In college journalism students are taught how to write badly.
Got any facts on your assumption? Doubt it.
You miss the whole point of reporting. They're not supposed to be experts. They're not supposed to put their own knowledge in the article at all. They're supposed to go out and find experts, and put their knowledge in the article. By your logic, a random guy who can write and knows some physics is more qualified to write than a person who can write well (and they can, despite what you seem to think), and gets their information from an expert in the field.
Not there are not problems with modern journalism...When everything is owned by a corporation, then they're priting stuff that they think will increase their sales, and not offend their subscribers. Not anywhere near as bad as TV, but still.
As a smart person working for a newpaper, I'd like to say, kiss my ass. You'd be hard pressed to find another industry that has more interesting data handling issues than a newspaper. We've got financial data, image data, text data (which is stored in a version tracking system similar to, but more extensive than, CVS), and massive archiving which is seperate from and connected to all of the above.
And all of this data has to be able to transition from pure digital to paper through a conversion and optimization process that requires raster processing and laser lithography like a goddamn microchip fabrication plant. You've got disaster recovery and stress like you wouldn't believe.
That being said, I have to agree with Rob. Interesting that he picked a KR paper. Knight Ridder has a terrible online presence...It's not done by individual papers either, it's all done on the corporate level. Check the websites: Charlotte, Philaphelphia, Biloxi, Macon...Notice anything? One size fits all.
The reason Knight Ridder is a bad example is because they don't take the web seriously in the least. They don't spend any money on it, and they don't let their individual papers do it themselves. Until they make more of an effort, they're not going to grow their web readership or their web presence. That's just common sense.
Alas, I can't put myself on that kind of level. And, in retrospect, if anyone put that code into one of my projects, I'd fire 'em too. Gratuitous recursion is too memory intensive and diffucult to read to be of much use. Sure it's pretty, but doing it with a simple loop is more efficient, even if oh so much uglier.
Wow, that's really interesting. Why does Google.uk have half as many results as Google.us? Either they are completely separate databases, or one updates the other on some schedule so the data stays linked. Iiiiiinteresting.
Offtopic, but who the hell would buy from Walmart.com? Doesn't seem like their business model would translate well to the internet. What's the point of buying cut-rate crap when all the savings get eaten up by the shipping fees?
Well, we have the primary news sites, then we have the secondary news sites, then we have news blogs (like this one), then every fricking blog and message board, then all the spam-blogs...I googled it just a second ago and got 2,060,000 hits. So if it can jump from 800k at the time of submission, to 2,060,000 hopefully not too much later, I think you may be underestimating how many people can talk abotu nothing, and how fast google can make that meaningless blather available to the world.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go google this post.
Nope. Actually, I'm the opposite. OSS allows serious code audits and customization that is very useful for the military, and I don't know why they would use anything else.
While I think the current war is a huge fiasco, I'm a big proponent of a strong military. The rule of thumb will always be: if you don't have it, someone else will.
Eh. All I know is the installer borked on installing FCIV to that box. It was supposedly the i386 build, but clearly that particular build wasn't 100% 386 compatible. Wasn't a major issue with me...All I really needed was IPTables, sshd, and a few other simple tools, and I could have compiled the support in, if I'd wanted to.
Force of habit. I'm used to networking crappy M$ machines to solid Unix servers using Samba...Though I use Samba on my home network which is Windows, OSX, Linux, just because it plays nice with all those systems.
I reccommend the Linux Terminal Server Project. You can hook up two dozen machines fit only for the trash to one competent machine and get a solid setup for little cash. Not much local disk access, but if you're just looking for an internet/email lab, it works great, and you can add in Samba to give each box a "harddrive", and printing capablity if that's needed.
As long as you've got harddrive space, most older distro's work fine on hardware down to 100mhz. I've got a number of 300mhz boxes running Red Hat 7.3, and they do fine as firewalls and low end FTP servers. Got an old BSD box running named that I don't even know the stats on, and I'm afraid to reboot it, for fear it'll never come back up.
Fedora Core IV was the first distro that wouldn't run on my old PIII 700, so it got refurbed and passed off as a firewall to a friend of mine running FCII with no gui. I could have recompiled the kernel to support the old coppermine architecture, but it was worth the 120.00 dollars to me to upgrade to a much faster AMD processor.
I'm all in favor of keeping the older boxes running and useful, but after a point you have to consider diminishing returns. Recompiling a kernel (and then recompiling it again to put in the junk I forgot the first time) on my home network would have taken more of my life than I was willing to spend on a hopelessly obsolecent box.
No, but they still work within boundary contructs, which is the point of a logical operator. While loops don't randomly disregard the truth value of their repeat condition, nor do For loops. But goto statements do, which breaks the big rule of logical operators...the truth value of the premise must be preserved.
My favorite ever comment was, "If I ever saw this in the real world, I'd fire you" attached to an "A" test paper with a programming question on it I'd managed to reduce to one line of nearly incomprehensible recursion.
That's not really a goto...it's just a conditional. If--->then--->else
A goto is like a derailed thought process. It would be like having a disjoint right in the middle of a sentence telling you to go farther along and do some unrelated thing for a minute, then jerking you back to what you were doing in the first place with another goto statement.
See, if I'd bothered to read the article, I would have skipped the comment. I skimmed the summary with about 2% comprehension, and punched one of my own buttons regarding hand testing code. Nothing makes me crazier than having to work the math on a simple change that anyone with six months experience would see as an obvious improvement in a project that would take less time to compile than it would take to get a fresh cup of coffee.
Think about it. There is no valid logical operator that says, "Okay, skip everything in between and go to the end." There is no valid logical constuct that allows you to ignore conditions, or to skip steps without simplifying. It's no wonder its so damn hard to maintain Goto code...Our brains don't work that way!
Sure it's quick. How could it not be? There isn't anything to it...you don't have to check anything or clear anything, you just jump ahead.
Goto isn't considered bad programming because it slows things down. It's considered bad programming because it leads to spagetti code.
And people who "meticulously hand optomize" their code annoy the crap out of me. Run it, tweak it, run it again. Was the second run faster? Then tweak some more.
Well, the port idea is pretty lame. It would take a ton of work, and not really provide any benefit.
Ideas like the.xxx tld are much more workable, and much easier to implement. In the end, its going to come down to the producers of porn complying with whatever measures are agreed upon by whatever countries. It would be much much MUCH easier to stick them in a specific block of IP adresses, or limit them to certain TLDs or some rational solution like that, than it would be to try and sort out content coming in a thousand different formats, through one port. That way seems seriously error prone.
Not to be all practical and stuff, but the reason we can't push all porn to a single port is that all porn is not protocol homogenous. You can get porn through http, ftp, half a dozen streaming formats, all the filesharing protocols. You could tunnel it through ssl, or ssh. All those protocols have their own ports, and their own listeners. So whatever is listening on 69 would have to be able to understand all those things.
Technically speaking, it'd be much easier just to try and get all the pron people to put some kind of broadcast flag on their own stuff, and then just filter by that. Not that that would work either, but at least it COULD work.
The whole thing is stupid on the face of it. I'd love to use BT at work, but I can't because we block every port except 21,22,25,80, and 443. There are a few exceptions, but they're all NAT'ed to specific internal IPs, and there is a mountain of paperwork on top of each one.
I'm sure most business networks are the same. So it comes down to port 80, but there are a million ways to filter port 80. People have been making products to do that for years and years.
I always thought the XBox linux cluster was a better way of sticking it to MS. If the hardware is cheaper than you can actually buy it, then buy it, warp it to your own ends, and laugh all the way to the bank.
I myself am not a zen buddhist. I am a long time game player seething with repressed rage, etc.
The thing that bothers me about JT is the same thing that bothers me about a lot of extremist pundits...Their perfect willingness to mislead, exaggerate, and outright lie when confronted with a rational, factual argument.
You see this all the time in tv news...They know that the talking head has no interest in their veracity, so they just make up some horrific sounding statistic or factoid, then strawman their opponent to death with it.
In terms of agressive debate, it's nearly flawless. They retake the initiative, while their opponent is stunned, and the same stunned-ness makes it appear as if a telling blow has been struck. I've seen this tactic used with the "Abortion causes cancer" factiod, saw Thompson himself swear that you could get graphic child nudity from The Sims, and that all gun violence was directly related to video games---even so far as to say that kids were fine with bringing guns to school before video games.
That's why I hate him...Because he is a lying, loudmouthed, fecal pudding, with the moral intellectual integrity of a serial poodle rapist.
Re:Who would you rather have on your team
on
Ask The Mythbusters
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· Score: 1
Soldering with a coin and a battery to repair a pump to fill a trench to divert, army ants?
Don't ask me what corner of my brain that factiod was lying around in. Haven't watched that show in years.
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In college journalism students are taught how to write badly.
Got any facts on your assumption? Doubt it.
You miss the whole point of reporting. They're not supposed to be experts. They're not supposed to put their own knowledge in the article at all. They're supposed to go out and find experts, and put their knowledge in the article. By your logic, a random guy who can write and knows some physics is more qualified to write than a person who can write well (and they can, despite what you seem to think), and gets their information from an expert in the field.
Not there are not problems with modern journalism...When everything is owned by a corporation, then they're priting stuff that they think will increase their sales, and not offend their subscribers. Not anywhere near as bad as TV, but still.
As a smart person working for a newpaper, I'd like to say, kiss my ass. You'd be hard pressed to find another industry that has more interesting data handling issues than a newspaper. We've got financial data, image data, text data (which is stored in a version tracking system similar to, but more extensive than, CVS), and massive archiving which is seperate from and connected to all of the above.
And all of this data has to be able to transition from pure digital to paper through a conversion and optimization process that requires raster processing and laser lithography like a goddamn microchip fabrication plant. You've got disaster recovery and stress like you wouldn't believe.
That being said, I have to agree with Rob. Interesting that he picked a KR paper. Knight Ridder has a terrible online presence...It's not done by individual papers either, it's all done on the corporate level. Check the websites: Charlotte, Philaphelphia, Biloxi, Macon...Notice anything? One size fits all.
The reason Knight Ridder is a bad example is because they don't take the web seriously in the least. They don't spend any money on it, and they don't let their individual papers do it themselves. Until they make more of an effort, they're not going to grow their web readership or their web presence. That's just common sense.
Alas, I can't put myself on that kind of level. And, in retrospect, if anyone put that code into one of my projects, I'd fire 'em too. Gratuitous recursion is too memory intensive and diffucult to read to be of much use. Sure it's pretty, but doing it with a simple loop is more efficient, even if oh so much uglier.
Wow, that's really interesting. Why does Google.uk have half as many results as Google.us? Either they are completely separate databases, or one updates the other on some schedule so the data stays linked. Iiiiiinteresting.
Offtopic, but who the hell would buy from Walmart.com? Doesn't seem like their business model would translate well to the internet. What's the point of buying cut-rate crap when all the savings get eaten up by the shipping fees?
Well, we have the primary news sites, then we have the secondary news sites, then we have news blogs (like this one), then every fricking blog and message board, then all the spam-blogs...I googled it just a second ago and got 2,060,000 hits. So if it can jump from 800k at the time of submission, to 2,060,000 hopefully not too much later, I think you may be underestimating how many people can talk abotu nothing, and how fast google can make that meaningless blather available to the world.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go google this post.
Nope. Actually, I'm the opposite. OSS allows serious code audits and customization that is very useful for the military, and I don't know why they would use anything else.
While I think the current war is a huge fiasco, I'm a big proponent of a strong military. The rule of thumb will always be: if you don't have it, someone else will.
Eh. All I know is the installer borked on installing FCIV to that box. It was supposedly the i386 build, but clearly that particular build wasn't 100% 386 compatible. Wasn't a major issue with me...All I really needed was IPTables, sshd, and a few other simple tools, and I could have compiled the support in, if I'd wanted to.
Force of habit. I'm used to networking crappy M$ machines to solid Unix servers using Samba...Though I use Samba on my home network which is Windows, OSX, Linux, just because it plays nice with all those systems.
I reccommend the Linux Terminal Server Project. You can hook up two dozen machines fit only for the trash to one competent machine and get a solid setup for little cash. Not much local disk access, but if you're just looking for an internet/email lab, it works great, and you can add in Samba to give each box a "harddrive", and printing capablity if that's needed.
As long as you've got harddrive space, most older distro's work fine on hardware down to 100mhz. I've got a number of 300mhz boxes running Red Hat 7.3, and they do fine as firewalls and low end FTP servers. Got an old BSD box running named that I don't even know the stats on, and I'm afraid to reboot it, for fear it'll never come back up.
Fedora Core IV was the first distro that wouldn't run on my old PIII 700, so it got refurbed and passed off as a firewall to a friend of mine running FCII with no gui. I could have recompiled the kernel to support the old coppermine architecture, but it was worth the 120.00 dollars to me to upgrade to a much faster AMD processor.
I'm all in favor of keeping the older boxes running and useful, but after a point you have to consider diminishing returns. Recompiling a kernel (and then recompiling it again to put in the junk I forgot the first time) on my home network would have taken more of my life than I was willing to spend on a hopelessly obsolecent box.
No, but they still work within boundary contructs, which is the point of a logical operator. While loops don't randomly disregard the truth value of their repeat condition, nor do For loops. But goto statements do, which breaks the big rule of logical operators...the truth value of the premise must be preserved.
My favorite ever comment was, "If I ever saw this in the real world, I'd fire you" attached to an "A" test paper with a programming question on it I'd managed to reduce to one line of nearly incomprehensible recursion.
That's not really a goto...it's just a conditional. If--->then--->else
A goto is like a derailed thought process. It would be like having a disjoint right in the middle of a sentence telling you to go farther along and do some unrelated thing for a minute, then jerking you back to what you were doing in the first place with another goto statement.
Eh. If that was true, then you could use "if(true)" everywhere you use goto, and there would be no difference.
I disagree with the brain statement as well. There are very few neural functions that have no boundary conditions.
See, if I'd bothered to read the article, I would have skipped the comment. I skimmed the summary with about 2% comprehension, and punched one of my own buttons regarding hand testing code. Nothing makes me crazier than having to work the math on a simple change that anyone with six months experience would see as an obvious improvement in a project that would take less time to compile than it would take to get a fresh cup of coffee.
You're right! Jesus.
*Pours more coffee*
Mods on crack. I tell ya. Can't believe that made it to 5.
The thing is, "Goto" isn't logical.
Think about it. There is no valid logical operator that says, "Okay, skip everything in between and go to the end." There is no valid logical constuct that allows you to ignore conditions, or to skip steps without simplifying. It's no wonder its so damn hard to maintain Goto code...Our brains don't work that way!
Sure it's quick. How could it not be? There isn't anything to it...you don't have to check anything or clear anything, you just jump ahead.
Whatever.
Goto isn't considered bad programming because it slows things down. It's considered bad programming because it leads to spagetti code.
And people who "meticulously hand optomize" their code annoy the crap out of me. Run it, tweak it, run it again. Was the second run faster? Then tweak some more.
Well, the port idea is pretty lame. It would take a ton of work, and not really provide any benefit.
.xxx tld are much more workable, and much easier to implement. In the end, its going to come down to the producers of porn complying with whatever measures are agreed upon by whatever countries. It would be much much MUCH easier to stick them in a specific block of IP adresses, or limit them to certain TLDs or some rational solution like that, than it would be to try and sort out content coming in a thousand different formats, through one port. That way seems seriously error prone.
Ideas like the
Not to be all practical and stuff, but the reason we can't push all porn to a single port is that all porn is not protocol homogenous. You can get porn through http, ftp, half a dozen streaming formats, all the filesharing protocols. You could tunnel it through ssl, or ssh. All those protocols have their own ports, and their own listeners. So whatever is listening on 69 would have to be able to understand all those things.
Technically speaking, it'd be much easier just to try and get all the pron people to put some kind of broadcast flag on their own stuff, and then just filter by that. Not that that would work either, but at least it COULD work.
The whole thing is stupid on the face of it. I'd love to use BT at work, but I can't because we block every port except 21,22,25,80, and 443. There are a few exceptions, but they're all NAT'ed to specific internal IPs, and there is a mountain of paperwork on top of each one.
I'm sure most business networks are the same. So it comes down to port 80, but there are a million ways to filter port 80. People have been making products to do that for years and years.
So whats the problem?
I always thought the XBox linux cluster was a better way of sticking it to MS. If the hardware is cheaper than you can actually buy it, then buy it, warp it to your own ends, and laugh all the way to the bank.
I myself am not a zen buddhist. I am a long time game player seething with repressed rage, etc.
The thing that bothers me about JT is the same thing that bothers me about a lot of extremist pundits...Their perfect willingness to mislead, exaggerate, and outright lie when confronted with a rational, factual argument.
You see this all the time in tv news...They know that the talking head has no interest in their veracity, so they just make up some horrific sounding statistic or factoid, then strawman their opponent to death with it.
In terms of agressive debate, it's nearly flawless. They retake the initiative, while their opponent is stunned, and the same stunned-ness makes it appear as if a telling blow has been struck. I've seen this tactic used with the "Abortion causes cancer" factiod, saw Thompson himself swear that you could get graphic child nudity from The Sims, and that all gun violence was directly related to video games---even so far as to say that kids were fine with bringing guns to school before video games.
That's why I hate him...Because he is a lying, loudmouthed, fecal pudding, with the moral intellectual integrity of a serial poodle rapist.
Soldering with a coin and a battery to repair a pump to fill a trench to divert, army ants?
Don't ask me what corner of my brain that factiod was lying around in. Haven't watched that show in years.