131–140 of 325 posts
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Well sort of, I can't read the binaries but I expect the vendor to have source and maintain it properly right?
There's a lot of software that only exists in binary and whose vendors/maintainers are long gone, and that is used for decades because it just does its job.
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My gripe with most programmers that they keep re-learning the same narrow set of skills while ignore the rest that actually makes someone a efficient expert.
That would be nice, but people keep hiring based upon specific programming languages and other programming specific skills.
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How can the sum of a bunch of positive powers powers of 2 be a negative number? Isn't the sum of any infinite series of positive numbers infinity?
\1 is a good question that deserves an answer. \2 is "not always" .. Consider SumOf 1 + 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + 1/16 + 1/32 ... an infinite sequence of continuously decreasing numbers, the more you add the smaller the quantity added becomes. It appears to approach but never reach some finite limit. Unless, of course, by "Number" you mean "whole integer" | counting number, etc. It's important to nail down those definitions.
The same argument I mentioned above, that subtracting 0.99999... from 1 will give you a number that is equal to zero, will also tell you that binary ...11111 or decimal ...999999 is equal to negative one. If you add one to the value, you will get a number that is equal to zero.
You might object that there is an infinite carry bit, but in that case you should also object that there is an infinitesimal residual when you subtract 0.9999... from 1.
It works for everything, not just -1. The infinite bit pattern ...(01)010101 is, according to the geometric series formula, equal to -1/3 [1 + 4 + 16 + 64 + ... = 1 / (1-4)]. What happens if you multiply it by 3?
...0101010101
x 11
-------------------
...0101010101
+ ...01010101010
-------------------
...11111111111
> There’s a lot of software being produced that just doesn’t care about its users [... caused by] a mismatch between what we thought doing a good job was and what a significant part of the industry considers profitable [... so] perhaps we should take a stronger ethical stand not to harm users. Or, we could ditch the "biz" part. It just so happens that software not written to serve business interests tends to also res…
If we ditch the business part what's your recommendation to pay rent?
TIL of ≹, which "articulates a relationship where neither of the two compared entities is greater or lesser than the other, yet they aren't necessarily equal either. This nuanced distinction is essential in areas where there are different ways to compare entities that aren't strictly numerical." ( https://www.mathematics-monster.com/symbols/Neither-Greater-... )
I think what I am seeing in this article is a curious mixture of should and does . For example, the "user > dev" formula is a clear example of "should"; but when he gets to "biz > user", he surreptitiously switches to "does". He explains the biz > user by pointing out stakeholders, and investors, and personal interests, and politics, and all other sorts of crap that, in the real world, puts biz before the user. Very…
How would it work if it wouldn't? He explains what he means by that. If you spend time and resources on all things the users require and your run out of money and go out of business, everybody loses.
Of course you can take any of the "rules" and take them to an extreme where they become wrong. But I think if you don't push them to their breaking point they are good rules of thumb :)
"biz > user" is valid on paper because someone has to pay for the party; there are a finite number of software devs and capitalism is great at allocating scarce resources where they're most needed. Or at least the "spherical cows" version of free-market capitalism is great at that. In that version of capitalism, if your OS spends too much time putting spam in the Start Menu and not enough on fixing bugs, you can just…
Just because this doesn’t happen instantaneously doesn’t mean it’s a fantasy. Large changes in an ecosystem always take time. It may be years before the incumbents are truly displaced, but that doesn’t mean they won’t be. MySpace and RIM also seemed like they’d be there forever.
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Likewise, TIL. In your link however it states "Example 1: Numerical Context Let's consider two real numbers, a and b. If a is neither greater than nor less than b, but they aren't explicitly equal, the relationship is ≹" How can that be possible?
I think they mean the case where a and b are variables for which you don't know the values.