Re:Who Actually USES These Patterns?
on
Design Patterns
·
· Score: 2
As a C++ and Java developer (7 years dev experience), I use several of the patterns very frequently. In order of usefulness in my career:
Composite pattern Iterator!! (used in STL and Java Collections) Singleton Proxy (used implicitly in Java RMI) Prototype factory Adapter Observer (Java listeners, document-view architecture) Template method (used basically any time you do polymorphism) Decorator
I'm astounded that people with OO design experience who've read the book can claim that they don't use the patterns! Several of the patterns are more esoteric, but I would have to say I have used virtually every pattern in the book at one time or another.
What a crock! How is it any more "democratic" or "emphasizing individual choice" to travel to my destination by private rather than by public transit? In areas with good public transportation, it takes less time, is less stressful, is less dangerous, and allows more social interaction.
You can keep your America where more money equals the right to pollute more and increase accident rates, where we pride ourselves on being rugged individualists while we mindlessly play dick-measuring games with the size of our cars and idiotic consumption, where we gab about our open and democratic government while we lock people away following no due process and engage in war-mongering that even our allies despise.
America's founding principles make me proud. People who claim that our right to drive SUVs the size of semis and imprison foreign citizens because we have the biggest guns is what makes America great make me sick.
I apologize for the off-topic rant, but you hit a hot-button.
I agree that in the short term, tariffs and subsidies are much more important than IP laws. However, in the longer term, as nanotechnology matures, absurd IP laws like the ones we have now will make the difference between a world in which everyone has plenty, and a world in which we all work for media companies so we can pay twice the development costs to get the rights to have something we developed ourselves.
He explicitly pointed out that the fourth amendment grants rights against search, and did so more informatively than you did!
Your "I don't know what Bill of Rights" comment applies much more to you than to the original poster. Amendment IX and X state that the constitution doesn't deny people other rights, not that the constitution guarantees people every other right!
I don't see any support for your comment that privacy was considered such a natural right that it didn't need to be enumerated. One could make such an argument for any right not guaranteed in the constitution and it would still be just as falsifiable or provable (i.e. not at all provable).
The constitution clearly enumerates a number of rights. It is clear that we have other rights, as well. However, until those rights are added to the constitution, they're not constitutional rights.
In fact, though, I suspect you, me and the parent poster all agree with regard to the unconstitutionality of the specific behaviors you're talking about. Certainly airport searches and ID checks violate the fourth amendment. But that doesn't mean you have a constitutional right to not have your handwriting analyzed on a criminal document, or to keep the police from looking through your windows if you leave them open.
Hmm, it was the National Merit scholarship that I got; it's federally funded. I don't remember my score for certain; I think it was 1440. I certainly would have thought 1490 would be high enough.
It was based on percentage placement in the population, though, so maybe there were lots of high scores in the year you took it. I think the National Merit paid $2k per semester (of course, that was 14 years ago). That combined with the Pell left me working only part-time, basically for spending money. Actually, I got something called the Arkansas Scholarship that would have paid for my room, board & tuition for the full 4 years, but I screwed that one up after the first year:( but, on the other hand, I had a lot of fun in college:)
If those programs have ended, that's a very sad thing.
The really smart kids (or at least the ones who take tests well) have their college paid for anyway. If you take the SAT and score high enough, you get a full scholarship, at least for a state school. Combined with pell grants, you don't even have to work to get through college. I was really really poor growing up (I missed school for a week once because we couldn't afford shoes. I shit you not.) but my college was free.
With a sig that says "please don't comment about spelling" and a posting style that ignores the existence of most capital letters and punctuation, comments about someone's style of formatting URLs is a little disingenuous.
BTW, it's "URLs" and "can't", not "URL's" and "cant".
Excellent point. If we really wanted to investigate this, we should look at countries that have strong patent laws versus weak ones, and see who performs better in practice.
That's an excellent point. In my opinion, any drug that would significantly affect someone's ability to live a normal life should be available to that person at the cost of manufacture, if they can't afford the normal price of the drug. Of course, you have to make that rigorous and associate the monthly cost of the drug with a minimum monthly income, but that's easily enough done.
The only possible argument against this that I can see is that the drug companies would lose some small amount of money selling drugs to people who really can't afford them, but who come up with the money through charity, stealing, extremely frugal lifestyle, etc. Compared to the benefit of lives saved and made worth living, this cost is completely insignificant. I agree with you that pharmaceutical companies would probably recoup this cost many times over in good PR if they were to take this policy on their own, but apparently they don't see it that way. IMO it should be made part of the patent law. In fact, perhaps the rule should be that other companies can copy the drug, but they can sell it only to those who fall under the income cap. Then you don't have to set an artificial price for the drug, and you're not making patent law more restrictive, but rather less so. And, in fact, this could reduce the cost to manufacture the drug for the original company as they learn from refinements the other companies put into place. Of course, patent should still be of limited period, after which anyone can produce the drug who likes.
Hmmm... in fact, my understanding of patent law would indicate that right now I could look up the patent for the drugs and produce them in my home, if I need them. Of course, in the US it's probably illegal to practice medicine on yourself. We really have come a long way from the independent minded founders of this country.
How many drugs would we not have today if the pharmaceutical companies couldn't patent them? I doubt seriously that 1/3 as much money would be spent on development of new drugs if they weren't patentable.
I'm not particularly pro-patent, but let's keep this in perspective.
This doesn't invalidate your point (although it does make filtering harder) but steganography doesn't have to hide the data in a picture. You can hide data in a sound file, in a text stream, a binary download, or any other data stream in which what you pull down is not absolutely rigorously patterned.
Steganography most commonly uses pictures right now since they're large and easy to hide data in, but it doesn't have to.
I don't understand why this is interesting at all. These properties only matter for numbers expressed in base 10 (I mean, for other bases other numbers might exhibit the property, but the property is inherent to a standard base expression of the number).
A particular base expression of a number is not the number, it's a representation of the number. There are plenty of ways to express a number that don't involve any base, much less base 10. To me, interesting mathematical properties are independent of the expression of the number, like primality, arithmetic properties, whether it's algebraic or trancendental, etc.
The notion of 'palindrome' doesn't apply to numbers at all. It may apply to your representation of the number, but I can come up with a representation that is or is not a palindrome for any number you like. I just don't get the interest.
I did read all the way through. The system requires that it run into the word five times, spelled the same way, in a message marked as spam. That means that the the first spams that you receive that use only misspelled "spam words" will bypass the filter, and that will happen again and again as long as the spammers can come up with new ways to misspell the words.
I do think it's a good system, but his testing methodology as listed in the article is atrocious, and there are techniques spammers can use to bypass the filter if it were to become very popular.
But initially, the misspelling is only a word that the filter doesn't know, which is rated at.2, which is considered not a spam. After receiving a few spams with the misspelling and "delete-as-spam"ing them, the system will correct itself, until the spammers begin misspelling the word in a different way.
I question his testing methods. If I read the article right (oops, slashdot faux pas, I admitted to reading the article) he built the Bayesian map from about 4000 messages, then tested the efficacy of his algorithm against those same 4000 messages! He waves his hands about why that's OK, but wouldn't it make more sense to take 10 minutes to build his map against the first 2000 messages and test it against the remaining 2000? I really don't trust algorithms that use the input data combined with the desired results derive those same results against the same input data.
Secondly, over time, assuming that spammers put forth any effort into bypassing his filters, the filters will become much less useful. Spammers will intentionally misspell key words to lower their total spam rating. The easy solution to this is to make the map using a running total of only the messages from the last 3 months, or 6 months, or whatever period works best, but he should have at least mentioned that. Otherwise, over time the massive weight from the old emails will drown out any new spam identifying words.
All in all, it sounds like a great system, though, pending the results of a real test against emails other than the one you built the map from;)
Your big counter to his argument is that he's saying something "uncool" and "lame"? Could you conceivably be less persuasive?
Take a look at the rights guaranteed in the bill of rights, then take a look at how those rights are violated by other legislation. Can you tell the feds to stick it when they want your id before letting you on a plane? (unreasonable search) What about how Steve Jackson's hardware was stolen from him by the government based on groundless accusations? (unreasonable siezure) Can you go buy a machine gun or a tank? What part of "shall not be infringed" doesn't the government understand? What part of "to promote the progress of science and the arts" is the legislature failing to comprehend?
Some of us are grousing about our freedoms being taken away, while others seem determined to speed up the process. So far, very few are really standing up against it. I just hope we (myself included) come out of our apathy to stop and reverse this madness before guns and bombs will be necessary.
If special relativity is correct, you don't have to work to survive long trips at speeds near c.
The passage of time is relative, with a ratio of (1/(1-(v/c)^2). If your v is small compared to c, then the factor is near 1. If your v is, say,.9c, then the factor is (1/(1-.9^2)) = 1/.81 =~ 12. So a 4 light year trip at.9c would take only about 4 months in ship time, while it would take about 4 years from the point of view of those who didn't undergo the acceleration of the trip.
If you can go.99c, then the time factor is (1/(1-.99^2)) =~ 50, so the same trip would take about a month ship time, while still taking about 4 years from the planet-bound point of view.
It should take about a year to get up to near light speed at acceleration of 1 gravity. Of course, you have to get all that energy from somewhere, but I'm sure you can pull together some kind of Bussard Ramjetty thing to do it with, since we're assuming that we're at the singularity.
The various **AAs spend a lot of time bitching about how free copies are hurting their sales. They never produce any data to defend their position. If you want to see what free copies really do to sales, see http://www.baen.com/library/palaver6.htm for someone's actual experience.
If one civilization decides to build self-replicating probes that spread across the universe at STL speeds, terraforming the planets they land on (or perhaps just building explore-bots, or perhaps growing an entire civilization from data seeds carried along for the ride), that civilization radically improves its chances for survival. Such probes could cover much of the universe in quite a short period of time, relative to the age of the universe.
Assume that the probes travel at.1c, and every 10 light years they encounter enough raw material to spend 6 months (probably too long, but let's over-estimate) building new probes to send to all of the nearby neighbors. This would cover the galaxy in about 1.5 million years.
So if any one of those 100 billion stars in our galaxy had intelligent life that hit that point any time 1.5 million years ago or longer, at least one of those civilizations should own the galaxy.
To my mind, there are only a few possible answers: either there is some super-powerful civilization that conserves new life, we live in some kind of simulation run by other intelligent life, or intelligent life so rarely makes it to that point that the chances of there being another civilization are slim.
The problem is that natural selection should apply on these scales like it doesn on a planetary scale. Only the life forms that breed from planet to planet are likely to survive in the long run. Where are they?
I don't know. It's a very complex question. There is no doubt that Wal-Mart operates more efficiently than the mom-n-pop stores do, so it has to increase value overall. The problem is that they also take jobs away (not really a problem, that's what improved efficiency is all about) and give what work is left over to extremely underpaid people elsewhere. Those people are outside the US jurisdiction and we don't dictate to our companies that they can't buy things made under inhumane conditions.
So, the operations are more efficient. Good. Jobs are taken from US soil where we have some reasonable restrictions for humane conditions in the workplace. Bad. Some of the profit reduces prices. Good. Some of the extra profit goes to a few people, who apparently don't feel a moral obligation to not hurt people. Bad.
I don't know where you can get any information that isn't either propoganda from the big corps or from anti-sweatshop organizations, which I suspect are mostly run by unions, which I think are also run by people without real concern for the common good.
If you find out, please reply to this post with links:)
I disagree with the way you were moderated. I'm unsure of my position regarding Wal-Mart...
The question is, if it weren't for Wal-Mart, would your friend's family have had more money? Does Wal-Mart siphon more money out of the community than the amount they save you with more efficient operations?
I dunno the answer, but it seems like the answer is the same as the answer to the question "Is Wal-Mart bad for your community?"
Slashdot Mirror
As a C++ and Java developer (7 years dev experience), I use several of the patterns very frequently. In order of usefulness in my career:
Composite pattern
Iterator!! (used in STL and Java Collections)
Singleton
Proxy (used implicitly in Java RMI)
Prototype factory
Adapter
Observer (Java listeners, document-view architecture)
Template method (used basically any time you do polymorphism)
Decorator
I'm astounded that people with OO design experience who've read the book can claim that they don't use the patterns! Several of the patterns are more esoteric, but I would have to say I have used virtually every pattern in the book at one time or another.
What a crock! How is it any more "democratic" or "emphasizing individual choice" to travel to my destination by private rather than by public transit? In areas with good public transportation, it takes less time, is less stressful, is less dangerous, and allows more social interaction.
You can keep your America where more money equals the right to pollute more and increase accident rates, where we pride ourselves on being rugged individualists while we mindlessly play dick-measuring games with the size of our cars and idiotic consumption, where we gab about our open and democratic government while we lock people away following no due process and engage in war-mongering that even our allies despise.
America's founding principles make me proud. People who claim that our right to drive SUVs the size of semis and imprison foreign citizens because we have the biggest guns is what makes America great make me sick.
I apologize for the off-topic rant, but you hit a hot-button.
Well, I thought of this when I was 15, 17 years ago. It's amazing the crap people can patent.
The vast majority of the value of gold is emotional (the "oooh! pretty!" factor), so your statement is obviously false.
I agree that in the short term, tariffs and subsidies are much more important than IP laws. However, in the longer term, as nanotechnology matures, absurd IP laws like the ones we have now will make the difference between a world in which everyone has plenty, and a world in which we all work for media companies so we can pay twice the development costs to get the rights to have something we developed ourselves.
He explicitly pointed out that the fourth amendment grants rights against search, and did so more informatively than you did!
Your "I don't know what Bill of Rights" comment applies much more to you than to the original poster. Amendment IX and X state that the constitution doesn't deny people other rights, not that the constitution guarantees people every other right!
I don't see any support for your comment that privacy was considered such a natural right that it didn't need to be enumerated. One could make such an argument for any right not guaranteed in the constitution and it would still be just as falsifiable or provable (i.e. not at all provable).
The constitution clearly enumerates a number of rights. It is clear that we have other rights, as well. However, until those rights are added to the constitution, they're not constitutional rights.
In fact, though, I suspect you, me and the parent poster all agree with regard to the unconstitutionality of the specific behaviors you're talking about. Certainly airport searches and ID checks violate the fourth amendment. But that doesn't mean you have a constitutional right to not have your handwriting analyzed on a criminal document, or to keep the police from looking through your windows if you leave them open.
Hmm, it was the National Merit scholarship that I got; it's federally funded. I don't remember my score for certain; I think it was 1440. I certainly would have thought 1490 would be high enough.
:( but, on the other hand, I had a lot of fun in college :)
It was based on percentage placement in the population, though, so maybe there were lots of high scores in the year you took it. I think the National Merit paid $2k per semester (of course, that was 14 years ago). That combined with the Pell left me working only part-time, basically for spending money. Actually, I got something called the Arkansas Scholarship that would have paid for my room, board & tuition for the full 4 years, but I screwed that one up after the first year
If those programs have ended, that's a very sad thing.
The really smart kids (or at least the ones who take tests well) have their college paid for anyway. If you take the SAT and score high enough, you get a full scholarship, at least for a state school. Combined with pell grants, you don't even have to work to get through college. I was really really poor growing up (I missed school for a week once because we couldn't afford shoes. I shit you not.) but my college was free.
With a sig that says "please don't comment about spelling" and a posting style that ignores the existence of most capital letters and punctuation, comments about someone's style of formatting URLs is a little disingenuous.
BTW, it's "URLs" and "can't", not "URL's" and "cant".
Excellent point. If we really wanted to investigate this, we should look at countries that have strong patent laws versus weak ones, and see who performs better in practice.
That's an excellent point. In my opinion, any drug that would significantly affect someone's ability to live a normal life should be available to that person at the cost of manufacture, if they can't afford the normal price of the drug. Of course, you have to make that rigorous and associate the monthly cost of the drug with a minimum monthly income, but that's easily enough done.
The only possible argument against this that I can see is that the drug companies would lose some small amount of money selling drugs to people who really can't afford them, but who come up with the money through charity, stealing, extremely frugal lifestyle, etc. Compared to the benefit of lives saved and made worth living, this cost is completely insignificant. I agree with you that pharmaceutical companies would probably recoup this cost many times over in good PR if they were to take this policy on their own, but apparently they don't see it that way. IMO it should be made part of the patent law. In fact, perhaps the rule should be that other companies can copy the drug, but they can sell it only to those who fall under the income cap. Then you don't have to set an artificial price for the drug, and you're not making patent law more restrictive, but rather less so. And, in fact, this could reduce the cost to manufacture the drug for the original company as they learn from refinements the other companies put into place. Of course, patent should still be of limited period, after which anyone can produce the drug who likes.
Hmmm... in fact, my understanding of patent law would indicate that right now I could look up the patent for the drugs and produce them in my home, if I need them. Of course, in the US it's probably illegal to practice medicine on yourself. We really have come a long way from the independent minded founders of this country.
How many drugs would we not have today if the pharmaceutical companies couldn't patent them? I doubt seriously that 1/3 as much money would be spent on development of new drugs if they weren't patentable.
I'm not particularly pro-patent, but let's keep this in perspective.
This doesn't invalidate your point (although it does make filtering harder) but steganography doesn't have to hide the data in a picture. You can hide data in a sound file, in a text stream, a binary download, or any other data stream in which what you pull down is not absolutely rigorously patterned.
Steganography most commonly uses pictures right now since they're large and easy to hide data in, but it doesn't have to.
I don't understand why this is interesting at all. These properties only matter for numbers expressed in base 10 (I mean, for other bases other numbers might exhibit the property, but the property is inherent to a standard base expression of the number).
A particular base expression of a number is not the number, it's a representation of the number. There are plenty of ways to express a number that don't involve any base, much less base 10. To me, interesting mathematical properties are independent of the expression of the number, like primality, arithmetic properties, whether it's algebraic or trancendental, etc.
The notion of 'palindrome' doesn't apply to numbers at all. It may apply to your representation of the number, but I can come up with a representation that is or is not a palindrome for any number you like. I just don't get the interest.
I did read all the way through. The system requires that it run into the word five times, spelled the same way, in a message marked as spam. That means that the the first spams that you receive that use only misspelled "spam words" will bypass the filter, and that will happen again and again as long as the spammers can come up with new ways to misspell the words.
I do think it's a good system, but his testing methodology as listed in the article is atrocious, and there are techniques spammers can use to bypass the filter if it were to become very popular.
But initially, the misspelling is only a word that the filter doesn't know, which is rated at .2, which is considered not a spam. After receiving a few spams with the misspelling and "delete-as-spam"ing them, the system will correct itself, until the spammers begin misspelling the word in a different way.
I question his testing methods. If I read the article right (oops, slashdot faux pas, I admitted to reading the article) he built the Bayesian map from about 4000 messages, then tested the efficacy of his algorithm against those same 4000 messages! He waves his hands about why that's OK, but wouldn't it make more sense to take 10 minutes to build his map against the first 2000 messages and test it against the remaining 2000? I really don't trust algorithms that use the input data combined with the desired results derive those same results against the same input data.
;)
Secondly, over time, assuming that spammers put forth any effort into bypassing his filters, the filters will become much less useful. Spammers will intentionally misspell key words to lower their total spam rating. The easy solution to this is to make the map using a running total of only the messages from the last 3 months, or 6 months, or whatever period works best, but he should have at least mentioned that. Otherwise, over time the massive weight from the old emails will drown out any new spam identifying words.
All in all, it sounds like a great system, though, pending the results of a real test against emails other than the one you built the map from
From now on, shouldn't it be (as not-root) ./configure && make && sudo make install
?
It won't stop all trojans by any stretch of the imagination, but it's just a little bit safer than the alternative...
With total conversion, reaching .99c should take only (only ;) 100 times the mass of the object you are accelerating.
I agree the energy requirements are ludicrous, but we are talking about the capabilities of entities capable of whatever is physically possible.
Your big counter to his argument is that he's saying something "uncool" and "lame"? Could you conceivably be less persuasive?
Take a look at the rights guaranteed in the bill of rights, then take a look at how those rights are violated by other legislation. Can you tell the feds to stick it when they want your id before letting you on a plane? (unreasonable search) What about how Steve Jackson's hardware was stolen from him by the government based on groundless accusations? (unreasonable siezure) Can you go buy a machine gun or a tank? What part of "shall not be infringed" doesn't the government understand? What part of "to promote the progress of science and the arts" is the legislature failing to comprehend?
Some of us are grousing about our freedoms being taken away, while others seem determined to speed up the process. So far, very few are really standing up against it. I just hope we (myself included) come out of our apathy to stop and reverse this madness before guns and bombs will be necessary.
If special relativity is correct, you don't have to work to survive long trips at speeds near c.
.9c, then the factor is (1/(1-.9^2)) = 1/.81 =~ 12. So a 4 light year trip at .9c would take only about 4 months in ship time, while it would take about 4 years from the point of view of those who didn't undergo the acceleration of the trip.
.99c, then the time factor is (1/(1-.99^2)) =~ 50, so the same trip would take about a month ship time, while still taking about 4 years from the planet-bound point of view.
The passage of time is relative, with a ratio of (1/(1-(v/c)^2). If your v is small compared to c, then the factor is near 1. If your v is, say,
If you can go
It should take about a year to get up to near light speed at acceleration of 1 gravity. Of course, you have to get all that energy from somewhere, but I'm sure you can pull together some kind of Bussard Ramjetty thing to do it with, since we're assuming that we're at the singularity.
The various **AAs spend a lot of time bitching about how free copies are hurting their sales. They never produce any data to defend their position. If you want to see what free copies really do to sales, see http://www.baen.com/library/palaver6.htm for someone's actual experience.
If one civilization decides to build self-replicating probes that spread across the universe at STL speeds, terraforming the planets they land on (or perhaps just building explore-bots, or perhaps growing an entire civilization from data seeds carried along for the ride), that civilization radically improves its chances for survival. Such probes could cover much of the universe in quite a short period of time, relative to the age of the universe.
.1c, and every 10 light years they encounter enough raw material to spend 6 months (probably too long, but let's over-estimate) building new probes to send to all of the nearby neighbors. This would cover the galaxy in about 1.5 million years.
Assume that the probes travel at
So if any one of those 100 billion stars in our galaxy had intelligent life that hit that point any time 1.5 million years ago or longer, at least one of those civilizations should own the galaxy.
To my mind, there are only a few possible answers: either there is some super-powerful civilization that conserves new life, we live in some kind of simulation run by other intelligent life, or intelligent life so rarely makes it to that point that the chances of there being another civilization are slim.
The problem is that natural selection should apply on these scales like it doesn on a planetary scale. Only the life forms that breed from planet to planet are likely to survive in the long run. Where are they?
I don't know. It's a very complex question. There is no doubt that Wal-Mart operates more efficiently than the mom-n-pop stores do, so it has to increase value overall. The problem is that they also take jobs away (not really a problem, that's what improved efficiency is all about) and give what work is left over to extremely underpaid people elsewhere. Those people are outside the US jurisdiction and we don't dictate to our companies that they can't buy things made under inhumane conditions.
:)
So, the operations are more efficient. Good.
Jobs are taken from US soil where we have some reasonable restrictions for humane conditions in the workplace. Bad.
Some of the profit reduces prices. Good.
Some of the extra profit goes to a few people, who apparently don't feel a moral obligation to not hurt people. Bad.
I don't know where you can get any information that isn't either propoganda from the big corps or from anti-sweatshop organizations, which I suspect are mostly run by unions, which I think are also run by people without real concern for the common good.
If you find out, please reply to this post with links
I disagree with the way you were moderated. I'm unsure of my position regarding Wal-Mart...
The question is, if it weren't for Wal-Mart, would your friend's family have had more money? Does Wal-Mart siphon more money out of the community than the amount they save you with more efficient operations?
I dunno the answer, but it seems like the answer is the same as the answer to the question "Is Wal-Mart bad for your community?"