We need the computer fairies to handle our errors, that way the beauty of our code will not be marred by mundane things like error checking.
Seriously, error checking is part of the process. It's not the fun part of the process but it's a necessary part. Return values and exceptions work just fine as long as you get off your high horse and realize that your code will not be hung in the Louvre. Working is more important than pretty.
Yes. We should not accept Climate Change based on a POLL!!!
We should believe scientists because they have DATA to back up their assertions. Science is not a popularity contest or a political race. Polls of what scientists think is not science.
This is my main complaint about the way this issue is framed. We appeal to the high priests (of either side) to tell us what is right, rather than look at the data and what it tells us. It's become just one more shout-fest.
If I may suggest an alternative, give micro loans through kiva.org instead. You can just keep recycling the money into new loans as you get paid back. The good gets multiplied many times over and communities get built up.
The actual math needed to understand the basics of relativity[1] is actually quite simple. If you've had calculus, you have more than you need.
The hard part is wrapping your brain around the concepts and the fact that the rules you use to interact with the world around you are a subset of the rules of the universe.
A book I have recommended several times for people who want to start learning about physics is 'Asimov on Physics'. Dr. Asimov was a master of explaining difficult science in a way that laymen could understand.
[1] Going beyond the basic, or getting into odder corners of general relativity, is another matter.
It will be interesting the first time a band of pirates (the killing and looting kind, not the sharing kind) storms one of these 'sovereign nations'. I'm guessing they will develop a sudden affection for the country with the nearest naval vessel who can save their bacon.
I ran windows for a long time and got sick of the crappy OS and security so poor 50% of the CPU power is dedicated to preventing me from getting hacked.
Then I ran Ubuntu for a few years. This time I got tired of the completely crappy/inconsistent interfaces, and having to spend way too much of my time being a sysadmin.
Now I've got a Mac. It's nicely designed, I don't have to mess with it, and I've got a Unix-variant at my fingertips when I'm feeling that command-line itch. I still have to deal with lack of software due to Windows dominance, but I'm learning to live without some stuff.
All of this is on my home machine. At work where I need the real thing it's vterms to a Unix box, baby.
Having said that, I did this because it was MY CHOICE. I didn't hand control over to anyone. I can install just about any software I care to on this machine and Steve Jobs is not going to show up with a baseball bat. OSS paranoia about the big bad corporations coming to steal your compilers doesn't help anything.
The slot machines have very clearly printed disclaimers that all malfunctions void the entire transaction. They will get the original bet returned. That's the equivalent of taking that defective shirt back to the store and getting a refund.
It's disappointing for the people that they didn't win their jackpot, but the rules are presented very clearly beforehand.
So, how is liquid diamond different from liquid graphite or liquid carbon? It's my understanding that the only difference between graphite and diamond is that the crystalline structure is 2-d in graphite and 3-d in diamond.
Is it just the fact that at those temperatures and pressures the natural crystals formed from the liquid are diamond?
How about if they start taking their responsibility seriously and let those works pass into the public domain after a reasonable amount of time, AS WAS THE ORIGINAL INTENT. Give us back our culture, damnit!
The tithe is entirely voluntary. It's the clowns in bad suits on TV who pressure people to 'give til it hurts'. Real churches don't do that kind of crap.
You give in gratitude for your salvation, not in order to win it. That is bedrock Christian theology. And God is just as happy with you giving through volunteer work or simply visiting a friend. But do keep in mind that your local church can't keep the doors open unless they get help.
Even though the documentation for proprietary software can be crap, it is usually light years ahead of what you get for most Freeware/Open Source/Hippieware/Whatever programs.
I hate it when I install something and I get a window with three greyed out menus. Somehow I am supposed to magically know to go edit ~/.korgodi/pyconfig/menus/anabling.cfg to turn them on. And when I look for documentation about this or even a damn README, I get a link to a forum where everyone is too busy arguing the philosophy of tabs vs. spaces for indentation to tell me anything.
I hate writing up the documentation as much as anyone, but your project is not ready to be released until you can give the user a document telling them how to use the stupid thing.
I'll give you a real-time example. I am going to attempt to find the format for conditional execution in gmake. I don't do development on this machine normally, so some fumbling will be necessary.
Step 1: 'man gmake': What do you mean there's no gmake? I installed the dev package.
Step 2: search for where gmake is. Let's check synaptic to see where they put it. No gmake in there. Oh, they called it just plain 'make' in Ubuntu. Of course.
Step 3: 'man make': Blah blah blah . . . purpose of make . . . startup options . . . damn there are a lot of them . . . THAT'S ALL?!!! . . . Wait, there was a SEE ALSO back there.
See Also The Gnu Make Manual. Oh, of course, I have one of those with me at all times. WHERE IS IT!
Step 4: Google Type in 'The Gnu Make Manual'. There it is. Ah yes, a webpage with a format circa 1994. ^F conditional . . . See Conditionals. At least it's a link. Reading . . . I had wondered what the definition of the word 'conditional' was. Show me the stupid syntax.
Blah blah blah, examples that no one will ever use . . . oh wait, for once the examples are relatively useful. Okay, that should get me started.
So, that wasn't too bad as was as documentation searches go. But I still had to resort to Google. WRITE THE DAMN MANUAL AND INCLUDE IT. If I type 'progname -h' give me something useful. Put something in the Help menu. No, I don't care what programs you compiled it with.
Then you shouldn't be talking about GB, you should be talking about 0x400000 bytes. I'm an assembly programmer by trade and if someone documented their code with an ambiguous term like 'GB' I'd hammer them in a review.
And it doesn't matter that 'byte' is not an SI unit. SI-prefixes can be used for anything.
As much as techies complain about people using technical terms inaccurately, we should use the SI prefixes in ways that mean what they mean. The fact that 2^10 is close to 1000 doesn't mean we get to hijack K/M/G to mean 2^10/2^20/2^30.
And mentally we're using them to mean powers of 1000 anyway. How often do you _really_ mean 1024 when you say 1K? Personally, I'm always thinking 1000-ish.
Why isn't a process being guided by a Supreme Being natural. If you posit the existence of a Creator, then 'natural' means following the laws that creator set down. The obvious analogy is computer games. Are the actions of the bad guys contrary to the game rules because those actions have been guided by their creator?
Asking who created God is like asking who drew you? Just because you can draw a picture of a person doesn't mean that you are also a picture. The nature of God is fundamentally different than our nature. I am willing to accept that there may be things that I don't (and can't) understand.
Why does God not do anything about evil? Consider what would be necessary for there to be no evil. You would have to be incapable of picking up a rock and splattering your neighbor's head. You would have to be incapable of exploiting your fellow humans. You would have to be incapable of many many things. In other words, you would have to be a puppet. Does that sound like a good thing?
Given the poor quality of the questions in that poll, almost any results are possible. They forced you to choose between 'natural process' and 'guided by a supreme being' as exclusive opposites. How about if you believe (as most religious people do) that natural processes are guided by a supreme being. The nature and tone of the question will cause most to choose the supreme being option, when they probably are thinking 'both'.
The other problem is that this particular issue has been latched onto and exploited by politicians and opinion-shapers. It has become an 'our side vs. their side' thing. People chose the anti-evolution option because that boosts their side. If you could decouple it from the fight, you might be able to convince more people.
You can probably guess where I come down on the issue. I do believe in God. I can't prove it, but I accept it as a tautology. I also believe in evolution as a natural process. I believe that the creation of the universe was a more subtle process than most Biblical literalists do. God set up the rules and conditions so that what he wanted to happen would happen. Sort of a 15+ billion year bank shot. To me, that is _much_ more impressive than "Wham, here's everything".
There's an easy way to tell if someone lives in the DC area. Offer them the choice between being horribly disemboweled by wolverines or driving from Greenbelt to Dulles at 5:00 on a Friday.
If they ask for a minute to think about it, they live near DC.
I'm highly skeptical of this idea for one reason. The volume of the oceans is MINISCULE compared to the volume of the outer core. In order for the oceans to generate the kind of magnetic field the Earth has, they would need to be highly magnetic. Steel ships orient themselves to the currents automatically type levels. The Earth we see is a wafer-thin skin on the massive iron/nickel mass that is the Earth
Go back to the original bargain at the heart of copyright. The government grants you a monopoly on the profit from the work for a limited time, and you agree to not hide the work.
A key here is _limited_ time. That definition has been stretched past the point of credibility these days. It should be something like 5 years, instead of lifetime plus 75. Let's face it, the bulk of the profits on a work will come in those first few years. After that, let the public have it.
The other key would be that any work that enjoys the protections of copyright cannot have DRM. None. If you want the government to step in and protect the work, you have to release it free and clear. If you want to try to protect it on your own, that's fine. But DRM = no copyright.
Slashdot Mirror
We need the computer fairies to handle our errors, that way the beauty of our code will not be marred by mundane things like error checking.
Seriously, error checking is part of the process. It's not the fun part of the process but it's a necessary part. Return values and exceptions work just fine as long as you get off your high horse and realize that your code will not be hung in the Louvre. Working is more important than pretty.
Oh, bless you, sir. I had been wondering how to do that.
Yes. We should not accept Climate Change based on a POLL!!!
We should believe scientists because they have DATA to back up their assertions. Science is not a popularity contest or a political race. Polls of what scientists think is not science.
This is my main complaint about the way this issue is framed. We appeal to the high priests (of either side) to tell us what is right, rather than look at the data and what it tells us. It's become just one more shout-fest.
If I may suggest an alternative, give micro loans through kiva.org instead. You can just keep recycling the money into new loans as you get paid back. The good gets multiplied many times over and communities get built up.
Does this mean I can get a couple of virtual Nobel Peace Prizes for the trillions of e-lives I saved playing Mass Effect?
The actual math needed to understand the basics of relativity[1] is actually quite simple. If you've had calculus, you have more than you need.
The hard part is wrapping your brain around the concepts and the fact that the rules you use to interact with the world around you are a subset of the rules of the universe.
A book I have recommended several times for people who want to start learning about physics is 'Asimov on Physics'. Dr. Asimov was a master of explaining difficult science in a way that laymen could understand.
[1] Going beyond the basic, or getting into odder corners of general relativity, is another matter.
It will be interesting the first time a band of pirates (the killing and looting kind, not the sharing kind) storms one of these 'sovereign nations'. I'm guessing they will develop a sudden affection for the country with the nearest naval vessel who can save their bacon.
I'm one of those engineers.
I ran windows for a long time and got sick of the crappy OS and security so poor 50% of the CPU power is dedicated to preventing me from getting hacked.
Then I ran Ubuntu for a few years. This time I got tired of the completely crappy/inconsistent interfaces, and having to spend way too much of my time being a sysadmin.
Now I've got a Mac. It's nicely designed, I don't have to mess with it, and I've got a Unix-variant at my fingertips when I'm feeling that command-line itch. I still have to deal with lack of software due to Windows dominance, but I'm learning to live without some stuff.
All of this is on my home machine. At work where I need the real thing it's vterms to a Unix box, baby.
Having said that, I did this because it was MY CHOICE. I didn't hand control over to anyone. I can install just about any software I care to on this machine and Steve Jobs is not going to show up with a baseball bat. OSS paranoia about the big bad corporations coming to steal your compilers doesn't help anything.
Or you could go read the 'print' version which is all on one page and not 75% advertisement.
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/features/363175/who-will-win-the-battle-for-control-of-the-web/print
The slot machines have very clearly printed disclaimers that all malfunctions void the entire transaction. They will get the original bet returned. That's the equivalent of taking that defective shirt back to the store and getting a refund.
It's disappointing for the people that they didn't win their jackpot, but the rules are presented very clearly beforehand.
So, how is liquid diamond different from liquid graphite or liquid carbon? It's my understanding that the only difference between graphite and diamond is that the crystalline structure is 2-d in graphite and 3-d in diamond.
Is it just the fact that at those temperatures and pressures the natural crystals formed from the liquid are diamond?
How about if they start taking their responsibility seriously and let those works pass into the public domain after a reasonable amount of time, AS WAS THE ORIGINAL INTENT. Give us back our culture, damnit!
And the second message was "Buy cheep c1al!5 now!".
The tithe is entirely voluntary. It's the clowns in bad suits on TV who pressure people to 'give til it hurts'. Real churches don't do that kind of crap.
You give in gratitude for your salvation, not in order to win it. That is bedrock Christian theology. And God is just as happy with you giving
through volunteer work or simply visiting a friend. But do keep in mind that your local church can't keep the doors open unless they get help.
I'm used to actual Unix, where 'make' is the standard version and 'gmake' is Gnu's version with the extra stuff.
Even though the documentation for proprietary software can be crap, it is usually light years ahead of what you get for most Freeware/Open Source/Hippieware/Whatever programs.
I hate it when I install something and I get a window with three greyed out menus. Somehow I am supposed to magically know to go edit ~/.korgodi/pyconfig/menus/anabling.cfg to turn them on. And when I look for documentation about this or even a damn README, I get a link to a forum where everyone is too busy arguing the philosophy of tabs vs. spaces for indentation to tell me anything.
I hate writing up the documentation as much as anyone, but your project is not ready to be released until you can give the user a document telling them how to use the stupid thing.
I'll give you a real-time example. I am going to attempt to find the format for conditional execution in gmake. I don't do development on this machine normally, so some fumbling will be necessary.
Step 1: 'man gmake':
What do you mean there's no gmake? I installed the dev package.
Step 2: search for where gmake is.
Let's check synaptic to see where they put it. No gmake in there.
Oh, they called it just plain 'make' in Ubuntu. Of course.
Step 3: 'man make':
Blah blah blah . . . purpose of make . . . startup options . . . damn there are a lot of them . . . THAT'S ALL?!!! . . . Wait, there was a SEE ALSO back there.
See Also The Gnu Make Manual. Oh, of course, I have one of those with me at all times. WHERE IS IT!
Step 4: Google
Type in 'The Gnu Make Manual'. There it is. Ah yes, a webpage with a format circa 1994. ^F conditional . . . See Conditionals. At least it's a link. Reading . . . I had wondered what the definition of the word 'conditional' was. Show me the stupid syntax.
Blah blah blah, examples that no one will ever use . . . oh wait, for once the examples are relatively useful. Okay, that should get me started.
So, that wasn't too bad as was as documentation searches go. But I still had to resort to Google. WRITE THE DAMN MANUAL AND INCLUDE IT. If I type 'progname -h' give me something useful. Put something in the Help menu. No, I don't care what programs you compiled it with.
Then you shouldn't be talking about GB, you should be talking about 0x400000 bytes. I'm an assembly programmer by trade and if someone documented their code with an ambiguous term like 'GB' I'd hammer them in a review.
And it doesn't matter that 'byte' is not an SI unit. SI-prefixes can be used for anything.
As much as techies complain about people using technical terms inaccurately, we should use the SI prefixes in ways that mean what they mean. The fact that 2^10 is close to 1000 doesn't mean we get to hijack K/M/G to mean 2^10/2^20/2^30.
And mentally we're using them to mean powers of 1000 anyway. How often do you _really_ mean 1024 when you say 1K? Personally, I'm always thinking 1000-ish.
Why isn't a process being guided by a Supreme Being natural. If you posit the existence of a Creator, then 'natural' means following the laws that creator set down. The obvious analogy is computer games. Are the actions of the bad guys contrary to the game rules because those actions have been guided by their creator?
Asking who created God is like asking who drew you? Just because you can draw a picture of a person doesn't mean that you are also a picture. The nature of God is fundamentally different than our nature. I am willing to accept that there may be things that I don't (and can't) understand.
Why does God not do anything about evil? Consider what would be necessary for there to be no evil. You would have to be incapable of picking up a rock and splattering your neighbor's head. You would have to be incapable of exploiting your fellow humans. You would have to be incapable of many many things. In other words, you would have to be a puppet. Does that sound like a good thing?
Given the poor quality of the questions in that poll, almost any results are possible. They forced you to choose between 'natural process' and 'guided by a supreme being' as exclusive opposites. How about if you believe (as most religious people do) that natural processes are guided by a supreme being. The nature and tone of the question will cause most to choose the supreme being option, when they probably are thinking 'both'.
The other problem is that this particular issue has been latched onto and exploited by politicians and opinion-shapers. It has become an 'our side vs. their side' thing. People chose the anti-evolution option because that boosts their side. If you could decouple it from the fight, you might be able to convince more people.
You can probably guess where I come down on the issue. I do believe in God. I can't prove it, but I accept it as a tautology. I also believe in evolution as a natural process. I believe that the creation of the universe was a more subtle process than most Biblical literalists do. God set up the rules and conditions so that what he wanted to happen would happen. Sort of a 15+ billion year bank shot. To me, that is _much_ more impressive than "Wham, here's everything".
Wow, plant-based electronics! This will surely usher in a new age of biological computers that will be able to . . .
What? It's not a geranium diode?
Uh, how 'bout that new version of Firefox? Pretty snazzy, eh.
There's an easy way to tell if someone lives in the DC area. Offer them the choice between being horribly disemboweled by wolverines or driving from Greenbelt to Dulles at 5:00 on a Friday.
If they ask for a minute to think about it, they live near DC.
I'm highly skeptical of this idea for one reason. The volume of the oceans is MINISCULE compared to the volume of the outer core. In order for the oceans to generate the kind of magnetic field the Earth has, they would need to be highly magnetic. Steel ships orient themselves to the currents automatically type levels. The Earth we see is a wafer-thin skin on the massive iron/nickel mass that is the Earth
Go back to the original bargain at the heart of copyright. The government grants you a monopoly on the profit from the work for a limited time, and you agree to not hide the work.
A key here is _limited_ time. That definition has been stretched past the point of credibility these days. It should be something like 5 years, instead of lifetime plus 75. Let's face it, the bulk of the profits on a work will come in those first few years. After that, let the public have it.
The other key would be that any work that enjoys the protections of copyright cannot have DRM. None. If you want the government to step in and protect the work, you have to release it free and clear. If you want to try to protect it on your own, that's fine. But DRM = no copyright.
The defendant shall be required to bring a parrot to trial each day and answer all inquiries with the phrase "Yar, I be a salty sea dog".