I force my visitors to use IE because the various trojans that I have on my website don't work on Firefox. I don't want to waste my bandwidth on those who cannot enjoy the full benefits of my website.
You can send your personal message of moral support to e360insight here:
http://e360insight.com/contact.php
I sure did.
If enough of the./ crowd join in, we can make them feel the same way all of us feel every day when we get their spam.
You'll be surprised how often rewriting something from scratch is preferable to pulling out an old piece of code. First of all, you have to be sure the code does what you want. Then, you have to be sure that it is self-contained, or that you can easily get all of its dependencies. Then, you need to figure out what the API is and how to use it for your particular problem. All this takes time.
In my experience, situations when you can successfully reuse previously written code are very rare. It's usually much faster/cheaper/less troublesome/more reliable to write the thing from scratch. Also, I find that over the years, my programming skills improve, so code that I've written before looks... sub-optimal. Since I'm a perfectionist when it comes to programming, I will be more likely to just rewrite it again.
That said, there are a few very small files that I have reused many times before. Most of them are data structure or algorithms like BigInt, AVL tree, maximum flow, bipartite matching, etc. I store them here: http://shygypsy.com/tools
Compilers have no sense of humour. If a language is not ISO C++, it is not C++ and should not have C++ as part of the name.
Yea, good luck with that line of reasoning. Have you seen Microsoft's "Visual C++"? Compare and contrast with the real C++, as defined by ISO, and you'll be shocked.
What are you talking about?
BitTorrent is against spyware and adware being distributed under the BitTorrent trademark. There will be no fees for anyone. Azureus will not have to pay for a license, and WhenU/Claria will not be allowed to pay for a license. It's a moral decicision for BitTorrent, not a business one.
So your question is, "How can I write code that doesn't crash?" First of all, it doesn't matter which language you use. There is no language that will guarantee uncrashability. There is no "design pattern" that will guarantee uncrashability. If you are asking such questions, I think your best course of action is to find an experienced programmer to do it for you. They are not cheap, but it will be worth it in the long run.
I've seen the most stable code written in C, and I've seen horrible mess in PHP and Python. It's like asking, "Which brand of circular saw should I use to make the best kitchen table?" A true hacker can make a work of art with an axe, and not because he is forced to, but because that happened to be the best tool for the job.
There is a problem with the hypothesis that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon. Some computers are already as complex as a human brain, especially if you take into account the fact that we rarely even use 10% of our brains. Yet, there is no evidence at all that they are conscious. Just being complicated is not enough to be conscious. Besides, you must have an idea where to draw your line in the animal hierarchy. I would claim that bacteria are conscious - they makes decisions on where to swim in water. Some of them even seek out saltier water, as experiments show. Yet bacteria are certainly nowhere as complicated as the simplest computers of today. I hope you are not claiming that computers are conscious. If you are, then I cannot win this argument, and I hope that you can admit that there _something_ that is fundamentally different between computers and humans. I'm calling it consciousness.
Also, if you say that you agree with me "today", then does it mean that tomorrow your definition of consciousness will change, as science advances forward? That's a pretty unstable definition. How would you define it in a way that does not change with scientific progress?
// Warning. More shameless advertising.
If you're really interested in this, I have a summary of several theories, including materialism, which seems to be your favourite, on my blog: http://trueai.blogspot.com/
There is quite a bit of debate on that point. I would suggest a set of DVD's called "Consciousness" which talk about exactly that problem - is there any difference between a brain and a computer? In other words, what is "consciousness"? Computers seem to be unconscious, while humans are.
I think it's simple. You are making a website for the purpose of making profit (hopefully). If you support browser X, which is used by Y% of your visitors, then it will correspond to Y% of your profit (more or less). If that number is less that it would cost to buy enough developers' time (including yours) to support browser X, then there is no need to do it.
Of course, you might have religious reasons to support, say, Firefox or Opera, even if those are not profitable by the formula above, but that's a different issue. The reality is - if you want a profitable website, then first of all, make darn sure it works on IE6 and IE5, only then should you worry about Firefox.
I know this is a pessimistic view, but the same applies to operating systems. Firstly, make your program work on XP and 2000, then maybe OS X. Anything beyond that is charity work that counts for cool points with the geeks, but not much in the way of cash.
What are you talking about? If you don't like search engines indexing your website, just put a robots.txt file on it and block all of the search engines' spiders. (My site blocks MSNBot, hee-hee.)
You can make it more detailed and only let them index certain parts of your website. As for all of the other people's websites, that's up to their webmasters whether they want to get indexed. They probably do because search engines bring a lot more value (i.e. traffic) than they "leech".
I started reading the comments to this artice 5 minutes ago. After going through 8 or 10 of them, I noticed that my eyes started to water and get tired. No kidding. This is really strange. I've been an obsessive programmer for about 15 years, and I've never had headaches or watery eyes from looking at monitors. Yet reading about this stuff had a definite effect on me. Anyone else have this and can explain it? Or should I see a shrink?
The statement in the article is not that stupid. First of all, if you look at the number of adults playing games, it's incredible. Secondly, even if you are not playing games, and if you are a computer science or ECE graduate, the appeal of working for a game company, compared to programming a credit card processing system at a bank is quite high.
On the other hand, the part of the article that I find suspicious is their figure of $60 grand. I spent a summer as an intern at a certain big game company, doing research in machine learning. Granted, that is not a software engineering position, but I would expect that my salary was higher than that of a programming intern. For one, I have a Master's in computer science. With that in mind, the amount of money they paid me was way below $60,000/yr. And from talking to some of my coworkers, this is indeed the situation - the game companies can get away with paying lower salaries just because making games is a cool job. I know that interns get paid less than full-time workers, and I don't have an exact figure on the entrance salary of a software engineer at that company, but I would be very surprised if it were $60k.
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.topcoder.com/tc They are pretty good at finding superstars and matching them to employers.
I force my visitors to use IE because the various trojans that I have on my website don't work on Firefox. I don't want to waste my bandwidth on those who cannot enjoy the full benefits of my website.
You can send your personal message of moral support to e360insight here: http://e360insight.com/contact.php I sure did. If enough of the ./ crowd join in, we can make them feel the same way all of us feel every day when we get their spam.
Tagging it as "hurray". Why didn't I think of this first? It seems obvious now - sue RIAA for antitrust. Ingenious! No sarcasm.
There is a simple fix for this. Add the following lines to the /robots.txt file on your website:
User-agent: MSNBot
Disallow: /
Aliases? Windows SSH? Could you please rephrase the question?
You'll be surprised how often rewriting something from scratch is preferable to pulling out an old piece of code. First of all, you have to be sure the code does what you want. Then, you have to be sure that it is self-contained, or that you can easily get all of its dependencies. Then, you need to figure out what the API is and how to use it for your particular problem. All this takes time.
In my experience, situations when you can successfully reuse previously written code are very rare. It's usually much faster/cheaper/less troublesome/more reliable to write the thing from scratch. Also, I find that over the years, my programming skills improve, so code that I've written before looks... sub-optimal. Since I'm a perfectionist when it comes to programming, I will be more likely to just rewrite it again.
That said, there are a few very small files that I have reused many times before. Most of them are data structure or algorithms like BigInt, AVL tree, maximum flow, bipartite matching, etc. I store them here: http://shygypsy.com/tools
Compilers have no sense of humour. If a language is not ISO C++, it is not C++ and should not have C++ as part of the name.
Yea, good luck with that line of reasoning. Have you seen Microsoft's "Visual C++"? Compare and contrast with the real C++, as defined by ISO, and you'll be shocked.
What are you talking about? BitTorrent is against spyware and adware being distributed under the BitTorrent trademark. There will be no fees for anyone. Azureus will not have to pay for a license, and WhenU/Claria will not be allowed to pay for a license. It's a moral decicision for BitTorrent, not a business one.
So your question is, "How can I write code that doesn't crash?" First of all, it doesn't matter which language you use. There is no language that will guarantee uncrashability. There is no "design pattern" that will guarantee uncrashability. If you are asking such questions, I think your best course of action is to find an experienced programmer to do it for you. They are not cheap, but it will be worth it in the long run.
I've seen the most stable code written in C, and I've seen horrible mess in PHP and Python. It's like asking, "Which brand of circular saw should I use to make the best kitchen table?" A true hacker can make a work of art with an axe, and not because he is forced to, but because that happened to be the best tool for the job.
There is a problem with the hypothesis that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon. Some computers are already as complex as a human brain, especially if you take into account the fact that we rarely even use 10% of our brains. Yet, there is no evidence at all that they are conscious. Just being complicated is not enough to be conscious. Besides, you must have an idea where to draw your line in the animal hierarchy. I would claim that bacteria are conscious - they makes decisions on where to swim in water. Some of them even seek out saltier water, as experiments show. Yet bacteria are certainly nowhere as complicated as the simplest computers of today. I hope you are not claiming that computers are conscious. If you are, then I cannot win this argument, and I hope that you can admit that there _something_ that is fundamentally different between computers and humans. I'm calling it consciousness.
// Warning. More shameless advertising.
Also, if you say that you agree with me "today", then does it mean that tomorrow your definition of consciousness will change, as science advances forward? That's a pretty unstable definition. How would you define it in a way that does not change with scientific progress?
If you're really interested in this, I have a summary of several theories, including materialism, which seems to be your favourite, on my blog:
http://trueai.blogspot.com/
There is quite a bit of debate on that point. I would suggest a set of DVD's called "Consciousness" which talk about exactly that problem - is there any difference between a brain and a computer? In other words, what is "consciousness"? Computers seem to be unconscious, while humans are.
//Warning: shameless advertising!
I have a blog about that here:
http://trueai.blogspot.com/
I think it's simple. You are making a website for the purpose of making profit (hopefully). If you support browser X, which is used by Y% of your visitors, then it will correspond to Y% of your profit (more or less). If that number is less that it would cost to buy enough developers' time (including yours) to support browser X, then there is no need to do it. Of course, you might have religious reasons to support, say, Firefox or Opera, even if those are not profitable by the formula above, but that's a different issue. The reality is - if you want a profitable website, then first of all, make darn sure it works on IE6 and IE5, only then should you worry about Firefox. I know this is a pessimistic view, but the same applies to operating systems. Firstly, make your program work on XP and 2000, then maybe OS X. Anything beyond that is charity work that counts for cool points with the geeks, but not much in the way of cash.
What are you talking about? If you don't like search engines indexing your website, just put a robots.txt file on it and block all of the search engines' spiders. (My site blocks MSNBot, hee-hee.) You can make it more detailed and only let them index certain parts of your website. As for all of the other people's websites, that's up to their webmasters whether they want to get indexed. They probably do because search engines bring a lot more value (i.e. traffic) than they "leech".
I started reading the comments to this artice 5 minutes ago. After going through 8 or 10 of them, I noticed that my eyes started to water and get tired. No kidding. This is really strange. I've been an obsessive programmer for about 15 years, and I've never had headaches or watery eyes from looking at monitors. Yet reading about this stuff had a definite effect on me. Anyone else have this and can explain it? Or should I see a shrink?
The statement in the article is not that stupid. First of all, if you look at the number of adults playing games, it's incredible. Secondly, even if you are not playing games, and if you are a computer science or ECE graduate, the appeal of working for a game company, compared to programming a credit card processing system at a bank is quite high.
On the other hand, the part of the article that I find suspicious is their figure of $60 grand. I spent a summer as an intern at a certain big game company, doing research in machine learning. Granted, that is not a software engineering position, but I would expect that my salary was higher than that of a programming intern. For one, I have a Master's in computer science. With that in mind, the amount of money they paid me was way below $60,000/yr. And from talking to some of my coworkers, this is indeed the situation - the game companies can get away with paying lower salaries just because making games is a cool job. I know that interns get paid less than full-time workers, and I don't have an exact figure on the entrance salary of a software engineer at that company, but I would be very surprised if it were $60k.
I bet you own a Mac, too.
[mod me Troll]
It's "apt-get install ie" ;-)
Have faith. I'm sure Carmack would never allow the gaming comunity to be raped this way.