but to really understand the details you need to know so much backstory that even after reading it 2 or 3 times I can't relate it.
Think about how much more detail there is in LOTR. Those movies were well received by fans and newcomers alike. Admittedly in Dune some of the more esoteric stuff is central to the plot, so it's probably harder to pull off.
The David Lynch version is one of my favorite movies of all time (Paul riding the worm with Brian Eno/Toto backing him up is pretty sweet) but I can see how it wouldn't resonate with someone who hadn't read the book. That Scifi channel thing was IMHO an example of how to fail by being overly faithful to the details of the source material and missing the spirit of it.
The sentry gun control in Aliens was pretty good: picture. It looks like you'd control it like a BIOS setup. It's possible to convey relevant information to the viewer while keeping it plausible. I'd imagine most filmmakers just aren't concerned with that level of detail (maybe they should be; it seems to be working for James Cameron.)
What ends up giving way? Quality. And it pisses me off. I can't do my job properly. Code reviews, unit/mock/functional testing, analysis, UML *all* have to give way because of all the above and just to get it out on time.
Quality's good, but 'good enough' and on time is better (from a business perspective.) There's a whole continuum between doing everything exactly by the book and just hacking some terrible thing together. A lot of people just blindly follow software engineering 'best practices' without evaluating the downside. Code reviews can be good, but often devolve into "you didn't do this the way I would have; let's scrap a bunch of working/tested code to make it fit my pet paradigm." UML isn't necessary if everyone on the team knows what they're doing.
I get your point, just playing devil's advocate.
I often find the choice of ads that Gmail comes up with more interesting than the actual email. It's sometimes a bit disconcerting how relevant they are (how did they know I'm a Barry Manilow Fan?!?) but if I want to be truly anonymous (which is pretty rare) I know not to use any of their services.
One thing I've noticed is if you get a "hell hath no fury like a woman scorned" email, that ad column is vacant (presumably nobody wants their company associated with that.) Also, I just checked and a message about a friend passing away was respectfully ad free.
I'd say show the kid assembly and C first (briefly.) Explain how the CPU registers work and how C abstracts some of that away. Then move on to Python and point out some of the additional things that happen automatically. Write some programs together that do interesting things in Python. It might be more appealing with some perspective into just how powerful high level languages are.
There's no bias against women in the vast majority of workplaces or academics.
There's less bias than there used to be, but it's easy to forget how recently outright discrimination was in effect.
Vera Rubin is responsible for some of the most important discoveries in astronomy in the last century, yet After she earned an A.B. from Vassar College (1948) she tried to enroll at Princeton but never received their graduate catalog as women there were not allowed in the graduate astronomy program until 1975. (emphasis mine)
Whiny PC bullshit irritates me too, but that's a real case of someone getting fucked over based on gender. Things have changed, but you don't go from being banned to being welcomed with open arms overnight.
This is only scary when you have a super-intelligent dictionary attack. Scrape the hard drive and any subpoenaed documents for words and add that to a dictionary of common password parts, then perform your dictionary attack -- dreadfully powerful.
If this much effort makes sense for words, does anyone ever consider keyboard layout passwords? Something like !@#$5678QWERtyui is easy to type/remember. I haven't seen any mention of that being a strategy in password cracking.
Also, if any of the people designing the "password strength rules" are reading this, can we do away with the systems where Blink182! is considered a strong password because it has upper/lower case and punctuation?
Given the reality of the math, it's a wonder that CDs - uncompressed from their 44.1 kHz standard - manage to sound as good as they do.
Maybe it was just a poor choice of words, but when the "reality" of the math doesn't match observed results, you're missing something.
Also, in the other post where you described a DAC's analog output voltage snapping instantaneously to each of its digital input levels (slew rate in the amp being our only savior) was that a DAC you built out of Legos?
It will basically find average the number of lines per function, ratio of code to comment, and other such metrics and give a letter grade to the code.
// // Are // two // numbers // equal? //
int is_equal(int a, int b) {
if ((a = b)) {
return 1;
}
return 0;
} // This // function // only // takes // up // 6 // lines
And preferring one format is very different from claiming that it is of a high-fidelity: for example, audio with a compressed dynamic range is by definition degraded, and yet it persists in commercial rock recordings because uniformly loud music grabs listeners' attention more easily.
Volume maximization in mastering and on the radio has gotten out of hand, but I don't think it's fair to call compressed signals "degraded" across the board. I don't think anyone would describe the sound of this unit as degrading. It's like saying Jimi Hendrix's amp ruined the pure tone of his guitar.
To be on topic: 48k sounds like ass. Most people don't know how to consciously listen and evaluate audio quality, but I'd guess they'll still get more satisfaction from listing to the 160 kb versions. That's about the point at which stuff starts to sounds good.
I'm totally going to clear out my Bugzilla queue tomorrow:
Bug 13272: Memory leak in widget_process_task()
RESOLVED/INVALID: cosmic rays
Bug 11207: Database corrupted by invalid user input
RESOLVED/INVALID: cosmic rays
Bug 12304: "if (A = B)" in the code where clearly "if (A == B)" was intended
RESOLVED/INVALID: cosmic rays
Good points, but I think there are a few good counter-counterarguments.
But when a change wages requires six months of work, it's worth seriously considering how long a rewrite would take. Six months for what should be a ten minute change (generously), no matter what the language, demands a rewrite.
If changes are infrequent, it might be worth it. Rewriting from scratch will necessitate finding and fixing a *lot* of new bugs, while the existing system has already been debugged over the past few decades.
If I did my accounting with a paper ledger, computerizing the process would probably make no sense to me
Nobody can covertly copy/sell your paper records with a thumb drive, and they need physical access to destroy them. Also they're immune to EMP.
if I became a fluent C/C++ programmer (especially C++), it might not be immediately obvious to me how useful garbage collection is
Less deterministic performance is a problem for some people, and there's always at least some performance hit.
If you've only ever worked with punch cards, or with a slowly-compiled language, it may not be immediately obvious how useful an interactive command prompt (read-eval-print-loop, to use the LISP terminology) can be.
I'm stretching my devil's advocate theme with this one but maybe some features aren't in the main UI of an app because they tell you to interactively hack the Lisp.
Bloated by what metric?
No argument on that one. If you're rewriting a COBOL app today, you've probably got a few orders of magnitude more of every resource than the original app required.
Good think those Macbooks have the magsafe connector for the power cord. Those thieves could have been looking at some costly repairs if they had been stealing Dells. Maybe that's their next commercial: "I stole a PC, but when I grabbed it the power connector broke, now it's like BEEP, BEEP, BEEP."
I have to agree with the "no mouse" posts here. If you think about the things you usually do with a mouse, they're mostly all incredibly time consuming compared to keyboard actions.
Selecting menu options is a big one: how much faster it is to type "CTRL-s" rather than moving the mouse to the "Edit" menu, clicking, moving the mouse to "Search" and clicking again. Not a big deal for casual web browsing, but if you're doing hundreds (thousands?) of searches every day it adds up.
Navigating (scroll wheel or scroll bar) is another mouse thing. Using search (from the keyboard shortcut) can usually make scrolling unnecessary. How much productivity is wasted every day by people scrolling through a code listing, searching visually for a specific string that could be located in less than 1 second with a search.
A few years ago I removed the menus and scrollbar from Emacs and would leave my mouse upside down so that it was inconvenient to use. After getting used to how fast everything could be done, it's painful to work "over the shoulder" with most other coders (everyone else where I work uses Eclipse and frequently resorts to mouse usage.)
Based on this new version I'd say it is. They seem to have fixed all the sketchy UI stuff (didn't there used to be a bunch of values of "-1" for defaults?) and also jumping to different points in a video is seamless now (much better than WMP.) I used to get a few seconds of weird colors when changing location. Good work VLC devs!
That's one thing I don't get. I'm actively trying to skip it; I'm getting increasingly annoyed; my urge to kill is rising. Is that really the association they want to make with what they're advertising? Isn't it counterproductive to make the consumer subconsciously link your studio logo to frustration? EA does that with games and it's equally maddening.
Firewire 1600/3200 is _really_ 1600 and 3200 mbit, no overhead etc. issues and you can CHAIN them without losing bandwidth. Think about netbooks having to have 3-4 USB inputs in such small space. A single FW1600 can handle all with amazing speed. What stops firewire? Of course, the high price of implementation. Apple can actually erase half or more of the price instantly with a single memo.
The fact that Windows XP SP2 totally screwed up Firewire support didn't help. Every FW device was slow, but many didn't work at all. To make things worse the fix was a big pain in the ass (matching up a bunch of values from the Device Manager with registry entries and editing them and running some patch program.) I'm surprised that anti MS people don't bring that up more often. It's the best "Windows isn't ready for the Desktop" evidence I've encountered.
There are some great technologies failed just because they weren't supported on Windows natively. Just look how that FAT16/32 dinosaur lives on while there are dozens of better filesystems out there.
I'm no expert on filesystems, but the fact that determining the free space on a FAT32 volume takes several seconds does seem a bit questionable. Plug an empty USB thumb drive into your system and watch how long the little LED flashes before it's ready.
Those guys seem to think everything should be coded in C, even if it takes 10 times longer than coding it in another language
I've come across a few C programmers who don't know anything else. Text processing is the worst of it. People that don't know about regular expressions will do some crazy shit.
On the other hand, I've been writing code that runs on a 133 MHz CPU (66 MHz to memory:() and it makes me cringe to think about some of the things that Python does.
The guy talks about how they were passionate about creating something awesome under difficult conditions and the result was something everyone loved.
Then he says: Now we don't have those limitations any more and all of the technical issues that people overlooked because it was a great work of art are solved.
Targeting is not just by want, but also by time and location. Print and TV are location based, due to physics.
They even manage to screw this up. I'm constantly bombarded with insurance ads with the Geico lizard/cavemen and that anime chick, but I'm in Massachusetts - as are the stations broadcasting those ads - so they have no chance of making a sale (MA has some weird insurance laws that ban their products.)
Maybe they're thinking they can lure me to another state to get better insurance?
Seriously - social skills? The same set you use with AIM or when sending a text message on a cell phone. I love how organizing or co-leading a raid really means you've got what it takes(!) to manage people or resources.
Managing a successful WOW guild requires substantial social skills. Even with a guild that's doing well and getting loot there's constant infighting and conflicting personalities to be managed (look at how frequently the top guilds disintegrate.) Never mind forming the guild in first place; it's like starting a company but there's no venture capital so you have to sell individual employees on the business plan alone.
Any time I was in a guild that had any luck, the person running it was universally respected and well liked. That's tough to pull off when you're talking about 50 semi-random people each with their own agenda.
Slashdot Mirror
but to really understand the details you need to know so much backstory that even after reading it 2 or 3 times I can't relate it.
Think about how much more detail there is in LOTR. Those movies were well received by fans and newcomers alike. Admittedly in Dune some of the more esoteric stuff is central to the plot, so it's probably harder to pull off.
The David Lynch version is one of my favorite movies of all time (Paul riding the worm with Brian Eno/Toto backing him up is pretty sweet) but I can see how it wouldn't resonate with someone who hadn't read the book. That Scifi channel thing was IMHO an example of how to fail by being overly faithful to the details of the source material and missing the spirit of it.
The sentry gun control in Aliens was pretty good: picture. It looks like you'd control it like a BIOS setup. It's possible to convey relevant information to the viewer while keeping it plausible. I'd imagine most filmmakers just aren't concerned with that level of detail (maybe they should be; it seems to be working for James Cameron.)
What ends up giving way? Quality. And it pisses me off. I can't do my job properly. Code reviews, unit/mock/functional testing, analysis, UML *all* have to give way because of all the above and just to get it out on time.
Quality's good, but 'good enough' and on time is better (from a business perspective.) There's a whole continuum between doing everything exactly by the book and just hacking some terrible thing together. A lot of people just blindly follow software engineering 'best practices' without evaluating the downside. Code reviews can be good, but often devolve into "you didn't do this the way I would have; let's scrap a bunch of working/tested code to make it fit my pet paradigm." UML isn't necessary if everyone on the team knows what they're doing. I get your point, just playing devil's advocate.
I often find the choice of ads that Gmail comes up with more interesting than the actual email. It's sometimes a bit disconcerting how relevant they are (how did they know I'm a Barry Manilow Fan?!?) but if I want to be truly anonymous (which is pretty rare) I know not to use any of their services. One thing I've noticed is if you get a "hell hath no fury like a woman scorned" email, that ad column is vacant (presumably nobody wants their company associated with that.) Also, I just checked and a message about a friend passing away was respectfully ad free.
I'd say show the kid assembly and C first (briefly.) Explain how the CPU registers work and how C abstracts some of that away. Then move on to Python and point out some of the additional things that happen automatically. Write some programs together that do interesting things in Python. It might be more appealing with some perspective into just how powerful high level languages are.
There's no bias against women in the vast majority of workplaces or academics.
There's less bias than there used to be, but it's easy to forget how recently outright discrimination was in effect.
Vera Rubin is responsible for some of the most important discoveries in astronomy in the last century, yet After she earned an A.B. from Vassar College (1948) she tried to enroll at Princeton but never received their graduate catalog as women there were not allowed in the graduate astronomy program until 1975. (emphasis mine)
Whiny PC bullshit irritates me too, but that's a real case of someone getting fucked over based on gender. Things have changed, but you don't go from being banned to being welcomed with open arms overnight.
This is only scary when you have a super-intelligent dictionary attack. Scrape the hard drive and any subpoenaed documents for words and add that to a dictionary of common password parts, then perform your dictionary attack -- dreadfully powerful.
If this much effort makes sense for words, does anyone ever consider keyboard layout passwords? Something like !@#$5678QWERtyui is easy to type/remember. I haven't seen any mention of that being a strategy in password cracking.
Also, if any of the people designing the "password strength rules" are reading this, can we do away with the systems where Blink182! is considered a strong password because it has upper/lower case and punctuation?
Given the reality of the math, it's a wonder that CDs - uncompressed from their 44.1 kHz standard - manage to sound as good as they do.
Maybe it was just a poor choice of words, but when the "reality" of the math doesn't match observed results, you're missing something.
Also, in the other post where you described a DAC's analog output voltage snapping instantaneously to each of its digital input levels (slew rate in the amp being our only savior) was that a DAC you built out of Legos?
It will basically find average the number of lines per function, ratio of code to comment, and other such metrics and give a letter grade to the code.
int is_equal(int a, int b) {
if ((a = b)) {
return 1;
}
return 0;
}
Do I get an A?
And preferring one format is very different from claiming that it is of a high-fidelity: for example, audio with a compressed dynamic range is by definition degraded, and yet it persists in commercial rock recordings because uniformly loud music grabs listeners' attention more easily.
Volume maximization in mastering and on the radio has gotten out of hand, but I don't think it's fair to call compressed signals "degraded" across the board. I don't think anyone would describe the sound of this unit as degrading. It's like saying Jimi Hendrix's amp ruined the pure tone of his guitar.
To be on topic: 48k sounds like ass. Most people don't know how to consciously listen and evaluate audio quality, but I'd guess they'll still get more satisfaction from listing to the 160 kb versions. That's about the point at which stuff starts to sounds good.
I'm totally going to clear out my Bugzilla queue tomorrow:
Bug 13272: Memory leak in widget_process_task()
RESOLVED/INVALID: cosmic rays
Bug 11207: Database corrupted by invalid user input
RESOLVED/INVALID: cosmic rays
Bug 12304: "if (A = B)" in the code where clearly "if (A == B)" was intended
RESOLVED/INVALID: cosmic rays
But when a change wages requires six months of work, it's worth seriously considering how long a rewrite would take. Six months for what should be a ten minute change (generously), no matter what the language, demands a rewrite.
If changes are infrequent, it might be worth it. Rewriting from scratch will necessitate finding and fixing a *lot* of new bugs, while the existing system has already been debugged over the past few decades.
If I did my accounting with a paper ledger, computerizing the process would probably make no sense to me
Nobody can covertly copy/sell your paper records with a thumb drive, and they need physical access to destroy them. Also they're immune to EMP.
if I became a fluent C/C++ programmer (especially C++), it might not be immediately obvious to me how useful garbage collection is
Less deterministic performance is a problem for some people, and there's always at least some performance hit.
If you've only ever worked with punch cards, or with a slowly-compiled language, it may not be immediately obvious how useful an interactive command prompt (read-eval-print-loop, to use the LISP terminology) can be.
I'm stretching my devil's advocate theme with this one but maybe some features aren't in the main UI of an app because they tell you to interactively hack the Lisp.
Bloated by what metric?
No argument on that one. If you're rewriting a COBOL app today, you've probably got a few orders of magnitude more of every resource than the original app required.
Good think those Macbooks have the magsafe connector for the power cord. Those thieves could have been looking at some costly repairs if they had been stealing Dells. Maybe that's their next commercial: "I stole a PC, but when I grabbed it the power connector broke, now it's like BEEP, BEEP, BEEP."
I have to agree with the "no mouse" posts here. If you think about the things you usually do with a mouse, they're mostly all incredibly time consuming compared to keyboard actions.
Selecting menu options is a big one: how much faster it is to type "CTRL-s" rather than moving the mouse to the "Edit" menu, clicking, moving the mouse to "Search" and clicking again. Not a big deal for casual web browsing, but if you're doing hundreds (thousands?) of searches every day it adds up.
Navigating (scroll wheel or scroll bar) is another mouse thing. Using search (from the keyboard shortcut) can usually make scrolling unnecessary. How much productivity is wasted every day by people scrolling through a code listing, searching visually for a specific string that could be located in less than 1 second with a search.
A few years ago I removed the menus and scrollbar from Emacs and would leave my mouse upside down so that it was inconvenient to use. After getting used to how fast everything could be done, it's painful to work "over the shoulder" with most other coders (everyone else where I work uses Eclipse and frequently resorts to mouse usage.)
Still, it's a great do it all player / streamer.
Based on this new version I'd say it is. They seem to have fixed all the sketchy UI stuff (didn't there used to be a bunch of values of "-1" for defaults?) and also jumping to different points in a video is seamless now (much better than WMP.) I used to get a few seconds of weird colors when changing location. Good work VLC devs!
3) Stop loading DVD's with unskippable cr@p
That's one thing I don't get. I'm actively trying to skip it; I'm getting increasingly annoyed; my urge to kill is rising. Is that really the association they want to make with what they're advertising? Isn't it counterproductive to make the consumer subconsciously link your studio logo to frustration? EA does that with games and it's equally maddening.
Firewire 1600/3200 is _really_ 1600 and 3200 mbit, no overhead etc. issues and you can CHAIN them without losing bandwidth. Think about netbooks having to have 3-4 USB inputs in such small space. A single FW1600 can handle all with amazing speed. What stops firewire? Of course, the high price of implementation. Apple can actually erase half or more of the price instantly with a single memo.
The fact that Windows XP SP2 totally screwed up Firewire support didn't help. Every FW device was slow, but many didn't work at all. To make things worse the fix was a big pain in the ass (matching up a bunch of values from the Device Manager with registry entries and editing them and running some patch program.) I'm surprised that anti MS people don't bring that up more often. It's the best "Windows isn't ready for the Desktop" evidence I've encountered.
There are some great technologies failed just because they weren't supported on Windows natively. Just look how that FAT16/32 dinosaur lives on while there are dozens of better filesystems out there.
I'm no expert on filesystems, but the fact that determining the free space on a FAT32 volume takes several seconds does seem a bit questionable. Plug an empty USB thumb drive into your system and watch how long the little LED flashes before it's ready.
Something like this will almost certainly be the result.
Those guys seem to think everything should be coded in C, even if it takes 10 times longer than coding it in another language
I've come across a few C programmers who don't know anything else. Text processing is the worst of it. People that don't know about regular expressions will do some crazy shit.
:() and it makes me cringe to think about some of the things that Python does.
On the other hand, I've been writing code that runs on a 133 MHz CPU (66 MHz to memory
if someone agrees to adopt this line I saw at work today:
pHSEGB->coarse += (7- nWeirdBits)*6 - 42;
Hungarian notation, confusing logic, magic numbers, "weird bits", and some jackass decided to subtract the ultimate answer from it all.
No time for love, Doctor Jones!
It's just like the Star Wars movies.
The guy talks about how they were passionate about creating something awesome under difficult conditions and the result was something everyone loved.
Then he says: Now we don't have those limitations any more and all of the technical issues that people overlooked because it was a great work of art are solved.
Targeting is not just by want, but also by time and location. Print and TV are location based, due to physics.
They even manage to screw this up. I'm constantly bombarded with insurance ads with the Geico lizard/cavemen and that anime chick, but I'm in Massachusetts - as are the stations broadcasting those ads - so they have no chance of making a sale (MA has some weird insurance laws that ban their products.)
Maybe they're thinking they can lure me to another state to get better insurance?
- Did I mention it's free? (I do accept PayPal donations, however)
If you reply with your paypal info I would actually send you money for that post.
Seriously - social skills? The same set you use with AIM or when sending a text message on a cell phone. I love how organizing or co-leading a raid really means you've got what it takes(!) to manage people or resources.
Managing a successful WOW guild requires substantial social skills. Even with a guild that's doing well and getting loot there's constant infighting and conflicting personalities to be managed (look at how frequently the top guilds disintegrate.) Never mind forming the guild in first place; it's like starting a company but there's no venture capital so you have to sell individual employees on the business plan alone.
Any time I was in a guild that had any luck, the person running it was universally respected and well liked. That's tough to pull off when you're talking about 50 semi-random people each with their own agenda.