Before y'all get up in arms, I'm not disputing that there's uglyness to HTML, and CSS is a huge step forward. However, CSS is a huge, bloated beast, and I can't really see how SVG advances the web. IMNSHO, the web should be:
- An easy way to access information
- Simple, adhering to the lowest reasonable common denominator that works across all common browsers (HTML 4, limited CSS, etc.)
- Not filled with bloat and fluff that doesn't help me access information (such as flash intros, flash menus, Java menu crap, etc.)
Many of the webmonkeys I've known in my company that complain about such things not working are the same people who couldn't do HTML by hand if they wanted to, insist that beauty should take priority over functionality, and develop IE-only pages because they never thought to test any other browser and then blame those browsers for not supporting the latest, greatest standard. Here's a tip: if you want people to use your stuff, you have to provide it in a format their tools can understand. You can't expect everyone to upgrade, so you have to work to your audience.
Granted, I, too, would like to shoot everyone using NS 4.x, but there are still people out there running it and viewing my site at 640x480. I don't know how they can stand it, but it's their choice. My choice is to continue to support them as well as possible, for the moment. So I don't really concern myself with the new standards. Besides, for me, I have little to no use for them at the moment anyway.
IMHO, mis-applied Java and Flash are the worst two things that ever happened on the web. And those were both "innovations", especially the Java bit. So understand if I'm wary about any so called "improvements" to what already works pretty darn well and is just now starting to truly work the same (mostly) in most mainstream browsers.
That said, I run Fire(name this week) and, yes, I don't have the Flash plugin installed. F@#$ing hate flash. Bane of my existance.
Me - Every Single Day
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JOE Hits 3.0
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· Score: 1
I'm a long-time loyal JOE user. Been one since I loaded up my first Slackware install eight years ago only to discover how much VI and I don't get along - at all.
Over the years, I've kept trying to become comfortable with vi, because, as many have pointed out, it's everywhere. However, for me it sucks - it and I don't work the same way. It was clearly built by individuals who didn't think the same way I do. I refuse to change the way I think to fit a tool that I can't even convince myself to like. I'd rather get what I consider to be a better tool. So, I use a tool that I like that's fast, efficient, works like I want it to, and gets the job done. I should also mention that I don't really use X - 99% of my work is done in SSH sessions. So GUI anything is useless in my world. I need a good, solid text-based editor.
In reference to another story on/. today, if a machine doesn't have it, the very first thing I put on is JOE. Period.
I'm thrilled to see the new release. I'm glad somebody's working on it again, because I was always too lazy to improve it. As for the complaints I've seen, I couldn't care less about proper Unicode support (as I hate Unicode with a unique passion reserved exclusively for it...), and I'm sure the context highlighting will be improved.
Pretty cool - kudos to those working on keeping my one and only editor running in 2004.
I tinker with my car all the time. Back when I had an ECU I even understood (had the firmware source, complete with symbols and comments, don't ask how...), I actually tinkered quite a bit more. Blow up the motor? Oops. Not like I haven't done that before, and there goes a Saturday down the drain changing it out. I usually have a spare engine or two sitting around, or if not I know where the junk yards are or I know how to rebuild or repair them (if possible, depends on the failure mode).
Car Lease? Warranty? What are these? I buy cars for cash (usually used, or occasionally built from 2-3 salvages) and drive the suckers into the ground, then repeat. My Blazer died at 190,000 miles (original engine, third tranny), my del Sol is still good at 160k and should live to well over 200k, and my Yukon is at 110k and is only three years old (only vehicle I've ever bought new). Yes, I drive a lot. Greatest feeling in the world to me - open road, open windows (or open top), radio cranked up, going places just to see what's over the next hill.
Also, how exactly do I invalidate my insurance? I don't carry coverage for repair on any of these, except the Yukon, and that's only because it's new enough to be worth fixing. The rest, after any wreck my insurance would have to pay to fix, I'd either cut up for scrap or fix them myself anyway. If it's the other guy's insurance, obviously I'm going to make them fix it (or just take the money and scrap the car). It's not like I'm stupid enough to ask the insurance people to fix something mechanically that's my fault through stupidity.
Chips are just a new piece of everything that's been done for years - overboring cylinders, performance cams, high flow exhausts, aftermarket blowers, etc. That said, though, chips on normally aspirated cars are usually a waste of time these days. Don't bother - work on the other upgrades instead.
Guess it all comes down to if you know what the hell you're doing, go for it. If you don't, don't be a wannabe wanker that complains when it doesn't go right.
Silly troll... Some of us are mature enough for real relationships with real women - you know, the ones that come with engineering degree, second salary, and sports car included?;)
Insulting - that's probably the most applicable term. Most everyone I remember from STS 95 was, while usually a bit geeky (myself definitely included), at least functionally socially adept. Most quite so - well adjusted, smart, funny, wonderful individuals. However, it's downright distasteful that rather than discussing the effort that goes into something like this and the personalities behind it, the author focuses on whether these people fit the stereotypes of nerdiness. It seems as if he did his abject best to trivialize these students and their work.
As far as pure science vs. applied science... I was one of the finalists while it was still the old Westinghouse STS (1995, to be exact). That year, there was a great amount of theoretical or pure science, with very little engineering-type research projects. Pure science did quite well that year, as I recall.
Any other former STSers out there slacking on/. ?
Nathan D. Holmes, STS Finalist 1995
Re:Apache 2.x safe to use yet?
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PHP 5 RC 1 released
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· Score: 2, Interesting
The only thing I remember was a problem relating to multiple includes of PHP scripts. The PHP people pointed at Apache, Apache people pointed at PHP. Something about apache filter vs. something-or-other, blah blah blah. Suffice to say they finally got things together a while back, and I run PHP 4.3.x on a handful of production servers (some with quite high load and mostly PHP pages) without issue.
I don't remember the exact details of the whole fiasco, but both sides racked up a black eye in my book. It was a very basic piece of functionality that they didn't seem to be moving too quickly to fix. It delayed my upgrade to A2 for about eight months and annoyed me every time I thought about it.
That said, PHP absolutely rocks. Fast, efficient, and concise. I just view it as improved C, which in my world (a world sans objects), is a very good thing.
And I send email and IMs to the guy in the next cube over all the time, for two simple reasons:
a) Email, because there's no reason for me to try to verbally explain a problem when I can just send the original report, with all the details, over for his review
Or...
b) IM because there are just some things that shouldn't be shouted in a corporate environment, even though I'm already known by my coworkers for loud strings of four-letter expletives, especially when dealing with the marketing, revenue, or legal departments. Also good for sending backchannel thoughts while sitting on giant conference calls (and my phone doesn't have a mute button)
They make a cool Bluetooth SoC that includes not only the RF chunks and necessarily Bluetooth hardware, but also an embedded ARM7TDMI processor core and flash, all on the same chip.
The only problem is getting them to talk to you. I'm an EE for a $20 billion/year Fortune 500 that's currently working on a Bluetooth experiment, and the damned rep won't even return an email to myself or one of my fellow engineers. So all I have to play with is a module I "harvested" from another prototype device from another group. Arg!
Pretty easily, really. For those of us that dislike object-oriented programming with a passion, C++ allows programmers to do things in ways that we find ugly, ineffecient, or at the least obfuscated. By adding to the language, you've allowed them to do things in ways we pure C guys object to.
Why is the automatic knee-jerk reaction of some people to start placing restrictions and bureaucracy on things? Let's look at licensing for a sec:
- The internet is based on the free exchange of ideas between everyone - even those that I proclaim idiots. Many of these people have differing views on how things should be set up, what hardward/software to use, etc. Someone has to administer this license, and this just begs for abuse of power.
- Many of the affected in the latest virus round were technical corporations. These are big places filled with lots of really smart (or at least well-educated, which is not synonymous) people. One of my fellow engineers got nailed by Slammer, because he forgot to patch one of our systems that sits in a corner (and somehow the damn thing got through/around the firewall). These people would easily get internet licenses, but they still forget about machines or otherwise screw up.
- This is a bureaucratic solution (more paperwork, etc.) to a problem that either a) is purely technical in nature (buggy software) or b) isn't a problem but rather just the way things are. The last thing we need is more paper-pushers pushing paper rather than actual people solving the actual issues.
If you roll your SUV, you f*#@ed up. Plain and simple. Are they more likely to roll? Yes. Higher center of gravity dictates that. Driving them isn't hard, it's just a matter of realizing the forces that affect such a vehicle and handling it appropriately.
Here, here, finally, somebody who uses theirs for what it was intended for - being an enclosed truck! My hobby is outdoor photography - both railways and natural subjects. Find me anything in which I can go thousands of miles comfortably and, when I get there, be able to travel over USFS roads and worse to reach remote locations. High clearance, skid plates, 4WD when needed, a winch, two full-sized spares, plenty of power (both torque for drive and electrical for running the laptop, cooler, battery chargers, radio, scanner, phone, etc.), and the ability to hold all my gear and luggage in a dry, climate-controlled environment are a must.
As a note, I drive a (ruggedized) 2001 GMC Yukon and a 1995 Honda Del Sol. Opposite ends of the scale, but no matter which I drive, I still bitch about gas. The Yukon is for driving into nowhere and back, and the Honda is my daily commuter car. I put about 30k a year on each. Considering I'm now paying as much to fill my Honda as I did to fill my old Blazer four years ago (though admittedly during the lowest gas prices in years) Like it or not, the world runs on petroleum, and specifically gas and diesel when it comes to transportation. While we'd be wise to change that, it's not going to happen overnight. In the meantime, cheap fuel is the best thing we could do to stimulate our sagging economy.
I wish as much as the next guy that the dumb idiots who buy SUVs for image would stop (mainly because they can't drive them, and because they're causing the auto makers to make them cushy and expensive rather than tough and practical), but I'll defend their existance and legitimate uses to the end.
The new "low cost" server option at my company is RHAS on a dual Xeon box connected to a huge EMC disk for network storage. F*$%ing overkill, bigtime. And they wonder why we can't do anything cheaply. This is the small, minimum production grade server standard embraced. JHMFC.
In my opinion (not so humbly, though), the only thing you're getting from big, expensive RH is the guarantee that Oracle will support whatever f-ed up configuration you come up with. It's still GNU/Linux at heart (there, RMS, ya happy now?) Sure, RH promises not to change it as often, but honestly I just upgraded an old RH server running 6.2. It's been running and stable for something like four years. It worked, so aside from patching and security, I left it the hell alone. This is something that large companies can't understand. Once it works, don't upgrade every damn chance you get - keep the old solid configuration running until you have the time and the need to do an upgrade.
Personally, since I believe that having three truly hard-core linux geeks that know their shit onsite is better than any professional support line you could ever call, I'd go with standard RH and order me some geeks instead. For $350k, you should be able to get a very nice set of them, and they'll be right there to save your ass if anything goes wrong.
This is why I have no future management prospects. I just can't think that way - I worked in small shops too long to think that throwing money at stuff fixes anything. We found ways to keep stuff running on a mix-and-match room full of old hardware - no support contracts, no officially supported configurations, just guys (and one lady) that knew what the hell they were doing. Once I moved into the big corporate world, I had to give myself a lobotomy to even understand their mindset towards problem-solving.
Old video games aren't hard to find, and for that matter, they're not very hard to repair, either. Most of them came with full schematics, etc.
As for me, I'm doing my part. Two coworkers and I took a spur-of-the-moment trip to Cheyenne, WY, one Monday and came home with three games in the back of my truck. Choplifter, Lode Runner, and the true gem of the day - Centipede. We then promptly brought Centipede to work and stuck it in our lab after a little restoration work. A bit expensive, but the best way to preserve this stuff is just to buy it and keep it running.
First - I'm as much of a Linux fan as the next guy. However, after spending the better part of the day today in frustration with my new Linux desktop at work, I feel the need to vent.
My main bitches about Linux (not the kernel, the whole system - RMS's part, Linus's part, all the commonly-installed stuff...) as a desktop OS (and 99% of them are about X):
- X sucks hard in terms of responsiveness. Click a OS-level button (such as, say, the close button on a window) in Windows, that sucker responds. It may still be doing stuff in the background, but from the user's point of view, it's snappy and responsive. I'm running on a 2.4GHz P4 with a 10k RPM SCSI disk and 512Mbytes of memory for god's sake, there shouldn't be signficant UI lag! Win2k was about as snappy and responsive as you could get. I realize this is because MS built the GDI into the kernel, but come on, we're supposed to be better. As a modern business desktop user, I (typically) don't give a rat's ass about running applications on that server in the closet and having them display on my desktop. I want responsiveness...
- Bizarre-ass fonts. I realize this is mostly a configuration issue, but I've never found a distro that provided a decent font setup. Again, gotta hand it to MS, but Windows has a good, no-frills set of fonts that universally look good without taking up too much space. Those who configure X seem to have an unholy fascination with huge widgets and huge text.
- At least semi-standardized look and feel. Windows apps these days all sort of look and feel alike, but X apps are all over the road. This is the result of freedom, and that's not bad in and of itself. However, if we could agree on common places to put certain things, it would really help the user experience.
- And as a side bitch, why does GIMP not have an image browsing plugin? I know, I know, because nobody's contributed one yet. I'd help, but I'm an embedded guy - you really don't want me writing desktop software.
Okay, flame retardant suit on... Sorry, but those are my core complaints about trying to be a simple Linux desktop user today.
I'm an electrical engineer first and a programmer second. I write everything from BIOS-esque firmware clear up to applications that do data analysis from huge mainframe databases for my company. My language of choice? As close to ANSI C as I can get, though usually I get lazy and use some GNU extensions.
Now, why on earth would I do something like that? Just to piss off the comp sci types around me? Well, no, but that's a nice side effect.
Reasons I love/use C:
- It IS glorified assembly. As such, the compiler tries to be minimally helpful and just lets me do what I want to do.
- It doesn't allow OOP crap. I won't argue that OOP doesn't have its place, somewhere, but that place isn't in anything I've needed to build yet. Why do I hate OOP so much? First and foremost I find it only a tool of obfuscation in the stuff I write. It's much easier to debug procedural code by just following the execution path than wondering what the hell the object that was just instantiated invoked in the constructor, etc. Too much jumping around in the code - basically causes me to forget to look, because it's not intuitive. Same exact reason I hate FORTH (but I'm still fluent in it anyway). I'd rather just have an initializer function called immediately following the declaration of a new variable than having behaviours tacked on.
- C is faster than C++ if you do everything according to the OOP model that C++ leads you toward. I guarantee my pointer math blows away any "safer" solution in terms of raw speed. It's also just as safe, because all the inputs are bounds checked once so I know they can't exceed certain limits. However, for intelligent mixes of OOP-model code and C-style fun, there's no significant speed difference.
- Also, C is standard. C is everywhere. I can use it (with code appropriate to the task) on everything from a PIC12xxx series part clear up to our IBM big iron (though that lack of curly braces it quite annoying). As long as I hang out close to ANSI, my code tends to be very portable. As such, I have a library that is used on everything from small, embedded M68k-series processors up to 16-proc Unix boxes and even larger yet mainframes. Completely threadsafe, no memory leaks, and very, very portable.
Basically, don't use bloat-o-language unless you have a good reason. Remember - CPUs still essentially execute one instruction at a time, mostly in order. Programming is all about moving register 1 to register 2, possibly while performing an arithmetic operation involving register 3.
I would assert that inappropriate use of OOP model programming, a complete disregard for effeciency in the face of beauty-of-design, and an unholy fascination with language du jour has lead to the sorry, bloated, buggy, slow state of modern applications. IMHO, OOP has lead us down this path, without buying us much. Much except the ability to hire less competent programmers to build their tiny chunk of the application, because everything's overdesigned and all the interfaces are pre-specified, because that's how humans would model the problem. Usually there's little regard for how a machine could best handle the problem.
Absolutely the same for me - I married my wife about two years ago, and before that we'd known each other for something like ten years. I have every note, letter, email, etc. that I ever sent her, because it's all electronic. Heck, I can even go back and look at the revisions and laugh at some of the stupid crap I thought about saying. It's an interesting archive of my thought processes at the time. 14+ years of back documents, 10+ years of back emails, etc. All neatly stored, and all still accessible (for the email, thank you Eudora for being able to handle my 2+Gb mail data directory.)
The few messages between us on paper have mostly now deteriorated from acidic paper and age. The paper is brittle, the ink is faded, and in some cases poor storage conditions has led to varmits thinking they were food items and eating the corners.
As for cursive, it's still marginally useful for some things. Signing your name. Yup, that's the only example I can come up with. My handwriting was always horrid, mainly because I saw no reason to improve it. It's legible by most people, but I don't inflict them with it - almost everything I put out is typed. I don't even use it for notes to myself - my back-of-napkin design scribblings are typically printed, because it's faster and easier for me to read later.
Personally, I wish the schools would spend more time on using grammar and how to clearly, precisely, and concisely express a thought. I'm not terribly great at it, and I wish they'd put the wasted handwriting time into those subjects instead.
As a side note, I'm an engineer, and I still enjoy the art of hand-drawn schematics, but unfortunately what used to be my neat block printing has gone to hell as well.
Plus, few people end up with jobs or projects that force them into Forth against their will, so there isn't much hatred out there.
Nope, but where I work (as a Forth programmer), there is a great amount of time where we're forced NOT to work in Forth, against our will. Leads to dislike of management who wants us to program in the Infoweek-compliant language flavor of the month, rather than what's appropriate for the task.
I've been thinking of building a device that would let anyone identifying themselves (via caller ID) ring through. However, the device would pick up any "Out of Area" calls and ask the caller to push a random number sequence to verify they weren't a solicitor before even ringing my phones.
Your solution sounds similar, but simpler - what device are you using? Where'd you get it?
Let's see - I'd almost call it a troll if it weren't true in some cases. That said, I'd like to dispute a few points:
Yes, I got picked on a lot in middle school and a bit in high school. However, by the time I hit high school I was already hardened emotionally to it, and didn't let it phase me much. Glad I did - Eventually those who would harrass me would give up, and everyone else decided I wasn't such a bad guy. I turned out a much more intelligent, hard-working individual because of it. It also has helped professionally - I understand how to "win friends and influence people", but it also doesn't hurt my feelings if I'm the last man standing for the better solution. I know quite a few co-workers that, as soon as their solution starts looking unpopular (but not necessarily worse), abandon ship to jump on the trendy solution. Some of the dumbest things I've ever seen out of this company come from decisions like that.
I'm an engineer. However, professionally I'm now an analyst and (still in some small way), a programmer. I use Windows and Linux interchangably, based on what's better for the job. I try to be a rational, balanced person. I'm a photographer, a writer, and a musician in my spare time. I read everything from paperback scifi to the great literary works of history. I like watching everything between Farscape (damn you, SciFi) and NFL games. I'm married, I have hobbies that absolutely don't involve much technology, and I have often thought of becoming a professional chef. Almost tried to go into culinary arts rather than engineering. I (oohh, here comes the negative karma) side with the RIAA in quite a few arguments - like the fact that 99.8% of Napster use was downloading music most people didn't own the rights to. Why? Because in my mind, it just makes sense. I've thought about it, and these are the things I feel make sense. Maybe it doesn't to you, but that's why we're individuals and we can argue about things. I think I've done a pretty good job of being balanced - perhaps a bit too much so, as it seems I'm always behind on everything I want to accomplish.
I do have an issue with many of the organizations and laws trying to step on my freedoms. Most of my arguments to the Evil-Acronym-Of-The-Month (DMCA, MPAA, etc.) are that they infringe on my freedoms to tinker with stuff or use it for things I'm legitimately allowed to do. I like ripping stuff apart, modifying it, understanding how it works. It's good for my professional mind, and keeps my curiousity going. I typically only get upset when they prohibit doing anything that might possibly sort-of, kind-of maybe lead to the ability for me to do something illegal, if I wanted to.
Punish me for the thing I did (or was about to do) wrong, not for the possibility that I might someday use modified Mountain Dew can as an antenna for a wireless network, over which I could, maybe, pirate movies. We don't assume people are mass murderers because they own a chain saw, despite that's one of Hollywood's popular uses for the tool. However, it seems certain organizations would like to label me a pirate because I have a computer with lots of MP3s (around 10 gig worth). The catch is that every one of those was ripped, by me, from CDs I purchased and still own. That's fair use - format shifting. Why do I keep them as MP3s? Because it's easier to take my laptop with me on the road than a stack of hundreds of CDs.
I also demand casual business environments. I don't come to work without shaving for a week, I get my shower in at least once a day, and my clothes are always clean and mostly appropriate. A polo-type shirt, jeans, and boots are my usual work wear. Soemtimes a random t-shirt sneaks in to the wardrobe. Why? Because it just makes sense. I don't need to impress anyone on the average day - my computer doesn't care what I look like, and neither do the people that call or email me to ask questions. Whether I'm wearing a suit and tie doesn't change the results in the reports I write. I find suits/ties very uncomfortable, and find they decrease my productivity because I am uncomfortable. I often work lying in a beanbag on my office floor. Why? It's comfortable; I get more done. Not only that, but when I'm soldering together a prototype chunk of hardware, I don't want a tie in the way or dress slacks to soak up the splatters of molten solder. For a meeting with the VPs? Sure, drag out the suit. Otherwise, tell me I have to wear a tie and I'll quit. I've done it before, when a previous company I worked for had a change of heart.
It depends on what field you're in. Are you writing a portable software component that is basically a business logic module, or are you writing code that is the whole system (embedded micros, etc.)? Software components, if they need to be portable, should be blackbox-esque.
Embedded stuff? Hell no. Software is there, usually, to facilitate the hardware. The smaller, tighter, and faster you can get the code, the cheaper the hardware to run it on, and the cheaper the overall design. That was one of the things that annoyed me most about college programming classes, etc. - the fact that everything was abstracted into a world where all hardware was equal and all code was perfectly modular.
I'm an embedded programmer. The hardware is mother, the hardware is father. Sure, usually I have at least a bootloader and/or possibly a separate kernel that abstracts the hardware just a bit. However, while abstractions are nifty and help prevent code duplication and coder error, the machine itself certainly doesn't need them and all they do is chew up processor cycles. That leads to needing bigger, more power hungry hardware to keep ahead of all the bloated code. The trick is balancing the two.
Sure, I can write C for a PIC with 64 bytes of memory and 2K of program space as well as I can write C for a 16-way Alpha server monstrosity, but the style of code I write will be massively different. There ain't no malloc, no filesystem, etc. on a PIC. You can't interface to a ODBC client to store data - you have to write the flash interface routines, check for errors, figure in wait states, etc. To manipulate certain registers, you have to execute very specific assembly in a very specific order, or you risk falling into bugs in certain revs of silicon.
I also tend to think that programming is moving bits around between registers. It's a fun way to flip transistors, essentially. Likewise, I've always thought that computer engineers should start at machine architecture, then move to assembly, then C, then C++, etc. Make them really think about what the abstraction each language buys you vs. what it costs in bloat and inefficiency (because no optimizing complier is as good as an hard-working ASM guru).
I'm not against portability, but I am against bloat and inefficient coding in cases where it doesn't buy me (or future maintainers) anything.
No, they're not fatal, but they're a sign that you're on the sending party's radar and they may intend to fire their patented Lawyer-O-Matic ray...
As far as the options you present:
1. Dangerous, especially if they do intend to actually waste money and sue for some reason. The next thing ol' Jim receives may be a notice that a lawsuit has been filed.
2. PCI-SIG has clearly communicated what they want him to do, I personally see no need for Jim to press further into what they want. They want him to close down the site and go away. The fact his first contact was a C&D and that whole part about not co-existing with his site made that pretty darn clear.
3. Doesn't matter what they can/can't do. They can still take him to court. For those of us without the money to waste on fighting dumb lawsuits, that makes us automagic losers.
The lawyer takes the tone that anything not officially sanctioned by a corporation (read - has money and legal teeth to fight) or the PCI-SIG in a closed, members-only fashion has no right to exist. (For those that didn't read the original, "We therefore request that you work through IBM to investigate the possibility of creating a similar database of PCI Vendor ID numbers...") That's the part that pisses me off more than anything. Why the hell does he have to work through a company? What's wrong with an individual doing this work? Oh yeah, he might actually accomplish something.
That said, I wholeheartedly agree with Jim's big red text at the bottom. I don't find his response all that lacking in maturity - it's a good way to draw attention to the problem while mitigating your own liability.
PCI-SIG, you're clueless snivling little bastards. Put the collar back on the lawyer, and hand his leash to the marketing and public relations people, as it should be. Since they're a "member-driven organization", I'm hoping certain member companies (IBM, you listening?) make sure this sort of stupidity doesn't go unpunished.
Yup. Just like me.:) I enjoy the challenge of finding such things - I now do this for a living, not just for fun.
Let me take the time to say that there is such a thing as a device that will never be maintained, such as these. The pieces worked fine for the 18 months we needed them. After that, they'll never need to be maintained again - and can't be, we took the source code and schematics with us. The next team was nearly incompetent and needed to start over, not build on technology they didn't understand.
Ex-girlfriend commentary as assembly line labels
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Linux Kernel Code Humor
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· Score: 5, Funny
Several years ago, there were three of us, all working (well, "working") for our university's solar car team. Most of the telemetry code was written by one of the other guys (whose basement I'm now writing this from), and somewhere mid-project his girlfriend royally screwed him over. As we now tell people, it wasn't that she was a raving bitch, it was just that she really, really liked guys. All of them, everywhere, personally and intimately.:)
Anyway, getting on with the story, after that event, he cranked out phenominal amounts of microcontroller code - all very intricate, clever, and good (from an engineer's point of view, not necessarily from a comp-sci view). However, written in assembly, he was forced to regularly come up with line labels for jumps in the code. These rapidly devolved from useful things like:CRC16UpperCalc before the girlfriend disaster to things like:LivsABitchDieDieDie afterwards. Made for some very funny looks back at the old code, but rather frustrating for anybody to debug. After all, how was I supposed to know the difference between the functionality of one with three "die"s and one with four "die"s. And yes, there was a difference, and yes, he knew exactly what each did.
Lousy maintainability, but it was microcontroller code that nobody would ever again touch. Or, based on what we know of the teams after us, even understand.:)
Understand that I've been around guns my whole life because of where I grew up (rural Iowa), and have understood the power and awesome responsibility for a long time. I don't hunt (never did, much), but I used to spend a lot of time at the firing range when I got bored. Consequently I'm a pretty good shot.
My current neighborhood isn't particularly dangerous. It's not the world's most upscale area, but that's how I prefer it. However, there have been several incidents of armed robbery in the area in the past five years that, up to this point, have gone unsolved. It just proves you never know when you're going to come up with a hostile in your house, and that hostile very well may be armed. I'm not anticipating it happening, but I view my firearm as relatively cheap insurance against the possibility.
To answer your second question: Yes, I do like my property. It represents, if nothing else, a significant time and effort investment on my part. Moreover, much of it holds significant sentimental value. The insurance company can't pay me enough to replace that. Besides, I have little regard for the life of anyone breaking into my house and threatening me in any way.
Honestly I'd probably have more regret over killing a cow for food. The cow didn't do anything to me to deserve it. Now on the legal front, that's a whole different issue, but I know what use of force is acceptible under my local laws. Everyone who keeps a gun for defense should be well-versed on theirs, as well.
It brings to mind something my father used to tell me when I was young: Don't pull a gun unless you intend to fire it, and don't fire it unless you intend to kill. Seems common sense, but you wouldn't believe the number of people that say, "It's only a deterrant - I don't intend to shoot them,", or, "I'm only going to shoot to wound them as a deterrant." Sorry, I don't buy either of those. It's a last resort, and should be used to maximal effectiveness.
Note: I don't have kids (yet), so I haven't given that issue a lot of thought. How do you secure a firearm from them, yet keep it accessible and ready to use? I don't know, basically.
Slashdot Mirror
Before y'all get up in arms, I'm not disputing that there's uglyness to HTML, and CSS is a huge step forward. However, CSS is a huge, bloated beast, and I can't really see how SVG advances the web. IMNSHO, the web should be:
- An easy way to access information
- Simple, adhering to the lowest reasonable common denominator that works across all common browsers (HTML 4, limited CSS, etc.)
- Not filled with bloat and fluff that doesn't help me access information (such as flash intros, flash menus, Java menu crap, etc.)
Many of the webmonkeys I've known in my company that complain about such things not working are the same people who couldn't do HTML by hand if they wanted to, insist that beauty should take priority over functionality, and develop IE-only pages because they never thought to test any other browser and then blame those browsers for not supporting the latest, greatest standard. Here's a tip: if you want people to use your stuff, you have to provide it in a format their tools can understand. You can't expect everyone to upgrade, so you have to work to your audience.
Granted, I, too, would like to shoot everyone using NS 4.x, but there are still people out there running it and viewing my site at 640x480. I don't know how they can stand it, but it's their choice. My choice is to continue to support them as well as possible, for the moment. So I don't really concern myself with the new standards. Besides, for me, I have little to no use for them at the moment anyway.
IMHO, mis-applied Java and Flash are the worst two things that ever happened on the web. And those were both "innovations", especially the Java bit. So understand if I'm wary about any so called "improvements" to what already works pretty darn well and is just now starting to truly work the same (mostly) in most mainstream browsers.
That said, I run Fire(name this week) and, yes, I don't have the Flash plugin installed. F@#$ing hate flash. Bane of my existance.
I'm a long-time loyal JOE user. Been one since I loaded up my first Slackware install eight years ago only to discover how much VI and I don't get along - at all.
/. today, if a machine doesn't have it, the very first thing I put on is JOE. Period.
Over the years, I've kept trying to become comfortable with vi, because, as many have pointed out, it's everywhere. However, for me it sucks - it and I don't work the same way. It was clearly built by individuals who didn't think the same way I do. I refuse to change the way I think to fit a tool that I can't even convince myself to like. I'd rather get what I consider to be a better tool. So, I use a tool that I like that's fast, efficient, works like I want it to, and gets the job done. I should also mention that I don't really use X - 99% of my work is done in SSH sessions. So GUI anything is useless in my world. I need a good, solid text-based editor.
In reference to another story on
I'm thrilled to see the new release. I'm glad somebody's working on it again, because I was always too lazy to improve it. As for the complaints I've seen, I couldn't care less about proper Unicode support (as I hate Unicode with a unique passion reserved exclusively for it...), and I'm sure the context highlighting will be improved.
Pretty cool - kudos to those working on keeping my one and only editor running in 2004.
I tinker with my car all the time. Back when I had an ECU I even understood (had the firmware source, complete with symbols and comments, don't ask how...), I actually tinkered quite a bit more. Blow up the motor? Oops. Not like I haven't done that before, and there goes a Saturday down the drain changing it out. I usually have a spare engine or two sitting around, or if not I know where the junk yards are or I know how to rebuild or repair them (if possible, depends on the failure mode).
Car Lease? Warranty? What are these? I buy cars for cash (usually used, or occasionally built from 2-3 salvages) and drive the suckers into the ground, then repeat. My Blazer died at 190,000 miles (original engine, third tranny), my del Sol is still good at 160k and should live to well over 200k, and my Yukon is at 110k and is only three years old (only vehicle I've ever bought new). Yes, I drive a lot. Greatest feeling in the world to me - open road, open windows (or open top), radio cranked up, going places just to see what's over the next hill.
Also, how exactly do I invalidate my insurance? I don't carry coverage for repair on any of these, except the Yukon, and that's only because it's new enough to be worth fixing. The rest, after any wreck my insurance would have to pay to fix, I'd either cut up for scrap or fix them myself anyway. If it's the other guy's insurance, obviously I'm going to make them fix it (or just take the money and scrap the car). It's not like I'm stupid enough to ask the insurance people to fix something mechanically that's my fault through stupidity.
Chips are just a new piece of everything that's been done for years - overboring cylinders, performance cams, high flow exhausts, aftermarket blowers, etc. That said, though, chips on normally aspirated cars are usually a waste of time these days. Don't bother - work on the other upgrades instead.
Guess it all comes down to if you know what the hell you're doing, go for it. If you don't, don't be a wannabe wanker that complains when it doesn't go right.
Silly troll... Some of us are mature enough for real relationships with real women - you know, the ones that come with engineering degree, second salary, and sports car included? ;)
Insulting - that's probably the most applicable term. Most everyone I remember from STS 95 was, while usually a bit geeky (myself definitely included), at least functionally socially adept. Most quite so - well adjusted, smart, funny, wonderful individuals. However, it's downright distasteful that rather than discussing the effort that goes into something like this and the personalities behind it, the author focuses on whether these people fit the stereotypes of nerdiness. It seems as if he did his abject best to trivialize these students and their work.
/. ?
As far as pure science vs. applied science... I was one of the finalists while it was still the old Westinghouse STS (1995, to be exact). That year, there was a great amount of theoretical or pure science, with very little engineering-type research projects. Pure science did quite well that year, as I recall.
Any other former STSers out there slacking on
Nathan D. Holmes, STS Finalist 1995
The only thing I remember was a problem relating to multiple includes of PHP scripts. The PHP people pointed at Apache, Apache people pointed at PHP. Something about apache filter vs. something-or-other, blah blah blah. Suffice to say they finally got things together a while back, and I run PHP 4.3.x on a handful of production servers (some with quite high load and mostly PHP pages) without issue.
I don't remember the exact details of the whole fiasco, but both sides racked up a black eye in my book. It was a very basic piece of functionality that they didn't seem to be moving too quickly to fix. It delayed my upgrade to A2 for about eight months and annoyed me every time I thought about it.
That said, PHP absolutely rocks. Fast, efficient, and concise. I just view it as improved C, which in my world (a world sans objects), is a very good thing.
And I send email and IMs to the guy in the next cube over all the time, for two simple reasons:
a) Email, because there's no reason for me to try to verbally explain a problem when I can just send the original report, with all the details, over for his review
Or...
b) IM because there are just some things that shouldn't be shouted in a corporate environment, even though I'm already known by my coworkers for loud strings of four-letter expletives, especially when dealing with the marketing, revenue, or legal departments. Also good for sending backchannel thoughts while sitting on giant conference calls (and my phone doesn't have a mute button)
http://www.zeevo.com/
They make a cool Bluetooth SoC that includes not only the RF chunks and necessarily Bluetooth hardware, but also an embedded ARM7TDMI processor core and flash, all on the same chip.
The only problem is getting them to talk to you. I'm an EE for a $20 billion/year Fortune 500 that's currently working on a Bluetooth experiment, and the damned rep won't even return an email to myself or one of my fellow engineers. So all I have to play with is a module I "harvested" from another prototype device from another group. Arg!
Pretty easily, really. For those of us that dislike object-oriented programming with a passion, C++ allows programmers to do things in ways that we find ugly, ineffecient, or at the least obfuscated. By adding to the language, you've allowed them to do things in ways we pure C guys object to.
Why is the automatic knee-jerk reaction of some people to start placing restrictions and bureaucracy on things? Let's look at licensing for a sec:
- The internet is based on the free exchange of ideas between everyone - even those that I proclaim idiots. Many of these people have differing views on how things should be set up, what hardward/software to use, etc. Someone has to administer this license, and this just begs for abuse of power.
- Many of the affected in the latest virus round were technical corporations. These are big places filled with lots of really smart (or at least well-educated, which is not synonymous) people. One of my fellow engineers got nailed by Slammer, because he forgot to patch one of our systems that sits in a corner (and somehow the damn thing got through/around the firewall). These people would easily get internet licenses, but they still forget about machines or otherwise screw up.
- This is a bureaucratic solution (more paperwork, etc.) to a problem that either a) is purely technical in nature (buggy software) or b) isn't a problem but rather just the way things are. The last thing we need is more paper-pushers pushing paper rather than actual people solving the actual issues.
If you roll your SUV, you f*#@ed up. Plain and simple. Are they more likely to roll? Yes. Higher center of gravity dictates that. Driving them isn't hard, it's just a matter of realizing the forces that affect such a vehicle and handling it appropriately.
Here, here, finally, somebody who uses theirs for what it was intended for - being an enclosed truck! My hobby is outdoor photography - both railways and natural subjects. Find me anything in which I can go thousands of miles comfortably and, when I get there, be able to travel over USFS roads and worse to reach remote locations. High clearance, skid plates, 4WD when needed, a winch, two full-sized spares, plenty of power (both torque for drive and electrical for running the laptop, cooler, battery chargers, radio, scanner, phone, etc.), and the ability to hold all my gear and luggage in a dry, climate-controlled environment are a must.
As a note, I drive a (ruggedized) 2001 GMC Yukon and a 1995 Honda Del Sol. Opposite ends of the scale, but no matter which I drive, I still bitch about gas. The Yukon is for driving into nowhere and back, and the Honda is my daily commuter car. I put about 30k a year on each. Considering I'm now paying as much to fill my Honda as I did to fill my old Blazer four years ago (though admittedly during the lowest gas prices in years) Like it or not, the world runs on petroleum, and specifically gas and diesel when it comes to transportation. While we'd be wise to change that, it's not going to happen overnight. In the meantime, cheap fuel is the best thing we could do to stimulate our sagging economy.
I wish as much as the next guy that the dumb idiots who buy SUVs for image would stop (mainly because they can't drive them, and because they're causing the auto makers to make them cushy and expensive rather than tough and practical), but I'll defend their existance and legitimate uses to the end.
The new "low cost" server option at my company is RHAS on a dual Xeon box connected to a huge EMC disk for network storage. F*$%ing overkill, bigtime. And they wonder why we can't do anything cheaply. This is the small, minimum production grade server standard embraced. JHMFC.
In my opinion (not so humbly, though), the only thing you're getting from big, expensive RH is the guarantee that Oracle will support whatever f-ed up configuration you come up with. It's still GNU/Linux at heart (there, RMS, ya happy now?) Sure, RH promises not to change it as often, but honestly I just upgraded an old RH server running 6.2. It's been running and stable for something like four years. It worked, so aside from patching and security, I left it the hell alone. This is something that large companies can't understand. Once it works, don't upgrade every damn chance you get - keep the old solid configuration running until you have the time and the need to do an upgrade.
Personally, since I believe that having three truly hard-core linux geeks that know their shit onsite is better than any professional support line you could ever call, I'd go with standard RH and order me some geeks instead. For $350k, you should be able to get a very nice set of them, and they'll be right there to save your ass if anything goes wrong.
This is why I have no future management prospects. I just can't think that way - I worked in small shops too long to think that throwing money at stuff fixes anything. We found ways to keep stuff running on a mix-and-match room full of old hardware - no support contracts, no officially supported configurations, just guys (and one lady) that knew what the hell they were doing. Once I moved into the big corporate world, I had to give myself a lobotomy to even understand their mindset towards problem-solving.
Old video games aren't hard to find, and for that matter, they're not very hard to repair, either. Most of them came with full schematics, etc.
As for me, I'm doing my part. Two coworkers and I took a spur-of-the-moment trip to Cheyenne, WY, one Monday and came home with three games in the back of my truck. Choplifter, Lode Runner, and the true gem of the day - Centipede. We then promptly brought Centipede to work and stuck it in our lab after a little restoration work. A bit expensive, but the best way to preserve this stuff is just to buy it and keep it running.
First - I'm as much of a Linux fan as the next guy. However, after spending the better part of the day today in frustration with my new Linux desktop at work, I feel the need to vent.
My main bitches about Linux (not the kernel, the whole system - RMS's part, Linus's part, all the commonly-installed stuff...) as a desktop OS (and 99% of them are about X):
- X sucks hard in terms of responsiveness. Click a OS-level button (such as, say, the close button on a window) in Windows, that sucker responds. It may still be doing stuff in the background, but from the user's point of view, it's snappy and responsive. I'm running on a 2.4GHz P4 with a 10k RPM SCSI disk and 512Mbytes of memory for god's sake, there shouldn't be signficant UI lag! Win2k was about as snappy and responsive as you could get. I realize this is because MS built the GDI into the kernel, but come on, we're supposed to be better. As a modern business desktop user, I (typically) don't give a rat's ass about running applications on that server in the closet and having them display on my desktop. I want responsiveness...
- Bizarre-ass fonts. I realize this is mostly a configuration issue, but I've never found a distro that provided a decent font setup. Again, gotta hand it to MS, but Windows has a good, no-frills set of fonts that universally look good without taking up too much space. Those who configure X seem to have an unholy fascination with huge widgets and huge text.
- At least semi-standardized look and feel. Windows apps these days all sort of look and feel alike, but X apps are all over the road. This is the result of freedom, and that's not bad in and of itself. However, if we could agree on common places to put certain things, it would really help the user experience.
- And as a side bitch, why does GIMP not have an image browsing plugin? I know, I know, because nobody's contributed one yet. I'd help, but I'm an embedded guy - you really don't want me writing desktop software.
Okay, flame retardant suit on... Sorry, but those are my core complaints about trying to be a simple Linux desktop user today.
I'm an electrical engineer first and a programmer second. I write everything from BIOS-esque firmware clear up to applications that do data analysis from huge mainframe databases for my company. My language of choice? As close to ANSI C as I can get, though usually I get lazy and use some GNU extensions.
Now, why on earth would I do something like that? Just to piss off the comp sci types around me? Well, no, but that's a nice side effect.
Reasons I love/use C:
- It IS glorified assembly. As such, the compiler tries to be minimally helpful and just lets me do what I want to do.
- It doesn't allow OOP crap. I won't argue that OOP doesn't have its place, somewhere, but that place isn't in anything I've needed to build yet.
Why do I hate OOP so much? First and foremost I find it only a tool of obfuscation in the stuff I write. It's much easier to debug procedural code by just following the execution path than wondering what the hell the object that was just instantiated invoked in the constructor, etc. Too much jumping around in the code - basically causes me to forget to look, because it's not intuitive. Same exact reason I hate FORTH (but I'm still fluent in it anyway). I'd rather just have an initializer function called immediately following the declaration of a new variable than having behaviours tacked on.
- C is faster than C++ if you do everything according to the OOP model that C++ leads you toward. I guarantee my pointer math blows away any "safer" solution in terms of raw speed. It's also just as safe, because all the inputs are bounds checked once so I know they can't exceed certain limits. However, for intelligent mixes of OOP-model code and C-style fun, there's no significant speed difference.
- Also, C is standard. C is everywhere. I can use it (with code appropriate to the task) on everything from a PIC12xxx series part clear up to our IBM big iron (though that lack of curly braces it quite annoying). As long as I hang out close to ANSI, my code tends to be very portable. As such, I have a library that is used on everything from small, embedded M68k-series processors up to 16-proc Unix boxes and even larger yet mainframes. Completely threadsafe, no memory leaks, and very, very portable.
Basically, don't use bloat-o-language unless you have a good reason. Remember - CPUs still essentially execute one instruction at a time, mostly in order. Programming is all about moving register 1 to register 2, possibly while performing an arithmetic operation involving register 3.
I would assert that inappropriate use of OOP model programming, a complete disregard for effeciency in the face of beauty-of-design, and an unholy fascination with language du jour has lead to the sorry, bloated, buggy, slow state of modern applications. IMHO, OOP has lead us down this path, without buying us much. Much except the ability to hire less competent programmers to build their tiny chunk of the application, because everything's overdesigned and all the interfaces are pre-specified, because that's how humans would model the problem. Usually there's little regard for how a machine could best handle the problem.
Absolutely the same for me - I married my wife about two years ago, and before that we'd known each other for something like ten years. I have every note, letter, email, etc. that I ever sent her, because it's all electronic. Heck, I can even go back and look at the revisions and laugh at some of the stupid crap I thought about saying. It's an interesting archive of my thought processes at the time. 14+ years of back documents, 10+ years of back emails, etc. All neatly stored, and all still accessible (for the email, thank you Eudora for being able to handle my 2+Gb mail data directory.)
The few messages between us on paper have mostly now deteriorated from acidic paper and age. The paper is brittle, the ink is faded, and in some cases poor storage conditions has led to varmits thinking they were food items and eating the corners.
As for cursive, it's still marginally useful for some things. Signing your name. Yup, that's the only example I can come up with. My handwriting was always horrid, mainly because I saw no reason to improve it. It's legible by most people, but I don't inflict them with it - almost everything I put out is typed. I don't even use it for notes to myself - my back-of-napkin design scribblings are typically printed, because it's faster and easier for me to read later.
Personally, I wish the schools would spend more time on using grammar and how to clearly, precisely, and concisely express a thought. I'm not terribly great at it, and I wish they'd put the wasted handwriting time into those subjects instead.
As a side note, I'm an engineer, and I still enjoy the art of hand-drawn schematics, but unfortunately what used to be my neat block printing has gone to hell as well.
Plus, few people end up with jobs or projects that force them into Forth against their will, so there isn't much hatred out there.
Nope, but where I work (as a Forth programmer), there is a great amount of time where we're forced NOT to work in Forth, against our will. Leads to dislike of management who wants us to program in the Infoweek-compliant language flavor of the month, rather than what's appropriate for the task.
I've been thinking of building a device that would let anyone identifying themselves (via caller ID) ring through. However, the device would pick up any "Out of Area" calls and ask the caller to push a random number sequence to verify they weren't a solicitor before even ringing my phones.
Your solution sounds similar, but simpler - what device are you using? Where'd you get it?
Let's see - I'd almost call it a troll if it weren't true in some cases. That said, I'd like to dispute a few points:
Yes, I got picked on a lot in middle school and a bit in high school. However, by the time I hit high school I was already hardened emotionally to it, and didn't let it phase me much. Glad I did - Eventually those who would harrass me would give up, and everyone else decided I wasn't such a bad guy. I turned out a much more intelligent, hard-working individual because of it. It also has helped professionally - I understand how to "win friends and influence people", but it also doesn't hurt my feelings if I'm the last man standing for the better solution. I know quite a few co-workers that, as soon as their solution starts looking unpopular (but not necessarily worse), abandon ship to jump on the trendy solution. Some of the dumbest things I've ever seen out of this company come from decisions like that.
I'm an engineer. However, professionally I'm now an analyst and (still in some small way), a programmer. I use Windows and Linux interchangably, based on what's better for the job. I try to be a rational, balanced person. I'm a photographer, a writer, and a musician in my spare time. I read everything from paperback scifi to the great literary works of history. I like watching everything between Farscape (damn you, SciFi) and NFL games. I'm married, I have hobbies that absolutely don't involve much technology, and I have often thought of becoming a professional chef. Almost tried to go into culinary arts rather than engineering. I (oohh, here comes the negative karma) side with the RIAA in quite a few arguments - like the fact that 99.8% of Napster use was downloading music most people didn't own the rights to. Why? Because in my mind, it just makes sense. I've thought about it, and these are the things I feel make sense. Maybe it doesn't to you, but that's why we're individuals and we can argue about things. I think I've done a pretty good job of being balanced - perhaps a bit too much so, as it seems I'm always behind on everything I want to accomplish.
I do have an issue with many of the organizations and laws trying to step on my freedoms. Most of my arguments to the Evil-Acronym-Of-The-Month (DMCA, MPAA, etc.) are that they infringe on my freedoms to tinker with stuff or use it for things I'm legitimately allowed to do. I like ripping stuff apart, modifying it, understanding how it works. It's good for my professional mind, and keeps my curiousity going. I typically only get upset when they prohibit doing anything that might possibly sort-of, kind-of maybe lead to the ability for me to do something illegal, if I wanted to.
Punish me for the thing I did (or was about to do) wrong, not for the possibility that I might someday use modified Mountain Dew can as an antenna for a wireless network, over which I could, maybe, pirate movies. We don't assume people are mass murderers because they own a chain saw, despite that's one of Hollywood's popular uses for the tool. However, it seems certain organizations would like to label me a pirate because I have a computer with lots of MP3s (around 10 gig worth). The catch is that every one of those was ripped, by me, from CDs I purchased and still own. That's fair use - format shifting. Why do I keep them as MP3s? Because it's easier to take my laptop with me on the road than a stack of hundreds of CDs.
I also demand casual business environments. I don't come to work without shaving for a week, I get my shower in at least once a day, and my clothes are always clean and mostly appropriate. A polo-type shirt, jeans, and boots are my usual work wear. Soemtimes a random t-shirt sneaks in to the wardrobe. Why? Because it just makes sense. I don't need to impress anyone on the average day - my computer doesn't care what I look like, and neither do the people that call or email me to ask questions. Whether I'm wearing a suit and tie doesn't change the results in the reports I write. I find suits/ties very uncomfortable, and find they decrease my productivity because I am uncomfortable. I often work lying in a beanbag on my office floor. Why? It's comfortable; I get more done. Not only that, but when I'm soldering together a prototype chunk of hardware, I don't want a tie in the way or dress slacks to soak up the splatters of molten solder. For a meeting with the VPs? Sure, drag out the suit. Otherwise, tell me I have to wear a tie and I'll quit. I've done it before, when a previous company I worked for had a change of heart.
Okay, I feel better now.
It depends on what field you're in. Are you writing a portable software component that is basically a business logic module, or are you writing code that is the whole system (embedded micros, etc.)? Software components, if they need to be portable, should be blackbox-esque.
Embedded stuff? Hell no. Software is there, usually, to facilitate the hardware. The smaller, tighter, and faster you can get the code, the cheaper the hardware to run it on, and the cheaper the overall design. That was one of the things that annoyed me most about college programming classes, etc. - the fact that everything was abstracted into a world where all hardware was equal and all code was perfectly modular.
I'm an embedded programmer. The hardware is mother, the hardware is father. Sure, usually I have at least a bootloader and/or possibly a separate kernel that abstracts the hardware just a bit. However, while abstractions are nifty and help prevent code duplication and coder error, the machine itself certainly doesn't need them and all they do is chew up processor cycles. That leads to needing bigger, more power hungry hardware to keep ahead of all the bloated code. The trick is balancing the two.
Sure, I can write C for a PIC with 64 bytes of memory and 2K of program space as well as I can write C for a 16-way Alpha server monstrosity, but the style of code I write will be massively different. There ain't no malloc, no filesystem, etc. on a PIC. You can't interface to a ODBC client to store data - you have to write the flash interface routines, check for errors, figure in wait states, etc. To manipulate certain registers, you have to execute very specific assembly in a very specific order, or you risk falling into bugs in certain revs of silicon.
I also tend to think that programming is moving bits around between registers. It's a fun way to flip transistors, essentially. Likewise, I've always thought that computer engineers should start at machine architecture, then move to assembly, then C, then C++, etc. Make them really think about what the abstraction each language buys you vs. what it costs in bloat and inefficiency (because no optimizing complier is as good as an hard-working ASM guru).
I'm not against portability, but I am against bloat and inefficient coding in cases where it doesn't buy me (or future maintainers) anything.
ND
No, they're not fatal, but they're a sign that you're on the sending party's radar and they may intend to fire their patented Lawyer-O-Matic ray...
As far as the options you present:
1. Dangerous, especially if they do intend to actually waste money and sue for some reason. The next thing ol' Jim receives may be a notice that a lawsuit has been filed.
2. PCI-SIG has clearly communicated what they want him to do, I personally see no need for Jim to press further into what they want. They want him to close down the site and go away. The fact his first contact was a C&D and that whole part about not co-existing with his site made that pretty darn clear.
3. Doesn't matter what they can/can't do. They can still take him to court. For those of us without the money to waste on fighting dumb lawsuits, that makes us automagic losers.
The lawyer takes the tone that anything not officially sanctioned by a corporation (read - has money and legal teeth to fight) or the PCI-SIG in a closed, members-only fashion has no right to exist. (For those that didn't read the original, "We therefore request that you work through IBM to investigate the possibility of creating a similar database of PCI Vendor ID numbers...") That's the part that pisses me off more than anything. Why the hell does he have to work through a company? What's wrong with an individual doing this work? Oh yeah, he might actually accomplish something.
That said, I wholeheartedly agree with Jim's big red text at the bottom. I don't find his response all that lacking in maturity - it's a good way to draw attention to the problem while mitigating your own liability.
PCI-SIG, you're clueless snivling little bastards. Put the collar back on the lawyer, and hand his leash to the marketing and public relations people, as it should be. Since they're a "member-driven organization", I'm hoping certain member companies (IBM, you listening?) make sure this sort of stupidity doesn't go unpunished.
Yup. Just like me. :) I enjoy the challenge of finding such things - I now do this for a living, not just for fun.
Let me take the time to say that there is such a thing as a device that will never be maintained, such as these. The pieces worked fine for the 18 months we needed them. After that, they'll never need to be maintained again - and can't be, we took the source code and schematics with us. The next team was nearly incompetent and needed to start over, not build on technology they didn't understand.
Several years ago, there were three of us, all working (well, "working") for our university's solar car team. Most of the telemetry code was written by one of the other guys (whose basement I'm now writing this from), and somewhere mid-project his girlfriend royally screwed him over. As we now tell people, it wasn't that she was a raving bitch, it was just that she really, really liked guys. All of them, everywhere, personally and intimately. :)
:CRC16UpperCalc before the girlfriend disaster to things like :LivsABitchDieDieDie afterwards. Made for some very funny looks back at the old code, but rather frustrating for anybody to debug. After all, how was I supposed to know the difference between the functionality of one with three "die"s and one with four "die"s. And yes, there was a difference, and yes, he knew exactly what each did.
:)
Anyway, getting on with the story, after that event, he cranked out phenominal amounts of microcontroller code - all very intricate, clever, and good (from an engineer's point of view, not necessarily from a comp-sci view). However, written in assembly, he was forced to regularly come up with line labels for jumps in the code. These rapidly devolved from useful things like
Lousy maintainability, but it was microcontroller code that nobody would ever again touch. Or, based on what we know of the teams after us, even understand.
Understand that I've been around guns my whole life because of where I grew up (rural Iowa), and have understood the power and awesome responsibility for a long time. I don't hunt (never did, much), but I used to spend a lot of time at the firing range when I got bored. Consequently I'm a pretty good shot.
My current neighborhood isn't particularly dangerous. It's not the world's most upscale area, but that's how I prefer it. However, there have been several incidents of armed robbery in the area in the past five years that, up to this point, have gone unsolved. It just proves you never know when you're going to come up with a hostile in your house, and that hostile very well may be armed. I'm not anticipating it happening, but I view my firearm as relatively cheap insurance against the possibility.
To answer your second question: Yes, I do like my property. It represents, if nothing else, a significant time and effort investment on my part. Moreover, much of it holds significant sentimental value. The insurance company can't pay me enough to replace that. Besides, I have little regard for the life of anyone breaking into my house and threatening me in any way.
Honestly I'd probably have more regret over killing a cow for food. The cow didn't do anything to me to deserve it. Now on the legal front, that's a whole different issue, but I know what use of force is acceptible under my local laws. Everyone who keeps a gun for defense should be well-versed on theirs, as well.
It brings to mind something my father used to tell me when I was young: Don't pull a gun unless you intend to fire it, and don't fire it unless you intend to kill. Seems common sense, but you wouldn't believe the number of people that say, "It's only a deterrant - I don't intend to shoot them,", or, "I'm only going to shoot to wound them as a deterrant." Sorry, I don't buy either of those. It's a last resort, and should be used to maximal effectiveness.
Note: I don't have kids (yet), so I haven't given that issue a lot of thought. How do you secure a firearm from them, yet keep it accessible and ready to use? I don't know, basically.
Nathan