The military has long been a treatment programs for such disorders as:
having knocked a girl up,
got caught stealing a car,
can't find a job,
belong to wrong demographic and there's a draft going on,
And various other disorders whose best cure is to very quickly leave town or, for preference, the whole country.
I'll admit that Internet addiction is a new one on me---it won't get me out of doing the dishes, let alone fighting for my country, and my country's being pretty militarily, ehrm, "enthusiastic" these days.
But treatment programs along the lines of "If you keep fucking up we'll have you shot with this gun right here" often have remarkable results.
You claimed: Good code is what you get when you take someone genuinely skilled in the art of Software Engineering and a depth of knowledge in the problem domain and the language to be used.
Nope. Good code is when you accuratly and efficiently implement the solution to a problem that has already thoroughly and correctly defined. By the time a single line of code has been written, 90% of the Software Engineering should already have happened.
Don't act like it's an insult to compare coding to auto repair or plumbing. Once you've dealt with bad plumbing, or stripped and scored half the bolts in a car's engine without actually fixing anything, you'll have gain some respect for the genuine craftsmanship involved in either trade. A master plumber spends years earning his title.
The society which scorns excellence in plumbing because plumbing is a humble activity, and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because philosophy is an exalted activity, will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy. Neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.
What's with the/*? I'm not wasting two whole keystrokes on this fellow.
How about
# tar xf/incriminating/kittyporn ~$LUSER
# mail -s "Look what I found!" ratOnYourCoworkers@fbi.gov <<EOF
One of our users, $LUSER, needs a good talking to.
sincerely, $BOFH
.
<<EOF
#
I'm admittedly off topic here, and silly to reply to a.sig, but your.sig says "Vote your conscience: Green Party in 2004!"
Well, Sparky, I am going to vote my conscience in 2004. And my conscience is telling me that as the resident of a Bush-leaning states, I don't want four more years of Bush on my conscience, which is why vanity candidates and single-issue third parties won't be getting my vote, money, support, respect or attention this year.
Neat trick, being able to tell a person's character from the look of their neighbors. Must come handy at times I'm sure.
Compare the neighborhood where Mr Wise lives to one of the claims he has made about who he is: a Lexus owner, see. He joined an online Lexus owners forum, publishing a picture of himself standing next to a Lexus, which was parked in front of a fairly nice house. The house does not jibe with the house the grandparent post saw firsthand. Nor does the Lexus jibe with the crappy car the grandparent post mentions. In other words, we may have a reasonable suspicion that Mr Wise has made misleading statements about who he is.
Incidentally, his wife notified the Lexus owners club that he had died tragically and set up a PayPal account accepting memorial donations.
In the meantime, stop being so goddamned sanctimonious. That he lives in such a dismal neighborhood is not ipso facto proof that Mr Wise is a bad person. It does, however, conflict with claims he has made about himself. It is the contrast between the claims and the truth that gives some of us pause.
Okay, see, I don't agree with the RIAA that piracy is wrong and should be stopped.
First of all, "piracy" is exactly the wrong word. It's a piece of linguistic tyrrany imposed upon us by an industry that has everything to lose if the government no longer recognizes its "property" as such. Linguistic tyrrany works like this: an eighteen-year-old-boy hooks up with a seventeen-year-old girl. Well, we could call it making love, but she's a minor, so we'll call her a child, and since she's a child she can't consent to anything, see, so what do you cal nonconsensual sex? That's right. This isn't making love. It's child rape. So let's abandon the term "piracy" right now, because it's being used to cloud the discussion.
Second, the whole concept of copyright has been perverted beyond anything its originators would recognize. Copyright was meant to balance the rights of the commons (i.e. everybody) with incentives to the creators of written works. The idea was that you would give the author (and not, I want to emphasize, some holding company) exclusive control over the printing of his work, for a limited amount of time. So if I write a book, I and only I get to say when and how it gets published, for a period of forteen years. After that, it belongs to the commons, and absolutely everybody gets to enjoy it however they choose to do so. More to the point, other people get to revise, expand, improve, and build on these works.
And it was for books, and books only. Not plays, not sheet music, nothing but printed words.
I sincerely believe that no corporation is entitled to own the whole of a work it did not hire someone to produce. I furthermore believe that copyright is not, and was never intended to be, a mechanism to supress the free flow of information, nor to award permanent ownership of a creative work to anyone, but rather to provide a monetary incentive to producers of such work in exchange for a time-limited monopoly over same.
If you sincerely think that the RIAA has a legitimate claim to what it says it has a right to, bear in mind that if you sing "Happy Birthday"---a song written over a century ago---over the radio, Time-Warner says they have a legitimate claim to some royalties. Hells bells, people, right now fucking Hendrix should be passing into the public domain, let alone "Happy Birthday".
When I saw them in Charlotte, NC, in November, 1988, they had two giant portraits of J.R. "Bob" Dobbs hanging behind them. I didn't know who he was at the time.
I have started collecting incredibly stupid analogies for a web site I'm putting together. Would you mind if I used this one on my banner page? Thanks.
Until the early 1990s all U.S. area codes had either 0 or 1 as their second digit. Furthermore, no exchange had 0 or 1 as its second digit. There was a substantial amount of reprogramming to do at phone companies and elsewhere to recognize the newly-allowed numbers as valid; it was not a trivial problem.
You want to know what would relieve area code pressure? Tax reform. I'm not kidding. The area code system was designed so that area codes never crossed state boundaries. In-state calls and interstate calls are subject to different taxes, see, so you have entire area codes wasted on places like Alaska and Wyoming, each with a population under a million.
Where I live, I have six area codes that are local calls, but I don't care anymore, because I don't use my home phone for anything anymore---from my cell phone, all calls are local and an 11th digit would be a trivial addition.
I'm not surprised by either. The VIN system was not adopted until 1981; before then, vehicle manufacturers used whatever internal serialization scheme they cared for. In Colorado, we were expected to left-fill the number with either X or 0, I forget which.
As for odometers, most states write "0" in the "odometer" field of the title for vehicles over N years old (where N in (10 15 20)). The asumption is that odometers are used to determine wear-and-tear on a vehicle; after N years, simple deterioration becomes a sufficiently important factor. I know a BMW motorcycle rider whose bike had just under 300,000 documented miles on it. When he retitled it, the odometer statement read "0". He was pissed.
The problem is that the iPod uses the same interface that the CD changer or one of the other devices) would. However, given the choice between six CDs and a 20GB MP3 player, I'll cheerfully opt to have the CD changer ripped out and replaced.
They already did this over a year ago with their F650CS motorcycle. One of the accessories available for this bike is an audio system. It's padded on the inside and has power and audio leads that will attach to a device like a Walkman or iPod. So for a few months last year they were giving away an audio system and iPod with every new CS sold.
It's a damned fun little bike, just so you know. It's fuel injected, agile, torquey, gets around 60MPG, can run 80MPH all day long, and is one of the cheapest, lightest machines you can get with belt drive and ABS.
I'm not surprised in the least that he wasn't interested in the laptop. If he was robbing a convenience store, he was probably pretty focussed on the cash.
I talked to a police detective after my fiancee was burglarized, and he told me that the absolute best things to steal are
money
drugs
guns
jewelry
Jewelry can be broken apart and resold easily, or pawned unaltered. Guns are tremendously salable on the black market in societies that curtail their legal purchase. Drugs and money, well, money's money, and often it's used to buy drugs in the first place. All these items can be concealed about the person, too---an advantage that small electronic devices share, but they're nowhere near as profitable as the above listed.
I keep myself safe by using technology that's five years behind the curve: my laptop is a Pentium II/300 with 64MB. My WiFi AP has more horsepower.
The United States has plenty of wide, flat nothing, thanyouverymuch. So does Canada, for that matter, and big, vertical tubes painted black make dandy thermal columns up where there's 20 hours of daylight in the summer months.
As for when weather is bad, that's when you either break down and drive your car.
Or buy some decent gear. Get an Aerostich Roadcrafter and some Sidi Sympatex boots. You can ride for hours in the rain that way. For an eighteen mile commute, I'm positive you'll arrive dry.
With the right gear, the only weather you can't ride in is weather that coats the street in ice.
What amounts to an opportunity to ignore the world around you and careen obliviously from lane to lane while eating a cheeseburger in a car can easily turn into a chance concentrate on the present, be totally involved in the moment, and actively participate in your environment on a motorcycle.
The whole "murdercycle" thing can be attributed to three things: intoxicated riders, untrained riders, inattentive riders. On a motorcycle, you are actually taking an active role in your personal safety, rather than passively relying on a bunch of technology to make safety happen to you.
A hotly-tuned, high-revving 600 will get sucky mileage. Stock Harleys regularly get in the 50+mpg range.
Don't think just of gasoline---think of the overall environmental impact of building the machine in the first place. Cars weigh 3000 pounds; motorcycles weigh 600. Cars use lots of upholstery and synthetic materials that are environmentally expensive; naked motorcycles are almost all metal plus the seat and wires---sports bikes have less than twenty pounds of plastic throughout.
A motorcycle in stop-and-go traffic will still get a respectable percentage of its peak fuel economy; a car still has to haul a ton and a half of mass up to speed, then back down again, typically getting half of its peak economy.
A diesel econobox has unbelievably dirty emissions compated to a gasoline vehicle. And speaking of what you can get used for cheap, you can get a heck of a used bike for two grand or less.
Besides---we're geeks here, right? A motorcycle is a complicated toy that you can fiddle with. Operating it requires a high level of involment and concentration, not unlike hacking, and an appreciation for physics.
If I have to carry stuff around, I'll take the car. If I only have myself and my bookbag and my laptop, I'll damned sure take the bike. It's a better choice.
I just got back from a week in Alaska, and I've been working to put together a travelogue. Here's what I did:
I kept a clipboard full of loose leaf paper on the passenger seat, a GPS on the dashboard, my digital camera in the center console, and my laptop in the trunk. When I saw something cool, I pulled over and took a picture. When I thought of something cool, or learned something cool, I jotted down a note. I do my best to keep the notes in chronological order (date and page number on top of each sheet), and use special marks to indicate something I've written out of sequence or as an aside. Whenever I had a useful stop, or saw something particularly interesting, I put a waypoint on the GPS.
When I got to that night's hotel, I took about half an hour to:
upload all the pictures to the laptop,
pull the day's Trackpoints into MapSource, and
transcribed and organized the day's notes into an outline plus comments.
Having the combination of the four created a comprehensive enough tickler set that I could recreate the day pretty thoroughly.
Probably the best thing I did to remember the trip was to send out an e-mail to everybody at the end of the day. Most of the hotels I stayed in were online, and every town I stayed in had an Internet cafe of some description (often it was a bar serving wonderful Alaskan beers). I CC:d myself on everything, and this has supplemented my running notes very nicely.
So I took the laptop, yes, but I only pulled it out at the end of the day, or when my digital camera was full and I needed to offload its contents somewhere. This took all of four minutes at a roadside picnic area.
All this gear made the airport a PITA, but it was all pretty worth it.
Oh---BASIC did teach me some bad habits that took a while to unlearn. For a few years, I was still:
Was stingy with the comments,
Kept variable names unnecessarily short,
Didn't trust the computer to get it right for me (not letting the compiler do its job),
Assumed I was in an incredibly cramped environment,
Assumed I had the whole damned machine to myself (busy-waits, things like that),
Wanted to PEEK and POKE,
Assumed that code that was easy for the computer to deal with was more important than code that was easy for a programmer to deal with,
Optimized the crap out of everything.
Books like Code Complete and Writing Solid Codee really helped me along in this respect, but for a while, before I started trusting the computer to do some of the work, things were pretty ugly.
Slashdot Mirror
- having knocked a girl up,
- got caught stealing a car,
- can't find a job,
- belong to wrong demographic and there's a draft going on,
And various other disorders whose best cure is to very quickly leave town or, for preference, the whole country.I'll admit that Internet addiction is a new one on me---it won't get me out of doing the dishes, let alone fighting for my country, and my country's being pretty militarily, ehrm, "enthusiastic" these days.
But treatment programs along the lines of "If you keep fucking up we'll have you shot with this gun right here" often have remarkable results.
Nope. Good code is when you accuratly and efficiently implement the solution to a problem that has already thoroughly and correctly defined. By the time a single line of code has been written, 90% of the Software Engineering should already have happened.
Don't act like it's an insult to compare coding to auto repair or plumbing. Once you've dealt with bad plumbing, or stripped and scored half the bolts in a car's engine without actually fixing anything, you'll have gain some respect for the genuine craftsmanship involved in either trade. A master plumber spends years earning his title.
John Gardner once said:
What's with the /*? I'm not wasting two whole keystrokes on this fellow.
How about /incriminating/kittyporn ~$LUSER
# tar xf
# mail -s "Look what I found!" ratOnYourCoworkers@fbi.gov <<EOF
One of our users, $LUSER, needs a good talking to.
sincerely, $BOFH
.
<<EOF
#
Well, Sparky, I am going to vote my conscience in 2004. And my conscience is telling me that as the resident of a Bush-leaning states, I don't want four more years of Bush on my conscience, which is why vanity candidates and single-issue third parties won't be getting my vote, money, support, respect or attention this year.
Compare the neighborhood where Mr Wise lives to one of the claims he has made about who he is: a Lexus owner, see. He joined an online Lexus owners forum, publishing a picture of himself standing next to a Lexus, which was parked in front of a fairly nice house. The house does not jibe with the house the grandparent post saw firsthand. Nor does the Lexus jibe with the crappy car the grandparent post mentions. In other words, we may have a reasonable suspicion that Mr Wise has made misleading statements about who he is.
Incidentally, his wife notified the Lexus owners club that he had died tragically and set up a PayPal account accepting memorial donations.
In the meantime, stop being so goddamned sanctimonious. That he lives in such a dismal neighborhood is not ipso facto proof that Mr Wise is a bad person. It does, however, conflict with claims he has made about himself. It is the contrast between the claims and the truth that gives some of us pause.
First of all, "piracy" is exactly the wrong word. It's a piece of linguistic tyrrany imposed upon us by an industry that has everything to lose if the government no longer recognizes its "property" as such. Linguistic tyrrany works like this: an eighteen-year-old-boy hooks up with a seventeen-year-old girl. Well, we could call it making love, but she's a minor, so we'll call her a child, and since she's a child she can't consent to anything, see, so what do you cal nonconsensual sex? That's right. This isn't making love. It's child rape. So let's abandon the term "piracy" right now, because it's being used to cloud the discussion.
Second, the whole concept of copyright has been perverted beyond anything its originators would recognize. Copyright was meant to balance the rights of the commons (i.e. everybody) with incentives to the creators of written works. The idea was that you would give the author (and not, I want to emphasize, some holding company) exclusive control over the printing of his work, for a limited amount of time. So if I write a book, I and only I get to say when and how it gets published, for a period of forteen years. After that, it belongs to the commons, and absolutely everybody gets to enjoy it however they choose to do so. More to the point, other people get to revise, expand, improve, and build on these works.
And it was for books, and books only. Not plays, not sheet music, nothing but printed words.
I sincerely believe that no corporation is entitled to own the whole of a work it did not hire someone to produce. I furthermore believe that copyright is not, and was never intended to be, a mechanism to supress the free flow of information, nor to award permanent ownership of a creative work to anyone, but rather to provide a monetary incentive to producers of such work in exchange for a time-limited monopoly over same.
If you sincerely think that the RIAA has a legitimate claim to what it says it has a right to, bear in mind that if you sing "Happy Birthday"---a song written over a century ago---over the radio, Time-Warner says they have a legitimate claim to some royalties. Hells bells, people, right now fucking Hendrix should be passing into the public domain, let alone "Happy Birthday".
vi was more like a Ramones song. Quick, sexy, gets the job done good and hard.
When I saw them in Charlotte, NC, in November, 1988, they had two giant portraits of J.R. "Bob" Dobbs hanging behind them. I didn't know who he was at the time.
I have started collecting incredibly stupid analogies for a web site I'm putting together. Would you mind if I used this one on my banner page? Thanks.
You want to know what would relieve area code pressure? Tax reform. I'm not kidding. The area code system was designed so that area codes never crossed state boundaries. In-state calls and interstate calls are subject to different taxes, see, so you have entire area codes wasted on places like Alaska and Wyoming, each with a population under a million.
Where I live, I have six area codes that are local calls, but I don't care anymore, because I don't use my home phone for anything anymore---from my cell phone, all calls are local and an 11th digit would be a trivial addition.
You drive a 2004 Honda manufactured in the US.
As for odometers, most states write "0" in the "odometer" field of the title for vehicles over N years old (where N in (10 15 20)). The asumption is that odometers are used to determine wear-and-tear on a vehicle; after N years, simple deterioration becomes a sufficiently important factor. I know a BMW motorcycle rider whose bike had just under 300,000 documented miles on it. When he retitled it, the odometer statement read "0". He was pissed.
Three lies for the price of one.
Also, CTFL, please, so you can see that the F650CS audio system is in fact a pair of external speakers mounted in front of the rider.
The problem is that the iPod uses the same interface that the CD changer or one of the other devices) would. However, given the choice between six CDs and a 20GB MP3 player, I'll cheerfully opt to have the CD changer ripped out and replaced.
It's a damned fun little bike, just so you know. It's fuel injected, agile, torquey, gets around 60MPG, can run 80MPH all day long, and is one of the cheapest, lightest machines you can get with belt drive and ABS.
I talked to a police detective after my fiancee was burglarized, and he told me that the absolute best things to steal are
- money
- drugs
- guns
- jewelry
Jewelry can be broken apart and resold easily, or pawned unaltered. Guns are tremendously salable on the black market in societies that curtail their legal purchase. Drugs and money, well, money's money, and often it's used to buy drugs in the first place. All these items can be concealed about the person, too---an advantage that small electronic devices share, but they're nowhere near as profitable as the above listed.I keep myself safe by using technology that's five years behind the curve: my laptop is a Pentium II/300 with 64MB. My WiFi AP has more horsepower.
"All the music I stole's been stolen!"
The United States has plenty of wide, flat nothing, thanyouverymuch. So does Canada, for that matter, and big, vertical tubes painted black make dandy thermal columns up where there's 20 hours of daylight in the summer months.
Or buy some decent gear. Get an Aerostich Roadcrafter and some Sidi Sympatex boots. You can ride for hours in the rain that way. For an eighteen mile commute, I'm positive you'll arrive dry.
With the right gear, the only weather you can't ride in is weather that coats the street in ice.
The whole "murdercycle" thing can be attributed to three things: intoxicated riders, untrained riders, inattentive riders. On a motorcycle, you are actually taking an active role in your personal safety, rather than passively relying on a bunch of technology to make safety happen to you.
Don't think just of gasoline---think of the overall environmental impact of building the machine in the first place. Cars weigh 3000 pounds; motorcycles weigh 600. Cars use lots of upholstery and synthetic materials that are environmentally expensive; naked motorcycles are almost all metal plus the seat and wires---sports bikes have less than twenty pounds of plastic throughout.
A motorcycle in stop-and-go traffic will still get a respectable percentage of its peak fuel economy; a car still has to haul a ton and a half of mass up to speed, then back down again, typically getting half of its peak economy.
A diesel econobox has unbelievably dirty emissions compated to a gasoline vehicle. And speaking of what you can get used for cheap, you can get a heck of a used bike for two grand or less.
Besides---we're geeks here, right? A motorcycle is a complicated toy that you can fiddle with. Operating it requires a high level of involment and concentration, not unlike hacking, and an appreciation for physics.
If I have to carry stuff around, I'll take the car. If I only have myself and my bookbag and my laptop, I'll damned sure take the bike. It's a better choice.
I got 13:60 and 15:60. Maybe you were getting data based on cached values.
I kept a clipboard full of loose leaf paper on the passenger seat, a GPS on the dashboard, my digital camera in the center console, and my laptop in the trunk. When I saw something cool, I pulled over and took a picture. When I thought of something cool, or learned something cool, I jotted down a note. I do my best to keep the notes in chronological order (date and page number on top of each sheet), and use special marks to indicate something I've written out of sequence or as an aside. Whenever I had a useful stop, or saw something particularly interesting, I put a waypoint on the GPS.
When I got to that night's hotel, I took about half an hour to:
Having the combination of the four created a comprehensive enough tickler set that I could recreate the day pretty thoroughly.
Probably the best thing I did to remember the trip was to send out an e-mail to everybody at the end of the day. Most of the hotels I stayed in were online, and every town I stayed in had an Internet cafe of some description (often it was a bar serving wonderful Alaskan beers). I CC:d myself on everything, and this has supplemented my running notes very nicely.
So I took the laptop, yes, but I only pulled it out at the end of the day, or when my digital camera was full and I needed to offload its contents somewhere. This took all of four minutes at a roadside picnic area.
All this gear made the airport a PITA, but it was all pretty worth it.
Books like Code Complete and Writing Solid Codee really helped me along in this respect, but for a while, before I started trusting the computer to do some of the work, things were pretty ugly.