Re:Harvey to Two Face felt forced
on
Batman Discussion
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Hmmmm, you have a point. Still, even with "just a little push," it didn't seem like his personality up to that point was that fragile. Of course, my argument goes against my other nitpick about the movie, which is that the Joker spent a lot of time explaining his motivations to the audience rather than leaving it up to them to deduce. Can I have my cake and eat it too?;-)
Harvey to Two Face felt forced
on
Batman Discussion
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
First I want to say I loved it, easily the best movie I've seen this year. Nolan did a great job at keeping it dark and gritty, and I can be satisfied with that alone. Some of the aspects of the movie really did seem forced though. For one thing it seemed like Harvey made the transition to Two Face very quickly. Yes, there he went through a lot, but his character never gave off a sense that it affected him all that much until the end. There was only one scene to really show that he might've been unhinged somewhat before becoming Two Face, and even then he seemed to be very much in control. It just seemed like there wasn't enough foreshadowing that he was capable of being a true monster. Aaron Eckhart gave a great performance, but I think if Harvey had been given more a backstory (such as how they introduced him in Batman: TAS, talking to a shrink) the overall effect would've been more profound.
You make a lot of good points, and I certainly understand where you are coming from regarding refactoring, use of OO principles, and design patterns. It's great if your shop has the time and money to spend refactoring code, but for us at least that is a secondary goal and I'd imagine that to be the case for any number of other shops as well.
I know what it is like to step into someone else's code (or as you pointed out, your own after a long period of time has passed), and while a full API is definitely useful to get to know the code it can suck when you start debugging it. Walking through call after nested method call can be a nightmare, especially if the codebase has been around for a while. I guess you take the good with the bad though.
I don't disagree with you completely, after all it sounds like your shop has had a lot of time to refine its coding standards. I'm sure there are plenty of valid reasons for the rules that you pointed out, I just disagree with dogmatic approaches that focus more on idealistic standards than actually getting work done. I'm not saying your shop is or isn't dogmatic in its approach, but you hopefully get my meaning.
I'm admittedly not an expert on compile optimization, so what you're saying could very well be true. Still, even if the compiler will handle it behind the scenes I don't see any reason not to use multiple return statements where they make sense (arguments about readability aside).
First let me just say I love Checkstyle. It is a very handy tool, and I highly recommend it. That being said I really disagree with some of the rules you've stated there.
limit the length of the method to be visible on one 1280x1024 screen; if it's longer it's probably handy to extract smaller methods from it - which will be far more easy to read.
Repeat after me: The method will be as long as it needs to be. While I agree with this idea in principle (in my experience) it usually doesn't hold up in a live environment. If a method can be easily broken into separate methods, great. If not, so be it. Sometimes things are complicated enough without having to jump all around the file finding particular methods.
similarly: set a file length limit (e.g. 1000 lines should be enough for everybody)
Same argument as above, but at the project level instead of the class/file level.
an upper limit on the allowed number of method parameters seems to be a good idea as well
If you have to enforce a rule like this chances are you have bigger problems than just correctly formatting your code. This is more of a design issue than anything else, and anyone who is generating code with method calls that take ungodly amounts of parameters needs to be straightened out rather quickly.
avoid star, redundant and unused imports
Most modern IDEs will notify you that an import is unused or redundant, Eclipse is one of these.
a major one: Checkstyle can warn if it discovers a typical coding problem (of course this has some false positives but better to be on the safe side): double checked locking, lack of hashcode when overriding equals, switch fallthroughs, illegal catches and throws, lack of super.clone() or super.finalize(), etc.
I've always found it to be very annoying when Checkstyle does this type of check. If I've written something a particular way I (usually) have a good reason for it. It is useful every now and then, but for the most part I just want to tell it I know what the hell I'm doing so leave me be.
you can also constraint the number of returns from methods (we found it to be very useful to set this to 1, using a result variable everywhere else - it's far easier to get hold of the code flow then)
I'm of two minds on this. On the one hand I am on board with the "one way in, one way out" approach, but on the other hand it can be more efficient to simply exit the method when you're done doing whatever you need to. Creating a return variable is also taking up more space in memory, and having to follow the method to its completion can be time-consuming, especially when you need to check that nothing else is happening with the return variable before it exits.
Hmmmm, they must have different pricing in different locations. At the Mill Run location (Hilliard, OH), it's $7.00 normally and $5 for matinee/children/seniors.
Wow, that's outrageous. We only paid $7.50 because it was a Friday night showing at the local Regal Cinemas. Lately we've been going to the Movie Tavern for their matinee. $5.00/person and you get lunch/dinner (extra of course) with it. I was really impressed with the place; clean, affordable, good service, decent food. The seats are padded office chairs and they have a bar in front of every row to place your food on. If you need a refill you flip a switch in front of you and they bring it out. I think if more places like this existed theaters as a whole wouldn't get such a bad rap. Of course, with their business model they have all the problems of a movie theater as well as all of the problems of a restaurant, but they seem to be doing very well from what I can tell.
Guillermo del Toro's influence in this one. He does a great job of bringing fantasy world's to life, and I'm sure he'll be the perfect fit for The Hobbit.
I enjoyed the movie overall, but at times it felt like they tried to hard to be funny. My wife and I both agreed that if it was just a little darker it would've been better, but it was still worth the $7.50/ticket to see it in theaters.
For user-generated content, the users are the "rights owners".
It depends on what the content is. If it is content which a user has created on their own, then sure, they're the right owners. If we're talking about a clip (of something that wasn't created by the user) that has been uploaded to youtube or a similar site then no, the user is not the rights owner, but it could be fair use. Just because you upload something to the Internet doesn't mean you own it.
The Viacom decision is about determining what viewers actually view, and whether big business content is more (or less) popular than other content.
No, it's not. It's about Viacom believing that Google/Youtube is making money by allowing users to upload content which they consider to be theirs.
"Hello, this is Homer Simpson aka Chunkylover53! The court has ordered me to IM every person in town to apologize for my botnet scheme. I'm sorry. If you can find it in your heart to forgive me, send one dollar to : Sorry Dude, 742 Evergreen Terrace, Springfield. You have the power!"
I like this series as a whole
on
Head First C#
·
· Score: 1
but this particular book doesn't do anyone any favors unless they are an absolute beginner. I picked it up when I started my current position (.NET shop, lots of C# and *shudder* classic ASP using VBScript) mainly because their books on Design Patterns and Servlets and JSPs were decent. I quickly discovered that if you know just about any other C-style variant that C# is a snap to pick up. This book does a great job of hand-holding and providing lots of examples of classic OO concepts, but I would never use it as a desk reference. Their style works very well for subjects which take some thought to wrap your head around (such as design patterns), but there is entirely too much noise to signal for learning a language for my taste. Personally I'd rather have quick access to the language reference and the pertinent APIs, but I suppose if someone was just getting started this book might be appropriate.
Wow man, you're hard to impress. Considering that most cars on the road only get about 20 - 30mpg I would say 235mpg is still pretty good. The article also points out that that they could produce 1,000/year of these to start with if they wanted to, whereas the vehicle you linked to seems to be no more than than a one-shot trophy winner. Don't get me wrong, they're both very cool concept cars, but I don't think one should be sneered at just because it doesn't meet your particular standard.
Also, is it just me or do both of these look like something someone could buy at the local adult store rather than drive down the street in?
Of course "hearing" is based on the detection of vibrations in the surrounding medium - a sense that is very antiquated indeed - and available to even some of the most primitive organisms. On Earth.
How exactly is hearing antiquated? Lets see:
Predator/prey/Danger detection
Territorial alarm mechanism (coupled with the ability to vocalize of course).
Used in mating rituals.
The list goes on. As far as how difficult it would be use hearing on a different world, I find that hard to believe as well. Given that sound is just vibrations traveling through a medium any planet with an atmosphere could conceivably have life that utilizes hearing for just such reasons as those listed above. In fact I would say that the ability to hear could very well be universal (or nearly so) in "advanced" lifeforms (advanced in the sense that they are more evolved than an amoeba for example).
And then we can argue that the "screeches", etc, are merely the way we choose to make our computers interpret this data.
Yes, because our brains are wired to listen for certain patterns, so what you're saying is correct. Of course, this could be true of a variety of lifeforms, so it could very well sound like that to them too. It would be interesting to encounter a lifeform that listens to those "screeches" and interprets them as, say, War and Peace (or the ET version of it), but I think it would be highly unlikely.
I know I shouldn't even be responding to you at this point, but...
I just said what I have observed by myself.
I don't have anything of real value to back up my POV
There is a word for this, it's "opinion." I don't begrudge you your opinion, but don't be surprised when you air it over the internet in a public forum and someone responds negatively to it.
Well, even if I had anything serious to back me up, you'd just tell it's bullshit, fake, or something along that, because you believe in what you like to believe in (so does everyone, me included).
I believe in science, facts and theories. Show me some of those and I might be more inclined to listen to you.
***A human mind is not a machine we can disassemble and take a look at to find out how it works or what's wrong with it***.
I'm sorry, but I'm sure psychologists and neurologists around the world would disagree with you.
If you want to dig up someone's deepest subconscious complexes, then you need not him to have a session with a psychotherapist, but for both of you to drink a few bottles of beer.
Remind me never to go drinking with you.
Insert your rambling piece about assisting lunatics with knives that I'm not going to dignify with a repost here.
Wow man, you're good. Have you ever thought of becoming a psychologist?
Many psychologists can't tell a shit about what's wrong with a guy
Get a degree in psychology
So which is it? Are they full of shit or not, and if so why are you advocating psychology?
learn Huna, or better yet - screw formal studies, *be effective*, and we may talk.
I had to go and look up Huna (Thank you Wikipedia, and kudos to you I guess for getting me to research it.), and lo and behold it looks like I made a hole in one in my first post! Look man, believe whatever you want (because as you said that's what everyone does), but don't expect the world to bend to your point of view, especially when the fact don't line up the way you would like them to.
Admittedly I do have a somewhat emotional involvement in the situation (I suppose according to the GP's logic I should worried about cancer myself now:-P), but there is evidence that the amount of pollution these companies produce can and do seriously affect the health of individuals who live around them. I provided the links as an illustration of this, so you may want to go back and follow them. I'll even provide you with another, just to drive home my point. As far as having no reason to suspect it wasn't natural, you can't seriously ask me to believe that lead levels like that are normal. Why do you think they don't use lead paint anymore? There is far, far more evidence pointing to pollution causing (some, not all) cancer than there is for any kind of traumatic psychological events that the GP is blathering about.
Not to be rude but you, good sir, are talking out of your ass. My brother was 14 when he died of pancreatic cancer. He wasn't suffering from "psychological conditions," he wasn't "unwilling to forgive someone" for some imaginary event that caused his body to somehow psychosomatically create the cancer that killed him. You want to know what I think caused his cancer? I think it was Doe Run and Dow Chemical polluting the crap out of the everything around them. We lived in Herculaneum, MO for the first 10 years of his life, and it wouldn't surprise me in the least if that was the cause. Your touchy-feely approach on this smacks of New Age "science" with nothing to back it up. "Oh it was their own feelings that did it!" Right. I suppose next you're going to start telling people that Thetans are causing all the world's ills.
I thought the bill had already passed, but apparently the last vote was just to stop a filibuster. Now I have more than a week to get my hopes up only to have them dashed again!
I'm nearing the end of my (yeesh) 5th year of my CS degree, and I think the best experiences I've had which are anything close to real world are the practicum courses I've taken. I'm currently a project leader in my capstone class, and I have certainly run into many of the situations which you've described. We were handed a classroom scheduling application which was originally written in VB.NET (of all things), rewritten in C# (not much better), and is now being ported to Java (simply because that is the only thing that the IS staff at the university will support at the moment). I've already had the requirements change on me once, and I now know the joys of having to manage a team of developers who are located in geographically disparate locations (I'm talking continents here, not states). Despite the many problems that come up I wouldn't trade these experiences for any amount of typical classroom programming exercises.
I think any CS program worth its salt has these types of classes in one form or another, but I don't believe that they provide the kind of experience you need to get ahead by themselves. A lot of what you're talking about (maintaining code, interacting with users, etc) can really only be learned once you're in the trenches (I think I'm qualified to say this, if only minimally, as I've recently entered the industry), but the classes still provide a foundation to build on.
It depends, what demographic are you aiming at? Something like this would probably work well for the same crowd that uses the usual swath of social websites (Mostly twenty-somethings who are fairly tech savvy) that are used to communicating via email, text messaging, and IM. On the other hand this method would obviously not play well with, say, senior citizens. Of course, there is no reason to think that this method would be the end-all be-all of communication, but it might help to bring in specific demographics. It all depends on what your intent is, and who you are using it for.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmmmm, you have a point. Still, even with "just a little push," it didn't seem like his personality up to that point was that fragile. Of course, my argument goes against my other nitpick about the movie, which is that the Joker spent a lot of time explaining his motivations to the audience rather than leaving it up to them to deduce. Can I have my cake and eat it too? ;-)
First I want to say I loved it, easily the best movie I've seen this year. Nolan did a great job at keeping it dark and gritty, and I can be satisfied with that alone. Some of the aspects of the movie really did seem forced though. For one thing it seemed like Harvey made the transition to Two Face very quickly. Yes, there he went through a lot, but his character never gave off a sense that it affected him all that much until the end. There was only one scene to really show that he might've been unhinged somewhat before becoming Two Face, and even then he seemed to be very much in control. It just seemed like there wasn't enough foreshadowing that he was capable of being a true monster. Aaron Eckhart gave a great performance, but I think if Harvey had been given more a backstory (such as how they introduced him in Batman: TAS, talking to a shrink) the overall effect would've been more profound.
You make a lot of good points, and I certainly understand where you are coming from regarding refactoring, use of OO principles, and design patterns. It's great if your shop has the time and money to spend refactoring code, but for us at least that is a secondary goal and I'd imagine that to be the case for any number of other shops as well.
I know what it is like to step into someone else's code (or as you pointed out, your own after a long period of time has passed), and while a full API is definitely useful to get to know the code it can suck when you start debugging it. Walking through call after nested method call can be a nightmare, especially if the codebase has been around for a while. I guess you take the good with the bad though.
I don't disagree with you completely, after all it sounds like your shop has had a lot of time to refine its coding standards. I'm sure there are plenty of valid reasons for the rules that you pointed out, I just disagree with dogmatic approaches that focus more on idealistic standards than actually getting work done. I'm not saying your shop is or isn't dogmatic in its approach, but you hopefully get my meaning.
I'm admittedly not an expert on compile optimization, so what you're saying could very well be true. Still, even if the compiler will handle it behind the scenes I don't see any reason not to use multiple return statements where they make sense (arguments about readability aside).
First let me just say I love Checkstyle. It is a very handy tool, and I highly recommend it. That being said I really disagree with some of the rules you've stated there.
Repeat after me: The method will be as long as it needs to be. While I agree with this idea in principle (in my experience) it usually doesn't hold up in a live environment. If a method can be easily broken into separate methods, great. If not, so be it. Sometimes things are complicated enough without having to jump all around the file finding particular methods.
Same argument as above, but at the project level instead of the class/file level.
If you have to enforce a rule like this chances are you have bigger problems than just correctly formatting your code. This is more of a design issue than anything else, and anyone who is generating code with method calls that take ungodly amounts of parameters needs to be straightened out rather quickly.
Most modern IDEs will notify you that an import is unused or redundant, Eclipse is one of these.
I've always found it to be very annoying when Checkstyle does this type of check. If I've written something a particular way I (usually) have a good reason for it. It is useful every now and then, but for the most part I just want to tell it I know what the hell I'm doing so leave me be.
I'm of two minds on this. On the one hand I am on board with the "one way in, one way out" approach, but on the other hand it can be more efficient to simply exit the method when you're done doing whatever you need to. Creating a return variable is also taking up more space in memory, and having to follow the method to its completion can be time-consuming, especially when you need to check that nothing else is happening with the return variable before it exits.
I thought we already had a name for that? Most people call it the internet.
Hmmmm, they must have different pricing in different locations. At the Mill Run location (Hilliard, OH), it's $7.00 normally and $5 for matinee/children/seniors.
Wow, that's outrageous. We only paid $7.50 because it was a Friday night showing at the local Regal Cinemas. Lately we've been going to the Movie Tavern for their matinee. $5.00/person and you get lunch/dinner (extra of course) with it. I was really impressed with the place; clean, affordable, good service, decent food. The seats are padded office chairs and they have a bar in front of every row to place your food on. If you need a refill you flip a switch in front of you and they bring it out. I think if more places like this existed theaters as a whole wouldn't get such a bad rap. Of course, with their business model they have all the problems of a movie theater as well as all of the problems of a restaurant, but they seem to be doing very well from what I can tell.
Guillermo del Toro's influence in this one. He does a great job of bringing fantasy world's to life, and I'm sure he'll be the perfect fit for The Hobbit.
I enjoyed the movie overall, but at times it felt like they tried to hard to be funny. My wife and I both agreed that if it was just a little darker it would've been better, but it was still worth the $7.50/ticket to see it in theaters.
For user-generated content, the users are the "rights owners".
It depends on what the content is. If it is content which a user has created on their own, then sure, they're the right owners. If we're talking about a clip (of something that wasn't created by the user) that has been uploaded to youtube or a similar site then no, the user is not the rights owner, but it could be fair use. Just because you upload something to the Internet doesn't mean you own it.
The Viacom decision is about determining what viewers actually view, and whether big business content is more (or less) popular than other content.
No, it's not. It's about Viacom believing that Google/Youtube is making money by allowing users to upload content which they consider to be theirs.
Of course! It's the state bordered by Ohio, Nevada, Maine, and Kentucky. You know the one!
"Hello, this is Homer Simpson aka Chunkylover53! The court has ordered me to IM every person in town to apologize for my botnet scheme. I'm sorry. If you can find it in your heart to forgive me, send one dollar to : Sorry Dude, 742 Evergreen Terrace, Springfield. You have the power!"
but this particular book doesn't do anyone any favors unless they are an absolute beginner. I picked it up when I started my current position (.NET shop, lots of C# and *shudder* classic ASP using VBScript) mainly because their books on Design Patterns and Servlets and JSPs were decent. I quickly discovered that if you know just about any other C-style variant that C# is a snap to pick up. This book does a great job of hand-holding and providing lots of examples of classic OO concepts, but I would never use it as a desk reference. Their style works very well for subjects which take some thought to wrap your head around (such as design patterns), but there is entirely too much noise to signal for learning a language for my taste. Personally I'd rather have quick access to the language reference and the pertinent APIs, but I suppose if someone was just getting started this book might be appropriate.
Haha, I suppose I could've phrased that better. I should've said SETI@home sends message of impending doom.......
.
.
.
.
for Arecibo Observatory budget.
Wow man, you're hard to impress. Considering that most cars on the road only get about 20 - 30mpg I would say 235mpg is still pretty good. The article also points out that that they could produce 1,000/year of these to start with if they wanted to, whereas the vehicle you linked to seems to be no more than than a one-shot trophy winner. Don't get me wrong, they're both very cool concept cars, but I don't think one should be sneered at just because it doesn't meet your particular standard.
Also, is it just me or do both of these look like something someone could buy at the local adult store rather than drive down the street in?
Hmmmmm, I see what you mean. Poor word choice if so... Or maybe antiquated doesn't mean what I think it means :-P
How exactly is hearing antiquated? Lets see:
The list goes on. As far as how difficult it would be use hearing on a different world, I find that hard to believe as well. Given that sound is just vibrations traveling through a medium any planet with an atmosphere could conceivably have life that utilizes hearing for just such reasons as those listed above. In fact I would say that the ability to hear could very well be universal (or nearly so) in "advanced" lifeforms (advanced in the sense that they are more evolved than an amoeba for example).
Yes, because our brains are wired to listen for certain patterns, so what you're saying is correct. Of course, this could be true of a variety of lifeforms, so it could very well sound like that to them too. It would be interesting to encounter a lifeform that listens to those "screeches" and interprets them as, say, War and Peace (or the ET version of it), but I think it would be highly unlikely.
I know I shouldn't even be responding to you at this point, but...
There is a word for this, it's "opinion." I don't begrudge you your opinion, but don't be surprised when you air it over the internet in a public forum and someone responds negatively to it.
I believe in science, facts and theories. Show me some of those and I might be more inclined to listen to you.
I'm sorry, but I'm sure psychologists and neurologists around the world would disagree with you.
Remind me never to go drinking with you.
Insert your rambling piece about assisting lunatics with knives that I'm not going to dignify with a repost here.
Wow man, you're good. Have you ever thought of becoming a psychologist?
So which is it? Are they full of shit or not, and if so why are you advocating psychology?
I had to go and look up Huna (Thank you Wikipedia, and kudos to you I guess for getting me to research it.), and lo and behold it looks like I made a hole in one in my first post! Look man, believe whatever you want (because as you said that's what everyone does), but don't expect the world to bend to your point of view, especially when the fact don't line up the way you would like them to.
One datapoint does not nullify a generalization.
Yes, because we all know how accurate generalizations tend to be.
It's been known for years that people who are lonely and/or stressed have higher incidences of cancer than those who are not.
Care to provide a link to a study or any kind of scientific evidence to back up this statement?
Admittedly I do have a somewhat emotional involvement in the situation (I suppose according to the GP's logic I should worried about cancer myself now :-P), but there is evidence that the amount of pollution these companies produce can and do seriously affect the health of individuals who live around them. I provided the links as an illustration of this, so you may want to go back and follow them. I'll even provide you with another, just to drive home my point. As far as having no reason to suspect it wasn't natural, you can't seriously ask me to believe that lead levels like that are normal. Why do you think they don't use lead paint anymore? There is far, far more evidence pointing to pollution causing (some, not all) cancer than there is for any kind of traumatic psychological events that the GP is blathering about.
Not to be rude but you, good sir, are talking out of your ass. My brother was 14 when he died of pancreatic cancer. He wasn't suffering from "psychological conditions," he wasn't "unwilling to forgive someone" for some imaginary event that caused his body to somehow psychosomatically create the cancer that killed him. You want to know what I think caused his cancer? I think it was Doe Run and Dow Chemical polluting the crap out of the everything around them. We lived in Herculaneum, MO for the first 10 years of his life, and it wouldn't surprise me in the least if that was the cause. Your touchy-feely approach on this smacks of New Age "science" with nothing to back it up. "Oh it was their own feelings that did it!" Right. I suppose next you're going to start telling people that Thetans are causing all the world's ills.
I thought the bill had already passed, but apparently the last vote was just to stop a filibuster. Now I have more than a week to get my hopes up only to have them dashed again!
I'm nearing the end of my (yeesh) 5th year of my CS degree, and I think the best experiences I've had which are anything close to real world are the practicum courses I've taken. I'm currently a project leader in my capstone class, and I have certainly run into many of the situations which you've described. We were handed a classroom scheduling application which was originally written in VB.NET (of all things), rewritten in C# (not much better), and is now being ported to Java (simply because that is the only thing that the IS staff at the university will support at the moment). I've already had the requirements change on me once, and I now know the joys of having to manage a team of developers who are located in geographically disparate locations (I'm talking continents here, not states). Despite the many problems that come up I wouldn't trade these experiences for any amount of typical classroom programming exercises.
I think any CS program worth its salt has these types of classes in one form or another, but I don't believe that they provide the kind of experience you need to get ahead by themselves. A lot of what you're talking about (maintaining code, interacting with users, etc) can really only be learned once you're in the trenches (I think I'm qualified to say this, if only minimally, as I've recently entered the industry), but the classes still provide a foundation to build on.
that we shouldn't expect to welcome any robot overlords anytime soon?
It depends, what demographic are you aiming at? Something like this would probably work well for the same crowd that uses the usual swath of social websites (Mostly twenty-somethings who are fairly tech savvy) that are used to communicating via email, text messaging, and IM. On the other hand this method would obviously not play well with, say, senior citizens. Of course, there is no reason to think that this method would be the end-all be-all of communication, but it might help to bring in specific demographics. It all depends on what your intent is, and who you are using it for.