Your comment brings up a good point. Yes, it all sucks. Blogs suck, the web sucks, TV sucks, hollywood sucks, the music industry sucks. This is all true. But they suck compared to... what? People are very comfortable trashing this stuff, but I don't think they even think about what they're saying. Are they saying that the average output of these sources is of lower quality than their favorites? Well, that seems like a pretty tautological statement. Why do they keep going on about it and acting like that signifies they have good taste?
Well, I guess I can't expect much better, because people suck;)
Amen brother. Your last line there almost makes the parent post seem like a satire:)
On the other hand, few designers are cool enough to let their beautiful work appear any different than they intended. It's partly a carry-over from traditional media, partly an ego thing, and partly because they don't realize that if they were really good they'd be able to design a layout is both attractive and scalable. So instead they think that forcing a fixed view is a sign of being "good". (Note, I never said _I_ was a good designer!)
It's like with everything I guess... it takes decades to get "best practices" down, and even then, about half of all stuff is crap. They still make crap cars and crap light bulbs. I mean, it's come a long way in the past century, but you'd think we'd have gotten the fundamentals worked out.
Thanks for the info -- that's a very different usage than what we were doing, and so it certainly might have been lousy in that case. I apprecaite learning what does and doesn't work for people.
Our data is nearly all ints and varchars. We use InnoDB pretty much exclusively. (We do have one fulltext MyISAM table, but it's very low volume and not so big). And we use Perl's DBI, which is rock solid. The fact that we use perl may itself clue you in to how we run our shop;)
Anyways, I agree it's always about finding the best tool for the job, and there's never one answer for everything. I just try to correct the occasional perception that MySQL is good for nothing, which some folks seem to be convinced of.
We do actually handle a large number of images here (over 1 million), but we went with the approach you mentioned where we just keep them in the Linux filesystem and store only a reference to the metadata (filename, size, dimensions) in the database. Perhaps if we had stored the images directly in the DB, I'd be cursing MySQL today:)
That's too bad. However I sort of feel that if I was able to get it to work so well for the past five years then you must have been doing something wrong, no? Or maybe I'm just too easy to please. I'm glad Postgres is working out better for you, though. I haven't felt a need to try it, but if I became dissatisfied with MySQL, that's where I'd go next.
I'l agree with you on replication, though. It's far too brittle. I've become good at managting it, but it took a while.
And here I am still coding in perl. Nobody's enthusiastic about perl any more. But it's still my favorite web development language. Funny how the trends go.
And of course, absolutely no mention of stability, reliability, bugs, robustness, etc... what a suprise, considering that both MSSQL and MySQL are arguably far behind in those areas.
I don't usually get involved in these discussions, because it's just armchair politics. But look -- I'm an employee for a highly successful company built on top of MySQL, and it works great. Hundreds of tables, many with hundreds of millions of rows. Our primary DB averages over 1200 queries per second (yes, that's an average over several months). 15 percent of those are writes. Our system is stable. MySQL is a solid database, end of story.
Yeah, I'm tired by these flimsy pop-AI articles too. Your comment about teaching it like we teach a child is really the key, too. I think that most people are going in totally the wrong direction thinking about AI. People seem to think that intelligence is in the hardware, that if we built a "super brain" it would be super smart. But I don't think so: I think that we've already got "super brains" in our heads (in the sense that they blow away any hardware we've been able to concoct with all our high tech chips and such as of yet), but we don't know how to teach them.
Let's make pretend you had a neural net with the exact same properties as the human brain. It would be the most advanced nerual net ever constructed by a huge margin. Now what? Read it nursery rhymes? Make it watch Blues Clues? Send it to public school? And if we instead say it's twice as powerful as the human mind (whatever that means), now what? You think it'll be smarter because...?
I think good AI research is very interesting, and it teaches us about the near-magic behavior of our brains. But I don't believe in it'll lead us to a superintelligence. Maybe it could bring about a faster intelligence, but that's certainly not the same thing. That would be a neural net that reached middle-aged intelligence in only 15 years. But 100 years later do you think it would be smarter? If we extrapolate the way people learn as they age?
I don't know. I guess it comes down to this: us humans are so stupid we can't see how smart we are:)
Nothing to do with cowboys in space. It's not about genre. It's about character development and good dialogue. And please don't come back with other examples of character development and good dialogue in sci-fi. It's not the olympics you know, there's no competition for a single gold medal. We can have any number of good shows on TV in a given genre.
But when Wash bit it, I totally thought Wheadon might let others die as well. Coming from a franchise trying to restart itself, that was a balsy move, because I thought they were untouchable.
Well, that's understandable. It can be a chore for retailers to support the web.
Not really. Assuming you have a web designer on board who's made more than a couple real-world pages, and you can keep the marketing/business types from forcing the site to use annoying high-tech crap and rich media. So far, my company has pulled it off.
Feel free to complain that we're using somewhat hacky HTML 3.2, but our site works in every browser we've come across since IE/NS 4. "Keep it simple" is all it really takes. And users seem to like it better as well.
Agreed. There are situations -- rare situations -- where a light smack on the backside will clue a kid in if they aren't paying attention to stern, clear instruction. But I'm referring to the parents who use this as a first line of dicipline because they're too lazy to commnicate effectively with their kids, or those who hit hard in an effort to cause pain and release their own anger. It doesn't sound like that's what you do with your children.
As to your out of control stepson; why do you think earlier spanking would have solved his troubles? Being a stepson has effects on the child all by itself and is a difficult parenting situation. He's also markedly genetically different than your daughters, if I understand the situation. Comparing them is probably fruitless. I wouldn't blame yourself.
Here here. And this isn't just because I get all warm and fuzzy about kids. Hitting kids is just plain impractical. It's always the parents who smack their kids around that have the most out of control kids. Well, it's a close call between them and the ones who give no dicipline whatsoever. Even if I hated your kids, I'd want you to stop smacking them and learn how to manage them. Yeah, kids can be difficult, but they can be managed to a large degree. And to the degree that they can't, smacking them just seems to aggrevate the situation. Grow up and figure out how to deal with these little people you've created.
I've only spent thousands and thousands of dollars on CD's over the past fifteen years. It's really a bummer for the music biz that I can just enjoy those songs on my iPod now. I don't find that much new music to buy, and when I do it's usually indie stuff anyways. That's just reality.
Yep, it could happen. And then a few months later, after you're comfortable with your new higher bill, the corps that want to advertise stuff will offer the network more money to slip the ads back in. And why wouldn't they? This is why cable TV shows ads today. There was actually a few months back in '81 where cable TV was mostly commercial free. It just won't last as long as there is stuff to sell.
And other reviews are fact?!? I've not seen Aeon Flux, and probably won't, so I've got no agenda here. But all reviews are opinion. And all of them just point out things they liked and didn't like, which only occasionally line up with the things I liked or didn't like, and they fumble arond to justify their opinion. Professional reviewers often degrade to just throwing insults, sometimes personal ones, at the actors, writer or directors. The really good profesional ones do it well with scathing wit. But it certainly isn't any more than opinion.
HTML isn't a very good language for making Web pages.
Compared to what? Sure, I've coded enough HTML to have bumped into countless limitations and annoyances. But with all the file formats invented over the years that have been even less adopted, why are we so sure there's something so much better than HTML? Describing visual objects with words (what any web page language has to do) is hard. I've used Java and other languages to do app layout, and they're certainly not any better. Or perhaps we want to move to a drag-n-drop wysiwyg system with binary files underneath, like Flash?
Sure, there are improvements that can and should be made to HTML. But saying it's not good for making web pages is like saying food is not good for eating. Maybe there's something else better, but we've yet to see it. And it seems it's done a pretty astonishing job so far.
They must think you're stupid if you wait until after you announce your resignation to start messing with the system. If the idea is that you're going to do something maliciously, it's already too late.
That said, consider it a good thing: anything that goes wrong now can't possibly be your fault. It's safer for you and them.
10%... heh, it's a little higher than that. I wish I could dig up the pages I found all those years ago when I was looking into this topic feverishly (I'll let you work out why), but my memory is that 70% of marriages include infidelity. I think it was like 60% of men and 50% of women are unfaithful. This is based off people admitting their infidelity, so the figre could be even higher.
I agree with you that it's totally non-magical. But I don't think it's programmable, per se. I think intelligence can only develop by building a framework for learning and then letting it build itself. And despite the desire by some to label the mind as not-so-special... it is special. Intelligence is a rare thing in the universe (not to mention the planet, or even the US;)
Way, way off. As far as I'm concerned, if it's directly programmable, it's not intelligent. Intelligence is about adaptability and learning, and the more open ended the learning the more intelligence. Learning a few settings on applying heuristics to a database is about as shallow as it gets. Creating new heuristics and database schemas on the would be a little more like it.
Cheers.
Not to dismiss internet addiction entirely but...
on
Hooked On The Web
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· Score: 1
spend hours online each day, surfing the Web, trading stocks, instant messaging or blogging, and a fast-rising number are becoming addicted to Internet video games.
Er, so reading, writing, talking and playing games with friends are all bad when they're online? I think that's a bit ridiculous. Trading stocks online is either gambling or a business. The former might be a problem, the latter not so much. But again, just because it's on a computer this is somehow a problem?
Cheers.
Comments are Critical to larger scale projects
on
How to Write Comments
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Sure, well written code should read clearly and be clear about what is happening at every step. But in any larger scale project, no matter how well you make your data structures or how cleanly you encapsulate, eventually you'll code things where the motivation isn't clear.
Good comments don't talk about the code itself, they talk about why the code is doing what it's doing. What the code is doing should be obvious if it's well written, but I've never written a code file that couldn't benefit from a little english exposition.
The idea of profiting from slashdot doesn't bother me. It's that he's profiting by spamming google. I appreciate google, and I don't like people messing it up. And I don't like that one of my preferred newssites keeps encouraging it.
And what is with this "so, someone is pissing in the pool... who cares" attitude being so common today? Take a minute to think if this is a good thing. It's obviously abuse, but it seems like unless you can see how it's going to harm you in the next five minutes you don't even care? No wonder the world is such a lousy place. Grow up and realize that we're responsible for our society and our environment.
As a musician, I really don't give a fuck about making a better society.
That's too bad, since you have to live in it yourself.
I'm a musician and a programmer too. And though you imply that the programming business is like the music business it's not. In fact, the very reason you and I are making money programming and struggling on the side with music is because society does support a giant population of living wage programmers, but only a handful of lucky overpaid musicians.
So take your completely unrealistic dreams of winning the rock star lottery and "shove it up your ass". I'd rather be able to work hard at music and make an honest living than to wait for the fairy godmother at EMI to bless me with their wand so I can be on MTV cribs.
Fair enough, but is Aspergers really associated with geekdom? I think that's overreaching. I realize there are some traits that may seem common between the two, but I don't think most geeks are really borderline Aspergers. And yes, I read about the increase in Aspergers in the SF Bay Area during the dot-com bubble. Still, I maintain that Aspergers folks might be more likely to be geeks, but it is not a common trait of geekdom.
Slashdot Mirror
Your comment brings up a good point. Yes, it all sucks. Blogs suck, the web sucks, TV sucks, hollywood sucks, the music industry sucks. This is all true. But they suck compared to... what? People are very comfortable trashing this stuff, but I don't think they even think about what they're saying. Are they saying that the average output of these sources is of lower quality than their favorites? Well, that seems like a pretty tautological statement. Why do they keep going on about it and acting like that signifies they have good taste?
;)
Well, I guess I can't expect much better, because people suck
Cheers.
Amen brother. Your last line there almost makes the parent post seem like a satire :)
On the other hand, few designers are cool enough to let their beautiful work appear any different than they intended. It's partly a carry-over from traditional media, partly an ego thing, and partly because they don't realize that if they were really good they'd be able to design a layout is both attractive and scalable. So instead they think that forcing a fixed view is a sign of being "good". (Note, I never said _I_ was a good designer!)
It's like with everything I guess... it takes decades to get "best practices" down, and even then, about half of all stuff is crap. They still make crap cars and crap light bulbs. I mean, it's come a long way in the past century, but you'd think we'd have gotten the fundamentals worked out.
Cheers.
Thanks for the info -- that's a very different usage than what we were doing, and so it certainly might have been lousy in that case. I apprecaite learning what does and doesn't work for people.
;)
:)
Our data is nearly all ints and varchars. We use InnoDB pretty much exclusively. (We do have one fulltext MyISAM table, but it's very low volume and not so big). And we use Perl's DBI, which is rock solid. The fact that we use perl may itself clue you in to how we run our shop
Anyways, I agree it's always about finding the best tool for the job, and there's never one answer for everything. I just try to correct the occasional perception that MySQL is good for nothing, which some folks seem to be convinced of.
We do actually handle a large number of images here (over 1 million), but we went with the approach you mentioned where we just keep them in the Linux filesystem and store only a reference to the metadata (filename, size, dimensions) in the database. Perhaps if we had stored the images directly in the DB, I'd be cursing MySQL today
Cheers.
That's too bad. However I sort of feel that if I was able to get it to work so well for the past five years then you must have been doing something wrong, no? Or maybe I'm just too easy to please. I'm glad Postgres is working out better for you, though. I haven't felt a need to try it, but if I became dissatisfied with MySQL, that's where I'd go next.
I'l agree with you on replication, though. It's far too brittle. I've become good at managting it, but it took a while.
Cheers.
And here I am still coding in perl. Nobody's enthusiastic about perl any more. But it's still my favorite web development language. Funny how the trends go.
Cheers.
And of course, absolutely no mention of stability, reliability, bugs, robustness, etc... what a suprise, considering that both MSSQL and MySQL are arguably far behind in those areas.
I don't usually get involved in these discussions, because it's just armchair politics. But look -- I'm an employee for a highly successful company built on top of MySQL, and it works great. Hundreds of tables, many with hundreds of millions of rows. Our primary DB averages over 1200 queries per second (yes, that's an average over several months). 15 percent of those are writes. Our system is stable. MySQL is a solid database, end of story.
Cheers.
Yeah, I'm tired by these flimsy pop-AI articles too. Your comment about teaching it like we teach a child is really the key, too. I think that most people are going in totally the wrong direction thinking about AI. People seem to think that intelligence is in the hardware, that if we built a "super brain" it would be super smart. But I don't think so: I think that we've already got "super brains" in our heads (in the sense that they blow away any hardware we've been able to concoct with all our high tech chips and such as of yet), but we don't know how to teach them.
:)
Let's make pretend you had a neural net with the exact same properties as the human brain. It would be the most advanced nerual net ever constructed by a huge margin. Now what? Read it nursery rhymes? Make it watch Blues Clues? Send it to public school? And if we instead say it's twice as powerful as the human mind (whatever that means), now what? You think it'll be smarter because...?
I think good AI research is very interesting, and it teaches us about the near-magic behavior of our brains. But I don't believe in it'll lead us to a superintelligence. Maybe it could bring about a faster intelligence, but that's certainly not the same thing. That would be a neural net that reached middle-aged intelligence in only 15 years. But 100 years later do you think it would be smarter? If we extrapolate the way people learn as they age?
I don't know. I guess it comes down to this: us humans are so stupid we can't see how smart we are
Cheers.
Nothing to do with cowboys in space. It's not about genre. It's about character development and good dialogue. And please don't come back with other examples of character development and good dialogue in sci-fi. It's not the olympics you know, there's no competition for a single gold medal. We can have any number of good shows on TV in a given genre.
Oh, wait... I guess we can't.
Cheers.
Well, call me an idiot. (waits). Thanks.
But when Wash bit it, I totally thought Wheadon might let others die as well. Coming from a franchise trying to restart itself, that was a balsy move, because I thought they were untouchable.
Cheers.
Well, that's understandable. It can be a chore for retailers to support the web.
Not really. Assuming you have a web designer on board who's made more than a couple real-world pages, and you can keep the marketing/business types from forcing the site to use annoying high-tech crap and rich media. So far, my company has pulled it off.
Feel free to complain that we're using somewhat hacky HTML 3.2, but our site works in every browser we've come across since IE/NS 4. "Keep it simple" is all it really takes. And users seem to like it better as well.
Cheers.
Agreed. There are situations -- rare situations -- where a light smack on the backside will clue a kid in if they aren't paying attention to stern, clear instruction. But I'm referring to the parents who use this as a first line of dicipline because they're too lazy to commnicate effectively with their kids, or those who hit hard in an effort to cause pain and release their own anger. It doesn't sound like that's what you do with your children.
As to your out of control stepson; why do you think earlier spanking would have solved his troubles? Being a stepson has effects on the child all by itself and is a difficult parenting situation. He's also markedly genetically different than your daughters, if I understand the situation. Comparing them is probably fruitless. I wouldn't blame yourself.
Cheers.
Here here. And this isn't just because I get all warm and fuzzy about kids. Hitting kids is just plain impractical. It's always the parents who smack their kids around that have the most out of control kids. Well, it's a close call between them and the ones who give no dicipline whatsoever. Even if I hated your kids, I'd want you to stop smacking them and learn how to manage them. Yeah, kids can be difficult, but they can be managed to a large degree. And to the degree that they can't, smacking them just seems to aggrevate the situation. Grow up and figure out how to deal with these little people you've created.
Cheers.
I've only spent thousands and thousands of dollars on CD's over the past fifteen years. It's really a bummer for the music biz that I can just enjoy those songs on my iPod now. I don't find that much new music to buy, and when I do it's usually indie stuff anyways. That's just reality.
Cheers.
Yep, it could happen. And then a few months later, after you're comfortable with your new higher bill, the corps that want to advertise stuff will offer the network more money to slip the ads back in. And why wouldn't they? This is why cable TV shows ads today. There was actually a few months back in '81 where cable TV was mostly commercial free. It just won't last as long as there is stuff to sell.
Cheers.
This isn't a review. Its an opinion . . .
And other reviews are fact?!? I've not seen Aeon Flux, and probably won't, so I've got no agenda here. But all reviews are opinion. And all of them just point out things they liked and didn't like, which only occasionally line up with the things I liked or didn't like, and they fumble arond to justify their opinion. Professional reviewers often degrade to just throwing insults, sometimes personal ones, at the actors, writer or directors. The really good profesional ones do it well with scathing wit. But it certainly isn't any more than opinion.
Cheers.
HTML isn't a very good language for making Web pages.
Compared to what? Sure, I've coded enough HTML to have bumped into countless limitations and annoyances. But with all the file formats invented over the years that have been even less adopted, why are we so sure there's something so much better than HTML? Describing visual objects with words (what any web page language has to do) is hard. I've used Java and other languages to do app layout, and they're certainly not any better. Or perhaps we want to move to a drag-n-drop wysiwyg system with binary files underneath, like Flash?
Sure, there are improvements that can and should be made to HTML. But saying it's not good for making web pages is like saying food is not good for eating. Maybe there's something else better, but we've yet to see it. And it seems it's done a pretty astonishing job so far.
Cheers.
They must think you're stupid if you wait until after you announce your resignation to start messing with the system. If the idea is that you're going to do something maliciously, it's already too late.
That said, consider it a good thing: anything that goes wrong now can't possibly be your fault. It's safer for you and them.
Cheers.
10%... heh, it's a little higher than that. I wish I could dig up the pages I found all those years ago when I was looking into this topic feverishly (I'll let you work out why), but my memory is that 70% of marriages include infidelity. I think it was like 60% of men and 50% of women are unfaithful. This is based off people admitting their infidelity, so the figre could be even higher.
Cheers.
I agree with you that it's totally non-magical. But I don't think it's programmable, per se. I think intelligence can only develop by building a framework for learning and then letting it build itself. And despite the desire by some to label the mind as not-so-special... it is special. Intelligence is a rare thing in the universe (not to mention the planet, or even the US ;)
Cheers
how close are we to the real thing?
Way, way off. As far as I'm concerned, if it's directly programmable, it's not intelligent. Intelligence is about adaptability and learning, and the more open ended the learning the more intelligence. Learning a few settings on applying heuristics to a database is about as shallow as it gets. Creating new heuristics and database schemas on the would be a little more like it.
Cheers.
spend hours online each day, surfing the Web, trading stocks, instant messaging or blogging, and a fast-rising number are becoming addicted to Internet video games.
Er, so reading, writing, talking and playing games with friends are all bad when they're online? I think that's a bit ridiculous. Trading stocks online is either gambling or a business. The former might be a problem, the latter not so much. But again, just because it's on a computer this is somehow a problem?
Cheers.
Sure, well written code should read clearly and be clear about what is happening at every step. But in any larger scale project, no matter how well you make your data structures or how cleanly you encapsulate, eventually you'll code things where the motivation isn't clear.
Good comments don't talk about the code itself, they talk about why the code is doing what it's doing. What the code is doing should be obvious if it's well written, but I've never written a code file that couldn't benefit from a little english exposition.
Cheers.
The idea of profiting from slashdot doesn't bother me. It's that he's profiting by spamming google. I appreciate google, and I don't like people messing it up. And I don't like that one of my preferred newssites keeps encouraging it.
And what is with this "so, someone is pissing in the pool... who cares" attitude being so common today? Take a minute to think if this is a good thing. It's obviously abuse, but it seems like unless you can see how it's going to harm you in the next five minutes you don't even care? No wonder the world is such a lousy place. Grow up and realize that we're responsible for our society and our environment.
Cheers.
As a musician, I really don't give a fuck about making a better society.
That's too bad, since you have to live in it yourself.
I'm a musician and a programmer too. And though you imply that the programming business is like the music business it's not. In fact, the very reason you and I are making money programming and struggling on the side with music is because society does support a giant population of living wage programmers, but only a handful of lucky overpaid musicians.
So take your completely unrealistic dreams of winning the rock star lottery and "shove it up your ass". I'd rather be able to work hard at music and make an honest living than to wait for the fairy godmother at EMI to bless me with their wand so I can be on MTV cribs.
Cheers.
Fair enough, but is Aspergers really associated with geekdom? I think that's overreaching. I realize there are some traits that may seem common between the two, but I don't think most geeks are really borderline Aspergers. And yes, I read about the increase in Aspergers in the SF Bay Area during the dot-com bubble. Still, I maintain that Aspergers folks might be more likely to be geeks, but it is not a common trait of geekdom.
Cheers.