Thing is, it's much more illegal to supply ("push") copyright data than it is to receive ("pull") that same data (if of course, relative legality existed but hopefully you get the point, the rights holders are more interested in taking down the suppliers rather than the consumers which is why you end up with leechers on torrent networks).
I'll be interested to see how they deal with student flat shares. Personally I don't use P2P programs as I use Spotify for music and I would honestly rather own films on DVD (although I wait until they're on special offer in HMV, you can get DVDs a year after release for £5 now!). However, for the last 3 years I've been the person in my flat share to sort out the internet connection and all 3 years I've had at least one flat mate that is a very heavy bit torrent user. I wonder how the ISP and copyright holders would deal with that situation...
... if they put them into production. I bet they could make them for a pretty cheap price now as well. Maybe the Obama administration should start manufacturing them to help pay the national debt!
As long as it's not like Clash of the Titans, the rest of Legendary's films have been pretty awesome. How are they going to get the hours spent driving the mako through rocky terrain into the film though?? I at least hope they stick the to game's storyline rather than "interpreting" it.
Hmmm, well Starbucks is relevant to programming. Don't all programmers need vast quantities of caffeine? Maybe that's just me and my addiction...
I agree it's not as bad as flash ads all over blogs as long as it stays in search results but Google Ads on searches don't really bother me. Maybe you see something different to me but I only get ads in the form of paid links on the far right of the search results.
I won't get along with flash until it stops making my CPU and Graphics card double in temperature. I've been using the HTML5 beta of since shortly after it launched and without flash, my computer doesn't get nearly as hot...
There's already a Views 3 development version available for the drupal 7 dev release that works perfectly. I've been playing about with the D7 dev version for a few months now, there's a lot of great improvements. I'm particularly loving the admin overlay. It's much better than the overlay module for D6 and makes it nicer working with the site admin in general.
Cheers for the correction. Not sure how I got out by a factor of 100, obviously wasn't paying attention when I was tapping the numbers into the calculator...
I was passed the news on diaspora by a friend and was initially intrigued. After reading a bit all I could find were massive flaws in the idea from start to finish. I put some of them together here
The biggest issue I see is the cost of running your server. I'm sure some people here on/. run their own servers. Have you every stopped to think how much it is costing you?
Agreed. Warranty in the EU is a minimum of 2 years. I don't think they could withhold updates as an update (assuming we're talking about patches) is an admission that there was something in the original product that made it not fit for purpose. That would make it very difficult for them to justify making you pay for updates. I think the idea would be more like the premium rate would give you extra maps, maybe special items, possibly access to multiplayer (although that would make EA even bigger assholes if they withheld mutliplayer unless you pay).
I've always found that both I and many of my friends like to work in pairs so arrange the desks into 2 pairs where the pair can see eachother's screens. Also, make sure the devs feel comfortable hotseating. It should be their space as a team, not 4 individual spaces. Some offices even go as far as having one computer per 2 devs so people have to work paired. It's actually a great work dynamic as it's difficult to focus for a whole 8 hours of coding during a work day but it's reasonably easy to be an extra set of eyes on somebody elses coding. Having 2 devs working at a single station you often get more and better code (than if they were working separately) as the code quality will reflect the experience of both devs while 2 sets of eyes reduces errors so less time is spent debugging later.
I guess it will somewhat depend on what you expect them to be doing. If they will be working mainly on maintenance and sys admin tasks then arrangement is less important. If they are working on real software development projects then they need to be able to collaborate easily. Don't worry about devs chatting and wasting time, they will do that anyway. Writing good software requires significantly more focus than just about any other job in your office and it's important that a devs can clear their mind to take a fresh look at their work and make sure everything is on track. Heck, when I chat to my colleagues we tend to be debating pros and cons of different approaches to problems anyway which benefits us an the company as we produce better code by pooling the best ideas.
If I have a big project I can put in significantly more than 40 hours a week. Infact, I've put in about 30 hours programming in the last 48 hours because I have a project on at the moment. On the other hand, if my workload is lots of small tasks, bug fixes etc... I find it much harder to stay on track and probably only put in about 30 hours real programming on a week. I am definitely a thinker though. I approach a problem from a few different directions, boil it down to it's essence, then write the minimal amount of code that provides the functionality and can still be understood by a colleague who may have to maintain it somewhere down the line. There's always a balance to be struck between writing the most optimised code and writing code that can be maintained (and these days the compilers do a better job than a person optimising the vast majority of code scenarios anyway).
Given his touchiness about height it's not surprising Sarkozy has also banned anyone taller than he is. All those people have the option to either leave the country or get free "shortening" surgery on the French health service!
Seconded! I've been using avast for about 4 years now. I had the very occasional virus using norton before that but since switching to avast I've had none. I literally 2 hours ago installed it on a friends computer who was having some virus issues and it's fixed all his problems. I had no issue finding the free version and the registration... well I can't say it better that Pojut: "Oh noes, it took me 2 minutes to fill out the little form."
I think you would be amazed how much software for major (multi-billion $) companies is written in Java. While C is (or at least was a year or so ago) the most popular choice for new open source projects, companies that rely on their software are turning to Java because of the existence of really good IDEs that make managing large code bases much easier. In most cases I'd agree that learning C++ does make learning Java easier but if you want to teach some kids, Java is a much better option as pointers and pointer arithmetic is probably beyond most people without some previous knowledge of programming. I don't think we need to worry about employers as these are just kids we're talking about. If they become interested enough in computing to want to have a career in it there's plenty of time to learn C++.
You might want to double check your facts on PHP. You don't need a webserver. You can just install php and run it from the command line ("$>php file.php") and it certainly won't be dead as soon as what you're calling a mess is "cleaned up". PHP is a server side language, everything you mention is client side or markup apart from AJAX that uses js at the client and PHP/ASP/Java/Ruby/etc... at the server end.
Referencing a post here on/. a while ago, benchmarks across most of the available languages show java running with the server VM (selected by passing the -server option on the command line) is faster than all languages other than C and Clean. Given that your students will probably be able to solve any problems set using only single class of completely static java so you don't necessarily have to teach them OO programming I think Java will provide them with much more power for much less pain than C or C++, is just better than VB full stop and is significantly faster than Python or PHP (which is incidentally the slowest language of those benchmarked).
I'd also point out that Java has some of the best editors (Eclipse, Netbeans), that take the pain out of debugging.
Apologies that I can't remember the exact details but I read about the case of a university professor in the US who lost his job for allegedly saying there were more men in science because men were more intelligent than women. The issue revolved around the press not understanding standard deviations. What the professor had actually said (in fewer words) was that the standard bell curve for intelligence is slightly difference by gender. For men it is shorter and fatter but the tails don't extend very far while for women the curve is taller but with very long tails. It boils down to there being more intelligent men but equally, more stupid men while women have the potential to be both significantly more intelligent but also significantly less intelligent than the bulk of the male population.
All the details are in the book Super Crunchers which is incidentally a fantastic read for anyone interested in the application of statistics in a very general, non-mathematical sense (it covers the use of statistics by baseball scouts, medical computers, predicting changes in flight prices and predicting wine vintages to name a few scenarios that are covered). Unfortunately the professor lost his job because of the furore generated by the misinterpretation in the press.
I don't have quite such a severe problem but my left eye is so screwed up (I'm severely long sighted with a double squint and double astigmatism) that even with glasses it can't focus on anything so I end up seeing kind of half 3D. It just vaguely looks like there are 2 copies of everything with one floating a couple of feet infront of the screen but still appearing flat.
One of my flatmates did the same thing. He's found a massive improvement using DVORAK. The problem is nobody else uses it so he has to adjust when he sits down at any other computer... If you're writing a lot of code there is also the "programmer's DVORAK" layout. I think there are some windows and *nix drivers floating about somewhere.
We even have free internet in Starbucks, and yes my dear Americans we have Starbucks in the UK (and I'd note that you don't get free Wifi there in the US).
Why do Americans think the UK is so backward, we have faster broadband, cheaper mobile phone contracts even at a $2 to £1 exchange (that give more minutes, texts, data transfer) and those are just the first things to spring to mind.
I spend a lot of time in both countries and in the middle of Silicon Valley I find it harder to stay connected than anywhere short of the middle of a field in the UK.
Slashdot Mirror
Thing is, it's much more illegal to supply ("push") copyright data than it is to receive ("pull") that same data (if of course, relative legality existed but hopefully you get the point, the rights holders are more interested in taking down the suppliers rather than the consumers which is why you end up with leechers on torrent networks).
I'll be interested to see how they deal with student flat shares. Personally I don't use P2P programs as I use Spotify for music and I would honestly rather own films on DVD (although I wait until they're on special offer in HMV, you can get DVDs a year after release for £5 now!). However, for the last 3 years I've been the person in my flat share to sort out the internet connection and all 3 years I've had at least one flat mate that is a very heavy bit torrent user. I wonder how the ISP and copyright holders would deal with that situation...
... if they put them into production. I bet they could make them for a pretty cheap price now as well. Maybe the Obama administration should start manufacturing them to help pay the national debt!
As long as it's not like Clash of the Titans, the rest of Legendary's films have been pretty awesome. How are they going to get the hours spent driving the mako through rocky terrain into the film though?? I at least hope they stick the to game's storyline rather than "interpreting" it.
Well aren't you the popular one then... You've managed to avoid having any friends that are addicted to Twitter.
Hmmm, well Starbucks is relevant to programming. Don't all programmers need vast quantities of caffeine? Maybe that's just me and my addiction...
I agree it's not as bad as flash ads all over blogs as long as it stays in search results but Google Ads on searches don't really bother me. Maybe you see something different to me but I only get ads in the form of paid links on the far right of the search results.
Seconded!
I won't get along with flash until it stops making my CPU and Graphics card double in temperature. I've been using the HTML5 beta of since shortly after it launched and without flash, my computer doesn't get nearly as hot...
Try having friends who have pretty much stopped using any other form of digital communication...
There's already a Views 3 development version available for the drupal 7 dev release that works perfectly. I've been playing about with the D7 dev version for a few months now, there's a lot of great improvements. I'm particularly loving the admin overlay. It's much better than the overlay module for D6 and makes it nicer working with the site admin in general.
Don't know exactly how they are going to do these "Promoted Tweets" but if advertising tweets start appearing in my feed I'll be leaving twitter...
Cheers for the correction. Not sure how I got out by a factor of 100, obviously wasn't paying attention when I was tapping the numbers into the calculator...
I was passed the news on diaspora by a friend and was initially intrigued. After reading a bit all I could find were massive flaws in the idea from start to finish. I put some of them together here
/. run their own servers. Have you every stopped to think how much it is costing you?
The biggest issue I see is the cost of running your server. I'm sure some people here on
Agreed. Warranty in the EU is a minimum of 2 years. I don't think they could withhold updates as an update (assuming we're talking about patches) is an admission that there was something in the original product that made it not fit for purpose. That would make it very difficult for them to justify making you pay for updates. I think the idea would be more like the premium rate would give you extra maps, maybe special items, possibly access to multiplayer (although that would make EA even bigger assholes if they withheld mutliplayer unless you pay).
I've always found that both I and many of my friends like to work in pairs so arrange the desks into 2 pairs where the pair can see eachother's screens. Also, make sure the devs feel comfortable hotseating. It should be their space as a team, not 4 individual spaces. Some offices even go as far as having one computer per 2 devs so people have to work paired. It's actually a great work dynamic as it's difficult to focus for a whole 8 hours of coding during a work day but it's reasonably easy to be an extra set of eyes on somebody elses coding. Having 2 devs working at a single station you often get more and better code (than if they were working separately) as the code quality will reflect the experience of both devs while 2 sets of eyes reduces errors so less time is spent debugging later.
I guess it will somewhat depend on what you expect them to be doing. If they will be working mainly on maintenance and sys admin tasks then arrangement is less important. If they are working on real software development projects then they need to be able to collaborate easily. Don't worry about devs chatting and wasting time, they will do that anyway. Writing good software requires significantly more focus than just about any other job in your office and it's important that a devs can clear their mind to take a fresh look at their work and make sure everything is on track. Heck, when I chat to my colleagues we tend to be debating pros and cons of different approaches to problems anyway which benefits us an the company as we produce better code by pooling the best ideas.
If I have a big project I can put in significantly more than 40 hours a week. Infact, I've put in about 30 hours programming in the last 48 hours because I have a project on at the moment. On the other hand, if my workload is lots of small tasks, bug fixes etc... I find it much harder to stay on track and probably only put in about 30 hours real programming on a week. I am definitely a thinker though. I approach a problem from a few different directions, boil it down to it's essence, then write the minimal amount of code that provides the functionality and can still be understood by a colleague who may have to maintain it somewhere down the line. There's always a balance to be struck between writing the most optimised code and writing code that can be maintained (and these days the compilers do a better job than a person optimising the vast majority of code scenarios anyway).
Given his touchiness about height it's not surprising Sarkozy has also banned anyone taller than he is. All those people have the option to either leave the country or get free "shortening" surgery on the French health service!
Seconded! I've been using avast for about 4 years now. I had the very occasional virus using norton before that but since switching to avast I've had none. I literally 2 hours ago installed it on a friends computer who was having some virus issues and it's fixed all his problems. I had no issue finding the free version and the registration... well I can't say it better that Pojut: "Oh noes, it took me 2 minutes to fill out the little form."
I think you would be amazed how much software for major (multi-billion $) companies is written in Java. While C is (or at least was a year or so ago) the most popular choice for new open source projects, companies that rely on their software are turning to Java because of the existence of really good IDEs that make managing large code bases much easier. In most cases I'd agree that learning C++ does make learning Java easier but if you want to teach some kids, Java is a much better option as pointers and pointer arithmetic is probably beyond most people without some previous knowledge of programming. I don't think we need to worry about employers as these are just kids we're talking about. If they become interested enough in computing to want to have a career in it there's plenty of time to learn C++.
You might want to double check your facts on PHP. You don't need a webserver. You can just install php and run it from the command line ("$>php file.php") and it certainly won't be dead as soon as what you're calling a mess is "cleaned up". PHP is a server side language, everything you mention is client side or markup apart from AJAX that uses js at the client and PHP/ASP/Java/Ruby/etc... at the server end.
Referencing a post here on /. a while ago, benchmarks across most of the available languages show java running with the server VM (selected by passing the -server option on the command line) is faster than all languages other than C and Clean. Given that your students will probably be able to solve any problems set using only single class of completely static java so you don't necessarily have to teach them OO programming I think Java will provide them with much more power for much less pain than C or C++, is just better than VB full stop and is significantly faster than Python or PHP (which is incidentally the slowest language of those benchmarked).
I'd also point out that Java has some of the best editors (Eclipse, Netbeans), that take the pain out of debugging.
Apologies that I can't remember the exact details but I read about the case of a university professor in the US who lost his job for allegedly saying there were more men in science because men were more intelligent than women. The issue revolved around the press not understanding standard deviations. What the professor had actually said (in fewer words) was that the standard bell curve for intelligence is slightly difference by gender. For men it is shorter and fatter but the tails don't extend very far while for women the curve is taller but with very long tails. It boils down to there being more intelligent men but equally, more stupid men while women have the potential to be both significantly more intelligent but also significantly less intelligent than the bulk of the male population.
All the details are in the book Super Crunchers which is incidentally a fantastic read for anyone interested in the application of statistics in a very general, non-mathematical sense (it covers the use of statistics by baseball scouts, medical computers, predicting changes in flight prices and predicting wine vintages to name a few scenarios that are covered). Unfortunately the professor lost his job because of the furore generated by the misinterpretation in the press.
I don't have quite such a severe problem but my left eye is so screwed up (I'm severely long sighted with a double squint and double astigmatism) that even with glasses it can't focus on anything so I end up seeing kind of half 3D. It just vaguely looks like there are 2 copies of everything with one floating a couple of feet infront of the screen but still appearing flat.
One of my flatmates did the same thing. He's found a massive improvement using DVORAK. The problem is nobody else uses it so he has to adjust when he sits down at any other computer... If you're writing a lot of code there is also the "programmer's DVORAK" layout. I think there are some windows and *nix drivers floating about somewhere.
We even have free internet in Starbucks, and yes my dear Americans we have Starbucks in the UK (and I'd note that you don't get free Wifi there in the US). Why do Americans think the UK is so backward, we have faster broadband, cheaper mobile phone contracts even at a $2 to £1 exchange (that give more minutes, texts, data transfer) and those are just the first things to spring to mind. I spend a lot of time in both countries and in the middle of Silicon Valley I find it harder to stay connected than anywhere short of the middle of a field in the UK.