Oh believe me, I've had to maintain some utterly dreadful C and C++ in my time, and I have no trouble at all saying that the people that wrote that code should not be touching any language that allows you to do much more than draw a circle on the screen at a position of their choosing.
Maybe after a couple of years of moving circles around they'll be allowed to pick the colour too. Maybe.
In comparison to languages like Eiffel, Haskell, and Ada, C and C++ are inherently buggy and unsafe. There is no point in denying that. That doesn't mean that they are not the right choice for some (or most, if you think so) projects.
'Inherently buggy' does not equal 'easy to get wrong' in my book, sorry. It's also not 'inherently' unsafe for the same reason. I don't consider this any form of denial. If you want to say 'not foolproof', 'doesn't hold your hand', not the best tool for every job' or whatever else, go for it.
There are better tools than C or C++ for a lot of jobs, I'm not that wedded to one way of doing things. Python, for instance, is good for RAD, for scripting and a whole bunch of other stuff. Javascript is 'good' for certain values of good in the web sphere, for creating rich client in-browser apps. Other languages have their niches and uses, or in some cases they don't. Most of them have a runtime or compiler written in C or C++.
But you can have people who know what they're doing and keep it in mind, because security and stability are often very similar things, e.g buffer overflows.
BTW - 'in industry' or at least in the huge multinational I'm part of, we do spend quite a lot of time thinking about this stuff, complying with various standards, applying static analysis tools etc etc. This may not be all that commonplace, but we supply various government and military places, so it's necessary. To us it is a feature.
No more buggy than code written in any other language, and only unsafe in the hands of people that don't know what they're doing. Arguably these people shouldn't be allowed near any programming language anyway.
Never read Odd John, but I found Starmaker a little 'meh' and, well, Last and First Men was one of the most boring things I ever read that wasn't a tech manual or a contract.
I'd run out of authors I knew much about, so I picked up Joe Haldeman's "The Forever War" and enjoyed it. Then I noticed the '1' on the spine and that it was part of a series. Kept me busy for ages...
Of particular note (IMHO) was the Rediscovery of Man by Cordwainer Smith, though in this instance I'd recommend tracking down the complete works (under the same title) instead of the Sci Fi Masterworks version.
In the UK there's a low emissions zone around the capital that prevents the worst offenders from entering. or they have to pay, or something. Can't remember exactly but it's there!
For me I delighted in making the machine do something, and then when I learned that programming was a thing, yes, I programmed and learned about programming for it's own sake.
I was also fascinated by algebra as a child. Guess I'm just weird.
I agree though - don't try to teach kids what it means to be turing complete, or how to normalise data tables, not at first. Show them something with simple cause and effect, see if you can keep their interest.
The first one is a Cochrane study which means they're vastly better scientists than you.
Yup, it does. Which is why I find this anomalous result in a meta-study odd, especially as it has garnered little to no comment from anyone other than those who espouse pseudo-science. I shall continue to watch out for honest commentary on the subject.
The second thing you have to remember is that while homeopathy is perfect for testing vs placebo, how on earth do you 'blind' the acupuncturist? What if sham needles have an active therapeutic effect?
Maybe you should read about how it was done, your argument from ignorance only shows one thing, your ignorance.
The whole double-blind paradigm is broken for acupuncture, all bodywork modalities inc physiotherapy, dental treatment, psychotherapy, cancer treatment etc. And it is deliberately broken by drug companies to skew results in favour of their products.
Citations, multiple, needed, otherwise this is just a rant.
I'll agree that psychotherapy is wooly. But (for instance) cancer treatment is not.
Medical science? Don't make me laugh.
The only joke here is you and your judgements based on wilful ignorance.
I work for a giant multinational. While products in a suite may be globally distributed, we try to keep product teams in the same place.
There are certainly flexible working practices and telecommuting is allowed, but not all the time. It was encouraged for a while, until it was realised that it cut team effectiveness and it impacted productivity (IIRC) to have everyone working remotely all the time.
There are still communications problems between teams from time to time, whether in different time zones otr just different regions. I'm not sure you could solve these by having everyone in a giant office (and it would need to be huge), I think there are inevitable problems that will arise in any huge org. I don't think (100%) telecommuting and splitting up project teams is helpful, however.
Well, the first meta-study covers such a vast variety of different practices I find it hard to accept any sort of concrete conclusion there. And the second one there says nothing is certain, and specifically says in its discussion section:
"These findings should be seen in the light of recent results from high-quality randomized controlled trials. Cherkin et al. [14] have shown that, for chronic low back pain, individualized acupuncture is not better in reducing symptoms than formula acupuncture or sham acupuncture with a toothpick that does not penetrate the skin. All 3 forms of acupuncture, however, were more effective than usual care. The authors consider, therefore, that the benefits of acupunc-ture ââresulted from nonspecific effects such as therapist conviction, patient enthusiasm, or receiving a treatment believed to be helpful... Adequately controlling for nonspecific effects in future is likely to demonstrate that acupuncture has no or few specific effects on pain â(TM)â(TM)
Which seems to agree with the hypothesis that it's a placebo.
There is nothing magical about herbalism if you are actually doing it correctly. Everything that applies to dosing for regular pharmaceuticals applies to herbal treatments as well. Plus, modern chemistry has advanced to the point where the active compounds in plants and herbs can be identified and referenced accordingly which also improves the dosing significantly. In short, it's not based on magical thinking.
Then why prefer herbalism to other medicine?
True, but the same could be said for just about anyone billing themselves as a medical practitioner anywhere you go in the world.Just because someone has an MD, NP, or PharmD after their name, it doesn't mean that they are qualified or accredited.
Actually it does. There are specific standards they must adhere to, the MD does precisely mean they are qualified. You're talking nonsense here.
True, but that is part of the reason why anyone that actually wants to use plants and herbs needs education so that they know what they are doing. You can't just go into the woods, clip some leaves off a plant, and expect the same results every time, largely due to the varying concentrations that you mentioned. However, even if you have a consistent, known dose of a pharmaceutical, there are still PK/PD effects to take into account and dosing has to be adjusted to the patient.
They'd be better putting their learning efforts into mainstream medicine then. Of course things have to be adjusted by patient, but if you're using palnt material you have no idea what you're giving them, and as pointed out the plant source material can easily contain bad stuff as well. I gave willow as the example - there is indeed aspirin in there, there are also hepatoxic compounds. You are far better off giving a known dose of a pure substance than you are giving herbal supplements. This is an actual fact. There is no instance I know of where herbal remedies are both more effective and less harmful than refining the active ingredients and giving them at known doses. The possible exception to this is cannabis/marinol, but the retarded legal and moral situation around cannabis use makes this whole area difficult, and AFAICT the cannabis derived medications so far only look at THC, which is far from the whole picture.
Where's the study about acupuncture actually working?
All I've ever seen is that it works as well as a placebo. Chiropractice, or whatever it's called, may well work on limited conditions like back pain, as it is bone manipulation. More study of any positive effects and how to reproduce them would be good.
Acupuncture, OTOH, I was pretty sure had been shown to be nothing but a sham.
We know some of it works because we have studied those parts and found them effective, to the same standards of evidence base as actual medicine. However it's still alternative because -
1) It's based on magical thinking 2) Practitioners are not qualified/accredited and could be prescribing anything 3) Many of the effective herbal remedies (e.g. willow bark) contain varying concentrations of the active ingredient, and also other active ingredients that may be harmful, so the pharmaceutical (e.g. aspirin) is both more effective and safer.
Try reading up on the placebo effect. AFAICT it's not the magical self-healing miracle that people make it out to be. It's reports of better health where symptoms are highly subjective, not actual healing where symtpoms are objective.
The placebo effect isn't going to make your cancer go away, or your bones heal. But it might help with poorly-defined pain, or it might work as a stimulant, or a variety of other things which can be altered easily by perception and expectation.
I'm a 'techie' (software engineer) and effective collaboration is much easier and more productive face to face.
I work for a global company and I won't say that I can't communicate effectively with people I don't share a room with (or haven't even met), because I can. But I wouldn't want to be part of a team that didn't spend a good part of the week together.
Telecommuting is useful for those times when flexibility is required - someone lives remotely and would like not to commute a couple of times a week, the guy is coming to fix the dishwasher and you need to be home... but all the time? Hell no.
Yeah, it's the most overrated book in geekdom, IMHO. Don't understand all the love it gets around here.
It read like Doctorow was whcking off under the table with his free hand while he typed it with the other. The main character was a mary-sue par excellence an, well, I just didn't think it was that good.
Err, yeah, you are connected to people you know, therefore they know they're passing data your way.
Depending on how it's done, they may not know that data they are passing on is for you or for another hop beyond you, or what that data is. Each link is not anonymous to others it is linked to, but any given network transfer is.
Clamp down on torrents, clamp down on file sharing sites, what do you expect? People to meekly give up sharing files?
It only takes one person to write a darknet program like this and the game is back on.
It sounds a lot like a program I'd considered writing before and if done right it's basically impossible to shut down, or compromise effectively, without severely screwing up the internet. Which is probably the next step.
RS-232 serial ports were limited (back in the early 80s) to 19200 in hardware, although later they sped up by another factor of 2 or 3 before serial became passe.
Passe?
Still bloody useful in the embedded space.
That said, the speeds haven't changed since the 90s.
Because all that's ever happened before, so far as I can tell, is that it gets to a certain level and then someone from the other side closes it with a reply telling you it's a dumb idea and they're not going to listen.
Has one of these ever actually made it as far as a debate?
There was an official petitions web site set up under the last government, as part of their campaign to make it look like they were listening to the electorate. People could raise an issue, any issue, and others could sign their names to it.
All that happened was when a measure became popular enough, usually somewhere around the 50-100K mark, the PM (or more likely an underling) would tell you it was a stupid idea in their opinion and was never going to be considered further. It was a huge joke.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh believe me, I've had to maintain some utterly dreadful C and C++ in my time, and I have no trouble at all saying that the people that wrote that code should not be touching any language that allows you to do much more than draw a circle on the screen at a position of their choosing.
Maybe after a couple of years of moving circles around they'll be allowed to pick the colour too. Maybe.
Haven't read those! Maybe I will, or maybe I won't based on your review...
I meant the Gollanz/Orion Sci Fi Masterworks series, of which The Forever War is the first.
'Inherently buggy' does not equal 'easy to get wrong' in my book, sorry. It's also not 'inherently' unsafe for the same reason. I don't consider this any form of denial. If you want to say 'not foolproof', 'doesn't hold your hand', not the best tool for every job' or whatever else, go for it.
There are better tools than C or C++ for a lot of jobs, I'm not that wedded to one way of doing things. Python, for instance, is good for RAD, for scripting and a whole bunch of other stuff. Javascript is 'good' for certain values of good in the web sphere, for creating rich client in-browser apps. Other languages have their niches and uses, or in some cases they don't. Most of them have a runtime or compiler written in C or C++.
It's true, you can't guarantee security.
But you can have people who know what they're doing and keep it in mind, because security and stability are often very similar things, e.g buffer overflows.
BTW - 'in industry' or at least in the huge multinational I'm part of, we do spend quite a lot of time thinking about this stuff, complying with various standards, applying static analysis tools etc etc. This may not be all that commonplace, but we supply various government and military places, so it's necessary. To us it is a feature.
C/C++ inherently buyy and unsafe?
No more buggy than code written in any other language, and only unsafe in the hands of people that don't know what they're doing. Arguably these people shouldn't be allowed near any programming language anyway.
Never read Odd John, but I found Starmaker a little 'meh' and, well, Last and First Men was one of the most boring things I ever read that wasn't a tech manual or a contract.
There's gold in them there hills.
I'd run out of authors I knew much about, so I picked up Joe Haldeman's "The Forever War" and enjoyed it. Then I noticed the '1' on the spine and that it was part of a series. Kept me busy for ages...
Of particular note (IMHO) was the Rediscovery of Man by Cordwainer Smith, though in this instance I'd recommend tracking down the complete works (under the same title) instead of the Sci Fi Masterworks version.
In the UK there's a low emissions zone around the capital that prevents the worst offenders from entering. or they have to pay, or something. Can't remember exactly but it's there!
For me I delighted in making the machine do something, and then when I learned that programming was a thing, yes, I programmed and learned about programming for it's own sake.
I was also fascinated by algebra as a child. Guess I'm just weird.
I agree though - don't try to teach kids what it means to be turing complete, or how to normalise data tables, not at first. Show them something with simple cause and effect, see if you can keep their interest.
Yup, it does. Which is why I find this anomalous result in a meta-study odd, especially as it has garnered little to no comment from anyone other than those who espouse pseudo-science. I shall continue to watch out for honest commentary on the subject.
Maybe you should read about how it was done, your argument from ignorance only shows one thing, your ignorance.
Citations, multiple, needed, otherwise this is just a rant.
I'll agree that psychotherapy is wooly. But (for instance) cancer treatment is not.
The only joke here is you and your judgements based on wilful ignorance.
I work for a giant multinational. While products in a suite may be globally distributed, we try to keep product teams in the same place.
There are certainly flexible working practices and telecommuting is allowed, but not all the time. It was encouraged for a while, until it was realised that it cut team effectiveness and it impacted productivity (IIRC) to have everyone working remotely all the time.
There are still communications problems between teams from time to time, whether in different time zones otr just different regions. I'm not sure you could solve these by having everyone in a giant office (and it would need to be huge), I think there are inevitable problems that will arise in any huge org. I don't think (100%) telecommuting and splitting up project teams is helpful, however.
Well, the first meta-study covers such a vast variety of different practices I find it hard to accept any sort of concrete conclusion there. And the second one there says nothing is certain, and specifically says in its discussion section:
"These findings should be seen in the light of recent results from ... Adequately controlling for nonspecific effects in future is likely to demonstrate that acupuncture has no or few specific effects on pain
high-quality randomized controlled trials. Cherkin et al. [14] have
shown that, for chronic low back pain, individualized acupuncture is not better in reducing symptoms than formula acupuncture or sham acupuncture with a toothpick that does not penetrate the skin.
All 3 forms of acupuncture, however, were more effective than usual care. The authors consider, therefore, that the benefits of acupunc-ture ââresulted from nonspecific effects such as therapist conviction, patient enthusiasm, or receiving a treatment believed to be helpful
â(TM)â(TM)
Which seems to agree with the hypothesis that it's a placebo.
Then why prefer herbalism to other medicine?
Actually it does. There are specific standards they must adhere to, the MD does precisely mean they are qualified. You're talking nonsense here.
They'd be better putting their learning efforts into mainstream medicine then. Of course things have to be adjusted by patient, but if you're using palnt material you have no idea what you're giving them, and as pointed out the plant source material can easily contain bad stuff as well. I gave willow as the example - there is indeed aspirin in there, there are also hepatoxic compounds. You are far better off giving a known dose of a pure substance than you are giving herbal supplements. This is an actual fact. There is no instance I know of where herbal remedies are both more effective and less harmful than refining the active ingredients and giving them at known doses. The possible exception to this is cannabis/marinol, but the retarded legal and moral situation around cannabis use makes this whole area difficult, and AFAICT the cannabis derived medications so far only look at THC, which is far from the whole picture.
Where's the study about acupuncture actually working?
All I've ever seen is that it works as well as a placebo. Chiropractice, or whatever it's called, may well work on limited conditions like back pain, as it is bone manipulation. More study of any positive effects and how to reproduce them would be good.
Acupuncture, OTOH, I was pretty sure had been shown to be nothing but a sham.
Where it works, it is medicine.
We know some of it works because we have studied those parts and found them effective, to the same standards of evidence base as actual medicine. However it's still alternative because -
1) It's based on magical thinking
2) Practitioners are not qualified/accredited and could be prescribing anything
3) Many of the effective herbal remedies (e.g. willow bark) contain varying concentrations of the active ingredient, and also other active ingredients that may be harmful, so the pharmaceutical (e.g. aspirin) is both more effective and safer.
Try reading up on the placebo effect. AFAICT it's not the magical self-healing miracle that people make it out to be. It's reports of better health where symptoms are highly subjective, not actual healing where symtpoms are objective.
The placebo effect isn't going to make your cancer go away, or your bones heal. But it might help with poorly-defined pain, or it might work as a stimulant, or a variety of other things which can be altered easily by perception and expectation.
Does this count for non-US folks though? Does the law apply that way for things published from another country on a service that's running in the US?
I had a feeling there were exemptions to registration for that sort of situation.
Agreed.
I'm a 'techie' (software engineer) and effective collaboration is much easier and more productive face to face.
I work for a global company and I won't say that I can't communicate effectively with people I don't share a room with (or haven't even met), because I can. But I wouldn't want to be part of a team that didn't spend a good part of the week together.
Telecommuting is useful for those times when flexibility is required - someone lives remotely and would like not to commute a couple of times a week, the guy is coming to fix the dishwasher and you need to be home... but all the time? Hell no.
Yeah, it's the most overrated book in geekdom, IMHO. Don't understand all the love it gets around here.
It read like Doctorow was whcking off under the table with his free hand while he typed it with the other. The main character was a mary-sue par excellence an, well, I just didn't think it was that good.
Err, yeah, you are connected to people you know, therefore they know they're passing data your way.
Depending on how it's done, they may not know that data they are passing on is for you or for another hop beyond you, or what that data is. Each link is not anonymous to others it is linked to, but any given network transfer is.
Clamp down on torrents, clamp down on file sharing sites, what do you expect? People to meekly give up sharing files?
It only takes one person to write a darknet program like this and the game is back on.
It sounds a lot like a program I'd considered writing before and if done right it's basically impossible to shut down, or compromise effectively, without severely screwing up the internet. Which is probably the next step.
So you prefer a system in which there is no way for the public to force (at the least) a debate in parliament?
I see that as incredibly anti-democratic.
Passe?
Still bloody useful in the embedded space.
That said, the speeds haven't changed since the 90s.
Really?
Because all that's ever happened before, so far as I can tell, is that it gets to a certain level and then someone from the other side closes it with a reply telling you it's a dumb idea and they're not going to listen.
Has one of these ever actually made it as far as a debate?
Same in the UK.
There was an official petitions web site set up under the last government, as part of their campaign to make it look like they were listening to the electorate. People could raise an issue, any issue, and others could sign their names to it.
All that happened was when a measure became popular enough, usually somewhere around the 50-100K mark, the PM (or more likely an underling) would tell you it was a stupid idea in their opinion and was never going to be considered further. It was a huge joke.