I really don't believe that static typing is something that helps you with large programs.
I certainly see the value of strong static typing for certain jobs, but plumbing modules together into a large system isn't it.
Indeed, I like static typing for little fiddly components, and something more dynamic for the broad brush strokes.
For example, I recently put wrote an application in Groovy. I believe Groovy saved me days of work, and oodles of bugs, compared to writing it in Java. But, one core part required some encryption and some bit twiddling. Having the compiler help me with those fiddly bits was useful.
I'm not a physicist, but I'm given to understand that it's a valid way to look at the universe -- so say something is happening "now" when "now" is the earliest you could detect it given the speed of light.
Python is a nice language, but I'm not sure how it scales to tens of millions of lines of code? Java with its mature tools scales really well. It's not hard to maintain and add new features.
This would make more sense if you could mention some features of Java, pertaining to large codebases, that Python doesn't have.
It seems to me that whether you're using Java or Python, or anything else with a module mechanism, you write modules of a manageable size, and have them import one another.
I enjoy saying fairly shocking things; it relies on the person I'm talking to knowing me well enough to realise that I'm saying them in jest, and don't really mean them.
So I would never behave that way on a first date, or in an email introduction to a new person.
Of course, "works" is somewhat hazily defined. What does "works" mean?
- Your message gets a response?
- Your message eventually results in a date?
- Your message eventually results in sex?
- Your message eventually results in a monogamous relationship?
- Your message eventually results in marriage?
- Other?
OK Cupid's stats seems to be all about the first one -- which admittedly is an important first step towards any of the others. But how many of those responses are negative ones, or ones that will put you off continuing the conversation? Perhaps for some of those, it would be more of a win not to have had a response at all?
just because someone's religious, doesn't mean you should flat out ignore them as a prospective partner in crime, which doesn't pay
I'll tell you now, I don't think I could manage a serious relationship with someone who was so religious that they felt the need to mention it in their dating profile / opening message. I just get the feeling that over the months and years, they'd get resentful of me commenting that it's all bollocks. Or, they'd spend their life with the unhappy knowledge that the man they loved was going to suffer eternal damnation...
Similarly, I don't think I could manage a serious relationship with a very right wing person. Some people enjoy arguing with their partner. I don't.
As someone in a relationship, I cannot see why people would want to go through all the nagging, barking madness, and second guessing that a relationship brings, not when you have a lovely computer and/or cats to spend your time with instead.
Non-sequiturs seem to be rife when religious people talk about this kind of thing.
An acquaintance the other day, apparently parroting his minister, jumped straight from the subject of homosexuality, to that of paedophilia, as if they were inherently related.
According to Karen Armstrong's book "The Case For God", taking religious stories literally is a pretty new development. She reckons that right back into prehistory, people understood that creation myths were just that -- myths. Stories with a point; something to teach us about how to live our lives, but still just stories. This is why the stories were so malleable, or why the same culture could have more than one, contradictory, creation story on the go at once.
She reckons that was true of mainstream Christianity for most of its lifetime; literal readings being a 19th-20th century thing.
Am sorry but what is that suppose to mean "a foam missile counter-attack?!"
Er, what's difficult about that?
You know what foam is. You know what a missile is. You can probably imagine what a "foam missile" is, and if you've been to a toy shop in the last 20 years, you've seen one. So that bit's easy.
Now then. "Counter-attack". Is that the difficult bit? The commit that broke the build is the "attack". Launching the foam missiles at the culprit is the "counter-attack".
I remember friends picking PhD title by using a simple Combination function on the set {statistical, genetic algorithm, bayesian, theoretical, neural network, logic, reasoning, inductive, design, probabilistic, integrating, non-linear, optimization...} Is life totally meaningless now?
All those words have fairly precise meanings. I do hope your friends failed their PhD if their thesis didn't match the words in the title.
Yeah, it means something gets committed to the master branch, which either prevents compilation, breaks a unit test, or breaks an integration test.
It's serious because the rest of your team is relying on that master branch being good, so they can test their own changes against it.
In theory it should almost never happen, for the reasons you're hinting at; you don't merge into the branch until you've run unit tests elsewhere.
In practice, real life gets in the way. Your unit tests weren't complete, or made some dud assumption about an interface, or whatever. CI builds your code, runs tests, alerts everyone that something's broken. You fix it. Everything's back on track.
The lava lamps / etc. are just a way to get some (hopefully good natured) taboo around merging code that breaks the build. It should motivate developers to be more careful with their tests before committing/merging.
We only ever saw this nonsense at places made up of fools.
A great deal of the agile stuff has actually been tested -- as in, measuring the number of production defects before and after adopting agile practices.
CI works. Information radiators work. (That is, anything that shoves vital info like "the build is broken" at people with no opt-out).
This particular information radiator is a bit daft, but it doesn't seem like it took much effort, and someone's enjoyed themselves, so where's the harm?
I'm somewhat oblivious to what the world thinks about Rails. It seems like a good fit for certain types of web site, to me. I don't know where you're perceiving this terrible reputation NoSQL has. Where I'm sitting, I perceive a huge sigh of relief from people who don't have to work with Oracle DB any more.
I don't think that's naive at all. You could build an exact replica of your current US workplace in, say, Bombay. Same desks, same air con, same standard of canteen, same working hours, same work culture -- you might even be able to make it better.
You'd pay lower wages -- to reflect the cheaper cost of living. Rent would be cheaper. Food would be cheaper. Maintenance would be cheaper.
Treating staff badly is far from the only source of savings.
Of course, some of the savings trickle up from exploitation lower down the chain. For example your office cleaner is probably cheap because there are slum-dwellers willing to do the work.
An impartial observer does not care by definition, thus your question is a red herring.
An impartial observer can care, but is not biased towards a particular party. For an example, a football referee cares that both teams get treated fairly, but doesn't consider a Chelsea goal more or less desirable than an Arsenal goal.
You think the loss of an American job is undesirable, because, presumably, you're American or have a soft spot for Americans.
Someone with no partiality towards either nation would see that if an American loses their job and a Malaysian (say) gains one, that's a net change in global employment figures of zero.
Of course, there are hundreds of other factors to take into consideration -- the effect of the move on the size of the global economy, the availability of alternative employment for each individual, the nature of unemployed life in each place, working conditions in each facility -- I'm scratching the surface.
Its an end run around feel good environmental and labor relations laws and it's inherently racist. We got rid of all the factory workers jobs and their benefits and "improved" working conditions. Now its time to race the white collar guys to the bottom. Its intellectually dishonest to prattle on about safe and humane working and living conditions being a human right, unless you are not an American, in which case you deserve to sit in the back of the bus with the other undesirables..
That assumes that the working conditions are worse in whatever foreign workplace is doing the work. Now, often that will be the case. But it's certainly plausible that a US company could source work from a foreign workplace where conditions are as good as the equivalent American workplace, yet cheaper.
In addition, there's the question of what those foreign workers' conditions would be like if they were not producing output to be consumed in richer countries. Not better, I suspect.
Tariffs. Add the difference in costs between doing business in China vs doing business in USA to imports.
Uh-huh. American companies outsourcing abroad means fewer US jobs. So far so good.
More questions: - Why would an impartial observer care one jot about that? - For someone who did think it was an undesirable state of affairs, what can be done about it?
If you forbid US companies from outsourcing abroad -- they simply take their entire operation abroad, and cease to be US companies. If you enforce protectionist import/export restrictions -- other countries respond in kind.
You seem to be overlooking the exact problem that PKI aims to solve.
Let's say you and I want to communicate securely. I need your public key. How do you get it to me? Sure, it's a public key, so it's safe to transmit it in the clear. But by the time I get it, how do I know it's really your key, and not some snooper's? Sure, there are ways around it -- you could phone me, somehow convince me of your identity, and read out a hash of the key -- but that doesn't scale if I'm communicating with dozens, or thousands of correspondents, and you don't want to call everyone you want to communicate with, to set up a key relationship.
What we need, is some way of asking someone we trust "hey, this claims to be John Smith's public key. Is that true?". Guess what. That's a CA.
The problems are:
- CAs that basically aren't trustworthy
- That the top-down hierarchy of trust is too rigid for some people's tastes, for certain applications.
Using WebSockets, you can implement pretty much as efficient an instant messenger as is possible in this firewalled age.
It's true that in the past, making a web page look like a native app has involved ugly hacks. HTML5 and related technologies remove the obstacles that make those hacks necessary.
Slashdot Mirror
I really don't believe that static typing is something that helps you with large programs.
I certainly see the value of strong static typing for certain jobs, but plumbing modules together into a large system isn't it.
Indeed, I like static typing for little fiddly components, and something more dynamic for the broad brush strokes.
For example, I recently put wrote an application in Groovy. I believe Groovy saved me days of work, and oodles of bugs, compared to writing it in Java. But, one core part required some encryption and some bit twiddling. Having the compiler help me with those fiddly bits was useful.
I just love how the choice of music, the clicks and whirrs, the way the footbots light up, all conspire to reinforce the sense of creeping dread.
I'm not a physicist, but I'm given to understand that it's a valid way to look at the universe -- so say something is happening "now" when "now" is the earliest you could detect it given the speed of light.
Very little of your time spent learning Java will go to waste.
1. It's a very marketable language, and looks good on your CV even if you don't end up using it
2. Most of the concepts are transferable
'Effective Java' is a good book. A lot of the advice applies to every OO language.
Python is a nice language, but I'm not sure how it scales to tens of millions of lines of code? Java with its mature tools scales really well. It's not hard to maintain and add new features.
This would make more sense if you could mention some features of Java, pertaining to large codebases, that Python doesn't have.
It seems to me that whether you're using Java or Python, or anything else with a module mechanism, you write modules of a manageable size, and have them import one another.
I enjoy saying fairly shocking things; it relies on the person I'm talking to knowing me well enough to realise that I'm saying them in jest, and don't really mean them.
So I would never behave that way on a first date, or in an email introduction to a new person.
3rd date, maybe :)
Besides, trolling for sex in a place that advertises relationships isn't very honest.
From what I've been told, OK Cupid is very much used by people of both genders, looking for low commitment hook-ups.
Though not exclusively -- a friend of mine married someone he met on OK Cupid.
Of course, "works" is somewhat hazily defined. What does "works" mean?
- Your message gets a response?
- Your message eventually results in a date?
- Your message eventually results in sex?
- Your message eventually results in a monogamous relationship?
- Your message eventually results in marriage?
- Other?
OK Cupid's stats seems to be all about the first one -- which admittedly is an important first step towards any of the others. But how many of those responses are negative ones, or ones that will put you off continuing the conversation? Perhaps for some of those, it would be more of a win not to have had a response at all?
just because someone's religious, doesn't mean you should flat out ignore them as a prospective partner in crime, which doesn't pay
I'll tell you now, I don't think I could manage a serious relationship with someone who was so religious that they felt the need to mention it in their dating profile / opening message. I just get the feeling that over the months and years, they'd get resentful of me commenting that it's all bollocks. Or, they'd spend their life with the unhappy knowledge that the man they loved was going to suffer eternal damnation...
Similarly, I don't think I could manage a serious relationship with a very right wing person. Some people enjoy arguing with their partner. I don't.
.. but the OKCupid stats can't tell you about other dating sites.
As someone in a relationship, I cannot see why people would want to go through all the nagging, barking madness, and second guessing that a relationship brings, not when you have a lovely computer and/or cats to spend your time with instead.
So why are you still in the relationship?
Non-sequiturs seem to be rife when religious people talk about this kind of thing.
An acquaintance the other day, apparently parroting his minister, jumped straight from the subject of homosexuality, to that of paedophilia, as if they were inherently related.
Mount point: /usr
- in UNIX:
- in Windows: C:
- although you can mount volumes at arbitrary mount points in Windows too if you want to: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc938934.aspx
Block device identifier: /dev/sda1
- in UNIX:
- in Windows: er, can't find an example right now. I have seen it on boot logs when booting's broken.
According to Karen Armstrong's book "The Case For God", taking religious stories literally is a pretty new development. She reckons that right back into prehistory, people understood that creation myths were just that -- myths. Stories with a point; something to teach us about how to live our lives, but still just stories. This is why the stories were so malleable, or why the same culture could have more than one, contradictory, creation story on the go at once.
She reckons that was true of mainstream Christianity for most of its lifetime; literal readings being a 19th-20th century thing.
Am sorry but what is that suppose to mean "a foam missile counter-attack?!"
Er, what's difficult about that?
You know what foam is. You know what a missile is. You can probably imagine what a "foam missile" is, and if you've been to a toy shop in the last 20 years, you've seen one. So that bit's easy.
Now then. "Counter-attack". Is that the difficult bit? The commit that broke the build is the "attack". Launching the foam missiles at the culprit is the "counter-attack".
I remember friends picking PhD title by using a simple Combination function on the set {statistical, genetic algorithm, bayesian, theoretical, neural network, logic, reasoning, inductive, design, probabilistic, integrating, non-linear, optimization ...} Is life totally meaningless now?
All those words have fairly precise meanings. I do hope your friends failed their PhD if their thesis didn't match the words in the title.
Yeah, it means something gets committed to the master branch, which either prevents compilation, breaks a unit test, or breaks an integration test.
It's serious because the rest of your team is relying on that master branch being good, so they can test their own changes against it.
In theory it should almost never happen, for the reasons you're hinting at; you don't merge into the branch until you've run unit tests elsewhere.
In practice, real life gets in the way. Your unit tests weren't complete, or made some dud assumption about an interface, or whatever. CI builds your code, runs tests, alerts everyone that something's broken. You fix it. Everything's back on track.
The lava lamps / etc. are just a way to get some (hopefully good natured) taboo around merging code that breaks the build. It should motivate developers to be more careful with their tests before committing/merging.
We only ever saw this nonsense at places made up of fools.
A great deal of the agile stuff has actually been tested -- as in, measuring the number of production defects before and after adopting agile practices.
CI works. Information radiators work. (That is, anything that shoves vital info like "the build is broken" at people with no opt-out).
This particular information radiator is a bit daft, but it doesn't seem like it took much effort, and someone's enjoyed themselves, so where's the harm?
I'm somewhat oblivious to what the world thinks about Rails. It seems like a good fit for certain types of web site, to me.
I don't know where you're perceiving this terrible reputation NoSQL has. Where I'm sitting, I perceive a huge sigh of relief from people who don't have to work with Oracle DB any more.
Those modules communicate with each other. If you screw up the way they communicate, integration tests fail. That's a broken build.
Well, I guess the US could be big enough to do OK without imports/exports.
In the UK, we'd be screwed if foreign countries didn't import from us, and we'd be screwed if we couldn't import from elsewhere.
I don't think that's naive at all. You could build an exact replica of your current US workplace in, say, Bombay. Same desks, same air con, same standard of canteen, same working hours, same work culture -- you might even be able to make it better.
You'd pay lower wages -- to reflect the cheaper cost of living. Rent would be cheaper. Food would be cheaper. Maintenance would be cheaper.
Treating staff badly is far from the only source of savings.
Of course, some of the savings trickle up from exploitation lower down the chain. For example your office cleaner is probably cheap because there are slum-dwellers willing to do the work.
An impartial observer does not care by definition, thus your question is a red herring.
An impartial observer can care, but is not biased towards a particular party. For an example, a football referee cares that both teams get treated fairly, but doesn't consider a Chelsea goal more or less desirable than an Arsenal goal.
You think the loss of an American job is undesirable, because, presumably, you're American or have a soft spot for Americans.
Someone with no partiality towards either nation would see that if an American loses their job and a Malaysian (say) gains one, that's a net change in global employment figures of zero.
Of course, there are hundreds of other factors to take into consideration -- the effect of the move on the size of the global economy, the availability of alternative employment for each individual, the nature of unemployed life in each place, working conditions in each facility -- I'm scratching the surface.
Its an end run around feel good environmental and labor relations laws and it's inherently racist. We got rid of all the factory workers jobs and their benefits and "improved" working conditions. Now its time to race the white collar guys to the bottom. Its intellectually dishonest to prattle on about safe and humane working and living conditions being a human right, unless you are not an American, in which case you deserve to sit in the back of the bus with the other undesirables. .
That assumes that the working conditions are worse in whatever foreign workplace is doing the work. Now, often that will be the case. But it's certainly plausible that a US company could source work from a foreign workplace where conditions are as good as the equivalent American workplace, yet cheaper.
In addition, there's the question of what those foreign workers' conditions would be like if they were not producing output to be consumed in richer countries. Not better, I suspect.
Tariffs. Add the difference in costs between doing business in China vs doing business in USA to imports.
... which leads to tit-for-tat protectionism.
Uh-huh. American companies outsourcing abroad means fewer US jobs. So far so good.
More questions:
- Why would an impartial observer care one jot about that?
- For someone who did think it was an undesirable state of affairs, what can be done about it?
If you forbid US companies from outsourcing abroad -- they simply take their entire operation abroad, and cease to be US companies.
If you enforce protectionist import/export restrictions -- other countries respond in kind.
You seem to be overlooking the exact problem that PKI aims to solve.
Let's say you and I want to communicate securely. I need your public key. How do you get it to me? Sure, it's a public key, so it's safe to transmit it in the clear. But by the time I get it, how do I know it's really your key, and not some snooper's? Sure, there are ways around it -- you could phone me, somehow convince me of your identity, and read out a hash of the key -- but that doesn't scale if I'm communicating with dozens, or thousands of correspondents, and you don't want to call everyone you want to communicate with, to set up a key relationship.
What we need, is some way of asking someone we trust "hey, this claims to be John Smith's public key. Is that true?". Guess what. That's a CA.
The problems are:
- CAs that basically aren't trustworthy
- That the top-down hierarchy of trust is too rigid for some people's tastes, for certain applications.
Using WebSockets, you can implement pretty much as efficient an instant messenger as is possible in this firewalled age.
It's true that in the past, making a web page look like a native app has involved ugly hacks. HTML5 and related technologies remove the obstacles that make those hacks necessary.