He's a douche about the whole thing. People think he's insulting because he's a total dick when he talks about religion. There are lots of folks who can critizise religion without being jerks about it. At least for me, it's not Dawkin's ideas that people are offended by, but how he expresses them. More proof Dawkins is a jerk:
Sure, if the only goal is to get to Mars, then other plans might make more sense. What we're trying to do here is create a spacefaring society. Mars is part of that, but not the only thing. Zubrin talks a lot about gravity wells, yet he proposes that we go directly from one to another.
I have a confession to make. Forgive me. Wait, don't forgive me. I'm completely unapologetic. I am a programmer, and I don't write comments. I just needed to get that off my chest.
I don't believe in comments.
I have been writing a lot of fairly complex code lately. And all the while, the voices of dead Computer Science professors have been speaking to me. They repeat the mantra of good code commenting. I feel guilt, like when I go to church. Or when I don't make my bed in the morning. Of course, not one of them is able to give me any good suggestion of what a good set of comments is. They just tell me what isn't a good comment. So does that mean that anything else is a good comment? Like lots of swear words in the code. That's probably more useful than real comments, because they make me laugh and keep me from falling asleep at the keyboard.
Good comments, I'm told, are not just a rehash of what is already in the code. Well, if it isn't already in the code, then it isn't much use to the program is it? I don't believe in comments. I think they are mostly a waste of time. Maybe not for you, but for me they just make my life difficult. I have to make a context switch to English in order to write them. That takes time and just serves to confuse me.
Whenever I write English, I take the audience of my writing into account. Who is the audience for my comments? Some moron with a basic C++ book on his desk? Or the great man himself, Bjarne Stroustrup? Bjarne is pretty smart and will probably be able to figure out my code just fine without me, or my comments. Because he speaks C++. I speak C++ too, so that's how I like to communicate with computers and other people who speak the same language.
So I don't write comments. I'm one of those people who likes to use good variable names, good function names, and good file names. When I look at others' comments, I don't usually trust them, because they often don't make any sense. Or they are just plain wrong. That's just awesome. Like the time I first starting programming and I spent two days wondering why the second member of a pair of ints (pair) was always zero, even though the comments said it should contain some valuable piece of information. Actually, it was the first member, not the second one, which I finally figured out by actually looking at the damn code. Wonder of wonders, the code actually told me what the code did. Amazing.
I think that instead of comments we should put quotes of great authors at the top of all our code. That way, when people read our code, they will think that our code is profound, because we quote the greats of our time like, Dostoevsky, Helen Keller, or Dave Barry. And the best thing would be to just randomly pick those quotes so that when people try to make some connection between the code and the quote, they'll spend lots of time trying to figure out. Then they'll feel stupid, but won't want to admit it and we can fun of them when they can't explain the connection. And we won't have had to be smart at all, because all those people that we referred to are smart.
Have I even written comments? Of course, I slap all my comments in the headers, when I don't feel like writing documentation. Or when the function name is getting too long. Or when some fellow programmer makes me feel guilty for not following the religion of comments. What is the point of writing commments if the function name tells the whole story? Take vector for example, the size() function returns, guess what, the size of the vector. I know what you're thinking, that is completely non-intuitive. It's got to be commented. Look, if the function name can't tell you what the function does, then maybe you should change the function name. And if your function name gets too long, then maybe your function is doing too much.
Good, maintainable programs are easy to understand not because they hav
Thing is, I *want* a walled garden where I can install apps without fear of destroying my phone. I love having someone else vet the apps for malware. Now, I'm not saying that google is actually doing this, but the more they lock down their app store, the better it is. My problem is with Apple's App Store which gives you no option of going outside the walled garden if I feel like it.
Gas, power, and water utilities manage to deliver and upkeep what's arguably a more complicated infrastructure with the same model, why should data be any different?
Because gas, power, and water can be saved for another day. Any bandwidth we don't use right now is lost forever. It's actually more economical on a dollars per byte basis to keep your network near saturation.
The GP was talking about infrastructure, not product. Infrastructure in the gas, power, and water sectors follow the same rule as network infrastructure. They exist and have to be maintained no matter how much product they deliver.
How is the carrier supposed to know that the device was stolen? What would stop you as the original owner from selling the device and then reporting it stolen? Just to piss off the new owner? Now the carrier has to setup this whole infrastructure to manage all this tracking and arbitration. With a car, there's a title that has to be moved around. You want that for cell phones???
Actually it's pretty cut and dry here. I really don't see room for question. The main problem that South Korea has with Android is that magnifying glass in the top left corner. You tap it and it seems to only get its results from either local machine or Google.com. The first isn't the problem and neither is the second. What the problem seems to be is that there doesn't see a way to change where Internet results as received from.
You're thinking about this backwards. That's not monopoly abuse because they don't have a monopoly in mobile operating systems. You have to be abusing a monopoly position to impact competition. They're not in the case you cited. How exactly are they using their monopoly in *search* to keep Android competition out? If you can't fill in the blanks of "Google is using their monopoly in ___ to keep the competition out of ___.", then you don't have a case.
It's called a "report a bug" menu item that automatically compiles as much data as you can think of that might help, including making the user include a description of the bug. Also, there's nothing wrong with just going over to the coworkers desk and working it out. Or schedule a day with the users when you'll be in their "area" to address issues and watch for bugs.
The reality is that most bugs *aren't* intermittent, and if you can fix all the bugs that aren't, then the intermittent ones tend to go away. The remaining stuff is tough to deal with, but certainly manageable.
I tried Bastion this morning on my arguable beefy 8-core 8 GB machine. SLOW AS SNOT. So either it's slow or I need to change some configuration setting. Maybe I'm missing something, but wasn't doing this crap in the browser supposed to make it "just work" (tm)?
For some reason IT folks think that all us iPhone toting folks are demanding that they support my iPhone. I don't expect you to support it, and most others don't either. At a basic level, I expect my IT department to not *actively* disallow use of such technology, which is what I see all the time, departments who see no middle ground between "100% supported" and "not on my network ever". It'd be nice if you could spend a few minutes helping me to figure out how to make my email work on the thing, fixing any server related issues in the process. I don't expect you do this for every crazy piece of hardware out there, but it would nice if you could be *helpful* as I try to figure it out myself.
"But please DON'T make a hotel reservation until we have fully explored other options. If there is anyone who wants to offer a spare couch, I would much rather stay there than in a hotel (provided I have a door I can close, in order to have some privacy). Staying with someone is more fun for me than a hotel, and it would also save you money.
"My distaste for a hotel is less if it does not know my name, but staying in a house with people is normally more enjoyable than staying alone."
Yeah, just try it wtih GCC. Not easy. CLANG on the other hand is looking AWESOME for this sort of thing. Once a libraryized version of CLANG is good, it'll make this sort of thing easy.
Would it be possible for this to work as way to increase the body's effective metabolism? Thereby allowing some folks with slow metabolisms to boost theirs?
I have small children (up to 9) who don't seem very good at path finding. They're constantly going around the house in the most inefficient manner possible. Humans aren't that good at it either.
You do realize that they didn't make a trip specifically just to deliver *your* package right? It gets delivered with all the other mail. The extra cost is negligible. Certainly not enough to setup your notification system.
How does Evolution handle full Exchange connectivity (including Calendaring, Contacts, Tasks, etc)? That is my main reason for sticking with Thunderbird.
Evolution integration with Exchange is bit f'ing crapshoot. I was constantly having problems with it. Bugs never got fixed. I went with Thunderbird and the calender plugin, and I'm happy now.
While this sort of "cooperation" can be occasionally useful, I find it generally annoying here in Utah where many folks do the same things. They're think they're being nice by letting folks in, stopping in the middle of traffic, not taking their proper turn at four way stops, and other such nonsense. Well, you're not being nice, you're confusing everyone around you because they don't know what you're going to do next. And it causes accidents. The traffic laws were designed to work without me needing to be able to look at you signalling to me from inside your car. Just follow the laws. If I have to wait, then I wait, but let's not cause an accident.
Copyright doesn't give you the right to control every single use of your work in every way forever. There are limits like fair use that apply to GPL software just as they apply to any other software. Various interoperability clauses allow me to use your software in a way you might not like, and then not release the code. Too bad for you. Just because *you* think that *my* work is a derived work, doesn't make it so. A court gets to decide that, in the case that you actually decide to sue me, which most GPL copyleft owners don't seem to be doing.
I love Open Source, the GPL, and Free Software. I'm a big believer. But I don't also don't think that the GPL should be used the same way that DRM is used, preventing people from doing what they have the legal right to do.
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He's a douche about the whole thing. People think he's insulting because he's a total dick when he talks about religion. There are lots of folks who can critizise religion without being jerks about it. At least for me, it's not Dawkin's ideas that people are offended by, but how he expresses them. More proof Dawkins is a jerk:
http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2012/10/sexism_in_the_skeptic_community_i_spoke_out_then_came_the_rape_threats.single.html
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/files/2011/07/dawkins_watson1.gif
Sure, if the only goal is to get to Mars, then other plans might make more sense. What we're trying to do here is create a spacefaring society. Mars is part of that, but not the only thing. Zubrin talks a lot about gravity wells, yet he proposes that we go directly from one to another.
From my blog:
http://madsoftware.blogspot.com/2007/06/my-confession.html
I have a confession to make. Forgive me. Wait, don't forgive me. I'm completely unapologetic. I am a programmer, and I don't write comments. I just needed to get that off my chest.
I don't believe in comments.
I have been writing a lot of fairly complex code lately. And all the while, the voices of dead Computer Science professors have been speaking to me. They repeat the mantra of good code commenting. I feel guilt, like when I go to church. Or when I don't make my bed in the morning. Of course, not one of them is able to give me any good suggestion of what a good set of comments is. They just tell me what isn't a good comment. So does that mean that anything else is a good comment? Like lots of swear words in the code. That's probably more useful than real comments, because they make me laugh and keep me from falling asleep at the keyboard.
Good comments, I'm told, are not just a rehash of what is already in the code. Well, if it isn't already in the code, then it isn't much use to the program is it? I don't believe in comments. I think they are mostly a waste of time. Maybe not for you, but for me they just make my life difficult. I have to make a context switch to English in order to write them. That takes time and just serves to confuse me.
Whenever I write English, I take the audience of my writing into account. Who is the audience for my comments? Some moron with a basic C++ book on his desk? Or the great man himself, Bjarne Stroustrup? Bjarne is pretty smart and will probably be able to figure out my code just fine without me, or my comments. Because he speaks C++. I speak C++ too, so that's how I like to communicate with computers and other people who speak the same language.
So I don't write comments. I'm one of those people who likes to use good variable names, good function names, and good file names. When I look at others' comments, I don't usually trust them, because they often don't make any sense. Or they are just plain wrong. That's just awesome. Like the time I first starting programming and I spent two days wondering why the second member of a pair of ints (pair) was always zero, even though the comments said it should contain some valuable piece of information. Actually, it was the first member, not the second one, which I finally figured out by actually looking at the damn code. Wonder of wonders, the code actually told me what the code did. Amazing.
I think that instead of comments we should put quotes of great authors at the top of all our code. That way, when people read our code, they will think that our code is profound, because we quote the greats of our time like, Dostoevsky, Helen Keller, or Dave Barry. And the best thing would be to just randomly pick those quotes so that when people try to make some connection between the code and the quote, they'll spend lots of time trying to figure out. Then they'll feel stupid, but won't want to admit it and we can fun of them when they can't explain the connection. And we won't have had to be smart at all, because all those people that we referred to are smart.
Have I even written comments? Of course, I slap all my comments in the headers, when I don't feel like writing documentation. Or when the function name is getting too long. Or when some fellow programmer makes me feel guilty for not following the religion of comments. What is the point of writing commments if the function name tells the whole story? Take vector for example, the size() function returns, guess what, the size of the vector. I know what you're thinking, that is completely non-intuitive. It's got to be commented. Look, if the function name can't tell you what the function does, then maybe you should change the function name. And if your function name gets too long, then maybe your function is doing too much.
Good, maintainable programs are easy to understand not because they hav
Thing is, I *want* a walled garden where I can install apps without fear of destroying my phone. I love having someone else vet the apps for malware. Now, I'm not saying that google is actually doing this, but the more they lock down their app store, the better it is. My problem is with Apple's App Store which gives you no option of going outside the walled garden if I feel like it.
Yes.
Gas, power, and water utilities manage to deliver and upkeep what's arguably a more complicated infrastructure with the same model, why should data be any different?
Because gas, power, and water can be saved for another day. Any bandwidth we don't use right now is lost forever. It's actually more economical on a dollars per byte basis to keep your network near saturation.
The GP was talking about infrastructure, not product. Infrastructure in the gas, power, and water sectors follow the same rule as network infrastructure. They exist and have to be maintained no matter how much product they deliver.
How is the carrier supposed to know that the device was stolen? What would stop you as the original owner from selling the device and then reporting it stolen? Just to piss off the new owner? Now the carrier has to setup this whole infrastructure to manage all this tracking and arbitration. With a car, there's a title that has to be moved around. You want that for cell phones???
Yes. Learn some basic economics please.
Actually it's pretty cut and dry here. I really don't see room for question. The main problem that South Korea has with Android is that magnifying glass in the top left corner. You tap it and it seems to only get its results from either local machine or Google.com. The first isn't the problem and neither is the second. What the problem seems to be is that there doesn't see a way to change where Internet results as received from.
You're thinking about this backwards. That's not monopoly abuse because they don't have a monopoly in mobile operating systems. You have to be abusing a monopoly position to impact competition. They're not in the case you cited. How exactly are they using their monopoly in *search* to keep Android competition out? If you can't fill in the blanks of "Google is using their monopoly in ___ to keep the competition out of ___.", then you don't have a case.
It's called a "report a bug" menu item that automatically compiles as much data as you can think of that might help, including making the user include a description of the bug. Also, there's nothing wrong with just going over to the coworkers desk and working it out. Or schedule a day with the users when you'll be in their "area" to address issues and watch for bugs.
The reality is that most bugs *aren't* intermittent, and if you can fix all the bugs that aren't, then the intermittent ones tend to go away. The remaining stuff is tough to deal with, but certainly manageable.
I tried Bastion this morning on my arguable beefy 8-core 8 GB machine. SLOW AS SNOT. So either it's slow or I need to change some configuration setting. Maybe I'm missing something, but wasn't doing this crap in the browser supposed to make it "just work" (tm)?
Please don't click the link.
Or you could just use mosquito nets. Very cool, but it's a solution in search of a problem.
For some reason IT folks think that all us iPhone toting folks are demanding that they support my iPhone. I don't expect you to support it, and most others don't either. At a basic level, I expect my IT department to not *actively* disallow use of such technology, which is what I see all the time, departments who see no middle ground between "100% supported" and "not on my network ever". It'd be nice if you could spend a few minutes helping me to figure out how to make my email work on the thing, fixing any server related issues in the process. I don't expect you do this for every crazy piece of hardware out there, but it would nice if you could be *helpful* as I try to figure it out myself.
Not all of it is negative:
"But please DON'T make a hotel reservation until we have fully explored
other options. If there is anyone who wants to offer a spare couch, I
would much rather stay there than in a hotel (provided I have a door I
can close, in order to have some privacy). Staying with someone is
more fun for me than a hotel, and it would also save you money.
"My distaste for a hotel is less if it does not know my name, but
staying in a house with people is normally more enjoyable than staying
alone."
Yeah, just try it wtih GCC. Not easy. CLANG on the other hand is looking AWESOME for this sort of thing. Once a libraryized version of CLANG is good, it'll make this sort of thing easy.
Would it be possible for this to work as way to increase the body's effective metabolism? Thereby allowing some folks with slow metabolisms to boost theirs?
That was creative.
Fascinating enough for you to comment.
I have small children (up to 9) who don't seem very good at path finding. They're constantly going around the house in the most inefficient manner possible. Humans aren't that good at it either.
You do realize that they didn't make a trip specifically just to deliver *your* package right? It gets delivered with all the other mail. The extra cost is negligible. Certainly not enough to setup your notification system.
If you use some software, then the process is MUCH easier. http://www.reviewboard.org/
How does Evolution handle full Exchange connectivity (including Calendaring, Contacts, Tasks, etc)? That is my main reason for sticking with Thunderbird.
Evolution integration with Exchange is bit f'ing crapshoot. I was constantly having problems with it. Bugs never got fixed. I went with Thunderbird and the calender plugin, and I'm happy now.
While this sort of "cooperation" can be occasionally useful, I find it generally annoying here in Utah where many folks do the same things. They're think they're being nice by letting folks in, stopping in the middle of traffic, not taking their proper turn at four way stops, and other such nonsense. Well, you're not being nice, you're confusing everyone around you because they don't know what you're going to do next. And it causes accidents. The traffic laws were designed to work without me needing to be able to look at you signalling to me from inside your car. Just follow the laws. If I have to wait, then I wait, but let's not cause an accident.
Copyright doesn't give you the right to control every single use of your work in every way forever. There are limits like fair use that apply to GPL software just as they apply to any other software. Various interoperability clauses allow me to use your software in a way you might not like, and then not release the code. Too bad for you. Just because *you* think that *my* work is a derived work, doesn't make it so. A court gets to decide that, in the case that you actually decide to sue me, which most GPL copyleft owners don't seem to be doing.
I love Open Source, the GPL, and Free Software. I'm a big believer. But I don't also don't think that the GPL should be used the same way that DRM is used, preventing people from doing what they have the legal right to do.