I'm perfectly capable of deciding what I want, thank you. I don't need any company (profit-making or not) attempting to do that for me.
You can't make everything yourself, others have to learn what you want to make it for you.
And there is no clean distinction between your information and their information, there is only that which you, as a valued customer, would like shared or that which you would not like shared.
If the fact that a specific product was sold is their information, then Bob Jones has no right to complain when Kinky Gear prints on their front page that they've sold 1 dildo engraved "Bob Jones' real one is even bigger, but it won't reach where this is going!"
That's an extreme example, but in some cases the time and quantity of a sale can itself strongly suggest the identity of the purchaser, especially if it's combined with other "general" information such as how it was paid for and what country it was shipped to.
It's just a matter of coming to an agreement about what is acceptable distribution of that information. If the reaction is a uniformly paranoid, "It's my information, don't touch it!" then you can hardly be surprised at companies being deceptive about what they actually do, given that some use of the information is vital, and any public disclosure causes a backlash. If you want to know, and ultimately control, what they are doing with collected data, you can't just attack them every time you hear about it.
It's not realistic to assume that your arbitrary distinction between what is "your" data and what is "their" data is a moral absolute that only evil people disagree with.
BRITANNUS (shocked):
Caeser, this is not proper.
THEODOTUS (outraged);
How?
CAESAR (recovering his self-possession):
Pardon him Theodotus: he is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature.
Caesar and Cleopatra, Act II
--George Bernard Shaw --
I think there is far too much appeal to emotions when hackers talk about internet privacy, as if gathering consumer data was some evil conspiracy.
There are plenty of cases where you want your information distributed to for-profit companies. I mean, you can hardly complain about companies knowing what you buy and companies not knowing what you want at the same time. They need the former to even guess at the latter.
The question is how much personal detail is acceptable: sometimes you don't care if they shout it out to the world, sometimes the only data you want let out is that someone bought this product, not even what other products this anonymous person was interested in.
If customers aren't 1) reasonable about letting out information that they would want distributed, if they only thought about it for a second, and 2) not only outraged, but vengeful, when their stated wishes are betrayed, then there is no hope for a resolution to these concerns. --
What is a life without appreciation for the poetic beauty of Ice Pirates? Truly, it is a peerless wonder, a magnificent gift from the gods themselves.
O, shameful day, when a soulless sore on the face of humanity may mock humanity's greatest achievement with impunity! O, sorrowful day, when an innocent child, as we are all innocent children in our heart of hearts, is denied the light of life that comes in VHS format! --
Sure, the hardware is designed to be reusable, but given the past examples of the Ariane 5 and the Mars Climate Orbiter, I'm sure the software industry will come to the rescue and make these rockets disposable. --
Huh? If I work at a job and I want to do something different, I make it my responsibility to seek out new opportunities. Be proactive. If your manager isn't helping you, go to their manager. If that still doesn't work, go up another level. If that doesn't work, quit. Be proactive.
What, are you brain dead? I mean, shit, "Be proactive." twice in one paragraph. How goodthinkful of you. The motivational speakers who teach you to work hard for the company must love you. (and what a surprise: a Java programmer, who bought the hype early on!)
Of course the guy pushed for other projects, most of all he pushed to be allowed to actually do the work properly, rather being micro-managed by the inferior project-leader. People don't turn bitter like that unless they've been screwed repeatedly for years.
Maybe your recruiting department should be more selective. Ours is. We've only had to fire a handful of people in the eight years we've been around.
"My" recruiting department? I only worked at that place for a few months, it would have been stupid to stick around there. I thought I made it quite clear that I wasn't talking about myself. Unlike my unfortunate friend, I was willing and able to go into business for myself. I truly hope he rode out on the dot-com rush.
As for "only had to fire a handful," that's the typical attitude: go through the incredible effort of one or two man-days evaluating someone you end up stuck with for ten or twenty years (only firing them for not showing up, or being blatantly disruptive), and call that "selective" recruiting.
Most professional programmers are near-useless incompetents, they add nothing to a project but bugs, bloat, and management overhead. That's why most software projects fail, and why the ones that "succeed" barely work. It's not bad organization, or bad methodology, it's bad people.
You simply can't evaluate a programmer with less than a few weeks of working with them. The fact that the industry in general is unwilling to do so, or to fire people who are cooperative but useless, means that job experience is no indicator of competence. I've met good coders who came straight from high school (okay, just one, but he was very good; dug into the Knuth in his mid-teens), and total incompetents with master degrees and 10 years directly relevant experience (yes, more than one).
Programming is not a generally competent profession, in which a respected member can usually be relied upon to produce good results. As such, it takes unusual and extreme measures to build a truly competent team. --
I once knew a really nasty, bitter programmer who did good work, but played mean, disruptive pranks and talked about everyone behind their backs.
Why? Because he was treated like absolute shit.
In this company, he was the lowest-paid programmer, because he was the least "qualified," with no university degree. He was also the most productive programmer, and could do in days what other programmers would take months to do.
They often set him to work debugging worse programmers' code. He knew he could do the same work in one tenth the code or less (in some demonstrated cases, a hundredth the code; replacing months of team effort with a few hours' work), and it took him much longer to debug their crap than it would to rewrite it from scratch.
The management perspective? He was a pain-in-the-ass second-rate programmer, an example of why they should only hire "qualified" personnel. Presumably they didn't replace him because he had years of experience with their systems.
He couldn't leave, because nobody else would hire him. He looked terrible on paper: most of his project experience was maintenance of failing software, he was never sent for the expensive and useless 2-day certificate courses the good programmers were flown out to every few months, and he never received a written commendation for the rabbits he pulled out of hats on the rare occasions desperation drove project managers to let him do things his way (after all, if he did it, it must have been easy). Just some debugging monkey, who never worked except under close supervision.
I don't think his type is rare.
Just look at job postings: "We need someone with a BS in CS, at least X years experience with language A and Y years with language B, a close familiarity with Buzzwordica and FAD-17."
Those things mean nothing. I have met so many useless idiots who look great on paper that it makes me sick. Degrees are handed out to anyone who puts in their time and money, and they don't have to learn things if they don't want to. Having worked in certain areas does not mean having done useful work in those areas.
The real killer, though, is the tendency to stick someone in a role when you hire them, and never move them, regardless of ability. That's insane, and very common. Promotions and demotions should both be common, with none of this creeping promotion based on time-in-role bullshit. People should be hired on a trial basis, and you should reject 4 out of 5 trial hires in the first month. That's the only way to get decent people, because the whole industry is messed up and no amount of "management" of incompetents is going to get good work out of them. --
He was the greatest mind ever to have developed a keyboard layout. Far greater than that wannabe Dvorak.
Any hack can study character frequency and place the keys to minimize finger travel (hint: layouts based on past usage are optimized for use in the past!), but it takes a real genius to create a design that lets you spell "typeuriter" using only the top row.
However, there is a better keyboard design, which promises to reduce instruction time to a fraction of current cost by the use of a surpassingly elegant mnemonic device:
\Mr.Jock:TV"
quizPhD,bags
([few])lynx?
And who created this great innovation?
It was found among the lost notes of none other than the great Jock Querty! He invents better dead than Dvorak did alive! --
It takes a week to get a 1kg package from New Zealand Regina Saskatchewan. It also takes a week to get a letter from a place 5 hours away from Regina to Regina. This make sense?
Makes sense to me. Actual transport in bulk, whether across town or across the world, is easy, fast, and cheap. Having human beings read each individual address (often hand-written) and make sure it ends up in exactly the right place, losing or misplacing fewer than one in a thousand properly addressed packages, is hard, slow, and expensive.
I know from experience that city-to-city letter mail usually only takes 2-3 days, so I'll assume that you're talking about mail from rural Saskatchewan.
One day to pick up, one day to sort, one day to transport by truck, another day to sort, and one for final delivery. Change that to one day to transport by air, and you've got the same schedule for intra-province from a rural area and for international mail. Sure, they could do it overnight, but you'd have to pay for it, and most people would rather wait for an extra few days than pay fifty times as much for postage (to get overnight mail to or from a small town, you'd basically have to hire a guy to drive or fly out a handful of packages every day; ridiculously expensive). --
Last week, the "free software" community showed its true colors by "liberating" thousands of illegal copies of Microsoft's new OS, Windows XP.
Techniques for breaking MS theft-prevention were discussed openly on popular Linux forum slashdot.org. This was not only tolerated, but appears to have been encouraged by the managers of the site, who made the piracy articles more visible through a process known as "moderation."
In a press conference, Bill Gates had this to say: "Not only does it reveal that what they are really after is to get things without paying for them, but that they'll take Windows over Linux, when they have the chance."
Both criminal prosecution and civil legal action are being prepared, aided by new security features in Windows XP itself and the Microsoft servers used to distribute it.
More information can be found on Microsoft's new page, Slashdot.Arrr! Pirate Central which sports a black flag with a skull over the slashdot.org logo, which resembles cross-bones, and explains how this will increase computer prices and hurt the average consumer. --
I once had a pizza order-taker read my credit card number back to me... the one I had used the last time I called, and hadn't told her during that call. Just because I called from the same number, they were sure I was the same person and could be trusted with the number, and could pay them with it. I could just tell she was enjoying my reaction to how much she knew (surprise mostly, mild annoyance, not anger); I bet she didn't keep that job long, she was having entirely too much fun with a touchy subject (that town was weird though... all the fast food service was the worst I've ever seen).
Now, I want good data out there... in aggregate. I want places to know what people want to buy; it means more of the stuff you want with less waste and better prices. I'd even like to have the option of asking them to remember my preferences. I don't ever want them assuming they know who I am, or figuring out my identity, without me explicitly telling them.
I mean, it's like you're not safe to buy 50 bags of fertilizer from different stores and 20 tanks of diesel from different gas stations over a single weekend with cash any more... --
Re:Sick of hearing about "such a great design"
on
Apple Dumps the Cube
·
· Score: 2
I myself thought this until the day I borrowed a friend's VAIO and went to a cafe, and a woman sat next to me and said "that's a really sexy machine."
Oh, come on, I obviously wasn't talking about portables. Towers go under the desk, nobody sees them. I rarely even have a cover on mine. A portable goes out in public; it's like a watch or a car. At least a little attention to appearance is called for.
As for the engineering, it would have been vastly more expensive if they had worked out the bugs first. Unlike the NeXT box, they weren't starting from a clean sheet, with the freedom to choose the most reasonable design, they were told to cram a tower into a cute little fanless cube, consequences be damned. The chips were too hot, the hard drive was too hot, and they couldn't afford to design new ones. The NeXT box's unorthodoxy resulted from freedom to create a superior machine (at a higher price), not a command from on high to be superficially weird and different for marketing purposes while using standard components to duplicate standard functionality. --
Sick of hearing about "such a great design"
on
Apple Dumps the Cube
·
· Score: 3
Being non-standard for the sake of being different is not good design. These things had a poor cost-performance ratio and upgrade capacity exactly because they were made to be cute. They were unreliable and defect prone exactly because they were unorthodox.
Quite frankly, people who seriously factor the appearance of a computer into their buying choices are idiots. It's like buying a furnace or water-heater for its looks. While idiots might seem like an ideal target market, you have to beat the competition to get to them, and Apple's marketing isn't aggressive enough. --
I'm very curious about future woody penetration. If that's the goal, I wonder if they're pushing too hard. I think freezing woody at this time might be a drastic step. While it might seem to make further penetration possible, it could cause serious damage to long term usability.
I mean market penetration. Geez, get your mind out of the gutter. --
Pointers are distinguished by pointer arithmetic. They don't have to be memory addresses, they only have to support moving around in an array they reference. Garbage-collected array reference plus simple integer index equals garbage-collected pointer. There's no good reason not to include them.
If you think gotos are only good for breaking out of loops, you've never written a state machine. Or at least, never written one well (hint: a case statement inside a loop is just an obfuscated set of gotos with wasteful runtime overhead). Have you ever even experienced trouble from using gotos in your work, or is it pure herd-mind prejudice?
Macros are useful to allow factoring code without excessive argument passing. What advantage is it to write a 3-line function that takes 6 arguments? If 5 of the arguments are going to be the same each time, a macro only needs to take one argument. Used properly (for one thing, defined near where they are used, rather than all segregated into a "macros" section or hidden in header files), they cut way down on cut-and-paste and increase readability and greatly increase editability.
That these features are poorly used by poor programmers doesn't mean these are poor features. However, believing that it does is the mark of a poor programmer.
Try reading some of Donald Knuth's code sometimes. He writes damn good stuff, and he isn't the least bit embarassed to use gotos, macros, and pointer arithmetic. I recommend his literate conversion of Adventure for fun reading. --
It doesn't exist to fill an empty niche, but to try to squeeze into an overstuffed one (general scripting language).
It has an abbreviation already used by 2 common things (Cascading Style Sheets and Content Scrambling System).
Worst of all, it doesn't really follow the C language closely, it skips some of the major features, such as pointers, gotos, and #define macros. I mean, pointer arithmetic defines C. This is about as close to C as Java or Perl. Your C programming skills will not transfer except in the most superficial way. --
apt-get, dselect, et al will cheerfully rape your system when you ask for unstable software, replacing all your nice stable shared libraries and even your nice stable software with broken development versions. Never mind the security issues with running a black-box install that fetches software from the internet.
There is a "Yes, but...", however, it is fully as complicated as just managing the packages by hand.
Nothing should ever need to be "installed" to be run. Much less should it require dozens or even hundreds of files for the run-time alone, unless they can be kept neatly segregated into a single exclusive directory which can be "uninstalled" neatly with an rm -r .
I think the very idea of shared libraries is a bad one. It encourages promiscuous linking and immense run-time bloat. My view is that it is an attempt to treat the symptom (static linked executables would be too big) rather than the disease (they're too big because they're full of whatever garbage you could shoehorn in). --
The real problem is: how far do you peel back the onion? Why stop with assembler?
Thirty years ago, I learned machine code to program the PDP-8. Why not teach that today? Or why not go further down and teach VLSI processor design, or semiconductor physics?
Semiconductor physics has nothing to do with computer science. VLSI processor design is not fundamental anything, but an engineering discipline based on a particular fabrication technology (more-or-less 2D semiconductor electronics).
Learning the machine code is part of learning assembler. A small part. There's no need to memorize it, just to be able to assemble by hand to understand what's going on (with references, of course). A few hours doing such exercises should suffice.
Once this is learned, assembler is a simple convenience giving full control over the machine code with fewer headaches.
A CS student certainly should learn about logic gates and how they build up into addition, multiplication, RAM, etc. This is also fundamental CS. How to build these gates from transistors (or vacuum tubes, or tinker toys) is not, and should be left to the engineers.
If you don't understand how a functioning computer is built out of logic components, you have no theoretical basis for why one operation should be slower than another, or why there is limited memory. Without this base, all programs that work are equally good, and if one works slower than another in practice, or can't run because it needs too much memory, it is merely a quirk of the hardware design. A machine could be built which always sorts any billion entries in the same amount of time as it takes for it to add two 32-bit numbers, machines are built which take the same amount of time to multiply as to add, but addition is fundamentally simpler and faster than multiplication, and adding two 32-bit numbers is certainly fundamentally faster than sorting a billion entries. The supersorter is a quirky machine, but without knowing about the gates from which all digital computers are built, you have no valid mathematical basis for saying so.
Similarly, if you don't know anything about machine language, you have no reason for saying why one HLL program should run faster than another, or which will consume more memory.
The heart of CS is the interaction between the gate logic and the data fed into the gates. Anyone who doesn't understand the fundamentals of this interaction is not remotely a computer scientist. Learning a machine language is making one case study. --
Slashdot Mirror
You can't make everything yourself, others have to learn what you want to make it for you.
And there is no clean distinction between your information and their information, there is only that which you, as a valued customer, would like shared or that which you would not like shared.
If the fact that a specific product was sold is their information, then Bob Jones has no right to complain when Kinky Gear prints on their front page that they've sold 1 dildo engraved "Bob Jones' real one is even bigger, but it won't reach where this is going!"
That's an extreme example, but in some cases the time and quantity of a sale can itself strongly suggest the identity of the purchaser, especially if it's combined with other "general" information such as how it was paid for and what country it was shipped to.
It's just a matter of coming to an agreement about what is acceptable distribution of that information. If the reaction is a uniformly paranoid, "It's my information, don't touch it!" then you can hardly be surprised at companies being deceptive about what they actually do, given that some use of the information is vital, and any public disclosure causes a backlash. If you want to know, and ultimately control, what they are doing with collected data, you can't just attack them every time you hear about it.
It's not realistic to assume that your arbitrary distinction between what is "your" data and what is "their" data is a moral absolute that only evil people disagree with.
BRITANNUS (shocked):
THEODOTUS (outraged);
CAESAR (recovering his self-possession):
Caesar and Cleopatra, Act II
--George Bernard Shaw
--
I think there is far too much appeal to emotions when hackers talk about internet privacy, as if gathering consumer data was some evil conspiracy.
There are plenty of cases where you want your information distributed to for-profit companies. I mean, you can hardly complain about companies knowing what you buy and companies not knowing what you want at the same time. They need the former to even guess at the latter.
The question is how much personal detail is acceptable: sometimes you don't care if they shout it out to the world, sometimes the only data you want let out is that someone bought this product, not even what other products this anonymous person was interested in.
If customers aren't 1) reasonable about letting out information that they would want distributed, if they only thought about it for a second, and 2) not only outraged, but vengeful, when their stated wishes are betrayed, then there is no hope for a resolution to these concerns.
--
I mourn for the bleakness of your existence.
What is a life without appreciation for the poetic beauty of Ice Pirates? Truly, it is a peerless wonder, a magnificent gift from the gods themselves.
O, shameful day, when a soulless sore on the face of humanity may mock humanity's greatest achievement with impunity! O, sorrowful day, when an innocent child, as we are all innocent children in our heart of hearts, is denied the light of life that comes in VHS format!
--
I mourn for the impossibility of Ice Pirates. Alas, that marvelous dry universe of adventure is not ours.
--
It's a natural formation, recently discovered.
--
Wouldn't it make more sense to call it "The Found City?"
It's a bit pessimistic to start right off assuming we're going to lose it.
--
Sure, the hardware is designed to be reusable, but given the past examples of the Ariane 5 and the Mars Climate Orbiter, I'm sure the software industry will come to the rescue and make these rockets disposable.
--
Huh? If I work at a job and I want to do something different, I make it my responsibility to seek out new opportunities. Be proactive. If your manager isn't helping you, go to their manager. If that still doesn't work, go up another level. If that doesn't work, quit. Be proactive.
What, are you brain dead? I mean, shit, "Be proactive." twice in one paragraph. How goodthinkful of you. The motivational speakers who teach you to work hard for the company must love you. (and what a surprise: a Java programmer, who bought the hype early on!)
Of course the guy pushed for other projects, most of all he pushed to be allowed to actually do the work properly, rather being micro-managed by the inferior project-leader. People don't turn bitter like that unless they've been screwed repeatedly for years.
Maybe your recruiting department should be more selective. Ours is. We've only had to fire a handful of people in the eight years we've been around.
"My" recruiting department? I only worked at that place for a few months, it would have been stupid to stick around there. I thought I made it quite clear that I wasn't talking about myself. Unlike my unfortunate friend, I was willing and able to go into business for myself. I truly hope he rode out on the dot-com rush.
As for "only had to fire a handful," that's the typical attitude: go through the incredible effort of one or two man-days evaluating someone you end up stuck with for ten or twenty years (only firing them for not showing up, or being blatantly disruptive), and call that "selective" recruiting.
Most professional programmers are near-useless incompetents, they add nothing to a project but bugs, bloat, and management overhead. That's why most software projects fail, and why the ones that "succeed" barely work. It's not bad organization, or bad methodology, it's bad people.
You simply can't evaluate a programmer with less than a few weeks of working with them. The fact that the industry in general is unwilling to do so, or to fire people who are cooperative but useless, means that job experience is no indicator of competence. I've met good coders who came straight from high school (okay, just one, but he was very good; dug into the Knuth in his mid-teens), and total incompetents with master degrees and 10 years directly relevant experience (yes, more than one).
Programming is not a generally competent profession, in which a respected member can usually be relied upon to produce good results. As such, it takes unusual and extreme measures to build a truly competent team.
--
I once knew a really nasty, bitter programmer who did good work, but played mean, disruptive pranks and talked about everyone behind their backs.
Why? Because he was treated like absolute shit.
In this company, he was the lowest-paid programmer, because he was the least "qualified," with no university degree. He was also the most productive programmer, and could do in days what other programmers would take months to do.
They often set him to work debugging worse programmers' code. He knew he could do the same work in one tenth the code or less (in some demonstrated cases, a hundredth the code; replacing months of team effort with a few hours' work), and it took him much longer to debug their crap than it would to rewrite it from scratch.
The management perspective? He was a pain-in-the-ass second-rate programmer, an example of why they should only hire "qualified" personnel. Presumably they didn't replace him because he had years of experience with their systems.
He couldn't leave, because nobody else would hire him. He looked terrible on paper: most of his project experience was maintenance of failing software, he was never sent for the expensive and useless 2-day certificate courses the good programmers were flown out to every few months, and he never received a written commendation for the rabbits he pulled out of hats on the rare occasions desperation drove project managers to let him do things his way (after all, if he did it, it must have been easy). Just some debugging monkey, who never worked except under close supervision.
I don't think his type is rare.
Just look at job postings: "We need someone with a BS in CS, at least X years experience with language A and Y years with language B, a close familiarity with Buzzwordica and FAD-17."
Those things mean nothing. I have met so many useless idiots who look great on paper that it makes me sick. Degrees are handed out to anyone who puts in their time and money, and they don't have to learn things if they don't want to. Having worked in certain areas does not mean having done useful work in those areas.
The real killer, though, is the tendency to stick someone in a role when you hire them, and never move them, regardless of ability. That's insane, and very common. Promotions and demotions should both be common, with none of this creeping promotion based on time-in-role bullshit. People should be hired on a trial basis, and you should reject 4 out of 5 trial hires in the first month. That's the only way to get decent people, because the whole industry is messed up and no amount of "management" of incompetents is going to get good work out of them.
--
He was the greatest mind ever to have developed a keyboard layout. Far greater than that wannabe Dvorak.
Any hack can study character frequency and place the keys to minimize finger travel (hint: layouts based on past usage are optimized for use in the past!), but it takes a real genius to create a design that lets you spell "typeuriter" using only the top row.
However, there is a better keyboard design, which promises to reduce instruction time to a fraction of current cost by the use of a surpassingly elegant mnemonic device:
\Mr.Jock:TV"
quizPhD,bags
([few])lynx?
And who created this great innovation?
It was found among the lost notes of none other than the great Jock Querty! He invents better dead than Dvorak did alive!
--
It takes a week to get a 1kg package from New Zealand Regina Saskatchewan. It also takes a week to get a letter from a place 5 hours away from Regina to Regina. This make sense?
Makes sense to me. Actual transport in bulk, whether across town or across the world, is easy, fast, and cheap. Having human beings read each individual address (often hand-written) and make sure it ends up in exactly the right place, losing or misplacing fewer than one in a thousand properly addressed packages, is hard, slow, and expensive.
I know from experience that city-to-city letter mail usually only takes 2-3 days, so I'll assume that you're talking about mail from rural Saskatchewan.
One day to pick up, one day to sort, one day to transport by truck, another day to sort, and one for final delivery. Change that to one day to transport by air, and you've got the same schedule for intra-province from a rural area and for international mail. Sure, they could do it overnight, but you'd have to pay for it, and most people would rather wait for an extra few days than pay fifty times as much for postage (to get overnight mail to or from a small town, you'd basically have to hire a guy to drive or fly out a handful of packages every day; ridiculously expensive).
--
It's so unrealistic how they're hanging in mid-air.
I can see the wires, I swear.
--
Linux Hackers Steal MS Software
Last week, the "free software" community showed its true colors by "liberating" thousands of illegal copies of Microsoft's new OS, Windows XP.
Techniques for breaking MS theft-prevention were discussed openly on popular Linux forum slashdot.org. This was not only tolerated, but appears to have been encouraged by the managers of the site, who made the piracy articles more visible through a process known as "moderation."
In a press conference, Bill Gates had this to say: "Not only does it reveal that what they are really after is to get things without paying for them, but that they'll take Windows over Linux, when they have the chance."
Both criminal prosecution and civil legal action are being prepared, aided by new security features in Windows XP itself and the Microsoft servers used to distribute it.
More information can be found on Microsoft's new page, Slashdot.Arrr! Pirate Central which sports a black flag with a skull over the slashdot.org logo, which resembles cross-bones, and explains how this will increase computer prices and hurt the average consumer.
--
I once had a pizza order-taker read my credit card number back to me... the one I had used the last time I called, and hadn't told her during that call. Just because I called from the same number, they were sure I was the same person and could be trusted with the number, and could pay them with it. I could just tell she was enjoying my reaction to how much she knew (surprise mostly, mild annoyance, not anger); I bet she didn't keep that job long, she was having entirely too much fun with a touchy subject (that town was weird though... all the fast food service was the worst I've ever seen).
Now, I want good data out there... in aggregate. I want places to know what people want to buy; it means more of the stuff you want with less waste and better prices. I'd even like to have the option of asking them to remember my preferences. I don't ever want them assuming they know who I am, or figuring out my identity, without me explicitly telling them.
I mean, it's like you're not safe to buy 50 bags of fertilizer from different stores and 20 tanks of diesel from different gas stations over a single weekend with cash any more...
--
I myself thought this until the day I borrowed a friend's VAIO and went to a cafe, and a woman sat next to me and said "that's a really sexy machine."
Oh, come on, I obviously wasn't talking about portables. Towers go under the desk, nobody sees them. I rarely even have a cover on mine. A portable goes out in public; it's like a watch or a car. At least a little attention to appearance is called for.
As for the engineering, it would have been vastly more expensive if they had worked out the bugs first. Unlike the NeXT box, they weren't starting from a clean sheet, with the freedom to choose the most reasonable design, they were told to cram a tower into a cute little fanless cube, consequences be damned. The chips were too hot, the hard drive was too hot, and they couldn't afford to design new ones. The NeXT box's unorthodoxy resulted from freedom to create a superior machine (at a higher price), not a command from on high to be superficially weird and different for marketing purposes while using standard components to duplicate standard functionality.
--
Being non-standard for the sake of being different is not good design. These things had a poor cost-performance ratio and upgrade capacity exactly because they were made to be cute. They were unreliable and defect prone exactly because they were unorthodox.
Quite frankly, people who seriously factor the appearance of a computer into their buying choices are idiots. It's like buying a furnace or water-heater for its looks. While idiots might seem like an ideal target market, you have to beat the competition to get to them, and Apple's marketing isn't aggressive enough.
--
I'm very curious about future woody penetration. If that's the goal, I wonder if they're pushing too hard. I think freezing woody at this time might be a drastic step. While it might seem to make further penetration possible, it could cause serious damage to long term usability.
I mean market penetration. Geez, get your mind out of the gutter.
--
I get the giggles because they're talking about freezing their woody.
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Pointers are distinguished by pointer arithmetic. They don't have to be memory addresses, they only have to support moving around in an array they reference. Garbage-collected array reference plus simple integer index equals garbage-collected pointer. There's no good reason not to include them.
If you think gotos are only good for breaking out of loops, you've never written a state machine. Or at least, never written one well (hint: a case statement inside a loop is just an obfuscated set of gotos with wasteful runtime overhead). Have you ever even experienced trouble from using gotos in your work, or is it pure herd-mind prejudice?
Macros are useful to allow factoring code without excessive argument passing. What advantage is it to write a 3-line function that takes 6 arguments? If 5 of the arguments are going to be the same each time, a macro only needs to take one argument. Used properly (for one thing, defined near where they are used, rather than all segregated into a "macros" section or hidden in header files), they cut way down on cut-and-paste and increase readability and greatly increase editability.
That these features are poorly used by poor programmers doesn't mean these are poor features. However, believing that it does is the mark of a poor programmer.
Try reading some of Donald Knuth's code sometimes. He writes damn good stuff, and he isn't the least bit embarassed to use gotos, macros, and pointer arithmetic. I recommend his literate conversion of Adventure for fun reading.
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It doesn't exist to fill an empty niche, but to try to squeeze into an overstuffed one (general scripting language).
It has an abbreviation already used by 2 common things (Cascading Style Sheets and Content Scrambling System).
Worst of all, it doesn't really follow the C language closely, it skips some of the major features, such as pointers, gotos, and #define macros. I mean, pointer arithmetic defines C. This is about as close to C as Java or Perl. Your C programming skills will not transfer except in the most superficial way.
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Flying Headless Goku - version 0.8 (the other 0.2 would be the head)
thinking of idea
considering approaches
initialization complete, beginning typing
I dont' se e the protlem with verbose messages, you can just ignroe tem if you're not interested in what they say.
spellcheck:
dont': don't dent donut
don't
se: sea see is se.cx
see
e: a
ignroe: ignore
ignore
tem: Tim term team them
them
finished processing!
I don't see the problem with verbose messages, you can just ignore them if you're not interested in what they say.
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as SinFest demonstrates.
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Say we take some DNA, and use it as a protein blueprint for some kind of organism, then pick the most pleasant sounds it produces and call that music?
Or has that been done?
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apt-get, dselect, et al will cheerfully rape your system when you ask for unstable software, replacing all your nice stable shared libraries and even your nice stable software with broken development versions. Never mind the security issues with running a black-box install that fetches software from the internet.
There is a "Yes, but...", however, it is fully as complicated as just managing the packages by hand.
Nothing should ever need to be "installed" to be run. Much less should it require dozens or even hundreds of files for the run-time alone, unless they can be kept neatly segregated into a single exclusive directory which can be "uninstalled" neatly with an rm -r .
I think the very idea of shared libraries is a bad one. It encourages promiscuous linking and immense run-time bloat. My view is that it is an attempt to treat the symptom (static linked executables would be too big) rather than the disease (they're too big because they're full of whatever garbage you could shoehorn in).
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The real problem is: how far do you peel back the onion? Why stop with assembler?
Thirty years ago, I learned machine code to program the PDP-8. Why not teach that today? Or why not go further down and teach VLSI processor design, or semiconductor physics?
Semiconductor physics has nothing to do with computer science. VLSI processor design is not fundamental anything, but an engineering discipline based on a particular fabrication technology (more-or-less 2D semiconductor electronics).
Learning the machine code is part of learning assembler. A small part. There's no need to memorize it, just to be able to assemble by hand to understand what's going on (with references, of course). A few hours doing such exercises should suffice.
Once this is learned, assembler is a simple convenience giving full control over the machine code with fewer headaches.
A CS student certainly should learn about logic gates and how they build up into addition, multiplication, RAM, etc. This is also fundamental CS. How to build these gates from transistors (or vacuum tubes, or tinker toys) is not, and should be left to the engineers.
If you don't understand how a functioning computer is built out of logic components, you have no theoretical basis for why one operation should be slower than another, or why there is limited memory. Without this base, all programs that work are equally good, and if one works slower than another in practice, or can't run because it needs too much memory, it is merely a quirk of the hardware design. A machine could be built which always sorts any billion entries in the same amount of time as it takes for it to add two 32-bit numbers, machines are built which take the same amount of time to multiply as to add, but addition is fundamentally simpler and faster than multiplication, and adding two 32-bit numbers is certainly fundamentally faster than sorting a billion entries. The supersorter is a quirky machine, but without knowing about the gates from which all digital computers are built, you have no valid mathematical basis for saying so.
Similarly, if you don't know anything about machine language, you have no reason for saying why one HLL program should run faster than another, or which will consume more memory.
The heart of CS is the interaction between the gate logic and the data fed into the gates. Anyone who doesn't understand the fundamentals of this interaction is not remotely a computer scientist. Learning a machine language is making one case study.
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