Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's a "p90 use case"?
90th percentile use case
Ha I thought it was related to P90X somehow
FizzleFade
71–80 of 182 posts
Re: FizzleFade
#72I have the feeling that knowledge about bits is lacking by a lot of younger coders. And I also think this is what causes bloatware. CPUs are powerful enough to use a naive fade transition. But coders who are aware of the internal workings can make it even faster on todays hardware. Great article and imho still relevant on todays much more powerful computers.
I agree. Unfortunately, it feels like there is so many people out there lacking the fundamental engineering background to write software. I once spent an hour "optimizing" a piece of code that ran in 15 minutes, which tested an embedded system. The resulting code ran in 4 seconds. The root cause was a complete misunderstanding of how microprocessor interrupts work. I spent a week re-writing a 4000 line C-function, wh…
> lacking the fundamental engineering background to write software.... young coders graduate with less knowledge about the underlying hardware on which their software will run.
There's a lot of software being written in Excel macros and Wordpress web development. These tools actually get work done - they automate things that were not automated before, they publish things that were not published before, and they generate revenue and improve productivity.
Young coders, and the authors of these programs, should not be forced or expected to go through low-level programming classes to get work done. The tools are good enough and the hardware is fast enough that for 99.99% of all projects, they don't need this expertise.
I say this as someone with an EE degree (from less than a decade ago) consisting of classes that spanned the entire pyramid of complexity: from analysis and simulation of individual transistors, through construction of a CPU on an FPGA, through writing an RTOS for a microcontroller, up to programming a web server. That understanding benefits me greatly in what I'm doing today.
But I work with plenty of people who don't have that background. For all the business logic that seems to be found in any software project, that's just fine. Most of the work is in translating people's desire for the software to "do what I want" into actual requirements and then codifying those requirements into a database or UI. For construction of state machines, they should use a library or have someone more competent construct the framework and let them implement the actual states, and when the work requires an understanding of how microprocessor interrupts, they should defer to someone who understands that technology.
And yes, they should teach some version control in college as well. It would be enough to give students one major project that ends up with the filename laydn-Project-complete-final-actuallyfinal-3-done-8-29.zip, which just worked a minute ago after which you barely changed anything and now it's completely broken, and that thing that worked once stopped working at some unknown time in the past. Then just mention that git and svn are things that exist.
Re: FizzleFade
#73I have the feeling that knowledge about bits is lacking by a lot of younger coders. And I also think this is what causes bloatware. CPUs are powerful enough to use a naive fade transition. But coders who are aware of the internal workings can make it even faster on todays hardware. Great article and imho still relevant on todays much more powerful computers.
Anecdotal evidence - I cut my teeth on C and a dabble of asm as a kid (even writing z80 opcodes directly for fun!). I vaguely remember wrangling bits to drive logic. I also wrote webpages as Apache C modules with binary logic to parse requests :D
That was a long time ago in tech terms (~15 years). In the intervening gap I spent most of my time in scripted languages (as3, c#, etc.).
Result? I don't know how to wrangle bits anymore. The added speed increase I'd add almost definitely isn't worth it (for example, flash and unity games, web services, etc.). That doesn't mean it isn't worth it for the end product - I rely on Unity, Adobe, Google, etc. to worry about those optimizations so I can stand on their shoulders and benefit.
But in terms of cost/benefit, getting into that stuff myself (again) just didn't make sense for most of my professional needs.
Re: FizzleFade
#74Cool, I knew that LFSRs were used in ciphers. I was not aware that they were also useful for implementing old-school graphical effects. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear-feedback_shift_register...
CSS[1] was the defacto 'DRM' back in the day, which used two LFSRs for 40-bit encryption. Apart from being able to brute force it today, there are many other ways to break it[2].
Now the DRM on DVDs/BluRays is AACS[3], which uses AES. You might also recognise it from the 'copyrighted numbers' fiasco[4]
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_Scramble_System
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_Scramble_System#Crypta...
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Access_Content_System
[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AACS_encryption_key_controvers...
Re: FizzleFade
#75I have the feeling that knowledge about bits is lacking by a lot of younger coders. And I also think this is what causes bloatware. CPUs are powerful enough to use a naive fade transition. But coders who are aware of the internal workings can make it even faster on todays hardware. Great article and imho still relevant on todays much more powerful computers.
Why? I mean if you look at the majority of work that programmers do today - frontend/backend web development and apps, there is no need to have knowledge about bits. In fact, if I see someone using binary operators in languages such as Java,JS,Ruby etc... I'll immediately consider it bad code, regardless of context - it's just not the right tool for the level of abstraction in these languages. The fact is that in the…
I remember a recent example. What I wrote was:
int x = somefunction();
int x_dividedby16 = x >> 4;
int x_dividedby16 = (int)Math.ceil(x / 16.0);Re: FizzleFade
#76I have the feeling that knowledge about bits is lacking by a lot of younger coders. And I also think this is what causes bloatware. CPUs are powerful enough to use a naive fade transition. But coders who are aware of the internal workings can make it even faster on todays hardware. Great article and imho still relevant on todays much more powerful computers.
Agreed. I like this list of somewhat common bit hacks (the popular Bit Twiddling Guide): graphics.stanford.edu/~seander/bithacks.html
Re: FizzleFade
#77Related: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10054732
Fundamentally you want to make a random permutation, but not spend linear memory on it, as you would if you did it by shuffling.
Re: FizzleFade
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why? I mean if you look at the majority of work that programmers do today - frontend/backend web development and apps, there is no need to have knowledge about bits. In fact, if I see someone using binary operators in languages such as Java,JS,Ruby etc... I'll immediately consider it bad code, regardless of context - it's just not the right tool for the level of abstraction in these languages. The fact is that in the…
I remember a recent example. What I wrote was: int x = somefunction(); int x_dividedby16 = x >> 4; My coworker corrected the second line to something like: int x_dividedby16 = (int)Math.ceil(x / 16.0);
Did your coworker correct it with "this is more readable" or "this is the correct way to do it"? The first is arguable (though I don't personally agree with the argument), the second just betrays a real lack of knowledge.
Re: FizzleFade
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why? I mean if you look at the majority of work that programmers do today - frontend/backend web development and apps, there is no need to have knowledge about bits. In fact, if I see someone using binary operators in languages such as Java,JS,Ruby etc... I'll immediately consider it bad code, regardless of context - it's just not the right tool for the level of abstraction in these languages. The fact is that in the…
I remember a recent example. What I wrote was: int x = somefunction(); int x_dividedby16 = x >> 4; My coworker corrected the second line to something like: int x_dividedby16 = (int)Math.ceil(x / 16.0);
Why not `x / 16`?
Re: FizzleFade
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
I remember a recent example. What I wrote was: int x = somefunction(); int x_dividedby16 = x >> 4; My coworker corrected the second line to something like: int x_dividedby16 = (int)Math.ceil(x / 16.0);
Why not `x / 16`?
Yes, which is more readable and would be compiled to the same thing