I think you read that as "Censorship may be necessary, but it should be overseen by Government" instead of the intended "Censorship may be necessary, but should it be overseen by Government?" I blame wombats in the tubes, stealing question marks. But I agree--censorship on this level is never necessary.
Ok, so that's for a known tooth. But what if a tooth of a type which has never been seen before is found? Even in that case, many "scientists" will risk a guess...
Oh, that's simple--you just extract the DNA from the tooth, patch it up with frog genes, and stick it in an ostrich egg. What could possibly go wrong?
If by "living in peace" you mean "subject to riots and general unrest between the native population and the increasing numbers of Muslim immigrants", then yes. Of course, since situations like that are developing throughout Europe, France is not exactly alone in that regard.
Back in high school, I used to ssh to my on-campus Linux box (I was running a cluster in the computer lab) and use smbclient to send those Windows popup messages; I think it's called "net send" under Windows. The best part was that you could specify who it should appear to be from, so I could send stuff as God or whoever. That's a prank. If I had used it to send a message to the teacher saying, "You have fat legs", that would be more on-par with the article.
Kids these days, I tell ya. In my day, we had to chisel the bits onto stone tablets and push them uphill both ways to the server room, and we were happy to have it!
That makes me think of an old fortune quote:
Although it is still a truism in industry that "no one was ever fired for buying IBM," Bill O'Neil, the chief technology officer at Drexel Burnham Lambert, says he knows for a fact that someone has been fired for just that reason. He knows it because he fired the guy.
"He made a bad decision, and what it came down to was, 'Well, I bought it because I figured it was safe to buy IBM,'" Mr. O'Neil says.
"I said, 'No. Wrong. Game over. Next contestant, please.'"
-- The Wall Street Journal, December 6, 1989
Mainframes have never really been about speed. Just throwing that out there.
To use the tired old car analogy, complaining about mainframe vs. PC clock cycles or MIPS is like saying semi trucks suck because they don't accelerate as fast as your car.
...If a processor is working on a particular piece of a problem and the data required to solve this will be made available by some other processor located away from the processor, I guess we are really talking wait times and not distance, am I right?
Depending on the network topology, it may be a question of actual machine-room distance. The BG/L, for instance, has a toroidal network, with each node connected to the 6 nearest nodes. There are four other networks in BlueGene, but the torus is used for most message-passing stuff. In that network, it's going to take longer to reach nodes that are physically farther away, unless you can wrap around the edges of the torus... see http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/rd/492/gara.html for more info.
If your work tends to be I/O bound... it doesn't belong on an exaflop cluster. You know BlueGene/L? Most of its nodes don't even talk directly to the storage system--they're connected to special I/O nodes which then talk to the storage system.
Scientific computing doesn't really deal with THAT much data. The scientists here at Sandia (yeah I work at Sandia CA) think they are just HUGE data creators. "We generate a PETABYTE per YEAR!" they say... not realizing that a petabyte is a drop in the bucket for the guys running these systems. As a colleague from LLNL said the other day, a petabyte isn't even worth charging for--they've got that much storage available in the tapes lying around the machine room.
Grandpa: How would you like to make a dollar Billy?
Stan: My name's not Billy grandpa, it's Stan.
Grandpa: Dammit Billy, do you want a dollar or don't ya?
Stan: Sure.
Grandpa: Ok. You just have to do one thing for me.
Stan: I'm not gonna kill you grandpa.
Grandpa: Why not?
Stan: 'Cause, I'll get in trouble.
Grandpa: I killed my grandpa when I was your age.
Stan: Leave me alone grandpa.
Grandpa: What has America's youth come to? Kids won't even kill their own grandparents.
Jesus Christ. You're acting like MS is the first company to put their logo on a stupid office toy and give it out for free. Get over yourself. I have no less than 6 worthless pieces of plastic with a corporate logo on my desk but I doubt you would have ranted on like a lunitic over them if you were here. Oh, that's right, none of them say Microsoft on them. My bad.
Most companies don't write elaborate and incredibly stupid backstories for the toys.
A priori, it seems reasonable that a warning label would discourage people, but people need to read them, think about them, and then decide to follow them. As we see with cigarettes, some people have trouble doing that.
So you've just decided that all "normal" people would decide "Hmm, the Surgeon General warned me, better not smoke!", rather than weighing the risks and deciding that the pleasure obtained through smoking was worth it? Remember--a decision is only a smart, *informed* decision if it's the same one you approve of! Everyone who decides otherwise is just brainwashed.
Hey, with all that background radiation, who needs gravity? Just run some thermocouples up to the blisteringly warm heap of slag that used to be your house!
Pretending to have cred by slagging a product you probably don't understand and claiming a text editor is "better" because you've obviously never had to work in a real software project really doesn't fly. Well, except around here I guess.
Excepting the real software project I did under Visual Studio, of course. You know, the one I mentioned in my post. Sure, I was only there for a 3-month stint, but in that time I updated a non-trivial GUI app (written in C#) that was shipped to customers, which meant learning how all the code worked and then essentially rewriting large chunks of it and adding plenty of brand new code to work with our new hardware product. Also did work on the new WPF version of the software, which unfortunately we didn't get finished before I left. Now I'm working on other real software projects, but with the rather preferable tools I also mentioned in my post.
Just curious, are your opinions based on Visual C++ 6 ? The code completion there was slow to trigger and often didn't work right, which did really limit its usefulness. Try something more recent, as code completion has improved incredibly since.
Visual Studio 2005, writing C#. It seemed for some reason that whenever I wanted code completion it wouldn't work, and whenever I didn't it would pop up and fsck me up. I've tried to blot most of it out of my mind:)
Yeah, college students download a lot. When the network guys shut down the DC hub, our external links were basically saturated overnight with bittorrent downloads. The usage graphs hit the upper limit. Eventually, they had to open up another line to give reasonable service back.
An IDE is a great helper to start coding. Once you learn how to code it is no longer a help, it is a hindrance.
Frankly, anyone who absolutely NEEDS an IDE to learn coding probably shouldn't be doing it. As my coworkers and I have discussed, development would be in a far better state if Comp Sci, Software Engineering, and Computer Engineering (what I consider the Big Three coding majors) students all started out on assembly or C using a text editor. Yeah, I know that Johnny SE will never use assembly again, but it means that people who really shouldn't be coding won't stick around as long.
Just gotta get the right job. I'm interning doing work with Plan 9 (Unix successor) and I haven't touched a Windows box since I came here. First thing they asked was, "What Linux distro do you want on your laptop?". Nothing but C, assembly, awk, and shell scripting and I'm loving it. Ahhh, research labs.
Code completion is a crutch and not particularly helpful: "oooh look a menu of stuff to scroll through and select the right function!"... now honestly, was that any faster than just typing the damn function? If your function names are so long that you really need completion, you should rethink your naming scheme. Jump-to-declaration--sounds like ctags to me. As for project-wide renames, learn sed, my friend.
Fast startup time is a concern on something like a web browser or file editor, which you're likely going to launch repeatedly throughout the day, but not an IDE.
I've been running the same Firefox for over a week, same goes for my Emacs/SLIME (Lisp environment), and I have several acme (Plan 9 editor) sessions that have been running at least that long. I still expect quick startup times because 1) I'm impatient as hell, and 2) If it takes 15 seconds to page in all the stuff I need to run the program, this app is *how* big now?
I'm a Computer Engineering student, so I've done quite a bit of coding in classes and have also had two programming jobs. Just some thoughts on what I've experienced:
In CS 1, they started us out using Macs (yeah, ugh, etc.) to ssh into the CS dept's Sun boxes. With Emacs and the command line java tools, we learned basic coding. When we advanced to CS 2, though, the professor decided it was time to give us Eclipse. I guess this was supposed to be a favor. Instead, I found that I now had less of a feel for how things were going together. Eclipse was hiding stuff from me, and I didn't like it; in trying to make stuff like CVS, compilation, debugging, etc. more transparent, Eclipse was making it harder to understand what was going on. By CS 3, I had reverted to Emacs. When CS 4 rolled around and we moved on to C++, my now Eclipse-dependent compatriots were left in the cold; they fiddled with various Eclipse plugins for a while, then came back to Emacs. Other classes such as Assembly and Applied Programming (C) were also best performed with a text editor and some command line tools.
My first coding job was a summer internship writing C# under Visual Studio. I liked the job but didn't like the development environment. VS seemed to hide things even more than Eclipse... I felt far away from the code. As I recall, I wasn't able to compile my stuff outside of Visual Studio. The super tight integration just didn't work for me. VS struck me as the Disneyland of development tools--flashy, costly, structured; all your lodging (repositories), activities (coding), eating (compilation?), etc. are all right there.
I'm still at my second job. I write C code for the Plan 9 operating system using the Acme text editor, a compiler (8c), a linker (8l), and a debugger (acid). They're good tools and they have the advantage of keeping everything out in the open. I can poke around in the source files and see all the data that acme could show me; there are no hidden properties or anything like that. A utility called the plumber helps link the shell, the editor and the debugger in a useful way. It's a rather looser system, and I have a greater feeling of control when I'm programming with it. If VS is Disneyland, the Plan 9 (or *nix) tools are a hiking trail in the mountains--cheap, allows you to go off the beaten path, the users tend to be dirty... ok, I'm stretching a little.
At last, the point! In my experience, as a computer engineer/student, I want control of my code. I want to know where things are and what they do. I don't like applications that hold my hand too much. Some of my friends prefer to have the development environment do as much as possible, but I think there's a weakness to this--they tend to get lost when something new/unexpected comes up. Even if it's just that their box got fsck'd up and they have to use ssh and emacs to finish a project; at the very least, they're going to be in trouble without some of the features they've come to expect, while at the worst, their code simply will not work/will be unmodifiable (I've seen this happen).
Slashdot Mirror
Probably just one line of Perl, right?
Wait, Perl isn't "cool" anymore... I meant to say Ruby there.
I think you read that as "Censorship may be necessary, but it should be overseen by Government" instead of the intended "Censorship may be necessary, but should it be overseen by Government?" I blame wombats in the tubes, stealing question marks. But I agree--censorship on this level is never necessary.
Ok, so that's for a known tooth. But what if a tooth of a type which has never been seen before is found? Even in that case, many "scientists" will risk a guess...
Oh, that's simple--you just extract the DNA from the tooth, patch it up with frog genes, and stick it in an ostrich egg. What could possibly go wrong?
If by "living in peace" you mean "subject to riots and general unrest between the native population and the increasing numbers of Muslim immigrants", then yes. Of course, since situations like that are developing throughout Europe, France is not exactly alone in that regard.
Back in high school, I used to ssh to my on-campus Linux box (I was running a cluster in the computer lab) and use smbclient to send those Windows popup messages; I think it's called "net send" under Windows. The best part was that you could specify who it should appear to be from, so I could send stuff as God or whoever. That's a prank. If I had used it to send a message to the teacher saying, "You have fat legs", that would be more on-par with the article.
Kids these days, I tell ya. In my day, we had to chisel the bits onto stone tablets and push them uphill both ways to the server room, and we were happy to have it!
That makes me think of an old fortune quote: Although it is still a truism in industry that "no one was ever fired for buying IBM," Bill O'Neil, the chief technology officer at Drexel Burnham Lambert, says he knows for a fact that someone has been fired for just that reason. He knows it because he fired the guy.
"He made a bad decision, and what it came down to was, 'Well, I bought it because I figured it was safe to buy IBM,'" Mr. O'Neil says.
"I said, 'No. Wrong. Game over. Next contestant, please.'"
-- The Wall Street Journal, December 6, 1989
Mainframes have never really been about speed. Just throwing that out there.
To use the tired old car analogy, complaining about mainframe vs. PC clock cycles or MIPS is like saying semi trucks suck because they don't accelerate as fast as your car.
Or something completely random, like "wan24nic8"?
Perhaps making the cars ugly is a clever environmental maneuver--it makes you humble so you don't create so much smug?
Depending on the network topology, it may be a question of actual machine-room distance. The BG/L, for instance, has a toroidal network, with each node connected to the 6 nearest nodes. There are four other networks in BlueGene, but the torus is used for most message-passing stuff. In that network, it's going to take longer to reach nodes that are physically farther away, unless you can wrap around the edges of the torus... see http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/rd/492/gara.html for more info.
If your work tends to be I/O bound... it doesn't belong on an exaflop cluster. You know BlueGene/L? Most of its nodes don't even talk directly to the storage system--they're connected to special I/O nodes which then talk to the storage system.
Scientific computing doesn't really deal with THAT much data. The scientists here at Sandia (yeah I work at Sandia CA) think they are just HUGE data creators. "We generate a PETABYTE per YEAR!" they say... not realizing that a petabyte is a drop in the bucket for the guys running these systems. As a colleague from LLNL said the other day, a petabyte isn't even worth charging for--they've got that much storage available in the tapes lying around the machine room.
Grandpa: How would you like to make a dollar Billy?
Stan: My name's not Billy grandpa, it's Stan.
Grandpa: Dammit Billy, do you want a dollar or don't ya?
Stan: Sure.
Grandpa: Ok. You just have to do one thing for me.
Stan: I'm not gonna kill you grandpa.
Grandpa: Why not?
Stan: 'Cause, I'll get in trouble.
Grandpa: I killed my grandpa when I was your age.
Stan: Leave me alone grandpa.
Grandpa: What has America's youth come to? Kids won't even kill their own grandparents.
Jesus Christ. You're acting like MS is the first company to put their logo on a stupid office toy and give it out for free. Get over yourself. I have no less than 6 worthless pieces of plastic with a corporate logo on my desk but I doubt you would have ranted on like a lunitic over them if you were here. Oh, that's right, none of them say Microsoft on them. My bad.
Most companies don't write elaborate and incredibly stupid backstories for the toys.
You don't buy them, as far as I can tell... you get them by signing up for seminars or webcasts.
A priori, it seems reasonable that a warning label would discourage people, but people need to read them, think about them, and then decide to follow them. As we see with cigarettes, some people have trouble doing that.
So you've just decided that all "normal" people would decide "Hmm, the Surgeon General warned me, better not smoke!", rather than weighing the risks and deciding that the pleasure obtained through smoking was worth it? Remember--a decision is only a smart, *informed* decision if it's the same one you approve of! Everyone who decides otherwise is just brainwashed.
Who wants to live to be 90?
Hey, with all that background radiation, who needs gravity? Just run some thermocouples up to the blisteringly warm heap of slag that used to be your house!
Pretending to have cred by slagging a product you probably don't understand and claiming a text editor is "better" because you've obviously never had to work in a real software project really doesn't fly. Well, except around here I guess.
Excepting the real software project I did under Visual Studio, of course. You know, the one I mentioned in my post. Sure, I was only there for a 3-month stint, but in that time I updated a non-trivial GUI app (written in C#) that was shipped to customers, which meant learning how all the code worked and then essentially rewriting large chunks of it and adding plenty of brand new code to work with our new hardware product. Also did work on the new WPF version of the software, which unfortunately we didn't get finished before I left. Now I'm working on other real software projects, but with the rather preferable tools I also mentioned in my post.
Just curious, are your opinions based on Visual C++ 6 ? The code completion there was slow to trigger and often didn't work right, which did really limit its usefulness. Try something more recent, as code completion has improved incredibly since.
Visual Studio 2005, writing C#. It seemed for some reason that whenever I wanted code completion it wouldn't work, and whenever I didn't it would pop up and fsck me up. I've tried to blot most of it out of my mind :)
Yeah, college students download a lot. When the network guys shut down the DC hub, our external links were basically saturated overnight with bittorrent downloads. The usage graphs hit the upper limit. Eventually, they had to open up another line to give reasonable service back.
An IDE is a great helper to start coding. Once you learn how to code it is no longer a help, it is a hindrance.
Frankly, anyone who absolutely NEEDS an IDE to learn coding probably shouldn't be doing it. As my coworkers and I have discussed, development would be in a far better state if Comp Sci, Software Engineering, and Computer Engineering (what I consider the Big Three coding majors) students all started out on assembly or C using a text editor. Yeah, I know that Johnny SE will never use assembly again, but it means that people who really shouldn't be coding won't stick around as long.
Just gotta get the right job. I'm interning doing work with Plan 9 (Unix successor) and I haven't touched a Windows box since I came here. First thing they asked was, "What Linux distro do you want on your laptop?". Nothing but C, assembly, awk, and shell scripting and I'm loving it. Ahhh, research labs.
Code completion is a crutch and not particularly helpful: "oooh look a menu of stuff to scroll through and select the right function!"... now honestly, was that any faster than just typing the damn function? If your function names are so long that you really need completion, you should rethink your naming scheme. Jump-to-declaration--sounds like ctags to me. As for project-wide renames, learn sed, my friend.
Fast startup time is a concern on something like a web browser or file editor, which you're likely going to launch repeatedly throughout the day, but not an IDE.
I've been running the same Firefox for over a week, same goes for my Emacs/SLIME (Lisp environment), and I have several acme (Plan 9 editor) sessions that have been running at least that long. I still expect quick startup times because 1) I'm impatient as hell, and 2) If it takes 15 seconds to page in all the stuff I need to run the program, this app is *how* big now?
I'm a Computer Engineering student, so I've done quite a bit of coding in classes and have also had two programming jobs. Just some thoughts on what I've experienced:
In CS 1, they started us out using Macs (yeah, ugh, etc.) to ssh into the CS dept's Sun boxes. With Emacs and the command line java tools, we learned basic coding. When we advanced to CS 2, though, the professor decided it was time to give us Eclipse. I guess this was supposed to be a favor. Instead, I found that I now had less of a feel for how things were going together. Eclipse was hiding stuff from me, and I didn't like it; in trying to make stuff like CVS, compilation, debugging, etc. more transparent, Eclipse was making it harder to understand what was going on. By CS 3, I had reverted to Emacs. When CS 4 rolled around and we moved on to C++, my now Eclipse-dependent compatriots were left in the cold; they fiddled with various Eclipse plugins for a while, then came back to Emacs. Other classes such as Assembly and Applied Programming (C) were also best performed with a text editor and some command line tools.
My first coding job was a summer internship writing C# under Visual Studio. I liked the job but didn't like the development environment. VS seemed to hide things even more than Eclipse... I felt far away from the code. As I recall, I wasn't able to compile my stuff outside of Visual Studio. The super tight integration just didn't work for me. VS struck me as the Disneyland of development tools--flashy, costly, structured; all your lodging (repositories), activities (coding), eating (compilation?), etc. are all right there.
I'm still at my second job. I write C code for the Plan 9 operating system using the Acme text editor, a compiler (8c), a linker (8l), and a debugger (acid). They're good tools and they have the advantage of keeping everything out in the open. I can poke around in the source files and see all the data that acme could show me; there are no hidden properties or anything like that. A utility called the plumber helps link the shell, the editor and the debugger in a useful way. It's a rather looser system, and I have a greater feeling of control when I'm programming with it. If VS is Disneyland, the Plan 9 (or *nix) tools are a hiking trail in the mountains--cheap, allows you to go off the beaten path, the users tend to be dirty... ok, I'm stretching a little.
At last, the point! In my experience, as a computer engineer/student, I want control of my code. I want to know where things are and what they do. I don't like applications that hold my hand too much. Some of my friends prefer to have the development environment do as much as possible, but I think there's a weakness to this--they tend to get lost when something new/unexpected comes up. Even if it's just that their box got fsck'd up and they have to use ssh and emacs to finish a project; at the very least, they're going to be in trouble without some of the features they've come to expect, while at the worst, their code simply will not work/will be unmodifiable (I've seen this happen).
Would you like to play a game?
> GLOBAL THERMONUCLEAR WAR