Why not lead by example then? Have you sponsored a Summer of Code? How about releasing even some source code to everyone so they can learn about your software, make improvements and become an integral part of the process?
Only kids who want to be there (or parents who want their kids to be there) are allowed[1].
Everyone else -- go find a vocation and learn to live modestly since you don't give a damn about yourself anyway.[2]
[1] This means even learning disabilities are allowed as long as the child or their parent wants them the receive an education. As long as one or both of them care, then the system should bend over backwards to help them.
[2] Parents cannot FORCE their kids out of school either. If the kid wants to be there, again, bend over backwards to help them stay there even if it means separating them from some selfish parents who want their kids to go work in a factory instead.
He thinks Christians and Jews are abominations and must be exterminated. He hates the West, all of it, regardless of whether or not a given subsection of it is involved in Iraq or not. America is the "Big Satan" and Israel is the "Little Satan" and anybody who isn't actively trying to destroy both nations is the enemy of Islam.
He doesn't think of Christians and Jews as abominations. He just considers us unbelievers who must be kept out of Arab affairs and especially out of Islamic holy sites. E.g., the American forces stationed near Mecca. He and his followers are sick of having their plans for an ideal, "just" Islamic society being thwarted by American funded & trained tyrants. Like the Saudi royal family. It's that simple. He's quite OK with letting us live our corrupt, infedlic lives; he just wants us to do it over here, not there.
Now his vision of an ideal, "just" Islamic society is abhorrent to most everyday Arabs, and that's where his campaign of terror comes in. Essentially, he provokes the West to occupy and brutalise an Arab country. Al Queda shows it is "fighting the infdels over there to prevent them from coming over here". They become popular. They can take control. Nightmare for everyone who lives under a pure Islamist state.
No. Bullshit. They tried to knock over the World Trade Center in 1993 when Bill Clinton was president. Why? They bombed the USS Cole during Clinton's term. Why? They slaughtered hundreds at our embassies in Africa. Why? President Clinton mostly ignored them, why did they still want to get us? All because of Gulf 1? If there's no connection between al Qaeda and Iraq, why in the world would these terrorists be so upset about Iraq?
Your life would be easier if you stopped watching Fox news. Al Queda's stated aims have always been "the expulsion of American Armed forces from the sacred sites of Islam [Saudi Arabia]". That's why OBL got followers. That's why they came after the U.S. It's a stupid, irrational reason, but that's religion for you.
And, I ask you, why has there not been a single American civilian death on our own soil since 9/11?
Because Al Queda likes to think big. Simple suicide bombings in a food court are too small potatoes. Also, their main goal was to get America to invade, occupy and brutalise an Arab nation. Mission Accomplished.
I actually don't know the answer, but I have a few ideas. (1) They're busy dying in Iraq (2) Our new security policies after 9/11 have been successful on some level (3) They get to America and begin to live here and experience our country while planning their assault, and after experiencing freedom, stability, and economic success, their urge to blow themselves to smithereens or get arrested while trying to both other people up abates and eventually vanishes. Why destroy this? It's paradise compared to the disease-infested cess pools they came from.
Al Queda is not a monolithic group. It's the umbrella name given by the West to the world-wide Islamist insurgency that views OBL as their role-model. Most of the "Al Queda" fighters in Iraq are locals and from neighbouring states. The cells are very likely still alive and kicking. Just waiting for their next order.
As for "cess-pools", that would be true if they were poor. Almost all of the known Al Queda operatives captures or killed came from very nice, middle-class Arab families. Fairly well educated and had a good future if they wanted it. I saw an interview with the family of one of the 9/11 hijackers and their pain and grief were heart-breaking. They hate Islamists and terrorism. They're quite moderate Islamics and have nice jobs. They don't understand why their son suddenly turned their back on them when he went to Europe to go to University. He almost completely stopped
I agree totally. However, I would like to remind people that the war on terror possibly prevented many more such incidents.
I'm reminded of Lisa Simpson:
Homer: Not a bear in sight. The Bear Patrol must be working like a charm. Lisa: That's specious reasoning, Dad. Homer: Thank you, dear. Lisa: By your logic I could claim that this rock keeps tigers away. Homer: Oh, how does it work? Lisa: It doesn't work. Homer: Uh-huh. Lisa: It's just a stupid rock. Homer: Uh-huh. Lisa: But I don't see any tigers around, do you? Homer: *Homer thinks of this, then pulls out some money* Lisa, I want to buy your rock. Lisa: *Lisa shakes head in refusal at first, then takes the exchange*
I think you misunderstood me. I mean they used photos taken RIGHT after the eruption. The more recent photos show more greenery in it and Spirit Lake looks a little healthier.
Time. If I'm lucky, what I want to see if a blockbuster so there are start times around the clock. Otherwise, "Um, one showing at 4:23".
Focus. Here in Vancouver, the big chains don't even bother to focus properly. I stopped wearing my glasses (I'm only marginally near-sighted) because the focus is so bad.
Lighting. As
Roger Ebert
and Kodak have complained for years, the
big theatre chains
are deliberately dimming the bulb to save on "bulb life". But as many professional projectionsts claim there is no gain in bulb life.
Film stock. The film stock, especially up here in Vancouver, is just horrible. During dim scenes, I could say the film grain dancing big as life. There was a time when film was copied onto quality film stock, but someone, somewhere is cheaping out.
Ads. I once spent 30 minutes sitting through commercials (not trailers!) to see a bad movie. 'Nuff said.
The Theater. The seats are uncomfortable, the floor is sticky and if I'm lucky, the drink holder is gum free. The annoying teens kkicking the back of my seat, the goof ball popping open his brightly lit cell phone to check e-mail, the sound system that hasn't been adjusted since the floor sweeper fiddled with the control because some person complained that it was disturbing their infant they brought into the latest guns-and-explosion action fest from Vin Diesel. AARGH!
Give me DVDs any day of the week on my big screen and decent sound system.
"Sorry, slashdot users aren't allowed. You've been too naughty."
Too funny.
Re:Never write off Microsoft...
on
Gates on Google
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Never write off or underestimate what lies in Redmond. Too many companies have made that mistake - even mighty IBM - and learnt not to do it the hard way.
Only two products in the entire company turn a profit. Microsoft is now viewed as "the evil guy" by the really technically savvy. The smartest people no longer want to work for Microsoft. OK, not enough? Try this.
Netscape was undone by its internal problems including lack of coder discipline (releasing a really buggy release that so pissed off Netscape users they defected en mass to IE). IBM was culturally unable to cope with the modern world of start ups. No one could make a decision without getting 100% buy-in from everyone. Sun is well... I won't go there.
The point is that Microsoft has traditionally gone up against incompetents. Google (despite some claims) is not incompetent. Google doesn't lose focus on what they are doing. More importantly, Google innovates in ways Microsoft no longer does. And it helps that Google's motto is "Do no evil". It might surprise you how far that goes to encouraging people to switch. Microsoft used to be like that too, but now they've bought into their own press and have become like IBM and the other behemoths they helped "take down".
Sorry, I just don't buy it. MS will continue to exist and be profitable. It just won't be the hottest thing on the market anymore.
All the 813,621 users before you don't really exist. These messages are randomly generated geek buzzwords. "Users" are given personalities, ranging from "Linux lover" to "Windows loser", from "I'm just a troll" to "IAARS", from "Funny" to "I take myself serious, but no one else does".
I am not a Bot! (Funny Bot response #3245) In Soviet Union, you extort extortionists! (Funny Bot response #42) Yeah, well how about a beowolf cluster of those bots? (Funny Bot response #5637)
Having RTFA, I can see what he's trying to get at, but as someone who has (unfortunately) found himself spending most of my 10 year career in programming cleaning up other people's poop. At first I thought it was because I must have done something wrong that I kept ending up being assigned this work, but as I came to realise, it was because I make the code better than I found it and I have a knack for fixing stuff other people give up on. I also had silly managers who assign work to the people least qualified to do it.
At any rate, some observations:
1. 20 lines of comments "documenting" your code before you write it (or even after you write it) is far less useful than writing the code COHERENTLY and CORRECTLY in the first place.
Last month, I had a 1200 (yes 1,200) line method with huge blocks of documentation before big pieces of code. I still can't quite tell you what it thought it was doing. The code was a for loop wrapping around code to handle 3 different and mutually exclusive situations. Instead of identifying which of the 3 situations it was and creating a method for each situation, the person just stuffed it all in with lots of comments documenting everything the article's author said. The code was still unmaintainable.
2. Comments are useless unless they are kept up to date
Part of the reason that code was so difficult to figure out was because most of those big verbose documentation comments referred to a completely different implementation. After the programmer had written the first case, she encountered some other bad cases and eventually had to completely change a block of code embedded in this 1200 line for-loop. The code was now correct, but the comments no longer had anything to do with that block of code.
3. Don't be clever when you can be clear
I have made a solemn vow to hunt down and hurt anyone who puts "clever" code in my project. I am so sick of trying to figure out what some obfuscated piece of code in C, C++ or even SmallTalk is doing. And find out it was just a "clever" way of doing something pretty straight forward like iterating over a list. There was no speed gain from the clever trick, and the code wasn't even a bottleneck to begin with. *sigh*
4. If you don't know how to solve the problem, write some experiment code in a separate app to figure it out. Then take the time to do the "right" thing in the production code.
3 days from final for a video game. The CD streaming library for the Sony Playstation was making this strange "hic-up" sound at rare moments. By this time, the original author of this code has long since gone to another company. So I plunge into the code and found that the original programmer didn't know how to write streaming code so he created this hack of a hack of a hack of a test (ad nauseum). The code was programmed by accident, not design. No amount of comment before coding could help this. If the author had dumped the code, wrote documentation describing everything he learned then wrote the code, things would have been a lot better.
5. Unrelated to comments, but use variable names that make sense. Don't name them arbitrarily or to amuse yourself!
That CD sound streamer code I mentioned above used quirky names for variables. Can you tell what "little_ninja" is supposed to be just from the name? When I confronted the coder about this quirk of his (in another library he wrote), he got all huffy and didn't understand why people didn't appreciate his little puzzles or his sense of humor. It galls me he still earns a paycheck in the industry.
I've never found grades any great indicator of how good someone is at their job. Why all this push for straight A students? The smartest people I ever met in University and work life did well (B's and such) but were never the elite, especially in fields they weren't interested in (English was usually C's).
Will Internet service providers be required to keep records of all their customers' web activity?
It is important to clarify that data retention is not being considered in the lawful access proposals. ISPs would only be required to preserve specific data when requested to do so through a preservation order and only for a specific period of time. The proposed amendments would not require ISPs to retain data relating to their customers' web activity.
I could swear that was the building where I bought my morning coffee!:-)
It's really weird for me watching the Occupied Caprica scenes. They keep showing shots of downtown Vancouver and I keep going "But that's not an alien world! Hey, that's the building I work in!!"
The worst cog-diss was in the pilot at the Market scene. That was the AQ of my alma mater, Simon Fraser University. Nothing ruins the mood of an alien world than locating the benches you used to take naps on between classes.:-)
Do you guys in NY and LA have the same cognitive dissonance when watching your towns subbing for other parts of the world?
What I think is they'll provide some c++ framework or perhaps some meta language so that programmers define small treatment units with clearly defined treatment, inputs and output streams, and interconnect them without having to write tons of boilerplate code, and with abstractions to be able not to care about the details of memory management and streaming from and toward other treatment units running on other SPEs.
Then the compiler would have enough informations to slice these up in independant binary units that would be scheduled and installed over the various SPEs automatically by the OS.
Woah. This stuff already exists... for MP super computers. I remember getting a brief overview about this in my OS class. This parallelizing language extensions are available for C and FORTRAN. I vaguely recall there were even custom languages. At any rate, MP super computer tech has now reached the desktop. Cool!:-)
Any MP gurus out there: care to share some websites that will help us lowly SP coders raise ourselves up?:-)
The one thing I don't understand is how I would code for this thing. As best as I understand it, I now have some instructions for controlling the cache (or LAM, whatever) which sounds cool, but are there any details yet of how I'd write code for this? I'm also disappointed that the article didn't explain how one would use their SIMD instructions if they aren't using any of the existing standards. So I load my vectors with the cache control and ask the processors to ever so kindly add them?
Anybody out there with experience on this architecture or even attended the presentation itself can give us mere coders details? Preferably a website.
I'm not at liberty to provide the details (because I worked for the game company), but ESPN once signed an "exclusive" deal with Radical Entertainment and that went... badly.
Just because EA is involved doesn't mean a) it will succede, and b) that ESPN won't cancel the deal if they're unhappy.
*sigh* Bad memories... *starts rocking back and forth sucking thumb*
"But, but... You can't do Physics without that REALLY hard math!"
Yup, thus the reason Physics is on the "decline" (which I don't believe it is) is because it's now become a discipline that requires the brightest of us. Not everyone can get it, and those who do will go into it anyway 'cause I think it's a personality thing.
So for those who aren't the brightest, they will chose the "lesser" Physics of Chemistry, engineering, etc. And for those who do, then comes ANOTHER problem and why I don't believe it's on the decline: finding tenure.
Physics is not a gentlemen's leisure activity. It's a full time calling and you can't just do it while working as a patent clerk anymore. There needs to be more research positions, teaching positions, etc. and frankly, there just isn't enough to go around for the Physics majors who do brave all the hard work. They usually end up becoming SysAdmins or programmers and make the rest of us remember why we couldn't hack it in Physics.;-) (I.e., Physics grads are awesome).
So rather than trying to get more kids into Physics, we should spend more time making positions for our existing physics majors.
Quit getting all your info from books and then arguing with those who have real-world experience - go out and experience some things for yourself. Japan is a wonderful place and I think you, like most westerners their first time there, would be pretty surprised by what you see the first time you go.
Are you Japanese or gaijin? Your social interactions will be 100% different from a native-born Japanese person.
For most Japanese, especially the ones I know, most of their day is consumed with empty personal interactions. Even the afterwork socializing is considered pretty "empty". The reports of dysfunctional marriages are increasing and recent surveys done in Japan show married couples are talking less and less to each other. Far worse than in the West.
It's a lot of fun reading the popular press in Japan interview their versions of Dr. Laura and Dr. Phil about the problem of being "lonely in a crowd". Especially after the mate-pager thing was introduced.
Are Japanese social? Yes, that's why I said half of it is. There is a reluctance when it comes to sticking their neck out to create a new interaction or friend. But once they have an excuse to talk to someone, they are very social. But again, I point to what I said originally, the other half is time pressures. Since the bubble burst in the 90s, most Japanese people have been putting more and more hours into work and "self-improvement". Companies would rather reduce staff and pay OT (which apparently they are "forgetting" to do lately) than make the situation more tolerable. With all this time spent trying to survive, it's very hard to get the energy or time to socialize in conventional ways.
There are a lot of mis-conceptions about Japan and its culture, and the "introversion" is one of them. It's not shyness (and I made sure NOT to call it shyness): it's about keeping the civil order and protecting each other's miniscule personal spaces in a very densely populated country. It's a defense mechanism against being crowded. If Americans had to live like that, they'd also experience this introversion. Oh wait, it has happened: New York. A town that looks plenty social, but it also has the highest per capita of unhappy lonely people.
I think you've come closer to the truth. There is a Japanese obsession with "novelty". Something new and shiny and cool that can be a fad then thrown away. It has become a huge headache for the government with all the electronics ending up in land fills. It seems like the Japanese rely on shopping for their entertainment more than TV or movies. Their retail culture is completely twisted around this idea. Some stores have an amusement park on the roof even!
Also, there is less "personal" interaction in Japan. Half of it is the infamous cultural introversion, but the other half is lots of hours spent at work, school or commuting. They don't spend a lot of time really interacting with each other anymore. So to get that human interaction, they like constant electronic attention grabbers especially if it will connect them to people. Now you can see why wireless is so popular in Japan?
In North America, take a look at who wants & embraces the tech in question. It's people in a similar boat: not enough daily personal interaction. If you have lots of friends you can talk to face-to-face or talk to live on the phone, do you really want some chirping electronic device intruding in your life?
You know, most trolls attribute goatse.cx to the appropriate URL, because they know plagiarism is bad. Give credit where credit is due.
You wish I was a troll. I was some one who spent 2 years learning Lisp, getting really good at it then discovering that I was 2x to 5x more productive in Perl & C and 20x more productive in PROLOG (which the Lisp zealots sniffed at as an "inferior" by-product of Lisp).
The paper you site is laughable:
It might be because the
subjects were
self-selected. It might be because the benchmark
task involved search and managing a
complex linked data structure, two jobs for
which Lisp happens to be specifically designed
and particularly well suited. Or it might be
because Lisp programmers tend to be good
programmers. This in turn might be because
good programmers tend to gravitate toward
Lisp, or it might be because programming in
Lisp tends to make one a good programmer.
To be fair, I left the last line in even though it's completely unsubstantiated. To be further fair, I cannot prove or disprove it. But let's continue with the meat of it: compilation time. Before posting my comments, I looked for a productivity report and all I could find were anecdotes and self-serving quotes on Lisp pages. The productivity is due to interactive debugging & compilation time!?!? I saw no mention of meta-programming as a productivity boost (a Faustian bargain one at that), and just a lot of crap about how Lisp is the only language that can do incremental compilation. Oh geez, give me a fucking break!
The reason I am so anti-Lisp is because I was a Lisp zealot until I took comparitive programming languages. I am probably one of the few Lisp detractors who have written Lisp programs that can verify the correctness of Lisp programs! I have written "self-modifying" Lisp code. Dude, I know Lisp better than some of its adherents. I've written my own Lisp interpreter from scratch using K&R C.
I have never found Lisp to be that productive. It forces me to think in unnatural ways to express my solutions. To be productive, I usually end up doing ugly things like writing procedural code. For power, I prefer PROLOG. For raw speed, I prefer C. For OO, well, I'm still looking. But the point here is what does Lisp offer anymore? List handling and garbage collection is now a standard part of all modern languages. Meta languages is a Faustian bargain where if everyone is on the same page, great, but if someone has to pick it up from scratch, one had to depend on the previous programmer organizing their code in an easily comprehensible manner (which they usually don't). Switching projects becomes a headache because now you have to learn that local dialect. In short, you got a Tower of Babel of language extensions.
I feel like Diogeneyse looking for a wise man in the city of Lisp zealots.
Slashdot Mirror
Why not lead by example then? Have you sponsored a Summer of Code? How about releasing even some source code to everyone so they can learn about your software, make improvements and become an integral part of the process?
Only kids who want to be there (or parents who want their kids to be there) are allowed[1].
Everyone else -- go find a vocation and learn to live modestly since you don't give a damn about yourself anyway.[2]
[1] This means even learning disabilities are allowed as long as the child or their parent wants them the receive an education. As long as one or both of them care, then the system should bend over backwards to help them.
[2] Parents cannot FORCE their kids out of school either. If the kid wants to be there, again, bend over backwards to help them stay there even if it means separating them from some selfish parents who want their kids to go work in a factory instead.
Nice hystrionics full of specious reasoning.
He doesn't think of Christians and Jews as abominations. He just considers us unbelievers who must be kept out of Arab affairs and especially out of Islamic holy sites. E.g., the American forces stationed near Mecca. He and his followers are sick of having their plans for an ideal, "just" Islamic society being thwarted by American funded & trained tyrants. Like the Saudi royal family. It's that simple. He's quite OK with letting us live our corrupt, infedlic lives; he just wants us to do it over here, not there.
Now his vision of an ideal, "just" Islamic society is abhorrent to most everyday Arabs, and that's where his campaign of terror comes in. Essentially, he provokes the West to occupy and brutalise an Arab country. Al Queda shows it is "fighting the infdels over there to prevent them from coming over here". They become popular. They can take control. Nightmare for everyone who lives under a pure Islamist state.
Your life would be easier if you stopped watching Fox news. Al Queda's stated aims have always been "the expulsion of American Armed forces from the sacred sites of Islam [Saudi Arabia]". That's why OBL got followers. That's why they came after the U.S. It's a stupid, irrational reason, but that's religion for you.
Because Al Queda likes to think big. Simple suicide bombings in a food court are too small potatoes. Also, their main goal was to get America to invade, occupy and brutalise an Arab nation. Mission Accomplished.
Al Queda is not a monolithic group. It's the umbrella name given by the West to the world-wide Islamist insurgency that views OBL as their role-model. Most of the "Al Queda" fighters in Iraq are locals and from neighbouring states. The cells are very likely still alive and kicking. Just waiting for their next order.
As for "cess-pools", that would be true if they were poor. Almost all of the known Al Queda operatives captures or killed came from very nice, middle-class Arab families. Fairly well educated and had a good future if they wanted it. I saw an interview with the family of one of the 9/11 hijackers and their pain and grief were heart-breaking. They hate Islamists and terrorism. They're quite moderate Islamics and have nice jobs. They don't understand why their son suddenly turned their back on them when he went to Europe to go to University. He almost completely stopped
I'm reminded of Lisa Simpson:
I think you misunderstood me. I mean they used photos taken RIGHT after the eruption. The more recent photos show more greenery in it and Spirit Lake looks a little healthier.
Nice picture. It looks like they used the post eruption photos only.
*gollum* *gollum*
It sees everything, precious. It never closes! *gollum* *gollum*
Why I hate going to the movie theater:
Give me DVDs any day of the week on my big screen and decent sound system.
"Sorry, slashdot users aren't allowed. You've been too naughty."
Too funny.
Only two products in the entire company turn a profit. Microsoft is now viewed as "the evil guy" by the really technically savvy. The smartest people no longer want to work for Microsoft. OK, not enough? Try this.
Netscape was undone by its internal problems including lack of coder discipline (releasing a really buggy release that so pissed off Netscape users they defected en mass to IE). IBM was culturally unable to cope with the modern world of start ups. No one could make a decision without getting 100% buy-in from everyone. Sun is well... I won't go there.
The point is that Microsoft has traditionally gone up against incompetents. Google (despite some claims) is not incompetent. Google doesn't lose focus on what they are doing. More importantly, Google innovates in ways Microsoft no longer does. And it helps that Google's motto is "Do no evil". It might surprise you how far that goes to encouraging people to switch. Microsoft used to be like that too, but now they've bought into their own press and have become like IBM and the other behemoths they helped "take down".
Sorry, I just don't buy it. MS will continue to exist and be profitable. It just won't be the hottest thing on the market anymore.
I'd like to remind them that as a trusted TV personality, I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground PigeonRank facilities.
(What? How did you think TrustRank was going to work?>
I am not a Bot! (Funny Bot response #3245)
In Soviet Union, you extort extortionists! (Funny Bot response #42)
Yeah, well how about a beowolf cluster of those bots? (Funny Bot response #5637)
ERROR: Funny Bot caught in loop. Call Cmdr Taco!
No. I'll just flick your forehead. :-) At least you know it's wrong.
Having RTFA, I can see what he's trying to get at, but as someone who has (unfortunately) found himself spending most of my 10 year career in programming cleaning up other people's poop. At first I thought it was because I must have done something wrong that I kept ending up being assigned this work, but as I came to realise, it was because I make the code better than I found it and I have a knack for fixing stuff other people give up on. I also had silly managers who assign work to the people least qualified to do it.
At any rate, some observations:
1. 20 lines of comments "documenting" your code before you write it (or even after you write it) is far less useful than writing the code COHERENTLY and CORRECTLY in the first place.
Last month, I had a 1200 (yes 1,200) line method with huge blocks of documentation before big pieces of code. I still can't quite tell you what it thought it was doing. The code was a for loop wrapping around code to handle 3 different and mutually exclusive situations. Instead of identifying which of the 3 situations it was and creating a method for each situation, the person just stuffed it all in with lots of comments documenting everything the article's author said. The code was still unmaintainable.
2. Comments are useless unless they are kept up to date
Part of the reason that code was so difficult to figure out was because most of those big verbose documentation comments referred to a completely different implementation. After the programmer had written the first case, she encountered some other bad cases and eventually had to completely change a block of code embedded in this 1200 line for-loop. The code was now correct, but the comments no longer had anything to do with that block of code.
3. Don't be clever when you can be clear
I have made a solemn vow to hunt down and hurt anyone who puts "clever" code in my project. I am so sick of trying to figure out what some obfuscated piece of code in C, C++ or even SmallTalk is doing. And find out it was just a "clever" way of doing something pretty straight forward like iterating over a list. There was no speed gain from the clever trick, and the code wasn't even a bottleneck to begin with. *sigh*
4. If you don't know how to solve the problem, write some experiment code in a separate app to figure it out. Then take the time to do the "right" thing in the production code.
3 days from final for a video game. The CD streaming library for the Sony Playstation was making this strange "hic-up" sound at rare moments. By this time, the original author of this code has long since gone to another company. So I plunge into the code and found that the original programmer didn't know how to write streaming code so he created this hack of a hack of a hack of a test (ad nauseum). The code was programmed by accident, not design. No amount of comment before coding could help this. If the author had dumped the code, wrote documentation describing everything he learned then wrote the code, things would have been a lot better.
5. Unrelated to comments, but use variable names that make sense. Don't name them arbitrarily or to amuse yourself!
That CD sound streamer code I mentioned above used quirky names for variables. Can you tell what "little_ninja" is supposed to be just from the name? When I confronted the coder about this quirk of his (in another library he wrote), he got all huffy and didn't understand why people didn't appreciate his little puzzles or his sense of humor. It galls me he still earns a paycheck in the industry.
I've never found grades any great indicator of how good someone is at their job. Why all this push for straight A students? The smartest people I ever met in University and work life did well (B's and such) but were never the elite, especially in fields they weren't interested in (English was usually C's).
No kidding. I've enjoyed Sallis's work since Last of the Summer Wine.
A handy FAQ for the tinfoil brigade.
Of special note:
I could swear that was the building where I bought my morning coffee! :-)
:-)
It's really weird for me watching the Occupied Caprica scenes. They keep showing shots of downtown Vancouver and I keep going "But that's not an alien world! Hey, that's the building I work in!!"
The worst cog-diss was in the pilot at the Market scene. That was the AQ of my alma mater, Simon Fraser University. Nothing ruins the mood of an alien world than locating the benches you used to take naps on between classes.
Do you guys in NY and LA have the same cognitive dissonance when watching your towns subbing for other parts of the world?
Woah. This stuff already exists... for MP super computers. I remember getting a brief overview about this in my OS class. This parallelizing language extensions are available for C and FORTRAN. I vaguely recall there were even custom languages. At any rate, MP super computer tech has now reached the desktop. Cool! :-)
Any MP gurus out there: care to share some websites that will help us lowly SP coders raise ourselves up? :-)
The one thing I don't understand is how I would code for this thing. As best as I understand it, I now have some instructions for controlling the cache (or LAM, whatever) which sounds cool, but are there any details yet of how I'd write code for this? I'm also disappointed that the article didn't explain how one would use their SIMD instructions if they aren't using any of the existing standards. So I load my vectors with the cache control and ask the processors to ever so kindly add them?
Anybody out there with experience on this architecture or even attended the presentation itself can give us mere coders details? Preferably a website.
I'm not at liberty to provide the details (because I worked for the game company), but ESPN once signed an "exclusive" deal with Radical Entertainment and that went... badly.
Just because EA is involved doesn't mean a) it will succede, and b) that ESPN won't cancel the deal if they're unhappy.
*sigh* Bad memories... *starts rocking back and forth sucking thumb*
"But, but... You can't do Physics without that REALLY hard math!"
;-) (I.e., Physics grads are awesome).
Yup, thus the reason Physics is on the "decline" (which I don't believe it is) is because it's now become a discipline that requires the brightest of us. Not everyone can get it, and those who do will go into it anyway 'cause I think it's a personality thing.
So for those who aren't the brightest, they will chose the "lesser" Physics of Chemistry, engineering, etc. And for those who do, then comes ANOTHER problem and why I don't believe it's on the decline: finding tenure.
Physics is not a gentlemen's leisure activity. It's a full time calling and you can't just do it while working as a patent clerk anymore. There needs to be more research positions, teaching positions, etc. and frankly, there just isn't enough to go around for the Physics majors who do brave all the hard work. They usually end up becoming SysAdmins or programmers and make the rest of us remember why we couldn't hack it in Physics.
So rather than trying to get more kids into Physics, we should spend more time making positions for our existing physics majors.
Are you Japanese or gaijin? Your social interactions will be 100% different from a native-born Japanese person.
For most Japanese, especially the ones I know, most of their day is consumed with empty personal interactions. Even the afterwork socializing is considered pretty "empty". The reports of dysfunctional marriages are increasing and recent surveys done in Japan show married couples are talking less and less to each other. Far worse than in the West.
It's a lot of fun reading the popular press in Japan interview their versions of Dr. Laura and Dr. Phil about the problem of being "lonely in a crowd". Especially after the mate-pager thing was introduced.
Are Japanese social? Yes, that's why I said half of it is. There is a reluctance when it comes to sticking their neck out to create a new interaction or friend. But once they have an excuse to talk to someone, they are very social. But again, I point to what I said originally, the other half is time pressures. Since the bubble burst in the 90s, most Japanese people have been putting more and more hours into work and "self-improvement". Companies would rather reduce staff and pay OT (which apparently they are "forgetting" to do lately) than make the situation more tolerable. With all this time spent trying to survive, it's very hard to get the energy or time to socialize in conventional ways.
There are a lot of mis-conceptions about Japan and its culture, and the "introversion" is one of them. It's not shyness (and I made sure NOT to call it shyness): it's about keeping the civil order and protecting each other's miniscule personal spaces in a very densely populated country. It's a defense mechanism against being crowded. If Americans had to live like that, they'd also experience this introversion. Oh wait, it has happened: New York. A town that looks plenty social, but it also has the highest per capita of unhappy lonely people.
I think you've come closer to the truth. There is a Japanese obsession with "novelty". Something new and shiny and cool that can be a fad then thrown away. It has become a huge headache for the government with all the electronics ending up in land fills. It seems like the Japanese rely on shopping for their entertainment more than TV or movies. Their retail culture is completely twisted around this idea. Some stores have an amusement park on the roof even!
Also, there is less "personal" interaction in Japan. Half of it is the infamous cultural introversion, but the other half is lots of hours spent at work, school or commuting. They don't spend a lot of time really interacting with each other anymore. So to get that human interaction, they like constant electronic attention grabbers especially if it will connect them to people. Now you can see why wireless is so popular in Japan?
In North America, take a look at who wants & embraces the tech in question. It's people in a similar boat: not enough daily personal interaction. If you have lots of friends you can talk to face-to-face or talk to live on the phone, do you really want some chirping electronic device intruding in your life?
You wish I was a troll. I was some one who spent 2 years learning Lisp, getting really good at it then discovering that I was 2x to 5x more productive in Perl & C and 20x more productive in PROLOG (which the Lisp zealots sniffed at as an "inferior" by-product of Lisp).
The paper you site is laughable:
To be fair, I left the last line in even though it's completely unsubstantiated. To be further fair, I cannot prove or disprove it. But let's continue with the meat of it: compilation time. Before posting my comments, I looked for a productivity report and all I could find were anecdotes and self-serving quotes on Lisp pages. The productivity is due to interactive debugging & compilation time!?!? I saw no mention of meta-programming as a productivity boost (a Faustian bargain one at that), and just a lot of crap about how Lisp is the only language that can do incremental compilation. Oh geez, give me a fucking break!
The reason I am so anti-Lisp is because I was a Lisp zealot until I took comparitive programming languages. I am probably one of the few Lisp detractors who have written Lisp programs that can verify the correctness of Lisp programs! I have written "self-modifying" Lisp code. Dude, I know Lisp better than some of its adherents. I've written my own Lisp interpreter from scratch using K&R C.
I have never found Lisp to be that productive. It forces me to think in unnatural ways to express my solutions. To be productive, I usually end up doing ugly things like writing procedural code. For power, I prefer PROLOG. For raw speed, I prefer C. For OO, well, I'm still looking. But the point here is what does Lisp offer anymore? List handling and garbage collection is now a standard part of all modern languages. Meta languages is a Faustian bargain where if everyone is on the same page, great, but if someone has to pick it up from scratch, one had to depend on the previous programmer organizing their code in an easily comprehensible manner (which they usually don't). Switching projects becomes a headache because now you have to learn that local dialect. In short, you got a Tower of Babel of language extensions.
I feel like Diogeneyse looking for a wise man in the city of Lisp zealots.