I certainly don't see why what I do (software design and implementation for finance and credit card applications, amongst other things, money and time-critical software) is any less engineering than hardware.
Oh sure, I totally agree with that. Hell, I couldn't do my job without the systems guys, and I don't mean I need help because "My Outlook is broken". There's an awful lot of knowledge needed and a lot of skill. It's just different knowledge.
The only reason I ever get pissed off with the misunderstanding of the field is when I'm doing someone a favour and cleaning the viruses off their heavily infected windows machine, and they say "so this is, like, what you do for a job then?"
Actually, in software engineering, designing and implementing new languages happens more often than you might think. They're not usually general purpose programming languages, but they are there. I'm not sure I know of anyone, ever that creates both programming languages and instruction sets.
Do you seriously not see the difference between an architect and a builder? A software developer and a helpdesk operative?
Well, good luck to you. You'll probably end up in management fairly quickly with an attitude like that...
"Seriously, I call them "developers" to differentiate them from people who actually know something about the hardware and the OS."
Errr, that's pretty seriously snarky.
A good developer/engineer knows a lot about their target platform, probably more in some areas (like memory paging strategies, cache usage etc) than the IT guys. They may not know how to run the myriad of services that are usually on these boxes or how to diagnose some of the problems that systems have, but to say they know nothing... well, you're either an asshat or you work with java developers.
"I do recognize that C will be "faster" than other languages... but that's just one metric"
It's the most important for many applications. Look, we're all turing-complete adults here. Some languages lower development time, some languages abstract away from the machine they run on etc etc. In most spheres you need to find a balance between writing code at an acceptable speed and getting the most out of the machine. At the low end (embedded) and the high end (speed-critical server apps) the balance falls at C.
"sometimes I wonder why a lot of programmers who seem very married to the low-level consider anything else to be "dumbing down".
Depends, sometimes making things easier just encourages sloppy programming, I've seen a lot of sloppy java code and a lot of java coders that don't seem to take execution speed or memory efficiency into any sort of account, mostly because they don't have to actually manage their own memory. It's like a rich kid that doesn't realise the value of money, except he's not as rich as he thinks.
"they can just take some (or a lot) of the manual drugdery out,"
Yes they can, at the cost of efficiency. Usually. There's another interesting area of study, actually, the improvement of machine optimisation.
Oh, and BTW, I mention Java so much because between C, C++ and Java, you probably have 90% of the commercial codebase covered. That has no bearing on elegance or functionality, it's just what I come across in my working life.
You don't work in the high-throughput or large-data-set server sectors do you?
Because believe me, the C implementations of things like memory resident databases and multiprocess transaction servers beat the pants off anything I have yet to see in higher level languages. The java implementations in particular are huge, bloated, slow and less capable.
Is this a reflection on the teams that produce them? Maybe. Is it a reflection of the general discipline of mind and forced resource caretaking in C? Maybe. Whatever it is, it's certainly a real phenomenon that the higher you go the less performant things are, where that matters.
On the desktop? Sure, who cares, though again a lot of java apps are slow to start and sluggish to respond.
I find C fascinating, and having a lot of control over *exactly* what's going on underneath to be very necessary, and not just in the embedded world.
I have a friend who's an amateur musician and devices (his mobile phone) have started to deny him the ability to play his own music due to it being "unlicensed".
How the hell do these clowns expect to be able to figure out what's unauthorised copying?
Also there are places like isohunt, but they're not a tracker. There are other P2P techs in the pipeline, such as oneswarm, but in order to truly darken p2p traffic we need faster connections and to put up with slower, multi-hop transfers.
Had I actually bothered investing in stock this year I would have at least doubled my money this year.
Reading slashdot and other tech press does give you an insight into this industry far better than fund managers have. Or the rest of the traders that, at the worst of the crash, clearly missed out on simple facts like big, cash rich, debt free corporations like IBM, Apple and MS were not going anywhere because of some petty recession, and as a result were seriously undervalued.
It's just very hard to find the right account to do this in the UK. The banks want you to use funds so they can skim money off at every opportunity.
It's at the peak of it's popularity and thus the peak of it's perceived value.
They'll "go public", the owners (founders and other investors) will make out like bandits and then retards^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hfund managers will invest money in it from all of our pensions and savings. The stock will change hands many times as it is speculated upon repeatedly until such time as the next big thing comes along and it takes a slow plunge to worthlessness and irrelevancy.
In the meantime the founders are rolling in (our) cash.
Glasgow? FYI London has bagpipers, whisky shops and world class food, far better than your deep fried pizza. We also don't have quite such a high percentage of the population addicted to heroin.
The weather is whole lot shittier and the city is nasty. Id you'd said edinburgh you might have got away with it.
I also have lived in the UK my whole life. I find that there's nowhere else that feels like a real city and that outside of one or two picturesque places much the countryside is a shitheap, especially the small-to-midsize towns.
It's about the only place in the UK worth bothering with. Everywhere else is full of pissed-up chavs.
I guess you're just a yokel though, if you don't like cities. Here's a tip - some people like to do more with their evenings than hang out in the barn fucking pigs.
They aren't bookmarks, the history is emptied. Try it, use a sqlite browser and take a look in your.mozilla directory, it NEVER gets rid of your tracks.
I don't *hate* the awesome bar, but firefox is not a good browser for privacy since it came along.
Whilst you can change the look, there seems to be no way to stop it storing a full history in its location database which you cannot wipe with the privacy settings.
This, IMHO, sucks!
Re:So let me get this straight...
on
Less Than Free
·
· Score: 4, Funny
And get paid for it! Don't forget that bit!
Yeah, sound sucky doesn't it? I had hoped that we were starting to see the end of "this feature crippled by your carrier, instead here's a button that'll take you to our website (and charge you for that)".
(sorry if you didn't know that, or I've missed the sarcasm, no snark intended. If you just keep scrollin' on down the answers are usually there at the bottom.)
Here in the UK, when you do a degree you study aspects of that subject only. No "you must take a language or arts subject", you just study what you came for.
I don't want to get into the relative merits and comparative breadth of education here, but I liked being immersed only in the subject I was there for.
I did install linux on it but I've barely used that capability. It's a pretty capable media player without needing linux. You can put stuff onto an external drive if you want, either a USB flash drive or (what we do) you set up media sharing on another box and stream video over the network.
I have a headless linux server that does torrents. There's a program called "Mediatomb" that allows you to share media over UPnP. The PS3 just finds these servers on the local network and allows you to browse the shares. Windows (vista or 7) can share using media player and appear in the same way. It's pretty cool. Most stuff doesn't even need to be transcoded in any way. And if the network's being crap, as ours sometimes is, you can tell it to copy the video to its internal drive, then watch it locally.
I know a lot of folks dislike the PS3, but I love it. We use it as a media box more than a games machine now.
Slashdot Mirror
Probably with the IEEE, yes. Sure, why not?
I certainly don't see why what I do (software design and implementation for finance and credit card applications, amongst other things, money and time-critical software) is any less engineering than hardware.
Oh sure, I totally agree with that. Hell, I couldn't do my job without the systems guys, and I don't mean I need help because "My Outlook is broken". There's an awful lot of knowledge needed and a lot of skill. It's just different knowledge.
The only reason I ever get pissed off with the misunderstanding of the field is when I'm doing someone a favour and cleaning the viruses off their heavily infected windows machine, and they say "so this is, like, what you do for a job then?"
But then it's not what you do either...
Yes, I am. I do software engineering. It's not just programming, though that is a large part of it.
Actually, in software engineering, designing and implementing new languages happens more often than you might think. They're not usually general purpose programming languages, but they are there. I'm not sure I know of anyone, ever that creates both programming languages and instruction sets.
Do you seriously not see the difference between an architect and a builder? A software developer and a helpdesk operative?
Well, good luck to you. You'll probably end up in management fairly quickly with an attitude like that...
"Seriously, I call them "developers" to differentiate them from people who actually know something about the hardware and the OS."
Errr, that's pretty seriously snarky.
A good developer/engineer knows a lot about their target platform, probably more in some areas (like memory paging strategies, cache usage etc) than the IT guys. They may not know how to run the myriad of services that are usually on these boxes or how to diagnose some of the problems that systems have, but to say they know nothing... well, you're either an asshat or you work with java developers.
Hi there,
I'm a software engineer. Take your funny definitions of what is and what isn't engineering somewhere else.
"I do recognize that C will be "faster" than other languages... but that's just one metric"
It's the most important for many applications. Look, we're all turing-complete adults here. Some languages lower development time, some languages abstract away from the machine they run on etc etc. In most spheres you need to find a balance between writing code at an acceptable speed and getting the most out of the machine. At the low end (embedded) and the high end (speed-critical server apps) the balance falls at C.
"sometimes I wonder why a lot of programmers who seem very married to the low-level consider anything else to be "dumbing down".
Depends, sometimes making things easier just encourages sloppy programming, I've seen a lot of sloppy java code and a lot of java coders that don't seem to take execution speed or memory efficiency into any sort of account, mostly because they don't have to actually manage their own memory. It's like a rich kid that doesn't realise the value of money, except he's not as rich as he thinks.
"they can just take some (or a lot) of the manual drugdery out,"
Yes they can, at the cost of efficiency. Usually. There's another interesting area of study, actually, the improvement of machine optimisation.
Oh, and BTW, I mention Java so much because between C, C++ and Java, you probably have 90% of the commercial codebase covered. That has no bearing on elegance or functionality, it's just what I come across in my working life.
I've seen and written a variety of highly complex server applications in C and C++.
You just have to get it right. And memory errors aren't all that nasty to debug, not when you've got good tools like valgrind and/or purify.
You don't work in the high-throughput or large-data-set server sectors do you?
Because believe me, the C implementations of things like memory resident databases and multiprocess transaction servers beat the pants off anything I have yet to see in higher level languages. The java implementations in particular are huge, bloated, slow and less capable.
Is this a reflection on the teams that produce them? Maybe. Is it a reflection of the general discipline of mind and forced resource caretaking in C? Maybe. Whatever it is, it's certainly a real phenomenon that the higher you go the less performant things are, where that matters.
On the desktop? Sure, who cares, though again a lot of java apps are slow to start and sluggish to respond.
I find C fascinating, and having a lot of control over *exactly* what's going on underneath to be very necessary, and not just in the embedded world.
I have a friend who's an amateur musician and devices (his mobile phone) have started to deny him the ability to play his own music due to it being "unlicensed".
How the hell do these clowns expect to be able to figure out what's unauthorised copying?
"The ONLY selling point of the iPhone is the ecosystem. Brand loyalty, huge number of apps and huge installed base."
Our THREE main selling points are the the brand loyalty, the huge number of apps and the huge install base. And the web browser.
Damn! Damn! I'll come back in.
*cough*nntp*cough*
Also there are places like isohunt, but they're not a tracker. There are other P2P techs in the pipeline, such as oneswarm, but in order to truly darken p2p traffic we need faster connections and to put up with slower, multi-hop transfers.
It is easy.
Had I actually bothered investing in stock this year I would have at least doubled my money this year.
Reading slashdot and other tech press does give you an insight into this industry far better than fund managers have. Or the rest of the traders that, at the worst of the crash, clearly missed out on simple facts like big, cash rich, debt free corporations like IBM, Apple and MS were not going anywhere because of some petty recession, and as a result were seriously undervalued.
It's just very hard to find the right account to do this in the UK. The banks want you to use funds so they can skim money off at every opportunity.
It's at the peak of it's popularity and thus the peak of it's perceived value.
They'll "go public", the owners (founders and other investors) will make out like bandits and then retards^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hfund managers will invest money in it from all of our pensions and savings. The stock will change hands many times as it is speculated upon repeatedly until such time as the next big thing comes along and it takes a slow plunge to worthlessness and irrelevancy.
In the meantime the founders are rolling in (our) cash.
I think they want some of these really.
Well, I wouldn't mind one or two to play with.
(For those not interested in following the link, it's a blade style pizza-box server with dual (next-gen)Cell and up to 32GB of RAM)
Hi,
Glasgow?
FYI London has bagpipers, whisky shops and world class food, far better than your deep fried pizza. We also don't have quite such a high percentage of the population addicted to heroin.
The weather is whole lot shittier and the city is nasty. Id you'd said edinburgh you might have got away with it.
I also have lived in the UK my whole life. I find that there's nowhere else that feels like a real city and that outside of one or two picturesque places much the countryside is a shitheap, especially the small-to-midsize towns.
YMMV, of course.
TFL - Transport for London
It covers buses and overground trains in the London area too. Their website - tfl.gov.uk - has quite a useful journey planner on it.
It's about the only place in the UK worth bothering with. Everywhere else is full of pissed-up chavs.
I guess you're just a yokel though, if you don't like cities. Here's a tip - some people like to do more with their evenings than hang out in the barn fucking pigs.
No, it doesn't fix it.
They aren't bookmarks, the history is emptied. Try it, use a sqlite browser and take a look in your .mozilla directory, it NEVER gets rid of your tracks.
I don't *hate* the awesome bar, but firefox is not a good browser for privacy since it came along.
No, you can't. The awesome bar reads them from it's database again later.
There is no way, from the GUI, to stop firefox recording stuff. Go into your .mozilla/firefox// and run strings on places.sqlite
Everything you ever visited is in there.
Whilst you can change the look, there seems to be no way to stop it storing a full history in its location database which you cannot wipe with the privacy settings.
This, IMHO, sucks!
And get paid for it! Don't forget that bit!
Yeah, sound sucky doesn't it? I had hoped that we were starting to see the end of "this feature crippled by your carrier, instead here's a button that'll take you to our website (and charge you for that)".
Like having to scroll ALL THE WAY down the page?
(sorry if you didn't know that, or I've missed the sarcasm, no snark intended. If you just keep scrollin' on down the answers are usually there at the bottom.)
History and sociology don't play a part
Is that solely a US thing?
Here in the UK, when you do a degree you study aspects of that subject only. No "you must take a language or arts subject", you just study what you came for.
I don't want to get into the relative merits and comparative breadth of education here, but I liked being immersed only in the subject I was there for.
Hey, sorry to post that and then leave...
I did install linux on it but I've barely used that capability. It's a pretty capable media player without needing linux. You can put stuff onto an external drive if you want, either a USB flash drive or (what we do) you set up media sharing on another box and stream video over the network.
I have a headless linux server that does torrents. There's a program called "Mediatomb" that allows you to share media over UPnP. The PS3 just finds these servers on the local network and allows you to browse the shares. Windows (vista or 7) can share using media player and appear in the same way. It's pretty cool. Most stuff doesn't even need to be transcoded in any way. And if the network's being crap, as ours sometimes is, you can tell it to copy the video to its internal drive, then watch it locally.
I know a lot of folks dislike the PS3, but I love it. We use it as a media box more than a games machine now.