I disagree with both of you. There should not be a need for this. Linux memory management should be closer to optimal for desktop users, but unfortunately the current strategy just doesn't work. It's optimized for servers, paging out interactive apps whenever there's something going on in the background.
In particular, the locatedb daemon makes everything unresponsive because linux caches every file on your file-system it touches, even though it's pretty much guaranteed nobody else needs those files anytime soon. This may be theoretically "optimal" in the general case, but it certainly doesn't feel that way for desktop users. Most desktop users would be more than happy to have background jobs run slower if it didn't impact responsitivity. Also, I believe many people would prefer predictive response-times; it's better for the disk to churn while loading a huge file, instead of it churning everywhere else to page in libraries that have been paged out because the huge file is in memory.
Adding a daemon to predict shared library usage is a step in the wrong direction. Not because it doesn't fix the problem, unfortunately I haven't tried it, but sure, it might even work fantastic. It's a step in the wrong direction because it's a kludge, and not a proper fix for having memory management strategies in the kernel that the users actually want. Unfortunately, fixes to this problem are hard to do, and every time someone tries to do a proper fix, it is debated to death on the kernel mailing list, and then dies slowly as it ages out of tree. For all I know, it's also the right decision, if it should be in-kernel, it should also be *right*. A daemon might be a better place to experiment, and hell, if it solves the problem for 99% of the users, we might not even need to change the current strategy, which is certainly right for servers. After all, we live with kludges other places, such as the X Window System needing to be root and accessing raw kernel memory.
But yeah, memory management is complicated. I doubt you can solve this on a piece of paper. If it works, I'm all for it! Maybe this is a proper kludge?
Actually, it's a kind of a gravity lamp, but unlike the one written about here recently, this one doesn't spin a rotor to generate electricity, and it generates its own gravity field by having immense mass. The crunching of matter through gravity results in a fusion reaction which heats matter further and balances the contraction so that it doesn't turn into a black hole. The light it creates is simply a byproduct of this heat, and contains almost every wavelength of light, thus creating a good work light, hence the term "daylight" which historically defined working hours. While most workplaces have artificial light available today, sunlight is still of importance in agriculture, and for planetary environmental reasons.
Re:This is all ridiculous and breeds future behavi
on
Internet Pranks in Schools
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I really don't get why labelling things as "online" makes them new and edgy.
Because things on the Internet have the potential to (a) be seen by a lot more people, and (b) last almost forever. There's a difference between calling someone a fatass in the classroom or schoolyard, and doing it on youtube.
It will/has happen(ed) by whatever means of communication kids use.
Yes it will happen, but no, it shouldn't happen. There's a difference between descriptive and normative ethics. For example, I have never heard of teachers were the pupils posted posters all over town describing how much they disliked them. And if it happened, I'm sure it would involve a criminal case. Kids need to learn that with greater power (the Internet) comes greater responsibility. If they can't handle that responsibility, they shouldn't use the Internet. Lots of people probably shouldn't (and now I'm talking about posting stuff, not using Internet banking or similar things that everybody needs to do).
A teacher claiming she can't work because she got made fun of is like a firefighter complaining he can't work because fires are hot.
Actually, firefighters do that all the time. Going into a burning building is a very high-risk operation, and you need to carefully examine many factors, including temperature, before you decide to enter. Similarly, school-teachers are, like most people, emotional beings, and if the abuse is to large, they can't continue teaching.
If the problem is the complexity of the format itself, embedding human-readable names for each field into the file-format, isn't going to reduce the complexity one bit. And if you already have a specification (even if it's reverse engineered), human-readability or embedded field-names is not of importance. Granted, XML doesn't make it any more complicated, so it doesn't hurt much, but a straightforward translation of word or excel file-formats into XML is not particulary helpful. XML has its uses. Relying on it like it was magic, is not one of them. First and foremost because it isn't magic.
I've written tons of library code for reading and writing old proprietary binary file-formats on newer incompatible computers with different byte-order, different floating point formats, etc... It's not particulary hard. Anyone can do it. It's code-monkey stuff, or a computing 101 exercise, not something you even need real programmers to tackle. The problem with office formats isn't that it's binary, it's that it's complicated.
Look, I'm sitting at a fucking computer. I know how to use a hex editor. I'm a programmer, I know how to write programs to do what I want. If, as the article states, MS office formats are designed to be copied directly into C structs, then that makes parsing simpler, not harder. I'm not going to load that fucking office document into my brain, so human-readable means absolutely nothing to me. I'm going to load it into a computer. And unless the file-format is designed with interoperability in mind, making it XML won't help one single bit. All XML would mean is that in addition to all the other work I have to do, I also need an XML parser.
Hungarian notation has nothing to do with typing systems.
Hell, I'm barely a novice programmer, but even I can see that.
There are plenty of things that are obvious to the novice programmer, but not to experienced programmers. Then the novice becomes enlightened. Hungarian notation is type-information. The problem is that your view of types is too limited.
You are used to view types as what the programming langauge you are currently using, provides for you, or lets you make through e.g. classes. This is a very restricting view. There's no reason types can't be used for other things, such as horizontal versus vertical, litres versus gallons, meters versus kilograms, coordinates versus tuples, or just about any form of contextual information. Just because your programming language doesn't offer you any practical way of doing this, doesn't mean that you can't view contextual information as "types", it simply means that you can't implement it in code without resorting to hacks like hungarian notation.
Hungarian notation is a good variable naming practice -- as long as you use it to mirror internal program semantics, not create redundant typing information.
Or in more general terms: Strict rules are good, as long as you use the right rules. Whether you choose Hungarian notation or not, the important thing is to use common sense, not Hungarian notation.
In that case, I agree. Scientist by itself leaves too much unexplained, just like few people tend to describe themselves as "paper movers", "machine operators", or "smile-to-the-customer employee", even if that's their real job. However, it depends on context. Many people would probably reply with "yes" when asked if they are a scientist (or paper mover, machine operator, or smile-to-the-customer employee) (again depending on context, and often with a more specific followup-explanation).
Does it matter. Obviously he makes a living by being a salesman and a hay farmer. But the things he sells, are his own inventions, thus making him an inventor. I'm sure he makes some of them himself, which also makes him a craftsman. Creating bottle-rockets isn't exactly what I would call engineering, but if you want to call him an engineer, that's fine too, as he actually is educated as an EE. Anyway, what you should realize is that this guy is creating bottle-rockets and selling them because it's fun, not because he wants to put "inventor" on his CV.
Also, a "scientist" is someone who is working as a researcher in science. Most scientists have a Ph.D or equivalent academic degree. There's nothing wrong about putting "scientist" on your CV, although I believe most scientists put their actual titles there instead, e.g. professor, postdoctoral researcher, etc... Note that scientists doesn't necessarily need to work at a university, several companies hire scientists to do their research. One easy way to distinguish actual scientists from people who pretend to be scientists is to see if they have been recently published in a peer-reviewed academic journal.
Ah, I see. Since you view this as a strawman attack, you really never make mistakes. Even so, it is still a mistake to assume that the rest of us are as perfect as you. I think I'll just stand by what I just said, untill you prove otherwise.
Yeah, because you never make mistakes, right? And once you, or someone in your company makes a mistake, nobody inside the company you work for, will ever make that mistake again? Dude, get real! People are not computers! Everybody does mistakes! And taking responsibility for your mistakes doesn't involve standing on the sideline seeing the company you work for take huge losses. It involves *fixing* the mistake, which they obviously did. If in the process they did another mistake (forgetting to inform the customers), this mistake is easily corrected too, they can send the fucking emails now.
You need to relax boy, if you assume people behave like computers, you either need to meet more people to get some perspective in life, or just stick to the computers and avoid commenting on things were humans are involved.
False advertising is false advertising and as such is fraudulent. I wonder if Amazon had overpriced items would they voluntarily give the money back.
They don't have to. All you need to do is to send your item back, and you will get your money back. As all reputable online vendors, they have a full money-back guarantee.
Besides, there's a big difference between false advertizing, and human error. This was most likely human error. Apart from the fact that there's no way amazon can make money from deleting customer orders, or prizing items so low they are guaranteed to lose a significant amount of money (and getting nothing in return), there is no indication that this is a systematic thing that amazon does often or deliberately.
Hanlon's razor states: "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity". I think that should tell you enough. Someone amazon employee screwed up. Naturally, when the screwup is discovered, they fix it up, to avoid taking a big loss. That's all there is to it.
So because someone at amazon screwed up and put the wrong prize on some items, amazon should lose lots of money? No, you don't get to buy a car for $100 if the dealer forgot to put three zeros behind the price-tag either. In some cases it might be beneficial for the dealer to let the deals go through, to avoid bad feelings, and so on. But in this case, no reasonable person would insist that amazon needs to take the loss. The only bad thing amazon did, was to not inform their customers of the cancellation of their order, but then again, this is based on heresay, not verifiable fact. I couldn't really give a shit! Besides, nobody is flawless, the only people who are surprised by this are the people who prefer to stick to their compilers instead of interacting with real humans.
Yes. Testing brings benefits. But how much is enough? And what kinds of test should you focus on? The main problem with todays software methodologies is that software is released when it's "good enough" from a marketing perspective, instead of following some objective standards. Developers would like to release when it's "good enough" from their perspective, but that is not a quantifiable goal either. The difference between "good enough" from a marketing perspective, and "good enough" from a developer perspective is enormous, and also impossible to quantify. You can hardly release a product and say that it's "three quarters of the way from good enough from marketing to good enough from developers". And you can hardly inspect a software products "plans" (i.e. source code) in court, point out the piece that failed, and make a reasonable assertion of whether or not the failure of that piece of code was due to negligence, or if it was just bad luck and the developers did follow accepted industry practices.
Civil engineering succeeds in developing good standards for "good enough" because they solve the same problem over and over again. Thus, if you follow these practices, it's highly unlikely your bridge will fall down in the next 100 years. But there's nothing of the sort for software development. More testing will help, yes, but there are no reasonable standards of how much testing you should do. You can hardly say "I've done tests conforming to regulated industry standards, and if the software fails catastrophically, I'm no longer liable". The only people who accepts any liability for their software are the guys who do so much testing, and formal methods, and every other way of ensuring it works, that the costs get so high that only NASA (and a few others) can afford it.
And exactly what are these "practices". From the (admittedly few) companies I've been hired by, these "practices" consists of things like indenting C-code a certain way, or automatically extracting "documentation" from your code by using some UML-tool, none of which improves anything but the vanity of the writer of the "best practices" document.
Very few "best practices" can objectively be said to increase code quality. The problem is that it's pretty hard to say that product A is 15% buggy, whereas product B is only 12% buggy. Especially when the bugs are not the same. Even spending more money or using more time, is rarely a guarantee that more, or better, work will be done.
I'm sorry, you either have to admit that software engineering already exists as a discipline, or you will be forced to hold the position that it will never grow up. There's no way you can establish reasonable standards at sucking slightly less than the status quo, but not so much that it really makes an objective measurable difference.
As long as Moores law continues to be in effect, there will never be "reasonable standards of quality" in anything software-related. If you could build bridges for half the cost every 18 months, I'll bet we would see a lot more bridges fall too.
Two reasons. 1: the warranty disclaimer. Like it or not, "NO WARRANTY" is stamped on to the licenses of commercial software because software consumers don't want to pay the higher cost that would be demanded if a warranty were provided
And the last time I drove over a bridge, I failed to notice this warning as I entered the bridge: "THE BRIDGE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL [WE] OR ANY OTHER CONTRIBUTOR BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE BRIDGE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE BRIDGE." The no warranty clauses in software is not the *reason* software comes without warranty. That would be circular argumentation. The real reason software lacks warranty is because it's hard to do.
The other big reason is that a blue screen of death doesn't result in actual death.
This is entirely untrue. Bsods can result in ships navigating wrongly, emergency responders being without working phones, medical equipment failing, bombs hitting the wrong target, valves at a chemical plant erroneosly releasing harmful substances, or a zillion other life-threatening things.
Compared to who? $20 for unlimited data is astronomical? If you say "Europe", I say "move there".
If that's the case, then that part of the deal doesn't suck. Still, I see no reason for forcing you to accept even that deal, just because you bought a certain piece of hardware from some other vendor. Especially when there are other companies who could also provide the same service. This should be the customers choice, not Apples.
And I want to be able to rent an apartment without signing a 1 year lease in my area, but find it pretty rare. Same thing.
There are plenty of legal, economic, and practical reasons why the two are entirely different. All that needs to be done for cell-phone providers is to update one record in the customer database, and to create/mail new SIM-cards for new customers. Housing is a bit more complicated and takes more time and money. Also, it is typically possible to negotiate your contract when renting an apartment.
Because if you want a cellphone in the USA you have no other choice.
Is it illegal for americans to import their own unlocked cellphone from abroad? That's certainly what I would do.
sure it sucks, but in the end two year contracts aren't all that bad. They can't randomly raise your rates either. Apple is playing ball with the cell phone companies or else the iPhone would never have gotten to market,
You can't be serious. Two years is longer than the projected lifespan of the phone, even if you treat it nicely. And most people who rushed to buy their iPhone want a new phone within two years, regardless of whether it lasts that long, or not. Besides, the contract sucks horseshit regardless of how long it is, making the horseshit last two years isn't going to make it any better.
Also, I'm not interested in whether AT&T is going to raise the rates. The rates they already have are already astronomical! What I want is a free market, and that means that I'm not locked to two year contracts, and can change provider any time I feel like it. A cell-phone carrier is not something that should need your first-born son just to be able to sell you their service.
Finally, I see no reason why an over-hyped but somewhat fashionable touch-screen phone should need to play a different ball-game than all the other phones on the market. Especially when the rules of the new ball-game is to get screwed, over and over again, by bending over and letting corporate shitheads put their contracts so deep into your anus you start to blead. If they should change the rules, they should instead have tried to make it a fair game, but I guess that's asking a bit too much.
How exactly does one sharpen a folded metal (annealed) sword after the fact? I thought they were sharpened by microscopic fracture of the blade during creation?
You sharpen it by repeated application of a flat ablative surface against both sides of the edge, working at a constant angle. Just like you sharpen any other edge. And if you want to sharpen your edge, you want your "microscopic fractures" to go away, not the other way around. A sharp edge is, uhm, sharp --- not damaged by irregularities and/or by microscopic fractures.
A captive tiger trained to "kill" carcasses dragged after a car, actively kills defenceless animals released into its fenced area? What's next in this brilliant line of research? I have only two things to say in response to this "research":
Any kid could have told you that
This won't tell us jack shit about how tigers in the wild would react
Playing with axes, as in "please chop some wood", or "here's how you build something out of timber". Most adults are perfectly capable of that, as long as they are told how to do it safely. Most kids too, at least that's what we did in the boyscouts. Other forms of axe-playing, such as axe-throwing, would be fine too, as long as it's done with a focus on safety, but I wouldn't necessarily encourage it, mostly because I'm not into it myself. An axe is so obviously dangerous that most kids and adults will heed your warnings of what *not* to do with it.
As for looking at the sun, well I wouldn't normally give my kids lsd, and would tell them to use safety glasses when looking at eclipses, just like everyone else. The reason (some very few) people damage their eyes at eclipses is because normally your reflexes make you turn away from the sun, but some morons absolutely *have* to stare at the exciting event without protection, and despite the incredibly high volume of warnings from media before such events. But yeah, I'd be hesitant to give those people an axe to play with too;-)
Actually, talking on a cell-phone with handsfree is more distracting than talking to a real live person sitting in the seat next to you. The same thing can be said for pedestrians using their phones (or handsfree) in traffic. The reason is that the people you are talking to aren't seeing the same thing as you do, so they don't know when you are experiencing a situation that needs your attention. If somebody is sitting right next to you while you are coming up to a crossing or anything remotely dangerous, there will normally be a pause in the conversation untill the situation is resolved. Not so with cell-phones.
I've noticed this phenomenon myself, when I'm driving my mentally retarded brother. He can't really talk, but is fond of attention, and typically says a lot of "hi" and "hello" and other things to grab your attention. Since he has absolutely no understanding about what goes on in traffic, his attention-grabbing often comes at unfortunate times, and I have to admit that this has caused some potentially dangerous situations. Naturally, I'm more careful when driving him now. I'll bet most parents have similar experiences.
My cell-phone usage while driving is mostly related to professional activities with people who know I'm driving, so I have no problem with telling them that I'm coming up to an intersection or something, and they have no problem waiting. On the other hand, I can easily see that other types of conversation can be a lot more dangerous. I try to avoid those while driving, but unfortunately, it's not always easy to pull over, especially in dense traffic where you need it the most.
Do you think people who buy $300 flashlights leave them just sitting around where small kids can "play" with them?
Uhm, yes. People who buy this flashlight are in this respect essentially children themselves, and buy them to play with. Very few people have an actual use for a very bright flashlight with 15 minutes battery time. It's basically a show-off item, or an expensive toy for children older than 18. If I had kids, and had bought one of these, the kids would certainly be allowed to play with it, just like I would encourage them to play with matches, knives, axe, the kitchen oven, the lawnmower, etc... Under supervision of course, or at least with some guidance and some degree of trust. At some point those kids will become adults, and the sooner they are taught to be responsible with dangerous things, the better.
A 4100 lumen light isn't that bright. It won't set your kids face on fire.
I agree. Normal reflex would make you turn away long before you go blind. Most people survive looking at the sun just fine, and the sun is a helluva lot brighter.
This has to take the price of the stupidest article on slashdot ever. It's an article, using three pages, to explain in great detail, the prejudices most people have for/against perl, and explaining it like it was something really insightful. No shit, perl is good scripting, but bad for numerical analysis? You must be kidding me? Who the fuck needs to be *told* that?
Ok, I realize this was for cio.com, which I assume is for pointy-haired bosses (not really sure about american nomenclature for boss titles). But come on, why not put up an article explaining that it's good to listen to your technically competent employees when you face decisions of a technical nature? And what the fuck is it doing on slashdot? I thought this was "news for *nerds*", not "news for blatantly incompetent people who decide to replace actual thought with stereotyping".
Slashdot Mirror
I disagree with both of you. There should not be a need for this. Linux memory management should be closer to optimal for desktop users, but unfortunately the current strategy just doesn't work. It's optimized for servers, paging out interactive apps whenever there's something going on in the background.
In particular, the locatedb daemon makes everything unresponsive because linux caches every file on your file-system it touches, even though it's pretty much guaranteed nobody else needs those files anytime soon. This may be theoretically "optimal" in the general case, but it certainly doesn't feel that way for desktop users. Most desktop users would be more than happy to have background jobs run slower if it didn't impact responsitivity. Also, I believe many people would prefer predictive response-times; it's better for the disk to churn while loading a huge file, instead of it churning everywhere else to page in libraries that have been paged out because the huge file is in memory.
Adding a daemon to predict shared library usage is a step in the wrong direction. Not because it doesn't fix the problem, unfortunately I haven't tried it, but sure, it might even work fantastic. It's a step in the wrong direction because it's a kludge, and not a proper fix for having memory management strategies in the kernel that the users actually want. Unfortunately, fixes to this problem are hard to do, and every time someone tries to do a proper fix, it is debated to death on the kernel mailing list, and then dies slowly as it ages out of tree. For all I know, it's also the right decision, if it should be in-kernel, it should also be *right*. A daemon might be a better place to experiment, and hell, if it solves the problem for 99% of the users, we might not even need to change the current strategy, which is certainly right for servers. After all, we live with kludges other places, such as the X Window System needing to be root and accessing raw kernel memory.
But yeah, memory management is complicated. I doubt you can solve this on a piece of paper. If it works, I'm all for it! Maybe this is a proper kludge?
Actually, it's a kind of a gravity lamp, but unlike the one written about here recently, this one doesn't spin a rotor to generate electricity, and it generates its own gravity field by having immense mass. The crunching of matter through gravity results in a fusion reaction which heats matter further and balances the contraction so that it doesn't turn into a black hole. The light it creates is simply a byproduct of this heat, and contains almost every wavelength of light, thus creating a good work light, hence the term "daylight" which historically defined working hours. While most workplaces have artificial light available today, sunlight is still of importance in agriculture, and for planetary environmental reasons.
Because things on the Internet have the potential to (a) be seen by a lot more people, and (b) last almost forever. There's a difference between calling someone a fatass in the classroom or schoolyard, and doing it on youtube.
Yes it will happen, but no, it shouldn't happen. There's a difference between descriptive and normative ethics. For example, I have never heard of teachers were the pupils posted posters all over town describing how much they disliked them. And if it happened, I'm sure it would involve a criminal case. Kids need to learn that with greater power (the Internet) comes greater responsibility. If they can't handle that responsibility, they shouldn't use the Internet. Lots of people probably shouldn't (and now I'm talking about posting stuff, not using Internet banking or similar things that everybody needs to do).
Actually, firefighters do that all the time. Going into a burning building is a very high-risk operation, and you need to carefully examine many factors, including temperature, before you decide to enter. Similarly, school-teachers are, like most people, emotional beings, and if the abuse is to large, they can't continue teaching.
If the problem is the complexity of the format itself, embedding human-readable names for each field into the file-format, isn't going to reduce the complexity one bit. And if you already have a specification (even if it's reverse engineered), human-readability or embedded field-names is not of importance. Granted, XML doesn't make it any more complicated, so it doesn't hurt much, but a straightforward translation of word or excel file-formats into XML is not particulary helpful. XML has its uses. Relying on it like it was magic, is not one of them. First and foremost because it isn't magic.
I've written tons of library code for reading and writing old proprietary binary file-formats on newer incompatible computers with different byte-order, different floating point formats, etc... It's not particulary hard. Anyone can do it. It's code-monkey stuff, or a computing 101 exercise, not something you even need real programmers to tackle. The problem with office formats isn't that it's binary, it's that it's complicated.
Look, I'm sitting at a fucking computer. I know how to use a hex editor. I'm a programmer, I know how to write programs to do what I want. If, as the article states, MS office formats are designed to be copied directly into C structs, then that makes parsing simpler, not harder. I'm not going to load that fucking office document into my brain, so human-readable means absolutely nothing to me. I'm going to load it into a computer. And unless the file-format is designed with interoperability in mind, making it XML won't help one single bit. All XML would mean is that in addition to all the other work I have to do, I also need an XML parser.
There are plenty of things that are obvious to the novice programmer, but not to experienced programmers. Then the novice becomes enlightened. Hungarian notation is type-information. The problem is that your view of types is too limited.
You are used to view types as what the programming langauge you are currently using, provides for you, or lets you make through e.g. classes. This is a very restricting view. There's no reason types can't be used for other things, such as horizontal versus vertical, litres versus gallons, meters versus kilograms, coordinates versus tuples, or just about any form of contextual information. Just because your programming language doesn't offer you any practical way of doing this, doesn't mean that you can't view contextual information as "types", it simply means that you can't implement it in code without resorting to hacks like hungarian notation.
Or in more general terms: Strict rules are good, as long as you use the right rules. Whether you choose Hungarian notation or not, the important thing is to use common sense, not Hungarian notation.
In that case, I agree. Scientist by itself leaves too much unexplained, just like few people tend to describe themselves as "paper movers", "machine operators", or "smile-to-the-customer employee", even if that's their real job. However, it depends on context. Many people would probably reply with "yes" when asked if they are a scientist (or paper mover, machine operator, or smile-to-the-customer employee) (again depending on context, and often with a more specific followup-explanation).
Does it matter. Obviously he makes a living by being a salesman and a hay farmer. But the things he sells, are his own inventions, thus making him an inventor. I'm sure he makes some of them himself, which also makes him a craftsman. Creating bottle-rockets isn't exactly what I would call engineering, but if you want to call him an engineer, that's fine too, as he actually is educated as an EE. Anyway, what you should realize is that this guy is creating bottle-rockets and selling them because it's fun, not because he wants to put "inventor" on his CV.
Also, a "scientist" is someone who is working as a researcher in science. Most scientists have a Ph.D or equivalent academic degree. There's nothing wrong about putting "scientist" on your CV, although I believe most scientists put their actual titles there instead, e.g. professor, postdoctoral researcher, etc... Note that scientists doesn't necessarily need to work at a university, several companies hire scientists to do their research. One easy way to distinguish actual scientists from people who pretend to be scientists is to see if they have been recently published in a peer-reviewed academic journal.
Ah, I see. Since you view this as a strawman attack, you really never make mistakes. Even so, it is still a mistake to assume that the rest of us are as perfect as you. I think I'll just stand by what I just said, untill you prove otherwise.
Yeah, because you never make mistakes, right? And once you, or someone in your company makes a mistake, nobody inside the company you work for, will ever make that mistake again? Dude, get real! People are not computers! Everybody does mistakes! And taking responsibility for your mistakes doesn't involve standing on the sideline seeing the company you work for take huge losses. It involves *fixing* the mistake, which they obviously did. If in the process they did another mistake (forgetting to inform the customers), this mistake is easily corrected too, they can send the fucking emails now.
You need to relax boy, if you assume people behave like computers, you either need to meet more people to get some perspective in life, or just stick to the computers and avoid commenting on things were humans are involved.
They don't have to. All you need to do is to send your item back, and you will get your money back. As all reputable online vendors, they have a full money-back guarantee.
Besides, there's a big difference between false advertizing, and human error. This was most likely human error. Apart from the fact that there's no way amazon can make money from deleting customer orders, or prizing items so low they are guaranteed to lose a significant amount of money (and getting nothing in return), there is no indication that this is a systematic thing that amazon does often or deliberately.
Hanlon's razor states: "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity". I think that should tell you enough. Someone amazon employee screwed up. Naturally, when the screwup is discovered, they fix it up, to avoid taking a big loss. That's all there is to it.
So because someone at amazon screwed up and put the wrong prize on some items, amazon should lose lots of money? No, you don't get to buy a car for $100 if the dealer forgot to put three zeros behind the price-tag either. In some cases it might be beneficial for the dealer to let the deals go through, to avoid bad feelings, and so on. But in this case, no reasonable person would insist that amazon needs to take the loss. The only bad thing amazon did, was to not inform their customers of the cancellation of their order, but then again, this is based on heresay, not verifiable fact. I couldn't really give a shit! Besides, nobody is flawless, the only people who are surprised by this are the people who prefer to stick to their compilers instead of interacting with real humans.
Yes. Testing brings benefits. But how much is enough? And what kinds of test should you focus on? The main problem with todays software methodologies is that software is released when it's "good enough" from a marketing perspective, instead of following some objective standards. Developers would like to release when it's "good enough" from their perspective, but that is not a quantifiable goal either. The difference between "good enough" from a marketing perspective, and "good enough" from a developer perspective is enormous, and also impossible to quantify. You can hardly release a product and say that it's "three quarters of the way from good enough from marketing to good enough from developers". And you can hardly inspect a software products "plans" (i.e. source code) in court, point out the piece that failed, and make a reasonable assertion of whether or not the failure of that piece of code was due to negligence, or if it was just bad luck and the developers did follow accepted industry practices.
Civil engineering succeeds in developing good standards for "good enough" because they solve the same problem over and over again. Thus, if you follow these practices, it's highly unlikely your bridge will fall down in the next 100 years. But there's nothing of the sort for software development. More testing will help, yes, but there are no reasonable standards of how much testing you should do. You can hardly say "I've done tests conforming to regulated industry standards, and if the software fails catastrophically, I'm no longer liable". The only people who accepts any liability for their software are the guys who do so much testing, and formal methods, and every other way of ensuring it works, that the costs get so high that only NASA (and a few others) can afford it.
And exactly what are these "practices". From the (admittedly few) companies I've been hired by, these "practices" consists of things like indenting C-code a certain way, or automatically extracting "documentation" from your code by using some UML-tool, none of which improves anything but the vanity of the writer of the "best practices" document.
Very few "best practices" can objectively be said to increase code quality. The problem is that it's pretty hard to say that product A is 15% buggy, whereas product B is only 12% buggy. Especially when the bugs are not the same. Even spending more money or using more time, is rarely a guarantee that more, or better, work will be done.
I'm sorry, you either have to admit that software engineering already exists as a discipline, or you will be forced to hold the position that it will never grow up. There's no way you can establish reasonable standards at sucking slightly less than the status quo, but not so much that it really makes an objective measurable difference.
As long as Moores law continues to be in effect, there will never be "reasonable standards of quality" in anything software-related. If you could build bridges for half the cost every 18 months, I'll bet we would see a lot more bridges fall too.
And the last time I drove over a bridge, I failed to notice this warning as I entered the bridge: "THE BRIDGE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL [WE] OR ANY OTHER CONTRIBUTOR BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE BRIDGE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE BRIDGE." The no warranty clauses in software is not the *reason* software comes without warranty. That would be circular argumentation. The real reason software lacks warranty is because it's hard to do.
This is entirely untrue. Bsods can result in ships navigating wrongly, emergency responders being without working phones, medical equipment failing, bombs hitting the wrong target, valves at a chemical plant erroneosly releasing harmful substances, or a zillion other life-threatening things.
If that's the case, then that part of the deal doesn't suck. Still, I see no reason for forcing you to accept even that deal, just because you bought a certain piece of hardware from some other vendor. Especially when there are other companies who could also provide the same service. This should be the customers choice, not Apples.
There are plenty of legal, economic, and practical reasons why the two are entirely different. All that needs to be done for cell-phone providers is to update one record in the customer database, and to create/mail new SIM-cards for new customers. Housing is a bit more complicated and takes more time and money. Also, it is typically possible to negotiate your contract when renting an apartment.
Is it illegal for americans to import their own unlocked cellphone from abroad? That's certainly what I would do.
You can't be serious. Two years is longer than the projected lifespan of the phone, even if you treat it nicely. And most people who rushed to buy their iPhone want a new phone within two years, regardless of whether it lasts that long, or not. Besides, the contract sucks horseshit regardless of how long it is, making the horseshit last two years isn't going to make it any better.
Also, I'm not interested in whether AT&T is going to raise the rates. The rates they already have are already astronomical! What I want is a free market, and that means that I'm not locked to two year contracts, and can change provider any time I feel like it. A cell-phone carrier is not something that should need your first-born son just to be able to sell you their service.
Finally, I see no reason why an over-hyped but somewhat fashionable touch-screen phone should need to play a different ball-game than all the other phones on the market. Especially when the rules of the new ball-game is to get screwed, over and over again, by bending over and letting corporate shitheads put their contracts so deep into your anus you start to blead. If they should change the rules, they should instead have tried to make it a fair game, but I guess that's asking a bit too much.
You sharpen it by repeated application of a flat ablative surface against both sides of the edge, working at a constant angle. Just like you sharpen any other edge. And if you want to sharpen your edge, you want your "microscopic fractures" to go away, not the other way around. A sharp edge is, uhm, sharp --- not damaged by irregularities and/or by microscopic fractures.
A captive tiger trained to "kill" carcasses dragged after a car, actively kills defenceless animals released into its fenced area? What's next in this brilliant line of research? I have only two things to say in response to this "research":
Useless
Wow, what is the trajectory of a massless tiger? Go to another college, boy!
Playing with axes, as in "please chop some wood", or "here's how you build something out of timber". Most adults are perfectly capable of that, as long as they are told how to do it safely. Most kids too, at least that's what we did in the boyscouts. Other forms of axe-playing, such as axe-throwing, would be fine too, as long as it's done with a focus on safety, but I wouldn't necessarily encourage it, mostly because I'm not into it myself. An axe is so obviously dangerous that most kids and adults will heed your warnings of what *not* to do with it.
As for looking at the sun, well I wouldn't normally give my kids lsd, and would tell them to use safety glasses when looking at eclipses, just like everyone else. The reason (some very few) people damage their eyes at eclipses is because normally your reflexes make you turn away from the sun, but some morons absolutely *have* to stare at the exciting event without protection, and despite the incredibly high volume of warnings from media before such events. But yeah, I'd be hesitant to give those people an axe to play with too ;-)
Actually, talking on a cell-phone with handsfree is more distracting than talking to a real live person sitting in the seat next to you. The same thing can be said for pedestrians using their phones (or handsfree) in traffic. The reason is that the people you are talking to aren't seeing the same thing as you do, so they don't know when you are experiencing a situation that needs your attention. If somebody is sitting right next to you while you are coming up to a crossing or anything remotely dangerous, there will normally be a pause in the conversation untill the situation is resolved. Not so with cell-phones.
I've noticed this phenomenon myself, when I'm driving my mentally retarded brother. He can't really talk, but is fond of attention, and typically says a lot of "hi" and "hello" and other things to grab your attention. Since he has absolutely no understanding about what goes on in traffic, his attention-grabbing often comes at unfortunate times, and I have to admit that this has caused some potentially dangerous situations. Naturally, I'm more careful when driving him now. I'll bet most parents have similar experiences.
My cell-phone usage while driving is mostly related to professional activities with people who know I'm driving, so I have no problem with telling them that I'm coming up to an intersection or something, and they have no problem waiting. On the other hand, I can easily see that other types of conversation can be a lot more dangerous. I try to avoid those while driving, but unfortunately, it's not always easy to pull over, especially in dense traffic where you need it the most.
Uhm, yes. People who buy this flashlight are in this respect essentially children themselves, and buy them to play with. Very few people have an actual use for a very bright flashlight with 15 minutes battery time. It's basically a show-off item, or an expensive toy for children older than 18. If I had kids, and had bought one of these, the kids would certainly be allowed to play with it, just like I would encourage them to play with matches, knives, axe, the kitchen oven, the lawnmower, etc... Under supervision of course, or at least with some guidance and some degree of trust. At some point those kids will become adults, and the sooner they are taught to be responsible with dangerous things, the better.
I agree. Normal reflex would make you turn away long before you go blind. Most people survive looking at the sun just fine, and the sun is a helluva lot brighter.
This has to take the price of the stupidest article on slashdot ever. It's an article, using three pages, to explain in great detail, the prejudices most people have for/against perl, and explaining it like it was something really insightful. No shit, perl is good scripting, but bad for numerical analysis? You must be kidding me? Who the fuck needs to be *told* that?
Ok, I realize this was for cio.com, which I assume is for pointy-haired bosses (not really sure about american nomenclature for boss titles). But come on, why not put up an article explaining that it's good to listen to your technically competent employees when you face decisions of a technical nature? And what the fuck is it doing on slashdot? I thought this was "news for *nerds*", not "news for blatantly incompetent people who decide to replace actual thought with stereotyping".