Nnnnope, I count myself in the 'To hell with TV' pile of people... over 2 years running. Of the maybe 3 or so shows I want to watch... that's what the good old internet is for. No ads, and I watch when I want, how I want, without the need to buy/build a PVR.
So your advice to me is become an internet pirate, and download p2p traffic (which could put me up against a traffic limit and/or shaping), when it's all available for free? Thanks, I appreciate that.
Who says you have to be a pirate? A lot of networks have started putting their stuff online in simple flash players. You get practically no ads (there'll be 0-1/commercial break, or maybe just some silent banners on the side), and you watch whatever episode of whatever show whenever you want whenever you want. Yes, the site goes down from time to time, but given the price I can live with it. That's how I watch South Park and The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, The Listener, and a bunch of other stuff I enjoy. I know there are other options as well.
Shows I can't find on there, I buy on DVD. Every episode of Futurama, a good fraction of Family Guy, and several BBC documentaries I loved (Planet Earth, etc) is sitting on a shelf less than two meters away from me right now. All of it combined cost roughly the same as one season's worth of satellite TV. And they're also valuable as a means to get legal access to other shows for free ("Hey, can I borrow your Simpsons DVDs? I'll lend you my Futurama in return...").
I gave up TV a while ago and I don't miss it at all.
I did the same thing. We had 200 channels of satellite TV (Bell), but no more than three interesting things would be on at any given time, and nine times out of ten they would be reruns. So I cancelled my subscription, and it's been amazing how much free time opened up. It was certainly more than $length_of_show_I_like (even including commercials) times $episodes_per_season. All the time wasted turning the TV on a few minutes early to catch the start and then maybe watching just one more half-hour afterwards added up to lot more time than it seems.
Every once in a while, I'll watch the Daily Show or 30 Rock
You don't even need to give up watching the shows you like if you give up the cable/satellite package. You can get the few shows you really like online or on DVD. It's silly, actually, that I ever paid for regular TV. Given how overpriced it is, and how few of the shows actually have any substance to them, it is cheaper (at least in my case) to buy every show I like on DVD than it is to maintain even a basic cable/satellite subscription. And it's pretty easy to get the price down further by borrowing box sets from friends or renting (to say nothing of torrenting).
The best part, I've found, of getting shows on DVD is the fact that it's more fun to watch that way. First, you do it on your own time, so there's no anxiety about getting home in time to catch the start. Second, there are no (or at least fewer, if you're watching online) commercial interruptions, which I found make a huge impact in my enjoyment of the show.
Thanks for the links. That's very interesting that they're looking at releasing bacteria specifically cultured to feed on oil residues into the ocean, along with all the plastic (granted that's way more dramatic-sounding than it is, given what I'd expect to be a significant chemical difference between oil residue and plastic).
I knew that plastic is a hydrocarbon polymer - I'm just not enough of a chemistry nerd to understand the effect of the particular arrangements we produce on the amount of energy in the bonds (and also what the net remainder after expending some energy to break them would be). I probably should have stated that a bit better, rather than coming across as an idiot:)
Visual C's profile-guided optimizations do actually do this, in cases where profiling shows obj to be one of a small number of types during the vast majority of invocations.
[t]he floating plastic particles resemble zooplankton, which can be inadvertently consumed by jellyfish.
I've read (here in the comments and other places that I can't recall right now) that the particles can be small enough that the zooplankton itself will eat the plastic. I've also read about bacteria having evolved to eat some of the chemical precursors to some of our plastics (which bear similarities to the finished product).
By spreading such large quantities of plastic over such large areas, and letting the sea grind it into a form that some of the fastest-reproducing creatures might consider it to be food, aren't we practically daring something to evolve an enzyme to digest plastic? I don't know if that's even possible (maybe the plastic has too little chemical energy to ever be food - though the fact that it can burn seems to suggest otherwise), so maybe someone more knowledgeable can comment.
Looking at the plastic casing on almost all of the useful gadgets in my house (and thinking of the vapor barrier in the walls, and the insulation around the wires, etc), it strikes me that life would really suck if plastic suddenly found its way into the group of things that rot.
There are also cases where you genuinely cannot know the exact type of the variable you want to declare, but where the compiler already does:
template< typename A, typename B > void foo( const A &a, const B &b ) {
some_type temp = a * b;
if( temp < 0 ) //...
if( temp < 1 ) //...
if( temp < 2 ) //... }
The function, as I intend to write it, doesn't care what types A and B are, only that operator* is defined between them, and that the result of operator* supports operator<( int ). What, besides auto, replaces some_type without pushing additional constraints onto the callers of this function?
The only thing I can do right now is either replace each reference to temp with (a * b), which sucks if operator* is nontrivial, or I can add additional constraints to the valid types for A and B, pushing responsibility for foo's implementation details down onto its callers (which also sucks).
I assume that TFA wouldn't lie about something as verifiable as the freshwater production thing; but I'd like to have a better idea of how exactly that happens
Probably a byproduct of the distillation process they use to extract the ethanol.
The journalist will get a reputation for being difficult, and other people won't give them interviews either.
If the point is just to please the politicians (and other interesting people) then let's just get rid of the fucking "journalists". Seriously. Just have the elected blog on a.gov site about whatever they care to share (since that's all we get out of them anyway). Not only would that would even spare them the bother of driving down to the TV station, it would also allow them to proof-read and double-check their statements before posting them, thus alleviating them of any anxiety they may have about (oh horror!) mis-modulating their voice for half a second.
All you need after that is a nice company (like, say, Google) to aggregate the links to the more interesting ones, and maybe some mildly literate person to read the introductory paragraph to the ten most read every evening on TV, and, in terms of information and distribution, we've got exactly what the MSM delivers now.
See, somehow, I always thought journalists are supposed to be hated by their interviewees. I thought the whole point of journalism was building such a reputation of being a reliable source of verified fact that, much as they may hate it, politicians ask the journalist for access to some small slice of that credibility, in the form of an interview.
Looking at the world today, that sounds pretty damn ridiculous. But that's how it's advertised, with all the talk of "your most trusted source" you see in their adverts. I'm probably just a retard for daring to hope that maybe some small bit of that might be believed.
Meh. Back to laughing bitterly as the world burns I go.
And is it just me, or does FSAA have little real effect on visual quality?
Look at triangle (not texture!) edges. The way FSAA is implemented in modern hardware, that's really the only place you can expect to see a difference.
Funny how since the beginning of history, groups of people have been claiming that the world is going to end. And it keeps not happening.
That depends on your definition of "world". Sure, the planet's still here, but there are a lot of cities, religions, races, and empires (in essence: ways of life) which have died or been destroyed. If your civilization was where a desert is now, and you're watching the unending drout destroy everything you know, how do you express that? Or if you see that your nation's trade is falling apart, the military is too small, the people are as likely to start killing and looting each other as they are to band together to pull through a crisis, the barbarians are massing at the borders, and the emperor won't do a goddamn thing because he's off having a drunken orgy with his friends?
Honestly, it comes down to this: if you are about to die, and everything you know about the world - everything you have worked to build - is about to vanish, then what's the difference, from your point of view, between the whole world ending or just your tiny little corner of said world?
If we're going to make the implicit assumption that the past keeps repeating, then may I point out that no civilization has ever survived intact forever. At best they are replaced by something vaguely similar, but even then only after periods of chaos and suffering on a monumental scale. At worst we find a stone tablet somewhere praising king X for wiping out every man, woman, and child in neighboring city Y in only a day.
Did I mention that our university just instituted bonuses for faculty who have the highest student-based popularity scores?
Reminds me of a discussion I had with one of my former profs when I was told the higher-ups were thinking of cutting Formal Logic (a class which should have been called Introduction to Formal Logic) from the CS program requirements (yeah, CS without logic - WTF indeed). The gist of it went something like this: The administration wants more revenues, for which students are required. The students want easier courses. If the professors won't make the courses easier, other professors are brought in who will. The student-based popularity scores are used to push out the ones that stick to teaching the hard stuff that the students actually need to know - despite the fact that the new prof's students are failing next year's courses in much higher numbers than is usual.
I'd be happy if they removed the DRMish iTunes requirement. Just show me my music in a mounted file system of some sort, and let me drag stuff on and off the device the way I can with any other portable media player.
And it's not just high-school level bullshit. There's also the trend of students are getting into classes without mastering the prerequisites, and they're allowed to pass without really meeting the requirements. Not to the same level you see in secondary schools, but to a large extent it's there. A few of the profs I've talked to about it chalk it up to dealing with the reality of failing high schools, but quite a few identify their institution's administration as pushing it in order to increase enrollment (and thus total tuition fees collected).
Actually, about a month ago, I had lunch with one of the music profs at the University of Alberta. He told me it was common to get students in his first year classes who were practically illiterate, or had no musical instinct or experience whatsoever. He has to fight to have the students that won't learn removed from the class. The administration won't help him at all. They either threaten him with enrollment figures and budgets, or they hide behind irate parents defending their helpless 20 year old snowflake from the nasty man with the difficult music. His friends at other universities (in Canada and the USA) complain of the same thing. It was really sad when he exclaimed, "A Calculus prof wouldn't have to deal with students that don't know how to multiply, but I'm expected to teach the most basic fundamentals at a university?!" and I told him about some of the students in my first year calculus courses.
But the music prof made an interesting observation, he said (paraphrasing), "Well, given that they don't understand the basics, you can practically expect them to misbehave. Without knowing the basic terms they can't even understand what I'm saying when I lecture. They don't know what to listen for when I play. It's all just going over their heads. Of course they're going to get bored... I only wish I could more easily send them back to a regular music teacher, or to another program altogether."
I'd honestly like to say that it surprises me - but after seeing it myself when I was a student, and hearing about it from my profs and other college and university teachers I know, it's pretty much to be expected. At least most of that gets filtered out after first year...
You will be taught things like coding style, how to use comments, object orientation, etc.
A number of people on here say that about college/university. Honestly, I never saw it there. They gave us all the "good practices" lectures about commenting, making good objects, etc. None of it really meant anything to anyone, because, without the experience of having tried to maintain a horrible mess, the guidelines just seem like silly encumbrances. The worst is when people who don't understand them take the various code patterns to extremes, making an even bigger mess than they would otherwise have had.
The only reason I code well is that, when I was younger, I spent a lot of time writing various programs on my own, working for many months on each one. I always found that, after a certain critical point, it would become too much of a pain to do anything with the code. Then I'd stop for a while, figure out why it was such a pain, design a fix for the problem, and then start again. Later on it occurred to me to study the structure of various open-source projects to learn from others who'd been coding for a hell of a lot longer than I.
So I don't know - how do they actually teach that? None of the projects we did were anywhere near long or large enough that anyone would come to equate difficulty advancing with some fundamental design issue - even the ones that lasted most of a semester. It certainly didn't occur to anyone in my class. They all hit the brick wall, complained loudly, somehow persevered till it was minimally done, and then handed it in and forgot all about it. The most frustrating thing was that I would go and try to help some of them and point out how and why they'd painted themselves into a corner, but without the experience, the idea just couldn't click. I know they weren't stupid, because some of them figured it out later on (again, on their own). It's just something I've never seen taught effectively.
How did your school teach it? Was there a mentorship program or something? I'd love to know, if for nothing else than some better ideas when it comes time for me to train up my next junior coder.
480 days is outrageous. I won't argue that it's beneficial for the child. But business is fast, always changing, and you must always adapt. If someone takes off 480 days, just by the sheer amount that they've forgotten and the amount that they've missed out on, it'd be like hiring a new employee.
Yes, it's a pretty big cost to business. I get that. But I think it could be argued that poorly raised children are going to be even more expensive in the long run.
Just think about all the extra money schools have to spend dealing with the increasing number of undisciplined (and undisciplinable) students. What's the value of the other students' time wasted by said problem children? Or the property damage done by bored teens? Or break-ins over beer and pot money? How much wealth is simply never made because these kids waste years of their lives and then spend up to a decade going back to school at age twenty, when real life finally does for them what their parents failed to do?
Yeah, in the isolated case of one child the cost to the business is probably more than its worth. But when you talk about an entire generation being badly raised, the businesses are probably saving money. Otherwise, they'd just be taxed for the cleanup. And if not them, then their customers, who are probably not going to be shopping as much after paying $500 to replace a window smashed to get at $50 worth of stuff for pot money. And your business will be paying more wages too, partially because you need to cover people's higher cost of living, and partially because the worse off the schools are, the fewer properly educated people you'll find to fill positions.
The only thing that makes me sad is that, despite not actually saving their business with all the law suits, they have still managed to (likely forever) change the way the people think about IP. It used to be not such a big deal. Yes, anyone that knew anything about computers (or was a friend of such) wasn't paying for media, but the record stores weren't closing either so nobody gave a damn. And even during Napsters glory days I knew tons of kids that went out and spent ridiculous sums of money on posters and t-shirts and concert tickets and, yes, CDs - because of having pirated a good chunk of a band's works. Now you can't even have a discussion about that without throwing in a disclaimer almost half as long as your actual message to point out that you aren't actually telling people to go out and break the law.
Sorry to go a bit off-topic. It just depresses me that you (quite rightly) felt you had to throw in that last paragraph, even though the things you didn't say can be easily spotted, simply by reading your actual message.
You know, I never really did care all that much for the whole JRPG play style, but, damn I love the artwork they put into those games. It's something I have trouble finding in other genres (though I don't game that much so maybe I'm just not looking in the right spots). Most of the other stuff I see tends to go to either Star Trek Wannabe Universe #45342, Medieval European Haunted Castle Town #342847, or Gritty Contemporary City Streets #342721. It's just nice to look at something that's different every now and then.
Although I'm sure people that play tons of these games would be saying the same about any of the styles I think have been done to death.
As I see it the issue at hand is that on your local branch you have several small changes that encompass different parts of the application which are dependent on each other, but each have to be merged separately without the explicit dependencies defined. In subversion this happens with a single dump, in git (if I am understanding it correctly) you are merging into the master each local commit you made one at a time.
However when management decides that a new feature on branch X needs to go out before a new feature on branch Y, and the X merge goes smoothly into the master Z...
To your first question, I would have the committer rewrite their local history to give me several fairly stand-alone commits rather than a mess of "work in progress" commits or a single "three days work" commit. I don't really allow anything else into the main release codebase. If things have to be shuffled around after that, yes, there are going to be merging issues, there would be with any system. Git has some nice features, however, that make dealing with merge issues like that much easier, provided you've taken the time to keep the main history sane.
Another question (apologies for the rambling post), if git has you performing each of your local commits into the master one at a time (I'm assuming this is how git works, since I don't see how else it could decide to demarcate commits), it seems like this would be harder then subversion's one time dump, unless you were atomically committing working changes into your local branch.
Git has no requirements whatsoever when it comes to development practices. I have commits going into the master one at a time for my own sanity. The old SVN "pull down master, push up my changes" style will work just as well with Git as with anything else. In fact, that's what we do, except that pulling and pushing from master is less disruptive to people who aren't yet ready to merge, and I have people submit patches with clean histories (which make merging both now and later easier) rather than SVN's "here's some changes on top of your work, hope that works for you" approach.
As for merging branches that have diverged quite a bit, again, I leave that up to the developer of the branch. If they want to periodically rebase their stuff (covers merging in master + cleaning up history), they're free to do so. Or they can do it all at once before they give me a patch. My requirements are simply that their stuff go in as a small number of well-organized patches on top of the current master. Beyond that they can do as they please.
Never used CC but I'll try to answer what I (think I) can:
The problem I saw with Clearcase, though, was more of a policy program.
Many of the issues you run into with any team are, simply put, people problems that are going to need people-based solutions.
Too many people either didn't understand the rational behind the policy, were too stubborn to do it any way but their own, or simply made too many mistakes trying to keep up with the rules of the best practices.
[...]
Final question: the git method (as I understand it) certainly makes a lot of sense. But what about for developers who "don't get it"? It seems like it would be easy in such a de-centralized system to bung things up pretty bad for everyone else. I.e., how is sane usage policy enforced?
I sort of got into this earlier. At the end of the day, code quality is my job. I enforce policy by hand by forcing people's commits to go through me. If the team grew a bunch, I'd divide the code up and designate a lieutenant to be responsible for part of it. You could try to automate this, but, at the end of the day somebody is going to be responsible if the code is a mess and the product doesn't work, and I think it makes all the sense in the world to have that person watching over things from the beginning, rather than only when things break.
Yeah, there's the issue of who and how strict and all the politics that goes along with that. In our case it was definitely worth it to move to that sort of a system, even though it did take a while for people to get used to it. The entire team feels better about the code now, and we're all spending less time per bug than we were before so it's worth the inconvenience and pain - YMMV, of course.
Also, CC was dreadfully slow---everyone talks about how git is faster than svn, and svn is definitely faster than Clearcase (in my experience anyway).
Git is so fast it's just silly. There's really no other way to put it, it's just ridiculously fast. This isn't going to be an issue for you, unless you misconfigure the central repo server or throw in a bunch of random giant binary blobs with all your source or do something horrible like that.
I am guessing that git is fairly open by design---how does it fare for distributed groups for proprietary development (i.e. where the code needs to be kept secret)?
That's another people problem that Git doesn't attempt to solve. All of a Git repo's data sits inside of a single.git folder at the root of a project (or submodule). If you want to move it, just grab your working folder and off you go. There's no authentication scheme or anything - if you can cp, you can copy the repository. If you're gonna offshore, you'll need to rely on good contracts and the law to keep your code safe. Not that CC or anything else would really keep it safe anyway, I imagine - if they can see the code to edit it, they can copy/paste it into another file somewhere else.
I remember the offshore team checking code in, then I would go through and re-work the revision history to make it adhere to our policy.
Well, either that or they could have been paid to have it meet standards, with contractual obligations for them to pass reviews and all, or you pay someone on your team. The work's gotta get done either way. Unless you ignore it, but then you pay come release time, with an even bigger cost (customer confidence) come patch time after that if lots of bugs got through.
Slashdot Mirror
Nnnnope, I count myself in the 'To hell with TV' pile of people... over 2 years running. Of the maybe 3 or so shows I want to watch... that's what the good old internet is for. No ads, and I watch when I want, how I want, without the need to buy/build a PVR.
So your advice to me is become an internet pirate, and download p2p traffic (which could put me up against a traffic limit and/or shaping), when it's all available for free? Thanks, I appreciate that.
Who says you have to be a pirate? A lot of networks have started putting their stuff online in simple flash players. You get practically no ads (there'll be 0-1/commercial break, or maybe just some silent banners on the side), and you watch whatever episode of whatever show whenever you want whenever you want. Yes, the site goes down from time to time, but given the price I can live with it. That's how I watch South Park and The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, The Listener, and a bunch of other stuff I enjoy. I know there are other options as well.
Shows I can't find on there, I buy on DVD. Every episode of Futurama, a good fraction of Family Guy, and several BBC documentaries I loved (Planet Earth, etc) is sitting on a shelf less than two meters away from me right now. All of it combined cost roughly the same as one season's worth of satellite TV. And they're also valuable as a means to get legal access to other shows for free ("Hey, can I borrow your Simpsons DVDs? I'll lend you my Futurama in return...").
Thanks for the link. I was not too long trying to explain to someone why 4D vectors are often used in 3D graphics, and that's a useful illustration.
Gods though, sometimes Youtube comments make me want to weep for the future...
I gave up TV a while ago and I don't miss it at all.
I did the same thing. We had 200 channels of satellite TV (Bell), but no more than three interesting things would be on at any given time, and nine times out of ten they would be reruns. So I cancelled my subscription, and it's been amazing how much free time opened up. It was certainly more than $length_of_show_I_like (even including commercials) times $episodes_per_season. All the time wasted turning the TV on a few minutes early to catch the start and then maybe watching just one more half-hour afterwards added up to lot more time than it seems.
Every once in a while, I'll watch the Daily Show or 30 Rock
You don't even need to give up watching the shows you like if you give up the cable/satellite package. You can get the few shows you really like online or on DVD. It's silly, actually, that I ever paid for regular TV. Given how overpriced it is, and how few of the shows actually have any substance to them, it is cheaper (at least in my case) to buy every show I like on DVD than it is to maintain even a basic cable/satellite subscription. And it's pretty easy to get the price down further by borrowing box sets from friends or renting (to say nothing of torrenting).
The best part, I've found, of getting shows on DVD is the fact that it's more fun to watch that way. First, you do it on your own time, so there's no anxiety about getting home in time to catch the start. Second, there are no (or at least fewer, if you're watching online) commercial interruptions, which I found make a huge impact in my enjoyment of the show.
Thanks for the links. That's very interesting that they're looking at releasing bacteria specifically cultured to feed on oil residues into the ocean, along with all the plastic (granted that's way more dramatic-sounding than it is, given what I'd expect to be a significant chemical difference between oil residue and plastic).
I knew that plastic is a hydrocarbon polymer - I'm just not enough of a chemistry nerd to understand the effect of the particular arrangements we produce on the amount of energy in the bonds (and also what the net remainder after expending some energy to break them would be). I probably should have stated that a bit better, rather than coming across as an idiot :)
Visual C's profile-guided optimizations do actually do this, in cases where profiling shows obj to be one of a small number of types during the vast majority of invocations.
[t]he floating plastic particles resemble zooplankton, which can be inadvertently consumed by jellyfish.
I've read (here in the comments and other places that I can't recall right now) that the particles can be small enough that the zooplankton itself will eat the plastic. I've also read about bacteria having evolved to eat some of the chemical precursors to some of our plastics (which bear similarities to the finished product).
By spreading such large quantities of plastic over such large areas, and letting the sea grind it into a form that some of the fastest-reproducing creatures might consider it to be food, aren't we practically daring something to evolve an enzyme to digest plastic? I don't know if that's even possible (maybe the plastic has too little chemical energy to ever be food - though the fact that it can burn seems to suggest otherwise), so maybe someone more knowledgeable can comment.
Looking at the plastic casing on almost all of the useful gadgets in my house (and thinking of the vapor barrier in the walls, and the insulation around the wires, etc), it strikes me that life would really suck if plastic suddenly found its way into the group of things that rot.
There are also cases where you genuinely cannot know the exact type of the variable you want to declare, but where the compiler already does:
The function, as I intend to write it, doesn't care what types A and B are, only that operator* is defined between them, and that the result of operator* supports operator<( int ). What, besides auto, replaces some_type without pushing additional constraints onto the callers of this function?
The only thing I can do right now is either replace each reference to temp with (a * b), which sucks if operator* is nontrivial, or I can add additional constraints to the valid types for A and B, pushing responsibility for foo's implementation details down onto its callers (which also sucks).
I assume that TFA wouldn't lie about something as verifiable as the freshwater production thing; but I'd like to have a better idea of how exactly that happens
Probably a byproduct of the distillation process they use to extract the ethanol.
The journalist will get a reputation for being difficult, and other people won't give them interviews either.
If the point is just to please the politicians (and other interesting people) then let's just get rid of the fucking "journalists". Seriously. Just have the elected blog on a .gov site about whatever they care to share (since that's all we get out of them anyway). Not only would that would even spare them the bother of driving down to the TV station, it would also allow them to proof-read and double-check their statements before posting them, thus alleviating them of any anxiety they may have about (oh horror!) mis-modulating their voice for half a second.
All you need after that is a nice company (like, say, Google) to aggregate the links to the more interesting ones, and maybe some mildly literate person to read the introductory paragraph to the ten most read every evening on TV, and, in terms of information and distribution, we've got exactly what the MSM delivers now.
See, somehow, I always thought journalists are supposed to be hated by their interviewees. I thought the whole point of journalism was building such a reputation of being a reliable source of verified fact that, much as they may hate it, politicians ask the journalist for access to some small slice of that credibility, in the form of an interview.
Looking at the world today, that sounds pretty damn ridiculous. But that's how it's advertised, with all the talk of "your most trusted source" you see in their adverts. I'm probably just a retard for daring to hope that maybe some small bit of that might be believed.
Meh. Back to laughing bitterly as the world burns I go.
And is it just me, or does FSAA have little real effect on visual quality?
Look at triangle (not texture!) edges. The way FSAA is implemented in modern hardware, that's really the only place you can expect to see a difference.
Funny how since the beginning of history, groups of people have been claiming that the world is going to end. And it keeps not happening.
That depends on your definition of "world". Sure, the planet's still here, but there are a lot of cities, religions, races, and empires (in essence: ways of life) which have died or been destroyed. If your civilization was where a desert is now, and you're watching the unending drout destroy everything you know, how do you express that? Or if you see that your nation's trade is falling apart, the military is too small, the people are as likely to start killing and looting each other as they are to band together to pull through a crisis, the barbarians are massing at the borders, and the emperor won't do a goddamn thing because he's off having a drunken orgy with his friends?
Honestly, it comes down to this: if you are about to die, and everything you know about the world - everything you have worked to build - is about to vanish, then what's the difference, from your point of view, between the whole world ending or just your tiny little corner of said world?
If we're going to make the implicit assumption that the past keeps repeating, then may I point out that no civilization has ever survived intact forever. At best they are replaced by something vaguely similar, but even then only after periods of chaos and suffering on a monumental scale. At worst we find a stone tablet somewhere praising king X for wiping out every man, woman, and child in neighboring city Y in only a day.
Think of all the man-hours being saved.
You bastard! Cutting jobs in an economy like this...
Did I mention that our university just instituted bonuses for faculty who have the highest student-based popularity scores?
Reminds me of a discussion I had with one of my former profs when I was told the higher-ups were thinking of cutting Formal Logic (a class which should have been called Introduction to Formal Logic) from the CS program requirements (yeah, CS without logic - WTF indeed). The gist of it went something like this: The administration wants more revenues, for which students are required. The students want easier courses. If the professors won't make the courses easier, other professors are brought in who will. The student-based popularity scores are used to push out the ones that stick to teaching the hard stuff that the students actually need to know - despite the fact that the new prof's students are failing next year's courses in much higher numbers than is usual.
I'd be happy if they removed the DRMish iTunes requirement. Just show me my music in a mounted file system of some sort, and let me drag stuff on and off the device the way I can with any other portable media player.
The GP is serious.
And it's not just high-school level bullshit. There's also the trend of students are getting into classes without mastering the prerequisites, and they're allowed to pass without really meeting the requirements. Not to the same level you see in secondary schools, but to a large extent it's there. A few of the profs I've talked to about it chalk it up to dealing with the reality of failing high schools, but quite a few identify their institution's administration as pushing it in order to increase enrollment (and thus total tuition fees collected).
Actually, about a month ago, I had lunch with one of the music profs at the University of Alberta. He told me it was common to get students in his first year classes who were practically illiterate, or had no musical instinct or experience whatsoever. He has to fight to have the students that won't learn removed from the class. The administration won't help him at all. They either threaten him with enrollment figures and budgets, or they hide behind irate parents defending their helpless 20 year old snowflake from the nasty man with the difficult music. His friends at other universities (in Canada and the USA) complain of the same thing. It was really sad when he exclaimed, "A Calculus prof wouldn't have to deal with students that don't know how to multiply, but I'm expected to teach the most basic fundamentals at a university?!" and I told him about some of the students in my first year calculus courses.
But the music prof made an interesting observation, he said (paraphrasing), "Well, given that they don't understand the basics, you can practically expect them to misbehave. Without knowing the basic terms they can't even understand what I'm saying when I lecture. They don't know what to listen for when I play. It's all just going over their heads. Of course they're going to get bored... I only wish I could more easily send them back to a regular music teacher, or to another program altogether."
I'd honestly like to say that it surprises me - but after seeing it myself when I was a student, and hearing about it from my profs and other college and university teachers I know, it's pretty much to be expected. At least most of that gets filtered out after first year...
You will be taught things like coding style, how to use comments, object orientation, etc.
A number of people on here say that about college/university. Honestly, I never saw it there. They gave us all the "good practices" lectures about commenting, making good objects, etc. None of it really meant anything to anyone, because, without the experience of having tried to maintain a horrible mess, the guidelines just seem like silly encumbrances. The worst is when people who don't understand them take the various code patterns to extremes, making an even bigger mess than they would otherwise have had.
The only reason I code well is that, when I was younger, I spent a lot of time writing various programs on my own, working for many months on each one. I always found that, after a certain critical point, it would become too much of a pain to do anything with the code. Then I'd stop for a while, figure out why it was such a pain, design a fix for the problem, and then start again. Later on it occurred to me to study the structure of various open-source projects to learn from others who'd been coding for a hell of a lot longer than I.
So I don't know - how do they actually teach that? None of the projects we did were anywhere near long or large enough that anyone would come to equate difficulty advancing with some fundamental design issue - even the ones that lasted most of a semester. It certainly didn't occur to anyone in my class. They all hit the brick wall, complained loudly, somehow persevered till it was minimally done, and then handed it in and forgot all about it. The most frustrating thing was that I would go and try to help some of them and point out how and why they'd painted themselves into a corner, but without the experience, the idea just couldn't click. I know they weren't stupid, because some of them figured it out later on (again, on their own). It's just something I've never seen taught effectively.
How did your school teach it? Was there a mentorship program or something? I'd love to know, if for nothing else than some better ideas when it comes time for me to train up my next junior coder.
480 days is outrageous. I won't argue that it's beneficial for the child. But business is fast, always changing, and you must always adapt. If someone takes off 480 days, just by the sheer amount that they've forgotten and the amount that they've missed out on, it'd be like hiring a new employee.
Yes, it's a pretty big cost to business. I get that. But I think it could be argued that poorly raised children are going to be even more expensive in the long run.
Just think about all the extra money schools have to spend dealing with the increasing number of undisciplined (and undisciplinable) students. What's the value of the other students' time wasted by said problem children? Or the property damage done by bored teens? Or break-ins over beer and pot money? How much wealth is simply never made because these kids waste years of their lives and then spend up to a decade going back to school at age twenty, when real life finally does for them what their parents failed to do?
Yeah, in the isolated case of one child the cost to the business is probably more than its worth. But when you talk about an entire generation being badly raised, the businesses are probably saving money. Otherwise, they'd just be taxed for the cleanup. And if not them, then their customers, who are probably not going to be shopping as much after paying $500 to replace a window smashed to get at $50 worth of stuff for pot money. And your business will be paying more wages too, partially because you need to cover people's higher cost of living, and partially because the worse off the schools are, the fewer properly educated people you'll find to fill positions.
Fuck you all. Real men use teams of butterflies .
The only thing that makes me sad is that, despite not actually saving their business with all the law suits, they have still managed to (likely forever) change the way the people think about IP. It used to be not such a big deal. Yes, anyone that knew anything about computers (or was a friend of such) wasn't paying for media, but the record stores weren't closing either so nobody gave a damn. And even during Napsters glory days I knew tons of kids that went out and spent ridiculous sums of money on posters and t-shirts and concert tickets and, yes, CDs - because of having pirated a good chunk of a band's works. Now you can't even have a discussion about that without throwing in a disclaimer almost half as long as your actual message to point out that you aren't actually telling people to go out and break the law.
Sorry to go a bit off-topic. It just depresses me that you (quite rightly) felt you had to throw in that last paragraph, even though the things you didn't say can be easily spotted, simply by reading your actual message.
He's not dead yet!
We know, we know, you don't have to remind us...we know...
Why is the parent modded funny?
Oh you don't know? Moderation is secretly an indirect personality test for the /. readership. Someone just failed.
You know, I never really did care all that much for the whole JRPG play style, but, damn I love the artwork they put into those games. It's something I have trouble finding in other genres (though I don't game that much so maybe I'm just not looking in the right spots). Most of the other stuff I see tends to go to either Star Trek Wannabe Universe #45342, Medieval European Haunted Castle Town #342847, or Gritty Contemporary City Streets #342721. It's just nice to look at something that's different every now and then.
Although I'm sure people that play tons of these games would be saying the same about any of the styles I think have been done to death.
Meh. Enough rambling.
Strangely appropriate.
As I see it the issue at hand is that on your local branch you have several small changes that encompass different parts of the application which are dependent on each other, but each have to be merged separately without the explicit dependencies defined. In subversion this happens with a single dump, in git (if I am understanding it correctly) you are merging into the master each local commit you made one at a time.
However when management decides that a new feature on branch X needs to go out before a new feature on branch Y, and the X merge goes smoothly into the master Z...
To your first question, I would have the committer rewrite their local history to give me several fairly stand-alone commits rather than a mess of "work in progress" commits or a single "three days work" commit. I don't really allow anything else into the main release codebase. If things have to be shuffled around after that, yes, there are going to be merging issues, there would be with any system. Git has some nice features, however, that make dealing with merge issues like that much easier, provided you've taken the time to keep the main history sane.
Another question (apologies for the rambling post), if git has you performing each of your local commits into the master one at a time (I'm assuming this is how git works, since I don't see how else it could decide to demarcate commits), it seems like this would be harder then subversion's one time dump, unless you were atomically committing working changes into your local branch.
Git has no requirements whatsoever when it comes to development practices. I have commits going into the master one at a time for my own sanity. The old SVN "pull down master, push up my changes" style will work just as well with Git as with anything else. In fact, that's what we do, except that pulling and pushing from master is less disruptive to people who aren't yet ready to merge, and I have people submit patches with clean histories (which make merging both now and later easier) rather than SVN's "here's some changes on top of your work, hope that works for you" approach.
As for merging branches that have diverged quite a bit, again, I leave that up to the developer of the branch. If they want to periodically rebase their stuff (covers merging in master + cleaning up history), they're free to do so. Or they can do it all at once before they give me a patch. My requirements are simply that their stuff go in as a small number of well-organized patches on top of the current master. Beyond that they can do as they please.
Never used CC but I'll try to answer what I (think I) can:
The problem I saw with Clearcase, though, was more of a policy program.
Many of the issues you run into with any team are, simply put, people problems that are going to need people-based solutions.
Too many people either didn't understand the rational behind the policy, were too stubborn to do it any way but their own, or simply made too many mistakes trying to keep up with the rules of the best practices.
[...]
Final question: the git method (as I understand it) certainly makes a lot of sense. But what about for developers who "don't get it"? It seems like it would be easy in such a de-centralized system to bung things up pretty bad for everyone else. I.e., how is sane usage policy enforced?
I sort of got into this earlier. At the end of the day, code quality is my job. I enforce policy by hand by forcing people's commits to go through me. If the team grew a bunch, I'd divide the code up and designate a lieutenant to be responsible for part of it. You could try to automate this, but, at the end of the day somebody is going to be responsible if the code is a mess and the product doesn't work, and I think it makes all the sense in the world to have that person watching over things from the beginning, rather than only when things break.
Yeah, there's the issue of who and how strict and all the politics that goes along with that. In our case it was definitely worth it to move to that sort of a system, even though it did take a while for people to get used to it. The entire team feels better about the code now, and we're all spending less time per bug than we were before so it's worth the inconvenience and pain - YMMV, of course.
Also, CC was dreadfully slow---everyone talks about how git is faster than svn, and svn is definitely faster than Clearcase (in my experience anyway).
Git is so fast it's just silly. There's really no other way to put it, it's just ridiculously fast. This isn't going to be an issue for you, unless you misconfigure the central repo server or throw in a bunch of random giant binary blobs with all your source or do something horrible like that.
I am guessing that git is fairly open by design---how does it fare for distributed groups for proprietary development (i.e. where the code needs to be kept secret)?
That's another people problem that Git doesn't attempt to solve. All of a Git repo's data sits inside of a single .git folder at the root of a project (or submodule). If you want to move it, just grab your working folder and off you go. There's no authentication scheme or anything - if you can cp, you can copy the repository. If you're gonna offshore, you'll need to rely on good contracts and the law to keep your code safe. Not that CC or anything else would really keep it safe anyway, I imagine - if they can see the code to edit it, they can copy/paste it into another file somewhere else.
I remember the offshore team checking code in, then I would go through and re-work the revision history to make it adhere to our policy.
Well, either that or they could have been paid to have it meet standards, with contractual obligations for them to pass reviews and all, or you pay someone on your team. The work's gotta get done either way. Unless you ignore it, but then you pay come release time, with an even bigger cost (customer confidence) come patch time after that if lots of bugs got through.