He wasn't seriously lining up for the iPhone 6. He was doing a piece of performance art that he could post on Twitter to get some attention. Looks like he got it.
That, and we're talking about Javascript; javac doesn't ever enter into the picture. It's equally true and equally relevant to say that JIT does not mean "python" or "g++" in disguise.
It's the employer's job to stand by their product or service, but to be honest in the first place whether they can realistically fulfill the customer's needs. It's the employees' job to inform their employer that they don't have the proper tools to do the job, but to give the job their best effort anyhow (or seek employment elsewhere).
If the customer themself made a informed decision that ends up being against their best interests after being informed of it by the provider of the product/service, that sounds like a situation a lot of businesses would try to rectify as a courtesy to the customer.
What did I say in my previous post that made it sound like I'd want to hold the employee/mechanic personally liable for a mistake?
*Looks at phone* Yes, Dropbox has an option to allow upload only over a wifi connection, instead of the phone's data plan. The problem is that it still goes up to Dropbox's server before going to the PC's folder, and subby said that they don't like that.
I disagree. The programmer is closer to the builder's employee. The computer is the masonry trowel. An employee is paid to advance the aims of their employers, and in both cases, uses an appropriate tool to do so. The relative required skill of the two positions is moot; the important part of the analogy is the employer-employee-tool relationship.
Less experienced or simply more optimistic programmers will make more mistakes because they're constantly learning.
Not quite. Less-experienced programmers make more mistakes because they're...less experienced. If a more-experienced programmer stops learning, they aren't going to be a programmer for very long.
One might further say that a programmer, who by trade is exercising the trade of "computer science", is in fact closer in position to that of a scientist.
Computer science isn't a trade; it's a field of study. "Scientist" is a trade, but not one that's particularly closely-related to software engineering, so it's odd that you bring it up.
If I need to write a large piece of software, there's a certain irreducible complexity that will be involved. There's a point where simplifying the program any further would require dropping features from the program.
In the end, you still need to specify behavior. I don't think that it matters if the program is shown represented as some kind of image, control blocks arranged visually, a flowchart, text, or anything else, the problems of writing complex software will be the same; you need to organize the program logically, maintain its internal state somehow, take input, and produce results.
Say that I write some 100-class project in Python (so, a fair-sized system, but not *too* huge). I could come up with a visual metaphor for everything in the program, maybe with ways to assign pictures to variables and functions that (somehow) give a language-free representation of the meaning of that variable/function. It's still going to have 100 classes in it, the same effective logic in its design, but now, I'd have no idea how to search for a specific function in it. The thought that I'm left with is that yes, it would be cool to have a magic pill that made programming easy for everyone to do, but I'll believe it when I see it. I've never seen a non-text-based way to produce a computer program that could represent an algorithm in a way that wouldn't look like a horrific visual jumble for a non-trivial algorithm.
I think they're using some external javascript libraries that my work blocks, and it looks pretty bad. The page layout improves if I completely disable page styles. Of course, all of the behavior of the page is broken anyhow, so it's not much of a benefit.
My phone seems to display everything OK, but even in landscape, the comment tree quickly becomes about 30 characters wide with a big grey strip off to the right when you get a couple of replies in. The spacing feels too wide overall (both height and width).
When it works, I wouldn't call the beta "horrible", but I'd say that it still needs some serious tweaking. If I can't view the site on my work machine though, that's basically going to automatically kick it out of the daily rotation for me.
If they know someone here, they could likely get past HR and get an interview. If they could then convince their interviewers that they have the understanding of threading, efficiency, and data structures that a formally-educated candidate would have, I don't think they'd be denied the job at that point.
"$80k in student loan debt" is an exaggeration anyhow, unless you're going somewhere for the name or somewhere out of state. Tuition and fees at my school come out to about $6500/year this year, and I could've taken my brother's route and lived at home the first two years, knocking out GEs at a community college.
If you know a pool of competent, unemployed, self-taught programmers in my area, then you know a bunch of people that haven't tried looking for jobs around here.
"The bar" at my employer for an entry-level development position is basically: CS or related degree and the ability to write simple algorithms (like binary tree traversal) in C++, C#, or Java. We're struggling to find programmers when we want them.
Maybe other parts of the country have a more saturated market; Southern California seems to have more developer openings than people to fill them.
As far as Nintendo, I've bought a limited number of virtual console games. I get your point about the cartridge games. If they were still produced in that format by their original manufacturers, for a price similar to a used game, I think I'd still buy them.
Someone else mentioned the Atari Flashback. The history of the Atari name is interesting. The company that built that device was originally founded in 1993 as GT Interactive, so I'm not sure how much you could say that the Flashback was produced by the original company. It looks more like a hodge-podge of selling the name back and forth.
We are basically willing to try any streaming device that is under 100 dollars, and chromecast was no better than just HDMI-ing my laptop to the TV, since the only sensible/exclusive feature it included was the ability to make a browser window appear on screen, but if it requires a PC in order for chromecast to be worth a damn, well then it is a 50 dollar hdmi cable with added network latency.
I like it during parties; anyone with an Android or Apple phone can enqueue music or Youtube videos. You don't have to search for a remote; any phone or PC in the house will work as one. I like using my phone or tablet for an interface more than I like using an IR remote. Chromecast does a lot of things that I like without running an HDMI cable across the room to my laptop.
That's all pretty subjective, of course. Some things are a result of my own preferences, and some things are a result of how my living room is set up. For my uses, it's a worthwhile device.
I don't know; it depends on who you are. Are you a developer that would like to be able to stream audio and video to a television or other HDMI-equipped device? Then this is an API that will allow you to do so, provided the user has a device called a "Chromecast".
Are you an owner of the aforementioned Chromecast device? Then you should be interested that with an API available, more developers can implement Chromecast apps, and you'll be able to stream a greater variety of content to your TV.
If you're neither, and you've never heard of a "Chromecast" before, then you can still get some information from the summary. First, that it's a Google device for streaming things "to the living room", second, that it requires app-specific support to work, and third, that Google has now released an API for the device that will allow developers to provide Chromecast streaming support in their apps.
In this case, what "backups" does it prevent? You're perfectly free to make copies of your Starcraft II disk itself, and that copy will work to install the game. Alternatively, you can download the installer from Blizzard itself and use that to install the game. You can back up your local savegame folder (although it also gets saved "to the cloud", so I don't see the point).
If Blizzard dies without releasing some kind of unlock patch, well, that sucks. Multiplayer's gone, and you'd have to use an "unofficial" method to break the DRM and get to singleplayer. Maybe someone will come up with a server implementation.
You see a feature, I see a limitation of my rights and what I can do with what I purchased.
Those two things aren't mutually exclusive; I see both. For my part, I'm mostly interested in the single player portion of the game anyhow. When the campaigns drop to $20, I pick them up. At that price, the benefits outweigh the drawbacks for me.
I've got an AMD HD7870 in my desktop, an Nvidia GTX 540m in my laptop, and an Intel HD3000 in an older netbook. I remember starting the kernel in single-user mode to install the Nvidia driver, but that wasn't hard. The Nouveau driver kind of sucked (bad performance, tearing, etc), but the non-free driver has treated me pretty well.
The AMD installer runs under X. I had a previous AMD video card in here (from about 3 years ago), so I didn't have to do much more than install an updated driver. It doesn't look like I did any customization to the config though, so it was probably pretty close to working as soon as I installed the driver.
The Intel chipset was the only one that "just worked" acceptably with in-kernel drivers. Still, I can't see that I've seen any terrible problems with driver installation on any company's GPU in recent memory.
The price of a customer encountering a serious bug can be the loss of that customer to a competitor, schedules for new development slipping to make time to fix the bug, lawsuits over loss of customer data, etc. The rule of thumb that we use is that a bug found by QA might cost 10x as much as if the developer didn't produce buggy code (due to delays in testing, the developer having to diagnose the problem, abandoning their current work to re-immerse themselves in the buggy section of code, etc). A bug found by a customer will be at least 10x the cost of a bug found by QA, once you consider support time, the escalation process, the same costs of a QA-found bug, impact on development schedules, the potential for lawsuits, time spent by the release engineering group in packaging and deploying a hotfix, etc.
The price of fixing a problem varies, depending on when and where the problem is found, and the price of fixing it is only "just recompiling" if the developer finds the problem in the course of the preliminary testing done prior to checking the code in. Granted, most devs aren't going to have to worry about fatal consequences in their bugs, and it's not like we have to buy more physical materials when there's a mistake, but saying that it's not engineering and that the cost of a problem is near-zero is just goofy.
I already said it. I don't believe that it's always feasible for an indie songwriter to defend themselves against a lawsuit for accidental infringement. Even if there's no real case against them, a wealthier artist or label could essentially pay to grind them into the ground.
If a recording artist is his own label, how would he go about getting his music onto FM or satellite radio or onto the playlists of popular Internet streaming music providers, such as Pandora, Spotify, and foreign counterparts?
In short, that depends on the service they want their music on. Different services have different procedures.
And how should a songwriter make sure that he didn't accidentally copy parts of a popular song when writing his own?
As you so helpfully pointed out, they don't/can't always. The human mind is prone to subconscious influence; there's no way around that.
RIAA-affiliated labels add value through promotion and through their affiliated music publishers.
True, although it's debatable whether the value that they add is greater than the cost that they impose. The artists that they promote are like lottery winners: the lucky few that you can point to as indicators that the system is beneficial to artists and the public as a whole. In a nutshell, they're a great example of a selection bias.
I don't have a high horse; I just think you need to get the sand out of your ass. A speaker's intent is much more important than the etymology of their vocabulary. Post as yourself. Any further replies as an AC to this thread will go unread.
As a further note, avoid all uses of the words "hooligan", "uppity", "peanut gallery", "hip hip hooray", "vandal", "barbarian", "assassin", "spade", "maroon", or any other word, phrase, figure of speech, or expression that has ever been deemed offensive by anyone at any time.
Also, take care to avoid using the words "hysteria", "orchid", "seminar", "avocado", "mastodon", "manatee", "fundamental", or other words with similarly sexual etymologies around underage people.
Words come from places and take meanings and connotations that don't match their origins. Get over it.
Slashdot Mirror
He wasn't seriously lining up for the iPhone 6. He was doing a piece of performance art that he could post on Twitter to get some attention. Looks like he got it.
That, and we're talking about Javascript; javac doesn't ever enter into the picture. It's equally true and equally relevant to say that JIT does not mean "python" or "g++" in disguise.
Except Java and Javascript share common letters in their name.
I like to say that java:javascript::ham:hamster. OK, yeah, I stole it.
It's the employer's job to stand by their product or service, but to be honest in the first place whether they can realistically fulfill the customer's needs. It's the employees' job to inform their employer that they don't have the proper tools to do the job, but to give the job their best effort anyhow (or seek employment elsewhere).
If the customer themself made a informed decision that ends up being against their best interests after being informed of it by the provider of the product/service, that sounds like a situation a lot of businesses would try to rectify as a courtesy to the customer.
What did I say in my previous post that made it sound like I'd want to hold the employee/mechanic personally liable for a mistake?
*Looks at phone* Yes, Dropbox has an option to allow upload only over a wifi connection, instead of the phone's data plan. The problem is that it still goes up to Dropbox's server before going to the PC's folder, and subby said that they don't like that.
Less experienced or simply more optimistic programmers will make more mistakes because they're constantly learning.
Not quite. Less-experienced programmers make more mistakes because they're...less experienced. If a more-experienced programmer stops learning, they aren't going to be a programmer for very long.
One might further say that a programmer, who by trade is exercising the trade of "computer science", is in fact closer in position to that of a scientist.
Computer science isn't a trade; it's a field of study. "Scientist" is a trade, but not one that's particularly closely-related to software engineering, so it's odd that you bring it up.
I'd guess that it set a cookie. You can always click the little link at the bottom of the page.
If I need to write a large piece of software, there's a certain irreducible complexity that will be involved. There's a point where simplifying the program any further would require dropping features from the program.
In the end, you still need to specify behavior. I don't think that it matters if the program is shown represented as some kind of image, control blocks arranged visually, a flowchart, text, or anything else, the problems of writing complex software will be the same; you need to organize the program logically, maintain its internal state somehow, take input, and produce results.
Say that I write some 100-class project in Python (so, a fair-sized system, but not *too* huge). I could come up with a visual metaphor for everything in the program, maybe with ways to assign pictures to variables and functions that (somehow) give a language-free representation of the meaning of that variable/function. It's still going to have 100 classes in it, the same effective logic in its design, but now, I'd have no idea how to search for a specific function in it. The thought that I'm left with is that yes, it would be cool to have a magic pill that made programming easy for everyone to do, but I'll believe it when I see it. I've never seen a non-text-based way to produce a computer program that could represent an algorithm in a way that wouldn't look like a horrific visual jumble for a non-trivial algorithm.
I think they're using some external javascript libraries that my work blocks, and it looks pretty bad. The page layout improves if I completely disable page styles. Of course, all of the behavior of the page is broken anyhow, so it's not much of a benefit.
My phone seems to display everything OK, but even in landscape, the comment tree quickly becomes about 30 characters wide with a big grey strip off to the right when you get a couple of replies in. The spacing feels too wide overall (both height and width).
When it works, I wouldn't call the beta "horrible", but I'd say that it still needs some serious tweaking. If I can't view the site on my work machine though, that's basically going to automatically kick it out of the daily rotation for me.
If they know someone here, they could likely get past HR and get an interview. If they could then convince their interviewers that they have the understanding of threading, efficiency, and data structures that a formally-educated candidate would have, I don't think they'd be denied the job at that point.
"$80k in student loan debt" is an exaggeration anyhow, unless you're going somewhere for the name or somewhere out of state. Tuition and fees at my school come out to about $6500/year this year, and I could've taken my brother's route and lived at home the first two years, knocking out GEs at a community college.
If you know a pool of competent, unemployed, self-taught programmers in my area, then you know a bunch of people that haven't tried looking for jobs around here.
"The bar" at my employer for an entry-level development position is basically: CS or related degree and the ability to write simple algorithms (like binary tree traversal) in C++, C#, or Java. We're struggling to find programmers when we want them.
Maybe other parts of the country have a more saturated market; Southern California seems to have more developer openings than people to fill them.
As far as Nintendo, I've bought a limited number of virtual console games. I get your point about the cartridge games. If they were still produced in that format by their original manufacturers, for a price similar to a used game, I think I'd still buy them.
Someone else mentioned the Atari Flashback. The history of the Atari name is interesting. The company that built that device was originally founded in 1993 as GT Interactive, so I'm not sure how much you could say that the Flashback was produced by the original company. It looks more like a hodge-podge of selling the name back and forth.
but you aren't likely to purchase a copy of a game from 1989.
Speak for yourself. I enjoy the nostalgia of Atari and Nintendo games from the 80s.
We are basically willing to try any streaming device that is under 100 dollars, and chromecast was no better than just HDMI-ing my laptop to the TV, since the only sensible/exclusive feature it included was the ability to make a browser window appear on screen, but if it requires a PC in order for chromecast to be worth a damn, well then it is a 50 dollar hdmi cable with added network latency.
I like it during parties; anyone with an Android or Apple phone can enqueue music or Youtube videos. You don't have to search for a remote; any phone or PC in the house will work as one. I like using my phone or tablet for an interface more than I like using an IR remote. Chromecast does a lot of things that I like without running an HDMI cable across the room to my laptop.
That's all pretty subjective, of course. Some things are a result of my own preferences, and some things are a result of how my living room is set up. For my uses, it's a worthwhile device.
I don't know; it depends on who you are. Are you a developer that would like to be able to stream audio and video to a television or other HDMI-equipped device? Then this is an API that will allow you to do so, provided the user has a device called a "Chromecast".
Are you an owner of the aforementioned Chromecast device? Then you should be interested that with an API available, more developers can implement Chromecast apps, and you'll be able to stream a greater variety of content to your TV.
If you're neither, and you've never heard of a "Chromecast" before, then you can still get some information from the summary. First, that it's a Google device for streaming things "to the living room", second, that it requires app-specific support to work, and third, that Google has now released an API for the device that will allow developers to provide Chromecast streaming support in their apps.
Of course, it all depends on whose stats you use...
If Blizzard dies without releasing some kind of unlock patch, well, that sucks. Multiplayer's gone, and you'd have to use an "unofficial" method to break the DRM and get to singleplayer. Maybe someone will come up with a server implementation.
You see a feature, I see a limitation of my rights and what I can do with what I purchased.
Those two things aren't mutually exclusive; I see both. For my part, I'm mostly interested in the single player portion of the game anyhow. When the campaigns drop to $20, I pick them up. At that price, the benefits outweigh the drawbacks for me.
I've got an AMD HD7870 in my desktop, an Nvidia GTX 540m in my laptop, and an Intel HD3000 in an older netbook. I remember starting the kernel in single-user mode to install the Nvidia driver, but that wasn't hard. The Nouveau driver kind of sucked (bad performance, tearing, etc), but the non-free driver has treated me pretty well.
The AMD installer runs under X. I had a previous AMD video card in here (from about 3 years ago), so I didn't have to do much more than install an updated driver. It doesn't look like I did any customization to the config though, so it was probably pretty close to working as soon as I installed the driver.
The Intel chipset was the only one that "just worked" acceptably with in-kernel drivers. Still, I can't see that I've seen any terrible problems with driver installation on any company's GPU in recent memory.
The price of a customer encountering a serious bug can be the loss of that customer to a competitor, schedules for new development slipping to make time to fix the bug, lawsuits over loss of customer data, etc. The rule of thumb that we use is that a bug found by QA might cost 10x as much as if the developer didn't produce buggy code (due to delays in testing, the developer having to diagnose the problem, abandoning their current work to re-immerse themselves in the buggy section of code, etc). A bug found by a customer will be at least 10x the cost of a bug found by QA, once you consider support time, the escalation process, the same costs of a QA-found bug, impact on development schedules, the potential for lawsuits, time spent by the release engineering group in packaging and deploying a hotfix, etc.
The price of fixing a problem varies, depending on when and where the problem is found, and the price of fixing it is only "just recompiling" if the developer finds the problem in the course of the preliminary testing done prior to checking the code in. Granted, most devs aren't going to have to worry about fatal consequences in their bugs, and it's not like we have to buy more physical materials when there's a mistake, but saying that it's not engineering and that the cost of a problem is near-zero is just goofy.
It sounds more like ignorance than malevolence. If it makes you feel better, the post wasn't at +5 anymore when I read it.
I already said it. I don't believe that it's always feasible for an indie songwriter to defend themselves against a lawsuit for accidental infringement. Even if there's no real case against them, a wealthier artist or label could essentially pay to grind them into the ground.
If a recording artist is his own label, how would he go about getting his music onto FM or satellite radio or onto the playlists of popular Internet streaming music providers, such as Pandora, Spotify, and foreign counterparts?
Information for artists submitting to Pandora
Information for artists submitting to Spotify
Getting your music on iTunes
In short, that depends on the service they want their music on. Different services have different procedures.
And how should a songwriter make sure that he didn't accidentally copy parts of a popular song when writing his own?
As you so helpfully pointed out, they don't/can't always. The human mind is prone to subconscious influence; there's no way around that.
RIAA-affiliated labels add value through promotion and through their affiliated music publishers.
True, although it's debatable whether the value that they add is greater than the cost that they impose. The artists that they promote are like lottery winners: the lucky few that you can point to as indicators that the system is beneficial to artists and the public as a whole. In a nutshell, they're a great example of a selection bias.
The original saying is "From your lips to God's ears", basically meaning "I hope that what you say comes true".
I don't have a high horse; I just think you need to get the sand out of your ass. A speaker's intent is much more important than the etymology of their vocabulary. Post as yourself. Any further replies as an AC to this thread will go unread.
As a further note, avoid all uses of the words "hooligan", "uppity", "peanut gallery", "hip hip hooray", "vandal", "barbarian", "assassin", "spade", "maroon", or any other word, phrase, figure of speech, or expression that has ever been deemed offensive by anyone at any time.
Also, take care to avoid using the words "hysteria", "orchid", "seminar", "avocado", "mastodon", "manatee", "fundamental", or other words with similarly sexual etymologies around underage people.
Words come from places and take meanings and connotations that don't match their origins. Get over it.