Eric Wolpaw and Chet Faliszek have worked in the gaming industry, and the site itself is referenced in numerous interviews, articles, quotations, and even in games. All valid reasons for a Wikipedia entry, I'd think.
I'm not even close to the best of musicians, but I learned a long time ago that I could sing and play guitar at the same time easily. Trying to do any more than that, even including thinking about other things while I'm doing both, is a recipe for disaster.
I don't doubt it. And I can't count how many times I've heard people doing consulting work marvel over how much more work they get when they raise their rates from the bargain prices they were to something more equitable with whatever the local rate is. Simple reality is that lots of people equate price with quality.
Re:Sacrifice hardware for the good of software?
on
How Cheap Can A PC Be?
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· Score: 4, Insightful
MS gets away with this because they sell the majority of their Office licenses to business users, and tons of businesses remain firmly convinced that something you pay for is always better than something that's free. A worldview that makes sense, given that a business usually makes money by selling some product and/or service. The more money something costs, the higher quality and/or more useful it must be.
As a former ACLU member, I found it awfully troubling that the ACLU tries to defend civil rights, but is supposedly "neutral" on the subject of gun control. From their statement on the subject:
We believe that the constitutional right to bear arms is primarily a collective one, intended mainly to protect the right of the states to maintain militias to assure their own freedom and security against the central government. In today's world, that idea is somewhat anachronistic and in any case would require weapons much more powerful than handguns or hunting rifles. The ACLU therefore believes that the Second Amendment does not confer an unlimited right upon individuals to own guns or other weapons nor does it prohibit reasonable regulation of gun ownership, such as licensing and registration.
My question, then, is how they suppose the rest of our civil liberties can be ensured if they ignore the amendment which gives us the teeth to defend them. They couldn't answer me this, so I cancelled my membership and joined the NRA. YMMV.
One awful thing about the Ruby community is that they pipe up about how they are almost as good as Perl whenever Perl is mentioned.. it's offtopic, untrue, and gets old after a while.
That's a really good point. Speaking as a Rubiac, I apologize. The decision to use Ruby seems so obvious to us - it'll make you more popular in school, re-grow hair, give you an Atlas body in just days, etc. . . - that we assume if someone isn't using it, well, they must never have heard of it! At this point, though, and certainly on Slashdot, we've done enough preaching that it's probably safe to assume any given person has heard about it, and made their own decisions already. Shutting up about it now, sir.
Re:Another day, another batch of applications
on
Joel Rants About Resumes
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· Score: 5, Insightful
If it's my dream job that I have no chance in hell at every getting, I send it out printed on cotten with a calogne-laced envelope.
According to Joel's article, there's two reasons why he wouldn't consider you for a job if you did that. First:
If you don't have the right qualifications, don't apply for the job. When the job listing says "summer intern," don't ask for a full time job. You're not going to get it and you're just going to waste your time. (It won't count against you in the future, of course, because your original application was deleted so quickly I'll have no memory of you when we do get a full time opening and you apply for it.)
And second:
Study the directions that are given for how to apply. They are there for a reason. For example our website instructs you to send a resume to jobs@fogcreek.com. This goes into an email folder which we go through to find good candidates. If you think for some reason that your resume will get more attention if you print it out and send it through the mail, that you'll "stand out" somehow, disabuse yourself of that notion. Paper resumes can't get into the email folder we're using to keep track of applicants unless we scan them in, and, you know what? The scanner is right next to the shredder in my office and the shredder is easier to use.
I've known career counselors that have told me to do the same things you've described, but I have to admit Joel is making a lot of sense here. His company runs on very few employees, and he's always been extremely selective, so perhaps his hiring process is not the norm. However, in these times when every employer is getting hundreds of resumes for even the lowliest position, they can afford to be every bit as selective (some might say arbitrary) in their hiring processes.
Let the content of your resume do the talking, not the presentation. Follow the instructions the employer gives for applying, and proofread your application several times for clarity and spelling. Beyond that, there's not much you could that that would serve any purpose beyond annoying a potential employer. IANAHM, though. Just a schmuck who recently landed a job.
Oh, no. I'm speaking more along the lines of the example you gave. Like, for example, outfitting a new computer lab to be used for teaching graphics with Voodoo cards.
That's not the only example of technophobia, though. The two most senior professors in one department I know of have never opened the cases on their computers, and in fact refuse to learn how to do things like install new hardware, etc. . . Which, I suppose, is their prerogative, but it's somewhat distressing to me all the same.
Most professors not in CS are technophobes, or at least, not as comfortable with the machines they use to teach to renovate their entire set of courseware.
As much as it shames me to say it, most of the professors I've met in CS are technophobes to some extent. At least in that the-stuff-I-used-20-years-ago-should-still-be-good -enough sense.
It would appear that they do, considering the story is about a guitar string maker who switched his business operations to OSS, and the difficulties and successes that were encountered with this. The only mention of guitar strings is that his company happens to make them.
It should be noted that some of this Perlesque is deliberate, and that much of it is simply syntax sugar on top of objects. The regexps, for example, are actually Regexp objects, and as such can be extended or inherited just as any other object would. matz decided to include the/regexp/ construct to aid those who were used to it. As for the $_, $&, and its cousins, if you don't like the look of those you can include the English mixin in the standard library that allows you to say things like $LAST_READ_LINE and $MATCH.
I have to agree on the variable prefixes. @instance and @@class variables are hard on the eyes, but other than that you don't have to append anything to the beginning of a variable. lowerCase variables are local, Uppercase are constants or classes. If you're using globals in an OO language, may Dog have mercy on your soul.
And as for the libraries, check out raa.ruby-lang.org. Many there, more being developed all the time.
Maybe include a checkbox for "Consider this news item the front page"? Would cut down on number of items you'd have to slog through, as well as give developers a little more leeway in what they put in their news items.
Being the person who wrote that news item and is developing rSort, I feel I should say that I agree with you. It's not very impressive, and frankly I was not expecting Tom to put that particular item on the home page, but there's little I can do to control that. I will say that there are far more impressive projects going on both at RubyForge and at raa.ruby-lang.org, and I'd encourage anyone with a mild interest in ruby to browse through both sites and see what others have done with it.
I received this book just last week and am slowly working my way through it in-between work and other projects. I and am very pleased with it. The reviewer is correct in that this book makes learning much, much easier. It is, however, a little short on in-depth material, but I feel it can be forgiven for that in light of how well it teaches the basics.
How well does it teach? Through 4 years of a comp-sci degree that taught things using C++, I never understood Object-Oriented design as well as I do after just the first 7 chapters of this book. Hell, I'd recommend the entire book just for the chapter on polymorhism alone.
I won't go into detail since I'm short on time, but basically, if you're new to Java but know how to program in some procedural language already, this book might be what helps you go from writing programs the same way in Java to writing in Java, the way it was designed to be used. If you already know Java, though, you'll probably be bored silly. It's not a reference tome.
It matters if you're splitting them up into an array and indexing them based on what position you expect them to be in. i.e. if you get "bgcolor=white; username=dave" and you're expecting them to be reversed, your code that goes something like:
cookie.breakIntoArray() username = cookie[1]
is going to be broken. Of course, this isn't the best coding practice to begin with, but I found it odd that they came in a different order using Safari than they did with every other browser I've tried, including ones on different platforms.
This might be slightly off-topic, but I have noticed one strange thing with Safari while working with cookies on my own site: it reads them backwards. I had the headers printed out in Safari and Camino, and when I had a cookie set in Camino it would come out as
"username=dave; bgcolor=white"
but in Safari it'd be
"bgcolor = white; username=dave"
I'll be damned if I know why this is happening, but I was able to fix it easily (the site is done in Ruby, which has some nice string manipulation and array methods) once I realized what was going on.
Might be something to check out. If anyone ever reads this, that is.;)
So though I really hate Sony's music and movie division, I still like their video game division.
Watching them systematically drive Sega out of the console hardware market was more than enough to give me a severe distate for that particular division. Not that Sega was a paragon of free thought and good management, mind you. It's just pretty damned anti-competitive to threaten retailers with pulling your entire line of products (TVs, VCRs, etc...) if they so much as stock your competition's video game console.
If only Safari didn't look like a bucket of ass and had a way to turn off all its "helpful" browsing improvements I might give it an honest try. As long as Chimera doesn't inherit Mozilla's feature-bloat, has tabbed browsing, and is nearly as fast as Safari (for most pages) I'll use it.
Or is Intel still doing their little just-closer-to-maximum-speed thing with their chips? I'd be willing to bet I could overclock a 1 ghz way past 1.4 with no problem.
Slashdot Mirror
Eric Wolpaw and Chet Faliszek have worked in the gaming industry, and the site itself is referenced in numerous interviews, articles, quotations, and even in games. All valid reasons for a Wikipedia entry, I'd think.
I'm not even close to the best of musicians, but I learned a long time ago that I could sing and play guitar at the same time easily. Trying to do any more than that, even including thinking about other things while I'm doing both, is a recipe for disaster.
I guess YMMV, though.
I don't doubt it. And I can't count how many times I've heard people doing consulting work marvel over how much more work they get when they raise their rates from the bargain prices they were to something more equitable with whatever the local rate is. Simple reality is that lots of people equate price with quality.
MS gets away with this because they sell the majority of their Office licenses to business users, and tons of businesses remain firmly convinced that something you pay for is always better than something that's free. A worldview that makes sense, given that a business usually makes money by selling some product and/or service. The more money something costs, the higher quality and/or more useful it must be.
Flawed but understandable reasoning.
My question, then, is how they suppose the rest of our civil liberties can be ensured if they ignore the amendment which gives us the teeth to defend them. They couldn't answer me this, so I cancelled my membership and joined the NRA. YMMV.
Your radical ideas about society, individualism, and religion have already occurred to others
That's a really good point. Speaking as a Rubiac, I apologize. The decision to use Ruby seems so obvious to us - it'll make you more popular in school, re-grow hair, give you an Atlas body in just days, etc. . . - that we assume if someone isn't using it, well, they must never have heard of it! At this point, though, and certainly on Slashdot, we've done enough preaching that it's probably safe to assume any given person has heard about it, and made their own decisions already. Shutting up about it now, sir.
Karma-whoring reference link
According to Joel's article, there's two reasons why he wouldn't consider you for a job if you did that. First:
And second:
I've known career counselors that have told me to do the same things you've described, but I have to admit Joel is making a lot of sense here. His company runs on very few employees, and he's always been extremely selective, so perhaps his hiring process is not the norm. However, in these times when every employer is getting hundreds of resumes for even the lowliest position, they can afford to be every bit as selective (some might say arbitrary) in their hiring processes.
Let the content of your resume do the talking, not the presentation. Follow the instructions the employer gives for applying, and proofread your application several times for clarity and spelling. Beyond that, there's not much you could that that would serve any purpose beyond annoying a potential employer. IANAHM, though. Just a schmuck who recently landed a job.
Oh, no. I'm speaking more along the lines of the example you gave. Like, for example, outfitting a new computer lab to be used for teaching graphics with Voodoo cards.
That's not the only example of technophobia, though. The two most senior professors in one department I know of have never opened the cases on their computers, and in fact refuse to learn how to do things like install new hardware, etc. . . Which, I suppose, is their prerogative, but it's somewhat distressing to me all the same.
As much as it shames me to say it, most of the professors I've met in CS are technophobes to some extent. At least in that the-stuff-I-used-20-years-ago-should-still-be-good -enough sense.
It would appear that they do, considering the story is about a guitar string maker who switched his business operations to OSS, and the difficulties and successes that were encountered with this. The only mention of guitar strings is that his company happens to make them.
It should be noted that some of this Perlesque is deliberate, and that much of it is simply syntax sugar on top of objects. The regexps, for example, are actually Regexp objects, and as such can be extended or inherited just as any other object would. matz decided to include the /regexp/ construct to aid those who were used to it. As for the $_, $&, and its cousins, if you don't like the look of those you can include the English mixin in the standard library that allows you to say things like $LAST_READ_LINE and $MATCH.
I have to agree on the variable prefixes. @instance and @@class variables are hard on the eyes, but other than that you don't have to append anything to the beginning of a variable. lowerCase variables are local, Uppercase are constants or classes. If you're using globals in an OO language, may Dog have mercy on your soul.
And as for the libraries, check out raa.ruby-lang.org. Many there, more being developed all the time.
_dave
Maybe include a checkbox for "Consider this news item the front page"? Would cut down on number of items you'd have to slog through, as well as give developers a little more leeway in what they put in their news items.
_dave
Being the person who wrote that news item and is developing rSort, I feel I should say that I agree with you. It's not very impressive, and frankly I was not expecting Tom to put that particular item on the home page, but there's little I can do to control that. I will say that there are far more impressive projects going on both at RubyForge and at raa.ruby-lang.org, and I'd encourage anyone with a mild interest in ruby to browse through both sites and see what others have done with it.
_dave
I received this book just last week and am slowly working my way through it in-between work and other projects. I and am very pleased with it. The reviewer is correct in that this book makes learning much, much easier. It is, however, a little short on in-depth material, but I feel it can be forgiven for that in light of how well it teaches the basics.
How well does it teach? Through 4 years of a comp-sci degree that taught things using C++, I never understood Object-Oriented design as well as I do after just the first 7 chapters of this book. Hell, I'd recommend the entire book just for the chapter on polymorhism alone.
I won't go into detail since I'm short on time, but basically, if you're new to Java but know how to program in some procedural language already, this book might be what helps you go from writing programs the same way in Java to writing in Java, the way it was designed to be used. If you already know Java, though, you'll probably be bored silly. It's not a reference tome.
It matters if you're splitting them up into an array and indexing them based on what position you expect them to be in. i.e. if you get
"bgcolor=white; username=dave" and you're expecting them to be reversed, your code that goes something like:
cookie.breakIntoArray()
username = cookie[1]
is going to be broken. Of course, this isn't the best coding practice to begin with, but I found it odd that they came in a different order using Safari than they did with every other browser I've tried, including ones on different platforms.
This might be slightly off-topic, but I have noticed one strange thing with Safari while working with cookies on my own site: it reads them backwards. I had the headers printed out in Safari and Camino, and when I had a cookie set in Camino it would come out as
but in Safari it'd be
I'll be damned if I know why this is happening, but I was able to fix it easily (the site is done in Ruby, which has some nice string manipulation and array methods) once I realized what was going on. Might be something to check out. If anyone ever reads this, that is. ;)
Watching them systematically drive Sega out of the console hardware market was more than enough to give me a severe distate for that particular division. Not that Sega was a paragon of free thought and good management, mind you. It's just pretty damned anti-competitive to threaten retailers with pulling your entire line of products (TVs, VCRs, etc. ..) if they so much as stock your competition's video game console.
If only Safari didn't look like a bucket of ass and had a way to turn off all its "helpful" browsing improvements I might give it an honest try. As long as Chimera doesn't inherit Mozilla's feature-bloat, has tabbed browsing, and is nearly as fast as Safari (for most pages) I'll use it.
And yet somehow I'll live, even knowing an anonymous person on the internet doesn't find something particularly amusing.
Oh, yeah? Well, my dog's better than your dog because he's. . .oh, guess we're not qualifying statements anymore.
If I could, I'd moderate this way up.
Or is Intel still doing their little just-closer-to-maximum-speed thing with their chips? I'd be willing to bet I could overclock a 1 ghz way past 1.4 with no problem.
You've got my vote for Supremor of The Entertainment Industry.