It's not as simple as building a better mousetrap. The problem is all the worse mousetraps all over the world that you'll have to deal with when your "special flower" isn't available.
I went through this with Autocad 14 - very customizable interface, I customized it, worked in my customized interface for about 200 hours and was a good 20% faster than I would have been using the standard setup. Then I went to a machine shop and tried to work with one of the tech's Autocad workstations there and I was about 80% slower than I would have been had I spent those 200 hours learning the standard setup.
You're right, most methodologies do have their place, and there are some programmers who can be productive "coding" 40 hours a week; especially when "coding" includes significant breaks from direct work on the software and doing other things, like posting to/.
Circling back to the article topic, I think this is what a lot of people hate about pair programming - they do a lot of "stuff" during work that they don't want anyone to know about, they think their management is clueless and that they "get away" with being "off task" because they work alone in a cube with their back to the wall. When they pair up, that is taken from them, especially if they do work under clueless management that thinks that optimal productivity comes from being "on task" 8am to 5pm every day.
When I do this in Ubuntu 15.10, it works, but it also slows down boot times pretty badly. All the systemd haters say that there are ways to fix that, I'd really like to see one of them put up (a convenient, and sensible, patch for Debian that addresses the boot time issue), or all of them shut up.
Some of this is cat and mouse... whatever system is used to identify them is circumvented, when that circumvention no longer works a new one is devised. If a company gets nailed badly enough, they declare bankruptcy and continue on in another corporation using slightly improved evasion methods.
Like calling from out of the country maybe - where such laws don't apply or cannot be easily enforced.
Yeah, the ultimate evasion - it does take quite a bit of initial investment to set up an international scam, or at least pre-existing contacts in the non-extradition country willing to help. Thankfully, most telemarketing harassers don't have that much initiative or resources.
at least one study indicates that placing commonly used keys far apart, as with the QWERTY, actually speeds typing, since you frequently alternate hands; and (4) the QWERTY keyboard did not become a standard overnight but beat out several competing keyboards over a period of years. Thus it may be fairly said to represent the considered choice of the marketplace.
seems almost as weak as they are portraying the QWERTY myth to be... Even if QWERTY won over competing keyboards, it won during the reign of mechanical typewriters, so it is a standard from the mechanical keyboard age. I actually "learned to type on a manual" in 1981... it's a very different animal from electronic keyboards.
The whole point of "erty" keyboards is to slow down the typists and reduce key-jams. It's an intentionally bad standard which has lived beyond its meaningfulness for more than 30 years now (when was the last manual typewriter made?)
No such animal, either engage a lawyer who will charge you $400 to try to win $500, or take a day off from work to go press the case yourself.
I've been dealing with a serial harasser who claims to be Google, but is damnably hard to identify - even though they purport to want my business... it's not worth the hassle of chasing down their identity to try to possibly sue them in a local court to win a judgement that is then impractical to collect.
See, that kind of blows me away, that LTS updates now push new kernels and versions of the GL drivers. I understand that this serves the majority of the users, but not all updates improve things for all users.
Some of this is cat and mouse... whatever system is used to identify them is circumvented, when that circumvention no longer works a new one is devised. If a company gets nailed badly enough, they declare bankruptcy and continue on in another corporation using slightly improved evasion methods.
First Amendment pre-dates telephones. If a salesman wants to stand on the public right-of-way and talk about his wares, that is his right under the First Amendment. The First Amendment did not give salesmen the right to make a device in my pants pocket vibrate at all hours of the day and night, masquerading as someone I might want to talk to and interrupting my private time.
It should be a simple patch to a distro like Ubuntu, and easy enough to maintain. I'm surprised that no one has stepped up and packaged something like: "Slow booting Ubuntu for systemd haters." I understand that you can tweak around and get most of that lost boot time back, so do that in the distro and make it worthwhile.
Perhaps guns and crypto are a bad analogy, but this is/., and if a car analogy isn't available, a bad one will have to make do.
If crypto is outlawed, not only is it easier to homebrew crypto than guns, but also less directly harmful. What those in power fear is that crypto allows conspiracy, which can ultimately be more destructive and harmful than a single man with a gun ever could be. Crypto allows better planning and coordination of surprise attacks. It comes down to a question of privacy and personal security vs law enforcement's ability to stop "pre-crime."
My feeling is that crypto should be protected for the same reason that the right to bear arms is protected under the constitution. Ironically, I don't "bear arms" and I believe the world would be a safer place if no-one but outlaws did, and the outlaws were actively pursued and stripped of their personal implements of instant judgement and execution. I think it's a matter of the world changing over the last 200 years, and I feel that in today's world the right to communicate privately across long distance (and time) is more important to protect against those who would abuse surveillance, run massive searches on private communications, and take action - even if that action is "legal investigation" against those who say things that might be interpreted as subversive. Too much is illegal and unenforced, selective enforcement is bad enough, but selective enforcement against people who may have expressed unpopular political views at some time in the past is worse.
Symmetric key encryption is basically unbreakable. It has the challenge of sharing the key by secure channel, but once that is done, there are any number of "quasi random" sequences that perfectly mask any signal. If you happen to be able to guess where in the 2^19997 sequence the key says to start, then: kudos, you've cracked it. Thing is, just guessing on short messages can lead to false positive decryptions - you think the message said "this" but in reality it said "that", you just randomly happened upon a key that decoded the source to "this".
The only way to break a strong symmetric key (strong: something that can be implemented with an 1980s 8 bit micro encrypting >10KBps) is to get the key, if the communicating parties have adequately protected their key, you're screwed.
It's a realist approach: "If guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns." kind of logic, and it's perfectly sound.
They can try to keep it out of mainstream consumer electronics, but there's too much "DIY" capability in the world to keep strong cryptography contained.
It reminds me of the early mp3.com days - the genie has long since left the bottle, doesn't matter if you saw it coming or not, it has happened. Now, you'll have to deal with it. Attempting to recapture the genie is a fool's errand.
No, it's easy - park in a safe place and never move.
Just like helicopter engineers know the way to make their stuff safe is to make it so heavy that it will never fly.
If you never exceed 30mph, lock the doors and windows shut anytime the car is moving, equip it with 6 sided slow-fill airbags, inside and out, and deploy upon even the threat of impact, you'll probably get the occupant death rate down below the struck pedestrian death rate (and improve the struck pedestrian death rate at the same time.)
Some people are easily intimidated by text - not just procedural thinking, but actual text - not many of those people will participate in a text based discussion board like/. but they exist, watching YouTube videos, and working in your company. One way of thinking says: so let people who can handle text handle all the programming. Another way says: give them a mouse and a drag and drop language so we don't have to have endless meetings with these people trying to get them to explain something they want in terms that can actually be delivered.
If you give a person something they can work with directly, they can learn the limitations for themselves. Otherwise, they'll often assume your "can't be done" explanations are a form of laziness, or ignorance, rather than a communication of the physical realities of the universe we live in.
A lot of this is potato / potato (spoken in different accents). I will often say "programming is not a performance art form" - meaning: get the hell out of my office and I'll have it for you much sooner, and better, than if you stay. I also say this to other programmers as they try to do something in-front of me and I don't have the time and/or patience to "sync up" with their thought process. I will say, there is no way in hell that I, or anyone I know, could show up to the office every morning by 9am, work in a paired team, one "driving" the keyboard and mouse, both looking at the same screen for 3 hours, take lunch, then do it for another 4 hours in the afternoon with a 15 minute break in the middle - 3 days of that and I'll be looking for another placement.
On the other hand, if you and a partner have sufficient time to tackle a problem together, sitting down together for 1-3 hour stints, 2-3 times a week, can be extremely productive. The first part of the pair time can be spent catching up on progress that was made separately, like a review, but different in that the shared information is work in progress, rather than product to be inspected. Solutions generated should meet both partners' "minimum standards" for readability, maintainability, and other technical merit, and code review becomes a formality of documentation, instead of a pro-forma meeting where the reviewers often tune out, nod and sign. If the 2 programmers instead spend their "pair time" on independent projects and then turn around and do a good quality formal review (including revisions for value-add improvements) of each-other's work at the end, I'd say productivity is about the same.
You might be amazed how much "code" that is not web-pages still interfaces with people. If libraries and compilers aren't used by at least 100x as many programmers as the ones required to write and maintain them, I'd call "you're doing it wrong" on the libraries and compilers. I'll grant that "large back end systems" require a lot of effort, and maintenance, but in this case your "customers" are the programmers that interface to the system - and, in a way, the specifications of those interfaces.
If a coding problem is clearly defined, unchanging, in other words: academic, then there is not as much need to revisit architecture and specifications. But, if that's the case - the problem can be solved, code can be complete, and hopefully there are other problems waiting to be addressed.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not as simple as building a better mousetrap. The problem is all the worse mousetraps all over the world that you'll have to deal with when your "special flower" isn't available.
I went through this with Autocad 14 - very customizable interface, I customized it, worked in my customized interface for about 200 hours and was a good 20% faster than I would have been using the standard setup. Then I went to a machine shop and tried to work with one of the tech's Autocad workstations there and I was about 80% slower than I would have been had I spent those 200 hours learning the standard setup.
That's what I do in Raspbian ;-P
State Farm is already sending me "targeted" promotional information - so far I can't detect any value add for them coming from this Spam.
You're right, most methodologies do have their place, and there are some programmers who can be productive "coding" 40 hours a week; especially when "coding" includes significant breaks from direct work on the software and doing other things, like posting to /.
Circling back to the article topic, I think this is what a lot of people hate about pair programming - they do a lot of "stuff" during work that they don't want anyone to know about, they think their management is clueless and that they "get away" with being "off task" because they work alone in a cube with their back to the wall. When they pair up, that is taken from them, especially if they do work under clueless management that thinks that optimal productivity comes from being "on task" 8am to 5pm every day.
When I do this in Ubuntu 15.10, it works, but it also slows down boot times pretty badly. All the systemd haters say that there are ways to fix that, I'd really like to see one of them put up (a convenient, and sensible, patch for Debian that addresses the boot time issue), or all of them shut up.
Some of this is cat and mouse... whatever system is used to identify them is circumvented, when that circumvention no longer works a new one is devised. If a company gets nailed badly enough, they declare bankruptcy and continue on in another corporation using slightly improved evasion methods.
Like calling from out of the country maybe - where such laws don't apply or cannot be easily enforced.
Yeah, the ultimate evasion - it does take quite a bit of initial investment to set up an international scam, or at least pre-existing contacts in the non-extradition country willing to help. Thankfully, most telemarketing harassers don't have that much initiative or resources.
Interesting, but:
at least one study indicates that placing commonly used keys far apart, as with the QWERTY, actually speeds typing, since you frequently alternate hands; and (4) the QWERTY keyboard did not become a standard overnight but beat out several competing keyboards over a period of years. Thus it may be fairly said to represent the considered choice of the marketplace.
seems almost as weak as they are portraying the QWERTY myth to be... Even if QWERTY won over competing keyboards, it won during the reign of mechanical typewriters, so it is a standard from the mechanical keyboard age. I actually "learned to type on a manual" in 1981... it's a very different animal from electronic keyboards.
Seems optimistic, would be nice, but I've never known the legal system to try that hard to help people.
The whole point of "erty" keyboards is to slow down the typists and reduce key-jams. It's an intentionally bad standard which has lived beyond its meaningfulness for more than 30 years now (when was the last manual typewriter made?)
There's a lot of POE "standards" some ranging up to 57V - make sure you know what you're getting into when you start plugging and playing:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
reasonably streamlined adjudication process
No such animal, either engage a lawyer who will charge you $400 to try to win $500, or take a day off from work to go press the case yourself.
I've been dealing with a serial harasser who claims to be Google, but is damnably hard to identify - even though they purport to want my business... it's not worth the hassle of chasing down their identity to try to possibly sue them in a local court to win a judgement that is then impractical to collect.
See, that kind of blows me away, that LTS updates now push new kernels and versions of the GL drivers. I understand that this serves the majority of the users, but not all updates improve things for all users.
Some of this is cat and mouse... whatever system is used to identify them is circumvented, when that circumvention no longer works a new one is devised. If a company gets nailed badly enough, they declare bankruptcy and continue on in another corporation using slightly improved evasion methods.
First Amendment pre-dates telephones. If a salesman wants to stand on the public right-of-way and talk about his wares, that is his right under the First Amendment. The First Amendment did not give salesmen the right to make a device in my pants pocket vibrate at all hours of the day and night, masquerading as someone I might want to talk to and interrupting my private time.
Too bad kernel 4.5 isn't making it into Ubuntu 16.04 Xenial Xerus... http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/201...
It should be a simple patch to a distro like Ubuntu, and easy enough to maintain. I'm surprised that no one has stepped up and packaged something like: "Slow booting Ubuntu for systemd haters." I understand that you can tweak around and get most of that lost boot time back, so do that in the distro and make it worthwhile.
Perhaps guns and crypto are a bad analogy, but this is /., and if a car analogy isn't available, a bad one will have to make do.
If crypto is outlawed, not only is it easier to homebrew crypto than guns, but also less directly harmful. What those in power fear is that crypto allows conspiracy, which can ultimately be more destructive and harmful than a single man with a gun ever could be. Crypto allows better planning and coordination of surprise attacks. It comes down to a question of privacy and personal security vs law enforcement's ability to stop "pre-crime."
My feeling is that crypto should be protected for the same reason that the right to bear arms is protected under the constitution. Ironically, I don't "bear arms" and I believe the world would be a safer place if no-one but outlaws did, and the outlaws were actively pursued and stripped of their personal implements of instant judgement and execution. I think it's a matter of the world changing over the last 200 years, and I feel that in today's world the right to communicate privately across long distance (and time) is more important to protect against those who would abuse surveillance, run massive searches on private communications, and take action - even if that action is "legal investigation" against those who say things that might be interpreted as subversive. Too much is illegal and unenforced, selective enforcement is bad enough, but selective enforcement against people who may have expressed unpopular political views at some time in the past is worse.
Symmetric key encryption is basically unbreakable. It has the challenge of sharing the key by secure channel, but once that is done, there are any number of "quasi random" sequences that perfectly mask any signal. If you happen to be able to guess where in the 2^19997 sequence the key says to start, then: kudos, you've cracked it. Thing is, just guessing on short messages can lead to false positive decryptions - you think the message said "this" but in reality it said "that", you just randomly happened upon a key that decoded the source to "this".
The only way to break a strong symmetric key (strong: something that can be implemented with an 1980s 8 bit micro encrypting >10KBps) is to get the key, if the communicating parties have adequately protected their key, you're screwed.
Whatever backdoors are present, they are irrelevant if the payload being transferred is itself strong encrypted.
Judges do it with "contempt of court." They don't need no steenking wrenches.
It's a realist approach: "If guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns." kind of logic, and it's perfectly sound.
They can try to keep it out of mainstream consumer electronics, but there's too much "DIY" capability in the world to keep strong cryptography contained.
It reminds me of the early mp3.com days - the genie has long since left the bottle, doesn't matter if you saw it coming or not, it has happened. Now, you'll have to deal with it. Attempting to recapture the genie is a fool's errand.
No, it's easy - park in a safe place and never move.
Just like helicopter engineers know the way to make their stuff safe is to make it so heavy that it will never fly.
If you never exceed 30mph, lock the doors and windows shut anytime the car is moving, equip it with 6 sided slow-fill airbags, inside and out, and deploy upon even the threat of impact, you'll probably get the occupant death rate down below the struck pedestrian death rate (and improve the struck pedestrian death rate at the same time.)
No you don't.
C++ and Java are both great beginner's languages.
Yeah, that's why there is LabView.
Some people are easily intimidated by text - not just procedural thinking, but actual text - not many of those people will participate in a text based discussion board like /. but they exist, watching YouTube videos, and working in your company. One way of thinking says: so let people who can handle text handle all the programming. Another way says: give them a mouse and a drag and drop language so we don't have to have endless meetings with these people trying to get them to explain something they want in terms that can actually be delivered.
If you give a person something they can work with directly, they can learn the limitations for themselves. Otherwise, they'll often assume your "can't be done" explanations are a form of laziness, or ignorance, rather than a communication of the physical realities of the universe we live in.
A lot of this is potato / potato (spoken in different accents). I will often say "programming is not a performance art form" - meaning: get the hell out of my office and I'll have it for you much sooner, and better, than if you stay. I also say this to other programmers as they try to do something in-front of me and I don't have the time and/or patience to "sync up" with their thought process. I will say, there is no way in hell that I, or anyone I know, could show up to the office every morning by 9am, work in a paired team, one "driving" the keyboard and mouse, both looking at the same screen for 3 hours, take lunch, then do it for another 4 hours in the afternoon with a 15 minute break in the middle - 3 days of that and I'll be looking for another placement.
On the other hand, if you and a partner have sufficient time to tackle a problem together, sitting down together for 1-3 hour stints, 2-3 times a week, can be extremely productive. The first part of the pair time can be spent catching up on progress that was made separately, like a review, but different in that the shared information is work in progress, rather than product to be inspected. Solutions generated should meet both partners' "minimum standards" for readability, maintainability, and other technical merit, and code review becomes a formality of documentation, instead of a pro-forma meeting where the reviewers often tune out, nod and sign. If the 2 programmers instead spend their "pair time" on independent projects and then turn around and do a good quality formal review (including revisions for value-add improvements) of each-other's work at the end, I'd say productivity is about the same.
You might be amazed how much "code" that is not web-pages still interfaces with people. If libraries and compilers aren't used by at least 100x as many programmers as the ones required to write and maintain them, I'd call "you're doing it wrong" on the libraries and compilers. I'll grant that "large back end systems" require a lot of effort, and maintenance, but in this case your "customers" are the programmers that interface to the system - and, in a way, the specifications of those interfaces.
If a coding problem is clearly defined, unchanging, in other words: academic, then there is not as much need to revisit architecture and specifications. But, if that's the case - the problem can be solved, code can be complete, and hopefully there are other problems waiting to be addressed.