No dude, you're wrong. I suppose you can believe that with sufficient abstraction, you're right, but you're not. All that formal systems theory and Turing business is great talking about abstract systems running abstract algorithms, but such discussions have zero to say about anything having to do with HUMAN error, which is what we're talking about here.
I've probably spent about equal time writing C and writing in higher level languages, and I can promise that I make fewer errors in higher level languages, doing equal tasks. I think anyone with a lot of code under their belts can make similar statements. The closer to the machine a language makes you work, the harder it is to keep higher level details in the back of your head. In a high-level language, you're much less likely to make a low-level error (and any you make will almost certainly be caught by a warnings mode on the compiler, and this leaves you to keep more of your neurons working on, for instance, keeping your database and its wrapper classes working together correctly -- a task that is, perhaps, a simple afternoon's work in Python, Perl, Ruby etc. two days in C# or Java, and a week of hair-pulling in C... and well... I doubt such a thing has ever been done in assembler.
Anyway, drop the semantic B.S. this is a debate about practicalities.
Lowering the entry barrier is always a good thing. When C compilers got good enough that applications could be written with only a minimum of assembly, people groaned about the same thing. There's a lot of hype right now, and a lot of interest, things will settle down.
All of these frameworks and libraries and doohickies come about for a simple reason: web application programming is too complicated. Given the relatively simple functionality being designed, coding an (even non-AJAX) webapp is a pain in the ass involving a mostly stateless system running 4 or 5 languages. The techniques for getting around this problem are relatively cookie cutter, and we really should no more be coding them by hand than we should be rolling our own printf every time we write a terminal utility.
There's more creativity and action in interactive online software than ever before, and it's nothing but a good thing.
"Don't like a particular secret, activity, or program? Elect people with different priorities. Don't think the government should be able to do anything that the Chinese or Iranian governments can't see as easily as you can? Grow up."
How on earth are we supposed to know if we do or don't like an activity that is secret?
It is a crime for intelligence agents to release classified information, but it is absolutely necesarry for the preservation of our freedoms that the press be allowed to report those broken secrets once broken. This provides a human check on the power of secret organizations: if someone within the organization is sufficiently outraged that they're willing to risk inprisonment, then secrets can be made public so that, as you say, the voters can elect new representatives, but if there is no such process, then we have no ability to punish our leaders for abuse of the power of secrecy.
That wouldn't be any more secure. You'd just get spam with a link to the trojaned file, which you would still download and run.
I understand frustration at protocols getting warped way past original spec, but unless we're working in CVS, there aren't good ways of insuring metadata ANYWHERE... email is hardly alone in this problem.
The real problem here is that an office document can open a backdoor to the system. I think it's *Word* not email that's being used dangerously beyond its original problem domain. Frankly, I don't even know how I'd go about developing an office suite with this problem on purpose.
The iBook has always been a very nicely priced package. You can go cheaper, but not with any PC laptop brand I'd trust (not many left these days).
As for the black casing? Black iPods way outsell the white ones. I'm sure Apple thinks to itself, "Well for branding, we'd rather keep a unified look across the product line, but if the suckers want black, well, a sweet plum would make up for the small margin we're getting on the bottom-line model." (At volume pricing, the differences between the different processors and harddrive sizes is negligable, markup goes up as you go up any product line.
Re:I seem to be saying this a lot lately...
on
The CVS Cop-Out
·
· Score: 1
You also gain the skills of using CVS and a compiler.
I'd really suggest that novice linux users out there spend a couple of hours learning enough CVS or SVN to get their favorite package's souce-tree, and then learn how to compile it (probably just./configure; make install)
You'll learn a bit about your machine and the linux environment, comilers and versioning tools are useful to know about even if you don't write code, and if you do, you're one step closer to knowing enough to help out on OS devteams.
I put the comment ==CH== next to any compatibility hack (not just in HTML, this goes for any cross-platform coding) so when things change, a simple vim command can find everything that needs to be checked out. Really helps when you've got hundreds of documents to keep track of.
Well, I'm a developer, and I can assure you that I *definitely* care about the rights granted and restricted by the platform I'm developing for.
I'm moving west, and trying to move into web and web services in part to get out of the nightmare world of doing projects for Microsoft shops. Closed source is a terrible world to be writing software in. My projects should rely only on me, my client, and future maintainers. The future actions of some third party shouldn't force us to reconsider our solution, or worse, worry about legal problems.
The problem with tech unions are that it's so independant. Many of us are employed by large employers, but probably just as many are in small businesses, or are independant.
Tech workers need a *GUILD* (no not like Warcraft, like Screen Actors' and other tradespersons') In order to be in charge of our own profession and to prevent abuses like having some parentally supported college student doing 50 hours of free work a week over summer as an unpaid 'intern.'
And the best way to stop outsourcing would be to let the Indians join, or encourage a similar organization in India. If our workforces aren't competing with each other, then we'll both be able to demand higher salaries.
Has anyone ever read a Time exclusive that WASN'T enthusiastic?
Those guys are really whores for who ever will let them have the front cover pop culture scoop before the other newsmags. Go read a stack of their magazine from the 80s or earlier, back when they only covered news, and 90% was reporting, not op-ed. Night and day... night and day...
do you select edit->copy and edit->paste every time? of course not. you use keyboard shortcuts.
while it might take a week of peeking at a cheatsheet, once you learn vim, it's very very fast. you can change bash to work like vim, there are vim modes for editing, vim's about a million times easier to script than emacs (by which i mean, you don't have to learn lisp.) it's fast & small, and available for everything. it's on every unix terminal (except basic gentoo installs i think) so you're never without it. and the depth of its power features go way beyond what a combination of menus and taskbars can do.
all that said, the learning curve is steep, and if you don't spend 8-18 hours a day writing code and jumping around 50 file source trees, it's probably not going to be your thing. Me, my desktop has a HUGE gvim session loaded with custom scripts and about 8 frames (tabbed editing in vim 7 will be a godsend) more often than any other application.
Yes, but can you then take your sims mansion out to your sandbox and build sandcstles around it? Can you pull in characters from your older brother's Ninja Turtles game into the Sims? Physical toys exist in the real world and can interact with any physical object. A child's imagination is going to be able to provide more variable parameters for interaction than even Will Wrights'.
You can pretty much fuck around with your youth however you want. Dress crazy, sleep around, be poor, be rich, whatever. There comes a point -- let's say 30 -- when you need to get serious and start thinking about the future. I'm not talking about a job or investing or anything, I mean, do that stuff, but we're not covering that here. We're talking about identity and personality... who you are. There comes a time when reinventions of self are just tedious to your friends and family, so you need to pick a target for middle/old age, and then work, slowly, on gracefully transitioning from whoever you were at 29 into that guy.
Yeah, I've got a fading black napster T-Shirt and it gets a lot of compliments. People clearly don't associate their positive feelings about the brand with the current service.
You're just not going to be able to charge people for music that can't go on an iPod.
I've got an awesome idea though:
someone with a lot of cash should start a new major record label, and not treat fans like dirt, don't abuse new technologies (like satellite radio), and take a minimal approach to DRM (i understand why a business model that relies on pushing millions of units pretty well has to have *some* but accept that it's going to be cracked, and don't sue college students)
I really think the goodwill from both fans and artists (who almost universally disagree with their labels' practices) would make them a mint.
"The hype, graphics, and back of the box features mean nothing if the game doesn't deliver the fun."
Unless that hype sells you a million unit on pre-sales. Video game fans are some of the stupidest consumers around, the game publishers get away with complete abuse of their customer base.
Actually... this is a pretty fantastic idea for distributed filesharing.
It's much easier to get 50% of a 200% larger file than to get 100% of the original. You'd never need to see a complete download, thus you wouldn't get cases where your transfer gets delayed waiting for a seed for the one little piece that nobody else has.
50% is probably overkill for bittorrent. If zip format were built that could reconstruct its contents with any arbitrary 90% of the file, that would be *amazing* for torrents.
So er... anyone want to point me toward some readings on the basics of file compression and checksums and that kind of thing?
If you decide to stick with what you've got, will you give the laptop to the most convincing argument given for the status quo?
Here's mine: you guys are the Morton's Salt of web design. Give it five more years, and the outdated look will suddenly suggest dependability, class, and timelessness.
Oh and thanks for distracting me from work all these years.
Slashdot Mirror
No dude, you're wrong. I suppose you can believe that with sufficient abstraction, you're right, but you're not. All that formal systems theory and Turing business is great talking about abstract systems running abstract algorithms, but such discussions have zero to say about anything having to do with HUMAN error, which is what we're talking about here.
I've probably spent about equal time writing C and writing in higher level languages, and I can promise that I make fewer errors in higher level languages, doing equal tasks. I think anyone with a lot of code under their belts can make similar statements. The closer to the machine a language makes you work, the harder it is to keep higher level details in the back of your head. In a high-level language, you're much less likely to make a low-level error (and any you make will almost certainly be caught by a warnings mode on the compiler, and this leaves you to keep more of your neurons working on, for instance, keeping your database and its wrapper classes working together correctly -- a task that is, perhaps, a simple afternoon's work in Python, Perl, Ruby etc. two days in C# or Java, and a week of hair-pulling in C... and well... I doubt such a thing has ever been done in assembler.
Anyway, drop the semantic B.S. this is a debate about practicalities.
Lowering the entry barrier is always a good thing. When C compilers got good enough that applications could be written with only a minimum of assembly, people groaned about the same thing. There's a lot of hype right now, and a lot of interest, things will settle down.
All of these frameworks and libraries and doohickies come about for a simple reason: web application programming is too complicated. Given the relatively simple functionality being designed, coding an (even non-AJAX) webapp is a pain in the ass involving a mostly stateless system running 4 or 5 languages. The techniques for getting around this problem are relatively cookie cutter, and we really should no more be coding them by hand than we should be rolling our own printf every time we write a terminal utility.
There's more creativity and action in interactive online software than ever before, and it's nothing but a good thing.
About as many as I know men who would be interested... so... zero.
"Don't like a particular secret, activity, or program? Elect people with different priorities. Don't think the government should be able to do anything that the Chinese or Iranian governments can't see as easily as you can? Grow up."
How on earth are we supposed to know if we do or don't like an activity that is secret?
It is a crime for intelligence agents to release classified information, but it is absolutely necesarry for the preservation of our freedoms that the press be allowed to report those broken secrets once broken. This provides a human check on the power of secret organizations: if someone within the organization is sufficiently outraged that they're willing to risk inprisonment, then secrets can be made public so that, as you say, the voters can elect new representatives, but if there is no such process, then we have no ability to punish our leaders for abuse of the power of secrecy.
Still upset about Marbury vs. Madison, eh?
"It's really time we upgraded our Office 97"
Don't be a Dinosaur
That wouldn't be any more secure. You'd just get spam with a link to the trojaned file, which you would still download and run.
I understand frustration at protocols getting warped way past original spec, but unless we're working in CVS, there aren't good ways of insuring metadata ANYWHERE... email is hardly alone in this problem.
The real problem here is that an office document can open a backdoor to the system. I think it's *Word* not email that's being used dangerously beyond its original problem domain. Frankly, I don't even know how I'd go about developing an office suite with this problem on purpose.
The iBook has always been a very nicely priced package. You can go cheaper, but not with any PC laptop brand I'd trust (not many left these days).
As for the black casing? Black iPods way outsell the white ones. I'm sure Apple thinks to itself, "Well for branding, we'd rather keep a unified look across the product line, but if the suckers want black, well, a sweet plum would make up for the small margin we're getting on the bottom-line model." (At volume pricing, the differences between the different processors and harddrive sizes is negligable, markup goes up as you go up any product line.
You also gain the skills of using CVS and a compiler.
./configure; make install)
I'd really suggest that novice linux users out there spend a couple of hours learning enough CVS or SVN to get their favorite package's souce-tree, and then learn how to compile it (probably just
You'll learn a bit about your machine and the linux environment, comilers and versioning tools are useful to know about even if you don't write code, and if you do, you're one step closer to knowing enough to help out on OS devteams.
a trick of mine:
I put the comment ==CH== next to any compatibility hack (not just in HTML, this goes for any cross-platform coding) so when things change, a simple vim command can find everything that needs to be checked out. Really helps when you've got hundreds of documents to keep track of.
Well, I'm a developer, and I can assure you that I *definitely* care about the rights granted and restricted by the platform I'm developing for.
I'm moving west, and trying to move into web and web services in part to get out of the nightmare world of doing projects for Microsoft shops. Closed source is a terrible world to be writing software in. My projects should rely only on me, my client, and future maintainers. The future actions of some third party shouldn't force us to reconsider our solution, or worse, worry about legal problems.
Exactly!
The problem with tech unions are that it's so independant. Many of us are employed by large employers, but probably just as many are in small businesses, or are independant.
Tech workers need a *GUILD* (no not like Warcraft, like Screen Actors' and other tradespersons') In order to be in charge of our own profession and to prevent abuses like having some parentally supported college student doing 50 hours of free work a week over summer as an unpaid 'intern.'
And the best way to stop outsourcing would be to let the Indians join, or encourage a similar organization in India. If our workforces aren't competing with each other, then we'll both be able to demand higher salaries.
http://www.vim.org/tips/tip.php?tip_id=1220
Stay classy, world.
Has anyone ever read a Time exclusive that WASN'T enthusiastic?
Those guys are really whores for who ever will let them have the front cover pop culture scoop before the other newsmags. Go read a stack of their magazine from the 80s or earlier, back when they only covered news, and 90% was reporting, not op-ed. Night and day... night and day...
It's called Cream.
http://cream.sourceforge.net/
It's the gateway drug into a wonderful universe.
I think "these days" here refers to "since 1987 or thereabouts." ... when was the first vi (or vi clone) to support full IBM keyboards?
guis are easy to learn, but they aren't fast.
do you select edit->copy and edit->paste every time? of course not. you use keyboard shortcuts.
while it might take a week of peeking at a cheatsheet, once you learn vim, it's very very fast. you can change bash to work like vim, there are vim modes for editing, vim's about a million times easier to script than emacs (by which i mean, you don't have to learn lisp.) it's fast & small, and available for everything. it's on every unix terminal (except basic gentoo installs i think) so you're never without it. and the depth of its power features go way beyond what a combination of menus and taskbars can do.
all that said, the learning curve is steep, and if you don't spend 8-18 hours a day writing code and jumping around 50 file source trees, it's probably not going to be your thing. Me, my desktop has a HUGE gvim session loaded with custom scripts and about 8 frames (tabbed editing in vim 7 will be a godsend) more often than any other application.
vim rocks! use it and love it!
Yes, but can you then take your sims mansion out to your sandbox and build sandcstles around it? Can you pull in characters from your older brother's Ninja Turtles game into the Sims? Physical toys exist in the real world and can interact with any physical object. A child's imagination is going to be able to provide more variable parameters for interaction than even Will Wrights'.
If I remember correctly, the 2600 version of PacMan wasn't fun for ANYONE and only require the language skills needed to say
"What the HELL!? this isn't fuckin' PacMan!"
and what, you and your parents don't share a common language? that's kind of odd.
Funny, my only Microsoft product is a mouse...
a partial guide to life:
You can pretty much fuck around with your youth however you want. Dress crazy, sleep around, be poor, be rich, whatever. There comes a point -- let's say 30 -- when you need to get serious and start thinking about the future. I'm not talking about a job or investing or anything, I mean, do that stuff, but we're not covering that here. We're talking about identity and personality... who you are. There comes a time when reinventions of self are just tedious to your friends and family, so you need to pick a target for middle/old age, and then work, slowly, on gracefully transitioning from whoever you were at 29 into that guy.
I think this is my guy.
(idea cribbed somewhat from Vice magazine)
Yeah, I've got a fading black napster T-Shirt and it gets a lot of compliments. People clearly don't associate their positive feelings about the brand with the current service.
You're just not going to be able to charge people for music that can't go on an iPod.
I've got an awesome idea though:
someone with a lot of cash should start a new major record label, and not treat fans like dirt, don't abuse new technologies (like satellite radio), and take a minimal approach to DRM (i understand why a business model that relies on pushing millions of units pretty well has to have *some* but accept that it's going to be cracked, and don't sue college students)
I really think the goodwill from both fans and artists (who almost universally disagree with their labels' practices) would make them a mint.
"The hype, graphics, and back of the box features mean nothing if the game doesn't deliver the fun."
Unless that hype sells you a million unit on pre-sales. Video game fans are some of the stupidest consumers around, the game publishers get away with complete abuse of their customer base.
Actually... this is a pretty fantastic idea for distributed filesharing.
It's much easier to get 50% of a 200% larger file than to get 100% of the original. You'd never need to see a complete download, thus you wouldn't get cases where your transfer gets delayed waiting for a seed for the one little piece that nobody else has.
50% is probably overkill for bittorrent. If zip format were built that could reconstruct its contents with any arbitrary 90% of the file, that would be *amazing* for torrents.
So er... anyone want to point me toward some readings on the basics of file compression and checksums and that kind of thing?
While we're asking stupid questions:
If you decide to stick with what you've got, will you give the laptop to the most convincing argument given for the status quo?
Here's mine: you guys are the Morton's Salt of web design. Give it five more years, and the outdated look will suddenly suggest dependability, class, and timelessness.
Oh and thanks for distracting me from work all these years.