The key phrase is right in the first sentence: "could someday [...]"
Usually (and especially in this case) a strong indication that reading the article is a complete waste of time.
Because it's hopelessly outdated down to the very core and that's kinda secretly the reason why throwing money or workforce on it wouldn't really get anywhere. It would need to be rewritten entirely and paying for improving something existing or financing the creation of a new "FOSS photoshop" are very different things.
Just imagine how bizarre, unexpected and awesome it would be if in two months there was a press conference with Xi Jinping announcing to the world that they found a cube/monolith with strange inscriptions on the moon...
Kind of horrifying, actually. Imagine some intelligent life discovered Earth and its primates and dropped us a calling card in a place we will only find when we're sufficiently advanced.
How ridiculous the ET assumption is depends on the amount of plausible alternatives. And for the Nimitz encounter to be something mundane, several very different things must have glitched or been missinterpreted and one has to put how ridiculous THAT would be into perspective.
How do you come to the conclusion that they are hiding badly? Assuming they are there and they are in fact hiding, I think they are pretty good at it. Or do you have reliable photo or video evidence that suggests otherwise? :-)
They don't come to that conclusion. They think the chance that extraterrestrial life could both travel to earth and be rubbish at hiding is very, very low
The Pentagon didn't send or release anything. They confirmed the publication of an - at least perhaps initially - unidentified object to be a genuine recording.
a) “Why do we use DRAM instead of SRAM?” is a perfectly valid question from a programmer that is worth a paragraph of detail, including the capacitor discharge curves. It is not like this is a major focus of the article! It’s just a small detail in the overview of the hardware. Seems very strange to be so upset by this.
b) If you ever write software for something that isn’t a desktop or server (eg a printer, a robot, some new shiny tech) then the hardware details of RAM are absolutely relevant and can’t be abstracted away by a nice alloc API. I can understand not wanting to focus on areas like this (devices are not my cup of tea) but I can’t understand deciding it’s ipso facto irrelevant because you’re a programmer.
I think you are contorting the comment to mean something it doesn't mean. "every" is the keyword there. Not every programmer needs to know how memory works. Some programmers should know. I don't need to know for 99.99999999% of the work I do. But even that 0.00000001% it is debatable. I write code that runs on target systems. I can evaluate its performance on the target system. Now if I had to write software for a system and speed was critical and I could choose the type of memory to use, then you bet I would be reading up on this subject.
> I write code that runs on target systems. I can evaluate its performance on the target system. Now if I had to write software for a system and speed was critical and I could choose the type of memory to use, then you bet I would be reading up on this subject.
Differences between types of memory don't just matter when you're picking what hardware to purchase. It also matters greatly when trying to understand why your code achieves a certain level of performance. Understanding the characteristics of your memory matters even if you're targeting a single fixed hardware platform that you can profile your code on.
The why isn't very important. You only need to know the constraints of your system, you don't need to know why the constraints are what they are... maybe you want to, but not need.
The why does come into play, often quite unexpectedly if you don't really understand how your memory system works. I've seen StackOverflow questions about performance anomalies that could only be properly answered by digging into the details of not just cache line size, but also cache associativity.
Not understanding how the system works means that sometimes you'll have to settle for not being able to use the full performance of your hardware, and that your performance constraints will in practice be rather inscrutable and often unpredictable.
> but I can’t understand deciding it’s ipso facto irrelevant because you’re a programmer.
The negation of “everyone should know this” is not “no one should know this”. I can understand that someone would protest to a claim about how “everyone should X” by giving a blanket statement like “no I shouldn’t”, but I interpret that as hyperboly in this case.
"Every" Is usually tacked onto these sorts of statements by someone who either has to go around cleaning up after other people, or is just generally tired of dealing with the consequences of other people hiding behind ignorance like it's the best shield even invented.
Externalizing your problems to others isn't right either.
Being upset is one of the way we signal that social mores have been violated. Making statements about how it would be good if everyone behaves is another.
Rejecting them and saying 'not my problem' is part of the problem.
I am using my own domain with Fastmail for years and can set as many aliases as I want. So I use an alias for every account I have that requires a mail address to sign up.
Occasionally I get a spam on one of these addresses and immediately know that the associated service/website had a potential data breach and the address and all my personal data was likely hacked/sold/leaked from there.
