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Those folks at CSI also have amazing internet trace softare. Even from octets in the 300s! Click "expand text" and scroll down a tick.)

If they can hunt you down from that, no telling what they could do with actual AI-controlled footage of you comitting a crime.

Simple example: Portal. Right now, it involves all sorts of crazy tricks. As I understand it, objects (at least, cubes which fall through the portal) are duplicated at both ends of a portal (in case you can see both ends at once)... The "hall of mirrors" effect of two portals across the hallway from each other is apparently intensive (it causes lag), and there is a hard (adjustable) limit, which can't be set above, what, 7 layers?

If Portal had been done raytraced, there would still be tricky things to do with the physics, but at least the portal graphics themselves would require roughly a single line of code -- add a few more, and you could have it shimmer and distort -- and they'd perform about the same either way. And they'd look better -- the "hall of mirrors" would continue to the pixel (or sub-pixel, if antialiased) scale, with no huge lag when you turn towards those mirrors.

But if there's one thing we could use in games, it's simplifying the code. Consider that games have tight schedules as it is (even moreso with the knowledge that any problems can be patched via download), and that it's not as though you have to design for ten years worth of feature enhancements and bugfixes -- you generally won't carry much over to the next game, so if it runs, it's good enough.

Given that attitude, what kind of hiring pratices will you have? Even The Daily WTF doesn't like to talk about it.

Now add the absolute requirement for performance, and you get esoteric, incomprehensible hacks at every level. And this is considered normal -- celebrated, even. After all, John Carmack has a hack named after him.

This is an area which could really use some solid engineering. To liken it to Web development, it seems everyone's working with crusty old PHP (or even straight C), when what's needed is either Rails (for large projects) or Sinatra (for small projects).

Try the Whatever blog then:

http://scalzi.com/whatever

It's by science fiction author whatever and covers a large range of topics from science fiction (obviously) to politics, and also bears the honour of being on of the first ever blogs.

It's also quite prolific most of the time.

On the subject of authors, there is also:

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/
Charles Stross, science fiction author

http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/blog/blog.asp
William Gibson - surely you know who this is.

http://blog.laurellkhamilton.org/
Laurell K Hamilton, most well known of the Paranormal Romance emerging genre

http://wilwheaton.typepad.com/wwdnbackup/
Wil Wheaton, author and famous as "Wesley" from Star Trek: TNG years ago.

There are a lot of other feeds on my list, many of which have already been mentioned. One that hasn't however is The Register.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/

A british news site with a tech slant

and Worse than Failure (The Daily WTF)

http://thedailywtf.com/

A site that highlights the worst of the worst in programming and IT stories. Highly entertaining.

Some blogs that help me get through the day:

b3ta - Full to the brim with lots of inspired/close-to-the-bone/somewhere-through-the-bone humour.
The Daily WTF - Most people will already have this, but for softies like me, its a goldmine of stories that get just a little too familiar for comfort.
Fancyplants' Japan Blog - Japan from a guy who backpacked his way round for three weeks - and had never been abroad before!

Here are some of the blogs I read:

Joel on Software
Introversion - an indie games company
The Old New Thing - Raymond Chen of Microsoft
The Daily WTF - how not to code
The Consumerist
FAIL Blog
Not Always Right - for people who [used to] work in retail

• bsdtalk various interviews with BSD people
• debaday not really a debianwhore but nice gems to be found there
• fleshbot who doesn't like porns?
• hubertf everyone's favorite NetBSD dev
• papod PA podcast
• tdwtf the daily wtf so you don't feel you are alone in your editor
• thinkgeek must buy everything!
• undeadly not dead yet

First I will add a plug for https://www.bloglines.com/ â" RSS feeds where ever I can log in, via HTTPS. Great for those feeds I read whenever & everywhere; and for those I only check when waiting to board the airplane. In my bloglines collection I have around 400 feeds, which will grow after looking through these threads. :) Some selections that hopefully no one else has mentioned:

Amusement:
http://failblog.wordpress.com/feed/
All about the Fail

http://lolbots.com/?feed=rss2
Robots making the LOLz, though not updated often.

http://lolgeeks.com/?feed=rss2
Geeks making the LOLz, though not updated often.

The latest limerick database entries - http://peeron.com/tickers/limerickdb.xml

The Triumph of Bullshit - http://bullshit.tumblr.com/rss

Diesel Sweeties by R Stevens - http://www.dieselsweeties.com/ds-unifeed.xml

PHD Comics - http://www.phdcomics.com/gradfeed.php
Ever spent time in academia? You will relate to this web comic.

Unshelved - http://www.unshelved.com/rss.aspx
A web comic about a library. Ssssshhhuusshh!

Indexed - http://indexed.blogspot.com/atom.xml
Take two (or more) topics and compare them using graphs & charts â" full of insight & lolz.

Computerworld Shark Tank News - http://feeds.computerworld.com/Computerworld/Shark/Tank
Many stories, full of humor and face palm

Overheard in the Office - http://www.overheardintheoffice.com/atom.xml
Instead of what was overheard in New York, now worldwide and from your office.

Common geek topics (those blogs that seem to hit all the topics days or weeks before you see them on Slashdot):
Didnt You Hear... http://www.didntyouhear.com/feed/

The Daily WTF - http://thedailywtf.com/rss.aspx

Global Nerdy - http://globalnerdy.com/feed/

Shopping:
http://content.dealnews.com/dealnews/rss/todays-edition.xml
Many of those geek toys you need

Newegg.com daily deals: http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=DailyDeals&nm_mc=OTC-RSS
Need I say more?

Slickdeals: http://www.slickdeals.net/rss.php
Need I say more?

Woot! http://www.woot.com/blog/rss.aspx

Dumb political stuff:
Homeland Stupidity: http://feeds.feedburner.com/HomelandStupidity
Government gaffes, bureaucratic blunders and incumbent incompetence

Groklaw: http://www.groklaw.net/backend/GrokLaw.rdf

Declan McCullagh's Politech http://www.politechbot.com/info/rss/politech.xml
Also not updated often, but on target when it is.

Cryptome: http://cryptome.org/cryptome.xml
You can get lost here for hours

Music:
House of Blues: http://hob.com/venues/clubvenues/lasvegas/
The RSS feed for the local House of B

Given that every reply you got here basically says something different, I'd say that although many people have very strong opinions on this subject, nobody really knows. The same goes for me, and I have been developing for 24 years, I have a PhD in Computational Linguistics, worked in industry, taught software engineering courses etc. Of course you should be aware of methodologies such as waterfall, XP etc. But if you take a closer look you will see there is neither much of a theoretical nor an empirical basis for them, it always comes down to some guys saying 'this is how you should do it, trust us'. Think about it, would you buy a mortgage backed bond from somebody who tells you that documentation is a bad thing? Only in software engineering will you hear such a thing. So, the truth of the matter is, nobody knows. I think heavy engineering-type approaches generally do not work and are not used in practice. As an example, take OO programming. Almost any programmer will tell you that principles like inheritance, data encapsulation etc help you write better code. But, as far as I know, nobody bothered to check whether this is actually true (in a scientific way) until Les Hatton did, and guess what: he claims that OO code is significantly more buggy than non-OO . It seems counter-intuitive, but there you go. Another disturbing finding is that software quality has steadily decreased over the last few decades. I don't think his work has had much impact on how code is written nowadays. Another example, Cleanroom. It sounds good, the most scientific approach to software development I know of (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleanroom_Software_Engineering). Case studies have indicated that it's really good for delivering high-quality, cost-effective code. So good in fact that, as far as I know, nobody has ever adopted it. Cleanroom is an extreme case, but I could give many more such examples. The main reason for bad software is not technical, it's caused by the way the industry works. It's run by the kind of people that believe in motivational posters. That kind of mentality is dangerous in any engineering discipline, where you need to think defensively. Another problem is that there is no regulation as found in any other industry (food, aviation, civil engineering, healthcare etc). The way I see it, there's a war going on between professionals and 'generalists', and in ICT the latter have been on top for decades. Compared to say lawyers and surgeons, software developers have very little status. I hope I don't sound too cynical, of course I think there's a place for SE and I wish you the best of luck with your research. But I'm very sceptical about software quality going up in the near future as a result of SE research. There is hope though. If a team manages to steer clear of worst practices, and uses some kind (any kind!) of methodology, it would already produce code that's way beyond industry standard. The things you read on http://thedailywtf.com/ are just the tip of the iceberg. I've seen industry-grade code which had an implementation of bubble sort (in C). Some of the worst practices imho: - hiring the most uneducated and uncaring people you can find. All large IT firms do this, they're cheap, malleable, and motivated by money, which is something any manager can understand. Also, managers don't like to have people work for them that are better educated than they are. So as a customer, you pay extortionist prices to have art history majors and ex-cons build your back-office software. Another problem is that, even if a firm does not have this kind of policy, recruiters tend to be clueless bimbos. I've heard one of them complain about not being able to find C-programmers, "only C++, and what use are those!". I've also heard a recruiter proudly proclaim "we only do projects for large companies, the others can't afford us". - hiring antisocial, narcissistic people. Obviously arrogant behaviour is an indication of high market value. Never mind that such people check in non-comp

It's stupid, but I always look twice... pop 10k here, so I would have seen them before.

Still, my favorite has to be this one, and ones like it.

Seriously, one of these days, I have got to get into the porn business. If any idiot with FrontPage can make money, imagine what will happen when you get someone competent... I can see it now: PornDB! Complete with buzzword compliance (social networking! REST!) and a query language!

SELECT videos.* FROM models LEFT JOIN videos ON model_id WHERE bust_size > size('33C') AND bmi 120;

(Nobody mod me insightful!)

To add to your list above, my personal favourite, the Brillant Paula Bean. Which is quite apt actually - its the complete opposite of what happened in the article...

It's sort of interesting, in a vague way, but you can read much more dire and funny stories on (the highly recommended) the daily WTF. My favourites would have to be the hotel reservation system from hell, the story of VirtuDyne and the digital donkey and a case of the MUMPS.

It's sort of interesting, in a vague way, but you can read much more dire and funny stories on (the highly recommended) the daily WTF. My favourites would have to be the hotel reservation system from hell, the story of VirtuDyne and the digital donkey and a case of the MUMPS.

It's sort of interesting, in a vague way, but you can read much more dire and funny stories on (the highly recommended) the daily WTF. My favourites would have to be the hotel reservation system from hell, the story of VirtuDyne and the digital donkey and a case of the MUMPS.

It's sort of interesting, in a vague way, but you can read much more dire and funny stories on (the highly recommended) the daily WTF. My favourites would have to be the hotel reservation system from hell, the story of VirtuDyne and the digital donkey and a case of the MUMPS.

Ah the world of black and white, true and false.

It also bears strange resemblance to a certain Daily WTF, though this instance cites Googlebot as the super hacker and gives more specific details.

Don't forget Paula Bean, and T/F/FNF.

Don't forget Paula Bean, and T/F/FNF.

Porn, printed as ASCII art on a dot-matrix printer.

See the third item here, titled "I didn't ask..."

MadCow.

This one really wasn't the IT staff's fault, so this is slightly off topic, but this is my all time favorite Daily WTF story.

http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Im-Sure-You-Can-Deal.aspx

steveha

http://thedailywtf.com/. Even if some of the stories are probably made up.

http://www.thedailywtf.com/

pretty much a new bone head story every day

http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/The_Brillant_Paula_Bean.aspx

And for those of you under the age of ten, the real truth about programming:

http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/real.programmers.html

Tell me a woman could do that...go on, I dare you.

of course different people will have a different idea what is obvious and what is not, but there are degrees. sorry to be somewhat harsh but if someone looks at a simple 'for' loop and needs explanation what it does, these people should be the least of the code author's concerns. you said you have not completed your education as programmer, so maybe the above comment would be useful to you - but once you have graduated, you will recognize it being redundant. I'm fairly tolerant with regards to coding and commenting styles, but this particular example is clearly extreme - such comments only create clutter.

one good example of redundant commenting - and a bad code in one - is at http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/wtflibphp.aspx. if you're interested, CodeSOD section of that site has more examples of redundant and overcomplicated code.

And then you have women like the brillant Paula.

I realise that mob-style business practice has built MSFT into a giant, but as the public and their representatives catch up with the new paradigms of the digital age, said practices will become increasingly counter-productive. Which is a good thing.

"The Savior was a self-made billionaire who struck it rich doing the type of business that makes unregulated industries regulated."

So, you're the author of this URL?

"Idle.slashdot.org is a total waste of your time. Never go there."
Why is it that the three words Never go there, invariably invokes the Big Red Buttoneffect?

Well, I'm not the OP, but:

1) No programming team would ignore FF unless directed to do so. You are telling me you got a group of programmers together and they all loved IE so much they were completely oblivious to FF?

Never underestimate bad development: http://www.thedailywtf.com/.

2) Some .NET goodies didnt work? Only some? If sales dipped like you said... then the whole system had to be hosed to get 0 sales from that demographic.

I'd guess all. Not that it needs to be. If the "goody" is something like checking out, then you'd get 0 sales.

3) You traffic would not drop to nil in a week, so that is your biggest "I am lying" thing. You are suggesting that all your past users accessed your site that week, saw it didnt work right, and decided to not come back ever again. None of the only check the site every couple weeks? I mean give me a break - this is obviously an exaggeratiom

  4) FF traffic shot back up in a week. (See #3)

  5) Your 'younger' crowd would have been apt to try your site in IE if it failed in FF... at least in lets say... 25% of the cases.

Consider sites like tiger direct or new egg. If one wasn't working, or frankly was even a bit slow, I'd go to the other and buy my stuff. You'd see one page hit on the broken one, and loads on the other as I did my searched. I buy new stuff maybe once in every 6 months, but the traffic of these sites is high. If everyone was a lazy, impatient, and not very frequent shopper like myself, a traffic pattern like this would be likely. The people coming in week 2 would not be the same people in the 9broken) week one. Also if there is stiff competition, then website problems just make me go elsewhere.

I measure productivity by check-ins per hour. It's way more effective.

(I really wished I could have done separate posts, but I feared the mods / admins would strike me down)

Despite the capitalization, this is not a reference to the Thinking Machines Corporation, recently featured on the DailyWTF.

Coincidentally, http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Overdue-Retirement.aspx.

That's sounds like a good submission to The Daily WTF.

As a DBA, my heart sinks at the thought of amateurs pawing through my database.

Unfortunately, 'because you are stupid' is not considered a valid business reason to reject their request.

Actually, that is a valid reason if framed in the correct language. You can easily claim that unrestricted ad hoc queries might cause performance issues because it's true. (There are ways to get around this, if the customer is prepared to pay e.g. a replica database). However, that's not your reason for restricting access. Your real reason is you don't want the customer "pawing through the database", so it seems to me that you aren't worried that the customer is too stupid but that they are bright enough to recognise a poor DB design when they see one.

Anyway, if you are based in the UK and your database contains contains personal data, the point is probably moot since what your customer is asking for may be illegal under the DPA (seek proper legal advice at the customer's expense).

[..snip..] I used to work at Thinking Machines [..snip..]

Then you would really love this Daily WTF.

Do you use Front-Ahead Design? I am almost certain that you do.

http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/FrontAhead-Design.aspx

The options in any serious environment are Java (enterprise) and PHP (any small to medium size web development shop, or large if you know what you're doing). Immature fad languages have no place in a real company.

Boolean possible values: null, true, false

Don't forget FileNotFound

Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity. Hanlon's razor

See, Bush isn't incompetent, his government IT staff is. Just like our friends in Oklahoma... Bad IT developers

The reason that skilled employees quit, however, is a bit more complicated. In virtually every job, there is a peak in the overall value (the ratio of productivity to cost) that an employee brings to his company. I call this the Value Apex.

On the first minute of the first day, an employee's value is effectively zero. As that employee becomes acquainted with his new environment and begins to apply his skills and past experiences, his value quickly grows. This growth continues exponentially while the employee masters the business domain and shares his ideas with coworkers and management.

However, once an employee shares all of his external knowledge, learns all that there is to know about the business, and applies all of his past experiences, the growth stops. That employee, in that particular job, has become all that he can be. He has reached the value apex.

If that employee continues to work in the same job, his value will start to decline. What was once "fresh new ideas that we can't implement today" become "the same old boring suggestions that we're never going to do". Prior solutions to similar problems are greeted with "yeah, we worked on that project, too" or simply dismissed as "that was five years ago, and we've all heard the story." This leads towards a loss of self actualization which ends up chipping away at motivation.

Skilled developers understand this. Crossing the value apex often triggers an innate "probably time for me to move on" feeling and, after a while, leads towards inevitable resentment and an overall dislike of the job. Nothing - not even a team of on-site masseuses - can assuage this loss.

Please submit your story to http://thedailywtf.com/

people
id | name
01 | Bill
02 | Tina
 
items
id | item
01 | candy
01 | ice cream
03 | milk

SELECT name, item FROM people INNER JOIN items USING (id)
name | item
Bill | candy
Bill | ice cream

SELECT name, item FROM people LEFT OUTER JOIN items USING (id)
name | item
Bill | candy
Bill | ice cream
Tina | NULL

SELECT name, item FROM people RIGHT OUTER JOIN items USING (id)
name | item
Bill | candy
Bill | ice cream
NULL | milk

SELECT name, item FROM people FULL OUTER JOIN items USING (id)
name | item
Bill | candy
Bill | ice cream
Tina | NULL
NULL | milk

You mean the "Sexual and Violent Offender Registry". I recently read an article about it. Somehow I don't think that it will be effective against cyber criminals.

So your three states would then be:
True,
False,
FileNotFound

http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/What_Is_Truth_0x3f_.aspx

"Now, what was my password five years ago?"

Not necessarily. During the dotcom days, I saw lots of companies blowing venture capital on Oracle to manage tiny databases when almost anything would have been more cost-effective. The folks I worked for wanted to use it to store the output of Nagios, for instance.

Note: I'm a PostgreSQL fanboy, but the idea still stands.

i'm nearly sure you already know TDWTF, but in the off-chance you don't, here it is: http://thedailywtf.com/Series/CodeSOD.aspx

I generally read Dilbert one a week, or every two weeks. I LOVED being able to click on the calendar to choose how far back I want to go, read that one, then just click 'Next' to go to the next one. Where is that excellent function?!? They made a heavier sight, that loads more slowly, that requires extra plug-ins not every one has, and took away functionality. This is an upgrade?!? I think it might end up at http://thedailywtf.com/Default.aspx! For some of you who seem to think Dilbert is passe... Get a grip. It entertains me. It entertains my PHB (which really entertains me). It still entertains many people, as evidenced by the calendars, mugs, etc that still make the author money. If you don't like it, why are you even here commenting on the website change?

I think you mean this: http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/The_Spider_of_Doom.aspx

Like these people: http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/The_Spider_of_Doom.aspx