the continued existence of a universe is based on its ability to produce complex structures without intelligence that would find out how to collapse it and use that as a weapon. The best protection against intelligence getting too far is a steady rate of catastrophic events. As universes get older, their contents get more evenly distributed and catastrophic events get less frequent, opening the odds up for their eventual demise.
Many people move on from programming to management or entirely other careers because it is so hard. What makes most existing systems hard to develop is the unnecessary complexity, lack of or overabstraction and negligence of test code. Management coming from such mess and never seeing anything better can not strive for anything better. It is hard to navigate such an enviroment and stay sane and become productive. Once you succeed it is highly rewarding to coach younger team members. I'm living proof of that and there are plenty more at least in the Finnish agile circles. Career age would be of essence to anyone looking for real successful team leads.
Most of those images were invented only because it was expected at the time to have a picture for every action, which was kikd of stupid in first place.
Myself I'm an elitist bastard who only takes jobs at very liberal companies, but through the contemporary global society this corporate/bureucratic culture of general hostility is bound to make its mark on the lives of us free dwellers as well. Not to say I didn't care for the people suffering this in the first degree, but they've got their own choices to make. It would be best for the common good, though, if these environments would go largely disregarded.
If the streams were secured, there'd be a monopoly or oligopoly of the information thereof, paving way for police states. As long as it's publicly accessible (though it should be properly accounted and publicly listed) it's common knowledge to be leveraged by all. Want to check whether your friends are hanging at their usual place? Check it out from the live stream. Want to see how it's like to live on the other side of the world? Want to follow an uprising in Tunisia? Likewise.
...their interpreters. Powershell isn't as backwards compatible.
Languages compilable to self-contained executables not installing anything extra on your computer (not a single file) are typically a lot more effort to work with - and the users can't just read the file to find out it's trustworthy to run.
Only exception to above rules I saw in comments here (pardon me for not linking, htc hero is really hard for this stuff) is the PAR perl exe packager. I'd jump to try that out if I developed for Windows.
I'd say keep it simple and avoid the colors. They bring extra complications and add no business value.
I admire your mad batch skills. How do you talk to the printers and send mail without extra dependencies, by having the script write out small com files to run, eh?
Oh, my ++ is really rusty on the conversion details to which this boils down to, but naturally this is an irresistible challenge, Fnord:
36 False Fnord 14 7 Fnord
Can't remember off the top of my head, but I'd imagine since we have a bool type, it'd render itself something sane such as "False" as a string, and stream:: would have the decency to prefer the string presentation to numeric; I could be miserably wrong and it could as well be either 0 or NULL (well, hopefully not that). Fnord.
I take it that truish to convention "class Fnord" would override the bool Fnord() in scope and create a Fnord by name Fnord. Fnord.
Then again, my eyes have to have been contaminated from some coding style guide, since they hurt from just looking at all those violations. Fnord.
Yes, I've completed my work at current customer and just biding my time. Fnord.
Now please tell me why I tend to land on non-programming jobs? Fnord.
This post contains no Fnords. Please keep the world safe for children and carefully dispose of any Fnord. Fnord.
There's water on moon, mars, europa, other bodies. We haven't yet even settled on the ethical price of human life. If it suddenly somehow became feasible to exploit those worlds, many of us would not care that some of us would see to it that we'd never notice signs of life there.
Did I mention Avatar yet? In real life we'd never heard about Na'vi.
It'd be great to have ethical guidelines; that would at least make people think about their actions. Get general public ponder it a bit. Fix Earth first perhaps? Environmentally acceptable solutions for getting out of the gravity well?
> I'm pretty much pushing a rock up hill here, but some people enjoy pointless struggle.
I love pointless struggle! I could read it for hours.
Funny part is, all this fuzz about FTL goes on and on because people don't understand what time and distance are. Explain that, and the babbling stops.
Throw in "automate the acceptance tests" between the usage agreement and coding, just for good measure. Well, actually to free the developers from ever worrying whether they met the goals or broke any planned functionality again.
Really. It's not that hard: - Expect for the commandline, - Netcat for network, - Selenium for web, - Robot framework for graphical user interfaces.
Googleable, deadwooden and professional help are available on all of above.
It's a world I'd love to live and work in where programmers were engineers providing precise solutions to actual problems!
Only if you tune your meter so that it covers the variation available rather than some idealistic edge of scale, you get variation. Such as people varying between misery and happiness, nobody quite stably at either end, as moods tend to be dynamic in living things. Then you can inspect people who tend more towards one end than the other, on a reasonable timescale, not whole life, since we do tend to learn and grow.
I know people from many walks of life from many places on Earth and do not perceive a clear correlation not to mention idea of causality (used to nurture one though) between how you live and your happiness or misery. Yes you have to have basic needs fulfilled, after that it's up to your ability to react constructively to your environment; a lot about communication and sympathy, it would seem. I'd risk a guess that those would even expand to one's success at work as well.
As usual, reality is rather more complex and boring than extreme one-liners:)
I agree (would mod up but gave up modding way back). However this is an interesting and probably reoccurring problem: extending the wealth of public net wisdom with precision data from local context (organisational or task-centric rather than geolocational).
A proxy adding local content into pages loaded from outside as suggested in Re:Solution by mcrbids would solve some of the problems you mention:
* The wikipedia content will always be out of date
* it's fetched from real sources in real time
* Changes made to wikipedia content don't get fed back into wikipedia
* this changes to risk of unintentionally publishing private information - how hilarious!
* Trying to load the wikipeida DB locally is a headache due to its shear size
* not done; could instead cover the whole of outside web with one solution.
This problem remains:
* Creates confusion as to what is and is not company information
I guess you'd be best off injecting a (user-hidable) "widget" layer that would contain all the local information needed, thus providing clear separation of local and global content. Least breakage of existing layout that way, I hope.
I assume here that we restrict our proxy to embed HTML (possibly including Javascript) into well parsing HTML pages only, so as to avoid breaking things as much as possible - inevitable to happen sometimes anyway.
Updating the contents of another window based on browsed content would require either
* a single sign-on solution to target references to correct user's desktop (seen in updaters of multiple applications views in medical solutions for instance) or
* a browser-specific local hack to study each page url and content and to fetch related information from local database based on those.
OT, adding such meshing into Google Wave would probably prove an interesting challenge:) Think of doing it Right (tm), with private additions to documents and discussions getting saved and tracked on local servers while public parts would be passed on to public servers.
My jobs seem to be increasingly about solving problems with bright colleagues rather than stomping away untested code.
Then again, when you have your problems solved and only tests and code to write, I've found commuting most effective. Hands free, no-one requiring your attention. I'd rather not drive a car (not even a cdr) to work, that would slow me down tremendously.
> Are you then going to include.NET Framework 2 in your repository? > Are you going to download it from Microsoft, using Microsoft's Download Center as a kind of adjunct repository? > Are you going to talk to Microsoft to see if they will cooperate in working out a solution?
Interesting question. What occurs to me naturally is to make a metapackage that provides dotnetfw2, that looks to see whether it is installed, then attempts to download the package from the official location - I'd try to implement this as semi-interactive browser use, so that user could enter login credentials or intervene in other manners in case the web pages do not answer in ways known to the script - or inform the user how to achieve installation of dotnetfw2 and fail.
Bigger question probably is whether this project will get enough contributors to achieve sufficient quality to pass as the premium choice for end users. I think there are probably plenty of software professionals who have to work on said platfrom, either permanently or every now and then, and thus likely no shortage of potential contributors - and power users.
> If nothing else, you might be able to provide a good menu of open source products that are deemed worthy of consideration.
There's a lot of that stuff that I'd love to see so easily available. Just yesterday felt kind of lost without grep. Luckily, Active perl is easy and familiar.
Anyway, the Design Patterns book contains patterns for problems imminent in the class of languages it concentrates in. In different language classes different problems arise. Higher patterns than those in that book would be more poignant to a larger set of languages.
Say iterators. In Perl (and Python IIRC) they're implemented by the virtual machine long as your data structure provides methods. The pattern's there but pretty mutilated by the fact that it's use is forced by the machine that runs your code.
Delegates are useless if you have dynamic multiple inheritance like in Lingo; I think Perl at least used to have that too with mutilating @ISA array. Likewise in Javascript etc, although lacking classes you'd have to map each method separately, ugly, but delegatable to common initializers. Umm, ok, bad example, I'll stop here:)
It's really nice to be able to support a user base of millions very few of whom ever choose to put any money into the game.
At least in our platform, however, the advertisers have to be hand-picked to fit our "world", and the advertisement method and material have to be tailored by hand. It's hard to see what the role of a mediator would be in this kind of setting. Maybe consultant, but probably only before our platform is chosen as the channel.
I for one love RT. Hooks up with normal (email) communication the right way. Things just tend to stay in order with it.
Customizable like nothing else. I wrote a couple of fundamental changes to it at my last job. There's a Right Place for every unimaginable change in the source.
Slashdot Mirror
the continued existence of a universe is based on its ability to produce complex structures without intelligence that would find out how to collapse it and use that as a weapon. The best protection against intelligence getting too far is a steady rate of catastrophic events. As universes get older, their contents get more evenly distributed and catastrophic events get less frequent, opening the odds up for their eventual demise.
Many people move on from programming to management or entirely other careers because it is so hard. What makes most existing systems hard to develop is the unnecessary complexity, lack of or overabstraction and negligence of test code. Management coming from such mess and never seeing anything better can not strive for anything better. It is hard to navigate such an enviroment and stay sane and become productive. Once you succeed it is highly rewarding to coach younger team members. I'm living proof of that and there are plenty more at least in the Finnish agile circles. Career age would be of essence to anyone looking for real successful team leads.
Alternatively, you may refer to it as Wiki-wiki-web, Usenet, Matrix, Information Superhighway, Virtual Space or Altavista.
Text all the way.
Most of those images were invented only because it was expected at the time to have a picture for every action, which was kikd of stupid in first place.
1. pandemia
2. ???
3. profit!
It dragged them down unnecessarily and nobody figured any way to use it for anything so they schemed a plot to leave it behind.
It probably won't hurt your corporate image too much to bolster some idealism every once in a while.
Myself I'm an elitist bastard who only takes jobs at very liberal companies, but through the contemporary global society this corporate/bureucratic culture of general hostility is bound to make its mark on the lives of us free dwellers as well. Not to say I didn't care for the people suffering this in the first degree, but they've got their own choices to make. It would be best for the common good, though, if these environments would go largely disregarded.
If the streams were secured, there'd be a monopoly or oligopoly of the information thereof, paving way for police states. As long as it's publicly accessible (though it should be properly accounted and publicly listed) it's common knowledge to be leveraged by all. Want to check whether your friends are hanging at their usual place? Check it out from the live stream. Want to see how it's like to live on the other side of the world? Want to follow an uprising in Tunisia? Likewise.
Awesomely clearly explained context and subject matter. This is one of the reasons why c# is so nice to write in itself even if it's not very unixy.
Looking forward to scala myself.
"And not a single house blew down."
That's an F for the testers, then.
...their interpreters. Powershell isn't as backwards compatible.
Languages compilable to self-contained executables not installing anything extra on your computer (not a single file) are typically a lot more effort to work with - and the users can't just read the file to find out it's trustworthy to run.
Only exception to above rules I saw in comments here (pardon me for not linking, htc hero is really hard for this stuff) is the PAR perl exe packager. I'd jump to try that out if I developed for Windows.
I'd say keep it simple and avoid the colors. They bring extra complications and add no business value.
I admire your mad batch skills. How do you talk to the printers and send mail without extra dependencies, by having the script write out small com files to run, eh?
Oh, my ++ is really rusty on the conversion details to which this boils down to, but naturally this is an irresistible challenge, Fnord:
36 False Fnord
14 7 Fnord
Can't remember off the top of my head, but I'd imagine since we have a bool type, it'd render itself something sane such as "False" as a string, and stream:: would have the decency to prefer the string presentation to numeric; I could be miserably wrong and it could as well be either 0 or NULL (well, hopefully not that). Fnord.
I take it that truish to convention "class Fnord" would override the bool Fnord() in scope and create a Fnord by name Fnord. Fnord.
Then again, my eyes have to have been contaminated from some coding style guide, since they hurt from just looking at all those violations. Fnord.
Yes, I've completed my work at current customer and just biding my time. Fnord.
Now please tell me why I tend to land on non-programming jobs? Fnord.
This post contains no Fnords. Please keep the world safe for children and carefully dispose of any Fnord. Fnord.
There's water on moon, mars, europa, other bodies. We haven't yet even settled on the ethical price of human life. If it suddenly somehow became feasible to exploit those worlds, many of us would not care that some of us would see to it that we'd never notice signs of life there.
Did I mention Avatar yet? In real life we'd never heard about Na'vi.
It'd be great to have ethical guidelines; that would at least make people think about their actions. Get general public ponder it a bit. Fix Earth first perhaps? Environmentally acceptable solutions for getting out of the gravity well?
> I'm pretty much pushing a rock up hill here, but some people enjoy pointless struggle.
I love pointless struggle! I could read it for hours.
Funny part is, all this fuzz about FTL goes on and on because people don't understand what time and distance are. Explain that, and the babbling stops.
Takers?
Oh yes.
Throw in "automate the acceptance tests" between the usage agreement and coding, just for good measure. Well, actually to free the developers from ever worrying whether they met the goals or broke any planned functionality again.
Really. It's not that hard:
- Expect for the commandline,
- Netcat for network,
- Selenium for web,
- Robot framework for graphical user interfaces.
Googleable, deadwooden and professional help are available on all of above.
It's a world I'd love to live and work in where programmers were engineers providing precise solutions to actual problems!
In reality everyone is miserable.
"In reality everyone is happy" is equally true.
Only if you tune your meter so that it covers the variation available rather than some idealistic edge of scale, you get variation. Such as people varying between misery and happiness, nobody quite stably at either end, as moods tend to be dynamic in living things. Then you can inspect people who tend more towards one end than the other, on a reasonable timescale, not whole life, since we do tend to learn and grow.
I know people from many walks of life from many places on Earth and do not perceive a clear correlation not to mention idea of causality (used to nurture one though) between how you live and your happiness or misery. Yes you have to have basic needs fulfilled, after that it's up to your ability to react constructively to your environment; a lot about communication and sympathy, it would seem. I'd risk a guess that those would even expand to one's success at work as well.
As usual, reality is rather more complex and boring than extreme one-liners :)
I agree (would mod up but gave up modding way back). However this is an interesting and probably reoccurring problem: extending the wealth of public net wisdom with precision data from local context (organisational or task-centric rather than geolocational).
A proxy adding local content into pages loaded from outside as suggested in Re:Solution by mcrbids would solve some of the problems you mention:
* The wikipedia content will always be out of date
* it's fetched from real sources in real time
* Changes made to wikipedia content don't get fed back into wikipedia
* this changes to risk of unintentionally publishing private information - how hilarious!
* Trying to load the wikipeida DB locally is a headache due to its shear size
* not done; could instead cover the whole of outside web with one solution.
This problem remains:
* Creates confusion as to what is and is not company information
I guess you'd be best off injecting a (user-hidable) "widget" layer that would contain all the local information needed, thus providing clear separation of local and global content. Least breakage of existing layout that way, I hope.
I assume here that we restrict our proxy to embed HTML (possibly including Javascript) into well parsing HTML pages only, so as to avoid breaking things as much as possible - inevitable to happen sometimes anyway.
Updating the contents of another window based on browsed content would require either
* a single sign-on solution to target references to correct user's desktop (seen in updaters of multiple applications views in medical solutions for instance) or
* a browser-specific local hack to study each page url and content and to fetch related information from local database based on those.
OT, adding such meshing into Google Wave would probably prove an interesting challenge :) Think of doing it Right (tm), with private additions to documents and discussions getting saved and tracked on local servers while public parts would be passed on to public servers.
Count me in on any efforts, I've waited for those over ten years as well.
Those, a pair of data gloves and the laptop in my back pack that's already always there anyway.
For simpler tasks than Eclipse, a modern phone would provide enough of a CPU.
Prolonged battery life from walking movement powered generator or solar panel jacket.
Some reason for hiking.
Thank you for writing my viewpoint for me.
My jobs seem to be increasingly about solving problems with bright colleagues rather than stomping away untested code.
Then again, when you have your problems solved and only tests and code to write, I've found commuting most effective. Hands free, no-one requiring your attention. I'd rather not drive a car (not even a cdr) to work, that would slow me down tremendously.
> Are you then going to include .NET Framework 2 in your repository?
> Are you going to download it from Microsoft, using Microsoft's Download Center as a kind of adjunct repository?
> Are you going to talk to Microsoft to see if they will cooperate in working out a solution?
Interesting question. What occurs to me naturally is to make a metapackage that provides dotnetfw2, that looks to see whether it is installed, then attempts to download the package from the official location - I'd try to implement this as semi-interactive browser use, so that user could enter login credentials or intervene in other manners in case the web pages do not answer in ways known to the script - or inform the user how to achieve installation of dotnetfw2 and fail.
Bigger question probably is whether this project will get enough contributors to achieve sufficient quality to pass as the premium choice for end users. I think there are probably plenty of software professionals who have to work on said platfrom, either permanently or every now and then, and thus likely no shortage of potential contributors - and power users.
> If nothing else, you might be able to provide a good menu of open source products that are deemed worthy of consideration.
There's a lot of that stuff that I'd love to see so easily available. Just yesterday felt kind of lost without grep. Luckily, Active perl is easy and familiar.
Anyway, the Design Patterns book contains patterns for problems imminent in the class of languages it concentrates in. In different language classes different problems arise. Higher patterns than those in that book would be more poignant to a larger set of languages.
Say iterators. In Perl (and Python IIRC) they're implemented by the virtual machine long as your data structure provides methods. The pattern's there but pretty mutilated by the fact that it's use is forced by the machine that runs your code. Delegates are useless if you have dynamic multiple inheritance like in Lingo; I think Perl at least used to have that too with mutilating @ISA array. Likewise in Javascript etc, although lacking classes you'd have to map each method separately, ugly, but delegatable to common initializers. Umm, ok, bad example, I'll stop here :)
It's really nice to be able to support a user base of millions very few of whom ever choose to put any money into the game. At least in our platform, however, the advertisers have to be hand-picked to fit our "world", and the advertisement method and material have to be tailored by hand. It's hard to see what the role of a mediator would be in this kind of setting. Maybe consultant, but probably only before our platform is chosen as the channel.
I for one love RT. Hooks up with normal (email) communication the right way. Things just tend to stay in order with it. Customizable like nothing else. I wrote a couple of fundamental changes to it at my last job. There's a Right Place for every unimaginable change in the source.