Re:"not designed with the American consumer in min
on
Hacking the XO Laptop
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· Score: 1
Actually, it looks a hell of a lot harder to use than normal distros, at least for what they were trying to do. What's this nonsense crap about running an embedded X server just so you can run opera? One X server isn't enough?
I call O.o for slashdotters not realizing this sooner.
I realized it immediately, but it doesn't really matter if we're talking about 1 billion or 2 billion gold, it's a stunning, staggering amount of money either way and it makes no difference.
But its very easy to think you understand things after a few weeks when infact your missing some incredibly subtle point and so I'm sure we would be flooded by bogus results due to misinterpretations from the data if we release it.
You sound very intelligent and I'm sure you're correct. But I couldn't help but think how much that sounds like the reasons why the Catholic Church conducted mass in Latin for so long, and why they were initially reluctant to have the Bible translated to English.
If we ever achieve AI it will be with a core of code that can generate modules of code that attempt different strategies, in other words grows a brain as program code and database, not just a matrix recording true - false results from random permutation outputs.
In that case, the future is already here. You should look into the work of John Koza and others. Their work involves generating code, real computer generated programs, not a matrix of lookup tables. I highly recommend his books, they are eye opening and amazing. (Warning, it's Lisp. But if you want to do this kind of work in any most other modern languages, you end up essentially building a Lisp-like interpreter anyway. Ruby would be one exception to this.)
Thanks for summing up the major problem with the Western world-view in a single sentence.
Agreed. It's one of the greatest problems mankind faces, the way money works. It is simply more profitable to let people die and accelerate collapse through excessive consumption than it is to behave like a species that wishes to survive.
I thought his ideas were very good. I have a suspicion that AC here doesn't fit enough of the profile of a very good programmer, according to that article. The article is of course overgeneralizing, but the article can't help it. The topic is to give business guys an idea of how to spot good programmers, so the pointers given can't be perfect. They are pretty good though, I think. Of course, if I didn't fit the bill in a bunch of the categories I'd be saying this article is crap.
However, locking code down is an interesting problem in that a lot of the more modern high-level languages have no way to really lock down the code.
I agree, and I was kind of surprised about this. At first I thought that surely I must be missing something. Near as I can tell your options for writing Web code without releasing the source are Java,.NET, or CGI-bin using C++ or another compiled language. I actually seriously considered using FastCGI with D, and then I snapped out of my reverie and got to work in C#. Anyway the whole experience kind of made me feel a little surprised about the way the languages are going. As you say, it could just be that most web apps are one-offs.
Actually the Python installer approach would be adequate for my problem. I chose C# because I was in a hurry and already knew C#.
Re:Just how slow is "slow"?
on
Rails May Not Suck
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· Score: 2, Informative
There's 3 aspects to the slowness, IMHO:
1. The language. Ruby tends to be slower. Something like this programming language shootout will give you details. But this isn't the whole story.
2. Enough rope to hang you. Rails gives you a lot of ways to easily define dynamic classes, where the class is being generated dynamically on the fly. It can make the code lovely and small to use, but can make it slower than hammering it out in a lower level language. This and other techniques can lead to higher memory consumption, too. But I don't fault the language here. I see it as a powerful tool that must be wielded carefully sometimes.
3. Active record. A lot of the slowness that people see can come from automagic that's happening in the background. If you're not careful with active record, for example, it pulls in every last field from table you're looking for, along with the relatives. I just needed the customer's name, and ended up with 8 kilobytes of data because I wasn't careful with what I was doing.
Ruby and Rails are delicious, but there's 2 things I need that I can't get from Ruby on Rails right now. Because of these 2 things, I am using C# under Mono, but I'd far rather use Ruby on Rails if I could:
1. Protect the code. I need to be able to deploy it without the code being easily copied and reviewed. I know, I've seen it all on this topic: I don't really need to protect it, whatever I'm doing isn't that hard to figure out, etc. Trust me, I really need to protect the code. I write products for a living, and my customers will unfairly pirate/sell/give my code away, and it will cut into my income if I can't keep control of who gets my code. This is why I'm using C# and Mono. And yes, I realize that can easily be decompiled. But it's still more than adequate protection in my business space.
2. Make it faster. Ruby is too slow for what I need to do. My customers can only afford around $100 USD/mo for hosting my special purpose application, and for the number of people they get hitting the site, Ruby doesn't cut it. I know, I know, do more caching do more magic, get more computers, build a server farm, etc. Whatever. I just rewrote the thing in C# and I could support way more users per $100 of server. It made me cry to have to do it.
Please, if there's ways to do better on those 2 areas, let me know! But trust me, I really do need to protect the code.
I'm thinking I might be able to solve both of these problems using JRuby some day, but I'm not sure yet.
Ruby looks like gibberish..?? You've just told the world that you've never looked at it.
Here's some Ruby code.
def self.style(*args) [self::WidgetClassName, *(args.map!{|a| _get_eval_string(a)})].join('.') end
Looks a little jibberishy, honestly. But as I ranted about elsewhere, it's up to the programmer to make the code clear when it needs to be. It depends on who your audience is for reading the code. If they can handle stuff like that above, then great. But if it's gonna baffle them, then consider making it easier to understand.
It's up for argument, perhaps, but I wouldn't dismiss GP's claim that Ruby can look like jibberish. Much of the Ruby code people wave about in Ruby is overly black magick-y for my taste.
Blame the programmer not the language
on
Rails May Not Suck
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· Score: 3, Insightful
A lot of Ruby tutorials do try to be overly clever. But really, quite a bit of C code was/is overly clever, also. People cramming so much stuff onto a single line that the code is unreadable and difficult to support.
But that's not really a problem in the language. That's a style thing. I very frequently when coding in C, Java, or C# split things onto multiple lines that could be expressed in a single line. I often take intermediate values and put them into variables with good names, instead of ramming the values all together.
I remember when I was a wee lad, learning C, and being utterly baffled by a lot of the code I read. Casting pointers to other things, doing math, switching to array notation, then suddenly treating the whole expression as a function pointer, and feeding a stream of other things as arguments into the function... That kind of thing is amusing, but has no place in typical production applications code. Something far more common is huge expressions with the ternary operator that are just one element in a more complex expression. I saw this kind of thing in most of the C code I read, and felt like I must be a noob if I didn't do that. Then one day I decided I just would write code that was simple and made sense, and that's what I do-- it's a style choice.
The point is, writing code that's easy to understand is up to the programmer, and less to the language. People used to defend COBOL because it was more readable. But one huge problem with COBOL is you've gotta write a lot of lines of drivel to get anything done, compared to say C. The price we pay for the comparative expressiveness of C is we have to be more careful with the code to keep it understandable. From C to Ruby is a similar jump in expressiveness, with a commensurate risk of it being less understandable. But it's possible to write difficult to understand code in any language.
Ruby does have some things in it that make it quite different from other languages, most notably closures and metaprogramming. But honest, you do get used to it. You can even avoid the elements you're not comfortable with, and ease into them later.
But over time you start to find there's quick and dirty ways of doing things in very few lines of code in Ruby. And things like testing kits and the way Rails helps you structure your code make it so that your code is spread out nicely, and it's easy to isolate bugs quickly, even if some of your code is a little overly terse.
I recommend not starting with Rails. Spend a few hours alone with Ruby before trying to wrap your head around the way Rails works. Write a tic tac toe program on the console, or something. Get to where you've made peace with Ruby before you get into rails.
Because starting off directly with Rails and Ruby, not understanding either one can be very difficult. They are both such different approaches from what many developers are used to that it's a bit like learning Pig Latin and Chinese at the same time.
Don't go into management! Once you do, it'll be hard to come back to technical work. And if you do go into management, keep coding in your spare time and stay current.
Work your "dirt" job as a sysadmin, and use your free research time to work on something cool. Big deal-- you'd still get more time to work on "cool" things as a dirt Google employee than most normal programmers with "cool" job titles.
I would gladly give up if it meant not sitting in traffic for hours
If you're truly willing to give things up, then you can have what you want. Figure out a way to get a job where you can work from home. Sell the car. Move somewhere with really cheap housing where you can walk to the grocery store. It sounds like I'm being glib, but I'm dead serious. Do it.
I did it. My wife and I both took 50% pay cuts to find work at home jobs. We sold one car and used it to pay off the other. We fill up our remaining car about once every 2 months or so. We had many expenses before that we no longer have, including about $150 USD/mo in toll roads and about $250 USD/mo in gas, and our car insurance is super cheap now with 1 car fully paid off instead of 2 cars. Plus, we both recovered about 2 hours per day each on commute times, which we now use to enjoy our happier less stressful lives.
Seriously-- if you're honestly willing to make sacrifices to not sit in traffic, then do it. You're in charge of your life, right?
I was taught java much to my detriment and annoyance (I had taught myself VB6 prior to going to uni so wasnt a newbie to programming).
Never too late. Stop blaming the university and go learn C. Don't be discouraged; it's easy to write programs that compile yet don't work in C, so be prepared for that. But go do it. Best way to learn it is to try to write something simple, like Blackjack or whatever interests you.
We're a heck of a lot closer with this than without it. This is a huge step in that direction. There's already quite a bit of technology out there to convert bitmaps to line drawings, and things to track the same object in a video. We'll wake you up later if you insist, but I expect a lot of hardcore developers are waking up now and getting started on some badass research projects.
"Not completely connected" is a very strange phrase. I could say that my laptop is "not completely connected" to the internet because there's a router between them. But either there's a connection between the two networks or there isn't.
Ok, consider this scenario, and tell me if these two systems are perhaps "not completely connected": System A is a machine that under processor control can turn a mechanical relay on or off. There's a wire from that relay to System B, and system B can tell if the relay is on or not. Now, those two systems are connected in a limited way, but it might be ok to say that they are not 'completely connected' because they don't have network access to each other.
I can wrap my head around the laws of physics being different in hypothetical alternative universes. But surely at least mathematics and logic would be universal?
Exactly. Define "Getting nowhere", I would say. Take Parmenides for example, who reasoned based on his observations that reality is illusion. One could say that he got nowhere. But one could also say that he successfully challenged the status quo of man's way of thinking about things at the time, and thus advanced it. Even when someone is proven wrong they can make a contribution to knowledge and quality of thought. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that anyone who would say "Philosophers have been pondering this nonsense for centuries, and have gotten nowhere" doesn't understand much about the history of thought.
Come on, cut the guy some slack. Watching a number increment isn't all there is to it. There's a lot involved in trying to increment that little number. I can tell from your remarks that you've never done it. It takes a lot of commitment, time, or money to really hammer down some big numbers on a project like this. It can involve system administration, overvlocking, social engineering... Seriously, if you get 10 or 50 CPU's all doing something, and keep doing it, for a couple of months solid, it can be time consuming. And if one of those machines winks out, you need to fix it, or in a year you'll be down to half your original horsepower. And then you need to monitor them somehow, to make sure they're all still running. It's a fun thing to try to do, to set your sites on overtaking a friend that's got better numbers than you. You could do far worse for a hobby.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, it looks a hell of a lot harder to use than normal distros, at least for what they were trying to do. What's this nonsense crap about running an embedded X server just so you can run opera? One X server isn't enough?
You talk a lot of smack, for a pussy that was too afraid to leave the Post Anonymously box unchecked.
I thought his ideas were very good. I have a suspicion that AC here doesn't fit enough of the profile of a very good programmer, according to that article. The article is of course overgeneralizing, but the article can't help it. The topic is to give business guys an idea of how to spot good programmers, so the pointers given can't be perfect. They are pretty good though, I think. Of course, if I didn't fit the bill in a bunch of the categories I'd be saying this article is crap.
1. The language. Ruby tends to be slower. Something like this programming language shootout will give you details. But this isn't the whole story.
2. Enough rope to hang you. Rails gives you a lot of ways to easily define dynamic classes, where the class is being generated dynamically on the fly. It can make the code lovely and small to use, but can make it slower than hammering it out in a lower level language. This and other techniques can lead to higher memory consumption, too. But I don't fault the language here. I see it as a powerful tool that must be wielded carefully sometimes.
3. Active record. A lot of the slowness that people see can come from automagic that's happening in the background. If you're not careful with active record, for example, it pulls in every last field from table you're looking for, along with the relatives. I just needed the customer's name, and ended up with 8 kilobytes of data because I wasn't careful with what I was doing.
Regarding copying the code, I don't currently prevent copying exactly. I just have it locked to particular domains.
1. Protect the code. I need to be able to deploy it without the code being easily copied and reviewed. I know, I've seen it all on this topic: I don't really need to protect it, whatever I'm doing isn't that hard to figure out, etc. Trust me, I really need to protect the code. I write products for a living, and my customers will unfairly pirate/sell/give my code away, and it will cut into my income if I can't keep control of who gets my code. This is why I'm using C# and Mono. And yes, I realize that can easily be decompiled. But it's still more than adequate protection in my business space.
2. Make it faster. Ruby is too slow for what I need to do. My customers can only afford around $100 USD/mo for hosting my special purpose application, and for the number of people they get hitting the site, Ruby doesn't cut it. I know, I know, do more caching do more magic, get more computers, build a server farm, etc. Whatever. I just rewrote the thing in C# and I could support way more users per $100 of server. It made me cry to have to do it.
Please, if there's ways to do better on those 2 areas, let me know! But trust me, I really do need to protect the code.
I'm thinking I might be able to solve both of these problems using JRuby some day, but I'm not sure yet.
Looks a little jibberishy, honestly. But as I ranted about elsewhere, it's up to the programmer to make the code clear when it needs to be. It depends on who your audience is for reading the code. If they can handle stuff like that above, then great. But if it's gonna baffle them, then consider making it easier to understand.
It's up for argument, perhaps, but I wouldn't dismiss GP's claim that Ruby can look like jibberish. Much of the Ruby code people wave about in Ruby is overly black magick-y for my taste.
A lot of Ruby tutorials do try to be overly clever. But really, quite a bit of C code was/is overly clever, also. People cramming so much stuff onto a single line that the code is unreadable and difficult to support.
But that's not really a problem in the language. That's a style thing. I very frequently when coding in C, Java, or C# split things onto multiple lines that could be expressed in a single line. I often take intermediate values and put them into variables with good names, instead of ramming the values all together.
I remember when I was a wee lad, learning C, and being utterly baffled by a lot of the code I read. Casting pointers to other things, doing math, switching to array notation, then suddenly treating the whole expression as a function pointer, and feeding a stream of other things as arguments into the function... That kind of thing is amusing, but has no place in typical production applications code. Something far more common is huge expressions with the ternary operator that are just one element in a more complex expression. I saw this kind of thing in most of the C code I read, and felt like I must be a noob if I didn't do that. Then one day I decided I just would write code that was simple and made sense, and that's what I do-- it's a style choice.
The point is, writing code that's easy to understand is up to the programmer, and less to the language. People used to defend COBOL because it was more readable. But one huge problem with COBOL is you've gotta write a lot of lines of drivel to get anything done, compared to say C. The price we pay for the comparative expressiveness of C is we have to be more careful with the code to keep it understandable. From C to Ruby is a similar jump in expressiveness, with a commensurate risk of it being less understandable. But it's possible to write difficult to understand code in any language.
Ruby does have some things in it that make it quite different from other languages, most notably closures and metaprogramming. But honest, you do get used to it. You can even avoid the elements you're not comfortable with, and ease into them later.
But over time you start to find there's quick and dirty ways of doing things in very few lines of code in Ruby. And things like testing kits and the way Rails helps you structure your code make it so that your code is spread out nicely, and it's easy to isolate bugs quickly, even if some of your code is a little overly terse.
I recommend not starting with Rails. Spend a few hours alone with Ruby before trying to wrap your head around the way Rails works. Write a tic tac toe program on the console, or something. Get to where you've made peace with Ruby before you get into rails.
Because starting off directly with Rails and Ruby, not understanding either one can be very difficult. They are both such different approaches from what many developers are used to that it's a bit like learning Pig Latin and Chinese at the same time.
Don't go into management! Once you do, it'll be hard to come back to technical work. And if you do go into management, keep coding in your spare time and stay current.
Think of it as being a nice object oriented language with simplified C++ syntax, very similar to C#, an excellent language.
Languages like And Such, and the PHP.
Work your "dirt" job as a sysadmin, and use your free research time to work on something cool. Big deal-- you'd still get more time to work on "cool" things as a dirt Google employee than most normal programmers with "cool" job titles.
If you're truly willing to give things up, then you can have what you want. Figure out a way to get a job where you can work from home. Sell the car. Move somewhere with really cheap housing where you can walk to the grocery store. It sounds like I'm being glib, but I'm dead serious. Do it.
I did it. My wife and I both took 50% pay cuts to find work at home jobs. We sold one car and used it to pay off the other. We fill up our remaining car about once every 2 months or so. We had many expenses before that we no longer have, including about $150 USD/mo in toll roads and about $250 USD/mo in gas, and our car insurance is super cheap now with 1 car fully paid off instead of 2 cars. Plus, we both recovered about 2 hours per day each on commute times, which we now use to enjoy our happier less stressful lives.
Seriously-- if you're honestly willing to make sacrifices to not sit in traffic, then do it. You're in charge of your life, right?
We're a heck of a lot closer with this than without it. This is a huge step in that direction. There's already quite a bit of technology out there to convert bitmaps to line drawings, and things to track the same object in a video. We'll wake you up later if you insist, but I expect a lot of hardcore developers are waking up now and getting started on some badass research projects.
I can wrap my head around the laws of physics being different in hypothetical alternative universes. But surely at least mathematics and logic would be universal?
Exactly. Define "Getting nowhere", I would say. Take Parmenides for example, who reasoned based on his observations that reality is illusion. One could say that he got nowhere. But one could also say that he successfully challenged the status quo of man's way of thinking about things at the time, and thus advanced it. Even when someone is proven wrong they can make a contribution to knowledge and quality of thought. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that anyone who would say "Philosophers have been pondering this nonsense for centuries, and have gotten nowhere" doesn't understand much about the history of thought.
He knows because of the proof in the Church-Turing thesis.
Come on, cut the guy some slack. Watching a number increment isn't all there is to it. There's a lot involved in trying to increment that little number. I can tell from your remarks that you've never done it. It takes a lot of commitment, time, or money to really hammer down some big numbers on a project like this. It can involve system administration, overvlocking, social engineering... Seriously, if you get 10 or 50 CPU's all doing something, and keep doing it, for a couple of months solid, it can be time consuming. And if one of those machines winks out, you need to fix it, or in a year you'll be down to half your original horsepower. And then you need to monitor them somehow, to make sure they're all still running. It's a fun thing to try to do, to set your sites on overtaking a friend that's got better numbers than you. You could do far worse for a hobby.