* Posts by David Nečas

5 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Apr 2007

MIT student walks into airport wearing circuit board and wires

David Nečas

re: Dumb and dumbest

Bombs don't look like circuit boards with blinking lights. So what exactly wrong with it? If walking to the airport with something that doesn't look like a bomb is a dumb idea, then what we should do? Walk there with something that does look like a bomb?

Apple sells one in six US laptops

David Nečas

Re: FUD? (Mike Moyle)

I have no idea what Vista does, so this may be irrelevant... Anyway, in other operating systems, the ideal state is that the OS uses essentially all memory that is not used by applications as cache. Cache roughly equals to free memory because anything there can be easily discarded and the memory given to applications. But it's better than free memory -- if you need something that happens to be in the cache you don't have to read it from the (slow) disk.

Is VMware too close to Linux?

David Nečas

Standards

> Linux complains about Microsoft standards

Not sure what `Linux complains' means...

> ( when Linux really has no standards)

..anyway, trying to adhere to existing standards instead of calling any random crap `a new standard' really results in a very small number of `standards' created -- ideally only for the few things that are OS-specific by definition.

Hacking WoW and the pursuit of knowledge

David Nečas

justice

The whole point of computers is to be programmed to do repetitive tasks themselves. If you spend several hours a day doing repetitive tasks on a computer (call it playing MMORPG or whatever), you missed the point completely and deserve to be whacked by a bot. That's what I call justice.

Don't forget the ‘C’ in Objective-C

David Nečas

feel

Anonymous wrote:

> Finally, the best programmers don't have 'feel' for the way in which their code is mapped onto machine code and spend their time optimising code that offends them.

They do, precisely because

> The best programmers use profilers and tools that tell them exactly where the bottlenecks in their code and focus their time optimising these

and thus they develop the `feel' (having some idea what happens at the deeper levels helps in the process). In fact, you don't develop any `feel' after being exposed to the same patterns again and again you can hardly call yourself a programmer.

Dave Jewell wrote:

> I did a little googling and it turns out that a lot of folks do use the 'strstr' technique to check OpenGL extensions.

A little googling can find awful lots of people making all kinds of mistakes. Your `strstr technique' is taught in programming classes -- as an example of common programming errors. If the goal was to make performance-conscious programmers look like complete idiots, you can congratulate yourself.