These people need to be severely beaten up... This is juvenile, pathetic and offensive on the most basic level. What kind of a person would do something like this? Yeah, the Nigerian scams are bad, but this is an order of magnitude worse. It makes me want to vomit.
On a more informative sidenote, the scammers have learned to use online translators, and if your email is on a country TLD, you might receive a machine-translated email. I recently got one from someone who portrayed themselves to be a bank employee from London. They even attached a photoshopped (well, more like MS-painted) ID card.
That will only happen when you pass complex, reference parameters. We are talking about beginners here, and they will - at best - pass "x" and "y", both integers, to an "Add" function. Later on, yes, they are going to encounter "pointers" even in VB.Net, but it will be at a point in time when they'll be able to understand what's going on.
Anyway, the greatest challenge with beginners is to get them to start thinking like programmers and understand the logic behind all this.
I don't know about you, but when I first started playing around with SQL, I had issues thinking in terms of sets. I've never encountered anything similar, so it got me all confused at first and I desperately wanted to use cursors and loops and billions of selects instead of joins, as we would do in regular programming languages to iterate over data. Took a while, and lots of very easy examples for the new thinking type to root itself in my brain. Now, if SQL was a bloodied mess of "%(##column1+column2 -//table1||table2 x1=x2)" (makes no sense, made this up), I'd have an even harder time understanding that over "select column1,column2 from table1 inner join table2 where table1.x1=table2.x2". Thankfully, SQL is englishist and verbose;)
On a sidenote, I've never seen my university professors tell people to do sanity checks. Not one of them said "you are supposed to enter a number here, but watch out if someone enters some text or a negative number". But they'll teach people pointers...
I'm rambling here, it's well past midnight, so I have no idea where I'm going with this, except that someone should make a very easy programming language for beginners. Like this:
let x = user input add constraint to x: if not integer then terminate with error "you need to enter a number" add constraint to x: if below 0 then terminate with error "the number must be 0 or above" let y = x + 10 print "y is: " y
Rewrite that in vanilla C and see how much more complicated it gets.
"if x and not y then foo" is much easier for a beginner to understand than "if x && !y foo".
Having endured some programming classes at the university with people who never had any programming experience, two things could immediately be observed as problems: people kept forgetting which symbols are used for what and few could grasp pointers (one of the reasons why C sucks for beginners).
Visual Basic as you know it is dead. Everything.NET compiles into the same bytecode, so the speed is the same between all languages. Not much of a difference between native code and.NET JIT.
He'd better learn VB.Net. It's more verbose and easier for beginners to grasp, while still having the entire.NET framework underneath. If he grows to like the C syntax, great - he has C# to move to, and if goes to Linux, there's Mono. Maybe he'll like Python, so he could use IronPython...
I have personally went through a really strange cycle of programming language choices. Started with BASIC, moved to C, then to Pascal (and Delphi) and now I'm on VB.Net and heavy JavaScript:)
I often go to the cinema alone, because I love non-Hollywood stuff the most, and my geek friends can't stand any of that "indie shit". Met my last girlfriend while watching Fish Tank.
However, Avatar is a flashy, shiny collection of great CGI, and I'd like to see it with other people I know so that we can comment on things mentioned in the TFA over a beer and things like that. I don't want to see Fish Tank with my geek friends, and I don't want to see Avatar with my (former) girlfriend.
Carakan is cross-platform. That cannot be stressed enough. Since Opera is used on a *lot* of devices, from mobile phones, over fridges (!) and airplane entertainment centres, to the Wii, this is truly a major step forward for Opera.
According to the first link in the article (from Facebook), the bulk of the 30000 servers is dedicated to running PHP/Apache. That seems in line with 800+ servers runing memcached, and a few thousands (4000 ?) servers?
The bulk of those 30k servers is probably also running a partitioned database, which - as you may have guessed - is also cached in memory. It's cache one way or another. Now, if they have 25k pure PHP servers, 4k pure DB servers, and 1k pure memcached servers, that's a different issue, but I don't think that would be the case...
The reason why they have so many servers is because Facebook contains so much data. The servers are there for a reason, and the reason is CACHING.
The overhead of PHP is very small for a platform that is all about sharing data and the bulk of processor time surely goes towards fetching that data in the first place. What, do you seriously think that when you hit your home page on Facebook, there are database queries issued for that? Lulz.
Besides, I'm almost sure that FB uses something like Zend Accelerator, which increases code execution speed a lot.
Why don't you put your money where your mouth is, Mr. Smartypants, and take a couple of months to clone Yelp and find out. Better yet, take four months and make a site that is twice as good! If it's so easy, then do it. Half a billion dollars for four months of work! What are you waiting for?
If you are going to pay me during that time, I'm all for it. However, I don't see the point - the American market is taken, and this site concept definitely wouldn't work in large parts of the rest of the world. I've just asked several friends from Western Europe (ages 20-40), nobody ever heard of Yelp, nobody knows of a similar local site and nobody would care.
The point still stands: the website is shitty and could easily be made functionally better in a very short time. That doesn't mean it would attract users, the same as the iPhone is popular and objectively better phones aren't, or insert-your-own-analogy-here.
If you know how to attract American users and have the money to pay me while I work, let's make a deal and we'll strike a goldmine.
I don't mean this in an offensive way, but - it looks like an "American" thing. Where I live, and in the several European countries I've been to, people don't go out to eat (if they do, any random fast food will do) and a bar is just a bar. I personally cannot even remember the last time I've been to a restaurant. It's cheaper and tastier to simply eat at home.
I still don't see how information on Yelp could be worth more than 1-2 million instead of 500.
500 million for a very simple website that has people reviewing restaurants and shit? Half the people on Slashdot would be able to clone that website in a couple of months (working alone!), and the user base is *not* worth half a billion (BILLION!!!).
What is this world coming to?
Or, what am I missing? Is yelp.com offering something other than people subjectively reviewing things like food?
However, YOU are aware that it's already possible to download the 3D versions of the movie Avatar from certain pirate locations?
It isn't. The only copies of Avatar are cams - there is no R5 yet, much less a 3D version. If you stumbled upon something like that, rest assured it's a fake, used as a honeypot by the MAFIAA, or contains an exe with malware.
This is a perfect example. The DRM was broken so quickly, keys were available online http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=avatar+keygen so pirates were not inconvenienced, but the legitimate customers (the theatre who was showing the movie) were unable to use the item they had purchased in a timely manner.
You are aware that "avatar+keygen" gives no meaningful results, aren't you, because it's just link spam from fishy sites? Even if it *did* give meaningful results, they would be about the *game*, not the *movie*.
I've been waiting for TB3 ever since they mentioned it will have tabs.
Unfortunately, for all of us Eudora users - TB3 isn't a replacement. Eudora allowed opening mailboxes in tabs, TB3 doesn't. Eudora saved opened "tabs" (it used MDI) and reloaded them when it was started again - TB3 doesn't.
On top of that, TB3 happily crashed while importing my Eudora emails... Which honestly puzzles me because Eudora uses a simple mbx format. How can it fail to import pure text?!
Oh well, let's wait for TB4... If I don't write my own Clonedora client in the meantime.
Many of the games on the alternatives list have exactly the same kind of violence. Hell, in Overlord you're taking control of a evil god like character that controls his minions to destroy and kill enemies, the good people.
Furthermore, in Overlord II you can have a foursome. I think it even gives you an achievement for it.
Yes, or I could use the Apple extensions, or the Amiga version of Rock Ridge, or god knows what else...
We are talking about Windows here - perhaps I haven't been clear enough.
Non-Windows systems have never required Joliet, but Windows has, because all other solutions are technically inadequate for that OS. For that very reason, Joliet is technically inadequate on MacOS and UNIX-like systems, the Apple ISO-9660 extensions are inadequate on UNIX, etc, etc.
Now, if you want to propose a unified spec that would be technically adequate for all operating systems and all file systems, then by all means, go ahead. In the meantime, Joliet is a technical necessity for Microsoft OSs.
Well, the CD-ROM standard they support is "Joliet". Which is their own extension.... I wonder how long until they are going with patents after others implementing it.
ISO-9660 doesn't support Unicode. Believe it or not, some languages use characters that aren't part of ASCII.
ISO-9660 doesn't support lower case letters, spaces and multiple dots in file/directory names.
There's nothing wrong with naming a directory "Family Photos 25.12.2009." - if Joliet didn't exist, we'd have to burn that to CD as "FAMILYPHOTOS25122009".
Functions have their place, Subroutines have their place. Global variables have their place. Static variables, Heap variables, and stack variables have their place. Even a Go To has it's place (in rare cases).
The point is to use these tools in such a way that someone else can figure out what you're doing.
Yes, that is true.
But in my case, for example, a variable named "i" (obviously for "integer") is used in a million places. The only way to figure out how something works is to run everything through a debugger, step through, and use pencil and paper to map the flow of the variables from one sub to another. Sometimes one sub will "accept" "i" and "return" "i", sometimes it will place the result in "ii". Sometimes the code will throw you a red herring because it will "return" the result but it won't be used anywhere else in the process; well, of course, the tenth sub in the chain might overwrite it so that the eleventh may use it, and god help you if you've missed the tenth sub and thought "why the fuck is the eleventh sub doing this when 'i' was 5 just a moment ago?!".
The code is usually beyond fixing. It takes more time to figure it out and refactor than to properly rewrite everything from scratch after asking the end user what a certain part of the application should be doing.
Coding practices are nice and all, but they can't get around idiots. To put it differently, a lack of unified and useful coding practices is merely a minor inconvenience, whereas a programming moron is a clusterfuck.
A person whose code I regularly inherit seems to hate functions. He just writes subs with no parameters and uses global variables to pass information to and from them. It's awesome...
Eventually they will introduce billing by the Gigabytes, and pipesize.
I'm on a connection with a monthly cap of 10 GB, both upload and download. It's a soft cap; you go over, you pay extra.
I have personally been using 3-4 GB per month. Once I let other family members online from their computer, the bandwidth usage less than doubled. We have never crossed the monthly bandwidth cap, not once. Unlimited traffic is... let me check... about $10 extra per month, and we don't consider it worthwhile. Sure, I could download some torrents and they could watch YouTube all day, but neither of us needs to do those things.
What I'm trying to say that metered connections and billing by the gigabyte isn't necessarily such an evil thing. There's a lot of people out there who don't need "unlimited" traffic and would be perfectly content with a lower monthly fee that would still cover their bandwidth usage (and then some).
Slashdot Mirror
These people need to be severely beaten up... This is juvenile, pathetic and offensive on the most basic level. What kind of a person would do something like this? Yeah, the Nigerian scams are bad, but this is an order of magnitude worse. It makes me want to vomit.
On a more informative sidenote, the scammers have learned to use online translators, and if your email is on a country TLD, you might receive a machine-translated email. I recently got one from someone who portrayed themselves to be a bank employee from London. They even attached a photoshopped (well, more like MS-painted) ID card.
That will only happen when you pass complex, reference parameters. We are talking about beginners here, and they will - at best - pass "x" and "y", both integers, to an "Add" function. Later on, yes, they are going to encounter "pointers" even in VB.Net, but it will be at a point in time when they'll be able to understand what's going on.
Anyway, the greatest challenge with beginners is to get them to start thinking like programmers and understand the logic behind all this.
I don't know about you, but when I first started playing around with SQL, I had issues thinking in terms of sets. I've never encountered anything similar, so it got me all confused at first and I desperately wanted to use cursors and loops and billions of selects instead of joins, as we would do in regular programming languages to iterate over data. Took a while, and lots of very easy examples for the new thinking type to root itself in my brain. Now, if SQL was a bloodied mess of "%(##column1+column2 - //table1||table2 x1=x2)" (makes no sense, made this up), I'd have an even harder time understanding that over "select column1,column2 from table1 inner join table2 where table1.x1=table2.x2". Thankfully, SQL is englishist and verbose ;)
On a sidenote, I've never seen my university professors tell people to do sanity checks. Not one of them said "you are supposed to enter a number here, but watch out if someone enters some text or a negative number". But they'll teach people pointers...
I'm rambling here, it's well past midnight, so I have no idea where I'm going with this, except that someone should make a very easy programming language for beginners. Like this:
let x = user input
add constraint to x: if not integer then terminate with error "you need to enter a number"
add constraint to x: if below 0 then terminate with error "the number must be 0 or above"
let y = x + 10
print "y is: " y
Rewrite that in vanilla C and see how much more complicated it gets.
Shit, I have to get up in six hours...
For one thing, it uses words instead of symbols ;)
"if x and not y then foo" is much easier for a beginner to understand than "if x && !y foo".
Having endured some programming classes at the university with people who never had any programming experience, two things could immediately be observed as problems: people kept forgetting which symbols are used for what and few could grasp pointers (one of the reasons why C sucks for beginners).
Visual Basic as you know it is dead. Everything .NET compiles into the same bytecode, so the speed is the same between all languages. Not much of a difference between native code and .NET JIT.
Delphi is great, but I doubt it has a future...
He'd better learn VB.Net. It's more verbose and easier for beginners to grasp, while still having the entire .NET framework underneath. If he grows to like the C syntax, great - he has C# to move to, and if goes to Linux, there's Mono. Maybe he'll like Python, so he could use IronPython...
I have personally went through a really strange cycle of programming language choices. Started with BASIC, moved to C, then to Pascal (and Delphi) and now I'm on VB.Net and heavy JavaScript :)
I have geek friends who went to the extremes. "Let's go to the cinema!" is regularly met with "Why? The R5 is out."
I often go to the cinema alone, because I love non-Hollywood stuff the most, and my geek friends can't stand any of that "indie shit". Met my last girlfriend while watching Fish Tank.
However, Avatar is a flashy, shiny collection of great CGI, and I'd like to see it with other people I know so that we can comment on things mentioned in the TFA over a beer and things like that. I don't want to see Fish Tank with my geek friends, and I don't want to see Avatar with my (former) girlfriend.
I haven't seen it because all of my friends have torrented the damn movie, some even watched horrible cam rips with a foreign language and no subs.
Nobody wants to go to the cinema any more.
Fuck you, torrents.
Carakan is cross-platform. That cannot be stressed enough. Since Opera is used on a *lot* of devices, from mobile phones, over fridges (!) and airplane entertainment centres, to the Wii, this is truly a major step forward for Opera.
Looking forward to the final release!
According to the first link in the article (from Facebook), the bulk of the 30000 servers is dedicated to running PHP/Apache. That seems in line with 800+ servers runing memcached, and a few thousands (4000 ?) servers?
The bulk of those 30k servers is probably also running a partitioned database, which - as you may have guessed - is also cached in memory. It's cache one way or another. Now, if they have 25k pure PHP servers, 4k pure DB servers, and 1k pure memcached servers, that's a different issue, but I don't think that would be the case...
Simply put: no.
The reason why they have so many servers is because Facebook contains so much data. The servers are there for a reason, and the reason is CACHING.
The overhead of PHP is very small for a platform that is all about sharing data and the bulk of processor time surely goes towards fetching that data in the first place. What, do you seriously think that when you hit your home page on Facebook, there are database queries issued for that? Lulz.
Besides, I'm almost sure that FB uses something like Zend Accelerator, which increases code execution speed a lot.
Anyway, just no.
Why don't you put your money where your mouth is, Mr. Smartypants, and take a couple of months to clone Yelp and find out. Better yet, take four months and make a site that is twice as good! If it's so easy, then do it. Half a billion dollars for four months of work! What are you waiting for?
If you are going to pay me during that time, I'm all for it. However, I don't see the point - the American market is taken, and this site concept definitely wouldn't work in large parts of the rest of the world. I've just asked several friends from Western Europe (ages 20-40), nobody ever heard of Yelp, nobody knows of a similar local site and nobody would care.
The point still stands: the website is shitty and could easily be made functionally better in a very short time. That doesn't mean it would attract users, the same as the iPhone is popular and objectively better phones aren't, or insert-your-own-analogy-here.
If you know how to attract American users and have the money to pay me while I work, let's make a deal and we'll strike a goldmine.
Thanks for the info.
I don't mean this in an offensive way, but - it looks like an "American" thing. Where I live, and in the several European countries I've been to, people don't go out to eat (if they do, any random fast food will do) and a bar is just a bar. I personally cannot even remember the last time I've been to a restaurant. It's cheaper and tastier to simply eat at home.
I still don't see how information on Yelp could be worth more than 1-2 million instead of 500.
500 million for a very simple website that has people reviewing restaurants and shit? Half the people on Slashdot would be able to clone that website in a couple of months (working alone!), and the user base is *not* worth half a billion (BILLION!!!).
What is this world coming to?
Or, what am I missing? Is yelp.com offering something other than people subjectively reviewing things like food?
However, YOU are aware that it's already possible to download the 3D versions of the movie Avatar from certain pirate locations?
It isn't. The only copies of Avatar are cams - there is no R5 yet, much less a 3D version. If you stumbled upon something like that, rest assured it's a fake, used as a honeypot by the MAFIAA, or contains an exe with malware.
This is a perfect example. The DRM was broken so quickly, keys were available online http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=avatar+keygen so pirates were not inconvenienced, but the legitimate customers (the theatre who was showing the movie) were unable to use the item they had purchased in a timely manner.
You are aware that "avatar+keygen" gives no meaningful results, aren't you, because it's just link spam from fishy sites? Even if it *did* give meaningful results, they would be about the *game*, not the *movie*.
I've been waiting for TB3 ever since they mentioned it will have tabs.
Unfortunately, for all of us Eudora users - TB3 isn't a replacement. Eudora allowed opening mailboxes in tabs, TB3 doesn't. Eudora saved opened "tabs" (it used MDI) and reloaded them when it was started again - TB3 doesn't.
On top of that, TB3 happily crashed while importing my Eudora emails... Which honestly puzzles me because Eudora uses a simple mbx format. How can it fail to import pure text?!
Oh well, let's wait for TB4... If I don't write my own Clonedora client in the meantime.
In what way is Rock Ridge "technically inadequate"?
Take a guess? Also, does it support Unicode?
For that matter, why not just use UDF? It's designed for all optical media, not just DVDs, and has supported Unicode for almost a decade.
UDF (consumer-level) is plagued with incompatibilities, not just on computers.
Many of the games on the alternatives list have exactly the same kind of violence. Hell, in Overlord you're taking control of a evil god like character that controls his minions to destroy and kill enemies, the good people.
Furthermore, in Overlord II you can have a foursome. I think it even gives you an achievement for it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLYBGqwT7Tg
I don't recall a single other game that allowed you to do that.
Wrong. You COULD use rock ridge -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock_Ridge . Of course microsoft prefers to come up with its own thing.
Yes, or I could use the Apple extensions, or the Amiga version of Rock Ridge, or god knows what else...
We are talking about Windows here - perhaps I haven't been clear enough.
Non-Windows systems have never required Joliet, but Windows has, because all other solutions are technically inadequate for that OS. For that very reason, Joliet is technically inadequate on MacOS and UNIX-like systems, the Apple ISO-9660 extensions are inadequate on UNIX, etc, etc.
Now, if you want to propose a unified spec that would be technically adequate for all operating systems and all file systems, then by all means, go ahead. In the meantime, Joliet is a technical necessity for Microsoft OSs.
Well, the CD-ROM standard they support is "Joliet". Which is their own extension.... I wonder how long until they are going with patents after others implementing it.
ISO-9660 doesn't support Unicode. Believe it or not, some languages use characters that aren't part of ASCII.
ISO-9660 doesn't support lower case letters, spaces and multiple dots in file/directory names.
There's nothing wrong with naming a directory "Family Photos 25.12.2009." - if Joliet didn't exist, we'd have to burn that to CD as "FAMILYPHOTOS25122009".
Functions have their place, Subroutines have their place. Global variables have their place. Static variables, Heap variables, and stack variables have their place. Even a Go To has it's place (in rare cases).
The point is to use these tools in such a way that someone else can figure out what you're doing.
Yes, that is true.
But in my case, for example, a variable named "i" (obviously for "integer") is used in a million places. The only way to figure out how something works is to run everything through a debugger, step through, and use pencil and paper to map the flow of the variables from one sub to another. Sometimes one sub will "accept" "i" and "return" "i", sometimes it will place the result in "ii". Sometimes the code will throw you a red herring because it will "return" the result but it won't be used anywhere else in the process; well, of course, the tenth sub in the chain might overwrite it so that the eleventh may use it, and god help you if you've missed the tenth sub and thought "why the fuck is the eleventh sub doing this when 'i' was 5 just a moment ago?!".
The code is usually beyond fixing. It takes more time to figure it out and refactor than to properly rewrite everything from scratch after asking the end user what a certain part of the application should be doing.
Coding practices are nice and all, but they can't get around idiots. To put it differently, a lack of unified and useful coding practices is merely a minor inconvenience, whereas a programming moron is a clusterfuck.
A person whose code I regularly inherit seems to hate functions. He just writes subs with no parameters and uses global variables to pass information to and from them. It's awesome...
There is more tryptophan in a glass of milk than a serving of turkey
Is that why the myth of "drink a glass of warm milk to help you sleep better" appeared? I have no idea.
Eventually they will introduce billing by the Gigabytes, and pipesize.
I'm on a connection with a monthly cap of 10 GB, both upload and download. It's a soft cap; you go over, you pay extra.
I have personally been using 3-4 GB per month. Once I let other family members online from their computer, the bandwidth usage less than doubled. We have never crossed the monthly bandwidth cap, not once. Unlimited traffic is... let me check... about $10 extra per month, and we don't consider it worthwhile. Sure, I could download some torrents and they could watch YouTube all day, but neither of us needs to do those things.
What I'm trying to say that metered connections and billing by the gigabyte isn't necessarily such an evil thing. There's a lot of people out there who don't need "unlimited" traffic and would be perfectly content with a lower monthly fee that would still cover their bandwidth usage (and then some).