I never liked STL. It's extremely cryptic and not object-oriented, it's a kludge to work around limitations in the language, gaining efficiency at the cost of being confusing. Given my druthers, I'd rather use my own tools, but at least the MFC collection classes are easily understandable.
Believe me, I threw out some ideas that just got blank stare. Even the simple ideas rocked the boat. When questioned why I used Hungarian notation (a name that my supervisor thought was some kind of joke), no explanation I could give could convince her there was any value to it.
Don't worry, you won't see it. It was for the military. And I actually believe it will work in the end through brute force simply because they have something like 2 years scheduled to do it.
In that way, it was the antithesis of the way I'm used to working. In most of my jobs, the boss would say, I want this, this and this. I don't care how you do it as long as it works and it's not crap code (sometimes not even the latter), get back to me in two weeks. I'd go off and do my thing, solve the problem the best way I knew how, and things worked well. In this government contract work, I was told the support people were incompetent mouth-breathers, so we had to do everything in a real brain-dead brute-force way, otherwise no one would be able to make fixes. Of course, my suggestion of building solid tools that would make the application level changes and fixes easier fell on deaf ears. To them, everything needed to be brain-dead. I also proclaimed that with some well-thought-out code, the app could be changed from 4 coders to 1 or 1 and a half and about 3 people to sift through reams of government documentation (talk about low signal-to-noise ratio) to determine requirements, but no they'd rather have a 16-year programming veteran doing that, and filling in blanks in a hard-wired GUI app whose code would have looked archaic 10 years ago.
Is this the beginning of a trend where companies recognize that the quality offered by relocation to cheaper centers around the world doesn't result in customer appreciation and better quality?
No, because that would imply that a major American company is taking a diametric turn from the growing trend to consider employees as completely interchangeable commodities.
That happened to me in spades at my last job, from which I was unfortunately laid off recently (sad to lose the pay, not the job). I am a Windows developer with 16 years of professional programming experience and long history of developing superior code, but was directly told to write no code which could not be understood by an entry-level non-C++ programmer. This does _not_ mean to write good, clean, well-documented code. This literally means that I was not allowed to write anything more complex than brain-dead C code, even though this project was developed with Visual C++. For instance, all memory allocation was done in fixed-size arrays, meaning if you exceeded one of the many arbitrary limits, the program crashed and you had to hunt down and find the proper #define to increase to make the array big enough. Of course allocating 70-some thousand instance of some object that was used many 500 times was one of the lesser adverse side-effects of such nonsense.
The idea of using something so simple as a CArray was beyond these people's experience and they were afraid that in bringing too much of this thinking on board, they would find themselves at a point where they couldn't swap bodies and have a new person pick (who theoretically didn't have any C++ experience) could pick it up and run with it.
Encapsulating the hard parts to make the rest easier to use was not only met with resistance, but actively condemned. I was truly being treated as a body warming a seat rather than having my substantial skills and experience utilitized in a meaningful way.
Why, might you ask, did they hire me then? I don't know, and no one could answer that question. On the other hand the pay was decent and it gave me something to do (struggling to keep sane from boredom is a challenge). I fear for the project, however, since I was just about the only one asking the tough questions, while the party line was to blunder along blindly and fix problems only when they showed up.
Actually, that's disappointing to me, because having seen the first HP movie and some of the second, they came across to me as merely somewhat disconnected sequences of things that happen mainly to be a vehicle for cool special effects. I had assumed that the books, which I did intend to read some day, had lost a lot in the translation to cinema. The characters were extremely one-dimensional, many elements of the story seem to exist solely to show off neat ideas, rather than advance the plot, and a lot of elements seemed to be shamelessly lifted from other mythology, rather than worked into the story in an organic way (e.g., Cerberus vs, say, Tolkien's Elves).
I did read a few pages of the first Harry Potter and did find the writing style to be good, but based on the movie (if it is a true representation of the story), I'd rather stick to Terry Pratchett, or reread Tolkien for (n + 1)th time.
"Master/slave" is now verboten. (George Orwell was a prophet.)
How about "pimp/ho" or "Clinton/intern"?
Really, we have become a society so thin-skinned that people get bent all out of shape over completely meaningless things.
I hate to say it, but a lot of people need a taste of real adversity so they can get a sense of perspective. There's so much real bad stuff going on in the world, you don't need to pretend.
You have to wonder what a person who feels "offended" would do in a society where if you say the wrong thing you get your tongue cut out. You have to wonder when "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" became "entitlement, reparations and punative action against people who disagree with you"?
When did "Free Speech" become "Free Hearing of Only Things I Want to Hear"?
If I had a dollar for every time I am offended by immorality, hatred, or sheer stupidity, I'd treat everyone on/. to a free order from Thinkgeek, but I understand that's how the world works and I expect it. I don't whine.
What if you put your 50" plasma screen TV out in the yard? If people come and use it while you are away is it a crime? Probably, but you're an idiot if you don't think it's going to happen.
The real metaphor, however, is what if you put it in the street? That's analogous to having an unsecured wireless network accessible from outside your home or place of residence. Sure, you don't want people to steal from you, but it's hard to place blame when you are sitting on your front porch handing it out.
I have a hard time believe that by turning on your machine and using it, that you can be committing a crime, at least assuming you are not wardriving or looking for it on purpose. However, the person who used it from his office can hardly be held responsible. And if they tried, all he has to do is feign ignorance... who can prove that?
Agreed. What's the point of mentioning Dell's first computer. The article even admits no one's ever heard of it.
Bzzzzzt! Not influential, regardless of who made it.
I totally agree about the original Mac, as well as the TRS-80 and the Amiga.
Hell, even the Lisa could be a candidate. I have fond memories of the fact that you had to dismantle the thing to retrieve the floppy when it froze up.
The Feds, quite rightly, don't take kindly to anything even resembling a threat to the President of the U.S, given that there have been assassination attempts on every President in the last 150 years or so.... try it and see how far "But I didn't commit a crime!" gets you when you are dog-piled by a dozen really tough guys in suits and sunglasses that consider taking a bullet part of their job description.
No one mentioned England, that's just where Bush happens to be today.
OK, I forgot about Bluetooth. It's a Toshiba e335 and a Samsung N400. Does what I need, and is quite flexible. And I've got the software development kits for both.
It tries to be everything to everybody and does none of them well. Between my cellphone and my PDA (which together didn't cost as much as an N-Gage) I can do everything it does only better....and I don't have to take the batteries out to switch games.
I don't agree with your assesments of Time, et al, but I will agree with you on one thing. When I debate and intelligent and thoughtful person I find I tend to agree with them more than disagree regardless of their political persuation. Clearly there are issues on which I would differ with almost anyone, but for people who can get beyond the knee-jerking and the slogan-chanting, common ground is easy to find, and disagreements can be respectful and educational.
Unfortunately, thoughfulness and intelligence in debate are seldom found on TV, a little more on talk radio, but mostly in the printed word.
Maybe I'm biased but I don't find Fox as blatantly right-wing and Time Magazine, the Washington Post, CBS News or CNN are blatantly left-wing. The biggest thing I get tired of on Fox is the undue attention to pointless, non-newsworthy stuff like the Paris Hilton sex tape. I like O'Reilly even if he is a pompous ass, but I don't like Hannity. He's like the neighbors Scotty who barks all night at the trees. I disagree with Colmes 95% of the time but he's a much better debater. I also like MSNBC, particularly Chris Matthews.
In any event, it's impossible to be human and not have a bias, the best bet is to follow many sources, including news magazines (particularly in-depth ones like "The Economist") and even the Internet.
20th Century Fox is only one of the largest media conglomerates in the world. And ironically, the Fox TV network owes its very existence to "The Simpsons" which along with "Married, With Children" were about the only highly rated shows it had for the first 5 years.
Fox News has been around for several years and is now beating CNN's pants off. This might have something to do with CNN's complete lack of credibility in the last few years, but can also probably be attributed to Fox News politically right slant (at least in contrast to the other TV news outlets...)
Even my mother, who is one of the most computer illiterate people on the planet, was able to grasp the concept.
Yeah, but she's a computer-illerate Mom, which is about three steps on the evolutionary ladder above PHB's. _She_ will listen to reason and consider alternative ideas presented to her.
My wife isn't very computer literate either (though I have taught her enough so that she can start teaching herself, she completely set up and installed a laser printer without my help which impressed me), and she understands these issues very well. She even understands how I can use MS software for 20 years+ and yet hate them as much as I do. (The reason: I get paid well)
Nothing wrong with using an abacus... it was a joke because using an abacus doesn't require environmentally unfriendly things like metal or electricity.
Take a deep breath and relax.
Me? I just do it in my head, unless I have a machine nearby.
"Microsoft supplies no method of backing up and restoring fully operational copies of Windows 2000 and Windows XP. "
Not entirely true. I had an ex-Microsoftie show me how to do it with robocopy (from the Windows RK). I don't recall the specifics (sorry) and I think he might have had to play with some of the security settings on the file system first, but we used to maintain about 4 different Windows environments (NT, 2000, with AD, without, or something like that) that we could test with our software.
Just reboot to a second partition, issue a robocopy command, wait a couple minutes and reboot to the original partition.
It was fast and efficient and worked just fine. I just wish I knew how to do it now.
Weren't there something like 7 incompatible versions of the first service pack for Office 2000?
This is why I had to smirk cyncially when the talking heads talked about breaking up Microsoft as a possible punishment. You can't break up something that isn't unified in the first place. (Also you would just replace a monopoly with a duopoly or triopoly and acheive nothing but some inconsequential transparency in how the company works).
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, they did use enums.
I never liked STL. It's extremely cryptic and not object-oriented, it's a kludge to work around limitations in the language, gaining efficiency at the cost of being confusing. Given my druthers, I'd rather use my own tools, but at least the MFC collection classes are easily understandable.
Believe me, I threw out some ideas that just got blank stare. Even the simple ideas rocked the boat. When questioned why I used Hungarian notation (a name that my supervisor thought was some kind of joke), no explanation I could give could convince her there was any value to it.
Don't worry, you won't see it. It was for the military. And I actually believe it will work in the end through brute force simply because they have something like 2 years scheduled to do it.
In that way, it was the antithesis of the way I'm used to working. In most of my jobs, the boss would say, I want this, this and this. I don't care how you do it as long as it works and it's not crap code (sometimes not even the latter), get back to me in two weeks. I'd go off and do my thing, solve the problem the best way I knew how, and things worked well. In this government contract work, I was told the support people were incompetent mouth-breathers, so we had to do everything in a real brain-dead brute-force way, otherwise no one would be able to make fixes. Of course, my suggestion of building solid tools that would make the application level changes and fixes easier fell on deaf ears. To them, everything needed to be brain-dead. I also proclaimed that with some well-thought-out code, the app could be changed from 4 coders to 1 or 1 and a half and about 3 people to sift through reams of government documentation (talk about low signal-to-noise ratio) to determine requirements, but no they'd rather have a 16-year programming veteran doing that, and filling in blanks in a hard-wired GUI app whose code would have looked archaic 10 years ago.
Is this the beginning of a trend where companies recognize that the quality offered by relocation to cheaper centers around the world doesn't result in customer appreciation and better quality?
No, because that would imply that a major American company is taking a diametric turn from the growing trend to consider employees as completely interchangeable commodities.
That happened to me in spades at my last job, from which I was unfortunately laid off recently (sad to lose the pay, not the job). I am a Windows developer with 16 years of professional programming experience and long history of developing superior code, but was directly told to write no code which could not be understood by an entry-level non-C++ programmer. This does _not_ mean to write good, clean, well-documented code. This literally means that I was not allowed to write anything more complex than brain-dead C code, even though this project was developed with Visual C++. For instance, all memory allocation was done in fixed-size arrays, meaning if you exceeded one of the many arbitrary limits, the program crashed and you had to hunt down and find the proper #define to increase to make the array big enough. Of course allocating 70-some thousand instance of some object that was used many 500 times was one of the lesser adverse side-effects of such nonsense.
The idea of using something so simple as a CArray was beyond these people's experience and they were afraid that in bringing too much of this thinking on board, they would find themselves at a point where they couldn't swap bodies and have a new person pick (who theoretically didn't have any C++ experience) could pick it up and run with it.
Encapsulating the hard parts to make the rest easier to use was not only met with resistance, but actively condemned. I was truly being treated as a body warming a seat rather than having my substantial skills and experience utilitized in a meaningful way.
Why, might you ask, did they hire me then? I don't know, and no one could answer that question. On the other hand the pay was decent and it gave me something to do (struggling to keep sane from boredom is a challenge). I fear for the project, however, since I was just about the only one asking the tough questions, while the party line was to blunder along blindly and fix problems only when they showed up.
Actually, that's disappointing to me, because having seen the first HP movie and some of the second, they came across to me as merely somewhat disconnected sequences of things that happen mainly to be a vehicle for cool special effects. I had assumed that the books, which I did intend to read some day, had lost a lot in the translation to cinema. The characters were extremely one-dimensional, many elements of the story seem to exist solely to show off neat ideas, rather than advance the plot, and a lot of elements seemed to be shamelessly lifted from other mythology, rather than worked into the story in an organic way (e.g., Cerberus vs, say, Tolkien's Elves).
I did read a few pages of the first Harry Potter and did find the writing style to be good, but based on the movie (if it is a true representation of the story), I'd rather stick to Terry Pratchett, or reread Tolkien for (n + 1)th time.
"Master/slave" is now verboten. (George Orwell was a prophet.)
/. to a free order from Thinkgeek, but I understand that's how the world works and I expect it. I don't whine.
How about "pimp/ho" or "Clinton/intern"?
Really, we have become a society so thin-skinned that people get bent all out of shape over completely meaningless things.
I hate to say it, but a lot of people need a taste of real adversity so they can get a sense of perspective. There's so much real bad stuff going on in the world, you don't need to pretend.
You have to wonder what a person who feels "offended" would do in a society where if you say the wrong thing you get your tongue cut out. You have to wonder when "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" became "entitlement, reparations and punative action against people who disagree with you"?
When did "Free Speech" become "Free Hearing of Only Things I Want to Hear"?
If I had a dollar for every time I am offended by immorality, hatred, or sheer stupidity, I'd treat everyone on
What this country needs is a few more adults.
Did you even read my post?
I think a better metaphor is:
What if you put your 50" plasma screen TV out in the yard? If people come and use it while you are away is it a crime? Probably, but you're an idiot if you don't think it's going to happen.
The real metaphor, however, is what if you put it in the street? That's analogous to having an unsecured wireless network accessible from outside your home or place of residence. Sure, you don't want people to steal from you, but it's hard to place blame when you are sitting on your front porch handing it out.
I have a hard time believe that by turning on your machine and using it, that you can be committing a crime, at least assuming you are not wardriving or looking for it on purpose. However, the person who used it from his office can hardly be held responsible. And if they tried, all he has to do is feign ignorance... who can prove that?
Agreed. What's the point of mentioning Dell's first computer. The article even admits no one's ever heard of it.
Bzzzzzt! Not influential, regardless of who made it.
I totally agree about the original Mac, as well as the TRS-80 and the Amiga.
Hell, even the Lisa could be a candidate. I have fond memories of the fact that you had to dismantle the thing to retrieve the floppy when it froze up.
To me, that very fact prevents it from being a good design in the first place.
I agree... but one thing confuses me.
Why would it take a 1000-page book to understand Compact Flash?
No one mentioned England, that's just where Bush happens to be today.
and finally,
It's a joke, laugh.
No, that was my first thought too. But Jackson was never a "rockstar" in my opinion, Eddie Van Halen notwithstanding.
And I'm amused how he's still referred to as the "King of Pop" although that title hasn't fit him for at least 15 years or so.
Of course, since I stick to the likes of the Flower Kings, Spock's Beard, and Glass Hammer, I find popular music to be almost completely irrelevant.
Then imagine the fun of a whole bunch of pranksters doing 20 to life at Ft. Leavenworth.
No Zorkmids?!
OK, I forgot about Bluetooth. It's a Toshiba e335 and a Samsung N400. Does what I need, and is quite flexible. And I've got the software development kits for both.
Don't you pay a subscription for the N-Gage?
N-Gage fails because it sucks.
...and I don't have to take the batteries out to switch games.
It tries to be everything to everybody and does none of them well. Between my cellphone and my PDA (which together didn't cost as much as an N-Gage) I can do everything it does only better.
I don't agree with your assesments of Time, et al, but I will agree with you on one thing. When I debate and intelligent and thoughtful person I find I tend to agree with them more than disagree regardless of their political persuation. Clearly there are issues on which I would differ with almost anyone, but for people who can get beyond the knee-jerking and the slogan-chanting, common ground is easy to find, and disagreements can be respectful and educational.
Unfortunately, thoughfulness and intelligence in debate are seldom found on TV, a little more on talk radio, but mostly in the printed word.
Maybe I'm biased but I don't find Fox as blatantly right-wing and Time Magazine, the Washington Post, CBS News or CNN are blatantly left-wing. The biggest thing I get tired of on Fox is the undue attention to pointless, non-newsworthy stuff like the Paris Hilton sex tape. I like O'Reilly even if he is a pompous ass, but I don't like Hannity. He's like the neighbors Scotty who barks all night at the trees. I disagree with Colmes 95% of the time but he's a much better debater. I also like MSNBC, particularly Chris Matthews.
In any event, it's impossible to be human and not have a bias, the best bet is to follow many sources, including news magazines (particularly in-depth ones like "The Economist") and even the Internet.
20th Century Fox is only one of the largest media conglomerates in the world. And ironically, the Fox TV network owes its very existence to "The Simpsons" which along with "Married, With Children" were about the only highly rated shows it had for the first 5 years.
Fox News has been around for several years and is now beating CNN's pants off. This might have something to do with CNN's complete lack of credibility in the last few years, but can also probably be attributed to Fox News politically right slant (at least in contrast to the other TV news outlets...)
Even my mother, who is one of the most computer illiterate people on the planet, was able to grasp the concept.
Yeah, but she's a computer-illerate Mom, which is about three steps on the evolutionary ladder above PHB's. _She_ will listen to reason and consider alternative ideas presented to her.
My wife isn't very computer literate either (though I have taught her enough so that she can start teaching herself, she completely set up and installed a laser printer without my help which impressed me), and she understands these issues very well. She even understands how I can use MS software for 20 years+ and yet hate them as much as I do.
(The reason: I get paid well)
Nothing wrong with using an abacus... it was a joke because using an abacus doesn't require environmentally unfriendly things like metal or electricity.
Take a deep breath and relax.
Me? I just do it in my head, unless I have a machine nearby.
"Microsoft supplies no method of backing up and restoring fully operational copies of Windows 2000 and Windows XP. "
Not entirely true. I had an ex-Microsoftie show me how to do it with robocopy (from the Windows RK). I don't recall the specifics (sorry) and I think he might have had to play with some of the security settings on the file system first, but we used to maintain about 4 different Windows environments (NT, 2000, with AD, without, or something like that) that we could test with our software.
Just reboot to a second partition, issue a robocopy command, wait a couple minutes and reboot to the original partition.
It was fast and efficient and worked just fine. I just wish I knew how to do it now.
Yeah, I know exactly what you mean. My previous sig generated a lot of comments. It went like this:
So, if the plural of "virus" is "virii", then I guess the plural of "radius" is "radiii".
I got several comments correcting my pluralization of "radius", which means they obviously missed my point.
I love the quote you gave... I'm going to add it to my quotes file. Thanks!
Weren't there something like 7 incompatible versions of the first service pack for Office 2000?
This is why I had to smirk cyncially when the talking heads talked about breaking up Microsoft as a possible punishment. You can't break up something that isn't unified in the first place. (Also you would just replace a monopoly with a duopoly or triopoly and acheive nothing but some inconsequential transparency in how the company works).
You can start with the Blue Screen of Death and acheive any functionality.