Noted Slashdot analyst "Jerf" has analyzed the portable market, and has determined that the DS will beat the PSP in the US. Jerf points out that in its first year both PSP and DS managed around 13 million units each, with DS slightly ahead. Year two cumulative stats give DS 25 million over the PSP's 22 million. In Year Three the difference rises to ten million (38m to 28m). In Year Four, the DS' lead has stretched to 15 million and to 20 million by Year Five.
When asked for evidence for his claims, he replied: "What, we need evidence and reasons? What, are you a Communist or something?"
(Actually, the report may or may not be useful. Who can tell, since we don't seem to have a link to it. But the article is useless trash, and if I had to guess, this study does sound suspiciously paid-for, if you get my drift.)
Big number fallacy; a nuke is big, sure, but let's be amazingly optimistic and assume it can completely physically clear a 10-mile radius of space junk, while not adding anything itself.
To cover LEO, we need to cover a volume of (4.0/3)*pi*((4000+1600)**3 - (4000+400)**3) miles, which is 378,000,000,000 cubic miles (378 American billion). Our incredible optimistic nuke can "clean" (4.0/3)*pi*(10 **3) cubic miles, or 4,200 cubic miles. Dividing the (unrounded) numbers reveals that we need to set off 90,449,062 (~90 million) miracle nukes to clean the orbit.
(If you start python and type as your first line "from math import pi", those expressions will slide right into Python so you can verify them. Insignificant figures have been trimmed for presentation.)
And it's even harder than that, since the objects are moving at different speeds, and it's quite easy for objects to slip between the cracks if we don't light up the entire orbit at once.
Clearly, this is absurd, because we don't even have that many pieces of space trash in orbit, by many orders of magnitude. Because of the difference, we don't even need to do any sort of statistics to safely conclude that there are no "concentrations" of space trash that could be nuked, and we are in fact going to have to address the situation one piece of trash at a time.
Back in the mists of time, you may have flipped the "show all articles on homepage" setting on. I was going to link to the setting, but lo, it hath changed. Now it lets you control on a section-by-section basis whether you get a summary or the full story. Presumably, those who did not have the now-nonexistant "show all stories on homepage" setting turned on get the other sections set to "summary", while those of us who had it on get them all set to "display full".
I think you're right. I've been around the loop a few times now, and I've examined any number of frameworks. I've used a few, but more often, I've rolled my own.
The big advantage of frameworks is they make the things the designer wanted to make easy, easy. The problem with frameworks is they make things the designer never thought of or never wanted either harder than it would be to do it directly, harder than it should be, or, in the worst cases, flat out impossible.
I've found that for larger projects, the disadvantages frequently outweigh the advantages.
I'll still use components here or there, but anything claiming to be an all-in-one approach is genarally more trouble than it's worth for anything over a couple of man-years*. Web frameworks are damned easy to build, as you can witness by the proliferation of them.
If I was knocking up a personal website, I might use a framework of some kind. But for anything serious, they're just so often a source of more trouble than gain after the first six months.
One of the reasons this work is that your local, custom framework can be "instantiated lazily"; you only add things as you need them. Framework purveyors have to work very hard to cover a lot of cases, you just need to cover the ones you use. With decent unit testing (don't leave home without it!), you can end up with a radically simpler system that works for you, rather than you working for it.
(*: Yes, yes, "mythical man years". The phrase can still have meaning.)
I had been visiting the site because of an odd 43 degree F temperature change overnight, and decided to check on that again.
Also, dogs are cavorting with cats, turnips grown in the fields are singing arias from Carmen, and Republicans and Democrats are admitting that the other side "may or may not have a point at this present time, but they're still unredeemable jackasses".
Yes, you two can win arguments by simply dropping words out of your opponent's points.
He said "retail checkout line", and there's a difference between that and the "retail level".
An episode of "Unwrapped" just went by on TV about Supermarkets, where they point out the modern supermarket can have on the order of tens of thousands of items. Your average supermarket checkout clerk can not be expected to remember the names of all of these items, let alone obscure information about what might happen if you stick a CD by one of the many sub-labels some company owns if you stick it in a computer. (Yes, the average supermarket doesn't sell CDs but the point applies across a lot of types of stores nowadays.)
GP is correct. Fighting at the retail checkout level is a waste of time.
Yes, Border's definately should know, but you're not going to correct the institutional ignorance by harassing the checkout clerk, who barely has the authority to process returns (if that), let alone pull product from the shelves or make decisions for the rest of the store/company.
My point was that you shouldn't need WPA at all, ever, if you already have application layer encryption.
Ah, yes, the "hypothetical that proves my point is true if my point is true". True, you don't need encryption if you already have encryption. However, since a lot of traffic is not encrypted, especially over the web, what's your point again?
There are people with a valid desire for WPA, and suggesting that they should just wait for all web traffic to go over SSL and all their other applications to start using application layer security... well that just a "mildly-informed psuedo-geek" making up reasons to look down on putatively "mildly informed psuedo-geeks".
That's not the point. Your wireless network can't be both WEP and WPA, so one non-WPA device means you have to drop the entire network down to WEP... or below. At the moment, my stickler is actually my Linux laptop, where I can't quite get all the kernel patches I want in at once, and WPA working with my wireless lost out.
You know, I thought marketing vaporware claims were bad, but political marketing vaporware, now that's whole new dimensions of vapor. It's bad enough when marketing has excessive influence on tech development, can you imagine what it'll be like when politicians are involved as a matter of "national prestige"? I have not the humor chops to properly satirize that.
No, they were quite clearly talking about another full generation of Gameboy, not just another GBA model.
My guess is that it was simply a hedge against people not liking the DS, so if it was a flop, they could say "Oh, well, that wasn't a GameBoy. Here's what you were looking for!" Whereas if it was a success, as it now is, those statements can be quietly thrown into the Memory Hole, which is where they seem to be now.
(On a side note, I wish people in general were better about following up on things. We now live in a world, and have for a while, where marketers/politicians can simply expect things to fall in the memory hole, and they make plans based on that. And no, this isn't a dig at any "obvious targets"; if the accusations and charges leap immediately to mind, then they obviously weren't in the Memory Hole, were they?)
The full announcement of the Revolution will probably be the deciding point. If the Revolution's remaining unannounced "secret weapon" is anything other than the next generation of GameBoy (and I expect that it will be something else, though I have no idea what, except maybe just a full announcement of the emulation deals they've cut (Sega Genesis games?)), I think we can safely guess the "This isn't a gameboy" talk was just CYA.
The word "data" is confusing. It is true that the actual information described in those files can't be "copyrighted" (scare quotes as the concept does not actually apply). However, the database itself would be protected under a compilation copyright. That is unless you can demonstrate to the court that the compilation contains no creative effort whatsoever, something that the courts have historically interpreted as an extremely high standard that this collection would almost certainly not meet, leaving its copyright intact. (The only thing that I am aware of that has ever met this standard is the phone book as a set of names->phone numbers; if much else has, it's a small set.)
It is true that you don't need their permission to use the data from an entry or two as you choose, but by licensing the whole under CC, they are also allowing you use the whole database under the (loose) terms of that license. The CC license is not redundant, as it does add to your set of legally permissible actions (with direct negotiation).
Real racism is not in the eye of the beholder. Real racism is when you irrationally use the characteristics you believe are true of a "race" to judge a member of that race. It becomes especially destructive when the characteristics believed true are false and derogatory, and especially destructive when it involves judging the value of a person (something not intrinsically wrong in certain contexts... "would I hire this person?" "is that person going to try to kill me?" we make value judgements every day).
This is as close to an emprically verifiable term as you can ever get when dealing with humans, assuming you can get at the inner state of the person.
The second type of racism is in the eye of the beholder, and it has gotten to the point where "That's racist!" is one step shy of "I don't like that!", only much, much meaner. The distinguishing characteristic of this kind of "racism" is that if the accuser can come up with any reason that the accusee might be doing or saying something for a racist reason, regardless of how likely or even how true that reason is, the accusee can be presumed racist, and should therefore be vilified. Fortunately, I think we're very near the point where that accusation will have been so overused that it will be diluted into nearly no effect.
As a homework exercise, estimate the probability that this form of racism will ever be "eliminated", and consider the consequences of your answer.
Often, it's hard to tell which is which. I prefer to cultivate an attitude more like the South Park children than the current attitudes of people who are hypersensitive about the second type of racism. This is the first I've heard that "of course" King Kong is a stand-in for black people. Personally, I thought he was just a giant monster. Since this accusation is a "projection" type accusation, I am inclined to think this is the second kind of "racism."
(Incidentally, the second type of "racism" is not itself really racist. It's just evil, in every sense of the term, especially including how it destroys the one afflicted with it. No apology for that belief.)
It really doesn't matter anyhow, as with the amount of emails sent out by your average spammer, any penalty that might actually stop them will bankrupt the target. 10 cents a mail still comes out to 110 million, after all, and that's low. At 10 cents a mail, some morons will do the math and still decide it's economically feasible.
Try turning on Firefox's "Minimum Font Size" feature.
While it's not at all uncommon for that to "break" a site, it often renders the text of The Escapist partially or totally unreadable. Fortunately, I find that is also true of the articles themselves, so all in all I'm not missing much. When the Slashdot discussions are routinely several times more interesting or intelligent (and much better laid out on my browser), you have a problem with your website.
No, we're taught to measure volume in terms of Nature's Simultaneous Harmonic 4-Day Time Cubes, which your singularity education has left you unable to comprehend, you educated stupid.
You have not the mentality to comprehend the simple math of Cubic antipode creation, for at about age 6, your parents gave your 2 opposite antipode brains to Big Brother academic hirelings, to clone thought to serve evil singularity brotherhood - destroying Cubic families, villages and tribes.
I think it's something like 1 Nature's Sumultaneous Harmonic 4-Day Time Cube per Cubic Antipodal Creation. I leave it to you to translate to your pathetic 1-day measurements.
I was going to post a reply pointing out there is a lot of skepticism about the effectiveness of Lorenzo's Oil, but it appears my information is old. A quick Google found this New Scientist article about a study showing its effectiveness. You can still find links expressing skepticism, but I'd say a study trumps those.
where are all the gadflies who normally come out of the woodwork with dire warnings about passing off rank theory as fact?
All over the place. They just aren't connected to religion (or at least not major religions), so they don't get the microphone of a major religious organization.
Hang out on one of Usenet's science groups, or look through the archive, and you'll find all sorts of kooks with all sorts of theories "proving" QM, or General Relativity (link to examples), or Gravitation, or the accepted theories of Cosmology, wrong.
The thought has crossed my mind that more people would be more upset about physics if they realized how thorougly it contradicts their ideas about how the universe works, and really, that statement isn't just limited to the religious, either. But most people live in varying states of blissful ignorance, and ultimately, that's probably just fine.
Why would there be a correlation between warming on Mars and warming on Earth?
Well, this is just a guess, but maybe because they have the same heat source?
It would be far more stunning if there weren't a correlation. (And of course you are aware that "correlation" is a continuous variable, right, not just a binary true/false value? Just checking.)
Why would he do that? It wouldn't work. Anyone who is going to panic and rush out to buy the DVD because of this news... was going to buy the DVD anyway and probably had it pre-ordered.
Odds are this sort of public pessimism will have a minimal positive impact on DVD sales. What it will do is make it that much harder to pitch in the future, having expressed this skepticism.
Much as I enjoy Firefly, I'm inclined to take this at face value, and I can't see anybody making any more movies out of it. Sure, Serenity will make a profit in the end, but not enough to make up for the opportunity cost of the profits you can make with $40million on another movie.
Unit testing is not OOP. I use it procedurally all the time, and while I don't currently program functionally, it would be very easy to use it under that paradigm too. (In fact it would be much easier, since it's typically side-effects in testing that cause the problems.)
Regression testing is good, but it fails to capture the point about automation of the tests, which is critical. You can never automate 100%, but the closer you can get, the better.
While I don't agree with everything Joel says, I do know variations on "hallway usability testing" have been recommended by a variety of other usability experts, under various names, since there's no official one. (Usability is still largely in its infancy, since it is pretty much ignored by everyone.)
Finally, in your situation (which is fairly similar to mine, actually), "the best tools money can buy" would in this case simply be hardware adequate to the task you set them. In my previous job I had to go scrounging around for spare memory, even though $50 worth of RAM would have recouped its value in about three days by my estimate. 256MB of RAM and the corporate load of software, plus development tools, went together poorly.
See, you'd "fail" my employer interview, and by my asking these questions and your subsequent interpretation, you'd know not to hire me. Mission accomplished. Being accused of being an OO zealot (which I happen to know is not true) simply because I use a testing methodology (better than the average "none", no?) and interpreting everything said in the worst possible way doesn't exactly endear you to me, either.
I disagree with that completely. You see, in Hungary exactly such is the situation: You cannot sign away the "rights" to your music.
What you talk about aren't "moral rights", which is a very specific subset of traditional copyright rights. See here, for instance, for a UK take on the term, though it looks familiar to me in the French context as well. The moral rights are:
to be identified as the author of the work or director of the film in certain circumstances, e.g. when copies are issued to the public
to object to derogatory treatment of the work or film which amounts to a distortion or mutilation or is otherwise prejudicial to the honour or reputation of the author or director
The second would be controversial in the United States under our First Amendment rules, but I do like the first, personally.
At any rate, they don't have anything to do with your right to compensation chosen under free-market rules.
This post corrects both the parent and the grandparent, which first brought up the term "moral rights" but then didn't talk about any of them. It's a well-defined term with a well-defined meaning, not a fuzzy thing to use randomly in an argument.
A number of other people had good questions, so this is not everything I'd suggest; I just didn't see this on a quick perusal.
Ask about their development practices. The Joel Test is a good place to start, even if you don't agree with everything he says or all of his points. I definately make sure to ask about unit testing, for instance, without which you are wasting everybody's time, especially mine as a developer. If you're going to yell at me for that, I want to know up front.
To highlight the other things I consider a bare minimum: Source control is an absolute must, or again, you're going to have to pay me a lot more to deal with the stress. Bug databases of some kind are a must. In both of those cases, it is possible to deploy such things on your own initiative, as long as no-one is actively undercutting you. You'll also get a pretty good sense of what you're going into; if the answer is not just "no", but "why the hell would you want that?", then you're in trouble.
Of course, if you yourself don't use any of these things... well, uh, more power to you and, ah, good luck with that "programming" thing...
The good news is that this will tend to greatly impress anybody else who knows what you're talking about. I pretty much sealed my last two jobs with two little words, "unit test".
Slashdot Mirror
... did they get you?
Noted Slashdot analyst "Jerf" has analyzed the portable market, and has determined that the DS will beat the PSP in the US. Jerf points out that in its first year both PSP and DS managed around 13 million units each, with DS slightly ahead. Year two cumulative stats give DS 25 million over the PSP's 22 million. In Year Three the difference rises to ten million (38m to 28m). In Year Four, the DS' lead has stretched to 15 million and to 20 million by Year Five.
When asked for evidence for his claims, he replied: "What, we need evidence and reasons? What, are you a Communist or something?"
(Actually, the report may or may not be useful. Who can tell, since we don't seem to have a link to it. But the article is useless trash, and if I had to guess, this study does sound suspiciously paid-for, if you get my drift.)
Big number fallacy; a nuke is big, sure, but let's be amazingly optimistic and assume it can completely physically clear a 10-mile radius of space junk, while not adding anything itself.
The average radius of the Earth is 3,959 miles, call it 4000. The definition of LEO orbit is from 400 to 1600 miles above the Earth. Sphere volume (close enough) is defined as (4/3)*pi*r^3.
To cover LEO, we need to cover a volume of (4.0/3)*pi*((4000+1600)**3 - (4000+400)**3) miles, which is 378,000,000,000 cubic miles (378 American billion). Our incredible optimistic nuke can "clean" (4.0/3)*pi*(10 **3) cubic miles, or 4,200 cubic miles. Dividing the (unrounded) numbers reveals that we need to set off 90,449,062 (~90 million) miracle nukes to clean the orbit.
(If you start python and type as your first line "from math import pi", those expressions will slide right into Python so you can verify them. Insignificant figures have been trimmed for presentation.)
And it's even harder than that, since the objects are moving at different speeds, and it's quite easy for objects to slip between the cracks if we don't light up the entire orbit at once.
Clearly, this is absurd, because we don't even have that many pieces of space trash in orbit, by many orders of magnitude. Because of the difference, we don't even need to do any sort of statistics to safely conclude that there are no "concentrations" of space trash that could be nuked, and we are in fact going to have to address the situation one piece of trash at a time.
Back in the mists of time, you may have flipped the "show all articles on homepage" setting on. I was going to link to the setting, but lo, it hath changed. Now it lets you control on a section-by-section basis whether you get a summary or the full story. Presumably, those who did not have the now-nonexistant "show all stories on homepage" setting turned on get the other sections set to "summary", while those of us who had it on get them all set to "display full".
I think you're right. I've been around the loop a few times now, and I've examined any number of frameworks. I've used a few, but more often, I've rolled my own.
The big advantage of frameworks is they make the things the designer wanted to make easy, easy. The problem with frameworks is they make things the designer never thought of or never wanted either harder than it would be to do it directly, harder than it should be, or, in the worst cases, flat out impossible.
I've found that for larger projects, the disadvantages frequently outweigh the advantages.
I'll still use components here or there, but anything claiming to be an all-in-one approach is genarally more trouble than it's worth for anything over a couple of man-years*. Web frameworks are damned easy to build, as you can witness by the proliferation of them.
If I was knocking up a personal website, I might use a framework of some kind. But for anything serious, they're just so often a source of more trouble than gain after the first six months.
One of the reasons this work is that your local, custom framework can be "instantiated lazily"; you only add things as you need them. Framework purveyors have to work very hard to cover a lot of cases, you just need to cover the ones you use. With decent unit testing (don't leave home without it!), you can end up with a radically simpler system that works for you, rather than you working for it.
(*: Yes, yes, "mythical man years". The phrase can still have meaning.)
I had been visiting the site because of an odd 43 degree F temperature change overnight, and decided to check on that again.
Also, dogs are cavorting with cats, turnips grown in the fields are singing arias from Carmen, and Republicans and Democrats are admitting that the other side "may or may not have a point at this present time, but they're still unredeemable jackasses".
Therefore, the Nemesis theory is true. QED.
Yes, you two can win arguments by simply dropping words out of your opponent's points.
He said "retail checkout line", and there's a difference between that and the "retail level".
An episode of "Unwrapped" just went by on TV about Supermarkets, where they point out the modern supermarket can have on the order of tens of thousands of items. Your average supermarket checkout clerk can not be expected to remember the names of all of these items, let alone obscure information about what might happen if you stick a CD by one of the many sub-labels some company owns if you stick it in a computer. (Yes, the average supermarket doesn't sell CDs but the point applies across a lot of types of stores nowadays.)
GP is correct. Fighting at the retail checkout level is a waste of time.
Yes, Border's definately should know, but you're not going to correct the institutional ignorance by harassing the checkout clerk, who barely has the authority to process returns (if that), let alone pull product from the shelves or make decisions for the rest of the store/company.
(Read all the words.)
My point was that you shouldn't need WPA at all, ever, if you already have application layer encryption.
Ah, yes, the "hypothetical that proves my point is true if my point is true". True, you don't need encryption if you already have encryption. However, since a lot of traffic is not encrypted, especially over the web, what's your point again?
There are people with a valid desire for WPA, and suggesting that they should just wait for all web traffic to go over SSL and all their other applications to start using application layer security... well that just a "mildly-informed psuedo-geek" making up reasons to look down on putatively "mildly informed psuedo-geeks".
That's not the point. Your wireless network can't be both WEP and WPA, so one non-WPA device means you have to drop the entire network down to WEP... or below. At the moment, my stickler is actually my Linux laptop, where I can't quite get all the kernel patches I want in at once, and WPA working with my wireless lost out.
It will also include a multi-lingual pony.
You know, I thought marketing vaporware claims were bad, but political marketing vaporware, now that's whole new dimensions of vapor. It's bad enough when marketing has excessive influence on tech development, can you imagine what it'll be like when politicians are involved as a matter of "national prestige"? I have not the humor chops to properly satirize that.
No, they were quite clearly talking about another full generation of Gameboy, not just another GBA model.
My guess is that it was simply a hedge against people not liking the DS, so if it was a flop, they could say "Oh, well, that wasn't a GameBoy. Here's what you were looking for!" Whereas if it was a success, as it now is, those statements can be quietly thrown into the Memory Hole, which is where they seem to be now.
(On a side note, I wish people in general were better about following up on things. We now live in a world, and have for a while, where marketers/politicians can simply expect things to fall in the memory hole, and they make plans based on that. And no, this isn't a dig at any "obvious targets"; if the accusations and charges leap immediately to mind, then they obviously weren't in the Memory Hole, were they?)
The full announcement of the Revolution will probably be the deciding point. If the Revolution's remaining unannounced "secret weapon" is anything other than the next generation of GameBoy (and I expect that it will be something else, though I have no idea what, except maybe just a full announcement of the emulation deals they've cut (Sega Genesis games?)), I think we can safely guess the "This isn't a gameboy" talk was just CYA.
The word "data" is confusing. It is true that the actual information described in those files can't be "copyrighted" (scare quotes as the concept does not actually apply). However, the database itself would be protected under a compilation copyright. That is unless you can demonstrate to the court that the compilation contains no creative effort whatsoever, something that the courts have historically interpreted as an extremely high standard that this collection would almost certainly not meet, leaving its copyright intact. (The only thing that I am aware of that has ever met this standard is the phone book as a set of names->phone numbers; if much else has, it's a small set.)
It is true that you don't need their permission to use the data from an entry or two as you choose, but by licensing the whole under CC, they are also allowing you use the whole database under the (loose) terms of that license. The CC license is not redundant, as it does add to your set of legally permissible actions (with direct negotiation).
Reminds me of this, too.
There are really two types of racism.
Real racism is not in the eye of the beholder. Real racism is when you irrationally use the characteristics you believe are true of a "race" to judge a member of that race. It becomes especially destructive when the characteristics believed true are false and derogatory, and especially destructive when it involves judging the value of a person (something not intrinsically wrong in certain contexts... "would I hire this person?" "is that person going to try to kill me?" we make value judgements every day).
This is as close to an emprically verifiable term as you can ever get when dealing with humans, assuming you can get at the inner state of the person.
The second type of racism is in the eye of the beholder, and it has gotten to the point where "That's racist!" is one step shy of "I don't like that!", only much, much meaner. The distinguishing characteristic of this kind of "racism" is that if the accuser can come up with any reason that the accusee might be doing or saying something for a racist reason, regardless of how likely or even how true that reason is, the accusee can be presumed racist, and should therefore be vilified. Fortunately, I think we're very near the point where that accusation will have been so overused that it will be diluted into nearly no effect.
As a homework exercise, estimate the probability that this form of racism will ever be "eliminated", and consider the consequences of your answer.
Often, it's hard to tell which is which. I prefer to cultivate an attitude more like the South Park children than the current attitudes of people who are hypersensitive about the second type of racism. This is the first I've heard that "of course" King Kong is a stand-in for black people. Personally, I thought he was just a giant monster. Since this accusation is a "projection" type accusation, I am inclined to think this is the second kind of "racism."
(Incidentally, the second type of "racism" is not itself really racist. It's just evil, in every sense of the term, especially including how it destroys the one afflicted with it. No apology for that belief.)
It's punitive, and meant as a deterrent.
It really doesn't matter anyhow, as with the amount of emails sent out by your average spammer, any penalty that might actually stop them will bankrupt the target. 10 cents a mail still comes out to 110 million, after all, and that's low. At 10 cents a mail, some morons will do the math and still decide it's economically feasible.
Try turning on Firefox's "Minimum Font Size" feature.
While it's not at all uncommon for that to "break" a site, it often renders the text of The Escapist partially or totally unreadable. Fortunately, I find that is also true of the articles themselves, so all in all I'm not missing much. When the Slashdot discussions are routinely several times more interesting or intelligent (and much better laid out on my browser), you have a problem with your website.
No, we're taught to measure volume in terms of Nature's Simultaneous Harmonic 4-Day Time Cubes, which your singularity education has left you unable to comprehend, you educated stupid.
You have not the mentality to comprehend the simple math of Cubic antipode creation, for at about age 6, your parents gave your 2 opposite antipode brains to Big Brother academic hirelings, to clone thought to serve evil singularity brotherhood - destroying Cubic families, villages and tribes.
I think it's something like 1 Nature's Sumultaneous Harmonic 4-Day Time Cube per Cubic Antipodal Creation. I leave it to you to translate to your pathetic 1-day measurements.
I was going to post a reply pointing out there is a lot of skepticism about the effectiveness of Lorenzo's Oil, but it appears my information is old. A quick Google found this New Scientist article about a study showing its effectiveness. You can still find links expressing skepticism, but I'd say a study trumps those.
where are all the gadflies who normally come out of the woodwork with dire warnings about passing off rank theory as fact?
All over the place. They just aren't connected to religion (or at least not major religions), so they don't get the microphone of a major religious organization.
Hang out on one of Usenet's science groups, or look through the archive, and you'll find all sorts of kooks with all sorts of theories "proving" QM, or General Relativity (link to examples), or Gravitation, or the accepted theories of Cosmology, wrong.
The thought has crossed my mind that more people would be more upset about physics if they realized how thorougly it contradicts their ideas about how the universe works, and really, that statement isn't just limited to the religious, either. But most people live in varying states of blissful ignorance, and ultimately, that's probably just fine.
Why would there be a correlation between warming on Mars and warming on Earth?
Well, this is just a guess, but maybe because they have the same heat source?
It would be far more stunning if there weren't a correlation. (And of course you are aware that "correlation" is a continuous variable, right, not just a binary true/false value? Just checking.)
Why would he do that? It wouldn't work. Anyone who is going to panic and rush out to buy the DVD because of this news... was going to buy the DVD anyway and probably had it pre-ordered.
Odds are this sort of public pessimism will have a minimal positive impact on DVD sales. What it will do is make it that much harder to pitch in the future, having expressed this skepticism.
Much as I enjoy Firefly, I'm inclined to take this at face value, and I can't see anybody making any more movies out of it. Sure, Serenity will make a profit in the end, but not enough to make up for the opportunity cost of the profits you can make with $40million on another movie.
I agree; I hope they are able to follow through on the last "laser placard" (or whatever they call it), which IIRC was "See you on another channel."
Unit testing is not OOP. I use it procedurally all the time, and while I don't currently program functionally, it would be very easy to use it under that paradigm too. (In fact it would be much easier, since it's typically side-effects in testing that cause the problems.)
Regression testing is good, but it fails to capture the point about automation of the tests, which is critical. You can never automate 100%, but the closer you can get, the better.
While I don't agree with everything Joel says, I do know variations on "hallway usability testing" have been recommended by a variety of other usability experts, under various names, since there's no official one. (Usability is still largely in its infancy, since it is pretty much ignored by everyone.)
Finally, in your situation (which is fairly similar to mine, actually), "the best tools money can buy" would in this case simply be hardware adequate to the task you set them. In my previous job I had to go scrounging around for spare memory, even though $50 worth of RAM would have recouped its value in about three days by my estimate. 256MB of RAM and the corporate load of software, plus development tools, went together poorly.
See, you'd "fail" my employer interview, and by my asking these questions and your subsequent interpretation, you'd know not to hire me. Mission accomplished. Being accused of being an OO zealot (which I happen to know is not true) simply because I use a testing methodology (better than the average "none", no?) and interpreting everything said in the worst possible way doesn't exactly endear you to me, either.
What you talk about aren't "moral rights", which is a very specific subset of traditional copyright rights. See here, for instance, for a UK take on the term, though it looks familiar to me in the French context as well. The moral rights are:
- to be identified as the author of the work or director of the film in certain circumstances, e.g. when copies are issued to the public
- to object to derogatory treatment of the work or film which amounts to a distortion or mutilation or is otherwise prejudicial to the honour or reputation of the author or director
The second would be controversial in the United States under our First Amendment rules, but I do like the first, personally.At any rate, they don't have anything to do with your right to compensation chosen under free-market rules.
This post corrects both the parent and the grandparent, which first brought up the term "moral rights" but then didn't talk about any of them. It's a well-defined term with a well-defined meaning, not a fuzzy thing to use randomly in an argument.
A number of other people had good questions, so this is not everything I'd suggest; I just didn't see this on a quick perusal.
Ask about their development practices. The Joel Test is a good place to start, even if you don't agree with everything he says or all of his points. I definately make sure to ask about unit testing, for instance, without which you are wasting everybody's time, especially mine as a developer. If you're going to yell at me for that, I want to know up front.
To highlight the other things I consider a bare minimum: Source control is an absolute must, or again, you're going to have to pay me a lot more to deal with the stress. Bug databases of some kind are a must. In both of those cases, it is possible to deploy such things on your own initiative, as long as no-one is actively undercutting you. You'll also get a pretty good sense of what you're going into; if the answer is not just "no", but "why the hell would you want that?", then you're in trouble.
Of course, if you yourself don't use any of these things... well, uh, more power to you and, ah, good luck with that "programming" thing...
The good news is that this will tend to greatly impress anybody else who knows what you're talking about. I pretty much sealed my last two jobs with two little words, "unit test".