That goes without saying. Your job isn't to not do that yourself, but to prevent the sales droids from doing it. Basically, a sales engineer is what a sales person should be in the first place. That said, there are plenty of "sales engineers" who aren't.
No. A sales engineer is an engineer with unusually good people skills, who comes along with business people on sales trips and provides technical backup, while managing not to commit any of the classical faux pas which are typical of most other engineers (such as calling the customer an idiot when they are bein an idiot).
To be fair, you could create a StringNum class that's derived from String, but handles numbers encoded as ASCII strings. I'd obviously overload the operators to do the calculations, and cast to and from a string, but if I add a String to a StringNum, which operator will it use? Will it cast the String to a StringNum and do the StringNum add, or will it cast the StringNum to a String and do an append?
The error is this example was in deriving StringNum from String. This is a classic case of the "has-a" vs "is-a" question. A StringNum is not a string, because it fails the substitution principle (for instance, you can assign "Cat" to a String, but assigning it to a StringNum is nonsensical). Therefore, StringNum must not derive from String, and there will be no ambiguity
You have no way of knowing that without seeing the code.
That goes for all code, not just overloaded operators. I could write a function called ConcatenateTwoStrings() which actually converts them to floats and adds them, but I would be guilty of bad name choice. You do not blame that on the language do you?
Obviously, you've never worked on a team of programmers with different backgrounds.
If "team of programmers with different backgrounds" means "people with illogical thought processes," then no, I haven't, and I hope never to.
Add the string "0.5" to the string "1.0." with the '+' operator. Is the result "1.5" or "1.00.5" ?
The result is the string "1.0.0.5". No sane person would expect otherwise, and no sane person would use a language where it wasn't.
While it is true that an idiot can overload an operator to do something non-intuitive, this is not limited to operators. A programmer could give a function a non-intuitive (or outright misleading) name as well.
Do you hold the C language accountable when somebody writes a function called MultiplyTwoIntegers() which actually subtracts them?
It's a thermodynamics issue. Order turning to disorder. The rate at which we can recover thermodynamic order is limited by the power of sunlight. We should not contribute to entropy more than is necessary, because we'll have to wait to recover order. For instance it takes millions of years to replenish fossil fuel stores.
Instead of suing, why not crowdsource people to begin the task of transcribing the movies and just give it to Netflix? That way, you can even do it on a per-demand basis so that the most popular movies are transcribed first. It's a bummer that so many of these movies don't have CC already, but that's the way it is, and it doesn't seem productive to get belligerent about it. Just get some people together and fix the problem instead of crying to the man, resulting possibly in the removal of movies to the detriment of everyone.
I'd be willing to do a movie a week, for free. Why not, I watch movies anyway.
Oh yes, it is! Once you introduced contours detection or image partitioning, you are have decision-making embedded in the process -- that's out of filtering and into AI territory.
So any computer program that has an if-statement in it, is artificial intelligence. Ok, glad we got that cleared up.
If you fire people often enough that you have codified a rote procedure for it, then you are a fucking shitty manager. Apparently, you don't have any skill hiring decent workers in the first place. When you brag about canning people, you're really bragging about how awful a judge of character and skill you are. HR, of course, knows these procedures by heart (it's their job function). But if you are a decent manager in any sense, the termination of an employee should be a reason for you to quite literally shed tears. At the first company I ever worked for, the founder did terminate someone once. After taking care of this unpleasant task, he pulled me outside, shaking and in tears. He explained that it was the most difficult thing he had ever done, and he nearly begged me to go out for beers with him at the end of the day so he could drown his sorrow without feeling like an alcoholic.
As I tell my four year old when he messes up, you apologize but you also DO something about it. Just saying you are sorry is a platitude. Did Britain's apology come along with some tangible action or is it just useless verbiage?
Fuck them, and their stupid apology. Dead in his forties. Who knows what Turing might have accomplished. If God does indeed burn some people in Hell, homophobes surely must make up a large part of that population. Burn. Burn in agony for eternity. Evil worthless pieces of shit.
Get over it, man. It's just dirt. You're not going to die. Maybe you'd get sick if you licked your dog's butthole. Other than that, if doggy dirt makes you queasy, why do you own one? Sorry about the complex your parents gave you.
You absolutely can test every single state and input set for every finite state machine (every computer that has ever existed).
The idea of using software to test other software is obviously a good one. However, it doesn't guarantee freedom from bugs. There could be bugs in your test software. To prevent that, you try to rigorously test the test software. But that might not catch everything, so you'll need to write test-test-tests to make sure the test-tests aren't giving you the mistaken impression that your tests are passing when in fact, they only pass because the test-test-tester had a bug when it tested the test-test.
If you ever sit down and actually try to do anything you just suggested, this will all start to become clearer to you.
Software does "wear out," it just happens differently. All software contains defects. Most of these defects are discovered early on and fixed. Some very rarely triggered defects always remain. Always. Suppose there is a defect which only manifests itself once every seven years, on average. If the software is only used for two years before being replaced by something else, chances are low that this defect will manifest. If the software is used for twelve years, chances are high the defect will manifest.
Use the software for a shorter period of time == fewer failures. Use it longer == more failures. This is not exactly analogous to a physical part wearing out, but there are similarities. Software can only "never wear out" if it's absolutely perfect, and that never happens.
How long the software should be supported for defects?
Forever. Since the software doesn't wear out, any defect was developed there from origin, it's a reasonable expectation that when someone asks for something, it is asking for something without defects, so covering for bugs forever is the only sensible way to respect the contract.
If you have a contract that actually makes you provide free bug fixes forever, then you signed a shitty contract. Software always has defects, this is simply a fact of life. Extremely rare defects, by definition, do not make themselves visible very often. The reason rare defects are not found during testing is precisely because of this. More comprehensive testing does not ensure zero defects -- it only ensures that whatever defects do remain happen exceedingly rarely, or under exceedingly improbable circumstances.
It is quite reasonable, as a client, to expect a software maker to provide bug fixes for software they provide. It is equally reasonable for the software maker to request ongoing payment (commonly called "maintenance") to continue providing these bug fixes indefinitely. Both parties to the contract are making a risk tradeoff when they sign. The client is risking that they will pay a certain amount of money for the software (including the initial development costs and any ongoing maintenance costs) and never actually recoup this expense by using the software. The software maker is risking that they will charge a certain amount for development and maintenance and some defect will arise that will cost more to fix than they are getting paid to fix it.
The two parties hopefully meet in the middle with a price and contract that seems optimal for both.
Just because it's software, doesn't mean you let your eyes glaze over and throw basic economics out the window. Or, for that matter, the basic observation that humans are fundamentally fallible and you can't expect people to magically do things perfectly just because they work in a technical field.
(Another factor in this is that it is actually not risk-free to fix bugs. Fixing bugs necessarily involves changing code. Changing code may introduce yet another defect, or expose a latent one.)
To use the old inflating balloon analogy, it's like ants on the surface of an inflating balloon. If two ants are close to each other (like Milky Way and Andromeda), they can walk fast enough to close the distance between them. If they are far from each other there is so much expanding balloon in between that they can't reach each other (analogy, the galaxies would have to go faster than light to reach each other)
What really drives me nuts is watching a plot-and-dialog-driven TV show or movie, with other people in the same room who insist on talking about tangents the entire time. First I move closer to the TV, and if that doesn't work well enough to let me follow what's going on, I leave. I'd rather give up and miss the whole thing than catch bits and pieces of it and not know what is going on or why. If it's broadcast TV or a DVR, I'll probably retreat to another room and complete it there. I've given up complaining, but when someone finds I'm in another room watching the same thing they are, ALONE, they can usually figure it out.
There seem to be two styles of watching TV. In your style (and mine), if you're bothering to watch at all it's because you're willing to actually pay attention to whatever you're watching. In the other style, watching TV is just a setting where people socialize. My wife and her entire family are that way, and I gave up trying to hush them a loooong time ago. They consider my style just as bizarre as I consider theirs, as if I'm anti-social because I want to pay attention. When I finally understood why they do what they do, I got over my frustration with it.
I'll posit this - either both CO2 and O2 are pollutants because they are excrement of life (either plant based or animal based), or *neither* CO2 or O2 are pollutants because they are the engines of life (either plant based or animal based). Making the case that one is a pollutant, while the other is not, is difficult.
It's not difficult at all, really. The CO2 released by animals and consumed by plants is just a metabolic fact of life. The CO2 released by massive coal-burning power plants and fossil-fueled vehicles is a choice that humanity has made. These are very, very different things and quite easy to categorize.
I think you are making the article's point for it. You seem so determined to believe that anthropogenic CO2 is not a problem that you have descended to the point of trying to redefine the meaning of the word "pollution" in order to maintain cognitive harmony. A waste product of an industrial process (power generation), which is emitted into the environment, is pollution. Plain and simple. It doesn't matter if it's harmful only at massive levels, or whether we are releasing harmful quantities of it. A few atoms of arsenic aren't harmful either, but I doubt you'd try to argue that releasing small quantities of arsenic is not pollution.
Slashdot Mirror
That goes without saying. Your job isn't to not do that yourself, but to prevent the sales droids from doing it. Basically, a sales engineer is what a sales person should be in the first place. That said, there are plenty of "sales engineers" who aren't.
No. A sales engineer is an engineer with unusually good people skills, who comes along with business people on sales trips and provides technical backup, while managing not to commit any of the classical faux pas which are typical of most other engineers (such as calling the customer an idiot when they are bein an idiot).
To be fair, you could create a StringNum class that's derived from String, but handles numbers encoded as ASCII strings. I'd obviously overload the operators to do the calculations, and cast to and from a string, but if I add a String to a StringNum, which operator will it use? Will it cast the String to a StringNum and do the StringNum add, or will it cast the StringNum to a String and do an append?
The error is this example was in deriving StringNum from String. This is a classic case of the "has-a" vs "is-a" question. A StringNum is not a string, because it fails the substitution principle (for instance, you can assign "Cat" to a String, but assigning it to a StringNum is nonsensical). Therefore, StringNum must not derive from String, and there will be no ambiguity
You have no way of knowing that without seeing the code.
That goes for all code, not just overloaded operators. I could write a function called ConcatenateTwoStrings() which actually converts them to floats and adds them, but I would be guilty of bad name choice. You do not blame that on the language do you?
Obviously, you've never worked on a team of programmers with different backgrounds.
If "team of programmers with different backgrounds" means "people with illogical thought processes," then no, I haven't, and I hope never to.
Add the string "0.5" to the string "1.0." with the '+' operator. Is the result "1.5" or "1.00.5" ?
The result is the string "1.0.0.5". No sane person would expect otherwise, and no sane person would use a language where it wasn't.
While it is true that an idiot can overload an operator to do something non-intuitive, this is not limited to operators. A programmer could give a function a non-intuitive (or outright misleading) name as well.
Do you hold the C language accountable when somebody writes a function called MultiplyTwoIntegers() which actually subtracts them?
And ultimately, what is wrong with waste?
It's a thermodynamics issue. Order turning to disorder. The rate at which we can recover thermodynamic order is limited by the power of sunlight. We should not contribute to entropy more than is necessary, because we'll have to wait to recover order. For instance it takes millions of years to replenish fossil fuel stores.
Replying to undo moderation. I wanted Funny, not Flamebait.
Instead of suing, why not crowdsource people to begin the task of transcribing the movies and just give it to Netflix? That way, you can even do it on a per-demand basis so that the most popular movies are transcribed first. It's a bummer that so many of these movies don't have CC already, but that's the way it is, and it doesn't seem productive to get belligerent about it. Just get some people together and fix the problem instead of crying to the man, resulting possibly in the removal of movies to the detriment of everyone.
I'd be willing to do a movie a week, for free. Why not, I watch movies anyway.
No. Those things are heuristics.
Oh yes, it is! Once you introduced contours detection or image partitioning, you are have decision-making embedded in the process -- that's out of filtering and into AI territory.
So any computer program that has an if-statement in it, is artificial intelligence. Ok, glad we got that cleared up.
If non-ionizing, it's completely harmless.
So, you'd happily climb into an industrial microwave and turn it on. Right?
If you fire people often enough that you have codified a rote procedure for it, then you are a fucking shitty manager. Apparently, you don't have any skill hiring decent workers in the first place. When you brag about canning people, you're really bragging about how awful a judge of character and skill you are. HR, of course, knows these procedures by heart (it's their job function). But if you are a decent manager in any sense, the termination of an employee should be a reason for you to quite literally shed tears. At the first company I ever worked for, the founder did terminate someone once. After taking care of this unpleasant task, he pulled me outside, shaking and in tears. He explained that it was the most difficult thing he had ever done, and he nearly begged me to go out for beers with him at the end of the day so he could drown his sorrow without feeling like an alcoholic.
Yeah. It's as if people vote for people who are... representative... of themselves. Clearly a crock.
As I tell my four year old when he messes up, you apologize but you also DO something about it. Just saying you are sorry is a platitude. Did Britain's apology come along with some tangible action or is it just useless verbiage?
Fuck them, and their stupid apology. Dead in his forties. Who knows what Turing might have accomplished. If God does indeed burn some people in Hell, homophobes surely must make up a large part of that population. Burn. Burn in agony for eternity. Evil worthless pieces of shit.
Get over it, man. It's just dirt. You're not going to die. Maybe you'd get sick if you licked your dog's butthole. Other than that, if doggy dirt makes you queasy, why do you own one? Sorry about the complex your parents gave you.
You can "not accept" it if you want, but it doesn't change anything.
You absolutely can test every single state and input set for every finite state machine (every computer that has ever existed).
The idea of using software to test other software is obviously a good one. However, it doesn't guarantee freedom from bugs. There could be bugs in your test software. To prevent that, you try to rigorously test the test software. But that might not catch everything, so you'll need to write test-test-tests to make sure the test-tests aren't giving you the mistaken impression that your tests are passing when in fact, they only pass because the test-test-tester had a bug when it tested the test-test.
If you ever sit down and actually try to do anything you just suggested, this will all start to become clearer to you.
Software does "wear out," it just happens differently. All software contains defects. Most of these defects are discovered early on and fixed. Some very rarely triggered defects always remain. Always. Suppose there is a defect which only manifests itself once every seven years, on average. If the software is only used for two years before being replaced by something else, chances are low that this defect will manifest. If the software is used for twelve years, chances are high the defect will manifest.
Use the software for a shorter period of time == fewer failures. Use it longer == more failures. This is not exactly analogous to a physical part wearing out, but there are similarities. Software can only "never wear out" if it's absolutely perfect, and that never happens.
How long the software should be supported for defects? Forever. Since the software doesn't wear out, any defect was developed there from origin, it's a reasonable expectation that when someone asks for something, it is asking for something without defects, so covering for bugs forever is the only sensible way to respect the contract.
If you have a contract that actually makes you provide free bug fixes forever, then you signed a shitty contract. Software always has defects, this is simply a fact of life. Extremely rare defects, by definition, do not make themselves visible very often. The reason rare defects are not found during testing is precisely because of this. More comprehensive testing does not ensure zero defects -- it only ensures that whatever defects do remain happen exceedingly rarely, or under exceedingly improbable circumstances.
It is quite reasonable, as a client, to expect a software maker to provide bug fixes for software they provide. It is equally reasonable for the software maker to request ongoing payment (commonly called "maintenance") to continue providing these bug fixes indefinitely. Both parties to the contract are making a risk tradeoff when they sign. The client is risking that they will pay a certain amount of money for the software (including the initial development costs and any ongoing maintenance costs) and never actually recoup this expense by using the software. The software maker is risking that they will charge a certain amount for development and maintenance and some defect will arise that will cost more to fix than they are getting paid to fix it.
The two parties hopefully meet in the middle with a price and contract that seems optimal for both.
Just because it's software, doesn't mean you let your eyes glaze over and throw basic economics out the window. Or, for that matter, the basic observation that humans are fundamentally fallible and you can't expect people to magically do things perfectly just because they work in a technical field.
(Another factor in this is that it is actually not risk-free to fix bugs. Fixing bugs necessarily involves changing code. Changing code may introduce yet another defect, or expose a latent one.)
To use the old inflating balloon analogy, it's like ants on the surface of an inflating balloon. If two ants are close to each other (like Milky Way and Andromeda), they can walk fast enough to close the distance between them. If they are far from each other there is so much expanding balloon in between that they can't reach each other (analogy, the galaxies would have to go faster than light to reach each other)
What really drives me nuts is watching a plot-and-dialog-driven TV show or movie, with other people in the same room who insist on talking about tangents the entire time. First I move closer to the TV, and if that doesn't work well enough to let me follow what's going on, I leave. I'd rather give up and miss the whole thing than catch bits and pieces of it and not know what is going on or why. If it's broadcast TV or a DVR, I'll probably retreat to another room and complete it there. I've given up complaining, but when someone finds I'm in another room watching the same thing they are, ALONE, they can usually figure it out.
There seem to be two styles of watching TV. In your style (and mine), if you're bothering to watch at all it's because you're willing to actually pay attention to whatever you're watching. In the other style, watching TV is just a setting where people socialize. My wife and her entire family are that way, and I gave up trying to hush them a loooong time ago. They consider my style just as bizarre as I consider theirs, as if I'm anti-social because I want to pay attention. When I finally understood why they do what they do, I got over my frustration with it.
Why would a spark be dangerous? The atmosphere, being 100% oxygen, contains nothing combustible.
I'll posit this - either both CO2 and O2 are pollutants because they are excrement of life (either plant based or animal based), or *neither* CO2 or O2 are pollutants because they are the engines of life (either plant based or animal based). Making the case that one is a pollutant, while the other is not, is difficult.
It's not difficult at all, really. The CO2 released by animals and consumed by plants is just a metabolic fact of life. The CO2 released by massive coal-burning power plants and fossil-fueled vehicles is a choice that humanity has made. These are very, very different things and quite easy to categorize.
I think you are making the article's point for it. You seem so determined to believe that anthropogenic CO2 is not a problem that you have descended to the point of trying to redefine the meaning of the word "pollution" in order to maintain cognitive harmony. A waste product of an industrial process (power generation), which is emitted into the environment, is pollution. Plain and simple. It doesn't matter if it's harmful only at massive levels, or whether we are releasing harmful quantities of it. A few atoms of arsenic aren't harmful either, but I doubt you'd try to argue that releasing small quantities of arsenic is not pollution.