Could the moderator who moderated this "Interesting" come out of the woodwork and explain what they found interesting about this? Maybe the mental exercise of trying to figure out what the hell that means?
I have to admit there is something to that interpretation, though. Every time I think I've got it figured out, I realize I don't. The only sentence that makes sense, the second one, also has nothing to do with the article, so it is no help. Upon reflection, I couldn't make a masterpiece of Rorschach posting like this if I tried.
We can't use JSP's, there hard to maintain! We can't use Javascript, it's loosely typed! We have to use an Object Broker, SQL is not maintainable!
All the projects that I have been on where code maintainability has been the primary goal have one thing in common. They all failed.
If that is their idea of "maintainable", they didn't fail because they shot for maintainable, they failed because they drank the kool-aide and trapped themselves into software paradigms that only work when oodles of resources are thrown at them. Smaller teams require more agile methods to get results, and that is also the mechanism whereby smaller teams can produce software where larger teams failed. (It goes both ways, I'm not claiming that as an absolute. But that small teams can and have beaten much bigger ones is an unassailable fact.)
Certainly you've got some good facts at hand to learn from, but I think you're taking the wrong lesson away. Projects that simply ignore maintainability fail, too. Can you imagine Mozilla with no concern for maintainability, or the Linux kernel?
The focus should always be on product quality, not code quality.
If you don't have quality code, you don't have a quality product. You may have an adequate product. You may be in a situation where an adequate product is all you need. I have an adequate set of knives in my kitchen, because I can not afford quality knives. But I do not pretend that they are therefore quality knives.
You're calling for a classic short-term focus, and you can and will suffer the classic penalties for short-term focus. I know, I've seen it first hand and dragged software products out of their local optima by the sweat of my brow. It's not easy, but either it happens or the product dies a code-quality death.
You need to use the proper metric for quality. Inappropriately using and paying for a strong type system is anti-quality in my book; that goes for your other two examples as well, when done correctly. (SQL and JSP code both need to be rationally minimized via the application of Once and Only Once, but they are not the cause of the unmaintainability; the abandonment of Once and Only Once is. Once and Only Once is one of the most important aspects of any proper quality metric.) Your quality metric should have functionality built into it.
Raising the price you pay at the pump is not noted for its power to make people buy more gasoline, and giving this extra money to the government is not noted for improving the bottom line of oil companies, either. A little less conspiracy and a little more thought, please. (Theories based on supposed integration between the two I dismiss as outright absurd... the oil companies are obviously not spending the California budget, nor deriving any particular benefit from the California spending proportionate to the "take"; if they were going to benefit significantly from this money it'd have to show up on their bottom line, not California's.)
(You may also find this relevant; as a motivation to get people to buy more gas, this is an atrocious plan.)
Please explain to me how this "punishes" you for owning a fuel-efficient vehicle?
"Punish" is the wrong word. But there is something fairly unethical in convincing people to be fuel-efficient by telling them they will pay less tax (even if it was never explicitly said, we've been using taxation like that for a long time now and that was definately part of the reason gas taxes were hiked), then taking away those benefits in a panic as soon as people actually start using them.
If this is enacted and left in place, it still won't "punish" people for using fuel-efficient vehicles, but it will disincentivize them relative to the current situation. (Hey, look, I used "disincentivize" in a non-bureaucratic situation and it's actually a half-way decent word choice(!), as all the alternatives I can come up with are too long or fail to capture nuances.)
Now, with respect to software, from what I have seen anecdotally there's just not the same kind of rigor placed on most software projects, even large, very expensive software projects.
The fundamental problem is that we honestly don't seem to know what rigor to put in. I know what we need. Bob knows what we need. ISO knows what we need. Several book authors know what we need. Unfortunately, many of these things end up quite contradictory, and scientific studies are impractical and borderline impossible. Between that and endlessly moving requirements, we just haven't been able to really nail down what makes a good manager, i.e., what makes for a well managed project. It's not like most engineering projects... or rather, it's just like most other engineering projects, multiplied by ten or twenty.
(And at the risk of sounding elitist, I'd also personally add that the average programmer is really quite astoundingly incompetent, both due to the wildly changing world we live in, and a basic lack of skill (compounded by the difficulty of mentoring in said wildly changing world). Would you want to drive over a bridge where the senior engineer on the project has only three years experience in building bridges? Yet, how can you have much more than three years experience in.Net?)
Every field has its own trials and tribulations, and I don't mean to minimize other fields, but software really is a mess.
I don't know if its the idea that "Hey, its only software, its no problem if we change crap halfway through implementation" that causes this or something else,
I believe the observation goes back all the way to The Mythical Man Month that this, which should be software's greatest asset and turn a software project into something vastly easier to engineer than a bridge, has been turned into its greatest liability through the mechanisms you propose, and the resulting higher-order effects.
The moral of the story (I'll stop rambling here) is that project management is very much a learned skill.
Looking back, what I meant to emphasize more is that you don't seem to be able to pick it up from books, and further that some people can't seem to learn it at all (though that shouldn't be surprising). But I did not say that as clearly as I meant to.
This might change if A: We could nail down a One True Way to manage (not even "the" one true way, "a" would do nicely) and B: Somebody wrote a good book on it. In the meantime, I just haven't seen the evidence that a real manual on management has emerged. You can benefit from a lot of people who will tell you what not to do, but there isn't so much work on what to do.
(Example: The classic Mythical Man Month book has a lot of "don't" essays, including the eponymous one that basically says "don't throw manpower at a project expecting it to be perfectly fungible", but the suggestions on what to do are tentative, untested hypotheses about building software teams on a "surgeon" model, which IIRC had a note added in the 25th Ann. Edition to the effect that he still hadn't tried it yet.)
Why do you think to convince me with insults, the very glib generalizations you so readily accuse me of, and jousting at strawmen? To wit: Re my statement that the conflict was inevitable, you "counter" by... pointing out the motivation one side has to be in conflict? Also, correctly pointing out the root problem with the Muslim world (IMHO)... then suggesting three steps that do absolutely nothing to address those points whatsoever?
Do you wonder why you have failed to convince me? You can stop wondering now. Before you can make an argument that stands a chance (at least with me), you need to be able to hold on to a coherent line of thought. You are much too reactionary, spouting knee-jerk accusations and "evidence" that undermines the very point you think you are trying to make!
Do me a favor... if your "reply" is this reactive, don't bother. I've seen it all before.
You might want to consider the story about the splinter and the plank in the eye, before accusing somebody of swallowing propoganda whole. I see no particular evidence of thought in your post; you are merely host to a couple of virulant memes, almost as if not by choice. I've chosen my position, which, by the evidence I see here, you don't even understand. (How could you? I haven't stated it. You've jumped to empirically false conclusions about it. By the way, do you know what that word means?) Have you chosen yours, or merely absorbed it?
Are there any books or other reading material that I could read in order to manage a software project effectively?
No.
(Semi-serious. The evidence suggests to me that either you can do it (presumably with some practice) or you can't. If there is a group of people who can learn it from books, they are lost in the noise. Nor does there seem to be a way of knowing in advance whether you can. Like I said, semi-serious; I don't fully mean this but it's not fully a joke either.)
Ha. I knew it. Part of the definition of "good exercise" is that it has to be boring.
I guess that heart beating and sweating and stuff for easily the recommended 15-30 minutes at a time isn't enough... it overloads the easily-overloaded "fun" receptors on the heart and other muscles and cancels out all of the other benefits. The fact that I'm feeling better is also an illusion brought on by excessive fun, which can of course cause hallucinations.
If you're not slamming you feet on hard concrete and hating every minute of it, unless you let go of your sanity and use the cognitive dissonance of "Why the hell am I doing this?" to convince yourself that, logically, you must be having fun, you're not really getting exercise.
Although, maybe I'm jumping the gun on this post. Having heard of neither Heard Disease nor excercise, maybe I'm accidentally reading into what you were saying. Maybe excercise really is the cure for Heard Disease, probably helps Caner too, which I hear is really vicious. (You haven't lived until you're under attack by a Heard of Caners, either. Damn, man, now that's sickness.)
Ok... Is it safe to assume that the _whole_ game is coded in Python then?
Not in the slightest. Python integrates well with C and C++. (Some other languages do it without somewhat less boilerplate in the integration code, but Python is one of the languages that basically integrates 100% feasibly.)
In fact, quite the opposite; it's safe to assume only the high level is in Python. That's Standard Operating Procedure for high-performance code in the Python world.
You obviously don't care about security, as that is twelve times more vulnerable than it should be. Distribute one patch a year.
Come to think of it, let's make Windows infinitely more secure, and not distribute any patches at all! The cool thing about this is you can test this theory by simply pretending no patches are ever released and not downloading them, thus ending up with the most secure Windows installation ever.
Let me know how that goes; this "simply declaring Windows secure" strategy will probably reduce the workload of a lot of Windows admins, foolishly running around and installing patches, and will probably have application in many other admin domains as well. ("The printer is out of paper? That's impossible, we haven't had to put more paper in it this year and therefore it is clearly not out of paper now. No, we will not come take a look as you are clearly a raving lunatic. Bye!" See? Way easier than committing the grievous error of actually putting paper in... if you do it today, you'll only have to do it again later.)
Given that your judgements were empirically wrong, yes.
In answer to your question, yes. Both Islamism and American culture are expansionist, though in wildly different ways (and almost certainly not the way you are thinking of for America; note I said culture, not people). Conflict was utterly inevitable in the context of a shrinking world. Even complete and utter appeasement would merely have delayed the day of reckoning and merely further armed the Islamists.
Ah yes, "cutting off women's parts of women's genitals at birth" morally equated to "implementing one side of a controversial issue that has split the entire country about 50/50 for decades", with about half of the country seeing it not as "repressing women" but "standing up for the unborn".
I suppose I'm supposed to recant, say 100 "Hail Chomsky"s, and immediately sign up for a protest march?
This sort of moral equivalency argument only works on those who already agree with you. As an argument for swaying people to your side, it is a prime example of why the Democrats as a party continue to lose ground as they allow themselves to be run by people who seriously tender this argument: You simply repulse them.
(I'm going to fire the "issues aren't all black and white" card off here, too.... even if you stipulate that the abortion issue is completely a women repression issue, that still does not entitle you to collapse the issue into a binary, black/white "women repressed/women free" issue and declare Bush on the same side as the terrorists; Bush is far, far more to the "women free" side of the issue and is responsible for huge strides in freeing women: The women of both Afghanistan and Iraq were free to vote, putting them ahead of our democracy's track record by a long shot despite being, overall, much more repressed than we started out at. Of course, since you collapse the issue to black/white, you see it as women going from "repressed->repressed", no progress, and again, are you suprised you're not going to convince me? I find myself rather often thinking that people are forcing themselves into these black/white views because it is the only way to prevent themselves from having to admit that whatever bad things Bush may have done, he has undeniably done accomplished huge swathes of goodness as well, and that just Can't Happen (TM)... and I rarely encounter evidence to the contrary.)
You left off two words... for themselves. Very few people have truly fought for the freedom of others, and I'm not seeing it from the terrorists.
Seriously, that changes everything, effectively invalidates the rest of your message, and if you don't see that you need those words to make a true statement, look around you, for Pete's sake. I'd lay money that you can name ten ways the "bad guys who support the war" (or whoever) are trying to restrict your freedom; in the opposite context you know that's trivially true. Why are you so swift to forget it when it comes to the terrorists?
The terrorists can, for instance, just go fuck themselves if they are fighting for the "freedom" to repress women, which is indeed one of the many things they are fighting for; this is essentially empirical truth. They may be fighting for "freedom" but that is not enough to be noble, or worth rooting for.
Overgeneralizing; it is trivial for me to come up with ways I don't agree with the current US policy, therefore your attempted criticisms fall flat. Not worth responding to. Why I'd look to someone who overgeneralizes while criticizing others about overgeneralization beats me.
You may be one-dimensional, but don't project that onto me.
I don't think Osama bin Laden sent those planes to attack us because he hated our freedom. I think he did it because of our support for Israel, our ties with the Saudi family and our military bases in Saudi Arabia. You know why I think that? Because that's what he fucking said! Are we a nation of 6-year-olds?" - David Cross
Taking a psychotic, intelligent, unapologetic mass murderer with political ambitions at face value on his public propoganda? And insulting others who don't? Yes, that sounds like about the maturity I'd expect from a six-year-old.
(Sorry, couldn't resist the crack. That is one of the single worst arguments I have ever heard made on this entire topic, which attracts bad arguments from both sides like honey does flies. I guess it got modded some kind of Bizzaro World Informative?)
I was with you, right up until you suggested that we remove humans from science.
What, you don't think that's what you said? Well, you'll understand eventually. Either that, or show me a group bigger than 100 people that has "no politics" in which case I'll concede I might be wrong.... but even if you show me such a group it'll still remain the more probable outcome that you are simply blind to the politics. (Evidence: If you really think it's only "Republicans" bending science, it's probably because the bending done by "Democrats" is invisible to you. Caveat: The terms Republican and Democrat are not really meaningful in this context anyhow; I'm borrowing your particular meanings.)
(When people say "remove politics from the system", what they are really saying, even if they don't realize it, is that the system should align with their politics, which are of course not politics, but merely and quite obviously the truth. Were it only so simple...)
This is not to say the diagnosis is inaccurate... oh, you've oversimplified to the point of effective absurdity but that's just what happens in a short Slashdot post, I have too but at least I labelled some of it. I'm just saying that you might as well phrase your "solution" as "Booga booga, grunt, wallabie wallabie smooger!" in terms of the useful, implementable solution content it contains.
Every time when I convert a PVCS user to Subversion they are scared because of the edit/conflict/merge idea.... I have a hard time conveying the benefit of the CVS/subversion way.
The fundamental argument is, "If it's so horrifying to be without [X], why doesn't the doom and gloom actually happen to people who try living without it?", followed by pointing out the large number of people living without it.
This same argument can be applied to a lot of dogma that we've accreted over the past few decades... static typing, the "need" for various excessively top-down methodologies, the need to compile all the way down to machine code or suffer Performance Doom. (The last one is one we are quite a ways into shaking ourselves free of; I mention it so more people can see the "other side" of a thing like this.)
Of course, this only applies to doom-and-gloom-based arguments. I bold that because there can be benefits in some situations for some of this class of issue, but the benefit won't be the avoidance of doom and gloom. You can make positive arguments about the benefits that, say, static typing might bring under some situations and this counterargument doesn't apply to that point.
The best thing about this though isn't so much using it to convince others, it's using it to convince yourself and advance your understanding. If there are a lot of people who are doing something you just know is wrong and certain to lead them to doom, it is still worth a try, especially if these people seem otherwise smart. You may still be right (PHP is still a disaster of a language, for instance), but you may prove wrong and learn something. It's happened to me several times. (Yes, the conclusion that I tried PHP is correct, and it's one of the few times I can think of that following this algorithm led me to reinforce my preconceptions on the issue, rather than discard or modify them.)
To get back to the topic at hand, abundant community experience indicates that source control needs to be easy, or nobody will bother with it. The price of rare conflict resolution (which is admittedly a cost, though there is some benefit in the explicit existance of a conflict that wouldn't necessarily be revealed in a lock-based system) is more than repaid by the way people actually use the source control system, instead of ignoring it as much as possible and sometimes actively fighting it. (Every time you fight or work around the system, you're not preventing problems, you're creating them.)
Which is the dichotomy I was going for when I referenced Star Trek writers as "really believing it". That example of Firefly stood out because it bothered me right then, though, whereas none of the other shows really bothered me that way. (Although I've yet to watch the DVDs, so I've only seen the TV shows; I have this major mental block about watching them and running out of shows to watch. So far the rational part of my mind has not yet successfully convinced the rest of it that that is a damned dumb reason to not watch them at all.)
This is something that always bothered me about Star Trek; everything always happens within at most a couple of kilometers of each other.
And they still fire and miss, with shots that you should have been able to hit with manual aiming by eyeball. (I don't care what "jamming" may or may not be applied, a warp-capable starship should be better able to hit things than I personally am with a shotgun.)
As dramatic license it was merely silly, but as the series wore on it became increasingly clear that the writers actually thought that way. The "Insurrection" movie provided one of the clearest examples of that, with that silly "briar patch" that, apparently, was about 100 miles across, given the speed that they traversed it and how long it took them.
Riiiiiiiiiiiight. (And it's really, really dense and really, really big, so they can't go around it, but not so dense that it experiences gravitational collapse. Riiiiiiiiiight. I suppose Q put it there and sustains it with his hocus-pocus, it just never came up in the movie.)
Even Firefly, which I love, managed to sometimes feel a little claustrophobic (ships crossing between stars passing by within a few hundred feet of each other, a little strange).
In Europe, party change is accomplished by changing what party is in charge. In America, it is accomplished by transforming the party. If a party breaks, it is replaced; it happened once to the Whigs (->Republicans), and a lot of us think we might be seeing it happend to the Democrats, despite your post.
The Republicans of, say, the 1950s are not particularly related to the Republicans of today. (When I see a party claim some historical figure to prove a modern point, I have to just laugh. So Lincoln was a "Republican"... so what? Like modern Democrats are going to run on a Pro-Slavery ticket?) In fact, there are noticable differences between the Republicans of today and of the early 90s.
For more info, consult the link. Which is better? Depends on what you want out of your system. Personally, I prefer the American overall, but I wouldn't cry if I was under the European system.
(At least, the theoretical system. The EU scares me. But that's another post.)
I say this with wistful sadness... are you sure those aren't killer apps?
Sports games and racing games sell damned well, thought the majority are, at the very least, not creative by "gamer" standards. (Yes, there are exceptions, especially in the racing section, but if you don't know what I mean, you're being willfully contrary.)
But "gamers" are, despite the name, increasing in the minority of "those who play and buy games".
Are you sure that Sony doesn't know which side of the bread their butter is on?
Looks like you got hit by a fan-boy moderator; he hit Nanogator too for posting a perfectly reasonable post (by Slashdot standards) about poor fan-boy logic. (I can't prove it's the same person, but it's a good guess.)
but if they allow the IP to be bought and sold they can no more expropriate the goodness of my sword than my ISP can arbitrarily delete content off my professional website.
While an interesting discussion, I can't think of any current class of "intellectual property" that your character would fall under. (Remember, there is no such thing as "intellectual property", it's a grouping term, and discussion like this is exactly why it is important to remember this!)
It clearly isn't trademarkable or patentable. It fails the creativity criterion for copyrightability; your database records simply describe your character. (Your name might conceivably be protectable, or if your character were allowed to carry novels that you wrote around, but the mere numbers describing your character are not copyrightable.) The last category would be trade secret, which would be, I believe, flimsy at best, although perhaps not completely impossible, but that wouldn't apply to the transfers being made, where the buyer and the seller are never in possession of the secret parts of those numbers.
I don't think there is any "IP" at work here in the legal sense, so the EULA is all you've got. (Incidentally, when they claim IP rights in the EULA, they're talking about their art, sounds, etc., not your character data, which I'm sure they claim but at least legally I don't think it's "IP".)
Some players are morally offended by the idea that their "fun" is being corrupted, and regardless of whether you think they're hypocrites, off balance, or whatever, their $15 a month is as green as everyone else's and they will gladly take it elsewhere.
That is a point that bears repeating, so I did.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Could the moderator who moderated this "Interesting" come out of the woodwork and explain what they found interesting about this? Maybe the mental exercise of trying to figure out what the hell that means?
I have to admit there is something to that interpretation, though. Every time I think I've got it figured out, I realize I don't. The only sentence that makes sense, the second one, also has nothing to do with the article, so it is no help. Upon reflection, I couldn't make a masterpiece of Rorschach posting like this if I tried.
We can't use JSP's, there hard to maintain!
We can't use Javascript, it's loosely typed!
We have to use an Object Broker, SQL is not maintainable!
All the projects that I have been on where code maintainability has been the primary goal have one thing in common. They all failed.
If that is their idea of "maintainable", they didn't fail because they shot for maintainable, they failed because they drank the kool-aide and trapped themselves into software paradigms that only work when oodles of resources are thrown at them. Smaller teams require more agile methods to get results, and that is also the mechanism whereby smaller teams can produce software where larger teams failed. (It goes both ways, I'm not claiming that as an absolute. But that small teams can and have beaten much bigger ones is an unassailable fact.)
Certainly you've got some good facts at hand to learn from, but I think you're taking the wrong lesson away. Projects that simply ignore maintainability fail, too. Can you imagine Mozilla with no concern for maintainability, or the Linux kernel?
The focus should always be on product quality, not code quality.
If you don't have quality code, you don't have a quality product. You may have an adequate product. You may be in a situation where an adequate product is all you need. I have an adequate set of knives in my kitchen, because I can not afford quality knives. But I do not pretend that they are therefore quality knives.
You're calling for a classic short-term focus, and you can and will suffer the classic penalties for short-term focus. I know, I've seen it first hand and dragged software products out of their local optima by the sweat of my brow. It's not easy, but either it happens or the product dies a code-quality death.
You need to use the proper metric for quality. Inappropriately using and paying for a strong type system is anti-quality in my book; that goes for your other two examples as well, when done correctly. (SQL and JSP code both need to be rationally minimized via the application of Once and Only Once, but they are not the cause of the unmaintainability; the abandonment of Once and Only Once is. Once and Only Once is one of the most important aspects of any proper quality metric.) Your quality metric should have functionality built into it.
Raising the price you pay at the pump is not noted for its power to make people buy more gasoline, and giving this extra money to the government is not noted for improving the bottom line of oil companies, either. A little less conspiracy and a little more thought, please. (Theories based on supposed integration between the two I dismiss as outright absurd... the oil companies are obviously not spending the California budget, nor deriving any particular benefit from the California spending proportionate to the "take"; if they were going to benefit significantly from this money it'd have to show up on their bottom line, not California's.)
(You may also find this relevant; as a motivation to get people to buy more gas, this is an atrocious plan.)
Please explain to me how this "punishes" you for owning a fuel-efficient vehicle?
"Punish" is the wrong word. But there is something fairly unethical in convincing people to be fuel-efficient by telling them they will pay less tax (even if it was never explicitly said, we've been using taxation like that for a long time now and that was definately part of the reason gas taxes were hiked), then taking away those benefits in a panic as soon as people actually start using them.
If this is enacted and left in place, it still won't "punish" people for using fuel-efficient vehicles, but it will disincentivize them relative to the current situation. (Hey, look, I used "disincentivize" in a non-bureaucratic situation and it's actually a half-way decent word choice(!), as all the alternatives I can come up with are too long or fail to capture nuances.)
Now, with respect to software, from what I have seen anecdotally there's just not the same kind of rigor placed on most software projects, even large, very expensive software projects.
.Net?)
The fundamental problem is that we honestly don't seem to know what rigor to put in. I know what we need. Bob knows what we need. ISO knows what we need. Several book authors know what we need. Unfortunately, many of these things end up quite contradictory, and scientific studies are impractical and borderline impossible. Between that and endlessly moving requirements, we just haven't been able to really nail down what makes a good manager, i.e., what makes for a well managed project. It's not like most engineering projects... or rather, it's just like most other engineering projects, multiplied by ten or twenty.
(And at the risk of sounding elitist, I'd also personally add that the average programmer is really quite astoundingly incompetent, both due to the wildly changing world we live in, and a basic lack of skill (compounded by the difficulty of mentoring in said wildly changing world). Would you want to drive over a bridge where the senior engineer on the project has only three years experience in building bridges? Yet, how can you have much more than three years experience in
Every field has its own trials and tribulations, and I don't mean to minimize other fields, but software really is a mess.
I don't know if its the idea that "Hey, its only software, its no problem if we change crap halfway through implementation" that causes this or something else,
I believe the observation goes back all the way to The Mythical Man Month that this, which should be software's greatest asset and turn a software project into something vastly easier to engineer than a bridge, has been turned into its greatest liability through the mechanisms you propose, and the resulting higher-order effects.
The moral of the story (I'll stop rambling here) is that project management is very much a learned skill.
Looking back, what I meant to emphasize more is that you don't seem to be able to pick it up from books, and further that some people can't seem to learn it at all (though that shouldn't be surprising). But I did not say that as clearly as I meant to.
This might change if A: We could nail down a One True Way to manage (not even "the" one true way, "a" would do nicely) and B: Somebody wrote a good book on it. In the meantime, I just haven't seen the evidence that a real manual on management has emerged. You can benefit from a lot of people who will tell you what not to do, but there isn't so much work on what to do.
(Example: The classic Mythical Man Month book has a lot of "don't" essays, including the eponymous one that basically says "don't throw manpower at a project expecting it to be perfectly fungible", but the suggestions on what to do are tentative, untested hypotheses about building software teams on a "surgeon" model, which IIRC had a note added in the 25th Ann. Edition to the effect that he still hadn't tried it yet.)
propoganda you gulp down without thought
Again, empirically wrong.
Why do you think to convince me with insults, the very glib generalizations you so readily accuse me of, and jousting at strawmen? To wit: Re my statement that the conflict was inevitable, you "counter" by... pointing out the motivation one side has to be in conflict? Also, correctly pointing out the root problem with the Muslim world (IMHO)... then suggesting three steps that do absolutely nothing to address those points whatsoever?
Do you wonder why you have failed to convince me? You can stop wondering now. Before you can make an argument that stands a chance (at least with me), you need to be able to hold on to a coherent line of thought. You are much too reactionary, spouting knee-jerk accusations and "evidence" that undermines the very point you think you are trying to make!
Do me a favor... if your "reply" is this reactive, don't bother. I've seen it all before.
You might want to consider the story about the splinter and the plank in the eye, before accusing somebody of swallowing propoganda whole. I see no particular evidence of thought in your post; you are merely host to a couple of virulant memes, almost as if not by choice. I've chosen my position, which, by the evidence I see here, you don't even understand. (How could you? I haven't stated it. You've jumped to empirically false conclusions about it. By the way, do you know what that word means?) Have you chosen yours, or merely absorbed it?
Are there any books or other reading material that I could read in order to manage a software project effectively?
No.
(Semi-serious. The evidence suggests to me that either you can do it (presumably with some practice) or you can't. If there is a group of people who can learn it from books, they are lost in the noise. Nor does there seem to be a way of knowing in advance whether you can. Like I said, semi-serious; I don't fully mean this but it's not fully a joke either.)
Ha. I knew it. Part of the definition of "good exercise" is that it has to be boring.
I guess that heart beating and sweating and stuff for easily the recommended 15-30 minutes at a time isn't enough... it overloads the easily-overloaded "fun" receptors on the heart and other muscles and cancels out all of the other benefits. The fact that I'm feeling better is also an illusion brought on by excessive fun, which can of course cause hallucinations.
If you're not slamming you feet on hard concrete and hating every minute of it, unless you let go of your sanity and use the cognitive dissonance of "Why the hell am I doing this?" to convince yourself that, logically, you must be having fun, you're not really getting exercise.
Although, maybe I'm jumping the gun on this post. Having heard of neither Heard Disease nor excercise, maybe I'm accidentally reading into what you were saying. Maybe excercise really is the cure for Heard Disease, probably helps Caner too, which I hear is really vicious. (You haven't lived until you're under attack by a Heard of Caners, either. Damn, man, now that's sickness.)
Thanks for setting me straight, Dr. SoTuA.
Just a sign of how far Star Trek has slipped in the mind share of its "target audience".
I gotta say it never even occurred to me, and I certainly used to be a Trekkie.
Ok... Is it safe to assume that the _whole_ game is coded in Python then?
Not in the slightest. Python integrates well with C and C++. (Some other languages do it without somewhat less boilerplate in the integration code, but Python is one of the languages that basically integrates 100% feasibly.)
In fact, quite the opposite; it's safe to assume only the high level is in Python. That's Standard Operating Procedure for high-performance code in the Python world.
You obviously don't care about security, as that is twelve times more vulnerable than it should be. Distribute one patch a year.
Come to think of it, let's make Windows infinitely more secure, and not distribute any patches at all! The cool thing about this is you can test this theory by simply pretending no patches are ever released and not downloading them, thus ending up with the most secure Windows installation ever.
Let me know how that goes; this "simply declaring Windows secure" strategy will probably reduce the workload of a lot of Windows admins, foolishly running around and installing patches, and will probably have application in many other admin domains as well. ("The printer is out of paper? That's impossible, we haven't had to put more paper in it this year and therefore it is clearly not out of paper now. No, we will not come take a look as you are clearly a raving lunatic. Bye!" See? Way easier than committing the grievous error of actually putting paper in... if you do it today, you'll only have to do it again later.)
Given that your judgements were empirically wrong, yes.
In answer to your question, yes. Both Islamism and American culture are expansionist, though in wildly different ways (and almost certainly not the way you are thinking of for America; note I said culture, not people). Conflict was utterly inevitable in the context of a shrinking world. Even complete and utter appeasement would merely have delayed the day of reckoning and merely further armed the Islamists.
Ah yes, "cutting off women's parts of women's genitals at birth" morally equated to "implementing one side of a controversial issue that has split the entire country about 50/50 for decades", with about half of the country seeing it not as "repressing women" but "standing up for the unborn".
I suppose I'm supposed to recant, say 100 "Hail Chomsky"s, and immediately sign up for a protest march?
This sort of moral equivalency argument only works on those who already agree with you. As an argument for swaying people to your side, it is a prime example of why the Democrats as a party continue to lose ground as they allow themselves to be run by people who seriously tender this argument: You simply repulse them.
(I'm going to fire the "issues aren't all black and white" card off here, too.... even if you stipulate that the abortion issue is completely a women repression issue, that still does not entitle you to collapse the issue into a binary, black/white "women repressed/women free" issue and declare Bush on the same side as the terrorists; Bush is far, far more to the "women free" side of the issue and is responsible for huge strides in freeing women: The women of both Afghanistan and Iraq were free to vote, putting them ahead of our democracy's track record by a long shot despite being, overall, much more repressed than we started out at. Of course, since you collapse the issue to black/white, you see it as women going from "repressed->repressed", no progress, and again, are you suprised you're not going to convince me? I find myself rather often thinking that people are forcing themselves into these black/white views because it is the only way to prevent themselves from having to admit that whatever bad things Bush may have done, he has undeniably done accomplished huge swathes of goodness as well, and that just Can't Happen (TM)... and I rarely encounter evidence to the contrary.)
Everyone loves freedom.
You left off two words... for themselves. Very few people have truly fought for the freedom of others, and I'm not seeing it from the terrorists.
Seriously, that changes everything, effectively invalidates the rest of your message, and if you don't see that you need those words to make a true statement, look around you, for Pete's sake. I'd lay money that you can name ten ways the "bad guys who support the war" (or whoever) are trying to restrict your freedom; in the opposite context you know that's trivially true. Why are you so swift to forget it when it comes to the terrorists?
The terrorists can, for instance, just go fuck themselves if they are fighting for the "freedom" to repress women, which is indeed one of the many things they are fighting for; this is essentially empirical truth. They may be fighting for "freedom" but that is not enough to be noble, or worth rooting for.
people like you
Overgeneralizing; it is trivial for me to come up with ways I don't agree with the current US policy, therefore your attempted criticisms fall flat. Not worth responding to. Why I'd look to someone who overgeneralizes while criticizing others about overgeneralization beats me.
You may be one-dimensional, but don't project that onto me.
I don't think Osama bin Laden sent those planes to attack us because he hated our freedom. I think he did it because of our support for Israel, our ties with the Saudi family and our military bases in Saudi Arabia. You know why I think that? Because that's what he fucking said! Are we a nation of 6-year-olds?" - David Cross
Taking a psychotic, intelligent, unapologetic mass murderer with political ambitions at face value on his public propoganda? And insulting others who don't? Yes, that sounds like about the maturity I'd expect from a six-year-old.
(Sorry, couldn't resist the crack. That is one of the single worst arguments I have ever heard made on this entire topic, which attracts bad arguments from both sides like honey does flies. I guess it got modded some kind of Bizzaro World Informative?)
remove politics
I was with you, right up until you suggested that we remove humans from science.
What, you don't think that's what you said? Well, you'll understand eventually. Either that, or show me a group bigger than 100 people that has "no politics" in which case I'll concede I might be wrong.... but even if you show me such a group it'll still remain the more probable outcome that you are simply blind to the politics. (Evidence: If you really think it's only "Republicans" bending science, it's probably because the bending done by "Democrats" is invisible to you. Caveat: The terms Republican and Democrat are not really meaningful in this context anyhow; I'm borrowing your particular meanings.)
(When people say "remove politics from the system", what they are really saying, even if they don't realize it, is that the system should align with their politics, which are of course not politics, but merely and quite obviously the truth. Were it only so simple...)
This is not to say the diagnosis is inaccurate... oh, you've oversimplified to the point of effective absurdity but that's just what happens in a short Slashdot post, I have too but at least I labelled some of it. I'm just saying that you might as well phrase your "solution" as "Booga booga, grunt, wallabie wallabie smooger!" in terms of the useful, implementable solution content it contains.
Every time when I convert a PVCS user to Subversion they are scared because of the edit/conflict/merge idea.... I have a hard time conveying the benefit of the CVS/subversion way.
The fundamental argument is, "If it's so horrifying to be without [X], why doesn't the doom and gloom actually happen to people who try living without it?", followed by pointing out the large number of people living without it.
This same argument can be applied to a lot of dogma that we've accreted over the past few decades... static typing, the "need" for various excessively top-down methodologies, the need to compile all the way down to machine code or suffer Performance Doom. (The last one is one we are quite a ways into shaking ourselves free of; I mention it so more people can see the "other side" of a thing like this.)
Of course, this only applies to doom-and-gloom-based arguments. I bold that because there can be benefits in some situations for some of this class of issue, but the benefit won't be the avoidance of doom and gloom. You can make positive arguments about the benefits that, say, static typing might bring under some situations and this counterargument doesn't apply to that point.
The best thing about this though isn't so much using it to convince others, it's using it to convince yourself and advance your understanding. If there are a lot of people who are doing something you just know is wrong and certain to lead them to doom, it is still worth a try, especially if these people seem otherwise smart. You may still be right (PHP is still a disaster of a language, for instance), but you may prove wrong and learn something. It's happened to me several times. (Yes, the conclusion that I tried PHP is correct, and it's one of the few times I can think of that following this algorithm led me to reinforce my preconceptions on the issue, rather than discard or modify them.)
To get back to the topic at hand, abundant community experience indicates that source control needs to be easy, or nobody will bother with it. The price of rare conflict resolution (which is admittedly a cost, though there is some benefit in the explicit existance of a conflict that wouldn't necessarily be revealed in a lock-based system) is more than repaid by the way people actually use the source control system, instead of ignoring it as much as possible and sometimes actively fighting it. (Every time you fight or work around the system, you're not preventing problems, you're creating them.)
He's not thinking about the children!
Won't somebody please think of the children?!
Which is the dichotomy I was going for when I referenced Star Trek writers as "really believing it". That example of Firefly stood out because it bothered me right then, though, whereas none of the other shows really bothered me that way. (Although I've yet to watch the DVDs, so I've only seen the TV shows; I have this major mental block about watching them and running out of shows to watch. So far the rational part of my mind has not yet successfully convinced the rest of it that that is a damned dumb reason to not watch them at all.)
This is something that always bothered me about Star Trek; everything always happens within at most a couple of kilometers of each other.
And they still fire and miss, with shots that you should have been able to hit with manual aiming by eyeball. (I don't care what "jamming" may or may not be applied, a warp-capable starship should be better able to hit things than I personally am with a shotgun.)
As dramatic license it was merely silly, but as the series wore on it became increasingly clear that the writers actually thought that way. The "Insurrection" movie provided one of the clearest examples of that, with that silly "briar patch" that, apparently, was about 100 miles across, given the speed that they traversed it and how long it took them.
Riiiiiiiiiiiight. (And it's really, really dense and really, really big, so they can't go around it, but not so dense that it experiences gravitational collapse. Riiiiiiiiiight. I suppose Q put it there and sustains it with his hocus-pocus, it just never came up in the movie.)
Even Firefly, which I love, managed to sometimes feel a little claustrophobic (ships crossing between stars passing by within a few hundred feet of each other, a little strange).
American "parties" and European "parties" aren't the same thing, and should not be directly compared; the word "party" refers to something fundamentally dissimilar.
In Europe, party change is accomplished by changing what party is in charge. In America, it is accomplished by transforming the party. If a party breaks, it is replaced; it happened once to the Whigs (->Republicans), and a lot of us think we might be seeing it happend to the Democrats, despite your post.
The Republicans of, say, the 1950s are not particularly related to the Republicans of today. (When I see a party claim some historical figure to prove a modern point, I have to just laugh. So Lincoln was a "Republican"... so what? Like modern Democrats are going to run on a Pro-Slavery ticket?) In fact, there are noticable differences between the Republicans of today and of the early 90s.
For more info, consult the link. Which is better? Depends on what you want out of your system. Personally, I prefer the American overall, but I wouldn't cry if I was under the European system.
(At least, the theoretical system. The EU scares me. But that's another post.)
I say this with wistful sadness... are you sure those aren't killer apps?
Sports games and racing games sell damned well, thought the majority are, at the very least, not creative by "gamer" standards. (Yes, there are exceptions, especially in the racing section, but if you don't know what I mean, you're being willfully contrary.)
But "gamers" are, despite the name, increasing in the minority of "those who play and buy games".
Are you sure that Sony doesn't know which side of the bread their butter is on?
Looks like you got hit by a fan-boy moderator; he hit Nanogator too for posting a perfectly reasonable post (by Slashdot standards) about poor fan-boy logic. (I can't prove it's the same person, but it's a good guess.)
but if they allow the IP to be bought and sold they can no more expropriate the goodness of my sword than my ISP can arbitrarily delete content off my professional website.
:-)
While an interesting discussion, I can't think of any current class of "intellectual property" that your character would fall under. (Remember, there is no such thing as "intellectual property", it's a grouping term, and discussion like this is exactly why it is important to remember this!)
It clearly isn't trademarkable or patentable. It fails the creativity criterion for copyrightability; your database records simply describe your character. (Your name might conceivably be protectable, or if your character were allowed to carry novels that you wrote around, but the mere numbers describing your character are not copyrightable.) The last category would be trade secret, which would be, I believe, flimsy at best, although perhaps not completely impossible, but that wouldn't apply to the transfers being made, where the buyer and the seller are never in possession of the secret parts of those numbers.
I don't think there is any "IP" at work here in the legal sense, so the EULA is all you've got. (Incidentally, when they claim IP rights in the EULA, they're talking about their art, sounds, etc., not your character data, which I'm sure they claim but at least legally I don't think it's "IP".)
Some players are morally offended by the idea that their "fun" is being corrupted, and regardless of whether you think they're hypocrites, off balance, or whatever, their $15 a month is as green as everyone else's and they will gladly take it elsewhere.
That is a point that bears repeating, so I did.