Look at China. Look at India. I wouldn't call those dents. And yes, it's great for the employer in the short term. In the long term it works out for everybody as the economy of the world as a whole increases.
Yep standard of living goes up a tiny bit for far flung countries. Meanwhile people in your own countries see their standard of living plumet.
This is just protectionalism again - If you mandate a high wage, the jobs don't move, and the peasant who'd gladly take that 'sweatshop' job rather than work in the fields like his ancestors have done for thousands of years
First of all that's rubbish. Mandate a high wage and everyone competes on merit. It means you have to raise people's standard of living enough in the 3rd world country for them to be able to afford an education and compete against people in your own country. That is not a bad thing. That makes for real competition, instead of outsourcing jobs to people who can't actually do them because they work 16 hours a day and can't afford much more than food.
Secondly what you're proposing is moving everyone out of the fields and into the sweat shops. This is bunk. It does nothing for society or humanity whatsoever. We need farmers. They should be paid reasonably well. The techniques may need to move to something more mechanized to increase output and support the world of today, but there's nothing wrong with farming.
Please note that when I'm talking about 'sweatshop' stuff I'm talking about stuff that pays wages that outrage americans. But when you dig into them, you find out that the people working in the factory or whatever are actually making multiples of what they were previously - normally subsidence farmers
If you take someone that's paid $1 a week and pay them $4 a week, they're still not going to be able to live a good life. They may break the barrier to supporting themselves for basic food, but don't kid yourself about them getting decent medical care if they fall ill. Forget decent education too. All they'll be taught to do is some repedative task until a machine is developed that is good enough (read cheap enough) to replace them. If one isn't developed they've got a job for life (or until they get sick or hurt, whichever comes first) with nearly zero prospect of improving that life, and near zero prospect of improvement. Make no mistake you're not doing them a favour. You're USING them in the worst way and expect to throw them away as soon as the business proposition means its easier. In order to better yourself you have to have enough time away from your job, and enough money to persue skills that will be paid higher. Most sweat shops make sure their workforce can't move on - it's in their best interest to keep training costs down. Now a sick or injured employee is an even bigger liability so in that case they will retrain someone because it's cheaper. The entire idea that this kind of MODERN SLAVERY is better than the alternative is a bunch of shit people with money tell themselves so they can employ such foul tactics and sleep at night.
As a result of the increased pay and moves away from farming, additional services end up appearing - taking even more farmers out of the fields. Frequently the farmers end up being able to sell their products for more, allowing them to automate to increase production even more. It ends up being a positive circle.
OH fucking give me a break. When's the last time you heard of a subsistence farmer being able to own any portion of the profit automation brings (either in a factory job or in the field)? The farmer can't afford the machinery to do anything like this. What fucking fantasy world are you living in? Show me the story of 3rd world business farmer becomes rich (without doing something illegal and immoral like selling drugs or running a racket). You are either kidding yourself or being deceitful.
No, I haven't. Where did I talk about forcing people to work, trading and selling them?
Unless you're talking about being able to predict the rate of failure reliably, what's the point? I don't think that's possible because you'd need to be able to predict specific events that lead to a significant improvement or drop in quality.
Associations, cultures, empires all come and go. That's not something that's new or poorly understood. People have been applying empirical measures of success to all of the above for quite some time.
Oddly enough, the best way to do this is to encourage stuff like outsourcing; outsourcing helps dry up the labor market in the receiving country, increases the economy - helping to point the country towards the labor shortages that improved working conditions in the USA.
Rather than clever, I find that logic completely backwards. While you're busy trying to dry up a massive labour market, your own country's market languishes and suffers. Great for the employer in the short term. They pay less as they've just increased supply by orders of magnitude. Meanwhile you've not even made a dent fixing their economy..
The only way to do it is to legislate that work done for an employer in a particular company (directly or otherwise) is to be paid above a certain minimum wage. Competition should be above that minimum wage. Unfortunately the directly or otherwise part is notoriously difficult to police.
'Sweatshop wages' often are better than the alternative.
A slippery slope argument. If you accept this you must also accept that the vast majority of the world's people will end up earning slave wages within the next few decades. As you introduce sweatshop wages to replace those worse conditions, the rest of the world has to compete with those sweatshop wages. Pretty soon only sweat shop wages are competitive. I don't accept this. If you have children, nieces, nephews or just kids you care about neither should you.
Usually the people that use this weak argument have a lot to gain from paying sweat shop wages.
Yet people find ways. They found ways during the potato famine, Iraqies managed to find ways to get out of the country, etc... In multiple areas you had people move between continents with only the clothes on their back.
Lovely image of the future you have there. Regardless they have to have somewhere better to run to. If you accept slave labour (as you have above) there will be nowhere as markets globalize increasingly. Also you're suggesting that acts of heroism that have become notworthy in history, and incredible pain and sacrifice should be the accepted norm. Yet it's only the survivors that get to tell their stories? How many died in the potato famine? How many Iraqies were killed and are still being killed? How many didn't make it. You seem to think a law of the jungle survival of the fitest evolutionary approach is good, yet what makes you think that under those circumstances you and those around you will shine? How many die not because they make bad choices but because the circumstances are overwhelming?
We live better today than we ever have in the past. What I was talking about though, is reality. You take care of the basics first, doing what you have to do. THEN you work towards personal gratification(ie perks).
Your approach would see us move towards the past as people make less and less money and instead of having to sacrifice perks and luxury items they have to sacrifice decent food, education and medical care
When I talked about 'how it should be', I was meaning that some parents take gratification over their kid's needs - which isn't 'how it should be'. Vegetables come before beer on the shopping list.
On this one point we completely agree. People are all too willing to put their own selfish wants above those of their family. (Just yesterday I was disgusted by a pregant woman with a toddler in tow lighting up!!!). People seem to think that if they have to give anything up in a relationship or to have a family there must be something wrong. We completely agree that your needs and those of your family if you have one should come way above playstations and booze.
I talked to a couple of my former coworkers recently. Turns out that a few months after I left, they gave up on finding a replacement, disbanded my old team and moved further development for the product I had been working on (which is used by millions of people and has at least one book written about it) to Bangalore, where it is languishing. And it's not like it was a crufty mess, either -- it was clean, very thoroughly documented and there were several developers who were very familiar with it. Unfortunately, they were also very junior, and apparently judged unfit to be in charge of it
Yep, some random coder from Bangalore is much more fit to be in charge of it. Good thinking 99. Sounds like $VERY_LARGE_COMPANY isn't managed very well.
Then hiring US citizens became too expensive and stuff was outsourced to other countries where the old conditions prevailed because it was cheaper.
Some would say if we want a civilized society, making those conditions that make US citizens too expensive universal is what we should be aiming for, rather than pulling away those protections and moving back to a fend for yourself law of the jungle situation. Having some protection by society is a good thing.
Do YOU really want to live in a society where if you get hurt at work, you end up a beggar? Do you know what it's like in some of the countries you're talking about? Can you blame a guy for wanting to kill you for $5 if that is all that stands between him and starvation (or worse his family starving)?
If you want to change things, realize that you might have to move, get training to go into a different career field, change your income expectations, etc...
If you're stuck in a badly paid position, moving is almost never an option. Moving costs money. Much moreso if you've got a family.
You do what it takes to keep a roof over your family's head, food in their mouths, shoes on their feet. After that, then you can work towards personal satisfaction. That's just how it is(or at least should be). That's what my grandparents did. That's what my parents did. That's what I do
Oh I see, you'd like to go back to the good old days. Why not extend it just a few more decades. You know, when women died in childbirth, immunization didn't exist, your job was one of indentured servitude, and if you fell ill or were injured through no fault of your own you'd end up homeless. You've got no idea what it was like to live even a couple of centuries ago, and clearly you have zero idea how fortunate you are. To suggest that moving back towards the systems that existed decades or even a century ago is asinine, and suggests that you're spoilt. Oh and fuck slashdot for modding this stupid rant as insightful.
I disagree: driving really slowly to save gas isn't doing what you can to get along with people. The road's a shared resource, and most people get annoyed if you are travelling much slower than the speed limit. Some of these people are complete whackos.
If you know first hand what the consequences of accidents and road rage can be, then I'd suggest you have your priorities way out of whack if you're willing to risk these things to save a few bucks. Add up your estimated savings for the year. Is it really worth the risk?
Did your parents try to shield you from mock violence when you played as a kid? "Sorry little Xtense, but if you play cowboys and indians or cops and robbers you might grow up to become a mass murder". Gimme a break. Political correctness gone insane.
I don't piss people off on purpose, but I'm not going to waste my gas or money avoiding it either.
The reality is if you piss someone off by accident and thereby end up in a road rage incident you suffer the same consequences. ie. The more people you piss off in traffic the higher the chance you'll end up in a serious accident. If you do end up in a car wreck i promise you the last thing you'll be thinking of is that $2.53 you saved on your last trip. One hospital bill will more than wipe out all your gas money savings, never mind one funeral.
But hey you sound stubborn enough to do whatever you want to. I was just reminding you of what you might be trading off. It's your life and you have every right to live it as you choose. You just have to wear the consequences even if they are you, your loved ones, or innocents being harmed. You're not the one commiting the act of stupidity yet you know there are stupid people out there so I suggest if something does happen you may feel responsible even if the law doesn't hold you responsible.
So what you're saying is that you're proud to have made yourself a living by being CEO friendly and end user hostile. The CEO might love you for quite a while...until morale hits the floor and he's left with a bunch of unimaginative drones with locked down computers that aren't actually doing anything positive for the company. That's fine in a company where innovation isn't important. I also wonder how many of the "original complainers" then see fit to steer clear of your company because you gave them a hard time.
A good system requires that you work for both the end user and the employer. Just as a single example I often hear the mantra that access to web sites that aren't business related should be locked down because they're an unneeded attack vector, and if a user wants to do their shopping/banking/socializing they should do it on their own time. That's bunk. A well educated user can avoid virii and save a lot of time which may then get invested in work. They'll also be happier that they're not treated like a child and locked out of doing things. Yes you do have to educate them and put some effort in on that front but if they can register their car, pay their bills and do their banking in their lunch hour instead of queing up or spending that time at home where they may have commitments that can't be put down for an hour, you'll get more out of them.
Just be real careful. Pissing people off in traffic isn't a good idea by accident let alone on purpose.
I'm no hypermiler. I try to stick to the limit and even that pisses people off. I was once run off the road by a pair of semi-trailers for doing 40km/hr (the speed limit) in a work area. The trucks had to slow down much more than me when the road was rough. 5 minutes later they came up behind me doing about 100 (still in the 40 zone) on a single lane road and with a full load. Luckily I saw them in time and had some gutter to pull into otherwise I have no doubt that my wife and I would have been killed. They passed by so quickly I had no chance of getting their plate numbers without driving dangerously. (They had a head start on me doing 2 1/2 times the speed limit after all).
No interest in a reference that isn't searchable.
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A programming book has to be the kind you can sit down and read cover to cover (or chapter by chapter), that teaches something new. I simply don't have time to spend "getting to know" a particular book or painstakingly tracking down reference information.
While we all might not have a silicon fab in the basement
You don't? How tragic. I'm afraid you'll have to hand in your geek card. In the meantime I wonder if the OLPC guys would consider a OSFPPC (One Silicon Fab Plant Per Child) program.
By all accounts your NexStar should be an excellent scope for viewing. You should however be aware that there are limitations when it comes to long exposure astrophography on an alt-az mount, even with a field de-rotator. The Celestron C8-SGT 8" Go-To XLT shouldn't be much different in price, has goto, and is on an EQ mount. Bear in mind that I've not used either scope. I just know if I was going to want to do any photography I'd pick an EQ mount. It's your choice, of course.
I haven't had much experience with GOTO, bascially because I'm too cheap and you can pretty much double the price for buying astro gear in Australia. (I have considered buying one of the baby NexStar gotos and using it as a spotting scope with green laser pointer attached, but I don't imagine that would be anywhere near as worthwhile as true GOTO). The sad truth is I don't use the gear I do have because I don't have much time to observe these days.
...and while the astronomers fiddle with gear you and I can only dream of having access to, take your camera and a tripod outside, and with no more than a portrait lens, you can take shots like these.
Disclaimer: I have a masters in Astronomy but I've never worked in the field. I did the degree "for fun", because I never got the opportunity to study in highschool, and because I wanted to know how we know what we know about the universe. I'm very much an amateur in every respect.
Defintely worth fiddling with camera gear, but at some point if you're taking your own shots you're going to want to use a telescope. Starting with binoculars is definitely the best way. Moving to a dobsonian for viewing (but terrible for photography) is a good next step. (Don't buy anything with a small aperture unless all you're interested in is moon and planets). Next good step would be a Newtonian on EQ mount or SCT. It gets very expensive very quickly. I pretty much gave up on astrophotography. (I live in a large city and when I do get away far enough, I'm usually exhausted from the drive, and there are other priorities (family). Also a 10" scope takes up a hell of a lot of room even in a station wagon).
An alternative to the above is to get hold of sky survey data that's already available and captured by the pro images. There's a lot out there that gets released usually after a year (to give the professional scientists time to work with it). Hubble data, Chandra X-Ray data, SOHO images. It's not all pretty composite colour pictures - you often have to learn to manipulate the images with image software or with more complex data there's specialized software that's not always for the faint of heart (often free, often Linux based). "Amateurs" have done amazing things with some of the images and data. In astronomy there is an "image" (FITS) file format that is actually more than just a simple JPEG etc. You have a background in photography so while it's not strictly RAW data in the sense that it's not coming straight off a sensor, you can think of this format as containing more information the way RAW contains more than JPEG (stuff like calibration information). More information here.
Please understand I'm not trying to discourage you from backyard astronomy. I just thought you might be interested in this too. These days the guys that take the images/capture data and the guys that analyse them are not always the same. ie. you often have technicians that specialise in running the machines.
If you want more detail and are prepared to try to work out science speak, you can get access to draft papers on: http://arxiv.org/ Look under astrophysics
I don't have time to go into any more. Hope you're interested.
And the only thing we appear to disagree on is perhaps how severe one isolated instance of that particular code would be.
I can respect that, especially since we're unlikely to ever work together on code and therefore I guess it's academic. We've both clarified our positions and retracted hostilities. Let's let it go at that.
You came out immediately hostile. I have merely expressed my opinion and you have taken offense.
You're right. I was a little more hostile than necessary off the bat. I took offense to you saying the code wasn't bad. It's not the worst I've seen (I've actually seen code pranks triggered on april fools in live code that told the user their computer was being erased). It's definitely not good code.
After a while maintaining someone else's crap, you expect to see bad code. Curiosities like i*=1 may elicit an "oh come on" response but they're nothing to write home about.
There wasn't a single instance of this in the code. It was a short program (few hundred lines), and strewn with code like the above. (Several cases of those two lines for starters). It's hard to follow and I dread the idea of rewriting it.
I'm not "insisting on defending" the sample you provided. Frankly, I don't think it's god-awful-horrible to the degree you do. Yeah, it's bad. Yeah, it's unnecessary. But on the whole its effect is *maybe* one of a couple wasted cpu cycles and a minor headache (and one heavily flamed slashdot poster). I haven't seen the rest of the code, and obviously I'm not defending the entirety of this person's code.
Sorry but that sounds like a defense of it to me. There's no reason for code like that. None whatsoever. A programmer should be making every attempt to make code easy to understand and this seems like a willful effort to go the other way. There's no way that simplification wouldn't be obvious to anyone writing the code. Someone spent time making this code hard to understand, and they were PAID to do it. That in my book is unforgivable. Not a lot different to a mechanic you're paying to fix your car purposefully doing damage to other parts of it.
The couple of wasted cycles doesn't matter at all. It'd have to be in one hell of a loop for me to care about that.
I never said I don't see a problem with it. I do think it is bad code. We could be having this conversation without the attempts at bullying me.
I apologise if it comes across as bullying. I completely disagree with your assessment of the code. I think the programmer that wrote that was not being professional and should be taken to task. A programmer who writes bad code because he knows no better, or due to circumstance is one thing. A programmer that obfuscates his code because he's bored doesn't belong in the profession.
Talking about your opinions regarding code maintenance practices hardly qualifies as imposing, let alone hypocritical.
It does when you impose them on other people (ie. criticising me for "bitching" about bad code), then violate them yourself (bitching about my criticism of the code). Too bad you can't see that.
I work as a DBA in a nonprofit healthcare organization. If our backup guys lost a tape, and I hadn't bothered to check off the box in our database backup software that says "Encrypt: 256-bit AES", I would lose my job.
What you need to ask is what was the procedure and was the guy following it?
If it's standard procedure for this guy to carry unencrypted data around in his car, it's the guy setting policy/procedure that should be made responsible.
If it is standard procedure for you to encrypt your data, and you fail to follow that procedure you should be disciplined. Better still would be to find a way to make that little check box for encryption on by default. Even better would be to find a way to restrict export without encryption unless it's authorized by a second person. It shouldn't be easy for you to make a mistake that could cause you or your company massive damage.
If it wasn't standard practice to encrypt the data, and if it was standard practice for this guy to be required to carry the tape in his car, I'd argue he was made a scapegoat even if it is just a week's vacation that he lost. Unless of course the guy is responsible for setting policy/procedure (but even then someone should be reviewing that and signing off).
Actually, modern compilers are quite adept at optimizing arithmetic, so "i*=0;" could very likely become something like "and eax 0" and "j*=1" would probably be discarded. Which is very likely what the code you replaced it with would compile to. It has nothing to do with whether the code is sensible.
I wasn't disputing that the compiler could optimize. That isn't my issue with the code. My issue is that there is no excuse for making it so cryptic. I can only think that the programmer got bored, because there was no need to multiply a number by 1 or 0.
Earlier you stated: "This was in some rather critical code." I assumed you meant cpu-critical, not maintenance-critical. That's usually what people mean when they say critical.
No, you assumed that usage. It was critical as in vitally important. Where I am the word critical is used in that idiom all the time.
If the code *works*, is *critical*, and is in *production*, then unorthodox code be damned; you don't want to be a hero. Throw in a "wtf" comment and leave it be.
I didn't touch the code and wouldn't unless I had to. Unfortunately it's destined to be replaced in a completely different language. At that point it will make no sense whatsoever to make a verbatim translation of that cryptic crap.
I've inherited shitty code too. Unless it's really atrocious, you don't bitch about it. You fix it if it needs fixing, and you move on.
You're a coder right? We all inherit bad code, and we all "bitch about it". Just one more line down you accuse me of thinking any opinion that disagrees with mine is that of a moron. Yet you hyprocrtically decide to impose your own rather backwards set of ethical coding rules on me. I happen to think that if code is shitty you should let people know about it so it can be fixed.
Quite the broad assumption. I take it you think everyone who disagrees with you is a moron?
No I just call a coder that insists on defending REALLY bad code is a moron. There are plenty of other opinions that differ from mine that I respect, but certainly not yours.
Quite the broad assumption. I take it you think everyone who disagrees with you is a moron?
The quality of my programming speaks for the quality of my programming.
If you're a good coder and the code is being regression tested you should relish an oportunity to make code more intelligible. You on the other hand don't see a problem with code that looks completely crap and for no reason - in fact you're defending it because the compiler will probably optimize it. You blame others for your narrow interpretation of their words (ie. critical) and take zero responsibility for failing to clarify. I know all I need to know about the quality of your code.
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Look at China. Look at India. I wouldn't call those dents. And yes, it's great for the employer in the short term. In the long term it works out for everybody as the economy of the world as a whole increases.
Yep standard of living goes up a tiny bit for far flung countries. Meanwhile people in your own countries see their standard of living plumet.
This is just protectionalism again - If you mandate a high wage, the jobs don't move, and the peasant who'd gladly take that 'sweatshop' job rather than work in the fields like his ancestors have done for thousands of years
First of all that's rubbish. Mandate a high wage and everyone competes on merit. It means you have to raise people's standard of living enough in the 3rd world country for them to be able to afford an education and compete against people in your own country. That is not a bad thing. That makes for real competition, instead of outsourcing jobs to people who can't actually do them because they work 16 hours a day and can't afford much more than food.
Secondly what you're proposing is moving everyone out of the fields and into the sweat shops. This is bunk. It does nothing for society or humanity whatsoever. We need farmers. They should be paid reasonably well. The techniques may need to move to something more mechanized to increase output and support the world of today, but there's nothing wrong with farming.
Please note that when I'm talking about 'sweatshop' stuff I'm talking about stuff that pays wages that outrage americans. But when you dig into them, you find out that the people working in the factory or whatever are actually making multiples of what they were previously - normally subsidence farmers
If you take someone that's paid $1 a week and pay them $4 a week, they're still not going to be able to live a good life. They may break the barrier to supporting themselves for basic food, but don't kid yourself about them getting decent medical care if they fall ill. Forget decent education too. All they'll be taught to do is some repedative task until a machine is developed that is good enough (read cheap enough) to replace them. If one isn't developed they've got a job for life (or until they get sick or hurt, whichever comes first) with nearly zero prospect of improving that life, and near zero prospect of improvement. Make no mistake you're not doing them a favour. You're USING them in the worst way and expect to throw them away as soon as the business proposition means its easier. In order to better yourself you have to have enough time away from your job, and enough money to persue skills that will be paid higher. Most sweat shops make sure their workforce can't move on - it's in their best interest to keep training costs down. Now a sick or injured employee is an even bigger liability so in that case they will retrain someone because it's cheaper. The entire idea that this kind of MODERN SLAVERY is better than the alternative is a bunch of shit people with money tell themselves so they can employ such foul tactics and sleep at night.
As a result of the increased pay and moves away from farming, additional services end up appearing - taking even more farmers out of the fields. Frequently the farmers end up being able to sell their products for more, allowing them to automate to increase production even more. It ends up being a positive circle.
OH fucking give me a break. When's the last time you heard of a subsistence farmer being able to own any portion of the profit automation brings (either in a factory job or in the field)? The farmer can't afford the machinery to do anything like this. What fucking fantasy world are you living in? Show me the story of 3rd world business farmer becomes rich (without doing something illegal and immoral like selling drugs or running a racket). You are either kidding yourself or being deceitful.
No, I haven't. Where did I talk about forcing people to work, trading and selling them?
Yeah some choice. You just l
Unless you're talking about being able to predict the rate of failure reliably, what's the point? I don't think that's possible because you'd need to be able to predict specific events that lead to a significant improvement or drop in quality.
Associations, cultures, empires all come and go. That's not something that's new or poorly understood. People have been applying empirical measures of success to all of the above for quite some time.
Oddly enough, the best way to do this is to encourage stuff like outsourcing; outsourcing helps dry up the labor market in the receiving country, increases the economy - helping to point the country towards the labor shortages that improved working conditions in the USA.
Rather than clever, I find that logic completely backwards. While you're busy trying to dry up a massive labour market, your own country's market languishes and suffers. Great for the employer in the short term. They pay less as they've just increased supply by orders of magnitude. Meanwhile you've not even made a dent fixing their economy..
The only way to do it is to legislate that work done for an employer in a particular company (directly or otherwise) is to be paid above a certain minimum wage. Competition should be above that minimum wage. Unfortunately the directly or otherwise part is notoriously difficult to police.
'Sweatshop wages' often are better than the alternative.
A slippery slope argument. If you accept this you must also accept that the vast majority of the world's people will end up earning slave wages within the next few decades. As you introduce sweatshop wages to replace those worse conditions, the rest of the world has to compete with those sweatshop wages. Pretty soon only sweat shop wages are competitive. I don't accept this. If you have children, nieces, nephews or just kids you care about neither should you.
Usually the people that use this weak argument have a lot to gain from paying sweat shop wages.
Yet people find ways. They found ways during the potato famine, Iraqies managed to find ways to get out of the country, etc... In multiple areas you had people move between continents with only the clothes on their back.
Lovely image of the future you have there. Regardless they have to have somewhere better to run to. If you accept slave labour (as you have above) there will be nowhere as markets globalize increasingly. Also you're suggesting that acts of heroism that have become notworthy in history, and incredible pain and sacrifice should be the accepted norm. Yet it's only the survivors that get to tell their stories? How many died in the potato famine? How many Iraqies were killed and are still being killed? How many didn't make it. You seem to think a law of the jungle survival of the fitest evolutionary approach is good, yet what makes you think that under those circumstances you and those around you will shine? How many die not because they make bad choices but because the circumstances are overwhelming?
We live better today than we ever have in the past. What I was talking about though, is reality. You take care of the basics first, doing what you have to do. THEN you work towards personal gratification(ie perks).
Your approach would see us move towards the past as people make less and less money and instead of having to sacrifice perks and luxury items they have to sacrifice decent food, education and medical care
When I talked about 'how it should be', I was meaning that some parents take gratification over their kid's needs - which isn't 'how it should be'. Vegetables come before beer on the shopping list.
On this one point we completely agree. People are all too willing to put their own selfish wants above those of their family. (Just yesterday I was disgusted by a pregant woman with a toddler in tow lighting up!!!). People seem to think that if they have to give anything up in a relationship or to have a family there must be something wrong. We completely agree that your needs and those of your family if you have one should come way above playstations and booze.
I talked to a couple of my former coworkers recently. Turns out that a few months after I left, they gave up on finding a replacement, disbanded my old team and moved further development for the product I had been working on (which is used by millions of people and has at least one book written about it) to Bangalore, where it is languishing. And it's not like it was a crufty mess, either -- it was clean, very thoroughly documented and there were several developers who were very familiar with it. Unfortunately, they were also very junior, and apparently judged unfit to be in charge of it
Yep, some random coder from Bangalore is much more fit to be in charge of it. Good thinking 99. Sounds like $VERY_LARGE_COMPANY isn't managed very well.
Then hiring US citizens became too expensive and stuff was outsourced to other countries where the old conditions prevailed because it was cheaper.
Some would say if we want a civilized society, making those conditions that make US citizens too expensive universal is what we should be aiming for, rather than pulling away those protections and moving back to a fend for yourself law of the jungle situation. Having some protection by society is a good thing.
Do YOU really want to live in a society where if you get hurt at work, you end up a beggar? Do you know what it's like in some of the countries you're talking about? Can you blame a guy for wanting to kill you for $5 if that is all that stands between him and starvation (or worse his family starving)?
If you want to change things, realize that you might have to move, get training to go into a different career field, change your income expectations, etc...
If you're stuck in a badly paid position, moving is almost never an option. Moving costs money. Much moreso if you've got a family.
You do what it takes to keep a roof over your family's head, food in their mouths, shoes on their feet. After that, then you can work towards personal satisfaction. That's just how it is(or at least should be). That's what my grandparents did. That's what my parents did. That's what I do
Oh I see, you'd like to go back to the good old days. Why not extend it just a few more decades. You know, when women died in childbirth, immunization didn't exist, your job was one of indentured servitude, and if you fell ill or were injured through no fault of your own you'd end up homeless. You've got no idea what it was like to live even a couple of centuries ago, and clearly you have zero idea how fortunate you are. To suggest that moving back towards the systems that existed decades or even a century ago is asinine, and suggests that you're spoilt. Oh and fuck slashdot for modding this stupid rant as insightful.
Pagers have been around for millenia
Why just the other day I was reading about how Julius Caesar might have avoided death if he'd taken the time to read his pager.
I disagree: driving really slowly to save gas isn't doing what you can to get along with people. The road's a shared resource, and most people get annoyed if you are travelling much slower than the speed limit. Some of these people are complete whackos.
If you know first hand what the consequences of accidents and road rage can be, then I'd suggest you have your priorities way out of whack if you're willing to risk these things to save a few bucks. Add up your estimated savings for the year. Is it really worth the risk?
Actually I think it is pretty good parenting?
Did your parents try to shield you from mock violence when you played as a kid? "Sorry little Xtense, but if you play cowboys and indians or cops and robbers you might grow up to become a mass murder". Gimme a break. Political correctness gone insane.
They would have brought more bibles and guns. Though I'm not sure which would have done more harm.
I don't piss people off on purpose, but I'm not going to waste my gas or money avoiding it either.
The reality is if you piss someone off by accident and thereby end up in a road rage incident you suffer the same consequences. ie. The more people you piss off in traffic the higher the chance you'll end up in a serious accident. If you do end up in a car wreck i promise you the last thing you'll be thinking of is that $2.53 you saved on your last trip. One hospital bill will more than wipe out all your gas money savings, never mind one funeral.
But hey you sound stubborn enough to do whatever you want to. I was just reminding you of what you might be trading off. It's your life and you have every right to live it as you choose. You just have to wear the consequences even if they are you, your loved ones, or innocents being harmed. You're not the one commiting the act of stupidity yet you know there are stupid people out there so I suggest if something does happen you may feel responsible even if the law doesn't hold you responsible.
They wouldn't have much room to keep moving in the C130. Baby sharks?
Just think, if you'd played your cards right, this man could have been your father in law!!!
So what you're saying is that you're proud to have made yourself a living by being CEO friendly and end user hostile. The CEO might love you for quite a while...until morale hits the floor and he's left with a bunch of unimaginative drones with locked down computers that aren't actually doing anything positive for the company. That's fine in a company where innovation isn't important. I also wonder how many of the "original complainers" then see fit to steer clear of your company because you gave them a hard time.
A good system requires that you work for both the end user and the employer. Just as a single example I often hear the mantra that access to web sites that aren't business related should be locked down because they're an unneeded attack vector, and if a user wants to do their shopping/banking/socializing they should do it on their own time. That's bunk. A well educated user can avoid virii and save a lot of time which may then get invested in work. They'll also be happier that they're not treated like a child and locked out of doing things. Yes you do have to educate them and put some effort in on that front but if they can register their car, pay their bills and do their banking in their lunch hour instead of queing up or spending that time at home where they may have commitments that can't be put down for an hour, you'll get more out of them.
Just be real careful. Pissing people off in traffic isn't a good idea by accident let alone on purpose.
I'm no hypermiler. I try to stick to the limit and even that pisses people off. I was once run off the road by a pair of semi-trailers for doing 40km/hr (the speed limit) in a work area. The trucks had to slow down much more than me when the road was rough. 5 minutes later they came up behind me doing about 100 (still in the 40 zone) on a single lane road and with a full load. Luckily I saw them in time and had some gutter to pull into otherwise I have no doubt that my wife and I would have been killed. They passed by so quickly I had no chance of getting their plate numbers without driving dangerously. (They had a head start on me doing 2 1/2 times the speed limit after all).
A programming book has to be the kind you can sit down and read cover to cover (or chapter by chapter), that teaches something new. I simply don't have time to spend "getting to know" a particular book or painstakingly tracking down reference information.
Not completely.
:-)
I respectfully submit that you're wrong. Perhaps the pot affected your assessment of your stone-briety
While we all might not have a silicon fab in the basement
You don't? How tragic. I'm afraid you'll have to hand in your geek card. In the meantime I wonder if the OLPC guys would consider a OSFPPC (One Silicon Fab Plant Per Child) program.
No problem.
By all accounts your NexStar should be an excellent scope for viewing. You should however be aware that there are limitations when it comes to long exposure astrophography on an alt-az mount, even with a field de-rotator. The Celestron C8-SGT 8" Go-To XLT shouldn't be much different in price, has goto, and is on an EQ mount. Bear in mind that I've not used either scope. I just know if I was going to want to do any photography I'd pick an EQ mount. It's your choice, of course.
http://www.celestron.com/c2/product.php?CatID=11&ProdID=60
I haven't had much experience with GOTO, bascially because I'm too cheap and you can pretty much double the price for buying astro gear in Australia. (I have considered buying one of the baby NexStar gotos and using it as a spotting scope with green laser pointer attached, but I don't imagine that would be anywhere near as worthwhile as true GOTO). The sad truth is I don't use the gear I do have because I don't have much time to observe these days.
...and while the astronomers fiddle with gear you and I can only dream of having access to, take your camera and a tripod outside, and with no more than a portrait lens, you can take shots like these.
Disclaimer: I have a masters in Astronomy but I've never worked in the field. I did the degree "for fun", because I never got the opportunity to study in highschool, and because I wanted to know how we know what we know about the universe. I'm very much an amateur in every respect.
Defintely worth fiddling with camera gear, but at some point if you're taking your own shots you're going to want to use a telescope. Starting with binoculars is definitely the best way. Moving to a dobsonian for viewing (but terrible for photography) is a good next step. (Don't buy anything with a small aperture unless all you're interested in is moon and planets). Next good step would be a Newtonian on EQ mount or SCT. It gets very expensive very quickly. I pretty much gave up on astrophotography. (I live in a large city and when I do get away far enough, I'm usually exhausted from the drive, and there are other priorities (family). Also a 10" scope takes up a hell of a lot of room even in a station wagon).
An alternative to the above is to get hold of sky survey data that's already available and captured by the pro images. There's a lot out there that gets released usually after a year (to give the professional scientists time to work with it). Hubble data, Chandra X-Ray data, SOHO images. It's not all pretty composite colour pictures - you often have to learn to manipulate the images with image software or with more complex data there's specialized software that's not always for the faint of heart (often free, often Linux based). "Amateurs" have done amazing things with some of the images and data. In astronomy there is an "image" (FITS) file format that is actually more than just a simple JPEG etc. You have a background in photography so while it's not strictly RAW data in the sense that it's not coming straight off a sensor, you can think of this format as containing more information the way RAW contains more than JPEG (stuff like calibration information). More information here.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FITS
http://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/heasarc/fits.html
Please understand I'm not trying to discourage you from backyard astronomy. I just thought you might be interested in this too. These days the guys that take the images/capture data and the guys that analyse them are not always the same. ie. you often have technicians that specialise in running the machines.
Here are some links for you:
FITS data from lots of missions/instruments
http://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/archive.html
Digitized Sky Survey
http://archive.eso.org/dss/dss
http://archive.stsci.edu/cgi-bin/dss_form
Hubble
http://hubblesite.org/
SOHO
http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/
Chandra
http://chandra.harvard.edu/
http://chandra.harvard.edu/resources/
If you want more detail and are prepared to try to work out science speak, you can get access to draft papers on:
http://arxiv.org/
Look under astrophysics
I don't have time to go into any more. Hope you're interested.
And the only thing we appear to disagree on is perhaps how severe one isolated instance of that particular code would be.
I can respect that, especially since we're unlikely to ever work together on code and therefore I guess it's academic. We've both clarified our positions and retracted hostilities. Let's let it go at that.
You came out immediately hostile. I have merely expressed my opinion and you have taken offense.
You're right. I was a little more hostile than necessary off the bat. I took offense to you saying the code wasn't bad. It's not the worst I've seen (I've actually seen code pranks triggered on april fools in live code that told the user their computer was being erased). It's definitely not good code.
After a while maintaining someone else's crap, you expect to see bad code. Curiosities like i*=1 may elicit an "oh come on" response but they're nothing to write home about.
There wasn't a single instance of this in the code. It was a short program (few hundred lines), and strewn with code like the above. (Several cases of those two lines for starters). It's hard to follow and I dread the idea of rewriting it.
I'm not "insisting on defending" the sample you provided. Frankly, I don't think it's god-awful-horrible to the degree you do. Yeah, it's bad. Yeah, it's unnecessary. But on the whole its effect is *maybe* one of a couple wasted cpu cycles and a minor headache (and one heavily flamed slashdot poster). I haven't seen the rest of the code, and obviously I'm not defending the entirety of this person's code.
Sorry but that sounds like a defense of it to me. There's no reason for code like that. None whatsoever. A programmer should be making every attempt to make code easy to understand and this seems like a willful effort to go the other way. There's no way that simplification wouldn't be obvious to anyone writing the code. Someone spent time making this code hard to understand, and they were PAID to do it. That in my book is unforgivable. Not a lot different to a mechanic you're paying to fix your car purposefully doing damage to other parts of it.
The couple of wasted cycles doesn't matter at all. It'd have to be in one hell of a loop for me to care about that.
I never said I don't see a problem with it. I do think it is bad code. We could be having this conversation without the attempts at bullying me.
I apologise if it comes across as bullying. I completely disagree with your assessment of the code. I think the programmer that wrote that was not being professional and should be taken to task. A programmer who writes bad code because he knows no better, or due to circumstance is one thing. A programmer that obfuscates his code because he's bored doesn't belong in the profession.
Talking about your opinions regarding code maintenance practices hardly qualifies as imposing, let alone hypocritical.
It does when you impose them on other people (ie. criticising me for "bitching" about bad code), then violate them yourself (bitching about my criticism of the code). Too bad you can't see that.
I work as a DBA in a nonprofit healthcare organization. If our backup guys lost a tape, and I hadn't bothered to check off the box in our database backup software that says "Encrypt: 256-bit AES", I would lose my job.
What you need to ask is what was the procedure and was the guy following it?
If it's standard procedure for this guy to carry unencrypted data around in his car, it's the guy setting policy/procedure that should be made responsible.
If it is standard procedure for you to encrypt your data, and you fail to follow that procedure you should be disciplined. Better still would be to find a way to make that little check box for encryption on by default. Even better would be to find a way to restrict export without encryption unless it's authorized by a second person. It shouldn't be easy for you to make a mistake that could cause you or your company massive damage.
If it wasn't standard practice to encrypt the data, and if it was standard practice for this guy to be required to carry the tape in his car, I'd argue he was made a scapegoat even if it is just a week's vacation that he lost. Unless of course the guy is responsible for setting policy/procedure (but even then someone should be reviewing that and signing off).
Actually, modern compilers are quite adept at optimizing arithmetic, so "i*=0;" could very likely become something like "and eax 0" and "j*=1" would probably be discarded. Which is very likely what the code you replaced it with would compile to. It has nothing to do with whether the code is sensible.
I wasn't disputing that the compiler could optimize. That isn't my issue with the code. My issue is that there is no excuse for making it so cryptic. I can only think that the programmer got bored, because there was no need to multiply a number by 1 or 0.
Earlier you stated: "This was in some rather critical code." I assumed you meant cpu-critical, not maintenance-critical. That's usually what people mean when they say critical.
No, you assumed that usage. It was critical as in vitally important. Where I am the word critical is used in that idiom all the time.
If the code *works*, is *critical*, and is in *production*, then unorthodox code be damned; you don't want to be a hero. Throw in a "wtf" comment and leave it be.
I didn't touch the code and wouldn't unless I had to. Unfortunately it's destined to be replaced in a completely different language. At that point it will make no sense whatsoever to make a verbatim translation of that cryptic crap.
I've inherited shitty code too. Unless it's really atrocious, you don't bitch about it. You fix it if it needs fixing, and you move on.
You're a coder right? We all inherit bad code, and we all "bitch about it". Just one more line down you accuse me of thinking any opinion that disagrees with mine is that of a moron. Yet you hyprocrtically decide to impose your own rather backwards set of ethical coding rules on me. I happen to think that if code is shitty you should let people know about it so it can be fixed.
Quite the broad assumption. I take it you think everyone who disagrees with you is a moron?
No I just call a coder that insists on defending REALLY bad code is a moron. There are plenty of other opinions that differ from mine that I respect, but certainly not yours.
Quite the broad assumption. I take it you think everyone who disagrees with you is a moron?
The quality of my programming speaks for the quality of my programming.
If you're a good coder and the code is being regression tested you should relish an oportunity to make code more intelligible. You on the other hand don't see a problem with code that looks completely crap and for no reason - in fact you're defending it because the compiler will probably optimize it. You blame others for your narrow interpretation of their words (ie. critical) and take zero responsibility for failing to clarify. I know all I need to know about the quality of your code.