> Whats the point of a keyboard where every key is a screen ?
What's the point of those animations on fancy car stereo screens today, or what's the point of a neon light in my car's undercarriage, or what's the point of LEDs built into my computer's fans?
Some of it is pure bling, but this can actually be useful as well. I know someone that uses the Dvorak layout, I do not, when we're at each others' computers there's a good bit of akwardness. This could be a handy way to swap without actually changing keyboards.
I also like the idea of putting function names on keys for games, as going between Doom3 and HalfLife2 and other games can leave me forgetting what key does what command in which game, even if I try to set them all as similar as possible there's always something different.
Or you could perhaps have multiple computers on a KVM switch that may be different platforms. The Windows keys could perhaps automatically redisplay as Macintosh propeller keys, or even to the Amiga logo keys for us rare weirdos still using that.
Perhaps someone is supporting remote computers in a remote country, the keyboard could change to that language layout which can be useful if that language has umlauts and stuff, or backards 'K's or something.
Or maybe you just don' tlike the standard PC keyboard layout. Different keyboards can cause confusion. Some have the tilde key above the backspace, sometimes it's elsewhere. The Sun keyboard at work as well as my weird Amiga keyboards both have the control key above the left shift key, but my PC keyboards have it belos the left shift key. I might like to set my PCs to have the same control key location as the other keyboards I use to reduce confusion between computers, especially as I'm at teh Sun all day at work and then games using ctrl as fire sometimes tick me off when I'm pounding on the PC's shift lock key by mistake and my character dies because of it.
I wouldn't expect to be changing languages very often myself, but there are still some actually useful possibilities in addition to the bling factor which the case mod market will go nuts for.
Uhm, I was given a quiz, asked to design en edge detector circuit, and asked to draw s small VLSI layout by my current employer during my interview.
I've gotten calls a few times over the years from other companies I had applied to when I finished college.
I've even gotten calls from headhunters at work, during work hours, at a phone number I haven't given to anyone for such things, and I don't have customers to spread business cards to as I work on standard products, not ASICs or ASSP things.
How is calling back someone a couple years later a bad thing, as long as you aren't interrupting his current work day? Sure, it was unsolocited, but I'd hope the hiring people would make sure that some guy really is as good as they were told he is before committing to a big salary.
I've never applied to or heard from Microsoft, but I've had similar experiences with other companies. I'm happy to know that there's still some demand out there for what I do...
I spent this past weekend outside, canoeing and bicycling, wearing #45 sunscreen and still came out of it with a respectable tan. Farmer style of course.:) But without the sunscreen I'd likely be much mor eof a steamed lobster red color than something so much less painful than that...
A friend missed a spot on th aback of his hand that is now a sortof neon pink color and is quite painful. Why would I want to prefer that to what I got??
> Hint: Try the "next chapter" button. Does the trick for me.
My next chapter button is nearly always disabled. Often the fast-forward still works though and can be used to 20x speed through the crap. Sometimes it plows through the menu and speeds through the first few minutes of the movie and I have to reset teh chapter, but usually it's nice enough to stop at the menu.
>All of which makes me wonder, do evangelical users >and press help or hurt the popularity of a platform?
I think AmigaOS is the greatest, it's easier to use and customize than blah blah blah.
Guess what? Every time someone says a good thing about Amiga, zillions of Slashdotters attack, calling the poster nuts, stupid, dead, and other things. I'll probably get called names or told my platform is dead just for posting this satirical evangalistic nonsense here.
So it's not good or beneficial to all platforms. You all used to think Mac users were a bunch of weirdos too until the switch to OSX, right? Suddenly Macs became cool and accepted on Slashdot and other places. Why did the Mac Mini get popular here, because someone went on and on about how cool they thought Apple or Jobs was, or because a tiny quiet computer with a BSD based OS was actually useful for new space-sensetive applications?
I don't think that evangelizing changed that, the better technology did.
Will Apple make OSX available for ANY x86 hardware? Will I be able to put it on my exiting PCs? Will I be able to choose my own motherboards and other parts for future upgrades?
If so, then I may be tempted to go Mac and dump Linux when the Linux software I like gets ported. I think Linux will still thrive in the embedded systems and industrial controls, plus the occasional PDA markets.
If not, then I think Linux will still thrive as it does now.
Apple has always seemed very protective of its hardware. I imagine they will do something to keep control of things so we still have to buy Apple hardware to run MacOS, regardless of what CPU is in the thing.
How many of us will be willing to wait so long between hardware upgrades? Sure, kids won't be spending money every year for the latest graphics card. But thre's still enough demand for keeping up with the latest chips that something will keep PC games selling, so we aren't forced to wait 6 years before getting a better gfs chip.
Besides, wouldn't converting EVERYONE to such a slow upgrade cycle slow down chip development?
Doesn't that sound like something MS would say? Don't waste your resources developing for small-time operating system like Linux or Mac when only the large market platform, ie. MS, is feasible for reaching your feature goals in a timely manner?
Come on. While this is an excuse for a proprietary for-profic product with a small team, I don't see this as flying as well in open source land. If some guy wants to port Firefox or OpenOffice to something off the wall like AROS or some other nearly unknown platform, let him. He wouldn't be working on the Windows or Linux ports regardless, so why prevent him from doing something so crazy with his own time and money?
I guess there's just so much proof that overload is a problem that he either didn't bother to read it, or tried but couldn't absorb it well. Since the evidence of overloading was so overwhelming to become unconvincing, he chooses to ignore it.
> Seriously though, what if you wanted to buy a gift for somebody?
That's a good point, I wonder if they've thought of that. I buy a few DVDs, but I receive more as gifts.
Or what about kiddy movies, little Junior wants to watch his Disney movie while Mom and Dad who bought the DVD are away and he's stuck home with a babysitter.
I take it that soon it should be illegal for me to lend the DVD I paid for at the store to a friend?
You're right, this is going to work out very well.
"Hey Bill, our virus subscription revenue is too low!"
"Well then, lets add more holes to Windows in the next update! Hopefully the virus coders out there wil make good use of the new holes quickly so we don't have to develop viruses of our own."
I wish we had things set up so these attachments could not be possible. If you're voting on a military spending bill, no off-topic items have any reason to be there. Are you spending money on the military, or are you defining an ID card requirement? They don't belong together.
Much like whatever that controversial thing added to the big budget omnibus a while back, this sort of thing should not be allowed to take place.
If you want a national ID card, VOTE ON A NATIONAL ID CARD LAW.
If you're afraid it will fail a vote, then it must not be a very good idea, and should not be snuck by in a vote on an unrelated topic.
Considering how many of our reps vote without reading bills, I think most of congress should be outright fired anyway, but I've already petitioned my own congressman to do something about this off-topic attachment crap and people not possibly having time to read and understand bills before voting, such as the emergency budget omnibus and anti-terror bills. I dont' expect this to go anywhere, but at least I've tried...
If MSIE was more secure than Firefox, I'd use MSIE. I currently believe Firefox is the safer browser to use. Firefox is open source.
If MS Office hadn't been such a slow buggy annoying jerk when I used it many years ago, I might use it now. Unfortunately for them, that bad experience with Word 6 has made me look elsewhere. Openoffice hasn't given me a bad user experience yet. Open office is also open source.
The recent "Windows black box" news giving them the ability to see the contents of my email/document/whatever is concerning. I have access to certain documents under NDA. What if the viewer program crashes and I forget to remove that document's contents before sending off the "core dump" to Microsoft? Am I fired for giving information to MS against my NDA agreement's terms? Is my employer screwed for the same reason? I'd rather simply avoid that possibility. I was quite fond of a set of programs called Final Writer and Final Calc, which was closed source, but has been unsupported for some time now. I'd like to try one called Pagestream which is also closed source.
I don't use any x86 or Windows app for email. With all those viruses and other junk clogging the mail system today, I'd rather not be in any way compatible with that code. So I use an antiquated computer platform with a Motorola 68060 CPU. I ain't gonna get none of that crap... This email program is open source.
I don't like many smaller details of the Windows user interface and how I interact with it. These small details annoy me, and they add up enough that I prefer to use something else. I've tried Linux, but it's still too hard to configure and maintain to my liking, but I do like it as a general user. Just not as an admin. I'm comfortable using Solaris at work, but I won't be setting that up at home. I'd like to give MacOS X a try, but cannot currently afford a Mac, but someday I'd like to get an iBook.
For the moment, for most tasks, I again use my antiquated platform simply because I get on with it better than the others I've tried. This OS is closed source and currently in beta. It includes a project I'm working on, which is also closed source.
When it don't do what I want, I load up Windows for games or web sites unfriendly to my aging web browser, and my linux box currently cracks keys for dnetc but will hopefully someday be a successful MythTV installation. Windows has already proven unsatisfactory as a dedicated always-on DVR machine. MythTV is open source.
I can't stand Windows Explorer. I find it to be the most clunky interface I've ever used. I use the Directory Opus 6.x replacement for it. It's not perfect either, but is far better for me than WI is. DOpus is closed source.
I haven't used Photoshop. I can't figure out how to use Gimp. I like ImageFX, which is closed source.
So, it depends on how safe I feel using a product and how comfortable I am with the user interface. A lot of Windows programs suffer from the Windows GUI design forced upon them IMNSHO.
If a closed source program makes me happier than open source equivalents, then RMS would be disappointed to hear that I do not share his obsession with the open source concept as being the only possible acceptable way to write software. If open source makes me happier than the closed source equivalent, I'm happy to use it. I'm not part of a revolution, nor do I want to be. I just want to use whatever product is best for my own personal needs and preferences, regardless of what anyone else thinks about it. Each of you should use what you use because it's best for your own particular needs, not because you're on a magical quest or are trying to impress the open source fanclub here on slashdot, or whatever.
OK, you prefer no comment at all. Fine. Now, I ask you, go look up that 5 line DVD decoder written in perl a while ago, and by only reading the perl code, explain to me how it works and what it is doing.
Your example is a good one to show that good variable names with no comments can be better than bad variable names with comments, but it's also very simplistic.
I wouldn't use obscene amounts of comments, to be sure, information overload can be as annoying or meaningless as insufficient information. But even with good variable and function names, sometimes you simply need a bit more. Look through grahics driver code in Xfree/xorg. It's ugly as heck. It's nigh-impossible to tell WHAT is happening in there, let alone the possibly more important WHY it's being done.
Yes, variable names should be chosen to minimize explaining what the variable is used for. Same for function names. But you shouldn't stop there.
Here and there you need to say what is being done. Give a brief summary of how it works. And please don't forget the why it's there. They can all be life-savers later on, where variable or function names may not be enough for someone else to truely understand what's happening and why or how they need to make their changes.
I was hoping to learn a few things from certain Xfree/xorg driver code a couple years ago. It wasn't at all helpful, and we were left to random experimentation in our own code until "something good happened". That's not the ideal now is it? Our code now describes our situation and explains things as best we can pretend to understand them for our own uses in the future, the xorg driver code continues to be meaningless last I saw.
It's funny that many users of my obscure OS of choice seem to think that if there is open-source Linux driver code out there, any hardware can be made to work on our platform too. Sorry dudes, but much of the driver sources out there can happily live in the "no documentation exists whatsoever" category.
Other code out there is quite good. But I'll never agree that the code documents itself, as I've seen to much proof otherwise, including my own code from weeks earlier. I've had a profound comments learning experience since then, and can now much better understand my own old code.
I even comment basic concepts in my code, even for files only I look into at work. Cadence's VSLI tools have a scripting language I've used to make a parameterized chip core layout. Skill is the ugly bastard-child of C and lisp... Change the parameters and it automatically swaps in different versions of cells, changes cell libraries to use, or resizes the repeating array. Basic concept here, is my program a generator seperate from it's layout output, or is it one and the same thing as the resulting layout? My understanding is they are one and the same, as changes to the code immediately affect the layout view without any recompiling or any other "generating process". It just "is" different in the layout viewer. Other workers have complained when my work on the code has mangled their layout work, with me doing nothing more than vi-ing a file and saving changes to disk. People asked me if I was looking for another job after seeing me commenting this code, as if I was preparing things for the next guy to take over. I was doing it to keep myself sane when I have to work on it again next year or whenever...
My learning experience about commenting code was a difficult one. Like many, while in college I wrote the code and then went back to comment it so the profs were happy.
Then I did a co-op with an automated storage/retreival systems company in their software department. One of the processes involved in a communications system needed some work. The code was licensed from another company in another country. There was no documentation for this communications system. There was very little commenting in the code. Luckily it wasn't in a foreign language. Unluckily it was wrong, apparently the structure of this program was similar to that of another, which was mostly gutted and rewritten, but a few old-program comments survived to be the ONLY comments in the new program.
Sure, the sources could be reverse engineered to provide the documentation required. I did it. It took a few weeks.
After that, I didn't leave comments for last anymore. It's been a good thing. I now work for a semiconductor design company and often write perl scripts or skill-language scripts to automate tedious tasks. I think I'm abou thte only one in the office that comments such scripts in any way. It's nice to read what stuff does when I have to revisit code many months or years later. I hate having to revisit someone else's code because it's nearly guaranteed to be completely barren of anything human-readable.
Listen up kids! Commenting is GOOD! Your professors aren't just being jerks. Learn the easy way and hopefully save yourself a great deal of trouble with your own code. Other people's code will always suck, but your own shouldn't have to.
I've seen some French films. For a while my employer had brought an employee of our French location to the American office I work at, and he showed us his DVDs if we were interested. I even ordered a copy of Bricole' Girls for my own. The French film Taxi was a great action film with a great chase scene. I hope the recent American movie also called Taxi isn't a cheesy ruining of the French one, but it seems it may be. I haven't seen the American one... I need to take some French language classes though and get better at following the dialog, I've unfortunatley lost much of what I learned in high-school French classes.
Pity my Apex DVD player was crap and died (so did its two replecements) and I can't watch my DVD at the moment. As soon as I get my MythTV box running I'll be able to see this DVD again as the DVD drive is already modded to allow it.
I've used double-sided sticky foam tape to attach 40mm fans to hard drives before. The foam tape can be stacked a few layers high to provide room for air to flow away as it is pushed down against the drive.
Considering the length of a roll of this stuff and the number of fans you can mount in the fashion I have done, it's probably cheaper per fan than those 10cent brackets are.
And I've never had any problems with magnetic field interference with data on the disk. Everything has worked great, and I've been doing this for at least 10 years.
> 1. Privacy. If it's on Yahoo!'s servers, you have no idea who can see it.
And if webcrawlers harvest my email address posted here, do you think I want it to find my hotmail address, or do you think I want it to find my "real" email address? I think that using free email accounts in relation to posting in forums is a good idea.
If my hotmail account gets overburdened with spam, I abandon it for another one. I ain't gonna do that with my real address... Stuff that's actually important gets told about my real address where I have more space, privacy, larger attachments, etc.
I'd say that him using a yahoo address for you guys to post on the front comments page is a good idea, as it help him maintain the privacy of his real address...
Slashdot Mirror
There was a time where these were required for electrical engineering students at Virginia Tech. I missed that boat though.
Yea, but remember that when Ronald Regan used that excuse he did actually prove to have Alzheimers. Do you?
So, how many tinfoil hat types do we have wondering if the London thing today was a staged engouragment to pass the bill? :)
So, the Happy Hat from Ren & Stimpy has finally left the cartoon world? Cool!
> Whats the point of a keyboard where every key is a screen ?
What's the point of those animations on fancy car stereo screens today, or what's the point of a neon light in my car's undercarriage, or what's the point of LEDs built into my computer's fans?
Some of it is pure bling, but this can actually be useful as well. I know someone that uses the Dvorak layout, I do not, when we're at each others' computers there's a good bit of akwardness. This could be a handy way to swap without actually changing keyboards.
I also like the idea of putting function names on keys for games, as going between Doom3 and HalfLife2 and other games can leave me forgetting what key does what command in which game, even if I try to set them all as similar as possible there's always something different.
Or you could perhaps have multiple computers on a KVM switch that may be different platforms. The Windows keys could perhaps automatically redisplay as Macintosh propeller keys, or even to the Amiga logo keys for us rare weirdos still using that.
Perhaps someone is supporting remote computers in a remote country, the keyboard could change to that language layout which can be useful if that language has umlauts and stuff, or backards 'K's or something.
Or maybe you just don' tlike the standard PC keyboard layout. Different keyboards can cause confusion. Some have the tilde key above the backspace, sometimes it's elsewhere. The Sun keyboard at work as well as my weird Amiga keyboards both have the control key above the left shift key, but my PC keyboards have it belos the left shift key. I might like to set my PCs to have the same control key location as the other keyboards I use to reduce confusion between computers, especially as I'm at teh Sun all day at work and then games using ctrl as fire sometimes tick me off when I'm pounding on the PC's shift lock key by mistake and my character dies because of it.
I wouldn't expect to be changing languages very often myself, but there are still some actually useful possibilities in addition to the bling factor which the case mod market will go nuts for.
Uhm, I was given a quiz, asked to design en edge detector circuit, and asked to draw s small VLSI layout by my current employer during my interview.
I've gotten calls a few times over the years from other companies I had applied to when I finished college.
I've even gotten calls from headhunters at work, during work hours, at a phone number I haven't given to anyone for such things, and I don't have customers to spread business cards to as I work on standard products, not ASICs or ASSP things.
How is calling back someone a couple years later a bad thing, as long as you aren't interrupting his current work day? Sure, it was unsolocited, but I'd hope the hiring people would make sure that some guy really is as good as they were told he is before committing to a big salary.
I've never applied to or heard from Microsoft, but I've had similar experiences with other companies. I'm happy to know that there's still some demand out there for what I do...
I spent this past weekend outside, canoeing and bicycling, wearing #45 sunscreen and still came out of it with a respectable tan. Farmer style of course. :) But without the sunscreen I'd likely be much mor eof a steamed lobster red color than something so much less painful than that...
A friend missed a spot on th aback of his hand that is now a sortof neon pink color and is quite painful. Why would I want to prefer that to what I got??
> Hint: Try the "next chapter" button. Does the trick for me.
My next chapter button is nearly always disabled. Often the fast-forward still works though and can be used to 20x speed through the crap. Sometimes it plows through the menu and speeds through the first few minutes of the movie and I have to reset teh chapter, but usually it's nice enough to stop at the menu.
>All of which makes me wonder, do evangelical users
>and press help or hurt the popularity of a platform?
I think AmigaOS is the greatest, it's easier to use and customize than blah blah blah.
Guess what? Every time someone says a good thing about Amiga, zillions of Slashdotters attack, calling the poster nuts, stupid, dead, and other things. I'll probably get called names or told my platform is dead just for posting this satirical evangalistic nonsense here.
So it's not good or beneficial to all platforms. You all used to think Mac users were a bunch of weirdos too until the switch to OSX, right? Suddenly Macs became cool and accepted on Slashdot and other places. Why did the Mac Mini get popular here, because someone went on and on about how cool they thought Apple or Jobs was, or because a tiny quiet computer with a BSD based OS was actually useful for new space-sensetive applications?
I don't think that evangelizing changed that, the better technology did.
Will Apple make OSX available for ANY x86 hardware? Will I be able to put it on my exiting PCs? Will I be able to choose my own motherboards and other parts for future upgrades?
If so, then I may be tempted to go Mac and dump Linux when the Linux software I like gets ported. I think Linux will still thrive in the embedded systems and industrial controls, plus the occasional PDA markets.
If not, then I think Linux will still thrive as it does now.
Apple has always seemed very protective of its hardware. I imagine they will do something to keep control of things so we still have to buy Apple hardware to run MacOS, regardless of what CPU is in the thing.
How many of us will be willing to wait so long between hardware upgrades? Sure, kids won't be spending money every year for the latest graphics card. But thre's still enough demand for keeping up with the latest chips that something will keep PC games selling, so we aren't forced to wait 6 years before getting a better gfs chip.
Besides, wouldn't converting EVERYONE to such a slow upgrade cycle slow down chip development?
Doesn't that sound like something MS would say? Don't waste your resources developing for small-time operating system like Linux or Mac when only the large market platform, ie. MS, is feasible for reaching your feature goals in a timely manner?
Come on. While this is an excuse for a proprietary for-profic product with a small team, I don't see this as flying as well in open source land. If some guy wants to port Firefox or OpenOffice to something off the wall like AROS or some other nearly unknown platform, let him. He wouldn't be working on the Windows or Linux ports regardless, so why prevent him from doing something so crazy with his own time and money?
I guess there's just so much proof that overload is a problem that he either didn't bother to read it, or tried but couldn't absorb it well. Since the evidence of overloading was so overwhelming to become unconvincing, he chooses to ignore it.
> Seriously though, what if you wanted to buy a gift for somebody?
That's a good point, I wonder if they've thought of that. I buy a few DVDs, but I receive more as gifts.
Or what about kiddy movies, little Junior wants to watch his Disney movie while Mom and Dad who bought the DVD are away and he's stuck home with a babysitter.
I take it that soon it should be illegal for me to lend the DVD I paid for at the store to a friend?
You're right, this is going to work out very well.
I agree with this.
"Hey Bill, our virus subscription revenue is too low!"
"Well then, lets add more holes to Windows in the next update! Hopefully the virus coders out there wil make good use of the new holes quickly so we don't have to develop viruses of our own."
The AROS project has been doing bounties for a while now. http://www.aros.org/
I wish we had things set up so these attachments could not be possible. If you're voting on a military spending bill, no off-topic items have any reason to be there. Are you spending money on the military, or are you defining an ID card requirement? They don't belong together.
Much like whatever that controversial thing added to the big budget omnibus a while back, this sort of thing should not be allowed to take place.
If you want a national ID card, VOTE ON A NATIONAL ID CARD LAW.
If you're afraid it will fail a vote, then it must not be a very good idea, and should not be snuck by in a vote on an unrelated topic.
Considering how many of our reps vote without reading bills, I think most of congress should be outright fired anyway, but I've already petitioned my own congressman to do something about this off-topic attachment crap and people not possibly having time to read and understand bills before voting, such as the emergency budget omnibus and anti-terror bills. I dont' expect this to go anywhere, but at least I've tried...
OK all you foil hat types, start working on a tin-foil insert to protect the contents of my wallet!
I care becauseof product quality and security.
I do not care about open source vs closed source.
If MSIE was more secure than Firefox, I'd use MSIE. I currently believe Firefox is the safer browser to use. Firefox is open source.
If MS Office hadn't been such a slow buggy annoying jerk when I used it many years ago, I might use it now. Unfortunately for them, that bad experience with Word 6 has made me look elsewhere. Openoffice hasn't given me a bad user experience yet. Open office is also open source.
The recent "Windows black box" news giving them the ability to see the contents of my email/document/whatever is concerning. I have access to certain documents under NDA. What if the viewer program crashes and I forget to remove that document's contents before sending off the "core dump" to Microsoft? Am I fired for giving information to MS against my NDA agreement's terms? Is my employer screwed for the same reason? I'd rather simply avoid that possibility. I was quite fond of a set of programs called Final Writer and Final Calc, which was closed source, but has been unsupported for some time now. I'd like to try one called Pagestream which is also closed source.
I don't use any x86 or Windows app for email. With all those viruses and other junk clogging the mail system today, I'd rather not be in any way compatible with that code. So I use an antiquated computer platform with a Motorola 68060 CPU. I ain't gonna get none of that crap... This email program is open source.
I don't like many smaller details of the Windows user interface and how I interact with it. These small details annoy me, and they add up enough that I prefer to use something else. I've tried Linux, but it's still too hard to configure and maintain to my liking, but I do like it as a general user. Just not as an admin. I'm comfortable using Solaris at work, but I won't be setting that up at home. I'd like to give MacOS X a try, but cannot currently afford a Mac, but someday I'd like to get an iBook.
For the moment, for most tasks, I again use my antiquated platform simply because I get on with it better than the others I've tried. This OS is closed source and currently in beta. It includes a project I'm working on, which is also closed source.
When it don't do what I want, I load up Windows for games or web sites unfriendly to my aging web browser, and my linux box currently cracks keys for dnetc but will hopefully someday be a successful MythTV installation. Windows has already proven unsatisfactory as a dedicated always-on DVR machine. MythTV is open source.
I can't stand Windows Explorer. I find it to be the most clunky interface I've ever used. I use the Directory Opus 6.x replacement for it. It's not perfect either, but is far better for me than WI is. DOpus is closed source.
I haven't used Photoshop. I can't figure out how to use Gimp. I like ImageFX, which is closed source.
So, it depends on how safe I feel using a product and how comfortable I am with the user interface. A lot of Windows programs suffer from the Windows GUI design forced upon them IMNSHO.
If a closed source program makes me happier than open source equivalents, then RMS would be disappointed to hear that I do not share his obsession with the open source concept as being the only possible acceptable way to write software. If open source makes me happier than the closed source equivalent, I'm happy to use it. I'm not part of a revolution, nor do I want to be. I just want to use whatever product is best for my own personal needs and preferences, regardless of what anyone else thinks about it. Each of you should use what you use because it's best for your own particular needs, not because you're on a magical quest or are trying to impress the open source fanclub here on slashdot, or whatever.
OK, you prefer no comment at all. Fine. Now, I ask you, go look up that 5 line DVD decoder written in perl a while ago, and by only reading the perl code, explain to me how it works and what it is doing.
Your example is a good one to show that good variable names with no comments can be better than bad variable names with comments, but it's also very simplistic.
I wouldn't use obscene amounts of comments, to be sure, information overload can be as annoying or meaningless as insufficient information. But even with good variable and function names, sometimes you simply need a bit more. Look through grahics driver code in Xfree/xorg. It's ugly as heck. It's nigh-impossible to tell WHAT is happening in there, let alone the possibly more important WHY it's being done.
Yes, variable names should be chosen to minimize explaining what the variable is used for. Same for function names. But you shouldn't stop there.
Here and there you need to say what is being done. Give a brief summary of how it works. And please don't forget the why it's there. They can all be life-savers later on, where variable or function names may not be enough for someone else to truely understand what's happening and why or how they need to make their changes.
I was hoping to learn a few things from certain Xfree/xorg driver code a couple years ago. It wasn't at all helpful, and we were left to random experimentation in our own code until "something good happened". That's not the ideal now is it? Our code now describes our situation and explains things as best we can pretend to understand them for our own uses in the future, the xorg driver code continues to be meaningless last I saw.
It's funny that many users of my obscure OS of choice seem to think that if there is open-source Linux driver code out there, any hardware can be made to work on our platform too. Sorry dudes, but much of the driver sources out there can happily live in the "no documentation exists whatsoever" category.
Other code out there is quite good. But I'll never agree that the code documents itself, as I've seen to much proof otherwise, including my own code from weeks earlier. I've had a profound comments learning experience since then, and can now much better understand my own old code.
I even comment basic concepts in my code, even for files only I look into at work. Cadence's VSLI tools have a scripting language I've used to make a parameterized chip core layout. Skill is the ugly bastard-child of C and lisp... Change the parameters and it automatically swaps in different versions of cells, changes cell libraries to use, or resizes the repeating array. Basic concept here, is my program a generator seperate from it's layout output, or is it one and the same thing as the resulting layout? My understanding is they are one and the same, as changes to the code immediately affect the layout view without any recompiling or any other "generating process". It just "is" different in the layout viewer. Other workers have complained when my work on the code has mangled their layout work, with me doing nothing more than vi-ing a file and saving changes to disk. People asked me if I was looking for another job after seeing me commenting this code, as if I was preparing things for the next guy to take over. I was doing it to keep myself sane when I have to work on it again next year or whenever...
My learning experience about commenting code was a difficult one. Like many, while in college I wrote the code and then went back to comment it so the profs were happy.
Then I did a co-op with an automated storage/retreival systems company in their software department. One of the processes involved in a communications system needed some work. The code was licensed from another company in another country. There was no documentation for this communications system. There was very little commenting in the code. Luckily it wasn't in a foreign language. Unluckily it was wrong, apparently the structure of this program was similar to that of another, which was mostly gutted and rewritten, but a few old-program comments survived to be the ONLY comments in the new program.
Sure, the sources could be reverse engineered to provide the documentation required. I did it. It took a few weeks.
After that, I didn't leave comments for last anymore. It's been a good thing. I now work for a semiconductor design company and often write perl scripts or skill-language scripts to automate tedious tasks. I think I'm abou thte only one in the office that comments such scripts in any way. It's nice to read what stuff does when I have to revisit code many months or years later. I hate having to revisit someone else's code because it's nearly guaranteed to be completely barren of anything human-readable.
Listen up kids! Commenting is GOOD! Your professors aren't just being jerks. Learn the easy way and hopefully save yourself a great deal of trouble with your own code. Other people's code will always suck, but your own shouldn't have to.
I've seen some French films. For a while my employer had brought an employee of our French location to the American office I work at, and he showed us his DVDs if we were interested. I even ordered a copy of Bricole' Girls for my own. The French film Taxi was a great action film with a great chase scene. I hope the recent American movie also called Taxi isn't a cheesy ruining of the French one, but it seems it may be. I haven't seen the American one... I need to take some French language classes though and get better at following the dialog, I've unfortunatley lost much of what I learned in high-school French classes.
Pity my Apex DVD player was crap and died (so did its two replecements) and I can't watch my DVD at the moment. As soon as I get my MythTV box running I'll be able to see this DVD again as the DVD drive is already modded to allow it.
I've used double-sided sticky foam tape to attach 40mm fans to hard drives before. The foam tape can be stacked a few layers high to provide room for air to flow away as it is pushed down against the drive.
Considering the length of a roll of this stuff and the number of fans you can mount in the fashion I have done, it's probably cheaper per fan than those 10cent brackets are.
And I've never had any problems with magnetic field interference with data on the disk. Everything has worked great, and I've been doing this for at least 10 years.
> 1. Privacy. If it's on Yahoo!'s servers, you have no idea who can see it.
And if webcrawlers harvest my email address posted here, do you think I want it to find my hotmail address, or do you think I want it to find my "real" email address? I think that using free email accounts in relation to posting in forums is a good idea.
If my hotmail account gets overburdened with spam, I abandon it for another one. I ain't gonna do that with my real address... Stuff that's actually important gets told about my real address where I have more space, privacy, larger attachments, etc.
I'd say that him using a yahoo address for you guys to post on the front comments page is a good idea, as it help him maintain the privacy of his real address...