When scanning through new code this helps a lot, even if it's not done 100% consistently.
Until someone changes your an char to a signed char - and doesn't change the name.
Hungarian notation reminds me of why un-normalized relational databases are bad - when you repeat the same bit of information in more than one place, you're asking for trouble.
Re:LOL, Struts is right on target.
on
Software Fashion
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Using modular design leads to more complex code, its a fact of life.
If modularization begets complexity, you ain't doin' it right.
Modularization should simplify, in that each module encapsulates and abstracts a well-definined function. It may add volume to your code, but should render it easier to work with.
I suggest you go and watch Clerks. When you get to the part about the independent contractors and the Death Star, you will be enlightened.
I've seen it, know the part you mean. It's great.
(Oh, and crack-smoking moderators: flamebait is something posted to generate a flamewar. An honestly expressed idea posted to an existing thread may be offtopic, but is not flamebait.)
it will obfuscate your config files so that you need to use webmin.
I haven't had any problem with that - Webmin is pretty good about parsing config files, and writing them out in a clear format. Much better than linuxconf, or RedHat's tools, in my experience.
The only difference between the links is that the one link gives the poster a $1 commission from Amazon and the other link Amazon keeps that $1. There's no spam or other email involved.
Using/. to post surreptitious advertisements for one's own business (which is what an affiliate program is), is perhaps not spam, but it's sure a close relative.
All military action creates terror. It's the reason behind phenomena ranging from war dances to atomic bomb tests to "shock and awe" bombing: scare the other side to take the fight out of them.
And a lot of things can create terror. In the 1960s, non-violent Civil Rights marches scared the shit out of a bunch of rascists - did that make King a terrorist?
A terrorist is a person who commits acts intending to terrorise a population into submitting to said terrorists agenda (Note that this is distinctly seperate from war, which is a violent dispute between governments).
So the American Revolution was terrorism, not a war? Or did the Continential Congress count as a government?
And if so, why wouldn't the IRA or PLO or Al Quida count as governments rather than terrorist organizations? What does it take to make a government?
...while terrorists are people who try to accomplish their goals by killing civilians on purpose.
Of course, "civilians" and "on purpose" are terms that can be applied flexibly.
Are Israelis living in occupied territories civilians, or invaders? Were people living in Hiroshima or Dresden civilians, or as workers in their nations' war industry were they legimate targets? When NATO bombed Kosovo rather than sending in ground troups, keeping soldiers safe while putting civilians at higher risk, were the innocents killed "on purpose"?
No one ever says "we kill innocents on purpose"; everyone adjusted their defintions of guilt and of what is avoidable to suit their own ends.
When you bake a raisin bread and it rises, all the raisins get farther apart from each other. Each raisin sees all the other raisins receeding from it.
Yes, but a loaf of bread has a definite center. The surface of a balloon doesn't. Ignoring discontinuity at the neck of the balloon, every spot on the balloon's surface has equal claim to be the center, which makes it a better analogy in this case.
In the real Universe of course, I'm the center.:-)
No, text is equally analog information. It has only been encoded in a fixed format encoding (i.e., printed in a standardized script, with standardized glyphs, and standardized spelling/orthography) relatively recently.
Those variations are only noise in the digital signal. Each character in a stream of text is either one character or another, nothing in between - that's the digital nature. It's the same work whether handwritten or printed, handwriting is just a noiser signal. (Especially mine. "Is that an `a' or a `d'"?)
Ksh? Ksh? What's with this new-fangled k-thingie? That something to do with the "katie ee" thing the kids keep going on about? K this, K that...sounds korny if you ask me.
sh is the only real shell. Remember, you can't spell "shell" without sh.
This object didn't move, but grew very bright, brighter than the real mars a month ago. It grew extremely bright over the period of about 30 seconds. Maybe 5x the brightness and size of Mars's best showing this year. Then it quickly faded to nothing.
I saw something similar about two weeks ago, a little way north of Baltimore. My best guess is that is was one of the Iridium satellites - when the light catches them just right, they shine very brightly for a short time.
IANAL, but why does the
legal system allow such a hideous shell-game to
be played? It does little more than invite
every unethical creep to exploit us to their heart's content.
Because by and large, the legal system is controlled by unethical creeps which no compuction about exploiting us. Corporations and government, working togther for a more exploitative tomorrow.
He feels that programmers fear design because it is a creative process rather than a logical one
What, and programming isn't?
Creating a program is not a mechanical, logical process (consult Turing for details).
Also, a well-crafted computer program is not just a set of instructions for a machine, it is a creative work that documents and explains a process.
It is as creative as a mathematical proof, or a poem. Duff's device is as creative and as beautiful as Basho's frog haiku. Any of these may be analyzed from a logical perspective, but their creation remains to some degree ineffable.
I always hear how Uranium mining is so environmentally unfriendly. Is it so much more unfriendly than other kinds of mining?
Metal mining does tend to be exceptionally messy. Leach mining fscks with groundwater something harsh. I don't know exactly how it stacks up against coal; tearing the tops off of mountains ain't pretty either.
My point, however, is that fission power is not pollution free, not the pancea that many of its supports make it out to be. I'm not comparing it to coal, but to a combination of efficiency, renewables, and progress towards fusion.
Neither fossil fuels nor fission is an acceptable long-term choice. Our investment in electric capacity should be directed towards decreasing demand by increasing efficiency, and towards clean and renewable power. It should not be directed toward building new plants using non-renewable, polluting, and uneconomical fission or coal. (Of course existing plants should be upgraded to use cleaner technologies if appropriate. I don't enjoy choking on the pollution from dirty coal-fired plants in the Midwest that blows here to the East Coast.)
CTRL-ALT-DEL is can never, ever be trapped by an application -- unless Windows has hosed completely, it's guaranteed to get the OS's attention.
That's called a "secure attention key (SAK)". It's an old idea, found on many different systems - a key or key sequence that can't be intercepted and is guaranteed to reach the "trusted computing base (TCB)".
Quite apart from the fact that uranium mining is hardly enviromentally friendly, apart from the unsolved problems of waste disposal, apart from the risk of meltdown (I think the "pebble bed" reactor design just about negates that one), there are serious security concerns about having a bunch of fissionables moving about. Some people don't want other people to have 'em, due to (reasonable or not) concerns about diversion to weapons programs. Others see fission reactors as a good terrorist target due to the possibility of fallout contamination.
Resources should be directed towards effiency improvements and renewables. Rather than building nukes, get hybrid cars (preferably fueled by methanol rather than gasoline) and ground-source heatpumps to the masses. Work on fusion, but also figure out better ways to use that huge fusion reactor Nature has so kindly provided us, only 93 million miles away.
Try copying and pasting between those windows, Mr. Slippery.
I've been copying and pasting between windows using the X Window System since about 1989.
All those millions of user research and feedback Apple and Microsoft have done is all bollocks. The human brain doesn't appreciate visual cues.
Sure it does. That doesn't mean realistic cues are better. Take for example this
U.S. Navy study which found that non-pictoral symbols resulted in better performance when using tactical displays.
I don't know how much of Apple and MS's work is real HCI research ("this is useful and will improve performance"), and how much is marketing research ("this is shiny and will improve sales"), the equivalent of racing stripes, fake spoilers, and chome trim on automobiles. I suspect the latter weighs heavily.
Now if that's your idea of pretty (I think Aqua gaudy myself), fine, everyone should be able to have the desktop they want. But don't pretend that not fitting your aethestic preferences is a flaw or weakness in the leading open desktops.
Forgive me for wanting a hard drive icon to look like a hard drive, because you think some random designers said so.
I'm not sure how to parse this...random designers want me to forgive you? Random designers want (or don't want) an icon to look like a piece of hardware that the average user (who never opens the case) wouldn't recognize?
The desktop environments are just attempts to SIMULATE a desktop.
Silly Overly Critical Guy. When you've got a bunch of windows on the sceem you've got a desktop.
Meanwhile, in August of 2005, Longhorn is due out, with hardware acceleration, vector-scaled widgets for resolution-independent resizing, a yet-to-be-revealed photorealistic user interface,
Eye candy that improves user experience not one whit.
Indeed, some designers argue that a "realistic" interface is a bad idea - icons should be iconic. A road sign for a pedestrian crossing has stick figures, not a photograph of a parent and child crossing the street.
and even the ability to add and remove RAM without rebooting
Now that's cool. Almost completely useless, certain irrelevant to desktop users, probably more of a hardware specification issue than a software one, but cool.
He put his company and title in the paper. If he did not clear that with his company before publishing this paper, @stake has every reason to fire him.
Nonsense. His company and title are simple facts, not an endorsement by @stake of his ideas or a claim to represent @stake in this matter.
It's clearly stated in the paper that the author's views are theirs alone.
@stake's actions are unjustified, ethically if not legally - if the law backs them, it shows only how far into corporate feudalism we've slid.
Certainly @stake has just been removed from my list of trusted voices on the topic of security.
What if it was truly about a constitutional issue?
This wasn't; the issue in this particular ruling is whether the FTC or the FCC is the body with the proper authority. Since Congress delegates its lawmaking authority to both bodies, all it had to do was adjust the FTC's congressional mandate.
(There is a big, but almost never examined, Constitutional issue there, in that Congress is supposed to make laws, not delegate to administrative bodies; if the House and Senate had to actually take responsibility for all those Federal regs, they'd be a lot simpler. But that wasn't contested here.)
And in my experience, no, employers don't negotiate employment contracts for any jobs below the Director (possibly Group Manager) level.
I'm no Director or Group Manager, just a hacker, but I've had such "All your time are belong to us" clauses striken from contracts twice.
I just pointed out that, under the clause as written, I couldn't teach my karate classes, or write my poetry. Surely they didn't mean such a silly thing as that, I know it's not their intention, but I can't sign a binding document that means I'd abandon my poor students, think of the children in my karate class, or the college kids in my writing workshop...
Of course, the increasing prevalance of bullshit like this is part of the reason I've cut back to doing tech work part-time, and am now studying massage and shiatsu. (Though it was not even an issue at my current tech job.) Do bodywork part-time, do some tech consulting on the side, and never again have to argue with morons about who gets to control my ideas and my spare time. (Or about peeing in a cup. Or have to worry about some guy in India doing my job for half the pay.)
Slashdot Mirror
Until someone changes your an char to a signed char - and doesn't change the name.
Hungarian notation reminds me of why un-normalized relational databases are bad - when you repeat the same bit of information in more than one place, you're asking for trouble.
If modularization begets complexity, you ain't doin' it right.
Modularization should simplify, in that each module encapsulates and abstracts a well-definined function. It may add volume to your code, but should render it easier to work with.
I've seen it, know the part you mean. It's great.
(Oh, and crack-smoking moderators: flamebait is something posted to generate a flamewar. An honestly expressed idea posted to an existing thread may be offtopic, but is not flamebait.)
Linux is harder to deal with because it is more secure.
Security is a pain that happens now; getting 0wned is a bigger pain, but it's a future possibility, not a present reality. So security gets ignored.
I haven't had any problem with that - Webmin is pretty good about parsing config files, and writing them out in a clear format. Much better than linuxconf, or RedHat's tools, in my experience.
Spam !-> e-mail. Some of us remember Green Cards
Using /. to post surreptitious advertisements for one's own business (which is what an affiliate program is), is perhaps not spam, but it's sure a close relative.
All military action creates terror. It's the reason behind phenomena ranging from war dances to atomic bomb tests to "shock and awe" bombing: scare the other side to take the fight out of them.
And a lot of things can create terror. In the 1960s, non-violent Civil Rights marches scared the shit out of a bunch of rascists - did that make King a terrorist?
So the American Revolution was terrorism, not a war? Or did the Continential Congress count as a government?
And if so, why wouldn't the IRA or PLO or Al Quida count as governments rather than terrorist organizations? What does it take to make a government?
Of course, "civilians" and "on purpose" are terms that can be applied flexibly.
Are Israelis living in occupied territories civilians, or invaders? Were people living in Hiroshima or Dresden civilians, or as workers in their nations' war industry were they legimate targets? When NATO bombed Kosovo rather than sending in ground troups, keeping soldiers safe while putting civilians at higher risk, were the innocents killed "on purpose"?
No one ever says "we kill innocents on purpose"; everyone adjusted their defintions of guilt and of what is avoidable to suit their own ends.
Yes, but a loaf of bread has a definite center. The surface of a balloon doesn't. Ignoring discontinuity at the neck of the balloon, every spot on the balloon's surface has equal claim to be the center, which makes it a better analogy in this case.
In the real Universe of course, I'm the center. :-)
Those variations are only noise in the digital signal. Each character in a stream of text is either one character or another, nothing in between - that's the digital nature. It's the same work whether handwritten or printed, handwriting is just a noiser signal. (Especially mine. "Is that an `a' or a `d'"?)
Ksh? Ksh? What's with this new-fangled k-thingie? That something to do with the "katie ee" thing the kids keep going on about? K this, K that...sounds korny if you ask me.
sh is the only real shell. Remember, you can't spell "shell" without sh.
I saw something similar about two weeks ago, a little way north of Baltimore. My best guess is that is was one of the Iridium satellites - when the light catches them just right, they shine very brightly for a short time.
Because by and large, the legal system is controlled by unethical creeps which no compuction about exploiting us. Corporations and government, working togther for a more exploitative tomorrow.
What, and programming isn't?
Creating a program is not a mechanical, logical process (consult Turing for details).
Also, a well-crafted computer program is not just a set of instructions for a machine, it is a creative work that documents and explains a process.
It is as creative as a mathematical proof, or a poem. Duff's device is as creative and as beautiful as Basho's frog haiku. Any of these may be analyzed from a logical perspective, but their creation remains to some degree ineffable.
Metal mining does tend to be exceptionally messy. Leach mining fscks with groundwater something harsh. I don't know exactly how it stacks up against coal; tearing the tops off of mountains ain't pretty either.
My point, however, is that fission power is not pollution free, not the pancea that many of its supports make it out to be. I'm not comparing it to coal, but to a combination of efficiency, renewables, and progress towards fusion.
Neither fossil fuels nor fission is an acceptable long-term choice. Our investment in electric capacity should be directed towards decreasing demand by increasing efficiency, and towards clean and renewable power. It should not be directed toward building new plants using non-renewable, polluting, and uneconomical fission or coal. (Of course existing plants should be upgraded to use cleaner technologies if appropriate. I don't enjoy choking on the pollution from dirty coal-fired plants in the Midwest that blows here to the East Coast.)
That's called a "secure attention key (SAK)". It's an old idea, found on many different systems - a key or key sequence that can't be intercepted and is guaranteed to reach the "trusted computing base (TCB)".
When Iraq tried to build a nuclear power plant, Israel bombed them.
Quite apart from the fact that uranium mining is hardly enviromentally friendly, apart from the unsolved problems of waste disposal, apart from the risk of meltdown (I think the "pebble bed" reactor design just about negates that one), there are serious security concerns about having a bunch of fissionables moving about. Some people don't want other people to have 'em, due to (reasonable or not) concerns about diversion to weapons programs. Others see fission reactors as a good terrorist target due to the possibility of fallout contamination.
Resources should be directed towards effiency improvements and renewables. Rather than building nukes, get hybrid cars (preferably fueled by methanol rather than gasoline) and ground-source heatpumps to the masses. Work on fusion, but also figure out better ways to use that huge fusion reactor Nature has so kindly provided us, only 93 million miles away.
I've been copying and pasting between windows using the X Window System since about 1989.
Sure it does. That doesn't mean realistic cues are better. Take for example this U.S. Navy study which found that non-pictoral symbols resulted in better performance when using tactical displays.
I don't know how much of Apple and MS's work is real HCI research ("this is useful and will improve performance"), and how much is marketing research ("this is shiny and will improve sales"), the equivalent of racing stripes, fake spoilers, and chome trim on automobiles. I suspect the latter weighs heavily.
Now if that's your idea of pretty (I think Aqua gaudy myself), fine, everyone should be able to have the desktop they want. But don't pretend that not fitting your aethestic preferences is a flaw or weakness in the leading open desktops.
I'm not sure how to parse this...random designers want me to forgive you? Random designers want (or don't want) an icon to look like a piece of hardware that the average user (who never opens the case) wouldn't recognize?
Look at the OS X and Win XP hard drive icons and tell me that a naiive user would say "obviously that's a hard drive".
Silly Overly Critical Guy. When you've got a bunch of windows on the sceem you've got a desktop.
Eye candy that improves user experience not one whit.
Indeed, some designers argue that a "realistic" interface is a bad idea - icons should be iconic. A road sign for a pedestrian crossing has stick figures, not a photograph of a parent and child crossing the street.
Now that's cool. Almost completely useless, certain irrelevant to desktop users, probably more of a hardware specification issue than a software one, but cool.
Nonsense. His company and title are simple facts, not an endorsement by @stake of his ideas or a claim to represent @stake in this matter.
It's clearly stated in the paper that the author's views are theirs alone.
@stake's actions are unjustified, ethically if not legally - if the law backs them, it shows only how far into corporate feudalism we've slid.
Certainly @stake has just been removed from my list of trusted voices on the topic of security.
Uh, no, I don't. Not unless I'm on the clock and working in my capacity as an employee.
Greetings, serf! Welcome to 21st century feudalism. Remember these simple rules:
We look forward to several decades of exploiting you. Thank you.
This wasn't; the issue in this particular ruling is whether the FTC or the FCC is the body with the proper authority. Since Congress delegates its lawmaking authority to both bodies, all it had to do was adjust the FTC's congressional mandate.
(There is a big, but almost never examined, Constitutional issue there, in that Congress is supposed to make laws, not delegate to administrative bodies; if the House and Senate had to actually take responsibility for all those Federal regs, they'd be a lot simpler. But that wasn't contested here.)
I'm no Director or Group Manager, just a hacker, but I've had such "All your time are belong to us" clauses striken from contracts twice.
I just pointed out that, under the clause as written, I couldn't teach my karate classes, or write my poetry. Surely they didn't mean such a silly thing as that, I know it's not their intention, but I can't sign a binding document that means I'd abandon my poor students, think of the children in my karate class, or the college kids in my writing workshop...
Of course, the increasing prevalance of bullshit like this is part of the reason I've cut back to doing tech work part-time, and am now studying massage and shiatsu. (Though it was not even an issue at my current tech job.) Do bodywork part-time, do some tech consulting on the side, and never again have to argue with morons about who gets to control my ideas and my spare time. (Or about peeing in a cup. Or have to worry about some guy in India doing my job for half the pay.)