And that is of course the reason these guys used this particular method to estimate pi: not "science", but as an excuse to blast away with a shotgun. As if you need an excuse for that...
Not this "software engineers aren't real engineers" crap again. Those real engineers make plenty of mistakes too,sometimes costly ones, sometimes even deadly. And they too hide behind the "shit happens" excuse from time to time, after signing off on a disaster. I recognize that software engineering is not nearly as mature as other fields of endeavor, but you're doing the profession of software design a disservice comparing it to bloodletting and leeches.
It is good to take responsibility if you screw up, and I would like to see more real engineering rigour in software development. However that doesn't mean the guy making the mistake should be the scapegoat. The best of us can make mistakes, but the fact that these mistakes make it into the final product is not only our failing, but a failing of the procedures in place as well. If your process cannot cope with a single human being making a mistake, then it's the team, manager and company failing, not just the solitary engineer. Software engineering processes suck pretty bad in that regard, but "real" engineering practices have their failings too. Thinking of the famous "woodpecker" comparison between architects and software engineers, I'll say the world is damn lucky that real-world construction is way more forgiving when it comes to small errors translating to big issues, even if it's failure modes are a usually a lot mor noisy, dangerous, and costly.
French companies can have 24x7 coverage, however they cannot force people to work after hours. Those people who elect to work odd hours or overtime are paid for doing so. Sounds just fine to me: it prevents a race to the bottom, and looking at the statistics French workers do just fine in terms of productivity. From personal experience, I've never noticed that the French liberal (commie, sensible, unproductive, fair, take your pick) approach to work/life balance translates to slacking during the hours that they do work. Working with them gives about the same results as with German, Belgian or Dutch firms (cultural differences aside).
Learning the concepts of coding can be incredibly useful for anyone using computers in the workplace. It's not about people writing full blown programs, but writing Excel macros or doing a little VBA scripting. Similarly, I know a little about carpentry, tiling, plumbing and electrical work, and I found these to be very useful skills to have for small jobs around the house, but I don't do any of that for a living. Learning a little coding doesn't mean you have to make a career out of it.
"dad...you seem really smart...why in the world did you decide to be a programmer and sit behind a computer 10 hours a day instead of doing something cool?"
Sounds like a perception issue, and one that sadly is perpetuated in schools and society at large. Think of the cliche oft-heard lament in movies, parent talking to son: "You could have been a doctor or a lawyer". My brother's kid provided a nice counterexample; when they had a class discussion on interesting family members: "One of my uncles builds robots, one of them writes iPhone apps, and one of them works for Blackberry" (back then, BB still was a cool brand) which according to the class trumped the other kids with family doctors, lawyers, MPs or directors in coolness factor.
But with that said, it is true that with older kids and adults, coding carries very little glamour or prestige (which does have an impact on pay, by the way).
Injection moulded UAV airframe produced in.... minutes?
How many minutes and $$$ to produce the mold? It's pretty clear that 3d printing is a poor substitute for bulk production processes. It is however a viable option in case you want to quickly produce a single instance of an item (prototyping, or locations where shipping or stocking items is too slow or too expensive). It's also a good option to produce small runs of complex items. One of my clients started using a (industrial-quality) 3d printer to produce highly complex manifolds for pumps. They had trouble producing that design using injection molding, casting or milling, and they are now using the 3d printer for production runs.
Lots of advantages in having things online, or at least connected to a home automation controller. If there's a problem (fire, burglary, water leak) the system can take action and / or notify you. And sometimes there are good reasons to add a few features (adding complexity).
With that said, most home automation enthusiasts recognize that these systems are not as reliable as their more simple counterparts. Current best practice for stuff like this is to use standard smoke detectors wired into a conventional alarm panel, then hook up the alarm panel to the home automation controller. I have some smart-ish smoke detectors, they are regular detectors with a wireless (Z-wave, not WiFi) chip bolted onto the connection meant to go to an alarm panel. That means I'll be notified when it goes off, but if the HA system fails for whatever reason, the detector will still beep is there's smoke.
Exactly. I'm not against advertising, but it seems that advertisers are once again engaged in a loudness war. For a good while, online ads were pretty decent: small banners with relevant information. But it's getting worse again; animated (bouncing) ads, auto-playing movies, roll over sound effects, anything to grab your attention. Interstitials and pop-ups are back in a big way. And that's without even getting started on the "goods" being advertised.
And besides the fact hat ad tracking is an invasion of my privacy (and thus far fails to deliver me relevant ads), it can also be detrimental to the performance of the hosting website. As TFA mentions, on some pages, tracking scripts make up as much as 25% of the downloaded data, and it shows. I increasingly see pages load very slowly or even fail to load at all because of an overtaxed ad server somewhere.
A watch is a nice example of a wearable device. And today even more so than back when those lines were written, watches are worn as an accessory rather than for their function. In that light, it surprises me that most of the currently available "smart" watches are ugly as sin.
I've worked in various different work environments, but thankfully nothing as horrible as that. I do know that employees with kids and a mortgage are seen as being easier to manage than contractors with large nest eggs or even employees with a sufficiently large "f.u. fund", for authoritarian managers that is. On the flip side, people in the work force who are rich and independent enough to not have to put up with any crap from their manager, are there of their own volition, and probably like what they do. Such self-motivated, happy employees generally make for better employees.
I have certainly never come across an employer who favours or actively seeks out indebted job seekers in order to have a tighter control over their workforce.
That is exactly what rubs me the wrong way about that announcement, besides fears that FB will turn Oculus into another data mining opportunity. Gaming is barely a blip? The buzz around Oculus has been from two sides: business (who want to use VR tech for telepresence, operating ROVs etc), and gamers. We want to control our Parrot drone with the Oculus, we want to walk around Tamriel or Middle Earth wearing this thing, or immerse ourselves in virtual battlefields, or perhaps watch a movie in a virtual cinema... What we don't want, need or asked for is friggin' Second Life VR.
With that said, if the drivers / SDK remain openly available, I am sure game developers will get on board. But with gaming "barely on the radar", I fear for the undoubtedly necessary collaboration between Oculus and game developers.
Speaking of craftsmen... One of the problems with programming is that in many (but not all) shops, coding actually is a craft, rather than a profession. There's little on the job training or coaching, few common frameworks and methodologies that work well, and a lot of the job descriptions within IT seem to have been made up mostly to make life easy for project managers and HR, not to relate to the actual and complete skill sets of individuals.
Or perhaps the problem is that the nature of programming is more like a craft, while we are trying to treat is like a profession.
a charlatan that appeals to the pointy haired bosses of the world looking for that silver bullet.
Spot on. Managers need (or are expected to have) a wide range of ever changing skills and traits, and if you claim that you can fill a gap or two, you'll have an easy sale. They are suckers for magic bullets. Just look at the staggering amount of management books available, not the "hard" ones on project management or business administration, but the soft ones. 7 Habits, The Art of War For Business, all with tiny nuggets of wisdom fluffed up and packaged in a bunch of crap. (I've read my share...). Hey, and everyone would like to be charismatic, so I can well believe this lady has plenty of clients.
Pro tip: since this lady has charisma covered, focus on other buzzwords to give seminars on. "Authentic leadership" seems to be popular lately... leaders are trying so hard to be authentic that almost by definition they achieve the exact opposite. But my 2 day seminar will help you to let your inner authentic self blossom forth, and I've a book on that as well. Order your copy today!
I'm not too worried about trolls, but I've seen plenty of abuse and accusations of cheating hurled at "skillers", in games like BF4. All to easy to hit the "report" button in frustration after the same guy headshoots you for the 6th time in a round. And the crowdsourcing effect will not work here to filter out abuse; I expect strong players to consistently attract such reports against them in online games.
One way to counter this to some degree is to spot-check reports, and apply heavy penalties to players making false accusations. It still is a lot of work, and I doubt whether an operator could make the distinction between a rage-report and an inaccurate report made in good faith.
Out of interest, has anyone tried to cash in amounts like these after the recent hype died down? During the hype I remember people finding some old BTC behind the sofa as it were, and cashing them in the $100k and even $1M ranges. What is the BTC to $ trading volume these days?
This function is all but forgotten by officials in the judicial system, these days (In NL and in Europe in general, it seems). "Stiffer sentences don't work" is something touted as an absolute truth backed by scientific research, but it's little more than a mantra going around in an echo chamber. Stiffer sentences do hurt rehabilitation, and after a certain point they no longer work as a deterrent, but they work wonders for insulation.
Retribution is a somewhat irrelevant aspect (though not wholly pointless!), but I disagree that insulation is more important than rehabilitation, it varies per case. If there is a good chance to rehabilitate a criminal, then it makes sense to try that; it's cheaper and there's less chance of recidivism compared to a criminal serving an "insulation" sentence. But if there's no reasonable outlook on successful rehab, better to then just keep the criminal out of society for a while. In that sense, I do not believe in "stiffer sentences" per se, but I do believe in longer jail terms for repeat offenders from an "insulation" perspective, as they have proven to be less susceptible to rehabilitation.
If Luckey and Zuck say that this changes nothing and that they aim to just sell the hardware to us without any FB strings attached, I believe them... now. I also believe that very soon after launch, there will be a boardroom meeting at FB to discuss ways to create more synergy between the Occulus and FBs core business, which is 1) suckering more people into their service, 2) retaining those people as active members, 3) mining any and all data from those customers, 4) selling that data to interested 3rd parties, and 5) serving us crappy ads. None of those goals promise any improvement (for us) over an Occulus sold "as is", on the contrary, but I can think of plenty of ways how FB would benefit from a more "integrated" Occulus.
But even if they will truly sell this device without any strings attached, I'd still be hesitant to buy it. FB is fast becoming the Monsanto of the IT world, and besides a reluctance to deal with them from a privacy perspective, I'm now beginning to have moral objections as well.
At the code level, elegance means readability and ease of understanding what is being done, it's not about the code lines being pretty or poetic. If you have to use a crappy workaround or do some non-obvious API calls because the API you code against is crap, you add comments to explain what you're doing, and try to contain each "hack" to one function or method (rather than designing your objects around them). That way, you can keep your code readable and understandable, and elegant.
At the data / object model level, there are good real-world examples of elegant coding. At this level, elegance affords the ability to make smaller changes or bug fixes without having to resort to major refactoring or adding a lot of messy code in many different places in your program. At this level, elegance also works to isolate the overall program from ugly interfaces / APIs.
That's a neat trick, but is it elegant? To me, elegance at code level means succinct and readable code. Optimizing for performance usually comes at a lower level of readability.
Look at the examples from that article:
do {/* count > 0 assumed */ *to = *from++;/* Note that the 'to' pointer is NOT incremented */ } while(--count > 0);
Compared to Duff's optimization:
send(to, from, count) register short *to, *from; register count; { register n = (count + 7) / 8; switch(count % 8) { case 0: do { *to = *from++; case 7: *to = *from++; case 6: *to = *from++; case 5: *to = *from++; case 4: *to = *from++; case 3: *to = *from++; case 2: *to = *from++; case 1: *to = *from++; } while(--n > 0); } }
(for the life of me I can't figure out how to indent those code snippets properly here).
From which of the two is it easier to understand what the code snippet does, and which is easier to debug? To me, those are two important outcomes of elegant coding.
For the record: I'm not a fan of Bitcoin and I have never had more than half a BTC or so to my name. I'll leave the rest of your comment for what it is.
Slashdot Mirror
Just keep firing, soldier! Accuracy will improve.
And that is of course the reason these guys used this particular method to estimate pi: not "science", but as an excuse to blast away with a shotgun. As if you need an excuse for that...
Not this "software engineers aren't real engineers" crap again. Those real engineers make plenty of mistakes too,sometimes costly ones, sometimes even deadly. And they too hide behind the "shit happens" excuse from time to time, after signing off on a disaster. I recognize that software engineering is not nearly as mature as other fields of endeavor, but you're doing the profession of software design a disservice comparing it to bloodletting and leeches.
It is good to take responsibility if you screw up, and I would like to see more real engineering rigour in software development. However that doesn't mean the guy making the mistake should be the scapegoat. The best of us can make mistakes, but the fact that these mistakes make it into the final product is not only our failing, but a failing of the procedures in place as well. If your process cannot cope with a single human being making a mistake, then it's the team, manager and company failing, not just the solitary engineer. Software engineering processes suck pretty bad in that regard, but "real" engineering practices have their failings too. Thinking of the famous "woodpecker" comparison between architects and software engineers, I'll say the world is damn lucky that real-world construction is way more forgiving when it comes to small errors translating to big issues, even if it's failure modes are a usually a lot mor noisy, dangerous, and costly.
Or the language or its standard libraries contain a vulnerability. That nice bounds checking container or gargabe collector? Maybe they're broken.
French companies can have 24x7 coverage, however they cannot force people to work after hours. Those people who elect to work odd hours or overtime are paid for doing so. Sounds just fine to me: it prevents a race to the bottom, and looking at the statistics French workers do just fine in terms of productivity. From personal experience, I've never noticed that the French liberal (commie, sensible, unproductive, fair, take your pick) approach to work/life balance translates to slacking during the hours that they do work. Working with them gives about the same results as with German, Belgian or Dutch firms (cultural differences aside).
Crap, you're right and I need more coffee...
Interestingly, the English word "nor" is more like a NAND.
The point is still valid: if something on a car fails, there is a very good chance you'll walk away from it. On an aircraft, not so much.
"and flyers a taste of their personal pilot.". That sounds... wrong. Or maybe the deal is "ass, gas, or gras"?
"dad...you seem really smart...why in the world did you decide to be a programmer and sit behind a computer 10 hours a day instead of doing something cool?"
Sounds like a perception issue, and one that sadly is perpetuated in schools and society at large. Think of the cliche oft-heard lament in movies, parent talking to son: "You could have been a doctor or a lawyer". My brother's kid provided a nice counterexample; when they had a class discussion on interesting family members: "One of my uncles builds robots, one of them writes iPhone apps, and one of them works for Blackberry" (back then, BB still was a cool brand) which according to the class trumped the other kids with family doctors, lawyers, MPs or directors in coolness factor.
But with that said, it is true that with older kids and adults, coding carries very little glamour or prestige (which does have an impact on pay, by the way).
Injection moulded UAV airframe produced in.... minutes?
How many minutes and $$$ to produce the mold? It's pretty clear that 3d printing is a poor substitute for bulk production processes. It is however a viable option in case you want to quickly produce a single instance of an item (prototyping, or locations where shipping or stocking items is too slow or too expensive). It's also a good option to produce small runs of complex items. One of my clients started using a (industrial-quality) 3d printer to produce highly complex manifolds for pumps. They had trouble producing that design using injection molding, casting or milling, and they are now using the 3d printer for production runs.
Lots of advantages in having things online, or at least connected to a home automation controller. If there's a problem (fire, burglary, water leak) the system can take action and / or notify you. And sometimes there are good reasons to add a few features (adding complexity).
With that said, most home automation enthusiasts recognize that these systems are not as reliable as their more simple counterparts. Current best practice for stuff like this is to use standard smoke detectors wired into a conventional alarm panel, then hook up the alarm panel to the home automation controller. I have some smart-ish smoke detectors, they are regular detectors with a wireless (Z-wave, not WiFi) chip bolted onto the connection meant to go to an alarm panel. That means I'll be notified when it goes off, but if the HA system fails for whatever reason, the detector will still beep is there's smoke.
Exactly. I'm not against advertising, but it seems that advertisers are once again engaged in a loudness war. For a good while, online ads were pretty decent: small banners with relevant information. But it's getting worse again; animated (bouncing) ads, auto-playing movies, roll over sound effects, anything to grab your attention. Interstitials and pop-ups are back in a big way. And that's without even getting started on the "goods" being advertised.
And besides the fact hat ad tracking is an invasion of my privacy (and thus far fails to deliver me relevant ads), it can also be detrimental to the performance of the hosting website. As TFA mentions, on some pages, tracking scripts make up as much as 25% of the downloaded data, and it shows. I increasingly see pages load very slowly or even fail to load at all because of an overtaxed ad server somewhere.
A watch is a nice example of a wearable device. And today even more so than back when those lines were written, watches are worn as an accessory rather than for their function. In that light, it surprises me that most of the currently available "smart" watches are ugly as sin.
I've worked in various different work environments, but thankfully nothing as horrible as that. I do know that employees with kids and a mortgage are seen as being easier to manage than contractors with large nest eggs or even employees with a sufficiently large "f.u. fund", for authoritarian managers that is. On the flip side, people in the work force who are rich and independent enough to not have to put up with any crap from their manager, are there of their own volition, and probably like what they do. Such self-motivated, happy employees generally make for better employees.
I have certainly never come across an employer who favours or actively seeks out indebted job seekers in order to have a tighter control over their workforce.
That is exactly what rubs me the wrong way about that announcement, besides fears that FB will turn Oculus into another data mining opportunity. Gaming is barely a blip? The buzz around Oculus has been from two sides: business (who want to use VR tech for telepresence, operating ROVs etc), and gamers. We want to control our Parrot drone with the Oculus, we want to walk around Tamriel or Middle Earth wearing this thing, or immerse ourselves in virtual battlefields, or perhaps watch a movie in a virtual cinema... What we don't want, need or asked for is friggin' Second Life VR.
With that said, if the drivers / SDK remain openly available, I am sure game developers will get on board. But with gaming "barely on the radar", I fear for the undoubtedly necessary collaboration between Oculus and game developers.
Speaking of craftsmen... One of the problems with programming is that in many (but not all) shops, coding actually is a craft, rather than a profession. There's little on the job training or coaching, few common frameworks and methodologies that work well, and a lot of the job descriptions within IT seem to have been made up mostly to make life easy for project managers and HR, not to relate to the actual and complete skill sets of individuals.
Or perhaps the problem is that the nature of programming is more like a craft, while we are trying to treat is like a profession.
a charlatan that appeals to the pointy haired bosses of the world looking for that silver bullet.
Spot on. Managers need (or are expected to have) a wide range of ever changing skills and traits, and if you claim that you can fill a gap or two, you'll have an easy sale. They are suckers for magic bullets. Just look at the staggering amount of management books available, not the "hard" ones on project management or business administration, but the soft ones. 7 Habits, The Art of War For Business, all with tiny nuggets of wisdom fluffed up and packaged in a bunch of crap. (I've read my share...). Hey, and everyone would like to be charismatic, so I can well believe this lady has plenty of clients.
Pro tip: since this lady has charisma covered, focus on other buzzwords to give seminars on. "Authentic leadership" seems to be popular lately... leaders are trying so hard to be authentic that almost by definition they achieve the exact opposite. But my 2 day seminar will help you to let your inner authentic self blossom forth, and I've a book on that as well. Order your copy today!
I'm not too worried about trolls, but I've seen plenty of abuse and accusations of cheating hurled at "skillers", in games like BF4. All to easy to hit the "report" button in frustration after the same guy headshoots you for the 6th time in a round. And the crowdsourcing effect will not work here to filter out abuse; I expect strong players to consistently attract such reports against them in online games.
One way to counter this to some degree is to spot-check reports, and apply heavy penalties to players making false accusations. It still is a lot of work, and I doubt whether an operator could make the distinction between a rage-report and an inaccurate report made in good faith.
Out of interest, has anyone tried to cash in amounts like these after the recent hype died down? During the hype I remember people finding some old BTC behind the sofa as it were, and cashing them in the $100k and even $1M ranges. What is the BTC to $ trading volume these days?
This function is all but forgotten by officials in the judicial system, these days (In NL and in Europe in general, it seems). "Stiffer sentences don't work" is something touted as an absolute truth backed by scientific research, but it's little more than a mantra going around in an echo chamber. Stiffer sentences do hurt rehabilitation, and after a certain point they no longer work as a deterrent, but they work wonders for insulation.
Retribution is a somewhat irrelevant aspect (though not wholly pointless!), but I disagree that insulation is more important than rehabilitation, it varies per case. If there is a good chance to rehabilitate a criminal, then it makes sense to try that; it's cheaper and there's less chance of recidivism compared to a criminal serving an "insulation" sentence. But if there's no reasonable outlook on successful rehab, better to then just keep the criminal out of society for a while. In that sense, I do not believe in "stiffer sentences" per se, but I do believe in longer jail terms for repeat offenders from an "insulation" perspective, as they have proven to be less susceptible to rehabilitation.
If Luckey and Zuck say that this changes nothing and that they aim to just sell the hardware to us without any FB strings attached, I believe them... now. I also believe that very soon after launch, there will be a boardroom meeting at FB to discuss ways to create more synergy between the Occulus and FBs core business, which is 1) suckering more people into their service, 2) retaining those people as active members, 3) mining any and all data from those customers, 4) selling that data to interested 3rd parties, and 5) serving us crappy ads. None of those goals promise any improvement (for us) over an Occulus sold "as is", on the contrary, but I can think of plenty of ways how FB would benefit from a more "integrated" Occulus.
But even if they will truly sell this device without any strings attached, I'd still be hesitant to buy it. FB is fast becoming the Monsanto of the IT world, and besides a reluctance to deal with them from a privacy perspective, I'm now beginning to have moral objections as well.
At the code level, elegance means readability and ease of understanding what is being done, it's not about the code lines being pretty or poetic. If you have to use a crappy workaround or do some non-obvious API calls because the API you code against is crap, you add comments to explain what you're doing, and try to contain each "hack" to one function or method (rather than designing your objects around them). That way, you can keep your code readable and understandable, and elegant.
At the data / object model level, there are good real-world examples of elegant coding. At this level, elegance affords the ability to make smaller changes or bug fixes without having to resort to major refactoring or adding a lot of messy code in many different places in your program. At this level, elegance also works to isolate the overall program from ugly interfaces / APIs.
Look at the examples from that article:
Compared to Duff's optimization:
(for the life of me I can't figure out how to indent those code snippets properly here).
From which of the two is it easier to understand what the code snippet does, and which is easier to debug? To me, those are two important outcomes of elegant coding.
For the record: I'm not a fan of Bitcoin and I have never had more than half a BTC or so to my name. I'll leave the rest of your comment for what it is.