I don't write shoddy code at work. I do, however, do exactly and only as much as I need to, to fulfil the requirements that I'm given. Often, that means writing core that I know or suspect will be discarded, or writing code that works today, at the cost of needing a re-write tomorrow.
It's not the appearance, it's the smell. RMS smells bad. He smells so bad that it's difficult to concentrate on what he's actually saying, face to face. This is not a troll, nor repetition of a third party anecdote; it's a personal observation, based on meeting and talking to him. It annoys me that he apparently takes deliberate delight in forcing people to get past the smell (and the appearance) in order to dialogue with him. I find it childish and inconsiderate. Personal hygiene is a basic common courtesy.
Have you ever worked with any of the big Korean or Malaysian software developers? They run their operations like battery chicken farms, with developers crowded in elbow-to-elbow. Time to market is everything, and so they deliberately duplicate effort by promoting internal competition, with individuals and teams rushing to hammer out code before someone else beats them to it. It makes them a real nightmare to work with, and the standard of their code is appalling. They get code that gets the job done, but then they have to throw it away and start over. They actually, and I know this from bitter experience, obfuscate their code to make it harder for anyone else to work on it, so that they can win the next round of competitive completion. Yuk.
I have a dreadful suspicion that software bounties will engender the same type-type-done-next school of development among Free software projects, and it's not something that I look forward to. My further suspicion is that Joe Bounty will lash something together to claim the money, and then Sally Tidyup will have to come along later and unpick the mess. Poor Sally.
I'd bet on RMS, smelly hippy though he is, being right in the mid to long term, if for no other reason than he hasn't (to the best of my knowledge) been wrong yet. In any prediction. Ever.
In purely practical terms, the OSDL patent project is like trying to put out a burning forest by standing close enough to sweat on it.
Note to the easily confused. "Getting into orbit" means (for geosynchronous) going 35,786km that way, and also moving at 3070 m/s t'other way. You have to do both, or you're going to come back down this way with a rather nasty bump.
Do you think that Ma Bell should be forced to give paedophiles and terrorists full and unfetted access to the AOLnet, so that they can swap their depraved upskirt images of your children, and instructions on how to blow them up?
And that's how you skew a poll. Funny or insightful, I'll take either.
If it walks like a duck, don't believe it when it quacks that it's a sheep.
Piratbyran is a front for commercial copiers. Let's not mince words; these guys make their living from other peoples' creations. The "Pirate Party" is just a particularly clever wheeze to give a veneer of respectability to their actions. Yes, they believe that what they are doing is right, but so do paedophiles, and you wouldn't give much credence to the Kiddie Fiddling Party, would you?
Say... has anyone checked how they spent their campaign contribitions?
If we did, then we might notice that 14m * 6.5m * 1 kW m-2 * 15% efficiency ~= 13.65 kW ~= 18 horsepower. At mid-day, with no cloud cover.
From "Choosing the Right Outboard For Your Boat", we find that an 18 horsepower motor is sufficient for a boat up to 25 feet (7.7m) and 600lbs (272 kg). The boat in question here is an Aquabus C60 variant, at 14m and weighing approximately 10000 kg when empty.
Note that the standard boat has 2 x 16 kW motors, but a solar surface of only 20m2, which will produce only about 3 kW (4 hp); i.e. for all practical purposes, it is battery powered.
If this boat even makes headway on an open sea, let alone 5-6 knots 24 hours a day, I'll eat my tin foil hat.
It's a cute advertising gimmick though, I'll give them that.
Well, they could increase the surface area by building vertical fins. And while they're doing that, they could shape the fins in order to act as aerofoils. And then they could forget about the stupid, expensive, resource-intensive and inefficient solar cells, and just sail the damn boat.
> "It's completely possible to produce solar panels without oil"
No, it's not. You're thinking of the future, when it may be possible to do so. But this article is about "[demonstrating] that the time has come for solar boats".
Make your argument based on what's possible now, please. Right now, solar cells require a large up front investment for a small long term payoff.
>"Get paid to answer questions! Use Student of Fortune as a source of extra cash. Answer questions from other users and earn a bounty."
Attention impoverished college professors with a malicious sense of justice and an ability to write plausible looking bullshit! Now you too can earn $$$ while wrecking the lives of trust fund cheaters!
Less than 1/50th the price. Not insignificantly, 22lbs is light enough to carry if it breaks down. The lightest Segway is 70lbs. When it breaks down (or, more often, shuts down with an Out Of Cheese error), you might as well call a tow-truck.
So take them off and pop them in the microwave, then replace them. Dire warnings aside, the workload on modern refuse collectors is so high that it's vanishingly unlikely that the system will be set up scan and refuse bins without an RFID before emptying them, and it's a fair bet that the beaurocracy won't be set up effectively to investigate who owns which anonymous bin. Do you see the chap on the bin lorry giving a damn? He just wants to get done as soon as possible.
Well, Belgium is a dull, law abiding sort of place. Here in Blighty, the patriotic thing to do would be to dump your trash in your neighbour's bin and make them pay for it.
Um, they are starting with the bunny suit guys. I know it's important to get your comment in without wasting time reading the article, but the biggest losses will be in marketing. So this is just 100% great news for all the people involved.
Slashdot Mirror
What QuantumG said.
I don't write shoddy code at work. I do, however, do exactly and only as much as I need to, to fulfil the requirements that I'm given. Often, that means writing core that I know or suspect will be discarded, or writing code that works today, at the cost of needing a re-write tomorrow.
It's not the appearance, it's the smell. RMS smells bad. He smells so bad that it's difficult to concentrate on what he's actually saying, face to face. This is not a troll, nor repetition of a third party anecdote; it's a personal observation, based on meeting and talking to him. It annoys me that he apparently takes deliberate delight in forcing people to get past the smell (and the appearance) in order to dialogue with him. I find it childish and inconsiderate. Personal hygiene is a basic common courtesy.
The Usar Freindly example, if you've been following the history:
I have to admire the guy's persistence. He's a tone deaf opera singer who just won't take "STFU" as an answer.
Not different, but not necessarily good.
I don't see how it can work without resulting in:
Have you ever worked with any of the big Korean or Malaysian software developers? They run their operations like battery chicken farms, with developers crowded in elbow-to-elbow. Time to market is everything, and so they deliberately duplicate effort by promoting internal competition, with individuals and teams rushing to hammer out code before someone else beats them to it. It makes them a real nightmare to work with, and the standard of their code is appalling. They get code that gets the job done, but then they have to throw it away and start over. They actually, and I know this from bitter experience, obfuscate their code to make it harder for anyone else to work on it, so that they can win the next round of competitive completion. Yuk.
I have a dreadful suspicion that software bounties will engender the same type-type-done-next school of development among Free software projects, and it's not something that I look forward to. My further suspicion is that Joe Bounty will lash something together to claim the money, and then Sally Tidyup will have to come along later and unpick the mess. Poor Sally.
The code I write at home for my own enjoyment is far higher quality than what I write to satisfy the terms of my employment contract. End of anecdote.
I'd bet on RMS, smelly hippy though he is, being right in the mid to long term, if for no other reason than he hasn't (to the best of my knowledge) been wrong yet. In any prediction. Ever.
In purely practical terms, the OSDL patent project is like trying to put out a burning forest by standing close enough to sweat on it.
Relevant how? This is like setting fire to the curtains and saying "How do you like that, kitchen counter?"
Great, we're killing our host. Why couldn't we have waited until we'd spread our infection to a new planet?
Multiple Organisms is a ridiculous feminist myth.
So you did. Cheerfully retracted.
I can't think of a payload for a 100km straight-up--straight-down mission other than a camera. Care to drop any less cryptic hints?
Note to the easily confused. "Getting into orbit" means (for geosynchronous) going 35,786km that way, and also moving at 3070 m/s t'other way. You have to do both, or you're going to come back down this way with a rather nasty bump.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Specifically I think it means about 7.73 km/sec away from what you think it means. Going up is the easy part. The trick is staying there.
And that's how you skew a poll. Funny or insightful, I'll take either.
If it walks like a duck, don't believe it when it quacks that it's a sheep.
Piratbyran is a front for commercial copiers. Let's not mince words; these guys make their living from other peoples' creations. The "Pirate Party" is just a particularly clever wheeze to give a veneer of respectability to their actions. Yes, they believe that what they are doing is right, but so do paedophiles, and you wouldn't give much credence to the Kiddie Fiddling Party, would you?
Say... has anyone checked how they spent their campaign contribitions?
If we did, then we might notice that 14m * 6.5m * 1 kW m-2 * 15% efficiency ~= 13.65 kW ~= 18 horsepower. At mid-day, with no cloud cover.
From "Choosing the Right Outboard For Your Boat", we find that an 18 horsepower motor is sufficient for a boat up to 25 feet (7.7m) and 600lbs (272 kg). The boat in question here is an Aquabus C60 variant, at 14m and weighing approximately 10000 kg when empty.
Note that the standard boat has 2 x 16 kW motors, but a solar surface of only 20m2, which will produce only about 3 kW (4 hp); i.e. for all practical purposes, it is battery powered.
If this boat even makes headway on an open sea, let alone 5-6 knots 24 hours a day, I'll eat my tin foil hat.
It's a cute advertising gimmick though, I'll give them that.
Well, they could increase the surface area by building vertical fins. And while they're doing that, they could shape the fins in order to act as aerofoils. And then they could forget about the stupid, expensive, resource-intensive and inefficient solar cells, and just sail the damn boat.
No, it's not. You're thinking of the future, when it may be possible to do so. But this article is about "[demonstrating] that the time has come for solar boats".
Make your argument based on what's possible now, please. Right now, solar cells require a large up front investment for a small long term payoff.
Attention impoverished college professors with a malicious sense of justice and an ability to write plausible looking bullshit! Now you too can earn $$$ while wrecking the lives of trust fund cheaters!
And a subscription to the Phantom(R) Game Service.
I think I've found one which matches the Segway's promise.
Less than 1/50th the price. Not insignificantly, 22lbs is light enough to carry if it breaks down. The lightest Segway is 70lbs. When it breaks down (or, more often, shuts down with an Out Of Cheese error), you might as well call a tow-truck.
So take them off and pop them in the microwave, then replace them. Dire warnings aside, the workload on modern refuse collectors is so high that it's vanishingly unlikely that the system will be set up scan and refuse bins without an RFID before emptying them, and it's a fair bet that the beaurocracy won't be set up effectively to investigate who owns which anonymous bin. Do you see the chap on the bin lorry giving a damn? He just wants to get done as soon as possible.
Well, Belgium is a dull, law abiding sort of place. Here in Blighty, the patriotic thing to do would be to dump your trash in your neighbour's bin and make them pay for it.
Um, they are starting with the bunny suit guys. I know it's important to get your comment in without wasting time reading the article, but the biggest losses will be in marketing. So this is just 100% great news for all the people involved.