It's an odd assertion that Roman's wanted arms control. I would like to see the evidence on this as I am tired of reading it every time some gun nut asserts that gun control doesn't work.
Please present your evidence when making this assertion.
I've never worked at a job where I would not have been fired for that lazy crap example you just coded.
Logically, if you place an else or if you return from the function early you avoid having the need for the goto. Its lazy and it goes against every coding standard I've ever seen and unless you are Larry Wall (Perl designer and coder and goto apologist) you don't get to use them.
Out of the slppery depths of Hell the Leviathan rises once more. DIGITAL EQUIPMENT CORPORATION has returned. Say it with me Brothers and sisters: all hail the PDP- 16894. Hoozaah. Hoozaaah. Is that a tear of joy or despair. We will never know.
Memory management isn't taught so much these days because, what in the hell are you going to write that's going to use 16GB of RAM?
In all seriousness though, memory management was important when software and hardware were on par with one another. However, (IMO) hardware has outpaced software at this point. I defy you to find a program my gaming PC can't run whilst I simultaneously play Crysis and browse Slashdot. In addition, most high level languages are incredibly forgiving when it comes to bad memory management, thanks to good built-in garbage collection. Sure, it helps to know that grittier low level, less abstracted stuff. Knowing what your computer is doing on that level would make you exceptionally efficient. However, if you are an experienced programmer, who understands best practice and can competently scour an API for the most efficient classes and methods to use in your object oriented programming, I see no reason why you shouldn't be seen as a "real" programmer. Anyone who says otherwise needs to get with the times...
If you only program on Windows then you are write. Welcome, however to the real world where windows is but a very small fraction of the hardware devices in existence and the very vast majority of them do in fact require memory management to function. Bad Advice is in the end Bad Advice.
Funny thing about games even, it turns out that if you were writing games even on Xbox you would find that your employer would fire you with that advice. You should keep it to yourself.
If you go to college and all you learn is Java when you got your CS then your an idiot. I got my degree in Math, taught myself C, avoided Fortran like it was Ebola (it is in Software terms, not wait, that's Forth). Anyway, Software is Art. It isn't science, it isn't Engineering. It is Art. It should be taught like Painting, only with Math and to Nerds, and Geeks, and people with severe social problems who are way too smart.
The thing is, that the people who are good at this, really good, are so good that you will never, no matter how much you work at it, be as good as they are. They are gods. I've been doing this for twenty five years and I'm good, I'm slow but I am good. But I have seen really good, I have seen artists who are like Rembrandt, these guys like Linus Torvulds (never met him but you know his work) these guys come along and they just kiss the canvas and they change our lives. They pretend that they are writing software but they are creating art.
The rest of us do that to, and most of us are pretty good, we invent languages, and rules, and say stupid things like, "if you don't get close to the machine for a semester then you aren't a real Computer Scientist". And then we expect that other people will just follow along.
In the end the things that makes you a computer scientist, a software engineer, a computer programmer, an engineer, a mad scientist, a developer, they are all pretty much the same things. You know what tools you need to do your job. You work to get those tools. You don't bitch about it if you can't get them, or you leave, and in the end. You write software that works. That is it. You write software that works. You want to be a Computer Scientist? Can you write software?
You have odd ideas ocean CEO's. I won't argue that there are a few idiots who some how smoozed their way to the top. However, if you stop to look at The the bios of startups and take a look at the CEOs of most of those companies you will find that for the most part these positions are filled by scary smart people who are smart technically as well as emotionally. These people are often the single point of success or failure of any company.
Being a genius, you probably already new that and you were saying something stupid just for the argument.
Athiesm is very much a faith, and one of the more annoying ones at that. I put it on the same pedestal as Vegans and Mormons which is my Verse is slightly lowers than Krishnas but higher than Muslims in the order of who annoys me more. Athiests are those group of people who go around loudly proclaiming that they don't believe in God because there isn't one, but they can't be happy enough with that. They won't rest until every one else is as unhappy as they are. In the world of annoying gits who are going no where when they die Athiests are the top of the list. Every one else at least has a comfortable fiction of what happens when you die, but Athiests live in the ultimately depressing reality that this is it. There is no afterlife that in a thousand years not anything we do as a civilization will mean anything at all. Maybe five people from this century will be memorable, the rest of us will be sediment. Athiests are not happy unless the rest of us succumb to their dogma that this is it.
So, in the great shit hole of religious dogmas, Athiests have absolute worst, the least imaginative, the least useful, and ultimately the most self defeating. Every other religion has a place, an afterlife: HOPE. Athiests are religious and what they preach is despair. So, I now officially reorder my list of annoying religions and place Athiests at the top, displacing Satanists, who, while voting for the wrong team, at least admit there is a team.
It seems that what you are good at is bitching. I don't see what Slashdot gets out of it. You don't add anything substantive. You have offered nothing except the always helpful "it all sucks" which we all know in the end is not helpful and is not even true. It does even not "all" suck. It is not 'all" a steaming pile of "dog shit."
Slashdot is going to change. This much is true, but you want input into the change. Instead of offering what is in essence the big "F*ck Off" to change why don't you step up to the plate and offer a list of things you would like to see different. I always find it amusing to say the least that tech people who pride themselves on embracing change when it hits them in the chest like a train always are the first to rail against anything that seems like change. Try this exercise: Instead of envisioning that you have the power to put Slashdot out of business (you don't). Try to imagine that you have the power to make them better, something you want to read.
Come to think of it. That's what this page is for.
So, stop bitching and planning for the end of days and for overthrowing web sites and try to be a little constructive. If you can't do that then just shut the fuck up because truthfully your just a noisy prick who needs to take his dick out of his mouth and zip up his pants and get back to work.
Funny thought on how you get to be the guy who decides what is "good" or not. I would say "ill informed." It doesn't matter what your opinion is at all, or mine for that matter. The people who the government pays to make decisions are generally the people I would trust to be the best informed people in the room. You either trust them or you don't. In this politics is irrelevant. If you don't trust the people making the decision for the country then then you should leave the country. You could tie up the agency, make it less efficient, make it worse, but in the end who are you hurting? Certainly not the Chinese and Indians, and Russians who would very much thank you.
In any case, "personal contact with guys from NSA" doesn't count much with me as I once ran into a guy who new Bjorne Stourstroup. So what. If you had worked for the NSA you could maybe say, I used to work for the NSA but probably wouldn't and you couldn't certainly ever tell anybody what you did. Snowden is almost certainly unique in being able to talk about it.
Your argument is pointless. You don't really know what the NSA does so you assume that almost everything it does is evil. Then as example, you concoct and example and show that by using your example of evil some good could come from it. Stupid.
The NSA doesn't exist because it does evil. The NSA exists because what it does actually does work, and is good. The problem is that most of what it does, the very vast majority of it will never be public. This probably is research into capabilities but also serious work into what our major International Competitors are doing, people like the Chinese, Indians, and even Brazilians might be doing.
I prefer a bullet to the brainpan. It's more correct for the crime of treason and it doesn't make a mockery as you would do of the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
The military is NOT protecting me. Sorry, but the United States Military that exists today has NOTHING to do with protecting the citizens.
You are an idiot.
Militarily speaking, the reason why you think that the military does nothing to protect the citizens is because it does it better than any other military in the world. 2.5 Million men and women, many of whom spent way too much time away from their families in the past twelve years because their country asked them to in countries they hate, not fighting for the most part but building infrastructure such as roads and sewage systems (I have friends who spent time there). You do this so that people there feel hope and maybe don't hate us quite so much.
Our military has a command structure designed over fifty years that spans the globe which watches for threats to Americans so that you can go almost anywhere in the globe and when you try to get a Visa to some country in the middle of nowhere the Embassy can say "Hm, no that's not a good idea, denied." and maybe they just saved your life.
You can go anywhere in the world almost and walk almost any street in the world and you don't even know that the reason why you can do it safely is because just maybe the people there like you as an American but maybe they hate you because you're a snot nosed American with a self important attitude that thinks you know better than everybody else and maybe you just walked into a really big drug deal but nobody is going to kill you because just maybe that might spark a drone attack.
When Genghis Khan ruled China it was said that you could walk from one end to another without fear of Bandits. This is what the US Military brings you outside of the United States. Safety. This is the reason why
I have looked at a lot comments concerning this and the surprising thing about it is the number of people who just assumed that everything that Snowden did is write and everything that the NSA did is wrong. I understand that this is predominantly liberal media, and believe it or not, I am predominantly liberal. I voted for Obama. I believe the Republicans are working very hard to destroy our Democracy. I believe many of the Democrats are eager to help them.
However, I can say this with absolute certainty. Who gave him the right? Was he elected? Did someone make him king? Did God anoint him? Access is not permission to steal.
Snowden, by any description, by any definition is the bad guy here. He is a traitor. It doesn't matter that his results are good. It doesn't matter that the NSA takes a couple of hits or did some bad things. He could mitigate his damage by coming home and facing the music but he doesn't. He threatens that the "Worst is yet to come." These are not the acts of a hero. These are not the acts of a man who should be given clemency.
Face it, this is a bad scary world. Russia and China are not our friends. They know that. They look out for their own best interests. When you don't look out for your own best interest as a nation then you turn into Portugal. A used to be great country with a few good Bed and Breakfasts and some really great Scenery.
Snowden will never be given Clemency. At this stage in his life I would suspect the only thing keeping him alive is the fact that there is the threat that something he has which might be "Really Big" hasn't been released. It's probably a pretty big something because if it weren't he might have an unfortunate accident. I for one wouldn't miss him.
I have met people who were not marveled by the display of the Milky Way in the night sky. I have met people who were scared by it. I would suggest that I know more people in New York City that are terrified of it then not. There is a reason they are willing to live in Manhattan and pay those prices living on top of each other. They like the comforting crush of other humans and it is very okay for them to think that for every one of them four or five or fifteen people toil in the fields, or seas, or whatever to supply their needs. The comforting crush of humanity, with ever present light and noise isolates them from the three things in this universe that most people cannot abide: Silence, Night (Dark, Lost), Alone.
You will have some freedom making light more friendly to the dark skies initiative but the moment people even begin to suspect that the Milky Way is out there they will want it walled away by lights again.
Is this a serious question? Would you post Egyptian Hieroglyphic to illustrate some important fact about Egypt 3000 years ago? There are very few Math equations that people understand intuitively and they usually go something like this 5 + 3 = 8. Mathematicians will eat this stuff up. Physicists will appreciate it. Maybe some other math nerds might like it but in the end what will happen is the collective mass of humans will not even bother to shrug their shoulders before they move on.
I love big math formulae and I love equations in stuff but I realize that I am kind of a big nerd that way and the Gods honest truth is that I don't understand most of what I see. I guarantee that not only will most NY Times readers not understand what they are seeing, they will stop reading at that point ant move onto the next article.
My wife started using facebook because her coworkers were using it. She was working with them in close quarters all day and then she would come home and talk to them on facebook most of the evening. Its been a year since it ended and I don't yet know if this is going to end in divorce. What I can tell you is that we as people were never evolved to have someone whispering in our ear all day. What makes Facebook in particular and social networking in general dangerous is that you used to have to be close to someone to become attached. Now you only have to be texting them or chatting with them or whatever. It does what the phone never could do: It connects you to anyone you ever met that you can find online.
I'm not saying that this is neccessarily a bad thing. I am saying that we aren't wired for and we aren't prepared for this kind of connectivity.
If all Software and IT needs were being funneled into new projects and new features and new ideas then the Red Hat guy might be write. This is not the case however. Most Software development done in the world is based on specific needs generated by specific customers on existing IT systems. It is a painfully slow, deliberate process that sometimes produces astonishingly public failures. Most of the time what is produced is quite successes that for the most part do what the customer wanted done.
A couple of years ago my organization switched from Silicon Graphics workstations running an ancient C++ compiler to Red Hat Linux on Dell workstations. It took us about six months to migrate the code from one platform to another. We didn't develop new features that nobody wanted. We didn't create waste where none existed. What we did is exactly what the customer paid us to do.
Vendor driven software that is created with an unknown user in mind is usually pretty scary in that you are always going to get features you didn't want and features that you do want but they don't work well. Guess what, that's what you get for making a product that is designed for the general propulation. Cars are the same way. I want a Toyota Truck, and I want a really cool sound system. They don't sell them that way. I get the adequate sound system that Toyota provides, it kind of does what I want, but if I want better I am going to have to by better, and even then it make not work 100% in my truck, and it will most certainly do things I didn't want it to do.
This isn't, for the most part, waste. Waste is what you get when you contract a software system to build, it takes five years, costs 100 million, thirty developers, and then when you are two weeks from shipping sales tells you that they can't sell your stuff. However, for every one of those types of projects there are literally dozens that didn't get cancelled and were shipped to sometimes eager customers.
Look for another job. When upper management sticks their nose in with the rational that you described, doom is just around the corner. The problem is simple. How do you get the best performance out of your best people? The answer is not: Fit them all into the round hole. The correct answer is: Let them use the best tools possible as they perceive them to be.
Okay, languages need to be standardized, but after that, the environment needs to be perogative of the developer.
If you are having a compitition for creating the best word processor and some kid from Iran pipes up and says: "Hey look at mine." Great.
If you are talking about an open source evolution for UAVs where the inovation can be a new algorithm designed to double the flight time, conserve fuel some manner not ever thought of before, or maybe the inovation is some way to double the resolution of current on board cameras, then you will have a substantially large problem.
The problem isn't if the Iranian kid is the one who figures out the algorithm. The problem is if you or some other American figures out the algorithm and then gives it to the Iranian kid to incorporate into his design.
Maybe he isn't an Iranian kid though. Maybe he is an Iranian Intelligence officer working with an Iranian programmer, designing a new type of UAV to be better than anything in the curent U.S. arsenal. Maybe the inovation is resolution doubling for some on board camera and six weeks or six months down the road that algorithm is used on an Iranian UAV to pinpoint something in Iraq that the Iranians shouldn't know about. Maybe then some Iranian intelligence officer transmits that data to the Iraqi freedom fighters inhabiting that area and the next day six U.S. soldiers were killed, and you read about it in the newspaper or see it on the web. Maybe one of those that dies is the brother of some girl you really like and she is now so distraught that she has to quit school, at least for the semester, and she goes home and in a depressed state she takes her own life.
Let's review, in the spirit of cooperation, you have a UAV open source project that allows the Iranians to build a better camera for the one UAV they have devoloped, U.S. soldiers die and the girl you were destined to spend the rest of your life with is now dead from an overdose of NoDoz sleeping pills.
Never mind that what have committed is probably treason. There are laws, and IANAL and I don't know which ones, but there are laws that you may already have broken in your effort to bring Open Source to software governing matters of National Interest and Self Defense.
While the scenario I have presented is pattently absurd, please take the warning to heart. The U.S. government will prosecute you if anything that looks like it might be or might need to be a national secret is transmitted out of the United States. Anything concerning UAVs would fall under that catagory.
Item 41 in the book "C++ Coding Standards" is: Make data members private, except in behaviorless aggregates (C-style structs).
We've gone round and round on this where I work but the long and the short it is that Sutter and Alexandrescu are correct. Large collections of setters/getters are generally signs of a bad design. If you have a struct that maybe has some basic functionality that isn't germain to the purpose of the class then simplify it and put it in structs. If it does something then design it so that you don't have ten or twenty setters and getters for your class.
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It's an odd assertion that Roman's wanted arms control. I would like to see the evidence on this as I am tired of reading it every time some gun nut asserts that gun control doesn't work.
Please present your evidence when making this assertion.
Naw, just for being a dick about it
Now you are just being stupid.
How does this particular eloquent insulting flame bait get Scored all the way up to Insightful? What a dipshit.
I've never worked at a job where I would not have been fired for that lazy crap example you just coded.
Logically, if you place an else or if you return from the function early you avoid having the need for the goto. Its lazy and it goes against every coding standard I've ever seen and unless you are Larry Wall (Perl designer and coder and goto apologist) you don't get to use them.
Out of the slppery depths of Hell the Leviathan rises once more. DIGITAL EQUIPMENT CORPORATION has returned. Say it with me Brothers and sisters: all hail the PDP- 16894. Hoozaah. Hoozaaah. Is that a tear of joy or despair. We will never know.
Memory management isn't taught so much these days because, what in the hell are you going to write that's going to use 16GB of RAM?
In all seriousness though, memory management was important when software and hardware were on par with one another. However, (IMO) hardware has outpaced software at this point. I defy you to find a program my gaming PC can't run whilst I simultaneously play Crysis and browse Slashdot. In addition, most high level languages are incredibly forgiving when it comes to bad memory management, thanks to good built-in garbage collection. Sure, it helps to know that grittier low level, less abstracted stuff. Knowing what your computer is doing on that level would make you exceptionally efficient. However, if you are an experienced programmer, who understands best practice and can competently scour an API for the most efficient classes and methods to use in your object oriented programming, I see no reason why you shouldn't be seen as a "real" programmer. Anyone who says otherwise needs to get with the times...
If you only program on Windows then you are write. Welcome, however to the real world where windows is but a very small fraction of the hardware devices in existence and the very vast majority of them do in fact require memory management to function. Bad Advice is in the end Bad Advice.
Funny thing about games even, it turns out that if you were writing games even on Xbox you would find that your employer would fire you with that advice. You should keep it to yourself.
If you go to college and all you learn is Java when you got your CS then your an idiot. I got my degree in Math, taught myself C, avoided Fortran like it was Ebola (it is in Software terms, not wait, that's Forth). Anyway, Software is Art. It isn't science, it isn't Engineering. It is Art. It should be taught like Painting, only with Math and to Nerds, and Geeks, and people with severe social problems who are way too smart.
The thing is, that the people who are good at this, really good, are so good that you will never, no matter how much you work at it, be as good as they are. They are gods. I've been doing this for twenty five years and I'm good, I'm slow but I am good. But I have seen really good, I have seen artists who are like Rembrandt, these guys like Linus Torvulds (never met him but you know his work) these guys come along and they just kiss the canvas and they change our lives. They pretend that they are writing software but they are creating art.
The rest of us do that to, and most of us are pretty good, we invent languages, and rules, and say stupid things like, "if you don't get close to the machine for a semester then you aren't a real Computer Scientist". And then we expect that other people will just follow along.
In the end the things that makes you a computer scientist, a software engineer, a computer programmer, an engineer, a mad scientist, a developer, they are all pretty much the same things. You know what tools you need to do your job. You work to get those tools. You don't bitch about it if you can't get them, or you leave, and in the end. You write software that works. That is it. You write software that works. You want to be a Computer Scientist? Can you write software?
You have odd ideas ocean CEO's. I won't argue that there are a few idiots who some how smoozed their way to the top. However, if you stop to look at
The the bios of startups and take a look at the CEOs of most of those companies you will find that for the most part these positions are filled by scary smart people who are smart technically as well as emotionally. These people are often the single point of success or failure of any company.
Being a genius, you probably already new that and you were saying something stupid just for the argument.
Athiesm is very much a faith, and one of the more annoying ones at that. I put it on the same pedestal as Vegans and Mormons which is my Verse is slightly lowers than Krishnas but higher than Muslims in the order of who annoys me more. Athiests are those group of people who go around loudly proclaiming that they don't believe in God because there isn't one, but they can't be happy enough with that. They won't rest until every one else is as unhappy as they are. In the world of annoying gits who are going no where when they die Athiests are the top of the list. Every one else at least has a comfortable fiction of what happens when you die, but Athiests live in the ultimately depressing reality that this is it. There is no afterlife that in a thousand years not anything we do as a civilization will mean anything at all. Maybe five people from this century will be memorable, the rest of us will be sediment. Athiests are not happy unless the rest of us succumb to their dogma that this is it.
So, in the great shit hole of religious dogmas, Athiests have absolute worst, the least imaginative, the least useful, and ultimately the most self defeating. Every other religion has a place, an afterlife: HOPE. Athiests are religious and what they preach is despair. So, I now officially reorder my list of annoying religions and place Athiests at the top, displacing Satanists, who, while voting for the wrong team, at least admit there is a team.
It seems that what you are good at is bitching. I don't see what Slashdot gets out of it. You don't add anything substantive. You have offered nothing except the always helpful "it all sucks" which we all know in the end is not helpful and is not even true. It does even not "all" suck. It is not 'all" a steaming pile of "dog shit."
Slashdot is going to change. This much is true, but you want input into the change. Instead of offering what is in essence the big "F*ck Off" to change why don't you step up to the plate and offer a list of things you would like to see different. I always find it amusing to say the least that tech people who pride themselves on embracing change when it hits them in the chest like a train always are the first to rail against anything that seems like change. Try this exercise: Instead of envisioning that you have the power to put Slashdot out of business (you don't). Try to imagine that you have the power to make them better, something you want to read.
Come to think of it. That's what this page is for.
So, stop bitching and planning for the end of days and for overthrowing web sites and try to be a little constructive. If you can't do that then just shut the fuck up because truthfully your just a noisy prick who needs to take his dick out of his mouth and zip up his pants and get back to work.
Funny thought on how you get to be the guy who decides what is "good" or not. I would say "ill informed." It doesn't matter what your opinion is at all, or mine for that matter. The people who the government pays to make decisions are generally the people I would trust to be the best informed people in the room. You either trust them or you don't. In this politics is irrelevant. If you don't trust the people making the decision for the country then then you should leave the country. You could tie up the agency, make it less efficient, make it worse, but in the end who are you hurting? Certainly not the Chinese and Indians, and Russians who would very much thank you.
In any case, "personal contact with guys from NSA" doesn't count much with me as I once ran into a guy who new Bjorne Stourstroup. So what. If you had worked for the NSA you could maybe say, I used to work for the NSA but probably wouldn't and you couldn't certainly ever tell anybody what you did. Snowden is almost certainly unique in being able to talk about it.
Your argument is pointless. You don't really know what the NSA does so you assume that almost everything it does is evil. Then as example, you concoct and example and show that by using your example of evil some good could come from it. Stupid.
The NSA doesn't exist because it does evil. The NSA exists because what it does actually does work, and is good. The problem is that most of what it does, the very vast majority of it will never be public. This probably is research into capabilities but also serious work into what our major International Competitors are doing, people like the Chinese, Indians, and even Brazilians might be doing.
I prefer a bullet to the brainpan. It's more correct for the crime of treason and it doesn't make a mockery as you would do of the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
The military is NOT protecting me. Sorry, but the United States Military that exists today has NOTHING to do with protecting the citizens.
You are an idiot.
Militarily speaking, the reason why you think that the military does nothing to protect the citizens is because it does it better than any other military in the world. 2.5 Million men and women, many of whom spent way too much time away from their families in the past twelve years because their country asked them to in countries they hate, not fighting for the most part but building infrastructure such as roads and sewage systems (I have friends who spent time there). You do this so that people there feel hope and maybe don't hate us quite so much.
Our military has a command structure designed over fifty years that spans the globe which watches for threats to Americans so that you can go almost anywhere in the globe and when you try to get a Visa to some country in the middle of nowhere the Embassy can say "Hm, no that's not a good idea, denied." and maybe they just saved your life.
You can go anywhere in the world almost and walk almost any street in the world and you don't even know that the reason why you can do it safely is because just maybe the people there like you as an American but maybe they hate you because you're a snot nosed American with a self important attitude that thinks you know better than everybody else and maybe you just walked into a really big drug deal but nobody is going to kill you because just maybe that might spark a drone attack.
When Genghis Khan ruled China it was said that you could walk from one end to another without fear of Bandits. This is what the US Military brings you outside of the United States. Safety. This is the reason why
I have looked at a lot comments concerning this and the surprising thing about it is the number of people who just assumed that everything that Snowden did is write and everything that the NSA did is wrong. I understand that this is predominantly liberal media, and believe it or not, I am predominantly liberal. I voted for Obama. I believe the Republicans are working very hard to destroy our Democracy. I believe many of the Democrats are eager to help them.
However, I can say this with absolute certainty. Who gave him the right? Was he elected? Did someone make him king? Did God anoint him? Access is not permission to steal.
Snowden, by any description, by any definition is the bad guy here. He is a traitor. It doesn't matter that his results are good. It doesn't matter that the NSA takes a couple of hits or did some bad things. He could mitigate his damage by coming home and facing the music but he doesn't. He threatens that the "Worst is yet to come." These are not the acts of a hero. These are not the acts of a man who should be given clemency.
Face it, this is a bad scary world. Russia and China are not our friends. They know that. They look out for their own best interests. When you don't look out for your own best interest as a nation then you turn into Portugal. A used to be great country with a few good Bed and Breakfasts and some really great Scenery.
Snowden will never be given Clemency. At this stage in his life I would suspect the only thing keeping him alive is the fact that there is the threat that something he has which might be "Really Big" hasn't been released. It's probably a pretty big something because if it weren't he might have an unfortunate accident. I for one wouldn't miss him.
Never. Why do you think Flashlights were invented? There is no genetic imperative not to be eaten by a Grue in the dark if you carry a flashlight.
I have met people who were not marveled by the display of the Milky Way in the night sky. I have met people who were scared by it. I would suggest that I know more people in New York City that are terrified of it then not. There is a reason they are willing to live in Manhattan and pay those prices living on top of each other. They like the comforting crush of other humans and it is very okay for them to think that for every one of them four or five or fifteen people toil in the fields, or seas, or whatever to supply their needs. The comforting crush of humanity, with ever present light and noise isolates them from the three things in this universe that most people cannot abide: Silence, Night (Dark, Lost), Alone.
You will have some freedom making light more friendly to the dark skies initiative but the moment people even begin to suspect that the Milky Way is out there they will want it walled away by lights again.
Thank you Mozilla....
Is this a serious question? Would you post Egyptian Hieroglyphic to illustrate some important fact about Egypt 3000 years ago? There are very few Math equations that people understand intuitively and they usually go something like this 5 + 3 = 8. Mathematicians will eat this stuff up. Physicists will appreciate it. Maybe some other math nerds might like it but in the end what will happen is the collective mass of humans will not even bother to shrug their shoulders before they move on.
I love big math formulae and I love equations in stuff but I realize that I am kind of a big nerd that way and the Gods honest truth is that I don't understand most of what I see. I guarantee that not only will most NY Times readers not understand what they are seeing, they will stop reading at that point ant move onto the next article.
My wife started using facebook because her coworkers were using it. She was working with them in close quarters all day and then she would come home and talk to them on facebook most of the evening. Its been a year since it ended and I don't yet know if this is going to end in divorce. What I can tell you is that we as people were never evolved to have someone whispering in our ear all day. What makes Facebook in particular and social networking in general dangerous is that you used to have to be close to someone to become attached. Now you only have to be texting them or chatting with them or whatever. It does what the phone never could do: It connects you to anyone you ever met that you can find online.
I'm not saying that this is neccessarily a bad thing. I am saying that we aren't wired for and we aren't prepared for this kind of connectivity.
If all Software and IT needs were being funneled into new projects and new features and new ideas then the Red Hat guy might be write. This is not the case however. Most Software development done in the world is based on specific needs generated by specific customers on existing IT systems. It is a painfully slow, deliberate process that sometimes produces astonishingly public failures. Most of the time what is produced is quite successes that for the most part do what the customer wanted done.
A couple of years ago my organization switched from Silicon Graphics workstations running an ancient C++ compiler to Red Hat Linux on Dell workstations. It took us about six months to migrate the code from one platform to another. We didn't develop new features that nobody wanted. We didn't create waste where none existed. What we did is exactly what the customer paid us to do.
Vendor driven software that is created with an unknown user in mind is usually pretty scary in that you are always going to get features you didn't want and features that you do want but they don't work well. Guess what, that's what you get for making a product that is designed for the general propulation. Cars are the same way. I want a Toyota Truck, and I want a really cool sound system. They don't sell them that way. I get the adequate sound system that Toyota provides, it kind of does what I want, but if I want better I am going to have to by better, and even then it make not work 100% in my truck, and it will most certainly do things I didn't want it to do.
This isn't, for the most part, waste. Waste is what you get when you contract a software system to build, it takes five years, costs 100 million, thirty developers, and then when you are two weeks from shipping sales tells you that they can't sell your stuff. However, for every one of those types of projects there are literally dozens that didn't get cancelled and were shipped to sometimes eager customers.
Look for another job. When upper management sticks their nose in with the rational that you described, doom is just around the corner. The problem is simple. How do you get the best performance out of your best people? The answer is not: Fit them all into the round hole. The correct answer is: Let them use the best tools possible as they perceive them to be.
Okay, languages need to be standardized, but after that, the environment needs to be perogative of the developer.
Nuff said...
If you are having a compitition for creating the best word processor and some kid from Iran pipes up and says: "Hey look at mine." Great.
If you are talking about an open source evolution for UAVs where the inovation can be a new algorithm designed to double the flight time, conserve fuel some manner not ever thought of before, or maybe the inovation is some way to double the resolution of current on board cameras, then you will have a substantially large problem.
The problem isn't if the Iranian kid is the one who figures out the algorithm. The problem is if you or some other American figures out the algorithm and then gives it to the Iranian kid to incorporate into his design.
Maybe he isn't an Iranian kid though. Maybe he is an Iranian Intelligence officer working with an Iranian programmer, designing a new type of UAV to be better than anything in the curent U.S. arsenal. Maybe the inovation is resolution doubling for some on board camera and six weeks or six months down the road that algorithm is used on an Iranian UAV to pinpoint something in Iraq that the Iranians shouldn't know about. Maybe then some Iranian intelligence officer transmits that data to the Iraqi freedom fighters inhabiting that area and the next day six U.S. soldiers were killed, and you read about it in the newspaper or see it on the web. Maybe one of those that dies is the brother of some girl you really like and she is now so distraught that she has to quit school, at least for the semester, and she goes home and in a depressed state she takes her own life.
Let's review, in the spirit of cooperation, you have a UAV open source project that allows the Iranians to build a better camera for the one UAV they have devoloped, U.S. soldiers die and the girl you were destined to spend the rest of your life with is now dead from an overdose of NoDoz sleeping pills.
Never mind that what have committed is probably treason. There are laws, and IANAL and I don't know which ones, but there are laws that you may already have broken in your effort to bring Open Source to software governing matters of National Interest and Self Defense.
While the scenario I have presented is pattently absurd, please take the warning to heart. The U.S. government will prosecute you if anything that looks like it might be or might need to be a national secret is transmitted out of the United States. Anything concerning UAVs would fall under that catagory.
Item 41 in the book "C++ Coding Standards" is:
Make data members private, except in behaviorless aggregates (C-style structs).
We've gone round and round on this where I work but the long and the short it is that Sutter and Alexandrescu are correct. Large collections of setters/getters are generally signs of a bad design. If you have a struct that maybe has some basic functionality that isn't germain to the purpose of the class then simplify it and put it in structs. If it does something then design it so that you don't have ten or twenty setters and getters for your class.