And me without mod-points. The point, of course, is that no one wants to deal with the cause of these ills because then they might have to actually face up to the fact that greed and blatant disregard for the whole of humanity has brought much of this to fruition. Without discontent or dissatisfaction, there would be no motivation to cause harm or chaos. It is the "let them eat cake" attitude that will ultimately bring what we know as civilization crashing down around our ears, because there are many more people on this planet who feel disenfranchised than those who believe that they cannot be touched due to their wealth.
So you're telling me that the number of people killed by Christians during the Crusades is not significant?
More blood has been shed in the name of forcing one's views on others over the course of history than any plague, famine or natural disaster. Theistic religions are not the only guilty parties in this regard, but their hands are still quite bloody. One reason that "godless" regimes such as the Third Reich and Communist nations such as the USSR and China attempted to eradicate religion was the "undue influence" religion had on the actions of the populace. Conversely, we have the conflict in the Middle East not only between Muslims and Jews, but between various Muslim sects. Never mind the fact that on the one hand people in the US (where I was born and raised, and still reside) who think a religious government in Iraq would be bad but have a President of the United States who is not a devout Christian would be a harbinger of the end of the world. As long as there is intolerance of any kind, or a desire to push one's views as more "right" than someone else's, there will be conflict and there will be bloodshed.
And under copyright law (which governs things like movies), re-selling a derivative work (such as a clean edit) without explicit permission of the copyright holder is illegal. You have no "right" to purchase any form of a movie than those which are sold by the copyright holder or by someone who has been given explicit permission to sell their particular version of the movie. If you knowingly purchase a movie that has been edited and resold in violation of copyright law because you do not wish to see material that offends you, you are a thief (for abetting someone else's efforts to steal the original copyright holder's IP) and a hypocrite (for rationalizing that theft in the name of your beliefs). That ANYONE would be offended by the raw display of love that is made more urgent by the very real possibility that one might die in the near future to the point that they could not watch that scene, and yet not be offended by the even more graphic representation of death, bloodshed and human suffering that dominates the rest of the movie is positively gut wrenching. It is indicative of a society that has lost all sense of proportion, along with its soul.
People much wiser than I am said, "I'd rather have my son watch a film with 2 people making love than 2 people trying to kill one another. I, of course, can agree. It is a great sentence. I wish I knew who said it first. - George Carlin
...than ISPs who block known troublesome ports with a mechanism in place to allow users who have a need to unblock those ports for their access. As one of the parent posters pointed out, a vast majority of the people who use consumer ISPs like Comcast or Cox don't have a need for unfettered access to making SMTP connections outside of the ISP's network. Those who do have a need can contact customer support or go through a customer service control panel for their account and remove the block. If you think for one moment that there will ever be a time when clueless users are going to get off the Internet simply out of the goodness of their hearts, you need a reality check - the clueless ones have money, and therefore companies who are in the business of taking money in exchange for Internet service will continue to take their money. If you don't think things like blocking known troublesome ports is an effective way to reduce the potential for the spread of viruses, worms and other malware with a minimum of impact to the vast majority of users, then you need to spend more time reading up on network security principles and less time whining on/.
And don't tell me you already know "blah blah blah" about network security principles. If you did, you wouldn't be making the kind of statements that imply that you are "entitled".
The best place for company proprietary data is where they can maintain explicit control over access to that data. As soon as you move the data outside of the corporate enterprise, you lose that control, and no corporation whose proprietary data is worth any amount of money is going to consider that an acceptable risk. Corporations make decisions based on cost and liability (when they're not making decisions on how to increase the value of the elite golden parachutes, but I digress), and allowing their proprietary data to be managed by someone else outside of the corporate enterprise is generally considered by most corporations to be an unacceptable risk. Why? Because even though they may have legal recourse after the fact, once proprietary data has been accidentally or intentionally released the real damage is already done.
As for Google being better at accessibility, security and cost, that is too broad of an assumption. Most companies that have proprietary data worth protecting make the point of hiring competent information security personnel, and the principle of "the less people who have access to the data the more secure it is" generally applies.
The second amendment does not apply to normal citizens. It applies to organized militias.
One word: bullshit. That's not how SCOTUS has interpreted, nor is it how the majority of the Constitutional scholars interpret it either. The founders of the nation knew that governments can't be trusted any further than they can be thrown, and that's why they explicitly granted the right to keep and bear arms to the people of this country. Any other interpretation is complete and utter bullshit from someone who is either ignorant or promoting an agenda.
Yes but the quality of the audio files you are purchasing is NOT as good as CD quality, and you are restricted as to where you can play it. Whereas if you buy a used CD, it is cheaper per song, can be ripped at whatever bit rate you want, and can be played wherever you want. Do I buy from iTunes? Yes, when I can't find a song anyplace else.
Python sucks canal water through a straw. Indentation and line breaks do not good syntax make. It sucked in COBOL, and it sucks even more in Python because we should never have returned to that nonsense. Much maligned though it was, PASCAL really was one of the best languages for learning to code - it was wordy, yes, but at least there were never arguments over where to put the stupid curly brace (THEN went on the end of the line, BEGIN went on the start of a line), scoping was well defined (VAR meant variable, no VAR meant it wasn't), and it enforced strong data types from the get-go.
If you are in the U.S., make sure you kill them. Otherwise you will get sued out the ass by them and their family. Of course, if you are in the U.K. and have the temerity to defend yourself, you'll likely go to jail. I love how people (not you) posit that outlawing guns will stop gun-related violence. Horse hockey, it just means the criminals (who don't care about breaking the law) will still have guns and we won't be able to defend ourselves. The answer isn't less guns, it's MORE guns... if everyone is armed, people will be more damned polite.
Re:Loving complexity for complexity's sake
on
Ruby Off the Rails
·
· Score: 1
To whit: There is not now, nor will there ever be, a programming language in which it is impossible to write bad code. I have this on a button somewhere, and I consider it a fundamental truism.
I have had to work with many languages, and have had to maintain code in most of them. During that time, I have seen some incredibly clean and elegant code, and I have also seen some totally bind-moggling cruft. The problem is that many college CS curriculums do not provide any coursework dealing with how to develop software for the real world - and I mean writing code, gathering requirements, designing systems and testing. So many folks come out of college still taking the brute force approach to designing and codeing software - and I would have been in this boat myself if I hadn't been lucky enough to be working in high school and college with professionals who were willing to share their "lessons learned" about developing maintainable systems. So don't blame the language, blame the idiot who chose technologies for the sake of learning the technologies, and the manager who let him get away with it.
As for Java, I've been working with the language for about two years now in a web application environment. I came from a predominantly C/C++ background, and I can tell you that I now would rather write code in Java than either of those two languages (or most of the other languages I know). Why? Because it is truly OO, because it has the strengths of perl in terms of available libraries to do just about anything, because it has some of the best frameworks for developing web applications that I have seen, and because it is one of the cleanest languages I have ever worked with.
I think the OO part is what causes the most heartburn in modern applications written in OO languages - it has been my experience that many people don't truly grok OO, so they end up developing systems the old "C" method using an OO platform in name only. This means that you will run into the same problems with Ruby that you would in Java... sure, there might be some aspects of Ruby that reduce the amount of code you need to write over Java for certain tasks (but there's also probably a Java class library to do what you want), but it is quite likely that if someone couldn't handle the OO aspects of Java they're not going to grok how to use Ruby's OO features to best effect.
Bottom line: use the technologies that are appropriate for the job, and apply good software engineering practices for maintainable systems. If Ruby is the right thing for your environment, then do it. If it's Java, C, C++ or perl, then use those (just please, for the sake of the guy coming along behind you, try to stick to one language in the application). The only language on my "avoid" list (and I am sure that I will get flamed for this) is python - any language that cares about indentation (since COBOL) and uses blank lines as end-of-block delimiters (thus disallowing white spacing in code) is an abomination.
Amen brother, amen. Politics and greed can torpedo even a very successful operation, especially when it results in resources and recognition being taken away from a group that is actually getting work done, in order to make a more politically savvy (but totally worthless) manager and his team of engineers on crack look like they are actually capable of doing their jobs. Do I sound bitter?
Working for a major telecom, with a group that stood up some fairly sophisticated network security services in under six months from scratch, we worked hard and played hard. Shorts, t-shirts, sandals and a less than 10 minute drive to work, coupled with the team doing things like skiing, white water rafting and hanging out in the local Irish pub outside of work ON THEIR OWN DIME, because we fed off each other's enthusiasm, skills and sharing of knowledge. And almost all of us left, because politics and personal greed screwed the lot of us.
That being said, in my 20+ years in the field I've also worked in places where employee satisfaction was a major focus (and am fortunate to be employed at such a place currently) - because the management "got it". So in addition to good compensation, I've experienced things such as taking our team out for lunch, having quarterly get togethers after work, telling someone to take their spouse/SO out for a nice dinner and expense it for a job well done, making sure that employees have time to spend outside of the office, and just letting folks take some time to hang out and shoot the bull at the office. If you manage based on results, instead of appearances, you can get a hell of alot of work out people who will be happy to do that work for you. And if you reward those results with the type of treatment that says clearly "I appreciate all of your hard work", it is a cycle that feeds on itself.
And me without any mod points... not like this hasn't been made clear in this very space before, but downloading music and adding it to your damn library, listening to it over and over again is THEFT. If it is worth listening to, you should pay the money... and if it isn't worth listening to, then why do you have it on your hard drive?
Do I like to be able to listen to a song before I buy it? Yes I do... when I see reviews that give glowing praise to a new artist, I want to check them out, and I'd rather not spend the money on an album to find out that it isn't my cup of tea. However, a number of CDs in my collection are there now because I was able to either get music from a friend to listen to before buying, or the artist made some songs available. If it was worth listening to, I bought it, otherwise it got wiped off my hard drive. Doing anything else is theft, and most folks know that anyone who claims otherwise is either fooling themselves or a liar.
To be honest, you have just as much to worry about from software developers in America. There are no background checks or anything like that for folks doing software development in this country (unless they are working for clients like the government who require such things), and in many cases no safeguards in development practices to prevent:
someone with terrorist sympathies, or
someone with an axe to grind, or
someone who woke up stupid/pissed off
from inserting something nasty. And it does happen. Sending code off-shore simply increases an exposure that was already there. Sleep tight.
Nah, I like my tecoMac... that way even my drunken typing accomplishes something (ah, the days of line noise interjecting spurious behaviors in line editors...)
DEC uVAX II. And yes, it still runs - VMS, as a matter of fact. I even bought a new wire rack to load it into so that I could make better use of the space.
There is another advantage to the process that you have described... it is easier to implement for teams that for a variety of reasons cannot work physically together. However, by rotating the responsibility for the test harness and the coding of the application, it would appear that you do get a fair amount of benefit. Thanks for the insight!
I have tried it, and it sucks sewer water through a straw. There is a good reason why whitespace delimited/blocked languages were abandoned in favor of languages that use things like semicolons or curly braces - because whitespace should be used for making the code clearer to read, not as some syntactic convention. Python is a blight upon the world, and the fact that Red Hat has tied themselves so tightly to this piece of cruft that any inclination I ever had for using Red Hat has gone out the window. Python has a Ll rating of at least 9.5... I cannot even begin to grasp why anyone likes the foul beast.
I know it is off-topic but regarding the drug war tangemt, I find it funny that similar arguments about crime reduction and the right to carry firearms have been made, but the general public hasn't bought into that either. And I go agree that making regulating drugs as opposed to outlawing them makes more sense - when the profit incentive goes away, organized crime goes elsewhere. Think about how different things would be in Colombia if the so-called drug lords could be legitimate businessmen?
heh. I'm a coder and a hardware whore (nine working machines in my home cave, including a uVAX II), and up until last November my main machine was a PPro 200 w/ 128 MB RAM running NT 4.0. Why? Because it was stable, and was fast enough to pull e-mail, run Office or Visual Studio when I needed it, or run terminal windows when I was connecting into various *nix boxen. It is good that Joe Sixpack waking up to the fact that they don't need the fastest box out there (now if my dad-in-law would just come to grips with this).
Of course, I now run off of a Athlon Thunderbird box, and I wouldn't go back to the PPro. But everything else ('cept the uVAX) is PII, K2/K3 or 486-era technology, which runs Linux and Winders just fine. Pretty much the only reason I could see for really high-end stuff is if you are an ubergamer, hardcore graphic artist or someone working with video.
Slashdot Mirror
Goddammitt, and me without mod points!!! Mod this poster up "FUNNY!"
And me without mod-points. The point, of course, is that no one wants to deal with the cause of these ills because then they might have to actually face up to the fact that greed and blatant disregard for the whole of humanity has brought much of this to fruition. Without discontent or dissatisfaction, there would be no motivation to cause harm or chaos. It is the "let them eat cake" attitude that will ultimately bring what we know as civilization crashing down around our ears, because there are many more people on this planet who feel disenfranchised than those who believe that they cannot be touched due to their wealth.
So you're telling me that the number of people killed by Christians during the Crusades is not significant?
More blood has been shed in the name of forcing one's views on others over the course of history than any plague, famine or natural disaster. Theistic religions are not the only guilty parties in this regard, but their hands are still quite bloody. One reason that "godless" regimes such as the Third Reich and Communist nations such as the USSR and China attempted to eradicate religion was the "undue influence" religion had on the actions of the populace. Conversely, we have the conflict in the Middle East not only between Muslims and Jews, but between various Muslim sects. Never mind the fact that on the one hand people in the US (where I was born and raised, and still reside) who think a religious government in Iraq would be bad but have a President of the United States who is not a devout Christian would be a harbinger of the end of the world. As long as there is intolerance of any kind, or a desire to push one's views as more "right" than someone else's, there will be conflict and there will be bloodshed.
And under copyright law (which governs things like movies), re-selling a derivative work (such as a clean edit) without explicit permission of the copyright holder is illegal. You have no "right" to purchase any form of a movie than those which are sold by the copyright holder or by someone who has been given explicit permission to sell their particular version of the movie. If you knowingly purchase a movie that has been edited and resold in violation of copyright law because you do not wish to see material that offends you, you are a thief (for abetting someone else's efforts to steal the original copyright holder's IP) and a hypocrite (for rationalizing that theft in the name of your beliefs). That ANYONE would be offended by the raw display of love that is made more urgent by the very real possibility that one might die in the near future to the point that they could not watch that scene, and yet not be offended by the even more graphic representation of death, bloodshed and human suffering that dominates the rest of the movie is positively gut wrenching. It is indicative of a society that has lost all sense of proportion, along with its soul.
People much wiser than I am said, "I'd rather have my son watch a film with 2 people making love than 2 people trying to kill one another. I, of course, can agree. It is a great sentence. I wish I knew who said it first. - George Carlin
...than ISPs who block known troublesome ports with a mechanism in place to allow users who have a need to unblock those ports for their access. As one of the parent posters pointed out, a vast majority of the people who use consumer ISPs like Comcast or Cox don't have a need for unfettered access to making SMTP connections outside of the ISP's network. Those who do have a need can contact customer support or go through a customer service control panel for their account and remove the block. If you think for one moment that there will ever be a time when clueless users are going to get off the Internet simply out of the goodness of their hearts, you need a reality check - the clueless ones have money, and therefore companies who are in the business of taking money in exchange for Internet service will continue to take their money. If you don't think things like blocking known troublesome ports is an effective way to reduce the potential for the spread of viruses, worms and other malware with a minimum of impact to the vast majority of users, then you need to spend more time reading up on network security principles and less time whining on /.
And don't tell me you already know "blah blah blah" about network security principles. If you did, you wouldn't be making the kind of statements that imply that you are "entitled".
The best place for company proprietary data is where they can maintain explicit control over access to that data. As soon as you move the data outside of the corporate enterprise, you lose that control, and no corporation whose proprietary data is worth any amount of money is going to consider that an acceptable risk. Corporations make decisions based on cost and liability (when they're not making decisions on how to increase the value of the elite golden parachutes, but I digress), and allowing their proprietary data to be managed by someone else outside of the corporate enterprise is generally considered by most corporations to be an unacceptable risk. Why? Because even though they may have legal recourse after the fact, once proprietary data has been accidentally or intentionally released the real damage is already done.
As for Google being better at accessibility, security and cost, that is too broad of an assumption. Most companies that have proprietary data worth protecting make the point of hiring competent information security personnel, and the principle of "the less people who have access to the data the more secure it is" generally applies.
The second amendment does not apply to normal citizens. It applies to organized militias.
One word: bullshit. That's not how SCOTUS has interpreted, nor is it how the majority of the Constitutional scholars interpret it either. The founders of the nation knew that governments can't be trusted any further than they can be thrown, and that's why they explicitly granted the right to keep and bear arms to the people of this country. Any other interpretation is complete and utter bullshit from someone who is either ignorant or promoting an agenda.
Yes but the quality of the audio files you are purchasing is NOT as good as CD quality, and you are restricted as to where you can play it. Whereas if you buy a used CD, it is cheaper per song, can be ripped at whatever bit rate you want, and can be played wherever you want. Do I buy from iTunes? Yes, when I can't find a song anyplace else.
Python sucks canal water through a straw. Indentation and line breaks do not good syntax make. It sucked in COBOL, and it sucks even more in Python because we should never have returned to that nonsense. Much maligned though it was, PASCAL really was one of the best languages for learning to code - it was wordy, yes, but at least there were never arguments over where to put the stupid curly brace (THEN went on the end of the line, BEGIN went on the start of a line), scoping was well defined (VAR meant variable, no VAR meant it wasn't), and it enforced strong data types from the get-go.
If you are in the U.S., make sure you kill them. Otherwise you will get sued out the ass by them and their family. Of course, if you are in the U.K. and have the temerity to defend yourself, you'll likely go to jail. I love how people (not you) posit that outlawing guns will stop gun-related violence. Horse hockey, it just means the criminals (who don't care about breaking the law) will still have guns and we won't be able to defend ourselves. The answer isn't less guns, it's MORE guns... if everyone is armed, people will be more damned polite.
I hadn't thought about it before, but that does make alot of sense. Have you suggested it to the folks at Wikipedia?
Me without mod points again... I giggled my ass off on this one...
Dammit, and me without any moderator points!
To whit: There is not now, nor will there ever be, a programming language in which it is impossible to write bad code. I have this on a button somewhere, and I consider it a fundamental truism.
I have had to work with many languages, and have had to maintain code in most of them. During that time, I have seen some incredibly clean and elegant code, and I have also seen some totally bind-moggling cruft. The problem is that many college CS curriculums do not provide any coursework dealing with how to develop software for the real world - and I mean writing code, gathering requirements, designing systems and testing. So many folks come out of college still taking the brute force approach to designing and codeing software - and I would have been in this boat myself if I hadn't been lucky enough to be working in high school and college with professionals who were willing to share their "lessons learned" about developing maintainable systems. So don't blame the language, blame the idiot who chose technologies for the sake of learning the technologies, and the manager who let him get away with it.
As for Java, I've been working with the language for about two years now in a web application environment. I came from a predominantly C/C++ background, and I can tell you that I now would rather write code in Java than either of those two languages (or most of the other languages I know). Why? Because it is truly OO, because it has the strengths of perl in terms of available libraries to do just about anything, because it has some of the best frameworks for developing web applications that I have seen, and because it is one of the cleanest languages I have ever worked with.
I think the OO part is what causes the most heartburn in modern applications written in OO languages - it has been my experience that many people don't truly grok OO, so they end up developing systems the old "C" method using an OO platform in name only. This means that you will run into the same problems with Ruby that you would in Java... sure, there might be some aspects of Ruby that reduce the amount of code you need to write over Java for certain tasks (but there's also probably a Java class library to do what you want), but it is quite likely that if someone couldn't handle the OO aspects of Java they're not going to grok how to use Ruby's OO features to best effect.
Bottom line: use the technologies that are appropriate for the job, and apply good software engineering practices for maintainable systems. If Ruby is the right thing for your environment, then do it. If it's Java, C, C++ or perl, then use those (just please, for the sake of the guy coming along behind you, try to stick to one language in the application). The only language on my "avoid" list (and I am sure that I will get flamed for this) is python - any language that cares about indentation (since COBOL) and uses blank lines as end-of-block delimiters (thus disallowing white spacing in code) is an abomination.
Amen brother, amen. Politics and greed can torpedo even a very successful operation, especially when it results in resources and recognition being taken away from a group that is actually getting work done, in order to make a more politically savvy (but totally worthless) manager and his team of engineers on crack look like they are actually capable of doing their jobs. Do I sound bitter?
Working for a major telecom, with a group that stood up some fairly sophisticated network security services in under six months from scratch, we worked hard and played hard. Shorts, t-shirts, sandals and a less than 10 minute drive to work, coupled with the team doing things like skiing, white water rafting and hanging out in the local Irish pub outside of work ON THEIR OWN DIME, because we fed off each other's enthusiasm, skills and sharing of knowledge. And almost all of us left, because politics and personal greed screwed the lot of us.
That being said, in my 20+ years in the field I've also worked in places where employee satisfaction was a major focus (and am fortunate to be employed at such a place currently) - because the management "got it". So in addition to good compensation, I've experienced things such as taking our team out for lunch, having quarterly get togethers after work, telling someone to take their spouse/SO out for a nice dinner and expense it for a job well done, making sure that employees have time to spend outside of the office, and just letting folks take some time to hang out and shoot the bull at the office. If you manage based on results, instead of appearances, you can get a hell of alot of work out people who will be happy to do that work for you. And if you reward those results with the type of treatment that says clearly "I appreciate all of your hard work", it is a cycle that feeds on itself.
Mod this guy up... fuh-nee!
Do I like to be able to listen to a song before I buy it? Yes I do... when I see reviews that give glowing praise to a new artist, I want to check them out, and I'd rather not spend the money on an album to find out that it isn't my cup of tea. However, a number of CDs in my collection are there now because I was able to either get music from a friend to listen to before buying, or the artist made some songs available. If it was worth listening to, I bought it, otherwise it got wiped off my hard drive. Doing anything else is theft, and most folks know that anyone who claims otherwise is either fooling themselves or a liar.
- someone with terrorist sympathies, or
- someone with an axe to grind, or
- someone who woke up stupid/pissed off
from inserting something nasty. And it does happen. Sending code off-shore simply increases an exposure that was already there. Sleep tight.Nah, I like my tecoMac... that way even my drunken typing accomplishes something (ah, the days of line noise interjecting spurious behaviors in line editors...)
DEC uVAX II. And yes, it still runs - VMS, as a matter of fact. I even bought a new wire rack to load it into so that I could make better use of the space.
There is another advantage to the process that you have described... it is easier to implement for teams that for a variety of reasons cannot work physically together. However, by rotating the responsibility for the test harness and the coding of the application, it would appear that you do get a fair amount of benefit. Thanks for the insight!
I have tried it, and it sucks sewer water through a straw. There is a good reason why whitespace delimited/blocked languages were abandoned in favor of languages that use things like semicolons or curly braces - because whitespace should be used for making the code clearer to read, not as some syntactic convention. Python is a blight upon the world, and the fact that Red Hat has tied themselves so tightly to this piece of cruft that any inclination I ever had for using Red Hat has gone out the window. Python has a Ll rating of at least 9.5... I cannot even begin to grasp why anyone likes the foul beast.
Dammit - outta moderator points!!!
I know it is off-topic but regarding the drug war tangemt, I find it funny that similar arguments about crime reduction and the right to carry firearms have been made, but the general public hasn't bought into that either. And I go agree that making regulating drugs as opposed to outlawing them makes more sense - when the profit incentive goes away, organized crime goes elsewhere. Think about how different things would be in Colombia if the so-called drug lords could be legitimate businessmen?
I thought that the reason why it was named "Gnutella" was because the author really dug "Nutella". S'truth, I swear... I heard it on the Internet.
heh. I'm a coder and a hardware whore (nine working machines in my home cave, including a uVAX II), and up until last November my main machine was a PPro 200 w/ 128 MB RAM running NT 4.0. Why? Because it was stable, and was fast enough to pull e-mail, run Office or Visual Studio when I needed it, or run terminal windows when I was connecting into various *nix boxen. It is good that Joe Sixpack waking up to the fact that they don't need the fastest box out there (now if my dad-in-law would just come to grips with this).
Of course, I now run off of a Athlon Thunderbird box, and I wouldn't go back to the PPro. But everything else ('cept the uVAX) is PII, K2/K3 or 486-era technology, which runs Linux and Winders just fine. Pretty much the only reason I could see for really high-end stuff is if you are an ubergamer, hardcore graphic artist or someone working with video.