If a defense system could be built with something like lasers, you could defend against far more missiles than current countermeasures. You could probably exhaust the aggressors supply of missiles. Basically, make the ammo small enough that you can carry an enormous amount of it. In the case of said ammo being electricity, we already have nuclear reactors on ships that run for a very long time while only requiring a comparatively small amount of fuel to be carried.
I have issues with super bright screens but I also find bright text on a dark background difficult to read. Have you tried simply using a slightly off white background. By just using a slightly cream or grey (so little off white that you barely notice) it significantly reduces the "glare" you're trying to avoid. When I do like to get old school with light text on dark background, I do the same in reverse, I use a dark grey background, not black, and it then doesn't require the text to be so bright/high contrast to stand out easily. There's something about #000000 and #FFFFFF that make everything worse.
As with everything in life, it's hard to admit, and often even harder to see, your own failings. I have no idea what your code looks like, it would have been nice if you'd elaborated on exactly what this intern thinks is bad (architecture, syntax/coding standards, algorithm choices). Maybe there's nothing wrong with it. Plenty of developers are too locked into their own way of doing things and can't get on in a team when the team's way is different to their own.
If this person can specifically come to you and say "X,Y and Z are bad, do A,B and C to make it better" he may have a case, otherwise he's just blowing steam. The worst thing you could do is completely write him off just because he's young. Ask him to come up with an action plan that identifies 2 or 3 key improvements that could be made.
I attended an excellent lecture by a software consultant that was hired by a large financial institution to work on their trading platform. The platform was used internationally across their offices, was in excess of 500,000 lines of code and any attempt to add features was running months longer than it should have done. After 6 months working with his team on refactoring and rewriting large parts of the code the revised platform, with exactly the same functionality, was ~200,000 lines of code and features were on a one month release schedule. Some of the original developers quit as all the code they had written, and based their career on, was deleted.
I'm not saying one or the other of you is right, but neither should either of your opinions be entirely discounted. You have 50,000 lines of code and a team that understands it, you can't change it all overnight, but maybe you can make it better over the course of a few months, there's always room for improvement.
I agree many of the longer movies are tedious, but I wouldn't ask for Les Mis to be any shorter. I was mostly getting fed up with movies getting shorter while ticket prices skyrocketed... I don't want to be paying $15 a ticket for sub 90 minute film... Now I just hit up the first showings in the day on weekends to get $7 tickets, and less crowded theaters.
I hope your employer doesn't collapse when you get hit by a bus because you were the only person that understood some critical system and you failed to build it in such a way that somebody else could easily understand it. I'm not even asking for comments, just clean and clear code.
It's not naivety, it's common sense. I do my work properly so that when the people I have worked with leave and get jobs elsewhere and their new boss asks if they know anyone good, the say "You need to hire that guy!" That's exactly how I ended up in my current job, and the one before.
Bad code is the opposite of job security. No company can afford to have a single point of failure, the person that wrote the bad code. EVERYONE is replaceable. Good coders get job security through doing an awesome job, over-delivering on their promises and being somebody their colleagues enjoy working with.
the longer movies that are coming out. I was getting really fed up of more and more films creeping under the 90 minute mark. For kids films I understand keeping them shorter as most kids won't stay interested for the duration of a 2 to 3 hour film. As an adult though, I appreciate the extra character development and depth that can be provided in a longer film (not that I would ever use Avatar as an example of a film where the extended time was well used).
I would suggest that most of the code on stackoverflow, while answering a question to which the answer probably wasn't easy to find, is often so trivial as to make any license terms realistically unenforceable. Not that it doesn't have that license, but good luck trying to enforce it.
Whether I'm actually watching or just have it on as background noise, I consume about 40 hours per week minimum of media, mostly via Hulu and Netflix over my home broadband connection. That comes in at about twice the US national average for TV watching. On top of that, I'm an active online gamer and I work as a software developer (sometimes from home) for a cloud storage company (testing involves a lot of data flying back and forth). I go through about 100GB of bandwidth per month (so far I've maxed out at 120GB). As long as Comcast keeps its cap at the 250GB level I really don't see the average user going anywhere near that...
That being said, I would like to see mobile caps increasing (without an increase in price obviously). At the moment, I just use my phone for email, navigation and some news. If I had a more reasonable cap, I could see myself getting a 4G tablet and using it for Netflix and Skype with family abroad.
It's not that the server is less likely to go down, it's that it's less likely to get stolen/dropped/otherwise broken than your laptop. Servers typically (in a well managed setup) also have their data replicated somewhere so if they do die, it is recoverable. Do you take daily backups of your code from your desktop? I do, it's called pushing my code to the server's repo:-)
I'm a predominantly Python dev on Linux but when we needed a Windows 8 presence, I built a Metro app. I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was using the HTML5/JS setup. The MSDN docs are pretty crap, mostly because the relevant information to get anything done is spread between 3 separate areas of the site for any given thing. However, the overall process of using visual studio and packaging the final product was pretty painless.
Some good things: localization is stupidly simple, the grid and list layouts are very well implemented, lots of caching and paging optimizations with no extra code required.
Some stupid things: Excessive HTML generated by using WinJS.UI stuff, pretty much any JS error crashes the whole application, sometimes I want something to be synchronous but I don't have that option, when doing a file upload (using the Windows.Networking.BackgroundTransfer module) you can get at the headers of the server response, but not the body (seriously... I did a major wtf when I was told that).
Well done/. I'm doubly pleased because I now have something to buy with the ThinkGeek voucher I've had sitting on my desk for the last year. (I'm not saying ThinkGeek doesn't have lots of cool stuff, I just don't have any more room for cool toys, but I always have a need of more t-shirts)
And that sounds like "doing it right" to you? For two pieces of the same application having to communicate through an HTTP api when they are running on the same computer?
For those who don't have to write software Metro may seem nice. However, to those that do write software, if they haven't found out already they shortly will, Metro's sandboxing is just a total fuck up. Metro apps can't communicate with non-Metro apps. It's even difficult for them to communicate with other metro apps. Hell, it's even difficult for them to just access files on the hard disk. Want a nice Metro app to browser your downloads? No Sorry, you can't have that, your Downloads folder is off limits to Metro. I've seen some developers that actually had to build a web server into their desktop service so that a Metro UI could communicate with it over a REST api rather than using traditional inter process communication.
To the point one or two people have made about Windows 7 menu search and Metro. Yes you can bring up Metro and start typing to find the application you want. However, it's much less distracting and easier on the eye to have a small menu, with colours that match the rest of your system, pop up over a small area of the screen, rather than Metro where the whole screen flashes and changes colour before you eyes and start to type your search causes the entire interface to change, then selecting your application drops you back out of Metro, more sudden screen changes.
... have Linux installed on them. Linux has great support for "spaces" or "virtual desktops". Sorry couldn't resist, but seriously, I only use Windows for gaming, where you really don't need more than one desktop space... maybe 2 monitors though if you're playing supreme commander...
Note there is no mention of types of job. As somebody who grew up and went to university (Computing no less) in England and now lives and works in the US, I've commented to friends and family that people in the UK with a degree will look at certain jobs and consider it below them. On the other hand, I've met plenty of people here in the US who couldn't find the job they wanted when they graduated so they took a job as a waiter or in retail to give them an income while they looked for something they actually wanted to have a career in. The unemployment system in the UK makes people feel like they can turn down less than their perfect job even though they are unemployed.
Incidentally I don't know a single person from my university Computing class of ~120 that isn't employed. I've seen some exams from other top 50 universities and they would lead me to believe that for many universities in the UK, the problem with the computing courses is the content (one paper I saw has an essay question "Why do we need programming languages?"), rather than the social ineptitude of your average computing student getting in the way of job interviews (which was my first thought).
Why is it that people run these numbers and assume that say, efficiency stays stagnant. Heat in almost every use of energy is a by product that is the result of inefficiency in converting all the energy. I'm certain in the next 300 years the efficiency of our appliances/computer/electronics will drastically increase and therefore, drastically lower the heat they output.
It's not the cooling fan. My xbox 360 is silent. You just have to install the game, it's the optical drive that's loud. Install game -> optical drive never runs.
Used to play FPS on PC. Console is just less of a pain in the ass to keep up to date once you pass puberty. Agree that XBOX is superior to PS3 for FPS as the controller design and response is significantly better. Would still prefer a PC if I didn't have to shell out my own hard earned cash only to find I have to wind down the graphics till the game looks crap 6 months later. The benefit of consoles is that if the game is published for the console, it will run.
Towards the end of last year I bought a Samsung Fascinate on Verizon. It only had the Bing search widget, no Google search widget, even though it's an Android phone. There were plenty of ways to work around that problem (yes, Bing was a problem for me, no matter what MS do their search engines consistently fail to provide me with relevant results, maybe I'm just difficult) like simply adding google.com as a bookmark in the browser. Couple of extra taps but not impossible.
Around the same time a number of my friends bought the same phone. They had the same complaints about Bing and no Google search widget.
A few months ago, Verizon finally pushed the Android 2.2 update to the Fascinate which included the Google search widget. I now don't know a single person who uses the Bing search widget. Attempting to force people to use your products through deals with various vendors is not the way to build market share.
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If a defense system could be built with something like lasers, you could defend against far more missiles than current countermeasures. You could probably exhaust the aggressors supply of missiles. Basically, make the ammo small enough that you can carry an enormous amount of it. In the case of said ammo being electricity, we already have nuclear reactors on ships that run for a very long time while only requiring a comparatively small amount of fuel to be carried.
I have issues with super bright screens but I also find bright text on a dark background difficult to read. Have you tried simply using a slightly off white background. By just using a slightly cream or grey (so little off white that you barely notice) it significantly reduces the "glare" you're trying to avoid. When I do like to get old school with light text on dark background, I do the same in reverse, I use a dark grey background, not black, and it then doesn't require the text to be so bright/high contrast to stand out easily. There's something about #000000 and #FFFFFF that make everything worse.
As with everything in life, it's hard to admit, and often even harder to see, your own failings. I have no idea what your code looks like, it would have been nice if you'd elaborated on exactly what this intern thinks is bad (architecture, syntax/coding standards, algorithm choices). Maybe there's nothing wrong with it. Plenty of developers are too locked into their own way of doing things and can't get on in a team when the team's way is different to their own.
If this person can specifically come to you and say "X,Y and Z are bad, do A,B and C to make it better" he may have a case, otherwise he's just blowing steam. The worst thing you could do is completely write him off just because he's young. Ask him to come up with an action plan that identifies 2 or 3 key improvements that could be made.
I attended an excellent lecture by a software consultant that was hired by a large financial institution to work on their trading platform. The platform was used internationally across their offices, was in excess of 500,000 lines of code and any attempt to add features was running months longer than it should have done. After 6 months working with his team on refactoring and rewriting large parts of the code the revised platform, with exactly the same functionality, was ~200,000 lines of code and features were on a one month release schedule. Some of the original developers quit as all the code they had written, and based their career on, was deleted.
I'm not saying one or the other of you is right, but neither should either of your opinions be entirely discounted. You have 50,000 lines of code and a team that understands it, you can't change it all overnight, but maybe you can make it better over the course of a few months, there's always room for improvement.
I agree many of the longer movies are tedious, but I wouldn't ask for Les Mis to be any shorter. I was mostly getting fed up with movies getting shorter while ticket prices skyrocketed... I don't want to be paying $15 a ticket for sub 90 minute film... Now I just hit up the first showings in the day on weekends to get $7 tickets, and less crowded theaters.
I hope your employer doesn't collapse when you get hit by a bus because you were the only person that understood some critical system and you failed to build it in such a way that somebody else could easily understand it. I'm not even asking for comments, just clean and clear code.
It's not naivety, it's common sense. I do my work properly so that when the people I have worked with leave and get jobs elsewhere and their new boss asks if they know anyone good, the say "You need to hire that guy!" That's exactly how I ended up in my current job, and the one before.
Bad code is the opposite of job security. No company can afford to have a single point of failure, the person that wrote the bad code. EVERYONE is replaceable. Good coders get job security through doing an awesome job, over-delivering on their promises and being somebody their colleagues enjoy working with.
the longer movies that are coming out. I was getting really fed up of more and more films creeping under the 90 minute mark. For kids films I understand keeping them shorter as most kids won't stay interested for the duration of a 2 to 3 hour film. As an adult though, I appreciate the extra character development and depth that can be provided in a longer film (not that I would ever use Avatar as an example of a film where the extended time was well used).
Calm down my dear. I think you need a brown paper bag to breathe into before you start hyperventilating.
Submitter was a moron. From the book: "For a one-line program that loops forever..." also "...it uses GOTO 10 to loop back..."
I would suggest that most of the code on stackoverflow, while answering a question to which the answer probably wasn't easy to find, is often so trivial as to make any license terms realistically unenforceable. Not that it doesn't have that license, but good luck trying to enforce it.
Case in point, anything in this search: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/css
Bitbucket does the same thing but gives you unlimited private repos. Why not use that if you don't want your code shared. That's what I do...
Whether I'm actually watching or just have it on as background noise, I consume about 40 hours per week minimum of media, mostly via Hulu and Netflix over my home broadband connection. That comes in at about twice the US national average for TV watching. On top of that, I'm an active online gamer and I work as a software developer (sometimes from home) for a cloud storage company (testing involves a lot of data flying back and forth). I go through about 100GB of bandwidth per month (so far I've maxed out at 120GB). As long as Comcast keeps its cap at the 250GB level I really don't see the average user going anywhere near that...
That being said, I would like to see mobile caps increasing (without an increase in price obviously). At the moment, I just use my phone for email, navigation and some news. If I had a more reasonable cap, I could see myself getting a 4G tablet and using it for Netflix and Skype with family abroad.
It's not that the server is less likely to go down, it's that it's less likely to get stolen/dropped/otherwise broken than your laptop. Servers typically (in a well managed setup) also have their data replicated somewhere so if they do die, it is recoverable. Do you take daily backups of your code from your desktop? I do, it's called pushing my code to the server's repo :-)
I'm a predominantly Python dev on Linux but when we needed a Windows 8 presence, I built a Metro app. I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was using the HTML5/JS setup. The MSDN docs are pretty crap, mostly because the relevant information to get anything done is spread between 3 separate areas of the site for any given thing. However, the overall process of using visual studio and packaging the final product was pretty painless.
Some good things: localization is stupidly simple, the grid and list layouts are very well implemented, lots of caching and paging optimizations with no extra code required.
Some stupid things: Excessive HTML generated by using WinJS.UI stuff, pretty much any JS error crashes the whole application, sometimes I want something to be synchronous but I don't have that option, when doing a file upload (using the Windows.Networking.BackgroundTransfer module) you can get at the headers of the server response, but not the body (seriously... I did a major wtf when I was told that).
Well done /. I'm doubly pleased because I now have something to buy with the ThinkGeek voucher I've had sitting on my desk for the last year. (I'm not saying ThinkGeek doesn't have lots of cool stuff, I just don't have any more room for cool toys, but I always have a need of more t-shirts)
And that sounds like "doing it right" to you? For two pieces of the same application having to communicate through an HTTP api when they are running on the same computer?
For those who don't have to write software Metro may seem nice. However, to those that do write software, if they haven't found out already they shortly will, Metro's sandboxing is just a total fuck up. Metro apps can't communicate with non-Metro apps. It's even difficult for them to communicate with other metro apps. Hell, it's even difficult for them to just access files on the hard disk. Want a nice Metro app to browser your downloads? No Sorry, you can't have that, your Downloads folder is off limits to Metro. I've seen some developers that actually had to build a web server into their desktop service so that a Metro UI could communicate with it over a REST api rather than using traditional inter process communication.
To the point one or two people have made about Windows 7 menu search and Metro. Yes you can bring up Metro and start typing to find the application you want. However, it's much less distracting and easier on the eye to have a small menu, with colours that match the rest of your system, pop up over a small area of the screen, rather than Metro where the whole screen flashes and changes colour before you eyes and start to type your search causes the entire interface to change, then selecting your application drops you back out of Metro, more sudden screen changes.
... have Linux installed on them. Linux has great support for "spaces" or "virtual desktops". Sorry couldn't resist, but seriously, I only use Windows for gaming, where you really don't need more than one desktop space... maybe 2 monitors though if you're playing supreme commander...
Note there is no mention of types of job. As somebody who grew up and went to university (Computing no less) in England and now lives and works in the US, I've commented to friends and family that people in the UK with a degree will look at certain jobs and consider it below them. On the other hand, I've met plenty of people here in the US who couldn't find the job they wanted when they graduated so they took a job as a waiter or in retail to give them an income while they looked for something they actually wanted to have a career in. The unemployment system in the UK makes people feel like they can turn down less than their perfect job even though they are unemployed.
Incidentally I don't know a single person from my university Computing class of ~120 that isn't employed. I've seen some exams from other top 50 universities and they would lead me to believe that for many universities in the UK, the problem with the computing courses is the content (one paper I saw has an essay question "Why do we need programming languages?"), rather than the social ineptitude of your average computing student getting in the way of job interviews (which was my first thought).
"Hello? Mr. Smith? Will you be at home between 2pm and 5pm tomorrow? Excellent, you package will be delivered between those hours. Thank you."
Why is it that people run these numbers and assume that say, efficiency stays stagnant. Heat in almost every use of energy is a by product that is the result of inefficiency in converting all the energy. I'm certain in the next 300 years the efficiency of our appliances/computer/electronics will drastically increase and therefore, drastically lower the heat they output.
It's not the cooling fan. My xbox 360 is silent. You just have to install the game, it's the optical drive that's loud. Install game -> optical drive never runs.
Used to play FPS on PC. Console is just less of a pain in the ass to keep up to date once you pass puberty. Agree that XBOX is superior to PS3 for FPS as the controller design and response is significantly better. Would still prefer a PC if I didn't have to shell out my own hard earned cash only to find I have to wind down the graphics till the game looks crap 6 months later. The benefit of consoles is that if the game is published for the console, it will run.
Towards the end of last year I bought a Samsung Fascinate on Verizon. It only had the Bing search widget, no Google search widget, even though it's an Android phone. There were plenty of ways to work around that problem (yes, Bing was a problem for me, no matter what MS do their search engines consistently fail to provide me with relevant results, maybe I'm just difficult) like simply adding google.com as a bookmark in the browser. Couple of extra taps but not impossible.
Around the same time a number of my friends bought the same phone. They had the same complaints about Bing and no Google search widget.
A few months ago, Verizon finally pushed the Android 2.2 update to the Fascinate which included the Google search widget. I now don't know a single person who uses the Bing search widget. Attempting to force people to use your products through deals with various vendors is not the way to build market share.