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The Law of Leaky Abstractions
Joel Spolsky has a nice essay on the leaky abstractions which underlie all high-level programming. Good reading, even for non-programmers.
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The Law of Unpluggable Holes
The release of Christina Aguilera's new album "Stripped" has brought about a good deal of controversy, and with good reason as Aguilera's overnight transformation is an understandable shock to those who have extensively followed the work of this emerging artist.
I, personally, am extremely disappointed with Christina's departure from her pronounced classical music roots. As a young, underground artist, Ms. Aguilera created a very progressive, yet accessible sound, which will undoubtedly be heralded for many years to come. Aguilera's self-titled first endeavor was a musical Odyssey that exhibited Christina's classical groundings, but also exuded Christina's inured pop instinct that is paramount to divas none other than Tina Turner and Aretha Franklin.
"Stripped", however, represents little more than the commoditization of this young talent. In an effort to make her work more accessible to the mainstream audience, "Stripped" asserts a water-downed, musically inhibited Christina that abandons much of the technical prowess that defined her earlier compositions.
It is extremely depressing that an artist with the talent and aesthetic appeal to propel the music industry into a new, musically sensible era past all of the packaged music groups with their plastic bubble gum hits. Unfortunately, Ms. Aguilera has just joined the pack and the loss of her potential is, undoubtedly, one of the greatest musical tragedies of our time.
I looked down in suprise to find a leaky abstraction. Had to change pants.
Stop looking at porn sites, and you might be able to avoid that problem.
You can accomplish anything you set your mind to. The impossible just takes a little longer.
We use TCP for many things like fetching web pages and sending email. The reliability of TCP is why every exciting email from embezzling East Africans arrives in letter-perfect condition. O joy.
...
If you send a bunch of messages with IP, don't be surprised if only half of them arrive, and some of those are in a different order than the order in which they were sent, and some of them have been replaced by alternate messages, perhaps containing pictures of adorable baby orangutans, or more likely just a lot of unreadable garbage that looks like the subject line of Taiwanese spam.
Hmm, Mr Spolsky, you got mail.
And, of course, as soon as my first post got sinked it became +4 funny....
"The one shining example of this is FreeBSD, which is based totally on low level C programs and they stress using legacy program methodologies in place of the fancy schmancy new ones which are faulty."
Lol, good trolling - I see you're still getting mod points, too. Some moderators will never learn.
Imagine that we had a way of sending actors from Broadway to Hollywood that involved putting them in cars and driving them across the country. Some of these cars crashed, killing the poor actors.
Unlike TCP, though, we don't have the ability to re-send copies of Hollyweird actors. Or do we?
All I want is a kind word, a warm bed and unlimited power.
Nice troll.
got modded up =)
Damn right. It's +0 Normal.
Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go change.