Yeah, just because it's easy to say/write "I don't allow you to do this" or "You must do this if you use this program" doesn't automatically mean it is illegal to go against your wishes. Or that your wishes should be supported and enforced by a Court.
> Back when Volvo first released their diesel intercooled turbo's here in North America, people were stepping on the gas and wrapping them around trees,
> So no, they're not gutless. If you can get an S70 made before '98 you're in for a happy surprise too.
The main point is there is no contradiction if people say XP SP3 is good, but years ago the same people could say Win XP was not good enough.
Sure Win98 was crappy (in some cases even crappier than Win95 - for instance Win98 has problems if you press winkey at the wrong time while booting - try it - press winkey just as the desktop shows or is about to show;) - Win95 doesn't have that problem).
But being more stable than Win98 didn't automatically make it good enough.
Because there was Win2K. And the people who cared about stability and wanted to avoid those Win98 crashes were using Win2K which I believe was fairly well patched by then.
Going from Win2K to WinXP was not necessarily an improvement back then (except perhaps for the much faster boot up times:) ).
It could be illegal to throw sweet wrappers on the street, but still not a crime.
Breaches of contract are not normally considered criminal - the aggrieved party might file a civil suit. The cops might start looking for you if you keep not showing up in court and ignoring the court's requests.
Now to wait for someone to say [citation needed];).
The verbosity is bad in one way, because it means more work for the programmer.
If it's more work, it can mean the program handles fewer cases/scenarios because programmer just has less time to do it (or it's a bigger pain to do it). That makes the program not as robust or complete as it could be.
Of course the workaround or "feature" is the Lead Programmer ends up coding the program in English or some other human or formal language, and the other developers compile it to Java.
This means you have a larger development team - which is not necessarily a minus in some cases as it might look better for a manager's resume and also means he can negotiate a better package;). The other benefit is the Lead Programmer can switch to working on other programs and not have to spend as much time maintaining it - since the rest of the dev team in Elbonia will be doing that.
Whereas if it's a python/perl/ruby shop, it might be just the two of you, so when there's a new cool project to do, you and your colleague will have to do it as well as maintain the boring old project.
Anyway, what I don't like about verbose code is, you can't just stare at your screen till the code makes sense, since with verbosity, you may have to keep using the page up and page down keys;). You could push some code to another function/routine, but then that often means you have to go look there too to see if the bug is there;).
Now if you could push the code to a standard or defacto standard library that's different, since an experienced programmer in the field wouldn't normally have to look it up. And suddenly it becomes a whole lot more maintainable.
For that sort of reason (and because I'm lazy) I prefer to pick languages where I don't have to write lots of custom stuff - I prefer prefab.
Stuff like Lisp might give more power (macros etc) to the code I write, but I rather a language gives more power because of all the code I don't have to write;).
The hunter gatherer lifestyle isn't that bad actually in certain environments/regions, the big problem is if you have medical emergencies - break a leg etc.
The other big problem is, you need very many acres of land to support just a few humans doing that. Because "Nature" isn't going to conveniently produce edible plants/fruits and animals in high densities just for us humans.
Because of that I don't think the earth can support 6 billion humans living the "back to nature" hunter-gatherer lifestyle.
That's why farming will still be required. Whether the modern style farming with large areas of monoculture (same plants/animals), or some other form.
We're also running out of fish (due to terrible fishing practices like "bycatch" etc). If we weren't that low on fish, just a few humans would be able to live quite well just by fishing from the shore or from small boats. It seems that humans thrive on fish (that's not mercury/PCB/BPA laden;) ).
Just look at the historical accounts. In the past many places had "zillions" of oysters/lobsters/cod/sardines/bison etc. A small bunch of people could live very easily off such riches. It's a bit like a few people living off the "interest" of a large sum of money. Sadly we've been eating into the capital for a long time already.
The other big problem we wouldn't have as many cool toys or other "shiny" stuff, or fancy stuff like spacecraft for instance. I like my toys:).
It's not like "running out of content" bothered the thousands of Counterstrike and Starcraft players. The last I checked a lot of them were playing the same maps over and over again.
The annoying part about Guild Wars is it often takes a long time to get into certain PvP games. And there's often terrible lag. The lag doesn't only affect me - just the other day many of the enemy teams were lagged out and we could smack them without them being able to do a single thing.
As for new content, it would be nice if they could create a new PvP mission where you can have more players per side (e.g. 4 or even 5 teams of 4 and allow heroes/hench in each team). Don't really have epic battles in Guild Wars. But their system and network already seem to have a hard time coping with smaller stuff.
Actually I found the acting a bit better in the original Star Wars series.
Phantom Menace was rather poor, many of the actors seemed like they were reading their lines for the first or second time, and then the director says "OK! That's good enough, lets go work on Amidala's costumes".
Whereas at least in the first bit you have far more "in character" acting. For example the scene where Leia says "I love you", and Han says "I know" - even though the script actually was "I love you" or something more "Episode 1-3ish". That brought that scene from "blah" to something that many remember.
George Lucas writes some crappy lines. Don't get me wrong, Lucas has some good ideas, but it seems he just can't write lines. Maybe nowadays he's got more stubborn and has stopped allowing the actors to turn some of his crappier lines into gems. So perhaps it wasn't bad acting in Ep 1-3, the actors just gave up and read from the script.
It was like the first time you go through a presentation, and you're reading from the slides, and you just add a few bits here and there but that's it.
Whereas if you are a good presenter, by the 20th time you've given the same presentation, you show a slide and then you tell the audience, "See that? Now let me tell you a story...".
Exactly. That's why these formal verification stuff is rather useless for most cases I see.
If you pass the customer a mix of water, flour, yeast, eggs and sugar and the customer says "That's not cake, it's not acceptable".
And you then say - "But we meet the cake spec we agreed on, so by that definition it's cake, you have to pay us".
Sure you can go sue the customer and force them to pay you the full sum, but unless most other people agree the customer has just been way too fussy, you might have fewer customers in the future.
Which is useful in certain scenarios, but not so useful in most real world scenarios. After all, it still does not prove the spec is what the customer really wants.
In the real world the problem is not so much the program not following the specs, but the problem is you can never get complete specs, and "correct behaviour" when you get down to the details often starts to become a matter of preference - you can make up pros and cons for the various options, you could make it configurable, but then you also have to decide which should be default;).
A DHCP server I wrote, would give up and exit if someone shutdown the interface it was trying to send packets out from. Perhaps it shouldn't do that - but there was no spec on what it should do in that case (and many other cases).
One could spend years trying to write a complete spec, but most bosses, companies and customers can't wait that long.
For example: by the time you've finished a DHCP server spec, people might have long rolled out IPv6 and suddenly the requirements and specs change - people don't want an IPv4 dhcp server anymore;).
Or as apparently what many people are doing - just give up and don't bother.
Sometimes on a whim, I'll just add some info or make a correction. But I rarely bother to see if it stays. If people revert it, it's their or Wikipedia's problem, not mine.
It's not like I'm an avid supporter of wikipedia (esp given the sort of things they and their admins do). So I don't see the point of putting in extra effort for them (unless someone paid me enough:) ).
I've seen pages with pretty obvious stuff that's full of "citation needed" tags. I doubt that sort of thing is due to people trying to establish the truth, these sort of occurrences are more due to egos or politics or some astroturfing. Just a google search will provide tons of citations, so why clutter the wikipage with a citation for every other statement?
After that the light has to reach your eyes, the retina and then perceived in the brain somewhere.
Because the retina experiences "afterimage" effects and the brain also determines the colour of what it is seeing by context. You could see the exact same colour, but think it's a different shade based on the context.
Slashdot Mirror
Before one uses this, one should compare the evaporation rates of lake water with this, and lake water without, under various conditions.
The bacteria and other stuff in the lake surface microlayer might affect the results.
Yeah, just because it's easy to say/write "I don't allow you to do this" or "You must do this if you use this program" doesn't automatically mean it is illegal to go against your wishes. Or that your wishes should be supported and enforced by a Court.
Could be just due to separation of duties and authority levels.
The officers might not be allowed to post official police notices on the internet, so they get someone else with that job responsibility to do it.
It also shifts responsibility to someone else.
Might be classified as suicide or "missing person".
I'm curious - if you buy a music CD and play the music on two PCs does the RIAA come after you?
The BSA does come after you if you try that sort of thing with software ( if you don't have the required licenses).
> Back when Volvo first released their diesel intercooled turbo's here in North America, people were stepping on the gas and wrapping them around trees,
> So no, they're not gutless. If you can get an S70 made before '98 you're in for a happy surprise too.
Like being in a car that's wrapped around a tree?
There's also something called a DiesOtto:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DiesOtto
Nah, just a bias against Grand Viziers after Aladdin, which I believe came before Terry Pratchett's "Interesting Times".
Now that I've bothered to look, it seems there are accounts of good Grand Vizier's in the Arabian Nights, so my bias is unfair I guess.
Still, "The Evil Grand Vizier" does tend to have a that something "extra" compared to stuff like say - "The Evil Prime Minister".
The main point is there is no contradiction if people say XP SP3 is good, but years ago the same people could say Win XP was not good enough.
;) - Win95 doesn't have that problem).
:) ).
Sure Win98 was crappy (in some cases even crappier than Win95 - for instance Win98 has problems if you press winkey at the wrong time while booting - try it - press winkey just as the desktop shows or is about to show
But being more stable than Win98 didn't automatically make it good enough.
Because there was Win2K. And the people who cared about stability and wanted to avoid those Win98 crashes were using Win2K which I believe was fairly well patched by then.
Going from Win2K to WinXP was not necessarily an improvement back then (except perhaps for the much faster boot up times
Maybe he was a Grand Vizier in a previous incarnation.
:).
p.s. somehow Grand Viziers tend to be portrayed rather "unsympathetically" in books and films, wonder why
Depends on the law.
;).
It could be illegal to throw sweet wrappers on the street, but still not a crime.
Breaches of contract are not normally considered criminal - the aggrieved party might file a civil suit. The cops might start looking for you if you keep not showing up in court and ignoring the court's requests.
Now to wait for someone to say [citation needed]
If you haven't noticed, there are quite a number of differences between Windows XP (original release), and Windows XP SP3.
Windows XP (original release) wasn't really much more stable than Win98.
In contrast neither Windows XP SP2 nor SP3 crashed as much.
The verbosity is bad in one way, because it means more work for the programmer.
;). The other benefit is the Lead Programmer can switch to working on other programs and not have to spend as much time maintaining it - since the rest of the dev team in Elbonia will be doing that.
;). You could push some code to another function/routine, but then that often means you have to go look there too to see if the bug is there ;).
;).
If it's more work, it can mean the program handles fewer cases/scenarios because programmer just has less time to do it (or it's a bigger pain to do it). That makes the program not as robust or complete as it could be.
Of course the workaround or "feature" is the Lead Programmer ends up coding the program in English or some other human or formal language, and the other developers compile it to Java.
This means you have a larger development team - which is not necessarily a minus in some cases as it might look better for a manager's resume and also means he can negotiate a better package
Whereas if it's a python/perl/ruby shop, it might be just the two of you, so when there's a new cool project to do, you and your colleague will have to do it as well as maintain the boring old project.
Anyway, what I don't like about verbose code is, you can't just stare at your screen till the code makes sense, since with verbosity, you may have to keep using the page up and page down keys
Now if you could push the code to a standard or defacto standard library that's different, since an experienced programmer in the field wouldn't normally have to look it up. And suddenly it becomes a whole lot more maintainable.
For that sort of reason (and because I'm lazy) I prefer to pick languages where I don't have to write lots of custom stuff - I prefer prefab.
Stuff like Lisp might give more power (macros etc) to the code I write, but I rather a language gives more power because of all the code I don't have to write
The hunter gatherer lifestyle isn't that bad actually in certain environments/regions, the big problem is if you have medical emergencies - break a leg etc.
;) ).
:).
The other big problem is, you need very many acres of land to support just a few humans doing that. Because "Nature" isn't going to conveniently produce edible plants/fruits and animals in high densities just for us humans.
Because of that I don't think the earth can support 6 billion humans living the "back to nature" hunter-gatherer lifestyle.
That's why farming will still be required. Whether the modern style farming with large areas of monoculture (same plants/animals), or some other form.
We're also running out of fish (due to terrible fishing practices like "bycatch" etc). If we weren't that low on fish, just a few humans would be able to live quite well just by fishing from the shore or from small boats. It seems that humans thrive on fish (that's not mercury/PCB/BPA laden
Just look at the historical accounts. In the past many places had "zillions" of oysters/lobsters/cod/sardines/bison etc. A small bunch of people could live very easily off such riches. It's a bit like a few people living off the "interest" of a large sum of money. Sadly we've been eating into the capital for a long time already.
The other big problem we wouldn't have as many cool toys or other "shiny" stuff, or fancy stuff like spacecraft for instance. I like my toys
FWIW, it's trillions not billions.
Google search for: Federal Reserve trillion
And see how much transparency there really is about those trillions.
Those executive bonuses were a distraction. This 18M is nothing. Go find out where the trillions went.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=apx7XNLnZZlc
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=washingtonstory&sid=aGq2B3XeGKok
It's not like "running out of content" bothered the thousands of Counterstrike and Starcraft players. The last I checked a lot of them were playing the same maps over and over again.
The annoying part about Guild Wars is it often takes a long time to get into certain PvP games. And there's often terrible lag. The lag doesn't only affect me - just the other day many of the enemy teams were lagged out and we could smack them without them being able to do a single thing.
As for new content, it would be nice if they could create a new PvP mission where you can have more players per side (e.g. 4 or even 5 teams of 4 and allow heroes/hench in each team). Don't really have epic battles in Guild Wars. But their system and network already seem to have a hard time coping with smaller stuff.
Actually I found the acting a bit better in the original Star Wars series.
Phantom Menace was rather poor, many of the actors seemed like they were reading their lines for the first or second time, and then the director says "OK! That's good enough, lets go work on Amidala's costumes".
Whereas at least in the first bit you have far more "in character" acting. For example the scene where Leia says "I love you", and Han says "I know" - even though the script actually was "I love you" or something more "Episode 1-3ish". That brought that scene from "blah" to something that many remember.
George Lucas writes some crappy lines. Don't get me wrong, Lucas has some good ideas, but it seems he just can't write lines. Maybe nowadays he's got more stubborn and has stopped allowing the actors to turn some of his crappier lines into gems. So perhaps it wasn't bad acting in Ep 1-3, the actors just gave up and read from the script.
It was like the first time you go through a presentation, and you're reading from the slides, and you just add a few bits here and there but that's it.
Whereas if you are a good presenter, by the 20th time you've given the same presentation, you show a slide and then you tell the audience, "See that? Now let me tell you a story...".
But are EULAs binding?
And even if the ham stuff is damaged by EMP I bet the crustier hams could fix it.
You might be able to come up with contrived cases where the benefit to the legal owner outweighs the damage of the loss. :).
Depends on the test results and the sorts of tests run.
;).
If the 5 year tested program is still failing really badly, I'm going to wait for the formally verified program to be tested
Exactly. That's why these formal verification stuff is rather useless for most cases I see.
If you pass the customer a mix of water, flour, yeast, eggs and sugar and the customer says "That's not cake, it's not acceptable".
And you then say - "But we meet the cake spec we agreed on, so by that definition it's cake, you have to pay us".
Sure you can go sue the customer and force them to pay you the full sum, but unless most other people agree the customer has just been way too fussy, you might have fewer customers in the future.
Which is useful in certain scenarios, but not so useful in most real world scenarios. After all, it still does not prove the spec is what the customer really wants.
;).
;).
In the real world the problem is not so much the program not following the specs, but the problem is you can never get complete specs, and "correct behaviour" when you get down to the details often starts to become a matter of preference - you can make up pros and cons for the various options, you could make it configurable, but then you also have to decide which should be default
A DHCP server I wrote, would give up and exit if someone shutdown the interface it was trying to send packets out from. Perhaps it shouldn't do that - but there was no spec on what it should do in that case (and many other cases).
One could spend years trying to write a complete spec, but most bosses, companies and customers can't wait that long.
For example: by the time you've finished a DHCP server spec, people might have long rolled out IPv6 and suddenly the requirements and specs change - people don't want an IPv4 dhcp server anymore
Or as apparently what many people are doing - just give up and don't bother.
:) ).
Sometimes on a whim, I'll just add some info or make a correction. But I rarely bother to see if it stays. If people revert it, it's their or Wikipedia's problem, not mine.
It's not like I'm an avid supporter of wikipedia (esp given the sort of things they and their admins do). So I don't see the point of putting in extra effort for them (unless someone paid me enough
I've seen pages with pretty obvious stuff that's full of "citation needed" tags. I doubt that sort of thing is due to people trying to establish the truth, these sort of occurrences are more due to egos or politics or some astroturfing. Just a google search will provide tons of citations, so why clutter the wikipage with a citation for every other statement?
But a lot of these questions are only simple if nobody wants to know or understand the details.
For instance - is water blue? Why?
http://www.webexhibits.org/causesofcolor/5B.html
Turns out D2O is more colourless than H2O.
After that the light has to reach your eyes, the retina and then perceived in the brain somewhere.
Because the retina experiences "afterimage" effects and the brain also determines the colour of what it is seeing by context. You could see the exact same colour, but think it's a different shade based on the context.