Re:Lifetime of code...
on
Immortal Code
·
· Score: 1
I know a lot of software engineers who see it as an art and would loose all interest once it would become real engineering.
I've just about come to the conclusion that "engineering" is simply not the right way to think about creating good software.
Not that we can't steal tricks from the engineers, of course, but there are large gulfs between software and "engineered" creations. Compare software with bridges:
People have built plenty of bridges, that vary only in parameters: pick a type, height, and length, and a good civil engineer can easily work out the details. Most interesting software products are unique efforts - if it's been done before often enough, it gets put into a library, and the target of the next software project grows by an order of magnitude.
No one has to port a bridge to a new processor architecture or operating system. No one changes the semantics of rivets.
Software is made out of words, words that have to communicate to no only a machine but to other humans. This brings artistic considerations into scope, not just in making the overall design pretty but making the infrastructure and the parts
beautiful.
Good software design and development requires not only engineering skills, but poetic ones as well.
Re:Doubtful
on
Immortal Code
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Who doesn't keep a copy of their work, especially if it is good?
Those who are afraid of being crushed by lawyers for violating NDAs, that's who.
Last time I was job hunting I was asked for a code sample...all I could produce was a 2000 line Perl hack I did for my own amusement. Which was about all the Perl I've ever written, I'm a C/C++ guy. But I can't share anyone of the stuff I've done professionally, it's all copyrighted to my employers and trapped under non-disclosure agreements. (Well, some of the stuff I did back in grad school might be publically available somewhere.)
When it becomes unprofitable to continue the current means of production, a better way will be invented and applied.
Profitable to whom?
So long as manufacturers can externalize their costs, they'll be able to make profits for themselves while poisoning (a rather antiprofitable process) others.
If your local news had reported on a 5 car pileup on the Interstate where 7 people were killed, would you remember that moment vividly for the rest of your life??
No, but I vividly remember where I was when I heard that each of my three deceased grandparents had died.
Some people we care about - family and friends obviously, but "celebrities" too. Love it or lump it, that's human nature. And if and when dead astronauts no longer get automatic promotion to celebrity status - when a shuttle accdient is no more vividly remembered than a plane crash - then you'll know that the Space Age has truly arrived.
The cool thing is that if you look at any of the hair he sheds, it usually goes through about 4-5 different colors from root to tip
I used to have a dog like that; he'd shed hairs that were black on the end, brown in the middle, and white at the root. Which meant that whatever color you wore, the dog fur on your clothes would show up...
Re:Before everyone shouts global warming...
on
The Sky Is Rising
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
The earth's temperature fluctuates, and not necessarily because of humans.
People's heartrate fluctuates, and not necessarily because of caffeiene. However, if I just downed a triple espresso, and my pulse is now at 150bpm, it's a pretty good hypothesis that the drug is responsible, and common sense that if I don't want further increases I should cut back.
Sorry, but the question of whether your mini-blinds should be white, ivory, or eggshell defintely falls into the category of the trivial.
Maybe it's a question of what we expect the called party to be doing. I'm usually out and about doing things that interest me - if my housemate were to call me to say "Hey, I was going to get a new set of knives for kitchen, do you want black or white handles?" I'd take that as an annoying interruption of whatever interesting thing I'm up to by a completely trivial matter.
Maybe that's really the sad part - that people are so uninterested in their own lives that to get a call from a friend wandering the ailses of a grocery store, trying to decide whether to purchase Fritos or Doritos, is considered exciting.
but how about having two buttons on phones request contact info and send contact info.
And if I don't have my phone on me...? Yes, believe it or not, sometime I don't. In fact, would you belive that that there are people who don't own cell phones at all?:-)
Beaming info is cool and all, but cheap, low-tech, durable, business cards that you can give out by the handful are an excellent solution, unlikely to be displaced. We just need a better way to get the info from them into our computers. There are OCR systems, but from what I understand they often get confused.
So how do we remember people's emails? Using automatic address books.
Actually, I find it's easier to just remember the damn addresses, or to just scan back for the last message from someone and reply to it, than to keep an address book updated. "Automatic" address books don't help when many of your correspondant's From: lines don't include a name.
In America you don't have Fair Use that allows people to sing other's copyrighted songs....Singing copyrighted material is illegal (ie, most buskers are breaking the law).
Fair use applies to everything. You can sing in the shower, or at someone's birthday party, without fear. If you making a "public performance", mechanical royalties are due.
Scanning my bookshelves, some of my reading recommendations:
Tom Robbins might be considered fantasy, or "magical realism". Another Roadside Attraction is great.
Thoreau. I finally took the time to read "Walden", and I'm glad I did.
"Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglas". This should been required reading in every high school U.S. history class.
Speaking of which, Larry Gonicks' Cartoon History of the United States, Cartoon History of the Universe, and The Cartoon Guide to Sex are good.
Neil Gaiman's already been mentioned. If he wrote it,you should read it, it's just that simple.:-)
Ursula LeGuin. A Wizard of Earthsea is one of my all-time favorites; it's sequels are also worthy. Also, The Lathe of Heaven is excellent. (The old PBS movie is good; the recent TNT one sucked rocks.)
Roger Zelazny. Some of his later stuff (the second "Amber" series, for instance) is merely ok, but his good stuff will blow you away. (Isle of the Dead and My Name is Legion I can read over and over.)
Hunter S. Thompson. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Better Than Sex, and the various volumes of the Gonzo Papers.
Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep amazes me every time I read it.
Jonathan Lethem's Gun, With Occasional Music. Odd and interesting SF in the Chandleresque vein.
I don't want a phone/MP3/PDA/GPS/condom dispenser. A device like that would be too big. I want a small phone, a small GPS, a small MP3 player, and a small PDA.
Four things to remember to keep charging and swapping batteries? No thanks. I have enough trouble remembering to put my cell phone in the charger, and pretty much gave up using my Agenda PDA because if I remembered to put the cellphone on the charger I'd forget the PDA.
What I'd like: Linux-based (of course!) cell phone with good data access, and a few simple on-board apps, like prescibble and mupo from the Agenda. Forget more complex PDA apps - give me a unit with good enough display and input that I can use the web. With GPS, please, since a "where the hell am I" moment can happen anytime. Built-in camera, like Japanese cell phones, a nice bonus for sudden snapshot opportunities.
(I've been thinking that a camera that uploads images quickly would be great for activists and whistleblowers - if the cops or security try to confiscate your camera and your photos, your images are already up on a server somewhere.)
Re:It's just natural selection. Wake up, people.
on
Sharks in Serious Danger
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
If the sharks can't adapt to their new environment, another species that is more adaptable will be able use the newly freed
resources.
Ecological niches are not static. Wiping out a species has ripple effects thoughout the ecosystem.
Not to mention that the current rate of specied extintion is like nothing since the dinosaurs were wiped out and the whole ecosytem pretty much got rebuilt. Since we are a part of this ecosystem, fucking about with it is not intelligent behavior.
Sometimes I imagine the first blue-green algea having this conversation:
"Hey, all this oxygen we're releasing...it's going to mess up the ecosystem. You know, we're destroying all sort of anaerobic bacteria."
"Ah, screw them if they can't adapt."
And so evolution creates an adaptation - primitive animals. That feed on algea.
If an animal goes extinct for any reason, doesn't that just mean it wasn't "fittest"?
"Survial of the fittest" - or more accurately, "best adapted", is a biological observation, not an ethical guide.
Speices have died out because they were not adapted to human predation or other fucking about with the ecosystem, yes. That doesn't mean that human predation, etc., is ethical behavior; any more than if I kill a man and rape his wife to father offspring, thus increasing my reproductive fitness.
Populationwise the earth can sustain about 10 Billion (with a B and we are at 6 billion now)
We're unable to support our current 6 billion in a sustainable manner. Claims that the planet can sustain our present or greater population rely on either 1) ignorance of the nonsustainable nature of current agricultural, disposal, and economic methods, or 2) an assumption of a deus ex machina of new technology or new social organizations that would radically change resource usage.
Of course, Nature has a cure for overpopulation. But it's pretty unpleasant.
Example: I was with a friend at a large home improvement center, and he phoned home to the wife to check on her color preferences for some mini-blinds. A lady nearby did the big, exaggerated sigh and shook her head...What's the difference between that and him talking to one of the store staff, or talking to me?
The differenct is that you and the store staff are actually there.
It's a more subtle, but more important, thing than the mere aggrivation of someone bellowing into a phone. It's the disassociation from one's actual surroundings. It's the inability to make simple decisions without using your "phone a friend" lifeline. It's the failure to acknowledge the human beings around you because you're discussing trivia with some distant electronic voice.
What I feel for these people who can't put the phone away isn't irritation. It's pity.
That is, if you tried to open a restaurant or print shop or some other business, and it failed, then you couldn't be sued directly for say, your house and be put on the street with your family in tow.
Which means that if you run your restaurant in a neglectful fashion and poison people, or if you run your print shop unsafely and employees are injured or killed, you can't be sued personally.
While that may sound good to the owners of a small business (since genuine accidents and bogus lawsuits do happen), when applied to large corporations this evasion of responsiblity is not a good thing. T'would be a far better world if stockholders had some liability for corporate misbehavior, if they could be sued for any income they dervied from the corporation. For example, if oil company stockholders had to pay for the oil spill clean-up out of their own pockets, you'd see a lot more responsbile behavior from those corporations.
You make yourself sound like a pretentious 19 year old that has nothing to go on but what his left-wing, coulnd't make it in the real world so they thought they'd teach professor has told them.
You make yourself sound like someone resorting to ad homiem attacks due to lack of good arguements.
And those that have not been through it should bear in mind that the same laws that govern the Mega-companies also govern small ones like mine.
Which should not be the case. You are (I presume) an active participant in your business; the only relationship I have with the companies in which I own stock are pieces of paper I can sell sometime.
In software, you're best off without schedules at all!
Probably because you're not wasting time and energy trying to explain to ignorant managers why the schedules are meaningless fantasies.
An analogy that occured to me during the scheduling of our current project: You are presented with a jungle. You have no idea of the terrain inside - rivers? quicksand? swamps? You don't know if there are any paths through it at all, much less where any that exist might be. Your job is to build a superhighway through it.
Your first step - before any other work - is to build a detailed schedule. Not just an estimate of how long it will take, but a list of "milestones" such that you know exactly where the project will stand on any given day.
If your project is simple - just building a bridge across a river, where the terrain is well-known - you might be able to do this. But I've yet to work on a software project simple enough that the schedule
I'm going to have to track down a copy of Peopleware and beat managers over the head with it in the future...
The right to personal privacy is extremely important. Maybe even more important than the right to bear arms (don't rip my head off here, I bear arms all the time and would hate to see that right go away).
The RKBA is how (in the extreme case) we protect the right to privacy (and other rights).
A Corporation is a legal entity put in place to protect the people that own businesses from direct impact of the success or failures of that business.
In other words, to prevent people from suffering the consequences of their actions.
layers of legal parachute for people that risk their necks to provide goods, services, and ultimately jobs.
Oh, bulshit. Most corporate stockholders - i.e., absentee owners - aren't risking their necks, they are risking their surplus income on a speculative gamble. There's nothing more admirable or socially worthwhile about owning stock in the avergage corporation than about playing blackjack. (And I say that as a stockholder.)
So, an Author does not have the right to own the novel they spent years writing because they based it in something,
No one owns an idea. That's a philosophical and (so far as I know) legal misnomer - one possesses a copyright.
J.R.R. Tolkien's family doesn't have the right to own copyright on the Lord of the Ring's. Why? Why should his work become public domain? What gives you the right to it?
What gives the decendent of an author any special rights to it? What, should William Shakespeare's umpity-great grandson get royalties on Hamlet? Feh.
That not only doesn't make philosophical sense, it doesn't make Constitutional sense - Congress is authorized to grant a temporary exclusive copyright to an author. Not to his or her heirs.
Nothing is said about such a copyright being transferable or inheritable.
Legally, yes; but many people - advocacy groups and the media - often speak of "gun crimes" or "gun murders".
And it is totally different than unarmed robbery. People can die.
People can die during unarmed robbery too. Most crimes of violence are still committed with "personal weapons" - fists and feet. Knocking someone down and kicking them in the head can be just as deadly as shooting, stabbing, or clubbing.
Slashdot Mirror
I've just about come to the conclusion that "engineering" is simply not the right way to think about creating good software.
Not that we can't steal tricks from the engineers, of course, but there are large gulfs between software and "engineered" creations. Compare software with bridges:
Good software design and development requires not only engineering skills, but poetic ones as well.
Those who are afraid of being crushed by lawyers for violating NDAs, that's who.
Last time I was job hunting I was asked for a code sample...all I could produce was a 2000 line Perl hack I did for my own amusement. Which was about all the Perl I've ever written, I'm a C/C++ guy. But I can't share anyone of the stuff I've done professionally, it's all copyrighted to my employers and trapped under non-disclosure agreements. (Well, some of the stuff I did back in grad school might be publically available somewhere.)
Profitable to whom?
So long as manufacturers can externalize their costs, they'll be able to make profits for themselves while poisoning (a rather antiprofitable process) others.
No, but I vividly remember where I was when I heard that each of my three deceased grandparents had died.
Some people we care about - family and friends obviously, but "celebrities" too. Love it or lump it, that's human nature. And if and when dead astronauts no longer get automatic promotion to celebrity status - when a shuttle accdient is no more vividly remembered than a plane crash - then you'll know that the Space Age has truly arrived.
I used to have a dog like that; he'd shed hairs that were black on the end, brown in the middle, and white at the root. Which meant that whatever color you wore, the dog fur on your clothes would show up...
Sorry, but the question of whether your mini-blinds should be white, ivory, or eggshell defintely falls into the category of the trivial.
Maybe it's a question of what we expect the called party to be doing. I'm usually out and about doing things that interest me - if my housemate were to call me to say "Hey, I was going to get a new set of knives for kitchen, do you want black or white handles?" I'd take that as an annoying interruption of whatever interesting thing I'm up to by a completely trivial matter.
Maybe that's really the sad part - that people are so uninterested in their own lives that to get a call from a friend wandering the ailses of a grocery store, trying to decide whether to purchase Fritos or Doritos, is considered exciting.
And if I don't have my phone on me...? Yes, believe it or not, sometime I don't. In fact, would you belive that that there are people who don't own cell phones at all? :-)
Beaming info is cool and all, but cheap, low-tech, durable, business cards that you can give out by the handful are an excellent solution, unlikely to be displaced. We just need a better way to get the info from them into our computers. There are OCR systems, but from what I understand they often get confused.
Ok, I've got it. What we need are bar codes on business cards....
Actually, I find it's easier to just remember the damn addresses, or to just scan back for the last message from someone and reply to it, than to keep an address book updated. "Automatic" address books don't help when many of your correspondant's From: lines don't include a name.
Fair use applies to everything. You can sing in the shower, or at someone's birthday party, without fear. If you making a "public performance", mechanical royalties are due.
Scanning my bookshelves, some of my reading recommendations:
- Tom Robbins might be considered fantasy, or "magical realism". Another Roadside Attraction is great.
- Thoreau. I finally took the time to read "Walden", and I'm glad I did.
- "Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglas". This should been required reading in every high school U.S. history class.
- Speaking of which, Larry Gonicks' Cartoon History of the United States, Cartoon History of the Universe, and The Cartoon Guide to Sex are good.
- Neil Gaiman's already been mentioned. If he wrote it,you should read it, it's just that simple.
:-)
- Ursula LeGuin. A Wizard of Earthsea is one of my all-time favorites; it's sequels are also worthy. Also, The Lathe of Heaven is excellent. (The old PBS movie is good; the recent TNT one sucked rocks.)
- Roger Zelazny. Some of his later stuff (the second "Amber" series, for instance) is merely ok, but his good stuff will blow you away. (Isle of the Dead and My Name is Legion I can read over and over.)
- Hunter S. Thompson. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Better Than Sex, and the various volumes of the Gonzo Papers.
- Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep amazes me every time I read it.
- Jonathan Lethem's Gun, With Occasional Music. Odd and interesting SF in the Chandleresque vein.
That ought to hold you for a few weeks.Four things to remember to keep charging and swapping batteries? No thanks. I have enough trouble remembering to put my cell phone in the charger, and pretty much gave up using my Agenda PDA because if I remembered to put the cellphone on the charger I'd forget the PDA.
What I'd like: Linux-based (of course!) cell phone with good data access, and a few simple on-board apps, like prescibble and mupo from the Agenda. Forget more complex PDA apps - give me a unit with good enough display and input that I can use the web. With GPS, please, since a "where the hell am I" moment can happen anytime. Built-in camera, like Japanese cell phones, a nice bonus for sudden snapshot opportunities.
(I've been thinking that a camera that uploads images quickly would be great for activists and whistleblowers - if the cops or security try to confiscate your camera and your photos, your images are already up on a server somewhere.)
Ecological niches are not static. Wiping out a species has ripple effects thoughout the ecosystem.
Not to mention that the current rate of specied extintion is like nothing since the dinosaurs were wiped out and the whole ecosytem pretty much got rebuilt. Since we are a part of this ecosystem, fucking about with it is not intelligent behavior.
Sometimes I imagine the first blue-green algea having this conversation:
"Hey, all this oxygen we're releasing...it's going to mess up the ecosystem. You know, we're destroying all sort of anaerobic bacteria."
"Ah, screw them if they can't adapt."
And so evolution creates an adaptation - primitive animals. That feed on algea.
"Survial of the fittest" - or more accurately, "best adapted", is a biological observation, not an ethical guide.
Speices have died out because they were not adapted to human predation or other fucking about with the ecosystem, yes. That doesn't mean that human predation, etc., is ethical behavior; any more than if I kill a man and rape his wife to father offspring, thus increasing my reproductive fitness.
We're unable to support our current 6 billion in a sustainable manner. Claims that the planet can sustain our present or greater population rely on either 1) ignorance of the nonsustainable nature of current agricultural, disposal, and economic methods, or 2) an assumption of a deus ex machina of new technology or new social organizations that would radically change resource usage.
Of course, Nature has a cure for overpopulation. But it's pretty unpleasant.
The differenct is that you and the store staff are actually there.
It's a more subtle, but more important, thing than the mere aggrivation of someone bellowing into a phone. It's the disassociation from one's actual surroundings. It's the inability to make simple decisions without using your "phone a friend" lifeline. It's the failure to acknowledge the human beings around you because you're discussing trivia with some distant electronic voice.
What I feel for these people who can't put the phone away isn't irritation. It's pity.
Which means that if you run your restaurant in a neglectful fashion and poison people, or if you run your print shop unsafely and employees are injured or killed, you can't be sued personally.
While that may sound good to the owners of a small business (since genuine accidents and bogus lawsuits do happen), when applied to large corporations this evasion of responsiblity is not a good thing. T'would be a far better world if stockholders had some liability for corporate misbehavior, if they could be sued for any income they dervied from the corporation. For example, if oil company stockholders had to pay for the oil spill clean-up out of their own pockets, you'd see a lot more responsbile behavior from those corporations.
You make yourself sound like someone resorting to ad homiem attacks due to lack of good arguements.
Which should not be the case. You are (I presume) an active participant in your business; the only relationship I have with the companies in which I own stock are pieces of paper I can sell sometime.
Probably because you're not wasting time and energy trying to explain to ignorant managers why the schedules are meaningless fantasies.
An analogy that occured to me during the scheduling of our current project: You are presented with a jungle. You have no idea of the terrain inside - rivers? quicksand? swamps? You don't know if there are any paths through it at all, much less where any that exist might be. Your job is to build a superhighway through it.
Your first step - before any other work - is to build a detailed schedule. Not just an estimate of how long it will take, but a list of "milestones" such that you know exactly where the project will stand on any given day.
If your project is simple - just building a bridge across a river, where the terrain is well-known - you might be able to do this. But I've yet to work on a software project simple enough that the schedule
I'm going to have to track down a copy of Peopleware and beat managers over the head with it in the future...
The RKBA is how (in the extreme case) we protect the right to privacy (and other rights).
In other words, to prevent people from suffering the consequences of their actions.
Oh, bulshit. Most corporate stockholders - i.e., absentee owners - aren't risking their necks, they are risking their surplus income on a speculative gamble. There's nothing more admirable or socially worthwhile about owning stock in the avergage corporation than about playing blackjack. (And I say that as a stockholder.)No one owns an idea. That's a philosophical and (so far as I know) legal misnomer - one possesses a copyright.
What gives the decendent of an author any special rights to it? What, should William Shakespeare's umpity-great grandson get royalties on Hamlet? Feh.
That not only doesn't make philosophical sense, it doesn't make Constitutional sense - Congress is authorized to grant a temporary exclusive copyright to an author. Not to his or her heirs. Nothing is said about such a copyright being transferable or inheritable.
You know that and I know that. I'm not sure the U.S. government knows that.
All it takes is someone to take the label "cyberterrorist" seriously...bang. You're disappeared. All your liberties are belong to us.
(If you think it won't happen, you need to look at the creep in the application of things like RICO and civil forfeiture.)
Legally, yes; but many people - advocacy groups and the media - often speak of "gun crimes" or "gun murders".
People can die during unarmed robbery too. Most crimes of violence are still committed with "personal weapons" - fists and feet. Knocking someone down and kicking them in the head can be just as deadly as shooting, stabbing, or clubbing.