Perhaps they should make it so it can self-compile changed code? Would be hard, but a definate advantage.
Most chess programs are able to learn from their mistakes in a primitive way. They store earlier games and if they lost a game in a certain situation, they'll try a different variation next time.
This is most probably not intentional. There are glitches in every complicated software. Maybe they were trying out some new algorithm that wasn't completely refined yet. Maybe it was a random off-by-one bug that has been already fixed. Shit happens all the time, Google is no different.
There will probably be many people who try to see a conspiracy theory behind this and say that Google has sold out. This is very unlikely. The nature of the described flaw suggests that all queries are affected. Now why should they skew the results of everything to appease a single entity who might have given them some money? That just doesn't make sense.
If you start doing things because you hate others and want to screw them over the end result is bad.
There are many people here who are trying to be holier than the pope and prove in all ways that they are the true believeres and revolutionaries. And so they try to demonstrate their loyalty to "the cause" on every occasion by lamenting how this or that organization will bring the apocalypse and BillG is the antichrist. Hope this will calm them a bit.
Well, saying that there are places on these moons for life to live and prosper is a far cry from your earlier claim that life is Everywhere where we would go. Just pointing it out.
You've got anything to back it? We got to the moon, didn't find any life there. Why would we necessarily have any better luck elsewhere (not that I wouldn't like and hope for it, mind you)?
Check out this temperature comparison site. Basically it says that the coldest spot on earth is -128 F (-89 C, 184 K), while Pluto's surface temperature is -378 to -396 F (-228 to -238 C, 35 to 45 K), air actually turns liquid at this point. So this makes it quite different for any practical purposes. The article itself also mentions that the water (if any) is probably under 100 miles of ice, which makes Antarctica infinitely more hospitable and accessible.
This is exactly the point why e-mailed voice mail is much better. I used to hate voice mail until we got a "unified" system, evcerything's coming in as e-mail. Voice mail comes as.wav attachments, open in your favorite player, skip the uninteresting parts and get to the point. Extremely convenient, there is no way I would ever want to use the old style voice mail again. Just because Microsoft is thinking about it or you don't understand how it works, doesn't mean it's a bad idea.
OT: How to get your piece posted to the front page
on
Passport vs. Plan 9
·
· Score: 2
Repeat as many times as possible how much you hate Microsoft and it's products, even if it's not really relevant to the topic (how does hating XP matter here?) Slashdot (whether you like it or not) is a semi-commercial enterprise, hence it should (theoretically) try to reach as wide an audience as possible. But it's truly amazing how it keeps shooting itself into foot by posting such inane stuff (here's a newsflash for you: geek's definition is not 'someone who hates Microsoft', there are many geeks who have a positive or at least neutral attitude towards this company), and thus alienating sensible people. Yes, I know that this emotional bashing is probably very appealing to Slashdot's younger readers. I used to be like that. But you know what, once you've worked in the industry for a while, your attitude becomes much calmer and more reasonable. And who does actually have the purchasing power really keep Slashdot alive by subscriptions or buying goods from sponsoring companies? Not your teenage MS-basher.
Disclaimer: This was not intended as a flame, just a thought on how Slashdot could ease its financial problems.
Hungarian notation isn't about just the scope. Yes, I know:) g_foo is fine, gppdw_foo for global pointer to pointer to double-word score is not. Just look at the Windows API library to see why NOT to use Hungarian notation.
Both g_foo and gppdw_foo are Hungarian, the other one just uses too much of the good thing. Any overkill is bad, and that applies to the Hungarian notation as well. You are saying yourself that g_foo is good and then say that Hungarian should not be used. That doesn't make much sense:)
As soon as you have to work in a LARGE software project it's a godsend. It makes reading someone else's code, or your own code 2 years later, MUCH easlier. When i can look at a variable in a strange piece of code and tell it's type and scope just from it's name, that saves a ton of time.
Absolutely! I guess someone will mod me down because of this but one of the negative examples here is the Linux kernel. We had an assigment in college that involved dealing with Linux kernel code, which uses tons of global variables all over the place, and makes it very hard to read. It would have been much easier if the variables had had an indication of the scope in their names (making 'jiffies' to 'g_jiffies' isn't that hard, is it?). Later I have had to consult some customers on how to write code against some stuff. And if they can't do it then I sometimes have to debug it for them. And there have been countless occasions where I have wished that they had used any logical naming convention, so their intentions would be easier to understand.
Oh give me a break. 1) The guy had been working for Microsoft for 21 years (how long have you worked anywhere?) 2) He's a billionaire (how much money do you have?)
These are perfectly good reasons to move on and try something different. In fact, most people in the industry switch companies much, much more often, so this is actually a rather positive sign for Microsoft (that people are staying for so long).
If I give you a paper check, you and I both have certain rights and duties, and we know where we stand if something goes wrong. There are no such protections for electronic transactions. None. Nada. Zero. And the big boys want the little suckers, I mean people, to go all electronic. Care to guess why?
Estonia has had an electronic signing law for a while, electronic documents are just as binding as papers. Also, we are discussing big guys screwing little guys in the US, not in Estonia, so it kinda disproves your point, doesn't it?
I guess that when there was a shift from gold coins to paper money then there were also many guys like you raising panic. But history has proven that the new system's efficiency far outweighed any other concerns.
I come from a small country in Eastern Europe (Estonia) but I have lived in the US for the last three years. One thing that surprised me most when I moved here was the backwardness of the US banking system (this is not meant as a flamebait, just the sad truth). In my home country there's a very advanced electronic banking system. Some examples: 1) Whenever you open an account in any bank, you always get free Internet access to it and full control over your account (since 1997). 2) You can transfer money from any account of any bank to any other account of any other bank, the account number system, routing and other issues are standardized by the central bank (since 1995). 3) In most banks, all Internet-based transactions are free (since 1994). 4) Proper security. None of this 4-6 digit PIN nonsense, you get either at least two passwords (one made up by you, the other comes on a password sheet that contains tens of different passwords and changes from session to session), or a smart card (since 1996). I guess there are lots of other features by now but these are the ones that were implemented 5+ years ago and still aren't implemented in the US. I find it truly weird that I have complete control over an account and I can handle all sorts of transactions in my home country that is thousands of miles away but I still have to walk over to my local bank that is just 3 miles away every now and then. Just one example of how useful the system was: When we went out to lunch with friends, we never had to go through this bill-counting ritual (got change for 20?) when paying for it, one guy paid for lunch, and the others just transferred money immediately and directly to his bank account. If only the US banks got their act together and implemented a normal bank-to-bank transaction system, we wouldn't have this discussion here.
Personally, I can definitely say that the labels are getting less money from me than they used to. The main reasons are: 1) Very often I want to listen to just something very particular, and I believe it is silly to pay (and ask) $15 for just one song. 2) Convenience. Using file-sharing programs, I can get anything I want in a minute or two, in a convenient format that I can copy to my laptop and listen in my car or whatever. Buying a CD will never give me that. And yes, I know that there are ways to buy single songs online etc but the choice tends to be crappy, (the late) Napster and its clones have always had a better and more interesting choice. I believe that there are many people who share these reasons and there's going to be more and more every day. Now, the point is that the music industry could definitely do a better job here by making it cheaper and more convenient to get what I want but it is also wrong to say that online music sharing has no effect on their revenue.
I cannot find a single job. In part this problem has been caused by H1B's taking the jobs that I am going for
This is absolute nonsense, of course. I came to the US with an H1B about three years ago, my company spent tens of thousands of dollars just to bring me here (moving from one continent to another isn't cheap, neither are the legal costs). And no, it wasn't because I would have accepted a smaller salary figure, I'm making excellent money right now. Since my coming here, I have been interviewing lots and lots of potential co-workers and the overall picture is oh so sad. 90% of the guys who describe themselves as kick-ass coders can't properly solve the simplest problems that involve just a little bit of thinking. The situation is so bad that it makes me cry. I don't care where you come from, I don't care if your skin is green and you piss in the corner of my office but if you're smart and can solve problems, you're hired. This has always been the case here. So please excuse me but I strongly suspect that the problem isn't with H1Bs but rather with over-inflated egos of some guys who then blame other people for their misfortunes. Btw, the company I work for is hiring right now. You're very welcome to come here and try to get my job, I would be really happy to have some extra help. But if you can't get over the bar then sorry, I prefer having no people to bad people.
I find it really strange how otherwise serious and well-educated people very often go along with these "X doubles every Y days" stories. Everybody who is familiar with even basic math should know that this kind of growth can only last for for a very short time, otherwise we would all be impersonating Elvis by now. Now Worldcom probably tweaked the facts but if some people really believe in this kind of exponential growth then I hardly have any compassion for them, and blaming Worldcom or someone else for your own stupidity is just silly.
You also have to take into account that this probably includes building both ship and debug, and assembling all the resource files for all the different languages in which Windows ships. So yes, 8 hours is not too bad, especially since a regular developer would only build the part that s/he needs.
For a corporation, publicity is only good when it leads to sales--and let's face it, SlashDot is hardly MicroSoft's target market for OSS.
There are many different people reading Slashdot, not all of them hate Microsoft. And Slashdot just keeps repeating (not all the articles but a fair amount) its almost hysterical mantra: Microsoft is too big, Microsoft is too powerful, Microsoft is too rich, Microsoft can extinguish anybody and anything, Microsoft this and Microsoft that. This leaves an impression to many people that Microsoft is indeed the only viable vendor and everything else is destined to die. That's actually a positive PR in an unintended way.
Without doubt, they are a sovereign nation (check the history of Sealand if you don't believe me). If you mean the court precedents then the court only decided that they were not under UK's jurisdiction at that time because they were in international waters. It could as well have been some guy living in a house-boat, the decision would have been the same but it wouldn't have made the house-boat a nationstate. Later UK expanded its territorial claim over the waters and Sealand is in those waters now, effectively putting it under UK's jurisdiction. I know that Mr. Bates has its own claim over the surrounding waters but the house-boat argument applies here as well, a boat certainly can't have territorial waters, why should a concrete pillar have them?
That aside, you don't even need to be a government to take this place out -- a well-placed shaped charge on one of the supports would send this SOB to the bottom of the ocean, and *anyone* with sufficiant knowledge and motivation could do it.
I wouldn't be so sure. If you check the history of Sealand then you see that the residents have been extremely zealous about this place, firing warning shots at anyone getting close to the tower. This included some guys who had come to repair some buoy that was floating in the vicinity (called "units of British Navy" in the official Sealand history;-) ). A pair of machine guns would keep anything less than a real warship in safe distance, so "well-placing a charge" would be quite tricky. Also remember that this platform was actively use in World War II and military considerations were taken into account when building it, so it's not that easy to take them out for a random guy.
Many people have commented how dumb this kind of exams are and how people never need this skill in real life. I sort of disagree. First, writing code on paper or whiteboard teaches you to be more careful and creates good habits (not the common write-something-fix-compiler-errors style). If you're working on bigger projects where compiling the code and reproing mistakes takes a long time then it often pays off. Second, this approach also teaches you to read code carefully and spots mistakes quickly. This is an invaluable skill when working on projects that involve many people and where you often need read and debug other people's code. I have done my fair share of written exams plus whiteboard interviews and years of experience have given me a fairly good eye for seeing mistakes in unfamiliar code. And you wouldn't imagine how impressive this skill can sometimes seem to one's managers;)
I'm waiting for the day when people stop saying "We got another worm." and start saying "We just got Microsofted again".
So let's say that the dream of many slashdotters gets fulfilled and regular people will start using linux at home. I'm fairly sure that most of them would use root/root or something similar as their credentials and there would be worms to exploit it. What would you call the worm then? MS may be influential but it can't really do much about human stupidity.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps they should make it so it can self-compile changed code? Would be hard, but a definate advantage.
Most chess programs are able to learn from their mistakes in a primitive way. They store earlier games and if they lost a game in a certain situation, they'll try a different variation next time.
Gimme a break. See this link, it has nothing to do with buying rankings.
This is most probably not intentional.
There are glitches in every complicated software. Maybe they were trying out some new algorithm that wasn't completely refined yet. Maybe it was a random off-by-one bug that has been already fixed. Shit happens all the time, Google is no different.
There will probably be many people who try to see a conspiracy theory behind this and say that Google has sold out.
This is very unlikely. The nature of the described flaw suggests that all queries are affected. Now why should they skew the results of everything to appease a single entity who might have given them some money? That just doesn't make sense.
If you start doing things because you hate others and want to screw them over the end result is bad.
There are many people here who are trying to be holier than the pope and prove in all ways that they are the true believeres and revolutionaries. And so they try to demonstrate their loyalty to "the cause" on every occasion by lamenting how this or that organization will bring the apocalypse and BillG is the antichrist. Hope this will calm them a bit.
Well, saying that there are places on these moons for life to live and prosper is a far cry from your earlier claim that life is Everywhere where we would go. Just pointing it out.
You've got anything to back it? We got to the moon, didn't find any life there. Why would we necessarily have any better luck elsewhere (not that I wouldn't like and hope for it, mind you)?
Check out this temperature comparison site.
Basically it says that the coldest spot on earth is -128 F (-89 C, 184 K), while Pluto's surface temperature is -378 to -396 F (-228 to -238 C, 35 to 45 K), air actually turns liquid at this point.
So this makes it quite different for any practical purposes.
The article itself also mentions that the water (if any) is probably under 100 miles of ice, which makes Antarctica infinitely more hospitable and accessible.
..and then progress to Linux 95, Linux 98, LiNTux, Linux 2000, LinuXP and then *drum roll* Li.NET? :P
Just too bad we have to wait 93 years to get the next one...
This is exactly the point why e-mailed voice mail is much better. I used to hate voice mail until we got a "unified" system, evcerything's coming in as e-mail. Voice mail comes as .wav attachments, open in your favorite player, skip the uninteresting parts and get to the point. Extremely convenient, there is no way I would ever want to use the old style voice mail again. Just because Microsoft is thinking about it or you don't understand how it works, doesn't mean it's a bad idea.
Repeat as many times as possible how much you hate Microsoft and it's products, even if it's not really relevant to the topic (how does hating XP matter here?)
Slashdot (whether you like it or not) is a semi-commercial enterprise, hence it should (theoretically) try to reach as wide an audience as possible. But it's truly amazing how it keeps shooting itself into foot by posting such inane stuff (here's a newsflash for you: geek's definition is not 'someone who hates Microsoft', there are many geeks who have a positive or at least neutral attitude towards this company), and thus alienating sensible people.
Yes, I know that this emotional bashing is probably very appealing to Slashdot's younger readers. I used to be like that. But you know what, once you've worked in the industry for a while, your attitude becomes much calmer and more reasonable.
And who does actually have the purchasing power really keep Slashdot alive by subscriptions or buying goods from sponsoring companies? Not your teenage MS-basher.
Disclaimer: This was not intended as a flame, just a thought on how Slashdot could ease its financial problems.
Hungarian notation isn't about just the scope.
Yes, I know
g_foo is fine,
gppdw_foo for global pointer to pointer to double-word score is not.
Just look at the Windows API library to see why NOT to use Hungarian notation.
Both g_foo and gppdw_foo are Hungarian, the other one just uses too much of the good thing.
Any overkill is bad, and that applies to the Hungarian notation as well.
You are saying yourself that g_foo is good and then say that Hungarian should not be used. That doesn't make much sense
As soon as you have to work in a LARGE software project it's a godsend. It makes reading someone else's code, or your own code 2 years later, MUCH easlier. When i can look at a variable in a strange piece of code and tell it's type and scope just from it's name, that saves a ton of time.
Absolutely!
I guess someone will mod me down because of this but one of the negative examples here is the Linux kernel. We had an assigment in college that involved dealing with Linux kernel code, which uses tons of global variables all over the place, and makes it very hard to read. It would have been much easier if the variables had had an indication of the scope in their names (making 'jiffies' to 'g_jiffies' isn't that hard, is it?).
Later I have had to consult some customers on how to write code against some stuff. And if they can't do it then I sometimes have to debug it for them. And there have been countless occasions where I have wished that they had used any logical naming convention, so their intentions would be easier to understand.
Oh give me a break.
1) The guy had been working for Microsoft for 21 years (how long have you worked anywhere?)
2) He's a billionaire (how much money do you have?)
These are perfectly good reasons to move on and try something different. In fact, most people in the industry switch companies much, much more often, so this is actually a rather positive sign for Microsoft (that people are staying for so long).
shutting down KaZaA and grokster would not be difficult, they would just sue the $hit out of them, like they did with napster.
Kazaa is not made by a US company, and I doubt anybody else in the world would take DMCA very seriously. So suing them would be difficult.
If I give you a paper check, you and I both have certain rights and duties, and we know where we stand if something goes wrong.
There are no such protections for electronic transactions. None. Nada. Zero. And the big boys want the little suckers, I mean people, to go all electronic. Care to guess why?
Estonia has had an electronic signing law for a while, electronic documents are just as binding as papers.
Also, we are discussing big guys screwing little guys in the US, not in Estonia, so it kinda disproves your point, doesn't it?
I guess that when there was a shift from gold coins to paper money then there were also many guys like you raising panic. But history has proven that the new system's efficiency far outweighed any other concerns.
I come from a small country in Eastern Europe (Estonia) but I have lived in the US for the last three years. One thing that surprised me most when I moved here was the backwardness of the US banking system (this is not meant as a flamebait, just the sad truth). In my home country there's a very advanced electronic banking system. Some examples:
1) Whenever you open an account in any bank, you always get free Internet access to it and full control over your account (since 1997).
2) You can transfer money from any account of any bank to any other account of any other bank, the account number system, routing and other issues are standardized by the central bank (since 1995).
3) In most banks, all Internet-based transactions are free (since 1994).
4) Proper security. None of this 4-6 digit PIN nonsense, you get either at least two passwords (one made up by you, the other comes on a password sheet that contains tens of different passwords and changes from session to session), or a smart card (since 1996).
I guess there are lots of other features by now but these are the ones that were implemented 5+ years ago and still aren't implemented in the US.
I find it truly weird that I have complete control over an account and I can handle all sorts of transactions in my home country that is thousands of miles away but I still have to walk over to my local bank that is just 3 miles away every now and then.
Just one example of how useful the system was: When we went out to lunch with friends, we never had to go through this bill-counting ritual (got change for 20?) when paying for it, one guy paid for lunch, and the others just transferred money immediately and directly to his bank account.
If only the US banks got their act together and implemented a normal bank-to-bank transaction system, we wouldn't have this discussion here.
Personally, I can definitely say that the labels are getting less money from me than they used to.
The main reasons are:
1) Very often I want to listen to just something very particular, and I believe it is silly to pay (and ask) $15 for just one song.
2) Convenience. Using file-sharing programs, I can get anything I want in a minute or two, in a convenient format that I can copy to my laptop and listen in my car or whatever. Buying a CD will never give me that. And yes, I know that there are ways to buy single songs online etc but the choice tends to be crappy, (the late) Napster and its clones have always had a better and more interesting choice.
I believe that there are many people who share these reasons and there's going to be more and more every day. Now, the point is that the music industry could definitely do a better job here by making it cheaper and more convenient to get what I want but it is also wrong to say that online music sharing has no effect on their revenue.
I cannot find a single job. In part this problem has been caused by H1B's taking the jobs that I am going for
This is absolute nonsense, of course. I came to the US with an H1B about three years ago, my company spent tens of thousands of dollars just to bring me here (moving from one continent to another isn't cheap, neither are the legal costs). And no, it wasn't because I would have accepted a smaller salary figure, I'm making excellent money right now.
Since my coming here, I have been interviewing lots and lots of potential co-workers and the overall picture is oh so sad. 90% of the guys who describe themselves as kick-ass coders can't properly solve the simplest problems that involve just a little bit of thinking. The situation is so bad that it makes me cry. I don't care where you come from, I don't care if your skin is green and you piss in the corner of my office but if you're smart and can solve problems, you're hired. This has always been the case here.
So please excuse me but I strongly suspect that the problem isn't with H1Bs but rather with over-inflated egos of some guys who then blame other people for their misfortunes.
Btw, the company I work for is hiring right now. You're very welcome to come here and try to get my job, I would be really happy to have some extra help. But if you can't get over the bar then sorry, I prefer having no people to bad people.
I find it really strange how otherwise serious and well-educated people very often go along with these "X doubles every Y days" stories. Everybody who is familiar with even basic math should know that this kind of growth can only last for for a very short time, otherwise we would all be impersonating Elvis by now.
Now Worldcom probably tweaked the facts but if some people really believe in this kind of exponential growth then I hardly have any compassion for them, and blaming Worldcom or someone else for your own stupidity is just silly.
You also have to take into account that this probably includes building both ship and debug, and assembling all the resource files for all the different languages in which Windows ships.
So yes, 8 hours is not too bad, especially since a regular developer would only build the part that s/he needs.
For a corporation, publicity is only good when it leads to sales--and let's face it, SlashDot is hardly MicroSoft's target market for OSS.
There are many different people reading Slashdot, not all of them hate Microsoft. And Slashdot just keeps repeating (not all the articles but a fair amount) its almost hysterical mantra: Microsoft is too big, Microsoft is too powerful, Microsoft is too rich, Microsoft can extinguish anybody and anything, Microsoft this and Microsoft that. This leaves an impression to many people that Microsoft is indeed the only viable vendor and everything else is destined to die. That's actually a positive PR in an unintended way.
Without doubt, they are a sovereign nation (check the history of Sealand if you don't believe me).
If you mean the court precedents then the court only decided that they were not under UK's jurisdiction at that time because they were in international waters. It could as well have been some guy living in a house-boat, the decision would have been the same but it wouldn't have made the house-boat a nationstate.
Later UK expanded its territorial claim over the waters and Sealand is in those waters now, effectively putting it under UK's jurisdiction. I know that Mr. Bates has its own claim over the surrounding waters but the house-boat argument applies here as well, a boat certainly can't have territorial waters, why should a concrete pillar have them?
That aside, you don't even need to be a government to take this place out -- a well-placed shaped charge on one of the supports would send this SOB to the bottom of the ocean, and *anyone* with sufficiant knowledge and motivation could do it.
;-) ).
I wouldn't be so sure. If you check the history of Sealand then you see that the residents have been extremely zealous about this place, firing warning shots at anyone getting close to the tower. This included some guys who had come to repair some buoy that was floating in the vicinity (called "units of British Navy" in the official Sealand history
A pair of machine guns would keep anything less than a real warship in safe distance, so "well-placing a charge" would be quite tricky.
Also remember that this platform was actively use in World War II and military considerations were taken into account when building it, so it's not that easy to take them out for a random guy.
Many people have commented how dumb this kind of exams are and how people never need this skill in real life. I sort of disagree. ;)
First, writing code on paper or whiteboard teaches you to be more careful and creates good habits (not the common write-something-fix-compiler-errors style). If you're working on bigger projects where compiling the code and reproing mistakes takes a long time then it often pays off.
Second, this approach also teaches you to read code carefully and spots mistakes quickly. This is an invaluable skill when working on projects that involve many people and where you often need read and debug other people's code. I have done my fair share of written exams plus whiteboard interviews and years of experience have given me a fairly good eye for seeing mistakes in unfamiliar code. And you wouldn't imagine how impressive this skill can sometimes seem to one's managers
I'm waiting for the day when people stop saying "We got another worm." and start saying "We just got Microsofted again".
So let's say that the dream of many slashdotters gets fulfilled and regular people will start using linux at home. I'm fairly sure that most of them would use root/root or something similar as their credentials and there would be worms to exploit it. What would you call the worm then?
MS may be influential but it can't really do much about human stupidity.