I ask this question earnestly, as I'm not a biologist/virologist and don't claim to fully understand the mechanisms of infection and transmission.
That said, under what pressure is the flu virus mutating as to avoid this vaccine? That is, why would a flu virus six months from now produce markedly different antibodies than one today? Certainly, some random chance must factor in, but assuming there's no selection pressure until the time at which the vaccine is deployed, shouldn't the vaccine work as well as it usually does?
Or does the flu virus commonly mutate significantly in very short timespans?
I get the flu now and then, but I don't remember the last time I got the flu twice in one season, so the mutation rate can't be that high and the mutation factor can't be that extreme. Or maybe it can, and the flu just sweeps through an area and then goes away?
Yes, by all means, let's get angry at Apple for a product we haven't seen yet, with specifications that we don't know and with a form-factor that is--at best--undecided.
Apple hasn't said they're making this. There are rumors, but those are wrong all the time. For all we know, they're playing with wearable computer prototypes that go in your shoe or that you wear as a necklace or a weird Apple hat. And even if they ARE working on a watch, there's no guarantee that they'll ever release it. Maybe they're just looking at ways to strap your phone to your body, or maybe it's a Fitbit/Jawbone/Basis-like device.
Cool your jets. We don't actually know a goddamn thing at the moment.
Man, how general purpose do you want it? An iPad will do everything an Apple II did back in the day, and and a couple orders of magnitude faster. The method of interaction has changed, but it's still a general purpose computer. It isn't restricted to doing a single task. That CPU will execute arbitrary instructions. That's why you have an OS and you can make calls on it OR play games OR write a paper OR browse the web.
The fact that it's HARD to install a compiler on it (since that's what everyone seems to be getting at) doesn't make it less of a general purpose computing device. That's a function of the vendor, not the device. Since Android tablets are less restricted and I presume there's a port of GCC somewhere, why shouldn't they count as PCs? Of course these are PCs.
That's absurdly irrelevant. What if someone cuts your ethernet cable on your PC? What will you ssh to then? OH NO.
I can still write code on my iPad without SSHing somewhere. I just can't compile it without some special work.
But that's no different from a windows PC that you buy at the shop. It doesn't come with a compiler built in. These are all irrelevant distractions from the point.
Well, first of all, it's a false dichotomy. Most business users need to do some word processing and maybe some spreadsheet work. Sometimes a presentation. Maybe they need to do some research on the Internet. That sounds an awful lot like what home users use their PCs for.
I'm a programmer, and my needs are only marginally more technical. I need to do all those other things, but I need a compiler and an OS that will let me do my work without getting in my way too much. Since I'm a game developer, it turns out my development environment also often needs to be the same as the one that home consumers have, since they're the ones buying the games. If my development environment were too far removed, it'd make things harder. As it happens, since the games I work on tend to be for the Xbox, it means that I need extra dev hardware, but that's not really the main issue.
There are business cases that call for a different OS, but I'd argue at that point, you're probably also looking at things like Linux to do server-ish things. But yeah, the business environment is mainly stuff that is common in the home environment. Instead of making two product lines, they need to make one actually usable product line. Usability shouldn't just belong to one kind of consumer or the other.
If there's one thing everyone should be rushing to copy, it's Aplle's new connector design. Seriously. It's fast and you don't have to worry about orientation. That might not seem lime a big deal, but the design of standard USB connectors is so prone to misalignment that it's a common joke that they're somehow extra-dimensional (that is, it doesn't fit the first try, or on the second try when you flip it over, but it works on the third try when it's the same alignment as the first try).
From a human interface perspective, it's ideal.
Apple really can't win on the connector front. Macs were the first to commonly ship with USB ports, and people were none too pleased about that at first as I recall. Then FireWire, which was great for so many things and was faster, but had a fee that manufacturers found unpalatable. Now thunderbolt and lightning, which are superior to their predecessors in basically every way...but people still want to use USB.
Connector standards change. I've got four or five different USB cables for different things in my house; the 'standard' hasn't solved any cable proliferation problems at all. One more connector type doesn't bother me as long as it's better. I just regret that I bought my iPad a few months too early to get on the new connector bandwagon, despite the abundance of 30-pin cables I have laying around.
If the people that you're working with are bad enough that they're leaving incorrect comments in, the code probably isn't much good either.
It's a false equivalence, in any case. Good comments make code easier to read. As far as I know, nobody was brought up with C as their first language, and so are more expressive in a natural spoken language.
Bad comments do clutter things up, but nobody is saying you should comment poorly.
I've never owned a Blackberry. But I like interesting OSes, and I like marketplace diversity. It's this sort of stuff that makes it interesting to own a device.
I have an iPhone 4. The only Android device that's tempted me at all so far is one of the recently announced Sonys (waterproof, ANT+, Sony's typically good camera) and that's about it. The current state of the market offers me very little that's meaningful in my day-to-day life, and so phones are kind of boring. Samsung vs. Apple. Android vs. iOS vs. WP8! It's Meh vs. Meh if you ask me.
I stick with iOS because it's a Mac household, I have other iOS devices, and my friends and family have iPhones. iMessage and Facetime are staples for me. It'll take an awful lot to pry me away from that.
But that said, if the new Blackberry is interesting enough, I'll give it a serious look. The small players have to work harder to make things interesting, and RIM is now a legitimate 'small' player in this market. It's a bit do-or-die, so I expect some interesting stuff.
He loves the lack of white space, I hate it. Cramped code is irritating to read. If you want to take up less vertical space, reduce your font and increase the whitespace. You have a better sense of the separation of statements, stronger scoping and less room for error.
He also loves the lack of comments. I remain firmly in the camp that if you eschew comments as common practice, you're an idiot and you should stay away from programming on big teams.
It's not a clarity of code issue. I expect your code to be clear, too. But even after 20 years of programming, I read English faster than I read code. A description of an algorithm in English is going to be more terse than the code that implements it. Your code has to account for edge cases, but I probably just want to know what the code does and how the code does it at a high level so I can get a sense of the system and architecture. A descriptive method name only tells me WHAT the method does, not the manner in which it's done.
English (any natural language, really) is a powerful language with extraordinary expressive power. I don't understand why programmers are constantly trying to sweep it under the rug. Don't fill your code with useless comments like// increments the counter by 1, but if you're doing a non-trivial mathematical calculation that takes a whole method to encapsulate it, let me know what I'm getting in to.
Code comments--especially system level comments--should include the name of the author or current maintainer, as well. I tag my methods with my name and the date that the code was put in so people know where to go if there's trouble. They don't have to hunt through perforce time-lapses to see that I checked it in, they just email me.
And have some consideration for the new guy on the team, or the team that has to use your code 5 years in the future. They can't ask you questions, the context of the situation is lost, the code-base might be in the middle of being re-purposed (common in the game industry--which is where I am); comments are essential to maintainability. Man, I do code reviews and people often manage to forget exactly what they were trying to do, and it's only been a few hours. We always work it out, but if there were a comment, we wouldn't even have to spend THAT time.
Use comments. Use them wisely. It makes you a better programmer because you're wasting less of OTHER people's time.
Intellectually, I find it really interesting and impressive. I've always believed that jailbreaks and hacks were the sort of thing that would happen relatively quickly. While the issue of control may make this a problem for you, you have to be impressed that a phone and OS might be without an untethered hack for the whole meaningful lifetimes of those products. Could we actually see the next iteration of the phone before a proper jailbreak is released? If so, I rather think that Apple's programmers should be pretty proud of themselves. Security isn't easy.
If there are good comments in the code, people will at least understand the process if not the details.
If you're writing code that Snafucates something (and we all know how difficult properly snafucating an arbitrary thing is), an outline of the algorithm in the method comments will save everyone some time. Not everyone that comes and looks at your code needs to understand it intimately--sometimes they just need an overview to understand how various systems fit together.
If someone coming into the code DOES need to understand it intimately, the comments let them get a good idea of what's coming. They start to form a mental picture of how the code will go about the task of snafucating things.
I've come into heavily mathematical code more than once and had very little trouble understanding it because of the good comments and description of the solution. That domain is not what I'd consider my primary strength, and the code is usually very terse for performance reasons. Good comments solve a lot of problems--assuming both the code and comments are correct.
Fallacy. (Copy and paste is pretty trivial.) Fallacy/Over-generalisation (YouTube provides a link through its own share button inside the app; obviously you can copy and paste the URL in Safari. iPad users may or may not know these things. I do.) Opinion. (I think the ease-of-use of tablets is pretty accurate.) Opinion/Tautology (What do you do on your desktop that isn't handled by an application? Emacs does many things, but it's still an application. There are perhaps fewer general purpose applications on a tablet, but indeed, UNIX is itself conceptually built around the idea of small applications that only do one small task well, and it's up to the user to chain those results together. That's why grep only searches for things and doesn't also email the results or create tabular data.)
And I typed all of this using an onscreen keyboard because there's a cat on my lap and I'm sitting in an armchair. It didn't take me long. Maybe you're just bad at it.
Very few people can make a living like that. It forces them to take other jobs and not dedicate themselves to the products that people might want to use.
The problem is that writing software has this issue, whereas creating physical objects doesn't. If he made widgets, he could price the widgets knowing that when a person buys one, they buy only one, and he can account for costs and labour and profit and taxes all at once. If he writes software, he does no less REAL work, but there's an idea or expectation that because the work is copiable without degradation he should now be working on a donation model.
The only thing that's different here is that the cost of materials and distribution has gone way down. He hasn't done any less work. His price should be lower because his costs are lower, but you're paying for his ability to write good software that does the job that needs to get done.
It's one thing to choose to donate your time to a FSF project, but if he chooses to charge for his software, that doesn't give people the right to walk away with the work that he's done without paying for it. Pay for it or don't, but if you don't pay, he should be allowed to say that you can't have his work. Now whether you believe that he can protect the idea from being implemented by someone else at different quality or lower cost is another matter.
It takes a lot of money to make some kinds of software. I'm in the games industry and I've seen projects that cost $50 million to get out the door. A cheap triple-A game might be made for a bit less than $20 million. It's not the sort of thing that lends well to the donation model. (I'm not a big fan of DRM, btw...I feel that it takes away sufficiently enough convenience and good will as to make no financial sense. I still think you're a dick if you don't pay for a game and play it anyway, but I think it's better to make life easy for the non-dick population than to wage a hopeless war against assholes.)
Yes, and I can agree with that to an extent. But what this represented wasn't a matter of trying before buying. Assuming some of the claims are true—like the one where the online game had to shut down because of the excessive number of non-paying players—we're really just seeing the cheap-asses trying to get something for free.
The real test would've been if apple had a "try before buy" system already available. Most so-called piracy would've been much easier to distinguish at that point.
In any case, it's hard to shed a tear for any of these people—developers or users. When you buy an iPhone or whatever, you're walking into the walled garden with your eyes open. If you don't like it, buy an android phone or just stay out of the App Store.:/
What you're talking about is a dressed up version of the age old question about whether it's all right for a man to take a loaf of bread to feed his starving family. You're pitting extreme injustice (that anyone can be left to starve in a moral society) against the morality of theft. You're right: there's a grey area there and the whole thing is on a spectrum.
In a just society, a government would not allow such important drugs to be monopolised—if the government is really there to serve and protect the populace, we wouldn't need to get as far as individuals needing to steal or
But this is a false equivalence. What we're talking about is apps on an App Store, some of which cost as little as 99c. You'll have a hard time convincing me that anything there is a matter of life and death, and if it is, pay the dollar and save the life!
I don't believe in absolute morality in a general sense—there are lies worth telling, people worth killing and fights worth having, even if one should try to live their life in a manner that avoids lying and killing and fighting. But in the microcosm of the apple App Store, I really do think those are the two reasonable, moral choices.
Yes, okay, sure. The strict definition of copying and theft aren't isomorphic. That's fine.
But the reason why there's even anything called 'Copyright Infringement' is because there's a general notion that one can make a creative work that's value is in the concept rather than the physical embodiment.
Elvis music had value beyond the disc it was printed on. (If that weren't true, people wouldn't have wanted so badly to listen to it.)
Physicality is not the be-all and end-all of this discussion. If you go and get a haircut, you still have to pay, even though by walking out of the salon you haven't taken anything PHYSICAL. There was work invested in that haircut. It's a service. Services aren't necessarily tangible (psychotherapy, for instance) but there's still value in them.
I don't know why slashdotters have persisted for well over ten years now to insist only physical things can have value when most of us make our livings by providing services and selling the decidedly intangible work.
If someone is charging for an application, you have two—and ONLY two options—take it or leave it. If the work has value greater than or equal to the cost that they ask, you pay. If the work isn't worth what they're charging, you go looking for something else or write your own. Those are seriously your only two MORAL choices. Everything else is equivocation about how cheap a bastard you are.
I know a few people that used this as an excuse to jump ship back to Flickr, now that Flickr's app is pretty good. But I've got a lot of contacts on Instagram, so I'm weaning myself off of Instagram by posting my pictures on a delay, and providing links to my Flickr account. I'm still counted as an 'active' user, particularly on a weekly basis, but I'm using the service less. I'll be keeping my account to look at the photos that friends are posting for the foreseeable future, though.
Questionable content and Girls with Slingshots are personal favourites.
SMBC is the smartest comic out there. He updates every day. Sometimes he isn't as technically deep or impressive as XKCD (which I also love), but I find SMBC covers more topics and Ian way that can be appreciated by more people.
Girl Genius and Gunnerkrigg court get my vote for best long-running stories. Also lovely art and fantastic colours. (When the colourist for GG was sick, the strip was almost unreadable—the line work is very busy, and the colours really give depth.)
I've been programming professionally in C++ for ten years, and I'll be the first to admit that I stay away from a lot of the so-called 'powerful' features. In fact, in the games industry, we tend to stay away from that stuff in general. It's the nature of systems that have a lot of churn, both in features and maintainers. An engine is pretty old if it's five years old. Ten years (which I've seen) is really the limit of usefulness. The code needs to run fast, be debugged quickly and under pressure, and be reliable. So we use a fairly limited subset of the language.
But I still don't like it. My problem with it stems from two things (which is kind of just one thing):
1) There's a lot of discovered functionality; and 2) The specification is huge and difficult to implement properly.
The first is actually a result of the second, and that mostly comes down to templates. Template meta-programming wasn't intended. It's interesting stuff that's an accidental result of making a Turing complete language and bolting it onto the side of the primary language. And frankly, it's a solution to a problem that never should have existed in the first place. The things that templates do have been implemented in other languages before.
But that second point is the real kicker. I remember when the C++ standard was confirmed to NOT have a bad recursion in it. That was just around ten years ago, and it's a story I remember reading here. But what I also remember is that professional compiler writers were showing up and commenting about how insane the spec is. They often set out to make a perfect compiler that implemented everything, but they always gave up after tearing out their hair and going half insane.
To me, that's a huge issue that sits in the back of my mind. How good can a language be if the specification isn't understood BEFORE the compiler is written? How well implemented is the compiler that I'm using? How far can it be trusted?
I'm no great shakes as a compiler programmer—I've only implemented one that was a limited subset of pascal, in my university days—but I'm confident that given some time and impetus, I could actually write a C compiler that worked. I can basically guarantee that I'd never be able to do the same with C++. And is the increase in expressive power sufficient to make me believe that the trade-off is worth it? Obviously C can go a long way on its own.
At the end of the day, it's usually the algorithms that make the difference, and most of us can make a go of it in any language. But philosophically, I really just can't get behind what C++ is.
If you look at the caloric value of food, the values that are given are theoretical maxima. Fat has 9kcal of energy per gram. The value is calculated using a bomb calorimeter, and I'm relatively sure that it works at a higher efficiency than the human gut. Given that, you can know ahead of time how much energy you're getting from the food under best case conditions. The digestive system can only introduce thermodynamic drag on the system. So a person with the right kind of gut flora is getting closer to 100% of the value on the package. But that still means that if you're careful, you should be able to figure out how to eat less that what you output and lose weight.
So thermodynamics still rules the roost here, we just need to understand better how efficient some people are versus others, what sort of hormonal feedback loops are present (if you always feel hungry, it's going to be hard to limit your intake—people aren't robots) and what sorts of nutritional side effects this has.
I personally feel like this is an obvious result. Your gut bacteria must obviously have an impact on how many calories you can absorb—people on lots of antibiotics end up losing a lot of weight because they can't digest anything. Without those bacteria, you'll starve to death. To discover that some bacteria are more of an influence in obesity than others was just an obvious conclusion waiting for supporting data.
This only happens because people ignore that comments are important.
Or, put another way: the code isn't finished until it's documented. Sure, it runs, but it's not COMPLETE.
A sloppy programmer that programs bugs into code is the same a sloppy programmer that doesn't update the comments.
In any case, comments aren't a replacement for reading the code, they're to help you quickly interpret the code and the INTENT of the programmer that put it there. Documenting the algorithm is much more useful than documenting each bit of the implementation.
Apple's system will pay dividends of its own--their integrated map system is something you can leverage as a developer, whereas before this whole kerfuffle, there was no API to interact with the Google system. Now that Google's been punted, they're coming back AND they're opening up their own API; what a surprise.
Sometimes change is good. Sometimes change that initially looks bad is also good. Apple is coming out ahead on this one--their maps application may not be the best, but it's questionable whether or not that's relevant, since they still have access to the best maps application in the mobile space, thoughtfully provided by their supposed competitor.
I think Google is wising up to the fact that they just need to be in every pocket, regardless of OS. They win with every sale of iOS AND Android that way.
We do things that not any one animal is better at, but there are a considerable number of things that other animals can do that I think are far more impressive.
A cheetah, for instance, can run ~100kph and accelerate to that speed in roughly 3s. Sure, we can build cars that can do that, but they're thousands of kilograms and it takes nearly every ounce of engineering knowledge we possess to accelerate those kilograms that fast, but we do so at far lower efficiency than the cheetah. If our goal is to accelerate a consciousness on the ground to extremely high speeds at high efficiency, the cheetah has us beat.
Okay, maybe that example is too contrived, or it too easily dismisses our intellectual or engineering capacity. I might be able to buy that.
Well, we certainly can't dive as deep as...well, nearly any deep diving vertebrate, to say nothing of the invertebrates. We can't camouflage ourselves, adapt quickly to changing environmental conditions, grow new limbs, breathe water or eat toxic waste. We're not the biggest; most numerous; most dextrous; possessed of the best vision, sense of smell or hearing; the longest lived or the toughest.
Humans fall short in nearly every way you can measure except the ability to exploit and overwhelm the environment we're in. I can't even definitively say we're the smartest just because we've done these things; Dolphins and Whales (and Octopodes, perhaps) are all extremely intelligent in a way that I don't think we can really measure--their intelligence is effectively alien to us.
So I actually agree that it's hard to apply animal behaviour models to humans, because we aren't them and they aren't us. But if you study a rat neuron and a monkey neuron and a human neuron, the differences aren't so extreme as to invalidate the research. There's lots of stuff that we can study in animals first. (I actually just learned about something called 'Blindsight' today--and it was first discovered in monkeys. A damaged visual cortex makes you believe you're blind, but your brain is still processing visual signals. You're just not passing them through any of your 'consciousness'. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight)
Humans like to hold themselves above everything else, and we may have a few good reasons for that. But I think we need to realise how much a product of this planet and its confines we are, and how, biologically, we're thoroughly intertwined with so many other things around us. You're only about 1% different from a Chimp or Bonobo. Don't get cocky.:)
Slashdot Mirror
I ask this question earnestly, as I'm not a biologist/virologist and don't claim to fully understand the mechanisms of infection and transmission.
That said, under what pressure is the flu virus mutating as to avoid this vaccine? That is, why would a flu virus six months from now produce markedly different antibodies than one today? Certainly, some random chance must factor in, but assuming there's no selection pressure until the time at which the vaccine is deployed, shouldn't the vaccine work as well as it usually does?
Or does the flu virus commonly mutate significantly in very short timespans?
I get the flu now and then, but I don't remember the last time I got the flu twice in one season, so the mutation rate can't be that high and the mutation factor can't be that extreme. Or maybe it can, and the flu just sweeps through an area and then goes away?
Yes, by all means, let's get angry at Apple for a product we haven't seen yet, with specifications that we don't know and with a form-factor that is--at best--undecided.
Apple hasn't said they're making this. There are rumors, but those are wrong all the time. For all we know, they're playing with wearable computer prototypes that go in your shoe or that you wear as a necklace or a weird Apple hat. And even if they ARE working on a watch, there's no guarantee that they'll ever release it. Maybe they're just looking at ways to strap your phone to your body, or maybe it's a Fitbit/Jawbone/Basis-like device.
Cool your jets. We don't actually know a goddamn thing at the moment.
Man, how general purpose do you want it? An iPad will do everything an Apple II did back in the day, and and a couple orders of magnitude faster. The method of interaction has changed, but it's still a general purpose computer. It isn't restricted to doing a single task. That CPU will execute arbitrary instructions. That's why you have an OS and you can make calls on it OR play games OR write a paper OR browse the web.
The fact that it's HARD to install a compiler on it (since that's what everyone seems to be getting at) doesn't make it less of a general purpose computing device. That's a function of the vendor, not the device. Since Android tablets are less restricted and I presume there's a port of GCC somewhere, why shouldn't they count as PCs? Of course these are PCs.
Computers look different now, gosh! Film at 11.
That's absurdly irrelevant. What if someone cuts your ethernet cable on your PC? What will you ssh to then? OH NO.
I can still write code on my iPad without SSHing somewhere. I just can't compile it without some special work.
But that's no different from a windows PC that you buy at the shop. It doesn't come with a compiler built in. These are all irrelevant distractions from the point.
Well, first of all, it's a false dichotomy. Most business users need to do some word processing and maybe some spreadsheet work. Sometimes a presentation. Maybe they need to do some research on the Internet. That sounds an awful lot like what home users use their PCs for.
I'm a programmer, and my needs are only marginally more technical. I need to do all those other things, but I need a compiler and an OS that will let me do my work without getting in my way too much. Since I'm a game developer, it turns out my development environment also often needs to be the same as the one that home consumers have, since they're the ones buying the games. If my development environment were too far removed, it'd make things harder. As it happens, since the games I work on tend to be for the Xbox, it means that I need extra dev hardware, but that's not really the main issue.
There are business cases that call for a different OS, but I'd argue at that point, you're probably also looking at things like Linux to do server-ish things. But yeah, the business environment is mainly stuff that is common in the home environment. Instead of making two product lines, they need to make one actually usable product line. Usability shouldn't just belong to one kind of consumer or the other.
If there's one thing everyone should be rushing to copy, it's Aplle's new connector design. Seriously. It's fast and you don't have to worry about orientation. That might not seem lime a big deal, but the design of standard USB connectors is so prone to misalignment that it's a common joke that they're somehow extra-dimensional (that is, it doesn't fit the first try, or on the second try when you flip it over, but it works on the third try when it's the same alignment as the first try).
From a human interface perspective, it's ideal.
Apple really can't win on the connector front. Macs were the first to commonly ship with USB ports, and people were none too pleased about that at first as I recall. Then FireWire, which was great for so many things and was faster, but had a fee that manufacturers found unpalatable. Now thunderbolt and lightning, which are superior to their predecessors in basically every way...but people still want to use USB.
Connector standards change. I've got four or five different USB cables for different things in my house; the 'standard' hasn't solved any cable proliferation problems at all. One more connector type doesn't bother me as long as it's better. I just regret that I bought my iPad a few months too early to get on the new connector bandwagon, despite the abundance of 30-pin cables I have laying around.
If the people that you're working with are bad enough that they're leaving incorrect comments in, the code probably isn't much good either.
It's a false equivalence, in any case. Good comments make code easier to read. As far as I know, nobody was brought up with C as their first language, and so are more expressive in a natural spoken language.
Bad comments do clutter things up, but nobody is saying you should comment poorly.
I've never owned a Blackberry. But I like interesting OSes, and I like marketplace diversity. It's this sort of stuff that makes it interesting to own a device.
I have an iPhone 4. The only Android device that's tempted me at all so far is one of the recently announced Sonys (waterproof, ANT+, Sony's typically good camera) and that's about it. The current state of the market offers me very little that's meaningful in my day-to-day life, and so phones are kind of boring. Samsung vs. Apple. Android vs. iOS vs. WP8! It's Meh vs. Meh if you ask me.
I stick with iOS because it's a Mac household, I have other iOS devices, and my friends and family have iPhones. iMessage and Facetime are staples for me. It'll take an awful lot to pry me away from that.
But that said, if the new Blackberry is interesting enough, I'll give it a serious look. The small players have to work harder to make things interesting, and RIM is now a legitimate 'small' player in this market. It's a bit do-or-die, so I expect some interesting stuff.
He loves the lack of white space, I hate it. Cramped code is irritating to read. If you want to take up less vertical space, reduce your font and increase the whitespace. You have a better sense of the separation of statements, stronger scoping and less room for error.
He also loves the lack of comments. I remain firmly in the camp that if you eschew comments as common practice, you're an idiot and you should stay away from programming on big teams.
It's not a clarity of code issue. I expect your code to be clear, too. But even after 20 years of programming, I read English faster than I read code. A description of an algorithm in English is going to be more terse than the code that implements it. Your code has to account for edge cases, but I probably just want to know what the code does and how the code does it at a high level so I can get a sense of the system and architecture. A descriptive method name only tells me WHAT the method does, not the manner in which it's done.
English (any natural language, really) is a powerful language with extraordinary expressive power. I don't understand why programmers are constantly trying to sweep it under the rug. Don't fill your code with useless comments like // increments the counter by 1, but if you're doing a non-trivial mathematical calculation that takes a whole method to encapsulate it, let me know what I'm getting in to.
Code comments--especially system level comments--should include the name of the author or current maintainer, as well. I tag my methods with my name and the date that the code was put in so people know where to go if there's trouble. They don't have to hunt through perforce time-lapses to see that I checked it in, they just email me.
And have some consideration for the new guy on the team, or the team that has to use your code 5 years in the future. They can't ask you questions, the context of the situation is lost, the code-base might be in the middle of being re-purposed (common in the game industry--which is where I am); comments are essential to maintainability. Man, I do code reviews and people often manage to forget exactly what they were trying to do, and it's only been a few hours. We always work it out, but if there were a comment, we wouldn't even have to spend THAT time.
Use comments. Use them wisely. It makes you a better programmer because you're wasting less of OTHER people's time.
Intellectually, I find it really interesting and impressive. I've always believed that jailbreaks and hacks were the sort of thing that would happen relatively quickly. While the issue of control may make this a problem for you, you have to be impressed that a phone and OS might be without an untethered hack for the whole meaningful lifetimes of those products. Could we actually see the next iteration of the phone before a proper jailbreak is released? If so, I rather think that Apple's programmers should be pretty proud of themselves. Security isn't easy.
If there are good comments in the code, people will at least understand the process if not the details.
If you're writing code that Snafucates something (and we all know how difficult properly snafucating an arbitrary thing is), an outline of the algorithm in the method comments will save everyone some time. Not everyone that comes and looks at your code needs to understand it intimately--sometimes they just need an overview to understand how various systems fit together.
If someone coming into the code DOES need to understand it intimately, the comments let them get a good idea of what's coming. They start to form a mental picture of how the code will go about the task of snafucating things.
I've come into heavily mathematical code more than once and had very little trouble understanding it because of the good comments and description of the solution. That domain is not what I'd consider my primary strength, and the code is usually very terse for performance reasons. Good comments solve a lot of problems--assuming both the code and comments are correct.
Fallacy. (Copy and paste is pretty trivial.)
Fallacy/Over-generalisation (YouTube provides a link through its own share button inside the app; obviously you can copy and paste the URL in Safari. iPad users may or may not know these things. I do.)
Opinion. (I think the ease-of-use of tablets is pretty accurate.)
Opinion/Tautology (What do you do on your desktop that isn't handled by an application? Emacs does many things, but it's still an application. There are perhaps fewer general purpose applications on a tablet, but indeed, UNIX is itself conceptually built around the idea of small applications that only do one small task well, and it's up to the user to chain those results together. That's why grep only searches for things and doesn't also email the results or create tabular data.)
And I typed all of this using an onscreen keyboard because there's a cat on my lap and I'm sitting in an armchair. It didn't take me long. Maybe you're just bad at it.
Very few people can make a living like that. It forces them to take other jobs and not dedicate themselves to the products that people might want to use.
The problem is that writing software has this issue, whereas creating physical objects doesn't. If he made widgets, he could price the widgets knowing that when a person buys one, they buy only one, and he can account for costs and labour and profit and taxes all at once. If he writes software, he does no less REAL work, but there's an idea or expectation that because the work is copiable without degradation he should now be working on a donation model.
The only thing that's different here is that the cost of materials and distribution has gone way down. He hasn't done any less work. His price should be lower because his costs are lower, but you're paying for his ability to write good software that does the job that needs to get done.
It's one thing to choose to donate your time to a FSF project, but if he chooses to charge for his software, that doesn't give people the right to walk away with the work that he's done without paying for it. Pay for it or don't, but if you don't pay, he should be allowed to say that you can't have his work. Now whether you believe that he can protect the idea from being implemented by someone else at different quality or lower cost is another matter.
It takes a lot of money to make some kinds of software. I'm in the games industry and I've seen projects that cost $50 million to get out the door. A cheap triple-A game might be made for a bit less than $20 million. It's not the sort of thing that lends well to the donation model. (I'm not a big fan of DRM, btw...I feel that it takes away sufficiently enough convenience and good will as to make no financial sense. I still think you're a dick if you don't pay for a game and play it anyway, but I think it's better to make life easy for the non-dick population than to wage a hopeless war against assholes.)
Yes, and I can agree with that to an extent. But what this represented wasn't a matter of trying before buying. Assuming some of the claims are true—like the one where the online game had to shut down because of the excessive number of non-paying players—we're really just seeing the cheap-asses trying to get something for free.
The real test would've been if apple had a "try before buy" system already available. Most so-called piracy would've been much easier to distinguish at that point.
In any case, it's hard to shed a tear for any of these people—developers or users. When you buy an iPhone or whatever, you're walking into the walled garden with your eyes open. If you don't like it, buy an android phone or just stay out of the App Store. :/
What you're talking about is a dressed up version of the age old question about whether it's all right for a man to take a loaf of bread to feed his starving family. You're pitting extreme injustice (that anyone can be left to starve in a moral society) against the morality of theft. You're right: there's a grey area there and the whole thing is on a spectrum.
In a just society, a government would not allow such important drugs to be monopolised—if the government is really there to serve and protect the populace, we wouldn't need to get as far as individuals needing to steal or
But this is a false equivalence. What we're talking about is apps on an App Store, some of which cost as little as 99c. You'll have a hard time convincing me that anything there is a matter of life and death, and if it is, pay the dollar and save the life!
I don't believe in absolute morality in a general sense—there are lies worth telling, people worth killing and fights worth having, even if one should try to live their life in a manner that avoids lying and killing and fighting. But in the microcosm of the apple App Store, I really do think those are the two reasonable, moral choices.
Yes, okay, sure. The strict definition of copying and theft aren't isomorphic. That's fine.
But the reason why there's even anything called 'Copyright Infringement' is because there's a general notion that one can make a creative work that's value is in the concept rather than the physical embodiment.
Elvis music had value beyond the disc it was printed on. (If that weren't true, people wouldn't have wanted so badly to listen to it.)
Physicality is not the be-all and end-all of this discussion. If you go and get a haircut, you still have to pay, even though by walking out of the salon you haven't taken anything PHYSICAL. There was work invested in that haircut. It's a service. Services aren't necessarily tangible (psychotherapy, for instance) but there's still value in them.
I don't know why slashdotters have persisted for well over ten years now to insist only physical things can have value when most of us make our livings by providing services and selling the decidedly intangible work.
If someone is charging for an application, you have two—and ONLY two options—take it or leave it. If the work has value greater than or equal to the cost that they ask, you pay. If the work isn't worth what they're charging, you go looking for something else or write your own. Those are seriously your only two MORAL choices. Everything else is equivocation about how cheap a bastard you are.
I know a few people that used this as an excuse to jump ship back to Flickr, now that Flickr's app is pretty good. But I've got a lot of contacts on Instagram, so I'm weaning myself off of Instagram by posting my pictures on a delay, and providing links to my Flickr account. I'm still counted as an 'active' user, particularly on a weekly basis, but I'm using the service less. I'll be keeping my account to look at the photos that friends are posting for the foreseeable future, though.
Lackadaisy Cats is pretty much unbeatable for art: http://lackadaisy.foxprints.com/
Unless you also consider the Abominable Charles Christopher: http://www.abominable.cc/2012/08/
Consistently funniest is Oglaf (often NSFW): http://oglaf.com/branding/1/
Questionable content and Girls with Slingshots are personal favourites.
SMBC is the smartest comic out there. He updates every day. Sometimes he isn't as technically deep or impressive as XKCD (which I also love), but I find SMBC covers more topics and Ian way that can be appreciated by more people.
Girl Genius and Gunnerkrigg court get my vote for best long-running stories. Also lovely art and fantastic colours. (When the colourist for GG was sick, the strip was almost unreadable—the line work is very busy, and the colours really give depth.)
I've been programming professionally in C++ for ten years, and I'll be the first to admit that I stay away from a lot of the so-called 'powerful' features. In fact, in the games industry, we tend to stay away from that stuff in general. It's the nature of systems that have a lot of churn, both in features and maintainers. An engine is pretty old if it's five years old. Ten years (which I've seen) is really the limit of usefulness. The code needs to run fast, be debugged quickly and under pressure, and be reliable. So we use a fairly limited subset of the language.
But I still don't like it. My problem with it stems from two things (which is kind of just one thing):
1) There's a lot of discovered functionality; and
2) The specification is huge and difficult to implement properly.
The first is actually a result of the second, and that mostly comes down to templates. Template meta-programming wasn't intended. It's interesting stuff that's an accidental result of making a Turing complete language and bolting it onto the side of the primary language. And frankly, it's a solution to a problem that never should have existed in the first place. The things that templates do have been implemented in other languages before.
But that second point is the real kicker. I remember when the C++ standard was confirmed to NOT have a bad recursion in it. That was just around ten years ago, and it's a story I remember reading here. But what I also remember is that professional compiler writers were showing up and commenting about how insane the spec is. They often set out to make a perfect compiler that implemented everything, but they always gave up after tearing out their hair and going half insane.
To me, that's a huge issue that sits in the back of my mind. How good can a language be if the specification isn't understood BEFORE the compiler is written? How well implemented is the compiler that I'm using? How far can it be trusted?
I'm no great shakes as a compiler programmer—I've only implemented one that was a limited subset of pascal, in my university days—but I'm confident that given some time and impetus, I could actually write a C compiler that worked. I can basically guarantee that I'd never be able to do the same with C++. And is the increase in expressive power sufficient to make me believe that the trade-off is worth it? Obviously C can go a long way on its own.
At the end of the day, it's usually the algorithms that make the difference, and most of us can make a go of it in any language. But philosophically, I really just can't get behind what C++ is.
I agree with you...to a point.
If you look at the caloric value of food, the values that are given are theoretical maxima. Fat has 9kcal of energy per gram. The value is calculated using a bomb calorimeter, and I'm relatively sure that it works at a higher efficiency than the human gut. Given that, you can know ahead of time how much energy you're getting from the food under best case conditions. The digestive system can only introduce thermodynamic drag on the system. So a person with the right kind of gut flora is getting closer to 100% of the value on the package. But that still means that if you're careful, you should be able to figure out how to eat less that what you output and lose weight.
So thermodynamics still rules the roost here, we just need to understand better how efficient some people are versus others, what sort of hormonal feedback loops are present (if you always feel hungry, it's going to be hard to limit your intake—people aren't robots) and what sorts of nutritional side effects this has.
I personally feel like this is an obvious result. Your gut bacteria must obviously have an impact on how many calories you can absorb—people on lots of antibiotics end up losing a lot of weight because they can't digest anything. Without those bacteria, you'll starve to death. To discover that some bacteria are more of an influence in obesity than others was just an obvious conclusion waiting for supporting data.
This only happens because people ignore that comments are important.
Or, put another way: the code isn't finished until it's documented. Sure, it runs, but it's not COMPLETE.
A sloppy programmer that programs bugs into code is the same a sloppy programmer that doesn't update the comments.
In any case, comments aren't a replacement for reading the code, they're to help you quickly interpret the code and the INTENT of the programmer that put it there. Documenting the algorithm is much more useful than documenting each bit of the implementation.
...Said the anonymous coward. :)
In general, I'd like to make a 'complain' about this submission's diction and spelling.
Apple's system will pay dividends of its own--their integrated map system is something you can leverage as a developer, whereas before this whole kerfuffle, there was no API to interact with the Google system. Now that Google's been punted, they're coming back AND they're opening up their own API; what a surprise.
Sometimes change is good. Sometimes change that initially looks bad is also good. Apple is coming out ahead on this one--their maps application may not be the best, but it's questionable whether or not that's relevant, since they still have access to the best maps application in the mobile space, thoughtfully provided by their supposed competitor.
I think Google is wising up to the fact that they just need to be in every pocket, regardless of OS. They win with every sale of iOS AND Android that way.
We do things that not any one animal is better at, but there are a considerable number of things that other animals can do that I think are far more impressive.
A cheetah, for instance, can run ~100kph and accelerate to that speed in roughly 3s. Sure, we can build cars that can do that, but they're thousands of kilograms and it takes nearly every ounce of engineering knowledge we possess to accelerate those kilograms that fast, but we do so at far lower efficiency than the cheetah. If our goal is to accelerate a consciousness on the ground to extremely high speeds at high efficiency, the cheetah has us beat.
Okay, maybe that example is too contrived, or it too easily dismisses our intellectual or engineering capacity. I might be able to buy that.
Well, we certainly can't dive as deep as...well, nearly any deep diving vertebrate, to say nothing of the invertebrates. We can't camouflage ourselves, adapt quickly to changing environmental conditions, grow new limbs, breathe water or eat toxic waste. We're not the biggest; most numerous; most dextrous; possessed of the best vision, sense of smell or hearing; the longest lived or the toughest.
Humans fall short in nearly every way you can measure except the ability to exploit and overwhelm the environment we're in. I can't even definitively say we're the smartest just because we've done these things; Dolphins and Whales (and Octopodes, perhaps) are all extremely intelligent in a way that I don't think we can really measure--their intelligence is effectively alien to us.
So I actually agree that it's hard to apply animal behaviour models to humans, because we aren't them and they aren't us. But if you study a rat neuron and a monkey neuron and a human neuron, the differences aren't so extreme as to invalidate the research. There's lots of stuff that we can study in animals first. (I actually just learned about something called 'Blindsight' today--and it was first discovered in monkeys. A damaged visual cortex makes you believe you're blind, but your brain is still processing visual signals. You're just not passing them through any of your 'consciousness'. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight)
Humans like to hold themselves above everything else, and we may have a few good reasons for that. But I think we need to realise how much a product of this planet and its confines we are, and how, biologically, we're thoroughly intertwined with so many other things around us. You're only about 1% different from a Chimp or Bonobo. Don't get cocky. :)