Yeah. Between vials of smallpox showing up and their handling of ebola, I've gotten the impression that the CDC are a bunch of inept fools. Probably a bunch of cronies appointed in various administrations. You know when a bad time is to discover the people running your organization that's supposed to deal with infectious diseases in your country are a bunch of inept fools? When a disease that's so far killed 70% of the people who've contracted it enters your country. So far we've been very arrogant in our handling of this disease. We've thought we could do it better than some poor-ass country in Africa, we've thought that with the advanced medical technology at our disposal surely it won't kill nearly as many people, we've thought that the improved sanitation available here would help contain the spread, and we've been wrong on all counts so far. It'd be nice if we could start treating this disease with the respect it obviously deserves before 70% of everyone dies from it.
You mean the gigabit fiber the local municipal broadband company is running through my back yard literally right this very second? You know, I'm willing to take that chance.
Yeah! I mean think about it! If you're a patent troll, are you going to get more business by sitting back and hoping someone invents the thing you patented, or are you going to get more business by sending out an army of coders to make SURE something you've patented gets invented? Ah it's such a brilliant idea I should go get a business process patent for it!
I've written a linked list library in C at pretty much every company I've ever worked for. Yes, you could spend a few weeks re-implementing the STL, and all the unit tests you'd need to make sure it's functioning properly, and do that again on your next project. And again on your next project. Or your language could just supply those relatively uninteresting components and you could spend your development time on something you haven't done before.
You just never find out about it. It takes an open source developer to write a heartbleed-style bug, and some jackass at a company to attach a CGI shell script to a web server. I seem to recall the web server very specifically says never to do that. I've worked at companies from mom and pop shops to IBM and have never seen security as a priority for any commercial entity. Except that one time, auditing software at Data General for their B2 secure UNIX, which IBM acquired and decommissioned a year or so after I left the company.
I've been finding C++ pretty nice lately. Back when I started, the STL and templates weren't really a thing. They just added classes to C and called it good, and working with it then was a pretty shitty experience. I wandered off or a while and when I came back they'd added the STL,which provided some badly-needed data structures and language capabilities. Between that and boost and the tweaks to the syntax they made in C++11, it doesn't really feel like a bad language to work with. It can still be pretty bad if a programmer that's new to it goes crazy with operator overloading or tries to write it like Java or C. The streams library also feels pretty clunky, but you can always fall back to using the C file I/O or possibly boost's asio library if you hate it.
A problem I've been seeing lately is that everyone seems to think software is carved in stone. In the past 3 or 4 years I've heard a LOT of excuses why some flaw in one system or another made a feature impossible. In these cases, fixing the flaw would be pretty trivial. Instead of doing THAT, people just build another layer of crap on top of the previous layer of crap and try to kind-of get something working. Code is not immutable. If it doesn't do something you need it to do, MAKE it do what you need it to do. Write a library, redesign a layer, simplify an interface, whatever. Don't just wring your hands and make the problem worse! Code is made to change. No design is ever perfect right from the start. If you try to make your design perfect from the start, you'll just end up paralyzed, afraid of doing anything because you might do it wrong. Start with a design that seems reasonable and adjust it as needed. Write small, decoupled libraries that can support that, and write unit tests to insure that each component behaves as expected. It's really not that hard, people!
I go listen to a copyright song on Youtube. Illegal copyright infringement? Not on my part. Not on Google's part either, as long as they comply with the take-down request when it comes in. In fact, I think it would be very hard to illegally download something (Yes I know bittorrent yadda yadda but that's not JUST downloading, is it?) So I'd view a question like that as a trick question to weed out people who don't know copyright law, or a stupid question by stupid people who don't know copyright law or anything about computers. If it's the latter, they might have an easier time hiring people who know something about copyright law and computers if they didn't ask stupid questions like that. If it's the former, well I reckon that might work pretty well.
It seems a lot of people like to do this. I'm starting to feel abnormal because the second someone hands me a camera I don't feel in the least bit inclined to take a picture of my penis with it.
They should be doing that anyway! If you're riddled with flu and oozing mucus out of every orifice, I don't want to get on a plane with you! Apparently we can't expect our fellow passengers to be considerate. Hell, I've read of two or three incidences in the last year where some fucker got on a plane with tuberculosis! Everyone has to get a full body scan at the airport anyway, so they may as well take your temperature. If you're sick, they could pull you out of the line, wrap you in cellophane and chuck you in cargo where you won't infect your fellow passengers with whatever disease you decided to bring to the airport that day.
That seems like bad upbringing to me. A lot of people seem to accidentally reproduce themselves while having absolutely no fucking idea how to raise a child. We've all seen them out there, their little brat throwing an absolute shit-fit in public and them just ignoring it. Should we therefore hold it against the child when they physically become an adult without ever growing up? But becoming an adult means that a person is responsible for their actions, and ALL their actions do have consequences. We can have compassion for them because they're really just a child trapped in an adult body, while still holding them accountable for their actions.
Also unfortunately, our judicial and prison systems do not understand this either. People aren't maliciously the way they are. They get broken for a reason. Our prison system acts as a punishment and as a profit center for for-profit companies who run them. They should be a place where the broken people put into them can receive the discipline and structure they need to cope with an adult world without endangering society or themselves in the process. If we ever actually manage to reach that point, I think our species would be able to evolve just a little bit more. I don't have high hopes that it's possible.
Yeah I could see that working. You'd just want your cloud air-gapped from any public network, and to not provide any remote access. If you did that, I think it'd work great!
My first color laptop was a 486, had 4MB of RAM and could multitask. With X11, even! But if you want to squeeze all the juice out of a system, you really need to ditch the GUI. I've had Symbian phones that were text mode and offered very respectable performance and functionality for the hardware they were running on. And hell, if a few hundred million people in India are running text-only browsers, maybe the web would swing back that way. You don't need graphics (or video, ugh) for most of the crap that's going on with the web. Though I think some clever person could hack up a frame buffer video player so the people in India can still watch cat videos.
That's plenty of hardware. Hell, my first color laptop was less machine than that is. Someone just needs to rip the bloated goat of software they've put on there. I bet it'd be pretty damn snappy with a text-mode UI and a bare-bones Linux kernel.
Glad to hear the medical device they're about to jam in my pee-hole has firmware written in C. No doubt it would be easy to overflow the numeric field for temperature, causing the device to spontaneously change temperature to 65536 degrees. I'm really looking forward to that.
You mean generally racist or ultra-violent cartoons? By the time I started watching cartoons in the mid 70's, most of the really racist stuff wasn't being played anymore, but last time I rolled through Europe, Cartoon Network was playing a lot of the older Warner Brothers cartoons. I thought I pretty much knew the score there, but that was a bit of an eye-opener. Simpsons in German when you're jetlagged out of your skull is really fun, though.
Most of the cartoons of the 70's were crap. Remember the old Spider Man or Star Trek cartoons? They didn't seem like they ran that long. I'm pretty sure the writers used a lot of LSD. Justice League and Scooby Doo were just formulaic crap. I don't recall the Flintstones or Jetsons being overtly bad, but I don't remember them being particularly good either. And that was the A list. Once noon rolled around, things went from bad to worse. I had to get that in there somehow.
As bad as all that was, though, it was worse in Japan. I lived my first 5 years in Japan. Anime depicting decapitations and blood everywhere seemed to be kids' fare there in the early 70s. Somehow they still all seemed to end up growing up less fucked-up overall than we did. Assuming that you consider them getting vending machines with used panties and us getting the mass-murder-of-the-week club them growing up less fucked up. Seems like things went slightly better over there to me.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah. Between vials of smallpox showing up and their handling of ebola, I've gotten the impression that the CDC are a bunch of inept fools. Probably a bunch of cronies appointed in various administrations. You know when a bad time is to discover the people running your organization that's supposed to deal with infectious diseases in your country are a bunch of inept fools? When a disease that's so far killed 70% of the people who've contracted it enters your country. So far we've been very arrogant in our handling of this disease. We've thought we could do it better than some poor-ass country in Africa, we've thought that with the advanced medical technology at our disposal surely it won't kill nearly as many people, we've thought that the improved sanitation available here would help contain the spread, and we've been wrong on all counts so far. It'd be nice if we could start treating this disease with the respect it obviously deserves before 70% of everyone dies from it.
You mean the gigabit fiber the local municipal broadband company is running through my back yard literally right this very second? You know, I'm willing to take that chance.
Yeah! I mean think about it! If you're a patent troll, are you going to get more business by sitting back and hoping someone invents the thing you patented, or are you going to get more business by sending out an army of coders to make SURE something you've patented gets invented? Ah it's such a brilliant idea I should go get a business process patent for it!
You should implement your patented IP and then when you leave you should sue them for patent infringement!
That would definitely make it a lot easier to squish the atoms together! It's genius!
I've written a linked list library in C at pretty much every company I've ever worked for. Yes, you could spend a few weeks re-implementing the STL, and all the unit tests you'd need to make sure it's functioning properly, and do that again on your next project. And again on your next project. Or your language could just supply those relatively uninteresting components and you could spend your development time on something you haven't done before.
You just never find out about it. It takes an open source developer to write a heartbleed-style bug, and some jackass at a company to attach a CGI shell script to a web server. I seem to recall the web server very specifically says never to do that. I've worked at companies from mom and pop shops to IBM and have never seen security as a priority for any commercial entity. Except that one time, auditing software at Data General for their B2 secure UNIX, which IBM acquired and decommissioned a year or so after I left the company.
A problem I've been seeing lately is that everyone seems to think software is carved in stone. In the past 3 or 4 years I've heard a LOT of excuses why some flaw in one system or another made a feature impossible. In these cases, fixing the flaw would be pretty trivial. Instead of doing THAT, people just build another layer of crap on top of the previous layer of crap and try to kind-of get something working. Code is not immutable. If it doesn't do something you need it to do, MAKE it do what you need it to do. Write a library, redesign a layer, simplify an interface, whatever. Don't just wring your hands and make the problem worse! Code is made to change. No design is ever perfect right from the start. If you try to make your design perfect from the start, you'll just end up paralyzed, afraid of doing anything because you might do it wrong. Start with a design that seems reasonable and adjust it as needed. Write small, decoupled libraries that can support that, and write unit tests to insure that each component behaves as expected. It's really not that hard, people!
Once you've been crapping your organs out for a couple months, I'm sure you'd be willing to try just about anything.
I go listen to a copyright song on Youtube. Illegal copyright infringement? Not on my part. Not on Google's part either, as long as they comply with the take-down request when it comes in. In fact, I think it would be very hard to illegally download something (Yes I know bittorrent yadda yadda but that's not JUST downloading, is it?) So I'd view a question like that as a trick question to weed out people who don't know copyright law, or a stupid question by stupid people who don't know copyright law or anything about computers. If it's the latter, they might have an easier time hiring people who know something about copyright law and computers if they didn't ask stupid questions like that. If it's the former, well I reckon that might work pretty well.
Yeah. It works like this.
It seems a lot of people like to do this. I'm starting to feel abnormal because the second someone hands me a camera I don't feel in the least bit inclined to take a picture of my penis with it.
I can see why he wasn't an English major.
They should be doing that anyway! If you're riddled with flu and oozing mucus out of every orifice, I don't want to get on a plane with you! Apparently we can't expect our fellow passengers to be considerate. Hell, I've read of two or three incidences in the last year where some fucker got on a plane with tuberculosis! Everyone has to get a full body scan at the airport anyway, so they may as well take your temperature. If you're sick, they could pull you out of the line, wrap you in cellophane and chuck you in cargo where you won't infect your fellow passengers with whatever disease you decided to bring to the airport that day.
Also unfortunately, our judicial and prison systems do not understand this either. People aren't maliciously the way they are. They get broken for a reason. Our prison system acts as a punishment and as a profit center for for-profit companies who run them. They should be a place where the broken people put into them can receive the discipline and structure they need to cope with an adult world without endangering society or themselves in the process. If we ever actually manage to reach that point, I think our species would be able to evolve just a little bit more. I don't have high hopes that it's possible.
10000 Quatloos to the first person to gay marry a chimpanzee.
My guess is it's going to be C0lMu5+rd in the IRC chat-room with the FDA-Pee-Hole-Device int-range overflow exploit! How'd I do?
Yeah I could see that working. You'd just want your cloud air-gapped from any public network, and to not provide any remote access. If you did that, I think it'd work great!
My first color laptop was a 486, had 4MB of RAM and could multitask. With X11, even! But if you want to squeeze all the juice out of a system, you really need to ditch the GUI. I've had Symbian phones that were text mode and offered very respectable performance and functionality for the hardware they were running on. And hell, if a few hundred million people in India are running text-only browsers, maybe the web would swing back that way. You don't need graphics (or video, ugh) for most of the crap that's going on with the web. Though I think some clever person could hack up a frame buffer video player so the people in India can still watch cat videos.
That's plenty of hardware. Hell, my first color laptop was less machine than that is. Someone just needs to rip the bloated goat of software they've put on there. I bet it'd be pretty damn snappy with a text-mode UI and a bare-bones Linux kernel.
Sexy Robots!
Glad to hear the medical device they're about to jam in my pee-hole has firmware written in C. No doubt it would be easy to overflow the numeric field for temperature, causing the device to spontaneously change temperature to 65536 degrees. I'm really looking forward to that.
Most of the cartoons of the 70's were crap. Remember the old Spider Man or Star Trek cartoons? They didn't seem like they ran that long. I'm pretty sure the writers used a lot of LSD. Justice League and Scooby Doo were just formulaic crap. I don't recall the Flintstones or Jetsons being overtly bad, but I don't remember them being particularly good either. And that was the A list. Once noon rolled around, things went from bad to worse. I had to get that in there somehow.
As bad as all that was, though, it was worse in Japan. I lived my first 5 years in Japan. Anime depicting decapitations and blood everywhere seemed to be kids' fare there in the early 70s. Somehow they still all seemed to end up growing up less fucked-up overall than we did. Assuming that you consider them getting vending machines with used panties and us getting the mass-murder-of-the-week club them growing up less fucked up. Seems like things went slightly better over there to me.
Kind of like fish flavored bubblegum.
Technically, does that make Microsoft a patent troll?