The original analogy involved a principal (a fairly complex process) who instructs a group of students (a collection of complex processes) to go to various classrooms (a fairly expensive / time consuming task). The pseudo-code he has breaks most of these assumptions and results in a simple single threaded task calling move-to-classroom routine that is so trivial that the implementation is not even shown. His straw man analogy is thus not correct.
It could easily be the case where the analogy is correct. e.g.
This is distributed system run on a server farm so the principal and each student could easily be run as separate processes and thus giving responsibility via messaging would be more efficient.
Assigning a student to a classroom is an expensive operation. Perhaps many transactions have to be made, email needs to be sent, humans need to approve, etc.
In this case, implementing this system (especially with a technology such as actors) would very closely parallel the analogy and the anthropomorphism would aid in communicating the design. The straw man argument that the author dredges up is a very simple example not worthy of most tasks a software developer faces in the 21st century.
Any analogy can be incorrect. Don't use them if they're incorrect.
Has anyone been using this for Scala development with the android-sdk-plugin? I've been working on my first Scala android app and see it as a big improvement over Java. The only negative is that I've been using sbt+emacs instead of the blessed android dev environment (which used to be Eclipse) so I've been missing some features.
This is a pretty healthy conversation but I can still add my $0.02
I hosted my own email server (webserver etc.) from 1995 to 2005. It was very enlightening but eventually grew to be a big pain in the ass. The last straw was a power surge that fried the motherboard. (raid and backups can't help with that) and looking at the the time and effort of getting a new hardware (and getting more redundant hardware) I decided to go with a hosting service. Eventually I pointed my domains to gmail.
Every geek friend I know has at one time hosted his own email. I'd be hard pressed to find a techno-nerd worth his cred who hasn't tried this. I also don't know anyone who has continued to host their email after a number of years of feeding and caring for the server beast.
I think the big issue is figuring out where to separate you hobby from your job. If you have a classic car in your garage that you like to tinker with is fine. If you decide to do you daily 20 mile commute in your classic car you're signing yourself up for some headaches as there will be days that you will need to bumb a ride, take a bus or taxi, etc. Hosting your own email is like commuting to work in a car that only you are able to fix in an environment where there are no buses, taxis or other cars. You have to be prepared to drop everything at a moments notice to fix your email server.
You can have someone else host your hardware but then ask yourself, why not have someone else configure and maintain the software as well?
DIY is great but realize what your signing up for if you want to DIY a critical system.
Like any other data storage problem you have to ask yourself how you will access this data. For me there is a high probability that I will never look at an old phone bill or gas bill. In this case you want to optimize for insertion into the data store not selection from the data store.
so
I stick all of these statements into a big box. The more recent ones are on top so they are automatically sorted by date. When the box fills up I shred the bottom half of the box. This makes the most common case (insertion) really efficient; I just throw the paper in the box. In the rare case I need to find an old statement, I just hunt through the date sorted statements.
I bought a MythTV system from Cosmos Engineering. You can probably save money by building one yourself but I liked the fact that it just works out of the box. It was reviewed in Linux Journal so that might be reputable enough for you.
I talked to one WoW designer that who addressed this issue. If you have one quest that gives you SuperItem after you kill 1000 creatures and another quest that gives you SuperItem 1/1000 of times if you kill the same creature, then the latter quest will be more addicting. In the low level quests they use both of these (for variety) but many of the high level quests (raid) are all random drops.
Blizzard designed the game to be addictive. Of course you can argue that perhaps addictive==fun.
Since other people have chimed in calling you a whiner I figure I might as well chime in stating that I share your experience.
I'm another small user who was using Red Hat and paying for Red Hat when they decided to leave us out in the cold. I didn't want to switch from stable RH to unstable Fedora so I switched distributions which required some effort.
That's it: just the facts. People can call it whining if they want but once a company burns you it's very difficult to ever consider a product by that company again.
I would assume you're equally troubled that the Catholic Church no longer holds to the doctrine that the Earth is the center of the solar system. Should they have stood by their original beliefs "right or wrong"?
How did you come to respect this idea of "unshakeable beliefs?"
The full response of the Dalai Lama's was a little more humorous:
Sagan: "Yes. For example, in theological discussions with religious leaders, I often ask what their response would be if a central tenet of their faith were disproved by science. When I put this question to the Dalai Lama, he unhesitatingly replied as no conservative or fundamentalist religious leaders do: In such a case, he said, Tibetan Buddhism would have to change. Even, I asked, if it's a really central tenet, like (I searched for an example) reincarnation? Even then, he answered. However, he added with a twinkle - it's going to be hard to disprove reincarnation."
Still, to have a religious leader understand the concepts of evidence and falsifiability is pretty cool.
It's really simple. If the servers aren't performing well (this is subjective but Blizzard is currently admiting this) then Blizzard should not be selling new subscriptions.
The fact that they are still charging for new subscriptions while the servers are borked is crooked. Whether they are unwilling to fix the servers, unable to fix the servers, or if nobody on the planet is able to fix the servers, is irrelevant.
Your reasons echo my reasons for ditching the thinkpad.
For years I've been a thinkpad purchaser. I like the solid hardware and the consistent design. (IBM didn't feel the need to change the look every 6 months) IBM sold the laptop division all that brand loyalty evaporated. I don't have a negative opinion of Lenovo but rather I look at them as an unroven company that has yet to earn my trust. This is what makes me look at HP, Toshiba and even Apple when considering a future laptop.
I've been waiting to tell this story and this seems to be an appropriate venue.
I'm friends with a married couple. I'll call them Jack and Jill because one of them reads slashdot and I don't want to give the secret away.
Jack is a WoW addict. He works part time, plays 50+ hours per week. Is a member of a raiding guild and is always coveting that next purple, orange or whatever colored item.
Jill, his wife, is frustrated over his addiction. She bought an account just so she could spend a little more time with him. She leveled a character to 60 and occasionally raids but she enjoys RL more than the game and so resents having to play the game in order to spend time with her husband.
This is the part I thought was pretty cool.
Jill is the techie of the household and uses a linux based router/firewall/webserver/etc for local networking. As Jacks addiction grew worse she started checking out the ports used by WoW. Inititally she just started monitoring them in order to find out how much time he actually plays but later she realized she could throttle the connection (introduce lag) or block it completely (gee, the WoW servers are down again). The result is that when Jack has been playing WoW all day and Jill wants to go to dinner she either severely throttles the connection or cuts it completely. Jack thinks the blizzard servers are fscked up, wastes some time trying to log in and eventually gives up and joins Jill for dinner. Now Jill gets to occasionally go to dinner with Jack, to the movies, to a party. I kind of like it because I'm good friends with Jack and I get to see him occasionally now and then.
I'm not blind to the deception of this act. Yes it's kind of creepy, but so is not showering, playing wow for 20 hours straight with quick toilet breaks. While it doesn't get rid of the root problem of the addiction, it has prevented jack from completely losing all RL socialization.
I used to have a couple thousand books. One day when I realized I need more shelving the burden of the hoard finally started to weigh on me. I decided to go through the collection and sort it into two piles: the books I will likely read again and the books I will not likely read again. I ended up keeping a couple hundred books and donating the rest to the local library.
Now whenever I want to read a book I first search my local library listings, check it out and it gets delivered to my local branch. It's really easy.
My slimserver is running on a 450MHz PIII 256MB gentoo system. I also use it as a desktop so it is often running X, Gnome, and bloated Gnome apps. The squeezebox seems to perform fine but the web interface can be chunky at times. I wouldn't run it on a machine with a slower CPU or less RAM.
I'm not aware of any distributions as old as redhat 5 that are still being patched. Connecting a redhat 5 system to the internet would be a huge security risk. Sure, you could patch it yourself but that is a lot more work that upgrading.
Redhat 7.3 is still being patched by fedoralegacy. Maybe there is an old version of debian that is still being patched?
...could not answer, but instead just said arguing wouldn't matter. My friend quit EQ that day. I don't think I'll quit WoW over this, but I will take away some lessons. The GM I talked to had a nickname of something like...
What Blizzard hears:
BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH I don't think I'll quit WoW over this BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH
When reporters interview politicians or market droids who give answers without content, it would be great if the reporter would follow the interview with a summary similar to what the parent did. A few embarassing summaries might prod the interviewees to give more substantive answers. Better yet, they may cancel the interview. Who wants to read an interview that has no content?
I have so many friends and family that are either Democratic/Liberal or Rebublican/Conservative and create straw man arguments of the other side which makes them completely incapable of intelligently discussing the issues.
I probably have a much more liberal stance on many issues than you do but I'd like to think we could actually have a constructive dialog.
User defined content is a double edged sword and requires a really good community to work well. For whatever reason Blizzard has cultivated a horrible online community in WoW. Maybe it's the bnet kiddies, I don't know.
One of my favorite quotes reguarding player created content in WoW: If Blizzard created a "shovel" item, in one week Azeroth would be a giant hole. It's so much easier to destroy or vandalize than to create.
Slashdot Mirror
The original analogy involved a principal (a fairly complex process) who instructs a group of students (a collection of complex processes) to go to various classrooms (a fairly expensive / time consuming task). The pseudo-code he has breaks most of these assumptions and results in a simple single threaded task calling move-to-classroom routine that is so trivial that the implementation is not even shown. His straw man analogy is thus not correct.
It could easily be the case where the analogy is correct. e.g.
In this case, implementing this system (especially with a technology such as actors) would very closely parallel the analogy and the anthropomorphism would aid in communicating the design. The straw man argument that the author dredges up is a very simple example not worthy of most tasks a software developer faces in the 21st century.
Any analogy can be incorrect. Don't use them if they're incorrect.
Has anyone been using this for Scala development with the android-sdk-plugin? I've been working on my first Scala android app and see it as a big improvement over Java. The only negative is that I've been using sbt+emacs instead of the blessed android dev environment (which used to be Eclipse) so I've been missing some features.
This is a pretty healthy conversation but I can still add my $0.02
I hosted my own email server (webserver etc.) from 1995 to 2005. It was very enlightening but eventually grew to be a big pain in the ass. The last straw was a power surge that fried the motherboard. (raid and backups can't help with that) and looking at the the time and effort of getting a new hardware (and getting more redundant hardware) I decided to go with a hosting service. Eventually I pointed my domains to gmail.
Every geek friend I know has at one time hosted his own email. I'd be hard pressed to find a techno-nerd worth his cred who hasn't tried this. I also don't know anyone who has continued to host their email after a number of years of feeding and caring for the server beast.
I think the big issue is figuring out where to separate you hobby from your job. If you have a classic car in your garage that you like to tinker with is fine. If you decide to do you daily 20 mile commute in your classic car you're signing yourself up for some headaches as there will be days that you will need to bumb a ride, take a bus or taxi, etc. Hosting your own email is like commuting to work in a car that only you are able to fix in an environment where there are no buses, taxis or other cars. You have to be prepared to drop everything at a moments notice to fix your email server.
You can have someone else host your hardware but then ask yourself, why not have someone else configure and maintain the software as well?
DIY is great but realize what your signing up for if you want to DIY a critical system.
Like any other data storage problem you have to ask yourself how you will access this data. For me there is a high probability that I will never look at an old phone bill or gas bill. In this case you want to optimize for insertion into the data store not selection from the data store. so I stick all of these statements into a big box. The more recent ones are on top so they are automatically sorted by date. When the box fills up I shred the bottom half of the box. This makes the most common case (insertion) really efficient; I just throw the paper in the box. In the rare case I need to find an old statement, I just hunt through the date sorted statements.
I bought a MythTV system from Cosmos Engineering. You can probably save money by building one yourself but I liked the fact that it just works out of the box. It was reviewed in Linux Journal so that might be reputable enough for you.
I talked to one WoW designer that who addressed this issue. If you have one quest that gives you SuperItem after you kill 1000 creatures and another quest that gives you SuperItem 1/1000 of times if you kill the same creature, then the latter quest will be more addicting. In the low level quests they use both of these (for variety) but many of the high level quests (raid) are all random drops.
Blizzard designed the game to be addictive. Of course you can argue that perhaps addictive==fun.
A year old issue of Scientific American had a really good article which is a kind of Big Bang for Dummies.
The article is online and you can read it here: "Misconceptions about the Big Bang"
Since other people have chimed in calling you a whiner I figure I might as well chime in stating that I share your experience.
I'm another small user who was using Red Hat and paying for Red Hat when they decided to leave us out in the cold. I didn't want to switch from stable RH to unstable Fedora so I switched distributions which required some effort.
That's it: just the facts. People can call it whining if they want but once a company burns you it's very difficult to ever consider a product by that company again.
I would assume you're equally troubled that the Catholic Church no longer holds to the doctrine that the Earth is the center of the solar system. Should they have stood by their original beliefs "right or wrong"?
How did you come to respect this idea of "unshakeable beliefs?"
The full response of the Dalai Lama's was a little more humorous:
Still, to have a religious leader understand the concepts of evidence and falsifiability is pretty cool.
It's really simple. If the servers aren't performing well (this is subjective but Blizzard is currently admiting this) then Blizzard should not be selling new subscriptions.
The fact that they are still charging for new subscriptions while the servers are borked is crooked. Whether they are unwilling to fix the servers, unable to fix the servers, or if nobody on the planet is able to fix the servers, is irrelevant.
Your reasons echo my reasons for ditching the thinkpad.
For years I've been a thinkpad purchaser. I like the solid hardware and the consistent design. (IBM didn't feel the need to change the look every 6 months) IBM sold the laptop division all that brand loyalty evaporated. I don't have a negative opinion of Lenovo but rather I look at them as an unroven company that has yet to earn my trust. This is what makes me look at HP, Toshiba and even Apple when considering a future laptop.
I've been waiting to tell this story and this seems to be an appropriate venue.
I'm friends with a married couple. I'll call them Jack and Jill because one of them reads slashdot and I don't want to give the secret away.
Jack is a WoW addict. He works part time, plays 50+ hours per week. Is a member of a raiding guild and is always coveting that next purple, orange or whatever colored item.
Jill, his wife, is frustrated over his addiction. She bought an account just so she could spend a little more time with him. She leveled a character to 60 and occasionally raids but she enjoys RL more than the game and so resents having to play the game in order to spend time with her husband.
This is the part I thought was pretty cool.
Jill is the techie of the household and uses a linux based router/firewall/webserver/etc for local networking. As Jacks addiction grew worse she started checking out the ports used by WoW. Inititally she just started monitoring them in order to find out how much time he actually plays but later she realized she could throttle the connection (introduce lag) or block it completely (gee, the WoW servers are down again). The result is that when Jack has been playing WoW all day and Jill wants to go to dinner she either severely throttles the connection or cuts it completely. Jack thinks the blizzard servers are fscked up, wastes some time trying to log in and eventually gives up and joins Jill for dinner. Now Jill gets to occasionally go to dinner with Jack, to the movies, to a party. I kind of like it because I'm good friends with Jack and I get to see him occasionally now and then.
I'm not blind to the deception of this act. Yes it's kind of creepy, but so is not showering, playing wow for 20 hours straight with quick toilet breaks. While it doesn't get rid of the root problem of the addiction, it has prevented jack from completely losing all RL socialization.
I used to have a couple thousand books. One day when I realized I need more shelving the burden of the hoard finally started to weigh on me. I decided to go through the collection and sort it into two piles: the books I will likely read again and the books I will not likely read again. I ended up keeping a couple hundred books and donating the rest to the local library.
Now whenever I want to read a book I first search my local library listings, check it out and it gets delivered to my local branch. It's really easy.
You're missing a big point and that is: how much value do the new formats give you over the existing format?
VHS vs. broadcast/cable:
DVD vs. VHS:
BLU-ray vs. DVD
Both VHS and DVD offered a lot of value over the existing options. Not so with BLU-ray.
Yet another single data point:
My slimserver is running on a 450MHz PIII 256MB gentoo system. I also use it as a desktop so it is often running X, Gnome, and bloated Gnome apps. The squeezebox seems to perform fine but the web interface can be chunky at times. I wouldn't run it on a machine with a slower CPU or less RAM.
The parent should be modded up.
I'm not aware of any distributions as old as redhat 5 that are still being patched. Connecting a redhat 5 system to the internet would be a huge security risk. Sure, you could patch it yourself but that is a lot more work that upgrading.
Redhat 7.3 is still being patched by fedoralegacy. Maybe there is an old version of debian that is still being patched?
How can think that?
It's obvious that this is the result of His Noodly Appendage.
What Taco says:
What Blizzard hears:
BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH I don't think I'll quit WoW over this BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH
You could always filter Zonk. Slashdot is a lot sparser without Zonk's postings but the quality seems to be a bit higher.
When reporters interview politicians or market droids who give answers without content, it would be great if the reporter would follow the interview with a summary similar to what the parent did. A few embarassing summaries might prod the interviewees to give more substantive answers. Better yet, they may cancel the interview. Who wants to read an interview that has no content?
Can we import all the message from the other discussion we had today? Maybe Zonk can cut and paste them all to save us some time.
Very refreshing.
I have so many friends and family that are either Democratic/Liberal or Rebublican/Conservative and create straw man arguments of the other side which makes them completely incapable of intelligently discussing the issues.
I probably have a much more liberal stance on many issues than you do but I'd like to think we could actually have a constructive dialog.
User defined content is a double edged sword and requires a really good community to work well. For whatever reason Blizzard has cultivated a horrible online community in WoW. Maybe it's the bnet kiddies, I don't know.
One of my favorite quotes reguarding player created content in WoW: If Blizzard created a "shovel" item, in one week Azeroth would be a giant hole. It's so much easier to destroy or vandalize than to create.
What other (non-Blizzard) games do your designers like?
Computer games? Console games? Table-top RPGs? Chess, Go, Bridge?
What are your favorite german board games?