after the freeze lifts, you also have multiple contributors dumping large PRs at the same time, missing out on the progressive integration that happens otherwise. This makes it difficult to figure out the cause of regression (think bisect but with large commits).
Code freezes like this are worst when there is no individual branching capability or local revision control, because that guarantees large commits.
my anecdata is that I have always filed manually by myself, but every time had a small adjustment made by the IRS... indeed filing a correct return the 1st time seems close to impossible.
it's funny because I have seen the opposite.
Engineer: "it crashed because it dereferenced a null pointer"
boss: "add null pointer checks everywhere!"
... and because it used "if" instead of "assert", it made the null pointer arg a valid argument, making it a tolerable state of the running software, which displaced the locus of crashes far from the source of the issue. Moral of the story, use "assert" to make it crash as early as possible and debug THAT. You want to restrict the representable states in the software, not expand them by adding null checks everywhere.
This is right on point. I read this book recently, by coincidence, and it's funny and fascinating at the same time (at least for someone who speaks both English and French).
My daily driver in 1998-1999 was a 43P (see http://www.ibmfiles.com/pages/rs6000type7043150.htm ), an earlier model of this.
With AIX, it was slowish, swapping to disk very easily (i.e. not enough RAM). I don't miss AIX much, though.
This uses the Most Significant Bits to pack some bits into pointers..
Another technique is to use the Least Significant Bits: indeed since pointers are 64 bit aligned, the lowest 3 bits are always zero, therefore it is possible to pack 3 bits of information there.
And there's a third technique in C++, which is to use placement new to morph an object in-place. This can be use to toggle between 2 classes with a boolean method, where one has this method return true and the other class has this method return false. This creates per-object state that really uses bits in the vptr to store this boolean state. Obviously this can be used with a whole set of classes to stores more bits. I have used this successfully to store values of refcount (each AddRef/Release using placement new to morph from RefCounted1/RefCounted2/../RefCountedN classes) to implement reference counting without a counter.
can you clarify "how" it makes one a better developer?
When I think of how the java streams API is used, it generates lots of garbage (i.e. lots of intermediary allocs), doesn't always make things clearer.. i'm genuinely curious (and in fact i like the streams API, it's just often misused by collecting at the wrong step..).
About France's tax system being deceptive, I would highlight that France makes it even more deceptive by having different regimes for different categories:
for instance, nurses or lawyers in France feel that the state levies from them a disproportionate amount of the super-gross (about 70%), and that these categories
(I took 2, but in fact this is true for all "independents" in France) pay more than
the rest of the population... which is not true, it is simply that the fraction of income that is levied as taxes is more obvious to those categories.
A regular employee does not even see most of these levies on their pay stub (it's called the "charges patronales", i.e. employers' contribution, but it really is a portion of wages that is socialized: this is money that belongs to the employee as wages, it's not something that belongs to the employer that pays it for the privilege of employing a person), and in reality what nurses/lawyers/independent perceive as outrageous taxation is just them paying "self-employment" taxes (as it's called in the US).
These taxes are there for good reason, but they are indeed masked from mere mortals.
It would do a world of good for these things to appear (by law) on pay slips, for it would make people realize that the many public services that seem to be free are in fact very much not free at all. Indeed these public services (which are pretty good in France, IMHO) cost an arm and a leg, yet the system is rigged to make them appear free. If that's not deception, I don't know what is :)
architecture is political because an architecture (or a system) always ends up mirroring the organization that produced/operates it. A well-known fact in OB, and one reason why one wants to engineer (i.e. architect) the organization simultaneously with the system, otherwise you create silos or disjoint systems that can't talk to each other.