There is a chance of 1 in 2^16 to get a bad packet that produces the right checksum, but that doesn't mean that one in 2^16 packets will be corrupt (on average).
For a packet to be bad and undetected, two conditions must hold: it must be corrupt to begin with, and it must be lucky enough to produce the right checksum. The probability depends on the error rate of the connection as well as the weakness of the checksum.
In some cases you'd get a lot more errors (picking up the phone on a dial-up connection produces many undetected errors, a lot more than one in 2^16), and in some cases a lot less (running the server and the client on the same machine).
For point 3, we're talking about broadcast (like television) so the bandwidth is of no concern to the user who will be charged per programme rather than per MB.
The differences are: * A huge system to make sure that you pay for what you see (the exact opposite of Freeview) * More resilient in terms of Doppler effect and general noise (a lot of error-corrections in software and hardware) * Smaller size videos (probably 320x240 instead of 720x576 or more) * Good quality (H.264 and AAC instead of MPEG-2) * Ability to download files (annoying ringtones etc.)
I'm still not convinced about reception inside the London Underground or in places where TV reception is not the best.
In other words, you say that crap code should be rewritten, yet you acknowledge that sometimes crap code cannot be rewritten (unless you're willing to invest a lot of time, probably measured in years).
I have the utmost respect for anyone who maintained XEmacs, but don't you find the above a bit contradictory?
I've had the pleasure of working on code that had a basic binary search repeated about fifteen times. I still didn't rewrite it, simply because I had better things to do with my time. Like adding features that were requested by my boss (the one who wrote that code).
Code is only code - it has to be useful, it has to be maintainable, it had to be readable, and sometimes in that order.
By the way, that company has now folded, and not because the code base had the same function fifteen times (or because it was riddled with #ifs, or because it was divided into the wrong modules, or because every structure had a back pointer to the structure that contained it, or because there were no unit tests, or because the most complex data structure was the array which was the wrong choice for the data, or...)
Exactly right. They're very happy to use the snail mail analogy when it's about taking responsibility for user content: would you expect the post-person to open every letter just to make sure it's not about terrorism (or worse - a copyright infringement)?
Why don't they follow their own analogy: would you expect your post-person to open every letter just to be able to target the right paper-based spam to your door?
If you can open letters to gain profits, you can open letters to protect the interests of others. It's as simple as that. Of course, I think opening letters should be illegal, whether they're made of paper or made of IP packets.
Not to mention the huge amount of code I've written over the years. I wrote it, the company published it (one way or another), I deserve to live off it for the rest of my life. Every time they sell a copy, even though I've left the company many years ago, I still deserve a chunk of the profit.
In fact, even if they don't sell any copies, as long as they're still around it means that they benefit from code that I wrote. Now give me the money!
Why don't we use the 32 bit source address in each IP packet as an extension of the destination address? That way we can get 64 bit destination address.
I use a good car when I go to the supermarket (I do it often, so it's more convenient to use a nice car for that), but when I go on the motorway I use an old car that has less chance of being involved in an accident.
We're already paying to see adverts in cinemas and television, and most people take it for granted (yes, I've paid for some overpriced popcorn and a ticket to see a movie, so it makes sense that I'll watch 20 minutes of crap).
We're already used to huge billboards advertising cars and casinos - the view used to be ours, now it belongs to some company.
We're already used to having adverts on our clothes, our bags, our cars, our glasses, and some people even take pride of advertising companies they buy from (look at my expensive shoes - you don't have to guess which company made a lot of money, I'm advertising them as we speak!)
So yes, someone whispering NLP in my ears to go and buy more is not going to be outrageous. Yet another space that used to belong to us but can be bought or just taken without permission.
Having someone walking right next to me and asking me to go into McDonald's for an hour while I walk through town is not magic either, but I'm not sure I'd control myself and not punch him. Yes, it's a public place. No, it's not acceptable.
Do we really need a law against every obnoxious behaviour? Or is it possible for people just not to cross reasonable lines?
I'm glad to hear that you've found a place that lets you take the time to write code properly.
But even though you admit that you're lucky to be in a place like that, you still accuse others of working differently. For my employer, taking two days to solve something properly when it could have been solved in two hours "improperly" means losing business. If we can't promise, and deliver, products at extremely tight schedules, customers simply go to someone else. It doesn't matter that that someone else may give half-broken code that hardly works. All that matters is that we would lose a customer.
That's not to say that we write bad code on purpose (or at all). It just means that if we can save a little time development time by using a simple data structure, we're not going to implement the more complicated data structure, profile, optimise, and check if it's better. We'll just settle for what we have and get the product out of the door.
Again, this may sound terrible, but that's how most products are made. Not doing it that way means not doing it at all.
As for myself, I get a lot more out of my current work-place, because I see products with my name on them, than my previous work-place, where I could sit for two months and write perfect code that eventually wasn't used because we had no customers. If I could only find the perfect combination... but I heard it's quite rare - which is why you should consider yourself lucky.
I've heard the sentence "if we don't finish this by the end of the week, they are going to look for another provider" more times than I wanted to, but that's life.
I wish I had the luxury to spend a week to estimate how long it'll take to design, then two months to design and then a year to implement. Unfortunately, I get two minutes to say how long it'll take to implement, and then work to impossible deadlines where every (inevitable) extension is seen as a failure, and sometimes *is* a failure (i.e. the customers simply refuse to pay for any extra work etc.)
That's the sad reality, and I certainly hope they don't build cars/houses/machines/anything this way. But sometimes it's not important whether the code will be maintainable in a year's time, when it's not going to be used if it's not ready tomorrow (in whatever shape it is).
Contrary to what most books claim as the single possible truth, the programmer's time is not always the most expensive part of production - sometimes the software has to be put on 4,000,000 devices and manufacturing starts in two weeks. Missing the deadline costs more than the extra two weeks it'll take a programmer to make a change in a year's time - it could even mean that there won't be any code (nor programmer) in a year's time.
How many years must I work as a programmer before I am considered a good programmer? I don't even have a white belt yet, and I've been in this game for many many years.
I thought apprentices were prevalent in the west - you walk around with your "boss", do as you're told, learn on the job, until one day you know enough to have your own business. I guess we lost all that when blacksmiths went out of fashion and 16 levels of management became the norm.
I've been in a place where if someone was a shit he knew he'd eventually get a "blanket". That meant that at some point, someone would throw a blanket on him and then everybody would kick the living hell out of him.
It's not the best solution, but with some people you just can't reason. That place was the army, by the way.
Not to mention ridiculous 0.01a version for years on end. It's one thing to be permanently on 0.97p, but who even gives a version number such as 0.01? What does it do? Prints "hello world" and dies?
Yafray, I'm looking in your direction...
"Release candidate" is another favourite - we've been through alpha and beta, we're happy with the product, we're almost there, but no. RC1, RC2, RC6, RC9... Smartwin++ was 2.0 BETA1 on 2006-03-22. Then it was RC1 on 2006-07-23. Now it's on RC5 (released 2007-06-24).
And last but not least, "developer snapshot" that never ends... you get nightly builds, and that's essentially the version number. FLTK 2.0.x Weekly Snapshot, r5963.
Yes, he has a degree in History, but when I asked him who the third king of Russia was, he just stared at me.
What *do* they teach them these days?
(slightly exaggerated, I admit, but the last person to know everything about computer science was von Neumann and he's not around any more, not to mention my opinion that the best thing they teach in universities is not x86 opcodes, but where to find books and how to open them).
They motivate people to find alternatives to expensive yet ridiculously obvious "inventions", thus making huge progress in fields such as compression, encryption, search technologies etc.
Not exactly the intent behind the system, but it seems to work pretty well. If GIF hadn't been patented, we wouldn't have PNG now.
After all, I do need the key to your house to get physical access to your computer. Make sure you order a muffin as well.
I've seen enough Steven Seagal movies to know that any password can be obtained by threatening to burn your retina with a laser beam. I suspect the same holds for USB keys, but I haven't actually seen that in a movie yet, so maybe it doesn't work like that (note that breaking into a house, not to mention a museum with a huge diamond on display is really easy, so you can stop locking the door).
Three teams of developers? Why three? A single team can work a little harder, a little faster, a few more hours every week, and produce the output of three "standard" teams. And since there's no overtime pay involved, there's no actual increase in profit margin.
It only means they'll burn out a little faster, when they have to produce three games in the time it takes them to produce a single game now (but since we're talking about three identical games, built on the original 1995 engine, it doesn't make much difference).
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There is a chance of 1 in 2^16 to get a bad packet that produces the right checksum, but that doesn't mean that one in 2^16 packets will be corrupt (on average).
For a packet to be bad and undetected, two conditions must hold: it must be corrupt to begin with, and it must be lucky enough to produce the right checksum. The probability depends on the error rate of the connection as well as the weakness of the checksum.
In some cases you'd get a lot more errors (picking up the phone on a dial-up connection produces many undetected errors, a lot more than one in 2^16), and in some cases a lot less (running the server and the client on the same machine).
For point 3, we're talking about broadcast (like television) so the bandwidth is of no concern to the user who will be charged per programme rather than per MB.
The differences are:
* A huge system to make sure that you pay for what you see (the exact opposite of Freeview)
* More resilient in terms of Doppler effect and general noise (a lot of error-corrections in software and hardware)
* Smaller size videos (probably 320x240 instead of 720x576 or more)
* Good quality (H.264 and AAC instead of MPEG-2)
* Ability to download files (annoying ringtones etc.)
I'm still not convinced about reception inside the London Underground or in places where TV reception is not the best.
In other words, you say that crap code should be rewritten, yet you acknowledge that sometimes crap code cannot be rewritten (unless you're willing to invest a lot of time, probably measured in years).
...)
I have the utmost respect for anyone who maintained XEmacs, but don't you find the above a bit contradictory?
I've had the pleasure of working on code that had a basic binary search repeated about fifteen times. I still didn't rewrite it, simply because I had better things to do with my time. Like adding features that were requested by my boss (the one who wrote that code).
Code is only code - it has to be useful, it has to be maintainable, it had to be readable, and sometimes in that order.
By the way, that company has now folded, and not because the code base had the same function fifteen times (or because it was riddled with #ifs, or because it was divided into the wrong modules, or because every structure had a back pointer to the structure that contained it, or because there were no unit tests, or because the most complex data structure was the array which was the wrong choice for the data, or
Exactly right. They're very happy to use the snail mail analogy when it's about taking responsibility for user content: would you expect the post-person to open every letter just to make sure it's not about terrorism (or worse - a copyright infringement)?
Why don't they follow their own analogy: would you expect your post-person to open every letter just to be able to target the right paper-based spam to your door?
If you can open letters to gain profits, you can open letters to protect the interests of others. It's as simple as that. Of course, I think opening letters should be illegal, whether they're made of paper or made of IP packets.
Wait a minute... Something doesn't sound right.
According to the stereotype, Pakistanis don't smoke pot, don't watch porn and aren't atheists. So how come there's any prejudice against them?
In other words, who's perfect these days? Ah, the same people who were always perfect: White Anglo-Saxon Protestants.
Not to mention the huge amount of code I've written over the years. I wrote it, the company published it (one way or another), I deserve to live off it for the rest of my life. Every time they sell a copy, even though I've left the company many years ago, I still deserve a chunk of the profit.
In fact, even if they don't sell any copies, as long as they're still around it means that they benefit from code that I wrote. Now give me the money!
Why don't we use the 32 bit source address in each IP packet as an extension of the destination address? That way we can get 64 bit destination address.
Oh, wait...
I use a good car when I go to the supermarket (I do it often, so it's more convenient to use a nice car for that), but when I go on the motorway I use an old car that has less chance of being involved in an accident.
That makes sense, no?
Unfortunately, you're right.
We're already paying to see adverts in cinemas and television, and most people take it for granted (yes, I've paid for some overpriced popcorn and a ticket to see a movie, so it makes sense that I'll watch 20 minutes of crap).
We're already used to huge billboards advertising cars and casinos - the view used to be ours, now it belongs to some company.
We're already used to having adverts on our clothes, our bags, our cars, our glasses, and some people even take pride of advertising companies they buy from (look at my expensive shoes - you don't have to guess which company made a lot of money, I'm advertising them as we speak!)
So yes, someone whispering NLP in my ears to go and buy more is not going to be outrageous. Yet another space that used to belong to us but can be bought or just taken without permission.
It's sad, but you're absolutely right.
Having someone walking right next to me and asking me to go into McDonald's for an hour while I walk through town is not magic either, but I'm not sure I'd control myself and not punch him. Yes, it's a public place. No, it's not acceptable.
Do we really need a law against every obnoxious behaviour? Or is it possible for people just not to cross reasonable lines?
I'm glad to hear that you've found a place that lets you take the time to write code properly.
But even though you admit that you're lucky to be in a place like that, you still accuse others of working differently. For my employer, taking two days to solve something properly when it could have been solved in two hours "improperly" means losing business. If we can't promise, and deliver, products at extremely tight schedules, customers simply go to someone else. It doesn't matter that that someone else may give half-broken code that hardly works. All that matters is that we would lose a customer.
That's not to say that we write bad code on purpose (or at all). It just means that if we can save a little time development time by using a simple data structure, we're not going to implement the more complicated data structure, profile, optimise, and check if it's better. We'll just settle for what we have and get the product out of the door.
Again, this may sound terrible, but that's how most products are made. Not doing it that way means not doing it at all.
As for myself, I get a lot more out of my current work-place, because I see products with my name on them, than my previous work-place, where I could sit for two months and write perfect code that eventually wasn't used because we had no customers. If I could only find the perfect combination... but I heard it's quite rare - which is why you should consider yourself lucky.
I've heard the sentence "if we don't finish this by the end of the week, they are going to look for another provider" more times than I wanted to, but that's life.
I wish I had the luxury to spend a week to estimate how long it'll take to design, then two months to design and then a year to implement. Unfortunately, I get two minutes to say how long it'll take to implement, and then work to impossible deadlines where every (inevitable) extension is seen as a failure, and sometimes *is* a failure (i.e. the customers simply refuse to pay for any extra work etc.)
That's the sad reality, and I certainly hope they don't build cars/houses/machines/anything this way. But sometimes it's not important whether the code will be maintainable in a year's time, when it's not going to be used if it's not ready tomorrow (in whatever shape it is).
Contrary to what most books claim as the single possible truth, the programmer's time is not always the most expensive part of production - sometimes the software has to be put on 4,000,000 devices and manufacturing starts in two weeks. Missing the deadline costs more than the extra two weeks it'll take a programmer to make a change in a year's time - it could even mean that there won't be any code (nor programmer) in a year's time.
Hey I'm a big fan of Celine Dion since her guest appearance on South Park!
So a reasonable compromise would be to taser them in the nuts every time I download a song by Celine Dion.
Agreed?
How many years must I work as a programmer before I am considered a good programmer? I don't even have a white belt yet, and I've been in this game for many many years.
I thought apprentices were prevalent in the west - you walk around with your "boss", do as you're told, learn on the job, until one day you know enough to have your own business. I guess we lost all that when blacksmiths went out of fashion and 16 levels of management became the norm.
It costs a lot less for a broken arm or leg.
I've been in a place where if someone was a shit he knew he'd eventually get a "blanket". That meant that at some point, someone would throw a blanket on him and then everybody would kick the living hell out of him.
It's not the best solution, but with some people you just can't reason. That place was the army, by the way.
... created by the senior hourglass expert.
You're absolutely right.
... I don't even know what library can do that without creating an audio file first (doesn't look like SDL can).
Even so, it's so much easier than doing the same using the GDI (yes, I know it's extreme, but even in Tkinter it's not that simple).
And even more so with sound - compare:
10 SOUND 700, 5
to
10 LINE(100,100)-(200,200)
Now do it in C, Java, perl, python or ruby.
Then explain it in a single sentence.
Linear search sucks.
Not to mention ridiculous 0.01a version for years on end. It's one thing to be permanently on 0.97p, but who even gives a version number such as 0.01? What does it do? Prints "hello world" and dies?
Yafray, I'm looking in your direction...
"Release candidate" is another favourite - we've been through alpha and beta, we're happy with the product, we're almost there, but no. RC1, RC2, RC6, RC9... Smartwin++ was 2.0 BETA1 on 2006-03-22. Then it was RC1 on 2006-07-23. Now it's on RC5 (released 2007-06-24).
And last but not least, "developer snapshot" that never ends... you get nightly builds, and that's essentially the version number. FLTK 2.0.x Weekly Snapshot, r5963.
Yes, he has a degree in History, but when I asked him who the third king of Russia was, he just stared at me.
What *do* they teach them these days?
(slightly exaggerated, I admit, but the last person to know everything about computer science was von Neumann and he's not around any more, not to mention my opinion that the best thing they teach in universities is not x86 opcodes, but where to find books and how to open them).
Of course patents drive the industry forward.
They motivate people to find alternatives to expensive yet ridiculously obvious "inventions", thus making huge progress in fields such as compression, encryption, search technologies etc.
Not exactly the intent behind the system, but it seems to work pretty well. If GIF hadn't been patented, we wouldn't have PNG now.
The exact same reason.
After all, I do need the key to your house to get physical access to your computer. Make sure you order a muffin as well.
I've seen enough Steven Seagal movies to know that any password can be obtained by threatening to burn your retina with a laser beam. I suspect the same holds for USB keys, but I haven't actually seen that in a movie yet, so maybe it doesn't work like that (note that breaking into a house, not to mention a museum with a huge diamond on display is really easy, so you can stop locking the door).
Three teams of developers? Why three? A single team can work a little harder, a little faster, a few more hours every week, and produce the output of three "standard" teams. And since there's no overtime pay involved, there's no actual increase in profit margin.
It only means they'll burn out a little faster, when they have to produce three games in the time it takes them to produce a single game now (but since we're talking about three identical games, built on the original 1995 engine, it doesn't make much difference).