back in 2013 and was able to see this from the inside. Everyone would spend most of their time playing Diplomacy and just like the board game, it was impossible to win without stabbing someone in the back. Even if you survive one round, to survive the next you'd need to betray someone new. I have no idea why anyone would think "Survivor" would be a good work atmosphere -- but that's probably why I don't have a multi-million dollar salary.
I was happy being a contractor because (a) free food was good (b) I had no job security -- but neither did they and (c) pleasing my manager by doing good work was easy enough.
The other problem, was of course, most of their products are completely worthless. As one investor put it, Y! has three businesses worth keeping: mail (most popular provider in the world), Finance (most popular free stocks site), and Sports (again, most popular free site -- more users than ESPN). All three teams could easily fit inside a single building with some room to spare for day-to-day operational stuff (server maintenance and the like).
So cutting divisions like Games (bingo...seriously?) totally makes sense.
Modern socialism relies on capitalism -- and always has. "Communism" is socialism without capitalism.
In the US, we already have a socialist system -- largely state controlled -- where individuals get free food, housing, and healthcare, but will have a hard time finding a job if they do -- for a cool $30K a year. Emergency room is provided for free, but is much more expensive than traditional care. The words "social justice" are used here to mean that if Johnny smokes pot, he receives a prison term (despite having marginally harmed society) compared to white-collar crime which is almost never punished.
I am not sure how education for all -- we already do, Bernie merely wants to expand this to include college -- somehow invalidates the idea of the self-reliance any more than teaching someone to fish somehow makes them more reliant on you for fish. There's a different between a police state and a socialist state -- it's the reason you don't have to take off your shoes to get on an airplane in Sweden.
Really? so they have 3d printed plastic bullets as well? you do know that bullets are metal casings with metal projectiles that easily are detected with current metal detectors.
My pants buttons have about as much metal as a bullet has in them and pass metal detectors just fine. Given that most of these plastic guns can only fire a few shots reliably (before becoming structurally compromised), I'm skeptical of why anyone would take any more bullets than that.
The conventional defense against bringing firearms into crowded places (like sports stadiums, political speeches (when four of your presidents get shot (McKinley, Lincoln, TDR, Kennedy) it's kinda an issue), airports) has been metal detectors. If you start making guns that can bypass metal detectors, you open up a new vector of attack in said crowded places.
Given that using firearms in a crowded place to defend people is a Bad Idea (TM) because of collatoral damage, how do you propose we protect people? Americans, after all, have a long history of disarming people in crowded places that goes back to the Old West and further.
Sanders opposes and has opposed Citzens United, Corporate Financing of Election, the TPP, and the Iraq war since the beginning. He has never accepted corporate money in his entire career and isn't now that he's running for president.
AFAIK he is the only candidate with a long political record who's speeches are in line with his actions. You could vote for him or, you know, talk about the cynacism of the two party system and how political change is impossible.
I do know one thing. Cynacism is obedience to the plutocracy. Sure, it talks differently, but it functions exactly the same way.
According to a 2011 BBC documentary, the attacks resulted in the deaths of an estimated 9,000 civilians and military personnel, while 12,000 forced laborers and concentration camp prisoners were killed producing the weapons. ~Wikipedia
Seems like a basic tenet of a "good weapon" is killing more people than are killed building it.
Uh, the debt is just a number. If the debt goes too high, the dollar drops relative to other currencies, making US goods cheaper abroad. If debt is too low, the dollar strengthens our currency relative to other currencies (based on their debt:GDP ratios). However, we haven't seen a weakening of the dollar nor the incoming inflation apocalypse predicted by debt worry fetishists fear.
The newer housing market seems to be fine as increased regulatory scrutiny have caused most banks (the ones I've talked to anyway) require quite a bit more principle on down payment as well as more thorough proof of income. This seems like a valid business model to me.
So you're an investor, and are trying to make money. We were in love with Ali Baba, but it tanked along with the Chinese economy -- too risky. How about Europe? Well, most of that's tied into the EU with an ever-increasing risk of a Greek Euro exit and disastrous austerity policies, that's probably a good place to stay out of too.
A worker works for who pays them. Hillary's current gig is financed by Goldman, Citigroup, and Chase. She'll say whatever she likes to get elected, and serve the people she works for. Biting the hand that feeds you is bad for business.
why not write that in C/C++ and the rest in something easier?
I guess that's my point -- it's not easier anymore.
Python comes with its own problems; it's hard to write object oriented code in a weakly typed language because (1) changing object interfaces means your code appears to work until it suddenly fails during execution (typed languages check at compile time) (2) no IDE can autocomplete methods on an object (because it's impossible to infer the type and thus the impossible to infer the methods able to be called on an object) (3) writing "glue code" is not a 0 effort proposition (not writing any is;)) and the code itself can contain errors.
With Qt/C++11 it's entirely possbile to write code that is both performant AND readable with less effort than an interpreted language (even one I've been using for over a decade -- yes I'm Perl guy). YMMV.
Real money does not come into being by magic, it is not printed into existence, it is not magically created on a computer. Real money is the result of productive activity
So basing your economy on shiny rocks? The Lakota Sioux thought the stuff was generally worthless and called it "the yellow metal that makes white people crazy" (no tribe in the Americas ever had a gold based currency). Good to see there's still some insanity left.
I don't have a direct comparison with my current project, but having worked on other projects in the HPC, it's not 2x. It's more like (O)n vs (O) n log n -- or worse. There was a project I worked on with did feature tracking and at one point, I was asked to save the data for a small project to a DB so another product within our company (team of around 20 on each project) who was working on equivalent functionality in Java. I lazily saved the whole thing for each change which took under a second, but it took 20 seconds to load the same data in Java-land. No matter what feature you tried, it was always dog-slow. Think of it this way. You've got a triple nested for loops going over a 3D array of data (very common in vision, etc). So the C/C++ programmer goes in and you can optimize the innermost loop with extreme efficiency -- maybe even to the register level -- but it's rarely needed. Much more common is to simply try and reduce your new/frees to take outside of the loop and if it's really a bear, calling something like CUDA can increase performance dramatically (I've seen over 100x) as there's direct hooks from C++. But in Java/Scala/interpreted language land, you just optimize to the same level. 90% of your time is usually spent in 5% of your code, so it's really the ability to optimize easily when you need to without resorting to convoluted tricks and hooks into other languages.
Not just a GUI toolkit
on
Qt 5.5 Released
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Qt is not just a GUI toolkit. Doxygen has been using it for years. I do high performance computing and copy-on-write data structures (as Scott Myer suggest a decade ago in "More Effective C++") means I don't have to worry about functions returning references to a std::vector because QVector's copy constructor is O(1) as Scott Myers recommended a decade ago. I have a sane cross-platform cross-DB SQL interface. My strings are Unicode (and copy-on-write). Qt allows you to write high performance code but in a style closer to Perl (especially with 11. "Auto" is "my") while enabling a coder to use high performance C code without needing to write fancy interfaces and compile schemes Everything from threading (QtConcurrent is great!) to file access to JSON to regex to is well-documented and the compile errors are sane (see: boost) and the code is terse (also: boost). If you're doing serious C++ development with a small team, Qt is the best way to get things done in my experience...and it's also trivial to make a GUI to represent a SQL query.
While I have never work in C# myself, the ability stop code in a debugger, write some code, and then continue executing (compiling your code in real-time) seemed like a really awesome feature (as a C++ guy, we don't get to do this).
The Unity engine is also quite popular and an increasingly popular choice is C# for use with it.
Maybe Microsoft can make one useful invention every decade?;)
So about a year or so ago when I was working for a company that doesn't comment on requests, I had the process explained to me.
Essentially, it's illegal to say that you have received a request -- which is something you learn when you get a request. If you haven't had a request however, there is nothing illegal about saying it hasn't happened to you. He'd suggested saying something like "We haven't received any requests this month" to alert people.
After all the BS is said and done, there's a very high likelihood they have received a request based on inability to confirm or deny. And once you get one, there's always more where that came from.
Windows is something no car should have. What happens if there's a critical system update while you're driving or else a blue screen of death? And do I need 3 more tires to upgrade between versions?...but I'm not sure everyone will understand. Is there a good car analogy?
While everywhere I've worked has code reviews, there's no "retroactive reviews" for code written in the 90's which is truly horrid and fragile. I think we're also both lucky to have someone on our teams who is a language expert at C++ rather than a Java guy who dabbles -- but I've seen shitty code get into a workplace that way too.
Though the most depressing thing for me is doing a blame on good and bad code to find the author of the well-written code left the company and the terrible coder is in management.
C++ was the first popular fast OO language. As such, there's a lot of confusing cruft left behind. Consider overloading the && operator or || operators. You should never do this*. But someone will come along and do it anyway. You can't get rid of the feature because of backwards compatibility and yet it's miserable. We can go down the list from polymorphic arrays to calling virtual functions during constructors. All things one should never do, but the language keeps them there for the sake of backwards compatibility.
Languages like Java fix some of these problems by explicitly not allowing operator overloading (which is heavy-handed) but enforces some readability.
As others have said, using good 3rd party libraries like Qt makes the language tolerable, but in the legacy applications I've supported, there's no shortage of programming faux pas made possible by the language (like assumptions about the order of static variable destructors -- which is compiler dependent). As a programmer, it can be fun and productive since simply using the better parts of the language can make programs easy to write and read. As a maintainer, it's a smorgasbord of bad programming practices which the language makes no attempt to prevent.
In 2012, the first congressional election after the last round of gerrymandering, Democratic House candidates won 50.59 percent of the vote — or 1.37 million more votes than Republican candidates — yet secured only 201 seats in Congress, compared to 234 seats for Republicans. The House of Representatives, the “people’s house,” no longer requires the most votes for power. source
So blaming "democracy" seems a little odd -- especially since we're a Republic.
Just once I'd like to see a discussion on/. where women's experiences aren't discounted.
Maybe women have experiences men don't have and that we can't understand? Maybe us men shouldn't poo poo statistics just because they haven't "seen" discriminatory actions in the same way I shouldn't don't say there's no "racial bias" in policing just because I haven't experienced it personally (and probably won't).
But maybe I'm hoping for too much. Has/. even had a female on staff ever?
Crackers are white people who brag. As William Shakespeare wrote: "What cracker is this same that deafs our ears with this abundance of superfluous breath?" [from King John]
In that sense, I suppose, given the demographics of the hacker community and its outsize ego, maybe "cracker" is appropriate?
Slashdot Mirror
back in 2013 and was able to see this from the inside. Everyone would spend most of their time playing Diplomacy and just like the board game, it was impossible to win without stabbing someone in the back. Even if you survive one round, to survive the next you'd need to betray someone new. I have no idea why anyone would think "Survivor" would be a good work atmosphere -- but that's probably why I don't have a multi-million dollar salary.
I was happy being a contractor because (a) free food was good (b) I had no job security -- but neither did they and (c) pleasing my manager by doing good work was easy enough.
The other problem, was of course, most of their products are completely worthless. As one investor put it, Y! has three businesses worth keeping: mail (most popular provider in the world), Finance (most popular free stocks site), and Sports (again, most popular free site -- more users than ESPN). All three teams could easily fit inside a single building with some room to spare for day-to-day operational stuff (server maintenance and the like).
So cutting divisions like Games (bingo...seriously?) totally makes sense.
Modern socialism relies on capitalism -- and always has. "Communism" is socialism without capitalism.
In the US, we already have a socialist system -- largely state controlled -- where individuals get free food, housing, and healthcare, but will have a hard time finding a job if they do -- for a cool $30K a year. Emergency room is provided for free, but is much more expensive than traditional care. The words "social justice" are used here to mean that if Johnny smokes pot, he receives a prison term (despite having marginally harmed society) compared to white-collar crime which is almost never punished.
I am not sure how education for all -- we already do, Bernie merely wants to expand this to include college -- somehow invalidates the idea of the self-reliance any more than teaching someone to fish somehow makes them more reliant on you for fish. There's a different between a police state and a socialist state -- it's the reason you don't have to take off your shoes to get on an airplane in Sweden.
Canonical reacted to user feedback? That must be a first.
*Checks Gnome 3*
Nope, hell hasn't frozen over. Still not listening.
Really? so they have 3d printed plastic bullets as well? you do know that bullets are metal casings with metal projectiles that easily are detected with current metal detectors.
My pants buttons have about as much metal as a bullet has in them and pass metal detectors just fine. Given that most of these plastic guns can only fire a few shots reliably (before becoming structurally compromised), I'm skeptical of why anyone would take any more bullets than that.
The conventional defense against bringing firearms into crowded places (like sports stadiums, political speeches (when four of your presidents get shot (McKinley, Lincoln, TDR, Kennedy) it's kinda an issue), airports) has been metal detectors. If you start making guns that can bypass metal detectors, you open up a new vector of attack in said crowded places.
Given that using firearms in a crowded place to defend people is a Bad Idea (TM) because of collatoral damage, how do you propose we protect people? Americans, after all, have a long history of disarming people in crowded places that goes back to the Old West and further.
Sanders opposes and has opposed Citzens United, Corporate Financing of Election, the TPP, and the Iraq war since the beginning. He has never accepted corporate money in his entire career and isn't now that he's running for president.
AFAIK he is the only candidate with a long political record who's speeches are in line with his actions. You could vote for him or, you know, talk about the cynacism of the two party system and how political change is impossible.
I do know one thing. Cynacism is obedience to the plutocracy. Sure, it talks differently, but it functions exactly the same way.
According to a 2011 BBC documentary, the attacks resulted in the deaths of an estimated 9,000 civilians and military personnel, while 12,000 forced laborers and concentration camp prisoners were killed producing the weapons.
~Wikipedia
Seems like a basic tenet of a "good weapon" is killing more people than are killed building it.
Uh, the debt is just a number. If the debt goes too high, the dollar drops relative to other currencies, making US goods cheaper abroad. If debt is too low, the dollar strengthens our currency relative to other currencies (based on their debt:GDP ratios). However, we haven't seen a weakening of the dollar nor the incoming inflation apocalypse predicted by debt worry fetishists fear.
The newer housing market seems to be fine as increased regulatory scrutiny have caused most banks (the ones I've talked to anyway) require quite a bit more principle on down payment as well as more thorough proof of income. This seems like a valid business model to me.
Is FreeIPA "free" as in beer? Because I really like IPAs.
So you're an investor, and are trying to make money. We were in love with Ali Baba, but it tanked along with the Chinese economy -- too risky. How about Europe? Well, most of that's tied into the EU with an ever-increasing risk of a Greek Euro exit and disastrous austerity policies, that's probably a good place to stay out of too.
The fundamentals of the US economy are looking great in comparison. Housing prices are starting to come back, unemployment is down, and a deficit to GDP ratio that looks to be under control.
The Dow was up 4% in trading today along with the Nasdaq as investors look for a safer but still profitable place to put their money.
A worker works for who pays them. Hillary's current gig is financed by Goldman, Citigroup, and Chase. She'll say whatever she likes to get elected, and serve the people she works for. Biting the hand that feeds you is bad for business.
You could always vote for someone who takes money almost exclusively from unions and individuals and talked about corporate greed and struggling workers before it was "cool", but hey, how can you get elected without at least 3 major banks funding you?
why not write that in C/C++ and the rest in something easier?
I guess that's my point -- it's not easier anymore.
Python comes with its own problems; it's hard to write object oriented code in a weakly typed language because (1) changing object interfaces means your code appears to work until it suddenly fails during execution (typed languages check at compile time) (2) no IDE can autocomplete methods on an object (because it's impossible to infer the type and thus the impossible to infer the methods able to be called on an object) (3) writing "glue code" is not a 0 effort proposition (not writing any is;)) and the code itself can contain errors.
With Qt/C++11 it's entirely possbile to write code that is both performant AND readable with less effort than an interpreted language (even one I've been using for over a decade -- yes I'm Perl guy). YMMV.
Real money does not come into being by magic, it is not printed into existence, it is not magically created on a computer. Real money is the result of productive activity
So basing your economy on shiny rocks? The Lakota Sioux thought the stuff was generally worthless and called it "the yellow metal that makes white people crazy" (no tribe in the Americas ever had a gold based currency). Good to see there's still some insanity left.
I don't have a direct comparison with my current project, but having worked on other projects in the HPC, it's not 2x. It's more like (O)n vs (O) n log n -- or worse. There was a project I worked on with did feature tracking and at one point, I was asked to save the data for a small project to a DB so another product within our company (team of around 20 on each project) who was working on equivalent functionality in Java. I lazily saved the whole thing for each change which took under a second, but it took 20 seconds to load the same data in Java-land. No matter what feature you tried, it was always dog-slow.
Think of it this way. You've got a triple nested for loops going over a 3D array of data (very common in vision, etc). So the C/C++ programmer goes in and you can optimize the innermost loop with extreme efficiency -- maybe even to the register level -- but it's rarely needed. Much more common is to simply try and reduce your new/frees to take outside of the loop and if it's really a bear, calling something like CUDA can increase performance dramatically (I've seen over 100x) as there's direct hooks from C++. But in Java/Scala/interpreted language land, you just optimize to the same level.
90% of your time is usually spent in 5% of your code, so it's really the ability to optimize easily when you need to without resorting to convoluted tricks and hooks into other languages.
Qt is not just a GUI toolkit. Doxygen has been using it for years. I do high performance computing and copy-on-write data structures (as Scott Myer suggest a decade ago in "More Effective C++") means I don't have to worry about functions returning references to a std::vector because QVector's copy constructor is O(1) as Scott Myers recommended a decade ago. I have a sane cross-platform cross-DB SQL interface. My strings are Unicode (and copy-on-write).
Qt allows you to write high performance code but in a style closer to Perl (especially with 11. "Auto" is "my") while enabling a coder to use high performance C code without needing to write fancy interfaces and compile schemes Everything from threading (QtConcurrent is great!) to file access to JSON to regex to is well-documented and the compile errors are sane (see: boost) and the code is terse (also: boost).
If you're doing serious C++ development with a small team, Qt is the best way to get things done in my experience...and it's also trivial to make a GUI to represent a SQL query.
While I have never work in C# myself, the ability stop code in a debugger, write some code, and then continue executing (compiling your code in real-time) seemed like a really awesome feature (as a C++ guy, we don't get to do this).
The Unity engine is also quite popular and an increasingly popular choice is C# for use with it.
Maybe Microsoft can make one useful invention every decade?;)
So about a year or so ago when I was working for a company that doesn't comment on requests, I had the process explained to me.
Essentially, it's illegal to say that you have received a request -- which is something you learn when you get a request. If you haven't had a request however, there is nothing illegal about saying it hasn't happened to you. He'd suggested saying something like "We haven't received any requests this month" to alert people.
After all the BS is said and done, there's a very high likelihood they have received a request based on inability to confirm or deny. And once you get one, there's always more where that came from.
Yeah, Disney is making money hand-over-fist and it's all going to lazy people who don't work there (also known as "shareholders").
I sometimes imagine what would happen if there were a union big enough to call a national strike for all server-farms.
Windows is something no car should have. What happens if there's a critical system update while you're driving or else a blue screen of death? And do I need 3 more tires to upgrade between versions? ...but I'm not sure everyone will understand. Is there a good car analogy?
You could of course a popular SDK that works on desktops as well. But who would do that?
You're a lucky person.
While everywhere I've worked has code reviews, there's no "retroactive reviews" for code written in the 90's which is truly horrid and fragile. I think we're also both lucky to have someone on our teams who is a language expert at C++ rather than a Java guy who dabbles -- but I've seen shitty code get into a workplace that way too.
Though the most depressing thing for me is doing a blame on good and bad code to find the author of the well-written code left the company and the terrible coder is in management.
C++ was the first popular fast OO language. As such, there's a lot of confusing cruft left behind. Consider overloading the && operator or || operators. You should never do this*. But someone will come along and do it anyway. You can't get rid of the feature because of backwards compatibility and yet it's miserable. We can go down the list from polymorphic arrays to calling virtual functions during constructors. All things one should never do, but the language keeps them there for the sake of backwards compatibility.
Languages like Java fix some of these problems by explicitly not allowing operator overloading (which is heavy-handed) but enforces some readability.
As others have said, using good 3rd party libraries like Qt makes the language tolerable, but in the legacy applications I've supported, there's no shortage of programming faux pas made possible by the language (like assumptions about the order of static variable destructors -- which is compiler dependent). As a programmer, it can be fun and productive since simply using the better parts of the language can make programs easy to write and read. As a maintainer, it's a smorgasbord of bad programming practices which the language makes no attempt to prevent.
That said, Linus really likes the new version of Subsurface based on Qt. So there;)
* Scott Meyers More Effective C++ p.35
It may seem odd, but most people in last election voted for Democrats, who have climate change as part of their platform.
In 2012, the first congressional election after the last round of gerrymandering, Democratic House candidates won 50.59 percent of the vote — or 1.37 million more votes than Republican candidates — yet secured only 201 seats in Congress, compared to 234 seats for Republicans. The House of Representatives, the “people’s house,” no longer requires the most votes for power. source
So blaming "democracy" seems a little odd -- especially since we're a Republic.
Just once I'd like to see a discussion on /. where women's experiences aren't discounted.
Maybe women have experiences men don't have and that we can't understand? Maybe us men shouldn't poo poo statistics just because they haven't "seen" discriminatory actions in the same way I shouldn't don't say there's no "racial bias" in policing just because I haven't experienced it personally (and probably won't).
But maybe I'm hoping for too much. Has /. even had a female on staff ever?
Crackers are white people who brag. As William Shakespeare wrote:
"What cracker is this same that deafs our ears with this abundance of superfluous breath?" [from King John]
In that sense, I suppose, given the demographics of the hacker community and its outsize ego, maybe "cracker" is appropriate?