It seems incredibly obvious that there's nothing more to us than ourselves. Nothing leaves us when we die. Consciousness is simply the emergent behaviour of our very complex bodies. I'm sure the god-bothers will cling on for a while but there's no god of any variety and we're steadily proving that.
I so want this to happen it hurts. Would be a huge amount of fun to develop as well. If anyone's at all interested in exploring this idea then get in touch.
Any company capable of releasing a solid piece of software at the first version and having the balls to stand by its engineering and call it 1.0 would get a lot of respect and goodwill from me.
Can someone explain to me why this might not be simply the spectra of methane occurring anywhere in interstellar space between the star emitting the light and the measuring device. Do these guys *only* see the methane spectra when the planet transits it's star. Do we never see methane if we look in any other direction ?
This is a subject which has been exercising me greatly recently.
Good code to me is readable, obvious and 'efficient enough'.
Readability is a combination of whitespace, layout and good choice of symbol naming. It's got to be pleasing to the eye and easy to scan through without missing some important fact of execution. I should be able to figure out 98% of what a variable/function is just by knowing it's name. If the only way to encapsulate that sufficiently is to have a symbol something like DoXThenY then I'd rather have DoX and DoY.
'Efficient enough' is simple. Does it do what it has to do in the time allocated to it? For 90% of software this is a pretty undemanding requirement since to most users the difference between 1msec and 100 is neither here nor there. The remaining 10% is either real-time or very large data sets (and is where I've spent the majority of my career). In my experience the majority of efficiency problems in these two arenas are usually algorithmic in nature. For real-time it tends to be about how you use the hardware (cache miss, context switches, blocking I/O etc) for large data-sets it tends to be data structure related (using a list when an n-tree is faster etc).
Obvious is the difficult one. What's obvious to one coder is not necessarily obvious to the next guy. There's one overriding principle I've found to stand me in good stead in this regard. I constantly ask myself: "Is this the simplest possible *correct* way of doing this?". Simplest is not always in the least lines of code but it is often roughly equivalent. Simple also suggests a minimum of coupling. For functions this means the smallest set of args I can get away with. For methods this extends to the smallest number of members I can touch. Code paths should generally be straight through and down the page. Recursion (and same-thread re-entrancy) should be reserved for recursive problems.
The other great producer of non-obvious code is OO (or rather poor OO programmers). It takes time to become a good OO programmer. Years, I would say. The most confusing code I've seen has consistently been written by people who just don't 'get' OO, who perhaps have read a few patterns books and then go off in completely the wrong direction making problems fit inappropriate patterns and solving procedural tasks with labyrinthine object hierarchies and call-graphs.
And then.. after you've pared your code down to the very barest essentials, when your call graph is easy to visualise, your data structures clear and your source reads like a well written instruction manual on how to solve the problem you were tasked with.. if you are left with some section that is irreducibly non-obvious: COMMENT IT !!
Just to clear up a bit of misinformation below about the UK phone market:
There are two ways to have a phone: Contract or Pay-as-You go.
With Pay-As-You go you pay high costs for the handset and after that you buy calling credit which is typically a slightly higher price (than contract) per minute/text message. You can buy credit almost anywhere in the form of a scratchcard from the corner store or even from an ATM. There are no monthly charges. Typical text message cost is 10p (20c).
On a contract you'll get the phone free or for some token price. A typical monthly charge would be in the £30 ($60) range but with that you'll generally get more free airtime (I get 600 minutes) and text messages (I get 1000) than all but the heaviest users will use in a month. It's more or less a flat fee. Data rates are currently expensive but getting cheaper.
In the UK at least text messaging is extremely popular and not just amongst teenagers. I'm 35 and will generally use it more than the phone feature itself. I'm not unusual in this respect.
The UK market is extremely competitive. Contract deals are improving almost every week (more free minutes/texts, lower monthly charges). Towards the end of a contract your provider will generally ring you and try to offer you better phones and better rates to stay with them. All for free. I tend to change my phone about every 18 months and currently have Sony Ericsson W950i and very nice it is too. I don't believe I've ever paid a penny for a handset.
It sounds to me that one of the problems in the US market might be the inertia that the States has moving from one generation of technology to the other means that the market moves at a slower rate than the innovations. It could also be that the carriers simply aren't generating enough revenue from mobiles in a country where most land-line calls are are free. The only other reason why you're not getting the cool phones at reasonable prices might be that the providers are operating a cartel.
In most countries there will hopefully be just enough people exercising their rights under this kind of legislation to compel all concerned to comply. That's mostly what this sort of thing is about. The OP is a fool.. this *is* 'a good thing'.
Heh.. yes.. I know those places.. and on the more expensive scale of things, Blah Blah Blah in Goldhawk Rd, Manna in Primrose Hill, Mildreds in Soho, Terre a Terre in Brighton is truly excellent.
"and if they don't do it it's because they don't have the technology"
That was kind of my point..
And as for the Euro thing... consider the effect on the US economy if the OPEC nations decided to convert to the euro.. wholsale conversion of currency reserves (mainly chinese held) into the euro.. max exodus of capital out of the states and into harder currencies such as Sterling and the Euro.. crippling debt for the States as repayments are converted from the relatively weak dollar to much stronger european currencies.. check out the buying power of your average brit in New York this christmas.. the US economy is in a very precarious position right now.. the recent downturn almost a direct consequence of more mature nations deciding to consolidate trade relations amongst their own power blocks as EU, Chinese and Indian economies prove more attractive to do business with than an increasingly theocratic seeming US (although recent political events give great hope). They know the US is going to heal itself but they're not going to waste a decade of profit waiting for that to happen. Coming out the other side of this history will see the Bush presidency as the point at which the world started to realise the US was only *one* of the important trading nations and a new power balance based on the expanding economies of the Chinese, a unified Europe, India, an emerging and an increasingly independent South America will emerge. Economic power in this kind of situtation will return to the diplomatically skilled countries like the UK and France. The US will be increasingly side-lined..
Nah.. not really.. it's just an easy target.. but the UK right now, especially London, has 4 of the top 10 restaurants in the world and fully 1 in 4 of the top 50. The idea that British cuisine is lumpen is 20 years old. It's often forgotten that whilst they share so much with the culture of the US they are actually a European nation.
Barbarians compared to the US of course who indulge in no such activites..
Like rigging elections, assasinating democractically elected heads of state they don't agree with, invading countries for suggesting they might prefer to sell oil in Euros thus causing a huge run on the already weak dollar, selling arms and torture equipment to countries with appalling human rights records, wire-tapping their own citizens on a scale undreamed of by the most autocratic of regimes, collaborating with despots for profit, operating an institutionally rascist judicial systm, atempting to deny women rights fundamentally accepted as basic by the entire western world, accepting graft as a proxy for politic.. yadda yadda yadda..
I'm not saying the rest of the western world's any better.. the brits, the french, the israelis.. they're all doing their bits to help out f ck it all up.. but really.. it's the sheer bare-faced hypocrisy of the US that disappoints the most.. still.. we seem to be growing up slowly..
Just for reference the UK has the largest concentration of Michelin starred restaurants anywhere in the world right now including France.
Compare and contrast with the US where Chuck-e-Cheese is a restaurant and I nearly got thrown out of a place for correcting the waiter on the pronunciation of the wine Merlot (it's Mer-loh).
+ 1000 the two parent posters who show possibly the most acute understanding of what's going on in this sphere that I've seen round here for a long time.
After all this time there's still no OSS debugger that actually works even a tenth as well as the *other* one..
Really.. all the guys who cashed out and have a couple of years gentle work to spare on making a real debugger to go with a real kdevelop or (better still) anjuta for penguins can still make another million each out of that.. it's such a golden apple of a project still after all these years..
Although it would be right to think of it as effectively a veto it's actually termed royal assent. The last monarch to refuse assent was Queen Anne in 1707. One of the most recent examples of UK law being directly affected by a monarch was in Victoria's reign when all mention of female/female relationships were struck from a bill outlawing homosexuality because she simply refused to exist such a thing as a lesbian existed.
Slashdot Mirror
It seems incredibly obvious that there's nothing more to us than ourselves. Nothing leaves us when we die. Consciousness is simply the emergent behaviour of our very complex bodies. I'm sure the god-bothers will cling on for a while but there's no god of any variety and we're steadily proving that.
I so want this to happen it hurts. Would be a huge amount of fun to develop as well. If anyone's at all interested in exploring this idea then get in touch.
There is at least one company that sells a product that allows you to write native C/C++ apps once that target many different platforms: I3D
Any company capable of releasing a solid piece of software at the first version and having the balls to stand by its engineering and call it 1.0 would get a lot of respect and goodwill from me.
SEGFAULT !!!
Alright...
"You know, we evolved canine teeth for a reason."
A full set of teeth has 4 canines, 8 pre-molars and 12 molars. I would say that suggests we're designed to eat only a very small amount of meat.
"Do you really think it's healthy not to use them?"
It's healthier for the animals, at least.
Can someone explain to me why this might not be simply the spectra of methane occurring anywhere in interstellar space between the star emitting the light and the measuring device. Do these guys *only* see the methane spectra when the planet transits it's star. Do we never see methane if we look in any other direction ?
This is a subject which has been exercising me greatly recently.
Good code to me is readable, obvious and 'efficient enough'.
Readability is a combination of whitespace, layout and good choice of symbol naming. It's got to be pleasing to the eye and easy to scan through without missing some important fact of execution. I should be able to figure out 98% of what a variable/function is just by knowing it's name. If the only way to encapsulate that sufficiently is to have a symbol something like DoXThenY then I'd rather have DoX and DoY.
'Efficient enough' is simple. Does it do what it has to do in the time allocated to it? For 90% of software this is a pretty undemanding requirement since to most users the difference between 1msec and 100 is neither here nor there. The remaining 10% is either real-time or very large data sets (and is where I've spent the majority of my career). In my experience the majority of efficiency problems in these two arenas are usually algorithmic in nature. For real-time it tends to be about how you use the hardware (cache miss, context switches, blocking I/O etc) for large data-sets it tends to be data structure related (using a list when an n-tree is faster etc).
Obvious is the difficult one. What's obvious to one coder is not necessarily obvious to the next guy. There's one overriding principle I've found to stand me in good stead in this regard. I constantly ask myself: "Is this the simplest possible *correct* way of doing this?". Simplest is not always in the least lines of code but it is often roughly equivalent. Simple also suggests a minimum of coupling. For functions this means the smallest set of args I can get away with. For methods this extends to the smallest number of members I can touch. Code paths should generally be straight through and down the page. Recursion (and same-thread re-entrancy) should be reserved for recursive problems.
The other great producer of non-obvious code is OO (or rather poor OO programmers). It takes time to become a good OO programmer. Years, I would say. The most confusing code I've seen has consistently been written by people who just don't 'get' OO, who perhaps have read a few patterns books and then go off in completely the wrong direction making problems fit inappropriate patterns and solving procedural tasks with labyrinthine object hierarchies and call-graphs.
And then.. after you've pared your code down to the very barest essentials, when your call graph is easy to visualise, your data structures clear and your source reads like a well written instruction manual on how to solve the problem you were tasked with.. if you are left with some section that is irreducibly non-obvious: COMMENT IT !!
Just to clear up a bit of misinformation below about the UK phone market:
There are two ways to have a phone: Contract or Pay-as-You go.
With Pay-As-You go you pay high costs for the handset and after that you buy calling credit which is typically a slightly higher price (than contract) per minute/text message. You can buy credit almost anywhere in the form of a scratchcard from the corner store or even from an ATM. There are no monthly charges. Typical text message cost is 10p (20c).
On a contract you'll get the phone free or for some token price. A typical monthly charge would be in the £30 ($60) range but with that you'll generally get more free airtime (I get 600 minutes) and text messages (I get 1000) than all but the heaviest users will use in a month. It's more or less a flat fee. Data rates are currently expensive but getting cheaper.
In the UK at least text messaging is extremely popular and not just amongst teenagers. I'm 35 and will generally use it more than the phone feature itself. I'm not unusual in this respect.
The UK market is extremely competitive. Contract deals are improving almost every week (more free minutes/texts, lower monthly charges). Towards the end of a contract your provider will generally ring you and try to offer you better phones and better rates to stay with them. All for free. I tend to change my phone about every 18 months and currently have Sony Ericsson W950i and very nice it is too. I don't believe I've ever paid a penny for a handset.
It sounds to me that one of the problems in the US market might be the inertia that the States has moving from one generation of technology to the other means that the market moves at a slower rate than the innovations. It could also be that the carriers simply aren't generating enough revenue from mobiles in a country where most land-line calls are are free. The only other reason why you're not getting the cool phones at reasonable prices might be that the providers are operating a cartel.
In most countries there will hopefully be just enough people exercising their rights under this kind of legislation to compel all concerned to comply. That's mostly what this sort of thing is about. The OP is a fool.. this *is* 'a good thing'.
Are you aware that Israel is, for the largest part, self-sufficient in food production. Net importer of beef I think. Not much else.
Heh.. yes.. I know those places.. and on the more expensive scale of things, Blah Blah Blah in Goldhawk Rd, Manna in Primrose Hill, Mildreds in Soho, Terre a Terre in Brighton is truly excellent.
Good vegetarian that I am.
"and if they don't do it it's because they don't have the technology"
That was kind of my point..
And as for the Euro thing... consider the effect on the US economy if the OPEC nations decided to convert to the euro.. wholsale conversion of currency reserves (mainly chinese held) into the euro.. max exodus of capital out of the states and into harder currencies such as Sterling and the Euro.. crippling debt for the States as repayments are converted from the relatively weak dollar to much stronger european currencies.. check out the buying power of your average brit in New York this christmas.. the US economy is in a very precarious position right now.. the recent downturn almost a direct consequence of more mature nations deciding to consolidate trade relations amongst their own power blocks as EU, Chinese and Indian economies prove more attractive to do business with than an increasingly theocratic seeming US (although recent political events give great hope). They know the US is going to heal itself but they're not going to waste a decade of profit waiting for that to happen. Coming out the other side of this history will see the Bush presidency as the point at which the world started to realise the US was only *one* of the important trading nations and a new power balance based on the expanding economies of the Chinese, a unified Europe, India, an emerging and an increasingly independent South America will emerge. Economic power in this kind of situtation will return to the diplomatically skilled countries like the UK and France. The US will be increasingly side-lined..
$20 will not buy me a great meal in London. It will buy me a good meal though. $20 in LA will buy me a lot of calories.. but a great meal.. no.
Nah.. not really.. it's just an easy target.. but the UK right now, especially London, has 4 of the top 10 restaurants in the world and fully 1 in 4 of the top 50. The idea that British cuisine is lumpen is 20 years old. It's often forgotten that whilst they share so much with the culture of the US they are actually a European nation.
Barbarians compared to the US of course who indulge in no such activites..
Like rigging elections, assasinating democractically elected heads of state they don't agree with, invading countries for suggesting they might prefer to sell oil in Euros thus causing a huge run on the already weak dollar, selling arms and torture equipment to countries with appalling human rights records, wire-tapping their own citizens on a scale undreamed of by the most autocratic of regimes, collaborating with despots for profit, operating an institutionally rascist judicial systm, atempting to deny women rights fundamentally accepted as basic by the entire western world, accepting graft as a proxy for politic.. yadda yadda yadda..
I'm not saying the rest of the western world's any better.. the brits, the french, the israelis.. they're all doing their bits to help out f ck it all up.. but really.. it's the sheer bare-faced hypocrisy of the US that disappoints the most.. still.. we seem to be growing up slowly..
Just for reference the UK has the largest concentration of Michelin starred restaurants anywhere in the world right now including France.
Compare and contrast with the US where Chuck-e-Cheese is a restaurant and I nearly got thrown out of a place for correcting the waiter on the pronunciation of the wine Merlot (it's Mer-loh).
+ 1000 the two parent posters who show possibly the most acute understanding of what's going on in this sphere that I've seen round here for a long time.
And kudos to you for reining in your own impulses in that direction also.
A shining beacon of virtue..
According the the Economist Quality of Life Index:
Ireland, Switzerland, Norway, Luxembourg, Sweden, Australia, Iceland, Italy, Denmark, Spain, Singapore and Finland.
After all this time there's still no OSS debugger that actually works even a tenth as well as the *other* one..
.no sig
Really.. all the guys who cashed out and have a couple of years gentle work to spare on making a real debugger to go with a real kdevelop or (better still) anjuta for penguins can still make another million each out of that.. it's such a golden apple of a project still after all these years..
--
t o b e
How much can you invent that never existed before with components that already do...
Some, granted... but nowhere near it all..
.. it *is* acceptable to drink alcohol and smoke marijuana.
"no one is willing to pay money"
It more like no-one sees the need..
Although it would be right to think of it as effectively a veto it's actually termed royal assent. The last monarch to refuse assent was Queen Anne in 1707. One of the most recent examples of UK law being directly affected by a monarch was in Victoria's reign when all mention of female/female relationships were struck from a bill outlawing homosexuality because she simply refused to exist such a thing as a lesbian existed.