Familiar with Boo? I love it -- it has much of Python's easy-on-the-eyes (and fingers) goodness but with compile-time type inference (capable of Python-style duck typing, but only when explicitly requested).
For those who don't know enough Python to see this as a troll -- this could only happen in such a way as to cause undesired flow control (rather than an up-front parse error) if one isn't following PEP-8 conventions and is mixing tabs and spaces. Newer interpreters will stop this from happening anyhow, and static checking tools for Python will catch it (and have caught mixed-whitespace conditions for ages).
If one is following PEP-8, a single space being wrong could cause an up-front syntax error, but never invalid runtime behavior.
So, to the parent -- if you genuinely allowed code that won't pass pychecker (or even allow a module import w/o raising a syntax error) onto a production system, you might as well upload C source to a critical system without so much as compiling it on dev or QA hosts first; either way, you deserve what's coming to you.
The second best "genius coder" I know has an excellent sense of design (his job title usually has "architect" in it somewhere) and does test-first development for every piece of code he writes, every time, no exceptions. His code is as solid as one would expect.
The best "genius coder" I know is one of Linus's lieutenants. If his code wasn't solid, he'd lose his standing in the community -- and it is solid, tremendously so, even though his workflow is of the cowboy variety (and his productivity is easily on the scale of 30x that of a more conventional developer -- I've seen him write working video drivers for embedded chipsets from nothing more than a white paper in less than a day). That's genius. Your average cowboy may think they're good, but there are folks out there whose skillset defies conventional thinking... just not many of them.
How can we make it more efficient? Stick an anorexic child in the car, that'll reduce the weight, how ingenuitive!
If you were paying attention, the contest rules specified a minimum weight for the driver, and otherwise did work to limit the surface area of the problem.
If different teams found different ways of making improvements within those constraints -- good! Some subset of them might be applicable to larger-scale passenger vehicles; some of them might be applicable to unmanned robotic vehicles (there are entities that use those, y'know, and they do need fuel of one kind or another); some of them might be useful for something completely unforeseen (say, better small-scale generators).
If one of the technologies that comes out of this needs refinement to be productized, fine -- that's what startups and industry partnerships are for. This kind of competition, OTOH, serves as a forum to get those ideas generated and into proof-of-concept stage in the first place (and to get new engineers acquainted with the technologies and challenges involved in the field); productization can come later.
You remind me of one of those people who decries ${CHARITY_ONE} because they think the volunteers' effort would be better spent on ${CHARITY_TWO}. 'Ya know what? World's big enough for both.
I just don't see the benefit of working for startups, as the other poster talked about, unless you stand to really gain from it monetarily (by being a co-owner). You work really LONG hours, your pay sucks, and for what?
Who works for a startup that doesn't grant them a significant equity stake? I think you're coloring startup jobs inaccurately -- sane people taking them make sure they have plenty of upside to compensate for the risk. Insane people... well, that's their problem.:-P
And as for the pay -- one of the advantages of working with a startup is that anyone has potential for personal recognition from upper management, and thus the ability to negotiate pay scales only available with direct involvement from the same. My new employer is large and well-off -- but I made better money (before considering potential upside on the stock options) at the end of my tenure with the "penniless" startup preceding them.
Bull. The star DBA I work with isn't all that young -- but he's in massive demand.
He's positioned himself well, has an outstanding skillset, is eager to learn new things, is easy to work with -- and has no problems finding work, supposed ageism in IT or no.
Now, is it easier for a mediocre individual in IT if they're young? Absolutely. But if you're a star, you're a star.
That's silly. Where I live, employment is at-will for both parties -- you can quite at any time for any reason or no reason, and you can be fired at any time for any reason or no reason (excepting reasons related to being in a protected class).
Frankly, I think it's a sensible arrangement. Protect employees too much, and your economy ends up like France -- companies scared to hire anyone the least bit inexperienced on account of the risk that they might need to let them go but be unable.
My personal view is that people should be allowed to own guns, but only after completing an appropriate training course that includes written and practical examinations. That's the law of the land in many states, including the loonie leftist bastions of Arizona, Texas and Florida.
In Texas, at least, that's untrue. Concealed carry requires a license. Owning a shotgun (probably the ideal weapon for home defense) does not.
If you don't know what kind of change Obama is for, it's because you haven't been paying attention -- he only wrote a book on the topic years ago, after all. If you don't grok from his speeches, go read The Audacity of Hope and get back to me, mmm-kay?
It's not just about the policies; it's about the politics of how those policies are selected and implemented as well. Considering stakeholders on the other side of the aisle for reasons more than just cobbling enough votes to get a bill passed, being willing to admit that the other side might have a point at times... and yes, intelligent policies too; if you want to know the details of what those are, there's reams published by the campaign.
My apologies for my tone -- I'm well overdue for some sleep -- but I'm very, very tired of this "but what kind of change?" argument, when what kind of change Obama stands for was clear years ago to anyone willing to do some homework.
Let me clue you in. Just because you do not believe in god does not excuse you from having a religious framework. At a high level, this is easy enough to prove: if there is no god, and yet, religion exists, then religion must be solely a human invention and a social framework with exclusionary membership requirements. Basically, if people can act in a religious capacity and there is no god, then, it follows that people do act in a religious capacity even when they do not believe in God. By itself, this is begging the premise, but the factuality of that statement has been born out in godless societies, such as communism and atheistic liberalism.
For that reason, I don't accept that atheists can be fair minded or decent people because I think you are all self delusional. You've absolved yourselves of a supposed crime, belief in God, that actually has no bearing on the behaviors that you ascribe to organizing around such beliefs. Lacking any sense of awareness of what you really are, but having the same organizational bent as a religion, you are more likely than any other organization to engage in the behavior that you accuse religions of.
How does a natural tendency of religion to form in societies left to themselves imply an obligation for such to occur? Does a natural tendency to have our teeth rot and fall out before we're 30 years old imply an obligation to eschew dental care? Part of the point of technology (applied memetics included) is overcoming those parts of the "natural order" which are suboptimal for us, either as individuals or as a society.
So yes, you do seek to destroy humanity in accordance with your religion. First, you deny humanity any sort of priviledge space despite you being a member of that group, and seek to stop those that would. Then, you argue that infanticide is justifiable because a fetus is not alive, while at the same time, you argue that animals should triumph over humans. We're all meat, you would argue, and so it is perfectly natural that a human should be eaten by a wolf or a bear as much as a human would eat a cow. It's justice to you.
At the end of the day, you ask that I and others do not discriminate against you for your beliefs? That's crazy. How could we not despise you. I want to associate with people, and be led by people, that want humans to eat cows and not be eaten by bears. It's better for -our team-, the human team. If you want to give up an arm or a leg for the bears to eat, go right ahead, but, since you aren't willing to play on the human team, then there's no reason to compel the rest of us to trust you, as you already said we cannot.
So -- why do I want humanity to eat cows and not be eaten by bears? Because generally speaking, humanity is smarter than they are. Simple enough? I'm not on the "human team", and I think the whole idea of having one is as silly as a "red-haired bipeds" team; I'm on the sapience team, and so are you. Cut a little differently around the edges as you may -- either way, we're still on the same side, and infighting is nonproductive.
...but that's not the message given there week after week. The clips in question come from a few specific sermons -- which aren't, as a whole, as inciteful as the specific elements cut from them and aired -- given shortly after Obama decided to run for President, and for which he was not himself present.
Were controversial messages given from the pulpit while Obama was present? Absolutely. Hateful? No -- and when Obama heard about the sermons in question going close to that line, his decision to stay with the church was significantly influenced by knowledge of Wright's impending retirement.
I grew up in a church where the sermons given rotated between the board of elders -- and several of them preached things I absolutely wouldn't want to be associated with today. What I do know about Obama -- the friends he keeps, his considered thought process (The Audacity of Hope reveals much about his thought process -- and how he takes detailed, considered, multi-sided views on issues others see through partisan glasses -- additionally confirmed by every piece I've read by someone who's worked with him or knows him personally), and -- yes -- his elloquence, makes me excited to be represented by a President I can believe in.
But hey, don't take my word for it -- ask Huckabee.
It would matter... why? Raw assertion isn't all that useful on its own.
BTW, I believe the formerly-open tool I used to use (and may still have a pre-relicensing copy around somewhere) became the commercial product KineticFusion, which appears to have been sold to QMeCom and folded into their product line... somewhere.
Sorry, infringing the copyright on a work that is given away for free precludes 4.
Look at the ruling on the Java Model Railroad Interface case, and then come back and tell me you want that kind of valuation determination to be generally accepted.
The cost for commercial use of a work, even if that work is freely provided for non-commercial use, is whatever price the author decides on for a differently-licensed copy. Look at the business model used by Trolltech -- do you think that the availability of a GPLed version of Qt makes the commercially-licensed one somehow less valuable? Likewise, if $20 is in fact the market value for use of a flash game on an average commercial web site (which I don't accept -- look at how much Disney pays for the games freely available for children to play on their websites), do you seriously think that most licensors will leave that price in place if the customer wishes to rebrand their product and remove all acknowledgements? Those changes cost money -- as acknowledgement is valuable in drumming up future business -- and this claim of a $20 market value is ludicrous on its face.
In this case, no pricing had been published or offered for commercial use -- but surely that information would have been available on request.
Decompilers are few and hard to come by (and one which was open source years ago has gone closed... though some of us still have copies of the OSS code), but flash disassemblers are plentiful. Folks may have a pre-license-change copy of the Free decompiler that went closed (sorry, don't remember the name, would have to check the hard drive on a separate machine that's turned off right now to find it), or they may be using a disassembler and describing it badly. Does it matter?
Find a friend with an iPhone. Borrow it for a few hours. I could talk about Apple's aesthetics-centric font rendering, the general enjoyability of the multitouch interface, or the quality of the layout engine... but really, it's the illusive "user experience" that makes it.
I don't doubt that Opera Mini is great on your phone -- but I also don't doubt that you're seeing it through the lens of your own expectations.
I think it gets the government out of a position it shouldn't have gotten into in the first place.
Almost all of the enforcement of private small-scale non-commercial copyright infringement has been through the civil courts anyhow -- and while enforcement as a civil action may not be as effective a deterrent as some may wish for, wasting the taxpayer's dollars and diverting the prosecutor's time from more deserving efforts has proven not to be more so.
Personally, I think making the legal purchase of music online as easy as possible has done more than any other effort to solve the problem -- the thing about Napster wasn't just that it was free, but that it was convenient. Having DRM-free tracks available at reasonable prices makes doing the right thing the easy thing -- and given that, it only takes a small nudge (via the threat of civil action if not by conscience) to get those folks who would do the right thing to actually do so.
Hmm. State patronage does solve the music piracy problem, but I don't think it applies well to other fields like software. Coming up with such a system artists can opt into but which isn't easily gamed is a tricky problem, though.
Why would I want to send a photo by MMS (and have to have a MMS-supporting plan or pay my service provider per-message) when I can send it in its original format and size as an email attachment for free?
Sure, some functionality I don't care about is gone, but what's actually there is better.
Art existed long before copyright did -- but was paid for by a sponsoring patron.
I am absolutely not a copyright abolitionist (though I do think terms should be reduced to something more reasonable -- scale of 20 years or so) -- but to argue in the direction that no art would be created without copyright is fallacious. Less art, certainly... but that's a price some people may be willing to pay.
Given the priorities I outlined (re mobile device selection), Java support is a non sequitur. I don't doubt that it's legitimately important to other people, but I never once installed a Java app on my Blackberry in over two years and personally couldn't care less.
Do you think the Nintendo Wii has a decent web browser?
I find it unbearably frustrating to use -- and that's Opera running with a much bigger screen at a higher resolution with a much higher-bandwidth input device than what your average phone provides. So call me a snob when it comes to my web browsers -- but the iPhone's browser doesn't make me want to throw the device at a wall, and in that regard it's the first decent mobile web browser I've touched.
Look -- Opera Mobile may be good enough for you. It's probably good enough for most people. If their Wii port is any indication, I'm pretty darned sure I'd hate it. I'm not trying to argue that everyone should have an iPhone -- just that some subset of those who do may well have made that purchase for a reason other than wanting to look trendy.
Re the large-high-res-screen thing -- I've seen other mobile devices with comparable or better screens; some of Nokia's internet tablets are great in that respect (and while I haven't used them long enough to compare the browser to Mobile Safari, the screens are fantastic). However, those devices don't double as phones except over VoIP (when appropriate connectivity is available), and I can't justify purchasing a Nokia tablet and a separate cell phone, complete with separate plans for each.
Without the (comparatively) large, high-res screen and multitouch interface, I'm skeptical -- it's not the rendering quality but the clunky scroll wheel interface that soured me on the Blackberry's browser (though granted, the rendering quality didn't help any either, and that aspect could have been fixed by using Opera Mobile). The interface is critical to quick page navigation, and the screen is critical to actually getting enough text in there at once for readability.
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Familiar with Boo? I love it -- it has much of Python's easy-on-the-eyes (and fingers) goodness but with compile-time type inference (capable of Python-style duck typing, but only when explicitly requested).
For those who don't know enough Python to see this as a troll -- this could only happen in such a way as to cause undesired flow control (rather than an up-front parse error) if one isn't following PEP-8 conventions and is mixing tabs and spaces. Newer interpreters will stop this from happening anyhow, and static checking tools for Python will catch it (and have caught mixed-whitespace conditions for ages).
If one is following PEP-8, a single space being wrong could cause an up-front syntax error, but never invalid runtime behavior.
So, to the parent -- if you genuinely allowed code that won't pass pychecker (or even allow a module import w/o raising a syntax error) onto a production system, you might as well upload C source to a critical system without so much as compiling it on dev or QA hosts first; either way, you deserve what's coming to you.
You confuse "cowboy" with "genius".
The second best "genius coder" I know has an excellent sense of design (his job title usually has "architect" in it somewhere) and does test-first development for every piece of code he writes, every time, no exceptions. His code is as solid as one would expect.
The best "genius coder" I know is one of Linus's lieutenants. If his code wasn't solid, he'd lose his standing in the community -- and it is solid, tremendously so, even though his workflow is of the cowboy variety (and his productivity is easily on the scale of 30x that of a more conventional developer -- I've seen him write working video drivers for embedded chipsets from nothing more than a white paper in less than a day). That's genius. Your average cowboy may think they're good, but there are folks out there whose skillset defies conventional thinking... just not many of them.
If different teams found different ways of making improvements within those constraints -- good! Some subset of them might be applicable to larger-scale passenger vehicles; some of them might be applicable to unmanned robotic vehicles (there are entities that use those, y'know, and they do need fuel of one kind or another); some of them might be useful for something completely unforeseen (say, better small-scale generators).
If one of the technologies that comes out of this needs refinement to be productized, fine -- that's what startups and industry partnerships are for. This kind of competition, OTOH, serves as a forum to get those ideas generated and into proof-of-concept stage in the first place (and to get new engineers acquainted with the technologies and challenges involved in the field); productization can come later.
You remind me of one of those people who decries ${CHARITY_ONE} because they think the volunteers' effort would be better spent on ${CHARITY_TWO}. 'Ya know what? World's big enough for both.
And as for the pay -- one of the advantages of working with a startup is that anyone has potential for personal recognition from upper management, and thus the ability to negotiate pay scales only available with direct involvement from the same. My new employer is large and well-off -- but I made better money (before considering potential upside on the stock options) at the end of my tenure with the "penniless" startup preceding them.
Bull. The star DBA I work with isn't all that young -- but he's in massive demand.
He's positioned himself well, has an outstanding skillset, is eager to learn new things, is easy to work with -- and has no problems finding work, supposed ageism in IT or no.
Now, is it easier for a mediocre individual in IT if they're young? Absolutely. But if you're a star, you're a star.
That's silly. Where I live, employment is at-will for both parties -- you can quite at any time for any reason or no reason, and you can be fired at any time for any reason or no reason (excepting reasons related to being in a protected class).
Frankly, I think it's a sensible arrangement. Protect employees too much, and your economy ends up like France -- companies scared to hire anyone the least bit inexperienced on account of the risk that they might need to let them go but be unable.
If you don't know what kind of change Obama is for, it's because you haven't been paying attention -- he only wrote a book on the topic years ago, after all. If you don't grok from his speeches, go read The Audacity of Hope and get back to me, mmm-kay?
It's not just about the policies; it's about the politics of how those policies are selected and implemented as well. Considering stakeholders on the other side of the aisle for reasons more than just cobbling enough votes to get a bill passed, being willing to admit that the other side might have a point at times... and yes, intelligent policies too; if you want to know the details of what those are, there's reams published by the campaign.
My apologies for my tone -- I'm well overdue for some sleep -- but I'm very, very tired of this "but what kind of change?" argument, when what kind of change Obama stands for was clear years ago to anyone willing to do some homework.
The Day of Jerusalem's Fall (on 9/11)
Confusing God and Government (with the "God Damn America" quote)
Listen to them start to end, then come back and tell me it's hateful.
...but that's not the message given there week after week. The clips in question come from a few specific sermons -- which aren't, as a whole, as inciteful as the specific elements cut from them and aired -- given shortly after Obama decided to run for President, and for which he was not himself present.
Were controversial messages given from the pulpit while Obama was present? Absolutely. Hateful? No -- and when Obama heard about the sermons in question going close to that line, his decision to stay with the church was significantly influenced by knowledge of Wright's impending retirement.
I grew up in a church where the sermons given rotated between the board of elders -- and several of them preached things I absolutely wouldn't want to be associated with today. What I do know about Obama -- the friends he keeps, his considered thought process (The Audacity of Hope reveals much about his thought process -- and how he takes detailed, considered, multi-sided views on issues others see through partisan glasses -- additionally confirmed by every piece I've read by someone who's worked with him or knows him personally), and -- yes -- his elloquence, makes me excited to be represented by a President I can believe in.
But hey, don't take my word for it -- ask Huckabee.
It would matter... why? Raw assertion isn't all that useful on its own.
BTW, I believe the formerly-open tool I used to use (and may still have a pre-relicensing copy around somewhere) became the commercial product KineticFusion, which appears to have been sold to QMeCom and folded into their product line... somewhere.
The cost for commercial use of a work, even if that work is freely provided for non-commercial use, is whatever price the author decides on for a differently-licensed copy. Look at the business model used by Trolltech -- do you think that the availability of a GPLed version of Qt makes the commercially-licensed one somehow less valuable? Likewise, if $20 is in fact the market value for use of a flash game on an average commercial web site (which I don't accept -- look at how much Disney pays for the games freely available for children to play on their websites), do you seriously think that most licensors will leave that price in place if the customer wishes to rebrand their product and remove all acknowledgements? Those changes cost money -- as acknowledgement is valuable in drumming up future business -- and this claim of a $20 market value is ludicrous on its face.
In this case, no pricing had been published or offered for commercial use -- but surely that information would have been available on request.
Decompilers are few and hard to come by (and one which was open source years ago has gone closed... though some of us still have copies of the OSS code), but flash disassemblers are plentiful. Folks may have a pre-license-change copy of the Free decompiler that went closed (sorry, don't remember the name, would have to check the hard drive on a separate machine that's turned off right now to find it), or they may be using a disassembler and describing it badly. Does it matter?
So we've got different priorities. I don't want a massive collection of features I'll never use; I want the features I do use, done right.
Find a friend with an iPhone. Borrow it for a few hours. I could talk about Apple's aesthetics-centric font rendering, the general enjoyability of the multitouch interface, or the quality of the layout engine... but really, it's the illusive "user experience" that makes it.
I don't doubt that Opera Mini is great on your phone -- but I also don't doubt that you're seeing it through the lens of your own expectations.
Remember, I'm talking about the phone that's best for me, not the phone that's best for you.
I think it gets the government out of a position it shouldn't have gotten into in the first place.
Almost all of the enforcement of private small-scale non-commercial copyright infringement has been through the civil courts anyhow -- and while enforcement as a civil action may not be as effective a deterrent as some may wish for, wasting the taxpayer's dollars and diverting the prosecutor's time from more deserving efforts has proven not to be more so.
Personally, I think making the legal purchase of music online as easy as possible has done more than any other effort to solve the problem -- the thing about Napster wasn't just that it was free, but that it was convenient. Having DRM-free tracks available at reasonable prices makes doing the right thing the easy thing -- and given that, it only takes a small nudge (via the threat of civil action if not by conscience) to get those folks who would do the right thing to actually do so.
Hmm. State patronage does solve the music piracy problem, but I don't think it applies well to other fields like software. Coming up with such a system artists can opt into but which isn't easily gamed is a tricky problem, though.
Why would I want to send a photo by MMS (and have to have a MMS-supporting plan or pay my service provider per-message) when I can send it in its original format and size as an email attachment for free?
Sure, some functionality I don't care about is gone, but what's actually there is better.
Art existed long before copyright did -- but was paid for by a sponsoring patron.
I am absolutely not a copyright abolitionist (though I do think terms should be reduced to something more reasonable -- scale of 20 years or so) -- but to argue in the direction that no art would be created without copyright is fallacious. Less art, certainly... but that's a price some people may be willing to pay.
Given the priorities I outlined (re mobile device selection), Java support is a non sequitur. I don't doubt that it's legitimately important to other people, but I never once installed a Java app on my Blackberry in over two years and personally couldn't care less.
Let me back up a bit here.
Do you think the Nintendo Wii has a decent web browser?
I find it unbearably frustrating to use -- and that's Opera running with a much bigger screen at a higher resolution with a much higher-bandwidth input device than what your average phone provides. So call me a snob when it comes to my web browsers -- but the iPhone's browser doesn't make me want to throw the device at a wall, and in that regard it's the first decent mobile web browser I've touched.
Look -- Opera Mobile may be good enough for you. It's probably good enough for most people. If their Wii port is any indication, I'm pretty darned sure I'd hate it. I'm not trying to argue that everyone should have an iPhone -- just that some subset of those who do may well have made that purchase for a reason other than wanting to look trendy.
Re the large-high-res-screen thing -- I've seen other mobile devices with comparable or better screens; some of Nokia's internet tablets are great in that respect (and while I haven't used them long enough to compare the browser to Mobile Safari, the screens are fantastic). However, those devices don't double as phones except over VoIP (when appropriate connectivity is available), and I can't justify purchasing a Nokia tablet and a separate cell phone, complete with separate plans for each.
Without the (comparatively) large, high-res screen and multitouch interface, I'm skeptical -- it's not the rendering quality but the clunky scroll wheel interface that soured me on the Blackberry's browser (though granted, the rendering quality didn't help any either, and that aspect could have been fixed by using Opera Mobile). The interface is critical to quick page navigation, and the screen is critical to actually getting enough text in there at once for readability.