I'm glad you found yourself a group of people willing to exert themselves for a shitty wage at an even shittier job. I hope that works out for you. For the rest of us living the minimum-wage life, the only thing we'll exert ourselves at is getting a better/higher paying job - offer us something worth working for and we're all over it.
It's all what you think is a reasonable low end income, right? Ask an American what a person should be able to do with one minimum wage income, and I think you'll hear responses like "rent a small apartment, afford basic transportation, get medical care, and eat". Then take a look at the living conditions for many of your illegal immigrant workers. 10 people will share two vehicles and a 400 square foot apartment, work the equivalent of two full time minimum wage jobs, live on rice, beans, and water, use "pray you don't get sick" as their medical insurance, and use "hope your family loves you enough to support you" as a retirement plan.
Surprise surprise, even children from lower middle class American families just can't find it in themselves to get excited about that kind of lifestyle. If you're the type to think that the kids' poor attitude towards minimum wage is not your problem, you're wrong. If they can't be motivated to work for a living on minimum wage, they'll either turn to welfare or crime. In the end, supporting a good education system and a higher minimum wage is the cheapest path society can take.
Technical innovations in a home gaming system only matter if the end-user sees a direct benefit.
So if the PS3 offers less than a significant improvement in gameplay or graphics over other consoles (I am not making a judgement either way, just a supposition), then the presence of the Cell processor does not mean much.
Technology for technology's sake with no benefit in cost, reliability, efficiency, or performance is a waste. Blu Ray is good, but the Cell processor in the PS3 only matters if PS3 games offer substantially improved gameplay or visuals over the competition.
I haven't tried JSF, but I'm the sole maintainer of a Struts application. It works reliably, but changes are a pain in the behind.
I have zero experience with the Stripes web framework, but this comparison between Stripes and Struts has an excellent illustration of the klunkiness of Struts: http://stripes.mc4j.org/confluence/display/stripes /Stripes+vs.+Struts "One of my prime frustrations with Struts is the fact that just to implement a single page/form, I have to write or edit so many files. And I have to keep them in sync, or else things start going horribly wrong. With Struts I have to write my JSP, my Action, my Form, a form-bean stanza in the struts-config.xml, an action stanza in the struts-config.xml, and if I'm going to do it the Struts way, a bunch of forward stanzas. And let's not go into the fact that since this is all stored in one xml file I'm continually facing merge conflicts with my team mates. Yes, there are annotations for Struts, but they are just literal translations of what's in the XML file, and they don't feel natural to me."
You may with to learn Struts anyway, because it's so common. But if you're builing a new Java web app from scratch and no one on your team is used to Struts, I'd investigate alternatives. The Struts project page even lists a few under the 'Similar Projects' heading. Now, extensibility, stability, and other buzzwords matter just as much as ease of initial configuration. So don't use speed of initial development as your sole criteria.
I'm not saying that the concept, mathematics, and theory classes should be dumped! I still think they are the most important parts of a CS program.
What I am saying is that the design and theory classes should be supplemented with at least a handful of courses on accomplishing real world work. And if it's done right, that real world work will illustrate many of the abstract principals you learned in your other courses. Or even incorporate one or two elements of practical programming in each theory class. If every CS student has to take "Object Oriented Design 210", then maybe they would benefit if the professor for that course had the students put all of their projects for the class in CVS or Subversion. If every CS student has to take "Formal Methods", then maybe the professor for that course can take just a handful of classes to demonstrate bug hunting with formal proofs of function behavior. You don't even need to rewrite the curriculum, just ensure that each class spends a little time learning some basic practical skills.
My software engineering degree required a lot of presentations, a handful of written papers, and a lot of discussions on software development models, good design procedures, formal verification of code, testing practices, and so forth.
Now that I've been in the workforce 5 years, a lot of what I learned is very valuable. But for the first two years out, most of it was useless - I needed a background in actual application development at the low level in the trenches. I had the Computer Science, but no programming foundation to build it on - fine if you want to do testing or management, crap if you wanted to actually design and program.
Smart colleges should offer courses that cover bug tracking, source control, learning how to find the information you need in technical documentation, and especially how to read other people's code. Give a class a 50,000 line application with 20 or 30 known, non-trivial bugs in it and spend the semester showing them how to find the bugs. Give a class some applications which have very poor code reuse and show them how to break out common code into separate libraries which are easier to document, track, and debug. etc... etc... After getting my MS in Software Engineering, I was like a mechanic who could diagram the variable valve timing in a Ferrari but couldn't change a tire.
But it's not true. Most Linux distributions that try to attract home users have very end-user friendly graphical programs that handle all of the pieces of downloading and installing additional software. No command line required.
Installing Linux can be painfully difficult, since hardware vendors do not all build Linux-compatible drivers or release detailed specifications so Linux developers can build their own. And yes, many Windows problems just plain don't run on Linux. But once you have Linux running on your network, installing programs that are supported by your chosen distribution is a cinch.
I am not saying, however, that Linux is ready to take over the desktop. I value the freedom and community cooperation of Open Source software over convenience. Most home users have no interest in the political philosophy behind the software they use, they just want it to accomplish tasks easily. Freedom is great, but millions of people (including most of my friends and family) will accept a restrictive software license and a $20 to $300 price tag for an application or operating system over having to learn a new way to accomplish familiar computing tasks. I don't see Linux getting any real traction until Wine handles the entire Win32 API (and maybe DirectX) solidly enough for home users to easily run any Windows app on Linux or open source alternatives to most common Windows programs offer nearly identical features and user experiences.
I use PostgreSQL's PL/pgSQL language, which emulates PL/SQL (probably a small subset of it, I'm not familiar with all of PL/SQL's features). It's been wonderful for automating complex SQL queries and doing dynamic logging as it goes along.
Previously when we had duplicate patient entries in the system, a non-technical staff member had to run SQL queries to locate the offending records and then run about 10 separate SQL statements to merge each one by hand. It took me less than a week to write a PL/pgSQL function to scour the database for all conflicts you can detect with common errors, perform the merge, and log the exact SQL that was run in a change history table along with human-readable comments with each statement. *poof* problem solved, and we still have all the PL/pgSQL functions sitting around in case errors occur in the future.
It was my first time using a procedural language built on SQL, and I felt like a kid in a candy shop.
As an aside, I appreciate everyone's comments on the usefulness of Oracle. I honestly had no idea it really was that stable and optimized for efficient performance.
I understand Oracle is an industry juggernaut, but $160,000 for a 4-CPU license (from the Guardian article)? Is Oracle really that superior to Ingres, Sybase, Microsoft SQL Server, and especially PostgreSQL or MySQL?
I'm not trying to troll here. I'm just thinking that for the cost of several Oracle installations and experienced Oracle DBAs you could get a much cheaper (or outright free) database and some really top notch talent.
Re:This guy has staying power!
on
An Ode To Al
·
· Score: 1
I was raised Catholic, and Lehrer's "The Vatican Rag" never fails to leave me in stitches.
Maybe I just suck as a software engineer, but really the quality of code I write starts to take a serious dive after my first six or seven hours of work.
On the rare occasions I've pulled a 10 or 12 hour day, I usually got something that didn't crash at the drop of a hat out the door. Then when I needed to extend that code later, it almost always needed to be heavily revised or outright scrapped and redone.
I can't imagine frequent long shifts writing code. There'd be so much junk in the mix it would be a nightmare.
If the kid is going to cry about people running faster then him, or playing flag football better then him, and not try to get in better shape, let them be a fat slob for life, I could care less. Your same argument could get swapped around for science class, when those poor jocks get turned off because nerds answer all the questions, yada yada yada, a very lame argument.
You're missing a big part of the problem. If a jock can't answer a question in science class, and a nerd mocks him, said nerd will probably find himself stuffed into a locker after class. If a nerd, or anyone else, does poorly in gym class, the bullies among the athletes can have a field day making fun of him (or her) and there ain't a damn thing the victim can do about it.
I've belonged to three gyms since graduating from college. In each one, every single person there, no matter how fit or musclebound, was at least neutral towards the sedentary and obese people who joined the gym. A surprising amount of people were openly friendly and helpful. I've seen a guy with six pack abs who could bench press 350 pounds strike up a friendly conversation with a 350 pound, 45 year old woman. He appreciated that she was trying to do something about her poor health.
That's the exact opposite of most people's high school experiences. Many high school athletes are neutral or even friendly to their less athletic peers. But most schools have gangs of bullying and very vocal athletes that enjoy humiliating everyone weaker than they are. They turn exercise into a negative experience for the non athletes, and many people never even try to attend a commercial gym because they figure the experience there will be just as bad as high school.
Warren Buffet, one of the most successful investors in the US, CEO of mega-firm Berkshire Hathaway, makes good arguments in several of the Berkshire Hathaway annual reports that CEOs are dramatically overpaid.
3) pleasing corporations is not a tenant of oss and never has been,
The corporations make the hardware and pay for a lot of oss development. A basement OSS developer only has so much time to contribute to free software. Many of the OSS leaders have paid, full time corporate jobs to work on open source projects. And it's a lot easier to use hardware with open source software if the vendor provides an open driver or releases the device specs to open source developers.
In principle open source and corporations are unrelated. But if we want widespread open source software use - which builds the foundation for more open source development - we need to cooperate with businesses.
One step further:
2 QA Systems. One for testing the next release, one set up identically to the production server so QA can reproduce problems found with the production software.
The company I'm at now is extremely small. I constitute 50% of the software engineers and 33% of the entire IT department. We have a production setup, 2 developer setups, and a QA server that we've configured to rapidly switch between our production software and release software. The transition takes about 15 minutes.
I never noticed that the piano part in that song follows Ben Folds Five. Thanks for the connection. I'm not big on that song, though. Lyrics are funny, but the whiny tone just ruins it for me.
I own all of them, actually. Anywhere from 1-5 songs per album is an original that parodies a genre or a particular musician without mimicking any single song.
I like to sing. Because Al has jokes in his lyrics, he usually does a really good job speaking clearly so the listener can get the jokes. I could sing along with Smells Like Nirvana the second time I heard it. I still don't know all of the words to Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit, and I've heard that dozens of times. Weird Al is one of the only musicians whose lyrics I never need to look up after hearing a song.
I also have a taste for really bad puns and silly jokes. That's a help too.
If you have a less silly sense of humor, I can respect that. If you don't like the voice... I have many friends who go berserk for Rush, and I can't listen to their lead singer without wanting to shove a pencil through my ears. So I can respect that too.
I know the comment was made as a joke, but in all seriousness Weird Al is a decent musician.
The lyrics often sound like they came from a couple of bored teenagers, but his music has a wide variety including a lot of original songs that are not simply knockoffs of a specific song. Since You've Been Gone is an original in a barbershop quartet style. Swap a few lyrics, and Germs could seamlessly fit into a Nine Inch Nails album. Hardware Store is a brilliant rock and ska parody with a four part harmony I've wasted an embarassing amount of time listening to. Good Old Days easy listening. One More Minute 60s music. Nature Trail to Hell metal. Trigger Happy Beach Boys. You Don't Love Me Anymore soft rock/ love songs.
And of course, an impressive collection of Polkas. Why not enjoy it all with a good sound system?
i am sorry if you can't remember to free your own damn memory then.. why are you writing code???
In a perfect world, every project gets all the time required to be completed with optimal efficiency and performance. In the real world, the idea is to limit scope, cost, and timeline so that you can accomplish the task as best as you can within the allotted time.
If you don't have to worry about freeing your memory, that's one less thing slowing your productivity. It's also one less possible source of bugs. In any team project, it is also one less source of problems from other developers. Now in certain applications where performance is paramount and a fine level of control is desired, manual memory management is the way to go.
In other applications, the developer time you save by using Objective C, Java, Perl, Python, Ruby, or whatever easily pays for any additional server hardware you require to run the less efficient code.
and after nearly 10 years of Linux use, I'm on the edge of jacking it in and going back to fucking Windows.
The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. I have to use Windows for work. I can work from home periodically. I download the files I need, and work. The only problem is, even though my LAN works perfectly and my internet connection is fine, Internet Explorer and a few other apps prompt me to launch the VPN connection before I access the web. If I disregard the prompts, I can continue surfing just fine... for a few minutes. Then they appear again. Honest to god, I log in to the work VPN, get what I need, and then delete the connection. I recreate it when I need it. Otherwise, I have to dismiss 100 requests to connect to my work network over the course of the day at home.
Then there's the fun of accessing a network share through VPN. My work has a slow internet connection (topic of another rant). But if I'm navigating through FTP servers at my work network, performance is acceptable. But if a network share connection slows down too much, Explorer.exe hangs on my machine and then crashes. It recovers fine without requiring a reboot, but it's still 30 seconds of a blank screen and then having to open 'Network Neighborhood' and navigate back to the network share I was in and try again. The sysadmin doesn't know, but I've installed Filezilla on the work servers I access from home. I've traded the easy navigation of Explorer.exe on network shares for reliable functioning from FTP.
Not to mention the hassle of Windows Update and virus scans. There's another fun one. "Windows has downloaded a critical security update and your machine requires a reboot. Would you like to reboot now?" Repeat every five minutes. And of course, no Ctrl-Alt-F1 to access the console when something goes wrong. No beloved kill -9 to remove hanging processes. 'shutdown -h now' has never, ever failed me on Linux. On Windows, I usually get tired of hanging applications at reboot and just pull the damn power cord. I'm sure my stupidity will corrupt a crucial system file eventually, but I don't feel like waiting three minutes for it to shut everything down.
I dump files from a PostgreSQL database that end up anywhere from 6 MB to 32 MB as plain text files. Double click that on your Windows desktop, and depending upon the machine WordPad can hang long enough for you to brew a pot of coffee. And when I need to do global find/replaces on large files? Forget it. I much prefer the convenience of GUI over VIM, but I can pop those files open in VIM, search, replace, and save without ever having to wait for the system to finish the current command. Now of course, VIM is available for Windows. Many of the best Linux applications are available for Windows. But the point is, if I have to work around Windows' default functionality then I am not getting much benefit from using it.
I'm not saying Linux is unequivocably better in any measurable way aside from being open source. It can be a royal pain in the neck. But at least in my experience, every Linux bug or missing feature that drives me nuts is matched by something equally annoying in Windows. Whatever you decide, good luck.
My understanding is that Brazil already uses ethanol with almost half its fleet, and is closing in on self-sufficiency as far as their energy needs.
If you actually, you know, read the article you'd know that according to BP's research (and of course, they could be manipulating the figures) Brazil actually only gets 10% of its energy from ethanol. A large part of its energy independence is domestic oil production.
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I'm glad you found yourself a group of people willing to exert themselves for a shitty wage at an even shittier job. I hope that works out for you. For the rest of us living the minimum-wage life, the only thing we'll exert ourselves at is getting a better/higher paying job - offer us something worth working for and we're all over it.
It's all what you think is a reasonable low end income, right? Ask an American what a person should be able to do with one minimum wage income, and I think you'll hear responses like "rent a small apartment, afford basic transportation, get medical care, and eat". Then take a look at the living conditions for many of your illegal immigrant workers. 10 people will share two vehicles and a 400 square foot apartment, work the equivalent of two full time minimum wage jobs, live on rice, beans, and water, use "pray you don't get sick" as their medical insurance, and use "hope your family loves you enough to support you" as a retirement plan.
Surprise surprise, even children from lower middle class American families just can't find it in themselves to get excited about that kind of lifestyle. If you're the type to think that the kids' poor attitude towards minimum wage is not your problem, you're wrong. If they can't be motivated to work for a living on minimum wage, they'll either turn to welfare or crime. In the end, supporting a good education system and a higher minimum wage is the cheapest path society can take.
Technical innovations in a home gaming system only matter if the end-user sees a direct benefit.
So if the PS3 offers less than a significant improvement in gameplay or graphics over other consoles (I am not making a judgement either way, just a supposition), then the presence of the Cell processor does not mean much.
Technology for technology's sake with no benefit in cost, reliability, efficiency, or performance is a waste. Blu Ray is good, but the Cell processor in the PS3 only matters if PS3 games offer substantially improved gameplay or visuals over the competition.
That's right. Who cares if they were injured working on the job for an employer that is too cheap to hire legal American employees.
Who cares if it's some pregnant women.
Who cares if it's some sick children.
The important thing to remember was that they weren't born in this country, so fuck them. They can die in pain, it's not our problem.
I haven't tried JSF, but I'm the sole maintainer of a Struts application. It works reliably, but changes are a pain in the behind.
s /Stripes+vs.+Struts
I have zero experience with the Stripes web framework, but this comparison between Stripes and Struts has an excellent illustration of the klunkiness of Struts: http://stripes.mc4j.org/confluence/display/stripe
"One of my prime frustrations with Struts is the fact that just to implement a single page/form, I have to write or edit so many files. And I have to keep them in sync, or else things start going horribly wrong. With Struts I have to write my JSP, my Action, my Form, a form-bean stanza in the struts-config.xml, an action stanza in the struts-config.xml, and if I'm going to do it the Struts way, a bunch of forward stanzas. And let's not go into the fact that since this is all stored in one xml file I'm continually facing merge conflicts with my team mates. Yes, there are annotations for Struts, but they are just literal translations of what's in the XML file, and they don't feel natural to me."
You may with to learn Struts anyway, because it's so common. But if you're builing a new Java web app from scratch and no one on your team is used to Struts, I'd investigate alternatives. The Struts project page even lists a few under the 'Similar Projects' heading. Now, extensibility, stability, and other buzzwords matter just as much as ease of initial configuration. So don't use speed of initial development as your sole criteria.
I'm not saying that the concept, mathematics, and theory classes should be dumped! I still think they are the most important parts of a CS program.
What I am saying is that the design and theory classes should be supplemented with at least a handful of courses on accomplishing real world work. And if it's done right, that real world work will illustrate many of the abstract principals you learned in your other courses. Or even incorporate one or two elements of practical programming in each theory class. If every CS student has to take "Object Oriented Design 210", then maybe they would benefit if the professor for that course had the students put all of their projects for the class in CVS or Subversion. If every CS student has to take "Formal Methods", then maybe the professor for that course can take just a handful of classes to demonstrate bug hunting with formal proofs of function behavior. You don't even need to rewrite the curriculum, just ensure that each class spends a little time learning some basic practical skills.
My software engineering degree required a lot of presentations, a handful of written papers, and a lot of discussions on software development models, good design procedures, formal verification of code, testing practices, and so forth.
Now that I've been in the workforce 5 years, a lot of what I learned is very valuable. But for the first two years out, most of it was useless - I needed a background in actual application development at the low level in the trenches. I had the Computer Science, but no programming foundation to build it on - fine if you want to do testing or management, crap if you wanted to actually design and program.
Smart colleges should offer courses that cover bug tracking, source control, learning how to find the information you need in technical documentation, and especially how to read other people's code. Give a class a 50,000 line application with 20 or 30 known, non-trivial bugs in it and spend the semester showing them how to find the bugs. Give a class some applications which have very poor code reuse and show them how to break out common code into separate libraries which are easier to document, track, and debug. etc... etc... After getting my MS in Software Engineering, I was like a mechanic who could diagram the variable valve timing in a Ferrari but couldn't change a tire.
Actually, Wesnoth is developed for Windows, Linux, and Mac simultaneously. It's also a flat out, no joke damn good turn based strategy game.
I can't speak for other games he mentioned, because I only play strategy games.
But it's not true. Most Linux distributions that try to attract home users have very end-user friendly graphical programs that handle all of the pieces of downloading and installing additional software. No command line required.
Installing Linux can be painfully difficult, since hardware vendors do not all build Linux-compatible drivers or release detailed specifications so Linux developers can build their own. And yes, many Windows problems just plain don't run on Linux. But once you have Linux running on your network, installing programs that are supported by your chosen distribution is a cinch.
I am not saying, however, that Linux is ready to take over the desktop. I value the freedom and community cooperation of Open Source software over convenience. Most home users have no interest in the political philosophy behind the software they use, they just want it to accomplish tasks easily. Freedom is great, but millions of people (including most of my friends and family) will accept a restrictive software license and a $20 to $300 price tag for an application or operating system over having to learn a new way to accomplish familiar computing tasks. I don't see Linux getting any real traction until Wine handles the entire Win32 API (and maybe DirectX) solidly enough for home users to easily run any Windows app on Linux or open source alternatives to most common Windows programs offer nearly identical features and user experiences.
I use PostgreSQL's PL/pgSQL language, which emulates PL/SQL (probably a small subset of it, I'm not familiar with all of PL/SQL's features). It's been wonderful for automating complex SQL queries and doing dynamic logging as it goes along.
Previously when we had duplicate patient entries in the system, a non-technical staff member had to run SQL queries to locate the offending records and then run about 10 separate SQL statements to merge each one by hand. It took me less than a week to write a PL/pgSQL function to scour the database for all conflicts you can detect with common errors, perform the merge, and log the exact SQL that was run in a change history table along with human-readable comments with each statement. *poof* problem solved, and we still have all the PL/pgSQL functions sitting around in case errors occur in the future.
It was my first time using a procedural language built on SQL, and I felt like a kid in a candy shop.
As an aside, I appreciate everyone's comments on the usefulness of Oracle. I honestly had no idea it really was that stable and optimized for efficient performance.
I understand Oracle is an industry juggernaut, but $160,000 for a 4-CPU license (from the Guardian article)? Is Oracle really that superior to Ingres, Sybase, Microsoft SQL Server, and especially PostgreSQL or MySQL?
I'm not trying to troll here. I'm just thinking that for the cost of several Oracle installations and experienced Oracle DBAs you could get a much cheaper (or outright free) database and some really top notch talent.
I was raised Catholic, and Lehrer's "The Vatican Rag" never fails to leave me in stitches.
266.67 horsepower power supply? That's what, about 357 kilowatts?
What are you running, a network of beowulf clusters?
Maybe I just suck as a software engineer, but really the quality of code I write starts to take a serious dive after my first six or seven hours of work.
On the rare occasions I've pulled a 10 or 12 hour day, I usually got something that didn't crash at the drop of a hat out the door. Then when I needed to extend that code later, it almost always needed to be heavily revised or outright scrapped and redone.
I can't imagine frequent long shifts writing code. There'd be so much junk in the mix it would be a nightmare.
You're missing a big part of the problem. If a jock can't answer a question in science class, and a nerd mocks him, said nerd will probably find himself stuffed into a locker after class. If a nerd, or anyone else, does poorly in gym class, the bullies among the athletes can have a field day making fun of him (or her) and there ain't a damn thing the victim can do about it.
I've belonged to three gyms since graduating from college. In each one, every single person there, no matter how fit or musclebound, was at least neutral towards the sedentary and obese people who joined the gym. A surprising amount of people were openly friendly and helpful. I've seen a guy with six pack abs who could bench press 350 pounds strike up a friendly conversation with a 350 pound, 45 year old woman. He appreciated that she was trying to do something about her poor health.
That's the exact opposite of most people's high school experiences. Many high school athletes are neutral or even friendly to their less athletic peers. But most schools have gangs of bullying and very vocal athletes that enjoy humiliating everyone weaker than they are. They turn exercise into a negative experience for the non athletes, and many people never even try to attend a commercial gym because they figure the experience there will be just as bad as high school.
You may not be sympathetic to that, but I am.Warren Buffet, one of the most successful investors in the US, CEO of mega-firm Berkshire Hathaway, makes good arguments in several of the Berkshire Hathaway annual reports that CEOs are dramatically overpaid.
3) pleasing corporations is not a tenant of oss and never has been,
The corporations make the hardware and pay for a lot of oss development. A basement OSS developer only has so much time to contribute to free software. Many of the OSS leaders have paid, full time corporate jobs to work on open source projects. And it's a lot easier to use hardware with open source software if the vendor provides an open driver or releases the device specs to open source developers.
In principle open source and corporations are unrelated. But if we want widespread open source software use - which builds the foundation for more open source development - we need to cooperate with businesses.
Yeah, but you can guarantee that if they start considering a buyout nVidia's market cap will go up.
One step further:
2 QA Systems. One for testing the next release, one set up identically to the production server so QA can reproduce problems found with the production software.
The company I'm at now is extremely small. I constitute 50% of the software engineers and 33% of the entire IT department. We have a production setup, 2 developer setups, and a QA server that we've configured to rapidly switch between our production software and release software. The transition takes about 15 minutes.
Sadly, I am not familiar with Zappa's work or any comedy from Jerry Lewis.
I never noticed that the piano part in that song follows Ben Folds Five. Thanks for the connection. I'm not big on that song, though. Lyrics are funny, but the whiny tone just ruins it for me.
I own all of them, actually. Anywhere from 1-5 songs per album is an original that parodies a genre or a particular musician without mimicking any single song.
I like to sing. Because Al has jokes in his lyrics, he usually does a really good job speaking clearly so the listener can get the jokes. I could sing along with Smells Like Nirvana the second time I heard it. I still don't know all of the words to Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit, and I've heard that dozens of times. Weird Al is one of the only musicians whose lyrics I never need to look up after hearing a song.
I also have a taste for really bad puns and silly jokes. That's a help too.
If you have a less silly sense of humor, I can respect that. If you don't like the voice... I have many friends who go berserk for Rush, and I can't listen to their lead singer without wanting to shove a pencil through my ears. So I can respect that too.
I know the comment was made as a joke, but in all seriousness Weird Al is a decent musician.
The lyrics often sound like they came from a couple of bored teenagers, but his music has a wide variety including a lot of original songs that are not simply knockoffs of a specific song. Since You've Been Gone is an original in a barbershop quartet style. Swap a few lyrics, and Germs could seamlessly fit into a Nine Inch Nails album. Hardware Store is a brilliant rock and ska parody with a four part harmony I've wasted an embarassing amount of time listening to.
Good Old Days easy listening.
One More Minute 60s music.
Nature Trail to Hell metal.
Trigger Happy Beach Boys.
You Don't Love Me Anymore soft rock/ love songs.
And of course, an impressive collection of Polkas. Why not enjoy it all with a good sound system?
i am sorry if you can't remember to free your own damn memory then.. why are you writing code???
In a perfect world, every project gets all the time required to be completed with optimal efficiency and performance. In the real world, the idea is to limit scope, cost, and timeline so that you can accomplish the task as best as you can within the allotted time.
If you don't have to worry about freeing your memory, that's one less thing slowing your productivity. It's also one less possible source of bugs. In any team project, it is also one less source of problems from other developers. Now in certain applications where performance is paramount and a fine level of control is desired, manual memory management is the way to go.
In other applications, the developer time you save by using Objective C, Java, Perl, Python, Ruby, or whatever easily pays for any additional server hardware you require to run the less efficient code.
and after nearly 10 years of Linux use, I'm on the edge of jacking it in and going back to fucking Windows.
The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. I have to use Windows for work. I can work from home periodically. I download the files I need, and work. The only problem is, even though my LAN works perfectly and my internet connection is fine, Internet Explorer and a few other apps prompt me to launch the VPN connection before I access the web. If I disregard the prompts, I can continue surfing just fine... for a few minutes. Then they appear again. Honest to god, I log in to the work VPN, get what I need, and then delete the connection. I recreate it when I need it. Otherwise, I have to dismiss 100 requests to connect to my work network over the course of the day at home.
Then there's the fun of accessing a network share through VPN. My work has a slow internet connection (topic of another rant). But if I'm navigating through FTP servers at my work network, performance is acceptable. But if a network share connection slows down too much, Explorer.exe hangs on my machine and then crashes. It recovers fine without requiring a reboot, but it's still 30 seconds of a blank screen and then having to open 'Network Neighborhood' and navigate back to the network share I was in and try again. The sysadmin doesn't know, but I've installed Filezilla on the work servers I access from home. I've traded the easy navigation of Explorer.exe on network shares for reliable functioning from FTP.
Not to mention the hassle of Windows Update and virus scans. There's another fun one. "Windows has downloaded a critical security update and your machine requires a reboot. Would you like to reboot now?" Repeat every five minutes. And of course, no Ctrl-Alt-F1 to access the console when something goes wrong. No beloved kill -9 to remove hanging processes. 'shutdown -h now' has never, ever failed me on Linux. On Windows, I usually get tired of hanging applications at reboot and just pull the damn power cord. I'm sure my stupidity will corrupt a crucial system file eventually, but I don't feel like waiting three minutes for it to shut everything down.
I dump files from a PostgreSQL database that end up anywhere from 6 MB to 32 MB as plain text files. Double click that on your Windows desktop, and depending upon the machine WordPad can hang long enough for you to brew a pot of coffee. And when I need to do global find/replaces on large files? Forget it. I much prefer the convenience of GUI over VIM, but I can pop those files open in VIM, search, replace, and save without ever having to wait for the system to finish the current command. Now of course, VIM is available for Windows. Many of the best Linux applications are available for Windows. But the point is, if I have to work around Windows' default functionality then I am not getting much benefit from using it.
I'm not saying Linux is unequivocably better in any measurable way aside from being open source. It can be a royal pain in the neck. But at least in my experience, every Linux bug or missing feature that drives me nuts is matched by something equally annoying in Windows. Whatever you decide, good luck.
My understanding is that Brazil already uses ethanol with almost half its fleet, and is closing in on self-sufficiency as far as their energy needs.
If you actually, you know, read the article you'd know that according to BP's research (and of course, they could be manipulating the figures) Brazil actually only gets 10% of its energy from ethanol. A large part of its energy independence is domestic oil production.