another point. During Jimmy Carter's first year in state office, he sponsored a bill to prevent people from voting if they were already dead.
Seems like a shoe-in for a junior legislator.
He ended up compromising. "I know Bubba would never vote for that jerk." The final law stated you couldn't vote if you'd been dead more than 3 years.
I was ordered to write bad documentation. I told them there is no need to print a page showing what was on the screen and writing instructions down as to w hat was supposed to be entered in the Name and Address fields. imo, if you don't already know, you probably aren't going to read what I wrote anyway. I wanted to write answers to normal questions and the bugs that had already been found by testers but that got the kibosh.
Most criminals are really stupid and they will brag and have disagreements and turn each other in if given an opportunity. Elmore Leonard (paraphrased)
Gaia is a thing (read the book by James Lovelock). Gaia is a -result- of complexity.
Look at the chemical operations occurring in a single cell. A cell is the -result- of a soup of chemical reactions. The cell does not initiate basic chemistry anymore than Gaia can create a new species. When a new species is created, it is within and because of all the other complexities of Gaia.
Same with games (and anything). Add a few non-dependent rulesets and suddenly there is an amazing complexity.
If gaia is too conceptual for you, then cogitate on the differences between Rational and Irrational numbers, something independent of reality.
Like many of the 'findings' out of the Santa Fe Institute, this is not a discovery; it is merely an articulation of complexity theory. (Note: 1/t is the inverse of the basic Gaussian Distribution (basic statistics) which is why it is found at all unstable places of reality the same way the bell curve is found at stable ones).
If you want to explain basic complexity, talk about the differences between Rational and Irrational, or the differences between Integers and Fractions.
If you want to talk about games, start by reading The Art of Game Design.
I work with all developers (including the boss but she's over the hill and clueless now).
We each have our own office with a door that closes but the doors are generally open
When my clueless boss walks into my office, she starts talking immediately as if I'm listening.
When the rest of us walk into someone's office, there are two options for what the other person is doing
1. typing furiously on the keyboard or
2. staring out the window.
If the dev is staring out the window, I come back later not wanting to interrupt deep thought.
When something becomes popular enough to make big bucks, big money men become interested.
Blandness does NOT occur because of conspiracy. Blandness occurs because of the definition of popularity. The MOST POPULAR in an already existing market is by definition the lowest common denominator. In a new market or new presentation, then things get stirred up.
None of the money men will pick a dark horse such as O Brother Where Art Thou? sound track. They aren't venture capitalists.
The big money will invest in Taylor Swift's country and Beyonce's pop and get a reasonable return. The innovation occurs in the back alleys as usual, the various production companies trying to get a pilot on television and the independent film producers and the random garage bands being formed irregularly.
Bluegrass, Rock and the Hula Hoop are not obvious winners before release.
In any large organization, there are levels of bureaucracy. To get a new process or product approved, you usually need to go thru 7 or 8 layers.
SUCCESS requires getting 7 or 8 Yes answers in a row.
Failure means only one of those layers of bureaucratic managers has to say No.
mod the parent up.
Code you can read the history of right there in front of you is not the same as code hidden someplace in the version control system.
Many times the 'bug' is not a programming error; it is more of a user-desired update that didn't quite work for some reason. Having that reason right there in the code saves the developer a lot of time trying to re-implement it 18 months later when some new manager comes on board.
For a loser programmer, suggesting refactoring can backfire. We told one gal (who was finally fired after waaaay too long) to use a library file (in Perl) for the common routines for the reports she was 'writing' (cutting and pasting). The next day, instead of 20 files in our report directory, we had 40, a new.lib for every.pl!?! We refused to make any more suggestions.
I'm an ancient coder still using Perl (at work) but one of the things I took immediate advantage of was when we were freed to use descriptive variable and function names. Code Complete, the best book ever on coding, says well-named stuff makes code self-documenting.
I remember debugging some C code a long time ago in DOS (8.3 filename limit) and I discovered the compiler had a 5-character limit on distinct variable names. You didn't get an error but the compiler confused all the variables that were not distinct in the first 5 characters!?!
some code needs to be maintained and some doesn't.
speed of coding vs maintainability vs robustness are always in a tradeoff in a professional programmer's mind.
If this is a simple conversion routine that won't be used again, git her done..If robustness is important, spend some time thinking about the over-all design. If you have snarky developers with some kind of religious affiliation to a language or operating system, don't waste a lot of time arguing (assuming you want to win an argument (you know facts, logic, that jazz). If you just like arguing, then there is no one better to fool with;-)
I've never heard the term lily-padding but I've worked with those sorts of folks. They have to be removed at least from the team if not the company, sidelined into solo projects that don't require maintenance (because they never completely work in the first place;-) A development team needs cohesion, not necessarily conformity. I work with 3 other coders and we debug each others code when needed and over the last 7 years have mixed and matched approaches into something that is a lot more standard than any possible set of standard coding practices written up!?!
It happened organically. If you debug your own code two years later, you should have learned a lot (if you've been coding that time) whether on your own or working in a team. There are folks tho who do have what they call 20 years of the same 1-year experience, never learning anything after the first program./* that does not sound like the OPs issue tho*/
There are 3 types of gun-owners imo.
1. Hunters. I am not worried about them. I've confronted armed hunters in the woods. They have actually killed and eaten living things and understand death.
2. Video-gamers. They point and click and pretend-kill things. I am not worried about them even if they own a gun because real life shooting is not anything like gaming. (I suspect most don't own a gun at all which is why I don't count them in this list)
3. Sport shooters who frequent ranges. These assholes scare the shit out of me. They have never killed anything at all so aren't actually familiar with the destructive capability of their weapon. In addition, they are intimately trained in its use and they _like_ to shoot.
4. Scared citizens who buy a gun for protection. These guys aren't too bad but do cause most of the gun destruction in the US, either simply by having a gun int he house to make it easy for suicide and accident or by having it in reach of some angry guy whose girlfriend just broke up with him and now he's gonna make her pay along with anyone else who happens to be in the vicinity.
As far as the NRA proposal, if we suggested putting an armed guard at every single school in Afghanistan, would that be a sign we are winning the war there or losing it?
Capitalism is not Free Market either. A free market forces producers and businesses to pass profits along to consumers in the form of lower costs. A free market would tell Monsanto to advertise their food as genetically-modified instead of hide it. That would force Monsanto to sell the GM food for cheaper. Pass the profits to the consumer. Capitalism just means someone besides the 1st estate (church) and 2nd estate (government) gets to keep large sums of money in their own hands.
The reason folks still use paper is because it actually works for their needs. (I am a software analyst so the first thing I do is look at the current processes).
For example, write down some notes on that 25 page pdf you're reading then find them next week.
Test it against a printout with the same notes written on the paper. Computer word search vs flipping pages. Test it yourself.
Paper works in bright sunlight, too. And I can lay out 10 sheets of paper to look at simultaneously or unroll a giant chart and take in the whole thing at once. I can't do anything nearly as -quick- with a laptop screen.
In many situations and processes, using paper is _faster_ than electronics. We don't use electronics for fun or for ideology, we use them because they are faster than what we used before. And when electronics is not faster, regular people figure that out a lot quicker than analysts working with pure theory (which was probably written on paper because mathematical equations aren't that ez to write with electronics either)..
With the quick appearance of algae on Earth, it makes it seems as if basic life as cyanobacteria evolves quickly from chemicals or else evolved slowly some other place but survives the depths of space (which is possible).
However, panspermia doesn't explain multi-cellular life or backbones, something that didn't happen until just recently in the timescale, less than 500 million years. Bacterial life may arise almost spontaneously across the galaxy but advanced life obviously takes more doing. We aren't even off the planet yet. (Off the planet means establishing a self-sustaining colony someplace else).
Too many conspiracy theorists here and no can see the forest.
I have three wires into my house, electricity, cable TV, and phone landline, all 'natural monopolies (price Last Mile buildout before complaining about monopolies).
I can get internet thru two of the wires and they compete with each other for my business. There is supposedly a way to use electric wire for networking but nothing is commercially available. When it is, there will be 3 companies competing.
1. How close do I have to be to a wireless provider for decent speed? (I assume cell-phone coverage)
2. When everybody and his brother is now using the same wireless spectrum how fast is the speed? (There is a reason cable becomes slower when more people use it).
The reason traffic on the interstate slows down during rush hour is not because the contractor was skimming profits or was married to the mayor's sister.
That isn't a fix. The shill lady who writes 5 reviews/day for Amazon was interviewed publicly. One of the main problems police have with a noteworthy crime is dealing with all the folks who confess falsely. Some people like notoriety and some people are too stupid to be ashamed of their stupidity.
You can automatically judge reviewers of large numbers of book by determining how well their reviews fall into a normal distribution.
I disagree. For myself, I tend to only spend time writing reviews on books I like. Lukewarm doesn't get me moving. OTOH, if I really hate the book, I might write a review. so my distribution would be 20/0/0/30/50 and I think that would be a distribution of what a 'normal, unpaid volunteer reviewer' would post.
A well-written review is _exactly_ that and they are easy to sift from the chaff. I've read wonderful reviews of hilarious movies that make it obvious I wouldn't like the movie. And I've read other movie reviews where the reviewer didn't personally like the flick but because he was being paid, he still wrote an in-depth one that suggested it might be the kind of movie I'd like despite the trailers (which the reviewer was also ticked off about because they didn't accurately reflect the movie).
The fix might be as easy as having the ability to see all reviews by each reviewer.
Another option might be having a Netflix-like thing that only works for reviewers but that gives you recommendations from other reviewers. Some rewards like that might increase the quality of the writing.
I read about the one lady who gave all those good reviews and she _is_ a hack even if she does read 5 books/day like her husband says. She isn't _reading_
Nevertheless, if just random people wrote reviews, I still suspect most of them would be in the 4/5 range. I've written reviews on several sites. I only do that for books I like. Why even waste the time for books I don't like?
I'm not defending Amazon, just managing expectations of real life reviewing.
IR #4 is the genetics revolution. Free information over the web in enlightening, but it is only revolutionary when it gets transferred into bits--atoms that comprise some kind of hardware or physical actions by a human.
Design a system so driverless cars, run by PROGRAMMERS, don't take advantage of the system.
Uhhhhhh... has anyone ever heard of SPAM or computer viruses?
Why won't people try to take advantage of any new system?
Slashdot Mirror
another point. During Jimmy Carter's first year in state office, he sponsored a bill to prevent people from voting if they were already dead.
Seems like a shoe-in for a junior legislator.
He ended up compromising. "I know Bubba would never vote for that jerk." The final law stated you couldn't vote if you'd been dead more than 3 years.
I was ordered to write bad documentation. I told them there is no need to print a page showing what was on the screen and writing instructions down as to w hat was supposed to be entered in the Name and Address fields. imo, if you don't already know, you probably aren't going to read what I wrote anyway. I wanted to write answers to normal questions and the bugs that had already been found by testers but that got the kibosh.
Most criminals are really stupid and they will brag and have disagreements and turn each other in if given an opportunity. Elmore Leonard (paraphrased)
Gaia is a thing (read the book by James Lovelock). Gaia is a -result- of complexity.
Look at the chemical operations occurring in a single cell. A cell is the -result- of a soup of chemical reactions. The cell does not initiate basic chemistry anymore than Gaia can create a new species. When a new species is created, it is within and because of all the other complexities of Gaia.
Same with games (and anything). Add a few non-dependent rulesets and suddenly there is an amazing complexity.
If gaia is too conceptual for you, then cogitate on the differences between Rational and Irrational numbers, something independent of reality.
Like many of the 'findings' out of the Santa Fe Institute, this is not a discovery; it is merely an articulation of complexity theory. (Note: 1/t is the inverse of the basic Gaussian Distribution (basic statistics) which is why it is found at all unstable places of reality the same way the bell curve is found at stable ones).
If you want to explain basic complexity, talk about the differences between Rational and Irrational, or the differences between Integers and Fractions.
If you want to talk about games, start by reading The Art of Game Design.
I work with all developers (including the boss but she's over the hill and clueless now).
We each have our own office with a door that closes but the doors are generally open
When my clueless boss walks into my office, she starts talking immediately as if I'm listening.
When the rest of us walk into someone's office, there are two options for what the other person is doing
1. typing furiously on the keyboard or
2. staring out the window.
If the dev is staring out the window, I come back later not wanting to interrupt deep thought.
When something becomes popular enough to make big bucks, big money men become interested.
Blandness does NOT occur because of conspiracy. Blandness occurs because of the definition of popularity. The MOST POPULAR in an already existing market is by definition the lowest common denominator. In a new market or new presentation, then things get stirred up.
None of the money men will pick a dark horse such as O Brother Where Art Thou? sound track. They aren't venture capitalists.
The big money will invest in Taylor Swift's country and Beyonce's pop and get a reasonable return. The innovation occurs in the back alleys as usual, the various production companies trying to get a pilot on television and the independent film producers and the random garage bands being formed irregularly.
Bluegrass, Rock and the Hula Hoop are not obvious winners before release.
In any large organization, there are levels of bureaucracy. To get a new process or product approved, you usually need to go thru 7 or 8 layers.
SUCCESS requires getting 7 or 8 Yes answers in a row.
Failure means only one of those layers of bureaucratic managers has to say No.
mod the parent up.
Code you can read the history of right there in front of you is not the same as code hidden someplace in the version control system.
Many times the 'bug' is not a programming error; it is more of a user-desired update that didn't quite work for some reason. Having that reason right there in the code saves the developer a lot of time trying to re-implement it 18 months later when some new manager comes on board.
Just wait until TSA is spotted providing 'security' at a gun show.
For a loser programmer, suggesting refactoring can backfire. We told one gal (who was finally fired after waaaay too long) to use a library file (in Perl) for the common routines for the reports she was 'writing' (cutting and pasting). The next day, instead of 20 files in our report directory, we had 40, a new .lib for every .pl!?!
We refused to make any more suggestions.
I'm an ancient coder still using Perl (at work) but one of the things I took immediate advantage of was when we were freed to use descriptive variable and function names. Code Complete, the best book ever on coding, says well-named stuff makes code self-documenting.
I remember debugging some C code a long time ago in DOS (8.3 filename limit) and I discovered the compiler had a 5-character limit on distinct variable names. You didn't get an error but the compiler confused all the variables that were not distinct in the first 5 characters!?!
some code needs to be maintained and some doesn't.
;-)
speed of coding vs maintainability vs robustness are always in a tradeoff in a professional programmer's mind.
If this is a simple conversion routine that won't be used again, git her done..If robustness is important, spend some time thinking about the over-all design. If you have snarky developers with some kind of religious affiliation to a language or operating system, don't waste a lot of time arguing (assuming you want to win an argument (you know facts, logic, that jazz). If you just like arguing, then there is no one better to fool with
I've never heard the term lily-padding but I've worked with those sorts of folks. They have to be removed at least from the team if not the company, sidelined into solo projects that don't require maintenance (because they never completely work in the first place ;-) A development team needs cohesion, not necessarily conformity. I work with 3 other coders and we debug each others code when needed and over the last 7 years have mixed and matched approaches into something that is a lot more standard than any possible set of standard coding practices written up!?!
/* that does not sound like the OPs issue tho*/
It happened organically. If you debug your own code two years later, you should have learned a lot (if you've been coding that time) whether on your own or working in a team. There are folks tho who do have what they call 20 years of the same 1-year experience, never learning anything after the first program.
There are 3 types of gun-owners imo.
1. Hunters. I am not worried about them. I've confronted armed hunters in the woods. They have actually killed and eaten living things and understand death.
2. Video-gamers. They point and click and pretend-kill things. I am not worried about them even if they own a gun because real life shooting is not anything like gaming. (I suspect most don't own a gun at all which is why I don't count them in this list)
3. Sport shooters who frequent ranges. These assholes scare the shit out of me. They have never killed anything at all so aren't actually familiar with the destructive capability of their weapon. In addition, they are intimately trained in its use and they _like_ to shoot.
4. Scared citizens who buy a gun for protection. These guys aren't too bad but do cause most of the gun destruction in the US, either simply by having a gun int he house to make it easy for suicide and accident or by having it in reach of some angry guy whose girlfriend just broke up with him and now he's gonna make her pay along with anyone else who happens to be in the vicinity.
As far as the NRA proposal, if we suggested putting an armed guard at every single school in Afghanistan, would that be a sign we are winning the war there or losing it?
Capitalism is not Free Market either. A free market forces producers and businesses to pass profits along to consumers in the form of lower costs. A free market would tell Monsanto to advertise their food as genetically-modified instead of hide it. That would force Monsanto to sell the GM food for cheaper. Pass the profits to the consumer. Capitalism just means someone besides the 1st estate (church) and 2nd estate (government) gets to keep large sums of money in their own hands.
The reason folks still use paper is because it actually works for their needs. (I am a software analyst so the first thing I do is look at the current processes).
For example, write down some notes on that 25 page pdf you're reading then find them next week.
Test it against a printout with the same notes written on the paper. Computer word search vs flipping pages. Test it yourself.
Paper works in bright sunlight, too. And I can lay out 10 sheets of paper to look at simultaneously or unroll a giant chart and take in the whole thing at once. I can't do anything nearly as -quick- with a laptop screen.
In many situations and processes, using paper is _faster_ than electronics. We don't use electronics for fun or for ideology, we use them because they are faster than what we used before. And when electronics is not faster, regular people figure that out a lot quicker than analysts working with pure theory (which was probably written on paper because mathematical equations aren't that ez to write with electronics either)..
With the quick appearance of algae on Earth, it makes it seems as if basic life as cyanobacteria evolves quickly from chemicals or else evolved slowly some other place but survives the depths of space (which is possible).
However, panspermia doesn't explain multi-cellular life or backbones, something that didn't happen until just recently in the timescale, less than 500 million years. Bacterial life may arise almost spontaneously across the galaxy but advanced life obviously takes more doing. We aren't even off the planet yet. (Off the planet means establishing a self-sustaining colony someplace else).
Too many conspiracy theorists here and no can see the forest.
I have three wires into my house, electricity, cable TV, and phone landline, all 'natural monopolies (price Last Mile buildout before complaining about monopolies).
I can get internet thru two of the wires and they compete with each other for my business. There is supposedly a way to use electric wire for networking but nothing is commercially available. When it is, there will be 3 companies competing.
1. How close do I have to be to a wireless provider for decent speed? (I assume cell-phone coverage)
2. When everybody and his brother is now using the same wireless spectrum how fast is the speed? (There is a reason cable becomes slower when more people use it).
The reason traffic on the interstate slows down during rush hour is not because the contractor was skimming profits or was married to the mayor's sister.
That isn't a fix. The shill lady who writes 5 reviews/day for Amazon was interviewed publicly. One of the main problems police have with a noteworthy crime is dealing with all the folks who confess falsely. Some people like notoriety and some people are too stupid to be ashamed of their stupidity.
You can automatically judge reviewers of large numbers of book by determining how well their reviews fall into a normal distribution.
I disagree. For myself, I tend to only spend time writing reviews on books I like. Lukewarm doesn't get me moving. OTOH, if I really hate the book, I might write a review. so my distribution would be 20/0/0/30/50 and I think that would be a distribution of what a 'normal, unpaid volunteer reviewer' would post.
A well-written review is _exactly_ that and they are easy to sift from the chaff. I've read wonderful reviews of hilarious movies that make it obvious I wouldn't like the movie. And I've read other movie reviews where the reviewer didn't personally like the flick but because he was being paid, he still wrote an in-depth one that suggested it might be the kind of movie I'd like despite the trailers (which the reviewer was also ticked off about because they didn't accurately reflect the movie).
The fix might be as easy as having the ability to see all reviews by each reviewer.
Another option might be having a Netflix-like thing that only works for reviewers but that gives you recommendations from other reviewers. Some rewards like that might increase the quality of the writing.
This problem is easy to solve! We just need meta-meta-reviews!
Verisign will take care of that for us ;-)
I read about the one lady who gave all those good reviews and she _is_ a hack even if she does read 5 books/day like her husband says. She isn't _reading_
Nevertheless, if just random people wrote reviews, I still suspect most of them would be in the 4/5 range. I've written reviews on several sites. I only do that for books I like. Why even waste the time for books I don't like?
I'm not defending Amazon, just managing expectations of real life reviewing.
IR #4 is the genetics revolution. Free information over the web in enlightening, but it is only revolutionary when it gets transferred into bits--atoms that comprise some kind of hardware or physical actions by a human.
Design a system so driverless cars, run by PROGRAMMERS, don't take advantage of the system.
Uhhhhhh... has anyone ever heard of SPAM or computer viruses?
Why won't people try to take advantage of any new system?