An alternative interpretation of these statistics is that a lot of geeks like parts of Debian and hate other parts of it, ultimately leading to a higher volume of forks.
DRTFA. In fact I rarely RTFA these days, because 90% of/. stories are just bloggers trolling for hits. Not even good ones.
Quite honestly, the stubborn insistence upon sticking with Gecko - and really, the sort of management that leads to decisions like that being made - will be the death of Firefox. At this point, Mozilla aren't solving any problems with their browser. What's the motivation behind Firefox? Why is it so bloated, and why are any of its developers okay with that fact?
Guys, GUYS. I invented a time machine. It's an ingenious device that can be programmed to generate loud, audible signals at a specific point in time. All you have to do is program the device with a time set in the future, and then fall asleep. When you wake up - presumably via aural stimulation from my invention - you will be in the FUTURE!
Thanks, totally missed that. This is great, and I would actually be interested to see it generalized over n-dimensional "magic" structures (i.e. magic hybercubes).
At some point it feels like mental masturbation, but interesting no less.
I really hate not being able to edit/. posts.
On second thought, I would more succinctly define an n-dimensional volume as any subset of R^n. Addition would still be a simple set union.
I'm not sure about the technical definition of "well-defined" if there is a specific one in the case of an addition operation.
I assume that for n-dimensional volumes, it is sufficient to define addition as a union of two volumes (a volume being a bounded infinite set in R^n).
I think this guy's work can be abstracted even further.
I'm no mathematician, but I see no reason to stop at geometric shapes. It seems to me that any arbitrary set T with an addition operator defined over it has the potential to be a space in which magic squares can be found. In the case of this guy's work, that set happens to be the set of n-dimensional geometric shapes with the addition operator defined as a geometric union. In traditional magic squares, that set is simply {x : 0 x 10}.
This can probably be explained by the increasing number of avenues by which spam can be effectively delivered. Twitter and Facebook likely see more eyes more frequently than the average e-mail account.
When these values are sufficiently close, it's time to recognize that something is very deeply wrong with your code base. Or your programmers are monkeys, but the former case is most likely.
Start over.
You hit on a very important point: employers should take initiative in promoting and facilitating the professional development of their employees. It is a wise investment on the part of the employer, and it benefits (willing) employees too.
Employees unwilling to grow professionally yield a much lower ROI than employees who embrace the goal with passion.
It seems like this practice would be unfair, undesirable and impractical in many - if not the vast majority of situations. Personally, I work in a very small startup company and everyone here has a blurred separation between work and personal life. To be stingy with my time or personal resources would be to guarantee failure, and I expect (and receive) the same attitude from my constituents.
Of course we are a software company and we aren't plagued with IT support issues due to our relatively competent internal knowledge. In any case, it is very one-sided and cynical to suggest that there is never a good reason to leverage an employee's personal property (at their own discretion, of course) to mitigate operational costs.
Apple might be pushing HTML5 support ahead, and I certainly wouldn't deny them due credit for those efforts, but they are not solely responsible for the advent of or continued development and refinement of an HTML5 standard. Their reasons for supporting HTML5 are most certainly not to be more open (or whatever happy fairy tale one might conceive of), but to stifle their competition. There is nothing wrong with that, but let's not use it to justify some belief that Apple isn't a threat to the free Internet.
I doubt the intention is to have individual users broadcasting upstream directly to a giant base station. More likely, this solution involves deploying some number of intermediate base stations, with each one providing a local WiFi network as well as a backhaul to the central broadcasting station.
Some of Google's style guidelines are surprisingly nonsensical. It seems ludicrous that anyone would recommend against using exceptions and RAII judiciously to avert a number of expensive maintenance caveats. To even suggest that "Init" methods or uninitialized states are suitable alternatives to exception throwing... really? While some of their guidelines are trivially obvious to any seasoned C++ veteran, I still question the competence of whoever authored that document. To suggest that a need for RTTI is necessarily indicative of a design flaw is severely narrow-minded. It is true that many practical uses of RTTI are awful abuses by bad developers writing sub-par code. There are legitimate uses for which there are no better alternatives, and to reject their use as a matter of policy is a mistake.
The restrictions on Boost usage are also difficult to understand (C++0x is understandable, but only due to insufficient implementation). I think my favorite terrible exerts from the whole guide are these gems of irrationality:
As with Boost, some C++0x extensions encourage coding practices that hamper readability—for example by removing checked redundancy (such as type names) that may be helpful to readers, or by encouraging template metaprogramming. Other extensions duplicate functionality available through existing mechanisms, which may lead to confusion and conversion costs.
and
Some Boost libraries encourage coding practices which can hamper readability, such as metaprogramming and other advanced template techniques, and an excessively "functional" style of programming.
Really? "Excessively functional style of programming?" Template metaprogramming is inherently evil? Policies like these are products of fear and ignorance.
Anyone who outright dismisses C++ as a generally bad language to use in any situation is matched in their ignorance only by someone who swears by C++ as the best solution in every situation. I can't imagine keeping a straight face while using the term "engineer" in any capacity to describe a person made uncomfortable by such a powerful language.
Ugly? Yep. Stopgap solution that got out of control? Pretty much. The [i]only[/i] language in its class? Yep.
Bad C++ code can be very, very bad. Good C++ code is surprisingly elegant and extremely powerful. Its unique mix of expressive features, performance capacity, programmer flexibility and sheer volume of libraries far outweigh any argument about its semantical shortcomings.
I am confounded by all of these responses which argue the merits of teaching with one language or another. After going through college and grad school, I am convinced that students are taught CS completely ass-backwards.
AP should be focusing on introductory computation theory and basic algorithms. There is no need to write a single line of code so early in one's studies. That's not to say that it'd be bad for a student who's motivated and able, to pick up a language on his or her own time; as an academic field though, "Computer Science" is not "Computer Programming."
The future of content distribution is really not a source of much debate. Electronic distribution is cheap, efficient, and easily controlled; the decision of how to physically store content once its distributed is up to console makers and (in some cases) end users.
It is very likely that console and PC storage will eventually move to predominantly solid-state devices, but the means of distributing content to those devices are and will continue to be increasingly electronic.
Seems like a no-brainer here.
It "might almost be a conspiracy?" Perhaps it looks that way due to the fact that stupid people are easily led astray when given an incomplete set of information.
In truth, individuals are responsible for maintaining their own sufficient understanding of reality. As many others will surely tell you, "the media" (read: people) only disseminate the bad news because bad news sells.
Slashdot Mirror
An alternative interpretation of these statistics is that a lot of geeks like parts of Debian and hate other parts of it, ultimately leading to a higher volume of forks. DRTFA. In fact I rarely RTFA these days, because 90% of /. stories are just bloggers trolling for hits. Not even good ones.
Quite honestly, the stubborn insistence upon sticking with Gecko - and really, the sort of management that leads to decisions like that being made - will be the death of Firefox. At this point, Mozilla aren't solving any problems with their browser. What's the motivation behind Firefox? Why is it so bloated, and why are any of its developers okay with that fact?
Pride is a vicious thing.
Execs typically don't know that much about their technology, so their take on this matter is most likely irrelevant.
"Analysts" is a weaselly euphemism for "whomever we feel like citing."
Guys, GUYS. I invented a time machine. It's an ingenious device that can be programmed to generate loud, audible signals at a specific point in time. All you have to do is program the device with a time set in the future, and then fall asleep. When you wake up - presumably via aural stimulation from my invention - you will be in the FUTURE!
Suck it, Einstein.
this isn't an invisibility cloak; it's high school physics.
Thanks, totally missed that. This is great, and I would actually be interested to see it generalized over n-dimensional "magic" structures (i.e. magic hybercubes). At some point it feels like mental masturbation, but interesting no less.
I really hate not being able to edit /. posts.
On second thought, I would more succinctly define an n-dimensional volume as any subset of R^n. Addition would still be a simple set union.
I'm not sure about the technical definition of "well-defined" if there is a specific one in the case of an addition operation. I assume that for n-dimensional volumes, it is sufficient to define addition as a union of two volumes (a volume being a bounded infinite set in R^n).
Arrrg! Ahem, { x : 0 < x < 10 }
I think this guy's work can be abstracted even further.
I'm no mathematician, but I see no reason to stop at geometric shapes. It seems to me that any arbitrary set T with an addition operator defined over it has the potential to be a space in which magic squares can be found. In the case of this guy's work, that set happens to be the set of n-dimensional geometric shapes with the addition operator defined as a geometric union. In traditional magic squares, that set is simply {x : 0 x 10}.
This can probably be explained by the increasing number of avenues by which spam can be effectively delivered. Twitter and Facebook likely see more eyes more frequently than the average e-mail account.
Pure speculation, but it makes sense to me.
When these values are sufficiently close, it's time to recognize that something is very deeply wrong with your code base. Or your programmers are monkeys, but the former case is most likely. Start over.
You hit on a very important point: employers should take initiative in promoting and facilitating the professional development of their employees. It is a wise investment on the part of the employer, and it benefits (willing) employees too. Employees unwilling to grow professionally yield a much lower ROI than employees who embrace the goal with passion.
It seems like this practice would be unfair, undesirable and impractical in many - if not the vast majority of situations. Personally, I work in a very small startup company and everyone here has a blurred separation between work and personal life. To be stingy with my time or personal resources would be to guarantee failure, and I expect (and receive) the same attitude from my constituents.
Of course we are a software company and we aren't plagued with IT support issues due to our relatively competent internal knowledge. In any case, it is very one-sided and cynical to suggest that there is never a good reason to leverage an employee's personal property (at their own discretion, of course) to mitigate operational costs.
Apple might be pushing HTML5 support ahead, and I certainly wouldn't deny them due credit for those efforts, but they are not solely responsible for the advent of or continued development and refinement of an HTML5 standard. Their reasons for supporting HTML5 are most certainly not to be more open (or whatever happy fairy tale one might conceive of), but to stifle their competition. There is nothing wrong with that, but let's not use it to justify some belief that Apple isn't a threat to the free Internet.
People who currently make money are afraid of not making money!
That fact, however, does not preclude the rest of the world from leaving them in the dust.
Lua. WoW is scripted in Lua, not Python. Should have been Python, but embedding Python is a nightmare and - to some - a deadly sin.
I doubt the intention is to have individual users broadcasting upstream directly to a giant base station. More likely, this solution involves deploying some number of intermediate base stations, with each one providing a local WiFi network as well as a backhaul to the central broadcasting station.
The restrictions on Boost usage are also difficult to understand (C++0x is understandable, but only due to insufficient implementation). I think my favorite terrible exerts from the whole guide are these gems of irrationality:
As with Boost, some C++0x extensions encourage coding practices that hamper readability—for example by removing checked redundancy (such as type names) that may be helpful to readers, or by encouraging template metaprogramming. Other extensions duplicate functionality available through existing mechanisms, which may lead to confusion and conversion costs.
and
Some Boost libraries encourage coding practices which can hamper readability, such as metaprogramming and other advanced template techniques, and an excessively "functional" style of programming.
Really? "Excessively functional style of programming?" Template metaprogramming is inherently evil? Policies like these are products of fear and ignorance.
Anyone who outright dismisses C++ as a generally bad language to use in any situation is matched in their ignorance only by someone who swears by C++ as the best solution in every situation. I can't imagine keeping a straight face while using the term "engineer" in any capacity to describe a person made uncomfortable by such a powerful language. Ugly? Yep. Stopgap solution that got out of control? Pretty much. The [i]only[/i] language in its class? Yep. Bad C++ code can be very, very bad. Good C++ code is surprisingly elegant and extremely powerful. Its unique mix of expressive features, performance capacity, programmer flexibility and sheer volume of libraries far outweigh any argument about its semantical shortcomings.
I am confounded by all of these responses which argue the merits of teaching with one language or another. After going through college and grad school, I am convinced that students are taught CS completely ass-backwards. AP should be focusing on introductory computation theory and basic algorithms. There is no need to write a single line of code so early in one's studies. That's not to say that it'd be bad for a student who's motivated and able, to pick up a language on his or her own time; as an academic field though, "Computer Science" is not "Computer Programming."
The future of content distribution is really not a source of much debate. Electronic distribution is cheap, efficient, and easily controlled; the decision of how to physically store content once its distributed is up to console makers and (in some cases) end users. It is very likely that console and PC storage will eventually move to predominantly solid-state devices, but the means of distributing content to those devices are and will continue to be increasingly electronic. Seems like a no-brainer here.
It "might almost be a conspiracy?" Perhaps it looks that way due to the fact that stupid people are easily led astray when given an incomplete set of information. In truth, individuals are responsible for maintaining their own sufficient understanding of reality. As many others will surely tell you, "the media" (read: people) only disseminate the bad news because bad news sells.