A "high performance facade" is something that looks shiny and cool, but underneath is a pile of crap. You know, like a kit car that looks really cool but is really built on a VW beetle frame. Or a movie with lots of flash and SFX but no real substance.
Wait, I'm having problems parsing that. Is that the Agency dealing with Serious and Organized Crime, or the Crime Agency that is Serious and Organized? Because frankly, the latter sounds just one door down from the Ministry of Funny Walks.
Which is why they need to split it into several smaller rovers which can self-assemble into one larger one, Voltron style. Tell me that wouldn't be a cool lander!
A friend of mine remarked offhand that he had to change the fluid in his tranny. Maybe I need a break from the Internet, because working on his car is not the first thing that came to mind.
That's actually my biggest gripe with them. Code reviews always feel like an intrusion, like they're preventing you from getting real work done. Like coding. Coding is fun. Reviewing isn't.
You have to convince yourself that reviewing is part of the job. It's not necessarily fun part, but it is a part. Don't schedule yourself so tightly that you don't have time to review. Or, don't let your manager schedule you (and your team) that tightly. Yeah, I've been in this business a long time too, and I know that schedules are imposed by external pressures. And it's tough because at best, you're saving time in the QA cycle, not the engineering cycle. Think of it as an investment, spending a little extra time now to get back (hopefully) time not spent in last-minute debugging.
Because code reviews end up being an enabler for OCD coworkers to tell me how to indent.
You're doing it wrong.
If you're doing a written code review (diffs posted somewhere, people leave comments) then you can easily ignore Mr. Anal Indenter. If you're doing a in-person everyone-gather-round-the-conference-table review the answer to that is "Noted. Moving on." And that's the end of it. If there's any further discussion on coding style during the review it's a failure on the part of the moderator (or leader, or coder) and on the parts of everyone engaging in the discussion.
And, if this is happening frequently, you need to adopt coding standards. It doesn't matter what they are, just something you can point to when Mr. Anal pipes up, and say "We do it this way." If you can't get the team to agree on a standard than have the manager or architect or lead developer make an executive decision.
And yeah, I've been there. Even after all that we still had Mr. Anal trying to convince people that the standard was wrong. Everyone else just has to ignore him. Boot him out of the review if you have to. I once (in very straight-laced dress-shirt-and-tie type of company) brought in a Nerf gun and hid it under the desk. When Mr. Anal started in, I whipped it out and nailed him. Repeatedly. That shocked him so much we actually never had another problem from that guy. But if the Asshole Indenter persists treat it like any other workplace conflict and bring in management or HR or however you'd deal with a co-worker who's keeping you from getting your job done.
This. It's not perfect and I'd certainly like to see some other products in this arena, but Review Board gets the job done without introducing a lot of extra pain just fighting the tool.
At my current gig we review most significant changes before committing them to trunk. We do that informally via Review Board. Reviewers read the code at their convenience and leave comments; we don't need to schedule time when everyone can get together. The comments are usually pretty useful and range from "Did you consider...?" to "You missed this corner case." to "OMG, that's going to completely break the interaction with this other module!" There's no question, it's worthwhile.
I've been at places doing big, formal, gather-everyone-in-the-conference-room reviews. One place we sat down with printouts and read through it line by line. ALL comments were written down and classified, and we had to get pen-on-paper signatures from all reviewers okaying the changes before the code could be checked in. That's a serious waste of time.
While that's cool and all, why stop with real-world environments? You can ride in the real world any day. Instead, load up Google Mars and cycle up to the summit of Olympus Mons. Or ride Mario Kart's Rainbow Road. Or heck, glide through the air on a vaguely steampunk-ish ornithropter popping balloons for points. Reality is for people with tiny imaginations.
FWIW, roundabouts aren't really that difficult to use. You just drive round them.
Try telling that to the yahoos around here... I live in Michigan, and my neighborhood has roundabouts instead of intersections. People do all sorts of wacky stuff. Most commonly, people will go the wrong way around them when they think nobody's looking. Why go <whine>all the way around</whine> 270 degrees when you can go just 90 degrees the wrong way? Roundabouts are <whine>so stupid!</whine> The other thing people do is stop while they're in the roundabout to let other people in. No! Don't do that! You're in the circle, you have right-of-way. This behavior is, unfortunately, encouraged by bad road signs here. They replaced the intersection, but not the signage. So the east and west entrances to the roundabout have stop signs, but the north and south entrances don't. There are a lot of people who interpret that as you're supposed to yield to incoming traffic from N and S, but not E and W.
I like the roundabouts in general, and I think people will eventually get used to them. But this is the country where we, as a nation, willfully refused to change to the metric system. Fortunately the roundabouts are a done deal, and people will have to learn to cope as long as they want to drive those roads. It'll probably take a generation before they're commonly accepted, though.
In that case, just use a log scale. Then the bar for solar is less than 10 times the bar for natural gas, and back in the realm of the understandable again.
I remember back in the day, when I actually wanted to major in CS, Java came out. Yes, that long ago. And the big thing about Java was that you would be able to write code that was platform-independent, and just rely on a Java interpreter that would be released on any necessary platforms. Which is why everything is written in Java now...
Java? N00b. Back in my day, the big thing was the UCSD p-System. With p-System you would be able to write code that was platform-independent, and just rely on a p-Code interpreter that would be released on any necessary platforms. Which is why everything is written in p-Code now...
With every generation of programmer comes the dream that hey, wouldn't it be great if you could write programs once and run them everywhere? And sure, it would be great. So systems get built and subsequently abandoned as the devilish details stack up. In my day it was p-System. In yours it was Java. Today it's HTML5. Just sit back, sip your favorite summertime beverage, and quietly watch as the lessons are learned all over again. Then you can take my place cynically welcoming in the next generation of the disillusioned. Just try not to say "I told you so" too loudly. They hate that.
Seriously, someday it'll happen. Someday there will be enough spare memory and cycles that no one will care about the overhead of the universal virtual machine. But it's not going to happen this time around.
The problem isn't with the company, it's with the cashier. The company is perfectly happy taking the cards -- it's cleaner, more efficient, less prone to employees stealing from the till, etc. The cashiers hate it because it discourages tipping. If I give a $5 bill for a $3.95 cuppa joe, it's just as easy to drop the change in the tip jar as it is to put it in my pocket. If I pay with a credit card it's easier to just pay the required amount with no tip.
Of course, there's the whole other argument about whether or not some glorified soda jerk (ahem, "barista") really deserves a tip when you wouldn't think of giving one to the guy doing the same job in a fast-food joint, or to the cashier at a grocery store. But tipping is a weird custom anyway.
Serious question about the global menu bar: Did they find a way to make it work with focus-follows-mouse? That's one thing I really miss on my Mac. I hate click-to-focus, and I've tried the various add-ons to enable focus-follows-mouse. But on a Mac, the global menu bar makes it completely impractical. To get to the menu bar you have to move the mouse outside the window. If you pause over another window on your way to the menu, the other window gets focus and the menu changes. Has Canonical found a way around this, or did they just omit focus-follows-mouse as an option?
The other thing I didn't see in the article was any mention of multi-monitor support. Does Unity have it? If so, how does it play with the global menu and the launcher? Are they only on the primary display, or are they replicated on each one?
"DHS hires producer of TV commercials to produce TV commercial." Gee, what a shocker.
So, who should they have hired instead? Is there any production company, writer, or actor that doesn't have a vested interest in this matter? Were you expecting a PSA to show a reasoned intellectual debate about the pros and cons of copyright infringement? Would you expect Smokey the Bear to discuss how fire is a natural and necessary part of the life cycle of the forest, so go ahead and leave that campfire burning once in a while?
Stay tuned, kids. Tomorrow's great expose is sure to be, "FBI hires janitorial firm to clean toilets."
The Lego games are a lot of fun. Star Wars is undoubtedly the best, but I think Batman is a close second. Two-player is extremely well done. The second player can jump in and out of the game at any time, without having to restart the level or anything like that.
I just wish they'd do some games that don't revolve around movies. Sometimes following the plot of a movie (however loosely) seem too contrived. That's what I liked about Batman. It wasn't based on a movie, or on any particular story. I'd love to see a Lego zombie game. "Lego 4 Dead"... I like the sound of that.
Yes, it is that hard to parse a timestamp. People are inconsistent. You might see "7:00" (unadorned), "7:00a", "7:00 AM", "7AM", "07:00", and "7 o'clock" all in the same document. And dates are nearly impossible. When is 1/2/11? January 2nd or February 1st? 2011 or 1911?
Of course, I don't think this proposal is going to make things any better. If the display data was generated directly from the metadata, maybe. But as soon as someone touches it by hand you're going to see the two get out of sync. I go back to change the time; it's been moved to 8:30pm. Now the human-readable version says 8:30 but the machine-readable version still says 19:30. Which is it, really?
Don't think it'll happen? Ha! The majority of people just don't grok semantics. If it looks okay to them, then what's the problem? I've done a lot of format conversions, mostly converting HTML and Word docs to something an ebook reader can handle. Even people who should know how to apply styles to at least give semantic meaning to parts of documents don't bother. Why change to a header style when a normal paragraph with a large, bold font ends up looking the same? Why use a different style for a quoted paragraph when you can just adjust the font and indentation on a regular paragraph?
The majority of people just aren't going to bother with semantic markup, even if they understand what it's for. Especially if it's more work. Gee, I have to specify here that Hannah Montana is a person, and here that Hannah Montana is a city? That's too much work. People will know what I mean by context.
Slashdot Mirror
Spoken like a true loser of the Low UID Dickwars.
-1, Redundant
There's a competing product that does a much better job of keeping kids from running away.
Remember, furries exist to give trekkies someone to look down on.
It's a fair cop. But society is to blame!
A "high performance facade" is something that looks shiny and cool, but underneath is a pile of crap. You know, like a kit car that looks really cool but is really built on a VW beetle frame. Or a movie with lots of flash and SFX but no real substance.
Yeah, and I don't want to be just a "resource" to my employer either. Yet the HR department won that one ages ago.
Wait, I'm having problems parsing that. Is that the Agency dealing with Serious and Organized Crime, or the Crime Agency that is Serious and Organized? Because frankly, the latter sounds just one door down from the Ministry of Funny Walks.
Which is why they need to split it into several smaller rovers which can self-assemble into one larger one, Voltron style. Tell me that wouldn't be a cool lander!
A friend of mine remarked offhand that he had to change the fluid in his tranny. Maybe I need a break from the Internet, because working on his car is not the first thing that came to mind.
That's actually my biggest gripe with them. Code reviews always feel like an intrusion, like they're preventing you from getting real work done. Like coding. Coding is fun. Reviewing isn't.
You have to convince yourself that reviewing is part of the job. It's not necessarily fun part, but it is a part. Don't schedule yourself so tightly that you don't have time to review. Or, don't let your manager schedule you (and your team) that tightly. Yeah, I've been in this business a long time too, and I know that schedules are imposed by external pressures. And it's tough because at best, you're saving time in the QA cycle, not the engineering cycle. Think of it as an investment, spending a little extra time now to get back (hopefully) time not spent in last-minute debugging.
You're doing it wrong.
If you're doing a written code review (diffs posted somewhere, people leave comments) then you can easily ignore Mr. Anal Indenter. If you're doing a in-person everyone-gather-round-the-conference-table review the answer to that is "Noted. Moving on." And that's the end of it. If there's any further discussion on coding style during the review it's a failure on the part of the moderator (or leader, or coder) and on the parts of everyone engaging in the discussion.
And, if this is happening frequently, you need to adopt coding standards. It doesn't matter what they are, just something you can point to when Mr. Anal pipes up, and say "We do it this way." If you can't get the team to agree on a standard than have the manager or architect or lead developer make an executive decision.
And yeah, I've been there. Even after all that we still had Mr. Anal trying to convince people that the standard was wrong. Everyone else just has to ignore him. Boot him out of the review if you have to. I once (in very straight-laced dress-shirt-and-tie type of company) brought in a Nerf gun and hid it under the desk. When Mr. Anal started in, I whipped it out and nailed him. Repeatedly. That shocked him so much we actually never had another problem from that guy. But if the Asshole Indenter persists treat it like any other workplace conflict and bring in management or HR or however you'd deal with a co-worker who's keeping you from getting your job done.
This. It's not perfect and I'd certainly like to see some other products in this arena, but Review Board gets the job done without introducing a lot of extra pain just fighting the tool.
At my current gig we review most significant changes before committing them to trunk. We do that informally via Review Board. Reviewers read the code at their convenience and leave comments; we don't need to schedule time when everyone can get together. The comments are usually pretty useful and range from "Did you consider...?" to "You missed this corner case." to "OMG, that's going to completely break the interaction with this other module!" There's no question, it's worthwhile.
I've been at places doing big, formal, gather-everyone-in-the-conference-room reviews. One place we sat down with printouts and read through it line by line. ALL comments were written down and classified, and we had to get pen-on-paper signatures from all reviewers okaying the changes before the code could be checked in. That's a serious waste of time.
While that's cool and all, why stop with real-world environments? You can ride in the real world any day. Instead, load up Google Mars and cycle up to the summit of Olympus Mons. Or ride Mario Kart's Rainbow Road. Or heck, glide through the air on a vaguely steampunk-ish ornithropter popping balloons for points. Reality is for people with tiny imaginations.
Try telling that to the yahoos around here... I live in Michigan, and my neighborhood has roundabouts instead of intersections. People do all sorts of wacky stuff. Most commonly, people will go the wrong way around them when they think nobody's looking. Why go <whine>all the way around</whine> 270 degrees when you can go just 90 degrees the wrong way? Roundabouts are <whine>so stupid!</whine> The other thing people do is stop while they're in the roundabout to let other people in. No! Don't do that! You're in the circle, you have right-of-way. This behavior is, unfortunately, encouraged by bad road signs here. They replaced the intersection, but not the signage. So the east and west entrances to the roundabout have stop signs, but the north and south entrances don't. There are a lot of people who interpret that as you're supposed to yield to incoming traffic from N and S, but not E and W.
I like the roundabouts in general, and I think people will eventually get used to them. But this is the country where we, as a nation, willfully refused to change to the metric system. Fortunately the roundabouts are a done deal, and people will have to learn to cope as long as they want to drive those roads. It'll probably take a generation before they're commonly accepted, though.
In that case, just use a log scale. Then the bar for solar is less than 10 times the bar for natural gas, and back in the realm of the understandable again.
Aye. MediaMonkey rocks. I just wish it was available for the Mac. It runs under Wine, but it's not very happy doing so.
Java? N00b. Back in my day, the big thing was the UCSD p-System. With p-System you would be able to write code that was platform-independent, and just rely on a p-Code interpreter that would be released on any necessary platforms. Which is why everything is written in p-Code now...
With every generation of programmer comes the dream that hey, wouldn't it be great if you could write programs once and run them everywhere? And sure, it would be great. So systems get built and subsequently abandoned as the devilish details stack up. In my day it was p-System. In yours it was Java. Today it's HTML5. Just sit back, sip your favorite summertime beverage, and quietly watch as the lessons are learned all over again. Then you can take my place cynically welcoming in the next generation of the disillusioned. Just try not to say "I told you so" too loudly. They hate that.
Seriously, someday it'll happen. Someday there will be enough spare memory and cycles that no one will care about the overhead of the universal virtual machine. But it's not going to happen this time around.
The problem isn't with the company, it's with the cashier. The company is perfectly happy taking the cards -- it's cleaner, more efficient, less prone to employees stealing from the till, etc. The cashiers hate it because it discourages tipping. If I give a $5 bill for a $3.95 cuppa joe, it's just as easy to drop the change in the tip jar as it is to put it in my pocket. If I pay with a credit card it's easier to just pay the required amount with no tip.
Of course, there's the whole other argument about whether or not some glorified soda jerk (ahem, "barista") really deserves a tip when you wouldn't think of giving one to the guy doing the same job in a fast-food joint, or to the cashier at a grocery store. But tipping is a weird custom anyway.
IF that's what Google wants to do, sure. But why on Earth would Google want to do that?
Serious question about the global menu bar: Did they find a way to make it work with focus-follows-mouse? That's one thing I really miss on my Mac. I hate click-to-focus, and I've tried the various add-ons to enable focus-follows-mouse. But on a Mac, the global menu bar makes it completely impractical. To get to the menu bar you have to move the mouse outside the window. If you pause over another window on your way to the menu, the other window gets focus and the menu changes. Has Canonical found a way around this, or did they just omit focus-follows-mouse as an option?
The other thing I didn't see in the article was any mention of multi-monitor support. Does Unity have it? If so, how does it play with the global menu and the launcher? Are they only on the primary display, or are they replicated on each one?
"DHS hires producer of TV commercials to produce TV commercial." Gee, what a shocker.
So, who should they have hired instead? Is there any production company, writer, or actor that doesn't have a vested interest in this matter? Were you expecting a PSA to show a reasoned intellectual debate about the pros and cons of copyright infringement? Would you expect Smokey the Bear to discuss how fire is a natural and necessary part of the life cycle of the forest, so go ahead and leave that campfire burning once in a while?
Stay tuned, kids. Tomorrow's great expose is sure to be, "FBI hires janitorial firm to clean toilets."
Losing data!? How can you say that? Sharepoint comes from the company that brought us Visual Source Safe, after all!
"Me too."
The Lego games are a lot of fun. Star Wars is undoubtedly the best, but I think Batman is a close second. Two-player is extremely well done. The second player can jump in and out of the game at any time, without having to restart the level or anything like that.
I just wish they'd do some games that don't revolve around movies. Sometimes following the plot of a movie (however loosely) seem too contrived. That's what I liked about Batman. It wasn't based on a movie, or on any particular story. I'd love to see a Lego zombie game. "Lego 4 Dead"... I like the sound of that.
Yes, it is that hard to parse a timestamp. People are inconsistent. You might see "7:00" (unadorned), "7:00a", "7:00 AM", "7AM", "07:00", and "7 o'clock" all in the same document. And dates are nearly impossible. When is 1/2/11? January 2nd or February 1st? 2011 or 1911?
Of course, I don't think this proposal is going to make things any better. If the display data was generated directly from the metadata, maybe. But as soon as someone touches it by hand you're going to see the two get out of sync. I go back to change the time; it's been moved to 8:30pm. Now the human-readable version says 8:30 but the machine-readable version still says 19:30. Which is it, really?
Don't think it'll happen? Ha! The majority of people just don't grok semantics. If it looks okay to them, then what's the problem? I've done a lot of format conversions, mostly converting HTML and Word docs to something an ebook reader can handle. Even people who should know how to apply styles to at least give semantic meaning to parts of documents don't bother. Why change to a header style when a normal paragraph with a large, bold font ends up looking the same? Why use a different style for a quoted paragraph when you can just adjust the font and indentation on a regular paragraph?
The majority of people just aren't going to bother with semantic markup, even if they understand what it's for. Especially if it's more work. Gee, I have to specify here that Hannah Montana is a person, and here that Hannah Montana is a city? That's too much work. People will know what I mean by context.
A noble goal, but one that's doomed to failure.