HOWEVER, there is a difference in attitude between "losers are stupid and should never be informed of the facts of life" and something at least aimed toward making the users more informed. If you have a deadly disease, there is a difference between the doctor knows the name and refuses to tell you that name and the doctor tells you the name but you are not competent to understand the terms. Me I prefer the latter. Hiding file extensions does not do EVERYTHING to help out the bad guys, but it does draw a line in the sand as to where Microsoft stands regarding informed victims of its software.
>Why is it that they can provide 250GB of transfer for $45/month, but the next 250GB costs $500? In a word. Oversubscribed. Anyone who subscribes to the second 250GB tends to use ALL the first 250GB (instead of the more usual 5 or 10 GB).
Unfortunately the Burroughs refused to run mainframe software with such bugs. Burroughs died. IBMs ran such software without complaint. IBM survived. Since the programs certainly had some design errors, it really becomes a question of which erroneous behaviors are silliest. Often the "most correct" are the silliest.
>MS products are good in firms that have the resources to insure all machines are homogeneous and up to date, firms that require a high level of collaborations of complex non-technical documents
Including both customers' and vendors' computers. (regardless of how or how not technical);-) Actually you need to make exactly the same errors in the same way that your big customers/vendors do. Esperanto is a better language for everybody to use rather than English/French/Spanish/German.etc-etc, BUT
It is always useful to be able to blame your own mistakes on somebody else's version/configuration/whatever of software. With Microsoft this is much easier than if using software that actually works correctly.
> Just from my own experience, it seems like there are a bunch of different things going on when you try to multitask. Yep;-) From my own experience, the time-slicing model is pretty accurate, except that there is enough processing for a certain amount of things in the conscious mind. There is a lot more processing ability in the subconscious. Plus, much of the processing occurs at lower levels, like how much of coding is actually in the fingers, how much of driving is the the eye-hand-foot coordination. It's more like a higher level affecting a control loop well after the control loop has done its initial reactions.
How often: Not realy paying attention and miss a turn off? Not really paying attention and do the turn off to where you used to go?
For fun, try walking with total concentration and total conscious control of all aspects of movement and balance.
For things that require immediate attention (driving, balance) you develop well-trained reflexes. For everything else you can do such as replaying what you were hearing when you were not paying attention. (Saved my bacon many a time while sleeping in class)
The two-tasking theory seems to me to be more a case of the one, two, many. Without a clear distinction between the nature of the two and the many. I like yours better. Probably much more like a continuum between the one task in the forefront and everything else going on in the background(s). If you think or concentrate enough, you forget to breathe, so the two-task thingee must be some kind of oversimplification.
> That's assuming that comments add a significant amount time to a project. Granted, that extraneous comments are not a good thing, however the whole reason it is considered a good idea in the community, is because a comment takes 10 seconds to write for the developer. When you wrote a piece of code you know exactly what it is doing and can comment with very little effort. Dunno about you, but for me, knowing exactly what the code is doing is barely possible in extremely well designed Assembler code and far from feasible in anything "higher-level".
> That's assuming that comments add a significant amount time to a project. Granted, that extraneous comments are not a good thing, however the whole reason it is considered a good idea in the community, is because a comment takes 10 seconds to write for the developer. When you wrote a piece of code you know exactly what it is doing and can comment with very little effort. Very correct. The absence of a comment must be indicative about the state of the code quality.
> The other aspect is, I think it is excellent practice to write comments before you code. I've never seen it done, but that would be very workable and productive.
> It's a big assumption to say that all future developers to look at a block of code will understand it, especially when to you as the developer who wrote it it is all obvious. I have found that it is almost never obvious to me, after as little as 6 days, let alonw somebody else after 6 years. It is easy to write something and convince yourself that it makes sense, without it ever having made sense. This is significantly easier to do with "meaningful" names and "high level" languages. The problem is that what works and what does not work depend on the location of the edges and corners and where they impact the environment as things twist and turn.
>>No, comments like that are absolutely useless. When you write them, you know the context a lot better than someone who comes in to debug or extend it months or years later. Obviously you recognize there is or may be an inefficiency fragility to the code. Not having time to sort it out is understandable. Not having time to properly note what about the code is fragile or inefficient? Sorry, that's utter bullshit. Take the three minutes necessary to give the reader a proper explanation of what you don't like about it. "This fails if X possible but unlikely condition occurs," "This is unacceptably slow when more than N rows are returned because of Y," or something is more like it. "I don't have time to be helpful" is a lame excuse for not being very good at your job.
Horse-hockey. If he had time and ability to document exactly what was wrong with it, then he would have fixed the mess instead of commenting on it. Any existing code is the result of some kind of trade-offs between what is needed, when it is needed, and the resources available. On the information highway, it has to be useful to distinguish between expressways and goat-trails.
When code need to be revised, your own or somebody else's, the first thing I would want to distinguish is whether is is better to modify the existing or to do a complete redesign. You somehow seem to believe that the original writer has better foresight of my current context than I can have.
Now quick, what is it about Windows 7 that makes it fragile?
Yes it is error-prone. However not having ANYTHING commented is much more error-prone. You are not going to write anything non-trivial that does not have error. Your only choices are which errors and how many and some of what the (unforeseen) consequences are.
Maybe the best comments are those written with the attitude of "What would I need to know if I weren't the one who wrote this stuff?"
The situation is precisely that the system was vulnerable, somethings have been fixed, maybe, the system is still vulnerable, only we do not know what/where/when. You might catch a disease or something. Better to die quickly.
For fun, program something that matches exactly the rounding errors that would be done using pencil and paper. Seems like this is much much easier to do in COBOL (or basic assembler) and all the nice abstractions make an easy path to wrong answers.
Seems like the main problem with COBOL systems is that if you add once character to a data field, you must not only change all the programs and all the data, but also all the historical archives. Hmmmm.
>if you change the OS, does the user IQ change with it?
Other way around. When you lower the user IQ, the OS will change. When the IQ is low enough, the OS will be Microsoft. Just look at the audience that Microsoft ads are targeted toward.
When a book or charitable affair is advertised as being for a charitable purpose, then it is my business to know what the arrangement is. And there is a big difference between profits and proceeds. If a car dealer provides a car that is raffled off to some charity, it does matter if that charity is the car dealer's own pocket.
One reason for that kind of arrangement is that it avoids messy arguments about who gets what percentage of the profits/proceeds -- as in who gets more than whom.
seems to be one of those buzzwords that are taken for granted, but under duress are not really desirable attributes. The easiest (only?) way to achieve consistency in times of trouble is to destroy all information constent that is not consistent. That means destroying all files (and directories) which are not all there.
You are stranded on a desert island desperate for news. You have a choice between a month-old newspaper which is intact and yesterdays newspaper which has been mouthed over by hungry sharks.
Your network server with all your orders, shipments, invoices etc just went up in smoke. You have a choice between 97.5% recovery of all the current data or a00% recovery of month-old data.
Seems like the people that promote these things are never in the position of actually having to use them. (Sounds like politicians. Lots of plans sound great, as long as you do not actually have to implement them).
There is a basic rule of medicine which seems to not apply to systems analysis. First, do not damage (or something to that effect).
It's always Microsoft's fault. Shoot first. Find out the facts later. Read what follows. With the disconnect between hype and reality, the results are predictable. Enronitis does not stop at the borders. The infection bleeds over the edges. Any culture in which mediocrity is an aspiration will eventually run into trouble.
>i.e. the data without the program that interprets and presents it and controls its modification is pert' near worthless. You mean like hijacking credit card numbers, personal data, etc. etc. That's kinda like without the facade the building and the land it stands on is of little value.
>but it simply feels so hard to describe. What made Vista suck? >Yes people, a total stranger chipped in on a discussion to say his opinion on Vista The victims are wising up. Actually, Vista is not so bad once you get rid of everything that is supposed to make it better. Now watch for Windows 7 (and remember DOW down 777)
>It is supposed to be bad practice to argue different things in different courts at the same time. It is very good practice if you win both cases. However, seeing it is SCO, I'd much prefer they LOSE both cases. Assuming lawyers are rational????
>.. to become a rigorous engineering discipline. It's not quite there yet. I am not convinced that it ever will be. "Real Engineering" has something called "Strength of Materials". You can build a bridge out of wood or out of steel, but the designs will be different because engineers are aware that different materials have different properties and have some ability to quantify those differences. Designing a bridge so that it will "scale" would never be attempted in any real engineering discipline. However, engineers will make designs which are valid over some range. Look real deep and I suspect that the creative processes are the more rigorous. "Just remove everything from the block of marble that isn't David" Just being different shouln't count as being creative.
Slashdot Mirror
HOWEVER, there is a difference in attitude between "losers are stupid and should never be informed of the facts of life" and something at least aimed toward making the users more informed.
If you have a deadly disease, there is a difference between the doctor knows the name and refuses to tell you that name and the doctor tells you the name but you are not competent to understand the terms. Me I prefer the latter.
Hiding file extensions does not do EVERYTHING to help out the bad guys, but it does draw a line in the sand as to where Microsoft stands regarding informed victims of its software.
>Why is it that they can provide 250GB of transfer for $45/month, but the next 250GB costs $500?
In a word. Oversubscribed.
Anyone who subscribes to the second 250GB tends to use ALL the first 250GB (instead of the more usual 5 or 10 GB).
Further, expensive placebos have been shown to be more effective than cheaper placebos.
Unfortunately the Burroughs refused to run mainframe software with such bugs. Burroughs died.
IBMs ran such software without complaint. IBM survived.
Since the programs certainly had some design errors, it really becomes a question of which erroneous behaviors are silliest. Often the "most correct" are the silliest.
Methinks that atheism is effectively just another religion and that overzealousness and exclusiveness in all of them is a problem.
>MS products are good in firms that have the resources to insure all machines are homogeneous and up to date, firms that require a high level of collaborations of complex non-technical documents
Including both customers' and vendors' computers. (regardless of how or how not technical) ;-)
Actually you need to make exactly the same errors in the same way that your big customers/vendors do.
Esperanto is a better language for everybody to use rather than English/French/Spanish/German.etc-etc, BUT
It is always useful to be able to blame your own mistakes on somebody else's version/configuration/whatever of software.
With Microsoft this is much easier than if using software that actually works correctly.
> Just from my own experience, it seems like there are a bunch of different things going on when you try to multitask. ;-) From my own experience, the time-slicing model is pretty accurate, except that there is enough processing for a certain amount of things in the conscious mind. There is a lot more processing ability in the subconscious. Plus, much of the processing occurs at lower levels, like how much of coding is actually in the fingers, how much of driving is the the eye-hand-foot coordination. It's more like a higher level affecting a control loop well after the control loop has done its initial reactions.
Yep
How often:
Not realy paying attention and miss a turn off?
Not really paying attention and do the turn off to where you used to go?
For fun, try walking with total concentration and total conscious control of all aspects of movement and balance.
For things that require immediate attention (driving, balance) you develop well-trained reflexes.
For everything else you can do such as replaying what you were hearing when you were not paying attention. (Saved my bacon many a time while sleeping in class)
The two-tasking theory seems to me to be more a case of the one, two, many. Without a clear distinction between the nature of the two and the many. I like yours better. Probably much more like a continuum between the one task in the forefront and everything else going on in the background(s). If you think or concentrate enough, you forget to breathe, so the two-task thingee must be some kind of oversimplification.
> That's assuming that comments add a significant amount time to a project. Granted, that extraneous comments are not a good thing, however the whole reason it is considered a good idea in the community, is because a comment takes 10 seconds to write for the developer. When you wrote a piece of code you know exactly what it is doing and can comment with very little effort.
Dunno about you, but for me, knowing exactly what the code is doing is barely possible in extremely well designed Assembler code and far from feasible in anything "higher-level".
> That's assuming that comments add a significant amount time to a project. Granted, that extraneous comments are not a good thing, however the whole reason it is considered a good idea in the community, is because a comment takes 10 seconds to write for the developer. When you wrote a piece of code you know exactly what it is doing and can comment with very little effort.
Very correct. The absence of a comment must be indicative about the state of the code quality.
> The other aspect is, I think it is excellent practice to write comments before you code.
I've never seen it done, but that would be very workable and productive.
> It's a big assumption to say that all future developers to look at a block of code will understand it, especially when to you as the developer who wrote it it is all obvious.
I have found that it is almost never obvious to me, after as little as 6 days, let alonw somebody else after 6 years. It is easy to write something and convince yourself that it makes sense, without it ever having made sense. This is significantly easier to do with "meaningful" names and "high level" languages. The problem is that what works and what does not work depend on the location of the edges and corners and where they impact the environment as things twist and turn.
>>No, comments like that are absolutely useless. When you write them, you know the context a lot better than someone who comes in to debug or extend it months or years later. Obviously you recognize there is or may be an inefficiency fragility to the code. Not having time to sort it out is understandable. Not having time to properly note what about the code is fragile or inefficient? Sorry, that's utter bullshit. Take the three minutes necessary to give the reader a proper explanation of what you don't like about it. "This fails if X possible but unlikely condition occurs," "This is unacceptably slow when more than N rows are returned because of Y," or something is more like it. "I don't have time to be helpful" is a lame excuse for not being very good at your job.
Horse-hockey.
If he had time and ability to document exactly what was wrong with it, then he would have fixed the mess instead of commenting on it.
Any existing code is the result of some kind of trade-offs between what is needed, when it is needed, and the resources available.
On the information highway, it has to be useful to distinguish between expressways and goat-trails.
When code need to be revised, your own or somebody else's, the first thing I would want to distinguish is whether is is better to modify the existing or to do a complete redesign. You somehow seem to believe that the original writer has better foresight of my current context than I can have.
Now quick, what is it about Windows 7 that makes it fragile?
Yes it is error-prone.
However not having ANYTHING commented is much more error-prone.
You are not going to write anything non-trivial that does not have error.
Your only choices are which errors and how many and some of what the (unforeseen) consequences are.
Maybe the best comments are those written with the attitude of "What would I need to know if I weren't the one who wrote this stuff?"
Including the ability to make further updates.
The situation is precisely that the system was vulnerable, somethings have been fixed, maybe, the system is still vulnerable, only we do not know what/where/when. You might catch a disease or something. Better to die quickly.
>I eyerolled when he told a paramedic "this man needs an I.V."
The patient is dehydrated.
There is a standard saline solution into which they will sometimes put some other medicines.
For fun, program something that matches exactly the rounding errors that would be done using pencil and paper.
Seems like this is much much easier to do in COBOL (or basic assembler) and all the nice abstractions make an easy path to wrong answers.
Seems like the main problem with COBOL systems is that if you add once character to a data field, you must not only change all the programs and all the data, but also all the historical archives. Hmmmm.
Once upon a time I could even read the dumps. Nice orderly architecture, but that was in a former lifetime.
>if you change the OS, does the user IQ change with it?
Other way around.
When you lower the user IQ, the OS will change.
When the IQ is low enough, the OS will be Microsoft.
Just look at the audience that Microsoft ads are targeted toward.
When a book or charitable affair is advertised as being for a charitable purpose, then it is my business to know what the arrangement is. And there is a big difference between profits and proceeds.
If a car dealer provides a car that is raffled off to some charity, it does matter if that charity is the car dealer's own pocket.
One reason for that kind of arrangement is that it avoids messy arguments about who gets what percentage of the profits/proceeds -- as in who gets more than whom.
seems to be one of those buzzwords that are taken for granted, but under duress are not really desirable attributes. The easiest (only?) way to achieve consistency in times of trouble is to destroy all information constent that is not consistent. That means destroying all files (and directories) which are not all there.
You are stranded on a desert island desperate for news. You have a choice between a month-old newspaper which is intact and yesterdays newspaper which has been mouthed over by hungry sharks.
Your network server with all your orders, shipments, invoices etc just went up in smoke. You have a choice between 97.5% recovery of all the current data or a00% recovery of month-old data.
Seems like the people that promote these things are never in the position of actually having to use them. (Sounds like politicians. Lots of plans sound great, as long as you do not actually have to implement them).
There is a basic rule of medicine which seems to not apply to systems analysis. First, do not damage (or something to that effect).
It's always Microsoft's fault.
Shoot first. Find out the facts later. Read what follows.
With the disconnect between hype and reality, the results are predictable.
Enronitis does not stop at the borders. The infection bleeds over the edges.
Any culture in which mediocrity is an aspiration will eventually run into trouble.
>i.e. the data without the program that interprets and presents it and controls its modification is pert' near worthless.
You mean like hijacking credit card numbers, personal data, etc. etc.
That's kinda like without the facade the building and the land it stands on is of little value.
>but it simply feels so hard to describe. What made Vista suck?
>Yes people, a total stranger chipped in on a discussion to say his opinion on Vista
The victims are wising up.
Actually, Vista is not so bad once you get rid of everything that is supposed to make it better.
Now watch for Windows 7 (and remember DOW down 777)
>It is supposed to be bad practice to argue different things in different courts at the same time.
It is very good practice if you win both cases.
However, seeing it is SCO, I'd much prefer they LOSE both cases.
Assuming lawyers are rational????
Nah. What works is ...
Always blame Microsoft.
First blame Microsoft.
Then find out why.
Works annoyingly well.
The computer is an object of rage. Justified.
You can be on the side of the computer or the side of the human.
>.. to become a rigorous engineering discipline. It's not quite there yet. I am not convinced that it ever will be.
"Real Engineering" has something called "Strength of Materials". You can build a bridge out of wood or out of steel, but the designs will be different because engineers are aware that different materials have different properties and have some ability to quantify those differences. Designing a bridge so that it will "scale" would never be attempted in any real engineering discipline. However, engineers will make designs which are valid over some range.
Look real deep and I suspect that the creative processes are the more rigorous. "Just remove everything from the block of marble that isn't David" Just being different shouln't count as being creative.
Hmmm.... ..... "Bung"?
is the passed tense of "Bing"
>CD is read-only, thus not applicable.
I do not care about overwriting the CD.
I do care about overwriting everything else.
Seems like there are CD's which will boot and then automatically wipe the disk. Very useful for Windows computers.