Well, you know your province may be considered undesirable by some when you consider that the motto of Manitoba is, "Hey, at least we're not Saskatchewan!"
If you're going to use bold capitalized letters surrounded by underscores to make your points, please have a clue about what you are talking about before you say the U.S. government has nothing to do with the Internet.
Please watch this interview with Robert Kahn, the other co-inventor of TCP/IP and the originator of DARPA's Internet Program:
As of several months ago, when I last looked, there is no easy way to do automated unit testing on an application that requires a existing dataset for each unit.
Get your hands on Working Effectively with Leagacy Code by Michael C. Feathers. And do it soon.
Don't let the term "legacy code" in the title throw you off. Feathers calls any code that is not covered under automated testing "legacy code." On p. 17 of the book, Feathers gives an example of how to test code that currently requires hitting a database:
Change your code so that it does not call the database implementation directly. Rather, extract the interface of the database implementation into a new abstract class and have the implementation inherit from the interface. Now, you can have two classes inherit this interface: One for the real database implementation code and the other that returns "fake" test data. Then, when you unit test, you never hit the database, but you can still test to see if the logic of the surrounding code works.
As an example, if you have a method called getInvoices() in a class called DBConnection, then you can create an abstract class called IDBConnection with the method getInvoices(). Have both DBConnection and your new FakeDBConnection class implement this interface. Then you can pass the real or fake database connection object into the calling method and have everything work.
Feathers gives plenty of dependency breaking strategies that will help in getting more code under unit tests. One of his ideas is that no unit test should take more than 1/10th of a second to execute. If it does, then the code should should be refactored into something more conducive to quick testing. When unit tests run quickly, you're more likely to add more of them. And that's a good thing.
Again, check out the book and I'm sure you'll find plenty of ways to make the testing process a more fruitful endeavor.
CSquare and CRectangle should be the same type of object. There is no need to separate them into separate objects.
Sure they should be separate classes. Consider:
// make a rectangle 100 units wide and 50 units high
CFourSidedPolygon rectangle(100, 50);
rectangle.setSize(200, 50);// okay, it makes sense to widen rectangles
// now make a square 50 units wide and 50 units high
CFourSidedPolygon square(50, 50);// okay
square.setSize(100, 50);// whoops, our "square" is no longer a square!
The point is that you shouldn't create classes that allow clients to violate invariants such as square.width == square.height. Either, CFourSidedPolygon shouldn't support "setSize" functionality (probably, making it a worthless class) or "squares" should be of their own class, CSquare, that contains a CFourSidedPolygon rather than inheriting from one.
On one side we have those who want the United States to adopt the social-based work structures of western Europe. Maximum hours-per-week limits, six weeks of vacation per year (plus holidays, plus sick days), and guaranteed year-long maternity leave is what humanity should strive for.
On the other hand, we have pundits crying that outsourcing our jobs to eastern Asia is a natural result of how lazy Americans have become. To its proponents, outsourcing is capitalism at its finest. As long as someone else is willing to work more/harder for the same amount of money, the invisible hand prefers those who work more.
If we favor a social-based approach, we welcome downtime and life away from work at the cost of making cheap-labor markets look more enticing. If we favor outsourcing, it looks like we lose domestic jobs unless we work harder. Therefore, outsourcing convinces Americans to work harder to avoid losing every thing to others.
So, which side are we to favor? Working less seems nice, but is it viable?
Fortunately, it's largely a self correcting problem
I see it to be the complete opposite case: grammar and spelling is best corrected at the source.
People who submit such resumes don't get hired, their letters to the editor don't get published, and their proposals are rejected.
But people submitting typo-ridden resumes are getting hired, error-plagued letters to the editor are being published (because the proofreaders at the newspapers themselves have no grasp of the language), and people who routinely misspell in business documents are not being fired or reprimanded. Learning suffers, communication suffers, business suffers, and the rest of us have to deal with it.
Slashdot isn't the cause, just a symptom.
The cause is teachers who do not flunk high school students who consistently turn in nonsense papers and the parents who just don't care. But discussion groups such as Slashdot do not help the cause when error-ridden posts get +5 Insightful.
Where I disagree is with the public lambasting of anyone who doesn't spell perfectly.
The original post that started this subthread humorously pointed out how a supposedly educated man in business could misspell the word "corporate." It was a tongue-in-cheek joke and certainly not an example of "lambasting."
Misspelling "corporate" is not so bad, but then Felinoid went into a ridiculous rant about how incomprehensible communication is okay. Felinoid even argues that nobody should care about spelling because we'll just let Microsoft Word and paid proofreaders deal with our problems. Ironically, Felinoid's post has dozens of spelling errors in his post. It was a struggle to read through. Had he taken the time and effort to review his prose, I could have read it in half the time.
By the way, have you considered that the poster may not have been fluent in English?
Yes.
How about having some consideration for foreign posters?
Actually, by politely correcting an honest mistake, the foreign poster learns a valuable tip and avoids misuse in the future. It's better than letting a learner of the language eventually embarrass himself by misusing a word in an important situation. As long as we're not being vicious about typos, everyone wins!
As I said, content is more important to me then presentation.
Content is meaningless if the presentation obscures its meaning. In fact, it frequently occurs where someone thinks he learned something, but in fact he learned the incorrect thing because the spelling and grammar implied something else.
I do not find misspelling "corporate" to be a grievous crime. I do not correct misspellings on Slashdot out of habit. But when people argue that misspelling is a-okay in some contexts, of course I will jump in to set things straight.
I'm tired of people not taking pride in what they do. Spelling is just one example where people seem to not care about improving themselves. But, it's a particularly important one because so much can be discerned from it.
No, it's anal reactionaries like you who dilute the English language to the point of nonsense. Things have gotten so bad, college students commonly submit resumes riddled with typos, newspaper letters to the editor are incomprehensible, and business proposals look wholly unprofessional. And it all stems from slack usage of English in casual settings such as Slashdot.
It's embarrassing that you think that only English majors should have a solid command of the language. It just shows what a failure today's educational institutions are. When a person makes a typo, he should immediately realize it and correct it. If a person is unsure if the word is "consistent" or "consistant," then he should make the ten-second effort to find out and commit the fact to memory. This is what educated people do.
What is unacceptable is people that furiously type their thoughts and then do not even look over what they wrote to see if any of it makes sense.
What you need to learn is that spelling & grammar != intelligence
Oh, cut it out with the holier than thou bull. If a person cannot effectively communicate his intelligence, then that intelligence is worthless. Smart people cannot get far in modern times without being able to write. And smart people won't be heard if they treat the English language like a redheaded stepchild.
By the way, have you ever considered readers not fluent in English? When they encounter a misspelled word, they have no way of initially telling if the word is misspelled or if it is a word they just haven't encountered before. How about having some consideration for foreign readers?
By the way, have you ever considered blind readers who use screen-reading software? When you misspell words, you make your writing inaccessible to the blind. How about having some consideration for the blind?
People used to have pride in the things they wrote. Now instead of people sucking up their egos and admitting their mistakes, we have people that now argue that making mistakes doesn't matter.
There is a difference between making an honest mistake and continually choosing not to care. You encourage this recklessness. And now we have college graduates who think spell checking is what word processors do, and not what humans do. Even after running a spell check, students submit papers full of flagrant violations of the language. Because people continually abuse English in places such as Slashdot, they believe college papers and business proposals shouldn't be scoured of all errors.
The CBS network does not own all the CBS affiliates in the country. There are television stations that pay CBS to become CBS affiliates, but the majority of television stations in the United States are not owned by the networks.
During those "few minutes," an article about Leonardo da Vinci could be replaced by another work of art: namely that of Mr. Goatse in ASCII form.
This renders Wikipedia unusable as an authorative reference. Imagine citing an article on the Socratic Method for a paper. When a teacher verifies the sources in the paper, the teacher visits the site and finds a page describing an imagined story of child porn.
This isn't unlikely at all. Telling first time users of the site that they should view the page history of an article is ridiculous. Wikipedia is too open for abuse and too embarassing to use as a source when your teacher asks why you're referencing Goatse art in your papers.
Are you kidding? The guy was being shrill and confrontational from the beginning.
It's frightening how Slashbots make mental leaps between the police asking for identification of a man suspiciously pulled over on the side of the road and the SS asking for papers.
People here have absolutely no sense of historical perspective.
Re:Best examples of heresy I can think of
on
What You Can't Say
·
· Score: 1
Every time I boil water, I murder thousands or millions of microbes. Animals are murdered to become meat on our plates. We even murder trees to create paper, etc.
Murder is "the crime of unlawfully killing a person especially with malice aforethought." (m-w.com)
Has anyone noticed the increasingly uninformative results Google has been returning lately?
Searching for almost any generic term on Google results in a deluge of shopping sites. And (surprise, surprise) Amazon finds its way to the top of the lists nearly everytime.
I wouldn't be surprised that since every page on Amazon prominently features a Google search field that the folks at Google have conveniently avoided trying to find a way to fairly balance its search results.
Needless to say, Google is becoming less and less useful everyday.
Distributing source code may not increase piracy, but it will result in fewer copies of the software being sold--a result even worse than piracy. Opening up the source to a commercial product effectively guarantees that some other party will copy the code and pass it as own--regardless of any restrictions made on the code itself. If a closed source application releases its code, any anti-piracy checks in the software will be easily removed. Even though one could argue that anti-piracy techniques in commercial apps are easily manuvered around already, they still do a good enough job convincing many to fork over cash. If a third-party duplicates an application and changes the name of the product, an unassuming customer may not even know that a product is not the real-deal.
Opening up commercial source code may also result in trade secrets being compromised. Even if a company spends months or years developing, coding, and testing a revolutionary feature, it will all be for naught when a competitor comes along and duplicates it all in one fell swoop.
And, yes, companies such as Microsoft would lose power and control if they released source to applications such as Word. If Word's source became available today, there is no doubt that Microsoft would lose an enormous amount of clout and revenue. It's a lose-lose situation for them. It may be temporary good news for the open source community if such a thing happens, but be rest assured, the software industry would take a huge financial hit if it did so. There would be no temptation for Microsoft to make DOC formats, for Adobe to make PDF's and PSD's, or Macromedia to make SVF's.
I just do not see how simply releasing the code to commercial products will benefit the big companies out there, regardless if there are strict licenses on the source itself.
What stops somebody from reselling copies of Microsoft binaries for $5 each? Nothing. (Except the police). So what does the source have to do with it?
You really think the fact that it is illegal to resell copyrighted software has nothing to do with it? How can you argue that illegally reselling someone else's commercial software is the same as reselling open source software? In the former version, the party that creates the software forbids resale; in the latter version, the party explicity allows resale by anyone--how are these equivalent at all?
The number of people using something like SpamAssassin are so small, it's not worth their time.
Not for long. Filtering software such as SpamAssassin is now being used at the server level to recognize junk email for thousands of clients.
For example, the University of Colorado at Boulder now uses SpamAssassin to scan all incoming student email. This means SpamAssassin handles the spam filtering needs of a student population of 30,000. There is no doubt that as the spam problem increases, filtering solutions will begin to appear at the ISP level.
Slashdot Mirror
No, Aldous Huxley called it "soma."
Well, you know your province may be considered undesirable by some when you consider that the motto of Manitoba is, "Hey, at least we're not Saskatchewan!"
One potential issue I see with this program is that a person participating in it would have to live in Saskatchewan .
If you're going to use bold capitalized letters surrounded by underscores to make your points, please have a clue about what you are talking about before you say the U.S. government has nothing to do with the Internet.
Please watch this interview with Robert Kahn, the other co-inventor of TCP/IP and the originator of DARPA's Internet Program:
http://qanda.org/Program/?ProgramID=1036
Get your hands on Working Effectively with Leagacy Code by Michael C. Feathers. And do it soon.
Don't let the term "legacy code" in the title throw you off. Feathers calls any code that is not covered under automated testing "legacy code." On p. 17 of the book, Feathers gives an example of how to test code that currently requires hitting a database:
Change your code so that it does not call the database implementation directly. Rather, extract the interface of the database implementation into a new abstract class and have the implementation inherit from the interface. Now, you can have two classes inherit this interface: One for the real database implementation code and the other that returns "fake" test data. Then, when you unit test, you never hit the database, but you can still test to see if the logic of the surrounding code works.
As an example, if you have a method called getInvoices() in a class called DBConnection, then you can create an abstract class called IDBConnection with the method getInvoices(). Have both DBConnection and your new FakeDBConnection class implement this interface. Then you can pass the real or fake database connection object into the calling method and have everything work.
Feathers gives plenty of dependency breaking strategies that will help in getting more code under unit tests. One of his ideas is that no unit test should take more than 1/10th of a second to execute. If it does, then the code should should be refactored into something more conducive to quick testing. When unit tests run quickly, you're more likely to add more of them. And that's a good thing.
Again, check out the book and I'm sure you'll find plenty of ways to make the testing process a more fruitful endeavor.
Sure they should be separate classes. Consider:
CFourSidedPolygon rectangle(100, 50); // okay, it makes sense to widen rectangles
rectangle.setSize(200, 50);
// now make a square 50 units wide and 50 units high
CFourSidedPolygon square(50, 50); // okay
// whoops, our "square" is no longer a square!
square.setSize(100, 50);
The point is that you shouldn't create classes that allow clients to violate invariants such as square.width == square.height. Either, CFourSidedPolygon shouldn't support "setSize" functionality (probably, making it a worthless class) or "squares" should be of their own class, CSquare, that contains a CFourSidedPolygon rather than inheriting from one.
On one side we have those who want the United States to adopt the social-based work structures of western Europe. Maximum hours-per-week limits, six weeks of vacation per year (plus holidays, plus sick days), and guaranteed year-long maternity leave is what humanity should strive for.
On the other hand, we have pundits crying that outsourcing our jobs to eastern Asia is a natural result of how lazy Americans have become. To its proponents, outsourcing is capitalism at its finest. As long as someone else is willing to work more/harder for the same amount of money, the invisible hand prefers those who work more.
If we favor a social-based approach, we welcome downtime and life away from work at the cost of making cheap-labor markets look more enticing. If we favor outsourcing, it looks like we lose domestic jobs unless we work harder. Therefore, outsourcing convinces Americans to work harder to avoid losing every thing to others.
So, which side are we to favor? Working less seems nice, but is it viable?
Gee, let's see who funds this "PIPA" group who made the study:
PIPA's Foundation Sponsors
Ben and Jerry's Foundation
Ford Foundation
Rockefeller Foundation
Among others.
Never mind. I'm wrong.
Actually, the edit she made to the Monkeypox article live on the air was this edit. Admins corrected the change in twelve minutes.
And then everyone complains about Microsoft abusing its monopoly position and running shareware developers out of business.
Microsoft just can't catch a break in this anti-trust game, man.
I see it to be the complete opposite case: grammar and spelling is best corrected at the source.
But people submitting typo-ridden resumes are getting hired, error-plagued letters to the editor are being published (because the proofreaders at the newspapers themselves have no grasp of the language), and people who routinely misspell in business documents are not being fired or reprimanded. Learning suffers, communication suffers, business suffers, and the rest of us have to deal with it.
The cause is teachers who do not flunk high school students who consistently turn in nonsense papers and the parents who just don't care. But discussion groups such as Slashdot do not help the cause when error-ridden posts get +5 Insightful.
The original post that started this subthread humorously pointed out how a supposedly educated man in business could misspell the word "corporate." It was a tongue-in-cheek joke and certainly not an example of "lambasting."
Misspelling "corporate" is not so bad, but then Felinoid went into a ridiculous rant about how incomprehensible communication is okay. Felinoid even argues that nobody should care about spelling because we'll just let Microsoft Word and paid proofreaders deal with our problems. Ironically, Felinoid's post has dozens of spelling errors in his post. It was a struggle to read through. Had he taken the time and effort to review his prose, I could have read it in half the time.
Yes.
Actually, by politely correcting an honest mistake, the foreign poster learns a valuable tip and avoids misuse in the future. It's better than letting a learner of the language eventually embarrass himself by misusing a word in an important situation. As long as we're not being vicious about typos, everyone wins!
Content is meaningless if the presentation obscures its meaning. In fact, it frequently occurs where someone thinks he learned something, but in fact he learned the incorrect thing because the spelling and grammar implied something else.
I do not find misspelling "corporate" to be a grievous crime. I do not correct misspellings on Slashdot out of habit. But when people argue that misspelling is a-okay in some contexts, of course I will jump in to set things straight.
I'm tired of people not taking pride in what they do. Spelling is just one example where people seem to not care about improving themselves. But, it's a particularly important one because so much can be discerned from it.
This post is off-topic as is the parent.
No, it's anal reactionaries like you who dilute the English language to the point of nonsense. Things have gotten so bad, college students commonly submit resumes riddled with typos, newspaper letters to the editor are incomprehensible, and business proposals look wholly unprofessional. And it all stems from slack usage of English in casual settings such as Slashdot.
It's embarrassing that you think that only English majors should have a solid command of the language. It just shows what a failure today's educational institutions are. When a person makes a typo, he should immediately realize it and correct it. If a person is unsure if the word is "consistent" or "consistant," then he should make the ten-second effort to find out and commit the fact to memory. This is what educated people do.
What is unacceptable is people that furiously type their thoughts and then do not even look over what they wrote to see if any of it makes sense.
Oh, cut it out with the holier than thou bull. If a person cannot effectively communicate his intelligence, then that intelligence is worthless. Smart people cannot get far in modern times without being able to write. And smart people won't be heard if they treat the English language like a redheaded stepchild.
By the way, have you ever considered readers not fluent in English? When they encounter a misspelled word, they have no way of initially telling if the word is misspelled or if it is a word they just haven't encountered before. How about having some consideration for foreign readers?
By the way, have you ever considered blind readers who use screen-reading software? When you misspell words, you make your writing inaccessible to the blind. How about having some consideration for the blind?
People used to have pride in the things they wrote. Now instead of people sucking up their egos and admitting their mistakes, we have people that now argue that making mistakes doesn't matter.
There is a difference between making an honest mistake and continually choosing not to care. You encourage this recklessness. And now we have college graduates who think spell checking is what word processors do, and not what humans do. Even after running a spell check, students submit papers full of flagrant violations of the language. Because people continually abuse English in places such as Slashdot, they believe college papers and business proposals shouldn't be scoured of all errors.
Good spelling is important in all contexts.
The CBS network does not own all the CBS affiliates in the country. There are television stations that pay CBS to become CBS affiliates, but the majority of television stations in the United States are not owned by the networks.
During those "few minutes," an article about Leonardo da Vinci could be replaced by another work of art: namely that of Mr. Goatse in ASCII form.
This renders Wikipedia unusable as an authorative reference. Imagine citing an article on the Socratic Method for a paper. When a teacher verifies the sources in the paper, the teacher visits the site and finds a page describing an imagined story of child porn.
This isn't unlikely at all. Telling first time users of the site that they should view the page history of an article is ridiculous. Wikipedia is too open for abuse and too embarassing to use as a source when your teacher asks why you're referencing Goatse art in your papers.
Really? The USPTO funds the judicial system that has to put up with the patent lawsuits that will clog the courts? Please cite.
Are you kidding? The guy was being shrill and confrontational from the beginning.
It's frightening how Slashbots make mental leaps between the police asking for identification of a man suspiciously pulled over on the side of the road and the SS asking for papers.
People here have absolutely no sense of historical perspective.
Murder is "the crime of unlawfully killing a person especially with malice aforethought." (m-w.com)
A product still supported by Microsoft.
PC's running Windows ME report themselves as running Windows 98. Note that none of the pie on the Zeitgeist site includes any WinME figures.
Thus, you're missing a big chunk of Google's users with your analysis.
Has anyone noticed the increasingly uninformative results Google has been returning lately?
Searching for almost any generic term on Google results in a deluge of shopping sites. And (surprise, surprise) Amazon finds its way to the top of the lists nearly everytime.
I wouldn't be surprised that since every page on Amazon prominently features a Google search field that the folks at Google have conveniently avoided trying to find a way to fairly balance its search results.
Needless to say, Google is becoming less and less useful everyday.
Opening up commercial source code may also result in trade secrets being compromised. Even if a company spends months or years developing, coding, and testing a revolutionary feature, it will all be for naught when a competitor comes along and duplicates it all in one fell swoop.
And, yes, companies such as Microsoft would lose power and control if they released source to applications such as Word. If Word's source became available today, there is no doubt that Microsoft would lose an enormous amount of clout and revenue. It's a lose-lose situation for them. It may be temporary good news for the open source community if such a thing happens, but be rest assured, the software industry would take a huge financial hit if it did so. There would be no temptation for Microsoft to make DOC formats, for Adobe to make PDF's and PSD's, or Macromedia to make SVF's.
I just do not see how simply releasing the code to commercial products will benefit the big companies out there, regardless if there are strict licenses on the source itself.
You really think the fact that it is illegal to resell copyrighted software has nothing to do with it? How can you argue that illegally reselling someone else's commercial software is the same as reselling open source software? In the former version, the party that creates the software forbids resale; in the latter version, the party explicity allows resale by anyone--how are these equivalent at all?
Not for long. Filtering software such as SpamAssassin is now being used at the server level to recognize junk email for thousands of clients.
For example, the University of Colorado at Boulder now uses SpamAssassin to scan all incoming student email. This means SpamAssassin handles the spam filtering needs of a student population of 30,000. There is no doubt that as the spam problem increases, filtering solutions will begin to appear at the ISP level.