I had a nice rant all written up, because this is definitely not News for Nerds, or even Stuff that Matters. But its not worth it. Its already a lost cause when people ask slashdot to do assignments that they should be lerning from for them.
Going to the dead tree repository (you know, what we used to call a library) and doing some basic research on design in other fields completely unrelated to computers would be more useful, but lazy, unmotiviated students can't be bothered.
Nope the answer is "Teh Intar-net", some hand-waving, yadda yadda yaddda... a powerpoint presentation or 10 (novocaine for the brain), a paper written in large fonts, wide margins, triple-spaced, to bulk up the page count, lots of screen shots that take up ink and paper but communicate nothing, a ton of links cited as references (just grab the first few pages off google and cut-and-paste the linkies, but dont bother reading the content - its not like anyone else will check it) and you've got your 100-page piece of drek. Don't forget to spiral-bind it for extra credit.
One of these days a professor is going to require that assignments be hand-written; then we'll see people actually learn to communicate with an economy of words. It'll kill off the cut-n-paste gang. Big deal. They're already a waste of space.
He actually did go through 3 steering wheels. Then there came a time when he came back from trying to get yet another, smaller steering wheel - with the bad news - they didn't make a smaller steering wheel for his Kenworth.
A few years later, he had a heart attack.
THEN he lost some of the weight (lying in a hospital bed with an overloaded heart does that to people).
Contrary to popular belief, the markup on food at the retail level is damn sweet.
Retailers claim their "profit margin" is 4%. That's net net net. After all expenses. Gross markup is between 25% and 40%, in some cases 60%. The junkier the product, the higher the margins (breakfast cereal is junk).
This might be the straw that gets people to vote in laws requiring less waste in packaging. Its bad enough you open a box and its already half-empty ("some settling may occur" - yeah, sure - why does the same crap cereal settle more every decade?)
I should have become a potato-chip farmer - 1 potato sliced real thin, 10 pounds of cheap grease and a sack of salt == $127.48, and you don't have to worry about being sued - by the time it gets through the courts, they're dead.
I know one who does, and he's a hard worker. But his food consumption is astronomical. I once watched him eat... oh, forget it, you won't believe me. Heck, I saw it and *I* don't believe me. His employer bought him a van becasue he didn't fit in a car (and he didn't fit in most vans, either. They had to shop around). And another oe who kept on buying smaller steering wheels as his belly got bigger - "to save his shirts from wear and tear from the steering wheel."
That's one thing I couldn't figure out either. They "need" a minivan to haul their huge you-know-whats around town, they each eat more in one week than I do in a month... one of life's not-so-little mysteries.
Maybe they won the lottery. Or got an inheritance and are living off the fat of the land. Or money from suing fast-food joints when the seats break. Or for making them fat. Or restaurant owners pay them to go eat at competitors "all-you-can-eat" buffets.
They don't care - once everyone does it, it becomes part of the "cost of doing business". And everyone will do it because they can't be seen as giving up a competitive edge to others. So you'll have pressure to raise the price some more, and cut the actual quality and quantity of the content more.
If it sells product, and results in an incremental increase in volume, they'll do it, and figure out how to make it profitable.
Besides, people already mistakenly associate higher cost with "better", in everything from cars to clothes to cereal.
a shopping cart full of twinkies, soda and sugared cereal
... you forgot the 50 gallons of soda pop in the 3rd cart (behind the 2nd cart, which is loaded with chips, pretzels, and pizza pockets) - including a couple of diet cokes to "make up" for the twinkies:-) I couldn't believe my eyes the first time I saw that - 2 adults and 2 kids who, collectively, weighed at least 2/3 or a ton, pushing 3 shopping carts full of "fat food". The 2 diet soda pops just made it look more ludicrous. I thought about taking a picture, but there was no way that my camera-phone had a wide enough lense to capture it.
A friend of mine who works in the industry told me that they had to widen the aisles a few years ago because when 2 fatties match, 7' is not enough for them to pass each other without damaging stuff on the shelves!
I think that stores that got a reputation for kicking out parents who had noisy destructive kids would actually end up getting more customers. Just like stores that tell people with 20 items to get out of the "8 item or less" express lane.
There's easily room for a buck, never mind 50 cents. The actual food in that box of Cheerios costs under a dime. Everything else (advertising, box, packaging, shipping, handling, marketing, profit) is extra.
and the number one product i the future - spex that remove all advertising, so you don't see any of that crap. At that point, the "stick-your-message-on-everything" falls apart, because people won't see it. Just like a lot of people don't see popups or flash ads already.
Thee's always one parent that "doesn't get it" - their kid whines and whines and whines. Tears open stuff. Makes a mess all over. And whines some more. And the parents keep saying "stop it or we're leaving"... and never follow through.
Be nice to see the clerks being allowed to hand out $50 tickets for disturbing the peace. Or better yet, handing out "complimentary" exlax-chip cookies to the offending brats AND their parents. You can tell when they've been through a store - opened boxes and bags with stuff eaten, then the container put back on the shelf behind other stock, etc.
What's worse is if you miss that they've had their grubby paws in your food until you get home. Nothing quite as gross as a jar of peanut butter with fingerprints inside it...
Its illegal in my jurisdiction to have advertising (magazines, etc.) directed to children under 13.
This is over and above any broadcast requirements.
This could be a good thing if it gets parents more used to saying "Mo!" to their kids. After all, a pissed-off parent is already hostile to your product.
And I REALLY don't want to see the ads for Preparation H!
It might be geosynchronous, but that just means a 24-hour orbital period. On one side, it is being accelerated in relaton to the earth (not the sun), on the other, decellerated. This would tend to make the orbit an ellipse, not geosynchronous.
Better to just build a skyhook and exploit the differential electrical potential along its length. And, unlike a real skyhook, there's no need for it to go all the way to the ground, or even into the upper atmosphere, so that solves a lot of the materials problems assoicated with skyhooks.
If we had a space elevator (which is what we really should be working on), I don't think we'll need a solar array in orbit - just the electrical difference along the elevator is HUMUNGOUS.
There were newspaper reports of a teenager who had to undergo therapy because he got to the point where he WAS thinking in basic. Literally. His thoughts, if he wanted to do anything, ended up being short snippets of "code", complete with line numbers.
The problem is its NOT a solid structure. And there's no diff between trying to accelerate something, and trying to stop it from being accelerated. Also, if its in orbit around the earth (a reasonable requirement, unless your receivers are going to form a ring around the worlds' surface) the force isn't constant - on one side, its accelerating, on the other side, decellerating.
Any structure sufficiently rigid may be too heavy to build. Make it dynamically rigid (by spinning it up), doesn't solve the problem, it complicates it.
Think of trying to push a piece of string, because that's what any large structure is going to be like. Stringy.
First, there's no 100% efficient absorber. No solar panel is going to behave like a perfect black body.
Second, it irrelevant. The solar panel isn't converting mechanical energy (the motion of the photon) into electricity. Its converting the photon into electricity. The mechanical energy doesn't just "disappear". Since it has nowhere else to go, its absorbed by the structure. Hence, even a perfect absorber will be affected.
The problem I foresee is how you keep this thing from acting like a huge solar sail...
So you've got to get it dynamically stable - spinning, etc., so that it has some rigidity to it.
And you need thrusters, and reaction mass, etc. Then you have to beef up the components to account for the thrusters, tanks, etc., which means even bigger thrusters, more reaction mas, etc. Has anyone bothered to do the calculations to see if there's any point where this thing is even buildable in theory? Or is this one of those "dirty little secrets" that everyone is tip-toeing around because actually ding the calculations means no more funding?
The topic is debugging perl. Perl has a problem because it is not a very good language to begin with.
Perl has its uses - but not on large projects or long lifetimes. Its ambiguities in terms of language structure renders it pretty much unmaintainable.
As for the whole "learn to use the language" - I've been using it for years. In terms of maintainability of code, c has it beat by a mile. Perl has got to be one of the worst languages around in that respect. And that's what the topic is - debugging perl. I stick by my original contention that the quickest way to debug a perl program is to rewrite it in python. You'll not only get rid of your bugs, you'll have a program that's maintainable.
no more silent conversions between 0 and null and '0' and '' - that's stupid
Oh, wait - its easier to just rewrite the damn thing in pretty much ANY other language. Its not a question of understanding it - its a question of maintainability. Isn't that what debugging is about 90% of the time - fixing bugs that creep in because code is, in fact, NOT maintainable?
There's no replacement for proper string functions and an intuitive regular expression engine. And no excuse not to have them. Larry Wall made a mistake there, and its been perpetuated in the name of "backwards compatabiity" ever since.
(The *fastest* I ever learned a programming language to my satisfaction (discounting data languages such as SQL) was two weeks, and I spent twice that long attempting to learn Python... there's absolutely no way writing the page generator you describe could take that long.)
Learning enough python to do the job took less than an hour.
If you already have a decent background in c and at least one scripting language, say php, you should be good to go.
The hardest part? I kept putting in semicolons.
There's no way it should take 2 weeks to learn how to open files and use python's re module and data structures, especially since the data structures all have perl analogs.
Perhaps you had the wrong book? Or were not motivated enough? Anyone with programming experience (even BASIC) should be able to learn python in a day.
..there's something about an interpreted language which can be optimized down to nearly the size of machine code, only less readable.
Big deal. You still need to lead the interpreter, and set up the host environment, etc. Besides, the best way to debug a perl program is to rewrite it in python.
I've been using perl for years, but I'm dumping it for most things.
It took me less time to learn python and write my first utility (a page generator for 195 content categories in2 languages from source data files) than it would have to write it in perl and debug it.
The whole "TMTOWTDI" is just wrong, from a maintainability point of view. If you can't maintain it, you can't really reuse it.
And perl's greediness in matching strings sucks (because someone was too lazy to put proper string functions into the language?)
Perl - because when it all looks like line noise, nobody can criticize the "quality" of your code.
Slashdot Mirror
I had a nice rant all written up, because this is definitely not News for Nerds, or even Stuff that Matters. But its not worth it. Its already a lost cause when people ask slashdot to do assignments that they should be lerning from for them.
Going to the dead tree repository (you know, what we used to call a library) and doing some basic research on design in other fields completely unrelated to computers would be more useful, but lazy, unmotiviated students can't be bothered.
Nope the answer is "Teh Intar-net", some hand-waving, yadda yadda yaddda ... a powerpoint presentation or 10 (novocaine for the brain), a paper written in large fonts, wide margins, triple-spaced, to bulk up the page count, lots of screen shots that take up ink and paper but communicate nothing, a ton of links cited as references (just grab the first few pages off google and cut-and-paste the linkies, but dont bother reading the content - its not like anyone else will check it) and you've got your 100-page piece of drek. Don't forget to spiral-bind it for extra credit.
One of these days a professor is going to require that assignments be hand-written; then we'll see people actually learn to communicate with an economy of words. It'll kill off the cut-n-paste gang. Big deal. They're already a waste of space.
He actually did go through 3 steering wheels. Then there came a time when he came back from trying to get yet another, smaller steering wheel - with the bad news - they didn't make a smaller steering wheel for his Kenworth.
A few years later, he had a heart attack.
THEN he lost some of the weight (lying in a hospital bed with an overloaded heart does that to people).
Contrary to popular belief, the markup on food at the retail level is damn sweet.
Retailers claim their "profit margin" is 4%. That's net net net. After all expenses. Gross markup is between 25% and 40%, in some cases 60%. The junkier the product, the higher the margins (breakfast cereal is junk).
This might be the straw that gets people to vote in laws requiring less waste in packaging. Its bad enough you open a box and its already half-empty ("some settling may occur" - yeah, sure - why does the same crap cereal settle more every decade?)
I should have become a potato-chip farmer - 1 potato sliced real thin, 10 pounds of cheap grease and a sack of salt == $127.48, and you don't have to worry about being sued - by the time it gets through the courts, they're dead.
I know one who does, and he's a hard worker. But his food consumption is astronomical. I once watched him eat ... oh, forget it, you won't believe me. Heck, I saw it and *I* don't believe me. His employer bought him a van becasue he didn't fit in a car (and he didn't fit in most vans, either. They had to shop around). And another oe who kept on buying smaller steering wheels as his belly got bigger - "to save his shirts from wear and tear from the steering wheel."
That's one thing I couldn't figure out either. They "need" a minivan to haul their huge you-know-whats around town, they each eat more in one week than I do in a month ... one of life's not-so-little mysteries.
Maybe they won the lottery. Or got an inheritance and are living off the fat of the land. Or money from suing fast-food joints when the seats break. Or for making them fat. Or restaurant owners pay them to go eat at competitors "all-you-can-eat" buffets.
If it sells product, and results in an incremental increase in volume, they'll do it, and figure out how to make it profitable.
Besides, people already mistakenly associate higher cost with "better", in everything from cars to clothes to cereal.
A friend of mine who works in the industry told me that they had to widen the aisles a few years ago because when 2 fatties match, 7' is not enough for them to pass each other without damaging stuff on the shelves!
I think that stores that got a reputation for kicking out parents who had noisy destructive kids would actually end up getting more customers. Just like stores that tell people with 20 items to get out of the "8 item or less" express lane.
There's easily room for a buck, never mind 50 cents. The actual food in that box of Cheerios costs under a dime. Everything else (advertising, box, packaging, shipping, handling, marketing, profit) is extra.
and the number one product i the future - spex that remove all advertising, so you don't see any of that crap. At that point, the "stick-your-message-on-everything" falls apart, because people won't see it. Just like a lot of people don't see popups or flash ads already.
Thee's always one parent that "doesn't get it" - their kid whines and whines and whines. Tears open stuff. Makes a mess all over. And whines some more. And the parents keep saying "stop it or we're leaving" ... and never follow through.
Be nice to see the clerks being allowed to hand out $50 tickets for disturbing the peace. Or better yet, handing out "complimentary" exlax-chip cookies to the offending brats AND their parents. You can tell when they've been through a store - opened boxes and bags with stuff eaten, then the container put back on the shelf behind other stock, etc.
What's worse is if you miss that they've had their grubby paws in your food until you get home. Nothing quite as gross as a jar of peanut butter with fingerprints inside it ...
Darn! I even previewed it!
No! No! No! Aggghhhh!
Its illegal in my jurisdiction to have advertising (magazines, etc.) directed to children under 13.
This is over and above any broadcast requirements.
This could be a good thing if it gets parents more used to saying "Mo!" to their kids. After all, a pissed-off parent is already hostile to your product.
And I REALLY don't want to see the ads for Preparation H!
Better to just build a skyhook and exploit the differential electrical potential along its length. And, unlike a real skyhook, there's no need for it to go all the way to the ground, or even into the upper atmosphere, so that solves a lot of the materials problems assoicated with skyhooks.
If we had a space elevator (which is what we really should be working on), I don't think we'll need a solar array in orbit - just the electrical difference along the elevator is HUMUNGOUS.
Ouch. My condolences :-)
There were newspaper reports of a teenager who had to undergo therapy because he got to the point where he WAS thinking in basic. Literally. His thoughts, if he wanted to do anything, ended up being short snippets of "code", complete with line numbers.
The problem is its NOT a solid structure. And there's no diff between trying to accelerate something, and trying to stop it from being accelerated. Also, if its in orbit around the earth (a reasonable requirement, unless your receivers are going to form a ring around the worlds' surface) the force isn't constant - on one side, its accelerating, on the other side, decellerating.
Any structure sufficiently rigid may be too heavy to build. Make it dynamically rigid (by spinning it up), doesn't solve the problem, it complicates it.
Think of trying to push a piece of string, because that's what any large structure is going to be like. Stringy.
First, there's no 100% efficient absorber. No solar panel is going to behave like a perfect black body.
Second, it irrelevant. The solar panel isn't converting mechanical energy (the motion of the photon) into electricity. Its converting the photon into electricity. The mechanical energy doesn't just "disappear". Since it has nowhere else to go, its absorbed by the structure. Hence, even a perfect absorber will be affected.
The problem I foresee is how you keep this thing from acting like a huge solar sail ...
So you've got to get it dynamically stable - spinning, etc., so that it has some rigidity to it.
And you need thrusters, and reaction mass, etc. Then you have to beef up the components to account for the thrusters, tanks, etc., which means even bigger thrusters, more reaction mas, etc. Has anyone bothered to do the calculations to see if there's any point where this thing is even buildable in theory? Or is this one of those "dirty little secrets" that everyone is tip-toeing around because actually ding the calculations means no more funding?
What material would they use to replicate from?
Well, at least they have the potential for a world-wide-web. But the ping times would be aweful.
Perl has its uses - but not on large projects or long lifetimes. Its ambiguities in terms of language structure renders it pretty much unmaintainable.
As for the whole "learn to use the language" - I've been using it for years. In terms of maintainability of code, c has it beat by a mile. Perl has got to be one of the worst languages around in that respect. And that's what the topic is - debugging perl. I stick by my original contention that the quickest way to debug a perl program is to rewrite it in python. You'll not only get rid of your bugs, you'll have a program that's maintainable.
Oh, wait - its easier to just rewrite the damn thing in pretty much ANY other language. Its not a question of understanding it - its a question of maintainability. Isn't that what debugging is about 90% of the time - fixing bugs that creep in because code is, in fact, NOT maintainable?
There's no replacement for proper string functions and an intuitive regular expression engine. And no excuse not to have them. Larry Wall made a mistake there, and its been perpetuated in the name of "backwards compatabiity" ever since.
If you already have a decent background in c and at least one scripting language, say php, you should be good to go.
The hardest part? I kept putting in semicolons.
There's no way it should take 2 weeks to learn how to open files and use python's re module and data structures, especially since the data structures all have perl analogs.
Perhaps you had the wrong book? Or were not motivated enough? Anyone with programming experience (even BASIC) should be able to learn python in a day.
I've been using perl for years, but I'm dumping it for most things.
It took me less time to learn python and write my first utility (a page generator for 195 content categories in2 languages from source data files) than it would have to write it in perl and debug it.
The whole "TMTOWTDI" is just wrong, from a maintainability point of view. If you can't maintain it, you can't really reuse it.
And perl's greediness in matching strings sucks (because someone was too lazy to put proper string functions into the language?)
Perl - because when it all looks like line noise, nobody can criticize the "quality" of your code.
I wonder if the governor of California reads slashdot.
And then there's all the spam - "Proven formula. mix this new M1GHT7 M0U53 formula with V14GR4 and really amaze her! 60% larger."