I'm not too familiar with the implementation details of Python. Does it use a JIT, or is it purely interpreted? Because, if it doesn't use a JIT, it's probably slower than Java...
There is a JIT for Python but it is not as mature and integrated as Java's.
In fact... Java is a compiled language. If I run "python" from the shell, I can start typing in Python. This feeds it through a parser and whatnot before actually doing any work. Which means that even if Python has a JIT, it's doing the work of two: compiler and runtime.
That's right. It is helping you out by combining two steps into one rather than requiring you to do them yourself. Then it caches the result of the compilation step so that after the first run through it uses bytecodes just like Java. The only difference is that Java requires you to do that first compilation manually so you'll feel like you're using a more manly implementation rather than a helpful one.
It seems to me, not knowing much about the Python interpreter, that Java has the potential of being much faster than python...
Python makes it much easier to take bits of code and rewrite them in C, C++ (which is already the implementation language of OpenOffice) or compiled Pyrex. That means that in practice Python programs often run rings around Java programs where people are more reluctant to do that performance-oriented refactoring.
Neither Python nor Java are fast enough to write heavy office-style desktop apps in. The high level language is presumably mostly wrapper around C/C++ which does the performance-oriented heavy lifting.
I don't see how that point of view is "practical" at all. Did you live in that spot when it was a desert or covered with ice? Would you have wanted to? If not, then why would you have a blase attitude about ACCELERATING climate change?
Furthermore, I don't see why you believe that we could not contribute to massive climate change. We are provably changing the atmosphere. If we kept doing so indefinitely then why wouldn't the climate keep changing? The climate we have today is totally different than before the earth had life (oxygen-based atmosphere) so why wouldn't the climate of the future be different than before the earth had industry?
A shoutcast server does not use AM radio so I don't really see how it is the "same thing". In one case you are broadcasting over the Internet to a certain set of listeners (mostly people sitting at their computers). In the other you are broadcasting over the airwaves (e.g. to people in cars).
They are just examples. The point is that innovation continues in the software industry. If we discount the bubble, the industry is as exciting and innovative as it has been. I'd much rather be working in it now than in the 1980s on DOS stuff in assembly or the early 90s on Windows 3.x crap in C. In those days apps could not depend on a network being available because they seldom were. So the kinds of apps we built were much less collaborative and connected: IMHO, less interesting.
I can't understand the negativity. You say: It used to be that this was a field where you could really innovate and have fun with it; anymore, I don't see that.
Don't you think that they are having fun at Google? At Flickr? At Del.ic.ios? At Red Hat? At Opera? Even at some of the more advanced parts of Microsoft? Sure, there are a bunch of boring jobs working on accounting and CRM systems. But CS always had its dull projects (COBOL anyone?). The situation is as exciting today as it has ever been. Consider trends like the rise in web-based services, open source software, the move to higher level dynamic languages, new devices, etc. Things are as exciting as they have been.
I haven't followed the details. Linus has stated on a few occasions that he has ways of getting all of the data and metadata out of Bitkeeper without hacking the protocol. That's his statement, not mine.
I think I understand Linus' thinking about this based on some of his emails that were not as widely circulated as others. Linus is a pragmatist. He doesn't see open source or reverse engineering as intrinsically morally good or bad.
He sees them as good things if they produce good (profitable, valuable) results. He is upset with Tridge because he believes that Tridge had no good (profitable, valuable) end-game. Tridge's actions were destined to destroy the cooperation between the Linux kernel team and BitKeeper. Yet there is no situation in which those actions lead to benefit to either the kernel team, or the open source community or the BitKeeper company (in Linus' opinion). Here he is in his own words.
Tridge wanted to create a tool that checked out BK trees
for people who didn't sign the license. But it still
needed BK to actually do anything useful - since it would
not actually do the work that BK did.
"Hey, that's a useful helper". Yes, except when it isn't.
And it isn't, if releasing it just causes the BK protocols
to change, and people who used BK in the first place to
have to stop using it, and when using the tool against a
BK repository is a violation of the license that the BK
user agreed to.
See the problem now? Tridge's tool would have been useful
if that usage had been sanctioned by BitMover. But since
that tool ends up invalidating your right to use BK in
the first place, and since that tool can not replace
what BK did, then yes, the tool is pointless.
So you have three choices
- don't use the tool (which makes it useless)
- use the tool, but stop using BK (which makes it useless)
- use the tool _and_ use BK, which violates the BK
license
Two useless cases, and one outright license violation.
Now, let's look at a _constructive_ case: let's say that
Tridge had written a really good SCM. Now the choice would
be:
- use the tool (cool, that works)
- use BK (cool, that also works)
and everybody would be happy. If a developer wanted to
switch to Tridges hypothetical tool, BK comes with the
stuff needed to export your own data.
In other words, it wasn't the act of reverse engineering that is wrong. It is the act of screwing up Linus' life and BitKeeper's advertising scheme without having any beneficial side effects.
"Visa regulations" do not accompany "outsourcing". Visa regulations accompany the importation of foreign workers. The problems cited with outsourcing are mostly related to distance.
Civ 3 is a very graphically rich game. There are tons of animations and vector graphics. I don't think it is outrageous to encourage the Freeciv developers to invest in the same. It does make a difference to the enjoyment of game play. I love the little jets bombing my opponents into oblivion.
Purely because the Telephone System is the communications hub of most businesses. It's the one thing you don't expect to go down - so reliability is critical.
Do you have some inside knowledge that indicates that Asterisk is unreliable? I hadn't heard that.
There's no vendor backup, etc - same with most Open Source software, and while that wouldn't be an issue with most other applications - PBX's are a different kettle of fish.
I don't know what you mean by "vendor backup". If you buy a Asterisk-based solution then it is backed by your solution provider. They have access to the source code in the same way that a proprietary software vendor has access to the source code. On the other hand, unlike the situation with a proprietary software vendor, there is competition between solution providers with equal access to the source code.
It's the one thing you don't expect to go down - so reliability is critical.
Google.com and Amazon.com are both based in large part on open source software. Would you say that reliability is not "critical" for their websites?
I'm by no means an open source zealot (I write proprietary software) but I can't let illogic just pass by. There is some highly reliable open source software and some highly reliable proprietary software. And there is some crappy open source and proprietary software out there.
The original BSD developer for the TCP stack has no access to the MS implementation of that stack - since they slapped a proprietary license on it.
The TCP protocol is more important than the BSD implementation of the TCP protocol. Therefore the developer is probably happy that Microsoft used their implementation and made a more compatible TCP stack than they would have if they had implemented from scratch. Why would the BSD TCP implementor want Microsoft's Windows-specific hacks back in the code base? Simiarly, Python's developers would be overjoyed if Microsoft adopted Python and embedded it in Windows and Office. They wouldn't call this theft. They would call this a new distribution channel for their code which is a good thing overall.
If capital is free to move about the globe but labor isn't, then all that the owning class has to do to keep control is to keep moving from the rich, expensive countries to the poor, cheap countries. They let the rich countries become poor again, and then move back.
You talk as if capital is a cooperative conspiracy. But capitalists compete and it is not competitive to abandon a country to poverty once it has built up infrastructure that makes it more efficient. Instead you want to keep some types of labour in high-cost countries to take advantage of their infrastructure and some in low-cost countries to take advantage of their labour costs. Furthermore, once a country becomes rich, its citizens become valuable consumers which means that they need a huge services sector and that sector means jobs.
It's all about cheap labor, and if you think it's "Us" (the US and the West) vs. "Them" (China, India, etc.) then you have bought into the lie that the ruling class uses to keep control.
It isn't about "us" versus "them" at all. I mean don't dispute that rich people have interests that are sometimes at odds with poor people, but I do dispute that this is the dominant organizational conflict of our time. If I had to pick any particular group of people to be the "them" to our "us" I'd choose Islamic fundamentalists or Authoritarian governments. Bill Gates and Warren Buffet cause much less international misery than Mugabe and Bin Laden. (you might even throw the creeping authoritarianism of the Bush administration into the mix)
I'm not in the music industry and I'm not against P2P but I disagree with you that the P2P thing is a red herring. If Napster was still around and unmolested for a decade or so, it WOULD gradually have wiped out the CD business. Napster was so much more convenient, had so much more volume, and was basically better than CDs in every way. And that was before broadband was as ubiquitous as it is today. Today's P2P applications are not as good and are always changing so they are not as much of a threat. Let's have some intellectual honesty: CDs are an obsolete medium in slow-mo decline and most people prefer "free" (file sharing) to "cheap" (iTunes).
Sorry, I don't buy your argument. In the first case, the resistent bacteria is so rare as to be irrelevant before the anti-bacterial soap forced the adaptation of the species. So for all practical purposes, the anti-bacterial soap caused the adapted bacterial species to come into meaningful existence.
The human design metaphor actually fits your statistical situation. Just as a human being will sometimes (statistically) find an answer to a problem, evolution will (statistically) sometimes "figure out" how to dodge an environmental bullet. And sometimes it will not.
I came back to join this debate after a day of thinking about the issue because it seems to me that the "design metaphors" are very powerful because we need to get across to the populace that things that seem designed were, in a sense, designed: by evolution, not by an intelligence.
A Sun employee once pointed out to me that the genious of Sun's management is seeming much bigger than they are by staying in the news. Historically that was done by attacking Microsoft which made it seem as if they must be the same size as Microsoft. Now I guess they are trying to figure out a controversial new message that will keep them in the news.
You seem to think that 80 of 48 hours is a massive number of stories. Let's presume that there is only one editor working at a time in 8 hour shifts. Then the editor needs to post one article every half an hour. They don't need to write the interesting content: someone else does that. They don't need to find or summarize the content: the submitter does that. Presuming that the Slashdot CMS software is half-way comparable to the various free programs I've used (I haven't tried Slash), the editor basically selects the post, writes a sentence of text, writes a department-line and selects a category.
Doing this in half an hour is not a heroic act. In fact, I am pretty confident that the scroll rate of Slashdot is selected based upon their perception of reader preferences, not based upon the rate at which they can post. Frankly, it seems like a cushy job to me.
By the way, I've never done a dupe-complaining post myself. You started this meta-thread about whether dupe-yellers and I got involved because it seemed ludicrous to me that you are complaining about consumers asking editors to... er... edit.
Other commercial media sources don't find it so difficult. There is nothing uniquely difficult about editing Slashdot. Many sites (with much higher volume) actually link new articles to PREVIOUS articles on the same topic: this is much harder than finding out if such a previous article exists.
If Clippy is popular then why did Microsoft decide to hide it by default?
With regard to the registry: it violates two principles of good software architecture. First, you want to minimize the multiplication of namespaces and data access methods. Second, you don't want corruption of a single file to result in an inability to access your whole system.
You could argue that relational databases tend to violate these principles as well but the truth is that when they are used in volume applications they _are_ the data store and the metadata store and the single, unified namespace as well. They also have many more corruption-fighting features than does the registry.
2.) Why isn't there an accounting of the people who didn't catch the original stories? The 1 second lost by you may be gained by me because I don't sit on Slashdot reading every single story.
According to this logic, Slashdot should run every article over and over again in case someone missed it. If there is a problem with people "missing" articles that they would have wanted to see then personalization features are a much better solution than accidentally posting the same thing multiple times even for those who DID read it the first time.
"Ultimately it is just the lack of professionalism and respect for the audience that is galling."
What's so galling about it? Why is this galling, but Slashdot posting a story you already read on Yahoo news isn't?
I'd appreciate it if you would read what I wrote before responding. The answer to your question is above. A Slashdot editor posting an article from Slashdot is doing his job. A Slashdot editor reposting a dupe is just lazy. I guess I'll just admit that I'm offended by laziness in service providers. I also don't like typos in newspapers, dead air between television shows, poorly informed journalism, etc.
Don't answer just yet, think about it. I mean, you've mentioned that you are offended by Editors not constantly reading up on Slashdot, but have you taken any consideration at all into how the system works? They get tons of story submissions a day. In order to make Slashdot work, they probably queue up the story for publishing. In this case, it's possible for two seperate people to okay a story.
As you point out, Slashdot is a software system. This implies that there are two different ways to to solve the problem: manual and automatic. Let's take this most recent example. Slashdot is a linking system. So an important hint about the purpose of a post is its links. One of the dupes has a single link. The other has two. The one link is duplicated across the two articles. Therefore the slashdot CMS could easily inform the editor: "Warning: this article has links that are similar to these other articles:...". Using fuzzy matching it could easily pick up all articles about Opera recently but even just using exact text matching it could have picked up this particular dupe.
On the other hand, the manual way of doing this is pretty straightforward as well. You are posting something about "Opera". So you query the site and the queue for articles about "Opera". If there is something similar on the site or the queue then you don't add the new submission to the queue. It would add five minutes of effort to each article post. They can't be bothered to spend five extra minutes per story to make a more professional product. As someone who DOES try to make professional products , it bothers me.
Heck, even if it's the same editor, how can you expect him to be the memory man? Slashdot is very active. In the last two days there have been seventy seven articles posted. (I know this because I subscribe to the RSS feed.) How can they not have dupes?
Think it through. How does usatoday.com not have dupes? How does the New York Times not have dupes? They have editors. That's what editors do. Slashdot "queue clearers" call themselves editors but they are too lazy to do the job. Seventy seven articles over two days is not really that much to keep in one's head.
Eh forget everything I just said. What I find most comical about this rant about dupes is that Slashdot actually disclaims [slashdot.org] that there may be dupes. If this is so fricken unacceptable, then why even bother hanging around? I mean, if you go to McDonald's, and there's a sign saying "You may be kicked in the balls", can you really get mad about somebody attempting a field goal?
Sure. Why not? The EULA for every piece of software you buy says that you may encounter bugs but that doesn't mean that you accept the bugs happily. A parking garage sign may say that they take n
Dupes annoy me for the following reason: I am a professional. I try to put care into meeting my customer's needs. I expect the people who provide services to me (ad-sponsored and paid alike) to do the same. A Slashdot editor who cannot be bothered to read Slashdot insults me on a variety of levels: first, Slashdot is such a trivial medium that even its editors cannot be bothered to read it. So why do I read it? I guess I'm the fool. Second, my time is worth so little that they have the right to waste it, like a fast-food employee chatting on the phone with friends or a cable guy who says he'll arrive "sometime in the afternoon". Admittedly the dupe only wastes a second of my time but when you multiply that second across a tens of thousands of users it is actually quite costly.
Ultimately it is just the lack of professionalism and respect for the audience that is galling. The very nature of an "editor's" job is to save the readership from distracting little annoyances. An "editor" without professionalism should get a different job. They are like a computer programmer who doesn't think logically.
Your post is confusing. First you say that prefetching doesn't work that well in practice and present a link to Simon Willison's blog. But the blog says that prefetching is an "excellent feature" except for a couple of quirks in Mozilla's implementation. Google does not trigger those quirks so they are irrelevant.
Then you go off on a tangent about how "real software engineers" think through their design decisions more than "open source hackers". This is
totally contrary to my experience. I would more highly rate the software engineering of Mozilla against Internet Explorer, Unix versus Windows or Apache versus IIS. I could go through a long list of brutal design decisions in commercial software that did not hold up in the real world but I'll just mention Clippy and the Windows registry as two high-profile examples.
Finally, it is Google, a commercial software services company that is the topic of the article. So your whole argument is self-defeating. Either Google doesn't conform to your vision of real software engineering or the feature is not really at odds with real software engineering.
Mod parent up. It's really not as complicated as slashdot readers want it to be. Hell, notepad is the same. Some windows apps expect it to be there (try "view source" in IE). But that doesn't mean that it uses a bunch of super-mojo windows APIs that nobody else could emulate.
Re:My undocumented research...
on
Contrabandwidth
·
· Score: 1
This is what I see happening. I'm worried that, by the time I enter the workforce in several years, and almost certainly by the end of it, workers will be no more than a commodity.
What does that mean? That corporations will have no interest in whether their employees are talented or hard working? Despite your assertion, capitalism does prevent this from happening. The companies that invest just a bit more in the talented employees will succeed (Microsoft and Google are examples) and the ones that do not will fail (EDS seems like a likely candidate, though the example of Enron is more dramatic).
...
I like my women like I like my coffee: ground up and boiled.
What does that mean? Is it as mysoginistic as it sounds? Slashdot may be a (young) boy's club but we should not allow that sort of thing to pass by unremarked.
I wonder if this recent rise of very conservative religious fundamentalism in the USA and efforts to stop the presentation of things that contradict their view might not lead to the USA eventually falling beind in key sciences, and, as a consquence, losing its edge in the world of technology.
First: there is a lot of science that is uncontroversial. You don't need to believe in evolution to invent processes for etching silicon wafers. Second: only a very small percentage of the population needs to be scientific in order to remain leading edge. For every scientist there is an army of marketers and managers and lawyers and politicians and janitors and engineers and...
A good programmer will write readable code in any language he's writing in.
The world does not break down into three distinct camps: "Non-programmers", "Good programmers" and "bad programmers". Actually there is a spectrum and all programmers live somewhere along it. A language can encourage readability or discourage it. What does Perl do?
The TIMTOWTDI ethos is ultimately what makes the language as useful as it is. The more ways there are to do things, the more things you can do with a little creativity.
I'm sorry, one does not follow from the other at all. If I added a "+++" operator to C that increments by two then I now have at least three (obvious) ways to increment by two. Does that mean that I can now be more creative in C?
The myth that all Perl code is unreadable is preposterous.
Nobody claimed that in this thread.
I've written several very complex pieces of code in Perl that are not any more difficult to comprehend than any piece of C code designed to do the same thing, and often much less so.
Strange that you use C as your benchmark. How about a language designed in the last twenty years with readability as a goal? Perhaps Java, Python, Ruby, O'Caml, Haskell, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not too familiar with the implementation details of Python. Does it use a JIT, or is it purely interpreted? Because, if it doesn't use a JIT, it's probably slower than Java...
There is a JIT for Python but it is not as mature and integrated as Java's.
In fact... Java is a compiled language. If I run "python" from the shell, I can start typing in Python. This feeds it through a parser and whatnot before actually doing any work. Which means that even if Python has a JIT, it's doing the work of two: compiler and runtime.
That's right. It is helping you out by combining two steps into one rather than requiring you to do them yourself. Then it caches the result of the compilation step so that after the first run through it uses bytecodes just like Java. The only difference is that Java requires you to do that first compilation manually so you'll feel like you're using a more manly implementation rather than a helpful one.
It seems to me, not knowing much about the Python interpreter, that Java has the potential of being much faster than python...
Python makes it much easier to take bits of code and rewrite them in C, C++ (which is already the implementation language of OpenOffice) or compiled Pyrex. That means that in practice Python programs often run rings around Java programs where people are more reluctant to do that performance-oriented refactoring.
Neither Python nor Java are fast enough to write heavy office-style desktop apps in. The high level language is presumably mostly wrapper around C/C++ which does the performance-oriented heavy lifting.
Furthermore, I don't see why you believe that we could not contribute to massive climate change. We are provably changing the atmosphere. If we kept doing so indefinitely then why wouldn't the climate keep changing? The climate we have today is totally different than before the earth had life (oxygen-based atmosphere) so why wouldn't the climate of the future be different than before the earth had industry?
A shoutcast server does not use AM radio so I don't really see how it is the "same thing". In one case you are broadcasting over the Internet to a certain set of listeners (mostly people sitting at their computers). In the other you are broadcasting over the airwaves (e.g. to people in cars).
They are just examples. The point is that innovation continues in the software industry. If we discount the bubble, the industry is as exciting and innovative as it has been. I'd much rather be working in it now than in the 1980s on DOS stuff in assembly or the early 90s on Windows 3.x crap in C. In those days apps could not depend on a network being available because they seldom were. So the kinds of apps we built were much less collaborative and connected: IMHO, less interesting.
I can't understand the negativity. You say: It used to be that this was a field where you could really innovate and have fun with it; anymore, I don't see that.
Don't you think that they are having fun at Google? At Flickr? At Del.ic.ios? At Red Hat? At Opera? Even at some of the more advanced parts of Microsoft? Sure, there are a bunch of boring jobs working on accounting and CRM systems. But CS always had its dull projects (COBOL anyone?). The situation is as exciting today as it has ever been. Consider trends like the rise in web-based services, open source software, the move to higher level dynamic languages, new devices, etc. Things are as exciting as they have been.
I haven't followed the details. Linus has stated on a few occasions that he has ways of getting all of the data and metadata out of Bitkeeper without hacking the protocol. That's his statement, not mine.
I think I understand Linus' thinking about this based on some of his emails that were not as widely circulated as others. Linus is a pragmatist. He doesn't see open source or reverse engineering as intrinsically morally good or bad.
He sees them as good things if they produce good (profitable, valuable) results. He is upset with Tridge because he believes that Tridge had no good (profitable, valuable) end-game. Tridge's actions were destined to destroy the cooperation between the Linux kernel team and BitKeeper. Yet there is no situation in which those actions lead to benefit to either the kernel team, or the open source community or the BitKeeper company (in Linus' opinion). Here he is in his own words.
In other words, it wasn't the act of reverse engineering that is wrong. It is the act of screwing up Linus' life and BitKeeper's advertising scheme without having any beneficial side effects.
"Visa regulations" do not accompany "outsourcing". Visa regulations accompany the importation of foreign workers. The problems cited with outsourcing are mostly related to distance.
Civ 3 is a very graphically rich game. There are tons of animations and vector graphics. I don't think it is outrageous to encourage the Freeciv developers to invest in the same. It does make a difference to the enjoyment of game play. I love the little jets bombing my opponents into oblivion.
Purely because the Telephone System is the communications hub of most businesses. It's the one thing you don't expect to go down - so reliability is critical.
Do you have some inside knowledge that indicates that Asterisk is unreliable? I hadn't heard that.
There's no vendor backup, etc - same with most Open Source software, and while that wouldn't be an issue with most other applications - PBX's are a different kettle of fish.
I don't know what you mean by "vendor backup". If you buy a Asterisk-based solution then it is backed by your solution provider. They have access to the source code in the same way that a proprietary software vendor has access to the source code. On the other hand, unlike the situation with a proprietary software vendor, there is competition between solution providers with equal access to the source code.
It's the one thing you don't expect to go down - so reliability is critical.
Google.com and Amazon.com are both based in large part on open source software. Would you say that reliability is not "critical" for their websites?
I'm by no means an open source zealot (I write proprietary software) but I can't let illogic just pass by. There is some highly reliable open source software and some highly reliable proprietary software. And there is some crappy open source and proprietary software out there.
The original BSD developer for the TCP stack has no access to the MS implementation of that stack - since they slapped a proprietary license on it.
The TCP protocol is more important than the BSD implementation of the TCP protocol. Therefore the developer is probably happy that Microsoft used their implementation and made a more compatible TCP stack than they would have if they had implemented from scratch. Why would the BSD TCP implementor want Microsoft's Windows-specific hacks back in the code base? Simiarly, Python's developers would be overjoyed if Microsoft adopted Python and embedded it in Windows and Office. They wouldn't call this theft. They would call this a new distribution channel for their code which is a good thing overall.
If capital is free to move about the globe but labor isn't, then all that the owning class has to do to keep control is to keep moving from the rich, expensive countries to the poor, cheap countries. They let the rich countries become poor again, and then move back.
You talk as if capital is a cooperative conspiracy. But capitalists compete and it is not competitive to abandon a country to poverty once it has built up infrastructure that makes it more efficient. Instead you want to keep some types of labour in high-cost countries to take advantage of their infrastructure and some in low-cost countries to take advantage of their labour costs. Furthermore, once a country becomes rich, its citizens become valuable consumers which means that they need a huge services sector and that sector means jobs.
It's all about cheap labor, and if you think it's "Us" (the US and the West) vs. "Them" (China, India, etc.) then you have bought into the lie that the ruling class uses to keep control.
It isn't about "us" versus "them" at all. I mean don't dispute that rich people have interests that are sometimes at odds with poor people, but I do dispute that this is the dominant organizational conflict of our time. If I had to pick any particular group of people to be the "them" to our "us" I'd choose Islamic fundamentalists or Authoritarian governments. Bill Gates and Warren Buffet cause much less international misery than Mugabe and Bin Laden. (you might even throw the creeping authoritarianism of the Bush administration into the mix)
I'm not in the music industry and I'm not against P2P but I disagree with you that the P2P thing is a red herring. If Napster was still around and unmolested for a decade or so, it WOULD gradually have wiped out the CD business. Napster was so much more convenient, had so much more volume, and was basically better than CDs in every way. And that was before broadband was as ubiquitous as it is today. Today's P2P applications are not as good and are always changing so they are not as much of a threat. Let's have some intellectual honesty: CDs are an obsolete medium in slow-mo decline and most people prefer "free" (file sharing) to "cheap" (iTunes).
Sorry, I don't buy your argument. In the first case, the resistent bacteria is so rare as to be irrelevant before the anti-bacterial soap forced the adaptation of the species. So for all practical purposes, the anti-bacterial soap caused the adapted bacterial species to come into meaningful existence.
The human design metaphor actually fits your statistical situation. Just as a human being will sometimes (statistically) find an answer to a problem, evolution will (statistically) sometimes "figure out" how to dodge an environmental bullet. And sometimes it will not.
I came back to join this debate after a day of thinking about the issue because it seems to me that the "design metaphors" are very powerful because we need to get across to the populace that things that seem designed were, in a sense, designed: by evolution, not by an intelligence.
A Sun employee once pointed out to me that the genious of Sun's management is seeming much bigger than they are by staying in the news. Historically that was done by attacking Microsoft which made it seem as if they must be the same size as Microsoft. Now I guess they are trying to figure out a controversial new message that will keep them in the news.
You seem to think that 80 of 48 hours is a massive number of stories. Let's presume that there is only one editor working at a time in 8 hour shifts. Then the editor needs to post one article every half an hour. They don't need to write the interesting content: someone else does that. They don't need to find or summarize the content: the submitter does that. Presuming that the Slashdot CMS software is half-way comparable to the various free programs I've used (I haven't tried Slash), the editor basically selects the post, writes a sentence of text, writes a department-line and selects a category.
Doing this in half an hour is not a heroic act. In fact, I am pretty confident that the scroll rate of Slashdot is selected based upon their perception of reader preferences, not based upon the rate at which they can post. Frankly, it seems like a cushy job to me.
By the way, I've never done a dupe-complaining post myself. You started this meta-thread about whether dupe-yellers and I got involved because it seemed ludicrous to me that you are complaining about consumers asking editors to ... er ... edit.
Other commercial media sources don't find it so difficult. There is nothing uniquely difficult about editing Slashdot. Many sites (with much higher volume) actually link new articles to PREVIOUS articles on the same topic: this is much harder than finding out if such a previous article exists.
If Clippy is popular then why did Microsoft decide to hide it by default?
With regard to the registry: it violates two principles of good software architecture. First, you want to minimize the multiplication of namespaces and data access methods. Second, you don't want corruption of a single file to result in an inability to access your whole system.
You could argue that relational databases tend to violate these principles as well but the truth is that when they are used in volume applications they _are_ the data store and the metadata store and the single, unified namespace as well. They also have many more corruption-fighting features than does the registry.
2.) Why isn't there an accounting of the people who didn't catch the original stories? The 1 second lost by you may be gained by me because I don't sit on Slashdot reading every single story.
According to this logic, Slashdot should run every article over and over again in case someone missed it. If there is a problem with people "missing" articles that they would have wanted to see then personalization features are a much better solution than accidentally posting the same thing multiple times even for those who DID read it the first time.
"Ultimately it is just the lack of professionalism and respect for the audience that is galling."
What's so galling about it? Why is this galling, but Slashdot posting a story you already read on Yahoo news isn't?
I'd appreciate it if you would read what I wrote before responding. The answer to your question is above. A Slashdot editor posting an article from Slashdot is doing his job. A Slashdot editor reposting a dupe is just lazy. I guess I'll just admit that I'm offended by laziness in service providers. I also don't like typos in newspapers, dead air between television shows, poorly informed journalism, etc.
Don't answer just yet, think about it. I mean, you've mentioned that you are offended by Editors not constantly reading up on Slashdot, but have you taken any consideration at all into how the system works? They get tons of story submissions a day. In order to make Slashdot work, they probably queue up the story for publishing. In this case, it's possible for two seperate people to okay a story.
As you point out, Slashdot is a software system. This implies that there are two different ways to to solve the problem: manual and automatic. Let's take this most recent example. Slashdot is a linking system. So an important hint about the purpose of a post is its links. One of the dupes has a single link. The other has two. The one link is duplicated across the two articles. Therefore the slashdot CMS could easily inform the editor: "Warning: this article has links that are similar to these other articles: ...". Using fuzzy matching it could easily pick up all articles about Opera recently but even just using exact text matching it could have picked up this particular dupe.
On the other hand, the manual way of doing this is pretty straightforward as well. You are posting something about "Opera". So you query the site and the queue for articles about "Opera". If there is something similar on the site or the queue then you don't add the new submission to the queue. It would add five minutes of effort to each article post. They can't be bothered to spend five extra minutes per story to make a more professional product. As someone who DOES try to make professional products , it bothers me.
Heck, even if it's the same editor, how can you expect him to be the memory man? Slashdot is very active. In the last two days there have been seventy seven articles posted. (I know this because I subscribe to the RSS feed.) How can they not have dupes?
Think it through. How does usatoday.com not have dupes? How does the New York Times not have dupes? They have editors. That's what editors do. Slashdot "queue clearers" call themselves editors but they are too lazy to do the job. Seventy seven articles over two days is not really that much to keep in one's head.
Eh forget everything I just said. What I find most comical about this rant about dupes is that Slashdot actually disclaims [slashdot.org] that there may be dupes. If this is so fricken unacceptable, then why even bother hanging around? I mean, if you go to McDonald's, and there's a sign saying "You may be kicked in the balls", can you really get mad about somebody attempting a field goal?
Sure. Why not? The EULA for every piece of software you buy says that you may encounter bugs but that doesn't mean that you accept the bugs happily. A parking garage sign may say that they take n
Dupes annoy me for the following reason: I am a professional. I try to put care into meeting my customer's needs. I expect the people who provide services to me (ad-sponsored and paid alike) to do the same. A Slashdot editor who cannot be bothered to read Slashdot insults me on a variety of levels: first, Slashdot is such a trivial medium that even its editors cannot be bothered to read it. So why do I read it? I guess I'm the fool. Second, my time is worth so little that they have the right to waste it, like a fast-food employee chatting on the phone with friends or a cable guy who says he'll arrive "sometime in the afternoon". Admittedly the dupe only wastes a second of my time but when you multiply that second across a tens of thousands of users it is actually quite costly.
Ultimately it is just the lack of professionalism and respect for the audience that is galling. The very nature of an "editor's" job is to save the readership from distracting little annoyances. An "editor" without professionalism should get a different job. They are like a computer programmer who doesn't think logically.
Your post is confusing. First you say that prefetching doesn't work that well in practice and present a link to Simon Willison's blog. But the blog says that prefetching is an "excellent feature" except for a couple of quirks in Mozilla's implementation. Google does not trigger those quirks so they are irrelevant.
Then you go off on a tangent about how "real software engineers" think through their design decisions more than "open source hackers". This is totally contrary to my experience. I would more highly rate the software engineering of Mozilla against Internet Explorer, Unix versus Windows or Apache versus IIS. I could go through a long list of brutal design decisions in commercial software that did not hold up in the real world but I'll just mention Clippy and the Windows registry as two high-profile examples.
Finally, it is Google, a commercial software services company that is the topic of the article. So your whole argument is self-defeating. Either Google doesn't conform to your vision of real software engineering or the feature is not really at odds with real software engineering.
Mod parent up. It's really not as complicated as slashdot readers want it to be. Hell, notepad is the same. Some windows apps expect it to be there (try "view source" in IE). But that doesn't mean that it uses a bunch of super-mojo windows APIs that nobody else could emulate.
This is what I see happening. I'm worried that, by the time I enter the workforce in several years, and almost certainly by the end of it, workers will be no more than a commodity.
What does that mean? That corporations will have no interest in whether their employees are talented or hard working? Despite your assertion, capitalism does prevent this from happening. The companies that invest just a bit more in the talented employees will succeed (Microsoft and Google are examples) and the ones that do not will fail (EDS seems like a likely candidate, though the example of Enron is more dramatic).
I like my women like I like my coffee: ground up and boiled.
What does that mean? Is it as mysoginistic as it sounds? Slashdot may be a (young) boy's club but we should not allow that sort of thing to pass by unremarked.
I wonder if this recent rise of very conservative religious fundamentalism in the USA and efforts to stop the presentation of things that contradict their view might not lead to the USA eventually falling beind in key sciences, and, as a consquence, losing its edge in the world of technology.
First: there is a lot of science that is uncontroversial. You don't need to believe in evolution to invent processes for etching silicon wafers. Second: only a very small percentage of the population needs to be scientific in order to remain leading edge. For every scientist there is an army of marketers and managers and lawyers and politicians and janitors and engineers and ...
XML is defined as a subset of SGML. From the specification:
"The Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a subset of SGML that is completely described in this document."
A good programmer will write readable code in any language he's writing in.
The world does not break down into three distinct camps: "Non-programmers", "Good programmers" and "bad programmers". Actually there is a spectrum and all programmers live somewhere along it. A language can encourage readability or discourage it. What does Perl do?
The TIMTOWTDI ethos is ultimately what makes the language as useful as it is. The more ways there are to do things, the more things you can do with a little creativity.
I'm sorry, one does not follow from the other at all. If I added a "+++" operator to C that increments by two then I now have at least three (obvious) ways to increment by two. Does that mean that I can now be more creative in C?
The myth that all Perl code is unreadable is preposterous.
Nobody claimed that in this thread.
I've written several very complex pieces of code in Perl that are not any more difficult to comprehend than any piece of C code designed to do the same thing, and often much less so.
Strange that you use C as your benchmark. How about a language designed in the last twenty years with readability as a goal? Perhaps Java, Python, Ruby, O'Caml, Haskell, etc.