If only we could make the dangerous area give off some sort of "radiation" that could be detected using some kind of instrument.
Hey if we regress that far I'd think humanity has bigger problems. Modern humans KNOW that living near Chernobyl is probably not a good idea. But still a lot of people do, are we so sure a less advanced civilization would act differently?
Maybe a better question is, how do we warn whatever replaces us? Do we care? We have no problem killing other living things. As long as it's not US, mostly.
The whole thing smacks of chasing your own tail. The IDEA of NCLB is to make the gap between slow kids and bright kids smaller. So if the smart students were to improve at the same pace as the slow ones, that would mean you haven't made the gap smaller at all, this would result in bad publicity for a program that would be seen as "ineffective".
This makes the quote toward the end of the article even more priceless: "My concern is that this report makes it seem like we have to choose between seeking equity and excellence," she said. "We need to strive for both."
Allow me to point out, as example, the corruption fighting unit of South Africa, called the "Scorpions". Or should I say, the ex-corruption-fighting unit of South Africa...
So, turning any biomass into fuel is real good news for those dwindling rainforests, right?
We're going from JUST burning food, to burning pretty much everything. Excellent news.
"The safest thing a gun-carrying father of a 6 year old can do is thus to make it absolutely sure said gun isn't something new and strange."
Amen. As kids we got sat down and explained exactly what the two 9mm pistols in the house were, what it did, how to handle ammo, how to load it, how to check that the chamber IS empty, and how not to. They were hardly ever locked up, and I could easily get to one were my parents not home. Much like any child. (Kids know how locks work and where the keys are anyway). But it didn't intrigue me, because now I knew exactly what it was, I'd held it, unlocked it, etc. So, no more mystery, it was just a pistol, big deal.
Much like how I was taught to deal with alcohol. It was never "kept" from me and my brother, and we were allowed to drink small amounts of alcohol early on and more as we got older. When university hit, we weren't out binging, because it had been discovered, been done, nothing new to see here, move along..... From that perspective, students who had finally "slipped the bonds" and were out partying hard, looked pretty silly.
Couldn't have said it better. It's always hard to convey the whole story behind a slashdot post and invariably someone points out an omission. I have been lucky to have worked with some really talented people. I am not talking about all cases here.
I believe you are a bit wrong though. You don't ALWAYS tell your managers the code is bad. Sometimes what you inherit is a lot better than what you could have done yourself. If you do always tell your superiors the code is fucked, you probably don't have a clue, or you have really bad predecessors.
I've seen similair. Once I was tasked to "fix" something another developer had written, with management bad-mouthing him quite badly before giving the project to me. I ended up discovering that his code was fine and that the problem was in an underlying library.
Flame away if you want. I never said my code was perfect, or that this was the case for every person that left. Some people leave and you wonder how the hell you could ever be as good as them.
The point is that there ARE people who leave this kind of way. "Well, he thought different" doesn't cut it if the code doesn't WORK.
Note again, I'm saying code that doesn't work, not merely "code I don't like". Code that literally affects clients negatively. Do I write code like that? Yes. But it takes a big man to go to the manager and say: "I'm sorry, when I wrote that, I didn't understand the problem as much as I would have liked. I fucked up. Please let me fix it.". Instead of writing a quick fix and hiding the problem.
And yes, I have done that (admit my errors) and I will do it again. I considder programming an art that comes with time.
A lot of the time you find that, while someone is still employed, they do a good job of hiding their mistakes and covering up. It's when they leave that things start to go downhill because now suddenly, someone has to go read and understand their code. Then you realise it's a patchwork of quick fixes and bad design, and decide nice clean rewrite is in order.
At this point you try to justify the change to management, who will "schedule it for sometime next year", since this is not causing them any pain, only you get that priviledge. From that point on, you're stuck with someone else's bugs forever.
Now you're upset and become very vocal about the problems you now have to deal with.
There is a difference between "different" code that works, and bad code that routinely causes problems.
Usually the cracks show about a week or two after the guy leaves. And by cracks, I mean serious, client affecting shit.
> Some 3rd world countries have better wireless broadband access than we do.
The reason for this has a lot more to do with the fact that in a lot of 3rd world countries, a copper cable is lucky to stay in the ground for a day before it gets stolen and sold as scrap metal. I do a lot of work for cellphone providers/ISP's in African countries, and the wireless guys make buckets of money because it's near impossible to maintain a copper infrastructure.
Replace it with fibre? Well, if you could convince the locals that the cable they're about to steal is worthless to them BEFORE they rip it out.
We have wireless available in my country in addition to copper. The copper is way better. Thank the gods that you have it and leave wireless to the desperate/traveller. It's slow, it's laggy, the range and coverage of most wireless is useless for most travellers. The only realistic implementation I've seen is HSDPA. Maybe with WiMax starting to roll out in Africa it will better.
Just imagine the porn magazines....
Of course, you wouldn't want the condom packs in the store to blurt out: "Hi John! Want the rough rider again like last time? Or can we reccomend something new? Glow-in-the-dark? Susan will love it." At which point, Jane leaves.
Uhm. Thanks for that. I adressed the point of dumbing down the game under the guise of fairness though. Which would make me like the game less.
I did say that I do not agree with stacking the deck, I agree that these people must be dealt with. But it's not really what I wanted to address.
And no, roulette is not a fair game. The house always wins in the long run.
I play EVE. And the reason I play EVE, is exactly what you just spelled out. All those other games, anyone can get to the top. I want a game where I have to apply myself to get there, and where I have something to lose. And just like in real life, there are people who understand how to play the situation. Do I agree with the favouratism? No. But I can't stop it. RL is corrupt too. You can't police EVE perfectly just like you can't police RL perfectly.
EVE still is, and will be for a while, the only game that can get my pulse racing. Die in WOW, big deal, you're still lvl 70 and you lose nothing. Die in EVE, and you could be out of a ship for months. And yes, it does matter to us. It's like comparing chess to skydiving.
TFA states that there's that amount of water in one deposit.
There's probably other deposits, with much, much more....
"There's evidence that about 10 times or maybe even 100 times that much water has flowed across the surface of Mars to carve the various channels, the outflow valleys and other features we see in the images and topography data"
They're just saying that, they've found where a bunch of that water IS, but they still have to find where the rest of it is. If it's there.
As easy as it is to say, consoles these days are fast becoming PC alike, just as easy can I say that my PC is becoming more like a console.
Most of the new graphics cards can plug straight into a TV, and I do it on a regular basis. I've had the family in the lounge with a PC plugged into the TV playing Trackmania, tetris, etc. We also frequently watch movies this way. Just like a console.
Moreover, how many mini/nano/whatever-ITX projects are out there for computers that act as home entertainment systems?
More like, PC's are taking over the lounge, and consoles have to become PC's to compete.
Well, I don't know what my genetics are like. My dad lasted into his 50's without glasses, though my mom has had glasses since school. So I'm 50/50 on that one.
Thing is I've been playing computer games since I was about 6 going from green and amber monochrome to CGA to VGA and all them arcade games and consoles, etc. Point is, I've done a LOT of gaming up to now (26), and I'm a programmer so I spend my days in front of monitors. Then I go home and spend some more time in front of monitors.. And if prevailing knowledge had been right, I would have had bad eyesight by now. But I don't, I have 20/20 vision. I once had a optometrist TRY to find something wrong with my eyes (paid by the company), and he found squat. He looked quite let down.
So... yeah.... I can believe this. FWIW my brother has also been a game addict for that long and also has no need for glasses.
"Unlike regional newspapers, for example, the Internet makes news about distant cities as accessible as news about one's hometown."
But also, we read about the cool things other places are doing on places like slashdot. Of course, we're not interested in all the BAD news about those places. Because the crime news about other places more or less matches that of our own. Maybe that's why the grass looks greener. Because we see all the positive and negative of our own environment, but only the "cool" stuff going on in other places. So naturally we want to go there.
Slashdot Mirror
If only we could make the dangerous area give off some sort of "radiation" that could be detected using some kind of instrument.
Hey if we regress that far I'd think humanity has bigger problems. Modern humans KNOW that living near Chernobyl is probably not a good idea. But still a lot of people do, are we so sure a less advanced civilization would act differently?
Maybe a better question is, how do we warn whatever replaces us? Do we care? We have no problem killing other living things. As long as it's not US, mostly.
Then what the hell does she do with all her time and wealth?!
She waves at people.
The whole thing smacks of chasing your own tail. The IDEA of NCLB is to make the gap between slow kids and bright kids smaller. So if the smart students were to improve at the same pace as the slow ones, that would mean you haven't made the gap smaller at all, this would result in bad publicity for a program that would be seen as "ineffective".
This makes the quote toward the end of the article even more priceless:
"My concern is that this report makes it seem like we have to choose between seeking equity and excellence," she said. "We need to strive for both."
Allow me to point out, as example, the corruption fighting unit of South Africa, called the "Scorpions". Or should I say, the ex-corruption-fighting unit of South Africa...
http://www.mg.co.za/articlepage.aspx?area=/breaking_news/breaking_news__national/&articleid=330180&referrer=RSS
As a member of the EAA, I'd love to be the first person to actually FLY an airplane made completely from paper.
So, turning any biomass into fuel is real good news for those dwindling rainforests, right? We're going from JUST burning food, to burning pretty much everything. Excellent news.
"The safest thing a gun-carrying father of a 6 year old can do is thus to make it absolutely sure said gun isn't something new and strange."
Amen. As kids we got sat down and explained exactly what the two 9mm pistols in the house were, what it did, how to handle ammo, how to load it, how to check that the chamber IS empty, and how not to. They were hardly ever locked up, and I could easily get to one were my parents not home. Much like any child. (Kids know how locks work and where the keys are anyway). But it didn't intrigue me, because now I knew exactly what it was, I'd held it, unlocked it, etc. So, no more mystery, it was just a pistol, big deal.
Much like how I was taught to deal with alcohol. It was never "kept" from me and my brother, and we were allowed to drink small amounts of alcohol early on and more as we got older. When university hit, we weren't out binging, because it had been discovered, been done, nothing new to see here, move along..... From that perspective, students who had finally "slipped the bonds" and were out partying hard, looked pretty silly.
Do you tell management what you had found? Did you give the previous coder credit for their code being okay? I hope you did,
Hell yes.
I've been around this company for going on 3 years and am a senior dev.
I was here when the projects started and ended. When some of the people joined and left, I know the project histories well.
Couldn't have said it better. It's always hard to convey the whole story behind a slashdot post and invariably someone points out an omission. I have been lucky to have worked with some really talented people. I am not talking about all cases here.
I believe you are a bit wrong though. You don't ALWAYS tell your managers the code is bad. Sometimes what you inherit is a lot better than what you could have done yourself. If you do always tell your superiors the code is fucked, you probably don't have a clue, or you have really bad predecessors.
I've seen similair. Once I was tasked to "fix" something another developer had written, with management bad-mouthing him quite badly before giving the project to me. I ended up discovering that his code was fine and that the problem was in an underlying library.
Flame away if you want. I never said my code was perfect, or that this was the case for every person that left. Some people leave and you wonder how the hell you could ever be as good as them.
The point is that there ARE people who leave this kind of way. "Well, he thought different" doesn't cut it if the code doesn't WORK.
Note again, I'm saying code that doesn't work, not merely "code I don't like". Code that literally affects clients negatively. Do I write code like that? Yes. But it takes a big man to go to the manager and say: "I'm sorry, when I wrote that, I didn't understand the problem as much as I would have liked. I fucked up. Please let me fix it.". Instead of writing a quick fix and hiding the problem.
And yes, I have done that (admit my errors) and I will do it again. I considder programming an art that comes with time.
A lot of the time you find that, while someone is still employed, they do a good job of hiding their mistakes and covering up. It's when they leave that things start to go downhill because now suddenly, someone has to go read and understand their code. Then you realise it's a patchwork of quick fixes and bad design, and decide nice clean rewrite is in order.
At this point you try to justify the change to management, who will "schedule it for sometime next year", since this is not causing them any pain, only you get that priviledge. From that point on, you're stuck with someone else's bugs forever.
Now you're upset and become very vocal about the problems you now have to deal with.
There is a difference between "different" code that works, and bad code that routinely causes problems.
Usually the cracks show about a week or two after the guy leaves. And by cracks, I mean serious, client affecting shit.
Don't forget the "The Sims2: Mass Effect" expansion.
> Thank you for playing the, "I wish I could have free speech in America" game.
Which is now followed by the "Not everyone is from America" game.
> Some 3rd world countries have better wireless broadband access than we do.
The reason for this has a lot more to do with the fact that in a lot of 3rd world countries, a copper cable is lucky to stay in the ground for a day before it gets stolen and sold as scrap metal. I do a lot of work for cellphone providers/ISP's in African countries, and the wireless guys make buckets of money because it's near impossible to maintain a copper infrastructure.
Replace it with fibre? Well, if you could convince the locals that the cable they're about to steal is worthless to them BEFORE they rip it out.
We have wireless available in my country in addition to copper. The copper is way better. Thank the gods that you have it and leave wireless to the desperate/traveller. It's slow, it's laggy, the range and coverage of most wireless is useless for most travellers. The only realistic implementation I've seen is HSDPA. Maybe with WiMax starting to roll out in Africa it will better.
Just imagine the porn magazines.... Of course, you wouldn't want the condom packs in the store to blurt out: "Hi John! Want the rough rider again like last time? Or can we reccomend something new? Glow-in-the-dark? Susan will love it." At which point, Jane leaves.
Uhm. Thanks for that. I adressed the point of dumbing down the game under the guise of fairness though. Which would make me like the game less. I did say that I do not agree with stacking the deck, I agree that these people must be dealt with. But it's not really what I wanted to address. And no, roulette is not a fair game. The house always wins in the long run.
I play EVE. And the reason I play EVE, is exactly what you just spelled out. All those other games, anyone can get to the top. I want a game where I have to apply myself to get there, and where I have something to lose. And just like in real life, there are people who understand how to play the situation. Do I agree with the favouratism? No. But I can't stop it. RL is corrupt too. You can't police EVE perfectly just like you can't police RL perfectly.
EVE still is, and will be for a while, the only game that can get my pulse racing. Die in WOW, big deal, you're still lvl 70 and you lose nothing. Die in EVE, and you could be out of a ship for months. And yes, it does matter to us. It's like comparing chess to skydiving.
TFA states that there's that amount of water in one deposit.
There's probably other deposits, with much, much more....
"There's evidence that about 10 times or maybe even 100 times that much water has flowed across the surface of Mars to carve the various channels, the outflow valleys and other features we see in the images and topography data"
They're just saying that, they've found where a bunch of that water IS, but they still have to find where the rest of it is. If it's there.
As easy as it is to say, consoles these days are fast becoming PC alike, just as easy can I say that my PC is becoming more like a console.
Most of the new graphics cards can plug straight into a TV, and I do it on a regular basis. I've had the family in the lounge with a PC plugged into the TV playing Trackmania, tetris, etc. We also frequently watch movies this way. Just like a console.
Moreover, how many mini/nano/whatever-ITX projects are out there for computers that act as home entertainment systems?
More like, PC's are taking over the lounge, and consoles have to become PC's to compete.
Well, I don't know what my genetics are like. My dad lasted into his 50's without glasses, though my mom has had glasses since school. So I'm 50/50 on that one.
Thing is I've been playing computer games since I was about 6 going from green and amber monochrome to CGA to VGA and all them arcade games and consoles, etc. Point is, I've done a LOT of gaming up to now (26), and I'm a programmer so I spend my days in front of monitors. Then I go home and spend some more time in front of monitors.. And if prevailing knowledge had been right, I would have had bad eyesight by now. But I don't, I have 20/20 vision. I once had a optometrist TRY to find something wrong with my eyes (paid by the company), and he found squat. He looked quite let down.
So... yeah.... I can believe this. FWIW my brother has also been a game addict for that long and also has no need for glasses.
I thought, getting a "pink slip", was slang for taking the loser's car off his hands after a street race.
And "getting your walking papers" meant getting fired...
Someone enlighten me? Yank doesn't always make sense to me.
All I need now is flash player 8 for linux!
"Unlike regional newspapers, for example, the Internet makes news about distant cities as accessible as news about one's hometown."
But also, we read about the cool things other places are doing on places like slashdot. Of course, we're not interested in all the BAD news about those places. Because the crime news about other places more or less matches that of our own. Maybe that's why the grass looks greener. Because we see all the positive and negative of our own environment, but only the "cool" stuff going on in other places. So naturally we want to go there.