I can either design and build an automated system, which has a chance of failing, or I can send people, who based on past experience have about a 1% chance of dying (that's roughly NASA's record at this point, about 1 in 100). Also, the automated system is much cheaper to do, and can potentially work for longer, though perhaps not quite as flexible.
Which do you choose?
Manned flight. We're one meteor away from extinction, and the sooner we start getting practice at hedging our bets, the better.
What happened to this organisation that managed to put people on the moon, that managed to build a huge telescope in orbit around the earth, that even built a permanently manned space station?
They became another large corporation with managers and fiefdoms and a culture where it's safer to aim low and marginally succeed than to aim high and risk failure.
In all fairness, otherbird was being sarcastic to highlight the attitude of others. He then goes on to tell others why this isn't a good idea:
[16:24:51] <@otherbird> bjori: switch to US layout;) [16:24:57] <@johannes_> I like::: more than \ if it's only about bikeshed color... [16:25:20] <@otherbird> johannes_: if ~20% of users can't use it, we can't have it [16:25:26] <@otherbird> simple as [16:25:48] <@otherbird> Derick: we heard from 3 nationalities on-list that had problems with it
For the record, I grok Perl just fine, but fell in love with Python because it felt like "Perl done right". I don't avoid Perl because I have to, but because I can. I just mentioned that because a lot of people really seem to believe that Python is for people who can't handle anything else.
To receive any of this pathetic service credit (again, it is not a refund), you are required to send Amazon an email documenting (dates, times, regions) and providing evidence (heartbeat request logs, etc). *Yes, they want logs.*
If you outsource your servers but don't monitor them, then you pretty much deserve whatever happens.
If only linux were freely available from universities, computer geeks, and the internet!
When I wanted to install RedHat 4.something, I went to see if they had it in my university's library. Joy! They did! Unfortunately, the librarian refused to let me check it out because I "might install it on my own computer, which would be illegal." When I finally demonstrated that it would be OK, they still refused to let me leave the library with it, although I was welcome to bring a stack of floppies to copy the CD onto (as this was before CD burners became common).
No but a modern PC running windows uses 1000 times more RAM than GEOS Commodore 64, but doesn't really do anything extra. The OS needs to go on a diet.
GEOS supported thousands of printers, hundreds of hard drive adapters, hundreds of video cards, streaming network video, 3d gaming, virtual memory, several CPU vendors, hundreds of mice, and all that in 20KB of memory? Impressive!
Less sarcastic answer: modern computers do a whole awful lot more than GEOS did.
Why would you hate to admit that? I'd say that almost all FOSS contribution is selfish, in that it's done to fulfill a personal requirement, because it's fun, or for recognition. I can't think of too many projects run by anonymous people who don't like working on them.
Preach it. I'm not a beer snob (because it's hard to be snobbish about something you only get to drink once ever other month or so), but I don't bother with anything "lighter" than Sam Adams. If I'm going to have a beer, I'm going to have one that tastes good.
there are plenty of people out there who believe in the sanctity and purity of the human body.
If they were sincere, they'd refuse to breathe tainted air (smog, CO, might've been exhaled by $MINORITY) and would die immediately. The rest are moralizing hypocrites that you can make fun of before moving on.
never mind that supporting a pay product can be a big hassel and if the market isn't big enough it can simply not be economic
Jackpot. There just isn't that much commercial demand for what I did, and again, we're not a software house. We don't have any sales or support infrastructure in place to handle that project even if we wanted to.
Also buisness men don't like giving away things which might help their competitors.
Businessmen like the CEOs of IBM and Sun who give away huge projects that will definitely help their competitors? Yeah. Those guys are amateurs.:-)
Hi, Andrew! I know you're new to this and don't really understand these complicated ideas very well, but I'll try to help you.
My company has a program written in FoxPro. For reasons too long to explain, it's not going away any time soon. We needed a way to run queries against that data, and because FoxPro is too slow for interactive use, we decided to move that data into PostgreSQL. We looked and looked but there just wasn't a good program for regularly copying that data from one to the other on a scheduled basis. Eventually, I wrote one.
Now, my company isn't in the FoxPro-to-PostgreSQL conversion business. We have other, more interesting things to do all day than sell or support software. My boss, being enlightened, allowed me to release the program as Free Software so that other people could use it. It cost him absolutely nothing over what he'd already paid me to write the program. Since that first release, I've heard from users around the world who liked it and wanted new features or to make suggestions. Some of those features and suggestions turned out to be pretty good ideas for us, too, so I added them to the program.
My boss is happy because we really needed that program to conduct our business. I'm happy because I got to share a nice bit of code with the world. Random users everywhere are happy because they can spend their money on writing other cool programs and food and televisions instead of buying my program's commercial equivalent (if there was one). My boss got something nice, I got money to pay my mortgage, and everybody wins.
See, Andrew? It's not that hard! But please leave the big concepts to the adults until you get a little more practice, OK? Good boy.
Some large projects are organized and run in ways that require branching and merging. Some are organized and run in ways that don't.
No project of consequence is run in a way that doesn't. There are always branches of a non-trivial application, even if it's only the difference between production code and what's living on the developers' hard drives. The only difference between that situation and "proper" branching is that the developers don't get the benefit of version control on code they haven't copied to production yet, where in a branching system they can check in all sorts of minor tweaks and experiments without breaking anything else.
I don't check in things that I don't think are stable.
I recently modified a mission-critical application from a multi-threaded to running distributed across multiple processes on multiple machines. Now, I think I'm a pretty good programmer or I wouldn't have tackled the project in the first place, but I openly admit that the first checkin of the new version had bugs. What was I supposed to do with that - keep it on my hard drive until it was perfect and then do a single giant merge?
I'm not a fan of SVN. Use it at work, and I find myself missing things CVS does so well, like tagging and branching.
You have to be joking. Branching and tagging is so cheap under SVN that I actually do it now, and SVN support nice minor features like, say, renaming files and atomic commits. To the best of my knowledge, SVN is a strict superset of CVS.
Slashdot Mirror
I can either design and build an automated system, which has a chance of failing, or I can send people, who based on past experience have about a 1% chance of dying (that's roughly NASA's record at this point, about 1 in 100). Also, the automated system is much cheaper to do, and can potentially work for longer, though perhaps not quite as flexible.
Which do you choose?
Manned flight. We're one meteor away from extinction, and the sooner we start getting practice at hedging our bets, the better.
What happened to this organisation that managed to put people on the moon, that managed to build a huge telescope in orbit around the earth, that even built a permanently manned space station?
They became another large corporation with managers and fiefdoms and a culture where it's safer to aim low and marginally succeed than to aim high and risk failure.
You can add and multiply strings with the the same operators in Python which also has weak typing.
Python is strongly typed. PHP assumes you mean to do math and casts everything to a number:
Python assumes nothing, and performs a string operation since the left value is a string:
It never implicitly casts between dissimilar types (meaning you can still add floats and ints, but can't add an int and a str).
In all fairness, otherbird was being sarcastic to highlight the attitude of others. He then goes on to tell others why this isn't a good idea:
What happens when a PHP program for some reason evals() some user input that doesn't properly escape the namespaces?
An experienced programmer cries.
They all have corners of stupidity you have to work around - some more than others, but what does it matter really?
Write the equivalent of a list comprehension or generator function in COBOL, then get back to us.
For the record, I grok Perl just fine, but fell in love with Python because it felt like "Perl done right". I don't avoid Perl because I have to, but because I can. I just mentioned that because a lot of people really seem to believe that Python is for people who can't handle anything else.
To receive any of this pathetic service credit (again, it is not a refund), you are required to send Amazon an email documenting (dates, times, regions) and providing evidence (heartbeat request logs, etc). *Yes, they want logs.*
If you outsource your servers but don't monitor them, then you pretty much deserve whatever happens.
One of the main reasons this might work in Australia is because it is an island.
Just like the other places it's being rolled out, like Israel and Denmark.
lol something going that fast cant. at those speeds it litterly is flying. the gforces litterly pull it off the ground and its riding on them.
I feel dumber for having read that.
If only linux were freely available from universities, computer geeks, and the internet!
When I wanted to install RedHat 4.something, I went to see if they had it in my university's library. Joy! They did! Unfortunately, the librarian refused to let me check it out because I "might install it on my own computer, which would be illegal." When I finally demonstrated that it would be OK, they still refused to let me leave the library with it, although I was welcome to bring a stack of floppies to copy the CD onto (as this was before CD burners became common).
No but a modern PC running windows uses 1000 times more RAM than GEOS Commodore 64, but doesn't really do anything extra. The OS needs to go on a diet.
GEOS supported thousands of printers, hundreds of hard drive adapters, hundreds of video cards, streaming network video, 3d gaming, virtual memory, several CPU vendors, hundreds of mice, and all that in 20KB of memory? Impressive!
Less sarcastic answer: modern computers do a whole awful lot more than GEOS did.
Why would you hate to admit that? I'd say that almost all FOSS contribution is selfish, in that it's done to fulfill a personal requirement, because it's fun, or for recognition. I can't think of too many projects run by anonymous people who don't like working on them.
Preach it. I'm not a beer snob (because it's hard to be snobbish about something you only get to drink once ever other month or so), but I don't bother with anything "lighter" than Sam Adams. If I'm going to have a beer, I'm going to have one that tastes good.
there are plenty of people out there who believe in the sanctity and purity of the human body.
If they were sincere, they'd refuse to breathe tainted air (smog, CO, might've been exhaled by $MINORITY) and would die immediately. The rest are moralizing hypocrites that you can make fun of before moving on.
OT: the first two links on your resume page both point to http://www.eyetoy-antigrav.com/ .
never mind that supporting a pay product can be a big hassel and if the market isn't big enough it can simply not be economic
Jackpot. There just isn't that much commercial demand for what I did, and again, we're not a software house. We don't have any sales or support infrastructure in place to handle that project even if we wanted to.
Also buisness men don't like giving away things which might help their competitors.
Businessmen like the CEOs of IBM and Sun who give away huge projects that will definitely help their competitors? Yeah. Those guys are amateurs. :-)
The latest U.S. News & World Report appears to claim this recession is deeper than the post-dot-com recession.
And that would raise the demand for expensive, uncustomizable software how?
Hi, Andrew! I know you're new to this and don't really understand these complicated ideas very well, but I'll try to help you.
My company has a program written in FoxPro. For reasons too long to explain, it's not going away any time soon. We needed a way to run queries against that data, and because FoxPro is too slow for interactive use, we decided to move that data into PostgreSQL. We looked and looked but there just wasn't a good program for regularly copying that data from one to the other on a scheduled basis. Eventually, I wrote one.
Now, my company isn't in the FoxPro-to-PostgreSQL conversion business. We have other, more interesting things to do all day than sell or support software. My boss, being enlightened, allowed me to release the program as Free Software so that other people could use it. It cost him absolutely nothing over what he'd already paid me to write the program. Since that first release, I've heard from users around the world who liked it and wanted new features or to make suggestions. Some of those features and suggestions turned out to be pretty good ideas for us, too, so I added them to the program.
My boss is happy because we really needed that program to conduct our business. I'm happy because I got to share a nice bit of code with the world. Random users everywhere are happy because they can spend their money on writing other cool programs and food and televisions instead of buying my program's commercial equivalent (if there was one). My boss got something nice, I got money to pay my mortgage, and everybody wins.
See, Andrew? It's not that hard! But please leave the big concepts to the adults until you get a little more practice, OK? Good boy.
Some large projects are organized and run in ways that require branching and merging. Some are organized and run in ways that don't.
No project of consequence is run in a way that doesn't. There are always branches of a non-trivial application, even if it's only the difference between production code and what's living on the developers' hard drives. The only difference between that situation and "proper" branching is that the developers don't get the benefit of version control on code they haven't copied to production yet, where in a branching system they can check in all sorts of minor tweaks and experiments without breaking anything else.
I don't check in things that I don't think are stable.
I recently modified a mission-critical application from a multi-threaded to running distributed across multiple processes on multiple machines. Now, I think I'm a pretty good programmer or I wouldn't have tackled the project in the first place, but I openly admit that the first checkin of the new version had bugs. What was I supposed to do with that - keep it on my hard drive until it was perfect and then do a single giant merge?
I never mentioned green girls. Of course, things in my earlier years are a little hazy.
Be aware that she's available to anyone who asks.
I'm not a fan of SVN. Use it at work, and I find myself missing things CVS does so well, like tagging and branching.
You have to be joking. Branching and tagging is so cheap under SVN that I actually do it now, and SVN support nice minor features like, say, renaming files and atomic commits. To the best of my knowledge, SVN is a strict superset of CVS.
Git is an excellent piece of software, but Windows performance is not so great.
Git could paint your house and buy you a girlfriend, but that wouldn't help Windows.