I'm disappointed that more media sources haven't picked up on how clever the wording is when ID is discussed. Suggesting that we teach students "both sides of the controversy" sounds wonderfully reasonable, but it means you accept that there is a debate, and that there are two sides to discuss. Wonderful PR work.
A blunt anology is to holocaust denial; should we teach students in schools the version of history espoused by ring-wing neo-nazi groups? After all, we should show them both sides of the debate.
(Note that I don't think this kind of attack need lead to bad science in schools: you can have great fun accepting that neo-Darwinistic evolution is 'just a theory', as you can then discuss testability, predictions etc, and how it's doing against the evidence and what changes had to be made. Now do the same with ID - no testability, no predictions etc. Now pick the theory you want to use. For bonus points, discuss why ID is simply a stupid idea using Gould's separation of magisteria, or Fowler's mythos vs logos viewpoints.)
Parent said: > First, [CVs which don't] have CS or SE degrees get thrown out.
While I appreciate the first cut of a pile of CVs is always somewhat arbitary, I'm surprised by this. I'd be rejected on the first pass (PhD Physics) despite having worked as a software engineer since 1998.
And it's worth checking some of those apparent lies; it's not that unusual to find cases like someone who has written "10 years X" rather than explain to low-level HR that they first worked with X back when it was still called Y.
Can I ask why so many people have modded up an obvious troll? Cracks about socialism, protecting property, English teeth? C'mon, engage your critical faculties when modding.
UK taxes are not popular, but yes, increased taxes for important services like the National Health Services will be tolerated. We like public services, we recognise that taxes are necessary, but we don't like them, we don't generally* want more of them, and proposing a tax raise is always an unpopular move.
* Side note: I'd cheerfully pay my taxes provided I can tick boxes for what I want them to go on. I might choose to tick plenty for healthcare and education for example, and perhaps choose to tick fewer related to, eg, military spending.
So I'm out of the question because I'm a Java developer? Never mind that I've been paid to work in C, C++, Perl, and a few other propietary languages. Never mind that I write small Perl and Unix scripts most days. Never mind that the reality of being a working senior Java server-side developer is a knowledge of a vast, and ever growing, set of associated platforms, comms and database technologies required for large scale projects for, in my case, telecomms and financial customers. On multiple platforms. Multiple operating systems.
Apparently my decade or more performing scientific computing or writing code on Unix somehow means I don't know that environent. Somehow choosing to use that environment to write Java invalidates everything else I know.
You are a technology bigot and deserve the same sort of criticism I'd get if, say, I presented the view that sysadmins are just computer janitors for developers, most of whom could do the same job. See? That'd be a grossly unfair thing for me to say wouldn't it? (Even if I sometimes thought that when working with bad admins.)
You seem to be forgetting the golden rule: pick the right tool for the job.
Take a fully dark picture and use it to subtract static? Sounds familiar.
You're re-inventing some techniques familiar to astronomers. Back when CCDs (a) were very expensive (b) were very small and (c) had to be used in dewers they were mainly seen on telescopes.
The other technique (flat-fielding) was taking a picture of a uniform light source and using that to correct the apparent brightness across your images. (My flat fields at the time were terrible, should have been even, were striped and shaded instead. Modern CCDs are prolly a lot better.)
Good luck trying to get one of these devices if you live outside the US/Canada. You can't buy internationally from the manufacturer and there's a regulatory issue with european imports apparently, which means the normal retail channels don't have product for sale either.
Pity, it was just what I was looking for.
Re:One Rule For 90% of Bugs
on
Debugging
·
· Score: 1
[nitpick]
Java debuggers can't be used on remote systems? News to me. I really must stop doing that every single day at work...
If you do like logging, it's fun to start work in 24/7 environments like telecomms and finance; in my experience, no-one ever seems to consider just how big that log gets, or when it gets purged, or achived until it's on a client site or in final testing!
I notice most of the Didn't-Read-The-Article crowd seem to be missing that this is an undersea cable. They're Not Easy to work with, and besides, this outage is a great excuse to point you to Neal Stephenson's great geeky essay Mother Earth, Mother Board
It's hardly hidden in Safari - the Preferences option is on the menu it's always on for all apps, and there are a refreshingly small set of Preferences to be, er, preferred. The one for popups is clearly labelled as "Block popups."
In contrast, I'm bemused by the vast swathe of apparently useless options IE offers to me at work.
Are you seriously arguing that programmers with 1 year of experience are as productive as programmers with 10 years of experience?
Like you, I have 5+ years in software engineering and I can assure you that there is no way you can compare the output of two programmers with those levels of experience. I know the code I produce now is better than that I wrote when I started - how do I know? Generally I've ended up back doing maintanence on my own code at some point, and having seen what I wrote two years ago, when I thought I was shit-hot (and was well regarded with my teams), I know I've improved.
There is a lot more to the art of programming than lines of code per hour, and the experience you gain in programming is often what we generally call 'design', which is very hard to measure but easy to recognise.
This is a lovely bit of marketing. It deflects all blame for the viruses onto the writers, and implies that Microsoft have no responsibility here.
Don't get me wrong, I'd cheerfully beat the living daylights out of a virus writer on the basis that I can barely use my email now. Let's have an analogy:
You are a major company with expensive commercial premises. [You are a company who uses IT kit.]
You employ a security firm to look after your building. [You install an OS.]
Your building burns down because there were no doors and some bored teenagers wandered in and torched the place. [You get burned by a virus, and trust me, that costs business money in downtime and/or admins.]
Was the teenager guilty? Yes. Was the security firm negligent? Yes. Does going after the teenager mean the security firm is not negligent? Nope.
I'm rather bemused as to why a major business hasn't sued Microsoft over some of the security scandals this past couple of years. Much as I'd like to see it, I don't think any will really vote with their wallets; migrating desktops for plain ordinary business work (mail, Word, Excel) from Windows is never even discussed, no matter what the servers are.
My solution? XML document formats! Even if it's not XML, something common. Until we have that there'll always be a monoculture on the commercial desktop.
(For what it's worth, I bought Office on my Mac OS box. It's nice. I don't like Windows, but I don't object to Office at all, realising that LaTeX isn't for everyone.)
I would agree... but I bought one of those aluminium knobs, and regard it as some of the best money I spent on my machine!
It's a useability godsend for certain things. I really miss it when I'm in work. Besides, against the other hojillion dollars they spend on this setup, $40 looks like a bargain.
The article talks about a standard PC, which might mean a hardened box, but I doubt it. A unit such as you describe is no longer cheap, and makes dedicated hardware cost competitive again.
As for reduncancy, when I worked in the telecommunications industry - not wireless, but optical long-haul - even having redundant machines in the same physical location was regarded as unsafe.
What if there is big power failure? A serious fire? A flood? A plane crash on top of the station? A meteor strike? There's resiliency and then there's five nines resiliency, which takes a lot more work
Firstly, Email lists are not Usenet. Usenet is Usenet. Secondly, the article makes me wonder why Microsoft thinks there's any benefit to gained from entering this space; Usenet has been chugging on quietly for years and I don't see how it can be levered other than by something like Google's archiving service. Lastly, the service that the article talks about ignores kill files: kill files are vital in Usenet, and I don't see how any other centralised server can be used, or how it can be made fair and unbiased, and immune to gaming. The service they talk about is a novel way of applying views to the threaded data we all see on a newsreader; I'm happy to see a reader than can cope with "Show me messages sorted by content by regulars, where regulars post > 10 times a week" - I'm not happy with a central repository saying "David Kennedy is [something] on [newsgroup]" as it will be measured by criteria which are going to give different results in different threads.
Mmm, example. I am a troll; I post every day or so, an offensive post. Two or three people reply saying, "Don't feed the troll". I am a regular; I post every day or so, revelant comments. Two or three people reply saying, "Good point, fixed the problem." or "If you liked that book, try this one." Same metrics, different value to the readers of the group.
Apple's OS X has a nice approach to this; it runs at a specified time that you decide, looks for updates, asks you to pick which you want to install, then installs and prompts for restarts if needed.
As it runs twice a day automatically, every couple of weeks I just see a indicator in my Dock and I can then load the patch, new foo etc while continuing other work. The restart I just put off until I'm done with my current task.
Better than asking me to do something via email, more comfortable than my computer being remotely controller.
I hope the reviewer above is 14, for that would explain not only his terrible review, but also the fact that he praises what is, in my humble opinion, a crappy book.
Were I an English teacher, the above review wouldn't have been an acceptable homework from a kid!
> They need to sort out international licensing too.
Ooooh yes, indeed. It's a bit of slap in the face to have another OS X goodie be useless here in the UK.
I've signed a petition online about this, and sent feedback via Apple's web pages, but really, the only thing that talks is money... set it up, let me spend. Good for Apple, good for me.
(Here in the UK CD's are even more expensive than the US. I'm happy to pay full price for someone I know I like, but for a band I've not listened to before?)
I read Usenet daily. I post daily. I have done so for years. Usenet is alive and very useful.
In particular, Usenet offers a set of very mature readers which provide way more functionality than a web browser can give, even for a forum like this..
Don't like someone's attitude-filled posts? Mod them down, all the time. Kill file them even; never see their comments again.
Getting trolled all the time? Set up regexps which kill gnucontrol threads, or any thread started by someone in your troll list.
Distracted by big sigs? Snip them off. Almost all readers will manage this (I just colourise them differently, but auto-trim when replying.)
Even the older newsreaders, heck, especially the older readers, offer colour highlighting and mark up, making it easy to skim a thread, noting new comments.
Usenet is actually becoming a nicer place now; the Spam has died away, attracted by the bright lights of the web and mass email. Many newbies don't know what Usenet is and can't flood the place, even in these days of mass broadband. However, the trick is finding an ACTIVE group. Some groups do have a clique sitting in them, but on any decently on-topic group there remains plenty of activity.
Lastly, Google groups. What a goldmine of trivia. And how awful to see your own past posts...
(Amusingly, I still read Usenet with the venerable Unix command line app, 'tin'. It's not perfect, but it's fast and easy to use. It just looks so archaic when running on OS X, on a TiBook...)
Slashdot Mirror
I'm disappointed that more media sources haven't picked up on how clever the wording is when ID is discussed. Suggesting that we teach students "both sides of the controversy" sounds wonderfully reasonable, but it means you accept that there is a debate, and that there are two sides to discuss. Wonderful PR work.
A blunt anology is to holocaust denial; should we teach students in schools the version of history espoused by ring-wing neo-nazi groups? After all, we should show them both sides of the debate.
(Note that I don't think this kind of attack need lead to bad science in schools: you can have great fun accepting that neo-Darwinistic evolution is 'just a theory', as you can then discuss testability, predictions etc, and how it's doing against the evidence and what changes had to be made. Now do the same with ID - no testability, no predictions etc. Now pick the theory you want to use. For bonus points, discuss why ID is simply a stupid idea using Gould's separation of magisteria, or Fowler's mythos vs logos viewpoints.)
Parent said:
> First, [CVs which don't] have CS or SE degrees get thrown out.
While I appreciate the first cut of a pile of CVs is always somewhat arbitary, I'm surprised by this. I'd be rejected on the first pass (PhD Physics) despite having worked as a software engineer since 1998.
And it's worth checking some of those apparent lies; it's not that unusual to find cases like someone who has written "10 years X" rather than explain to low-level HR that they first worked with X back when it was still called Y.
Can I ask why so many people have modded up an obvious troll? Cracks about socialism, protecting property, English teeth? C'mon, engage your critical faculties when modding.
UK taxes are not popular, but yes, increased taxes for important services like the National Health Services will be tolerated. We like public services, we recognise that taxes are necessary, but we don't like them, we don't generally* want more of them, and proposing a tax raise is always an unpopular move.
* Side note: I'd cheerfully pay my taxes provided I can tick boxes for what I want them to go on. I might choose to tick plenty for healthcare and education for example, and perhaps choose to tick fewer related to, eg, military spending.
So I'm out of the question because I'm a Java developer? Never mind that I've been paid to work in C, C++, Perl, and a few other propietary languages. Never mind that I write small Perl and Unix scripts most days. Never mind that the reality of being a working senior Java server-side developer is a knowledge of a vast, and ever growing, set of associated platforms, comms and database technologies required for large scale projects for, in my case, telecomms and financial customers. On multiple platforms. Multiple operating systems.
Apparently my decade or more performing scientific computing or writing code on Unix somehow means I don't know that environent. Somehow choosing to use that environment to write Java invalidates everything else I know.
You are a technology bigot and deserve the same sort of criticism I'd get if, say, I presented the view that sysadmins are just computer janitors for developers, most of whom could do the same job. See? That'd be a grossly unfair thing for me to say wouldn't it? (Even if I sometimes thought that when working with bad admins.)
You seem to be forgetting the golden rule: pick the right tool for the job.
Take a fully dark picture and use it to subtract static? Sounds familiar.
You're re-inventing some techniques familiar to astronomers. Back when CCDs (a) were very expensive (b) were very small and (c) had to be used in dewers they were mainly seen on telescopes.
The other technique (flat-fielding) was taking a picture of a uniform light source and using that to correct the apparent brightness across your images. (My flat fields at the time were terrible, should have been even, were striped and shaded instead. Modern CCDs are prolly a lot better.)
Good luck trying to get one of these devices if you live outside the US/Canada. You can't buy internationally from the manufacturer and there's a regulatory issue with european imports apparently, which means the normal retail channels don't have product for sale either.
Pity, it was just what I was looking for.
[nitpick]
Java debuggers can't be used on remote systems? News to me. I really must stop doing that every single day at work...
If you do like logging, it's fun to start work in 24/7 environments like telecomms and finance; in my experience, no-one ever seems to consider just how big that log gets, or when it gets purged, or achived until it's on a client site or in final testing!
It is a pain to set up and configure, but I agree with the grandparent that as a developer USING it, ClearCase is really nice.
Slashdot has utterly lost any credibility it might once have had in the serious programming community, but honestly, this must be the nadir.
I'm not even going to try and list arguments FOR case-sensitivity, rather, I'll ask for substantial arguments against. The original poster had none.
I think you mean "Hear, hear!", not "Here, here!"
On a geeky site like this "shaped like a ring" IS a good description.
I used to work in optical telecomms until the industry collapsed, and the phrase "ring network" is common parlance.
They're not unfashionable in favour of mesh networks, but basically almost all existing high-cap networks are inter-linked ring topologies.
I notice most of the Didn't-Read-The-Article crowd seem to be missing that this is an undersea cable. They're Not Easy to work with, and besides, this outage is a great excuse to point you to Neal Stephenson's great geeky essay
Mother Earth, Mother Board
It's hardly hidden in Safari - the Preferences option is on the menu it's always on for all apps, and there are a refreshingly small set of Preferences to be, er, preferred. The one for popups is clearly labelled as "Block popups."
In contrast, I'm bemused by the vast swathe of apparently useless options IE offers to me at work.
Are you seriously arguing that programmers with 1 year of experience are as productive as programmers with 10 years of experience?
Like you, I have 5+ years in software engineering and I can assure you that there is no way you can compare the output of two programmers with those levels of experience. I know the code I produce now is better than that I wrote when I started - how do I know? Generally I've ended up back doing maintanence on my own code at some point, and having seen what I wrote two years ago, when I thought I was shit-hot (and was well regarded with my teams), I know I've improved.
There is a lot more to the art of programming than lines of code per hour, and the experience you gain in programming is often what we generally call 'design', which is very hard to measure but easy to recognise.
This is a lovely bit of marketing. It deflects all blame for the viruses onto the writers, and implies that Microsoft have no responsibility here.
Don't get me wrong, I'd cheerfully beat the living daylights out of a virus writer on the basis that I can barely use my email now. Let's have an analogy:
You are a major company with expensive commercial premises. [You are a company who uses IT kit.]
You employ a security firm to look after your building. [You install an OS.]
Your building burns down because there were no doors and some bored teenagers wandered in and torched the place. [You get burned by a virus, and trust me, that costs business money in downtime and/or admins.]
Was the teenager guilty? Yes. Was the security firm negligent? Yes. Does going after the teenager mean the security firm is not negligent? Nope.
I'm rather bemused as to why a major business hasn't sued Microsoft over some of the security scandals this past couple of years. Much as I'd like to see it, I don't think any will really vote with their wallets; migrating desktops for plain ordinary business work (mail, Word, Excel) from Windows is never even discussed, no matter what the servers are.
My solution? XML document formats! Even if it's not XML, something common. Until we have that there'll always be a monoculture on the commercial desktop.
(For what it's worth, I bought Office on my Mac OS box. It's nice. I don't like Windows, but I don't object to Office at all, realising that LaTeX isn't for everyone.)
I would agree ... but I bought one of those aluminium knobs, and regard it as some of the best money I spent on my machine!
It's a useability godsend for certain things. I really miss it when I'm in work. Besides, against the other hojillion dollars they spend on this setup, $40 looks like a bargain.
The article talks about a standard PC, which might mean a hardened box, but I doubt it. A unit such as you describe is no longer cheap, and makes dedicated hardware cost competitive again.
As for reduncancy, when I worked in the telecommunications industry - not wireless, but optical long-haul - even having redundant machines in the same physical location was regarded as unsafe.
What if there is big power failure? A serious fire? A flood? A plane crash on top of the station? A meteor strike? There's resiliency and then there's five nines resiliency, which takes a lot more work
Actually, yes, I have tried Quantum Mechanics (needed it for the PhD in Astrophysics).
No, I don't know why the phrase is "It's not rocket science" either, but I couldn't resist the chance to go with the wordplay.
If you're not a rocket scientist, here's a very readable introduction to aerospike engines.
Caution: It is rocket science, and a little bit of maths is required to appreciate even this introduction.
This article annoyed me in so many ways...
Firstly, Email lists are not Usenet. Usenet is Usenet. Secondly, the article makes me wonder why Microsoft thinks there's any benefit to gained from entering this space; Usenet has been chugging on quietly for years and I don't see how it can be levered other than by something like Google's archiving service. Lastly, the service that the article talks about ignores kill files: kill files are vital in Usenet, and I don't see how any other centralised server can be used, or how it can be made fair and unbiased, and immune to gaming. The service they talk about is a novel way of applying views to the threaded data we all see on a newsreader; I'm happy to see a reader than can cope with "Show me messages sorted by content by regulars, where regulars post > 10 times a week" - I'm not happy with a central repository saying "David Kennedy is [something] on [newsgroup]" as it will be measured by criteria which are going to give different results in different threads.
Mmm, example. I am a troll; I post every day or so, an offensive post. Two or three people reply saying, "Don't feed the troll". I am a regular; I post every day or so, revelant comments. Two or three people reply saying, "Good point, fixed the problem." or "If you liked that book, try this one." Same metrics, different value to the readers of the group.
Apple's OS X has a nice approach to this; it runs at a specified time that you decide, looks for updates, asks you to pick which you want to install, then installs and prompts for restarts if needed.
As it runs twice a day automatically, every couple of weeks I just see a indicator in my Dock and I can then load the patch, new foo etc while continuing other work. The restart I just put off until I'm done with my current task.
Better than asking me to do something via email, more comfortable than my computer being remotely controller.
I hope the reviewer above is 14, for that would explain not only his terrible review, but also the fact that he praises what is, in my humble opinion, a crappy book.
Were I an English teacher, the above review wouldn't have been an acceptable homework from a kid!
(My booklog, my SF reviews)
> They need to sort out international licensing too.
... set it up, let me spend. Good for Apple, good for me.
Ooooh yes, indeed. It's a bit of slap in the face to have another OS X goodie be useless here in the UK.
I've signed a petition online about this, and sent feedback via Apple's web pages, but really, the only thing that talks is money
(Here in the UK CD's are even more expensive than the US. I'm happy to pay full price for someone I know I like, but for a band I've not listened to before?)
Usenet is alive and very useful.
In particular, Usenet offers a set of very mature readers which provide way more functionality than a web browser can give, even for a forum like this..
Don't like someone's attitude-filled posts? Mod them down, all the time. Kill file them even; never see their comments again.
Getting trolled all the time? Set up regexps which kill gnucontrol threads, or any thread started by someone in your troll list.
Distracted by big sigs? Snip them off. Almost all readers will manage this (I just colourise them differently, but auto-trim
when replying.)
Even the older newsreaders, heck, especially the older readers, offer colour highlighting and mark up, making
it easy to skim a thread, noting new comments.
Usenet is actually becoming a nicer place now; the Spam has died away, attracted by the bright lights of the web and mass email. Many newbies don't know what Usenet is and can't flood the place, even in these days of mass broadband. However, the trick is finding an ACTIVE group. Some groups do have a clique sitting in them, but on any decently on-topic group there remains plenty of activity.
Lastly, Google groups. What a goldmine of trivia. And how awful to see your own past posts...
(Amusingly, I still read Usenet with the venerable Unix command line app, 'tin'. It's not perfect, but it's fast and easy to use. It just looks so archaic when running on OS X, on a TiBook...)
Complain here using the iTunes feedback form.