The big problem was that Red Hat refused to ship KDE because of this. I remember, because that was the main reason I switched to SuSE back then. (in the meantime I've made a 180 turn and I now run Debian).
Show me ONE EXAMPLE of someone held in Gitmo who WAS NOT an ununiformed combatant fighting our troops or implementing terror attacks.
This must be one of the most retarded posts I've ever read here. Really, what have you been doing these last years? Have you never read a newspaper?
Just to give you one link: http://www.talkleft.com/story/2006/01/17/822/22292
Did you know about the 9 Chinese detainees at Guantanamo? They are Uighurs, Muslims from western China, who are now in their 5th year of imprisonment. The Bush Administration acknowledged in 2004 they had been imprisoned by mistake and should be released since they are not enemy combatants. But they are still there. And Bush won't let them go. How did the USA get hold of all these prisoners? Are they people who surrendered in a fight? No, the army just put out a reward for turning in an "enemy combattant". So there are Afganistans who got rich by just taking unfortunate souls and selling them to the USA like slaves.
Now that I think of it, why am I even searching for examples? Let's just turn the question around: Can you give me ONE example of a Guantanamo prisoner who has been found guilty in court?
Really, what the USA is doing will remain a stain on its' reputation, it is despicable and shows once more what a banana replublic the country has become.
Who needs drugs to break your mind when you have science instead? I wouldn't be surprised if there are know cases of spontaneous head explosions caused by thinking about quantum mechanics for too long..
I could also memorize the info, what are you going to do about that? You could place a bar with free beer/vodka/coctails at the exit, but success is not 100% guaranteed. Basically, that's why NDA's exist.
I don't think that technology can solve the lack of trust problem.
I think the original post was trying to say that with encryption, you have to trust the recipient to not do anything unwanted, with DRM you have to trust the software not to do anything unwanted. So in that respect, he's right: if the DRM disables the print button, you can remove that "feature" yourself if you're using open source. In fact, even with closed source that's possible, you just need good assembler and reverse engineering skills.
OTOH, it could be possible to implement it in a single company, if the computers are locked down (nobody can install new software), and the DRM'ed data can only be sent between these trusted computers.
If you can't trust the computer and you can't trust the recipient, then the logical thing to do is not to send the data in the first place. If someone tries to convince you that there must be a way, you can bet it's a manager, and a pointy haired one too.
I get myself a coffee and go looking for a coworker with an imminent deadline, and have a chat, asking thing like "How was your holiday" or things like that.
I know exactly what you mean. I have the same discussions with management from time to time. Luckily there is a good athmosphere at work, so we can have these heated discussions and still be friends afterwards. The last time was with my evaluation, where "tendancy to rewrite code" was one of my weak points. My best defence was to point out that after the rewrites, there were far less bugs, and the code size didn't increase much. Another part of the code, where I didn't get permission to rewrite it, had bugs coming out of it almost every release. With each bug the code size increased, doubling it in six months (actually, it went from 3K lines to 6.8K lines). Those are statistics that tell you something is very wrong.
I think the problem is that by writing a piece of code the first time, you gain so much experience, that a rewrite will almost always give improvements. The question then is: is it worth it? It all depends on the quality of the first try. If it's ok, then just try to live with it. But if it causes problems, or you need to add functionality that would be much easier to do if you could start over, then a rewrite should be considered. Also, in my opinion, it's best to rewrite bad code ASAP, because if you don't, you'll spend a lot of time and energy trying to debug it, and the more time you spend on it, the harder it becomes to throw it away. If you rewrite it early, you'll have more time left for testing, and you'll save more time (by not spending it on a lost case).
Sounds like common sense to you? Well, it hardly gets through to managers.
The wired article itself does not provide much information, but one of its' links, more specifically this one explains a lot (including the reactions). It does say that is does not go on for ever, but repeats for "just" 15 cycles or more. It would have been cool if it went on forever, but no such luck.
The article said they would melt a bit of ice, there was no mention of drilling through 10km of ice. I guess they just want to examine surface ice for fossils.
Still, it's an ambitious plan. But am I the only one who's beginning to get sceptical about Russian announcements? Weren't they going to do a sample return mission to Mars' moon Phobos? Weren't they going to do moon rovers? Weren't they going to build their own space station in 2015, when the ISS will be deorbited (not that I think it will be deobited so soon)? Talk is cheap, those missions are *not*. They're all impressive plans, but what was the last interplanetary mission of Russia?
Frankly, they are reminding me of the decade following the dead of the Amiga. "It's been sold to another company!". "They're bringing out a new model real soon now!". "It's being sold again!". "Prepare for the rebirth of Amiga!". It all turned out to be a lot of hot air.
I really don't buy that the rovers were designed for only 90 days. It was just the "warranty", if they survived for 90 days they could call the mission a victory and get the pressure off. IMO they were designed to last at least a martian year.
Don't get me wrong, it's a fantastic mission, I still follow it weekly, and the rovers are performing amazingly well, but they were not designed to break down after 90 days.
Hmm, I didn't see that show, but you could be right. I tried to watch mythbusters a couple of times, it's quite interesting but I hate the format : in this episode, we're going to test X. (Ads). Previously, we said we were going to test X, and we're really going to do it. (Ads) So, we are going to test X, and we will do it this way. (Ads). Previously, we said we are going to test X this way. Keep watching. (Ads). Etc, etc. (Ads).
Some swimming pools use air bubbles for training 10m dives. The air diminishes the density of the water and the athletes don't hurt themselves as much if they land badly.
The thing that surprises me is that somehow, people seem to think that javascript is a nice language to write software with. It's an atrocity! It's a scripting language at best! Years ago, we had java applets, and now, somehow, people have decided that javascript is a better way to write a spreadsheet program? That's maddness! It was never meant to do that. I bet these AJAX apps are full of dirty hacks to get around the language's limitations.
It's more intuitive to find that programmers lack the TIME to just think. Courage has nothing to do with it. The longer ANY programmer spends on the same code, the better it gets designed (if not written). Really good programmers criticize themselves as they write and are almost never happy with a refactor. All three statements are correct. However, I fail to see the connection between them, and I'm not really sure where you're going.
Let's just start at the beginning. Do you really think I don't have deadlines too? Yet, while the rest is panicking, I'm taking a walk through the building, or looking through the window. I refuse to start coding right away. To me, this pays off: Once I have figured out exactly how I am going to tackle the problem, I need to write less code, debug it less and once it is in the field, I don't get as many support calls as some of my collegues. I get the job done and the customer is happy. But should you measure my productivity by how much code I write each day, I would be a lousy programmer. This is exactly what I mean by courage: in the face of deadlines, mass hysteria, panic and worried bosses, you need to sit back and relax.
Your second statement is beating a dead horse.
Your third statement... I don't know how you got there. Where did refactoring enter the discussion?
I'm not sure how that is helpful advice. You can't know how simple you can make something without usage. We come back to spending time reworking something you've already written. Once you see how other people (or just yourself) need to use it in the real world, you know how complex it *NEEDS* to be. Programmers are generally lazy and do not write things more complicated than necessary. When you start out sometimes it can get out of hand, but you come back to reality or dont ever come back./For who, exactly, was that advice...insightful? What I do is I write an as simple as possible API, and I pretend it is already implemented. Then I can use it in the rest of my code and if it is insufficient, I rethink the API. Of course you cannot always foresee all the neccesary functionality beforehand, but that's something everyone has to live with. If you know a way to make a completely stable API right from day one, I'm very curious to know.
On the other hand, if you constantly need to change the API, it's a sign you haven't clearly defined what you're willing to abstract. Again, thinking about the problem will make it clear what you need and in 80% of the cases it will do fine without modification (rough estimate from personal experience).
And if you think everybody writes code as simple and short as possible, you're either not very experienced, or else I want to work where you do.
PS: I could be wrong, but from the tone of your post I conclude that you consider me some sort of babbling fool. Let me assure you, I'm not - at least not on this subject. Sorry if I sound arrogant (hey, you started it), but my IQ is 135, I've been programming for over 20 years now, and I really, really know what I'm doing. Don't mess with me;-).
I think part of the problem is that programmers lack the courage to just think. I recently had a programming problem that I thought two weeks about. That's go to work, think, write down some key ideas, pitfalls, things to do etc. on a piece of paper and go home. After these two weeks I had three A4 papers with some text scribbled on it. Then I spent one week coding, and when I finally tested it it worked from the second time (one small bug found).
In my experience, not everybody dares to work this way. It is a bit embarrassing if your boss enters your office and you're just leaning back in your chair, day after day. But on the other hand, if they wanted someone who would always seem busy, they hired the wrong person; they should have gone for a typist. Thinking is an important part of a programmer's job.
A second advice would be to keep abstractions as simple as possible. Think "What do I need and what API do I need to do that?". If you can get away with an API with only an init function and a "worker" function, then be my guest! K.I.S.S. is very important. Again, to make things as simple as possible requires a lot of thinking.
And while you are thinking it helps to have enough experience to have a "mental compiler". I can write and test code in my head so to speak. But that is something you only get after many, many years of intensive programming.
Movies aren't 100% realistic? Man, you're soo smart pointing that out to me! Now I understand why I got those strange looks when I tried to book a vacation to middle earth!
You should watch "Idiocracy" immediately followed by "Shut up and sing". It's really scary. Some of the people demonstrating against the Dixie Chicks clearly escaped from the movie. The blend is perfect.
I also turned my love for computers into my job, but it's is still strong. I did chose embedded software, so with the company designing its own hardware, it's still a bit "old days"-like. We mostly use ARM7, so it's 32 bit, but I still have to know the special registers and know how the computer works inside out. I really like it.
At home I don't usually program anymore, however the reason is not a dislike, but just that I've already been programming (or thinking about programming) for eight hours, and enough is enough. So by doing my hobby during working hours, I now have free time to do other stuff, like photography, or just reading Slashdot.
Also - personally - I like programming professionally, because it forces me to finish the product. At home, I was constantly programming but I didn't often finish the software, so I rarely got the reward of my work.
Oh, if you have too much money, photography is the ideal hobby (astronomy too, btw):-). Anyway, most of the time I stop my lens at f/2.2 or higher, 1.8 is too fluffy (otherwise, if I focus on the eyes, the nose is out of focus:-) ). Ok, maybe I exagerate a bit..
There is a cheap way to do tracking , it's called a "scotch mount" (google is your friend). I haven't used it, but the images I've seen are very nice.
Those are great images! I've also bought a 50mm f/1.8 (Nikon) some time ago, and that was also one of my first thoughts: I could use it to try capture Andromeda. Unfortunately, I didn't have the time nor clear skies yet.
PS: My telescope has 650mm prime focus, so a calling a 600mm telelens "not a telescope" is considered cheating (by me);-).
And what about the legal aspect? Is it even legal to decide wether to sell you something or not based on the way you look? I foresee a "babyface discrimination action class lawsuit" if it ever hits the streets.
I'm using rdiff-backup backup myself, it seems that it does the same as your script. Every night an incremental backup is made, and when the backup server is done, the desktops are turned off (and the server itself).
Slashdot Mirror
The big problem was that Red Hat refused to ship KDE because of this. I remember, because that was the main reason I switched to SuSE back then. (in the meantime I've made a 180 turn and I now run Debian).
This must be one of the most retarded posts I've ever read here. Really, what have you been doing these last years? Have you never read a newspaper?
Just to give you one link: http://www.talkleft.com/story/2006/01/17/822/22292 Did you know about the 9 Chinese detainees at Guantanamo? They are Uighurs, Muslims from western China, who are now in their 5th year of imprisonment. The Bush Administration acknowledged in 2004 they had been imprisoned by mistake and should be released since they are not enemy combatants. But they are still there. And Bush won't let them go. How did the USA get hold of all these prisoners? Are they people who surrendered in a fight? No, the army just put out a reward for turning in an "enemy combattant". So there are Afganistans who got rich by just taking unfortunate souls and selling them to the USA like slaves.
Now that I think of it, why am I even searching for examples? Let's just turn the question around: Can you give me ONE example of a Guantanamo prisoner who has been found guilty in court?
Really, what the USA is doing will remain a stain on its' reputation, it is despicable and shows once more what a banana replublic the country has become.
Can anyone explain to me what "tickless kernel support" is?
And I bet she will be sued by the drug company for the losses caused by not needing their medicine. The insensitive little clod!
I could also memorize the info, what are you going to do about that? You could place a bar with free beer/vodka/coctails at the exit, but success is not 100% guaranteed. Basically, that's why NDA's exist.
I don't think that technology can solve the lack of trust problem.
I think the original post was trying to say that with encryption, you have to trust the recipient to not do anything unwanted, with DRM you have to trust the software not to do anything unwanted. So in that respect, he's right: if the DRM disables the print button, you can remove that "feature" yourself if you're using open source. In fact, even with closed source that's possible, you just need good assembler and reverse engineering skills.
OTOH, it could be possible to implement it in a single company, if the computers are locked down (nobody can install new software), and the DRM'ed data can only be sent between these trusted computers.
If you can't trust the computer and you can't trust the recipient, then the logical thing to do is not to send the data in the first place. If someone tries to convince you that there must be a way, you can bet it's a manager, and a pointy haired one too.
Why did he have to go through all that trouble? Were they too lazy to respawn, just like everybody else? Bah.
I get myself a coffee and go looking for a coworker with an imminent deadline, and have a chat, asking thing like "How was your holiday" or things like that.
Evil, I know. But it's still funny.
I know exactly what you mean. I have the same discussions with management from time to time. Luckily there is a good athmosphere at work, so we can have these heated discussions and still be friends afterwards. The last time was with my evaluation, where "tendancy to rewrite code" was one of my weak points. My best defence was to point out that after the rewrites, there were far less bugs, and the code size didn't increase much. Another part of the code, where I didn't get permission to rewrite it, had bugs coming out of it almost every release. With each bug the code size increased, doubling it in six months (actually, it went from 3K lines to 6.8K lines). Those are statistics that tell you something is very wrong.
I think the problem is that by writing a piece of code the first time, you gain so much experience, that a rewrite will almost always give improvements. The question then is: is it worth it? It all depends on the quality of the first try. If it's ok, then just try to live with it. But if it causes problems, or you need to add functionality that would be much easier to do if you could start over, then a rewrite should be considered. Also, in my opinion, it's best to rewrite bad code ASAP, because if you don't, you'll spend a lot of time and energy trying to debug it, and the more time you spend on it, the harder it becomes to throw it away. If you rewrite it early, you'll have more time left for testing, and you'll save more time (by not spending it on a lost case).
Sounds like common sense to you? Well, it hardly gets through to managers.
The wired article itself does not provide much information, but one of its' links, more specifically this one explains a lot (including the reactions). It does say that is does not go on for ever, but repeats for "just" 15 cycles or more. It would have been cool if it went on forever, but no such luck.
The article said they would melt a bit of ice, there was no mention of drilling through 10km of ice. I guess they just want to examine surface ice for fossils.
Still, it's an ambitious plan. But am I the only one who's beginning to get sceptical about Russian announcements? Weren't they going to do a sample return mission to Mars' moon Phobos? Weren't they going to do moon rovers? Weren't they going to build their own space station in 2015, when the ISS will be deorbited (not that I think it will be deobited so soon)? Talk is cheap, those missions are *not*. They're all impressive plans, but what was the last interplanetary mission of Russia?
Frankly, they are reminding me of the decade following the dead of the Amiga. "It's been sold to another company!". "They're bringing out a new model real soon now!". "It's being sold again!". "Prepare for the rebirth of Amiga!". It all turned out to be a lot of hot air.
I really don't buy that the rovers were designed for only 90 days. It was just the "warranty", if they survived for 90 days they could call the mission a victory and get the pressure off. IMO they were designed to last at least a martian year.
Don't get me wrong, it's a fantastic mission, I still follow it weekly, and the rovers are performing amazingly well, but they were not designed to break down after 90 days.
Hmm, I didn't see that show, but you could be right. I tried to watch mythbusters a couple of times, it's quite interesting but I hate the format : in this episode, we're going to test X. (Ads). Previously, we said we were going to test X, and we're really going to do it. (Ads) So, we are going to test X, and we will do it this way. (Ads). Previously, we said we are going to test X this way. Keep watching. (Ads). Etc, etc. (Ads).
So I started a one-man boycot. (Ads).
Some swimming pools use air bubbles for training 10m dives. The air diminishes the density of the water and the athletes don't hurt themselves as much if they land badly.
The thing that surprises me is that somehow, people seem to think that javascript is a nice language to write software with. It's an atrocity! It's a scripting language at best! Years ago, we had java applets, and now, somehow, people have decided that javascript is a better way to write a spreadsheet program? That's maddness! It was never meant to do that. I bet these AJAX apps are full of dirty hacks to get around the language's limitations.
The longer ANY programmer spends on the same code, the better it gets designed (if not written).
Really good programmers criticize themselves as they write and are almost never happy with a refactor. All three statements are correct. However, I fail to see the connection between them, and I'm not really sure where you're going.
Let's just start at the beginning. Do you really think I don't have deadlines too? Yet, while the rest is panicking, I'm taking a walk through the building, or looking through the window. I refuse to start coding right away. To me, this pays off: Once I have figured out exactly how I am going to tackle the problem, I need to write less code, debug it less and once it is in the field, I don't get as many support calls as some of my collegues. I get the job done and the customer is happy. But should you measure my productivity by how much code I write each day, I would be a lousy programmer. This is exactly what I mean by courage: in the face of deadlines, mass hysteria, panic and worried bosses, you need to sit back and relax.
Your second statement is beating a dead horse.
Your third statement... I don't know how you got there. Where did refactoring enter the discussion? I'm not sure how that is helpful advice. You can't know how simple you can make something without usage. We come back to spending time reworking something you've already written. Once you see how other people (or just yourself) need to use it in the real world, you know how complex it *NEEDS* to be. Programmers are generally lazy and do not write things more complicated than necessary. When you start out sometimes it can get out of hand, but you come back to reality or dont ever come back.
On the other hand, if you constantly need to change the API, it's a sign you haven't clearly defined what you're willing to abstract. Again, thinking about the problem will make it clear what you need and in 80% of the cases it will do fine without modification (rough estimate from personal experience).
And if you think everybody writes code as simple and short as possible, you're either not very experienced, or else I want to work where you do.
PS: I could be wrong, but from the tone of your post I conclude that you consider me some sort of babbling fool. Let me assure you, I'm not - at least not on this subject. Sorry if I sound arrogant (hey, you started it), but my IQ is 135, I've been programming for over 20 years now, and I really, really know what I'm doing. Don't mess with me
I think part of the problem is that programmers lack the courage to just think. I recently had a programming problem that I thought two weeks about. That's go to work, think, write down some key ideas, pitfalls, things to do etc. on a piece of paper and go home. After these two weeks I had three A4 papers with some text scribbled on it. Then I spent one week coding, and when I finally tested it it worked from the second time (one small bug found).
In my experience, not everybody dares to work this way. It is a bit embarrassing if your boss enters your office and you're just leaning back in your chair, day after day. But on the other hand, if they wanted someone who would always seem busy, they hired the wrong person; they should have gone for a typist. Thinking is an important part of a programmer's job.
A second advice would be to keep abstractions as simple as possible. Think "What do I need and what API do I need to do that?". If you can get away with an API with only an init function and a "worker" function, then be my guest! K.I.S.S. is very important. Again, to make things as simple as possible requires a lot of thinking.
And while you are thinking it helps to have enough experience to have a "mental compiler". I can write and test code in my head so to speak. But that is something you only get after many, many years of intensive programming.
Movies aren't 100% realistic? Man, you're soo smart pointing that out to me! Now I understand why I got those strange looks when I tried to book a vacation to middle earth!
You should watch "Idiocracy" immediately followed by "Shut up and sing". It's really scary. Some of the people demonstrating against the Dixie Chicks clearly escaped from the movie. The blend is perfect.
I also turned my love for computers into my job, but it's is still strong. I did chose embedded software, so with the company designing its own hardware, it's still a bit "old days"-like. We mostly use ARM7, so it's 32 bit, but I still have to know the special registers and know how the computer works inside out. I really like it.
At home I don't usually program anymore, however the reason is not a dislike, but just that I've already been programming (or thinking about programming) for eight hours, and enough is enough. So by doing my hobby during working hours, I now have free time to do other stuff, like photography, or just reading Slashdot.
Also - personally - I like programming professionally, because it forces me to finish the product. At home, I was constantly programming but I didn't often finish the software, so I rarely got the reward of my work.
Oh, if you have too much money, photography is the ideal hobby (astronomy too, btw) :-). Anyway, most of the time I stop my lens at f/2.2 or higher, 1.8 is too fluffy (otherwise, if I focus on the eyes, the nose is out of focus :-) ). Ok, maybe I exagerate a bit..
There is a cheap way to do tracking , it's called a "scotch mount" (google is your friend). I haven't used it, but the images I've seen are very nice.
Those are great images! I've also bought a 50mm f/1.8 (Nikon) some time ago, and that was also one of my first thoughts: I could use it to try capture Andromeda. Unfortunately, I didn't have the time nor clear skies yet.
;-).
PS: My telescope has 650mm prime focus, so a calling a 600mm telelens "not a telescope" is considered cheating (by me)
Anyway, thumbs up!
And what about the legal aspect? Is it even legal to decide wether to sell you something or not based on the way you look? I foresee a "babyface discrimination action class lawsuit" if it ever hits the streets.
I'm using rdiff-backup backup myself, it seems that it does the same as your script. Every night an incremental backup is made, and when the backup server is done, the desktops are turned off (and the server itself).