One red flag that went off immediately is the advocating of integrating code and data.
I dont understand the rationale behind integrating them - they are 2 very different things. Developers need to be able to change one without the other, hence the recent rise of the old MVC paradigm in the JSP world (mixing the Java code in the HTML page makes for a mess because designers have to work around it, and it gets hard for coders to manage.)
So why does Curl suddenly think it grand to re-mix all the code and data? Can anyone explain this to me?
Aside from this, I don't see any reason to code in Curl. There's lots of mindshare and knowledge out there in HTML + DOM + CSS + JavaScript. Sure, it can be a pain sometime, but there are a lot of people out there working to make it better. Why turn that distributed responsibility over to a company with a proprietary technology? I'd rather just improve upon the current open standards.
FINALLY someone who agrees with me about the needless additions to C++
Every time I go into a bookstore to read about C++ (every 4-6 months or so) I find out about more and more "features" that were added since I learned the language in 1995 or so. Stuff like 3 different versions of new and the namespaces.
IMO C++ has grown from being a useful extension of C to becoming a massive, horrible mess with too many features. Lots of people I know and work with talk about C++ in terms of being hard to learn and use well because it is extremely intricate. This is a good thing?
I'm disturbed by some of the more recent proposals for C++. Whitespace overloading?!? ho are we kidding?
I'm just glad that other people find solace from the insanity of C++ in Perl. Sometimes its refreshing to be able to choose your own way to do things, and to know that other people like you just want the damn program to work, with a minimum of futzing with things vaguely related to the problem you are solving (i.e., memory management ala C++ -- just how to exceptions and delete interact in a class hierarchy?) Who cares - every app I have written in the past 2 years has not needed to worry about these sorts of vaguely related things - why FORCE me to? Preaching the "paradogma" (great word Larry:) is just annoying.
There are certainly a number of cases when you NEED to care about those mundane, tedious details. Real-time programming and other systems level work are good examples.
I guess all I am saying is, thank you Larry, for freeing programmers like me from the tedium of malloc and free, sizeof and screwy arrays. You have added 20 years onto my lifespace, at least.
Could someone who knows more about accounting explain how a company that really lost millions of dollars can say they broke even, after adjusting the score to losing only $600,000? What do they adjust, why do they get to adjust, and when is that adjustment ever factored back in?
I'm really confused here and I haven't been able to find an good answer.
The linked article seems to indicate that NASA has another, identical MPL sitting there unused because they presume that the first one failed for mechanical reasons. However, if this is true, that the MPL landed safely, and we just can't communicate with it, then that means we just need to fix the comms gear and then we can send the other MPL out to do the first one's job.
Can anyone confirm whether there is another MPL craft, and if the finding that the first MPL landed OK would mean the mission could be tried again?
THe problem with WAP is the way it requires a compleetely new infrastructure to work with all the reworked protocols. Call them optimized for small devices, or attempts at locking consumers in. Either way, its a problem, and it is the reason why WAP is dead. Why should I bother learning WML and all the other Wireless technologies, when I can juse use a subset of HTML and clever design and achieve the same thing with AvantGo, or other similar Web-lite products?
Why doesn't someone start a sort of trust company for trademarks for OSS, so that a group can have the advantage of a group that can fight for the trademark's protection without having to waste time that could be better spent coding?
Pay this group a small fee, and they protect the trademark for you. Plus then they could package up the burned CDs needed to qualify as "use in commerce", and the developers wouldn't have to worry.
Is there a reason something like this hasn't been done yet, or a reason it can't be done now?
sftp is a problem because there are so few clients that support it. True, I could use it to send files between my servers, but for windows and mac it gets a little trickier. Can anyone recommend a good SFTP client for Mac/Win32?
That doesn't mean we should be tolerant. We, as a community, should demand source releases be timely. Waiting until code is in a "more stable state" could mean that we are waiting for weeks or months. That is unacceptable.
The fact is, id gave the community a gift in the form of the Quake source. Why should some members of that community be allowed to be selfish, and take it all for themselves? They shouldn't, and we shouldn't let them.
These days you can't afford to be loyal to the company, because when push comes to shove, they WON'T be loyal to you. Remember, the company's mission is to maximize profit. If your job comes in the way of that, they they must cut you. There is no loyalty from a nameless entity like a corporation.
If you stick around feeling the company will be loyal to you, you are SADLY mistaken.
Look out for your own interests, try to find your friends jobs at other places. If they are as talented as you say, they should have no trouble getting a better job in the tech market - companies are hungry for people.
In short, leave now, before you are forced to. If you are concerned about friends, send them to your recruiter buddies/monster.com/dice.com
This is nothing new with Sonys. They are notorious for being picky at playing CDRs. Car Audio enthusiasts have known this for years. You can either use higher quality media, or not buy a Sony.
Why are "office suites" the supposed be-all, end-all application that we all need to lead happy and productive lives? For many users, these office suites are among the most underused applications on their desktops. I imagine many Linux users like me would agree. So it's not hard to spend more time customizing your desktop than you do using an office suite, now is it?
Frankly, I'm just getting sick of hearing about how we need office suites to be able to keep our dicks up long enough to get a woman off. Please. WOrd processing and Spreadsheets just aren't that useful.
Can you download files from the PJB? I'd like to be able to store my MP3s on it but then copy them to and from my work computer. Having to download them from my slow cable modem web server is really a pain right now; being able to pull them off the PJB would be sooooo useful. Not to mention sticking a secret stash of pr0n on there as well;) So, can the PJB act as a USB hard drive file dump?
I run into these same problems all the time at work. When I talk about programming languages, or operating systems, or cars, or whatever, more often than not I am just interested in discussing the individual merits/drawbacks of that particular language/product. I am NOT implicitly comparing one thing to another. Unfortunately, that leads to a number of problems, since lots of people cannot comprehend anything but comparison. At work we are a big Perl shop, and we also use Java here and there. When I say something good about Java it's always met with "Well, I can do that in Perl too you know! Java isn't so fancy!" And so on.
Its very frustrating not to be able to carry on productive conversations with other people simply because they are set on making their language look good or your language look bad, simply for the personal gratification and the stability it brings. Tribalism is one unfortunate bug in humanity; it's too bad we can't exterminate it.
Sometimes it is really, really nice to be able to retreat into the confines of your cube and smash out some work. Having to live in the immediate presence of your coworkers may make you get a lot more done, but in my experience it has always made me much more edgy. Sometimes I need to just get away from the others and pound out the code. Having to endure other people's eyes on me all the time gets to me eventually.
Whether the independent researchers get any money is not the point. Rather, SDMI is ignoring the fact that four watermarking schemes have been broken, instead focusing on the results of the silly contest.
The fact that the researchers are being ignored, and SDMI is focusing on the hackers is telling; they know the researchers have done serious work that could compromise the system.
Exchange has the potential to introduce a number of new headaches into a system that works very well. Why change?
If they want to standardize on Outlook for the desktop, go ahead and do that. But that doesn't mean they need to get you to change your entire backend to run Exchange.
I remember reading somewhere, in one of the many "Kylix is coming!" articles, that CLX will include a new, sane db library.
That is about the only thing Delphi/C++Builder screwed up on. Hopefully Borland will come through on their promise and make the CLX db lib small, fast, and usable.
I was talking with my brother recently about the social problems something like that would cause.
It would be really cool, I agree, but how far is too far, in terms of realism?
Eventually, we will make something like that, which can interface directly with the human conciousness. What happens to love, and sadness, and depression, and death then?
If you can die because of things in the virtual world and how they affect your brain, should we allow that to happen? How can we deal with concepts like, falling in love with something in the virtual world, or being so tramuatized by a virtual event, that one can no longer function normally.
Slashdot Mirror
One red flag that went off immediately is the advocating of integrating code and data.
I dont understand the rationale behind integrating them - they are 2 very different things. Developers need to be able to change one without the other, hence the recent rise of the old MVC paradigm in the JSP world (mixing the Java code in the HTML page makes for a mess because designers have to work around it, and it gets hard for coders to manage.)
So why does Curl suddenly think it grand to re-mix all the code and data? Can anyone explain this to me?
Aside from this, I don't see any reason to code in Curl. There's lots of mindshare and knowledge out there in HTML + DOM + CSS + JavaScript. Sure, it can be a pain sometime, but there are a lot of people out there working to make it better. Why turn that distributed responsibility over to a company with a proprietary technology? I'd rather just improve upon the current open standards.
Note there are two uses:
But thats what Weak references are for:
http://search.cpan.org/search?dist=WeakRef
How can you say Napster notwithstanding?
Napster (and things like it - media sharing) ARE/b> the killer P2P apps. That part of your argument is complete crap.
FINALLY someone who agrees with me about the needless additions to C++
:) is just annoying.
Every time I go into a bookstore to read about C++ (every 4-6 months or so) I find out about more and more "features" that were added since I learned the language in 1995 or so. Stuff like 3 different versions of new and the namespaces.
IMO C++ has grown from being a useful extension of C to becoming a massive, horrible mess with too many features. Lots of people I know and work with talk about C++ in terms of being hard to learn and use well because it is extremely intricate. This is a good thing?
I'm disturbed by some of the more recent proposals for C++. Whitespace overloading?!? ho are we kidding?
I'm just glad that other people find solace from the insanity of C++ in Perl. Sometimes its refreshing to be able to choose your own way to do things, and to know that other people like you just want the damn program to work, with a minimum of futzing with things vaguely related to the problem you are solving (i.e., memory management ala C++ -- just how to exceptions and delete interact in a class hierarchy?) Who cares - every app I have written in the past 2 years has not needed to worry about these sorts of vaguely related things - why FORCE me to? Preaching the "paradogma" (great word Larry
There are certainly a number of cases when you NEED to care about those mundane, tedious details. Real-time programming and other systems level work are good examples.
I guess all I am saying is, thank you Larry, for freeing programmers like me from the tedium of malloc and free, sizeof and screwy arrays. You have added 20 years onto my lifespace, at least.
I understand that, I was more curious as to how they can really lose $24M, but somehow magically adjust that to $600K to get to the break even.
Someone mentioned depreciated elsewhere in the thread, but I don't see how that ties in.
Compare that figure to the $600,00 they adjusted their loss to in 2001, and that's what I don't understand.
Anyone have a good explanation, or can point me to a concise resource for these sorts of questions?
Could someone who knows more about accounting explain how a company that really lost millions of dollars can say they broke even, after adjusting the score to losing only $600,000? What do they adjust, why do they get to adjust, and when is that adjustment ever factored back in?
I'm really confused here and I haven't been able to find an good answer.
The linked article seems to indicate that NASA has another, identical MPL sitting there unused because they presume that the first one failed for mechanical reasons. However, if this is true, that the MPL landed safely, and we just can't communicate with it, then that means we just need to fix the comms gear and then we can send the other MPL out to do the first one's job.
Can anyone confirm whether there is another MPL craft, and if the finding that the first MPL landed OK would mean the mission could be tried again?
THe problem with WAP is the way it requires a compleetely new infrastructure to work with all the reworked protocols. Call them optimized for small devices, or attempts at locking consumers in. Either way, its a problem, and it is the reason why WAP is dead. Why should I bother learning WML and all the other Wireless technologies, when I can juse use a subset of HTML and clever design and achieve the same thing with AvantGo, or other similar Web-lite products?
Why doesn't someone start a sort of trust company for trademarks for OSS, so that a group can have the advantage of a group that can fight for the trademark's protection without having to waste time that could be better spent coding?
Pay this group a small fee, and they protect the trademark for you. Plus then they could package up the burned CDs needed to qualify as "use in commerce", and the developers wouldn't have to worry.
Is there a reason something like this hasn't been done yet, or a reason it can't be done now?
sftp is a problem because there are so few clients that support it. True, I could use it to send files between my servers, but for windows and mac it gets a little trickier. Can anyone recommend a good SFTP client for Mac/Win32?
Just like Star Trek made us doomed to hear "Resistance is futile" every time someone uses the word "resistance."
That doesn't mean we should be tolerant. We, as a community, should demand source releases be timely. Waiting until code is in a "more stable state" could mean that we are waiting for weeks or months. That is unacceptable. The fact is, id gave the community a gift in the form of the Quake source. Why should some members of that community be allowed to be selfish, and take it all for themselves? They shouldn't, and we shouldn't let them.
These days you can't afford to be loyal to the company, because when push comes to shove, they WON'T be loyal to you. Remember, the company's mission is to maximize profit. If your job comes in the way of that, they they must cut you. There is no loyalty from a nameless entity like a corporation.
If you stick around feeling the company will be loyal to you, you are SADLY mistaken.
Look out for your own interests, try to find your friends jobs at other places. If they are as talented as you say, they should have no trouble getting a better job in the tech market - companies are hungry for people.
In short, leave now, before you are forced to. If you are concerned about friends, send them to your recruiter buddies/monster.com/dice.com
This is nothing new with Sonys. They are notorious for being picky at playing CDRs. Car Audio enthusiasts have known this for years. You can either use higher quality media, or not buy a Sony.
Why are "office suites" the supposed be-all, end-all application that we all need to lead happy and productive lives? For many users, these office suites are among the most underused applications on their desktops. I imagine many Linux users like me would agree. So it's not hard to spend more time customizing your desktop than you do using an office suite, now is it?
Frankly, I'm just getting sick of hearing about how we need office suites to be able to keep our dicks up long enough to get a woman off. Please. WOrd processing and Spreadsheets just aren't that useful.
Gcc and emacs are.
Can you download files from the PJB? I'd like to be able to store my MP3s on it but then copy them to and from my work computer. Having to download them from my slow cable modem web server is really a pain right now; being able to pull them off the PJB would be sooooo useful. Not to mention sticking a secret stash of pr0n on there as well ;) So, can the PJB act as a USB hard drive file dump?
I run into these same problems all the time at work. When I talk about programming languages, or operating systems, or cars, or whatever, more often than not I am just interested in discussing the individual merits/drawbacks of that particular language/product. I am NOT implicitly comparing one thing to another. Unfortunately, that leads to a number of problems, since lots of people cannot comprehend anything but comparison. At work we are a big Perl shop, and we also use Java here and there. When I say something good about Java it's always met with "Well, I can do that in Perl too you know! Java isn't so fancy!" And so on.
Its very frustrating not to be able to carry on productive conversations with other people simply because they are set on making their language look good or your language look bad, simply for the personal gratification and the stability it brings. Tribalism is one unfortunate bug in humanity; it's too bad we can't exterminate it.
Sometimes it is really, really nice to be able to retreat into the confines of your cube and smash out some work. Having to live in the immediate presence of your coworkers may make you get a lot more done, but in my experience it has always made me much more edgy. Sometimes I need to just get away from the others and pound out the code. Having to endure other people's eyes on me all the time gets to me eventually.
do you have a link to the piece in Wired about the perl world?
Whether the independent researchers get any money is not the point. Rather, SDMI is ignoring the fact that four watermarking schemes have been broken, instead focusing on the results of the silly contest.
The fact that the researchers are being ignored, and SDMI is focusing on the hackers is telling; they know the researchers have done serious work that could compromise the system.
Why change something that works well?
Exchange has the potential to introduce a number of new headaches into a system that works very well. Why change?
If they want to standardize on Outlook for the desktop, go ahead and do that. But that doesn't mean they need to get you to change your entire backend to run Exchange.
The BDE is shit, even Borland recognizes that.
I remember reading somewhere, in one of the many "Kylix is coming!" articles, that CLX will include a new, sane db library.
That is about the only thing Delphi/C++Builder screwed up on. Hopefully Borland will come through on their promise and make the CLX db lib small, fast, and usable.
I was talking with my brother recently about the social problems something like that would cause.
It would be really cool, I agree, but how far is too far, in terms of realism?
Eventually, we will make something like that, which can interface directly with the human conciousness. What happens to love, and sadness, and depression, and death then?
If you can die because of things in the virtual world and how they affect your brain, should we allow that to happen? How can we deal with concepts like, falling in love with something in the virtual world, or being so tramuatized by a virtual event, that one can no longer function normally.
Fascinating stuff...