I once spent some time with a company that sold our services to another company and the markup rate was 50% or more of what I was getting. I was rather disgusted at the notion. It was impossible for me to get that job, but by going through one of these companies, I could get it and there I was, "the same damned person."
By going through an agency, the employer can get rid of you more easily when the job is completed. Laying off employees is hard; not renewing a contract is easy. Also, part of the markup is for payroll overhead and benefits (if any), etc. You wouldn't get all of that even if you were a direct employee.
Code comments--especially system level comments--should include the name of the author or current maintainer, as well. I tag my methods with my name and the date that the code was put in so people know where to go if there's trouble.
I was agreeing with you completely until this. Putting your name and the date in code is useless. Your version control system should tell you who did what and when, littering the code with your name is just ego. When a programmer leaves, do you go through and remove his name from all the code?
On a similar topic, comments should be "absolute", not "relative". By this I mean that you don't comment the change you made to the code, you comment what the code does now. I don't care when you changed it, the version control system can tell me that. If there's some tricky coding that was inserted to fix some bug, explain what you're doing, but don't bother telling me what it used to do.
I BELIEVE I've IDENTIFIED who this ANONYMOUS COWARD is. He SEEMS to be quite EGO-DRIVEN as he continually MENTIONS his grandiose ACCOMPLISHMENTS to establish his CREDENTIALS. I assume that he's a MAJOR PAIN IN THE ASS to work with.
http://sourceforge.net/p/ultradefrag/discussion/709672/thread/f8561602
4.5. Misunderstand macro-economics and intoduce more supply than could possibly be consumed by the demand and cause a collapse of gold prices as a precious metal.
I'm planning to sell it to aliens, Mr. Smarty Pants.:-P
There's a good recent book about the history of meteorite collecting (and dealing), if you're really interested.
The Fallen Sky by Christopher Cokinos. He chronicles the activities of a couple of very active meteorite dealers of the 20th century - they would mostly rush to the sites of recent falls and look around or buy pieces from local people who find them.
From skimming their paper, it doesn't appear that they get any real speedup from their parallelism. This is apparent because they state, in the part about the millions of lines of code written in their language, that
These and other applications written in the source language
are performance-competitive with established implementations
on standard benchmarks
Translation: we didn't speed them up any, or at least not by enough that we care to share any number.
Amdahl's Law is difficult to overcome in auto-parallelising systems that rely on anything other than loop optimizations. Basically, in straight-line code, if you make 50% of the code run on multiple cores, you're only going to get at most a 2x improvement in speed. In practice, you won't even get that much (except in loops) due to added overhead. Bottom line: you can write papers about your wonderful auto-parallelizing technique, but when the rubber hits the road this is unlikely to lead to much performance improvement.
Are you one of those people who pines for the old days when you had to buy a separate coprocessor and cache memory along with your CPU and motherboard?
Slackers! We built our computers from discrete logic. In fact, we built our own NAND gates using only dirt and duct tape!
This is a false dilemma, as an "enthusiast" would just choose from what's available. After all, you can't really get every motherboard/CPU combination now, you can only use the CPUs that are supported by your chosen motherboard.
It was like this when I was in school back in the 60's and 70's. I realize the study is from the UK, but anti-intellectualism is a long tradition here in the good ol' USA - witness the support for creationism and denial of climate change, etc, etc.
I'm wonder why anyone would even bother putting a telescope on the planet at this point
This scope will cost about $700 million to build; the Hubble Space Telescope cost $2.5 billion initially, and about $10 billion over its lifetime. Much better bang-for-your-buck to build telescopes on the ground, even if the space telescopes can do more. Sometimes quantity is better than quality.
Brilliant idea, but better might be a Fischer clock, which adds time each time the button is pushed. That way the debaters get a little extra time to respond whenever their opponent is done. They'll still be able to respond to every point, but if they're long-winded earlier they'll get less time later.
And shouldn't the car be flying?
Remembering back a few decades, the main difference between then and now is that "modern" people play with their phones a lot. I see no reason to think the future will change any faster.
Slashdot Mirror
I once spent some time with a company that sold our services to another company and the markup rate was 50% or more of what I was getting. I was rather disgusted at the notion. It was impossible for me to get that job, but by going through one of these companies, I could get it and there I was, "the same damned person."
By going through an agency, the employer can get rid of you more easily when the job is completed. Laying off employees is hard; not renewing a contract is easy. Also, part of the markup is for payroll overhead and benefits (if any), etc. You wouldn't get all of that even if you were a direct employee.
Code comments--especially system level comments--should include the name of the author or current maintainer, as well. I tag my methods with my name and the date that the code was put in so people know where to go if there's trouble.
I was agreeing with you completely until this. Putting your name and the date in code is useless. Your version control system should tell you who did what and when, littering the code with your name is just ego. When a programmer leaves, do you go through and remove his name from all the code?
On a similar topic, comments should be "absolute", not "relative". By this I mean that you don't comment the change you made to the code, you comment what the code does now. I don't care when you changed it, the version control system can tell me that. If there's some tricky coding that was inserted to fix some bug, explain what you're doing, but don't bother telling me what it used to do.
How do they feel about the nuclear family? Do they split up as soon as their first kid is born?
I BELIEVE I've IDENTIFIED who this ANONYMOUS COWARD is. He SEEMS to be quite EGO-DRIVEN as he continually MENTIONS his grandiose ACCOMPLISHMENTS to establish his CREDENTIALS. I assume that he's a MAJOR PAIN IN THE ASS to work with. http://sourceforge.net/p/ultradefrag/discussion/709672/thread/f8561602
If the problem is that they can't generate "random" number fast enough, maybe they could just return 42 when the entropy pool is empty.
I sure hope he purchased 75 licenses for those keyloggers. Otherwise the SPA will be on him like a Bond woman on a corrupt Belizian official.
4.5. Misunderstand macro-economics and intoduce more supply than could possibly be consumed by the demand and cause a collapse of gold prices as a precious metal.
I'm planning to sell it to aliens, Mr. Smarty Pants. :-P
1. Find 500,000 kilogram solid-gold asteroid ...
2. Tow into moon orbit for $2.6 billion
3.
4. Sell for current market price of $26 billion
5. Profit!
There's a good recent book about the history of meteorite collecting (and dealing), if you're really interested. The Fallen Sky by Christopher Cokinos. He chronicles the activities of a couple of very active meteorite dealers of the 20th century - they would mostly rush to the sites of recent falls and look around or buy pieces from local people who find them.
per dot-com bubble!
The problem is that this hole will allow any app to read or write to any of memory, allowing trojans.
These and other applications written in the source language are performance-competitive with established implementations on standard benchmarks
Translation: we didn't speed them up any, or at least not by enough that we care to share any number.
Amdahl's Law is difficult to overcome in auto-parallelising systems that rely on anything other than loop optimizations. Basically, in straight-line code, if you make 50% of the code run on multiple cores, you're only going to get at most a 2x improvement in speed. In practice, you won't even get that much (except in loops) due to added overhead. Bottom line: you can write papers about your wonderful auto-parallelizing technique, but when the rubber hits the road this is unlikely to lead to much performance improvement.
Are you one of those people who pines for the old days when you had to buy a separate coprocessor and cache memory along with your CPU and motherboard?
Slackers! We built our computers from discrete logic. In fact, we built our own NAND gates using only dirt and duct tape!
This is a false dilemma, as an "enthusiast" would just choose from what's available. After all, you can't really get every motherboard/CPU combination now, you can only use the CPUs that are supported by your chosen motherboard.
You obviously don't know how homeopathy works. Perhaps read up an article or a book about it?
Huzzah, the google has provided the answer! http://www.howdoeshomeopathywork.com/
Not that I'm doubting your sincerity, but even
if you think you're avoiding all ads,
keeping them out of your subconscious is
extremely difficult.
Design the test in such a way that it tests for skills needed to drive a vehicle, kind of like a field driver's exam.
Except that a sizeable fraction of sober drivers would fail the test. Speaking of false positives, have they arrested John McAfee yet?
It was like this when I was in school back in the 60's and 70's. I realize the study is from the UK, but anti-intellectualism is a long tradition here in the good ol' USA - witness the support for creationism and denial of climate change, etc, etc.
I doubt if more caffeine is what you need right now.
the media let it die out right there
Yes, I haven't heard anything about this attack. Those darn media, keeping it a secret like that.
I'm wonder why anyone would even bother putting a telescope on the planet at this point
This scope will cost about $700 million to build; the Hubble Space Telescope cost $2.5 billion initially, and about $10 billion over its lifetime. Much better bang-for-your-buck to build telescopes on the ground, even if the space telescopes can do more. Sometimes quantity is better than quality.
Brilliant idea, but better might be a Fischer clock, which adds time each time the button is pushed. That way the debaters get a little extra time to respond whenever their opponent is done. They'll still be able to respond to every point, but if they're long-winded earlier they'll get less time later.
And Slashdot still won't allow you to edit or delete your posts when you screw up the tags. :P
And shouldn't the car be flying? Remembering back a few decades, the main difference between then and now is that "modern" people play with their phones a lot. I see no reason to think the future will change any faster.
Anyone who's read "Snow Crash" knows what is possible.