I tend to document my algorithms in the code. Even if the code is fairly straight forward, the comments explain what the code is *supposed* to do which simplifies the process of development and debugging. I tend to briefly describe the purpose of functions and document their inputs and outputs. It saves a lot of time when I revisit old code or share my code. It takes a lot of effort to fully comment the code and I think programmers who don't do it are just lazy.
I've downloaded a ton of open source software in the hops of helping to debug or enhance it. Virtually without fail, every project I have ever seen is completely without documentation or helpful comments. It's as if somebody wrote a script to strip the comments out of every piece of code checked into the repository. I find that extremely frustrating. Even if the code is obvious and as simple as can be, there are still dozens of files to examine and commit to memory. "Was that the print function in m_system1.c or a_systemb.c ? Who the fuck named these files? "
A person's code is sort of like the county's 10 volume book of codes and regulations, or the legalese on the bottom of a contract, or my health insurance provider's explanation of my benefits. Sure the words and sentences are clear enough to the person who wrote them, but the rest of us need judges, lawyers, and agents to give us the Cliff's Notes version.
Code needs comments. I do believe that the effort that goes into commenting (or lack there of) is a reflection of the programmer's professionalism. And in the case of FOSS, I think it would be a lot easier for the public to contribute and for the project to change hands if the original programmers could swallow their elitist pride or crawl out of their own heads for a second and actually write some comments at all.
I hope you're being facetious. It's retarded beliefs like this that are at the heart of the public speaking debacle. Powerpoint has caused an unfortunate paradigm shift int he way people give presentations. Correct use of powerpoint is not a paradigm shift. You still need your note cards and to have a topic to speak about.
Bullshit. The original slide medium were, uh, SLIDES. Maybe you're too young to even know what a slide projector is, but I guarantee you that nobody worth their salt was taking photographs of bullet points and developing them into slides.
Your outline goes on these little things we call note cards, or that even smaller thing called your brain. Slides are for graphics, charts, diagrams, tables, etc. Text essentially doesn't belong on the overhead or the slide. If people are reading your lists then they aren't listening to you. If you're using an entire wall of a conference room to replace your note cards then you're a fucking idiot.
? That's 68 feet per second which is 46.3 mph. I hope you're not planning to send any probes to Mars or meter out dosages of medicine any time soon....
You're all fools -- DNA is an interpreted language. There's no compiler and therefore no compile-time errors.
Genetic syntax errors manifest at runtime.
Cystic fibrosis: Runtime Error 203
Down syndrome: Runtime Error 216
Duchenne muscular dystrophy: Runtime Error 223
We're coded in BASIC.
I've been wondering for a long time why eBay even bought skype. There is no relationship whatsoever and it doesn't come as a surprise to me that they're recently looking to dump it. They paid an outrageous sum, didn't get full rights, and failed to leverage that technology in any way useful to the company. Bizarre move..
If you think you go to school to learn how to program/gain experience programming, then it's time for you to switch majors.
Broad exposure to several languages is the better system, IMO. It's then all on you to take it home and gain the experience by practicing and also by studying other people's better code.
I initially thought the same thing, but perhaps they need variable descent rates and perhaps the first set or two of chutes is more likely to get tangled, ripped, or burned. We also don't know if the failure of one system prevents all the subsequent systems from operating or not. It may be more reliable than it first appears.
Hacked up HTML as our universal word processing format?
That has to be the most naive -- no, the dumbest fucking idea I have ever heard in my entire life.
For a full explanation of why, take 50 cents and go buy an education. It should be obvious to anybody that HTML was a complete failure in interoperability and it is one of the clumsiest protocols to try and use when it comes to content presentation. As others have already pointed out repeatedly, there already exist better mousetraps for this problem anyway.
I don't think people are arguing for a mass exodus of planet Earth. What's wrong with wanting to terraform another planet or have a permanently manned moonbase for the sake of thrill and science? I think getting a handful of us off this rock is a noble and realistic goal. You'd be a fool to want to leave Earth, though. She's a good planet.
I think your argument is weak anyway. It speaks more to your pessimism and lack of vision than anything else. Sailing the open ocean? Nonsense. Absurd fantasy.
Flying in sky-planes? If God wanted us to fly, he'd have given us wings. Flying is for birds. What practical use is there to a flying machine, anyway?
Travel to the moon? A pointless ambition. Not only will it never happen, but so-what once you get there! The only thing more dumb and more improbable would be sending probes beyond the reaches of our solar system or driving remote-control cars around on Mars! hahahahahha What fool would sink money into a lame thing like that. Remote control cars on MARS. PFFFFT!!!!! NEVER. HAPPEN.
Is that about how it goes? If it's impossible to imagine today, then it certainly won't be done tomorrow?
Of course everybody knows we would have cured cancer, AIDS, famine, social inequality, ignorance, AND obtained world-peace by now if we hadn't allocated all our funds for those projects to stupid things like "space telescopes" and "satellites." Yup, it's just money that's been holding us back. Nothing like money to fix every problem in the world and sadly it's all being allocated to science and research which will apparently only benefit the successor species to Homo Sapiens... sigh
------snip-------
And that's pretty much what I think about what you just said.
So my take was that he's a total choad. He's blaming the chip makers for his software's poor performance and his company's inability to design a scalable architecture?
If he is so damn sure of what he wants, then why isn't he putting it together himself? He blames the server manufacturers for failing to provide both super fast and ultra low-power machines. He spec'd the whole thing out of Unobtanium and then complained that *surprise* nobody can deliver it.
Maybe his app is I/O or memory bound, and a 35% increase in CPU performance isn't going to do shit. Maybe he should have purchased a couple new CPUs and tested them before committing to a large purchase and then pointing his finger at the marketing reps.
He says servers have to be powerful, power efficient, and cheap. Then he says his advice is "don't be cheap." What a choad-farmer. I'll bet he bitches that his wife isn't Smart, Beautiful, AND Sane. He doesn't seem to get the concept of "You have three options: pick two."
That's my two cents--keep the change.
That's if/elseif structure and "break" are for. You can accomplish the same thing in just about every widely used language without using a GOTO.
The fact that you see the world as either an ever-deepening forest of nested conditionals or vertical stream of logic punctuated by a bunch of magic "get me the fuck out of here" GOTO statements is a testament to your own limitations and lack of creativity. Well-placed breaks and returns combined with a more logical conditional structure are going to do more for you than escape-pipe GOTOs.
Wait, this has been general knowledge for decades... What the hell?
Am I really so old that I'm seeing the body of human knowledge being rediscovered again by an entirely new generation of n00bs?
Sleep deprivation studies and experiments were carried out AGES ago, people.
This is nice for some educational value, but it's not news. I've designed far more sophisticated systems that didn't have cookbook solutions and then brought them to fruition. Haven't we all? You won't see my personal projects on slashdot, no matter how cool they are, because they simply aren't news.
Not like you'll listen to anybody anyway, but:
Are you trying to solve math problems or draw pretty pictures? What's your beef with the display on graphing calculators? How many REAL problems actually even require a graphical display? Do you know how many DAMN FINE engineers made it through life with nothing but a SLIDE RULE? (There's no graphic display on a slide rule, BTW.)
If you're just going to solve some baby algebra problems and you really think you're going to graph functions on your calculator during tests, then do yourself a favor and get a TI-whatever. You'll be really proud of your purchase.
On the other hand, if you're going to solve linear algebra, differential equation, symbolic integral, and vector/complex number/phasor problems: YOU SHOULD BUY THE HP48. There is no calculator better for real physics and engineering problems.
By the way, I went through differential calculus, integral calculus, multivariable calculus, differential equations, linear algebra, physics 1 (basic mechanics), physics 2 (thermo, baby-quantum, optics), physics 3 (electricity and magnetism), Chem 1. Chem 2, circuits 1, circuits 2, engineering problem solving, statics (that's physics and NOT statistics you unenlightened tard), relativity and quantum mechanics, industrial manufacturing and engineering, semiconductor devices, and a variety of other classes that use math WITHOUT EVER USING OR NEEDING THE GRAPH ON MY CALCULATOR.
In other words, the graphic display on these devices amounts to nothing more than "bling" factor and is really not useful for serious work. On those rare occasions where it would be cool to plot a function and look at it for some quick estimations, who the fuck cares if it's only monochrome or if it's slightly pixelated?! Go use a computer for that. By the time you're done dicking around with the display window on your graphing calculator during a test or quiz, your time is up anyway.
Sheesh.
If I seem like I have a bad attitude, it's because I know nobody is going to read nor adhere to my sage advice. I'm pre-bitter about it.
I don't know what kind of EE you are, but HELLO you're implying that other caps don't phase shift AC signals.
Remember all caps and inductors have a complex component because they store energy. You're gonna get a phase shift as a result of capacitance regardless of the construction of the capacitor.
Sure electrolytics suck, but phase shift isn't one of the reasons... Come on.
Apparently a lot of readers don't understand what induction is, and that this power pad works off that principle.
Power isn't routed to a device on top of the pad like many people seem to think. There's no electrical contact between the power source and the device on top of the pad.
The device in need of power will have a coil of wire. The power pad will detect where on the pad the device is and then create a virtual coil of wire underneath the device. The two coils of wire do not touch, but they are near enough each other that they create and air-core transformer. In other words, AC current traveling in the pad's coil will electro-magnetically INDUCE an AC current in the device's coil.
This is really, really old science. The problem is that in order to transfer a significant amount of power efficiently, the two coils have to be closely coupled to one another. This means that the power pad's coil has to have a small cross-section and be located directly under the device to be powered.
By detecting where the device is with, say, a pressure sensor, and then using semiconductors to dynamically route a current in a virtual coil directly underneath the device, this power pad allows for the device to be placed haphazardly in virtually any location on top of the pad.
This is the same principle that Sonicare toothbrushes use to charge, but imagine now being able to put the toothbrush anywhere on the counter to charge instead of inside a dedicated charging station.
Slashdot Mirror
I tend to document my algorithms in the code. Even if the code is fairly straight forward, the comments explain what the code is *supposed* to do which simplifies the process of development and debugging. I tend to briefly describe the purpose of functions and document their inputs and outputs. It saves a lot of time when I revisit old code or share my code. It takes a lot of effort to fully comment the code and I think programmers who don't do it are just lazy. I've downloaded a ton of open source software in the hops of helping to debug or enhance it. Virtually without fail, every project I have ever seen is completely without documentation or helpful comments. It's as if somebody wrote a script to strip the comments out of every piece of code checked into the repository. I find that extremely frustrating. Even if the code is obvious and as simple as can be, there are still dozens of files to examine and commit to memory. "Was that the print function in m_system1.c or a_systemb.c ? Who the fuck named these files? " A person's code is sort of like the county's 10 volume book of codes and regulations, or the legalese on the bottom of a contract, or my health insurance provider's explanation of my benefits. Sure the words and sentences are clear enough to the person who wrote them, but the rest of us need judges, lawyers, and agents to give us the Cliff's Notes version. Code needs comments. I do believe that the effort that goes into commenting (or lack there of) is a reflection of the programmer's professionalism. And in the case of FOSS, I think it would be a lot easier for the public to contribute and for the project to change hands if the original programmers could swallow their elitist pride or crawl out of their own heads for a second and actually write some comments at all.
I hope you're being facetious. It's retarded beliefs like this that are at the heart of the public speaking debacle. Powerpoint has caused an unfortunate paradigm shift int he way people give presentations. Correct use of powerpoint is not a paradigm shift. You still need your note cards and to have a topic to speak about.
Bullshit. The original slide medium were, uh, SLIDES. Maybe you're too young to even know what a slide projector is, but I guarantee you that nobody worth their salt was taking photographs of bullet points and developing them into slides. Your outline goes on these little things we call note cards, or that even smaller thing called your brain. Slides are for graphics, charts, diagrams, tables, etc. Text essentially doesn't belong on the overhead or the slide. If people are reading your lists then they aren't listening to you. If you're using an entire wall of a conference room to replace your note cards then you're a fucking idiot.
? That's 68 feet per second which is 46.3 mph. I hope you're not planning to send any probes to Mars or meter out dosages of medicine any time soon....
You're all fools -- DNA is an interpreted language. There's no compiler and therefore no compile-time errors. Genetic syntax errors manifest at runtime. Cystic fibrosis: Runtime Error 203 Down syndrome: Runtime Error 216 Duchenne muscular dystrophy: Runtime Error 223 We're coded in BASIC.
I've been wondering for a long time why eBay even bought skype. There is no relationship whatsoever and it doesn't come as a surprise to me that they're recently looking to dump it. They paid an outrageous sum, didn't get full rights, and failed to leverage that technology in any way useful to the company. Bizarre move..
If you think you go to school to learn how to program/gain experience programming, then it's time for you to switch majors. Broad exposure to several languages is the better system, IMO. It's then all on you to take it home and gain the experience by practicing and also by studying other people's better code.
I initially thought the same thing, but perhaps they need variable descent rates and perhaps the first set or two of chutes is more likely to get tangled, ripped, or burned. We also don't know if the failure of one system prevents all the subsequent systems from operating or not. It may be more reliable than it first appears.
Hacked up HTML as our universal word processing format? That has to be the most naive -- no, the dumbest fucking idea I have ever heard in my entire life. For a full explanation of why, take 50 cents and go buy an education. It should be obvious to anybody that HTML was a complete failure in interoperability and it is one of the clumsiest protocols to try and use when it comes to content presentation. As others have already pointed out repeatedly, there already exist better mousetraps for this problem anyway.
I don't think people are arguing for a mass exodus of planet Earth. What's wrong with wanting to terraform another planet or have a permanently manned moonbase for the sake of thrill and science? I think getting a handful of us off this rock is a noble and realistic goal. You'd be a fool to want to leave Earth, though. She's a good planet.
I think your argument is weak anyway. It speaks more to your pessimism and lack of vision than anything else. Sailing the open ocean? Nonsense. Absurd fantasy. Flying in sky-planes? If God wanted us to fly, he'd have given us wings. Flying is for birds. What practical use is there to a flying machine, anyway?
Travel to the moon? A pointless ambition. Not only will it never happen, but so-what once you get there! The only thing more dumb and more improbable would be sending probes beyond the reaches of our solar system or driving remote-control cars around on Mars! hahahahahha What fool would sink money into a lame thing like that. Remote control cars on MARS. PFFFFT!!!!! NEVER. HAPPEN.
Is that about how it goes? If it's impossible to imagine today, then it certainly won't be done tomorrow?
Of course everybody knows we would have cured cancer, AIDS, famine, social inequality, ignorance, AND obtained world-peace by now if we hadn't allocated all our funds for those projects to stupid things like "space telescopes" and "satellites." Yup, it's just money that's been holding us back. Nothing like money to fix every problem in the world and sadly it's all being allocated to science and research which will apparently only benefit the successor species to Homo Sapiens... sigh
------snip-------
And that's pretty much what I think about what you just said.
So my take was that he's a total choad. He's blaming the chip makers for his software's poor performance and his company's inability to design a scalable architecture? If he is so damn sure of what he wants, then why isn't he putting it together himself? He blames the server manufacturers for failing to provide both super fast and ultra low-power machines. He spec'd the whole thing out of Unobtanium and then complained that *surprise* nobody can deliver it. Maybe his app is I/O or memory bound, and a 35% increase in CPU performance isn't going to do shit. Maybe he should have purchased a couple new CPUs and tested them before committing to a large purchase and then pointing his finger at the marketing reps. He says servers have to be powerful, power efficient, and cheap. Then he says his advice is "don't be cheap." What a choad-farmer. I'll bet he bitches that his wife isn't Smart, Beautiful, AND Sane. He doesn't seem to get the concept of "You have three options: pick two." That's my two cents--keep the change.
Modern extensions of BASIC *are* good languages. Don't know what hole you crawled out of but don't confuse a compiled BASIC with sluggish Java.
That's if/elseif structure and "break" are for. You can accomplish the same thing in just about every widely used language without using a GOTO. The fact that you see the world as either an ever-deepening forest of nested conditionals or vertical stream of logic punctuated by a bunch of magic "get me the fuck out of here" GOTO statements is a testament to your own limitations and lack of creativity. Well-placed breaks and returns combined with a more logical conditional structure are going to do more for you than escape-pipe GOTOs.
Wait, this has been general knowledge for decades... What the hell? Am I really so old that I'm seeing the body of human knowledge being rediscovered again by an entirely new generation of n00bs? Sleep deprivation studies and experiments were carried out AGES ago, people.
This is nice for some educational value, but it's not news. I've designed far more sophisticated systems that didn't have cookbook solutions and then brought them to fruition. Haven't we all? You won't see my personal projects on slashdot, no matter how cool they are, because they simply aren't news.
Not like you'll listen to anybody anyway, but:
Are you trying to solve math problems or draw pretty pictures? What's your beef with the display on graphing calculators? How many REAL problems actually even require a graphical display? Do you know how many DAMN FINE engineers made it through life with nothing but a SLIDE RULE? (There's no graphic display on a slide rule, BTW.)
If you're just going to solve some baby algebra problems and you really think you're going to graph functions on your calculator during tests, then do yourself a favor and get a TI-whatever. You'll be really proud of your purchase.
On the other hand, if you're going to solve linear algebra, differential equation, symbolic integral, and vector/complex number/phasor problems: YOU SHOULD BUY THE HP48. There is no calculator better for real physics and engineering problems.
By the way, I went through differential calculus, integral calculus, multivariable calculus, differential equations, linear algebra, physics 1 (basic mechanics), physics 2 (thermo, baby-quantum, optics), physics 3 (electricity and magnetism), Chem 1. Chem 2, circuits 1, circuits 2, engineering problem solving, statics (that's physics and NOT statistics you unenlightened tard), relativity and quantum mechanics, industrial manufacturing and engineering, semiconductor devices, and a variety of other classes that use math WITHOUT EVER USING OR NEEDING THE GRAPH ON MY CALCULATOR.
In other words, the graphic display on these devices amounts to nothing more than "bling" factor and is really not useful for serious work. On those rare occasions where it would be cool to plot a function and look at it for some quick estimations, who the fuck cares if it's only monochrome or if it's slightly pixelated?! Go use a computer for that. By the time you're done dicking around with the display window on your graphing calculator during a test or quiz, your time is up anyway.
Sheesh.
If I seem like I have a bad attitude, it's because I know nobody is going to read nor adhere to my sage advice. I'm pre-bitter about it.
I don't know what kind of EE you are, but HELLO you're implying that other caps don't phase shift AC signals. Remember all caps and inductors have a complex component because they store energy. You're gonna get a phase shift as a result of capacitance regardless of the construction of the capacitor. Sure electrolytics suck, but phase shift isn't one of the reasons... Come on.
Apparently a lot of readers don't understand what induction is, and that this power pad works off that principle. Power isn't routed to a device on top of the pad like many people seem to think. There's no electrical contact between the power source and the device on top of the pad. The device in need of power will have a coil of wire. The power pad will detect where on the pad the device is and then create a virtual coil of wire underneath the device. The two coils of wire do not touch, but they are near enough each other that they create and air-core transformer. In other words, AC current traveling in the pad's coil will electro-magnetically INDUCE an AC current in the device's coil. This is really, really old science. The problem is that in order to transfer a significant amount of power efficiently, the two coils have to be closely coupled to one another. This means that the power pad's coil has to have a small cross-section and be located directly under the device to be powered. By detecting where the device is with, say, a pressure sensor, and then using semiconductors to dynamically route a current in a virtual coil directly underneath the device, this power pad allows for the device to be placed haphazardly in virtually any location on top of the pad. This is the same principle that Sonicare toothbrushes use to charge, but imagine now being able to put the toothbrush anywhere on the counter to charge instead of inside a dedicated charging station.