Why not have them always enter the check digit, and use that to check their entry? It would seem to address your concerns exactly---perhaps it's why the check digit is printed with the others in the first place.
Finally, if it were a software problem, shouldn't they be able to play back the exact sequence of commands to a duplicate machine at JPL and reproduce the problem?
Step 1: Make an in-lab copy of the Mars environment...
My Tivo went dead a couple of months after I bought it (a $500 directv dual-tuner model), and it was out for three weeks getting repaired. I have three friends with a Tivo and every one of us has had it fail while under warranty.
Tivo, when it works, is great. But the common knowledge that the hardware is low quality has been borne out in my experience. I already have decided that the next time my Tivo goes belly-up I'm going to try resuscitate it myself with the online sites.
[...] but when someone replies with empty threats, the judicial system brings down the hammer.
How do you identify an empty threat?
A friend of mine's ex-boyfriend told her he'd kill her some day if she broke up with him. I told her I thought it was really unlikely that he'd actually travel across the country to kill her; people get angry like that all the time when someone breaks up with them, but the anger dissipates. (Beer often helps.)
She didn't hear from him for about six months, and then he showed up and killed her and her boyfriend.
I don't blame anyone for considering such a threat seriously, and I'm glad the law does too.
(In the case of my friend, she did take it seriously but there was nothing the police could do unless she had something in writing.)
What if you just want perl to run fast on Apache? That's what I'm using it for.
Then mod_perl is the wrong choice.
No it isn't. You suggest alternatives to writing Perl. If he wants Perl to run fast on Apache, which is what he said, then yes, mod_perl is exactly the way to do that.
It maintains an in-memory copy of the perl environment, and compiled versions of your scripts. In addition to giving you a lightning-fast perl environment, it also gives you access to Apache's API from Perl if you want it.
The drawback is that the children can be large (e.g., 25MB), requiring you to do some engineering to accomodate a lot of children. (E.g., have a non-mod_perl front-end Apache server for non-mod_perl requests, or a Squid cache can help, or preload everything so most of the bloat is shared.)
I worry that TiVo is going to lose their focus on making a good PVR that I like to use. If they see themselves as a data-collection company, they're likely to see me less as a feature-hungry tv viewer and more as a data source; their real customer becomes whoever buys the data, at which point it stops being all about me.
A startup company relies on excited customers, so the customer is in charge for a while. If the customers grow into a "customer base" to be used in some manner, that can dominate the company's focus. Then the CEO with the original vision is replaced with a number-cruncher who figures out how to maximize revenue, and nothing is very much fun anymore.
Fortunately, someone else eventually picks up the slack, and the original company no longer matters.
I hope I'm wrong; maybe this won't happen at TiVo...
Some people trust the government to give them comfort and safety; some don't, or don't value comfort or safety at the expense of liberty. Where you lie along this spectrum affects how much you like taxes.
There are lots of both kinds of people in the world...
Assuming that governments have to collect taxes somehow, why is this a bad way to do it, as opposed to income or corporate tax?
One way to compare taxes is how intrusive they are. To collect sales tax, the government has to follow every transaction. Even if you don't care about privacy issues, the overhead is greater than for a tax on, say, land.
While it's true that the government doesn't itself have to watch every transaction, because of self-policing on the part of businesses, there is the distributed overhead of the businesses themselves having to do that policing. You pay the cost one way or another.
Income tax has less overhead, but is still intrusive. (And unfair: I work extra hard, get that hard-earned raise, and the government takes a chunk without doing anything more for me.) Taxing land (not belongings, or buildings, but acreage) is the best of these, because (a) the records are already public, so it's not intrusive at all, and (b) there's relatively much less overhead. (And there's an argument that it's fair: A country is its land, and the protection thereof from foreign invaders. The more of that land that you can keep your fellow countrymen off of, the more you pay for that privilege.)
This is all on the issue of kinds of taxes. As to whether a business in one country should collect tax and send it to the government of the destination country, well, that just seems ridiculous to me: Your country's finances are between you and it. I shouldn't even have to know about it.
The problem is, everyone on slashdot would rather just complain on slashdot instead of actually writing thier representative a well worded letter.
No, the problem is writing a coherent letter is difficult. What exactly will the letter say?
If there was a clear bill in front of them that laid out every freedom we want to demand, it would be easy to write "Support XYZ". But if I'm going to express my opinion, I want to really address what's bugging me.
I want to make a case for not patenting most things, fair use, privacy, ending war on vice (drugs, prostitution, etc.), ending US military involvement outside the US, repealing the income, capital gains and inheritance taxes...
It quickly loses focus, and yet each of those things matters deeply to me, and they're all related to each other.
It takes a masterful writer to express a cogent argument, and in the end I believe there's little chance ANY such letter to my representatives would make an actual difference. In the past, a focused letter or email to my representatives has produced a response like:
"Thank you for expressing your opinion. Your opinion matters to me. My opinion is X. I will continue to move forward with X. Let me know if there's anything else I can do for you."
The framers of the U.S. Constitution and Declaration of Independence already wrote two remarkable letters to all lawmakers, who have been failing to be persuaded ever since.
Causing real change has to be difficult, or everyone would be doing it and change wouldn't last. (For better or worse they don't last anyway, though some changes will outlive me.)
I'm not saying don't write your representatives, but don't compare it to posting on slashdot. You may as well say don't protest the war with a sign when you could be dying alongside the Iraqis instead. Changing the government from within is a Sisyphean task that requires giving a good portion of your life to it. Expressing your opinion casually, every chance you get, may be less effective, but it also takes less of your life away and that matters too.
i'm sorry, but scenic pastoral allegories about bridges and houses makes me want to choke. has the author ever actually worked in the business world?
No, the article is right---most code I've seen is abysmal, and it's not an academic issue; elegant design matters on projects that will live for awhile, for a couple of reasons:
1. Code that is easy to follow is easier to get right than code that is not. (Of course.)
2. Elegant code is more fun to write, debug, and maintain than random-scatter code. An elegantly designed code base attracts and keeps better programmers than junk does---nobody likes to work on someone else's mess.
The second point is really this: If you spend a lot of time in code, the way you write that code determines what kind of world you live in; spending a little extra time (if that's what it takes) to make that world nicer pays off in joy, which matters to most programmers I've worked with.
Of course, aesthetics are an individual issue. One programmer likes that the program is small; another treasures its documentation; another its speed; another its unique approach.
Programming, because it takes place within the mind, is an intimate practice; this makes it difficult to tolerate aesthetic disagreements between programmers, which crop up everywhere. This gets in the way of (2) unless your programmers are unusually compatible or your team is very small. I imagine this crops up in every form of collaborative art, not just programming.
[...] one of my reasons against adding Scheme-style continuations to the language [...] is that it can't be implemented in a JVM. I find the existence of Jython very useful because it reminds me to think in terms of more abstract language semantics, not just implementation details.
Slashdot Mirror
Why not have them always enter the check digit, and use that to check their entry? It would seem to address your concerns exactly---perhaps it's why the check digit is printed with the others in the first place.
Finally, if it were a software problem, shouldn't they be able to play back the exact sequence of commands to a duplicate machine at JPL and reproduce the problem?
Step 1: Make an in-lab copy of the Mars environment...
Yeah, you know everything I'm sure.
My Tivo went dead a couple of months after I bought it (a $500 directv dual-tuner model), and it was out for three weeks getting repaired. I have three friends with a Tivo and every one of us has had it fail while under warranty.
Tivo, when it works, is great. But the common knowledge that the hardware is low quality has been borne out in my experience. I already have decided that the next time my Tivo goes belly-up I'm going to try resuscitate it myself with the online sites.
[...] but when someone replies with empty threats, the judicial system brings down the hammer.
How do you identify an empty threat?
A friend of mine's ex-boyfriend told her he'd kill her some day if she broke up with him. I told her I thought it was really unlikely that he'd actually travel across the country to kill her; people get angry like that all the time when someone breaks up with them, but the anger dissipates. (Beer often helps.)
She didn't hear from him for about six months, and then he showed up and killed her and her boyfriend.
I don't blame anyone for considering such a threat seriously, and I'm glad the law does too.
(In the case of my friend, she did take it seriously but there was nothing the police could do unless she had something in writing.)
No it isn't. You suggest alternatives to writing Perl. If he wants Perl to run fast on Apache, which is what he said, then yes, mod_perl is exactly the way to do that.
It maintains an in-memory copy of the perl environment, and compiled versions of your scripts. In addition to giving you a lightning-fast perl environment, it also gives you access to Apache's API from Perl if you want it.
The drawback is that the children can be large (e.g., 25MB), requiring you to do some engineering to accomodate a lot of children. (E.g., have a non-mod_perl front-end Apache server for non-mod_perl requests, or a Squid cache can help, or preload everything so most of the bloat is shared.)
I worry that TiVo is going to lose their focus on making a good PVR that I like to use. If they see themselves as a data-collection company, they're likely to see me less as a feature-hungry tv viewer and more as a data source; their real customer becomes whoever buys the data, at which point it stops being all about me.
A startup company relies on excited customers, so the customer is in charge for a while. If the customers grow into a "customer base" to be used in some manner, that can dominate the company's focus. Then the CEO with the original vision is replaced with a number-cruncher who figures out how to maximize revenue, and nothing is very much fun anymore.
Fortunately, someone else eventually picks up the slack, and the original company no longer matters.
I hope I'm wrong; maybe this won't happen at TiVo...
Some people trust the government to give them comfort and safety; some don't, or don't value comfort or safety at the expense of liberty. Where you lie along this spectrum affects how much you like taxes.
There are lots of both kinds of people in the world...
One way to compare taxes is how intrusive they are. To collect sales tax, the government has to follow every transaction. Even if you don't care about privacy issues, the overhead is greater than for a tax on, say, land.
While it's true that the government doesn't itself have to watch every transaction, because of self-policing on the part of businesses, there is the distributed overhead of the businesses themselves having to do that policing. You pay the cost one way or another.
Income tax has less overhead, but is still intrusive. (And unfair: I work extra hard, get that hard-earned raise, and the government takes a chunk without doing anything more for me.) Taxing land (not belongings, or buildings, but acreage) is the best of these, because (a) the records are already public, so it's not intrusive at all, and (b) there's relatively much less overhead. (And there's an argument that it's fair: A country is its land, and the protection thereof from foreign invaders. The more of that land that you can keep your fellow countrymen off of, the more you pay for that privilege.)
This is all on the issue of kinds of taxes. As to whether a business in one country should collect tax and send it to the government of the destination country, well, that just seems ridiculous to me: Your country's finances are between you and it. I shouldn't even have to know about it.
No, the problem is writing a coherent letter is difficult. What exactly will the letter say?
If there was a clear bill in front of them that laid out every freedom we want to demand, it would be easy to write "Support XYZ". But if I'm going to express my opinion, I want to really address what's bugging me.
I want to make a case for not patenting most things, fair use, privacy, ending war on vice (drugs, prostitution, etc.), ending US military involvement outside the US, repealing the income, capital gains and inheritance taxes...
It quickly loses focus, and yet each of those things matters deeply to me, and they're all related to each other.
It takes a masterful writer to express a cogent argument, and in the end I believe there's little chance ANY such letter to my representatives would make an actual difference. In the past, a focused letter or email to my representatives has produced a response like:
"Thank you for expressing your opinion. Your opinion matters to me. My opinion is X. I will continue to move forward with X. Let me know if there's anything else I can do for you."
The framers of the U.S. Constitution and Declaration of Independence already wrote two remarkable letters to all lawmakers, who have been failing to be persuaded ever since.
Causing real change has to be difficult, or everyone would be doing it and change wouldn't last. (For better or worse they don't last anyway, though some changes will outlive me.)
I'm not saying don't write your representatives, but don't compare it to posting on slashdot. You may as well say don't protest the war with a sign when you could be dying alongside the Iraqis instead. Changing the government from within is a Sisyphean task that requires giving a good portion of your life to it. Expressing your opinion casually, every chance you get, may be less effective, but it also takes less of your life away and that matters too.
No it isn't. You've just already been forced to pay for it with taxes or go to jail.
What, do you work for the patent office?
"This doesn't do just one thing. It does three things. Grant the patent."
When someone in Norway is indicted he probably is named Jon Johansen...
Type it a hundred times, with no apostrophes:
His, hers, its.
Redistribution of this post is encouraged.
No, the article is right---most code I've seen is abysmal, and it's not an academic issue; elegant design matters on projects that will live for awhile, for a couple of reasons:
1. Code that is easy to follow is easier to get right than code that is not. (Of course.)
2. Elegant code is more fun to write, debug, and maintain than random-scatter code. An elegantly designed code base attracts and keeps better programmers than junk does---nobody likes to work on someone else's mess.
The second point is really this: If you spend a lot of time in code, the way you write that code determines what kind of world you live in; spending a little extra time (if that's what it takes) to make that world nicer pays off in joy, which matters to most programmers I've worked with.
Of course, aesthetics are an individual issue. One programmer likes that the program is small; another treasures its documentation; another its speed; another its unique approach.
Programming, because it takes place within the mind, is an intimate practice; this makes it difficult to tolerate aesthetic disagreements between programmers, which crop up everywhere. This gets in the way of (2) unless your programmers are unusually compatible or your team is very small. I imagine this crops up in every form of collaborative art, not just programming.
--Pete
That's why he compiled for MIPS on both platforms.
He covered that in the article, as can be learned by reading it.
Clearly!