Let me know when I can boot Windows 7 on an ARM processor....
Oh, wait, aren't ARM processors those things that run my phone, that are barely fast enough to swap a task or open a window without latency on a 320x240 display?
The processors that take us back in time (and processor performance) to the Pentium Pro 200?
Yeah, it does seem like he forgot about them. For a good reason.
Google is a business. It is giving users a service (useful search results), and selling your eyeballs to advertisers (customers). I have no problem with that.
If I searched for "Chester's Guide" because I was planning a trip to England and got a link to (even in-jest) pedophilia, that's not a search result that I would be looking for - it's a failure for Google's search engine. Frankly, if I were Google, I would want people to tell me when they think my search results weren't working well, so I could update my algorithms to serve the users better so I could get more money from the customers.
This doesn't need to involve blacklists - all it requires is Google rejiggering it's algorithms to move more relevant links higher in the returned results, and less relevant links lower. They must do that on a regular basis anyway - heck they already (claim to) do it in cases of detected SEO abuse. Now, if its the case that a book on Pedophilia is more relevant given the search terms than a guide to a city in England, not only is Western Civilization in serious jeopardy, a certain city in England has its own issues of irrelevance./frank
Wow, never talk about nuclear bombs again. every single 'fact' you have is wrong. According to the CDI: http://www.cdi.org/pdfs/USNuclearArsenal08.pdf most US warheads currently deployed are in the 100-300 KT yield range.
Completely OT, but... I'm pretty sure you won't get a million volts between your finger and a doorknob. The industry standard ESD test to simulate such an event only goes up to 15KV or so, and generates a spark an inch or two long. Cranking the ESD simulator up to 30KV, and applying to small insects is, shall we say, cruelly entertaining.
A million volts would be, well, scary, even if current limited./frank
I agree; why the hell would I pay $300 for a device just so I have the right to pay $10 for each book I want to read?
A device with an unprotected screen that I don't expect to last a year? A device that, should Amazon or Sony decide to get out of the market, will become a paperweight that I can't read my purchased content on anymore, and can't transfer my purchased content anywhere (see Yahoo Music Store, MSN Music, Walmart online music, etc ). A device that can, at any time, decide that some of my content is no longer "acceptable", and delete it (see Amazon and "1984"/"Animal Farm")?
The concept is great; the current implementations just suck./frank
I just haven't figured out yet how to "right-click" a file from the remote talking to the media center extender. The PC running WMC is headless and stuffed under the desk in the back bedroom.
I know I'm just whining; but I no longer enjoy the one-upsmanship of constantly trying to get around roadblocks purposely put in my way. If MythTV trivially supported a guide, and worked with an extender, I'd spend the month to figure out how to get it set up just so I wouldn't have to screw with it again./frank
I've got Windows 7 Media center running with a Linksys Media Center Extender.
On the positive side, It Just Works. Having a paperback sized MCE (cheap on Ebay, BTW) next to the big-screen rather than a PC is very nice.
On the negative side, Microsoft keeps trying so hard to prevent users from doing what they'd like. For example, they changed to the.wtv file format late in the Vista cycle, which broke things like dvrmstoolbox that was used for commercial skipping, and had no desire to help fix it. That's fixed by the community now, of course.
They also broke ripped DVD playback on the extender. For the Vista media center, it was found that by creating a hard link to the DVD files (and giving the hard link a ".mp4" (IIRC) extension), DVD's would play fine on the extender. With Windows 7, sorry, but that workaround has been disabled.
Interesting that Shrike82 is never accurate, at least according to wikipedia: from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Model_T
"Colors
By 1918, half of all cars in America were Model Ts. However, it was a monolithic bloc; as Ford wrote in his autobiography, "Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black".[17] Model Ts in different colors were produced from 1908 to 1914, and then again from 1926 to 1927."
Damn whippersnappers! I've got 1440x1050 on this damned Thinkpad, and by the end of a long day, I'm wishing for the same pixels on twice the screen real estate.
We'll ask you again in about 34 years when you get to be 50, and see what you think at that time...Now get offa my lawn!
/frank
Actually, for the 40 and 50 year olds that he references in the summary, you are exactly backwards - LOW DPI monitors are whats needed, and what he asked for.
/frank
Please change your default Windows Font size (it's been possible forever; at least as far back as Windows 2000, and probably back into the 3.x days). Some things look good, most things break in unseemly ways. I try doing that every few years, all the way back to my 21" 1600x1200 monitor, but back away from it each time due to incompatible apps.
I tried it again this year - hooked up a PC to my 47" LCD HDTV running Media Center. Realized that I couldn't read text from the couch, so I increased the system font size to make email, etc legible. And Microsoft Windows Media Center, published by a company that really should be doing this kind of testing, took it's already 1" tall font, readable by a legally blind dog from 50 feet away, and blew it up even larger, breaking the screen layout in unusable ways.
And, so, I went back to the default system font size, again. I'll try it again in a few more years, but I just don't expect it to ever work the way a user wants it to work.
It would not only be a waste of my time to include the entire referenced content, but that content might change over time and I see a huge benefit in having code updated based on updated specs. Credit card number encoding and ranges or UPOS interfaces are good examples of this.
Are you really saying that by linking to a reference rather than including the content directly, you expect your code to get automatically updated for you?
I am interested in your theories and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
Or are you saying that when I read your code 2 years later, click the link to read the latest Credit card number encoding and see version 3.7 of the spec where you implemented 2.2, I should "just know" that the code represents a solution to a different spec than the current one?
Frankly, directly include content so I know what you think you implemented.
I'm of the belief that if you properly named your functions/variables, you shouldn't have to explain WHAT the code does, just WHY.
And I'm of the belief that the FSM touched me at a young age with his noodly appendage, and changed my life forever. Of course, beliefs are a dime a dozen, and very seldom backed up even by something as tenuous as an anecdote.
In the real world, your belief is an excellent goal, one that every quality professional programmer strives towards. However, in the real world, it is an unobtainable goal for 100% of functions. You very quickly find that a name that is perfectly descriptive to you is not as descriptive to the next programmer, or even to you revisiting the program 6 months later. An 8 to 16 character English (OK, "Native language" ) string is seldom going to capture all the details and nuances of a 50 line function - if it does, you've just invented a remarkably more efficient programming language, and you should be suitably rewarded by the market for your insight.
Comments, especially header comments, help to capture the edge cases, the side effects, the algorithms that a readable function name can't possibly impart.
Being as this is devolving into a discussion of long comments, rather than a discussion of whether mispellings in comments indicate a lack of attention to detail in coding, I thought I'd throw in something.
To maintain some sense of topicality: I don't particularly agree with the blog post. As someone with good English skills, I've read a lot of code where the English language skills (and thus spelling and grammar in the comments) of the coder are below mine, but their skills in the computer language at issue are superior to mine. Frankly, there's a far greater relationship between accuracy of the comments (do they actually describe what the code does) and the quality of the code, than there is between spelling, subject-verb agreement, and number of spaces after a period and the quality of the code. This relationship does follow the blog author's contention about coders needing to be nit-pickers.
Occasionally in my coding, I write a novel in the function header. Generally, this isn't because I don't understand the problem so much as its because I do understand the problem. I've spent hours or days understanding the problem, and the particular necessray function that implements the solution, and I don't relish spending hours or days 6 months in the future remembering what I know today. The interesting thing is that, most of the time, the novel is multiple times larger than the function - 50 lines of comment for a 20 NCLOC function isn't unheard of.
In my specialty (embedded systems, with especially tight hardware integration), there are functions that need to be written that deal with extraordinarily complex situations. Many times, the bare code tells a misleadingly simple tale - "do this, that, and the other thing", rather than (as Russ Nelson pointed out above)
but to explain all the other code that could have been written, but wasn't
. Oftentimes, the novel is there to explain all the ways to trip up in this 20-line function - e.g. unspecified hardware dependencies, subtle system dependencies, unobvious race conditions. Sometimes its there to explain why, no matter how wrong the function appears, it is actually correct.
Well, it seems that BS1363 allows non-earthed plugs also, quoting from wikipedia: "Moulded plugs for unearthed, double-insulated appliances may substitute this contact with a non-conductive plastic pin to open the shutter." So, should a fair assessment include non-grounded plugs British plugs also?
As a native of the US, I find the items you point out incomprehensible, but acceptable just due to familiarity. I would absolutely love UL and the NFPA (the non-governmental bodies that, in reality, sets most of the standards for these things in the USA) banning 2-prong plugs and outlets. 2-prong outlets have been effectively banned in new construction since 1962; I'm sorry, but if you have an old house you'll have to rewire or buy lots of adapters.
I'd love to have 220V coming out of the wall sockets as half the world does; it's unlikely to be more dangerous than the 120 we have now, and would allow for products with twice the power of currently available one (think vacuums, table saws, etc). Alternatively, products could have thinner cords - at half the amperage, the required wire diameter is smaller.
As far as light dimming, that's going to occur in Britain also if you plug in a 13 amp device. It's unavoidable, and driven by the current being drawn; the cords will get warm also. Of course, there won't be as many 13 amp devices - my 120 volt, 13 amp vacuum cleaner would become a 240 volt, 6.5 amp vacuum cleaner; the 6.5 amps is unlikely to dim the lights and unlikely to make a noticeable temperature difference to the wire.
But I just can't get over the size of that British plug. It's got to be bigger than the cellphone that my AC Adapter would be trying to charge. How about practicality - how often do the shutters on British outlets fail, jam, or break?/frank
The worst for me was Frodo offering the ring to Galadriel - Her transformation in appearance and voice was just awful, and ugly to boot.
One of the most powerful and pivotal scenes in the series, and it looked like it was designed and directed by a seventh grader.
There are a couple of scenes that I found absolutely awful; totalling maybe 60 seconds out of the, what, 7 hours of movies?
As someone who had read the series a dozen times over, well, a few years, I have to say that the movie is a shining example of what can be done in translating from paper to film, but so seldom is.
We did the same, ohh, 7 or 8 years ago. Took four tracks (a solo piano, a new Rolling Stones piece, a classical piece, something else), encoded them to 128/192/256 kbps CBR using the Fraunhofer codec of the day, converted them back to WAV files and burned them to an AUDIO CD. Each piece was put on the CD 5 times: The first was the raw track. The following four tracks were the raw track (again) and the 128/192/256 bit versions, in random order.
Everyone at work was invited to take the disk home, play it on their home stereo, and tell me what each track had been encoded as. This took "computer" items (sound cards, speakers, etc) out of the loop, and let them evaluate on the best system that they had. Being as this was an engineering company with a lot of high-ego types, there was some pretty impressive equipment out there.
50% of the people who took the challenge were unable to tell the difference between the encoding methods - they simply said "I listened to all five versions of each song, and they sounded exactly the same to me". Most of the others tried to assign bit rates to the various versions, but their results were essentially random - none of them reliably detected even the 128 kbps version. One guy was fairly confident in his results, and reliably detected the 128 kbps version of each song, but didn't make a guess on the higher bit rates as he couldn't tell the difference between them. One guy spent the evening with his spectrum analyzer trying to cheat on the test, but gave up.
That's when I stopped worrying about bit rates, especially when I spend most of my time these days listening to music in my car over the factory sound system.
Slashdot Mirror
Let me know when I can boot Windows 7 on an ARM processor....
Oh, wait, aren't ARM processors those things that run my phone, that are barely fast enough to swap a task or open a window without latency on a 320x240 display?
The processors that take us back in time (and processor performance) to the Pentium Pro 200?
Yeah, it does seem like he forgot about them. For a good reason.
Google is a business. It is giving users a service (useful search results), and selling your eyeballs to advertisers (customers). I have no problem with that.
If I searched for "Chester's Guide" because I was planning a trip to England and got a link to (even in-jest) pedophilia, that's not a search result that I would be looking for - it's a failure for Google's search engine. Frankly, if I were Google, I would want people to tell me when they think my search results weren't working well, so I could update my algorithms to serve the users better so I could get more money from the customers.
This doesn't need to involve blacklists - all it requires is Google rejiggering it's algorithms to move more relevant links higher in the returned results, and less relevant links lower. They must do that on a regular basis anyway - heck they already (claim to) do it in cases of detected SEO abuse. Now, if its the case that a book on Pedophilia is more relevant given the search terms than a guide to a city in England, not only is Western Civilization in serious jeopardy, a certain city in England has its own issues of irrelevance. /frank
Anyone faced with a woman about to deliver, and their first thought is "I know, I'll go search around on google" is my hero.
Wow, never talk about nuclear bombs again. every single 'fact' you have is wrong.
According to the CDI: http://www.cdi.org/pdfs/USNuclearArsenal08.pdf most US warheads currently deployed are in the 100-300 KT yield range.
Completely OT, but...
I'm pretty sure you won't get a million volts between your finger and a doorknob. The industry standard ESD test to simulate such an event only goes up to 15KV or so, and generates a spark an inch or two long. Cranking the ESD simulator up to 30KV, and applying to small insects is, shall we say, cruelly entertaining.
A million volts would be, well, scary, even if current limited. /frank
I live in Phoenix.
Doing a quick and unscientific test, the Phoenix Kijiji site has 37 for-sale listings posted for Saturday, Sunday, and Today.
The Phoenix Craigslist site has 1200 for-sale listings in the last 45 MINUTES.
At least for my location, I think Kijiji qualifies as an "Epic failure".
OK, I use Ebay a lot, and Craigslist even more, and this is the first time I've ever heard of Kijiji.
Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kijiji) says it's been up since 2007 in the US.
Sounds like an epic failure to me. I wonder if it carries any Zune ads?
I agree; why the hell would I pay $300 for a device just so I have the right to pay $10 for each book I want to read?
A device with an unprotected screen that I don't expect to last a year?
A device that, should Amazon or Sony decide to get out of the market, will become a paperweight that I can't read my purchased content on anymore, and can't transfer my purchased content anywhere (see Yahoo Music Store, MSN Music, Walmart online music, etc ).
A device that can, at any time, decide that some of my content is no longer "acceptable", and delete it (see Amazon and "1984"/"Animal Farm")?
The concept is great; the current implementations just suck. /frank
I just haven't figured out yet how to "right-click" a file from the remote talking to the media center extender. The PC running WMC is headless and stuffed under the desk in the back bedroom.
I know I'm just whining; but I no longer enjoy the one-upsmanship of constantly trying to get around roadblocks purposely put in my way. If MythTV trivially supported a guide, and worked with an extender, I'd spend the month to figure out how to get it set up just so I wouldn't have to screw with it again. /frank
I've got Windows 7 Media center running with a Linksys Media Center Extender.
On the positive side, It Just Works. Having a paperback sized MCE (cheap on Ebay, BTW) next to the big-screen rather than a PC is very nice.
On the negative side, Microsoft keeps trying so hard to prevent users from doing what they'd like. .wtv file format late in the Vista cycle, which broke things like dvrmstoolbox that was used for commercial skipping, and had no desire to help fix it. That's fixed by the community now, of course.
For example, they changed to the
They also broke ripped DVD playback on the extender. For the Vista media center, it was found that by creating a hard link to the DVD files (and giving the hard link a ".mp4" (IIRC) extension), DVD's would play fine on the extender. With Windows 7, sorry, but that workaround has been disabled.
Interesting that Shrike82 is never accurate, at least according to wikipedia: from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Model_T "Colors By 1918, half of all cars in America were Model Ts. However, it was a monolithic bloc; as Ford wrote in his autobiography, "Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black".[17] Model Ts in different colors were produced from 1908 to 1914, and then again from 1926 to 1927."
Just, ... wow.
Oops, strike that; GP was referring to a different "him" than I thought.
/frank
Damn whippersnappers! I've got 1440x1050 on this damned Thinkpad, and by the end of a long day, I'm wishing for the same pixels on twice the screen real estate.
/frank
We'll ask you again in about 34 years when you get to be 50, and see what you think at that time...Now get offa my lawn!
Actually, for the 40 and 50 year olds that he references in the summary, you are exactly backwards - LOW DPI monitors are whats needed, and what he asked for.
/frank
Please change your default Windows Font size (it's been possible forever; at least as far back as Windows 2000, and probably back into the 3.x days). Some things look good, most things break in unseemly ways. I try doing that every few years, all the way back to my 21" 1600x1200 monitor, but back away from it each time due to incompatible apps.
/frank
I tried it again this year - hooked up a PC to my 47" LCD HDTV running Media Center. Realized that I couldn't read text from the couch, so I increased the system font size to make email, etc legible. And Microsoft Windows Media Center, published by a company that really should be doing this kind of testing, took it's already 1" tall font, readable by a legally blind dog from 50 feet away, and blew it up even larger, breaking the screen layout in unusable ways.
And, so, I went back to the default system font size, again. I'll try it again in a few more years, but I just don't expect it to ever work the way a user wants it to work.
It would not only be a waste of my time to include the entire referenced content, but that content might change over time and I see a huge benefit in having code updated based on updated specs. Credit card number encoding and ranges or UPOS interfaces are good examples of this.
Are you really saying that by linking to a reference rather than including the content directly, you expect your code to get automatically updated for you?
I am interested in your theories and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
Or are you saying that when I read your code 2 years later, click the link to read the latest Credit card number encoding and see version 3.7 of the spec where you implemented 2.2, I should "just know" that the code represents a solution to a different spec than the current one?
Frankly, directly include content so I know what you think you implemented.
I'm of the belief that if you properly named your functions/variables, you shouldn't have to explain WHAT the code does, just WHY.
And I'm of the belief that the FSM touched me at a young age with his noodly appendage, and changed my life forever. Of course, beliefs are a dime a dozen, and very seldom backed up even by something as tenuous as an anecdote.
In the real world, your belief is an excellent goal, one that every quality professional programmer strives towards. However, in the real world, it is an unobtainable goal for 100% of functions. You very quickly find that a name that is perfectly descriptive to you is not as descriptive to the next programmer, or even to you revisiting the program 6 months later. An 8 to 16 character English (OK, "Native language" ) string is seldom going to capture all the details and nuances of a 50 line function - if it does, you've just invented a remarkably more efficient programming language, and you should be suitably rewarded by the market for your insight.
Comments, especially header comments, help to capture the edge cases, the side effects, the algorithms that a readable function name can't possibly impart.
To maintain some sense of topicality: I don't particularly agree with the blog post. As someone with good English skills, I've read a lot of code where the English language skills (and thus spelling and grammar in the comments) of the coder are below mine, but their skills in the computer language at issue are superior to mine. Frankly, there's a far greater relationship between accuracy of the comments (do they actually describe what the code does) and the quality of the code, than there is between spelling, subject-verb agreement, and number of spaces after a period and the quality of the code. This relationship does follow the blog author's contention about coders needing to be nit-pickers.
Occasionally in my coding, I write a novel in the function header. Generally, this isn't because I don't understand the problem so much as its because I do understand the problem. I've spent hours or days understanding the problem, and the particular necessray function that implements the solution, and I don't relish spending hours or days 6 months in the future remembering what I know today. The interesting thing is that, most of the time, the novel is multiple times larger than the function - 50 lines of comment for a 20 NCLOC function isn't unheard of.
In my specialty (embedded systems, with especially tight hardware integration), there are functions that need to be written that deal with extraordinarily complex situations. Many times, the bare code tells a misleadingly simple tale - "do this, that, and the other thing", rather than (as Russ Nelson pointed out above)
but to explain all the other code that could have been written, but wasn't
. Oftentimes, the novel is there to explain all the ways to trip up in this 20-line function - e.g. unspecified hardware dependencies, subtle system dependencies, unobvious race conditions. Sometimes its there to explain why, no matter how wrong the function appears, it is actually correct.
Well, it seems that BS1363 allows non-earthed plugs also, quoting from wikipedia:
"Moulded plugs for unearthed, double-insulated appliances may substitute this contact with a non-conductive plastic pin to open the shutter." So, should a fair assessment include non-grounded plugs British plugs also?
As a native of the US, I find the items you point out incomprehensible, but acceptable just due to familiarity. I would absolutely love UL and the NFPA (the non-governmental bodies that, in reality, sets most of the standards for these things in the USA) banning 2-prong plugs and outlets. 2-prong outlets have been effectively banned in new construction since 1962; I'm sorry, but if you have an old house you'll have to rewire or buy lots of adapters.
I'd love to have 220V coming out of the wall sockets as half the world does; it's unlikely to be more dangerous than the 120 we have now, and would allow for products with twice the power of currently available one (think vacuums, table saws, etc). Alternatively, products could have thinner cords - at half the amperage, the required wire diameter is smaller.
As far as light dimming, that's going to occur in Britain also if you plug in a 13 amp device. It's unavoidable, and driven by the current being drawn; the cords will get warm also. Of course, there won't be as many 13 amp devices - my 120 volt, 13 amp vacuum cleaner would become a 240 volt, 6.5 amp vacuum cleaner; the 6.5 amps is unlikely to dim the lights and unlikely to make a noticeable temperature difference to the wire.
But I just can't get over the size of that British plug. It's got to be bigger than the cellphone that my AC Adapter would be trying to charge. How about practicality - how often do the shutters on British outlets fail, jam, or break? /frank
The worst for me was Frodo offering the ring to Galadriel - Her transformation in appearance and voice was just awful, and ugly to boot. One of the most powerful and pivotal scenes in the series, and it looked like it was designed and directed by a seventh grader.
As a counterpoint, I submit LOTR.
There are a couple of scenes that I found absolutely awful; totalling maybe 60 seconds out of the, what, 7 hours of movies?
As someone who had read the series a dozen times over, well, a few years, I have to say that the movie is a shining example of what can be done in translating from paper to film, but so seldom is.
Do you have a source for that U-238? I've always thought it would be pretty cool to have lump of it sitting around. /frank
We did the same, ohh, 7 or 8 years ago. Took four tracks (a solo piano, a new Rolling Stones piece, a classical piece, something else), encoded them to 128/192/256 kbps CBR using the Fraunhofer codec of the day, converted them back to WAV files and burned them to an AUDIO CD. Each piece was put on the CD 5 times: The first was the raw track. The following four tracks were the raw track (again) and the 128/192/256 bit versions, in random order.
/frank
Everyone at work was invited to take the disk home, play it on their home stereo, and tell me what each track had been encoded as. This took "computer" items (sound cards, speakers, etc) out of the loop, and let them evaluate on the best system that they had. Being as this was an engineering company with a lot of high-ego types, there was some pretty impressive equipment out there.
50% of the people who took the challenge were unable to tell the difference between the encoding methods - they simply said "I listened to all five versions of each song, and they sounded exactly the same to me". Most of the others tried to assign bit rates to the various versions, but their results were essentially random - none of them reliably detected even the 128 kbps version. One guy was fairly confident in his results, and reliably detected the 128 kbps version of each song, but didn't make a guess on the higher bit rates as he couldn't tell the difference between them. One guy spent the evening with his spectrum analyzer trying to cheat on the test, but gave up.
That's when I stopped worrying about bit rates, especially when I spend most of my time these days listening to music in my car over the factory sound system.
Too bad you big mentally strong human being are susceptible...to brain-sucking parasitic amoebas: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/10/01/brain_parasite/ Unfortunately real.