I've never found regexes to be useful at all. I prefer to write my own parsers from scratch in assembly language, or conway's game of life, if I'm feeling m/(ambitious|artistic|autistic|masochistic)/.
Yes... and try installing Windows XP on a RAID array without using a driver floppy disk. Even Houdini couldn't pull that one off! Linux on the other hand is a breeze. The array is automatically detected and the appropriate drivers are installed and initialized.
'diff' - compare two files, list differences
'tr' - text replace... replaces all instances of a character in the input stream with a different one in the output.
'touch' - update timestamps on a file, or create it if it's not there
At my last job I dealt with a lot of HIPAA compliant medical files... All tilde delimited with no endlines. I ended up writing a bunch of perl scripts that piped the files through tr to replace tildes with endlines, then do something useful such as grep, or parse the files with regexes. Perl also has special variables for the field record seperators, which you can set to change the endline character that it reads ( $/ ) and writes ( $\ ). If you're ever working with delimited files with no endlines, this can be a lifesaver... just set both variables to your delimiter, and it handles all the conversion for you.
Yeah, I know about test driven development. I've read the book. The reality is that doesn't happen in most places, and even if you've got an Agile development model, say Scrum, you've still got a two week cycle for new development. If a production issue occurs that needs to be patched same day, you need the ability to branch.
It depends though, on what level of reliability you want to ensure. In most cases, committing your code and making sure it compiles and passes unit tests is not enough. Production needs to be kept sanitary, and that means any code that gets there has to go through regression and user acceptance tests. This all takes time, and the more code you're dumping into production, the longer it's going to take. So it's very useful, and often integral to the operation of the business, to be able to branch, in order to limit the amount of change you're introducing to a critical system.
This idea might be extended to use on Mars. A mobile settlement would be ideal, I think, in that it would allow exploration and you could move to take shelter from storms. Course, doors, windows and a chimney is a far stretch from an airlock and sustainable resources for maintaining life on another planet... but imagine mass produced housing pods, roaming around Mars. The next generation of pioneers... I hope I live to see the exodus.:-)
Exactly. Anyone arguing against branching either a) has never worked on a large scale production or b) isn't able to wrap their mind around keeping track of various branches. The system suggested by the grandparent would be a disaster at any of the places I've worked. It just doesn't allow any flexibility in responding to the needs of the customer. Most software teams now are moving towards the 'agile' model, or some variation, and the tools that they use should reflect their principles. So branching is a given, the question is, which system does it best?
Everyone is living in a personal delusion, just some are more delusional than others.
I think it's more that some people agree to have the same delusions.:-)
...don't leave anything to chance and keep it protected all the way through the production pipeline.
I can't see why those idiots in the video game industry aren't listening to Randy Stude. Obviously we're dealing with someone who's seen the issues and thought out detailed solutions to them. And when confronted with this biting criticism from the interviewer:
VideoGamer.com: It doesn't sound like rocket science to me. I don't understand why publishers don't shore up the production line.
Randy fires back a steadfast conclusion:
Yeah. And that doesn't even mean that at the end of the day someone's not going to hack the game and put it up on a torrent network... We in the PCGA believe than an industry group such as ours and others out there should be the ones that tackle it from a standards perspective, provide guidance... We don't have the answer yet today but we would invite anyone who believes piracy is a problem to join our organisation...
Amazing! This nearly tops the genius and wisdom of a self referential slashdot post. Hats off to you, Randy! I'm going to join the PC Gaming Alliance right now!
"How much money is lost when people download music?"
Wrong example. Copying music, whether done by a record company or its illegal competitor the music pirate, is always producing value. No money is lost. Money is lost when you are not downloading while you want to.
I think the music example was right on the mark. I was going to make that same comparison before I found theaveng's post. I'm not sure where you're going with the rest of this... The only difference between copying music and copying a linux distro is that you're violating copyright law in one instance. In both cases the user gets some satisfaction or utility as a result, and both cases are impossible to qualify in financial terms, as you note further on.
Open source also provides value by acting as an anchor point for pricing of commercial software and raising the bar for required features. This forces companies to innovate and advance technology in order to remain profitable. Free open source is by definition outside of any economic model, so you can't put a price on it... but it does have value.
The same reasoning can also be extended to media piracy... It exists, it will continue to exist, and in order for companies to be profitable they have to provide some value above and beyond what is freely available. Security in an untrusted environment will always fail, and extortion is not a sustainable business model. This too shall pass... Wait and see!
I believe in the John Carmack approach to open source. When your old games are no longer a significant source of revenue - open source them. Let the community play around with them, and would-be game developers see how the pros do it. Ultimately this feeds the whole industry, and might lead some inspired candidates to apply at your company sometime in the future. If people are still willing to pay $40 for Diablo 2, well then I don't blame you for keeping that one, but I'd say open source Warcraft I and II and Diablo I. They're well past their prime.
That's interesting... would you care to elaborate? The main thing I'm concerned with is the way their tax burden is distributed between the wealthy and the poor/middle class. What's area(s) are you in agreement with McCain?
It's logical, just in a lazy sort of way. You see, being lazy people, we would rather assimilate someone else's opinion than formulate our own based on the facts. So we see this guy and we say, "Oh, he's like me! He's got an opinion... what does he say?"
It's too hard for most people to... say, browse to the presidential candidates' websites (no, I won't provide links, you swine, google it!), and examine their policies, which are listed out in detailed, multi-paged PDFs. It's even too hard to find the analysis of experts on the subject matter (say... economists?), which break the differences of those plans down into what effect they will have upon you and me and the world at large.
So most people end up voting upon trivialities - their gut feeling on whether they like a candidate or not. This is the only explanation I can find for why McCain has any significant proportion of the vote, because if most people were to read and understand his plans for the presidency, they would realize that he doesn't have their interests at heart. So, articles like this are targeted towards the sheep in the crowd. The shepherds (and the wolves for that matter) already know what they're going to do.
I'm calling prior art on this one. Marilyn Manson used a guitar in brain surgery on Garth Brooks in Celebrity Deathmatch Season 1. Many saw it as a fantastic success, but Hanson disagreed...
JaRule is likely endorsing whoever promises to legalize marijuana. Vint Cerf is likely endorsing the person that best represents his values. Since he is (presumably) a leader in technology and slashdot is a place for geeks, his opinion may well be relevant for the readers of this site.
The world does not need Wal-Mart, Microsoft, McDonald's, or any other substandard, exploitative American brand. The height of absurdity is Wal-Mart selling rice to Indians. What do the Wal-Marts in China sell? Crappy plastic Chinese crap back to the Chinese? The whole concept is absurd. What is Wal-Mart even doing in Canada?
That's hilarious, and true too. I hope someday the masses will wake up and realize they're getting screwed... Until then I'm just glad there's enough of a market to keep the local joints I frequent in business.
If you have an opportunity to get an internship, you should definitely go for that. They usually pay well, and the experience will give you a jump start on your career.
I didn't get an internship, and I had somewhat of a slow start coming out of college. I worked in QA for two companies. Luckily the second company allowed me to work with a lot of automation, and get experience doing some actual coding. I used that as a spring board to get a development role at another company.
While working at that QA job, I realized that the most important thing was to be dedicated to my goal of becoming a programmer. I worked with several other people who claimed that this was their goal, but while I was taking advantage of every opportunity to code (repetitive task? Cool, I'll write a Perl script!), my peers for some reason or another just didn't do that. So I think it's important, if you can't get an internship or a development role, to find a place at a software company and look for opportunities to help out using your programming knowledge. Study programming and work on some projects in your off time and just focus on building your skills. Actions speak louder than words, and if you're able to present a few instances where you were able to contribute something of value, you'll really shine in an interview, and you'll also get good references from the people you worked for.
I think the main driving force behind Firefox's popularity was probably businesses. The biggest security risk in most companies is their own employees, and having them run IE is like giving a book of matches to toddlers and setting them free in your house. When competition came along, and it dealt better with security concerns, the push was made to convert all those users to Firefox. From there on they start using at home and telling their friends.
Historically, google hasn't needed to make a big splash when they introduce a new product. They release a beta, get some feedback, and grow and adapt to the market. At some point, people start to realize that google's product does everything they need, it does it very well, and it's free. Hmm... And when everyone starts switching, google is more than able to scale up to the demand. Suddenly the little guy in the corner is looking to be a formidable opponent indeed.
I was a beta tester in Eve, and played the game when it first came out. The game had an amazing community before it was ever released, and there was a lot of anticipation around it. When it opened up, it was this huge world that was mostly empty, and a lot of players went solo, or in small corporations. It had much more of a wild west feeling, especially out in 0 sec. The economy was a grand experiment, and there were many creative ways to turn a profit.
I ended up quitting Eve because I felt that a lot of the things I enjoyed about it were being lost as the game matured. As large corporations and alliances moved into space, we lost the freedom and uncertainty of a lawless land. CCP considered many of the more "creative" ways of making money exploits, and banned players for using them, instead of fixing loopholes in the mechanics which were the root cause. In short, politics and heavy-handed policy enforcement killed the game for me.
Now I'm not saying they went the wrong direction with it. I think it was a natural maturing of the game which led to where it is now. But I do think they lost their most loyal player base by doing that, and made it more of a mainstream endeavor. While I can't fault them for wanting to expand their audience, and pull in some big revenue, personally, I wish they'd taken a different direction. In any case, I'm always interested to hear how "the experiment" is progressing, and I do think they've made a fresh contribution to the gaming industry. It will be interesting to see where their ideas evolve from here.
Hmm... my dad set my grandpa up with Ubuntu, but I don't think he uses it much. 'Twas a bad plan to do that when grandpa doesn't have any of the family geeks living nearby... Mac might have been a better (though more expensive) option.
Bob Slydell: You see, what we're actually trying to do here is, we're trying to get a feel for how people spend their day at work... so, if you would, would you walk us through a typical day, for you?
Peter Gibbons: Yeah.
Bob Slydell: Great.
Peter Gibbons: Well, I generally come in at least fifteen minutes late, ah, I use the side door - that way Lumbergh can't see me, heh heh - and, uh, after that I just sorta space out for about an hour.
Bob Porter: Da-uh? Space out?
Peter Gibbons: Yeah, I just stare at my desk; but it looks like I'm working. I do that for probably another hour after lunch, too. I'd say in a given week I probably only do about fifteen minutes of real, actual, work.
Slashdot Mirror
I've never found regexes to be useful at all. I prefer to write my own parsers from scratch in assembly language, or conway's game of life, if I'm feeling m/(ambitious|artistic|autistic|masochistic)/.
But even an artist gets lazy sometimes.
Yes... and try installing Windows XP on a RAID array without using a driver floppy disk. Even Houdini couldn't pull that one off! Linux on the other hand is a breeze. The array is automatically detected and the appropriate drivers are installed and initialized.
Harah for vi mode!
'diff' - compare two files, list differences
'tr' - text replace... replaces all instances of a character in the input stream with a different one in the output.
'touch' - update timestamps on a file, or create it if it's not there
At my last job I dealt with a lot of HIPAA compliant medical files... All tilde delimited with no endlines. I ended up writing a bunch of perl scripts that piped the files through tr to replace tildes with endlines, then do something useful such as grep, or parse the files with regexes. Perl also has special variables for the field record seperators, which you can set to change the endline character that it reads ( $/ ) and writes ( $\ ). If you're ever working with delimited files with no endlines, this can be a lifesaver... just set both variables to your delimiter, and it handles all the conversion for you.
Yeah, I know about test driven development. I've read the book. The reality is that doesn't happen in most places, and even if you've got an Agile development model, say Scrum, you've still got a two week cycle for new development. If a production issue occurs that needs to be patched same day, you need the ability to branch.
It depends though, on what level of reliability you want to ensure. In most cases, committing your code and making sure it compiles and passes unit tests is not enough. Production needs to be kept sanitary, and that means any code that gets there has to go through regression and user acceptance tests. This all takes time, and the more code you're dumping into production, the longer it's going to take. So it's very useful, and often integral to the operation of the business, to be able to branch, in order to limit the amount of change you're introducing to a critical system.
Do we get to nominate people to go?
No, but we get to vote them off.
Mars! It's the next step in reality TV! Apply today!
This idea might be extended to use on Mars. A mobile settlement would be ideal, I think, in that it would allow exploration and you could move to take shelter from storms. Course, doors, windows and a chimney is a far stretch from an airlock and sustainable resources for maintaining life on another planet... but imagine mass produced housing pods, roaming around Mars. The next generation of pioneers... I hope I live to see the exodus. :-)
So I guess you've never worked in the real world
Exactly. Anyone arguing against branching either a) has never worked on a large scale production or b) isn't able to wrap their mind around keeping track of various branches. The system suggested by the grandparent would be a disaster at any of the places I've worked. It just doesn't allow any flexibility in responding to the needs of the customer. Most software teams now are moving towards the 'agile' model, or some variation, and the tools that they use should reflect their principles. So branching is a given, the question is, which system does it best?
Everyone is living in a personal delusion, just some are more delusional than others.
I think it's more that some people agree to have the same delusions. :-)
...don't leave anything to chance and keep it protected all the way through the production pipeline.
I can't see why those idiots in the video game industry aren't listening to Randy Stude. Obviously we're dealing with someone who's seen the issues and thought out detailed solutions to them. And when confronted with this biting criticism from the interviewer:
VideoGamer.com: It doesn't sound like rocket science to me. I don't understand why publishers don't shore up the production line.
Randy fires back a steadfast conclusion:
Yeah. And that doesn't even mean that at the end of the day someone's not going to hack the game and put it up on a torrent network ... We in the PCGA believe than an industry group such as ours and others out there should be the ones that tackle it from a standards perspective, provide guidance ... We don't have the answer yet today but we would invite anyone who believes piracy is a problem to join our organisation ...
Amazing! This nearly tops the genius and wisdom of a self referential slashdot post. Hats off to you, Randy! I'm going to join the PC Gaming Alliance right now!
"How much money is lost when people download music?"
Wrong example. Copying music, whether done by a record company or its illegal competitor the music pirate, is always producing value. No money is lost. Money is lost when you are not downloading while you want to.
I think the music example was right on the mark. I was going to make that same comparison before I found theaveng's post. I'm not sure where you're going with the rest of this... The only difference between copying music and copying a linux distro is that you're violating copyright law in one instance. In both cases the user gets some satisfaction or utility as a result, and both cases are impossible to qualify in financial terms, as you note further on.
Open source also provides value by acting as an anchor point for pricing of commercial software and raising the bar for required features. This forces companies to innovate and advance technology in order to remain profitable. Free open source is by definition outside of any economic model, so you can't put a price on it... but it does have value.
The same reasoning can also be extended to media piracy... It exists, it will continue to exist, and in order for companies to be profitable they have to provide some value above and beyond what is freely available. Security in an untrusted environment will always fail, and extortion is not a sustainable business model. This too shall pass... Wait and see!
use rock on wife
> wife is dead
Lock door.
> you hear a grue scratching outside
I believe in the John Carmack approach to open source. When your old games are no longer a significant source of revenue - open source them. Let the community play around with them, and would-be game developers see how the pros do it. Ultimately this feeds the whole industry, and might lead some inspired candidates to apply at your company sometime in the future. If people are still willing to pay $40 for Diablo 2, well then I don't blame you for keeping that one, but I'd say open source Warcraft I and II and Diablo I. They're well past their prime.
That's interesting... would you care to elaborate? The main thing I'm concerned with is the way their tax burden is distributed between the wealthy and the poor/middle class. What's area(s) are you in agreement with McCain?
It's logical, just in a lazy sort of way. You see, being lazy people, we would rather assimilate someone else's opinion than formulate our own based on the facts. So we see this guy and we say, "Oh, he's like me! He's got an opinion... what does he say?"
It's too hard for most people to... say, browse to the presidential candidates' websites (no, I won't provide links, you swine, google it!), and examine their policies, which are listed out in detailed, multi-paged PDFs. It's even too hard to find the analysis of experts on the subject matter (say... economists?), which break the differences of those plans down into what effect they will have upon you and me and the world at large.
So most people end up voting upon trivialities - their gut feeling on whether they like a candidate or not. This is the only explanation I can find for why McCain has any significant proportion of the vote, because if most people were to read and understand his plans for the presidency, they would realize that he doesn't have their interests at heart. So, articles like this are targeted towards the sheep in the crowd. The shepherds (and the wolves for that matter) already know what they're going to do.
I'm calling prior art on this one. Marilyn Manson used a guitar in brain surgery on Garth Brooks in Celebrity Deathmatch Season 1. Many saw it as a fantastic success, but Hanson disagreed...
JaRule is likely endorsing whoever promises to legalize marijuana. Vint Cerf is likely endorsing the person that best represents his values. Since he is (presumably) a leader in technology and slashdot is a place for geeks, his opinion may well be relevant for the readers of this site.
Stick around for logical fallacies 101.
God is an American.
The world does not need Wal-Mart, Microsoft, McDonald's, or any other substandard, exploitative American brand. The height of absurdity is Wal-Mart selling rice to Indians. What do the Wal-Marts in China sell? Crappy plastic Chinese crap back to the Chinese? The whole concept is absurd. What is Wal-Mart even doing in Canada?
That's hilarious, and true too. I hope someday the masses will wake up and realize they're getting screwed... Until then I'm just glad there's enough of a market to keep the local joints I frequent in business.
I call it "Digital Prohibition". I expect it to fail in a similar manner.
If you have an opportunity to get an internship, you should definitely go for that. They usually pay well, and the experience will give you a jump start on your career.
I didn't get an internship, and I had somewhat of a slow start coming out of college. I worked in QA for two companies. Luckily the second company allowed me to work with a lot of automation, and get experience doing some actual coding. I used that as a spring board to get a development role at another company.
While working at that QA job, I realized that the most important thing was to be dedicated to my goal of becoming a programmer. I worked with several other people who claimed that this was their goal, but while I was taking advantage of every opportunity to code (repetitive task? Cool, I'll write a Perl script!), my peers for some reason or another just didn't do that. So I think it's important, if you can't get an internship or a development role, to find a place at a software company and look for opportunities to help out using your programming knowledge. Study programming and work on some projects in your off time and just focus on building your skills. Actions speak louder than words, and if you're able to present a few instances where you were able to contribute something of value, you'll really shine in an interview, and you'll also get good references from the people you worked for.
I think the main driving force behind Firefox's popularity was probably businesses. The biggest security risk in most companies is their own employees, and having them run IE is like giving a book of matches to toddlers and setting them free in your house. When competition came along, and it dealt better with security concerns, the push was made to convert all those users to Firefox. From there on they start using at home and telling their friends.
Historically, google hasn't needed to make a big splash when they introduce a new product. They release a beta, get some feedback, and grow and adapt to the market. At some point, people start to realize that google's product does everything they need, it does it very well, and it's free. Hmm... And when everyone starts switching, google is more than able to scale up to the demand. Suddenly the little guy in the corner is looking to be a formidable opponent indeed.
I was a beta tester in Eve, and played the game when it first came out. The game had an amazing community before it was ever released, and there was a lot of anticipation around it. When it opened up, it was this huge world that was mostly empty, and a lot of players went solo, or in small corporations. It had much more of a wild west feeling, especially out in 0 sec. The economy was a grand experiment, and there were many creative ways to turn a profit.
I ended up quitting Eve because I felt that a lot of the things I enjoyed about it were being lost as the game matured. As large corporations and alliances moved into space, we lost the freedom and uncertainty of a lawless land. CCP considered many of the more "creative" ways of making money exploits, and banned players for using them, instead of fixing loopholes in the mechanics which were the root cause. In short, politics and heavy-handed policy enforcement killed the game for me.
Now I'm not saying they went the wrong direction with it. I think it was a natural maturing of the game which led to where it is now. But I do think they lost their most loyal player base by doing that, and made it more of a mainstream endeavor. While I can't fault them for wanting to expand their audience, and pull in some big revenue, personally, I wish they'd taken a different direction. In any case, I'm always interested to hear how "the experiment" is progressing, and I do think they've made a fresh contribution to the gaming industry. It will be interesting to see where their ideas evolve from here.
Hmm... my dad set my grandpa up with Ubuntu, but I don't think he uses it much. 'Twas a bad plan to do that when grandpa doesn't have any of the family geeks living nearby... Mac might have been a better (though more expensive) option.
And if I had mod points they'd go to Ivan. :)
+1: correct identification of logical fallacy
Bob Slydell: You see, what we're actually trying to do here is, we're trying to get a feel for how people spend their day at work... so, if you would, would you walk us through a typical day, for you?
Peter Gibbons: Yeah.
Bob Slydell: Great.
Peter Gibbons: Well, I generally come in at least fifteen minutes late, ah, I use the side door - that way Lumbergh can't see me, heh heh - and, uh, after that I just sorta space out for about an hour.
Bob Porter: Da-uh? Space out?
Peter Gibbons: Yeah, I just stare at my desk; but it looks like I'm working. I do that for probably another hour after lunch, too. I'd say in a given week I probably only do about fifteen minutes of real, actual, work.
Guess which big three letter company I work for?
Burn the Caldera man!