What's wrong with making personal remarks about it? If I try someone's product out (competitor or otherwise) and I think it sucks, what am I supposed to do? Give them a good old pat on the back, say "good job", and give them a thumbs up? The world isn't that sweet. Should I remain totally silent and keep my opinion to myself? Well, last time I checked negative criticism was still a legal and moral practice. In my opinion this whole bashing accusation is a load of crap.
I've actually been noticing that Microsoft's "MSNBot" web robot has been sucking up much more bandwidth from my site than it should. Here's a comparison of the bandwidth consumption by robots on my site last month:
So MSNBot consumes more than 27 times the bandwidth than Googlebot. Therefore I consider your statement "Microsoft's business model is to throw something out there that is usually half baked and then refine it until it works just good enough" to be highly accurate. Granted 47MB isn't a huge amount of bandwidth, but it's still more than it should be.
So can I now have a viable excuse for sleeping on the job? ^_~
Honestly though, I remember one night a couple years ago where I was trying to solve a circuit problem that was giving me a really hard time, so I gave up and slept on it. Somehow, I solved the problem in my dream and when I woke up, I knew the answer and I just had to write down the solution on paper. It was like one of the coolest moment in my life, which is also kind of pathetic if I think about it. >_>
Yeah, I'm not a big CVS fan and I'm eager to start using subversion. Unfortunately, SourceForge still doesn't support it so I (and thousands of others) are stuck with CVS for a while. However, they're looking into it. Here's an excert from their site status updates:
Subversion Service: The research, analysis, and support gear-up needed to implement a Subversion service at SourceForge.net is now in progress. As with all SourceForge.net services, extensive analysis and testing must be performed to verify suitable levels of stability and scalability before a service can be rolled-out. We are expecting the initial phases of this effort to last several weeks, to be followed by the implementation of a testing environment which will be used for a live beta test by specific selected projects. Pending successful scalability testing, service details will be finalized and service will be offered to all projects. (Refreshed 2005-04-21, to show continued in-progress status.) (Last updated: 2005-04-21 Pacific)
That was a good summary, but you could have shortened it to just one word:
OWNED!!!
Seriously now, let's do something about this...
on
Nuclear Fusion Discovered
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Why don't the/. administrators install some software that will help prevent these dupes from happening? For example, before allowing a/. admin to post an article, require a search of the past x days/weeks/months of/. posts and use document clustering to rank the top 5 or so most likely pages that are similar to the one about to be posted. Then before the/. poster makes his final decision, force him to look at the titles and summaries of those previous articles to make sure that he (or she..?) is not creating a dupe post. It's a simple and effective solution.
Thank you for your comments everyone. I believe you are all right, I do comment too excessively in some parts of my code. (But then again, I think commenting too much is better than commenting too little). I'll keep this in mind for future code I write.:)
I agree. Giving your variables descriptive names is a good practice, but it's not nearly enough "commenting". If you have a piece of code that manipulates the values of those descriptive variables with bit masks to spit out a value, how is someone supposed to know what you just did? I think the adage "you don't document your code, but you code your document" is a little extreme, but it gets across the importance of code documentation. I'm working on an open source project of my own right now. I went back to modify a piece of code that I hadn't touched for nearly 4 months, only to make absolutely no sense of what the hell I was doing there. Luckly I commented it extremely well so after reading the comments I was able to get that "Oh yeah..." feeling and make the appropriate modifications without breaking the code. Lesson: commenting code may take you some more time now, but it's going to save you a hell of a lot of time later.
On that topic, what are some good examples of well-commented code? Rather than just see words, I'd rather see real-life applications of these practices. For starters, here's typically how much I comment my code: Allacrost source code (note: not all files were written by me, by I try to stress heavy commenting on the rest of my team)
Wow. Screw cremation. Screw being burried. This is how I want to go. Just tie my carcass to a medium sized rocket full of explosvies, fire me up, and boom. I think that's a good way for people to remember me by.
Do they have any methods to stop the bone growth? If they don't, then isn't this just trading one bone disease for another? I fail to see how that would help the problem....
I'm excited to see the ideals of OSS spread to other domains. Just imagine what the future could be like...we'll finally know what they put in those damn addicting Oreo cookies!!!
it's ok, I was the same and I've been out of bed for about 5 hours. Seriously though, why would you need porn on your PSP? Does Playboy think that men are going to "read the articles" when they are commuting or in public places? It doesn't make any sense to me.
Even if the conclusion can not accurately be drawn from the data, the conclusion fails to surprise me for two reasons.
1) Outsourcing software design and tech support is becoming a big problem for American computer technicians/programmers. Who wants to invest 4 years studying your ass off at a university to loose any hopes of a job postition to some people in India?
2) CS is harder than most majors. When I was an undergrad I knew so many ex-CS majors it was baffling. Too bad people don't drop smoking as easily as they drop their CS major. >_>
I can totally relate passthecrackpipe. (odd name for such a....umm...mature post). My little brother is 16 now and ever since he was about 11 or 12 he's had a problem with letting computer games controlling his life that has gotten progressively worse and worse. Although he does keep up with his grades (because if they plummet he knows he will lose his computer priveledges until they come back up). Try that with your son, that is remove or severely restrict his gaming time until he gets those grades up. I think that would help solve your problem.
But it won't end there, let me assure you. Even though my brother keeps his grades up, he spends *all* his free time playing games, reading about games, and pretty much nothing but games. He doesn't go outside. He doesn't socialize with others. He just wants to get online and "pwn pplz with hiz 1337 skillz". (-_-) In the past my parents had been pretty damn lax about this, even though they knew it was a problem, and I insistently pressured them to make him do something else, anything else but play games! I'm afraid that this problem is only going to grow exponentially for each generation as kids start to grow up on games and let them control their lives. As parents, guardians, or whatever you are, I urge you all to remind your younger family members that games are great, but they should try doing other things with their lives. Otherwise, they will never know how many great things they are capable of doing in this world.
Just what I was about to say. [i]"built from indium phosphide and indium gallium arsenide"[/i] doesn't sound like something as common and cheap as silicon. It's equivalent of announcing that you've made an engine 10 times as powerful as the fastest existing one, only it's composed of 100% 24carat gold. In terms of a performance/price pay off, the new engine loses, and I imagine this 600Ghz transitor does to. (Correct me if I'm wrong, I don't know anything about the compounds used in the transistor).
I use Ogg whenever I can, and my design team is using the format in a game we're developing. But Ogg has one critical flaw (which isn't really it's own fault), and that is it's not supported by any portable media players (that I know of). Now I'm finding myself going back and creating MP3 versions for all my OGG files so I can play the music I like in my iPod shuffle. You *can* convert Ogg to MP3 (and vice versa) with ease, however both are lossy formats that throw away different parts of the audio, so if you use a converter tool then you'll have reduced quality of the version you converted to as opposed to if you did it from a raw WAV source.
I would absolutely *LOVE* to see a (decent) portable media player that supports Ogg. Unfortunately though it doesn't seem like the hardware manufactures are interested. =(
It's ok. We can use that new "natural language programming" that is being developed (mentioned on/. a couple weeks ago, too lazy to find the link). Then all we have to do is type this:
If (object posses wong)
cover eyes
else
show boobies
Will it have a feature where you can see through women's clothing? I think it should be an absolute necessity. Only physics could bring the unthoughtof reality where I could actually be jealous of a blind person for their (lack of) sight. (-_-")
Slashdot Mirror
What's wrong with making personal remarks about it? If I try someone's product out (competitor or otherwise) and I think it sucks, what am I supposed to do? Give them a good old pat on the back, say "good job", and give them a thumbs up? The world isn't that sweet. Should I remain totally silent and keep my opinion to myself? Well, last time I checked negative criticism was still a legal and moral practice. In my opinion this whole bashing accusation is a load of crap.
Of the story "The Little Engine That Could".
"I think I can! I think I can! I think I can!
Kinda makes me want to cheer our little martian rover on. "Come on buddy! Just a little bit more! Come on!"
I've actually been noticing that Microsoft's "MSNBot" web robot has been sucking up much more bandwidth from my site than it should. Here's a comparison of the bandwidth consumption by robots on my site last month:
MSNBot: 47.18 MB
Inktomi Slurp: 4.39 MB
Googlebot: 1.71 MB
WISENutbot: 787.08 KB
Alexa (IA Archiver): 1.27 MB
AskJeeves: 531.41 KB
Walhello appie: 667.89 KB
LinkWalker: 68.96 KB
So MSNBot consumes more than 27 times the bandwidth than Googlebot. Therefore I consider your statement "Microsoft's business model is to throw something out there that is usually half baked and then refine it until it works just good enough" to be highly accurate. Granted 47MB isn't a huge amount of bandwidth, but it's still more than it should be.
That sounds exactly like the plot in the anime Gundam Seed, followed by the plot in the game Total Annihilation.
God I need to get a life >_
So can I now have a viable excuse for sleeping on the job? ^_~
Honestly though, I remember one night a couple years ago where I was trying to solve a circuit problem that was giving me a really hard time, so I gave up and slept on it. Somehow, I solved the problem in my dream and when I woke up, I knew the answer and I just had to write down the solution on paper. It was like one of the coolest moment in my life, which is also kind of pathetic if I think about it. >_>
Yeah, I'm not a big CVS fan and I'm eager to start using subversion. Unfortunately, SourceForge still doesn't support it so I (and thousands of others) are stuck with CVS for a while. However, they're looking into it. Here's an excert from their site status updates:
Subversion Service: The research, analysis, and support gear-up needed to implement a Subversion service at SourceForge.net is now in progress. As with all SourceForge.net services, extensive analysis and testing must be performed to verify suitable levels of stability and scalability before a service can be rolled-out. We are expecting the initial phases of this effort to last several weeks, to be followed by the implementation of a testing environment which will be used for a live beta test by specific selected projects. Pending successful scalability testing, service details will be finalized and service will be offered to all projects. (Refreshed 2005-04-21, to show continued in-progress status.) (Last updated: 2005-04-21 Pacific)
That was a good summary, but you could have shortened it to just one word:
OWNED!!!
Why don't the /. administrators install some software that will help prevent these dupes from happening? For example, before allowing a /. admin to post an article, require a search of the past x days/weeks/months of /. posts and use document clustering to rank the top 5 or so most likely pages that are similar to the one about to be posted. Then before the /. poster makes his final decision, force him to look at the titles and summaries of those previous articles to make sure that he (or she..?) is not creating a dupe post. It's a simple and effective solution.
Thank you for your comments everyone. I believe you are all right, I do comment too excessively in some parts of my code. (But then again, I think commenting too much is better than commenting too little). I'll keep this in mind for future code I write. :)
I agree. Giving your variables descriptive names is a good practice, but it's not nearly enough "commenting". If you have a piece of code that manipulates the values of those descriptive variables with bit masks to spit out a value, how is someone supposed to know what you just did? I think the adage "you don't document your code, but you code your document" is a little extreme, but it gets across the importance of code documentation. I'm working on an open source project of my own right now. I went back to modify a piece of code that I hadn't touched for nearly 4 months, only to make absolutely no sense of what the hell I was doing there. Luckly I commented it extremely well so after reading the comments I was able to get that "Oh yeah..." feeling and make the appropriate modifications without breaking the code. Lesson: commenting code may take you some more time now, but it's going to save you a hell of a lot of time later.
On that topic, what are some good examples of well-commented code? Rather than just see words, I'd rather see real-life applications of these practices. For starters, here's typically how much I comment my code: Allacrost source code (note: not all files were written by me, by I try to stress heavy commenting on the rest of my team)
Wow. Screw cremation. Screw being burried. This is how I want to go. Just tie my carcass to a medium sized rocket full of explosvies, fire me up, and boom. I think that's a good way for people to remember me by.
Do they have any methods to stop the bone growth? If they don't, then isn't this just trading one bone disease for another? I fail to see how that would help the problem....
On a personal note, I would go with more bone.
I'm excited to see the ideals of OSS spread to other domains. Just imagine what the future could be like...we'll finally know what they put in those damn addicting Oreo cookies!!!
WARNING: PARENT IS NOT WORK SAFE!!! Shit, thank god no one was looking at me.
Wait, you mean the U.S. patent system can actually get WORSE!? I knew I should have stayed in bed this morning.
it's ok, I was the same and I've been out of bed for about 5 hours. Seriously though, why would you need porn on your PSP? Does Playboy think that men are going to "read the articles" when they are commuting or in public places? It doesn't make any sense to me.
Even if the conclusion can not accurately be drawn from the data, the conclusion fails to surprise me for two reasons.
1) Outsourcing software design and tech support is becoming a big problem for American computer technicians/programmers. Who wants to invest 4 years studying your ass off at a university to loose any hopes of a job postition to some people in India?
2) CS is harder than most majors. When I was an undergrad I knew so many ex-CS majors it was baffling. Too bad people don't drop smoking as easily as they drop their CS major. >_>
I can totally relate passthecrackpipe. (odd name for such a....umm...mature post). My little brother is 16 now and ever since he was about 11 or 12 he's had a problem with letting computer games controlling his life that has gotten progressively worse and worse. Although he does keep up with his grades (because if they plummet he knows he will lose his computer priveledges until they come back up). Try that with your son, that is remove or severely restrict his gaming time until he gets those grades up. I think that would help solve your problem.
But it won't end there, let me assure you. Even though my brother keeps his grades up, he spends *all* his free time playing games, reading about games, and pretty much nothing but games. He doesn't go outside. He doesn't socialize with others. He just wants to get online and "pwn pplz with hiz 1337 skillz". (-_-) In the past my parents had been pretty damn lax about this, even though they knew it was a problem, and I insistently pressured them to make him do something else, anything else but play games! I'm afraid that this problem is only going to grow exponentially for each generation as kids start to grow up on games and let them control their lives. As parents, guardians, or whatever you are, I urge you all to remind your younger family members that games are great, but they should try doing other things with their lives. Otherwise, they will never know how many great things they are capable of doing in this world.
WUNDERBAR!!!!!
:(
That's the only German I know unfortunately.
Just what I was about to say. [i]"built from indium phosphide and indium gallium arsenide"[/i] doesn't sound like something as common and cheap as silicon. It's equivalent of announcing that you've made an engine 10 times as powerful as the fastest existing one, only it's composed of 100% 24carat gold. In terms of a performance/price pay off, the new engine loses, and I imagine this 600Ghz transitor does to. (Correct me if I'm wrong, I don't know anything about the compounds used in the transistor).
You have no chance to survive make your time. Hah hah hah...
Seriously though, this proclamation kind of scares me as a computer engineer, because the scenario definitely has the potential to become true.
I use Ogg whenever I can, and my design team is using the format in a game we're developing. But Ogg has one critical flaw (which isn't really it's own fault), and that is it's not supported by any portable media players (that I know of). Now I'm finding myself going back and creating MP3 versions for all my OGG files so I can play the music I like in my iPod shuffle. You *can* convert Ogg to MP3 (and vice versa) with ease, however both are lossy formats that throw away different parts of the audio, so if you use a converter tool then you'll have reduced quality of the version you converted to as opposed to if you did it from a raw WAV source.
I would absolutely *LOVE* to see a (decent) portable media player that supports Ogg. Unfortunately though it doesn't seem like the hardware manufactures are interested. =(
It's ok. We can use that new "natural language programming" that is being developed (mentioned on /. a couple weeks ago, too lazy to find the link). Then all we have to do is type this:
If (object posses wong)
cover eyes
else
show boobies
Will it have a feature where you can see through women's clothing? I think it should be an absolute necessity. Only physics could bring the unthoughtof reality where I could actually be jealous of a blind person for their (lack of) sight. (-_-")
So, how long until someone is able to boot linux on it? >_>