They /said/ the top was covered in duct tape...
on
Home Improvement
·
· Score: 2
...they just didn't say which side of the tape was facing outwards.:-) I assumed it was sticky-side-down, but after seeing this question, I have to wonder.
If It Was Me, I'd probably put most of the tape sticky-side-down, with the occasional strip reversed. Most of the table would be smooth, with occasional places of stickiness built-in. Definitely sounds like a useful workbench, when a 2mm screw floating loose could wedge in some panel and kill you.
I forgot the catholic church & political democracy
on
The Business
·
· Score: 2
as other examples of peers electing one of their own to lead them (cardinals electing a pope, citizens electing a president). Gosh, examples just popping up like mushrooms!
I resent movies that promote out of context, graphic sexual irresponsibility [...] This film handled both with kid gloves
I liked this movie, but here we disagree.
The hero and the token babe have, if memory serves me correctly, three short public conversations, one short public argument, and sex, in that order. That's a bit rushed for me.
Maybe not graphic sex, and if "We Will Rock You" wasn't out of context, than a little boinking surely wasn't, but it flunked the responsibility test flat.
Still a hilarious, fun movie, though, and I'll recommend it to any of my friends.
Ignore this message. I've switched from Netscape 4.7 to Mozilla 0.9 about ten minutes ago, and I wanted to see whether it still crashes on textarea fields. My/. post was still in the history from this morning...
Hmmm. The linewrapping sucks, but at least it's still running. The automatic insertion of "Re: " is a bit odd, too.:-)
Let's see what happens when I click submit...
I'll grant that much (most) of what takes place here on/. is pretty trite, but at least the people are intelligent and can get through the
day without referencing Survivor...
I've never seen Survivor. Sorry, you'll have to explain this one.
...for ease of memorization. Each stanza beginning with a successive letter of the alphabet, for example. Makes reciting several pages' worth a lot easier when you won't have a printing press for several centuries.
Now that would be an interesting use of acrostics in a term paper. "Prof, I can prove that this paper is mine. Here, follow along while I recite it from memory..."
This seems like a perfectly good example of a technological solution being applied successfully to a sociological problem...
I was chuckling when I posted my first article, wondering if anybody would notice that.
I honestly believe that, while the "look for cheaters" software is an interesting and useful step, it's not going to help in the long term, or even in the medium term. Frankly, students have far more time to spend on finding easy ways to skip out of honest work than the professors have on fighting the disease.
Does that mean that tech can't help? No, it's a useful tool. Just remember that it's only a tool, not a complete solution.
It should probably have read totally solve rather than apply, but there you go.
Maybe
Edwards' Law is more like a trite observation...
No need to be an asshole about it. Point me to something on/. that hasn't been a trite observation.
The article says that it takes a six-word phrase to trigger the initial match. That's quite a bit if you think about it; three- and four-word phrases are going to be relatively common, but beyond that...
It seems to have worked, too:
Word got out about the honor investigation a week before this semester's term papers were due. When he tested the latest batch, he found almost no plagiarism. "It was a very fast educational process," he said.
...because those maintainers in a position of authority (mostly the Steering Committee) have been too busy getting 3.0 ready for release. Herb Sutter had contacted the GCC list but apparently got no reply.
As you can see, as far as compliance goes, Gnu C++ is pretty good for a compiler, but is lacking in the library department. I find it
interesting, and I'm sure the GNU C++ team is looking at the numbers, considering how important the library is to the standard (it really
does make C++ more powerful).
The last releases, 2.95.x, as well as RH's snapshot-based spinoff of 2.96, all shipped with the old, nonstandard, noncompliant v2 C++ library, which has been mostly unmaintained for years.
Everybody's been working on the rewritten-from-scratch v3 C++ library, which has ISO compliance as its primary goal and criteria. If you get one of the nightly 3.0 build snapshot RPMS, you'll find that the new C++ library is the default.
Somewhere I still have the Usenet article where somebody was trying to get an Apache server to "speak Java" (some JVM problem I think), and was told that he had forgotten to signal with SIGHUP after making his changes. Except that U is right next to I on a qwerty keyboard, and so the poster mispelled it SIGHIP.
One of the followups said, no, if you send it a SIGHUP it'll speak Java, but if you send it a SIGHIP it'll start speaking Jive, and then proceeded to list a bunch of HTTP response codes all in "jive".
The only one I remember is "404 that file is NOT in da house."
In high school, I did some work for a local TV station, and I still remember filming an interview with a "hometown celebrity" who flew in some of the older warplanes.
Fokker (sp?) makes a lot of warplanes. Fokker also sounds a bit, um, obscene when spoken by somebody with a gutteral voice.
"...an' then we hit some ack-ack from the border guards an' that ol' Fokker started twisting so bad..."
Had to do quite a bit of trimming on that interview before running it.
What an understatement. OpenPROM 3.x absolutely rocks. PC BIOS makers could learn a thing or two from OpenPROM. (Yes, it's command-line instead of a GUI. Deal with it.) Device aliases have saved my bacon countless times.
Embedding a FORTH interpreter in the PROM for the boot monitor ("BIOS" for those of you who have never journeyed beyond PC-land) might seem like overkill, but I've heard a couple of sysadmins who apparently had their bacon saved by the ability to run arbitrary FORTH scripts before an operating system is loaded (remapping devices and whatnot).
Having to outrun the sunrise sorta blew it for me. There's the poking-fun-at-the-genre kind of silly, and there's the not-taking-ourselves-too-seriously kind of silly, and there's even the if-we-use-enough-F/X-we-don't-really-need-a-plot kind of silly, but running faster than the rotation of the planet somewhat bothers me. Armies of undead don't, but that does.
As an aside, my last programming boss told me when I signed on that if I was working a problem in my head during a 15-minute drive to work, then that was 15 billable minutes. Some managers do appreciate these questions.
Anyhow, your experiences with Andersen sound like a conglomeration of Death March projects. I think/. did a book review of it last year, I don't recall. It's written by the same guy who predicted major doom and gloom for American coders right before the big positive wave, Edward Yourdon (sp?). _Death March_ is a really good book, however.
The evil conslutant technique I feared the most was the crunch-time manager brought in to rescue a project who would create an artifical crisis as his way of seeing who would burn out "easily" and who could hack 80+ hours a week.
If I'm not learning something and enjoying learning it, it's work.
If I could have been spending the time trying to get Abby or Gloria or Nikky or Angel to go out on a date, but instead I'm having to clean up the system after someone with superluser privs horks it up, that's work.
Java was natural language evolution: it was created out of a technical need for a simple language with features from Smalltalk,
Pascal, and C++. When Sun created Java, they certainly weren't in competition with Smalltalk, Pascal, or C++ vendors.
Bullshit.
Don't get me wrong, I think Java does a good job in certain fields, and a lousy job in others, and I'd say the same thing about every other programming language in existence.
But don't even try and tell me that it wasn't a buisness decision to fight Microsoft. No previous programming language has been marketed to VPs and managers as well as programmers. No previous programming language got prime-time TV advertisements (anybody else remember the "Java has no limits" spot?) and huge billboards next to the downtown highways.
Java has the distinction of being the first programming language with a marketing slogan.
It's a nifty language and I like playing with it. It can do some things that, while certainly not new, are damn useful. But it wasn't a natural language evolution. It was designed to do one thing -- make money for Sun.
How can you possibly call yourself successful...
on
Coder on the Cross
·
· Score: 2
And I go home, forget about work, mow my lawn, go for a walk, watch the sunset and enjoy my life.
...if you have to mow your own lawn? Either get your kids to mow it while you walk and enjoy the sunset, or hire a high-school kid to mow it while you walk and enjoy the sunset, or genetically modify the grass to grow no higher than 3.7 inches and forget about it altogether while you walk and enjoy the sunset.
(I agree with you and your dad completely. I'm just teasing because I'd rather go back into the office than mow the lawn. I either stick with apartments where it's done for us, or I'll buy a house surrounded back a beautiful rock garden. Maybe some ferns.)
First, I just want to agree with your point about right-tool-for-the-right-job. Disturbingly few people understand that. Anyhow:
Lisp code is hard to read for most programmers, one big reason for this is that the condition in a conditional statement can be 10 lines
long, and 5 parentheses deep. Because of this, finding a bug in a Lisp program could take longer than finding on in a procedural
program.
Like the quote goes, "You can write FORTRAN in any language." Don't blame bad programming style or bad design on the language. You say it would take longer to find a bug than it would in a procedural language, but that's only because you know procedural programming better than Lisp hacking. Be fair.
Secondly not many people speak Lisp. Like Esperanto, something can be wonderfully designed but if it isn't widely used
So it has to be popular to be good? I know that's not what you really meant (hopefully), but that's a dangerous trap to fall into for a programmer. You just became one of those competitors in the article.
There's probably no data worth anything it will ever send back again.
Except for, "I'm 7 billion miles away AND STILL FUNCTIONING! Kiss my low-tech metallic ASS, you planned-obsolesence designers!"
The simple fact of its existence is enough to keep reminding ourselves that Americans used to know how to make things that went the distance. Now we make things cheaply, quickly, and crappily, and we do it on purpose.
The GNATS bug-tracking software (oh, go to www.gnu.org and look on their software list) does the same thing. Severity is how badly the software screws up. Priority is how soon it needs to be fixed.
Take a look at how GCC manages their bug reports for an example of this in use.
Slashdot Mirror
...they just didn't say which side of the tape was facing outwards.
If It Was Me, I'd probably put most of the tape sticky-side-down, with the occasional strip reversed. Most of the table would be smooth, with occasional places of stickiness built-in. Definitely sounds like a useful workbench, when a 2mm screw floating loose could wedge in some panel and kill you.
as other examples of peers electing one of their own to lead them (cardinals electing a pope, citizens electing a president). Gosh, examples just popping up like mushrooms!
Workers councils, good OSS projects, you name it...
I liked this movie, but here we disagree.
The hero and the token babe have, if memory serves me correctly, three short public conversations, one short public argument, and sex, in that order. That's a bit rushed for me.
Maybe not graphic sex, and if "We Will Rock You" wasn't out of context, than a little boinking surely wasn't, but it flunked the responsibility test flat.
Still a hilarious, fun movie, though, and I'll recommend it to any of my friends.
Ignore this message. I've switched from Netscape 4.7 to Mozilla 0.9 about ten minutes ago, and I wanted to see whether it still crashes on textarea fields. My /. post was still in the history from this morning...
Hmmm. The linewrapping sucks, but at least it's still running. The automatic insertion of "Re: " is a bit odd, too. :-)
Let's see what happens when I click submit...
I'll grant that much (most) of what takes place here on
I've never seen Survivor. Sorry, you'll have to explain this one.
...for ease of memorization. Each stanza beginning with a successive letter of the alphabet, for example. Makes reciting several pages' worth a lot easier when you won't have a printing press for several centuries.
Now that would be an interesting use of acrostics in a term paper. "Prof, I can prove that this paper is mine. Here, follow along while I recite it from memory..."
I was chuckling when I posted my first article, wondering if anybody would notice that.
I honestly believe that, while the "look for cheaters" software is an interesting and useful step, it's not going to help in the long term, or even in the medium term. Frankly, students have far more time to spend on finding easy ways to skip out of honest work than the professors have on fighting the disease.
Does that mean that tech can't help? No, it's a useful tool. Just remember that it's only a tool, not a complete solution.
It should probably have read totally solve rather than apply, but there you go.
No need to be an asshole about it. Point me to something on /. that hasn't been a trite observation.
The article says that it takes a six-word phrase to trigger the initial match. That's quite a bit if you think about it; three- and four-word phrases are going to be relatively common, but beyond that...
It seems to have worked, too:
Good corrective feedback mechanism there.
...because those maintainers in a position of authority (mostly the Steering Committee) have been too busy getting 3.0 ready for release. Herb Sutter had contacted the GCC list but apparently got no reply.
The last releases, 2.95.x, as well as RH's snapshot-based spinoff of 2.96, all shipped with the old, nonstandard, noncompliant v2 C++ library, which has been mostly unmaintained for years.
Everybody's been working on the rewritten-from-scratch v3 C++ library, which has ISO compliance as its primary goal and criteria. If you get one of the nightly 3.0 build snapshot RPMS, you'll find that the new C++ library is the default.
When will 3.0 be released? Sooner, if you help.
Somewhere I still have the Usenet article where somebody was trying to get an Apache server to "speak Java" (some JVM problem I think), and was told that he had forgotten to signal with SIGHUP after making his changes. Except that U is right next to I on a qwerty keyboard, and so the poster mispelled it SIGHIP.
One of the followups said, no, if you send it a SIGHUP it'll speak Java, but if you send it a SIGHIP it'll start speaking Jive, and then proceeded to list a bunch of HTTP response codes all in "jive".
The only one I remember is "404 that file is NOT in da house."
In high school, I did some work for a local TV station, and I still remember filming an interview with a "hometown celebrity" who flew in some of the older warplanes.
Fokker (sp?) makes a lot of warplanes. Fokker also sounds a bit, um, obscene when spoken by somebody with a gutteral voice.
"...an' then we hit some ack-ack from the border guards an' that ol' Fokker started twisting so bad..."
Had to do quite a bit of trimming on that interview before running it.
SPARC's OpenPROM is really, really cool.
What an understatement. OpenPROM 3.x absolutely rocks. PC BIOS makers could learn a thing or two from OpenPROM. (Yes, it's command-line instead of a GUI. Deal with it.) Device aliases have saved my bacon countless times.
Embedding a FORTH interpreter in the PROM for the boot monitor ("BIOS" for those of you who have never journeyed beyond PC-land) might seem like overkill, but I've heard a couple of sysadmins who apparently had their bacon saved by the ability to run arbitrary FORTH scripts before an operating system is loaded (remapping devices and whatnot).
It's not "speed of shadows in general," it's "speed of the terminator (dividing line between day and night)."
some fucking bike shop owners from north carolina trying to FLY, for god's sake, FLY!
This would be very like /. considering the brothers weren't from North Carolina. :-)
Having to outrun the sunrise sorta blew it for me. There's the poking-fun-at-the-genre kind of silly, and there's the not-taking-ourselves-too-seriously kind of silly, and there's even the if-we-use-enough-F/X-we-don't-really-need-a-plot kind of silly, but running faster than the rotation of the planet somewhat bothers me. Armies of undead don't, but that does.
None of them do a single thing with computers at all. Definitely not with the systems I hack on.
If they did, though, I'm just screwed all around.
As an aside, my last programming boss told me when I signed on that if I was working a problem in my head during a 15-minute drive to work, then that was 15 billable minutes. Some managers do appreciate these questions.
Anyhow, your experiences with Andersen sound like a conglomeration of Death March projects. I think /. did a book review of it last year, I don't recall. It's written by the same guy who predicted major doom and gloom for American coders right before the big positive wave, Edward Yourdon (sp?). _Death March_ is a really good book, however.
The evil conslutant technique I feared the most was the crunch-time manager brought in to rescue a project who would create an artifical crisis as his way of seeing who would burn out "easily" and who could hack 80+ hours a week.
If I'm not learning something and enjoying learning it, it's work.
If I could have been spending the time trying to get Abby or Gloria or Nikky or Angel to go out on a date, but instead I'm having to clean up the system after someone with superluser privs horks it up, that's work.
Bullshit.
Don't get me wrong, I think Java does a good job in certain fields, and a lousy job in others, and I'd say the same thing about every other programming language in existence.
But don't even try and tell me that it wasn't a buisness decision to fight Microsoft. No previous programming language has been marketed to VPs and managers as well as programmers. No previous programming language got prime-time TV advertisements (anybody else remember the "Java has no limits" spot?) and huge billboards next to the downtown highways.
Java has the distinction of being the first programming language with a marketing slogan.
It's a nifty language and I like playing with it. It can do some things that, while certainly not new, are damn useful. But it wasn't a natural language evolution. It was designed to do one thing -- make money for Sun.
...if you have to mow your own lawn? Either get your kids to mow it while you walk and enjoy the sunset, or hire a high-school kid to mow it while you walk and enjoy the sunset, or genetically modify the grass to grow no higher than 3.7 inches and forget about it altogether while you walk and enjoy the sunset.
(I agree with you and your dad completely. I'm just teasing because I'd rather go back into the office than mow the lawn. I either stick with apartments where it's done for us, or I'll buy a house surrounded back a beautiful rock garden. Maybe some ferns.)
First, I just want to agree with your point about right-tool-for-the-right-job. Disturbingly few people understand that. Anyhow:
Lisp code is hard to read for most programmers, one big reason for this is that the condition in a conditional statement can be 10 lines long, and 5 parentheses deep. Because of this, finding a bug in a Lisp program could take longer than finding on in a procedural program.
Like the quote goes, "You can write FORTRAN in any language." Don't blame bad programming style or bad design on the language. You say it would take longer to find a bug than it would in a procedural language, but that's only because you know procedural programming better than Lisp hacking. Be fair.
Secondly not many people speak Lisp. Like Esperanto, something can be wonderfully designed but if it isn't widely used
So it has to be popular to be good? I know that's not what you really meant (hopefully), but that's a dangerous trap to fall into for a programmer. You just became one of those competitors in the article.
it's not going to be too useful.
If it makes me $20 million, I'd call it useful.
Except for, "I'm 7 billion miles away AND STILL FUNCTIONING! Kiss my low-tech metallic ASS, you planned-obsolesence designers!"
The simple fact of its existence is enough to keep reminding ourselves that Americans used to know how to make things that went the distance. Now we make things cheaply, quickly, and crappily, and we do it on purpose.
The GNATS bug-tracking software (oh, go to www.gnu.org and look on their software list) does the same thing. Severity is how badly the software screws up. Priority is how soon it needs to be fixed.
Take a look at how GCC manages their bug reports for an example of this in use.
Before I actually respond to your post, I just want to thank you for your Device. That is truly a work of art.
Anyhow, I posted a comment mentioning why this won't work. It's way way down the page attached to a score=2 article, but here you go.
Basically, the problem is client-side security. I fully agree with the rest of your thoughts, however.