Required javadoc/doxygen/VCS comments often result in "XXX: required for checkin" type comments.
True. This is why, in the topsy-turvey world of software development, it's often useful to have a nice, solid piece of wood in your hands...sometimes a LART
must serve as a "Developer Attitude Readjustment Tool."
Rules for initializing and using globals, rules for maximum method length, code ownership, and small group code walkthroughs can do a lot to prevent the kind of problems you mention.
Well, a method should be as long as it needs to be and no longer; I disagree with artificial limits that end up breaking one subroutine into n plus one that does nothing but call those parts in sequence. But code walkthroughs/reviews, hell yeah. Not only do they make for better code, they're educational and thus make for better coders.
Did anyone think that open osurce software is as a general rule well documented or documented as well as many commercial projects that have project management (for better or worse) and technical writers on staff to do internal as well as external documentation?
Do you really think that commercial software is as a general rule well documented? (Or documented at all?)
I've only worked on two proejects that had technical writers, and their job was mostly to clean up grammar and spelling from the developers. (Which, lest I be misunderstood, is a valuable job.) They were first on the post-boom chopping block anyway.
Most projects I've worked on, you were lucky if you got meaningful comments in the code at all.
This "study" is complete BS. With no comparison at all to proprietary software, no conclusion about the maintainability or quality of F/OSS is possible.
If you find fun in the death of sentient creatures..."reason" is, honestly, not a word I would use to decribe your thought processes.
These creatures are smaller and more helpless than I am, but can you imagine a reasonable man of noble feelings who would like to base on such a difference a claim or right to abuse the weakness and the smallness of others? Don't you think that it is just the bigger, the stronger, the superior's duty to protect the weaker creatures instead of persecuting them, instead of killing them? "Noblesse oblige." I want to act in a noble way.
...
I think that men will be killed and tortured as long as animals are killed and tortured. So long there will be wars too. Because killing must be trained and perfected on smaller objects, morally and technically.
Nuclear Magnetic Resonance ( NMR ) which was changed to Magnetic Resonance Imaging ( MRI ) because too many people were afraid of the word nuclear.
I've heard this several times. Does anyone know how exactly was it determined that "too many people were afraid of the word nuclear"? Or was there one marketroid who decided "nuclear" was too scary?
Moreover, our client does not allow others to provide links to our client's web site without permission.
Uh, where has any law or court opinion even suggested that one needs permission to link to a web site?
No copyright or trademark law lets Red Hat restrict me from making factual statements like, "Red Hat's web site is www.redhat.com", any more that they can prevent me from stating "Red Hat's phone number is 1-888-REDHAT1" or "Red Hat's address is 1801 Varsity Drive, Raleigh, NC 27606."
Including certain browser-parsable elements in that declaration: "Red Hat's web site is www.redhat.com" doesn't change that.
because it's cruel, disrespectful, and accomplishes nothing more than to promote hatred.
Censorship - using force to silence people - is more cruel and disrespectful, and accomplishes nothing more than to promote the views of the censored party.
The cure for hate speech is truth, logic, laughter, and love. Not threats of violence.
If you've lost your license because of DUI and are driving around in another state, it is of extreme importance.
If you're driving on a suspended or revoked license, yes, that fact is significant. But the offence that lead to the suspension or revokation is not relevant at the time of the stop. Your driving history is not relevant, only the question of whether or not your licence is valid.
Are you really pissing and moaning because law enforcement wants to be able to get a certain level of appropriate information from all driver's licenses?...The only people I can see having a true complaint are the drivers who want to hide their tickets in one state from LEOs in another state.
There is a term for a government in which legistlation is passed for the mere convenience of law enforcement officers.
The term is "police state".
Sure, what we have is a lite version, a mostly-benign police state (at least if you're a white middle-class non-Muslim person with mainstream political views). But as others have observed for the past few decades, anytime, anywhere, no matter what you're doing, there is some law under which you can be arrested and booked.
When a cop pulls me over, it is completely irrelevant to the matter at hand how many points are on my licence or what previous violations exist. In fact it would be a violation of equal protection if I were to be treated differently based on this information.
So you're saying if someone develops a cure for cancer and you were in charge, you'd confiscate it from them? If that becomes policy nobody will put R&D money into the search.
"Confiscate"? Knowledge isn't property, and patents are a state intervention in the market.
When you start out with the premise that the state failing to use force to stop other people from implementing the cure is confiscation you're pretty far off the rails already.
Then you bring "socialism" into it. Publicly funded research has nothing to do with an economic system based on the exchange of labor rather than the ownership of capital.
So, yes, I'd say public funding is an option.
(Indeed, I'd argue that for medical research on infectious disease, that's part of the state's role to "provide for the common defense".)
Or exercise eminent domain on life-saving patents, buy 'em out. Or require drug companies to agree to certain research as a condition of other patents being granted ("you can have your monopoly on penis pills, diet drugs, and baldness cures, so long as you keep working on the cancer thing").
How is it then that all of those other countries are able to prevent themselves from being attacked?
They aren't. Any non-nuclear nation on the face of the earth is protected only by not being important to us, or by sympathy of nations we care about.
Since WWII the U.S. has engaged overt military interventions or in major covert operations in nations including Cuba, Guatemala, Panama, Iran, Grenada, Lebanon, Vietnam, Cambodia, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, Libya, Somalia, Haiti, Yugoslavia, Iraq, and, oh yeah, we're still involved in the Korean war (there's been a long cease fire but the war is still in effect).
The historical lesson is clear: we want you, your ass is ours. Unless you've got nukes.
except that they were in violation of UN sanctions, and had been in violation for over a decade.
Iraq's violations of U.N. resolutions were fairly minor. (Certainly when compared with those of Israel.) In the months prior to the U.S. lead invasion they were cooperating with inspectors. The strongest case Bush could make was that Iraq didn't have the right paperwork detailing the destruction of weapons.
You don't realize that we had to invade Iraq just so that it would not become another North Korea?
Hussein's Iraq was in no position to do anything but dream of becoming another North Korea. As the complete failure of the search for WMDs shows, the sanctions worked perfectly adequately to keep them from developing nukes.
Meanwhile, the invasion demonstrated to the world that the U.S. will not be restrained by law, ethics, or common sense; so if we don't like your nation, the only way you might be secure against U.S. invasion is to develop WMDs.
Sci-Fi shouldn't be about drama, it should be science-fiction. The story lines should only be there as an excuse for more space-battles.
You, sir, and those like you, are the reason why so much science fiction sucks. Somebody hand me my clue-by-four...
Science fiction is a genre which allows the author to create not just characters and a setting but an entire universe. As such it is eminently suited for all sorts of thoughtful and intelligent stories
Yes, an author can also choose to create a universe inhabited by sterotypes who do nothing but blow stuff up. That can be amusing in light doses, but if you want nothing but space battles, go play a frickin' video game.
What does it mean if you DO perform well on high-pressure tests such as the GRE?...Recently, I have actually felt pressured (first-year in grad school), and my tests have suffered as a result.
My hypothesis is that if you have a history of doing well on standardized tests, you don't see them as pressure. They're almost fun. I did well on the GREs - but I did well on the SATs, PSATs, all the way back to the Iowa standardized tests in elementary school. When you have the belief "I'm good at standardized tests", standardized tests aren't a lot of pressure.
(In fact I felt nostalgic a few months ago when taking the NCCAOMAsian Bodywork Therapy exam, which is given with old-school fill-in-the-bubble, #2 pencil forms, the way we used to take GREs and SATs back in the old days.)
But like you, I felt pressured in grad school. I didn't do as well as I would have liked. A decade later, and having recently gone back to school for a while to study therapeutic bodywork, I think the problem was that I had never developed good study habits - because I'd never had to.
Up until my junior year of college, pretty much everything I found interesting was fairly easy to learn. I actually was trying to do a double degree program - physics and computer science - in four years. (Not just a double major, mind you, but a double degree - requiring 150 credits. Ah, hubris.) I had the belief "I'm good in school," so there wasn't a lot of pressure or stress.
I managed to keep chugging along with the CS program, but the physics...when I hit the upper level classes, I just didn't get it. (Looking back I think the first problem was that I never got a firm enough grasp on differential equations.) And not getting the material was almost a completely new experience!
Sure, I'd hit the odd snag in trying to learn something new, but a few days of poking at it usually resolved it. This was different. Weeks of staring at it didn't make it go into my brain. I ended up dropping the physics side of my plan, finished my CS degree with good enough grades to get into grad school - where I hit the same problem of not knowing what to do when the way became difficult.
If I knew then what I know now, I might have tried such radical ideas as looking at the recommended supplemental reading, taking advantage of instructor's office hours, and studying with fellow students. But I'd gotten so far without even doing that, that it simply didn't occur to me. Maybe I even felt embarassed to try to get help. Pretty dumb for a "smart" person, eh?
So don't be like me! If things have been easy and suddenly get difficult, take advantage of all those support systems that "average" students use.
Re:WTF is Boxen?
on
EFF's Logfinder
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Just trying to figure out why admins call them "boxen," not supporting the strange practice.
If the code is complicated and hard to understand, that makes it difficult for others to compete against you. But again, that's an example of a perverse incentive.
True. But if the code is needlessly complicated and hard to understand - deliberately obfuscated - it will get a reputation as a sack o' shit, and everyone will recommend that other projects be used. Maybe even a cleaned up fork of your obfuscated code.
(I would think that the way to make money off open source is the same way to make money off closed soure - custom development. The majority of software developers aren't engaged in building the shrinkwrap stuff, they work on in-house projects.)
If we've now got a better technology than lighthouses, use it and switch off the lighthouses.
Define "better". GPS doesn't have the reliability of the lighthouse.
GPS receivers shipboard can fail; severe weather - including "space weather" solar events - can prevent a clear signal; and the Pentagon, operator of the GPS system, reserves the option to degrade or eliminate service at their whim.
Biofuel (ethanol, etc.) are net negative sources of fuel: The harvesting of biomass ethanol requires more fuel for trucks, processing, etc. than the ethanol contains.
That's simply not correct. It was true decades ago when the only source of biomass being used was food-grade crops - current industrial agriculture is massively inefficient. Current biomass production, primitive as it is, is net positive.
Gasoline, Natural Gas and Coal are scarce and major polutants.
Uranium and Plutonium are both highly toxic. Supplies of U-235 are limited. Plutonium presents massive security issues.
Wind and Solar are too costly.
Costs of both photovoltaic and wind are falling. When external costs are figured, they're cheaper than coal or nuclear.
And we can't sensibly say to the developing world, "We're building fission plants, but if you start building any you'll get bombed."
Face it: from a standpoint of physics, wind, water, and solar, and the mechanisms for extracted energy from them, are NOT ENOUGH to sustain any semblance of the current lifestyles, right or wrong, without drastic and dramatic changes that would have far-reaching economic and social implications.
Sticking fission reactors everywhere also would have far-reaching economic and social implications. And military and environmental ones too.
Resources would be better spent on efficiency, and fusion and renewables research, than on building fission power plants.
It's a shame that so many otherwise intelligent people are so caught up in the Gernsbackian romanace of "man has harnessed the power of the atom!". (And yes, it's a shame that so many otherwise intelligent people have an irrational fear of anything involving the world "nuclear".)
The combined cost of Spirit and Opportunity was $820 million dollars. The potential cost of a manned mission to Mars, using off the shelf technology and launching today: $20 billion dollars.
Probes would be cheaper by the dozen. Mass-produce and amortize the R & D and other common costs over 1,000 units.
Zubrin's plan is, shall we say, highly optimistic. (The article you link gives a contrasting figure of $450 billion - at $420 million each for Spirit and Opportunity, I'm amazed to find a number that matches the "thousand times" I pulled out of my butt.:-) )
Humans would be forced to stay on the surface of Mars for roughly 2 (Earth) years, until conditions to launch are optimal again.
Not if - as some plans call for - they only stay a few weeks before launching for home.
Slashdot Mirror
True. This is why, in the topsy-turvey world of software development, it's often useful to have a nice, solid piece of wood in your hands...sometimes a LART must serve as a "Developer Attitude Readjustment Tool."
Well, a method should be as long as it needs to be and no longer; I disagree with artificial limits that end up breaking one subroutine into n plus one that does nothing but call those parts in sequence. But code walkthroughs/reviews, hell yeah. Not only do they make for better code, they're educational and thus make for better coders.
Ideally, requirements and design documents. And interface specifications for code libraries.
Code tells you what's happening. It doesn't tell you what is supposed to happen or why.
Then perhaps you only work on trivial applications. Or are very new to the field of software development.
Thing is, you're also likely to get a stumped reaction if you made such an inquiry about a random proprietary project.
Do you really think that commercial software is as a general rule well documented? (Or documented at all?)
I've only worked on two proejects that had technical writers, and their job was mostly to clean up grammar and spelling from the developers. (Which, lest I be misunderstood, is a valuable job.) They were first on the post-boom chopping block anyway.
Most projects I've worked on, you were lucky if you got meaningful comments in the code at all.
This "study" is complete BS. With no comparison at all to proprietary software, no conclusion about the maintainability or quality of F/OSS is possible.
Mod parent +1 literary reference... :-)
If you find fun in the death of sentient creatures..."reason" is, honestly, not a word I would use to decribe your thought processes.
I've heard this several times. Does anyone know how exactly was it determined that "too many people were afraid of the word nuclear"? Or was there one marketroid who decided "nuclear" was too scary?
Uh, where has any law or court opinion even suggested that one needs permission to link to a web site?
No copyright or trademark law lets Red Hat restrict me from making factual statements like, "Red Hat's web site is www.redhat.com", any more that they can prevent me from stating "Red Hat's phone number is 1-888-REDHAT1" or "Red Hat's address is 1801 Varsity Drive, Raleigh, NC 27606."
Including certain browser-parsable elements in that declaration: "Red Hat's web site is www.redhat.com" doesn't change that.
RHAT: please put down the TM crackpipe.
Censorship - using force to silence people - is more cruel and disrespectful, and accomplishes nothing more than to promote the views of the censored party.
The cure for hate speech is truth, logic, laughter, and love. Not threats of violence.
If you're driving on a suspended or revoked license, yes, that fact is significant. But the offence that lead to the suspension or revokation is not relevant at the time of the stop. Your driving history is not relevant, only the question of whether or not your licence is valid.
In sentencing, after guilt has been "proven" in court, perhaps. But not for police to do so when making a citation or arrest.
My driving record is quite good, thank you, and you can take your ad hominem and stuff it.
There is a term for a government in which legistlation is passed for the mere convenience of law enforcement officers.
The term is "police state".
Sure, what we have is a lite version, a mostly-benign police state (at least if you're a white middle-class non-Muslim person with mainstream political views). But as others have observed for the past few decades, anytime, anywhere, no matter what you're doing, there is some law under which you can be arrested and booked.
When a cop pulls me over, it is completely irrelevant to the matter at hand how many points are on my licence or what previous violations exist. In fact it would be a violation of equal protection if I were to be treated differently based on this information.
"Confiscate"? Knowledge isn't property, and patents are a state intervention in the market. When you start out with the premise that the state failing to use force to stop other people from implementing the cure is confiscation you're pretty far off the rails already.
Then you bring "socialism" into it. Publicly funded research has nothing to do with an economic system based on the exchange of labor rather than the ownership of capital.
So, yes, I'd say public funding is an option. (Indeed, I'd argue that for medical research on infectious disease, that's part of the state's role to "provide for the common defense".)
Or exercise eminent domain on life-saving patents, buy 'em out. Or require drug companies to agree to certain research as a condition of other patents being granted ("you can have your monopoly on penis pills, diet drugs, and baldness cures, so long as you keep working on the cancer thing").
They aren't. Any non-nuclear nation on the face of the earth is protected only by not being important to us, or by sympathy of nations we care about.
Since WWII the U.S. has engaged overt military interventions or in major covert operations in nations including Cuba, Guatemala, Panama, Iran, Grenada, Lebanon, Vietnam, Cambodia, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, Libya, Somalia, Haiti, Yugoslavia, Iraq, and, oh yeah, we're still involved in the Korean war (there's been a long cease fire but the war is still in effect).
The historical lesson is clear: we want you, your ass is ours. Unless you've got nukes.
Iraq's violations of U.N. resolutions were fairly minor. (Certainly when compared with those of Israel.) In the months prior to the U.S. lead invasion they were cooperating with inspectors. The strongest case Bush could make was that Iraq didn't have the right paperwork detailing the destruction of weapons.
Hussein's Iraq was in no position to do anything but dream of becoming another North Korea. As the complete failure of the search for WMDs shows, the sanctions worked perfectly adequately to keep them from developing nukes.
Meanwhile, the invasion demonstrated to the world that the U.S. will not be restrained by law, ethics, or common sense; so if we don't like your nation, the only way you might be secure against U.S. invasion is to develop WMDs.
You, sir, and those like you, are the reason why so much science fiction sucks. Somebody hand me my clue-by-four...
Science fiction is a genre which allows the author to create not just characters and a setting but an entire universe. As such it is eminently suited for all sorts of thoughtful and intelligent stories
Yes, an author can also choose to create a universe inhabited by sterotypes who do nothing but blow stuff up. That can be amusing in light doses, but if you want nothing but space battles, go play a frickin' video game.
My hypothesis is that if you have a history of doing well on standardized tests, you don't see them as pressure. They're almost fun. I did well on the GREs - but I did well on the SATs, PSATs, all the way back to the Iowa standardized tests in elementary school. When you have the belief "I'm good at standardized tests", standardized tests aren't a lot of pressure.
(In fact I felt nostalgic a few months ago when taking the NCCAOM Asian Bodywork Therapy exam, which is given with old-school fill-in-the-bubble, #2 pencil forms, the way we used to take GREs and SATs back in the old days.)
But like you, I felt pressured in grad school. I didn't do as well as I would have liked. A decade later, and having recently gone back to school for a while to study therapeutic bodywork, I think the problem was that I had never developed good study habits - because I'd never had to.
Up until my junior year of college, pretty much everything I found interesting was fairly easy to learn. I actually was trying to do a double degree program - physics and computer science - in four years. (Not just a double major, mind you, but a double degree - requiring 150 credits. Ah, hubris.) I had the belief "I'm good in school," so there wasn't a lot of pressure or stress.
I managed to keep chugging along with the CS program, but the physics...when I hit the upper level classes, I just didn't get it. (Looking back I think the first problem was that I never got a firm enough grasp on differential equations.) And not getting the material was almost a completely new experience!
Sure, I'd hit the odd snag in trying to learn something new, but a few days of poking at it usually resolved it. This was different. Weeks of staring at it didn't make it go into my brain. I ended up dropping the physics side of my plan, finished my CS degree with good enough grades to get into grad school - where I hit the same problem of not knowing what to do when the way became difficult.
If I knew then what I know now, I might have tried such radical ideas as looking at the recommended supplemental reading, taking advantage of instructor's office hours, and studying with fellow students. But I'd gotten so far without even doing that, that it simply didn't occur to me. Maybe I even felt embarassed to try to get help. Pretty dumb for a "smart" person, eh?
So don't be like me! If things have been easy and suddenly get difficult, take advantage of all those support systems that "average" students use.
It's a running joke. See also this.
True. But if the code is needlessly complicated and hard to understand - deliberately obfuscated - it will get a reputation as a sack o' shit, and everyone will recommend that other projects be used. Maybe even a cleaned up fork of your obfuscated code.
(I would think that the way to make money off open source is the same way to make money off closed soure - custom development. The majority of software developers aren't engaged in building the shrinkwrap stuff, they work on in-house projects.)
Define "better". GPS doesn't have the reliability of the lighthouse.
GPS receivers shipboard can fail; severe weather - including "space weather" solar events - can prevent a clear signal; and the Pentagon, operator of the GPS system, reserves the option to degrade or eliminate service at their whim.
Except that:
That's simply not correct. It was true decades ago when the only source of biomass being used was food-grade crops - current industrial agriculture is massively inefficient. Current biomass production, primitive as it is, is net positive.
Uranium and Plutonium are both highly toxic. Supplies of U-235 are limited. Plutonium presents massive security issues.
Costs of both photovoltaic and wind are falling. When external costs are figured, they're cheaper than coal or nuclear.
So stop with the FUD already, ok?
Certainly not until waste disposal and security issues are dealt with. The Yucca Mountain plan is a technological and political failure, and the more fissionables are around the more likely they are to fall into the wrong hands.
And we can't sensibly say to the developing world, "We're building fission plants, but if you start building any you'll get bombed."
Sticking fission reactors everywhere also would have far-reaching economic and social implications. And military and environmental ones too.
Resources would be better spent on efficiency, and fusion and renewables research, than on building fission power plants.
It's a shame that so many otherwise intelligent people are so caught up in the Gernsbackian romanace of "man has harnessed the power of the atom!". (And yes, it's a shame that so many otherwise intelligent people have an irrational fear of anything involving the world "nuclear".)
Probes would be cheaper by the dozen. Mass-produce and amortize the R & D and other common costs over 1,000 units.
Zubrin's plan is, shall we say, highly optimistic. (The article you link gives a contrasting figure of $450 billion - at $420 million each for Spirit and Opportunity, I'm amazed to find a number that matches the "thousand times" I pulled out of my butt. :-) )
Not if - as some plans call for - they only stay a few weeks before launching for home.