You know, every time someone tells me I "don't need" to know or investigate something in that sort of condescending manner, it just serves to convince me that I do indeed need to know it.
If 10 minutes cross-checking a diagnosis is enough to confirm or discredit it (within some reasonable level of confidence) then I'm much better off doing that than waiting for the chance that some review at some point in the future will catch the screwup after the harm is done.
Ayep. I can't find the link right now but there was a news article a while ago about a bunch of doctors complaining about people researching their own symptoms online.
Admittedly, it's bad when some looney googles a list of every single illness that initially presents with "headache, fever, sore throat" and insists they have meningitis or chlorine poisoning when they obviously just have a cold. There's also the flip side, though, that if a doctor isn't very good, they're going to be easy to catch out with some basic cross checking of their diagnosis. A lot of doctors seem to have this idea that just because they studied medical science instead of some other kind of science, that they're beyond question and somehow better than non-medical specialists. They hate getting caught out.
Define "missile"? Most homing missiles (still, afaik) aim at heat signatures. Sent by humans or not, meteors that land on human habitations are missiles. (Missile: n. An object that is forcibly propelled at a target, by hand or mechanically.) I think "by physics" counts as "forcibly propelled".
No, the body doesn't NEED calories. It WANTS them because we've evolved to fatten up when food is plentiful so that we don't starve when food is scarce. The nasty side effect is that when food is always plentiful, and we don't have the discipline to consciously manage our energy intake to sustain a healthy weight, then we blimp up.
Agreed, though, that people are still going to feel hungry after eating an entire McDonalds and then barfing it up again.
Yeah, what you describe is about the level that I'd consider appropriate. Also you make a good point about the type of comments: They should be high level semantic information, not a low level description of the code itself. So where a newbie would say "loop through all of the X and add each one to the sumX variable", a more experienced coder would write "get the total number of X" or similar.
Agreed. The issue here sounds more like "graduate is shocked to find that real world code isn't written according to what his lecturers told him was best practice" than "graduate points out real flaws in commercial code."
Code style changes as you get more experience anyway... Well meaning newbies document the crap out of eeeeverything, for instance, and use stupidly long (but descriptive) filenames. With experience, hopefully they learn to only document interfaces and non-obvious code rather than every for-loop and if-statement, and use pithy (but still descriptive) names.
As originally envisaged, a netbook was a portable computer with a small laptop form factor which was optimised for ruggedness and lowest cost rather than performance. It was a cheap internet appliance designed to literally be thrown across the room to whoever at your house party wanted internet access right now. They started out at $500ish for the EEE PC range and got down to about $200 before stupid consumers started thinking that netbook equals cheap laptop, and so started whinging that netbooks weren't laptops. Likewise, stupid marketing execs heard these stupid consumers and insisted that the next generation of "netbooks" had to be cheap-ass laptops. Luckily for Apple, this was about the time of the first iPad release and so tablets took over the market segment that was formerly covered by netbooks.
Fast forward 100 years to a point where genuinely brainpower-increasing neural implants are expensive but available. Someone like Paris Hilton decides to get one because she's rich enough to afford one. Suddenly, she's ten times smarter than any un-augmented human being.
Neural enhancements will spell the end of the 'rich but dumb' celebrity.
I see what you're saying but I still think you're concerned about the wrong things.
The fundamental thing that makes drug testing a privacy issue is that there are consequences for being caught using drugs. The problem with HR firing you for eating a poppyseed muffin isn't that they're invading your privacy by testing you. An employer should have a right to know whether their employees are fit to work when they show up in the morning. The problem is with the fact that under our present system we can be fired for having smoked a joint, done some speed, dropped some eccies, whatever at some point in the past few weeks, even though we're currently clean and sober, which is not a fair condition. The only reason we accept such strict rules in the first place is because we know that there's a very low chance of us getting caught (in most industries) unless we actually show up to work intoxicated.
(Of course, there is an invasion-of-personal-freedom issue with them being entitled to stick needles in whenever they want... but that's a different issue.)
I completely agree that the situation you describe is awful. I disagree that the issue is the discovery of a violation of policy, rather than the policy itself.
The thing is, unless we assume that it's still meant to be possible for individuals to band together and overthrow the government by force (which, let's face it, is unlikely these days) there's no reason to be upset about police or anyone else getting data on how you drive... Unless you feel entitled to speed (or otherwise break the road rules) sometimes. Generally, that's what 'privacy' comes down to; you want to break some rules (laws, road rules, social norms, whatever) or at least to have some chance of getting away with doing so. Take drug tests, for example - I couldn't care less if I get drug tested because I don't use them. If I did, I'd be all about the "privacy issues" surrounding drug testing. Take GPS tracking on vehicles - I'm strongly opposed to it because I feel entitled to at least a sporting chance of getting away with it if I ever do feel it worthwhile to break road rules. You do too, or you wouldn't object.
What I think will be interesting is, once ubiquitous data is available on all peoples' behaviour at all times (and it will be, sooner or later), whether public pressure builds to change some of our stupider laws. There are a great number of laws which in principle are not always what the average person would call 'just' - but we tolerate them because 'they're only applied to bad people'. Once automated law enforcement is implemented, people will start realising just how important discretion is, or alternately, just how many laws should be fixed or repealed.
...already written 350,000 lines of C code... many ingenious algorithms Ken invented... over 2,000 lines long, and IIRC, it was exactly one function... seemed to be 2 letter variables only because he'd run out of 1 letter options. There were no comments.
It sounds like the guy makes this work for him - although I must wonder, if "the only bugs he'd have would be typos" and he uses all one- and two-letter variables, how many bugs he was introducing with each fix. It also sounds like a complete nightmare to debug, maintain, or extend.
The real question is, how many lines of code would those functions have been if he'd actually structured them properly? For that matter, how many lines of code would the codebase have been, and how many of those bug fixes would have been necessary, if he'd actually designed his system rather than just typing it in and assuming it was correct?
Yes, in the short term. You'll notice that cowboy coders generally get on the best with the least technical people, and only stay in any given job for a year or two at most. They don't stay in any one place long enough for the pitfalls of their 'method' to show, and it's not until after they've left that their co-workers are able to get the "oh god what have they done" sentiment through to their management.
Spot on. The guys that pump out something that looks like a product, really fast, but it's horribly un-maintainable and poorly designed, are not rock stars. They're hackers. Rock-star code gets written (sometimes literally) overnight, is easy to maintain and extend, and simple enough that a new graduate could debug it.
(Source: Am currently in a team of pretty good programmers who got rid of a hacker who thought he was a rock star a year ago and are still digging his turds out of our codebase.)
Not any type of proof. If you damage part of a TV set, it stops to exhibit all of its features, for example may stop to display color. That still does not mean the picture is generated in there. So while the brain plays a part like any good interface does, it is not enough to explain the overall thing.
Surely the "brain as receiver" hypothesis is easily defeated by the types of changes in fuction observable after damage to the brain? It's one thing for a TV to stop displaying colour, but for the metaphor to match what we've observed with human brain injuries, you'd need the TV set to suddenly only show spaghetti westerns, or to translate one particular actor's lines to German, or it blur out any area of the screen that contains a picture of a cat.
Is the actual rendering work done the same under both? In the past I've often seen games that run under both OpenGL and DirectX just have a basic engine port for OpenGL and have all the cutting edge eye candy under DirectX - I'd be very surprised if that didn't run a bit slower given all the extra work it's doing.
These are my issue with it. First, they're marketing it as "1280x800" but it's not, it's 640x800x2 and that's pretty misleading. Second, that means that (especially with the FoV they're quoting) the horizontal pixel density is going to be very low.
It'll be interesting to see how it stands up to the Sony HMZ-T1...
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You know, every time someone tells me I "don't need" to know or investigate something in that sort of condescending manner, it just serves to convince me that I do indeed need to know it. If 10 minutes cross-checking a diagnosis is enough to confirm or discredit it (within some reasonable level of confidence) then I'm much better off doing that than waiting for the chance that some review at some point in the future will catch the screwup after the harm is done.
Ayep. I can't find the link right now but there was a news article a while ago about a bunch of doctors complaining about people researching their own symptoms online.
Admittedly, it's bad when some looney googles a list of every single illness that initially presents with "headache, fever, sore throat" and insists they have meningitis or chlorine poisoning when they obviously just have a cold. There's also the flip side, though, that if a doctor isn't very good, they're going to be easy to catch out with some basic cross checking of their diagnosis. A lot of doctors seem to have this idea that just because they studied medical science instead of some other kind of science, that they're beyond question and somehow better than non-medical specialists. They hate getting caught out.
Define "missile"? Most homing missiles (still, afaik) aim at heat signatures. Sent by humans or not, meteors that land on human habitations are missiles. (Missile: n. An object that is forcibly propelled at a target, by hand or mechanically.) I think "by physics" counts as "forcibly propelled".
Calm down, Randi. Anyone who understands the scientific method agrees with you, and we file this under 'that's nice, call back when you have data'. :)
It only saves the 1's. The 0's are lost ferever.
The middle note on a piano keyboard?
http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2012/07/24/3549931.htm
20 to 50 pounds overweight IS FAT. I think you mean it's not morbidly obese (aka 'so fat that it will kill you).
No, the body doesn't NEED calories. It WANTS them because we've evolved to fatten up when food is plentiful so that we don't starve when food is scarce. The nasty side effect is that when food is always plentiful, and we don't have the discipline to consciously manage our energy intake to sustain a healthy weight, then we blimp up.
Agreed, though, that people are still going to feel hungry after eating an entire McDonalds and then barfing it up again.
Yeah, what you describe is about the level that I'd consider appropriate. Also you make a good point about the type of comments: They should be high level semantic information, not a low level description of the code itself. So where a newbie would say "loop through all of the X and add each one to the sumX variable", a more experienced coder would write "get the total number of X" or similar.
Agreed. The issue here sounds more like "graduate is shocked to find that real world code isn't written according to what his lecturers told him was best practice" than "graduate points out real flaws in commercial code."
Code style changes as you get more experience anyway... Well meaning newbies document the crap out of eeeeverything, for instance, and use stupidly long (but descriptive) filenames. With experience, hopefully they learn to only document interfaces and non-obvious code rather than every for-loop and if-statement, and use pithy (but still descriptive) names.
As originally envisaged, a netbook was a portable computer with a small laptop form factor which was optimised for ruggedness and lowest cost rather than performance. It was a cheap internet appliance designed to literally be thrown across the room to whoever at your house party wanted internet access right now. They started out at $500ish for the EEE PC range and got down to about $200 before stupid consumers started thinking that netbook equals cheap laptop, and so started whinging that netbooks weren't laptops. Likewise, stupid marketing execs heard these stupid consumers and insisted that the next generation of "netbooks" had to be cheap-ass laptops. Luckily for Apple, this was about the time of the first iPad release and so tablets took over the market segment that was formerly covered by netbooks.
Fast forward 100 years to a point where genuinely brainpower-increasing neural implants are expensive but available. Someone like Paris Hilton decides to get one because she's rich enough to afford one. Suddenly, she's ten times smarter than any un-augmented human being. Neural enhancements will spell the end of the 'rich but dumb' celebrity.
You use a lot of ellipses.
One.
(Trick question. It's always comparable to one.)
Hanged, by the neck, until dead, for misquoting that dude. And you did it in only one line. Wow, you're good!
I see what you're saying but I still think you're concerned about the wrong things.
The fundamental thing that makes drug testing a privacy issue is that there are consequences for being caught using drugs. The problem with HR firing you for eating a poppyseed muffin isn't that they're invading your privacy by testing you. An employer should have a right to know whether their employees are fit to work when they show up in the morning. The problem is with the fact that under our present system we can be fired for having smoked a joint, done some speed, dropped some eccies, whatever at some point in the past few weeks, even though we're currently clean and sober, which is not a fair condition. The only reason we accept such strict rules in the first place is because we know that there's a very low chance of us getting caught (in most industries) unless we actually show up to work intoxicated.
(Of course, there is an invasion-of-personal-freedom issue with them being entitled to stick needles in whenever they want... but that's a different issue.)
I completely agree that the situation you describe is awful. I disagree that the issue is the discovery of a violation of policy, rather than the policy itself.
The thing is, unless we assume that it's still meant to be possible for individuals to band together and overthrow the government by force (which, let's face it, is unlikely these days) there's no reason to be upset about police or anyone else getting data on how you drive... Unless you feel entitled to speed (or otherwise break the road rules) sometimes. Generally, that's what 'privacy' comes down to; you want to break some rules (laws, road rules, social norms, whatever) or at least to have some chance of getting away with doing so. Take drug tests, for example - I couldn't care less if I get drug tested because I don't use them. If I did, I'd be all about the "privacy issues" surrounding drug testing. Take GPS tracking on vehicles - I'm strongly opposed to it because I feel entitled to at least a sporting chance of getting away with it if I ever do feel it worthwhile to break road rules. You do too, or you wouldn't object.
What I think will be interesting is, once ubiquitous data is available on all peoples' behaviour at all times (and it will be, sooner or later), whether public pressure builds to change some of our stupider laws. There are a great number of laws which in principle are not always what the average person would call 'just' - but we tolerate them because 'they're only applied to bad people'. Once automated law enforcement is implemented, people will start realising just how important discretion is, or alternately, just how many laws should be fixed or repealed.
...already written 350,000 lines of C code ... many ingenious algorithms Ken invented ... over 2,000 lines long, and IIRC, it was exactly one function ... seemed to be 2 letter variables only because he'd run out of 1 letter options. There were no comments.
It sounds like the guy makes this work for him - although I must wonder, if "the only bugs he'd have would be typos" and he uses all one- and two-letter variables, how many bugs he was introducing with each fix. It also sounds like a complete nightmare to debug, maintain, or extend.
The real question is, how many lines of code would those functions have been if he'd actually structured them properly? For that matter, how many lines of code would the codebase have been, and how many of those bug fixes would have been necessary, if he'd actually designed his system rather than just typing it in and assuming it was correct?
Yes, in the short term. You'll notice that cowboy coders generally get on the best with the least technical people, and only stay in any given job for a year or two at most. They don't stay in any one place long enough for the pitfalls of their 'method' to show, and it's not until after they've left that their co-workers are able to get the "oh god what have they done" sentiment through to their management.
Spot on. The guys that pump out something that looks like a product, really fast, but it's horribly un-maintainable and poorly designed, are not rock stars. They're hackers. Rock-star code gets written (sometimes literally) overnight, is easy to maintain and extend, and simple enough that a new graduate could debug it. (Source: Am currently in a team of pretty good programmers who got rid of a hacker who thought he was a rock star a year ago and are still digging his turds out of our codebase.)
Yeah, that bit bugged me too. It's like saying that a walking robot "responds to its environment rather than physics."
Not any type of proof. If you damage part of a TV set, it stops to exhibit all of its features, for example may stop to display color. That still does not mean the picture is generated in there. So while the brain plays a part like any good interface does, it is not enough to explain the overall thing.
Surely the "brain as receiver" hypothesis is easily defeated by the types of changes in fuction observable after damage to the brain? It's one thing for a TV to stop displaying colour, but for the metaphor to match what we've observed with human brain injuries, you'd need the TV set to suddenly only show spaghetti westerns, or to translate one particular actor's lines to German, or it blur out any area of the screen that contains a picture of a cat.
Is the actual rendering work done the same under both? In the past I've often seen games that run under both OpenGL and DirectX just have a basic engine port for OpenGL and have all the cutting edge eye candy under DirectX - I'd be very surprised if that didn't run a bit slower given all the extra work it's doing.
These are my issue with it. First, they're marketing it as "1280x800" but it's not, it's 640x800x2 and that's pretty misleading. Second, that means that (especially with the FoV they're quoting) the horizontal pixel density is going to be very low.
It'll be interesting to see how it stands up to the Sony HMZ-T1...