Of course the ultimate example of what you are talking about is Lord of the Rings. [ducks]
Granted it was written for children and still manages to hold itself up through pure imagination and exploration of a fantasy world - but I think it has set the tone for many fantasy/scifi stories since, including the ones you reference.
If you watch children play with toys (or remember playing with them yourself, as I do) you'll notice a lot of parallels with modern day fantasy/hero movies - the hero is always put into a completely impossible situation, against enemies that are set up to be so evil and powerful that any hope of defeating them is absurd - and yet the hero always prevails. The details of how are irrelevant. How many times in Terminator: Salvation could the old-school terminator have snapped Connor's neck rather than throw him dramatically into a large cushiony vent pipe? Child's play.
I use password safe, installed on a thumb drive. I have over 150 unique passwords I have to keep track of for work, as well as close to 100 unique passwords for personal sites stored on it. For passwords I rarely need I let the safe generate them for me, I never even actually know them. Just double click on the entry and it is inserted into your clipboard for ~3 minutes or something. For ones I use more frequently I came up with a scheme:
All passwords are of the form "[prefix][password][postfix]"
Choose 3 values for each element of the password. e.g. prefix could be "*(", "$^", or "@!", password could be "sparky", "fido", "jomama", and postfix might just be 3 well known 4-6 digit numbers.
Memorize these nine tokens, and if you need to write down specific passwords you can just put in placeholders for the values. e.g. "$^fido5150" can be written down as power-woof-vanhalen.
When I started as a lowly tech support/junior developer at a software company making $39k in Chicago it didn't take long for me to realize that I needed more money. I did good work for 3 months then asked to sit down with my manager and laid out a case for more money including evidence of similar jobs in the market that paid much more, and evidence of my own good work and accomplishments - this resulted in a 25% pay increase after 3 months on the job. I left that job 3 years later around $70k, took a consulting gig at $75k, pulled off a similar bargain shortly thereafter and left at $85. In the two jobs since the same tactics have gotten me around $115k, and I'm in a position to ride this up and continue techie work, or go the mgmt/lead route and make much more.
The moral of this story is when you think you should be making more money, just tell your company that. I've never heard of anyone getting fired for asking for a raise. Even if you don't deserve it the worst they will do is say no, and then you leave on your own. It's a business, they will do everything they can to hire you below your worth - all you have to do is call them on it - if you're worth it they will gladly pony up the cash.
Ha! I kind of agree with that, it is hard to read some jerk's posts about where he is, or how far he ran today, etc. without thinking - wow, this asshole must actually think this will be important to someone...
I find facebook useful as a kind of "focused email" client, where all of the features can basically be seen as shortcuts for things that we could easily do through email, and I would not post what I ate for breakfast any sooner than I would send a mass email out to everyone I know about what I ate for breakfast.
Out of curiosity, not trolling - please tell me your top 3 reasons for hating facebook. I have an account, rarely log in but find it useful from time to time. It's opt-in only, so it's not like you are being forced or even asked to do anything against your will - I don't get it. Are the haters just contrarians?
I'll check it out - thanks. My last great flurry of productivity came while listening to Herbie Hancock's Head Hunters - Check it out if you haven't already, just put on the album and let it roll.
I think it's the music - I was once in a situation where I was stuck sitting with a large group of developers/support/sales people in an area that was originally set up as a call center. The cubes were tiny (~5x6?) and had very low walls that you could see over when sitting. I was working late one night when a team came in and installed these big cylinders in the drop ceiling that I found out were "white noise generators" designed to drown out the ambient noise of people on the phone, people eating, people typing, etc. It definitely helped, there was always this sound that resembled forced air in the background and it was much easier to concentrate. Even with this though I found that music was still the main catalyst for great productivity. Only when I'm listening to music do I get those 3 hour miracle flurries where you write 600 lines of code that runs correctly the first time, and the only thing holding you back is how fast you can type.
Ha. I temporarily sat with my team in an area that was set up as a call center, so we had tiny cubes with very low walls and were packed in like sardines. I discovered one of my buttons during that time: when you can just barely hear someone else's music coming from their headphones - not well enough to make out the tune but well enough to distinguish a beat. That and loud chewing take me from a placid calm to homicidal thoughts in ~2.2 seconds.
I wish they had done some studies about the effects of music on productivity. I have some of those very nice Bose headphones and by far my most productive hours are spent wearing them.
Any music that I am able to "zone out" to will do, classical, jazz, techno - usually long tracks with many subtle transitions.
Granted I am a programmer, and listening to music while working is perfectly reasonable while it may be totally unacceptable for others.
What I should have told the parent was BCC'ing or CC'ing developers on client communications were equally bad ideas.
If you give a customer an email address, you better expect them to use it.
On the flip side, if you surreptitiously give a developer a customer email address, you better hope they don't use it.
Maybe if you were not playing BS politics, you would never find a BCC'ed email to be awkward.
Someday after you learn to admit that you do not know everything and some company lets you have direct reports you'll find out that people are wildly unpredictable and do all kinds of stupid things to put you in bad situations without you having breathed one political breath in your life.
That's a good point but look, the bottom line is you can achieve the same thing without BCC or CC and just deliver requirements to your devs outside of the conversation with clients - you might have it the other way, a dev needs to know some inane API detail and grabs an client email address from the mail and ends up annoying the CTO of your client. If I copy people on an email to clients it's usually a support team member that I fully expect to be able to handle all aspects of direct communication.
I dunno...that's certainly not a malicious use of BCC, but what do you do when the client responds with a clarification or correction? You have to remember to forward that response to the BCC'd engineer. CC would be much more useful. You can put a disclaimer that all communications should go through you, or instruct the engineer to reply with the same if contacted directly. The kind of bullshit I've seen it used for more than once is people BCC'ing their own or the recipient's manager, instantly creating an awkward situation for all involved.
I've never used BCC once, and always considered it a pretty spineless move on the part of anyone that did use it in a business setting. Its only use as far as I can tell (I welcome counter examples) is to enable political bullshit.
If you can handle multi-line regex (where . matches a newline) on the command line in unix, it's beyond me (perl's regex might handle this - I know java's does). I would break out awk for that on the command line, and process a simple i/o character stream in a more advanced language. For giggles though, this pattern, inside a find loop in java, and append-replacing $1X (where X is what you want to insert) whenever the 2nd group is *not* present - would work:
No good. The given requirement is not compliant with the URI spec, and the canned toString() will *not* put a slash between the domain and the query string when no path component is present. This means you have to build your own custom toString() for URI, and properly build it with all of the components in their correct places with the addition of the extra slash when necessary.
The requirement actually comes from a popular URL shortening service (I don't know why I'm resisting identifying it, but I am). The "url" variable is a plain String generated in one of many other parts of the code - these other parts guarantee that the URL is valid by the spec, but as you point out this particular requirement is beyond the spec. And anyway, to gain the advantage of the URL class's built-in validation the string would have to be used to instantiate a URL instance, and a failure to validate would result in a thrown exception - whatever the built-in validation does (probably uses regex:) ) plus a thrown Exception is much more harsh than a little, if sometimes unnecessary, regex replacement.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course the ultimate example of what you are talking about is Lord of the Rings. [ducks]
Granted it was written for children and still manages to hold itself up through pure imagination and exploration of a fantasy world - but I think it has set the tone for many fantasy/scifi stories since, including the ones you reference.
If you watch children play with toys (or remember playing with them yourself, as I do) you'll notice a lot of parallels with modern day fantasy/hero movies - the hero is always put into a completely impossible situation, against enemies that are set up to be so evil and powerful that any hope of defeating them is absurd - and yet the hero always prevails. The details of how are irrelevant. How many times in Terminator: Salvation could the old-school terminator have snapped Connor's neck rather than throw him dramatically into a large cushiony vent pipe? Child's play.
There is a chapter in Michael Abrash's Graphics Programming Blackbook called "Don't be a Compiler Johnny" that supports your statement.
Works like a charm for me.
I think the Slashdot editors are just trying to wind us up here...
You're right! Let's not give them the satisf...oh, nevermind.
However a third is indispensable.
Mod +1 "Amen"
When I started as a lowly tech support/junior developer at a software company making $39k in Chicago it didn't take long for me to realize that I needed more money. I did good work for 3 months then asked to sit down with my manager and laid out a case for more money including evidence of similar jobs in the market that paid much more, and evidence of my own good work and accomplishments - this resulted in a 25% pay increase after 3 months on the job. I left that job 3 years later around $70k, took a consulting gig at $75k, pulled off a similar bargain shortly thereafter and left at $85. In the two jobs since the same tactics have gotten me around $115k, and I'm in a position to ride this up and continue techie work, or go the mgmt/lead route and make much more.
The moral of this story is when you think you should be making more money, just tell your company that. I've never heard of anyone getting fired for asking for a raise. Even if you don't deserve it the worst they will do is say no, and then you leave on your own. It's a business, they will do everything they can to hire you below your worth - all you have to do is call them on it - if you're worth it they will gladly pony up the cash.
Off topic, you missed a good one: LOST DASH
Ha! I kind of agree with that, it is hard to read some jerk's posts about where he is, or how far he ran today, etc. without thinking - wow, this asshole must actually think this will be important to someone...
I find facebook useful as a kind of "focused email" client, where all of the features can basically be seen as shortcuts for things that we could easily do through email, and I would not post what I ate for breakfast any sooner than I would send a mass email out to everyone I know about what I ate for breakfast.
Out of curiosity, not trolling - please tell me your top 3 reasons for hating facebook. I have an account, rarely log in but find it useful from time to time. It's opt-in only, so it's not like you are being forced or even asked to do anything against your will - I don't get it. Are the haters just contrarians?
I'll check it out - thanks. My last great flurry of productivity came while listening to Herbie Hancock's Head Hunters - Check it out if you haven't already, just put on the album and let it roll.
I think it's the music - I was once in a situation where I was stuck sitting with a large group of developers/support/sales people in an area that was originally set up as a call center. The cubes were tiny (~5x6?) and had very low walls that you could see over when sitting. I was working late one night when a team came in and installed these big cylinders in the drop ceiling that I found out were "white noise generators" designed to drown out the ambient noise of people on the phone, people eating, people typing, etc. It definitely helped, there was always this sound that resembled forced air in the background and it was much easier to concentrate. Even with this though I found that music was still the main catalyst for great productivity. Only when I'm listening to music do I get those 3 hour miracle flurries where you write 600 lines of code that runs correctly the first time, and the only thing holding you back is how fast you can type.
Ha. I temporarily sat with my team in an area that was set up as a call center, so we had tiny cubes with very low walls and were packed in like sardines. I discovered one of my buttons during that time: when you can just barely hear someone else's music coming from their headphones - not well enough to make out the tune but well enough to distinguish a beat. That and loud chewing take me from a placid calm to homicidal thoughts in ~2.2 seconds.
The Bose phones were a gift, it's all good :)
I wish they had done some studies about the effects of music on productivity. I have some of those very nice Bose headphones and by far my most productive hours are spent wearing them.
Any music that I am able to "zone out" to will do, classical, jazz, techno - usually long tracks with many subtle transitions.
Granted I am a programmer, and listening to music while working is perfectly reasonable while it may be totally unacceptable for others.
Good call - by far my favorite episode is "Amazon Women in the Mood".
The spirit is willing...but the flesh is spongy and bruised - The Velour Fog
Agreed on both points :)
If you give a customer an email address, you better expect them to use it.
On the flip side, if you surreptitiously give a developer a customer email address, you better hope they don't use it.
Maybe if you were not playing BS politics, you would never find a BCC'ed email to be awkward.
Someday after you learn to admit that you do not know everything and some company lets you have direct reports you'll find out that people are wildly unpredictable and do all kinds of stupid things to put you in bad situations without you having breathed one political breath in your life.
That's a good point but look, the bottom line is you can achieve the same thing without BCC or CC and just deliver requirements to your devs outside of the conversation with clients - you might have it the other way, a dev needs to know some inane API detail and grabs an client email address from the mail and ends up annoying the CTO of your client. If I copy people on an email to clients it's usually a support team member that I fully expect to be able to handle all aspects of direct communication.
I dunno...that's certainly not a malicious use of BCC, but what do you do when the client responds with a clarification or correction? You have to remember to forward that response to the BCC'd engineer. CC would be much more useful. You can put a disclaimer that all communications should go through you, or instruct the engineer to reply with the same if contacted directly. The kind of bullshit I've seen it used for more than once is people BCC'ing their own or the recipient's manager, instantly creating an awkward situation for all involved.
Someone else pointed that out as well, that is a nice counter example.
I've never used BCC once, and always considered it a pretty spineless move on the part of anyone that did use it in a business setting. Its only use as far as I can tell (I welcome counter examples) is to enable political bullshit.
If you can handle multi-line regex (where . matches a newline) on the command line in unix, it's beyond me (perl's regex might handle this - I know java's does). I would break out awk for that on the command line, and process a simple i/o character stream in a more advanced language. For giggles though, this pattern, inside a find loop in java, and append-replacing $1X (where X is what you want to insert) whenever the 2nd group is *not* present - would work:
:)
(?m)(..).(?:((?=4))|(?=.)|$)
Not the ideal solution
No good. The given requirement is not compliant with the URI spec, and the canned toString() will *not* put a slash between the domain and the query string when no path component is present. This means you have to build your own custom toString() for URI, and properly build it with all of the components in their correct places with the addition of the extra slash when necessary.
The requirement actually comes from a popular URL shortening service (I don't know why I'm resisting identifying it, but I am). The "url" variable is a plain String generated in one of many other parts of the code - these other parts guarantee that the URL is valid by the spec, but as you point out this particular requirement is beyond the spec. And anyway, to gain the advantage of the URL class's built-in validation the string would have to be used to instantiate a URL instance, and a failure to validate would result in a thrown exception - whatever the built-in validation does (probably uses regex :) ) plus a thrown Exception is much more harsh than a little, if sometimes unnecessary, regex replacement.