Seems like a false comparison. Netflix lacks news, sports and the vast amount of programming that is available on Cable... it better be cheaper! A much more interesting comparison would be Netflix and HBO.
All those you mention come at an extra price. And the comparison is still valid since it is calculating cost per hour watched, not cost per content type. I used to have cable, the so-called premium plans because I needed (wanted) to watch things not in the basic or family plans. Price tag was almost double ($180) and still, I would get so much other stuff I did not want (and I wouldn't necessarily got what I wanted.)
I cut the cord two years ago and I could not be happier. $49 for internet, $9 for Netflix, $7 for Hulu and Amazon Prime (which comes to be $8.25 a month, which I will most likely cancel.) I certainly do not get HBO, Starz, sports or hunting channels, but whatever. I simply refine and schedule what I want to watch. A program I want to watch, I simply buy it on Amazon. It still comes a lot cheaper than cable.
The only thing I miss from cable (AT&T specifically) was the Japan TV channel for my kids. That's it.
At the end of the day, content can be varied and still dull. And per hour, it is still more expensive than Netflix (or any of the other streaming alternatives.) And we are not even factoring out other costs like early cancellation (or joining) fees (which are non-existing in Netflix.)
If cable simply were to provide true a-la-carte plans, I suspect cost would drop.
0F is the temperature of a particular ice/brine mixture, and it was approximately the lowest temperature typically experienced in Fahrenheit's area. I suppose that one advantage of that is not having to use negative values very often.
100F is approximately human body temperature. That's pretty easy to relate to.
One nice property of the system is that 0F is often dangerously cold, and 100F is often dangerously hot.
Nice, didn't know that (having grown in a Celsius-driven country.)
Don't worry, at 76C you will soon be dead. It won't matter what you are wearing.
That kinda shows how little we in the US know about the Celsius system. Honestly, I've been living here for close to three decades, and I still have to convert to Celsius from time to time to truly understand cold weather reports in the Fahrenheit scale. Something to do with Celsius zero being the freezing point of water (a good reference point). Heat descriptions in F scale are easier for me to interpret, but still, I'm always like "what's water boiling point in F?" (100C is so much easier to reason.)
The site is owned and operated by Americans, that makes it an American site, dipshit. Also, most people in the world speak more than one language, so language has SFA to do with country of origin except to rubes.
I'm sure the Americans how operate the site never had the intention to see their site considered as such. But hey, beat your chest in jingoistic bravado if it gets you into an e-raged filled patriotgasm.
The general thrust is: You can't help people commit crimes.
In many countries (and I will probably now be disappointed to find that the US isn't one of them) you don't get to just roll up with $5 million of bank notes in a truck and buy something expensive like land or a company. If you do that, and later somebody asks the lawyers "So, what's with the $5M in cash?" and they shrug and say "I didn't ask" they lose their licenses and their offices are crawling with investigators. Even if it turns out you got that $5M through some unlikely but entirely legal means, their failure to ask reasonable questions makes them guilty.
In my country if you ask the "bank of mum and dad" to help pay for your first house, they need to write a letter explaining who they are, and why this big sum of unexpected money appeared with no strings attached, because otherwise your lender, or your lawyers, or both will freak out and everything stalls while this mysterious money is explained. If instead of "mum and dad" the money comes from "Uncle Albert" who like, isn't actually an uncle but he knew you from when you were a baby, expect that to get crawled over even more. Who is this "Uncle Albert" dude? Does he end up with control over the property in practice despite you owning it on paper? Where did _he_ get the money from?
Right now in the press you might see fuss about a company called British Home Stores or BHS. The guy who owned it sold it to someone they knew was a fly-by-night terrible business person, so that he could walk away saying it was fine when he left. It collapsed, as he will have known it probably would. Did the politicians say "Oh, well, you sold it, so not your problem" ? No, they're demanding he pay off its pension fund and they're tearing into the other directors, the auditors, and so on. Because all those people had a DUTY not to just say "Oh, whatever, if the owner wants to sell it to some scumbag let him".
It's not just country (I assume you are not in the US.) My wife and I live in Florida, and when we bought our first home, we had to write letters to the bank (BoA) explaining all our sources of income or wealth, including a generous cash gift we got from our in-laws. And before we got a loan with BoA we were trying to get one via NACA, and that organization had us write regular letters explaining our cash flows (which got annoying at times since we traveled abroad every year to see my in-laws, which incurred in money transfers between US and Japan's accounts.)
If someone gets away with paying a property with cash without even writing a notarized letter explaining the source, I suspect a crooked hand (and the seller can be in for a world of pain.)
But that's for us plebeians. For those on top, they can get away with that kind of shit and more. Land of the free and home of the brave I guess....
Maybe you young'ns can't remember, but I remember when you had to access Yahoo by an IP address (since DNS wasn't a thing then), and then all it really was, was a directory of links to other sites that existed. No such thing as a search engine back then.
The founders capitalized on that, and at one point, Yahoo was the biggest, best thing on the world wide web. Then they decided that the "portal" thing was the way to go, and after that, it was kinda downhill from there.
And then Google came and ate their lunch, and after that were a series of terrible CEOs that didn't understand the company at all (probably because there was no cohesive strategy to understand -- they grew too rapidly at the start for that).
Bye Bye Yahoo. You were great for a little while in the early days, and I appreciated what you did for the web. But I don't think you were ever meant to be a commercial venture, and essentially that was your downfall.
I remember everything you said except the "access Yahoo by an IP address" (or that "DNS wasn't a thing then").
These always struck me as a fad waiting to die, but I'm not trying to be the usual Slashdot curmudgeon, so I'll ask: what are the killer features of a smart watch?
The best my buddy could come up with who bought an Android one was some mumbling about how its more socially acceptable to glance at texts on your wrist, than to take your phone out.
Killer features would differ from people to people, but this is what I'd love to see assuming the technology were to exist at an affordable price (affordable price, subjective, I know):
e-mail/sms/jabber/slack/infrastructure-devops notifications (be them sound or vibration) - if I need to reply I pull my phone or go to a computer, but at least I'd like to be notified without me having to pull my phone to read (yes, affordable laziness is bliss.)
fitbit-like capabilities to monitor my physical activity and sleep patterns.
pre-programmed purchasing buttons (think Amazon Dash) for common/recurrent items.
pre-programmed ordering buttons in some type of logistics/supply chains
baby/toddler tracking within a given radius.
discrete weather monitor showing chances of rain or heat or whatever.
traffic alerts.
job search alerts (or any type of alert feed that you might be interested.)
product scanners at a warehouse or store.
Killer features, I think, will revolve around very specific, repetitive, utilitarian tasks. I do not see smart watches taking off as general media consumption devises (not even for music), but as devices that provide convenient and inconspicuous notification of events as well as means to trigger recurring processes.
And that is the key, I think. I don't see smartwatches taking off as media consumption devises, but as programmable notifiers/triggers.
Obviously we can do the later now with smartphones, but a smartwatch is more convenient. It would not work in isolation, but in tandem with a smartphone on a personal level (or as part of a much larger system.)
OK, I know this business, and I can tell you that the contractors supporting the system are doing so with minimum personnel, so that can't be it. Maximum of 500 people involved in dev and support, and probably less. The system itself is not useful to a general purpose user. Let's assume 50,000 people ever touch it, that's probably a generous estimate. I imagine if we saw their usage data, it would be in the four figures, not six.
LOL, no. The minimum personnel is only used when the money begins to dry. Contractors will attempt to put as many bodies as possible and rake the hours. I've been in this business, too, and I've seen this unfold (with predictable results, mind you.)
The City doesn't sell cars... many banks and other financial institutions will get up and leave London, or at least heavily downgrade their presence.
And Davis doesn't really seem to care, contrary to what you wrote (and hoped), maybe because he suspects that the vast majority of the British people would probably be happy if investment bankers lost their jobs. Sorry (not).
It is not just bankers (whatever you think that name stands for) that will lose their jobs. There will be plenty of white-collar flight, you know, the middle class spenders that make the economy going. The folks who don't care are either going for a Pyrrhic victory or don't quite grasp basic economics.
I guess it surprises someone that "software development" includes a whole lot of people all over the country.
It actually surprises me that a full 10 percent of software jobs are actually in Silicon Valley. Every major city I've ever lived in across the US has been teeming with job openings in the tech sector. Just seems kind of weird that the headline of the article is going on about 90 percent of software developers working outside the valley. Is this news to anyone?
For the mobile app/unicorn hipsters in the valley, yep.
[...] sounds like you're getting ripped off considering the area.
Unless like most people, I was born and raised here. I'm not yet ready to let the hipsters run me out of town.
But you are certainly bleeding money. Money is not everything, but by God, do the math. You could be losing between $300K to $500K in wages in 10 years if you stay where you are. That's not chump change.
Why would I pay $3000/month to share a ROOM with four other people [...]
I pay $1477 for a 475-sqf studio apartment in San Jose, where I lived there by myself for 10+ years and make only $50K per year in IT support.
You can make almost twice as much and pay the same amount for a 2-bedroom apartment rental with 1-car garage in a decent area here in South Florida. You are getting ripped off. What the hell are you doing there?
You don't. Even in the heart of SV, you can rent your own room for about $1000/month.
Or you can buy a decent house here for that. So am I surprised most software developers don't live in Silicon Valley? No. For the same reason I never moved there.
Aside from that, as mcmonkey quite correctly pointed out, most of everything is outside of Silicon Valley. Most of anything is outside of any given city.
Are you sure about that? Because I pretty much gave up trying to move to the valley because I could not find anything decent for that price. Yeah, I could find that in very shitty areas, but what would be the point of that? I did the math, and pretty much I would have to earn 3X of what I make now to afford the type of housing, schools and amenities that I currently provide my family (and I live in South Florida, not the cheapest of regions.)
Why would I pay $3000/month to share a ROOM with four other people making $120K when I can BUY a four bedroom house on one acre of land in the country for $825/month on half that salary anywhere between the Rocky and Appalachian mountain ranges? I'd take the boring enterprise 9-5 job at a no-name B2B service company any day of the week and enjoy my big house and yard with my kids any day of the week.
I agree with you, partly, on the wisdom of paying crazy rent in the valley. But I have misgivings about living away from major metropolitan areas because the smaller the metro area, the less number of employers. Less expensive real state tends to correlate with a smaller number of employers (and thus a greater risk when things go south.)
So there is a balance where, at least for me, I prefer to pay the extra cost of living in a large metropolitan area (say, Atlanta, South Florida, Dallas, Denver, Portland or Seattle) as insurance against being bound to a very small number of employers.
But as some point, as you mention, the increased cost makes no sense because it begins to trample on quality of life. If I were to pay so much for renting in the Valley, I might as well move to a megapolis like NYC or Tokyo (much larger, more interesting places with a sufficiently large number of employers.)
If "Fame" is your only measure of success, then I guess "luck" has everything to do with it.
No. It is not *my* only measure of success. It is one of the different measures that society and humanity measure success. Nice way to misread my comment though.
In the real world, "learning some other guy's code base" sometimes would indeed take more time than rewriting it the first chance you get.
If you haven't learned what something does and how it does it, then how the f*ck are you going to succeed at rewriting it?
By re-implementing the functional requirement that is supposed to be met by the God-awful complicated (and most likely buggy) code from scratch. Typically you have to delve into existing code to integrate or to fix something. Most often to fix something.
So in those cases:
You know what the code is supposed to do, functionally, and
either the code is not doing it right, or
it is doing it right, but it is additionally doing something wrong
Think clean-room re-engineering from specs. This happens all the time, a system or function F that is supposed to do A, but that it uses too much memory, or it is too slow, or it leaks resources.
Whatever, but you know what F is supposed to do.
And the code behind A is just nasty and impenetrable, so hard to untangle to simply fix what is broken.
So you implement it from scratch so that it does A without all the other unwanted shit. That's how it is done all too often in the real world.
My experience in real life is that there is a high degree of correlation between a high number of dumbfuckery bugs in code and a lack of useful comments (*). They correlate like motherfuckers.
* There is such a thing as a bad/useless comment. Think/* i is a counter */. Or worse,/* This function returns teh string./*. Or even worse,// This is a helper function.
OK. I happen to disagree. But if a project has a coding standard, then you need to follow it anyway.
As it happens, my preferred comment style matches one of the ones he disapproves of. I like to conserve vertical space, so I prefer:
/** Title of the comment.
* body of the comment.
* body continued. */
I don't plan on reading it there, though, I plan on using Doxygen to produce commented text, and not looking at the code again unless I need to modify it.
We seldom read our code. But if the code does something valuable (and/or is craptacular), others will. If no one seldom reads it, then it is either rock solid, or it has no value whatsoever.
...they first cause comment syntax to twist their panties into a bunch.
Huh, I thought it was tabs vs spaces first, comment formatting second.
80 character lines.
I thought we all agreed to set our terminal windows to 120 characters?
The only people who do that are the ones who do not run side-to-side diffs. Have mercy on the people who have to run diffs while fixing your bugs and stick to 80 character lines.
Slashdot Mirror
Seems like a false comparison. Netflix lacks news, sports and the vast amount of programming that is available on Cable ... it better be cheaper! A much more interesting comparison would be Netflix and HBO.
All those you mention come at an extra price. And the comparison is still valid since it is calculating cost per hour watched, not cost per content type. I used to have cable, the so-called premium plans because I needed (wanted) to watch things not in the basic or family plans. Price tag was almost double ($180) and still, I would get so much other stuff I did not want (and I wouldn't necessarily got what I wanted.)
I cut the cord two years ago and I could not be happier. $49 for internet, $9 for Netflix, $7 for Hulu and Amazon Prime (which comes to be $8.25 a month, which I will most likely cancel.) I certainly do not get HBO, Starz, sports or hunting channels, but whatever. I simply refine and schedule what I want to watch. A program I want to watch, I simply buy it on Amazon. It still comes a lot cheaper than cable.
The only thing I miss from cable (AT&T specifically) was the Japan TV channel for my kids. That's it.
At the end of the day, content can be varied and still dull. And per hour, it is still more expensive than Netflix (or any of the other streaming alternatives.) And we are not even factoring out other costs like early cancellation (or joining) fees (which are non-existing in Netflix.)
If cable simply were to provide true a-la-carte plans, I suspect cost would drop.
What does Fahrenheit relate to? Who knows?
0F is the temperature of a particular ice/brine mixture, and it was approximately the lowest temperature typically experienced in Fahrenheit's area. I suppose that one advantage of that is not having to use negative values very often.
100F is approximately human body temperature. That's pretty easy to relate to.
One nice property of the system is that 0F is often dangerously cold, and 100F is often dangerously hot.
Nice, didn't know that (having grown in a Celsius-driven country.)
AT 76C I'd have no idea what to put on....
Don't worry, at 76C you will soon be dead. It won't matter what you are wearing.
That kinda shows how little we in the US know about the Celsius system. Honestly, I've been living here for close to three decades, and I still have to convert to Celsius from time to time to truly understand cold weather reports in the Fahrenheit scale. Something to do with Celsius zero being the freezing point of water (a good reference point). Heat descriptions in F scale are easier for me to interpret, but still, I'm always like "what's water boiling point in F?" (100C is so much easier to reason.)
The actual funny thing is that your "2 digit positive number" has overflown into three digits for this story.
Thermobaric Y2K!
The site is owned and operated by Americans, that makes it an American site, dipshit. Also, most people in the world speak more than one language, so language has SFA to do with country of origin except to rubes.
I'm sure the Americans how operate the site never had the intention to see their site considered as such. But hey, beat your chest in jingoistic bravado if it gets you into an e-raged filled patriotgasm.
The general thrust is: You can't help people commit crimes.
In many countries (and I will probably now be disappointed to find that the US isn't one of them) you don't get to just roll up with $5 million of bank notes in a truck and buy something expensive like land or a company. If you do that, and later somebody asks the lawyers "So, what's with the $5M in cash?" and they shrug and say "I didn't ask" they lose their licenses and their offices are crawling with investigators. Even if it turns out you got that $5M through some unlikely but entirely legal means, their failure to ask reasonable questions makes them guilty.
In my country if you ask the "bank of mum and dad" to help pay for your first house, they need to write a letter explaining who they are, and why this big sum of unexpected money appeared with no strings attached, because otherwise your lender, or your lawyers, or both will freak out and everything stalls while this mysterious money is explained. If instead of "mum and dad" the money comes from "Uncle Albert" who like, isn't actually an uncle but he knew you from when you were a baby, expect that to get crawled over even more. Who is this "Uncle Albert" dude? Does he end up with control over the property in practice despite you owning it on paper? Where did _he_ get the money from?
Right now in the press you might see fuss about a company called British Home Stores or BHS. The guy who owned it sold it to someone they knew was a fly-by-night terrible business person, so that he could walk away saying it was fine when he left. It collapsed, as he will have known it probably would. Did the politicians say "Oh, well, you sold it, so not your problem" ? No, they're demanding he pay off its pension fund and they're tearing into the other directors, the auditors, and so on. Because all those people had a DUTY not to just say "Oh, whatever, if the owner wants to sell it to some scumbag let him".
It's not just country (I assume you are not in the US.) My wife and I live in Florida, and when we bought our first home, we had to write letters to the bank (BoA) explaining all our sources of income or wealth, including a generous cash gift we got from our in-laws. And before we got a loan with BoA we were trying to get one via NACA, and that organization had us write regular letters explaining our cash flows (which got annoying at times since we traveled abroad every year to see my in-laws, which incurred in money transfers between US and Japan's accounts.)
If someone gets away with paying a property with cash without even writing a notarized letter explaining the source, I suspect a crooked hand (and the seller can be in for a world of pain.)
But that's for us plebeians. For those on top, they can get away with that kind of shit and more. Land of the free and home of the brave I guess....
And an equal amount of money was lost.
Can't play with babies (or shit flinging monkeys) without getting some shit on you.
Maybe you young'ns can't remember, but I remember when you had to access Yahoo by an IP address (since DNS wasn't a thing then), and then all it really was, was a directory of links to other sites that existed. No such thing as a search engine back then.
The founders capitalized on that, and at one point, Yahoo was the biggest, best thing on the world wide web. Then they decided that the "portal" thing was the way to go, and after that, it was kinda downhill from there.
And then Google came and ate their lunch, and after that were a series of terrible CEOs that didn't understand the company at all (probably because there was no cohesive strategy to understand -- they grew too rapidly at the start for that).
Bye Bye Yahoo. You were great for a little while in the early days, and I appreciated what you did for the web. But I don't think you were ever meant to be a commercial venture, and essentially that was your downfall.
I remember everything you said except the "access Yahoo by an IP address" (or that "DNS wasn't a thing then").
Oh wow, two companies that suck found a way to make each other suck even more! (Leveraging mutual synergies...)
Corporate 69?
These always struck me as a fad waiting to die, but I'm not trying to be the usual Slashdot curmudgeon, so I'll ask: what are the killer features of a smart watch?
The best my buddy could come up with who bought an Android one was some mumbling about how its more socially acceptable to glance at texts on your wrist, than to take your phone out.
Killer features would differ from people to people, but this is what I'd love to see assuming the technology were to exist at an affordable price (affordable price, subjective, I know):
e-mail/sms/jabber/slack/infrastructure-devops notifications (be them sound or vibration) - if I need to reply I pull my phone or go to a computer, but at least I'd like to be notified without me having to pull my phone to read (yes, affordable laziness is bliss.)
fitbit-like capabilities to monitor my physical activity and sleep patterns.
pre-programmed purchasing buttons (think Amazon Dash) for common/recurrent items.
pre-programmed ordering buttons in some type of logistics/supply chains
baby/toddler tracking within a given radius.
discrete weather monitor showing chances of rain or heat or whatever.
traffic alerts.
job search alerts (or any type of alert feed that you might be interested.)
product scanners at a warehouse or store.
Killer features, I think, will revolve around very specific, repetitive, utilitarian tasks. I do not see smart watches taking off as general media consumption devises (not even for music), but as devices that provide convenient and inconspicuous notification of events as well as means to trigger recurring processes.
And that is the key, I think. I don't see smartwatches taking off as media consumption devises, but as programmable notifiers/triggers.
Obviously we can do the later now with smartphones, but a smartwatch is more convenient. It would not work in isolation, but in tandem with a smartphone on a personal level (or as part of a much larger system.)
OK, I know this business, and I can tell you that the contractors supporting the system are doing so with minimum personnel, so that can't be it. Maximum of 500 people involved in dev and support, and probably less. The system itself is not useful to a general purpose user. Let's assume 50,000 people ever touch it, that's probably a generous estimate. I imagine if we saw their usage data, it would be in the four figures, not six.
LOL, no. The minimum personnel is only used when the money begins to dry. Contractors will attempt to put as many bodies as possible and rake the hours. I've been in this business, too, and I've seen this unfold (with predictable results, mind you.)
This has been done in Japan for years. But MIT did say robot instead of machine or mechanism so TECH NEWS!
I was about to say the same thing. I should tell my in-laws in Yokohama to add a robot and claim to have a furniture mecha or something.
The City doesn't sell cars... many banks and other financial institutions will get up and leave London, or at least heavily downgrade their presence.
And Davis doesn't really seem to care, contrary to what you wrote (and hoped), maybe because he suspects that the vast majority of the British people would probably be happy if investment bankers lost their jobs. Sorry (not).
It is not just bankers (whatever you think that name stands for) that will lose their jobs. There will be plenty of white-collar flight, you know, the middle class spenders that make the economy going. The folks who don't care are either going for a Pyrrhic victory or don't quite grasp basic economics.
Either way, countries reap what they sow.
I guess it surprises someone that "software development" includes a whole lot of people all over the country.
It actually surprises me that a full 10 percent of software jobs are actually in Silicon Valley. Every major city I've ever lived in across the US has been teeming with job openings in the tech sector. Just seems kind of weird that the headline of the article is going on about 90 percent of software developers working outside the valley. Is this news to anyone?
For the mobile app/unicorn hipsters in the valley, yep.
wooosh?
[...] sounds like you're getting ripped off considering the area.
Unless like most people, I was born and raised here. I'm not yet ready to let the hipsters run me out of town.
But you are certainly bleeding money. Money is not everything, but by God, do the math. You could be losing between $300K to $500K in wages in 10 years if you stay where you are. That's not chump change.
Why would I pay $3000/month to share a ROOM with four other people [...]
I pay $1477 for a 475-sqf studio apartment in San Jose, where I lived there by myself for 10+ years and make only $50K per year in IT support.
You can make almost twice as much and pay the same amount for a 2-bedroom apartment rental with 1-car garage in a decent area here in South Florida. You are getting ripped off. What the hell are you doing there?
Or you can buy a decent house here for that. So am I surprised most software developers don't live in Silicon Valley? No. For the same reason I never moved there.
Aside from that, as mcmonkey quite correctly pointed out, most of everything is outside of Silicon Valley. Most of anything is outside of any given city.
Are you sure about that? Because I pretty much gave up trying to move to the valley because I could not find anything decent for that price. Yeah, I could find that in very shitty areas, but what would be the point of that? I did the math, and pretty much I would have to earn 3X of what I make now to afford the type of housing, schools and amenities that I currently provide my family (and I live in South Florida, not the cheapest of regions.)
Why would I pay $3000/month to share a ROOM with four other people making $120K when I can BUY a four bedroom house on one acre of land in the country for $825/month on half that salary anywhere between the Rocky and Appalachian mountain ranges? I'd take the boring enterprise 9-5 job at a no-name B2B service company any day of the week and enjoy my big house and yard with my kids any day of the week.
I agree with you, partly, on the wisdom of paying crazy rent in the valley. But I have misgivings about living away from major metropolitan areas because the smaller the metro area, the less number of employers. Less expensive real state tends to correlate with a smaller number of employers (and thus a greater risk when things go south.)
So there is a balance where, at least for me, I prefer to pay the extra cost of living in a large metropolitan area (say, Atlanta, South Florida, Dallas, Denver, Portland or Seattle) as insurance against being bound to a very small number of employers.
But as some point, as you mention, the increased cost makes no sense because it begins to trample on quality of life. If I were to pay so much for renting in the Valley, I might as well move to a megapolis like NYC or Tokyo (much larger, more interesting places with a sufficiently large number of employers.)
If "Fame" is your only measure of success, then I guess "luck" has everything to do with it.
No. It is not *my* only measure of success. It is one of the different measures that society and humanity measure success. Nice way to misread my comment though.
“Luck Is What Happens When Preparation Meets Opportunity" - Seneca
If you're not prepared for opportunity, and someone else is, you call them "lucky". Probably because you were too busy with Pokemon Go!
Bullshit regardless of which historical luminary said it.
What happens when preparation never meets opportunity?
Or what happens when the likes of Paris Hilton or Kim Kardashian are born in wealth.
Luck is luck, a simple opportunity window that blesses equally the prepared as well as the one who (if you forgive the repetition) was born in luck.
People who quote Seneca do so to dismiss that luck is a real, determining factor.
In the real world, "learning some other guy's code base" sometimes would indeed take more time than rewriting it the first chance you get.
If you haven't learned what something does and how it does it, then how the f*ck are you going to succeed at rewriting it?
By re-implementing the functional requirement that is supposed to be met by the God-awful complicated (and most likely buggy) code from scratch. Typically you have to delve into existing code to integrate or to fix something. Most often to fix something. So in those cases:
Think clean-room re-engineering from specs. This happens all the time, a system or function F that is supposed to do A, but that it uses too much memory, or it is too slow, or it leaks resources.
Whatever, but you know what F is supposed to do.
And the code behind A is just nasty and impenetrable, so hard to untangle to simply fix what is broken.
So you implement it from scratch so that it does A without all the other unwanted shit. That's how it is done all too often in the real world.
especially if it lacks comments
My experience in real life is that there is a high degree of correlation between a high number of dumbfuckery bugs in code and a lack of useful comments (*). They correlate like motherfuckers.
* There is such a thing as a bad/useless comment. Think /* i is a counter */. Or worse, /* This function returns teh string./*. Or even worse, // This is a helper function.
Yes, I've seen this.
OK. I happen to disagree. But if a project has a coding standard, then you need to follow it anyway.
As it happens, my preferred comment style matches one of the ones he disapproves of. I like to conserve vertical space, so I prefer:
I don't plan on reading it there, though, I plan on using Doxygen to produce commented text, and not looking at the code again unless I need to modify it.
We seldom read our code. But if the code does something valuable (and/or is craptacular), others will. If no one seldom reads it, then it is either rock solid, or it has no value whatsoever.
...they first cause comment syntax to twist their panties into a bunch.
Huh, I thought it was tabs vs spaces first, comment formatting second.
80 character lines.
I thought we all agreed to set our terminal windows to 120 characters?
The only people who do that are the ones who do not run side-to-side diffs. Have mercy on the people who have to run diffs while fixing your bugs and stick to 80 character lines.