The first step, I think, is to stop purchasing crap chocolate, and to convince your friends to cut it out, too.
I know I can get good small-brand chocolate for not much more than the price of a Hershey bar (this Milka thing is new to me; must not be common in the USA), and it tastes infinitely better.
Granted, part of that prejudice probably comes from the fact that I think milk chocolate just barely counts as chocolate. (I mean, come on, it tastes more like sugar than chocolate) and even Hershey's dark chocolate is milk chocolate in disguise.
I imagine that multithreading is a situation where OOP finally begins to really shine, as the amount of code factoring involved would make it much easier to keep track of when and where you need to be frotzing with synchronization and locking.
I also imagine that if you can try to line up thread boundaries with object boundaries, the task of avoiding race conditions becomes almost trivial.
But then, I haven't done much serious multithreaded programming, so maybe I am missing the point. Someone set me straight.
Any programmer who complains of being stranded because his old language has died or fallen out of favor and he's unwilling to learn the new language needs to get the hell out of my industry.
Geez. Some of us actually want jobs, and now we have a bunch of VB programmers or their managers or whatever suddenly screaming that the sky is falling because their jobs might have to involve actual work in the near future.
I bet these are the same people who were pulling their hair out over the replacement of MS-DOS with Windows.
But seriously, this brings to light a good point - Slashdot readers have a responsibility to take everything on Slashdot with a grain of salt. Lots of people post things without checking their facts very carefully (I know I've done it), and the editors have made it more than clear that they aren't checking stories very carefully before putting them on the site with the number of dupes we see as well as the number of times the editor has added a comment that makes it clear he doesn't really know what he's talking about.
If you use any OSS unix-like, or many OSS tools other than something with an Open* name, you are likely using at least a few things that have benefitted directly from the OpenBSD project. In an effort to keep OpenBSD secure, they contribute security patches to all sorts of software that runs on OpenBSD.
In particular, I'd encourage everyone who uses Linux to contribute.
These indoor composters seem to me to be a great example of people who are trying to be environmentally friendly, but get caught up in trying to do all sorts of "green" things without stopping to think why they are done, and thus doing them in some twisted way that really isn't helping anybody.
For example, I imagine that these indoor composters are meant for people who live in apartment buildings who don't have any space to compost outdoors. City-dwellers don't need, to be composting, though. People should compost to avoid consuming artificial fertilizers and incurring the environmental damange that they cause. Composting is a great way to fertilize your lawn without poisoning your soil and without being wasteful.
Call me dim, but I just fail to see where people who have no outdoor space to live in are going to find a use for several pounds a day worth of rotting organic matter. It's not like it's somehow better for the environment to throw compost in the trash than it is to pitch banana peels - they will decompose in the landfill just as nicely as they decomposed in your kitchen, and without you having to harm the environment by purchasing a large lump of plastic and burning some electricity.
You could much more inexpensively meet your keep-your-houseplants-happy compost needs by purchasing some of it every so often. I'm sure you can work out an arrangement with somebody at a farmer's market to supply you with the compost you need for far less than the $300 price tag you're looking at for this baby.
And you can do it without having to become the proud owner of yet another yuppie gadget that uselessly adds 10lb of plastic to the world and which you know is not going to make your life happy any more than your plasma TV and 5.1 surround sound system did, and which is going to end up on the curb faster than your ThighMaster did.
Kill off all the geeks who can't help but make comments like this every time women are mentioned, and IT will drive away fewer women. The creepy hormone-ghoul thing will only get you so far with people.
There isn't a single female programmer at the place I work, but when I was a TA in college it seemed to me that while there were certainly far fewer women taking CS classes, those that did take them were overall better students and better programmers than the males.
I think that the women had an unfair advantage, though, since they obviously cheated by using illegal techniques like error checking and debugging.
That's great and all, and I realize that there are all sorts of safety regulations on aircraft.
But I said it is a hypothetical situation, and it was obviously an example that was deliberately chosen as an exaggeration. What about the core of the remark? Why don't we talk about manufacturers like Belkin?
Judging from the design of Cocoa, I think that Apple is probably also helped along by the fact that they have the luxury of working with a much cleaner system that is probably a great deal easier to maintain.
(And it's not that OS X is a complete re-write, because it isn't. Lots of major components of Mac OS X are getting close to being 20 years old. That's a lot more decrepit than the Windows NT line.)
Re:Shouldn't that be too bloated to test?
on
Too Darned Big to Test?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
This sometimes amazes me. The market forces that push companies to try and release products ahead of the competition exist in every industry, but it seems to only be software that has responded in such an insane manner, and I'm pretty sure software is the only industry where a company who does this can get away with it.
Let's consider the hypothetical situation where Airbus releases the A380 prematurely (to keep ahead of the market) and creates an airplane that costs an incredible amount of money to maintain - or even worse, breaks regularly. What happens in this situation? Easy; everyone throws up a huge stink, and Airbus loses lots and lots of business for the next few years or decades.
On a smaller scale, I have definitely done this with Belkin - they released a couple too many crap products, and now I am never buying their stuff again, and I know of other people who feel the same way.
But in software, companies can just promise that It Will All Be Better In The Next Releease. Repeatedly.
Windows 95 will fix the world. Ooops, no, we meant 98. . . uhh. . make that 98SE. Nope, ME. Ahh, screw that, let's drop that line and give Windows 2000 a shot. Except you should probably try XP. . . . . SP2. ..
And I don't mean to just Microsoft-bash; they are just an easy target. Apple does it, most the major Linux distros I've used do it, it seems like it is just the way the software industry works nowadays. And it is insane.
The worst part about having your chair too high like that is that it causes a tendency to bend your wrists backwards when you use the mouse or keyboard. This puts immeasurably more strain on your wrists than the correct method, which is somewhere between straight and limp-wristed.
Can you imagine the amount of time it would take to put something like that together, just to keep track of what apps a person uses, and whether there is a reasonable FOSS equivalent?
And if you want it to really work correctly, you'd need to be able to monitor how a person uses that app, because different people use different programs for different things. For example, one MS Office user might be perfectly happy with OO.o or AbiWord, while another might use Office for a feature that is not provided (or not provided adequately) on any FOSS app.
You'd also need to monitor things like how people interact with the computer. Someone who has to spend a lot of time hunting for things and has difficulties with applications that sport non-standard or opaque interfaces is _NOT_ going to be happy on Linux. (Just think about how many different ways there are to cut-and-paste text that you have to learn if you're using FOSS software.)
My family and I used to play a game called Acquire, which was centered on the idea of hotel chains growing and merging, and trading in stock on them. (Sadly, there were only mergers, no spinoffs or going out of business allowed.)
Still, it was great fun, far better than Monopoly, and we would play it maybe twice a month for years.
One I used to see folks having a great deal of fun with at a coffee shop I used to frequent is Cults Across America. (For reference, these same folks loved to play the stuff put out by Cheapass Games.)
Where I live, there is a single jazz station. The country stations only play popabilly CMT shite. There isn't a 24 hour classical station I can find, and the rock stations spend more time branding themselves as "The " and ripping on each other than playing actual music. All the stations within a given format range use the exact same 10-song playlist anyway, but they make it sound likethere's more variety with their vast libraries of IDs. The two NPR stations I can pick up just play All Things Considered all day, crappy light jass all evening, and BBC worldservice all night - now a whiff of a truly inspired show like Odyssey or Tavis Smiley.
And with a job that has me driving across the country on a fairly regular basis, I can say that I'm pretty sure that my home area is par for the course.
I don't know much about podcasting, but I can tell you my Sirius subscription is well worth the 12-something a month I pay for it. They play MUSIC! Actual MUSIC!
(Too bad the company cars have XM radio, which is only a marginal improvement over FM radio and still not as good as a Mr. Big album on repeat for 10 hours.)
Given the response I got when I asked Yahoo why their Java applets wouldn't run on any of my web browsers and if they knew of any for my platform that did work, which was to suggest that I install a web browser that is only available for Windows (which is not the OS I told them I use), it would certainly seem that they're not so interested in getting people to install their software by making it good and being responsive to customers.
http://www.halfempty.com/sunday/This guy has done some good stuff in the past. Not sure how the current incarnation of the site is, it sems to have changed since I last saw it.
Relativistic time dilation has always seemed incredibly counter-intuitive to me.
It seems very easy to me to come up with two bodies moving in such a way as to make it impossible to determine which one is moving faster, because the answer to that question depends completely on the point of reference in relation to which you determine their veolocity.
Which means that there's no way of determining which of the two bodies will age more quickly and at what rate they will age in relation to each other - according to the exaplanations I've been given, there are infinitely many answers to that question. But the point of reference you use is merely a mathematical abstraction and, being immaterial, has absolutely no impact on the real world. It would seem that the implication is that I can change the way every body in the universe is behaving just by thinking about the universe in slightly different way.
I know this is impossible, so I just want to ask, what the heck is the missing piece? Is the explanation an oversimplification, or am I completely misinterpreting it?
You only have to convince twelve people dull enough to end up on a jury that it's true.
Was't it Ambrose Bierce who observed what a folly it is to place someone's future, possibly even his life, in the hands of twelve people too stupid to get out of jury duty?
I also think that we should hold directors, producers, and actors responsible when people who have seen their movies commit acts of violence.
I also think we should hold authors responsible when people who have seen their books commit acts of violence. (The guy who wrote The Turner Diaries should be executed. He's obviously responsible for the Oklahoma City bombing.)
Most of all, I think we should hold politicians responsible if people who have witnessed them start wars commit acts of violence. They, more than anyone else in this country, are responsible for teaching our children that violence is a good way to solve problems.
Slashdot Mirror
The first step, I think, is to stop purchasing crap chocolate, and to convince your friends to cut it out, too.
I know I can get good small-brand chocolate for not much more than the price of a Hershey bar (this Milka thing is new to me; must not be common in the USA), and it tastes infinitely better.
Granted, part of that prejudice probably comes from the fact that I think milk chocolate just barely counts as chocolate. (I mean, come on, it tastes more like sugar than chocolate) and even Hershey's dark chocolate is milk chocolate in disguise.
Your experience can be made obsolete at any time, no matter what languages or OS's you use.
That's exactly what I'm saying.
I imagine that multithreading is a situation where OOP finally begins to really shine, as the amount of code factoring involved would make it much easier to keep track of when and where you need to be frotzing with synchronization and locking.
I also imagine that if you can try to line up thread boundaries with object boundaries, the task of avoiding race conditions becomes almost trivial.
But then, I haven't done much serious multithreaded programming, so maybe I am missing the point. Someone set me straight.
Any programmer who complains of being stranded because his old language has died or fallen out of favor and he's unwilling to learn the new language needs to get the hell out of my industry.
Geez. Some of us actually want jobs, and now we have a bunch of VB programmers or their managers or whatever suddenly screaming that the sky is falling because their jobs might have to involve actual work in the near future.
I bet these are the same people who were pulling their hair out over the replacement of MS-DOS with Windows.
But seriously, this brings to light a good point - Slashdot readers have a responsibility to take everything on Slashdot with a grain of salt. Lots of people post things without checking their facts very carefully (I know I've done it), and the editors have made it more than clear that they aren't checking stories very carefully before putting them on the site with the number of dupes we see as well as the number of times the editor has added a comment that makes it clear he doesn't really know what he's talking about.
If you use any OSS unix-like, or many OSS tools other than something with an Open* name, you are likely using at least a few things that have benefitted directly from the OpenBSD project. In an effort to keep OpenBSD secure, they contribute security patches to all sorts of software that runs on OpenBSD.
In particular, I'd encourage everyone who uses Linux to contribute.
These indoor composters seem to me to be a great example of people who are trying to be environmentally friendly, but get caught up in trying to do all sorts of "green" things without stopping to think why they are done, and thus doing them in some twisted way that really isn't helping anybody.
For example, I imagine that these indoor composters are meant for people who live in apartment buildings who don't have any space to compost outdoors. City-dwellers don't need, to be composting, though. People should compost to avoid consuming artificial fertilizers and incurring the environmental damange that they cause. Composting is a great way to fertilize your lawn without poisoning your soil and without being wasteful.
Call me dim, but I just fail to see where people who have no outdoor space to live in are going to find a use for several pounds a day worth of rotting organic matter. It's not like it's somehow better for the environment to throw compost in the trash than it is to pitch banana peels - they will decompose in the landfill just as nicely as they decomposed in your kitchen, and without you having to harm the environment by purchasing a large lump of plastic and burning some electricity.
You could much more inexpensively meet your keep-your-houseplants-happy compost needs by purchasing some of it every so often. I'm sure you can work out an arrangement with somebody at a farmer's market to supply you with the compost you need for far less than the $300 price tag you're looking at for this baby.
And you can do it without having to become the proud owner of yet another yuppie gadget that uselessly adds 10lb of plastic to the world and which you know is not going to make your life happy any more than your plasma TV and 5.1 surround sound system did, and which is going to end up on the curb faster than your ThighMaster did.
Kill off all the geeks who can't help but make comments like this every time women are mentioned, and IT will drive away fewer women.
The creepy hormone-ghoul thing will only get you so far with people.
There isn't a single female programmer at the place I work, but when I was a TA in college it seemed to me that while there were certainly far fewer women taking CS classes, those that did take them were overall better students and better programmers than the males.
I think that the women had an unfair advantage, though, since they obviously cheated by using illegal techniques like error checking and debugging.
That's great and all, and I realize that there are all sorts of safety regulations on aircraft.
But I said it is a hypothetical situation, and it was obviously an example that was deliberately chosen as an exaggeration. What about the core of the remark? Why don't we talk about manufacturers like Belkin?
Judging from the design of Cocoa, I think that Apple is probably also helped along by the fact that they have the luxury of working with a much cleaner system that is probably a great deal easier to maintain.
(And it's not that OS X is a complete re-write, because it isn't. Lots of major components of Mac OS X are getting close to being 20 years old. That's a lot more decrepit than the Windows NT line.)
This sometimes amazes me. The market forces that push companies to try and release products ahead of the competition exist in every industry, but it seems to only be software that has responded in such an insane manner, and I'm pretty sure software is the only industry where a company who does this can get away with it.
.
Let's consider the hypothetical situation where Airbus releases the A380 prematurely (to keep ahead of the market) and creates an airplane that costs an incredible amount of money to maintain - or even worse, breaks regularly. What happens in this situation? Easy; everyone throws up a huge stink, and Airbus loses lots and lots of business for the next few years or decades.
On a smaller scale, I have definitely done this with Belkin - they released a couple too many crap products, and now I am never buying their stuff again, and I know of other people who feel the same way.
But in software, companies can just promise that It Will All Be Better In The Next Releease. Repeatedly.
Windows 95 will fix the world. Ooops, no, we meant 98. . . uhh. . make that 98SE. Nope, ME. Ahh, screw that, let's drop that line and give Windows 2000 a shot. Except you should probably try XP. . . . . SP2. .
And I don't mean to just Microsoft-bash; they are just an easy target. Apple does it, most the major Linux distros I've used do it, it seems like it is just the way the software industry works nowadays. And it is insane.
The worst part about having your chair too high like that is that it causes a tendency to bend your wrists backwards when you use the mouse or keyboard. This puts immeasurably more strain on your wrists than the correct method, which is somewhere between straight and limp-wristed.
Your government does it all the time. Only normally, it's not the underdog company, and the company is based in a tax haven or something like that.
Compared to some of the contracts I've seen awarded lately, this barely even counts as overseas. Besides, we could use more trade with Canada.
Can you imagine the amount of time it would take to put something like that together, just to keep track of what apps a person uses, and whether there is a reasonable FOSS equivalent?
And if you want it to really work correctly, you'd need to be able to monitor how a person uses that app, because different people use different programs for different things. For example, one MS Office user might be perfectly happy with OO.o or AbiWord, while another might use Office for a feature that is not provided (or not provided adequately) on any FOSS app.
You'd also need to monitor things like how people interact with the computer. Someone who has to spend a lot of time hunting for things and has difficulties with applications that sport non-standard or opaque interfaces is _NOT_ going to be happy on Linux. (Just think about how many different ways there are to cut-and-paste text that you have to learn if you're using FOSS software.)
My family and I used to play a game called Acquire, which was centered on the idea of hotel chains growing and merging, and trading in stock on them. (Sadly, there were only mergers, no spinoffs or going out of business allowed.)
Still, it was great fun, far better than Monopoly, and we would play it maybe twice a month for years.
One I used to see folks having a great deal of fun with at a coffee shop I used to frequent is Cults Across America. (For reference, these same folks loved to play the stuff put out by Cheapass Games.)
Where I live, there is a single jazz station. The country stations only play popabilly CMT shite. There isn't a 24 hour classical station I can find, and the rock stations spend more time branding themselves as "The " and ripping on each other than playing actual music. All the stations within a given format range use the exact same 10-song playlist anyway, but they make it sound likethere's more variety with their vast libraries of IDs. The two NPR stations I can pick up just play All Things Considered all day, crappy light jass all evening, and BBC worldservice all night - now a whiff of a truly inspired show like Odyssey or Tavis Smiley.
And with a job that has me driving across the country on a fairly regular basis, I can say that I'm pretty sure that my home area is par for the course.
I don't know much about podcasting, but I can tell you my Sirius subscription is well worth the 12-something a month I pay for it. They play MUSIC! Actual MUSIC!
(Too bad the company cars have XM radio, which is only a marginal improvement over FM radio and still not as good as a Mr. Big album on repeat for 10 hours.)
Given the response I got when I asked Yahoo why their Java applets wouldn't run on any of my web browsers and if they knew of any for my platform that did work, which was to suggest that I install a web browser that is only available for Windows (which is not the OS I told them I use), it would certainly seem that they're not so interested in getting people to install their software by making it good and being responsive to customers.
http://www.halfempty.com/sunday/This guy has done some good stuff in the past. Not sure how the current incarnation of the site is, it sems to have changed since I last saw it.
There are just somethings that are best done with Flash
Yeah. Like this.
Relativistic time dilation has always seemed incredibly counter-intuitive to me.
It seems very easy to me to come up with two bodies moving in such a way as to make it impossible to determine which one is moving faster, because the answer to that question depends completely on the point of reference in relation to which you determine their veolocity.
Which means that there's no way of determining which of the two bodies will age more quickly and at what rate they will age in relation to each other - according to the exaplanations I've been given, there are infinitely many answers to that question. But the point of reference you use is merely a mathematical abstraction and, being immaterial, has absolutely no impact on the real world. It would seem that the implication is that I can change the way every body in the universe is behaving just by thinking about the universe in slightly different way.
I know this is impossible, so I just want to ask, what the heck is the missing piece? Is the explanation an oversimplification, or am I completely misinterpreting it?
Supplying all these keyboard commands for me is helpful, and I will definitely use them. Thanks.
But they really aren't an answer to the issue, since it takes actively hunting for them. A good desktop GUI should be more not-there than there.
Under this law, you would have to charge a 9-year old and a bunch of 25-50 year-olds that he has never met under conspiracy statutes.
You only have to convince twelve people dull enough to end up on a jury that it's true.
Was't it Ambrose Bierce who observed what a folly it is to place someone's future, possibly even his life, in the hands of twelve people too stupid to get out of jury duty?
I also think that we should hold directors, producers, and actors responsible when people who have seen their movies commit acts of violence.
I also think we should hold authors responsible when people who have seen their books commit acts of violence. (The guy who wrote The Turner Diaries should be executed. He's obviously responsible for the Oklahoma City bombing.)
Most of all, I think we should hold politicians responsible if people who have witnessed them start wars commit acts of violence. They, more than anyone else in this country, are responsible for teaching our children that violence is a good way to solve problems.