One very important thing to remember about code size is that LOC is a very good indicator of # of bugs. Reducing the number of lines of code (obviously without reducing functionality) is a good way to reduce # of bugs, and also to make your hackers more productive.
Yup, that's one of the fundamental constants of software engineering, the other is:
"Time to write a line of code is constant"
In other words:
Bugs/LOC = k
Time/LOC = k
Reducing the number of LOC you have to write is therefore a good thing on two counts - less time writing, less time debugging + more stable apps.
And no, you can't argue with the SE weenies on this one - it's been shown to be true a million times over.*
* Caveat: k is different for different people, different measurement systems etc. Obviously.
1) Scientology is in the "Official 300's" - it's just below Satanism - which is a little scary: Even if there is no "official" recognition granted by being amongst the real religions, it's worrying to think that Scientology wangled it's way up there, and instead of being alongside the Jedi Knights, where it belongs...
2) We tried the same thing in New Zealand. The government ditched the data as "spurious". Bastards.
Yes, you should probably worry that practically anyone can build a supercomputer. But you could mitigate all that fear with the fact that not practically anyone can whip up software that takes full advantage of it.
Thank god there isn't any off the shelf "missile trajectory" software in the CDW catalog. you would hope that any society that can whip together motivated coders to write such code already has access to some pretty spiffy kit.
And in tonights' news, Saddam Hussein announces his support for the open source movement, and promises to help coordinate and fund a number of projects in a a variety of areas, including chemical analysis, epidemiology and particle physics.
That seems kind of confusing to me that it offers protection against electronic eavesdropping, as doesn't the building need to connect to the "outside world" somehow? As long as a single line filled with data is coming out of the building, it isn't protected fully. Now if they could secure the lines all the way to uhh, the end user's house...THEN it would be superior.
Unless of course the end user is not the end user they think is there, or the end user is an undesirable... securing an entire communications channel is no simple task!
This kind of blatant misinformation is exactly what we need to guard against. It's an old trick, take the facts and distort them subtly to completely misrepresent reality. The US and other allies regularly bomb Iraqi military targets, they bomb Radar installations and command and control infrastructure Iraq uses to direct missile attacks on overflying jets. Your loyalties are betrayed by the bare faced lies in the text of the article you are promulgating. There are thousands of innocent civilians dead in America and Palestinians are dancing in the street.
Oh for God's sake cut the bullshit! To accuse others of "misinformation" and then state that there were "thousands" of Palestinians dancing in the streets is complete and utter hypocrisy, and the absolutely worst kind of racist political scare mongering.
The reality is a small number of extremists yelling and screaming, filmed repeatedly in tightly focussed shots. Most Palestinians were indoors, watching the TV just like the rest of the world - and just as horrified as the rest of the world.
Go on. Mod me down because your angry. You know it will make you feel better...
Re:Not this stupid 'programming is art' BS again!
on
Software Aesthetics
·
· Score: 1
>>Please think before repeating these banal
>>opinions that software is art. It just isn't.
>>Deal with it, and if you want to be an artist,
>>learn to paint.
>
>Spoken like someone who just doesn't really
>comprehend software design, or why one design
>might be more elegant than another. I suppose
>you don't think mathematics is beautiful ?
>either...
I'd say the first poster was also someone who doesn't understand art. Art is not necessarily about creating visual images - it's about expressing and inspiring emotions. Whether you do it "prettily" or "beautifully" has absolutely nothing to do with whether the art has any power.
Yes, it's subjective, but by and by, _good_ art arouses in _most_ people emotion of some form (which is not necessarily uniform across the viewers.)
Becoming an artist by just learning to paint is absurd.
Disclaimer: Spoken by someone who has absolutely no artistic ability whatsoever... although I love music, mathematics, programming and visual/traditional art for it's artistic merits. I am always amazed at how much information can be contained so compactly within equations... beauty through economy.
Humanity will, over the next few years - perhaps a couple of centuries - evolve along the following path:
1) Soft aids. As you describe - "smart" devices, jacking in to networks, visual representations of computer internals.
2) Hard aids. Computer equipment that is internal, implanted possibly at birth, puberty or adulthood. Enhanced memory, face recognition, logical analysis etc will all be available - a lawyer + videocamera in our heads.
3) Non-physical humans. Simulation of a human brain within a computer. Gradual evolution away from the traditional human brain model, towards something more optimised for an artificial brain. What exactly? I don't know. But I predict that within a few hundred years, physical humans will be very rare.
Yes... I think a lot of people have confused Satanism with devil worship. As I understand it the two are very different, with Satanism essentially being, as the "commandment" you quote suggests, an anarchistic philosophy, rather than a religion dedicated to doing evil.
Doh! I'm guilty here of not carefully reviewing what I wrote before I hit Submit.
How you phrased it is as I intended it - I just worded it very ambiguously.
That said, I am surprised to hear that minors rights are in fact that limited in the US, but I'm not going to disagree with you - I merely assumed otherwise:)
Dragon jewellery is sacreligious?! Seriously though, this is exactly what I'm talking about...
I myself am not an American, so can't comment - I can only go by what I have heard from others who are - but I'm surprised to hear that minors have no constitutional rights?
First of all, surely minors are entitled to the same protections from, for example, police brutality, the right to bear arms and be in a state militia etc etc.
Likewise, I wouldn't have thought a school could discriminate so blatantly, and allow one group to wear their insignia, but not another.
Finally, in my opinion, if an organisation is publically funded - especially public schools, which are almost entirely publically funded - then it, to me, falls into the same category as organisations such as the armed forces and government funded hospitals - and IIRC there was a big stink about Wiccan's in the military being discriminated against recently, and how the military had to change.
As an aside, I find it ironic that pentagrams are banned... they are traditional Christian symbols, and represent a man with arms uplifted, looking up to heaven.
If the school allows other clubs, then they should allow bible clubs equal access. Otherwise they are prohibiting the free exercise of religion, abridging those student's right to free speech, and preventing them from peaceably assembling on property that is available to others.
I think most of the conflict arises when the bible clubs want to post things like the ten commandments publicly on the noticeboards... but don't want people posting, for example the commandments of the Satanists (or the equivalent - do they have commandments?).
Hypocrisy is never ethical. And frankly, I think it's something many religious organisations are guilty of.
[Dons asbestos suit and prepares to take cover behind fireproof wall]
Your misunderstanding the singularity. It is not necessarily an asymptote, merely the idea that at a certain point, the rate of change of "whatever" becomes so great that it's impossible to predict anything more than a trivial distance into the future. Vinge predicts that this will come sometime in the mid 21st century - that any predictions after then are off, simply because the rate of change is so steep - not because theres an "asymptote" preventing us from reaching that point.
While I didn't do this course, the introductory COMP course at Otago Uni uses Computer Confluence, by Beekman, which I have read.
It is a good mix of basic windows concepts (menus, left and right clicking etc), basic hardware concepts (what is software, what is hardware, input and output) and a mix of applicatio specific stuff like MS Word. It's not a book for techies, but it's a very friendly book for non-geeks who just want to learn how to use a computer.
As a weapon - it would take a huge fleet of X-33 type bombers (which would have to be converted to stealth devices) to have much of an impact on the outcome of a war.
Whether or not the bombers would need to be "stealth" is an interesting question. For a start, most IADS systems don't have radars that scan up to a suborbital altitude with any significant signal strength, because there are few incoming threats at this time. In addition, the current crop of ASAT weapons (the only ones that could reach a sub-orbital altitude) are not designed to track a moving target. It would be like trying to shoot down an SR-71 flying a couple of times as fast and three or four times as high (at least).
Secondly, it does not necessarily take a huge fleet of bombers, of any kind, to have a significant impact.
For example, 5 or 6 of these could strike multiple targets all over a nation-state in a single sortie (I'm assuming they use some form of JDAM-guided kinetic harpoon or the like) with nearly 100% accuracy. Runways could be cratered, bridges knocked out, radars and communication nodes hit. Any high value target you could see could probably be hit from outside the country's borders - from a sub-orbital altitude and travelling at high speeds, you have a mighty long ballistic arc to play with. Hence, like stealth bombers, a "space-bomber" could be used to strike strategic targets at the beginning and during a war, crippling enemy forces and allowing traditional forces to accomplish their missions unchecked.
The U.S. is the only country in the history of the world to have been in the situation of knowing it could conquer the rest of the world and yet not do it. While other countries might bad mouth the U.S. they also realize this simple truth: at the end of World War II the rest of the world was at the mercy of the U.S., and mercy is exactly what the U.S. showed.
This is factually dodgy. The US and USSR were very closely balanced, with the BoP probably tipping towards the Soviets until the early 1950's. And then of course we got MAD and lot's of nukes, and conquering the world just wasn't viable. Rest assured, if it had been to the US's advantage, and possible, she would have conquered the world. (As any nation-state would have).
Yes, if there's one thing I hate, it's people who moan whenever they encounter a long sentence. I can't write them yet (I'm working on it), but a long sentence is a thing of beauty, clarity and deep informativeness - it allows one to capture a much larger model or concept much more efficiently than dealing with it in parts. If you want short sentences, go hang out at a kindergarten.
Of course, the downside is that those people who can't or won't read long sentences gain no understanding at all. But as Heinlein said, it is only the people who "think regularly, accurately, creatively, and without self-delusion" that matter - and to do this, creating and conceptualising large models is a prerequisite.
I've personally found Sun Tzu very helpful in games, especially against humans. He's basically required reading for "Diplomacy", which the British Foreign Service requires it's advisers and ambassadors to play, but I also wrote a text on deception and psychological warfare for Red Alert/Generic RTS's based on his writings... it worked brilliantly when you could pull it off, and cost little if it failed.
What have other people found worthwhile reading? I've read some good stuff on military theory, but that is generally very wargame specific - although the idea of force projection and the associated concepts are useful at times in other games - what are the more general texts that people have found useful?
Idly flicking through the Adobe site I came across this...
Reporting Suspected Privacy
If you know of, or believe you know of, an organization or an individual who is committing software piracy, please let us know. Reporting piracy is a good thing because:
Adobe will work with the person or organization to help it become compliant.
If the information you provide turns into a corporate lead and if we get the company to legalize (by buying genuine Adobe software), Adobe will donate a portion of the proceeds as software to underprivileged schools and nonprofits in North America and the rest of the world.
Oh the irony. I suppose this only applies to people who are actually pirating Adobe products, and not just showing the world how worthless they are?
Think of it as an indirect approach. For example, I was reading somewhere (cannot recall the source, but it was some magazine) about a scientist who decided to figure out why it was that coffee spills always dried with a dark ring around the outside. A whole lot of research later, science now knows a lot more about how molecules interact in fluids, which has led to practical applications such as (among many others that I cannot remember) fast-drying paint.
So now they've ruined Paint Watching as a sport as well?
Just great. Fucking wonderful.
Next thing you know the inherent entertainment in grass growing will be all sped up with some sort of fertility-enhancing "technology", just so morons with ride on mowers can grow luscious green lawns in the desert.
So for the sake of GOD....don't talk confuse the activites of Taliban with the teachings of ISLAM. I don't think there is any religion in the world that teaches us to harm other beings/be disrespectful to others.
How does a hand-grenade explosion a few feet away from you motivate you if you've just been marching 16 hours in tremendous heat?" asked Dr. Barry G. Silverman, an engineering professor at the University of Pennsylvania.
I'm not sure how you'd be motivated, but I'd be motivated to lie on my back and moan piteously, and then die shortly after from massive bleeding.
Why do they make new laws? Because it's easier and cheaper than enforcing the existing ones, while still making the politicos looking like they are earning their keep.
Oh, and did you mean necrophilia? narcophilia would be (presumably) love of drugs:)
A/. article in which, not only is the article informative, but most of the posts are more so!
I implore you, valiant editors of slashdot - we must defend the "/. is mindless entertainment" meme from the grievous threat of articles such as this and the second article on unicode - Act now! Your country needs you! Once more into the breach!
>The open source argument can and likely will be
>made moot by a little agility on Microsoft's
>part coupled with a tremendous amount of cash.
And this is definitely one thing MS definitely does have - 24 billion in cash and cash equivalents, according to their 2000 Annual Report:
http://www.microsoft.com/msft/ar.htm
Slashdot Mirror
Yup, that's one of the fundamental constants of software engineering, the other is:
"Time to write a line of code is constant"
In other words:
Bugs/LOC = k
Time/LOC = k
Reducing the number of LOC you have to write is therefore a good thing on two counts - less time writing, less time debugging + more stable apps.
And no, you can't argue with the SE weenies on this one - it's been shown to be true a million times over.*
* Caveat: k is different for different people, different measurement systems etc. Obviously.
2) We tried the same thing in New Zealand. The government ditched the data as "spurious". Bastards.
Thank god there isn't any off the shelf "missile trajectory" software in the CDW catalog. you would hope that any society that can whip together motivated coders to write such code already has access to some pretty spiffy kit.
And in tonights' news, Saddam Hussein announces his support for the open source movement, and promises to help coordinate and fund a number of projects in a a variety of areas, including chemical analysis, epidemiology and particle physics.
Unless of course the end user is not the end user they think is there, or the end user is an undesirable... securing an entire communications channel is no simple task!
Read the Alice and Bob after Dinner Speech (http://www.conceptlabs.co.uk/alicebob.html) for a beautiful summary of the issue.
Oh for God's sake cut the bullshit! To accuse others of "misinformation" and then state that there were "thousands" of Palestinians dancing in the streets is complete and utter hypocrisy, and the absolutely worst kind of racist political scare mongering.
The reality is a small number of extremists yelling and screaming, filmed repeatedly in tightly focussed shots. Most Palestinians were indoors, watching the TV just like the rest of the world - and just as horrified as the rest of the world.
Go on. Mod me down because your angry. You know it will make you feel better...
>>Please think before repeating these banal
:)
>>opinions that software is art. It just isn't.
>>Deal with it, and if you want to be an artist,
>>learn to paint.
>
>Spoken like someone who just doesn't really
>comprehend software design, or why one design
>might be more elegant than another. I suppose
>you don't think mathematics is beautiful ?
>either...
I'd say the first poster was also someone who doesn't understand art. Art is not necessarily about creating visual images - it's about expressing and inspiring emotions. Whether you do it "prettily" or "beautifully" has absolutely nothing to do with whether the art has any power.
Yes, it's subjective, but by and by, _good_ art arouses in _most_ people emotion of some form (which is not necessarily uniform across the viewers.)
Becoming an artist by just learning to paint is absurd.
Disclaimer: Spoken by someone who has absolutely no artistic ability whatsoever... although I love music, mathematics, programming and visual/traditional art for it's artistic merits. I am always amazed at how much information can be contained so compactly within equations... beauty through economy.
I'm rambling. I'll stop
Exactly... the progression in my mind is clear.
:)
Humanity will, over the next few years - perhaps a couple of centuries - evolve along the following path:
1) Soft aids. As you describe - "smart" devices, jacking in to networks, visual representations of computer internals.
2) Hard aids. Computer equipment that is internal, implanted possibly at birth, puberty or adulthood. Enhanced memory, face recognition, logical analysis etc will all be available - a lawyer + videocamera in our heads.
3) Non-physical humans. Simulation of a human brain within a computer. Gradual evolution away from the traditional human brain model, towards something more optimised for an artificial brain. What exactly? I don't know. But I predict that within a few hundred years, physical humans will be very rare.
But hey, that's just my wild prophesising
Yes... I think a lot of people have confused Satanism with devil worship. As I understand it the two are very different, with Satanism essentially being, as the "commandment" you quote suggests, an anarchistic philosophy, rather than a religion dedicated to doing evil.
:)
But once again, I may be incorrect
Doh! I'm guilty here of not carefully reviewing what I wrote before I hit Submit.
:)
How you phrased it is as I intended it - I just worded it very ambiguously.
That said, I am surprised to hear that minors rights are in fact that limited in the US, but I'm not going to disagree with you - I merely assumed otherwise
Thanks for correcting me.
Christo
Dragon jewellery is sacreligious?! Seriously though, this is exactly what I'm talking about...
I myself am not an American, so can't comment - I can only go by what I have heard from others who are - but I'm surprised to hear that minors have no constitutional rights?
First of all, surely minors are entitled to the same protections from, for example, police brutality, the right to bear arms and be in a state militia etc etc.
Likewise, I wouldn't have thought a school could discriminate so blatantly, and allow one group to wear their insignia, but not another.
Finally, in my opinion, if an organisation is publically funded - especially public schools, which are almost entirely publically funded - then it, to me, falls into the same category as organisations such as the armed forces and government funded hospitals - and IIRC there was a big stink about Wiccan's in the military being discriminated against recently, and how the military had to change.
As an aside, I find it ironic that pentagrams are banned... they are traditional Christian symbols, and represent a man with arms uplifted, looking up to heaven.
I think most of the conflict arises when the bible clubs want to post things like the ten commandments publicly on the noticeboards... but don't want people posting, for example the commandments of the Satanists (or the equivalent - do they have commandments?).
Hypocrisy is never ethical. And frankly, I think it's something many religious organisations are guilty of.
[Dons asbestos suit and prepares to take cover behind fireproof wall]
Great. Just great.
Your misunderstanding the singularity. It is not necessarily an asymptote, merely the idea that at a certain point, the rate of change of "whatever" becomes so great that it's impossible to predict anything more than a trivial distance into the future. Vinge predicts that this will come sometime in the mid 21st century - that any predictions after then are off, simply because the rate of change is so steep - not because theres an "asymptote" preventing us from reaching that point.
There's no $$$ in 'team'...
He got what?! Holy shit! Someone inform Microsoft right away - there's money to be made in this 'open source' thing!
It is a good mix of basic windows concepts (menus, left and right clicking etc), basic hardware concepts (what is software, what is hardware, input and output) and a mix of applicatio specific stuff like MS Word. It's not a book for techies, but it's a very friendly book for non-geeks who just want to learn how to use a computer.
There's no $$$ in 'team'...
Whether or not the bombers would need to be "stealth" is an interesting question. For a start, most IADS systems don't have radars that scan up to a suborbital altitude with any significant signal strength, because there are few incoming threats at this time. In addition, the current crop of ASAT weapons (the only ones that could reach a sub-orbital altitude) are not designed to track a moving target. It would be like trying to shoot down an SR-71 flying a couple of times as fast and three or four times as high (at least).
Secondly, it does not necessarily take a huge fleet of bombers, of any kind, to have a significant impact.
For example, 5 or 6 of these could strike multiple targets all over a nation-state in a single sortie (I'm assuming they use some form of JDAM-guided kinetic harpoon or the like) with nearly 100% accuracy. Runways could be cratered, bridges knocked out, radars and communication nodes hit. Any high value target you could see could probably be hit from outside the country's borders - from a sub-orbital altitude and travelling at high speeds, you have a mighty long ballistic arc to play with. Hence, like stealth bombers, a "space-bomber" could be used to strike strategic targets at the beginning and during a war, crippling enemy forces and allowing traditional forces to accomplish their missions unchecked.
The U.S. is the only country in the history of the world to have been in the situation of knowing it could conquer the rest of the world and yet not do it. While other countries might bad mouth the U.S. they also realize this simple truth: at the end of World War II the rest of the world was at the mercy of the U.S., and mercy is exactly what the U.S. showed.
This is factually dodgy. The US and USSR were very closely balanced, with the BoP probably tipping towards the Soviets until the early 1950's. And then of course we got MAD and lot's of nukes, and conquering the world just wasn't viable. Rest assured, if it had been to the US's advantage, and possible, she would have conquered the world. (As any nation-state would have).
Cheers,
doubtme
There's no $$$ in 'team'...
Of course, the downside is that those people who can't or won't read long sentences gain no understanding at all. But as Heinlein said, it is only the people who "think regularly, accurately, creatively, and without self-delusion" that matter - and to do this, creating and conceptualising large models is a prerequisite.
I've personally found Sun Tzu very helpful in games, especially against humans. He's basically required reading for "Diplomacy", which the British Foreign Service requires it's advisers and ambassadors to play, but I also wrote a text on deception and psychological warfare for Red Alert/Generic RTS's based on his writings... it worked brilliantly when you could pull it off, and cost little if it failed.
What have other people found worthwhile reading? I've read some good stuff on military theory, but that is generally very wargame specific - although the idea of force projection and the associated concepts are useful at times in other games - what are the more general texts that people have found useful?
There's no $$$ in 'team'...
Reporting Suspected Privacy
If you know of, or believe you know of, an organization or an individual who is committing software piracy, please let us know. Reporting piracy is a good thing because:
Adobe will work with the person or organization to help it become compliant.
If the information you provide turns into a corporate lead and if we get the company to legalize (by buying genuine Adobe software), Adobe will donate a portion of the proceeds as software to underprivileged schools and nonprofits in North America and the rest of the world.
Oh the irony. I suppose this only applies to people who are actually pirating Adobe products, and not just showing the world how worthless they are?
Source: http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/antipiracy/report. html
There's no $$$ in 'team'...
So now they've ruined Paint Watching as a sport as well?
Just great. Fucking wonderful.
Next thing you know the inherent entertainment in grass growing will be all sped up with some sort of fertility-enhancing "technology", just so morons with ride on mowers can grow luscious green lawns in the desert.
Oh wait. Never mind.
There's no $$$ in 'team'...
None of them teach it. All of them do it.
There's no $$$ in 'team'...
I'm not sure how you'd be motivated, but I'd be motivated to lie on my back and moan piteously, and then die shortly after from massive bleeding.
So in the future when all the 21 inch monitors have digital CPRM cables we'll have to purchase 61 inch monitors to watch our DVDs?
Oh damn.
Why do they make new laws? Because it's easier and cheaper than enforcing the existing ones, while still making the politicos looking like they are earning their keep. Oh, and did you mean necrophilia? narcophilia would be (presumably) love of drugs :)
A /. article in which, not only is the article informative, but most of the posts are more so!
I implore you, valiant editors of slashdot - we must defend the "/. is mindless entertainment" meme from the grievous threat of articles such as this and the second article on unicode - Act now! Your country needs you! Once more into the breach!
>made moot by a little agility on Microsoft's
>part coupled with a tremendous amount of cash.
And this is definitely one thing MS definitely does have - 24 billion in cash and cash equivalents, according to their 2000 Annual Report:
http://www.microsoft.com/msft/ar.htm