Wouldn't it look bad if a Microsoft employee came to your company to demo a new product, and they whipped-out their Apple Macbook to give the presentation?
Wouldn't it look bad if a VP dropped in on your internal product demo and asked "So how does this compare to that Apple shit that we're trying to compete with" and you have to say "I have no idea since I'm not allowed to buy a fucking Mac to make the comparison?"
If you want to be egalitarian then you should separate the child from the parents at the moment of birth, lest the child accidentally experience a different upbringing than someone else did. The idea is complete lunacy. If such a system was ever implemented, I would arrange for my house and possessions to go up in flames upon the moment of my death.
Regardless of how much the standards COST (let's for the sake of argument say that they are FREE), do you seriously think any fallible human being is able to properly comply with tens or hundreds of thousands of pages of regulations? What's the point in buying all that junk, you're just going to fuck up on something anyway.
In adversarial game theory, to "solve" a game means that you've shown that the first player can always win (provided he makes the right moves), or whether it's just a tie, or even that the first player will always lose (if the opponent makes the right moves). Does anybody know whether the white player in chess can ALWAYS win, so long as he makes no mistakes? No, nobody knows that. The game's not solved.
At this point, one wonders why one would waste one's time with such contests. If the only reason I feel assured that my opponent is not cheating, is because he has been prevented from doing so, why should I play? Why would I want to match wits with somebody who obviously has no interest in participating in an actual competition? You can lock him in a room and force him to play fair, but why?
Yeah, it's SO confusing. I mean, I'm a father, a brother, and a son! All at the same freaking time! And on top of that, I'm pclminion! I mean who the hell can get their head around that? He's a father... AND a brother? And the father is pclminion, and the brother is pclminion, and the son is pclminion? MY GOD I CANNOT GRASP THIS
I should append to that, that my wife actually runs a profitable business from our home and somehow manages to also handle the kids, so maybe she really is taking on more than I do. I'd still rather trade places than not, though.
Another thing the stay-at-home spouse sometimes fail to understand is that although staying with the kids is tiring, it also returns enormous rewards that most salary workers simply don't get from doing their jobs. I've had to stay home and do the kid thing, and although I'm pretty wiped out by the end of the day, I would do that instead of working in an office in a fucking instant. They have to deal with the kids all day, sure. Then again, they get to be with the kids all day! I get to be with... my boss. Speaking of bosses, does the caretaker have a boss? Can they be fired from their job if they make a mistake? If they wake up twenty minutes late does everyone lose the house?
Yeah, I get to sit on my butt eight hours a day. Like that's a good thing! And whenever I take vacation I always end up depressed at the end, wondering why the hell I'm wasting away half my waking life sitting in an office.
Seems like a common trap that young parents fall into, a sort of competition about who's life is harder or sucks more. If you're having that sort of debate you may want to step back and look at the big picture.
PS: I once grumbled to my wife that her whole life was just a continuous vacation. She didn't get it... And neither did I after that.
Well I was thinking an anchor with a length of rope
Exactly how big of a balloon are you planning on having, because it will need to lift the weight of thousands of feet of rope. Unless you thought all that rope just magically floats there in the sky.
a master coder's "obvious" code can be completely obfuscated to a novice programmer
Truly masterful code is never obfuscated. In fact, it looks a lot like novice code, pseudocode even. It's an amazing coming together of all the right ideas, all the right interfaces, to make code that reads exactly like what it does. Masterful code makes you wonder how the hell the programmer made it look so incredibly easy.
You may have heard of a joke about "write only code," commonly applied to perl and some other languages. Masterful code is more like "read only code." It means exactly what it says, it looks elegant and simple (and in fact it is), HOWEVER, a novice isn't capable of writing it. If a novice attempted to do the same thing as the master, it might eventually work but it'll be a jumbled mess. The right ideas didn't pop into their thought processes in the right order, at the right times.
Of course, not all code in the world has to meet the criteria for "masterful" status (nor is there any official such thing). There's tons of functional, important code which is difficult to comprehend. But to me, if I look at a piece of code and can't understand it, I usually blame the code, not myself.
This is really, really important for new programmers to understand. If you go out there and grab the source to some massively popular open source project, chances are you're going to find a complete mess. Don't make the mistake of thinking it's because you're never going to be a good programmer -- the code might look incomprehensible because it IS incomprehensible. You don't have enough experience yet to really tell the difference!
Yes, anyone can read the code and figure out what it does, but without any indication as to why, future maintainers are likely to break it.
True, but comments aren't the only way to improve maintainability. If code can't be safely modified without comprehending a mountain of side effects, the real problem is coupling, not a lack of documentation. Good designs are easy to change, and bad ones are not. Just because an over-complicated system is well-documented doesn't make it easily maintainable.
Ideally, the architecture itself provides most of the safety. On top of that, a rich set of unit tests provide confidence when making changes. Unit tests also serve as a kind of documentation in themselves, as they demonstrate use cases of specific modules and help to define what is and isn't expected to be valid. If you find it difficult to write meaningful unit tests at all, this itself is indicating deficiencies in design.
Basic code comments are a matter of politeness to whoever comes next. Not putting in some reasonable comments is like giving that person a big fat finger. What other documentation you do have, must be accurate and relevant. I'm by no means discouraging comprehensive documentation, just pointing out that long-term maintainable software depends on a lot more than that.
I used to take this to extremes. I did a series of batches I called "human senses only" where I measured everything with no instruments. I'd throw grain into the pail until it looked "good 'nuff", I'd mash-in with more and more water until it looked "about right," hell I even gauged strike temperature by feel -- I use a beer keg as a HLT and used a combination of putting my hand momentarily against the vessel and looking at the bubbles of dissolved gas as the temp came up. I boiled for what felt like "about an hour" and added hops at what seemed like the right times.
Believe me, you REALLY get to know your rig this way, and it's incredibly fun. Just stay sober while doing it, because it distorts your sense of time and space! And yes, as you'd expect, the most difficult part is getting the strike temperature right. If you fuck that up you can ruin the batch right from the beginning.
Having to stop drinking beer was like a friend dying:-(
If you think it shouldn't be allowed, fair enough, just remember what the alternative is.
How about a compromise? If you are threatened by a weapon, warn that you will go directly to lethal force if necessary. If no weapon is present and you need to force compliance, due it only through direct physical contact (i.e. hand-to-hand combat). Nothing in between is allowed. Less-lethal weapons which can be easily deployed from a distance while inside an armored vehicle are simply too easy to abuse.
The electrons in wire move toward the positive terminal at a rate measured in millimeters per minute. Their motion has no practical relevance to the behavior of electric circuits.
No, this is a basic half-life calculation. Te explosion is like the radioactive decay of an atom. Suc things are measured in terms of rate per particle-second.
1000 cans per day is an imaginary dose, because no human could actually consume that. And nowhere have I implied that the effect of Coke is precisely like this, I am pointing out that for risk factors which have a constant risk per unit time, there is a proportional relationship between amount consumed and overall risk. I'm talking about math, okay?
Why make "number two" a stressful event by turning it into a race? There aren't many feelings worse than not feeling "quite finished" with the act. I've noticed people seem to fall into two categories on this, the quick and the leisurely. I have no idea if the people in the "quick" camp actually feel "finished" after only two minutes, but I know for sure that I don't.
Wow, you've noticed it isn't linear except at small doses. Pat yourself on the back. The point is, at low doses it DOES behave linearly. Oddly enough, we're concerned about what happens at low doses, since we're more likely to be exposed at low doses than high doses.
But I'm not assuming all things are the same - I'm saying that assuming 1/1000th of a dose means 1/1000th of the probability, given that 1000/1000th (or 1) causes cancer is a stupid argument.
The human body doesn't work like that.
Consider a liquid where each milliliter of liquid has a 1% chance of exploding per day. In other words, a 99% chance of not exploding per day. If you have 2 ml of liquid, it's a 99%*99% = 98.01% chance of safety per day, in other words a 2% chance of death. Tada, a doubling of dose doubles your chance of death, QED. It has to do with how the SUBSTANCE works, not how the human body works.
Your argument would make sense, if all things in the world were exactly the same. But "assuming everything is like everything else" is a somewhat weak opening argument. Has it occurred to you that the mechanism behind cancer and the mechanism behind drowning might, I dunno, have some differences?
You have an accounting and marketing budget but you use Paypal instead of a merchant account? So what you're saying is, PayPal might be bad but at least it's better than direct access to the credit network? I seriously do not get it.
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Wouldn't it look bad if a Microsoft employee came to your company to demo a new product, and they whipped-out their Apple Macbook to give the presentation?
Wouldn't it look bad if a VP dropped in on your internal product demo and asked "So how does this compare to that Apple shit that we're trying to compete with" and you have to say "I have no idea since I'm not allowed to buy a fucking Mac to make the comparison?"
If you want to be egalitarian then you should separate the child from the parents at the moment of birth, lest the child accidentally experience a different upbringing than someone else did. The idea is complete lunacy. If such a system was ever implemented, I would arrange for my house and possessions to go up in flames upon the moment of my death.
Regardless of how much the standards COST (let's for the sake of argument say that they are FREE), do you seriously think any fallible human being is able to properly comply with tens or hundreds of thousands of pages of regulations? What's the point in buying all that junk, you're just going to fuck up on something anyway.
In adversarial game theory, to "solve" a game means that you've shown that the first player can always win (provided he makes the right moves), or whether it's just a tie, or even that the first player will always lose (if the opponent makes the right moves). Does anybody know whether the white player in chess can ALWAYS win, so long as he makes no mistakes? No, nobody knows that. The game's not solved.
At this point, one wonders why one would waste one's time with such contests. If the only reason I feel assured that my opponent is not cheating, is because he has been prevented from doing so, why should I play? Why would I want to match wits with somebody who obviously has no interest in participating in an actual competition? You can lock him in a room and force him to play fair, but why?
Yeah, it's SO confusing. I mean, I'm a father, a brother, and a son! All at the same freaking time! And on top of that, I'm pclminion! I mean who the hell can get their head around that? He's a father... AND a brother? And the father is pclminion, and the brother is pclminion, and the son is pclminion? MY GOD I CANNOT GRASP THIS
I should append to that, that my wife actually runs a profitable business from our home and somehow manages to also handle the kids, so maybe she really is taking on more than I do. I'd still rather trade places than not, though.
Another thing the stay-at-home spouse sometimes fail to understand is that although staying with the kids is tiring, it also returns enormous rewards that most salary workers simply don't get from doing their jobs. I've had to stay home and do the kid thing, and although I'm pretty wiped out by the end of the day, I would do that instead of working in an office in a fucking instant. They have to deal with the kids all day, sure. Then again, they get to be with the kids all day! I get to be with... my boss. Speaking of bosses, does the caretaker have a boss? Can they be fired from their job if they make a mistake? If they wake up twenty minutes late does everyone lose the house?
Yeah, I get to sit on my butt eight hours a day. Like that's a good thing! And whenever I take vacation I always end up depressed at the end, wondering why the hell I'm wasting away half my waking life sitting in an office.
Seems like a common trap that young parents fall into, a sort of competition about who's life is harder or sucks more. If you're having that sort of debate you may want to step back and look at the big picture.
PS: I once grumbled to my wife that her whole life was just a continuous vacation. She didn't get it... And neither did I after that.
This plan seems more feasible and cheaper by the minute!
Well I was thinking an anchor with a length of rope
Exactly how big of a balloon are you planning on having, because it will need to lift the weight of thousands of feet of rope. Unless you thought all that rope just magically floats there in the sky.
A good way to tell if somebody's code looks like line noise is to ask them if they have a Ph.D.
X is more difficult than the kernel, and probably more important too.
You gotta understand that with X, they have to be extremely careful what they accept, or they might end up modernizing the system. Nobody wants that.
a master coder's "obvious" code can be completely obfuscated to a novice programmer
Truly masterful code is never obfuscated. In fact, it looks a lot like novice code, pseudocode even. It's an amazing coming together of all the right ideas, all the right interfaces, to make code that reads exactly like what it does. Masterful code makes you wonder how the hell the programmer made it look so incredibly easy.
You may have heard of a joke about "write only code," commonly applied to perl and some other languages. Masterful code is more like "read only code." It means exactly what it says, it looks elegant and simple (and in fact it is), HOWEVER, a novice isn't capable of writing it. If a novice attempted to do the same thing as the master, it might eventually work but it'll be a jumbled mess. The right ideas didn't pop into their thought processes in the right order, at the right times.
Of course, not all code in the world has to meet the criteria for "masterful" status (nor is there any official such thing). There's tons of functional, important code which is difficult to comprehend. But to me, if I look at a piece of code and can't understand it, I usually blame the code, not myself.
This is really, really important for new programmers to understand. If you go out there and grab the source to some massively popular open source project, chances are you're going to find a complete mess. Don't make the mistake of thinking it's because you're never going to be a good programmer -- the code might look incomprehensible because it IS incomprehensible. You don't have enough experience yet to really tell the difference!
Yes, anyone can read the code and figure out what it does, but without any indication as to why, future maintainers are likely to break it.
True, but comments aren't the only way to improve maintainability. If code can't be safely modified without comprehending a mountain of side effects, the real problem is coupling, not a lack of documentation. Good designs are easy to change, and bad ones are not. Just because an over-complicated system is well-documented doesn't make it easily maintainable.
Ideally, the architecture itself provides most of the safety. On top of that, a rich set of unit tests provide confidence when making changes. Unit tests also serve as a kind of documentation in themselves, as they demonstrate use cases of specific modules and help to define what is and isn't expected to be valid. If you find it difficult to write meaningful unit tests at all, this itself is indicating deficiencies in design.
Basic code comments are a matter of politeness to whoever comes next. Not putting in some reasonable comments is like giving that person a big fat finger. What other documentation you do have, must be accurate and relevant. I'm by no means discouraging comprehensive documentation, just pointing out that long-term maintainable software depends on a lot more than that.
I used to take this to extremes. I did a series of batches I called "human senses only" where I measured everything with no instruments. I'd throw grain into the pail until it looked "good 'nuff", I'd mash-in with more and more water until it looked "about right," hell I even gauged strike temperature by feel -- I use a beer keg as a HLT and used a combination of putting my hand momentarily against the vessel and looking at the bubbles of dissolved gas as the temp came up. I boiled for what felt like "about an hour" and added hops at what seemed like the right times.
Believe me, you REALLY get to know your rig this way, and it's incredibly fun. Just stay sober while doing it, because it distorts your sense of time and space! And yes, as you'd expect, the most difficult part is getting the strike temperature right. If you fuck that up you can ruin the batch right from the beginning.
Having to stop drinking beer was like a friend dying :-(
If you think it shouldn't be allowed, fair enough, just remember what the alternative is.
How about a compromise? If you are threatened by a weapon, warn that you will go directly to lethal force if necessary. If no weapon is present and you need to force compliance, due it only through direct physical contact (i.e. hand-to-hand combat). Nothing in between is allowed. Less-lethal weapons which can be easily deployed from a distance while inside an armored vehicle are simply too easy to abuse.
The electrons in wire move toward the positive terminal at a rate measured in millimeters per minute. Their motion has no practical relevance to the behavior of electric circuits.
No, this is a basic half-life calculation. Te explosion is like the radioactive decay of an atom. Suc things are measured in terms of rate per particle-second.
1000 cans per day is an imaginary dose, because no human could actually consume that. And nowhere have I implied that the effect of Coke is precisely like this, I am pointing out that for risk factors which have a constant risk per unit time, there is a proportional relationship between amount consumed and overall risk. I'm talking about math, okay?
Why make "number two" a stressful event by turning it into a race? There aren't many feelings worse than not feeling "quite finished" with the act. I've noticed people seem to fall into two categories on this, the quick and the leisurely. I have no idea if the people in the "quick" camp actually feel "finished" after only two minutes, but I know for sure that I don't.
Strange, but interesting, topic.
Wow, you've noticed it isn't linear except at small doses. Pat yourself on the back. The point is, at low doses it DOES behave linearly. Oddly enough, we're concerned about what happens at low doses, since we're more likely to be exposed at low doses than high doses.
But I'm not assuming all things are the same - I'm saying that assuming 1/1000th of a dose means 1/1000th of the probability, given that 1000/1000th (or 1) causes cancer is a stupid argument. The human body doesn't work like that.
Consider a liquid where each milliliter of liquid has a 1% chance of exploding per day. In other words, a 99% chance of not exploding per day. If you have 2 ml of liquid, it's a 99%*99% = 98.01% chance of safety per day, in other words a 2% chance of death. Tada, a doubling of dose doubles your chance of death, QED. It has to do with how the SUBSTANCE works, not how the human body works.
Your argument would make sense, if all things in the world were exactly the same. But "assuming everything is like everything else" is a somewhat weak opening argument. Has it occurred to you that the mechanism behind cancer and the mechanism behind drowning might, I dunno, have some differences?
Bacteria don't cause colds.
You have an accounting and marketing budget but you use Paypal instead of a merchant account? So what you're saying is, PayPal might be bad but at least it's better than direct access to the credit network? I seriously do not get it.