Why would you want them to be descriptive ? who's going to be interested in that description? Another programmer perhaps? Why would that other programmer be interested in patterns as a descriptive device?
Exactly, because they make the code easier to understand.
So why should you use patterns as a prescriptive device? well, simply because they will make your code easier to understand for another programmer.
In the end, their value as a descriptive device is exactly the reason why patterns should be prescriptive.
That doesn't exclude the need for fingerspitzengefuhl (? my german is dated) to know when and when not to use a pattern.
o but it does have memory leaks for sure. The only difference with before is, that now you'll have a forgotten reference to a memory structure somewhere. A couple of years ago I developed a java based GUI component, based on an open-source graphics toolkit. That toolkit created it's own thread to keep track of mouse movements (it triggered a custom tooltip).
Thing was, when you would shutdown my component the mouse thread would not be killed. And since it maintained a reference to some object which maintained a reference to my component instance, the garbage collector would never clean up my component. So there you have it, a memory leak in Java.
The only realistic way I know of to find these leaks is to use a tool like JProbe, which will show you the references to each instance.
Allocate a budget (needn't be large) and just let the team decide. Encourage team members to come up with fun things to do with it.
if need be, you can always speed things up by proposing something yourself. If no one wants to stick his/her neck out, find the leader within the team (no not you, one of the employees who tends to represent the others in collective stuff) and ask him/her directly to organize something.
IMHO, the worst thing you can do is say something like 'Listen up guys, I asked slashdot for some fun team-building things to do. Next wednesday we'll all go...' I'd cringe.
In case you haven't thought of it yet, check the editorials of the washington post and the new york times (you can read most of the nyt ones without registering at iht.com). Essays by William Safire come recommended, if only for the excellent analyses
In Holland, you can get an appointment the same day if required. If you're in a real hurry just go to the emergency room. The one big problem we have with our collective healthcare system is excessive cost. But then again that's a problem US healthcare is not immune to, now is it?
This whole social healthcare vs do-it-yourself discussion always boggles my mind. It's not like you don't pay for healthcare if it's not collectively organized. I mean, I may pay higher taxes than you do, but you still have to pay a significant amount of healthcare insurance right?
You might counter that there is no obligation for people in the US to be insured for healthcare costs, whereas we are. Whether that's a good or a bad thing is left for personal judgement.
One argument for collective healthcare is (I hope I'm recalling this correctly) that people in general are inclined to not take out insurance against events that are unlikely to occur. Noone expects to develop that 1-in-a-million hart condition that costs $500K to treat. This tempts people to not take any health insurance. From a general welfare point-of-view I'd say that is undesirable.
Just for my understanding: wouldn't bypassing a MAC filter or eavesdropping on the SSID be illegal as well? If bypassing WEP is illegal, this stuff is too right?
Next election, what do you think the positions of these two candidates will be? See, they're both trying to win, so they'll both try to appeal to as many people as possible. Since the electorate (you!) spoke last election and said: we prefer DEM's ideas to REP's ideas, REP will be selling a slightly modified set of ideas, designed to appeal to DEM leaning people -- there are more of them, or REP would have won last election. Similarly, DEM must shift further left to avoid being totally identical to REP -- they can get by with being similar, but not _too_ similar.
So what happens, in your model, when a large number of people vote for Nader?
Exactly! Next election, both the DEM and the REP will move towards Nader. By your own logic, you should therefor pick the candidate which most closely resembles your ideas.
Let me put it like this... Say you're a left-wing commie (same argument applies to nazi gun-nuts). You could vote for DEM, or for REP, or for the local commie party who represent your views. However, voting for the local commie party doesn't make them your representative, it makes whoever other people thought was best your representative. Essentially, your vote is almost useless unless it is the single vote that changes the result.
You're saying you should not vote the commies, because that would make "whoever other people thought was your best representative" the winner. The way to make your vote count, then, would be to vote for the DEM. The reason you must vote for the DEM is that he has a chance of winning. The reason he has that chance is because a lot of people are voting for him. Conclusion: because other people think the DEM is a good representative, you vote for him. In my opinion, that is still a waste of your vote, since your vote is still determined by other people.
Again you vote DEM, and again your candidate wins. Again, the country has very slightly closer policies to those you support. Repeat until both parties policies approximate yours.
in closing, this strategy won't work if neither candidate resembles your views. Which would be the case if you are inclined to vote Nader.
I think you misunderstood the parents post. Your assumption that you could buy infinitedly many tickets is invalid: you can only buy infinitedly many $100K tickets if you're infinitedly rich. The parent explicitely excluded the possibility of you being that rich from his example.
So what the parent is saying is that, if you're not extremely rich, you probably won't be ready to trade 100K for a 1:3 chance of winning 1M. This behaviour, coincidentally, is something that game theory tries to model. Chaos theory has little to do with it.
Not only did I get the pages to validate. By using CSS, I was able to get rid of several images they had been using with their design. The overall size of a page, including graphics and CSS, now weighs in at about 35 kbytes. This is compared to around 120 kbytes with the proposed code.
Dude, what kind of network equipment are you using? pigeons? are you printing out IP packets on paper to have 'em typed over by a bunch of filipino's in the other faculty building?
Let's assume you're on a 10 MBit network. This gives you about 1220 KB/s. In two days work, 16 hours, you've managed to reduce the transfer time for one page from 1/10th of a second to 1/35th of a second. The time you've spent reworking that page means that after roughly 806 THOUSAND pages served, you'll have achieved a net reduction in time spent. That is, you'll have wasted two precious days of your life, while the network will have saved itself two worthless days of it's life. Congratulations.
If you're mailhost is running the qmail mailserver, you can create aliases on the fly by appending -alias to your email address. So if you're email is bob@example.com, mail to bob-nytimes@example.com will be delivered to your mailbox as well.
Off course, a catch-all account like someone else suggested would accomplish the same thing.
One thing: just like writing bob AT example DOT com is painfully obvious to any mail harvester, the qmail alias trick is compromized as well. Once I received some virus mails after signing up with an online newspaper. Apparently, the newspaper gathered all emailaddresses in the addresbook in outlook(!), which was subsequently harvested by a virus. I noticed this, because I started receiving identical mails on bob@example.com and bob-newspaper@example.com simultaneously....
if you're interested in this kind of stuff, read Introduction into Kolmogorov Complexity by Paul Vitanyi I attended his class at the University of Amsterdam last year. The stuff was a somewhat out of my league, but from what I can remember the indenumerably infinite supply term means that there is an infinite amount of such numbers, which you cannot produce in any form. Contrast this with the denumberable but infinite set of odd numbers.
Ummm, people in the population increase you cite are all under 4 years old.
Ummmm, there is this thing called immigration. Even though foreigners seem to be regarded as sub-human nowadays they're still counted in the population.
In addition, a common theme in articles about US job losses is that somewhere around 100'000 jobs are needed per month to accommodate for the new arrivals on the job market (there are several NY times articles which mention this, but I can't be bothered to go look them up now:) )
what's the problem with not using your cell phone behind the steer? We have a similar law in the Netherlands. You're only allowed to use a cell phone if it's on a handsfree set. If I recall correctly, the law was introduced after cellphone use was linked to a significant amount of accidents. At least one accident involved a lady who was composing an SMS when she missed a red light or something.
In my opinion this has little to do with personal freedoms (use a handsfree and you're fine) and everything with protecting the public's interest.
But then again, I've never understood why you people get so worked up about the right to bear guns either.
Well put. I noticed in practice both you and the client experience a development process. You develop software, while the customer simultaneously develops an understanding of their own business or problem. Looking at it this way, it is clear immediately why a waterfall development approach won't work.
But still at the development shop where I work, the gospel is to create a detailed requirements document (including quote) beforehand. The customer must sign off, and development starts. Every project I have seen performed so far has ended in sour feelings on both sides, due to the customer wanting to change requirements midstream. And everytime I'll hear other developers complain about customers who do not know what they want. It baffles me that no one (especially management) tries to find a development form that can handle changing requirements in a smooth way.
Extreme Programming promises to take care of this problem, but I'm not quite sure how you'd make an initial quote. The feeling at work is that customers will only accept a quote which promises to deliver a certain set of specifications for a certain price. Apparently, customers themselves do not realise beforehand that their requirements will change over time. Therefor, they will prefer a quote which promises them to deliver what they think they want, rather than a quote which promises them a best effort in a rather open-ended time frame.
Anyone have any experience with quoting XP projects?
Did you now you can turn the exclusive locks off? You can set it as a default somewhere, otherwise look at the checkout options when you're checking out files in the sourcesafe client. It's been awhile since I had merge conflicts but I recall there being a nice colorful interface if you need to resolve any conflicts.
Amazing how you can agree with my reasoning yet disagree with the conclusion:)
Running with the above example, if a user didn't even know about something called a screwdriver, they might be perfectly happy with their hammer. Now granted, it might be a mighty-fine, high quality hammer, but it's still a low quality screwdriver.
Assume for a minute that there is a way to screw that bolt into the wall using telepathy. Wouldn't that be even better than that screwdriver? Wouldn't that make the screwdriver a low quality tool according to your reasoning? Now snap back.
We don't know how to use telepathy. Worse, We don't even know whether it is feasible. Even more worse, we don't know whether someone else knows that it is feasible.
So now you have the situation where the screwdriver *might* be a high quality tool, but we don't know, since there *may* be a better way, which we know *nothing* about and have no reason to assume exists, just like that poor guy that's still using the hammer.
Explain me what's the difference between us with the screwdriver en him with the hammer and I might yield:)
meantime, let me restate my view: Quality is a property which is assigned to stuff by individuals. Quality is a relative property, in the sense that the screwdriver is of better quality than the hammer with regards to getting a bolt into a wall. It is of high quality only because we know of no better way of achieving the same.
Well, you can repeat that all you want, it still just plain wrong
You didn't read my post carefully. *You* were supposed to repeat it;)
This is silly. Those best practices and standard you refer to are defined for some purpose. Some procedure is a best practice only if you intend to achieve the effect for which the practice is accepted to be best. Right?
(In other words, using a hamer is a best practice for driving a nail into a wall. Using a hamer is not a best practice if you intend to screw a bolt into that wall).
So if quality is defined by best practices, that means quality is dependent on the purpose for which the thing is meant - which I fully agree with.
But this means that if a user is okay with something, it must be of high quality! For if it's okay, than it must fit the purpose that user intends it for, right?
So repeat this mantra: Quality is in the eye of the beholder (and keep it in mind if you're developing software - the only thing that determines whether the software is any good is whether it fits the purpose the user intends it for)
I've wondered about that too. The only reason I can come up with is that your smtp server will defer delivery when the receiving smtp is offline. Maybe sendmail crashed a lot in the good ol' days?
Slashdot Mirror
patterns should be descriptive, not prescriptive.
Why would you want them to be descriptive ? who's going to be interested in that description? Another programmer perhaps?
Why would that other programmer be interested in patterns as a descriptive device?
Exactly, because they make the code easier to understand.
So why should you use patterns as a prescriptive device? well, simply because they will make your code easier to understand for another programmer.
In the end, their value as a descriptive device is exactly the reason why patterns should be prescriptive.
That doesn't exclude the need for fingerspitzengefuhl (? my german is dated) to know when and when not to use a pattern.
o but it does have memory leaks for sure. The only difference with before is, that now you'll have a forgotten reference to a memory structure somewhere. A couple of years ago I developed a java based GUI component, based on an open-source graphics toolkit. That toolkit created it's own thread to keep track of mouse movements (it triggered a custom tooltip).
Thing was, when you would shutdown my component the mouse thread would not be killed. And since it maintained a reference to some object which maintained a reference to my component instance, the garbage collector would never clean up my component. So there you have it, a memory leak in Java.
The only realistic way I know of to find these leaks is to use a tool like JProbe, which will show you the references to each instance.
Allocate a budget (needn't be large) and just let the team decide. Encourage team members to come up with fun things to do with it.
...' I'd cringe.
if need be, you can always speed things up by proposing something yourself. If no one wants to stick his/her neck out, find the leader within the team (no not you, one of the employees who tends to represent the others in collective stuff) and ask him/her directly to organize something.
IMHO, the worst thing you can do is say something like 'Listen up guys, I asked slashdot for some fun team-building things to do. Next wednesday we'll all go
In case you haven't thought of it yet, check the editorials of the washington post and the new york times (you can read most of the nyt ones without registering at iht.com). Essays by William Safire come recommended, if only for the excellent analyses
In Holland, you can get an appointment the same day if required. If you're in a real hurry just go to the emergency room. The one big problem we have with our collective healthcare system is excessive cost. But then again that's a problem US healthcare is not immune to, now is it?
This whole social healthcare vs do-it-yourself discussion always boggles my mind. It's not like you don't pay for healthcare if it's not collectively organized. I mean, I may pay higher taxes than you do, but you still have to pay a significant amount of healthcare insurance right?
You might counter that there is no obligation for people in the US to be insured for healthcare costs, whereas we are. Whether that's a good or a bad thing is left for personal judgement.
One argument for collective healthcare is (I hope I'm recalling this correctly) that people in general are inclined to not take out insurance against events that are unlikely to occur. Noone expects to develop that 1-in-a-million hart condition that costs $500K to treat. This tempts people to not take any health insurance. From a general welfare point-of-view I'd say that is undesirable.
Just for my understanding: wouldn't bypassing a MAC filter or eavesdropping on the SSID be illegal as well? If bypassing WEP is illegal, this stuff is too right?
Next election, what do you think the positions of these two candidates will be? See, they're both trying to win, so they'll both try to appeal to as many people as possible. Since the electorate (you!) spoke last election and said: we prefer DEM's ideas to REP's ideas, REP will be selling a slightly modified set of ideas, designed to appeal to DEM leaning people -- there are more of them, or REP would have won last election. Similarly, DEM must shift further left to avoid being totally identical to REP -- they can get by with being similar, but not _too_ similar. So what happens, in your model, when a large number of people vote for Nader? Exactly! Next election, both the DEM and the REP will move towards Nader. By your own logic, you should therefor pick the candidate which most closely resembles your ideas. Let me put it like this... Say you're a left-wing commie (same argument applies to nazi gun-nuts). You could vote for DEM, or for REP, or for the local commie party who represent your views. However, voting for the local commie party doesn't make them your representative, it makes whoever other people thought was best your representative. Essentially, your vote is almost useless unless it is the single vote that changes the result. You're saying you should not vote the commies, because that would make "whoever other people thought was your best representative" the winner. The way to make your vote count, then, would be to vote for the DEM. The reason you must vote for the DEM is that he has a chance of winning. The reason he has that chance is because a lot of people are voting for him. Conclusion: because other people think the DEM is a good representative, you vote for him. In my opinion, that is still a waste of your vote, since your vote is still determined by other people. Again you vote DEM, and again your candidate wins. Again, the country has very slightly closer policies to those you support. Repeat until both parties policies approximate yours. in closing, this strategy won't work if neither candidate resembles your views. Which would be the case if you are inclined to vote Nader.
I think you misunderstood the parents post. Your assumption that you could buy infinitedly many tickets is invalid: you can only buy infinitedly many $100K tickets if you're infinitedly rich. The parent explicitely excluded the possibility of you being that rich from his example.
So what the parent is saying is that, if you're not extremely rich, you probably won't be ready to trade 100K for a 1:3 chance of winning 1M.
This behaviour, coincidentally, is something that game theory tries to model. Chaos theory has little to do with it.
Not only did I get the pages to validate. By using CSS, I was able to get rid of several images they had been using with their design. The overall size of a page, including graphics and CSS, now weighs in at about 35 kbytes. This is compared to around 120 kbytes with the proposed code.
Dude, what kind of network equipment are you using? pigeons? are you printing out IP packets on paper to have 'em typed over by a bunch of filipino's in the other faculty building?
Let's assume you're on a 10 MBit network. This gives you about 1220 KB/s. In two days work, 16 hours, you've managed to reduce the transfer time for one page from 1/10th of a second to 1/35th of a second. The time you've spent reworking that page means that after roughly 806 THOUSAND pages served, you'll have achieved a net reduction in time spent. That is, you'll have wasted two precious days of your life, while the network will have saved itself two worthless days of it's life. Congratulations.
God I hope you're not on a gigabyte ethernet.
If you're mailhost is running the qmail mailserver, you can create aliases on the fly by appending -alias to your email address. So if you're email is bob@example.com, mail to bob-nytimes@example.com will be delivered to your mailbox as well.
Off course, a catch-all account like someone else suggested would accomplish the same thing.
One thing: just like writing bob AT example DOT com is painfully obvious to any mail harvester, the qmail alias trick is compromized as well. Once I received some virus mails after signing up with an online newspaper. Apparently, the newspaper gathered all emailaddresses in the addresbook in outlook(!), which was subsequently harvested by a virus. I noticed this, because I started receiving identical mails on bob@example.com and bob-newspaper@example.com simultaneously....
So far for that little trick.
if you're interested in this kind of stuff, read Introduction into Kolmogorov Complexity by Paul Vitanyi I attended his class at the University of Amsterdam last year. The stuff was a somewhat out of my league, but from what I can remember the indenumerably infinite supply term means that there is an infinite amount of such numbers, which you cannot produce in any form. Contrast this with the denumberable but infinite set of odd numbers.
Ummm, people in the population increase you cite are all under 4 years old.
:) )
Ummmm, there is this thing called immigration. Even though foreigners seem to be regarded as sub-human nowadays they're still counted in the population.
In addition, a common theme in articles about US job losses is that somewhere around 100'000 jobs are needed per month to accommodate for the new arrivals on the job market (there are several NY times articles which mention this, but I can't be bothered to go look them up now
what's the problem with not using your cell phone behind the steer? We have a similar law in the Netherlands. You're only allowed to use a cell phone if it's on a handsfree set. If I recall correctly, the law was introduced after cellphone use was linked to a significant amount of accidents. At least one accident involved a lady who was composing an SMS when she missed a red light or something.
In my opinion this has little to do with personal freedoms (use a handsfree and you're fine) and everything with protecting the public's interest.
But then again, I've never understood why you people get so worked up about the right to bear guns either.
Well put. I noticed in practice both you and the client experience a development process. You develop software, while the customer simultaneously develops an understanding of their own business or problem. Looking at it this way, it is clear immediately why a waterfall development approach won't work.
But still at the development shop where I work, the gospel is to create a detailed requirements document (including quote) beforehand. The customer must sign off, and development starts. Every project I have seen performed so far has ended in sour feelings on both sides, due to the customer wanting to change requirements midstream. And everytime I'll hear other developers complain about customers who do not know what they want. It baffles me that no one (especially management) tries to find a development form that can handle changing requirements in a smooth way.
Extreme Programming promises to take care of this problem, but I'm not quite sure how you'd make an initial quote. The feeling at work is that customers will only accept a quote which promises to deliver a certain set of specifications for a certain price. Apparently, customers themselves do not realise beforehand that their requirements will change over time. Therefor, they will prefer a quote which promises them to deliver what they think they want, rather than a quote which promises them a best effort in a rather open-ended time frame.
Anyone have any experience with quoting XP projects?
Did you now you can turn the exclusive locks off? You can set it as a default somewhere, otherwise look at the checkout options when you're checking out files in the sourcesafe client. It's been awhile since I had merge conflicts but I recall there being a nice colorful interface if you need to resolve any conflicts.
Amazing how you can agree with my reasoning yet disagree with the conclusion :)
:)
;)
Running with the above example, if a user didn't even know about something called a screwdriver, they might be perfectly happy with their hammer. Now granted, it might be a mighty-fine, high quality hammer, but it's still a low quality screwdriver.
Assume for a minute that there is a way to screw that bolt into the wall using telepathy. Wouldn't that be even better than that screwdriver? Wouldn't that make the screwdriver a low quality tool according to your reasoning? Now snap back.
We don't know how to use telepathy. Worse, We don't even know whether it is feasible. Even more worse, we don't know whether someone else knows that it is feasible.
So now you have the situation where the screwdriver *might* be a high quality tool, but we don't know, since there *may* be a better way, which we know *nothing* about and have no reason to assume exists, just like that poor guy that's still using the hammer.
Explain me what's the difference between us with the screwdriver en him with the hammer and I might yield
meantime, let me restate my view: Quality is a property which is assigned to stuff by individuals. Quality is a relative property, in the sense that the screwdriver is of better quality than the hammer with regards to getting a bolt into a wall. It is of high quality only because we know of no better way of achieving the same.
Well, you can repeat that all you want, it still just plain wrong
You didn't read my post carefully. *You* were supposed to repeat it
This is silly. Those best practices and standard you refer to are defined for some purpose. Some procedure is a best practice only if you intend to achieve the effect for which the practice is accepted to be best. Right?
(In other words, using a hamer is a best practice for driving a nail into a wall. Using a hamer is not a best practice if you intend to screw a bolt into that wall).
So if quality is defined by best practices, that means quality is dependent on the purpose for which the thing is meant - which I fully agree with.
But this means that if a user is okay with something, it must be of high quality! For if it's okay, than it must fit the purpose that user intends it for, right?
So repeat this mantra: Quality is in the eye of the beholder (and keep it in mind if you're developing software - the only thing that determines whether the software is any good is whether it fits the purpose the user intends it for)
I've wondered about that too. The only reason I can come up with is that your smtp server will defer delivery when the receiving smtp is offline. Maybe sendmail crashed a lot in the good ol' days?