There is a lot of truth to coding style that is not necessarily related to open source. Seasoned programmers work very hard to keep naming, patterns and even formatting consistent. It makes it easier to read.
The open source angle is that the code will be viewed by many people and thus there is a greater detail to presentation, it's a form of ego stroking and seems to work quite well.
I do code reviews all the time and I can tell a novice developer from someone who has done it for a while, it's a hard thing to explain, it's like a difference between good and bad art. And just like with art, you can have decent artists and you can have great artists with very little in-between. Go figure:)
Unless they can make a deal with ATI or NVidia and have their PPU work with a GPU, it will be a very difficult thing to sell to people. They also need to get Direct X support and maybe have it work transparently with it (if that is possible). I can see this being a part of a video card, not a standalone PCI card unless the results are incredible and can be shown as a huge benefit to gaming, othewise only the hardcore framerate junkies will buy it.
Knowing what the requirements are is important. We techies are usually quite intelligent and can understand what the customer wants. The big problem is that 'what customer wants' gets translated by the sales/marketing to 'what I think we can deliver that customer wants' and sales/marketing people are not techies and do not know what is possible and what is not. We techies can work as sales/marketing, but not vice versa.
I remember working for a company where we had a full suite of products and I would often get a request for functionality that was sold and think to myself "do these people not know what we have?" and that is the hard truth, sales people will agree to anything whether possible or not.
While some techies prefer to stay out of sight, there are others who would like to work more proactively and actually collaborate on a product instead of being told what to do by people half educated and half intelligent as them.
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools Working software over comprehensive documentation Customer collaboration over contract negotiation Responding to change over following a plan
Sounds great but how do you convince the sales/marketing/business/management types that it is better to deliver a working product than to syphon money from a customer, deliver something barely resembling what they requested and then charge them more to improve the product to meet their "new" needs.
Most developers can make software that the cutomer wants if they actually talked to the customer, but sales and marketing people somehow think that developers don't have perople skills to deal with customers... it is a sad world when someone with a business degree tries to make a technical decision.
Radio stations are threatened by satellite radio, and they should be, if satellite radio takes off in the next year or two, there will be little if any use to broadcast radio and radio station owners will lose money unless they use these laws and corrput politicians to keep themselves in the money making area. Making satellite radio indecent is a way to level the playing field. The issue here is that satellite is a subscription service and should not be subjected to the same rules as a free one.
No. I took Fortran and Pascal in college and despite the fact Pascal had problems, I almost always tried to write the code in it instead of Fortran because the Fortran code was ugly and unmanageable and worse after 2 weeks I couldn't figure out why I wrote something (yet I have written C/C++ code 8 years ago that I still can read and understand why I did something.
Like any language Fortran had it's uses back in the 80s as a language well suited for mathematical computations, but with availability of C/C++ and tons of 3rd party math libraries there is no reason to use Fortran. I think using Mathematica is a lot more elegant if you must use something math oriented and that is what many math based researchers use (albeit they often have supercomputers or clusters avaialble to them to cruch those problems anyways).
My advice is to stay away from it unless you like learning languages of old, then I can recommend Logo and APL to you also:)
The problem is not the initial trip to a new village where you get 3 or 4 quests and can doa few together, upon completion you return to the village and one of the quests is part of a chain, so you take the next step which can't be done in tandem with anything else unless you know of other quests that may take you to the right area. I have done one quest in the horde town in 1000 needles, where first part was closeby, next step was a long run to the north part of the zone, then a trip to thunder bluff which took about 30 minutes to run there and back to complete. I try to use the hearthstone when possible or take the bird, but not all quests are nearby.
Another major gripe is with trade skills, I took mining and engineering, however no small town/village has a forge/anvil and bank nearby, since many components are banked (liek gems, intermediates, skins) I can't do anything but lug around metal bars until I get to a bank, with space being at a premium already I spend quite a bit of time managing my paltry inventory.
Lets just say the gaem is very time consuming and if I didn't use it as a glorified IRC to chat with many friends who play I would dump this game. When I know my friends are not on I play City of Heroes, it's a lot more exciting without the inherent tedium blizzard decided to inherit from other slow moving mmorpgs.
Have you ever flown a bird from the Cenarion Town to Thunder Bluff (level 10 druid quest for bear form)? It's about 15 minutes in the air, I went to make food and came back and was still flying over areas.
Ever die in The Barrens? Ever die in the north part of Mulgore? Ever die by Razonfen Kraul?
All those are at least 10 minute run.
Let's try quests now. Lets try the quest for bearform, you have to kill a moonkin in barrens, so you run to thunder bluff to get the quest, then 15 minute run through mulgore into barrens, kill 1 thing, run back through mulgore, into thunder bluff. I timed it and the whole quest took me little under 30 minutes, all that to get a power I am supposed to get at level 10.
Another example: quest in Ratchet to get slithid eggs, the run from ratchet to stonetalon is about 20 minutes (running accross entire barrens, then halfway up stonetalon, then you kill a few spiders, loot some layed eggs and have to run another almost 30 minutes back to get the reward.
There are quests that can be done in under 10 minutes, like kill 10 of such and such which usually roam nearby, but anything involved is going to be a lot of running.
Now for yet another thing that is annoying, the dependence on fan info sites is growing. Let me give you a few examples. You are fighting and you loot a sharp talon which is green, now you have no idea what it is used for, it happens to be used in weaponsmithing but I only found that out by searching thottbot.org.
I also get quests to kill such and such and I can't find that area without using the Brady official guide or Allakhazam. Some quests are self explanatory, some are quite obscure and the description is inadequate and sometimes even incorrect (the 3 raptor nest location is wrong in the quest text for example).
If you have played other MMORPGs like EQ or AC or DAoC then the grind and long travel times and lag and bugs may be what you can accept. I have been playing City Of Heroes more and more lately because their lag is very low even in busy areas, travel is very painless once you get travel powers and missions are easy to understand and find and there is never any need for a fan data gathering site. Maybe I like playing games that don't come with baggage, some people who like the grind are gluttons for punishment and accept it as a norm.
To each his own, but I personally do not think WoW has lived up to the hype.
The game is really not stable. They had a patch few weeks ago that results in at least 2 crashes per play session (ones where you get a dialog to send the crash dump to Blizzard). The lag is awful with NPC updates happening too seldom which results in you running and suddenly being beat up by something.
Lag happens during combat and when a lot of NPCs are involved (like pulling a room). The lag is about 7-10 seconds and I can just sit there and rotate my camera around waiting for the server to come back, if I am solo I will probably be dead, if grouped I will just stand around and get mauled.
I am liking this game less and less, I really had high hopes for it but there is no innovation, lots of borrowed ideas from Everquest and the ever looming "grind" everywhere I go.
The worst part of this game is: travel. Until level 40 you have to run (slowly) everywhere, if you don't have a flying transport between areas you need you will easily spend 30minutes real world time running. Heck some bird trips can take 15-20 minutes, essentially causing me to switch to a browser and read some news; not very immersive, just very annoying.
My WoW experience: 1. Spend 30 minutes running from town to where the quest is 2. Spend 30 minutes killing N enemies to get Y items or something similar 3. Spend 30 minutes more running back to quest giver
insert in there: If I lag during a fight spend 15 minutes running to corpse from graveyard.
If you enjoy mindless grind and can forgive lag and tedious travel, it may be the game for you.
I've been trying to buy a PDA for a year and cannot find a PDA that has the features I need, every PDA has pros and cons, however the cons in almost every PDA make it a questionable buy. If you want to use the HP iPaq and have a phone plan you can only use TMobile which has horrible reception in my area, Cingular and Verizon offer their own versions but the PDAs they provide are very subpar and expensive to boot. Just with there was a great PDA avaialable with cellular provider of your choice, but that would be good for consumer and bad for the cellular companies...
That personally pisses me off, how can I possibly have more rage than when my whole group runs off and I am left tanking some very angry hyena looking bipeds... come on!
Then again I think this is a well known gripe with the warrior class in the game:)
Name two developers that wrote/designed/coded the game you really like... can't think of any, but most people can rattle off B-actor/actress names. Our society is very much about visual appeal and instant gratification, the people behind the schenes are often forgotten and ignored.
I think most people in these situations use a language and acronyms which their audience can understand, if they are not then they are deceiving the recepient and I agree with your point.
Many of my emails would be completely incoherent outside of the recepient (unless an outside source is aware of the environment and acronyms used within the company, and every company has a huge set of their own).
I work in a corporation and have to read/write/replyto 30-100 emails. If I had all the time in the world I would format my sentences, use approriate punctuations and avoid abbreviations. However, we do not operate on the academia timescale and I really don't have time to worry about punctuations when I need to get an urgent point across.
Using terms which some english professor finds cryptic is my way of life, I work in the tech sector and using terms approriate to the environment is the norm. I really do not care if some english professor finds my writing deplorable, I find some of their teaching deplorable and having taken English 101, 102, 201 and 202 (about 20 years ago), I can say that I got no joy from that class. I was studying to be a programmer not sales person with an english degree. Call me biased.:)
Have to agree with you, I often watch crime drama shows (worst offender is Cold Case Files, not the A&E one), where people just confess everything at the end. I am sitting there thinking... "what a dumbass, just lawyer up, they don't have a case against you, not until you open your big mouth and give them something to use against you in a court of law...":)
The only CSI that is watchable is CSI (the original). CSI:NYC and CSI:Miami are horrible for one aspect, the acting sucks. They got all these glamour types that do not in any way fit a person that would be working as a cop or a lab technician or a forensics scientist (none that I have met and I have met many). Personally I am tired of shows with actors/actresses that are nothing but a pretty face/bosy and lack any ability to portray the character they are assigned and even worse do not posses any qualities of the character they are trying to portray.
The original CSI at least tried to add this with unique characters that have flaws, exhibit some geekiness that goes with the territory and can almost pass for some of the roles (against there is evident hollywood factor). The main guy is an ubernerd, has horrible people skills but can name an insect and it's locale by looking at it, has no family, no social life and is very good at what he does. This fits many forensics I know, they all have some odd quirk and some obscure obsession relating to their field (hey this can be said about most scientists). The blond female is a b*tch, may have some peronality skills but extremely pushy and bossy (just like many female cops), a dichotomy of power and feminism. His assistant had a serious gambling problem and is trying to clean up. The lab guy is one of the best characters, he's a geek, anime fan, tries to look cool but has something that screams geek all over him, mentions a bunch of fetishes, always seems horny, sometimes unsuccessfully hits on women and I don't think he has gotten laid yet (a perfect techie type if you ask me). The other 2 are ok, but no defining characteristics for them yet that make them stand out, yet they don't seem too out of place.
As far as accuracy... just remember that people writing this stuff are same english majors that wrote technically accurate movies like War Games, Hackers and a slew of others. Let's just say they are part right on many issues, but they leave the logistics out to spare you the boredom. DNA tests take weeks to run, finding a speciment on the glass lside can take over an hour (getting the dye right, correct light frequency, etc). However there are quick tests for presence of blood and semen that are as easy as spray on or spray and use UV light. So the show has a mix of accurate stuff, somewhat accurate but sped up stuff and some questionable. If they followed detail the show would not fit in the 44 or so minutes they have (plus commercials). Don't blame the makers, it's the networks that impose the timelines.
That is my point, people blidly apply patterns to everything, which results in bulky, slow code. I used to think that getter/setter was needed for all members, but having used both, I think a balance is a nice thing to have. In some cases you want to expose the variable, in others you want to keep it in getter/setter pattern. It all depends on the design and how the object is going to be used. If the class is nothing more t han a placeholder for some data (ala C struct), then adding getter/setter is a waste and often good compilers will just compile out the method call and do it inline (but not all compilers are created equal).
My point is missed... the idea is that not every accessor needs to be a get/set method, some that will not need complex functionality behind it can just use the variable directly. This is a design issue more than anything else, and in the modern world of dev environments, refactoring is not too hard. Even with C++ this is not hard, just put the variable in the private: area and see what breaks and replace with accessor. If you do this too often then you are not deisgning the hierarchy correctly:)
Re:Getters/setters bad?
on
Holub on Patterns
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· Score: 2, Informative
Let's take an example in java:
class Foo {
public int getValue() { return m_value; }
public void setValue(int v) { m_value = v; }
private int m_value = 0; }
and now this:
class Foo {
public int m_value = 0; }
There is absolutely no difference in functionality here, so there is no need for getter/setter for something which does not get any benefit of scope.
If you has something like this, then it makes sense to have a getter/setter:
class Foo {
public int getValue() { return 2 * m_value + 10; }
public void setValue(int v) { m_value = v -5; }
private int m_value = 0; }
Here the implementation hides away the logic which the user should not care about (this is a simplistic example, but you get the idea).
People should use patterns to make coding easier, not code so that you can use patterns.
By comparisson Tomcat is one of the best and quickest servers to run J2EE, servlets and JSP (it is also the best static content server around, Apache you know).
I have used many other java application servers and they don't really come close. WebLogic dev environment and stability made me appreciate a root canal. WebSphere taught me patience while waiting for the debugger to start (if it doesn't crash while starting); not to mention the debugger can easily use up 1GB of ram while running. iPlanet, well I won't even go into that, I'd rather forget those 6 months I had to write code for it and it's bastard brother Kiva.
Tomcat is relatively lightweight, you can use Eclipse to develop and deploy to it. But most important, the code executed on it is as good as the writer of the code and too often people writing apps for Tomcat should have just stuck with thier non-CS background and found an appropriate job:|
On a side note, J2EE is a big hype, it's slow, cumbersome and overly complicated. You can do almost enything you want with a servlet or JSP page (and people should always try to keep as much of the content static as possible to take advantage of caches and reduce pointless execution cycles). Marshalling code in many implementations adds too much overhead to justify any benefits you may get from distribution, but your mileage may vary.
Tomcat is free, people can just download it (http://www.apache.org) and try it out, the online docs and FAQs are pretty good, then once you have it running and you like it, buy some good books on it.
Lots of companies do this already. They set up large headquarters in some far rural area that is maybe few hours away from the main office and keep all the non-business people there. If need be they can always drive/train to the main office. It makes sense, and many people working for the rural office tend to migrate to rural areas and actually afford buying a house which is really tough if you are in a metropolis or a high density area.
This paper is almost complete rubbish. The bias against C/C++ is absurd. Why not blame the hammer for carpenters' injuries?
From my experience in the software industry, the biggest problem I have encountered is that management assumes that developers are unable to design any software. Instead they have business, marketing and sales people write up requirements (english majors who usually do not understand logic flow or coding). The requirements contain cases which totally break consistency and flow, creating possibilities for an error. Having worked at companies of various size, the larger the corporation the more non engineers control the design.
Another major issue is that the difference between good and average programmer is huge. Mixing of good and average programmers usually results in code that will have bugs. Average programmers don't always understand what good programmers do with their code and their additions often break the consistency of the code. This is a hard qualitative idea to explain, but I am sure many have been faced with it at one point in their life or another.
And on the final note: those that are not good at what they do always blame the tools for their problems.
Bartle mentions there.com as an example. When I was feeling restless at my job, I interviewed at there.com. During the interview they asked me a bunch of simple programming questions and then they asked me if I knew perlDB, I asked them if they were really designing a MOG or just some small scale accounting software (at this point I knew I did not want to work for this clueless company). MOGs are notorious for high load on resources (especially at peak times), using anything less than C/C++ with thin layer DB client (DB in at least a small cluster to start) is just asking for trouble.
I asked them what they thought of the Bartle book (Designing Virtual Worlds one) and the guy never heard of it, nor did he hear of the mud-dev lists. From what I understood, they had marketing and sales tightly involved in the design process. I got out of there as fast as I could. It's like you are rocking on a chair and you lean just a little too far, that's how it felt.
Their highlight: They offered in-game items for sale for real money, however most you could buy was a dune buggy and some flashier clothes that you could use to impress members of the opposite sex (who were most likely members of the same sex). Youcan do this in real life and actually have a slight chance of getting laid.:)
That is exactly the point. A supreme court justice must not add any bias, they are there to just interpret the law. With that said, they do have the choice of which cases they decide to hear and which they do not. This is where the liberal/conservative justice issue comes into play. It's is a good thing when the justices are near evenly distributed on the liberal/conservative scale, it's not good when there is a lopsided distribution. If you have too many right wing conservative judges they may chose to hear the appeals dealing with pro-choice, medicinal marijuana, civil liberties while avoiding corporate loophole cases, separation of church and state issues and such.
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There is a lot of truth to coding style that is not necessarily related to open source. Seasoned programmers work very hard to keep naming, patterns and even formatting consistent. It makes it easier to read.
:)
The open source angle is that the code will be viewed by many people and thus there is a greater detail to presentation, it's a form of ego stroking and seems to work quite well.
I do code reviews all the time and I can tell a novice developer from someone who has done it for a while, it's a hard thing to explain, it's like a difference between good and bad art. And just like with art, you can have decent artists and you can have great artists with very little in-between. Go figure
Unless they can make a deal with ATI or NVidia and have their PPU work with a GPU, it will be a very difficult thing to sell to people. They also need to get Direct X support and maybe have it work transparently with it (if that is possible). I can see this being a part of a video card, not a standalone PCI card unless the results are incredible and can be shown as a huge benefit to gaming, othewise only the hardcore framerate junkies will buy it.
Knowing what the requirements are is important. We techies are usually quite intelligent and can understand what the customer wants. The big problem is that 'what customer wants' gets translated by the sales/marketing to 'what I think we can deliver that customer wants' and sales/marketing people are not techies and do not know what is possible and what is not. We techies can work as sales/marketing, but not vice versa.
I remember working for a company where we had a full suite of products and I would often get a request for functionality that was sold and think to myself "do these people not know what we have?" and that is the hard truth, sales people will agree to anything whether possible or not.
While some techies prefer to stay out of sight, there are others who would like to work more proactively and actually collaborate on a product instead of being told what to do by people half educated and half intelligent as them.
Tread lightly with that tone, you are on Slashdot and bad things happen to people who ridicule the natives!
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan
Sounds great but how do you convince the sales/marketing/business/management types that it is better to deliver a working product than to syphon money from a customer, deliver something barely resembling what they requested and then charge them more to improve the product to meet their "new" needs.
Most developers can make software that the cutomer wants if they actually talked to the customer, but sales and marketing people somehow think that developers don't have perople skills to deal with customers... it is a sad world when someone with a business degree tries to make a technical decision.
Radio stations are threatened by satellite radio, and they should be, if satellite radio takes off in the next year or two, there will be little if any use to broadcast radio and radio station owners will lose money unless they use these laws and corrput politicians to keep themselves in the money making area. Making satellite radio indecent is a way to level the playing field. The issue here is that satellite is a subscription service and should not be subjected to the same rules as a free one.
No. I took Fortran and Pascal in college and despite the fact Pascal had problems, I almost always tried to write the code in it instead of Fortran because the Fortran code was ugly and unmanageable and worse after 2 weeks I couldn't figure out why I wrote something (yet I have written C/C++ code 8 years ago that I still can read and understand why I did something.
:)
Like any language Fortran had it's uses back in the 80s as a language well suited for mathematical computations, but with availability of C/C++ and tons of 3rd party math libraries there is no reason to use Fortran. I think using Mathematica is a lot more elegant if you must use something math oriented and that is what many math based researchers use (albeit they often have supercomputers or clusters avaialble to them to cruch those problems anyways).
My advice is to stay away from it unless you like learning languages of old, then I can recommend Logo and APL to you also
The problem is not the initial trip to a new village where you get 3 or 4 quests and can doa few together, upon completion you return to the village and one of the quests is part of a chain, so you take the next step which can't be done in tandem with anything else unless you know of other quests that may take you to the right area. I have done one quest in the horde town in 1000 needles, where first part was closeby, next step was a long run to the north part of the zone, then a trip to thunder bluff which took about 30 minutes to run there and back to complete. I try to use the hearthstone when possible or take the bird, but not all quests are nearby.
Another major gripe is with trade skills, I took mining and engineering, however no small town/village has a forge/anvil and bank nearby, since many components are banked (liek gems, intermediates, skins) I can't do anything but lug around metal bars until I get to a bank, with space being at a premium already I spend quite a bit of time managing my paltry inventory.
Lets just say the gaem is very time consuming and if I didn't use it as a glorified IRC to chat with many friends who play I would dump this game. When I know my friends are not on I play City of Heroes, it's a lot more exciting without the inherent tedium blizzard decided to inherit from other slow moving mmorpgs.
Have you ever flown a bird from the Cenarion Town to Thunder Bluff (level 10 druid quest for bear form)? It's about 15 minutes in the air, I went to make food and came back and was still flying over areas.
Ever die in The Barrens?
Ever die in the north part of Mulgore?
Ever die by Razonfen Kraul?
All those are at least 10 minute run.
Let's try quests now. Lets try the quest for bearform, you have to kill a moonkin in barrens, so you run to thunder bluff to get the quest, then 15 minute run through mulgore into barrens, kill 1 thing, run back through mulgore, into thunder bluff. I timed it and the whole quest took me little under 30 minutes, all that to get a power I am supposed to get at level 10.
Another example: quest in Ratchet to get slithid eggs, the run from ratchet to stonetalon is about 20 minutes (running accross entire barrens, then halfway up stonetalon, then you kill a few spiders, loot some layed eggs and have to run another almost 30 minutes back to get the reward.
There are quests that can be done in under 10 minutes, like kill 10 of such and such which usually roam nearby, but anything involved is going to be a lot of running.
Now for yet another thing that is annoying, the dependence on fan info sites is growing.
Let me give you a few examples. You are fighting and you loot a sharp talon which is green, now you have no idea what it is used for, it happens to be used in weaponsmithing but I only found that out by searching thottbot.org.
I also get quests to kill such and such and I can't find that area without using the Brady official guide or Allakhazam. Some quests are self explanatory, some are quite obscure and the description is inadequate and sometimes even incorrect (the 3 raptor nest location is wrong in the quest text for example).
If you have played other MMORPGs like EQ or AC or DAoC then the grind and long travel times and lag and bugs may be what you can accept. I have been playing City Of Heroes more and more lately because their lag is very low even in busy areas, travel is very painless once you get travel powers and missions are easy to understand and find and there is never any need for a fan data gathering site. Maybe I like playing games that don't come with baggage, some people who like the grind are gluttons for punishment and accept it as a norm.
To each his own, but I personally do not think WoW has lived up to the hype.
The game is really not stable. They had a patch few weeks ago that results in at least 2 crashes per play session (ones where you get a dialog to send the crash dump to Blizzard). The lag is awful with NPC updates happening too seldom which results in you running and suddenly being beat up by something.
Lag happens during combat and when a lot of NPCs are involved (like pulling a room). The lag is about 7-10 seconds and I can just sit there and rotate my camera around waiting for the server to come back, if I am solo I will probably be dead, if grouped I will just stand around and get mauled.
I am liking this game less and less, I really had high hopes for it but there is no innovation, lots of borrowed ideas from Everquest and the ever looming "grind" everywhere I go.
The worst part of this game is: travel. Until level 40 you have to run (slowly) everywhere, if you don't have a flying transport between areas you need you will easily spend 30minutes real world time running. Heck some bird trips can take 15-20 minutes, essentially causing me to switch to a browser and read some news; not very immersive, just very annoying.
My WoW experience:
1. Spend 30 minutes running from town to where the quest is
2. Spend 30 minutes killing N enemies to get Y items or something similar
3. Spend 30 minutes more running back to quest giver
insert in there: If I lag during a fight spend 15 minutes running to corpse from graveyard.
If you enjoy mindless grind and can forgive lag and tedious travel, it may be the game for you.
I've been trying to buy a PDA for a year and cannot find a PDA that has the features I need, every PDA has pros and cons, however the cons in almost every PDA make it a questionable buy. If you want to use the HP iPaq and have a phone plan you can only use TMobile which has horrible reception in my area, Cingular and Verizon offer their own versions but the PDAs they provide are very subpar and expensive to boot. Just with there was a great PDA avaialable with cellular provider of your choice, but that would be good for consumer and bad for the cellular companies...
That personally pisses me off, how can I possibly have more rage than when my whole group runs off and I am left tanking some very angry hyena looking bipeds... come on!
:)
Then again I think this is a well known gripe with the warrior class in the game
Name two developers that wrote/designed/coded the game you really like... can't think of any, but most people can rattle off B-actor/actress names. Our society is very much about visual appeal and instant gratification, the people behind the schenes are often forgotten and ignored.
I think most people in these situations use a language and acronyms which their audience can understand, if they are not then they are deceiving the recepient and I agree with your point.
Many of my emails would be completely incoherent outside of the recepient (unless an outside source is aware of the environment and acronyms used within the company, and every company has a huge set of their own).
Life is so rosey in the academia...
:)
I work in a corporation and have to read/write/replyto 30-100 emails. If I had all the time in the world I would format my sentences, use approriate punctuations and avoid abbreviations. However, we do not operate on the academia timescale and I really don't have time to worry about punctuations when I need to get an urgent point across.
Using terms which some english professor finds cryptic is my way of life, I work in the tech sector and using terms approriate to the environment is the norm. I really do not care if some english professor finds my writing deplorable, I find some of their teaching deplorable and having taken English 101, 102, 201 and 202 (about 20 years ago), I can say that I got no joy from that class. I was studying to be a programmer not sales person with an english degree. Call me biased.
Have to agree with you, I often watch crime drama shows (worst offender is Cold Case Files, not the A&E one), where people just confess everything at the end. I am sitting there thinking... "what a dumbass, just lawyer up, they don't have a case against you, not until you open your big mouth and give them something to use against you in a court of law..." :)
The only CSI that is watchable is CSI (the original). CSI:NYC and CSI:Miami are horrible for one aspect, the acting sucks. They got all these glamour types that do not in any way fit a person that would be working as a cop or a lab technician or a forensics scientist (none that I have met and I have met many). Personally I am tired of shows with actors/actresses that are nothing but a pretty face/bosy and lack any ability to portray the character they are assigned and even worse do not posses any qualities of the character they are trying to portray.
The original CSI at least tried to add this with unique characters that have flaws, exhibit some geekiness that goes with the territory and can almost pass for some of the roles (against there is evident hollywood factor). The main guy is an ubernerd, has horrible people skills but can name an insect and it's locale by looking at it, has no family, no social life and is very good at what he does. This fits many forensics I know, they all have some odd quirk and some obscure obsession relating to their field (hey this can be said about most scientists). The blond female is a b*tch, may have some peronality skills but extremely pushy and bossy (just like many female cops), a dichotomy of power and feminism. His assistant had a serious gambling problem and is trying to clean up. The lab guy is one of the best characters, he's a geek, anime fan, tries to look cool but has something that screams geek all over him, mentions a bunch of fetishes, always seems horny, sometimes unsuccessfully hits on women and I don't think he has gotten laid yet (a perfect techie type if you ask me). The other 2 are ok, but no defining characteristics for them yet that make them stand out, yet they don't seem too out of place.
As far as accuracy... just remember that people writing this stuff are same english majors that wrote technically accurate movies like War Games, Hackers and a slew of others. Let's just say they are part right on many issues, but they leave the logistics out to spare you the boredom. DNA tests take weeks to run, finding a speciment on the glass lside can take over an hour (getting the dye right, correct light frequency, etc). However there are quick tests for presence of blood and semen that are as easy as spray on or spray and use UV light. So the show has a mix of accurate stuff, somewhat accurate but sped up stuff and some questionable. If they followed detail the show would not fit in the 44 or so minutes they have (plus commercials). Don't blame the makers, it's the networks that impose the timelines.
That is my point, people blidly apply patterns to everything, which results in bulky, slow code. I used to think that getter/setter was needed for all members, but having used both, I think a balance is a nice thing to have. In some cases you want to expose the variable, in others you want to keep it in getter/setter pattern. It all depends on the design and how the object is going to be used. If the class is nothing more t han a placeholder for some data (ala C struct), then adding getter/setter is a waste and often good compilers will just compile out the method call and do it inline (but not all compilers are created equal).
My point is missed... the idea is that not every accessor needs to be a get/set method, some that will not need complex functionality behind it can just use the variable directly. This is a design issue more than anything else, and in the modern world of dev environments, refactoring is not too hard. Even with C++ this is not hard, just put the variable in the private: area and see what breaks and replace with accessor. If you do this too often then you are not deisgning the hierarchy correctly :)
Let's take an example in java:
class Foo {
public int getValue() { return m_value; }
public void setValue(int v) { m_value = v; }
private int m_value = 0;
}
and now this:
class Foo {
public int m_value = 0;
}
There is absolutely no difference in functionality here, so there is no need for getter/setter for something which does not get any benefit of scope.
If you has something like this, then it makes sense to have a getter/setter:
class Foo {
public int getValue() { return 2 * m_value + 10; }
public void setValue(int v) { m_value = v -5; }
private int m_value = 0;
}
Here the implementation hides away the logic which the user should not care about (this is a simplistic example, but you get the idea).
People should use patterns to make coding easier, not code so that you can use patterns.
By comparisson Tomcat is one of the best and quickest servers to run J2EE, servlets and JSP (it is also the best static content server around, Apache you know).
:|
I have used many other java application servers and they don't really come close. WebLogic dev environment and stability made me appreciate a root canal. WebSphere taught me patience while waiting for the debugger to start (if it doesn't crash while starting); not to mention the debugger can easily use up 1GB of ram while running. iPlanet, well I won't even go into that, I'd rather forget those 6 months I had to write code for it and it's bastard brother Kiva.
Tomcat is relatively lightweight, you can use Eclipse to develop and deploy to it. But most important, the code executed on it is as good as the writer of the code and too often people writing apps for Tomcat should have just stuck with thier non-CS background and found an appropriate job
On a side note, J2EE is a big hype, it's slow, cumbersome and overly complicated. You can do almost enything you want with a servlet or JSP page (and people should always try to keep as much of the content static as possible to take advantage of caches and reduce pointless execution cycles). Marshalling code in many implementations adds too much overhead to justify any benefits you may get from distribution, but your mileage may vary.
Tomcat is free, people can just download it (http://www.apache.org) and try it out, the online docs and FAQs are pretty good, then once you have it running and you like it, buy some good books on it.
Lots of companies do this already. They set up large headquarters in some far rural area that is maybe few hours away from the main office and keep all the non-business people there. If need be they can always drive/train to the main office. It makes sense, and many people working for the rural office tend to migrate to rural areas and actually afford buying a house which is really tough if you are in a metropolis or a high density area.
Pay may be less, but so is the cost of living.
This paper is almost complete rubbish. The bias against C/C++ is absurd. Why not blame the hammer for carpenters' injuries?
From my experience in the software industry, the biggest problem I have encountered is that management assumes that developers are unable to design any software. Instead they have business, marketing and sales people write up requirements (english majors who usually do not understand logic flow or coding). The requirements contain cases which totally break consistency and flow, creating possibilities for an error. Having worked at companies of various size, the larger the corporation the more non engineers control the design.
Another major issue is that the difference between good and average programmer is huge. Mixing of good and average programmers usually results in code that will have bugs. Average programmers don't always understand what good programmers do with their code and their additions often break the consistency of the code. This is a hard qualitative idea to explain, but I am sure many have been faced with it at one point in their life or another.
And on the final note: those that are not good at what they do always blame the tools for their problems.
Bartle mentions there.com as an example. When I was feeling restless at my job, I interviewed at there.com. During the interview they asked me a bunch of simple programming questions and then they asked me if I knew perlDB, I asked them if they were really designing a MOG or just some small scale accounting software (at this point I knew I did not want to work for this clueless company). MOGs are notorious for high load on resources (especially at peak times), using anything less than C/C++ with thin layer DB client (DB in at least a small cluster to start) is just asking for trouble.
:)
I asked them what they thought of the Bartle book (Designing Virtual Worlds one) and the guy never heard of it, nor did he hear of the mud-dev lists. From what I understood, they had marketing and sales tightly involved in the design process. I got out of there as fast as I could. It's like you are rocking on a chair and you lean just a little too far, that's how it felt.
Their highlight: They offered in-game items for sale for real money, however most you could buy was a dune buggy and some flashier clothes that you could use to impress members of the opposite sex (who were most likely members of the same sex). Youcan do this in real life and actually have a slight chance of getting laid.
That is exactly the point. A supreme court justice must not add any bias, they are there to just interpret the law. With that said, they do have the choice of which cases they decide to hear and which they do not. This is where the liberal/conservative justice issue comes into play. It's is a good thing when the justices are near evenly distributed on the liberal/conservative scale, it's not good when there is a lopsided distribution. If you have too many right wing conservative judges they may chose to hear the appeals dealing with pro-choice, medicinal marijuana, civil liberties while avoiding corporate loophole cases, separation of church and state issues and such.