style is one eternal point of contention (except for python programmers, but they're in a straight jacket), I don't think that it is a part of 'are you proud of your code', that has little to do with what other people think of your code, but everything about what you think of your own code.
When I look at my own code it's a mixed bag. The stuff that I earned the most money with is actually programmed quite bad, some of the most elegant stuff I wrote is sitting unused on the shelf.
I find that in a commercial setting I'm far more inclined to 'cut & paste' to keep moving rather than refactoring just to save the time. Sure, it leads to maintenance headaches down the line and I quite often just scrap stuff and rewrite it rather than figuring out what it did and why. Tools evolve at such a tremendous clip that I don't think the lifespan of code is anywhere near the point where it could be justified to spend say an extra week or two to get an algorithm tweaked to perfection if the next release of the tool or framework is going to have it built in anyway.
Faster machines also lead to sloppy code, I'm running a lot of production stuff on uncompiled PHP, whereas in the past I've rolled out code in assembler because I could beat the C compiler by a couple of cycles on most tight loops.
Times are changing, and that is the biggest 'driver' against 'clean' code, it won't be long before the actual code will start to disappear. For some environments that is already happening.
Oh well, old guys like me will find employment writing for embedded systems, which are about a decade behind the curve.
that's right on the money. I think that the 'big change' will come the day there is a linux distro out there that will have wine installed and functional to the point where it will run office 2003 out of the box. When that's achieved there will be a large amount of people in a position to switch.
All those people complaining about 'not being able to run their games' forget one thing: Computers were not designed to be game playing machines, they were designed as productivity tools. That the gaming market was able to flourish on the back of the roll out of the PC was a side effect, not the main cause. The spreadsheet was and is probably the biggest single 'invention' in the software world, Dan Bricklin did more for the 'gamers' by getting the PC adopted by the millions than any games programmer ever did.
On how many real life acts-of-terroris-in-the-making have been uncovered using cameras like this ? Iirc the only use they were in London was that *after* the bombings it was still possible to see what the bombers had looked like.
I guess the difference is that wikipedia contains a fairly large amount of factual errors and the Britannica much less. There seems to be a group of people that get off on vandalizing wikipedia. Personally I think they're jerks, but there are apparently trolls in any online system that gets large enough (including slashdot) that seem to be hellbent on spoiling other peoples enjoyment and hard work. It's annoying but it's a fact of online life. That said, wikipedia's breadth is nothing short of stunning and if you keep a half eye open and are vigilant you will likely do fine. As with any other source of information, never rely on one:)
It's sad but online projects now start with analyzing the abuse potential instead of seeing what you could do in a cooperative fashion. There are days that I find myself wishing for positively identified access to the internet, but that would definitely not be a solution, that's just my frustration speaking.
to every rule there are probably exceptions. I'm more thinking of the 'university vanity press' that produces relatively small runs of very pricey text books that get to be 'proscribed reading' for the students. Whether it's for ego or for profit is debatable, but it's a pretty bad practice in either case.
I'm strongly of the opinion that *any* research ought to be public, no restrictions whatsoever. nature publishes your paper, for 3 months they can charge for it, after that it automatically enters the public domain. After all none of those universities would be anywhere at all if not for the the public funding.
the word 'peer' means someone more or less at the same level of knowledge as you. Since wikipedia is not reviewed (or written) by people that have to have any qualifications you can not be sure that the reviewer knew as much of the subject matter as they would have to if they were to review a paper on the subject for some fancy dead-tree magazine.
I could review an article about anything on wikipedia and if I would be verbally skillful enough or had a 'clique' around me of supporting wikipedians (who may know even less about the subject) then I could probably get away with that.
So, no, wikipedia is not peer reviewed.
Funny thing: wikipedia is against the publishing of 'original research' so fanatically *because* they are not peer reviewed.
If they would be then it would be a fine place to publish such research. After all, whether something is original or not hardly matters, what matters is if it is based on solid science and if it is right and true.
Every now and then wikipedia is hugely embarrassed because some yokel that has been the wikipedia authority on some matter or other owns up to having read the 'for dummies' book on the subject and has been social engineering his own reputation.
that the source is 'second hand'. if they're halfway decent about it they will cite *their* sources, then you might as well go there and check up on it. If you've done that you are now in a position to cite the original article.
there are plenty of textbooks out there that only exist because the prof wants to be able to make you buy them to supplment their income. They might as well be blank pages and as far as the content is considered you would be no worse off if they were. It would be a good rule if professors were not able to make you buy their own textbook for a course.
I don't even have a TV anymore. Ever since the net 'boom' (say mid '95 or so) I've tried to make everything digital and to have only one 'outlet', my PC. There isn't enough material on the 'idiot box' that I find interesting enough to justify having one and files are so much more handy than physical media. I live in the Netherlands, where a 10 Mbit/s DSL line is about $50 / month, it's not cheap but I'm sure they can't be making much money on this particular one:)
but how on EARTH is this news... in all the years that I've been on slashdot I can't recall a single posting of mine that actually got accepted (I stopped trying a short while ago), and just about every day there is at least one article that simply should not have made the cut. it seriously pisses me off, even though tfm says that there is no point in griping about such things because it's normal. I think that if it's 'normal' that something is wrong.
dog catchers are not generally putting their lives in harms way. That's a comparatively easy thing to decide for someone else (if history is any guide) but is hard to decide for yourself because you may end up paying the ultimate price.
well, at least he didn't claim it as his own, unless you count 'anonymous' as a name now. (I realize there is someone out there with the 'anonymous' nick).
I'm not sure if 'naive' is the right moniker to use. Not cynical enough maybe ? The charm of unmanned vehicles has nothing to do with shifts or logistics or payloads. It has everything to do with being able to rain down death on others with impunity, because you no longer have to defend loss of life to the 'homefront'. Note that the only solid number of casualties to come out of Iraq is the number of American servicemen / women that have died there. Casualties of the 'enemy' are not counted, much less reported ('we don't do bodycounts'). So, by mechanizing the airforce, the army and the marine forces war will be wageable by remote control. No more people that get upset because their own countrymen are at risk of losing life or limb. This means that future wars will be even easier to wage from a political point of view, because the 'cost' to the own base approaches 0.
I personally think that everybody that is in politics and that votes for a war would have to immediately join the frontline troops in that war or retract their votes. Substituting children would not be permitted, only if they think that the war is so important they are willing to *personally* risk their lives then I think their vote should be counted.
Slashdot Mirror
I didn't realize the year was over already...
hehe, that had me puzzled for about 10 seconds :)
a real life librarians worst nightmare is a fire.
the internet population can be divided into two parts, those that use yahoo and those that don't.
style is one eternal point of contention (except for python programmers, but they're in a straight jacket), I don't think that it is a part of 'are you proud of your code', that has little to do with what other people think of your code, but everything about what you think of your own code.
When I look at my own code it's a mixed bag. The stuff that I earned the most money with is actually programmed quite bad, some of the most elegant stuff I wrote is sitting unused on the shelf.
I find that in a commercial setting I'm far more inclined to 'cut & paste' to keep moving rather than refactoring just to save the time. Sure, it leads to maintenance headaches down the line and I quite often just scrap stuff and rewrite it rather than figuring out what it did and why. Tools evolve at such a tremendous clip that I don't think the lifespan of code is anywhere near the point where it could be justified to spend say an extra week or two to get an algorithm tweaked to perfection if the next release of the tool or framework is going to have it built in anyway.
Faster machines also lead to sloppy code, I'm running a lot of production stuff on uncompiled PHP, whereas in the past I've rolled out code in assembler because I could beat the C compiler by a couple of cycles on most tight loops.
Times are changing, and that is the biggest 'driver' against 'clean' code, it won't be long before the actual code will start to disappear. For some environments that is already happening.
Oh well, old guys like me will find employment writing for embedded systems, which are about a decade behind the curve.
that's right on the money. I think that the 'big change' will come the day there is a linux distro out there that will have wine installed and functional to the point where it will run office 2003 out of the box. When that's achieved there will be a large amount of people in a position to switch.
All those people complaining about 'not being able to run their games' forget one thing: Computers were not designed to be game playing machines, they were designed as productivity tools. That the gaming market was able to flourish on the back of the roll out of the PC was a side effect, not the main cause. The spreadsheet was and is probably the biggest single 'invention' in the software world, Dan Bricklin did more for the 'gamers' by getting the PC adopted by the millions than any games programmer ever did.
On how many real life acts-of-terroris-in-the-making have been uncovered using cameras like this ? Iirc the only use they were in London was that *after* the bombings it was still possible to see what the bombers had looked like.
I guess the difference is that wikipedia contains a fairly large amount of factual errors and the Britannica much less. There seems to be a group of people that get off on vandalizing wikipedia. Personally I think they're jerks, but there are apparently trolls in any online system that gets large enough (including slashdot) that seem to be hellbent on spoiling other peoples enjoyment and hard work. It's annoying but it's a fact of online life. That said, wikipedia's breadth is nothing short of stunning and if you keep a half eye open and are vigilant you will likely do fine. As with any other source of information, never rely on one :)
It's sad but online projects now start with analyzing the abuse potential instead of seeing what you could do in a cooperative fashion. There are days that I find myself wishing for positively identified access to the internet, but that would definitely not be a solution, that's just my frustration speaking.
my apologies, oh one and only, I meant prescribed. It's just that this is
1) not my first language and
2) it was late.
that if the britannica is wrong it is by omission or human error, not by malice.
to every rule there are probably exceptions. I'm more thinking of the 'university vanity press' that produces relatively small runs of very pricey text books that get to be 'proscribed reading' for the students. Whether it's for ego or for profit is debatable, but it's a pretty bad practice in either case.
I'm strongly of the opinion that *any* research ought to be public, no restrictions whatsoever. nature publishes your paper, for 3 months they can charge for it, after that it automatically enters the public domain. After all none of those universities would be anywhere at all if not for the the public funding.
the word 'peer' means someone more or less at the same level of knowledge as you. Since wikipedia is not reviewed (or written) by people that have to have any qualifications you can not be sure that the reviewer knew as much of the subject matter as they would have to if they were to review a paper on the subject for some fancy dead-tree magazine.
I could review an article about anything on wikipedia and if I would be verbally skillful enough or had a 'clique' around me of supporting wikipedians (who may know even less about the subject) then I could probably get away with that.
So, no, wikipedia is not peer reviewed.
Funny thing: wikipedia is against the publishing of 'original research' so fanatically *because* they are not peer reviewed.
If they would be then it would be a fine place to publish such research. After all, whether something is original or not hardly matters, what matters is if it is based on solid science and if it is right and true.
Every now and then wikipedia is hugely embarrassed because some yokel that has been the wikipedia authority on some matter or other owns up to having read the 'for dummies' book on the subject and has been social engineering his own reputation.
that the source is 'second hand'. if they're halfway decent about it they will cite *their* sources, then you might as well go there and check up on it. If you've done that you are now in a position to cite the original article.
there are plenty of textbooks out there that only exist because the prof wants to be able to make you buy them to supplment their income. They might as well be blank pages and as far as the content is considered you would be no worse off if they were. It would be a good rule if professors were not able to make you buy their own textbook for a course.
drm light ? is that like divX ? ;)
hehe, thanks :)
I don't even have a TV anymore. Ever since the net 'boom' (say mid '95 or so) I've tried to make everything digital and to have only one 'outlet', my PC. There isn't enough material on the 'idiot box' that I find interesting enough to justify having one and files are so much more handy than physical media. I live in the Netherlands, where a 10 Mbit/s DSL line is about $50 / month, it's not cheap but I'm sure they can't be making much money on this particular one :)
simply distribute them digitally :)
;)
I'm sure that people won't mind downloading them and it will save some $.
feel free to report any abuse on http://ntlgl.com/
but how on EARTH is this news... in all the years that I've been on slashdot I can't recall a single posting of mine that actually got accepted (I stopped trying a short while ago), and just about every day there is at least one article that simply should not have made the cut. it seriously pisses me off, even though tfm says that there is no point in griping about such things because it's normal. I think that if it's 'normal' that something is wrong.
hehe, yes, of course ! sorry about that. /me shall eat humble pie, and play pink floyd for a week or two. Will that be enough atonement ?
dog catchers are not generally putting their lives in harms way. That's a comparatively easy thing to decide for someone else (if history is any guide) but is hard to decide for yourself because you may end up paying the ultimate price.
well, at least he didn't claim it as his own, unless you count 'anonymous' as a name now. (I realize there is someone out there with the 'anonymous' nick).
wsan't that crater on the darkside ? and if so how would a telescope get to look at it without orbiting the moon ?
I'm not sure if 'naive' is the right moniker to use. Not cynical enough maybe ? The charm of unmanned vehicles has nothing to do with shifts or logistics or payloads. It has everything to do with being able to rain down death on others with impunity, because you no longer have to defend loss of life to the 'homefront'. Note that the only solid number of casualties to come out of Iraq is the number of American servicemen / women that have died there. Casualties of the 'enemy' are not counted, much less reported ('we don't do bodycounts'). So, by mechanizing the airforce, the army and the marine forces war will be wageable by remote control. No more people that get upset because their own countrymen are at risk of losing life or limb. This means that future wars will be even easier to wage from a political point of view, because the 'cost' to the own base approaches 0.
I personally think that everybody that is in politics and that votes for a war would have to immediately join the frontline troops in that war or retract their votes. Substituting children would not be permitted, only if they think that the war is so important they are willing to *personally* risk their lives then I think their vote should be counted.