Did you see the report on the "outside" candidates for the democratic nomination, in which they lumped Lieberman with a guy in a lobster costume? Then they asked, "Joe, wouldn't it be...fun to be president?"
Of *COURSE* Bush never made any mistakes. If he had, he might have to change his mind on a policy, and we can't have that. We all know that the reason we aren't supposed to vote for that unpatriotic John Kerry is that he has a histroy of flip flopping on issues. Such a terrible thing. I mean, here he was, supporting the Vietnam war...then he goes there and decides it's bullshit? What's that all about? Getting wounded and seeing your friends killed shouldn't be enough to make you change your mind on policy. Somebody should tell Kerry that if you feel yourself starting to change your mind in politics, you should just walk away. Relax a bit, go golfing. Ride your snowmobile through a protected national forest. Hang out on your ranch in Texas. And only when you've become reassured that your non working programs are the way to go should you even THINK about going back to work.
Tough Crowd hasn't been cancelled yet because even though Colin Quinn is "fucking terrible," his guests are generally funny, quick thinkers and incredibly raunchy. After the quality programming of the daily show, sometimes I'm in the mood for hundred year old stereo types and obnoxious accents.
Supposedly low budgets. I've heard they come out about the same...that what they save on writers and well known actors, they spend on more talented editors, more cameras, and exotic locations.
Well, there's also the LAUGHTER during the daily show. The only laughter I have with Fox News is when they pair Sean "the devil" Hannity with a sycophantic pussy and call themselves "fair and balanced."
Alan Colmes, if you're out there: I hate you. You do for liberals what Barabra Streisand does for Democrats: you keep regular thinking people away because they don't want to be associated with you!
Ahem. If I go to a restaurant, and the food is not good overall BUT the ambience is nice, the waitress friendly and they have this one appetizer that's fantastic, I will give the restaurant a better review than if everything were merely ok.
1) The amazing album art. Eight panels of pen sketches of NYC skyline on acide free paper. MMM.
2) "An open letter to NYC" The sort of song a band records at the end of their career; this is their "Let it Be," it's solid.
3) The great production work. Even though many of the songs have wack to weak lyricism, and Mike D sounds like he's about 50 and has larengitis, the music is very clean and the songs are punk short. Just enough to make the weaker songs tolerable.
Of course, this style of acting would never work on, say, "Friends." But in the "life as we know it" world of Sci-Fi, I'd much rather have Patrick Stewart than, I dunno, Tom Hanks. Come on -- Darth Vader was James Earl Jones, that deep, rumbling voice shook the death star to its foundation!
Don't blame the coders, man. It's probably some project manager's fault. They probably said, "we'd like to spend time making the site designer work on platforms other than IE. It will take 60 hours," to which the manager said "Naw, let's not do that just for those linux guys. Ooh! Let's make some more of those paper dolls in slutty costumes that all the teenage girls seem to like!"
How about this: the maximum upload throughput on most cable connections is 128 kilobits per second unburstable. That's not much if you do any other upload activities, like p2p, online gaming, putting photos on a website, etc. Adding to that the inherent instability of domestic internet access, not to mention domestic power, just say "I run my own server at home" is kind of quixotic. Better to put your stuff on a small server whose admins will give you damn near carte blanche for a low, low price.
Most hosting companies offer POP, IMAP AND webmail on the same account. So you can use IMAP/POP (don't let it delete from the server!) when you have access to a REAL mail program and use webmail when you're on the go. I host a number of $5/month email-only domain accounts just because people wanted this flexibility without the financial uncertainty of a free service or the vendor lock-in of an ISP.
Yes, but this has become a Star Trek thing. Shatner, Shakespearrean actor who filled the screen with his presence. Patrick Stewart, Skaespearrean actor who filled the screen with his stern brogue and cue-ball head. Avery Brooks, I dunno if he's Shakespearrean but he's a real over the top actor who stole the show in every scene he was in...shit, do you not remember the tension in the DS9 pilot when Sisco met Picard? I thought there was going to be some kind of explosion due to an overload of intense acting
In fact, one could say the reason that Voyager and Enterprise suck so badly is that their captains just don't have the overacting leadership needed to make it in Star Fleet.
You thought you were trolling. Really, you just accurately described just about every episode of the original series. In fact, the only difference I see is that Shatner could make a fight believable. He could make me care. Segal makes me want to see what's playing on the radio.
Like Next Generation is any better..."To boldy go where no man has gone before, have it attack us, and then escape at the last minute by reversing the polarity of something!"
Well, I guess that depends. When you download a new program, do you -- before anything else -- pull up the source code and check to be sure that that all tree operations were written using the most efficient algorithm?
Or do start the program and see if it, you know, has all the features implemented, looks good, and does what you need it to do?
I'm guessing the latter. Which means that you don't give a shit about "good programming," as preached by computer scientists. You only care about good programs. Computer scientists don't make programs; they make textbooks and write papers about algorithms and design and clever new ways of accessing hardware. PROGRAMMERS make programs, and good programming has as much to do with computer science as good masonry has to do with civil engineering. One influences the other, but proficiency in one is not required for the other.
I would define a good programmer not as one who uses the most efficient algorithm and knows intuitively every way he will manipulate a certain piece of data, but as one who makes the most efficient use of time to create the most full featured program. If I could sit down and take as much time as I please to write a dumb utility method, I would. But generally speaking, I have a half hour. So I use the "best practices under twenty minutes" method of coding. I take the a bunch of somewhat efficient, memory wasting generic data structures I'm used to and pick the one that's closest to what I want to do. When that becomes ungainly, I swap it out.
And I guess that's why you say I am not a very good programmer. I guess to impress the slashdot crowd, I should say "fuck the schedule" and code a tiny jewel of a utility, the kind of thing that will execute without a single wasted cycle, rock solid, outlasting even the human race. But instead, I aim to get as much as I can done before the customer, you know, asks for their money back. Shitty programming: it's my religion, and it pays good too.
1) Never would a computer class ever, EVER tell you how to identify a SCSI card because that's trivial -- the sort of trivia you can learn reading the back of a box. The sort of trivia that would be wrong as soon as you learned it -- tell me, how many pins on a MODERN scsi cable?
Scoffing at a person for not knowing the difference between two interfaces is foolish. If anything, scoff at her for not checking to be sure the cable plugged in to the hard disc before buying it!
2) You're claiming that telling a person to run HEADLESS is something to be proud of? It is TOUGH to set up a machine without a video card and a keyboard...sure, it can be done, but most of the early set up of a machine is acheived quicker with a monitor.
Yes! Yes! Algorithms, O notation and code optimization are *EXACTLY* what we want in a propsective network administrator! You're hired!
Actually, I am a programmer. None of these things is really all that important anymore -- not as important as getting the program churned out as quickly as possible. You don't write the hash algorithm, you call new Hashtable(). You don't worry about the Big O of operations, you just write them and then rewrite them when they get slow. I guarantee you, knowing how to track down a speedbump in a profiler is far more worthwhile a skill than being able to identify the PRINCIPLE behing a certain segment of code. These are the kind of things that seem so important in school...the things that the instructors get very serious about. And in the real world, they're recalled by veterans over beer as a waste of goddamn time.
In fact, I dropped out of the CS program early when I realized that everything I was learning I already knew, most of my time was spent writing bullshit lab write ups for other people and the stuff I didn't know could be looked up on the Internet and learned in roughly ten minutes. The SCIENCE of computers is laregely academic in the real world, and those parts that aren't academic are best learned on demand.
Well yeah, duh. Certifications are, and always have been, a way of setting you apart from all the other blank faces. They say, "in lieu of everything else I might not be able to do, at least I can pass this marginally complicated test pertaining to my future position."
Requiring a cert is an easy way to cut down on pospective garbage. And there's a lot of garbage...I stopped telling people I worked with web applications because every fifth guy I met would tell me "Really? I design websites too!" At the very least a guy with a cert was serious enough about the field to pay for and study for a test to prove his seriousness. He could still be an idiot, but for every idiot that gets a cert, there are four idiots who didn't bother.
Incidentally, everybody I know in IT that I trust -- and there aren't a lot of them -- is well certified. Bullshit or not, certs will get you jobs with companies that do the work on a big scale. And that experience is worth its weight in laminated certificates.
dasmb: PICO! [crickets chirp] dasmb: It's free-as-in-love software? Comes with Pine? Tells you right on the screen how to save, cut a line, or quit out of it and doesn't expect you to automatically know that it's ESC, Colon, Q?
Incidentally, I wrote all my essays in college in Pico and then reformatted them in Word Perfect. This permitted me to completely forget about formatting while I was writing, and forced me to proof read everything while setting up the display format.
The latest Nero may have umpteen thousand features, but it's still REALLY GOOD. Best burnsoft I've seen on the PC. But if you want simple, elegant burnsofts, you've got to check out Toast 6. Holy crap. It is so easy to use, and yet has just about everything you could want. It lets you switch from CD to DVD with one button, automatically figures out the best way to reencode video and even sets intelligent defaults.
Yes, it's the same price as Nero with fewer features. It's worth it for the time you save using it...which is substantial.
Maybe you should take a class (or read a book) on Word styles. After hearing my wife complain for MONTHS that Word didn't do what she wanted it to do (which was act like WordPerfect and reveal codes like it was a fucking markup language -- can you imagine manually bolding, italicizing, resizing fonts, changing margins, etc, on 100+ page documents? In the 21st friggin' Century?), I did exactly that. I built her a style book that did everything she wanted to do with a lot less work; she's considering asking her boss to bring me in as a trainer so she can get the rest of her office (who are being forcefully brought into MS Word) how to use them.
The "inheritance" is not mysterious at all. It's just very, very detailed. Each style is linked to the style that it's based on. Unless you manually set a value, your style grabs one from the one it's based on. This permits you to change ALL of the settings in a document by changing that setting in one style. Want to switch fonts in all captions? Make a caption style, and base individual captions for images, tables, etc on that one. Change anything EXCEPT for the font...leave that the way it is. Then, changing the font on the parent applies to everything else. This is exactly the way CSS (cascading style sheets) works in web development.
As for Word being the wrong choice for 200+ page docs...I can only speak for Office 2004, but it's pretty good at managing big data. My wife has 150 pages of a report on her G3 with images and styles and charts and hyperlinks and all of that, and it's as fast as it was with 10 pages (which isn't snappy but is usable). Unfortunately, the Office apps for Macintosh are written by a different group (used to be a different COMPANY) than those for PC. So it's hardly representative. The only thing they share is a feature set and file format...everything else, including (I think) the codebase is compeltely different.
Slashdot Mirror
Did you see the report on the "outside" candidates for the democratic nomination, in which they lumped Lieberman with a guy in a lobster costume? Then they asked, "Joe, wouldn't it be...fun to be president?"
Of *COURSE* Bush never made any mistakes. If he had, he might have to change his mind on a policy, and we can't have that. We all know that the reason we aren't supposed to vote for that unpatriotic John Kerry is that he has a histroy of flip flopping on issues. Such a terrible thing. I mean, here he was, supporting the Vietnam war...then he goes there and decides it's bullshit? What's that all about? Getting wounded and seeing your friends killed shouldn't be enough to make you change your mind on policy. Somebody should tell Kerry that if you feel yourself starting to change your mind in politics, you should just walk away. Relax a bit, go golfing. Ride your snowmobile through a protected national forest. Hang out on your ranch in Texas. And only when you've become reassured that your non working programs are the way to go should you even THINK about going back to work.
Tough Crowd hasn't been cancelled yet because even though Colin Quinn is "fucking terrible," his guests are generally funny, quick thinkers and incredibly raunchy. After the quality programming of the daily show, sometimes I'm in the mood for hundred year old stereo types and obnoxious accents.
Supposedly low budgets. I've heard they come out about the same...that what they save on writers and well known actors, they spend on more talented editors, more cameras, and exotic locations.
Well, there's also the LAUGHTER during the daily show. The only laughter I have with Fox News is when they pair Sean "the devil" Hannity with a sycophantic pussy and call themselves "fair and balanced."
Alan Colmes, if you're out there: I hate you. You do for liberals what Barabra Streisand does for Democrats: you keep regular thinking people away because they don't want to be associated with you!
Ahem. If I go to a restaurant, and the food is not good overall BUT the ambience is nice, the waitress friendly and they have this one appetizer that's fantastic, I will give the restaurant a better review than if everything were merely ok.
This album is worth it for three things:
1) The amazing album art. Eight panels of pen sketches of NYC skyline on acide free paper. MMM.
2) "An open letter to NYC" The sort of song a band records at the end of their career; this is their "Let it Be," it's solid.
3) The great production work. Even though many of the songs have wack to weak lyricism, and Mike D sounds like he's about 50 and has larengitis, the music is very clean and the songs are punk short. Just enough to make the weaker songs tolerable.
Of course, this style of acting would never work on, say, "Friends." But in the "life as we know it" world of Sci-Fi, I'd much rather have Patrick Stewart than, I dunno, Tom Hanks. Come on -- Darth Vader was James Earl Jones, that deep, rumbling voice shook the death star to its foundation!
Don't blame the coders, man. It's probably some project manager's fault. They probably said, "we'd like to spend time making the site designer work on platforms other than IE. It will take 60 hours," to which the manager said "Naw, let's not do that just for those linux guys. Ooh! Let's make some more of those paper dolls in slutty costumes that all the teenage girls seem to like!"
How about this: the maximum upload throughput on most cable connections is 128 kilobits per second unburstable. That's not much if you do any other upload activities, like p2p, online gaming, putting photos on a website, etc. Adding to that the inherent instability of domestic internet access, not to mention domestic power, just say "I run my own server at home" is kind of quixotic. Better to put your stuff on a small server whose admins will give you damn near carte blanche for a low, low price.
Offering a service for free can be quite lucrative, but only if you make it up in volume.
I'll bet Stephen Sondheim could put together a penis enlargement mail that would really make you think.
Most hosting companies offer POP, IMAP AND webmail on the same account. So you can use IMAP/POP (don't let it delete from the server!) when you have access to a REAL mail program and use webmail when you're on the go. I host a number of $5/month email-only domain accounts just because people wanted this flexibility without the financial uncertainty of a free service or the vendor lock-in of an ISP.
"The webserver crashed. How long to fix it?"
"Six Hours, sir."
"You have three. Make them count."
"Maybe I can reverse the polarity on the apache config file!"
"You do that."
Yes, but this has become a Star Trek thing. Shatner, Shakespearrean actor who filled the screen with his presence. Patrick Stewart, Skaespearrean actor who filled the screen with his stern brogue and cue-ball head. Avery Brooks, I dunno if he's Shakespearrean but he's a real over the top actor who stole the show in every scene he was in...shit, do you not remember the tension in the DS9 pilot when Sisco met Picard? I thought there was going to be some kind of explosion due to an overload of intense acting
In fact, one could say the reason that Voyager and Enterprise suck so badly is that their captains just don't have the overacting leadership needed to make it in Star Fleet.
You thought you were trolling. Really, you just accurately described just about every episode of the original series. In fact, the only difference I see is that Shatner could make a fight believable. He could make me care. Segal makes me want to see what's playing on the radio.
Like Next Generation is any better..."To boldy go where no man has gone before, have it attack us, and then escape at the last minute by reversing the polarity of something!"
Well, I guess that depends. When you download a new program, do you -- before anything else -- pull up the source code and check to be sure that that all tree operations were written using the most efficient algorithm?
Or do start the program and see if it, you know, has all the features implemented, looks good, and does what you need it to do?
I'm guessing the latter. Which means that you don't give a shit about "good programming," as preached by computer scientists. You only care about good programs. Computer scientists don't make programs; they make textbooks and write papers about algorithms and design and clever new ways of accessing hardware. PROGRAMMERS make programs, and good programming has as much to do with computer science as good masonry has to do with civil engineering. One influences the other, but proficiency in one is not required for the other.
I would define a good programmer not as one who uses the most efficient algorithm and knows intuitively every way he will manipulate a certain piece of data, but as one who makes the most efficient use of time to create the most full featured program. If I could sit down and take as much time as I please to write a dumb utility method, I would. But generally speaking, I have a half hour. So I use the "best practices under twenty minutes" method of coding. I take the a bunch of somewhat efficient, memory wasting generic data structures I'm used to and pick the one that's closest to what I want to do. When that becomes ungainly, I swap it out.
And I guess that's why you say I am not a very good programmer. I guess to impress the slashdot crowd, I should say "fuck the schedule" and code a tiny jewel of a utility, the kind of thing that will execute without a single wasted cycle, rock solid, outlasting even the human race. But instead, I aim to get as much as I can done before the customer, you know, asks for their money back. Shitty programming: it's my religion, and it pays good too.
Okay. A few problems with your anecdote:
1) Never would a computer class ever, EVER tell you how to identify a SCSI card because that's trivial -- the sort of trivia you can learn reading the back of a box. The sort of trivia that would be wrong as soon as you learned it -- tell me, how many pins on a MODERN scsi cable?
Scoffing at a person for not knowing the difference between two interfaces is foolish. If anything, scoff at her for not checking to be sure the cable plugged in to the hard disc before buying it!
2) You're claiming that telling a person to run HEADLESS is something to be proud of? It is TOUGH to set up a machine without a video card and a keyboard...sure, it can be done, but most of the early set up of a machine is acheived quicker with a monitor.
Yes! Yes! Algorithms, O notation and code optimization are *EXACTLY* what we want in a propsective network administrator! You're hired!
Actually, I am a programmer. None of these things is really all that important anymore -- not as important as getting the program churned out as quickly as possible. You don't write the hash algorithm, you call new Hashtable(). You don't worry about the Big O of operations, you just write them and then rewrite them when they get slow. I guarantee you, knowing how to track down a speedbump in a profiler is far more worthwhile a skill than being able to identify the PRINCIPLE behing a certain segment of code. These are the kind of things that seem so important in school...the things that the instructors get very serious about. And in the real world, they're recalled by veterans over beer as a waste of goddamn time.
In fact, I dropped out of the CS program early when I realized that everything I was learning I already knew, most of my time was spent writing bullshit lab write ups for other people and the stuff I didn't know could be looked up on the Internet and learned in roughly ten minutes. The SCIENCE of computers is laregely academic in the real world, and those parts that aren't academic are best learned on demand.
Well yeah, duh. Certifications are, and always have been, a way of setting you apart from all the other blank faces. They say, "in lieu of everything else I might not be able to do, at least I can pass this marginally complicated test pertaining to my future position."
Requiring a cert is an easy way to cut down on pospective garbage. And there's a lot of garbage...I stopped telling people I worked with web applications because every fifth guy I met would tell me "Really? I design websites too!" At the very least a guy with a cert was serious enough about the field to pay for and study for a test to prove his seriousness. He could still be an idiot, but for every idiot that gets a cert, there are four idiots who didn't bother.
Incidentally, everybody I know in IT that I trust -- and there aren't a lot of them -- is well certified. Bullshit or not, certs will get you jobs with companies that do the work on a big scale. And that experience is worth its weight in laminated certificates.
Pico. I didn't pay for it, but it's not free?
What the fuck do I cared what those debian assholes think?
dasmb: PICO!
[crickets chirp]
dasmb: It's free-as-in-love software? Comes with Pine? Tells you right on the screen how to save, cut a line, or quit out of it and doesn't expect you to automatically know that it's ESC, Colon, Q?
Incidentally, I wrote all my essays in college in Pico and then reformatted them in Word Perfect. This permitted me to completely forget about formatting while I was writing, and forced me to proof read everything while setting up the display format.
The latest Nero may have umpteen thousand features, but it's still REALLY GOOD. Best burnsoft I've seen on the PC. But if you want simple, elegant burnsofts, you've got to check out Toast 6. Holy crap. It is so easy to use, and yet has just about everything you could want. It lets you switch from CD to DVD with one button, automatically figures out the best way to reencode video and even sets intelligent defaults.
Yes, it's the same price as Nero with fewer features. It's worth it for the time you save using it...which is substantial.
Maybe you should take a class (or read a book) on Word styles. After hearing my wife complain for MONTHS that Word didn't do what she wanted it to do (which was act like WordPerfect and reveal codes like it was a fucking markup language -- can you imagine manually bolding, italicizing, resizing fonts, changing margins, etc, on 100+ page documents? In the 21st friggin' Century?), I did exactly that. I built her a style book that did everything she wanted to do with a lot less work; she's considering asking her boss to bring me in as a trainer so she can get the rest of her office (who are being forcefully brought into MS Word) how to use them.
The "inheritance" is not mysterious at all. It's just very, very detailed. Each style is linked to the style that it's based on. Unless you manually set a value, your style grabs one from the one it's based on. This permits you to change ALL of the settings in a document by changing that setting in one style. Want to switch fonts in all captions? Make a caption style, and base individual captions for images, tables, etc on that one. Change anything EXCEPT for the font...leave that the way it is. Then, changing the font on the parent applies to everything else. This is exactly the way CSS (cascading style sheets) works in web development.
As for Word being the wrong choice for 200+ page docs...I can only speak for Office 2004, but it's pretty good at managing big data. My wife has 150 pages of a report on her G3 with images and styles and charts and hyperlinks and all of that, and it's as fast as it was with 10 pages (which isn't snappy but is usable). Unfortunately, the Office apps for Macintosh are written by a different group (used to be a different COMPANY) than those for PC. So it's hardly representative. The only thing they share is a feature set and file format...everything else, including (I think) the codebase is compeltely different.