No, I don't think your code should say why- that is what the documentation is for. If you say why, then the code may be eroneous when somebody starts using your function for something else, or changes are made elsewhere.
I think it should clearly say what and to some extent how it is doing what it needs to. And it needs to be quite local, and include any significant gotchas, non obvious connections out to other places in the code, that sort of thing.
I'm a professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Washington University in Saint Louis
Please to meet you. I'm the pope.
This will never work.
Gee. Do you think? Funnily enough most people here know that this idea is just a cartoon sketch of an idea; a bit of brainstorming, but apparently you don't.
Its pure pop science, and the CalTech should revoke this guys tenure, if he has any.
You obviously want his job. Anyway enough wasting time with you, I've got eclesiastical matters to deal with.
That'd work, but only if there was some place for the heat to go. Can't get rid of heat, right, all you can do is move it around? Hard to do that when you're surrounded by friggin molten iron.
That's not quite true. Consider a refrigerator. It consists of an insulator layer and a heat pump. When heat leaks past the insulator it gets sucked back out and dumped.
So you could do the same thing in the earths core, use brick as the insulating layer, and run a refrigerator to pump the heat out, and increase the temperature of the molten iron just outside the insulator. Molten iron is a good conductor of heat, so convection would carry the heat away from the probe.
I must admit I'm more worried by the unbelievable pressure of hundreds of miles of rock, oh yeah, that and the nuclear device they'd need to start off the crack...
At university, I took a course in pascal, with an instructor that was fairly heavy on good style, adding comments, sensible names etc.
Anyway, I made a point of making almost completely no comments at all. Every single time I would get back 'more comments'. Funny thing was, I still got a 1st on the course overall.
The trick was, my code was incredibly well structured, all of the variable names actually did what they said- the code was extremely readable, it read like english.
However, now I'm older and probably dumber, and besides I have to work with other peoples crappy variable amd function names. I now find it is a really good idea to comment each paragraph of code. I find that putting in the comments mean I have to read the code through, and I find a lot of bugs that way (a sort of self code inspection.) So perhaps the instructor was right, but it took me maybe 10 years to get to this point; and I was working on up to 350,000 lines of code or so before it made a big enough difference.
Because adding operator overloading to a language is like giving the programmer the ability to change and mutate the language to her desires.
Yes. That's precisely why I want operator overloading.
In some situations you really do need to do that. I wrote a library once in C++ that dealt with a special sort of list operator, that was going to be used ubiquitously throughout the code. Using double less than operator to put data into the list was a shoe-in, and worked extremely well.
Frankly when you are reading C/C++ software, if you don't know what type a particular variable is, then you aren't reading closely enough. It's only confusing if you are a bad programmer. Admittedly there's plenty of those around, and everyone has off days occasionally. Still, C++ is remarkably intolerant of off-days, even if you never use operator overloading.
Yeah. China on the other hand... Allegedly- (according to a chinese guy I used to work with, although as far as I know he had know first hand knowledge), there are remote villages in China where they have been known to eat live monkey brains. They have this special table... trust me you don't want to know.
The thing with China is that in their history they've been through some agonizing famines- these guys will eat just about anything edible; and several things you or I just don't agree are edible;-)
In practice, that is often not an issue, provided you even out the wear. The flash memory manufacturers guarantee atleast 1 million erase cycles. But the write takes quite a while. So provided you have a reasonable quantity of memory (say 128 megabytes), you would never age the memory in 15 years.
a) we only have his word on it that he refused porn- and his word is worth a lot because he is a spammer (not!)
b) he may be well spoken, but if he was that intelligent he wouldn't have bragged about his spamming past
c) spamming is not a legitimate business; at most it might be legal, but it often isn't (for example he admitted that he didn't used 'ADV:' so he was breaking the law in many jurisdictions.)
d) what morality? He's a spammer.
e) what responsibility? He's a spammer.
Yeah right, so he promises he took people's name off the list if they asked. Big flipping deal. What idiot ever replies to spam? You're a real moron.
Come to think of it, you are supporting a spammer. You sure you're not a spammer yourself?
As much as we all hate it, ( I know I do, both at home and due to my position at work ) as long as its legal, it will continue to be a large part of net-life.
As much as we hate it, it often isn't legal, and it is still a large part of net-life.
The problem with the Verve was that they copied the Stones' song completely, slowing down the tempo a bit.
Um. No. The Verve recording took only 4 notes from the stones song, and none of the lyrics!
If you listen to it, there's 4 notes that start at the beginning and they continue to loop underneath for the entire song. That's the 4 notes that they stole. Actually they didn't steal, they told the Stones that they wanted to use those notes they said ok, and the Stones more or less reneged on the deal when they found out that they'd looped it right down the whole track; and more importantly because they could, demanded full rights (legally it's a derived work as soon as you copy a single note, more or less).
The Verve probably could have held out for atleast partial credit, but the Stones played hardball and apparently knew that the Verve couldn't release their album without the Stones permission for the track, so the Stones had them by the balls.
That's a trifle unfair, apparently 14 out of 16 of his tests have been successful, and he recently tested a very respectable large liquid fuelled rocket engine.
Whilst he did seem a bit naive when he started, he certainly seems to be learning, and like any of the groups trying to do this stuff, he may well succeed at not dying.
Pretty much agreed; although rewrites of systems can work well in some well-contained cases.
Generally, In coding (and life in general) problems fall into roughly two categories:
a) messes inherent in the problem domain
b) messes you caused whilst solving the problem in the way you did
Trouble is, most software engineers aren't real good at telling the difference between the two, and usually prescribe 'rewrites' for both of them. If the mess is type b) then you may be able to remove it, albeit often causing different (hopefully fewer) kinds of problems. If the mess is of type a) then it implies that the engineers have missed it; which nearly always leads to trouble in the long run...
If it's the original team that is involved, a rewrite might be a good idea, but usually it isn't the original team; and even if it is the original team there is a thing called 'second system syndrome' where the designers try to fix every, single, little problem in their first attempt; this usually ends up in a system too large and unwieldy to work well.
They got lucky here, the engines worked and they entered the atmosphere in so called "ballistic trajectory" (how can it be non-ballistic?)
Ballistic reentry is one that has no significant lift, only drag. For various reasons that results in losing more of the speed at lower altitude in the thick atmosphere, which makes the braking more intense.
By controlling the angle of the capsule the Soyuz can achieve some lift, and hence lose more speed at a slower rate at higher altitude, reducing the peak acceleration.
Well, according to the press release Max Faget was invited to the unveiling as a dignatory, as was Dennis Tito, but they didn't say anything about either being involved in the project.
Not necessarily. You've still got a chance to do the right thing with Bush Junior.;-)
Or you may think that spending $70 billion, when you're running a deficit, to remove weapons of mass destruction from a regime that doesn't appear to have had any (found yet anyway), is exercising good leadership. The choice is yours!
Well, I believe that they stated it to be a legal concern of some kind; like would they get sued for liability if John Carmack blew himself or someone else up with it.
But it may not be true. It's not impossible that they were lying; for example if NASA or one of NASA's contractors decided to stop buying stuff from FMC then FMC could lose much more than this amount of business.
Or it may be that their total supply of peroxide is only enough for military use, but not much more, and they want to keep some in reserve. In that case they would be expected to make an excuse.
Whatever the reason, they treated John pretty shabbily.
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I think it should clearly say what and to some extent how it is doing what it needs to. And it needs to be quite local, and include any significant gotchas, non obvious connections out to other places in the code, that sort of thing.
Please to meet you. I'm the pope.
This will never work.
Gee. Do you think? Funnily enough most people here know that this idea is just a cartoon sketch of an idea; a bit of brainstorming, but apparently you don't.
Its pure pop science, and the CalTech should revoke this guys tenure, if he has any.
You obviously want his job. Anyway enough wasting time with you, I've got eclesiastical matters to deal with.
That's not quite true. Consider a refrigerator. It consists of an insulator layer and a heat pump. When heat leaks past the insulator it gets sucked back out and dumped.
So you could do the same thing in the earths core, use brick as the insulating layer, and run a refrigerator to pump the heat out, and increase the temperature of the molten iron just outside the insulator. Molten iron is a good conductor of heat, so convection would carry the heat away from the probe.
I must admit I'm more worried by the unbelievable pressure of hundreds of miles of rock, oh yeah, that and the nuclear device they'd need to start off the crack...
Anyway, I made a point of making almost completely no comments at all. Every single time I would get back 'more comments'. Funny thing was, I still got a 1st on the course overall.
The trick was, my code was incredibly well structured, all of the variable names actually did what they said- the code was extremely readable, it read like english.
However, now I'm older and probably dumber, and besides I have to work with other peoples crappy variable amd function names. I now find it is a really good idea to comment each paragraph of code. I find that putting in the comments mean I have to read the code through, and I find a lot of bugs that way (a sort of self code inspection.) So perhaps the instructor was right, but it took me maybe 10 years to get to this point; and I was working on up to 350,000 lines of code or so before it made a big enough difference.
Yes. That's precisely why I want operator overloading.
In some situations you really do need to do that. I wrote a library once in C++ that dealt with a special sort of list operator, that was going to be used ubiquitously throughout the code. Using double less than operator to put data into the list was a shoe-in, and worked extremely well.
Frankly when you are reading C/C++ software, if you don't know what type a particular variable is, then you aren't reading closely enough. It's only confusing if you are a bad programmer. Admittedly there's plenty of those around, and everyone has off days occasionally. Still, C++ is remarkably intolerant of off-days, even if you never use operator overloading.
The thing with China is that in their history they've been through some agonizing famines- these guys will eat just about anything edible; and several things you or I just don't agree are edible ;-)
Actually, come to thing of it. Neither have I. ;-)
In practice, that is often not an issue, provided you even out the wear. The flash memory manufacturers guarantee atleast 1 million erase cycles. But the write takes quite a while. So provided you have a reasonable quantity of memory (say 128 megabytes), you would never age the memory in 15 years.
a) we only have his word on it that he refused porn- and his word is worth a lot because he is a spammer (not!)
b) he may be well spoken, but if he was that intelligent he wouldn't have bragged about his spamming past
c) spamming is not a legitimate business; at most it might be legal, but it often isn't (for example he admitted that he didn't used 'ADV:' so he was breaking the law in many jurisdictions.)
d) what morality? He's a spammer.
e) what responsibility? He's a spammer.
Yeah right, so he promises he took people's name off the list if they asked. Big flipping deal. What idiot ever replies to spam? You're a real moron.
Come to think of it, you are supporting a spammer. You sure you're not a spammer yourself?
As much as we all hate it, ( I know I do, both at home and due to my position at work ) as long as its legal, it will continue to be a large part of net-life.
As much as we hate it, it often isn't legal, and it is still a large part of net-life.
The micro_http server seems to have lasted better ;-)
Um. No. The Verve recording took only 4 notes from the stones song, and none of the lyrics!
If you listen to it, there's 4 notes that start at the beginning and they continue to loop underneath for the entire song. That's the 4 notes that they stole. Actually they didn't steal, they told the Stones that they wanted to use those notes they said ok, and the Stones more or less reneged on the deal when they found out that they'd looped it right down the whole track; and more importantly because they could, demanded full rights (legally it's a derived work as soon as you copy a single note, more or less).
The Verve probably could have held out for atleast partial credit, but the Stones played hardball and apparently knew that the Verve couldn't release their album without the Stones permission for the track, so the Stones had them by the balls.
Whilst he did seem a bit naive when he started, he certainly seems to be learning, and like any of the groups trying to do this stuff, he may well succeed at not dying.
Well, I was going to say, 'great view' or 'getting my astronaut wings' or 'exclusivity' or 'bragging rights' but how about:
zero-g sex?
:-)
Generally, In coding (and life in general) problems fall into roughly two categories:
a) messes inherent in the problem domain
b) messes you caused whilst solving the problem in the way you did
Trouble is, most software engineers aren't real good at telling the difference between the two, and usually prescribe 'rewrites' for both of them. If the mess is type b) then you may be able to remove it, albeit often causing different (hopefully fewer) kinds of problems. If the mess is of type a) then it implies that the engineers have missed it; which nearly always leads to trouble in the long run...
If it's the original team that is involved, a rewrite might be a good idea, but usually it isn't the original team; and even if it is the original team there is a thing called 'second system syndrome' where the designers try to fix every, single, little problem in their first attempt; this usually ends up in a system too large and unwieldy to work well.
If only they would stop forging the return addresses.
Well, I did also say line of sight.
a) you have large-enough antennas at each end
or: b) you don't have any equivalent of the FCC hassling you if you go slightly above the power limits
Distances of 70+km have been achieved.
Ballistic reentry is one that has no significant lift, only drag. For various reasons that results in losing more of the speed at lower altitude in the thick atmosphere, which makes the braking more intense.
By controlling the angle of the capsule the Soyuz can achieve some lift, and hence lose more speed at a slower rate at higher altitude, reducing the peak acceleration.
Um. No, not unless bits of the earth go flying off.
Actually, since this is the UK, they're straight teeth, since children get free dentistry.
Well, according to the press release Max Faget was invited to the unveiling as a dignatory, as was Dennis Tito, but they didn't say anything about either being involved in the project.
Actually, in a fairly real sense, it's 3 craft. Both stuck together, each on their own.
The question is whether all three craft will work as designed. It looks good though.
Not necessarily. You've still got a chance to do the right thing with Bush Junior. ;-)
Or you may think that spending $70 billion, when you're running a deficit, to remove weapons of mass destruction from a regime that doesn't appear to have had any (found yet anyway), is exercising good leadership. The choice is yours!
The answer is simple. We need to make sure that everybody gets high levels of lead! They're clearly deficient in lead!
Well, I believe that they stated it to be a legal concern of some kind; like would they get sued for liability if John Carmack blew himself or someone else up with it.
But it may not be true. It's not impossible that they were lying; for example if NASA or one of NASA's contractors decided to stop buying stuff from FMC then FMC could lose much more than this amount of business.
Or it may be that their total supply of peroxide is only enough for military use, but not much more, and they want to keep some in reserve. In that case they would be expected to make an excuse.
Whatever the reason, they treated John pretty shabbily.