While others have pointed out that "The boy is riding his bike to the store" is not passive, I would like to jump in with a plug for E Prime or English Prime. E Prime was developed as a simple mechanical derivative of English in which all forms of the verb "to be" (is, am, are, were, was, will be, etc.) simply do not exist. Avoid those, and your writing becomes E Prime compliant. You may find that you start writing in a more active voice, without really having to understand the mechanics of active voice.
Personally, I'll add my biggest suggestion to become a better writer: recognize and experiment with the value of wordplay. Write some poetry. Spot puns and double entendres. Try to find a five-letter word that means roughly the same thing as the seven-letter word you were going to write down. Proofread your sentences to come up with the most comedic but literal misunderstandings of your intended meaning.
I don't advocate a glib and playful tone in documentation, but wordplay will energize your language centers and help you write things that the reader will find useful instead of tedious and confusing.
The original was filmed on the University of Arizona campus (the A logo subverted into the team letter for the "Atoms" instead). It was released just a year before I went there so it was fun to location-spot. Wonder where the new one will be filmed?
This "thought password" is just another biometric, except one which even the actual owner can't be certain he can reproduce at will.
If a sensor can non-invasively read your brain activity to open the door, then another sensor can non-invasively read your brain activity to try to reproduce the signature by fraud. It may or may not turn out to be easy to train a bunch of random lab biomass to reproduce a particular "thought."
Lastly, a password is something that can be lent to authorized parties or bequeathed when you're no longer around. A biometric in general cannot. In some circumstances, this can be a good thing or a problem. A lawyer or boss can be the "executor" in your absense, but some situations are best when there is no proxy or executor middleman.
The issue isn't a service company having problems, but of established product companies trying to change their mindset and business from "put together some atoms you can ship, inject it once into the retail channel, get a wad of cash in the clear" to "talk to customers for a long time, maintain the systems for a long time, get a trickle of ongoing cash." It's not a trivial shift for an established business to make.
Having been intimately involved with the server management of one of the first graphical MMORPGs (3DO's Meridian 59), all I can say is that this is nothing new for MMORPG server clusters or services.
Our game had its server problems and we were in "learning mode" to deal with some major outages, major gameplay renovations, major strife from jerks, and major socio-legal issues behind the scenes such as player-to-player harassment and real-life stalking. EA/Origin's Ultima Online started later and had some of the same issues in an almost predictable order and timing. Then EverQuest repeated our mistakes, and so on.
I would think that as an industry, as a set of geeks, we MMORPG server managers would learn from each others' mistakes, but apparently, we do not. It is also a problem in that the management in *product* companies think it is easy to become a world-class *service* company, where the service is being sold to thousands to millions of *household* mass market customers.
Did anyone else read this headline and blurb, and think about Microsoft employees defecting to work for Apple? I know it's talking about users, but I wonder if the Intel switch might inspire a number of disenchanted Redmond developers to get caught up by the Infinite Loop buzz. And whether the Apple folks would even try to reach out for the talent?
It appears there's a correlation between the "famous names in game development" and the "career-minded senior developers in game development."
Correlation isn't causation, but which end is wagging which? Is it because they're a rare breed to stick around so long, or because they're a rare breed who have excellent gaming ideas?
Maybe they're just rare because of the career stress. The likelihood of making a name for oneself in the industry is pretty slim. The industry is incestuous and churn after November (after Retail Christmas) is a big problem. If you have to start your career over every year or two, who wants to keep up that grind forever?
But maybe it's just a matter of a group of people who like instant gratification in their games, who also want instant gratification in their career path, and they usually don't find it.
Ninety percent of everything is crap, and that goes for the workforce in any industry too. There may only be room for a few bright spots to float to the top, while the rest continue to wallow below.
Contracts are for ensuring compliance with the expectations of the interface. That's a far cry from documenting them. And code should not be documentation: document the strategy, not the tactics.
Uh, you remembered wrong. I doubt even LISP qualifies as the first.
"For many people, Java is the first language they've used with automatic garbage collection. While it may seem like new technology, it's actually been around for a very long time and is a well studied field. This book is a good tour through all the gritty details of many GC algorithms and covers the tradeoffs that distinguish them." -James Gosling
the "pet rock" of programming languages
on
EiffelStudio Goes Open
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· Score: 3, Insightful
This guy has had what, fifteen years? The language is a niche language in a crowded field of languages. It's not going to just catch fire and get more fans because you slapped the seal of Free Software onto it. It smells more of an abandonware goodwill gesture than anything.
As a language, Eiffel doesn't make it more convenient to express a problem to receive a good solution, it just makes the programmer follow the public speaker's maxim:
First, say what you're about to say; then say what you came to say; then say what you just said.
Programming by contract is essentially just writing twice as many unit tests, wrapped all around the code that is supposed to be doing the work. It's even easier to write bad tests when it's right next to the code being tested, so why bother?
Well, I dunno about the Stones, but I think I can be safe in saying that Steve Jobs is DEFINITELY not planning on having the Beatles come and sing a celebration anytime soon.
Of course, those of us who remember bang notation saw DNS as being oddly backwards to begin with. Why finish the name with the "root" of the tree, if that's who you'll have to ask first?
The final new chapter in the second edition is on RealWorldz. RealWorldz is a demo that renders planets with fractal terrain, oceans, sky, and other effects. Everything in the demo is generated procedurally through GLSL shaders and the chapter describes the techniques used in implementing the demo.
While this is a nice tour-de-force demo of a capability, it strikes me that a more important demo of this scale is to use ALL of OpenGL's capabilities to its fullest, and highlight "best practices" for presenting highly capable scene graphs with a lot of really nice and popular shading effects.
Just showing that you can implement PAC-MAN using Excel macros does not particularly give the reader a good understanding of making the fastest-possible PAC-MAN game, nor the most robust actuarial financial model.
Was there anyone who actually thought that the human line(s) immediately dominated the hunting scene the instant they became geneticly distinct from the other primates?
That is in fact exactly what the Adam & Eve Creationist types somehow think. That God told them that the animals were theirs to exploit, and that if Eve hadn't sinned, that humankind was probably destined to be essentially immortal.
I've also wondered if being the victim of bullying affected the socio-political choices you make in the future. For example, do those who've never experienced bulling see more or less need for protecting civil liberties and privacy? Do those who were loners in school see more or less need for organized labor? And so on.
I'm not saying Republicans are bullies and Democrats are victims or anything, but there sure seem to be a lot of people who just don't "get" the need for judicial oversight, fair representation in court or congress, support for the poor, or the concept of a truly open marketplace.
Yeah, you're really hiding your identity-- they can just query their database to find out which of the TWO losers actually rented Thundercats, and find that only one of those losers also rented the more popular NGE and Inuyasha series.
Does OpenZoep run on Zope? Who comes up with these names? I swear, these names sound like they come from a Dr. Seuss book. "If you hope to wash soup off a rope, simply scrub it with SKROPE! Skrope is so strong that no rope is too long!"
Cute joke, but "stop" was the word used to indicate a period. Long before it became trendy to call it a "dot," the punctuation we call a period has also been called a stop or a full stop. You wouldn't use "stop" in the middle of a sentence.
2) Comply with China's request, therefore helping the average Chinese citizen access information while only restricting their access slightly. In addition, they can have a message that notifies them that sites are being blocked for political reasons.
I have heard this argument, but have not yet seen the proposed message that the Chinese user would see. If it really says, "hey, your government made us hide some useful information from you" then fine, but I really expect it will end up watered down, barely better than "the Party Seal means you're getting 85% more fresh Party goodness, guaranteed."
There is no reason why shifting into reverse at 80 MPH should completely brickify a car. Result in speed loss? Yeah. Mean you have to start the engine again? That's fine. But render a car utterly incapable of being restored to a usable state by the user? Absolutely not. We're not talking about pouring sugar in the gas tank here, or driving it off a bridge, we're just talking about experimenting with the subsystem that adjusts gearing ratios in order to try to, legitimately, get into fourth gear.
I can tell you, from my time at Microsoft long ago (Win3.1 era), that there were more internal bugs reported against the CLOCK.EXE program than there were lines of code. It's a bit misleading since it's such a subjective kind of app where everyone wants to have a say on how it looks in different clock face styles, but it also was used as a demonstration of a surprising number of GDI bugs at the time.
It was also interesting to note that there were clearly understood data overrun problems in the WMF stuff, even back then. WMF is basically just a fancy scene graph or display list, where it records GDI calls and regurgitates it into a drawing later. But the GDI API was not really well-suited to support that concept in the first place. A huge chunk of bug reports overall, even in those days, was to avoid breaking backward compatibility, even if it meant not fixing real design flaws.
Slashdot Mirror
Personally, I'll add my biggest suggestion to become a better writer: recognize and experiment with the value of wordplay. Write some poetry. Spot puns and double entendres. Try to find a five-letter word that means roughly the same thing as the seven-letter word you were going to write down. Proofread your sentences to come up with the most comedic but literal misunderstandings of your intended meaning.
I don't advocate a glib and playful tone in documentation, but wordplay will energize your language centers and help you write things that the reader will find useful instead of tedious and confusing.
The original was filmed on the University of Arizona campus (the A logo subverted into the team letter for the "Atoms" instead). It was released just a year before I went there so it was fun to location-spot. Wonder where the new one will be filmed?
This "thought password" is just another biometric, except one which even the actual owner can't be certain he can reproduce at will. If a sensor can non-invasively read your brain activity to open the door, then another sensor can non-invasively read your brain activity to try to reproduce the signature by fraud. It may or may not turn out to be easy to train a bunch of random lab biomass to reproduce a particular "thought." Lastly, a password is something that can be lent to authorized parties or bequeathed when you're no longer around. A biometric in general cannot. In some circumstances, this can be a good thing or a problem. A lawyer or boss can be the "executor" in your absense, but some situations are best when there is no proxy or executor middleman.
The issue isn't a service company having problems, but of established product companies trying to change their mindset and business from "put together some atoms you can ship, inject it once into the retail channel, get a wad of cash in the clear" to "talk to customers for a long time, maintain the systems for a long time, get a trickle of ongoing cash." It's not a trivial shift for an established business to make.
Our game had its server problems and we were in "learning mode" to deal with some major outages, major gameplay renovations, major strife from jerks, and major socio-legal issues behind the scenes such as player-to-player harassment and real-life stalking. EA/Origin's Ultima Online started later and had some of the same issues in an almost predictable order and timing. Then EverQuest repeated our mistakes, and so on.
I would think that as an industry, as a set of geeks, we MMORPG server managers would learn from each others' mistakes, but apparently, we do not. It is also a problem in that the management in *product* companies think it is easy to become a world-class *service* company, where the service is being sold to thousands to millions of *household* mass market customers.
Did anyone else read this headline and blurb, and think about Microsoft employees defecting to work for Apple? I know it's talking about users, but I wonder if the Intel switch might inspire a number of disenchanted Redmond developers to get caught up by the Infinite Loop buzz. And whether the Apple folks would even try to reach out for the talent?
It appears there's a correlation between the "famous names in game development" and the "career-minded senior developers in game development." Correlation isn't causation, but which end is wagging which? Is it because they're a rare breed to stick around so long, or because they're a rare breed who have excellent gaming ideas? Maybe they're just rare because of the career stress. The likelihood of making a name for oneself in the industry is pretty slim. The industry is incestuous and churn after November (after Retail Christmas) is a big problem. If you have to start your career over every year or two, who wants to keep up that grind forever? But maybe it's just a matter of a group of people who like instant gratification in their games, who also want instant gratification in their career path, and they usually don't find it. Ninety percent of everything is crap, and that goes for the workforce in any industry too. There may only be room for a few bright spots to float to the top, while the rest continue to wallow below.
Contracts are for ensuring compliance with the expectations of the interface. That's a far cry from documenting them. And code should not be documentation: document the strategy, not the tactics.
"For many people, Java is the first language they've used with automatic garbage collection. While it may seem like new technology, it's actually been around for a very long time and is a well studied field. This book is a good tour through all the gritty details of many GC algorithms and covers the tradeoffs that distinguish them." -James Gosling
As a language, Eiffel doesn't make it more convenient to express a problem to receive a good solution, it just makes the programmer follow the public speaker's maxim:
Programming by contract is essentially just writing twice as many unit tests, wrapped all around the code that is supposed to be doing the work. It's even easier to write bad tests when it's right next to the code being tested, so why bother?
Bertie, give it up already!
Well, I dunno about the Stones, but I think I can be safe in saying that Steve Jobs is DEFINITELY not planning on having the Beatles come and sing a celebration anytime soon.
http://halley.cc/typoxy
http://halley.cc/typoxy.png
http://halley.cc/dot-typo (~/.typo)
Requires HTTP::Proxy (e.g., apt-get libhttp-proxy-perl).
Of course, those of us who remember bang notation saw DNS as being oddly backwards to begin with. Why finish the name with the "root" of the tree, if that's who you'll have to ask first?
While this is a nice tour-de-force demo of a capability, it strikes me that a more important demo of this scale is to use ALL of OpenGL's capabilities to its fullest, and highlight "best practices" for presenting highly capable scene graphs with a lot of really nice and popular shading effects.
Just showing that you can implement PAC-MAN using Excel macros does not particularly give the reader a good understanding of making the fastest-possible PAC-MAN game, nor the most robust actuarial financial model.
That is in fact exactly what the Adam & Eve Creationist types somehow think. That God told them that the animals were theirs to exploit, and that if Eve hadn't sinned, that humankind was probably destined to be essentially immortal.
"Anoninimity"? That sounds like a combination of anoninanity and anonenmity.
I'm not saying Republicans are bullies and Democrats are victims or anything, but there sure seem to be a lot of people who just don't "get" the need for judicial oversight, fair representation in court or congress, support for the poor, or the concept of a truly open marketplace.
Yeah, you're really hiding your identity-- they can just query their database to find out which of the TWO losers actually rented Thundercats, and find that only one of those losers also rented the more popular NGE and Inuyasha series.
Does OpenZoep run on Zope? Who comes up with these names? I swear, these names sound like they come from a Dr. Seuss book. "If you hope to wash soup off a rope, simply scrub it with SKROPE! Skrope is so strong that no rope is too long!"
Cute joke, but "stop" was the word used to indicate a period. Long before it became trendy to call it a "dot," the punctuation we call a period has also been called a stop or a full stop. You wouldn't use "stop" in the middle of a sentence.
I have heard this argument, but have not yet seen the proposed message that the Chinese user would see. If it really says, "hey, your government made us hide some useful information from you" then fine, but I really expect it will end up watered down, barely better than "the Party Seal means you're getting 85% more fresh Party goodness, guaranteed."
There is no reason why shifting into reverse at 80 MPH should completely brickify a car. Result in speed loss? Yeah. Mean you have to start the engine again? That's fine. But render a car utterly incapable of being restored to a usable state by the user? Absolutely not. We're not talking about pouring sugar in the gas tank here, or driving it off a bridge, we're just talking about experimenting with the subsystem that adjusts gearing ratios in order to try to, legitimately, get into fourth gear.
How about that move to change the motto from "Intel Inside!" to "Intel Aside!"
It was also interesting to note that there were clearly understood data overrun problems in the WMF stuff, even back then. WMF is basically just a fancy scene graph or display list, where it records GDI calls and regurgitates it into a drawing later. But the GDI API was not really well-suited to support that concept in the first place. A huge chunk of bug reports overall, even in those days, was to avoid breaking backward compatibility, even if it meant not fixing real design flaws.
That didn't parse. Pick one according to your meaning, or rephrase.