It never ceases to amaze me how posters on Slashdot feel qualified to comment on something when it's really obvious that they don't know the first thing about it.
Here's my suggestion: Actually find out what Refactoring is about before posting this kind of nonsense. It's a well-documented procedure and is used by a great many professional software developers. It's not about "kicking crap code to extend its life a bit longer". If it involves crap code at all, it's about making it not crap.
What would you do with crap code if you weren't going to refactor it into something better?
> Most comments I do are for the sanity of my future self/others, who are not perfect and are > not experts at coding. (eg 6months of simple programming from college)
I'm not advocating having no comments at all, which seems to be the way everyone's reading what I said. I'm simply saying that if you find you need to write two lines of comments per line of code something is definitely wrong. I used to write code like this, and it was a living nightmare to update later on.
Code sensibly; choose sensible variable and function names, comment at the beginning of function definitions explaining the purpose of the function and at the beginning of each logical block - a for loop, for example. If there are a couple of lines which need additional explanation, a comment there. I find that this works, and code I have written in this way is still actively in use and maintainable by others some six years on.
Again, the closer your code is to being self-documenting the easier it will be to maintain, irrespective of how many comments are in it. There is little worse, in my opinion, than finding code like: a = a + b;// Add a to b and store the result in a
A well-commented line, to be sure. But what additional information does the comment pass on? If you're writing two comment lines per line of code, I can't see how you're avoiding stuff like this.
There is a school of thought which contends that if your code requires that many comments, it hasn't been very well-written. Good code should be almost self-documenting - an excess of comments can swamp the code and make it just as difficult to understand, if not more so, than the same code with no comments at all.
Additionally, if you're spending twice as much time writing comments as you are writing code, then only one third of your time is being immediately productive. I appreciate the long-term value of well-documented code, but also tend to believe that brevity is the soul of clarity. And with that in mind, I'll shut up now.
It's not based on MPEG. The press release mentions the MPEG decoder as being their first open source release - it doesn't say that the new library is for anything other than Motion JPEG. After all, if you already have an MPEG player library in the open source domain, where's the benefit from releasing another one?
You don't feel, then, that an opinion carries more weight if it has someone's real name attached to it? I know that there are valid reasons for posting anonymously, but someone who isn't prepared to stand up and be identified with the view they're expressing cannot expect those views to have as much of an impact. Shouts from the crowd are always more likely to be passed over.
Not that anonymous views are in any way less valid; just that they're less likely to make an impact.
I think the dangerous trend is to rely on benchmarks at all for anything. If you buy a system based entirely on a benchmark result, the odds are good that unless your setup is identical to that used for the benchmark, the performance you get will bear little to no relation to the benchmark anyway.
Instead of comparing server speeds, why don't they run these tests for a month and compare time-between-reboots? For web sites, guaranteed uptime is far more important, given that any half-powerful web server can saturate your outgoing bandwidth anyway. You're not going to care how many pages/minute your server's capable of serving if it's too busy rebooting to serve any pages at all.
That's where it's all going to go, same as always. Already games are being shipped on multiple CDs or on DVD. This technology ensures you can go on installing them to your hard drive and enjoying the benefits of low seek rates and high retrieval speeds for all those MBs of data modern games throw about.
Anyway, even if the common user doesn't have a use for 216GB, it'll put downward pressure on the price of 108GB drives, and that has to be a good thing:)
BT are legally liable to put a stop to nuisance calls if they continue, but they are not liable for the content of those calls - if this case result were applied in the telecoms industry, BT would be liable if someone rang up someone else and told them lies about you.
Usenet is a steaming morass of defamation, and if someone were determined to post such things, and knew that if they did it would be the ISP and not them held liable, how is this ruling going to stop it? --
Well, you'd hope so. But if all they're doing is clamping the base, I wouldn't trust that relatively flimsy piece of plastic to hold the screen at that kind of angle.
*muffled scream* "What was that?" "Oh, Bob's relaxing at his desk again." --
What's to stop your monitor toppling off this thing and breaking your ribs? I have a 19" screen. That would be really painful. --
Re:Linux kernel is his; nothing more
on
GNU Inside?
·
· Score: 2
Linus worked in the Linux kernel; nothing more. The kernel is his, no problem; the typical Linux system is not his; and he is not in a position to claim anything but the kernel.
So now you're back to calling it GNU/XFree86/Cheeseplant/Spanner/Linux or whatever. If you're taking the line that the GNU project should be mentioned because of its contribution, then all contributors should be so mentioned, otherwise it wouldn't be fair.
Or you could quote RMS' line about "The GNU project adopted XFree86". Fine. The Linux project adopted GNU. So it's called Linux.
I think the sticker is a nice compromise - I think it's more likely to promote awareness of the GNU project than insisting on a more complicated pronunciation of the name of the OS. Human nature tends towards simplification of names - "Bob" from "Robert", "Win95" from "Microsoft Windows 95" (which is, after all, the name on the box) and "Linux" from "GNU/Linux".
Plus a cool logo/slogan works better than deliberately injecting naffness into a name.
That's right, they do. Which is why, since he was sending the mail from his home machine and not hiding the source in any way, they should have blocked his mail at their mail hub instead of taking him to court. As it is, dangerous precedents would be set whichever way the ruling went. --
Seems to me that IT industry pundits are a lot like astrologers - make the vaguest possible predictions, and then a year down the line bend what's happened to fit what you predicted and claim to have been right all along. Either that or just state the bleeding obvious.
"I predict that in a group with a great deal of dedication to the platform, factionalism will arise." Well, duh. Show me any group like that where it doesn't. I think it'd be an improvement for a lot of factions to produce more code and vent less heat, but the old rule applies - competition promotes innovation and improvement.
If Linus ever did get tired of being in charge of the kernel, I think in the first instance he'd hand it over to someone he trusted. That's what I'd do. And if the worst does happen and the code forks, people will use what suits them best, and changes will probably migrate back and forth. --
There's a difference between removing someone's right to offer their opinion and removing the ability to attack someone while hiding behind the shield of anonymity. If you have a strong belief that you're right, why be afraid to have your name attached to it?
(I also believe Voltaire knew the identity of the person he was talking about.) --
Will SCSI ever achieve 80MByte/sec? You seem to be quoting speeds from something that doesn't exist yet.
More importantly, SCSI still has that 7-device limit. That is where FireWire really scores over SCSI.
--
Depends.. [Was: Contracting is the solution: yep]
on
Why Work Sucks
·
· Score: 1
I tend to disagree, although I haven't been in the contracting realm for long. Certainly you have taxes to worry about, but that's one of the reasons for having an accountant. If you so choose, he/she can handle all of that stuff. You just end up paying a bit more for the service. Certainly if you don't feel you have time to take care of it, get the accountant to. It is, after all, what they're trained for:)
The other thing is, one of the reasons I got into contracting is because I was tired of living hand-to-mouth - I want to be able to live comfortably and buy a new toy every so often. Doubling my effective income will certainly help with that.
I'd say do it if you can - job security these days is only marginally better if you're a permanent employee, and you get substantially less remuneration for your efforts.
One thing I'd add, though, is to have someone around who knows the ins and outs of the whole thing - my father's been contracting for over a decade now, and so I have someone to get the handy hints from:)
Slashdot Mirror
It never ceases to amaze me how posters on Slashdot feel qualified to comment on something when it's really obvious that they don't know the first thing about it.
Here's my suggestion: Actually find out what Refactoring is about before posting this kind of nonsense. It's a well-documented procedure and is used by a great many professional software developers. It's not about "kicking crap code to extend its life a bit longer". If it involves crap code at all, it's about making it not crap.
What would you do with crap code if you weren't going to refactor it into something better?
--
The press release doesn't mention VGS at all. Could we possibly check for editorial accuracy before posting these, please?
--
> Most comments I do are for the sanity of my future self/others, who are not perfect and are
// Add a to b and store the result in a
> not experts at coding. (eg 6months of simple programming from college)
I'm not advocating having no comments at all, which seems to be the way everyone's reading what I said. I'm simply saying that if you find you need to write two lines of comments per line of code something is definitely wrong. I used to write code like this, and it was a living nightmare to update later on.
Code sensibly; choose sensible variable and function names, comment at the beginning of function definitions explaining the purpose of the function and at the beginning of each logical block - a for loop, for example. If there are a couple of lines which need additional explanation, a comment there. I find that this works, and code I have written in this way is still actively in use and maintainable by others some six years on.
Again, the closer your code is to being self-documenting the easier it will be to maintain, irrespective of how many comments are in it. There is little worse, in my opinion, than finding code like:
a = a + b;
A well-commented line, to be sure. But what additional information does the comment pass on? If you're writing two comment lines per line of code, I can't see how you're avoiding stuff like this.
Simes.
--
There is a school of thought which contends that if your code requires that many comments, it hasn't been very well-written. Good code should be almost self-documenting - an excess of comments can swamp the code and make it just as difficult to understand, if not more so, than the same code with no comments at all.
Additionally, if you're spending twice as much time writing comments as you are writing code, then only one third of your time is being immediately productive. I appreciate the long-term value of well-documented code, but also tend to believe that brevity is the soul of clarity. And with that in mind, I'll shut up now.
Simes.
--
It's not based on MPEG. The press release mentions the MPEG decoder as being their first open source release - it doesn't say that the new library is for anything other than Motion JPEG. After all, if you already have an MPEG player library in the open source domain, where's the benefit from releasing another one?
--
Um.
You do know what the word "hyperbole" actually means, don't you?
--
You don't feel, then, that an opinion carries more weight if it has someone's real name attached to it? I know that there are valid reasons for posting anonymously, but someone who isn't prepared to stand up and be identified with the view they're expressing cannot expect those views to have as much of an impact. Shouts from the crowd are always more likely to be passed over.
Not that anonymous views are in any way less valid; just that they're less likely to make an impact.
--
I think the dangerous trend is to rely on benchmarks at all for anything. If you buy a system based entirely on a benchmark result, the odds are good that unless your setup is identical to that used for the benchmark, the performance you get will bear little to no relation to the benchmark anyway.
Instead of comparing server speeds, why don't they run these tests for a month and compare time-between-reboots? For web sites, guaranteed uptime is far more important, given that any half-powerful web server can saturate your outgoing bandwidth anyway. You're not going to care how many pages/minute your server's capable of serving if it's too busy rebooting to serve any pages at all.
--
That's where it's all going to go, same as always. Already games are being shipped on multiple CDs or on DVD. This technology ensures you can go on installing them to your hard drive and enjoying the benefits of low seek rates and high retrieval speeds for all those MBs of data modern games throw about.
:)
Anyway, even if the common user doesn't have a use for 216GB, it'll put downward pressure on the price of 108GB drives, and that has to be a good thing
--
BT are legally liable to put a stop to nuisance calls if they continue, but they are not liable for the content of those calls - if this case result were applied in the telecoms industry, BT would be liable if someone rang up someone else and told them lies about you.
Usenet is a steaming morass of defamation, and if someone were determined to post such things, and knew that if they did it would be the ISP and not them held liable, how is this ruling going to stop it?
--
Well, you'd hope so. But if all they're doing is clamping the base, I wouldn't trust that relatively flimsy piece of plastic to hold the screen at that kind of angle.
*muffled scream*
"What was that?"
"Oh, Bob's relaxing at his desk again."
--
The word instantly said "web server log" to me, even though I'd never seen it used anywhere before. So I'd go with the "bad choice" vote.
Surely there were lots of other words you could have chosen which would have had even less possibility for confusion?
--
What's to stop your monitor toppling off this thing and breaking your ribs? I have a 19" screen. That would be really painful.
--
Linus worked in the Linux kernel; nothing more. The kernel is his, no problem; the typical Linux system is not his; and he is not in a position to claim anything but the kernel.
So now you're back to calling it GNU/XFree86/Cheeseplant/Spanner/Linux or whatever. If you're taking the line that the GNU project should be mentioned because of its contribution, then all contributors should be so mentioned, otherwise it wouldn't be fair.
Or you could quote RMS' line about "The GNU project adopted XFree86". Fine. The Linux project adopted GNU. So it's called Linux.
I think the sticker is a nice compromise - I think it's more likely to promote awareness of the GNU project than insisting on a more complicated pronunciation of the name of the OS. Human nature tends towards simplification of names - "Bob" from "Robert", "Win95" from "Microsoft Windows 95" (which is, after all, the name on the box) and "Linux" from "GNU/Linux".
Plus a cool logo/slogan works better than deliberately injecting naffness into a name.
--
That's right, they do. Which is why, since he was sending the mail from his home machine and not hiding the source in any way, they should have blocked his mail at their mail hub instead of taking him to court. As it is, dangerous precedents would be set whichever way the ruling went.
--
Seems to me that IT industry pundits are a lot like astrologers - make the vaguest possible predictions, and then a year down the line bend what's happened to fit what you predicted and claim to have been right all along. Either that or just state the bleeding obvious.
"I predict that in a group with a great deal of dedication to the platform, factionalism will arise." Well, duh. Show me any group like that where it doesn't. I think it'd be an improvement for a lot of factions to produce more code and vent less heat, but the old rule applies - competition promotes innovation and improvement.
If Linus ever did get tired of being in charge of the kernel, I think in the first instance he'd hand it over to someone he trusted. That's what I'd do. And if the worst does happen and the code forks, people will use what suits them best, and changes will probably migrate back and forth.
--
There's a difference between removing someone's right to offer their opinion and removing the ability to attack someone while hiding behind the shield of anonymity. If you have a strong belief that you're right, why be afraid to have your name attached to it?
(I also believe Voltaire knew the identity of the person he was talking about.)
--
Will SCSI ever achieve 80MByte/sec? You seem to be quoting speeds from something that doesn't exist yet.
More importantly, SCSI still has that 7-device limit. That is where FireWire really scores over SCSI.
--
I tend to disagree, although I haven't been in the contracting realm for long. Certainly you have taxes to worry about, but that's one of the reasons for having an accountant. If you so choose, he/she can handle all of that stuff. You just end up paying a bit more for the service. Certainly if you don't feel you have time to take care of it, get the accountant to. It is, after all, what they're trained for :)
:)
The other thing is, one of the reasons I got into contracting is because I was tired of living hand-to-mouth - I want to be able to live comfortably and buy a new toy every so often. Doubling my effective income will certainly help with that.
I'd say do it if you can - job security these days is only marginally better if you're a permanent employee, and you get substantially less remuneration for your efforts.
One thing I'd add, though, is to have someone around who knows the ins and outs of the whole thing - my father's been contracting for over a decade now, and so I have someone to get the handy hints from
Simes.
--