if they made APIs that made sense then you would need less programmers and less hours to complete a task
Actually, it's been my experience that the hours allocated to complete a "task" are based less around the time that it actually takes to do it, or the amount of time that an experienced (or even an inexperienced) programmer guesses he needs to do it than on the amount of time the marketroids decide they need it in. Since programmers all work on salary, the amount of hours allocated to complete any task are always 0, and the programmer ends up working overtime to complete the task (and five others) in 0 hours, so the net cost doesn't change.
This is the sort of thing graduate degrees in CS are all about... and beleive me; if I can comprehend it, anybody can. If you really find it interesting, start studying for the GRE - before you know it, you'll be comprehending more than you bargained for.;)
Oh, hang on. What happens if we have a language with an infinite choice of characters that can be made up of any number of those characters?
Actually, beleive it or not, I'm studying exactly that this semester (among other things). If your means of representing the language is limited to single characters of an infinite alphabet "sigma" and your language consists of all string over the alphabet "sigma" (also known as the "Kleene Star" of sigma), then there are still an infinite number of infinite languages that can not be represented by your representation scheme. In other words, sigma is referred to as being "countably infinite" under set theory, but "sigma-star" is uncountably infinite (being the "power set" of sigma). So, even with an infinite choice of characters, you still miss an infinite number of languages. Thus, one infinity is actually greater than another.
David Hilbert's first problem discusses this in more depth.
And people say advanced degrees in computer science don't have any real-world applicability...
Have you (or anybody else) ever actually seen this experiment work? I've read about it many times, and tried it a few, and I can never get it to work the way it's described. I guess I'm using the wrong kind of light or something...
That seems to argue the author's point, doesn't it? It's like we (the software engineers/programmers) are the designers for a completely automated manufacturing plant (which would be the compiler & the linker). So, separating design from manufacturing in the manufacturing world is like the silly practice of trying to separate "designers" from "coders/programmers" in the software world. It could be done, but it would take ten times as long as it would to just have the designer do the programming.
Let n = the amount of time spent designing. When n = 0, there is no design work, therefore the impact of design on code is irrelevant, and n = 0 is true.
Now we form an induction hypothesis for the case k <= n and assume that k is true.
Finally, for the case k + 1, if we remove one hour of design work, we see that k + 1 = ( k ) plus the one hour we removed. Since ( k ) is true by the induction hypothesis (above), it remains to be proven that the one removed hour is also true. This can be proven by examining the fact that, for the fucntion f(x) = x, lim {x -> 0} f( x ) is in fact zero, therefore the one hour of design which was removed is irrelevant, completing the proof.
Wow, this computer science degree came in handy after all.
There was an interesting case (don't have any links, so you'll have to take my word for it) about something similar that happened here in Dallas a few years back. There are some "photo-artists" (Jock Sturges, Robert Mapplethorpe and Sally Mann, to name a few) whose art includes pictures from European nudist beaches, replete with underage subjects. You can legally buy collections of their photos at Barnes & Noble (and, presumedly, other booksellers)... evidently, some right-wing talk-show host got his panties in a knot over this, and encouraged his listeners to go into the bookstores, find those books, and rip them up. A lot of them did, and IIRC, were never prosecuted for anything (neither was B&N for selling what this right-wing talk show host considered CP).
Tell me about it. The surgeon general has determined that cigarette smoking can cause lung cancer, emphysema, yellow teeth, bad breath, chronic hacking cough, and the early onset of social pariah-ty. Didn't slow many people down.
Although I will probably never get why a closing tag requires a repeat of the file opening tag name
Not sure if you were serious here or not, but this is necessary to disambiguate the following improperly formed XML:
<start>
Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their <noun>country</noun></phrase>
which is either missing a "phrase" start tag or mixed up the start & end tags... in a long XML document, the parser can give you a better hint where to look for the error.
Or you were kidding and I missed the joke, in which case I'm about to be called all sorts of impolite things... (I might even be referred to as Sean Penn).
How will the authorities know if she's underage or not?
IANAL, but IIRC, in the US at least, the burden of proof is on the accused. So, in other words, if the prosecutor says "she's underaged in this picture", it's up to you to track down the photographer, the model, and find the required proof-of-age documentation, or you're going to jail. Possible governmenttal abuses of this law are left as an exercise to the reader.
A simple question turns into an RTFM reply and after a couple more postings, the original subject of the message is lost as the thread denegrates into complete trash
Huh... that sounds like another forum I read and post to regularly... What was it? It's on the tip of my tongue...
A while back, I was frustrated by slowness and lack of completeness in my news feed, so I looked into what I could do to speed it up. Well, I discovered that I could get a complete "suck feed" (e.g. all the newsgroups) for about $500/month. This seemed a bit high (at the time, that's what I was paying for rent), so I considered setting up my own side business - a commercial news server - to distribute the cost of the feed a bit. Well, in order to do that, of course, I would need 24x7 hosting, high bandwidth lines (more than a couple of T-3s), huge RAID arrays for retention, etc. etc. etc. Once I finally crunched all the numbers (and I'm sure I overlooked lots of things) I figured I'd need over 1000 customers, each willing to pay me $20/mo (for the same crappy service I was originally unhappy with myself), just to break even. That goes along with the hassle of running a business - I don't know if I'd call running Usenet "cheap".
Now, let me ask you something. What do you think of everybody else's goto-ridden code? How do you feel about maintaining somebody else's global-variable ridden code? Yeah, that's what I thought. That's how the rest of us feel when we're stuck maintaining your "I'm smarter than everybody else" zealot code.
Tell me about it. This "OO" buzzword is never going to catch on - it's been over 10 years since it became mainstream, but I'm sure we'll all come to our senses and go back to the purity of fortran any day now. Next thing you know, he'll be writing GUI interfaces instead of command-line applications, too.
Did you switch topics, or was that a typo? You went from talking about interface design to talking about I/O programming. I'm just curious which one Knuth actually discussed, and don't feel like going out and buying the book to find out.;)
I'm kind of with you, here - it seems to me that they're actually trying to take a measured, reasonable approach to software patenting by making sure that they're not stepping on anybody's toes. They're doing this to CYA (such that Y=T), but it seems like, if there are going to be software patents, this is a good thing.
Well, maybe Dave Thompson the drug user wouldn't send such a message, but you better hope those packet-sniffing "dogs" aren't out there right now, since you just did...
Hmmm... I think the post about suicide got more well-thought-out responses than any software-related posts. Assuming that most of us are software professionals, what does this say about the state of programming as a profession in the 21st century?
Re:Tee hee... published before editing was finishe
on
TCPA Support in Linux
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Garrick, please don't forget to remove my inline comments to you before you post this article.
Holy shit; I have to stop reading this forum at work... your post made me laugh so hard I had to explain what I was doing to my co-workers. And you made a relevant point, too! Thanks, and welcome to my friends list.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, it's been my experience that the hours allocated to complete a "task" are based less around the time that it actually takes to do it, or the amount of time that an experienced (or even an inexperienced) programmer guesses he needs to do it than on the amount of time the marketroids decide they need it in. Since programmers all work on salary, the amount of hours allocated to complete any task are always 0, and the programmer ends up working overtime to complete the task (and five others) in 0 hours, so the net cost doesn't change.
This is the sort of thing graduate degrees in CS are all about... and beleive me; if I can comprehend it, anybody can. If you really find it interesting, start studying for the GRE - before you know it, you'll be comprehending more than you bargained for. ;)
Actually, beleive it or not, I'm studying exactly that this semester (among other things). If your means of representing the language is limited to single characters of an infinite alphabet "sigma" and your language consists of all string over the alphabet "sigma" (also known as the "Kleene Star" of sigma), then there are still an infinite number of infinite languages that can not be represented by your representation scheme. In other words, sigma is referred to as being "countably infinite" under set theory, but "sigma-star" is uncountably infinite (being the "power set" of sigma). So, even with an infinite choice of characters, you still miss an infinite number of languages. Thus, one infinity is actually greater than another. David Hilbert's first problem discusses this in more depth.
And people say advanced degrees in computer science don't have any real-world applicability...
Have you (or anybody else) ever actually seen this experiment work? I've read about it many times, and tried it a few, and I can never get it to work the way it's described. I guess I'm using the wrong kind of light or something...
That seems to argue the author's point, doesn't it? It's like we (the software engineers/programmers) are the designers for a completely automated manufacturing plant (which would be the compiler & the linker). So, separating design from manufacturing in the manufacturing world is like the silly practice of trying to separate "designers" from "coders/programmers" in the software world. It could be done, but it would take ten times as long as it would to just have the designer do the programming.
Well, first we start with the base case.
Wow, this computer science degree came in handy after all.
There was an interesting case (don't have any links, so you'll have to take my word for it) about something similar that happened here in Dallas a few years back. There are some "photo-artists" (Jock Sturges, Robert Mapplethorpe and Sally Mann, to name a few) whose art includes pictures from European nudist beaches, replete with underage subjects. You can legally buy collections of their photos at Barnes & Noble (and, presumedly, other booksellers)... evidently, some right-wing talk-show host got his panties in a knot over this, and encouraged his listeners to go into the bookstores, find those books, and rip them up. A lot of them did, and IIRC, were never prosecuted for anything (neither was B&N for selling what this right-wing talk show host considered CP).
Tell me about it. The surgeon general has determined that cigarette smoking can cause lung cancer, emphysema, yellow teeth, bad breath, chronic hacking cough, and the early onset of social pariah-ty. Didn't slow many people down.
Not sure if you were serious here or not, but this is necessary to disambiguate the following improperly formed XML:
<start> Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their <noun>country</noun></phrase>which is either missing a "phrase" start tag or mixed up the start & end tags... in a long XML document, the parser can give you a better hint where to look for the error.
Or you were kidding and I missed the joke, in which case I'm about to be called all sorts of impolite things... (I might even be referred to as Sean Penn).
Ummmm... would that be Denver, Australia, then?
That's because in North Korea, only old people post soviet russia comments.
IANAL, but IIRC, in the US at least, the burden of proof is on the accused. So, in other words, if the prosecutor says "she's underaged in this picture", it's up to you to track down the photographer, the model, and find the required proof-of-age documentation, or you're going to jail. Possible governmenttal abuses of this law are left as an exercise to the reader.
Playing solitaire.
Huh... that sounds like another forum I read and post to regularly... What was it? It's on the tip of my tongue...
A while back, I was frustrated by slowness and lack of completeness in my news feed, so I looked into what I could do to speed it up. Well, I discovered that I could get a complete "suck feed" (e.g. all the newsgroups) for about $500/month. This seemed a bit high (at the time, that's what I was paying for rent), so I considered setting up my own side business - a commercial news server - to distribute the cost of the feed a bit. Well, in order to do that, of course, I would need 24x7 hosting, high bandwidth lines (more than a couple of T-3s), huge RAID arrays for retention, etc. etc. etc. Once I finally crunched all the numbers (and I'm sure I overlooked lots of things) I figured I'd need over 1000 customers, each willing to pay me $20/mo (for the same crappy service I was originally unhappy with myself), just to break even. That goes along with the hassle of running a business - I don't know if I'd call running Usenet "cheap".
Now, let me ask you something. What do you think of everybody else's goto-ridden code? How do you feel about maintaining somebody else's global-variable ridden code? Yeah, that's what I thought. That's how the rest of us feel when we're stuck maintaining your "I'm smarter than everybody else" zealot code.
Tell me about it. This "OO" buzzword is never going to catch on - it's been over 10 years since it became mainstream, but I'm sure we'll all come to our senses and go back to the purity of fortran any day now. Next thing you know, he'll be writing GUI interfaces instead of command-line applications, too.
Did you switch topics, or was that a typo? You went from talking about interface design to talking about I/O programming. I'm just curious which one Knuth actually discussed, and don't feel like going out and buying the book to find out. ;)
Damn - first our jobs go offshore, now our wave power feasibility demonstration projects go offshore too. Is nothing sacred?
I'm kind of with you, here - it seems to me that they're actually trying to take a measured, reasonable approach to software patenting by making sure that they're not stepping on anybody's toes. They're doing this to CYA (such that Y=T), but it seems like, if there are going to be software patents, this is a good thing.
Well, maybe Dave Thompson the drug user wouldn't send such a message, but you better hope those packet-sniffing "dogs" aren't out there right now, since you just did...
I think you mean "pore" over. Although I've seen the things history majors read, and pouring (say, beer) over it might help.
I have a BA in English, followed by an MBA.Mwahahahahahaha!
Hmmm... I think the post about suicide got more well-thought-out responses than any software-related posts. Assuming that most of us are software professionals, what does this say about the state of programming as a profession in the 21st century?
Garrick, please don't forget to remove my inline comments to you before you post this article.
Holy shit; I have to stop reading this forum at work... your post made me laugh so hard I had to explain what I was doing to my co-workers. And you made a relevant point, too! Thanks, and welcome to my friends list.