing the actual image data when you change metadata, any decent diff program should only store a small delta to represent the change.

I'm hopeful that someday we all can learn to peacefully cohabit this planet, and maybe even stand up for and protect each other.

Some people use religion as an excuse to hurt or kill, while others use it as inspiration to improve their own and others' lives. I think it has more to do with the person than the religion.

Well, yes, there are plenty of crappy programmers out there. And some developers always are looking for ways to make things simpler for everyone by creating all-encompassing frameworks, but in the end, almost invariably, it does lead to a lot of cargo cult programming practices with an over-reliance on frameworks and little understanding of how things work internally.

That being said, there's nothing wrong with using higher-level systems and frameworks so long as you understand the tradeoffs you're making. I'm an expert C++ programmer (videogame development), but I always turn to C# / .NET for internal tools, because I'm so much more productive in that language. The tradeoff, of course, is that the tools tend to be much less efficient, as well as some extra work for writing interop with native code. It's not as much of an issue since I can assume we have more powerful development machines using those tools, and high-speed is less critical than efficient workflow, functionality, and safety.

I think it's the same sort of tradeoff you'd be making when using this sort of framework. It's never going to be as optimal as a carefully tuned, custom crafted solution. As such, for extremely large or complex systems, or anything that absolutely demands extreme efficiency, you'd be better off with custom solutions written by experts. However, for projects with more modest goals, it could be that the requirements in productivity outweigh the costs of a custom, low-level solution. As long as the decision is made knowing these tradeoffs, it's fine.

The problem is that the vendor never tells us about these tradeoffs. For years, Microsoft touted C# / .NET as the next big thing, and told us that "pretty soon" we were going to see performance comparable to native code. It never happened. Natively compiled C++ still kicks the crap out of managed code in real world scenarios. Most major client-side applications are still written in native code. I suspect it will be similar for this sort of platform. Yes, it will work, but it's never going to be nearly as optimal or flexible as a custom solution expertly designed and optimized for the particular task at hand.

And yet, in most developed first world countries, birth rates have pretty much plateaued, or are on the way there. The US, China, Japan, Singapore, Russia, most of Europe - all currently below population sustaining birth rates at the moment. Check out this chart, sorted by fertility rates from lowest to highest. You can likely notice a clear trend between the upper portions of the chart and the lower regions.

Economics and education (especially of women) is the key, not police state policies that encroach on more of our personal liberties. We need to get everyone to first-world economic status as fast as we can, because then:

1) People will stop pumping out kids en mass, since at that point they're an economic liability, not an advantage, and
2) People will start caring more about the environment when they're not trying to figure out where they'll get they're next meal, or if they will have a roof over their heads tomorrow.

Seriously, exploding population was the boogieman twenty or thirty years ago. If we forecast using today's trends, it seems pretty likely that the world's population will most likely peak and then decline. Take a look at the actual data trends (the recent ones - and don't extrapolate linearly), then draw your own conclusions.

Yes, watch what humans do.

They build amazing structures, write inspiring music, invent fantastic technology, care deeply for others, and sacrifice their lives to save a friend. I've seen people risk their lives to save a dog drowning in a frozen lake, or to save complete strangers from a burning building. The world holds it's breath when miners are trapped in a cave in, and if they are miraculously saved, we weep tears of joy at the happy reunions with their loved ones. When tragedy strikes in the form of a hurricane, flood, tsunami or earthquake, we come together to donate our money and our time to help those affected. People have returned thousands of dollars lost to their owners when they had nothing to gain from it. Some people devote their entire lives to helping the least fortunate among us.

Sure, the world has plenty of evil people that do evil things. But if you can't see the good in humanity as well, you're not looking hard enough.

"Not adding up" was the reason dark matter was invented. ;)

I've often wondered about that. It's pretty well known that classical Newtonian physics tends to break down at the quantum level. I wonder if the same thing happens at the largest scales - galaxy-sized measurements. I'd never go so far as to argue against the prevailing theory with people that study these things their entire lives, but it does make for interesting reading and/or discussion to consider some of the proposed alternatives.

I think perhaps you're overestimating the value of *what* they know, and underestimating the value of *who* they know. The latter knowledge is not going to be obsolete in a year, and the former can be easily gained by inviting an old colleague out to a nice lunch (at company expense, of course), and discussing out what's going on back at the old office.

Fun quiz time! Which of these are poisonous, and which can be ingested safely:

pyridoxine HCl
copper gluconate
L-5-methyl tetrahydrofolate
cholecalciferol
cyanocobalamin
polynicotinate
retinyl palmitate
biotin
niacinamide

.
.
.

All scary sounding as hell. All very good for you.

I've seen people give poor reviews to medical food bars (that's where I got this list) that contained these ingredients because they apparently thought those were a bunch of unhealthy chemical additives. Well, yes, they're chemical additives, but they're things your body needs to stay alive and healthy. *facepalm* We have a massive government bureaucracy dedicated to making sure companies aren't feeding us poison. At some point, you just need to trust that they're doing their damned job.

Yeah, unfortunately, many lay-persons are horrible at exercising good judgment about such matters (including vaccines). I say let them keep their vaccine treatments, but require kids in public schools to be vaccinated. If they want to benefit from publicly-funded education, then they need to be responsible for the general public's well being as well. If private schools don't want to require vaccinations, then it's on them.

As an old(er) fart, I would respectfully disagree. Shitty firmware and an abandoned or poorly supported product is a perfectly good reason to throw something out and get new hardware. If you're dissatisfied enough with your phone to complain about it to other people, don't then turn around and grumble that people are telling you to get a better one. What else are they supposed to suggest? Just don't make the same mistake and buy a product that doesn't work well out of the box, or buy from the same company, thus rewarding their poor after-sales service.

The way I figure it, my time and satisfaction level are both valuable to me, and I'm willing to pay for a product that performs to my satisfaction. Of course, once I find a device that's working well for me, I'll hold onto it for a long time - typically long into obsolescence. I'm not into the "replace my gadget every year or two" race, but I don't see the point in putting up with unnecessary annoyances when better alternatives exist for a very modest price.

I wouldn't worry too much about the "throwaway" culture and the desire to get a new phone every year. The real reason this has been happening is because the technology is advancing so bloody fast. Phones will eventually reach a quality level and degree of market saturation so that it's no longer necessary or even desirable to upgrade so rapidly.

Look at what's happened with PCs. I feel people misunderstood the "decline" of the PC market significantly, declaring the era of PCs over, PCs are dead, blah, blah. Nonsense. What happened was a convergence of several factors: PC speed, power, and storage reached such a level that it was no longer necessary to upgrade every few years, since PCs even six or seven years old are perfectly capable of running most business software. CPUs became so small and powerful that a lot of previous tasks only performed by PCs could now be performed by phones or tablets. Nowadays, there's no reason to expect that a decent mid-grade PC will last you less than five years at a minimum, and maybe even a decade or more if you want to stretch it's life out.

I think a similar "market peak" will eventually occur with phones in the near future - maybe within the next five years or so. I think we're already starting to see it with tablets. At some point, people will stop caring about faster processors, more memory / storage. We've already reached the saturation point with graphics resolution, of course. More importantly, the novelty will wear off, and people will tire of spending hundreds of dollars each year for a new gizmo that does pretty much what last year's gizmo does, only a tiny big better.

So you give someone a bunch of money for a year long vacation, and THEN they can start collecting their payola? Sounds like a sweet deal. I'm not sure I understand how this is supposed to solve anything. A year-long cooldown won't make much of a difference in the long term for them. It's also a bit unfair, because it blocks entry into the private sector with a pretty onerous restriction - presumably on the employer, as it would be insane for the government to have to cover that. That means only the top few percent of government employees ever have a shot at making the jump to the private sector successfully if they desired to do so. Presumably everyone else would have to take temp jobs at McDonalds to get by for a year, because they can't get a job in their actual field of expertise.

Look, as much as we hate to admit it, the person you'd want to hire at a private firm would be the person that knows the ins and outs of the government agencies your company deals with. That's common sense, but if you look at it from a cynical angle, it smacks of corruption and payoffs. Lobbying the government in it's best form is simply letting your representatives know what your industry concerns are and trying to convince them to see things your way. Everyone passionate about a cause does it all the time. Lobbying in its worst forms is outright bribery, and that happens plenty of times as well.

I'm not sure what we can do about this. If you restrict or eliminate lobbying via draconian laws, you're essentially limiting access to our representative government, and that's probably unconstitutional anyhow. The only way to counter this is with a transparent government and media, public watchdog groups, and an engaged electorate that closely watches the government and exposes corruption where it occurs. I don't think there are any magic bullets or laws we can pass to "solve" this issue, to be honest.