Ditch Katz and approach maddog to write on a regular basis. We need geeks writing for geeks. Katz seems to think loser == geek and that's what makes him think he is qualified to talk about geeks.
...whether or not there's ShutUp Software out there. For the vast majority of us, we don't LIKE hearing other people's opinions, and generally tune them out whether or not there's software to help us. Out of the 79,350 Slashdot readers who haven't blocked Jon, how many hits does he get when he posts an article? That's probably a better count.
We all know there's stuff out on the internet that's patently offensive, stuff that I wouldn't want my kid to see (if I indeed had a kid). Used judiciously, filtering can help. And as for free speech, well, you can talk all you want, but I don't have to listen.
Personally, I keep my Slashdot settings at -1. I want to hear everything, the good, the bad and the ugly. If someone wants to set it at 0, however, and skip all the AC's who post "first!" every time, more power to them.
In general, I've found that if people are predisposed NOT to listen, then you can't force them. And you shouldn't. The right to tune out speech is just as sacrosanct as the right to speak it.
I have to agree- I am shocked and amazed that katz would be censored by go.com, etc. for merely political views. (I assume that he wasn't posting porno as well in former columns =)
However, Jon, you should not be so dismissive of "flaming" as you call it. It's true that many flames are just bitter or bored people looking for a rise, but it is also easy to dismiss legitimate, civil comments that are unpleasent to read as simple flames. For instance, during the running to the website incident, I published what I felt was a civil criticism of what I felt smacked of self-promotion. This is an unpleasent thing for you to read, I realize, and not a nice thing to say. But I didn't make wild accusations about kickback schemes, and all that other crap that so many other people did. And yet, from a number of responses to my post, many of which were personal, angry, and uncivil, I assume that it was taken to be a flame.
If you don't like blocking software, be sure that you are not too quick to dismiss comments as flames; that too is the kind of censorship you are talking about.
Hmm. I notice that this code has NOT ONE SINGLE COMMENT. Terrible practicum, well on the way to Write-Only Programs.
Some more salient questions about code: How many _totally_incompatible_except_MicroSoft() function calls did you use? How many global variables changed in every function you ever wrote? How many ridiculous fpszqhPrefixToVariableName did you use? And finally, how many of those lines of code were (gulps back bile) VisualBasic...
I really do not understand Apple's marketing plan for the Macintosh, I never did. No EvangeList would have been necessary without their suicidal marketing. It seems as if they want to marginalize their product with bemusing ads filled with weirdos, artists, and assorted freaks(and bad grammar). At best they can get the market towards which they are aiming. In reality they can only achieve a portion of this segment. In rare cases they do focus on the superior technology and other features and benifits of Macs, but then they would counter this with some Feliniesqe tragic clown pleading with the masses to "Think Different(ly)". I imagine the boardroom: guy1) We can show off the vastly superior graphics of our system by rendering complex wireframe images. Twice as fast as a PC, that will impress people! guy2) No, we should have a fuzzy black and white still from the "Bicycle Thief", with dirty typewriter font for our tagline.
BUT Versus PC's, which is the least "conformist" machine? Mac: One manufacturer. You get the models and options Big Apple says you want. PC: hundreds of manufacturers, hundreds of models. You can home brew any system you desire, and you don't need a NEA grant to buy one.
I like Macs, love them even. But I cringe with every new ad campaign.
to me, logitech seems like the microsoft of the pointing device of business. they have rarely innovated and they like to copy designs of small companies, for example, kensington orbit.... their "innovations" were ergonomically bad(small, rsi-inducing trackballs that an user is supposed to operate with the thumb... logitech just spends less money on ergonomic R&D and more money on marketing and manufacturing
Don't envy "this guy" too much because he spends I would say less than 10% of his time writing Perl code. And that is only because he has an idea of a certain tool that can help him do the actual job of verifying the chip and there is just no EDA tool vendor which already has a tool in place for that purpose. And how far is EE from CS, really?
Chris.
I guess Mac's are officially "mainstream" again...
on
EvangeList closes down
·
· Score: 1
Posted by Lord Kano-The Gangster Of Love:
Primitive? Are you deranged? How many "new" or "high end" windoze features are old mainstream mac features?
Multiple monitors, auto poweron/off, SCSI, the ability to boot from any drive you connect(except the new fruity colored machines), RISC processing, a complete GUI these are all things that Apple's Engineers brought to the market YEARS before HewlettComPackarDell even though of them.
of course I don't write many lines of code. I do however, reuse a great deal of code. I spend more time designing than programming so I don't have to write large amounts of code, re-write, or patch.
I just read SC and I've rarely been so ambivalent about a novel. It was half really cool (some of the VR stuff was neat, the Mafia stuff was funny and the "neurolinguistic programming" was interesting) and half really really lame and overdone (the rest of the VR stuff, the heavily glossed over details of neuro-programming and one-dimensional characters).
But the worst was the shaggy-dog ending. A whole novel of build-up and then pfft at the end.
But I figured Neal was just starting as an author and so could be forgiven a few things. I then picked up Diamond Age. Very good beginning. Pretty strong middle. Very very loose end, what there was of it. Nothing wrapped up, no questions answered, all characters left up in the air. It's like he was told "Stop on page 450, no matter what". Lame.
I will probably read a third Neal Stephenson book just to see if he's improved, but if I get burned a third time, it's quits for me.
Several above posts follow the line of "but what good is HDTV if it's not on a 60" screen?" So what I want to know is: does anybody have any info on maximum angular resolution of the human eye with 20/20 vision? or maybe comfortable angular resolution? Surely there is some info on this somewhere. This is the same sort of analysis that led to CDs being 16-bit 44kHz and CRTs having three colors, because those specs pretty well match what humans can sense.
Without this info it seems clumsy to discuss whether or not HDTV on a small set is wasteful or not, as I certainly don't know the viwing distance intended for those 60" sets. -- Note the comfortable angular resolution would set the viewing distance for a given pixel size. Maybe this is actually a better statistic: some relation between comfortable viewing distance and dpi.
Just fishing for useful info I haven't had a change to look around for. -Dean
This is so strange. I was talking about this around 12:30 this morning, one hour before the post. The only exception is that I was refering more to (both corporate & private) windows programmers. I HATE all this visual crap. (Dos rules!) I even run an open source site.
I'm a Solaris and AIX sysadmin and have run Linux and Solaris at home as well. FreeBSD is my main OS now. It "fits" me.
I am a Solaris sysadmin as well. I feel the exact same way as you do. Linux is great and all, but to me, FreeBSD just somehow "feels" more right to me. Funny, this unix thing.:)
What this article may not be taking into consideration is the language that code is written in. Cobol or Fortran are languages which dictate that coders use more lines to do the same things. In the US C(++) is the dominant language. The objects in C++ and the ability to reuse those objects eliminates the need the re-invent the wheel and type those lines of code again, and again.
I keep all of the code that I've written handy, just in case I want to save 4 hours of work rewriting and redebugging a group of objects.
I'm not currently coding for a living, I do it to learn, and to accomplish simple repetitive tasks. If I had to do it to keep food on my table, I'd probably learn even more tricks to save time and get the job done faster. If these guys could get the same amount of work done while only writing 500 lines of code, I'd say all the better.
Slashdot Mirror
Posted by The ULTIMATE Crippler:
Ditch Katz and approach maddog to write on a regular basis. We need geeks writing for geeks. Katz seems to think loser == geek and that's what makes him think he is qualified to talk about geeks.
Posted by Mike@ABC:
...whether or not there's ShutUp Software out there. For the vast majority of us, we don't LIKE hearing other people's opinions, and generally tune them out whether or not there's software to help us. Out of the 79,350 Slashdot readers who haven't blocked Jon, how many hits does he get when he posts an article? That's probably a better count.
We all know there's stuff out on the internet that's patently offensive, stuff that I wouldn't want my kid to see (if I indeed had a kid). Used judiciously, filtering can help. And as for free speech, well, you can talk all you want, but I don't have to listen.
Personally, I keep my Slashdot settings at -1. I want to hear everything, the good, the bad and the ugly. If someone wants to set it at 0, however, and skip all the AC's who post "first!" every time, more power to them.
In general, I've found that if people are predisposed NOT to listen, then you can't force them. And you shouldn't. The right to tune out speech is just as sacrosanct as the right to speak it.
Thanks for reading this. Or not.
Posted by The Mongolian Barbecue:
Has anyone made an open standard that offers this kind of compression quality?
Posted by The Mongolian Barbecue:
I have to agree- I am shocked and amazed that katz would be censored by go.com, etc. for merely political views. (I assume that he wasn't posting porno as well in former columns =)
However, Jon, you should not be so dismissive of "flaming" as you call it. It's true that many flames are just bitter or bored people looking for a rise, but it is also easy to dismiss legitimate, civil comments that are unpleasent to read as simple flames. For instance, during the running to the website incident, I published what I felt was a civil criticism of what I felt smacked of self-promotion. This is an unpleasent thing for you to read, I realize, and not a nice thing to say. But I didn't make wild accusations about kickback schemes, and all that other crap that so many other people did. And yet, from a number of responses to my post, many of which were personal, angry, and uncivil, I assume that it was taken to be a flame.
If you don't like blocking software, be sure that you are not too quick to dismiss comments as flames; that too is the kind of censorship you are talking about.
Posted by Reitzel:
Hmm. I notice that this code has NOT ONE SINGLE COMMENT. Terrible practicum, well on the way to Write-Only Programs.
Some more salient questions about code: How many _totally_incompatible_except_MicroSoft() function calls did you use? How many global variables changed in every function you ever wrote? How many ridiculous fpszqhPrefixToVariableName did you use? And finally, how many of those lines of code were (gulps back bile) VisualBasic...
Posted by F.A.N.G.:
I really do not understand Apple's marketing plan for the Macintosh, I never did. No EvangeList would have been necessary without their suicidal marketing.
It seems as if they want to marginalize their product with bemusing ads filled with weirdos, artists, and assorted freaks(and bad grammar). At best they can get the market towards which they are aiming. In reality they can only achieve a portion of this segment.
In rare cases they do focus on the superior technology and other features and benifits of Macs, but then they would counter this with some Feliniesqe tragic clown pleading with the masses to "Think Different(ly)".
I imagine the boardroom:
guy1) We can show off the vastly superior graphics of our system by rendering complex wireframe images. Twice as fast as a PC, that will impress people!
guy2) No, we should have a fuzzy black and white still from the "Bicycle Thief", with dirty typewriter font for our tagline.
BUT Versus PC's, which is the least "conformist" machine?
Mac: One manufacturer. You get the models and options Big Apple says you want.
PC: hundreds of manufacturers, hundreds of models.
You can home brew any system you desire, and you don't need a NEA grant to buy one.
I like Macs, love them even. But I cringe with every new ad campaign.
Posted by Nr9:
to me, logitech seems like the microsoft of the pointing device of business. they have rarely innovated and they like to copy designs of small companies, for example, kensington orbit....
their "innovations" were ergonomically bad(small, rsi-inducing trackballs that an user is supposed to operate with the thumb... logitech just spends less money on ergonomic R&D and more money on marketing and manufacturing
Posted by The Merry Misanthrope:
If you know how many lines of code you've written in the last year, you've got way too much time on your hands. Go be more productive, weenie boys!
Posted by The Merry Misanthrope:
If it's hard to write, it should be hard to read.
Posted by this_guy:
Don't envy "this guy" too much because he spends I would say less than 10% of his time writing Perl code. And that is only because he has an idea of a certain tool that can help him do the actual job of verifying the chip and there is just no EDA tool vendor which already has a tool in place for that purpose. And how far is EE from CS, really?
Chris.
Posted by Lord Kano-The Gangster Of Love:
Primitive? Are you deranged? How many "new" or "high end" windoze features are old mainstream mac features?
Multiple monitors, auto poweron/off, SCSI, the ability to boot from any drive you connect(except the new fruity colored machines), RISC processing, a complete GUI these are all things that Apple's Engineers brought to the market YEARS before HewlettComPackarDell even though of them.
LK
Posted by DiegoGuy:
I have used FreeBSD in the past, and what impressed me the most was the ports system.
Linux definitely needs something like this.
Posted by FascDot Killed My Previous Use:
The Win32 version is slow to work but quick to render. Only problem is, I can't configure Preferences so I can't get out my firewall.
Love the interface. The the order of magnitude size difference from IE5.
Posted by LOTHAR, of the Hill People:
of course I don't write many lines of code.
I do however, reuse a great deal of code. I spend more time designing than programming so I don't have to write large amounts of code, re-write, or patch.
Posted by Paul Holden:
The difference between O(n) and O(n^2) is in no way 2 days - "a fraction of a second".
Posted by FascDot Killed My Previous Use:
This isn't all that new. I've been seeing this technology on re-runs of Bill Nye for at least 3 years.
Posted by FascDot Killed My Previous Use:
I just read SC and I've rarely been so ambivalent about a novel. It was half really cool (some of the VR stuff was neat, the Mafia stuff was funny and the "neurolinguistic programming" was interesting) and half really really lame and overdone (the rest of the VR stuff, the heavily glossed over details of neuro-programming and one-dimensional characters).
But the worst was the shaggy-dog ending. A whole novel of build-up and then pfft at the end.
But I figured Neal was just starting as an author and so could be forgiven a few things. I then picked up Diamond Age. Very good beginning. Pretty strong middle. Very very loose end, what there was of it. Nothing wrapped up, no questions answered, all characters left up in the air. It's like he was told "Stop on page 450, no matter what". Lame.
I will probably read a third Neal Stephenson book just to see if he's improved, but if I get burned a third time, it's quits for me.
Posted by Dean Townsley:
Several above posts follow the line of "but what good is HDTV if it's not on a 60" screen?" So what I want to know is: does anybody have any info on maximum angular resolution of the human eye with 20/20 vision? or maybe comfortable angular resolution? Surely there is some info on this somewhere. This is the same sort of analysis that led to CDs being 16-bit 44kHz and CRTs having three colors, because those specs pretty well match what humans can sense.
Without this info it seems clumsy to discuss whether or not HDTV on a small set is wasteful or not, as I certainly don't know the viwing distance intended for those 60" sets. -- Note the comfortable angular resolution would set the viewing distance for a given pixel size. Maybe this is actually a better statistic: some relation between comfortable viewing distance and dpi.
Just fishing for useful info I haven't had a change to look around for.
-Dean
Posted by Zero G:
I program in a lot of different languages.
I do mostly C, but I use other languages as needed.
Posted by Zero G:
This is so strange. I was talking about this around 12:30 this morning, one hour before the post. The only exception is that I was refering more to (both corporate & private) windows programmers. I HATE all this visual crap. (Dos rules!) I even run an open source site.
Posted by FascDot Killed My Previous Use:
Doesn't IPv6 incorporate security? What's the diff?
Posted by DonR:
:)
I'm a Solaris and AIX sysadmin and have run Linux and Solaris at home as well. FreeBSD is my main OS now. It "fits" me.
I am a Solaris sysadmin as well. I feel the exact same way as you do. Linux is great and all, but to me, FreeBSD just somehow "feels" more right to me. Funny, this unix thing.
---
Donald Roeber
Posted by EveBaby:
Did you americans ever think that what a "line of code" is, must have been the same across the study??
American idiocy never ceases to amaze me . . .
Posted by Pseudonet:
Could anybody tell me what percentage of Microsoft programmers are American - this article could explain a few things.
From
A man how writes barely 1000 lines a year
Posted by Lord Kano-The Gangster Of Love:
What this article may not be taking into consideration is the language that code is written in. Cobol or Fortran are languages which dictate that coders use more lines to do the same things. In the US C(++) is the dominant language. The objects in C++ and the ability to reuse those objects eliminates the need the re-invent the wheel and type those lines of code again, and again.
I keep all of the code that I've written handy, just in case I want to save 4 hours of work rewriting and redebugging a group of objects.
I'm not currently coding for a living, I do it to learn, and to accomplish simple repetitive tasks. If I had to do it to keep food on my table, I'd probably learn even more tricks to save time and get the job done faster. If these guys could get the same amount of work done while only writing 500 lines of code, I'd say all the better.
LK