A bit off-topic but in car programs nothing beats
TopGear. I've seen Fifth Gear
and I don't like it.
The BBC is probably the only broadcaster I would pay money to
(say EUR200 / year ) to watch their programs (note to USA readers: I
deliberately didn't use the
word shows.) Unfortunately they broadcast free-to-air which means I
get the programs for free.
Using hard coded spaces consumes more bytes
In coding, the last thing you should worry about is the excess file size
caused by coding style formatting issues.
For a long time I though TABs were better than spaces for the reasons
you mentioned. They aren't. Very few experienced coders use TABs. Four spaces
are fine. Read coding styles. Read code written by ancients cracks.
Also, use IDEs as much as you want but make your code readable for people
with plain terminals (think 24x80 chars vt100.) It's not that hard to do
in the first place and more people will like/contribute to your code.
There ain't such thing as a free iPod. Ever tried getting a free Disney ticket? It'll at least cost you a morning and expose you to trained time sharing salesmen.
That's what failed programmers that become middle managers tell newbie
programmers. As always, it depends. There are highly readable short expressions
as well as boringly long novels which are unreadable. As a rule of thumb I
try to fully understand the algorithm I want to program before actually
programming it. By that I can minimize the amount of code and keep
it readable at the same time.
For instance in C, if you implement linked lists "the stupid way" you probably
wind up handling head, body and tail members separately in access functions.
I've actually seen this. If you think just a bit harder you realize you can handle them all equally.
In my security policy, running MS software is an unacceptable risk. Could
you make me a PC that will not run any MS software at all? Oh yes, I assume
I will not need to pay MS tax for a system that is disabled to run MS
software.
but Java really isn't that much work
I see you never did any plain text parsing in Java. Sure, Java has regex.
But you'd be amazed how compact plain text parsing code is in Perl.
OTOH, I like Java over Perl for it's stringer typing and for it's usable OO
environment (usable 'cause multiple inheritance is missing and 'cause I
dislike misusing interfaces for this.)
In related news it is stated that according to the United Retailers
Interchange New Estimates (URINE), shop keepers already adopted these
types of cunning deductions years ago. One shop keeper in Farton declares:
"For instance, when a customer drops in for a bar of soap I can easily
deduct that he is likely to be filthy, male, between 20 and 75 and that
he really needs a new toupet. Of course, the fact that I know Mr. Johnson
and his cheap slut wife from the swingers club me and my Doberman frequent
helps a great deal. But you shouldn't underestimate the Sherlock in me."
How far do you think MS is in making.NET the ultimate environment to have applications truly run platform independent?
I bet they even haven't started thinking about it.
IME, Quality = Knowledgeable_Staff_On_Good_Salary + No_Deadlines.
That's the typical attitude of a techie: Let me work and you get
a result eventually. That's OK if you're in a creative process and milestones
are absent.
Science is (or should be) such a field where creativity is highly appreciated
and very valuable. In business typically you want to know exactly what you
will be delivering, how much it will cost, how much you can charge and when
the payments will arrive. If you take a business approach towards software
development you appreciate QA as a means to make accurate forecasts of
products you will deliver.
My definition of quality is the measure of how much an object/subject/process
corresponds to a set of defined rules. Is a project administered according
to specific standards? Are the designers/programmers trained to do their
jobs? etc...
Quality assurance is making sure the quality you desire is maintained. A feed
back loop in your quality object/subject/process makes this happen. Periodic
audit rounds provide you with status information and allow you to correct
quality where necessary.
Having said that,...
I have been a QA auditor and I think QA processes are very important in any
organization. However, I find QA audits a horribly boring activity. I feel
like I'm parenting adult people all the time. I don't mind being audited.
There's also something as a 'personal quality'. In essence, this is a very
meaningless term to say "I'm a pro, I will listen to your needs, work to
solve your problems and provide you regularly with feedback." Not very
exact, conceptually wrong but nevertheless highly effective.
I am a technical specialist and I earn my money by showing my 'personal
quality'. If any form of formal quality assurance is required I can comply
as a matter of course. I believe to be in a very privileged position
exactly because of my 'personal quality' and because trust has set in
which means I'm allowed large amounts of freedom in planning and doing
my work.
My advice to the geek community is to learn about business administration
and to use that knowledge to show your professionally to managers by which
you will achieve your own goals more easily.
Boy this sounds risky. Especially if your business depends on the system.
We do not have the root password.
Ever tried booting with a rescue CD, mounting the root partition and changing the password? Just the first thing I would do I guess. No, I'd make a backup of the disk first.
Enough business knowledge and a network. That's what managers with loads
of technical knowledge need to successfully run a technically-oriented
company. There are very few of these around.
If a sugar water salesman gets the right technical advisers he is more
likely to succeed than a techie with a good PR adviser.
In case you wonder, I'm a techie (what a surprise on/.)
I recently ran a realistic stress test using standard business software on
Xeon (dual cores) CPUs. The processes are very CPU intensive and require
minimal I/O. I got both cores to 100% usage and I had no iowaits whatsoever.
The result was that I could run two times the processes I could on a single
CPU system. This is of no use for Joe Average but in a business situation the
double CPU bandwidth makes sense.
I recall tracks of data being broadcasted on an nl. electronics radio
program back in the late 70-ies. I know taped stuff for my self built
2650 microprocessor system.
Kahn and Cerf deserve credit they are getting but not based on
the mere fact that the whole world uses TCP/IP. I mean to say that
if you'd reason merely by size then good ole Bill would be a candidate
for the Turing award. The reasons why IP has become the default network
protocol should be stated more clearly.
IMHO the genius of Kahn and Cerf lies in the fact that they "thought
deeply of simple things" almost exactly like Thompson and Ritchie did
with Unix. For me, the transmission error handling and the routing
are simply beautiful.
If a packet is lost, IP and UDP simply don't care and neither should
the underlying layers do (forget about x.25 for a moment.) Try
explaining this apparently frivolous approach to an IBM SNA guy -or
even to most non networking CS people. Hell, IBM even built quality of
service stuff in their Tokenring stuff. Nice to have, if you can switch
it OFF. If a packet or frame is lost: too bad, TCP will take care of it,
anything else should stop whining about it.
The fact that part of the routing is done by IP on any node is also
marvelous. It made the protocol usable in small networks without
having to buy or explicitly set-up a router. You know, equipment used
to be horribly expensive. Ever studied SNA or OSI?
There would be loads of jobs for us techies in supporting the Internet if it were made up SNA, OSI or NetBIOS. But who'd want them?
Would Metcalf deserve the same honor as Kahn and Cerf but then for
inventing Ethernet? I'd say yes.
I know of a case
from the Netherlands where newspaper editors wanted to prohibit deep linking
to their sites. The judge did not honor the request.
IMHO you can link to whatever you want on the Internet. There are enough
ways to prevent your content being accessed by unauthorized people. The
content provider is the only one responsible for its authorization management.
"buddies' to know when other 'buddies' are playing games online, and easily join such games."
One usage they have not foreseen is that you could use the messaging service to
"avoid your 'buddies' like the plague." That enhancement would be
sufficiently significant to apply for a patent, to sue the bastards back and
to show the silliness of it all.
Note that the cost is $1 per CPU hour. This means that if your
application uses 1,000 CPUs, it will cost you $1,000 per hour.
What a bold way to express your lack of knowledge of CPU costs. $1 per CPU
hour is dead cheap (even for low end Solaris systems.) $1k for an hour of
1k CPUs is even cheaper. Do you know how much you have to invest to get
this amount of CPU bandwidth? And do you realize that the odds are you will
not load a 1k CPU system efficiently? Have you paid attention to your screen
saver reporting the average CPU load? I have spent time doing capacity
planning for a large institution and I have seen CPU prices for IBM
mainframe, Solaris and Linux on Intel/AMD so I know what I'm talking
about.
OTOH, the BBC article has no detail information and the
buck-an-hour quote must be taken with a grain-of-salt.
I also could not easily find useful details on Sun's site. But very likely,
$10 per CPU is still dead cheap for commercial organisations.
In 10 years even the politcians know this is a very bad form of
market regulation. Some politcians know already but "common
awareness" has to "grow" and hence nothing
happens. In the mean time I'll stik with my HP LaserJet 5 which
is not likely to break until the time down at 100 pages per year.
Slashdot Mirror
Even if the content isn't that great...
A bit off-topic but in car programs nothing beats TopGear. I've seen Fifth Gear and I don't like it.
The BBC is probably the only broadcaster I would pay money to (say EUR200 / year ) to watch their programs (note to USA readers: I deliberately didn't use the word shows.) Unfortunately they broadcast free-to-air which means I get the programs for free.
Using hard coded spaces consumes more bytes
In coding, the last thing you should worry about is the excess file size caused by coding style formatting issues.
For a long time I though TABs were better than spaces for the reasons you mentioned. They aren't. Very few experienced coders use TABs. Four spaces are fine. Read coding styles. Read code written by ancients cracks.
Also, use IDEs as much as you want but make your code readable for people with plain terminals (think 24x80 chars vt100.) It's not that hard to do in the first place and more people will like/contribute to your code.
The very clear symptoms are:
Knock knock.....
BANG BANG BANG!! Open the fscking door it's the USA forces!!!
Squeek.... Whaddayawant this is Europe for fsck's sake.
HE'S RESISTING ARREST BEAT HIM UP AND FSCK HIS RIGHTS. Yessir.
You have a beard.
I didn't shave yet.
SHUT UP FSCKER. You wear a dress.
I just got outa bed.
LIAR YOU'RE A COMMIE RELIGIOUS EXTREMIST.
There ain't such thing as a free iPod. Ever tried getting a free Disney ticket? It'll at least cost you a morning and expose you to trained time sharing salesmen.
a system that is disabled to run MS software....Sure not a problem...The new Xserve...
;)
Are you sure Windows NT 3.51 will NOT run on it?
compact code is hard to read and maintain
That's what failed programmers that become middle managers tell newbie programmers. As always, it depends. There are highly readable short expressions as well as boringly long novels which are unreadable. As a rule of thumb I try to fully understand the algorithm I want to program before actually programming it. By that I can minimize the amount of code and keep it readable at the same time.
For instance in C, if you implement linked lists "the stupid way" you probably wind up handling head, body and tail members separately in access functions. I've actually seen this. If you think just a bit harder you realize you can handle them all equally.
Dear Dell, Hewlett-Packard and IBM,
In my security policy, running MS software is an unacceptable risk. Could you make me a PC that will not run any MS software at all? Oh yes, I assume I will not need to pay MS tax for a system that is disabled to run MS software.
Yours faithfully,
Spagh
but Java really isn't that much work
I see you never did any plain text parsing in Java. Sure, Java has regex. But you'd be amazed how compact plain text parsing code is in Perl.
OTOH, I like Java over Perl for it's stringer typing and for it's usable OO environment (usable 'cause multiple inheritance is missing and 'cause I dislike misusing interfaces for this.)
In related news it is stated that according to the United Retailers Interchange New Estimates (URINE), shop keepers already adopted these types of cunning deductions years ago. One shop keeper in Farton declares: "For instance, when a customer drops in for a bar of soap I can easily deduct that he is likely to be filthy, male, between 20 and 75 and that he really needs a new toupet. Of course, the fact that I know Mr. Johnson and his cheap slut wife from the swingers club me and my Doberman frequent helps a great deal. But you shouldn't underestimate the Sherlock in me."
Cut to the chase: What type of mouse is he using?
Of course it is [thin wrappers to Win32 calls].
.NET the ultimate environment to have applications truly run platform independent?
I bet they even haven't started thinking about it.
Regardless of the quality of the Win32 APIs...
How far do you think MS is in making
IME, Quality = Knowledgeable_Staff_On_Good_Salary + No_Deadlines.
That's the typical attitude of a techie: Let me work and you get a result eventually. That's OK if you're in a creative process and milestones are absent.
Science is (or should be) such a field where creativity is highly appreciated and very valuable. In business typically you want to know exactly what you will be delivering, how much it will cost, how much you can charge and when the payments will arrive. If you take a business approach towards software development you appreciate QA as a means to make accurate forecasts of products you will deliver.
My definition of quality is the measure of how much an object/subject/process corresponds to a set of defined rules. Is a project administered according to specific standards? Are the designers/programmers trained to do their jobs? etc...
Quality assurance is making sure the quality you desire is maintained. A feed back loop in your quality object/subject/process makes this happen. Periodic audit rounds provide you with status information and allow you to correct quality where necessary.
Having said that,... I have been a QA auditor and I think QA processes are very important in any organization. However, I find QA audits a horribly boring activity. I feel like I'm parenting adult people all the time. I don't mind being audited.
There's also something as a 'personal quality'. In essence, this is a very meaningless term to say "I'm a pro, I will listen to your needs, work to solve your problems and provide you regularly with feedback." Not very exact, conceptually wrong but nevertheless highly effective.
I am a technical specialist and I earn my money by showing my 'personal quality'. If any form of formal quality assurance is required I can comply as a matter of course. I believe to be in a very privileged position exactly because of my 'personal quality' and because trust has set in which means I'm allowed large amounts of freedom in planning and doing my work.
My advice to the geek community is to learn about business administration and to use that knowledge to show your professionally to managers by which you will achieve your own goals more easily.
I know, I sound like an old fart.
Boy this sounds risky. Especially if your business depends on the system.
We do not have the root password.
Ever tried booting with a rescue CD, mounting the root partition and changing the password? Just the first thing I would do I guess. No, I'd make a backup of the disk first.
Enough business knowledge and a network. That's what managers with loads of technical knowledge need to successfully run a technically-oriented company. There are very few of these around.
/.)
If a sugar water salesman gets the right technical advisers he is more likely to succeed than a techie with a good PR adviser.
In case you wonder, I'm a techie (what a surprise on
But what's the processor utilization?
I recently ran a realistic stress test using standard business software on Xeon (dual cores) CPUs. The processes are very CPU intensive and require minimal I/O. I got both cores to 100% usage and I had no iowaits whatsoever. The result was that I could run two times the processes I could on a single CPU system. This is of no use for Joe Average but in a business situation the double CPU bandwidth makes sense.
I recall tracks of data being broadcasted on an nl. electronics radio program back in the late 70-ies. I know taped stuff for my self built 2650 microprocessor system.
And get a silent chair too if you don't want yer wife to chatch you red handed!
Kahn and Cerf deserve credit they are getting but not based on the mere fact that the whole world uses TCP/IP. I mean to say that if you'd reason merely by size then good ole Bill would be a candidate for the Turing award. The reasons why IP has become the default network protocol should be stated more clearly.
IMHO the genius of Kahn and Cerf lies in the fact that they "thought deeply of simple things" almost exactly like Thompson and Ritchie did with Unix. For me, the transmission error handling and the routing are simply beautiful.
If a packet is lost, IP and UDP simply don't care and neither should the underlying layers do (forget about x.25 for a moment.) Try explaining this apparently frivolous approach to an IBM SNA guy -or even to most non networking CS people. Hell, IBM even built quality of service stuff in their Tokenring stuff. Nice to have, if you can switch it OFF. If a packet or frame is lost: too bad, TCP will take care of it, anything else should stop whining about it.
The fact that part of the routing is done by IP on any node is also marvelous. It made the protocol usable in small networks without having to buy or explicitly set-up a router. You know, equipment used to be horribly expensive. Ever studied SNA or OSI?
There would be loads of jobs for us techies in supporting the Internet if it were made up SNA, OSI or NetBIOS. But who'd want them?
Would Metcalf deserve the same honor as Kahn and Cerf but then for inventing Ethernet? I'd say yes.
I know of a case from the Netherlands where newspaper editors wanted to prohibit deep linking to their sites. The judge did not honor the request.
IMHO you can link to whatever you want on the Internet. There are enough ways to prevent your content being accessed by unauthorized people. The content provider is the only one responsible for its authorization management.
"buddies' to know when other 'buddies' are playing games online, and easily join such games."
One usage they have not foreseen is that you could use the messaging service to "avoid your 'buddies' like the plague." That enhancement would be sufficiently significant to apply for a patent, to sue the bastards back and to show the silliness of it all.
Note that the cost is $1 per CPU hour. This means that if your application uses 1,000 CPUs, it will cost you $1,000 per hour.
What a bold way to express your lack of knowledge of CPU costs. $1 per CPU hour is dead cheap (even for low end Solaris systems.) $1k for an hour of 1k CPUs is even cheaper. Do you know how much you have to invest to get this amount of CPU bandwidth? And do you realize that the odds are you will not load a 1k CPU system efficiently? Have you paid attention to your screen saver reporting the average CPU load? I have spent time doing capacity planning for a large institution and I have seen CPU prices for IBM mainframe, Solaris and Linux on Intel/AMD so I know what I'm talking about.
OTOH, the BBC article has no detail information and the buck-an-hour quote must be taken with a grain-of-salt . I also could not easily find useful details on Sun's site. But very likely, $10 per CPU is still dead cheap for commercial organisations.
What will be the sound of...goatse?
That's and easy one. It will sound hollow.
I would never use "virii"
That would indeed be silly as the plural form of virus remains virus.
"Fuck once... fuck anywhere"
Foreplay once...
In 10 years even the politcians know this is a very bad form of market regulation. Some politcians know already but "common awareness" has to "grow" and hence nothing happens. In the mean time I'll stik with my HP LaserJet 5 which is not likely to break until the time down at 100 pages per year.