My wife, while an undergraduate at the Univ of MI, had one of those DMV- (well, in MI, Sec of State-) issued non-driver's license photo IDs. It was completely useless. She was unable to deposit a check into her own checking account at her bank adjacent to the campus, even with the ID. Now, that probably says more about the teller and manager of the branch, but apparently, if it's not a DL, it doesn't count.
That's a good clarification of what I said. I'd add, however, that no passenger needs to be tagged; the tag on your luggage is linked to your boarding pass when you check the luggage, so all they have to know is that the boarding pass has been scanned (as the passenger enters the jetway; I suppose an evildoer could exit the jetway without actually boarding the plane, but they do watch for that sort of thing).
Not only that, but you can put scanners in the baggage hold and know that every bag in the hold is matched to a passenger who has already boarded. Much easier than a barcode reader.
Also, this summer, I had an experience where they simply turned the carousel off too early; my bag was actually still on the ramp up to the carousel. They had *no idea* where my bag was. With a scanner at the point where it hits the carousel (so the baggage people could say, "It was on the carousel, so someone must have taken it"), they could have said, "Hey, it's still on the carousel." As it was, my clever wife had actually climbed onto the stopped carousel and looked down the ramp.
I may not have been entirely clear. Management is not worrying about it; my fellow developers and I are. This is a relatively small shop, and at least half (the ones I've talked to about it) agree we should have some standards; two newer employees asked me why we don't ("Because we're such a small shop.").
Sometimes I have to maintain code that, visually, is a pile of crap. (Some of it I wrote myself, years ago.) In the process of trying to understand it, I essentially run it through a "prettifier," but those aren't perfect; any edit has the potential to introduce error. All of us want to be able to walk into anyone else's code and follow the logic. It's not about being Big Brother: it's about making each other's lives easier.
It's all about readability and maintainability. Most of the things I'm calling standards can be handled by everyone using the same preferences in their IDE: Set indent to x, auto-indent blocks, replace tabs with spaces. So I'm not "forcing people to code in a way thats [sic] not natural to them." I'm asking to take underscores out of variable names, which are harder to type than simply capitalizing a new word in the name. I'm asking to add white space around some punctuation (except parentheses).
That's really about it. How does that interfere with your coding? For about a week, you might have to think about it; after that, it'll be habit. The gains across your team(s) will far outlast this brief adjustment period.
Consistent naming, spacing, parenthesization, indentation, etc., do have tangible business value.
I am a very visual person. I suspect many other mathematical/programming types are as well. Looking over a mish-mash of code from several developers, each of whom has his or her own perferred naming convention, or doesn't worry about lining up curly braces, or is happy to slap new code right up against the left margin, slows me down significantly when I have to go in to add features. As one of the top programmers in our company (our VP of new product development has told me in reviews that I'm probably the best programmer we've got), that slow-down is real dollars to my employer.
Would it slow you down to change to a consistent programming style? Maybe for a week or so, until it's a habit. But having everyone in the company fluent in a company-wide style (especially one that can be implemented across all languages used) speeds up everyone's development, which is a tangible benefit.
The whole point of the new arrangement (you have to go to the Mobience site, not the first-referenced article) is to put the most-frequent letters first, so the average number of key hits per letter is only 1.35, not 2 (1 * 70% + 2 * 25% + 3 * 5%).
The choice of where to put the keys was recommended by (but does not duplicate) the common QWERTY arrangement, so people who are accustomed to the motions of typing words in QWERTY ("Where's the next letter?") will habitually head towards the correct key (see the YouTube video for a demonstration of this using the numbers "one" through "ten").
Since the key recognition is all software anyway, they could probably come up with a Dvorak-recommended arrangement if they saw enough market demand (which means, of course, they won't bother) to make it worth a second set of key caps. Barring that, some enterprising soul could do it without changing the letters on the key caps, ensuring that only he or she could type with the altered phone.
No, the problem is that DST is too complicated for many people. I get so frustrated by people who use "EST" when they mean simply "ET" (that is, EST in the winter, EDT in the summer). Partly that comes from having lived in South Bend, IN, for seven years; most of IN just started observing DST this year. It's terribly confusing to arrange conference calls when one week you were on the same time as New York, and the next week you weren't, and the guys in NY said the call would be at "11am EST" in the email. No, sorry, that's at 10am EST, idiot.
Anybody remember when MacConnection offered $3 overnight shipping for all orders placed, according to the catalog, "by 11pm EST"? Well, I tried that once at 10:30pm EST (in June). No amount of arguing by me would get them to bring the truck back to the loading dock which it had left at 10:20pm EST (which was, after all, 11:20pm ET). But within about six months, the catalog said "by 11pm ET." And then within another six months, they'd dropped the $3 flat shipping rate anyway.
Buzz! Thank you for playing. Florida is very nearly evenly split (remember 2000?), even "South Florida" (considering that the U. of South Florida is 'way up here in Tampa, "South Florida" is a pretty big place).
Dade County (Miami) is strongly conservative (primarily due to a large Cuban population), but Palm Beach County is certainly not (possibly due to a large New York retiree population), and no matter whether you consider Tampa part of South Florida, Palm Beach surely is.
Interestingly, my wife never turns on the bathroom light when she goes to the toilet at night (basically, yes, finding the toilet blindfolded). It wakes you up too much and messes with your night vision for the walk back to the bedroom. Since I realized that, I've started doing the same thing (and sitting down to pee at night).
But then I've always been a lid-down guy anyway, having grown up with dogs. I think a previous poster mentioned this habit, as well.
I'm not sure what you mean by "many employers." Most people in the US work for small companies. I used to ride to work four days a week, but then the company moved to a new location about three times as far away. It was still ridable, but I'd have to have a shower. I'm a sweaty guy, and the route crossed a river valley, so it really was "uphill both ways." Even in winter in Indiana (yes, I rode through the snow) I'd work up a sweat on the shorter ride, but I was much stinkier after the longer ride. I tested it while the new building was still under construction.
I expressed my concerns to my employer, and he looked into installing a shower. It turns out the "slip-and-fall" insurance involved in having a shower was prohibitively expensive. If he'd had even five employees who'd use it, he could have justified the cost, but not for one. A company with five times as many employees might be able to get five regular riders, but no way would we get 20% of the company on bikes. I ended up only able to ride about once a month, when I could manage to get there early enough to really cool down before changing into my work clothes.
But on a stationary cycle, there's no air drag to overcome. All the power goes into the generator (I've got a mag resistance trainer, and I've been thinking about how I'd harness that electricity instead of turning it into heat), so the result only depends on the efficiency (power transfer from tire to trainer, power loss to heat). How many watts, then, without fighting air resistance?
I'd hate to have my workstation power dependent on my sales ability. Does the bidding have to keep going up a certain percentage per hour to keep the lights on?
Ooh, perhaps the editor meant "pedal". Yeah, that makes more sense.
But the airline is a common carrier, meaning it has a number of responsibilities, including carrying anyone who pays their fare and doesn't do anything wrong. What's happened is that someone in the TSA has decided that criticizing the TSA (quietly; it was written on a bag) is wrong.
Also, it used to be that you weren't forced to leave the White House (or rallies) for wearing an anti-Clinton t-shirt. It's this "with us or with the terrorists" attitude that pisses me off.
So normally you'd go 65 mph over 8 miles; that's 8 / 65 hours, times 60 to get it in minutes, is 7.385. To save five minutes, you want to do those 8 miles in 2.385 minutes, so that's 8 / 2.385, times 60 to get it in mph, is 201.3.
Call me before you get on the road, will you? I'll stay home.
Seriously, I picked these numbers to "save" less than a minute in the example (I'm a recovering math teacher, we like to make our problems come out to a round figure).
I have two personal cases that reflect the usefulness of this philosophy.
The first is an 11 mile freeway trip with a 55 mph limit on most of it (about a mile has a 50 mph limit). I kept wanting to do 70, which the Troopers frown on, and so I decided to find out the difference between doing 62 (which I can get away with) and 70 on that trip. I came up with a difference of about 72 seconds. Since the light at the bottom of the ramp on my homebound journey has a two-minute cycle, I had only a 60% chance of getting an earlier light by going 70, but at the cost of raising my chance of a ticket from effectively 0 to something unknown but definitely positive. I'd have to average 76 mph to guarantee getting the previous light; that would also about guarantee a ticket if there was a trooper anywhere on the route.
The other is rural two-lane U.S. highway with towns averaging every ten miles. The highway is marked 55 mph, with occasional marked passing areas, but the towns are marked 35 or 30, and usually four-lane allowing easy passing inside town limits. I'd like to go 65 on the highway, but I'd frequently come up behind someone going slower (sometimes as low as 45). I got pretty good at estimating in my head how much time I'd save by passing the "slowpoke" on the highway rather than waiting for the next town. Most of the time, it was less than a minute. If it was 90 seconds or more, I'd usually start looking for a chance to pass; but it was never more than about three minutes, which is almost negligible on a trip of about two hours.
Knowing I'm only "losing" a couple of minutes by following patiently instead of gnashing my teeth because I can't get a break in oncoming traffic does wonders for my blood pressure.
WTF? To double the "quality" in two dimensions requires a two-fold increase in each dimension, i.e., two squared: four. Try upgrading when it hits 24Mpx.
Stimpy, you eee-diot! Apple is a hardware company. OS X is the nice candy that only runs on Apple hardware. The OS is sold separately only for people who already have the hardware ('cause it doesn't run on any other hardware) and want to upgrade to the latest software Apple is bundling. If people buy Apple hardware to run Windows, Jobs & co. will gleefully sell them a piece of hardware, oh, and throw in a nifty operating system to "boot". Microsoft and Apple are in different games; until Microsoft sells hardware in the same market sector that Apple does (did someone whisper, "Zune"?), neither is beating the other at their "game".
While I was a grad student in Ann Arbor, one night walking home, I was stopped by police. It seems there was someone who was attacking women (I'm probably misremembering, it was 16 or 17 years ago), so they were stopping everyone who matched the description. Unfortunately, the description was "wearing a parka with the hood up," and it was about seven degrees F (did I mention this was in January?). Want to guess where I'd have been that night if I'd refused to show identification? Not at home, betcherass.
When the description is "arab-looking" (or whatever), you actually reinforce the view of Americans as bigoted. (I've seen the mention of "behavioral profiling"; maybe that is working for TSA.) But the point of random searches (presuming uniformity) is that as the number of terrorists trying to get through security increase, the chance of all getting through decreases exponentially; and once you find one, you start searching everybody, especially people on the same flight. You just can't game uniform random searches; you can only hope you're lucky.
There's nothing like seeing a Saturn V go up, though. Geez, it must have been Apollo 13 (my youngest brother wasn't there, and I can't possibly be remembering Apollo 12). I think we were on the causeway, just standing by our parked car.
Still, I hope the kid is at least five, so the memory is of more than just the actual moment of launch.
Simple: Most keypads are on the side of the phone you're holding up to your ear.
However, having a numeric backup is important for noisy conditions. In Florida, the 511 (traffic alert) system has a set of numeric codes (275204 = "I-275 Southbound, Tampa"); however, I think you have to look those up ahead of time on the web, because before I had them memorized, I would just get stuck in, "I'm sorry, I didn't understand. What did you want, again?"
I once made the mistake of putting that CD in a six-disc cassette and set the whole thing on random play/no repeat for a party (this was back in '94 or so). Sure enough, six hours later, there was nothing left in the "no repeat" bin but about a dozen of those ten-second tracks. Completely destroyed TMBG's "artistic integrity", but we laughed like fools.
No-one with the slightest clue about how to code would use floating point maths in any kind of financial program, particularly not one where they're working with the LSE.
Not true. It depends what, exactly, the goal of the financial software is. Yes, if you're *adding* lots of numbers, or adding a small number to a large one, floats (or doubles) are a poor choice. But when *multiplying* numbers, especially ones of different scales, doubles can be just what the doctor ordered.
The important things are to be aware of the limitations (know *when* to used integer arithmetic with fixed-point), know what the customer's tolerance is (and in my particular niche, there is always a tolerance), and apply sanity checks. Simply relegating any financial programmer who uses floating point to the rank of idiot shows a good deal of ignorance of the range of work that comes under "financial."
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My wife, while an undergraduate at the Univ of MI, had one of those DMV- (well, in MI, Sec of State-) issued non-driver's license photo IDs. It was completely useless. She was unable to deposit a check into her own checking account at her bank adjacent to the campus, even with the ID. Now, that probably says more about the teller and manager of the branch, but apparently, if it's not a DL, it doesn't count.
That's a good clarification of what I said. I'd add, however, that no passenger needs to be tagged; the tag on your luggage is linked to your boarding pass when you check the luggage, so all they have to know is that the boarding pass has been scanned (as the passenger enters the jetway; I suppose an evildoer could exit the jetway without actually boarding the plane, but they do watch for that sort of thing).
Not only that, but you can put scanners in the baggage hold and know that every bag in the hold is matched to a passenger who has already boarded. Much easier than a barcode reader.
Also, this summer, I had an experience where they simply turned the carousel off too early; my bag was actually still on the ramp up to the carousel. They had *no idea* where my bag was. With a scanner at the point where it hits the carousel (so the baggage people could say, "It was on the carousel, so someone must have taken it"), they could have said, "Hey, it's still on the carousel." As it was, my clever wife had actually climbed onto the stopped carousel and looked down the ramp.
Unless I misread TFA, it's 21 cents per RFID tag, which is "ten times" the cost of the barcode.
I may not have been entirely clear. Management is not worrying about it; my fellow developers and I are. This is a relatively small shop, and at least half (the ones I've talked to about it) agree we should have some standards; two newer employees asked me why we don't ("Because we're such a small shop.").
Sometimes I have to maintain code that, visually, is a pile of crap. (Some of it I wrote myself, years ago.) In the process of trying to understand it, I essentially run it through a "prettifier," but those aren't perfect; any edit has the potential to introduce error. All of us want to be able to walk into anyone else's code and follow the logic. It's not about being Big Brother: it's about making each other's lives easier.
It's all about readability and maintainability. Most of the things I'm calling standards can be handled by everyone using the same preferences in their IDE: Set indent to x, auto-indent blocks, replace tabs with spaces. So I'm not "forcing people to code in a way thats [sic] not natural to them." I'm asking to take underscores out of variable names, which are harder to type than simply capitalizing a new word in the name. I'm asking to add white space around some punctuation (except parentheses).
That's really about it. How does that interfere with your coding? For about a week, you might have to think about it; after that, it'll be habit. The gains across your team(s) will far outlast this brief adjustment period.
Consistent naming, spacing, parenthesization, indentation, etc., do have tangible business value.
I am a very visual person. I suspect many other mathematical/programming types are as well. Looking over a mish-mash of code from several developers, each of whom has his or her own perferred naming convention, or doesn't worry about lining up curly braces, or is happy to slap new code right up against the left margin, slows me down significantly when I have to go in to add features. As one of the top programmers in our company (our VP of new product development has told me in reviews that I'm probably the best programmer we've got), that slow-down is real dollars to my employer.
Would it slow you down to change to a consistent programming style? Maybe for a week or so, until it's a habit. But having everyone in the company fluent in a company-wide style (especially one that can be implemented across all languages used) speeds up everyone's development, which is a tangible benefit.
The whole point of the new arrangement (you have to go to the Mobience site, not the first-referenced article) is to put the most-frequent letters first, so the average number of key hits per letter is only 1.35, not 2 (1 * 70% + 2 * 25% + 3 * 5%).
The choice of where to put the keys was recommended by (but does not duplicate) the common QWERTY arrangement, so people who are accustomed to the motions of typing words in QWERTY ("Where's the next letter?") will habitually head towards the correct key (see the YouTube video for a demonstration of this using the numbers "one" through "ten").
Since the key recognition is all software anyway, they could probably come up with a Dvorak-recommended arrangement if they saw enough market demand (which means, of course, they won't bother) to make it worth a second set of key caps. Barring that, some enterprising soul could do it without changing the letters on the key caps, ensuring that only he or she could type with the altered phone.
Bzzt! Thank you for playing.
Anyone can write a law (most are written by lobbyists, right?). Only Congress can pass new legislation.
We often talk about the White House "sending a bill to Congress."
No, the problem is that DST is too complicated for many people. I get so frustrated by people who use "EST" when they mean simply "ET" (that is, EST in the winter, EDT in the summer). Partly that comes from having lived in South Bend, IN, for seven years; most of IN just started observing DST this year. It's terribly confusing to arrange conference calls when one week you were on the same time as New York, and the next week you weren't, and the guys in NY said the call would be at "11am EST" in the email. No, sorry, that's at 10am EST, idiot.
Anybody remember when MacConnection offered $3 overnight shipping for all orders placed, according to the catalog, "by 11pm EST"? Well, I tried that once at 10:30pm EST (in June). No amount of arguing by me would get them to bring the truck back to the loading dock which it had left at 10:20pm EST (which was, after all, 11:20pm ET). But within about six months, the catalog said "by 11pm ET." And then within another six months, they'd dropped the $3 flat shipping rate anyway.
Buzz! Thank you for playing. Florida is very nearly evenly split (remember 2000?), even "South Florida" (considering that the U. of South Florida is 'way up here in Tampa, "South Florida" is a pretty big place).
Dade County (Miami) is strongly conservative (primarily due to a large Cuban population), but Palm Beach County is certainly not (possibly due to a large New York retiree population), and no matter whether you consider Tampa part of South Florida, Palm Beach surely is.
Interestingly, my wife never turns on the bathroom light when she goes to the toilet at night (basically, yes, finding the toilet blindfolded). It wakes you up too much and messes with your night vision for the walk back to the bedroom. Since I realized that, I've started doing the same thing (and sitting down to pee at night).
But then I've always been a lid-down guy anyway, having grown up with dogs. I think a previous poster mentioned this habit, as well.
A boyfriend of Renée Descartes? Or her own, personal, Jesus?
Perhaps the editor meant Immanuel? Honestly, this is two major errors in the posts this week.
I'm not sure what you mean by "many employers." Most people in the US work for small companies. I used to ride to work four days a week, but then the company moved to a new location about three times as far away. It was still ridable, but I'd have to have a shower. I'm a sweaty guy, and the route crossed a river valley, so it really was "uphill both ways." Even in winter in Indiana (yes, I rode through the snow) I'd work up a sweat on the shorter ride, but I was much stinkier after the longer ride. I tested it while the new building was still under construction.
I expressed my concerns to my employer, and he looked into installing a shower. It turns out the "slip-and-fall" insurance involved in having a shower was prohibitively expensive. If he'd had even five employees who'd use it, he could have justified the cost, but not for one. A company with five times as many employees might be able to get five regular riders, but no way would we get 20% of the company on bikes. I ended up only able to ride about once a month, when I could manage to get there early enough to really cool down before changing into my work clothes.
But on a stationary cycle, there's no air drag to overcome. All the power goes into the generator (I've got a mag resistance trainer, and I've been thinking about how I'd harness that electricity instead of turning it into heat), so the result only depends on the efficiency (power transfer from tire to trainer, power loss to heat). How many watts, then, without fighting air resistance?
I'd hate to have my workstation power dependent on my sales ability. Does the bidding have to keep going up a certain percentage per hour to keep the lights on?
Ooh, perhaps the editor meant "pedal". Yeah, that makes more sense.
But the airline is a common carrier, meaning it has a number of responsibilities, including carrying anyone who pays their fare and doesn't do anything wrong. What's happened is that someone in the TSA has decided that criticizing the TSA (quietly; it was written on a bag) is wrong.
Also, it used to be that you weren't forced to leave the White House (or rallies) for wearing an anti-Clinton t-shirt. It's this "with us or with the terrorists" attitude that pisses me off.
Just asking: How do you get 10,000 songs on your iPod Nano? Or do you spend $10 per song?
So normally you'd go 65 mph over 8 miles; that's 8 / 65 hours, times 60 to get it in minutes, is 7.385. To save five minutes, you want to do those 8 miles in 2.385 minutes, so that's 8 / 2.385, times 60 to get it in mph, is 201.3.
Call me before you get on the road, will you? I'll stay home.
Seriously, I picked these numbers to "save" less than a minute in the example (I'm a recovering math teacher, we like to make our problems come out to a round figure).
I have two personal cases that reflect the usefulness of this philosophy.
The first is an 11 mile freeway trip with a 55 mph limit on most of it (about a mile has a 50 mph limit). I kept wanting to do 70, which the Troopers frown on, and so I decided to find out the difference between doing 62 (which I can get away with) and 70 on that trip. I came up with a difference of about 72 seconds. Since the light at the bottom of the ramp on my homebound journey has a two-minute cycle, I had only a 60% chance of getting an earlier light by going 70, but at the cost of raising my chance of a ticket from effectively 0 to something unknown but definitely positive. I'd have to average 76 mph to guarantee getting the previous light; that would also about guarantee a ticket if there was a trooper anywhere on the route.
The other is rural two-lane U.S. highway with towns averaging every ten miles. The highway is marked 55 mph, with occasional marked passing areas, but the towns are marked 35 or 30, and usually four-lane allowing easy passing inside town limits. I'd like to go 65 on the highway, but I'd frequently come up behind someone going slower (sometimes as low as 45). I got pretty good at estimating in my head how much time I'd save by passing the "slowpoke" on the highway rather than waiting for the next town. Most of the time, it was less than a minute. If it was 90 seconds or more, I'd usually start looking for a chance to pass; but it was never more than about three minutes, which is almost negligible on a trip of about two hours.
Knowing I'm only "losing" a couple of minutes by following patiently instead of gnashing my teeth because I can't get a break in oncoming traffic does wonders for my blood pressure.
WTF? To double the "quality" in two dimensions requires a two-fold increase in each dimension, i.e., two squared: four. Try upgrading when it hits 24Mpx.
Stimpy, you eee-diot! Apple is a hardware company. OS X is the nice candy that only runs on Apple hardware. The OS is sold separately only for people who already have the hardware ('cause it doesn't run on any other hardware) and want to upgrade to the latest software Apple is bundling. If people buy Apple hardware to run Windows, Jobs & co. will gleefully sell them a piece of hardware, oh, and throw in a nifty operating system to "boot". Microsoft and Apple are in different games; until Microsoft sells hardware in the same market sector that Apple does (did someone whisper, "Zune"?), neither is beating the other at their "game".
While I was a grad student in Ann Arbor, one night walking home, I was stopped by police. It seems there was someone who was attacking women (I'm probably misremembering, it was 16 or 17 years ago), so they were stopping everyone who matched the description. Unfortunately, the description was "wearing a parka with the hood up," and it was about seven degrees F (did I mention this was in January?). Want to guess where I'd have been that night if I'd refused to show identification? Not at home, betcherass.
When the description is "arab-looking" (or whatever), you actually reinforce the view of Americans as bigoted. (I've seen the mention of "behavioral profiling"; maybe that is working for TSA.) But the point of random searches (presuming uniformity) is that as the number of terrorists trying to get through security increase, the chance of all getting through decreases exponentially; and once you find one, you start searching everybody, especially people on the same flight. You just can't game uniform random searches; you can only hope you're lucky.
There's nothing like seeing a Saturn V go up, though. Geez, it must have been Apollo 13 (my youngest brother wasn't there, and I can't possibly be remembering Apollo 12). I think we were on the causeway, just standing by our parked car.
Still, I hope the kid is at least five, so the memory is of more than just the actual moment of launch.
Simple: Most keypads are on the side of the phone you're holding up to your ear.
However, having a numeric backup is important for noisy conditions. In Florida, the 511 (traffic alert) system has a set of numeric codes (275204 = "I-275 Southbound, Tampa"); however, I think you have to look those up ahead of time on the web, because before I had them memorized, I would just get stuck in, "I'm sorry, I didn't understand. What did you want, again?"
I once made the mistake of putting that CD in a six-disc cassette and set the whole thing on random play/no repeat for a party (this was back in '94 or so). Sure enough, six hours later, there was nothing left in the "no repeat" bin but about a dozen of those ten-second tracks. Completely destroyed TMBG's "artistic integrity", but we laughed like fools.
Not true. It depends what, exactly, the goal of the financial software is. Yes, if you're *adding* lots of numbers, or adding a small number to a large one, floats (or doubles) are a poor choice. But when *multiplying* numbers, especially ones of different scales, doubles can be just what the doctor ordered.
The important things are to be aware of the limitations (know *when* to used integer arithmetic with fixed-point), know what the customer's tolerance is (and in my particular niche, there is always a tolerance), and apply sanity checks. Simply relegating any financial programmer who uses floating point to the rank of idiot shows a good deal of ignorance of the range of work that comes under "financial."