The achievement for using goto is "Go To Hell". How is that encouraging, I have no idea:) . In fact, most of those achievements are just a funny take on amateur programmers. Just take a look at the list:
Interrupting Cow (Have 10 breakpoints in a file.Where's that bug? Could here, could be there, could be anywhere! - 5 points)
Stubby (Generate method stubs 9 times. You're a TDD bad ass! - 5 points)
Save A Tree (Print source code. My boss told me to. I swear! - 5 points)
Not hard at all in most cases. Check the list of running processes for strange names. Run msconfig and check for weird programs starting up. Boot with a pen drive linux distribution, let's say Backtrack. Delete the offending files and clean those scripts. Rinse and repeat.
This is a funny numbers game. CO2 is far from the worst greenhouse gas, so all these people posting their reactions about Americans and their big suv's, cars whatever, need to look more closely at which gases cause the most greenhouse effects, and where these gases come from.
It would have been nice if you had written those greenhouse gases. Let me do that for you: sulfur hexafluoride is the most potent greenhouse gas (luckily, we don't release a lot to the atmosphere, or things would be much different today), and the biggest contributor to the greenhouse effect is water vapor. After that, the biggest contributors are carbon dioxide, methane and ozone, which human beings release. This raises the atmosphere's temperature, causing indirectly more water vapor. There.
You can fit me into the "greenhouse deniers" if you like, but I'm suspicious of pretty much all the data that is surrounding this issue -- there is too much money to be made on "popular" science like this for there to be any real hope of getting sound scientific data right now...
If you are as suspicious of the researchers as you are of the denialists, just throw a coin and support that faction. Or talk to actual scientists and verify their methods.
I've also yet to hear anyone make a reasonable sounding proposal to make any positive changes, its always up in the air stuff like "We all need to hold hands and plant trees and drive less" -- that's absurd. Lowering pollution is a good idea whatever the effects on temperature so I'm all for this goal, but to actually get to the point of seriously damaging the economy and lives we've all come to like living isn't going to happen and shouldn't. These are scientific issues and probably have scientific solutions.
Although holding hands is useless, you gave nice examples. A growing forest is the cheapest carbon-sequestration system available. Switching to bicycle or public transport also reduces emmisions. All in all, what you are looking for is a comprehensive, systemical approach. From the most important to the least, it should reduce CO2 releases due to (a) Non-green energy generation, (b) Inefficient energy use at the end of the power lines (e.g., homes) and (c) transportation. Planting trees also helps, but not as much as working on those three issues. There's not an easy way to do it, otherwise we would have done it long ago.
People seem to want impossible things on this issue. Hippies are an illogical group of people who work solely in knee-jerk reactions and boogey-man scare tactics, they just complain without making much sense. Coal power bad, but nuclear is bad too! Damn, these goes our safest and best way to generate power. It all has to be hippie-power, hydro and solar. Yeah, well, if that worked then why wouldn't they use it, they can fleece us on power bills with solar or hydro just as easily as coal or nuke.
Heh, yeah. Just ignore hippies, they'll never be satisfied. You just need to be reasonable. Nuclear and hydro are nice options, and they aren't as expensive as you seem to think.
I don't see a lot of logic and reason with this entire issue.
Well, you don't seem to be contributing with those. "Either part of the problem, or part of the solution", right.
To be honest, I was intrigued on how would the slash-crowd answer to this. All in all, there are a lot of geeks that enjoy photography and provide nice and helpful advice, even posting prices and pros/cons. Just pick at random, chances are it could be modded informative. There are a few aggressive or sarcastic comments, but they don't seem to have a clue.
I don't think you understand SOPA. SOPA isn't a problem with Technology.... It threatens uploading content, it threatens internal networks, it threatens open source software, it threatens DNS, DNSSEC and internet security.... You don't need to understand technology to read the pieces on how this is a direct assault on free speech.
Unfortunately, yes, you do. You just listed four highly technical terms, and explaining how SOPA is going to break those things does require a highly technical understanding. So I believe the original article is absolutely right that the problem is politicians not understanding technology.
Heh, that's creative editing and quoting. Those sentences aren't even in the same paragraph. GP's point is that SOPA's main problem isn't about technology, although it causes a few tech issues. SOPA's main problem is that it attack civil liberties.
The vast majority of people I know are not *against* copyright. They are either: (a) merely indifferent or (b) downright oblivious. Yeah, a lot of people I talk to don't know that you have to pay for a Windows license.
When I tell people that I worked on DRM for a living, they usually ask how to break the system (answer: you can, but usually after the studios turned a profit) or they say that all things are hackable (answer: the beauty of this system is that it embraces that fact). The sharing culture is deeply ingrained in the people here, you can tell... recent studies indicate that 72% of all the software is pirated in this country, for example. Music sharing also have some bad numbers. A tragedy of the commons in its full ugliness.
In this context, it's hard to argue that there should be a mechanism to correct that. Would you write a piece of software, knowing only 1 in 4 people are paying for it? Indio Solari, a great artist in this country, said that he won't sell discs or digital songs anymore because he doesn't get any money that way, and that's horrible because now I can't hear his new songs. You could say that it was a wrong marketing decision, or that he's greedy, but he's the friggin' artist, and a famous one too, not some corporation. I guess everyone's OK with sharing until you can't make a living with your own work.
IMHO, copyright laws are unsustainable in their current form: there should be smaller fines and have shorter terms, either 15 or 20 years. Something reasonable and enforceable. But if you want to simply drop those laws, you should come up with a system that doesn't eventually starve artists.
Well, I started using Netbeans when it was 3.6 (it was faster than Eclipse and BlueJ). Up to 5.5, it was on par with Visual Studio (perhaps a few features were missing, but it was cool). I used it both in Linux and Windows, and everything was smooth. When I switched to 6.0, it started to fall apart. I couldn't create a Java project (or any project) without the IDE throwing an exception (yet, after restarting the IDE, the project worked perfectly, go figure). The Python plugin never worked, opening a project group took forever, and when I did the switch to Java SE 7 and downloaded Netbeans 7.0, it never started, not even once. There were times, though, when all I did was program for Java SE, that everything did work nicely. Of course, I know I only have one data point, but it's still my experience. Perhaps it has to do somehow with the fact that in three years I never reinstalled the OS, or that I have now Ubuntu 11.10 with yucky Unity (I cry blood:( ). Either way, I missed those "5.5" days. What version are you using and which OS and JVM? Perhaps I should give it another try...
Visual Studio was also massive, and also had its share of problems, but they weren't as painful to me as Netbeans' . VS 2010 was a hell of a mess and I had to juggle with Service Packs and updates. In the end, the only thing that didn't work was the.aspx visual editor and preview, but at that point I already programmed using the text editor only, so I hardly bothered.
Heh, relax. Sure, GP is interchanging those terms and it's wrong, but overall he's right once you filter the crap (C# supports.Net, lol). Besides, on these days, the programming language is named as its main platform or virtual machine (Python, Java and PHP, just from the top of my head). He said that PHP is fine, but ASP.Net, the de facto platform for the web for.Net, have a few advantages. I agree with most of them, but a few are just crazy talking.
I like my languages dynamic, so I prefer either Linux + Apache + Python + Django or Linux + Apache + PHP (plain, no framework on top of it). Plus, I wanted to try Linux + Haskell + Snap. Obviously, I wouldn't count C# support as an advantage (I could try C# 4.0, but I found the syntax unappealing). I also wouldn't put a language's level of support or paradigm as advantage, since it has more to do with your personal taste and the task at hands. I'm pretty sure that having multiple support for languages is *not* an advantage, though: having three different languages in a single project is a recipe for disaster!
If I'm developing on Windows, it would be crazy not to use IIS + Asp.Net, as managing the server is a brain-dead activity. Sure, I can do it manually and write my own scripts, but it's easier the Microsoft Way. Management for PHP and Python is mostly by command line. I remember using a neat GUI for managing Apache (rapache, I guess?), but it had problems to represent my particular settings (it had something to do with Proxy / Proxypass or virtual addresses, can't remember).
Since the IDE is instrumental for development and deployment, it should also be factored. Visual Studio is the best IDE, period. Eclipse's plugin system is utterly broken and Netbeans suffers from instability, so for me it's either gedit or vim for Python and PHP.
In general, I noticed that, "for the enterprise", people prefer static-typing. A good friend of mine said that Java and C# acted like abusive mothers that will hit you mercilessly. They will stop your show if you mess up your types or common mistakes, so it's nice for novices and people "he can't trust" (yeah, those words). But if he trusted on its team, he would use Python and Werkzeug. I guess that, in that context, it makes sense. To be honest, my only grudge with PHP, as a language, is its idiotic $var[] syntax, and the lack of try-catch-finally.
The Tao demands that you exert your influence and spend the least possible amount of effort to accomplish a task. In this case, just saying that you consider a blackout may be enough to coax those technologically oblivious people. Leadership is not about acting, but about influencing.
Funny, that's not what they say to their own employees. IBM employees are told that they belong to a global company, working and doing business with everyone in the world. Also, even though they say they are global, they've got to be based somewhere, right? And lo and behold, it's in Armonk, New York, not in the Cayman Islands (although I don't know whether they have a subsidiary there or not).
I can't remember who said "Everyone has an opinion. But we are interested in knowledge.". It surely applies here.;)
Why is pizza bad? Is it bad at all? I don't know. I sure have an idea that it is less healthy than other options, but I'll be honest and say that I really don't know. That's why people study Nutrition at Uni. I do know that the food pyramid takes into account that fats, even though you must consume them or risk malnutrition, you should eat very little of them, especially if you are sedentary, because you won't burn the huge amount of calories you would ingest.
Trust these people, they studied all those years so you don't have to!;)
Sorry, I RTFA, but I'll post instead about the company's name: "Allot". Boy, if only they had named it "Allotof", the potential lulz would have been huge.
I was told by a low-level IT manager that San Francisco and Palo Alto are one of the most expensive cities to have a house. He said she paid over a million for a modest house in Palo Alto.
So, what exactly I'm missing? Either they hold their value really high (saying they have an unaffordable price is weird), this manager's statement is overrated, Palo Alto/San Francisco aren't part of SV, Eric Schmidt is not entirely correct or all of the above.
When I read the summary, it sounded a lot like troll physics, hence the joke. But I'll get serious now.
I friend of mine studied/worked on alternative energies, and he told me that, at a small scale (houses) the efficiency is too low to make great economic sense. There are a few designs that are cheap and useful, but nothing fancy like electricity from solar or wind. What the Germans are trying to do requires a lot of planning and design, and in any case it won't "easily generate". Just look at the car in the original (German) webpage: it's reeeeealy tiny. You can imagine why:P.
Just an example close to home: I know a married couple that have a farm, and they installed solar panels and a wind turbine to generate electricity. The solar panels power exclusively the fence (so the goats won't escape) and the turbine charges an accumulator (so they can have lights and, at least for a few hours before the battery dies, satellite TV). Hardly reaches the level of comfort we got accustomed to.
We are still at least a decade away from economically sensible solar and wind (for individual homes, at least).
Slashdot Mirror
I lol'd.
The achievement for using goto is "Go To Hell". How is that encouraging, I have no idea :) . In fact, most of those achievements are just a funny take on amateur programmers. Just take a look at the list:
...if the difference in used bandwidth will save Wikipedia a few bucks.
Except the Military has been training and using dolphins for decades, so why waste your investment?. Check this over-the-top story from The Guardian.
Not hard at all in most cases. Check the list of running processes for strange names. Run msconfig and check for weird programs starting up. Boot with a pen drive linux distribution, let's say Backtrack. Delete the offending files and clean those scripts. Rinse and repeat.
Perhaps this gives us a clue about Kodakâ(TM)s future plans to be solvent...
I see it more like an attempt to capitalize their patents and earn a few extra bucks before the ship sinks.
This is a funny numbers game. CO2 is far from the worst greenhouse gas, so all these people posting their reactions about Americans and their big suv's, cars whatever, need to look more closely at which gases cause the most greenhouse effects, and where these gases come from.
It would have been nice if you had written those greenhouse gases. Let me do that for you: sulfur hexafluoride is the most potent greenhouse gas (luckily, we don't release a lot to the atmosphere, or things would be much different today), and the biggest contributor to the greenhouse effect is water vapor. After that, the biggest contributors are carbon dioxide, methane and ozone, which human beings release. This raises the atmosphere's temperature, causing indirectly more water vapor. There.
You can fit me into the "greenhouse deniers" if you like, but I'm suspicious of pretty much all the data that is surrounding this issue -- there is too much money to be made on "popular" science like this for there to be any real hope of getting sound scientific data right now...
If you are as suspicious of the researchers as you are of the denialists, just throw a coin and support that faction. Or talk to actual scientists and verify their methods.
I've also yet to hear anyone make a reasonable sounding proposal to make any positive changes, its always up in the air stuff like "We all need to hold hands and plant trees and drive less" -- that's absurd. Lowering pollution is a good idea whatever the effects on temperature so I'm all for this goal, but to actually get to the point of seriously damaging the economy and lives we've all come to like living isn't going to happen and shouldn't. These are scientific issues and probably have scientific solutions.
Although holding hands is useless, you gave nice examples. A growing forest is the cheapest carbon-sequestration system available. Switching to bicycle or public transport also reduces emmisions. All in all, what you are looking for is a comprehensive, systemical approach. From the most important to the least, it should reduce CO2 releases due to (a) Non-green energy generation, (b) Inefficient energy use at the end of the power lines (e.g., homes) and (c) transportation. Planting trees also helps, but not as much as working on those three issues. There's not an easy way to do it, otherwise we would have done it long ago.
People seem to want impossible things on this issue. Hippies are an illogical group of people who work solely in knee-jerk reactions and boogey-man scare tactics, they just complain without making much sense. Coal power bad, but nuclear is bad too! Damn, these goes our safest and best way to generate power. It all has to be hippie-power, hydro and solar. Yeah, well, if that worked then why wouldn't they use it, they can fleece us on power bills with solar or hydro just as easily as coal or nuke.
Heh, yeah. Just ignore hippies, they'll never be satisfied. You just need to be reasonable. Nuclear and hydro are nice options, and they aren't as expensive as you seem to think.
I don't see a lot of logic and reason with this entire issue.
Well, you don't seem to be contributing with those. "Either part of the problem, or part of the solution", right.
I'm missing my mod points right now...
Ah, well, I'll give you a virtual +1...
Kind of spoils the fun of having a ./ story posted for the first time. :-/
Don't worry. Even if it had been authentic, someone would have thrown feces at it anyway. XD
To be honest, I was intrigued on how would the slash-crowd answer to this. All in all, there are a lot of geeks that enjoy photography and provide nice and helpful advice, even posting prices and pros/cons. Just pick at random, chances are it could be modded informative. There are a few aggressive or sarcastic comments, but they don't seem to have a clue.
A nice "Ask /.", if you ask me...
Can't say I agree with you. Just look at this: there was a republican candidate that wanted to stop corporations from dominating election campaign's funding (as it is today), PACs, the whole thing. Compare this with a democrat like, let's say, Bill Clinton. So no, not all republicans are the same, some of them have nice ideas too!
Unfortunately, yes, you do. You just listed four highly technical terms, and explaining how SOPA is going to break those things does require a highly technical understanding. So I believe the original article is absolutely right that the problem is politicians not understanding technology.
Heh, that's creative editing and quoting. Those sentences aren't even in the same paragraph. GP's point is that SOPA's main problem isn't about technology, although it causes a few tech issues. SOPA's main problem is that it attack civil liberties.
The vast majority of people I know are not *against* copyright. They are either: (a) merely indifferent or (b) downright oblivious. Yeah, a lot of people I talk to don't know that you have to pay for a Windows license.
When I tell people that I worked on DRM for a living, they usually ask how to break the system (answer: you can, but usually after the studios turned a profit) or they say that all things are hackable (answer: the beauty of this system is that it embraces that fact). The sharing culture is deeply ingrained in the people here, you can tell... recent studies indicate that 72% of all the software is pirated in this country, for example. Music sharing also have some bad numbers. A tragedy of the commons in its full ugliness.
In this context, it's hard to argue that there should be a mechanism to correct that. Would you write a piece of software, knowing only 1 in 4 people are paying for it? Indio Solari, a great artist in this country, said that he won't sell discs or digital songs anymore because he doesn't get any money that way, and that's horrible because now I can't hear his new songs. You could say that it was a wrong marketing decision, or that he's greedy, but he's the friggin' artist, and a famous one too, not some corporation. I guess everyone's OK with sharing until you can't make a living with your own work.
IMHO, copyright laws are unsustainable in their current form: there should be smaller fines and have shorter terms, either 15 or 20 years. Something reasonable and enforceable. But if you want to simply drop those laws, you should come up with a system that doesn't eventually starve artists.
Well, I started using Netbeans when it was 3.6 (it was faster than Eclipse and BlueJ). Up to 5.5, it was on par with Visual Studio (perhaps a few features were missing, but it was cool). I used it both in Linux and Windows, and everything was smooth. When I switched to 6.0, it started to fall apart. I couldn't create a Java project (or any project) without the IDE throwing an exception (yet, after restarting the IDE, the project worked perfectly, go figure). The Python plugin never worked, opening a project group took forever, and when I did the switch to Java SE 7 and downloaded Netbeans 7.0, it never started, not even once. There were times, though, when all I did was program for Java SE, that everything did work nicely. Of course, I know I only have one data point, but it's still my experience. Perhaps it has to do somehow with the fact that in three years I never reinstalled the OS, or that I have now Ubuntu 11.10 with yucky Unity (I cry blood :( ). Either way, I missed those "5.5" days. What version are you using and which OS and JVM? Perhaps I should give it another try...
Visual Studio was also massive, and also had its share of problems, but they weren't as painful to me as Netbeans' . VS 2010 was a hell of a mess and I had to juggle with Service Packs and updates. In the end, the only thing that didn't work was the .aspx visual editor and preview, but at that point I already programmed using the text editor only, so I hardly bothered.
Heh, relax. Sure, GP is interchanging those terms and it's wrong, but overall he's right once you filter the crap (C# supports .Net, lol). Besides, on these days, the programming language is named as its main platform or virtual machine (Python, Java and PHP, just from the top of my head). He said that PHP is fine, but ASP.Net, the de facto platform for the web for .Net, have a few advantages. I agree with most of them, but a few are just crazy talking.
I like my languages dynamic, so I prefer either Linux + Apache + Python + Django or Linux + Apache + PHP (plain, no framework on top of it). Plus, I wanted to try Linux + Haskell + Snap. Obviously, I wouldn't count C# support as an advantage (I could try C# 4.0, but I found the syntax unappealing). I also wouldn't put a language's level of support or paradigm as advantage, since it has more to do with your personal taste and the task at hands. I'm pretty sure that having multiple support for languages is *not* an advantage, though: having three different languages in a single project is a recipe for disaster!
If I'm developing on Windows, it would be crazy not to use IIS + Asp.Net, as managing the server is a brain-dead activity. Sure, I can do it manually and write my own scripts, but it's easier the Microsoft Way. Management for PHP and Python is mostly by command line. I remember using a neat GUI for managing Apache (rapache, I guess?), but it had problems to represent my particular settings (it had something to do with Proxy / Proxypass or virtual addresses, can't remember).
Since the IDE is instrumental for development and deployment, it should also be factored. Visual Studio is the best IDE, period. Eclipse's plugin system is utterly broken and Netbeans suffers from instability, so for me it's either gedit or vim for Python and PHP.
In general, I noticed that, "for the enterprise", people prefer static-typing. A good friend of mine said that Java and C# acted like abusive mothers that will hit you mercilessly. They will stop your show if you mess up your types or common mistakes, so it's nice for novices and people "he can't trust" (yeah, those words). But if he trusted on its team, he would use Python and Werkzeug. I guess that, in that context, it makes sense. To be honest, my only grudge with PHP, as a language, is its idiotic $var[] syntax, and the lack of try-catch-finally.
The Tao demands that you exert your influence and spend the least possible amount of effort to accomplish a task. In this case, just saying that you consider a blackout may be enough to coax those technologically oblivious people. Leadership is not about acting, but about influencing.
Funny, that's not what they say to their own employees. IBM employees are told that they belong to a global company, working and doing business with everyone in the world. Also, even though they say they are global, they've got to be based somewhere, right? And lo and behold, it's in Armonk, New York, not in the Cayman Islands (although I don't know whether they have a subsidiary there or not).
Beautiful reply!
I can't remember who said "Everyone has an opinion. But we are interested in knowledge.". It surely applies here. ;)
Why is pizza bad? Is it bad at all? I don't know. I sure have an idea that it is less healthy than other options, but I'll be honest and say that I really don't know. That's why people study Nutrition at Uni. I do know that the food pyramid takes into account that fats, even though you must consume them or risk malnutrition, you should eat very little of them, especially if you are sedentary, because you won't burn the huge amount of calories you would ingest.
Trust these people, they studied all those years so you don't have to! ;)
Try again. :)
In this /. comment InterestingFella said Namecheap and Gandi were good providers, therefore you can't use it. It's viral advertising from the past! lol
Sorry, I RTFA, but I'll post instead about the company's name: "Allot". Boy, if only they had named it "Allotof", the potential lulz would have been huge.
Allotof Declines...
XD
That's all. Proceed as usual.
Well, it may be for those of us who don't live in SV or SFBA. ;)
Homes hold their value.
I was told by a low-level IT manager that San Francisco and Palo Alto are one of the most expensive cities to have a house. He said she paid over a million for a modest house in Palo Alto.
So, what exactly I'm missing? Either they hold their value really high (saying they have an unaffordable price is weird), this manager's statement is overrated, Palo Alto/San Francisco aren't part of SV, Eric Schmidt is not entirely correct or all of the above.
When I read the summary, it sounded a lot like troll physics, hence the joke. But I'll get serious now.
I friend of mine studied/worked on alternative energies, and he told me that, at a small scale (houses) the efficiency is too low to make great economic sense. There are a few designs that are cheap and useful, but nothing fancy like electricity from solar or wind. What the Germans are trying to do requires a lot of planning and design, and in any case it won't "easily generate". Just look at the car in the original (German) webpage: it's reeeeealy tiny. You can imagine why :P .
Just an example close to home: I know a married couple that have a farm, and they installed solar panels and a wind turbine to generate electricity. The solar panels power exclusively the fence (so the goats won't escape) and the turbine charges an accumulator (so they can have lights and, at least for a few hours before the battery dies, satellite TV). Hardly reaches the level of comfort we got accustomed to.
We are still at least a decade away from economically sensible solar and wind (for individual homes, at least).
The project is a German government-backed initiative to build an energy-efficient house that generates more electricity than it consumes
Problem, thermodynamics?