April 25, 2010
Walter Bright wrote:
> Nick Sabalausky wrote:
>> Heh. I've surprised a lot of laymen, after telling them I'm a programmer, by my opinions that most programmers are incompetent and most software and consumer electronics are terrible. Seems hugely ironic to those unfamiliar with the field, but being around it and (at the risk of narcissism) knowing what I'm going, I think puts me (along with many of the people on this board) in a prime position to notice flaws and steps backwards.
> 
> I share your opinion that most software and consumer electronics is terrible. Of course, I've produced my share of terrible software, but I won't make any excuses for doing so.
> 
> For example, my TV set crashes every once in a while, and must be power cycled :-(
> 
> The old analog sets never did that!
That's nothing. My laptop power supply crashes every so often and starts failing to report itself to my laptop. It then has to be power cycled. I am not making this up!
April 25, 2010
Walter Bright wrote:
> 
> For example, my TV set crashes every once in a while, and must be power cycled :-(
> 
> The old analog sets never did that!

Yeah but your old telly didn't play youtube.
How on earth we survived without an infinite number of low quality
videos of cats doing vaguely amusing things, will forever be a mystery.

- --
My enormous talent is exceeded only by my outrageous laziness.
http://www.ssTk.co.uk
April 25, 2010
On 04/25/2010 04:55 AM, Gareth Charnock wrote:
> Walter Bright wrote:
>> Nick Sabalausky wrote:
>>> Heh. I've surprised a lot of laymen, after telling them I'm a
>>> programmer, by my opinions that most programmers are incompetent and
>>> most software and consumer electronics are terrible. Seems hugely
>>> ironic to those unfamiliar with the field, but being around it and
>>> (at the risk of narcissism) knowing what I'm going, I think puts me
>>> (along with many of the people on this board) in a prime position to
>>> notice flaws and steps backwards.
>>
>> I share your opinion that most software and consumer electronics is
>> terrible. Of course, I've produced my share of terrible software, but
>> I won't make any excuses for doing so.
>>
>> For example, my TV set crashes every once in a while, and must be
>> power cycled :-(
>>
>> The old analog sets never did that!
> That's nothing. My laptop power supply crashes every so often and starts
> failing to report itself to my laptop. It then has to be power cycled. I
> am not making this up!

Well actually that's a different matter altogether. Power supplies are switching devices that, when old, fail to maintain oscillation. When you power cycle them they usually re-prime themselves because there's some simple electronics that does it. If you listen carefully to the source, you may hear a high-pitch sound when it's working. The louder the noise, the older the source.

Failure to report comes from the third wire that connects the source to the laptop. That wire is quite thin and is the first to break on an older source. The manifestation is that the laptop intermittently fails to figure that it is connected to a correct power source.

Time to change the power brick. Many go for under $10 on ebay, free shipping. (How the heck do they make money off them?)


Andrei
April 25, 2010
div0 wrote:
> Walter Bright wrote:
>> For example, my TV set crashes every once in a while, and must be power
>> cycled :-(
>>
>> The old analog sets never did that!
> 
> Yeah but your old telly didn't play youtube.

My current one doesn't either; it has no digital inputs. But it clearly has a computer internally.

I bought it right before the collapse of LCD TV prices, it's the last of the flat screen tube jobs.
April 25, 2010
"div0" <div0@users.sourceforge.net> wrote in message news:hr14hk$2de0$1@digitalmars.com...
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
>
> Walter Bright wrote:
>>
>> For example, my TV set crashes every once in a while, and must be power cycled :-(
>>
>> The old analog sets never did that!
>
> Yeah but your old telly didn't play youtube.
> How on earth we survived without an infinite number of low quality
> videos of cats doing vaguely amusing things, will forever be a mystery.
>

We had to get by with Bob Sagat saying vaguely amusng things overtop an infinite number of slightly-less-low-qualty videos of people falling down.


April 25, 2010
Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> We had to get by with Bob Sagat saying vaguely amusng things overtop an infinite number of slightly-less-low-qualty videos of people falling down.

Bob Sagat was never amusing. Though I felt sorry for him, how many jokes could you make about the same pratfalls, over and over, week after week?
April 26, 2010
On 26/04/10 07:56, Walter Bright wrote:
>>
>
> Bob Sagat was never amusing. Though I felt sorry for him, how many jokes
> could you make about the same pratfalls, over and over, week after week?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0HW4mPZmKPM  (NSFW)


If you don't know, Bob Saget is the most blue comic I have ever heard. Which was surprising to me, only knowing him from AFV and Full House.
April 29, 2010
On 04/24/2010 01:13 AM, retard wrote:
> Maybe Walter is trying to break the world record for implementing things
> without understanding them first?

Didn't Walter implement templates without grokking them? I think I read that somewhere around here.

That's quite a respectable feat, if you ask me.
April 29, 2010
On Fri, 23 Apr 2010 15:23:22 +0200, Walter Bright <newshound1@digitalmars.com> wrote:

> bearophile wrote:
>> Walter Bright:
>>> OCaml has a global interpreter lock which explains its behavior. Russell
>>> didn't know why the Haskell behavior was so bad. He allowed that it was
>>> possible he was misusing it.
>>  You have just the illusion to have learned something about this. Trying to
>> read too much from this single example is very wrong. A single benchmark,
>> written by a person not expert in the language, means nearly nothing. You
>> need at least a suite of good benchmarks, written by people that know the
>> respective languages. And even then, you have just an idea of the situation.
>
>
> Fair enough, but in order to dismiss the results I'd need to know *why* the Haskell version failed so badly, and why such a straightforward attempt at parallelism is the wrong solution for Haskell.
>
> You shouldn't have to be an expert in a language that is supposedly good at parallelism in order to get good results from it.
>
> (Russel may or not be an expert, but he is certainly not a novice at FP or parallelism.)
>
> Basically, I'd welcome an explanatory riposte to Russel's results.

IIRC Haskell's problems with concurrency have roots in its 100% lazy evaluation.

Anyone wanting more details may find this page useful:

http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Research_papers/Parallelism_and_concurrency

Petr
April 29, 2010
retard wrote:
> Fri, 23 Apr 2010 10:57:31 -0700, Walter Bright wrote:
> 
>> bearophile wrote:
>>> Being Haskell not easy, it's even possible for me to not understand the
>>> explanation if some Haskell expert eventually explains me why that
>>> Haskell program was slow :-)
>> It's statements like this (and I've heard this repeatedly) that makes me
>> wonder what the value of Haskell actually is to conventional programming
>> tasks and regular programmers.
> 
> Regular programmers just die away. At some point we don't need crappy results anymore.
> 
> The software engineering is often about reimplementing things. If a level 1 novice writes a blog engine, you need level 2..20 programmers to fix all the sql injection / xss bugs and caching issues. After that, even better programmers finally write maintainable and readable code. But it doesn't scale. That's why companies like Facebook hire guys like Andrei to fix the bugs caused by the 1st generation PHP newbies.

Good one, retard; that's really funny and surprising that Andrei didn't bite :-)

Hard to imagine Andrei doing maintenance programming in some infidel programming language that doesn't have decent metaprogramming facilities though !!!