Yes, I'm paid by the hour, but I also care about the quality of that hour. If the problem is interesting, I tend to research other solutions (to scope out the pitfalls and features I might not have thought of), then I'll often implement my own solution, because learning someone else's code tend to be pretty high on the tedium scale.
If the problem is NOT interesting, I have a lot more motivation to find someone else's code that I can use; if I find a quality solution, I can plug it in, spend hopefully minimal time debugging and testing it, and move on.
And there CAN be pride in using someone else's code, actually; I really get a kick out of using libraries and sending back elegant enhancements or bugfixes back to the authors ("Your library was excellent. I improved it.").
Also, if the code you found is really good stuff, it might help you to finish up a complex feature in record time, which also feels nice ("Oh, I almost forgot to mention it, but that new report we scoped out yesterday is out on the test server").
Now that I see the actual text, this doesn't surprise me that much.
Basically, they don't want you giving out LindowsOS to all of your friends for free. You can use it on any of your own computers (or computers of anyone else in your household), but no one else....then the wording was made *stronger* than it really needed to be. They do this to kind of make up for any loopholes they might have left in, like the guy who builds computers for a room full of computers he's lending to a local school, and installs his copy of Lindows on each one ("hey, they're still my computers!").
I'm guessing if enough people complain about this, they'll have to put more work into it and reduce the restrictions (but probably double the size of the text to close the loopholes...).
-- This stare intentionally left blank.
Math correction
on
Spam, Milord
·
· Score: 2, Informative
825M messages per $1M is 825 messages per dollar, or $0.0012 per message (not 1.21 cents).
This number *still* seems inflated for bandwidth alone, even considering multiple cycles per email (as the mail servers retry failed deliveries, deal with bounces, etc., which obviously are a far greater problem with spam than with normal email).
I would say that even though this number is likely inflated for bandwidth costs alone, to consider the total costs incurred by Earthlink you also have to consider space wasted by mail queues, processor and drive wear, performance hits to their customers (which hurts business), and the massive amount of staff time it took to continually shut down Carmack's accounts, and eventually track him down.
I wouldn't be surprised by a $1M cost... which makes me wonder if there was a misquotation or miscommunication (possibly intentional... I don't want to pretend Earthlink is a paragon of goodness) somewhere along the way from the engineer who made the estimate, through Earthlink management, to the newspapers.
There are other ways with which to solve this in distributed/clustered computing, such as voting: servers in the cluster vote for each other's sanity (i.e. determine if the messages sent by one computer make sense to at least two others). However, even not this system is rock solid (what if two computers happen to malfunction in the same manner simultaneously? what if the malfunction is contagious? or widespread in the cluster?).
We can learn some lessons from how human society works. If your messages don't make sense to most other people, or if you start damaging a lot of other people, you get separated from the rest and possibly "rebooted" (some call this "electroshock therapy") or even deactivated (some call this "Welcome to Texas").
The difference here is that if the computers in the cluster are all running the same programs, they will contain the exact same coding flaw that they will all concur is the only sane answer (in human terms, this is called "religion"). So we're protected from hardward malfunctions, but not bugs in software or hardware.
That's why this stuff is so hard to do. It may be possible to use selective program restarts to temporarily keep service up in spite of a nasty memory leak, but nothing is really "repaired"; it's just providing a few more fingers to plug holes in the dam while the river keeps rising. So... do you get into providing alternative services for the ones malfunctioning?
Interesting stuff (maybe I'll even read the article now).
These stories are known in the slashdot community as "dupes", and the practice (now becoming well-celebrated in the spammer community) is called "duping the nerds".
Stay tuned for more details in the next posted article, (and again next week,...and probably again a few days after that, if a new newspaper article is written about it).
I just watched the fourth movie clip they made available on the site -- there's a creature that's helping her who has a very warm rich voice... with a slight British accent. Listen to the "if you had the chance, would you leave Axis?" to hear it clearly.
It could be that they're working off the stereotype that the elite (evil or not) speak with British accents. Think also of what's called the "mid-Atlantic" accent (the accent spoken partway between the US and Britain...) taught so carefully to Julliard drama students -- you know how "Frasier Crane" talks? Yup, Kelsey Grammer is a Julliard grad. He's got it down pat.
He also spoke the role of the villainous but brilliant Sideshow Bob on the Simpsons....Whoah, I just looked up his bio to make sure he is, indeed American (confirmed; grew up in NJ and Florida), and it seems his father (a bar-owner) was murdered in '68. His sister was murdered in '75, and 2 half brothers died while scuba-diving in '80. Ouch.
I fully agree with your main point, but I want to comment on this:
it pisses me off when management tells me I need to use only certains idioms in case someone comes over my code and don't understand it. I hate to have to program like the next maintainer will be clueless and ignorant.
One of the dangers of throwing in more (and more) special language features to reduce extra code is that some of them aren't going to be nearly as powerful as others. Honestly, there are (alas) programmers out there who use obscure language features simply "because it's there", to remind themselves of their cleverness. Check it out! I saved one line of code and possibly one millisecond out of a 900 millisecond operation (what do you mean, I can't go lead the new project in the Bahamas because I'm "needed here"!?).
These latest updates seem to be mostly addressing very real needs of developers, and will give us enough value to make it worth increasing the complexity of the syntax... but these updates bear *very* close watching. We should avoid adding features that will only be used very rarely... because they will affect maintainability when they are used.
It would be interesting to build a tool that would analyse my Java code and pop out a list of "rules" that any reader of my code would need to know to understand what I'm doing -- e.g.: * the defaults of uninitialized instance variables * evaluation of i++ vs. ++i * path of execution of break when loops are unlabelled * path of execution with return inside try/finally * path of execution when throwing exception within catch block, with finally clause * differences b/w && and & as boolean "and" (not bit-shifting).
There are lots of niggling little rules that no one knows when they first start, and while they should learn them, if I can easily avoid depending on them, I should. As more language constructs are added into the language, we're increasing the entrance barrier. Maybe with a sufficient benefit, but we should be aware of the cost.
Yeah, troll, but I'll bite, because I have a nifty example of how careful Sun has been NOT to break backwards-compatibility.
It boggles the mind, but some fairly complex applets I wrote in 1996, using JDK 1.0.2 and the pre-1.1 event model still compile and run just fine in JSDK 1.4.
I'm assuming this will be the same in 1.5, but it's madness, I tell you. Madness!
The Java 1.0 event model was trickle-down -- no listeners. You had to subclass components and override methods to get events. It was horrible... but it's still fully supported (though not recommended, I'm sure).
Yes, when I ran the compilation, I got deprecation warnings out the wazoo... but it worked!
This is irrelevant. You'll get the compiler error either way.
(x = 5) doesn't evaluate to a boolean value any more than (5 = x) does. The compiler will choke on it because it needs a boolean for the "if" test.
You people are thinking of C/C++.... Very understandable error, but a good illustration of one of the small improvement Java made -- you're trying to fix a problem that isn't there.
Make sure you understand the diff between i++ and ++i, though -- they don't behave quite the same.
i++ and ++i both increment i, but they evaluate differently. int i = 1; int x = i++;
Here i is 2, and x is 1; putting the ++ after the i means "increment i after evaluating".
int i = 1; int x = ++i;
Here i is 2, and x is also 2; "increment i before evaluating".
For the next one, I want to point out that you are NOT helping anything by using 5==x instead of x==5.
If you screw up and type
if( x = 5 ) you WILL get a compiler error because Java is stricter than C/C++ and only accepts booleans for a boolean test (not "any non-zero integer", etc. etc.).
But I have a related case where putting the things you're comparing "backwards" makes code simpler, if you can handle the confusing ordering.
String CONSTANT = "hello"; String s = null;
if( s.equals(CONSTANT) ) return 1;
This will throw a NullPointerException because you're calling a method on s. If you used
if( CONSTANT.equals(s) ) return 1;...it wouldn't. And since what you really want to know is whether s equals the constant or not, this is simpler... but I'm torn about the readability thing. I usu tend to either comment stuff like this to make sure the reader understands the trick, or I just suck it up and write
if (s != null && s.equals(CONSTANT) ) return 1;
It's like that ternary thing
String s = (boolValue) ? value1 : value2;...it's convenient, but I can't use it because it sucks to read, and it's kind of obscure so plenty of programmers won't understand it.
Wait, what's this about side deals? Are you talking reality here or conspiracy theories? Obviously shady dealings happen in the corporate world all the time, but that doesn't mean we can assume w/o solid evidence.
From the article: Base spokesman Bob Pepper had no information on whether any higher speeds had been reached by land vehicles other than sleds, because the base doesn't do other types of land speed experiments.
If their goal were simply moving something as fast as possible along this ground, this would NOT be the case. I'll bet their assignment was to find the most controlled way possible to hit a target with a missle, so that the process can be studied and improved.
Or, maybe just just like sleds. "I'm also glad my wife and three kids were here today to see this great day -- ah, correction: just two kids... we got a little carried away with the tobaggan upgrades this past winter."
They aren't talking about requiring open source usage -- yes, that would be foolish.
The argument is about requiring that applicable OSS solutions are considered before the final decision is made. In many cases, the costs to convert everone over to OpenOffice from Office97 would cost more than it was worth... but they have to at least add up the numbers.
This would clearly NOT result in big changes immediately, partly just because a lot of govt employees just use the windows software that comes with their computers, but over time this would help to counteract the marketing engine of proprietary software.
The article does have a lot of good reasons why using closed-source software can be harmful to some parts of govt.
Personally, though, I'm still kind of jumpy because we're only seeing one side of the argument here. Where can we see other testimony? It's like watching a debate on TV and turning down the volume when the candidate you don't like speaks!
-- You should doubt everything (wait, should you?)
Ah, you're confusing their claims. They aren't pretending that they invented frames.
They're just claiming that the most obvious use of frames (putting links in a "navigation" frame and content in another) was their idea first.
Kind of like patenting chair-rocking right after the rocking chair entered the market, I think, and I would imagine this could be blown out of the water by simply proving that this was what Netscape had in mind when they were first implementing frames... but I'm certainly no patent lawyer.
I actually do have a buddy who had his SSN in barcode format tattooed on the back of his neck (as a comment on privacy erosion, etc.), about 10 years ago... I think we were still in high school.
I just went to his wedding last year. Forgot to ask the bride what she thought of it, though.
I know it's expanding quickly, but the main thing the FindBugs homepage is missing is a list of the errors that FindBugs identifies.
I got a few hints from the screenshots and changelist... but I need more!
* infrastructure for doing dataflow analysis * tracking of locks for inconsistent synchronization detector * a few general cleanup fixes in the screenshot
The first 2 especially sound interesting... but not quite enough for me to download a 0.5 version release and slog through the source code.
Eclipse (also free and currently my IDE of choice) has more and more of these kinds of features built-in with each release.
It's still mostly cleanup stuff, but it looks like they're moving towards having more of this stuff included by default. Currently you can set the error level (ignore, warning, error) when you do a build for unused imports/parameters/classes/methods/fields, circular dependancies, unreachable code, methods with constructor names, overridden methods that aren't package visible, hidden catch blocks, non-static access to static variables, using a char array in String concatenation, etc..
Checks on general threading practices and lock sequences would be cool... that seems to be a dangerous area for new Java programmers. Ever seen a servlet with doGet() and doPost() synchronized? No, it didn't scale very well.
...is that the bad coding that caused the Polar Landing accident resulted from poor communication among international collaborators.
If one software module passes metric values into another software module expecting values in English standard measurement, that's a software error, whatever the reasons for it, and no matter how well each module was tested independantly.
This really just highlights why writing "perfect" software is so difficult... there are so many ways something can go wrong, regardless of how intelligent and professional the creators of the software.
Debugging a complex program is NOT like debugging a complex mechanical thing like a car... imagine if you cleaned the floor mats in your car, and the next time you hit 80 mph your entire chassis vaporized.
This is most definitely NOT a question that comes up only in the visual arts. Questioning the borders of "music" and "non-music" is another horse that's been beaten well past death (Stockhausen is not the bleeding edge of modern music).
There's a well-known composition by John Cage, called 5:33 (five minutes and 33 seconds), composed entirely of rests. Conveniently, it can be performed on any instrument; the performer just sits down at the piano (for example), wipes off the keys, and sits there. At the end of 5:33, they get up and bow.
There's another composition where the audience is asked to bring along as many mechanical metronomes as possible. They're all set up on stage and started, and the piece is over when the last one finally winds down and stops.
There are some Pauline Oliveros works that I think are kind of neat, that involve audience participation. One example: there are no on-stage performers; instead, the audience is instructed to listen until they hear any pitch (a hum from the ventilation system, a chair squeak, whatever), then they should hum that pitch (which of course sets off a chain reaction). Then find a new pitch in the din, and hum that.
The list goes on...
Anyway, I think I'd also disagree that art must have no utility. For one thing, art has an effect on you (i.e., it might make you laugh, or freak you out, or introduce your mind to new ways of looking at the world around you, etc.). If I gain the optimism to face the day by looking at a painting in my kitchen every morning, is that less "utile" than a backscratcher?
Religious-themed art by El Greco, Rafeal, Michaelangelo, etc. was intended (in part) to help viewers understand various religious stories at a more visceral level. Are these "crafts" because they served a purpose?
Hey, I don't know what the hell "art" is, but I would agree with you that using online media won't disqualify anyone.
Odd; for me it popped an error message in a grumpy-looking font saying something about how if *I* didn't know what the problem was, *it* certainly wasn't going to tell me, and if I thought I could just click a link and waltz on in I had another think coming.
I'm just going to wait a while, and try again later (should I dim the lights, or something?).
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, I'm paid by the hour, but I also care about the quality of that hour. If the problem is interesting, I tend to research other solutions (to scope out the pitfalls and features I might not have thought of), then I'll often implement my own solution, because learning someone else's code tend to be pretty high on the tedium scale.
If the problem is NOT interesting, I have a lot more motivation to find someone else's code that I can use; if I find a quality solution, I can plug it in, spend hopefully minimal time debugging and testing it, and move on.
And there CAN be pride in using someone else's code, actually; I really get a kick out of using libraries and sending back elegant enhancements or bugfixes back to the authors ("Your library was excellent. I improved it.").
Also, if the code you found is really good stuff, it might help you to finish up a complex feature in record time, which also feels nice ("Oh, I almost forgot to mention it, but that new report we scoped out yesterday is out on the test server").
Now that I see the actual text, this doesn't surprise me that much.
...then the wording was made *stronger* than it really needed to be. They do this to kind of make up for any loopholes they might have left in, like the guy who builds computers for a room full of computers he's lending to a local school, and installs his copy of Lindows on each one ("hey, they're still my computers!").
Basically, they don't want you giving out LindowsOS to all of your friends for free. You can use it on any of your own computers (or computers of anyone else in your household), but no one else.
I'm guessing if enough people complain about this, they'll have to put more work into it and reduce the restrictions (but probably double the size of the text to close the loopholes...).
--
This stare intentionally left blank.
825M messages per $1M is 825 messages per dollar, or $0.0012 per message (not 1.21 cents).
This number *still* seems inflated for bandwidth alone, even considering multiple cycles per email (as the mail servers retry failed deliveries, deal with bounces, etc., which obviously are a far greater problem with spam than with normal email).
I would say that even though this number is likely inflated for bandwidth costs alone, to consider the total costs incurred by Earthlink you also have to consider space wasted by mail queues, processor and drive wear, performance hits to their customers (which hurts business), and the massive amount of staff time it took to continually shut down Carmack's accounts, and eventually track him down.
I wouldn't be surprised by a $1M cost... which makes me wonder if there was a misquotation or miscommunication (possibly intentional... I don't want to pretend Earthlink is a paragon of goodness) somewhere along the way from the engineer who made the estimate, through Earthlink management, to the newspapers.
There are other ways with which to solve this in distributed/clustered computing, such as voting: servers in the cluster vote for each other's sanity (i.e. determine if the messages sent by one computer make sense to at least two others). However, even not this system is rock solid (what if two computers happen to malfunction in the same manner simultaneously? what if the malfunction is contagious? or widespread in the cluster?).
We can learn some lessons from how human society works. If your messages don't make sense to most other people, or if you start damaging a lot of other people, you get separated from the rest and possibly "rebooted" (some call this "electroshock therapy") or even deactivated (some call this "Welcome to Texas").
The difference here is that if the computers in the cluster are all running the same programs, they will contain the exact same coding flaw that they will all concur is the only sane answer (in human terms, this is called "religion"). So we're protected from hardward malfunctions, but not bugs in software or hardware.
That's why this stuff is so hard to do. It may be possible to use selective program restarts to temporarily keep service up in spite of a nasty memory leak, but nothing is really "repaired"; it's just providing a few more fingers to plug holes in the dam while the river keeps rising. So... do you get into providing alternative services for the ones malfunctioning?
Interesting stuff (maybe I'll even read the article now).
Newsflash: the evil spammers are fighting back and hitting slashdot where it hurts, by submitting stories to the slashdot site that have already been posted and discussed.
...and probably again a few days after that, if a new newspaper article is written about it).
These stories are known in the slashdot community as "dupes", and the practice (now becoming well-celebrated in the spammer community) is called "duping the nerds".
Stay tuned for more details in the next posted article, (and again next week,
I just watched the fourth movie clip they made available on the site -- there's a creature that's helping her who has a very warm rich voice... with a slight British accent. Listen to the "if you had the chance, would you leave Axis?" to hear it clearly.
...Whoah, I just looked up his bio to make sure he is, indeed American (confirmed; grew up in NJ and Florida), and it seems his father (a bar-owner) was murdered in '68. His sister was murdered in '75, and 2 half brothers died while scuba-diving in '80. Ouch.
It could be that they're working off the stereotype that the elite (evil or not) speak with British accents. Think also of what's called the "mid-Atlantic" accent (the accent spoken partway between the US and Britain...) taught so carefully to Julliard drama students -- you know how "Frasier Crane" talks? Yup, Kelsey Grammer is a Julliard grad. He's got it down pat.
He also spoke the role of the villainous but brilliant Sideshow Bob on the Simpsons.
I fully agree with your main point, but I want to comment on this:
it pisses me off when management tells me I need to use only certains idioms in case someone comes over my code and don't understand it. I hate to have to program like the next maintainer will be clueless and ignorant.
One of the dangers of throwing in more (and more) special language features to reduce extra code is that some of them aren't going to be nearly as powerful as others. Honestly, there are (alas) programmers out there who use obscure language features simply "because it's there", to remind themselves of their cleverness. Check it out! I saved one line of code and possibly one millisecond out of a 900 millisecond operation (what do you mean, I can't go lead the new project in the Bahamas because I'm "needed here"!?).
These latest updates seem to be mostly addressing very real needs of developers, and will give us enough value to make it worth increasing the complexity of the syntax... but these updates bear *very* close watching. We should avoid adding features that will only be used very rarely... because they will affect maintainability when they are used.
It would be interesting to build a tool that would analyse my Java code and pop out a list of "rules" that any reader of my code would need to know to understand what I'm doing -- e.g.:
* the defaults of uninitialized instance variables
* evaluation of i++ vs. ++i
* path of execution of break when loops are unlabelled
* path of execution with return inside try/finally
* path of execution when throwing exception within catch block, with finally clause
* differences b/w && and & as boolean "and" (not bit-shifting).
There are lots of niggling little rules that no one knows when they first start, and while they should learn them, if I can easily avoid depending on them, I should. As more language constructs are added into the language, we're increasing the entrance barrier. Maybe with a sufficient benefit, but we should be aware of the cost.
Yeah, troll, but I'll bite, because I have a nifty example of how careful Sun has been NOT to break backwards-compatibility.
It boggles the mind, but some fairly complex applets I wrote in 1996, using JDK 1.0.2 and the pre-1.1 event model still compile and run just fine in JSDK 1.4.
I'm assuming this will be the same in 1.5, but it's madness, I tell you. Madness!
The Java 1.0 event model was trickle-down -- no listeners. You had to subclass components and override methods to get events. It was horrible... but it's still fully supported (though not recommended, I'm sure).
Yes, when I ran the compilation, I got deprecation warnings out the wazoo... but it worked!
This is irrelevant. You'll get the compiler error either way.
(x = 5) doesn't evaluate to a boolean value any more than (5 = x) does. The compiler will choke on it because it needs a boolean for the "if" test.
You people are thinking of C/C++.... Very understandable error, but a good illustration of one of the small improvement Java made -- you're trying to fix a problem that isn't there.
Make sure you understand the diff between i++ and ++i, though -- they don't behave quite the same.
...it wouldn't. And since what you really want to know is whether s equals the constant or not, this is simpler... but I'm torn about the readability thing. I usu tend to either comment stuff like this to make sure the reader understands the trick, or I just suck it up and write
...it's convenient, but I can't use it because it sucks to read, and it's kind of obscure so plenty of programmers won't understand it.
i++ and ++i both increment i, but they evaluate differently.
int i = 1;
int x = i++;
Here i is 2, and x is 1; putting the ++ after the i means "increment i after evaluating".
int i = 1;
int x = ++i;
Here i is 2, and x is also 2; "increment i before evaluating".
For the next one, I want to point out that you are NOT helping anything by using 5==x instead of x==5.
If you screw up and type
if( x = 5 )
you WILL get a compiler error because Java is stricter than C/C++ and only accepts booleans for a boolean test (not "any non-zero integer", etc. etc.).
But I have a related case where putting the things you're comparing "backwards" makes code simpler, if you can handle the confusing ordering.
String CONSTANT = "hello";
String s = null;
if( s.equals(CONSTANT) ) return 1;
This will throw a NullPointerException because you're calling a method on s.
If you used
if( CONSTANT.equals(s) ) return 1;
if (s != null && s.equals(CONSTANT) ) return 1;
It's like that ternary thing
String s = (boolValue) ? value1 : value2;
Wait, what's this about side deals? Are you talking reality here or conspiracy theories? Obviously shady dealings happen in the corporate world all the time, but that doesn't mean we can assume w/o solid evidence.
From the article:
Base spokesman Bob Pepper had no information on whether any higher speeds had been reached by land vehicles other than sleds, because the base doesn't do other types of land speed experiments.
If their goal were simply moving something as fast as possible along this ground, this would NOT be the case. I'll bet their assignment was to find the most controlled way possible to hit a target with a missle, so that the process can be studied and improved.
Or, maybe just just like sleds. "I'm also glad my wife and three kids were here today to see this great day -- ah, correction: just two kids... we got a little carried away with the tobaggan upgrades this past winter."
I don't seem to have the checkbox to post anonymously anymore. It was there earlier today...
Hmm. The "annoy the non-subscribers" campaign has begun....
SuSE, pronounced soo'-suh, comes from the German acronym, "Software und Systementwicklung (Software and System Development).
Sheesh... expecting people to click links and suchlike.
They aren't talking about requiring open source usage -- yes, that would be foolish.
The argument is about requiring that applicable OSS solutions are considered before the final decision is made. In many cases, the costs to convert everone over to OpenOffice from Office97 would cost more than it was worth... but they have to at least add up the numbers.
This would clearly NOT result in big changes immediately, partly just because a lot of govt employees just use the windows software that comes with their computers, but over time this would help to counteract the marketing engine of proprietary software.
The article does have a lot of good reasons why using closed-source software can be harmful to some parts of govt.
Personally, though, I'm still kind of jumpy because we're only seeing one side of the argument here. Where can we see other testimony? It's like watching a debate on TV and turning down the volume when the candidate you don't like speaks!
--
You should doubt everything (wait, should you?)
Where's that user with the sig "The can is open... the worms are everywhere"?
Seems appropriate here.
Ah, you're confusing their claims. They aren't pretending that they invented frames.
They're just claiming that the most obvious use of frames (putting links in a "navigation" frame and content in another) was their idea first.
Kind of like patenting chair-rocking right after the rocking chair entered the market, I think, and I would imagine this could be blown out of the water by simply proving that this was what Netscape had in mind when they were first implementing frames... but I'm certainly no patent lawyer.
My current license plate is CHY 6766.
Yep, that's "Christ Hates You", and 666 with a broken crucifix in the middle.
No, there aren't any other possible interpretations!
I actually do have a buddy who had his SSN in barcode format tattooed on the back of his neck (as a comment on privacy erosion, etc.), about 10 years ago... I think we were still in high school.
I just went to his wedding last year. Forgot to ask the bride what she thought of it, though.
I know it's expanding quickly, but the main thing the FindBugs homepage is missing is a list of the errors that FindBugs identifies.
I got a few hints from the screenshots and changelist... but I need more!
* infrastructure for doing dataflow analysis
* tracking of locks for inconsistent synchronization detector
* a few general cleanup fixes in the screenshot
The first 2 especially sound interesting... but not quite enough for me to download a 0.5 version release and slog through the source code.
Eclipse (also free and currently my IDE of choice) has more and more of these kinds of features built-in with each release.
It's still mostly cleanup stuff, but it looks like they're moving towards having more of this stuff included by default. Currently you can set the error level (ignore, warning, error) when you do a build for unused imports/parameters/classes/methods/fields, circular dependancies, unreachable code, methods with constructor names, overridden methods that aren't package visible, hidden catch blocks, non-static access to static variables, using a char array in String concatenation, etc..
Checks on general threading practices and lock sequences would be cool... that seems to be a dangerous area for new Java programmers. Ever seen a servlet with doGet() and doPost() synchronized? No, it didn't scale very well.
...is that the bad coding that caused the Polar Landing accident resulted from poor communication among international collaborators.
If one software module passes metric values into another software module expecting values in English standard measurement, that's a software error, whatever the reasons for it, and no matter how well each module was tested independantly.
This really just highlights why writing "perfect" software is so difficult... there are so many ways something can go wrong, regardless of how intelligent and professional the creators of the software.
Debugging a complex program is NOT like debugging a complex mechanical thing like a car... imagine if you cleaned the floor mats in your car, and the next time you hit 80 mph your entire chassis vaporized.
... a "tity"?
No titties makes sense, but no tities?
Ah, whatever. I guess you're changing it anyhow.
This is most definitely NOT a question that comes up only in the visual arts. Questioning the borders of "music" and "non-music" is another horse that's been beaten well past death (Stockhausen is not the bleeding edge of modern music).
There's a well-known composition by John Cage, called 5:33 (five minutes and 33 seconds), composed entirely of rests. Conveniently, it can be performed on any instrument; the performer just sits down at the piano (for example), wipes off the keys, and sits there. At the end of 5:33, they get up and bow.
There's another composition where the audience is asked to bring along as many mechanical metronomes as possible. They're all set up on stage and started, and the piece is over when the last one finally winds down and stops.
There are some Pauline Oliveros works that I think are kind of neat, that involve audience participation. One example: there are no on-stage performers; instead, the audience is instructed to listen until they hear any pitch (a hum from the ventilation system, a chair squeak, whatever), then they should hum that pitch (which of course sets off a chain reaction). Then find a new pitch in the din, and hum that.
The list goes on...
Anyway, I think I'd also disagree that art must have no utility. For one thing, art has an effect on you (i.e., it might make you laugh, or freak you out, or introduce your mind to new ways of looking at the world around you, etc.). If I gain the optimism to face the day by looking at a painting in my kitchen every morning, is that less "utile" than a backscratcher?
Religious-themed art by El Greco, Rafeal, Michaelangelo, etc. was intended (in part) to help viewers understand various religious stories at a more visceral level. Are these "crafts" because they served a purpose?
Hey, I don't know what the hell "art" is, but I would agree with you that using online media won't disqualify anyone.
Just my 10 cents.
Odd; for me it popped an error message in a grumpy-looking font saying something about how if *I* didn't know what the problem was, *it* certainly wasn't going to tell me, and if I thought I could just click a link and waltz on in I had another think coming.
I'm just going to wait a while, and try again later (should I dim the lights, or something?).