How to make use of binary trees and how to optimize algorithms.
I was taught this kind of thing.
How to plan software projects and what problems to expect. How to plan, lay down and manage a network.
Neither of these are even close to what I was taught.
And, more important, when it stops working you'll have a clue why it did. And you'll have a plan how to fix it, or at the very least, you'll know where to look.
Really? Are we still talking networks? I don't do system administration any more and when I did it was fairly entry level/small business. On top of that networks weren't covered at all in any of my classes (not offered at the time). Yet it's hard for me to imagine class room instruction being the most important knowledge in diagnosing large scale network problems in the typical case.
For myself as a software developer when something stops working the most important information is the location of the log files (not something I was taught in class obviously). Given the choice of the error/debug log or theory I learned in a class, I'll take error logs any day of the week.
This is not to say I haven't worked with people who are very comfortable with a black box. They don't know how it works and don't feel it has any impact on how they interact with it. They know how to use it (they think so anyway) and that's enough for them. If a solution doesn't work, they'll try something else, they're bound to stumble upon it eventually. But those people are just like that, it's not because they have any less education. I'm guessing this mentality is what you might have been driving at.
My effectiveness at my job is about 0% based on what I learned in my CS classes. It's about 80% things my parents taught me (team work, results rather than excuses) and about 20% (usually fairly specific) things I've learned on the job(s).
Although the conspiracy theories may well be correct, I think the explanation is most likely very simple. It's cheaper (thus more profitable) to just crank out some junk than to try and do it right.
You must be either very good or very lucky as a software engineer if you've never worked somewhere where management just wanted it done as quickly and cheaply as possible. For many companies the return on investment of doing a good job just doesn't exist as there is no real penalty as long as the result is perceived as good enough.
Diebold is selling these things quite successfully with low quality. Why change? Does the average person give a shit? I know they should care. I know that market forces should force Diebold to either do a good job with voting machines or not do voting machines. But I think the reality is that Diebold has such crappy products for the same reason so many other companies do, because it's working for them.
Why has outlook had so many serious security flaws over the years? Because calendar integration is more important than security to such a huge number of people. It's not that creating a reasonably secure email client is too difficult for microsoft. It's that secure is less profitable than a feature that will help them with lock-in.
You could do exactly the same thing using paper resources if you had the time and patience.
Agreed.
I don't think there are really any more these days, simply a greater proportion of them doing it faster.
I'm not so sure. Does the lower time and patience barrier mean that people who pre-internet would have been a wannabe stalker are now actual stalkers? I suppose it depends on how laziness, ethics, fear of repercussions or other reasons not to stalk are weighted. I'm no expert on the psychology of stalkers, but I do know that laziness can be a strong disincentive.
According to the "far worse than first thought" link not fetching images isn't enough as the problem isn't limited to just images.
It's unclear to me whether email clients like Thunderbird are really blocking just image fetching with that feature or everything. It's quite common for people to try to blacklist what they know is a problem rather than whitelist what they know is OK.
If anyone knows the specifics of what Thunderbird does I'd like to know. Maybe I'll do some tests later.
And BTW, a "really nice sender" wouldn't include images in their email:-) Whether attached or not it forces me to use something other than pine to see them. I'd rather get a link, though I realize that's not always viable for everyone.
I'm not sure that if I'm getting legitimate emails that might be a scam I want to submit it to find out. I recognize that email isn't secure and there shouldn't be any private information in them, but there is. At least partial information such as the last 4 CC digits. Often a token to take you direct to the page where you can input your personal info.
This is primarily geared towards people who have trouble determining if it's a scam or not. Should those people really be forwarding emails to a phishing detection service?
Not that I don't trust the intent of this group (nor do I necessarily trust them), but I would be uncomfortable with the idea of them having such a large collection of non-scam emails. If they had bad intent, that sounds like the ultimate phishing scam, send us everything that CLAIMS to need your personal info and this service will tell you whether's that was real or not. And if they are successfully detecting phishing scams, what a trove of private non-scam emails that were volunteered.
I hated it too. And I read the whole thing anyway. Since so many people seem to like it so much, I figured eventually the liking it would kick in, but it didn't.
I have to say, the suggestion to try re-reading it sounds intersting. I might very well like it better the second time. But no fucking way am I going to find out, I *really* hated that book. If not the, at least the second least enjoyable book I've read (by choice, reading assignments in school don't count).
At the same time, I did find it a bit expanding. Well, a little constricting too, I hate Ayn Rand by extension despite having read nothing of hers. But I found myself interested in learning about more religions (which lead to The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James, that's the one that competes with Illuminatus as least enjoyable read ever, though I got a lot more out of it. It's just very academic and I found that dull).
I did go on to read Promethus Rising. Didn't hate it, but didn't really accept what it was saying either.
I did like the fnord concept, that was cool, and hearing about fnord was how I first heard of Illuminatus. However, even if it really is good and it just takes a couple of reads or the right mindset or whatever, it still suprises me that the opinion is so overwhelmingly favorable. How many people are willing to give a 1000 page book a second chance? Maybe I'm just particularly literature lazy.
Osama bin Laden must be ROFL wherever he is that he was able to destroy the ideals of the United State of America that took centuries to build so easily.
OBL doesn't "hate us for our freedom" as the president likes to say. He really doesn't so much give a shit about it. It's our involvement, particularly in the middle east, that he would like to change. 9/11 didn't exactly work out that way for him.
And this errosion of freedom/privacy didn't start under the current administration.
Look, I'm with you, but this idea that "Osama won" is just as much a load of crap as is those that claim this bill is going to make a difference in fighting terrorism. Osama isn't the enemy on the freedom issue, it's OUR government and the citizens that are either indifferent or actually supportive of it.
I agree. It's not so much Bush and the Republicans. Bush has relatively recently begun using "Islamofacists" and similar terms. For the first few years after 9/11 Bush generally went out of his way to point out that we're out to get "terrorists, not all muslims" and tried to avoid using "Islam" or "Muslim".
The problem is that many people simply can't handle nuanced information. They feel the need to simplify down to black and white at which point they (think they) can make a judgement.
If you accept that 9/11 = terrorism (oversimplification, a subset is not equality), and 9/11 hijackers = muslim (still not equal, only works in one direction), you can see how this becomes muslims = terrorists.
Really I see this 9/11 = terrorism belief at least as much as I see the muslim = terrorist belief. Saying the most damaging thing Bush has done is to play this up is ridiculous (yet moderated as +5 insightful).
I have a question that's been bugging me for a while that is related to, but not quite the same as what the submitter asked. It's more relevant to the company I used to work for, but I still want to know the answer even though I don't so much have the need anymore.
The submitter wants to make non-functional mockups without spending a lot of time. Our designers would do that in photoshop and once the client approved the design, they would then do the mockups in HTML.
The HTML mockups weren't bad, they did their best to make them as "real" as possible. For example the form submit actually take you to the next page instead of just "#". But if the form was edit.jsp and after you press submit it takes you to view.jsp, we'd have to go in and change it so that the form actually submitted to EditSubmitAction which would then display view.jsp. I wanted them to be able to point it to EditSubmitAction and give them an accessible way to map that to displaying view.jsp.
Another example would be they would have on view.jsp something like:
[tr][td] Name 1:[/td][td] Bob Smith [/td][/tr]
[tr][td] Name 2:[/td][td] Chuck Jones [/td][/tr]
[!-- etc for each row --]
I wanted them to just be able to use JSTL tags to create the actual while loop. If they had a way to put in some sample data like Bob and Chuck that would be great too, but it was usually "ipsum dolar epsum" or however that goes anyway.
It seems to me that creating a framework that would allow them to do that wouldn't be terribly hard. It would save the programmers a lot of time integrating the code with the design. And I don't think it would be a significant burden on the designers (they were paid less, so even if it was a burden to some extent the company could come out ahead).
For whatever reason this suggestion went nowhere. I wasn't expecting it to be perfect. I was expecting to have to fix some things, change a lot of the names the designers gave, etc.. But it seemed feasible to get a pretty good return with fairly minimal effort.
Has anyone had any experience with a framework such as this? Or perhaps a different approach to accomplish the same thing?
Re:Just like there will never be another Doom
on
Can Anyone Beat WoW?
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· Score: 1
While I fundamentally agree you with, there is an aspect of WoW you are overlooking. WoW is persistent and that adds a bit of a lock-in factor. Getting first place in a game of doom means nothing in the next match, much less the next FPS. Although "first place" may be less well defined in WoW, it does affect the next "match".
Does this carry over to the next MMORPG? It could, but I have my doubts. If WoW can keep adding content and features (say battlegrounds, new spells and talents) they could maintain a huge lead. Microsoft has a lot less pressure to create meaningful improvements in windows because the backwards compatibility for applications is very compelling.
While I certainly wouldn't want to play some WoW competitor game that is 1% better if it meant starting over, at the same time I'm not playing EQ anymore despite my time investment there. Could blizzard just continue to build on WoW in such a way that they can maintain this compatibility? And not discourage new users who haven't already sunk a bunch of time in?
I think the answer is yes so far, but it's not sustainable over the long term. Eventually things will improve (or at least change) such that "old" characters just don't really transfer to the latest game. I think if they come out with World of Starcraft in 5 years a fresh start would be better than just saying a character with a 300 gun skill now has a 300 phaser skill. However, if they could pull it off, it would certainly be a big hurdle for competitors.
Yes, because the program as it is actually run includes the library.
I'm not sure I can even parse this. "run includes" ?
I have to say, the parent poster seems absolutely correct to me in that this viral "myth" was not clarified at all. It is viral. And many people don't understand where the line is.
It seems to me that dynamically linking DOES taint your code. But obviously there is confusion here. Saying things like, if you don't like the GPL license, don't use GPL code doesn't clarify this. Saying the GPL is not viral does the opposite of clarifying. This is no way to remove uncertainty.
I'm not sure I agree with you. The original post said "pick up any language/platform as if it's nothing at all" and you said that it took you "about a week to figure it all out". If the underlying concepts were all that mattered you wouldn't have lost a week learning the new language. I don't think the original post was implying concepts are useless (quite the opposite), but that it's not trivial to switch to the latest thing and might be for no gain. The way the original post was worded was a bit exaggerated (it's not so much a "lie" as an over simplification).
Bear in mind that you are an undergrad with a summer programming gig under your belt. It sounds to me like you aren't really all that proficient with any language. As such it's easy to attain the same level of proficiency in a new language. I think if you knew (as an example) java so in depth as to pass the Sun Certified Java Programmer test, you wouldn't be able to reach the same level of detail in C++.NET in a week.
This isn't a slam on you personally. It's quite common and especially prevelant among younger and less experienced people. The more you learn, the more you realize how little you knew before. It's not cake to learn a new language unless "learn" means "I can do a hello world in that too".
Keep learning the priciples and keep getting exposure to new things. It's good. But eventually you are going to reach a point where learning a little bit about something new isn't going to significantly increase your productivity, just waste a bit of time and distract away from what's important. And I've worked with some people who are pretty much full-time distractions.
The original post mentioned UML as an example. I think it's a good one in a sense. Knowing *HOW* to do UML doesn't help much (though UML can be learned quickly). I've seen plenty of UML that didn't express anything useful. All the while the person explaining was sure his half-assed ideas were good, because people with good ideas can express them with UML and he was using UML himself, so it must be good. UML is also a good example of what you're talking about though. Solid understanding of design can be expressed equally well in UML or some other format if you really have a solid understanding. That understanding is hard to get, learning a new way to express it is not.
And therein lies the question submitted to slashdot. If there's this UML thing or some new framework or some new language you've heard about, how do you know whether it's just another rehash of something you've already got a reasonable solution for (i.e. hype) or is it really something useful that's going to be worth the time to learn? Would you be better off spending your time gaining additionally proficiency with your current framework? I've met plenty of bad programmers who think a new technology will solve their problems, when what they really need is a deeper understanding. I think that was basically what the original post was trying to say, but went a bit far with "ignore them".
New technologies do provide real benefits sometimes, but it's hard to know until AFTER you've spent the time to learn them. And you need to have a decent understanding of the technology you are trying to replace or even after learning the new one, you still won't know if it was worth it.
I don't think there's a magic bullet answer, but there are some good ideas in this thread. And "ignore it" actually has some merit, though it wasn't explained clearly. The best answer I can give is finding good people who have enough experience, understanding and pragmatism to have a solid debate with.
The game works fine, unless you want to play on a particular server at a particular time
I disagree. On my primary server queues to get in are very rare, but performance has been getting worse and worse with time even once you are logged in.
I see two problems. One is that the "Retreving characters" (once you login to the server [realm] and choose which char to play) is starting to take a while. It sometimes takes upwards of a minute where this was near instaneous even 3-4 months ago. Not a big deal, but annoying.
The other problem is that items changing hands can be very slow. This is especially a problem when you loot a corpse and it lags. If you enter combat (which is not always something you can control) you can't fight back until the item you looted makes it into your inventory. Very annoying to die because "another action is in progress". It's annoying even when you are just selling off to a vendor in town, but in the field problems are extremely aggrevating.
I have been playing since launch and this problem keeps getting worse and worse with time.
The issue is still the knocking on the door and demanding stuff, that should never have happened.
Why not? I understand the point in general in regards to a lot of issues (e.g. NSA wiretaps, although that's not cut-and-dried). I'm not sure I buy it in this case though.
I am certainly concerned about what the DoJ is going to push regarding COPA. Their track record so far is very discouraging and the current officials aren't my favorites.
Ultimately they are requesting facts to shape public policy. That's not a bad thing. It is inevitable that the facts will be twisted, but less facts isn't a better answer. The information they are "requesting" (in the case of google, no quotes for Yahoo, AOL, MSN) sounds like it's pretty on target to the debate.
I have concerns about what the end result of this will be. I prefer better counter arguments to the DoJ's desired laws rather than less information. So far that's been working OK (not great, but it could be worse). There are many people who would like all porn outlawed. So far, I think "get a grip" seems pretty reasonable, well depending on the parent poster's meaning:-)
I was looking at the SVGs themselves. But they don't scale. I first tried this at home which is windows and I've got the "resize large images to fit window" turned off (preferences -> advanced -> general -> browsing). Thought that might be the problem (even though it shouldn't apply to SVGs).
Trying it at work on OSX, with the resize thing enabled, same result.
Maybe I have this all wrong, but I thought SVG = scalable vector graphics. When I view the stuff at openclipart.org the SVGs don't seem to scale at all (either shrink down or expand to the browser window). What's up with that? Are my expectations just wrong?
Not just latency but lack of reliability too. The internet usually works, but I have problems reaching IP addresses much more often than I have problems going landline to landline. Cell phones are also noticebly less reliable than landlines. Combine the unreliability of two, add the latency and reduced sound quality.
And what do you get out of it? "free" phone calls. Except you need an extra cell phone to be connected to your computer. And you can only call Skype users unless paying an additional fee.
It's a neat "because you can" thing, but that's about it for most people.
Pretty much the entire poll leaves a lot of room for interpretation.
The question was "In your opinion, how likely is it that there are intelligent life forms on other planets that are similar to humans?". You say "80% think it would be life like us".
Where did "it" come from? The question was more along the lines of "any of it". And you're counting the 46% that said "somewhat likely" in you're 80%.
I think you've got a valid point about our own assumptions and biases. However, the question was worded in such a way that I'm not terribly surprised at the answers they got. I think the results to this question was not so much lack of imagination, but a question that left lots of room so people just went with "somewhat likely" as the top answer.
In any event, as I gather from the promo, the primary point of the show was to help expand people's imagination on this. I wonder what the results would be to the same wording of people before and after watching the show?
Um, that logically means that you have no free speech rights. At all. What -- we only have the right not to be silenced by the government, but anyone else can shut you up at will because you are on their property? Put a roof over land, and the constitution ends at the parking lot?
I think you are getting a little carried away here. It means you have no free speech RIGHT, that doesn't equate to the inability to speak.
Work - school - malls - airports - anyplace on earth - is private property. This is madness.
Not always, many schools and workplaces are in fact public, at least to the point that free speech rights are greater than private schools and workplaces. And yes, airports have elevated speech restrictions. That doesn't mean you can't express an idea in an aiport, nor is it exclusively bad.
The first amendment was intentionally limited to governmental restrictions on speech. It was not intended to disallow all restrictions under all circumstances, wisely in my opinon. There are other non-legal factors involved that promote free speech absent the absolute right.
I'm not saying I'm pro-censonsorship or oblivious to the (many) dangers of private speech restrictions. But I think you went too far with your conclusions.
If we caught the terrorists, there could be no war on terror, no war for the control of middle east oil production, which is the greatest concern of the Bush family.
I think the war in Iraq shows that a war in the middle east is possible regardless of who was caught after 9/11. They are essentially unrelated and the Iraq war happened anyway.
If anything, I think if the administration had caught more 9/11 related figures (Osama especially) they would be given even greater latitude with their "comprehensive" anti-terror strategy.
The charge is that he flip-flops based on what people want to hear, not based on new information. For example, voted for the war but when an anti-war position was helping Dean in the primaries Kerry flip-flopped to be more anti-war himself (this was specifically mentioned during one of the debates).
That's the charge anyway. Whether it's logical or not is not really a prerequisite for campaign smear anyway. But there certainly is a rational basis to criticize someone if their position changes depending on who they are talking to or what the current polls suggest is popular.
I'm not saying I completely agree with the flip-flop charge (nor do I entirely disagree). Much of the evidence being given to support the flip-flop charge is extremely weak. I'm just saying I'm not confused by it. It's a reasonable complaint at it's core, it wouldn't resonate if it wasn't. It's being misapplied because the Republicans see that they are getting away with it. I don't think Kerry's camp is doing a very good job of dispelling it either.
Slashdot Mirror
Was I completely ripped off in my CS education?
How to make use of binary trees and how to optimize algorithms.
I was taught this kind of thing.
How to plan software projects and what problems to expect. How to plan, lay down and manage a network.
Neither of these are even close to what I was taught.
And, more important, when it stops working you'll have a clue why it did. And you'll have a plan how to fix it, or at the very least, you'll know where to look.
Really? Are we still talking networks? I don't do system administration any more and when I did it was fairly entry level/small business. On top of that networks weren't covered at all in any of my classes (not offered at the time). Yet it's hard for me to imagine class room instruction being the most important knowledge in diagnosing large scale network problems in the typical case.
For myself as a software developer when something stops working the most important information is the location of the log files (not something I was taught in class obviously). Given the choice of the error/debug log or theory I learned in a class, I'll take error logs any day of the week.
This is not to say I haven't worked with people who are very comfortable with a black box. They don't know how it works and don't feel it has any impact on how they interact with it. They know how to use it (they think so anyway) and that's enough for them. If a solution doesn't work, they'll try something else, they're bound to stumble upon it eventually. But those people are just like that, it's not because they have any less education. I'm guessing this mentality is what you might have been driving at.
My effectiveness at my job is about 0% based on what I learned in my CS classes. It's about 80% things my parents taught me (team work, results rather than excuses) and about 20% (usually fairly specific) things I've learned on the job(s).
It's a matter of motivation, not difficulty.
Although the conspiracy theories may well be correct, I think the explanation is most likely very simple. It's cheaper (thus more profitable) to just crank out some junk than to try and do it right.
You must be either very good or very lucky as a software engineer if you've never worked somewhere where management just wanted it done as quickly and cheaply as possible. For many companies the return on investment of doing a good job just doesn't exist as there is no real penalty as long as the result is perceived as good enough.
Diebold is selling these things quite successfully with low quality. Why change? Does the average person give a shit? I know they should care. I know that market forces should force Diebold to either do a good job with voting machines or not do voting machines. But I think the reality is that Diebold has such crappy products for the same reason so many other companies do, because it's working for them.
Why has outlook had so many serious security flaws over the years? Because calendar integration is more important than security to such a huge number of people. It's not that creating a reasonably secure email client is too difficult for microsoft. It's that secure is less profitable than a feature that will help them with lock-in.
You could do exactly the same thing using paper resources if you had the time and patience.
Agreed.
I don't think there are really any more these days, simply a greater proportion of them doing it faster.
I'm not so sure. Does the lower time and patience barrier mean that people who pre-internet would have been a wannabe stalker are now actual stalkers? I suppose it depends on how laziness, ethics, fear of repercussions or other reasons not to stalk are weighted. I'm no expert on the psychology of stalkers, but I do know that laziness can be a strong disincentive.
According to the "far worse than first thought" link not fetching images isn't enough as the problem isn't limited to just images.
:-) Whether attached or not it forces me to use something other than pine to see them. I'd rather get a link, though I realize that's not always viable for everyone.
It's unclear to me whether email clients like Thunderbird are really blocking just image fetching with that feature or everything. It's quite common for people to try to blacklist what they know is a problem rather than whitelist what they know is OK.
If anyone knows the specifics of what Thunderbird does I'd like to know. Maybe I'll do some tests later.
And BTW, a "really nice sender" wouldn't include images in their email
I'm not sure that if I'm getting legitimate emails that might be a scam I want to submit it to find out. I recognize that email isn't secure and there shouldn't be any private information in them, but there is. At least partial information such as the last 4 CC digits. Often a token to take you direct to the page where you can input your personal info.
This is primarily geared towards people who have trouble determining if it's a scam or not. Should those people really be forwarding emails to a phishing detection service?
Not that I don't trust the intent of this group (nor do I necessarily trust them), but I would be uncomfortable with the idea of them having such a large collection of non-scam emails. If they had bad intent, that sounds like the ultimate phishing scam, send us everything that CLAIMS to need your personal info and this service will tell you whether's that was real or not. And if they are successfully detecting phishing scams, what a trove of private non-scam emails that were volunteered.
I hated it too. And I read the whole thing anyway. Since so many people seem to like it so much, I figured eventually the liking it would kick in, but it didn't.
I have to say, the suggestion to try re-reading it sounds intersting. I might very well like it better the second time. But no fucking way am I going to find out, I *really* hated that book. If not the, at least the second least enjoyable book I've read (by choice, reading assignments in school don't count).
At the same time, I did find it a bit expanding. Well, a little constricting too, I hate Ayn Rand by extension despite having read nothing of hers. But I found myself interested in learning about more religions (which lead to The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James, that's the one that competes with Illuminatus as least enjoyable read ever, though I got a lot more out of it. It's just very academic and I found that dull).
I did go on to read Promethus Rising. Didn't hate it, but didn't really accept what it was saying either.
I did like the fnord concept, that was cool, and hearing about fnord was how I first heard of Illuminatus. However, even if it really is good and it just takes a couple of reads or the right mindset or whatever, it still suprises me that the opinion is so overwhelmingly favorable. How many people are willing to give a 1000 page book a second chance? Maybe I'm just particularly literature lazy.
Osama bin Laden must be ROFL wherever he is that he was able to destroy the ideals of the United State of America that took centuries to build so easily.
OBL doesn't "hate us for our freedom" as the president likes to say. He really doesn't so much give a shit about it. It's our involvement, particularly in the middle east, that he would like to change. 9/11 didn't exactly work out that way for him.
And this errosion of freedom/privacy didn't start under the current administration.
Look, I'm with you, but this idea that "Osama won" is just as much a load of crap as is those that claim this bill is going to make a difference in fighting terrorism. Osama isn't the enemy on the freedom issue, it's OUR government and the citizens that are either indifferent or actually supportive of it.
I agree. It's not so much Bush and the Republicans. Bush has relatively recently begun using "Islamofacists" and similar terms. For the first few years after 9/11 Bush generally went out of his way to point out that we're out to get "terrorists, not all muslims" and tried to avoid using "Islam" or "Muslim".
The problem is that many people simply can't handle nuanced information. They feel the need to simplify down to black and white at which point they (think they) can make a judgement.
If you accept that 9/11 = terrorism (oversimplification, a subset is not equality), and 9/11 hijackers = muslim (still not equal, only works in one direction), you can see how this becomes muslims = terrorists.
Really I see this 9/11 = terrorism belief at least as much as I see the muslim = terrorist belief. Saying the most damaging thing Bush has done is to play this up is ridiculous (yet moderated as +5 insightful).
I have a question that's been bugging me for a while that is related to, but not quite the same as what the submitter asked. It's more relevant to the company I used to work for, but I still want to know the answer even though I don't so much have the need anymore.
The submitter wants to make non-functional mockups without spending a lot of time. Our designers would do that in photoshop and once the client approved the design, they would then do the mockups in HTML.
The HTML mockups weren't bad, they did their best to make them as "real" as possible. For example the form submit actually take you to the next page instead of just "#". But if the form was edit.jsp and after you press submit it takes you to view.jsp, we'd have to go in and change it so that the form actually submitted to EditSubmitAction which would then display view.jsp. I wanted them to be able to point it to EditSubmitAction and give them an accessible way to map that to displaying view.jsp.
Another example would be they would have on view.jsp something like:
[tr][td] Name 1:[/td][td] Bob Smith [/td][/tr]
[tr][td] Name 2:[/td][td] Chuck Jones [/td][/tr]
[!-- etc for each row --]
I wanted them to just be able to use JSTL tags to create the actual while loop. If they had a way to put in some sample data like Bob and Chuck that would be great too, but it was usually "ipsum dolar epsum" or however that goes anyway.
It seems to me that creating a framework that would allow them to do that wouldn't be terribly hard. It would save the programmers a lot of time integrating the code with the design. And I don't think it would be a significant burden on the designers (they were paid less, so even if it was a burden to some extent the company could come out ahead).
For whatever reason this suggestion went nowhere. I wasn't expecting it to be perfect. I was expecting to have to fix some things, change a lot of the names the designers gave, etc.. But it seemed feasible to get a pretty good return with fairly minimal effort.
Has anyone had any experience with a framework such as this? Or perhaps a different approach to accomplish the same thing?
While I fundamentally agree you with, there is an aspect of WoW you are overlooking. WoW is persistent and that adds a bit of a lock-in factor. Getting first place in a game of doom means nothing in the next match, much less the next FPS. Although "first place" may be less well defined in WoW, it does affect the next "match".
Does this carry over to the next MMORPG? It could, but I have my doubts. If WoW can keep adding content and features (say battlegrounds, new spells and talents) they could maintain a huge lead. Microsoft has a lot less pressure to create meaningful improvements in windows because the backwards compatibility for applications is very compelling.
While I certainly wouldn't want to play some WoW competitor game that is 1% better if it meant starting over, at the same time I'm not playing EQ anymore despite my time investment there. Could blizzard just continue to build on WoW in such a way that they can maintain this compatibility? And not discourage new users who haven't already sunk a bunch of time in?
I think the answer is yes so far, but it's not sustainable over the long term. Eventually things will improve (or at least change) such that "old" characters just don't really transfer to the latest game. I think if they come out with World of Starcraft in 5 years a fresh start would be better than just saying a character with a 300 gun skill now has a 300 phaser skill. However, if they could pull it off, it would certainly be a big hurdle for competitors.
Yes, because the program as it is actually run includes the library.
I'm not sure I can even parse this. "run includes" ?
I have to say, the parent poster seems absolutely correct to me in that this viral "myth" was not clarified at all. It is viral. And many people don't understand where the line is.
It seems to me that dynamically linking DOES taint your code. But obviously there is confusion here. Saying things like, if you don't like the GPL license, don't use GPL code doesn't clarify this. Saying the GPL is not viral does the opposite of clarifying. This is no way to remove uncertainty.
I'm not sure I agree with you. The original post said "pick up any language/platform as if it's nothing at all" and you said that it took you "about a week to figure it all out". If the underlying concepts were all that mattered you wouldn't have lost a week learning the new language. I don't think the original post was implying concepts are useless (quite the opposite), but that it's not trivial to switch to the latest thing and might be for no gain. The way the original post was worded was a bit exaggerated (it's not so much a "lie" as an over simplification).
.NET in a week.
Bear in mind that you are an undergrad with a summer programming gig under your belt. It sounds to me like you aren't really all that proficient with any language. As such it's easy to attain the same level of proficiency in a new language. I think if you knew (as an example) java so in depth as to pass the Sun Certified Java Programmer test, you wouldn't be able to reach the same level of detail in C++
This isn't a slam on you personally. It's quite common and especially prevelant among younger and less experienced people. The more you learn, the more you realize how little you knew before. It's not cake to learn a new language unless "learn" means "I can do a hello world in that too".
Keep learning the priciples and keep getting exposure to new things. It's good. But eventually you are going to reach a point where learning a little bit about something new isn't going to significantly increase your productivity, just waste a bit of time and distract away from what's important. And I've worked with some people who are pretty much full-time distractions.
The original post mentioned UML as an example. I think it's a good one in a sense. Knowing *HOW* to do UML doesn't help much (though UML can be learned quickly). I've seen plenty of UML that didn't express anything useful. All the while the person explaining was sure his half-assed ideas were good, because people with good ideas can express them with UML and he was using UML himself, so it must be good. UML is also a good example of what you're talking about though. Solid understanding of design can be expressed equally well in UML or some other format if you really have a solid understanding. That understanding is hard to get, learning a new way to express it is not.
And therein lies the question submitted to slashdot. If there's this UML thing or some new framework or some new language you've heard about, how do you know whether it's just another rehash of something you've already got a reasonable solution for (i.e. hype) or is it really something useful that's going to be worth the time to learn? Would you be better off spending your time gaining additionally proficiency with your current framework? I've met plenty of bad programmers who think a new technology will solve their problems, when what they really need is a deeper understanding. I think that was basically what the original post was trying to say, but went a bit far with "ignore them".
New technologies do provide real benefits sometimes, but it's hard to know until AFTER you've spent the time to learn them. And you need to have a decent understanding of the technology you are trying to replace or even after learning the new one, you still won't know if it was worth it.
I don't think there's a magic bullet answer, but there are some good ideas in this thread. And "ignore it" actually has some merit, though it wasn't explained clearly. The best answer I can give is finding good people who have enough experience, understanding and pragmatism to have a solid debate with.
The game works fine, unless you want to play on a particular server at a particular time
I disagree. On my primary server queues to get in are very rare, but performance has been getting worse and worse with time even once you are logged in.
I see two problems. One is that the "Retreving characters" (once you login to the server [realm] and choose which char to play) is starting to take a while. It sometimes takes upwards of a minute where this was near instaneous even 3-4 months ago. Not a big deal, but annoying.
The other problem is that items changing hands can be very slow. This is especially a problem when you loot a corpse and it lags. If you enter combat (which is not always something you can control) you can't fight back until the item you looted makes it into your inventory. Very annoying to die because "another action is in progress". It's annoying even when you are just selling off to a vendor in town, but in the field problems are extremely aggrevating.
I have been playing since launch and this problem keeps getting worse and worse with time.
Why not? I understand the point in general in regards to a lot of issues (e.g. NSA wiretaps, although that's not cut-and-dried). I'm not sure I buy it in this case though.
I am certainly concerned about what the DoJ is going to push regarding COPA. Their track record so far is very discouraging and the current officials aren't my favorites.
Ultimately they are requesting facts to shape public policy. That's not a bad thing. It is inevitable that the facts will be twisted, but less facts isn't a better answer. The information they are "requesting" (in the case of google, no quotes for Yahoo, AOL, MSN) sounds like it's pretty on target to the debate.
I have concerns about what the end result of this will be. I prefer better counter arguments to the DoJ's desired laws rather than less information. So far that's been working OK (not great, but it could be worse). There are many people who would like all porn outlawed. So far, I think "get a grip" seems pretty reasonable, well depending on the parent poster's meaning :-)
I was looking at the SVGs themselves. But they don't scale.
I first tried this at home which is windows and I've got the "resize large images to fit window" turned off (preferences -> advanced -> general -> browsing). Thought that might be the problem (even though it shouldn't apply to SVGs).
Trying it at work on OSX, with the resize thing enabled, same result.
Maybe I have this all wrong, but I thought SVG = scalable vector graphics. When I view the stuff at openclipart.org the SVGs don't seem to scale at all (either shrink down or expand to the browser window). What's up with that? Are my expectations just wrong?
Thank you. This complaint makes perfect sense now.
Can someone post an explanation or a link for Date's Central Rule? I tried some searching but mostly what I found is it's missing from MySQL.
Something like Oracle Application Server maybe?
Not just latency but lack of reliability too. The internet usually works, but I have problems reaching IP addresses much more often than I have problems going landline to landline. Cell phones are also noticebly less reliable than landlines. Combine the unreliability of two, add the latency and reduced sound quality.
And what do you get out of it? "free" phone calls. Except you need an extra cell phone to be connected to your computer. And you can only call Skype users unless paying an additional fee.
It's a neat "because you can" thing, but that's about it for most people.
Pretty much the entire poll leaves a lot of room for interpretation.
The question was "In your opinion, how likely is it that there are intelligent life forms on other planets that are similar to humans?". You say "80% think it would be life like us".
Where did "it" come from? The question was more along the lines of "any of it". And you're counting the 46% that said "somewhat likely" in you're 80%.
I think you've got a valid point about our own assumptions and biases. However, the question was worded in such a way that I'm not terribly surprised at the answers they got. I think the results to this question was not so much lack of imagination, but a question that left lots of room so people just went with "somewhat likely" as the top answer.
In any event, as I gather from the promo, the primary point of the show was to help expand people's imagination on this. I wonder what the results would be to the same wording of people before and after watching the show?
My suggestion is avoid dating chicks named Ass Ambassador. Probably could have avoided the whole mess if you had just paid attention to that red flag.
Um, that logically means that you have no free speech rights. At all. What -- we only have the right not to be silenced by the government, but anyone else can shut you up at will because you are on their property? Put a roof over land, and the constitution ends at the parking lot?
I think you are getting a little carried away here. It means you have no free speech RIGHT, that doesn't equate to the inability to speak.
Work - school - malls - airports - anyplace on earth - is private property. This is madness.
Not always, many schools and workplaces are in fact public, at least to the point that free speech rights are greater than private schools and workplaces. And yes, airports have elevated speech restrictions. That doesn't mean you can't express an idea in an aiport, nor is it exclusively bad.
The first amendment was intentionally limited to governmental restrictions on speech. It was not intended to disallow all restrictions under all circumstances, wisely in my opinon. There are other non-legal factors involved that promote free speech absent the absolute right.
I'm not saying I'm pro-censonsorship or oblivious to the (many) dangers of private speech restrictions. But I think you went too far with your conclusions.
If we caught the terrorists, there could be no war on terror, no war for the control of middle east oil production, which is the greatest concern of the Bush family.
I think the war in Iraq shows that a war in the middle east is possible regardless of who was caught after 9/11. They are essentially unrelated and the Iraq war happened anyway.
If anything, I think if the administration had caught more 9/11 related figures (Osama especially) they would be given even greater latitude with their "comprehensive" anti-terror strategy.
The charge is that he flip-flops based on what people want to hear, not based on new information. For example, voted for the war but when an anti-war position was helping Dean in the primaries Kerry flip-flopped to be more anti-war himself (this was specifically mentioned during one of the debates).
That's the charge anyway. Whether it's logical or not is not really a prerequisite for campaign smear anyway. But there certainly is a rational basis to criticize someone if their position changes depending on who they are talking to or what the current polls suggest is popular.
I'm not saying I completely agree with the flip-flop charge (nor do I entirely disagree). Much of the evidence being given to support the flip-flop charge is extremely weak. I'm just saying I'm not confused by it. It's a reasonable complaint at it's core, it wouldn't resonate if it wasn't. It's being misapplied because the Republicans see that they are getting away with it. I don't think Kerry's camp is doing a very good job of dispelling it either.