Jerry Coffin

25,279 reputation

23898

bio	website	coderscentral.blogspot.com
	location	Colorado Springs, CO
	age	48
visits	member for	2 years, 8 months
	seen	12 hours ago
stats	profile views	755

Started programming on a Control Data mainframe in FORTRAN IV, back when that was still a new thing. Was apparently quite masochistic, because I kept programming anyway. For that matter, I still do...

Gold C++ badge #20
Gold C badge #12
Legendary badge #35

	25,279 reputation	bio	website	coderscentral.blogspot.com	visits	member for	2 years, 8 months
23898 badges		location	Colorado Springs, CO		seen	12 hours ago

summary answers questions tags badges favorites bounties reputation activity

417 Comments

suggestions reviews revisions comments badges posts accepts all

May 29	comment	WinRT: How usable will it be? @mlvljr: at least based on my experience, yes, BSD is cleaner and more understandable. I should probably add a disclaimer though: I have some personal friends who are BSD fans, and find some of Linus's rants fairly objectionable, so my personal feelings may influence that to some degree.
May 29	comment	WinRT: How usable will it be? @mlvljr: Linux isn't exactly trivial either. It's been maintained for quite a while now, has quite a few performance hacks, and more than a few fairly fundamental design changes that don't always integrate perfectly. Ultimately, yes, it's undoubtedly easier, but not by as large a margin as we might wish.
May 26	comment	Where could Distributed Version Control Systems currently be in Gartner's hype cycle? The time scale on the chart doesn't seem to relate to time since original introduction. Just for example, "Wireless power" is shown toward the left side even though Tesla did it in the 1890's and even if we restrict it to high tech/computer kinds of things, passive RFID tags have been using it for quite a while too.
May 25	comment	What does Jamie Zawinski's Law mean? aka "Greenspun's tenth rule."
May 24	comment	timers with threads on queue In this case, the items in the queue apparently expire in order, so you can use a normal queue instead of a priority queue. The receiving thread just sleeps until the expiration time for the item at the front of the queue, removes it (if it's still present) and repeats.
May 24	comment	Effective way to gain practical knowledge Seems like the obvious thing to do would be to write some code independently, attempting to apply what you've learned in your non-coding CS classes.
May 23	comment	Why was ASCII needed? @LokiAstari: I'm not really advocating anything -- but at least if I recall correctly, that was how they were used, at least part of the time (though the 7-track drives of which I was aware were mostly recording CDC's 6-bit code + parity in parallel). Later, there were also 9-track drives, that worked pretty much the same way. Then there were drives that acted like 9-track drives, but actually used a head on a rotating drum, about like in a VCR (I believe all 6250 FCI drives worked that way).
May 23	comment	Why was ASCII needed? At that time, 7-track tape drives were also fairly common.
May 17	comment	Text Classification Implementation My immediate reaction is that the general idea isn't very useful -- regenerating the data from the text is probably about as easy as parsing XML correctly. Other than that, I'm a bit uncertain why you'd mess with C++/CLI for it. If you want C++, using C++. If you want .NET, use C#. C++/CLI is one of those "neither fish nor fowl" things, that's better avoided unless truly required.
May 17	comment	Interpretation of DRY principle I think this would/will be a lot easier to answer given some sort of concrete example. My immediate reaction is that the dichotomy you're portraying isn't entirely real -- i.e., those aren't the only two choices. As an aside, I'd consider any use of a `boolean` as a parameter somewhat suspect at best.
May 17	comment	What would be the Impact of P=NP? @DavidThornley: Perhaps we should turn it around for a moment. Let's assume I give you an "oracle" that will factor the product of large primes in constant time. We can all see how that breaks RSA instantly. Can you describe how to derive something from it that would help make it any easier to break AES at all?
May 16	comment	Why do trees grow downward? @FrustratedWithFormsDesigner: Exactly!
May 16	comment	Why do trees grow downward? @GaryRowe: A widely propagated falsehood. Manhole covers are round primarily because they cover ends of pipes, and pipes are round. Pipes are round because 1) that distributes stress on them evenly, and 2) it maximizes the cross-section for a given perimeter. Overall, it maximizes the strength and capacity of the pipe you can get from a specific amount of material.
May 16	comment	What would be the Impact of P=NP? @DavidThornley: Do you have some citation to support that assertion? I'm not at all sure how showing that P=NP would make it any easier to break a typical block cipher (DES, AES, etc.), but would be interested to read about it if there was.
May 16	comment	What would be the Impact of P=NP? @Oleski: A proof would not necessarily involve showing a working algorithm. People publish purported proofs that P=NP on a fairly regular basis. So far, defects have been found in all of them -- but I'd estimate at least 90% would should nothing about how to solve NP-complete problems in polynomial time even if they were correct.
May 16	comment	Is the 14th line of The Zen of Python a reference to Dijkstra? I pick option C: it's mostly an attempt at imparting a sense of the deep and mysterious to statements to which "banal" might more accurately be applied.
May 14	comment	What is upcasting/downcasting? @acidzombie24: But in books on computer science, you'll find that trees are normally drawn as I've described, with the root at the top.
May 14	comment	Would “Efficient C++” book be irrelevant now due to compiler improvements? @Roger: Maybe. Sutter's books undoubtedly mention efficiency in passing, but are devoted primarily to other issues (especially exception safety).
May 14	comment	Would “Efficient C++” book be irrelevant now due to compiler improvements? I think you misread -- Meyers wrote Effective C++, but he's asking about Efficient C++.
May 11	comment	C++ “under the hood” books for advanced readers? Inside The C++ Object Model by Stanley Lippman covers most of what you seem to be after.