FBI don't install spyware on your computer. They install it on the ISP's so they can can monitor traffic.
There is probably lots of stuff on most peoples computers that is not send around on the Internet (personal letters, job-related documents, etc). So I would say there is a great difference!
Compare, hidden cameras are installed in most public areas, but most likely not in your bedroom (unless you are a pervert).
I have noticed that most games for children (and adults) are Zero-sum by a game theory definition - you have to battle over limited resources either implictly (Chess, Frustration) or explicitly (Monopoly).
Hey, Monopoly is not zero-sum. Each round, each player gets a reward for passing through the start field. So there will always be much more money in the game when the game is finished, compared to the lously resources each player had when they started.
It is also a fun game, both for adults and children (and trust me: children learn math fast if they play this game). Besides, it's so extremely frustrating for the looser, that it teaches you to keep up the spirit when loosing.
Sure, monopoly is about competition, but hey, it's one of the more entertaining games out there... And, you go through so many ranges of emotion: greed, frustration, happiness, pride, envy, anger, exploitation, selfishness, winning and loosing. In short: a great game!
By the same logic as they used in this benchmark, my uniprocessor system is thus 31 percent faster than the same old uniprocessor system. Bah! I just wish people weren't posting nonsensible benchmarks like this. At least, they should _try_ to make it somewhat representable...
I would believe that for a task as easily parallelizable as kernel compilation (one file per processor), there should really be almost linear speedup with the number of processors.
Why do people consider 142% for two processors impressive?
At least Linux/FreeBSD/Solaris etc are now converging on a common interface or two, instead of 20.
No, they converge to one major interface, KDE/Gnome. The difference between these two desktop environments are very small for end-users, and will only get smaller in the years to come.
On the other hand, we will always have alternatives. You don't realistically think everyone would be using either Gnome or KDE, do you?
Personally, I like using a highly customized sawfish, with keyboard shortcuts for everything, and no window-decorations. I don't suspect many others would like it, but for me, it's definitely a productivity booster. I like using both Gnome and KDE apps, but will never run their "desktop"-environment.
And, of course, there are people going in the other direction, Enlightenment, 3D window-managers, and so on. Nothing will ever converge...
Hmm, that seems somewhat unreasonable to me. Maybe you mean that Evolution killed Nautilus. But even that isn't true, as there are plenty of nautiluses in both Indian and Pacific waters.;-)
Well, if you feel like you must nitpick, you should probably be aware of that it is tops that are the zero g portions of the trip. The bottoms would have more g, of course...
Anyway, you are correct in pointing out that Stranger4U got it wrong, it should really be parabolic arcs, not loops. You can view the details here, although it should be pretty obvious for anyone who have a grasp of high-school physics.
If it's actually comparable to disposable cameras, I'm excited. Sure, they're autofocus,
Disposable cameras are fixfocus, not autofocus. Otherwise, I agree. I would love to have a cell-phone that's easy replacable if it breaks, is stolen, lost, forgotten, or whatever...
Unless somebody makes them so small they fit in your wristwatch, of course (without making it bigger, and still being pleasant to use...)
Seriously, though - it's very hard to rewrite a program from the ground up; somehow, it's never as good. I'd clean up the code, but not rewrite.
This statement is wrong, just plain wrong. The axiom in computer science is "Don't fix bad code, rewrite it.
May I ask where you studied computer science? Rest assured, that is not what I've learnt. I didn't think computer science had an answer to this at all, and if it had, I would guess it would be something like "Interesting problem, let's conduct a study by doing both...".
Anyway, it is impossible to give advice about this in a general way, because each messy system is different, and messy is sort of hard to classify anyway! But I think the original posters advice was right on!
In a real-world project there are lots of code that doesn't seem to serve any purpose at all. But trust me, most of it does have some purpose, it might be a bugfix, some tweak requested by users, a kludge fixing some problems with third-party software, or even hardware, or just something really smart that you'd never understand anyway.
By reimplementing something from scratch, the new program has to work just as good as the old one (from a users standpoint). And first when your users complain that you find out that many of those small uninteresting tidpits needs to be in the new version as well. Which makes the new version almost as dull as the previous...
I guess you guys didn't get it. This is intended to be funny...
Read the following line:
Despair has also petitioned the court to require defendants to
submit a handwritten letter which repeats the phrase ":-( is a
registered trademark of Despair, Inc." one-thousand times.
Or how about the following? I think real lawyers would know the
difference between a trademark and a patent...
What is certain, however, is that it appears that someone has
finally bested patent 5443036 for most ridiculous intellectual
property filing in history."
But I think this one is probably the funniest:
he had personally taken Jeff Bezos and his wife to dinner, to
congratulate him on his willingness to "take a innovative stand
against innovation", and also to inform him that Bezos was amongst the
7,000,000 who had violated Despair's trademark.
Ok, I've been in exactly the same situation myself. The company has some old crufty software, developed in about 6 months, and extended for the next 12 years (all code added, almost nothing deleted or redesigned). The result: a total mess (of course!). And that's where I came in... So, did I somehow magically transform twelve years of total mess into something clean and managable? No! Tell you the truth, I didn't even try. Be grateful you've got a job, and try to do something that maximizes the comany's profit instead!
The best way to keep software clean over time is to redesign parts when you add functionality, otherwise things will only get worse over time. Tell management that it is called refactoring, if you think that helps. The wonderful fact about redesigning when needed is that you can do as little or as much of it as time and budget allows. And whenever you feel it is necessary.
The important thing is to stay in contact with management. Typically, you will be fixing a bug, or adding some functionality. In order to do that, you will often need to understand a component really good. At that point, you can tell the management that the chosen component, which you now understand perfectly, is a big mess. Tell them that since you have worked with it for over almost a month now, you know it's in and out's perfectly, and that you have some ideas for a better design. Tell them that you don't want to rewrite it all, because that would be to costly, but that there are some parts especially crufty, that it would be better to rewrite, and you would like to do just that. You can even tell them that it would probably be cheaper to to that then to just add your cruft to the other cruft, as it is probably true.
But don't lie to the management! Be honest, and tell them exactly why something needs a rewrite. There is very rarely a need for a total rewrite! Most code that exists are there for a reason! Sure, it can be cut&paste code (modularize), it can be deeply nested long blocks of hard-to-understand code (modularize), and it can be ugly non-portable code (clean up). All these are good reasons for a minor redesign.
But whatever you do, don't redo it all! Unless you wrote the program yourself, chances are that you will not do a better job than the previous guy! It might be hard to accept for someone who used to be a hot-shot programmer at the university, but there do exist other good programmers than yourself!
If management resists a total rewrite, then they are acting sensibly. While you don't understand all of the code, chances are that most of it is there for a reason. Even rewriting a single component from scratch is more than likely going over your head. The company is more interested in keeping software working than in having to do new regression tests three times over because your new module didn't work exactly up to specs.
And trust me, if you think coding is expensive, I tell you what, testing ill-designed components (which they have to be, given that you only redesigned a small part) is very expensive. And if the software is mission-critical (which it often is), or it is sold to actual customers, it will get even costier.
So, just grab a beer, start coding, and be thankful that you can at least make a small bit of the cruftiness disappear. If you want something else, you'd better wait untill you've proven yourself for the company, or start for yourself.
That's not true. printf() returns an int. Casting it to void is more correct than silently throwing away the return value.
No. It is not "more" correct. In fact, both options are legal ISO C, and therefore equally "correct". It is, however, a stylistic issue.
And when it comes to style, opinions sometimes differ. I agree that there might theoretically exist situations were a void-cast could theoretically improve some readers understanding of a program, but I have yet to see that in practice. Anyone knows that printf() is called mainly for a side-effect. And side-effecting functions should not be a foreign concept to C programmers, as C is not exactly what I would call a pure functional language.
Anyway, I think any C-programmer on the planet knows that printf() is called mainly for a side-effect. You do not need to tell them that with a void-cast, as little as you need to tell them that with a comment. Do you really think there is even a single programmer on the planet that think it is easier to understand your programs because you put in lots of redundant unnesseceary casts?
Good for you. That's a matter of style. The program is not more or less beautiful or elegant because of it.
Maybe you need to check out another C book then. Let my guess, you are using The Annotated ANSI C Standard, annotated by Herbert Schildt? This is probably the worst book ever written on the ANSI C standard. Or are you just using some other half-good book on C? I doubt you are actually using the ANSI standard, because in that case you have proven that you do not know how to read.
If you get to the end of the main block, that is
assumed to be grounds for correct correct program termination(so the compiler will helpullfy insert the return statement for you).
No, that is not true ISO C. I think it might be true of C++, but then again, that's a completely different language. Also, the fact that some compilers will allow it, is not very interesting either, since compilers are allowed to do what ever they want when it comes to undefined behaviour, which is what this is.
If the patent wasn't filed (and accepted) in, say, England, then people in England are free to use the process. A US patent does not affect
British use.
It's a software patent. Nobody could file it in any European Country!
I would suggest you download Hugs, start dabbling in Haskell, and read the Haskell Prelude. It is relatively easy reading and contains code that is very beautyful.
There seems to be a witch-hunt involving anything vaguely associated with pedophiles these days. I'll be the first to say that paedophiles are not exactly something I admire, but I think people are taking this witch-hunt a bit too far. There are other crimes that are just as ill or worse. And there is no reason to throw normal citizen rights overboard just because there exist some paedophiles.
How about hand-drawn imagery. Should that be legal, and computer-generated imagery be illegal? What about a collage? It can be made with computer, or with paper, scissor and glue! Or is it realism that counts. Some good artists can create very photo-realistic paintings on a canvas. Should that be illegal as well? How about bad computer-generated images. How about parody? How about unrealistic computer-generated images (hand drawn in windows paintbrush?)
And what exactly does it mean that something depicting children in sexual activities is porn? How about teaching materials (for parents, teachers and children about paedophiles)?
I think it is time that we stop thinking about paedophiles as the worst evil of our time. The witch-hunt for paedophiles is most likely creating a lot of victims that doesn't deserve the label (much like the witch-hunting did!). A convicted paedophile today will have very much trouble to adapt to society after his sentence is finished, because he will have to live with the fear that someone finds out about his past and decides to do whatever they find appropriate (starting a lynch-mob, fire him from his job, kick him out of his apartment, whatever...)
I am not to say that paedophilia is ok, because it certainly isn't, but today I think we are going too far. Treat paedophiles as humans, not monsters! They are humans that need treatment (and perhaps punishment), but they don't need a witch-hunt. And please don't judge anyone in advance. Many accusations that come up against a "paedophiliac" are false, but yet it is very hard for the person accused.
We don't need to get medieval just in order to feel safe about our children. The good, old, normal system of justice is just fine. I am not even so sure that child-porn increases paedophilic activity. Maybe it is better for them to get their steem out through pornography than through real life. Anyone know of some good studies of this?
Hmm, why is that? I was under the impression that if you could "prove" (however this is done legally) a clean room implementation you could do it.
Because there are patents out there. That is exactly what patents are supposed to do, protect an innovation. It doesn't matter whether you stole the idea, or discovered it yourself, if it is covered by a patent, it is owned by someone else. (A cleanroom implementation would take care of copyrights, not patents.)
I take it that the author is either not very intelligent, or doesn't really know much about the Internet. Look at the following gems:
Advertisers, whom the entire Internet is funded by, [...]
Yeah, right, how was Internet funded before the web, then?
The Internet has always been a medium that promotes anonymity and faceless, one-way interaction between consumer and business.
No, anonymity on the net is a relatively recent idea. Traditionally, anonymity has been scorn upon on the Internet. And the key difference between Internet and other media-types has always been the possibility of two-way communication. On the other hand, television promotes one way interaction between consumer and business.
Also, the tone through the article was that the Internet needs
better targeting of ads. It doesn't. Perhaps the web needs it, but not
even that is true. The only thing on the Internet that needs ads are.coms. And
personally, I don't care much about.com's.
Now what would happen to the web if the.coms died? Well, we would
retain all the interesting sites, such as content offered by
universities, personal pages, the gutenberg project, in short:
anything of real value! What would happen is that most stuff that
annoys us would be gone. Ads would be gone, lawyers would be gone,
domain-name wars would be gone, badly designed sites with company
graphics and too much javascript would be gone, and the bandwith would
still be there.
But even if one see.coms as something good, and not something bad,
there is the question of ads. People seem to have forgotten about
micropayments as an alternative to adverticing. But seriously, what do
you want? Pay 2 cents to access your favourite website, or have it
filled up with banners and popups? I would like a portion of those
micropayments, thank you!
the molecular biology equivalent of script kiddies ("gene kiddies?"). I can see it now..."i'm a 133t m013kv14r bi010je5t"
Yeah! Hordes of teenagers having their own gene-kit creating deceases discovered by grey-hat doctors. Of course, you will find most of them documented on "gene-sec.com" as well. However, as everything happens so fast in genetic engineering, people that want to move around in public with other people must all read "gene-sec.com" to be aware of the latest exploits, and make sure to vaccinate themselves appropriately.
Slashdot Mirror
There is probably lots of stuff on most peoples computers that is not send around on the Internet (personal letters, job-related documents, etc). So I would say there is a great difference!
Compare, hidden cameras are installed in most public areas, but most likely not in your bedroom (unless you are a pervert).
Hey, Monopoly is not zero-sum. Each round, each player gets a reward for passing through the start field. So there will always be much more money in the game when the game is finished, compared to the lously resources each player had when they started.
It is also a fun game, both for adults and children (and trust me: children learn math fast if they play this game). Besides, it's so extremely frustrating for the looser, that it teaches you to keep up the spirit when loosing.
Sure, monopoly is about competition, but hey, it's one of the more entertaining games out there... And, you go through so many ranges of emotion: greed, frustration, happiness, pride, envy, anger, exploitation, selfishness, winning and loosing. In short: a great game!
I tried the same test on my uniprocessor system, running first "time make bzImage" then "make clean", and last "time make -j 2 bzImage":
Single thread:
597.00user 46.40system 12:11.08elapsed 88%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 0maxresident)k
0inputs+0outputs (789303major+881687minor)pagefaults 0swaps
Two threads on one processor:
511.41user 31.30system 9:21.66elapsed 96%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 0maxresident)k
0inputs+0outputs (489357major+669019minor)pagefaults 0swaps
By the same logic as they used in this benchmark, my uniprocessor system is thus 31 percent faster than the same old uniprocessor system. Bah! I just wish people weren't posting nonsensible benchmarks like this. At least, they should _try_ to make it somewhat representable...
Ehh.. Shoule have read better. That is very impressive! How can this happen?
Why do people consider 142% for two processors impressive?
No, they converge to one major interface, KDE/Gnome. The difference between these two desktop environments are very small for end-users, and will only get smaller in the years to come.
On the other hand, we will always have alternatives. You don't realistically think everyone would be using either Gnome or KDE, do you?
Personally, I like using a highly customized sawfish, with keyboard shortcuts for everything, and no window-decorations. I don't suspect many others would like it, but for me, it's definitely a productivity booster. I like using both Gnome and KDE apps, but will never run their "desktop"-environment.
And, of course, there are people going in the other direction, Enlightenment, 3D window-managers, and so on. Nothing will ever converge...
It's called mc (or Midnight Commander). Works perfectly for me!
Hmm, that seems somewhat unreasonable to me. Maybe you mean that Evolution killed Nautilus. But even that isn't true, as there are plenty of nautiluses in both Indian and Pacific waters. ;-)
Anyway, you are correct in pointing out that Stranger4U got it wrong, it should really be parabolic arcs, not loops. You can view the details here, although it should be pretty obvious for anyone who have a grasp of high-school physics.
Disposable cameras are fixfocus, not autofocus. Otherwise, I agree. I would love to have a cell-phone that's easy replacable if it breaks, is stolen, lost, forgotten, or whatever...
Unless somebody makes them so small they fit in your wristwatch, of course (without making it bigger, and still being pleasant to use...)
May I ask where you studied computer science? Rest assured, that is not what I've learnt. I didn't think computer science had an answer to this at all, and if it had, I would guess it would be something like "Interesting problem, let's conduct a study by doing both...".
Anyway, it is impossible to give advice about this in a general way, because each messy system is different, and messy is sort of hard to classify anyway! But I think the original posters advice was right on!
In a real-world project there are lots of code that doesn't seem to serve any purpose at all. But trust me, most of it does have some purpose, it might be a bugfix, some tweak requested by users, a kludge fixing some problems with third-party software, or even hardware, or just something really smart that you'd never understand anyway.
By reimplementing something from scratch, the new program has to work just as good as the old one (from a users standpoint). And first when your users complain that you find out that many of those small uninteresting tidpits needs to be in the new version as well. Which makes the new version almost as dull as the previous...
Read the following line:
Despair has also petitioned the court to require defendants to submit a handwritten letter which repeats the phrase ":-( is a registered trademark of Despair, Inc." one-thousand times.
Or how about the following? I think real lawyers would know the difference between a trademark and a patent...
What is certain, however, is that it appears that someone has finally bested patent 5443036 for most ridiculous intellectual property filing in history."
But I think this one is probably the funniest:
he had personally taken Jeff Bezos and his wife to dinner, to congratulate him on his willingness to "take a innovative stand against innovation", and also to inform him that Bezos was amongst the 7,000,000 who had violated Despair's trademark.
The best way to keep software clean over time is to redesign parts when you add functionality, otherwise things will only get worse over time. Tell management that it is called refactoring, if you think that helps. The wonderful fact about redesigning when needed is that you can do as little or as much of it as time and budget allows. And whenever you feel it is necessary.
The important thing is to stay in contact with management. Typically, you will be fixing a bug, or adding some functionality. In order to do that, you will often need to understand a component really good. At that point, you can tell the management that the chosen component, which you now understand perfectly, is a big mess. Tell them that since you have worked with it for over almost a month now, you know it's in and out's perfectly, and that you have some ideas for a better design. Tell them that you don't want to rewrite it all, because that would be to costly, but that there are some parts especially crufty, that it would be better to rewrite, and you would like to do just that. You can even tell them that it would probably be cheaper to to that then to just add your cruft to the other cruft, as it is probably true.
But don't lie to the management! Be honest, and tell them exactly why something needs a rewrite. There is very rarely a need for a total rewrite! Most code that exists are there for a reason! Sure, it can be cut&paste code (modularize), it can be deeply nested long blocks of hard-to-understand code (modularize), and it can be ugly non-portable code (clean up). All these are good reasons for a minor redesign.
But whatever you do, don't redo it all! Unless you wrote the program yourself, chances are that you will not do a better job than the previous guy! It might be hard to accept for someone who used to be a hot-shot programmer at the university, but there do exist other good programmers than yourself!
If management resists a total rewrite, then they are acting sensibly. While you don't understand all of the code, chances are that most of it is there for a reason. Even rewriting a single component from scratch is more than likely going over your head. The company is more interested in keeping software working than in having to do new regression tests three times over because your new module didn't work exactly up to specs.
And trust me, if you think coding is expensive, I tell you what, testing ill-designed components (which they have to be, given that you only redesigned a small part) is very expensive. And if the software is mission-critical (which it often is), or it is sold to actual customers, it will get even costier.
So, just grab a beer, start coding, and be thankful that you can at least make a small bit of the cruftiness disappear. If you want something else, you'd better wait untill you've proven yourself for the company, or start for yourself.
No. It is not "more" correct. In fact, both options are legal ISO C, and therefore equally "correct". It is, however, a stylistic issue.
And when it comes to style, opinions sometimes differ. I agree that there might theoretically exist situations were a void-cast could theoretically improve some readers understanding of a program, but I have yet to see that in practice. Anyone knows that printf() is called mainly for a side-effect. And side-effecting functions should not be a foreign concept to C programmers, as C is not exactly what I would call a pure functional language.
Anyway, I think any C-programmer on the planet knows that printf() is called mainly for a side-effect. You do not need to tell them that with a void-cast, as little as you need to tell them that with a comment. Do you really think there is even a single programmer on the planet that think it is easier to understand your programs because you put in lots of redundant unnesseceary casts?
Good for you. That's a matter of style. The program is not more or less beautiful or elegant because of it.
Beautyful? Yes, Elegant? No
Maybe you need to check out another C book then. Let my guess, you are using The Annotated ANSI C Standard, annotated by Herbert Schildt? This is probably the worst book ever written on the ANSI C standard. Or are you just using some other half-good book on C? I doubt you are actually using the ANSI standard, because in that case you have proven that you do not know how to read.
If you get to the end of the main block, that is assumed to be grounds for correct correct program termination(so the compiler will helpullfy insert the return statement for you).
No, that is not true ISO C. I think it might be true of C++, but then again, that's a completely different language. Also, the fact that some compilers will allow it, is not very interesting either, since compilers are allowed to do what ever they want when it comes to undefined behaviour, which is what this is.
It's a software patent. Nobody could file it in any European Country!
So, do you feel bad about it, or are you flattered that somebody will actually hunt down your posts to gain karma?
Yeah, I'll take Function before Fasion any day...
I would suggest you download Hugs, start dabbling in Haskell, and read the Haskell Prelude. It is relatively easy reading and contains code that is very beautyful.
How about hand-drawn imagery. Should that be legal, and computer-generated imagery be illegal? What about a collage? It can be made with computer, or with paper, scissor and glue! Or is it realism that counts. Some good artists can create very photo-realistic paintings on a canvas. Should that be illegal as well? How about bad computer-generated images. How about parody? How about unrealistic computer-generated images (hand drawn in windows paintbrush?)
And what exactly does it mean that something depicting children in sexual activities is porn? How about teaching materials (for parents, teachers and children about paedophiles)?
I think it is time that we stop thinking about paedophiles as the worst evil of our time. The witch-hunt for paedophiles is most likely creating a lot of victims that doesn't deserve the label (much like the witch-hunting did!). A convicted paedophile today will have very much trouble to adapt to society after his sentence is finished, because he will have to live with the fear that someone finds out about his past and decides to do whatever they find appropriate (starting a lynch-mob, fire him from his job, kick him out of his apartment, whatever...)
I am not to say that paedophilia is ok, because it certainly isn't, but today I think we are going too far. Treat paedophiles as humans, not monsters! They are humans that need treatment (and perhaps punishment), but they don't need a witch-hunt. And please don't judge anyone in advance. Many accusations that come up against a "paedophiliac" are false, but yet it is very hard for the person accused.
We don't need to get medieval just in order to feel safe about our children. The good, old, normal system of justice is just fine. I am not even so sure that child-porn increases paedophilic activity. Maybe it is better for them to get their steem out through pornography than through real life. Anyone know of some good studies of this?
Well, lex is relatively obvious, but the others...
Because there are patents out there. That is exactly what patents are supposed to do, protect an innovation. It doesn't matter whether you stole the idea, or discovered it yourself, if it is covered by a patent, it is owned by someone else. (A cleanroom implementation would take care of copyrights, not patents.)
Yeah, right, how was Internet funded before the web, then?
No, anonymity on the net is a relatively recent idea. Traditionally, anonymity has been scorn upon on the Internet. And the key difference between Internet and other media-types has always been the possibility of two-way communication. On the other hand, television promotes one way interaction between consumer and business.
Also, the tone through the article was that the Internet needs better targeting of ads. It doesn't. Perhaps the web needs it, but not even that is true. The only thing on the Internet that needs ads are .coms. And
personally, I don't care much about .com's.
Now what would happen to the web if the .coms died? Well, we would
retain all the interesting sites, such as content offered by
universities, personal pages, the gutenberg project, in short:
anything of real value! What would happen is that most stuff that
annoys us would be gone. Ads would be gone, lawyers would be gone,
domain-name wars would be gone, badly designed sites with company
graphics and too much javascript would be gone, and the bandwith would
still be there.
But even if one see .coms as something good, and not something bad,
there is the question of ads. People seem to have forgotten about
micropayments as an alternative to adverticing. But seriously, what do
you want? Pay 2 cents to access your favourite website, or have it
filled up with banners and popups? I would like a portion of those
micropayments, thank you!
Yeah! Hordes of teenagers having their own gene-kit creating deceases discovered by grey-hat doctors. Of course, you will find most of them documented on "gene-sec.com" as well. However, as everything happens so fast in genetic engineering, people that want to move around in public with other people must all read "gene-sec.com" to be aware of the latest exploits, and make sure to vaccinate themselves appropriately.