Stuff gets old as time goes by and tends to be replaced.
This is just a testament to the way those VB developers have been educated - they have been handed a series of recipes for developing applications without any theory or background information, and now their recipes are outdated. They're trying to swim in the wake of a new language (or, in the case of VB.NET, a new interface and toolset for the same syntactical language), and all they can think of doing is scream for help and flail around wildly hoping someone else will fix the situation.
Languages evolve. Life goes on. It's the nature of the industry.
In college, we used to make a game of calling people in class to see if they remembered to turn their ringers off.
Oh man, that brings back some great memories. In our smaller 400 level classes we would only have 10 people in the class, and in the middle of class if were bored we'd find out if anyone left their ringers on. One guy never turned his off and was often the first target for everyone. He wouldn't turn it off until the 3rd or 4th call either, so we'd all take turns. I should call him now and see if he's got his phone on during one of his grad classes.
No see the correct analogy would be if the government were to pay you to not make your own movies that would compete with the MPAA. Get paid not to make movies. Sounds like a good deal to me.
And just like sports broadcasters, the people who get good ratings are the ones that stay in the business. I don't understand why this article is news, it's just stating the obvious: people who are bad at reviewing games will write bad reviews. As they enter the foray of writing reviews, those people are eventually weeded out naturally by the number of people who do or don't read/watch their material. It's all about ratings, whether it's the Nielsens for primetime football pregame or the traffic to some kid's blog. If you're getting paid for it, you get fired if you lose your audience. If you're doing it for fun, the lack of an audience will dismount anyone from their soap box.
Salaried employees don't get overtime. It's rare (from all the surveys I've seen) for IT staff to be hourly workers -- for this very reason. As an "IT guy" and knowing many more in IT, it's rare for anyone to care that they're working more than 40hr/wk. (spouses, on the other hand, complain a lot.)
I can be added to your list of people who get overtime. Yearly I get paid a little less than average salary for my experience level around here, but since I work 50+ hours a week they stay very competitive. I work at a printing company, and I am one of two people that manage the IT operations of the company as well as do typesetting and health care printing. The other guy is IT by education, and I'm a programmer by education, and between the two of us we can handle pretty much everything they throw at us. Well, except that we're slowly getting behind in our work despite the 10+ hours overtime we put in every week. God help us if this trend continues and we need to find a third person with the credentials to do everything we need.
Back on topic, being on the ground floor of a rapidly expanding company, we have the good fortune of basically have an unlimited IT budget. For example, about 2 months ago (before I was hired) they bought a brand new XServe and RAID array just to be a domain controller and do some file and print sharing. To go off on a tangent, they contracted its setup to some momo who broke it horribly (set/etc/hostname to the company's web address and until I found it completely borked my attempts to set up Samba) and actually left the first time saying he had to "go home and research" how to do what he was hired to do. When he called back a month later saying he found (read: subcontracted) someone with the knowledge, I told them not to bring him back and that I could do it in less time and certainly less money (inevitebly on overtime) since I know exactly what we need.
We can pay $1500 for a color laser jet printer and after we got it all hooked up (just a few days ago) all our boss says is "wow that looks great hey don't show anyone this they'll want to come in here and start using it". As far as management and finances goes, it's really the most absurd (and the laxest) place I've ever worked.
(Side note: 'Laxest' is a strange word. I would have assumed 'more lax' if I hadn't just looked it up)
It's easy to create a program that pounds through the first few stages of a brute force algorithm to see which passwords might be susceptible; however, it's difficult to create a program that will rate the human guessability of a user's password, such as incorporating information like maiden names, birthdates, or anniversaries. Though difficult to brute force, guessable passwords like those are a security risk to the individual sitting down at a terminal and making guesses, especially if they have a calendar nearby with the date in question marked. I doubt end-users would ever make the connection, or care if they did, that they have their password in plain sight on their desk.
I didn't feel like waiting for a response from the grandparent and googled for it. I found this thread on cdfreaks. Apparently there is credence to this claim, and there's a poorly formatted correspondence 8 posts down that describes the issue in detail. This seems to be a worst-case it-might-happen scenario since I couldn't find any reference via google to someone actually having a CD go bad as a result of the solvent from sharpies or other permanent marker, but it might just be overlooked as the cause. I suppose a fair experiment would be to extract the ink from a few dozen sharpies and rest a burned CD data-side up in a shallow puddle of it (possibly apply heat, as the post in that link talks about heat being a catalyst) and see if anything makes its way through.
Your own music preferences and social life aside, not everyone is always next to their computer or listens to the latest teeny-bopper chart toppers. There's lots of good music to be found out there that isn't maintstream. The boss at my old job has an mp3 player that he has loaded up with classical music. That's the nice thing about them - you can put whatever you like in it.
My current job requires me to constantly run from my computer to the printers and back, which is about 30 meters away and down a flight of two dozen steps. The workout is good, I won't complain about that, but after a few weeks there I'm starting to consider buying an mp3 player to keep myself entertained during the relay runs to the printers and back. On my 40 minute commute I listen to the radio as well, but if I were to get the mp3 player I would definently wire the mp3 player into my car so I can listen to my music in there as well. You don't need headphones to listen to it in the car; there are plenty of cheap cassette adapters available, or you could use an FM transmitters if you don't have a cassette player. There's a few examples of purposes and uses for you.
usability.gov is a useful place to read up on how to maintain compatibility and accessability using up-to-date standards. Lots of interesting and informative design tips there, too, and it's surprising considering it's a.gov. Nice to see my federal taxes put to good use (or at least better than other purposes).
I wondered what kind of sad kid would get so excited about protecting the furniture.
I have a better one. When I was 4 my Grandmother asked me what I wanted for Christmas. I wasn't able to come up with an answer so she jokingly said "how about a pair of salt and pepper shaker?" I excitedly responded, "Yeah!" So as Christmas approached I was completely thrilled about the salt and pepper shakers my grandmother was going to get for me. Of course, as any good grandmother would, she got me a nice pair of ceramic shakers shaped like Santa and Mrs. Claus. Judging purely on my reaction, those who witnessed it say it was one of the best gifts I ever got. I still have them here in my desk drawer, in the original box, 20 years later.
I guess I don't understand the lego thing.
Mind you, I grew up with an arc welder around and
had lots of scrap to build stuff out of.
Tinkering with legos, well, seemed silly when I
could fabricate a perfectly useful table
fireplace log holder which can support 500lbs
without as much as a strain.:)
I
would definently agree with you; playing with
heat and metal is far more practical than plastic
blocks, but making stuff with legos offers
both a handicap and limitation that challenges
the builders to be creative. With stuff like this
it's not so much "look what I can do" but rather
"look what I can do with all these limitations
and obstacles". To reverse the roles, welding
together a bunch of metal interlocking blocks and
making a small castle out of them would be
equally cool, even though the legos would have
been an easier solution and ultimately achieved
the same design.
That is by far the best use of legos I've ever
seen. I wish I had enough gears in the bins I
have tucked away to do something elaboratively
creative with that. Though I bet once you get too
many in sequence the gears would require more
torque than the lego housings can resist.
roveros.c: 1: non-lvalue in assignment
make: *** [roveros] Error 1
I'm sorry, your rover is lost in space. Insert $1 billion and press any key to try again.
Fraternities are about social networking and getting drunk at wild parties, not coding and playing HL2
Though I was not a member, a CS major that graduated the year before me was the president of a frat, and most of his pledges were involved at one point or another in our daily Medal of Honor between-class routine in the lab. Of course this was a small college, and "pledges" numbered less than half a dozen, as did my graduating CS class.
I went through all of their administrative pages and couldn't find a thing. Nor have I received any email, as others have, pertaining to this development. I made sure the contact info for my domains were pointing at a human being and hopefully they'll address the issue soon.
However, CitiBank's site (used in the example) won't work without JavaScript. Bad CitiBank, no cookie for you!
I think the/.ing is punishment enough. If the web admins over there don't read/. I'd bet they are pulling their hairs out thinking they're getting hit with a DDoS or something.
I think the point of obfuscating is to not describe how it works (or doesn't work) in comments. Also the simple "else" that pinches out all third parties is some nice political satire, whether you meant it to be or not.
Thus a slower thrusting craft that obtains a higher delta-V over time is still likely to beat out a high-thrust craft that only burns for a few minutes.
Plus there's none of that pesky drifting off into deep space. That tends to make your flight a little depressing.
My college classmates and I had a term for this. We called them "flashy people". As you described them, they're the people who value looks over functionality. There's a small bit of play on words with Flash there, too, since flashy people (usually a part of management and/or graphics design) are the ones responsible for demanding the Flash animations for a corporate/product page that prevent a more straightforward display of content.
I learned something interesting last night. I typed in www/mapquest.com by accident. It sent me to Yahoo. After a few minutes of sheer confusion and a bit of research I realized that Yahoo was the I'm Feeling Lucky result for "www". That search has an interesting list of results, one of which was a link to mapquest as #10, which saved me from attempting to type it again. So the circle of life was completed, and it was a moment of tranquility and peace in the otherwise chaotic global infrastructure.
Let's see: 2004-500=1504. Da Vinci (Mona Lisa, 1504)Shakespeare, the Enlightenment, the Reformation (Martin Luther, 1517), Michaelangelo (starts the Cistine ceiling, 1508), the age of exploration (Columbus, 1492, et cetera).
500 just seemed like a nice round number. Incidental human genius aside, it's unlikely that any great minds such as these would be born out of the nuclear fallout. Besides, the macaques would eventually subdue them all, since 500 years is also a massive setback in our technological and social evolution.
This message comes to you from far into the future. We have recently discovered ancient texts that indicate a horrible timeline of events is about to transpire:
1. Canadian team launches X-Prize entry due southeast.
2. US sees incoming Canadian ballistics; President orders retalliation strikes. Canada's government is overthrown by the US in the name of the War on Terror and replaces it with a "better" democratic government.
3. Canadian militias revolt and succed in a coup, overthrowing the new government and militia leaders take over governmental responsibilities. Quebec, on the other hand, grasps opportunity in the chaos and officially secedes.
4. US locks down its northern borders. Canadian military immediately and successfully invades the poorly defended state of Alaska.
5. Russia seizes opportunity to get foothold on the North American continent and invades Alaska; Canadian forces resist, and Russia deploys its nuclear arsenal.
6. US sees ICBMs launched by Russia toward the North American continent; fearing they have allied with Canada, US retaliates, firing its arsenal at Russia as well as all other Russian-allied or communist nuclear powers.
7. Global nuclear war sends civilization back 500 years of development. The upright macaque manages to survive and begins propogation.
8. The international space station is caught in a space-time fissure created by nuclear resonance and the astronauts are sent into the future.
9. Planet of the Apes
What do we learn from all of this? You must make every possible effort to stop this launch!
This message will self destruct in 7.5 seconds. Have a nice day.
Slashdot Mirror
Stuff gets old as time goes by and tends to be replaced. This is just a testament to the way those VB developers have been educated - they have been handed a series of recipes for developing applications without any theory or background information, and now their recipes are outdated. They're trying to swim in the wake of a new language (or, in the case of VB.NET, a new interface and toolset for the same syntactical language), and all they can think of doing is scream for help and flail around wildly hoping someone else will fix the situation. Languages evolve. Life goes on. It's the nature of the industry.
In college, we used to make a game of calling people in class to see if they remembered to turn their ringers off.
Oh man, that brings back some great memories. In our smaller 400 level classes we would only have 10 people in the class, and in the middle of class if were bored we'd find out if anyone left their ringers on. One guy never turned his off and was often the first target for everyone. He wouldn't turn it off until the 3rd or 4th call either, so we'd all take turns. I should call him now and see if he's got his phone on during one of his grad classes.
many games seems terribly "looking through a small box"
That's because you are. Add a second and third monitor and then you'll be able to start pretending otherwise.
Through a bizarre experiement inspired by shock therapy, they implement the "/girlfriend" command to load up goatse.cx in the browser.
No see the correct analogy would be if the government were to pay you to not make your own movies that would compete with the MPAA. Get paid not to make movies. Sounds like a good deal to me.
And just like sports broadcasters, the people who get good ratings are the ones that stay in the business. I don't understand why this article is news, it's just stating the obvious: people who are bad at reviewing games will write bad reviews. As they enter the foray of writing reviews, those people are eventually weeded out naturally by the number of people who do or don't read/watch their material. It's all about ratings, whether it's the Nielsens for primetime football pregame or the traffic to some kid's blog. If you're getting paid for it, you get fired if you lose your audience. If you're doing it for fun, the lack of an audience will dismount anyone from their soap box.
Salaried employees don't get overtime. It's rare (from all the surveys I've seen) for IT staff to be hourly workers -- for this very reason. As an "IT guy" and knowing many more in IT, it's rare for anyone to care that they're working more than 40hr/wk. (spouses, on the other hand, complain a lot.)
/etc/hostname to the company's web address and until I found it completely borked my attempts to set up Samba) and actually left the first time saying he had to "go home and research" how to do what he was hired to do. When he called back a month later saying he found (read: subcontracted) someone with the knowledge, I told them not to bring him back and that I could do it in less time and certainly less money (inevitebly on overtime) since I know exactly what we need.
I can be added to your list of people who get overtime. Yearly I get paid a little less than average salary for my experience level around here, but since I work 50+ hours a week they stay very competitive. I work at a printing company, and I am one of two people that manage the IT operations of the company as well as do typesetting and health care printing. The other guy is IT by education, and I'm a programmer by education, and between the two of us we can handle pretty much everything they throw at us. Well, except that we're slowly getting behind in our work despite the 10+ hours overtime we put in every week. God help us if this trend continues and we need to find a third person with the credentials to do everything we need.
Back on topic, being on the ground floor of a rapidly expanding company, we have the good fortune of basically have an unlimited IT budget. For example, about 2 months ago (before I was hired) they bought a brand new XServe and RAID array just to be a domain controller and do some file and print sharing. To go off on a tangent, they contracted its setup to some momo who broke it horribly (set
We can pay $1500 for a color laser jet printer and after we got it all hooked up (just a few days ago) all our boss says is "wow that looks great hey don't show anyone this they'll want to come in here and start using it". As far as management and finances goes, it's really the most absurd (and the laxest) place I've ever worked.
(Side note: 'Laxest' is a strange word. I would have assumed 'more lax' if I hadn't just looked it up)
It's easy to create a program that pounds through the first few stages of a brute force algorithm to see which passwords might be susceptible; however, it's difficult to create a program that will rate the human guessability of a user's password, such as incorporating information like maiden names, birthdates, or anniversaries. Though difficult to brute force, guessable passwords like those are a security risk to the individual sitting down at a terminal and making guesses, especially if they have a calendar nearby with the date in question marked. I doubt end-users would ever make the connection, or care if they did, that they have their password in plain sight on their desk.
I didn't feel like waiting for a response from the grandparent and googled for it. I found this thread on cdfreaks. Apparently there is credence to this claim, and there's a poorly formatted correspondence 8 posts down that describes the issue in detail. This seems to be a worst-case it-might-happen scenario since I couldn't find any reference via google to someone actually having a CD go bad as a result of the solvent from sharpies or other permanent marker, but it might just be overlooked as the cause. I suppose a fair experiment would be to extract the ink from a few dozen sharpies and rest a burned CD data-side up in a shallow puddle of it (possibly apply heat, as the post in that link talks about heat being a catalyst) and see if anything makes its way through.
Your own music preferences and social life aside, not everyone is always next to their computer or listens to the latest teeny-bopper chart toppers. There's lots of good music to be found out there that isn't maintstream. The boss at my old job has an mp3 player that he has loaded up with classical music. That's the nice thing about them - you can put whatever you like in it.
My current job requires me to constantly run from my computer to the printers and back, which is about 30 meters away and down a flight of two dozen steps. The workout is good, I won't complain about that, but after a few weeks there I'm starting to consider buying an mp3 player to keep myself entertained during the relay runs to the printers and back. On my 40 minute commute I listen to the radio as well, but if I were to get the mp3 player I would definently wire the mp3 player into my car so I can listen to my music in there as well. You don't need headphones to listen to it in the car; there are plenty of cheap cassette adapters available, or you could use an FM transmitters if you don't have a cassette player. There's a few examples of purposes and uses for you.
I better stop now; my geekiness over this movie is starting to frighten me.
At least you picked a good movie to be geeky about instead of some engineered-for-a-blockbuster rehashed junk.
usability.gov is a useful place to read up on how to maintain compatibility and accessability using up-to-date standards. Lots of interesting and informative design tips there, too, and it's surprising considering it's a .gov. Nice to see my federal taxes put to good use (or at least better than other purposes).
I wondered what kind of sad kid would get so excited about protecting the furniture.
I have a better one. When I was 4 my Grandmother asked me what I wanted for Christmas. I wasn't able to come up with an answer so she jokingly said "how about a pair of salt and pepper shaker?" I excitedly responded, "Yeah!" So as Christmas approached I was completely thrilled about the salt and pepper shakers my grandmother was going to get for me. Of course, as any good grandmother would, she got me a nice pair of ceramic shakers shaped like Santa and Mrs. Claus. Judging purely on my reaction, those who witnessed it say it was one of the best gifts I ever got. I still have them here in my desk drawer, in the original box, 20 years later.
I guess I don't understand the lego thing. Mind you, I grew up with an arc welder around and had lots of scrap to build stuff out of. Tinkering with legos, well, seemed silly when I could fabricate a perfectly useful table fireplace log holder which can support 500lbs without as much as a strain. :)
I would definently agree with you; playing with heat and metal is far more practical than plastic blocks, but making stuff with legos offers both a handicap and limitation that challenges the builders to be creative. With stuff like this it's not so much "look what I can do" but rather "look what I can do with all these limitations and obstacles". To reverse the roles, welding together a bunch of metal interlocking blocks and making a small castle out of them would be equally cool, even though the legos would have been an easier solution and ultimately achieved the same design.
That is by far the best use of legos I've ever seen. I wish I had enough gears in the bins I have tucked away to do something elaboratively creative with that. Though I bet once you get too many in sequence the gears would require more torque than the lego housings can resist.
roveros.c: 1: non-lvalue in assignment
make: *** [roveros] Error 1 I'm sorry, your rover is lost in space. Insert $1 billion and press any key to try again.
Fraternities are about social networking and getting drunk at wild parties, not coding and playing HL2
Though I was not a member, a CS major that graduated the year before me was the president of a frat, and most of his pledges were involved at one point or another in our daily Medal of Honor between-class routine in the lab. Of course this was a small college, and "pledges" numbered less than half a dozen, as did my graduating CS class.
I went through all of their administrative pages and couldn't find a thing. Nor have I received any email, as others have, pertaining to this development. I made sure the contact info for my domains were pointing at a human being and hopefully they'll address the issue soon.
However, CitiBank's site (used in the example) won't work without JavaScript. Bad CitiBank, no cookie for you!
/.ing is punishment enough. If the web admins over there don't read /. I'd bet they are pulling their hairs out thinking they're getting hit with a DDoS or something.
I think the
I think the point of obfuscating is to not describe how it works (or doesn't work) in comments. Also the simple "else" that pinches out all third parties is some nice political satire, whether you meant it to be or not.
Thus a slower thrusting craft that obtains a higher delta-V over time is still likely to beat out a high-thrust craft that only burns for a few minutes.
Plus there's none of that pesky drifting off into deep space. That tends to make your flight a little depressing.
My college classmates and I had a term for this. We called them "flashy people". As you described them, they're the people who value looks over functionality. There's a small bit of play on words with Flash there, too, since flashy people (usually a part of management and/or graphics design) are the ones responsible for demanding the Flash animations for a corporate/product page that prevent a more straightforward display of content.
I learned something interesting last night. I typed in www/mapquest.com by accident. It sent me to Yahoo. After a few minutes of sheer confusion and a bit of research I realized that Yahoo was the I'm Feeling Lucky result for "www". That search has an interesting list of results, one of which was a link to mapquest as #10, which saved me from attempting to type it again. So the circle of life was completed, and it was a moment of tranquility and peace in the otherwise chaotic global infrastructure.
This message comes to you from far into the future. We have recently discovered ancient texts that indicate a horrible timeline of events is about to transpire:
1. Canadian team launches X-Prize entry due southeast.
2. US sees incoming Canadian ballistics; President orders retalliation strikes. Canada's government is overthrown by the US in the name of the War on Terror and replaces it with a "better" democratic government.
3. Canadian militias revolt and succed in a coup, overthrowing the new government and militia leaders take over governmental responsibilities. Quebec, on the other hand, grasps opportunity in the chaos and officially secedes.
4. US locks down its northern borders. Canadian military immediately and successfully invades the poorly defended state of Alaska.
5. Russia seizes opportunity to get foothold on the North American continent and invades Alaska; Canadian forces resist, and Russia deploys its nuclear arsenal.
6. US sees ICBMs launched by Russia toward the North American continent; fearing they have allied with Canada, US retaliates, firing its arsenal at Russia as well as all other Russian-allied or communist nuclear powers.
7. Global nuclear war sends civilization back 500 years of development. The upright macaque manages to survive and begins propogation.
8. The international space station is caught in a space-time fissure created by nuclear resonance and the astronauts are sent into the future.
9. Planet of the Apes
What do we learn from all of this? You must make every possible effort to stop this launch!
This message will self destruct in 7.5 seconds. Have a nice day.