MediaWiki (the software behind Wikipedia) can transform a company's culture from "nobody ever documents anything" into "Is it on the wiki yet??" It's the "swiss army knife" of intranet applications, super-extendable and easy to use. Even non-techies can master wikitext syntax with about 15 minutes of training.
Dude, go back to logic school. "There exist some happy prostitutes" does not equal "All prostitution is victimless." I guess that explains the rest of your "logic."
Your guesses about my own morality were quite amusing, bordering on silly. I loved when you wrote, "YOU are the one helping to enslave them...." Truly inspired. I congratulate you on a fine, industrial-strength troll.
...even though there are no victims for this crime...
Ah. You believe the myth of the happy prostitute.
Picking up runaways off the street, forcing them into prostitution, and getting them indebted and hooked on drugs so they can't leave, is not a victimless crime. Making prostitution legal will not prevent this; there are always girls down on their luck, and always scum ready to prey on them.
Two techniques I particularly remember for increasing my Linux effectiveness were:
1. find piped into xargs (or "find -print0" piped into "xargs -0" for safety) to process a directory tree in a single command
2. Printing commands on stdout and piping them into bash. For example, if you want to rename a bunch of files, and you put the old names into file "oldnames" and the new names into "newnames", one per line, you can do the mass renaming with:
$ paste oldnames newnames | sed 's/^/mv/' | bash
generates a sequence of "mv" commands and executes them.
First time I saw each of these, it was so eye-opening.
...because it works. Endless uptime. Tools that do the basics correctly, and the advanced stuff with a little extra effort. State-of-the-art scripting. Mysterious problems fixed with one quick Google search. It just works.
...ad agency Neurotronics has developed a new means of getting consumer's attention: bashing them in the skull with a sledgehammer. "There's going to be a certain population sensitive to it," says CEO Gary Krane, "But once people see what it does and feel it for themselves, they'll see it's effective for getting attention."
I wonder if this is a non-issue. I've been using eBay for years and honestly, I haven't noticed the ads. Literally. If you'd asked me earlier today if eBay has these ads, I'd have said no.
Definitely my digital bathroom scale. When you stand on it, the LED lights up with the word "OFF" telling you to get off. Then it goes to zero, and you stand on it a SECOND time to get weighed.
Uhhh... why not a scale that you stand on once... and it WEIGHS you?!? Too mind-boggling a user interface, I guess.
And no, I'm not so heavy that the scale WANTS me off.:-)
10 years ago, the Republicans were fighting the exact same war against the Clinton administration (you remember Mr. "I did not have sex with that woman", don't ya?).
Oh definitely. Ten years ago, the president was lying about having sex, whereas the current president launched a war based on lies that has killed more Americans than 9/11 and tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians. For starters.
Yeah, these sound like "the exact same war" to me!:-/
If you're just asking for functions then you're doing something wrong....
Heh... that's what I get for giving a quick answer. You took me too literally. We certainly do not evaluate a software candidate simply by asking them to code a few functions. (Though a surprising number can't even do that.) Candidates with good-looking resumes first have an hour-long technical phonescreen. Then they visit for 4-5 interviews of an hour each, covering programming, databases, back-of-the-envelope problem-solving, previous jobs, etc. Lots of coverage from high-level to low-level, from big problems to small ones. Then they provide a code sample, then references.
It seems like we're doing a pretty good job at it. Most engineers are happy here, the work is challenging, and the company's been profitable for years.
any employer that asks for a code sample has no clue what they're doing. They should put you at a whiteboard with a pen and have you write something on the fly.
We do both. Coding at the whiteboard is necessary but NOT sufficient -- you can't demonstrate large-scale coding ability in 1 hour with a marker. A code sample shows how well a person works within a larger project, and whether they maintainable code or not. We've turned candidates down because they talked a good game and could write subroutines on the whiteboard, but their larger samples were a mess that we wouldn't want to maintain.
That being said, we recognize that some coding is done under pressure:-) where the end justifies the means, so we ask the candidates about the context in which the code was written ("Get it done now" vs. "get it done right").
...the danger from individuals changing the vote seems to really be that they will shift a close race (say 10% apart) one way or another.
Not only that. If you shifted the vote by a huge amount (say, 100% to 0%), that would go a long way to undermining the voting system and producing panic in the population.
I suggest stability. Firefox 1.5.* crashes every day or two on my Linux box. I've been an enthusiastic Firefox/Mozilla user for years; its stability is at a low on Linux.
Yes, classes in addition to the reading would be great, but the classes should augment the reading....
As a former university instructor (who was voted the #1 teacher in the university by the students), I completely agree. My lectures always augmented the book. Unfortunately, most students don't do the reading in advance. They come to class expecting the teacher to cover the material in the book, and therefore are completely unable to participate in class. (My classes were always interactive, even large lectures.)
When I don't cover the material in the book, and the material appears on a test, look out: the students scream "unfair" and "we didn't know we had to know this part" and on and on. Of course, these aren't the A+ students, but it is still aggravating.
Note: none of this is unique to academia. Same thing happens in industry when you have "meetings." Nobody reads the background material in advance.
If you've got a lot of Windows users, go with Subversion...
Just make sure your PCs have really fast disks and large disk caches. Subversion is my favorite version control system, but it is slow as heck on NTFS, which deals poorly with large numbers of files. You might not notice with a few thousand files, but with tens or hundreds of thousands of files, it's very noticeable.
My company is aggressively hiring software engineers right now. When we interview a senior developer who really knows what he/she is talking about it, it's like a breath of fresh air.
It's true you can get more raw work done by two junior bodies vs. one senior engineer at twice the price, but when your production database server is dying under load, you want the engineer with experience to be there.
In the scientific community, emotions are still pretty mysterious things. The claim that "facial expressions communicate emotion reliably" is controversial, believe it or not. This might sound silly, because we can ALL gauge other people's emotions by looking at their faces, right? But if you think about it... how do we know we're right? We see a frowning face, we automatically "know" they're sad or angry, but scientifically speaking, there's no objective validation that we're accurate.
There are some famous researchers in psychology (most notably, Paul Ekman) who claim facial expressions communicate emotion unambiguously, but new research suggests serious problems with that work and offers other explanations. Plus, facial expressions vary across cultures and possibly even across individuals.
Heavy psychology research paper on the contoversy. (MS Word format.) Bottom line: there are no consistent biological markers to distinguish one emotion from another in the body.
You're right, Emacs does have a limit. It's larger than 128MB though: I just opened a 150MB file with no problem. But a 300MB file was rejected as "too big."
Note: On the "too big" file, Emacs checked its limit and did the right thing. As opposed to other programs that blindly try to read the file and then crash.
I use Emacs because it does the basics RIGHT. Until you've experienced this, it's hard to appreciate. For example:
When you edit a REALLY REALLY large file, it just works. Even binary
files.
When you try to edit a nonexistent file, it creates the file for you. (It
doesn't go, "Duhhh, sorry dude, file not found!")
While you're in the middle of editing a file, suppose someone else
changes your file on disk and saves it. What does YOUR text editor do?
Emacs realizes what happened and offers you choices. It doesn't blindly
overwrite the file on your next save.
When you save your document, what happens to your Undo information?
Emacs keeps it. Many other programs throw it away, assuming that by
saving, you no longer care about undoing.
Unlimited levels of undo, and ALL operations can be undone (except
"Exit":-)).
Traditional Cut/Copy/Paste operations usually keep only the last thing
you cut or copied. In emacs, YOU decide how many levels of cut/copied text
to keep in memory (the default is 60), so you can get back most any text
you previously cut.
Then there's the super-powerful search and replace. Want to add a blank line after each
paragraph? Surround every line with double quotes? Capitalize all vowels?
Place a dollar sign in front of every number in your document unless it's
at the end of a sentence? Interactive search-and-replace within all
documents in a folder and all subfolders in one shot? No problem.
I run a web site that contains lyrics for songs on major labels. Years ago, I asked permission of the copyright holder to reproduce the lyrics, album art, etc. on my web site and got it, free.
Slashdot Mirror
MediaWiki (the software behind Wikipedia) can transform a company's culture from "nobody ever documents anything" into "Is it on the wiki yet??" It's the "swiss army knife" of intranet applications, super-extendable and easy to use. Even non-techies can master wikitext syntax with about 15 minutes of training.
Your guesses about my own morality were quite amusing, bordering on silly. I loved when you wrote, "YOU are the one helping to enslave them...." Truly inspired. I congratulate you on a fine, industrial-strength troll.
Ah. You believe the myth of the happy prostitute.
Picking up runaways off the street, forcing them into prostitution, and getting them indebted and hooked on drugs so they can't leave, is not a victimless crime. Making prostitution legal will not prevent this; there are always girls down on their luck, and always scum ready to prey on them.
1. find piped into xargs (or "find -print0" piped into "xargs -0" for safety) to process a directory tree in a single command
2. Printing commands on stdout and piping them into bash. For example, if you want to rename a bunch of files, and you put the old names into file "oldnames" and the new names into "newnames", one per line, you can do the mass renaming with:
$ paste oldnames newnames | sed 's/^/mv /' | bash
generates a sequence of "mv" commands and executes them.
First time I saw each of these, it was so eye-opening.
...because it works. Endless uptime. Tools that do the basics correctly, and the advanced stuff with a little extra effort. State-of-the-art scripting. Mysterious problems fixed with one quick Google search. It just works.
...ad agency Neurotronics has developed a new means of getting consumer's attention: bashing them in the skull with a sledgehammer. "There's going to be a certain population sensitive to it," says CEO Gary Krane, "But once people see what it does and feel it for themselves, they'll see it's effective for getting attention."
Looks like this might be a great host for a SlimServer based MP3 system. Anybody know how well the server software performs on this box?
Anybody know how well this box works as a SlimServer MP3 server?
I wonder if this is a non-issue. I've been using eBay for years and honestly, I haven't noticed the ads. Literally. If you'd asked me earlier today if eBay has these ads, I'd have said no.
Definitely my digital bathroom scale. When you stand on it, the LED lights up with the word "OFF" telling you to get off. Then it goes to zero, and you stand on it a SECOND time to get weighed.
:-)
Uhhh... why not a scale that you stand on once... and it WEIGHS you?!? Too mind-boggling a user interface, I guess.
And no, I'm not so heavy that the scale WANTS me off.
10 years ago, the Republicans were fighting the exact same war against the Clinton administration (you remember Mr. "I did not have sex with that woman", don't ya?).
Oh definitely. Ten years ago, the president was lying about having sex, whereas the current president launched a war based on lies that has killed more Americans than 9/11 and tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians. For starters.
Yeah, these sound like "the exact same war" to me! :-/
...four out of five people lie.
If you're just asking for functions then you're doing something wrong....
Heh... that's what I get for giving a quick answer. You took me too literally. We certainly do not evaluate a software candidate simply by asking them to code a few functions. (Though a surprising number can't even do that.) Candidates with good-looking resumes first have an hour-long technical phonescreen. Then they visit for 4-5 interviews of an hour each, covering programming, databases, back-of-the-envelope problem-solving, previous jobs, etc. Lots of coverage from high-level to low-level, from big problems to small ones. Then they provide a code sample, then references.
It seems like we're doing a pretty good job at it. Most engineers are happy here, the work is challenging, and the company's been profitable for years.
any employer that asks for a code sample has no clue what they're doing. They should put you at a whiteboard with a pen and have you write something on the fly.
We do both. Coding at the whiteboard is necessary but NOT sufficient -- you can't demonstrate large-scale coding ability in 1 hour with a marker. A code sample shows how well a person works within a larger project, and whether they maintainable code or not. We've turned candidates down because they talked a good game and could write subroutines on the whiteboard, but their larger samples were a mess that we wouldn't want to maintain.
That being said, we recognize that some coding is done under pressure :-) where the end justifies the means, so we ask the candidates about the context in which the code was written ("Get it done now" vs. "get it done right").
You wrote the password 500 times?
Not only that. If you shifted the vote by a huge amount (say, 100% to 0%), that would go a long way to undermining the voting system and producing panic in the population.
I suggest stability. Firefox 1.5.* crashes every day or two on my Linux box. I've been an enthusiastic Firefox/Mozilla user for years; its stability is at a low on Linux.
If it can't see you, you can't see it!
Yes, classes in addition to the reading would be great, but the classes should augment the reading....
As a former university instructor (who was voted the #1 teacher in the university by the students), I completely agree. My lectures always augmented the book. Unfortunately, most students don't do the reading in advance. They come to class expecting the teacher to cover the material in the book, and therefore are completely unable to participate in class. (My classes were always interactive, even large lectures.)
When I don't cover the material in the book, and the material appears on a test, look out: the students scream "unfair" and "we didn't know we had to know this part" and on and on. Of course, these aren't the A+ students, but it is still aggravating.
Note: none of this is unique to academia. Same thing happens in industry when you have "meetings." Nobody reads the background material in advance.
Just make sure your PCs have really fast disks and large disk caches. Subversion is my favorite version control system, but it is slow as heck on NTFS, which deals poorly with large numbers of files. You might not notice with a few thousand files, but with tens or hundreds of thousands of files, it's very noticeable.
My company is aggressively hiring software engineers right now. When we interview a senior developer who really knows what he/she is talking about it, it's like a breath of fresh air.
It's true you can get more raw work done by two junior bodies vs. one senior engineer at twice the price, but when your production database server is dying under load, you want the engineer with experience to be there.
There are some famous researchers in psychology (most notably, Paul Ekman) who claim facial expressions communicate emotion unambiguously, but new research suggests serious problems with that work and offers other explanations. Plus, facial expressions vary across cultures and possibly even across individuals.
Heavy psychology research paper on the contoversy. (MS Word format.) Bottom line: there are no consistent biological markers to distinguish one emotion from another in the body.
Note: On the "too big" file, Emacs checked its limit and did the right thing. As opposed to other programs that blindly try to read the file and then crash.
Then there's the super-powerful search and replace. Want to add a blank line after each paragraph? Surround every line with double quotes? Capitalize all vowels? Place a dollar sign in front of every number in your document unless it's at the end of a sentence? Interactive search-and-replace within all documents in a folder and all subfolders in one shot? No problem.
It wasn't hard.