A former workmate used to have an Austin Healy 3000 with a $2500 hand rubbed lacquer paint job. He kept it parked in his carport (covered but not enclosed). One day he finds a line of dusty cat footprints across the hood. All the neighbours swore it wasn't their precious kittycats that did the dammage. "Fine" says buddy and hooks an ignition coil to a metal cat dish full of cat food. The next night he hears one very loud meow and no more footprints after that. If you think that's inhumane, his next step would have been to leave out a dish of antifreeze.
A variety of contending opinions? More than we expect from a country which calls those little orangeish squares of god-only-knows-what-edible-oil-byproduct they melt on burgers "cheese".
One of the funniest things I ever saw on tv was some US spokeswoman (govt?/NGO? I forget) giving a speech in Sudan. She was trying to say "Black Africans" (as opposed to Arab Africans) without using the un-PC word "Black". It came out as "African American Africans"; about as meaningless as a phrase can be.
Sometimes language doesn't fit into neat little pigeonholes any better than people do.
You are correct about tradeoffs. "Perfect is the mortal enemy of good enough." For most software good enough is, well, good enough. Development cost and time-to-market drive decisions much more than ultimate lack of bugs. I realize that 99.9% of all sofware out there is not life and safety critical. Nobody dies if a printer driver crashes. Thus, there is no point, other than pride in ones own craftsmanship, in writing perfect code.
However, a lot of people here have stated that it is flat out impossible to write code with no bugs. Almost as if it were a law of physics, or religious dogma. It is, of course, also a handy excuse for writing buggy software, and a great way to dodge the responsibilty.
It IS possible to write bug free software; I know because that's what I do for a living. We write software for railroad traffic control systems. An unsafe failure can easily lead to dozens of lives being lost. For an analogy, picture an intersection of two busy four-lane highways, where the traffic lights once in a while all go green at the same time.
There simply can't be bugs in our finished software. The procedures and methods we use to ensure this are time consuming and expensive, but we have no choice. And if, God forbid, somebody died because of a bug in my software, then I would be responsible.
Why do so many slashdotters claim that writing bug free software is impossible? It is difficult, expensive and time consuming, but it is possible. This attitude is why I think the term "Software Engineer" is mostly an oxymoron. Yes, it is posible to apply engineering principles and disciplines to the production of software. If you can do this, and if you take full responsibility for any defects in your work, and if you have the authority to not release code until you are satisfied that it is correct, complete and safe, then you are a software engineer. Otherwise you are just a coder.
Remember, just because you can't write bug free code, doesn't mean it isn't possible.
I think maybe you missed the point. What annoys me is not people who don't understand computers. Some do, some don't, whatever. What annoys me is people who are bragging that they don't understand. People who are _proud_ of their ignorance.
What makes me homicidal (well, more than usual) is people who are actually proud that they don't understand computers. At least, they think it's funny. There is a "ditzy housewife folk wisdom" person who writes a column for the local fishwrapper where about every other weeek she talks about how she just doesn't get all these gigglebites and interwebs and hard driver things (chuckle chuckle). She should be either (a) not so damn proud of being too stupid to understand something or (b) deeply ashamed of being too lazy to learn something new. Computers are not new. They have been in most businesses for 25 years and in most homes for 10 or 15 years. If my 5 year old kid and my 75 year old mother can learn to use a computer, then you can too. Learn the basics, or, for the love of God, SHUT UP.
People dont crash their cars and then say "I never could tell the brakes from the accellerator, huh huh huh".
Light rock is very bad and stupid and wrong and evil and if you women change the channel on the radio one more time to "EZ Silk Lite Soft Smooth FM" I will by God snap and RIP YOUR TINY BRAINS OUT THROUGH YOUR NOSTRILS, DO YOU HEAR ME!!!
Hate It. Inuksuit (yes that's the plural) are from the high arctic and have as much to do with Vancouver as Aztec pyramids. If they have to appropriate from the natives, surely they could find some west coast first nations symbol a little closer to home.
All these pathetic posts about locking down the (l)users make me want to hurl. You are trying to use technical means to solve a social problem, and IT WILL NOT WORK. And by the way, who the hell are you, to tell me what I do or don't need to use my computer for. Get over yourselves, you BOFH wannabes.
Your job is to provide me with the IT tools I need to do my job. Have all the policies you want, but the second those policies keep me from doing my job, they have to give way.
How about this? You give me admin access to my laptop so that the 15 year old proprietary crapola DOS based compilers and config software that I NEED TO DO MY DAMN JOB will run. In return I promise to take reasonable steps to keep my laptop spyware and virus free. I promise to keep it physically secure, and not let my kids use it.
If you lock down systems hard enough to keep Jane the receptionist from installing the happy kitten screensaver spyware, you will also keep Bob the engineer from downloading and installing the monitor software for the milling machine that just quit and has your main production line down.
Your job has conflicting requirements. Boo hoo, deal with it.
It was explained to me thusly - Martini's were stirred in order to not "bruise" the gin, and because it would still be clear when poured. Obviously only posers would worry about these things, (and our Mr. Bond was not one of them.) A shaken martini would be (theoretically) colder and thus superior. Just another one of the ways that Ian Fleming emphasised how cool and competent (in a late 50s sort of way) Bond really was.
You are, of course, correct. I am well rebuked. I simply got carried away with the wonder and excitement of the moment. What would you do if you saw Bigfoot and Elvis wakeboarding behind the Loch Ness Monster; would you run giddyly about to tell people or Google first?
Billions??? I don't know if your sig is ignorance, a subtle joke or a troll, but I'll bite.
This is a thoroughly debunked urban myth. See Snopes.com. Fischer spent about $ 1 Million of their own money developing the space pen. Then they sold a bunch to NASA for $3 a piece. They were used by both the Americans and Russians for every mission thereafter. Pencils are no good for spaceflight because they are flammable and the leads (graphite) are conductive.
Right you are, lad. The analogy is, of course, just an analogy. It got so bad lately that even Steve Jobs' RDF couldn't convince people that a 2.4 Ghz Mac was magically faster than a 4 Ghz P4.
Sorry. Wrong. Macs were always THAT much more expensive than PC's. I bought a PC in 1990, 1994, 1997 and 2002. Each time I checked and for what I was buying, which was mid-range performance, say six months to a year behind the leading edge, the PC was significantly less expensive than an equivalent Apple machine. The question then becomes, do I spend $1000 of my family's money on a PC or $2000 on a Mac. I could never, in good conscience, justify the extra.
You can argue till the cows come home that it wasn't that much more, but for me and for most likely the vast majority of people, purchase price is a big deciding factor.
To use the somewhat cliche car analogy, I would much rather drive to work every day in a $30,000 Lexus LS than a $15,00 Ford Taurus. The Lexus is in every respect a "better" car. It is faster, more powerful, quieter, handles better, more comfortable, better engineered....Reality is I'm going to suck it up, drive the Ford and put the extra $15k on my mortgage.
I don't understand the geek mentality sometimes. If you don't know the most obscure facts, say Bobba Fett's shoe size, you are "the lamez0r". If you state the PDP-8 was an 8 bit machine, one gazillion people will immediately correct you.
So why can't the average geek do simple English and figure out the difference between INFER and IMPLY and use them correctly. Do they not know? Do they know but not care?
Slashdot Mirror
The 80's are coming back! They have to. I have a whole pile of skinny leather ties just waiting for the day.
Um, don't most British people think Europe is on the other side of the English Channel?
A former workmate used to have an Austin Healy 3000 with a $2500 hand rubbed lacquer paint job. He kept it parked in his carport (covered but not enclosed). One day he finds a line of dusty cat footprints across the hood. All the neighbours swore it wasn't their precious kittycats that did the dammage. "Fine" says buddy and hooks an ignition coil to a metal cat dish full of cat food. The next night he hears one very loud meow and no more footprints after that. If you think that's inhumane, his next step would have been to leave out a dish of antifreeze.
A variety of contending opinions? More than we expect from a country which calls those little orangeish squares of god-only-knows-what-edible-oil-byproduct they melt on burgers "cheese".
Merry Christmas and Happy Chewbacca!
Holy Stereotypical AC Zealot Troll Batman.....
Q. - I need to do $foo at work. Can I do $foo with Linux?
A - Why the FSCK do you want to do $foo? Are you FSCKING retarded? Nobody should ever want to do $foo ever.
Thank you so much for the helpful reply.
Apparently Americans get a substantial tax deduction for being overweight. The heavier they are the bigger the deduction.
Well....they must....No other explanation makes sense.
One of the funniest things I ever saw on tv was some US spokeswoman (govt?/NGO? I forget) giving a speech in Sudan. She was trying to say "Black Africans" (as opposed to Arab Africans) without using the un-PC word "Black". It came out as "African American Africans"; about as meaningless as a phrase can be.
Sometimes language doesn't fit into neat little pigeonholes any better than people do.
You are correct about tradeoffs. "Perfect is the mortal enemy of good enough." For most software good enough is, well, good enough. Development cost and time-to-market drive decisions much more than ultimate lack of bugs. I realize that 99.9% of all sofware out there is not life and safety critical. Nobody dies if a printer driver crashes. Thus, there is no point, other than pride in ones own craftsmanship, in writing perfect code.
However, a lot of people here have stated that it is flat out impossible to write code with no bugs. Almost as if it were a law of physics, or religious dogma. It is, of course, also a handy excuse for writing buggy software, and a great way to dodge the responsibilty.
It IS possible to write bug free software; I know because that's what I do for a living. We write software for railroad traffic control systems. An unsafe failure can easily lead to dozens of lives being lost. For an analogy, picture an intersection of two busy four-lane highways, where the traffic lights once in a while all go green at the same time.
There simply can't be bugs in our finished software. The procedures and methods we use to ensure this are time consuming and expensive, but we have no choice. And if, God forbid, somebody died because of a bug in my software, then I would be responsible.
Why do so many slashdotters claim that writing bug free software is impossible? It is difficult, expensive and time consuming, but it is possible. This attitude is why I think the term "Software Engineer" is mostly an oxymoron. Yes, it is posible to apply engineering principles and disciplines to the production of software. If you can do this, and if you take full responsibility for any defects in your work, and if you have the authority to not release code until you are satisfied that it is correct, complete and safe, then you are a software engineer. Otherwise you are just a coder.
Remember, just because you can't write bug free code, doesn't mean it isn't possible.
I think maybe you missed the point. What annoys me is not people who don't understand computers. Some do, some don't, whatever. What annoys me is people who are bragging that they don't understand. People who are _proud_ of their ignorance.
What makes me homicidal (well, more than usual) is people who are actually proud that they don't understand computers. At least, they think it's funny. There is a "ditzy housewife folk wisdom" person who writes a column for the local fishwrapper where about every other weeek she talks about how she just doesn't get all these gigglebites and interwebs and hard driver things (chuckle chuckle). She should be either (a) not so damn proud of being too stupid to understand something or (b) deeply ashamed of being too lazy to learn something new. Computers are not new. They have been in most businesses for 25 years and in most homes for 10 or 15 years. If my 5 year old kid and my 75 year old mother can learn to use a computer, then you can too. Learn the basics, or, for the love of God, SHUT UP.
People dont crash their cars and then say "I never could tell the brakes from the accellerator, huh huh huh".
Light rock is very bad and stupid and wrong and evil and if you women change the channel on the radio one more time to "EZ Silk Lite Soft Smooth FM" I will by God snap and RIP YOUR TINY BRAINS OUT THROUGH YOUR NOSTRILS, DO YOU HEAR ME!!!
/end rant
Deep breath...Calm down....sorry
Hate It. Inuksuit (yes that's the plural) are from the high arctic and have as much to do with Vancouver as Aztec pyramids. If they have to appropriate from the natives, surely they could find some west coast first nations symbol a little closer to home.
All these pathetic posts about locking down the (l)users make me want to hurl. You are trying to use technical means to solve a social problem, and IT WILL NOT WORK. And by the way, who the hell are you, to tell me what I do or don't need to use my computer for. Get over yourselves, you BOFH wannabes.
Your job is to provide me with the IT tools I need to do my job. Have all the policies you want, but the second those policies keep me from doing my job, they have to give way.
How about this? You give me admin access to my laptop so that the 15 year old proprietary crapola DOS based compilers and config software that I NEED TO DO MY DAMN JOB will run. In return I promise to take reasonable steps to keep my laptop spyware and virus free. I promise to keep it physically secure, and not let my kids use it.
If you lock down systems hard enough to keep Jane the receptionist from installing the happy kitten screensaver spyware, you will also keep Bob the engineer from downloading and installing the monitor software for the milling machine that just quit and has your main production line down.
Your job has conflicting requirements. Boo hoo, deal with it.
The part that's under water?
It was explained to me thusly - Martini's were stirred in order to not "bruise" the gin, and because it would still be clear when poured. Obviously only posers would worry about these things, (and our Mr. Bond was not one of them.) A shaken martini would be (theoretically) colder and thus superior. Just another one of the ways that Ian Fleming emphasised how cool and competent (in a late 50s sort of way) Bond really was.
You are, of course, correct. I am well rebuked. I simply got carried away with the wonder and excitement of the moment. What would you do if you saw Bigfoot and Elvis wakeboarding behind the Loch Ness Monster; would you run giddyly about to tell people or Google first?
Sorry. It won't happen again.
Congratulations, Sir! You are the first /. poster ever to spell the word hobbyist correctly.
Well done indeed!
OMG
TGWB!
Billions??? I don't know if your sig is ignorance, a subtle joke or a troll, but I'll bite.
This is a thoroughly debunked urban myth. See Snopes.com. Fischer spent about $ 1 Million of their own money developing the space pen. Then they sold a bunch to NASA for $3 a piece. They were used by both the Americans and Russians for every mission thereafter. Pencils are no good for spaceflight because they are flammable and the leads (graphite) are conductive.
Right you are, lad. The analogy is, of course, just an analogy. It got so bad lately that even Steve Jobs' RDF couldn't convince people that a 2.4 Ghz Mac was magically faster than a 4 Ghz P4.
Sorry. Wrong. Macs were always THAT much more expensive than PC's. I bought a PC in 1990, 1994, 1997 and 2002. Each time I checked and for what I was buying, which was mid-range performance, say six months to a year behind the leading edge, the PC was significantly less expensive than an equivalent Apple machine. The question then becomes, do I spend $1000 of my family's money on a PC or $2000 on a Mac. I could never, in good conscience, justify the extra.
You can argue till the cows come home that it wasn't that much more, but for me and for most likely the vast majority of people, purchase price is a big deciding factor.
To use the somewhat cliche car analogy, I would much rather drive to work every day in a $30,000 Lexus LS than a $15,00 Ford Taurus. The Lexus is in every respect a "better" car. It is faster, more powerful, quieter, handles better, more comfortable, better engineered....Reality is I'm going to suck it up, drive the Ford and put the extra $15k on my mortgage.
I don't understand the geek mentality sometimes. If you don't know the most obscure facts, say Bobba Fett's shoe size, you are "the lamez0r". If you state the PDP-8 was an 8 bit machine, one gazillion people will immediately correct you.
So why can't the average geek do simple English and figure out the difference between INFER and IMPLY and use them correctly. Do they not know? Do they know but not care?
One of my favorite /. quotes, from a previous discussion about system noise:
"(somebody's gaming rig)...sounded like a VTOL aircraft landing on a Swedish death metal band..."