This is a problem I see in the entire STEM field. You work on technology X for a while, you learn it inside and out, and you expect everyone else who is "qualified" knows what you know. You want to hire someone with no ramp, who is going to drop in on day 1 and start doing great stuff, just as soon as he sets a password to his laptop.
That's great, until you ask a question about second-year college stuff. Like "show me how to reverse a linked list", which is basic Data Structures class material, not the hard stuff. And then suddenly they get the deer-in-the-headlights look. Back around '04 or so, the group I was in interviewed some people, with the same interview style that I got hired with. All the Java-addled recent CS grads were useless. Only the EE grads actually knew how to program.
It's called the DRY principle, as in Don't Repeat Yourself. Any time you do the same sequence of stuff in multiple places, when that sequence needs to change, the chance of missing one is increased.
int i;
bool ok = true;
for (i = 0; ok && i < 3; i++) {
; switch (i) {
; ; case 0: if (!AcquireResource1()) ok = false; break;
; ; case 1: if (AcquireResource2()) ok = false; break;
; ; case 2: if (AcquireResource3()) ok = false; break;
; }
; if (!ok) break;
}
switch(i) {
; case 3: Cleanup3();
; case 2: Cleanup2();
; case 1: Cleanup1();
}
I think part of it was just the era, when FORTRAN still was a significant programming language. Its arithmetic IF was basically a triple GOTO statement, and you could literally go anywhere from it. Only being able to use numbers for labels, with no enforcement of numeric order, made it even worse.
As long as you make the effort to use the standard (and more readable) control structures where they apply, the really weird stuff like error abort stuff then can stand out by its use of goto. I still don't feel that it's significantly more readable to abuse stuff like do { } while(0) (other than in a #define macro to ensure statement atomicity) over a "goto abort".
The real fun comes when every one of those layers has an else block. So you end up with about 300 lines of code, then come up on a dozen else error("some message"); else error("another message"); else error("another twisty message all different"); else etc. To paraphrase the real estate agent's motto: locality, locality, locality!
And of course the legacy code that I had to work on did all of this in main(). He also had a fondness for putting assignments inside the if statements, like: if (retval = longnamefunction(parameter, anotherfunction(parm, pram), paremater, &pretamer) and they would go to about column 120 or so
That's why you never pick the numbers from a fortune cookie. It actually happened once, and the lottery people at first suspected fraud when there were 100 winning tickets. Then they found out it was a fortune cookie number. (Hint: they're mass-printed on sheets before being cut into strips.)
What's wrong, did you buy a bubble-priced house in the People's Republic of California and end up underwater? Here in Texas, housing prices didn't skyrocket into the stupid. The other day I noticed a price for a comparable house (100sqft larger) a few blocks away that is about 70% more than what I paid for my house 14 years ago. At that price my loan is over 60% equity.
Any regular reader of thedailywtf.com would also include the support classes like BubbleSortFactory, BubbleSortFactoryFactory, automated testing support, etc. Who needs regular fluffy when you can have enterprisey fluffy!
Nope. 4 and 5 left index finger, 6 and 7 right index finger.
But just because a broken keyboard broke your typing doesn't mean you can't type well. My usage of the right shift key was broken by a few months in college of having to use a 1970's era IBM 327x terminal, where the right-shift location was either the "SEND" key or something else useless. (I really looked hard but could only find pictures of 327x keyboards with a proper right shift key.)
So now I always use the left shift, and to type an uppercase A, my left ring finger goes to the A key.
Their picture quality is really good, so I nabbed it. It acts like a normal TV, and powers on instantly, at least.
How instantly is instantly? My big TV set takes about 10 seconds to start up, half of that time with "Please wait" on the screen. (I think all big-screen TV sets these days run an embedded Linux, so it probably cold-boots when turned on.) I have a smaller set that takes like three seconds just to turn the power LED on.
In any case, it's easy enough for me to simply disconnect the TV from the Internet (I use a MAC filter)
I wouldn't be satisfied with anything less than a "pair of scissors filter". <img src="RonSwanson.jpg">
Smart TV is the new DIVX. Back in the day I even got one person to return their player to Circuit Shitty for a refund.
I refuse to hook up a TV set to the internet and allow it to run whatever the fuck mystery-ware it wants. I won't use them as anything other than a dumb TV hooked up to an antenna, or a display connected to a computer (which may even contain an ATSC receiver). But so far I haven't yet been in a situation where I've been forced to buy a "smart" TV.
Interesting. That thread has reached a point where they're trying to confirm that it's just the edges of the chip that are light senstive.
A while back I took apart a scrap HD-DVD player and I noticed black epoxy around the edges of some chips. I thought it was just an attempt to prevent hacking the player, but I think those were the same type of flip-chip packaging, with nothing but mirror silicon on top.
Also I seem to recall that CPUs and other chips with a mirror silicon chip in the middle always have the silicon's edges covered.
Fecal transplants from thin people to fat people causing weight loss is actually a thing. What I hadn't heard of before is the reverse, but I am certainly not surprised.
I have TRSDOS backups from the mid '80s. Years ago I imaged a bunch of.DMK files with a Catweasel board (including the bad sectors from back in the day), then used a utility to extract files from the images. I can now use them with an emulator. While I was at it, I even imaged some random Osborne and Kaypro CP/M floppies that I had found.
My remaining big project someday is that I have a bunch of TRS-80 cassettes from back when I was a kid. I have ripped a few of those, but the crappy signal levels are as much of a pain in the ass to decode with software as they were back in the day with hardware.
By getting a big pretty PC? There are PC cases intended for living room use, with big slow fans and rubber shock mounts for hard drives. If you get an old-school horizontal case, they fit nicely on a shelf. I actually have two, one to play games that need Winderz, and the other running MythTV on Linux.
Also you may have to turn on optimization for your compiler to report certain warnings. I know this has happened to me before with gcc. Do your first -O2 build since a few weeks ago, and you will probably see some warnings. I've even had warnings that only showed up after I tried a 64-bit build. Also, learn to use asserts, it's all about the belt-and-suspenders stuff.
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This is a problem I see in the entire STEM field. You work on technology X for a while, you learn it inside and out, and you expect everyone else who is "qualified" knows what you know. You want to hire someone with no ramp, who is going to drop in on day 1 and start doing great stuff, just as soon as he sets a password to his laptop.
That's great, until you ask a question about second-year college stuff. Like "show me how to reverse a linked list", which is basic Data Structures class material, not the hard stuff. And then suddenly they get the deer-in-the-headlights look. Back around '04 or so, the group I was in interviewed some people, with the same interview style that I got hired with. All the Java-addled recent CS grads were useless. Only the EE grads actually knew how to program.
Someone should write an emulator that runs on an Arduino.
There should be only ONE return statement in a function
Um, yeah, I'm gonna have to put up a [CITATION NEEDED] here. Sure, that's a thing, but so is Systems Hungarian Notation.
It's called the DRY principle, as in Don't Repeat Yourself. Any time you do the same sequence of stuff in multiple places, when that sequence needs to change, the chance of missing one is increased.
minor change:
case 2: if (AcquireResource3()) ok = false; else DoStuffWithResources(); break;
int i;
bool ok = true;
for (i = 0; ok && i < 3; i++) {
; switch (i) {
; ; case 0: if (!AcquireResource1()) ok = false; break;
; ; case 1: if (AcquireResource2()) ok = false; break;
; ; case 2: if (AcquireResource3()) ok = false; break;
; }
; if (!ok) break;
}
switch(i) {
; case 3: Cleanup3();
; case 2: Cleanup2();
; case 1: Cleanup1();
}
Why yes, I read thedailywtf.com, why do you ask?
I think part of it was just the era, when FORTRAN still was a significant programming language. Its arithmetic IF was basically a triple GOTO statement, and you could literally go anywhere from it. Only being able to use numbers for labels, with no enforcement of numeric order, made it even worse.
As long as you make the effort to use the standard (and more readable) control structures where they apply, the really weird stuff like error abort stuff then can stand out by its use of goto. I still don't feel that it's significantly more readable to abuse stuff like do { } while(0) (other than in a #define macro to ensure statement atomicity) over a "goto abort".
20 layers of nested ifs is already a disaster.
The real fun comes when every one of those layers has an else block. So you end up with about 300 lines of code, then come up on a dozen else error("some message"); else error("another message"); else error("another twisty message all different"); else etc. To paraphrase the real estate agent's motto: locality, locality, locality!
And of course the legacy code that I had to work on did all of this in main(). He also had a fondness for putting assignments inside the if statements, like: if (retval = longnamefunction(parameter, anotherfunction(parm, pram), paremater, &pretamer) and they would go to about column 120 or so
That's why you never pick the numbers from a fortune cookie. It actually happened once, and the lottery people at first suspected fraud when there were 100 winning tickets. Then they found out it was a fortune cookie number. (Hint: they're mass-printed on sheets before being cut into strips.)
What's wrong, did you buy a bubble-priced house in the People's Republic of California and end up underwater? Here in Texas, housing prices didn't skyrocket into the stupid. The other day I noticed a price for a comparable house (100sqft larger) a few blocks away that is about 70% more than what I paid for my house 14 years ago. At that price my loan is over 60% equity.
Any regular reader of thedailywtf.com would also include the support classes like BubbleSortFactory, BubbleSortFactoryFactory, automated testing support, etc. Who needs regular fluffy when you can have enterprisey fluffy!
Nope. 4 and 5 left index finger, 6 and 7 right index finger.
But just because a broken keyboard broke your typing doesn't mean you can't type well. My usage of the right shift key was broken by a few months in college of having to use a 1970's era IBM 327x terminal, where the right-shift location was either the "SEND" key or something else useless. (I really looked hard but could only find pictures of 327x keyboards with a proper right shift key.)
So now I always use the left shift, and to type an uppercase A, my left ring finger goes to the A key.
The 6 key is on the left side? Do you even touch-type, bro? This is the one thing that annoys me the most about split keyboards.
Their picture quality is really good, so I nabbed it. It acts like a normal TV, and powers on instantly, at least.
How instantly is instantly? My big TV set takes about 10 seconds to start up, half of that time with "Please wait" on the screen. (I think all big-screen TV sets these days run an embedded Linux, so it probably cold-boots when turned on.) I have a smaller set that takes like three seconds just to turn the power LED on.
In any case, it's easy enough for me to simply disconnect the TV from the Internet (I use a MAC filter)
I wouldn't be satisfied with anything less than a "pair of scissors filter". <img src="RonSwanson.jpg">
Smart TV is the new DIVX. Back in the day I even got one person to return their player to Circuit Shitty for a refund.
I refuse to hook up a TV set to the internet and allow it to run whatever the fuck mystery-ware it wants. I won't use them as anything other than a dumb TV hooked up to an antenna, or a display connected to a computer (which may even contain an ATSC receiver). But so far I haven't yet been in a situation where I've been forced to buy a "smart" TV.
1: find ancient Apple AirPort or LinkSys wireless router
2: set it up with a bogus SSID like "Free no-Internet" and no password
3: tell TV to use that wireless
4: PROFIT!
They even made a movie once about a smart car.
Interesting. That thread has reached a point where they're trying to confirm that it's just the edges of the chip that are light senstive.
A while back I took apart a scrap HD-DVD player and I noticed black epoxy around the edges of some chips. I thought it was just an attempt to prevent hacking the player, but I think those were the same type of flip-chip packaging, with nothing but mirror silicon on top.
Also I seem to recall that CPUs and other chips with a mirror silicon chip in the middle always have the silicon's edges covered.
Fecal transplants from thin people to fat people causing weight loss is actually a thing. What I hadn't heard of before is the reverse, but I am certainly not surprised.
Or you could have, you know, looked it up in the appropriate places.
But HP summarized it with some details that I was not aware of before. Sounds like a modern social media campaign, done entirely by postal reply.
I have TRSDOS backups from the mid '80s. Years ago I imaged a bunch of .DMK files with a Catweasel board (including the bad sectors from back in the day), then used a utility to extract files from the images. I can now use them with an emulator. While I was at it, I even imaged some random Osborne and Kaypro CP/M floppies that I had found.
My remaining big project someday is that I have a bunch of TRS-80 cassettes from back when I was a kid. I have ripped a few of those, but the crappy signal levels are as much of a pain in the ass to decode with software as they were back in the day with hardware.
tl;dr: me
I not only don't use cloud file storage, I run my own e-mail server and DNS.
By getting a big pretty PC? There are PC cases intended for living room use, with big slow fans and rubber shock mounts for hard drives. If you get an old-school horizontal case, they fit nicely on a shelf. I actually have two, one to play games that need Winderz, and the other running MythTV on Linux.
So where will I go now to get blank stares?
Also you may have to turn on optimization for your compiler to report certain warnings. I know this has happened to me before with gcc. Do your first -O2 build since a few weeks ago, and you will probably see some warnings. I've even had warnings that only showed up after I tried a 64-bit build. Also, learn to use asserts, it's all about the belt-and-suspenders stuff.