What's the point of all these fancy new RAID arrays and such if we developers can't get increasingly sloppy with our coding practices?
Though I kid, I find that populating drop-down boxes for applications are pretty minor in the grand scheme of things. My performance issues tend to stem around doing cross-server database queries involving tables with millions of rows. That's when things get slow.
I'm sure there are some people who have to do this level of optimization - folks like Google and Amazon. The only place I've had to deal with this sort of thing is with things like our Intranet home page. In that case, all the drop-down boxes became JavaScript includes that were dynamically recreated every time the database changed. It went from an ASP-based page to completely static, taking considerable load off the server.
Of course the student would want to draw attention to this. One person's "overblown" is another person's "needed publicity."
I'm guessing that if this went to court, it would be thrown out as this site is fairly clearly a parody site. This allows considerable freedom in copying images, ideas, logos, and so on.
Much like the Gone with the Wind publisher battling The Wind Done Gone, it can be fairly counterproductive for large corporations to try and fight these parodies. They do nothing but draw unwanted attention to their rather nasty behavior.
To be honest, I got the idea from a science-fiction book. The advantage that those authors have is that they can dismiss all those practical issues as "engineering problems".
Your arguments are admittedly quite compelling.
I suppose we're back to "throw it into the sun" and other disposal methods that add considerably to the overall cost of nuclear power.
Well, genes do appear through mutation, so if you have a few million or billion years, you could probably get fish oil in corn. There's also "jumping genes" and viruses which can move genetic material from one species to another. Bacteria do it all the time. If I remember right, there was some tentative examples of this happening in a few cases with larger species (shark cancer resistance maybe?)
Selective breeding isn't simply shuffling genes around. Instead it's taking the "most desirable" of the current crop and propagating it. Historically there was little understanding as to where those traits came from. Creating corn, for example, was looking for the right mutation and exploiting it.
In recent years selective breeding has undergone a revolution. Now that people can look for specific genes, it's possible to better understand the genetic mechanics behind what was previously trial-and-error.
So yes, I agree there's a difference. I also agree that you have to be careful with new tools. Still, all the techniques involve changing the genetic makeup of populations. Some are more effective than others.
To be fair, nuclear power is a tricky beast. The main problem is the safe storage of the byproducts, which tend to be very nasty. The best I can see is dumping them into some subduction trench and let the earth itself recycle it (how's that for irony). All of these issues does add to the overall cost of things.
I think that much of the future relies on the "smaller and cheaper" approach. It's far cheaper to entertain yourself with a computer game than to buy a big boat and drive around a lake each weekend. Using LEDs for lighting is a huge energy saver. Creating power from solar, biomass, and wind seem quirky, but their cost is slowly approaching that of traditional methods.
My other hope is that everyone starts looking at the overall cost of energy sources. Coal has significant air pollution and carbon emission issues. Nuclear has disposal problems. Oil ends up getting us involved in expensive wars. Eventually, we have to pay the piper.
Hell, I've been eating genetically engineered food since I was a kid. Cows have been engineered to be docile and tasty. Corn is essentially grass with incredibly huge kernels. The main issue is that previous methods are slow and random. The new ones are much faster.
To be fair, it's possible to put in genes that would take forever to express themselves via selective breeding (e.g. getting corn to produce fish oil). Some of these could trigger allergies or other unintended effects. Still, I'd rather see the environmental groups embrace this technology and recommend some base-level guidelines (e.g. when doing cross-species gene splicing, some basic safety tests are required).
I'll have to agree that the true conclusion of this article is that BMI is often a poor way to establish someone's body fat percentage. I'm technically overweight, though that's primarily because I lift weights nearly every day. My height hasn't changed any since I started, but I went from 165 lbs to 190 lbs. The BMI index, coupled with an "overweight" rating system considers me the same as someone who's had one too many doughnuts.
Personally I'd like to see a move to a different measurement system. The catch is that other methods to determine body fat tend to be expensive or annoying.
As someone who makes games for fun.
on
For Love of The Game
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I've spent a fair amount of time over the last few years making modules for Neverwinter Nights (Shadowlords, Dreamcatcher, and Demon). I've gotten some fairly amazing e-mails from people who had some fairly emotional reactions to the game.
A woman who was severely ill from cancer thanked me for making her husband laugh. Those moments were few and far between for her family.
I had several people professing their love, not for me but for one of the NPCs.
There's a moment in the game where the player experiences a deep loss. A few people reported they were actually moved to tears.
I've decided that the best measure of success for a game is seeing how far I can emotionally draw players into the story. Emotions such as hate, joy, greed, and love are things core to the human experience. Even after all these centuries, the things that Shakespeare wrote can still move us.
I have to admit that I'm not immune to that sort of thing. I remember playing GTA and then driving around afterwards. Things like curbs and stoplights seemed so unnecessary.
To be honest, I find that customers have a hard time visualizing how something will work unless they can interact with it. I'll take some internal design notes for myself, then whip up something and reiterate.
This approach doesn't work well with some projects, but for the small web applications I make it works great.
In general, the article seemed a bit fluffy. For example, the robot versus people argument didn't mention that sending up a robot to do a specific task is often one or two orders of magnitude cheaper than people. Robotic capabilities keep getting better while plain old non-genetically modified humans remain the same.
I'm not sure that people must colonize space immediately. For me, it's like playing those old sim games. Do you spend limited research dollars on building 1960's style moon bases, or keep pressing on and shooting for nanotech before you move off the planet? If you can hold on long enough before colonization, you can move far more people and reach self-sufficiency much sooner.
I was a web developer back in the early days when our company was trying to figure out the whole "Intranet" thing. I was lucky enough to have the time to crank out what I thought might be some useful general tools such as a survey builder and form builder.
To this day, those basic tools have become central to our business and saved huge sums of money. Shucks, the paper costs associated with printing, distributing, and analyzing surveys were tens of thousands of dollars each year.
In general, I think that giving bright developers some time to themselves is a good way to foster creativity and minimize project burn-out.
I got the hunkering a few years ago to build my own wood computer.
I dubbed it "The Fossil Computer", based on the fish fossil I have as a badge. The buttons and CD cover are hand-made out of brass. The wood was made on a milling machine. It turned out amazingly beautiful.
On the down side, a solid wood case is quite heavy. It's also an excellent insulator so I had to be careful with airflow.
Hmm. You may be right that "dismissal" is the new euphemism for being jailed or killed. I'll have to be careful about how I use the term should I end up working with Chinese contractors.
On the other hand, if I tell them the last programmer was dismissed due to the poor quality of their work, it might increase their enthusiasm considerably.
There is absolutely no substitute for intelligent, capable people. Even the best process is worthless if the people doing the work don't have a clue.
Personally, I'm a fan of treating every project uniquely. The process you use for a five minute report is vastly different than a system upgrade or a new web application.
I think for me, it's about risk. The risk of my heart going into defib due to looking at Janet Jackson's nipples is pretty small. The risk of a nuclear accident causing death, cancer, and birth defects is somewhere above that.
I also tend to feel that just because something didn't happen yet doesn't mean it's not going to happen in the future.
Finally, I'm not anti-nuclear power by any means. France has done a great job keeping it clean and safe over the years. I also feel that the cost of coal and oil powerplants don't reflect their true cost in pollution, deaths from respiratory disease, and contribution to global climate change.
You're joking, right? I don't think our country can easily afford to have our own special Chernobyl.
Safety issues should be part of doing business for a nuclear powerplant. If a power station can't compete with other energy sources and maintain safety, perhaps they shouldn't be doing business at all.
There are many futures of gaming. Essentially anything that entertains and captures the attention of the masses will still be around. I suspect you'll see more variety in gaming as it becomes more mainstream, with niche downloadable games for people with various tastes.
I think our current lack of variety in the big games are due to publishers being risk-averse. Notice all the sequels out there. When you know a previous game sold well, you don't want to change things much. Look to mod developers and the few independant development houses to push the envelope.
Thank you - I stand corrected. It doesn't help that our Organizational Integrity group came up with the HIPAA Hippo as their mascot. Now I can't figure out how many P's either of the words have.
I work in healthcare and the HIPPA rules are just starting to come into effect. The vast majority of the rules are fairly common sense, though sometimes the legal and operational implications are complex.
For example, one of the tenants is that people have access to only what they need to do their job. While it sounds easy to manage, there's huge issues with tracking temps, contractors, and people shifting job responsibilities when tens of thousands of people have access to your systems.
Then there's the auditing piece, making sure that people are using their security appropriately. I'm in the process of building a database that pulls in the 2 million records each day of people looking at patient information. Another group of people audit the information, making sure that people aren't looking up coworkers, friends, or family inappropriately.
We're also drafting new policies that cover everything from sending patient information in e-mail (only if encrypted) to protecting physical access to computers, backups, PDA's and so on.
Basically, it's a lot of work but it's been effective getting people thinking more seriously about these issues.
Slashdot Mirror
What's the point of all these fancy new RAID arrays and such if we developers can't get increasingly sloppy with our coding practices?
Though I kid, I find that populating drop-down boxes for applications are pretty minor in the grand scheme of things. My performance issues tend to stem around doing cross-server database queries involving tables with millions of rows. That's when things get slow.
I'm sure there are some people who have to do this level of optimization - folks like Google and Amazon. The only place I've had to deal with this sort of thing is with things like our Intranet home page. In that case, all the drop-down boxes became JavaScript includes that were dynamically recreated every time the database changed. It went from an ASP-based page to completely static, taking considerable load off the server.
There's also this Register piece, which has a different take on things.
Interesting to me was this quote:
Microsoft said that its home division - which includes Xbox - turned a profit for the first time, as did MSN.
Well, it's not a particularly good parody perhaps. If I were doing it, I'd subtly change the images for amusement value.
My latest favorite parody is Boring Boring, a parody of Boing Boing.
How about we just give him a C+ for his school assignment and keep the lawyers out of it?
Of course the student would want to draw attention to this. One person's "overblown" is another person's "needed publicity."
I'm guessing that if this went to court, it would be thrown out as this site is fairly clearly a parody site. This allows considerable freedom in copying images, ideas, logos, and so on.
Much like the Gone with the Wind publisher battling The Wind Done Gone, it can be fairly counterproductive for large corporations to try and fight these parodies. They do nothing but draw unwanted attention to their rather nasty behavior.
I saw this on Fark a few days ago. The quality is good, if a bit choppy.
FYI - this is further evidence of the process by which the rover's solar panels are regularly cleaned (thus extending the mission's life).
To be honest, I got the idea from a science-fiction book. The advantage that those authors have is that they can dismiss all those practical issues as "engineering problems".
Your arguments are admittedly quite compelling.
I suppose we're back to "throw it into the sun" and other disposal methods that add considerably to the overall cost of nuclear power.
Well, genes do appear through mutation, so if you have a few million or billion years, you could probably get fish oil in corn. There's also "jumping genes" and viruses which can move genetic material from one species to another. Bacteria do it all the time. If I remember right, there was some tentative examples of this happening in a few cases with larger species (shark cancer resistance maybe?)
Selective breeding isn't simply shuffling genes around. Instead it's taking the "most desirable" of the current crop and propagating it. Historically there was little understanding as to where those traits came from. Creating corn, for example, was looking for the right mutation and exploiting it.
In recent years selective breeding has undergone a revolution. Now that people can look for specific genes, it's possible to better understand the genetic mechanics behind what was previously trial-and-error.
So yes, I agree there's a difference. I also agree that you have to be careful with new tools. Still, all the techniques involve changing the genetic makeup of populations. Some are more effective than others.
To be fair, nuclear power is a tricky beast. The main problem is the safe storage of the byproducts, which tend to be very nasty. The best I can see is dumping them into some subduction trench and let the earth itself recycle it (how's that for irony). All of these issues does add to the overall cost of things.
I think that much of the future relies on the "smaller and cheaper" approach. It's far cheaper to entertain yourself with a computer game than to buy a big boat and drive around a lake each weekend. Using LEDs for lighting is a huge energy saver. Creating power from solar, biomass, and wind seem quirky, but their cost is slowly approaching that of traditional methods.
My other hope is that everyone starts looking at the overall cost of energy sources. Coal has significant air pollution and carbon emission issues. Nuclear has disposal problems. Oil ends up getting us involved in expensive wars. Eventually, we have to pay the piper.
Hell, I've been eating genetically engineered food since I was a kid. Cows have been engineered to be docile and tasty. Corn is essentially grass with incredibly huge kernels. The main issue is that previous methods are slow and random. The new ones are much faster.
To be fair, it's possible to put in genes that would take forever to express themselves via selective breeding (e.g. getting corn to produce fish oil). Some of these could trigger allergies or other unintended effects. Still, I'd rather see the environmental groups embrace this technology and recommend some base-level guidelines (e.g. when doing cross-species gene splicing, some basic safety tests are required).
I'll have to agree that the true conclusion of this article is that BMI is often a poor way to establish someone's body fat percentage. I'm technically overweight, though that's primarily because I lift weights nearly every day. My height hasn't changed any since I started, but I went from 165 lbs to 190 lbs. The BMI index, coupled with an "overweight" rating system considers me the same as someone who's had one too many doughnuts.
Personally I'd like to see a move to a different measurement system. The catch is that other methods to determine body fat tend to be expensive or annoying.
- A woman who was severely ill from cancer thanked me for making her husband laugh. Those moments were few and far between for her family.
- I had several people professing their love, not for me but for one of the NPCs.
- There's a moment in the game where the player experiences a deep loss. A few people reported they were actually moved to tears.
I've decided that the best measure of success for a game is seeing how far I can emotionally draw players into the story. Emotions such as hate, joy, greed, and love are things core to the human experience. Even after all these centuries, the things that Shakespeare wrote can still move us.I have to admit that I'm not immune to that sort of thing. I remember playing GTA and then driving around afterwards. Things like curbs and stoplights seemed so unnecessary.
. . . is a prototype.
To be honest, I find that customers have a hard time visualizing how something will work unless they can interact with it. I'll take some internal design notes for myself, then whip up something and reiterate.
This approach doesn't work well with some projects, but for the small web applications I make it works great.
Just think about how much older you are than all the doctor's female assistants. You could almost put a "Barely Legal Teens!" caption to most of them.
In general, the article seemed a bit fluffy. For example, the robot versus people argument didn't mention that sending up a robot to do a specific task is often one or two orders of magnitude cheaper than people. Robotic capabilities keep getting better while plain old non-genetically modified humans remain the same.
I'm not sure that people must colonize space immediately. For me, it's like playing those old sim games. Do you spend limited research dollars on building 1960's style moon bases, or keep pressing on and shooting for nanotech before you move off the planet? If you can hold on long enough before colonization, you can move far more people and reach self-sufficiency much sooner.
Not to mention the military cost of oil, which seems to be quite high at the moment.
I was a web developer back in the early days when our company was trying to figure out the whole "Intranet" thing. I was lucky enough to have the time to crank out what I thought might be some useful general tools such as a survey builder and form builder.
To this day, those basic tools have become central to our business and saved huge sums of money. Shucks, the paper costs associated with printing, distributing, and analyzing surveys were tens of thousands of dollars each year.
In general, I think that giving bright developers some time to themselves is a good way to foster creativity and minimize project burn-out.
I got the hunkering a few years ago to build my own wood computer.
I dubbed it "The Fossil Computer", based on the fish fossil I have as a badge. The buttons and CD cover are hand-made out of brass. The wood was made on a milling machine. It turned out amazingly beautiful.
On the down side, a solid wood case is quite heavy. It's also an excellent insulator so I had to be careful with airflow.
Hmm. You may be right that "dismissal" is the new euphemism for being jailed or killed. I'll have to be careful about how I use the term should I end up working with Chinese contractors.
On the other hand, if I tell them the last programmer was dismissed due to the poor quality of their work, it might increase their enthusiasm considerably.
It seems these days that when I read about China censorship, it's merely a continuation of policies that have existed for years.
What's remarkable to me is that the admin group refused and was merely dismissed. A couple decades ago, I'd expect them to be jailed at the least.
There is absolutely no substitute for intelligent, capable people. Even the best process is worthless if the people doing the work don't have a clue.
Personally, I'm a fan of treating every project uniquely. The process you use for a five minute report is vastly different than a system upgrade or a new web application.
I think for me, it's about risk. The risk of my heart going into defib due to looking at Janet Jackson's nipples is pretty small. The risk of a nuclear accident causing death, cancer, and birth defects is somewhere above that.
I also tend to feel that just because something didn't happen yet doesn't mean it's not going to happen in the future.
Finally, I'm not anti-nuclear power by any means. France has done a great job keeping it clean and safe over the years. I also feel that the cost of coal and oil powerplants don't reflect their true cost in pollution, deaths from respiratory disease, and contribution to global climate change.
You're joking, right? I don't think our country can easily afford to have our own special Chernobyl.
Safety issues should be part of doing business for a nuclear powerplant. If a power station can't compete with other energy sources and maintain safety, perhaps they shouldn't be doing business at all.
There are many futures of gaming. Essentially anything that entertains and captures the attention of the masses will still be around. I suspect you'll see more variety in gaming as it becomes more mainstream, with niche downloadable games for people with various tastes.
I think our current lack of variety in the big games are due to publishers being risk-averse. Notice all the sequels out there. When you know a previous game sold well, you don't want to change things much. Look to mod developers and the few independant development houses to push the envelope.
Thank you - I stand corrected. It doesn't help that our Organizational Integrity group came up with the HIPAA Hippo as their mascot. Now I can't figure out how many P's either of the words have.
I work in healthcare and the HIPPA rules are just starting to come into effect. The vast majority of the rules are fairly common sense, though sometimes the legal and operational implications are complex.
For example, one of the tenants is that people have access to only what they need to do their job. While it sounds easy to manage, there's huge issues with tracking temps, contractors, and people shifting job responsibilities when tens of thousands of people have access to your systems.
Then there's the auditing piece, making sure that people are using their security appropriately. I'm in the process of building a database that pulls in the 2 million records each day of people looking at patient information. Another group of people audit the information, making sure that people aren't looking up coworkers, friends, or family inappropriately.
We're also drafting new policies that cover everything from sending patient information in e-mail (only if encrypted) to protecting physical access to computers, backups, PDA's and so on.
Basically, it's a lot of work but it's been effective getting people thinking more seriously about these issues.