I agree with parent, and have you considered that developers whose code quality is affected by seating arrangements relative to other developers might not be...um, the best developers?
That's pretty dumb. Of course having face-to-face exposure to other people will have definite effects on productivity, some of them positive, some negative. Being in close proximity to other people, being able to hear them sighing, muttering, seeing the expressions on their faces, this is going to have some kind of impact. We're geeks, not fucking aliens.
using 3.14159 is just silly because you can only be sure of 3 digits anyway
No. We are absolutely certain of the first several BILLION digits of pi. You are only certain about three digits of the measurement. Deliberately dropping digits of a known quantity is idiotic. What you REPORT, at the end of whatever calculation you have performed, should be truncated to the proper number of digits (in this case, three), but you NEVER deliberately introduce error into a value just because it is more precise than some other value. And that's exactly what you are doing by truncating pi -- introducing error.
I'd like to see an "unreasonable burden" approach to fighting certain EULAs. Anything beyond, let's say, two pages of 12 point text should fall into this category. Thirty pages of dense legalese inside an installer window will never be read by any consumer, and should be seen as negotiating in bad faith.
If you don't understand an agreement, don't enter into the agreement. If you're not absolutely sure whether clause 14.1(a) requires you to give daily blood samples, why on earth would you agree to it?
What product could be so important to you that you're willing to agree to a thirty page EULA that you don't even understand? Just don't use the product.
The $100 bill is the most common unit of US currency in foreign transactions. The vast majority of $100 banknotes in the world are not held by Americans.
Did you seriously just post a link to a zip file containing a.exe and suggest that people copy this program into their system32 directory? Look at the ground -- I think your brain may have fallen out.
The very annoying thing is that svchost.exe doesn't do anything of its own, really, except run other programs.
Uh, kind of like/sbin/init on UNIX systems? It may not "do anything" by itself, but it only happens to be one of the most important processes on the system...
Shame that XP never thought you would need a way to know exactly what that svchost.exe instance was actually doing.
And that's really the major difference between svchost.exe and/sbin/init. init launches standalone instances -- svchost.exe loads service DLLs and runs them in its own context. However, there are ways to see what's going on. Anybody who does anything serious with Windows should have a copy of Process Explorer. It will show you what is going on.
I've definitely got some stuff gathering dust in places in my house. The thing is, every damn time I dump or recycle an item, it turns out I need it shortly thereafter. It's never the stuff that I'm keeping. Only the stuff that I get rid of. Grrr.
A corollary to this: the best way to avoid ever breaking something is to have a spare.
If you are not convinced, I suppose you can always bring the case to court and force disclosure and investigation. But experience up to now seems to indicate that companies who are violating the terms of the GPL usually change their ways before things get that far.
So, with no evidence other than some abstract mathematical metric, you're going to make me invest tens of thousands of dollars to prove to you that I haven't violated the GPL in some way? Sounds an awful lot like "guilty until you can prove yourself innocent" to me. By the way, I'll be sending you a bill for wasting my time after proving myself to your silly satisfaction.
Might be a sucky life for the cows but at least its a life
By this logic, if we had the ability to create life, but only in a mutated, agonizing form, we should do it, because its better than non-existence. That's crazy talk.
You should not attribute human emotions, feelings, and thoughts to other creatures.
I don't. I have no idea what a cow thinks or feels. However, what I feel is important to me, and irrational or not, the idea of feeding cows a food which is alien to them, causing all sorts of damage to their internal organs, just because it leads to something called "marbling" which I don't give a crap about anyway, is not sufficient justification. Seeing it happen makes ME feel bad.
If processor manufacturers used different manufacturing lines for each version of a CPU that is actually sold, the prices would be ten times higher. What actually happens is each chip is tested, and depending what quality class it ends up falling into, parts of the chip that aren't up to snuff are disabled.
Wow, those assholes, trying to make it as cheap as possible to manufacture CPUs while still providing low-end, low-cost versions to those of us who can't afford to subsidize the $3 billion they spent on the plant to make the damn things.
When I take two steps to the right, all of a sudden all I see are AC posts modded down to -1. It appears the Slashdot moderation system is angle-dependent! I'm sure to win the Nobel for this.
I disagree. Computer science has never really been about what happens in the real world. What happens in the real world is engineering. And before you scoff that most code you've ever seen is terribly engineered, remember that these people didn't study engineering at all -- they studied computer science. The problem is that people keep trying to glob CS and software engineering into a single idea, when it's not. CS is no more engineering than organic chemistry is chemical engineering. The goals, practices, daily ways of thinking are not the same.
If I work with CS graduates who can't engineer their way out of a wet sack, I'm not very surprised, because engineering wasn't what they actually studied. And it's not their fault either, because the distinction is never explained in the first place. Students are prepared and told that to be a programmer, they need to study CS. I think CS is something you should study if you want to be a computer scientist. If you want to develop real world code, you need to be on an engineering track.
It is unfortunate that you got the impression that the reason you learned Pascal was to know Pascal. You might have enjoyed the forest, had you not been focusing on the trees.
If you're not looking at the code, how are you actually grading?
The same way code is checked in industry: unit testing. Unfortunately, this leads to a binary "pass/no pass" kind of grading, but at least it bears some resemblance to industry.
How can you help individual students improve their coding styles?
I can't believe I'm saying this, but computer science isn't the place to learn coding practice. Good coding style and architecture is an engineering problem, and should be taught as an engineering discipline. Not to mention, most of the instructors in CS aren't very good at it themselves, and wouldn't teach anything particularly helpful anyway.
While modularity is obviously a goal, the cool thingies we play with as developers had to be created by somebody. Where do you think all this technology around you comes from? Aliens?
Yes, we shouldn't ever focus on anything like "local culture" or find things to be proud of as residents of a certain place, or promote anything that isn't monotonous, requisite, fiscally appropriate. We ought to be freaking out and struggling to keep our heads above water at all times. There's no time to be human beings, we have drudgery to deal with!
Slashdot Mirror
I agree with parent, and have you considered that developers whose code quality is affected by seating arrangements relative to other developers might not be...um, the best developers?
That's pretty dumb. Of course having face-to-face exposure to other people will have definite effects on productivity, some of them positive, some negative. Being in close proximity to other people, being able to hear them sighing, muttering, seeing the expressions on their faces, this is going to have some kind of impact. We're geeks, not fucking aliens.
using 3.14159 is just silly because you can only be sure of 3 digits anyway
No. We are absolutely certain of the first several BILLION digits of pi. You are only certain about three digits of the measurement. Deliberately dropping digits of a known quantity is idiotic. What you REPORT, at the end of whatever calculation you have performed, should be truncated to the proper number of digits (in this case, three), but you NEVER deliberately introduce error into a value just because it is more precise than some other value. And that's exactly what you are doing by truncating pi -- introducing error.
I'd like to see an "unreasonable burden" approach to fighting certain EULAs. Anything beyond, let's say, two pages of 12 point text should fall into this category. Thirty pages of dense legalese inside an installer window will never be read by any consumer, and should be seen as negotiating in bad faith.
If you don't understand an agreement, don't enter into the agreement. If you're not absolutely sure whether clause 14.1(a) requires you to give daily blood samples, why on earth would you agree to it?
What product could be so important to you that you're willing to agree to a thirty page EULA that you don't even understand? Just don't use the product.
How is determining a person's location equivalent to vigilantism?
Go for it. Just don't associate it with my name. How fucking hard is that?
The $100 bill is the most common unit of US currency in foreign transactions. The vast majority of $100 banknotes in the world are not held by Americans.
Did you seriously just post a link to a zip file containing a .exe and suggest that people copy this program into their system32 directory? Look at the ground -- I think your brain may have fallen out.
The very annoying thing is that svchost.exe doesn't do anything of its own, really, except run other programs.
Uh, kind of like /sbin/init on UNIX systems? It may not "do anything" by itself, but it only happens to be one of the most important processes on the system...
Shame that XP never thought you would need a way to know exactly what that svchost.exe instance was actually doing.
And that's really the major difference between svchost.exe and /sbin/init. init launches standalone instances -- svchost.exe loads service DLLs and runs them in its own context. However, there are ways to see what's going on. Anybody who does anything serious with Windows should have a copy of Process Explorer. It will show you what is going on.
Wow. You've just totally rocked my world with that deep insight. Turns out I wasn't a DSP expert after all.
What you're describing sounds like a video hardware problem, not a software issue. Did you bother filing a bug report to find out?
Enforcement? What do you mean? Get infected, go to jail?
I've definitely got some stuff gathering dust in places in my house. The thing is, every damn time I dump or recycle an item, it turns out I need it shortly thereafter. It's never the stuff that I'm keeping. Only the stuff that I get rid of. Grrr.
A corollary to this: the best way to avoid ever breaking something is to have a spare.
If you are not convinced, I suppose you can always bring the case to court and force disclosure and investigation. But experience up to now seems to indicate that companies who are violating the terms of the GPL usually change their ways before things get that far.
So, with no evidence other than some abstract mathematical metric, you're going to make me invest tens of thousands of dollars to prove to you that I haven't violated the GPL in some way? Sounds an awful lot like "guilty until you can prove yourself innocent" to me. By the way, I'll be sending you a bill for wasting my time after proving myself to your silly satisfaction.
Might be a sucky life for the cows but at least its a life
By this logic, if we had the ability to create life, but only in a mutated, agonizing form, we should do it, because its better than non-existence. That's crazy talk.
You should not attribute human emotions, feelings, and thoughts to other creatures.
I don't. I have no idea what a cow thinks or feels. However, what I feel is important to me, and irrational or not, the idea of feeding cows a food which is alien to them, causing all sorts of damage to their internal organs, just because it leads to something called "marbling" which I don't give a crap about anyway, is not sufficient justification. Seeing it happen makes ME feel bad.
WTF? I've done this before. Why are the double quotes not quoting the $F?
If processor manufacturers used different manufacturing lines for each version of a CPU that is actually sold, the prices would be ten times higher. What actually happens is each chip is tested, and depending what quality class it ends up falling into, parts of the chip that aren't up to snuff are disabled.
Wow, those assholes, trying to make it as cheap as possible to manufacture CPUs while still providing low-end, low-cost versions to those of us who can't afford to subsidize the $3 billion they spent on the plant to make the damn things.
xargs? Eww.
for F in `tar tf file.tar`; do rm "$F"; done
When I take two steps to the right, all of a sudden all I see are AC posts modded down to -1. It appears the Slashdot moderation system is angle-dependent! I'm sure to win the Nobel for this.
I must work with a very different sort of engineer than you.
I disagree. Computer science has never really been about what happens in the real world. What happens in the real world is engineering. And before you scoff that most code you've ever seen is terribly engineered, remember that these people didn't study engineering at all -- they studied computer science. The problem is that people keep trying to glob CS and software engineering into a single idea, when it's not. CS is no more engineering than organic chemistry is chemical engineering. The goals, practices, daily ways of thinking are not the same.
If I work with CS graduates who can't engineer their way out of a wet sack, I'm not very surprised, because engineering wasn't what they actually studied. And it's not their fault either, because the distinction is never explained in the first place. Students are prepared and told that to be a programmer, they need to study CS. I think CS is something you should study if you want to be a computer scientist. If you want to develop real world code, you need to be on an engineering track.
It is unfortunate that you got the impression that the reason you learned Pascal was to know Pascal. You might have enjoyed the forest, had you not been focusing on the trees.
If you're not looking at the code, how are you actually grading?
The same way code is checked in industry: unit testing. Unfortunately, this leads to a binary "pass/no pass" kind of grading, but at least it bears some resemblance to industry.
How can you help individual students improve their coding styles?
I can't believe I'm saying this, but computer science isn't the place to learn coding practice. Good coding style and architecture is an engineering problem, and should be taught as an engineering discipline. Not to mention, most of the instructors in CS aren't very good at it themselves, and wouldn't teach anything particularly helpful anyway.
While modularity is obviously a goal, the cool thingies we play with as developers had to be created by somebody. Where do you think all this technology around you comes from? Aliens?
Yes, we shouldn't ever focus on anything like "local culture" or find things to be proud of as residents of a certain place, or promote anything that isn't monotonous, requisite, fiscally appropriate. We ought to be freaking out and struggling to keep our heads above water at all times. There's no time to be human beings, we have drudgery to deal with!
But if I'm telling the truth, how is it perjury? I still don't understand how an innocent person can harm themselves by proclaiming their innocence.