To add to the sibling post by an AC: if the error is a DB error, I need to inform the appropriate person in the user's organization. So while I cannot rectify the DB problem on my own (maybe the DB is down?), I will log it in such a way that the DBA of the user's organization reads this error message.
If that is not possible, I will inform the user to contact his DBA, and give enough information for the DBA to be able to solve the problem.
While designing the code, the coder knew that it is a "generic abstraction". This should have given him a hint to add an exception specific to this abstraction. No implementation level exceptions make sense at this layer because there is no implementation. So, the interface declaration should have said
Now we come to the exception. This should extend the java.lang.Exception. The constructor to create this exception using another exception as the cause makes awesome sense (because implementation will have its own exception types). So create that constructor, and test it well.
Generic exceptions would make it possible but that sounds even more silly than normal Java shit.
What do you mean by "generic exceptions"? If it is java.lang.Exception, yeah it doesn't make sense. But defining a custom exception definitely makes sense. Because any caller at higher layers would need to know that this particular abstraction gave a problem. He can investigate the implementation level cause of this exception by ".getCause()" method.
But if you are saying the aforementioned GenericAbstractionException sounds silly, I think generic abstractions should also sound silly to you. So why did you create an interface MyGenericAbstraction ?
Can you describe the "common idioms" a bit more? And how do other languages solve those problems?
I have experience only in C (no "exceptions" as such) and java (the one you are pointing out problems with). I am vaguely familiar with some other languages, but I am not at first name terms with them. So I cannot identify with what you say, though it seems to be interesting.
Well, that is how the conspiracy theory runs. I knew it was not a great joke, but seeing that I am having to explain it, it seems to be an awful joke. Sorry.
What's the #1 thing that brings down the cost of manufacturing? Economies of scale
Well, that happens in free, for-profit markets. What you are advocating is a non-profit entity to fund research. Any examples of it being the #1 thing that brings down the cost of manufacturing in such non-free, non-profit ecosystems also?
Come to look at it - Why does economy of scale bring down cost of manufacturing? Scale creates profit, profit creates incentive to do better/same at same/lower prices, thus drives corporate R&D. Why should government take this long, wasteful and circuitous route to reduce cost of manufacturing when they could invest directly in R&D? Why manufacture thousands of square kilometres of solar panels, only to replace them with 20% more efficient ones after 3 years?
Government already has institutions that specialize in R&D. Public universities / government owned research organizations. Just fund research on design, manufacturing process, deployment, large scale effects, etc. for solar PV panels / solar thermal / whatever "clean" energy production technologies they can think of. Such institutions are already working reasonably well. Setting up new institutions needs a lot of effort that is not required in this case.
Take home message: Think about why economy of scale reduces cost of manufacturing.
Remember the basic definitions of the quantities, which is that power is proportional to voltage^2, so it is mathematically impossible for them to change together by the same ratio.
Absolutely false.
I have a 1.3 volt battery that weighs 20 grams, and a 1.5 volt battery also weighing 20 grams. I tie them both to identical string, and rotate them with my hand. The power I am expending on rotating them with my hand with the same angular velocity is NOT in the ratio of their voltages, nor square of the voltages. The power is very nearly the same even though optimal potential difference between the ends of the batteries has a big difference - almost 13-15 percent.
Frankly, I have never seen a worse reply to a confessedly pedantic slashdot post. Hope I never will. If there was one thing slashdot posts were good at, it was pedantry. With the advent of maxfresh, that one thing seems to be lost.
The '+' and '-' symbols on batteries makes children ask about what they are.
This is where USPTO comes to the defence of civilization. Some electronics manufacturers will not be able to afford a license on this Microsoft Patent. So their battery would need to be placed in the correct orientation. So children would ask - "Why do batteries need to be placed this way in this device but works any which way in the other device?"
Such a question would not only enable you to teach electrical engineering to the said children, but you could also go on a long and cathartic rant about patents and how the country is going to the dogs.
Time difference between the post and clarifying post was only one minute. So it is entirely possible that the moderators saw the clarification and modded the original post funny. Otherwise it would be marking the clarifying post funny, which had other punch lines too - example slashdot being stupid, people not using preview, etc.
1) The scenario was that the OP would continue to only buy from the iTunes App Store.
I don't see any such necessity.
2) Having competing app stores would reduce the number of apps available at the iTunes App Store, as some small percentage of developers would chose to only sell from some other store.
Citation needed. Though the apps that got rejected from Apple's app store will very likely be available from the alternate app stores.
3) Ergo, the OP would have LESS apps to chose from, not more.
Obviously if someone chooses to install only apps whose name's MD5 sum is b2b75221f6d2344125e6f5aea35ca79b, obviously he would have LESS apps to choose from. I can't be expected to consider such stupid use cases, can I? As expected, you ignored the example I gave of whole classes of applications that would be available under the alternate app stores. And you want to concentrate on the meaningless metric of number of apps to choose from.
I feel sorry for you that you are too stupid to work this out for yourself. Even having had it explained to you previously.
You deserve the aforementioned sorrow more than me.
So in this analogy, you make 50g of bread the analog for 225,000 apps available for the app store.
No. It just shows how idiotic it is to mention 100% (of an arbitrarily smaller set) as a better thing than less than 100% (of an arbitrarily larger set).
The blandest foodstuff, in a starvation quantity, the suggested analog for the rich variety of amazing apps available in the app store
No. Just the fact that nothing is stopping you from consuming 50 grams of bread even when you are not imprisoned. Similarly, nothing is stopping you from getting these "rich variety of amazing apps" even when app store is not the only store for apps. Highlights the idiocy of the 100% argument a bit more.
Your (100% of smaller set) is a subset of (less than 100% of a larger set). Yet you tout the percentage : 100 > less than 100. That really got me to admire you a lot.
numerically less apps
Absolutely irrelevant. In this context, a greater variety of apps is a meaningful metric.
Just for example - Android 2.0 did not support bluetooth file transfer. But apps were available to make it possible. Iphone 3 did not support multi-tasking / copy-paste. Were apps available to make it possible?
If I imprison you and give you 50 grams of bread a day - you would be happy that you can eat 100% of all the food in your enclosure. Instead, if you were at home - there would be pests like family, friends etc. who would eat a non-zero percentage of your food (assuming there is a non-zero number of family and friends). You would totally ignore the fact that there would be much more than 50 grams of food available if I had not imprisoned you in the first place. Even when free, you can eat 50 grams of bread whenever you want. But this 50 grams is a tiny percentage of your total food availability. Would you worry about being able to eat only a tiny percentage of total food in the enclosure, or being able to eat hundreds of grams of various kinds of food a day?
How is 100% a good thing if it is 100% of a restricted choice? That 100% is less than 50% of a larger choice?
It would require re-rendering the video in real time with post-processing effects.
No. Real-time re-rendering is not necessarily required. In the priority of popularity, videos can be processed offline. At least one processing can be done immediately after upload. For this first processing - client's computing resources can be used via AJAX. Maybe one video always comes with same ads, maybe it has fixed set of a few different ads.
With some effort, it could even be pluggable - processing to decide the bits to pick is done offline. Actual bits are picked at runtime. This might affect the efficacy of video compression - but maybe worth it.
given the scale of the YouTube service
It makes it easier actually - because anyone can upload a video. A vast Majority of uploads are shit. An extreme form of 80-20 rule applies to youtube videos, something like : 0.1% of videos generate 99.9% of traffic. You just have to concentrate on the 0.1 % of videos.
How? Video was playing in 480x640. Google edits the video to another video of 480x640 where the top 320x640 is playing the (vertically shrunk) video. But the bottom 120x640 video is a video advertisement from Google.
How would HTML5, in all its wisdom, figure out that the bottom half is now an advertisement and not the video WillyWanker wants to wank off with?
For an individual, death penalty by some criteria is the worst punishment possible. Self is the only thing that one is sure of the existence of. Evidence of "life"-after-death is not strong enough. So death penalty is loss of everything.
For a corporate - the decisions were taken by executives (shareholders are guilty of allowing them, of course). The executives will get fat paycheques at other companies. Screwing up one company doesn't seem to be much of a blot on their resumes, if you observe the careers of heads of failed companies. Shareholders take a bit of loss - but not enough to call it the equivalent of death penalty for individuals.
For your points, anyone is free to fork the source code of firefox and add whatever features they want to add. One could even try to convince an existing fork to do what they want. So no freedom is actually being taken away by firefox at least.
Why not put the better battery in an existing car which is already designed, certified and being manufactured on a mass scale? Part of it being a "better" battery is that it can be put into existing cars (with maybe some different circuitry).
Look at the bright side. This submitter had the good sense to consolidate 4 stories into one. Otherwise you would have had to make this protest at 4 different Slashdot stories.
Slashdot Mirror
To add to the sibling post by an AC: if the error is a DB error, I need to inform the appropriate person in the user's organization. So while I cannot rectify the DB problem on my own (maybe the DB is down?), I will log it in such a way that the DBA of the user's organization reads this error message.
If that is not possible, I will inform the user to contact his DBA, and give enough information for the DBA to be able to solve the problem.
Coder mistake.
While designing the code, the coder knew that it is a "generic abstraction". This should have given him a hint to add an exception specific to this abstraction. No implementation level exceptions make sense at this layer because there is no implementation. So, the interface declaration should have said
MyGenericAbstraction { void apply(int parameter) throws GenericAbstractionException; }
Now we come to the exception. This should extend the java.lang.Exception. The constructor to create this exception using another exception as the cause makes awesome sense (because implementation will have its own exception types). So create that constructor, and test it well.
Now the implementer just needs to do
try {
MyGenericAlgorithm.invoke(sqlExceptionThrowingThingy.getMyAbstraction());
} catch (SQLException e) { throw new GenericAbstractionException(e); }
Generic exceptions would make it possible but that sounds even more silly than normal Java shit.
What do you mean by "generic exceptions"? If it is java.lang.Exception, yeah it doesn't make sense. But defining a custom exception definitely makes sense. Because any caller at higher layers would need to know that this particular abstraction gave a problem. He can investigate the implementation level cause of this exception by ".getCause()" method.
But if you are saying the aforementioned GenericAbstractionException sounds silly, I think generic abstractions should also sound silly to you. So why did you create an interface MyGenericAbstraction ?
Can you describe the "common idioms" a bit more? And how do other languages solve those problems?
I have experience only in C (no "exceptions" as such) and java (the one you are pointing out problems with). I am vaguely familiar with some other languages, but I am not at first name terms with them. So I cannot identify with what you say, though it seems to be interesting.
Well, that is how the conspiracy theory runs. I knew it was not a great joke, but seeing that I am having to explain it, it seems to be an awful joke. Sorry.
What's the #1 thing that brings down the cost of manufacturing? Economies of scale
Well, that happens in free, for-profit markets. What you are advocating is a non-profit entity to fund research. Any examples of it being the #1 thing that brings down the cost of manufacturing in such non-free, non-profit ecosystems also?
Come to look at it - Why does economy of scale bring down cost of manufacturing? Scale creates profit, profit creates incentive to do better/same at same/lower prices, thus drives corporate R&D. Why should government take this long, wasteful and circuitous route to reduce cost of manufacturing when they could invest directly in R&D? Why manufacture thousands of square kilometres of solar panels, only to replace them with 20% more efficient ones after 3 years?
Government already has institutions that specialize in R&D. Public universities / government owned research organizations. Just fund research on design, manufacturing process, deployment, large scale effects, etc. for solar PV panels / solar thermal / whatever "clean" energy production technologies they can think of. Such institutions are already working reasonably well. Setting up new institutions needs a lot of effort that is not required in this case.
Take home message: Think about why economy of scale reduces cost of manufacturing.
no threats of war over who gets access to solar power
I live in England, you insensitive clod!
Remember that whole Gizmodo thing? Apple knew that's what would happen.
Yeah, obviously. "The best way to predict the future is to invent it." -- Alan Kay
Remember the basic definitions of the quantities, which is that power is proportional to voltage^2, so it is mathematically impossible for them to change together by the same ratio.
Absolutely false.
I have a 1.3 volt battery that weighs 20 grams, and a 1.5 volt battery also weighing 20 grams. I tie them both to identical string, and rotate them with my hand. The power I am expending on rotating them with my hand with the same angular velocity is NOT in the ratio of their voltages, nor square of the voltages. The power is very nearly the same even though optimal potential difference between the ends of the batteries has a big difference - almost 13-15 percent.
Frankly, I have never seen a worse reply to a confessedly pedantic slashdot post. Hope I never will. If there was one thing slashdot posts were good at, it was pedantry. With the advent of maxfresh, that one thing seems to be lost.
With firefox 3.x, you don't need an extension for this.
Preferences -> Advanced -> General -> "Warn me when websites try to redirect or reload the page".
And that is just for boolean options. For options of more complex data types, it is much worse.
This works with FireGestures too.
The '+' and '-' symbols on batteries makes children ask about what they are.
This is where USPTO comes to the defence of civilization. Some electronics manufacturers will not be able to afford a license on this Microsoft Patent. So their battery would need to be placed in the correct orientation. So children would ask - "Why do batteries need to be placed this way in this device but works any which way in the other device?"
Such a question would not only enable you to teach electrical engineering to the said children, but you could also go on a long and cathartic rant about patents and how the country is going to the dogs.
Time difference between the post and clarifying post was only one minute. So it is entirely possible that the moderators saw the clarification and modded the original post funny. Otherwise it would be marking the clarifying post funny, which had other punch lines too - example slashdot being stupid, people not using preview, etc.
1) The scenario was that the OP would continue to only buy from the iTunes App Store.
I don't see any such necessity.
2) Having competing app stores would reduce the number of apps available at the iTunes App Store, as some small percentage of developers would chose to only sell from some other store.
Citation needed. Though the apps that got rejected from Apple's app store will very likely be available from the alternate app stores.
3) Ergo, the OP would have LESS apps to chose from, not more.
Obviously if someone chooses to install only apps whose name's MD5 sum is b2b75221f6d2344125e6f5aea35ca79b, obviously he would have LESS apps to choose from. I can't be expected to consider such stupid use cases, can I? As expected, you ignored the example I gave of whole classes of applications that would be available under the alternate app stores. And you want to concentrate on the meaningless metric of number of apps to choose from.
I feel sorry for you that you are too stupid to work this out for yourself. Even having had it explained to you previously.
You deserve the aforementioned sorrow more than me.
So in this analogy, you make 50g of bread the analog for 225,000 apps available for the app store.
No. It just shows how idiotic it is to mention 100% (of an arbitrarily smaller set) as a better thing than less than 100% (of an arbitrarily larger set).
The blandest foodstuff, in a starvation quantity, the suggested analog for the rich variety of amazing apps available in the app store
No. Just the fact that nothing is stopping you from consuming 50 grams of bread even when you are not imprisoned. Similarly, nothing is stopping you from getting these "rich variety of amazing apps" even when app store is not the only store for apps. Highlights the idiocy of the 100% argument a bit more.
Your (100% of smaller set) is a subset of (less than 100% of a larger set). Yet you tout the percentage : 100 > less than 100. That really got me to admire you a lot.
numerically less apps
Absolutely irrelevant. In this context, a greater variety of apps is a meaningful metric.
Just for example -
Android 2.0 did not support bluetooth file transfer. But apps were available to make it possible.
Iphone 3 did not support multi-tasking / copy-paste. Were apps available to make it possible?
GP:
Plus when the Nexus One came out its display actually was 2x higher res than the top of the line iPhone 3GS.
You :
they are always following
When someone points out that they are not following, you ignore that part of the post. Interesting.
Wow!
If I imprison you and give you 50 grams of bread a day - you would be happy that you can eat 100% of all the food in your enclosure. Instead, if you were at home - there would be pests like family, friends etc. who would eat a non-zero percentage of your food (assuming there is a non-zero number of family and friends). You would totally ignore the fact that there would be much more than 50 grams of food available if I had not imprisoned you in the first place. Even when free, you can eat 50 grams of bread whenever you want. But this 50 grams is a tiny percentage of your total food availability. Would you worry about being able to eat only a tiny percentage of total food in the enclosure, or being able to eat hundreds of grams of various kinds of food a day?
How is 100% a good thing if it is 100% of a restricted choice? That 100% is less than 50% of a larger choice?
It would require re-rendering the video in real time with post-processing effects.
No. Real-time re-rendering is not necessarily required. In the priority of popularity, videos can be processed offline. At least one processing can be done immediately after upload. For this first processing - client's computing resources can be used via AJAX. Maybe one video always comes with same ads, maybe it has fixed set of a few different ads.
With some effort, it could even be pluggable - processing to decide the bits to pick is done offline. Actual bits are picked at runtime. This might affect the efficacy of video compression - but maybe worth it.
given the scale of the YouTube service
It makes it easier actually - because anyone can upload a video. A vast Majority of uploads are shit. An extreme form of 80-20 rule applies to youtube videos, something like : 0.1% of videos generate 99.9% of traffic. You just have to concentrate on the 0.1 % of videos.
Because HTML5 won't allow that either
How? Video was playing in 480x640. Google edits the video to another video of 480x640 where the top 320x640 is playing the (vertically shrunk) video. But the bottom 120x640 video is a video advertisement from Google.
How would HTML5, in all its wisdom, figure out that the bottom half is now an advertisement and not the video WillyWanker wants to wank off with?
How is it a "penalty" ?
For an individual, death penalty by some criteria is the worst punishment possible. Self is the only thing that one is sure of the existence of. Evidence of "life"-after-death is not strong enough. So death penalty is loss of everything.
For a corporate - the decisions were taken by executives (shareholders are guilty of allowing them, of course). The executives will get fat paycheques at other companies. Screwing up one company doesn't seem to be much of a blot on their resumes, if you observe the careers of heads of failed companies. Shareholders take a bit of loss - but not enough to call it the equivalent of death penalty for individuals.
Face it - you cannot jail / kill a company.
For your points, anyone is free to fork the source code of firefox and add whatever features they want to add. One could even try to convince an existing fork to do what they want. So no freedom is actually being taken away by firefox at least.
Why not put the better battery in an existing car which is already designed, certified and being manufactured on a mass scale? Part of it being a "better" battery is that it can be put into existing cars (with maybe some different circuitry).
No, even Astro doesn't need root access to install an apk file.
Dear dangit "Murphy was an optimist" man,
Look at the bright side. This submitter had the good sense to consolidate 4 stories into one. Otherwise you would have had to make this protest at 4 different Slashdot stories.
And the computer you get will be fast and secure
Yeah, because Apple were by far the last to patch the serious Kaminsky DNS vulnerability.