From the limited time I've spent in eclipse's code, it seems a case of poorly done decoupling. It's layers upon layers of abstraction that's expected to just kinda sort itself out, which of course it doesn't and things end up in loops until the operation either times out, fails, or something changes that lets it get out of the loop and maybe even finish.
Clicking the cancel button is optimistic at best, especially when it's in one of it's death patterns. It just really seems to do a poor job of operation management in my opinion. When eclipse seems to be "taking forever", chances are it's two operation tasks bouncing back and forth waiting on each other, and not actually slow processing.
That said, I still love eclipse for Java development. Once you learn the do's and don'ts (and which files to delete when eclipse has a melt down), it's pretty usable.
A lot of bad code was written by good programmers under tight deadlines, budgets, and with requirements that are less a set of well thought out points about what needs to be done and more like "today's set of whims, check back tomorrow". The other thing I've seen (especially in-house apps) is they've been passed around to different developers for like 5 years because they were a low priority and as soon as something important came up, it was put on the back burner.
Most good programmers I know are very critical of their own earlier work, and have a good sense of how bad some of the stuff they've produced is. A lot of times if you go to them they'll happily run through their "what I really wanted to do but didn't have time.." list with you.
The worst case is as was said, if they guy thinks the code he wrote is golden. In that case.. run. You'll give yourself an ulcer trying to work there.
I'd add, most previous posts seem to assume the submitter knows what he's doing and the code really is awful.
This could well be the case, but at the same time, this reaction is very typical of people fresh out of university who have never worked on real code. The lack of "I'm considering doing a rewrite" in the post is encouraging, but the "I introduced code and broke stuff" indicates not fully understanding the scope of his impact (even in really terrible code it's usually possible though tedious to get an idea of what something is going to do, at least to the point of knowing it might break something) which is something you see in new coders.
As to whether to stay or run, the biggest things I'd look at are:
- Is there any hope of the project succeeding in the timeline (if not, run, you are about to be the fall guy) - Is the political environment there such that you will be able to fix the project in the timeline (if not, run, you are about to get an ulcer, then become the fall guy) - Are you actually capable of fixing the problem (always hard to know, but you should have a good grasp of your capabilities by now)
Taking a pile of shit and making it awesome is a great thing, both career wise and emotionally. Riding a burning wreck is a terrible thing career wise and emotionally.
The whole product has a kind of uncool aura around it. When I hear the name I picture the type of browser my non-technical grandmother would use to look at pics of her grandchildren.
It shouldn't matter, but it does. I kinda liken it to AOL.
Where "limited time" is still quite large, and licensing is often well out of reach for the little and even medium sized guys, they may as well be trade secrets.
I think I'd prefer a world where if you can figure out how to do it, you can sell it. Maybe in the large scale stuff this would be terrible, but from where I am it would seem to open a lot of currently closed doors and allow a lot of innovation at the garage and small business level.
I do agree that simply abolishing all forms of IP protection is probably not a viable option, but some serious reform would seem in order.
It's refreshing to see a nice clean design that just presents the information you're probably there to see. It feels like the right amount of content. It's not a big wall f text, but it still lists what they are doing, latest news, and their main mission.
I find the lack of social media "like/share" buttons, tag clouds, annoying animation, and weird floating dealies gives it a professional feel.
It doesn't, and many people who run those services have to deal with the same headaches.
Usually stores/coffee shops/etc deal with it by requiring you to create an account before using the service, or at least logging connections, so they can point the finger away from them when law enforcement comes knocking.
Running an exit relay is basically asking for major headaches from law enforcement. You are essentially allowing others to access _any_ content, some of which will very likely be highly illegal such as child porn, through your connection.
My vague understanding of this (and I haven't really been following it so take with salt) is that this really doesn't defeat TOR itself, but merely takes advantage of ones position as an exit node to perform well known man in the middle style attacks.
TOR is about hiding your identity. The exit node can see what you are sending and receiving, but doesn't know your actual IP (just the IP of the last node in the chain), the entry node knows your IP, but not what you are sending and receiving. This attack doesn't appear to compromise that.
That sounds way closer to how I'd prefer to play, and for that matter, closer to how I actually learned.
It would be nice if rocksmith had (assuming it doesn't) a feature where it basically waited at every chord, and if you screwed it up, made you repeat the chord. This would seem almost a direct translation of how I learned. I seem to remember it kinda did that on one of the very early intro songs but I don't remember it as an option (then again, I didn't explore much outside the campaign/career mode and mini games).
I tried rocksmith back when it first came out, and while I found the mini games really cool (and I imagine actually useful), I found actually playing the songs very frustrating.
The big problem in my opinion is their adaptive difficulty thing. One (or at least I) becomes good at a song through muscle memory, which is really damn hard when the game keeps changing it up on you in the middle of a song. The basic ability to lock it into a difficulty level would have made a huge world of difference.
My view (as someone who learned guitar the old fashioned way (you know, through youtube videos..)) is this might act as a stepping stone (kinda like rocksmith and even rockband) to get someone through the dull and tedious part where you can't do anything besides make your fingertips really sore.
I kinda see two use cases for this thing: -people who buy it, use it mostly like a toy for a while, then eventually put it in the closet -people who play around with it, and gradually transition to a traditional guitar / traditional learning approach
One thing I find really interesting about these new learning aids is the focus on "just start playing, learn technique later" vice the approach I (and probably most people who currently play guitar) generally took of learning chords and scales first.
Does an unwillingness to grind things out the old way make one unworthy of music? Personally I think if this gets more people into music than it's a force of good.
Before it was as you said, all about making customers happy. Happy customers come back, tell their friends, that's how you make money.
Now it seems to be about walking a thin line between how much you can screw your customers and get away with. Companies have realized that most people (myself included) will forgive minor slights, and for stuff we really want/need, even major ones. Now it's all about pushing the limits of that.
If you have 100 customers that you are making $1 off, you do something evil that generates $1.25 per customer (except for the 10 that stormed away angry), congratulations, you've made profit! Obviously highly simplified, but this seems to be the way it's going.
Look at the network solution opt-in thing. That's gonna piss a lot of people off.. but at $10 or whatever a domain, if they get even a few idiots to pay ~$2000 a year for phone verification of their domain settings (cause ya know, someone making shit pay on an IT desk was never tricked over the phone) they've probably made a huge profit.
Not sure if it's actually nationalized in Sweden or if they have a system where one company owns the infrastructure for an area and other providers pay a fee to use it (kinda like telecom), but you have a choice of provider.
They actually have a pretty reasonable reason for this.
Theo responds (in his usual patient and understanding manner) later in the linked thread when someone suggests trimming some of these old machines with these reasons, but the basic gist is:
Having such a diversity of platforms makes errors more apparent (some bugs which while they might impact all platforms might only be obvious one one platform for whatever reason) and the interest of some devs might be tied to these weird architectures.
I know it's different in other countries, where the grid is nationalized and people can choose between one of many providers, and maybe it's different in other parts of Canada, but at least where I am you usually only have one choice for a given area.
Sounds like an ad from a toothbrush commercial, but next checkup after I started using one the hygienist commented that I my teeth were really clean and the dentist commented that a spot I have trouble with (weird shaped teeth and food gets caught in there) was looking much better.
Entirely possible I was using the manual wrong though, and I'm mainly in it for the convenience (seems silly, but it's just one of those things I'm not in the mood to think about after a long day..).
I also suspect this is going to mainly be the "facebook games" crowd anyway, so probably not a tragic loss to society. Then again, some pretty big technological pioneers started out doing some rather goofy things, so who knows, we may just get artificial intelligence out of this simply because it was the only way to solve that stubborn bristle motion problem.
(Also my previous post came out way more serious than intended).
People spend their time and abilities on what interests them. I generally avoid the "something more worthwhile" argument, as we can't all work on a cure for cancer or whatever society deems the most worthy problem. You need people making stupid gizmos that no one needs. You need really smart scientists and millions of dollars in lab equipment tied up working on Viagra v2. Just the way the world has to work.
That said, a community of people interested in developing apps for their toothbrush worries me greatly.
Like any medical field, experts seem unable to agree.
Old dentist recommended something similar, current dentist says circular motion to get in there and "sweep out" the junk. Both seemed reasonably competent, both approaches seem to work.
I suspect barring special circumstances, as long as you are brushing in some kind of sensible manner and flossing, all is probably well.
These days I use a good quality electric. I said for years "pff, who needs that..", but I'd never go back. Less effort and does a better job.
It's actually amazing how seemingly obvious stuff can get missed on these kinds of large multi-year projects and huge teams of reasonably smart people.
Sometimes momentum causes things to plow right through logic. Anyone who has worked on a large project for a big company has probably seen this.
I don't have a specific opinion in this case, but I guess my point is not to assume that a huge team of competent people can't collectively make a really big and obvious mistake. History is loaded with products that sat on shelves while everyone asked "why the hell did they think anyone would buy that!".
There's a huge difference between encouraging kids to get outside and do some physical activity (which I do strongly agree with) in addition to other forms of entertainment and cutting off an entire widely used social outlet.
Slashdot Mirror
Agree.
I'm a long time apple hater, but when I read that letter regarding flash, I was nodding the whole time.
Flash is a pile of junk, and if they are going to go all walled garden, flash seems a great thing to keep out of said garden.
From the limited time I've spent in eclipse's code, it seems a case of poorly done decoupling. It's layers upon layers of abstraction that's expected to just kinda sort itself out, which of course it doesn't and things end up in loops until the operation either times out, fails, or something changes that lets it get out of the loop and maybe even finish.
Clicking the cancel button is optimistic at best, especially when it's in one of it's death patterns. It just really seems to do a poor job of operation management in my opinion. When eclipse seems to be "taking forever", chances are it's two operation tasks bouncing back and forth waiting on each other, and not actually slow processing.
That said, I still love eclipse for Java development. Once you learn the do's and don'ts (and which files to delete when eclipse has a melt down), it's pretty usable.
This I think is a very common thing.
A lot of bad code was written by good programmers under tight deadlines, budgets, and with requirements that are less a set of well thought out points about what needs to be done and more like "today's set of whims, check back tomorrow". The other thing I've seen (especially in-house apps) is they've been passed around to different developers for like 5 years because they were a low priority and as soon as something important came up, it was put on the back burner.
Most good programmers I know are very critical of their own earlier work, and have a good sense of how bad some of the stuff they've produced is. A lot of times if you go to them they'll happily run through their "what I really wanted to do but didn't have time.." list with you.
The worst case is as was said, if they guy thinks the code he wrote is golden. In that case.. run. You'll give yourself an ulcer trying to work there.
Indeed.
I'd add, most previous posts seem to assume the submitter knows what he's doing and the code really is awful.
This could well be the case, but at the same time, this reaction is very typical of people fresh out of university who have never worked on real code. The lack of "I'm considering doing a rewrite" in the post is encouraging, but the "I introduced code and broke stuff" indicates not fully understanding the scope of his impact (even in really terrible code it's usually possible though tedious to get an idea of what something is going to do, at least to the point of knowing it might break something) which is something you see in new coders.
As to whether to stay or run, the biggest things I'd look at are:
- Is there any hope of the project succeeding in the timeline (if not, run, you are about to be the fall guy)
- Is the political environment there such that you will be able to fix the project in the timeline (if not, run, you are about to get an ulcer, then become the fall guy)
- Are you actually capable of fixing the problem (always hard to know, but you should have a good grasp of your capabilities by now)
Taking a pile of shit and making it awesome is a great thing, both career wise and emotionally. Riding a burning wreck is a terrible thing career wise and emotionally.
As a Canadian, I'll admit the name puts me off.
The whole product has a kind of uncool aura around it. When I hear the name I picture the type of browser my non-technical grandmother would use to look at pics of her grandchildren.
It shouldn't matter, but it does. I kinda liken it to AOL.
At this point, using a lossy codec for audio seems silly to me.
We have the processing power and the storage, may as well keep all the data.
Where "limited time" is still quite large, and licensing is often well out of reach for the little and even medium sized guys, they may as well be trade secrets.
I think I'd prefer a world where if you can figure out how to do it, you can sell it. Maybe in the large scale stuff this would be terrible, but from where I am it would seem to open a lot of currently closed doors and allow a lot of innovation at the garage and small business level.
I do agree that simply abolishing all forms of IP protection is probably not a viable option, but some serious reform would seem in order.
I actually like their site.
It's refreshing to see a nice clean design that just presents the information you're probably there to see. It feels like the right amount of content. It's not a big wall f text, but it still lists what they are doing, latest news, and their main mission.
I find the lack of social media "like/share" buttons, tag clouds, annoying animation, and weird floating dealies gives it a professional feel.
It doesn't, and many people who run those services have to deal with the same headaches.
Usually stores/coffee shops/etc deal with it by requiring you to create an account before using the service, or at least logging connections, so they can point the finger away from them when law enforcement comes knocking.
There's a reason there are so few..
Running an exit relay is basically asking for major headaches from law enforcement. You are essentially allowing others to access _any_ content, some of which will very likely be highly illegal such as child porn, through your connection.
My vague understanding of this (and I haven't really been following it so take with salt) is that this really doesn't defeat TOR itself, but merely takes advantage of ones position as an exit node to perform well known man in the middle style attacks.
TOR is about hiding your identity. The exit node can see what you are sending and receiving, but doesn't know your actual IP (just the IP of the last node in the chain), the entry node knows your IP, but not what you are sending and receiving. This attack doesn't appear to compromise that.
That sounds way closer to how I'd prefer to play, and for that matter, closer to how I actually learned.
It would be nice if rocksmith had (assuming it doesn't) a feature where it basically waited at every chord, and if you screwed it up, made you repeat the chord. This would seem almost a direct translation of how I learned. I seem to remember it kinda did that on one of the very early intro songs but I don't remember it as an option (then again, I didn't explore much outside the campaign/career mode and mini games).
I tried rocksmith back when it first came out, and while I found the mini games really cool (and I imagine actually useful), I found actually playing the songs very frustrating.
The big problem in my opinion is their adaptive difficulty thing. One (or at least I) becomes good at a song through muscle memory, which is really damn hard when the game keeps changing it up on you in the middle of a song. The basic ability to lock it into a difficulty level would have made a huge world of difference.
My view (as someone who learned guitar the old fashioned way (you know, through youtube videos..)) is this might act as a stepping stone (kinda like rocksmith and even rockband) to get someone through the dull and tedious part where you can't do anything besides make your fingertips really sore.
I kinda see two use cases for this thing:
-people who buy it, use it mostly like a toy for a while, then eventually put it in the closet
-people who play around with it, and gradually transition to a traditional guitar / traditional learning approach
One thing I find really interesting about these new learning aids is the focus on "just start playing, learn technique later" vice the approach I (and probably most people who currently play guitar) generally took of learning chords and scales first.
Does an unwillingness to grind things out the old way make one unworthy of music? Personally I think if this gets more people into music than it's a force of good.
Before it was as you said, all about making customers happy. Happy customers come back, tell their friends, that's how you make money.
Now it seems to be about walking a thin line between how much you can screw your customers and get away with. Companies have realized that most people (myself included) will forgive minor slights, and for stuff we really want/need, even major ones. Now it's all about pushing the limits of that.
If you have 100 customers that you are making $1 off, you do something evil that generates $1.25 per customer (except for the 10 that stormed away angry), congratulations, you've made profit! Obviously highly simplified, but this seems to be the way it's going.
Look at the network solution opt-in thing. That's gonna piss a lot of people off.. but at $10 or whatever a domain, if they get even a few idiots to pay ~$2000 a year for phone verification of their domain settings (cause ya know, someone making shit pay on an IT desk was never tricked over the phone) they've probably made a huge profit.
Sweden comes to mind, also the UK.
Not sure if it's actually nationalized in Sweden or if they have a system where one company owns the infrastructure for an area and other providers pay a fee to use it (kinda like telecom), but you have a choice of provider.
They actually have a pretty reasonable reason for this.
Theo responds (in his usual patient and understanding manner) later in the linked thread when someone suggests trimming some of these old machines with these reasons, but the basic gist is:
Having such a diversity of platforms makes errors more apparent (some bugs which while they might impact all platforms might only be obvious one one platform for whatever reason) and the interest of some devs might be tied to these weird architectures.
I know it's different in other countries, where the grid is nationalized and people can choose between one of many providers, and maybe it's different in other parts of Canada, but at least where I am you usually only have one choice for a given area.
Sounds like an ad from a toothbrush commercial, but next checkup after I started using one the hygienist commented that I my teeth were really clean and the dentist commented that a spot I have trouble with (weird shaped teeth and food gets caught in there) was looking much better.
Entirely possible I was using the manual wrong though, and I'm mainly in it for the convenience (seems silly, but it's just one of those things I'm not in the mood to think about after a long day..).
Hehe, that I can get behind.
I also suspect this is going to mainly be the "facebook games" crowd anyway, so probably not a tragic loss to society. Then again, some pretty big technological pioneers started out doing some rather goofy things, so who knows, we may just get artificial intelligence out of this simply because it was the only way to solve that stubborn bristle motion problem.
(Also my previous post came out way more serious than intended).
People spend their time and abilities on what interests them. I generally avoid the "something more worthwhile" argument, as we can't all work on a cure for cancer or whatever society deems the most worthy problem. You need people making stupid gizmos that no one needs. You need really smart scientists and millions of dollars in lab equipment tied up working on Viagra v2. Just the way the world has to work.
That said, a community of people interested in developing apps for their toothbrush worries me greatly.
Like any medical field, experts seem unable to agree.
Old dentist recommended something similar, current dentist says circular motion to get in there and "sweep out" the junk. Both seemed reasonably competent, both approaches seem to work.
I suspect barring special circumstances, as long as you are brushing in some kind of sensible manner and flossing, all is probably well.
These days I use a good quality electric. I said for years "pff, who needs that..", but I'd never go back. Less effort and does a better job.
It's actually amazing how seemingly obvious stuff can get missed on these kinds of large multi-year projects and huge teams of reasonably smart people.
Sometimes momentum causes things to plow right through logic. Anyone who has worked on a large project for a big company has probably seen this.
I don't have a specific opinion in this case, but I guess my point is not to assume that a huge team of competent people can't collectively make a really big and obvious mistake. History is loaded with products that sat on shelves while everyone asked "why the hell did they think anyone would buy that!".
Your consistent and almost obsessive negativity interests me.
There's a huge difference between encouraging kids to get outside and do some physical activity (which I do strongly agree with) in addition to other forms of entertainment and cutting off an entire widely used social outlet.