but it does help with creating a believable universe
Not really. Check the Matrix for a prime example. And note that good FX != believable.
Regarding LOTR, the actors were all relative unknowns at the time they were hired. All of them were good actors, yes (although Elijah Wood sadly still doesn't convince as Frodo - ho hum), but none of them were doing it for the money. In fact, none of the crew were doing it for the money at all. Watch the "making-of" bits on the extended DVDs and you'll see how personally committed they all were, and how much each group (actors and support, digital FX, model-makers, etc) really became a family. The sheer *closeness* of them all afterwards was unbelievable.
Personally I don't there's any other movie that could inspire that kind of commitment, or ever will again. The reason they all committed was bcos it *was* LOTR, not bcos they were being paid. LOTR was a one-off, and I can't see any here-today-gone-tomorrow computer game tie-in getting anywhere near. Certainly not just bcos some studio boss has splurged $10m for the rights.
Hardware *is* a problem. Stereo goggles don't work for many people - if you've not got close-to-correct vision (and you don't wear contact lenses) then you can forget it. Unless we stipulate that air traffic controllers must not be spectacle wearers, that's not practical.
Stereo goggles also put strain on the wearer, because you're not using your eyes normally (no focussing or eye movement possible), so they're not really suitable for long-term use.
Try taking a car from a Ford lot and claiming "it's my right to travel so I'm not paying you any money", asshat.
Hint: No one suggested that we were dealing with freeloaders, and it's absurd to suggest that we were discussing anything like that.
Nor was I. I was saying that if you want to buy a Ford car, you need to abide by Ford's rules to get that car. Which means paying them money. If you want to get a plane, you need to abide by the airline's rules. Which means paying them money and passing a security check.
Who said you had a right to travel by any means you choose
Hint: I did. In the post you replied to. I specifically said that you have many rights, even those not listed. That would include traveling by any means you choose. Boat, airplane, bus, car, horse and buggy, dogsled, rocketship, Rocketcar Taxi.
Except you don't. Anything in the air is regulated by the FAA, so you explicitly DON'T have a right to do that. Motorised transport on roads is regulated by your relevant state authority, so you explicitly DON'T have a right to drive a car, motorbike or bus. Bus drivers and train conductors can throw you off at the next stop if you're drunk or abusive, so you explicitly DON'T have a right to ride on them. Airlines can (and do) stop at the nearest airport if a passenger becomes violent (in fact international air law governs what you can and can't do in a plane), so you explicitly DON'T have a right to be a passenger in a plane. And try walking down the centre of I94 - assuming you survive (which is unlikely) then you'll be arrested by the nearest traffic cops, so you explicitly DON'T have a right to walk anywhere you like.
Hint: In spite of what you may think, you can't just say "I have a right to do this" and assume it's true. Or rely on what someone else says about the rights you *should* have and assume it's true.
Sucked out the hole, no. But everyone on that plane will die, bcos the plane will depressurise. The ones who survive total instant depressurisation at 60k feet (and plenty won't) will die on impact, bcos no-one's flying the plane.
Sure you have a right to travel - get your shoes on and start walking. Who said you had a right to travel by any means you choose, without taking on any further responsibilities? Try taking a car from a Ford lot and claiming "it's my right to travel so I'm not paying you any money", asshat.
To be fair, the American ex-military people I've met really do irony in a big way. I guess you have to... And geeks seem to be more into it than most. Try irony on your typical shop staff though and watch the glazed look appear in their eyes ("like, did he really *mean* that?")
A government-funded board does not have the right to teach *exactly* what they want. Nor does *anyone* have the right to mess up a child's education this way. If Kansas wanted to teach that 1+1=3 in a maths lesson, would that also be acceptable?
I don't have a problem with people believing in creationism, provided they are clear that this is stems from a *religious* belief and has no scientific basis in fact. I don't have a problem with people objecting to evolution, provided their arguments are relevant to today's knowledge of the existence of previous species.
I *do* have a problem with creationists claiming that they believe this through scientific reasoning. This is provably false - they have started from the desired conclusion (the Bible as fact) and worked backwards. I *do* have a problem with the allegedly scientific reasons that are very easily disproved with a little knowledge of the field. I *do* have a problem with creationists saying that evolution amounts to a religious stance of atheism, when all it amounts to is disbelief in the literal existence of the events in the Book of Genesis (a disbelief that incidentally is shared by the Catholic church, amongst others).
we're actually getting sicker and sicker as a population
Bullshit. Check the stats - how many of your family died before the age of 10? Before "increased medical knowledge" the figure was about 50%. Today it's close to zero.
Or do you mean "more people can be identified as having some ailment of some kind?" Well, the more ailments you know about, the more you can identify. Someone who previously was just called "twitchy" can now have some neurological explanation given, for example. It doesn't necessarily solve the problem, but at least you know the reason for it.
And re getting your body to its healthiest state, there's an army of physiotherapists, nutritionists, occupational therapists, sports therapists, etc, etc who do just that. That claim is provably false.
Medical science knows quite a lot about the body, especially about the eye, bcos all the principles of the eye can be demonstrated with glass/plastic lenses on a bench. An eye has two focussing lenses, one on the outside which does most of the focussing, and one on the inside which is variable (controlled by muscles). The variable one has a pretty good range, so the problem is getting the focus of the fixed one within that range. That's what glasses are for - compensating for flaws in the fixed lens (the cornea). If the flaw is small, then continuously exerting the muscles for the variable lens may bring things back into focus, but at the cost of continuous exertion which may lead to straining those muscles.
So if you've got glasses, you do absolutely have to keep focussing using the variable lens (and eye muscles). If you don't, you'll only see long-distance and never see close-range things. The only other way to focus close-up would be to move your glasses closer to or further away from your eye.
The reason new users of glasses get eyestrain is that the brain has learnt how much to move the eye muscles in which direction to focus. Suddenly that's thrown for a loop by the glasses. The eye gets strained by overworking the muscles to find the adjustment point, in the same way as a new driver tends to get tired arms and shoulders from gripping the steering wheel too hard.
And your alleged reason for the problem - poor posture - fails by its own reasoning. If people get neckache and backache keeping their heads up, they *are* keeping their heads up. So they're looking through the correct part of their eyes. Oops.
Who says the world will implement a new version of email? It would be *nice*, but the install base for today's email is so vast that I can't see Email2 (or whatever you want to call it) taking off. It's the old chicken-and-egg problem. If no-one else has an Email2 account, who are you going to contact?
Original email solved that by dishing out a zillion email accounts simultaneously to all students and lecturers at a university/college. Ex-students were then the driving force in introducing email to the world ("why can't I use email now I've left uni?"). Today, there are more private users of email than uni/college users, so dishing out Email2 accounts to students won't be the solution this time.
The only way you're going to get people to take up Email2 accounts is if it's backwardly compatible with original email, so people can still contact their friends/colleagues/business/whatever. And if you can send and receive normal emails on Email2, you'll be receiving spam as before. So you've not solved the problem.
Interestingly, I think there's ample evidence we are still evolving physically. However, we're evolving to fit an environment in which most physical ailments can be cured or their effects minimised.
The most obvious example is eyesight. Until a couple hundred years ago, if you couldn't see reasonably well then you were basically doomed to begging for the rest of your (short) life. Result - most people had reasonable eyesight, because anyone with a genetic flaw leading to poor eyesight never got to have kids. When spectacles became relatively cheap and universally available (about 100-150 years ago), this was no longer the case. Today, the majority of people wear glasses or contact lenses.
There are any number of other examples. Diabetes; asthma, hayfever and other immune system disorders; even cancer: all these are more common today. There's a good debate in there as to whether the primary cause is evolution (or "devolution"), or whether it's environmental changes that have caused it. Personally I think it's a bit of both, but I'm pretty sure myself that evolution has played a significant part.
Re your mental evolution, I can't see that happening. Evolution doesn't happen of itself; rather, it's the end result of something that kills off anyone who doesn't make the grade, or otherwise stops them reproducing.
The only place this is happening is China, where only rich families (that is, those with the brains to come out on top in commerce) get to have more than one child. Elsewhere in the world, smart (or richer) people generally have less children and dumb (or poorer) people generally have more - any British housing estate (or US inner city) will show you this result. And usually this *is* the result of being smart or dumb, because democracy gives a reasonably level playing field. Obviously it's not perfect, bcos some familial factors (eg. being born black, or Roma, or female in an Islamic family) give an unfair disadvantage, and some (eg. being born into the British or American aristocracy) give an unfair advantage.
But even though you can use those smarts to get yourself a good career, good money, a nice house and a wife and a couple of kids, the underskilled burger-flipper on the next block is having 8 kids with various short-term girlfriends and so is outranking you in evolutionary terms. So although those smarts you got out of the genetic dice roll will get passed onto your kids, your kids will be the minority and the burger-flipper's kids will be the base level for the next generation. And if smarts are hereditary (as general opinion has it), then even if your kids get a bad throw of the genetic dice and the burger-flipper's kids get a good throw, the burger-flipper's kids are starting from a lower initial position so it's less likely they'll be smarter than your kids. Not to say it's impossible, just less likely.
Pseudo-code, or any other formal or semi-formal tool, is the kiss of death. Do not EVER, under ANY circumstances, use ANY method to document exactly what the code should do. It is always quicker to just write the damn code, and your design document becomes an unusable pile of crap.
What a design document should say is what they want the design to do, and the decisions made in implementing it. So the architecture, the interface between your software and the outside world, and the interfaces between chunks of your software are essential to capture. Data flow diagrams are a useful tool here. A truly vast amount of errors come from interface issues, where group A expected one thing and group B expected another. NASA's little oopsie in units is a good example, but another thing to beware of is deadlock, where process A is waiting for message X before it sends message Y, and process B is waiting for message Y before it sends message X.
Flow charts and state machines can be useful, but only as a method of documenting what's supposed to be happening in the "big picture". A good guideline is that if you ever find yourself using variable names, this is the point to close down your current diagram, delete it, and probably delete the next diagram or two above it as well.
What else? Hmm. "Why did you implement something a particular way?" "Oh, because it saved 200KB and 5% execution time, so it's super-efficient even though the code looks way confusing." Write it down, otherwise someone else may misunderstand your code, rewrite it and add 200KB and 5% execution time to a future release.
And if you don't have a requirements document, write your requirements in the design document. It's more of the "why did we do that?" decisions, and it also stops you getting reamed by the customer when someone realises they forgot feature X and then lies through their teeth to say they told you to do it.
Exactly - which is why you WRITE IT DOWN!!!!! If the decision was trivial, no worries. But if it was anything significant, or involved any reasonable application of brainpower, get it documented.
Untrue. A design document upfront is worth its weight in precious metal X for any system more complex than a tricycle.
Check your argument. You're saying it's not useful because it's not current, and it's not current because management is lousy. But you've failed to see that the fix is to tell management that writing docs after the fact will increase the time to do your coding. If they see docs as a 20-hour surcharge after the project, sure, this'll happen. But if they see docs as a 20-hour charge at the start which then reduces coding cost by 10% then believe me, they'll get the message. It's like saying "my boots come off when I walk through puddles of thick mud, therefore I should never wear boots" - you've missed the obvious concept of "don't walk through muddy puddles"!;-)
It sounds like the problem is that you've never worked in a company with competent management and a half-decent development process.
"Worthless" is a bad way of expressing this, yes. A better word would be "unrealisable".
But this does not invalidate the previous poster's point - you're arguing over the misuse of a word, not over the real point. The Vatican *does* have a large number of art treasures sat around, but it considers these to be held in trust and so they can never be sold. It therefore does *not* have a large fund of money that it should use to help the poor, because the conversion step of art treasure to money will never be taken.
Tell that to the relatives of Amadou Diallou, or the relatives of the victims of Bloody Sunday, or the relatives of the many civilians shot in Iraq by US/UK soldiers for no good reason (went past a checkpoint they didn't know was there/driving fast to get an family member to hospital/caught between US and Iraqi forces/etc).
With guns, you know you're shooting at a person across the way. History shows that the shooter often doesn't know who the person is, can't see them clearly, doesn't know for sure they're a threat, and all-too-frequently is just acting out of reflex because the guy next too him got nervous and popped off a shot when he shouldn't have.
So "shooting back in self-defense" actually is very likely to be "shooting at someone who never shot at you, for reasons you don't really know". In other words, it's almost identical to your network protection...
Check "Snow Crash". Assuming Stephenson quoted correctly, the original line translates as "its top with the Heavens" - a more likely meaning being that it was an observatory with a star map.
Theme and relation are sadly what's suffered, apparently. The key point is "as sanctioned by Adams" and with Adams' involvement in implementing them. This movie seems to have been written by a bunch of lower primates who don't understand the book/radio/play/TV versions, and are desperately trying to please a management who can't handle any comedy more sophisticated than "Married with children" or "Friends". So the whole thing becomes HHGTTG in name only, just like "I Robot", "Bicentennial Man", etc, etc.
Compare and contrast to "Lord of the Rings". Hacked to pieces for the film, obviously. But the changes mostly made sense, because they were done by someone who Got It and wanted to preserve the feel of the original in a new medium.
They'll simply take input and use a pre-determined algorythm to produce output.
Just like a brain does, in fact. Every living organism has a bunch of hard-wired responses - we tend to refer to them as "instincts". Creatures with less sophisticated processing facilities (such as reptiles, insects, lower mammals and, yes, human babies) are basically predictable in that they follow these instincts.
One such algorithm is the "motivation" to learn. If a baby can't learn from an adult of its own species, it's just as happy learning from an adult of another species. This has been programmed in by evolution over many years (it's pretty obvious that babies that don't bond to their protectors and babies that don't learn are going to have short lives and become a crunchy snack for some predator). This is functionally indistinguishable from a computer program with similar processing equipment and processing power, endowed with the same "motivation" by a programmer.
For your reference, there's just as consistent a "streak of fairly crude sexism" in large groups of women. You might also find that Irish jokes are more common in groups without Irish people, etc, etc. Most jokes involve the denigration of a person or stereotype, and most people are smart (or sensitive) enough not to insult people by repeating those jokes around people likely to be offended by it. This does not equate to a discriminatory attitude.
What you might like to note though is that in spite of the occasional sexist jokes, most geeks prefer to go on quality of work rather than gender/race/whatever.
If you don't know what you want to do in your year out, go to uni. If you want a year out sometime during uni then fine - most places are cool with that. But if you take a year out and spend the whole time sponging off your folks and watching the TV, you will find it *much* harder getting a job later.
One big thing *not* to do in your year out is to do a year out with a sponsor company. In the UK, there are sponsorships going with engineering companies (to attract students to work at those companies afterwards). The deal is usually that you work two years with them, of which one will usually be before or during uni. I got sponsorship and decided to do a year out beforehand.
Big mistake. HUGE! Why? Well, your typical engineering company needs graduate-level people as a minimum standard. If you've just come out of high school, you can't help them. Result: you spend a year working on the production line. Now some time on the shop floor is a good thing, but most intelligent people do *not* want to do this. Eventually you settle into a rut, because the job needs no intelligence so you "switch off". And boy, is it hard to switch back on again when you start uni! To be honest, I didn't really start getting back into it properly until the fourth year of my course.
If you've got a real definite goal in mind, then great. "Me and my band are going to try and make a living off it." "I want to go to Africa and work with Oxfam." Or even "I want to travel round the world, just because it seems a cool thing to do." Excellent. This is the time to go and do it, while you've got no other committments. Get out there and go for it! But if you're not driven that way, you're wasting your time. A year flipping burgers is *not* a good use of your time and brains.
Another thing to consider is that you will have forgotten at least half (and probably more) of everything you learnt in the previous year at high school. That's all the stuff you need as the base for your first year at uni. So you'll be starting at a disadvantage, and if you're unlucky then you may never completely catch up.
Some of us have this quaint idea of not supporting people who beat up on others for the hell of it. Buying gear off Monster is directly helping them keep doing this. Maybe you don't know anyone who'd be affected by this - I know I don't. But if it was happening to a friend of mine, I'd be pretty damn pissed about it, and I suspect you'd feel the same if it happened to someone you knew.
Now I'm not prepared to go down the route of "it's OK to do whatever you like to people so long as it's happening to someone I don't know". That's why it matters to me. As for yourself, check on whether it bothers you, knowing that you'd be giving money to help someone else get screwed over...
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but it does help with creating a believable universe
Not really. Check the Matrix for a prime example. And note that good FX != believable.
Regarding LOTR, the actors were all relative unknowns at the time they were hired. All of them were good actors, yes (although Elijah Wood sadly still doesn't convince as Frodo - ho hum), but none of them were doing it for the money. In fact, none of the crew were doing it for the money at all. Watch the "making-of" bits on the extended DVDs and you'll see how personally committed they all were, and how much each group (actors and support, digital FX, model-makers, etc) really became a family. The sheer *closeness* of them all afterwards was unbelievable.
Personally I don't there's any other movie that could inspire that kind of commitment, or ever will again. The reason they all committed was bcos it *was* LOTR, not bcos they were being paid. LOTR was a one-off, and I can't see any here-today-gone-tomorrow computer game tie-in getting anywhere near. Certainly not just bcos some studio boss has splurged $10m for the rights.
Grab.
Hardware *is* a problem. Stereo goggles don't work for many people - if you've not got close-to-correct vision (and you don't wear contact lenses) then you can forget it. Unless we stipulate that air traffic controllers must not be spectacle wearers, that's not practical.
Stereo goggles also put strain on the wearer, because you're not using your eyes normally (no focussing or eye movement possible), so they're not really suitable for long-term use.
Grab.
Try taking a car from a Ford lot and claiming "it's my right to travel so I'm not paying you any money", asshat.
Hint: No one suggested that we were dealing with freeloaders, and it's absurd to suggest that we were discussing anything like that.
Nor was I. I was saying that if you want to buy a Ford car, you need to abide by Ford's rules to get that car. Which means paying them money. If you want to get a plane, you need to abide by the airline's rules. Which means paying them money and passing a security check.
Who said you had a right to travel by any means you choose
Hint: I did. In the post you replied to. I specifically said that you have many rights, even those not listed. That would include traveling by any means you choose. Boat, airplane, bus, car, horse and buggy, dogsled, rocketship, Rocketcar Taxi.
Except you don't. Anything in the air is regulated by the FAA, so you explicitly DON'T have a right to do that. Motorised transport on roads is regulated by your relevant state authority, so you explicitly DON'T have a right to drive a car, motorbike or bus. Bus drivers and train conductors can throw you off at the next stop if you're drunk or abusive, so you explicitly DON'T have a right to ride on them. Airlines can (and do) stop at the nearest airport if a passenger becomes violent (in fact international air law governs what you can and can't do in a plane), so you explicitly DON'T have a right to be a passenger in a plane. And
try walking down the centre of I94 - assuming you survive (which is unlikely) then you'll be arrested by the nearest traffic cops, so you explicitly DON'T have a right to walk anywhere you like.
Hint: In spite of what you may think, you can't just say "I have a right to do this" and assume it's true. Or rely on what someone else says about the rights you *should* have and assume it's true.
Grab.
Google is your friend. Search "Godwin's Law".
Sucked out the hole, no. But everyone on that plane will die, bcos the plane will depressurise. The ones who survive total instant depressurisation at 60k feet (and plenty won't) will die on impact, bcos no-one's flying the plane.
Grab.
Sure you have a right to travel - get your shoes on and start walking. Who said you had a right to travel by any means you choose, without taking on any further responsibilities? Try taking a car from a Ford lot and claiming "it's my right to travel so I'm not paying you any money", asshat.
Grab.
Nah, just the American part...
To be fair, the American ex-military people I've met really do irony in a big way. I guess you have to... And geeks seem to be more into it than most. Try irony on your typical shop staff though and watch the glazed look appear in their eyes ("like, did he really *mean* that?")
Grab.
A government-funded board does not have the right to teach *exactly* what they want. Nor does *anyone* have the right to mess up a child's education this way. If Kansas wanted to teach that 1+1=3 in a maths lesson, would that also be acceptable?
I don't have a problem with people believing in creationism, provided they are clear that this is stems from a *religious* belief and has no scientific basis in fact. I don't have a problem with people objecting to evolution, provided their arguments are relevant to today's knowledge of the existence of previous species.
I *do* have a problem with creationists claiming that they believe this through scientific reasoning. This is provably false - they have started from the desired conclusion (the Bible as fact) and worked backwards. I *do* have a problem with the allegedly scientific reasons that are very easily disproved with a little knowledge of the field. I *do* have a problem with creationists saying that evolution amounts to a religious stance of atheism, when all it amounts to is disbelief in the literal existence of the events in the Book of Genesis (a disbelief that incidentally is shared by the Catholic church, amongst others).
Grab.
we're actually getting sicker and sicker as a population
Bullshit. Check the stats - how many of your family died before the age of 10? Before "increased medical knowledge" the figure was about 50%. Today it's close to zero.
Or do you mean "more people can be identified as having some ailment of some kind?" Well, the more ailments you know about, the more you can identify. Someone who previously was just called "twitchy" can now have some neurological explanation given, for example. It doesn't necessarily solve the problem, but at least you know the reason for it.
And re getting your body to its healthiest state, there's an army of physiotherapists, nutritionists, occupational therapists, sports therapists, etc, etc who do just that. That claim is provably false.
Medical science knows quite a lot about the body, especially about the eye, bcos all the principles of the eye can be demonstrated with glass/plastic lenses on a bench. An eye has two focussing lenses, one on the outside which does most of the focussing, and one on the inside which is variable (controlled by muscles). The variable one has a pretty good range, so the problem is getting the focus of the fixed one within that range. That's what glasses are for - compensating for flaws in the fixed lens (the cornea). If the flaw is small, then continuously exerting the muscles for the variable lens may bring things back into focus, but at the cost of continuous exertion which may lead to straining those muscles.
So if you've got glasses, you do absolutely have to keep focussing using the variable lens (and eye muscles). If you don't, you'll only see long-distance and never see close-range things. The only other way to focus close-up would be to move your glasses closer to or further away from your eye.
The reason new users of glasses get eyestrain is that the brain has learnt how much to move the eye muscles in which direction to focus. Suddenly that's thrown for a loop by the glasses. The eye gets strained by overworking the muscles to find the adjustment point, in the same way as a new driver tends to get tired arms and shoulders from gripping the steering wheel too hard.
And your alleged reason for the problem - poor posture - fails by its own reasoning. If people get neckache and backache keeping their heads up, they *are* keeping their heads up. So they're looking through the correct part of their eyes. Oops.
Grab.
Hint: CD drives have an "eject" button that allows you to remove the CD...
the one the world impliments in a few years
Who says the world will implement a new version of email? It would be *nice*, but the install base for today's email is so vast that I can't see Email2 (or whatever you want to call it) taking off. It's the old chicken-and-egg problem. If no-one else has an Email2 account, who are you going to contact?
Original email solved that by dishing out a zillion email accounts simultaneously to all students and lecturers at a university/college. Ex-students were then the driving force in introducing email to the world ("why can't I use email now I've left uni?"). Today, there are more private users of email than uni/college users, so dishing out Email2 accounts to students won't be the solution this time.
The only way you're going to get people to take up Email2 accounts is if it's backwardly compatible with original email, so people can still contact their friends/colleagues/business/whatever. And if you can send and receive normal emails on Email2, you'll be receiving spam as before. So you've not solved the problem.
Grab.
Interestingly, I think there's ample evidence we are still evolving physically. However, we're evolving to fit an environment in which most physical ailments can be cured or their effects minimised.
;-)
The most obvious example is eyesight. Until a couple hundred years ago, if you couldn't see reasonably well then you were basically doomed to begging for the rest of your (short) life. Result - most people had reasonable eyesight, because anyone with a genetic flaw leading to poor eyesight never got to have kids. When spectacles became relatively cheap and universally available (about 100-150 years ago), this was no longer the case. Today, the majority of people wear glasses or contact lenses.
There are any number of other examples. Diabetes; asthma, hayfever and other immune system disorders; even cancer: all these are more common today. There's a good debate in there as to whether the primary cause is evolution (or "devolution"), or whether it's environmental changes that have caused it. Personally I think it's a bit of both, but I'm pretty sure myself that evolution has played a significant part.
Re your mental evolution, I can't see that happening. Evolution doesn't happen of itself; rather, it's the end result of something that kills off anyone who doesn't make the grade, or otherwise stops them reproducing.
The only place this is happening is China, where only rich families (that is, those with the brains to come out on top in commerce) get to have more than one child. Elsewhere in the world, smart (or richer) people generally have less children and dumb (or poorer) people generally have more - any British housing estate (or US inner city) will show you this result. And usually this *is* the result of being smart or dumb, because democracy gives a reasonably level playing field. Obviously it's not perfect, bcos some familial factors (eg. being born black, or Roma, or female in an Islamic family) give an unfair disadvantage, and some (eg. being born into the British or American aristocracy) give an unfair advantage.
But even though you can use those smarts to get yourself a good career, good money, a nice house and a wife and a couple of kids, the underskilled burger-flipper on the next block is having 8 kids with various short-term girlfriends and so is outranking you in evolutionary terms. So although those smarts you got out of the genetic dice roll will get passed onto your kids, your kids will be the minority and the burger-flipper's kids will be the base level for the next generation. And if smarts are hereditary (as general opinion has it), then even if your kids get a bad throw of the genetic dice and the burger-flipper's kids get a good throw, the burger-flipper's kids are starting from a lower initial position so it's less likely they'll be smarter than your kids. Not to say it's impossible, just less likely.
Pretty depressing, huh?
Grab.
Good call.
Pseudo-code, or any other formal or semi-formal tool, is the kiss of death. Do not EVER, under ANY circumstances, use ANY method to document exactly what the code should do. It is always quicker to just write the damn code, and your design document becomes an unusable pile of crap.
What a design document should say is what they want the design to do, and the decisions made in implementing it. So the architecture, the interface between your software and the outside world, and the interfaces between chunks of your software are essential to capture. Data flow diagrams are a useful tool here. A truly vast amount of errors come from interface issues, where group A expected one thing and group B expected another. NASA's little oopsie in units is a good example, but another thing to beware of is deadlock, where process A is waiting for message X before it sends message Y, and process B is waiting for message Y before it sends message X.
Flow charts and state machines can be useful, but only as a method of documenting what's supposed to be happening in the "big picture". A good guideline is that if you ever find yourself using variable names, this is the point to close down your current diagram, delete it, and probably delete the next diagram or two above it as well.
What else? Hmm. "Why did you implement something a particular way?" "Oh, because it saved 200KB and 5% execution time, so it's super-efficient even though the code looks way confusing." Write it down, otherwise someone else may misunderstand your code, rewrite it and add 200KB and 5% execution time to a future release.
And if you don't have a requirements document, write your requirements in the design document. It's more of the "why did we do that?" decisions, and it also stops you getting reamed by the customer when someone realises they forgot feature X and then lies through their teeth to say they told you to do it.
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Exactly - which is why you WRITE IT DOWN!!!!! If the decision was trivial, no worries. But if it was anything significant, or involved any reasonable application of brainpower, get it documented.
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Untrue. A design document upfront is worth its weight in precious metal X for any system more complex than a tricycle.
;-)
Check your argument. You're saying it's not useful because it's not current, and it's not current because management is lousy. But you've failed to see that the fix is to tell management that writing docs after the fact will increase the time to do your coding. If they see docs as a 20-hour surcharge after the project, sure, this'll happen. But if they see docs as a 20-hour charge at the start which then reduces coding cost by 10% then believe me, they'll get the message. It's like saying "my boots come off when I walk through puddles of thick mud, therefore I should never wear boots" - you've missed the obvious concept of "don't walk through muddy puddles"!
It sounds like the problem is that you've never worked in a company with competent management and a half-decent development process.
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"Worthless" is a bad way of expressing this, yes. A better word would be "unrealisable".
But this does not invalidate the previous poster's point - you're arguing over the misuse of a word, not over the real point. The Vatican *does* have a large number of art treasures sat around, but it considers these to be held in trust and so they can never be sold. It therefore does *not* have a large fund of money that it should use to help the poor, because the conversion step of art treasure to money will never be taken.
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At least with guns, you know who you're shooting.
Tell that to the relatives of Amadou Diallou, or the relatives of the victims of Bloody Sunday, or the relatives of the many civilians shot in Iraq by US/UK soldiers for no good reason (went past a checkpoint they didn't know was there/driving fast to get an family member to hospital/caught between US and Iraqi forces/etc).
With guns, you know you're shooting at a person across the way. History shows that the shooter often doesn't know who the person is, can't see them clearly, doesn't know for sure they're a threat, and all-too-frequently is just acting out of reflex because the guy next too him got nervous and popped off a shot when he shouldn't have.
So "shooting back in self-defense" actually is very likely to be "shooting at someone who never shot at you, for reasons you don't really know". In other words, it's almost identical to your network protection...
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Check "Snow Crash". Assuming Stephenson quoted correctly, the original line translates as "its top with the Heavens" - a more likely meaning being that it was an observatory with a star map.
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Hate to be the one to tell you, but Red Dwarf did that joke way earlier.
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Theme and relation are sadly what's suffered, apparently. The key point is "as sanctioned by Adams" and with Adams' involvement in implementing them. This movie seems to have been written by a bunch of lower primates who don't understand the book/radio/play/TV versions, and are desperately trying to please a management who can't handle any comedy more sophisticated than "Married with children" or "Friends". So the whole thing becomes HHGTTG in name only, just like "I Robot", "Bicentennial Man", etc, etc.
Compare and contrast to "Lord of the Rings". Hacked to pieces for the film, obviously. But the changes mostly made sense, because they were done by someone who Got It and wanted to preserve the feel of the original in a new medium.
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Alternatively you can smear your screen with Vaseline...
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They'll simply take input and use a pre-determined algorythm to produce output.
Just like a brain does, in fact. Every living organism has a bunch of hard-wired responses - we tend to refer to them as "instincts". Creatures with less sophisticated processing facilities (such as reptiles, insects, lower mammals and, yes, human babies) are basically predictable in that they follow these instincts.
One such algorithm is the "motivation" to learn. If a baby can't learn from an adult of its own species, it's just as happy learning from an adult of another species. This has been programmed in by evolution over many years (it's pretty obvious that babies that don't bond to their protectors and babies that don't learn are going to have short lives and become a crunchy snack for some predator). This is functionally indistinguishable from a computer program with similar processing equipment and processing power, endowed with the same "motivation" by a programmer.
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For your reference, there's just as consistent a "streak of fairly crude sexism" in large groups of women. You might also find that Irish jokes are more common in groups without Irish people, etc, etc. Most jokes involve the denigration of a person or stereotype, and most people are smart (or sensitive) enough not to insult people by repeating those jokes around people likely to be offended by it. This does not equate to a discriminatory attitude.
What you might like to note though is that in spite of the occasional sexist jokes, most geeks prefer to go on quality of work rather than gender/race/whatever.
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If you don't know what you want to do in your year out, go to uni. If you want a year out sometime during uni then fine - most places are cool with that. But if you take a year out and spend the whole time sponging off your folks and watching the TV, you will find it *much* harder getting a job later.
One big thing *not* to do in your year out is to do a year out with a sponsor company. In the UK, there are sponsorships going with engineering companies (to attract students to work at those companies afterwards). The deal is usually that you work two years with them, of which one will usually be before or during uni. I got sponsorship and decided to do a year out beforehand.
Big mistake. HUGE! Why? Well, your typical engineering company needs graduate-level people as a minimum standard. If you've just come out of high school, you can't help them. Result: you spend a year working on the production line. Now some time on the shop floor is a good thing, but most intelligent people do *not* want to do this. Eventually you settle into a rut, because the job needs no intelligence so you "switch off". And boy, is it hard to switch back on again when you start uni! To be honest, I didn't really start getting back into it properly until the fourth year of my course.
If you've got a real definite goal in mind, then great. "Me and my band are going to try and make a living off it." "I want to go to Africa and work with Oxfam." Or even "I want to travel round the world, just because it seems a cool thing to do." Excellent. This is the time to go and do it, while you've got no other committments. Get out there and go for it! But if you're not driven that way, you're wasting your time. A year flipping burgers is *not* a good use of your time and brains.
Another thing to consider is that you will have forgotten at least half (and probably more) of everything you learnt in the previous year at high school. That's all the stuff you need as the base for your first year at uni. So you'll be starting at a disadvantage, and if you're unlucky then you may never completely catch up.
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Some of us have this quaint idea of not supporting people who beat up on others for the hell of it. Buying gear off Monster is directly helping them keep doing this. Maybe you don't know anyone who'd be affected by this - I know I don't. But if it was happening to a friend of mine, I'd be pretty damn pissed about it, and I suspect you'd feel the same if it happened to someone you knew.
Now I'm not prepared to go down the route of "it's OK to do whatever you like to people so long as it's happening to someone I don't know". That's why it matters to me. As for yourself, check on whether it bothers you, knowing that you'd be giving money to help someone else get screwed over...
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