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Comment: latenlawieanphobia (Score 1) 312

by OrangeTide (#38911761) Attached to: Oklahoma Politician Wants To Tax Violent Video Games

The authority is on the side of the bullies, so just let them walk all over you, or you will be punished.

I don't believe that is really the case after Columbine. Now school administrators are terrified of bullying. They are afraid of extreme actions students may take as a result of the vile society that children create for themselves. Suicides and shootings are was administrators are afraid of, and the lawsuits attached to those kinds of extreme events.

Of course administrators still like to prattle on about zero tolerance for violence, and will generally punish both the bully and his/her victim. For them establishing inflexible rules to maintain order is the best way to avoid responsibility and ultimately a lawsuit.

Comment: Re:There is nothing wrong with printf debugging (Score 1) 446

by OrangeTide (#38888025) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Transitioning From 'Hacker' To 'Engineer'?

I agree. Using printf debugging is just one of many tools for trouble shooting. It's not the end-all-be-all but nothing is. I tend to flip between printf debugging and full JTAG remote debugging with very little in between. (nothing against application debuggers, they can be another useful tool)

Prints can add delays in a program and made race conditions disappear, which can be quite frustrating. But I also find fancy debuggers add unusual behaviour to a program which often result in tracking down some inaccurate stack trace or causes multi-threaded programs to act in a single threaded way.

Custom hacks to do some data collection that you can dump without much overhead is a pretty helpful tool for debugging the tougher problems. Also what can be troublesome to debug are programs that don't crash or corrupt and just perform the wrong calculations, like in video and image codecs where you can easily introduce tiny floating point errors that are not immediately obvious.

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