hmm. Interesting perspective. Not sure that I agree with it but it's an interesting tack.
I always thought that it might be cool to write a sci-fi book about a society of AI's who don't know they are AI and don't know they are in a computer. Some of them believe that humans exist outside the universe, and created them, but the scientist AIs reject that notion as religious rhetoric. "How is it possible to argue that AI is too complex to have evolved in RAM, but that some magical 'creator' is not too complex to have evolved?"
But then I'd get sued by Disney for copyright violations over Tron.
Why should I keep bugtraq postings? The bugtraq website is a better way for me to find a posting from 10 years if I should need to do that. If everybody who reads bugtraq used google's way of thinking, then that same worthless information would be duplicated hundreds and hundreds of times taking up a lot of HD space. It's just worthless. Bugtraq is something I read once and throw away. The "google way" only applies to ie. email between friends.
another quick example. I'm playing a "play by email" game called stars. Every day my turn is emailed to me. I do the turn and send it back to the host. I will never ever need to look at that file again - ever.
As it stands, anyone blogging on their own time already has free speech on the internet.
You're going to end up eating those words. The FEC or FCC or some overbearing federal department is going to come down on your ISP and say, "you host web pages that benifit a particular candidate. Those web pages are an in-kind donation to that candidate. Therefore, you have to pay taxes on those donation, limit the donations, fill out all this paperwork, etc. etc. ISPs are going say, "screw this!" and just change their TOS and cut you off if you have political content on your website.
If you were really honest with yourself, you have to admit that you would support this if the democrats were behind it. As for me, I'm a die-hard Libertarian. I think it should even be legal to shout fire in a crowded theater, to use the oft-sided excuse for limiting your rights (though it should be illegal to falsely incite panic).
I guess this is one way to achieve faster than light travel.
I know you're joking but just in case anyone doesn't understand, you can't actually slow light down. When light passes through a medium, glass for example, the atoms in the glass absorb the light and then re-emit it. So, an atom on the outside edge of the pane of glass absorbs a photon and then reemits it, then the next atom in the glas absorbs it, and so on until the light emerges from the inside edge of the glass. The total trip time for light was greater than c/distance, but no actual photon was ever slowed. It's like when a packet goes through a router. On the other side of the router, you get electrons - just not the same electrons.
I just want to make sure that I'm clear here. You can do whatever you want. I'm not going to have to read your code so I don't care. But Alan Turing managed to produce a mathematical proof stating that any algorithm can be represented with only sequence, selection, an iteration. In other words, it is a fact that goto and break are not required - they are optional. My argument is that, given the fact that you don't have to use break, I feel it is bad practice to do so because it makes the code less readable. My opinion is that it is easier on the person reading and maintaining your code if, when they come to a loop, they can determine immediately what the conditions are that keep that loop running. They don't have to hunt around inside perhaps hundreds of lines of code looking for random breaks. You say it's cleaner to use breaks. That's cool. I just disagree. When you've spent as many years as I have looking at poorly written code, you come to value people who make that little extra effort to make it readable.
And if there are multiple termination conditions which occur at different points in the loop and preclude further execution of the loop?
generally this occurs when you want to handle errors cleanly. Typically, the way this is done is as follows (in sudo code):
while (data_left_to_process) { preamble = read_preamble()//you might imagine this is an xml begin tag if (valid_preamble(preamble)) data = read_data() if (valud_data(data)) {close = read_close(); add_data_to_some_data_structure(data)}
data_left_to_process = check_for_more_data() }
the point is just that you can look at just the first line of that and know that at the end of that loop, there is no more data to process.
No problem. But first can you define this for me: without changing the semantics of the program. because I suspect you're going to waste my time and move the goalposts on me.
people writing absolute statements on Slashdot tend to be those with little relevant experience?
oh? Please detail for the audience what my experience is. You don't know? Then what are you talking about? Just because you don't like my opinion, that doesn't mean my opinion is wrong.
well, it's not *good* coding practice, but I have seen people do that on purpose. They use break to get out of the loop. Personally, I would never do it. I like to imagine that chic track or whatever where jesus is looking over the guy's shoulder while he's on the computer, only in my case I imagine that Knuth is looking over my shoulder and would slap me on the back of the head if I wrote while(1)
What I've seen a lot of are databases designed by programmers - good programmers too, these guys weren't slouches. They didn't have any formal training in databases or maybe they hadn't paid attention. Programmers tend to approach database design by thinking, "what data structures do I need to get out of this?" Someone more experienced in database design approaches the problem by thinking, "what relationships are here and how do I model them?"
Here's a real-world example. A web-based application that I was hired to extend and maintain included a system for users to exchange the lesson plans they created on the site with other users. In doing this, the users built up something like a buddy list. "These are the people that I often share with." Or you can think of it as being like an address book.
With me so far? OK, the programmer (who was very sharp - probably better at this than I am) approached the database thinking, "what data do I need from this thing," and decided that what he needed was a comma delimited list of userIDs. So he physically stored the buddy list in the database in like a char(500) as a comma delimited list.
That was actually great for what he was doing. He was just showing a user their buddy list. Unfortunately, that isn't normalized. So, there is a question you can ask which can't be answered by the data. That question is, "how many people have userID 50 as one of their buddies?"
See, the correct way of doing this is to have a many-to-many relationship which you implement with a table containing just two columns, userID and BuddyID. So if I'm user 12 and users 13,14, and 15 are my buddies, I have three rows in that table:
UserID BuddyID 12 13 12 14 12 15
Now if I need to ask, "how many people have userID 50 as one of their buddies" I can do select count(*) from X where BuddyID = 50
BTW, I actually fixed this one not by normalizing but with a hack. I appended 0 to the front and back of the buddy list, then I could do select count(*) from user where buddylist like '%,50,%' But hacks aren't how I make my living. I'd prefer to do things the right way. What my boss wanted was, every time you look at this page it shows you who has you set as a buddy. Kind of like what Slashdot does with the "fans" page. If it was normalized, that would be a scan of an indexed column. It would be lighting fast. so fast the page would practically load before you even clicked the link. But doing a "like" on a big char field is slow.
There are I'm sure still other questions that the un-normalized database cannot answer. Also there are problems with deleting users and, the big one, overflowing that char(500). "How many buddies can a person have?" I was asked. "It depends" I said. If all my buddies are low number IDs, I can have a lot. If my buddies are high number IDs, I can have fewer. It's all just huge mess! Of course, it worked according to the original specification though.
I have a lot of respect for the guy who wrote it. And I'm not tooting my own horn either. I've have other people look at databases I've designed and just torn them to pieces. This is just one example where I just happen to know that he did it the wrong way.
You might try some university-level database books. The advantage there is that they tend to concentrate on the underlying principals rather than any particular database implementation. Since you already know the syntax of the database you want to work with, you should be able to apply whatever you learn in the book to what you're actually doing.
The textbook they used in my "Database 101" class is still available on Amazon. It's ok. I suppose it's probably about average.
If there is a university close to where you live, you might also try going to their bookstore and looking at the used books they have.
Just stay away from those, "Learn Microsoft SQL Server 2005 in 21 days" books. That's the trap many people fall into. You don't want to learn a particular implementation. You want to learn normalization. I promise you, it will make your life easier in the long run. Normalization is to database design what goto-less programming is to programming. When you start programming, you do it on your own and you learn bad habbits, like using gotos all over the place. Then one day you sit down with a book, not a "C" book or a "Java" book, but a programming book, and that's when you really learn. Same here. You want to learn design and normalization.
good luck. I think it's good that you're motivated to do this.
Have you ever seen a Database "constructed" by someone who knows nothing about Database design?
That would describe 90% of the databases I've ever seen. Then people are amazed when they realize that there are questions that their data CANNOT answer, not because the information isn't there, but because of they way they've organized it.
cool! Thanks for the link. Is it possible with this to have a (very simple) program that would compile under both windows and linux? Or are the libraries too different?
do we really want our elections to be for sale to the highest bidder
I understand what you're saying, but I disagree that this is what campaign finance legislation is preventing. The law is telling individuals that they can't speak. That's me. Me, oni, and you, AthenianGadfly. We'll get fined or sent to jail if we put up a website with a political message.
Doesn't that seem wrong to you?? Sure, the prohibitian is "only" 30 days before an election. I can put up my website 60 days before the election, no problem. Just like copyright is "only" 10 years after the author's death. But you have to know that in a few years, they'll extend it to 3 months (just like they extended copyright) and then they'll extend it to one year, and then they'll just say, "no political speach period"
But you'll be happy with that because the corporations will also be restricted?
How are these "ancient" remains different from modern small folk
Well IANAB but:
Number 1: They aren't homo sapiens. They are a species almost as different from you as apes. Our common ancestor may only be a few million years removed.
Number 2: This isn't a deformity. This is just the way they are. A pair of midgets can have a full-size child. These people had children the same size as they were.
Some highlights: "members of the UN Commission on Human Rights, for instance, include Zimbabwe, Algeria, Sudan, China and Vietnam. Brutal despotisms all"
I promise you that if the UN has control of DNS, they will start passing rules like, "nobody who criticizes the UN gets a domain name" Trust me, that's what will happen.
I am shocked (shocked) that people don't get sarcasm. I should have quoted TFA in my post. Here, read this and see if it makes more sense:
from the article: Geoff Johnston, an analyst with WebSideStory. 'We always knew there was a finite number of early adopters out there and a finite number of Microsoft haters who would switch to something new
So, to paraphrase Mr. Johnston: The only possible reasons why someone would use firefox are: 1. they are one of those annoying people who think they're cool when they have "the latest thing" 2. they are one of those annoying people who hold an irrational hatred of microsoft.
The only possible reasons why someone would use firefox are: 1. they are one of those annoying people who think they're cool when they have "the latest thing" 2. they are one of those annoying people who hold an irrational hatred of microsoft.
There's no other reason. No sir. Nobody in the entire world looked at each browser and made a sound, logical choice to use the one that best met thier needs. No, that would never happen.
Well, I agree that OpenBSD probably sucks as a desktop OS. I couldn't even get X running on FreeBSD and it's supposed to be easier to configure.
Continuing the discussion of older packages, you should know that I'm a debian guy so I'm used to being 10 years behind everybody else - but on the other hand, I always know that what I install is going to work.
Slashdot Mirror
That's the proper skill for Quake
Will anyone ever make a game that's better than Quake 3 Threewave Capturestrike??
hmm. Interesting perspective. Not sure that I agree with it but it's an interesting tack.
I always thought that it might be cool to write a sci-fi book about a society of AI's who don't know they are AI and don't know they are in a computer. Some of them believe that humans exist outside the universe, and created them, but the scientist AIs reject that notion as religious rhetoric. "How is it possible to argue that AI is too complex to have evolved in RAM, but that some magical 'creator' is not too complex to have evolved?"
But then I'd get sued by Disney for copyright violations over Tron.
Why should I keep bugtraq postings? The bugtraq website is a better way for me to find a posting from 10 years if I should need to do that. If everybody who reads bugtraq used google's way of thinking, then that same worthless information would be duplicated hundreds and hundreds of times taking up a lot of HD space. It's just worthless. Bugtraq is something I read once and throw away. The "google way" only applies to ie. email between friends.
another quick example. I'm playing a "play by email" game called stars. Every day my turn is emailed to me. I do the turn and send it back to the host. I will never ever need to look at that file again - ever.
As it stands, anyone blogging on their own time already has free speech on the internet.
You're going to end up eating those words. The FEC or FCC or some overbearing federal department is going to come down on your ISP and say, "you host web pages that benifit a particular candidate. Those web pages are an in-kind donation to that candidate. Therefore, you have to pay taxes on those donation, limit the donations, fill out all this paperwork, etc. etc. ISPs are going say, "screw this!" and just change their TOS and cut you off if you have political content on your website.
If you were really honest with yourself, you have to admit that you would support this if the democrats were behind it. As for me, I'm a die-hard Libertarian. I think it should even be legal to shout fire in a crowded theater, to use the oft-sided excuse for limiting your rights (though it should be illegal to falsely incite panic).
I guess this is one way to achieve faster than light travel.
I know you're joking but just in case anyone doesn't understand, you can't actually slow light down. When light passes through a medium, glass for example, the atoms in the glass absorb the light and then re-emit it. So, an atom on the outside edge of the pane of glass absorbs a photon and then reemits it, then the next atom in the glas absorbs it, and so on until the light emerges from the inside edge of the glass. The total trip time for light was greater than c/distance, but no actual photon was ever slowed. It's like when a packet goes through a router. On the other side of the router, you get electrons - just not the same electrons.
I just want to make sure that I'm clear here. You can do whatever you want. I'm not going to have to read your code so I don't care. But Alan Turing managed to produce a mathematical proof stating that any algorithm can be represented with only sequence, selection, an iteration. In other words, it is a fact that goto and break are not required - they are optional. My argument is that, given the fact that you don't have to use break, I feel it is bad practice to do so because it makes the code less readable. My opinion is that it is easier on the person reading and maintaining your code if, when they come to a loop, they can determine immediately what the conditions are that keep that loop running. They don't have to hunt around inside perhaps hundreds of lines of code looking for random breaks. You say it's cleaner to use breaks. That's cool. I just disagree. When you've spent as many years as I have looking at poorly written code, you come to value people who make that little extra effort to make it readable.
//you might imagine this is an xml begin tag
And if there are multiple termination conditions which occur at different points in the loop and preclude further execution of the loop?
generally this occurs when you want to handle errors cleanly. Typically, the way this is done is as follows (in sudo code):
while (data_left_to_process) {
preamble = read_preamble()
if (valid_preamble(preamble)) data = read_data()
if (valud_data(data)) {close = read_close(); add_data_to_some_data_structure(data)}
data_left_to_process = check_for_more_data()
}
the point is just that you can look at just the first line of that and know that at the end of that loop, there is no more data to process.
but hey, you can do whatever you like.
No problem. But first can you define this for me: without changing the semantics of the program. because I suspect you're going to waste my time and move the goalposts on me.
people writing absolute statements on Slashdot tend to be those with little relevant experience?
oh? Please detail for the audience what my experience is. You don't know? Then what are you talking about? Just because you don't like my opinion, that doesn't mean my opinion is wrong.
It's much cleaner to break out of a loop at the instant the termination condition becomes true.
Which, if you did your job right, would be the bottom of the loop, so it would break out the instant the termination condition becomes true.
an endless while(true) loop
well, it's not *good* coding practice, but I have seen people do that on purpose. They use break to get out of the loop. Personally, I would never do it. I like to imagine that chic track or whatever where jesus is looking over the guy's shoulder while he's on the computer, only in my case I imagine that Knuth is looking over my shoulder and would slap me on the back of the head if I wrote while(1)
I'm curious, could you show such examples?
9 17525
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=166851&cid=13
What I've seen a lot of are databases designed by programmers - good programmers too, these guys weren't slouches. They didn't have any formal training in databases or maybe they hadn't paid attention. Programmers tend to approach database design by thinking, "what data structures do I need to get out of this?" Someone more experienced in database design approaches the problem by thinking, "what relationships are here and how do I model them?"
Here's a real-world example. A web-based application that I was hired to extend and maintain included a system for users to exchange the lesson plans they created on the site with other users. In doing this, the users built up something like a buddy list. "These are the people that I often share with." Or you can think of it as being like an address book.
With me so far? OK, the programmer (who was very sharp - probably better at this than I am) approached the database thinking, "what data do I need from this thing," and decided that what he needed was a comma delimited list of userIDs. So he physically stored the buddy list in the database in like a char(500) as a comma delimited list.
That was actually great for what he was doing. He was just showing a user their buddy list. Unfortunately, that isn't normalized. So, there is a question you can ask which can't be answered by the data. That question is, "how many people have userID 50 as one of their buddies?"
See, the correct way of doing this is to have a many-to-many relationship which you implement with a table containing just two columns, userID and BuddyID. So if I'm user 12 and users 13,14, and 15 are my buddies, I have three rows in that table:
UserID BuddyID
12 13
12 14
12 15
Now if I need to ask, "how many people have userID 50 as one of their buddies" I can do select count(*) from X where BuddyID = 50
BTW, I actually fixed this one not by normalizing but with a hack. I appended 0 to the front and back of the buddy list, then I could do select count(*) from user where buddylist like '%,50,%' But hacks aren't how I make my living. I'd prefer to do things the right way. What my boss wanted was, every time you look at this page it shows you who has you set as a buddy. Kind of like what Slashdot does with the "fans" page. If it was normalized, that would be a scan of an indexed column. It would be lighting fast. so fast the page would practically load before you even clicked the link. But doing a "like" on a big char field is slow.
There are I'm sure still other questions that the un-normalized database cannot answer. Also there are problems with deleting users and, the big one, overflowing that char(500). "How many buddies can a person have?" I was asked. "It depends" I said. If all my buddies are low number IDs, I can have a lot. If my buddies are high number IDs, I can have fewer. It's all just huge mess! Of course, it worked according to the original specification though.
I have a lot of respect for the guy who wrote it. And I'm not tooting my own horn either. I've have other people look at databases I've designed and just torn them to pieces. This is just one example where I just happen to know that he did it the wrong way.
You might try some university-level database books. The advantage there is that they tend to concentrate on the underlying principals rather than any particular database implementation. Since you already know the syntax of the database you want to work with, you should be able to apply whatever you learn in the book to what you're actually doing.
2 880678/103-4666631-1635844?n=507846
The textbook they used in my "Database 101" class is still available on Amazon. It's ok. I suppose it's probably about average.
Title = Database Design, Application & Administration
Author = Maminno
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/007
If there is a university close to where you live, you might also try going to their bookstore and looking at the used books they have.
Just stay away from those, "Learn Microsoft SQL Server 2005 in 21 days" books. That's the trap many people fall into. You don't want to learn a particular implementation. You want to learn normalization. I promise you, it will make your life easier in the long run. Normalization is to database design what goto-less programming is to programming. When you start programming, you do it on your own and you learn bad habbits, like using gotos all over the place. Then one day you sit down with a book, not a "C" book or a "Java" book, but a programming book, and that's when you really learn. Same here. You want to learn design and normalization.
good luck. I think it's good that you're motivated to do this.
Have you ever seen a Database "constructed" by someone who knows nothing about Database design?
That would describe 90% of the databases I've ever seen. Then people are amazed when they realize that there are questions that their data CANNOT answer, not because the information isn't there, but because of they way they've organized it.
I'll give examples if anyone is interested.
cool! Thanks for the link. Is it possible with this to have a (very simple) program that would compile under both windows and linux? Or are the libraries too different?
I've played a lot of Stock Market. The end guy is hard
This makes virtually no difference to the effort required to transfer an object to Mars from Earth. The orbit would be an elliptical transfer orbit
I'm glad that you pointed this out.
Listen up everyone, space travel is not about straight lines. Download orbiter and fly a few trips to mars yourself. It will all become clear.
And if we start getting into laws that regulate the content, you can look for even more pro-establishment favoratism.
When it comes to government corruption, more government is not the solution.
you are absolutely correct!
do we really want our elections to be for sale to the highest bidder
I understand what you're saying, but I disagree that this is what campaign finance legislation is preventing. The law is telling individuals that they can't speak. That's me. Me, oni, and you, AthenianGadfly. We'll get fined or sent to jail if we put up a website with a political message.
Doesn't that seem wrong to you?? Sure, the prohibitian is "only" 30 days before an election. I can put up my website 60 days before the election, no problem. Just like copyright is "only" 10 years after the author's death. But you have to know that in a few years, they'll extend it to 3 months (just like they extended copyright) and then they'll extend it to one year, and then they'll just say, "no political speach period"
But you'll be happy with that because the corporations will also be restricted?
How are these "ancient" remains different from modern small folk
Well IANAB but:
Number 1: They aren't homo sapiens. They are a species almost as different from you as apes. Our common ancestor may only be a few million years removed.
Number 2: This isn't a deformity. This is just the way they are. A pair of midgets can have a full-size child. These people had children the same size as they were.
hunt down and mate with wild female
That's the most romantic thing I've ever heard (on slashdot)
Until the females evolve some defense like multiple matings.
It's even simpler than that. Females who prefer males that don't glow in the dark will have a greater chance of passing on their genes
I really mind the UN doing it.
Exactly. The UN is a corrupt body.
**Everyone needs to read this***
http://209.157.64.200/focus/f-news/953471/posts
Some highlights:
"members of the UN Commission on Human Rights, for instance, include Zimbabwe, Algeria, Sudan, China and Vietnam. Brutal despotisms all"
I promise you that if the UN has control of DNS, they will start passing rules like, "nobody who criticizes the UN gets a domain name" Trust me, that's what will happen.
I am shocked (shocked) that people don't get sarcasm. I should have quoted TFA in my post. Here, read this and see if it makes more sense:
from the article:
Geoff Johnston, an analyst with WebSideStory. 'We always knew there was a finite number of early adopters out there and a finite number of Microsoft haters who would switch to something new
So, to paraphrase Mr. Johnston:
The only possible reasons why someone would use firefox are:
1. they are one of those annoying people who think they're cool when they have "the latest thing"
2. they are one of those annoying people who hold an irrational hatred of microsoft.
How the heck did this get modded up to 4?
Maybe the post contained some kind of strange social custom that you don't understand.
The only possible reasons why someone would use firefox are:
1. they are one of those annoying people who think they're cool when they have "the latest thing"
2. they are one of those annoying people who hold an irrational hatred of microsoft.
There's no other reason. No sir. Nobody in the entire world looked at each browser and made a sound, logical choice to use the one that best met thier needs. No, that would never happen.
Well, I agree that OpenBSD probably sucks as a desktop OS. I couldn't even get X running on FreeBSD and it's supposed to be easier to configure.
Continuing the discussion of older packages, you should know that I'm a debian guy so I'm used to being 10 years behind everybody else - but on the other hand, I always know that what I install is going to work.